Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost is an epic poem by the English writer John Milton, first published in 1667.

The poem tells the story of the Fall of Man. Satan and the band of rebel angels are defeated and thrown out of heaven, and they plot their revenge against God, with the struggle ranging across three worlds: heaven, hell and earth. At the centre of the conflict are Adam and Eve, who are moved by very human temptations and whose downfall is bound up with love, and the poem follows the temptation and everything that follows from it. The work has had a profound influence on writers, artists and illustrators, and in the twentieth century on filmmakers as well. Much of the mystic poetry of William Blake is a direct response to or rewriting of Paradise Lost, with Blake emphasising the rebellious, satanic elements of the epic and making the repressive figure of Urizen in his Four Zoas a tyrannical version of Milton's God; Blake also wrote Milton: a Poem, in which Milton, like Satan, rejects a life in heaven.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was influenced by the poem too: a quotation from Book X of Paradise Lost stands on its epigraph page, and Paradise Lost is one of the three books the creature finds and reads.