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7. Milton in the Modern

The Invention of Personality

WILLIAM LOGAN

WHAT IF WE KNEW, to its determining hour, when Milton wrote each of his sonnets? He can't have meant, in the ripeness or rottenness of their conception, for them to appear together, the way they do as specimen days in some collections. Yet he published them together himself, gaggled like geese in both 1645 and 1673, omitting only those the mercurial temper of politics rendered inopportune. Gathered together, yet rendered apart—Milton's two dozen sonnets vary within and without, divided from each other and from the tradition. The sonnets are a peculiar instance, a peculiarly conflicted instance, where tradition proposes and the artist disposes, where the poet's inheritance permits his deviation from tradition, and only the inheritance permits such deviation. Milton's sonnets represent one of the first moments—perhaps the first moment—when a poet writing in English took his form for granted, when the poet's respect for the rules required him to break the rules. Where the innocence of form was lost, the moment of Eliot's dissociation of sensibility began. If we believed in such things, that would be the beginning of the modern.

The sonnet is an old form in English but older elsewhere, first picked up by poets who showed their taste by what they collected in travels to the Continent, whether objets d'art or the trifle of a language, some affectation or affection of manner, a trivial poetic form. It would be impossible to recreate the sonnetmad decade of the 1590s, when young men

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abandoned themselves to sonneteering, without reference to tulipomania or the South Sea Bubble in the centuries that followed; but even wars may seem fancies or crazes, however much they cloak themselves in belief.

Ben Jonson, in his witty, probably drink-fueled conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden in 1619 (some of the only table talk of Elizabethan playwrights to survive), claimed the sonnet was no better than Procrustes' bed—where some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short.^[1] The boyish poets of the 1590s were trying to impress each other as much as their lovers. In a way difficult to imagine a very few years later, they became addicted to a poetic form. Poetic forms may seem difficult to poets for whom rhyme and meter are not common currency, but writing sonnets can be as hard to stop as swallowing laudanum or drinking absinthe.

Sonnets can never be as hardened in the reading as the writing; but they show how easy it is to wear out a form, to make writer or reader sick through overexposure. (It is one reason to think Shakespeare wrote his over a shorter rather than longer period—they burn with intensities of months or years, not decades.) By the turn of the century the craze was over: when Shakespeare's sonnets were published in 1609, they must have seemed stale memories of the vanished Elizabethan Age. New king, new courtiers; many in the old court had died or been executed before Elizabeth's death (Burghley and Essex, for example). The Sonnets did not arouse much comment when finally published (some say because the book was too personal, more than sonnet sentiment allowed) and apparently did not reach a second edition. The sale was small compared to Venus and Adonis, which had inflamed young Elizabethans only sixteen years before and was still in print. By 1640, when Shakespeare's sonnets were reprinted, they were so old-fashioned the new publisher did not hesitate to change the sexes willy-nilly, making the fair youth a fairer lady.

Milton was spurred to sonnets twice in his life, or rather in two periods: as a proud and headstrong university student of the late 1620s, a boy who had absorbed Petrarch and Della Casa, Tasso and Bembo; and as the older, grittier, battle-scarred pamphleteer. The surviving sonnets are numbered 1–19 in the edition of 1673, which also includes an unnumbered sonnet with a tail (“On the New Forcers of Conscience”), but not a few left in manuscript—three to heroes of the Civil War and one, on blindness, that preens with mention of Milton's defense of liberty. Their published order, though roughly chronological, has allowed scholars to disagree about exact composition. (These notes on Milton have been written on the backs of

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Parker, the biographer; Smart and Honigmann, who edited the sonnets; Carey and Leonard, who edited editions of the poems. I've used Carey's text but have followed one reading in the Trinity manuscript.)^[2]

The seven sonnets of Milton's Cambridge days are a vision of nightingales and shepherdesses, pastoral romance out of college handbooks. The first and last are in English—Sonnet 1 begins, unpromisingly, “O nightingale, that on yon bloomy spray” (bloomy spray, indeed!). It is in fact the first English sonnet on the nightingale. The five sonnets between have been cast in Italian, an occasionally clumsy Italian a romantic college boy might invent. In his biography, W. R. Parker makes a pretty tale of them, a plaintive love story that may have fact filtered into it; but if Milton were as tongue-tied as the tale suggests, his beloved could easily have been fantasy. The convention-and clicheé-ridden lines have had life squeezed out of them; what could have been more tempting, for a boy schooling himself on Italian sonnets, than to dream up a bella donna as his object of desire? (Milton was mulish, admitted to “honest haughtiness,”^[3] and for unspecified offenses had been sent down his first year—perhaps he was unworldly about women. Other undergrads called him “the Lady of Christ's College,” and it wasn't flattering.)^[4]

