Literary autonomy is precisely what the works Milton produced in the 1640s and 1650s most obviously lack. By the time the 1645 volume was published, he had given up verse—even occasional verse. Only three of its poems, three sonnets, belong to the preceding five years. The other most recent English poem, Lycidas, dates all the way back to 1637, and the most recent work in Latin is the Epitaphium Damonis of 1640. In the meantime, Milton had turned to prose, finding there a use for the studies that had so far borne little poetic fruit. At first he was inclined to regard these controversial writings as labors of the left hand, works required of him by duty, but ill-suited to achieve the undying fame that was properly the laureate's meed. But early in the 1650s, following the execution of King Charles, the institution of the Commonwealth, and his own appointment as Latin Secretary to the Council of State, he began to think differently. If he was not a King's Poet, he was nevertheless the divinely inspired spokesman of the nation, and, as such, he was acting the laureate part for which he had so long prepared himself. In his Defense of the English People he had, he said, "performed … the service which [he] thought would be of most use to the commonwealth" and in doing so had erected a "monument which will not speedily perish."¹³⁶ "It is not possible for me, nor can it ever be my desire, to ascribe to myself anything greater or more glorious."¹³⁷ Responding to an opponent who had mocked him for his lack of renown, he wrote:

The truth is, I had learned to be long silent, to be able to forbear writing … and carried silently in my own breast what, if I had chosen then, as well as now, to bring forth, I could long since have gained a name. But I was not eager for fame, who is slow of pace…. It was not the fame of everything that I was waiting for, but the opportunity.¹³⁸

Milton's development depended, to a degree unequaled by that of any previous laureate, on opportunity, on the chance of a favorable occasion. In the English revolution he found that opportunity—or so he thought.

He was mistaken. His Defense did not outlive the government for which it was written. Nor could it fairly have been expected to do so. Where Milton saw an epic account of the English struggle for liberty, later readers have been hard put to find more than a violently partisan diatribe heavily charged with ad hominem abuse, a book so dependent for its emphases and structure on the work of its opponent that it can scarcely claim an independent existence. Even a critic intent on tracing common aesthetic principles in the prose and the verse finds himself obliged to complain of "the disparity between Milton's ambitious claims for [the First Defense] and our feeling of disappointment at the delay, if not the squanderings, of his genius."¹³⁹ That Milton should have erred in just this way is, however, not surprising. His mistake was the product of tendencies strong both in his generation and in the laureate tradition. I have said enough already of the preemption of the cavalier poets and their work by interests inimical to the maintenance of literary autonomy. Davenant's devotion to the royal court and its occasions and Cowley's to the Royal Society and its are but two signs of an erosion of autonomy that affected amateur, professional, and laureate alike. But even without the erasure of boundaries characteristic of his belated generation, Milton, as laureate, might have been susceptible to the blandishments of power—so long, that is, as he could convince himself of its legitimacy. The very process of differentiation by which the laureate defined and presented himself—a process whose result was enforced by the authoritative example of Virgil and by the Renaissance tradition of civic humanism—led him to make the reason of state the reason of his work. Already in earlier generations this inclination had decisively and, often, destructively manifested itself. Spenser's defense of English policy in Ireland went a long way toward ruining Book V of The Faerie Queene. Only the pastoral retreat of Book VI and the reintroduction of Colin Clout restored his poetic integrity, but that restoration was accomplished at considerable cost to his laureate identity. A similar inclination drew Drayton toward topography and Daniel toward history and prose. And from the same laureate sources came Jonson's abandonment of drama in favor of masque. To serve a monarch, or a policy, or simply a body of established fact, Spenser, Drayton, Daniel, and Jonson each gave up something of his artistic autonomy and with it the role of poet current among the amateurs and professionals of his own generation. But perhaps the most extreme example, and the one closest to Milton both in time and in partisan sympathy, is George Wither. Born in 1588, Wither renounced the pastoral and satiric guises of his youth to emerge in the early 1640s as the indefatigable poet, prophet, and pamphleteer of the English revolution. "Wither had," as one critic has remarked, "the ability to delight, but it deserted him when he decided that his duty was to teach. He is, in a sense, a casualty of Renaissance poetic—… of the Horatian, Sidneyan, Bartasian notion of the poet's function."¹⁴⁰ Though a far more sophisticated interpreter of that notion, Milton too fell victim to it. Unlike Wither, he had the good sense to write his pamphlets in prose. But his good sense did not keep him from thinking those pamphlets the great work he was destined to produce—the great work that aftertimes would not willingly let die.

