Exactly when Milton began Paradise Lost is open to question. Edward Phillips, Milton's nephew and early biographer, claimed to have heard parts of Paradise Lost as early as 1642. That Milton may have written poems and speeches that became a part of his epic well before the 1660s is not just possible but probable. In his Cambridge epic in Latin on the Gunpowder Plot, In Quintum Novembris, Satan appears as a character. In fact, in that early exercise, Satan calls a council of devils, and at the end of the poem, God laughs at the futility of the evildoers. Foreshadowings of Paradise Lost then occur as early as 1626. Further, in the Trinity manuscript of the 1640s, which contains a number of ideas for projects that Milton intended to pursue, there is an outline for a play called Adam Unparadised, containing a number of features that appear in Paradise Lost.
However, even though evidence exists that ideas for and sections of Paradise Lost existed well before the 1660s, strong evidence in the poem itself suggests that the main scenes and ideas of the epic occurred after 1660. That is, Milton had the idea for an epic poem while still in college. Over a period of close to 40 years, the plans for that epic developed and changed. Milton wrote many poems, songs, and speeches that seem now to be parts of Paradise Lost. But the one overriding fact remains that not until he was blind and finished with government work did Milton bring all that he had thought and worked on together into a complete epic structure.
In the end, Milton chose not to copy Homer and Virgil, but to create a Christian epic. His creation is still a work of great magnitude in an elevated style. Milton chose not to write in hexameters or in rhyme because of the natural limitations of English. Instead he wrote in unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse, the most natural of poetic techniques in English. He also chose a new kind of heroism to magnify and ultimately created a new sort of epic — a Christian epic that focuses not on the military actions that create a nation but on the moral actions that create a world.
