How Paradise Lost drew on Genesis
A documented line of influence: John Milton demonstrably engaged Moses’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
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On Paradise Lost’s page
- Paradise Lost is Milton rewriting Genesis 1–3 as epic — the same Creation, the same temptation, the same exile from Eden
- Book I leans directly on the forbidden tree of Genesis 2:16–17; the spine of Milton's poem is the spine of those opening chapters
- Read Genesis first and you'll feel exactly where Milton is faithful and where he invents — the silences he chose to fill are the whole poem
On Genesis’s page
- Three chapters of Genesis become twelve books of English epic
- Milton takes the bare frame here — the Creation, the forbidden tree, the serpent, the Fall, the expulsion from Eden — and fills it with motive, interiority, and theology
- Paradise Lost is the most ambitious expansion of Genesis ever attempted: everything Scripture states in a sentence, Milton dramatizes across thousands of lines