SOURCE: "Five Types of Lycidas," in Milton's Lycidas: The Tradition and the Poem, University of Missouri Press, 1983, pp. 216-35.

In the following essay, Abrams surveys interpretations of "Lycidas."

Most modern critics base their theories on the proposition that a poem is an object in itself. And all critics endorse enthusiastically at least one statement by Matthew Arnold, that the function of criticism is "to see the object as in itself it really is." The undertaking is surely valid, and laudable; the results, however, are disconcerting. For in this age of unexampled critical activity, as one poetic object after another is analyzed under rigidly controlled conditions, the object proves to be highly unstable, and disintegrates. In the pages of the critics we increasingly find, under a single title, not one poem but a variety of poems.

Milton's "Lycidas" is a convenient case in point, because it is short enough...