‘Forgive Me Awful Poet:’ The Redemption and Rewriting of Paradise Lost

CECS & CREMS Joint Seminar

Faced with the problem of Milton’s reputation in the Restoration, the earliest critics of Paradise Lost invented foundational critical moves to redeem the poem from its own politics and unorthodoxies. This talk explores more radical interventions: the wholesale rewriting of Paradise Lost, especially that of John Dryden and later (rather odd) “translations” into prose by way of French versions of the epic.

Colonel Dave Harper is Professor and Head of the Department of English and Philosophy at the United States Military Academy, West Point. He is the author of several articles on John Milton as well as Shakespeare. His most recent chapter, “Milton Beyond Iconoclasm” appears in Immortality and the Body in the Age of Milton from Cambridge University Press. While in the U.K. he is a Visiting College Fellow at St. Chad’s College, Durham University, and a Research Associate at the University of York’s Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. His monograph in progress is tentatively entitled The Redemption of Paradise Lost and the Making of English Literary Scholarship.