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The Eighteenth-Century Reception of Milton's Poems

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The Eighteenth-Century Reception of Milton's Poems ‘A Poet Early, and Always in his Soul’: the eighteenth-century reception of Milton’s Poems (1645) Roberta Sidonie Klimt Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Language and Literature at University College London in 2016 1 Declaration I, Roberta Klimt, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 Thesis abstract This thesis explores the reception of Milton’s first volume of poetry, now known as the Poems (1645), during their first 150 or so years of life. It is a broadly chronological study of the Poems’ publication, citation, and critical appreciation both as a discrete volume and, more often, as broken up into its constituent parts in anthologies, miscellanies, adaptations, and translations. Running throughout this history is a thematic analysis of the eighteenth century’s changing critical approach to these early Miltonic works, including notable editions of the poems, especially those from 1673, 1695, 1752, and 1785. My project is occasioned by the absence to date of a sustained, book-length study of the reception of Milton’s Poems. Such reception studies of Milton as do exist either chronicle receptions of his entire oeuvre, or focus exclusively on Paradise Lost. My critical field encompasses these existing reception histories, as well as studies primarily devoted to analysis of the Poems (1645). It also pays attention to scholarship on eighteenth-century poetics and its main proponents, to books about miscellany and anthology culture, and to histories of the emerging concept of an English literary canon around the middle of the eighteenth century. The aim of my study is, first, to illuminate an area of Milton criticism that has not, proportionally at least, been much studied; secondly, to continue a relatively recent critical tendency towards privileging the Poems as a separate body of work, meriting scholarly attention not just as the prelude to Paradise Lost but as a collection in its own right, with its own themes, its own dilemmas, and its own preoccupations. 3 Table of contents Acknowledgements 5 Introduction: Milton’s 6 ‘iuvenilia carmina’ Chapter 1: ‘Foredating his 24 beginning’ Chapter 2: Poems upon 92 several occasions Chapter 3: Poems in the 153 canon Chapter 4: ‘Fictions more 205 valuable than reality’ Coda: Poems at the 257 beginning of the nineteenth century Bibliography 276 4 Acknowledgements My first thanks go to Paul Davis for his patient, encouraging, and altogether exemplary supervision. For proof-reading and many helpful suggestions, thanks are due to Zoe Hawkins and Chris Stamatakis. For companionship and support along the way, thanks to Elsa Court (l’union fait la force!) and George Potts. My love and thanks also to Beci Carver, and to Mark, Alexis, Sophie, Natasha, and Albie Klimt. This thesis is dedicated to my grandmother Valerie Klimt. 5 Introduction: Milton’s ‘iuvenilia carmina’ In 1633, at the age of fifteen, Abraham Cowley published his Poetical Blossomes. Their title-page bears the simple motto ‘Sit surculus arbor’ [‘let the shoot be a tree’];1 the facing page shows a portrait of the poet as a (very) young man, and underneath it is printed a short poem likening the beardless Cowley to Phoebus Apollo: Reader, when first thou shalt behold this boyes Picture, perhaps thou’lt thinke his writings toyes Wrong not our Cowley so will nothing passe But gravity with thee Apollo was Beardlesse himselfe and for ought I can see Cowley may yongest sonne of Phoebus bee.2 Cowley’s book is small, its contents referring often to their own youthfulness and lack of expertise, the fact that so far they can only promise the greatness that is to follow; the dedication to Pyramus and Thisbe, for instance, opens, ‘My childish Muse is in her Spring; and yet / Can onely shew the budding of her Wit.’3 There may be a trepidatious note in the frontispiece poem’s reference to Cowley as a potential ‘son of Phoebus’, subject to ‘gravity’ – as if he, like Phaethon, might lose control of a set of skills he is too young yet to command. Despite these possible fears, Cowley’s volume confidently encompasses several genres, including love poetry, odes, tragedy, and elegy. It is thought to have been one of the most important models for the Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin, Compos’d at Several Times, printed in 1645.4 A comparison of the debut publications of these two poets results in many expected differences. Milton was thirty-seven, not fifteen, when his Poems were published; his volume is much longer than Cowley’s (271 pages to 62), and far more various in 1 A[braham] C[owley], Poetical Blossomes (1633), sig. A2r. 2 Poetical Blossomes, sig. A1v. 3 Poetical Blossomes, sig. F1r. 4 See, for example, the comment that ‘Milton’s own volume of Poems doubtless owes much to earlier prodigy volumes like Cowley’s’. Leah S. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (1996), p. 205. 6 language and genre, including Italian and Greek as well as the English and Latin its title advertises. Milton was also well-travelled and beginning to be well-known by the time the Poems came out, a renown reflected by the volume’s several, multilingual encomia to its author’s talent and fame on the continent as well as in England. In many ways, Milton’s Poems Both English and Latin more closely resemble Cowley’s collected Poems from 1656, when their author was thirty-nine – a much more compendious, heterogeneous work than the Poetical Blossomes, running to 394 pages, grouped into four sections: ‘Miscellanies’, ‘The Mistress, or, Love Verses’, ‘Pindarique Odes’, and the (Latin) Davideis. Milton’s 1645 volume combines an air of initiatory hesitancy with one of confident bravura, its contents encompassing compositions from Milton’s true youth up to those from his early middle age; but a high proportion of the poems make as much of a feature of their precocity, and articulate as many hopes and uncertainties for the future, as if they had been written by a far younger man. Of course many of them had, and they declare it, being dated either with the year of their composition or with the author’s age at the time of writing. Colin Burrow calls the book ‘a belated prodigy volume’,5 identifying the contradiction by which Milton bestrides the gap between his impressively early age when many of the Poems were written and his age at publication, when such virtuosity, if not unremarkable, would certainly seem less prodigious. Yet several generations of readers would pass before this gap in Milton’s self-presentation was properly noted in criticism of his work. Instead, throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Milton’s Poems were almost always considered – when they were considered at all – as pure juvenilia, a categorisation that both flatters and diminishes them, and which would not even begin to be reassessed until the latter half of the twentieth century. 5 Colin Burrow, ‘The Future Poet’, in Dennis Danielson, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Milton, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1999), p. 56. Hereafter Cambridge Companion. 7 This thesis examines and attempts to account for the kinds of interpretation and misinterpretation undergone by the Poems during their first hundred and fifty or so years of life. My study begins in 1632 with Milton’s first published poem, ‘On Shakespeare’, and ends in 1801, when Henry John Todd’s landmark edition of Milton’s Poetical Works was published. This period of Milton’s reception has been covered in histories by John T. Shawcross, James Ogden, and, most recently, John Leonard.6 Shawcross’s two-volume Milton: The Critical Heritage is a meticulous catalogue of ‘appearance[s] of [Milton’s] name in print’ between 1628 and 1801;7 it has furnished much of the raw material for this thesis. Writing about thirty-five years after Shawcross, James Ogden devotes roughly half of his monograph, John Milton’s Literary Reputation, to the minor poems (as he, following Shawcross, calls them). Ogden’s study is discursive, describing key moments, as he sees them, in Milton’s reception history, and following no real chronological order. From the point of view of this thesis, Ogden’s most important contribution is the particular attention he draws to the brothers Thomas and Joseph Warton’s interventions in Milton studies in the latter part of the eighteenth century; the Wartons are utterly overlooked by Shawcross, but they play a major part in the story of the Poems’ eighteenth-century reception. John Leonard’s 2013 Faithful Labourers, meanwhile, confines its elegant, thematically organised observations to the field of Paradise Lost. The lack of a reception study devoted solely to the Poems is understandable for the same reason, I venture, that one is necessary: for most of the period under 6 See John T. Shawcross, Milton: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols. (1970–72); James Ogden, John Milton’s Literary Reputation (Lampeter, 2010); John Leonard, Faithful Labourers: A Reception History of Paradise Lost (Oxford, 2013). 7 Critical Heritage, I. i. Shawcross begins at 1628 so as to include quotations from some of Milton’s own poetry dated to this time, though the poems in question would not be published until 1645. 8 discussion, the volume was not read, analysed, or otherwise experienced as a whole, but broken up into various permutations, with certain works excerpted, anthologised, adapted or translated into forms far from their first incarnation. Keeping the original 1645 collection in mind is difficult from 1673 onwards, when their second and arguably more famous edition was published, but it becomes almost impossible after 1695, when the Poems were relegated to the back of the last volume of Milton’s Poetical Works, positioned after Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regain’d.
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