Milton wrote Paradise Lost just as the old cosmos was collapsing, and his poem holds both universes in suspension — Ptolemaic spheres and Copernican suns. Thomas Orchard’s The Astronomy of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ reads the epic with an astronomer’s eye, tracing what Milton knew (he had visited Galileo, blind under house arrest), what he believed, and how the poem’s cosmology actually works.
It is a lovely hybrid of literary criticism and history of science, generous to both. Download the free EPUB and tour the last great poem written inside the old universe.