Reaching a European Audience: Milton's Neo-Latin Poems for Charles Diodati, 1625–39

Abstract

Although relatively neglected, Milton's three Latin poems for his school friend Charles Diodati are arguably amongst the most self-revelatory poems in the 1645 collection. As well as evidence of the strength of their literary friendship, each of these poems adumbrates aspects of Milton's vocational dilemma and provides an intriguing example of how Latin afforded Milton an imaginative freedom that he did not exercise when composing in English at this time. The disillusionment that clouded Milton's first impressions of Cambridge is voiced feelingly in the wittily nuanced Elegia Prima, while Elegia Sexta, for all its affable and accommodating manner, also offers serious reflections on the conditions necessary to nurture poetic creativity, and captures what seems to be a pivotal moment in Milton's understanding of his own poetic vocation. Although both these verse-epistles are directed at Diodati as their immediate recipient, they enabled Milton to engage a European audience when recitations of his Latin verses won him acclaim in the Florentine academies. The Epitaphium Damonis, written after Milton's return from Italy, laments the death of Diodati, his first “fit audience,” and celebrates the literary fellowship he had enjoyed in Florence. Separated from his school-friend by death and the Florentine literary community by the unbridgeable distance between them, the full force of his isolation found expression in a letter to Carlo Dati in which he described his feelings of inner exile.

Notes

1. In Geneva Milton signed his name thus in Camillo Cardoini's album; see Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 126.

2. Notable amongst recent critical analyses of Milton's views on nationhood and national identity are: Elizabeth Sauer, “Milton's Of True Religion, Protestant Nationhood, and the Negotiation of Liberty,” Milton Quarterly 40.1 (2006): 1–9 and David Loewenstein, “Late Milton: Early Modern Nationalist or Patriot?” Milton Studies (2008); see, too, Early Modern Nationalism and Milton's England, ed. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).

3. John Milton, Areopagitica (1644), in The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998), 1018–19. Quotations and translations of Milton's poetical and prose works are, where available, taken from The Riverside Milton; remaining quotations are from The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank A. Patterson et al., 22 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–38); hereafter cited as Works. I have modified translations slightly on occasion, where the Latin original seems to invite minor re-phrasing.

4. Milton reveals here his own cultural bias in his unquestioning casting of the Turks as an epitome of godless barbarity.

5. Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), concludes that “No writer before Milton fashioned himself quite so self-consciously as an author” (x). Retrospective autobiographical accounts in Milton's polemical prose treatises—the anti-episcopal tracts Reason of Church-government and An Apology against a Pamphlet (1642) as well as the much later pro-Parliament tract Defensio Secunda (1654)—were shaped by the need to secure a sympathetic, receptive readership and defend his own character against his opponents’ vilifications. Such polemics nevertheless provide, in Lewalski's words, “a fascinating insight into how he wished to remember his boyhood and represent it to others” (1–2). Other discussions of Milton's art of self-presentation include: C. W. R. D. Moseley, The Poetic Birth: Milton's Poems of 1645 (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1991); Cedric C. Brown, John Milton: A Literary Life (London: Macmillan, 1995), and J. Martin Evans, “The Birth of the Author: Milton's Poetic Self-Construction,” Milton Studies 38 (2000): 47–65. In Milton's Peculiar Grace: Self-Representation and Authority (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), Stephen M. Fallon has produced “a literary biography of the autobiographical Milton” (xi). The present essay is in tune with recent interest in “career criticism,” particularly the approach taken by Philip Hardie and Helen Moore in their introduction to Classical Literary Careers and Their Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), which “takes as its starting point the totality of an author's textual output and asks how that oeuvre as a whole shapes itself,” being “unabashed in making the author its focus, always with the recognition that the author is mediated through texts, which in turn are always received by readers” (1).

6. See John K. Hale's perceptive study, “Milton Playing with Ovid,” Milton Studies 25 (1989): 3–19; Stella P. Revard's informative discussion of the Latin poems in Milton and the Tangles of Neaera's Hair: The Making of the 1645 Poems (London: University of Missouri Press, 1997), and Cedric C. Brown's new essay, “John Milton and Charles Diodati: Reading the Textual Exchanges of Friends,” Milton Quarterly 45.2 (2011): 73–94. The last appeared when the present essay was in its final stages.

