^1. Eras and Modes in English Poetry (Berkeley, Calif., 1957, rev. ed. 1964), pp. 5–6, 11.

^2. Miles, Eras and Modes, pp. 13, 16.

^3. H. Poutsma, A Grammar of Late Modern English (Gronin-gen, 1928), I, 504, calls them “intermediate between verbs and adjectives.”

^4. The suffix -al in this word and others like it (nominal, verbal, adverbial) refers to the parts of speech as syntactically rather than morphologically marked.

^5. See the work of Noam Chomsky for definitions of this grammatical concept, especially Syntactic Structures ('s-Gravenhage, 1955), and “A Transformational Approach to Syntax,” in Third Texas Conference on Problems of Linguistic Analysis in English (Austin, 1962). An introduction to the subject can be found in H. A. Gleason, Linguistics and English Grammar (New York, 1965), pp. 222–298.

^6. Chomsky, “Transformational Approach,” p. 148.

^7. Compare Cloth'd with transcendent brightness (l.86), rackt with deep despare (I.126), Thunder / Wing'd with red Lightning (i.174-175), but also swallow'd up in endless misery (i-142), amerc't / Of Heav'n (i.609-610), etc.

^8. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York, 1955), p. 89; cf. pp. 88–93.

^9. A Preface to Paradise Lost (London, 1942), p. 46. He cites other examples at ii.557 and viii.291.

^10. O. Jespersen, Modern English Grammar (London, 1946), v, 45 ft, reviews the history of this form in English. Up to 1660 it “was used but sparingly by authors whose style was essentially English… . But after 1660 when English prose style developed a new phase, which was saturated with classical elements, the construction rapidly gained ground and was finally naturalized in the language.”

^11. Poutsma, i, 973.

^12. Jespersen, v, 49.

^13. Werner Behrens, Lateinische Satzformen im Englischen: Lalinismen in der Syntax des englischen Humanismus (Münster, 1937). Behrens seems to count only participial phrases, not single modifiers.

^14. Ronald Emma, Milton's Grammar (The Hague, 1963), p. 109.

^15. Satires through v, “The Good-morrow,” “Song,” “Woman's Constancy,” “The Undertaking,” “The Sun Rising,” “The Computation.”

^16. “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” “The Wheel,” “A Prayer for My Daughter,” “Demon and Beast,” “On a Political Prisoner,” “The Rose Tree,” “Sixteen Dead Men,” “Easter, 1916,” “Two Songs of a Fool,” “Upon a Dying Lady,” “Memory,” “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” “An Irish Airman,” and “The Wild Swans.”

^17. “The Waste Land,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” “Preludes,” “Gerontion,” and the first sixty-three lines of “Burnt Norton.”

^18. See M. Majorie Crump, The Epyllion from Theocritus to Ovid (Oxford, 1931), and the opposing article by Walter Allen, Jr., “The Epyllion: A Chapter in the History of Literary Criticism,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, LXXI (1940), 1–26.

or

^22. See how he lies at random, carelessly diffus'd,

It may seem strange that Thomson's descriptive mode should increase the number of present participles, which had been a traditionally narrative device. The answer is that for the eighteenth century the form was a useful adjectivization of the timeless, categorizing simple present. The natural processes described in “Spring,” for example, have been, are, and will be the same, generally and iteratively. Each year the air unbinds the earth, each year softness strays about, each year the farmer sees nature relent, and so forth. The present participle, like the ubiquitous -y adjective, had become very useful for expressing quality and category. A standard example is the rising ground, which tells us not what the ground does but what it is like. (This use of the present participle as categorizer or qualifier explains the greater number of single-word, as opposed to phrasal, occurrences, a matter to be discussed in detail below.) At the same time, things have happened to Thomson's people, animals, and objects, and so the past participle is no less necessary: the plow has often been used, the yoke often harnessed to the oxen, and the oxen often cheered by the songs of birds.

^29. See John Arthos, The Language of Natural Description in Eighteenth Century Poetry (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1949), Geoffery Tillotson, On the Poetry of Pope (London, 1950), and Donald Davie, The Language of Science and the Language of Literature, 1700–1740 (London, 1963).

^30. See Ivan Fonagy, “Informationsgehalt von Wort und Laut in der Dichtung,” Poetics ('s-Gravenhage, 1961), pp. 591–603, for a demonstration of how the relative redundancy of poetic and other forms of discourse may be measured by guessing techniques.

^31. Shelley, like Spenser, the early Milton, and Keats, was fond of hyphenated compound forms. For a discussion of this interesting subject, see Bernard Groom, The Formation and Use of Compound Epithets from 1579 (S.P.E. tract No. 49, 1937), and Ch. vi of Thomas Quayle, Poetic Diction (London, 1924).

^32. Leo Spitzer, Essays on English and American Literature (Princeton, N. J., 1962), pp. 9–10.

^33. As quoted in Christopher Ricks, Milton's Grand Style (Oxford, 1963), pp. 79–80.

^34. Lewis, p. 43.

^35. R. M. Adams, Ikon: John Milton and his Modern Critics (Ithaca, N. Y., 1955), p. 193, argues that in Samson Agonistes (11. 521–531) the stringing of clauses “loosely and episodically together,” without complete predicates, achieves effects of empty bluster and wavering resolution and “turbulent, pell-mell rush.” But neither of his examples quite proves the point; doesn't the sentence contain two perfectly well-formed predicates, excelled and walked about? It is not so much that Milton deletes predicates but that, as Adams elsewhere observes, he heaps up constructions so repetitively that one can lose track of the predicate. The effect is one of overloading rather than of throwing out “glancing” epithets and modifiers.

^36. “Syntax and Music in ‘Paradise Lost’, ” in Frank Kermode, ed., The Living Milton (New York, 1961), pp. 74, 83. The remark was made with particular reference to Paradise Lost ?.677-678. See also Ricks, pp. 90 and 96, n., citing Donald Davie and John Wain on modifying words that “radiate both ways.”

^37. “Adam Unparadised,” in The Living Milton, p. 94.

^38. Ricks, p. 85.

^39. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, as quoted by Ricks, p. 85.

^40. Lewis, p. 41.

^41. P. 66.

^42. Answerable Style (Minneapolis, Minn., 1953), p. 123.

^43. Stein, p. 124, feels that Milton's practice of commenting directly on the action in this way is not intrusive. The use of participle rather than predicate helps to minimize the prominence of these commentaries.

^44. Mimesis (New York, 1957), p. 9.