Paradise Lost

Overview

Published

1667, by Samuel Simmons in London, as 'Paradise lost. A Poem Written in Ten Books'; issues of 1668 added the prose Arguments (summaries of each book), a note on 'The Verse' and a list of errata

Second edition

1674, the year of Milton's death: the poem redivided into twelve books by splitting Books VII and X, with the Arguments now placed before each book, a few new lines, small revisions and commendatory poems by Samuel Barrow and Andrew Marvell

Text on this site

The 1667 text, arranged in the twelve books of 1674; the lines added in 1674 at the openings of Books VIII and XII are shown in square brackets, and some 1674 variants are recorded in notes at the end of each book. Line references in this guide follow the standard 1674 numbering used by modern editions

Genre

Christian epic on the classical model of Homer and Virgil, absorbing tragedy, pastoral, hymn, georgic, romance and biblical history

Metre

Blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter, with long verse paragraphs and frequent enjambment

'The Verse'

Milton's prefatory note, added in 1668, defends 'English Heroic Verse without Rime' on the precedent of Homer and Virgil, calls rhyme 'the Invention of a barbarous Age', and presents its rejection as the recovery of 'ancient liberty' from 'the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing'

Length

About 10,550 lines in ten books (1667); about 10,565 in twelve books (1674)

Setting

Heaven, Hell, Chaos, the newly created universe and the Garden of Eden; the narrative ranges from before the creation of the world to the Last Judgement

Narrator

A blind, inspired bard who invokes the 'Heav'nly Muse' and the Holy Spirit, and speaks of his own situation in the invocations to Books I, III, VII and IX

Key themes

Free will and providence; obedience and the Fall; theodicy; the heroic redefined as patience and faith; marriage, gender and hierarchy; the limits of knowledge; liberty, tyranny and monarchy

Context

John Milton was born in Bread Street, London, on 9 December 1608, the son of a prosperous scrivener who was also a composer. He was educated at St Paul's School and at Christ's College, Cambridge (BA 1629, MA 1632), then spent nearly six years in private study before a journey through France and Italy in 1638–1639, during which, he later wrote, he visited the aged Galileo, then under house arrest. Already in the poems of these years ('On the Morning of Christ's Nativity', 'Lycidas', the masque known as Comus) he showed the ambition to become a great national poet; around 1640–1642 he sketched outlines for a biblical tragedy on the Fall, titled in one draft 'Adam unparadiz'd' (Lewalski 2000).

The poem was delayed for some twenty years by the English Revolution. From 1641 Milton wrote prose tracts against bishops, for divorce on grounds of incompatibility, and, in Areopagitica (1644), against pre-publication licensing. After the execution of Charles I in January 1649 he defended the regicide in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes, and served the new Commonwealth as Secretary for Foreign Tongues, answering royalist Europe in his Latin Defences of the English people. On the eve of the Restoration in 1660 he published The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, still arguing against the return of kingship. When Charles II returned, Milton went into hiding, was briefly imprisoned, and escaped the scaffold; his books were burned. Paradise Lost was finished and published in a nation that had restored the monarchy he had opposed (Hill 1977) (Lewalski 2000).

By about 1652 Milton was totally blind. According to his early biographers, notably his nephew Edward Phillips and John Aubrey, he composed the poem largely after 1658, often at night or early in the morning, and dictated it in batches to whoever was available to write it down, revising as the copy was read back. The poem's invocations turn this situation into part of its subject: the narrator, 'In darkness, and with dangers compast round', asks for an inward illumination to replace the light he has lost (Lewalski 2000) (Fowler 1968).

Milton chose the epic, the highest of the classical genres, and set out to surpass it. Paradise Lost begins in medias res like the Iliad and Aeneid, contains invocations, a catalogue, councils, single combats, a descent to the underworld in reverse, epic similes and a prophetic review of future history modelled on Aeneid 6. But it also measures the classical epic against a 'better fortitude', and turns the heroic values of Homer and Virgil (martial glory, revenge, empire) into attributes of Satan. Renaissance theorists had looked for a Christian epic; Milton's model of a poem that contains all the other genres has been traced in detail by Barbara Lewalski (Lewalski 1985) (Quint 2014).

