1. The best study of the poem’s immediacy is J. Martin Evans, The Miltonic Moment (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998).
2. Paradise Lost, 1.13. Complete Poems and Major Poems, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 211. Further references to Milton’s poetry will be to this edition.
3. See Stephen M. Wheeler, A Discourse of Wonders: Audience and Performance in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) for an exemplary reading of Ovid’s late epic as troping on the form’s performative nature.
4. Prose 1668–1691, ed. Samuel Holt Monk, Works (Berkeley et al: University of California Press, 1971), 17.80. Further references to An Essay of Dramatick Poesy will be to this edition.
5. Peter Herman’s Destabilizing Milton: Paradise Lost and the Poetics of Incertitude (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) makes this case, as do many of the essays gathered in