Poetic Economy Research Articles

From General Economy to Poetic Economy: Expenditure and Equipartition of Energy in Paul Valéry’s Course in Poetics

Resumo Recuperando registros estenográficos inéditos e organizando as notas de aula dispersas conservadas pela Biblioteca Nacional da França, William Marx publica em dois volumes o Cours de Poétique, de Paul Valéry, no início de 2023. Finalmente pudemos saber como se desenvolveram nas aulas do poeta as reflexões sobre a economia do ato poético e as relações entre produção e consumo do poema, anunciadas nas pouquíssimas partes do curso até então conhecidas: a proposta de sua candidatura ao cargo de professor (publicada com o título “De l’enseignement de la Poétique au Collège de France”) e a “Primeira aula do curso de poética”, um dos ensaios de Variété mais lidos de Valéry. Abordaremos essas reflexões recentemente publicadas, articulando-as com algumas passagens da “Poiética”, elaborada pelo escritor em seus Cahiers, e em diálogo e contraponto com comunicações e textos recentes de William Marx, Antoine Compagnon e Jonathan Culler, que também buscaram entender como esses dois volumes do Cours de Poétique desdobram a economia da experiência poética, na produção e no consumo.

Daring Dozen: The Twelve Who Walked on the Moon by Suzanne Slade

Reviewed by: Daring Dozen: The Twelve Who Walked on the Moon by Suzanne Slade Elizabeth Bush Slade, Suzanne Daring Dozen: The Twelve Who Walked on the Moon; illus. by Alan Marks and with photographs. Charlesbridge, 2019 48p Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-58089-773-0 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-63289-635-3 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 3-5 NASA’s Apollo missions 11 through 17, which landed a dozen astronauts on the moon between 1969 and 1972, are recounted in brief, engrossingly illustrated chapters in this picture book for middle-grades readers. Goals and outcomes of the missions are central to each entry, and together they demonstrate the broad scope of accomplishment in space travel and lunar research that was compressed into a mere four years. Marks’ pictures get up close to the astronauts, the materials they collect, and the artifacts and traces they leave behind, drawing readers into the action as Slade’s narration, clipped and shaped with poetic economy, spins this science tale with affecting grace. Although the subtitle coyly sidesteps the demographic elephant in the room, it will be glaringly obvious to readers that the only people who have set foot on the lunar surface are white and male; some authorial mention of the attitudes, customs, and politicking that led to that outcome should have commanded inclusion, at least in the back matter. Nonetheless, as a smoothly [End Page 313] written recap of the historic lunar missions, this captures some of the excitement and the audacity of the era and leaves readers with perhaps with a sigh of regret that current space exploration, however inspiring, leaves human command on the ground. Source notes and a selected bibliography are included. Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Diplomacy, Poetry, and Publics in the Late Seventeenth Century: Elegies for Mary II by George Stepney and Matthew Prior

Growing political concern for public opinion toward the close of the seventeenth century intensified the demands on diplomats to address multiple publics, and it affected the ways in which diplomats produced and circulated poetry. Drawing on elegies for Mary II and related correspondence by two late seventeenth-century diplomats, George Stepney and Matthew Prior, Joanna Craigwood interrogates these increasing pressures. In composing poems commissioned by their Whig superiors for London publication, the two diplomat-writers faced competing demands from their English readerships, who expected highly conventionalized elegy, and from their international political publics, who had a more satirical take on William III's incapacitating grief following his wife's death. Stepney solved the dilemma by adhering to domestic norms but circulating manuscript satire on the Continent, Prior by paratextual reframing that allowed him to bypass the domestic poetic economy of the elegies. Their concerns, vacillations, and eventual solutions expose the extent to which diplomatic poetry was characterized by an almost obsessive concern with the ways in which a specific time, place, and audience placed particular demands and constraints on their words.

