John Milton, by then completely blind, composed his epic poem by dictation. ... Milton composed “Paradise Lost” aloud, in bed or (per witnesses) “leaning backward obliquely in an easy chair, ...

John Milton died 350 years ago, leaving behind Paradise Lost, a poem composed in a state of deep despair. Blind, alone, and reeling from the failures of the English Revolution, Milton wrote an ...

Today, Milton is best known for “Paradise Lost.” Long before writing that epic poem about the fall of man, however, he was a polemicist who participated in the political controversies of his day.

The conditions of the composition of Paradise Lost, we learn from Joe Moshenska’s new Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton, are a crucial part of the poem itself.

There are many reasons to read Milton’s poem, whose10,565 lines are rich in language, texture and theology. I’d encourage anyone to read it, or even just to dip into passages every now and then.

Samuel Johnson quipped that even the admirers of John Milton’s epic never wished it ‘longer than it is.’ But ‘Paradise Lost’ reshaped English literature.

Merve Emre reviews “What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost,” by the British academic Orlando Reade, which traces John Milton’s influence on revolutionary thinkers ...