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READING MILTON 285 edition of 1963. Rachel Bromwich, well-known for her scholarlywork on Dafydd's poetry, has translated an excellent selection offifty-six poems, presented with the Welsh text on facing pages. Both the translations and the apparatus of the two volumes are so different that they complement each other strikingly. Loomis is considerably more literal in his rendering ofDafydd's syntax, but the occasionally stilted line which this produces is offset by the clarity of his colloquial style. Bromwich translates more freely but also in a more formal manner. On the whole, Loomis's translations make the better reading, though a few serious errors have crept in (such as the attribution of lines 17-20 in 'The Goose Shed' to the girl, rather than to her husband of line 9). _ Bromwich's volume comes into its own with its apparatus. Her elaborate notes illuminate every line, discussing ambiguities and clarifying interpretations. Her introduction brings a lifetime of love and thought to hear on Dafydd's poetry. Loomis's apparatus, though useful, is simply outclassed. In comparison with Bromwich's, his notes are thin (though the bibliographical notes are good), and his introduction is full of rather strange things. A whole page (p 20) is devoted to demonstrating the kinship of Welsh and Breton for purposes not very clear, and what begins as an excellent discussion of the range of meaning of some of Dafydd's more common monosyllables (p 30) falls down in an inadequate discussion of colour words. This whole aspect of Loomis's volume seems not well thought out, for his useful discussion of Dafydd's vocabulary presupposes that the reader has the Welsh text in front ofhim. Itis Loomis's translations that will be of great use, for they are clear, literal, and generally accurate. Bromwich's volume will primarily be useful for its superb notes, the culmination of many years devoted to Dafydd's poetry. Were W.J. Gruffydd still with us, these two volumes might just tempt him to revise his opinion. They will at least help towards a recognition of Dafydd's true status as one of the greatest poets of the fourteenth century. Stories of Reading Milton PAUL STEVENS Elizabeth Ely Fuller. Milton's Kinesthetic Vision in 'Paradise Lost' Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses 1983. 321. $46.50 James Thorpe. John Milton: The Inner Life San Marino: Huntingdon Library 1983. x, 191. illus. $17.50 Since the end of the 'Milton controversy' in the 1960s, since what Bernard Sharratt calls 'the "defeat" of 1968' (Essays and Studies [1982], p 144), the withering away of the older generation's attacks on Milton under the glare of a historical scholarship recharged by the ingenuity of the New Criticism, the canon of academic Milton UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1985 286 PAUL STEVENS criticism has remained confidently conservative. 'Miltonists have returned to the rigors of scholarship,' Joseph Wittreich announced in 1979, 'without withdrawing the rewards of interpretation' (Review [1979], p 158). Works whatever their thesis that have failed to pay deference to either authorial intention or historical plausibility have tended to be silently excluded from the canon. A work as radical as Surprised by Sin, radical because it was prepared to challenge the orthodoxy of the'affective fallacy' by making the reader's experience its central concern, gained access precisely because Stanley Fish protected his theory of reader-response by careful reference to seventeenth-century rhetorical strategies - puritan practices that made his story of reading Milton historically plausible. Elizabeth Fuller's work, like Fish's, is a story of reading Paradise Lost, but unlike Fish, from whom she is at pains to distance herself, she shows little interest in historical plausibility - her reader's responses are not documented in such a way as to make them appear the consciously desired effects of a seventeenth-century poet. Her story begins with the reader first encountering the poem's kinaesthetic structure - a multiplicity of contradictory or 'disjunctive' perspectives, physical, emotional, intellectual, a maze whose purpose is to disrupt the reader's normal, sense-making habits of mind, to prevent 'him/her' resting in stock emotional responses...

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