Paradise Lost
The member's edition. The leader's edition adds notes for whoever opens the discussion: what the book is doing, where Milton's theology is Reformed and where it is his own, which critics' quarrel is in play (Blake and Shelley, Lewis and Empson, Waldock and Fish), the Homer and Virgil behind each scene, and a question to start a fight.
Read it
Paradise Lost is in the public domain. The whole poem is on this page, book by book, with every harder word glossed where it stands; the Society's library, the Armarium, has the same 1674 text under paradise_lost, twelve lines to a unit.
Listen free
LibriVox's complete reading of Paradise Lost (2014), one book to a track or two, by a company of volunteer readers, about eleven hours; the text is the same twelve-book poem as this page, in modern spelling, so the words agree and the page agrees. The track list and the player are not on this page yet: the Society's build machine could not reach the Internet Archive when this page was made, and the list of files and their lengths will be filled in from Adam's ThinkPad; the catalogue link opens the recording now.
Recorded for LibriVox and hosted by the Internet Archive; in the public domain. A group reading: the voice changes between books. Each track is a 64 kbps MP3 of 20 to 40 MB: on a phone plan, start it on Wi-Fi.
Kindle + Audible
Whispersync links a Kindle book to its Audible narration: own both, and your phone keeps one place between them, so you can read at home and pick up by ear in the car where you stopped.
Paradise Lost, unabridged, on AudibleFor the car the Society's nomination is an unabridged single-voice reading; Audible has several (Anton Lesser's for Naxos is the one most often praised, Simon Vance's and Charlton Griffin's are also complete), and any of them reads the same twelve books as this page in modern spelling, so the glossary and the line numbers hold. The 1674 text is free on Kindle in several editions and modernised in most; whether a Kindle copy pairs with a narration is Amazon's to say: on the Kindle book's page, look for Add Audible narration.
Paradise Lost is the English epic: ten thousand lines of blank verse on the fall of the angels and the fall of man, written by a blind republican in the first years of the Restoration, when the cause he had served was dead and his own neck had only just been spared. Milton set out to do in English what Homer did in Greek and Virgil in Latin, and to do it on a subject he believed greater than theirs, and to 'justifie the wayes of God to men' while he was at it. He gave the Devil the best speeches, gave God the hardest arguments, gave Adam and Eve the first marriage, and ended with the two of them walking out of the garden hand in hand into the world. Three centuries of readers have quarrelled about whose side the poem is on, which is the surest sign that it is alive.
This is the whole poem in the twelve-book text of 1674, the last Milton saw through the press, with his Arguments before each book and his spelling as he left it (thir, sovran, eevn, the apostrophes marking which syllables the line counts and which it does not). The old spelling slows a modern reader for a page and then stops mattering; the glossary beside each unit explains the words that have changed their sense, and leaves the spellings alone. The text is H. C. Beeching's Oxford edition of 1900, which prints 1674 as it stands, from Project Gutenberg #1745 as canon-corpus holds it.
The poem is cut here by book, twelve nights of reading of six hundred to eleven hundred lines each; the Society may wish to give Book IX two. Before each book is Milton's own Argument and a short note on what happens; after it, the turn of the book in plain words, who is in it, the lines worth keeping, the harder words glossed, the Great Ideas it touches, the Scripture it is built from (Milton has the whole Bible by heart and rarely goes twenty lines without it), books in the Armarium to read beside it, questions for the meeting, and (in the leader's edition) notes for whoever opens the discussion. The Society reads Dante the same season and the two companions point at each other where the poets disagree, which is often. At the foot of the page are the indexes for the whole poem, the Potent Quotables and the memory deck.
A note on the text
The text is the second edition of 1674, twelve books with the Arguments, as H. C. Beeching printed it for the Clarendon Press in 1900 and Project Gutenberg #1745 carries it, in Milton's spelling and punctuation. Each book is cut into units of twenty-four lines, named paradise_lost:I.1, I.25 and so on by book and first line, with the Argument of each book as paradise_lost:I.arg. The Armarium holds the same text under paradise_lost on a twelve-line grid, so a link from this page to the library lands on the first half of the same unit, and the line numbers agree. Nothing is cut and nothing is modernised; the Society's glossary marks a word spelling when it is only the old dress of a word you know.
Persons
Everyone in the book, alphabetically by surname, with the parts they are in.
The Great Ideas
Each of Adler's Great Ideas the book touches, with the parts where it does. Ideas marked in gold are from the Society's own Syntopicon Addendum and link to it.
Scripture
Every quotation and clear allusion, in canonical order, with the King James text.
Glossary
Every harder word, A to Z, glossed in the sense it has here. Each links to the place it is used. Rarity is measured by how seldom the word turns up in English at large; the commonest words are never glossed.
Lines Worth Keeping
Every line the Society marked, in order.
Potent Quotables
The book's most-quoted lines, as first-letter study cards: read the first letters and say the line, then check it against the full text.
The Armarium Shelf
Books in the Society's library that the companion sends you to, and which parts send you there.
Memory Work
The Potent Quotables, and every line worth keeping ( of them), as decks for the Mnemonicon.
Download the Potent Quotables or the whole deck, then in the Mnemonicon choose Import and pick the file. Importing both adds nothing twice.
To study the glossary's words with spaced repetition, open the Vocabularium.