Editing Paradise Lost (section)

=== Eighteenth-century critics ===
The writer and critic [[Samuel Johnson]] wrote that ''Paradise Lost'' shows off Milton's "peculiar power to astonish" and that Milton "seems to have been well acquainted with his own genius, and to know what it was that Nature had bestowed upon him more bountifully than upon others: the power of displaying the vast, illuminating the splendid, enforcing the awful, darkening the gloomy, and aggravating the dreadful".<ref>Johnson, Samuel. ''Lives of the English Poets''. New York: Octagon, 1967.</ref>

William Blake famously wrote in ''[[The Marriage of Heaven and Hell]]'': "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it."<ref>Blake, William. ''The Marriage of Heaven and Hell''. 1793.</ref> This quotation succinctly represents the way in which some 18th- and 19th-century English Romantic poets viewed Milton.