Milton’s Lycidas: Occasion

Milton’s Lycidas: Occasion
Milton is considered the most important poet in the language of English after William Shakespeare. His masterpiece Lycidas was first appeared in 1638 in a collection of elegies entitled ‘Justa Edouardo King Naufrago’. It contained twenty three pieces of Greek and Latin verses. Lycidas is a lament in verse on the tragic and untimely death of Edward King, a college-mate of Miton’s at Cambridge who drowned in a shipwreck in 1637. The king was young and poetic promise. His untimely death shocked all who knew him. Milton was asked to make a contribution to the collection about his emotional conflicts especially about poetry. Milton was superior to king and had not been very close to King. Both were devoted to Latin and religious. In Lycidas Milton uses the form of a pastoral elegy to express his sorrow. But Lycidas has only few passages that bear specific reference to the dead man. The poem goes on to describe the heavenly bliss that is Lycidas’fortune after death.