LYCIDAS, ITs'l-das. A pastoral elegy con tribbted by John Milton to a memorial vol ume published at Cambridge in 1638 in honor of Edward King, a prospective parish priest. who while on a voyage to Ireland, perished in a shipwreck off the Welsh coast in August 1637. Little is known of Milton's relations with King or of the circumstances attending the writing and publishing of (Lycidas,) but there is evi dence that the poet bestowed much pains upon his elegy which has come to be regarded as a masterpiece in its kind, being practically un surpassed in English poetry in Itch beauty and noble harmony. Tennyson told Edward Fitz \ Gerald, who seems to have shared the opinion, that (Lycidas) ((was a touchstone of poetic taste?) In kind the poem holds by the pastoral elegies of the ancients Theocritus, Bion, Moschus, Virgil and of their Renaissance imi tators, but it dispenses with some typical features, e.g., the refrain, and it swells, partic ularly in the passage that introduces Saint Peter denouncing the corruption of the English clergy, to an ode-like intensity of lyric utterance tt might warrant the claim that in Mil ton created a new form of elegy, one blending the primary poem of lamentation with the pastoral and the ode. The exceptional features to be observed in the verse-lengths and the rhymes, which show Italian influence, give color to this view. Few poems better repay the student who is interested in the sources from which a great poet draws his materials, but such study of only enhances respect for Milton's art and leaves his right to be re garded as essentially original unimpaired.
Admirers of (Lycidas) have found difficulty in keeping their praise within bounds, but it has not lacked detractors, the most conspicuous of whom is Dr. Johnson. Hostile criticism is generally based on the artificial elements of the poem, which it shares with other pastorals, on the alleged lack of a deep personal interest on the part of the elegist in the subject of his elegy, and on the assumed incompatibility of the denunciatory passage on the clergy with the soft, pensive tone of regret which should char acterize
elegy. The first objection applies, however, to poems like
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