Had Milton stopped here, aftertimes would surely not have allowed him the laureate standing he claimed. As a poetry of promise, a poetry that constantly looks forward to something that it is not itself, the work collected in the Poems of 1645 depends for its richest resonance on a fulfillment that comes only with Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. Lacking that fulfillment, Milton's early verse would have remained unnoticed in his lifetime and might not have enjoyed even the posthumous attention accorded the work of such amateurs as Marvell, Crashaw, or Vaughan. But of course Milton did not stop. With the decline of the Commonwealth and the approaching defeat of the political and religious positions he had defended, his attitude again changed. Moved in part by the example of Cowley, Davenant, Fanshawe, and Benlowes, he returned to poetry and began work on the epic that was to be Paradise Lost, a poem that would acknowledge no patron but God. Gone was the expectation that the laureate's position depended on official recognition. "Not sedulous by nature to indite / Wars, hitherto the only argument / Heroic deemed," Milton shifted the action of the epic from the outer world of history to the inner world of the individual mind, to "the better fortitude / Of patience and heroic martyrdom," and made the poet responsible only to his own inspired vision (379). No longer was he prompted—as Spenser had been in The Faerie Queene, or Jonson in his masques, or he himself in his pamphlets—by reason of state. In the epilogue to the second edition of the Defension Prima, Milton used the term public reason to explain why he had written the book with such haste, pro eo ac ratio turn reipub. postulabat.¹⁴¹ In Paradise Lost, the term reappears in the mouth of Satan, who uses it to justify his temptation of Adam and Eve (287). The difference suggests the distance Milton traveled as laureate.

History, as Milton portrays it in the opening and concluding books of Paradise Lost, constitutes a series of betrayals, acts of individual and collective disobedience to God, countered in each age by one man chosen of God and obedient to his commands—"the one just man alive,"

Noah, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, David, Josiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel were such men, and so too were Samson and Jesus, the protagonists of Milton's last poems. It is in this line that Milton inscribes himself. Once again the chosen people have betrayed their sacred trust, and once again the just man of God has risen up "in darkness and with dangers compassed round" to illustrate and justify God's ways. Though an epic poet, he is an epic poet with a difference. He imitates the genealogical-historical catalogues of Virgil, Ariosto, Spenser, and Camoens, but, where they celebrated a family, a race, or a nation and led to the glory of a particular patron, he records the sins of humanity and leads to the coming of Christ. He has no other patron.

The laureate's new isolation from the institutions of power shapes the presentation and substance of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, as it did those of their predecessor. Like Paradise Lost and unlike virtually all other previous laureate verse, these works appear with no sign of a connection between poet and state. Rather, they ignore the political dispensation under which their author lived and express contempt for any change that is not also a change in heart. Jesus disdains an earthly kingdom and Samson, though a hero of action rather than of suffering, knows that his deeds can deliver Israel only if Israel is inwardly prepared to accept deliverance. "The deeds themselves, though mute, [speak] loud the doer" (557). Inspired deeds have a self-presentational value. But "in nations grown corrupt"—and from Milton's point of view such corruption has characterized most of human history, including finally the history of his own time—they are likely to have no other effect.

Milton's laureate self-fashioning deeply informs each of these last poems. Paradise Regained, as I have already suggested, draws on the experience of his early years, on the experience of the great young man, sure of his calling but unsure how to fulfill it. In a similar manner, Samson Agonistes reflects the experience of the older man whose work in the cause of liberty had failed to achieve its expected end and who seemed denied a second chance.¹⁴² The crisis of his defeat, his blindness, and his captivity forces Samson, as the crisis of 1660 must have forced Milton, to review the signs of his vocation. Can this be what was meant? "Why," Samson asks,

Like Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes discovers a gap between the apparent meaning of the signs of special election and the situation in which the protagonist finds himself, a gap between God's plan and man's understanding.

Milton had known such a gap in the development of his own career. At various times in the years that stretched between the first announcement of his laureate ambition and the writing of Paradise Lost, he must have felt that the "one talent which is death to hide," was, as he said in reflecting on his blindness, "lodged with me useless" (168). Though he was always eager to serve therewith his maker and present his true account, the means of service were often lacking. At first the literary tradition failed him. What use was a great poetic talent in an age when poetry had lost its autonomy, when there remained nothing for the poet to do but demonstrate stylistic virtuosity while adorning the ordinary occasions of public and private life, nothing for him to be but another son of Orpheus? And then the cavalier world was swept away by a revolution in church and state, a revolution that made demands on him no less destructive of his laureate purpose. What use a great poetic talent in an age that required prose? Neither the Caroline peace of the 1630s nor the civil war and Puritan Commonwealth of the 1640s and 1650s provided a way of achieving a laureate career, a way of being at once poet, prophet, and spokesman of the governing order.

