The Early Popularity of Miltons Minor Poems

s," and dozens of lesser creations in the several approved "kinds." Meanwhile, there was relatively little attention to types struck out by modern or English poets. Such writers were mainly utilized as storehouses of excellent phrases, and their diction was frequently echoed by their successors. Hence the value of the phrasal digests made by such men as Poole, Bysshe, and Gildon. Borrowing phrases was not necessarily a covert proceeding, as Thomas Warton seems to have thought (op. cit., pp. x, xi), though it was apparently more creditable to borrow from the ancients than from the moderns. The poet, if successful, made some new or clever application of the phrase borrowed, whereupon he was frequently content to advertise the fact by printing the source in a footnote, or by printing the borrowed phrase in italics. Early in the eighteenth century occasional quotation marks indicate borrowings, but this present-day method was then rare. In most of his poems, for example, Pope called attention to his classical borrowings?and decidedly less often to his English borrowings?in footnotes. Not late in the century the hold of the classical "kinds" on poets began to weaken, and imitations of various English and French poets became more frequent. The numberless imitations of Milton's minor poems, or, to be more exact, of "L'Allegro" and "II Penseroso" around 1750 do not necessarily imply a sudden awakening to the merits of these poems; the fact is merely that, Horace's Satires an...