Read it through once

We do not say this when we read Shakespeare or Milton, because we are always conscious of the greatness of the man, and of the miracles that he is performing with the language; we come nearer perhaps with Chaucer—but that Chaucer is using a different, from our point of view a cruder speech. And Shakespeare and Milton, as later history shows, left open many possibilities of other uses of English in poetry: whereas, after Virgil, it is truer to say that no great development was possible, until the Latin language became something different.