7. For discussion of the impact of Cicero's De amicitia on early modern England, see Laurens J. Mills, “One Soul in Bodies Twain”: Friendship in Tudor Literature and Stuart Drama (Bloomington, IN: Principia Press, 1937), 76–80. Following John T. Shawcross, “Milton and Diodati: An Essay in Psychodynamic Meaning,” Milton Studies 7 (1975): 127–64, speculation continues over their special relationship. See, for example, Anna Beer, Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 47–52. In “The Erotic Milton,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 41 (1999): 128–41, John P. Rumrich attempts to analyse their friendship in terms of Platonic eroticism, and offers a salutary warning against viewing it “in terms of a twentieth-century homosexual relation even when it is supposed that that attraction may have been latent” (131). Brown's essay, just mentioned, sets their literary exchanges “in the context of complex Renaissance codes of ideal male friendship” (74).

8. The verse epistle in elegiac couplets was established as a vehicle for private feelings by Ovid in exile. Yet in a poet with Ovid's mastery of rhetorical techniques, every literary or presentational device serves both to further an argument and dramatise emotion, so that the figure of the “flebilis exul” (“tearful exile,” El. 1.22), as Milton dubbed him, that we encounter in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, is evidently an authorial persona fashioned to heighten sympathy for his plight and to win himself a reprieve from Rome.

9. This purpose was first mooted in the poem delivered At a Vacation Exercise in the College (30) when Milton unexpectedly abandons Latin, the medium of the academic exercise, to address his mother tongue in English, “Hail, native language” (1).

10. Revard finds Milton experimenting with “different types of elegiac performance” here (Milton and the Tangles of Neaera's Hair, 9). John K. Hale shows how Milton's self-presentation in the Latin verse epistles is modified by his choice of Ovidian elegy as his model, disclosing “a Milton more relaxed than elsewhere,” in Milton's Languages: The Impact of Multilingualism on Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 37.

11. Beer suggests that in his Latin writings “Milton could explore areas of life that were impossible to approach, impossible even to describe in his mother tongue” (Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot, xv).

12. In Sonnet 3 the speaker employs the delicate image of faithfully tending a beautiful, exotic but tender plant in an inhospitable climate to figure forth his commitment to cultivating the Italian language (1–5). In the Canzone the speaker presents himself as careless of the gibes and blank incomprehension he attracts for writing in Italian, secure in the knowledge that he is fulfilling the wishes of his lady and addressing her in the language on which Love prides himself (15). For all the patriotic fervour that attends the fulsome praise of English beauties in Elegia Prima, in Sonnet 4 the speaker shows himself to be fully appreciative of other styles of beauty, and this “Pellegrina belleza” (7) in particular. Milton's letter to Benedetto Buonmattei (Epist. 8, Works, 12.32–33) is evidence of his concern to perfect his pronunciation, and in Of Education (1644), he recommended that Latin should be pronounced as near to Italian as possible, wryly observing “For we Englishmen being farre northerly, doe not open our mouthes in the cold air, wide enough to grace a Southern tongue. … So that to smatter Latin with an English mouth, is as ill a hearing as law French.” (Riverside, 982).

13. Although Milton passed through France on his European trip and was proficient in that tongue (Ad Patrem, 82), in Defensio Secunda he described himself as having been particularly desirous of visiting Italy (Works, 8.120; Riverside, 1116) .

14. Moseley records that “There are 22 English and 6 Italian poems in the first part of the book; 2 Greek and 24 Latin poems in the second. The book thus divides almost exactly in half between the modern and ancient languages” (“Poetic Birth,” 85–86). In her detailed study of Milton's 1645 Poems, Revard precisely analyses the way “the Latin sequence … balances and speaks to the English collection” (Milton and the Tangles of Neaera's Hair, 1).

15. Milton, Reason of Church-government, Riverside, 923.

16. In the first draft of a rare and important English-language letter “To a Friend” (1633), Milton uses this expression to introduce the sonnet, “How soone hath Time,” included as an example of the poet's troubled “nightward thoughts” (Riverside, 1050). Even in his early twenties, Milton was prey to anxieties about his own belatedness, but remained determined to secure a reputation founded on “longo & acri studio” (“long and concentrated study”) as opposed to the false glitter of a fame snatched from “properato & præcoci stylo” (“a premature and hastily acquired eloquence,” Prol. 7, Works, 12.248; Riverside, 867).

