“Against... the Bishops” 1639–1642them, that every where they call it a burden.... But when God commands to take
the trumpet and blow a dolorous or a jarring blast, it lies not in mans will what he shall
say, or what he shall conceal.^100Yet as a scholar and an accomplished rhetorician he finds polemic distasteful. It does
not allow for anything “elaborately compos’d,” or for the “full circle” of learning
to be completed, or for overlaying the text with “the curious touches of art” (807).
Nevertheless, he willingly undertakes this “unlearned drudgery,” since “God by his
Secretary conscience” enjoins it (822).
Finally, claiming his primary identity as poet he finds prose itself somewhat on-
erous, “wherin knowing my self inferior to my self, led by the genial power of
nature to another task, I have the use... but of my left hand” (808). This may not
pertain to the passionate, poetic, prophetic prose he sometimes produces, but to the
cool discourse of this tract and to the difficulties of prose autobiography, mirrored
in his sometimes involuted syntax. Whereas “a Poet soaring in the high region of
his fancies with his garland and singing robes about him” can write easily of his
expansive bardic self, “for me sitting here below in the cool element of prose, a
mortall thing among many readers of no Empyreall conceit, to venture and divulge
unusual things of my selfe, I shall petition to the gentler sort, it may not be envy to
me” (808). He then reviews the stages by which he came to recognize his vocation
as poet. His father had him exercised in “the tongues, and some sciences.” His
teachers praised his style “prosing or versing, but chiefly the latter” as “likely to
live.” The Italian academics offered him “written Encomiums” (810), and several
“friends here at home” offered encouragement. But the final confirmation came
from within: “An inward prompting... now grew daily upon me, that by labour
and intent study (which I take to be my portion in this life) joyn’d with the strong
propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes, as
they should not willingly let it die” (810). He proceeds to reaffirm his great project
of writing a national epic that will advance “Gods glory by the honour and instruc-
tion of my country.” Turning all his industry and art “to the adorning of my native
tongue,” he intends to become “an interpreter & relater of the best and sagest
things among mine own Citizens throughout this Iland,” emulating what “the
greatest and choycest wits of Athens, Rome, or modern Italy, and those Hebrews of
old” did for their countries. He expects to have one advantage over all of them, the
true subject matter available to a Protestant Christian (811–12).
After another contorted and somewhat embarrassed excuse for continuing his
self-revelation,^101 Milton describes his poetics – the most complete statement he
ever made about the kinds, subjects, nature, and uses of poetry. Of the three major
kinds – epic, drama, and lyric – he gives most attention to epic, distinguishing two
varieties: “diffuse,” modeled on Homer, Virgil, and Tasso, and “brief,” modeled
on the Book of Job. As to structure, he considers whether to follow Aristotle’s
prescription for a tightly unified plot, or to follow “nature,” i.e. to create an