The poem's narrative core comes from the first three chapters of Genesis, which give only a few verses to the temptation and the Fall. Milton expands it with material from elsewhere in the Bible (the war in Heaven from Revelation 12, the fall of Lucifer read into Isaiah 14, the Son's exaltation from Psalm 2 and Hebrews 1), from Jewish and Christian commentary, and from the hexameral tradition of poems on the six days of creation. His own heterodox theology, set out in the Latin treatise De Doctrina Christiana, shapes the poem's account of the Son, of matter and of free will (Campbell 2007) (Fallon 1991).

Plot overview

The poem opens in Hell, where Satan and his rebel angels lie on a burning lake after being thrown out of Heaven. Satan rouses them, they build the palace of Pandaemonium, and in a great council they decide to take revenge on God by corrupting his new creation, the human race. Satan volunteers for the journey. At the gates of Hell he meets his daughter Sin and their son Death, crosses the realm of Chaos, and approaches the newly created universe.

In Heaven, God foresees that man will fall by his own free choice, and the Son offers to die to redeem him. Satan, disguised as a young cherub, tricks the archangel Uriel into directing him to Eden. There he first sees Adam and Eve, overhears that they must not eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and is found whispering at Eve's ear as she sleeps. God sends the archangel Raphael to warn the couple, and over a meal Raphael tells Adam the story that the poem has so far omitted: the exaltation of the Son, Satan's rebellion, the three-day war in Heaven and the expulsion of the rebels, followed by the six days of creation. Adam in turn tells of his own creation and of Eve's.

The order of events is thus not the order of telling. Chronologically, the story runs from the Son's exaltation and the revolt (Books V–VI), through the creation of the world and of Adam and Eve (Books VII–VIII), to Satan's fall into Hell and journey (Books I–III), his arrival in Eden (Book IV) and the temptation (Book IX); the epic plunges 'into the midst of things', as the Argument to Book I says, and recovers its past through Raphael's narrative.

In Book IX Satan returns and enters the serpent. Eve persuades Adam to let her work apart from him; the serpent flatters her and persuades her to eat the forbidden fruit, and Adam eats too, unwilling to live without her. They fall into lust, shame and mutual accusation. The Son pronounces judgement, Sin and Death build a bridge from Hell to the world, and Satan's followers are turned into serpents. After despair and quarrelling, Adam and Eve are reconciled and repent. The archangel Michael shows Adam the future history of the world up to the Flood, then narrates the rest, to the redemption by Christ and the Last Judgement. Adam and Eve leave Paradise hand in hand.

Book by book

Characters

Heaven

God the Father

The omnipotent and omniscient Creator, who speaks mainly in Books III and V–VI, and in Book X. He explains that he made angels and men free, that his foreknowledge does not cause the Fall, and that man will receive grace. His plain, logical speech has divided readers: for some he is a just and loving God, for others, notably Empson, a tyrant (Empson 1961) (Danielson 1982).

The Son

The Son of God, exalted by the Father as head of the angels, who drives the rebels out of Heaven, creates the world, offers to die for mankind, and judges Adam and Eve with mercy. He is the poem's true hero, whose heroism is obedience and self-sacrifice. His subordination to the Father has been read in the light of the anti-Trinitarian theology of De Doctrina Christiana (Campbell 2007).

Raphael

The 'affable Arch-angel' sent to warn Adam and Eve. He eats with them, explains the order of creation, narrates the war in Heaven and the creation, and answers Adam's questions about astronomy and love, warning him against curiosity and passion. His long narrative occupies Books V–VIII.

Michael

The archangel who leads the loyal angels in the war in Heaven, wounding Satan, and who in Books XI–XII shows and tells Adam the future history of the world before leading him and Eve out of Paradise.

Gabriel

The archangel who guards the gate of Paradise in Book IV. He confronts Satan, captured by Ithuriel and Zephon, and debates with him until the sign of the scales sends Satan away. He also fights in the war in Heaven.

Abdiel

The seraph who alone among Satan's followers rejects the revolt in Book V and returns to God, and who strikes the first blow against Satan in the war in Heaven. He is the poem's model of solitary faithfulness against the majority.

