This week has turned out to be more complicated than I thought it would be, so I won’t be able to do my audio posts on Paradise Lost. But I have something better: the brilliant essays written some years ago by my friend Jessica Martin — in fact, I believe I got to know Jessica and her husband Francis Spufford through these essays, which I praised when I first read them — to introduce new readers to the poem:
Reading this series was what got me thinking about writing a book on Paradise Lost, which I had already been teaching for decades.