Discuss John Milton's Refashioning of Existing Genres and Conventions to Meet 'Fresh Occasions'

Milton constantly adapts, and refashions, the English, and classical, poetic traditions in which he repeatedly and explicitly places himself. This often takes the form of the religious (seen in his Nativity Ode), the political (particularly in his sonnets) and the personal (most apparent in the pastoral elegy Lycidas). It is the 1645 collection, published Poems of Mr John Milton, both English and Latin, Compos’d at Several Times, from which I will draw my selection of verse, in order to exemplify the ways in which Milton emulates, alludes to, and manipulates existing genres and poetic conventions. While not a source study, specific literary debts will be investigated.It is worth noting that out of all of the poems of the 1645 anthology, Lycidas is widely deemed ‘the most specifically imitative’[1], finding inspiration in Virgil’s Eclogue X[2]. The thematic and stylistic resemblances are indeed striking. Phoebus Apollo, for instance, appears at a crucial juncture in both poems. Silvanius, wearing ‘rustic glories on his brow, waving his fennel flowers and tall lillies’ is clearly a prototype of Camus (employed to represent Cambridge University), with his ‘mantle hairy, and bonnet sedge/ Inwrought with figures dim’. Pan, the god of shepherds, has his counterpart in Peter, the founder of the Church. Both poems essentially pose the same question regarding their subject: ‘who would not refuse verses to Gallus?’ becomes ‘who would not sing for Lycidas?’ (10). Both poems appeal to Arethusa for aid, and both interrogate the mythical nymphs, though Milton substitutes British for Arcadian landmarks in his adaptation of Virgil’s lines. Striking though they are, these formal similarities are overshadowed by potent differences. Virgil is mourning a lover who died of unrequited passion, whereas Milton celebrates the memory of a studious young churchman who died in accidental tragedy. His death simply cannot be attributed, as that of Gallus could, to some fatal error on his part, making it morally meaningless. This is emphasised when, after paraphrasing Virgil’s interrogative to the naiads, Milton seems to bitterly comment:Ay me, I fondly dreamHad ye been there – for what could that have done?                                           (56-7)If King’s chastity, retirement and study of poetry were no protection against the ‘blind Fury’ and her ‘shears’ (75), the purpose of sexual and political self-denial appears futile. The fundamental context with which Milton chooses to mourn his fellow student, therefore, seems not so much to relate to some anxiety regarding his own premature departure, as has often been suggested, but rather to the validity of the kind of life Milton, who sees in King a counterpart, had been leading for the preceding years[3]. It is fitting, then, that Milton chooses the particular pastoral name of Lycidas for his dead friend, for he is the protagonist of the ninth and perhaps bleakest of the Eclogues, in which the power of poetry to shape events is called seriously into contention. As he ponders the premature death of another Lycidas, Milton is made to question the point in so strictly serving the Muse, if she herself is not merely ‘thankless’, but powerless in action. Lycidas, then, can be observed as making use of its classical antecedent, at least in part, to inquire, and express doubt, as to the value of the poet’s vocation itself: the ‘homely slighted shepherd’s trade’ (65). This is further emphasised by the digressio regarding the legend of Orpheus’ watery death[4] (58-63), who, like the angelic choir in On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, and Lycidas through his poetic ‘song’, possessed the power to restore the mythical Golden Age with his redemptive music[5]. Here, then, Milton reshapes the conventions of the pastoral elegy in order to explore, and to some extent denounce, his own ambitions of acquiring earthly fame through the composing of poetry.Furthermore, Milton often arouses pity, fear and a sense of moral landscape by simple appropriations from the classical literary tradition’, though often these take the form of more than mere allusions, but are frequently in fact the climax, and to some extent the point, of the verse that they inhabit. For instance, in Sonnet VIII[6], the classical traditions of Greek history and literature are employed to corroborate Milton’s political agenda, as he imagines himself, a poet, speaking with an army leader from the opposing Royalists of the Civil War, entreating that some human rights should obtain even during wartime. Ignoring the moral dubieties of ‘the great Emathian conqueror’ (10) and of the ‘repellent Athenian imperialism which had brought the city’s own walls under threat’[7], Milton maintains his focus on what was once felt due to poets as such, as Pindar’s ‘house’ was spared during the general act of reprisal. The defeated city of Athens, Milton’s beloved Periclean Athens, was saved by the thought that it had produced a Euripides[8]: ‘sad Electra’s poet’ (13), who possessed the ‘power/ To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare’ (14). The closing moral exemplum of the sonnet makes many simultaneous points for Milton in his own time, ‘his own situation of internecine