The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660-1800 9780199600809, 0199600805

Table of contents :
Cover
The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660–​1800
Copyright
Contents
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Part I Poems in Social Settings
1. Poems on the Streets
2. Poems on the Stage
3. Poems in Print
4. Poems in Magazines
5. Poems in the Novel
6. Poems in the Nursery
7. Poems in the Lecture Hall
Part II Poetic Identities
8. The Poet as Clubman
9. The Poet as Professional
10. The Poet as Laborer
11. The Poet as Teacher
12. The Poet as Man of Feeling
13. The Poet as Genius
14. The Poet as Fraud
15. The Poet as Poetess
Part III Poetic Subjects
16. Poems on Poetry
17. Poems on Politics
18. Poems on Nation and Empire
19. Poems on Science and Philosophy
20. Poems on Place
21. Poems on the Sexes
Part IV Poetic Form
22. Couplets
23. Blank Verse
24. Stanzas
25. Free Verse and Prose Poetry
Part V Poetic Genres
26. Pastoral
27. Georgic
28. Epic
29. Satire
30. Ode
31. Elegy
32. Ballad
33. Devotional Poetry
34. Lyric
35. Translation
Part VI Poetic Devices
36. Imagery
37. Metaphor
38. Allusion
39. Irony
Part VII Criticism
40. Scholarship
41. Histories
42. Reviews
43. Honors
Index

Citation preview

 

The Oxford Handbook of

BRITISH POETRY, 1660–​1 800

 

 

The Oxford Handbook of

BRITISH POETRY, 1660–​1 800 Edited by

JAC K  LY N C H

1

 

3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2016 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2016 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2016944778 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​960080–​9 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

 

Contents

List of Illustrations  Notes on Contributors  Introduction 

ix xi xix

PA RT I   P OE M S I N S O C IA L SE T T I N G S 1. Poems on the Streets  William Donaldson

3

2. Poems on the Stage  Cynthia Wall

23

3. Poems in Print  James McLaverty

40

4. Poems in Magazines  Jennifer Batt

55

5. Poems in the Novel  Thomas Keymer

72

6. Poems in the Nursery  Andrea Immel and Lissa Paul

88

7. Poems in the Lecture Hall  Richard Terry

108

PA RT I I   P OE T IC I DE N T I T I E S 8. The Poet as Clubman  Moyra Haslett

127

9. The Poet as Professional  Brean Hammond

144

 

vi   Contents

10. The Poet as Laborer  Bridget Keegan

162

11. The Poet as Teacher  Lorna Clymer

179

12. The Poet as Man of Feeling  Rivka Swenson

195

13. The Poet as Genius  Marshall Brown

210

14. The Poet as Fraud  Nick Groom

227

15. The Poet as Poetess  Isobel Grundy

247

PA RT I I I   P OE T IC SU B J E C T S 16. Poems on Poetry  David F. Venturo

269

17. Poems on Politics  Christine Gerrard

286

18. Poems on Nation and Empire  Leith Davis

303

19. Poems on Science and Philosophy  Pat Rogers

320

20. Poems on Place  Donna Landry

335

21. Poems on the Sexes  Catherine Ingrassia

356

PA RT I V   P OE T IC  F OR M 22. Couplets  J. Paul Hunter

373

 

Contents   vii

23. Blank Verse  Conrad Brunström

386

24. Stanzas  Rodney Stenning Edgecombe

405

25. Free Verse and Prose Poetry  Richard Bradford

422

PA RT V   P OE T IC  G E N R E S 26. Pastoral  David Hill Radcliffe

441

27. Georgic  David Fairer

457

28. Epic  Anna M. Foy

473

29. Satire  Ashley Marshall

495

30. Ode  Sandro Jung

510

31. Elegy  James D. Garrison

528

32. Ballad  Ruth Perry

547

33. Devotional Poetry  Emma Mason

563

34. Lyric  Jennifer Keith

579

35. Translation  Tanya Caldwell

596

 

viii   Contents

PA RT V I   P OE T IC DE V IC E S 36. Imagery  Timothy Erwin

617

37. Metaphor  Blanford Parker

632

38. Allusion  Marcus Walsh

649

39. Irony  Jack Lynch

668

PA RT V I I   C R I T IC I SM 40. Scholarship  Adam Rounce

685

41. Histories  Philip Smallwood

701

42. Reviews  Antonia Forster

716

43. Honors  Daniel J. Ennis

732

Index 

747

 

List of Illustrations

6.1 The rope dancer card from Jane Johnson, Manuscript Nursery Library, Elisabeth Ball Collection. Reproduced by permission of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. 

97

6.2 The trumpeter. Silvia Cole Ms., pp. 38–​9. Reproduced courtesy of the Osborne Collection, Toronto Public Library. 

101

6.3 Silvia in the street. Silvia Cole Ms., pp. 40–​1. Reproduced by permission of the Toronto Public Library, Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books. 

101

6.4 Dick criticizes his friend’s delivery. Dorothy Kilner, Poems (London, 1785), p. 66. Reproduced by permission of the Toronto Public Library, Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books. 

104

12.1 A literalized “sonnet lady,” from Charles Sorel, The Extravagant Shepherd; or the History of the Shepherd Lysis, trans. John Davies (London, 1654). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. 

199

 

 

Notes on Contributors

Jennifer Batt is Lecturer in Eighteenth-​Century English Literature at the University of Bristol, and was formerly Postdoctoral Project Coordinator of the Digital Miscellanies Index project (http://​digitalmiscellaniesindex.org) at the Faculty of English, University of Oxford. She has published on laboring-​class poetry and eighteenth-​century miscellany culture, and her essay on eighteenth-​century lyric verse won the Review of English Studies essay prize in 2010. She is completing a monograph on the iconic laboring-​class poet, Stephen Duck. Richard Bradford is Research Professor of English at Ulster University. He has published twenty-​seven books. He recently published Is Shakespeare Any Good? And Other Questions on How We Evaluate Literature (Wiley-​Blackwell, 2015), along with The Importance of Elsewhere: Philip Larkin’s Photographs (Frances Lincoln, 2015). Marshall Brown is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington and editor of Modern Language Quarterly. His books include The Shape of German Romanticism (Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), Preromanticism (Stanford Univ. Press, 1991), Turning Points: Essays in the History of Cultural Expressions (Stanford Univ. Press, 1997), The Gothic Text (Stanford Univ. Press, 2004), “The Tooth That Nibbles at the Soul”: Essays on Music and Poetry (Univ. of Washington Press, 2010), and, as editor, the Romanticism volume of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000). Conrad Brunström is Lecturer in English at Maynooth University. He has published two monographs on the poetry of William Cowper (2004) and the oratory of Thomas Sheridan (2011). He has also published and presented papers internationally on topics as diverse as religious literature, poetic form, theater history, political rhetoric, and Queer Studies and on authors as varied as Samuel Johnson, James Beattie, Charles Churchill, Matthew Prior, and Frances Burney. He is researching Irish and Canadian nationalisms and the role of speech-​ making in the formation of a sense of collective political identity. Tanya Caldwell is Professor of English and Associate Graduate Director at Georgia State University. She has published widely on various topics across the eighteenth century. Her most significant works on the classics in translation include Time to Begin Anew: Dryden’s Georgics and Aeneis (Bucknell Univ. Press, 2000) and Virgil Made English: The Decline of Classical Authority (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Her most recent work focuses on drama. She has published the anthology Popular Plays by Women in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Broadview, 2011) and is working on a biography of Hannah Cowley. Lorna Clymer is Professor of English, Emerita, California State University, Bakersfield. She is an independent scholar in Washington, D.C. Leith Davis, Professor in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University in Greater Vancouver, is author of Acts of Union: Scotland and the Negotiation of the British Nation

 

xii   Notes on Contributors (Stanford Univ. Press, 1998)  and Music, Postcolonialism and Gender:  The Construction of Irish National Identity, 1725–​1875 (Notre Dame Univ. Press, 2005), as well as co-​editor of Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004) and Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture (Ashgate, 2012). Her current book project examines the articulation of cultural memory through print culture in the early eighteenth century. She serves as the Director of Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Scottish Studies. William Donaldson is author of numerous books on Scottish literature and music, including Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland (Aberdeen Univ. Press, 1986), The Jacobite Song: Political Myth and National Identity (Aberdeen Univ. Press, 1988), and The Highland Pipe and Scottish Society (Tuckwell, 2000). He worked for many years in the Open University, and now teaches in the Literature Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is now engaged in two substantial projects: a history of Scottish song and its links with the wider definition of Scottish culture, and a variorum online edition of ceol mor, the classical music of the Highland bagpipe. Rodney Stenning Edgecombe lectures in English literature at the University of Cape Town, and holds one of its Distinguished Teacher Awards. He took his MA with distinction at Rhodes University, where he won the Royal Society of St. George Prize for English, and his PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was awarded the Members’ English Prize, 1978/​79. He has published 11 books—​the most recent being on Thomas Hood—​and 400 articles on topics that range from Shakespeare to nineteenth-​century ballet and opera. Daniel J. Ennis serves as Dean of the Edwards College of Humanities and Fine Arts at Coastal Carolina University. He is the author of Enter the Press-​Gang:  Representations of Naval Impressment in Eighteenth-​Century British Literature (Univ. of Delaware Press, 2002) and edited, with Judith B. Slagle, a collection entitled Prologues, Epilogues, Curtain-​ Raisers and Afterpieces: The Rest of the Eighteenth-​Century London Stage (Univ. of Delaware Press, 2007). He also edited, with Jack DeRochi, the collection Richard Brinsley Sheridan: The Impresario in Political and Cultural Context (Bucknell Univ. Press, 2013). He has published essays on John Dryden, Christopher Smart, and Lord Byron among others. Timothy Erwin, Professor of English and former Chair of Cultural Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, works on the interdisciplinary relations of literature and art and is the author of Textual Vision: Augustan Design and the Invention of Eighteenth-​Century British Culture (Bucknell Univ. Press, 2015). David Fairer is Professor of Eighteenth-​Century English Literature at the University of Leeds. His most recent book, Organising Poetry:  The Coleridge Circle 1790–​1798 (Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), traces poetry’s development during the 1790s, building on the concerns of his previous comprehensive study, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–​1789 (Longman, 2003). He is also the author of Pope’s Imagination (Manchester Univ. Press, 1984), The Poetry of Alexander Pope (Penguin, 1989), and editor of Pope: New Contexts (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990). He has edited The Correspondence of Thomas Warton (Univ. of Georgia Press, 1995) and the first complete printing of Warton’s History of English Poetry (Routledge, 1998). With Christine Gerrard he has edited Eighteenth-​Century Poetry:  An Annotated Anthology (Wiley-​Blackwell, 3rd ed. 2015). His reading of the ecological potential of georgic

 

Notes on Contributors    xiii writing has been developed in a recent article, “ ‘Where Fuming Trees Refresh the Thirsty Air’: The World of Eco-​Georgic.” Antonia Forster is Professor of English at the University of Akron. Her publications include an edition of Taming of the Shrew for Sourcebooks in 2008, Index to Book Reviews in England, 1749–​1774 (Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1990) and Index to Book Reviews in England, 1775–​1800 (British Library, 1997). Vol. 1 (1770–​1799) of The English Novel, 1770–​ 1829:  A  Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles (with James Raven) was published by Oxford University Press in 2000. Anna M. Foy is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. She is at work on a book examining Restoration and eighteenth-​century conceptions of poetry’s civic utility. James D. Garrison is the author of A Dangerous Liberty: Translating Gray’s Elegy (Univ. of Delaware Press, 2009). Christine Gerrard is Professor of English at Oxford University and the Barbara Scott Fellow in English at Lady Margaret Hall Oxford. She has recently edited the first volume of The Complete Correspondence of Samuel Richardson (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013), and has co-​edited with David Fairer Eighteenth-​Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Wiley-​ Blackwell, 3rd ed., 2015). She is working on a study of eighteenth-​century women poets. Nick Groom is Professor in English at the University of Exeter. He is a leading authority on Percy’s Reliques (the subject of his first monograph, published by Clarendon Press in 1999) and Thomas Chatterton, on whom he has written many articles and essays. Among his books are The Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature (Picador, 2002), The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford Univ. Press, 2012), and The Seasons: An Elegy for the Passing of the Year (Atlantic, 2013), and he has edited Chatterton’s poetry (Cyder Press, 2003), as well as Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Matthew Lewis’s Monk (Oxford World’s Classics, 2014 and 2016, respectively). Isobel Grundy, Professor Emeritus at the University of Alberta, Canada, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, was until 2003 Henry Marshall Tory Professor in that university’s Department of English. She holds a DPhil from Oxford University (St. Anne’s College) and taught at Queen Mary, London University, 1971–​90. She is author of Samuel Johnson and the Scale of Greatness (Univ. of Georgia Press, 1986), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Comet of the Enlightenment (Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), and (with Virginia Blain and Patricia Clements) The Feminist Companion to Literature in English:  Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (Yale Univ. Press, 1990). She has edited various texts by Montagu, and Secresy (1795) by Eliza Fenwick. She is a Patron of Chawton House Library, and co-​editor (with Susan Brown and Patricia Clements) of Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, Cambridge University Press, http://​orlando.cambridge.org. Brean Hammond is Emeritus Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of many books and articles ranging from Shakespeare’s period to the Romantics, as well as on modern theater. His best-​known publications are Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–​1740: “Hackney for Bread” (Clarendon Press, 1997),

 

xiv   Notes on Contributors and an edition of Shakespeare’s “lost play,” Double Falsehood (Methuen, 2010), for the Arden Shakespeare. Moyra Haslett is Professor in Eighteenth-​Century and Romantic Literature in the School of English, Queen’s University Belfast. Among her publications is a book-​length study of ideas of community and conversation in the eighteenth century, Pope to Burney, Scriblerians to Bluestockings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and several essays on poetry and club culture: “Becoming Bluestockings: Contextualising Hannah More’s ‘The Bas Bleu,’ ” and “Swift and Conversational Culture.” A  recent essay on the culture of song in early eighteenth-​ century Dublin is also forthcoming: “Singing at the Club: Songs on the Wood’s Halfpence Affair, Dublin 1724–​25.” J. Paul Hunter has taught at Williams, Emory, Rochester, and Virginia, and he is now Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. His Before Novels (Norton, 1990) won the Gottschalk Prize, and he has published widely on the British novel and (more recently) on early modern and eighteenth-​century poetry. He is the longtime author of The Norton Introduction to Poetry, now in its 9th edition. Andrea Immel is the Curator of the Cotsen Children’s Library in the Princeton University Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. She contributed chapters to the fifth and sixth volumes of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009) and the Oxford Companion to the History of the Book (Oxford Univ. Press, 2010). Immel was also a senior editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature (Oxford Univ. Press, 2006) and co-​editor of four volumes: (with M. Witmore) Childhood and Children’s Books in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 2006); (with E. Goodenough) Under Fire: Childhood in Shadow of War (Wayne State Univ. Press, 2008); (with M. O. Grenby) The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009); and (with Emer O’Sullivan) Imagining Sameness and Difference for Children (forthcoming). Her most recent publication was a scholarly facsimile edition of Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-​Book (Cotsen Occasional Press, 2013), the first collection of English nursery rhymes. Catherine Ingrassia is Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her publications on the literature and culture of the eighteenth century include Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Eighteenth-​Century Culture (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), Anti-​Pamela and Shamela (editor, Broadview, 2004), and British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century (co-​editor, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2009). She is a past editor of Studies in Eighteenth-​Century Culture, and the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–​1789 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015). Sandro Jung is Director of the Centre for the Study of Text and Print Culture at Ghent University, President of the East-​Central American Society for Eighteenth-​Century Studies, and EURIAS Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Advanced Studies. He is the author, among other publications, of David Mallet, Anglo-​Scot: Poetry, Politics, and Patronage in the Age of Union (Univ. of Delaware Press, 2008), The Fragmentary Poetic: Eighteenth-​ Century Uses of an Experimental Mode (Lehigh Univ. Press, 2009), and James Thomson’s “The Seasons,” Print Culture, and Visual Interpretation, 1730–​1842 (Lehigh Univ. Press, 2015). He edited the English Association’s 2013 Essays and Studies volume on British Literature and

 

Notes on Contributors    xv Print Culture, and co-​edited the 2015 number of Yearbook of English Studies on the History of the Book. Bridget Keegan is Dean of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English at Creighton University. She is the author of British Labouring-​Class Nature Poetry, 1730–​1837 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and has published numerous articles on laboring-​ class writing, and edited several collections of essays devoted to the topic. She also served as an editor for the anthologies Eighteenth-​Century English Labouring-​Class Poets (Pickering & Chatto, 2003) and Nineteenth-​Century English Labouring-​Class Poets (Pickering & Chatto, 2006). With John Goodridge she is editing the forthcoming Cambridge History of British Working-​Class Literature. Jennifer Keith is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has edited, with Claudia Thomas Kairoff, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, comprising Volume 1: Early Manuscript Books and Volume 2: Later Collections, Print and Manuscript (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2016). The Anne Finch Digital Archive http://​library.uncg.edu/​dp/​annefinch provides selected digitized manuscript and print images and contexts that complement the scholarly edition. Keith is also author of Poetry and the Feminine from Behn to Cowper (Univ. of Delaware Press, 2005) and essays on eighteenth-​century poetry and poetics. Thomas Keymer is University Professor and Chancellor Jackman Professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he directs the university’s Collaborative Program in Book History and Print Culture. His publications include Richardson’s Clarissa and the Eighteenth-​Century Reader (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), Pamela in the Marketplace:  Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-​Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005, with Peter Sabor), and numerous edited volumes. He is completing Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660–​1830 for Oxford Univ. Press’s Clarendon Lectures in English series. Donna Landry is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Kent, and a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. She is the author of The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-​ Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–​1796 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990; 2005)  and The Invention of the Countryside:  Hunting, Walking, and Ecology in English Literature, 1671–​1831 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), and the co-​editor of The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–​1850, with Gerald MacLean and Joseph P. Ward (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999; 2006). Her most recent book is Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2009). Landry is a founder-​member of the Evliya Çelebi Way Project, a team of scholars and equestrians who rode across western Anatolia on horseback following the great Ottoman travel writer Evliya Çelebi, establishing a UNESCO Cultural Route. Project website:  http://​www.kent.ac.uk/​ english/​evliya/​index.html Jack Lynch is Professor of English at Rutgers University–​Newark, and author of The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003) and Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Ashgate, 2008). With John T. Scanlan he edits The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual.

 

xvi   Notes on Contributors James McLaverty is Emeritus Professor of Textual Criticism at Keele University. He is the author of Pope, Print, and Meaning (Oxford Univ. Press, 2001) and of essays on Swift, Pope, Johnson, and the theory of textual criticism. He serves as one of the general editors of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift. Ashley Marshall is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author of The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–​1770 (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2013) and of Swift and History: Politics and the English Past (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015), as well as articles in Modern Philology, Review of English Studies, The Library, Huntington Library Quarterly, Philological Quarterly, Eighteenth-​Century Life, Swift Studies, and other journals. Emma Mason is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Recent publications include Reading the Abrahamic Faiths: Rethinking Religion and Literature (Bloomsbury, 2014), Elizabeth Jennings:  The Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2012), and The Cambridge Introduction to Wordsworth (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010). She is a co-​editor of On Human Flourishing: A Poetry Anthology (McFarland, 2015), The Oxford Handbook to the Reception History of the Bible (Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), and The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature (Blackwell, 2009). With Mark Knight, she edits Bloomsbury’s series New Directions in Religion and Literature. Blanford Parker is Professor of Literature at Ave Maria University. He previously taught at the CUNY Graduate Center and College of Staten Island and New York University. His book, The Triumph of Augustan Poetics (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998) was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, Review of English Studies, Eighteenth-​Century Studies, The Age of Johnson, Philological Quarterly, and elsewhere. Lissa Paul is Professor in the Faculty of Education at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. Her most recent monograph, The Children’s Book Business: Lessons from the Long Eighteenth Century, was published in 2011. She is also an Associate General Editor of The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (Norton, 2005) and co-​editor (with Philip Nel) of Keywords for Children’s Literature (NYU Press, 2011). Children’s Literature and Culture of the First World War (co-​edited with Rosemary Rose Johnston and Emma Short) is in press with Routledge. Her current work in progress, a biography, Hunting for Mrs. Fenwick (1766–​1840): An Eighteenth-​Century Life for the Twenty-​First Century, is to be published by the University of Toronto Press. Ruth Perry was past President of the American Society for Eighteenth-​Century Studies, a founder of the Boston Graduate Consortium of Women’s Studies, and founding Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies program at MIT, where she is the Ann Fetter Friedlaender Professor of Humanities. Her most recent monograph is Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture 1748–​1818 (Cambridge Univ. Press) and her most recent edited volume an edition of Charlotte Lennox’s Henrietta (1758) co-​edited with Susan Carlile for the University of Kentucky Press. She is writing a biography of Anna Gordon Brown, an eighteenth-​century Scotswoman who preserved our finest ballads. She is herself a folksinger and teaches courses on folk music. David Hill Radcliffe is Professor of English and co-​director of the Center for Applied Technologies at Virginia Tech. He is the author of Forms of Reflection (Johns Hopkins Univ.

 

Notes on Contributors    xvii Press, 1993) and Edmund Spenser: A Reception History (Camden House, 1996) and the editor of two digital archives, Spenser and the Tradition: English Poetry, 1579–​1830 (2006) and Lord Byron and His Times (2008–​). He is the technical editor for The Thomas L. Gravell Watermark Archive (1996–​) and the Digital Index of Middle English Verse (2014). Pat Rogers is Distinguished University Professor and DeBartolo Chair in the Liberal Arts, University of South Florida, and the author of books and editions relating to Pope, Johnson, Boswell, Swift, Austen, Defoe, Fielding, Reynolds, Thackeray, and others. His recent work includes The Life and Times of Thomas, Lord Coningsby: The Whig Hangman and his Victims (Continuum, 2011–​13) and Documenting Eighteenth-​Century Satire:  Pope, Swift, Gay, and Arbuthnot in Historical Context (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013). He is now completing, with Paul Baines, A Catalogue of the Publications of Edmund Curll, 1706–​1747. He has written on topics ranging from the beginnings of weight-​watching and the evolution of draughts (checkers) to gout, the quest for the longitude, and the history of surveying. Adam Rounce is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Nottingham. He has written extensively on various seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century writers, including Dryden, Pope, Swift, and Johnson. His monograph on literary culture and lack of success in the long eighteenth century, Fame and Failure, 1720–​1800: The Unfulfilled Literary Life, was published by Cambridge Univ. Press in 2013. Philip Smallwood is Emeritus Professor of English at Birmingham City University and Visiting Fellow in the School of Humanities at Bristol University. He has written widely on seventeenth- and eighteenth-​century literary criticism and is the author of monographs on Pope and on Johnson. Smallwood is the editor of several volumes of collected essays and is co-​editor (with Greg Clingham) of Samuel Johnson After 300 Years (Oxford Univ. Press, 2009). He is also co-​editor of the previously unpublished literary, critical, and cultural manuscripts of the British philosopher of history, R. G. Collingwood (2005). Smallwood’s latest monograph, Critical Occasions, was published by AMS Press in 2011, and his hybrid anthology of critical mockery, Ridiculous Critics (with Min Wild), was published by Bucknell Univ. Press in 2014. Rivka Swenson is Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. Recent and forthcoming work includes Essential Scots and the Idea of Unionism in Anglo-​ Scottish Literature, 1660–​1832 (Bucknell), essays for The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–​1789, The Cambridge Companion to “Robinson Crusoe,” and the MLA volume on Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Henry Fielding, as well as a Broadview Press edition of The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (co-​edited with John Richetti) and a guest-​edited special issue of The Eighteenth ​Century: Theory and Interpretation (co-​ edited with Manushag N. Powell) on “Sensational Subjects.” Richard Terry is Professor of Eighteenth-​Century English Literature at Northumbria University, having worked for many years previously at the University of Sunderland. He has written numerous articles on aspects of eighteenth-​century literature. His monograph Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past, 1660–​1781 was published by Oxford Univ. Press in 2001. His most recent book is The Plagiarism Allegation in English Literature from Butler to Sterne (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). David F. Venturo, Professor of English at The College of New Jersey, author of Johnson the Poet: The Poetic Career of Samuel Johnson (Univ. of Delaware Press, 1999), and editor of The

 

xviii   Notes on Contributors School of the Eucharist . . . With a Preface Concerning the Testimony of Miracles (AMS Press, 2007), writes about and teaches British literature, 1600–​1850, poetry, baseball and American culture, and the Beatles and popular culture. An editor of ECCB: The Eighteenth-​Century Current Bibliography and The Scriblerian, he is writing a book on epic, mock-​epic, and growing skepticism about heroic ideals in seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century literature. Cynthia Wall is Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006; Honorable Mention, James Russell Lowell Award) and The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), as well as the editor of Pope’s Rape of the Lock (Bedford Cultural Editions, 1998), Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (Penguin, 2003), and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (Norton, 2009). She is also the editor of the forthcoming Norton Critical Edition of Restoration and Eighteenth-​Century Drama. Marcus Walsh, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Liverpool, has published on Christopher Smart, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, and Edmond Malone; on the theory, practice, and history of literary editing; on eighteenth-​century poetry, poetics, and poetic language; and on biblical interpretation and scholarship in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He edited two volumes of the Poetical Works of Christopher Smart (Oxford Univ. Press, 1983, 1987), and A Tale of a Tub for the new edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010). He is an Associate Editor of the Oxford Companion to the Book (Oxford Univ. Press, 2010). His monograph Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-​Century Literary Editing was published by Cambridge Univ. Press in 1997.

 

Introduction Jack Lynch Eighty years ago Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Thomas Gray were riding high—​ they were the very models of great poets. Through the middle of the twentieth century, from at least the 1930s to the 1960s, the poetry of the eighteenth century was adored by critics, and received not only the tribute of large-​scale scholarly projects—​the Twickenham Edition of Pope, say, and Harold Williams’s edition of Swift’s prose—​but even attention in primary and secondary schools. Anyone with pretensions to education could repeat tags from An Essay on Criticism or An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. For much of their history, though, both before and after this golden age, the poets of the Restoration and eighteenth century have struggled for respectability. Already by the 1750s there were complaints that their poetry was not poetic enough. Joseph Warton’s Essay on Pope (1756), for instance, defined poetry so as to exclude the most famous poet of his own century: “The sublime and the Pathetic are the two chief nerves of all genuine poesy. What is there sublime or very Pathetic in Pope?” He was willing to grant that “In that species of poetry wherein Pope excelled, he is superior to all mankind,” but could not help adding that “this species of poetry is not the most excellent one of the art.”1 For William Wordsworth a few decades later, the eighteenth century’s problem was “vicious diction.” With his “curiously elaborate” language, Gray had worked “to widen the space of separation betwixt Prose and Metrical composition,” and the result—​not merely for Gray, but for Pope, Johnson, and Cowper as well—​was affectation, and therefore at odds with true poetry.2 Eighty years later still, and the problem was just the opposite—​instead of being too flashily poetic, eighteenth-​century poets were too prosaic. “Though they may write in verse,” Matthew Arnold declared in 1880, “though they may in a certain sense be masters of the art of versification, Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose.”3 A Handbook of British Poetry, 1660–​1800 takes for granted that Dryden, Swift, Pope, Gray, and company are very much classics of our poetry, and should be discussed as such. The book is not a chronologically organized literary history, nor an encyclopedia, nor a collection of thematically related essays; rather it is an attempt to provide a systematic overview of the poetry of the age, and to restore it to a position of centrality in modern criticism. This Handbook is concerned with the English-​language poetry of the British Isles during the 1 

Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (London, 1756), vol. i, p. iv. Wordsworth, preface to Lyrical Ballads, in Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–​1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 749, 764. 3  The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. Robert H. Super, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1960–​77), vol. ix, p. 181. 2 

 

xx   Introduction “long eighteenth century,” 1660–​1800, though these boundaries are tested on occasion. The focus on Britain does not systematically rule out verse from elsewhere; Latin, French, and Gaelic verse make brief appearances; and the volume inevitably includes glances backward to the 1640s and 1650s, and forward into the 1800s and 1810s. Still, the focus is generally on the period from the Restoration through the end of the eighteenth century, between the age of Sir John Denham, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton in the middle of the seventeenth century and the age of Charlotte Smith, William Blake, and William Wordsworth at the end of the eighteenth. The purpose is not to repeat conventional wisdom, but to survey the current trends in scholarship and, I hope, to set a research agenda. The volume is organized in seven large parts. The first, “Poems in social settings,” considers the sociology of poetic production and reception, from marketplaces and bibliography through education and oral tradition. Our unspoken understanding of eighteenth-​century poetry involves carefully prepared texts of “literary” authors, and our editions strive to make that experience available to us. But in fact eighteenth-​century audiences for poetry—​“readers” is too limiting a term, for even the illiterate encountered poems—​were accustomed to getting their poetry in very different packages. The Handbook therefore opens by looking into some of the places where verse might be encountered: not merely in the clean pages of a Tonson quarto, but also on the streets of Edinburgh, in the pit at Drury Lane, in the cramped type of monthly magazines, and in the middle of novels. This is also the era when vernacular poetry was becoming a mainstay of education, from young children first learning their ABCs through the lecture halls of Dissenting academies and even the universities. Perhaps one reason some later critics have had trouble appreciating eighteenth-​century poetry is that other ages have had narrowly circumscribed conceptions of who could be a poet and what poetry could be about. The eighteenth century helped to create several archetypes of the poet that have since become clichés: the impecunious hack starving in a drafty garret, the rebellious genius rejected by an uncaring critical establishment. But the range of identities open to the eighteenth-​century poet was vast. Poets were reclusive and sociable, wealthy establishment figures and destitute rebels, shrewd entrepreneurs and dreamy flâneurs. They could be teachers and preachers, sentimentalists and geniuses, dukes and milkmaids and slaves. And the poetry they wrote could be about traditionally “poetic” topics like martial valor and lovers’ eyes, but more often it was about Newtonian optics and tariffs, dildos and the reproductive processes of flowering plants. The Handbook’s second part, “Poetic identities,” considers these diverse subject positions open to eighteenth-​century poets—​the poet as clubman, the poet as professional, the poet as laborer—​while part III, “Poetic subjects,” surveys some of the major topics that exercised the minds of eighteenth-​ century poets, including empire, science, and poetry itself. Parts IV through VI—​“Poetic form,” “Poetic genres,” and “Poetic devices”—​tell the stories of various formal features over the course of the long eighteenth century, and give the lie to the notion that eighteenth-​century verse begins and ends with satire in heroic couplets. Formalism has been accused of promoting sterility; late in the twentieth century it became critical code for being hermetically sealed from the outside world. In recent years, though, formalist studies have experienced a rebirth, and there is much talk of “new formalisms.” Poetic forms, after all, carry with them histories and associations, present to every eighteenth-​century poet and reader, and much of the best recent scholarship manages to combine formalism with historical awareness. These chapters are organized around formal, generic, and technical questions, but never lose sight of the social and political meanings of

 

Introduction   xxi various modes of poetic expression—​even pastoral, which may seem on the surface to be a retreat from society, is inevitably engaged with the world. The result is more pages on formal and generic questions than in any book on eighteenth-​century literature in many years. Finally part VII, “Criticism,” treats literary criticism as an integral part of the subject of eighteenth-​century poetry. Eighteenth-​century poets had a genuinely symbiotic relationship with critics: critics responded to poets, but also shaped poetic concerns, and therefore poetic practice. The number of major poets who were also major critics—​Dryden, Johnson, Warton, and others—​is high. During the Restoration and eighteenth century the methods of scholarship were applied to modern, vernacular poetry for the first time; the first histories of English poetry were written, part of what Lawrence Lipking has called “the ordering of the arts”;4 the book review as we know it came into being; and the Oxford Professorship of Poetry and dozens of prizes for poetry came into being. The forty-four contributors to this volume—​senior scholars from the US, UK, Canada, Republic of Ireland, Belgium, and South Africa—​have paid attention to the entire era, from 1660 to 1800, and noted developments over the course of the period. They engage with a mix of canonical and unfamiliar poets and critics, men and women, English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish poets, and so on, and offer a range of specific examples from the poetry of the period. Most important, they have accepted the challenge both to summarize conventional wisdom and to go beyond it. The result is the most comprehensive overview to date of the poetry of the long eighteenth century.

4  See Lawrence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-​Century England (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970).

 

 

Pa rt  I

P OE M S I N  S O C IA L SE T T I N G S

 

 

Chapter 1

P OEM S on th e St re ets William Donaldson The class system in England is a byword for its ubiquity, its prescriptive power, and—​to an outsider at least—​its almost bewildering complexity and nuance. No area of life seems untouched by it, least of all “literature,” where rigid divisions into high and low, canonical and noncanonical, have divided the literary sheep from the goats at least since the eighteenth century. It has long been acknowledged that the modern canon—​centering on poetry, fiction, and drama—​is based on a narrow segment of a book market that was itself an elite commodity beyond the reach of most people until at least the early years of the twentieth century—​the culture, in other words, of an elite within an elite.1 This did not mean that ordinary people failed to read, of course; just that most of them had long gotten their recreational reading matter in places other than books, and the mental landscape they occupied by virtue of this fact was a world away from Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson. In the centuries following the introduction of printing, the production of cheap reading matter for the general market greatly surpassed the high-​art domain in terms of volume. It has been estimated, for example, that by the dawn of the eighteenth century there may have been more than ten thousand broadside ballads alone in circulation, with numbers of chapbooks and pamphlets probably at least as great again. This merely counts titles: the cumulative print runs must have been enormous. The ability of such popular cultural material to reach its market, carried by a legion of professional ballad-​singers and traveling peddlers, must have been considerably greater than that achievable by booksellers and circulating libraries, a disparity increasing as literacy levels grew. This in turn was only the tip of an encompassing oral culture which must have been very much larger still.

1  It was well into the twentieth century, for example, before most British families could afford to buy even a cheap six-​shilling novel—​then the standard format—​on a regular basis. See Frank Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel, 1875–​1914 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1989), pp. 405–​8.

 

4   William Donaldson

The General Picture In the eighteenth century, the street was a showground as well as a thoroughfare. On market and fair days, ballad-​sellers and chapbook-​patterers, ubiquitous and mighty-​lunged, made the streets of Britain ring with poetry, most of it sung. Poetry was more frequently encountered on the street corner than in many a drawing room. Yet when we turn to the textbooks for an account of this, we find it strangely absent. In a typical recent example, Christine Gerrard’s Companion to Eighteenth-​Century Poetry (2006), we search in vain for a reference to “broadside,” “ballad,” or “chapbook” in the index; the single piece which ostensibly deals with popular culture is devoted to the Gentleman’s Magazine.2 Clearly we need an explanation which might begin to integrate this material more effectively into our existing view of literary history. Popular literature in England lies at the unhallowed crossroads dividing literary studies from folklore and history, and nobody seems quite sure what to do with the body. Folklorists grub about for traces of more prized oral material, while social historians mine the popular press, sometimes rather half-​heartedly, for popular attitudes and political beliefs—​their uncertainty stemming from doubts about whether what the common people thought mattered at all, or whether the content of popular literature genuinely reflected their values and beliefs. Cultural differences within the United Kingdom add a further difficulty. While the Scots have placed popular song near the center of their national canon since at least the earlier years of the eighteenth century, the English have been slow to acknowledge it as a significant medium; the Irish experience has, generally speaking, only recently begun to contribute to wider perspectives as students have looked beyond the popular art-​song of Tom Moore and his followers to the genuine poetry of the street. Meanwhile a great mass of material lies there, undigested, indigestible. The general picture, in terms of form at least, is tolerably clear. The beginning of the eighteenth century marked the high-​water mark—​just as its end marked the virtual demise—​of the classic black-letter broadside, except, perhaps, in Ireland, where it is said to have lingered on for almost another century.3 During the eighteenth century black letter was replaced and the old broadside sheets themselves, which had swelled many a ballad-​seller’s satchel and adorned walls for upward of two centuries, were replaced by smaller-​scale forms such as the song-​slip and the penny garland, in which forms the popular printed tradition descended into the nineteenth century. In England the trade was long dominated by London, and the interlinked Dicey and Cluer families based at the Maiden-​Head in Bow Churchyard and elsewhere in the provinces. Theirs was a highly miscellaneous business operating in various sectors of the market, which was probably one secret of their success, and they issued newspapers, prints, and novelties

2  A similar compilation—​John Sitter (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-​Century Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001)—​barely mentions popular poetry in the sense of the poetry of the streets, the stuff that most people actually read, or had read—​or sung—​to them. 3  Colin Neilands, “Irish Broadside Ballads: Performers and Performances,” Folk Music Journal, 6, no. 2 (1991), 209–​22, at p. 209.

 

Poems on the Streets    5 as well as broadside ballads.4 The trade was evidently profitable, at least for the printers and booksellers, and it flourished also in a number of provincial centers such as Newcastle-​ upon-​Tyne, York, Tewkesbury, and Bath.5 In a similar manner, the broadside trade in Ireland was not focused exclusively on Dublin and Belfast. A recent study draws our attention to William Goggin, who was active in Limerick during the last third of the eighteenth century. His output included penny histories, manuals, spelling books, primers, prints, and “a large assortment of ballads.”6 We see here, as elsewhere in Britain, a typically regional pattern of distribution, Goggin’s territory—​defined by the routes of the packmen and peddlers who worked with him—​covering the counties of Limerick, Cork, Clare, and Galway. There were, in theory, various checks and restraints on what could be published. In England, every title was supposed to be registered with the Stationers’ Company, which enjoyed a regulatory monopoly from 1557. It is thought, however, that only a small percentage of printed songs were actually recorded, presumably to avoid the fee. Hence, the records of the Company give only a partial view of what was published, by whom, and when. Because of the informal nature of the trade, its many small units of production, and widely distributed geographical base, the popular press in England may have largely escaped regulation and control. The remit of the Stationers’ Company did not extend uniformly throughout the United Kingdom. In Scotland, general oversight of the press was the responsibility of the Privy Council, which in February 1684 forbade the printing of new material without prior license by “the Bishop of the dioces for anything in divinity, the Dean of Facultie for the law, the President of the Coledge of Phisicians for phisick, and the clerks of Councill to licence for anything els.”7 Presumably at least part of this fell void at the Revolution of 1688–​9, when the Episcopalian Church in Scotland was disestablished. Censorship probably continued to be exercised at burghal level. In Aberdeen, for example, there was a printing monopoly in the gift of the town council throughout the eighteenth century. It is not clear how effective this kind of oversight was in regulating the many small presses responsible for the production of popular poetry and song.

Broadside Content Broadside content was extremely diverse, covering a wide range of political and social concerns, with a heavy emphasis on topicality and a range of preoccupations not unlike a modern popular newspaper: “Royalty, Murders, Topical News, Politics, Sport, Humour and Advertisements.”8 Texts were typically printed on one side of a broadside sheet in battered 4 

V. E. Neuburg, Popular Literature: A History and Guide (London: Woburn Press, 1977), pp. 108–​22. Leslie Shepard, The History of Street Literature: The Story of Broadside Ballads, Chapbooks, Proclamations, News-​Sheets, Election Bills, Tracts, Pamphlets, Cocks, Catchpennies, and Other Ephemera (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973), pp. 62–​4. 6  Marc Caball and Andrew Carpenter (eds.), Oral and Print Cultures in Ireland, 1600–​1900 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), pp. 33–​4. 7  P. Hume Brown (ed.), The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, 3rd series, no. 8 (Edinburgh: H. M. General Register House, 1915), p. 384. 8  Leslie Shepard, The Broadside Ballad: A Study in Origins and Meaning (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1962). 5 

 

6   William Donaldson secondhand type, adorned with crude woodcut illustrations and more or less aligned decorative borders. The verses tended to be similarly reach-​me-​down, often knocked together on the printing house floor from pre-​existing verbal bits and pieces. It is impossible to give more than a hint of the style, but the following examples give some idea of the typical broadside manner. Here, for example, is a characteristic piece inspired by contemporary political issues, “The Brags of Washington,” dating from the American War of Independence in the later 1770s. We note the “come-​all-​ye” introductory formula, the verse strung together in loosely rhymed quatrains, well adapted for a quick-​moving, casually structured narrative, the damn-​your-​eyes English pugnacity, and the idea of fighting for personal gain as much as patriotic zeal, all of them entirely typical of the form: Come all you brave seamen and landsmen likewise, That have got an inclination your fortunes to rise, That have got an inclination to fight the proud Bostonians, And soon we’ll let you know that we are the sons of Britain. Fal lal. ………………………… As for the brags of Washington we care not a pin, We will fire at his breast-​works, and make him let us in, Our bomb shells and cannons shall roar like mighty thunder, And by our constant firing we will make them to surrender. Fal lal. And when the wars are over, if fortune saves our lives, We will bring great store of riches to our sweethearts and our wives, And drink a health unto the lad that has a heart to enter, That man can never gain a prize that is afraid to venture. Fal lal.9

The most obvious feature of all, of course, is the high topicality of the subject matter. But some broadside verses touched more ancient and pervasive themes, their general tone of carefree hedonism tempered by the melancholy fate of those who “went a-​roving” once too often, and a little too heedlessly. Here is a version of the “young man cut down in his prime” motif (lamenting a young man, sometimes a young woman, brought to a miserable end by the ravages of venereal disease) from mid-​eighteenth-​century London: As I was walking down Covent Garden, Listen awhile, and the truth I’ll relate, Who should I meet but my dearest comrade, Wrapped up in flannel, so hard was his fate. Had I but known what his disorder was, Had I but known it, and took it in time, I’d took pila cotia, all sorts of white mercury, But now I’m cut off in the height of my prime. ………………………… When I am dead wrap me up in funeral fine, Pinks and fine roses adorning my head, 9  John Holloway and Joan Black (eds.), Later English Broadside Ballads (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 38–​9.

 

Poems on the Streets    7 Come all gallows whores that do mourn after me, Let them all follow me unto my grave.10

Versions of this have been found throughout the English-​speaking world. Gavin Greig and James Bruce Duncan encountered several in early twentieth-​century Aberdeenshire: “Had she told me when she disordered me, | Had she told me of it in time; | I might have been cured by the peels of white mercury | But now I’m a young man cut down in my prime.”11 Readers may also recollect the American version, “The Cowboy’s Lament,” published by John Lomax in Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910): “As I walked out in the streets of Laredo, | As I walked out in Laredo one day, | I spied a young cowboy wrapped up in white linen, | Wrapped up in white linen as cold as the clay.”12 One could find on broadside sheets the kind of material later collected from oral sources and described as “folk songs,” in forms little different from their later guise: The lark in the morning she rises from her nest, And mounts in the air with the dew round her breast, And with the jolly Plowman she’ll whistle and sing, And at night she’ll drop into her nest again.13

There were a number of stock motifs: songs of true lovers trepanned by press gangs, and of returning sweethearts unrecognized after long absence; songs of city lowlife, with prostitutes and flash girls tricking (or being tricked by) innumerable “Johnny-​raws”; of women dressing as men to follow their lovers; songs of cuckoldry and the woes of marriage; songs of crime and punishment, with gallant poachers and highwaymen braving the perils of transportation and the gallows tree; songs of great sporting occasions; of battles and sea fights; and political songs of every description.

Poems in Performance The tunes to which the songs were to be sung were usually specified only by their titles. This was natural enough when music engraving was expensive and the melodies were already familiar, but there is disappointingly little direct evidence about the performance tradition, i.e., exactly how the street singers presented their material. The Aberdeenshire ballad-​seller Charles Leslie (c.1677–​1782), known as “Mussel Mou’d Charlie,” is noted as singing in a characteristic “deep hollow roar,”14 which may have been fairly typical of male singers whose voices had to contend with the hubbub of the street, especially on fair days when they might expect to do their best business.

10 Ibid., p. 48. 11 

Patrick Shuldham-​Shaw, Emily B. Lyle, et al. (eds.), The Greig-​Duncan Folk Song Collection, 8 vols. (Aberdeen: Aberdeen Univ. Press; Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1981–​2002), pp. vii, 252. 12  John A. Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (New York: Sturgis & Walton, 1910), pp. 74–​6. 13  Holloway and Black (eds.), p. 213. 14  “‘Biographia Lesleyana,’ or Life of Charles Lesley, the Aberdeen Ballad-​Singer,” in The Ballad Book, ed. G. R. Kinloch (privately printed, 1827), pp. iii–​viii.

 

8   William Donaldson The writer and ballad-​collector William Allingham preserves an Irish example, which sounds intriguingly different: The minstrel is found to be a tall, sad, stooping man, about thirty-​five; his song, to the very favourite tune of “Youghal Harbour,” is about two faithful lovers; his vocal excellence consists in that he twirls every word several times round his tongue, wrapt in the notes of a soft, husky, tremulous voice. In this style of gracing—​which is considered highly artistic, and for which I believe, “humouring” is the country phrase—​the words are delivered somewhat as follows: This pay-​air discoo-​oocyoor-​cered with sich foo-​oocy-​oorce o’ ray-​ayizin, Ther may-​aynin they ay-​apee-​ayx-​esprayss’d so-​hoo-​o-​o clearrrr, That fau-​hor to lae—​ssen too-​oo ther caw-​aw-​he-​on-​vairsay-​ay-​ashin, My ehe-​ee-​in-​clinay-​sheeay-​ashin was for too-​oo-​hoo-​hoo draw-​aw-​haw-​ee-​aw-​a-​nearrrr. that is to say: This pair discoursed with such force of reasoning, Their meaning they expressed so clear, That for to listen to their conversation, My inclination was for to draw near. This singer earned high praise from his listeners. In fact, Allingham reports one listener describing the singer as the best he has heard for twenty years, while another in the crowd said, “In troth, it’s worth a ha’penny to hear him go over it, let alone the paper.”15

Allingham’s orthography implies much use of showy rubato and a highly decorated line—​ which of course would have to be reflected in the melody, as words and music were obviously closely integrated in performance—​the articulation being shaped so extravagantly as to bear only a distant resemblance to standard English. Of course, this is merely a single example, although a suggestive one. We must not suppose a uniform street performance style throughout the United Kingdom. In Ireland, we know, there were broad regional differences: the Northern style, for example, was considered remarkably “plain.” We possess at least some information about the people who performed and sold this material. Paula McDowell’s Women of Grub Street draws attention to the squalid lives of the women, often disabled and elderly, who sold political ballads in the streets of London, and how dangerous a pastime this could be, with recurring episodes of arrest and imprisonment.16 In Ireland, however, ballad-​singers and sellers could be quite well remunerated.17 In Scotland, “Mussel-​Mou’d Charlie” was well known throughout the North East during much of the eighteenth century. He was born in the Garioch in central Aberdeenshire, the illegitimate son, it was said, of a local laird. He was notable not only for selling ballads but for

15 

Quoted in Neilands, “Irish Broadside Ballads,” p. 219. Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–​1730 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 58–​62; see also Tim Fulford, “Fallen Ladies and Cruel Mothers: Ballad Singers and Ballad Heroines in the Eighteenth Century,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 47, nos. 2–​3 (Summer–​Fall 2006), 309–​29, at pp. 317–​18. I am indebted for these references to Ruth Perry. 17  The Irish evidence suggests that ballad singers there could earn a good deal more than laborers: see Neilands, “Irish Broadside Ballads,” p. 213. 16 

 

Poems on the Streets    9 composing them too and, although based in the city of Aberdeen and surrounding districts, his “pitch” was virtually the whole east coast of Scotland. A small oil portrait of him survives, showing a rakishly angular figure with long lugubrious features and a small pursed mouth (hence his nickname). He is described as a remarkable, thin-​made man, about 5 feet ten inches high, with small red, fiery eyes, a long chin, reddish hair, and carried a long pike staff, with a large harden bag slung over his shoulders to hold his ballads, and a small pocket covered Bible, with a long string to it. He was a devoted Jacobite, and so popular in Aberdeen that he enjoyed in that city a sort of monopoly of the minstrel calling, no other person being allowed, under any pretence, to chant ballads on the causeway or planestanes of “the brave burgh.”18

He seems to have been a walking treasury of folklore and genealogy as well as an unfailing source of the latest news, and the writer and ballad-​collector Peter Buchan, our main source for Leslie’s life, notes that, “When he knew of any to be hanged at Edinburgh, he was sure to be there that day for their last speech and dying words.”19 Leslie represents an interesting example of a popular poet whose work was shaped by the political predilections of his audience. The North East was the heartland of the Jacobite movement in Lowland Scotland. Leslie himself had been “out” in the Rising of 1715 and again in 1745, and this was very evident from the kind of material he performed on the streets: The magistrates of Aberdeen were very ill-​natured to him: they often put him into jail for singing, and asked him what for he did it? “Why,” says Charlie, “for a bit of bread.”—​“Why,” says the provost, “cannot you sing other songs than that rebellious ones?” “Oh, aye,” says Charlie, “but they winna buy them.”20

Charles Leslie, although latterly blind apparently, practiced his trade till within a few weeks of his death at the reputed age of 105.

Broadside-​Buyers A wide variety of people bought such material. We know of gentleman collectors like Samuel Pepys and Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, whose agent was the bookseller and antiquary John Bagford. We know, too, that popular printed material was consumed by every social class (upper-​class children being particularly susceptible to the fairytales circulated by the chapbook trade).21 But there seems to be relatively little direct evidence about how the products of the popular press were received by those intended to form the mainstay of their audience,

18 

“Notes to Jacobite Ballads,” Scottish Notes and Queries, 3rd series, 4, no. 9 (Sept. 1926), 157. Peter Buchan, An Interesting and Faithful Narrative of the Wanderings of Prince Charles Stuart and Miss Flora MacDonald, after the Battle of Culloden . . . and Several Jacobite Poems and Songs (Glasgow, 1839), pp. 38–​41. 20 Buchan, An Interesting and Faithful Narrative, pp. 38–​41. 21  There is much evidence of the social ubiquity of the ballad tradition in England and Ireland and the links between the English and Irish traditions in Julie Henigan’s important study Literacy and Orality in Eighteenth-​Century Irish Song (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012). For upper-​class children reading 19 

 

10   William Donaldson namely the common people, unless they happened themselves to be writers.22 Robert Burns, for example, records the dramatic impact of The Ancient and Renown’d History of the Surprising Life and Adventures and Heroic Actions of Sir William Wallace, a modernized version of the metrical epic by Blind Hary (c.1440–​c.1492) by William Hamilton of Gilbertfield (c.1665–​1751), which circulated as a large chapbook, saying, “the story of Wallace poured a Scotish [sic] prejudice in my veins which will boil along there till the flood-​gates of life shut in eternal rest.”23 Hamilton was author of the classic vernacular mock-​elegy The Last Dying Words of Bonny Heck, a Famous Grey-​Hound in the Shire of Fife, and a friend and correspondent of Allan Ramsay.24 As an ex-​professional soldier, Hamilton wrote with a knowledgeable eye to the use of ground and the finer points of attack and defense, and he preserved much of Hary’s swashbuckling narrative and rapid heroic couplets. The preface provided a detailed prose account of the Wars of Independence, “the most famous war that ever fell out in the isle of Britain, fought most valiantly for the space of forty years, betwixt the two realms of Scotland and England,”25 focusing strongly on the baseness and treachery of the English King Edward I. It followed the familiar contours of the inherited Scottish worldview which pictured the national past as a heroic struggle for survival of an ancient community against almost-​ overwhelming odds. Hamilton celebrated such illustrious Patriots and bold, Who stoutly did maintain our rights of old, Who their malicious, and inveterate foes, With sword in hand did gallantly oppose; And in their own, and nations just defence, Did briskly check the frequent insolence Of haughty neighbours, enemies profest, Picts, Danes, and Saxons, Scotland’s very pest; Of such, I say, I’ll brag and vaunt so long As I have pow’r to use my pen or tongue; And sound their praises, in such modern strain, As suiteth best a Scot’s poetic vein. First, here I honour in particular, Sir William Wallace, much renown’d in war.26

chapbooks, see John Simons (ed.), Guy of Warwick and Other Chapbook Romances: Six Tales from the Popular Literature of Pre-​Industrial England (Exeter: Univ. of Exeter Press, 1998), p. 7. 22 

There are a few scraps of testimony from plebeian writers in Neuburg, Popular Literature, pp. 113–​14. 23  The Letters of Robert Burns, ed. J. De Lancey Ferguson and G. Ross Roy, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), vol. i, p. 136. 24 In A Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems, Both Ancient and Modern, part 1 (Edinburgh, 1706), pp. 68–​70. 25  William Hamilton (ed.), The Ancient and Renown’d History of the Surprising Life and Adventures and Heroic Actions of Sir William Wallace, General and Governor of Scotland: A New Edition: Wherein the Old Obsolete Words Are Rendered More Intelligible; and Adapted to the Understanding of Such Who Have Not Leisure to Study the Meaning and Import of Such Phrases, without the Help of a Glossary (Falkirk, 1785). 26 Ibid., p. 20.

 

Poems on the Streets    11 The heroic deeds of Robert the Bruce and Sir William Wallace were frequent themes of Scottish broadsides and chapbooks, reminding us that it was nation rather than social class that formed the focus of popular culture in the north. In England, popular political poetry was produced in large quantities particularly at times of crisis, such as the South Sea Bubble, the Gordon riots, and the Wilkes affair.27 But English political poetry seems to have remained within the realm of public amusement and commentary. In Scotland, it was to change the very concept of the nation. Scotland had long enjoyed historically high levels of literacy, and its popular print culture was correspondingly vigorous.28 The main centers were Glasgow, Edinburgh, Paisley, Stirling, and Falkirk, the last two places lying near the central hub of the country, the crossroads between Highlands and Lowlands, east coast and west. But there was hardly a burgh of any pretensions in Scotland that did not have a press issuing chapbooks and ballads during the eighteenth century, including “Aberdeen, Perth, Dundee, Dunbar, Ayr, Kilmarnock, Dumfries, Newton Stewart and Inverary … Irvine, Airdrie, Leith, Haddington, Dundee and Montrose … Banff, Beith … Brechin, Crieff, Dalkeith, Dunfermline, Elgin, Hawick, Kelso, Kirkcudbright, Kirkintilloch, Leith, Peterhead, Pittenweem and Wigtown.”29

Dougal Graham of Stirling Many people must have been involved in the chain of composition and distribution, but we know about the career of only one of them in detail, the remarkable Dougal Graham of Stirling (1721–​79), poet, songwriter, chapbook composer, and general master-​spirit of eighteenth-​century Scottish popular culture. Graham was crippled, and a hunchback scarcely five feet tall, but blessed with a ready wit and tongue, and he early took to the life of a wandering packman. He became a member of the Fraternity of Stirlingshire Chapmen in 1749 and, about the year 1770, town crier (or “Skellat Bellman”) of Glasgow. The great drama of his life came in 1745–​6 and the Jacobite rising, which he personally witnessed almost from the beginning through to its final military defeat. He followed the Highland army as a kind of roving reporter for the chapbook trade, and the literary results of his labors were announced in the Glasgow Courant some five months later: there is to be sold by James Duncan, Printer in Glasgow, in the Saltmercat, … a Book intituled A full, particular, and true Account of the late Rebellion in the Year 1745 and 1746, beginning with the Pretender’s Embarking for Scotland, and then an Account of every Battle, Siege, and Skirmish that has happened in either Scotland or England.

27  For songs on the latter, see “Popular Projections of Wilkes,” in John Mullan and Christopher Reid (eds.), Eighteenth-​Century Popular Culture: A Selection (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 264–​70. 28  For a discussion of the consequences of this for popular culture, and in particular the concept of “oral tradition” as it has been applied by Scottish scholars during the twentieth century, see William Donaldson, “Re-​thinking Popular Antiquities,” Review of Scottish Culture, 21 (2009), 124–​31. 29  Edward J. Cowan and Mike Paterson, Folk in Print: Scotland’s Chapbook Heritage, 1750–​1850 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2007), p. 17.

 

12   William Donaldson To which is added, several Addresses and Epistles to the Pope, Pagans, Poets and the Pretender: all in Metre. Price Four Pence. But any Booksellers or packmen may have them easier from the said James Duncan, or the Author, D. Grahame. The like has not been done in Scotland since the Days of Sir David Lindsay.30

Graham’s poem—​apparently a great favorite of Sir Walter Scott31—​is about 5,000 lines in length. It was first published in 1746, and ran to several editions, enlarged to include the wanderings of Prince Charles Edward Stuart in the Western Isles following the rising and remained in print into the following century. It begins thus: In the year se’enteen hundred and forty one, An imperious and bloody war began, Amongst kings and queens in Germanie, Who should the Roman Emperor be. French and Prussians did jointly go, The Hungarian queen to overthro’; But British, Hanoverians, and Dutch, Espous’d her cause, and that too much. From year to year, the flame it grew, Till armies to the field they drew, At Dittingen and Fontenoy, Did many thousand lives destroy. And then the French, they form’d a plan, To animate our Highland clan, By sending the Pretender’s son To claim Great Britain as his own; Which drew the British forces back, And made the German war to slack. (vol. i, p. 85)

Graham wrote in the “low style,” the accommodating four-​foot rhyming couplets, which had long been the mainstay of metrical journalism in Scotland. The tone is that of a rough-​and-​ready man of the people but, behind the informality of manner, his grasp is impressive. Graham’s largely eyewitness account is dispassionate, impartial, and well informed, from the minutiae of military tactics to the geopolitical situation we see above giving rise to the French diversionary tactic of fomenting a Jacobite rising in Scotland. A swift and racy narrative follows, beginning with Charles Edward Stuart’s landing and march to Prestonpans near Edinburgh, where he defeated a government force under General Sir John Cope on September 21, 1745. It has all the lively detail and circumstantiality of an eyewitness account. Graham is immensely well informed: he knows what is happening in the councils of war on both sides, and the “inside story” of a number of the most interesting aspects of the rising including near-​mutiny in the government army after Culloden, and fly-​on-​the-​wall reporting of plausible-​sounding debates and divisions in the Jacobite camp.

30  George MacGregor (ed.), The Collected Writings of Dougal Graham “Skellat” Bellman of Glasgow: Edited with Notes, Together with a Biographical and Bibliographical Introduction, and a Sketch of the Chap Literature of Scotland, 2 vols. (Glasgow, 1883), vol. i, pp. 13–​14. 31  “The Scotch Penny Chap-​Books,” Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 491 (April 3, 1841), 84.

 

Poems on the Streets    13 Best of all, perhaps, are his vivid descriptions of the various battles that marked the campaign. Here is an excerpt from his account of the Battle of Falkirk, January 16, 1746, in which government forces were for a second time defeated by the Jacobite army: The Highlanders in columns three, Came moving on couragiouslie, With loud huzza’s on every side, Their bloody banners were display’d, The front line only three men deep, They in reserve the rest did keep: Their plaids in heaps were left behind, Light to run if need they find: And on they came with a goodwill, At the dog-​trot, adown the hill. (vol. i, p. 129)

Graham insists upon the shambolic nature of war, its utter pitilessness, the way it shows human nature at very nearly its worst. At Falkirk, for example, the looting of the dead and dying moves him to pity and indignation: on the morn both great and small Unto Falkirk assembled all, To view the field and bury the slain; But which was which, was ill to ken: For by their clothes no man could tell, They stripped were as fast’s they fell. The plund’ring wives, and savage boy Did many wounded men destroy; ……………………………………… Some of the brutish commons too, I saw them run the wounded thro’! (vol. i, pp. 134–​5)

He gives us a memorable picture of the Jacobite army’s return from its campaign in England, in which it had soldiered through one of the worst winters of the century, like men straggling out of a nightmare: To Glasgow they came the next day, In a very poor forlorn way, The shot was rusted in the gun, Their swords from scabbards would not twin, Their count’nance fierce as a wild bear, Out o’er their eyes hang down their hair, ………………………………………………. . Some of them did barefooted run, Minded no mire nor stony groun’; But when shav’n, drest and cloth’d again They turn’d to be like other men. (vol. i, pp. 123–​4)

After the final shattering Jacobite defeat at Culloden, the remnants of the Highland army disperse: Their parting was at Badenoch, With wat’ry eyes and loud Och-​hoch: Their bag-​pipes mournfully did rore, And Piperoch Dhonail was no more. (vol. i, p. 167)

 

14   William Donaldson This last touch is a deft one, transforming a famous pibroch melody (the Cameron tune Píobaireachd Dhomhnuill Duibh, or “Black Donald Balloch of the Isles March to the First Battle at Inverlochy 1427”), with its memories of triumph on another day, into a metaphor for a whole lost cause.32 It would be easy to claim that the living epic of the Forty-​five had found answering form in Dougal Graham’s chapbook folk epic. But, while the persona which emerges is tough, sagacious, and “folksy” enough in feel, Graham is not at all of the “folk” as that term was to be conceived by later scholars. He was consciously and explicitly a writer rather than an oral bard. He wrote of his “Itch for Scribling,” continuing, “having wrote the following for my Pleasure, I had an Ambition to have this Child of mine placed out in the world, expecting, if it should thrive and do well, it might bring Credit or Comfort to the Parent” (vol. i, pp. 83–​4). The book was published into the chapbook trade and may be supposed to have enjoyed a wide distribution given the number of editions it enjoyed and the time it remained in print. The enduring impression is not just of the little man’s view of history—​because Graham’s account is as “learned” as anything written by a contemporary in the sophistication of its grasp and its political savvy—​but of a gifted observer, humane, level-​headed, sane, moving with shocked disbelief through a world gone suddenly mad.