If the girl did exist, if the sonnets aren't a farrago of fitting lies, her name was probably Emilia and she might have been a singer of talent. A suitor's pair of sonnets (2 and 3), wooing her in flowery, formal terms, are interrupted by a canzone, complaining that Milton's friends have been teasing him for writing in Italian (rather than speaking up in English, as Parker has it)—the canzone is in Italian, too. The sonnet that follows (4), to his close friend Charles Diodati, confesses the poet's mortifying shock at falling in love. The closing sonnets (5 and 6) return to address the young woman in conventional if hothouse metaphors, with flashes of lightning, an adamant heart. Much of Sonnet 5 is taken up describing a sigh. Only when writing to Diodati (whose father was Italian—Milton could have met an Italian girl in the family circle) does something of the erotic leak in.

The poet has fallen in love, not with a sonnet's ideal sweetheart of gold hair and rose cheeks (Né treccie d'oro, né guancia vermiglia) but with a girl with black lashes. In no other way does Milton betray any notion that a poet might break the rules (though scholars are impressed by his tortured syntax, which a reader must assume is not mere clumsiness). In no other way has he learned a thing from Shakespeare, whose Sonnets might have been difficult to find twenty years after publication. To read Milton, you'd think sonnet writing had fallen into mere bookishness after Shakespeare's

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plumes of rhetoric. The poet who in Lycidas took pastoral elegy by the throat hasn't been born.

The final sonnet of Milton's youth (7), probably dated late in 1632 (possibly a year earlier), probably some months after he left Cambridge (he had taken his M.A. in July), is by a writer more confident in his soiled phrasings if still content in the purity of convention—in the Trinity manuscript, a draft letter encloses the sonnet as “some of my nightward thoughts… made up in a Petrarchian stanza.”^[5]

	How soon hath time the subtle thief of youth,
	Stol'n on his wing my three and twentieth year!
	My hasting days fly on with full career,
	But my late spring no bud or blossom sheweth.
	Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth.

The language never again measures up to the opening metaphor's sharp practice. Subtle was a subtle word (Milton may have known the Latin originally meant “finely woven”); and perhaps the main sense here is, as the OED suggests, crafty or cunning in a treacherous way. But Milton used it in other ways: shadowing the meaning are “not easily grasped”; “skillful, clever”; and “characterized by penetration, acumen.” Milton later wrote in Areopagitica of a “Nation not slow and dull, but… acute to invent, suttle.”

Many boys feel their youth vanishing without accomplishment (to feel old at twenty-three is no feat); and this feeling would have been keener when many boys died young (think of the pressure Shakespeare brought on his “lovely boy” to hurry up and have children), when plague could ravage a college town, as Cambridge was ravaged in 1626 and 1630. Yet this boy had already written L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. (Milton was a little proud of looking boyish—at forty he looked thirty, he noted in Defensio Secunda.)^[6] His termite-ridden Petrarchan sonnets had blossomed into these twinned poems in a form quite un-English, poems drenched in Shakespearean reading, not just A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet but minor plays besides. Two years earlier Milton had written the epitaph “On Shakespeare,” published among the prefatory poems in the Second Folio (1632). Milton must have had access to the First Folio; perhaps he received a gratis copy of the Second (the bookseller lived just down the street from Milton's London home). In 1640 the epitaph reappeared in Poems: Written by Wil. Shakespeare, Gent., the book that brought the sonnets back into print.

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One can imagine a smitten youth, impatient in feeling but imperfect in Italian (or a youth imagining what it was to be smitten), composing the Emilia sonnets to impress a girl who knew the language, knew it when Milton's friends did not (this is Parker's fairy tale); but even if she existed, the girl might have been allegorical by the time she made her way into verse. Similarly, a young man who had expected to be ordained at twentythree, who disliked theological students at Cambridge (There is really hardly anyone among us… who, almost completely unskilled and unlearned in Philology and Philosophy alike, does not flutter off to Theology unfledged,… learning barely enough for sticking together a short harangue),^[7] might feel the harrying of time, especially when practicing the verses to which his ambition was increasingly, if privately, devoted.

