Wednesday, October 07, 2020

On Writing Miltonic Sonnets

One Milton scholar I know couldn't activate the Octo-Emanations function for looking inside the book, so I sent my Miltonic sonnets to him, and he responded:

They're certainly Miltonic, and the effect is arresting. Apart from respecting and admiring them, I'm not sure what I make of them yet, although I now recall there was a time when I pondered, as a project/experiment, writing in a past idiom "now," to see what effect it produced. Well, now I've apprehended it and at some point hopefully I'll comprehend it! A fuse has been lit but I don't know how long it is...

As for me, writing in Miltonic style is relatively easy because I grew up in a region, the Ozarks, that used the King James Bible, and nearly everybody I knew there could pray in King James English because they read solely that Bible and memorized its passages.

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