Where Would You Suggest Someone Begins Looking In Order To Fully Understand The Scope And Breadth Of

Where would you suggest someone begins looking in order to fully understand the scope and breadth of Milton's Paradise Lost? I've started pursuing the bible, and some classical texts (Ovid, Virgil, Homer & Hesiod), but I feel like I'm still missing the mark with it. It is such a beautiful and rich text, and I would love to be able to enjoy it fully, so any help pointing me in the right direction would be very greatly appreciated.

yeah Paradise Lost is a strange thing (strange and unorthodox even in its day) and it takes some time and work—you’re not going to grasp all of it immediately. 

first, you need to understand Milton’s politics: this is the era of the English Civil War (see Braddick’s God’s Fury, England’s Fire (ebook) or Purkiss’, The English Civil War: A People’s History), and Milton is a public writer with powerful republican convictions, knee-deep in pamphlet wars and controversy. when Milton begins to write PL, it’s nine years after an English king was executed by his subjects, and a Commonwealth declared. Milton agrees to support that “republic”, even though the rule of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector, contradicts his beliefs. but the republic collapses—in 1660, the son of the executed king is restored to the throne, and Milton goes into hiding. readers have endlessly debated what kind of shadow this casts over PL—whether God is a tyrant and Satan a republican revolutionary (e.g. Bryson’s The Tyranny of Heaven), or God the only legitimate monarch there could ever be and Satan a pretender to His throne (Achinstein’s Literature and Dissent).

also, Milton’s theology is strange and nuanced, sometimes unorthodox and heretical, and indivisible from his politics. the vitality of freedom, free will and thought and action, goes through all his work—the chapter on Milton’s theodicy in the Cambridge Companion to Milton (pdf) is good on this. (it’s helpful to have Genesis of the KJV open side-by-side with it, because Milton is constantly echoing/adapting/transforming its words and verses).

as for the poetry itself—on the page it can look daunting, because Milton’s compound sentences seem to reach on forever, but it’s written in very clear iambic pentameter, blank verse—the same stuff as Shakespeare—and the five-beat rhythm goes through its lines like a blood-beat, it’s wonderful spoken aloud (like this, Satan’s speech from Book I). you want a good edition with comprehensive footnotes (like the Norton Critical Edition or Longman Annotated), and you have to take it slowly—it’s beautiful beautiful poetry, but it’s so dense, it’s doing so much all at once. pay attention to the texture of it, the alliterative and consonant and assonant sounds (because those are also joining characters and ideas together). 

there’s a gigantic critical tradition, and you can wade into that as much or as little as you like. the “Satanic” controversy is something you’ll have to wrestle with by book IX (to me, Romantic views of Satan as tragic hero are bad and should feel bad because they fall for what Milton was doing with the devil hook line and sinker and don’t know it). you could look at Kolbrener’s Milton’s Warring Angels, Rumrich’s MIlton Unbound, Fish’s Surprised By Sin, Raymond’s Milton’s Angels, Martin’s Milton and Gender and The Ruins of Allegory, Purkiss’ Literature, Gender and Politics During the English Civil War, Leonard’s Naming in Paradise. darkness visible is also a brilliant resource.