The sonnet is a form particularly permeable to a brief suit of inspiration and is sufficiently tangled to provide resistance to making the barren lines bear. For later poets it has been the empty vessel kept at hand, into which inspiration might be poured. Its brevity forces the poet to attenuate his thinking and concentrate his energies: the divagations permitted by blank verse, even encouraged by it, are subject to different laws of passion. When inspiration is hot, a poet may not want to muse over what form seems suitable—to think with formal calculation would be to lose the steaming immediacy, which is why icier and more formulary passions look so much worse in the sonnet. Milton's Italian sonnets are those of a cold fish—even emotions hot in the feeling can be frosty on the page, unless art intervenes.

The sonnet thrives on hot blood—it is Italian after all. That is bad argument but not, not necessarily, an untrue observation. Such notions of intrinsic character are absurd, yet they bring the opposing case into antagonistic relief: that form has no character whatsoever and in no way responds to certain types of inspiration. Such a case, neatly in the negative, has flaws as telling as its responsibilities. We know from the successes of a form—in the villanelle, say—that it acts on some designs, some meanings, more willingly than others. With its recuperations and choral returns, its brevity, it is difficult for the villanelle to answer to narrative, which is why narrative can be a tour de force (Elizabeth Bishop's “One Art” is a triumph over form as much as a triumph of form). The rhyme scheme of Shakespeare's sonnet was formally most responsive to three examples and a moralizing turn (a turn so often immorally tacked on it could have been detached and used elsewhere—it's not surprising, only embarrassing, that Sonnets 36 and 96 have the same closing couplet). The

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breaches of form's decorum, its tacitly elicited phrasing, are therefore often its victories.

After this, youth really did fly on. There was a long hiatus of withdrawal and private study, and only after the outbreak of war a decade later did Milton return to sonnets. In 1642 he was living in London, in Aldersgate Street. He had spent a year on the Continent, visiting the exiled Grotius in Paris, the nearly blind Galileo in Florence. Comus and Lycidas had reached print. Charles Diodati had died. Having abandoned thoughts of the priesthood, Milton had become something of a pamphlet polemicist on the Reformation. In the spring of 1642 he had mysteriously married one Mary Powell—disappearing into the country, home he returns a Married-man, that went out a Batchelor.^[8] Some weeks later she returned just as mysteriously to her parents. By August the Civil War had begun.

The comedy of potted history was not comedy to those living in London when the Parliamentarian army retreated that October, leaving the roads open to the troops of Charles I. In the panic Milton wrote a sonnet and tacked it to his door (or so his amanuensis was led to believe). It began:

	Captain or colonel, or knight in arms,
	Whose chance on these defenceless doors may seize,
	If ever deed of honour did thee please,
	Guard them, and him within protect from harms,
	He can requite thee, for he knows the charms
	That call fame on such gentle acts as these,
	And he can spread thy name o'er lands and seas.

This is a curious and unpromising act of extortion. Sweating soldiers would probably not stop to read a sonnet before smashing in the door—this, like his somewhat lead-footed verses on the death of the carter Thomas Hobson, may be one of the rare poems to promise Milton had a sense of humor (though a very dark sense). Only a poet with no hope of success would say, “Lift not thy spear against the muses' bower.” Spear? The Cavaliers have become Alexander's Macedonians.

Although very droll, this incident does hint at stoic courage or a withering high-mindedness in the face of danger. What matters is that Milton was—at least in jest—willing to offer his poetic talents, in whorish fashion, to prevent the pillage of his household. (The poem is as donnish as its distant legatee, Auden's “‘The Truest Poetry Is the Most Feigning.'”)

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No one took him up on the offer because, possibly short of ammunition, faced with quickly mustered militia, the royalist army retreated. To Milton's friends the joke might have seemed gallows humor, the sort wits approve; but it strikes an odd note, included beside love sonnets in his first book of poems, published in 1645. The war had been over for just half a year, less or not at all when the book was arranged—such a poem is either wicked (“Here's what I was prepared to do, at a low point”) or triumphal (“How far we have come from the dark days”). This sonnet marks out its ground to one day, one hour, in a mood where pride stiffened the purpose of panic; and Milton thought that mood worth preserving. It is from the strangeness of that moment, that failure to follow the conventions of sonnet writing, that we gain access to character: the form of the sonnet has been opened to alien matter.

