Paradise Lost and Milton's Associative Memory

Paradise Lost and Milton's Associative Memory Ian Lancashire University of Toronto

April 2013

Abstract. How did blind Milton create so lexically rich and syntactically complex a poem as Paradise Lost? Lexical and phrasal repetitions, routinely collected by full-text retrieval programs, contribute data that can be interpreted within the model of language production theorized by present-day cognitive psychology and neuroscience. A single memory network, focused on Milton's famous line in Book I, "the Arch-fiend lay I Chain'd on the burning lake," illustrates how Mihan's extended working memory overcame the constraining chunkiness of flow-state composition.

1

Introduction

In 1980, Jaacov Choueka published a "sermon" preaching that "computerized full-text retrieval systems can be a useful, versatile and interesting tool in humanities research." At the 1987 Jerusalem ALLC conference he hosted, Professor Choueka exemplified and promoted this tool-based, collaborative, scientific research in the humanities. His words encouraged junior colleagues like myself to produce interactive concordancers, to digitize dictionaries, and to employ lexical co-occurrences in analyzing authorship . • Afterwards my Canadian colleagues and I produced tools such as TACT (Lancashire 1996), databases like Lexicons of Early Modem English, and text-analysis research that used repeating phrases as a lexical sign of Alzheimer's disease in novelists such as Iris Murdoch, Agatha Christie, and Ross Macdonald (Le 2011). I have been fortunate to find scientific collaborators who made up my deficiencies in programming and computational linguistics. In the thirty years since Professor Choueka's homily, the scientific methods of the digital humanities employed by hundreds of researchers have been vindicated by their outstanding contributions to knowledge. Computerized fulltext retrieval systems are now a universal everyday tool, and we owe thanks to Yaacov Choueka for so eminently pioneering a text technology with which any lone researcher, inadequately funded but gifted with curiosity and a quick mind, can tackle the largest research problems.

2

Milton as a Flow-StateWriter

Most of us with a favourite author want to know how he writes. If the writing is scripture, curiosity becomes devotion. Although English lacks the resources of Hebrew and Greek, John Milton's Paradise Lost - an epic version of the Old Testament uttered N. Dershowitz and E. Nissan (Eds.): Choueka Festschrift, Pan II, LNCS 8002, pp. 88-102, 2014. © Springer-Verlag

Berlin Heidelberg 2014

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by a blind poet - comes close to prophecy: it 'is a work purported to have been directly communicated by God to man. Normally, a poet has tools to write, but John Milton had been completely blind from 1651, well before he began composing Paradise Lost about 1658 (parker 1965: 1,509). He took six years to complete, if Edward Phillips is correct in saying that the epic was finished about three years after the restoration of Charles n (Parker I, 595). During this lime Milton aged from 50 to 55 years. He would die from gout ten years later at 65 in 1674 and, while he appears to have suffered from no mental illness during composition, he denied personal responsibility for the content of the epic. According to his early biographers, Milton composed his verse mentally in the early morning, in "darkness ... I And solitude" (15), up to forty lines at a time, and waited for his daughters or amanuences to wake up and "milk" him (Darbishire 1932; French 1956: 191-92; Lucy 21). His routine was to stock his mind in advance by having someone read to him during the day, then to compose after awaking from a night's sleep, and finally to revise consciously after dictation. The minds of many poets are predominantly visual and imagistic; others hear words more than see images in their minds. Milton says helpfully that he was "With inward eyes illuminated," but his expert prosody also communicates sensitivity to nuances of sound. Once he dictated his lines, Milton could reduce 40 lines to half that length, according to Jonathan Richardson. Although blind, he could still post-edit his verse, assisted by hearing his dictation as it was stored in writing and read aloud back to him. But how did he manage the astounding feat of making and storing these lines mentally? Answering this is central to our understanding of Milton's poetry and of linguistic creativity itself, for Paradise Lost is among the greatest literary achievements of the past three centuries. To do so, we must look to the extended working memory of contemporary neuroscience. We can tell that Milton already revered flow-state composition - which takes place naturally, without conscious editing and assembly -- from how he describes Shakespeare's writing method in a poem celebrating his second folio (1630). What neede my Shakespeare for his honour'd bones, The labour of an Age, in piled stones Or that his hallow'd Reliques should be hid Vnder a starre-ypointing Pyramid? Deare Sonne of Memory, great Heire of Fame, What needst thou such dull witnesse of thy Name? Thou in OUf wonder and astonishment Hast built thy selfe a lasting Monument: For whil'st to th' shame of slow-endevouring Art Thy easie numbers flow, and that each part, Hath from the leaves of thy vnvalued Booke, Those Delphicke Lines with deepe Impression tooke Then thou our fancy of her selfe bereaving, Dost make us Marble with too much conceiving;

