Milton shows a constant concern with form, with genre, to a degree remarkable even in his genre-conscious era. Among the first questions to ask about any of his poems are what conventions he embraced and what freight of shared cultural significances he took on by casting a poem in a particular genre. In poem after poem he achieves high art from the tension between his immense imaginative energy and the discipline of form. Yet he is never a mere follower of convention and neoclassical rules: his poems gain much of their power from his daring mixtures of generic elements and from radical transformations that disrupt and challenge reader expectation.
In 1642, in the preface to the Second Book of The Reason of Church-Government, Milton provided his most extended comment on poetry and poetics. Among other topics, he points to some of the literary genres he hopes to attempt, offering an important insight into his ideas about and ways with genre:
Much as the Renaissance Italian critic Minturno did (Minturno 1559: 3), Milton thought in terms of three general categories or ‘parts’ of poetry – epic, dramatic, lyric – and within each of these categories he identified certain historical genres or ‘kinds’ (the Renaissance term). Here he mentions ‘diffuse’ and ‘brief’ epic, pastoral dramas and tragedies, odes, and hymns. Renaissance theorists and poets also recognized many other kinds, identified by a mix of formal and thematic elements, conventions and topics: metre, structure, size, scale, subject, values, occasion, style and more (Fowler 1982: 1–74). Milton’s reference to ‘pastoral’ drama in the passage quoted calls attention to the category of literary modes – what Sidney in The Defence of Poesie called ‘species’ and defined chiefly by tone, topics and affect: for example, pastoral, satiric, comedic, heroic, elegiac (Sidney 1595, sigs C2r, E3v–F1r). These modes may govern works or parts of works in several kinds: we might have a pastoral comedy, or pastoral eclogue, or pastoral song; or a satiric verse epistle, or epigram, or novel. Also, Milton links biblical with classical models – Homer and Job for epic, Sophocles and the Apocalypse for tragedy, Pindar and the Psalms for the high lyric – indicating his sense of the Bible as a compendium of literary genres and poetic art. His final comment privileging biblical lyric over all other lyric poetry not only for truth, but also for art assumes a Platonic union of truth and beauty.
Renaissance poets and critics often repeated the Horatian formula for the purpose of poetry, to teach and delight, and Sidney added to these aims the function of rhetoric, to move. Milton was thinking in these terms as he debated with himself whether epic or tragedy might be more ‘doctrinal and exemplary’ to the nation. But Milton’s poetic teaching is not a matter of urging a message or doctrine: it involves representing human life and human values in all their complexity, in a richly imagined poetic universe. Genre is a major element in that representation, for genres afford, in Rosalie Colie’s terms, a series of frames or fixes upon the world (Colie 1973: vii), transmitting the culture’s shared imaginative experience. By his virtuoso use of the literary genre system, and especially by his characteristic mixture of generic elements in most of his poems, Milton can invite his readers to weigh and consider the values the several kinds have come to embody, and to make discriminating choices (Lewalski 1985: 17–24).
During Milton’s earlier career, genres associated with and promoted by the Caroline court took on special political and cultural import. Court masques and pastoral dramas mystified the virtue, power, and benevolence of Charles I and Henrietta Maria. Cavalier poets associated with the court wrote witty, sophisticated, playful love lyrics imbued with the fashionable neoplatonism and pastoralism or treated carpe diem themes with a light-hearted licentiousness. Other common royalist kinds were panegyrics on members of the royal family and their celebratory occasions, and religious poems treating the ‘high church’ rituals, feasts, ceremonies, and arts promoted by Archbishop Laud. During the period of the Commonwealth and Protectorate (1649–60), royalists in retreat from London and without a court often wrote works in pastoral and romance modes, celebrating retirement and friendship, or courtly chivalry (Potter 1989; Smith 1994: 233–41). By contrast, some writers associated with the revolution reached toward the sublime or prophetic register to celebrate heroic action, as in Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’ (Norbrook 1999: 251–71). Restoration court culture, with Dryden at its center, promoted heroic drama, satire, and Virgilian panegyric, written in smooth and graceful pentameter couplets.
