Paradise Lost is his masterpiece, with more than 10,000 lines, 12 volumes. This story is taken from Genesis and Revelation. The poet used the flashback technique of classical epic from the "center of the story". There are two clues. One is that Satan betrayed God and was banished from heaven and sent to hell. One is that Adam and Eve violated the ban and were expelled from heaven. Epic points out that there are two main reasons for depravity: one is pride, Satan's ambition and arrogance; Eve, on the other hand, pursues extraordinary knowledge and strength, dreams of becoming a god, and essentially repeats Satan's evil; Adam's pride lies in his excessive curiosity about astronomy, which goes beyond his unconditional trust in God. The other is the weakness of reason. Eve is not rational, while Adam is weak-willed, doting on his wife, giving up his responsibility and putting his loyalty to his wife above his loyalty to God. Milton affirms knowledge, but thinks that knowledge is hierarchical, and the highest knowledge lies in knowing God, so he denies blindly seeking knowledge without the highest truth (God). In other words, knowledge should help to promote moral life, and the highest wisdom comes from God and the Bible, which is higher than the knowledge of classical Greece and Rome. He affirmed life, but stressed that feelings should be accepted and dominated, and thought that reason could make people know God, stick to the truth, and constantly pursue and resist evil. He affirmed freedom, but believed that only those who obey God and persist in the best can enjoy real freedom. These are all manifestations of Christian humanism.
The characters in Paradise Lost are vividly portrayed by Satan. Especially in the first two volumes, the author portrayed him as a tall hero by imitating the classical model. Satan shows the heroic spirit of reversing the classical model, and its essence is his pride and ambition. On the one hand, this poem makes Satan constantly grandiose, on the other hand, it repeatedly points out that he is a coward, and a clever sentence makes him angry. As soon as Satan had the idea of resisting God, he gave birth to his daughter's "sin" from his mind, and he and his daughter gave birth to "death" because of incest. These two demons guard the gates of hell, and together with Satan, they form the "Satan-sin-death" trinity, which is in contrast with the "God-Son-Holy Spirit" trinity in heaven. The contradiction between appearance and essence highlights the characteristics of Satan's hypocrisy and fraud, which runs through the whole process of his rhetoric to lure angels to rebel against God and Eve to steal the forbidden fruit. The poet also used many images to describe Satan according to the traditional technique of the devil's changeable form. He changed from a whale to a vulture, a wolf, an emu, a toad and so on. , and finally turned into a snake. This not only describes the gradual shrinkage of his appearance, but also gradually exposes his fraudulent characteristics and evil nature. In sharp contrast to Satan's "heroism", it is the true heroism of the Son Jesus. When Satan went to heaven to try to destroy mankind, the Son decided to save mankind with his own life. Satan tries to get "glory", while the son is full of love rather than glory. Son is the embodiment of kindness and reason, with infinite power, showing a more noble heroic quality than those classical epic heroes who are fighting and galloping on the battlefield, that is, the spirit of "perseverance and heroic sacrifice".
Paradise regained praises the victory of reason (Jesus) over lust (Satan) and emphasizes the recovery of the paradise of the soul with firm faith. The poem praises Jesus' firm will and real heroic qualities, criticizes the pagan heroic modes in classical epics, such as the pursuit of sensual pleasure, secular honor, wealth, power and learning, and affirms that the quality of Christianity is higher than pagan ideals. John bunyan (1628—— 1688), born in the lower class, was a self-taught craftsman. He was arrested twice for propagating Puritanism and imprisoned 12 years. His masterpiece is Pilgrim's Progress (1678), which is a dream that the writer dreamed after falling asleep outdoors. The story vividly reflects the spiritual world of Puritans in the17th century in the form of dream implication, and describes the spiritual course that everyone has experienced or is experiencing from good to evil. The charm of Pilgrim's Progress comes from the author's profound life experience, broad imagination, superhuman courage and noble personality. It is said that when it was published in the18th century, ordinary British people had to have two books at home, one was the Bible, and the other was the Pilgrim's Progress, which was well known to the British people. Among them, Vanity Fair and other sectors are particularly famous.