Paradise Lost Summary
John Milton

Paradise Lost Summary

Paradise Lost, one of the greatest poems in the English language, was first published in 1667. Milton had long cherished the ambition to write the definitive English epic, to do for the English language what Homer and Virgil had done for Greek and Latin, and what Dante had done for Italian. He had originally planned to base his epic on the Arthurian legends, which were the foundational myths for English nationalism, but later turned...

(read more from the Study Guide)