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Flowerets and Sounding Seas: A Study in the Affective Structure of Lycidas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Wayne Shumaker
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Extract

More insistently, perhaps, than any other poem in English, Lycidas raises the purely aesthetic problem of how the emotions may be stirred by lines which at first are much less than perspicuous to the intellect and even after many readings remain obscure at two or three points. Johnson's attack to one side, Lycidas has received all but universal praise, couched often in language so high-pitched that it absorbs easily adjectives like “exquisite,” “thrilling,” “tremendous,” and. “supreme.” Why is the emotional impact so powerful? A reply must be sought (I think) in the affective connotations of words, phrases, and images in formal combination; and it is worth finding because if in one of its aspects literature is history, in another, and not unimportant, aspect it is immediate experience.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 66 , Issue 4 , June 1951 , pp. 485 - 494
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1951

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References

Note 1 in page 485 “The Pattern of Milton's Nativity Ode,” UTQ, x (1941), 171–172.

Note 2 in page 489 See, e.g., the recent discussion of water as a fertility symbol by Richard P. Adams in “The Archetypal Pattern of Death and Rebirth in Milton's Lycidas,” PMLA, LXIV (1949), 183–188.

Note 3 in page 491 Caroline W. Mayerson has recently made this passage central to a discussion of both the structure and meaning of Lycidas. See “The Orpheus Image in Lycidas,” PMLA, lxrv (1949), 189–207.

Note 4 in page 493 F. A. Patterson, in quite a different way, has also emphasized an implication at the end of the poem that the world must now again be faced. See his notes to Lycidas in the revised edition of The Student's Milton (New York, 1946). It is from Patterson's text, incidentally, that I have drawn my quotations.