The story
Paradise Lost is an epic poem by John Milton, first published in London in 1667 in ten books and reissued in 1674 in twelve. It tells the story of the fall of humankind: Satan, cast out of heaven after a failed rebellion, tempts Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden into disobedience, and they lose paradise. Milton says his aim is to 'justify the ways of God to men'. It is written in unrhymed iambic pentameter, called blank verse, and is about 10,500 lines long.
Milton had been a poet and a polemicist for Parliament and the Commonwealth during the English Civil War, and a Latin secretary for Cromwell. He lost his sight by about 1652, and after the Restoration of 1660 he was arrested and then released. He composed the poem in his head and dictated it to assistants and to his daughters. The poem draws on the Authorized Bible, the Genesis story and the epic tradition of Homer, Virgil and Dante, but it puts a Protestant, republican politics under its theology. Milton reportedly sold the copyright to the printer Samuel Simmons for five pounds.
Readers have long argued about Satan, who gets some of the poem's greatest speeches. William Blake said Milton was 'of the Devil's party without knowing it', and Romantic poets such as Shelley and Byron admired him. The poem shaped English religious imagery, and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials takes its title from it.
Why it mattered
- The poem became the English-language epic, fixing an image of Eden, Satan and the fall that painters, poets and novelists reused.
- Its Satan, an attractive rebel, influenced Romantic ideas of the heroic outcast, as in Frankenstein, where the creature reads the poem.
- It showed how Protestant biblical culture and the classical epic could be joined in English verse.
Sources
- Milton sold his epic Paradise Lost for a bargain price Christian History Institute
- Restoration, Censorship, and Paradise Lost Rutgers University Libraries
- Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) University of Virginia Library
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