The State of Innocence The State of Innocence The State of Innocence was intended to be performed as an opera, with the libretto written in 1674, (first published in 1677) by John Dryden. It is basically a musical stage adaptation of John Milton's epic poem "Paradise Lost", a tribute to Milton rather than a satire of the poem. That Dryden was an admirer of Milton's is surprising as the two men were politically opposed. Milton was against the restoration of the British monarchy, while the royalist Dryden was created England’s first Poet Laureate by the restored Charles II. So great an admirer of Milton
The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs called it "the best poem I know" According to the philologist E. V. Gordon "Sigurd the Volsung" is "incomparably the greatest poem – perhaps the only great poem – in English which has been inspired by Norse literature", and George Bernard Shaw went so far as to call it "the greatest epic since Homer". However the novelist Eric Linklater, while acknowledging that "Morris tells his story with endless invention, with a brilliant profusion of detail", complained that the poem's "Thames-side heroism" conveyed too facile a sense of tragedy. It has never had a wide readership, and contemporary judgements on "Sigurd"