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Brian Russell Graham expertly examines Milton a Poem through a close reading that engages with performative speech act theory, using it to demonstrate the importance of the characters’ spoken lines and also to explain how the lack of any direct speech can help to bring about, or forestall, the impending apocalypse. It is this apocalypse that Graham makes the center of his argument, rather than, as one might expect, the overall value of the speech acts themselves. By structuring his theoretical approach around the observation that “everything that happens in Blake’s Prophetic Books either results in progress towards apocalypse or serves to frustrate that process” (1), he is able to create a clear boundary, one that he sticks to throughout.