ABSTRACT
John Milton saw himself as a poet, as a Christian poet, as an English poet and as a ‘just’ poet. Milton, given his position as self-dedicated poet, and Humanist imitator of the Classics, was inevitably wedded to the idea and the practice of genre. Milton’s attitude to the epic poem he regarded as the crown of his life, the work ,he could leave behind and which others would not willingly let die, marks out not only his relation to the models of epic writing – Homer, Virgil, Tasso – but also his sense of himself and his relationship to the English language. Milton represents the occasion of the poem, the death of Edward King, as making a primary demand on a pastoral poet for a kind of poetry he is too immature to write. As always in Milton, the classics are invoked only as a procession of splendid captives, dragged in to grace the Christian triumph.
