Milton's Prosody (book) - The Prosody of Paradise Lost

The Prosody of Paradise Lost

Bridges shows that:

1. there are no lines with fewer than ten syllables in Paradise Lost
2. with a suitable definition of elision, there are no mid-line extra-metrical syllables
3. the stresses may fall at any point in the line,
4. although most lines have the standard five stresses, there are examples of lines with only three and four stresses.

Thus according to Bridges' analysis Milton was writing a form of syllabic verse. At the time this was a controversial thesis. George Saintsbury disagreed with Bridges, and stated that Milton had simply been using standard extra-metrical liberties, but Bridges was able to answer this objection by showing that every single instance in the poem of such a variation from the norm could be explained by his natural definition of elision; this would be extremely unlikely to be the case if the poet had simply been allowing himself extra-metrical variations as described by Saintsbury. Bridges took the very restricted range of Milton's variations to be a proof of his thesis.