Paradise Lost
John Milton1667Milton set out to "justify the ways of God to men" and ended up writing the most compelling Satan in all of literature.
Read this if you…
- want the best, most stunningly beautiful poetic language ever used in any English work ever
- are fascinated by Satan
- are interested in Genesis and christianity
Skip this if you…
- don't want to read a retelling of story directly taken from the bible (Adam + Eve from Genesis)
- hate unbelievably fantastic poetry
Why It Matters
Milton set out to "justify the ways of God to men" and ended up writing the most compelling Satan in all of literature. The poem remade the English epic, proved blank verse could carry a work on this scale, and gave every later writer their template for the charismatic rebel. Whether Milton meant Satan to come off sympathetic is still argued over, which is part of the point.
The 
Take
Some of the best descriptive imagery in poetry I’ve ever heard, very lofty and detailed. A detailed plot was lacking and super basic but that’s not the point. Just the language itself was great
Where to go next
- Genesis by Moses. Paradise Lost built on it. - *Paradise Lost* is Milton rewriting *Genesis* 1–3 as epic — the same Creation, the same temptation, the same exile from Eden - Book I leans directly on the forbidden tree of Genesis 2:16–17; the spine of Milton's poem is the spine of those opening chapters - Read *Genesis* first and you'll feel exactly where Milton is faithful and where he invents — the silences he chose to fill are the whole poem
- The Aeneid by Virgil. Paradise Lost built on it. - *Paradise Lost* is the *Aeneid* recast for Heaven and Hell — Milton took Virgil's twelve-book architecture and his every epic convention - The invocation, the start in the middle of the action, the towering similes: all Virgilian inheritance, working in English - Read the *Aeneid* first and you see the classical scaffolding Milton raised his fallen angels upon
- Revelation by John. Paradise Lost built on it. - The War in Heaven at the epic's heart comes straight out of Revelation 12 — it survives nowhere else in scripture - Michael against the great dragon is John's image; Milton stages it as the climax of his cosmic civil war - But he changes the ending: John crowns Michael, Milton crowns the Son in the chariot — reading Revelation first shows you exactly where Milton honored the source and where he overruled it
- The Iliad by Homer. Paradise Lost built on it. - *Paradise Lost* is Milton's bid to surpass Homer — the invocation, the in-medias-res opening, and the War in Heaven all reach straight back to the *Iliad* - The roll call of devils answers the Catalogue of Ships; the similes are Homeric machinery turned to Christian ends - Read the *Iliad* first and you'll catch what Milton is doing with Satan: dressing him in Achilles' martial glory in order to expose it as damnation
- Isaiah by Isaiah. Paradise Lost built on it. - The Satan you know — the fallen morning-star, proud and ruined — is Milton reading Isaiah 14:12 - "How art thou fallen, O Lucifer, son of the morning" gave Milton both the image and the name; the identification of Lucifer with Satan is largely *Paradise Lost*'s doing - Read Isaiah first and the source of Milton's grandest character is hiding in a single prophetic verse
- Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. Paradise Lost built on it. - Satan's hell-within-the-self was Marlowe's idea first - His "Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell" (Book IV) echoes Faustus's "Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it" — scholars treat Marlowe's damned scholar as a direct source for Milton's fallen angel - Read *Dr. Faustus* and you hear the earlier voice standing behind Satan's interior torment
- Metamorphoses by Ovid. Paradise Lost built on it. - Milton's Eden is built partly from Ovid — the simile for paradise traces to Proserpine gathering flowers, and Eve at the pool is Ovid's Narcissus rewritten - The Sin-and-Death allegory of Book II runs Ovidian metamorphosis into the realm of the demonic - Reading the *Metamorphoses* first lets you see Milton's allusive layer — the pagan transformations he stitched into a Christian creation
- The Odyssey by Homer. Paradise Lost built on it. - *Paradise Lost* opens the way Homer's epics do — invoking the Muse — and runs on conventions the *Odyssey* helped establish: the elevated style, the perilous voyage, the hero who wanders - Satan's journey carries the shape of an Odyssean voyage; Milton drew his imagery deliberately from Homer - Reading the *Odyssey* first reveals the pagan epic frame Milton is filling with a Christian cosmos
- Tobit by Unknown. Paradise Lost built on it. - *Paradise Lost* names *Tobit* outright: Satan's thwarted desire for Eve is likened to Asmodeus, the demon the fishy fume drove from Tobit's son's bride (IV.167-71) - Milton's angel Raphael is the same Raphael who "deign'd to travel with Tobias" in *Tobit* - Read the short, strange book of *Tobit* and you'll catch the allusions Milton expected you to know
- Ephesians by Paul. Paradise Lost built on it. - Milton's faithful angels fight in Ephesians 6's "armour of God" — Michael's sword drawn "from the armoury of God" marks their panoply as spiritual, against the merely Homeric weaponry of Satan's host - The whole War in Heaven is Paul's "spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms" given a literal battlefield - Read Ephesians first and Milton's angels reveal themselves as the church militant in arms
- The Complete Poems by William Blake. Paradise Lost shaped it. - No later poet wrestled with Milton harder than Blake — he read *Paradise Lost* as a poem at war with itself - Blake's famous verdict: Milton was "a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it" — Satan is too alive, God too cold, and Blake noticed - His illuminated epic *Milton* is a sustained re-vision of *Paradise Lost*, and he engraved twelve illustrations to it besides
- Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Paradise Lost shaped it. - Milton's epic is the moral skeleton inside Mary Shelley's monster - *Frankenstein*'s epigraph is Adam's lament from *Paradise Lost* Book X — "Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me Man..." - The Creature literally finds and reads a copy of *Paradise Lost*, casting himself first as Adam, then — abandoned and enraged — as Satan
