I read Paradise Lost for the first time when I was 18. It was in a 200-level Milton course, the sort of old-fashioned, single author humanities seminar that is often the first on the chopping block when college administrators start side-eyeing the department’s budget.
The class was held in a three-story brick building, in a room with a chalkboard and too large tables. I remember during the first week sitting with my back to the windows and the blinding, westering sun, and thinking “What the hell am I doing here?” I was the only freshman.
With the single exception of a graduate-level philosophy course that was, in retrospect, a mistake (try being the only person in a classroom who doesn’t know ancient Greek), the Milton course remains the most intimidating class of my life.
This was not the fault of the professor, and thank god I had one.
Milton can be challenging. An author known for profuse biblical and classical allusions, autobiographical references, and complex, multi-clausal syntax, Milton is considered essential—but not easy—reading. For readers unaccustomed to picking apart densely-layered text, the first encounter may well be their last.
This is why literary companions like Michael Cavanagh’s Paradise Lost: A Primer are indispensable. Readers who might not feel comfortable navigating the unknown terrain of a difficult classic can step a little more surely with an experienced guide to lead the way.
One of the benefits of reading Paradise Lost at any age is that it’s a masterclass in critical thinking. Milton continually forces the reader to assume a position and then revise it, turning what could, in another poet’s hands, be a simplistic morality play about obedience and sin into a complex grappling with what it really means to know good from evil. Satan isn’t just another bestial send-up—he’s a sly politician, and he could seduce you, too.
It’s this moral complexity that Paradise Lost: A Primer stresses repeatedly, tracing, in its first chapter, how Paradise Lost’s wrestling develops through Milton’s earlier works, then following this thread through the epic itself. Written with the intention of preparing first-time readers to encounter the sprawling world of the poem and the poet, Michael Cavanagh’s Paradise Lost: A Primer offers textual analysis, light historical background, and biographical details that illuminate Milton’s life and idiosyncratic worldviews.
Cavanaugh guides the reader through the text of the poem with the grace and textual fluency of a lifelong scholar. At times, it’s hard not to feel like a student in a lecture hall, experiencing Milton’s work for the first time. It is difficult to sustain a reader's attention with close reading, however, and this kind of careful textual analysis makes up the bulk of Cavanagh's Primer. But, for readers with a solid footing in formal poetic structure and a certain comfort with literary criticism, Paradise Lost: A Primer offers a concise, yet in-depth, overview of the poem. In this way, it might be more at home on the syllabus of an introductory course in Early Modern Literature than the nightstand of the casual reader, even one with the ambition to tackle a great English epic.
This kind of sustained literary analysis is extremely valuable. The ability to incise an argument, analyze tricky syntax, and inspect poetic formulae both opens the door to a greater appreciation of the poem's aesthetic achievements and gives us the critical tools required to unpack Milton's thornier passages. It is, after all, much easier to follow (and be swayed by) Satan's revolutionary bombast in the early books than to digest, say, God's speeches on the nature of free will.
Perhaps Paradise Lost: A Primer’s most valuable contribution is that it serves as a wide-ranging introduction to the world of Milton Studies. In each chapter, Cavanaugh not only explicates one to two books of the poem, but cites a wide range of scholarly views and interpretations, granting first time readers a thorough introduction to broader scholarship. In this way, Cavanaugh’s Primer is particularly indispensable for students, and even educators, tasked with familiarizing themselves with Milton’s epic.
A Primer ends with an examination of Milton’s style. Perhaps most fittingly, the last pages are devoted to Denis Danielson’s prose translation, which renders Milton’s sweeping poetic language in bland, digestible modern prose that poses the question: Why write poetry at all? Danielson maintains that the difficulty of Milton’s language has become a barrier to modern audiences who, unwilling or unable to engage with challenging works, are shut out of the poem’s broader ideas and plot.
I’m fully on board with this and believe we should go even further: why not repaint Guernica to make it more accessible? Or reshoot Citizen Kane? The artistic sensibilities that shaped these works are too challenging for modern audiences to decipher and become a barrier to mass appeal. That antique armoire it took an artisan years to carve? Ideally, we’d pulp it and reassemble it in the form of an IKEA wardrobe.
Good art is never frictionless. Its value is often in the challenge it presents us and how we strive to meet it. As Milton writes of knowledge and virtue in Areopagitica, “that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.” The benefit of books like Cavanaugh’s is that they help us train for the race.
Sara McKinney holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and is Managing Editor of The Milton Review. Her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the PEN/Dau award and was the winning Horror/Thriller selection in Uncharted Magazine's Novel Excerpt Contest. Her writing appears in Fractured Lit, Puerto Del Sol, BOOTH, Jewish Fiction, Uncharted Magazine, and elsewhere. Read more at: www.saramckinney.com