Paradise Lost. A Poem in Twelve Books.

MILTON, John.

Item Number: 27007

London: S. Simmons, 1674.

Rare Second edition of Milton’s masterpiece. Octavo, with portrait frontispiece, contemporary calf, rebacked, original marbled edges. In very good condition with some toning to the text, contemporary name, bookplates.

First published in 1667, “Paradise Lost is generally conceded to be one of the greatest poems in the English language; and there is no religious epic in English which measures up to Milton’s masterpiece… Milton performed an artist’s service to his God” (Magill, 511, 515). 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."