Uriel

The archangel who stands guard in the sun. Deceived by Satan's disguise, he directs him to Eden, but later recognises him by his distorted expression and warns Gabriel. He shows that even the sharpest-sighted angel cannot see through hypocrisy.

Ithuriel and Zephon

Two angels of Gabriel's guard who find Satan 'Squat like a Toad' whispering into the ear of the sleeping Eve; at a touch of Ithuriel's spear Satan starts up in his own shape.

Hell

Satan

The leader of the rebel angels, once among the highest in Heaven, who revolts in envy at the Son's exaltation and is thrown into Hell. He dominates the first books, with his defiance, eloquence and courage, and his tragic soliloquy in Book IV. Then he degenerates through a series of disguises to the serpent. Whether he is the hero of the poem has been a central critical question since the Romantics (Lewis 1942) (Waldock 1947) (Fish 1967).

Beelzebub

Satan's second in command, the first to whom Satan speaks in Hell. In the council of Book II he proposes Satan's plan to corrupt mankind, presented as his own.

Moloch

The fiercest of the fallen angels, later worshipped with child sacrifice. In the council he argues for open war, preferring annihilation to endurance.

Belial

The most graceful and eloquent of the fallen angels, and the most dissolute. In the council he argues for passive endurance, in the hope that God's anger will subside; the narrator calls his counsel 'ignoble ease'.

Mammon

The fallen angel who, even in Heaven, looked down at the golden pavement. He leads the mining of gold for Pandaemonium and in the council argues for building a rival empire in Hell.

Mulciber

The architect of Pandaemonium, whom the Greeks called Hephaestus and the Romans Vulcan. The narrator retells the myth of his fall from Olympus and then dismisses it as an error: he fell long before, with the rebel angels.

Eden

Adam

The first man, created directly by God, whose story of his creation and of his request for a companion is told in Book VIII. He is intelligent and inquisitive but vulnerable through his love for Eve, for whose sake he eats the fruit 'not deceav'd'. After the Fall he despairs, accuses God and Eve, and finally repents and learns from Michael the meaning of history.

Eve

The first woman, created from Adam's rib. She tells of her first awakening and her attraction to her own reflection. She is deceived by Satan and eats the fruit first, but she also begins the reconciliation after the Fall and receives the promise that from her will come the redeemer. Her role is at the centre of feminist debates about the poem (Gilbert 1979) (McColley 1983).

Allegorical figures

Sin

Satan's daughter, born from his head when he first conceived rebellion, and the mother of Death by him. She is a woman above and a serpent below, surrounded by hell-hounds. She holds the keys to Hell's gates and opens them for Satan; after the Fall she and Death build a bridge to the world.

Death

The son of Satan and Sin, a shapeless shadow wearing 'the likeness of a Kingly Crown'. He rapes his mother at birth, quarrels with his father at Hell's gate, and after the Fall comes to the world to devour all things.

Chaos and Night

The rulers of the realm of unformed matter between Heaven and Hell, where hot, cold, moist and dry fight endlessly. Chaos directs Satan on his journey, hoping to regain territory lost to the new creation.

Others

The narrator

The blind poet who speaks in the invocations and comments on the action. He identifies himself with the prophets and with blind poets of antiquity, and describes his danger and isolation after the Restoration. His comments sometimes seem to contradict the impressions the narrative creates, a gap at the centre of the debate between Waldock and Fish (Waldock 1947) (Fish 1967).

Urania

The Muse invoked in Book VII, named after the classical Muse of astronomy but declared by Milton to be 'The meaning, not the Name': a heavenly Muse who was with the Father before creation, sister of Wisdom.

Nimrod

The 'mightie Hunter' of Genesis 10, who in Michael's account in Book XII is the first tyrant, claiming dominion over his equals, and the builder of the tower of Babel.

Enoch and Noah

The 'one just Man' figures of Michael's visions in Book XI. Enoch, who speaks for justice in a world at war, is taken up to Heaven; Noah preaches repentance to a corrupt world and is saved from the Flood.

