Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. This week, brace yourselves, I'm going

to be looking at John Milton's Paradise Lost. I know, but I actually think it's amazing.

No, there's 12 books to Paradise Lost. I'm just going to do book one and even then only

the greatest hits of book one, as I see them. So I think it's very tempting to think

Paradise Lost is going to be a long tedious experience. I actually think there's so much

unbelievable stuff in it that you might change your mind. Dr. Samuel Johnson, who you may recall

is a literary hero of mine from the 18th century, said quite famously, I use famously

an inverted commas, I mean, in literary circles quite famously, of Milton's Paradise Lost

that none ever wished it longer. And that gets quoted quite a lot as a sort of quite

comical thing to say about a poem that's regarded as a literary classic. But he also said,

and I quote, you could learn the art of English poetry just by reading this one book. So

I think that's less quoted because it's more positive, and that is the way of the world,

of course. My relationship with Milton is sort of too pronged back in the late 70s, early

80s. I know a lot of my literary obsessions. I was saying literary a lot, I suppose that's

inevitable in this line of work. A lot of my literary obsessions started at Birmingham

Polytechnic when I was doing an English B.A. Honours course there. And we had an American

lecturer there who taught us Milton, and who did Lissidus, which is another poem by Milton

that is long but less long than this. And he talks in that about a friend who has died

young. And in it, one of the sort of fights come along with a bored, sheer, so horrible

nasty ceasers. And I remember him in his American accent used to say, and slits the thin

spun life. And that always stopped with me, I'm saying that in class. And slits the thin

spun life. And you can hear that silken thread of life being slits the thin spun. And

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