“Higher Argument”: Paradise Lost 1665–1669vulgar conceit of men, that Lying is Essential to good Poetry.”^23 Milton might also
have taken as a personal challenge Cowley’s gesture of handing on the difficult task
he could not complete to some better poet:
He who can write a prophane Poem well, may write a Divine one better; but he who can
do that but ill, will do this much worse. The same fertility of invention, the same
wisdom of Disposition; the same Judgement in observation of Decencies, the same lustre
and vigor of Elocution; the same modesty and majestie of number; briefly the same kind
of habit is required to both; only this latter allows better stuff, and therefore would
look more deformedly, if ill drest in it. I am farre from assuming to my self to have
fulfilled the duty of this weighty undertaking. But sure I am, that there is nothing yet
in our Language (or perhaps in any) that is in any degree answerable to the Idea that I
conceive of it. And I shall be ambitious of no other fruit from this weak and imperfect
attempt of mine, but the opening of a way to the courage and industry of some other
persons, who may be better able to perform it thoroughly and successfully.^24At some point while he was writing and revising his epic, Milton decided on a
ten-book format, thereby distinguishing his poem from the twelve-book Virgilian
model consciously followed by Tasso and Cowley. There is some reason to think
that Milton originally planned a twelve-book structure, turned away from it for the
first edition (1667), and returned to it for the second (1674). The Proem to Milton’s
Book VII, which recalls Virgil’s invocation to the second half of his poem near the
beginning of his Book VII, contains Milton’s line “Half yet remaines unsung” (21);
this is strictly true for an epic in twelve books but not for a ten-book poem.^25
Milton may have rejected the Virgilian format to emphasize that his is not an epic
of conquest and empire, but another reason was surely that royalists had appropri-
ated the Virgilian heroic mode both before and after the Restoration. John Denham
translated Book II of the Aeneid as a poem in heroic couplets entitled The Destruction
of Troy (1656), making Aeneas’s narrative of and lament for the loss of the Trojan
kingdom resonate with the royalist defeat and the loss of Charles I’s English king-
dom. Denham’s poem ends with Priam’s death (well before the end of Virgil’s
Book II), associating it with the beheading of Charles: “On the cold earth lies this
neglected King, / A headless Carkass, and a nameless Thing.”^26 In what Laura
Knoppers terms the “politics of joy” following the Restoration, poets hailed the
new era in Virgilian terms as a Golden Age restored, and celebrated Charles II as a
new Augustus.^27 His coronation procession was designed as a magnificent Roman
Triumph through four elaborate Roman arches that identified him with Augustus,
Aeneas, and Neptune. Dryden’s Astraea Redux rings explicit changes on those mo-
tifs: “Oh Happy Age! Oh times like those alone / By Fate reserv’d for Great Augustus
Throne.”^28 Reason enough for republican Milton to find a formal means to with-
hold his poem from such Virgilian appropriations. His opening lines indicate that
the true Restoration will not be effected by an English Augustus but must await a
divine hero: “Till one greater Man / Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat.”