>Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and over-burdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions.
>literature criticism
I feel this way but in the opposite
>>25472159my experience with Paradife Loft is I reread the first chapter about 50 times because it was so good, I can now recite the first 500 lines or so from memory with this cadence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l7YJmMVN00&list=PL7q9mnu28O3td0Yd8v152KIhg5-pl25qs I have never read any chapter 2 or further
Voltaire on Paradise Lost>Candide, seeing a Milton, asked the senator if he did not think that author a great man.>“Who?” said Pococurante sharply; “that barbarian who writes a tedious commentary in ten books of rumbling verse, on the first chapter of Genesis? that slovenly imitator of the Greeks, who disfigures the creation, by making the Messiah take a pair of compasses from heaven’s armoury to plan the world; whereas Moses represented the Deity as producing the whole universe by his fiat? Can I, think you, have any esteem for a writer who has spoiled Tasso’s hell and the devil? who transforms Lucifer sometimes into a toad, and, at others, into a pigmy? who makes him say the same thing over again a hundred times? who metamorphoses him into a school-divine? and who, by an absurdly serious imitation of Ariosto’s comic invention of fire-arms, represents the devils and angels cannonading each other in heaven? Neither I nor any other Italian can possibly take pleasure in such melancholy reveries; but the marriage of Sin and Death, and snakes issuing from the womb of the former, are enough to make any person sick that is not lost to all sense of delicacy, while his long description of a lazar-house is fit only for a gravedigger. This obscene, whimsical and disagreeable poem met with neglect at its first publication; and I only treat the author now as he was treated in his own country by his contemporaries.”
>>25472159this nigga's legacy is an exploitable meme from 2011
>>25472165I meant book rather then chapter, mea culpa
>>25472159Johnson loved the shit out of Pope and Swift, of course he finds Milton tedious.>>25472167You should read his essays, they're fun. Start with the Rambler.
Did Milton write anything besides Paradise Lost that was worth reading?
>>25472314Lycidas is a fun little poem.
>>25472166>not establishing the contextpococurante looks down his nose at everything
>>25472165>Paradife Loft>fIt's a long s retard.
damn it's too bad johnson never lived to shitpost on twitter what a beast
>>25472159Paradise Lost is my favorite book and so far I've read it four times.
>>25472159He so jelly.
>>25472167Have you never used a dictionary?
>>25472314ComusNightingale sonnets
>>25472166That passage is a satire of overcritical midwit pseuds, the Pococurante also dislikes Homer. He is a part of an archetype mocked multiple times in Candide: miserable faggots who only complain all the time despite all the wonderful things they have.
Here's a funny meme about paradise losthttps://youtu.be/sPrGgcJbnx8
>>25472165>Paradife Loft
>>25472684>>25473510it's a meme you dip
>>25473688thanks for defending me anon
