[Milton-L] Lycidas Query

[Carrol Cox]

srevard at siue.edu wrote:
> 
> The Ludlow Mask was published in 1637 by Lawes without Milton's
> name on it.  Lycidas was identified in 1638 only with Milton's
> initials.

It's been so long since I read it that I remember no details, but the
title of John Crowe Ransom's essay on Lycidas remains highly suggestive,
"A Poem Nearly Anonymous." But aside from whether or not formally
identified as the author, in all of Milton's poems the narrator comes
from nowhere, addressing a reader equally anonymous. That is what makes
him the first modern poet -- i.e. the poet of a world of atomized
individuals, of actions which are only related 'behind the backs' as it
were of the agents, the celebrant of the endless struggle of "isolated
-- abstract -- individuals" to form and reform and to reform relations
in a world in which no relations exist except as they are continually
reaffirmed by free acts of will. A world of no meaning except that
created by the acts of individuals.

Carrol