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And so Sepulcher'd in such pompe dost lie That Kings for such a Tombe would wish to die. Like Ben Jonson earlier, Milton contrasts the "slow-endevouring Art" of others with how Shakespeare's "easie numbers flow" in creating "Delphi eke Lines," that is, oracular verse that emerges as if divine power, not the poet, is personally responsible (Patterson 21). Milton also wrote much of Paradise Lost in a flow state. The invocation to Book I confidently thanks the Heavenly Muse, whom he associates principally with the second person of God, the Holy Ghost, whose light (he adds in the invocation to Book III) does "irradiate ... and plant eyes" within his mind. At night Milton says that he can "feed on thoughts, that voluntarie move / Harmonious numbers." By Book VII Milton associates this heavenly muse, the Holy Ghost, with Urania and adds that she visits him while he is asleep and unconscious. He rules out the seven classical muses (cf. Revard 1979). In the invocation to Book IX, it is not his memory, but wisdom delivered to him involuntarily by another, and his vocabulary echoes his sonnet about Shakespeare. "Her nightly visitation unimplor'd," his "Celestial Patroness" dictates to him "slumbring" or later, when he is awake, "inspires J Easie my unpremeditated Verse." Milton allowed that the times, the cold climate of England (unaccountably, Milton composed best from fall to spring), or his age could depress his uttering -"and much they may, if all be mine." He feared that another voice, say his own, might be implicated and that, if so, the poem might contain heresy. Samuel Johnson thought that Milton was a natural writer, but modern critics are skeptical that he devised his epic unconsciously (e.g., Diekhoff 1965). Even Juliet Lucy stresses how much Milton's "writing involved much more social interaction and input from others than has generally been recognized" and that he "continued to revise after a book had been published." However, the evidence for this is slender. Milton added half a dozen lines when turning a IO-book epic into a 12-book epic, and he evidently lifted a short passage from an early play of Paradise Lost. If we believe Milton's repeated testimony, some of his readers appear to have confused conscious control of task-like writing with consciousness during a daydream-like experience. Clearly, Milton could not have crafted his verse verbatim in working memory, as we usually generate conversation. Anyone who tries to script what is uttered orally will see how haltingly the words come out. Only flow-state composition can explain why Milton thought that he was uttering words given to him in real time by a divine muse. Despite the decades in which Milton wrote for Cromwell's government with expert knowledge of tongues (he knew ten, composed in four, and translated five), it is hard to credit that he composed Paradise Lost fully consciously, in short-term memory, chunk by chunk.

3

A Cognitive Theory of Authorship

Tools and the data they generate are not enough to explain authoring: a theory must exist to tell us how the data came to take the form they did. The testimony of writers

