Featured on PDR in the collection John Martin’s Illustrations of Paradise Lost (1827)

Paradise Lost (1667) tells the oldest story in the book. Blind as Homer and permanently exiled from political life after the Restoration of 1660, John Milton dictated an epic of the series of falls — of the angels, of Adam and Eve, of human language — that led to the corrupt and warlike world in which he lived. His declared intention was to “assert eternal providence / And justify the ways of God to men.” But as every reader of Paradise Lost can attest, Lucifer and the other fallen angels come out far more interesting than God, a peculiarity that prompted William Blake to claim that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”.