Paradise Lost

John Milton (16081674) spent his early years in scholarly pursuit. In 1649 he took up the cause for the new Commonwealth defending the English revolution both in English and Latin and sacrificing his eyesight in the process. He risked his lifeby 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.John Miltons celebrated epic poem exploring the cosmological moral and spiritual origins of mans existence Paradise Lost has been fully revised with an introduction by John Leonard in Penguin Classics.In Paradise Lost Milton produced poem of epic scale conjuring up a vast aweinspiring cosmos and ranging across huge tracts of space and time populated by a memorable gallery of grotesques. And yet in putting a charismatic Satan and naked innocent Adam and Eve at the centre of this story he also created an intensely human tragedy on the Fall of Man.Written when Milton was in his fifties blind bitterly disappointed by the Restoration and in danger of execution Paradise Losts apparent ambivalence towards authority has led to intense debate about whether it manages to justify the ways of God to men or exposes the cruelty of Christianity.John Leonards revised edition of Paradise Lost contains full notes which elucidates Miltons biblical classical and historical allusions and discuss his vivid highly original use of language and blank verse.An endless moral maze introducing literatures first Romantic Satan John CareyParadise Lost is to my mind the greatest poem in English Philip Pullman author of His Dark Materials trilogy