Abstract
“Apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another”: so Milton describes the verse of Paradise Lost. Practices of citation and remediation, however, may radically detach individual lines from their poetic context, interrupting or ignoring the epic’s usual linear flow. Analyzing the OED, Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and Twitter, and historicizing the logics of these textual spaces in terms of practices already established in the Renaissance (commonplacing and consultation reading), this chapter discusses the function and phenomenology of the lineated deformance of Paradise Lost within print and digital media, and assays a graphical “x-ray” of its presence in the reference works. The chapter reflects and reflects on the role of numbers and data visualization in the age of digital literary studies.
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Notes
- 1.
William Empson, Milton’s God, rev. ed. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), 7.
- 2.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alistair Fowler, 2nd ed. (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1997), 55. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations of Paradise Lost and its paratexts are from this edition. Where Paradise Lost is quoted from a source that does not include line numbers, line numbers keyed to Fowler’s edition are supplied parenthetically.
- 3.
One should distinguish between a line of verse and a line of print or display. Marginal line numbers in poetic texts tally the former, not the latter. The two will in general coincide, but material instantiations of a poetic text may present a single verse line in such a way that it occupies more than one line of print or display as a contingency of format. For example, in Gordon Teskey’s edition of Paradise Lost (New York: Norton, 2005), line 3.651 (“That run through all the heavens, or down to the earth”) occupies one line of print, whereas in Fowler’s edition the words “That run through all the heavens, or down to the” occupies one line of print, while “earth” appears alone on the following line, indented to indicate its belonging to the same verse line. This contingent feature is not part of the “poetics” of the line. Within the usual bounds of interpretation, it is not significant that the reader’s eye moves “down” the page to “earth” in accordance with the sense of 3.651, whereas a critic may legitimately hypothesize such verbal mimesis as relevant to 1.522–23 (“but with looks / Downcast”). Digital contexts may introduce further complication: on the current implementation of The John Milton Reading Room, for example, the text is encoded so as to occupy as many lines of display as necessary to fit within the width of the browser window.
- 4.
This is not to deny that line endings are used as a rhythmic resource in Paradise Lost. John Leonard cites a passage from Donald Davie’s “Syntax and Music in Paradise Lost,” in The Living Milton, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), 70–84, as refuting “the idea that Milton is deaf to line-endings” (Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of Paradise Lost, 1667–1970, 2 vols. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013], 250). On the sense of (and critical debate over) the expressions “apt numbers” and “fit quantity of syllables” see Leonard, “Fit Quantity of Syllables,” in Approaches to Teaching Milton’s Paradise Lost, ed. Peter C. Herman, 2nd ed. (New York: Modern Language Association, 2012), 118–24; and Faithful Labourers, 110–13 et passim.
- 5.
Compare Teskey, introducing his edition: “Developing longer rhythms, like ocean swells, than are possible in the single verse line is Milton’s most important technical contribution to later verse in English” (xiii). Given the important concession of the previous note, my wordplay may appear to over-value what John Dryden called “the jingle of a more poor paranomasia”; see Account of the ensuing Poem,” prefacing Annus Mirabilis (1667) in The Works of John Dryden, ed. H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., et al., 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956–2002), 1:53. But “jingling” is of course part of what is at stake in “The Verse.” Dryden is spectrally present as the foil to the note’s poetic theory, as he is more explicitly present (as “town-Bayes”) in Andrew Marvell’s “On Paradise Lost,” which satirizes Dryden’s conversion of Paradise Lost into the rhymed drama The State of Innocence (47). Indeed, Milton’s “The Verse” suggestively tracks, as if in implicit rebuttal or overgoing, certain parts of Dryden’s concessive defense of his rhymed stanzas in the Account of Annus Mirabilis. In addition to “jingle”/“jingling,” compare Dryden’s “The learned languages have, certainly, a great advantage of us, in not being tied to the slavery of any Rhyme; and were less constrained in the quantity of every syllable, which they might vary with Spondæes or Dactiles” (51). Noteworthy too is that Dryden’s competing standard for English heroic poetry is centered on “delightful imaging” (53) rather than “true musical delight.”
- 6.
