“Between Private Walls” 1645–1649makes him look more like 51 (plate 8). Richard Johnson points out that the face
divides in the middle: one side is that of a youthful poet, the other, that of a crabbed
controversialist.^130 However, Milton had his revenge – incidentally showing him-
self not immune to a touch of vanity – by causing Marshall, who knew no Greek,
to inscribe under the portrait a witty Greek epigram ridiculing it:
That an unskilful hand had carved this print
You’d say at once, seeing that living face;
But, finding here no jot of me, my friends,
Laugh at the botching artist’s mis-attempt.^131Also, by his title-page epigraph from Virgil’s Eclogue VII Milton presents himself as
predestined Bard (vati... futuro),^132 explicitly refusing the ‘Cavalier’ construction
laid upon him by the title page and some other features of Moseley’s apparatus.
In the 1645 volume Milton presents himself as a new kind of reformist poet. He
organizes his poetic production over more than twenty years so as to underscore his
development toward that role. He probably approved and may have suggested the
design for the frontispiece which contains the wretched portrait, since it previews
the character of the volume appropriately. He sits before a drapery pulled back at
one corner to reveal a pastoral landscape with a shepherd piping and figures dancing
on the lawn, indicating the pastoral mode governing several of these poems. In the
corner niches are four Muses suggestive of the poet’s generic range: Erato (elegy
and erotic poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), Clio (History), and Urania (Divine po-
etry). These poems display Milton’s command of several languages and all the re-
sources of high culture, sharply distinguishing him from a Puritan plain-style poet
like George Wither.^133 But he separates himself as decisively from Cavalier lyricists,
court masque writers, and Anglican devotional poets, with poems designed to re-
claim and reform several genres dominated by them. He also claims a poetic mode
shunned by the Cavaliers: prophecy.
The multiple languages, the poetic variety, and the several commendations from
learned friends – the Italian Catholic literati and Sir Henry Wotton, as well as
Lawes’s laudatory preface to the 1637 Maske – allow Milton to present himself as a
man of many parts: scholar, humanist, man of the world, highly accomplished Latin
poet, new English bard.^134 But he means those parts to cohere with his self-presen-
tation as reformist poet, and in large part he makes them do so. The commendatory
poems show him accurately as a man whose friendships transcend ideological barri-
ers, but he does not identify with the politics or religion of those friends. Also, these
commendations make a gesture of unusual poetic independence, suggesting that
this as yet little-known poet need not depend on courtly or aristocratic patrons but
can be introduced to the world by a distinguished coterie of scholars and artists at
home and abroad. He includes in this volume almost all of his poems written to
date, even the unfinished “Passion” which he describes as “above the years he had.”