Nationhood The very fact that Graham chose verse rather than prose as his medium reminds us of important truths about culture and communication in the middle years of the eighteenth century. The Impartial History is a large-​scale work on a sensationally important public subject and it is in meter—​a discursive and analytical text for which the preferred medium remains poetry rather than prose. As we consider the role of political poetry in cultural change later in the eighteenth century, we see that Graham’s work is not unique. In Scotland poetry, and especially popular poetry, had a prominent role in discourse concerning national identity and affairs of state. We can see something of what this might mean in James Watson’s three-​volume Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems (Edinburgh, 1706–​11).33 Watson was a leading Edinburgh publisher of the period, and he printed a wide variety of poems in Scots and English from the later Renaissance to the early eighteenth century. His edition has always been regarded by Scottish literary scholars as an important source, marking the first of the post-​Union literary “revivals” which form so prominent a part of Scottish literary annals, and setting the parameters for much of what happened subsequently.34

32 

Donald MacDonald, A Collection of the Ancient Martial Music of Caledonia Called Piobaireachd, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh, 1822), pp. 106–​10. 33  There is a modern scholarly edition: Harriet Harvey Wood (ed.), James Watson’s Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1977–​91). 34  Charles Duffin, “Fixing Tradition: Making History from Ballad Texts,” in Edward J. Cowan (ed.), The Ballad in Scottish History (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000), pp. 19–​35: “The importance of the publication of A Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems in 1706 lay not so much in the editor and printer James Watson’s choice of materials, which were largely sourced from readily available broadside versions rather than the folk tradition, as in his recognition that there was a literary market for popular verse in Scots” (p. 24).

 

Poems on the Streets    15 But Watson’s was not just a literary anthology. It was issued in the immediate aftermath of the Union by the Jacobite Watson and a group of like-​minded Episcopalian literati and drew its materials predominantly from the literature of the Scottish right. One of its most obvious intentions was to assert as forcefully as possible Scotland’s wealth, power, and historic independence. The fine eighteenth-​century translation it included of George Buchanan’s Latin “Epithalamium upon the Marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to the Dauphin of France” particularly reinforced this theme.35 It is typical of the larger Scottish pattern that Watson’s volumes should also contain a vigorous strand of popular literature and especially of song, as we see in his inclusion of Francis Semple’s “Bythsome Wedding,” a popular classic dating from the second half of the seventeenth century, with its celebration of joyous prodigality and Bruegelesque character appearing at a penny wedding—​so called because everybody contributed a penny toward the festive fare, and everybody had a riotously good time, with the emphasis on riot: Fy let us all to the Briddel, for there will be Lilting there, For Jockie’s to be Married to Maggie the Lass with the Gauden-​hair; And there will be Lang-​kail and Pottage and Bannocks of Barley-​Meal, And there will be good Salt-​herring to relish a Kog of good Ale, Fy let us all to the Briddel, for there will be lilting there, For Jockie’s to be married to Maggie the Lass with the Gauden hair. ………………………………………… And there will be Sow-​libber Peatie and plouckie fac’t Wat in the Mill, Capper-​nos’d Gibbie and Francie that wins in the how of the Hill, And there will be Alaster-​Dowgal that splee-​fitted Bessie did woo, And sniffling Lillie and Tibbie, and Kirstie that Belly-​god Sow, Fy let us all &c.36

As the eighteenth century progressed, the song culture of Scotland experienced a period of rapid growth. An estimated three to four thousand new compositions found their way into print during the period,37 and songs like “Ettrick Banks” and “Corn Rigs,” “Lass o’ Peatie’s Mill,” “The Birks of Abergeldie,” “The Broom of the Cowdenknows,” “The Bush Aboon Traquhair,” and dozens of other lovely pieces went on to achieve classic status. Key collections like Allan Ramsay’s Tea-​Table Miscellany (4 vols., 1723–​37), David Herd’s Collection of Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, Heroic Ballads, Etc. (2 vols., 1769–​76), and, perhaps most

35 Watson, Choice Collection, pp. 59–​ 64.   36 Ibid., pp. 8–​10.

37  Thomas Crawford, Society and the Lyric: A Study of the Song Culture of Eighteenth-​Century Scotland (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1979), p. 144.

 

16   William Donaldson famous of all, Robert Burns and James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum (6 vols., 1787–​1803) confirmed the centrality of the popular art song to Scottish cultural enterprise. We must remind ourselves, however, that this was the genteel drawing-​room aspect of the common tradition, the point where popular and high art conventions met, as they frequently did in the music of the Scottish baroque—​typified by the regulation of the Aberdeen Music Society, one of the leading musical institutions in the country, which stipulated that their programs must always include a composition of Arcangelo Corelli and a selection of Scottish songs. The Tea-​Table Miscellany was ostensibly aimed at people who possessed drawing rooms and keyboard instruments to put in them; who had the range and technique to execute the classic songs (the compass and melodic intricacy of a good many of these would tax a less-​than-​gifted voice); who were musically literate and had the income to afford volumes of fashionable new Scots song arrangements. By the same token, Ramsay’s versions will have had to find a place in repertories that already contained significant numbers of Scottish songs acquired orally or through the manuscript tradition. And just like broadside ballads pasted up on walls in imperfectly literate settings, which could be construed and re-​transmitted by anybody who came along and possessed the requisite skill, Ramsay’s songs also reached a wide audience by being re-​ transmitted orally.38 Ramsay’s collection printed words only—​tribute to the already wide diffusion of the melodies, as well as to the expense of music engraved texts. It was enormously influential and remained in print for more than a century, ultimately going through more than twenty editions. Most interesting of all, perhaps, it illustrates the close ties in Scotland between the literature of the streets and that of the salon. Ramsay was himself a significant songwriter, and it seems likely that a good deal of the contents of The Tea-​Table Miscellany had earlier been issued as individual song-​slips and hawked around the streets.39 A crude view of Ramsay’s work might treat it simply as gentrification, the appropriation of lower-​class cultural products for an expanding bourgeois literary market; but we know that this material was already widely diffused through Scottish society at every level. One key element here may not be social class but gender. Ramsay seems to have envisaged a mainly female audience for his collection, dedicating it To Ilka lovely British Lass Frae Ladys Charlote, Anne and Jean, Down to ilk bonny singing Bess, Wha dances barefoot on the green.

In a society in which musicianship and repertory were strongly marked by gender, and men and women tended to make music in sexually segregated groups, The Tea-​Table Miscellany may represent the migration of a hitherto predominantly male repertory into a new significantly female performance and reception context.

38  Sigrid Rieuwerts, “Allan Ramsay and the Scottish Ballads,” Aberdeen University Review, 58, no. 201 (Spring 1999), 29–​40, at p. 30. 39  Ibid., pp. 31–​2.

 

Poems on the Streets    17

Songs of the Jacobite Risings Song as a medium was frequently considered by later theorists merely to reflect passively the values, ideas, and preoccupations of the host society, so that—​at best—​it could never be more than a footnote to the great events of the day. But in eighteenth-​century Scotland, song was an active medium capable of initiating far-​reaching cultural change, in which things of ideological importance could be negotiated. We see this most clearly in the songs of the Jacobite risings. These were initiated by the deposition of James VII and II in 1688/​9, which precipitated a succession of civil wars—​essentially the Wars of the British Succession—​with significant outbreaks in 1689–​91, 1708, 1715, 1719, and again in 1745–​6. The party cries of Whig and Jacobite divided Scotland with particular violence, and since it was a singing community, a considerable body of vocal material began to accumulate around these themes. The prominent role played by Highland armies in the campaigns which culminated in Killiecrankie, Sheriffmuir, Prestonpans, and Culloden created a powerful association of the Highlands with the Jacobite cause, especially after the Forty-​five. Great Power rivalry had kept Scotland in a state of instability for many years, fomenting the Highland–​Lowland antagonism that loomed so large in the Scottish world picture. But the daring exploits of the Highlanders under Prince Charles Edward Stuart captured the popular imagination, and Highland dress and arms began to be used symbolically in popular song, shedding narrow party associations to evoke a mood of national resurgence, and create the pseudo-​messianic figure of “Bonnie Prince Charlie.” The constant recycling of conventional verbal material—​phrases and images, motifs and refrains—​was the normal mechanism of change and renewal in the popular song culture of Lowland Scotland, and provided the technical means by which this was achieved. Given the appropriate political catalyst, the forces of collective creativity, every bit as active in printed as in oral tradition, could break out in new directions, challenging the existing hierarchy of types: amatory, bacchanalian, pastoral, and so on, to bring a new and powerful genre—​the Jacobite song—​into being.40 Political songs and poems had clustered round the Jacobite movement from its inception, of course, in the normal eighteenth-​century fashion, finding conventional expression in pieces like “There will never be Peace till JAMIE come Hame,” which makes typically unfavorable comparisons between the kings de facto and the kings de jure: There can never be Peace till Jamie come hame Peace cannot consist with our ruinous Scheme We banisht our Glory and brought o’er our shame So how can we have Peace till Jamie come hame We catch’d at the Phantom and hug’d the fond name Of Liberty Charming but all is a Dream Our Slavery’s apparent our ffolly’s the same Which will never wipe off till Jamie come hame ……………………………………………………… 40 

See William Donaldson, The Jacobite Song: Political Myth and National Identity (Aberdeen: Aberdeen Univ. Press, 1988).

 

18   William Donaldson Our Honour we’ve chang’d for disgrace that we Wear A base fforreign Yoke and as basely we bear We got for a Curse and we find it the same Which will never Redress till Jamie come hame41

and so on, through several further stanzas lamenting the apostasy of the nation and the degeneracy of the times. Distinguishable from the surrounding song-​culture only by its political subject matter, and, in aesthetic terms, “little above the general effusions of the age,” this is typical of the Jacobite song in the first decade or so of its existence. But then something unusual happened. In the ongoing cycle of creation and recreation, somebody reached into the pot of existing schemata and produced this: I Crossed Forth, I Crossed Tay, I left Dundee, and Edinborrow, I saw nothing there worth my Stay, and so I bad them all Good-​morrow. O my bonny, bonny Highland Laddie, O my bonny, bonny Highland Laddie, When I am sick and like to dye, Thou’lt row me in thy Highland Pladie.42

The “Bonnie Highland Laddie” motif immediately passed into general circulation. This is Allan Ramsay’s version from the Tea-​Table Miscellany: The Lawland Lads think they are fine, But O they’re vain and idly gaudy! How much unlike that gracefu’ Mein, And manly Looks of my Highland Laddie? …………………………………………………… O my bonny, bonny Highland Laddie, My handsome charming Highland Laddie: May Heaven still guard, and Love reward Our Lawland Lass and her Highland Laddie.

The amatory encounter of a Lowland lass and a glamorous Highlander was an apt symbol for the way Jacobite affiliation crossed traditional lines of demarcation in Scottish society and in particular the historic Highland–​Lowland divide; it could become a symbol for Scotland herself, independent and reunited under a line of native princes. As such it proved irresistible to Jacobite songwriters and became one of their major points of reference, a catalyst for a whole new song-​type. When Charles Edward Stuart himself donned Highland dress during the Forty-​five, the final link in the chain was complete: Pr—​ce C—​s is come o’er from France, In Scotland to proclaim his dadie; May the heav’ns pow’r preserve and keep That worthy P—​ce in’s highland plaidie.

41  “Old Scotch Ballads Broadsides &c.,” Rosebery Collection, National Library of Scotland, Ry III a.10, fol. 90. 42  Ibid., fol. 89.

 

Poems on the Streets    19 Oh my bonny, bonny highland laddie, My handsome, charming, highland laddie, May heav’n reward, and him still guard When surrounded with foes in’s highland plaidie. First when he came to view our land, The graceful looks of that young laddie, Made a’ our true Scots hearts to warm, And choose to wear the highland plaidie. O my bonny, &c.

The melodies themselves played an active role in this process. There were two main “Highland Laddie” tunes, which came to prominence in the decade following the Revolution. They were fine tunes, both later set by Haydn and Beethoven,43 and provided the vehicle for a numerous progeny of song texts during the long eighteenth century. Here is the second root-​song in the group with its hypnotically reiterated refrain, in a version dating from the Forty-​five, which powerfully asserts the link between Charles Edward Stuart and the “Bonnie Highland Laddie” trope: The bonniest lad that e’er I saw, Bonny laddie, highland laddie, Wore a plaid and was fu’ braw, Bonny laddie, highland laddie; On his head a bonnet blue, Bonny laddie, &c. His royal heart was firm and true, Bonny Laddie, &c. But when the Hero did appear, C—​pe and his men were seiz’d wi’ fear; Then he boldly drew his sword, And he gave his Royal word; That from the field he would not fly, But with his friends would live or die: I hope to see him mount the th—​ne G—​e, and all his foes, begone. Here’s a health to J—​s our K—​g, God send him soon o’er us to r—​gn, For then we a’ fu’ glad will be, When we his Majesty do see.44

Once the initial link had been made, the new composite symbol was rapidly exploited, as we see in the song “Though Geordie Reigns in Jamie’s Stead,” probably dating from the early 1750s: He’s far beyond Dumblain the Night, Whom I love weell for a’ that; 43  John Glen, Early Scottish Melodies: Including Examples from MSS. and Early Printed Works, along with a Number of Comparative Tunes, Notes on Former Annotators, English Claims, and Biographical Notices, Etc. (Edinburgh: J. & R. Glen, 1900), pp. 241–​3. 44  “A Song—​Tune,—​Bonnie Laddie, Highland Laddie,” in The True Loyalist; or, Chevalier’s Favourite: Being a Collection of Elegant Songs, Never Before Printed: Also, Several Other Loyal Compositions, Wrote by Eminent Hands ([Edinburgh?], 1779), p. 50.

 

20   William Donaldson He wears a Pistol by his Side that makes me blyth for a’ that, The Highland Coat, the Philabeg, the Tartan Hose, and a’ that, And tho’ he’s o’er the Seas the Night, He’ll soon be here for a’ that. For a’ that, and a’ that, And thrice as muckle a’ that; He’s far beyond the Seas the Night, Yet he’ll be here for a’ that. He wears a Broadsword by his Side, And weell he kens to draw that, The Target and the Highland Plaid, The Shoulder-​belt and a’ that; A Bonnet bound with Ribbons blue, The White Cockade, and a’ that, And tho’ beyond the Seas the Night, Yet he’ll be here for a’ that. And a’ that, etc.45

Here we find the association of Charles Edward Stuart with romantic exile and Highland glamor, particularly the use of Highland dress in an explicitly symbolic way that marked the whole subsequent course of Jacobite song. Within a decade of the Forty-​five, the mythic figure “Bonnie Prince Charlie” was conjured into being by a succession of anonymous songwriters applying largely reflex techniques of song-​making. From the outside it looks remarkably like spontaneous creation. Along with Robert the Bruce, William Wallace, and Mary Queen of Scots, “Bonnie Prince Charlie” is one of the great Scottish icons. Yet scholars were long at a loss to account for its creation, since “ordinary” historical documents could not explain its rise and growth. Song sources—​and song sources alone—​could do this, because it was in these that the process of transformation took place. This extraordinary act of sustained communal composition, the cumulative result of no intention on the part of any single printer, writer, or editor (although later carried on by a succession of named songwriters which included Robert Burns, James Hogg, and Carolina Oliphant) was, by the end of the nineteenth century, being hailed as one of the outstanding examples of Volkslied in Europe.46

The Folk The concept of “the folk” that lay behind this development was, as Matthew Gelbart reminds us in an important book, The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music”: Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner (2007), the work largely of Scottish scholars including John Gregory (1724–​73), William Tytler (1711–​92), Alexander Campbell (1764–​1824), and James Beattie (1735–​1803). For example, Beattie’s “On Poetry and Music, as They Affect the Mind” (1776) 45 

Quoted in Donaldson, Jacobite Song, p. 63.

46 Donaldson, Jacobite Song, pp. 1–​4. For recent examples of the genre, see Andy Hunter, “King

Fareweel,” in King Fareweel, Lismor Folk, LIFL 7002; and Michael Marra, “Mincing wi’ Chairlhi,” in Gaels Blue, Mink Records (2)—SHS 2, 1985.

 

Poems on the Streets    21 made the powerful claim that popular music and song might form not merely an adjunct, but the vital essence of a national culture. Such thinking underwrote—​indeed required—​ the inclusion of a substantial body of popular song in the Scottish canon, and justified the practice of a succession of eighteenth-​century collectors and editors such as Ramsay in The Tea-​Table Miscellany, Herd in Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, Heroic Ballads, Etc., and Burns and Johnson in the Scots Musical Museum.47 Since the Scots had suffered a relative loss of high literary culture following the southern migration of the court at the Union of the Crowns in 1603, it was perhaps natural for them to concentrate on the popular strand. Yet in England, except perhaps for a number of “folk songs” culled from the general stream and spruced up for admission to polite society by Cecil Sharp and his fellow members of the Folk-​Song Society during the early years of the twentieth century, the focus was absolutely different. The thrust of Scots theorizing as it continued into the nineteenth century tended increasingly to valorize the oral at the expense of the written. In England, as we see in the practice of Cecil Sharp and his associates, this led to the conferring of “authenticity” on a single strand of tradition thought to represent an orally transmitted, illiterate peasant “folk” culture, and the consignment to relative oblivion of the great surrounding mass of popular printed tradition from which the “folk” element had been extracted by various forms of scholarly alchemy. In Scotland, something quite different happened. For about a century and a half popular song material lay securely at the heart of what the Scots considered as their main cultural achievement, but this, too, faded in time. The heavy concentration on orality and oral transmission, including the prioritizing of the tape recorder over the book by agencies like Edinburgh University’s School of Scottish Studies, ended by excluding much of the repertory that had sparked this interest in the first place, and the great tradition of eighteenth-​century Scottish book song was reduced to a relatively minor role in academic accounts of Scottish literature. Two conclusions suggest themselves: first, that our conventional ideas about the separation of the oral, written, and printed domains have been too simple, and that we have proposed too great a dichotomy between “tradition” in its printed and in its oral form. A tune, for example, might be composed aurally, transmitted orally, written down in a manuscript, subsequently printed, then retransmitted orally/​aurally again, probably also finding its way back into manuscript, perhaps repeatedly, in its journey through time.48 Second, there is the problem of the United Kingdom itself, ethnically diverse, speaking half a dozen languages, whose political conjuncture was seldom more than a matter of geopolitical convenience. It presents great—​perhaps insuperable—​difficulties for those who seek to generalize about it. The common cultural space that some of the Scots at least set out so earnestly to create in the century following the Union of 1707 appears not to have been achieved. Meanwhile, the essentially class-​based dualism sketched at the beginning of this chapter continues to mark mainstream English-​language traditions. Early in the twenty-​ first century, it will be interesting to see if an aesthetic emerges capable of embracing Chuck Berry as well as Robert Lowell.

47  Matthew Gelbart, The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music”: Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), pp. 89, 91. 48  Similar journeys between oral and literate media are described in Adam Fox’s Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–​1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).

 

22   William Donaldson

References Cowan, Edward J., and Mike Paterson, Folk in Print: Scotland’s Chapbook Heritage 1750–​1850 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2007). Donaldson, William, The Jacobite Song:  Political Myth and National Identity (Aberdeen:  Aberdeen Univ. Press, 1988). Gelbart, Matthew, The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music”: Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007). Henigan, Julie, Literacy and Orality in Eighteenth-Century Irish Song (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012). Holloway, John, and Joan Black (eds.), Later English Broadside Ballads (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975). Shepard, Leslie, The Broadside Ballad:  A  Study in Origins and Meaning (London:  Herbert Jenkins, 1962; reissued 1978). Shepard, Leslie, The History of Street Literature: The Story of Broadside Ballads, Chapbooks, Proclamations, News-​Sheets, Election Bills, Tracts, Pamphlets, Cocks, Catchpennies, and Other Ephemera (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973). Simpson, Claude M., The British Broadside Ballad and Its Music (New Brunswick:  Rutgers Univ. Press, 1966).

 

Chapter 2

P oems on t h e  Stag e Cynthia Wall Action indeed has a natural Excellence in it, superior to all other Qualities; Action is Motion, and Motion is the Support of Nature, which without it would again sink into the sluggish Mass of Chaos… . But next to this is the Art of Speaking, in which also a Player ought to be perfectly skilled; for, as an eminent Writer observes, “The Operation of Speech is strong, not only for the Reason or Wit therein contained, but by its Sound. For in all good Speech there is a sort of Music, with respect to its Measure, Time and Tune.” —​Thomas Betterton, The History of the English Stage (1741)

Poetry on the stage is embodied, enacted, voiced, four-​dimensional. The move from the page to the stage, as the play is performed, or from the stage to the page, as it is published, is a move between worlds of interpretation and experience. As A. R. Braunmuller points out, “The heavily patterned verbal rhetoric of English drama in the 1590s was in many respects word-​play writ large. It was ‘auricular,’ appealing first and powerfully to the listener-​spectator’s rhythmic and auditory sensibilities.”1 Early modern audiences, argues Coburn Freer, could hear a poetic line “emerge and take shape, and their ability to do this gives the point to literally hundreds of speeches and scenes in English Renaissance drama.”2 The nature of poetry on the stage changed across the Restoration and eighteenth century as verse tragedy, both rhymed and blank, faced a gradual extinction, but from prologues and epilogues to concluding couplets to embedded songs to operas to farce, poems on the stage maintained a robustly healthy population. In this chapter I will consider the various forms of stage poetry in this period both as it appeared in print, how it was arranged on the page as a visual reading experience, and as it inhabited the stage,

1 

A. R. Braunmuller, “The Arts of the Dramatist,” in A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), p. 64. 2  Coburn Freer, The Poetics of Jacobean Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1981), p. 33.

 

24   Cynthia Wall brought to life by an actor—​poetry as gesture, as action, with the measures, times, and tunes of its historical moments.

Prologues and Epilogues Gentlemen, we must beg your pardon; here’s no Prologue to be had to day; Our New Play is like to come on without a Frontispiece; as bald as one of you young Beaux, without your Perriwig. —​John Dryden, Prologue to The Mistakes (1691)

Like a periwig, the prologue had a number of functions: adornment, expression, mediation, self-​protection; in the words of Lynn Festa, “the wig’s physical nature—​the way it shuttles among different individuals, recomposing the body and its surfaces—​erodes the boundaries that set the individual subject off from the world.”3 So the prologue shuttles among characters (or is the character Prologue), composing or recomposing the relationship between audience and playwright, audience and players, audience and play, by stepping across the physical and psychological and imaginative boundaries between them. And like the periwig, the prologue was almost invariably curled—​set off from the rest of the playtext in italics. Why? John Smith, in the Printer’s Grammar (1755), notes that italics were designed for “varying the different Parts and Fragments, abstracted from the Body of a work—​for passages which differ from the language of the Text … and by which they intend to convey to the reader either instructing, satyrizing, admiring, or other hints and remarks.”4 For roman type, he notes, “being always of a bolder look than Italic of the same Body, takes advantage of the soft and tender face of Italic” (p. 13). Joseph Loewenstein describes italics as “the typeface of privilege, as the type of quotation, of accuracy, obtrusion, assertion… . To print in italics is to fracture the English body type, so to print other, more highly authored words. Thus do we make the muffled authority of mere impression give way to authentic inscription.”5 The prologues and epilogues in printed playtexts perform their italics: they are a varied part, a fragment, separate from the play and frequently written by another writer, and certainly either instructing, satirizing, admiring, or otherwise hinting and remarking. (Though rarely are they “soft and tender,” even when written by, for, or about women; no, bold and saucy is the Prologue, italic in character but Roman in Character.) As direct addresses to the audience, spoken usually by a character in dress but out of character, they employ the aesthetic freedoms of apparent impromptu, of scribal flourish rather than typeset fixity, of the informal actor rather than the professional author; they quote and allude and mimic and mock, if not with accuracy, then certainly with obtrusion and assertion, and thus do prologues translate

3 

Lynn Festa, “Personal Effects: Wigs and Possessive Individualism in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-​Century Life, 29, no. 2 (2005), 47–​90, at p. 48. 4  John Smith, The Printer’s Grammar: Wherein Are Exhibited, Examined, and Explained, the Superficies, Gradation, and Properties of the Different Sorts and Sizes of Metal Types, Cast by Letter Founders (London, 1755), p. 13. 5  Joseph F. Loewenstein, “Idem: Italics and the Genetics of Authorship,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 20, no. 2 (Fall 1990), 205–​24, at p. 224.

 

Poems on the Stage    25 impression to inscription and give the muffled authority of the character the authentic authority of the actor through the poetic art of the writer. Prologues and epilogues had been part of dramatic equipage at least since Elizabethan times; they more or less evolved from the internal direct address to the audience by the characters such as Vice in the medieval mysteries and morality plays. But as Anne Barton argues, “By the time of Shakespeare, it was understood that almost all speeches of this kind were overheard by the spectators as the result of stage convention, not through conscious intent on the part of the speaker.”6 The more systematized addresses were pushed out to the edges of the playworld to protect the self-​contained illusion of the stage. Yet something about the restoration of the theater in the 1660s, along with the monarchy, prompted a particular love affair with the prologue and epilogue, in large part because they so emphatically rematerialized the stage. We are most definitely Back, they declaim in several hundred ways; the new plays celebrated the fashionable new world, and their prologues and epilogues celebrated “the ‘reality’ of the theatre itself.”7 As the “obvious bridges between the two realms of reality and illusion” (Barton, Idea, p. 60) prologues and epilogues could set up or knock down expectations for the play; celebrate or mock-​attack the playwright; define or direct the audience; applaud or attack said audience; support or subvert the tone of the play; distill and disseminate current literary criticism; refresh an old play or introduce a new; titillate monarchs and ignite historical moments. They tend to share a common form and performance—​somewhere around thirty rhymed, italicized lines. On the page, their space is limited, confined, metadramatically separate, often without a character or a stage direction assigned. But as Daniel J. Ennis and Judith Bailey Slagle note, as they bracketed the central material, so they necessarily modified what they framed, both textually and even more so performatively, when the actor could play her character across different thresholds.8 In John Dryden’s Tyrannic Love; or, The Royal Martyr, a Tragedy (1669), Nell Gwyn, who had played the tragic character Valeria opposite Elizabeth Boutell’s St. Catherine, gave the epilogue a particularly memorable turn: Spoken by Mrs. Ellen, when she was to be carried off dead by the Bearers. To the Bearer. Hold, are you mad? You damn’d confounded Dog, I am to rise, and speak the Epilogue. To the Audience. I come, kind Gentlemen, strange News to tell ye, I am the Ghost of poor departed Nelly. Sweet Ladies, be not frighted, I’le be civil, I’m what I was, a little harmless Devil. . . . Gallants, look to’t, you say there are no Sprights; But I’le come Dance about your Beds at nights. . . . To tell you true, I walk, because I dye Out of my Calling in a Tragedy. O Poet, damn’d dull Poet, who could prove

6  Anne Barton, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962; repr. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), p. 60. 7  Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack, English Drama: A Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 135. 8  Daniel J. Ennis and Judith Bailey Slagle, introduction to Prologues, Epilogues, Curtain-​Raisers, and Afterpieces: The Rest of the Eighteenth-​Century London Stage (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2007), p. 21.

 

26   Cynthia Wall So senseless! to make Nelly dye for Love; Nay, what’s yet worse, to kill me in the prime Of Easter-​Term, in Tart and Cheese-​cake Time! . . . As for my Epitaph when I am gone, I’le trust no Poet, but will write my own. Here Nelly lies, who, tho’ she liv’d a Slater’n, Yet dy’d a Princess, acting in S. Cathar’n.9

The actor Thomas Betterton notes in the History of the English Stage, from the Restauration to the Present Time (1741, compiled by Edmund Curll from his papers):  “in performing which, [Mrs. Guyn] so captivated the King, who was present the first Night of the Play, by the humorous Turns she gave it, that his Majesty, when she had done, went behind the Scenes and carried her off to an Entertainment that Night.”10 She was one of those actresses who, in the words of Colley Cibber, “had Charms sufficient at their leisure Hours, to calm and mollify the Cares of Empire.”11 This one epilogue efficiently if vixenishly accomplishes many of the functions to be developed by these paratexts over the Restoration and eighteenth century:  illusion-​ shattering, audience-​addressing, audience-​seducing, audience-​warning, genre-​defining, poet-​bashing, genre-​historicizing, and poetry-​writing. By the 1670s, Dryden was the “acknowledged master” of the art, and he multiplied their imaginative possibilities: they could also serve as “intelligencers” for the day, purveying the latest gossip, news, fashion, and theatrical events; many, like Nell Gwyn’s raised ghost, had a “vaudevillian” cast, with an astrologer casting the play’s horoscope, or a Mercury, or Shakespeare’s ghost, or Dryden himself making his last bequests. The paratexts could ponder the nature of contemporary satire, modernizing Greek or Elizabethan drama, French rules, rhyming plays, and politics.12 And, of course, they could play with themselves, so to speak. Dryden’s prologue to Joseph Harris, The Mistakes; or, The False Report: A Tragicomedy (1691), opens with a pre-​ prologue in prose, as Mr. Bright enters to apologize for the lack of prologue (and to compare prologues to periwigs), until Mr. Bowen enters to reassure everyone that he’s found “honest Mr. Williams, just come in, half mellow, from the Rose-​Tavern,” who has obligingly agreed to “speak something, in Rhyme, now, for the Play.” And Secret-​Love; or, The Maiden-​ Queen (1698) has two prologues—​the first in six numbered stanzas of triplets (all about the “Unities of Action, Place, and Time”), and the second in forty lines of couplets, as the Prologue (as character) had left and then returns: “I had forgot one half I do protest, | And now am sent again to speak the rest.” Prologues and epilogues continued robustly throughout the eighteenth century; all kinds of plays sported their appropriate periwig. David Garrick’s prologue to Oliver Goldsmith’s 9  John Dryden, Tyrannick Love; or, The Royal Martyr: A Tragedy: As It Is Acted by His Majesties Servants, at the Theatre Royal (London, 1670), p. 69. 10  Thomas Betterton, The History of the English Stage, from the Restauration to the Present Time (London, 1741), pp. 56–​7. The British Library printed catalog entry notes: “Compiled by William Oldys and Edmund Curll from the papers of T. Betterton. With ‘Memoirs of Mrs. Anne Oldfield.’ By Edmund Curll?”: copy 641.h.6.(1.). 11  Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Comedian, and Late Patentee of the Theatre-​Royal (London, 1740), p. 55. 12  See William Bradford Gardner, The Prologues and Epilogues of John Dryden: A Critical Edition (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1951).

 

Poems on the Stage    27 She Stoops to Conquer (1773), written as an antidote to the sentimental drama, has a figure “dressed in Black, and holding a Handkerchief to his Eyes,” weep to the audience: “excuse me, Sirs, I pray—​I can’t yet speak—​| I’m crying now—​and have been all the week! | ’Tis not alone this mourning suit, good masters; | I’ve that within—​for which there are no plaisters! | Pray wou’d you know the reason why I’m crying? | The Comic muse, long sick, is now a dying!” At the other end of the spectrum, Matthew Lewis prefixes a bit of serious Romantic poetry to his Gothic drama The Castle Spectre (1798), wafting Atmosphere across the stage, as Romance … loathes the sun, or blazing taper’s light: The moon-​beam’d landscape and tempestuous night Alone she loves; and oft, with glimmering lamp, Near graves new-​open’d, or ’midst dungeons damp, Drear forests, ruin’d aisles, and haunted towers, Forlorn she roves and raves away the hours!

The popularity of prologues and epilogues through the century was not simply on the stage; in fact, they frequently broke off from their plays and formed independent collections. The Covent Garden Drolery of 1672 advertised itself in its title as “A Collection of all the Choice Songs, Poems, Prologues, and Epilogues (Sung and Spoken at Courts and Theatres) never in Print before.” Countless other collections followed: Thomas Duffat’s New Poems, Songs, Prologues, and Epilogues, Never Before Printed (1676), The Last New Prologues and Epilogues (1703), Apollo’s Feast (1703), A Second and Last Collection of the Most Celebrated Prologues and Epilogues Spoken at the Theatres of Drury Lane and Lincoln’s-​Inn (1727), The Complete English Songster (1761), The Temple of Taste (1763), The Essence of Theatrical Wit (1768), The Court of Thespis (1769), The Juvenile Roscius; or, Spouter’s Amusement (1770), The Spouter’s Companion (1770), The British Spouter (1773), The Young Spouter (1790), The Theatrical Bouquet (1780), The Complete Theatrical Remembrancer (1800), and, just to widen the geographical scope, The Oriental Masonic Muse (Calcutta, 1791). And according to Ennis and Slagle, “no Gentleman’s Magazine was truly complete unless it featured the opening (and/​ or closing) lines of the latest tragedy” (Prologues, Epilogues, p. 22). Given this rather spouting list, I think it is safe to proclaim that throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, prologues and epilogues remained perhaps the most important poems on the stage.

Tragedies Robert Boyle, first Earl of Orrery, writes of his play The Generall (the public inauguration of rhymed heroic romance, written 1661, staged 1664): “[Charles II] Commanded me, to write a Play for Him; … And therfore … I presumed to lay at his majts Feet, a Trage-​Comedi, All in Ten Feet verse, & Ryme. I writt it, in that manner … because I found his majty Relish’d rather, the French Fassion of Playes then the English.”13 The “French Fassion of Playes” was neoclassical, founded on Aristotle’s poetics and brought back from France with the monarchy. For some neoclassically inclined English critics, most stridently Thomas Rymer, Aristotle 13  Quoted in Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 195.

 

28   Cynthia Wall had the first and last word on epic, dramatic, and other sorts of poetry: “The truth is, what Aristotle writes on this Subject, are not the dictates of his own magisterial will, or dry deductions of his Metaphysicks; But the Poets were his Masters, and what was their practice, he reduced to principles.”14 Up sprung the fierce debate in the late seventeenth century about what constituted a proper tragedy—​could Shakespeare, who paid little attention to the unities of time, space, and action, be considered a great dramatist? And what about verse in all this?—​rhymed, blank, or none at all? Thomas Betterton records that, during the time between George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham’s writing of The Rehearsal (1663–​4) and its performance (1671), many Plays were brought upon the Stage written in Heroic Rhime; and on the Death of Sir William D’Avenant in 1668, whom Mr. Dryden succeeded as Poet-​Laureat, it became still in greater Vogue: This moved the Duke to change the Name of the Hero from Bilboa to Bays, directing levelling his Bolt at Mr. Dryden. It was brought upon the Stage in 1671, acted with universal Applause, and is the justest and truest Satire upon a vitiated and Dramatic Taste, the World ever saw. (Betterton, History, p. 8)

Dryden himself had enacted the debate in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668), where the critic Crites insists that rhyme is “not allowable in serious Plays” because rhyme itself is unnatural—​blank verse, particularly the iambic pentameter favored by Aristotle, is closer to nature, the art of rhyme is too visible and therefore too distracting, and in a play we require to be deceived by probability (the Elizabethan self-​contained illusion of the stage). Dryden’s new man Neander, however, rebuts:  an argument against rhyme is really an argument against verse—​rhyme need not distort sense, and metrical variety is required in any case. Furthermore, he says in praise of English poetry, our Couplet Verses may be rendred as near Prose as blank verse it self, by using those advantages I lately nam’d, as breaks in an Hemistich, or running the sense into another line, thereby making Art and Order appear as loose and free as Nature: or not tying our selves to Couplets strictly, we may use the benefit of the Pindarique way, practis’d in the Siege of Rhodes; where the numbers vary and the Rhyme is dispos’d carelesly, and far from often chymeing.15

In other words, “True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance, | As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.”16 Neander, however, hardly settled the question. In 1711 Joseph Addison weighed in with all the authority of the Spectator, citing Aristotle again and the conversational mode of iambic blank verse that is such a due Medium between Rhyme and Prose, that it seems wonderfully adapted to Tragedy. I am therefore very much offended when I see a Play in Rhyme, which is as absurd in English, as a Tragedy of Hexameters would have been in Greek or Latin. The Solæcism is, 14 

Thomas Rymer, “The Preface of the Translator,” in R. Rapin, Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poesie (London, 1674), sig. A4v. 15  John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1956–​2000), vol. xvii, p. 71. 16  Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, lines 362–​3, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–​69), vol. i, p. 282.

 

Poems on the Stage    29 I think, still greater in those Plays that have some Scenes in Rhyme and some in Blank Verse, which are to be looked upon as two several Languages; or where we see some particular Similes dignified with Rhyme, at the same time that every thing about them lyes in Blank Verse.17

Neo-​Aristotelians from Addison to John Selden in Table-​Talk (1892) steadily resisted poetry in drama: “There is no reason why plays should be in verse, either in blank or rhyme; only the poet has to say for himself, that he makes something like that which somebody made before him. The old poets had no other reason but this, their verse was sung to music, otherwise it had been a senseless thing to have fettered up themselves” (Selden, quoted in Freer, p. 134). But poets just as steadily insisted. Aristotle, as George Farqhuar pointed out in A Discourse on Comedy (1702), “was no Poet, and consequently not capable of giving instructions in the Art of Poetry” (p. 135).18 For nearly a century verse—​primarily blank but still occasionally rhymed—​dominated English tragedy, supported by the Aristotelian dictum, as digested by René Rapin and translated by Rymer, that the language must be lofty and splendid, … for the common and ordinary terms are not proper for a Poet, he must use words that partake nothing of the base and vulgar, they must be noble and magnificent … to express all the force and dignity of the great things it speaks: terms that go off roundly from the mouth, and that fill the ears, are sufficient to render all admirable, as Poesie requires.19

Thus, of course, even in the non-​neoclassical Shakespeare the speeches of the monarchs are nearly always in verse, often rhymed, to set them apart from the ordinary characters and events; so tragedy itself was held higher in the generic strata: “Tragedy we know is wont to image to us the minds and fortunes of noble persons, and to portray these exactly, Heroick Rhime is nearest Nature, as being the noblest kind of modern verse” (Dryden, Dramatick Poesie, p. 74). It was sometimes the actors themselves who determined the answer, in the way they made the verse “go off roundly from the mouth, and … fill the ears, … [and] render all admirable.” Betterton records a number of instances where an actor makes the line live. Elizabeth Barry, for example, playing the Hungarian Queen in Orrery’s Mustapha, brought extraordinary power to couplets not particularly affecting or memorable when simply lying limply on the page: The very Air she appeared with, in that distressed Character, moved them with Pity, preparing the Mind to greater Expectations, but when she spoke these Words to the insulting Cardinal, My Lord, my Sorrow seeks not your Relief; You are not fit to judge a Mother’s Grief: You have no Child for an untimely Grace, Nor can you lose what I desire to save.

17  Joseph Addison, Spectator 39 (April 14, 1711), in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), vol. i, pp. 164–​5. 18  See also David Wiles on Aristotle’s lack of poetics in “Aristotle’s Poetics and Ancient Dramatic Theory,” in Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), 92–​107, at p. 103. 19  René Rapin, Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poesie: Containing the Necessary, Rational, and Universal Rules for Epick, Dramatick, and Other Sorts of Poetry: With Reflections on the Works of the Ancient and Modern Poets, and Their Faults Noted, trans. Thomas Rymer (London, 1674), p. 43.

 

30   Cynthia Wall Here, Majesty distressed by the hostile Foe, the Widow Queen forlorn, insulted by her Subjects, feeling all an afflicted Mother could suffer by a stern Counsellor’s forcing her to yield her only Son to be sacrificed to the Enemy to save themselves and City, these Passions were so finely expressed by her, that the whole Theatre resounded with Applauses. (Betterton, History, pp. 16–​17)

Nicholas Rowe, Joseph Addison, and others carried verse tragedy into the eighteenth century, often settling the question by combining blank and rhymed verse in that poetic diversity promoted by Neander. In Addison’s Cato (1713), every character speaks in blank verse (every character is noble or elevated in some sense), but each act ends with couplets, as does the play itself: From hence, let fierce contending Nations know What dire Effects from Civil Discord flow. ’Tis this that shakes our Country with Alarms, And gives up Rome a Prey to Roman Arms, Produces Fraud, and Cruelty, and Strife, And robb’s the Guilty World of Cato’s Life. (p. 62)

If, in Rymer’s view, the Spanish language is like “the Kettle-​drum to Musick” (Aristotle, sig. A5v), one might say the rhymed couplets that close each act drum home a poetic resolution of the blank verse both sonically and interpretively: strife resolves into (the poet hopes and warns) a national life beyond civil discord, knowing and flowing from the loss of Cato’s life. The beginning of the eighteenth century introduced “private” life into tragedy, with Rowe’s she-​tragedy The Fair Penitent (1703): “We ne’er can pity what we ne’er can share | … Therefore an humbler Theme our Author chose, | A melancholy Tale of private Woes: | No Princes here lost Royalty bemoan, | But you shall meet with Sorrows like your own” (Prologue). By the 1730s arguments emerged in favor not only of more ordinary characters and ordinary action in tragedy, but also for ordinary prose. George Lillo, in his dedication to The London Merchant (1731), argues:  “Tragedy is so far from losing its Dignity, by being accommodated to the Circumstances of the Generality of Mankind, that it is more truly August in Proportion to the Extent of its Influence,” since princes are not the only ones “liable to Misfortunes, arising from Vice, or Weakness” (pp. iv–​v). Its prologue and epilogue are the only sustained pieces of poetry in the play, although each act ends with one or more couplets delivering a moral. Act i, for example, closes with the seductive Mrs. Millwood convincing young Barnwell into an affair; when he protests, “yet for a Moment’s guilty Pleasure, shall I lose my Innocence, my Peace of Mind, and Hopes of solid Happiness?”: Mill. Chimeras all,  —​—​ —​—​Come on with me and prove, No Joy’s like Woman kind, nor Heav’n like Love. Barn. I wou’d not,  —​— ​yet I must on.  —​—​ Reluctant thus, the Merchant quits his Ease, And trusts to Rocks, and Sands, and stormy Seas; In Hopes some unknown golden Coast to find, Commits himself, tho’ doubtful, to the Wind, Longs much for Joys to come, yet mourns those left behind.

}

(Lillo, London Merchant, p. 13)

The contemporary typography suggests and shapes interpretation—​ the separated, rhymed, italicized lines insert an ambiguity about voice—​are these last lines spoken

 

Poems on the Stage    31 aloud by Barnwell to Millwood? To the audience as soliloquy? In this form they could even be spoken by a different voice on or off stage—​Fate, perhaps. I am making an argument, of course, for not modernizing texts. In J. Douglas Canfield and Maja-​Lisa Von Sneidern’s (in many ways impressive) Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-​Century Drama (2001), the spelling, punctuation, and typography have been modernized in the name of “readability,” although the editors claim to be “not insensitive to original aspects of texts that might have facilitated performance.”20 Yet much is lost; the separateness of the poetry disappears, its emphasis blunted. Not only Barnwell’s—​ musings? second thoughts? conscience? open demur? self-​doom? fatedness?—​but also Millwood’s long suggestive pause, before cinching the couplet-​knot, is blended into practically the same line: Chimeras all,

Come on with me and prove, No joy’s like womankind, no heaven like love.

This is a case (well, they all are, I’d say) where the poem on the stage should be retained as a poem on the page. Vive la différence.

Comedies and Couplets Although comedy, as the lower form of generic life, was never badgered by the verse controversy, it still loved its poetry. Prologues and epilogues (in verse) suffered no loss of popularity, as discussed above, and their acts, as with tragedy, often ended with a couplet or triplet. Joseph Addison, that opponent of rhymed heroic tragedy, conceded: “I would not … debar the Poet from concluding his Tragedy, or, if he pleases, every Act of it, with two or three Couplets, which may have the same Effect as an Air in the Italian Opera after a long Recitativo, and give the Actor a graceful Exit” (Spectator 39, vol. i, p. 165). The end of act i of William Wycherley’s Country Wife (1675), for example, ends with Horner’s prose and verse comments on Pinchwife’s paranoid jealousy of his young wife Margery: Horn. Why, ’tis as hard to find an old Whoremaster without Jealousy and the Gout, as a young one without Fear, or the Pox.

}

As Gout in Age, from Pox in Youth proceeds; So Wenching past, the Jealousy succeeds: The worst Disease that Love and Wenching breeds.21

The triplet adds a kind of inevitable poetic logic to the prose: the lines succeed as the rhymes breed, and all proceed from the source: the dark side of sex. The play ends with “A Dance of Cuckolds,” and then Horner finally pronouncing: Vain Fops, but court and dress, and keep a pother, To pass for Women’s Men, with one another,

20 

J. Douglas Canfield and Maja-​Lisa Von Sneidern (eds.), The Broadview Anthology of Restoration & Early Eighteenth-​Century Drama (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2001), p. xxi. 21  William Wycherley, The Country Wife (London, 1731), p. 21.

 

32   Cynthia Wall But he who aims by Women to be priz’d, First by the Men, you see, must be despis’d. (Wycherley, Country Wife, p. 106)

This particular stanza is not italicized, but “of that bolder look” of roman type (Smith, Printer’s Grammar, p.  13)—​the victorious Horner, cause of all those cuckolds, finishing things off with the tight seams of rhyme, the strong “masculine” consonants of z, s, d. Concluding an act with a couplet became fairly standard, and the last person to leave the stage would have the chance to seal off the transition with a sort of metrical zipper. Having the last word meant having the last rhyme. In Congreve’s Way of the World (1700), for example, Mirabell contemptuously dismisses Petulant, who “always take[s]‌Blushing either for a Sign of Guilt, or ill Breeding”: Mira. I confess you ought to think so. You are in the right, that you may plead the Error of your Judgment in defence of your Practice. Where Modesty’s ill Manners, ’tis but fit That Impudence and Malice pass for Wit.22

Congreve’s brilliant use of couplets formalizes the shifting, uncertain atmosphere of this play as it moves toward resolution. Although, on the one hand, the act-​concluding couplets generally fix the tone or crystallize the problem (as in Waitwell’s collision between life and wife at the end of act ii: “Ay there’s my Grief; that’s the sad Change of Life; | To lose my Title, and yet keep my Wife,” p. 25), on the other, the couplet can underline fracture. In act iv, when Millamant, undecided about whether Mirabell should be admitted or not, “Repeat[s]‌and | walk[s] about. [and quotes Sir John Suckling:] There never yet was Woman made, | Nor shall, but to be curs’d,” the poetry interrupts her interrupted speech: “No —​— ​ What would the dear Man have? I am thoughtful and would amuse my self, —​— ​ bid him to come another time… . Ay: if you please, Foible, send him away, —​ — ​Or send him hither,—​just as you will dear Foible. —​—​ I think I’ll see him —​— ​shall I? Ay, let the Wretch come” (p. 42). Later in the scene, she scatters more of Suckling’s “filthy Verses” throughout her conversation with Sir Willfull “ruder than Gothick” Witwoud (“I prithee spare me, gentle Boy, | Press me no more for that slight Toy”; “I swear it will not do its part, | Tho’ thou do’st thine, employst thy Power and Art,” p. 43), with the final couplet (en) closed by Mirabell: Milla. Ay, ay; ha, ha, ha. Like Phœbus sung the no less am’rous Boy. Enter Mirabell. Mira. —​—​—​ Like Daphne she, as Lovely and as Coy. (p. 44)

A match made in metrics: their names, their natures, their rhymes. In Susanna Centlivre’s Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718), couplets do not systematically end the acts, but they are still interpretively employed. Act i ends with Mrs. Lovely speaking in the “soft and tender face of Italic” (Smith, Printer’s Grammar, p. 13) to implore the God of Love to assist her Fainwell: “Point all thy Darts to aid my Love’s Design, | And make his Plots as prevalent as thine.”23 Colonel Fainwell, on the other hand, ends act ii in bold roman prose: “I hope

22  23 

William Congreve, The Way of the World, 2nd ed. (London, 1706), p. 12. Susanna Centlivre, A Bold Stroke for a Wife: A Comedy (London, 1718), p. 9.

 

Poems on the Stage    33 to bite you all, if my Plots hit” (p. 22). And occasionally a character flourishes a couplet in an exit: Tradelove, the “Change-​Broker” guardian of Anne Lovely, assures Fainwell’s friend Freeman: If I were but the sole Trustee now, I should not fear it. Who the Devil would be a Guardian, If when Cash runs low, our Coffers t’enlarge, We can’t, like other Stocks, transfer our Charge?           [Exit. Free. Ha, ha, ha—​he has it. (p. 43)

Sometime in the 1760s Oliver Goldsmith observed, “For some years, Tragedy was the reigning entertainment; but of late it has entirely given way to Comedy, and our best efforts are now exerted in these lighter kinds of composition. The pompous Train, the swelling Phrase, and the unnatural Rant, are displaced for that natural portrait of Human Folly and Frailty, of which all are judges, because all have sat for the picture.”24 But a great many things got cleaned up and cleared out on the way. A new kind of decorum, in the wake of Jeremy Collier’s Short View on the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), governed both form and content of dramatic art. David Garrick’s reworking of Wycherley’s play, for example, ends act i rather differently: Horn. Ha, ha, ha! poor Jack! what a life of suspicion does he lead! I pity the poor fellow, tho’ he ought, and will suffer for his folly—​Folly! ’tis treason, murder, sacrilege! When persons of a certain age will indulge their false ungenerous appetites, at the expence of a young creature’s happiness, dame Nature will revenge herself upon them, for thwarting her most heavenly will and pleasure. [Exit.25 

Language, imagery, and typography are all regularized, absorbed into an all-​encompassing prose. In Goldsmith’s own “good-​natur’d” play, She Stoops to Conquer (1773), all the poetry (apart from one of Tony Lumpkin’s drinking songs) is transported out into the prologue and epilogue; the alternate linguistic plane of the couplet was vanishing in comedy.

Songs, Opera, and Ballad Operas But songs remained a form of poetry ubiquitous on the stage—​and on a variety of stages. They “ear’d” before, during, after, and outside of plays. The eighteenth-​century music historian Charles Burney noted, “Music has at all times been called in to the assistance of the weak plays and unattractive actors of our national theatres; and incidental songs, and singing between the acts, have been found so alluring, that when there was no plan formed for exhibiting musical

24  Oliver Goldsmith, “Essay X: Sentimental Comedy,” in Essays and Criticisms, by Dr. Goldsmith; with An Account of the Author, 3 vols. (London, 1798), vol. i, p. 57. 25  The Country Wife, a Comedy, Altered from Wycherley by David Garrick (London, 1772), p. 15.

 

34   Cynthia Wall dramas, singers have been engaged at considerable salaries, expressly for that purpose.”26 As a prologue written by a well-​known playwright or spoken by a well-​loved actor could refresh a play, so it was “powerful recommendation to a song, during the last century, to say that it had been performed at the play-​house” (Burney, General History, vol. iv, p. 631). In some cases the song was made famous by the singer. Nell Gwyn, for example, performed one naughty little Dryden song “with great archness,” according to Thomas Betterton: The Song, in this Comedy [Assignation; or, Love in a Nunnery (1672)] is introduced by a young Lady’s being asked this Question —​—  ​Are you fit, at Fifteen, to be trusted with a Maidenhead? ’Tis as much, Child, as your Betters can manage at full Twenty; I. For ’tis of a Nature so subtile, That if ’tis not luted with Care, The Spirit will work thro’ the Bottle, And vanish away into Air. II. To keep it, there nothing so hard is, ’Twill go, between Waking and Sleeping, The Simple, too weak for a Guard is, And no Wit, would be plagu’d with the keeping. Nelly was eased of her Virginity by Mr. Hart, at the same time that Lord Buckhurst, —​—  ​sighed for it.  —​—  ​But his Majesty carrying off the Prize, we must leave her under the Royal Protection. (Betterton, History, pp. 58–​9)

Opera first evolved in the late seventeenth century when, in Colley Cibber’s account, the two theater companies (the King’s and the Duke’s) ran out of material for a while. The King’s Company were still able to draw audiences with their better actors (Betterton, Gwyn, and Barry among them) and their Shakespearean and Jacobean repertoire; “Sir William Davenant, therefore, Master of the Duke’s Company, to make Head against their Success, was forc’d to add Spectacle and Musick to Action; and to introduce a new Species of Plays, since call’d Dramatick Opera’s, of which kind were the Tempest, Psyche, Circe, and others, all set off with the most expensive Decorations of Scenes and Habits, with the best Voices and Dancers” (Cibber, Apology, pp. 56–​7). Then, in the 1720s, Enter: George Frideric Handel and Italian Opera. Londoners such as Charles Burney and his daughter Frances, or Frances Burney’s heroine in Evelina (1778), loved the poetry as well as the music of operatic performance; Evelina refers to a “symphony of a song of Signor Millico’s,” a song “which was slow and pathetic”—​he looks “doleful” because Evelina, knowing Italian, knows that “the character he performs is in distress.”27 But not everyone saw the point. Evelina’s irritable and unsophisticated cousin Mr. Branghton is taken aback when he first (and presumably last) attends, growling, “What a jabbering they make! … there’s no knowing a word they say. Pray what’s the reason they can’t

26 

Charles Burney, A General History of Music, 4 vols. (London, 1776–​89), vol. iv, p. 631. Frances Burney, Evelina; or, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, ed. Stewart J. Cooke (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), p. 78. 27 

 

Poems on the Stage    35 as well sing in English?—​but I suppose the fine folks would not like it, if they could understand it.” His son was flabbergasted that “there’s nothing but singing!—​I wonder when they’ll speak” (Evelina, p. 78). The Spectator came out with a few ripe diatribes, and a counter­attack was launched, spearheaded by John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728), which Charles Burney declared formed “a memorable epoch in our national Music: for though not a single new air was composed for this pasticcio in our vulgar tongue, it has proved the best opera to the patentees of our playhouses that ever was brought on the stage … a favourite singer can always fill the rest of the house” (Burney, History of Music, vol. iv, p. 650). Italian opera and English opera “came to delineate a binary opposition in eighteenth-​ century culture,” including a binary in performance expectations of language and acting, in vocal technique and repertoires.28 Both prompted imitators and competitors. Burney notes that “Mr. [Thomas] Arne was aspiring, and always regarded Handel as a tyrant and usurper, against whom he frequently rebelled, but with as little effect as Marsyas against Apollo” (Burney, History of Music, vol. iv, p. 667). But Arne had his own marked triumphs. Probably best known now for the patriotic song “Rule, Britannia,” Arne was one of the leading musical figures of mid-​eighteenth-​century London. He became house composer for Drury Lane Theatre, writing music for a number of plays (including Shakespearean productions), and was one of the founders of the Royal Society of Musicians (along with Handel, William Boyce, and Johann Christoph Pepusch). He worked to establish English opera in England to rival the popularity of Italian opera, and succeeded, both with serious operas and with ballad opera. Artaxerxes (1762) combined all the “strands of operatic writing and performance,” both Italian and English, into “the greatest operatic achievement of any composer in eighteenth-​and early nineteenth-​century London” (Burden, “Opera,” p. 214), and convinced “an English audience that [it] could tolerate even recitative” (Burney, quoted in Burden, p. 214). His ballad opera Thomas and Sally (1760) is a short, comic, afterpiece opera, intended to follow a serious production, such as Romeo and Juliet. Musically, it was sophisticated, with a full orchestra, and it was through-​sung, like an Italian opera, but with intelligible (if not high-​end) English words by the librettist Isaac Bickerstaff: “Avast, my boys, avast, all hands on shore, | Mess-​mates, what cheer? Old England, hey! once more.” This opera set the stage, so to speak, for Bickerstaff and Arne’s tremendously successful collaboration two years later in Love in a Village, the first “official” musical comedy. As one musical historian has put it, “Without Thomas and Sally, we would not have Gilbert and Sullivan, Rogers and Hammerstein, or even Andrew Lloyd Webber.”29

Afterpieces Lewis Theobald ironically dedicated his Shakespeare Restored (1726) to John Rich, the theater manager of London’s most lavish stage productions, as the one who almost single-​ handedly created an age which preferred “Pleasures, in which the rational Soul has no Share. 28 

Michael Burden, “Opera in London Theatres,” in Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730–​1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), pp. 105, 106–​7. 29  Linda V. Troost, personal e-​mail, April 27, 2010.

 

36   Cynthia Wall So shall we be able to account both for the reception of Grotesque and Opera.”30 But “grotesques” (including farce, burlesque, and pantomime), as well as opera, kept poetry on the stage. These short, ostensibly simple and conventional interludes or afterpieces (“farce” comes from the sixteenth-​century French farce “stuffing”) had their own reserves of suggestive power: their own logic, Peter Holland argues, “derived from [that] very conventionality, refuting the demands of contemporary theories with their high valuing of the ‘natural,’ of the necessity of mimetic accuracy.”31 John O’Brien makes similar claims for pantomime, arguing that it “reproduced within itself the heterogeneous character of the period’s theatre in which serious fare was frequently intermingled with singing, dancing, acrobatics and farce. In content and structure … pantomime stands as an example of what we can call popular neoclassicism.”32 One of the most popular pantomimes in the early eighteenth century, The Necromancer; or, Harlequin, Doctor Faustus (1723) illustrates such theatrical and poetic convention in miniature. A Good and Bad Spirit appear to the Doctor reading at his table and address him in a sort of tetrameter blank verse: Good Spirit. O Faustus! thy good Genius warns, Break off in time; pursue no more An Art, that will thy Soul ensnare. Bad Spirit. Faustus, go on: That Fear is vain: Let thy great Heart aspire to trace Dark Nature to her secret Springs, Till Knowledge make thee deem’d a God. [Good and Bad Spirit disappear: The Doctor uses magical Motions, and an Infernal Spirit rises.]33

Interspersed are poems (“INCANTATION. | … Arise! the Schreech [sic]-​Owl’s Voice proclaims, | Darkness is in her awful Noon: | The Stars keep back their glimm’ring Flames, | And Veils of Clouds shut in the Moon,” p. 6); soliloquies with songs (Helen of Troy); dialogues with songs (Hero and Leander); rhymed-​couplet speeches (“Charon. | What mean this whining, pining Pair, | Must I for you detain my Fare? | Or do your Wisdoms think my Wherry, | Should wait your Time to cross the Ferry?,” p. 12); and, after “the Doctor is seiz’d, hurried away by Spirits, and devour’d by the Monster,” a new set of demons appears and close the pantomime with the traditional couplet: “Now triumph Hell, and Fiends be gay, | The Sorc’rer is become our Prey” (p. 15). The piece itself is not much longer than a couplet, and in a way, these afterpieces perform like concluding couplets or epilogues, adding one more theatrical layer of distance, different voice, and sense of conclusion and resolution to the evening’s entertainment.

30 

Lewis Theobald, Shakespeare Restored; or, A Specimen of the Many Errors, as Well Committed, as Unamended, by Mr. Pope in His Late Edition of This Poet (London, 1726), sig. A2r. 31  Peter Holland, “Farce,” in Moody and O’Quinn (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, pp. 107–​26, at p. 118. 32  John O’Brien, “Pantomime,” in ibid., pp. 103–​14, at p. 105. 33  John Thurmond, A Dramatick Entertainment, Call’d the Necromancer; or, Harlequin, Doctor Faustus (London, 1724), pp. 3–​4.

