Paradise Lost

• 1. Introduction

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  Paradise Lost opens not with a garden or a god, but with a catastrophe already in progress. Satan and his rebel angels have just lost a war in Heaven, and Milton drops the listener into Hell alongside them, amid the wreckage of a failed uprising. The question hanging in the air is not whether God will win, but why the grandest, most eloquent voice in the poem belongs to the loser.

  John Milton published this epic poem in 1667, when he was blind, ill with gout, and grieving. He had dictated every line to friends and helpers, including his daughters, working from somewhere between 1658 and 1663 according to his contemporary and biographer John Aubrey. The poem ran to more than ten thousand lines across ten books in that first edition; a second edition in 1674 reorganised them into twelve books, following the structure of Virgil's Aeneid.

  Milton's stated ambition was to justify the ways of God to men. That phrase appears near the very beginning of the poem at line 1.20. What he produced in pursuit of that goal was one of the most argued-over works in the English language, a poem that prompted readers across centuries to disagree violently about whether Milton succeeded, whether Satan was a hero or a monster, and whether the whole enterprise was a Christian morality tale or something far stranger. Those debates have never stopped.

• 2. Satan's Grandeur and Ruin

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  "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven." That line from Book 1, spoken at line 1.263, is perhaps the most quoted sentence in the poem, and it captures the central puzzle Milton built around his villain. Satan delivers it not as a boast but as a philosophical position, and Milton gives him the voice to make it sound almost reasonable.

  Milton describes Satan early in the poem as possessing a "fixt mind", "unconquerable Will" and "courage never to submit or yield" (1.97, 106, 108). These are the qualities of an epic hero, and Milton assigns them deliberately to the character who is supposed to be the origin of all evil. The rebellion itself began, according to the poem, when God proclaimed the Son of God "anointed" as saviour (5.660-664). Satan "thought himself impaird", meaning his envy made him feel diminished by God's action, and he gathered a following among the angels and led them in a war that lasted three days before the Son of God single-handedly drove them all into Hell.

  Book 4 marks a turning point. Satan arrives in Eden and, looking at it, breaks into a private lament: "Me miserable! which way shall I flie / Infinite wrauth, and infinite despaire? / Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell." The grandeur cracks. Satan, who has traversed Chaos alone in a journey Milton compares to those of Odysseus and Aeneas, who has shifted shape (becoming a cherub in Book 3, then a serpent), who has rallied an entire fallen army through sheer rhetoric, finds himself unable to escape his own mind.

  The Romantic poets seized on this interiority. William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Hazlitt all read Satan as a kind of hero. Blake famously wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Milton "was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it." C. S. Lewis pushed back hard, arguing in A Preface to Paradise Lost that readers far from Milton's era were romanticising a character that Milton's original audience would have recognised immediately as a stock warning. Comparative religion scholar R. J. Zwi Werblowsky offered a different frame entirely, noting in his book Lucifer and Prometheus the deep parallels between Milton's Satan and the Greek Titan Prometheus, which he called "most illuminating" for understanding why the character generates such divided responses. John Carey's resolution was to argue that Satan exists in more modes than any other character in the poem, and that any one-sided reading necessarily discards half the evidence.

• 3. Adam, Eve, and the Shape of the Fall

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  Adam asks God, before Eve is created, for a companion: "Of fellowship I speake / Such as I seek, fit to participate / All rational delight, wherein the brute / Cannot be human consort" (8.389-392). God grants the request, creates Eve from one of Adam's ribs, and from that moment the poem's domestic story begins.

  Eve wakes next to a lake. She sees a reflection in the water and is drawn to it, not understanding it is herself. Milton is deliberately echoing the myth of Narcissus here, and he develops it. When Eve later recounts this memory to Adam, she tells him she found him, at first, less enticing than her own reflection (4.477-480). Satan exploits exactly this vulnerability in Book 9, approaching Eve alone after she and Adam have agreed to work in separate parts of the garden. Satan, inside the serpent, flatters Eve by telling her that her beauty makes her nearly divine and that the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge gave the serpent the power of speech and reason. The language he uses, Milton signals, draws on Renaissance love poetry.

