No, but I just wanted to get to the Muse part to show his emulation of Homer and Virgil. The benefit of his scarce use of punctuation, though, is that sometimes it creates a neat effect where a given phrase can be read as belonging either to the preceding bit, or the following one, resulting in a double meaning. The downside, of course, is that at times you go "hang on, I think I missed a verb five verses back... this grammar isn't making any sense to me". Or at least I did.

I still need to read Dante.

Understandable. I did read him from start to finish, but my reading pace was a good bit slower than it might have been, and I suppose if you read in chunks you have a keener appreciation for the brilliant bits, than when you read hundreds and hundreds of verses at a time.

I agree, must be a mix.

Yeah. No such thing in Paradise Lost; the closest thing Satan gets to romance is his incestuous fling with his repulsive daughter.

I suppose Philip Pullman went and wrote the book that might have become, albeit in prose.

And I don't know, light and loveliness doesn't have to be boring and preachy - it rarely is in Tolkien, for instance - so Blake really might be on to something when he calls Milton "fettered" in those bits.

The beginning is certainly more epic, but then, in almost any epic, it's the quiet, intimate scenes inbetween (such as the one with Hector and Andromache that you mentioned, or a number of scenes from LotR that I could list) that really make the work great, or not.

Yes. I have now realized I really need to read Blake. Any suggestions on where to start?


These two lines are one of his most successful uses of unconventional and Latinate word order, imho - put the verb in the first verse and it's far weaker. And a brilliant contrast between "hand in hand" and "solitary" on top of it.


I haven't read Pope, either. In fact, I don't think I've read - until now - anyone between Shakespeare and Austen, as far as British literature goes, not unless you count children's versions of Gulliver's Travels.