ABSTRACT
Milton's Lycidas is often placed in the context of Milton's career, but scholars have put less emphasis on its original print setting: the 1638 university miscellany Justa Edouardo King. By attending to the ways the poem may have been received by readers of the 1638 volume, this essay reads Lycidas as a response and counter to the other poems in the volume—the work of a poet attuned to his immediate social circumstances and reception. In Lycidas Milton is simultaneously engaged and at odds with his fellow contributors, and the poem expresses a tension between individual and collective impulses that would come to characterize much of Milton's future writing.
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