Themes

Free will and providence

The theodicy of Paradise Lost depends on free will. God declares that he made angels and men 'Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall', and that his foreknowledge is not a cause: they would fall just as certainly if he had not foreseen it. Without freedom, he argues, obedience would be worthless. The poem returns again and again to the moment of choice: Satan's, Abdiel's, Eve's, Adam's.

The difficulty, which the fallen angels themselves debate in Book II, is how human freedom can coexist with divine omniscience and omnipotence. Milton's position is Arminian: grace is offered to all, and individuals decide whether to accept it. Dennis Danielson has defended the coherence of the poem's argument, while Empson saw it as an elaborate cover for divine responsibility (Danielson 1982) (Empson 1961).

Obedience and the Fall

The single prohibition, not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, is in Milton's account a 'Sole pledge' of obedience, an arbitrary test whose very arbitrariness makes it a pure expression of trust. Raphael tells Adam that his happiness depends on 'thy obedience'. The Fall is thus not about the fruit but about disobedience, which the poem's first line names as its subject.

The poem analyses the Fall psychologically. Satan's fall is caused by envy and pride; Eve's by a desire for knowledge and godhead aroused by flattery; Adam's by the love that makes him prefer Eve to God. The poem also suggests that the Fall begins before the act: in Eve's dream, in Adam's excessive passion, in the separation scene.

Justifying the ways of God

The poem's declared purpose is to 'justifie the wayes of God to men'. This is a theological argument and a poetic one: the poem must show a God whose actions readers can accept as just. Its success in doing so has been disputed. For many readers God is the least successful character, and the theodicy is weakened by his tone (Empson 1961).

Defenders reply that the poem's argument is not confined to God's speeches but extends to the whole design: the Son's offer, the generosity of grace, the human recovery, and the promise of a greater good. Fish argued that the reader's discomfort with God is part of the poem's strategy, revealing the reader's own fallen perspective (Fish 1967) (Danielson 1982).

The epic and the heroic redefined

Milton writes in the tradition of Homer and Virgil but claims a subject 'more Heroic' than theirs. The poem systematically attributes the qualities of classical heroes (martial courage, desire for glory, eloquence, revenge) to Satan, and reserves true heroism for obedience, patience and self-sacrifice: the Son's offer, Abdiel's witness, and Adam's final understanding that 'suffering for Truths sake / Is fortitude to highest victorie' (Lewalski 1985).

This redefinition makes the poem a critique of its own genre. The war in Heaven, the most conventionally epic episode, is also the most futile; the most heroic speeches belong to Satan. David Quint reads the poem as a sustained engagement with the epic tradition, and especially with Virgil (Quint 2014).

Gender and Eve

Paradise Lost sets out a hierarchy of man over woman ('Hee for God only, shee for God in him'), and makes Eve the first to fall. It has therefore been central to feminist criticism. Virginia Woolf's phrase 'Milton's bogey' became, in Gilbert and Gubar, a figure for the patriarchal poetic tradition that women writers had to confront (Gilbert 1979).

Yet the poem gives Eve intelligence, a voice and a story of her own. She argues for her freedom in the separation scene, begins the reconciliation after the Fall, and receives the final promise of redemption. Diane McColley has defended Milton's Eve as a full moral agent, and the debate continues over whether the poem reinforces or complicates hierarchy (McColley 1983).

Knowledge and its limits

The forbidden tree is the Tree of Knowledge, and the poem is preoccupied with what can and should be known. Raphael shares much knowledge with Adam but warns him against unnecessary curiosity about the heavens. Satan tempts Eve with the promise of godlike knowledge, and, as God says in Book XI, man now has knowledge of 'Good lost, and Evil got'.

The poem does not condemn knowledge as such. Adam's learning from Michael in the final books is a positive education, and the poem itself displays vast learning. The distinction is between knowledge sought in obedience and knowledge grasped against God, and between knowledge of things and the wisdom of knowing one's place.

Politics, liberty and monarchy

Written by a defender of regicide after the Restoration, the poem is full of political vocabulary. Satan speaks as a republican rebel against a monarch, but Heaven is a monarchy the poem endorses. Critics have debated whether this means that Milton abandoned his republicanism, or whether his point is that only God may legitimately be a king, so that the poem's real target is the human monarchy that imitates divine rule (Hill 1977).

