Paradise Lost

Milton's celebrated epic poem; now in a gorgeous new clothbound edition designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. These delectable and collectable editions are bound in high-quality; tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. In Paradise Lost Milton produced a poem of epic scale; conjuring up a vast; awe-inspiring cosmos and ranging across huge tracts of space and time. And yet; in putting a charismatic Satan and naked Adam and Eve at the centre of this story; he also created an intensely human tragedy on the Fall of Man. Written when Milton was in his fifties - blind; bitterly disappointed by the Restoration and briefly in danger of execution - Paradise Lost's apparent ambivalence towards authority has led to intense debate about whether it manages to 'justify the ways of God to men'; or exposes the cruelty of Christianity. John Milton (1608-1674) spent his early years in scholarly pursuit. In 1649 he took up the cause for the new Commonwealth; defending the English revolution both in English and Latin - and sacrificing his eyesight in the process. He risked his life by publishing The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth on the eve of the Restoration (1660). His great poems were published after this political defeat. John Leonard is a Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario.