Heaven, Hell and Paradise Lost: Bookmarked

A poet who crafted the greatest character in literary history with his engaging anti-hero of Satan, and who connected personal experience with the breadth of cosmic epic, John Milton’s Paradise Lost is a touchstone of English literature.

In the latest entry in Ig’s celebrated Bookmarked series, author Ed Simon considers Paradise Lost within the scope of his own alcoholism and recovery, the collapse of higher education, the imbecility of the canon wars, the piquant joys of labyrinthine sentences, and the exquisite attractions of Lucifer. Milton is easy to respect and easier to fear, but with the guidance of Simon, Milton becomes easiest of all to love. Paradise Lost may have generated thousands of works of criticism over the centuries, but none of them are like this.

Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine and a staff writer for The Millions. A widely published author, his work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, Poetry, McSweeney’s, Aeon, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Washington Post and The New York Times, among dozens of others. Simon is also the author of several books, including Printed in Utopia: The Radicalism of the Renaissance and Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology. He has taught literature at several institutions of higher education, and holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University. Simon is from Pittsburgh, where he still lives.