Pasquale Toscano
speaker
115 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Pasquale Toscano’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We often think of narrative...
Stories as being in prose and poetry being short and lyrical and very effusive.
But epic is both narrative and it's poetic.
And in that sense, it jolts us out of our complacencies about what literature is and what it can be.
So the lines are typically the same length.
There's regular verse patterns, regular rhyme schemes.
This is a genre that really rewards continuity and endurance, but a technical virtuosity extended over these great lengths.
you know,
Milton is fascinated by the models of heroism that he's inheriting from the ancient epics.
And I was just looking in the news the other day about Matt Damon losing all this weight to play Odysseus in the Christopher Nolan film.
And I think Milton has a sense for sort of the way that epic heroism gets hyped up as this very physical sort of thing.
And then Milton comes in as this blind hero
poet who's living as a sort of mocked and maligned disabled figure in the 17th century and thinking about, well, how can I draw on the techniques of representing heroes and thinking about heroes in action?
How can I draw on that tradition while also shifting
what it is that you can do to be heroic in the first place.
And so in Paradise Lost, you get a couple, Adam and Eve.
We already heard a little bit of Adam.
But you get a couple that's helping each other to be heroic.
And they're being heroic by using their minds and exercising their faculties of conscious and reason and choosing good over evil.
But
Showing 21–40 of 115 · page 2 of 6
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