Poems of Mr. John Milton was almost ignored. As Parker points out, the first edition was still being sold fifteen years later. However often Milton's occasions of sonnet writing accorded with occasions of temper (or, more commonly, of moods variant to those that could be channeled into religious verse), they oddly respect his oddities of character. Few poets want to appear only in one guise, but poets like to repeat their successes—applause is the spur to repetition. The sonnet gave Milton an out; it was a form at first too trivial for serious art (yet not so trivial it couldn't later be used to serious purpose). Although Tasso had addressed heroic figures in it, although—on rare occasion—the Elizabethans had cheated it of the clicheés of love, Milton gave the sonnet up to personality, and so gave it personality. He could make grim jokes or smooth lies (10, “To the Lady Margaret Ley,” is unctuous compliment), or he could write encomia for older friends (13, “To Mr. H. Lawes, on his Airs”); but not until the sonnet turned various did personality intervene. That is, the form of variety came before inventions in the verse line.

	Harry whose tuneful and well-measured song
	First taught our English music how to span
	Words with just note and accent, not to scan
	With Midas' ears, committing short and long.

The sonnet for composer Henry Lawes prefaced his Choice Psalms (1648)—the Civil War did not rupture the friendship between royalist musician and republican poet (the poet's own brother fought for the royalists). Milton's personality lounges across that chummy “Harry” (it marks its distance from Sonnet 4—which began with a friend's last

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name—and its closeness to the familiarity of Falstaff). Invention (Lawes's ability to set the music as if the words mattered) had become idiom. Here you begin to sense how lightly, by 1646, Milton was able to address the sonnet; and in three violent sonnets the same year (or nearly the same year) the depth of that personality is judged.

Milton was proud of his writing, and prickly. His divorce tracts had given him notoriety. (What do you do when your adolescent bride leaves you? If you're Milton, you not only think of divorce, but you start to write pamphlets about it. The poet was thirty-three, the bride seventeen and a royalist—perhaps differences more important to her.) In three sonnets he attacked those who attacked him, the Presbyterians once his allies.

	I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs
	By the known rules of ancient liberty,
	When straight a barbarous noise environs me
	Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes and dogs.

This is the beginning of Sonnet 12, “On the Detraction which followed upon my Writing Certain Treatises,” a formal title formally at odds with the witty virulence that follows. More than half a century early, these lines take on the savagery of Pope. They fall to a bitter ending:

	For who loves that, must first be wise and good;
	But from that mark how far they rove we see
	For all this waste of wealth, and loss of blood.

By that Milton means liberty—freedom from the religious shackles of marriage to an incompatible temperament (though after three years his wife returned and bore children), freedom from prior censorship (Areopagitica), and freedom from the stiffened conventions of the verse line. In this sonnet there is a slightly dishonest bewilderment (“I did but prompt …”), as if Milton couldn't quite understand why his views provoked hostility. Vituperation has its uses: it turns the prey into predator. In his next two sonnets (I am following John Carey's chronology) Milton breaks with all the settled understandings of idiom his early sonnets had acquiesced to.

Milton's sonetto caudato, “On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament,” had its genesis in battles among Protestant sects for the right of dissent. Beneath arguments for heterodoxy its lines declare

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themselves for heterodoxy of style, for release from the censorship of poetic idiom.

	Dare ye for this adjure the civil sword
	To force our consciences that Christ set free,
	And ride us with a classic hierarchy
	Taught ye by mere A. S. and Rutherford?
	Men whose life, learning, faith and pure intent
	Would have been held in high esteem with Paul
	Must now be named and printed heretics
	By shallow Edwards and Scotch What-d'ye-call.

Scotch What-d'ye-call! He might mean Robert Baillie, but whoever he meant, it is comically demeaning to forget his name and injury as well as insult to rhyme on the forgetfulness. The colloquial use of names (or nonnames) and the angry straitening toward prose syntax almost break the sonnet form as well as sonnet diction. The last of the three sonnets must be quoted entire.

Sonnet 11

	A book was writ of late called Tetrachordon;
	And woven close, both matter, form and style;
	The subject new: it walked the town awhile,
	Numbering good intellects; now seldom pored on.

