Useful statistic measuring the frequency of enjambment, overlapping beats, integral lines, and masc/femm endings Surgical precision of analysis which reflect the precision of the composition This work is groundbreaking alone for its typesetting in the 50s. The diagrams are insane

see pp 61

Simmons was the printer “Simmon’s London printshop” Seen the first fn referenced on pp 19 Fletcher apparently responsible for production of a facsimile of the 1st ed

“When printer Simmons complained that buyers of PL were “stumbled” “why the poem rimes not,” he secured from the poet that evasive statement about “The Verse.”” pp 13

“What the prosodist calls enjambement occurs with very great frequency in both PL and PR. In Edd. 1 and 2 of PL it averages close to 60 per cent, and in some paragraphs exceeds 80 per cent. In any edited text it averages at least 50 per cent. PR is less enjambed, yet the rate is higher than that of the great bulk of blank verse written before or since.” pp 13

Printing process

“The closer one gets to the movement of Milton’s verse, the deeper grows a conviction that one is in the presence of the most painstakingly supervised writing ever set up in type, and that the supervisor — ubiquitous, insistent — is the poet himself. Again and again he must have had every page of the edition of 1667 read back to him. And by men worthy of his trust, men who deeply respected him, and did all they humanly could to fulfil a blind man’s most finicky directions, whether logical or Illogical.” pp 14

“A moment’s thought tells us that enjambement in any blank verse is related in an important way to the maintenance of the five-beat metric line — the norm. The higher the rate of enjambement, the fewer the lines which the ear recognizes as integral pentameters. It follows that when a poet, deliberately and on principle, and with unprecedented frequency, variously draws out the sense from one verse into another, he is liable to obscure in the listener’s mind — even obliterate — that norm.” pp 15

“The closer we examine the rhythmic ordonnance of the Miltonic paragraph, the more certain wTe are that Milton’s method is consciously analogous to that of contrapuntal music.” pp 16

“And the delight of reading good verse arises largely from this duality of apprehension.” pp 25

“[In the superposing of irregular rhythms upon regular metric] an irregularity which never degenerates into confusion is the rhythmic ideal to which the composer aspires. . . . But the composers were not content with the effect obtainable by contrasting the real rhythmical accent with the imaginary metrical accent. Above all they loved to make the rhythmical accents of each part cross and clash with those of every other part. This constant rhythmical conflict is the most vital and suggestive feature in the whole of the 16th-century technique. . . . This volume has missed its aim entirely if it has failed to make clear that counterpoint is rhythm, and very little else.” (Italics mine)” pp 25-26

He really do be getting mathematical with it

“If the sum of the beats in two line-segments a and b is 5, then the group a—(n X 5 1—b may be in cross-rhythm with the metric frame in such a way that enjambement (or near-enjambement consonant with rhetorical trend) produces a continuous rhythmic aggregate which may be felt as a multiple of 5, thus serving indirectly to safeguard the norm from obliteration.” 29

“For, like the rhythmic continuum of a T-construction, such a multiple can serve as a reminder, and hence a safeguard, of the norm. Call the construction E” pp

“Over 35 variant patterns appear, some of which seem curiously functional to context. Their ingenious symmetry may be regarded as inevitable elaboration of an intensely meditated method of crossrhythmic designing.” pp 34 “Intercalated E s are most numerous in PL VI, where there are ten in all, five of them occurring between lines 200-300 in the description of celestial warfare. Their rhythmic complexity certainly seems intended to parallel the presumed complexity of angelomachy.”

In treatment of Adam’s soliloquy in book X.720-844 launching into an insanely mathematically precise chain of overlapping beats which Whaler details

“Here the alternations of pause within successive lines are throbs of Adam’s anguish, the lifting and sagging of his head shaken by cheerless hope and black despair, alternations so recurrent that the metric frame seems to shift, now forward, now backward. Nothing, surely, elsewhere in literature to surpass this functional application of a mathematically precise technique. If there is ever a blank-verse style distinguishable in its purity, it is here. One thinks of Hamlet’s soliloquy on a similar theme. Shakespeare’s verse, beginning with four feminine endings — a succession that never occurs in PL or PR — owes its solemn impressiveness to entirely different and conventional means, means that are no longer available to Milton, bent upon creating for epic verse a fresh method and manner.” pp 36

Fletcher referenced as an example of the type of verse Milton would’ve found disdainful lol

“From 1600 to 1660 there was produced in England a substantial amount of sustained pentameter verse rhyming in willfully loose couplet form. John Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess is an important instance.” pp 49

Meter reflects the degradation of Sepent

“At PL X, 163-168 God condemns the serpent in a passage containing intervals that accommodate the descending series 12, 9’, 6'’, 3'(=3X [4,3,2, 1]).” pp 64

Decidedly less scrutiny than Conklin(?) applies to his rabbinical/linguistic mastery

“As for Milton, he was aware not only of Kepler’s laws of planetary motion but Kepler’s rationalization of the Music of the Spheres. Though he never mentions Descartes, he could not escape a spirit that swept over Europe — Cartesianism — Uesprit geometrique — with its faith in mathematics as the guarantor of excellence in art as well as in all clear thinking. For Milton this spirit would be but a reinforcement of Pythagoras’ and Plato’s apotheosis of mathematics. Why be surprised then if Milton’s consummated rhythmic style in measured verse should contain an occasional fusion of two loves: his love for contrapuntal music and his love for mathematical processes” pp 70

Contains more discussion of the symmetry of metrical structure throughout militaristic sequences which elude the scope of the book which I have attempted to make as comprehensive as is reasonable

Really love the schizophrenic statistical analysis from this guy

“If there were an abundance of 113-line paragraphs, and if the contexts of many of these paragraphs were concerned with astronomy, then, given enough paragraphs on astronomy of this precise length — it being understood that the poet entirely ignores numerical response — sooner or later the statement concerning the sun’s centrality might be expected to fall at the paragraph’s exact center. But there is only one 113-line paragraph in all Milton’s blank verse, and this of all paragraphs is a lecture on astronomy That there should begin, at the exact center of this lecture,” pp 82

So true

Maybe include in prologomena, with the note that it may seem like plucking this out of context would be unflattering in any light, but I assure you that the surrounding diagrams do little to combat the inquiries of mental continence

“Inferable from many scattered progressions, the symbolic meaning of 17 is that of 7 aggrandized by 10.” pp 89

Thank you for your service Mr. Whaler

“Now the very thought of examining a blank verse paragraph for the presence of a series composed of successive powers is, I dare say, as repugnant to the reader as it was to me.” pp 97

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