conflict, and danger to non-combatants’[9]. In this way, Milton incorporates the classical literary tradition within the social and political demands of his own society, and allegiances. Milton also adapts well-established forms to coincide with his own Christian theology and mythology. In the occasional piece, and first of the collection, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, the poet imagines himself, as typical of its genre, welcoming the Christ child, as the shepherds of the Nativity had, while dismissing the pagan gods, with ‘sullen Moloch fled’ (205) and ‘Orisis’ unseen (213), now dislodged by the arrival of the true saviour[10]. While alluding indirectly to Virgil’s fourth Eclogue[11], this commemorative poem, along with Upon the Circumcision and the unfinished The Passion, belongs to a seventeenth-century literary preoccupation, established in the Jacobean period by the likes of Donne[12], Herrick and Herbert. In this ‘decidedly competitive poem’[13], Milton, like his contemporaries, thrusts himself into the frame of the events he commemorates, urging his Muse to ‘prevent them (the Magi) with thy humble ode’ (24). Though self-characterised as ‘humble’, Milton’s humility appears little on display and is besought, not to second the efforts of the lowly shepherds, or ‘star-led wizards’ (23), but rather toJoin thy voice unto the angel quire,From out his secret altar touched with hallowed fire.                                               27-8Milton’s real competition, however, is not with the New Testament shepherds, but with contemporary poems; by stepping into a subject area as frequently visited as the birth of Christ, he is inviting – perhaps insisting on – comparison with the rest, in order to begin to cement himself among the canon of English (and European) poets. Milton, in his expression of Christ as the ultimate, and final, saviour, develops, unlike his contemporaries, the expulsion of the pagan gods into a ceremony of power based on spectacular punishment. In the passage extending from stanzas XVIII to XXV, each deity or group is dismissed with an increasing humiliation. The ram-headed Hammon ‘shrinks his horn’ (203) while Orisis, as a manifestation of the bull, is blinded by ‘The rays of Bethlehem’ (223), and none of the pagan creeds offer any semblance of resistance. While not a radical, or puritan poem, it reflects a religious sensibility which will become radicalised as the crises of the late 1630s develop, with the slogan ‘Christ the only King’ a favoured one in Cromwell’s New Model Army, which Milton goes on to support with fervour. In this way, Milton conscientiously separates himself, and his verse, from the conventional topicalities of both contemporary and classical incarnations of the genre.Milton then, carefully manipulates and refashions existing genres and conventions in order to match the religious, political and personal contexts of ‘fresh occasions’, and of his time. His autobiographical images are almost always fashioned by the demands of occasion, as we find throughout the 1645 collection multiple lesser narratives regarding the poet: Milton the Cambridge poet (as in Lycidas), Milton the Italian Petrarchista (as in Sonnet I: O Nightingale), the lover of music (as in At a Solemn Musick), the dedicated Protestant (as in On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity), the radical Parliamentarian (as in Sonnet VIII: Captain or Colonel) and the young poet anxiously uncertain as to what he will do next (as in Sonnet VII: How Soon Hath Time). These instruments set the precedent for Milton’s mature works, including Samson Agonistes and, of course, Paradise Lost. [1] Dennis Danielson, The Cambridge Companion to John Milton, Cambridge University Press, 2006[2] Commemorating death of famous soldier, statesman and poet, Cornelius Gallius, set in Arcadia (legendary landscape of pastoral form)[3] The poem, then, can in some sense be seen to represent an epiphany: this is the last poem written in English, with the exception of a few sonnets, for the next twenty years, instead dedicating his life to establishing himself as one of the principle champions of the Puritan and Parliamentarian causes[4] As recounted by Ovid in his Metamorphoses[5] In Ad Patrem, for instance, Milton assures his father that poets were the acknowledged legislators of the world, and that their original prototype was Orpheus, ‘who with his singing (…) held streams spellbound and gave ears to the oak-trees and moved lifeless phantoms to tears’ (52-5)[6] Entitled, in the Trinity Manuscript, When the Assault was Intended to the City, 1642[7] Arthur E Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma: 1641-1660, University of Toronto Press, 2001[8] Plutarch records that Pindar’s descendants were spared[9] Thomas N Corns, A Companion to Milton, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2001[10] Both Mantuan and Tasso write Nativity odes dismissing the pagan gods[11] Which celebrates the return of the mythical Golden Age with the birth of Roman Consul Pollio’s son, but which was generally thought by Christians to prophesy the coming of the True Messiah, who alone could restore it[12] Donne’s Goodfriday, 1613 often considered the most influential of this subgenre [13] John Carey, Milton: The Complete Shorter Poems, Routledge, 2013