A Note of Introduction

In accord with its policy of bringing news of scholarly events to the academic public as they happen, The Crimson is pleased to publish a major find in the area of Milton scholarship, which is already beginning to rock the world of literary criticism on both sides of the Atlantic. The discover of this manuscript, Assistant Professor of English Paul A. Cantor '66, explains his lucky find this way:

I found the following lines scribbled on the reverse sides of the pages of a paper handed in late in my course, Humanities 118, "Myths of Creation." I can only surmise that some student, working in a Milton archive and pressed for time, seized upon the nearest available paper, unaware of the momentous discovery within his grasp. For obviously what the student had unwittingly stumbled upon was a fair copy of a previously unknown fragment of Paradise Lost. I of course did not jump to this conclusion, but subjected the fragment to all possible tests, including metrical analysis and carbon 14 dating, before deciding that these lines are indeed by Milton. Possibly they represent an abortive attempt at a Book XIII, or even the beginning of a sequel to Paradise Lost. However, the regularity of the iambic pentameter suggests that these lines were written early in Milton's career, and hence represent rather a preliminary study for the Great Epic. In any event, this fragment clearly is a major addition to the Milton corpus, illuminating as it does with hitherto unparalleled clarity the personal dimension to Paradise Lost, showing how deeply rooted the poem is in Milton's own experience. The fragment also seems to confirm Harold Bloom's controversial claim in A Map of Misreading that Milton's "allusiveness introjects the past, and projects the future, but at the paradoxical cost of the present, which is not voided but is yielded up to an experiential darkness." The fragment is printed here for the first time, with spelling modernized.