Vindicated by Dr Johnson

Back at the beginning of the summer I briefly meditated on great books that I’ve tried to read but simply can’t. I wrote in some detail about The Grapes of Wrath but also mentioned Paradise Lost, which I have started many times and never finished—a fact I always feel a little ashamed of.

Well, this week I started reading Joseph Bottum’s The Decline of the Novel, which is excellent so far, and in the introduction he included this passage from Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets:

“‘Paradise Lost’ is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.”

This has been precisely my experience, and if Samuel Johnson could say the same—with much more besides—I can feel a little better about this gap in my reading.

Addendum: Having read the portion of Johnson’s life of Milton in which Johnson assesses Paradise Lost on the merits, I find some of his criticisms precisely accurate and insightful—the allegorical figures don’t work, Adam and Eve’s situation is literally unimaginable, and Milton has set himself the impossible task of describing at length things that can’t be described—while others are more specious. Maybe what will finally propel me through Paradise Lost is the need to make up my own mind about these controversies. To justify the ways of Dr Johnson, that is.