Title: Paradise Lost Author: John Milton Creation Date: 1667 Location: England
Summary
Milton's epic poem retells the story of the Fall of Man in twelve books of blank verse. It opens with Satan and his rebel angels cast into Hell after their failed revolt against God, follows Satan's journey through Chaos to the newly created Earth, and depicts his temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, experience shame and conflict, and are expelled from Paradise — but with the promise of future redemption. Framing this narrative are the great set-pieces: Satan's defiant speeches in Hell, the War in Heaven, Raphael's account of Creation, and Michael's vision of future human history.
Why This Book Matters
Paradise Lost is the last great European epic poem and the work that proved English could match Latin, Greek, and Italian as a vehicle for the highest literary ambitions. Milton undertook to "justify the ways of God to men," but his poem's enduring power lies in its ambiguity: Satan is the most charismatic figure in the poem, his rhetoric of rebellion against tyranny anticipates Romantic and revolutionary language, and the poem's God can seem cold and authoritarian. This tension — did Milton intend to make Satan sympathetic, or did his genius betray his theology? — has fuelled three and a half centuries of debate. The poem transformed how English-speaking cultures think about evil, rebellion, freedom, and the relationship between the human and the divine.
Historical Context
Milton published Paradise Lost in 1667, after the failure of the English Revolution to which he had devoted his political life. He had served as Oliver Cromwell's Secretary for Foreign Tongues, defended the regicide of Charles I in print, and gone blind in the service of the Commonwealth. With the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, Milton was briefly imprisoned and permanently marginalised. The poem is inescapably shaped by this context: its depiction of failed rebellion, lost paradise, and the necessity of carrying on after catastrophic defeat resonates with Milton's own political experience.
Literary Significance
Milton's blank verse — unrhymed iambic pentameter deployed in long, periodic sentences modelled on Latin syntax — created a new music for English poetry, one that would influence every subsequent epic and philosophical poet from Wordsworth to Stevens. His characterisation of Satan as a figure of tragic grandeur helped create the template from which later Romantic anti-heroes would be read. The poem's treatment of Adam and Eve's relationship — their conversations, their sexuality, their mutual recrimination after the Fall — is among the most psychologically nuanced depictions of marriage in literature before the novel.
Research Notes
Essential for the Renaissance/Early Modern period. Milton bridges the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and Paradise Lost is the capstone of the European epic tradition that begins with Homer and runs through Virgil and Dante. The poem's difficulty is real but manageable with a good annotated edition. Fowler's edition provides generous glosses. The poem rewards re-reading more than almost any other work on this list.
The Reading
He who saw the deep, the burning lake, the palace of Hell rising from sulphurous ground — let us begin with the catastrophe already complete. The poem opens in medias res, after the war in Heaven has been lost, after the rebel angels have fallen for nine days through the void, after Satan and his legions lie stunned and burning on a lake of fire that gives off not light but "darkness visible." The fall has already happened. We are in its aftermath, and the first voice we hear is the most dangerous voice in the poem.
Book I: The Fall of the Angels
Satan is the first to stir. He lifts his head from the flames and speaks, and from his first words, the problem of the poem — the problem that has occupied readers for three and a half centuries — declares itself. Satan is magnificent.
"What though the field be lost? / All is not lost; the unconquerable will, / And study of revenge, immortal hate, / And courage never to submit or yield."
The rhetoric is stirring. The defiance is heroic. The voice is that of a leader refusing despair in the face of total defeat. If these lines were spoken by a human general rallying his broken army, they would be unambiguously admirable. But they are spoken by the being who has just led a third of Heaven's angels in war against God and lost — the being whose pride, according to Milton's theology, is the origin of all evil.
Milton knew what he was doing. He gave Satan the best lines because he understood that evil does not announce itself as evil. It announces itself as courage, as independence, as the refusal to kneel. The seductiveness of Satan's rhetoric is the seductiveness of sin itself.
Satan rouses his fallen legions. They assemble on the burning plain, an army of the damned, and Satan surveys them from a vantage, moved in spite of himself: "Thrice he assayed, and thrice, in spite of scorn, / Tears such as angels weep burst forth." He weeps for what they were and what they have become. Then he hardens. He proposes their course: not a second assault on Heaven, which would be futile, but a more subtle revenge. God, they have heard, has created a new world and a new race of beings — Man. They will corrupt this creation. They will strike at God through His newest and most vulnerable work.
The fallen angels build Pandaemonium — the palace of Hell, raised from the burning ground by demonic craft, its gilded dome gleaming in the hellish light. They hold a council.
