James: That's a fair point about the workshop environment. I suppose I wasn't thinking of "preface" quite that way, but I'm okay with someone asking for "targeted" advice -- if they're happy with the content but want criticism on the meter etc. I still think any excessive contextualization is anathema to the point of reading a poem, however, unless the poem will indeed be published / sent out with that extra information (a la Coleridge's revised "Ancient Mariner" text).
And Roger...yes! I actually have the same edition of Paradise Lost you mention (I think) -- I've collected a few different editions over the years, and if it's same one I think you're referring to, I bought it precisely because it was so beautifully rendered. It's a true folio, which you don't see very often in modern editions. I was fortunate enough to first read Paradise Lost in Merritt Hughes's edition of Milton's works. It does have footnotes, but they're tiny and really don't interfere with the main text. It was great as a student, because I could easily read it without eye-skip, but could also squint at the footnotes if I found something particularly confusing. I legitimately love Paradise Lost, and it broke my heart a little to have to cut a 400-line section of it from my syllabus last week when I realized my students were having a hard enough time with short poems, and probably couldn't handle peak Milton. (It's an intro / survey course, meaning students from a blend of majors. Had they all been English majors, I would have kept it).
Incidentally, thinking back to my earlier post, this will likely be the last time I use Norton anthologies in my literature classes. They certainly have their uses, but I'm realizing that the editorial interpolations are far too intrusive for me. When I saw that they literally changed two words of a Shakespeare Sonnet (as in, made up something out of thin air as "editorial conjecture") because the original words are "probably" a printing error...well, that made up my mind, for what I hope are obvious reasons.
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