The Acrostic Paradise Lost by John Milton and Terrance Lindall

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organized by Lindall to celebrate John Milton’s 400th birthday and acclaimed around the
world for its enormous achievement and success, culminating in his elephant folio edition
of Paradise Lost with illustrations in size and artistic design and use of illustrated borders
and historiated initials that ensure that this magnificent edition will “stand the test of
time,” as Samuel Johnson said is true of any great work. And great work indeed is
Terrance Lindall’s Paradise Lost Elephant Folio.
When Terrance Linall completed the first Paradise Lost Elephant Folio and presented it
to Yuko Nii for the Nii Foundation, he said to me in words that were perhaps intended to
be private, but which demand sharing with the world: “I have to say that I think it is the
greatest illustrated book ever done [for many reasons, but especially] for all the
imagination, thought, and work I have put into Paradise Lost all my life that is summed
up in this folio. This is my supreme work. There is nothing else I need to achieve.
Everything was moving toward this object all my life, but I did not know it. The folio is
everything I had hoped and imagined it could be.”
A short while later in a hand-written note to me, he reiterated sentiments I share, that “I
know now that the Elephant Folio will be one of the greatest printed and embellished
books ever produced!”
Lindall’s elephant folio with the grandeur of size given each illustration, accompanied by
clarity of text through his own synopsis of Paradise Lost, affords Milton’s great epic the
quality of scope and epic design it deserves and brings Paradise Lost to life in exciting
new ways that are as new to Milton’s epic as Milton’s epic itself must have been to his
own generation and others that followed. With the publication of his illustrated Paradise
Lost Elephant Folio, Lindall claims a stature as illustrator par excellence of Milton’s
Paradise Lost for our age and for all ages to come. His illustrations stand second to none
and rank among the best-known paintings for Milton’s epic, and as the epic will live on
because of its intrinsic and unique celebration of the state of man, so will the illustrations
of it by Lindall, enabling everyone in every age to recognize and appreciate what makes
Milton’s epic so timeless and for all ages. Milton’s epic together with Lindall’s
illustrations, have become intertwined for every age and for all ages to come.
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From being a Benedictine monk in ND in the mid-1960s, Robert J. Wickenheiser
received his MA and PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1969 &1970. He then
moved on to teaching Milton on the faculty in the English Department of Princeton
University. At the age of 34 he became the 21st president of Mount St. Mary’s
University (MD), where he served for 16 years from 1977 to the early 1993 and is