"Who would not sing for Lycidas?": Milton's Satirical Reform of the Justa Edouardo King

This essay argues that John Milton's Lycidas is a considerably more satirical poem than has traditionally been recognized and that among the chief targets of its encrypted criticism are its fellow elegies in Edward King's memorial volume, the Justa Edouardo King naufrago (1638). Historical and biographical evidence strongly suggests that the young, radicalized Milton of 1637 would have been an unlikely friend of King—an ordained Laudian and sycophantic poet—and an even more unlikely participant in King's markedly Laudian Cambridge miscellany. This essay thus reads Lycidas in close conjunction with the other Justa poems in order to show how and why Milton nevertheless did participate in a volume he ideologically opposed. As some earlier critics have suggested, Milton probably saw manuscript copies of other Justa poems prior to publication, thereby giving him an opportunity to satirically mimic and critique them in Lycidas itself, in part through his use of the enigmatic "uncouth Swain" persona. The greater purpose behind such elegiac satire, I argue, was first to reform from within, as it were, the Laudian usurpation of the English church in the 1630s; and second, to reclaim the "sad occasion dear" of King's death from the ceremonialist conceits of the Justa poets, in order to perform a harsher but ultimately more fitting, and compassionate, poetic memorial for the drowned youth.