In Paradise Lost Milton produced a poem of epic scale,conjuring up a vast,awe-aspiring 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 on his fifties - blind,bitterly dissapointed 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.