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and textual data (repeated words, phrases, and syntactic structures) are helpless in authorship research unless they can be explained, as by a theory of language production from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Poetry originates in brain function, about which we now know much, and composition can be theorized accordingly. The neurosciences offer a reading of how the text emerged from a flowstate darkness in the author's mind (Lancashire 2010). Anyone who authors with a healthy mind is aware of this interior mental interaction of two processes, flow and revision. The creative voice utters onto the page and has no memory of its exhilarating making. Flow-state, characterized by being "in the zone," being so engaged in an action that one forgets that one is doing it. Immediately on examining a flow-state draft, a poet's task-oriented reader-eduor sees all, revises deliberately, and yet (if a new passage must replace the old) must ultimately reactivate flow-state processing to produce it. The normal experience of many poets is that no good poem or passage can be consciously assembled from scratch on the page or screen. Created utterances must come from dynamic long-term memory, not from information. In 200J neuroscientist Michael Greicius discovered the brain's flow-state mechanism: he calls it the default mode network or DMN. It links the medial and prefrontal cortex (specifically, the posterior cingulate cortex and inferior parietal lobes) and activates whenever we are awake, aware, mind-wandering, but resting and engaged in no conscious task. It becomes visible in medical images that take pictures of the blood-oxygen level in the brain. Four uncontrolled mental activities converge in mind-wandering: personal episodic memory of our past, personal projection of Our future, imaginative storyhtelling of someone else's possible past and future, and navigation. Three of these amount (as the Toronto psychologist Endel Tulving has said) to two kinds of time travel, revisiting a past, and projecting a future. The time traveller can be either oneself or an imaginary person of which our DMN tells us stories of ourselves and of others. It also underlies navigation, the mapping of our memories and stories against a landscape that gives us our bearings. In general, the DMN supplies the stuff of Our imagination, which brings back to us feelings, ideas, voices and sounds, and sensations. Neuroscientist Kalina Christoff and others regard spontaneous creativity as an activity of the DMN. It behaves as creative writers say that the muse does. If engaged in a conscious task, however, the blood-oxygen level in our DMN settles down. Another network lights up, called the cognitive or executive control network (CCN). It links the language and logic sites of the temporal cortex-which execute novel statements-with the planning of Our prefrontal cortex. These two mutually exclusive networks, DMN and CCN, toggle on and off all day. When our inner voice casually retrieves or generates a phrase, the DMN is active. Whenever we revise that text, consciously, the DMN subsides and the CCN takes over. A worldwide library of brain images confirmed the discovery of these two great neurological networks in 2010. The interplay of DMN and CCN in cognition is important to the study of poetry for two reasons. First, they explain known stages in the creative composition of poetry. Second, they account for features in the style of poets suffering from depression and dementia.

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The DMN serves its needs by drawing on episodic and semantic long-term memory, not on traces elicited by a deliberate memory probe, but rather on clusters originally stored by the twin amydalae with a keynote emotion. An initial feeling in the prefrontal cortex searches unconsciously for its similitude in stored episodic memories. Once memory responds, our unconscious language process begins to form sentences. A Netherlander, Willem Levelt, is responsible for modeling the standard neurocognitive theory of sentence production today. Our mind begins with lexical concepts, which are then refined into lemmas or specific words. These lexical lemmas cannot yet be heard in our mind. Next they form chunks with two or three items each, like rudimentary phrases. We are not conscious of this part of the process because both the first-stage lexical concepts and the secondstage lemmas lack phonological or auditory encoding. We cannot "hear" them silently in our minds. Scientists have detected their chunk-like nature by attending to typical speech-errors that we make. Next our cognitive production-line crosses what Levelt calls a developmental rift. It encodes lemmas with phonemes so that they are audible as inner speech and, lastly, can be scored for being uttered aloud by voice. Once encoded auditorially, chunks fall into our short-term or working memory, where we listen to them with our inner ear, silently, as they are scored for speech by the motor cortex. Often what we hear silently in our minds, what we are conscious of inner speech, goes directly to paper without being spoken aloud. I expect that the speech-towriting conversion takes place last of all because it is a very new, learned cognitive skill, and because most of us hear what we write before we finish writing. This model explains some hard-won truths. We are conscious during the last steps of making our language but not of the making process as it unfolds. We can only recognize made language after its basic semantic form has already taken shape and once words have been auditorially encoded. Yet the phonological loop, to use Alan Baddeley's term for the holding area for speech in working memory, can only hold • two seconds of speech at a time. At first, when poetry only existed orally, man had only two options in consciously managing word-meaning, making changes in sorelyconstrained working memory, and self-correcting aloud. With the arrival of literacy, once writing was invented, we constructed an external form of memory that greatly extended the constrained limits of our natural working memory ... except where the blind are concerned.

4

"The Arch-fiend lay Chain'd on the burning Lake"

The most striking image in Book I of Paradise Lost illustrates how Milton's creative mind could have worked. The sentence has five lexical concepts: the chief fallen angel, his position, his immobilization, fire, and liquid. These were linked conceptually during the amassing of lexical concepts, well before lemma-selection took place, because any proposition asserts an idea, not just words. Milton recalled the lake of fire from Revelations, "And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone" (20:10). Why, however, did he use the verb "Chain'd"?


