Sources …

… Milton’s blinding reading list | The Spectator. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

 We’ve long known that Homer, Lucan, Lucretius, Ovid and Virgil exercise transformative influences on the meanings of Paradise Lost; thanks to Poole we can now supplement this list with a much longer series of more obscure authorities — including Apollonius of Rhodes, Aratus, Dionysius Periegetes, Hesiod, Nicander, Quintus Smyrnaeus, and Oppian — who Milton engaged with very carefully both in his educational programme and his later poem.

This is certainly interesting, but if appreciation of the poem depended on knowing this the poem would be an exercise in scholarship, not a demonstration of poetic genius.