The political argument is clearest in Book XII, where Nimrod's tyranny over his equals is condemned, and Michael explains that the loss of inner liberty to passion leads to the loss of outward liberty to tyrants. Abdiel's definition of servitude, and Satan's hollow appeals to freedom, sharpen the poem's account of true and false liberty.

Motifs

Light and darkness

The poem moves between the 'darkness visible' of Hell and the unapproachable light of God. The narrator's blindness gives the contrast personal force: in the invocation to Book III he asks for an inner light to replace the outer one. Light is associated with God, truth and creation, darkness with evil and ignorance, but the poem also complicates the pattern, since God himself is shrouded in a light so bright that it seems dark.

Falling and rising

Satan's fall from Heaven, his rise from the lake, his ascent to Eden; the angels' scale of being by which man might rise; the Fall of man; the Son's descent and ascension. Vertical movement structures the poem. The pun in 'fall'n on evil dayes' links the poet to his subject.

Wandering

The word 'wander' and its cognates recur throughout the poem, often associated with error (from Latin errare, to wander): the devils' arguments 'in wandring mazes lost', Eve's wandering thoughts, the serpent's mazes. In the last lines, 'wandring steps and slow', the word acquires a fallen but hopeful sense of journey.

Epic similes

Milton's long similes compare Satan and the devils to leaves, the leviathan, the moon through a telescope, locusts, bees and a vulture. They connect the poem's events to later history, classical myth and contemporary science, and often contain hidden judgements: the comparisons that seem to magnify Satan frequently foreshadow his defeat (Ricks 1963).

Sight and seeing

Satan's eyes from the sun, Uriel's sharp sight, God's all-seeing view, the narrator's blindness, Eve's reflection in the pool, Adam's visions in Book XI: the poem constantly asks who sees, and what sight reveals or conceals.

Symbols

The Tree of Knowledge

The tree whose fruit is forbidden represents not knowledge as such but the boundary of obedience. Its fruit gives knowledge of good and evil only in the sense of experiencing evil. After the Fall, the irony of Satan's promise becomes clear: in God's words in Book XI, man has knowledge of 'Good lost, and Evil got'.

Pandaemonium

The palace of the devils, built of gold in Book I, represents the false splendour of Hell. It is a parody of Heaven and of human courts and temples; the comparison with Babylon and Egypt links it to the idolatrous empires of later history.

The scales in Heaven

The golden scales that appear in the sky at the end of Book IV recall the scales of Zeus in the Iliad and Aeneid. They show Satan that his strength is limited, and represent the providence that weighs all events.

The bridge of Sin and Death

The causeway that Sin and Death build across Chaos after the Fall represents the ease with which evil now enters the world. It parodies both the creative work of the Son and the imperial bridges of Xerxes.

Critical debates

The Satanist controversy

Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Milton was 'of the Devil's party without knowing it', freer when he wrote of devils than of angels and God. Shelley, in A Defence of Poetry, argued that Satan was morally far superior to Milton's God (Blake 1793) (Shelley 1840). A. J. A. Waldock argued that the poem's narrative and its commentary are at odds: Satan's grandeur is shown, and then the narrator's corrections tell us to disbelieve what we have seen (Waldock 1947).

C. S. Lewis replied that Satan is an embodiment of pride and self-deception whose story is one of steady degeneration, from hero to politician, spy and snake (Lewis 1942). Stanley Fish turned the problem around: the poem deliberately makes readers admire Satan in order to reveal their own fallen state, and then corrects them, so that the reader becomes the true subject of the poem (Fish 1967). Empson, from the other side, saw Satan's case as the honest response to a tyrannical God (Empson 1961).

Milton's God

The representation of God the Father has long been considered a weakness. In Milton's God, William Empson argued that the poem's God is wicked, and that the poem is good precisely because Milton's honesty makes this visible. He saw the poem's moral confusion as the source of its power (Empson 1961).

Dennis Danielson defended the theodicy philosophically, showing how Milton's free-will argument answers the charges of Empson and others (Danielson 1982). Other critics argue that Milton deliberately gives God a plain style to distinguish divine truth from Satanic rhetoric, and that God's speeches are best judged in the context of the whole design (Fish 1967) (Lewalski 1985).