	Cries the stall-reader, Bless us! what a word on
	A title-page is this! And some in file
	Stand spelling false, while one might walk to Mile-
	End Green. Why is it harder sirs than Gordon,

	Colkitto, or Macdonnel, or Galasp?
	Those rugged names to our like mouths grow sleek
	That would have made Quintilian stare and gasp.

	Thy age, like ours, O soul of Sir John Cheke,
	Hated not learning worse than toad or asp;
	When thou taught'st Cambridge, and King Edward Greek.

There is much to admire here, beginning with the subject: the author's pride-pricked reaction (Parker called it “amused contempt”)^[9] to the spurning of his book, “now seldom pored on”—notice, given that the etymology of subtle was “woven close,” what might be a quiet compliment to himself. The book is a man, as good as a man, sauntering about town—

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a book about town! (Horace described his book of epistles as a strolling whore.) There's gaiety within the bitterness.

The portrait of bookstall reader, not someone who's going to buy the book, is cruelly deft, and unusual—it reeks of the street, of close observation, where Shakespeare's vignettes, when he has them, seem fancies. Consider how neatly the comic rhymes (Tetrachordon/pored on/word on/ Gordon) toy with violence of feeling—as if without comedy the violence could scarcely be expressed. Yet some of the comedy is directed back at the author for having titled a pamphlet so. Only Milton could write such a book with such a preposterous title and then write so idiomatically about having written it. In the Trinity manuscript the line stands, “I writ a book …,” which might have been even better; but the revision makes up in acidic detachment what it loses in flat admission.

Then the remarkable lines: “… while one might walk to Mile-/ End Green. Why is it harder sirs than Gordon, / Colkitto, or Macdonnel, or Galasp?” That enjambment on the hyphen must have been shocking—it had been done only rarely in English verse (there are classical examples in Catullus, Horace, Sappho). As John Hollander notes in Vision and Resonance, it was used in poems modeled on Greek meters. Milton, in smuggling the device into English pentameter, may have been borrowing from Ben Jonson, whose Pindaric ode “To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of That Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison” has a witty enjambment on “twi-/ Lights, the Dioscuri.” Jonson would have known classical examples (and this is a classical allusion); but in “A Fit of Rhyme against Rhyme” he blames rhyme for “jointing syllabes,” meaning disjointing them.

Milton's line break is even more disturbing in the Trinity manuscript, without initial capitals: Mile-/ end Greene. It promises that none of the proprieties is safe any longer—not thoughts on divorce, not the trimness of verses or the chasteness of words bound within lines (indeed, Mile- has been divorced from End rather cuttingly). It's no less confident in its misbehavior than Robert Lowell's enjambment, when breaking the bonds of his pentameter, of “the duck /-'s web-/ foot” some three centuries later.

If Scottish names made familiar by civil war are hard, they are not so hard they can't be turned to verse, and they are made harder by “spelling false” (though Milton also means “misinterpreting”)—even as Milton, perhaps haplessly, has done, Coll Keitache becoming Colkitto; Gillespie, Galasp; Macdonald now Macdonnel. These three sonnets are among the most thrilling in the rise of colloquial idiom in English verse (if it hadn't been blasphemous, Milton might have thought he'd harrowed hell). What

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is important in the progress of diction is not what sounded natural in a period but what survived that sounded natural to a later period. (As in many things, accident sometimes overwhelms design.) Until Wordsworth, whose much more conscious attempt to reproduce the “real language of men” was only partly successful, no one advanced the cause of plain speech any further—not even Rochester and Swift, whose satires stood on the outskirts of the permissible and so licensed the impermissible. Milton's layered ironies, his comic turns in tragic proportion, his cross-bow-fired syntax, the language of the street—these secured the sensibility of the modern. After this almost anything could fall into verse.

Milton suffered the conflict between languages perhaps more severely than any major English poet, suffered the conflict, as Shakespeare did not, of whether to write in English at all. Paradise Lost might have been an even better poem in Latin, but the tension in Milton between his native tongue and his natural scholarship perhaps meant that in English he did not always have to make his lines learnéd. The tensions of personality were of course not the invention of Milton alone: there are passages in Jonson (his epigrams love the roil of the streets), as well as Donne and Herbert, and further back in Wyatt, where the personality of diction seems distinctly modern; but for different reasons, accidents of taste and access, none proved as influential. Just as we owe pentameter in English more to Wyatt and Surrey than to Chaucer, we owe what we owe in diction to Milton's example. We might therefore blame Milton for both the grand style and the ripening of the vernacular.

