Milton and Some Extemporaries

This essay contends that John Milton's treatment of the sentence is best read as an aesthetic extension of extemporary conduct: an improvisatory openness to circumstance richly theorized in religious controversy of the 1640s. Not only an attack on mental images or static representations, Milton's contestation of idolatrous form, in the early prose tracts examined here, engages the "practical sense" embedded in habituated and institutionalized syntactic forms, among them the "cross-jingling periods" of an overconforming Church.