Evariste-Désiré de Parny 'Le Paradis perdu'

Evariste-Désiré de Parny though largely forgotten now was well known in the nineteenth century for his lyric poems especially the Poésies Erotiques (1778-81) and the prose-poems in Chansons Madécasses (1787). He also wrote much humorous verse including the anti-religious La Guerre des Dieux (1799) and Le Paradis perdu (1805). The latter is a parody of Milton's Paradise Lost in four relatively short cantos. It gives a central place to the War in Heaven casting Satan as a revolutionary. It is highly entertaining in itself and also an important example of parody as critical response to an original text.