Poet of Revolution by Nicholas McDowell

Author:Nicholas McDowell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 11. Anonymous title-page of A Maske presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634 (1637).

Diodati had returned to England, after several years in the early 1630s studying theology in Geneva, but to follow his father Theodore into a medical career rather than to enter the clergy. Milton makes several references in the letter to Diodati’s new life as a doctor in Chester, in the north-west of England, and it seems Diodati has enquired in his last letter as to what Milton ‘is thinking of’ and what he is doing; but no reference is made to a clerical career for either of them. Rather Milton discloses his vision of ‘an immortality of fame’ and of how he has been ‘growing my wings and practising flight. But my Pegasus still raises himself on very tentative wings’. That fame is to be obtained through poetic achievement is implied in the image: the hoof-print of Pegasus created Hippocrene, the spring of poetic inspiration on Mount Helicon. In the 1633 letter to a friend, Milton had written with some tentativeness of the ‘desire of honour and repute, and immortal fame seated in the breast of every true scholar’; but that has given way, for all the jocular tone that Milton always adopted in addressing himself to Diodati, to more confident and lofty visions. Beauty and wisdom are personified by Diodati; hence Milton’s love for his friend:

For though I do not know what else God may have decreed for me, this certainly is true: He has instilled into me, if anyone, a vehement love of the beautiful. Not so diligently is Ceres, according to the Fables, said to have sought her daughter Proserpina, as I seek for this idea of the beautiful, as if for some glorious image throughout all the shapes and forms of things (“for many are the shapes of things divine”); day and night I search and follow its lead eagerly as if by certain clear traces. Whence it happens that if I find anywhere one who, despising the warped judgement of public, dares to feel and speak and be that which the greatest wisdom throughout all ages has taught to be the best, I shall cling to him immediately from a kind of necessity.22

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