ABSTRACT
Paradise Lost (1667), John Milton's epic poem about the Fall of Adam and Eve, is unquestionably one of the greatest achievements in English literature. It is also an achievement that we owe to the experience of loss, both personal and public. Paradise Lost might never have been completed had it not been for the eventual failure of the English republican government for which Milton worked for a decade after the execution of the king, Charles I, in 1649. It was only after this political failure began to look increasingly inevitable that Milton turned in earnest to writing Paradise Lost. By imagining the originary moment of loss in the Garden of Eden, Milton sought to place the history of human weakness, of which the failed English republic was the latest example, in the context of eternity. As the extracts in this chapter from both Paradise Lost and his prose work, The History of Britain (1670), illustrate, Milton regarded himself as a solitary voice of virtue in the dissolute world of Restoration England, thrust once again under the yoke of monarchical tyranny, and he blamed the lost opportunity to establish religious and political liberty upon the moral cowardice of the English people.