That digital remediation tends to augment the apprehension and production of Paradise Lost as lineated is serendipitously illustrated in a 1996 MLA guide to a suite of computing tools and literary corpora, which presents as a sample of the text mark-up of Paradise Lost (prepared by Roy Flannagan) the note on “The Verse” itself, delimited into individually numerically tagged lines corresponding to the earliest print text. See Ian Lancashire et al., eds., Using TACT with Electronic Texts: A Guide to Text-Analysis Computing Tools, Version 2.1 for MS-DOS and PC DOS (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1996), 246–47.
- 7.
“Deformance” is Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann’s general term for a procedural approach to text in order to release or engage its imaginative potentials in ways outside the dominant, concept-based, semiosis-directed critical tradition, which they designate “performance.” See Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann, “Deformance and Interpretation,” New Literary History 30, no. 1 (1999): 25–56.
- 8.
Critical discussion of printed line numbers is thin; Stephen Dobranski makes use of them as evidence in his argument concerning the Omissa of Samson Agonistes, noting (following D. F. McKenzie) that in this period they “were probably set separately” from the text and their alignment then checked by the compositor against his manuscript. See “Samson and the Omissa,” SEL Studies, in English Literature, 1500–1900 36, no. 1 (1996): 149–69 (155).
- 9.
In the case of Paradise Lost, the convention of decimal multiples happens to coincide with a formal feature noted by John Creaser: “The verse of Paradise Lost is distinguished by the sustained length of its sentences, which are on average about ten lines long, despite the frequent use of short sentences for rhetorical effect” (“‘A Mind of Most Exceptional Energy’: Verse Rhythm in Paradise Lost,” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 471).
- 10.
See John Creaser, “‘Service is Perfect Freedom’: Paradox and Prosodic Style in Paradise Lost,” Review of English Studies 58, no. 235 (2007): 268–315; and “Verse Rhythm,” 464–73 for this prosodic lexicon and method in action with reference to Paradise Lost. Creaser explicates and builds upon Attridge’s reorientation of English prosody around the tendencies towards isochrony of stress and duple rhythm in the language, in order to classify and illustrate the kinds and extent of metrical variation (by demotion, promotion, and pairing of stresses) that Milton uses in his epic. Creaser shows that line endings matter at the syllabic level—“A significant nuance is that, under precise conditions, the pause of the line-turn may act as a syllable, stressed or unstressed, and make deviation possible, so that two rather than three syllables may permit promotion or demotion, and a single stress may permit pairing” (“Verse Rhythm” 465)—as well as the linear and verse paragraph levels—“The handling of the turn colours the whole movement, and metrically the strongest points of a line of iambic verse are the words given the first and final beats” (467).
- 11.
Archie Burnett, “‘Sense Variously Drawn Out’: The Line in Paradise Lost,” Literary Imagination 5, no. 1 (2003): 69–92 (69).
- 12.
John Hollander, Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse, 3rd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 53.
- 13.
See The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ed. Alice Mary Smyth (London: Oxford University Press, 1941); The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ed. Angela Partington, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); and The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, ed. Elizabeth Knowles, 8th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). A full list of editions of ODQ by year: 1st (1941), 2nd (1953), 3rd (1979), 4th (1992), 5th (1999), 6th (2004), 7th (2009), and 8th (2014). The most recent two editions are also published digitally.
- 14.
“Universe, n.” OED Online, June 2017, Oxford University Press, <oed.com/view/Entry/214800>. Accessed 18 November 2017.
- 15.
This use of “non-linear” with reference to the interaction of lineation and remediation is distinct from its more common critical usage, denoting kinds of (aesthetic) temporality different from linear time. For example, Jennifer Tole (citing Giorgio Agamben) finds in Samson Agonistes a powerful instance of a general poetic capacity to experience and understand temporality as non-linear: “poetry creates a ‘time within time,’ in which the disruption of linearity shows that our representations of chronological time are just that—representations—and not the only way of experiencing temporality” (“Divine Violence and the Messianic Possibilities of Samson Agonistes,” in Milton’s Modernities: Poetry, Philosophy, and History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, ed. Feisal G. Mohamed and Patrick Fadely [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017], 114–15). If Milton’s temporally transfigurative, chronologically self-conscious late works, such as Paradise Lost or the 1671 volume containing Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, can release readers from an “imprisonment in homogenous linear time” (115), however, this is at least in part dependent upon their internal organization—on the serial lineation of their first print publication. That is, the non-linear (in my sense) remediation of Miltonic texts may, through formal transformations, render less accessible a thematic relation to non-linearity (in Tole’s sense).
