Inspiration found

THANKS to the muse Urania, John Milton gave us “Paradise Lost.” Sick, blind, a political pariah, Milton couldn’t have finished his epic poem about the fall of Adam and Eve without the help of “my celestial patroness,” he says in Book IX, “who deigns / Her nightly visitation unimplored, / And dictates to me slumbering.... “

A beautiful new edition from Oxford University Press (374 pp., $28) comes with a red-ribbon page marker and exquisite engravings reproduced from the 1688 edition. Each of the poem’s 12 books opens with an illustration -- the angelic rebellion, the serpent’s wily business in Eden, or my favorite, the image for Book I: a winged, horned Satan trying to rouse his stunned legions, stirring and jabbing at them in a pool of fire as if it were a pot of stew.

“What an opening! And what scenery!” novelist Philip Pullman writes in his exuberant introduction. “[I]t’s easy to see that his imagination delighted in the scenery of hell.... “ Pullman’s a shrewd choice for commentator. He’s thrilled many young readers with “His Dark Materials,” a fantasy trilogy inspired by his reading of Milton. In fact, with his commentary to guide us, this edition of “Paradise Lost” seems backlit by Pullman’s own epic: Satan’s romantic defiance evokes Lord Asriel’s, while the chilly hierarchy of Milton’s Heaven is reminiscent of the sinister Mrs. Coulter. Perhaps this marketing strategy will draw new readers to “Paradise Lost,” a poem whose outrage still smolders some 350 years after an angelic visitor whispered it in Milton’s ear.

-- Nick Owchar