An illustration by John Martin from an 1846 edition of Paradise Lost. A marathon reading of the poem this past February was the culminating experience of English professor Timothy Harrison’s undergraduate lecture course on Milton’s masterpiece. (The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949)
Creating and condemning the world in a day.
The Miltonathon—an all-day, nonstop, out-loud reading of the more than 10,000 lines of John Milton’s 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost—began just past 10 a.m. on the last day of February. Physically it took place in Rosenwald 405, a spacious classroom furnished with a long seminar table and couches pushed against the wood-paneled walls. Experientially the event was happening at no particular time or place, reality having been subsumed entirely by the lyrical, winding, hefty strands of Miltonic verse.
Timothy Harrison, an associate professor of English, organized the event after hearing of similar marathon reading enterprises at other schools. He had led a seminar on Paradise Lost for PhD students in the fall and was teaching an undergraduate lecture class on the poem at the time of the Miltonathon. “I thought it would make sense as a culminating experience,” he said in an interview after the event. “It also fits the Chicago ethos, where students want to do hard things.”
About 25 of us, mostly students, were there at the beginning, settled in chairs or behind the big table or curled up on a couch in the back. A podium stood at the front of the room, as did a whiteboard, where people could sign up to read during a 15-minute slot of their choosing—about 300 lines. Lunch and dinner would be provided.
Harrison read the poem’s famous first invocation, his voice filling the room to the corners: I thence / Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song.
What happened next? Well, I listened to people read Paradise Lost for 10 hours. Privately I had expected this to be a bit of a slog. But it was not bad, not once. “Time became very elastic,” Harrison reflected. “There was a feeling of being gripped by the movements of the narrative. It’s pushing you forwards and backwards.” Dozens of people lent their voices to the poem. Near the end of each time slot, the next speaker would hover near the podium, ready for a seamless transition.
Sometimes I was struck by the beauty of the language—With Head up-lift above the wave, and Eyes / That sparkling blaz’d. Other times I sat back and let the sound of the verse wash over me. All around the room, life went on: People walked in and out; a student balanced her coffee carefully on the shelf of the whiteboard and wrote her initials next to 2 p.m.; someone on the far wall tried to open a paper bag in silence, delicately unfolding each crease and corner with agonizing slowness; two women knitted; the face of one of Harrison’s young daughters appeared at the door and then vanished. Somehow all of this activity felt as much a part of Paradise Lost as the lines of the poem itself. “It’s this massive whole,” Harrison says of the poem. “It’s a theory of everything. It’s a story of all things.”
In the late afternoon, the room cooling, Harrison crept behind the table and closed the windows. Ambient sounds I hadn’t been aware of ceased abruptly. Nothing, anymore, was going in and out. Must I thus leave thee Paradise?
Almost 10 hours in I sensed the end of the poem approaching. It was as if it were a physical thing emerging from the horizon. Harrison took over for the final pages. As he read, a tremendous stillness seized the room, and I realized that I believed in the poem. I don’t really know a better way to say it.
Harrison spoke the final lines. And in the moment before we applauded, put our books away, and pulled on our coats, we felt it—a luminous unity, the world hanging together.