Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. The first version, published in 1667, consists of ten books with over ten thousand lines of verse. A second edition followed in 1674, arranged into twelve books with minor revisions throughout, it is considered by critics to be Milton's major work, it helped solidify his reputation as one of the greatest English poets of his time. The poem concerns the biblical story of the Fall of Man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Milton's purpose, stated in Book I, is to "justify the ways of God to men." In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Paradise Lost, the Milton scholar John Leonard notes, "John Milton was nearly sixty when he published Paradise Lost in 1667. The biographer John Aubrey tells us that the poem was begun in about 1658 and finished in about 1663. However, parts were certainly written earlier, its roots lie in Milton's earliest youth."

Leonard speculates that the English Civil War interrupted Milton's earliest attempts to start his "epic that would encompass all space and time."Leonard notes that Milton "did not at first plan to write a biblical epic." Since epics were written about heroic kings and queens, Milton envisioned his epic to be based on a legendary Saxon or British king like the legend of King Arthur. In the 1667 version of Paradise Lost, the poem was divided into ten books. However, in the 1672 edition, Paradise Lost contained twelve books. Having gone blind in 1652, Milton wrote Paradise Lost through dictation with the help of amanuenses and friends, he wrote the epic poem while he was ill, suffering from gout, despite the fact that he was suffering after the early death of his second wife, Katherine Woodcock, in 1658, the death of their infant daughter. The poem is divided into "books"; the Arguments at the head of each book were added in subsequent imprints of the first edition. Milton used a number of acrostics in the poem.

In Book 9, a verse describing the serpent which tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden spells out "SATAN", while elsewhere in the same book, Milton spells out "FFAALL" and "FALL". These represent the double fall of humanity embodied in Adam and Eve, as well as Satan's fall from Heaven; the poem follows the epic tradition of starting in medias res, the background story being recounted later. Milton's story has one about Satan and the other following Adam and Eve, it begins after Satan and the other rebel angels have been defeated and banished to Hell, or, as it is called in the poem, Tartarus. In Pandæmonium, the capital city of Hell, Satan employs his rhetorical skill to organize his followers. Belial and Moloch are present. At the end of the debate, Satan volunteers to corrupt the newly created Earth and God's new and most favoured creation, Mankind, he braves the dangers of the Abyss alone in a manner reminiscent of Aeneas. After an arduous traversal of the Chaos outside Hell, he enters God's new material World, the Garden of Eden.

At several points in the poem, an Angelic War over Heaven is recounted from different perspectives. Satan's rebellion follows the epic convention of large-scale warfare; the battles between the faithful angels and Satan's forces take place over three days. At the final battle, the Son of God single-handedly defeats the entire legion of angelic rebels and banishes them from Heaven. Following this purge, God creates the World, culminating in his creation of Eve. While God gave Adam and Eve total freedom and power to rule over all creation, he gave them one explicit command: not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil on penalty of death; the story of Adam and Eve's temptation and fall is a fundamentally different, new kind of epic: a domestic one. Adam and Eve are presented as having a romantic and sexual relationship while still being without sin, they have distinct personalities. Satan, disguised in the form of a serpent tempts Eve to eat from the Tree by preying on her vanity and tricking her with rhetoric.

Adam, learning that Eve has sinned, knowingly commits the same sin. He declares to Eve that since she was made from his flesh, they are bound to one another – if she dies, he must die. In this manner, Milton portrays Adam as a heroic figure, but as a greater sinner than Eve, as he is aware that what he is doing is wrong. After eating the fruit and Eve have lustful sex. At first, Adam is convinced that Eve was right in thinking that eating the fruit would be beneficial. However, they soon fall asleep and have terrible nightmares, after they awake, they experience guilt and shame for the first time. Realizing that they have committed a terrible act against God, they engage in mutual recrimination. Meanwhile, Satan returns triumphantly amid the praise of his fellow fallen angels, he tells them about how their scheme worked and Mankind has fallen, giving them complete dominion over Paradise. As he finishes his speech, the fallen angels around him become hideous snakes, soon enough, Satan himself turns into a snake, deprived of limbs and unable to talk.

