Form and Content in Milton's Latin Elegies

Abstract

NEO-LATIN POETRY has often been overlooked in modern discussions of an author's work, perhaps because it is usually characterized as conventional. And since most of Milton's Latin poems were written before he left Cambridge in 1632, they are also often dismissed as mere youthful exercises. True, a few commentators have observed his modifying and reworking the old material to suit the literary forms of his own time and the need of his own personality.' These commentators have generally stressed the biographical value of Milton's Latin verse rather than its poetic merit or its foreshadowing of the great English poetry to come. It does enhance our knowledge of Milton's life, but it also has literary meaning and worth. The Latin elegies, which are among the earliest poetic works, are a case in point. Milton published seven Latin elegies in the first edition of his minor poems in 1645 under the general heading Elegiarum Liber Primus, along with eight other brief poems. Most scholarship over the years has been concerned with the dates of composition (from April 1626 to December 1629 or May 1630, depending upon the date of the seventh elegy), literary allusions and sources, or topical references and biographical matter.2 In this paper I look at these elegies as literature and thus as precursors of the future greatness. For when examined past the customary nod, they herald the poetic themes, the ideological theses, and the mythic concepts of Paradise Lost. The form of the elegies is easy to describe: they are poems of varying lengths composed of a series of elegiac distichs (or couplets), each consisting of a line of dactylic hexameter and a line of dactylic pentameter. This