The Politics of Publication: Misrepresentation in Milton's 1645 Poems

Abstract

1645 Poems is, in many respects, a strange document, and some critics have attested to its strangeness. It seems to be the prod uct of a gentleman poet, possibly a member of the landed gentry with close ties to Caroline peerage. We have among the collection of poems a maske written for an earl, a sonnet addressed to the daughter of another earl, an elegy on a Catholic Marchioness and an other sonnet addressed to an anonymous Lady, presumably the daughter of a peer, all which endeavors would incline a reader to view the poet as an member of a privileged class patronized by the nobility. Among these poems, however, are intermixed others evok ing a reformist fervor not entirely consonant with the modest image of the gentleman poet,1 a special indication of this being Lycidas with its headnote, yet evident in less obtrusive passages in Comus and the devotional hymns. In his essay, The Rising Poet, 1645, Louis Martz appears to have been among the first of modern critics to address the political impli cations of the volume, suggesting that the intention, presumably of both Milton and his publisher, Humphrey Moseley, was to project the image of a poet hailing from a courtly and Royalist milieu.2 Since Martz's 1965 essay, various critics have taken up this issue in the effort to reconcile such a mode of presentation with partisan politics. Thomas Corns, in Milton's Quest for Respectability, focuses on motives for bringing out the volume and argues that Mil ton desired, despite his strong puritan partisanship, to project the im age of a contemporary gentleman poet asserting his claim to social respectability.3 Corns argues that Milton uses the volume to counter act his reputation as a lower class sectary, a reputation that he sup posedly won for himself in the pamphlet wars of the 1640s. Peter Lindenbaum, in John Milton and the Republican Mode of Literary Production, endorses Corns's thesis, stating that the 1645 volume appeals to a coterie audience, [and] insists upon its connections with the court.4 Lindenbaum argues that the effect of exposure, during his stay in Venice, to the republican mode of publication (a system whereby the author presents himself as independent of pa

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