Wallace is a freelance writer and poet. In this essay, Wallace explores Milton's use of biblical imagery in his youthful discussion of his own destiny.

When a young John Milton penned "On His Having Arrived at the Age of Twenty-Three," he was still a student at Cambridge University, working towards a master of arts degree, which he would receive the next year, at the age of twenty-four. Milton had been writing poems since the age of fifteen, and by the time he left Cambridge, he had accumulated a significant body of poetry: Latin elegies, translations of biblical psalms, and many pages of English verse.

He would wait almost another ten years before he began to publish widely, and even then the works he put his name to would be political or theological arguments, not poetry. Not until fourteen years later, at the age of thirty-seven, would his...