“Studious Retirement” 1632–1638in 1637 let A Maske be published without his name. Those gestures, and the exam-
ple of Lycidas as a kind of poetic ministry, reconciled Milton senior to his son’s
poetry and persuaded him to finance his Grand Tour.^86 Ernest Sirluck, pointing to
Milton’s new emphasis on virginity in the 1637 Maske, argues that Milton resolved
his career anxieties and a three-year writer’s block by making a covenant of sacrifi-
cial celibacy in 1637, confirming his dedication as God’s poet–priest – a gesture that
empowered him to claim his poetic vocation.^87 Kerrigan finds in the paralyzed
virgin of A Maske a version of Milton’s own poetic and sexual paralysis due to
oedipal pressures, from which he was largely released by the death of his mother in
1637; he was then able to leave home and move closer to a mature sexuality, as
evidenced in the images of (heavenly) erotic fulfillment in the expanded epilogue
of the 1637 Maske.^88 In Shawcross’s scenario, Milton’s 1637 letters to Diodati indi-
cate that he has at last come to terms with a debilitating disruption some years
earlier in their repressed or perhaps overt homosexual relationship. His new em-
phasis on virginity is a means of sublimating that attraction, and the Trinity manu-
script and Commonplace Book (both begun, Shawcross thinks, in 1637) are evidence
of his restored creativity.^89
Whatever validity there may be to one or another of these narratives, they rest
on scant evidence and unsubstantiated assumptions. Milton’s two brief references
to his mother hardly afford evidence of an oedipal struggle resolved by her death.
His cryptic comment in the Defensio Secunda linking his trip abroad to his mother’s
death – “I became desirous, my mother having died, of seeing foreign parts, espe-
cially Italy, and with my father’s consent I set forth” (CPW IV.1, 614) – seems
intended simply to underscore Milton’s filial piety: he had the consent of his father
and no longer needed to seek that of his mother. Or, the phrase may imply that she
had been seriously ill for some time and he felt he could not leave under those
circumstances. Milton’s statement that his father initially intended him for the
ministry does not mean that he stubbornly insisted on that career for his son and
disapproved of A Maske. Milton’s exaltation of virginity in 1637 does not imply
that this staunch Protestant made a temporary vow of celibacy – a gesture he
would surely see as popish. Nor do Milton’s 1637 letters to Diodati point to Milton’s
new acceptance of homosexual feelings or activities he had earlier denied; the
sexual doubles entendres in Latin that Shawcross points to in those letters are not
convincing, as virtually any text could be made to yield such meanings if pressed.
And the assimilation of Diodati to the class of Neoplatonic beautiful and noble
souls suggests, if anything along these lines, the continued sublimation of homoerotic
feeling.
The narrative Milton constructs about himself in the letters and poems of these
years is rather different and I think more illuminating. At the center of his conscious
mind was the problem of vocation, which he saw not only in terms of his own
talents, inclinations, and opportunities, but also with reference to public duties –
the needs of church and nation. He defined himself as poet and scholar, but neither