Abstract
Milton’s English sonnets, the chief poetic output of his middle years, pronounce the civilising writer, staking out matters of public notice and displaying private style. We ended the last chapter with the ironic ‘Captain or Colonel’; we begin this with two sonnets to women, both found in fair copy on the same page of the Trinity Manuscript and printed adjacently in the edition of 1645, both bearing the marks of social exchange, each establishing with moral seriousness a different type of woman. Neither is precisely datable; one might guess at about 1642. Since the early 1640s also saw Milton’s first marriage and his divorce tracts, images of women seem a good place to begin.
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Notes
Milton’s Sonnets, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (London, 1966), p. 107; Leo Miller, ‘John Milton’s “Lost” Sonnet to Mary Powell’, MQ, 25 (1991), 102–7
Leo Miller, ‘A German Critique of Milton’s Areopagitica in 1647’, N & Q, 234 (NS 36) (1989), 29–30.
Stanley Fish, ‘Driving from the Letter: Truth and Indeterminacy in Milton’s Areopagitica’, in Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 234–54.
Annabel Patterson, ‘“Forc’d Fingers”: Milton’ Early Poems and Ideological Constraint’, in ‘The Muses Common-Weale’: Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988), p. 21.
Thomas N. Corns, ‘Milton’s Quest for Respectability’, Modern Language Review 77 (1982), 769–79.
William B. Hunter, ‘Milton Translates the Psalms’, Philological Quarterly, 40 (1961), 485–94.
See, for example, P 322–35. A recent subtle and detailed account of Milton’s use of the psalms is Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Milton’s Epics and the Book of Psalms (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
The latest edition of Tenure (with a new English translation of the first Defence), detailing Milton’s polemic against the Presbyterians, is Milton, Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
A recent study of the History representing the first position is Nicholas von Malzahn, Milton’s ‘History of Britain’: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991)
Austin Woolrych, ‘The Date of the Digression in Milton’s History of Britain’, in For Veronica Wedgwood These: Studies in Seventeenth-Century History, ed. R. Ollard and P. Tudor-Craig (London: Collins, 1986), pp. 217–46.
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© 1995 Cedric C. Brown
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Brown, C.C. (1995). Cultural Renewal in a Time of Free Speaking. In: John Milton. Macmillan Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24150-7_5
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