A cor em Haruo Ohara

Este artigo busca apresentar em linhas gerais o trabalho fotográfico do agricultor nipo-londrinense transformado em fotógrafo, Haruo Ohara. Particularmente, visa-se compreender o papel da cor, seus aspectos poéticos e técnicos, na obra fotográfica de Ohara. Trabalha-se com a hipótese de que a cor em suas imagens fotográficas não é um mero acréscimo, mas a expressão do trabalho de composição da luz, mostrando-se assim como um importante instrumento de economia poética e reflexiva em suas fotografias.

Life as Art, or Art as Life: Robert Filliou and the Eternal Network

This essay focuses on the Portraits Not Made (1970) by Robert Filliou, a French artist of the postwar neo-avant-garde and a founding member of the international transdisciplinary art movement Fluxus. Interrogating originality and authorship, these ‘Intermedia’ works ‘depict’ artists: George Brecht, Dieter Rot, Dorothy Iannone, Irmeline Lebeer, Josef Beuys, Andy Warhol, John Cage, Arman, and Toi (you). Though virtually blank, they translate between binaries: visual/textual, material/immaterial, made/not made, artist/viewer. Inherently performative, Filliou’s portraits draw the viewer into a ‘poetic economy’ based on three systems: Permanent Creation, the Eternal Network, and the Principle of Equivalence (well made, badly made, not made). Drawing on economic theory shaped by Fluxian absurdity and a Zen-like understanding of reality as at once empty and full, Filliou’s works undermine hierarchies – artistic and political – that privilege individual genius and art as capital exchange. His works propose alternative systems of value by acknowledging the viewer as co-creator.

Poetic destroyers. Vico, Emerson and the aesthetic dimension of experiencing

The aesthetic dimension of meaning-making in human conduct has been often overlooked. In this article, “aesthetic” refers to an immediate form of experiencing in which affective, ethical and cognitive dimensions are experienced as a totality, rather than a more restrictive meaning of artistic experience. The philosopher Giambattista Vico (1670–1744) developed the concept of “poetic logic,” that is a specific mode of thought typical of early stages of civilization. Poetic logic is the first form of collective elaboration of experience, a way of creating universals concepts based on sensory, affective sense-making and religious thinking. Vico claims that poetic logic was the cornerstone for the elaboration of whole systems of collective knowledge (poetic economy, science, geography, history, law, etc.) crystallized in myths. Poetic logic, based on imaginative function is a proper epistemological stance that, though overcome by rationality at a later stage of civilization, still plays an important function in keeping alive the ethical dimensions of collective life against the “barbarism of reflection.” Two centuries later, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), one of the fathers of Pragmatism, developed an idea of poetic and imagination as forms of knowledge. Though echoing Vico’s ideas, he represents the aggressiveness of modernity. From the discussion of their ideas, I will try to sketch the psychological aspects of the aesthetic dimension of experience that can be found in a wide range of human activities, including actions of killing, overpowering and social injustice. I will try to argue that meaning-making is oriented through processes that affect such aesthetic dimension.

Economía poética de Pedro Páramo: de la Revolución a la Cristiada

All the work of Juan Rulfo is a model of brevity. The narrative discourse of Pedro Paramo illustrates the efficiency, not only brevity, but poetic economy, understanding this as the art of projecting meaning by means of limitation in the employment of resources for meaning. All of the seventy fragments which make up said discourse are examples of this type of economy, but among them there is one which stands out: fragment 67 which recounts, in fourteen replicas (like a sonnet), the fourteen years running from the consolidation of Carranzism in 1915 until the cristero war ended in 1929. In light of its economy, the alluded to fragment is examined.

Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales

Reviewed by: Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales Landon Moore (bio) Coleman, Wanda. Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales. Boston: David R. Godine, 2008. Wanda Coleman's "Jazz at Twelve" begins in a Malibu club as a woman anxiously awaits a jazz performance. She admires the musician's signature sound and his growing popularity on the radio station. "In these days of pop-disco-rock it's tough for jazznicks to draw," she remarks. "They don't teach music appreciation in grade school anymore. A whole generation has grown up without proper ears" (12). If what she says is true, readers may learn a great deal from Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales, Coleman's latest collection of short stories. As one might expect from a poet's prose, Coleman's writing is lyrical, inspired by the blues and jazz rhythm that has contributed to her reputation as the "L.A. Blueswoman." Suitably named for a line in Billy Strayhorn's song "Lush Life," this is Coleman's first collection of new short stories in almost fifteen years. She explores poverty, racism, sexism, and, ultimately, the power of human resilience in thirteen intricate portraits of "sad and sullen gray faces with distant gay traces" (Strayhorn). The collection opens with "Joy Ride" as Coleman tunes the car radio to a local jazz station and we are introduced to two young married couples. On their way home from a picnic, the impending responsibilities of daily life at home and at work dim the couples' moods as they travel "through palm-laced residential zones and along wide-laned boulevards, southeast, toward that poorer, darker section of the City of Angels to which they are intangibly restricted" (1). As the sedan bounces down the potholed road, conversation ebbs, and inversely, the music emanating from the radio surges to "become bluesy and discordant, occasionally shrill and punctuated by staccato runs. The harpist, the pianist and the string section defer to brass and woodwinds. The percussionists begin their ascension" (2). The rising drums, like the escalating soundtrack of a suspense film, create a palpable tension that vibrates with expectation. When the song changes to a "jassy jazz" so too does the mood in the car, for in the road is a moving gunny sack, and while the slide trombone sounds, "the newlyweds syncopate as they speculate" about what the bag could hold (3). The music builds to a crescendo when the sound of the impact is almost smothered by the trumpet's shriek. Only when the couples exit the steaming vehicle does the music stop as "a deacon of the old school leans into the car's interior and cuts the sound" (3). By this time, [End Page 894] a crowd has gathered around the accident to see "a tiny chocolate arm perfectly formed" fall loosely from the folds of the sack, and "the faces of the watchers are all shades of a shared darkness" (3). Coleman's poetic economy of language infiltrates her prose so that this "shared darkness" becomes multivalent, significant not only for its suggestion of race but also as a descriptor of the crowd's collective mood after witnessing this scene unfold in their neighborhood, that "darker section of the City of Angels" from which, because of their skin color and grim financial status, there is no escape. Coleman's writing dances to the rhythm that is repetition in the aforementioned "Jazz at Twelve," narrated by Babe, who first defines herself as Kevin's wife, and then, much later in the story, as a moonlight songwriter "living for the day when women's music will receive as much attention as men's" (18). The story begins and ends in one location, a Malibu jazz club, but Coleman's recurring sections of ironic prose travel beyond the traditional limitations of setting and chronological storytelling. While Babe is acutely aware of her immediate physical surroundings, she doesn't know that she's pregnant, or that her husband is addicted to heroin, or that in a couple of months her coin collection and a sealed envelope filled with cash will disappear, and after a while, so will her husband. Here, the negative space outside the...

"Echo and Reply": The Elegies of Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, and Elizabeth Barrett

Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish. --Eugene Ionesco (1967) (1) ties that bind women elegists to one another differ radically from what we consider normative elegiac bonds. Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, and Elizabeth Barrett did not share any kind of personal relationship: they were not friends; they did not move in the same literary circles; they did not write to each other. (2) Yet these three women developed an elegiac dialogue that set in place a poetic economy of shared and negotiated values that flourished throughout the nineteenth century. The Grave of a Poetess (1828), Landon's Stanzas on the Death of Mrs. (1835), and Barrett's Stanzas Addressed to Miss Landon and Suggested by Her 'Stanzas on the Death of Mrs. Hemans' (1835) use the elegiac genre as a space to evaluate women poets and their poetry: sorrow, sympathy, and suffering open up a dialogue of mourning for these poets that extends beyond the recent death of a poetic peer. Allusion becomes a primary tool both to locate particular value in the dead poet's work and to position the general values of poetry they share or dispute; Hemans and Landon create a self-reflexive impulse that transforms the conventional presence of the feminine in elegy. Barrett enters the discourse in a responsive elegy for Hemans that places her (at best) as a mediator of those values or (at worst) as the voice of tradition that challenges a feminine poetic economy. Elegy is typically a space of ordered and contained emotion, and it can offer women poets relief from their expected productions of conventionally effusive verse. Melissa F. Zeiger discusses the role of women in masculine elegies and notes that figures abound in the major, canonical English elegies, occupying constantly shifting roles as enabling or threatening adjuncts to the poetic process. (3) Further, Zeiger argues, in elegy it is not unusual for women to be noted only as absences (p. 10). Our canonical perception of the feminine in elegy sees Woman and her female essence as obstacle, device, trope. This inheritance of silence, absence, or oppositional force draws Hemans, Landon, and Barrett together; their elegies share primarily the need to speak to the dead, to each other, to their poetic heirs. In the process, they begin what Esther Schor calls a circulation of sympathies, which maps in a moral realm the dynamic process of exchange, negotiation, circulation--that is, the mechanisms by which both valued things and values themselves are distributed within a culture. (4) As these poets speak to one another through the elegiac genre, they position their sympathies as a kind of poetic economy: what they value and the idea of value as it distinctly relates to their position as women poets. lack of overt personal contact between these women indicates that elegy redresses the relationships they did not, or could not, share in life. Felicia elegy for Mary Tighe commences the dialogue between women poets that, in its turn, sets up the poetic economy her heirs receive. As one of the period's most popular poetesses, diminutive designation intimates that the hard poetry written by educated, gifted men becomes softened when under the emotional, intuitive hands of a woman. writing published between 1780 and 1830 reveals that the sensibility usually relegated to the domestic and private realm--the feminine--becomes a tool that accomplished male poets and philosophers discuss, evaluate, and adopt. Stuart Curran notes that a singular phenomenon, suddenly appearing in mid[eighteenth] century and not only coinciding with the rise of women poets but also its very hallmark, was the cult of sensibility, which, despite Rousseau's impact on this culture, was largely a female creation. …

The Widow’s Mite and the Value of Praise: Commendatory Verses and an Unrecorded Marginal Poem in LSU’s Copy of The Faerie Qveene 1590

This essay introduces a previously unstudied commendatory poem inscribed in a first edition copy of The Faerie Qveene (London: Ponsonby, 1590). Bound with a copy of 1596, this volume also contains corrections in the same hand that exceed those of the errata slip. Although the available evidence is not sufficient to establish the poem’s authorship, the poem is inscribed in the middle of an important epideictic literary context, the Commendatory Verses and Dedicatory Sonnets. While adopting some conventions of Renaissance praise poetry—allusiveness, aemulatio, treatment of the poet’s Muse and chosen genres—it ignores others. The margin poem, as script poems often do, challenges the literary conventions and values of the printed poems, inviting reconsideration of its commendatory context. This poem takes its cue from the mercantile implications of the final Commendatory Verse, Ignoto’s skeptical “To looke vpon a worke of rare deuise” (CV 7). By means of the familiar parable of the widow’s mite, the handwritten poem inverts Ignoto’s trade-based poetic economy and recalibrates the literary worth of the Commendatory Verses.

The Poetic Economy of the Frame: The Critical Stance of Auguste Perret

This essay explores Auguste Perret's justification for his technique in shaping an aesthetic for the material of reinforced concrete. Beginning with an archival document recording a conversation between Perret and the poet Paul Valéry, the argument first explores critiques of Perret's handling of concrete, using Reyner Banham as a point of reference. It then considers the contrasting themes of his working method: the priority of technique over material, the imperative of a modern structural frame being rooted in a classicist lineage, and the disciplined method of an elaborative practice that constantly seeks to define the relationship between economy and style.

