Literary Names by Fowler Alastair;

Author:Fowler, Alastair;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

To sound

[Or taint integritie; but all obey’d

The wonted signal, and superioR] …

Within the frame indicated by square brackets “[Or … superio R] may be seen an anagram with letters dispersed but correctly ordered: “[Or taint integritie; but alL obe Y’d | The V vont-Ed signal, and superio R]”. And a condensed, scrambled anagram may be found in “[V vonted signaL, and sup ERIOR]”, that is, VLERIOR: OLIVER. (Only one R is used, a common licence.)

These and similar anagrams, throwing unexpected light on Milton’s political stance, raise new questions. Were they hidden from all but a like-minded inner circle? Or were they obvious to any well-educated reader of poetry? In either case, Paradise Lost appears to have been an even more incautious poem than has been thought—quite on a par with the fearless tract A Ready and Easy Way. But perhaps Milton calculated (as Robert Herrick must have done in 1648 when he published his royalist poems) that governments pay little attention to poetry. Poems pose little political threat to a state.

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