This chapter discusses a cluster of English verse translations of Milton’s Poemata that emerged in the long eighteenth century. Focusing on versions by Symmons, Cowper, and, to a lesser degree, Strutt and others, it foregrounds a variety of contexts—biographical, literary, discursive—that engendered, it is argued, an intellectual discourse on translational methodology that is still relevant today. It is a discourse, moreover, that raises a host of important theoretical questions: about the nature and function of translation; the viability of rendering a neo-Latin source text in a target language; the potential ‘fetters’ that, in Drydenesque terms, might constrain ‘the Verbal Copyer’, or perhaps the quasi-liberating fluency, described by Venuti as the ‘fluent strategy’, attendant upon recourse to verse as translational medium.
