Paradise Lost (Annotated)

John Milton's *Paradise Lost* is a twelve-book biblical epic that recounts the rebellion of Satan, the creation of the world, and humanity's fall through Adam and Eve, while ambitiously seeking to "justify the ways of God to men." Written in unrhymed iambic pentameter, its elevated blank verse adapts the conventions of Homeric and Virgilian epic to Christian narrative. The poem's grand similes, th...