Why Paradise Lost is so beautiful (one and a half of many reasons)

The reasons why Paradise Lost is such a beautiful piece of literature are many but, to be quite frank, have in my view been grossly misrepresented and twisted over the centuries. Blake famously said that Milton was 'of the Devil's party without knowing it', because Blake was one of those people who assumed that any depiction of the Devil as anything more complex than an unremittingly disgusting psycho killer (like the genuinely terrifying Un-Man in Lewis's Perelandra) automatically meant that the author intended the reader's sympathies to be drawn.

The beauty of Milton's Devil is that he is a hateful and horrifying figure without being the sort of over-the-top mad evil idiot so common in mediaeval art and mystery plays--the tradition where St Dunstan or St Dominic can trick him into doing household chores or pinch his nose with a pair of pliers like the Three Stooges. Real-life sociopaths and borderlines are not immediately or easily identifiable as such. The beauty of Adam and Eve is that they aren't idiots and their actions are understandable and even, yes, sympathetic--but still not portrayed as right. John Milton, unlike many great poets, actually understood how people work. The man was Oliver Cromwell's private secretary and involved in many of the great upheavals of seventeenth-century England, on at least two different sides (the parliamentarians early on and the moderate restorationists later).

The beauty of the writing has to do with Milton's mastery of English blank verse--a mastery which, speaking purely mathematically, surpasses Shakespeare's. Milton's style in Paradise Lost is a lot more formal than Shakespeare's usually is. But such formality may go unnoticed, may even put some people off. There is (or, at least, should be) nothing controversial about writing characters in an interesting way that actually makes sense.