Paradise Lost
by John Milton
Summary
Paradise Lost is the epic of the Fall: Satan's rebellion and expulsion from Heaven, his journey across Chaos to the new created Earth, and the temptation of Adam and Eve in the garden, ending with the pair walking out of Eden into human history. Milton announced that he meant to justify the ways of God to men, and he built the attempt on the largest scale English poetry offers, in blank verse that rolls through sentences a dozen lines long, dense with classical allusion and organ toned proper names.
Be honest about the reading experience: this is a demanding poem. The syntax is Latinate, the pace is stately, and nobody should feel embarrassed for needing an annotated edition. The reward is a grandeur nothing else in the language matches, and a central problem that keeps the poem alive: Satan gets the best lines. His defiance in the opening books is so magnetic that readers have argued for three centuries about whether Milton intended it, a debate William Blake fixed in one sentence when he wrote that Milton was of the Devil's party without knowing it.
The circumstances of composition are part of the story. Milton had gone completely blind in 1652, and he composed the poem in his head, dictating it line by line to assistants and friends, apparently between 1658 and 1663. It was published in ten books in 1667, then reorganised into twelve for the 1674 edition, in the manner of Virgil's Aeneid. Read it slowly, out loud where you can; the verse was built for the ear.
Historical Context & Significance
Milton had planned a national epic on a legendary British king, Arthur among the candidates, before settling on a subject larger than any nation. The finished poem became the measure of ambition in English verse: Samuel Johnson, no friend to Milton's politics, granted his peculiar power to astonish, and the Romantics made the poem their battleground, with Blake and Shelley reading Satan as tragic hero while later critics such as C.S. Lewis argued the reading was a mistake the poem itself corrects.
The Catholic Church placed it on the Index of prohibited books, which did nothing to slow it. It has attracted the great illustrators, Blake, Fuseli, John Martin and Gustave Dore among them, and its embedded jokes still surface: Book 9 conceals acrostics spelling SATAN and FALL down the opening letters of consecutive lines.