The poem was exceedingly popular. It was hailed as Milton's best poem, and by some as the greatest lyrical poem in the English language.[29] Yet it was detested for its artificiality by Samuel Johnson, who found "the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing" and complained that "in this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new."[30]
A line from the poem inspired the title and themes in Stops of Various Quills, an 1895 poetry collection by William Dean Howells.[31] Similarly, it is from a line in "Lycidas" that Thomas Wolfe took the name of his novel Look Homeward, Angel:
- Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth:
- And, O ye Dolphins', waft the hapless youth. (163–164)
The title of Howard Spring's 1940 political novel Fame is the Spur takes its title from the poem, as does The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner which is taken from line 125.
The title of the short story "Wash Far Away" by John Berryman from the collection Freedom of the Poet is also taken from this poem:
- Ay me! Whilst thee the shores and sounding Seas
- Wash far away, where ere thy bones are hurld, (154–155)
The song "The Alphabet Business Concern (Home of Fadeless Splendour)", from the album Heaven Born and Ever Bright (1992) by Cardiacs, contains the lines:
Comes the blind Fury with th'abhorred shears And slits the thin spun life. (75–76)
