“Seeing Foreign Parts” 1638–1639the fact that he announced his intention to become a major English poet in Latin
poems which are exquisite achievements in that linguistic medium. If Milton was
preparing to bid his Latin muse farewell, he did so in fine style.
Mansus, a 100-line verse letter in hexameters, has, as Anthony Low points out,
several purposes: “to repay a kindness, to immortalize a patron, to claim a similar
immortality for poets, to continue a conversation, to answer a backhanded compli-
ment [Manso’s distich], to bridge as well as to acknowledge the gap between poet
and recipient.”^107 It probes issues also central to Ad Salzillum but more profoundly:
the power of poets and of poetry, the aid poets may receive (here, from an earthly
patron), and the inevitability of death. As a praise of Manso, the poem reverses
many generic norms for panegyric: instead of the expected emphasis on the duty of
poets to honor their patrons, Milton insists on the duty and high privilege of pa-
trons to befriend and assist poets. Manso’s epigram for Milton did not honor him as
a poet, so (reprising “Ad Patrem”) Milton takes on the role of a worthy son respect-
fully asserting his worth to another father (“Manse pater,” l. 25), who might not
accept him as a poet or value his poetry. As in “Ad Patrem,” the son hopes the
brilliance and elegance of his poem and his skillful rhetorical address will make his
case to a man who demonstrably did and does value poetry.
Milton’s poem shares some elements with many Italian encomia that had re-
cently been presented to Manso from contemporary literati and that he had ap-
pended to his own collection of verse, Poesie Nomiche (1635), but it is more remarkable
for the differences.^108 For one thing, Milton’s poem makes no reference to Manso
as a poet, praising him solely in the role of patron and friend to poets: his greatness
and claim to fame inheres in promoting their fame. For another, for all its gracious-
ness and urbanity, Milton’s poem centers on himself as poet, not Manso and his
achievements. Milton represents his encounter with Manso as a significant moment
in his growing consciousness of himself as an aspiring English epic poet: the poem’s
controlling conceit is Milton’s insertion of himself into the line of epic poets Manso
had fostered. Manso was “once bound to the great Tasso by a happy friendship”;
then Marino “took pleasure in being called your foster-child”; now he has honored
“a young foreigner,” the present author, with supreme kindness.^109
Milton also sets himself in the English poetic line of Chaucer, Spenser, and the
Druids, and in doing so he voices and dispels his often-expressed anxiety that po-
etry might not thrive in England’s cold climate:
Therefore, father Manso, in the name of Clio and of great Phoebus, I, a young pil-
grim sent from Hyperborean skies, wish you health and long life. You, who are so
good, will not despise an alien Muse, which, though poorly nourished under the
frozen Bear, has recently presumed to make her rash flight through the cities of Italy.
I believe that in the dim shadows of night I too have heard the swans singing on our
river, where the silvery Thames with pure urns spreads her green locks wide in the
swell of the ocean. And Tityrus [Chaucer] also long ago made his way to these shores.... We also worship Phoebus.^110