Paradise Lost, Book 2 by John Milton read by A Poetry Channel

"Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven." My recording of Milton's 17th century epic poem about the ultimate rebellion continues... If you enjoy my readings and would like to support the channel, you can buy me a cup of coffee : https://buymeacoffee.com/lorigomez_ap...    • Paradise Lost by John Milton   Writer and critic Samuel Johnson wrote that Paradise Lost shows off Milton's "peculiar power to astonish" and that Milton "seems to have been well acquainted with his own genius, and to know what it was that Nature had bestowed upon him more bountifully than upon others: the power of displaying the vast, illuminating the splendid, enforcing the awful, darkening the gloomy, and aggravating the dreadful". William Blake famously wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it." This quotation succinctly represents the way 18th- and 19th-century English Romantic poets viewed Milton, but whatever your view on Milton's religious affiliations, this poem is a masterwork.