Michael Cavanagh, _Paradise Lost: A Primer_ (ed. Scott Newstok)

I GAMELY ATTEMPTED Paradise Lost on my own the summer I was nineteen and actually made it all the way to the end, though I would not have been able to tell anyone anything coherent about it. About three years later I read it again while a student in Michael Cavanagh's course on Milton, and that did the trick. In grad school, I was willing to credit almost anything Eliot said in his criticism, but I never bought into his attempt to dethrone Milton. I had been inoculated.

Reading Michael's posthumously-published book on Paradise Lost is a bit like taking the course again but actually much better, since Michael had taught and thought about the poem a great deal more in the twenty-odd years after he had me in class, and I have had the benefit of another dozen or so times through it myself. 

As the subtitle indicates, Paradise Lost: A Primer is not a contribution to the specialist literature on the poem. It is not exactly a Dummy's Guide, either, though--Michael does not explain who William Blake is or what the English Civil War was. 

It may be the perfect book for someone in my situation, actually, as a teacher whose specialty lies well outside the early modern period yet who often teaches Paradise Lost in our small department's undergraduate survey course.

The MLA guides to teaching this or that canonical text are rarely helpful, I've found; they are usually too interested in throwing whatever the fashionable shapes of the moment are. Reading a raff of recent articles will usually leave you lost in the weeds with nothing in which an undergraduate audience's attention will find purchase. 

My fallback tactic--read everything in the back of the Norton Critical Edition--worked reasonably well. But to any non-specialist teaching the poem now, I would say: read Cavanagh. You will get a tour of the poem's most universally discussable themes and an introduction to its most influential critics in the utterly engaging voce of someone who has lived with and loved the poem for most of a lifetime. And that is exactly what will help you the most.