ABSTRACT
Milton first appears in print in the second Shakespeare folio as the anonymous author of "An Epitaph on the admirable Dramaticke Poet, W. Shakespeare", a poem later retitled "On Shakespeare" and redated 1630, foredating his beginning. Becoming blank, the Miltonic text can become the tomb on which an initial inscription is engrafted; stones before seeds, an excessive monument, and a pyramid built to conceal what is buried within. This is the blank space of the Miltonic inscription. That blank space, where the warning voice and prevention meet, is Milton's territory. He claims it as his own at every beginning. As in that early letter to a friend, he reports the other's warning in voice which appropriates the warning and makes it his own. But the warning voice is already in quotation, Christ speaking to the blind man at Siloah's brook, miraculously restoring his sight so that he can work in the light granted in darkness before the final darkness comes.
