The final edition of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, increased from 10 to 12 books in homage to Virgil’s Aeneid, was first published in July 1674. The original version of 1667 had not proved an instant hit. One reader complained: ‘’tis neither usual nor handsome, to leap immediately from the Title-page to the Matter’. Early modern audiences, perhaps, were uneasy at the prospect of being ‘hurled headlong’, like Milton’s anti-hero Satan, into ‘the vast and boundless Deep’ of Paradise Lost, without any preface, introduction, commendatory verse, authorial note or other paratextual lamp to light the way. The readers of its first edition expected, at the very least, some advance warning as to what kind of text they were about to read. Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), for example, was subtitled ‘The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civill’. John Dryden’s plays were advertised as comedies, tragedies, or tragi-comedies on their title pages. Milton offered only the vaguely threatening prospect of ‘A Poem in Ten Books’.

Given Paradise Lost’s subsequent reputation, it may surprise us that its first readers also took issue with Milton’s style. Attempting to boost sluggish sales, Milton’s printer Samuel Simmons re-issued it in 1668 with new title pages and prefatory material. It began with a note from ‘The Printer to the Reader’. ‘Courteous Reader’, Simmons implores: ‘There was no Argument at first intended to the Book, but for the satisfaction of many that have desired it, I have procured it, and withal a reason of that which stumbled many others, why the Poem Rimes not.’

Readers of Paradise Lost were not only perplexed at the ‘vast infinitude’ of Milton’s cosmology but puzzled, even disappointed, with its lack of rhyme – another aspect of the ‘boundless[ness]’ that made Milton’s epic a daunting literary prospect. After adding ‘Arguments’ summarising each book, Milton justified his poetic style with a short but tetchy explanation of ‘The Verse’. He was more concerned about rhythm than rhyme, and set a high value on metre because, as he saw it:

true musical delight […] consists onely in apt Numbers, fit quantity of Syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoyded by the learned Ancients both in Poetry and all good Oratory.

In Paradise Lost, Milton clarified: ‘The Measure is English Heroic Verse without Rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and Virgil in Latin’:

Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter; grac’t indeed since by the use of some famous modern Poets, carried away by Custom, but much to thir own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse then else they would have exprest them.

For Milton, rhyme had no place in epic poetry. Of course, his other work resounds with neat schemes, couplets and musical harmonies. ‘Lycidas’ (1638), the sonnets, and ‘On Shakespeare’ (1630) all made sublime use of rhyme. In the epic mode, however, Milton points firmly to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (c.late eighth-early seventh century BC) and Virgil’s Aeneid (c.30–19 BC), all composed in unrhymed dactylic hexameter, as the proper models to follow. The aim to match and outmatch the two classical poets is famous today from the opening of Paradise Lost, which bullishly introduced Milton’s ‘adventrous Song, / That with no middle flight intends to soar / Above th’ Aonian Mount, while it pursues / Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime’. Milton’s dig at ‘famous modern Poets’ who rely on rhyme, though, is less familiar, yet reveals a fascinating controversy in English literary history.

Which is the more fitting mode for the highest forms of English poetry: the unrhymed, cascading and, at times, loose and unruly blank verse of Christopher Marlowe’s and William Shakespeare’s dramas and Milton’s epic; or the neat, precise, often end-stopped symmetrical elegance of the rhyming couplets preferred by John Dryden and other ‘famous modern Poets’ after the Restoration? That Milton addressed the question of rhyme, apparently in response to the ‘many’ readers who ‘stumbled’ over its absence, shows Paradise Lost should be read not only as part of the timeless pantheon of the Western literary canon but also set against the grubbier backdrop of late-17^th century squabbles about prosody and English writers’ longstanding anxieties about the possibilities of their native tongue.

Early modern poets had been debating the point for over a century. Blank verse was invented, virtually ex nihilo, by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in his Certain Bokes of Virgiles Aeneis. In an epitaph for his contemporary Sir Thomas Wyatt, who pioneered the sonnet form in English, Howard said Wyatt ‘taught what might be said in rhyme’. Howard, though, attempted to forge an English vernacular form to equal the dactylic hexameter of the classical epics. Composed around 1540, but not published until after its author’s execution for treason (1547), Howard’s unrhymed translation of Books II and IV of the Aeneid was immediately recognised as something radical. A note on the title page of the 1554 edition printed by John Day advertised: ‘Virgill […] translated into English, and drawne into a straunge meter’.