 

Poems on the Stage    37 Farce, pantomime, and burlesque had their contemporary defenders. Dr. William Kenrick (albeit “one of London’s most despised, drunken, and morally degenerate hack writers in the later eighteenth century”34) argued contra Goldsmith: The Burlesque affords an inexhaustible fund of humour. It is yet so little understood by the vulgar, both great and small, as to meet with constant opposition on the Stage. It consists of two species; the one, that in which mean and common subjects are ludicrously invested with the trappings of affected dignity, as in the “Rape of the Lock” of Pope, and the “Tom Thumb” of Fielding; the other, that in which lofty and sublime subjects are clothed in the garb and stile of the vulgar; … it is in this disparity between the style and the subject that the ridicule, and consequently the humour, of the piece consists.35

Kenrick may have been wrong on most things in his life, but in this he agrees with Thomas Keymer, who claims for Fielding’s Tom Thumb: “A burlesque of heroic drama that misapplies the grandiloquent rhetoric of tragedy to a trivial chapbook world, Tom Thumb does for high literature what The Author’s Farce does for low (and the plays regularly featured as a double bill, on thirty-​four occasions in their opening season).”36 I would like to conclude this chapter with some of the greatest of eighteenth-​century poetry on the stage ever—​from that very Tom Thumb, which started as a general burlesque of heroic tragedy form with Shakespearean allusions that Fielding added to The Author’s Farce as an afterpiece in 1730. The Tragedy of Tragedies; or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great had repercussions in the worlds of public and private dramatic performance that make it a stage competitor to Pope’s Dunciad. Charles Burney records that Thomas Arne, after the success of his serious opera, Addison’s Rosamund, decided to try his powers at a burletta, and fixed upon Fielding’s Tom Thumb for that purpose, which under the title of the Tragedy of Tragedies having met with great success in 1731, he now got it transformed into the Opera of Operas, and setting it to Music, “after the Italian manner,” had it performed May 31st, at the new theatre in the Hay-​market; the part of Tom Thumb by Master Arne, his brother. Princess Amelia and the Duke of Cumberland honoured the second representation with their presence; the prince of Wales, the sixth; the youngest princesses, the eighth; and afterwards it had a considerable run. (Burney, History of Music, vol. iv, pp. 656–​7)

Tom Thumb “was to prove one of Fielding’s most enduring plays, with intriguing later revivals: Frances Burney played Huncamunca in private theatricals of 1777, and there was a domestic production by the Austen family at Steventon in 1788; the eminent (and prodigiously tall) critic W. K. Wimsatt was the giantess Glumdalca at Yale University in 1953” (Keymer, “Fielding’s Theatrical Career,” p. 26). Farce and pantomime are an “actor’s genre,” depending primarily on gesture, spectacle, action. Holland notes that with the focus on actors’ bodies, those bodies are transformed from sexual objects into “metamorphic realities that can transform their worlds” (p. 109). But these afterpieces and interludes depend—​just as much as any tragedy or comedy—​upon their poetry for their stage effect; as Betterton says, next to the art of gesture is “the Art of 34 

Paul Fussell, Jr., “William Kenrick’s ‘Courtesy’ Book,” PMLA, 66, no. 4 (1951), 538–​40, at p. 539. Afterword to Goldsmith’s “Essay X,” by Dr. Kenrick, in Essays and Criticisms, by Dr. Goldsmith, p. 67. 36  Thomas Keymer, “Fielding’s Theatrical Career,” in Claude Rawson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), p. 26. 35 

 

38   Cynthia Wall Speaking … For in all good Speech there is a sort of Music, with respect to its Measure, Time and Tune” (Betterton, History, pp. 45–​6). And what better music, what more measured and tuned, than a Fielding farce? As King Arthur says fondly to Queen Dollalolla: “—​Ha! what wrinkled Sorrow, | Hangs, sits, lies, frowns upon thy knitted Brow? | Whence flow those Tears fast down thy blubber’d Cheeks, | Like a swoln Gutter, gushing through the Streets?”37 Or as the princess Huncamunca muses, “O Tom Thumb! Tom Thumb! wherefore art thou Tom Thumb?” (p.  21). (Although the play parodies one Shakespeare play after another, the Scriblerian notes never once mention an allusion; the note here points us to Otway’s Marius: “Oh! Marius, Marius; wherefore art thou Marius?”) Or, perhaps finest of all, Grizzle’s ode to Huncamunca: “Oh Huncamunca, Huncamunca! oh!” (p. 25).38 In the end, the red cow swallows up Tom Thumb, the Queen kills Noodle, Cleora kills the Queen, Huncamunca kills Cleora, Doodle kills Huncamunca, Mustapha kills Doodle, the King kills Mustapha, and then himself: And take thou this. So when the Child whom Nurse from Danger guards, Sends Jack for Mustard with a Pack of Cards; Kings, Queens and Knaves, throw one another down, ’Till the whole Pack lies scatter’d and o’erthrown; So all our Pack upon the Floor is cast, And all I boast is—​—​that I fall the last.

What more is there to say?

[Kills himself, and falls.

[Dies. (p. 55)

F I N I S.

References Bliss, Lee, “Pastiche, Burlesque, Tragicomedy,” in A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, 2nd ed. (Cambridge:  Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 228–​53. Braunmuller, A. R., “The Arts of the Dramatist,” in A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, 2nd ed. (Cambridge:  Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 53–​92. Brown, Laura, English Dramatic Form (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981).

37  Henry Fielding, The Tragedy of Tragedies; or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (London, 1731), pp. 5–​6. 38 “p) This beautiful Line, which ought, says Mr. W—​—​ to be written in Gold, is imitated in the New Sophonisba;

Oh! Sophonisba, Sophonisba, oh! Oh! Narva, Narva, oh! The Author of a Song call’d Duke upon Duke, hath improv’d it. Alas! O Nick, O Nick, alas! Where, by the help of a little false Spelling you, have two Meanings in the repeated Words” (Fielding, p. 25 n).

 

Poems on the Stage    39 Corman, Brian, Genre and Generic Change in English Comedy, 1660–​1710 (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1993). Dobson, Michael, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–​1769 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992). Ennis, Daniel J., and Judith Bailey Slagle, “Introduction,” in Prologues, Epilogues, Curtain-​ Raisers, and Afterpieces: The Rest of the Eighteenth-​Century London Stage (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2007). Flint, Lorna, Shakespeare’s Third Keyboard:  The Significance of Rime in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2000). Freer, Coburn, The Poetics of Jacobean Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1981). Holland, Peter, The Ornament of Action:  Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979). Holland, Peter, “Farce,” in Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), pp. 107–​26. Hume, Robert D., Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). Markley, Robert, and Laurie Finke (eds.), From Renaissance to Restoration: Metamorphoses of the Drama (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Univ. Press, 1984). Marsden, Jean, The Re-​Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-​Century Literary Theory (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1995). Nicoll, Allardyce, The Garrick Stage: Theatres and Audience in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Sybil Rosenfeld (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1980). O’Brien, John, Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1690–​1760 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2004). O’Brien, John, “Pantomime,” in Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), pp. 103–​14. Roach, Joseph, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1993). Shepherd, Simon, and Peter Womack, English Drama: A Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Summers, Montague, The Playhouse of Pepys (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935).

 

Chapter 3

P oem s in  Pri nt James McLaverty The relationship between print and poetry in the period from Paradise Lost to Lyrical Ballads was an uneasy one. On poetry’s side, the link with a vocal performance and with the freedom and expressivity of manuscript circulation was still strong, and it was accompanied by a deep mistrust of compromise with the commercial demands of print.1 On print’s side, poetry was always going to be troublesome, because its frequent brevity and persistent demands on paper created difficulties in shaping it into something saleable. Prestige attached itself to the publication of great poems, but reference books, religious and political controversy, plays, and, late in the period, novels were a better financial bet. The sheer awkwardness of this relationship, however, generated a period of diversity and experiment. What could be done to represent the human voice through the resources of the compositor’s case was tried, though it risked charges of diseconomy and inelegance. The beauties of manuscript publication were mimicked in large illustrated and ornamented quartos and folios, while some of its casualness was echoed in slips and half-​sheets. In a counter move, poems played with the bookishness of their embodiment, toying with the dignity of the Bible or the classical variorum, or with the antique in the form of prophecy or medieval lyrics. The book trade’s most significant innovation, alongside the magazine and the miscellany, was to make the poetry book a luxury item, paying its way by using up more and better paper than it strictly needed in order to command a higher price. Although this practice moderated in the course of the century, it remained an influence in poetry publication, as it does today. As Roger Lonsdale notes in his pioneering New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse, late in the century booksellers turned poems themselves into vast reference collections, anthologizing the age’s verse and deciding which authors merited reprinting.2 My account will follow the eighteenth-​century editors’ lead and, with some exceptions, focus on the poetry that they were already making canonical.3 1  For continuing manuscript publication, see the final chapter of Harold Love’s Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-​Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); and Margaret J. M. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1999). 2  Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), pp. xxxv–​xxxvii. For details, see William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 525–​30. 3  An excellent account of poetry 1695–​1774 is provided by Michael Suarez, S.J. in Michael F. Suarez, S.J. and Michael L. Turner (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume V, 1695–​1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 654–​60.

 

Poems in Print   41

Poems on the Page The printing of poems moves from relative simplicity (or at least closeness to prose) after the Restoration, through years of experimental grandeur, to a new plainness in the final years of the century.4 From an interpretive point of view the most important developments were the small-​scale variations in typography, particularly in italics and capitals, that allowed the poem to be inflected in different ways. The master printer and compositor were undoubtedly collaborators in these effects, but the instigator of departures from convention was always likely to be the author. Moxon, writing in 1683, lays down a strict rule that “by the Laws of Printing, a Compositer is strictly to follow his Copy,” but then concedes some desirable collaboration in correcting bad spelling and punctuation.5 My general assumption in examining the poem on the page is that a conventional pattern was adopted by the printing house, but that departures from it are likely to be the author’s. The most flexible and powerful element in inflecting meaning was italic type. At the beginning of this period italics were still used for all sorts of paratextual material (dedications, prefaces, introductions, contents, notes) and for certain sorts of words in the poem: quotations were likely to be in italics, as was any motto or tag, foreign words or phrases, and proper nouns. By the time John Smith wrote his Printer’s Grammar in 1755, the heavy use of italic for paratext was being rejected in favor of different sorts of roman, and its use for proper nouns was becoming regarded as inelegant—​“altogether puerile,” as Smith has it.6 But italic was still used for emphasis. Moxon says, “Words of great Emphasis are also Set in Italick” (p. 216), while Smith, in rejecting the heavy use of italic in his grammar, shows extraordinary insight into its potential for highlighting certain sorts of meaning: “for words, terms, or expressions which some authors would have regarded as more nervous; and by which they intend to convey to the reader either instructing, satyrizing, admiring, or other hints and remarks” (p. 14). Italics might, then, be used to represent different modes of speech; the effect might be emphatic, but it might also be comic, subtle, or insinuating.7 There is an exemplary use of this sort of italic in poems of instruction from around 1680 to the appearance of the first edition of Pope’s Essay on Criticism in 1711. Sometimes the italic underlines Pope’s antitheses and the music of the poem: Good-​Nature and Good-​Sense must ever join; To Err is Humane; to Forgive, Divine.8

4 

For an overview of typography in the period, see Nicolas Barker, “The Morphology of the Page,” in Suarez and Turner (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume V, pp. 248–​67. For analogies with other arts, see Bertrand H. Bronson, Printing as an Index of Taste in Eighteenth-​Century England (New York: New York Public Library, 1963). 5  Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683–​4), ed. Herbert Davis and Harry Carter, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962), p. 192. 6  John Smith, The Printer’s Grammar (London, 1755), p. 13. 7  These ideas are elaborated in my “Italics in Swift’s Poems,” Swift Studies, 26 (2011), 22–​37. 8  Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (London, 1711), lines 525–​6. Except where noted, all poems are quoted from their first editions. The editions have been consulted themselves and on Eighteenth Century Collections Online (http://​gale.cengage.co.uk/​product-​highlights/​history/​eighteenth-​century-​ collections-​online.aspx).

 

42   James McLaverty But Pope tends to avoid repeated antithesis, and to aim at a semantic rather than a vocal insistence: A little Learning is a dang’rous Thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring: There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain, And drinking largely sobers us again. (lines 218–​21)

Pope concentrates on the contrast of “little,” “shallow,” and “largely,” but he withholds the italic from “deep” in order to avoid a predictable pattern, and from “intoxicate” and “sobers,” which presents the major antithesis in these lines. The tone of insistence—​ teaching, advising, instructing—​seems more important than what is singled out for emphasis. Pope probably derived this tone from Thomas Creech’s translation of Horace’s Odes, Satyrs, and Epistles in 1684 and the Earl of Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse of the same year, but the first poem in which I have noticed its prominence is Dryden’s Religio Laici (1682): Dim, as the borrow’d beams of Moon and Stars To lonely, weary, wandring Travellers, Is Reason to the Soul: And as on high, Those rowling Fires discover but the Sky Not light us here; So Reason’s glimmering Ray Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way, But guide us upward to a better Day. (lines 1–​7)

This italic is not automatically underlining antitheses, and there is no support for parallelism until the final couplet. It seems instead to clog the movement of the “lonely, weary, wandring Travellers” of the second line. It is not utterly impossible that Jacob Tonson, Dryden’s bookseller, could have added this italic to the poem, but other expressive uses of typography make that highly unlikely: Those Gyant Wits, in happyer Ages born, (When Arms, and Arts did Greece and Rome adorn) Knew no such Systeme: no such Piles cou’d raise Of Natural Worship, built on Pray’r and Praise, To One sole GOD. (lines 80–​4)

The meter and italics were surely planned together, the final short italic-​and-​capitals line expressing the singleness of the godhead. Dryden may have been influenced by one of his sources, Sir Charles Wolseley’s Reasonableness of Scripture Belief (1672), which uses italic in a similar way, but it is clearly appropriate to the legislative and majestic qualities of the plain style that Dryden insists on in his preface to the poem.9 Although the most common use of italic in poetry is in poems of instruction, it can suggest other relations to its material. Thomas Gray uses it to distinguish the epitaph that ends

9  For Wolseley, see Dryden, Selected Poems, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007), pp. 256 and 282. Hammond and Hopkins would not attribute typographical effects to Dryden.

 

Poems in Print   43 his Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751). Swift expresses his alienation from the language of corruption by italicizing it, as in “To Mr. Gay”: Nor, think yourself secure in doing wrong, By telling Noses with a Party strong. (lines 59–​60)

Burns draws on italics both to acknowledge dialect words (“strappan youth”), and also to draw attention to his moral: I’ve paced much this weary, mortal round, And sage EXPERIENCE bids me this declare …10

With capitals here underlining the moral and supporting the italic, this looks like a return to an older usage, but poetry’s attention to colors of voice and language will always draw it to the possibilities of italic. In the quotations I have used to illustrate italics, there are some other interesting capitals. In the early period nearly all nouns have capitals, in imitation of Continental practice, but the omission of capitals in Dryden’s “borrow’d beams” and “doubtful way” seems to reflect the tentative or secondary quality of what is being described. The withdrawal of capitals from some nouns is balanced by their addition elsewhere. Pope is the most daring, using capitals for the verbs in “Err” and “Forgive” in his famous emphatic line, but Dryden, if he is responsible, capitalizes the adjective in “Natural Worship,” drawing attention to the word’s thematic importance. These regular and inventive uses of capitals mostly disappear in the second half of the eighteenth century, with 1750 acting as something like a turning point. Johnson is in this respect a complex and representative figure. The manuscript of The Vanity of Human Wishes (1748) begins “Let Observation with extensive view,” which strongly suggests a personification for the capitalized noun; in the first edition (1749), “Let Observation with extensive View” weakens that effect; while the reprinting of the poem in Dodsley’s Collection a few years later (1755), “Let observation with extensive view,” further reduces it.11 The printing in the Collection is consistent in lowering all capitals until we get to line 73: Unnumber’d suppliants croud Preferment’s gate[.]‌

In 1749 “Suppliants” was capitalized as well, but it is probably the potential materiality of “gate” that causes a personification sustained with a capital here. By the time we get to “By Int’rest, Prudence; and by Flatt’ry, Pride” (line 340), the radical experiment at the start of the poem has been abandoned and these words have been given capitals merely because they are abstract nouns. The retention of capitals for such nouns remained common in poems toward the end of the period. Crabbe’s Village (1783), for example, uses capitals for “Nature” “Fortune,” “Folly,” and “Rapine,” though “Plenty” is a clear personification (“she smiles for few,” book i, line 136). As well as initial capitals, the period saw extensive use of words in capitals or caps and smalls (large followed by small capitals). Moxon says that “Capitals express Dignity wherever they are Set, and Space and Distance also implies stateliness” (Mechanick Exercises, p. 216).

10 

Robert Burns, “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” lines 75–​6, in Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Kilmarnock, 1786). 11  The comparison is facilitated by the facsimile, London 1738 and 1748 and The Vanity of Human Wishes 1749 and 1755, ed. J. D. Fleeman (Menston: Scolar Press, 1970).

 

44   James McLaverty That dignity is greatest when they are used for “Lord” in the Bible and in derivative religious writings, but the practice extends to poems. Capitals are often used to dignify both persons and ideas. In Pope’s Essay on Man (1734), for example, “St. John” is awoken in the first line of the first book, while “Whatever Is, is Right” provides the last line. Thomson’s Seasons in its first collected edition begins, “COME gentle Spring, Æthereal Mildness, come,” thereby dignifying its topic and its qualities, and a few lines later the dedicatee, “Hertford,” is similarly honored. So well established is the convention that Swift is able to adapt it for satiric purposes: “I place a S T A T E S M A N full before my Sight” (“To Mr. Gay,” line 32). That a connection with religious sentiment is retained to the end of the eighteenth century is clear from the writings of Mary Robinson, which signal their devotional focus through a persistent respectful use of caps and smalls, as in her poem “Sight”: O THOU! all wonderful, all glorious Pow’r! That through the Soul diffusest light sublime, And bidst it see th’omnipotence of God! O Sight! to Man, the vivifying lamp, That, darting through the intellectual maze, Givs’t to each rising thought the living ray! As the Promethean touch awoke that source Whose glory warms the Planetary world; So The Supreme illum’d the Visual Orb, To mark his works, and wonder at this pow’r!12

The capitals are devotional but not hierarchical. “Omnipotence” does not get capitals, nor does “glory.” “God” is not given capitals, but “The Supreme” is. Robinson honors God through his creation, as the final simile here indicates, and the close relations of divine and natural power are emphasized by capitals.

Format A striking aspect of poems in print in this period is that they appeared in so many different shapes and sizes. The question of suitable format for poems was unsettled. In a period when histories were published in quarto or folio, it is no surprise that collections of verse should appear in large formats, but that a large number of individual poems should be published in folio is surprising to the modern reader, as is the balancing publication of occasional and polemical poems in slips and half-​sheets. Searching the ESTC provides a general picture for the eighteenth century.13 The smallest size used regularly was an eighth of a sheet, or the equivalent of one leaf of an octavo. There are few of these, and I suspect they were often given away—​for example, a song from the theater where Henry Carey’s Honest Yorkshire Man

12  Mary Robinson, “Sight,” lines 1–​10, in Sight, the Cavern of Woe, and Solitude: Poems by Mrs. Mary Robinson (London, 1793). 13  With initial advice from Christian Algar at the British Library, I searched ESTC (http://​estc. bl.uk) under poems in English. The figures for 1660–​1700 seemed unreliable and are not used. Analysis of the letters A–​D (over 2,200 poems) in David Foxon’s catalog English Verse, 1701–​1750, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975) confirmed the ESTC findings.

 

Poems in Print   45 was being performed—​but there are more ¼os, where Foxon distinguishes between regular quarter-​sheets and slips, which were printed in four columns parallel with the short side of the sheet and commonly used for songs. These constitute around 2.5 percent of the total. The really popular format for short pieces, generally occasional, was the half-​sheet, the equivalent of a folio leaf but issued on its own, unfolded. In the early decades of the century this format rivaled the folio and quarto for popularity at 13–​15 percent of the total, but it dropped off later; the figure for the century is around 7.5 percent. Folios were high in importance in the early decades of the century, rising to 30 percent of the total in the 1730s, but they too fell away very rapidly after 1750 and for the final three decades barely amount to 2 percent. Quartos performed much more steadily, constituting 33 percent of the output overall and rising to more than 50 percent in the 1760s and 1770s, when they started to dominate the luxury book market. Octavos too were popular throughout the century, making up around 45 percent in total. They far outstripped duodecimos, which were very unpopular for poems in the early period, when they struggled to make 5 percent.

Large Formats The large formats of the early eighteenth century lent the poetry of the era a lapidary quality and dignity, a style more appropriate to public declamation than private reading in an armchair. To a degree, poetic and publication styles coincided. An outstanding example is Addison’s Campaign (1705), a poem commissioned by Sidney, Earl of Godolphin, and Charles Montagu, Earl of Halifax, to celebrate the Duke of Marlborough’s victory at Blenheim and published by Jacob Tonson, the ministry’s bookseller, on December 14, 1704, the day of Marlborough’s return in triumph. Although the layout of the first page of text is in no way eccentric, it is entirely appropriate. The dropped head reads: THE│CAMPAIGN,│A│POEM, │To His GRACE the│DUKE of MARLBOROUGH

The Duke’s name, in its contrasting swash italic, binds the whole together through its place in the middle of the page. The poem itself, which occupies the second half of the page, begins with itself and its role: While Crouds of Princes Your Deserts proclaim, Proud in their Number to enroll Your Name; While Emperors to You commit their Cause, And ANNA’s Praises crown the vast Applause, Accept, Great Leader, what the Muse indites, That in ambitious Verse records Your Fights …

The emphasis is on the grandeur and size (“vast Applause” and “ambitious Verse”) that the typography enacts. The dignity of the italic capitals for ANNA is appropriate to her status and, in an unconventional twist to the typography, Marlborough’s own dignity is insisted on by the capitalization of the personal pronouns “You” and “Your.” The folio format has an appropriateness to other poems of public celebration in this period. Matthew Prior’s Ode, Humbly Inscrib’d to the Queen: On the Late Glorious Success of Her Majesty’s Arms (1706) perhaps owes a direct debt to Addison, but Thomas Tickell’s Poem on the Prospect of Peace (1713) and Pope’s Windsor-​Forest (1713) clearly belong to the same

 

46   James McLaverty tradition. Johnson says perceptively in his Life of Prior, “Every thing has its day. Through the reigns of William and Anne, no prosperous event passed undignified by poetry”14—​or undignified by typography, he might have added. But not all folio poems were engaged in national celebration, and it is less easy to see why the format was appropriate for Pope’s Ode for Musick (1713) or imitations of Horace, or Stephen Duck’s Hints to a Schoolmaster (1741), or for Johnson’s own imitations of Juvenal. Not all celebrated poems were published in folio, even in the early century. Quarto seems to have been popular for serious essays. Both Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711) and Essay on Man (1734) entered the world as quartos, as did John Brown’s Essay on Satire, Occasion’d by the Death of Mr. Pope (1745), though this association was by no means fixed. Significant canonical works were also printed in octavo, though the proportion was relatively low. John Philips’s Cyder (1708) appeared in octavo, as did Gay’s Shepherd’s Week (1714) and Trivia (1716), Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1714) and Temple of Fame (1715), and Swift’s Cadenus and Vanessa (1726). Edward Young’s Complaint; or, Night Thoughts (1742–​5) is wonderfully representative of the changes in the first half of the century. The first edition of the first night was a folio, but the second was a quarto. All subsequent first editions of nights were quartos, but the collected editions were all octavos.

Sales The popularity of large formats in the early eighteenth century doubtless reflects a desire for dignity, but another important reason for their prevalence was commercial. As David Foxon says of Pope’s folio Windsor-​Forest and Ode for Musick, they were printed in “a format which would justify a price sufficient to make a profit—​one shilling for Windsor Forest in five sheets, 6d. for the Ode in three.”15 The basic problem was that demand for poetry was relatively low. Even poems that enjoyed critical esteem did not have big sales. The first edition of a poem by Pope could be expected to sell 2,000 copies, and those not necessarily all at once. Woodfall’s ledgers show him printing 2,000 copies of the First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace (1737), with 150 fine-​paper copies in addition, while Bowyer printed only 2,000 copies of the New Dunciad (1742), which might have been expected to be a bestseller.16 And I don’t think Pope sold badly. Bowyer printed 2,000 copies of Gray’s Trivia, with 250 fine, in January 1716 and needed to print only 1,000 of the second edition in June. William Somervile’s The Chace was a popular success, running to eight editions between 1735 and 1749, but the first edition, printed by Bowyer, was a quarto of only 750 copies, with an additional 500 on royal paper, while the second edition dropped to octavo and was of 1,000 copies; only the third, again octavo, at 1,500 suggests marked success. The fourth authorized edition was not needed until 1743, and consisted of only 500 copies.17 It is worth

14  Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: with Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), vol. iii, p. 51. 15  David Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-​Century Book Trade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 39. 16  The position is summarized for Pope’s later poems in Foxon, Pope and the Book Trade, pp. 138–​44. 17  The Bowyer Ledgers, ed. Keith Maslen and John Lancaster (London: Bibliographical Society; New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1991), entries 3013, 281 and 302, 2156, 2170, 2184, and 3114.

 

Poems in Print   47 noting that the sale of 6,000 copies of the octavo Rape of the Lock in six weeks was regarded as a phenomenal success. Not all publication of poetry was funded by a bookseller. I suspect many of those eighth-​, quarter-,​and half-​sheets were funded either by the author or by some organization whose interests they served; others witness cheap printing of cheap copy. Swift’s career, which has a significant output of small-​format poetry, shows elements of government support and then a switch to unauthorized publication. During the time he was working with the Tory ministry (1710–​13), his publications were handled by the ministry’s printer, John Barber, with John Morphew acting as distributor. I suspect publication was supported by government money as well as by sales. Peace and Dunkirk; Being an Excellent New Song upon the Surrender of Dunkirk to General Hill (1712) is an excellent example of a pro-​ministry piece, focusing on Swift’s particular interest in this element in the treaty of Utrecht. It was a half-​sheet in one column; it could have been sold at twopence or given away. The W—​nds-​r Prophecy (1711), an attack on the Duchess of Somerset, elaborately printed in black letter, is another one-​column half-​sheet. Swift reported in the Journal to Stella that Mrs. Masham had asked for publication to be stopped because the queen would be offended: “so I writ to the printer to stop them. They have been printed and given about, but not sold.”18 During Swift’s later career as an Irish patriot, further half-​sheets appear, but their source is different. Swift’s poems were handed about in manuscript (as he says at one point, “copies ran”) and got passed on to printers. There was no payment for copy, and they would have sold for a couple of pence. Examples are half-​sheet poems related to the Drapier’s Letters, and probably the work of their printer, John Harding (Foxon, English Verse, S898 and S902), but there are other fine poems that arise out of Swift’s social life at this time, S861 The Journal, recording a summer spent at Gaulstown House, and S868 “Lady A—​s—​n Weary of the Dean,” about a visit to Market Hill, both half-​ sheets. Free copy, cheap labor in Dublin, and Swift’s popularity made such small-​scale publication possible.

The Luxury Poetry Book The credit for moving poetry to the luxury end of the book market, if it is credit, must go to Jacob Tonson, Sr. He saw that the bookseller’s financial problems could be solved not by printing as cheaply as possible, but by printing elegantly and charging a higher price. Tonson’s influence on the poetry book can be seen by comparing the first edition of Paradise Lost of 1667 with his edition of 1688. The first edition is printed without fuss, as though the poem is a slightly extravagant form of prose. The format is quarto, with the type set solid. Rules are used to surround the text tightly, with boxes to the upper and outer margins. The impression is of a religious text; the presentation, though without black letter and double columns, is not unlike that of the King James Bible.19 Tonson’s 1688 edition, undertaken jointly with Richard Bentley, is altogether more spacious, with Milton beginning to

18 

Journal to Stella, ed. Harold Williams, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1948), vol. ii, pp. 446, 454.

19 See John Milton’s Complete Poetical Works Reproduced in Photographic Facsimile, ed. Harris Francis

Fletcher, 4 vols. (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1943), vol. ii, p. 109.

 

48   James McLaverty be treated as a classic. The edition was marketed by subscription, a fusion of patronage and publication; in buying the book in advance you supported it with cash and with your name. The 1688 Paradise Lost is a folio in fours, much more spacious than the quarto first edition, and it is illustrated. The first edition used printer’s flowers quite creatively, but Tonson’s is “Adorn’d with Sculptures,” beginning with a frontispiece Milton in a decorated oval frame, accompanied by lines from Dryden comparing him with Homer and Virgil. Each book begins with a full-​page plate (to designs by John Baptist Medina and others), sometimes integrating several narrative episodes and drawing out their significance.20 The illustrations of hell are particularly dramatic, and the first image, of a heroic Satan, may have influenced subsequent interpretation. Kathleen Lynch remarks on the parity of Tonson’s treatment of English and classical literature: “In rescuing from obscurity or oblivion the masterpieces of English authors and publishing them with similar care, he was an innovator.”21 When Tonson was asked which poet he had got most by, he replied, “Milton,” but this edition was followed by Shakespeare (ed. Nicholas Rowe, 1709) and Spenser (ed. John Hughes, 1715), alongside the impressive quarto Caesar (1712) and the development of Maittaire’s editions of the classics (1713–​14). Early editions in large formats could be followed up with reprint “Elzevirs” in duodecimo.22 Tonson was involved in contemporary literature, as well as in creation of classics. As Pope said, “Jacob creates Poets, as Kings sometimes do Knights, not for their honour, but for money. Certainly he ought to be esteem’d a worker of Miracles, who is grown rich by Poetry.”23 Late in his career he co-​operated with John Barber on one of the finest tributes to a contemporary poet, Matthew Prior’s Poems on Several Occasions (1718), which Lynch calls “one of the handsomest and literally the weightiest volume that Tonson’s press produced.” Prior, who made four thousand guineas from the subscription, had wanted it printed on vellum, but Tonson said that was “impractical, improbable, impossible,” and compensated by using imperial paper, the largest available (Lynch, Jacob Tonson, pp. 82, 134). It is certainly a very big book, but in my view the space is not well handled. The monumentality is inappropriate to Prior’s light verse, and the poetry is not presented to its readers in a coherent and organized way. Tonson and his printer, John Watts, did better in volumes of translation, and in this period much of the best illustration and poetry comes in translations into English. The second edition of Dryden’s Satires of Juvenal and Persius (1697) with engravings by Michael Van der Gucht is an impressive book, but still more so is Dryden’s translation of the Works of Virgil (1697), a subscription edition and a large folio. Illustration is much more copious than in Paradise Lost (101 plates in total and each plate subscribed for); book vi of the Aeneid, for example, was provided with a whole sequence of plates. Such illustration clearly shapes the reader’s experience, and Tonson intervened directly to shape the work’s contemporary resonance. Aeneas’s nose was changed to resemble that of William III, so that the account

20 

See Helen Gardner, “Milton’s First Illustrator,” Essays and Studies, 9 (1956), 27–​38. Kathleen Lynch, Jacob Tonson: Kit-​Cat Publisher (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1971), p. 126. 22  Foxon highlights these formats in Pope and the Early Eighteenth-​Century Book Trade, pp. 23–​33, but I think they were usually a follow-​up for grander first editions. 23  The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), vol. i, p. 61. 21 

 

Poems in Print   49 of Aeneas’s founding of a new empire reflected on William’s new kingdom and military victories. Bernard Lintot, whose aim was to rival Tonson’s pre-​eminence as a publisher of fashionable poetry, allied himself with Pope to produce beautiful books to compete with Tonson’s. The illustrations for the octavo Rape of the Lock (1714) were full-​page plates, like those of Tonson’s Paradise Lost. For the Iliad, though, Pope and Lintot produced six volumes in quarto rather than one in folio, and attempted a greater integration of engraving and letterpress, with narrative headpieces, tailpieces, and initials, prepared under Pope’s direction. Such illustration was more difficult to manage because the sheets would have to go through the rolling press to add the engravings after the usual printing process, but the same pattern was retained for the Odyssey, though this time the headpieces became symbolic, confining any narrative element to a central oval, with symbols to the sides. Their flagons, weapons, and urns aim to conjure up a style of life as well as elements in the action. When after his quarrel with Lintot over the distribution of the Odyssey Pope became his own bookseller, the overall quality of his publications declined, but not before he had produced one book in which illustration and print were combined to astonishing satiric effect. The Dunciad Variorum (1729) was both scholarly edition and mock book, its victims usually taken to be the denizens of Grub Street. When Robert Walpole presented it at court, the king pronounced Pope “a very honest man,” but he lacked J. Paul Hunter’s sharp eyes.24 The first couplet of the poem is isolated on the page by the annotation: Books and the Man I sing, the first who brings The Smithfield Muses to the Ear of Kings.

Immediately above it is an engraving of an owl supported by two asses with prominent ears. These asses’ ears represent the king’s. Pope never explained the allusion in his notes to this poem, but he treats it in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1734), where he compares himself to Midas’s minister or queen, who, seeing that the king had an ass’s ears, had to speak or burst. The ears sprang, of course, because Midas preferred Pan’s music to Apollo’s. In the light of the illustrative glossing on the first page, I agree with Hunter that the title-​page ass, burdened with bad writing, becomes a persuasive symbol of the monarch too. The contrast with Tonson’s Aeneas could not be more striking. The illustrated poetry book was taken further later in the century by Designs by Mr. R. Bentley, for Six Poems by Mr. T. Gray in 1753, though structurally Bentley simply added the Tonson full plate to the headpieces, initials, and tailpieces favored by Lintot and Pope. Gray’s approach to the dignity of publication is clear from his resistance to allowing his Elegy to appear first in a journal, The Magazine of Magazines on February 16, 1751. With a characteristic air of indifference barely masking fascination with the processes of production, he told Horace Walpole to get Robert Dodsley to publish it in a fine edition.25 The result was a small and not particularly attractive quarto, priced only sixpence, but its success—​five editions in the year of publication—​led to the printing of the Designs by Mr. R. Bentley. This is a 24  J. Paul Hunter, “From Typology to Type: Agents of Change in Eighteenth Century English Texts,” in Margaret J. M. Ezell and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (eds.), Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image, and the Body (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 41–​69. 25  Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), vol. i, pp. 341–​2.

 

50   James McLaverty luxury book, with very thick paper (folio in shape, but with horizontal chain lines), and the text and engravings printed on one side of the paper only. The illustrations combine narrative elements with symbols. The frontispiece to the Eton College Ode, for example, has putti engaged in the various activities described in the poem, while the figure of Father Thames sits with his urn watching. The most famous illustration, the plate for the Elegy, shows a visitor being shown the epitaph on the gravestone, but the frame to the gate to the churchyard combines symbols of rural toil on one side and the empty monuments of the great on the other. Loftus Jestin, in his facsimile of the Designs, sees a persistent challenge to the text in the illustrations, and though I think he is often wrong—​that boy bowling a hoop is not at all Sisyphus—​his interpretations point to a potential conflict between poet and artist, one that Gray resolved by dropping the illustrations in later editions.26 He had refused, when the volume was being planned, to allow his portrait to form a frontispiece, and Walpole’s answer to his enquiry about why Dodsley wanted to go to such expense tells us much about the luxury book: How the bookseller would be less a Loser by being at more expense, I can easily explain to you: He feared the price of half a guinea woud seem too high to most purchasers; if by the expence of ten guineas more he coud make the book appear so much more rich & showy … as to induce people to think it cheap, the profits from selling many more copies woud amply recompense him for his additional disbursement.27

This catches perfectly the thinking behind the marketing of poetry as a luxury. The practice could be taken further by engraving the whole text, as in Blake’s illuminated books, but that form of production lies beyond the scope of this chapter.

Place In this period the dominance of London in the printing and publication of poetry was striking. Initially printing in England was limited to London, Cambridge, Oxford, and York, and, though by the end of the eighteenth century most market towns would have had a printing press, they would not often have been used for poetry.28 A group of copyright-​owning booksellers came to dominate the London trade, with the resources to spend sums in acquiring copy and then in printing and distributing the books. A remarkably high proportion of canonical poetry was promoted by a small number of ambitious and resourceful London booksellers: the Jacob Tonsons, Bernard and Henry Lintot, the Dodsley brothers, Andrew Millar, Joseph Johnson, George Kearlsey, and Thomas Cadell. This list does not pretend to be exhaustive, but a relatively small group of “topping” booksellers dominated the poetry market until the end of the eighteenth century. 26  Loftus Jestin, The Answer to the Lyre: Richard Bentley’s Illustrations for Thomas Gray’s Poems (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). 27  Correspondence of Gray, vol. i, pp. 373–​4. Gray offered to reimburse Dodsley for the expenditure on the plate. 28  For a lucid and perceptive survey, see James Raven, “The Book Trades,” in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-​Century England (London: Leicester Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 1–​34.

 

Poems in Print   51 Significantly the provincial working-​class poets who acquired a reputation did so in London. Stephen Duck the thresher poet, for example, came from Wiltshire, but he was first published in a highly conventional London way. His Poems on Several Subjects . . . Which Were Publicly Read by the Right Honourable the Earl of Macclesfield, in the Drawing-​Room at Windsor-​Castle was printed at the respectable shop of Henry Woodfall for “J. Roberts,” the most popular of the trade publishers, a distributor rather than a copyright bookseller, and “sold by the booksellers of London and Westminster.” Some of the patrons of the Windsor Castle reading were displeased, but seven editions appeared before they could do anything about it.29 Foxon has spotted what he takes to be a Northampton piracy of “The Thresher’s Labour” in the same year and an advertisement for an edition of Duck’s poems in the Northampton Mercury for October 26, 1730 (English Verse, D476), but the edition seems not to have appeared, and Northampton was simply responding to the London vogue for Duck, who was later taken up by Weaver Bickerton and Robert Dodsley. Mary Collier, the Hampshire washerwoman, responded to Duck with The Woman’s Labour (1739), which had a very similar imprint: “London: Printed for the Author; Sold by J. Roberts, and at the Pamphlet Shops near the Royal Exchange.” When Collier collected her poems together in 1762, however, there was provincial publication, with the striking engagement of a woman printer, Mary Ayres in Winchester. Mary Leapor’s Poems upon Several Occasions were printed with a Roberts imprint very like these others, but for the benefit of her father, a gardener in Brackley, Northamptonshire. Ann Yearsley, the Bristol milkwoman, had her poems printed by subscription (1785), but they were handled by a bookseller rather than a distributor, Thomas Cadell in the Strand. A partial exception to this general picture can be found in Scotland, where Robert Burns achieved author-​led publication before any recognition by the London trade. His Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect appeared first as a subscription edition with a Kilmarnock imprint, “Printed by John Wilson,” in 1786. After his arrival in Edinburgh there was a further subscription edition, “Printed for the Author, and Sold by William Creech,” in April 1787. The London edition was advertised as early as May 1787 but not published until late November or early December, with the imprint “Printed for A. Strahan; T. Cadell in the Strand; and W. Creech in Edinburgh.” The career of Burns’s predecessor in Edinburgh, Allan Ramsay, had a similar shape. His poems were printed in octavo at his own expense “for the author” and then gathered into collections for reissue in 1720, but by 1731 they were being published in a new edition in London, with the names of prominent members of the trade, including Andrew Millar, in the imprint. I suspect the Burns Kilmarnock edition was not atypical of provincial publication in that it was not published at the risk of a member of the book trade. Subscription or simple payment by the author is the most likely way in which poetry would be first published in the provinces. An example with an unusual regional distribution is A Pastoral Elegy: Being a Florist’s Lamentation for the Loss of His Flowers, Destroy’d by Birds: Inscrib’d to the Right Hon. the Lady Luxborough, by a Clergyman of Warwickshire (1749), which was printed for the author in Birmingham, where it was sold by T. Aris and T. Warren, and by “J. Keating at His Shops at Stratford, Shipston, and Alcester.” Henrietta Knight, Lady Luxborough, was a friend of William Shenstone, and had developed a ferme ornée at her home The Barrells, near Henley-​in-​Arden. This was a local jeu d’esprit circulated

29 

I am grateful to Dr. Jennifer Batt, University of Bristol, for this information.

 

52   James McLaverty in the Stratford area, but it had to go to Birmingham for printing. Shenstone’s own most famous poem, The School-​mistress (1742), was local in subject matter, but published by Dodsley in London. Remarkably, the collection that might have rivaled Burns’s Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect as the most important collection of eighteenth-​century poetry published outside London, Lyrical Ballads, finished up being published there. The arrangements were made with Joseph Cottle of Bristol, with much debate about the manner of publication, and the printing was by Biggs and Cottle in Bristol, but Cottle lost literary or financial confidence, and though Wordsworth tried to transfer the publication to Joseph Johnson, who was willing to take it, Lyrical Ballads was finally published by “J. and A. Arch” in London. In London itself some activity lay outside the control of copyright-​owning booksellers. Some poetry, which might properly be labeled Grub Street, emerged with only a minimal identification of its path through the book trade. Two of Pope’s dunces illustrate the point. William Bond, identified in The Curliad as using the pseudonym H. Stanhope, published his mixed, verse and prose, attack on Pope, The Progress of Dulness (1728), without information on publication on the title page. His poems Buckingham House (?1721) and Verses . . . to the Memory of . . . the Duchess of Grafton (1727) were similar, though the last, printed on silk, is a special case. His “Stanhope” poems were printed for Curll and his religious poems found conventional distribution. Thomas Cooke, whose Battle of the Poets (1725) upset Pope, worked to a very similar pattern, though without Curll’s support. That poem bears just the trade publisher’s name (James Roberts) and, with very few exceptions, that is how Cooke’s work emerged, with the name “A. Moore,” not a even real publisher, appearing on two works. It was this pattern Pope was imitating in the original Dunciad by using the name of Anne Dodd, a mercury, one step down from a publisher, in the imprint. Foxon’s English Verse records 122 editions with the imprint “A. Moore” or a variation on it, and 160 examples of “A. Dodd,” an indication of a significant undercurrent of satirical or dissident poetry in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Piracy In addition to Grub Street writing, there was for the “topping” booksellers the persistent irritant of piracy, generally the marketing of works in a smaller format and on inferior paper. The outstanding figure early in the eighteenth century was Henry Hills. Gay wrote of “Pirate Hill’s brown Sheets, and scurvy letter” in his poem for Lintot’s 1712 Miscellany, and the description is precise. Hills began the century with deplorable reprints of Dryden, with all the major poems being reprinted individually in octavo before being brought together in the rather splendid-​sounding Collection of the Best English Poetry in 1717. Not all piracy, though, was of this low order. Pope’s Dunciad Variorum was pirated in 1729, with the printer James Watson doing a very acceptable job, including the Dunciad ass on the engraved title page. Pope’s first edition was a quarto costing 6s. 6d., so it was not difficult to undercut it at 2s. Similar piratical reprints of Pope’s poems appeared throughout the second half of his career, when his decision not to sell his copyrights to a bookseller deprived him of any threat of in-​trade retaliation. The ornament evidence suggests that these piracies were by Thomas Ruddiman in Edinburgh, and there were hostilities between the Edinburgh and London trades throughout the century, culminating in the copyright cases Millar v. Taylor (1769)

 

Poems in Print   53 and Donaldson v. Beckett (1774). In both cases the text in dispute was Thomson’s Seasons, which was no longer protected by the Copyright Act of 1709–​10. In the first case the London booksellers’ claim to perpetual common-​law copyright was upheld, in the second it was disallowed. Scottish law, it had already been made clear, had no room for a common-​law copyright claim, but more broadly the Scottish booksellers resented the London claims to monopoly and the attempts to restrict the development of their own trade. The position in Dublin had always been different because the 1709 Act had no claim to be operative there, and there had long been Irish reprinting of English material for the home market. In the case of the Irish trade, the engagement of one bookseller, George Faulkner, with one author, Jonathan Swift, seems to have led to major developments. Faulkner understood that the Irish market was not large enough to ensure financial success, so from around 1730 onward poems that came his way through manuscript circulation were first printed in Dublin and then through William Bowyer, Jr., Faulkner’s former master, in London. Through his London contacts Faulkner was able to publish his subscription edition of Swift, of which the second volume was devoted to poems, and the collaboration continued through the middle century.

Conclusion The most remarkable aspect of poems in print in this period is their sheer variety, and it is worth noting in conclusion how much poems differed in themselves. Print might be expected to have the effect of stabilizing poetic texts, but it has its own inbuilt tendency toward variation.30 Even if stop-​press correction, prevalent in the early period, is put aside, there are opportunities for change through later editions, the correction and expansion of existing works, and the addition of introductory and explanatory apparatus. The initiative for such changes may often come from the author, but the book trade clearly has an interest in generating new copy and new sales. There are notable developments in editions of most major works of the period—​ Paradise Lost, The Seasons, The Dunciad, Lyrical Ballads—​as well as frequent minor revisions. Paradise Lost moved from ten books to the more Virgilian twelve.31 The Dunciad first became a variorum, and then grew another book, tragically destroying in the process the relation between the poem and its paratext. Thomson’s extravagant additions to The Seasons (“Winter,” which started at 405 lines, finished at 1,069; “Summer,” which began at a hefty 1,146, ended up with 1,805) were noted in his own lifetime, and in his posthumous edition, George Lyttelton attempted, especially in Liberty, to retrench what he took to be superfluities. Lyttelton’s presumptuous co-​authorship seems sadly to have deterred later editors from printing Thomson’s own shorter versions of his texts.32 In 1800 Lyrical Ballads grew to two 30  See Harold Love’s introduction to his edition of the “triphibian” Rochester, The Works of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), pp. v–​xlvii. 31  See Michael Lieb’s introductory chapter to the second volume of Paradise Lost: A Poem Written in Ten Books, ed. Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross, 2 vols. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 2007). 32  James Thomson, The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. xxiii.

 

54   James McLaverty volumes, losing its anonymity, its link to Percy’s Reliques with the modernization of the title of “The Rime of the Anceynt Marinere,” and its status as a proper collaboration. Rather than resembling the single poem Coleridge suggested, the collection came to emphasize contingency, the bundling up of the fragments suggested by Wordsworth’s titles. Twentieth-​ century editing on the whole proved intolerant of this instability of printed texts exemplified by these notable cases and sought to counteract it. Perhaps the new century will embrace it.

References Bronson, Bertrand H., Printing as an Index of Taste in Eighteenth-​ Century England (New York: New York Public Library, 1963). Foxon, David, English Verse, 1701–​1750, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975). Foxon, David, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-​ Century Book Trade (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1991). Hunter, J. Paul, “From Typology to Type: Agents of Change in Eighteenth Century English Texts,” in Margaret J. M. Ezell and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (eds.), Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image, and the Body (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 41–​69. Lynch, Kathleen, Jacob Tonson: Kit-​Cat Publisher (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1971). Raven, James, “The Book Trades,” in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-​ Century England (London: Leicester Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 1–​34. St. Clair, William, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004). Smith, John, The Printer’s Grammar (London: W. Owen & M. Cooper, 1755). Suarez, Michael F., S. J., “Publishing Contemporary English Literature, 1695–​1774,” in Michael F. Suarez, S. J. and Michael L. Turner (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume V, 1695–​1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 649–​66.

 

Chapter 4

P oems in M ag a z i ne s Jennifer Batt Appearing in January 1692 and promising a regular and miscellaneous digest of “news, history, philosophy, poetry, musick &c,” the first issue of the Gentleman’s Journal; or, Monthly Miscellany ushered in a phenomenon that would, over the course of the eighteenth century, become an established and vital feature of the publishing landscape. A hundred years after this first appearance, magazines (as the periodical miscellany format became known in the 1730s) were being produced around the country, offering a frequent dose of culture and current affairs to a broad constituency of readers nationwide. Verse was a key feature of many periodical publications: the first issue of the Gentleman’s Journal, for example, contained thirteen poems, and by 1792 over a hundred poems were being published in magazines every month. From pieces submitted directly by the author to items copied from newspapers, rival magazines, and other printed sources, magazines printed a vast quantity of verse, ranging from riddles and rebuses to poems reflecting cutting-​edge literary trends. Often anonymous or pseudonymous, poems by established writers—​published with or without their consent—​ jostled with verse by up-​and-​coming authors and enthusiastic amateurs of varying degrees of skill. As magazines courted the regular custom of purchasers, their poetry pages encouraged reader contributions and fostered the development of literary communities and coteries. Sandwiching poetry between prose sections devoted to essays and news, magazines brought contemporary verse within reach of readers who were not poetry enthusiasts, or who were otherwise not inclined to buy collections of verse. Magazines enabled a wide spectrum of readers to engage with and participate in contemporary poetic culture. The vital role that magazines played in shaping and spreading eighteenth-​century poetic culture has received little scholarly attention.1 The designation “magazine verse,” as Linda K. Hughes notes in her investigation of the genre’s neglect in Victorian periodical studies, “has become a signifier of trite or sentimental ‘filler’ worth no one’s time.”2 Deterred by assumptions of its worthlessness, few scholars have been tempted to explore what is a dauntingly vast terrain composed of tens of thousands of poems for which no map or guidebook yet exists. A portion 1  Scholars have focused on prose, particularly the periodical essay, book reviews, and serialized fiction. Manushag Powell surveys the field of periodical studies in “New Directions in Eighteenth-​ Century Periodical Studies,” Literature Compass, 8, no. 5 (May 2011), 240–​57. 2  Linda K. Hughes, “What the Wellesley Index Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies,” Victorian Periodicals Review, 40, no. 2 (Summer 2007), 91–​125, at p. 91.

 

56   Jennifer Batt of this territory—​the verse published in the Gentleman’s Magazine—​has been charted by scholars including Calvin D. Yost, Carl L. Carlson, Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, and Titia Ram. Yet, important though the first-​ever self-​proclaimed magazine undoubtedly was, as Walter Graham cautioned long ago, “a study limited to the poetry of one magazine cannot but be partial and inconclusive.”3 In recent years the scholarly gaze has begun to move toward other periodical miscellanies, with Margaret Ezell focusing on the Gentleman’s Journal, James Tierney on the Museum, and Barbara L. Fitzpatrick on the many titles associated with the bookseller and publisher John Coote. The advent of digital collections such as ProQuest’s British Periodicals and Adam Matthew’s Eighteenth Century Journals should encourage and enable the development of these scholars’ work, but much remains to be done before we comprehensively understand the contribution of magazines to eighteenth-​century literary culture. This chapter offers a sketch map of magazine verse, from its beginnings in 1692 to the end of the eighteenth century. Delineating the major features of this vast terrain, this sketch map suggests how and why magazine verse became such a rich and vital part of eighteenth-​ century poetic culture. Over the course of the century, verse was printed in dozens of magazines—​national and provincial, generalist and niche, carefully edited and haphazardly thrown together, long-​running and short-​lived—​and the first half of this chapter traces the development of magazine publishing.4 From tentative beginnings and abortive experiments in the first third of the eighteenth century, magazine publishing emerged as a significant cultural force in the 1730s, before expanding and diversifying as the century progressed. The second half of this chapter examines the strategies that editors employed to ensure the poetry pages of their magazines were well filled and attractive to readers. Even as each magazine exhibits its own, distinctive editorial culture, it is possible to identify patterns in these strategies, from the competitions, puzzles, and debates editors employed to provoke and stimulate contributions, to the steps they took to reflect current literary and cultural trends. Though it is impossible to survey the tens of thousands of poems published in magazines over the course of the century, by sketching out some of the major features of the landscape this chapter highlights just how rich and valuable a resource the poetry pages of magazines are for scholars of eighteenth-​century poetry.

The Periodical Miscellany Though by the end of the eighteenth century magazines had become an integral part of the literary marketplace, it took more than four decades for the format to gain a significant

3 

Walter Graham, review of Calvin Daniel Zost [i.e., Yost], The Poetry of the Gentleman’s Magazine: A Study in Eighteenth Century Taste (1936), in Journal of English and German Philology, 36, no. 4 (1937), 613. 4  An extensive list of eighteenth-​century newspapers and periodicals is given by R. S. Crane and F. B. Kaye, “A Census of British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1620–​1800,” Studies in Philology, 24, no. 1 (1927), 1–​205. For a survey of literary magazines, see Walter Graham, English Literary Periodicals (New York: T. Nelson & Sons, 1930). For short accounts of some of the many literary magazines produced over the course of the eighteenth century, see Alvin Sullivan (ed.), British Literary Magazines, 4 vols. (New York: Greenwood, 1983–​6), vols. i and ii.

 

Poems in Magazines    57 foothold. The earliest periodical miscellanies appeared in the 1690s, emerging from an increasingly well-​developed newspaper trade and inspired by the success of Continental models such as the French periodical, the Mercure Galant (founded 1672). From the very beginning, poetry was designed to be an integral part of these regular packages of entertaining writing. The very first, Peter Motteux’s Gentleman’s Journal (1692–​4), contained verse by William Congreve, John Dryden, and Matthew Prior. Motteux’s Journal was followed by several, mostly short-​lived, periodical miscellanies, including William Pittis and Thomas Brown’s monthly Miscellanies over Claret (1697–​8), John Oldmixon’s Muses Mercury; or, The Monthly Miscellany (1707–​8), James Petiver’s Monthly Miscellany; or, Memoirs for the Curious (1707–​9), and John Tipper’s Delights for the Ingenious: A Monthly Entertainment for the Curious of Both Sexes (1711). Henry Playford followed his musical periodical, Mercurius Musicus (1699–​1702), with a poetical paper, the Diverting Post (1704–​6), while both Samuel Philips’s Poetical Courant (1706) and Nahum Tate and Marshall Smith’s Monitor (1713) were regular papers devoted to verse. Many of these ventures sputtered to a halt within a year or two, typically because of waning interest on the part of the editor and the difficulties of acquiring enough material to fill each month’s pamphlet, but the proliferation of titles over two decades suggests a genuine enthusiasm for the format. By the 1710s, however, this enthusiasm was increasingly stifled. The growth of essay periodicals, led by the Review (1704–​13), the Tatler (1709–​11), and the Spectator (1711–​14), drew readers, editors, and booksellers away from the periodical miscellany format, while changes in legislation made it increasingly difficult for periodical miscellanies to remain financially viable.5 John Tipper documented these struggles in the final issues of Delights for the Ingenious, as first he lamented how an almanac tax had delayed the production of the June 1711 issue and then, in the July–​September issue, how an increase in postage rates had caused a dramatic decrease in reader contributions, forcing him to move from monthly to quarterly production.6 Calling a halt to production at the end of the year, Tipper planned to resume his periodical miscellany in 1713, but, Edward P. Willey suggests, “the stamp tax of 1712 on all pamphlets succeeded in frustrating this ambition.”7 The demise of Tipper’s periodical brought to an end two decades of gradual, if stuttering, growth for literary journals, and when the genre re-​emerged in the 1730s, it would take on a rather different guise.

The Magazine By the early 1730s, the newspaper trade was healthy and vigorous, with numerous daily or thrice-​weekly papers joined by weekly partisan publications like the Craftsman or the Freeholder, cultural and literary journals including the Universal Spectator and Grub-​Street Journal, and regular digests of current events such as the Monthly Chronicle. Such fecundity 5  On the Tatler-​inspired vogue for essay periodicals see James Woodruff, “Successors, Imitators, Contemporaries of the Tatler,” in Sullivan (ed.), British Literary Magazines, vol. i, pp. 393–​400. 6  Delights for the Ingenious, 6 (June 1711), 202; 7 (July–​Sept. 1711), 242. 7  Edward P. Willey, “Delights for the Ingenious,” in Sullivan (ed.), British Literary Magazines, vol. i, p. 84.

 

58   Jennifer Batt fostered the invention of the first ever “magazine,” when an entrepreneurial printer with a background in newspaper publishing and access to well-​developed channels of distribution conceived of a way of profiting from other newspaper proprietors’ publications.8 Edward Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine; or, Trader’s Monthly Intelligencer was begun in 1731 as a monthly compendium of “all the Pieces of Wit, Humour, or Intelligence, daily offer’d to the Publick in the News-​papers, (which of late are so multiply’d, as to render it impossible, unless a man makes it a business, to consult them all).” Being printed on “loose Papers, uncertainly scatter’d about,” so Cave argued, “it often happens that many things deserving Attention … are only seen by Accident, and others not sufficiently publish’d or preserved for universal Benefit and Information.”9 Offering his readers a compact abridgment of all the latest informative and entertaining writing, Cave bypassed the problem of obtaining fresh and original content which had haunted so many earlier projectors and in doing so originated a new kind of periodical: the magazine. A magazine was, as Samuel Johnson noted, “a storehouse, commonly an arsenal or armoury, or repository of provisions,”10 and though the noun had previously been used in the title of compendia of useful information (such as the Mariners Magazine, the Merchant’s Magazine, or the Penman’s Magazine), Cave was the first to use it to name a periodical miscellany. Drawing on sources including the London Journal, the Whitehall Evening Post, the Craftsman, the Grub-​Street Journal, and the Universal Spectator, Cave’s repository reprinted news, essays, and verse, with the first issue containing four pages of “Poetical Essays.”11 Cave was initially slow to recognize just how important poetry might be to his periodical, and several early issues contain no verse at all. Before the end of the magazine’s first year, though, “Poetical Essays” had become established as a key element of the publication. The success of the Gentleman’s Magazine prompted a range of imitators, including the Bee (1733–​5) and the Weekly Amusement; or, The Universal Magazine (1734), both of which attempted to gazump Cave by providing readers with a digest of the papers on a weekly, rather than monthly basis. More importantly, however, it was the inspiration for two long-​running periodicals which, together with the Gentleman’s, would set the standard for magazine publishing in the British Isles. By 1732, the group of booksellers responsible for the Monthly Chronicle (including John Wilford, John Clarke, and Thomas Astley) had come to recognize that the magazine format as developed by Cave was more appealing to readers than their own more expensive periodical. In April 1732 they replaced the Monthly Chronicle with a new title, the London Magazine; or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer (1732–​85). This copied the layout of the Gentleman’s Magazine closely, employing a similar mix of news, essays, and verse, and from the outset there was a bitter rivalry between

8 

On Cave’s early career in the newspaper trade, see Carl Lennart Carlson, The First Magazine: A History of “The Gentleman’s Magazine” (Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1938), pp. 5–​10. On Cave’s exploitation of distribution networks, see Anthony D. Barker, “Poetry from the Provinces: Amateur Poets in the Gentleman’s Magazine in the 1730s and 1740s,” in Alvaro Ribeiro and James G. Basker (eds.), Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-​ Century Canon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 241–​56, at pp. 242–​4. 9 Introduction, Gentleman’s Magazine, 1 (1731), n.p. 10  Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (London, 1755), s.v. magazine. 11  Gentleman’s Magazine, 1 (Jan. 1731), 20–​3.

 

Poems in Magazines    59 the two titles.12 The two magazines were distributed nationwide, and their popularity prompted the Edinburgh-​based printers Alexander Murray and James Cochran to establish a Scottish-​printed rival. Copying the by-​now-​expected formula of news, essays, and verse, the Scots Magazine (1739–​1817) was designed to combine national news and cultural developments with distinctly Scottish concerns that seldom featured in the London-​based periodicals. Its editors boasted that they offered their “countrymen … the productions of every month, sooner, cheaper, and better collected, than before.”13 These three long-​running, widely distributed titles established the monthly magazine as an important feature of the publishing landscape. All three were designed to be collected and reread rather than read once and thrown away. At the end of each year, title pages, prefaces, and cumulative indexes were printed, and readers were encouraged to bind separate monthly issues into a permanent record of the year’s happenings. Back issues were printed so readers could fill gaps in incomplete sets, and complete sets of previous years’ issues were also available for purchase. These magazines transformed scattered and ephemeral fragments of news and culture into a reference work fit for a library. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the Gentleman’s, London, and Scots would each experience numerous changes of editorial policy, as editors and proprietors came and went and each title adjusted with greater or lesser success to an ever-​evolving publishing climate.14 Succeeding decades would see increasing numbers of magazines inspired by the success of these pioneers. Far more magazines were produced than can be listed in this survey, but among the more significant and long-​lasting titles were the British Magazine (1746–​51), the Universal Magazine (1747–​1803), the Royal Magazine (1759–​7 1), the Town and Country Magazine (1769–​96), the Westminster Magazine (1773–​85), the Lady’s Magazine (1770–​1819), the European Magazine (1782–​1826), and the New London Magazine (1785–​97). In a fiercely competitive marketplace, magazines frequently attacked their rivals in print and publishers of established titles employed protectionist tactics against upstart competitors. An address “To the Publick” in the first issue of the Ladies Magazine; or, The Universal Entertainer (1749–​53), for example, noted that “several of the publick News Papers printed in London, have refused to advertise [this magazine], the Reason of which may be easily seen into.”15 Such methods were successful in bullying titles out of existence, as Robert Dodsley lamented in the final issue of his Publick Register; or, The Weekly Magazine (1741):  “the ungenerous Usage I  have met with from one of the Proprietors of a certain Monthly Pamphlet, who has prevail’d with most of the common News-​Papers not to advertise it, compel me for the present to discontinue it.”16 Yet competition between different titles was not always so ruthless, as the case of the bookseller John Coote reveals. Barbara L. Fitzpatrick has shown how “over a period of almost twenty years [Coote] was associated with at least twenty periodicals, seventeen of which he either established or controlled at some point in their existence.” At times there was considerable overlap between different titles under Coote’s control, as they concurrently published the same content, sometimes

12 Carlson, The First Magazine, pp. 45, 66–​8.

13 Preface, Scots Magazine, 1 (1739), ii. For a brief account of the revolutions in fortunes of these magazines, see Sullivan (ed.), British Literary Magazines, vol. i, pp. 136–​40, 202–​6, 299–​302. 15  “To the Publick,” Ladies Magazine, 1 (Nov. 18, 1749), 1. 16  Quoted by James E. Tierney in ODNB, s.v. Robert Dodsley. 14 

 

60   Jennifer Batt even from the same setting of type.17 Coote profited, not by aggressively defending a single title as publishers such as Edward Cave did, but by (equally aggressively) flooding the market with a variety of titles.

Diversification and Specialization Many early magazines included a heterogeneous mix of material designed to appeal to the widest possible readership (as the preface of the London Magazine noted, “a Work of this Nature, well executed, can hardly fail of pleasing almost all Sorts of Persons … so that if some Things do not please some Geniuses, here are others that may”).18 As the market became ever more crowded, though, others made targeted appeals to specific groups of readers. The titles of some of John Coote’s many periodicals hint at this specialization: male readers were targeted in the Court and City Magazine; or, A Fund of Entertainment for the Man of Quality (1770–​2), female in the Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770–​ 1819), and both genders in the British Magazine; or, Monthly Repository for Gentlemen and Ladies (1760–​7). Politically inclined readers were addressed in the Freeholder’s Magazine; or, Monthly Chronicle of Liberty (1769–​7 1), while different cultural tastes were met in the Sentimental Magazine; or, General Assemblage of Science, Taste, and Entertainment (1773–​7) and the Whimsical Repository; or, General Receptacle of Wit, Humour and Entertainment (1774–​6).19 In many cases, such attempts at branding remained at a superficial level as the content remained heterogeneous and eclectic, and, as Jan Fergus’s analysis of male readers of and contributors to the Lady’s Magazine shows, gender proscriptions made in titles did not restrict readership.20 Several magazines, however, were actively shaped to appeal to specific audiences. The Farmer’s Magazine, and Useful Family Companion (1776–​80), for example, combined “practical essays, dissertations, and remarks on the different branches of husbandry” and “abridgments of the new turnpike, highway, game, and poor laws” with “some select pieces of poetry,” beginning with Stephen Duck’s “Thresher’s Labour” and continuing with verse on agricultural themes. The Matrimonial Magazine; or, Monthly Anecdotes of Love and Marriage (1775) appealed particularly to female readers, combining discussion of married life with such verse as “Advice to a Lover,” “On Love,” “The Sweets and Bitters of Matrimony,” and “The Lover’s Remonstrance to his Mistress.” A number of publications—​including the Christian’s Magazine (1760–​7), the Gospel Magazine (1774–​83), the Arminian Magazine (1778–​97), the New Spiritual Magazine (1783–​5), the Evangelical Magazine (1793–​1800), and the Protestant Dissenter’s Magazine (1794–​7)—​ targeted readers of a general religious inclination or of a specific denomination, and typically combined theologically and morally instructive prose with hymns, psalms, biblical paraphrases, and moral and improving verse. Other periodical miscellanies self-​consciously 17  Barbara L. Fitzpatrick, “Physical Evidence for John Coote’s Eighteenth-​Century Periodical Proprietorships: The Examples of Coote’s Royal Magazine (1759–​7 1) and Smollett’s British Magazine (1760–​67),” Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, n.s., 11 (2000), 211–​58, at p. 213. 18 Preface, London Magazine, 1 (1732), n.p. 19  Fitzpatrick, “Physical Evidence,” pp. 240–​2. 20  Jan Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-​Century England (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), pp. 200–​9.

