“Seeing Foreign Parts” 1638–1639He indicates further that the experience of exchanging Latin poems with his Italian
friends helped him decide not to join the fraternity of worthy neo-Latin poets but
to become instead an epic poet in English. Italy also supplied a model for this
determination in Ariosto’s decision to write in the vernacular Italian:
Not only for that I knew it would be hard to arrive at the second rank among the
Latines, I apply’d my selfe to that resolution which Ariosto follow’d against the
perswasions of Bembo, to fix all the industry and art I could unite to the adorning of
my native tongue... to be an interpreter & relater of the best and sagest things among
mine own Citizens throughout this Iland in the mother dialect... not caring to be
once nam’d abroad, though perhaps I could attaine to that, but content with these
British Ilands as my world. (CPW I, 810–12)In 1642 also he thought back to the Florentine academy as a model for a similar
English institution that might provide cultural support for a reformed community:
[We might] civilize, adorn and make discreet our minds by the learned and affable
meeting of frequent Acadamies, and the procurement of wise and artfull recitations
sweetned with eloquent and graceful inticements to the love and practice of justice,
temperance and fortitude. (CPW I, 819)In his later prose and poetry, Milton drew upon his travel experiences constantly
but in subtle and often indirect ways. They contribute something to the sharp
oppositions in his polemic tracts, setting English Protestant culture against the Rome
of popes, prelates, and the Inquisition. Galileo is a reference point for the case
against censorship in Areopagitica and an emblem of scientific exploration and specu-
lation in Paradise Lost. Venice offers something to Milton’s ideas about republican
government and Spanish Italy to his hatred of Spain. Baroque Rome, and especially
St Peter’s, contributes to the portrait of Pandemonium in Paradise Lost (I. 710–30),
and the whole experience of Rome (and perhaps Capri) informs the Temptation of
Rome in Paradise Regained (IV. 44–97). Other influences are less tangible: how do
the various remembered landscapes contribute to Milton’s portrayal of Eden and of
Hell? How does the art he saw help shape his imaginative vision? How does the
music he heard help define the place of music in his verse, as symbol and as form?
Milton’s travels provided a fund of impressions that mesh with the imaginative
stimulus of his wide reading, ready to be used and transformed for his various
polemic and literary purposes.
“Love of the Sweet Muse Detained that Shepherd”
Both Mansus and Epitaphium Damonis develop more fully the poetic role that Milton
claimed and defended not long before, in “Ad Patrem.” There is a pleasant irony in