Paradise Lost by John Milton

Published 1667 · 896 pages · 80,243 words · about 8 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.

What Paradise Lost asks you to hold together

Paradise Lost sustains Systematic (12) on the Model of Hierarchical Complexity: a constellation. It peaks at Metasystematic (13), constellations compared on pages 138–140. Read from the full text, all 159 passages. What the stages mean.

Where Paradise Lost sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (159 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Paradise Lost scores 16 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.25. About the map of stories.

Mode: Myth
Him the Almighty Power Hurled headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky,
Symbol: Anagogic
And justify the ways of God to men.
Mythos: Tragedy iv (tragedy iv)
So saying, her rash hand in evil hour
Genre: Epos
Sing, Heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top

Where the story of Paradise Lost takes place

  • Heaven, Hell, and Eden — before time, the main setting
  • Eden: the garden of Adam and Eve
  • Hell, Chaos, and Heaven before and during the Fall
  • Michael's prophetic vision of biblical history: Abel, Flood, Babel, Exodus, Christ

6 things that are true of Paradise Lost, with the passage for each

  1. Satan declares that it is better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven.

    Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

  2. Sin tells Satan that she was born from his head.

    Out of thy head I sprung.

  3. The narrator laments his own blindness in the invocation to Light.

    But cloud instead, and ever-during dark

  4. Raphael floats the idea that the sun might be the centre of the world.

    Be center to the world; and other stars,

  5. Satan and his followers are transformed into serpents when they return to Hell.

    A monstrous serpent on his belly prone,

  6. The poem ends with Adam and Eve leaving Eden with the world before them.

    The world was all before them, where to choose

Scenes in Paradise Lost that Frye would name

57 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Demonic imagery, untitled
A dungeon horrible, on all sides round, Hell as a fiery prison is the poem's paradigmatic demonic world.
Lyric, untitled
Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven firstborn, The Hymn to Light is an overheard personal ode embedded in the epic.
Agon, untitled
Then Satan first knew pain, The sword-duel of Michael and Satan is the central combat of the War in Heaven.
Hamartia, untitled
So saying, her rash hand in evil hour Eve's fatal act of eating the fruit is the poem's central misstep.
Demonic imagery, untitled
The one seemed woman to the waist, and fair, Sin as half-woman, half-serpent surrounded by hounds is a demonic monster.
Sparagmos, untitled
Tore through my entrails, that, with fear and pain Death's birth rips Sin's body apart, and the hell-hounds perpetually gnaw her womb.

Books that share these scenes with Paradise Lost

About the author

John Milton