ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

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THE ONCE AND FUTURE POET
Milton in the 1645 Poems
Anno Domini 1619 he was ten years old, as by his picture,
and was then a poet.
John Aubrey, “Brief Lives”: Chiefly of his Contemporaries
Milton never learned the art of doing little things with
grace.
Samuel Johnson, “The Life of Milton”
The road from The Temple led in many directions: to Devonshire, to Wales, to
New England, eventually even to Rome itself in the person of Richard Crashaw.
But Herbert seems to have made little or no impression on the London-born poet
who, in 1645, published his first collection of verse and, though his main energies
were then going into writing prose, laid claim to being England’s greatest living
poet. “As true a Birth, as the Muses have brought forth since our famous Spencer
wrote” is how the bookseller Humphrey Moseley advertised John Milton’s
emergence as a poet. By 1645, the thirty-six year old Milton could hardly be
trumpeted as a discovery, which the enterprising Moseley no doubt knew. Milton
had recently attracted attention (mostly negative) for his radical defense of
divorce on grounds other than adultery in four learned and passionately argued
pamphlets known collectively as “The Divorce Tracts,” and these were published
during an eighteen-month spree from August 1643 to March 1645 that also
included the appearance of the now more famous Areopagitica in November 1644.
And before that, Milton had written a number of pamphlets denouncing the
tyrannical yoke of prelacy and urging England to bring to fruition many of the
purifying ideals of the early Reformation. The decision to publish his verse with
the innocuous, though distinctly genteel, title of Poems was, in Thomas Corns’s
words, in part a bid for respectability amid the heated controversies. 1
But it was more than that, too. In a peculiar but startling way, history had
caught up with some of the poems: their vatic energies now sometimes assume a
strange prophetic connection to contemporary events in a manner that the
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