17. Milton, An Apology (Works, 3.1.305).

18. In the Reason of Church-government, Milton countenances the possibility of there being something “advers in our climat, or the fate of this age” (Riverside, 923) that might obstruct his poetic endeavours.

19. Milton felt he had first to commit his talents to the reformation of the Church lest, if he remain “domb,” and not speak up in her cause, he might bring upon himself a “brutish silence”; so too, he remained reluctant to write until he had completed to his own satisfaction, “the full circle of my private studies” (Reason of Church-government, Riverside, 921–22)

20. Although Milton had resolved to compose this work in English, at this point he was still undecided about what form it would take. “Epick” and “stately Tragedy,” as the highest ranking in the hierarchy of the genres, were clearly front runners, but “Odes and Hymns” were still in contention (Riverside, 923).

21. As both of Diodati's extant letters (Epist. 32 and 33, Works, 12.292–95) are in Greek rather than Latin they form an especially private mode of communication.

22. Milton recognises here and elsewhere that genuine friendship doesn’t rely on a punctilious exchange of correspondence, but rather on keeping alive the memory of that person's virtues: “vivâ … virtutum recordatione” (Epist. 7, Works, 12.24).

23. Taken from a passage of the divorce tract, Tetrachordon (1645), in which Milton insists that periods of relaxation are essential to the husbanding of intellectual energies (Riverside, 1033). Although Milton always recognised hard work to be his lot in life, he also recommended “some recreating intermission of labour, and serious things” (Reason of Church-government; Riverside, 924). The importance of alternating periods of work with refreshing leisure is a topos which recurs in Milton's writings. Perhaps we find here the continuing influence of Diodati on Milton's outlook; his friend, who seemed in himself to embody a balanced approach to the competing claims of work and rest, had encouraged Milton to recognise “the proper limit of labour.”

24. For a more detailed discussion of Elegia Prima, see my essay “Lætus & exilii conditione fruor: Milton's Ovidian ‘Exile’,” in Two Thousand Years of Solitude: Exile After Ovid, ed. Jennifer Ingleheart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 85–102.

25. This could also be a reference to the arid scholasticism that Milton found to be the educational fare still at Cambridge (see Prolusion 3).

26. This impression is reinforced by the opening words to Prolusion 1. Milton represents himself, half-humorously but still with real bite, as facing a largely hostile audience whose approval he unceremoniously dismisses as not worth securing, preferring instead to reach a “fit audience though few”: “a quibus etiam quantumvis paucis, equidem probari malo quam ab innumeris imperitorum Centuriis, in quibus nihil mentis, nihil rectæ rationis, nihil sani judicii inest” (Works, 12.121; “The approval of these, few though they be, is more precious to me than that of the countless hosts of the ignorant, who lack all intelligence, reasoning power, and sound judgement” [Riverside, 846]).

27. Edward King may have provided an exception to this generalisation: see Norman Postlethwaite and Gordon Campbell, “Edward King, Milton's ‘Lycidas’: Poems and Documents,” Milton Quarterly 28 (1994): 77–84. While Milton may have been impressed by King's “great Learning and Parts” and “contracted a particular Friendship and Intimacy” with him, as Edward Phillips claims (Riverside, 20), this would only have occurred after the composition of Elegia Prima, since King was “admitted to Christ's College on 9 June 1626, and … assigned to William Chappell” after the latter had “rusticated Milton” (Postlethwaite and Campbell, 78) and ceased to be his tutor.

28. He was undoubtedly thinking of these literary establishments as the model for advancing cultural progress when he proposed that “the learned and affable meeting of frequent Academies” would be instrumental in “instructing and bettering the Nation” (Reason of Church-government; Riverside, 924).

29. One of the reasons for this warm reception was surely Milton's evident delight in almost every aspect of Italian culture, especially its language and poetry. Writing to Milton from Florence in 1647, a decade after his visit, Carlo Dati cherishes a friendship with one “chi le sue glorie magnifica, ama i suoi Cittadini, celebra i suoi Scrittori, e nel suo bello Idioma si propriamente e si politamente scrive, e ragiona” (“who magnifies our glories, loves our citizens, celebrates our writers, and who writes and speaks in so correct and polished a fashion in our beautiful idiom” [Epist. 34, Works, 12.296–97]), and pays Milton the compliment of replying to his letter in Tuscan and sharing with him some detailed critical observations on Italian poetry. Milton's efforts to converse fluently in Italian are exemplified in a Latin letter written while he was in Florence to Buonmattei, who was then working on Della Lingua Toscana (1643), asking him to add an appendix designed to help foreigners, like himself, master correct pronunciation (Epist. 8, Works, 12.30–38).

