Abstract: Ovid, the ancient Roman poet, left the Western literary world with many poetic masterpieces, of which Metamorphoseon is a representative. The 17th-century English poet John Milton in his Paradise Lost carried forward the great Christian proposition -- the fall of man ╞ in the form of literary epic. This paper studies the intertextuality between Ovid’s poems and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Starting from text reading, it conducts a comparative analysis of the characters, natural imagery and Genesis legends in Ovid’s poems and Paradise Lost in both Chinese and English versions. In Paradise Lost, Milton integrated all kinds of reference methods used to study Ovid’s poems during the Renaissance Era, placed Ovid’s poems into the evaluation system with Christian doctrines as the criterion, and stressed the perfect transcendence of Christian literature that he firmly believed over the classical literature.

Key words: Milton; Paradise Lost; Ovid’s poems; natural imagery; Genesis