Toward the end of his career, Mark Twain was in demand as an after-dinner speaker when he could be counted on for his distinctive blend of stand-up raillery and impromptu cultural criticism. On the evening of 20 November 1900, at New York's Nineteenth Century Club, the main event was Professor Caleb Thomas Winchester's talk on “The Disappearance of Literature.” Asked to make a response, Twain found himself bemused by Winchester's assertion that there were “no modern epics like Paradise Lost.” Surveying his audience, Twain quipped, “I don't believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don't want to. It's a classic, just as Professor Winchester says, and it meets his definition of a classic—something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” With a move as smooth as a gymnast's dismount, Twain nailed the landing and dispatched at once classical literature in general, Paradise Lost in particular, and the whole prospect of epics in the modern era.

Twain's flippancy was prophetic. As the new twentieth century was about to begin, Paradise Lost's stock was also about to take a nosedive with the emergence of Modernist literature and criticism. The knotty exuberance and quirky images of the “metaphysical” poetry of John Donne and Andrew Marvell were better aligned with Modernist experiment than Milton's oratory and Latinate diction. Caleb Winchester's verdict on the disappearance of epic, to which Twain offered his hearty endorsement, seemed con-firmed at every turn. E. M. W. Tillyard's weighty The English Epic and Its Background appeared in 1954, and it established a lengthy pedigree for the English epic in the classical era and the Middle Ages, with a grand tour of Renaissance epic theory and practice in Italy, England, France and Portugal before reaching Spenser's Faerie Queene and eventually Paradise Lost. After the Milton chapter, there are fewer than a hundred pages given over to “eighteenth-century trends” before Tillyard draws the curtain, having virtually nothing to say about the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, though he prudently declined to “conjecture what will be the fate of the epic in the near future.” His book's large helpings of context for the English epic give almost no attention to post-Miltonic epic.