Poetry Regained: Lost Milton Work Turns Up in Oxford Archives

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Paradise Lost it most definitely is not.

Academics at Oxford University have discovered what appears to be a bawdy poem by John Milton while sifting through their archives.

The work, a coarse innuendo-laden ditty titled "An Extempore Upon A Faggot", was found in the university's Harding Collection, the world's largest collection of popular poetic anthologies and songbooks.

The handwritten poem appears to have been signed by Milton but is written in a style utterly unlike his own, and does not tally with his status as an epic poet, polemicist and scholarly man of letters.

Milton was known for his abandonment of rhyme, irregular rhythms and a dignity …