- 16.
On Milton’s unpublished and unrecovered Latin Thesaurus see Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 507, 698–99. The secondary evidence for this manuscript (from John Aubrey, Cyriack Skinner, and the paratexts of Latin dictionaries claiming to depend on Miltonic material) is presented, not without skepticism, in John T. Shawcross, The Arms of the Family: The Significance of John Milton’s Relatives and Associates (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 85–87, 236–37. Recent scholarship has stressed the atypicality of what has come to be referred to as Milton’s Commonplace Book. In William Poole’s description, it was “a document not for private meditation but for public use. In this respect it is not really a typical, personal ‘Commonplace Book’ at all, for scholarly and mnemonic development, but a digest eventually stomached by others. Milton’s integration of so many of his commonplace entries into his later works thus removes his own example of the genre to the outer extremes of its kind” (“The Genres of Milton’s Commonplace Book,” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 367–81 [377]). See also Thomas Fulton, Historical Milton: Manuscript, Print, and Political Culture in Revolutionary England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), who observes that “the notes taken here are mostly not ‘commonplaces’ as the term was often understood, but ideas, facts, and the interpretation of history” (50–51). Both accounts valuably situate the Miltonic document in relation to contemporary practices, including attention to the temporal and agential layering of the manuscript (Fulton, Historical, 39).
- 17.
See Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 59. This mode of reading answers to the evolving forms of reference books. Blair cites and comments upon Conrad Gesner’s explanation of his alphabetical Historia animalium (1551): “the ‘utility of lexica [like this] comes not from reading it from beginning to end, which would be more tedious than useful, but from consulting it from time to time [ut consulat ea per intervalla].’ Here the classical Latin term consulere, usually applied to the consultation of oracles for advice, was applied to books; aware of introducing a new usage of the term Gesner added ‘per intervalla’ to make clear the intermittent and nonsequential nature of the reading he had in mind” (117; bracketed additions in original).
- 18.
On the self-conscious use of or allusion to non-serial affordances of print in early modern literary works, with comment on their extension in electronic texts including the OED, see Thomas N. Corns, “The Early Modern Search Engine: Indices, Title Pages, Marginalia and Contents,” in The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print, ed. Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday (London: Routledge, 2000), 93–102.
- 19.
“April 1879 Appeal,” OED Online, June 2017, Oxford University Press, <public.oed.com/history-of-the-oed/archived-documents/april-1879-appeal>. Accessed 15 November 2017.
- 20.
“Reading Programme,” OED Online. June 2017. Oxford University Press <public.oed.com/history-of-the-oed/reading-programme>. Accessed 15 November 2017; see also Blair, Too Much to Know, 229.
- 21.
See William B. Hunter, “New Words in Milton’s English Poems,” in The Descent of Urania: Studies in Milton, 1946–1988 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1989), 224–42, for a critical assembly and assessment of Miltonic coinages from the OED. Hunter’s essay, first published in 1954, relies on earliest quotation under a given headword as a first proxy for creation of a neologism, but large searchable databases of early English print have helped show the weakness of this assumption and the partiality of the OED’s testimony. John Leonard checked and updated Hunter’s work using the electronic OED in order to annotate neologisms in his edition of Paradise Lost (London: Penguin, 2003), liv-lv.
- 22.
OED Online, June 2017, Oxford University Press, <oed.com/advancedsearch>. Accessed 14 August 2017.
- 23.
For example, “grey | gray, adj. and n.” cites “Paradise Lost IV. sig. N4v,” i.e. the page containing 4.588 in the 1667 pagination; “lifeblood, n.” cites 7.1104 (i.e. the 1667 lineation of what is 8.466 in 1674); “pasture, n.” gives a bare “1667 MILTON Paradise Lost vii Shoales of Fish…Graze the Sea weed thir pasture.” “Atrophy, n.” cites text new to the 1674 edition but gets the line wrong: “1674 MILTON Paradise Lost (ed. 2) XI. 300” (in fact 11.486, “And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy”: the same error is present under “pining, adj.”; the correct lineation of the same verse is given under “moonstruck, adj.”). The most dramatic error is the citation under “self-begot, adj.” of “1.858”: the relevant line in 1667 is 5.857; in 1674 it is 5.860.
