Reviled as a regicide, isolated in a personal darkness, and aging, John Milton did not relinquish his voice. He somehow used that tireless voice, rather, to create Paradise Lost, one of the enduring masterpieces of English literature. Despite its difficulties--idiosyncratic syntax, densely packed ideas, capacious structure, and epic form--the poem still has the power to dislodge modern readers from our ordinary habits of reading and push us to experience new perspectives and new ideas.

This new edition, based on the 1674 text, guides readers through the poem's interpretive challenges with a compact but thorough introduction and a readable and helpfully annotated text. Illuminating contextual materials, including related works by Milton, classical and biblical sources, material on the composition of the poem, and illustrations of Paradise Lostfrom the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, are also included.