Orlando Reade, What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost (Vintage) £22

Not everyone read Milton’s great epic as he intended. In Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy (1990), for example, the protagonist, a spirited young woman who has emigrated from the West Indies to the United States to find work, recalls having to memorize sections of Paradise Lost when at school. She identifies with her almost-namesake, Lucifer, a name she would have preferred, principally against her ‘god-like mother’, but also because she is someone who likes to kick against the pricks, a colonised child fighting the authorities who assume that they are good, that she is bad and they have the right to hold her down.¹

What in Me Is Dark is an engaging and informative work that developed out of the author’s experience of studying at an Ivy League School while teaching inmates in a men’s prison, a complicated binary life in work that he has put to good use. The book opens with a juxtaposition of Milton’s revolutionary and post-revolutionary life, as the author has his students read out the opening lines of the poem. The first line precipitates vigorous debate. It seems to be straightforwardly iambic, but if the word ‘disobedience’ is pronounced with five syllables – ‘dis-o-be-di-ence’ instead of four ‘dis-o-be-dience’ – it disrupts the order of the line, which is in itself disobedient. Reade is slightly stunned and starts to wonder whether there is more to the radical politics and poetics of the poem than he has ...