- 24.
These graphs have a family resemblance to Ben Fry’s accomplished visualization of the changes made in successive editions of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Fry created an online implementation that dynamically colors a grid-like array containing Darwin’s text in order to show changes made between the first edition (1859) and the sixth (1872). While one can hover a cursor to magnify chunks of text, this is almost irrelevant: the impact of the project is created not at the linguistic level but by the total schematic color map layered upon a de facto invisible textual substrate. See Ben Fry, “On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces,” (September 2009) <benfry.com/traces>. Accessed 7 November 2017.
- 25.
“Introduction,” in ODQ (1941), vi.
- 26.
“The Compilers to the Reader,” in ODQ (1941), xiv.
- 27.
See Blair, Too Much to Know, for “engines of copia” (236); for examples from antiquity and early modernity of this kind of criticism (236–41); and for early precedents for the ODQ compilers’ rhetorical strategy, for instance in the fourteenth-century Catholicon (a Latin dictionary): “These lists [of authors and works] might serve to vouch for the value of the excerpts or to encourage readers to consult the original sources. This was the purpose highlighted in the preface to the Manipulus florum, which ended with a list of twenty-four authors and their 376 works” (133, see also 41). Kurt Vonnegut made a running joke of the anxiety and pretense occasioned by dictionaries of quotations by attributing literary allusions in his novels and essays directly to reference works: “‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’—Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations” (Hocus Pocus [1990; repr. London: Vintage, 2000], 147).
- 28.
Stephen O’Neill, “Shakespeare and Social Media,” Literature Compass 12, no. 6 (2015): 274–85 (281).
- 29.
Todd Presner, “Critical Theory and the Mangle of Digital Humanities,” in Between Humanities and the Digital, edited by Patrick Svensson and David Theo Goldberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 55–67 (62).
- 30.
The proxy for popularity in this statement is follower count: in late 2017 the number of followers for the following accounts exceeded five digits: @IAM_SHAKESPEARE, @samuelpepys, @TweetsOfGrass, @MobyDickatSea, @UlyssesReader, @TSElibot. The Eliot and Melville bots are randomized: they divide their input text into strings of a length below Twitter’s character limit that are tweeted non-serially.
- 31.
Peter C. Herman, “Introduction,” in Approaches to Teaching Milton’s Paradise Lost, ed. Peter C. Herman, 2nd ed. (New York: Modern Language Association, 2012), 21. Although 140 became proverbial as the character limit for individual tweets, Twitter recently declared the number unaptly low and doubled it for alphabetic languages. The cap remains 140 for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. See Aliza Rosen, “Tweeting Made Easier,” Twitter, 7 November 2017, <blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/product/2017/tweetingmadeeasier.html>. Accessed 18 November 2017. Systemic and cosmetic renovations, especially to the API and search functions, can complicate durational research on Twitter (as medium and platform obsolescence more generally bedevil digital studies). While Twitter has become significantly integrated in the media ecologies of journalism, politics, and entertainment, its political economy is complex and opaque; the commercial imperative to expand the user base or otherwise demonstrate profitability can result in variable researcher access or even (as here) changes to fundamental design elements.
- 32.
Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 1:726.
- 33.
Charles Reid, “Milton Bot Flock,” Github, 2 February 2015 <charlesreid1.github.io/milton/about.html>. Accessed 15 November 2016. A months-long hiatus in the bots’ tweeting in late 2016 provided a reminder that digital media may offer no more access to perpetuity than their predecessors, and potentially less.
- 34.
Reid, “Milton Bot Flock.”
- 35.
Mario Hawat has begun a project to automatically capture tweets likely to contain quotations of Paradise Lost and to clean this dataset for quantitative analysis.
- 36.
See “Deformance and Interpretation,” 37–40, where Samuels and McGann read a reverse-lineated text of Wallace Stevens’ “The Search for Sound Free from Motion.” See also Stephen Ramsay, Reading Machines: Towards and Algorithmic Criticism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 33–36.
- 37.
Jennifer Lei Jenkins, “Cut and Paste: Repurposing Texts from Commonplace Books to Facebook,” The Journal of Popular Culture 48, no. 6 (2015): 1374–90 (1387–88).
- 38.