Book II: The Infernal Council and the Journey Through Chaos
The council in Pandaemonium is a parliament of the damned, and Milton stages it as a political debate, each faction advocating a different strategy. Moloch, the fiercest, argues for open war — "My sentence is for open war." Belial, the most eloquent, argues for patient endurance — better to exist in Hell than to risk annihilation in another assault. Mammon argues for making the best of Hell, building their own empire: "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven" — though this famous line actually belongs to Satan in Book I; Mammon's version is the political programme that follows from it.
Beelzebub, Satan's second-in-command, rises last and proposes what Satan has already decided: the corruption of mankind. The council votes. Satan volunteers to make the journey alone, through the abyss of Chaos, to the new world. No one contests his claim. He is their leader. The mission is his.
The journey through Chaos is one of the poem's greatest set-pieces. Satan flies through a region that is not Heaven and not Hell and not Earth — a roiling void where the elements exist in perpetual conflict, "a dark / Illimitable ocean, without bound, / Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height, / And time and place are lost." He meets Chaos and Night, the primordial powers who ruled before Creation, and enlists their support. He emerges from the abyss and sees the new world hanging in space, a golden sphere suspended from Heaven by a golden chain. He descends toward it.
Books III and IV: Heaven, Eden, and the First Sight of Man
Book III shifts to Heaven, and the contrast is deliberate and total. Where Hell was rhetoric and grandeur, Heaven is light — pure, unmediated, overwhelming light. God the Father, seated on his throne, sees Satan approaching Earth and foretells the Fall. He declares that Man will fall, that Man's fall is Man's choice (free will being the condition of virtue), and that Man will be offered redemption. The Son volunteers to become incarnate and die for humanity: "Account me man; I for his sake will leave / Thy bosom, and this glory next to thee / Freely put off."
The theology is severe but internally consistent: God gives Man free will because obedience without choice is not obedience but mechanism. Man will choose wrong. The wrong choice will be punished. But mercy will also be offered, and mercy will ultimately triumph. Whether the reader finds this satisfying depends on whether the reader accepts that a God who creates beings He knows will fall, and then punishes them for falling, can be called just. Milton believed He could. Many readers have not agreed.
Book IV gives us Satan's arrival in Eden, and it gives us the lines that reveal the depth beneath his defiance. Standing on the boundary of Paradise, seeing the beauty of the world he intends to destroy, Satan speaks:
"Me miserable! Which way shall I fly / Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? / Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell."
This is the moment when Satan ceases to be a political rebel and becomes a psychological portrait. Hell is not a place. It is a condition. It is the state of a mind that has chosen pride over love and cannot undo the choice. Satan sees what he has lost. He sees the beauty of Eden. He feels, briefly, something like remorse. And then he hardens again, because to repent would be to submit, and submission is the one thing his identity cannot survive: "So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, / Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost; / Evil, be thou my good."
The last line is the definition of damnation: the deliberate inversion of all values. Not ignorance of good, but knowledge of good and the conscious choice of evil.
Satan enters Eden and sees Adam and Eve for the first time. They are naked, beautiful, unashamed, and in love. Milton's description of their relationship is one of the poem's unexpected triumphs — these are not abstracted figures of innocence but a married couple, physically attracted to each other, intellectually matched (though Milton, a man of his time, insists on a hierarchy: "He for God only, she for God in him"), and genuinely happy. Their conversations, their lovemaking, their evening prayers — all are rendered with a tenderness that makes the coming Fall feel like a personal loss.
Books V–VIII: Raphael's Visit and the History of Creation
God sends the angel Raphael to warn Adam and Eve of the danger. Raphael stays for a meal — angels eat, Milton specifies, digesting "with real hunger and concoctive heat" — and tells Adam the story of Satan's rebellion and the War in Heaven.
The War in Heaven occupies Book VI and is Milton's most Homeric passage: angelic armies clashing with swords and shields and, eventually, with artillery (Satan invents the cannon). The battle rages for three days. On the first day, the loyal angels prevail. On the second day, Satan's forces deploy their new weapons and gain the advantage. On the third day, the Son of God rides forth in his chariot of fire and drives the rebels out of Heaven single-handedly, flinging them over the crystal battlements into the abyss.
Book VII tells the Creation itself, narrated by Raphael. Six days of making: light, sky, sea, land, vegetation, animals, and finally Man. The descriptions are lavish, exuberant, full of the joy of a universe coming into being. Milton's God creates with delight, not duty, and the creation is good — genuinely, sensuously good. The fruit is real. The rivers are real. The animals are named by Adam, who demonstrates the intelligence that will be both his glory and his vulnerability.
Book VIII is Adam's account of his own creation — his first moments of consciousness, his naming of the animals, and his request for a companion. God creates Eve from Adam's rib while he sleeps, and when Adam wakes and sees her, he is overwhelmed: "Grace was in all her steps, heaven in her eye, / In every gesture dignity and love." Raphael warns him not to let his passion for Eve override his reason. Adam assures him he is in control. He is not.