Milton wrote many kinds of poem: sonnets in Italian and English, elegies and verse epistles in Latin elegiac verse, funeral elegies in English and Latin, songs, literary hymns, odes, epitaphs, encomiums, a masque, an entertainment, a tragedy, an epic, and a brief epic. He also wrote several kinds of prose treatises and polemics, both in English and in Latin – college orations, controversial tracts promoting particular causes or answering attacks, defenses of the regicide and the Commonwealth, histories, and theological exposition. As poet, he identified his career path with that defined by Virgil and imitated by Spenser: beginning with the lesser kinds, pastoral and lyric, and proceeding to the highest – assumed by Renaissance theorists to be epic, though Aristotle gave pride of place to tragedy. Milton wrote both.
Milton composed his neo-Latin poems with attention to generic categories based on classical metrical patterns. In his book of Poems … Both Latin and English (1645), he collected several early Latin poems (titled elegies because written in elegiac metre, a hexameter line followed by a pentameter) in a section called ‘Elegiarum Liber.’ Three of these are verse epistles, two others are funeral poems, and two celebrate spring and love. The second group of Latin poems in that volume is termed ‘Sylvarum liber,’ indicating a collection of poems in various metres (like the several kinds of trees in a forest, the meaning of Sylva). Some poems in that section are encomia, praises (Mansus, Ad Patrem). The final poem, Epitaphium Damonis, is a pastoral funeral lament for the death of his dear friend, Charles Diodati; it is termed an epitaph, not an elegy, because it is not in elegiacs. Milton identified as an ode the poem that he sent with a copy of the 1645 volume to the librarian of Oxford University, ‘Ad Joannem Rousium Oxoniensis’: in an appended note he explains his nontraditional use of classical ode structure (Strophe, Antistrophe, and Epode) and cites some precedents for his metrical irregularities.
In several early Latin and English poems Milton invokes the genre system to weigh alternative lifestyles, in both personal and cultural terms. ‘Elegy VI’, a Latin verse epistle addressed to his close friend Charles Diodati, is a counterstatement to his own ‘Elegy V’, an ecstatic celebration of love and springtime in Ovidian terms, written a few months earlier. ‘Elegy VI’ contrasts two kinds of poetry and the lifestyles appropriate to each. He identifies Diodati with the ‘gay elegy’, which is consonant with a festive life of ‘grand banquets’ and ‘frequent potions of old wine’, and locates himself with epic and hymnic poets – Homer, Tiresias, Linus and Orpheus – whose high subjects require an ascetic and chaste life: ‘For the poet is sacred to the gods: he is their priest’ (line 77). Claiming that role definitively, he included with this elegy his first major poem, ‘On the morning of Christs Nativity’ (1629), which he describes in the Proem as a ‘humble ode’ because of its pastoral elements, but which becomes a lofty ‘Hymn’ imagined as joining with the hymns of the angelic choir at that event. Also, the graceful, urbane companion poems, ‘L’Allegro’ and ‘Il Penseroso’, explore and contrast in generic terms the ideal pleasures appropriate to contrasting lifestyles – ‘heart-easing Mirth’ (line 13), ‘divinest Melancholy’ (line 12) – that a poet might choose, or might choose at different times, or in sequence. As celebrations of their respective deities, the Grace Euphrosone (Youthful Mirth) and the allegorical figure imagined as a deity, Melancholy, both poems are modeled on the classical hymn. But they also incorporate elements of several other kinds, among them the academic debate, the Theocritan pastoral idyll of the ideal day and its festivals, the Theophrastian prose ‘character’ with such titles as ‘The Happy Man’ or ‘The Melancholy Man’, the encomium, and the demonstrative or eulogistic oration with its traditional categories of praise: the goods of nature (ancestry and birth), the goods of fortune (friends and circumstances of life), and the goods of character (actions and virtues). The final couplet of each poem echoes and answers the question posed in Marlowe’s ‘Come live with me and be my love’ and its Elizabethan analogues. But despite the familiarity of these elements, Milton’s paired poems have no close antecedents.
The title personages of both poems are drawn ...