 

Poems in Magazines    61 appealed to readers with more discriminating literary tastes. Edited by Mark Akenside and published by Robert Dodsley, the Museum (1746–​7) featured contributions from Dodsley’s impressive circle of writerly acquaintances, including William Collins, Samuel Johnson, Christopher Smart, Joseph Spence, Horace Walpole, Joseph Warton, Thomas Warton, and William Whitehead.21 Ventures which placed a similar emphasis on original writing included the Student; or, The Oxford and Cambridge Monthly Miscellany (1750–​1) and the Midwife; or, The Old Woman’s Magazine (1750–​3), both edited by Christopher Smart, and their rival, William Kenrick’s Kapelion; or, Poetical Ordinary (1750–​1); St. James’ Magazine (1762–​4), edited initially by Robert Lloyd and later by Kenrick, who remodeled it into Literary Transactions of Europe (1764);22 and Francis Fawkes and William Woty’s Poetical Calendar (1763) and Poetical Magazine; or, Muses Monthly Companion (1764). These literary journals (resembling the model of Motteux’s Gentleman’s Journal rather more than Cave’s eclectic Gentleman’s Magazine) were typically short-​lived ventures, relying heavily on the energies of the editor and their access to original verse.

Regional Magazines Though most magazines were produced in London their audience was spread across the country.23 The expansion of the provincial press in this period has been well documented; as the regional book trade grew, so too did the regional magazine trade. The first regional periodical miscellany of note was the monthly Northampton Miscellany (1721), produced by the entrepreneurial provincial booksellers Robert Raikes and William Dicey. Though short-​lived, this provincial publication may have been the inspiration for the Gentleman’s Magazine. Raikes and Dicey were associates of Cave, and, as Carlson notes, “Cave quite possibly took from his friends … the idea of making a periodical out of scraps.”24 In the wake of the success of the Gentleman’s Magazine, a number of regional booksellers and printers were keen to exploit the growing enthusiasm for the genre. Some ventures were more successful than others: the Cumberland Magazine; or, Whitehaven Monthly Miscellany (1778–​81), the Bristol and Bath Magazine (1782–​3), and the Yorkshire Magazine (1786) were just a few of the titles that petered out after relatively short runs, but the Newcastle General Magazine (1747–​60), the Oxford Magazine; or, Universal Amusements (1768–​76), and the Dorset-​based Weekly Miscellany; or, Instructive Entertainer (1773–​83; later the Weekly Entertainer; or, Agreeable and Instructive Repository, 1784–​1819) all had lengthy runs. The Scottish magazine trade was vibrant. According to Stephen W. Brown’s estimate, “no fewer than forty-​seven magazines appeared in Edinburgh after [the appearance of the Scots Magazine in] 1739, with another nine in Glasgow, four in Aberdeen and perhaps as many as seven elsewhere in Scotland.” Major rivals of the Scots Magazine included the Edinburgh Magazine (1757–​62), the Weekly Magazine (1768–​84), the Edinburgh Magazine and Review 21  James E. Tierney, “The Museum, the ‘Super-​Excellent Magazine,’” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​ 1900, 13, no. 3 (Summer 1973), 503–​15, at pp. 506–​9. 22  Barbara L. Fitzpatrick, “The Literary Transactions of Europe: An Unrecorded Continuation of the St. James’s Magazine,” The Library, 6th series, 9 (March 1987), 23–​31. 23 Fergus, Provincial Readers, pp. 197–​235. 24 Carlson, First Magazine, pp. 9–​11, 25.

 

62   Jennifer Batt (1773–​6), the Edinburgh Magazine (1785–​1803), and the Bee (1790–​4).25 In Ireland, too, there were a number of Dublin-​based titles, including the Gentleman’s and London Magazine (1741–​ 93) (begun as the London Magazine and Monthly Chronologer), the Hibernian Magazine (1771–​1811), and the Sentimental and Masonic Magazine (1792–​5), as well as the Limerick-​produced Magazine of Magazines (1751–​61) and Belfast-​printed Ulster Repository (1785). Some of these regional ventures, such as Limerick’s Magazine of Magazines (in its early numbers at least), were direct reprints of London-​based titles, but others selected content from a range of London-​printed titles, repackaging and reshaping it to a greater or lesser degree. This was, boasted the Edinburgh Magazine, a considerable strength: in having “the opportunity of perusing the various English collections of that kind, and culling from them such essays, and fugitive pieces, as are distinguished for their merit,” the editor argued that he created a far stronger product for his readers than they could find in any single London-​ produced magazine.26 Other projectors, such as the publisher of the Aberdeen Magazine (1761), proclaimed rather more modest ambitions, and appealed to a sense of local loyalty: the publisher will not detract from the merit of former publications, nor promise that this Magazine shall be better than others. If it shall be found not worse, he is persuaded that the circumstance of its being printed in the North, and the opportunity of having it at regular stated periods, will give all the superiority necessary to establish it.27

As well as calling on local loyalties, regionally based magazines reflected and promoted distinctive local cultural movements, as with Walter Ruddiman’s championing of Robert Fergusson’s Scots-​language poetry in the Weekly Magazine.28 Regional magazines proved to be an outlet of choice for provincially based poets of all abilities; notably, while they were living in the south west of England in the 1790s, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth both contributed to the locally printed Weekly Entertainer.29

Poets and Magazines Magazines provided opportunities for poets of all kinds, from occasional versifiers to professional writers, to participate publicly in contemporary literary culture. Magazines allowed amateur poets to share their occasional verse with an audience, as Richard Graves explained somewhat diffidently in submitting a “Trifle” to the Gentleman’s Magazine: “I look upon the Poetical Part of your Magazine as a sort of Hotel Dieu, where your private Sinners in

25  Stephen W. Brown, “Newspapers and Magazines,” in Stephen W. Brown and Warren McDougall (eds.), The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland: Volume 2, Enlightenment and Expansion, 1707–​1800 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2012), pp. 353–​68, at pp. 364, 365. 26 Preface, Edinburgh Magazine, 2 (1758), iv. 27 Preface, Aberdeen Magazine, 1 (1761), 1. 28  Brown, “Newspapers and Magazines,” p. 367. 29  J. R. MacGillivray, “An Early Poem and Letter by Wordsworth,” Review of English Studies, 5, no. 17 (1954), 62–​6; David V. Erdman, “Unrecorded Coleridge Variants,” Studies in Bibliography, 11 (1958), 143–​ 62, at pp. 143, 147–​8.

 

Poems in Magazines    63 Rhiming may drop their accidental Brats, which they either don’t chuse to own, or don’t think worth a regular Care.”30 Enabling the exchange of verse, the poetry pages of magazines were a forum in which amateur, isolated writers dispersed around the country could come together with like-​minded souls as a literary community, as happened in the 1730s, when writers including Jane Brereton, Thomas Beach, Moses Browne, and John Duick, spread between London and Wales, came together in the Gentleman’s Magazine.31 For young writers who were ambitious to make a career of writing—​from Elizabeth Carter, Mark Akenside, and Samuel Johnson in the 1730s, to Wordsworth and Coleridge in the 1790s—​magazines offered a way of gaining exposure and building relationships with printers and booksellers.32 A number of writers progressed from making occasional offerings to becoming major contributing authors or editors, with, for example, Samuel Johnson becoming deeply involved in the Gentleman’s Magazine, Mark Akenside in the Museum, Christopher Smart in titles including the Student and the Midwife, Tobias Smollett in the British Magazine, and James Boswell in the London Magazine. For professional and established writers, magazines might offer a venue for occasional pieces, or, as with the involvement of the “Nonsense Club” in the St. James’s Magazine, a way of promoting a particular literary and political aesthetic.33 Established writers also frequently found their work appearing in magazines—​taken from manuscript or printed sources—​without their consent. Though such unauthorized reprinting of their work could be a source of considerable irritation and annoyance, as it was to Thomas Gray when the Magazine of Magazines threatened the publication of his “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” such demand for a writer’s work could be indicative of their standing in the literary world. Magazine editors employed several strategies to entice poets to submit original verse to their magazines. An address to the reader in the first issue of the Universal Magazine, for example, issued a general appeal for poetical contributions: All poems, prologues, epilogues, epigrams, sonnets, songs, catches, and satires, provided they are general: all tales, fables, and even riddles; letters in prose or verse … will always be acceptable to us, and seasonably published.34

Several magazines proposed rewards for the best submissions. John Tipper offered copies of Delights for the Ingenious to those contributors who could supply him with the best prose and verse, while James Anderson’s Bee promised a prize of a gold medal or five guineas to contributors of the most edifying prose with contributors of the best original poem or translation of foreign-​language verse to be awarded a silver medal or two guineas.35 In the 1730s 30 

Gentleman’s Magazine 10 (Sept. 1740), 460. On the identification of Graves as author of this poem, see Carlson, First Magazine, p. 253. The identification of anonymous and pseudonymous contributors to the Gentleman’s Magazine throughout this chapter is indebted to Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1731–​1868: An Electronic Union List, http://​bsuva. org/​bsuva/​gm2/​index.html. 31  Barker, “Poetry from the Provinces,” p. 254. 32  On Akenside and Carter, see Barker, “Poetry from the Provinces,” pp. 251–​4. 33  Lance Bertelsen, The Nonsense Club: Literature and Popular Culture, 1749–​1764 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 163–​6. 34  “The Authors to the Reader,” Universal Magazine, 1 (1747), ii. 35  Delights for the Ingenious, 1 (Jan. 1711), 2; “Premiums Proposed for Literary Essays &c.,” Bee, 1 (1790), xiii–​xiv.

 

64   Jennifer Batt Edward Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine ran a series of poetry contests with prizes ranging from a finely bound volume of a year’s worth of issues to a medal and a cash prize of £50. With rival publications directing considerable mockery at the endeavor, the Gentleman’s Magazine’s competitions were not an unequivocal success. Cave found it difficult to recruit judges, and entries were often of limited merit with the same two writers, John Duick and Moses Browne, repeatedly winning the top prizes. Yet, so Anthony Barker suggests, the contests “filled the poetry columns with much-​needed copy, generated useful publicity for the magazine, and attracted entries from Ireland and the Continent,” and though Samuel Johnson would later sneer dismissively at them, in the mid-​1730s, while he was courting Cave’s attention, he explicitly pointed to the competitions as evidence of Cave’s generosity as a patron.36

Puzzles While competitions might be used on an occasional basis to stimulate contributions, an ongoing appeal to correspondents came in the form of riddles, rebuses, and versified arithmetical puzzles. These short, entertaining pieces appeared regularly in magazines including the Gentleman’s Journal, Delights for the Ingenious, the Ladies Magazine, the Universal Magazine, the British Magazine, and the Weekly Entertainer, and on a more occasional basis in many other titles. Typically, a magazine would print a puzzle in one issue followed by a versified answer, submitted by a reader, in a subsequent issue. This generated contributions for the magazine, first, as readers strove to demonstrate their wit by providing answers and submitting ever more ingenious questions, and second, as participants in these puzzle-​exchanges were emboldened to send in other kinds of verse.37 Spreading questions and answers over two or more issues established a sense of continuity from one month to the next, encouraging readers to return to the magazine again and again. Some magazines invited readers to write in with the answer, offering them the thrill of seeing their name in print if they guessed correctly. Such lists of names reflect only a fraction of a magazine’s probable readership, but they offer a tantalizing glimpse at the audience a particular title reached, revealing, for example, that the father of the laboring-​class poet Mary Leapor was among the readers of the first issue of the early provincial magazine, the Northampton Miscellany.38 Issue by issue, the same names, pseudonyms, or initials recur in these lists, evoking a community of readers and writers, and though, spread out across the south west of England, Young Tyro of Totnes, J.K.C. from Wells, and J. Tucker of Penryn may never have met in real life, through their enthusiasm for versified puzzles in the Weekly Entertainer they came together with many others on the pages of the magazine as part of a vibrant literary community.39 36 

Barker, “Poetry from the Provinces,” pp. 246–​7. Margaret J. M. Ezell, “The Gentleman’s Journal and the Commercialization of Restoration Coterie Literary Practices,” Modern Philology, 89, no. 3 (1992), 323–​40, at pp. 328–​9; Fergus, Provincial Readers, pp. 200–​2. 38  Northampton Miscellany, 1 (Feb. 1720–​1), 62. 39  See, for example, Weekly Entertainer, 19 (Jan. 9, 1792), 44. See also Ezell, “The Gentleman’s Journal,” p. 334. 37 

 

Poems in Magazines    65 Verse puzzles were not to everyone’s taste, however, as might be seen in an exchange of verse which took place in the Gentleman’s Magazine over several months in 1740–​1. Poetry pages encouraged the exchange of views, and by printing verse on controversial subjects, editors often provoked their readers into contributing verse in support or refutation. Throughout 1740 several correspondents, including a young writer named Foster Webb (writing under the pseudonym Telarius), had been enthusiastically proposing and answering riddles in the magazine.40 In October another correspondent, S.S. (possibly William Shenstone), offered a critique of the writer who “fond of rhime | In Wit’s low species piddles; | And tires his thoughts, and wastes his time | In explicating Riddles.”41 By printing this criticism of his contributors and, implicitly of his editorial policy, Cave allowed his magazine to function as a forum in which debates might occur. An attack launched by one contributor on a group of others, however, required delicate handling, and S.S.’s criticism was directly followed by an editorial note which defended the magazine and its riddle-​writers. S.S. was thanked “for attacking these trifling amusements with so much spirit, elegance and judgment,” but was advised that “it was not in our power either to suppress or censure this kind of writing without giving offence to many of our readers and contributers.” Cave insisted that it was not the popularity of the genre alone that warranted its inclusion, but careful editorial judgment, it being “recommended by some of our learned friends.” Only the very best submissions of this kind had been included, Cave insisted, noting that “we have not … inserted one in twenty for which admittance was desired.” This explanation of editorial procedure was followed by a poem addressed to Telarius, which exhorted him to attempt more ambitious verse: “with enigmatic veil | No longer let thy Muse her charms conceal … avow thy native flame, | Burst thro’ the gloom:—​and brighten into Fame!”42 Written by Samuel Boyse, a regular contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine, this poem may have been commissioned by Cave by way of reassuring Foster Webb that his contributions were valued, and the appearance of Telarius’s “Horace, Book V. Ode I” a few issues later suggests that the young poet responded positively to this advice.43 Several other authors were also provoked by this exchange of views, and versified discussion of the literary merit of riddles filled the poetry pages well into the following year.44 Points of conflict such as this, prompting strong opinions both pro and con, could be used to generate contributions even if such debates needed careful editorial handling in order not to alienate certain constituencies of readers.

Cultural Trends Alongside such strategies designed to generate original content, magazines habitually filled their poetry pages with verse that reflected the major literary and cultural trends of the moment. Taking the trends of a single year—​1792, the centenary of the first English

40 Carlson, First Magazine, p. 264. 41 

Gentleman’s Magazine, 10 (Oct. 1740), 519. For the identification of Shenstone, see Donald F. Bond, review of Carlson, The First Magazine, in Modern Philology, 38, no. 1 (1940), 98. 42  Gentleman’s Magazine, 10 (Oct. 1740), 519. 43  Gentleman’s Magazine, 11 (Jan. 1741), 46. 44  Gentleman’s Magazine, 10 (Dec. 1740), 615; 11 (Feb. 1741), 104; 11 (March 1741), 160; 11 (May 1741), 271.

 

66   Jennifer Batt periodical miscellany—​as an example is instructive. Across the dozen monthly or weekly magazines produced nationwide in this year, from the London-​printed Arminian, European, General, Gentleman’s, Literary, Universal, New London, and Town and Country, to the Edinburgh-​produced Bee and Scots, Dublin’s Walker’s Hibernian, and the south west-​based Weekly Entertainer, several patterns emerge.45 These magazines contain a considerable quantity of generic (often anonymous or pseudonymous) verse which could have been written and published at any point in the century—​including poems on such general topics as domestic happiness, love at first sight, politeness, retirement, and the seasons46—​but they also contain verse which clearly reflects contemporary literary tastes. Parodies of and panegyrics to Shakespeare reflect his by-​then well-​established place at the center of English literature, while verse by, and to, James Thomson, reflects his ascendant reputation.47 Several poems testify to the ongoing fascination with the figure of the poetic bard, which had first become so popular in the 1760s, while the more recent vogue for “Della Cruscan” poetry is also represented.48 By the early 1790s, the sonnet had become one of the dominant modes of literary expression and more than a hundred sonnets were published in magazines over the course of the year. From mock-​heroic verse “On My Beard” to Catharine Stephens’s melancholic longing after suicide, and from Joseph Weston’s thoughts on the Revolution in France to anonymous lines celebrating a child’s recovery from illness, sonnets were used to explore a diverse range of subjects.49 There were a number of sonnet panegyrics addressed to writers, both living (Sophia Lee and Charlotte Smith) and dead (Pope and Thomson), as well as sonnets written in the voice of fictional characters (Sterne’s Maria).50 Sonnet contemplations of natural themes were also common, including topographical verse on Clifford Hill and Windsor Castle and meditations on aspects of the natural world, from roses to nightingales, woodlarks, and robins.51 Magazines testify to the popularity of the sonnet form, and its great versatility in the hands of late eighteenth-​century writers. As well as reflecting general trends in poetic culture, verse published in magazines in 1792 reflected—​and promoted—​specific literary and cultural events. Verse that had been printed in a newspaper or in a verse collection, performed on stage, or included in a novel might, 45  This survey of poems printed in magazines in 1792 draws heavily on the holdings of ProQuest’s British Periodicals database; while this includes a wide range of magazines published in this year, it is likely that their holdings are not comprehensive. Consequently, this survey is inevitably restricted by any biases or omissions present within the British Periodicals dataset. 46  Poems on these subjects appear, for example, in the Jan. 1792 issues of Town and Country, Literary, General, Bee, and Gentleman’s magazines. 47  On Shakespeare, see Gentleman’s Magazine, 62 (Oct. 1792), 943; on Thomson, Bee, 7 (Feb. 29, 1792), 329, and Scots Magazine, 54 (March 1792), 137. 48  “Lines from Ossian,” Weekly Entertainer, 20 (Oct. 1, 1792), 344. Della Cruscan verse includes various poems by and to Laura Maria (Mary Robinson) in Universal Magazine, 90 (March 1792), 230–​1; 90 (April 1792), 297; and 91 (Sept. 1792), 210. 49  Gentleman’s Magazine, 62 (May 1792), 462; 62 (July 1792), 654; and 62 (Oct. 1792), 944. 50  On Lee, see Gentleman’s Magazine, 62 (Aug. 1792), 749; on Smith, see Town and Country Magazine, 24 (March 1792), 139; on Pope, see Gentleman’s Magazine, 62 (Aug. 1792), 748–​9; on Thomson, see Bee, 8 (April 11, 1792), 227; on Sterne’s Maria, see Weekly Entertainer, 19 (Jan. 30, 1792), 128. 51  Gentleman’s Magazine, 62 (Aug. 1792), 750; European Magazine, 21 (Feb. 1792), 143; New London Magazine, 8 (Dec. 1792), 567; European Magazine, 21 (March 1792), 221; Literary Magazine, 9 (Oct. 1792), 311–​12; Literary Magazine, 9 (Dec. 1792), 471.

 

Poems in Magazines    67 within a matter of weeks, be reprinted across a range of different magazines, its currency, novelty, or aesthetic appeal driving its widespread reproduction. Verse by a number of the year’s most significant poets, including John Aikin, Robert Burns, William Lisle Bowles, Anthony Pasquin, Peter Pindar, Mary Robinson, Anna Seward, and Charlotte Smith appears in magazines, as does verse from a range of recent poetical publications.52 Extracts from collections by Elizabeth Bentley (1791) and George Thicknesse (1788–​91), and Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1791) were printed in magazines this year, as also were pieces from the miscellanies Salmagundi, a Miscellaneous Collection of Original Poetry (1791) and Poems Chiefly by Gentlemen of Devonshire and Cornwall (1792).53 Within weeks of their opening nights, the prologues and epilogues of several new plays—​including Thomas Holcroft’s Road to Ruin and Hannah Cowley’s Day in Turkey; or, The Russian Slaves—​were printed across a range of magazines, occasionally accompanied by reviews of the performance.54 Poems that had appeared in recently published novels (see ­chapter 5, “Poems in the Novel”) were reprinted in a range of magazines. Verse from Ann Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest (1791), Holcroft’s Anna St. Ives, and Samuel Egerton Brydges’s Mary De Clifford (both 1792) appeared in one or more magazines, while Henrietta O’Neill’s “Ode to the Poppy,” which had been included in Charlotte Smith’s novel Desmond in June 1792, appeared in at least five magazines.55 Magazines also featured verse which responded to other significant cultural events of 1792. A range of elegies and epitaphs paid tribute to the death of the painter and president of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds, in February.56 Prologues and epilogues

52 

For example: Aikin, “Duncan’s Warning,” General Magazine, 6 (March 1792), 122–​3; Burns, “Verses in Honour of the Celebrated Mr. James Thomson,” Weekly Entertainer, 19 (Jan. 2, 1792), 24; Bowles, “Sonnet to a Friend,” General Magazine, 6 (April 1792), 172; Peter Pindar, “On Humanity to Brutes,” Scots Magazine, 54 (March 1792), 137–​8; Anthony Pasquin, “Verses Written on Beholding a Favourite Dog Dead,” Gentleman’s Magazine, 62 (Feb. 1792), 168; Robinson, “Ode to Vanity,” Literary Magazine, 8 (Feb. 1792), 145–​6; Seward, “Song of a Northern Lover,” General Magazine, 6 (Feb. 1792), 73–​4; Smith, “Elegy: The Dead Beggar,” European Magazine, 22 (Nov. 1792), 382. 53  For Bentley’s Genuine Poetical Compositions on Various Subjects, see Literary Magazine, 9 (Nov. 1792), 392–​3. For Thicknesse’s Memoirs and Anecdotes of Philip Thicknesse, see European Magazine, 21 (April 1792), 311; New London Magazine, 8 (May 1792), 229; and Literary Magazine, 8 (May 1792), 383–​4. For Darwin’s Botanic Garden, see Weekly Entertainer, 20 (Sept. 24, 1792), 320, and 20 (Nov. 19, 1792), 511–​12; Universal Magazine, 90 (May 1792), 375–​6; and New London Magazine, 8 (June 1792), 277. For Salmagundi, see Universal Magazine, 90 (March 1792), 229–​30; and 90 (April 1792), 296–​7; and New London Magazine, 8 (June 1792), 278–​9. For Poems Chiefly by Gentlemen of Devonshire and Cornwall, see Gentleman’s Magazine, 62 (April 1792), 364; and Universal Magazine, 91 (Sept. 1792), 211; and 91 (Oct. 1792), 292–​3. 54 For The Road to Ruin, see Scots Magazine, 54 (Feb. 1792), 75; European Magazine, 21 (March 1792), 217–​18; New London Magazine, 8 (March 1792), 133–​4; Town and Country Magazine, 24 (March 1792), 137–​8. For A Day in Turkey, see Town and Country Magazine, 24 (Feb. 1792), 89–​90; European Magazine, 21 (March 1792), 216–​17; Universal Magazine, 90 (March 1792), 231–​2; and Walker’s Hibernian Magazine (March 1792), 279. 55 For Romance of the Forest, see Universal Magazine, 91 (July 1792), 58–​9; and European Magazine, 22 (Sept. 1792), 237; for Anna St. Ives, see Universal Magazine, 90 (April 1792), 298; for Mary De Clifford, see New London Magazine, 8 (April 1792), 182; and for “Ode to the Poppy,” see European Magazine, 22 (July 1792), 69–​70; Scots Magazine, 54 (July 1792), 340; Universal Magazine, 91 (July 1792), 59–​60; New London Magazine, 8 (Aug. 1792), 373; Weekly Entertainer, 20 (Nov. 12, 1792), 486–​7. 56  Universal Magazine, 90 (March 1792), 232; and 91 (August 1792), 130; Gentleman’s Magazine, 62 (March 1792), 261–​2; and 62 (May 1792), 461; European Magazine, 21 (April 1792), 310–​11; New London Magazine, 8 (Sept. 1792), 422.

 

68   Jennifer Batt commemorated one-​off theatrical performances such as benefit nights, while one of the most widely reproduced poems of the year, appearing in more than a dozen newspapers and magazines, was the ode written by the poet laureate Henry James Pye, and performed at St. James’s in honor of the king’s birthday in June.57 Magazines also included verse reflecting provincial cultural movements, such as the opening and closing nights of regional theaters and performances in private theaters and educational establishments.58 Yet, while magazine verse reflected contemporary cultural events, it seems to have offered considerably less engagement with current affairs. Many generalist magazines gave an account of national and international politics in their essay and news sections but commentary on such subjects seldom reached the poetry pages. Relatively few poems engaged closely with either the developing political situation in France or the campaign against the slave trade. The peak of activity for abolitionists came in 1792, with a petitioning movement sweeping the country in the early months of the year, but this made little impact on magazine verse.59 Over the course of the year, just a handful of poems appeared on the slave trade, including William Cowper’s “Negro’s Complaint” and Thomas Adney’s “Slave, an Ode.” Several poems ventriloquized the complaints of slaves or anticipated their gratitude when the trade was finally abolished, while others promoted the boycott of the products of forced labor, which had been prompted by William Fox’s Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum (1791).60 Several of these antislavery poems appeared in the Arminian Magazine, reflecting the strong evangelical backing of the abolitionist movement, but there seems to have been a limited appetite among most magazine editors for poems on this subject. The editor of the Weekly Entertainer actively discouraged contributors from submitting verse on this topic, noting that “A considerable portion of our Entertainer having been lately engrossed by pieces relative to the Slave-​Trade, we wish, for the present, to dismiss the subject, being satisfied that in so doing we shall please most of our readers.” Readers, the editor suggests, had become bored of the subject, and so he declined to print a poem recently submitted to him—​not because it lacked merit, but because it was “written with a good deal of warmth, and would probably have provoked a 57  For a benefit night, see European Magazine, 21 (Jan. 1792), 67–​8. The birthday ode appeared in the General Evening Post (June 2–​5, 1792); London Chronicle (June 2–​5, 1792); St. James’ Chronicle (June 2–​5, 1792); Evening Mail (June 4–​6, 1792); Lloyd’s Evening Post (June 4–​6, 1792); Diary; or, Woodfall’s Register (June 5, 1792); Public Advertiser (June 5, 1792); and in the June 1792 issues of the Gentleman’s, New London, Scots, Town and Country, European, Universal, and Weekly Entertainer. 58  For opening and closing nights of regional theaters, see European Magazine, 22 (July 1792), 65–​6; General Magazine, 6 (July 1792), 315–​16; Universal Magazine, 91 (July 1792), 58; and European Magazine, 22 (Oct. 1792), 304. On private performances, see European Magazine, 21 (March 1792), 218–​20; Gentleman’s Magazine, 62 (June 1792), 556–​7; and Town and Country Magazine, 24 (July 1792), 329. On school performances, see Weekly Entertainer, 19 (Jan. 2, 1792), 22–​3; and Walker’s Hibernian Magazine (June 1792), 558–​9. 59  For an overview of the 1792 petitioning campaign, see J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-​Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787–​1807 (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 59–​62. 60  For Adney, see European Magazine, 22 (Oct. 1792), 304–​6; for Cowper, see Scots Magazine, 54 (Jan. 1792), 32; and Town and Country Magazine, 54 (April 1792), 185; for “On Sugar,” see Arminian Magazine, 15 (April 1792), 224; and on the sugar boycott, Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-​Slavery, p. 57. See also Bee, 8 (March 21, 1792), 106–​7; and 9 (June 20, 1792), 249–​50; and Arminian Magazine, 15 (Nov. 1792), 612–​15.

 

Poems in Magazines    69 reply from some person equally warm on the other side.”61 Polemical verse on political subjects, be it focused on the rights of man or on the abolition of slavery, had the potential to alienate readers of opposing perspectives and to bore those who were not interested in politics; consequently it seems to have been avoided by many magazine editors.

Editorial Gatekeeping Magazine editors communicated such nuances of their editorial policies and managed the flow of submissions and the expectations of their contributors via editorial notes in monthly issues and statements of editorial procedure included in yearly prefaces. Many magazines issued frequent reminders that contributors “should pay the Postage of their Letters … otherwise they will not see what they send inserted,” and notes directed to specific correspondents were also common, advising them that their verse had arrived too late for inclusion in this month’s issue but would appear in a future number.62 Some magazines found themselves under such a deluge of submissions that personalized notes became impractical, with the 1748 preface to the British Magazine offering a general apology: As our Poetical Correspondents have been particularly liberal in their favours to us for the late months, we beg they will accept our sincerest gratitude, and be assured that none of their pieces shall remain unpublished longer than necessity obliges, always observing the rule of giving place in the order of time they come to hand, except in the case of any particular tim’d piece.63

Not every submission found a place. Some magazines offered a blanket prohibition against kinds of verse that might prove offensive to their readership. The Weekly Entertainer noted, for example, that “enigmatical lists of the names of young ladies generally give offence, and cannot, therefore, have a place,” while the editors of the British Magazine declared their intention to “avoid inserting any Pieces of double Entendre, as being unsuitable to be read in mix’d Companies, or a Family of Children … the Conductors of this Magazine being extremely desirous to exclude from this Entertainment every thing which shall seem the least offensive to Decency or Virtue.”64 Occasionally contributions would be printed after a little judicious editing, often to the chagrin of the original author, but some poems were deemed beyond editorial assistance. Different strategies were taken to reject verse, depending on the vehemence with which an editor wished to discourage a particular contributor. In the preface to the London Magazine of 1740, the editors took a conciliatory approach, thanking those Gentlemen, who have been so good as to communicate to us many excellent original Pieces, both in Prose and Verse: Most of them we have published; and as to those we have omitted, we hope, the ingenious Authors will believe, the Omission was not owing to a

61 

Weekly Entertainer, 19 (May 7, 1792), 469.

64 

Weekly Entertainer, 19 (Jan. 9, 1792), 45; British Magazine, 1 (April 1746), 80.

63 Preface, British Magazine, 3 (1748), n.p.

62 

Weekly Entertainer, 19 (Jan. 9, 1792), 45.

 

70   Jennifer Batt Disapprobation, or Dislike, of what they sent us, but to its being, some way or other, not agreeable to our Design.65

A more scathing tone was taken in an early issue of the Spiritual Magazine as the editor noted that “we have received several other original pieces from our poetical Correspondents, which we should very readily have inserted in our collection, could it have been done with any credit either to their authors or to ourselves; but the public expects, that even the most pious performance, if written in the poetic style, should indicate some elegance and spirit.”66 Occasionally, individual authors or poems were targeted for particular criticism, as happened with a poem entitled “Topsham” submitted to the Weekly Entertainer in 1792. This, the editor complained, “has in it so many bad lines, and is, in the general, so little calculated to please our readers, that we must decline inserting it.”67 Thus, though magazines brought participation in contemporary literary culture within reach of a broad range of amateur writers, careful editorial gatekeeping was required to maintain a level of quality control.

Conclusion Tens of thousands of poems were published in magazines over the course of the eighteenth century; a survey can only scratch the surface. Much more work needs to be done to document the complexity of the eighteenth-​century magazine trade and the place of poetry within it, but this chapter has begun to sketch out the thriving and vibrant poetic culture that found a home in magazines. Verse published in the pages of magazines reflected and disseminated contemporary poetic culture in rich and complex ways, and to read across an extended run of a single title’s offerings, or to investigate the contents of all magazines produced at a specific moment in time, is to gain a nuanced insight into the shape of that poetic culture. Hosting the work of an astonishing array of writers—​poets amateur and professional, good and bad, original and derivative, isolated and networked, metropolitan and provincial, literary enthusiasts and occasional riddle-​solvers—​magazines have the potential to illuminate scholarly understanding of cultures of authorship in the eighteenth century, enabling exploration of the popular reception of both familiar and unfamiliar authors. Magazines offer insight into the ways culture was shaped by commercial interests. Magazines were produced to make a profit, and with varying degrees of success (and, no doubt, cynicism) their editors exploited literary and cultural trends, promoted the agendas of special interest groups, and enabled the spread of literary movements. Supremely responsive to the ebb and flow of customer interest as evident in monthly sales patterns, entwined in a culture of reader participation, and providing a route into literature for purchasers whose primary interests lay elsewhere, magazines present an intriguing glimpse into the world of eighteenth-​ century readers. With the potential to enhance our understanding of poetic culture on a year-​by-​year—​even month-​by-​month—​basis, magazines are an underused but enormously

65 Preface, London Magazine, 9 (1740), iii–​iv. 67 

Weekly Entertainer, 19 (April 30, 1792), 445.

66 

Spiritual Magazine, 1 (Jan. 1761), 22.

 

Poems in Magazines    71 rich resource for scholars of eighteenth-​century poetry, the book trade, and the history of reading.

References Barker, Anthony D., “Poetry from the Provinces: Amateur Poets in the Gentleman’s Magazine in the 1730s and 1740s,” in Alvaro Ribeiro and James G. Basker (eds.), Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-​Century Canon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 241–​56. Brown, Stephen W., “Newspapers and Magazines,” in Stephen W. Brown and Warren McDougall (eds.), The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland: Volume 2, Enlightenment and Expansion, 1707–​1800 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2012), pp. 353–​68. Carlson, Carl Lennart, The First Magazine: A History of “The Gentleman’s Magazine” (Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1938). Crane, R. S., and F. B. Kaye, “A Census of British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1620–​1800,” Studies in Philology, 24, no. 1 (1927), 1–​205. de Montluzin, Emily Lorraine, “Attributions of Authorship in the Gentleman’s Magazine,” http://​bsuva.org/​bsuva/​gm2/​GMintro.html de Montluzin, Emily Lorraine, “The Poetry of the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1731–​1800:  An Electronic Database of Titles, Authors, and First Lines,” http://​www.gmpoetrydatabase.org/​ db/​ Ezell, Margaret J. M., “The Gentleman’s Journal and the Commercialization of Restoration Coterie Literary Practices,” Modern Philology, 89, no. 3 (1992), 323–​40. Fergus, Jan, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-​ Century England (Oxford:  Oxford Univ. Press, 2006). Fitzpatrick, Barbara L., “Physical Evidence for John Coote’s Eighteenth-​Century Periodical Proprietorships: The Examples of Coote’s Royal Magazine (1759–​7 1) and Smollett’s British Magazine (1760–​67),” Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, n.s., 11 (2000), 211–​58. Graham, Walter J., English Literary Periodicals (New York: T. Nelson & Sons, 1930). Hughes, Linda K., “What the Wellesley Index Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies,” Victorian Periodicals Review, 40, no. 2 (Summer 2007), 91–​125. Mayo, Robert D., The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–​1815 (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press; London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962). Ram, Titia, Magnitude in Marginality: Edward Cave and “The Gentleman’s Magazine,” 1731–​1754 (Utrecht: Universiteit Utrecht, 1999). Sullivan, Alvin (ed.), British Literary Magazines, 4 vols. (New York: Greenwood, 1983–​6). Tierney, James E., “The Museum, the ‘Super-​Excellent Magazine,’” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900, 13, no. 3 (Summer 1973), 503–​15.

 

Chapter 5

P oem s in t h e  Nov e l Thomas Keymer The 1790s fashion for advertising works of fiction as “interspersed” with poems—​the trailblazer was Helen Maria Williams’s Julia, a Novel: Interspersed with Some Poetical Pieces (1790)—​looks at first sight like a generic anomaly. Novels and poems are different things, after all. Where the language of fiction is functional and referential, a transparent medium for representing lived experience with seeming immediacy, the language of poetry calls attention to its own complexities and ambiguities, its shapes and sounds. Where the form of fiction is capacious and expansive, attuned to the novelist’s sense that (as Henry James famously put it) “really, universally, relations stop nowhere,” the form of poetry is regulated, patterned, and circumscribed—​though James was to make an exception for vast narrative poems like The Ring and the Book, whose volumes he read with an awkward sense of “the novel they might have constituted.”1 Other great long poems of the nineteenth century were added by Georg Lukács to the roster of honorary novels (Don Juan, Eugene Onegin), and Lukács looked for structures deeper than the “mere artistic technicality” of prose against verse when distinguishing between epic and the novel.2 Yet the question persists. “Why are novels in prose?” asks Franco Moretti, who cites the necessary momentum of narrativity as part of the answer: the ongoing, forward-​looking thrust of “prose, pro-​vorsa,” as against the symmetries and self-​circlings of “verse, versus.”3

Proper Words in their Proper Places Some of the most influential explorations of the prose–​verse binary emerge from the era in which Williams and fellow novelists like Charlotte Smith and Ann Radcliffe were mingling 1 

Henry James, The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction, ed. William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 260 (preface to Roderick Hudson); 461 (“The Novel in The Ring and the Book”). 2  Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-​Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974), p. 56. 3  Franco Moretti, “History of the Novel, Theory of the Novel,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 43, no. 1 (2010), 1–​10, at p. 1.

 

Poems in the Novel    73 the two modes. To some extent, William Wordsworth’s attempt in Lyrical Ballads (1798) to replace artificial diction by everyday language, and so register with maximum clarity and closeness “the fluxes and refluxes of the mind,” framed poetry in terms of a novelistic goal—​ specifically, the Richardsonian goal of tracing consciousness in motion. Some of the resulting poems were “strictly the language of prose,” albeit in metrical arrangement. Yet in his extended preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth also presents these poems as antidotes to tastes shaped by fashionable new fiction—​“frantic novels,” a term usually taken to denote the Gothic—​and insists on formal features such as rhyme and measure, metaphors and figures, as constituting the special density of lyric verse.4 Recalling Wordsworth’s preface in Biographia Literaria (1817), Samuel Taylor Coleridge also challenged the standard distinction between poetry and prose, preferring instead to use poetry/​science as his governing antithesis, and to distinguish, within the first of these terms, between prose and metrical composition. Even so, metrical composition was essentially, qualitatively different from its prose counterpart, and Coleridge was reluctant to admit novels or romances as species of poetry in the full sense. Meter worked to stimulate attention, and as such it marked an element of verbal intensity that was alien to prose, with its mundane referential ambitions, and alien especially to what Coleridge elsewhere calls “the common modern novel,” with its mere arousal of shallow sensation, “excitement without producing reaction.” The binary is at its starkest in a well-​known passage from his posthumously published Table Talk: The definition of good prose is—​proper words in their proper places;—​of good verse—​the most proper words in their proper places. The propriety is in either case relative. The words in prose ought to express the intended meaning, and no more; if they attract attention to themselves, it is, in general, a fault.

One could read Southey’s prose forever without noticing its medium of composition, adds Coleridge with a sly dart of faint praise. Verse must do more; it must direct the reader’s notice to the words themselves.5 It was perhaps with this hierarchy in mind that the younger Coleridge, in articles he is thought to have contributed to the Critical Review, singled out poems by Radcliffe and others as more valuable than the surrounding narrative. Reviewing The Mysteries of Udolpho (“A Romance; Interspersed with some Pieces of Poetry”) in 1794, he noted the monotony of Radcliffe’s verse, but praised “The Sea-​Nymph,” and quoted it in full, because in the framing context of Gothic adventure “poetical beauties have not a fair chance of being attended to.” Poetry was a taste, he adds, easily overwhelmed by narrative curiosity, which was an appetite seeking instant gratification. Authorship of the Udolpho review has been disputed, but three years later Coleridge made the same move in a more solidly attested review of Matthew Lewis’s Monk, praising and reprinting Lewis’s included poem “The Exile” as an “exquisitely tender elegy, Which, we may venture to prophesy, will melt and delight the heart, when ghosts and hobgoblins shall be found only in the lumber-​garret of a circulating 4  The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), vol. i, pp. 126, 128. 5  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures, 1808–​1819: On Literature, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), vol. ii, pp. 193, 194 (Coleridge glosses “reaction” as “an activity of the intellectual faculties”); Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1990), vol. ii, p. 242; see also Biographia Literaria, chaps. 14 and 18.

 

74   THOMAS Keymer library.”6 This was a fairly unusual position among fiction reviewers, however. Radcliffe’s poems, though sometimes admired in themselves, were routinely criticized as gratuitous or distracting in context. As the British Critic complained of Udolpho, “the introduction of verses in publications like the present is becoming a fashion, but we confess that they appear to us to be misplaced.” Instead these inset verses should be separately published—​as in time they duly were, stripped of their narrative raison d’être, as a slim (one might almost say spectral) volume entitled The Poems of Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1816). More eloquent than any review on this issue were the deadpan burlesque novels of William Beckford, Modern Novel Writing (1796) and Azemia (1797), both of which display the offending “Interspersed with Poetry” formula on their title pages. In the text itself, Beckford loses no opportunity to embellish his narrative with incompetent verse, and the most clodhopping of the many inset poems in Modern Novel Writing are doubtless his own handiwork. “Ye Gods disperse | This painful verse, | By some wild whirlwind thro’ the skies!” begins an early example, which struggles with rhyme and meter as the stanza limps on: “Lest in amaze-​| Ment at my lays, | The folks my folly should despise.” In his hunt for bathos, Beckford also found, and lifted, strong competition from recent collections of verse by other writers, including at least two poems by Charles James, an obscure but prolific imitator of Petrarch, and two more by William Parsons, a second-​tier Della Cruscan.7 No one—​including Beckford’s modern editor—​seems to have noticed, which may support the contention of the reviewers that poems held little interest for novel readers, and were often skipped.

Melting Generic Boundaries Yet there is nothing inevitable about the dichotomy between prose narrative on one hand, and lyric or epic poetry on the other. One of the founding texts of modern narrative theory, Mikhail Bakhtin’s essay “Discourse in the Novel” (1935), was written to contest a distinction in Russian formalism between verbally self-​conscious poetry and the merely representational language of novels—​a distinction, Bakhtin protests, that restricted criticism of fiction to thematic analysis. Bakhtin reorients this distinction rather than abandon it completely, but his manner of doing so—​which is to find a special openness in novels, uncharacteristic of poetry, to multiple discourses, styles, and traditions—​points to the absorption of poetic genres within the dynamic heteroglossia of the novel genre. The self-​enclosed language of 6  Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1936), pp. 366, 376. H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson accept the Monk review in their Bollingen edition of Coleridge’s Shorter Works and Fragments (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995); on the more conjectural Udolpho review, see Derek Roper, “Coleridge, Dyer, and The Mysteries of Udolpho,” Notes & Queries, 19, no. 8 (1972), 287–​9, and prior discussions cited by Roper. 7  William Beckford, Modern Novel Writing; or, The Elegant Enthusiast, ed. Robert J. Gemmett (Chalford: Nonsuch, 2008), p. 51. Poems by Charles James are stolen, and made slightly worse, on pp. 49 and 86–​7 (cf. James, Poems (1792), pp. 280, 151–​4), and by William Parsons on pp. 52 and 108–​9 (cf. Parsons, A Poetical Tour (1787), pp. 71, 12–​13). Also in Modern Novel Writing is a cruel send-​up of William Cowper, presumably by Beckford himself: “My Goldfinch died—​how did he dare, | To leave me lost in deep despair?” (p. 95).

 

Poems in the Novel    75 the poet is radically unlike, yet at the same time a constituent part of, the endlessly hospitable language of the novelist, a multi-​voiced entity that reprocesses and hybridizes a diversity of prior discourses. Bakhtin notes the Romantic inclusion of poems within novels (he specifies Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister of 1795–​6) as an unusually conscious, direct instance of this phenomenon. Elsewhere he cites Lord Byron and Heinrich Heine to illustrate the reverse contamination of poetic traditions (both epic and lyric) by novelistic features: “in an era when the novel reigns supreme, almost all the remaining genres are to a greater or less extent ‘novelized.’ ”8 In fact this dual sense of hybridization in Bakhtin’s thought—​literally, the incorporation of verse material within novelistic prose; more generally, a melting of generic boundaries between poetry and fiction—​is no less applicable to earlier periods. Prosimetrum is the term used by classicists to describe the habitual interweaving of verse and prose in the ancient novel. Some of the most significant cases were unknown in the eighteenth century, notably the fragmentary Iolaus papyrus, first published in 1971 and (writes Stephen Harrison) “evidently part of a low-​life prosimetric narrative in Greek.”9 But prosimetrum was also central to the Roman Menippean tradition, and the Satyricon of Petronius, partly narrated in verse by the poetaster Eumolpus and other characters, was well known following its reconstruction in an Amsterdam edition of 1669 and the first extended English translation of 1694. Another relevant term rarely heard in eighteenth-​century studies is dérimage (“unrhyming”), used by medievalists to describe the process through which epic and chivalric romances were recast as prose from the thirteenth century onward, so blending with the historical chronicle tradition in ways that seemed to promise access to the real. “The word vers (‘verse, verses’), which the troubadours often punningly align with vers (Occitan for ‘true, true things’), becomes associated with twisting (vers, from vertir, ‘to turn’),” writes Sarah Kay: “verse is indirect and contorted, whereas prose (fancifully derived from prorsum, ‘in a straight line’) is straightforward and truthful.”10 Long afterward, the routine interpolation of lyric poems in sixteenth-​century prose fiction served as an ongoing reminder of the metrical, rhymed origins of romance. George Gascoigne’s Discourse of the Adventures Passed by Master F.J. is at one level a novel of social climbing and love intrigue that looks forward, in different ways, to Daniel Defoe and Eliza Haywood. But this work was originally published in the framing context of A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573), a large, multi-​genre miscellany of Gascoigne’s writings, and it came studded with poems that Gascoigne’s narrator presents as the most authentic component of his tale. In popular fiction, the writing and reading of poems as a plot device, or simply the inclusion of poems as found objects, could operate as an elevating gesture, a way of establishing connections with recognizable, respected literary genres. In the more hallowed literary context of Sir Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia (composed c.1580), poems could offer glimpses

8  M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), p. 5; see also, on Wilhelm Meister, p. 322. 9  John Morgan and Stephen Harrison, “Intertextuality,” in Tim Whitmarsh (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008), p. 228; see also, in this volume, chaps. 17–​18, on the re-​emergence and influence of ancient novels in and after the Renaissance. 10  Sarah Kay, Terence Cave, and Malcolm Bowie, A Short History of French Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003), p. 62.

 

76   THOMAS Keymer of inwardness unavailable in the surrounding prose. When the courtly lovers Pamela and Musidorus carve extemporized poems to one another on the bark of trees, their verses are transcribed in Sidney’s narrative as privileged signs of interiority, indicators of the mind or the heart. Pamela’s lines are “the treasure of her thoughts”; Musidorus’s are “the badges of his passions.”11

The Condition of Poetry Eighteenth-​century attempts to think historically or theoretically about the novel genre were often faltering, slow to respond to creative developments, and grounded in neoclassical criteria of limited relevance to modern practice. Even so, the most ambitious eighteenth-​ century treatises showed real awareness of prose–​verse interpenetration in earlier fiction, and were sometimes willing to entertain, even endorse, the idea that the novel might in itself be a species of poem. Pierre Daniel Huet, whose Traitté de l’origine des romans (1670) was translated into English in 1715, noted the long-​term coexistence of verse and prose romances, and though anxious to keep these categories distinct, he drew on Aristotle (“who informs us, That ’tis Fiction rather than Verse which makes a Poet”) to claim the status of poetry for both. Richard Hurd responded skeptically to Huet in his Dissertation on the Idea of Universal Poetry (1766), insisting that the “harsh and rugged prose” of modern novels ruled out their pretensions to be anything more, at best, than “hasty, imperfect, and abortive poems.” But Hurd’s was by this time a notably conservative position, and the new wave of criticism typified in the 1780s by James Beattie’s discourse “On Fable and Romance” (1783) and Clara Reeve’s dialogue The Progress of Romance (1785) showed greater readiness to situate novels and poems in harmonious relation. When Beattie used the term “Poetical Prose Fable” to describe Tom Jones and Clarissa, he meant by “poetical” an artistic shaping, especially of plot, that was absent from “historical” cases like the cradle-​to-​grave memoir narratives of Defoe and Tobias Smollett. The category made sense to Beattie for Huet’s Aristotelian reason, because “Prose and Verse are opposite, but Prose and Poetry may be consistent.”12 Prose and verse are less easily kept apart in Reeve’s treatise. Reeve disliked the prose poems of James Macpherson, which merged the styles of ancient epic and modern sentimental fiction in innovative (if also somewhat fraudulent) ways, because Fingal (1761) and Macpherson’s other Ossianic narratives transgressed an essential boundary of style (see ­chapter  14, “The Poet as Fraud”). “This sort of writing,” declares Reeve’s spokeswoman Euphrasia, “corrupts and spoils our language, and destroys the barrier, which nature has placed, to distinguish between poetry and prose.” But in other contexts Euphrasia is unperturbed by what has always been, she recognizes, a highly permeable border. She cites Thomas Percy and other authorities for a generic history marked by long-​term instability between 11  Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Katherine Duncan-​ Jones (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), p. 174. On the broader relationship between poetry and prose in Elizabethan fiction, see Constance C. Relihan, Fashioning Authority: The Development of Elizabethan Novelistic Discourse (Kent: Kent State Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 17–​32. 12  Ioan Williams (ed.), Novel and Romance, 1700–​1800: A Documentary Record (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), pp. 46–​7, 270–​1, 318.

 

Poems in the Novel    77 verse and prose, and by counter-​currents of metrification and dérimage. There are epics in prose and histories in verse, while romances “have been translated and transcribed from prose to verse, and vice versa: so that the same stories have appeared, and are still extant in both forms.” In the end the verse/​prose distinction comes to look almost arbitrary, or at most a matter of presentation, conditioned merely by the vagaries of personal or collective preference: “the genius of the writers, or the taste of the times.”13 By the end of the eighteenth century, it was even possible for advocates of fiction to invert the usual hierarchy and defend narrative poetry as a species of novel. “What are epic poems but novels in verse?” Erasmus Darwin playfully asked in 1797.14 Recent criticism suggests a fuller sense in which the embedded lyrics of Romantic fiction indicate ambitions in the genre as a whole to attain the condition of poetry—​and poetry as understood in Wordsworthian, not merely Aristotelian, terms. Smith may always have been at heart a verse writer, one who after publishing her Elegiac Sonnets (1784) then turned to fiction for mainly commercial reasons, “compelled to live only to write & write only to live.”15 But a generation later there were clear expressive motives for Walter Scott’s move in the same direction, and from Waverley (1814) onward the historical novel gave Scott creative and analytic scope of a kind he had failed to find in verse tales like Marmion (1808). Persuasive accounts have been given of the aesthetic consequences in these and other cases. For Leah Price, who focuses on Radcliffe, the pervasive verse element of Romantic-​period fiction (in poetic epigraphs as well as original and quoted poems) is not gratuitously decorative but an essential structural resource. Though often clumsily integrated, verse “vertebrates” and “punctuates” the prose narrative, provides “textual speed-​bumps” to regulate the pace of reading, and encourages a view of novels in their entirety as serious works of lyrical evocation, not just sensational plot.16 Mary A. Favret also notes the awkward integration of verse by Radcliffe and Smith, but sees the lyrical intensity achieved in their poems as spilling over, if anything more powerfully, to the surrounding text. The emotional crises and sublime landscapes evoked in the verse become a primary concern of the narrative itself, albeit at a cost: “the novelist can render them into prose so successfully that the verses appear superfluous.”17 Marshall Brown makes larger claims in a discussion he grounds in Friedrich Schlegel’s challenge to the thesis that “all poetry should be metric” and in Schlegel’s corresponding view of the novel as, in ideal form, the essence and apotheosis of Romantic expression. Here Brown advances a starkly polarized generic history, one in which not only the included poetry but also the lyrical prose of Smith and Scott mark a “brief Romantic hiatus in the long-​running quarrel between prose and verse.” Thereafter the genre reverts to its old Enlightenment norm, and “a new form is born, the realist, the merely prosaic novel.”18 13 

Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance, 2 vols. (Colchester, 1785), vol. ii, p. 67; vol. i, pp. 44, iii. Erasmus Darwin, A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education (Derby, 1797), p. 34. 15  Charlotte Smith to Thomas Shirley, August 22, 1789, quoted by Judith Phillips Stanton, “Charlotte Smith’s ‘Literary Business’: Income, Patronage, and Indigence,” The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, 1 (1987), 375–​401, at p. 392. 16  Leah Price, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 92–​7. 17  Mary A. Favret, “Telling Tales about Genre: Poetry in the Romantic Novel,” Studies in the Novel, 26, no. 3 (1994), 281–​99, at p. 290. 18  Marshall Brown, “Poetry and the Novel,” in Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008), pp. 107–​28, at pp. 108 (quoting a 1797 fragment from Schlegel’s Literary Notebooks), and pp. 112, 124. 14 

 

78   THOMAS Keymer

The Poetical Novel Yet was fiction before Romanticism—​Brown’s first “Romantic novel” is Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield (1766), with its intermixture of ballad, ode, and lyric—​really as relentlessly prosaic as this account would suggest? An alternative view is proposed in a major study of generic interpenetration by G. Gabrielle Starr, in which eighteenth-​century novelists such as Haywood and Richardson at once draw on inherited lyric traditions and establish a language of emotion and self-​perception that becomes a constituent feature of Romantic verse. Novels absorb, and sometimes directly reproduce, poetic evocations of interior states, while “lyric expression in the long eighteenth century is cross-​implicated by and in the languages of emotion in early novels.”19 Something like the pattern Starr describes can be traced into the seventeenth century, most clearly in Lettres portugaises (1669), a pioneering, immensely influential work of epistolary fiction composed by Gabriel Joseph de Lavergne, comte de Guilleragues, and translated by Roger L’Estrange as Five Love-​Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier (1678). Loosely speaking, Lettres portugaises is an exercise in dérimage from verse epistle, a compelling adaptation into prose fiction of the poetic themes and rhetoric of Epistulae heroidum, the Ovidian locus classicus of “female complaint.” As such, this work offered novelists a model for representing consciousness in crisis that was most fully exploited by Aphra Behn in Love-​Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–​7), though there were also direct adaptations and continuations, including the spurious Five Love-​Letters Written by a Cavalier, in Answer (1683) and the third-​person “Story of the Portugueze Nun” in Jane Barker’s Lining of the Patch-​Work Screen (1726). Significant for present purposes is the eventual eclipse of L’Estrange’s prose translation by not one but two verse adaptations, Love without Affectation (1709) and the more popular Five Love-​Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier, Done into Verse (1713), both of which returned the nun to the Ovidian genre that first inspired her. The paradox is that the stressed, patterned prose of L’Estrange is often more poetic than the versifications. “Hee’s gone, hee’s gone; Irrevocably gone; h’as past the seas to fly thee,” L’Estrange writes in the opening letter, with a spare but striking effect of cadenced repetition. At this point the anonymous versifier of 1709 adds a maladroit rhyme, but otherwise has the sense to see that not much needed changing: “He’s gone, he’s gone! beyond Redemption gone! | He’s pass’d the Seas, that thou might’st be undone!” The 1713 version moves further away from L’Estrange’s wording, unleashing a blizzard of clichés: “The dear, false, cruel Man’s for ever gone, | And thou, unhappy thou! art left alone. | Gone is the tyrant, slighting all thy Charms, | And longs to languish in another’s arms.”20 These were the wrong words in the wrong places. Further complicating the generic interplay between prose fiction and verse epistle in the period was a heavily novelized version of the twelfth-​century correspondence of Abelard

19  G. Gabrielle Starr, Lyric Generations: Poetry and Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2004), p. 7. 20  Roger L’Estrange (trans.), Five Love-​Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier, in John Kerrigan (ed.), Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and “Female Complaint” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 240; Love without Affectation, in Five Letters from a Portuguese Nun, to a French Cavalier (London, 1709), p. 3; Five Love-​Letters from a Nun to a Cavalier, Done into Verse (London, 1713), p. 5.

 

Poems in the Novel    79 and Heloise, based not on the authentic Latin texts but on a French adaptation in the manner of Guilleragues, published by John Hughes in 1713. Hughes in turn became a source for Pope’s verse epistle Eloisa to Abelard (1717), Pope’s most sustained exercise in psychological exploration, and it has been argued by Gillian Beer that this was eventually to provide Radcliffe and her imitators with “a language of sensation, an iconography, a grandeur of scale, an emphasis on sequestration, and an acceptance of women’s extreme emotion which were all essential to the Gothic novelists.”21 Long before, the mental and emotional topography of Pope’s poem becomes an expressive resource in Richardson’s Pamela (1740). When Pamela surveys her lonely Lincolnshire prison, “with all its brown nodding Horrors of lofty Elms and Pines,” her words poignantly echo the despair of Eloisa, for whom “Black Melancholy … breathes a browner horror on the woods.”22 Later works such as Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) confirmed the novelistic absorption of the Heloise story, and more broadly the novel’s arrival as the genre of choice for depictions of inner turmoil. Even so, an elaborate rearguard action was fought by Anna Seward in Louisa, a Poetical Novel (1784), a self-​conscious attempt, in heroic couplets, to merge the narrative amplitude of Rousseau’s work with the formal rigor of Pope. Eloisa to Abelard is the stylistic model, but it was to Rousseau that Seward looked for the novelistic virtue of “minuteness,” above all in detailing the relationship between outward landscape and inward mindscape: “the Author had in view that striking letter in … the Nouvelle-​Heloise, which describes St. Preaux accompanying Mrs. Wolmar to the rocks of Meillerie, then covered with the richness of Summer-​luxuriance; and painting to her the situation of that very Scene, when he had visited it alone, amidst the horrors of Winter, and found those horrors congenial to the temper of his Soul.”23 Seward was probably unaware that the “poetical novel” subtitle had already been used by earlier writers to announce a modern style of handling pastoral or epic matter. Manlius; or, The Brave Adventurer: A Poetical Novel (1749) was a clandestine narrative poem about the Jacobite rebellion that sought to cash in on Ralph Griffiths’s more timely and successful novelized account, Ascanius; or, The Young Adventurer (1746). Daphnis: A Poetical, Pastoral Novel (1768) was a translation from the rhythmic German prose of Salomon Gessner, a Swiss poet who favored prose in order to imbue his idylls with verisimilitude and introspection. As Fabienne Moore writes, “neoclassical verse would have lessened Gessner’s impact, introducing a distancing artfulness not only to the shepherds’ outpouring of emotions, but also to their innocence.”24 These are fairly obscure works in the British context, Gessner’s success in Europe notwithstanding. But their convergence on the same hybrid generic label bears witness to a broader reluctance to see novel and poetry as wholly separate spheres. Even so, the appeal of the “poetical novel” label also lay as much in the teasing impression it gave of generic mismatch or oxymoron as in its promise of successful fusion. Some accounts of eighteenth-​century literary history see novel and poetry as pulling apart as the century wears on, as the 21 

Gillian Beer, “‘Our Unnatural No-​Voice’: The Heroic Epistle, Pope, and Women’s Gothic,” Yearbook of English Studies, 12 (1982), 125–​51, at p. 151. 22  Samuel Richardson, Pamela, ed. Albert J. Rivero (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011), p. 100, echoing Pope, Eloisa to Abelard, lines 165–​70. 23  Anna Seward, Louisa, a Poetical Novel (Lichfield, 1784), p. vi. 24  Fabienne Moore, Prose Poems of the French Enlightenment: Delimiting Genre (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), p. 140.

