Despite the fact that Ezra Pound wrote him off for his "asinine bigotry" and "the coarseness of his mentality", John Milton is usually celebrated as the politically radical, high-minded author of that great English epic Paradise Lost.
So Dr Jennifer Batt, an English lecturer at the University of Oxford, was somewhat surprised when she came across a filthy, innuendo-laden rhyme "by Milton" while reading a forgotten, early 18th-century poetic anthology.
Introduced in the volume as An Extempore Upon a Faggot, by Milton, the rather smutty ditty reads: "Have you not in a Chimney seen / A Faggot which is moist and green / How coyly it receives the Heat / And at both ends do's weep and sweat? / So fares it with a tender Maid / When first upon her Back she's laid / But like dry Wood th' experienced Dame / Cracks and rejoices in the Flame."
According to Batt, "if the attribution were correct, it would prompt a major revision of our ideas about Milton".
The coarse, and frankly misogynistic verse likens a young woman to a faggot, a bunch of damp sticks, which, when cast upon the fire, produces moisture "at both ends", like (according to the poem) a weeping virgin when sexually aroused. By contrast, the more sexually experienced woman is more like dry wood, which becomes joyfully enflamed when put on the fire.
It is all rather a long way from the lofty, Christian sentiments of Milton's great epic, Paradise Lost.
However, Batt's operative word is "if". According to Dr Abigail Williams, who is leading a project at Oxford to digitise the major collection of 18th-century poetic "miscellanies" in which Batt found the "Milton" rhyme, "You could become very rich and famous – well, famous, anyway – if you could prove the rhyme was really by Milton. I am pretty certain it is not."
The volume in which it was discovered, the Oxford and Cambridge Miscellany, published in 1708, was, said Williams, "a set of poems written by witty young men about town for witty young men about town".
The volume as a whole ("a ragbag of serious classical imitations, love lyrics and bawdy poems", according to Williams) is clearly intended to appeal to the prejudices of "cavalier and Tory" readers, she said.
At the time of the rhyme's publication, she said, "Milton was much more famous for his politics and having sanctioned regicide than he was as a poet". Milton died in 1674, having been a passionate advocate of the parliamentarian cause during the English civil war and serving in Oliver Cromwell's government as secretary of foreign tongues – producing correspondence in Latin to nations overseas but also writing pro-republican propaganda, including Eikonoklastes, a defence of Charles I's execution.
The rhyme, then, said Williams, "could have been written to discredit Milton, who had set himself up as a self-righteous puritan. The verse is saying, 'Actually, he was just as dirty as the rest of us.'"
In fact elsewhere in the volume is a poem that explicitly attacks Milton's politics, said Williams.
In the early 18th century, Milton's reputation was "still in the melting-pot", she said. Works such as Paradise Lost, which he dictated, blind, between 1658 and 1664, and which famously tells "Of Man's First disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste / Brought Death into the World", were slow to achieve prominence.
By 1708, when this volume was published, his poetic reputation was gradually on the rise, with Paradise Lost starting to become represented as the great English, Christian epic, a worthy rival to its pagan models, Virgil and Homer.
Part of the academic interest of such miscellanies, said Williams, is the sheer range of styles of verse represented. Immediately after the crude "Milton" rhyme comes an intensely serious work translated from Virgil's poem, The Georgics. "They tell us a fascinating story about fashionability and the history of reading," she said.