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The English certainly chained prisoners, but not to a Jake. Associational long-term memory may explain why. Milton seems to have been thinking of the punishment for heresy or witchcraft: being chained to a stake surrounded by firewood and then being burned alive. The Bible reserves Satan's fate for "the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars" (21.8). Living in the reign of the Roman Catholic son of the king that Puritan Milton helped put to death, the blind poet was vulnerable to execution at the time he wrote Paradise Lost. Milton had served a short time in jail in 1660 before his friends obtained his release; and he wrote Paradise Lost between 1658 and 1663. Plausibly, the five lexical concepts in this sentence were already available as a strong cluster in Milton's longterm memory. Neuroscientific evidence for the role of the amygdala in brain function suggests why Milton might have activated this cluster. When we search our long-term memory, we can either probe it for something specific, like a name, as a conscious task, or we can retrieve something without consciously sending a probe, that is, without priming it. The DMN works in the background, unconsciously grooming long-term memory, and that suits what is happening in pre-phonetic language processing. Although the hippocampus stores conscious memories in long-term memory, the twin amygdalae unconsciously attach emotion to and retrieve such traces. Unlike the hippocampus, the amygdalae will retrieve only the emotion-laden gist of a stored experience, not the details. Milton unconsciously elicited from his memory an emotionally-charged cluster associated with a martyrdom he feared for himself, being burned in chains. The lifecycle of a poem begins with the formation of long-term memory clusters in the poet's mind, especially ones that emotionally colour episodes, situations, and acts. The prefrontal cortex then, acting on a delayed emotional desire to tell a story, launches its language-production system, first interrogating long-term episodic memory for clusters encoded with the poet's initial affect. Once Milton's mind had these five clustered lexical concepts, he unconsciously found lemmas for them: "fiend" for Satan or Lucifer, "lay" from among terms like "inclined" and "flattened," "Chain'd" from among "bound" or "tied," "burning" from among "firy" and "blazing," and "lake" from among "sea," "ocean," or "pool." The lexical terms that emerge are already associationally bundled, ready for chunking, possibly prestructured syntactically. After lemmatization, the combined phrasal structures then fall, in two-second units, as auditory utterances into working memory. Blind Milton heard in his mind, as inner speech, pentameter lines that linked two pairs of chunks, ''The Arch-fiend lay I Chain'd on the burning Lake," that his ntind had powerfully etched in memory as punishment for heresy.

5

Associative Clusters in Book I

Here is the majestic 29-line sentence (1.192-220 [1674]) in which Milton's eight-word image is embedded. Content words in capital letters appear to be nodes in a lexical network that links at least five other passages in the poem (see appendix). I have

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labeled repeating fixed phrases by underlining (by italicizing or boldfacing wherever phrases overlap) and by giving, within square brackets, their frequency in the first 50,000 words of Paradise Lost. (For example," and EYES [3] / That [4]" marks two overlapping repeating phrases, underlined "and Eyes" and italicized "Eyes that".)' Thus Satan to his [3] neerest MATE With HEAD [2] up-LIFT above the [3] WAVE, and EYES [3] That [4] sparkling blaz'd, his other [3] PARTs [3] besides PRONE on the [76] FLOOD [4], extended LONG and [3] large [2] LAY FLOATing many a [20] rood, in BULK as HUGE As whom the [19] Fables name of[6] MONSTRous size, Titanian, or EARTH-BORN, that W ARR'D on [2] JOVE, Briareos or Typhon, whom the [19] Den By ancient Tarsus held, or that SEA-beast LEVIATHAN, which GOD [5] of [2] all his WORKS [2] CREATEd HUGEst that SWIM th' OCEAN [2] STREAM: Him haply slumbring on the [76J Norway foam The Pilot of some [6] small night-founder'd Skiff, Deeming some Island, oft, as SEA-men tell, With fixed Anchor in his [43] skaly rind Moors by his [19] side [2] under the [9] Lee, while Night INVESTs the SEA, and [2; 5] wished Morn delayes: So STRETCHT out [2] HUGE in [3] length [3] the [2] Arch-fiend LAY CHAIN'D ON THE BURNING LAKE [2], nor ever [2] thence Had RIS'N or heav'd his HEAD [3], but that [6] the [6] will [3] And HIGH [4] permission of all-ruling HEAVEN ',.LEFT him [2] at large [4] to his own [2] DARK DESIGNs, That with [11] reiterated crimes he might [4] Heap on himself [3] damnation, while he [3] SOUGHT Evil to [2] others [2], and enRAG'd might see How [3] all his [37] malice [2] serv'd but to [16] bring forth [2] Infinite goodness, grace and [4] mercy SHEWn On Man [3] by [3] him [7] seduc't, but on [3] himself[3] Treble confusion, wrath and VENGEANCE pour'd. (Un-220) There are 5,443 different repeating phrases occurring a total of 18,913 times.1 They vary from two to eight words long: 3,633 are 2-word, 795 are 3-word, 88 are 4word, and so on to one S-word. These repetitions -- 59 repeating phrases are found in

