Faithful Labourers Style And Genre

"Volume one attends to questions of style and genre. The first three chapters examine the longstanding debate about Milton's grand style and the question of whether it forfeits the native resources of English. Early critics saw Milton as the pre-eminent poet of 'apt Numbers' and 'fit quantity', whose verse is 'apt' in the specific sense of achieving harmony between sound and sense; twentieth-century anti-Miltonists faulted Milton for divorcing sound from sense; late twentieth-century theorists have denied the possibility that sound can 'enact' sense. These are extreme changes of critical perception, and yet the story of how they came about has never been told. These chronological chapters explain the roots of these changes and, in doing so, engage with the enduring theoretical question of whether it is possible for sound to enact sense"--