Epiloguedramatic version of Paradise Lost, Dryden imported couplet rhyme and royalist poli-
tics, and his satiric brief epic, Absalom and Achitophel (1681), written during the
exclusion crisis, models the Whig Shaftesbury on Milton’s crafty Satan. The temp-
tation scenes of Dryden’s Hind and the Panther bear Milton’s impress and verbal
allusions abound in his translations of Virgil. In a laudatory epigram to the 1688
edition of Paradise Lost, Dryden proposed Milton as England’s poet, surpassing Homer
and Virgil – though by locating all of them in a distant epic past he sought to
neutralize Milton’s politics and literary influence:
Three poets, in three distant ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.
The first in loftiness of thought surpassed;
The next in majesty; in both the last.
The force of nature could no further go;
To make a third, she joined the former two.That handsome 1688 Folio with its commendations, striking illustrations by John
Baptist Medina, and subscription by over 500 Englishmen was a major factor in
returning Milton to the mainstream, repressing his radical politics and theology,
and presenting his epic as the pride of the English nation. While several early read-
ers – among them Defoe, John Toland, John Dennis, and Isaac Newton – recog-
nized and sometimes complained of the Arianism and republicanism in Paradise
Lost, Addison’s influential series of essays for The Spectator (1712) sidestepped such
issues, emphasizing the poem’s classical dimension, evaluating its literary excellence
by neoclassical standards, and proclaiming it as the national epic.
A few eighteenth-century poets like Richard Blackmore tried to follow Milton in
epic, but better poets recognized that he had exhausted that genre, at least for a time,
and engaged with the Miltonic legacy in other ways. Pope’s brilliant mock epic, The
Rape of the Lock, parodies passages and supernatural machinery from Paradise Lost in
recounting a rake’s theft of a coquette’s lock of hair; and in his satiric epic The
Dunciad Pope rises to a Miltonic high style in evoking the image of Chaos and Night
returned again to uncreate the world. Also, Pope appropriated Miltonic language in
his translations of Homer and recast Milton’s epic purpose, “To justify the ways of
God to men,” in defining the intent of his Essay on Man: “To vindicate the ways of
God to man.” Many lesser poets – among them Thomas Gray, James Thomson,
Edward Young, William Collins, and William Cowper – attempted to imitate the
blank verse and “sublimity” of Paradise Lost, or wrote in “Miltonicks,” the tetram-
eter couplets of the very popular companion poems, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso; their
poems were filled with Miltonic allusions, poetic diction, and syntax. Milton came
to be regarded as the very type of the great poet, and a chorus of voices agreed with
Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson that his characteristic quality was sublimity. Dr
Johnson underscored Milton’s greatness but, prompted by his antipathy for Milton’s
politics and by the neoclassical standards of his age, he also found much to object to