Milton and critics

• Milton’s Note on Verse:

  “No Rhyme"

  “Rimeying” is not “estemmed writing"
• Milton’s note on verse:

  “Modern bondage"
• Milton’s Note on Verse: “Taken for defect” … "To Vulgar Readers"
• Addison, “The Spectator"

  • “Unnecessary ostentation of learning"
  • Old words
  • Foreign idioms
  • Cannot be understood “by ordinary readers"
  • “He often affects a kind of jingle in his words"
• Bentley’s Paradise Lost (1731-2)

  It is critical of the editing of the poem, amending the “hollowness and Emptiness of the English Verse” - Paradise “twice lost"
• Eric Griffiths, 1994


  rhyme establishes regularitty in Dryden