By Catherine Nicholson

Katie Kadue: Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton
Timothy M. Harrison: Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England
Nicholas McDowell: Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton
Joe Moshenska: Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton
NYRB

Of the many liberties John Milton took in writing Paradise Lost, his 1667 epic poem on Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden, the most delightful and underrated are his efforts to imagine daily life in Paradise before the Fall. Compared to the risks he takes elsewhere in the poem—recasting the devil as its charismatic antihero, scripting conversations between God the Father and his only begotten Son, staging war in heaven, describing angelic sex, and playing fast and loose with the logic of allusion so as to make himself the founding author of the entire Western literary tradition—the domestic details of prelapsarian existence can appear merely charming, inventive flourishes on the scenic backdrop to the grand conflicts between good and evil. In the long, relatively uneventful middle of the poem, after Satan has hatched his demonic plot but before he’s worked out the crucial business with the snake, Adam and Eve occupy themselves with an array of activities: talking, eating and drinking, strolling and stargazing, sleeping, dreaming, bickering and flirting, playing with the animals, tending the roses, socializing with angels, and passing whole days in the unexpectedly interesting business of innocence. [Read more…]