Praise for “Paradise Lost” Lyrics

Aside from the drug-enhanced novelist/stockbroker/corporate raider he portrayed in Limitless, [Bradley] Cooper has probably never played a guy as smart as he is in real life. At Georgetown, where he graduated with honors, Cooper wrote his thesis on Nabokov’s Lolita, remembers shedding actual tears in the campus library reading Romeo and Juliet, and still speaks with an eerie recall of and sincere affection for the other writers he read in the English program there. In the backyard of the café, I watch him, moved to something close to joy, recall his first encounter with Paradise Lost.

“Milton, bro? Milton. Fuckin’—that was the end of it. Motherfucker’s 57 or whatever, blind, dictating it to his fucking daughter-nurse—Paradise Lost? I mean, I just couldn’t… That poem fucking killed me. Satan? That character was un-fucking-believable. I could taste him in my mouth, dude, reading that. I really, really, for some reason, connected with that poem.”

[...]

...and then, in 2004, he got cast in Wedding Crashers. “A fucking tyrant” is how he describes the character now. His very own Satan, from Paradise Lost.

How to Format Lyrics:

  • Type out all lyrics, even repeating song parts like the chorus
  • Lyrics should be broken down into individual lines
  • Use section headers above different song parts like [Verse], [Chorus], etc.
  • Use italics (<i>lyric</i>) and bold (<b>lyric</b>) to distinguish between different vocalists in the same song part
  • If you don’t understand a lyric, use [?]

To learn more, check out our transcription guide or visit our transcribers forum

About

Genius Annotation

Excerpt from an interview with Bradley Cooper in the January 2014 issue of GQ.

Q&A

Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning

Credits
Featuring
Tags
Comments