The Paradise Loss of Milton

T.S. Eliot's critique of Milton wasn't so much the words he'd choose and how he implemented them, it was really syntax. These early poems are in Latin translated to English by somebody else usually. And so he's not at the dawn of an invented language. He's playing in an old tradition. Later on when he's writing more in English, I think Eliot's complaint is that he often distorted syntax to make things work on the sound level,.