SOURCE: “From The Lives of the English Poets,” in The Critical Response to John Milton's Paradise Lost, edited by Timothy C. Miller, Greenwood Press, 1997, pp. 103-13.

In the following excerpt, which originally appeared in his nine-volume work on the lives of the English Poets, Johnson examines the epic's defects—claiming that we do not readily identify with the human protagonists and noting that “none wished it longer than it is”—as well as its greatness, saying that “in reading Paradise Lost we read of universal knowledge.”

I am now to examine Paradise Lost, a poem, which, considered with respect to design, may claim the first place, and with respect to performance the second, among the productions of the human mind.

By the general consent of criticks, the first praise of genius is due to the writer of an epick poem, as it requires an assemblage of all the...