The story of Adam and Eve, the original human couple in the book of Genesis, is the story of mankind’s fall from Grace.  In Paradise Lost, John Milton elevates the story into an epic poem in blank verse that is a masterpiece of sound and rhythm considered by many as one of the greatest poems in the English language.  It was first published in 1667 in ten books, with Books 7 and 10 consisting of two parts each, and modified in a second edition in 1674 to consist of twelve books. It draws on traditional classical form by beginning in the middle of the story, invoking the muse and posing the epic question, but the subject matter is quintessentially Christian. The main characters are God, Adam and Eve, and Lucifer (or Satan), who takes center stage in a powerful and sympathetic characterization that has prompted many critical essays. Romantic poets such as William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley saw Satan as the real hero and admired his rebellion against the tyranny of heaven.  Milton’s theology here is subversive, and reflects his support for Puritan reformation of the church and a parallel belief in the republican commonwealth that followed the English Civil War.

Samuel Johnson wrote that Paradise Lost shows off Milton’s “peculiar power to astonish” and that he “seems to have been well acquainted with his own genius, and to know what it was that Nature had bestowed upon him more bountifully than upon others: the power of displaying the vast, illuminating the splendid, enforcing the awful, darkening the gloomy, and aggravating the dreadful.”

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