like divine Providence to Milton. Even while writing it, he believed that he shared a muse with Moses and King David and that she visited him nightly in his dreams; he woke up and dictated his poem in seemingly preformed stanzas. The palpable exhilaration of the poem's composition, and the heavy burden of its complex meanings, contributes to the thrilling tension of "Paradise Lost."Milton's burning question, how things could have gone so wrong in human affairs, is carried back to the moment when "our first parents" ate the apple and brought "death into the world, and all our woe."
from The New Yorker: Return to Paradise
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