DWill wrote:I thought the poem could be made more interesting if people offered their own ideas and resources they've found related to PL. For example, my daughter, who is a great fantasy genre reader, says that Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" reworks PL themes and has a band of rebel angels. There should be a graphic novel of PL.
No graphic novel, as of yet. It does seem that it would lend itself well to that format. As I was looking, I came across a blog that the person said he was taking a class on Milton and they read, round-robin, the entire poem; it took 9 1/2 hours!
Here is a list I found on Wikipedia of literary connections to PL (DWill, I bet your daughter has read the Sandman series):
In literature
* Much of the mystic poetry of William Blake is a direct response to or rewriting of Paradise Lost. Blake emphasized the rebellious, satanic elements of the epic; the repressive character Urizen in the Four Zoas is a tyrannical version of Milton's God. In addition to his famous quip in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell about Milton belonging to the devil's party, Blake wrote Milton: a Poem which has Milton, like Satan, rejecting a life in Heaven.
* Paradise Lost influenced Mary Shelley when she wrote her novel Frankenstein, in the 1810s; she included a quotation from book X on the title page, and it is one of three books Dr. Frankenstein's monster finds which influences his psychological growth.
* In his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie adapts major motifs and plot elements from Paradise Lost, such as a "fall" and subsequent transformation.
* The epic was also one of the prime inspirations for Philip Pullman's trilogy of novels His Dark Materials (itself a quotation from Book II of Paradise Lost). In Pullman's introduction, he adapts Blake's line to quip that he himself "is of the Devil's party and does know it."
* Libba Bray uses a quote from Paradise Lost to name the second book of her trilogy, Rebel Angels quoting from it "To reign is worth ambition though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav'n."
* In his epic Sandman comics/graphic novels series, Neil Gaiman uses Lucifer as a a character, most notably in the Season of Mists arc/collection, and makes reference to the poem, even having Lucifer openly quote Milton.
* In the 20th anniversery collection of Garfield comics, "Garfield: 20 Years and still Kicking", Jim Davis mentioned that Odie Never had to read "Paradise Lost"