A great poet is one of undaunted courage and belief in the expansion of his creative powers. Milton had been blind for six years when lie began lo write his masterpiece paradise lost. On this great epic he toiled in darkness for five or six years, sustained by his belief that his epic was greater than Homer's Iliad, that it would be read as long as the English language would be read or spoken. One may say that the great poet combines humility and self-confidence, or egotism: humility to see his faults and learn how to grow slowly; egotism to say of himself, as Shakespeare does in "Not Mar…
