Elegia Septima and Milton’s Erotic Temporalities

Abstract

This essay examines Milton’s Elegia Septima within the context of his larger poetic canon to trace a pattern of thought connecting erotic desire with queer temporalities, thus complicating previous readings of the seventh elegy that frame the poem as simplistic and solely focused on heteroerotic attraction. Instead, the elegy positions erotic encounters as profoundly queer, especially in the sense that they collapse not only multiple objects of desire but also multiple moments in time. Such an approach allows readers to see a lacuna in the critical reception of the poem that has overlooked various forms of homoerotic and heteroerotic modes of relation, as well as how the elegy can be contextualized within the larger body of Milton’s early Latin poems and in relationship to later poems such as Paradise Lost.