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Milton's missing rhymes. (poet John Milton)

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From: Style
Date: 19940622
Author:McCauley, Lawrence H.

In his prefatory note on "The Verse," attached to the second edition of Paradise Lost, Milton first explains "why the Poem Rimes not" by an appeal to cultural authority, aligning himself with a Classical and epic tradition--"that of Homer in Greek and of Virgil in Latin"--with "some both Italian and Spanish Poets of prime note," and with "our best English Tragedies." Eventually, though, the force of his explanation is to justify his poetic ways by invoking a higher authority. When he decries "the jingling sound of like endings" as "trivial and of no true musical delight" (my ...

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