“Overflowing Cups for Amorous Jove”: Abundance and Attraction in Milton’s Elegies

Abstract

In “‘Overflowing Cups for Amorous Jove’: Abundance and Attraction in Milton’s Elegies,” John S. Garrison explores the entanglement of loss and longing in Milton’s early elegiac verse, where pleasure is derived from a state of absence or lack. Careful to distinguish this economy of desire from more familiar Petrarchan formulations, Garrison shows that in Milton’s elegies, “absence characterizes a state of erotic engagement where the speaker finds pleasurable excess in his own lack of fulfillment.” Calling our attention to the genre’s dialectical qualities, Milton’s Latin elegies bring into view powerful articulations of eroticism’s constitutive lack and the queer forms of desire that follow from it.