Eve and gender

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, taking up Virginia Woolf's phrase 'Milton's bogey', read the poem as a founding text of patriarchal literary culture, whose Eve represents the subordination of women and with which women writers, from Mary Shelley to the Brontës, had to struggle (Gilbert 1979).

Diane McColley argued that this reading depends on the tradition of hostile interpretation of Eve rather than on the poem itself, and that Milton's Eve is an intelligent, responsible being who grows in wisdom and plays a central role in the regeneration (McColley 1983). Later critics have explored the tension between the poem's hierarchical statements and its sympathetic portrait of Eve, and Milton's own views of marriage as expressed in his divorce tracts (Lewalski 2000).

The Grand Style and the Milton controversy

In the 1930s T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis attacked Milton's style. Eliot argued that Milton wrote English like a dead language, sacrificing visual imagination to sound, and that his influence on later poetry had been harmful (Eliot 1936). Leavis criticised the 'Grand Style' as a monotonous ritual, remote from the sensitivity of speech (Leavis 1936). Eliot partly retracted his views in a 1947 lecture.

Christopher Ricks's Milton's Grand Style answered them with close readings that show the subtlety of Milton's syntax and wordplay, his use of Latinate senses of English words, and the way his similes and line endings create meaning (Ricks 1963). Harold Bloom later made Milton the great precursor whose achievement all later English poets have had to struggle against (Bloom 1973).

Milton's politics in the poem

Was Paradise Lost written by a defeated revolutionary, still committed to the republican cause? Christopher Hill read the poem in the context of the radical sects of the Revolution, and saw it as Milton's attempt to understand why God had allowed the cause to fail (Hill 1977).

Other scholars stress the poem's distinction between divine and human kingship: God is the only legitimate monarch, and the poem's attacks on idolatry, pomp and tyranny (Pandaemonium, Nimrod) reflect criticism of the Restoration court. Barbara Lewalski's biography follows Milton's political commitments to the end of his life (Lewalski 2000) (Quint 2014).

Theology: Arianism, monism and De Doctrina Christiana

The Latin treatise De Doctrina Christiana, discovered in 1823 and published in 1825, sets out heterodox views: the Son is subordinate to the Father and not coeternal with him (a position often called Arian or anti-Trinitarian), the soul dies with the body until the resurrection (mortalism), and God created the world not from nothing but from himself. If Milton wrote it, these views illuminate the poem. In 1991 William B. Hunter questioned Milton's authorship; a team led by Gordon Campbell and Thomas Corns concluded that the manuscript is Milton's work, though unfinished (Campbell 2007).

Stephen Fallon has studied Milton's monism, the view that spirit and matter are a single substance, in relation to the philosophers of his day, and has shown its importance for the poem's angels and for its account of creation (Fallon 1991). Critics still debate how far the poem's theology is orthodox, and how far its poetic effects depend on these heterodoxies (Lewalski 2000).

The fortunate fall

The idea of the felix culpa, or 'fortunate fall', holds that the Fall was ultimately good because it led to the greater good of the Incarnation and Redemption. A. O. Lovejoy traced the idea through Christian writers and showed its importance in Adam's exclamation in Book XII (Lovejoy 1937).

Critics differ on how far the poem endorses the paradox. Adam's 'full of doubt' leaves the question open, and the poem's account of the loss of Eden, and of the suffering of history, works against any simple celebration of the Fall. The poem's last lines, poised between grief and hope, preserve the ambivalence (Martz 1964).

The ten-book and twelve-book versions

The first edition of 1667 had ten books; in the 1674 second edition Milton divided Books VII and X, adding a few lines at the openings of the new Books VIII and XII and making small revisions, so that the poem had twelve books like the Aeneid. The change brought it closer to the Virgilian model and altered its proportions, making the poem's structure turn on a central division into two halves of six books (Fowler 1968).

Critics have discussed what each arrangement emphasises. The ten-book poem has been compared with the five-act structure of tragedy, which Milton had first planned for the subject; the twelve-book poem invites a reading in two halves, with the Son's victory closing Book VI and the creation opening Book VII. Modern editions follow the twelve-book text of 1674 (Fowler 1968) (Hughes 1957) (Kerrigan 2007) (Teskey 2005). The site text keeps the 1667 readings in twelve-book form, which lets readers see where the two versions differ.

