ABSTRACT
Rethinking Miltonic description of place necessarily means rethinking Milton’s position within the Vergilian tradition he invokes both explicitly and implicitly in all of his major works. The descriptions of place in Paradise Lost that I examine throughout this book get some of their heightened tension from Milton’s experimentation with genre, and his imitation, in his epic, of the style of the Eclogues and Georgics beyond and contradicting his explicit imitation of the Aeneid. But as Genette’s warning implies, all of those imitations are not allusions to a fixed Vergilian canon; they create in themselves a distinct understanding of what Vergilian description is in the first place. That understanding is itself based in a fluid and rapidly changing approach to reading Vergil, visible in a number of Renaissance poets within the Vergilian tradition. I will argue in this chapter that, in the Renaissance, the tension
about the rereading that takes place when translated bits of Vergil’s first two works make their way into English poetry already exists. Milton redoubles and intensifies that tension through the even greater generic complexity of Paradise Lost.