 

80   THOMAS Keymer increasing prominence and prestige of the novel forced on poets, or at least on theoreticians of poetry, a retreat to higher aesthetic ground. “As narrative becomes increasingly associated with the novel in the eighteenth century, poetry can no longer be thought of as primarily narrative in scope,” writes John Sitter of the shift from Aristotelian criteria to those of Wordsworth or Schiller: “ ‘poetry’ is coming less to stand for a set of stories than a way, or set of ways, of using language.”25

Interpolated Verse From the other side of the generic line, Defoe’s fiction might seem to illustrate this phenomenon. By the time of Robinson Crusoe in 1719, Defoe had been famous for two decades not least on account of his verse satires, and on the relatively rare occasions when he acknowledged his work on title pages he did so as “the Author of the True-​Born Englishman.” Pope may have mocked him as a tin-​eared poet in The Dunciad (1728), where Defoe’s “earless” state casts him as seditious and tone-​deaf at a single stroke, but there is no denying the popular success of The True-​Born Englishman (1701), Jure Divino (1706), and other satirical poems by Defoe. The novels, however, seem pointedly discontinuous with this authorial identity. They eschew anything resembling poetic prose, and commit themselves stylistically to a functional, transparent language of representation, geared to the unambiguous transmission of narrative meaning. The best rule, Defoe observes of prose fiction a year before Robinson Crusoe, is “to make the Language plain, artless, and honest, suitable to the Story, and in a Stile easie and free, with as few exotick Phrases and obsolete Words as possible, that the meanest Reader … may have no Obstruction to his searching the History of things by their being obscurely represented.”26 For all their richness of irony and implication, the novels derive their power from the rhetorical restraint with which they convey the human struggle to survive—​from a less-​is-​more aesthetic that minimizes verbal complexity in pursuit of descriptive rigor. Nor is Defoe willing to admit his own or others’ poems into his fiction. Robinson Crusoe features just one single line of verse, “For sudden Joys, like Grief, confound at first,” quoted as Crusoe recalls the confusion of deliverance when washed ashore after his shipwreck. But this line is there for political reasons arising from its provenance in a Dissenting broadside of 1672, and it functions to point up the relation between Crusoe’s ordeal and that of Restoration nonconformists. It inaugurates a pattern of political implication, not poetic allusion. In A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), H.F. quotes four lines from Defoe’s own early poem A New Discovery of an Old Intreague (1691). But otherwise it is bills of mortality, not inset poems, that stud the narrative, and instead of pastoral lovers carving poems on trees, one finds only the dying howl of a plague victim, cut with desperation into a wooden gate: “O mIsErY! | We BoTH ShaLL DyE, | WoE, WoE.” The heroine of Moll Flanders (1722) caps

25 

John Sitter, “Questions in Poetics: Why and How Poetry Matters,” in John Sitter (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-​Century Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), 133–​56, at p. 137. 26  Daniel Defoe, A Continuation of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy at Paris (London, 1718), p. v.

 

Poems in the Novel    81 verses flirtatiously with a lover, but she dismisses the result, etched on glass with a diamond ring, as mere “poetical scribble.”27 There is nothing marmoreal here. So where might one look among Defoe’s contemporaries to find harbingers of the poetic novel described by Brown? More specifically, where might one find the presence of interpolated lyrics, as the clearest formal indicator of this type? The obvious place would be Jane Barker’s so-​called “Galesia Trilogy,” the umbrella term now often used for Barker’s relatively straightforward amatory novella, Love Intrigues (1713), and her more intricate and layered follow-​up works, A Patch-​Work Screen for the Ladies (1723) and The Lining of the Patch Work Screen (1726). In practice “trilogy” is something of a misnomer, with its suggestions of continuity and coherence, but the aesthetic of fragmentation that governs the sequence makes it hospitable to included verse throughout. In Barker’s overall scheme, which she underpins with analogies between text and textile, the work is patched together from short compositions by Galesia in multiple genres:  “Pieces of Romances, Poems, Love-​Letters, and the like.” Barker thereby provides a formal alternative, discontinuous and generically hybrid, to the “Histories at Large … so Fashionable in this Age, viz. Robinson Crusoe, and Moll Flanders,” and holds up the result for imitation by her readers “as well in their Discourse, as their Needle-​Work.”28 Poetry is especially prominent in the mix, and on the title page of A Patch-​Work Screen Barker—​or her unlikely but always prescient publisher, Edmund Curll—​ anticipates by many decades the “interspersed with poetry” formula of the 1790s. The work is “a Collection of Instructive Novels, Related After a Manner intirely New, and interspersed with Rural Poems, describing the Innocence of a Country-​Life.” Yet Barker was as much a throwback as a pioneer. Born in 1652, she drew in the trilogy on verse and prose first drafted and circulated in the 1680s, and a patina of Jacobite innuendo reinforces the air of her late works as relics of another age. Her poetic model is Katherine Philips, the virtuous “Orinda” of the seventeenth century, and for fiction she looks back to Sidney and La Calprenède: Those honourable Romances of old Arcadia, Cleopatra, Cassandra, &c. discover a Genius of Vertue and Honour, which reign’d in the time of those Heroes, and Heroines, as well as in the Authors that report them; but the Stories of our Times are so black, that the Authors, can hardly escape being smutted, or defil’d in touching such Pitch.

In practice, Barker’s verse is not always especially reminiscent of either Philips or Sidney, and perhaps the most memorable poem in A Patch-​Work Screen, beginning “Take a large Barn-​door Cock, and all his Bones break,” is a recipe for chicken soup. But for the most part Barker deploys verse much as the Arcadia deploys it, to demonstrate the refinement and purity of idealized characters, though typically with more jarring effects in narrative context. Galesia’s verses are the work of a heroine who renounces love and the world for poetry and religion; in the pervasive language of needlework, she finds Orinda’s writing “so interwoven with Vertue and Honour” that she devotes herself to verse, “which has ever since interlac’d 27  Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Thomas Keymer and James Kelly (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), p. 41; Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Louis Landa and David Roberts (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 21, 130; Defoe, Moll Flanders, ed. G. A. Starr and Linda Bree (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), p. 67. 28  Jane Barker, The Galesia Trilogy and Selected Manuscript Poems, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 74, 51.

 

82   THOMAS Keymer all the Actions of my Life.”29 Unlike Orinda or Sidney’s Pamela, however, Galesia also has to inhabit a scandalous intrigue narrative in the vein of Behn, and to record similar stories involving others. Her poems thus stand in counterpoint, not harmony, with the prose that surrounds them: rural innocence versus worldly, urban forms of treachery and exploitation. Collections of short fiction by Barker were republished after her death, but it is hard to find much evidence that A Patch-​Work Screen was remembered. In the following decades, novels were presented on title pages as “interspersed” with all sorts of dispiriting things—​moral reflections, sentiments, remarks, observations—​but no one picked up Barker’s formula for included verse until its reinvention with Williams’s Julia in 1790. Even so, verse continued to be included in novels, and the most significant novelists before Richardson and Fielding were typically also poets (and even these were published poets, albeit in obscure contexts, before writing novels). Alongside Defoe, but with greater readiness to integrate the two modes, was Eliza Haywood. Haywood burst on the scene a few months before Robinson Crusoe with Love in Excess (1719–​20), and was frequently hailed, or alternatively blamed, as a successor to Behn and Manley. But as Kathryn R. King has argued, no less important a context for Haywood’s fiction was the “Hillarian” circle of aspiring writers who gathered around the poet Aaron Hill as she composed her novels, including Richard Savage, James Thomson, and Edward Young. Core activities within this coterie were the manuscript circulation and sometimes the collaborative authorship of verse, and though Haywood published only novels at first, several of her poems reached print alongside reprints of the fiction in her collected Works of 1724, and in Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems (1725). The governing aesthetic of the group was Longinian, and for King the fervid, hyperbolic style of Love in Excess is best viewed as the experimental formulation of a prose equivalent: “an attempt to translate into amatory fiction the effects of ‘the sublime,’ to represent the transporting effects of love in the medium of prose fiction.”30 Much of this judgment is implicit in a verse commendation contributed by Savage to Love in Excess, which credits Haywood’s prose with a poetic musicality transcending verse: “Thy prose in sweeter harmony refines, | Than numbers flowing thro’ the Muse’s lines.”31 In the text itself, Haywood emphasizes the activities of writing and reading poetry, reinforcing the link between verse and prose as comparable indicators, and stimulators, of extreme passion. As in Moll Flanders, but in far more heightened style, capping verses becomes an erotic game between courting lovers, and in Haywood’s hands it both displays and promotes “the wonderful effects of love.” In the second instalment of Love in Excess, the Count d’Elmont feels encouraged in his pursuit of Melliora on catching her dreamily reading Ovid’s Heroides; in the third, an entire poem is included (“The unfortunate Camilla’s Complaint to the Moon”) to amplify the narrative evocation of erotic obsession.32

29 Barker, Galesia Trilogy, pp. 252, 151, 76. 30 

Kathryn R. King, “New Contexts for Early Novels by Women: The Case of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and the Hillarians, 1719–​1725,” in Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (eds.), A Companion to the Eighteenth-​Century English Novel and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 261–​75, at p. 265. 31  Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess, ed. David Oakleaf (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1994), p. 86. 32 Haywood, Love in Excess, pp. 76, 112, 204.

 

Poems in the Novel    83 It is an oddity of literary history that Richardson, so anxious to decontaminate the novel genre and dissociate himself from Haywood especially, not only printed two volumes of Secret Histories, Novels, and Poems in its 1732 edition, but also turned to Haywood’s mentor, Hill, as promoter-​in-​chief of Pamela. Hill later became, alongside Young, Richardson’s closest literary adviser as he drafted Clarissa (1747–​8) and circulated the text in pre-​publication states. In practice much of Hill’s input was resisted or ignored, but Hill does seem to have exerted real influence in the lyric dimension of the novels, and contributed poems of his own to Pamela (“The Messenger” and “Celia, in the Garden”), at first without having given permission, though he later supplied corrected texts for use in revised editions. A further Hill poem, “The Misgrounded Compassion,” is in Richardson’s Pamela sequel of 1741.33 The two men fell out for a while when Hill overstepped the mark in his Clarissa role, and this may be why Lovelace turns out, in the first edition, to be an admirer of Hill’s extravagantly sensual poem “The Picture of Love.” With rapturous approval, he quotes dubious lines from Hill about “sweet compulsion” in his sinister fire-​scene letter, which foreshadows the rape—​ though Richardson then deleted this passage from the second edition, when relations with Hill were repaired.34 Elsewhere Lovelace is easily the most prolific source of included verse in Clarissa, notably from Restoration heroic tragedy, and to some extent his verse quotations work as a moral marker, a point of contrast with the prosaic rigor of a heroine who speaks in the language of conduct manuals and casuistical divinity. Venice Preserv’d and The Fair Penitent emerge from the process as significant intertexts for Clarissa, but critical interpretations based on other verse tragedies had the wind taken out of their sails by the discovery in 1981 that most of Lovelace’s quotations come from a thematically organized crib, Edward Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry (probably the sixth edition of 1718), complete with Bysshe’s mistranscriptions and misattributions.35 Richardson may have known the original plays, but that is often unlikely. More genuinely integral to the meaning of the novels are passages of verse that Richardson either composed himself or took from female-​centered networks of manuscript circulation to which his sponsorship of poetry by women gave him access. No source has been discovered for the crude but trenchant poem that Pamela quotes to articulate her moral and spiritual egalitarianism, where “at the last, are levell’d, King and Slave, | Without Distinction, in the silent Grave.”36 It is possible that the original of this poem blushes unseen in a magazine column somewhere, but a verse item from Richardson’s own hand had previously appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine for January 1736, and this is probably another example of his work. In Clarissa, the most striking lyric insertion is the “Ode to Wisdom, by a Lady,” which Clarissa quotes in full as a reflection of her Christian Stoic values; also inserted is a musical score, so offering the poem to readers, Gentleman’s Magazine-​style, as a script for polite sociability (and setting a trend followed by later novels like William Toldervy’s History of Two Orphans 33 

Christine Gerrard, Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector, 1685–​1750 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 205–​6, 211. 34  Nace, “Aaron Hill in Richardson’s Clarissa,” Notes & Queries, 55, no. 3 (2008), 331–​3; see also Nace, “More Aaron Hill in Clarissa,” Notes & Queries, 56, no. 2 (2009), pp. 247–​8. 35  Michael E. Connaughton, “Richardson’s Familiar Quotations: Clarissa and Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry,” Philological Quarterly, 60, no. 2 (1981), 183–​95. 36 Richardson, Pamela, p. 239.

 

84   THOMAS Keymer (1756), which features nine songs with musical settings). A man of print to his fingertips—​and incidentally the printer of landmark collections by women such as Mary Barber’s Poems on Several Occasions (1734) and the 1751 volume of Mary Leapor’s Poems upon Several Occasions—​ Richardson here violated the conventions of manuscript culture by using, without permission, a scribally published original by Elizabeth Carter. Carter objected vigorously, and embarrassed Richardson on the subject in the Gentleman’s Magazine. The quarrel was resolved in time, and Richardson later acted as printer for Carter’s Epictetus translation of 1758.37 Then there are the reworkings of Job and Psalms—​“the sacred poetry of the Hebrews,” as scholars like Robert Lowth were beginning to call these and other Old Testament books—​ that both heroines undertake in consolatory self-​alignment with the suffering exemplars of scripture. Pamela’s jingling adaptation of Psalm 137 flirts too often with bathos: “Remember, Lord, this Mrs. Jewkes, | When with a mighty Sound, | She cries, Down with her Chastity, | Down to the very Ground!”38 But Clarissa’s more conservative, unrhymed adaptations of Job and Psalms, in collages of pronominally adjusted quotations, are among the novel’s most plangent passages. By the end of Clarissa, conventional prose narrative is an activity from which Richardson withdraws his heroine, leaving as her only viable utterance the terse poetic sublimity of Job: “Oh that my grief were thoroughly weighed, and my calamity laid in the balance together! | For now it would be heavier than the sand of the sea: therefore my words are swallowed up.”39 For Starr, such passages indicate the more broadly poetic condition of Clarissa, and an ambition to capture for the novel genre qualities of intensity, resonance, and emotional richness associated mainly with verse; in the process, “lyric is dilated and diffused, its conventions spread over many pages and a vast stretch of time.”40 It may be for this extended lyrical effect, and not simply in Aristotelian terms of fiction and plot, that Clarissa was termed a poem by Denis Diderot, and its author “le poëte Richardson.”41 Not least in contradistinction, Henry Fielding presented his answer to Pamela, Joseph Andrews (1742), as “a comic Epic-​Poem in Prose,”42 and noisily asserted the conformity of his fiction with neoclassical aesthetics. The presence or absence of meter was a mere detail, and by all other relevant criteria—​fable, action, characters, sentiments, diction—​Fénelon’s Télémaque (1699), and by implication Joseph Andrews too, had as good a claim to epic status as Homer’s Odyssey or the lost comic Margites recorded by Aristotle. Fielding may sincerely have believed this argument, and in the same year he tells James Harris, albeit with a final flourish of ironic overclaim, that every sort of Stile except the Sublime may be reached by Prose: And what if even this may not only be atchieved by the Prose-​Writer; but it should be found that the Dignity & Majesty of Prose should be superiour to that of Verse. Will yo pardon me if I think Paradise lost is writ in Prose.43 37  T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 214–​16, 357. 38 Richardson, Pamela, p. 130. 39  Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 1125. 40 Starr, Lyric Generations, p. 46. 41  Œuvres complètes de Diderot, ed. J. Assézat and M. Tourneux, 20 vols. (Paris: Garnier frères, 1875), vol. v, p. 222. 42  Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 4. 43  The Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding, ed. Martin C. Battestin and Clive T. Probyn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 24.

 

Poems in the Novel    85 By the time of Tom Jones (1749), Fielding was laying claim to even the unreachable sublime, or at least a playful simulacrum of it, in the high-​flown description of Sophia’s beauty that he bills as “A short Hint of what we can do in the Sublime.”44 Both novels feature meticulous set-​piece burlesques of epic battle, waged with improvised weapons by yokels and bucks. More seriously, both are structured on the nostos model of epic homecoming, with elaborate patterns of allusion to Homer and Virgil. Prose or not, Paradise Lost is enlisted as a key vernacular intertext, and here Fielding draws closer to the practice of Richardson, most clearly where Tom’s expulsion from Paradise Hall—​“The World, as Milton phrases it, lay all before him”—​provides a comic parallel to Clarissa’s departure with Lovelace from Harlowe Place, “like the first pair, I at least driven out of my paradise.”45

Verse Quotation Yet there is also a more plainly epideictic aspect to Fielding’s allusiveness, especially to the classics (see ­chapter 38, “Allusion”). His learned quotations from Latin verse, usually with translation but less commonly with specification of source, position the novels on a plane of discourse from which “the mere English reader” is excluded with an urbane smile.46 Few imitators could compete with Fielding’s showy classicism, but over the next few decades verse quotation became an almost compulsory feature of novels, often with an emphasis on Restoration sources of the kind favored by Richardson’s Lovelace. Just how rapidly this elevating gesture caught on can be seen from Haywood’s resumption of the novel genre in Betsy Thoughtless (1751), which differs from her amatory fiction of the 1720s not least in its copious use of decorative verse quotation—​Cowley and Waller, Dryden and Otway, Congreve and Rowe—​introduced by Haywood’s narrator with a knowing “as the Poet says.” Yet even as this trend took hold, incorporation of original poetry failed to keep pace. Poets frequently feature as characters in fiction after 1750, often with examples of their poems supplied, but few are granted the respect of Johnson’s Imlac. More typical are the “flowery” poetaster Colonel Bellville in Frances Brooke’s Lady Julia Mandeville (1763), who writes “excellent verses, as Moliere says, to lock up in your bureau,” or the “Man of Genius” in Frances Burney’s Cecilia (1782), whose “indulgence of his fancy in some hasty compositions in verse” deludes him with fleeting celebrity, to disastrous effect.47 Elsewhere Burney includes verse as a serious marker of “internal wretchedness” like that of the distressed Scots poet in Evelina (1778), and in this respect she keeps alive a tradition of poetic interiority in the novel between Barker and Smith.48 So, earlier, did Charlotte Lennox, whose

44 

Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, ed. Martin C. Battestin and Fredson Bowers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 154. 45 Fielding, Tom Jones, p. 331; Richardson, Clarissa, p. 393. 46 Fielding, Joseph Andrews, p. 3. 47  Frances Brooke, The History of Lady Julia Mandeville, 2 vols. (1763), vol. i, pp. 155, 156; Frances Burney, Cecilia; or, Memoirs of an Heiress, ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), p. 216. 48  Frances Burney, Evelina, ed. Edward A. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), p. 177.

 

86   THOMAS Keymer Harriot Stuart (1750) draws on Lennox’s own Poems on Several Occasions (1747) to illustrate the tale of a heroine who, given in her youth to “a kind of poetic prose,” wins admiration during the novel for her scribally circulated verse.49 But the claim to articulate, regulate, and most of all to dignify the emotions is just as often debunked, most conspicuously with the ludicrous college poet of Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle (1751), whose flatulent, chaotic ode is a well-​targeted send-​up of Lyttelton’s “Monody.” Charged with technical incompetence and emotional posturing, Smollett’s poet serenely maintains “that the verse, in being irregular, the more nearly resembled the natural exclamations of real affliction; and that such irregularity had not only been excused, but even considered as a beauty in many modern productions.”50 Satirical passages like this were among other things a gesture of commitment to prose, and a sign of growing confidence in the novel as a serious, independent literary genre. In The Countess of Dellwyn (1759), Sarah Fielding becomes quite explicit in her disavowal of verse, with a merely token pose of generic modesty. Where her phony anti-​heroine retreats into poetic hyperbole, “heroically lamenting her own hard Fortune, as blank Verse or Rhyme occurred to her Remembrance,” Fielding’s narrator refuses to evoke psychological turmoil in anything less reliable than measured prose description. “If there were any reasonable Hopes of Success, I would make Effort to allure [the Muses’] Assistance by melodious Verse; but as those Ladies have been long out of Fashion, and would be deaf to all my Supplications, I  must proceed in humble Prose.”51 Numerous successors proceeded the same way for the rest of the century, developing and consolidating conventions for the representation of inward experience and outward environments that went beyond the scope of lyric verse. This was not yet the “solidity of specification” that James considered the supreme virtue of prose narrative, but as Cynthia Wall has argued, large cultural changes in the later eighteenth century—​experiential, technological, commercial, epistemological—​placed a new premium on the detail-​oriented vividness in which novels specialized.52 It was thanks to this tradition that Smith could achieve, in ten novels between Emmeline (1788) and The Young Philosopher (1798), and in the face of all her generic misgivings, striking narrative amplification of her poetry’s characteristic themes of emotion and landscape. By combining these novels with new poems ventriloquized in her characters’ voices, which she then fed back into expanded editions of Elegiac Sonnets, she achieved not mere interpolation of verse, but real generic blending. Like Williams, who made this blending a titular proclamation, and Radcliffe, whose work was its most conspicuous demonstration, she could do so only because a mature prose rhetoric had been created for her to exploit.

49 

Charlotte Lennox, The Life of Harriot Stuart, Written by Herself, ed. Susan Kubica Howard (Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1995), p. 64. 50  Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, ed. James L. Clifford, rev. Paul-​Gabriel Boucé (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983), p. 657. 51  Sarah Fielding, The History of the Countess of Dellwyn, 2 vols. (1759), vol. ii, pp. 32, 25. 52 James, Art of Criticism, p. 173 (“The Art of Fiction”); Cynthia Sundberg Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006).

 

Poems in the Novel    87

References Brown, Marshall, “Poetry and the Novel,” in Richard Maxwell and Katie Trumpener (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008), pp. 107–​28. Favret, Mary A., “Telling Tales about Genre: Poetry in the Romantic Novel,” Studies in the Novel, 26, no. 3 (1994), 281–​99. Hunter, J.  Paul, Before Novels:  The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-​Century English Fiction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). McKeon, Michael, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–​1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987). Parker, Kate, and Courtney Weiss Smith (eds.), Eighteenth-​Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2013). Power, Henry, Epic into Novel:  Henry Fielding, Scriblerian Satire, and the Consumption of Classical Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015). Price, Leah, The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000). Rowland, Ann Wierda, “Romantic Poetry and the Romantic Novel,” in James Chandler and Maureen McLane (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008). Starr, G. Gabrielle, Lyric Generations:  Poetry and Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2004).

 

Chapter 6

P oem s in th e Nu rse ry Andrea Immel and Lissa Paul In his survey of the state of children’s poetry in the twenty-​first century, Richard Flynn describes the “vast bulk of it,” disparagingly, as “goofy, sentimental or recycled from days of yore.”1 That was not the case in the long eighteenth century. Because poetry written exclusively for children at the time was still too novel to have been integrated into a literary hierarchy, few low-​order connotations were then associated with the “for children” tag. To begin to grasp the difference in attitudes toward children and poetry then and now, we have only to look to ways in which young eighteenth-​century children talked about their experiences of verse. Take Alexander Pope’s claim, “As yet a Child nor yet a Fool to Fame, | I lisp’d in Numbers, for the Numbers came,”2 for example, or seven-​year-​old Marjory Fleming’s journal entry, “Doctor Swift’s works are very funny & amusing & I get some by hart.”3 Neither Alexander nor Marjory were average children, but they had the advantage of being raised in a literary culture where children were encouraged to enjoy—​not fear—​the reading, reciting, and writing of verse. As Mrs. Barbauld remarked, “Poetry requires in the reader a certain elevation of mind and a practiced ear. It is seldom relished unless a taste be formed for it pretty early.”4 Our focus in this chapter, therefore, will be divided between the environment that encouraged a taste for poetry in young readers and the verse that was being composed for them.

1  Richard Flynn, “The Fear of Poetry,” in M. O. Grenby and Andrea Immel (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 76–​90, at p. 76. Flynn’s essay covers the current state of Anglophone poetry for children, revisiting ideas in a previous essay on American children’s poetry, “Consolation Prize,” Signal, 100 (2003), 66–​83. There he describes the sad state of American children’s poetry initially as “Classic, Comic or Cute,” though he adds the category of “Consoling” to his dispiriting list. 2  Alexander Pope, “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,” lines 127–​8, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–​69), vol. iv, pp. 104–​5. 3  Marjory Fleming, Journal III, in The Journals, Letters and Poetry, ed. Arundell Esdaile (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1934), p. 121. 4  Anna Letitia Barbauld, “On the Origins and Progress of Novel-​Reading,” in Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2001), p. 407.

 

Poems in the Nursery    89

Verse Immersion The history of eighteenth-​century poetry for children would be terra incognita if Iona and Peter Opie’s Oxford Book of Children’s Verse (1973) had not included a substantial selection of carefully chosen works from authors famous, forgotten, and anonymous, but we have decided not to follow in their footsteps. Nor will we emulate Morag Styles’s From the Garden to the Street: An Introduction to Three Hundred Years of Poetry for Children (1998) and survey the genre’s most important single-​authored volumes of verse. Her research, however, on women writers, “lost from the nursery,”5 as she says, suggested to us a return to the archives. Exploring the fruits of postwar institutional children’s book collecting has broadened our understanding of what eighteenth-​century children were hearing and reading, and of how they responded to the material. Our findings, as we develop them here, suggest that children growing up in the Enlightenment were not starved for rewarding literary experiences. On the contrary, their routine exposure to all kinds of verse and poetry constituted something closer to verse immersion.6 For example, the topsy-​turvy humor of The World Turn’d Upside Down was available in two different versions in verse: one a penny chapbook with crude cuts, the other an elegant sixty-​four-​page volume illustrated with engraved plates. A girl might have proudly inscribed her copy of Collection of Pretty Poems for the Amusement of Children Three Feet High (1756) with this traditional ownership rhyme: Steal not this book for fear of shame For heare you see the owner’s name.

The interplay of image and doggerel in the flap-​book Harlequin Cherokee; or, The Indian Chiefs in London (1772) might have delighted children who had seen the pantomime that inspired it. Siblings could subscribe for individual copies of Puerilia (1751), a volume of original poetry for girls and boys by John Marchant. The sensitive child might sniffle over the epitaph for a pet dormouse “really written by a little boy” in The History of Little Goody Two Shoes (1765), while a less tender-​hearted one chortle at John Gilpin’s wild ride. Time could be wiled away assembling a jigsaw puzzle illustrating John Aikin’s “Phaeton Junior” from Evenings at Home (1792–​6). In company the accomplished could sing settings of nursery rhymes in James Hook’s Christmas Box (1797) or moral songs for children translated from the German of Christian Felix Weisse. By structuring our chapter around a child’s induction into literacy from infancy, we are better able to suggest how verse immersion worked—​in public and in private settings, in print and manuscript, for rich children and for poor ones. We also want to make clear at the outset that we are deviating from the opposition of “instruction versus delight” that has permeated modern criticism and histories of children’s literature since F. J. Harvey Darton’s seminal Children’s Books in England (1931) in order to 5 

See Morag Styles, “Lost from the Nursery: Women Writing Poetry for Children, 1800–​1850,” Signal: Approaches to Children’s Books, 63 (Spring 1990), 177–​205, and “‘Of the Spontaneous Kind?’ Women Writing Poetry for Children—​from Jane Johnson to Christina Rossetti,” in Mary Hilton, Morag Styles, and Victor Watson (eds.), Opening the Nursery Door: Reading, Writing and Childhood, 1600–​1900 (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 142–​58. 6  For a similar view, see M. O. Grenby, Children’s Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2008), p. 40.

 

90    Andrea Immel and Lissa Paul discuss the genre in its cultural context. Because texts classed as didactic—​John Gay’s fables or Isaac Watts’s Divine Songs, for example—​are now regarded as inferior forms of children’s literature even though they were essential texts in their times, only the “goofy” and “sentimental” as types of the delightful continue to bob on the surface of the genre’s historical record. The rest of the poetic landscape sank, for the most part, into oblivion, and with it the literary context. As the construct of the Romantic child as the default “child” recedes, it is now possible to excavate some of that lost landscape and to see how permeable the boundaries between instruction and delight were. Because we are also fully cognizant that many children were taught at home for all or part of their education, we are able to attend to one of the most interesting features of poetry for children during this period: it was not confined to the nursery, that is, limited to a space cut off and separate from the social and intellectual life of the house where bland food for the mind was laid out on scaled-​down furniture. Rather, as we will show, poetry enjoyed a much higher profile: as something to nourish enquiring minds, fuel conversations, or spark informal lessons arising from encounters with everyone from servants to siblings and from tutors to tradesmen. Children experienced verse both as something to make learning easier and as something to study in its own right. Verses were sung, read in books, memorized, copied out for pleasure, and recited for praise. Poetry was as alive and present in formal lessons at home or at school as it was in the popular songs, cries, and ballads heard on the street (see ­chapter 1, “Poems on the Streets”).

Sounding Out During the eighteenth century, nursery verse was circulated orally to children by women (typically female servants and mothers) rather than via printed texts. It was only an eccentric antiquarian like John Aubrey who worried that this kind of lore might be lost to posterity: what some people heard was “th’ hateful Noise of Cradle rowling: | Now deaf ’d with Mammy’s Lullaby, | In Consort with the peevish Cry” that Robert Dodsley described,7 while others would have agreed with Isaac Watts that “The conundrums of nurses and dull rhymes that are sung to lull children asleep, or to sooth a froward humour, should be generally forbidden to entertain children.”8 Nursery rhymes were not regarded as a natural introduction to verse for children until the idea took hold in the mid-​nineteenth century that they were an integral part of every English-​speaking person’s literary heritage.9 Nevertheless, the majority of verses in the nursery rhyme canon first appeared in one of the three major collections published during the eighteenth century: the two-​volume Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-​Book (1744); Mother Goose’s Melody (1780); and Gammer Gurton’s Garland (c.1795), compiled by Joseph Ritson. 7 

Robert Dodsley, “An Epistle to My Friend J.B.,” in A Muse in Livery (London: printed for the author, 1732), p. 78. 8  Isaac Watts, The Improvement of the Mind: Second Part, ed. D. Jennings and P. Doddridge (London, 1784), p. 112. 9  For a revisionist history of the nursery rhyme, see Andrea Immel and Brian Alderson, “Nurse Lovechild’s Legacy: A History of Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-​Book” (Los Angeles: Cotsen Occasional Press, 2013), pp. 51–​5.

 

Poems in the Nursery    91 In the long eighteenth century, then, a child’s first verses were not typically equated with Mother Goose’s sonnets, but formal lessons, which could commence as early as two or three, or before the child could speak or “go,” as it was familiarly expressed. An explanation of the dominant method for teaching reading—​the “phonetic” or, more accurately, the “graphemic/​ phonemic” method—​is in order. Instruction commences with the smallest meaningful units of written language’s code, the letters of the alphabet, whose significations are assigned conventionally. Although these graphic symbols have no inherent meanings, they are considered the “font of all learning.”10 After memorizing the letters’ names and sounds, the child moved through a graded sequence of combining the letters into larger units of meaning: from letters to syllables; from syllables to monosyllabic words; from monosyllabic words to words of two, three, four, and five syllables; and finally words into sentences. In an encomium to the lowly hornbook, which had been used to teach the alphabet since the fifteenth century, Thomas Tickell celebrated the miraculous potential of shuffling and reshuffling the twenty-​six letters: O mighty Book, all are contain’d in you. All humane Arts, and ev’ry Science meet, Within the Limits of thy single Sheet.11

The lengthy elementary reading exercises for sounding out syllables and monosyllabic words in primers might be made more lilting through the use of rhythm, assonance, consonance, and rhyme. A drill such as “HA ha. HE he. HI hi hi hi. HO ho. Ha he hi ho. HU hu. Ha he hi ho hu” runs through a proscribed combination of consonants and vowels and bounces along hypnotically, threatening to trip up any inattentive child mindlessly reciting the series of alphabetic tongue-​twisters.12 Another strategy was to structure single-​syllable vowel/​consonant blends in lines of rhyming words. All the “jingling” in Thomas Dyche’s Guide to the English Tongue (1710) prompted the criticism that students droned through the lists without understanding the underlying principles for the combination of sounds.13 But could the presence of suggestive jingles within those long lists, such as “hiss kiss miss piss bliss” or “wench, drench, French, stench,” be a shrewd teacher’s trick to keep pupils alert?14 The little illustrated rhyming alphabets that enlivened two of the period’s most important texts for teaching reading were expected to perform more important cultural work than simple amusement. The easy verses reflected key educational values—​the early impression of religious and moral ideas on the mind and the engagement of the senses—​that writers for children would try to facilitate through the verse’s allure. The preceptive alphabet from T.H.’s Guide for the Child and Youth (1667), which became synonymous with the New England Primer (c.1685), inducted generations of children on both sides of the Atlantic into reading. The rhyme links reading to religion in its well-​known opening couplets: A In Adam’s fall We sinned all.

10 

“A Learned Song,” in Mother Goose’s Melody; or, Sonnets for the Cradle (London, c.1784), p. 70. Thomas Tickell, Poem in Praise of the Horn-​Book (Dublin, 1728), p. 8. 12  A Pretty Play-​Thing for Children (London, c.1759), p. 50. 13  Ian Michael, The Teaching of English from the Sixteenth Century to 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 101–​2. 14  Thomas Dyche, Guide to the English Tongue, in Two Parts, 2nd ed. (London, 1710), p. 7. 11 

 

92    Andrea Immel and Lissa Paul B This Book attend, Thy life to mend.15

The alliterative alphabet in Johann Amos Comenius’s Orbis sensualium pictus (1659), on the other hand, connects the sounds the letters represent with the same noises things make: The infant cryeth e e e The wind bloweth fi fi fi The goose gaggleth ga ga ga16

It foreshadows changes that would occur as the deep affiliations between reading and religion gave way to a more secular model of instruction based on the engagement of the ear and eye. The illustrated rhyming alphabet that taught how to name, sort, and categorize familiar things quickly became an essential part of eighteenth-​century reading instruction, from Newbery’s jaunty Little Pretty Pocket-​Book (1744) to the revised 1784 edition of the staid steady-​seller Reading Made Quite Easy, whose contents were drawn chiefly from the Psalms. Most letters in alliterative alphabets introduced basic vocabulary and information about the subject of signification in what Karen Coats calls a “traditional, linear, epistemological masculine” model.17 But sober verses like “D. Door. In Learning ne’er be counted poor, | But boldly knock on wisdom’s door,” could be followed by something more light-​hearted such as “E. Eel. For thanks you surely may appeal | If you’re as nimble as an eel.”18 Gentle social satire might also lure children through the door from babbling infancy to literacy: “A was an archer,” also known as “Tom Thumb’s Alphabet,” was peopled by familiar types, including the virago, the drunken vintner, and the stiff-​necked Quaker. It was reprinted so often that it inspired a parody for adults: “A was an Author | But got little by’t.”19 Invitations to engage in the active, imaginative construction of a poem’s reality, or what Coats calls “alphabetic containment,” could also be found in familiar rhymes like “A Apple Pye,” where the letters of the alphabet are personified as children scheming for shares of a gigantic pie (Coats, p. 92). Sometimes experienced teachers, like the Sheffield schoolmaster William Ronksley, explained why they believed children learned materials presented in verse more quickly than those in prose. In The Child’s Week’s-​Work (c.1712), Ronksley presumed that pupils could already sound out the letters and so began with easy lessons in the Psalms’ familiar stanzaic form. In the first poem, he reassured his pupils that lessons would be as “short and sweet” as his lines and would require attendance for just two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon, leaving plenty of time to play in between.20 He defended his approach by noting that reading instruction began at an age when children’s “gay and airy tempers” made

15 

Guide for Child and Youth (London, 1709), sig. A5r. Johann Amos Comenius, “Alphabetum vivum et vocale,” in Orbis sensualium pictus (London, 1672), p. 4. 17  Karen Coats, “P is for Patriarchy: Reimagining the Alphabet,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 25, no. 2 (2000), 88. 18  The Alphabet (London: H. Roberts, c.1776), leaves [5]‌and [6]. 19  “A Satirical Alphabet,” in The Miscellaneous and Whimsical Lucubrations of Lancelot Poverty-​Struck (London, 1768), p. 46. 20  William Ronksley, The Child’s Week’s-​Work (London, 1712), p. 4. 16 

 

Poems in the Nursery    93 the enjoyment of serious topics wittily or elegantly expressed beyond their comprehension (Ronksley, p. 3). So why not speed his passage through “wisdom’s door” by assigning age-​ appropriate jingles on things obvious to the sense like this one: Gloves for the Hands, Our Necks have Bands The Head is deckt with Hair : Some Masks the Face, And so no place, Or part, is left quite bare. (Ronksley, pp. 11–​12)

At the end of his five-​week course, Ronskley promised that students would be able to tackle “almost, what English Book you please,” while other children schooled the traditional way would limp along on “their old, rough, melancholy Trod” (Ronksley, p. 51). In the long run, it did not matter if the lines were dull or heavy, because this kind of easy verse was the equivalent of the walker a toddler uses until support is no longer necessary. Ronksley was not alone in relying on versified content to ease children along the road to learning. There were also rhyming grammar books, such as Grammar and Pleasure United; or, An Easy Introduction to the English and Latin Languages in Verse (1770) by Jenkins Thomas Phillips, consisting of helpful little mnemonics, aide-​memoires to relieve the tedium of language learning. The book begins with a reassuring little couplet—​“Eight only Parts the wise Grammarians teach | Because in them we comprehend all Speech”21—​that presages the delightful nineteenth-​century rhyming picture book introductions to grammar such as Thomas Love Peacock’s Sir Hornbook (1814), Mr. Stops’ Punctuation Personified (1824), or Walter Crane’s Romance of the Three Rs (1886). But not all verse invitations to learn what was necessary to be known were gilded pills. As literacy spread down the social hierarchy during the eighteenth century, the realization that poor children had to be taught as well as those in middle-​and upper-​class families became increasingly urgent. Henry Dixon, who wrote The English Tutor (1726) for charity school children, was well aware that there would be reluctant learners among his pupils. His much reprinted “Description of a Bad Boy,” an anecdote about a balky student that may date back to the Middle Ages, appears at first to chastise a dunce too slow to learn the most elementary of drills, the recitation of the letters of the alphabet in order. “Come on, cry Great A!” urge his classmates. But it is not that the lad can’t cry “Great A,” it is that he won’t, having shrewdly realized that once he co-operates, there is no turning back. So he chooses to stand before the door of the multi-​storied building, a symbol of the educational process at least since Comenius, rather than recite the alphabet to gain entrance.

Raising a Young Meditation Authors anticipated resistance to authority when composing devotional verse for children and seemed conscious that constant threats of eternal damnation might not persuade sullen little rebels to swerve onto the path God had prepared for them. If injunctions like “You must 21 

Jenkins Thomas Phillips, Grammar and Pleasure United (London, 1770), p. 3.

 

94    Andrea Immel and Lissa Paul take heed of every deed | That would your soul destroy”22 were always ringing in their ears, they would probably stop listening, like the unregenerate lad in Benjamin Keach’s War with the Devil (1672), who tells Conscience off: If you do speak loud when I am all alone, I will rise up and straightway will be gone To the brave Boys who toss the Pot around.23

Keach was, by his own admission, not much of a poet, yet the desire to win over young readers was so strong in the Restoration that he and other non-​conformists were willing to experiment. Condescension could be as critical to gaining hearts and minds as granting the devil his due. In Youth’s Divine Pastime (1689), Nathaniel Crouch retold in ballad meter forty well-​known Bible stories. John Bunyan played the fool and pretended to want the tops and papers of plumbs, which were the subjects of his emblems in Country Rimes for Boys and Girls (1681). But before unveiling their spiritual meanings, he frequently described the sweetness of everyday pleasures, such as the headlong pursuit of a butterfly over rough ground and through thorny bushes. Child narrators were allowed to describe their spiritual states, from voicing joy in having found a friend in Christ, as does the child singer in “My Song is Love Unknown” from Samuel Crossman’s Young Man’s Calling (1678), or confronting the terrifying truth that doubt persists after conversion as does the narrator in Bunyan’s “The Awakened Child’s Lamentation.” While we may find these portrayals of pious children unnerving, they nevertheless testify to their authors’ assumption that they were dealing with willful but intelligent minds capable of reflection and resolution. Isaac Watts was just as intent as his predecessors on communicating with his readers, but in Divine Songs (1715), he adopted quite a different strategy to encourage children’s thoughts to take a “divine turn” and “raise a young meditation,” a strategy whose difficulty has not always been acknowledged.24 Gathering together children of all classes and denominations to sing hymns in praise of God’s love, mercy, and the blessings of a Christian education was in itself ambitious enough, but Watts also set out to compose hymns in the common measure that would neither invite comparison with the psalms of Sternhold and Hopkins, nor aggravate sectarian tensions. Watts believed that the study of the Bible was the foundation of early religious education and the verse of the Divine Songs was supposed to awaken children’s sense of their spiritual duties in a delightful way, while also helping them develop the virtues for entrance into a rational, polite Christian community. While his child narrator may reflect on ideas such as the enormity of original sin or of his faults being recorded in God’s book, he never dwells so long on them as to dissolve into despair. Rather he is lifted up by the hope that the faithful performance of his duties will over the “growing Years improve the Song” (Watts, Divine Songs, Song V, p. 135). Children growing up in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries literally took Watts to heart. Lessons contained in the verses they memorized from Divine Songs were so familiar to children that allusions to lines needed little additional reference. Although the best-​known

22  Abraham Chear, “To My Youngest Kinsman, R.L.,” in A Looking-​Glass for Children, 4th ed. (London, 1708), p. 45. 23  Benjamin Keach, War with the Devil (London, 1711), p. 10. 24  Isaac Watts, Divine Songs … a Facsimile Edition of the First Edition of 1715, ed. J. H. P. Pafford (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), p. 145.

 

Poems in the Nursery    95 example appears in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865), where Alice—​parodying Watts’s opening lines “How doth the busy little bee” from “Against Idleness and Mischief ”—​ recites “How doth the little crocodile,” we would like to offer another from Elizabeth Kilner’s Warren Family; or, Scenes at Home (1810) to indicate the extent to which Watts’s verses were embedded in children’s culture. In the story, two young girls are horrified when they discover their brother, who is not quite four, pulling down the wallpaper they have so carefully and patiently just put up in their room. They scold and shake him, and, predictably, he screams. Their mother comes up to resolve the situation. She cites, as if proverbial, lines from Watts’s “Moral Song XI”: “What’s amiss I’ll strive to mend; and endure what can’t be mended,” which are also the chapter’s title.25

Inclining the Twig Here we also want to call attention to a parallel phenomenon—​the crafting of instructional materials in the domestic sphere. John Locke is typically credited with mainstreaming the idea that children should be “cozen’d” into learning to read by making the work a game, but Jill Shefrin and the late Julia Briggs have shown that decoying children was well-​established when Some Thoughts Concerning Education appeared in 1693.26 What is frequently overlooked is that Locke’s recommendations are based on his observation of the successful pedagogical practices of parents and his experience as a private tutor in an aristocratic family. Part of the explanation for this oversight is the low survival rate of manuscript teaching aides: once the child for whom they had been lovingly constructed had grown out of them (or they had become dog-​eared and soiled beyond recognition), they would have been discarded, along with the too-​small clothes and broken toys. But another reason for the lack of knowledge about domestic pedagogical practice is the paucity of examples for comparison: the question of literary merit simply becomes difficult to resolve when the pool of comparable items is all but empty. Medieval scholar Eric Stanley addresses a similar problem when he asks, rhetorically, whether or not “the fire which on 23 October 1731 raged in the Cotton Library at Ashburnham house in Westminster … held back from doing worse harm to MS Vitellius A xv, the Beowulf manuscript, than to scorch its edges, merely because the first taste the fire got of the poem convinced it of the excellence of Beowulf as a work of literature.”27 Stanley argues eloquently that literary merit is demonstrated both through internal evidence of stylistic sophistication and the fact that the poem itself was preserved for several hundred years after its estimated composition date in the eighth century.

25  Elizabeth Kilner, Warren Family (London, 1810), pp. 26–​7. Watts’s “Moral Song XI,” “Good Resolutions,” which the mother quotes, first appeared in the 16th edition of 1740. 26  See Jill Shefrin, “Dainty Fare,” in The Dartons: Publishers of Educational Aids, Pastimes & Juvenile Ephemera, 1781–​1876 (Los Angeles: Cotsen Occasional Press, 2009), pp. 6–​22; and Julia Briggs, “Delightful Task! Women, Children and Reading in the Mid-​Eighteenth Century,” in Donelle Ruwe (ed.), Culturing the Child, 1640–​1914 (Lanham: Scarecrow, 2005), pp. 67–​82. 27  E. G. Stanley, “Beowulf,” in E. G. Stanley (ed.), Continuations and Beginnings: Studies in Old English Literature (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1966), p. 105.

 

96    Andrea Immel and Lissa Paul Like the Beowulf manuscript, internal stylistic evidence, combined with the fact that generations of people thought Jane Johnson’s “Nursery Library” too good to throw out, testify to its value. A set of 438 charming little cards and other objects made of paper for teaching reading survives. Arranged in graded sequences, many of them are illustrated with tiny cut-​outs from engravings and backed with Dutch gilt paper, all made in the 1740s by Jane Johnson, the wife of an Anglican vicar in Buckinghamshire, for the use of her children. The evidence in the cards suggests that they were products of an environment that nurtured and supported such efforts, and they offer dramatic and unprecedented evidence for the engaged home-​ schooling parents Locke mentions. As was typical of many upper-​middle-​class late-​Enlightenment women, Jane Johnson had little formal education, but possessed what Susan Whymann calls “epistolatory literacy” in English.28 Capable of wide-​ranging critical reading and the skill to attempt many kinds of writing in English, she designed materials for her own children’s reading lessons that offered an appropriate outlet to fulfill the maternal duty to “incline the twig” while also expressing her artistic impulses. While she had some familiarity with the contemporary schoolbooks based on the graphemic–​phoenemic method such as the innovative Child’s New Play-​Thing (1742), she did not copy sources uncritically.29 Unlike Dyche, whose focus was the power and primacy of the drill in a classroom setting, she had the freedom to think about what and how she would teach at home. Jane Johnson wrote verses similar to Ronksley’s, but she printed them out on cards in clear legible roman letters and illustrated them with her own artwork or cut-​outs. What distinguishes Johnson’s work is the attempt to make every syllable count, to communicate something of the middle-​class social and Anglican religious values she wanted her children to share. Appropriate rewards and punishments for good and bad behavior are made visible to the emotions and senses: in one card love is offered as a powerful incentive to do one’s duties to others, while in another, the promise of divine retribution is held up to commandment-​breakers, personified by two topers, one seated on a barrel raising a glass. As her children’s teacher and mother, Johnson had more freedom to sound personal and humorous notes than schoolmasters like Dyche and Ronksley. Johnson could, if she wished, insert her children in the cards as characters. For example, the third card in set 19 shows a man and woman dancing: the caption identifies them as daughter Barbara dancing the minuet with Lord Montjoy at a Haymarket ridotto. The street verse in Johnson’s “Nursery Library” points to a world that lay a stone’s throw from the secure, orderly family circle. It seems that it was a world Johnson also wanted her children to know, a world where life was hard for most of the people who found themselves there. Instead of transcribing a famous poem such as Colley Cibber’s “Blind Boy,” Johnson writes an original one about a tightrope walker, whose feats probably dazzled her children, to help them see that the poor girl actually led a very precarious existence: The Girl to get money does dance on a Rope She will sure have good luck if her neck is not broke Quite hard is her fortune, her fate most unkind If no way for a living but this she can find.30 28  Susan E. Whyman, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers, 1600–​1800 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), p. 10. 29  Evelyn Arizpe and Morag Styles, Reading Lessons from the Eighteenth Century: Mothers, Children and Texts (Shenstone, Lichfield: Pied Piper, 2006). Chapter 3 consists of a detailed, illustrated analysis of Johnson’s cards in the “Nursery Library.” 30  Jane Johnson, Manuscripts c.1740–​1759 (LMC 1649), Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, set 21, card 19.

 

Poems in the Nursery    97

FIG. 6.1  The rope dancer card from Jane Johnson, Manuscript Nursery Library, Elisabeth Ball Collection. Reproduced by permission of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

Below the girl is a cowering boy, casting a long shadow (fig.  6.1). Is he her spotter or a spectator? The relationship between the picture and the verse is enigmatic, inviting interpretation. Both card and verse seem designed to engage conversation about lived experience in the world as well as literary experience with the cadences of English verse. Could Jane have been trying to help her children see connections between a performer they gawked at in the street and the poor worker closer to home whom they might have ignored? The Johnson family lived in Olney, a center for the cottage industry of lacemaking (Whyman, p. 169). Town children as young as six or seven were “put to the pillow” to learn lacemaking and while they worked they chanted little songs called “lace tellings” to help them keep and pass the time. There are traces of influence from that working-​class culture in the “Nursery Library.” Besides using lace-​scissors to cut out the tiny figures she pasted on the cards, Johnson seems to have riffed on the metrical structures from the lacemakers’ work-​songs, although quoting none directly. Was there supposed to be a metonymic link between the tightrope and the lacemaking thread, as well as between the lives of the tightrope walkers and lacemakers, that Jane could use in conversation to awaken feelings of sympathy and a sense of duty toward the poor in her children? The suggestion is clear though a definitive answer will always remain tantalizingly out of reach.

 

98    Andrea Immel and Lissa Paul

Writing Down Because the ubiquitous personal computer has all but sidelined handwriting instruction and minimized the need for memorization in elementary education, a description of how a child labored to acquire a good hand in Lady Fenn’s Juvenile Correspondence (1783) is a useful reminder of handwriting’s centrality to full vernacular literacy then.31 Writing masters grandly claimed that copybooks were engines driving the nation’s commercial sector, because those boys who learned to write in a fair hand stood a good chance of becoming prosperous tradesmen or merchants.32 Boys destined for the counting house were supposed to learn more than the rules for drawing up invoices, letters of credit, and bills of parcel in a clear round hand, and they were also expected to acquire the virtue that “enables a Man to discharge the Offices of Life with Honour, and makes him a fit Instrument to promote the Happiness of Society,”33 which may explain why snippets of Pope, Gay, Swift, Waller, and Denham, among others, occupy more leaves of George Bickham, Senior’s splendid Universal Penman (1741) than do financial documents. Boys were asked to transcribe Waller’s lines, “Things of deep Sense we may in Prose unfold, | But they please best in lofty Numbers told,”34 from “Upon the Earl of Roscommon’s Translation of Horace,” to help the hand acquire the necessary manual skills and furnish the mind with ideas that would incline the writer to “be prejudiced the better Way” (Tapner, p. iv). The Sussex schoolmaster John Tapner had such confidence in this kind of assignment that he compiled a dictionary of verse copies, and it probably provided many texts that filled the blank spaces within the engraved writing sheets’ decorative frames. While writing books are not children’s literature per se, one like Fables, and Other Short Poems (1731), which downplays commercial applications and promotes itself instead as a compendium of copies extracted from the most admired models of English verse, is a reminder of the genre’s role in creating a taste for poetry. We know that eighteenth-​century children were encouraged to internalize what they had been reading by transcribing works they thought worthwhile, or making extracts as it was also called, so that the texts would literally be at their fingertips. Enough eighteenth-​ century commonplace books, compiled by women like Jane Johnson, Hester Thrale, and the Burneys, survive to belie the suggestion that by this point the practice was unimportant. Collecting specimens of social verses, as Harriet does in Emma, was considered an elegant pastime, and the activity had broader applications, affording a social dimension to children’s experience of poetry. For example, children were encouraged to share transcriptions of extracts from poems they admired or that had been recommended by their parents in letters to friends and siblings, and that practice was modeled in the exchange between two schoolboys during the holidays in Lady Fenn’s Juvenile Correspondence (pp. 136–​7).

31  Lady Ellenor Fenn, Juvenile Correspondence; or Letters, Suited to Children, from Four to above Ten Years of Age (London, 1783), pp. 28–​9. 32  Aileen Douglas, “Marking Their Mark: Eighteenth Century Writing-​Masters and their Copy-​ Books,” Journal for Eighteenth-​Century British Studies, 24 (2001), 145–​6. 33  John Tapner, The School-​Master’s Repository; or, Youth’s Moral Preceptor (London, 1764), p. iii. 34  George Bickham, Sr., Universal Penman (London, 1741), p. 100.

 

Poems in the Nursery    99 Families also compiled albums that were part commonplace book, part scrapbook, such as the one associated with the Taylors of Ongar, assembled by James Philip Bailey.35 It contains both copies of admired poems (including Byron’s “Tear”), and original poems by various members of the family. Literary family entertainments might also include playing various kinds of verse word games. Some, like crambo or the capping of rhymes, required nothing more than a nimble mind and retentive memory. Riddle collections such as John-​the-​Giant-​Killer’s Food for the Mind (1757) or Peter Puzzlewell’s Puzzling Cap (1771), provided a wealth of brainteasers—​ old favorites such as “In ev’ry Commonwealth I’m found, | Yet not in Earth or Sea,” or ones attributed to Swift and his circle, such as “Tho’ I alas! A Pris’ner be, | My trade is, Pris’ners to set free,”36 which Vicesimus Knox thought witty enough for inclusion in Elegant Extracts in Verse (1796). Memory games were played for forfeits in the family circle and some of the more hilarious were accumulative alphabet rhymes such as “The House that Jack Built,” “The Gaping, Wide-​Mouthed Waddling Frog,” and “The Alphabetical Gimcrack,” a text in the nonsensical style associated with comedian Samuel Foote: “Q was a Quince that flavoured the pie, that was made of an Owl, that looked like a Noodle, the spouse of a Minx, that followed the Lord … .”37

Composing Writing light social verses of their own offered children with a bent for scribbling a way to entertain family and friends. The Christmas season was the traditional time of year for bringing out writing projects designed for the family’s enjoyment, similar to the famous fictional budget of Beechgrove Hall in Aikin and Barbauld’s Evenings at Home. The riddles, charades, and conundrums in The Christmas Amusement (1799) were supposedly composed by the child visitors of Mr. Puzzlebrain. Their best efforts were deposited in the vase of fancy, to be drawn out and read to the company in the evenings. There are also works such as The Twelfth-​Cake; or, A New Way of Drawing King and Queen (c.1798), with verses for the characters to recite on Twelfth Night: “As your name is TOM TRIP, | I suppose you can skip,” or “Sauce-​B ox! O! a horrid sound, | Since I never rude am found.”38 Young subscribers to the century’s pioneering periodicals like Newbery’s Lilliputian Magazine (1751) and Marshall’s Juvenile Magazine (1788) were invited to submit their witty verses for publication in future numbers. The sisters Ann and Jane Taylor, in fact, got their start as poets in their teens by contributing charades to the annual Minor’s Pocketbook, which famously led to the publisher, Darton and Harvey, extending an invitation to the young

35  James Philip Bailey, The Taylor Family Album, Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, Toronto Public Library. For a discussion of these kinds of albums, see c­ hapter 11 in David Allan, Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 159–​80. 36  The answers—​the letter M and a corkscrew—​appear on pp. 13 and 16 of The Puzzling Cap (London, 1799). 37  The Royal Guide; or, An Easy Introduction to Reading English (London, 1769), p. 86. 38  Twelfth-​Cake (London, c.1798), pp. 20, 23.

 

100    Andrea Immel and Lissa Paul ladies, asking them to provide “some specimens of easy poetry for children.”39 Ann and Jane Taylor’s first collection, Original Poems for Infant Minds (1804), contained Ann’s hit poem, “My Mother,” and its sequel, Rhymes for the Nursery (1806), produced Jane’s famous poem, “The Star,” known now as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Ideally, children who internalized literary language would be able to use it creatively, and surviving manuscripts by young people reveal another dimension of verse immersion in the eighteenth century. Elijah Fenton unwisely preserved his schoolboy epic, “Cleopatra,” only to be compared unfavorably with Pope, who destroyed anything that might diminish his reputation as a prodigy.40 But there are surprises, like the breathtakingly exquisite “Book of Silvia Cole,” a bound illustrated manuscript made around 1719 (decades before Hymns in Prose) for the young “Silvia Cole” of the title—​probably by an older child or young teenager.41 The volume itself, a picaresque account of life in London from the perspective of a child, Silvia Cole (who would have been about five when the volume was composed), has all the sophisticated attention to the dialogic relationships between image, text, and reader typically associated with the modern picture book. By looking at one four-​page sequence in the manuscript, it is possible to catch sight, if only for a moment, of how one child encountered the verse both in private reading at home, and in the public sphere of the street. The first two-​page spread in the sequence, though written as prose, scans as poetry, and bears the trace of a young author (we’ve retained the original spelling and capitalization) who understands how metrical structure, repetition, and alliteration all work: A blackamoor trumpeter sounds a fine tune, whilst mis Silvia reads in her fine books. A BLACKAMOOR with his drum Beats a march for mis Silvia Who reads like a great woman.42

The “blackamoor” musicians are shown playing their instruments, while Silvia, not in the pictures, is, as we are told in the text, off the page, reading (fig. 6.2). Turn the page, and Silvia is in the thick of a double-​page street scene. And the verse form changes to suit. The formal poetry of the kind little Silvia may have encountered in the printed books she was apparently reading indoors shifts to verses that echo the London cries of street-​sellers hawking their wares in the city: Here is Silvia Cole with all her trades folks about her Apples and wallnuts hot buns two apeny one a peny plum cakes four a peny biscakes rare hot Shrewsbury cakes two a peny (Book of Silvia Cole, pp. 40–​1)

Silvia has been rewarded for her diligence reading indoors, and celebrates by moving outdoors into the teeming life of the street (fig. 6.3). The sequence almost eerily anticipates both Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, published about 140 years later in 1859, and 39  Ann Taylor Gilbert, Autobiography and Other Memorials of Mrs. Gilbert, ed. J. Gilbert (London, 1874), p. 119. 40  Samuel J. Rogal, “Bleeding Romans on Leaky Barges: Elijah Fenton’s Cleopatra and the Process of Schoolboy Verse,” Children’s Literature, 14 (1986), 123–​31. 41  The manuscript, which was donated in 2011 to the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books by the Hagar Family of Victoria British Columbia, is described by Jill Shefrin in Newsletter of the Children’s Book History Society, 103 (August 2012), 24–​6. 42  “Book of Silvia Cole,” c.1719, (KB00) Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, Toronto Public Library, 38–​9.

 

FIG. 6.2  The trumpeter. Silvia Cole Ms., pp. 38–​9. Reproduced courtesy of the Osborne Collection, Toronto Public Library.

FIG. 6.3  Silvia in the street. Silvia Cole Ms., pp. 40–​1. Reproduced by permission of the Toronto Public Library, Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books.

 

102    Andrea Immel and Lissa Paul the “wild rumpus” sequence in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are published a century after that in 1963. There is no way of knowing, of course, whether or not the author of “The Book of Silvia Cole” was a prodigiously gifted proto-​Christina Rossetti or proto-​Maurice Sendak, or if she produced one of a limited number of surviving artifacts from what was once a thriving culture of child authors working in private, domestic settings. The criers sequence clearly reveals a child writer who has taken verse heard on the street and in the schoolroom and reworked it as verse composed for the page, rather similar to the transfer from street to nursery we noted previously in Jane Johnson’s “Nursery Library” some twenty years later, an enactment of oral verse that also played out in the moralized collections of street cries published later in the century. There were other ways, however, in which the verse taken in and internalized by children was then spoken out and externalized.

Acting Out Another justification for reading poetry from an early age argued that it offered intelligent children a path to “the heights of science”: by setting them on poetry’s pleasant path and appealing to their imaginations, they would grow strong enough to “relish and digest the solidest food of philosophy.”43 For Anna Barbauld, however, religion precedes philosophy in the education of young minds, though her rhythmically eloquent and memorable Hymns in Prose (1781) were designed with a similar objective of connecting language with the material wonders of the world: “to impress devotional feelings … by connecting religion with a variety of sensible objects; with all that he sees, all he hears, all that affects his young mind with wonder or delight.”44 Although Barbauld’s affinities with works in which mothers walk in woods or fields and talk to their children about the wonders of nature are clear, it is less often noted that her hymns were written explicitly as performance pieces. As William McCarthy explains, however, there is no way of knowing whether children recited the hymns “in unison, or whether they alternated antiphonally, or in dialogue with Barbauld.”45 What is deliciously clear, even more than two hundred years after the hymns were composed, is that children would have loved shouting out and acting out, playing some of the lines, such as these in Hymn IV on the strength of a lion: I will shew you what is strong. The lion is strong; when he raiseth up himself from his lair, when he shaketh his mane, when the voice of his roaring is heard, the cattle of the field fly, and the wild beasts of the desart hide themselves, for he is very terrible. The lion is strong, but he that made the lion is stronger than he: his anger is terrible; he could make us die in a moment, and no one could save us out of his hand. (Barbauld, Hymns, p. 242)

In connection with performance pieces we do want to mention in passing the old but controversial practice of putting on plays at school or home, which persisted from the Restoration

43  Vicesimus Knox, Elegant Extracts; or, Useful and Entertaining Pieces of Poetry, 2nd ed. (London, 1796), sig. A2r. 44  Anna Letitia Barbauld, Hymns in Prose, in Selected Poetry and Prose, p. 238. 45  William McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2008), p. 208.

