![]() While God gave Adam and Eve total freedom and power to rule over all creation, he gave them one explicit command: not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil on penalty of death. Following this purge, God creates the World, culminating in his creation of Adam and Eve. At the final battle, the Son of God single-handedly defeats the entire legion of angelic rebels and banishes them from Heaven. The battles between the faithful angels and Satan's forces take place over three days. Satan's rebellion follows the epic convention of large-scale warfare. After an arduous traversal of the Chaos outside Hell, he enters God's new material World, and later the Garden of Eden.Īt several points in the poem, an Angelic War over Heaven is recounted from different perspectives. He braves the dangers of the Abyss alone in a manner reminiscent of Odysseus or Aeneas. At the end of the debate, Satan volunteers to poison the newly created Earth and God's new and most favoured creation, Mankind. In Pandæmonium, Satan employs his rhetorical skill to organise his followers he is aided by Mammon and Beelzebub. It begins after Satan and the other rebel angels have been defeated and banished to Hell, or, as it is also called in the poem, Tartarus. Milton's story has two narrative arcs, one about Satan ( Lucifer) and the other following Adam and Eve. ![]() The poem follows the epic tradition of starting in medias res (Latin for in the midst of things), the background story being recounted later. Originally published in ten books, a fully "Revised and Augmented" edition reorganized into twelve books was issued in 1674, and this is the edition generally used today. The Arguments at the head of each book were added in subsequent imprints of the first edition. The poem is separated into twelve "books" or sections, the lengths of which vary greatly (the longest is Book IX, with 1,189 lines, and the shortest Book VII, with 640). ![]() Gustave Doré, Depiction of Satan, the central character of John Milton's Paradise Lost c. 1866
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