Living with an epic …

… My Ever New Delight: The Pleasures of Paradise Lost | The Hudson Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… the literary work I taught most often and with the most fervent enthusiasm and deepest satisfaction was Paradise Lost (a work with its own peculiar affinities to science fiction). From Mary Ann Radzinowicz I had absorbed the importance of slow and patient reading, always budgeting seven or eight weeks of the term for Milton’s epic, and I think that John Cooke would have been pleased to know that my undergraduates learned to read Paradise Lost aloud. After just a couple of weeks, even those students most hesitant about and intimidated by Milton could do it.