Paradise Lost

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Lore & Background

The image of Milton dictating the poem to his daughters became a popular subject for paintings, especially in the Romantic period. The poem follows the epic tradition of plunging in medias res, with the background story recounted later. It has two narrative arcs, one about Satan and the other about Adam and Eve. The poem begins after Satan and the other fallen angels have been defeated and banished to Hell. In Pandæmonium, the capital city of Hell, Satan organizes his followers and volunteers to corrupt the newly created Earth and Mankind. After an arduous traversal through Chaos, he arrives at God's new material World. God in Heaven foresees Satan's success but offers mankind redemption through the Son of God, who volunteers to die for man's sin. Satan eventually reaches the Garden of Eden, where he successfully tempts Eve by preying on her vanity, and Adam knowingly joins her in sin. They are cast out of Eden, but the poem ends with the promise of salvation through Christ.

Reader's Guide

Paradise Lost is a cornerstone of literary and theological discourse, praised for its linguistic richness, theological depth, and philosophical ambition. At its heart are themes of free will and the moral consequences of disobedience, as Milton seeks to 'justify the ways of God to men.' The poem addresses questions of predestination, human agency, and the nature of good and evil. Milton's Satan, portrayed with both grandeur and tragic ambition, is one of the most complex and debated characters in literary history, particularly for his perceived heroism by some readers. The poem's portrayal of Adam and Eve emphasizes their humanity, exploring their innocence before the Fall and their subsequent awareness of sin. Through their story, Milton reflects on the complexities of human relationships, the tension between individual freedom and obedience to divine law, and the possibility of redemption. Despite its controversy, particularly regarding Satan's portrayal, Paradise Lost continues to inspire scholars, writers, and artists, remaining a key work in understanding English epic poetry and Christian morality.

Did You Know?

• Milton's Paradise Lost is conventionally considered to be the last authentic epic in the Western tradition.
• Feminist literary critics have identified texts by women that they argue deserve to be considered epics, with many post-dating Paradise Lost.
• From Homer's Iliad to Milton's Paradise Lost, the epic canon has been defined by works authored by men.

The Masculine Canon and Milton's Place in It

For centuries, the epic genre has been understood as a space belonging almost entirely to men. From Homer's Iliad through Milton's Paradise Lost, the works that defined the tradition were authored by male poets, and the very language, subject matter, and tonal register of the form carried unmistakable associations with masculinity. In fact, scholars have observed that epic and masculinity seem almost inseparable, as though one cannot be discussed without the other. Within this framework, Milton's Paradise Lost occupied a singular position: it was conventionally regarded as the final authentic epic of the Western literary tradition, the closing monument of a canon that had run unbroken from ancient Greece. This perception created a powerful boundary. If the epic was a masculine form that had reached its natural endpoint with Milton, then any subsequent work—regardless of its ambition or scope—would struggle to claim the same generic authority. The assumption was not merely about who held the pen but about what the genre itself could express, making the exclusion of women from the epic tradition feel almost structural rather than accidental.

Feminist Criticism and the Reclaiming of Epic

In recent decades, feminist literary scholars have mounted a sustained challenge to the assumption that the epic belongs to men alone. By carefully examining works written by women across multiple centuries and cultures, these critics have demonstrated that many of them possess the very qualities traditionally used to define the genre: a central emphasis on heroism, narratives of nation-building, engagement with religious authority, a powerful quest structure, and substantial length. Because these works were composed after Milton's Paradise Lost—which had been treated as the genre's final word—they automatically fell into the category of modern epics. Yet the critics insist this temporal positioning is no contradiction. The epic, they argue, is not a closed form that expired with its last male practitioner. It remains a living, vital mode of literary expression to which women have made substantial and original contributions. Rather than diluting the tradition, these female-authored works expand its boundaries, proving that the heroic vision is not inherently masculine and that the epic's formal requirements can be met by any poet with the ambition and craft to see the project through.

A Global and Centuries-Long Tradition

The female epic is neither a recent invention nor confined to a single literary tradition. In fourth-century Rome, Faltonia Betitia Proba composed a Cento that wove verses from Virgil into a new narrative recounting the life of Jesus, creating a Christian epic from classical material. In the Arabic world, the Sirat Dhat al-Himma tells the story of Delhemma, a warrior-woman on the Byzantine frontier, whose clan's rivalry with the Banu Sulaym unfolds against the larger conflicts between Byzantines and Arabs and between the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties. Though its precise date is debated—scholars place it anywhere from around 1000 CE to the mid-twelfth century—it was well known among Muslim audiences during the Crusades. In the English-speaking world, Mary Tighe's Psyche (1805) adopted the Spenserian stanza from The Faerie Queene to retell the myth of Venus, Cupid, and Psyche, while H.D.'s Helen of Egypt (1961) fused Greek heroic mythology with Egyptian hermetic traditions to reimagine figures like Helen, Paris, and Achilles.

Postmodern and Contemporary Voices

The female epic tradition continues to evolve in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, often turning the form's conventions toward self-critical and politically charged ends. Giannina Braschi's Empire of Dreams (1988) is a postmodern poetry epic tracing an immigrant's passage from the margins into the center of American culture, with a climactic sequence set atop the Empire State Building, in Macy's, and at St. Patrick's Cathedral during a pastoral invasion of modern New York. Sylvie Kandé, a Franco-Senegalese poet, published a three-canto epic imagining the fate of Mansa Aboubakar II of Mali, including a scene in which a Malian imperial expedition reaches the Americas before Columbus. Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette (1996) goes further by critiquing the epic form itself: the heroine Alette descends into an underworld reimagined as an underground subway station, where she and others are trapped for eternity under the control of the Tyrant, a patriarchal figure who governs the world. These works demonstrate that the female epic is not a fixed category but an ongoing conversation about power, form, and who gets to tell the grandest stories.