ABSTRACT
The pastoral elegy had its roots in the Alexandrian or earlier Hellenistic period of the ancient world. Theocritus and Bion and Moschus, like Milton himself, though they wrote about shepherds and rustic life, were either born in or passed a good deal of time in towns. The kind of richness of sense which Lycidas possesses is not, however, the same kind of richness that people admire, say, in Donne or in Pope. Mr. Eliot's early judgement on Milton has in fact something in common with Mr. Graves's. Milton, in Lycidas, was harking back to Spenser, whereas the most fashionable poet who contributed to King's memorial volume, Cleveland, was a neo-Donneian; rather in which Mr. John Wain and Mr. Alfred Alvarez were once described as neo-Empsonians. The closeness with which Milton follows Fletcher here forces us to grapple at last with that notion of John Crowe Ransom's with which the authors started: the notion of Lycidas as 'a poem nearly anonymous'.
