FRIENDSHIP, MODERNITY, AND ELEGIAC TRADITION

5 6 Y F R I E N D S H I P , M O D E R N I T Y , A N D E L E G I A C T R A D I T I O N R O N A L D A . S H A R P One of the bitterest complaints in Dr. Johnson’s infamous attack on ‘‘Lycidas’’ is that Milton’s pastoral elegy ‘‘excite[s] no sympathy ’’ for the poet’s dead friend. Whereas in Cowley’s ‘‘On the Death of Mr. William Harvey,’’ ‘‘It is easy to suppose how much he must miss the companion of his labors and the partner of his discoveries,’’ in ‘‘Lycidas,’’ according to Johnson, one is never made to feel Milton’s sense of loss. Leaving aside the vexed issues of artistic sincerity and authenticity implicit in Johnson’s critique – to say nothing of his generic distaste for modern pastoral – I would like to suggest that his assumptions about friendship raise important issues that have been ignored by critics of the elegiac tradition. For Johnson seems to be assuming that it is appropriate for a critic to evaluate how successfully an actual friendship has been represented in a poem. The silence of most subsequent critics on this issue seems to be based on the assumption that Dr. Johnson is wrong, and that it is inappropriate to inquire about, let alone evaluate, the rendering of friendship in an elegy written about a friend. Perhaps it is time to reopen that question. Is there not an important distinction to be made between an 5 7 R elegy written about a genuine friend and one about an acquaintance ? Perhaps one reason the representation of friendship in ‘‘Lycidas’’ may seem inadequate is that Edward King was merely an acquaintance of Milton’s and not a friend. Does it make sense, to take another famous example, to continue to treat ‘‘Adonais’’ as though it were an elegy written by one friend about another? Shelley and Keats knew each other; they even spent a few evenings together, and Shelley made an extremely kind invitation to Keats. But they were scarcely friends. As a serious thinker about friendship himself, whose Rambler and Idler essays on the subject are among the best we have, Dr. Johnson would have read ‘‘Lycidas’’ not simply as a pastoral elegy but also as part of the long tradition of the literature of friendship. Johnson erred not by attempting to read the poem in the context of friendship but rather by failing to recognize that there is a species of pastoral elegy that employs the death of a friend or acquaintance merely as a conventional springboard to a meditation about poetry, death, and ultimate meaning. In such poems – ‘‘Adonais’’ is another good example – the reader ought to expect neither serious reflection about friendship generally nor a deeply felt rendering of the relationship with the dead friend. Such poems are occasions for writing about death and loss, not friendship. But Johnson’s impulse is not entirely misguided, for there is another kind of elegy in which the death of a friend, far from functioning merely as a conventional point of departure, is felt in the most deeply personal way, and in which friendship does indeed share center stage with death. Critics who approach these poems generically, in relation to the conventions of the elegy but in ignorance of that other rich but forgotten tradition, are bound to miss important dimensions of these works. To understand those elegies it is appropriate to consider the context of the literature of friendship, and all the more so since there is a deep and longstanding association of death and friendship that runs through that tradition. In fact, one of the defining features of the literature of friendship is its preoccupation with the conjunction of the two. If we are to understand the importance of friendship to the modern elegy we must first understand that the connection of death and friendship has been at the foundation of serious reflection about friendship for centuries. 5 8 S H A R P Y The immediate concern of Laelius’s discourse on friendship, which...