2
“To Cambridge... for Seven
Years” 1625–1632
Milton wrote appreciatively about his childhood and schooldays, with some patina
of nostalgia, but he was disappointed by and sharply critical of the education he
received at Cambridge University. He completed, while constantly complaining
about, the required studies and exercises in disputation for the Baccalaureate and
Master of Arts degrees. But he felt alienated from the curriculum and from his
fellow students, finding, he lamented, “almost no intellectual companions here”
(CPW I, 314). He came to Cambridge intending to prepare for ordination and, as
his commitment to poetry intensified, probably hoped to combine poetry and the
ministry as had John Donne, George Herbert, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, and
others. Yet in his collegiate writings he never speaks of himself as a prospective
minister but always as a poet and scholar; clearly those were the roles engaging his
mind and heart. While Milton portrayed his relations with his Cambridge associates
as uneasy and sometimes hostile, he continued to express warm regard for three
friends whose learning, poetry, and reformist politics he had long admired: Thomas
Young, his former tutor, Alexander Gil, the mentor–friend from St Paul’s School,
with whom he continued to exchange poems, and his dearest comrade, Charles
Diodati.
Milton’s early works return often to concerns common among late adolescents –
awakening sexuality, relations with peers, the mix of work and leisure, the worth of
academic studies, choice of vocation, politics – providing the basis for what may be
the most complete self-portrait of the author as a young man before the nineteenth
century. His works show us something of how he saw his student self and how he
represented that self to others: as an early rebel against authority, as a young man
much affected by feminine beauty yet defiantly chaste, as an ardent but very dis-
criminating friend, as a lover of London pleasures but also of nature and the English
countryside, as a zealous reformist Protestant, as a severe critic of his college educa-
tion and his student peers, and above all, as an aspiring poet.