💬 Opinion Sep 4, 2026 · Anthony Esolen

What I Learned From Memorizing Paradise Lost

American Spectator
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What I Learned From Memorizing Paradise Lost
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I have memorized Paradise Lost.
When I was a graduate student, one of my professors, the courtly and mild-mannered medievalist George Kane, who seems now to have come from a lost world, told us of a neighbor of his when he was growing up on his grandfather’s farm in Saskatchewan. The man would recite Paradise Lost while he was plowing his fields. That was in the 1920s, so he did not have radio music to distract him, supposing he could have strapped a radio to his ears. Indeed, what was there the

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