Featured on PDR in the collection The Universe as Pictured in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1915)

When we talk about fan fiction, we rarely think: “John Milton”. And yet, how better to approach his Paradise Lost (1667), which takes Satan (barely mentioned in the Bible) and makes this fallen arch-fiend into an ambivalent, epic hero? Structured on techniques and themes borrowed from Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and countless other texts and genres, Milton remixed classical and Renaissance forms to fashion the biblical universe into a setting for English literature’s (perhaps) greatest poem, one which Philip Pullman believes will [“n]ever be surpassed”. And if Milton stoked fandom in turn, he had no keener admirer than William Fairfield Warren, an eclectic scholar and the first president of Boston University. By the time Warren wrote his last…