Howard’s free-flowing blank verse was ‘straunge’ because it was unlike anything that came before. Middle English and early-16th-century poets had experimented with form but rarely questioned the primacy of rhyme. John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (c.1390) used a traditional octosyllabic metre soon to be outmoded by the pentameter of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (composed 1387-1400), but both relied on rhymes, as well as frequent caesurae, hemistitchs and end-stops. John Skelton (1463-1529), whose verse was so idiosyncratic that ‘Skeltonics’ are named after him, delighted in multiple consecutive rhymes, as in ‘The Tunning of Elynour Rummyng’. The first English history play, John Bale’s King Johan (performed 1538), was also wedded to rhyme, while Wyatt’s English sonnet inherited the patterned harmonies of its Italian progenitor.

Blank verse was something entirely different, and it went on to dominate English dramatic poetry. Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc (performed at the Inner Temple in January 1561/2, printed 1565) grafted Howard’s innovation onto tragedy, paving the way for Marlowe and Shakespeare, whose blank verse immortalised the early modern English stage. However, poets were already arguing about the relative merits of rhymed and blank verse.

In The Art of English Poesie (1589), George Puttenham remarked that imitating Greek and Latin metrical ‘feete whereupon their measures stand, and in deede is all the beautie of their Poesie’ was doomed to failure, ‘the nature of our language and wordes not permitting it’. ‘We haue in stead thereof twentie other curious points in that skill more then they euer had’, Puttenham said, ‘by reason of our rime and tunable concords or simphonie, which they neuer obserued.’ Rhyme, then, might be framed as an advantage of the English vernacular over Greek and Latin poetry.

A decade on, the composer and poet Thomas Campion’s Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602) argued against ‘the vnaptnesse of Rime in Poesie’. He mocked ‘those very expert’ who could ‘rime a man to death’, pushing back on the ‘prescription in the vse of Rime, to forestall the right of true numbers’. The difficulty of controlling metre and ‘the facilitie & popularitie of Rime’, he complained, ‘creates as many Poets, as a hot sommer flies’, addicted to ‘the childish titillation of riming’. Like Milton, Campion believed that ‘lack-learning times, and in barbarised Italy, began that vulgar and easie kind of Poesie which is now in vse throughout most parts of Christendome, which we abusiuely call Rime’. For both, unrhymed verse was the true descendent of Greek and Roman poetry, and rhyme was a barbaric pollution of the classical languages. This question of whether rhyme or blank verse was more ‘natural’ to the English tongue became a key theme of criticism.

Samuel Daniel responded directly to Campion in a letter to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, later published as A Defence of Ryme (1603). Daniel was surprised that anyone might question the ‘Generall Custome, and vse of Ryme in this kingdome […] hauing beene so long (as if from a Graunt of Nature) held vnquestionable’. For Daniel, ‘both Custome and Nature doth most powerfully defend’ rhyme. More than that, rhyme was ‘a Harmonie, farre happier than any proportion Antiquitie could euer shew vs’, which ‘dooth adde more grace, and hath more of delight than euer bare numbers, howsoeuer they can be forced to runne in our slow language, can possibly yeeld.’

Later in the century, Dryden, the most famous poet and critic of Restoration England, weighed in. In 1664, he wrote a dedicatory epistle to his play The Rival Ladies, asserting the ‘advantages which Rhyme has over Blanck Verse’. ‘That benefit which I consider most in [rhyme]’, Dryden said, ‘is that it Bounds and Circumscribes the fancy. For imagination in a Poet is a faculty so Wild and Lawless’, that the ‘the great easinesse of Blanck Verse, renders the Poet too Luxuriant; He is tempted to say many things, which might be better omitted, or at least shut up in fewer words.’

