earticle

영어

The purpose of this article is to make a close study of Milton’s “Elegia septima” and “Retraction” which was attached to the roman elegy in his first collection of works, Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645). As this “Retraction” is positioned just below the elegy, it is commonly said to retract only one poem, the seventh elegy. But this kind of understanding appears to disregard the poet’s intent to select and order some early works for publication and to put ‘a thin rule’ between the two poems. When publishing the collection, Milton means to sincerely show a portrait of the artist as a young man who would be a great Christian epic poet in English. “Elegia septima” is one of the seven numbered elegies in this collection, where Milton practices Latin elegies in order to overcome the great roman elegiac poets by reinterpreting and recreating their poetry for his own particular needs. When we think of “Retraction” as a postscript just to “Elegia septima”, it seems to be an honest regret for the poet’s foolish sentiment. As a revocation of the whole elegies, however, it proves to be a poem in which, after boasting paradoxically about his mastering conventional elegiac poems, the poet proclaims not only farewell to the classic genre but flight to a new epic world in the future.