Daniel Phillips’s Reviews > Paradise Lost > Status Update

He had wanted to write a great poem for several decades, but the civil war had intervened. His hope was to write an epic that would rival those of Homer, Virgil, and Tasso or a tragedy that would rival those of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. The aspiring epic poet, following a pattern established by Virgil, was to begin with pastoral apprentice work before graduating to the sublimity of heroic verse.