“All literary history,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe, “demonstrates that for the most frequent and palpable plagiarisms, we must search the works of the most eminent poets.” The term “plagiarism” may be variously defined in connection with a work of literary art, the crime ranging in degree from servile reproduction to such creative use of sources as one finds in Shakespeare and Milton. Indeed, the term is all too often used without any apparent recognition of the fact that an idea—or a phrase—may occur independently to two different minds. To Edgar Poe, harried, beset, frustrated, the thing became an obsession and for him the term gained the widest applicability—particularly as he saw, or fancied he saw, others poaching on his own preserves. Yet ironically the question arises as to whether the author of “Al Aaraaf” might not, by his own definition, be indicted for plagiarizing John Milton; whether, indeed, his reply to Outis —“Can any man doubt that between the Iliad and the Paradise Lost there might be established even a thousand idiosyncratic identities?—And yet is any man fool enough to maintain that the Iliad is the only original of Paradise Lost?”—represents to some degree a defensive attitude? In view of Poe's several footnotes indicating Milton as his source, additional annotation by his editors, and a considerable number of references to the blind bard in his essays and critical pieces, it would seem of considerable importance to determine just how familiar the poet was with his great predecessor.
"Sufficient to Have Stood, Though Free to Fall": Free Will in John Milton's Paradise Lost
