Lycidas

Sharon: Lycidas is a tribute to Milton's Cambridge friend, Edward King, whose ship went down on the Irish Sea.

Poetry and Healing Sharon Bakar 2006

He endured the drowning of a college friend-the subject for the pastoral elegy "Lycidas" - and the death of two wives, a son, and a daughter.

VQR 2009

He endured the drowning of a college friend-the subject for the pastoral elegy "Lycidas" - and the death of two wives, a son, and a daughter.

VQR 2009

"Il Penseroso", "Comus", and "Lycidas" -- poems within their own limits as perfect as anything he ever did.

The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 5: Diocese-Fathers of Mercy 1840-1916 1913

This, it is true, is about all that can be said for such criticism as that on Lycidas, which is a delicious example of the wrong way of applying strong sense to inappropriate topics.

Samuel Johnson Leslie, Stephen 1878

I had come into the possession of Milton's poetry, and though untouched by his Paradise Lost, his Lycidas was a revelation to me of the music and rhythm and allusions possible to poetry.

Confessions of Boyhood John Albee 1874

It strikes us as a little strange that, in these verses, Addison should be called Lycidas, a name of singularly evil omen for a swain just about to cross St. George's Channel.

Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay 1829

His condemnation of "Lycidas" ( "Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief") is perverse but exhilarating; his praise for the twin poems "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso" is hardly more than dutiful, while in Comus, to most admirers of Milton an early work of genius, he finds little to commend.

Heroic Milton: Happy Birthday Kermode, Frank 2009

If Johnson had been around he might have reminded his reader that Pattison was believed by many to be the original of George Eliot's Casaubon in Middlemarch, but his pedantic attack on "Lycidas" is best regarded as one of Johnson's more willful errors.

Heroic Milton: Happy Birthday Kermode, Frank 2009

The publication of his first collection of poems (including Comus and "Lycidas") in 1645 may have been meant to signify the end of his youthful verse and the announcement of a major phase, but that move forward was still no more than a promise, for there was more anticlerical work to be done; and he also had to tackle a problem that more and more occupied his mind.

Heroic Milton: Happy Birthday Kermode, Frank 2009