Milton's epic poem in three editions spanning 1852–1881 — including Doré's landmark illustration set and Milton's complete works.
John Milton dictated Paradise Lost after going blind, working through a scribe to complete an epic poem retelling the biblical Fall of Man -- Satan's rebellion and expulsion from Heaven, and Adam and Eve's temptation and exile from Eden. Published in 1667, three years after the restoration of the English monarchy that Milton, a committed republican, had spent the previous decade opposing, the poem is shot through with questions about freedom, authority, and disobedience that read differently depending on whether you sympathize with its famously charismatic Satan or its struggling, newly fallible humans. It remains one of the most technically ambitious poems in English, written in blank verse at an epic scale rarely attempted before or since.