Book 1 starts in media res in accord with early modern Western epic conventions, with Jesus entering the desert for the Temptation in the Wilderness, after he is baptized in the River Jordan by John the Baptist and before he embarks on his public mission. Interspersed are scenes in Heaven of God “smiling” in anticipation of “This perfect man, by merit called my Son” succeeding against Satan’s temptations ( PR 1.129, 166–670) the apostles Simon Peter and Andrew expressing their “plaints” at not being able to find the “Messiah” Jesus ( PR 2.1–59) followed by that of Jesus’ mother Mary ( PR 2.60–108) and Satan scheming in Hell ( PR 1.33–118, 2.115–235).

The four books of Paradise Regained are sparse in action and external description, and rich in dialogue primarily between Jesus and Satan. That topic is the biblical Jesus’ Temptation in the Wilderness, recounted in the Synoptic Gospels (Matt. One of those amanuenses was the Quaker Thomas Ellwood, who recounts in his History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood (1714) that he responded to having read a manuscript version of Paradise Lost, “Thou hast said much here of paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of paradise found?” Ellwood may have provided Milton with some encouragement for a topic that he had long considered.

Milton indicates his recognition the genre of brief epic, as Barbara Lewalski and others have noted, in his prose work The Reason of Church Government (1642): “that Epick form whereof the two poems of Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso are a diffuse, and the book of Job a brief model.” Having become fully blind in 1654, Milton dictated both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, as well as the tragedy Samson Agonistes (published under the same book covers as Paradise Regained) to amanuenses, family-members, and friends who wrote down his spoken words. Paradise Regained (1671) is a brief epic of 2,070 blank verse lines that John Milton (1608–74) published just four years after the first publication of his epic Paradise Lost (1667 in 10 books 1674 in 12 books), an imaginative retelling of the biblical Genesis 1–3 and comprised of 10,565 blank verse lines.

John milton paradise regained