The unit of the Miltonic style is not the phrase but the word, each word fastidiously chosen, commonly with some air of an original and lost meaning about it, and all set in a verse in which he contrived by an artful variation of pause and stress to give the variety which other writers had from rhyme.

In this as in his structure he accomplished what the Renaissance had only dreamed.

Though he had imitators (the poetic diction of the age following is modelled on him) he had no followers.

No one has been big enough to find his secret since..