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- Title
Companions with Time: Milton, Tasso, and Renaissance Dialogue.
- Authors
Howard, W. Scott
- Abstract
This article proposes to investigate the participation of the companion poems of English poet John Milton in a tradition of 16th- and 17th-century English verse dialogue informed by Torquato Tasso's 1585 essay "Discorso dell'arte del dialogo." Milton's twin poems "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" have raised questions about their generic characteristics. Given professed indeterminacy and their widely acknowledged metrical and tropological mirroring of one another, the poems have not been examined in relation to the one Renaissance literary form that epitomizes both the mixing of genres and the dramatization of intertextuality: the dialogue. As works of dialectical dialogue, the poems involve their respective characters and implied readers in a persistent critique of ideas and experiences of either mirth or melancholy as formulated through binary oppositions. The texts' dialogical representation of that disputation stages two important themes: the inter-involvement of both existential conditions, and the action of the reasoning process. For Milton's poems underscore not only the epistemological and metaphorical crossings between discourses of both mirth and melancholy, but also the social dynamics of shared inquiry.
- Subjects
MILTON, John, 1608-1674; TASSO, Torquato, 1544-1595; ENGLISH poetry; L'ALLEGRO (Poem : Milton); IL Penseroso (Poem : Milton); RENAISSANCE literature
- Publication
Comparatist, 2004, Vol 28, p5
- ISSN
0195-7678
- Publication type
Literary Criticism
- DOI
10.1353/com.2004.0015