Someone PLEASE Take Me Down to the Paradise City

Throughout most of my academic life I've avoided poetry from England's Restoration period like the plague (Get it?  Get it??  Ahh never mind...).  So as I find myself ready to embark upon my latest higher-education endeavor at CUNY Hunter, I realize that I registered myself for a course on Milton.  Oh why must I be too proud to drop a class??  And why, WHY must I register for classes drunk?!?  (In case you're wondering, the answers to those questions are stupidity and tradition, respectively.)

Now, Milton and I have a rather tumultuous relationship.  I'm fascinated by nearly all facets of Paradise Lost, from the Romantics' viewing of Satan as the epic hero (and, much later, Paul Stevens' placement of Satan as one of literature's first anti-heroes), to the more modern viewpoint that the epic is most likely an offshoot of Milton's own revolutionary tendencies.  Furthermore, the story of the fall of man is simultaneously one of culture's earliest and most consistently pervasive "official" positions of misogyny, and with my interest in gender theory and feminism, I simply can't avoid interest in anything dealing with the topic.  And, of course, given that I'm quite literally in love with the English language, particularly it's rhythms in blank verse, how can I not be interested in what is the first true epic poem composed entirely in that language and meter?

As you can see, all the pieces are in place for me to devour this text with the voracity of a badger in Santa's Little Helper's doghouse.  Unfortunately, each and every time I've attempted to read Paradise Lost, I inevitably sigh with confusion, frustration, and boredom somewhere around the bit about a "Heav'nly Muse" singing about something or other (how that reconciles with my decision to get Satan's speech that closes with "That glory never shall his wrath or might extort from me." tattooed on my body is up to you to figure out).

I've made it through Book I on four separate occasions, and Book II twice.  I've never once gone beyond that until now, when I've finally reached Book IV.  I simply can not account for why this is so.  I've read far less interesting works of greater length, including the entirety of Tolkien's legendarily boring The Silmarillion (based in no small part on Paradise Lost), along with dozens upon dozens of dense, turgid prose pieces dealing with everything from Victorian life-writing to whether ideology itself is a self-defeating concept in modern society.  Why, then, can I not find the discipline to sit and read one of the greatest works in the history of written English, and, arguably, in the history of the written word, especially when its subject matter is of great interest to me?

I suspect it has something to do with my general avoidance of this particular period of English poetry.  Regardless of how influential a work it was, or how subversive/revolutionary it proved to be, or whether it could make or break me on the GRE Subject Test (thank you very much, 2007), it's technically part of the Restoration.  That places Milton firmly with the insufferable bore (and accused plagiarist) John Dryden, the so-offensive-he's-funny-then-pathetic misogynist Robert Gould, and countless other court poets who preferred rhyming couplets to anything interesting.  Aside from Pope and Swift, most other Restoration poetry actually makes me a little nauseous. 

That's the only solution I can think of, unless I'm truly not sophisticated enough to grasp Milton's epic (an entirely possible a preposterously unimaginable scenario).  Hopefully this fifth attempt at finishing the epic will succeed, and will provide a decent-enough groundwork with which to begin my studies on the poem in the fall.  All I can do is request that my Muse "What in me is dark / Illumin, what is low raise and support..."