Extract

Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

Hell opens with a lake of fire, and on its burning shore an angel wakes who was once the brightest in heaven. The scale of the poem John Milton published in 1667 is itself an act of defiance: twelve books of blank verse reimagining the fall of Satan, the temptation of Eve, and the expulsion from Eden with a grandeur that rivals scripture. Milton, blind and politically disgraced after the Restoration, dictated every line. His Satan is magnificent and ruined, eloquent and self-deceiving, and the poem's deepest mystery is how thoroughly it lets us feel the seduction of rebellion before showing us its cost. Paradise is lost, yet the final image is of two figures walking hand in hand into the world, all of history before them.