Milton and Sound

Abstract

Milton and Sound offers a study of the role played by sound in the writings of English poet and pamphleteer John Milton (1608-1674). Pushing against the mimetic function typically assigned to sound effects in verse following Alexander Pope’s dictum that sound “must seem an echo to the sense,” I engage the critical resources of sound studies, intellectual history, and Renaissance poetic theory to explore the ways in which sound complicates, and at times actively undermines, cognitive and linguistic sense-making. I focus this search in particular on discursive sites where sense-making is mobilized to rationalize controversial topics – topics, that is, around which there was not only a storied lack of social or political consensus in early modern Europe, but a lack of consensus that has dictated national, political, and confessional party lines well into the twenty-first century. This project looks to the concept of sound as a means of disrupting sites of discursive identification, with a special emphasis on identificatory practices that entail or propose identification with the Christian deity.