Paradise Lost by John Milton
Published 1667 · 896 pages · 83,309 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Poetry
How hard is Paradise Lost to read?
Paradise Lost scores 69 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 78 out of 100
- Latinate diction, theological terminology, and classical allusion dense even by seventeenth-century standards.
- Sentence structure: 85 out of 100
- Epic similes extend for dozens of lines; periodic sentences suspend meaning across verses; inverted word order throughout.
- Abstraction: 80 out of 100
- Theological abstraction—free will, predestination, theodicy—drives the action and arguments.
- Information density: 75 out of 100
- Every line packed with allusion, argument, and imagery; the texture is relentlessly dense.
- Narrative indirection: 60 out of 100
- Satan's rhetoric is seductive and unreliable; the narrator intervenes but meaning is contested.
- Symbolic density: 80 out of 100
- Garden, Tree, fruit, light and darkness, the celestial hierarchy—symbol system of elaborate coherence.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Satan's self-deception is visible; Blake's reading of Milton's Satanism remains debated.
- Resolution withholding: 40 out of 100
- The Fall is complete but redemption is promised; the poem ends in exile with "the world all before them."
- Structural complexity: 70 out of 100
- Twelve books spanning heaven, hell, chaos, and earth; flashbacks to celestial war; visions of future history.
How Paradise Lost is regarded
Paradise Lost holds a literary regard score of 95 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.