John Milton
was named after his father John Milton, Senior.
Milton’s Continental tour, and especially the
Italian
portion of it, ‘which he describes
at some length in his
Defensio secunda, remained one of the chief pleasures of his
memory through all his subsequent life. Nor was it without
fruits of a literary kind. Besides two of his Latin Epistolae
familiares, one to the Florentine grammarian Buommattei, and
the other to Lucas Holstenius, there have to be assigned to
Milton’s sixteen months on the Continent his three Latin
epigrams AdLeonoram Romae canentem, his Latin scazons Ad
Salsillum poet am romanum aegrotantem, his fine Latin
hexameters entitled Mansus, addressed to Giovanni Battista
Manso, and his five Italian sonnets, with a canzone, in praise
of a Bolognese lady.
His bosom
friend and companion from boyhood, Charles Diodati, died in
Blackfriars, London, in August 1638, not four months after
Milton had gone away on his tour. The intelligence did not
reach Milton till some months afterwards, probably not till
his second stay in Florence; and, though he must have learnt
some of the particulars from his friend’s uncle in Geneva,
he did not know them fully till his return to England. How
profoundly they affected him appears from his Epitaphium
Damonis, then written in memory of his dead friend. The
importance of this poem in Milton’s biography cannot be
overrated. It is perhaps the noblest of all his Latin poems;
and, though written in the artificial manner of a pastoral, it
is unmistakably an outburst of the most passionate personal
grief. In this respect Lycidas, artistically perfect though
that poem is, cannot be compared with it; and it is only the
fact that Lycidas is in English that has led to the notion that Edward King of
Christ’s College was peculiarly and pre-eminently the friend
of Milton in his youth and early manhood.
We should
not have known, but for an incidental passage in the
Epitaphium Damonis, that, at the time of his return from
Italy, he had chosen a subject for a great poem from the
Arthurian legend. The passage (lines 160—178) is one in
which, after referring to the hopes of Diodati’s medical
career so suddenly cut short by his death, Milton speaks of
himself and of his own projects in his profession of
literature. Milton wrote that he was meditating an epic of
which King Arthur was to be the central figure, but which
should include somehow the whole cycle of British and
Arthurian legend. This epic was to be in English, and he had
resolved that all his poetry for the future should be in
the same tongue.
John
Milton |
The Story of
Milton | Interesting
Facts About Milton | Milton's
Literary Life |
Milton and
His Family | Particular
Works By Milton
poems: On
Time | The
Fifth Ode of Horace