![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() He recorded having told Milton after he had read an early manuscript copy of Paradise Lost – this is before Paradise Lost was even in print – he reports to us having told Milton, “Thou hast said much here of paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of paradise found?” And then Elwood continues, and it’s a wonderful little bit of information: “Milton made no answer to me but sat some time in a muse.” It was Thomas Elwood – he was one of the young men who acted as a secretary for Milton – who claimed years after the poet’s death that he had been responsible for Milton’s having written the sequel to Paradise Lost. I think that the disappointment aroused by a sequel, a sequel of any kind, is a phenomenon about which John Milton, as he wrote Paradise Regained, must have been extremely aware. It just comes attached to the notion of the sequel. It’s almost as if the diminished appeal was something like an inevitable and necessary fact of the sequel. Well, as anyone who’s read – and maybe there’s someone here in this room who has read the continuation of the novel Gone with the Wind – as anyone who has read that knows, or as anyone who’s seen, let’s say, “The Bride of Chucky” or “The Fast and the Furious, Part 3,” knows, sequels are rarely greater than the original works whose stories they continue. Professor John Rogers: Paradise Regained. Milton ENGL 220 - Lecture 21 - Paradise Regained, Books I-IIĬhapter 1. ![]()
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