“Teach the Erring Soul” 1669–1674Lost that his nephew Edward Phillips included in his Latin essay on the major poets
from Dante to the present, appended to John Buchler’s Thesaurus of poetical phrases:
John Milton, in addition to other most elegant books which he has written, both in
English and in Latin, has lately presented to public opinion Paradise Lost, a poem
which, whether we regard the sublimity of the subject, or the combined pleasantness
and majesty of the style, or the majesty of the invention, or the supremely natural
images and descriptions, will, if I am not mistaken, be received as truly heroic; for by
the votes of the many who are not ignorant how to judge, it is deemed to have
achieved perfection in this kind of poetry.^8On July 2, 1670 the volume containing Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes
was licensed for publication, indicating these two poems were then complete, or
substantially so; the volume was registered with the Stationers on September 10.^9
Edward Phillips thought that Paradise Regained “doubtless was begun and finisht and
Printed after the other was publisht, and that in a wonderful short space considering
the sublimeness of it” (EL 75), but the writing must have begun earlier; Milton’s
Quaker friend Thomas Ellwood saw at least a partial and perhaps a complete draft
of Paradise Regained in 1666.^10 But Phillips’s comment that Milton “could not hear
with patience” the general opinion that it was “much inferiour” to Paradise Lost
(EL 75–6) has the ring of truth.
Phillips also states, accurately, that “it cannot certainly be concluded” when he
wrote Samson Agonistes. The traditional dating, after Paradise Regained and during
the years 1667–70, is generally accepted; efforts to place it in the 1640s or 1650s on
metrical and biographical grounds, have not proved persuasive.^11 As Blair Worden
demonstrates, the language used by and about the imprisoned Samson often echoes
that used by and about republicans and regicides in exile and in prison after the
Restoration, especially Edmund Ludlow, Algernon Sidney, and Milton’s friend
Henry Vane.^12 Also, the political and religious issues faced by and debated by Samson,
a defeated warrior in God’s cause who is enslaved by his enemies and commanded
to participate in idolatrous ceremonies, resonate so strongly with the situation of
the defeated Puritans that it is almost impossible to imagine its composition at any
other time. The severe repressions of the Clarendon Code forbade Nonconformist
“conventicles” and required all office-holders, parliament members, teachers, uni-
versity students, and others to attend Anglican services as a public gesture of uni-
formity; ministers had to use and declare their full acceptance of the Book of Common
Prayer.^13 But some polemicists were urging limited toleration for dissenters in terms
suggestive for Milton’s dramatic poem, around the time the first Conventicles Act
expired (March, 1668). Nicholas Lockyer compared them to the Israelites enslaved
by Pharaoh and John Owen insisted that they were obedient subjects of the king in
civil matters though they refused to conform in religion; he also highlighted the
folly of expecting to persuade minds by using compulsion and penalties to impose