Paradise Lost — John Milton

A blind poet dictates the story of everything: the war in Heaven, the creation of the world, the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve, and the promise of eventual redemption. Satan, the most charismatic figure in English poetry, rebels against God, is cast into Hell, and takes his revenge by corrupting humanity. Milton's ambition was to 'justify the ways of God to men' -- but his Satan is so magnificently defiant that readers from Blake onward have wondered whose side the poet was really on.

Paradise Lost invented the literary Satan, reshaped English poetry, and posed questions about free will, authority, and rebellion that remain unresolved. It gave the Romantics their hero, feminists their quarry, and every subsequent epic its impossible standard. No poem in English has been more argued over, more imitated, or more consequential. To read it is to encounter the architecture of Western moral imagination at its most ambitious and most conflicted.