Chapter 4 - Poetry

Summary

Two years before the publication of Paradise Lost, Milton gave a hand-written copy of his epic to a former student. Thomas Ellwood was an earnest, 26-year-old Quaker who for approximately seven months in 1652 had met daily with the blind author and read to him in Latin while Milton interjected occasional explanations and corrections. Later, in April 1665, as the plague began raging in London – it ultimately killed more than 75,000 people – Ellwood helped his former teacher move to a cottage in Chalfont St. Giles, a safe distance outside the city.

It was at this cottage, which still stands today, that Milton two months later gave Ellwood the manuscript of Paradise Lost. He invited Ellwood to take it home and come back with his opinion. Ellwood recalled that when he returned, Milton and he discussed the epic:

He asked me how I liked it, and what I thought of it, which I modestly but freely told him: and after some further Discourse about it, I pleasantly said to him, Thou hast said much here of Paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise found? He made me no Answer, but sate some time in a Muse; then brake off that Discourse, and fell upon another Subject.

Months later, after Ellwood’s release from prison where he had been incarcerated for his religious beliefs, he visited the author again. Milton showed him Paradise Regained and “in a pleasant Tone said to me, This is owing to you: for you put it into my Head, by the Question you put to me at Chalfont; which before I had not thought of.”