After Milton’s graduation, he did not consider the ministry. Instead, he began a six-year stay at his father’s recently purchased country estate of Horton with the stated intention of becoming a poet. Milton made his move to Horton, a village of about 300 people, in 1632, saying that God had called him to be a poet. One of his first great works, Comus, a Masque, was written around this time.
In 1637, Milton’s mother died, possibly of the plague. That same year, one of his Cambridge friends, Edward King, a young minister, was drowned in a boating accident. Classmates at Cambridge decided to create a memorial volume of poetry for their dead friend. Milton’s poem, untitled in the volume but later called Lycidas, was the final poem, possibly because the editors recognized it as the artistic climax of the volume. Whatever the reasoning, the poem, signed simply J. M., has become one of the most recognized elegiac poems in English.
