Free Thinking: Breaking Free: Landmark - Paradise Lost
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 5 May 2017
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Professor John Carey joins New Generation Thinkers Islam Issa and Joe Moshenska and presenter Philip Dodd to discuss Milton's poem, the first version of which was published in 1667. The discussion explores the influence of Protestant thinking, the Reformation and the Renaissance on Milton's depiction of religious and political beliefs as part of Radio 3's Breaking Free series of programmes exploring the impact of Martin Luther's Revolution.
Dr Islam Issa from Birmingham City University has written Milton in the Arab-Muslim World Professor John Carey has written The Essential Paradise Lost. He is an Emeritus professor at Merton, Oxford - an Honorary Professor of Liverpool University, a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. Dr Joe Moshenska is the author of A Stain In The Blood: The Remakable Voyage of Sir Kenelm Digby and teaches at the University of Cambridge. Dr Mandy Green from Durham University is the author of Milton's Ovidian Eve.
Reader: Kerry Gooderson
Producer: Torquil MacLeod.
Transcript
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| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.0 | Hello and welcome to the arts and ideas download from the free thinking team at the BBC. |
| 0:38.3 | Trapped up to her neck in sand. |
| 0:41.3 | Winnie in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days quotes from it. |
| 0:46.3 | In Syria, the current regime refers to it to show that revolt can be vanquished. |
| 0:52.3 | The poem is an early source for the term self-esteem, |
| 0:57.0 | and the rebel of the poem was conjured up as an analogy for the terrorists of 9-11. This is indeed |
| 1:03.4 | a poem for all seasons. John Milton's Paradise Lost is the subject of this evening's landmark |
| 1:10.6 | free thinking. |
| 1:11.6 | First published in 1667, it was written in the aftermath of the execution of a king and the restoration of royalty. |
| 1:19.6 | And this isn't to mention the author's own troubled history. |
| 1:23.6 | He supported the regicide, became secretary of foreign tongues in the Republican government, was later jailed, and slowly lost his sight before the poem was finished. |
| 1:34.3 | The poem, a 12-book epic, was written to justify the ways of God to men, to use the poem's own words. |
| 1:43.3 | Paradise Lost has Jesus there at the beginning of the world, |
| 1:47.1 | and rebellious and defiant Lucifer expelled from heaven. |
| 1:51.7 | Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven, as he puts it. |
| 1:56.3 | But the poem's heart, at least to me, has always seemed to be Adam and Eve, |
| 2:00.7 | who live in and are then expelled |
| 2:03.1 | from Eden. They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, through Eden took their solitary way |
| 2:11.2 | together. That's how the poem ends. Milton was indeed cursed to live through interesting times, but what's extraordinary |
... |
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