Tony Esolen shared on facebook with these comments:
Excellent article.
I will add several more reasons.
First, Milton is a tremendous psychologist, an analyst of human motives, passions, thinking, and folly. You will learn more from Milton about man -- his reasons, his desires, and his confusions -- than from any other English author not named Shakespeare. In this regard, only a very few are his equal: Homer perhaps, Dante, and Dostoyevsky.
Second, Paradise Lost is often breathtakingly beautiful. That includes beauty as POWER, especially dramatic power. Eliot was wrong about Milton's never having seen anything. Milton did not so much examine the individual object of sight as he set things in dramatic situations. When Sergei Eisenstein was asked where he learned his craft of cinematic direction, he replied that Milton was his teacher.
Third, you really cannot understand the whole Romantic movement in England and then on the Continent if you have not read Milton. It isn't just Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats, and Tennyson you won't understand -- oh, and Blake. It's Goethe too ... and the Italian republicans ...
Fourth, for Americans: the Founders of this country did not "major" in political philosophy. If you want to understand their minds, you have to read Milton too ...
I am ashamed of what my profession has become. But Milton's achievement will still be honored a thousand years from now, when our follies have become proverbial.
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