SOURCE: “On Milton's Lycidas,” in The Pastoral Mode: A Casebook, edited by Bryan Loughrey, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1984, pp. 71-3.
In the following excerpt, originally published in his Lives of the English Poets in 1780, Johnson critcizes what he thinks are the faults of John Milton's poem Lycidas, whose pastoral form he finds vulgar and disgusting.
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