The Columbia History of British Poetry (59 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry
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Page 253
Further Reading
Carey, John.
John Donne: Life, Mind and Art
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Greer, Germaine, Susan Hastings, Jeslyn Medoff, and Melinda Sansone, eds.
Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Verse
. New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1988.
Hammond, Gerald.
Fleeting Things: English Poets and Poems, 16161660
. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Lewalski, Barbara.
Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric
. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.
Marcus, Leah.
Childhood and Cultural Despair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth-Century Literature
. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978.
Sanders, Wilbur.
John Donne's Poetry
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971.
Schoenfeldt, Michael C.
Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtiership
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Sharpe, Kevin.
Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Strier, Richard.
Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Summers, Joseph.
The Heirs of Donne and Jonson
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
 
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Milton
Martin Elsky
Known in his own day more as a political polemicist than as a poet, Milton's poetic renown grew soon after his death in the last part of the seventeenth century. From the end of the eighteenth century his reputation, built mainly on
Paradise Lost
, reached monumental status because of the enormous significance assigned variously to three dimensions of his work: his philosophical and theological ideas, his artistic genius, and his revolutionary politics; it has waxed and waned depending on how decisively the prestige accorded him in any one of these dimensions outweighed distaste for the other two.
It is one of the ironies of Milton's reception that, as the poet who did most to legitimate the literary artist's quest for fame, he never quite saw his own poetic fame realized in his lifetime. And yet Milton was to achieve posthumous celebrity in a manner that helped shape the cultural ideal and personality type that we have come to know as the Author. We now take for granted a literary culture dominated by authors, full-time writers who claim an authority based on a superior ability to perceive a higher truth. In Milton's day it was still more likely that a writer of poetry was a cultivated amateur whose full-time occupation was more typically that of courtier or statesman and who wrote poetry often as a form of sophisticated recreation. The fits and starts of Milton's attempt to establish literary authority for himself reveal the uneasiness that accompanied authorship in its early stages.
Among seventeenth-century English poets, Milton stands out in his immensely self-conscious, self-constructed, single-minded drive to gain fame through the religious, moral, and political authority of poetic pro-
 
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nouncements that find their most complete expression in epic. In a literary tradition already begun by Edmund Spenser and Ben Jonson, Milton came to see the entire political and religious nation as the subjects of that authority. And from early on he associated the vehicle of this authority with some combination of Christian doctrine and classical form. Even more than his forerunners Spenser and Jonson, Milton constructed a continually changing self-image of his developing authorship in an interlaced narrative of both professional vocation and personal identitya poetic career manifested in a continually self-commenting and self-revising oeuvre that, with a combination of anxiety, defensiveness, and self-confidence, projects its own fulfillment in the epic.
Early Poems
Milton's first full-scale publication under his own name,
The Poems of Mr. John Milton
, appeared in 1645. The volume includes most of his early poetry, offered as a kind of pledge of the great epic yet to come; each poem is accompanied by a note indicating (or misindicating) Milton's age at the time of its composition, suggesting that he regarded the volume as a record of his early poetic development. Included in the volume are his Latin elegies, written between 1616 and 1620, when he was eighteen to twenty-two years old. In these poems one can observe the youthful Milton experimenting with two models as the basis of his poetic persona. In themselves more showy than good, these elegies reveal Milton's early vacillation between religious lyric andastonishing in retrospecterotic lyric.
The erotic elegies (I, V, and VII) are particularly interesting because they represent a path not taken. Imitating Ovid in these poems, Milton associates poetic and sexual power.
At times he sees the ideal expression of this sexual/poetic potency in pastoral lyric melody, at times in an ecstatic epic elevation to the seat of the Muses, where he is privy to the secret of the gods; these two polespastoral and epicare to be defining points for Milton throughout his work. Many of the elegies reveal what was to become a pattern in Milton's early work, a fixation with beginningswith suitable smaller poetic forms that would project a suitably grand ending in a major poem. This pattern is already apparent in elegy VI as well, where Milton experiments with the poetic persona he was ultimately to claim as his own, that of the Christian poet. Milton here uses the pastoral

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