John Milton and Hellenistic Poetry: Encounters, Interactions, and Transformations

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My interdisciplinary project, combining English, Classics, and French, will demonstrate the significance of John Milton's engagement with the Hellenistic poet-scholars of the Library of Alexandria for the development of his epic, lyric, and tragic poetics. Miltonists have recently noticed a certain Greekness about Milton's poetry. William Poole (2017) argues that Milton as an epic poet is Hellenistic', and Gordon Teskey (2015) states that reading Milton is the closest you can come in English to the experience of reading poetry in Greek' I will test and develop these claims by exploring Milton's careful reading of and affinity with 3rd-century BCE Hellenistic poetry and poets, such as Apollonius of Rhodes, Callimachus,Lycophron, and Theocritus. Milton's own student reading and his teaching curriculum were richly Hellenistic, yet his surviving annotated copies of Hellenistic authors have been almost wholly overlooked by scholars. My thesis will build on my English M.St. dissertation on classical echoes in and the intertextual relationship between Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained as well as my research on prophecy in Apollonius Argonautica for my Classics MA. My study will reveal the debt owed by Milton to Hellenistic poets in his handling of prophetic speech, and, in so doing, cast fresh light on the profoundly intertextual nature of Milton's poetry and poetics.Hannah Crawforth's reassessment (2016) of Milton's annotated copy of Euripides revealed Milton's close study of Protestant humanist commentaries, and how they informed the design and politics of his tragedy Samson Agonistes. A number of Milton's surviving annotated books include Hellenistic poems that deal predominantly with prophecy namely, Aratus Phaenomena and Lycophrons Alexandra. I will examine Milton's marginalia in these texts, paying close attention to Milton's engagement with Protestant commentators such as Milton's extensive interaction with the Huguenot scholar Joseph Scaliger's 1564 translation of Lycophron's Alexandra, and in particular to Scaliger's employment of Virgillian allusions intranslating Lycophron's prophetic language which greatly anticipates arguments such as the classicist Nicholas Horsfall's (1991) that 'Lycophron gave Virgil an indication of how prophetic utterance could serve to bind the mythical and historical worlds'. I will build on the classicist David Sansone's view (2006) that Lycophron's prophetic language 'resembles St. Peter's words in [Milton's] Lycidas in its prophetic character' by showing how Milton's engagement with humanist scholars such as Scaliger in his reading of Hellenistic poetry shaped the prophetic language of his own verse.