ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests the young Milton's 'divided god' of secular music and poetry was already remote from the Calvinist deity who required the exclusive devotion of human gifts to his service. In opposing Laud's 'beauty of holiness', the godly increasingly adopted the severe anti-aestheticism of Calvin's Geneva, a city Milton mentions without any note of approval when he later recalls his European tour. Since many of Milton's early poems either celebrate or participate in these activities, it is not surprising that he expressed considerable anxiety about his vocation both before he left and after his return. Milton's early letters, prose, and poetry all reveal a deep distaste for the clerical ambition that may have led Heylyn in this opportunistic direction, yet they suggest an equal aversion to the increasingly reactionary direction embraced by the Puritans. Alan Rudrum suggests that Milton's self-deprecating remarks on his late 'bloom' in Sonnet 7 wryly pun on the fifteen-year-old Abraham Cowley's recent publication, Poetical Blossoms.
