Milton's of Reformation: The Politics of Vision

Abstract

Until 1641 Milton had subdued and transformed his personal experiences into literary genres appropriate to the emerging great poet. Some of the experiences themselves might be seen as selfconscious genres: the rebellion at Cambridge, the advertised chastity, the ivory tower at Horton, the Italian journey. Most of the written work and much of the experience was appropriate to the role which Milton had chosen-he himself had put it bluntlycareer great poet. From the beginning Milton saw his potential in only the grandest terms. The grandeur of ambition and the regularity of progress in that ambition are simple facts of Milton's biography from his childhood. His life was organized toward the production of the spectacularly ambitious poem.' He was obviously moving in the right direction. The brilliant education, Lawes' collaboration, the testimony of the Italian academies, the placement of Lycidas-the sheer fact of Lycidas-must have given him assurance that the career was unfolding under his strenuous care at a decent pace. Being asked, or allowed, to do the postscript to the Smectymnun Answer2 would also have corroborated the sense of his worth and achievement. That tract answered successfully one of the foremost spokesmen for the Anglican position, Bishop Joseph Hall. It became almost surely the most famous of Puritan tracts in the early 1640's. Milton had to feel some pride in his part, acknowledged or not. The rising poet decides to defer his progress, hastens back (at a rather stately pace) from Italy to assist his friends, presumably with the Postscript. Of Reformation follows, a much larger commitment, a substantial delay in his career plans. The tract must somehow register the decision to put off his poetic career, hitherto so assiduously pursued; and indeed it does testify to that accommodation. But it does more: it tries heroically to fuse career and history, Christian vocation in poetry and the deferral of that vocation in prose. Of course that prose itself becomes a vocation, necessary but not the real one, not that talent which is death to hide (however