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"Miltonic locution" (also "Miltonism" is the term given by literary critics to indicate turns of phrase, syntactical structures, and poetic devices considered to originate in the poetry of English poet John Milton. These include Latinisms in diction and syntax, that is, words, inflections, and word order found in Latin more readily than in English; words that Milton coined, in particular negative terms; unusual syntactic constructions especially in the word order of noun phrases; and, finally, a certain fluidity in choosing words from different lexical categories.

Many of Milton's terms have become accepted in English dictionaries and are used widely, and especially among English-language poets the influence of Milton is sometimes measured by the number and kind of Miltonic locutions a poet uses. Literary critic Harold Bloom commented that "Milton is the central problem in any theory and history of poetic influence in English",[1] and Milton's locutions were influential enough to have been employed for centuries after him. The anxiety Bloom signaled as an essential element of the poetic process is illustrated by poets who sometimes explicitly tried to expunge such locutions from their own work. John Keats for instance was said to have "de-Miltonized" the first version of his Hyperion when revising it and producing The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, though both Raymond Dexter Havens[2] and Jonathan Bate note that Keats in fact introduced Miltonisms in the second version of the poem.[3]

Latinisms[edit]

Roy Flannagan and other scholars counter the "common misapprehension" that Milton's diction is "merely Latinate". Still, his word choice and syntax (including the use of declensions) are frequently influenced by Latin. Flannagan notes that the opening sentence of Paradise Lost "waits until the sixth line to give us its verb"--and that verb, "sing", is the same verb as in the opening line of The Aeneid. And in many words he offers English, Latin, and Greek senses simultaneously; Flannagan cites "essence" and "effluence".[4]

Me miserable[edit]

In PL IV.73, Satan exclaims, "Me miserable! Which way shall I fly / Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?" Burton Raffel glosses "me miserable" as "Oh how miserable I am".[5] Flannagan notes it is "an exclamation of grief, roughly akin to the Elizabeth and Miltonic 'Ay me' (86) or the Italian 'Ahimé".[6] Its syntax is Latinate,[7] "the accusative of exclamation (O me miserum!)",[8] and the phrase is one of Milton's many latinisms. Keats uses this locution in Hyperion, "Me thoughtless", but as Bate notes, this is a Miltonism he introduced in the second version of Hyperion, where the first had the "innocuous" "O thoughtless".[9]

Negative words and constructions[edit]

Milton was particularly adept at forming negative compounds using the prefixes "un-" and "dis-";[10] William B. Hunter, in a study first published in 1956, counted over a thousand,[11] with "unbesought", "undelighted", and "disespouse" being frequently cited.[12]

These are not merely words; Paul Hammond lists a slew of scholars who have argued that Milton's theology is essentially an apophatic theology, since Paradise Lost is constructed around a prohibition: that Adam and Eve not eat from the fruit. Other works by Milton exhibit the same tendency--"At a Solemn Musick" has "undiscording", "Lycidas" has "unwept", "uncessant", and "unexpressive".[13] Annabel Patterson shows that Milton's polemic works in English and Latin have the same tendency: in The Reason of Church-Government Urged against Prelaty, he exhibits a "most peculiar negative positivism", a "syntactical negativity [as] a sign of vocational doubt. She remarks that the "central message" of Comus is "no", with an attendant "flurry of negative constructions", and from the (Latin) Defensio Secunda she cites a brief passage with thirteen negative constructions.[14]

Many 17th- and 18th-century writers took over this habit: one of them was the poet and critic Edward Young (1683-1765), whose Night-Thoughts (1742-45) is replete with Miltonic expressions, including dozens of negative verbs and adjectives, like "uncreate", "unabsurd", and "unadept".[15]

"Unlibidinous"[edit]

