Mainly papers, delivered in seminars or as talks, or simply reflecting my thoughts.

Epic Openings, from Homer to Milton

By comparing some five recurrent features of openings in European epics from Homer’s onwards, I seek to understand better what these features do in Paradise Lost, coming late in…

Blameworthy Latin: After Salmasius

To continue exploring this enquiry into aspersions cast on the Latinity of Milton’s Poemata, I review the strictures of Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864). Then from more recent times come those of the classical scholar H. W. Garrod in Helen Darbishire’s edition (1955). They exemplify the standpoints, respectively, of a dilettante and a classical scholar.

Milton and Otherness

“Otherness,” also known as Alterity, is vitiated as a concept by its inbuilt essentialism, indeed more so than most large general ideas are. Anything can be “other,” except the self itself; and…

Evaluating Salmasius’ Critique of Poemata

In his attack on Milton’s Latin poems Salmasius accuses him of bungling them by “false quantities,” that is, by incorrectly shortening long vowels. He further accuses him of the converse mistake, illicit longs for shorts, in a prosody which works by vowel-duration and not (like English verse) by word-accent.2 And Milton makes “many other errors.” How accurate is this stricturing? The present enquiry addresses each particular rebuke, then the general issue of “correctness” in Neo-Latin.

Studies of Milton’s ColourSense

How does Milton perceive and deploy colour in his poems? What colours does he use, and to what ends? To address these questions I work with three aspects of a sense of colour: (1) Hue, or tint; what you see in a paint-box; (2) Texture or surface; ranging from sheen or brilliancy to dullness or matt finish, with iridescence. (3) Depth or intensity of colour; Shakespeare’s “deep vermilion in the rose.” A fourth aspect is more general: (4) light, as the source of colourperception, with its correlative, darkness.

Milton Society of America – Award Acceptance

And thank you all, Milton Society of America, for your generous award. Here’s how I got into Milton scholarship, and what it has meant to me, in order as well to honour people who helped me…