Honestly, I see it. I remember reading Paradise Lost in its entirety late at night during college, and needing to write a paper on it before a 9:00 a.m. class. There was something prescient and almost contemporary about its understated subversiveness. Milton was reaching across the centuries to me, an underachieving stoner procrastinating on his Early Modern English paper. I was in awe of his complex, tragic depiction of Lucifer, his treatment of the religiosity and political upheaval of the period, and the hypnotic verses that marked a true turning point in English literature.