We could get lost in so many excurses with a text like Paradise Lost, and I want to, but not yet.
First, I want to recall why this is an excursus of an excursus. We were starting at Homer, and we were following the cultural influence those poems had throughout the ages, and other people who were so inspired by them, that they redid them in some way.
So we come to Paradise Lost at first asking, how is this tale like or unlike Homeric epic poems. What does he borrow, adapt, or reorganize from them.
So we started with the question how did Homeric poems inspire later generations, and now we got to the next question which is what is epic poetry.
As early at 1884
Grocott, John Cooper., Ward, Anna Lydia. Familiar Quotations with Parallel Passages from Various Writers. United Kingdom: George Routledge and Sons, 1884.
Huckabay, Calvin. John Milton: an Annotated Bibliography: 1929-1968. United States: Duquesne University Press, 1969.
See Louden, David Bruce. Interactive Narrative Techniques in the Illiad, the Odyssey and Paradise Lost. United States: University of California, Berkeley, 1990.
Various. Routledge Library Editions: Milton. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, 2021.
As far as the art goes, William Blake was inspired by this work and illustrated it. See this collection.