1

f collected data with R.le. Wan's Concordance (http://www.concordancesoftwa re. co. uk) , Xuan Le's utility program phkep.exe -- which she devised for my use on the

basis of the

TACT

CollGen procedure - and Roy Flannagan's transcription of the second

(J 674) edition of Paradise Lost in John Milton's complete poetical works reproduced photographic facsimile, as re-published in Representative Poetry Online (http://rpo library.utoronto.ca/poets/milton-john).

in .


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this one sentence -- are almost as numerous as Milton's vocabulary, which is (in this part of his work) 7,850 old-spelling word-types. Most phrasal repetitions are either pairs of function words, such as "above the", "on the", "many a", and so on, or a content word (a noun or a verb) with a function word. Only one repeating phrase links several content words: it is our image, "lay / Chain'd on the burning Lake." Satan uses it the second time later to quote what he says here. Eighteen of the lines have a mid-line caesura marked by a comma, and the rest are internally broken syntactically at phrasal boundaries. Milton's verse does resemble the work of the epic poet Homer with whom Milton shared his blindness, but Milton was no oral-formulaic poet. He did not recreate his verse narrative anew at each recital or performance by drawing from a hoard of prefabricated phrases. Each of Milton's lines consists of two phrases that take the form they do because they are sized by working memory. That is, each half-line, no longer than two seconds to utter, corresponds to a chunk in Willem Levelt's lexical production model. The regularity with which Milton sizes his verse is consistent with flow-state composing, stitching together seriatim a stream of equal-length phrases. The effect is additive. However, Milton made this sequence of 58 phrases into a unified thought. The building blocks of this hypothetical cluster in the Book I passage are the words in capitals. The sentence begins with Satan lying on a flood of fire, and ends with an explanation of what that flood represents, God's revenge "pour'd" on Satan. Many high-frequency content words in these passages, from three to nine occurrences, fall into two groups: the sea ("wave", "deep", "swim", "waters", "float", "lake", "ocean", "stream") and God ("Heaven", "light"). The nodes in this cluster might be images, sensations, and episodic memories rather than words. They clearly focus on an analogy, God's punishment as a sea. Milton's long-term memory unconsciously lit up nodes selected from an associational long-term memory. This large, imprecisely bounded cluster gave him an ideational paradigm for generating, top-down, one chunk after another, while ensuring that they contributed to a single purpose. That they also occur in five other widely-separated passages in Paradise Lost indicates that they evidently belonged in Milton's associational long-term memory. The Book I sentence employs a subset of 42 of a total of 59 clustered nodes in all six passages, particularly three terms, "huge" (3), "head" (2), "lay" (2), and "sea" (3). The passage in Book I is not just about liquid retribution. It is a well-developed image of Satan lying "prone on the flood" (J 95), compared to Leviathan "slumbring on the Norway foam" (203), and then reprised as "stretcht out huge in length ... lay Chain'd on the burning Lake" (209). Seven uses of "and" and two of "or" leave a strong additive impression, yet Milton's opening sentence actually unfurls into an amazing 16 subjunct and conjunct clauses. It takes shortcuts, eliding the verb "said" in the first line, as well as liberties, transforming what should be a past participle, "Lay", into the second verb modifying Satan. These prestidigitative effects set the sentence at! on a spree of clauses governed successively by "as" (2), "whom" (2), "that" (3), "which" (1), "while" (2), "so" (1), "nor" (1), "but" (3), and "how" (I). Logically, the passage moves from effect (Satan's fall) to future consequences (selfdamnation and the burgeoning of God's grace to others). Milton's associative memory does not casually link up a jumble of chunks.

