Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost is a long poem in blank verse about the fall of Satan and the first disobedience of Adam and Eve. John Milton wrote it as a blind man in his fifties, on the losing side of a civil war.

For twenty years Milton had put poetry aside for politics. He served Oliver Cromwell's republican government as Latin Secretary, writing its official correspondence, and he published a public defence of the execution of King Charles I. By 1652 his sight was gone completely, probably from glaucoma. Then in 1660 the monarchy came back. Milton's books were burned by the hangman, he was arrested and briefly imprisoned, and friends had to argue for his life. He was lucky to be released. Everything he had worked for politically had collapsed.

So he turned to the poem he had been circling since his twenties. Blind, he composed lines in his head at night and dictated them in the morning to whoever was available, family members and paid helpers. He complained, according to early accounts, that the verse came easily only in the colder months. When plague swept London in 1665 he took shelter in a cottage at Chalfont St Giles, and the manuscript went with him.

It appeared in 1667, in ten books. Milton sold the rights to the printer Samuel Simmons for five pounds down, with more owed if it sold. It did sell, slowly at first, then steadily. Some early readers were baffled by the lack of rhyme, so Milton added a short note called "The Verse" defending unrhymed English heroic verse as a return to ancient freedom. In 1674, the year he died, a second edition rearranged the poem into twelve books, matching Virgil.

Its afterlife has been enormous and argumentative. William Blake, the poet and engraver, wrote that Milton was of the Devil's party without knowing it, because Satan is written with such force. Mary Shelley put lines from the poem at the front of Frankenstein, and her creature reads it and recognises himself. Philip Pullman took the title of His Dark Materials from a phrase in Book 2. Readers keep coming back to argue with it.