Paradise Lost is

my absolute most favorite piece of literature ever.

Nov 25, 2025

I love it so much that I have the entire first book memorized. Sadly, most people I talk to have either not read it or they read it years ago and didn't think it was that great. My brothers and sisters, you are not reading it right. First, it needs to be read out loud. I promise it will hit differently if you hear it than stumbling through it in your head. This is one of the reasons I think that I memorized it. I like to recite epic poetry when I can't get my head to shut up and there is nothing more epic than Paradise Lost. I recite it in the car when I'm driving and I never get tired of it, even though I know probably 100 other epically lengthy poems by heart.

Over the decades, many people have illustrated various lines of the poem and I've wanted to collect them and post them with their corresponding passages for a while, so I think I'm going to make that my first project here.

The poem itself is divided into ten books. At one point it was banned by the Catholic Church. While Lucifer is not so much depicted as the hero of the story as he is in some other texts, he is a thoughtful and rational free-thinker and a brilliant orator. In the first book he spends several lengthy monologues convincing his fallen comrades to join him in another round with the armies of heaven. Lucifer's battalions are defeated and stunned, completely caught off guard, as they believed they would win, and now they are groveling in a lake of fire, broken and emotionally devastated. In spite of impossible odds, Lucifer, with his powerful rhetoric, is able to temper their anger and confusion and motivate them to try again. He is cunning and manipulative, unwavering and absolutely brilliant, yet three times he has to hold back tears because he knows they haven't got a chance. Although he manages to rally the troops, he confides in his best friend, Beelzebub and delivers the famous line that it would be, “better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.”

The first book briefly touches on the story of Adam and and Eve and the garden of Eden (briefly as in one paragraph) and then Milton relays that he will be starting in the middle of the story. The tenth book ends with Adam and Eve leaving the garden. When the first book opens, the fallen Angels are just waking up in the fiery inferno after being cast out of heaven. The story behind how they got there doesn't come up until book 6.

Milton begins with a prayer to the holy spirit and to his muse, so he might tell this story in such a way that readers will understand that God was justified. But was it a heartfelt prayer or was that just for show? 400 years ago, depicting Satan in a way that inspires compassion and sympathy would at the very least result in exile and possibly even death. It would have been prudent for Milton to cover his bases. I have to admit that although I love the story and I love the mythology, and above all else I love Milton's writing, I have never felt that God was justified. All Milton did was convince me even more that Lucifer was punished for being who God made him to be, and although Lucifer retaliated and swore to spend eternity tricking humanity into being evil, he still had feelings and experienced regret and remorse, while God only ever saw him as the personification of pure evil. Milton repeatedly points out that no matter how evil Lucifer's plan was, it was God's plan too. Even someone as brilliant as Milton could not spin that story. In fact, many of Milton's contemporaries believed he had made a deal with the devil, just due to the sublime way that Lucifer's character is written.

Anyway, enough about me. Let's hear from Milton.