Milton and Transcendent Authorship

This chapter examines Milton’s notion and practice of authorship over the first half of his career. Beginning with Sonnet 8 and some of Milton’s other early poems—‘On Shakespeare’, Mansus, ‘The Passion’, and Lycidas—the chapter shows how as a young writer he embraced an idealistic notion of poetry’s preservative power but always in terms of his texts’ material transmission. Two crucial experiences helped to develop Milton’s thinking about his authorship: the outrage prompted by his divorce tracts underscored his works’ vulnerability, while the printing of his Poems in 1645 drove home the need for collaboration if his writing were to survive. All of Milton’s early works illustrate how his concept of authorship anticipates the monist philosophy that will animate Paradise Lost. He understood early on that his writing was both letter and spirit: his words needed an appropriate material form if they were to have a lasting spiritual life.

High Enterprise

In the course of his research for the divorce tracts “Milton became a modern sort of scholar” as his scholarship changed and developed. Although in the divorce tracts themselves “Milton adheres mostly to Biblical and legal interpretation,” his scholarship “uses up to date methodologies of Biblical philology and reaches across sectarian divides.”