​

 

An illustrated scroll of John Milton's Paradise Lost Credit: Terrance Lindall

​

As with composers who write one work so popular that people never trouble to listen to anything else by them, or even to realise they wrote anything else (so what did Holst do besides The Planets, for example?) so it is with certain poets. One might imagine Gray lived solely to write his “Elegy”, or Spenser The Faerie Queene; and my purpose here is to describe the achievement of John Milton, in my opinion the finest poet in our language, and how it extends beyond his famed Paradise Lost.