Paradise Lost Is Anything but Paradise

I'm taking a class on the Age of Milton this semester and it has been one of the best and most challenging classes I have taken thus far. The course started off with prose and the poetry of Andrew Marvell, we then studied Milton's Paradise Lost, and are now reading The Duchess of Malfi. I am writing a research paper on Paradise Lost arguing that the poem is an epic, you know, like the Aeneid, Iliad, and Odyssey? If you have ever attempted to read any of these you know what a challenge literature of this genre can be. I thought I was lost reading Paradise Lost; I'm definitely lost writing about it. The footnotes in the book are longer than the page; I had a professor tell me once that that is the definition of good writing; so I obviously have a good edition of the epic poem. See what I did there? I wish giving the argument in my paper was that simple. The poem has all the conventions of an epic: beginning by stating the purpose of the poem, opening in medias res, invoking a muse, using epithets, epic catalogues, giving long speeches by main characters, portraying divine intervention concerning the fall of man, containing epic similes, and has a protagonist who the human race can relate to, fairly simple research paper right? Don't worry, I'm not having too hard of a time with the paper; I'm just using my blog as a divergence for a moment. I mean this blog is the "musings from the law" obviously appropriate since I am on the paragraph about Milton's invocation of the muse. Now I will get back to this paper with no title; if you have any thoughts or ideas about the paper/book/or Milton in general I'd love to hear them; just for the record, I think he was a great writer, but I don't much like him. 

Coldplay has it right: Lost