Milton's "Paradise Lost" is the great English-language philosophical poem about the nature of evil — is it a substance (Manichaeism), an absence of good (Augustine), or the consequence of free will's misuse (the Irenaean tradition)? — and these questions are embedded in the poem's dramatic action; Hannah Arendt's concept of the "banality of evil" — evil perpetrated not by monsters but by ordinary people who fail to think — provides a framework for contemporary poets writing about genocide, complicity, and institutional violence; A poet writing about the Holocaust or other historical atrocities faces the philosophical challenge that Adorno identified — after Auschwitz, what is the ethical status of poetry? — making the problem of evil a meta-poetic as well as a moral question; Blake's prophetic books engage philosophically with evil through the concept of "Urizen" — the rationalist God whose imposition of law is itself a form of evil — arguing against the conventional association of evil with passion and in favor of the view that repression and the denial of energy are the true sources of evil; The theodicy question — how to reconcile the existence of a benevolent God with the reality of evil — runs through much religious poetry, from Job's lamentations to Hopkins's "dark sonnets" to contemporary poems about cancer, war, and natural disaster; Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, who refuses to accept divine creation because of the suffering of children, voices a philosophical objection to theodicy that has influenced secular poets for whom the existence of innocent suffering makes religious consolation morally intolerable