 

Poems in the Nursery    103 onward. We know that Barbauld wrote many pieces for her students to recite at theatrical evenings at Palgrave, of which only the one composed for four-​year-​old Thomas Denman has survived. Other survivals include a full-​length piece by Thomas Spatemen, The Schoolboy’s Masque (1742), where boys were allowed to play the roles of exemplary lads who rise to eminence in adulthood (and speak exclusively in verse), as well as those of the dunce, the rake, an overly indulgent mother and her illiterate son. Girls, however, were not allowed such freedoms. “The Play” in Lady Fenn’s School Occurrences (1782) shows three girls rehearsing a scene from Racine’s much admired Athaliah for the pleasure of a visiting mama (the original had been composed for the schoolgirls at Saint-​Cyr). Hannah More’s playlets for girls, such as The Search After Happiness: A Pastoral Drama (1773) and “Moses in the Bulrushes” in her Sacred Dramas (1782), were widely read, recited, and performed into the next century. Elocution—​the formal component that addressed learning how to appreciate “good” poetry, whether to recite, read it aloud, or to allude to appropriate passages—​was an important feature of the eighteenth-​century literary curriculum, and many anthologies of passages for this purpose were compiled, some of the best-​known being James Greenwood’s Virgin Muse (1721), John Newbery’s Twelfth-​Day Gift (1767), William Enfield’s Speaker (1774), Mary Wollstonecraft’s Female Reader (1789), Vicesimus Knox’s Elegant Extracts (1796), and Blair’s Class Book (1806). The contents of anthologies compiled over the course of the period were by no means homogeneous, but works by Gray, Milton, Swift, Pope, and Shakespeare occupied places of honor throughout. The prose and verse selections in the volumes were chosen as part of a larger program to induct children into adult, literate society, and to teach them to incorporate literary language into their everyday vocabularies—​or, as William Enfield put it, “to read and speak with propriety,” useful accomplishments “a man has hourly occasion to do.”46 William Godwin, for instance, writing in a letter to his second wife Mary Jane, on May 24, 1811, notes that he has set his stepson, Charles, the task of learning Ann Taylor’s poem “My Mother” by heart, in order to encourage him to write a suitable letter to send to his mother.47 The point of acquiring such classic masterpieces by heart, as the educational philosopher Richard Lovell Edgeworth says in Poetry Explained for the Use of Young People (1802), was “to form a poetic taste” in children, because their “attention must be early directed to those circumstances in nature, which are capable of exciting ideas either of the sublime or the beautiful and to such books as may assist in awakening the mind to observation.”48 The practice was not without its critics, however. Seven-​year-​old Marjory Fleming thrilled to the “beautiful and Majestick” in Thomas Gray’s verse, but she also observed, “I am sorry to say that I think it is very Difficult to get by heart.”49 And poor delivery could spoil the experience of hearing someone read aloud, as Dick informs his bombastic friend Timotheus (see fig. 6.4): Your reading may often a moment beguile, Tho’ no profit, I’m certain, can ever accrue, From any that read so absurdly as you.50

46 

William Enfield, “An Essay on Elocution,” in The Speaker (London, 1774), pp. v–​vi. William Godwin to Mary Jane Godwin, May 24, 1811, in Bodleian MS Abinger c. 42, fol. 5. 48  Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Poetry Explained for the Use of Young People (London, 1802), pp. viii–​ix. 49  Fleming, Journal II (1810), p. 61. 50  Dorothy Kilner, “Dick’s Advice to Timotheus,” in Poems on Various Subjects (London, 1782), p. 67. 47 

 

104    Andrea Immel and Lissa Paul

FIG. 6.4  Dick criticizes his friend’s delivery. Dorothy Kilner, Poems (London, 1785), p. 66. Reproduced by permission of the Toronto Public Library, Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books.

Declaiming from memory had a more serious problem, as Mary Wollstonecraft expressed so pointedly, in that the too familiar, too frequently repeated verses quickly became clichéd. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft’s irritation at the practice of schooled recitations, with the attendant dangers of rote learning, still comes sharply off the page: How much time is lost teaching them to recite what they do not understand? Whilst, seated on benches, all in their best array, the mamas listen with astonishment to the parrot-​like prattle, uttered in solemn cadences, with all the pomp of ignorance and folly. Such exhibitions only serve to strike the spreading fibres of vanity through the whole mind, for they neither teach children to speak fluently, nor behave gracefully. So far from it, that these frivolous pursuits might comprehensively be termed the study of affectation; for we now rarely see a simple bashful boy, though few people of taste were ever disgusted by that awkward sheepishness so natural to the age, which schools and an early introduction into society have changed into impudence and apish grimace.51

Richard Edgeworth, despite being politically far removed from Wollstonecraft, had similar misgivings. He had been prompted to write his little books on poetry when he, and his 51  Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet M. Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols. (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1989), vol. v, p. 235.

 

Poems in the Nursery    105 daughter Maria, discovered that all the two-​to eight-​year-​olds in the Edgeworth brood of twenty-​one—​all being taught at home—​did not seem to have a good grasp on what they were reading or hearing. Both of Edgeworth’s little books on poetry instruction, Poetry Explained and Readings on Poetry, are deliberate attempts to enable children to make sense consciously of what they are reading and to that end provides detailed glosses on some of the famous poems contained in Enfield’s Speaker.

Taking a Stand The idea that children should be able to understand, interpret, and act was important to such dedicated educators as the Edgeworths, as it was for the family of Dissenting educationalists, the Aikins and Barbaulds. In the closing decades of the eighteenth century, one particular highly charged call to action engaged a growing portion of the population in England: the move to abolish the slave trade. Because political resistance to abolition was based on the premise that slavery was an “economic necessity,” a sugar boycott was called to demonstrate that the economic argument could equally well be employed to abolish slavery as it could to support it. And it was in that political climate that poetry played an important part in conveying not just the horrific injustice of enslaving another people, but also by creating empathy with the suffering being endured by slaves. Because poems circulated in periodicals, which were read and discussed in family circles, they did have real political influence (see ­chapter 4, “Poems in Magazines”). In 1791, Dr. John Aikin wrote to his sister Anna Letitia Barbauld praising his ten-​year-​old daughter Lucy, who had given up sugar in support of the growing campaign to legislate a ban on the slave trade. Aikin writes that, With respect to the young people, & even children, who have entirely on their own accord resigned an indulgence important to them, I triumph & admire! Nothing is to be despaired of if many of the rising generation are capable of such conduct. (quoted in McCarthy, p. 300)

What is interesting is that Lucy, though just ten, was obviously not shut away in a nursery, but, as Aikin suggests, counting herself among the politically engaged children who wished to mobilize against injustice. John Aikin’s letter was dated November 28, 1791, just five months after his sister, and Lucy’s aunt, Mrs. Barbauld had published what became a very famous poem, Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade, in June 1791, only two months after Wilberforce’s defeat in April of that year. It includes lines encouraging those who had formerly “averted” their eyes from the brutal realities of slavery, to look: Forc’d her averted eyes his stripes to scan, Beneath the bloody scourge laid bare the man, Claimed Pity’s tear, urged Conscience’s strong control.52

52 Barbauld, Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade, lines 7–​9, in Selected Poetry and Prose, p. 122.

 

106    Andrea Immel and Lissa Paul Those may not have been the only lines Lucy took to heart, though they became important lines in the struggle to abolish the slave trade. Sometime in the few months between Wilberforce’s defeat and John Aikin’s letter, the ten-​year-​old Lucy grasped the enormity of the issue and decided on a practical course of action. She may have been swayed by the work of other poets, such as Hannah More, who had been working toward social justice. More’s “Slavery: A Poem” (1788) also included lines forcing the reader to look at the injustice and see The burning village, and the blazing town: See the dire victim torn from social life, The shrieking babe, the agonizing wife.53

Little Lucy would also almost certainly have known these lines from “The Timepiece,” the second book of William Cowper’s Task (1785): And, worse than all, and most to be deplor’d, As human nature’s broadest, foulest blot, Chains him, and tasks him, and exacts his sweat With stripes, that mercy with bleeding heart, Weeps when she sees inflicted on a beast. Then what is man? And what man, seeing this, And having human feelings, does not blush, And hang his head, to think himself a man?54

Tellingly, just ten years after her father had praised her participation in the sugar boycott, Lucy Aikin continued the family tradition of encouraging social justice and political action through poetry. As a twenty-​one-​year-​old anthologist, she includes in Poetry for Children (1801) a different portion from The Task, calling it “Against Slavery,” as well as the celebrated antislavery poem by Thomas Day and John Bicknell, “The Dying Negro.” The slave trade was not legally abolished until 1807, but that proved to be the first stage in a long legal battle that culminated in the abolition of slavery in 1833. Poetry continued to play a role in shifting public opinion and another generation of children encouraged to empathize and act had grown up and were able to put through the necessary legislation. The fact that they were able to do so indicates the existence of a concerted effort on the part of late eighteenth-​century educators to encourage social action, and demonstrates the way in which political poetry was engaged. Lucy Aikin ends our account of “Poems in the Nursery” because she so clearly embodies the kind of person who could emerge from the pedagogical and verse-​immersion practices of the eighteenth century: a thinking, knowing, socially engaged person, someone who could feel the sufferings of slaves, partly through reading poems about them, and understand the political injustice of slavery. The default “child,” the innocent and ignorant child constructed by nineteenth-​century Romantics, was not like her at all. Instead, the innocent child who remains static—​frozen in time, an innocent forever, carefully fenced by the garden and the nursery, protected from the possibility of action—​is the one valorized by the Romantics. No wonder that child never gets beyond goofy and sentimental. By revealing the eighteenth-​century child engaged in speaking out, writing out, and acting out verse, in

53 

54 

Hannah More, Slavery: A Poem (London, 1788), lines 98–​100. William Cowper, The Task (London, 1785), lines 21–​8.

 

Poems in the Nursery    107 a range of formal and informal contexts, we hope that we’ve offered examples of the kinds of serious, engaged poetic experiences and practices that might serve as precedents or models for twenty-​first-​century parents and educators.

References Immel, Andrea, and Brian Alderson, “Nurse Lovechild’s Legacy: A History of Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-​Book” (Los Angeles: Cotsen Occasional Press, 2013), pp. 51–​5. Joy, Louise, and Katherine Wakely-​Mulroney (eds.), The Aesthetics of Children’s Poetry: A Study of Children’s Poetry in English (Burlington: Ashgate, 2015). Opie, Peter, and Iona Opie, The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973). Opie, Peter, and Iona Opie, Three Centuries of Nursery Rhymes and Poetry for Children, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press; New York: Justin G. Schiller Ltd., 1977). Styles, Morag, From the Garden to the Street: An Introduction to Three Hundred Years of Poetry for Children (London: Cassell, 1998). Styles, Morag, “Lost from the Nursery:  Women Writing Poetry for Children, 1800–​1850,” Signal: Approaches to Children’s Books, 63 (Spring 1990), 177–​205. Styles, Morag, Evelyn Arizpe, and Shirley Brice Heath, Reading Lessons from the Eighteenth Century: Mothers, Children and Texts (Lichfield: Pied Piper, 2006).

 

Chapter 7

P oem s i n t h e Lecture Ha l l Richard Terry Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s Poetry Explained for the Use of Young People, which came out in 1802 with a second edition in 1821, was one of a number of works on general or “literary” education produced by the Edgeworths, father and daughter. Between the two, they went further than any previous authors in establishing the principles on which literature could be taught in the classroom or the home. What prompted Richard Edgeworth to compile this particular book was a sense of the limitations and inefficacy of all previous schemes of learning in this area: Experience has convinced the author of the following pages, that children seldom understand the poetry which they early learn by rote, and that thus, instead of forming a poetic taste, they acquire the habit of repeating words to which they affix no distinct ideas, or of admiring melodious sounds which are to them destitute of meaning.1

Poetry Explained To appreciate the radicalism of Edgeworth’s project we need to contrast the principles expressed in his textbook with assumptions underlying most classroom-​based teaching of poetry during the eighteenth century. For the most part, little distinction was drawn between what we might term the “understanding of poetry” on the one hand, and the bare ability to recognize the words out of which poems were formed, and so to construe their surface meaning. Poetic texts, alongside ones in prose, were often used to teach basic word recognition skills. Edgeworth’s stress on the “explanation” of poems to children sits alongside his opposition to rote learning, often enforced in the education even of very young children. Such a stance did not in itself constitute an innovation, inasmuch as there had been numerous expressions of dissatisfaction with learning methods of this kind from the early eighteenth century onward, but, in Edgeworth’s case, it allies with a belief that the very point of “teaching” poetry has less to 1 

Richard Edgeworth, Poetry Explained for the Use of Young People (1821), p. iii.

 

Poems in the Lecture Hall    109 do with inducing forms of mental recognition, either at the level of the word or the poem as a whole, than with nurturing a particular “transferable skill” (as we might call it). This is “taste,” a combination of sensory refinement and mental acumen that could be applied to “objects of taste” (such as poems) or in the context of everyday situations and interactions. What perhaps sets the Edgeworths apart from other educators is their greater sensitivity to how the childish mind actually interacts with a poem: The pleasure that we [as adults] receive from the remote allusions or metaphoric language of poetry depends, in a great degree, upon the rapidity with which we pass over a number of intermediate ideas, and seize the meaning of the author; but children find much difficulty in supplying the elisions of poetic thought and diction. It is to them a laborious process; and even when they perform it successfully, much of the pleasure escapes during the operation. Surely it is doing young people injustice, to force fine poetry upon them before they can possibly taste its excellence; for thus we rob them of the present and defraud them of future pleasure. (Edgeworth, Poetry Explained, pp. iv–​v)

Edgeworth sees meaning as being constituted hierarchically, with poems being made up of what he terms “intermediate” ideas that build up into the overarching comprehension of a work. In other words, the overall meaning of a poem is never reducible to the meanings of its individual words laid, as it were, end to end, nor is it at all analogous to the way that a young pupil attributes meaning to a simple specimen sentence. Yet the most noteworthy aspect of Edgeworth’s educational creed may be his conviction that the final outcome of the child’s interaction with a poem, without which the exercise becomes entirely futile, should be pleasure. Not just is it always likely to prove quickly counterproductive to try to impose poetry on young children, but it risks deterring them for good and so defrauding them of pleasures that might have awaited them in the future. The key to children deriving pleasure from their encounter with poetry is “explanation,” as in the very title “Poetry Explained,” where the word does not refer to the elementary deciphering of the words, or even the dissection of poetic techniques such as meter or diction, so much as the arrival of the pupil at a totalizing understanding of the poetic work. For this reason, the poems are gathered in the vicinity of explanatory commentary. Take this stanza from Gray’s Elegy: For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey, This pleasing anxious being e’er resign’d, Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day Nor cast one longing, ling’ring look behind?

These lines lead Edgeworth to comment how “even these poor villagers wish to have some tokens of their existence raised over their graves, of frail or perishable materials” for “no human being departs from life without thinking with fondness and regret upon some friend, whom he leaves behind him in this world” (Poetry Explained, pp. 42–​3). The lesson that Edgeworth as teacher reads into the poem is about its pathos and the way that its sentiments resonate with our sense of the general human lot. Fully to “understand” the poem demands that the pupils put themselves in the requisite mood to feel a sense of accord with its great themes such that each of their childish bosoms (to use Samuel Johnson’s phrase) “returns an echo.”2

2  Samuel Johnson, Life of Gray, in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), vol. iv, p. 184.

 

110   Richard Terry The attitudes toward the teaching of poetry conveyed by Edgeworth’s volume are distinctive but also reflect a general modulation of views across the eighteenth century. We can see the distance traveled by looking at a not dissimilar work:  James Greenwood’s Virgin Muse: Being a Collection of Poems from Our Most Celebrated English Poets (1717). Greenwood taught at a boarding school at Woodford in Essex, and his book was explicitly advertised for “the Use of Young Gentlemen and Ladies, at Schools.” The principles underlying the collection are established in a short preface. The word “virgin” in the title indicates the fledgling nature of his readers, but also perhaps the book’s intention to promote moral spotlessness. Greenwood goes to some length to represent the prudence behind his choice of poems, and the pains he has taken (unlike other compilers) to ensure young readers meet with nothing that could be seen as “Shocking to Good Manners.” What he proposes is a “compleat Book for the Teaching to Read Poetry,” but his idea of what would be entailed by such a project is very different from Edgworth’s. The idea of “completeness” seems to relate to the inclusion “of different Measures” and “all the chief sorts of English Versification.” But also entirely different from Edgeworth is Greenwood’s concept of explanation: he says on the title page that his work comes “with Notes, and a Large Index, explaining [my emphasis] the difficult Places, and all the hard Words.” But explanation here means simply clarification of the surface meaning, the basic reference of the words, not the appreciation of poetic ideas or themes. Equally different is Greenwood’s attitude to “pleasure,” which he views rather disdainfully as a concession to immaturity. He seems embarrassed in admitting that his “Poems are designed for Youth,” mainly having been chosen (within the bounds of innocence and good manners) as likely to be attractive, and afford pleasure, to young readers. But this is seen only as one of many necessary “Allowances to be made to young People.” There is no suggestion that choosing for the consumption of young people poems of the more “Chearful and Pleasant” variety has anything to do with encouraging them to participate in a general aesthetic of pleasure. The assumption is rather that, on attaining maturity, they will voluntarily throw away such childish amusements, along with their cast-​off toys, and embrace more solemn reading fare. There is no sense that pleasure is the passport not just to happy juvenile reading but to rewarding adult reading as well.3

Pedagogic and Critical Rationales This chapter is about the inclusion of poetry on educational syllabuses during the eighteenth century. As such it will involve consideration of particular kinds of educational institution, chiefly Dissenting academies and Scottish universities, but in doing so it necessarily takes account of two contextual factors. The first is that no comprehensive or national educational system existed during the eighteenth century, with the distinction between school and university being more blurred than nowadays. The latter circumstance in particular owed something to the lower allowable age of university entrance, but also to the existence of institutions, such as many Dissenting academies, that served the purpose of both

3  James Greenwood, The Virgin Muse: Being a Collection of Poems from Our Most Celebrated English Poets (1717), title page and preface.

 

Poems in the Lecture Hall    111 schools and universities, implementing the recommendation in Milton’s “Of Education” of a foundation “at once both School and University, not needing a remove to any other house of Scholarship.”4 The second factor needing to be taken into account is that the survival of educational syllabuses, along with records of actual classroom practice, is very patchy, making it extremely hard to determine at this distance in time what students were actually taught and in precisely what way. Some evidence can be gleaned not from surviving records of instruction but from the popularity (in terms, that is, of circulation) of school textbooks, in the guidance they sometimes contain as to appropriate use, and in the high probability that certain textbooks would have been used in the institutions in which their authors were employed as teachers. The question of when English literature established itself as an educational subject was, for an earlier generation of critics, bound up with larger debates about the constructed nature and political utility of our inherited notion of literature. A certain line of argument drew strength from the conviction that the invention of the subject of English could be dated as late as the 1860s, when the first professorships of English literature were founded in English universities, or even not before the Newbolt report of 1921, which proved instrumental in elevating English literature to its (since unchallenged) position on secondary school educational syllabuses.5 The research of Ian Michael and others, however, has established overwhelming evidence to date the teaching of literature (and of poetry as the main aspect of literature) as far back as the 1700s.6 This chapter assumes that the principal question to be asked is not whether poetry had a role in eighteenth-​century schoolrooms and lecture theaters, but what that role precisely was, and what the pedagogic and critical rationale was that underpinned the teaching of it. To say that poetry gets taught is not to say that it gets taught toward its own end: that is to say, the principal purpose of a pupil’s being exposed to poetry was not necessarily that he or she should know more about poetry as a subject of value in itself. The purposes for which poetry was put in front of pupils could be very various. For most of the eighteenth century, pupils were likely to encounter poetry, sometimes in gobbets, in classes and textbooks that were devoted to a range of educational ends: the teaching of grammar, rhetoric, spelling, elocution, and composition (including verse composition). A famous early example of an anthology of poetic exempla is Joshua Poole’s English Parnassus; or, A Helpe to English Poesie (1657). It was a crib-​book for embryonic poets, supplying lists of rhyme words, poetic epithets, and handy poetical turns of phrase, as well as containing a dictionary of poetic sentiments expressed on a huge range of subjects. The way this material gets presented is strictly subordinated to the overriding function of the volume. It sees verse composition as essentially a mechanical practice, in which the budding practitioner learns to develop his own poetry through rehashing the constituent bits of other people’s poems or through narrowly focused imitation of technique. No hint is given that the best way of becoming a poet might be through becoming widely versed in an antecedent 4 

John Milton, Works, ed. Frank Allan Patterson et al., 18 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1931–​8), vol. iv, p. 280. 5  See, for example, Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism: 1848–​1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). 6  See, in particular, Ian Michael’s two books, The Teaching of English: From the Sixteenth Century to 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987); and Literature in School: A Guide to the Early Sources, 1700–​1800 (Swansea: Textbook Colloquium, 1999).

 

112   Richard Terry poetic tradition or through a process of developing one’s own taste. Visitors to Poole’s dictionary were hardly facilitated in gaining a grasp of the literary tradition, given that the excerpts remain unsourced and get run together nearly seamlessly. Poole’s anthology can be contrasted with Edward Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry (1702), which consisted (by the third edition) of sections on versification and rhyme as well as “A Collection of the most Natural, Agreeable, and Sublime Thoughts … that are to be found in the best English Poets.”7 What is different from Poole is that all these are attributed, and a full list of poets is printed on the title page reverse. Bysshe, moreover, felt under an obligation to defend his principles of selection, to convince the reader that his anthology could be seen as fairly representing its chosen field. What can be sensed from this is a process of mission creep in which the anthology no longer exists purely to teach the mechanical art of verse-​ making, but also now to convey an impression of the body of English poetry. As one travels from the mid-​seventeenth to the late eighteenth century, the opportunity for pupils to encounter English poetry in a variety of contexts gradually increases, even in contexts that might initially seem unpropitious. One such example is Ralph Johnson’s Scholar’s Guide (1665), devoted to the study not of English but of Latin. This book was designed to tutor pupils in Latin composition, chiefly through getting them to imitate Latin originals, but in cases where no classical example exists for the literary form under illustration, Johnson resorts instead to vernacular examples, such as his use of excerpts from Francis Quarles to illustrate emblems and acrostics. Johnson’s book is explicitly aimed at students of Latin, but examples of English poetry get smuggled in when these serve the larger purpose. It is much the same with Anthony Blackwall’s Introduction to the Classics (1718), published half a century later. It is divided into two parts: the first a disquisition on the importance of reading the classics, and the second an enumeration of rhetorical tropes. Yet, like Johnson before him, where Blackwall struggles to exemplify a trope from a classical source, he calls up the auxiliary aid of vernacular examples, from poets such as Shakespeare, Milton, Roscommon, and Dryden. This unobtrusive incorporation of examples drawn from English poets in pedagogic texts of various kinds is an essential phase in the acceptance of English poetry as a subject of legitimate study in schools and academies. We can see the development of this trend, for example, in S. Harland’s English Spelling-​Book Revis’d, of which the third edition appeared in 1719. Harland’s book includes a forty-​page anthology (or “Miscellaneous Collection,” as he calls it) of passages from well-​known English poets including Waller, Garth, Dryden, Blackmore, Cowley, Prior, and so on. The point of providing this material is ostensibly that pupils can sharpen their spelling prowess by being provided with reading material exemplifying correct orthography. Yet, over and above this, Harland seems to grasp that exposure to such choice illustrations drawn from the best English poets can foster skills in “literary” appreciation. Another context in which young people could encounter poetry was as a result of the elocutionary movement in the second half of the eighteenth century. The growth of interest in elocution reflected the rise of business values, with the successful completion of commercial transactions being seen as dependent on good communication skills, but also the high priority attached to linguistic integration following the Act of Union of 1707. Perhaps the most

7 

Edward Bysshe, The Art of English Poetry, 2nd ed. (London, 1705), title page.

 

Poems in the Lecture Hall    113 visible (and audible) champion of this movement was the actor, theater manager, and educational theorist, Thomas Sheridan. Sheridan’s zeal may have been partly fueled by a conversation he had had with Jonathan Swift shortly after having matriculated at college. When Swift enquired whether he was being taught to speak, and Sheridan replied in the negative, the great man’s riposte was crushing: “Then … they teach you Nothing.”8 The most celebrated elocutionary primer was William Enfield’s Speaker; or, Miscellaneous Pieces Selected from the Best English Writers . . . with a View to Facilitate the Improvement of Youth in Reading and Speaking (1774). It enjoyed enormous success, on which Enfield sought to capitalize by producing a few years later another work of similar design, his Exercises in Elocution (1780). So pervasive did The Speaker become that Margaret Weedon has stated that in the late eighteenth century it would have been encountered by “almost every English schoolboy with any pretensions to education.”9 As the dedication sets out, the book was compiled to aid the improvement of Enfield’s own scholars at Warrington Academy in their clear and elegant elocution of the English language. It tutored the pupils in distinctness of articulation, vigor of pronunciation, and the correct and effective use of emphases, pauses, and accompanying gestures. As with many similar primers or textbooks, the book itself does not contain details of the manner of its intended use, though Enfield remarks that “In performing these exercises, the learner should daily read aloud by himself, and, as often as he has opportunity, under the correction of an Instructor or Friend.”10 The exercises consisted simply of the recitation of the “miscellaneous” pieces contained in the anthology, listed under a variety of “Heads”: “Select Sentences,” “Narrative Pieces,” “Didactic Pieces,” and so on. Eighteenth-​century poets are very much in evidence including Pope, Thomson, Milton, Goldsmith, Dyer, and Gray. We can deduce from Enfield’s work and its success a trend in which the “appreciation” of literary texts, as distinct from their use for various other illustrative purposes, gains ground within classroom practice. Enfield was clearly aware of the appreciative dimension of his anthologies. In the advertisement to Exercises in Elocution, for example, he notes that besides merely providing “exercises,” he has chosen “a large number of … passages from the most approved literary productions of our own country, as might serve to lead young persons into some acquaintance with the most valuable writers, and assist them in forming a taste for the beauties of fine writing.”11 The rise in prominence of English poetry on educational curricula during the eighteenth century runs in tandem with certain other trends concerning children’s reading (see ­chapter 6, “Poems in the Nursery”). A general consensus exists that the eighteenth century witnessed for the first time the birth of a literature specifically aimed at children. The first landmark volume is often seen as being John Newbery’s Little Pretty Pocket-​Book (1744), which advertised its benefits under the slogan of “Delectando Monemus: Instruction with

8  The anecdote is quoted from W. S. Howell, Eighteenth-​Century British Logic and Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), p. 216. 9  Margaret Weedon, “Jane Austen and William Enfield’s The Speaker,” British Journal for Eighteenth-​ Century Studies, 11 (1988), 159–​62. 10  William Enfield, “An Essay on Elocution,” in The Speaker; or, Miscellaneous Pieces Selected from the Best English Writers (London, 1774), pp. xxv–​xxvi. 11  William Enfield, Exercises in Elocution Selected from the Various Authors and Arranged under Proper Heads (Warrington, 1780), advertisement.

 

114   Richard Terry Delight.” By “instruction” is meant mainly that of a moral sort. No doubt what mattered most to children was to be beguiled and entertained by exciting stories, but most fictions available to them were still dominated by moral instruction. Sarah Fielding’s Governess, for example, the first boarding school novel, never loses sight of its express purpose “to cultivate an early Inclination to Benevolence, and a Love of Virtue, in the Minds of young Women.” When the head pupil Jenny Peace regales the younger girls with an exotic “History of the Giants,” Mrs Teachum, while accepting that there need be nothing wrong in principle with the younger children being amused by such a far-​fetched tale, points out that the reading of the story should be accompanied by “proper Remarks … upon the Moral of it.”12 Matthew Grenby has noted as a general truism that “the later eighteenth century witnessed a sort of contest between didacticism and delight, a dialectical struggle that was resolved only in the mid-​nineteenth century.”13 This combining of pleasure with instruction in works written to entertain children was matched by a similar relationship in didactic texts. There was a growing appreciation that such texts worked best if they afforded pleasure, both because children learned more quickly if they enjoyed studying and because pleasurable learning helped instill habits of reading and enquiry that could prove lifelong. The idea of “pleasure” might enter into a didactic text through teaching addressed to the understanding as opposed to rote learning, in terms of a stress on examples rather than prescripts, and through the use of illustrative material chosen partly on the basis of its potential for entertainment, including examples drawn from the celebrated English poets. Ann Fisher’s Pleasing Instructor; or, Entertaining Moralist (1756) is not untypical among texts that sought to lace their didacticism with entertainment. Her work anthologized a variety of texts and passages collected from the “most eminent English Authors.” Fisher designed it for use both in the schoolroom and the home, and stresses its appropriateness to both sexes. In her preface, she professes that her cardinal intention in bringing out the volume was “to exhibit a connected Plan of Morality for the Instruction of the Youth of both Sexes,” but characteristic of her work is that the “Utile Dulci has been consulted, and Morality here appears smiling.”14 The anthologized contents consist of essays from periodicals such as the Gentleman’s Magazine, Spectator, Rambler, and others, mixed in with poems by the likes of Parnell, Gray, Thomson, Pope, and Greville. Fisher’s is one a number of literary or poetic anthologies published during the eighteenth century that were either expressly designed for school use or occasionally used in that context. The author’s pedagogic priorities are set out in some opening “Thoughts on Education.” What I most want to stress here is that her provision of examples of English poetry in a schoolroom anthology occurs in the vicinity of a particular set of complementary concerns. She is opposed to inculcation through punishment; she criticizes the limited opportunity traditionally given to women to develop in learning; she challenges the efficacy of general systems of education that take no account of the weaknesses or aptitudes of individual 12  Sarah Fielding, The Governess, ed. Candace Ward (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2005), pp. 45, 84. 13  M. O. Grenby, “Delightful Instruction? Assessing Children’s Use of Educational Books in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin (eds.), Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 181. 14  Ann Fisher, The Pleasing Instructor; or, Entertaining Moralist (London, 1756), preface, sig. π2v.

 

Poems in the Lecture Hall    115 pupils; and she denies the inherent usefulness of “Grammatical Learning,” especially that which assumes the strict derivation of English grammar from that of Latin. Chiefly, perhaps, Fisher sees the benefit of exposing young women to choice extracts of English poetry (and prose) at “the very Nick of Time a young Lady should be taught to think, reflect, and form a Taste of Life in,” this with a view to infecting them “early with a Love of Books.”15 Teaching poetry in the classroom, then, runs in the same vein, and makes common cause with, a set of related pedagogic aspirations.

Dissenting Academies The English Dissenting academies established themselves as a more or less direct response to the aggressive conformity legislation of the 1660s. The Act of Uniformity had required that all public or private schoolmasters make a formal declaration of allegiance to the Anglican liturgy and that they acquire a license from the relevant church authority. This clamping down on educational dissidence, however, fueled the need for a new set of educational establishments altogether outside the reaches of the state. Thus the need for academies was born. In conformity with Milton’s idea of a foundation “at once both School and University,” academies took boys in their early teens and educated them through to graduation level.16 Academies had a specific role in educating pupils toward a role in the Dissenting ministry, but were also concerned to equip their candidates with the skills required for a useful life. Joseph Priestley, for example, begins his Essay on a Course of Liberal Education (1765) by regretting the lack of “a proper course of studies … for Gentlemen who are designed to fill the principal stations of active life, distinct from those which are adapted to the learned profession.”17 Dissenting education, then, defined itself against the narrow classical education specifically geared to support a future life of scholarship, but it was also designed to take account of the fact that Dissenting pupils, debarred as they were from entering the established professions, needed to be trained in skills conducive to business and commerce. These were the first institutions to take seriously the idea of “employability” skills or the likely career destination of the students passing through them. The educational reformer Thomas Sheridan, for example, lamented the fact that in state-​approved education young men “are all trained in one and the same course, which fits them for no one employment upon earth.”18 Instead, Sheridan advocates that the education of each pupil should be tailored to his likely prospective career. The experimental school set up by Sheridan in Bath was not an academy as such, but his educational philosophy did share with the academies a staunch commitment to the value of English as the basis of a socially useful education. Moreover, it should not be underestimated how much state-​approved education, beyond the early years, was based on the acquisition of classical learning: English grammar schools, for example, were establishments specifically 15 

16  See Milton, Works, vol. iv, p. 280. Ibid., “Thoughts on Education,” pp. vii, ix. Joseph Priestley, An Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life (London, 1765), p. 1. 18  Thomas Sheridan, A Plan of Education for the Young Nobility and Gentry of Great Britain (London, 1769), p. 16. 17 

 

116   Richard Terry dedicated to the teaching of Latin grammar. Of most relevance to this chapter, though, is that the centrality of English teaching—​that is, the teaching of the vernacular, as well as the general delivery of the syllabus through the medium of English—​in such establishments is linked to the fact that Dissenting academies were the first institutions in England to prioritize the teaching of literature, including poetry. It is never easy to reconstruct the actual syllabuses that were delivered in educational establishments long since closed down. Such information can often be gleaned only from the reconstructed memories of pupils, from details of library holdings, or the nature of pedagogic works authored by particular teachers. Newington Green Academy in North London, under the leadership of Charles Morton, was arguably the most impressive of the later seventeenth-​century academies, right from the start its lectures being delivered in English rather than Latin. Its varied curriculum included instruction in religion, classics, history, geography, mathematics, natural science, politics, and modern languages. Similarly John Jennings’s influential academy at Kibworth, which opened its doors in 1715, delivered teaching in mathematics and natural philosophy, philology, history, geography, humanities, philosophy, and theology, as well as a range of “miscellaneous” studies, including oratory, architecture, and fortification.19 These early academies were innovative in delivering a modern range of subjects, with instruction delivered through the medium of English. Yet, so far as can be determined, neither seems expressly to have taught literary texts in the vernacular. Perhaps the most important figure involved in the introduction of literature teaching within the academies was Philip Doddridge, who studied under Jennings at Kibworth and briefly succeeded him there, before moving to a newly established academy at Market Harborough, later known as Daventry Academy. Doddridge seems to have had a particular zeal for the teaching of English. English was the only subject, apart from religion, to figure in each year of the academic program at Daventry, though understood widely as encompassing both oratory and rhetoric. However, as well as instruction in the practical usage of English, the syllabus also contained frequent assigned reading in English literature.20 One of the beneficiaries of Doddridge’s reformed system of education was Joseph Priestley. When he enrolled at Daventry as a pupil, in spite of being proficient in a number of languages, he seems to have nursed something of an aversion toward literary studies. Later, he claimed never to have “read any works of this kind [fictions], except Robinson Crusoe, until I went to the academy.” Daventry transformed his reading habits, and his diary shows that in 1754 and 1755 he was tackling English poets such as Dryden, Pope, Thomson, and Young, as well as devouring plays by Shakespeare. What he learned from Doddridge at Daventry, Priestley went on to impart in turn to his own students, initially at Nantwich and subsequently at Warrington Academy (Schofield, pp. 43–​4). Priestley’s attitude toward the teaching of English can be deduced from his textbook on The Rudiments of English Grammar (1761), which may have directly prompted the invitation for him to take up his new post at Warrington. The idea of teaching “the rudiments 19  For details of Jennings’s method, see Tessa Whitehouse, “Introduction to Philip Doddridge’s ‘Account of Mr Jennings’s Method,’ ” in Dissenting Education and the Legacy of John Jennings, c.1720–​ c.1729, at http://​www.qmulreligionandliterature.co.uk. 20  See Robert E. Schofield, The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Works from 1733 to 1773 (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1997), p. 42.

 

Poems in the Lecture Hall    117 of English grammar” was in itself provocative, drawing attention to Priestley’s general manifesto that a critical knowledge of English should be seen as “absolutely necessary to all persons of a liberal education.”21 Like Ann Fisher in her Pleasing Instructor, published five years earlier, Priestley strongly advocates the independence of English grammar from that of Latin, commenting on “the remarkable simplicity of its structure, when compared with … most other languages, ancient or modern” (Rudiments, p. v). Like Fisher’s volume, Priestley’s also assumes that greater understanding of, and conversancy with, English cannot be achieved merely by the absorption of rules, but also requires exposure to practical examples. For this reason, he included in the first edition of the Rudiments some “Observations on Style” with prestigious examples of English composition, including ones drawn from eighteenth-​century figures such as Johnson, Pope, Swift, and Young, as well as Shakespeare and the Bible. These examples were selected for a variety of purposes, to illustrate finer qualities of style, to nurture principles of good taste, but also to foster good habits of lifestyle, being calculated to “impress [the students’] minds with the sense of what is rational, useful and ornamental in their temper and conduct in life” (Rudiments, p. 65). The opportunity for Priestley to decamp to Warrington arose because of a vacancy arising there in 1761 for a tutor in languages and polite learning. It had become available as a result of the previous post-​holder, John Aikin, switching roles to occupy a tutorship in divinity. Almost immediately Priestley seems to have thrown himself into delivering what, only as late as 1777, he published as his Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism. The delay in the publication of the work, with the consequence that it emerged after George Campbell’s influential Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776), inevitably blunted its impact and visible novelty. The work addresses a range of issues specific to “literary” texts, such as novelty, humor, sublimity, metaphor, originality, imagination, the nature of true taste, and so on, all these within a Hartleian associationist methodology, seeking to “lay open the sources of all the pleasures we receive from this most refined art, explaining what are the properties, or principles, in our frame which lay the mind open to its influences.”22 As well as detailing literary genres and rhetorical figures, Priestley illustrates his points with profuse quotations from poetry and prose. Warrington stood apart in its time as unparalleled in terms of its intellectual reputation and the eminence of its tutors. Dubbed the “Athens of the North,” it threw open its doors in 1757 and admitted students up until 1783.23 Over this relatively short duration, occupants of just one of its tutorships, that of belles-​lettres, included, in addition to Priestley, William Enfield, famous for his two elocutionary primers already mentioned; John Aikin; and the gifted and energetic polymath Gilbert Wakefield. It was Aikin, perhaps, who set the tone, and was most instrumental in Warrington’s styling itself as an institution particularly hospitable to literary study. It is true that little evidence has survived about the exact nature of the curriculum (though a slot was allocated to belles-​lettres, whatever that contained), but we can glean something from the library catalog printed in 1775. As might be expected, holdings in modern subjects greatly outnumber those in classics, and while literary texts are not greatly 21  Joseph Priestley, The Rudiments of English Grammar: Adapted to the Use of Schools (London, 1761), p. viii. 22  Joseph Priestley, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (London, 1777), p. 72. 23  See P. O’Brien, Warrington Academy, 1757–​86: Its Predecessors and Successors (Wigan: Owl Books, 1989).

 

118   Richard Terry in evidence, the library did contain volumes of Prior’s and Gray’s poetry. What we do know, however, is that John Aikin ran a series of Saturday morning classes in which pupils engaged with passages selected from some of the finest English poets such as Milton, Pope, Thomson, Young, and Akenside. Apparently, Aikin read the passages out, followed in turn by the students, and although the primary purpose may have been elocutionary it seems likely that some attention was paid to issues of criticism and taste.24 Aikin believed strongly that the general sway held by classical learning helped to maintain a professional and class elite: in his more rebellious moods, he could be quite dismissive of the value of classical literature. His daughter, Anna Letitia, who consumed works of literature from an early age, inherited her father’s commitment to vernacular literature. This diet of early reading stood her in good stead throughout her life, and is reflected in the books that she and her husband used at Palgrave School in the 1770s and 1780s, and in the extracts selected for her anthology for young women, The Female Speaker, published in 1811. As regards the latter, William McCarthy has calculated that about two-​thirds of the extracts belong to “English Literature,” including selections from several poets including Pope, Thomson, Collins, and Gray.25

English and Scottish Universities It was in the lecture halls of Dissenting academies that vernacular poetry first makes its appearance in advanced-​level education in England. It is worth stressing that no parallel development occurs, in this period, within the two English universities, Oxford and Cambridge. In the eighteenth century, the Oxford BA, for example, required competence in three areas: spoken Latin; the “Sciences,” consisting of what we would now see as the nonscientific subjects of logic, rhetoric, geometry, morals, and politics; and demonstrated knowledge of three classical authors in two languages (either two in Latin and one Greek, or the other way around). The whole curriculum exudes an unflappable conviction that higher learning necessarily amounts to learning about classical culture. When the Oxford professorship of poetry was established in 1708, it was conceived by its founder Henry Birkhead specifically as a stimulus toward “the reading of the ancient poets”: modern poetry was not remotely considered a reputable subject of study.26 The eighteenth century tends to be thought of as a period in which the ancient English universities were both professionally lax and intellectually sluggish: such a view, though perhaps not the entire truth of the matter, is certainly lent credence by testimony such as Edward Gibbon’s damning account in his Memoirs of being taught virtually nothing during his

24 

See Irene Parker, Dissenting Academies in England: Their Rise and Progress and Their Place among the Educational Systems of the Country (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1914), p. 111. 25  William McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2008), p. 40. 26  L. S. Sutherland, “The Curriculum,” in T. H. Aston et al. (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford, 8 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–​2000), vol. v: The Eighteenth Century, ed. L. S. Sutherland and L. G. Mitchell (1986), pp. 469–​91, at p. 475.

 

Poems in the Lecture Hall    119 Oxford degree.27 The position seems to have been vastly different north of the border, which witnessed a flourishing in the teaching of English Literature or at least a reformed version of litterae humaniores. The urgency of reforms in Scottish university education stemmed mainly from the Act of Union of 1707, which led many Scots to become self-​conscious about the need for various kinds of national improvement if their country were to benefit culturally and commercially from the incorporation of Britain. One such area of improvement lay in the reform of the language, especially in the objective of anglicizing the Scottish tongue through the purging of offensive dialect terms (or “Scotticisms”) and the nurturing of a uniform standard of pronunciation. The task of linguistic reform registered itself on a personal level in the predicament of many educated Scots who left their native country to pursue literary or professional careers in England. Inability to speak the English language correctly, or at least intelligibly, posed itself as a significant barrier to personal advancement. When Roderick Random, the eponymous hero of Smollett’s novel, comes to London, he hears that an English schoolmaster would be prepared to instruct him in “the pronunciation of the English-​tongue, without which (he says) you will be unfit for business in this country.”28 Some of the leading Scottish intellectuals, including Hume, Blair, and Beattie, worried over the barbaric nature of the unreformed Scottish tongue, Hume even compiling a list of “Scotticisms” printed in the Political Discourses (1752). The specific incorrectness of the Scottish language, whether seen as one primarily of vocabulary or pronunciation, was picked over by commentators, as in the following extract in which Boswell records a conversation on the matter with Burke: I said to Burke, “You would not have a man use Scotch words, as to say a trance for a passage in a house.” “No,” said he, “that is a different language.” “But,” said I, “is it not better, too, to try to pronounce not in the broad Scotch way and to say passage and not pawssage.” “Yes,” said Burke, “when once you’re taught how they pronounce it in England; but don’t try at English pronunciation.” Said Richard Burke, “Better say pawsage than pissage.” And indeed some Scotsmen, such as Rae, the advocate, make blunders as bad as this.29

The whole exchange is pregnant with a sense of Scottish linguistic defeat and inferiority which cannot be escaped even by the copying of English habits of pronunciation, unless where these have been systematically taught. And yet those Scots who were closest to being word-​perfect in reproducing English speech traits also risked social opprobrium, courting disapproval in their turn for reneging on their cultural origins. The Scottish poet David Malloch, for instance, who on coming to London changed his surname to Mallet and conversed in flawless English, attracted hostility from other expatriate Scots. The movement to regulate the Scottish tongue went hand in hand with other schemes for cultural self-​improvement, including the establishment of convivial societies dedicated to the reform of manners and taste (see c­ hapter 8, “The Poet as Clubman”). Such developments form the backdrop to another innovation: the teaching of literature, including poetry, as an 27 

See Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. G. A. Bonnell (London: Nelson, 1966), pp. 46–​67. Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random, ed. P. G. Boucé (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), p. 96. 29  Cited in Pat Rogers, “Boswell and the Scotticism,” in Greg Clingham (ed.), New Light on Boswell: Critical and Historical Essays on the Occasion of the Centenary of “The Life of Johnson” (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), p. 63. 28 

 

120   Richard Terry element within Scottish university curricula. As distinct from the Oxbridge colleges, the Scottish Enlightenment universities accorded belles-​lettres the status of a recognized subject, and it was under this heading that literary texts first enter the lecture theater. To say that literature gets taught means specifically English literature—​as distinct from classical texts, but also as contradistinguished from Scottish literature, which had no part to play when the rationale for teaching literature was “improvement,” understood in terms of anglicization.

Lectures In 1748 the young Adam Smith delivered a set of public lectures in Edinburgh on “Rhetoric and Belles Lettres,” the program proving sufficiently popular to earn him £100 per year over the three successive years in which it ran. When Smith departed Edinburgh for the University of Glasgow in 1751, the lecture course traveled with him and was assimilated into the university curriculum. Smith’s lectures demonstrate a set of attitudes toward literature, and poetry in particular, that we can see in other lecture courses or teaching texts of the general period, such as Hugh Blair’s later lectures at Edinburgh. What mainly concerns him is what we would now call “communication,” either through articulate speech or through clear and forceful writing. Predictably, the writers in whom he is most interested are English prose stylists including Addison, Swift, and Shaftesbury.30 Poetry, in proportion to its resistance to being considered an eminently useful discourse of communication, fits awkwardly with the general mission of Smith’s lectures. When he cites extracts of poetry, which however is not infrequently, he tends to read these as prose, or at least to adopt a critical framework in which good poetry is valued mainly for its proximity to good prose. In his lecture on “perspicuity” (delivered November 19, 1762), for example, he criticizes a line from Pope specifically against the general communicative standard that “Our words must … be put in such order that the meaning of the sentence shall be quite plain, and not depend upon the accuracy of the printer or of the reader in placing the points or laying the emphasis on any certain words.” The line of Pope’s that exercises Smith as a breach of this standard is from the Essay on Man: “Born but to die, and reasoning but to err” (epistle ii, line 10). Smith’s analysis leads him to bemoan that the meaning of the line depends too much on the reader’s own allocation of stress, and to observe that the line’s supposed ambiguity could have been dissolved through the replacement of “but” with “though” (Lectures, p. 3). Lecture 14 (December 22) again sees Smith taking Pope to task, this time over the use of fuzzy epithets, as in a line from Eloisa to Abelard misquoted in the lecture as “the brown horror of the groves.” Here Smith finds cause to lament the senselessness of “ ‘brown’ joined to ‘horror,’ ” conveying, in his view, “no idea at all” (p. 73). That what it conveys might though be measured more in terms of evocativeness of verbal texture or richness of metaphoric association seems entirely lost on him. Smith’s lack of interest in poetry as a distinct compositional form with its own set of rules and virtues is evident also in later texts of the same kind. George Campbell’s Philosophy of

30  Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. John M. Lothian (Edinburgh: T. Nelson & Son, 1963), pp. xiii–​xiv.

 

Poems in the Lecture Hall    121 Rhetoric (1776), for example, also contains sprinkled analyses of poetic extracts as part of a more sweeping treatment of broad topics of communication such as “eloquence,” “elocution,” and “rhetoric” itself. Poetry again enters the frame as providing illustrative examples of proper or improper uses of language, but “proper” only in terms of what would apply as much to prose, or to spoken conversation, as poetry. In Campbell’s chapter “Of Vivacity,” he seizes on the passage in Paradise Lost in which the angels Ithuriel and Zephon discover Satan sitting by Eve’s ear and whispering into her dreams: Him there they found Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve.

What arrests his attention is the perfect appositeness of the word “Squat”: “No word in the language could have so happily expressed the posture, as that which the poet hath chosen.”31 That sense of the irreplaceability, the unique rightness of a word for its context, is what generates its “vivacity,” but Campbell does not see this as a specialized poetic attribute so much as an attribute of all precise and lively expression. Probably the most influential course of lectures given in the field of literary humanities during the eighteenth century was that by Hugh Blair, eventually making up his three-​ volume Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783). Blair’s lectures have in the past been enlisted as evidence underpinning the paradoxical contention that English literature was, in fact, invented by the Scots.32 Yet, looked at closely, they give relatively meager support for such a view. Most of them are given over to different facets of language use, such as style, eloquence, pronunciation, and to the examination of different genres of scholarly writing. The “literary” figures highlighted for particular attention are not poets or dramatists (not even Shakespeare), but rather the prose stylists Addison and Swift: authors who bore the hallmark, especially in Addison’s case, of stylistic politeness. Poetry enters into this pedagogic framework only where the qualities it exhibits are ones that might be thought to be representative of good communication in general. For example, alighting on a passage from “Il Penseroso” beginning “I walk unseen | On the dry, smooth-​shaven green,” Blair lauds Milton’s verses in terms that could be applicable to writing in any genre: Here, there are no unmeaning general expressions; all is particular; all is picturesque; nothing forced or exaggerated; but a simple Style, and a collection of strong expressive images, which are all of one class, and recall a number of similar ideas of the melancholy kind … We may observe too, the conciseness of the Poet’s manner. He does not rest long on circumstance, or employ a great many words to describe it; which always makes the impression faint and languid; but placing it in one strong point of view, full and clear before the Reader, he there leaves it.33

The key terms of approbation here are particularity, simplicity, expressiveness, concision, strength, and clarity, virtues that could be applied not just to poetry but also to good prose, even to effective public speaking.

31 

George Campbell, The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1786), vol. ii, p. 165. See Robert Crawford (ed.), The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998). 33  Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 5th ed., 3 vols. (London, 1793), vol. iii, pp. 164–​5. 32 

 

122   Richard Terry Throughout this chapter I have tried to emphasize that the mere existence of English poetry on educational syllabuses at whatever level says very little in itself about the ends to which its inclusion is being put. Certainly Smith, Campbell, and Blair introduce poetic examples in a manner that remains strictly subservient to their general program to inculcate high standards of verbal communication, this being seen as especially beneficial to young men intent on practical careers. Moreover, the sorts of refinement that could be instilled by exposure to poetry in the lecture room should be viewed specifically in light of convergence with a cultural ideal of anglicization. What the Scottish professors, and those other educators whose works or activities I have mentioned here, do not expressly claim is that the value of understanding poetry has to do with conversancy with a broad literary heritage. Acquaintance with poetry, rather than being designed to bring within the pupil’s purview a formulated body of knowledge, was instead seen as equipping him to act, and be personally effective, in the outside world. Its ability to do this was bound up with the acquisition of taste. Taste was seen as an elastic virtue, which could be inculcated through conversancy with “objects of taste” (such as poems) but which promised broader merits of discernment and cultural orientation. Ann Fisher, whose Pleasing Instructor I discussed earlier, argues for example that young ladies “should be taught to think, reflect, and form a Taste of Life”; and Blair lists among the categories of reader likely to benefit from the publication of his lectures those that “are studying to cultivate their Taste.”34 From the mid-​century onward, the use of poetry in classrooms and lecture theaters is increasingly in service to this larger pursuit of “taste,” a quality that, as William Enfield remarked, will “introduc[e]‌a man with great advantage to the notice of the world.”35

References Court, Franklin, Institutionalizing English Literature: The Culture and Politics of Literary Study, 1750–​1900 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992). Crawford, Robert (ed.), The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998). Hans, Nicholas, New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951). Hilton, Mary, and Jill Shefrin (eds.), Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). McCarthy, William, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2008). McLachlan, Herbert, English Education under the Test Acts: Being the History of the Non-​ Conformist Academies, 1662–​1820 (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1931). Michael, Ian, Literature in School: A Guide to the Early Sources, 1700–​1800 (Swansea: Textbook Colloquium, 1999).

34 

Fisher, p. ix; Blair, vol. i, p. iv. Cited in “An Essay on the Cultivation of Taste, as a Proper Object of Attention in the Education of Youth,” delivered as a lecture to the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society on March 7, 1793. See Richard Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 211–​12. 35 

 

Poems in the Lecture Hall    123 Michael, Ian, The Teaching of English:  From the Sixteenth Century to 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987). Miller, Thomas P., The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1997). Neuberg, Victor E., Popular Education in Eighteenth Century England (London:  Woburn Press, 1971). O’Brien, P., Warrington Academy, 1757–​86:  Its Predecessors and Successors (Wigan:  Owl Books, 1989). Parker, Irene, Dissenting Academies in England: Their Rise and Progress and their Place among the Educational Systems of the Country (New York: Octagon, 1969). Phillipson, Nicholas, “Politics, Politeness and the Anglicization of Early Eighteenth-​Century Scottish Culture,” in R. A. Mason (ed.), Scotland and England, 1286–​1815 (Ednburgh:  J. Donald, 1987), pp. 226–​47. Schofield, Robert E., The Enlightenment of Joseph Priestley: A Study of his Life and Works from 1733 to 1773 (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1997). Terry, Richard, “Teaching English Literature,” in Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 169–​215. Watson, Richard Foster, The Beginnings of the Teaching of Modern Subjects in England (London: Isaac Pitman, 1971).

 

 

Pa rt  I I

P OE T IC I DE N T I T I E S

 

 

Chapter 8

The P oet as C lu bma n Moyra Haslett In a genteel house, several miles outside Bath, a polite company gathers around an antique Roman urn, set on a pedestal in the bow-​window, with a view of the Avon providing a picturesque backdrop to the scene. The company watches together while poems are pulled out of the vase and read aloud by several of the gentlemen in turn. Shortly, a number of the gentlemen retire to another room and when they return, announce the three prizewinners of that week’s poetry contest. At this point the lady hostess steps forward and awards wreaths of myrtle to the three authors and the poems are read for a second time, this time by the authors themselves, their authorship only now revealed to the assembled company. Perhaps, as Horace Walpole claimed, the vase was decorated with pink ribbons in addition to the sprigs of myrtle and the Duchess of Northumberland composed verses on a buttered muffin; perhaps, as Richard Graves wrote, the judges deliberated over jellies, sweetmeats, and ice creams, and the prizes of flowers and myrtle were worn at the following night’s public assemblies in Bath; perhaps, as the Morning Post advertised, one gentleman caused uproar at a gathering when his satirical poem caricaturing the ladies was read aloud.1 Although accounts vary in such details, including many by writers who never attended the poetry breakfasts, Lady Miller’s Batheaston salon did take place, perhaps weekly, perhaps fortnightly, during the Bath social seasons of 1774 to 1781. And although they were much satirized—​one newspaper wrote of how “Proud Knights, silly ’Squires, and bald pated Seers, beat their Brains once a Week, and weave with Penelope’s Maids their Taffety Trappings”—​these poetry breakfasts are invoked here because of the ways in which they exemplify the sociability within which much eighteenth-​century poetry was conceived, composed, and circulated.2 Many of the poems read aloud in the Batheaston villa were subsequently published in four volumes as Poetical Amusements at a Villa near Batheaston (1775–​81). The first of these volumes suggests why the Batheaston salon was much mocked: of the 114 poems in this collection, 76 are bouts-​rimés, the vast majority of them mediocre and predictably fawning. Captain and Lady Miller’s own verses escape only the second of these judgments. Later

1 

For these and other responses, including that of the Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (May 6, 1778), see Ruth Avaline Hesselgrave, Lady Miller and the Batheaston Literary Circle (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1927). 2  St. James Chronicle (March 19–​22, 1774).

 

128   Moyra Haslett volumes would include far fewer bouts-​rimés and would include poetry by more esteemed writers, including Anna Seward, William Hayley, and Christopher Anstey. Yet the first volume testifies to the eighteenth-​century love of poetic jeux d’esprits and conversations in verse. Lady Miller undoubtedly turned poetry into a parlor game, but in doing so she merely developed an existing tradition in which poetry shaped, and was in turn shaped by, the sociable intimacy of clubs, families, and friends. When Lady Miller sent invitations to her poetry coterie with a list of rhymes or a suggested topic, she continued the practice of many clubs, groups, and drinking societies who composed and read poetry together as a form of social play: the Scriblerian wits, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, Thomas Parnell, and John Arbuthnot, for example, when they each wrote a couplet to Edward Harley, Lord Oxford (April 17, 1714), inviting him to leave the business of politics and join them in sociable ease; or George Colman and David Garrick, when they composed “The Cobler of Cripplegate’s Letter to Robert Lloyd, A.M.” (1763), in which comical sketches of each other are playfully suggested. For all these groups—​as for countless others—​poetry is a sociable game, a play of sportive wit that unites company in general conviviality and common humor. The eighteenth century’s fondness for playful, amusing genres enacts a formal counterpart to its clubbable, associational histories. It is to these, more formal, definitions of “club-​life” to which I will first turn, before returning to the question of clubbable poetic form.

Poetical Clubs The significance of club culture to eighteenth-​century poetry has been little remarked upon, despite the pervasive influence of Habermas’s theories of the public sphere upon both social and literary histories of the period since the 1990s.3 The figure of the solitary poet, wrestling with his inner demons in a lonely garret, is a popular stereotype of poetic composition, and is an image available within poetry of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as much as in any other period (see John Philips’s Splendid Shilling, 1701, or Mary Leapor’s “Epistle to a Lady,” 1748, for example). And the more plausible reality, of the poet corresponding with and talking to other poets and writers, is evident in the histories of centuries other than that of the long eighteenth. (One need only think of the “tribe” of Ben Jonson meeting in the Devil and St. Dunstan Tavern in the 1620s, or the Rhymers’ Club drinking together in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese in the 1890s.) But because the eighteenth century promoted itself so 3 

See for example, Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–​1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000); Markman Ellis, The Coffee-​House: A Cultural History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004); and James Kelly and Martyn Powell (eds.), Clubs and Societies in Eighteenth-​Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010). The influence of a renewed interest in eighteenth-​century club culture upon literary studies is most evident in work on the periodical. Two notable exceptions are Robert Crawford’s analysis of Robert Burns’s “Tam O’Shanter” in the context of male club culture and J. Paul Hunter’s argument that poetry, at least of the early eighteenth century, embodies the public sphere in being argumentative, social, and discursive. See Crawford, “Robert Fergusson’s Robert Burns,” in Robert Crawford (ed.), Robert Burns and Cultural Authority (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 1–​22; and J. Paul Hunter, “Couplets and Conversation,” in John Sitter (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-​Century Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 11–​36.

 

The Poet as Clubman    129 assiduously as an age of sociability—​of, in a variation on Johnson’s term, an age of “clubbability”—​its literary societies strike us with particular force.4 Among the thousands of clubs, associations, leagues, and guilds were many that are notable for their poets, or their poetry. Dryden presided over a circle of wits at Will’s coffee-house, the fame of this circle underscored when Richard Steele addressed his accounts of poetry in The Tatler (1709–​10) from there. Although predominantly political in character, the Kit-​Cat Club also linked Whig patrons and writers, including poets such as Samuel Garth and William Walsh, in sociable converse. Swift, Pope, Gay, and Parnell drew poetic energies and inspiration from each other as fellow “Scriblerians,” while Swift and Matthew Prior also met as fellow-​members of the Tory Brothers Club, and Pope and Gay were officially members of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society. Addison’s “little senate” of authors, which included the poets Thomas Tickell, Ambrose Philips, John Hughes, and Leonard Welsted, met at Button’s coffeehouse in London, where they shared Whig sympathies and critical opinions on such topics as pastoral poetry and translations of Homer. (Philips’s pastorals and Tickell’s Homer, for example, were celebrated rather than Pope’s.) Allan Ramsay found an audience for his early poetry in the Easy Club, whose members shared common interests in poetry and daringly printed Ramsay’s first poem, in memory of the Jacobite Archibald Pitcairne, in 1713. A “poetical club” of Oxford students published together their miscellany, Musapædia (1719); the authors were mercilessly lampooned in Nicholas Amherst’s satirical sketches of the university (1726).5 Centering on Aaron Hill was the literary group which included Eliza Haywood, John Dyer, David Mallet, Susanna Centlivre, Martha Fowke Sansom, and Richard Savage. Haywood and Savage collaborated on poems largely dedicated to “Hillarius,” a poetic persona given to Hill by Haywood, and many of the poems composed and exchanged by members of the group were eventually published in Miscellaneous Poems and Translations, compiled by Savage and published in 1725. In the mid-​century, Robert Lloyd founded the “Nonsense Club,” whose members included William Cowper, George Colman, Bonnell Thornton, and possibly Charles Churchill. The Club specialized in satire and parody: The Connoisseur (1754–​6), compiled by Colman and Thornton in obvious imitation of The Spectator, for example, or the burlesque of odes by William Mason and Thomas Gray, supposedly written at a meeting of the Nonsense Club.6 The Demoniacs, the club who gathered around John Hall-​Stevenson in Skelton Castle,

4  See, for example, Addison: “Man is said to be a Sociable Animal, and, as an Instance of it, we may observe, that we take all Occasions and Pretences of forming our selves into those little Nocturnal Assemblies, which are commonly known by the Name of Clubs” (Spectator 9, in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), vol. i, p. 39); David Fordyce: “we are of all nations the most forward to run into clubs, parties, and societies” (Dialogues concerning Education (London, 1745), pp. 60–​1); and David Hume on the “spirit of the age”: “Particular clubs and societies are everywhere formed: both sexes meet in an easy and sociable manner; and the tempers of men, as well as their behaviour, refine apace” (“Of Refinement in the Arts” (1742), in Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), p. 169). 5  Musapædia; or, Miscellany Poems, Never Before Printed, by Several Members of the Oxford Poetical Club, Late of Eton and Westminster, 2nd ed. (London, 1719); Nicholas Amherst, Terræ-​Filius; or, The Secret History of the University of Oxford, 2 vols. (London, 1726). 6  Although some doubt the existence of a formal club, a group identity emerges in the recurrent dedications of successive poems to each other. See Brean Hammond’s review of Lance Bertelsen, The Nonsense Club: Literature and Popular Culture, 1749–​1764 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), in The Review of English Studies, 39, no. 153 (Feb. 1988), 116–​17.

