...failure of imagination and of art. This perception is similar to his statement that in Milton's "Lycidas" "there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new" ("Life of Milton," 1, 163) where Johnson's complaint is not mainly about the poem's pastoral form or...

...Boadicea: Gender and Nation in Early Modern England. 9. Samuel Johnson's well-known remark on Lycidas — "its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting" (94) — is typical of a centuries-long English critical vendetta against the pastoraL 1o. A fine example...

...the poems is of an artistic failure, and in this Johnson echoes his observation on "Lycidas" that: "In this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new."4:1 But Johnson also comments on an experiential problem he sees in the metaphysicals, who "wrote...

..."Lycidas." Although Johnson finds "Lycidas" particularly offensive, he also attacks the genre itself: "its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting" The last word is explained by the Norton editors in the notes as meaning "displeasing, because its...

...opinion on this theme, Samuel Johnson's more famous critique of Milton's poem is perhaps exemplary : In this poem there is no nature for there is no truth;...improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind .... Among the flocks and copses and flowers appear the heathen deities, Jove and Phoebus, Neptune...

...of Milton, says the problem with Lycidas is the pastoral mode: "For in this poem there is no nature, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral,...whatever images it can supply are long ago exhausted . . . ."4 Clearly, though, stylization can serve to focus a powerful emotional statement. An emotion...