Eroticism and the Integral Self: Milton's Poems, 1645 and the Italian Pastoral Tradition

Abstract

Few are likely to disagree with Harris Fletcher's remark that Mil- ton, his lifetime, the most important ofall Italian poets was Torquato (2.307). Yet, the existing criticism does not confirm Flet- cher's insight ofTasso's importance to Milton throughout his lifetime. The evidence that has been advanced almost exclusively concerns Para- dise Lost, where MUton defined himselfagainst Tasso as the culmination of epic tradition and created an allusive poetics ofunprecedented com- plexity in which Gerusalemme Liberata figures prominently. Milton's own pronouncements may be responsible for the critical suence about Tasso's presence in the earlier poetry. In the 1642 Reason of Church Government (3.237) Milton ranks Tasso's epic ofthe first crusade with the epics ofHomer and Virgil, and in the 1644 OfEducation (4.286), he finds in Tasso's Discorsi del Poema Eroico the laws of true epic. I intend to argue that these statements have produced a critical imbal- ance, that in fact they were made at the time when Milton was using Tasso's other influential masterpiece, the pastoral drama Aminta, as a crucial intertext in the poetry, written in four languages, that he was assembUng to define the first stage ofa carefuUy conceived poetic career. Aware that the Aminta represents Tasso's entry onto the Virgilian gen- eric itinerary leading from pastoral to epic, MUton in his 1645 collection of poems, and most fully in Comus, its centerpiece, responds to his predecessor by offering his own version of the thematics of pastoral eroticism and the integral selfthat made Tasso's play so influential on subsequent pastoral discourse.