tutor, Nathaniel Tovey, he had worked hard and acquired a qualification which was the equivalent, in modern classification, of a borderline First. He decided to stay on and do a Master’s degree. Since the late sixteenth century, graduates of Oxford and Cambridge have been allowed to shift to MA from BA status by virtue of some almost magical notion of grandeur conferred by the two institutions; they could leave and earn themselves a postgraduate qualification as a kind of long-service award. Why exactly Milton chose to continue with a regime of intensive study is a matter for speculation; what is known is that, on Christmas Day 1629, he began what would be his first significant poem in English, ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’. Poems celebrating holy days were a customary feature of Renaissance culture, but what is striking about this one is a sense of intellectual presence which carries it beyond standard expectations of a respectful poeticisation of the birth of Christ. He virtually challenges the reader to engage with the gigantic complexity of the event. It set a precedent for verse that would follow, and introduced Milton as a figure for whom poetry, while attending to its aesthetic obligations, was a vehicle for contention, exposition and ratiocination.
The political and theological issues of Milton’s early years would play their part in subsequent writing and thinking, but what of the role of contemporary poetry?
Shakespeare was still alive during Milton’s early childhood and the Mermaid Tavern, where Ben Jonson and other writers with a taste for drink held their ‘merry meetings’, was a few hundred yards from Bread Street. In 1621, John Donne, then aged forty-nine, became Dean of St Paul’s and Milton, as a pupil at the Cathedral school, would have heard him preach. Donne’s verse would not appear in print until 1633, shortly after his death, but manuscript copies were in circulation among poetry enthusiasts of the day and it is not impossible that these would have passed through the Bread Street household. Even if the young Milton knew little of the verses themselves he must have been aware that the Dean, the renowned religious orator, had turned his skills privately to the secular mode of verse. It is therefore both intriguing and puzzling that Donne and his work feature neither in Milton’s writings nor in records of his opinions.
Twentieth-century consensus esteems Donne as the archetype of a school of writing, predominant in England during the early seventeenth century, known as Metaphysical Poetry. Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the Poets (1779) offered a concise description of the Metaphysicals’ technique; in their verse ‘heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’. Johnson was referring, albeit disapprovingly, to the so-called conceit, a metaphor which emphasises and frequently does not attempt to resolve the paradoxical relationship between two ideas, perceptions or states of mind. T.S. Eliot in a 1921 essay on the Metaphysicals offered a single line from Donne’s ‘The Relic’ as an example of this: ‘A bracelet of bright hair about the bone’. The bone referred to is the wrist of a man’s skeleton, uncovered many years after burial but still bearing the thread of a woman’s hair as a token of his endless love for her. In eight words Donne has compressed a catalogue of opposing concepts: life as temporary versus love as timeless; physical decay versus imperishable beauty; a decorative token versus eternal commitment, etc.
Other poets of the period whose work involved the frequent use of the adventurous conceit were George Herbert (1593–1633) and Andrew Marvell (1621–78). As these dates indicate several of the writers who would later be classified as belonging to the Metaphysical School were near contemporaries of Milton – indeed Marvell would become his colleague and close friend. As a young man, when evolving his own perceptions of English poetry, Milton would have been aware of the writings of the first generation of the Metaphysicals, particularly that of Donne and Herbert (Herbert, incidentally, was University Orator during Milton’s first few years at Cambridge), but we know practically nothing of what he thought of it. Parker, Milton’s biographer, writes that ‘London was not so large that a young poet found it impossible to meet the masters of his art if he desired to do so. Milton, unfortunately, left us no account of such meetings’ (1968, p. 61).
A number of questions are raised by Milton’s apparent reluctance to address himself to contemporary verse. Did he, as a classicist, regard the Greek and Latin poets as innately superior to their English-language counterparts? If that were the case then why did he also begin to write verse in English? Another possibility is suggested by the thesis and indeed the title of a book by the modern critic Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (1973), in which Bloom argues that many aspiring poets are so convinced of their own uniqueness that they set about detaching themselves from the reputations of both their precursors and their contemporaries. The only occasion on which Milton did refer in print to another major English poet was in a short poem called ‘On Shakespeare’, written in Cambridge in 1630 and printed in 1632 among prefatory material to the Shakespeare Second Folio. Shakespeare had been dead for fourteen years when Milton wrote the poem and it was already becoming evident that his enduring genius would outstrip his contemporaneous popularity. Milton’s poem is at once diligently respectful and unnerving, in that he addressed it not so much to Shakespeare the man as to his work which, he implies, is of far more significance than his living presence. The question of whether, or to what extent, Milton was familiar with Shakespeare’s writing has been the cause of speculation for three centuries. They were near-contemporaries and by consensus the most important English authors of the Renaissance whose legacies have endured matchlessly since their time. ‘On Shakespeare’ demonstrates that Milton was in awe of his reputation – anyone of the period who was not would have been a hermit – but it tells us nothing of whether he had formed an opinion on his work from reading it or seeing it performed. It would be misleading to assume that because he had been commissioned to contribute to the Preface of the Folio he had read the rest of it. Before 1623 less than half of Shakespeare’s works were in print, largely individual plays in short books known as quartos, and many of these contained only the names of the theatre companies which had performed them rather than that of the author. The rest were ‘foul’ copies, longhand versions of the plays, often transcribed and amended by those involved in performances. There is no proof that Milton purchased a copy of the Folio and it is unlikely that he would have been given a complimentary volume – this convention of token rewards for contributors to publications is relatively recent – but there is now convincing evidence that he owned a copy and read it diligently. One of the rare surviving 1623 Folios has been deposited in the Free Library of Philadelphia since 1944. It was annotated in longhand in the seventeenth century by its seemingly anonymous first owner but in September 2019 the Cambridge Milton specialist Jason Scott Warren looked at it and found striking similarities between Milton’s handwriting, recorded in various documents from his youth onwards, and the annotator’s. Other academics familiar with Milton manuscripts concurred, notably Will Poole of Oxford, and some went further. Not only is the handwriting identical to that known to be by Milton, the Folio annotator and the poet share grammatical and stylistic habits. The annotations are generally brief marginal notes rather than observations on the nature of Shakespeare’s qualities as a literary artist. For example, he underscores idiosyncratic rhyme echoes which, perhaps coincidentally, resurface in Milton’s verse. Nonetheless, the indication that Milton ‘close read’ Shakespeare raises questions about how this dialogue, albeit a one-sided exchange, between the two men would impress itself on the work of the former, notably Comus and Paradise Lost.
‘On Shakespeare’ marked his first encounter with his esteemed predecessor and one couplet is particularly unsettling:
Then thou our fancy of itself bereaving,Dost make us marble with too much conceiving
Here Milton seems to be, with polite ambiguity, suggesting that the influence of Shakespeare, or at least his work, could be counterproductive. Milton implies that ‘too much conceiving’ (the overuse of extravagant metaphor) will consign poets to the past (‘make us marble’) rather than cause them to endure via their work. Is he suggesting that Shakespeare’s surpassing skill with figurative language has become both his monument and, more sadly, the self-indulgent inheritance of his successors, the Metaphysicals? ‘On The Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ makes it clear that Milton regarded poetry more as a vehicle for the clarification of essential notions of human condition than, as he implied of Shakespeare,
