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Making Connections with Milton’s Epitaphium Damonis

Milton’s Epitaphium Damonis is often described as a profoundly lonely work, marking the loss of his oldest and most intimate friend, Charles Diodati. It also one of the first works to announce Milton’s epic ambitions, and accordingly it holds an important place in narratives that describe Milton as a singular, or even antisocial, poet, producing poetry from the deep well of his interior self. But this chapter examines the poem as a deeply social, collaborative work, and one of Milton’s important early experiments in using print publication to cultivate and maintain relationships. Milton needed printers to establish his name; printers like Augustine Mathewes and Matthew Simmons needed authors with established names as allies in their own extended war against print licensing and monopolies. The wider context of the Epitaphium Damonis’s production makes it clear that the circumstances of Milton’s stationers cannot be disentangled from the arc of his own career. His emerging authorial identity was not solitary but social, and print was an essential strategy for constructing, promoting, and preserving it.