Speech Acts in Blake’s Milton

<p>Using a framework based on J. L. Austin’s understanding of performative speech and Angela Esterhammer’s work on how things are done with words in Milton’s and Blake’s poetry this study provides an extended close reading of the speech acts of characters in Blake’s epic poem <i>Milton</i>. With the exception of what we learn about in the part of the poem known as the Bard’s Song Blake’s <i>Milton</i> is dedicated to providing an incredibly detailed account of the numerous facets of the instant of time immediately prior to apocalypse an instant in which Milton is the protagonist and Blake himself a participant. This study explores how in the poem sacred history proceeds towards and through the instant by means of the speech act. This extended commentary is intended for not just Blake scholars but also the common reader who wishes to approach Blake’s brief epic for the first time. For scholars this monograph offers a full account of a crucial but previously unexplored theme in the scholarship about <i>Milton</i>. For the common reader it offers a comprehensive introduction to what Northrop Frye called ‘one of the most gigantic imaginative achievements in English poetry’.</p>