Paradise Lost
by John Milton
Milton's poetry is epic-scale, evokes a vast, expressive cosmos, and encompasses vast arrays of space and time. Still, by putting the charismatic Satan and the naked Adam and Eve at the center of this story, he created an intense human tragedy about the Fall of Man. Written when Milton was in his fifties—blind, bitterly disillusioned with the Restoration, and briefly in danger of execution—Paradise Lost's apparent ambivalence toward power sparked intense debate about whether it had managed to "justify God's ways to men" or expose the tyranny of Christianity.
