Milton and Romanticism

All the English Romantics were admirers of Milton. Blake wrote a quasi-epic poem in which Milton was the title character. Wordsworth took up Milton’s prophetic mantle, and was regarded by Coleridge as the Milton of his day. Keats conceived his own poetic mission as one of surpassing Milton, and the latter-day Milton, Wordsworth, by developing “a system of Salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity.” Shelley, no believer, thought so highly of Paradise Lost that, according to Thomas Medwin, he “thinks it a sacrilege to name it in speaking of any other Poem.”