It is in the sonnets we
most realise the force of Wordsworth's image--
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea.
We are not then to look in the sonnets for latent traces of the
suspended poetic creation They come from the other side of Milton's
nature, the political, not the artistic. They are akin to the prose
pamphlets, not to _Paradise Lost_. Just when the sonnets end, the
composition of the epic was taken in hand. The last of the sonnets (23
in the ordinary numeration) was written in 1658, and it is to the same
year that our authority, Aubrey-Phillips, refers his beginning to
occupy himself with _Paradise Lost_. He had by this time settled the
two points about which he had been long in doubt, the subject, and the
form. Long before bringing himself to the point of composition, he had
decided upon the Fall of man as subject, and upon the narrative, or
epic, form, in preference to the dramatic. It is even possible that
a few isolated passages of the poem, as it now stands, may have been
written before. Of one such passage we know that it was written
fifteen or sixteen years before 1658, and while he was still
contemplating a drama.
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