Helpful Contraries: Carew’s “Donne” and Milton’s Lycidas

This is a brief, speculative essay attempting to yoke together two heterogeneous poets individually illuminated by Donald Friedman in a series of separate essays but whom custom has nearly always kept asunder.¹ Almost from the beginning, it seems, Thomas Carew and John Milton have been treated as not just belonging to different literary and political landscapes but practically inhabiting different planets or universes – this in spite of the odd fact that their lives and their poetry overlapped during one of the most combustible decades in England’s literary and political history: the 1630s. There is, of course, no direct evidence that the two ever knew each other. Born in 1594 or 1595, Carew belonged to the literary generation immediately preceding Milton’s. He entered Oxford in 1608, the year Milton was born; and while Milton was just beginning grammar school at St. Paul’s, Carew was probably already abroad, in Venice, in the company of Sir Dudley Carleton and the Earl of Arundel, and, after a few bumps, on his way to achieving a successful career at court. In 1630, Carew would be appointed to the position of “One of the Gentlemen of the Privie-Chamber, and Sewer in Ordinary to his Majesty,” Charles I, to quote from the 1640 title page of Carew’s Poems, and in the same year, he would perish, probably from syphilis. In his Bacchus-like behavior and brevity, he seems the very model for Lovelace’s grasshopper in his famous insect “Ode.”

By 1640, and by contrast, the Cambridge-educated Milton would only recently have returned from abroad in order to pursue the Puritan cause of religious freedom in England. As the familiar story goes, Milton’s decision to return soon brought him into further conflict with the Caroline court and the established Church of England, a decision that would eventuate in, among many things, not only a position as Secretary of the Foreign Tongues in the Cromwell government, but also, during the Restoration, the publication of the greatest long poem in English. When Samuel Johnson noted at the end of his “Life of Milton” that “from his contemporaries [Milton] neither courted nor received support,” Johnson was writing from the perspective that this epic poet’s rightful place was clearly among the pantheon of the elect: “There is in his writings nothing by which the pride of other authors might be gratified or favor gained; no exchange of praise, nor solicitation of support.”²

Although refined by later critics, Johnson’s trans-generational and, ultimately, trans-historical valuation of Milton still lies at the core of most literary histories. True, poems like Lycidas engage contemporary events, most notably in what used to be called “the digression” on the clergy, and his masque, Comus, has increasingly been read as a critique of forms and attitudes associated with the Caroline court, with Comus sometimes glossed as a Caroline suitor of sorts, and the Lady allegorized as a version of the British Church.³ But with regard to the matter of tracing Milton’s poetic lineage, Johnson’s long view continues to dominate. In these histories, the itineraries can vary in theoretical sophistication but rarely in direction: one travels back through the English Renaissance, via Shakespeare and Spenser, then sometimes over to Italy, in a journey that almost always arrives at Milton’s original classical sources, whether Theocritus, Virgil, or Homer. Meanwhile, Carew remains the quintessential Caroline poet, whose verse is both defined by and limited to the halcyon days before the revolutionary storm.

To the young Milton of the 1630s, however, the distance between his thinking and Carew’s might not have appeared so absolute or inevitable as it has to later readers. For one thing, however persuaded he was of his calling as a poet – “anno domini 1619 he was ten years old, as by his picture, and was then a poet,” writes Aubrey⁴ – the early poems eventually published in Poems 1645 reveal, in their great variety, only the certainty of a calling, not a belief in a single pathway to accomplishing his task. With regard...