The Revaluation of the Classical Heroic in Tasso and Milton

Abstract

N ONE OF THE most famous Milton's sparse autobiographical statements, prose polemicist sketched out his visions poetic career he was postponing do battle for cause. When his mind at home, in spacious circuits musing took liberty propose herself, an enterprise of highest hope, and hardest attempting, her first landfall was at epic form whereof two poems Homer, and those other two Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse . . . model.' To write an English poem with such models before him would be fulfillment, in realm epic poetry, that supremely Renaissance ambition to be an interpreter and relater best and sagest among mine own citizens throughout this island in mother dialect.2 In Milton's summary various literary traditions that attracted him, he linked two great names ancient literature only one creator contemporary narrative poetry-Torquato Tasso. His spare statement seems imply an unarguable assumption that Tasso belongs in such company and that any reader would immediately understand what he means by idea a literary form exemplified by any or all these three men. Tasso, as much as Virgil or Homer, contributes that cosmopolitan tradition the best and sagest things which Milton would strive incorporate into his own poetic voice. Yet modern readers have usually expressed discomfort at this version ancestry Paradise Lost, feeling that Gerusalemme Liberata could be brought into relationship with Milton's poem only in very