Not like Homer would I write,
Not like Dante if I might,
Not like Shakespeare at his best,
Not like Goethe or the rest,
Like myself, however small,
Like myself, or not at all.

Here pity only lives when it is dead - Virgil

There is no greater sorrow
than thinking back upon a happy time
in misery--

Milton was the gold standard of religious poets for English and American scholars. But Milton wrote of Hell and Heaven from above and below, respectively, not from the inside: safer advantages.

your soul has been assailed by cowardice,
which often weighs so heavily on a man--
distracting him from honorable trials--
as phantoms frighten beasts when shadows fall.