John Milton's 1667 blank verse epic — narrating the Fall of Satan, the Creation, and the Fall of Man — the most ambitious literary achievement in English and the source of the sympathetic Satan who influenced the Romantic tradition.
Creates the supreme English epic — Paradise Lost synthesizes Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Protestant theology into a 10,000-line blank verse poem; Satan's opening ('Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven') is the most quoted line in discussions of pride, rebellion, and self-defeating defiance in any literary tradition.
No recorded contemporaries.
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