"It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature"
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Drinkwater’s line is less a neutral compliment to Milton than a deft act of cultural gatekeeping. By declaring it “commonly asserted and accepted,” he invokes consensus as a credential, letting the crowd do the argumentative heavy lifting. The phrasing flatters the reader into joining an educated club: you don’t merely like Paradise Lost; you recognize it as a civilizational benchmark. That’s the intent - to stabilize a hierarchy at a moment when hierarchies in art were being challenged.
The subtext is anxious. Early 20th-century English letters are full of pressure from modernism, mass literacy, and shifting class authority; “supreme poetic achievement” reads like a bulwark against a world where the canon might stop feeling inevitable. Drinkwater’s “type” is doing quiet ideological work: Paradise Lost becomes not just great, but exemplary, the template that tells you what greatness should look like - scale, moral seriousness, a certain grandeur of diction. If you accept the template, you’re already primed to distrust poetry that values fragmentation, speed, or the demotic.
Context matters: Drinkwater was a Georgian-era poet, associated with a relatively traditional lyricism and a public-facing idea of literature. Elevating Milton aligns him with continuity, not rupture, and positions English poetry as a coherent inheritance rather than a battlefield. The sentence’s cool assurance is the point. It doesn’t argue; it pronounces. That tone mirrors how canons are maintained: by sounding as if the debate ended long ago, and anyone still debating is simply late.
The subtext is anxious. Early 20th-century English letters are full of pressure from modernism, mass literacy, and shifting class authority; “supreme poetic achievement” reads like a bulwark against a world where the canon might stop feeling inevitable. Drinkwater’s “type” is doing quiet ideological work: Paradise Lost becomes not just great, but exemplary, the template that tells you what greatness should look like - scale, moral seriousness, a certain grandeur of diction. If you accept the template, you’re already primed to distrust poetry that values fragmentation, speed, or the demotic.
Context matters: Drinkwater was a Georgian-era poet, associated with a relatively traditional lyricism and a public-facing idea of literature. Elevating Milton aligns him with continuity, not rupture, and positions English poetry as a coherent inheritance rather than a battlefield. The sentence’s cool assurance is the point. It doesn’t argue; it pronounces. That tone mirrors how canons are maintained: by sounding as if the debate ended long ago, and anyone still debating is simply late.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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