Some of his negative words remain Milton's alone: "unlibidinous" (PL 5.449) is not recorded by the OED outside of Milton; the word expresses the "pure sexuality of Adam and Eve, and implicitly links the absence of lust to the absence of jealousy".[16] F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot, who were frequently critical of Milton's style, would have objected to the word, according to Patterson, since it is clearly of Latin origin and because of its placement, between subject and verb: "In those hearts / Love unlibidinous reign'd" (PL 5.449). (The word is either a postnominal adjective, "unlibidinous love reigned", or a pre-verbal adjective where an adverb is more common, "love reigned unlibidinous[ly]".) According to Patterson, Christopher Ricks, author of the seminal 1963 work Milton's Grand Style, would have remarked that the placement allotted the word "syntactical fluidity", whose meaning could go toward either of the other two words; and Thomas Corns, author of the 1990 book Milton's Language, identifies it as one of many Miltonic negative coinages. Patterson adds that the positive version of the word, "libidinous", occurs in The Reason of Church-Government (she cautions scholars not to neglect Milton's prose works), and that the negative word in Paradise Lost may well be a comment on the libidinous court of Charles II of England.[17]

Abstract nouns with concrete verbs[edit]

Sorrow bearing pain[edit]

Christopher Miller notes that William Wordsworth's "the worst pang that sorrow ever bore", in the sonnet "Surprised By Joy — Impatient As The Wind", contains a Miltonic locution: the active "giving birth to" pain by the abstract emotion "sorrow".[18]

Syntax[edit]

Milton's "dislocations" of syntax were noted by many, including Ezra Pound: Paradise Lost's "Him who disobeys / Me disobeys" (5.611-612) is a well-known example of this. According to Michael Ferber, the first three words are a phrase in Object-Subject-Verb order, which in turn is the subject of another clause, in Subject-Object-Verb order. "Him" refers to the Son of God, and Ferber notes that "this is spoken by God, so it must be correct"; the clause translates as "who[ever] disobeys him [the Son of God] disobeys me [God]".[19] Another Miltonism noted by Bates in Keats's Hyperion is syntactic, and concerns the word order of the line "Ponderous upon my senses a whole moon". OH THERES A TON MORE, BUT LUNCH FIRST[20]

Pre- and postnominal use of adjectives[edit]

The postnominal use of adjectives is prevalent in Milton's writing, and such phrasing is often signaled as Miltonic, particularly in Keats ("influence benign on planets pale", "of triumph calm", "for rest divine").[21]

In general, Milton habitually placed a word, noun or verb, "between two others which depend upon it or upon which it depends".[22] In particular, he often applied multiple adjectives or adjectival phrases to a single nominal--one before, and one after the nominal. Michael Ferber provides a number of examples from Paradise Lost: "dismal Situation waste and wild" (1.60), "ever-burning Sulphur unconsum'd" (1.69), "human face divine" (3.44), and "vast profundity obscure" (7.229). These occur elsewhere in Milton: "sad occasion dear", in Lycidas, line 6, and "his native Wood-notes wild", in L'Allegro, line 136.[23] Many of these have found their way into others' poetry.

Milton: "human face divine", Pope and Blake: "human form divine"[edit]

"Human face divine" occurs in the invocation to Book 3 of Paradise Lost, in which the narrator comments on the problems and opportunities created by blindness: it is one of the elements the narrator can no longer see. The adjectives "human" and "divine" are placed around the noun "face". Alexander Bain's grammatical analysis of the phrase in his A First English Grammar is relatively straightforward: "The class noun 'face' is restricted by the adjective human--'human faces' are selected from the wider class 'faces'. The adjective 'divine' does not make a farther selection from human faces, or constitute a narrower class 'divine human faces,' leaving out certain human faces that are not divine; it adds to the class 'human faces,' in all its extent, the meaning 'divine'--the human face, which is divine, which is a divine face".[24] Daniel Shore, though, explains the design behind the construction: "it studiously avoids subordinating the face's humanity to its divinity, or vice versa, as it would if both adjectives were attributive" (Shore contrasts attributive with postpositive use of adjectives).[25]

