معرفی کتاب های رحیم پناهی

LEE M. JOHNSON

1Milton's epic style: the invocations in Paradise Lost

The style of Milton's verse, especially in Paradise Lost, is one of the great glories and problems of English poetry. As a subject for admiration and praise, Milton's epic style has received tributes from other poets such as Marvell, Dryden, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. Scholarly attempts to specify the nature of that style have led to the widespread use of distinctions between ornate and plain expressions, grand and conversational modes, and of epithets such as 'baroque' to describe the lavish splendour of Milton's language. More than perhaps any other major English work, Paradise Lost invites close and comprehensive examination of its style; and an additional benefit of all that scrutiny has been a general enhancement of our knowledge of style, no matter whose works we are considering, and a realization that metrical choices, as well as diction and syntax, must be taken into account in any thorough discussion of the subject. Remove Paradise Lost from the literary tradition, along with the thousands of pages devoted to its style alone which we find spread over more than three centuries, and our understanding of the possibilities of style in English verse would be greatly diminished.

There are those, of course, whose critical comments seem at times designed precisely to accomplish, if not the removal of Paradise Lost from the canon of poetry, at least a severe depreciation of its stylistic value. Along with his praise came the censure of Samuel Johnson, and John Keats also vacillated between wonder and dismay at the ways in which Milton did not keep up good English. In the twentieth century, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot have decried the style of Milton's epic and its bad influence on