In Paradise Lost Milton has produced a poem of epic dimensions, evoking a vast and majestic cosmos and sweeping across enormous stretches of space and time . With a charismatic Satan and a naked Adam and Eve at the center of this story, he created above all an intensely human tragedy about the fall of man. Written when Milton was in his fifties - blind and bitterly disappointed by the Restoration - Paradise Lost's apparent ambivalence towards authority led to intense debate.

John Milton (1608-1674) spent the his early working years as an academic researcher. He risked his life by publishing The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth on the eve of the Restoration (1660). His great poems were published after this political defeat.

John Leonard is a professor of English at the University of Western Ontario.

In the original language.