 

130   Moyra Haslett and who famously included Laurence Sterne, published a collection of eleven erotic poems, with fictional aliases that hinted of their club formation, as Crazy Tales (1762). Bluestocking gatherings circulated manuscript poems by Elizabeth Carter and Hannah More, and were themselves the subject of More’s humorous poem of tribute, The Bas Bleu (1784). Poetry was not a particularly notable feature of Samuel Johnson’s three clubs (the Ivy Lane, the Literary, and the Essex Head), although the Literary Club did include a number of poets (Thomas Percy and Joseph and Thomas Warton), and Goldsmith’s Retaliation (1774), while not depicting the Club itself, articulates Johnson’s definition of club as “an assembly of good fellows” in its successive portrait-​epitaphs of male friends.7 Robert Fergusson found in Edinburgh’s Cape Club a more congenial society than that offered by St. Andrews University. Later, Robert Burns would compose bawdy songs for the Edinburgh club, the Crochallan Fencibles, a radical reformist drinking club. Poems by a Literary Society (1784) declared its ambition to become a regular publication, but did not survive its terrible mauling by the reviewers: the society “holds frequent meetings, (to eat beef steaks, as we suppose),” one critic noted.8 The “Della Cruscan” group, centered on Robert Merry, first in Florence, then in London, published a number of poetic collections together and drew support from each other as they were mercilessly attacked in Juvenalian satires by William Gifford.9 While some of these groups were consciously poetic (the Oxford “poetic club,” the “Council of Parnassus” who authored the poems of 1784, the Batheaston set, the Della Cruscans), most were societies of varying kinds in which poetry was an incidental, not a defining feature: the bacchanalian homosociality of the Demoniacs or the Croachan Fencibles; the supportive, mixed friendships of the Hillarian circle and the Bluestockings; the coffee-​house communities of Will’s and Button’s; or the burlesque clubs of the Scriblerian and Nonsense groups. In some cases, the poet happened to be a member of a club, albeit inspired or supported in his writing by that club (as in the examples of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson). But, whether literary or not, all of these groups offered their writers an immediate audience for their works, a supportive and safe environment in which to experiment and innovate, a group of friends who might aid in the publication and positive reception of their books.

Club Culture To an extent, then, poetry simply found itself embraced within the self-​conscious associationalism of the period. As clubs, societies, lodges, guilds, taverns, reading groups, 7  Later William Cooke, a member of the Essex Head Club, would publish an expanded edition of The Pleasures of Conversation, a Poem with “Poetical Portraits of the principal Characters of Dr Johnson’s Club” (1796; 4th ed., 1815). 8  The English Review; or, An Abstract of English and Foreign Literature, 3 (Feb. 1784), 138. Samuel Bentley identified two of the poets as William Van Mildert and Thomas Percy (nephew of Bishop Percy); see John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 9 vols. (London, 1812–​16), vol. viii, p. 146. 9  See the two privately published collections, The Arno Miscellany: Being a Collection of Fugitive Pieces Written by the Members of a Society Called the Oziosi at Florence (Florence, 1784), and the more famous, and political, collection The Florence Miscellany (Florence, 1785), which inaugurated Merry’s poetic pseudonym (“Della Crusca”) and that of the poetic group associated with him. See also William Gifford, The Baviad (London, 1791) and The Maeviad (London, 1797).

 

The Poet as Clubman    131 coffee-​houses, and tea-​tables proliferated, so too did poetic accounts of this conspicuous sociability. Comic satires of the spa towns of Tunbridge Wells and Bath constitute a significant genre of eighteenth-​century poetry, Rochester’s “Tunbridge Wells” (1675) or John Byrom’s “Tunbridgiale” (1726), for example, and, on Bath, A Dream; or, The Force of Fancy (1710) or Christopher Anstey’s highly popular New Bath Guide (1766), which tells the adventures of the Blunderhead family in Bath, in colloquial verse letters. The settings of fashionable coffee-​houses, card-​tables, and private assemblies are marked in many notable eighteenth-​century poems, including Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Court Eclogues (1716), Matthew Prior’s “Conversation: A Tale” (1720), and Swift’s “Verses on the Death of Dr Swift” (1739). The clamor of voices, the conversation of company, is also evident throughout much eighteenth-​century poetry: in the dramatized scenes of reader-​critics in poems by Mary Leapor and Elizabeth Hands, for example, or the countless poetic dialogues and verse epistles of the period.10 And a number of “feast poems” celebrate the conviviality of the dinner table, including Robert Fergusson’s “To the Principal and Professors of the University of St Andrews, on their Superb Treat to Dr Samuel Johnson” (1773), Goldsmith’s Haunch of Venison (1776), and Anna Seward’s “Verses, Inviting Stella to Tea” (1791). Many minor poets of the period—​such as Charles Hanbury Williams (1708–​59), George Alexander Stevens (1710–​84), and William Woty (1731–​91)—​wrote comic songs for drinking companions, witty poems to be read aloud in company, celebrations or satires of fashionable visiting, and accounts of bustling social life. Although Stevens is remembered today for his popular “Lecture on Heads,” his songs brought an equivalent fame in his own lifetime: New Comic Songs (1753), containing 120 lyrics, was followed by a Collection of New Comic Songs (1759), and, in an attempt to deter pirated versions, a further, authorized edition was published as Songs, Comical and Satyrical (1772), now containing 134 songs. Among these is the ballad of “Bartleme Fair,” which defends the fair as the poor man’s opera, while also mocking its excess: Here are drolls, hornpipe dancing, and showing of postures; Plum-​porridge, black puddings, and op’ning of oysters; The taphouse guests swearing, and gall’ry folks squalling, With salt-​boxes, solos, and mouth-​pieces bawling; Pimps, pick-​pockets, strollers, fat landladies, sailors, Bawds, baileys, jilts, jockeys, thieves, tumblers and tailors.11

Similarly, William Woty’s “White Conduit House” (1760) portrays the popular London tea-​ garden on a busy Sunday afternoon: “’Tis hurry all | And rattling cups and saucers. ‘Waiter’ here, | And ‘Waiter’ there, and ‘Waiter’ here and there, | At once is called: ‘Joe—​Joe—​Joe—​ Joe—​Joe.’  ” In The Spouting Club (1758), Woty depicts a club at which young actors rehearse by declaiming (or rather, ranting and raving) their parts in the public setting of the tavern, their absurdly inflated pretensions mirrored in the poem’s comically grandiose blank verse: Here o’er the Summit of a Chair I loll; My circumspective Eyes explore the Room

10  Mary Leapor, “An Epistle to Artemisia: On Fame” (1751) and Elizabeth Hands, “A Poem, on the Supposition of an Advertisement Appearing in a Morning Paper of a Volume of Poems by a Servant Maid,” and its sequel “A Poem, on the Supposition of the Book Having Been Published and Read” (1789). 11  Lines 13–​18. “Bartleme Fair” was first published in the periodical Stevens edited, Beauties of all the Magazines (1762).

 

132   Moyra Haslett Illuminated. In th’extremest Verge Objects alternate strike my wond’ring Sight, Features distinct and various, while upon The Tables oval, the resplendent Cups Their pure Contents and frothy Surface boast Invigorant: Virginia’s wholesome Plant Lies in the Centre: With the Clay-​form’d Tubes Each Member graces his extended Hand.12

In such an account, we are reminded not only of the intensely ritualized, social world of Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1712–​17), but of the ways in which eighteenth-​century club culture functions as a miniaturized society.

Conscious Sociability Poets, like other writers, increasingly found their work inspired and supported by the networks of friends and fellow companions who met in clubs and societies. In addition to the more or less formal clubs, there were such centers of poetic activity as Robert Dodsley’s shop, the Tully’s Head, Pall Mall, in the 1750s, or Joseph Johnson’s shop in St. Paul’s Churchyard in the 1780s and 1790s, which provided informal literary clubs in which writers could meet and confer upon their work. Although the poet constituents of Dodsley’s shop did not meet under the usual rituals of club life—​regular meetings, sociable dining, exclusive membership—​they did collaborate on arguably the most significant “club” publication of poetry of the century: the six volumes of A Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1748–​58), published by Dodsley at the sign of Tully’s Head. Michael Suarez’s edition of this miscellany highlights the role of Dodsley’s gentlemen friends in its construction, in acting as consultant editors, contributors, and commissioners, in bringing in contributions through their own networks of influence and friendship. Literary history has tended to think of this collection as a significant act of literary canonization: Suarez suggests that friendship played a much more central role in its choice of poets.13 The importance of “club” identity to the fashioning of eighteenth-​century poetry therefore extends well beyond the formal clubs which are recognized by cultural historians today, important though these undoubtedly were. Patrick Delany, for example, called the group of friends who met regularly at his Stafford Street lodgings in Dublin his “Club,” or the “Dublin Thursday Society,” although we would recognize this circle of friends as representing a “coterie,” as familiar to the history of seventeenth-​century poetry as to that of the eighteenth.14 Jonathan Smedley, in his attack upon the first volume of Miscellanies (1727) by Pope

12 

William Woty, The Spouting Club: A Mock Heroic, Comico, Farcico, Tragico, Burlesque Poem (London, 1758), p. 2. 13  See Robert Dodsley (ed.), A Collection of Poems by Several Hands, 6 vols., intro. Michael Suarez (London: Routledge-​Thoemmes Press, 1997), vol. i, pp. 93–​9. 14  See Miss Kelly to Swift, July 8, 1733, in The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, D.D., ed. David Woolley, 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999–​2007), vol. iii, pp. 665–​6; Mary Pendarves to Swift, November 20, 1734, in Correspondence, vol. iii, p. 21.

 

The Poet as Clubman    133 and Swift, recognized the publication as a declaration of their friendship, but consciously misread it as a form of cabal when he wrote, “They would Club their Wit.”15 This chapter thus situates the poet as “clubman” when conscious sociability becomes a key aspect of the writing or publication of poetry. Subscription lists, miscellanies, and collaborative writing, for example, might all be said to give material form to the “clubbability” of eighteenth-​ century literature, and we can see traces of this connection in the language occasionally used to describe these aspects. In an allusion to the subscription edition of Gay’s Poems on Several Occasions (1720), for example, Richard Savage suggestively wrote of how “cabals were formed our Johnny’s debts to clear”; and, referring to the joint authorship of “One Epistle to Mr A. Pope” (1732), David Mallet wrote, “To guess, ere One Epistle saw the light, | How many brother-​dunces club’d their mite.”16 Although subscription publishing had been common in the seventeenth century for major scholarly works of science, theology, or jurisprudence, Jacob Tonson’s folio edition of Dryden’s Works of Virgil (1697) was the first volume by a living poet to be financed in this way.17 Subscription lists that ran into the hundreds, even thousands, could hardly be said to represent a community of friends and acquaintances. (A list of two thousand names preceded Jane Cave’s Poems on Various Subjects, 1783, and further names were added to later editions.) But the impulse that underpinned subscription publishing, in which potential readers would “club” together to finance the publication of the book, belongs as surely to the age of sociability as does the formation of more formal clubs. Lists of subscribers metaphorically stamped the book with the physical presence of its supporters and bore witness to the networks of friends and communities which may have pre-​existed the work’s publication, or were, in turn, created by the very act of subscribing. The most prestigious subscription lists of the period—​including those of Matthew Prior, Alexander Pope, and James Thomson—​ might emblazon the names of royalty at the head of their lists, “associates” of many of the other subscribers only insofar as their names decorate the same pages, but the rise of provincial subscription lists suggests that an idea of literary community was also being fashioned. In Jane Cave’s first edition of her poetry (1783), subscribers were arranged according to geography: Oxford, Winchester, Southampton, and a host of other towns in the south and west of England. In the second edition (1786), the list was expanded with subscribers from Windsor and Sussex. Both editions noted that the author did not know her subscribers personally, but then “club” membership, as both Johnson and the Bluestockings came to bewail, did not necessarily mean acquaintanceship, let alone intimacy.18 What Cave’s lists suggested was a local body of readers who proclaimed their shared support for poetry not only to a wider public, but also, perhaps primarily, to themselves.

15 

Jonathan Smedley (ed.), Gulliveriana; or, A Fourth Volume of Miscellanies (London, 1727), p. ix. David Nokes, John Gay: A Profession of Friendship (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), p. 289; David Mallet, Of Verbal Criticism (London, 1733), p. 14. See also the attack on Three Hours after Marriage, in A Letter to Mr John Gay (London, 1717), pp. 6–​7. 17  Jacob Tonson’s first subscription list for an edition of poetry had been his posthumous edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1688). 18  Johnson’s Literary Club was initially restricted to a maximum of twelve members, but rapidly increased from 1773 onward until a new rule was instituted in 1780 to restrict the maximum number of members to forty. 16 

 

134   Moyra Haslett Such loosely constituted groups as poetry subscribers might be seen to be paralleled by the authors who either published, or found their works published, in a miscellaneous collection. While the title “miscellany” could be used of any form of poetry collection, including those by a single author, many miscellanies exploited the opportunity for heterogeneity which the title permitted.19 While the miscellany had been a conventional, established form at least since the Elizabethan period, what is striking about eighteenth-​century miscellanies is the way in which they draw upon or allude to the culture of sociability. Miscellanies over Claret; or, The Friends to the Tavern, the Best Friends to Poetry; Being a Collection of Poems, Translations, &c to Be Continued Monthly from the Rose Tavern (1697–​8) is a title which, as Ann Cline Kelly notes, did “nothing to enhance the prestige of the genre.”20 It does, however, exemplify the way in which the form of the miscellany became associated with ideas of community, albeit of very different kinds. Barbara Benedict, in her detailed study of the form, distinguishes the eighteenth-​century miscellany from that of other periods by its address to a diverse readership.21 Given the prevalence of titles that point toward clubs and societies, the miscellany of our period can also be seen to contribute to the pervasiveness of club life as a defining feature of eighteenth-​century culture. The implications of Miscellanies over Claret are repeated in countless title pages across the period. One example is The Honey-​Suckle, Consisting of Original Poems, Epigrams, Songs, Tales, Odes, and Translations: By a Society of Gentlemen (1734). This work clearly alluded to its club formation in having its preface signed by “Simon Standish, esq; Secretary to the Society.”22 In comparison to this cheap, shilling publication was the clearly more “fashionable” Tunbrigalia; or, The Tunbridge miscellany (1740), which marked its more exclusive readership by selling only twenty-​six pages of poetry for six shillings. Just as the spa towns fashioned their own success by the visibility of the polite who promenaded in their streets, the Tunbrigalia announced that its “curious collection of miscellany poems” had been “Exhibited upon the Walks at Tunbridge Wells, in the last three Years” and was assembled “by a Society of gentlemen and ladies.” The “societies” of miscellany title pages sometimes invite our skepticism. Are we to believe that the “Tuesday Society” in Bath hired its own poet-​hairdresser, as the following title suggests: The Art of Dressing the Hair: A Poem: Humbly Inscribed to the Members of the T.N. Club, by E. P. Philocosm, and Late Hair-​Dresser to the Said Society (Bath, 1770)? According to an “uncontrolled note” to a 1716 miscellany in the Eighteenth-​Century Short Title Catalogue, the subtitle “by a society of gentlemen” means not by a society of gentlemen, “just poems which sundry people happened to write, collected by the editor.”23 Other titles suggest more plausible groups, such as the “expatriate” publication, Poems, Selected and Printed by a Small Party 19  See, for example, John Gay’s “On a Miscellany of Poems: To Bernard Lintott,” in Miscellaneous Poems and Translations (London, 1712). 20  Ann Cline Kelly, “The Semiotics of Swift’s Miscellanies,” Swift Studies, 6 (1991), 59–​80, at p. 61. 21  See Barbara M. Benedict, Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 3–​5. 22  Surviving copies of this miscellany suggest that this may have been a monthly publication, although the extent of its publication, beyond three editions in its first year, is unknown. 23  This note accompanies the entry for The Loyal Mourner for the Best of Princes, Being a Collection of Poems Sacred to the Immortal Memory of Her Late Majesty Queen Anne, by a Society of Gentlemen (London and Dublin, 1716). See also The Diverting Muse; or, The Universal Medley (1707), by “a society of merry gentlemen, for the entertainment of the town.”

 

The Poet as Clubman    135 of English, Who Made This Amusement a Substitute for Society, Which the Disturbed Situation of the Country Prevented Their Enjoying (Strasbourg, in the month of February, 1792). Also more convincing are the societies of artisan workers: the lamplighters of Norwich and the journeymen shoemakers, tailors, and weavers of Dublin, who compose poetry as part of their claim to civic status.24 For such groups, poetry functions as a marker of ritual. In the case of the Dublin tailors, for example, the broadside announces the guild-​like status of the group: A New Poem, on the Ancient and Loyal Society of Journey-​men Taylors, Who Are to Dine at the King’s-​Inn’s-​ Hall, This Present Monday, Being the 26th of This Instant July, 1725, by H.N. Bricklayer, One of the Brethren (Dublin, 1725). That so many miscellanies and anthologies would declare group identity on their title page is unsurprising in this context, since it is the recital or composition of poetry, as much, sometimes, as the drinking of wine, ale, or coffee, or the rousing declaration of toasts, that establishes the group as a formal association. Ned Ward’s popular Tipling Philosophers, for example, is first published as a “lyrick poem” in 1710. In its Dublin 1751 edition, the poem is alternatively titled Wine and Wisdom and is published with a range of miscellaneous titles, linked together under the suggestion “very proper to be read by a merry society, over a glass of good liquor.”25

Sociable Verse The enjoyment of poetry in club settings—​whether a mixed company of friends gathered at a member’s home, or the boisterous homosociality of the tavern—​lent itself particularly to forms of sociable verse. Bouts-​rimés, capping verses, or crambo; anagrams, acrostics, enigmas, and riddles; rebuses, macaronic verses, palindromes; contrived doggerel and epigrams: all of these forms were popular in the period, a popularity which is lamented, but also thereby demonstrated, in a series of essays in the Spectator attacking “false wit” (May 9–​12, 1711). All are consciously sociable forms. In “capping” verses, for example, verses are quoted alternately in emulation or contest, and composition becomes a kind of “round-​robin.” In deliberately composed doggerel, the reader’s enjoyment of the joke is at the expense of the poetic persona, not the author. Often this kind of light verse is an index of amateurism, a form of poetic play in which anyone can participate, or a form of apprenticeship, in which aspiring poets can exercise poetic wit. As obviously minor work, as verse rather than poetry, these forms have rarely been given critical attention.26 Jack Werner’s edition of the 24  See the highly popular collection, A Copy of Verses, Humbly Presented to All Our Worthy Masters in the City of Norwich, by the Careful Society of Lamp-​Lighters (Norwich, 1765), which, when a sequel was published in 1783, ran to at least seven further editions. Almost forty Dublin broadsides, published between 1725 and 1734, suggest an equally vibrant culture of artisan verse. 25  For the role of poetry in club ritual, see also The Relish; or, Congratulatory Poem on the Meeting of the Society, for Mutual Improvement by Free and Candid Inquiry, Held at the Robin Hood, Butcher-​Row, Temple-​Bar (London, 1759), and The Ruling Passion: An Occasional Poem: Written by the Appointment of the Society of the ΦBK and Spoken, on Their Anniversary, in the Chapel of the University, Cambridge, July 20 1797, by Thomas Paine, A.M. Published According to Act of Congress (Boston, 1797). 26  Significant exceptions are David S. Shields, Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1997); Brian Robins, Catch and Glee Culture in Eighteenth-​Century

 

136   Moyra Haslett manuscript poems of James Boswell is self-​consciously titled Boswell’s Book of Bad Verse (1974), and reminds us of the conviviality of this verse in arranging themed sections as a playful acrostic of “James Boswell.”27 No convivial gathering was complete, it would seem, without at least one poet to entertain and commemorate, a kind of “club laureate.” Boswell termed himself the “worshipful laureate” of the “Soaping Club,” a drinking and singing club which he helped found in Edinburgh in 1760. The satirical depiction of the “Society of Grub-​Street,” unsurprisingly then, includes, in addition to a secretary and historiographer, the poet Mr. Poppy, who is “ready to compose Panegyrics or Satires, Copies of verses from friends of Authors, Odes, Epithalamiums, Funeral Elegies, Anagrams and Acrostics, and annual Salutations from the City Bell-​men to their worthy masters and mistresses, at reasonable rates.”28 The condescension of literary history toward much of this poetry can appear entirely warranted. At its worst it might be called “bad verse,” at its best it is simply “verse” (or “minor poetry”). Jack Werner’s quip about Boswell is that he might be described as “the Prince of Biographers who began as the Laureate of Doggerel” (p. 27). Sociable verse, however, was undoubtedly popular, as the four volumes of Batheaston poetry or the countless miscellanies by groups suggest, and for that reason its historical significance is certain. Writing to Henry Cromwell, Pope noted that he had not quoted a single Latin author in his retirement in Windsor Forest, but had learned by heart a song by Thomas D’Urfey: “Dares any one despise Him, who has made so many men Drink?”29 “Light” verse makes no claims to the appreciation of posterity, yet it exemplifies many of the qualities which were most esteemed by contemporary readers:  ease, assurance, wit, deftness, fluency, vivacity, urbanity, and fa­cetiousness, for example. Boswell’s Life of Johnson records a number of conversations in which he and Johnson debated the merits of “mediocre” poetry. At one point Johnson repeats the common remark that “as there is no necessity for our having poetry at all, it being merely a luxury, an instrument of pleasure, it can have no value, unless when exquisite in its kind.”30 Boswell and Johnson’s conversations on light verse indicate a growing awareness in the eighteenth century that such poetry required a defense. Isaac D’Israeli, for example, introduced the term vers de société into English in an essay entitled “On Poetical Opuscula” (1796) and defended poetry written for the poet’s pleasure, rather than for his “glory,” in which he charms his readers “because he seems careless of their approbation.” For D’Israeli, such

England (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2006); and Aaron Santesso, “‘Playful’ Poetry and the Public School,” Eighteenth-​Century Life, 32, no. 1 (2008), 57–​80. 27  Boswell’s Book of Bad Verse: Love Poems and Other Verses, ed. Jack Werner (London: White Lion, 1974). The poems are organized under the headings: “Jovial,” “Amorous,” “Melancholy,” “Epigrammatic,” “Satirical,” “Boozy,” “Open-​hearted,” “Spiritual,” “Whimsical,” “Epistolary,” “Lamentable,” “Literary.” 28  Memoirs of the Society of Grub Street (London, 1737), p. 3. See also “Tim Syllabub,” the poet among the “Club of Authors” satirically sketched by Oliver Goldsmith in The Citizen of the World (1760–​1), who was “reckoned equally excellent at a rebus, a riddle, a bawdy song and an hymn for the tabernacle”: see The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), vol. ii, p. 125. 29  The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), vol. i, p. 81. 30 See Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Together with Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson’s Diary of a Journey into North Wales, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–​64), vol. ii, pp. 351–​2.

 

The Poet as Clubman    137 poetry is difficult to write well—​poetical amusements are “hazardous pieces”—​and English poets of vers de société, such as Edmund Waller and Matthew Prior, he argues, could make only awkward attempts at the refinement which is so consummately seen in French poetry.31 Waller and Prior, however, continued to be among the most popularly reprinted poets in the eighteenth century, and “poetical amusements” of the kind described in D’Israeli’s essay are pervasive throughout eighteenth-​century poetry. What self-​consciously “light” or “society” verses share more generally with highly regarded work from the period is a commitment to good-​humouredness, to the sharing of sociable pleasure. The outrageousness of Pope’s line, “And the fresh vomit run for ever green” (The Dunciad, book ii, line 156), owes something to this kind of culture, of a performance designed to amuse, and perhaps shock, friends. If we condemn light verse as “flat-​footed” or “doggerel,” we forget the sense of mischievous fun which the poetry generated in its first readers. The comic effects of bathos in major work of the period are widely recognized, and highly commended. Inept poets often create bathos unintentionally. Skillful poets deploy it satirically. And between the two instances lie considerable differences in talent, but much less sharp polarities in their effects. When Gay quoted a couplet of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s poetry as one of Phoebe Clinket’s banal extempore compositions, he did not necessarily insult her, but rather caught the element of comic ventriloquism of Montagu’s original poem.32 “Bad” verse might instead be thought to have a function in relation to its conviviality. While it may be the case that clubs or societies encourage bad verse because their members are mediocre poets who merely divert themselves and say kind things of each other, it may also be a conscious act of amusement to write bad verse deliberately.33 As Swift suggested in his satirical Compleat Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation (1738), “polite” conversation often resides only in fashionable jargon, cant words, or platitudes. Such lapses are contemptible—​ but also humorous. Anstey’s highly popular New Bath Guide (1766) attempts to capture contemporary idiom, evident in such colloquialisms as “in all my born days,” “as sure as a gun,” or “vastly” (a word denounced by Lord Chesterfield as a “vulgarism in language” and one which his son should avoid using). The poem’s speakers—​squire Simkin Blunderhead, his sister Prudence, and cousin Jenny—​celebrate and describe the social rounds of visiting, public assemblies, and public breakfasts in Bath, while inadvertently allowing us to see the shallowness and superficiality of this world, as well as its obvious appeal: The Captain’s a worthy good Sort of a Man, For He calls in upon us whenever He can, And often a Dinner or Supper He takes here, 31 

Isaac D’Israeli, Miscellanies; or, Literary Recreations (London, 1796), pp. 148–​58, at pp. 150, 154. “Opusculum” is Latin for a minor literary work, though it is translated by D’Israeli as “poetical amusement.” 32  Silliander’s couplet, “In her all Beauties of the Spring are seen, | Her Cheeks are rosy, and her mantua Green” (Tuesday, lines 78–​9), is quoted in Three Hours After Marriage (1717), act II, line 48. Compare John Fuller’s comment that the couplet was included as revenge against Montagu for the embarrassment caused by publication of the Court Poems (1716); John Gay, Dramatic Works, ed. John Fuller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 447. 33  See Hester Lynch Piozzi in The Florence Miscellany (Florence, 1785): “why we wrote the verses may be easily explain’d, we wrote them to divert ourselves, and to say kind things of each other; we collected them that our reciprocal expressions of kindness might not be lost, and we printed them because we had no reason to be ashamed of our mutual partiality” (p. 5).

 

138   Moyra Haslett And Jenny and He talk of Milton and Shakespear, For the Life of me now I can’t think of his Name, But we all got acquainted as soon as we came. (letter ii, lines 78–​83)

Margaret Doody and J. Paul Hunter have both written compellingly of the conversational idiom embedded within eighteenth-​century uses of the heroic couplet. Here, Simkin’s anapestic tetrameter lines give a longer, more discursive line than that of heroic couplet, with the bouncing, jaunty rhythm of the anapests.34 Other popular poetic forms may also be attributable to an eighteenth-​century culture of “clubbability.” Parodies and burlesque, for example, extend an invitation to shared joking, so evident in the literary culture of the Scriblerians and the Nonsense Club. The extempore composition of poetry gives gentlemen, and ladies, the opportunity to demonstrate their refinement in poetic improvisation in company: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s “Written Ex Tempore in Company in a Glass Window the First Year I Was Marry’d,” for example, or the public improvisation of poetry which was such an important part of the syllabus at Westminster School, where Dryden, Prior, Lloyd, Churchill, and Cowper all studied.35 Replies and counter-​replies to preceding poems or the party-​political factionalism of poetic responses are also often created out of club meetings or club loyalties: poems by the Kit-​Cats celebrating the Duke of Marlborough’s victories, for example, along with the Tory lampoons against that club.36 And the collective composition of verse is evident not only in the examples already noted of the Scriblerian and Nonsense Clubs, but in many cases throughout the century—​even involving Johnson, who, despite ridiculing the idea of collaborative composition, almost certainly contributed some lines to Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, and possibly The Traveller.37 Manuscript circulation might also be included in this list of poetic features, as the earlier traditions of coterie poetry are transmuted into the networks of affiliation and friendship which characterize eighteenth-​century sociability. Hannah More’s Bas Bleu (1786), for example, was published after three years of “wandering about in manuscript.” From surviving letters and diaries, we can identify at least thirty readers of the poem before

34  Although Matthew Prior, Jonathan Swift, and John Byrom all used anapestic form widely in their poetry, Anstey’s New Bath Guide led to anapestic tetrameter becoming known as “Anstey’s measure” or “New-​Bath verse”; see William Wallbeck, Fables; Ancient and Modern (London, 1787), p. xxxi. Goldsmith’s Haunch of Venison and Retaliation, Sheridan’s Ridotto of Bath (1771), and Anstey’s Election Ball (1776), written for one of Lady Miller’s breakfasts, all indicate the renewed popularity of this humorous form in the wake of the success of the New Bath Guide. 35  See Santesso, “ ‘Playful Poetry.’ ” 36  See, for example, Addison’s Campaign (1704), Congreve’s ballad “Jack Frenchman’s Defeat” (1708), or the “Toast to Mademoiselle Oudenarde: A Dialogue in Verse between Tonson, Hopkins, Topham and Lord Halifax” (1708); and Richard Blackmore’s Kit-​Cats (1704), Swift’s “Essay to Restore the Kit-​Cat Members to Their Lost Abilities” (1711), and a number of anonymous songs, including “A Song at the Kit-​ Cat Club” and The Loyal Calves-​Head Club (1710). 37  Boswell records Samuel Johnson’s skepticism that collaborative writing in poetry is possible: when told that Colman and Lloyd jointly composed the odes to obscurity and oblivion, in burlesque imitation of Mason and Gray, Johnson replied: “how can two people make an Ode? Perhaps one made one of them, and one the other”: see Boswell’s Life of Johnson, vol. ii, p. 334. Regarding Johnson’s contributions to Goldsmith’s poems, see Boswell’s Life of Johnson, vol. ii, p. 7, and vol. iii, p. 418; Margaret McFadden Smith, Index of English Literary Manuscripts (London: Mansell, 1989), vol. iii, part 2, p. 63; and John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. O. M. Brack, Jr. (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 2009), p. 420.

 

The Poet as Clubman    139 publication, many of whom enjoyed decoding the allusions to members and friends of the Bluestockings contained within the poem.38 The poem proves that the coterie practices of manuscript circulation which we associate primarily with sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​ century traditions of poetry were clearly still important in the late eighteenth century, and that often these practices survived as a result of the associational culture of the period.

Exemplary Poems and Poets A number of eighteenth-​ century poems might be said to exemplify all of these strands: Retaliation, for example, which circulated in manuscript among Goldsmith’s friends and was finally published posthumously, with stories of its origin in meetings of an informal club at St. James’s Coffee House, where, it was claimed, his friends improvised satirical poetry at his expense in an attempt to goad him into self-​defense. Retaliation is, then, written in the humorously conversational style of anapestic tetrameters, it is inspired (or so it is claimed) by sociable company and is a response to extempore verse. That the poem itself narrates a form of joking, joshing male homosociality, completes its status as an exemplary “club poem”: Of old, when Scarron his companions invited, Each guest brought his dish and the feast was united. If our landlord supplies us with beef and with fish, Let each guest bring himself and he brings the best dish: Our Dean shall be venison, just fresh from the plains; Our Burke shall be tongue, with a garnish of brains; Our Will shall be wild-​fowl, of excellent flavour, And Dick with his pepper shall heighten their savour; ………………………………………………………… . Here, waiter! more wine, let me sit while I’m able, Till all my companions sink under the table; Then, with chaos and blunders encircling my head, Let me ponder and tell what I think of the dead. (lines 1–​8, 19–​22)

Like More’s Bas Bleu, the poem extends the intimacy and pleasures of its particular company—​whether the Bluestockings or Goldsmith’s informal club—​to a wider audience. When Retaliation was published, it was accompanied by accumulating footnotes that identified the participants, in addition to a prefatory letter which explained the poem’s origin in a “club of beaux esprits.” Goldsmith’s initial embrace of his friends (“Our Dean … Our Burke”) and the immediacy of the table (“Here, waiter! more wine …”) are extended to anonymous readers. The poem’s contrast between the vivid present-​tense pleasures of food, wine, and company in the first verse paragraphs and the succeeding paragraphs of individual epitaphs presents a complicated instance of the private–​public dimensions of these mid-​century clubs. The subjects of Goldsmith’s epitaphs survive the poem and can be read as private

38  See Moyra Haslett, “Becoming Bluestockings: Contextualising Hannah More’s ‘The Bas Bleu,’” Journal for Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 33, no. 1 (2010), 89–​114.

 

140   Moyra Haslett portraits of public figures. Goldsmith himself speaks the epitaphs of others, but, with the poem published posthumously, from beyond the grave. The composition of their epitaphs becomes his own, incomplete, unfinished. Numerous replies and additions followed, including epitaphs of Johnson and of Goldsmith himself, sent by anonymous contributors to the Public Advertiser (April 25, 1774) and the London Chronicle (July 7–​9, 1774).39 Such readers responded to the poem, but also to the promise of belonging to an intimate circle which it appeared to extend to nonmembers. If Goldsmith’s Retaliation is a poem which exemplifies the “clubbability” of eighteenth-​ century literary culture, then Swift is perhaps its most exemplary poet. A member of the Saturday, Brothers’, and Scriblerian clubs, Swift also enjoyed the company of several circles in Ireland, including Delany’s informal club in Dublin, variously known as the “witty club,” the “Senatus Consultum,” “little senate” or, less affectionately, Swift’s “seraglio,” whose members included Patrick Delany, Thomas Sheridan, Matthew Pilkington, Mary Barber, Constantia Grierson, and Swift himself.40 This Dublin circle may have played an important role in the Dublin publications of Swift’s work, first by Samuel Fairbrother (1732), then by George Faulkner (1735), correcting and amending his work prior to publication, in group editing sessions at the Thursday meetings of the circle.41 Swift’s poetry includes countless informal poems which he exchanged with these and other Irish friends:  humorous jeux d’esprits on Dan Jackson’s large nose; comic “flyting” poems which rival each other in ingenious, or farcical, rhyming; “phatic” poems constructed simply out of the act of writing to one another; poems created out of verbal play, such as those written in “Latino-​Anglicus,” or mock Latin; collaboratively written poems, such as those by “George Nim-​Dan-​Dean”; occasional poems celebrating birthdays, the most famous of which are the annual poems to “Stella”; “left-​handed poems” in mirror writing and verses written in circles; and poems written as after-​dinner or evening entertainment, as is the case in many of the “Market-​Hill” poems.42 Swift shared his culture’s condescension for such “trifles”: “and what is a rebus? | A thing never known to the muses or Phoebus.”43 But he also shared his culture’s fondness for such forms: he suggested to Pope that he might compile a “ninepenny” collection just of riddles (December 5, 1726), and although these were not included in the Miscellanies (1727), 39  For a detailed account of the poem’s genesis and reception, see The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), pp. 741–​5. 40  For the quotations here, see The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Delany, ed. Lady Llanover, 3 vols. (London, 1861), vol. i, p. 397; Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington, ed. A. C. Elias, Jr., 2 vols. (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1997), vol. i, p. 283; Orrery Papers, vol. i, p. 213, quoted in Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, 3 vols. (London: Methuen, 1962–​83), vol. iii, p. 856; John Boyle, Earl of Orrery, Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift, 2nd ed. (London, 1752), p. 126 (also “female senate,” p. 127). 41  See A. C. Elias, Jr., “Senatus Consultum: Revising Verse in Swift’s Dublin Circle, 1729–​1735,” in Hermann J. Real and Helgard Stöver-​Leidig (eds.), Reading Swift: Papers from The Fourth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003), pp. 249–​67. 42  “George Nim-​Dan-​Dean” is a form of acronym for George Rochfort, John Rochfort, Daniel Jackson, and Swift. For more extended discussions of Swift’s sociable verse, see Pat Rogers, “Swift the Poet,” in Christopher Fox (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 177–​201; and Moyra Haslett, “Swift and Conversational Culture,” Eighteenth-​ Century Ireland, 29 (2014), 11–​30. 43  Undated broadside, A Rebus Written by a Lady, on the Rev. Dean Swift, with His Answer; later reprinted in The Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., 8 vols. (Dublin, 1741–​6), vol. viii, p. 354.

 

The Poet as Clubman    141 which is what Swift may have hoped, George Faulkner, presumably with Swift’s consent, included nine riddles in the first edition of The Works of J.S. (1735) and added a further thirteen in the second (1746). Faulkner’s first printing of a poem by Swift had been An Answer to the Ballyspellin Ballad (1728), in which Swift out-​rhymed his friend Thomas Sheridan in finding fifteen additional rhymes for “Ballyspellin.” That so many of Swift’s “sociable” verses, including riddles, crambos, and other “trifles,” were published in his lifetime, particularly in Dublin printings, is a reminder of the importance of these poems to Swift, and to his first readers.44 The poetry of “clubmen,” then, rarely attains the status of great, or highly regarded, poetry. Yet its forms and manners—​perhaps of spontaneity, or the air of spontaneity; perhaps of playful, ludic poetic comedy—​often inform major work. And, as a metaphor for eighteenth-​ century culture, the “club” can be surprisingly flexible, for while it dramatizes that culture’s commitment to conversation and debate and embodies its ideals of conviviality and generosity, it can also demonstrate the often extreme factionalism and the exclusions of the period. While poets such as Anne Finch and Mary Jones bear witness to the significant sociability of women’s lives, it remains impossible to write of the “clubwoman” in the eighteenth century.45 And while the Ulster weaver poets represent an informal “club” of laboring-​class poets, sometimes meeting together in Samuel Thomson’s cottage, “Crambo Cave,” their poems also testify to fractures between patrons and poets, even when they meet in sociable converse. Hugh Porter’s “Written, the Next Morning after Having Dined and Supped with the Rev. Messrs. T and B” (1813) opens in disbelief of having spent a night in such company, but it quickly registers both pride and defiance: Yestreen, like some great knight or squire, I loll’d upon a cushion’d chair, An’ fed on rich an’ dainty fare, Whar kindness ay comes gratis: This morn, I on a stool maun share A breakfast o’potatoes. Yestreen the privilege was mine To drink the rich an’rosy wine

44  In 1983 Pat Rogers estimated that just over 50 of Swift’s 280 poems were published in his own lifetime: see Jonathan Swift: The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), p. 15. Although more recent discoveries of early editions will have altered this statistic slightly, the extent of unpublished materials remains largely accurate and the early printings of his sociable verse all the more notable. Lord Orrery and Patrick Delany would later argue about the status of Swift’s riddles. For Orrery, “Swift composing Riddles is Titian painting draught-​boards”; for Delany, “a Riddle may be as fine painting as any other in the world. It requires as strong an imagination, as fine colouring, and as exact a proportion and keeping as any other historical painting.” See Orrery, Remarks, p. 128; and Patrick Delany, Observations upon Lord Orrery’s Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift (London, 1754), p. 222. 45  See poems such as “On Lady Cartret Drest like a Shepherdess at Count Volira’s Ball,” “After Drawing a Twelf Cake at the Hon:ble Mrs Thynne’s,” and “To the Honble Mrs H—​—​n,” in The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript Poems, ed. Barbara McGovern and Charles H. Hinnant (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1998); and “To Miss Clayton, Occasion’d by Her Breaking an Appointment to Visit the Author,” “To [Miss Charlot Clayton], Written at Fern-​Hill, While Dinner Was Waiting for Her,” “Sublime Strains, on the Author’s Walking to Visit Stella,” in Mary Jones, Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (Oxford, 1750).

 

142   Moyra Haslett Like ony favourite o’ the nine, And what’s a serious matter, This morn the produce o’ the vine Is turn’d, wi’ me, to water. Yet, water, for to tell the truth, Is famous ay for quenchin’ drouth; If we dislike it, in the mouth We needna let it dally; Whon past the pallet, then forsooth, It does a body bra’ly; But on the hale, I’ve learn’d to know There’s naething certain here below; E’en Bonaparte might be laid low, What fain our necks wad tread on, An’ whon he gets the hin’most blow, Nae matter what he fed on.46

In its “standard Habbie” verse form, a marker of its debt to Scottish vernacular poetry, and Burns in particular, Porter’s poem reminds us that “clubs” of poetry exist as much in the traditions and conversations evoked by the poetry itself, as by attendance at a ritualized, official club.

References Carpenter, Andrew, “Circulating Ideas:  Coteries, Groups and the Circulation of Verse in English in Early Modern Ireland,” in Martin Fanning and Raymond Gillespie (eds.), Print Culture and Intellectual Life in Ireland, 1660–​1941 (Dublin:  Four Courts Press, 2006), pp. 1–​23. Clark, Peter, British Clubs and Societies, 1580–​1800:  The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000). Crawford, Robert, “Robert Fergusson’s Robert Burns,” in Robert Crawford (ed.), Robert Burns and Cultural Authority (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 1–​22. Elias, A. C., Jr., “Senatus Consultum: Revising Verse in Swift’s Dublin Circle, 1729–​1735,” in Hermann J. Real and Helgard Stöver-​Leidig (eds.), Reading Swift: Papers from the Fourth Münster Symposium on Jonathan Swift (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003), pp. 249–​67. Haslett, Moyra, “Swift and Conversational Culture,” Eighteenth-​Century Ireland, 29 (2014), 11–​30. Hunter, J. Paul, “Couplets and Conversation,” in John Sitter (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-​Century Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 11–​36. Kelly, James, and Martyn Powell (eds.), Clubs and Societies in Eighteenth-​Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010). Mee, Jon, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762 to 1830 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011).

46 

Poetical Attempts, by Hugh Porter, a county of Down weaver (Belfast, 1813), p. 124.

 

The Poet as Clubman    143 Rogers, Pat, “Swift the Poet,” in Christopher Fox (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 177–​201. Santesso, Aaron, “‘Playful’ Poetry and the Public School,” Eighteenth-​Century Life, 32, no. 1 (2008), 57–​80. Shields, David S., Civil Tongues & Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1997).

 

Chapter 9

T he P oet as Profe s si ona l Brean Hammond This chapter will argue that poetry as a profession—​as an occupation in which a living can be earned (OED II.7.b.)—​first became a possibility in the 1740s. It resulted from a fruitful symbiosis between outstandingly talented versifiers, entrepreneurs eager to publish their work, an enhanced readership for serious poetry, and new forms of mediation of thought and feeling rendered in poetic form.

A Tale of Two Poems In 1709, several different and competing versions were published of a poem impressively titled Muscipula, sive Mambromyomaxia. Originally published in Latin by Edmund Curll, the publisher who would gain notoriety as a pornographer and hastener into print of unauthorized editions of poets living and dead, the poem was soon printed in a parallel Latin–​ English text, where the grandiose English title becomes The Mouse-​Trap; or, The Welsh Engagement with Mice.1 Its author was Edward Holdsworth of Magdalen College, Oxford, a member of a group of Anglo-​Latin poets led by Anthony Alsop of Christ Church—​Jacobites who exploited their facility in Latin to celebrate the Stuart cause. Muscipula itself is only very mildly political in its comical celebration of Welsh independence. Its main purpose is to get a rise out of Oxford’s outstanding Welsh community: men like Robert Lloyd to whom the poem is dedicated, Thomas Richards of Jesus College who responded to it, and the naturalist and philologist Edward Lhuyd, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum. The Welsh are despairing because their cheese is being overrun by mice. Cats are no more successful in ridding the country of this plague than was Caesar when he tried to overrun their heroic forefathers: Thy Cat, oh Taffy! gives thee no Relief, Nor saves thy Treasure from that hungry Thief; Tho’ oft indeed in Ambuscade she lyes About their Holes with silent Watch she plies,

1  Edward Holdsworth, Muscipula, sive Cambro-​Muo-​Machia: The Mouse-​Trap; or, The Welsh Engagement with Mice (London, 1709).

 

The Poet as Professional    145 And all the subtil Arts of Mischief tries. ’Tis all in vain, the little Foe secure By being small, can strait himself immure, And close intrench’d in Cheese defy poor Puss’s Pow’r; … So Cambria heretofore—​—​—​ With the same Cunning from the Victor fled, When Caesar o’re the World his Empire spread; The Terror of his dreadful Force to shun, Just so, into their Cliffs and Caves they run, Enclos’d with Rocks, just so they lay secure, And manfully withstood the Roman Power. Hence of unconquer’d Ancestors they boast, Of Language and a Country never lost. (pp. 7, 9)

Cometh the hour, cometh the man: Taffy, prompted by an Elder “whose mighty Beard had bred | Envy in every Goat that on his Mountains fed,” steps up to design a mousetrap, being given the idea by a mouse enticed into his mouth by the “hogo” (smell) of cheese, only to find Taffy’s teeth blocking its exit. Taffy’s device is lovingly described in the poem to the extent that a reader could probably make a prototype following its directions. He becomes a great hero; Welshmen are enjoined to celebrate his memory by binding “their scented Temples with a verdant Leek.” Despite its status as something of a university in-​joke, the poem proved hugely successful and reached a wide readership across the century. Its main literary importance lies in its anticipation, as a comic mock-​heroic, of Pope’s two-​canto Rape of the Locke (1712) and maybe even of his later Imitations of Horace (1730s), where the parallel printing of Horace’s Latin and Pope’s English enables sophisticated readers to enjoy the wit and dexterity revealed by the comparison. It has a wider sociological importance, however, as a source of information about the conditions in which poetry was being written in the early eighteenth century. The competition between printers Lintot and Curll for the rights to publish this poem resulted in Holdsworth’s being paid the high sum of five guineas for his copy—​conversion tables suggest a modern equivalent of £400, at a time when a reasonable average salary for a schoolmaster was £50. Given his social status as a fellow of an Oxford college, it is surprising that Curll paid him and equally so that he accepted payment. In 1709, Curll was paying for the right to prompt, not exclusive, publication, and possibly for the expectation that Holdsworth would put more successful poetry his way. Lintot, Hills, Morphew, and other publishers had versions of the poem in print, under “customized” titles—​for example Muscipula, sive Kambromyomaxia or Muscipula: sive Cambro-​Muo-​Machia—​by the end of the year. It was in this year (1709) that the first copyright act was passed, the Act for the Encouragement of Learning (8 Anne c. 21), but it would be some time before authors or their publishers could consider their works their own property. Eight years later, in 1717, Curll paid John Durant Breval four guineas for a poem entitled The Art of Dress. Again, the poem had been previously printed, by R. Burleigh (who may simply be a Curll alias or collaborator), but in purchasing it, Curll might have hoped that it would repeat the success of Muscipula and that Breval would be securely mortared into Curll’s “stable” of writers. This poem, dedicated to “the Toasts of Great-​Britain,” provides some evidence that women were being increasingly identified as a target readership, even for the relatively elite genre of poetry. The poem offers a mildly satirical and risqué historical account of the development of female attire, correlated with an epochal account of English

 

146   Brean Hammond history. There was a golden age of innocence before the Roman invasion, when womenfolk “Skins round their Middles negligently ty’d, | Conceal’d what Nature prompted them to Hide” (p. 2). The barometer of female vanity adjusts in various ways to the Roman, Saxon, and Norman invasions; and individual female “stars” such as Vortigern’s Rowena and Henry II’s Rosamond are dwelt upon as the apogees of beauty and fashion in their days. After the glory days of Elizabeth, who banished “Popish” fashions and introduced the steeple hat and whalebone petticoat, came the Scottish invasion of the Stuarts and their unhygienic women: Beauties that shifted hardly once a Week; For Cleanliness, alas! to them was Greek! Now follow’d Canting Puritans in Shoals, Who spoil’d our Bodies, as they damn’d our Souls; Of ev’ry Ornament they strip’d the Fair, And hid their Bubbies with Paternal Care; The Farthingall and Ruff appear’d no more, And Ribbons favour’d of the Scarlet Whore; With sad Simplicity they fill’d the Land, Brought in the Forehead-​Cloth and formal-​Band. (pp. 12–​13)

Modern fashion under Queen Anne gives Breval the opportunity for further satirical exposure of the provocative female body—​“White Breasts, and Shoulders bare, invade the Eye” and “Those pretty Legs, so Taper, and so Smart, | By which Men guess at ev’ry other Part” (p. 16). After the historical section, the poem offers more general advice to women in steering a middle way between vain adornment and appropriate buffing-​up, its indebtedness to Pope’s Rape of the Lock not difficult to discern. The topics covered in the two poems—​the invention of the mousetrap and the history and art of dress—​alert us to the extraordinary breadth of subject matter to be found in eighteenth-​century poetry. In ECCO’s copy of Breval’s Art of Dress, the poem is bound with another extolling the delights of Apple-​Pye. Although poetry in this period sometimes gains the reputation of being elitist or obscure, actually it is in some respects hyper-​accessible, being about anything and everything, not yet having narrowed itself down to that “Shorter Dictionary of Topics Properly Considered Poetic” that is Romantic verse. Was Holdsworth, though, in any sense a “professional” poet? Assuredly, he was not. He was what in modern terms we would call a one-​hit wonder, unknown to have published any other verse and making his living as an academic and in later life a tutor to the children of Jacobite families, often traveling abroad in their company. His poetry looks back to an earlier era of coterie writing designed to showcase wit—​to the era of Donne. If Holdsworth is “residual,” however, Breval is the shape of things to come. He had tried his hand at two other professions before settling on that of writer, having been a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge until a dispute with its overbearing master, the great classical scholar Richard Bentley, led to his being ejected from that position and to his joining the army. (This explains a gratuitously insulting reference to Bentley in The Art of Dress, where he is commended as exactly the kind of “puz’ling Critick” who can inform us on such mysteries as when and where the ruff came from: “Bentley, great Sage, who ne’er vouchsafes to write | But such important Matters come to Light,” p. 10.) From 1717 until the mid-​1720s, Breval appears to have made his living through the pen, but it is important to emphasize that he could not survive on poetry alone. He wrote also for the theater, involving himself in the controversy surrounding John Gay’s farce Three Hours after Marriage (1717) by writing a

 

The Poet as Professional    147 play called The Confederates that was a vicious attack on Gay and his collaborators Pope and Arbuthnot, firmly anchored in the early eighteenth-​century publishing and performance industries. This play (and Breval’s adoption of the pseudonym “Joseph Gay” to confuse readers) resulted in Breval’s appearance in Pope’s Dunciad of 1728–​9 (book ii, line 220). By 1726, Breval had achieved some success through diversification: his travel writings, descriptions of his European tour published by subscription, aroused the interest of the elite.

Early Eighteenth-​C entury Poetic Careers What we can deduce from the two writing careers briefly outlined is that there were no professional poets in the early eighteenth century, if what is meant by that is individuals who made a living from writing poetry alone. When Joseph Addison thinks about professions in the Spectator, he thinks only of those careers for which extensive training is necessary, and his concern is that there is not an adequate living to be made even in them: I am sometimes very much troubled, when I  reflect upon the three great Professions of Divinity, Law and Physick; how they are each of them over-​burdened with Practitioners, and filled with Multitudes of Ingenious Gentlemen that starve one another.2

Addison does not think even of the military as a profession although the army had had a career structure since the mid-​seventeenth century and the navy for even longer; how much less would he have considered what we now call “creative writing” a profession. Breval’s inclusion in Pope’s Dunciad might prompt us to consider, in this context, the typical trajectories of the dunces pilloried by Pope in the poem’s serial iterations. None of the hack writers featured could survive without their day jobs. Laurence Eusden, the puppet poet laureate, could not survive on his butt of sack, and settled into being a clergyman. Like Eusden, Ambrose Philips (dubbed “Namby Pamby” because of his saccharine pastorals) was a creature of Whig patronage. He had tutored the sons and daughters of the aristocracy before gaining his lucrative posts as paymaster of the lottery and justice of the peace. Matthew Concanen, a barrister, was eventually appointed attorney-​general to Jamaica and married a rich planter’s daughter. Leonard Welsted came reasonably close to living off his wits, but no longer had to when he gained an extraordinary clerkship in the Ordnance Office and an official residence in the Tower of London. Those who attempted to live primarily through the proceeds of their writing in the later seventeenth century later became bywords for poverty and the neglect of genius. By the time of Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets (1779–​81), the treatment accorded to such poets as Samuel Butler and Thomas Otway who were left to die in poverty was a matter of national reproach. Johnson casts doubt on the story that Otway died by swallowing, after a long fast, a piece of bread which charity had supplied. He went out, as is reported, almost naked, in the rage of hunger, and finding a gentleman in a neighbouring

2  Joseph Addison, Spectator 21, in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), vol. i, p. 88.

 

148   Brean Hammond coffee-​house, asked him for a shilling. The gentleman gave him a guinea; and Otway going away bought a roll, and was choaked with the first mouthful.

Even if the story is not literally true, nevertheless “that indigence, and its concomitants, sorrow and despondency, pressed hard upon him, has never been denied.”3 Otway had managed to survive on writing plays and a short period in the army, but only until his premature demise at the age of 33. Stories of poets starving in garrets in the early eighteenth century were not apocryphal. Jonathan Swift, in the letters to Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley later collected and entitled the Journal to Stella, writes of one such with whom he collaborated, William Harrison. He describes arriving, in February 1713, at the house he had secured for Harrison in Knightsbridge, one hour after the young poet had died from pneumonia. In the 1720s, another William, William Pattison, had a career that was a typical Grub Street story—​one trajectory of an aspirant to professional poetry in the 1720s. A farmer’s son, Pattison was assisted to a Cambridge education by the patronage of local dignitaries. He made his way to London in 1726 where he commenced a literary career. Paul Baines and Pat Rogers take up the story: The archetypal progress of an unfortunate poet culminated in the usual way—​lack of money, failure with patrons, a begging epistle to Lord Burlington in which he admits to being destitute of friends as well as funds… . While sheltering at night in St James’s Park, the poet is inspired by a vision to make his way to Chiswick, home of the munificent earl, from whom he now implores help.4

An unsuccessful hunt for subscribers is followed by death from smallpox within a year; in late 1727, his posthumous Poetical Works are published by the Curll family in two volumes. It took two meteoric early eighteenth-​century poetic careers to alter permanently the horizon of expectation for the financial and aesthetic success that could be achieved by professional writers: those of James Thomson and Alexander Pope. To Pope’s career we will return. James Thomson was a rich man by 1730. As the ODNB informs us, his Seasons had attracted 457 subscriptions at 1 guinea or more each, and he had profited from three author’s benefit nights in the theatre and the sale of copyrights to booksellers: Spring and Sophonisba for £137 10s. to Millar in January 1730 and all the other long blank-​ verse poems for £105 to Millan in July 1729.5

When he came to sell the copyright to the poem Liberty in 1734, Thomson’s stock had risen to the extent that Andrew Millar paid the unrivaled sum of £250 for what turned out to be a diminishing asset, since the poem declined in popularity as its parts were issued. Like several successful poets before him, however, Thomson did not rely solely upon his writing for income, having gained the sinecure of secretary to the briefs in the Court of Chancery

3 Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), vol. ii, p. 26. On poets in poverty, see also vol. ii, pp. 231 n., 262 n.; vol. iii, p. 416 n. 4  Paul Baines and Pat Rogers, Edmund Curll, Bookseller (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), p. 184. 5  James Sambrook, “Thomson, James (1700–​1748),” ODNB, May 2008 (http://​www.oxforddnb.com/​ index/​27/​101027306/​).

 

The Poet as Professional    149 through the patronage of the Talbot family, a non-​job that paid around £300  p.a. when Thomson held the position. The year 1744 is something of a watershed, marking a significant rise in what the most successful poets could earn. In that year, Edward Young, a fellow of All Souls College by profession and already in receipt of a government pension of £200 p.a. as a result of his successful satire series The Universal Passion (1725–​8), was paid 210 guineas by Robert Dodsley for the astonishingly popular poem Night-​Thoughts, while Mark Akenside obtained £120 from the same publisher for The Pleasures of Imagination, a considerable sum for an untried talent. Although Akenside never gave up his medical practice, he is in other respects a landmark figure for the development of literary professionalism. The publisher Dodsley contracted him to edit a periodical, The Museum, on an annual salary of £100. Even if the publication lasted only eighteen months, Akenside was the first well-​paid literary editor.

Poetry as Profession From this discussion it should be apparent that one cannot consider poetry in isolation from other forms of imaginative writing, at least in the early part of this period. We need to understand the rise of the professional writer, rather than the rise of the professional poet. We should consider poetry as part of the professionalization of imaginative writing, the emergence of the proprietary author and the importance of the so-​called “bourgeois public sphere.” Recent commentators on the topic of poetry in the eighteenth century have not fought shy of using the term “professional.” J. Paul Hunter, for example, divides eighteenth-​century poets into four “distinct categories of career intention and productivity”: there are poets by profession, writers who were only secondarily poets, occasional and inconsistent poets, and a fourth group who wrote poetry only very occasionally and for occasions.6 In respect of that first group, those culturally ambitious poets who hoped for fame and saw themselves in relation to a “laureate” tradition of great poets in the past, we should concede that all of them made their livings in other ways or did not require to make a living or engaged in a wide spectrum of literary endeavors including play-​writing and—​a very important source of income for many—​translation. Among those who could not make a direct living from poetry were the women (see ­chapter 15, “The Poet as Poetess”). Paula Backscheider cites statistical studies to the effect that poetry was women’s most popular literary form. Some 263 women published poetry between 1660 and 1800, the number of publishing women poets per decade greatly increasing from the 1760s onward. Whereas in the first decade of the eighteenth century only two women published collections of their poetry, in the 1790s more than thirty did so.7 Under 6  J. Paul Hunter, “Political, Satirical, Didactic and Lyric Poetry (1): From the Restoration to the Death of Pope,” in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–​1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), pp. 160–​209, at p. 174. 7  Paula R. Backscheider, Eighteenth-​Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005), p. xvii. She points out that fewer women (201) published novels.

 

150   Brean Hammond Hunter’s definition, many of those women would qualify as “professional” poets, an idea that needs to be pitted against Richard Terry’s contention that the traits most admired in female poets in the eighteenth century were persistently those of “private morality and professional reticence, a combination of virtues that allowed Katherine Philips to assume the center ground of the developing female canon in the place of the most obvious other contender, the licentious and mercenary Aphra Behn.”8 I will return to this point. Looking at authorship from a later vantage point—​say the 1860s—​we would find it to be a full-​fledged profession, officially recognized as such in 1884 through the formation of the Society of Authors. By then, authorship had become a means of making a living undertaken by many people, linked to other professions including the civil service, the law, and the universities. Paralleling the construction of the author as businessman was the rise in status of the publisher as guide, philosopher, and friend to the writer, leading to the emergence of the professional literary agent, Sir Walter Scott being the first writer known to employ someone in that capacity. By 1814, authors were protected by a copyright act that gave them sole rights for twenty-​eight years, or for life if they outlived that term. For literary stars, earnings could be colossal. The irresistible rise of Scott’s fees is a case in point. Andrew Nicholson informs us that “for the poems of which he had sold the copyright, Scott received £770 for The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), 1,000 guineas for Marmion (1808), 2,000 guineas for The Lady of the Lake (1810), and 3,000 guineas for Rokeby (1813).”9 Thomas Moore and Lord Byron were able to keep pace with that, the former earning 3,000 guineas for Lalla Rookh (1817) and the latter regularly receiving 1,000 guineas for pairs of poems and, in 1816, 2,000 guineas for the third part of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Long before his death in 1843, Robert Southey had been designated by Byron “the only existing entire man of letters.” This characteristically ambiguous remark, seems to mean that he had, in Lynda Pratt’s words, tried his hand at virtually every type of writing: poems (from pastorals to epics, lyrics to oriental romances), plays, essays, reviews, travel books, biographies, histories and even an experimental novel… . He wrote both on contemporary events and on the past, on home affairs and on those abroad.10

The reference there to Southey as an essayist reminds us that the expansion and diversification of the periodical press, providing myriad opportunities for weekly, monthly, and quarterly reviewing and for the publication of serialized fiction, and the dominance of the essay as a commercial form, were the most significant developments in professional authorship in the nineteenth century. Before 1660, most nondramatic imaginative writing took poetic form and circulated among peer-​group coteries in scribal copies. Harold Love’s work has demonstrated that there was no immediate replacement of the scribal manuscript culture by print. Throughout the seventeenth century there continued to be work that scriptoria performed more efficiently than did print shops: “short texts copied in limited numbers for immediate use,” large 8  Richard Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), p. 7. 9  The Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron, ed. Andrew Nicholson (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 2007), p. 10. 10  Lynda Pratt (ed.), Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. xxi.

 

The Poet as Professional    151 retrospective collections that required updating, and texts that it would be hazardous to print.11 The vast body of Restoration scriptorial satire, poems on affairs of state and libertine writing, comes into that last category. As Love contends, the scribal medium “could still in the 1690s claim to have produced more satire of real distinction than had so far appeared in print” (p. 276). Earnings could be significant from this method of transmission: “Once the charges of copying and paper had been met, the presentation of a work in manuscript to a well-​disposed patron could be expected to bring in a sum commensurate with that from the dedicating of a printed book” (p. 59), and the same presentation could be made to multiple patrons. Love is correct to remind us of the importance and longevity of handwritten forms of transmission. Nevertheless, a broad scholarly consensus had emerged by the beginning of this century to the effect that the period 1660–​1780 witnessed the transition to modern authorship, implying both the transition from inscribed manuscript to printed copy and that from the patron to the bookseller-​publisher as initial recipient of the text, as well as the move from known patron to unknown general public as the primary consumer of the text. The case has been made that this period marked the transition from writing patronized to writing marketed, with publishing by subscription (a method used to some effect for charitable support of female poets in the later eighteenth century) as an important halfway house. There was a symbiotic relationship between an economy offering greatly enhanced opportunities for literate and talented individuals to exploit their imaginations; and the social and legal legitimization of authorship as a means of making a living. Successful authorship came to depend on having something to sell to an amorphous reading public, the precise constitution of which was imperfectly known to author and publisher alike. That commodity was designated “wit” in the early years but prompted by (inter alia) Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), it came to be known as originality or “genius” (see ­chapter 13, “The Poet as Genius.”) In the debates over the passing of a Licensing Bill to limit theatrical representation in 1737, for instance, Lord Chesterfield reminded fellow peers of the need to protect and reward the creative intelligence: “Wit, my Lords, is a sort of property: it is the property of those who have it, and too often the only property they have to depend on.”12 “Wit” here is being regarded as a form of capital situated somewhere between the stock of goods or investment funding required to launch oneself in any trading concern; and the sump of knowledge improved by mental training required to prepare oneself for a profession. As the century progressed, “wit” moves inward, becoming less a marketable set of talents and more absorbed into the psyche of the artist as a personality type—​the “genius.” This happens in tandem with changes in the kind of art being produced, especially in the case of poetry, which retreats somewhat from public statement and becomes more exploratory of the self and of inner states. In the later seventeenth century, the debate about the legitimacy of professional imaginative writing was related to other nodes of cultural controversy, including the ancients-​vs.-​moderns debate, the concept of politeness and the controversy over plagiarism, out of which precipitated a

11 

Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-​Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 126. 12  See Brean S. Hammond, Hackney for Bread: Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–​1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 39, for the context of the quotation.

