The opening lines of PL book 9 ask us to consider a kind of heroism that is “more Heroic” than that sung by Homer in the Iliad or the Odyssey or by Virgil in his Aeneid: Because Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes were published together in 1671 (see the Title Page), and because Paradise Regain’d so clearly evokes Paradise Lost in its title and opening lines, it makes sense to consider all three poems as an extended meditation on heroism-Christian, classical and ancient Hebrew. How best to understand Milton’s redefinition of heroism is a larger question. The verse, however is still “English Heroic Verse without Rime” (“The Verse” in the Front Matter to Paradise Lost). The poem includes four books, compared to Paradise Lost’s twelve (or ten in the first edition of 1667), and each of the four books in Paradise Regain’d is about half as long as one in the earlier epic. Indeed that is the burden of Barbara Lewalski’s magisterial treatment of the poem in Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained (1966). Whether or not “diffuse” aptly describes Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain’d quite clearly follows the “brief model” Milton found in the biblical book of Job. ( The Reason of Church Government book 2) or Knight before the conquest might be chosen in whom to lay the pattern of a Christian Heroe. Whether 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: or whether the rules of Aristotle herein are strictly to be kept, or nature to be follow'd, which in them that know art, and use judgement is no transgression, but an inriching of art. Precise evidence of Milton’s musings about genre, epic in particular, appears as early as 1642 in the opening paragraphs of the second book of The Reason of Church Government, his third anti-prelatical tract. Paradise Regain’d can profitably be read as another installment in Milton’s effort to reform the genre of epic poetry and to redefine what constitutes heroism.

John milton paradise regained