“So Were I Equalled in Renown:” Autobiographical Elements and the Epic Poet's Career in Milton

Maria Rita Drumond Viana; Andrey Felipe Martins

doi:10.5007/2175-8026.2019v72n1p71

Authors

Maria Rita Drumond Viana UFSC https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1985-3375
Andrey Felipe Martins UFSC https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2193-3216

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2019v72n1p71

Abstract

John Milton is outlier among poets of the seventeenth century in his extensive recourse to details of his personal life, which are made integral part, covertly or explicitly, of his many works. From the early “Nativity Ode” onwards we can identify confessional passages in many of his poems that can be read autobiographically. What draws our attention to Milton’s case is that it also prefigures a major cultural and political revolution, in which the legitimacy of the individual consciousness was revalued. The main aim of this article is to explore specific moments in Milton’s oeuvre in which the autobiographical vein comes into sharp focus. Differently from his more mature work, in which he does not waver in confidence, in the earlier writings we can spot the doubts and anxieties of an apprentice poet of unbounded aspiration.

Author Biographies

Maria Rita Drumond Viana, UFSC

Maria Rita Drumond Viana is a lecturer and researcher at the Foreign Languages and Literatures Department at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC). She obtained her PhD on the letters of W. B. Yeats from the Universidade de São Paulo, with a Visiting Doctoral Student scholarship at the University of Oxford, under the guidance of R. F. Foster. She was elected a member of the Oxford Centre for Life Writing at Wolfson college during twice during the academic year of 2013-2014. Her research interests include Irish Studies, W. B. Yeats, nonfictional genres, epistolography, English and Irish romanticism and modernism, poetry, and literary adaptation and translation. At UFSC she coordinates the Irish Studies Research Cluster and a research group on the various nonfictional genres called Other Literatures.

Andrey Felipe Martins, UFSC

Andrey Felipe Martins is a Master of Arts candidate in the Graduate Program in English Language/Literature at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, and is writing his thesis on a queer reading of Wuthering Heights under the supervision of Eliana de Souza Ávila. His research interests, however, also include early modern poetry and philosophy

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