Paradise Lost as a Heroic Poem. There is an attempt to characterize Paradise Lost as a heroic poem. The rules of heroic poetry, as stated by Pré Ren Le Hunchback, state that an epic poem must have only one action, action signifying the plot, motivations and general movement of the poem. The action must be a whole action, with a beginning, a middle and an end; and it should be a great action, inasmuch as it should have great significance. Paradise Lost can be compared to the Iliad and Aenid, both widely accepted as the two great heroic epic poems. Samuel Johnson lightly takes issue with several of Paradise Lost's weaknesses. The main flaw, in his opinion, is that the reader will not receive any information about hell, heaven or the basic plot of the poem, as Johnson says: ". . . what we knew before we cannot learn; what is this ? it is not unexpected, it cannot be surprising." Johnson assumes that the reader of Paradise Lost will be a devout Christian, but he is certain that the poem can be appreciated by non-Christians and by those who have transmitted their faith. For the modern reader, Paradise Lost refreshes the biblical stories and makes them new. Paradise Lost does not suffer much from this flaw, because there is a minority of devout Christians in the world today. is that the characters are not of the world and cannot be identified by the reader He believes that readers will not be able to identify with Adam, Eve and the supernatural setting of the poem. This can only be seen as a flaw. minor, if at all, since many stories take place in distant and fanciful settings. The great mythologies of Greece and China are so far removed from the "real" world that they are more incredible than Paradise Lost, in fact. due to their temporal and spatial shift. Additionally, a Christian reader will find that Paradise Lost is based on truth and not fiction, and therefore understandable. The 20th century reader has become accustomed to science fiction mythologies like Star Trek and Star Wars, which are perhaps more distant and unfathomable than Paradise Lost. Both of these fantasies have characters who resemble God and are so foreign to our way of thinking that they cannot be explained, only accepted. The stories are about how human characters deal with their situations, and they are accessible because morality is always based on human models. The reader of Paradise Lost can identify with its main characters because they are “related” to us in human terms. We can object to the character of God, but he is no more inscrutable than many characters in modern or ancient mythology. The reader can simply accept the rules of the story and suspend disbelief. Additionally, Paradise Lost is an epic that isn't so much about God as it is about Satan, Eve, and Adam, so if there's a problem with God's character, then it's a minor flaw at worst.