Never was Milton able to combine all three functions. But sometime in the late 1650s he began to forge a new role for the laureate based exclusively on the functions of poet and prophet. No longer need the laureate model himself on "wise Demodocus" singing "at King Alcinous' feast" (31) or on Virgil reading to Augustus. Henceforth exile and alienation would be the signs of his calling. Elements of this new role begin appearing in Milton's work as early as the Nativity Ode, but only much later do they come together to constitute an altered idea of the laureate poet. What we have commonly ignored has been the difficulty of that coming together and, more particularly, the way in which Milton's generational position contributed both to the problem and to its solution. As the coeval of Davenant and Cowley, Milton suffered from the diminished autonomy of poetry, and, as their coeval, he wrote Paradise Lost.

Like Spenser and Jonson, though with still greater effect, Milton inscribed in the text of our culture a new self-presentational message. And, like them, he did so by placing himself in a strongly marked historical sequence—or rather, in his case, at the converging point of two such sequences, one of vatic poets, the other of Biblical prophets. The very weakness of his own literary generation, its insufficiency as foundation for a great poetic career, required that such diachronic pointers be all the more emphatic. But for all his explicit emphasis on his likeness to and his rivalry with the prophets and poets of Hebrew and pagan antiquity, Milton, like his Elizabethan and Jacobean forebears, also related himself, however unobtrusively, to his literary contemporaries. As we have already noticed, Paradise Lost resembles the heroic poems of the cavaliers at so many points that it comes finally to seem the fulfillment of a generational ambition. Such resemblance was not, however, what his contemporaries were quickest to notice. They were struck rather by the differences that lifted Milton above his age. The most obvious of these was that unsociable avoidance of rime to whose significance I earlier alluded. It alone would have sufficed to put Milton in a class apart not only from the cavaliers but also from their younger, Restoration followers—including, as Marvell pointed out, both the newly appointed "Town-Bayes," John Dryden, and Marvell himself.

I too transported by the mode offend,
And while I meant to praise thee must commend.
Thy verse created like thy theme sublime,
In number, weight, and measure, needs not rime.
(210)

As Marvell here suggests, the neglect of rime was caught up in a still more powerful—more powerful because more pervasive and less obviously intended—sign of Milton's unique eminence: his sublimity. Other poets of his generation—Davenant and Cowley among them—had striven for such elevation. Milton alone achieved it. So convincing is that achievement that even now we are more likely to read it as symptom than as sign, as a reflection of Milton's nature rather than as a conventional construct whose meaning derives from a socially determined and largely arbitrary play of signifiers and signifieds. But nature does not make one arrangement of words lofty and another low, nor does it decide which will say "laureate." In 1579 Spenser's homely shepherd talk conveyed this meaning. In 1616 Jonson's epigrammatic middle style did it. And in 1667 it took Milton's Latinate sublimity. What unites these radically differing modes is the dialectical relation each had to the poetic idiom of its author's generation.

Self-presentation is inevitably the reflex of a particular moment—even when the moment seems as unpropitious as Milton's. The differences by which the self declares its identity must necessarily be located in a synchronie system, in a communally established sense of social reality, a sense renewed and revised with each successive generation. The aspiring laureate comes on stage, his mind filled with lines that in earlier ages have served Homer or Virgil or Horace, only to find that the script has changed, that the laureate part has been eliminated or must be played in a costume and with gestures that utterly transform it. Yet such transformation is precisely what the laureate in his devotion to a fixed standard of moral worth can least afford to admit. No wonder that Jonson's work is riven by irreconcilable paradox, that Spenser's ends in a sustained meditation on mutability, or that Milton's turns repeatedly to the uncertainties of greatness in history. Whatever the answer, the question could not be avoided. How in this generation can I respond to the laureate summons my talent imposes on me, and how can I make my high office known?

Notes

¹³⁶ Milton, Works, VIII, 253.

¹³⁷ Milton, Works, VIII, 19.

¹³⁸ Quoted by Parker, Reputation, p. 32.

¹³⁹ Thomas Kranidas, The Fierce Equation: A Study of Milton's Decorum (The Hague: Mouton, 1965), p. 82. For other similar complaints about the First Defense, see Samuel L. Wolff, "Milton's 'Advocatum Nescio Quern,'" MLQ, 2 (1941), 559; James Holly Hanford, A Milton Handbook, 4th ed. (New York: Crofts, 1946), p. 110; and E. M. W. Tillyard, Milton (1930; rev. ed. London: Chatto, 1966), p. 159.

¹⁴⁰ Joan Grundy, The Spenserian Poets (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), p. 161. Grundy draws on an important article by Allan Pritchard, "George Wither: The Poet as Prophet," SP, 59 (1962), 211-230. Both Grundy's chapter and Pritchard's article discuss Wither in terms very suggestive for the student of laureate self-presentation. Christopher Hill has recently examined the similarities in career and ideas between Milton and Wither. See "George Wither and John Milton," in English Renaissance Studies, Presented to Dame Helen Gardner, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 212-227.

¹⁴¹ Milton, Works, VII, 554.

¹⁴² See Frank Kermode, "Milton in Old Age," The Southern Review, n.s. 11 (1975), 513-529.