“Long choosing, and beginning late”

The sublime prophetic poem which so impressed Andrew Marvell in the lines quoted in the preface to this volume was not the work of a youthful poet. By the time Milton wrote Paradise Lost, he was a blind man in his fifties, disappointed with the failures of church and state reformation, and yet aspiring to write a new kind of epic poem – one focusing on sacred truths and attempting, after the collapse of the English Revolution, to “assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men” (1.25–6). Although he had published his youthful Poems (1645–6) and had achieved considerable prominence as a controversial pamphleteer, he had still not written anything in verse nearly as ambitious nor as comprehensive as Paradise Lost. Yet Milton's earlier career can be seen as essential preparation for this great visionary project whose sacred subject and ambitious form he considered over many years. We need to begin, then, by addressing the literary choices and vocational issues that led to the composition of Milton's sublime epic.

We know that Milton was indeed “long choosing, and beginning late” in the sacred subject of his “Heroic Song”: so he tells us in the invocation to Book 9 of his poem. Paradise Lost was probably written between 1658 and 1663, a transitional period when he was completing much of his long career as a political pamphleteer and passionately opposing the Stuart Restoration which occurred in 1660.