Status Updates From Language Processing and the...

Tough going. A book for grammar nerds who want to understand the syntactic difficulty posed by writers including Milton, Wallace Stevens, William Faulkner and Henry James. Picking out and concentrating on their hardest paragraphs...

George Steiner described four types of poetic difficulty. Contingent difficulty requires general knowledge. Modal difficulty require an emotional response. Tactical difficulty is when the poet is deliberately hiding something. Syntactic difficulty is when the poet’s sentence structure ties you in knots.

Dillon has a grammatical approach to syntactic difficulty. It’s not easy, but neither is Paradise Lost.