Hellishly Good

Paradise Lost by John Milton
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Who but a blind man could so vividly write of the darkness of Hell?

Paradise Lost is fire and passion. It is the pinnacle and the bottomless pit. It is the struggle for all that is good. It is the struggle within the evil of all evils.

In the mid-1600s John Milton, aging and gone blind, dictated his most famous work, Paradise Lost, an epic poem that harkens back to Homer and Virgil. It not only tells the so very well-known story of Adam and Eve, it also describes the downfall of Satan in dramatic fashion. The empathy shown for this most famous of fallen angels is, for me, one of the most outstanding sections of this early work of English literature.

Epic is a laughably overused word these days. However, the depiction of Mammon and Beelzebub marshaling their demonic minions for the coming war is the stuff of ancient epics.



Tolkien and Lewis most definitely borrowed heavily from these passages of Milton's when penning their own epics.

The language has aged. Some of this is archaic and occasionally difficult to understand. But stick with it and you shall be rewarded.





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