Milton’s Effort to Justify the ways of God to Man

Abstract

John Milton was a great classical scholar. He combined in himself the learning of a scholar with the genius of a poet. But his scholarship did not in any way interfere with, or detract from his creative power; in fact he pressed his classical learning to service of his poetry. He devoted himself to study and meditation, and aspired to write a great epic poem that ''the world will nit let die ".He dreamt of immortality and he aspired to rank with Homer and Virgil. Milton had intended to write an epic most of his life, for to men of the Renaissance the greatest poetic form was that of the epic. Milton had originally planned to use King Arthur as the subject of a poem that would glorify England as Virgil's "Aeneid" glorified Rome. He changed his mind, however, and chose a topic of wider significance: a topic that included in its span the whole human race, since we are all children of Adam, and which glorified not a nation but God Himself We do not know the exact date at which Milton began his greatest work, but we do know from Milton's comment within the poem that it was written after he had become blind. Milton composed his poem in his mind in segments, having trained himself to remember them.