ABSTRACT
The great advantage of R. M. Adams’s method of handling Latin influences on John Milton’s style is that he avoids the simple antithesis between English spontaneity and Latin formalism, showing what extraordinary, unclassical and individual effects Milton required of syntax, always the master and never the servant of the various styles he had on call. The effort to achieve a genuine sincerity of style is pulled out of true into mock grandeur or pastiche by the force of Milton’s example. The defence of John Milton’s style is in fact difficult to sustain if the distinctions are allowed to be fully descriptive, not simply the partial consequences of prior generic choice. One must begin by allowing that the images of this passage do, indeed, exhibit one of the characteristics of a ‘classical’ style as Professor Bush describes it: they do not ‘number the streaks of the tulip’, they seem to avoid the peculiar and even the particular.
