The Multivocal Monody: Milton and the Poetics of Justa Edouardo King

Abstract

Milton's Lycidas is often placed in the context of Milton's career, but scholars have put less emphasis on its original print setting: the 1638 university miscellany Justa Edouardo King. By attending to the ways the poem may have been received by readers of the 1638 volume, this essay reads Lycidas as a response and counter to the other poems in the volume—the work of a poet attuned to his immediate social circumstances and reception. In Lycidas Milton is simultaneously engaged and at odds with his fellow contributors, and the poem expresses a tension between individual and collective impulses that would come to characterize much of Milton's future writing.