30. Milton wrote to Dati in April 1647; it seems no coincidence that the Powell family—his first wife Mary's mother and father and at least five of their children—had come to live with him in London after the fall of Oxford in the previous year, and that his own father had died in the previous month.

31. In 1645, when Milton first published his Latin poems, he prefaced the collection with tributes from Italian literati as proof of their appreciation of his poetic worth, and was quick to impress upon his readers that these “written Encomiums” were an exceptional distinction, “which the Italian is not forward to bestow on men of this side the Alps” (Reason of Church-government, Riverside, 922). The insistent labelling of Milton as Anglus in these commendations suggests that Milton, with his mastery of Latin and fluency in Italian, had made quite an impression and may have, temporarily at least, dismantled any Italian stereotypes of uncultured Englishmen.

32. This is, besides being an application of the ethical emphasis of the rhetorical training advocated by Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria, 12), a Christianised statement of the speaker's mission in poetry as in oratory, or indeed preaching.

33. Naturally, Comus's language is double-edged: such heightened expressions as “waking bliss” and “Divine inchanting ravishment” not only suggest religious ecstasy but also hint at his sexually predatory nature.

34. It seems less likely that Milton is concerned here with eradicating such “bad” poetry altogether, than in redressing the balance by offering an alternative, a choice to the properly discerning reader who will then be in a better position to “apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better” (Areopagitica, Riverside, 1006).

35. This important dimension to their friendship is later recalled by Milton in quite different circumstances in the Epitaphium Damon, discussed below. Milton had provided a public encomium of the social graces in the opening section of Prolusion 6.

36. According to the testimony of Edward Philips, his uncle was “an Example to those under him,” keeping to the strict regime he had imposed “of hard Study, and spare Diet,” yet he enjoyed “this advantage” over his charges, that “once in three Weeks or a Month, he would drop into the Society of some Young Sparks of his Acquaintance” and “with these Gentlemen he would so far make bold with his Body, as now and then to keep a Gawdy day” (Riverside, 23).

37. Vates, the Latin term for “poet,” carries with it clear overtones of a religious and prophetic nature, and reinforces the idea of a poetic vocation. Neither Milton nor Diodati entered the church as was originally expected of them: Milton describes himself as “Church-outed by the Prelats” (Reason of Church-government, Riverside, 925); Diodati studied theology at the Geneva Academy (1630), but eventually joined the medical profession like his father.

38. See James Holly Hanford, A Milton Handbook, 5^th ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970), 369–70.

39. Revard notes how the Nativity Ode, as “the first poem of the English Poems, holds the place that ‘Elegia 1’ to Charles Diodati occupies in the Poemata” (Milton and the Tangles of Neaera's Hair, 64).

40. Milton's phrasing in the penultimate line (“patriis … cicutis,” El. 6.89, “on your native country's pipes”) suggests that Milton also intended to read aloud to his friend the small group of sonnets composed in Italian that describe the speaker's attraction to the “Pellegrina belleza” (“foreign beauty,” Sonnet 4.7) who can speak more than one language and who is therefore presumably one of the Italian émigré community to which Diodati himself belonged. Sonnet 4 directly addresses Diodati in the opening line and wryly admits how he has unexpectedly succumbed to love.

41. There is some uncertainty as to whether in writing “IX” for the month in the two prose letters to Diodati, Milton meant “the ninth month New Style, or September, instead of Old Style, or November” (Riverside, 1051); I have assumed the month to be November. Lycidas is dated November 1637 in Milton's own manuscript (Riverside, 94).

42. In a letter to Carlo Dati, Milton mentions how he had sent him a copy of the poem, hoping that the verses about his Italian friends would draw them into correspondence (Epist. 10, Works, 12.48). Although, as Cedric Brown has noted (335), the epitaph is “a poem in which the memory of his dead friend and a sense of Italy are entwined” (“Horatian signature: Milton and Civilized Community,” in Milton's Italy: Contexts, Images, Contradictions, ed. Mario Di Cesare (Binghampton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991), it seems significant that, even though Milton traces Diodati's Italian roots on his father's side, he is nevertheless determined to claim his friend, in all other ways, as a fellow Englishman: cætera Anglus.