  In Book 9, Milton also encodes the story's meaning in the poem's own typography. A verse describing the serpent spells out "SATAN" (9.510), while elsewhere in the same book Milton spells "FFAALL" and "FALL" (9.333), a visual pun that scholars read as representing the double fall of both Adam and Eve.

  Adam's fall is constructed differently from Eve's. He knows what she has done. He eats the fruit anyway, declaring that since Eve was made from his flesh they are bound together; if she must die, he will die too. Milton presents this as simultaneously heroic and more culpable than Eve's sin, because Adam acts with full knowledge. After eating, both experience lust and shame for the first time, fall into nightmares, and wake to mutual recrimination. The Archangel Michael eventually shows Adam a vision of all human history up to the Great Flood, and tells him of mankind's potential redemption through what Michael calls "King Messiah." Adam and Eve leave Eden, and Michael tells Adam he may find "a paradise within thee, happier far."

• 4. Building a New Kind of Epic

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  Milton invokes not the classical muses at the opening of Paradise Lost but the Christian God directly, addressing him as his "Heav'nly Muse" (1.1). That substitution signals what the whole poem is doing: taking the machinery of classical epic and rewiring it for Christian purposes.

  The conventions are all present. There is the in medias res opening, the journey through the underworld, the large-scale battles, the elevated style, and the extended Homeric similes. But Milton reassigns their moral weight. Achilles, Odysseus, and Aeneas, as heroes of the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, are celebrated for military strength and guile; Milton gives those exact traits to Satan, and presents the Son of God as heroic instead for his love, mercy, humility, and self-sacrifice.

  The poem is written in blank verse, meaning metrically regular iambic pentameter without rhyme. Milton was not the first to use blank verse, but his handling of it was unusually complex. He exploited enjambment as a tool for double syntax, letting the end of one line carry a different meaning than the completed sentence does. In Book 9 he writes of Adam waiting for Eve's return: "Great joy he promised to his thoughts, and new / Solace in her return..." (9.843-844). The lack of a stop after "new" lets the word temporarily modify "thoughts," creating a momentary reading that the line then corrects, a technique that anticipates Eve's return having eaten the forbidden fruit. The blank verse form became so associated with Milton that Samuel Johnson, generations later, mocked the bad imitators it spawned, and both Alexander Pope and John Keats contended explicitly with its influence.

  The Catholic Church placed Paradise Lost on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, its list of banned books. Milton himself was well known to his contemporaries as a radical, partly for his republican politics and his heterodox theology. The theologian Tobias Gregory described him as "the most theologically learned among early modern epic poets," adding that he was a thinker of "great independence of mind" who worked in a society where questions of divine justice were debated with exceptional intensity. Milton believed, for instance, that God created Heaven, Earth, Hell, and all creatures not out of nothing but from part of Himself, a view reflected in how God is presented in the poem as the ultimate "author" of all creation.

• 5. Milton Blind, Milton Dictating

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  Milton went blind in 1652, fifteen years before Paradise Lost appeared in print. He composed the entire poem through dictation, working with a rotating group of amanuenses and friends.

  The image of Milton at work became, in the Romantic period, a subject for paintings. Both Henry Fuseli and Eugene Delacroix produced loosely biographical canvases inspired by the spectacle of a blind poet producing one of the most ambitious works in the English language. The popular image fixed specifically on Milton dictating to his daughters.

  His private circumstances during composition were difficult. John Aubrey places the writing between 1658 and 1663. In 1658, Milton's second wife Katherine Woodcock died, and their infant daughter died in the same period. He suffered from gout throughout. His earlier plans for an epic had been interrupted by the English Civil War; the Milton scholar John Leonard notes that Milton had not originally planned to write a biblical epic at all, envisioning instead a poem about a legendary Saxon or British king, possibly drawn from Arthurian legend. Leonard says Milton envisioned an "epic poem that would encompass all space and time."

