Reading Order
Paradise LostJohn Milton Works Reading Order
John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) is the greatest long poem in the English language — a twelve-book epic in blank verse retelling the story of Satan's rebellion against God and the subsequent fall of Adam and Eve from Eden. Written after the failure of the Puritan Commonwealth and Milton's own blindness, the poem argues simultaneously for divine justice and human freedom, creating in Satan one of the most compelling figures in all of literature.
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Paradise Lost
Complete Paradise Lost Book List
- 1Buy
Paradise Lost
John Milton·1667·The complete poem — twelve books of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). Best read in an annotated edition: the Longman (Fowler) or Oxford (Orgel and Goldberg) annotations are invaluable. The 1667 first edition had ten books; Milton revised to twelve books in 1674. - 2Buy
Paradise Regained
John Milton·1671·Milton's shorter companion epic — four books about Christ's temptation in the wilderness by Satan; published with Samson Agonistes in the same volume. More austere and concentrated than Paradise Lost, it is the deliberate antithesis: where Satan is tempted to rise above his station in Paradise Lost, Christ resists Satan's temptations by refusing to act beyond his commission. - 3Buy
Samson Agonistes
John Milton·1671·Milton's closest drama — a Greek-style tragedy about the blinded Samson in captivity among the Philistines, widely read as an allegory of Milton's own situation as a blind man in a restored monarchy that had executed the cause he championed; the most personal and psychologically complex of his later works. - 4Buy
The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri·1321·The major precursor to Paradise Lost — Dante's journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise is the theological and cosmological framework that Milton both inherits and argues with; Satan's opening speech in Paradise Lost book 1 is in direct dialogue with Dante's Inferno. - 5Buy
His Dark Materials
Philip Pullman·2000·Pullman's trilogy rewrites Paradise Lost from an explicitly secular, pro-Fall perspective — in Pullman's version, the Fall is not a catastrophe but a liberation, and the Church (Magisterium) is the villain; the most sustained and deliberate contemporary engagement with Milton's epic. - 6Buy
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
William Blake·1793·Blake's illuminated satirical work, in which the Devil speaks energy and desire against an oppressive angel of conventional morality — Blake famously accused Milton of being 'of the Devil's party without knowing it,' and this work rewrites Paradise Lost's moral structure to celebrate Satan as the true hero of creative energy. - 7Buy
Areopagitica
John Milton·1644·Milton's prose pamphlet arguing against pre-publication censorship — the greatest defense of freedom of the press in the English language, and essential for understanding the political thinker whose poetry gives Paradise Lost its arguments about freedom, authority, and the nature of God.
Paradise Lost — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Satan the hero of Paradise Lost?
This is the central interpretive question of Paradise Lost and has been debated since the poem was published. William Blake (1793) argued that Milton was 'of the Devil's party without knowing it' — that the imaginative energy of Satan's speeches in the first two books makes him the poem's true hero, while God is cold and abstract. Percy Shelley (1821) agreed. Most 20th-century scholars, following C.S. Lewis (A Preface to Paradise Lost, 1942), argue that this reading misreads the poem's structural logic: Satan's grandeur diminishes progressively through the poem (from archangel to serpent), and his speeches reveal self-deception and pride rather than heroism. Milton himself was quite clear that Satan is the antagonist. The debate persists because Milton gave Satan the most memorable verse in a poem full of extraordinary verse, and readers naturally respond to what is most vivid.
What is Paradise Lost about?
Paradise Lost tells the story of Satan's rebellion against God, his fall and the founding of Hell, his journey through Chaos to the newly created world, his temptation of Eve and the subsequent fall of Adam and Eve, and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The poem's declared purpose — 'to justify the ways of God to men' — means it is also a theological argument: Milton is arguing that God is just, that human freedom is real (the Fall was not predetermined and God is not responsible for it), and that the felix culpa (fortunate fall) — the idea that the Fall was necessary for the greater good of redemption through Christ — makes the loss of Eden ultimately meaningful. The poem is also deeply political, written after the failure of the Puritan Commonwealth that Milton had served as Latin Secretary, and many readers hear in it a meditation on what it means to have fought for freedom and lost.
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