ABSTRACT
A mainstay of reception histories of Paradise Lost are anecdotes about its discovery and reception that have been handed down to us from the early eighteenth century. These (perhaps apocryphal) stories are often used to show how Milton's epic became an almost-instant classic. Often glossed over, however, is the ways these accounts differ in the manner they construct a triumphalist history of the poem's ascent. For instance, one might justly ask how Paradise Lost was both brandished “wet from the press” as the noblest poem ever written, and yet also “laid as waste paper” in a bookseller's shop. Even in their variants, these stories glorify Milton by pushing back the date for his canonization and eliding the challenge his political reputation served for the poem's reception. Examining these earliest accounts anew, they serve as emblems of the bifurcation in Milton scholarship that remains a distinctive feature of its critical practice and suggest the need for the more nuanced reception narrative the remainder of this book will provide. Taken within the context of the trauma of the Restoration, these birth narratives of the poem reflect the long process by which early readers of Paradise Lost developed strategies to deal with the political anxiety that it and the author created.
