after his trip to italy in ‘38 he gains a lot of confidence in his verse

"Blank verse in Italian was the invention of the Cinquecento.1 Yet the attempts to perfect it as an instrument for epic poetry were for one reason or another unsuccessful."

"Johnson’s criticism of blank verse “ blank verse, if it be not tumid and gorgeous, is but crippled prose'” was preempted by a full 2 centuries by Italian"

"If blank verse were to succeed, it must be largely by virtue of some special power or beauty of diction. thus eliot and other critics of his August verse fail to recognize the grandeur required of his bold verse"

C.f. Whaler's statistical analysis of the lengths the poet goes to chain these digressions together with numerological significance

"A common usage in Italian poetry from Dante and Petrarch onwards is the addition of a second adjective, as an interjection or afterthought, to an already qualified substantive. Milton begins to chain these together in his digressions:

The last example illustrates beautifully how such patterns enrich themselves as they unfold, by a sort of natural impetus which they gather; that is to say, once the pattern imposes itself and its movement, numerous floating phrases may be attached to the central statement. Adjectives may be balanced against adverbial phrases or participles: It is clear, then, that the systematic deformation of 'logical' word-order, as it is applied in Milton, is made to serve the poetic effect both in a narrowly technical and in a more general aesthetic manner."

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