Geometry and Music: Rita Dove's 'Fifth Sunday'

Abstract The eight short stories in the collection are considered as a short story sequence or ensemble. They are linked with Joyce's Dubliners in terms of epiphany and naturalistic motifs in an analysis of the effect of socially prescriptive worlds upon the African-American protagonists. The relationships of ideology and form through the symbolic functions of geometry and music as organizing principles are discussed. 'The Vibraphone' is compared with Joyce's 'The Dead' on the theme of belatedness, and, in enacting the conflicts between verbal narrative and musical expression, is read as metafiction. Rita Dove's collection of short fiction published in 1985,[1] takes its title, as she has explained in an interview, from the idea of there being some leeway, some place for individual expression, even in the most regulated forms of institutional control: Fifth Sunday is also the title of the lead story and refers to those occasional months where there are five Sundays. In the church I attended when I was growing up, fifth Sunday was youth Sunday, and the entire service -- all except the sermon -- was conducted with the church youth. Using that title for the book was an intuitive decision, one I can't really articulate -- I suppose there is the sense of a fifth Sunday as something special -- once in a blue moon -- as well as the idea of being in control only occasionally, and in strict accordance with the social rules.[2] She went on to say that the eight short stories all 'feature individuals who are trying to be recognised as human beings in a world that lives to pigeonhole and forget' (p. 165). Her interest in the possibilities for individual expression of spirit within very socially prescriptive worlds unites the stories thematically: their variety of form is an index of the diversity of that expression. 'Fifth Sunday', the lead story, moves to its concluding negative epiphany with a Joycean assurance. Dove herself invites the analogy in stating that several of the stories 'are fairly traditional, a la Joyce's Dubliners' (p.164). 'Fifth Sunday' deploys naturalistic motifs to track and drag the romantic desires of Valerie, the teenage protagonist, within the confines of an urban American black church. As in 'Araby' in Dubliners, 'Fifth Sunday' mirrors the painfully limited environment against which youthful fantasy presses, but Dove is ideologically acute in revealing that Valerie's romantic longings and aspirations are not an escape, but the most marked internalization of the narrow constrictions of her social group. The revelation of the conclusion is how readily Valerie is re-absorbed into the petty downside of her society. The preparation of effect to make such a conclusion both an unpleasant shock and also inevitably proved, is finely done. In this tightly controlled narrative the imagery which acquires a structural value is that of geometry. The opening sentence condenses the essential framework with a poetic economy: 'The church stood on a hill all to itself, at the intersection of Prospect and Maple' (p. 3). The church is the focus of all Valerie's social aspirations, and it suggests a fine vantage point, exclusivity, with nature and culture amicably combined and coded in the names of the streets. However, it becomes apparent that the parts of the area available to blacks, even relatively prosperous respectable ones such as Valerie's father, are rundown and decayed. The park, in which 'birds sat as if drugged in the trees' (p. 4), is a geometric construct which facilitates transit. The second paragraph lays down the ironic markers precisely: Catercorner from the church was a park. It was everything a park should be: green, shaded, quiet. Stout black poles marked its perimeter at regular intervals, and strung between each pole were two chains, one at waist-level and another six inches from the ground. The park itself was segmented by two concrete paths that cut it on the diagonals, like a huge envelope. …

Context Needs a Contest: Poetic Economy and Bruce Andrews'sGive Em Enough Rope

Context Needs a Contest: Poetic Economy and Bruce Andrews's<i>Give Em Enough Rope</i>

Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes

Previous articleNext article No AccessContemporary Poetry, Alternate RoutesJerome J. McGannJerome J. McGann Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 13, Number 3Spring, 1987Politics and Poetic Value Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/448411 Views: 14Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1987 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Aaron Stoller Toward an Aesthetics of Creative Practice, Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 4, no.11 (Jun 2017): 45–56.https://doi.org/10.1080/20539320.2017.1319629 김영민 The Topology of Extimacy in Language Poetry: Torus, Borromean Rings, and Klein Bottle, The Journal of English Language and Literature 56, no.66 (Dec 2010): 1301–1314.https://doi.org/10.15794/jell.2010.56.6.014George Hartley Context Needs a Contest: Poetic Economy and Bruce Andrews's Give Em Enough Rope, Rethinking Marxism 5, no.44 (Dec 1992): 89–113.https://doi.org/10.1080/08935699208658034

What Is "Language Poetry"?