Dryden expanded on the theme in ‘An Essay of Dramatic Poesy’ (written in 1666, published in 1668), which stages an argument between Neander (representing Dryden, the ‘new man’) and Crites (fellow Royalist Sir Robert Howard) about the relative merits of rhyme and blank verse in different literary genres. Crites argues that rhyme is ‘proper to Epic Poesy’ but ‘unnatural in a Play, because Dialogue there is presented as the effect of sudden thought’. ‘A Play is the imitation of Nature’, he went on, ‘and since no man, without premeditation speaks in Rhyme, neither ought he to do it on the Stage’. For Crites, ‘Rhyme is incapable of expressing the greatest thoughts naturally’, whereas blank verse is ‘nearest Nature’. Neander responds that ‘in serious Plays […] Rhyme is there as natural, and more effectual than blank Verse’ and objects that rhyme is unnatural, since ‘the necessity of a rhyme never forces any but bad or lazy Writers to say what they would not otherwise’. Indeed, ‘Couplet Verses may be rendered as near Prose as blank verse it self, by using […] breaks in a Hemistich, or running the sense into another line, thereby making Art and Order appear as loose and free as Nature.’ Once again, the crux of the argument turned on the perceived naturalness of rhymed or blank verse.

Howard, Dryden’s brother-in-law, ill-advisedly criticised Dryden’s essay in the preface to The Great Favourite; or, The Duke of Lerma (1668). Howard argued for ‘the Rule of measuring thing to be the best, by being nearest Nature’, and insisted that the affinity of blank verse with ‘natural’ speech made it the most fitting mode for ‘a serious Play’ featuring ‘Persons speaking ex tempore’. Dryden responded with ‘Defence of the Epilogue; or, An Essay of the Dramatique Poetry of the Last Age’ (1668). ‘I shall not need to prove that [rhyme] is natural’, said Dryden, because ‘I am satisfied, if it cause delight: for delight is the chief, if not the only, end of poesie: instruction can be admitted but in the second place; for poesie only instructs as it delights.’ Besides, said Dryden: ‘Tis true, that to imitate well is a poet’s work; but to affect the soul, and excite the passions, and above all to move admiration, which is the delight of serious plays, a bare imitation will not serve.’ ‘Serious’ works, for Dryden, ‘must be heightened with all the arts and ornaments of poesie’ – above all with rhyme.

Dryden does not mention Milton in either essay, but his sketch of ‘Wild’ poetry, ‘Luxuriant’ in proportion and lacking the ‘Bounds’ of rhyme, resembles the ‘boundless Continent, Dark, waste, and wild’ at the heart of Paradise Lost. Despite their political differences, the royalist Dryden admired the republican Milton, praising his Christian epic as ‘one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems, which either this Age or Nation has produced’. According to Walter Scott’s Memoirs of John Dryden (1826), however, Dryden saw an unforgivable ‘deficiency’ in Paradise Lost, which he attempted to fix by composing (reportedly with Milton’s blessing) a heavily condensed, rhyming adaptation of it, entitled The State of Innocence, which was planned as an opera in 1674, never performed, and published in 1677.

The controversy did not stop there. The ‘revised and augmented’ second edition of Paradise Lost (1674) carried a dedicatory poem ‘On Paradise Lost’ by Andrew Marvell, which praised Milton’s ‘Verse created like thy Theme sublime, / In Number, Weight, and Measure, needs not Rime’, and insisted: ‘Well might’st thou scorn thy Readers to allure / With tinkling Rhime, of thy own sense secure’. As well as celebrating Milton’s ability to execute his ‘vast Design’ ‘without […] Bells’, Marvell went a step further. His reference to ‘some less skillful hand’ that ‘might hence presume the whole Creations day / To change in scenes, and show it in a Play’ was probably a cheeky dig at Dryden’s version.

Ultimately, Milton died having lost the prosodic battle of his day. Dryden’s rhyming adaptation became a bestseller – vastly more popular than Milton’s original in the late 17th century – and Restoration poetry of all stripes was dominated by rhyme. 350 years later, though, no-one reads The State of Innocence. Meanwhile, Paradise Lost – free from the ‘jingling sound of like endings’ – has emerged from Milton’s war on rhyme as the most celebrated poem in the English language.