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similar strategy of self-fashioning at the very beginning of the poet’s career. In
his first published piece, the poem entitled “On Shakespeare” Milton similarly
reinterprets the idea of the monument by pointing out that it takes readers
to commemorate the Bard: “each heart / Hath from the leaves of thy [Shake¬
speare’s] unvalued book / Those Delphick lines with deep impression took” (“On
Shakespeare” lines 10-12).”! Here the poem’s vocabulary (book, impression,
leaves) and its actual physical setting (it was printed in the Second Folio) make it
clear that Milton commemorates Shakespeare in the context of print culture.”
Yet these early lines also play on the literal sense: the catachrestic image of
hearts taking Shakespeare’s lines “with deep impression”—that is, as pages to
be printed on—might simply refer to being (literally) strongly influenced and
even moved by Shakespeare’s “Delphick lines.” But while decades later, in
his reference to the Muse’s dictation, Milton seems to promote an essentially
spiritual view of inspiration encumbered by material constraints (“evil days,”
old age and blindness), in this early poem he cherishes the material traces and
effects of inspiration, the actual printed book and the astonished readers.
Be that as it may, there is something deeply traditional in Milton’s poetic
self-presentation in the invocation to Book 9. By managing to disengage the
process of poetic creation from writing, the narrator becomes akin to ancient
inspired bards. In early Greek epic (in Hesiod and Homer), the vocabulary of
poetic inspiration includes expressions of “teaching” as well as “moving” or
“prompting” to song, and these might actually signify different perspectives on
the same poetic process.™* The Odyssey, reputedly Milton’s favourite epic, is full
of such references: the narrator claims that the Muse prompted the bard (Odys¬
sey 8.73), whereas Odysseus praises Demodocus for being well taught by the
Muse (Odyssey 8.481). One of the bards, Phemius, even makes a dual claim: he
confesses to be an autodidact, at the same time he claims the Muse has planted
song in his soul (Odyssey 22.347). In receiving the celestial Muse’s dictation
while slumbering, Milton’s epic narrator presents himself like Homer’s bards:
both as someone possessed, i.e. prompted, moved, or instructed by the Muse,
and as someone already in possession of the gift of song.
2 REVARD, Stella (ed.), John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 44.
On this point, see MENGES, Hilary, Books and Readers in Milton’s Early Poetry and Prose, English
Literary Renaissance 42 (2012), 119-145.
23° Cf. OED s.v. “impression” 6b
For a comprehensive survey, see TIGERSTEDT, E. N., Furor Poeticus: Poetic Inspiration in Greek
Literature before Democritus and Plato, Journal of the History of Ideas 31 (1970), 168.
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