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Knowing about Milton in John Philips's Cyder
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 58, Number 3, Summer 2018
- pp. 591-612
- 10.1353/sel.2018.0023
- Article
- Additional Information
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ABSTRACT:
John Philips's georgic poem Cyder (1708) has been described as the first work to make Milton's sinuous poetic style available to the poets of the eighteenth century. This article develops a more complicated understanding of Philips's debt to Milton by focusing on the dissembling apples that populate Cyder's orchards. Read in the light of Milton's Sublimity Asserted, a critical pamphlet published the year after Philips's poem, Cyder appears to stage a conflict between Miltonic and Virgilian forms of georgic; Milton's Sublimity Asserted, meanwhile, by imitating Philips's own imitation of Miltonic style, points its readers toward a new generic category: the mock georgic.