ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Lycidas is one of the most famous elegies, written by John Milton in 1637. This poem follows the convention of the Greek Pastoral Elegy.

Detailed explanation-2: -Written by John Milton, “Lycidas” is a pastoral elegy that first appeared in a 1638 collection of elegies in English and Latin entitled Justa Edouardo King Naufrago. Lycidas serves as Milton’s commemoration of his Cambridge college mate, Edward King, who drowned when his ship sank off the coast of Wales in August 1637.

Detailed explanation-3: -Genre. Lycidas is a pastoral elegy, a genre initiated by Theocritus, also put to famous use by Virgil and Spenser. Christopher Kendrick asserts that one’s reading of Lycidas would be improved by treating the poem anachronistically, that is, as if it was one of the most original pastoral elegies.

Detailed explanation-4: -Lycidas is a pastoral elegy written on the death of Milton’s classmate Edward King who drowned in a shipwreck in the Iris Sea in which he has expressed his tribute to his friend using the elegiac form popularised by the Greek poet Theocritus and Virgil.

Detailed explanation-5: -Pastoral poetry is a genre or mode of poetry that refers to works that idealize country life and the landscape they take place in. Pastoral poems usually make use of an idyllic setting, one that is completely, or almost entirely, removed from society.