What poetic form did John Milton use for Paradise Lost?

John Milton wrote Paradise Lost in blank verse.

Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. Each line generally has five iambic feet, creating a flexible rhythm without a fixed end-rhyme pattern. Milton used the form for his English epic because it could sustain elevated speech while allowing syntax, emphasis, and sentence movement to vary.

Paradise Lost was first published in 1667 in ten books. A second edition appeared in 1674 and divided the poem into twelve books, a structure that more closely resembled the organization of Virgil’s Aeneid. The epic retells the biblical story of the Fall of humanity, beginning with Satan and the rebel angels after their defeat.

Milton’s choice was unusual for a major English poem at the time. Many celebrated narrative poems used rhyme, but he defended unrhymed verse as more suitable for serious poetic composition. Readers sometimes confuse blank verse with free verse: blank verse has a metrical pattern, while free verse does not require a regular meter.