Milton has often been denounced for the Latinate contortions of Paradise Lost, for the grand style that seems all too grand; but this was conscious choice, not unconscious debility. The sonnets show how complexly comfortable, how coiled with the dramas of meaning, his plain syntax could be. Even roused to the fury of his polemics, Milton was a chillier character than Shakespeare—Milton's lines shiver with a rectitude deeper than metrical practice. Most of the sonnets were composed while his eyes were still of use (after Lycidas, in 1637, every occasional verse he wrote in English was a sonnet). A double handful, which include the most vivid, were not. A self-knitted form is not really any more difficult to compose blindfolded, or blind, than blank verse: the rhymes keep internal order and do not require, though they may permit, the cunning enjambments Milton gave to blank verse. In Lycidas we get emotion cloaked in pastoral. In the sonnets, at best, we get the emotion unmediated, with frightening directness.

Although after he was totally blind (in about 1652), composition had

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to cede something of improvisation to memory, the coolness is an aspect of character—his distance and even grandeur were not just a conscious harkening to classical models in a time riven with civil violence, but an imposition, a usurpation, a welcoming of the moral modalities of rhetoric. Milton often sounds as if he's delivering a set speech by Timon or Leontes, and he sounds as if he will never leave the stage.

Memory can be tricked, or tricked out—it isn't all that hard to compose and recall twenty or thirty lines at a pitch, not as hard as modern poets believe, not having been schooled in memorization or the concealed lath of meter. Most poets, in our century without memory, have no occasion to memorize; feats of recall, whether a matter of course or a course of desperation, seem more impressive. Anyone who has acted knows memory can improve, can hear over what it has multiply heard. Aural memories rise up unseen, as olfactory ones do; eidetic memory, the inward form of seeing, of insight (consider blindfolded grandmasters able to play chess exhibitions over twenty boards), need not have more than an intuition of hearing. It would be interesting to know whether the brilliant enjambments of Paradise Lost show how visual Milton's verbal memory became—that only a man who could cast his eye on a mental page would have come so frequently to the cunning reversals that tease or torment the eye at line break, that Paradise Lost was composed by someone who could see his composition like a printer, not just recollect it by ear. Or, rather, that he could hear the meaning suspended, line by line, enjambment by enjambment, the sense variously drawn out. (That he trusted his ear perhaps too much is revealed in his spellings—his hearings—of the Scottish names in Sonnet 11.)

Milton's great sonnets were all written after he was blind. Despite their intensity of visual language, they have nothing like the freedom with verbal idiom found in the sonnets written soon after the end of the Civil War—he has all but become his grand style and will shortly become only his grand style (Paradise Regained may seem less grand than Paradise Lost, but the style is grand compared to anyone else's). The sonnets share, however, far greater confidence in the use of personality—they are among the most reflective and personal verses of the seventeenth century or the century after.

The three sonnets that confirm the genius of the form are too well known to quote, 15 (“On the late Massacre in Piedmont”), 16 (“When I consider how my light is spent …”), and 19 (“Methought I saw my late espoused saint …”). They do not take the risks of idiom that have made their confidences possible, but they exist in confidence that idiom can

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repair the distances of personality, that the poem can become the fluent medium of expression in the words of the day (Sonnet 15 is like a newspaper headline, before there were newspaper headlines). That Milton chose to heighten the language, to leave it in the dressier realm of literary expression used in Paradise Lost, does not mean he had forgotten his gains or deepened his losses. Sonnet 16 closes with a line stoic in its disappointment and stern in its resolve (“They also serve who only stand and wait”)—a line justly famous but not often praised for modern simplicity.

The end of Sonnet 19, the vision of his dead second wife, shows Milton had not spurned his discoveries, only that he could choose his effects. The sonnet begins thick with Greek mythology and biblical reference; but the vision slowly clears, unveiling the woman with a veil, at least in the diction, which reaches its climax at its simplest and most moving:

	Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight,
	Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined
	So clear, as in no face with more delight.
	But O as to embrace me she inclined
	I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.

The metaphor is not just metaphorical—the poem ends in the terrible isolation of the blind, a blindness that shivers with guilt if not self-pity. Here, in the last simplicity of diction, is the personality stripped bare, without defense against whatever vision chooses to embrace it. It recalls the best and most intimate of Sir Thomas Wyatt's poems, “They flee from me….”

