Why consider the role of place in Milton’s poetry? A few years ago, while attending a seminar conducted by Diane McColley on the relation of nature to culture in the literary history of the natural world, I found myself returning again and again to the same question: what happens when culture is privileged over place? No mere academic question, as the last acres of the place my family had farmed for generations had given way to bulldozers the year before, I found myself feeling that I had somehow lost my place in the world
