AN Oxford University academic has sparked a literary riddle over a “smutty and innuendo-laden” poem by one of Britain’s most celebrated scribes.

John Milton, famous for poems like Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Lycidas, is credited with writing a ditty called An Extempore upon a Faggot.

Dr Jennifer Batt, an academic in English Literature at Oxford University, found the bawdy poem while sorting through the Harding Collection, owned by the Bodleian Library.

Last night, however, Dr Batt said Milton’s name could have been added by someone else to bring scandal on the poet.

The poem reads: “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.”

Dr Batt said: “To see the name of John Milton, the great religious and political polemicist, attached to such a bawdy epigram, is extremely surprising to say the least.

“The poem is so out of tune with the rest of his work, that if the attribution is correct, it would prompt a major revision of our ideas about Milton.

‘It is likely that Milton’s name was used as an attribution to bring scandal upon the poet, perhaps by a jealous contemporary.”