  For publication, Milton turned to the Simmons printing family. His previous work had been printed by Matthew Simmons, who was favored by radical writers. Matthew had died in 1654, and the business was run by his widow Mary Simmons with increasing help from her son Samuel. Milton had not published with the Simmons firm for twenty years. The first book Samuel Simmons registered for publication under his own name was Paradise Lost in 1667.

• 6. The Character of Sin and Death

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  Sin is introduced in Book 2 of Paradise Lost and is the first female character in the epic. She is Satan's daughter and lover, born from Satan himself in Heaven through parthenogenesis (2.757-760). After the angels fall, God charges her with guarding the gates of Hell (2.850-853). Her body is monstrous; Milton describes a serpentine lower half from which hellhounds are perpetually born and re-enter.

  Milton aligns her form with other monstrous females in earlier literature: Homer's Scylla from The Odyssey, Edmund Spenser's Error from The Faerie Queene, and the Greek figure of Lamia. The scholar Barbara Creed coined the term "monstrous feminine" for this archetype, and Sin fits it precisely. A. Louise Cole reads Sin as the first mother in the poem and argues that Milton's choice to make her female and a mother "allows us to read her character as the embodiment of the Son's curse upon Eve and her descendants."

  Death, Sin's incestuous son by Satan, is never given a clear physical form. Milton describes him only as an undefined shadowy figure, a "shadow" (10.264), whose shifting appearance reflects his status as an allegorical being rooted in disorder rather than stable creation. John S.P. Tatlock traces the pairing of Sin and Death back to James 1:15, which reads: "Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death."

  Not everyone was convinced the allegory worked. Joseph Addison, writing in The Spectator in the early 18th century, admired the vividness of Milton's descriptions of Sin but argued that her fantastical qualities undermined the serious realism the epic genre demanded. Samuel Johnson made a similar complaint, suggesting that the tangible interactions of Sin and Death with other characters weakened the allegorical argument. Professor James S. Baumlin countered that the allegory extends throughout Hell's population and that Sin carries a dual symbolism, representing both the concept of sin and the specific vice of Lust.

• 7. Criticism, Controversy, and Lasting Impact

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  Samuel Johnson wrote that Paradise Lost shows Milton's "peculiar power to astonish," crediting him with "the power of displaying the vast, illuminating the splendid, enforcing the awful, darkening the gloomy, and aggravating the dreadful." That assessment has held for centuries even as the debates around the poem have grown more complicated.

  William Empson took the most adversarial position among modern critics, arguing that Milton's God was "sickeningly bad" and comparing him to a "Stalinist" tyrant. The second volume of Empson's authorized biography was titled William Empson: Against the Christians, and his reading of the poem was inseparable from what his biographer called his "visceral loathing of Christianity." Empson argued that God's omniscience makes him complicit in the Fall; since God knew what would happen, the plan was God's plan too. Dennis Danielson challenged this reading directly in Milton's Good God (1982), arguing that foreknowledge does not equal culpability and that the poem's insistence on human free will is the answer Milton provides: God says in the poem, "They trespass, Authors to themselves in all, Both what they judge and what they choose; for so I formd them free, and free they must remain."

  Milton's treatment of marriage and gender has generated equally contested readings. A year after his wife Mary Powell left him, weeks after their wedding in 1642, Milton published The Divorce Tracts. In the tract Tetrachordon, he defines marriage as "a love fitly dispos'd to mutual help and comfort of life." Critics applying Adam-centered and Eve-centered frameworks to the poem disagree sharply about how hierarchy and equality function between the couple. Kristin Pruitt argues that the ideal human marriage in Milton's telling is "not masculinist or feminist but essentially...humanist."

  The illustrations that entered the poem's history became a tradition of their own. The first engravings were added to the fourth edition of 1688, with up to eight of the twelve prefatory images attributed to Sir John Baptist Medina and one to Bernard Lens II. Salvador Dali executed a set of ten colour engravings in 1974. Book 1 of the poem was translated into Tamil as Swarga Neekam MutharKandam in 1895 by V. P. Subramania Mudaliar (1857-1946), who included annotations and a biography of Milton alongside the translation.