Paradise Lost in Full Color: John Milton's Epic Clear Modern English, with 45 Color Illustrations by Gustave Dore

Milton's epic in clear modern English, with 45 Gustave Dore engravings in full colorParadise Lost is the most ambitious poem in the English language: the war in heaven, the creation of the world, the fall of humankind, and the first steps into exile. It is also, for most modern readers, nearly impossible to finish.This edition does not modernize Milton's ideas. It modernizes his sentences. The theology, the politics, the darkness, the grandeur are all preserved. What changes is the delivery. Sentences that ran forty lines now break where a reader can breathe, and the poem reads the way Milton sounds when someone who knows it tells you what happens.WHAT MAKES THIS EDITION DIFFERENT- Clear modern English. Faithful to Milton's meaning, without the inverted grammar that stops most readers halfway through Book I.- 45 full-page Dore engravings in full color. Remastered from first-edition scans and then colorized for this edition, with every line of the original engraving preserved beneath the color.- Printed at full bleed. One plate to a page, edge to edge, placed at the passage it illustrates.- Complete and unabridged. All twelve books, from the fall into hell to the expulsion from Eden.THE STORYTHE WAR IN HEAVEN. Satan raises a third of the angels against the throne of God, loses, and falls nine days into a burning lake. What he does next has fascinated readers for three and a half centuries: he refuses to repent, builds a capital in hell, and calls a council.THE TEMPTATION. He crosses Chaos alone, finds a newly made world, and takes the form of a serpent. Milton gives Eve the best argument in the poem and gives Adam the harder choice.THE EXPULSION. Judgment, grief, and a strange kind of hope. The archangel shows Adam the future, and the two of them walk out of Eden hand in hand into the world we live in.Dore engraved these plates in 1866 and never saw them in color. The linework here is his, cleaned of a century and a half of scan damage and then given color that follows the light and shadow he cut into the block. A black and white edition of this book is also available if you would rather have the plates exactly as they were printed.Clear Text Editions publishes the essential books of the Western tradition in language a modern reader can follow, with the original art back on the page.