The Canon Club 1 - Paradise Lost and Dr Johnson's "Life of Milton", with Jaspreet Singh Boparai

Canon Club

The inaugural Canon Club event took place in London at the Sekforde on Wednesday 11th October, where Jaspreet Singh Boparai spoke on Paradise Lost and Dr Johnson's "Life of Milton". The talk transcript is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eK1pUNKFY7-SHSRZqVUGZLTVrvdGJtyV/edit Jaspreet trained as a classicist and historian of art, and specialises in the culture of Renaissance Italy, and the influence of ancient Roman sculpture and classical Greek poetry on artists and writers in fifteenth-century Florence. He studied Classics so that he wouldn't need footnotes to understand the Latin and Greek references in Paradise Lost. His doctorate focussed on the work of the Renaissance polymath Politian (1454-1494), who was a hero both to John Milton and Dr Samuel Johnson. He is one of the founders of the Antigone Journal, a new and open forum for Classics in the twenty-first century. By way of an introduction, he writes: "Why is Paradise Lost the greatest poem in our language? And how is this, the work of a Puritan regicide, our national epic? English writers and thinkers have been arguing about this for over three hundred and fifty years. Sometimes these arguments get in the way of enjoying Milton's work, which is one of the richest sources of pleasure in English literature. Our best guide to Milton's poem remains Dr Samuel Johnson's "Life of Milton", from Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779-1781). Dr Johnson's exploration of Paradise Lost and its author has itself become a monument of English literature. But was Dr Johnson right about Milton?" Music Thomas Tallis - Mass for Four Voices: 3. Sanctus