Book IX: The Fall
This is the centre of the poem, the scene everything has been building toward, and Milton signals its gravity with a second invocation: "I now must change / These notes to tragic."
Satan, having been expelled from Eden and having circled the earth for seven days, returns in the form of a serpent. He finds Eve alone. She and Adam have separated for the morning — Eve proposed working apart to cover more ground, Adam was reluctant but yielded to her argument. This separation is itself a small fall: Adam chooses to let Eve go against his better judgement, prioritising her autonomy over her safety. The decision is loving, reasonable, and catastrophic.
Satan, in the serpent, approaches Eve. He flatters her. He tells her the fruit of the forbidden tree gave him speech and reason. He argues that God's prohibition is not justice but jealousy — that God does not want Man to become His equal. He deploys every rhetorical tool in the fallen arsenal: logic, persuasion, appeals to ambition, appeals to fairness, the suggestion that a just God would not punish a sincere seeker of knowledge.
Eve eats. The moment is described with devastating simplicity: "She plucked, she ate."
Then she brings the fruit to Adam. This is the moment that has generated the most debate. Adam is not deceived. He sees what has happened. He knows the fruit is forbidden. He knows Eve has transgressed. And he eats anyway — not because the serpent's arguments have persuaded him, but because he cannot bear to be separated from Eve. "How can I live without thee?" he says. His choice is love. His love is disobedience. His disobedience is the Fall.
The immediate consequences are vivid and brutal. Sexual desire, which before was innocent and joyful, becomes coarse and guilty. They make love "as with new wine intoxicated both" and wake ashamed. They begin to argue — recriminations, accusations, the first human quarrel. Adam blames Eve. Eve blames the serpent. The harmony of Eden is destroyed.
Books X–XII: Judgement, Grief, and the Promise
Book X brings the Son of God to Eden to pronounce judgement. The serpent is cursed to crawl on its belly. Eve is condemned to the pain of childbirth and subordination to her husband. Adam is condemned to labour: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, / Till thou return unto the ground; for thou / Out of the ground wast taken." Death has entered the world.
Sin and Death, allegorical figures who have been waiting at the gates of Hell, build a causeway from Hell to Earth — a permanent bridge connecting damnation to the human world. Satan returns to Pandaemonium in triumph, expecting applause. Instead, he and all his followers are transformed into serpents, hissing and crawling on the floor of Hell, compelled to eat fruit that turns to ashes in their mouths.
On Earth, Adam and Eve reach the lowest point of despair. Adam's soliloquy of self-loathing is one of the poem's most human passages: "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man?" The question is unanswerable and unanswered. He did not ask to be made. He did not ask to be given free will. He did not ask to be placed in a garden with a tree he must not touch. Yet he is responsible.
Eve, who has been listening, approaches Adam with a gesture of reconciliation. She weeps. She offers to take all the punishment on herself. She suggests they refrain from having children, to spare their descendants the misery they have caused. Adam, moved by her grief, relents. They embrace. They pray together for the first time since the Fall — a prayer of genuine repentance, "from the mercy-seat above / Prevenient grace descending."
In the final two books, the archangel Michael comes to escort Adam and Eve out of Eden. Before they go, he shows Adam a vision of future human history — from Cain's murder of Abel through the Flood, through the ages of tyranny and corruption, to the coming of the Son, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the eventual Last Judgement. It is a history of suffering leavened by hope, of falls followed by partial recoveries, of a humanity that stumbles forward through darkness toward a light it can never quite reach in this world.
Michael tells Adam that he can create "A paradise within thee, happier far" — that the true Eden is not a place but a state of mind, available to any person who chooses obedience and love.
The poem ends with Adam and Eve leaving Paradise. The last lines are among the most beautiful and most desolate in English poetry:
"Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon; / The world was all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: / They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way."
Hand in hand. Wandering steps and slow. Solitary. They have lost everything — innocence, immortality, the garden, the unmediated presence of God. They have gained everything — knowledge, mortality, each other, the vast and dangerous world that stretches before them. They walk into it together, weeping but not broken, fallen but not damned, carrying within them the seed of everything that human beings will ever build and destroy and mourn and celebrate, from this first morning to the last.
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
Paradise Lost requires a good annotated edition to get the most from its dense literary and theological allusions. Alastair Fowler's edition (Longman, 1968; revised 2006) is the scholarly standard — the most authoritative annotated edition in existence, with magisterial commentary on the first (1667) edition text. For general readers, John Leonard's Penguin Classics edition provides a clear and perceptive introduction that is fully alive to the poem's theological controversies.
Edited by Alastair Fowler. The scholarly standard — the most authoritative annotated edition, with generous glosses and magisterial commentary. Based on the first (1667) edition text.
Edited by John Leonard. The best accessible edition for general readers — clear introduction fully alive to the poem's theological controversies, with full notes on language and allusions.
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