ABSTRACT
The formal dispositions of John Milton’s language have been subjected to a series of minute investigations and irritated dismissals unique in literary history. Milton’s abjuration of rhyme might seem, to a twentieth-century reader, to be simply a matter of creative choice, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the blank verse of Paradise Lost was seen as an experiment which went far beyond the mere flouting of metrical prescriptions. Jacques Derrida’s “irreducibly graphic poetics” may seem to emerge most consistently with modernism but they are also a property of Paradise Lost. Denis Donoghue in his sustained critique of graphireading paraphrases Mallarme whose “irreducibly graphic poetics” Derrida celebrated. “The reading of the poet’s discourse as laced with purposive textual gaps, “new small actions in a sometimes complicated plot,” depends upon the critic positioning himself as listener in a communicative circuit where the “graphic poetics” of the written poem are transparent and unproblematic.