Key passages

Questions for study

1. Is Satan the hero of Paradise Lost?

   Consider the Romantic reading (Blake, Shelley) and the replies of Lewis and Fish. Compare Satan's speeches in Books I and IV, and trace his transformations through the poem.

2. Does the poem succeed in 'justifying the ways of God to men'?

   Look at God's speeches in Book III and their reception, from Pope to Empson. Consider whether the theodicy depends on God's arguments or on the whole design, including the Son and the ending.

3. How does Milton redefine heroism?

   Compare the invocation to Book IX with the war in Heaven in Book VI. Think about who in the poem embodies 'the better fortitude / Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom'.

4. Is Eve presented as inferior to Adam?

   Weigh the statements of hierarchy in Book IV against Eve's arguments in the separation scene and her role in the reconciliation in Book X. Compare Gilbert and Gubar with McColley.

5. Why does the poem begin in Hell rather than with the creation?

   Think about the epic convention of beginning in medias res, the effect of meeting Satan first, and how Raphael's narrative in Books V–VIII reorders the story.

6. What role do the invocations play in the poem?

   Read the invocations to Books I, III, VII and IX together. Consider what they tell us about the narrator, his blindness, his political situation and his relation to his Muse.

7. Who is responsible for the Fall?

   Consider God's foreknowledge, Satan's temptation, Eve's choice to work alone, Adam's consent and Adam's own choice to eat. What does the poem say about the difference between the two falls?

8. Is Paradise Lost a political poem?

   Look at Satan's republican rhetoric, the debate in Pandaemonium, Abdiel's definition of servitude, and Michael's account of Nimrod. Consider when and by whom the poem was written.

9. How does the poem treat knowledge?

   Compare Raphael's advice on astronomy in Book VIII with the serpent's promises in Book IX and Michael's education of Adam in Books XI–XII.

10. How should we read the poem's ending?

    Consider the idea of the fortunate fall, the 'paradise within', and the final lines. Is the ending more hopeful or more mournful?

Further reading

• Blake, William. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Illuminated book. London, c. 1790–1793.
• Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
• Campbell, Gordon, Thomas N. Corns, John K. Hale, and Fiona J. Tweedie. Milton and the Manuscript of De Doctrina Christiana. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Danielson, Dennis Richard. Milton's Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
• Eliot, T. S. "A Note on the Verse of John Milton." Essays and Studies 21 (1936): 32–40.
• Empson, William. Milton's God. London: Chatto & Windus, 1961.
• Fallon, Stephen M. Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
• Fish, Stanley. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's Press, 1967.
• Fowler, Alastair, ed. Milton: Paradise Lost. 2nd ed. Longman Annotated English Poets. Harlow: Longman, 1998. First published in John Carey and Alastair Fowler, eds, The Poems of John Milton (London: Longman, 1968).
• Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
• Hill, Christopher. Milton and the English Revolution. London: Faber and Faber, 1977.
• Hughes, Merritt Y., ed. John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose. New York: Odyssey Press, 1957.
• Kerrigan, William, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon, eds. The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton. New York: Modern Library, 2007.
• Leavis, F. R. Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry. London: Chatto & Windus, 1936.
• Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
• Lewalski, Barbara K. The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
• Lewis, C. S. A Preface to Paradise Lost. London: Oxford University Press, 1942.
• Lovejoy, Arthur O. "Milton and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall." ELH 4, no. 3 (1937): 161–179.
• Martz, Louis L. The Paradise Within: Studies in Vaughan, Traherne, and Milton. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964.
• McColley, Diane Kelsey. Milton's Eve. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.
• Quint, David. Inside Paradise Lost: Reading the Designs of Milton's Epic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.
• Ricks, Christopher. Milton's Grand Style. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963.
• Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "A Defence of Poetry" (written 1821). In Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, edited by Mary Shelley. 2 vols. London: Edward Moxon, 1840.
• Teskey, Gordon, ed. Paradise Lost. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005.
• Waldock, A. J. A. Paradise Lost and Its Critics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947.