However he died in 1654 and the business was then run by Mary Simmons. Milton's previous work had been printed by Matthew Simmons who was favoured by radical writers. He also wrote the epic poem while often ill, suffering from gout, and suffering emotionally after the early death of his second wife, Katherine Woodcock, in 1658, and their infant daughter. Having gone blind in 1652, Milton wrote Paradise Lost entirely through dictation with the help of amanuenses and friends. Since epics were typically written about heroic kings and queens (and with pagan gods), Milton originally envisioned his epic to be based on a legendary Saxon or British king like the legend of King Arthur. Leonard also notes that Milton "did not at first plan to write a biblical epic". However, parts were almost certainly written earlier, and its roots lie in Milton's earliest youth." Leonard speculates that the English Civil War interrupted Milton's earliest attempts to start his "epic that would encompass all space and time". The biographer John Aubrey (1626–1697) tells us that the poem was begun in about 1658 and finished in about 1663. In his introduction to the Penguin published edition of Paradise Lost, the Milton scholar John Leonard notes: "John Milton was nearly sixty when he published Paradise Lost in 1667. The poem concerns the biblical story of the fall of man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.Ĭomposition Milton Dictating to His Daughter, Henry Fuseli (1794) ![]() ![]() ![]() It is considered to be Milton's masterpiece, and it helped solidify his reputation as one of the greatest English poets of all time. A second edition followed in 1674, arranged into twelve books (in the manner of Virgil's Aeneid) with minor revisions throughout. The first version, published in 1667, consists of ten books with over ten thousand lines of verse. Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton (1608–1674).
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