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The five other passages are Satan's persuasion of the fallen angels to seek revenge (Book II), the invocation of the Holy Spirit (Book Ill), the creation of sea-creatures (Book VII), the temptation of Eve (Book IX), and Noah's flood (Book XI). The words in capital letters in these passages appear also in the Book I passage, while underlined keywords are not in the Book I cluster. Central to the association of these six passages are variations on "lay / Chain'd on the burning lake" (II); the metaphor of the Holy Spirit as a stream (Ill); Leviathan lying on the waves (VII); Satan floating prone on the grass as he tempts Eve, and the sail-shifting steersman or pilot who resembles him (IX); and Noah's floating ark on God's flood of revenge (XI). The impact that this memory network has in each passage depends on its length and on the frequency of associated keywords. In descending order of lexical and phrasal overlap with Book I, the passages rank VII (the creation), III (Holy Spirit), XI (Noah's flood), II (Satan on the lake), and IX (serpent tempting Eve). To normalize the overlaps, I calculated the ratios of word-types shared with the Book I passage to the number of lines:

VII III XI II IX

26 lines 12 lines 16 lines 22 lines 25 lines

32 word-types 13 word-types 18 word-types 18 word-types 19 word-types

shared shared shared shared shared

32126 13/12 18/16 18122 19125

= = = = =

1.2 1.1 1.1

0.8 0.8

However, semantically, the Book IX passage (with its "digression" on the pilots) seems closest to the Book I passage. Roy Flannigan has helped explain how Milton grew these networks: they draw from Biblical passages that are associated with other passages that the Geneva Bible cross-references in the margins . .~ Long-term associative memory is a dynamic entity that reforms itself beyond our ability to observe. Cognitively, Milton seems to have had expertise in knowledge of Biblical history comparable to a chess grandmaster who could hold in working memory substantial trains of moves and their branching consequences, well beyond the two-second limit of the phonological loop. With 10,000 hours' training, many of us can extend working-memory capacity in a single subject domain in which we have been long trained. Complex ideas, when deeply encoded in this way, can be retrieved in a very compact form. Further, expertise can be shuttled between long-term and working memory ten times as fast as can general knowledge. One of the values of extended working memory is our ability to become conscious of complex arguments and to map them in working memory, which can then in turn imprint consciously its contents on long-term memory. Such skill at network encoding would have helped Milton hold in memory both the gist and the verbatim lines of 40 lines of composed verse each night for dictation. Full-text retrieval systems now widely available enable scholars to extract repeating lexical and phrasal data from texts. With recent advances in neuroscientific understanding of how the brain produces language, they also have an experimentallybased theory with which to interpret such clusters of lexical echoes as evidence of neural networks operating in the unconscious of an author's mind. Although verse

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lines routinely broken by mid-line caesuras, and repeating phrases that would take no longer than two seconds to utter, indicate unselfconscious flow-state composition, extended working memory - which is conscious -- could still have given writers the means to marshall unified large utterances during composition. This is especially true where emotion-marked memories are retrieved as malleable gist, not as a mass of details. The Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood describes periods devoted to f1owstate creative writing as impossible to recall: they are hours cut out of her conscious life. Milton's composition of Paradise Lost while blind, incapable of writing words down, forced him to overcome the constraints of a flow state too. Researchers today have tools to know his associative mind during composition better than he could have known himself.