- Moby-Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville. Paradise Lost shaped it. - Milton's Satan is the secret blueprint for Captain Ahab — grand, ruined, and magnificent in defiance - Melville's reading of *Paradise Lost* in 1849–50 is when scholars date Ahab's conception; he annotated his own copy as the novel took shape - Listen for it in Ahab's own words — "proud as Lucifer," "damned in the midst of Paradise"
- William Wordsworth, Selected Poems by William Wordsworth. Paradise Lost shaped it. - After Coleridge, Milton was Wordsworth's greatest idol — and *Paradise Lost* was the model he measured himself against - *The Prelude* is a deliberate Miltonic blank-verse epic, recast as the story of a lost paradise and its recovery inside a single mind - The allusions are insistent, inviting the comparison — Wordsworth wanted you to hear Milton behind him
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Paradise Lost shaped it. - Milton's epic is the text *Jane Eyre* argues with — scholarly consensus reads the novel as a feminist revision of *Paradise Lost*, retold from Eve's perspective - Rochester quotes it directly (the "fallen serpent of the abyss"), and he and Jane trade Miltonic allusions in what reads like a verbal tennis game - Brontë even paints Jane's vision of Death in Milton's own words, quoting *Paradise Lost*'s Book 2 verbatim
- The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope. Paradise Lost shaped it. - Milton's epic machinery, shrunk to the scale of a hairpin - Pope built his mock-epic by burlesquing *Paradise Lost*: Belinda's premonitory morning dream echoes Eve's dream, and Umbriel's flight to the Cave of Spleen mirrors Satan's journey to the new world - The sylph whispering at Belinda's ear is Satan tempting Eve, miniaturized for a drawing-room — the grander you take Milton, the funnier Pope gets
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. Paradise Lost shaped it. - Milton supplied Hardy the frame for a fall out of Eden - In *Tess of the D'Urbervilles*, Alec tells Tess outright, 'You are Eve, and I am the other old one, come to tempt you' — and Hardy quotes Satan's seduction of Eve straight from *Paradise Lost* (9.626-31) - The temptation Milton dramatized as the loss of paradise becomes, in Hardy's hands, a country girl's ruin — same archetype, no Heaven to fall from
- Common Sense by Thomas Paine. Paradise Lost shaped it. - A century after Milton, his Satan turned up in American revolutionary pamphlets - Paine quotes *Paradise Lost* by name — Satan's "never can true reconcilement grow / where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep" (IV.98–99) - He aims Milton's line at Britain: after the bloodshed, the colonies can no more make peace with the crown than the fallen angels with Heaven
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Paradise Lost shaped it. - Milton was essential reading in the Brontë house — Rev. Patrick considered him indispensable, and Miltonic echoes run through the children's juvenilia - The Romantic reading of Milton's Satan — proud, magnetic, damned and unrepentant — is the mold Heathcliff is cast in, by way of Byron's Manfred - Catherine's dream of being flung out of heaven borrows *Paradise Lost*'s geography of exile and damnation
- Self-Reliance and Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Paradise Lost shaped it. - When Emerson built his roll of the self-reliant in *Self-Reliance*, Milton made the cut by name — set alongside Moses and Plato as men who 'spoke not what men but what they thought' - Two centuries on, Milton reads less as a poet of obedience than as Emerson's model of the mind that trusts itself over books and tradition - Emerson lectured on Milton and wrote an essay on him before the great essays — *Paradise Lost* sits behind that idea of the original soul
- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Paradise Lost shaped it. - Coleridge lectured formally on *Paradise Lost* and dissected Milton's Satan in the *Biographia Literaria* — he had Milton on the brain - He "had Milton's career very much in mind" drafting the *Rime*, which inherits the Miltonic fall-and-curse arc - The Mariner's guilt-and-redemption — and that ghastly Death / Life-in-Death pair — answer Milton's Satan and his allegory of Sin and Death
Depicted in Art
Bust-length profile of Satan after the fall, brooding wings folded behind a brow that still carries traces of archangelic beauty.
Gustave Doré, 1866
Satan, central and erect, stands over the prone bodies of his stunned legions on the burning shore, gesturing them awake.
William Blake, 1808
Satan stands rigid on the burning lake, arms outstretched, summoning the stunned fallen angels to rise; a wall of flame frames the assembly.
William Blake, 1805
Archangel Michael, sword raised, drives a writhing mass of rebel angels off the edge of heaven into a vortex of cloud and fire.
Gustave Doré, 1866
A vast luminous architecture rises beside a winding river of light; tiny blessed figures move along its banks under a radiant heaven.
John Martin, 1841
God the Father reaches down to draw Eve, half-emerged, from the side of the sleeping Adam beneath a crescent moon.
William Blake, 1808
A muscular, nude Satan stands on the burning lake, sword aloft and arm outstretched, rallying the prone fallen angels behind him.
Thomas Lawrence, 1797
Satan writhes, wounded for the first time in the celestial battle, body twisted against a backdrop of fellow rebel angels.
Gustave Doré, 1866
Satan recoils as Sin springs fully formed from his head, a writhing female figure emerging out of his skull while serpentine forms coil at his feet.
Henry Fuseli, 1793
The war in heaven mid-clash: armored angels collide in a roiling cloudbank, spears and bodies tangling across the full plate.
Gustave Doré, 1866
The serpent rears toward Eve, who reaches for the apple while a despairing Adam recoils in the background and lightning splits the sky.
William Blake, 1808
Recommended Editions
Penguin Classics
2003
John Leonard's Penguin introduction makes Milton's theology and politics readable without flattening them. Good notes, clean text, the version to pick if blank verse and fallen angels are new territory.
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Deep Dive
What It's About
This summary gives away plot details.
Notable Quotes
“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
“Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.”