This page presents a summary of the plot of Milton, as well as an overview of the poem's biographical and mythological subtexts. While these perspectives are not the focus of this exhibit, they do provide a helpful introduction.

This section concerns illuminated printing, the printmaking technique Blake employed to create Milton and most of Blake's original poetry. I compare illuminated printing with contemporary methods like intaglio etching and discuss the consequences of this approach with regard to textual variation, intention, and authority.

Blake's illuminated poetry as "composite art:" here I attempt to conceptualize his unique combination of text and image.

In this section, Blake's understanding of imagination guides us into a discussion of perception, creation, separation, empiricism, and the function of Blake criticism.

The theory of imagination, outlined in the previous section, applies here to a brief reading of the text of Milton.

The framework of interpretation expands from the lexical text to the material book in this section, which examines a single plate via text, image, and production.

Reading as inspired vision: on the incommunicable nature of aesthetic experience.