References Atwood, M.: Writing with intent: essays, reviews, personal prose: 1983-2005. Carroll and Graf, New York (2005) Baddeley, A.: Working

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Disorders 36(3), 189-208 (2003) Choueka, J.: Computerized full-text retrieval systems and research in the humanities: The Responsa project. Computers and the Humanities 14(3), 153-169 (1980) Choueka, J., Klein, ST., Neuwitz, E.: Automatic retrieval of frequent idiomatic and collocational expressions in a large corpus. ALLC Joumal4(1), 34-38 (1983) Cowan. N.: The Magical number 4 in short-term memory: a reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavorial and Brain Sciences 24, 87-185 (2000) Csikszentmihalyi, M.: Creativity: flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. Harper Perennial. New York (1996) Darbishire, H. (ed.): The Early lives of Milton. Constable, London (1932) Diekhoff 1.S. (ed.): Milton on himself: Millon's utterances upon himself and his works. Cohen and West, London (1965) Ellamil, M., Dobson, C, Beeman. M .. Christoff, K.: Evaluative and generative modes of thought during the creative process. Neurolmage 59(2), 1783-1794 (20 II) French, J.M. (ed.): The Life records of John Milton. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick ( 1948-1958) Lancashire, I.: Forgetful muses: reading the author in the text. University of Toronto Press, Toronto (2010) Lancashire. I., Bradley, J., McCarty, W., Stairs, M., Wooldridge, T.R.: Using TACT with electronic texts: a guide to text-analysis computing tools, version 2.1 for MS-DOS and PC DOS. Modern Language Association of America, New York (1996) Le, X., Lancashire, I., Hirst, G.. Jokel, R.: Longitudinal detection of dementia through lexicaJ and syntactic changes in writing: a case study of three British novelists. Literary and Linguistic Computing 26(4), 435--461 (2011) Levelt, W.J.M.: Spoken word production: a theory of lexical access. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 98(23), 13464-13471 (2001 ) Lucy. Juliet: Composition process. In: Dobranski, S.B. (ed.) Milton in Context, pp. 15-25. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2010)

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Milton, John.: An Epitaph on the admirable Dramaticke Poet, W. Shakespeare. Mr. William Shakespeares comedies, histories, and tragedies. London: T. Cotes for R. Allot. A5r (1632) Milton, John: John Milton's complete poetical works reproduced in photographic facsimile. A Critical text edition. In: Fletcher, H.F. (ed.) vot. Ill. University of Illinois Press, Urbana

(1948)

Milton, John: The Student's Milton. Patterson, F. A. (ed.). Appleton.Century-Crofts, New York

(1933) Parker, W.R.: Milton: a biography. Clarendon Press, Oxford (1968) Raichle, M.E., et al.: A Default mode of brain function. Proceedings of the National Academy

of Sciences of tbe United States of America 98(2), 676-682 (200I) Revard, S.P.: Milton's muse and the daughters of memory. English Literary Renaissance 9,

432-441 (1979) Tulving, E.: Episodic memory: from mind to brain. Annual Review of Psychology 53, 1-25

(2002)

Appendix The Five Associated Passages word

node not shared with passage in bk. I but with others of these five passages

WORD

node shared with passage bk. I

II.165-86 What when we fled amain, pursued and strook With HEAVEN's afflicting thunder, and beSOUGHT The deep to shelter us? this Hell then ~ed

" A refuge from those wounds: or when we LAY CHAINED ON THE BURNING LAKE? that sure was worse. What if the breath that kindled those grim fires Awaked should blow them into sevenfold RAGe And plunge us in the flames? or from above Should intermitted VENGEANCE arm again His red right hand to plague us? what if all

Her stores were opened, and this Firmament Of Hell should spout her cataracts of fire, Impendent horrors, threatning hideous fall One day upon our HEADs; while we perhaps DESIGNing or exhorting glorious WAR. Caught in a fiery tempest shall be hurled Each on his rock transfixt, the sport and prey

Of racking whirlwinds, or for ever sunk Under yon boiling OCEAN, wrap! in CHAINs;

There to converse with everlasting groans, Unrespited, unpitied, unreprieved. Ages of hopeless end; this would be worse.


