“Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour,” Wordsworthwrites in a sonnet (“London 1802”), “England hath need ofthee.” She has become stagnant, selfish, and unhappy, and Milton’sspirit would raise her up again. His soul was like a star, his voice was likethe sea’s – pure, majestic, and free.

Milton wrote poems of every sort, including sonnets of the sort Wordsworth iswriting here, as well as a great deal of prose, but he was best known, and mostrevered, for his epic Paradise Lost, that sea of majestic blankverse. Since the time of the ancients the prevalent opinion was that the epic isthe highest genre, and to compose one is the highest ambition of poets, thoughthere were a few who made fun of it. For the Roman poet Virgil the epic was theinevitable culmination of his career, which began with little poems(Eclogues) and then took up a middle-sized one(Georgics), as stages in his preparation for a great work.His Aeneid became the established model of the national epic assoon as it appeared and remained so well into the nineteenth century. Milton,however, chose a biblical theme, not a national one like the founding of Rome.His immense accomplishment lent even greater prestige to the form, but left thefield clear for a national English or British epic, if there was anyone worthyof entering the lists after him. There were indeed many who tried to produceone. At least two of them were friends of Wordsworth’s andColeridge’s: Joseph Cottle, who wrote Alfred (1800), andJohn Thelwall, who wrote The Hope of Albion; or, Edwin ofNorthumbria (1801) – both set in Anglo-Saxon times. A closerfriend, Southey, came out with several epics, set in Arabia, India, Spain, orWales. None these nor any of the others had lasting success; they are forgottentoday, perhaps because the very idea of a national epic was soon to seem quaintif not absurd. Even Paradise Lost, however admired, began tofeel dated by the Romantic era.