Previous articleNext article No AccessWhat Is "Language Poetry"?Lee BartlettLee Bartlett Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 12, Number 4Summer, 1986 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/448363 Views: 166Total views on this site Citations: 7Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1986 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Orna Levin Techno-poetics in micro-stories of the digital age: The case of Alex Epstein, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 35, no.22 (Jun 2019): 342–352.https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqz035 Kyoonwon Yang American Language Poetry: Its Strategy of Referential Opaqueness and Openness of Life, The Journal of English Language and Literature 63, no.44 (Dec 2017): 775–797.https://doi.org/10.15794/jell.2017.63.4.009Noura Wedell Progress toward New Sentimental Educations: How Contextual and Constructivist Poetics Reframe Issues of Distribution, IdeAs , no.99 (Jul 2017).https://doi.org/10.4000/ideas.2009Elina Siltanen Experimentalism as Reciprocal Communication in Contemporary American Poetry, 4 (Sep 2016).https://doi.org/10.1075/fillm.4George Hartley Context Needs a Contest: Poetic Economy and Bruce Andrews's Give Em Enough Rope, Rethinking Marxism 5, no.44 (Dec 1992): 89–113.https://doi.org/10.1080/08935699208658034 Jerome J. McGann Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes, Critical Inquiry 13, no.33 (Oct 2015): 624–647.https://doi.org/10.1086/448411Patricia Pace Language poetry: The radical writing project, Literature and Performance 7, no.22 (Apr 1987): 23–33.https://doi.org/10.1080/10462938709391636

Economic Vichism (Vico, Galiani, Croce – economics, economic liberalism)

As every reader of Giambattista Vico’s New Science knows, the book contains a section on “poetic economy” - the economy of the “age of heroes”. This was the first study of such a topic ever conceived. Vico also dealt with some socio-economic problems of later stages of social evolution. In none of his works, however, did he pay specific attention to problems of economics stricto sensu . The present work provides a study of the set of direct and indirect inferences that can be drawn from the principles of the New Science in the economic field - what we might call “Economic Vichism” - and the relationship or analogy, if any, of “Economic Vichism” to later economic theories or viewpoints, and its place in the history of economics. JEL: B11, B31

Il vichismo economico (Vico, Galiani, Croce-Economia, liberalismo economico) (Economic Vichism (Vico, Galiani, Croce – economics, economic liberalism))

As every reader of Giambattista Vico’s New Science knows, the book contains a section on “poetic economy” - the economy of the “age of heroes”. This was the first study of such a topic ever conceived. Vico also dealt with some socio-economic problems of later stages of social evolution. In none of his works, however, did he pay specific attention to problems of economics stricto sensu. The present work provides a study of the set of direct and indirect inferences that can be drawn from the principles of the New Science in the economic field - what we might call “Economic Vichism” - and the relationship or analogy, if any, of “Economic Vichism” to later economic theories or viewpoints, and its place in the history of economics. JEL: B11, B31

The Dialogue in Heaven: A Reconsideration of Paradise Lost, III.1–417

When Douglas Bush and C. S. Lewis—not to name readers as disparate in time and temperament as Pope, Blake, and Shaw—find the God of Paradise Lost unattractive, it may be ill-advised to attempt the justification of Milton's ways with Heaven. Even the excellent refutation of the Satanist position in John S. Diekhoff's book on Paradise Lost ignores rather than answers, perhaps quite properly, those who have objected to Milton's God as not so much a tyrant as a wooden bore. My paper is addressed to such readers and to any others who are willing to start from the assumption that Milton may have known what he was about in the first half of Book III as surely as in Books I and II. I put it thus because objections have generally turned on the first episode in Heaven and have rather consistently echoed Pope's quip that “God the Father turns a school-divine.” I wish to argue that we have mistakenly read the scene as a mere presentation of doctrinal assertions conveniently divided between the Father and the Son, and that to take it thus is to forget both how highly Milton prized poetic economy and how central he made this episode to the action of his whole poem. For may not the trouble be that we have incautiously misconstrued as dogma what Milton intended as drama? In short, the failure may be not in the scene but in our reading of it.