It was adopted and adapted by two poets after Milton: Alexander Pope and William Blake. Pope used it in his translation of the Odyssey (one of many borrowings from Milton in that work),[26] as "human form divine", to describe Odysseus's men after they've been turned into swine by Circe. According to Robert F. Gleckner, this is also an expansion, from the face to the entire form of humans. Blake, in turn, takes Pope's phrase and uses it in "The Divine Image" (from the Songs of Innocence, 1789) and "A Divine Image" (from Songs of Experience, 1794). One scholar used it for the title of a monograph on Blake, and the phrase "now seems quintessentially Blakean", according to Gleckner.[27]

Adjectives used for adverbs[edit]

Frequently Milton uses an adjective where ordinarily an adverb would be used. Havens cites four examples from Paradise Lost: "with gems...rich emblazed" (1.538), "grinned horrible" 2.846), "his grieved look he fixes sad" (4.28), "his proud step he scornful turned" (4.536). Havens comments that in "ordinary prose usage" this would be acceptable enough, but also that Milton's syntax is often so complex that it is not always clear whether he intends a specific modifier to be used adjectivally or adverbially.[28]

This usage is found in the work of Keats, for instance, according to Havens: in The Fall of Hyperion, "For by my burning brain I measured sure / Her silver seasons shedded on the night" (i.392-393) and "Oftentimes I pray'd / Intense" (i.396-397).[29]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ Bloom 33.
  2. ^ Havens 211-12.
  3. ^ Bate 329.
  4. ^ Flannagan 316.
  5. ^ Raffel 280.
  6. ^ Flannagan 443.
  7. ^ Greenblatt 2005.
  8. ^ Hammond 133.
  9. ^ Bate 329.
  10. ^ Flannagan 316.
  11. ^ Hunter 226.
  12. ^ Flannagan 316.
  13. ^ Hammond 362, and 362 n.1.
  14. ^ Patterson 175-79.
  15. ^ Havens 149-60, esp. 155.
  16. ^ Hammond 376.
  17. ^ Patterson 1-5/
  18. ^ Miller 195.
  19. ^ Ferber 112.
  20. ^ Bate 329.
  21. ^ Havens 211.
  22. ^ Havens 81.
  23. ^ Ferber 111.
  24. ^ Bain 71.
  25. ^ Shore 168.
  26. ^ Havens 582.
  27. ^ Gleckner 31-33.
  28. ^ Havens 82.
  29. ^ Havens 212.

Bibliography[edit]

  • Bain, Alexander (1872). A First English Grammar. Longmans and Company.
  • Bate, Jonathan (1992). "Keats's Two Hyperions and the Problem of Milton". In Brinkley, Robert; Hanley, Keith (eds.). Romantic Revisions. Cambridge University Press. pp. 321–38. ISBN 9780521380744.
  • Bloom, Harold (1997). The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. p. 33.
  • Ferber, Michael (2019). Poetry and Language: The Linguistics of Verse. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781108596220.
  • Flannagan, Roy, ed. (1998). The Riverside Milton. Houghton Mifflin.
  • Hammond, Paul (2017). Milton's Complex Words: Essays on the Conceptual Structure of Paradise Lost. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780192538178.
  • Havens, Raymond Dexter (1922). The influence of Milton on English poetry. Russell & Russell.
  • Gleckner, Robert F. (2001). McDayter, Ghislaine; Batten, Guinn; Milligan, Barry (eds.). Romantic Generations: Essays in Honor of Robert F. Gleckner. Bucknell University Press. ISBN 9780838754702.
  • Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. (2012). Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol. 1 (9 ed.). ISBN 9780393912470.
  • Hunter, William B. (1989). "New Words in Milton's English Poems". The Descent of Urania: Studies in Milton, 1946-1988. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. pp. 222–42.
  • Miller, Christopher R. (2015). Surprise: The Poetics of the Unexpected from Milton to Austen. Cornell UP. ISBN 9780801455780.
  • Patterson, Annabel (2009). Milton's Words. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780191571503.
  • Raffel, Burton (2009). The Annotated Milton: Complete English Poems. Random House. ISBN 9780307416933.
  • Shore, Daniel (2018). Cyberformalism: Histories of Linguistic Forms in the Digital Archive. JHU Press. p. 168. ISBN 9781421425504.
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