“Studious Retirement” 1632–1638no public recognition as a poet. Yet he refused to present himself in the public
arena: his epitaph for Shakespeare (1632) and his masque (1637) were published
anonymously, and Lycidas (1638) bore only his initials. For Lycidas such anonymity
might have seemed prudent, given the poem’s vehement attack on the Laudian
church. Also, he was perhaps restrained by the expectation that a gentleman (the
class he could now claim as a university graduate) should circulate his poems pri-
vately to patrons and friends, not expose them to the masses. But the pattern of
deferral and anonymity suggests that he felt himself unprepared for the great work
he hoped to produce, and unwilling to stake his claim on these occasional pieces.
Yet the strong religious and reformist impulse in all his works – and most emphati-
cally in Lycidas – distinguishes them clearly from the jeux of gentlemen poets and
indicates that he sought, even in anonymity, to find and address a “fit audience.”
Despite his anxieties, the few poems Milton did produce in these years reach
new heights of achievement. He continued the practice of setting poem against
poem as alternative or progressive explorations of the same theme or problem, but
he now looked to new models: the Italian madrigal and canzone, the English enter-
tainment and masque, and the pastoral funeral elegy. He developed some features
of his mature style: the verse paragraph and the long sonorous sentence extending
over several lines of verse. Also, he used English verse for the first time to probe his
own emotional crises and anxieties, achieving a new intensity of feeling. This in-
creasing mastery of his poetic craft helped him find the confidence in late 1637 to
claim poetry as his true vocation and to prepare to publish his most impressive
works to date, A Maske and Lycidas. At that time or in early 1638 he most likely
wrote Ad Patrem, urging his father to support his further preparation as a poet.
“I Do Not Know What... God May Have Decreed for Me”
Some time after September, 1631, Milton’s father the scrivener (then about 70
years old) left the business in Bread Street to his partner Thomas Bower and retired
to Hammersmith in the county of Middlesex; he was there by September, 1632 and
still there in January, 1635.^2 By May, 1636 and perhaps earlier, the family had
removed to Horton (about 17 miles from London); the outbreak of plague that
summer may have been a factor.^3 Milton’s account of his studies during these years
seems to pertain chiefly to Hammersmith, though his life probably kept much the
same contour in both places:
At my father’s country place, whither he had retired to spend his declining years, I
devoted myself entirely to the study of Greek and Latin writers, completely at leisure,
not, however, without sometimes exchanging the country for the city, either to pur-
chase books or to become acquainted with some new discovery in mathematics or
music, in which I then took the keenest pleasure. (CPW IV.1, 613–14)