Paradise Lost

John Milton’s epic poem recounts Satan’s rebellion against God and the fall of Adam and Eve. Its blank verse reworks the biblical story into a meditation on obedience, freedom, and divine justice.

Book of Genesis: The opening book of the Bible narrates creation, the first humans, and their expulsion from Eden. Milton expands Genesis’s brief account of humanity’s disobedience into the poem’s central story.
Satan in Paradise Lost: Milton’s Satan is the rebellious angel who leads a failed revolt and tempts humanity in Eden. His speeches and shifting motives drive the poem from celestial war toward human temptation.
John Milton: John Milton was a seventeenth-century English poet, polemicist, and civil servant. His political commitments and poetic ambitions shaped the poem’s treatment of liberty and authority.
Andrew Marvell: Andrew Marvell was a seventeenth-century English poet and politician associated with Milton’s literary circle. Marvell’s commendatory poem helped frame the first edition of Milton’s epic.
The Divine Comedy: Dante Alighieri’s Italian narrative poem follows a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Dante’s guided afterlife journey contrasts with Milton’s rebellion-and-fall narrative.
Epic poetry: A long narrative poem recounting the deeds of heroic figures and events of lasting significance. Milton adapts epic conventions to tell a cosmic story of rebellion and human loss.
The War in Heaven: The conflict in Christian tradition between God’s forces and rebellious angels led by Satan. Milton makes this revolt the cause of Satan’s exile and the opening action of the poem.
English Civil War: A series of armed conflicts from 1642 to 1651 between Parliamentarians and Royalists in England. Milton’s support for Parliament and the Commonwealth formed the political background to his writing.
John Dryden: John Dryden was a seventeenth-century English poet, playwright, and critic. Dryden adapted Milton’s epic into the operatic drama The State of Innocence.
Paradise Regained: John Milton’s later epic poem depicts Christ resisting Satan’s temptations in the wilderness. It answers the loss in Paradise Lost with a poem about temptation resisted.

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