m.i-rz Hail holy light. offspring of Heaven first-BORN. Or of the eternal coeternal beam May I express thee unblamed? since GOD is light, And never but in unapproached light Dweli from eternity, dwelt then in thee, Bright effluence of bright essence inCREA TE. Or hearest thou rather pure ethereal STREAM, Whose fountain who shall tell? before the sun, Before the Heavens thou wert, and at the voice Of GOD, as with a mantle didst INVEST The RISing world of waters DARK and deep, Won from the void and formless INFINITE. VII.391-416 And GOD CREATEd the great whales, and each Soul living, each that crept, which plenteously The ~ generated by their kinds, And every bird of wing after his kind; And saw that it was good, and blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, multiply, and in the SEAs And LAKEs and running STREAMS the waters fill; And let the fowl be multiplied on the EARTH. Forthwith the sounds and SEAs, each creek and bay With fry innumerable swarm, and shoals Of fish that with their fins and shining scales Glide under the green WAVE, in schools that oft Bank the mid sea: part single or with mate Graze the SEA weed their pasture, and through groves Of coral stray, or sporting with quick glance SHOW to the sun their WAVEd coats dropt with gold. Or in their pearly shells at ease, attend Moist nutriment, or under rocks their food In jointed armour watch: on smooth the seal, And bended dolphins play: PART HUGE of BULK Wallowing unwieldy, enormous in their gate Tempest the OCEAN: there LEVIATHAN HUGEst of living CREATures, on the deep STRETCHT like a promontory sleeps or SWIMs, And seems a moving land, and at his gills Draws in, and at his trunk spouts out a SEA. VIII.494-518 So spake the enemy of mankind, enclosed In serpent, inmate bad, and toward Eve

99

100

I.

Lancashire

Addressed his way, not with indented WAVE, PRONE on the ground, as since, but on his rear, Circular base of RISing folds, that toured Fold above fold a surging maze, his HEAD Crested aLOFT, and carbuncle his EYES; With BURNisht neck of verdant gold, erect Amidst his circling spires, that on the grass FLOATed redundant: pleasing was his shape, And lovely, never since of serpent kind Lovelier, not those that in IIIyria changed Hermione and Cadmus, or the GOD In Epidaurus; nor to which transformed Ammanian JOVE, or Capitoline was SEEn, He with Olympias, this with her who bore Scipio the heighth of Rome. With tract oblique At first, as one who SOUGHT access, but feared To interrupt, side-LONG he WORKS his way. As when a ship by skilful steersman wrought Nigh river's mouth or foreland, where the wind Veers oft, as oft so steers, and shifts her sail; So varied he, and of his tortuous train Curled many a wanton wreath in sight of Eve, To lure her EYE X,734-49 Meanwhile the south wind rose, and with black wings Wide hovering, all the clouds together drove From under HEAVEN; the hills to their supply Vapour, and exhalation dusk and moist, Sent up amain; and now the thickened Sky Like a DARK ceiling stood; down rushed the rain Impetuous, and continued till the EARTH No more was SEEn; the FLOATing vessel SWUM UPLJFTed; and secure with beaked prow Rode tilting ore the waves, all dwellings else FLOOD overwhelmed, and them with all their pomp Deep under water rolled; SEA covered SEA, SEA without shore; and in their palaces Where luxury late reigned, SEA-MONSTers whelped And stabled; of mankind, so numerous late, All LEFT, in one SMALL bottom SWUM imbark't.

Paradise LoSI and Milton's Associative Memory

Content Words in Cluster Repeated in Two or More Passages Word

Total Freq.

III

II

amain

2

born

2

bright

2

bulk

2

burning

2

chain'd

3

created

4

dark

3

deep

4

designs

2

earth

3

enrag'd

2

Eve

2

eyes

3

fires

3

float

3

flood

2

God

5

gold

2

head

4

heaven

4

huge

5

infinite

2

invests

2

Jove

2

kinde

3

lake

3

lay

3

left

2

Leviathan

2

long mankind

2

mate

2

VII

IX

2

2

2

2 3

2

2

3

2

2

2

Xl

101

lO2

I. Lancashire

moist

2

monstrous

2

ocean

3

part

3

prone

2

ris'n

3

Rock

•

2

2

Sea

12

See

3

seem

2

show

2

small

2

sought

3

sport

2

spout

2

stream

3

strercht

2

sun

2

swim

4

3

5

4

2

tell

2

tempest

2

uplift

2

vengeance

2

war

2

waters

4

2

wave

5

2

wind

3

wing

2

works

2