Abstract
Essays in this volume consider texts in relation to changing moments of publication, and to the different kinds of reading elicited in changing cultural and historical situations. Milton’s famous elegy of 1637/8 for Edward King presents a fascinating instance of a text intricately woven into its occasion, perhaps over-ambitiously writing it into its text. It demands a reading mindful of the conventional expectations of its funerary functions as well as its institutional and political situations, and the challenges it has presented to its readers over the centuries as a particularly artful example of elegy have spelled out a wonderful story of difficulty. I shall suggest that anxieties about understanding affected not only subsequent readerships but also, perhaps, the poet himself at the most important moment of subsequent publication, in his collection of poems in 1645. That is my specific subject.
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Notes
On this issue see, for example, Peter Lindenbaum, ‘John Milton and the Republican Mode of Literary Production’, in Patronage, Politics, and Literary Traditions in England, 1558–1658, ed. Cedric C. Brown (Detroit, 1991), pp. 93–108.
Donald Lemen Clark, John Milton and St Paul’s School (1948: reprint, New York, 1964). On the idea of a poetic career, see especially Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, and Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley, 1983); John Guillory, Literary Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (New York, 1983); Dustin Griffin, ‘The Beginnings of Modern Authorship: Milton and Dryden’, Milton Quarterly 24.1 (1990), pp. 1–7.
Reported in The Collected Works of Abraham Cowley, vol. 1, ed. Thomas O. Calhoun, Laurence Heyworth and Alan Pritchard (Newark, NJ, London and Toronto, 1989), p. 297. Hereafter cited as Works.
One of the themes of G. W. Pigman III in Grief and Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge, 1985), in which a general shift is traced from sixteenth-century containments of grief to greater allowance of expressions of grief in seventeenth-century elegy. Hereafter cited as Pigman.
On the whole epideictic tradition in relation to elegy, see Barbara K. Lewalski, Donne’s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode (Princeton, NJ, 1973); and
O. B. Hardison, The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill, NC, 1962); on funerary poems see, for example, Eric Smith, By Mourning Tongues (London, 1977); Pigman; Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore, MD, 1985); Joshua Scodel, The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth (Ithaca, NY, 1991). All these studies, however, tend to treat elegiac expression in a personal rather than community framework.
Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1905) vol. 1, pp. 163–5.
The material in this paragraph follows that in my John Milton: A Literary Life (Basingstoke, 1995), pp. 51–2. Amongst various contextualising accounts of ‘Lycidas’ in 1637, see David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London, 1985), pp. 275–85.
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© 1997 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Brown, C.C. (1997). Mending and Bending the Occasional Text: Collegiate Elegies and the Case of ‘Lycidas’. In: Brown, C.C., Marotti, A.F. (eds) Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25994-6_9
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