13 - Milton’s shorter poems

Summary

The shorter poems of John Milton (1608–74) exhibit an extraordinary range of genres and topics. He took up genre after genre – verse letters, love elegies, hymns, odes, psalm translations, songs, epitaphs, funeral elegies, sonnets of many kinds, an entertainment, a masque and more. But his major poems transform those genres, opening them to new possibilities. Several early poems and prose works explore his anxieties and aspirations as a poet, providing the basis for the most complete self-portrait of the author as a young man before the nineteenth century. In a poem to his father he proclaimed more forcefully than had any English poet before him, that poetry was his vocation and at the core of his self-definition: ‘it is my lot to have been born a poet’. What that might mean he spelled out in 1642: worthy poetry is the product of inspiration, supplemented by intense study and broad experience; and its Horatian purpose, to teach and delight, should also involve being ‘doctrinal and exemplary to a Nation’.

In 1645 he published Poems of Mr John Milton, collecting most of his poetry from the previous twenty years or so. The volume is in two parts with separate title pages: a vernacular book of mostly English and a few Italian poems, and a classical book with mostly Latin and a few Greek poems. The poems are arranged chiefly by genre and (in the Poemata, by verse form), though with some attention to chronology. Only four had been previously published: an epitaph for Shakespeare, anonymously, in the Second Folio of his plays (1632); the Mask known commonly as Comus, also anonymous (1637); Lycidas, bearing only his initials, in a memorial collection (1638); and Epitaphium Damonis, printed anonymously and privately, probably in 1640.