The account he gives, in the poem, of the way it came to him is very different from the sense of a heroic individual forging these materials into a shape all by himself and through his own powers of imagination and his own efforts. He seems to have believed – and to want the reader to believe – that he was being visited each night by a divine muse, so he would wake with the next portion of the poem ready-made in his head. His role was to dictate it to one of his scribes, his amanuensis, possibly one of his daughters, who would do the writing for him. He would then fix and edit it.
So, there’s an incredibly mixed sense of him being, on the one hand, this figure who is a heroic creator in his own right, and on the other hand, the much more archaic sense of the poet as a conduit for something, as someone who allows inspiration to flow through him.
The sentences of Paradise Lost are labyrinthine – extremely long and complicated. He writes in paragraphs of verse instead of couplets or shorter units, and that really conveys the sense of someone who feels like the poem is happening to him and, in some sense, also wants it to happen to us, as we read it.