Paradise Lost

About the book

Milton gives the biblical account of humanity's first disobedience an immense imaginative setting, moving between Hell, Heaven, and the newly created world. Satan's speeches and journeys place ambition and persuasive language beside the domestic life of Adam and Eve. The poem asks how beings capable of reason and choice come to act against what they understand as good, while repeatedly testing the relation between authority and willing obedience. Its blank verse makes argument, description, and dramatic exchange part of the same sustained movement. Readers encounter battles and vast landscapes, but also conversations about work, knowledge, companionship, and limits. This reading text is organised in ten books. Its difficulty rewards unhurried attention to who is speaking and how the form of an argument may conceal its purpose.

• Freedom and obedience
• Temptation
• Knowledge

Why read it

For the scale and argumentative energy with which Milton turns a familiar sacred story into an epic of choice.

Ten-book version · English text