Recent critical conversation has described John Milton’s major works as sites of uncertainty, irreconcilability, or even confusion—as texts that actually reflect radical incoherence and openness. These newer critical voices posit, moreover, that traditional critics must strain to find coherence and authorial control in Milton’s poetry. Richard DuRocher and Margaret Thickstun, together with an esteemed group of Milton scholars from a wide range of critical and theoretical backgrounds, respond to this challenge. While accepting the presence of uncertainty and welcoming the multiple perspectives that Milton builds into his works, this volume offers a variety of nuanced approaches to Milton’s texts. As these eleven essays demonstrate, Milton’s own acts of interpretation compel readers to reflect not only on the rival hermeneutics they find within his works but also on their own hermeneutic principles and choices—an interpretive complexity that is integral to his poetry’s enduring appeal. Thus, each of the contributors takes up the problem of this interpretive dilemma in some way: several explore Milton’s own engagement with the texts of Scripture and the classics; some examine the ways in which Milton represents the process of interpretation in his narrative poems; and still others are intrigued by the challenges that Milton’s works present for the reader’s own interpretive skills. Milton’s Rival Hermeneutics, in responding directly to the “incertitude critics” of Milton, will be of interest to those on all sides of this debate and will certainly redirect the ongoing conversation.

John Dolan takes a new approach to the evolution of the modern English lyric, emphasising the way in which several generations of poets, reacting to post-Reformation readers' dislike for invented poetic narratives, competed for the right to commemorate important public occasions and slowly expanded the range of acceptable occasion. This book demonstrates that many fundamental features of a typical modern lyric actually evolved as responses to the limitations of occasional poetry.

Excerpt from Milton's Fame on the Continent Milton was mentioned, but not as a poet, by P. Costar in his Memoire des gens de lettres celebres des pays etrangers and the Comte de Comminges, Louis XIV's ambassador at the court of Charles II, made, in 1663, his famous report to his royal master to the effect that the arts and sciences had passed to France, and that, if there were any vestiges left in England, 'ce n'est que dans la memoire de Bacon, de Morus, de Bucanan et, dans les derniers siecles, d'un nomme Miltonius qui s'est rendu plus infame par ses dangereux cerits que les bourreaux et les assassins de leur roi'. The lexicographers, C. Funccius, G. M. Konig, C. Gryphius, and V. Paravicini, give Milton brief notices in their biographical works, but they know him only as a political agitator, and especially as the author of Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, a book to which universal attention had been drawn on the Continent by the fact of its having been publicly burned at Paris and Toulouse. In 1697, Bayle honoured Milton by devoting to him three pages of his Dictionary, this being the only English poet mentioned in the work. Still, it is obvious that it was not Milton the poet, but Milton the political writer, in whom Bayle was interested, and he was content to repeat at second hand that Paradise Lost 'passe pour l'un des plus beaux ouvrages de poesie que l'on ait vu en anglais', Paradise Regained being 'not nearly so good'. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."

@Published in 1919 when Lewis was only twenty, these early poems give an insight into the author's youthful agnosticism. The poems are written in various metrical forms, but are unified by a central idea, expressing his conviction that nature was malevolent and beauty the only true spirituality. Preface by Walter Hooper.@@