43. Campbell and Corns, John Milton: Life, Work and Thought, 135. Milton clearly had Diodati very much in mind: he made an excursion, “ad paucos dies Lucam excucurri” (“for a few days to Lucca”), the Tuscan city from which Diodati's father originated, and he visited Diodati's uncle, John Diodati, Professor of Theology at the Geneva Academy, where his friend had studied, and “quotidianus versabar” (“conversed daily”) with him (Def. Sec., Works, 8.126; Riverside, 1116–17).

44. As Milton so poignantly put it in the letter to Dati, his most intimate friends were “jam pene omnes, aut morte, aut iniquissimâ locorum distantiâ invideri mihi” (Epist. 10, Works, 12.46), “now nearly all grudged me by death, or most hostile distance” (Riverside, 1052).

45. On a visit to Naples, home of ancient Roman and modern Italian epic—where Virgil had his villa and Tasso had completed Gerusalemme Conquistata—Milton had enjoyed the hospitality of the latter's patron and had openly proclaimed in a poem to Mansus, his intention of writing a national epic on King Arthur (lines 80–84).

46. Lewalski has observed the way, “As he refuses again and again to feed his hungry sheep he repudiates the poetic and prophetic responsibility the Miltonic swain accepted at the conclusion of Lycidas, and that Thyrsis intended to take up when ‘the care of the flock that he had left behind him recalled him’ from Italy” (The Life of John Milton, 116).

47. Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce 1.4, Riverside, 940. For a convincing account of the ways in which Milton's friendship with Diodati may have informed his views on the ideal marriage, see Gregory Chaplin, “‘One Flesh, One Heart, One Soul’: Renaissance Friendship and Miltonic Marriage,” Modern Philology 99.2 (2001): 266–92.

48. Essayes written in French by Michael Lord of Montaigne … . Done into English by John Florio (London: Melch. Bradwood for Edward Blount and William Barret, 1613), 90.

49. Francis Bacon, “Of Friendship,” in Essays or, Councels Civil and Moral (Glasgow: Printed by R. Urie, 1752), 100.

50. The vine's complete dependence on the elm's support is assumed in Shakespeare's use of the trope (Comedy of Errors, 2.2.173–76) and in Milton's usage in Of Reformation, 1641 (Riverside, 883).

51. It is Ovid's version of the topos, which signifies the complementary nature of the sexes on which Milton draws for the beautiful extended metaphor of the marriage relationship in Paradise Lost (5.211, 212–19). For a more detailed discussion, see my article, “‘The Vine and Her Elm’: Milton's Eve and the Transformation of an Ovidian Motif,” Modern Language Review 91.2 (1996): 301–16.

52. This emblem (160) reappears as Emblem 62 in Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes and other Devises (Leyden, 1576).

53. The bursting of the poet's pastoral pipe under the unaccustomed pressure of “graves … sonos” (“a serious tune,” 155–60) has been seen to signal the epic nature of this new enterprise. In the lines that immediately follow, Milton outlines his plans for a British epic. Eventually, disillusioned by his backsliding nation, Milton would fix upon a theme of universal rather than national significance.

54. That the “British places are celebrated by the sound and sequence of their versified Latin names, in the moment of turning away from Latin, is,” as Hale has astutely observed, “a triumphant paradox” (Milton's Languages, 61).

55. Milton's determination to write a great work in the vernacular was consolidated by his experiences in Italy. In the letter written to Buonmattei while he was in Florence, Milton not only encouraged him in his study of the Tuscan language as being of great benefit to his own countrymen, but posited a more general correlation between the health of a vernacular language and the standing of that nation: when a language is in decline it indicates “ad servile quidvis jam olim paratos incolarum animos” (“the minds of the inhabitants of that country are already long-prepared for any amount of servility”) whereas empires and states flourish at least moderately well “quamdiu Linguæ sua gratia, suusque cultus constitit” (“as long as liking, and cultivation for its own language lasted” [Epist. 8, Works, 12.32–33]).

56. See, for example, Paradisus Amissus … Latine Redditum a Guiliemo Dobson (Oxonii: Theatro Sheldoniano, 1750), or the version by Joseph Trapp (London 1741, 1744).