1. The epigraphs for this chapter derive from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides, ed. Joseph Wittreich (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970), 270, 277
2. and Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov (1990; rpt. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 12.
3. I have read, too late to assimilate to this chapter, the fine book on the same topic by Stephen M. Fallon, Peculiar Grace: Self-Representation, Intention, and Authority in Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). Fallon’s book was still in preparation when my own went to press.
4. In conjunction with Milton’s own observations, see the revealing remarks by Anne Ferry, The Title to the Poem (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 129.
5. Leah S. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 226.