News at Eleven: When [Charles] Diodati died in 1638,

aged twenty-nine, [John] Milton commemorated him in an elaborate Latin pastoral elegy called Epitaphium Damonis, which was published in 1640. [Samuel] Johnson contemptuously calls it "childish"; he also detested "Lycidas," written to mourn the death by drowning of a Cambridge friend, as belonging to the same artificial genre. "Surely no man could have fancied that he read Lycidas with pleasure, had he not known its author." So much for a poem so illustrious that it was once conventional to accept the judgment of the nineteenth-century author and scholar Mark Pattison and call it "the high-water mark of English Poesy."

from The New York Review of Books: Heroic Milton: Happy Birthday

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