Bibliographic record
Abstract
My love of Milton began when I first read Paradise Lost at the age of eighteen in my ‘year off’ between school and university. That was almost forty years ago and my love of Milton has not abated, though my opinions about this or that scholarly issue have often changed. This book is an attempt to share some of the reasons why I revere Milton and think he has enduring value. It is intended for as wide a readership as possible, so my emphasis is on Milton's own writings rather than on critical interpretations. I have no grand overarching thesis as to ‘why Milton matters’. Milton matters to different people for different reasons, some religious (or anti-religious), some political, and some purely literary. All of these approaches are valid and my emphasis in this book is on what can unite us as readers of Milton: the pleasures we can share rather than the political issues that sometimes divide us. Milton does have abiding relevance for political causes (especially free speech, divorce, and political liberty) and I have addressed these issues in my two chapters on the prose, but my primary concern is the joy of reading his poetry. Milton is nevertheless an unsettling author, both in poetry and prose, and I have tried to retain a sense of his nuisance value as well as his value. I have incurred many debts over the years, as student, teacher, and colleague. As an undergraduate at Cambridge in the late 1970s, I studied for the Tragedy paper under Adrian Poole and Theodore Redpath, whose lectures and supervisions have remained an important influence. My fond memories of Professor Poole's lecture on ‘the terrible’ in tragedy have proved especially useful to me, even after four decades, when pondering the question of whether Milton's tragedy Samson Agonistes should be seen as ‘a work in praise of terrorism’. Also at Cambridge, I had the privilege of being supervised (both as undergraduate and doctoral candidate) by Christopher Ricks, whose 1963 book Milton's Grand Style I consider the single most valuable book of Milton criticism ever written. My other debts are legion. I am deeply and personally indebted to the many students, at every level, whom I have taught (and from whom I have often learned) at Western University in Canada since 1987.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.338 | 0.166 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".