We know, to the day or nearly the day, when Milton wrote some of his sonnets; and this helps define the limitations, as well as the lassitudes (or luxuriances), of his relation to form. Milton didn't have to write them as sonnets: he chose the form more than it chose him—no one would say, looking at his Italian sonnets, that he came naturally to it. For that matter, looking at what were probably Shakespeare's amateur efforts, Sonnets 1–19, one wouldn't say that of Shakespeare, either. In their early work both poets are rigid with formal proprieties, with a due (and past-due) sense of occasion—they have written out presentations, not passions (whether this means later passions were true or just better constructed is moot). The passions perhaps came for Shakespeare when he knew the sonnets had been warmed to, even if unsuccessful in warming his “sweet boy” to marriage bed or the fathering of children; yet, however beautiful Shakespeare's sonnets are, they rarely seem personal to him. However distressingly

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personal the sonnets become, until we penetrate the diction, they never seem the poems of a man who has just revealed something it unnerves him to reveal.

Unlike Shakespeare's, Milton's sonnets, his later sonnets, seem drawn to real events, to momentary changes in a disrupted life (a life in some ways so regulated only disruption would have been worth poetry). The trivial and occasional nature of the sonnet (which Milton turned from love plaint to news bulletin, private musing, heroic address, invitation to a walk), which could be serious but need not be sullen, permitted a greater and less restricted range. Milton could be personal in the sonnet in a way he rarely risked elsewhere. If we care to know the hour of Milton's composition, it is because each poem is so much the invention of a distinct moment. The sonnets are often called occasional, as if to dismiss them; but in this, this too, they are cruelly modern. A poem called to account by a particular day, a naked homely event (rather than some distillation of the general) breaches the conventions between us. We feel the pastness of the past more keenly when poetry is aligned not with fiction but with history.

Perhaps I have gone too far, suggesting that in poetry the modern notion of personality first becomes accessible in Milton's everyday language, but only if the impress of personality does not lie in our own use of that language. To write in form now, with ears alienated by nearly a century of free verse, is to look back to any earlier period—any period later than Shakespeare's, at least—with a longing toward a past that did not suffer our own dissociation of sensibility, that had a less conscious and less embarrassed relation to its forms but a notion of how the vernacular might triumph within form. I use Eliot's phrase advisedly, with avarice rather than irony, knowing its faults but with respect for its sometimes unappreciated virtues. Any period is likely to feel its ruptures from the past more than its binding ligatures: we are always in the material condition of the Fall, though our notions of Paradise change. For Eliot, in 1921, it was the atonement—or at-one-ment—that poets like Donne achieved without reflection. The metaphor of the mirror is arch as well as brutal—we have long since rendered demonic any creature without reflection.

Any poet who chooses public statement on public matters will write as the ghost of Milton: Robert Lowell haunts my examples here. He began with the poetic diction Milton settled into at the end: Lowell started as epic and ended as personality, and this was considered an advance. The personal is not frightening to our age: we have accepted, as the highest

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condition of modern poetry, sensibilities of extremity, whether in the avant-garde or in the disrupted psychologies of confessional poetry. We are playing out a myth of the artist that is our inverted romance of sensibility. Lowell's unrhymed sonnets, which it is unfashionable to consider among the best of his work, have an immediacy of response lacking in the studied concerns of Life Studies. He found the sonnet a form that allowed him to say anything, and though he wrote hundreds to Milton's two dozen, though none approaches the artistry of Milton's finest, they are the modern inheritance of that invention of personality for which Milton is responsible.

If Milton speaks to the condition of our verse, it is partly as an artist who did not fit, who began to write after most of a century that had shattered a religious concord and was soon to violate a political dispensation. A poet of the 1640s might look back with longing to another time. That Milton was Protestant and republican rather than Catholic and monarchist doesn't make much difference to the condition: both sides longed for stability. That was the point of winning. Personality has to be acquired in each age; but to the romantics, our immediate ancestors, it was Milton's sonnets that spoke immediately and most distinctly. Had Milton chosen to press his discoveries further, had he cast Paradise Lost in the idiom the sonnets had begun to invent, how different literary history might have been. It is with mocking, perhaps Miltonic justice that among memories of Robert Lowell in the mental hospital lies one pertinent vision: Lowell reading aloud a revised version of Lycidas. The visitor does not record how long it took to realize that Lowell believed he was John Milton.^[10]

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