Although Blake and Coleridge may or may not have set eyes on one another in youth, they were at least united in having literary ambitions. They were both fascinated by Milton's poem ‘On the Morning of Christ's Nativity’, for instance: while they might be daunted by the prospect of achieving anything to equal Paradise Lost, the mannerist mode of Milton's early poetry offered a more manageable and humane model to a young poet. Writing the first version of his Religious Musings in 1794, Coleridge assumed the persona of a humble shepherd so as to join his praises at the birth of the ‘Meek Man and lowliest of the Sons of Men!’ In the same year Blake went so far as to write his own pastiche of Milton at the opening of Europe, taking over his use of the Christmas season and the story of the universal peace at the time, and turning them to different effect:

In this version of Blake's, the birth is that of Orc, the ‘horrent Demon’, the light of whose fury appears ‘in the vineyards of red France’ and in response to whom his father Los calls all his sons ‘to the strife of blood’.

As with this subversion of the gospel narrative, Blake believed Paradise Lost to embody a profound misreading of the human condition.