The Ghost of Rhetoric: Milton\u27s Logic and the Renaissance Trivium

Although English Renaissance poet John Milton (1608-1674) wrote both a grammar and a logic, he did not write a rhetoric. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric made up the trivium, the verbal portion of the seven liberal arts, the ideal curriculum since antiquity. Milton\u27s failure to write a rhetoric is partly due to the popularity of the disciplinary simplifications of Peter Ramus, which reduced rhetoric at the time to little more than a finding list of tropes and figures, and also partly due to Milton\u27s own temperament. Milton scholars are now beginning to understand how much the ideas expressed in Milton\u27s Logic can help interpret his other works, such as Paradise Lost