Paradise Lost Themes

Fate and free will are major topics in Paradise Lost. God reveals that he knows what will happen to Adam and Eve, but resolutely denies that there is any such thing as fate. Huh? God knows what wil...

Paradise Lost is about Adam and Eve's fall, the original sin! So it's no surprise that sin is a prominent theme in the poem. Don't forget that we also learn a lot about Satan's major sin (he tried...

Ah yes pride. Doesn't it seem like we're always talking about pride? Satan is the exemplar of pride par excellence. In Paradise Lost, he is too proud to accept God's Son as the boss in Heaven; he t...

Paradise Lost takes place almost exclusively in a time and place when death, sin, and lying didn't exist. In other words, it deals with a time when humanity was still innocent. While Milton is very...

In Paradise Lost, Satan is the ultimate trickster. He flat out lies to Eve, telling her the Forbidden Fruit has powers that it doesn't. Beyond that, however, he is somehow able to convince a third...

In many respects, Paradise Lost is a sort of revenge tragedy. Adam and Eve are the innocent victims of Satan's attempts to seek revenge against God. He sort of feels bad about it – he even cr...

In Book 5 of Paradise Lost, Adam asks the angel Raphael a lot of questions, and he mentions several times the difficulty of describing and explaining heavenly matters in mortal language. Raphael's...

There's not a lot of sex in Paradise Lost, but Adam and Eve do have a famous love-making scene in Book 4. After the Fall, they have a slightly steamier sex scene that is more lustful and less lovey...