Another Eden

In December 1996 Martin Amis told listeners of the BBC’s Desert Island Discs what would relieve his solitude were he to end up cast away in paradise with one piece of music, a luxury and a book for company. He chose Coleman Hawkins’s version of the jazz standard ‘Yesterdays’ as his only record — seduction music, he suggested — and opted for the luxury of an unlimited Sky Sports subscription package.

Amis’s preferred book, in this company, sounded similarly butch: John Milton’s Paradise Lost as edited by Alastair Fowler for the Longman Annotated English Poets series in 1968. Fowler’s edition of Milton’s epic poem remains a monumental feat of textual scholarship; a page frequently presents just half a dozen lines of blank verse above many hundreds of editorial words intricately tracing the poem’s echoes, the labyrinthine complexity of its allusions. Milton and Fowler are, Amis’s choice implies, Premier League.

So, too, is William Poole’s smart and original book on Paradise Lost, built upon the very best traditions of patient philological work represented by Fowler’s edition.