Called by many critics the greatest achievement of English lyrical poetry, this elegy was

written upon the death of a fellow alumnus of Milton's, Edward King, who was drowned in the Irish Sea in 1637. A group of King's former schoolmates at Cambridge issued a commemorative volume titled Obsequies to the Memory of Mr. Edward King (1638). It was in this limited publication that Lycidas first appeared. Heretofore, of his great poems only Comus had been published, and that anonymously.

Lycidas is not an expression of personal grief (personal grief was to be eloquent in Milton's next important poem, the Latin Epitaphium Damonis), but rather a record of the thoughts that King's death evoked in the poet. King had written verses himself and had prepared himself for the Church. These two facts of the dead man's career form. the basis for what Milton had to say. Outwardly the poem is written in the tradition of pastoral poetry, and more particularly in the tradition of the pastoral elegy as exhibited in the ancient Greek Lament for Bion by Moschus. The poet is spoken of as a shepherd. But Milton introduces the innovation of identifying the Christian idea of shepherd (pastor) as meaning priest. In a wonderful fusion of pagan and Christian tradition, Milton makes his elegy the occasion for a scathing attack on the corruptions of the clergy in his time, with parenthetical thrusts of scorn at his trivial contemporaries, the Cavalier poets.

Samuel Johnson, who disliked all pastoral poetry, made the one outstandingly foolish judgment of his career, in dismissing Lycidas as a work of an. He said its "diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing, "--a testimony of the fact that Johnson was deaf to the refinements of English poetry at its subtlest, for Lycidas is an exquisite piece of music from the first line through the last. Moreover, Johnson was upset at the mingling of "trifling fictions" with "the most awful and sacred truths, such as ought never to be polluted with such irreverent combinations." That pronouncement can only mean that Johnson failed to grasp the noble idea at the center of the poem: Milton's definition of the high function of a poet.

Samuel Johnson disliked Lycidas because ______.

A．he was deaf

B．he made a foolish judgment

C．it was a pastoral poem

D．he was not a friend of Edward King