Simon Peter Rowberry, “Commonplacing the Public Domain: Reading the Classics Socially on the Kindle,” Language and Literature 25, no. 3 (2016): 211–25 (223). Rowberry’s large dataset concerns shared highlights added to public domain texts on Amazon’s Kindle network; repeatedly highlighted text becomes viewable to users as “top highlights.” Rowberry is usefully attentive to the contingencies and limitations of accessing and studying data on proprietary platforms (see 212–13).
- 39.
Even casual inspection of preliminary data from the project referred to in note 35 strongly suggests that, for example, 1.262 and 1.263 are among the most frequently reproduced single lines of Paradise Lost circulating on the platform, along with 1.254–55 (“The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven”) from the same speech by Satan.
- 40.
See Robert Morrissey et al., Commonplace Cultures: Digging into 18th-century literary culture (2016–). <commonplacecultures.org>, <commonplacecultures.uchicago.edu>. Accessed 17 November 2017.
- 41.
Lucretius, De rerum natura, trans. W. H. D. Rouse, rev. Martin F. Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 69 (lines 1.823–27). On the Lucretian analogy of atoms and letters as a figure for the philological history of De rerum natura, see Gerard Passanante, The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Passanante also reflects on the present moment of scholarship: “It seems somehow appropriate that this scholarly renaissance of Lucretius is taking place now in what we might call the late age of print, when the fantasy of sending messages, books, and even whole libraries instantly across great distances has suddenly become a commonplace reality” (11).
- 42.
Philip Sidney, The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (1989; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 214–15.
- 43.
At the time of writing, OED Online is adding hyperlink cross-references between dictionary entries and Oxford Scholarly Editions Online. For example, since January 2018 a user subscribed to both resources can click an icon next to the first quotation under “self-begot” and bring up a pop-up (headed “Context”) displaying lines 5.850–870 without formatting, but with a further link to an electronic version of Helen Darbishire’s Oxford University Press edition (which displays the correct lineation for the word “self-begot,” i.e. 5.860, although the erroneous “1.858” remains in the dictionary entry). In turn, OED entries citing the poem, numbered by line, can be displayed as an extra panel in the edition’s reading interface—effecting a digital re-integration of non-linear reference work and linearly presented literary source.
- 44.
Raben alludes to his impetus to produce computational criteria for literary influence—specifically, the influence of Milton on Shelley—in “Introducing Issues in Humanities Computing,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 1, no. 1 (2007). See also Joseph Raben, “A Computer-Aided Study of Literary Influence: Milton to Shelley,” in Literary Data Processing Conference Proceedings, ed. Jess B. Bessinger, Jr., Stephen M. Parrish, and Harry F. Arader (New York: Modern Language Association, 1964), 230–74.
- 45.
Project Gutenberg, 7 April 2007 <gutenberg.org/cache/epub/26/pg26.html>. Accessed 28 November 2017.
- 46.
- 47.
On methodological retracing as a mode of inquiry within digital humanities, see Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair, “Thinking-Through the History of Computer-Assisted Text Analysis,” in Doing Digital Humanities: Practice, Training, Research, ed. Constance Crompton et al. (London: Routledge, 2016), 9–21: “Historical replication is a way of understanding outcomes, practices, and context of historical works by deliberately following through the activities of research. As such it is a ‘re-ply’ or folding back to engage practices of the past as relevant today and not simply of historical note. It is one of many ways to conjure up the context of historical moments to aid understanding, a fundamental humanistic impulse” (11). Giorgio Guzzetta and Federico Nanni have recently proposed a computational investigatation of critical understandings of literary influence using a recreation and refinement of Raben’s methods as a starting point—a “re-ply” to Raben in Rockwell and Sinclair’s sense. See Giorgio Guzzetta and Federico Nanni, “Computing, Memory and Writing: Some Reflections on an Early Experiment in Digital Literary Studies,” in Proceedings of the Second Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics, ed. Cristina Bosco, Sara Tonelli, and Fabio Massimo Zanzotto (Torino: Accademia University Press, 2015), 161–64.
- 48.
Matthew Wickman, “Robert Burns and Big Data; or, Pests of Quantity and Visualization,” MLQ 75, no. 1 (2014): 1–28 (24).
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Currell, D. (2018). “Apt numbers”: On Line Citations of Paradise Lost. In: Currell, D., Issa, I. (eds) Digital Milton. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90478-8_4
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