Editing Paradise Lost (section)

==Interpretation and critique==
[[File:MedinaPL3.jpg|upright|thumb|Plate prefacing Book 3, ''Creation of Man'', engraving by Michael Burghers based on [[John Baptist Medina]], from the 1688 edition.]]

=== Eighteenth-century critics ===
The writer and critic [[Samuel Johnson]] wrote that ''Paradise Lost'' shows off Milton's "peculiar power to astonish" and that Milton "seems to have been well acquainted with his own genius, and to know what it was that Nature had bestowed upon him more bountifully than upon others: the power of displaying the vast, illuminating the splendid, enforcing the awful, darkening the gloomy, and aggravating the dreadful".<ref>Johnson, Samuel. ''Lives of the English Poets''. New York: Octagon, 1967.</ref>

William Blake famously wrote in ''[[The Marriage of Heaven and Hell]]'': "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it."<ref>Blake, William. ''The Marriage of Heaven and Hell''. 1793.</ref> This quotation succinctly represents the way in which some 18th- and 19th-century English Romantic poets viewed Milton.

===Christian epic===
Tobias Gregory wrote that Milton was "the most theologically learned among early modern epic poets. He was, moreover, a theologian of great independence of mind, and one who developed his talents within a society where the problem of divine justice was debated with particular intensity."<ref>{{harvnb|Gregory|2006|p=178}}.</ref> Gregory says that Milton is able to establish divine action and his divine characters in a superior way to other Renaissance epic poets, including [[Ludovico Ariosto]] or [[Torquato Tasso]].<ref name="Gregory 178-179">{{harvnb|Gregory|2006|pp=178–179}}.</ref>

In ''Paradise Lost'' Milton also ignores the traditional epic format of a plot based on a mortal conflict between opposing armies with deities watching over and occasionally interfering with the action. Instead, both divinity and humanity are involved in a conflict that, while momentarily ending in tragedy, offers a future salvation.<ref name="Gregory 178-179"/> In both ''Paradise Lost'' and ''Paradise Regained'', Milton incorporates aspects of [[Marcus Annaeus Lucanus|Lucan]]'s epic model, the epic from the view of the defeated. Although he does not accept the model completely within ''Paradise Regained'', he incorporates the "anti-Virgilian, anti-imperial epic tradition of Lucan".<ref>{{harvnb|Quint|1993|pp=325–326}}.</ref> Milton goes further than Lucan in this belief and "''Paradise Lost'' and ''Paradise Regained'' carry further, too, the movement toward and valorization of romance that Lucan's tradition had begun, to the point where Milton's poems effectively create their own new genre".<ref>{{harvnb|Quint|1993|p=340}}.</ref>
The [[Catholic Church]] reacted by banning the poem and placing it on the [[Index Librorum Prohibitorum]].{{efn|1=[https://beta.nb.no/extrip/beacon/result?query=milton&country=8052&mode=all&pagesize=50 Beacon for Freedom of Expression search for Milton]}}