Trials of a poet …

… Was Milton embarrassed? “He doesn’t say which poems make him squirm.” (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

“Too often we see Milton as inevitably destined to be an epic poet, but there’s in fact really nothing in the Book of Elegies that would reinforce that view. Not only did he use Ovid‘s elegiac couplets instead of Virgil‘s dactylic hexameter, he compares the two great poets and comes down — perhaps jokingly, but still — on the side of Ovid as the greater of the two. Well, pursuit of poetic greatness in Latin poetry necessitated an eventual epic, and of course Milton knew that. The young Milton clearly reveled in the language and imagination of its mythology and romance to a greater extent than the battle scenes from the Aeneid. Milton also repeatedly looks to Ovid by adopting and adapting imagery from Tristia and presenting himself as an exile.”