Miltonists the world over will be groaning at the news that a new poem has just been attributed to their man. The 8-line ‘Extempore upon a Faggot’, discovered by Oxford academic Jennifer Batt, is a fine example of the sort of throwaway crudeness that overwhelms the printed and handwritten verse miscellanies of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries. ‘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.’

Batt herself suspects that the lines may be by John Suckling; perhaps he added the name of Milton to discredit the fiery radical, for whom faggots would have been associated more with burning martyrs than lustful dames. Myself, I’m holding out for Robert Herrick, whose poem ‘Upon the Nipples of Julia’s Breast’ opens with a similar turn of phrase–‘Have ye beheld (with much delight) / A red rose peeping through a white?’–and shares the aim of using things in the world to provoke lascivious thoughts in the (probably male) reader.

Given what we know about the vagaries of lyric authorship in the early modern period, we may need a moratorium on the announcement of new discoveries of this kind. One thinks back to the debates which raged when Gary Taylor discovered an ungainly poem beginning ‘Shall I die?’ with an attribution to Shakespeare in a Bodleian manuscript. But poetic miscellanies and anthologies also give us a valuable glimpse into a period’s literary undergrowth and force us to ask exactly how we can know who wrote what–which is often an extremely challenging and worthwhile question.