Status Updates From A Preface to Paradise Lost

“The unchanging recurrence of [Homer’s] ‘wine-dark sea’, his ‘rosy-fingered dawn,’ his ships launched ‘into the holy brine,’ his ‘Poseidon shaker of earth,’ produce an effect which modern poetry, except where it has learned from Homer himself, cannot attain. They emphasize the unchanging human environment. They express a feeling very profound and very frequent in real life, but elsewhere

“The matter inside the poet *wants* the Form: in submitting to the Form it becomes really original… The attempt to be oneself often brings out only the more conscious and superficial parts of a man’s mind; working to produce a given kind of poem which will present a given theme as justly, delightfully, and lucidly as possible, he is more likely to bring out all that was really in him”