Thus, they share the same punishment. Eve appeals to Adam for reconciliation of their actions, her encouragement enables them to approach God, sue for grace, bowing on supplicant knee, to receive forgiveness. In a vision shown to him by the Arc

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature. July - English poets Lord Byron, Leigh Hunt and Percy Bysshe Shelley agree to start The Liberal, a quarterly periodical to be published by John Hunt in London. July 8 - Percy Bysshe Shelley, returning from setting up The Liberal in Livorno to Lerici, is drowned when his boat sinks in a storm, his badly decomposed body, washed ashore ten days on the beach near Viareggio, is identified by the copy of Keats' Lamia and Isabella in the jacket pocket and cremated there in the presence of his friends Lord Byron and the adventurer Edward John Trelawny who claims to have seized Shelley's heart from the flames. Shelley's ashes are interred at the Protestant Cemetery, where Keats was buried the year before. William Barnes, Orra: A Lapland tale Bernard Barton: Napoleon, Other Poems Verses on the Death of Percy Bysshe Shelley Thomas Haynes Bayly Erin, Other Poems Thomas Lovell Beddoes, The Bride's Tragedy Robert Bloomfield, May Day with the Muses Caroline Bowles, The Widow's Tale, Other Poems Lord Byron: Cain Sardanapalus The Two Foscari The Vision of Judgment, published anonymously as by "Quevedo Redivivus" in the first number of The Liberal, written in response to Southey's A Vision of Judgement 1821.

Werner George Croly, Catiline: A tragedy, including poems Allan Cunningham, Sir Marmaduke Maxwell. Clarke was known as "the Mad Poet of Broadway" because of his eccentric behavior, with impulsive, dramatic reactions to music and society, although his mild insanity would worsen James Lawson, "Ontwa, the Son of the Forest", describing the life of Erie Indians, including notes by Lewis Cass, territorial governor of Michigan.

Malcolm Gluck is a British author and wine columnist. An advertising copywriter for Collett Dickenson Pearce, Doyle Dane Bernbach, a founder employee of Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO and creative director for Lintas, Gluck was for sixteen years the wine correspondent of The Guardian with the column "Superplonk". In addition to contributing articles for other publications, including Harpers Magazine he was a wine critic of The Oldie until 2011, the author of 36 books about wine. Among his titles are Superplonk, Brave New World and The Great Wine Swindle, the latter declared to become his final book due to the anticipated negative reaction of people in the wine industry, he featured in the BBC programme Gluck, Gluck. Gluck has been described as a "self-styled champion of the ordinary wine drinker, fighting against the perceived snobbery and stuffiness of the wine world". In November 2008 a survey by the wine industry consultancy firm Wine Intelligence was made public, having polled the views of more than 1,500 regular UK wine drinkers, results show that Gluck was the fifth most recognised wine critic in the UK.

Appearing in the Channel 4 episode of Dispatches titled "What's in your wine?" in 2008, Gluck stated, "Many, many wines are no better than a sort of alcoholic cola. You get artificial yeasts, sugar, tannins, all sorts of things added", a statement received with outrage in the wine industry. Gluck's other controversial statements include, ``, it is complete utter balderdash from the first syllable of its pretentious and mendacious utterance to its last". In reference to his opposition to cork stoppers, Gluck has stated, "Sticking a cork made from tree bark in a wine made in 1999 is like producing a modern motor car with a starting handle", he has declared cork taint "a serial killer of good wine". In the book The Great Wine Swindle, Gluck contends that the wine industry is "populated by liars and cheats, administered by charlatans and snake-oil salesman and run on a system of misrepresentation and ritualised fraud". Gluck has been involved in a public disagreement with author Salman Rushdie over, the quicker book-signer.

In January 2009, Gluck made a series of contentions on the nature of beer drinkers in the "Word of Mouth" pages of The Guardian, in an article asserting the rising numbers of wine drinkers in Britain, stating that "beer is only drunk by losers and sadsacks, unsexy people who care nothing for their minds or their bodies," and, "are terrible lovers, awful husbands, untidy flatmates". The statements drew prompt responses from beer writers Roger Protz and Melissa Cole, with Gluck challenged by Cole to appear at a beer and food pairing event. Gluck hosted deafblind charity Sense's first blind wine auction in October 2006, guiding guests through a wide variety of wine as they tasted the drinks in total darkness; the event was held at Dans Le Noir, a London restaurant where customers eat in the dark, one of Sense's corporate partners. List of wine personalities Footnotes