ABSTRACT
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar begin their groundbreaking book on the Victorian novel, The Madwoman in the Attic, by remarking that literary creativity is often construed as a masculine attribute. Analogies between mental creativity and bodily fecundity are not new to the English Renaissance, nor do they require the exaltation of a female function. In the Theaetetus, for instance, Socrates informs his interlocutor that his mother was a midwife and that he has inherited her gift. English Renaissance versions of the topos, however, complicate such neat distinctions. The association of intellectual creativity with the fecund female body is extremely attractive to him. But it is also more problematic than it is for Sidney and Jonson, since at this point in his life his poetic gift, he insists, is predicated upon sexual renunciation. Milton devises a solution which preserves many of the advantages of the trope of the poet-in-childbirth while adapting it to the decorum of his particular situation.
