Abstract

Marrying both formal and historical approaches to Milton's long poems, this article takes up once again the place of reasoned discourse and poetry as thinking in Milton's developing project. Offering a new interpretation of the chronological inversion of the events in Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes while considering the poems not as two independent pieces but as a single work designed to be read together in two parts, Grossman considers the instrumental relation between mimesis and reason, placing Milton's late experiments in literary typology in their Restoration context and in dialogue with the Socinian writings of Johannes Crellius. Demonstrating how Milton both adapted and expanded Crellius's reading of the Epistle to the Hebrews, Grossman shows how the mediation of poetry itself became essential to the project of defending reason, arguing along with Milton for the value of literary historical response in the making of intellectual history.

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