ABSTRACT
Wordsworth's distinction between Milton's public poetry and the private intimacies of his fellow sonneteers is not absolute. He himself traces Milton's public sonnets to a private source, while many other readers and critics - notably Robert Browning in his poem 'House' - have doubted that Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan sonneteers really sought to unlock their hearts. Furthermore, all published poetry is by definition a public act, even when it creates the impression of intimacy. Nevertheless, Wordsworth's choice of imagery remains perceptive. By casting Milton's sonnet specifically in the form of a trumpet he identifies a distinct tradition within the English sonnet. The majority of English sonnets and in particular sonnet sequences present themselves, ingenuously or otherwise, as selfrevelation. In the 1790s, however, a group of radical poets turned to Milton's 'On the Late Massacre at Piedmont' and his sonnets to Fairfax and Cromwell as models for a poetry of political intervention. 'Citizen' John Thelwall in 'To Tyranny' and 'The Vanity of National Grandeur', Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the first half-dozen of his Sonnets on Eminent Characters and Robert Southey in his sequence Poems on the Slave Trade paved the way for Wordsworth himself, who took up Milton's own mantle in 1802, declaring 'Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour:/England hath need of thee' ('London 1802', lLlt) and filling that need himself over the next few years by writing many of the most powerful political sonnets in the language.