 

152   Brean Hammond “thickened” concept of literary property.13 Some scholars have argued a more conservative case: that neither Pope’s death nor Johnson’s famous letter to Chesterfield really did herald the commencement of an interregnum between the patronage system and public market-​ driven patronage resulting from the commercialization of culture. Dustin Griffin, for example, sees no sudden diminution of the patronage system in the eighteenth century: more accurately, we witness an adaptation of the older forms.14 A central debating question here, still live, was the significance of the Act for the Encouragement of Learning (1709), briefly mentioned above.

Copyright and Proprietary Authorship In the 1990s, an argument was mounted that the key to the emergence of “proprietary” authorship was the developing legislative framework that led to the first copyright act, even if authorship as enshrined in copyright law was in the early years “the stalking-​horse” of the book trade.15 Primarily designed for the protection of bookseller-​publishers rather than authors, the legislation was nevertheless important in creating a sufficiently safe and worthwhile environment for writers to embody their imaginative ideas in published books. In this account legislation affected ideology and institutions: the literary work develops from being an act that is actionable—​subject to pains and penalties—​to an aesthetic object that is owned and capable of reaping profits, requiring protection from those who wished to reproduce it illegitimately. Subsequent commentators have taken a more cynical view of the Copyright Act and of “proprietary authorship.” Barbara M. Benedict, for example, states that “the Act … strengthened the [publishing] congers’ monopolies by ensuring that powerful booksellers retained complete control over the printing of new and valuable books.”16 Illegitimate reproduction—​ piracy—​was the only way to break the stranglehold and was in the eighteenth-​century context, virtuous. This stops short of acknowledging the effect of the Act as a catalyst for cultural change, but there is concrete evidence for changing attitudes toward literary property. The acquisition of royal licenses for the protection of particularly valuable literary properties, for example, such as Lewis Theobald took out for Double Falshood (1727) and Samuel Richardson for Pamela (1741), is symptomatic of an altering balance between bookseller-​publishers and 13  This was the argument made in my book cited above. See also Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-​Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), which makes a strong case for the culture of “paper credit” as another such transforming ideology especially relevant to female authorship and to the novel. 14  Dustin Griffin, Literary Patronage in Eighteenth-​Century England, 1650–​1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996). 15  See for example Martha Woodmansee, “The Cultural Work of Copyright: Legislating Authorship in Britain, 1837–​1842,” in Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (eds.), Law in the Domains of Culture (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1998), pp. 65–​96, at p. 67; Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993). 16  Barbara M. Benedict, “Publishing and Reading Poetry,” in John Sitter (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-​Century Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), pp. 63–​82, at p. 70. “Congers” were associations of publishers who co-​operated over the publication of particular titles.

 

The Poet as Professional    153 individual authors. Powerful authors such as Edward Young and Alexander Pope did succeed in retaining copyrights that they did not wish to sell—​even, in Pope’s case, the copyright to his correspondence.

The Bourgeois Public Sphere There is by now an extensive literature on the growth of the book market and the exponential increase in the value of literary property in the latter decades of the seventeenth century, on the spread of literacy, on the post-​1688 politico-​ecclesiastical consensus that was good for the book trade, on the non-​renewal of the 1695 Licensing Act that weakened the stranglehold of censorship; and on the gradual domestication of the literary agenda that enabled people, female people in particular, from ever-​widening social provenances, to join the categories “writer” and “reader.” Of importance in understanding such developments is Jürgen Habermas’s highly influential account of the emergence of a “bourgeois public sphere” in the later seventeenth century: a theory, that is, of the development of public opinion. Habermas’s definition given in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962, first English translation 1989) refers to “private people, [who] come together to form a public … [to] compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opinion.”17 Habermas made the argument, subsequently to become controversial, that these spaces are not merely virtual, not just what Charles Taylor would call a “social imaginary.”18 Actual physical spaces developed to give the new forms of polite conversation a local habitation and a name—​coffee-​ houses, clubs, and societies prominent among them, wherein the opinions of citizens could be expressed free from the trammels of the state and the church.19 Common people came to understand that they had a stake in their own governance and in this new and unique realm of discursive sociability, they came together to discuss such matters. In an inclusive, socially equalized sphere of print and orality, men could discuss their concerns—​though the degree to which it was limited to men is still energetically debated.20 The emerging consensus is that women were occasional proprietors, more than occasional servers, and often prostitutes; they were not customers or political debaters.

17 

Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), pp. 25–​6. 18  Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2004). 19  The part played by the coffee-​houses in particular in accommodating the public sphere has been intensely debated, as has the precise historical period of the sphere’s emergence and persistence, and the extent to which such a realm of idealized rationality accords with the facts on the ground. Markman Ellis, for example, in The Coffee House: A Social History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004) provides a good example of the ambivalence and theoretical insecurity that surrounds empirical research in the field. For an example of a dissenting voice, see J. A. Downie, “How Useful is the Concept of the ‘Bourgeois Public Sphere’?,” Literature Compass Online, 1, no. 1 (Jan. 2003), 1–​18. 20  Despite the efforts of Steve Pincus in an important article that aims to show the wholesale participation of women in coffee-​house society, there is no incontrovertible evidence for this, and Markman Ellis is adamant that the most common position for women in coffee-​houses was prone. See Steve Pincus, “‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture,” Journal of Modern History, 67 (1995), 807–​34.

 

154   Brean Hammond Michael McKeon’s recent work has given powerful endorsement to Habermas’s account of the “bourgeois public sphere,” though he would insist that “sphere” in this formulation is metaphorical and transhistorical. Discussion of Habermas, he would argue, has been bedeviled by various kinds of category confusion: its importance does not lie in any set of actual social spaces, nor in any actual section of society describable in class terms: The public-​sphere ideal of inclusiveness is not the ideological formation of a self-​conscious class strategically concerned to universalize its own interest. It is the discovery, in a society stratified by status, that the idea of the public interest … has meaning only if it is premised on the conviction that such interests are multiple and that no single interest—​not even that of the monarch—​is universal or “absolute.”21

Like the modern conception of the “market,” which is an abstraction from actual marketplaces, the public sphere is a virtual space; and “the indispensable means by which the public sphere coalesces as a virtual place are the public post, print culture, the periodical essay, and the like” (p. 276). The focus here is on how the subject imagines intersubjectivity. On this more theoretical understanding of the public sphere, its symbiosis with the proliferation of authorship is easier to discern and women’s contribution to the literary segments of such a public sphere, made through readership and authorship, is less susceptible to underestimation, especially if a political sphere is distinguished from a later-​developing literary sphere.22 Habermas himself distinguishes a political from a literary public sphere, the former a masculinist and homosocial enclave in which women were only marginally significant, but the latter being significantly female-​centered after 1750.23

Mediation These ideas have consequences for the ways in which we think about the category and function of authorship and the writing of poetry. Habermasian thought encourages us to see the production of imaginative writing not exclusively as the effusion of individual genius, but as a relationship between creative endeavor and a set of institutions and systems dedicated to setting the results of that endeavor before a reading public. It is in terms of such a relationship that “professional” poetry must be understood. We can distinguish between a “strong” concept of authorship as agency, original creativity, and intellectual ownership, and a “weak” concept of authorship as a product of cultural networks. In the first section of this chapter,

21  Michael McKeon, “Parsing Habermas’s ‘Bourgeois Public Sphere,’” Criticism, 46, no. 2 (Spring 2004), 273–​7, at p. 275. 22  Scholars of the pre-​and post-​1789 periods have begun to speak of diversifications within the bourgeois public sphere. See, for example, Michael Scrivener’s account in Cosmopolitan Ideal (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007), chap. 2, his particular focus being on the understanding of cosmopolitan as opposed to nationalist or communitarian strands of thinking within the broadly “Romantic” period. 23  McKeon’s Habermasian argument is greatly expanded in his monumental Secret History of Domesticity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005), where he sees the emergence of the public sphere as a staging-​post on the road of a process that begins in the English Civil War.

 

The Poet as Professional    155 poets and their work have been considered from the former point of view, since in the earlier part of our period, the concept of the “proprietary” author was at an important stage of historical formation. As the century progresses, however, the writing and dissemination of poetry increasingly needs to be understood as part of the broader processes of “mediation,” defined by Clifford Siskin as “shorthand for the work done by tools, by what we would now call ‘media’—​everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in-​between” the world and our knowing it.24 In that spirit, we might emphasize that the transformation of imaginative writing in the eighteenth century was achieved more by the development of the book trade than by individual writers or writings: by the mediators and by the institutions through which their mediation was achieved. New methods of controlling, distributing, and multiplying the production of books were as important as were Pope or Thomas Gray. Bookseller-​publishers come to dominate every aspect of the publishing industry, relegating formerly powerful printers to mere technicians. The bookseller-​publisher was not a mere retailer. He was what in modern terms we would call a “project manager,” responsible for all aspects of bookmaking from author’s manuscript to printed copy. He would promote ideas, purchase copyrights, subcontract the printing, engraving where necessary, and binding of the book, and then would store, distribute, and merchandise it through advertising. He was the real magnate. To illustrate this, I suggest that we look at Robert Dodsley’s career as a publisher of poetry. If Edmund Curll’s publishing career was barely respectable, the activities of Robert Dodsley raised the status of the trade and the popularity of poetry vastly in mid-​century. This remarkable man began his working life as a footman to various aristocrats and by 1735 was a successful playwright and poet turned publisher, opening a shop at the sign of “Tully’s Head” with financial support from Alexander Pope. Pope made him, along with Lawton Gilliver, the exclusive publisher of his poetry. Having provoked a theater riot with his play The King and the Miller of Mansfield (1737) and been prosecuted for publishing Paul Whitehead’s anti-​Walpole satire Manners, Dodsley was a celebrity by the early 1740s. Tully’s Head was by then known to be the center of modern poetry publishing: Dodsley published Shenstone, Akenside, Young, and Thomas Gray, the foremost poets of the age. Gray’s famous Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard was published by him in 1751. Between 1748 and 1758, with the publication of four volumes of A Collection of Poems by Several Hands, Dodsley constructed a lasting canon of English poetry. A publishing venture of extraordinary brilliance and taste, the six volumes document the changing face of poetry: the compendium ranges from the couplet-​dominated formality and public, occasional nature of the opening poet, Thomas Tickell, to the democratic, proto-​Romantic experimentation with the unconstrained Pindaric form of the final poem, Thomas Gray’s “Bard.” Harry M.  Solomon scarcely exaggerates in claiming that “when the influence of Dodsley’s volumes are added to their intrinsic merit, it is reasonable to argue that no eighteenth-​century publication was more significant to the subsequent history of English literature.”25 Despite his humble origins, Dodsley raised the social status of his profession, partly by paying honest and reasonable fees to his authors: Samuel Johnson, for example, 24 

Clifford Siskin and William Warner (eds.), This Is Enlightenment (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 5. 25  Harry M. Solomon, The Rise of Robert Dodsley: Creating the New Age of Print (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1996), p. 117.

 

156   Brean Hammond received fifteen guineas for The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), having protested that he would not take less than Whitehead received for Manners. The cost of apprenticeships rose, ranging from forty to a hundred guineas, and the sons of gentlemen began to seek available positions. Dodsley perceived that magazines, such as Edward Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine, would become crucial to the development of a literary discursiveness and he tried to outdo Cave’s monthly with the weekly Publick Register in 1741 and the more successful Museum; or, Literary and Historical Register in 1746. Serial publications were the future: the Gentleman’s Magazine, the Connoisseur, the Monthly Review, and the Critical Review all provided new avenues of participation for amateur authors and for women writers (see ­chapter 4, “Poems in Magazines”). Equally important are the collections that, from the mid-​to late eighteenth century onward, begin the work of establishing a canon of English poetry: Bonnell Thornton’s Poems by Several Ladies (1755), the first anthology of poetry by English women writers; The Works of the English Poets (1779, known as The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets when adorned by Johnson’s biographical essays); John Bell’s 109-​volume edition of The Poets of Great Britain Complete from Chaucer to Churchill (1776–​82); and Alexander Chalmers’s twenty-​one-​volume Works of the English Poets from Chaucer to Cowper (1810). Dodsley’s Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1748–​58, and several times reprinted) was more important to the popularization of poetry in the period than was any poet featured in it. As the century progresses, the demography of poetry broadens. Aristocrats and prominent court poets, influential in the seventeenth century, gradually give place to writers in the middle station of life and, as is now well documented, to a surprising number of laboring-​class writers (see c­ hapter  10, “The Poet as Laborer”):  Stephen Duck the thresher poet; Mary Collier the washerwoman, who wrote a spirited answer to Duck’s “Thresher’s Labour”; Robert Dodsley the footman; Mary Leapor the housekeeper, whose “Crumble Hall” plays exquisite variations on the male-​dominated and aristocratic genre of country-​house poetry; Ann Yearsley the milkmaid; Robert Burns the ploughman … The expansion of booksellers beyond London, the decline of patronage, the shift away from the city and toward the countryside as the ideological center of poetry—​all of those tendencies suggest that the expansion of the literary marketplace fostered both a professional culture of literary celebrities and a democratization of reading and writing. “Strong” and “weak” conceptions of authorship, that is to say, need to be held in tandem. George Justice’s analysis of the poetry publication undertaken by Edward Cave in the Gentleman’s Magazine shows that this publication encouraged both “professional” and “amateur” writers, the former by publishing excerpts from their work and the latter by promoting poetry prizes. Since, as Justice rightly states, Cave “offered more money than most poets could expect to gain from separate publication for a single long poem. (Prizes began at forty or fifty pounds for first place, descending to medals and other items for lower rankings),” and since the prizes did not attract professional poets but were regularly won by Moses Browne, we might want to say that the Gentleman’s Magazine turned Browne from an amateur into a professional.26

26  George Justice, “Poetry, Popular Culture, and the Literary Marketplace,” in Christine Gerrard (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Eighteenth-​Century Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 97–​110, at p. 102.

 

The Poet as Professional    157

Authorial Roles If the “big picture” is the move toward writing as a profession supported by an ever more sophisticated publishing industry increasingly dedicated to providing readers with good literature, to making profits, and to giving authors a fair share of those, we need also to recognize and appreciate forms of publication that are residual when considered against general trends. David Fairer, for example, argues that much eighteenth-​century poetic achievement is poised between the spheres of manuscript and print and, like Pope’s Dunciad, takes full advantage of that ambiguous situation. If print culture replaced manuscript culture over the longue durée, theorists of “epistolarity” would emphasize the significance of verse-​epistles and of letter-​narratives as forms situated between manuscript and print, between private correspondence and public text; forms that, as Fairer puts it, allow “a glimpse of the handwritten letter through the formalities of a printed page.”27 Types of publication such as publishing by subscription, serving the elite in the early part of our period, do not disappear but rather morph into charitable ways of assisting writers, female writers especially, who have talent but no access to the institutions of print. Paula Backscheider points to the two thousand subscribers for Poems on Various Subjects by Jane Cave Winscom; and the subscription that Hannah More arranged for Ann Yearsley’s Poems on Several Occasions (1785), which gained £600 for the indigent laborer’s wife (and led to a major quarrel between Yearsley and her gentlewomen sponsors), is another example.28 William Shenstone placed his poetry within a tradition defined by gentleman poet-​ politicians—​a deliberate throwback to a valorized manuscript culture. Frances Burney was both early and unusual in herself embracing the “strong” model of the professional working for financial gain. Describing the literary public sphere in all its many-​chambered complexity is, then, no simple matter. Although earlier in the chapter, I cited Richard Terry’s view that retiring domesticity and reticence over publication were admired traits in female poets—​the result of the separation out of spheres of activity along gender lines in the period—​I could equally have cited the work of Betty Schellenberg, who finds examples of professional self-​ assertion and ambition that contradict standard stories of female reticence and modesty, and points out that in the area of earnings, female novelists at any rate were not disadvantaged in comparison with men.29 Schellenberg’s work suggests that we should superimpose on a developmental model the concession that at any synchronic historical moment within the diachronic sweep of time, the entire array of modes of authorship might be available. There is, that is to say, a “smorgasbord” of available authorial roles to be performed. To some extent, this is a matter of chronology. Certainly, the careers of the most celebrated late-​century female poets, Hannah More, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Anna Seward, suggest that they 27 

David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth ​Century 1700–​1789 (Harlow: Pearson, 2003), p. 60. Bill Overton’s study of the verse-​epistle also insists on the genre’s importance as a constituent of the literary public sphere; see his Eighteenth-​Century British Verse Epistle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 18–​19. 28 Backscheider, Eighteenth-​Century Women Poets and Their Poetry, p. 4. 29  Betty Schellenberg, The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), chaps. 1, 7.

 

158   Brean Hammond longed for fame and distinction and the good opinion of influential critics, such as Samuel Johnson, just as much as did their male counterparts, even if they did not write primarily to make money. Seward was independently wealthy, having been left an annuity of £400 p.a. by her father; Barbauld supported herself throughout much of her career as the proprietor of private schools, where she also taught; and Hannah More made a fortune through her writings, even if poetry itself contributed a very small fraction to that. “Professional” poetry is created, I  would argue, when what I  have earlier termed “strong” and “weak” conceptions of authorship are able to coalesce: when writers whose names command a price in the marketplace have at their disposal adequate institutions for publishing, distributing, and rewarding their work. As I have suggested, the 1740s was a watershed decade. While William Collins could come to London in 1744 “a literary adventurer,” as Johnson described him, “a man, doubtful of his dinner, or trembling at a creditor,” opportunities were opening up, as we have seen, for other poets under the aegis of publishers such as Dodsley (Lives, vol. iv, p. 120). The road traveled might be measured by a brief comparison of key moments in the writing careers of John Milton and Samuel Johnson. Notoriously, Milton was paid only £10 in total by Samuel Simmons for the publication of two editions of Paradise Lost in 1667 and 1669. There is no evidence that Milton received any payment for his 1645 Poems or for other poetic writings. For most of his life, before he faced financial indigence after the Restoration, Milton did not see any connection between writing and earning: “Fame is the spur,” as he wrote in Lycidas. By contrast, Johnson’s edition of the Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, published a little more than a century later and regarded as an important document in the making of the English poetic canon, was undertaken at the request of a powerful publishers’ alliance. It was designed primarily to head off at the pass John Bell’s rival publication The Poets of Great Britain (1776–​82) that threatened to invade the London publishers’ property rights. In so many respects the most astute chronicler of the development of professional poetry, Johnson asked only two hundred guineas for his Prefaces (even the booksellers themselves felt obliged to add another hundred), when, as Malone commented, he could have asked fifteen hundred (Lives, vol. i, p. 13). Although Johnson was naive in his judgment of the market, his brief biographies were entirely the product of it. Lives of the Poets was a professional publication; Paradise Lost was not.

A Tale of Two Writers In this final section, I want to bring forward a case study that might point to some of the complexities and nuances in the general story of linear progress toward professionalism that this chapter is otherwise in danger of telling. I want to consider how the careers of two individual authors—​Pope and Byron—​can be plotted on the general map briefly sketched, coming to what I hope is the surprising conclusion that they are not where we would most expect them. Let us commence with Pope and turn to Byron a little later. Pope’s career instantiates the era of the publicly individuated poet. This is partly the contingent effect of historical accident: Pope was debarred from benefiting from most available systems of patronage. He developed two salient rhetorics: one of well-​connectedness, of his being related through friendship bonds to many of the most powerful aristocratic

 

The Poet as Professional    159 families in the land, Catholic as well as Protestant, and court-​and government-​based as well as oppositional. Thus he took advantage of whatever intangible, non-​remunerative benefits the patronage system afforded: familiarity, protection, and authority. The other was a rhetoric of independence—​belonging to no party, owing allegiance to no one, having no visible means of support, Pope’s career was an economic levitation act. Crucial to this was the development of an entirely distinctive poetic voice, an instantly recognizable, unmistakable personality, the keynote of which was independence. This is how Pope markets his marginality and disadvantage as a positive privilege. Constructing himself as an outsider, uninterested in power or patronage, a non-​metropolitan figure who, retiring to his suburban fastness in Twickenham, can view the follies of court, city, and government—​a creative artist who, like Oscar Wilde, has nothing to declare but his genius—​Pope can persuade us that he stands outside all the interest groups that polarize his society. If he can impress upon his readers that he is in no one’s pocket, that he owes allegiance to no potentate or party, he can make his own unimpeachable life underwrite the ethical truth of his writing. Both rhetorics were, however, subsumed in his actual business practices. As James McLaverty writes, publication of Pope’s Works (1717) “marked Pope’s acceptance of a new public sort of responsibility for his writing.”30 Between 1717 and the publication of the 1735–​6 Works, a period during which payments to Pope by the publisher Lintot for the Homer translations had exceeded £3,000 and made him wealthy, Pope had in effect set himself up as a one-​ man publishing firm. His obsessive interest in typography and the material aspects of book production rendered such hegemonic practices inevitable. By the 1730s, John Wright was acting almost exclusively for Pope as a printer, while his publisher, Lawton Gilliver, was under severely restrictive contractual terms that permitted him to sell, for one year only, as many of his “Poems or Epistles in Verse” as Pope should think fit. He would accept every poem that Pope put his way, and would pay £50 for each. The copyrights reverted to Pope after the year was out. What is equally clear is that, as Pope’s career progressed, he found much more advantage in publishing larger editions of relatively inexpensive octavo volumes than in publishing prestigious quartos or folios. In this sense, he became increasingly a bourgeois and popular writer. The careers of Pope and Byron, the literary superstars of their eras, afford the most charismatic “strong” authorship models in the period 1710–​1825. They mark the extremes of a temporal spectrum that should witness the decline of patronage, the proliferation of the literary market, and the rise of the mediating publisher; and we can track the rise of the publisher in the comparison of the ducking and weaving Curll with Dodsley—​already at the center of a highly cultured poetry-​writing salon—​and Byron’s publisher John Murray, whose premises at 50 Albemarle Street became, after 1812, exactly the kind of Habermasian center of literary discursiveness that this chapter has described. It was here that Byron and Sir Walter Scott met—​here also, in the beautiful drawing room, that the leading political and literary figures of the period rubbed shoulders. It can seem, however, that Pope and Byron reverse the temporal polarities in respect of the general map. Pope, who should be at the aristocratic and patronage-​based end of the calendar, is, as I have suggested, actually a bourgeois avatar of the marketplace, the most expert

30 

James McLaverty, Pope, Print and Meaning (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), p. 56.

 

160   Brean Hammond and astute literary businessman of his generation. We would expect, perhaps, that Byron’s relationship with his reading public and with his publisher, John Murray, would have been more significantly defined by the marketplace, but that is not precisely the case. Study of the Murray–​Byron correspondence suggests that Byron’s glittering writing career was destroyed by his complete failure to set up appropriately commercial relationships with Murray, whom he treated rather as an Italian prince might treat his domestic retainer, requiring him to send tooth-​powder and other toilet requisites in addition to a copy of almost every prestigious book he published. Murray took care of a range of Byron’s social functions, including even the burial of his illegitimate daughter by Clare Claremont, Allegra. To the lawyer Douglas Kinnaird Byron deputed the messy question of his remuneration which, for the first few years of his enormous success, he refused to receive at all, diverting it to a scoundrel called R. C. Dallas. Aesthetic functions were entrusted to the poet William Gifford, whom Byron regarded with idolatrous adoration. Given this separation of functions, Murray was never effectively able to bring Byron’s business interests and his commercial advantage together. Requiring only relatively small alterations to the cantos of Don Juan as they rolled out, pressurized by the outraged reactions of such as Gifford and John Wilson Croker and the certainty that some passages would ruin the sales, Murray felt unable to offer Byron the high copyright fees he demanded through Kinnaird. Byron’s aristocratic sprezzatura prevented him from discussing such sordid matters directly with Murray, but that did not mean that he was unaware of what such rival authors as Scott and Moore were earning and Kinnaird was under pressure to keep pace. Discernibly, though, the rock upon which Murray’s relationship with Byron perished was that of gentility. Byron could not treat Murray consistently as either a gentleman or as a merchant, and his rhetoric fluctuated dangerously with his mood. In August 1817, for example, after a dispute about the final line of Manfred, Murray expresses “a deep regret that in our pretty long intercourse I appear to have failed to shew, that a man in my situation, may possess the feelings & principles of a Gentleman.” In July 1819, Gifford was outraged that Byron should send a letter to Murray detailing his fall into the Grand Canal, followed by an assignation with one Angelina, to whom he “went dripping like a Triton to my Sea-​nymph.”31 Gifford comments: “to him (Murray, the bookseller—​a person so out of his caste & to whom he writes formally, beginning ‘Dear Sir’).” Murray hated dealing with Kinnaird, whom he contrasted with the urbane Hobhouse; and who admitted to Byron that “I deal with him as between a Gentleman & a Tradesman.”32 So often at issue in the Murray–​Byron correspondence is the question of where, exactly, a publisher is to be placed on the status ladder in dealing with a scribbling peer. Eventually, it was Byron’s mixing Murray up with Leigh Hunt and with his unrefined publisher-​brother John, who was to publish The Vision of Judgment, that was the final straw. For Murray, who had paid Byron more than £15,000 in copyright fees during his career, this association was the evidence of Byron’s gravitation toward the riffraff-​radical press, who were already hijacking publication of his masterpiece Don Juan that Murray had found it increasingly embarrassing to print. It was Lord Byron, in Murray’s opinion, who was no longer a gentleman.

31 

Nicholson (ed.), Letters of John Murray to Lord Byron, p. 241.    32  Ibid., p. 389.

 

The Poet as Professional    161

References Baines, Paul, and Pat Rogers, Edmund Curll, Bookseller (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007). Griffin, Dustin, Literary Patronage in Eighteenth-​Century England, 1650–​1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996). Hammond, Brean S., “Hackney for Bread”: Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 1670–​ 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Johns, Adrian, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998). Justice, George, “Poetry, Popular Culture, and the Literary Marketplace,” in Christine Gerrard (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Eighteenth-​Century Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 97–​110. Love, Harold, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-​ Century England (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1993). Suarez, Michael F., and Michael L. Turner (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume V, 1695–​1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010).

 

Chapter 10

T he P oet as L a b ore r Bridget Keegan Between 1700 and 1800, nearly 250 individuals of laboring-​class origins published poetry.1 In the same period, few if any individuals of laboring-​class origins published novels.2 Why did the writing of poetry flourish among laboring-​class authors while the writing of novels did not? Put another way, what factors define the possibilities and limits of laboring-​class literary production in the period? Larger cultural trends, some discussed in other chapters in this volume, may partially explain the phenomenon: the interest in theories of natural genius (which many of these poets were seen as embodying); the economic reconfiguration of the literary marketplace; or the impact of the professionalization of writing (which opened the field to a range of newcomers).3 While these developments may explain why laboring-​class people wrote, they do not necessarily explain why they wrote poetry.

Finding Occasions for Poetry In examining the emergence of the laborer as poet in the eighteenth century, we should not overlook more obvious answers to the question of what made their poems possible: time and material. Writing a novel involves a great deal of paper, a commodity that was relatively

1  This number is based upon information collected in John Goodridge et al. (eds.), A Database of British and Irish Labouring-​Class Poets and Poetry, 1700–​1900. The authors have compiled a bio-​ bibliographic list which includes information on approximately 2,000 poets of laboring-​class origins. Roughly 250 of these poets published before 1800. The most recent version is available at http://​ nottinghamtrent.academia.edu/​JGoodridge. 2  Ann Yearsley’s The Royal Captives (1795) is perhaps the most well-​known exception. 3  The introductions to each of the three volumes of Eighteenth-​Century Labouring-​Class Poets provide a useful survey of the main socio-​cultural trends that contributed to the rise of a plebeian literary culture. See John Goodridge (gen. ed.), Eighteenth-​Century Labouring-​Class Poets, 3 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003); vol. i is edited by William J. Christmas, vol. ii by Bridget Keegan, and vol. iii by Tim Burke. See also John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan, “John Clare and the Traditions of Laboring-​Class Verse,” in Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740–​1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 280–​95.

 

The Poet as Laborer    163 dear even into the nineteenth century, as we know from John Clare’s journals.4 Yet it was not simply access to the physical materials for writing that presented difficulties, but the creative materials as well. Often the poet’s sense of his or her station limited which topics he or she dared write about, and the poet’s worthiness to address a subject frequently served as the topic of many a laboring-​class poem. In the opening poem of Stephen Duck’s first collection, for example, the poet struggles with the appropriate subject matter for hands more used to holding a plough than a pen: Sir, were your Eloquence and Learning mine, And I, like you, a Fav’rite of the Nine; I quickly would Parnassus Summit climb, And find a Hero worthy of my Rhyme.5

The poet’s lack of education precludes lofty themes. At other times, poverty and hardship silence the poet’s muse, as John Frederick Bryant writes in “The Author on His Own Situation”: Oft, tho’ by Poverty’s chill hand depress’d, I’ve felt the charm that warm’d the poet’s breast; Oft, at the leisure hour, indulg’d my rage To turn the borrow’d volume’s magic page, Where some choice fav’rite of th’inspiring Nine Immortal lives in each immortal line; As oft, by daring Emulation fir’d, Invok’d the muse, and felt myself inspir’d: But ere quick Fancy snatch’d the heav’n-​born strain, By Mis’ry seiz’d, I sunk depress’d again.6

Pious themes generally offered the best defense of a poet’s right to write. Donna Landry, for instance, notes versifications of Scripture gave laboring-​class women poets “an ambitious range of possibilities for exploring ideas and aesthetic effects not otherwise readily accessible in the poetry of the day.”7 Regardless of gender or occupation, all laboring-​class poets were alert to potential accusations that they wrote to “rise above their station,” thus most made sure to demonstrate adequate humility and deference in their self-​presentations. If it was not a poet’s sense of modesty that limited what she or he wrote about, it was an even more critical factor: time. At the most basic level, being able to write at all demanded time, taking one away from one’s primary occupation or from the rare moments of leisure. The relationship to time distinctly characterizes poetry written by laborers. Again and again, in the prefaces and introductions to many a laboring-​class poet’s collection, the

4  Clare recounts how, as he was beginning to exercise his talents as a poet, he would have to rely on whatever scraps of paper could be found in his cottage. His mother, not recognizing these as his original compositions, felt free to use them for more practical purposes, such as lighting the wood in the fireplace. Thus our access to an unknown amount of Clare’s juvenilia has been lost. See Eric Robinson and David Powell (eds.), John Clare By Himself (Manchester: MIDNAG/​Carcanet, 1996), p. 13. 5  Stephen Duck, “To A Gentleman Who Requested a Copy of Verses from the Author,” Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1738), lines 11–​14. 6  Goodridge (ed.), Eighteenth-​Century English Labouring-​Class Poets, vol. iii, p. 123, lines 1–​10. 7  Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-​Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–​1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), p. 38.

 

164   Bridget Keegan well-​meaning patrons or the poets themselves stress that in pursuing their art, the poets took no time from “useful” occupations. Rather, whatever they accomplished was during “hours stolen from sleep,” not from employers. Samuel Law’s preface to his long poem A Domestic Winter-​Piece (1772) is typical: that exceeding small, that inconsiderably small share of learning that I am possessed of, I have acquired purely by my own industry; even by applying myself to the acquisition of scientific knowledge, in my very few, my short-​lived leisure hours. I frequently courted the amiable muses, at what time the purple morning rose, in the transitory moments of my noontide-​ hour, or in the solitary depths of silent eve, when nature’s sons were all in deepest slumbers drowned: For this is the hour, the only hour, for musing meditations: This is the time wherein the thoughts may roam, unmolested roam, at random, and range without controll.8

Similar protestations were necessary to ensure that doubts about the laborer-​poet’s moral merit did not negatively affect the reception of his or her work. William J. Christmas has argued that a “triumvirate of values”—​namely “honesty, industry, and piety”—​were crucial ideological components in laboring-​class literary self-​presentation: “Most plebeian poets made it into print because their lives could be represented profitably as positive examples of these values.”9 Industry meant that laboring-​class people occupied their time with activities deemed productive, not with poetic activity. I have written elsewhere about the fraught relationship that laboring-​class poetry has with “leisure time,” in particular how this is manifested in their engagement with pastoralism.10 With the pastoral mode, many plebeian poets explored how time shaped their artistic identities. But almost every laborer-​poet stressed the fact they could only occasionally be poets. A significant percentage of the volumes produced by laboring-​class poets—​arguably higher than those of refined poets—​are entitled Poems on Several Occasions or Poems on Various Occasions. These collections, moreover, contain poems that describe and celebrate those times such as evenings, the Sabbath, or holidays, when the artist was liberated from manual labor and could attend to the creative work of writing. Others featured poetic occasions that were exceptional or singular, showing the poet writing to capture a moment when he or she could. While almost all eighteenth-​century poets wrote occasional verse, laboring-​class occasional poetry provides unique insights into what distinguishes writers who were otherwise very different, hailing from a wide variety of primary occupations, regions, and cultural backgrounds. Occasional poems deal with a particular moment or event; their time and material are limited. They do not rely solely on invention or imagination; the most basic definition of the form stipulates that it “relies on a verifiable external event as its genesis.”11 In what follows, I will review a sample of occasional poems, focusing on those devoted to explicitly literary occasions: poems on receiving books, on being published, on reading the works of another poet, and on being asked to write. These meta-​literary occasions allow laboring-​class poets to reflect on the paradoxes of their identity and to experiment with self-​fashioning.

8 

Goodridge (ed.), vol. ii, p. 266. William J. Christmas, The Lab’ring Muses: Work, Writing and the Social Order in Plebeian Poetry, 1730–​1830 (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2001), p. 49. 10  Bridget Keegan, “Lambs to the Slaughter: Leisure and Laboring-​Class Poetry,” Romanticism on the Net, 27 (2002). 11  John Dolan, Poetic Occasion from Milton to Wordsworth (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 2. 9 

 

The Poet as Laborer    165 By focusing on occasional poems, I do not wish to suggest that plebeian poets did not attempt longer poems on serious or satirical subjects. Many did. Important as these poems are, they were the exception, not the rule. Writing a longer work involved time, a commodity whose value was renegotiated during the eighteenth century. The revaluation of time is everywhere legible in the writings of laboring-​class poets. E. P. Thompson’s classic essay “Time, Work-​Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” explicitly draws upon the works of Stephen Duck and Mary Collier to illustrate the tensions surrounding changing perceptions of a laborer’s time.12 Thompson and later John Goodridge show how The Thresher’s Labour illustrates the clash of seasonally driven agricultural rhythms and industrial clock time, and how The Woman’s Labour reveals the added pressures on women’s time from housework and childcare.13 In the earlier part of the eighteenth century, poets followed Duck and Collier and attempted to address limits of time and material by making their labor the topic of poetry. While this practice diminished in the second half of the century, a poet’s primary occupation was not an insignificant detail. Unsurprisingly, the three most poetically productive occupations were those which were largely unsupervised and where workers had the most control over their time: handloom weavers, shoemakers, and shepherds. Little explicit scholarly work on occasional poetry exists, though studies of those genres that describe specific occasions, such as elegies or epithalamia, are more plentiful. John Dolan’s Poetic Occasion from Milton to Wordsworth is the most thorough recent overview, though he does not discuss laboring-​class poets. Dolan’s analysis privileges elegies, but his argument that occasional poems were important to concepts of poetic invention and in shaping poetic careers for aspiring poets is especially relevant to a history of laboring-​class poets. The source of a laboring-​class poet’s creativity, in particular its relationship to education or to genius, is one reason to focus on meta-​literary occasions. Laboring-​class poets, like any poet of the period, composed poetry on a wide variety of events including weddings, birthdays, and other festive occasions. They penned poems about military victories or other issues of national and international concern (most notably the slave trade).14 But nearly every plebeian poet writes about the circumstances allowing him or her to write and the occasions for coming to writing. Laboring-​class meta-literary occasional poems can be divided into four sometimes overlapping categories. First are poems dedicated to those supporting the poet in his or her endeavors, whether financially or through praise or access to books. Conversely, the second group includes poems responding to those hostile to the poet or describing other hardships. Poems to other poets, often on the occasion of reading something by that poet or commemorating the anniversary of the other poet’s birth or death, make up the third category: Alexander Pope, Duck, Thomas Chatterton, and Robert Burns provide the most prominent sources of inspiration. Finally there are the singular performances, written upon particular request, often to demonstrate poetic virtuosity but sometimes to garner financial 12 

E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-​Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present, 38, no. 1 (1967), 56–​97. 13  John Goodridge, Rural Life in Eighteenth-​Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995). 14  See James Basker (ed.), Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, 1660–​1810 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2002). Laboring-​class poets from Duck and beyond are well represented in this collection.

 

166   Bridget Keegan support or defend the poet’s authentic voice (given the all-​too-​frequent suspicions that a laboring-​class poet might be a fraud).

Occasions of Patronage Because of the need to prove that a laborer could write at all, let alone write verse, volumes of laboring-​class poetry often appear with elaborate framing devices: typically an introduction penned by an authoritative figure (usually a patron or key supporter), an apology from the author, and a list of subscribers collectively validate the artist’s endeavors. Rare was the laboring-​class poet who published without the aid of a patron or patrons, although patronage relationships varied greatly.15 Models ranged from Queen Caroline’s elevation of Duck, to Bridget Freemantle’s encouragement of Mary Leapor, to Hannah More’s condescensions to Ann Yearsley.16 Patrons hailed from all levels of the upper and middle classes, and their interests in the laboring poets demonstrated a range of motives. Joseph Spence’s scholarly investigation of natural genius led to his championing of Duck. William Shenstone’s encouragement of James Woodhouse was based on a shared interest in gardening. Many viewed their investments in the poets as simply another mode of charity. Duck’s early success set the bar high for later aspiring poets. His elevation was such that, even near the end of the century, Horace Walpole (who had his own problematic relationship with that icon for laboring poets, Thomas Chatterton) would write to Hannah More about her discovery of Ann Yearsley: “When the late Queen patronised Stephen Duck, who was only a wonder at first, and had not genius enough to support the character he had promised, twenty artisans and labourers turned poets, and starved.”17 Although royal patronage was out of reach, laboring-​class poets still sometimes garnered noble support, as we see with Lord Radstock’s meddling assistance to John Clare in the 1820s. In 1745 Anglo-​Irish bricklayer poet Henry Jones earned the notice of Philip Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield, with two flattering poems, one addressed to Chesterfield and the other to his wife: “The Bricklayer’s Poem: Presented to His Excellency the Lord Lieutenant: On His Arrival in the Kingdom” and “The Bricklayer’s Poem, to the Countess of Chesterfield, on Her Ladyship’s Saving the Soldiers from Being Shot.” While Chesterfield helped launch Jones’s long and prolific career, Jones rapidly failed to live up to his patron’s expectations for deference, honesty, industry, and piety. By 1746, Jones had ceased to identify himself with his manual occupation in his publications. His ambitions were to be a poet full stop, and references to his career as a bricklayer were erased from later versions of the poems to Chesterfield and his wife. Although his status as laboring-​class is uncertain, James Eyre Weekes satirizes laboring-​ class fantasies of noble patronage by dedicating his Poems on Several Occasions “To His 15  Of only a handful of poets with no apparent support networks to facilitate their publication are John Bancks in the early part of the century and John Freeth near the end. 16  For an excellent overview of this topic, see Betty Rizzo, “The Patron as Poetic Maker: The Politics of Benefaction,” Studies in Eighteenth-​Century Culture, 20 (1990), 241–​66. 17  Horace Walpole to Hannah More, Nov. 13, 1784, in The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1937–​83), vol. vi, p. 238.

 

The Poet as Laborer    167 Serene Highness Prince Nobody,” and spoofing Jones in “The Cobler’s Poem, to a Certain Noble Peer: Occasioned by the Brick-​Layer’s Poem.”18 Weekes’s occasional poem plays on an extended analogy between versifying and bricklaying to mock Jones’s ambitiousness: No wonder then, my Lord, that he Thus aided dares to reach to thee, And boldly by Ambition driv’n Attempts to Build his Tow’r to Heav’n Exceeds the pride of Phaeton, And fain would draw the very Sun.19

Sardonically engaging the expectations of humility, Weekes asserts that he, as a cobbler, “more humble, as discreet, | Pay my devotions at thy Feet” (lines 71–​2). The model of the single, noble patron providing sole support for the artist grew rarer, replaced by more diffuse patronage via the solicitation of multiple subscribers, whose contributions were organized by one or two chief enthusiasts. While poets continued to write poems of gratitude to those who assisted their publication, the table of contents from a broad spectrum of laboring-​class collections reveal that intellectual rather than financial assistance was more frequently commemorated. James Woodhouse’s relationship with William Shenstone was instrumental to his initial publication, and a majority of the lines in his first collection Poems on Sundry Occasions (1764) and the second edition, titled Poems on Several Occasions (1766), are in praise of his friend and patron. Although Shenstone provided little money, he used his robust professional network to help Woodhouse publish. His “Verses Addressed to —​—​: On Receiving Some Valuable Books” commemorate the relief provided, after Shenstone’s death, by this unnamed supporter. Woodhouse likens books to food, noting how, after Shenstone’s demise, he feared “intellectual famine.” The books he received, however, “vouchsaf ’d a constant feast,” a miracle he compares to the appearance of manna to the wandering Israelites. Likewise, Ellen Taylor’s “Poem Address’d to a Gentleman, Who Had Lent Her Some Books” details her raptured evaluation of the works of Milton, Thomson, and Young provided by her anonymous supporter: What energy of thought,—​what mood and tense; What nervous force, and well-​digested sense: What intellectual strength, and beauties shine, Through every sentence, and through every line.20

Sadly she can enjoy these works only “when time permits” (line 4), which, for this late eighteenth-​century Irish washerwoman, was very infrequently. The fine line between generosity and condescension is acknowledged by Bristol gardener poet, William Job, in his “To Mr. T —​—​ r, on Receiving a Gift of Two Volumes, Call’d ‘The Art of English Poetry’ ” (referring to Edward Bysshe’s volume of 1702). In perfectly formed

18  For a discussion of Weekes’s background, see Patrick Fagan, A Georgian Celebration: Irish Poets of the Eighteenth Century (Dublin: Branar, 1989). According to Fagan, there may have been two individuals with the same name, both from Cork, writing at the same time; Fagan believes the person composing the parody of Jones’s work was in fact the son of a gentleman and educated at Trinity College Dublin. 19  Goodridge (ed.), vol. ii, p. 46, lines 61–​6. 20  Goodridge (ed.), vol. iii, p. 257, lines 7–​10.

 

168   Bridget Keegan heroic couplets, the poet reports his pleasure in learning the rules of the art he had been practicing: By reading, Sir, I have been taught to know When verses did in easy cadence flow; But why I could not tell, this clears the doubt, The accent, and the pause, is now found out: This is a key which opes to me a store Of knowledge that I never knew before.21

Job notes the further effect of this knowledge will be to rein in his muse, and to help “cull those crude materials fancy forms” (line 27). Yet even as he acknowledges the superiority of Bysshe’s models, he closes the poem praising God, the source of all knowledge and Job’s main inspiration. Pointing to a divine origin for his poetic impulses, one heretofore not guided by rules of art, the poet marshals one of the main defenses of laboring-​class writing, namely its religious source and purpose. In a model of poetic creativity dating back to Plato, Job can avoid charges of ambition by deferring to a higher source of inspiration. Religious piety was a useful cover for poetic ambition. William Lane engages in a similarly pious rhetoric of gratitude in his several poems on this theme, such as “To a Lady, Who Had Indulged the Author with a Perusal of Burns’s Poems,” “To a Young Lady, Who Had Lent the Author Cowper’s Translation of Madame Guion’s Poems,” and “To Miss W—​—​ms, Whose Late Father (T. W—​—​ms, Esq. M.P.) Had Procured the Author a Donation from the Literary Fund.” That all these poems are addressed to women is significant. The role of women as supporters of laboring-​class poets of either gender is important. From Queen Caroline in the 1730s to Clare’s advocate Eliza Emmerson in the 1830s, the history of laboring-​class poetry is replete with evidence of literary women who dedicated themselves to encouraging aspiring plebeian poets, if not with money then with intellectual companionship. Assisting a plebeian writer provided a way to combine cultural interests with a charitable impulse. While Lane’s female supporter shared Burns’s poems with him as a way to provide his humble muse further inspiration, Janet Little’s tongue-​in-​cheek thank-​you note, “To a Lady, Who Sent the Author Some Paper with a Reading of Sillar’s Poems,” takes the opposite tack. While she is grateful for the paper, her fellow laboring-​class poet David Sillar provides a negative role model, and Little wishes he had banished his muse and not “wrote in despite of good manners and sense.”22 Little is compelled by the gift of Sillar’s verses to put down her pen, “lest with such dunces as these I be number’d” (line 15). Laboring-​class poets were not universally supportive of each other’s work.

Difficult Occasions Poems describing physical, emotional, and intellectual hardship have been much more popular with modern critics. Stories of triumph over adversity are typically richer in sociological and historical details. While the popular image of the “distress’d poet,” immortalized visually by William Hogarth, included writers of all backgrounds, laboring-​class distresses were 21 

Ibid., p. 49, lines 5–​10.

22 

Ibid., p. 251, line 12.

 

The Poet as Laborer    169 more severe, and their hardships go beyond mere documentary interest. An early example of this subgenre of occasional poetry, John Bancks’s “Fragment of an Ode to Boreas, Made While the Author Sold Books in an Alley,” blends classical figures with the gritty circumstances of the poem’s composition. A weaver turned bookseller (an injury to his arm prevented him from continuing the former trade), Bancks was one of the few early eighteenth-​century laboring-​class poets to publish without patronage. Capitalizing upon Duck’s success, Bancks produced his first collection, The Weaver’s Miscellany (1730), at his own expense (though he clearly casts about for noble assistance in the poems). The ode appears in his second collection, titled (of course) Poems on Several Occasions (1733). Bancks turns a bad situation into an opportunity for poetry addressing the cold winter wind: “Blow, that thy Force I may rehearse; | While all my thoughts congeal to Verse!”23 The wind assails him, but also protects him: Blow, and the strongest Proofs dispense To ev’ry doubtful Reader’s Sense! But chiefly chill the Critic’s Nose, Who dares the Truths I sing oppose! (lines 5–​8)

The remainder of the poem depicts the poet’s efforts to stay warm, despite the holes in his clothes and his soggy shoes. Physical hardships were frequently recorded in poetry, but the social hardships were often more painful. Prime among these were the frequent accusations that the poets could not have produced their own verses. While few were subject to public inquests, such as the notorious interrogation Phillis Wheatley endured, many had occasion to address the court of public opinion to defend their creation.24 Three women poets provide lively examples of this subgenre of occasional poetry: Mary Masters in “To a Gentleman Who Questioned My Being an Author of the Foregoing verses” and “To the Author of the Epistle to Mrs. Masters and Her Readers”; Mary Collier in “An Epistolary Answer to an Exciseman, Who Doubted Her Being the Author of the Washerwoman’s Labour”; and Elizabeth Hands in “A Poem, on the Supposition of an Advertisement Appearing in a Morning Paper, of the Publication of a Volume of Poems, by a Servant Maid” and “A Poem, on the Supposition of the Book Having Been Published and Read.” Although Donna Landry argues that Mary Masters’s social circumstances were more genteel than plebeian, Masters’s preface ensures the reader is fully aware of all she has overcome: “The author of the following Poems never read a Treatise of Rhetorick, or an Art of Poetry, nor was ever taught her English Grammar. Her Education rose no higher than the Spelling-​Book.”25 Whether or not she is authentically laboring-​class, her self-​presentation marshals the typical rhetoric that, since Duck’s success in the 1730s, was used to promote literary achievement from members of the lower orders. The first poem in her defense summarizes the central apologies for laboring-​class poetry, including the phenomenon of natural genius. It is worth quoting at length for its exemplarity: Sir, ’tis allow’d as it has oft been said, Poets are only Born and never Made. Where Nature does her friendly Warmth exert, 23 

Goodridge (ed.), vol. i, p. 211, lines 3–​4. See Henry Louis Gates, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003). 25  Goodridge (ed.), vol. i, p. 234. 24 

 

170   Bridget Keegan A Genius may supply the Pedant’s Art. Hence ’tis, that I, unletter’d Maid, pretend To paraphrase a Psalm, or praise a Friend; Wholly unpractis’d in the learned Rules, And arduous Precepts of the noisy Schools Nature’s strong Impulse gives my Fancy Wings: …………………………………………………… Whate’er I write, whatever I impart, Is simple Nature unimprov’d by Art. Search but those Strains, you think so much excel, Scan ev’ry Verse, and try the Numbers well: You’ll plainly see, in almost ev’ry Line, Distinguishing Defects to prove them Mine.26

Masters’s association with Samuel Johnson led to accusations that she had been assisted in her work, thus she stresses her poetry’s flaws and imperfections to prove it is the product of a writer of humble origin. Her second occasional poem of self-​defense is more caustic, addressed to the anonymous author of a poem that criticized her use of religious metaphors in another occasional poem (“To Clemene, on Her Birth-​day”). While she is willing to admit that her verse is flawed (“Faults I allow in ev’ry Piece I’ve writ, | The Want of Spirit, Elegance and Wit”),27 she calls upon her unquestionable piety to defend her right to use Christian imagery. Mary Collier’s status as laboring-​class poet needs no defense, and The Woman’s Labour is now celebrated for its lively depiction of the “triple shift” of women’s work. Yet she too wrote well enough that doubts arose as to her verse’s authenticity. “An Epistolary Answer to an Exciseman, Who Doubted Her Being the Author of the Washerwoman’s Labour” is written playfully in ballad meter, the poet claiming her legal right to defend her name and attacking her critic for denying her access to knowledge. Her use of classical imagery had raised the suspicions of the tax-​collector, to which she replies: Tho’ my Extraction was so low, And I to labour bred; Yet Stories of the Pagan Gods, I oft have seen, and read.28

Moreover, she promises that she can authenticate herself further not only by sending the letter but also by writing for him on the spot. The poem closes with a broader defense of women against the condescensions of her critic: Tho’ if we Education had Which justly is our due, I doubt not, many of our Sex Might fairly vie with you. (lines 41–​4)

This poem offers Collier’s most direct defense of her right to write, one which later laboring-​ class women poets continued to assert. 26 

Ibid., p. 235, lines 1–​9, 15–​20.

27 

Ibid., p. 250, lines 23–​4.

28 

Ibid., p. 329, lines 21–​4.

 

The Poet as Laborer    171 Elizabeth Hands’s “Poem, On the Supposition of an Advertisement Appearing in a Morning Paper, of the Publication of a Volume of Poems, by a Servant Maid” is a masterpiece of this subgenre of occasional verse. Landry rightly compares her satiric achievement to Swift’s, as she depicts an imaginary scene of a polite drawing room. “The great Mrs Consequence” introduces the occasion of a servant publishing verses, to which the assembled guests respond with various witticisms: A servant write verses! Says Madam Du Bloom; Pray what is the subject?—​a Mop, or a Broom? He, he, he,—​says Miss Flounce; I suppose we shall see An Ode on a Dishclout—​what else can it be? Says Miss Coquettilla, why ladies so tart? Perhaps Tom the Footman has fired her heart.29

The conversation turns to whether or not a servant should be allowed writing, and if so, under what circumstances. “Old lady Marr-​joy” sees writing as a sign of the servant having excess leisure time and promises to find her “other employ.” “Miss Rhymer,” however, pities her depressed genius, while “old Miss Prudella” limits servants’ literacy to writing “to their mothers to say they are well, | And read of a Sunday the Duty of Man” (lines 30–​1). Finally, “Mrs. Candour” imagines that the author is actuallly “Some whimsical trollop” (line 41)  impersonating a servant. “Mrs. Domestic” complains of a servant she once had who wrote an occasional poem on a wedding which she dismisses because it was not useful. The servant would have done better to write down recipes. The discussion ends and the frivolity of the discussants is underscored with the arrival of a card table. As Christmas observes, “Those polite women, and not Hands, are in fact the ones who produce nothing, and thus they bear the brunt of the poet’s satire because she effecively turns their own arguments back on them.”30 The following poem, “On the supposition of the Book Being Published and Read” again parodies the imagined critics. In this poem, the company is mixed and the setting a postprandial conversation. Amidst the other gossip (“What wife was suspected, what daughter elop’d”),31 the topic of the servant woman’s book is introduced by Miss Rhymer, the only character in the previous poem who was slightly sympathetic. She then singles out Hands’s long religious poem “The Death of Amnon” for praise. The members of the party gossip about the author and the contents of the book, allowing Hands to satirize the “polite” responses to laboring-​class writing that, in the fifty years since Duck’s success, had become commonplace in mainstream reviews. The Rector, the poem’s literary authority figure, pronounces muted praise but stronger criticism: Some pieces, I think, are pretty correct; A stile elevated you cannot expect: To some of her equals they may be a treasure, And country lasses may read ’em with pleasure. That Amnon, you can’t call it poetry neither, There’s no flights of fancy, or imagery either; You may stile it prosaic, blank verse at the best;

29  31 

Goodridge (ed.), vol. iii, p. 159, lines 11–​16. Goodridge (ed.), vol. iii, p. 161, line 9.

30 Christmas, The Lab’ring Muses, p. 231.

 

172   Bridget Keegan Some pointed reflections, indeed, are exprest; The narrative lines are exceedingly poor. (lines 98–​106)

His assessment is abruptly interrupted when another gentleman opens the door and the poem concludes. On the one hand, as Christmas notes, “Hands’s rendition of the Rector’s criticisms serves to show her supporters that she does not harbor too high an estimation of her own poetic powers.”32 She is suitably humble; on the other hand, Christmas adds that, by breaking off the Rector’s speech mid-​sentence, Hands maintains her control of the discussion of her own work. Landry remarks that “Hands has her revenge on the rector, too; his forever interrupted discourse is marked by a blank in which we must surely be tempted to inscribe irreverence if not profanity, rupturing his decorum as ‘he’ has ruptured the discourse of Hands’s texts.”33 That poems of this type appear earlier and later in the century suggests that despite the growing number of laboring-​class poets, public acceptance remained elusive.

Occasions for Community Given the hardships and the hostility that they faced, laboring-​class poets’ desire for literary community, whether imagined or real, was profound, particularly given the isolation many of the authors felt. Poets such as Mary Leapor describe poignantly how their double identity as laborer and poet estranged them from the literary community they aspired to join and the plebeian community in which they lived. Her “Epistle to Artemesia: On Fame” shows her struggle for polite acceptance, while her “Epistle to Deborah Dough” shows her alienation from her laboring-​class relatives. The experiences of other poets offered consolation and inspiration. Christmas has written of the importance of Duck and the subgenre of poems addressed to Duck, and Goodridge has discussed the many poems related to Chatterton, but the poets’ affinities ran a range from polite to plebeian.34 I will focus briefly on the importance of Pope and Robert Burns. Pope’s support of earlier laboring-​class poets, such as Robert Dodsley and Duck, was real and direct. The author of the Dunciad was privately sympathetic to Duck’s earnest efforts and gave Dodsley the £100 that allowed him to establish himself as bookseller, the first step toward his becoming the most important publisher of poetry in mid-​century. Dodsley likely first encountered Pope when Dodsley served as Charles Dartineuf ’s footman in the late 1720s. Dartineuf hosted a number of luminaries, including Gay and Swift. Pope was friendly with Duck’s main patron and supporter, Joseph Spence. Inspired by Duck’s celebrity, Pope saw a political opportunity to create a potential rival to the queen’s genius.35 Pope mentored 32 Christmas, The Lab’ring Muses, p. 232.

33 Landry, The Muses of Resistance, p. 189. See Christmas, The Lab’ring Muses, especially pp. 95–​129. See also John Goodridge, “Identity, Authenticity, and Class: John Clare and the Mask of Chatterton,” Angelaki, 1, no. 2 (Winter 1993–​4), 131–​48; and “Rowley’s Ghost: A Checklist of Creative Works Inspired by Thomas Chatterton’s Life and Writings,” in Nick Groom (ed.), Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 262–​92. 35  Harry M. Solomon, The Rise of Robert Dodsley: Creating a New Age of Print (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 1–​28. 34 

 

The Poet as Laborer    173 Dodsley in his self-​presentation and publication. Dodsley’s appreciation for Pope’s support is expressed in numerous occasions in poetry. His “Epistle to Mr. Pope, Occasion’d by His Essay on Man” has not one but two introductory stanzas. The first begins with the conventional proclamations of elevated praise, but after four lines, the speaker self-​consciously stops himself: But Truth in Verse is clad too like a Lie, And you, at least, would think it Flattery; Hating the Thought I check my forward Strain, I change my Stile, and thus begin again.36

Dodsley shifts to describe his own struggle with understanding Pope’s philosophical epistle, and his difficulties finding the appropriate style to praise Pope’s accomplishment. The remainder of the poem charts Dodsley’s creative process as he interrupts his stanzas to comment upon what he is attempting to do. First he tries to emulate “honest Gay” (line 42) but decides after one stanza that he “wants his Wit” (line 56) and tries again. After four stanzas attacking Pope’s would-​be critics, the poem ends with a stanza of self-​criticism, Dodsley accusing himself of vanity. Pope needs no additional praise to exalt him. Dodsley’s cleverly self-​deferential attempt reveals as much about his own literary expertise as it does about Pope’s genius. Much in the same way as Elizabeth Hands’s speaker, he shows himself alert to the critical reception of plebeian poetry. Dodsley marshaled his literary connections shrewdly and went on to support other laboring-​class poets, such as James Woodhouse, whom he discovered through his friendship with William Shenstone. Woodhouse’s numerous (occasional) poems to Shenstone could be the topic of a separate article. His homages to Shenstone and his friends underscore the importance of literary sponsors (more than aristocratic patrons) to achieving publication. Like Dodsley, Henry Jones also went on to a long career built only briefly on the vogue for laboring-​class writers, and he too writes poems in defense of Pope. Jones’s “To a Friend Who Had Writ Verses to Mr Pope, in the Person of Apollo, Occasioned by Hearing That Poet Abus’d” criticizes Pope’s critics, and assumes an air of breezy familiarity calling him “Dan Pope.” But Jones also distances himself, for his praise of Pope is secondhand, praising another poet’s praise of Pope, enacting a sense of deferential distance from the great writer. Women poets often expressed admiration for Pope, who, Catholic and physically di­sabled, was socially marginalized in ways that likely resonated with them. Landry writes: The fact that Pope himself, as a social victim of exclusion on religious, political, and physical grounds, seems to have identified with female powerlessness, complicates his texts and works against his complicity with the gender ideology of the time. Indeed one might argue that women poets were particularly drawn to reading and responding discursively to Pope because of this very identification.37

One might add to Landry’s observations that Pope was also, in a manner of speaking, “self-​ taught,” thereby demonstrating the level of intellectual mastery possible outside elite university educations. Landry provides a thorough discussion of the many and complex responses to Pope by laboring-​class women, analyzing works by Mary Masters, Mary Leapor, Elizabeth Hands, Elizabeth Bentley, and Ann Yearsley. 36 

Goodridge (ed.), vol. i, p. 117, lines 7–​10.

37 Landry, The Muses of Resistance, pp. 45–​6.

 

174   Bridget Keegan Later in the century Robert Burns predominates as the subject of many an occasional poem. Identifications with Burns often have as much to do with his Scottishness as his social class. By the early nineteenth century, the spread of Burns clubs and annual Burns suppers made for ample occasion to commemorate the poet’s birth, death, and all his accomplishments in between. Yet even before 1800, during his own lifetime, poems to him or about Burns-​related occasions were plenty. Burns’s endorsement was a boon to fellow laboring-​ class poets, such as Janet Little, whose patron, Frances Dunlop, devoted herself to gaining the recognition of her friend and correspondent, Burns, for her protégée. Burns acquiesced and helped to round up subscribers (including fellow laboring-​class poets such as Alexander Wilson). Little’s “On a Visit to Mr. Burns” recounts her ecstasies upon meeting her hero in person. His talents exceed those of refined poets: Did Addison or Pope but hear, Or Sam, that critic most severe, A plough-​boy sing, wi’ throat so clear, They, in a rage, Their works wad a’ in pieces tear An’ curse your page.38

Little here deftly masters the standard Habbie meter that Burns popularized in his verse epistles; the meter is distinctive to the Scots tradition, making the poem one celebrating national as much as class-​based achievements. Burns’s death spurred a flood of poems in his memory, hundreds of poems, mostly by Scottish poets, appearing well into the nineteenth century. An eighteenth-​century example, by British poet Edward Rushton, “To the Memory of Robert Burns,” is exemplary of the elegiacal encomiums for the poet, condemning those who praised his artistry but refused him any real support, a hypocrisy that a fellow laboring-​class poet understood all too well: Applause, poor child of minstrelsy, Was all the world e’er gave to thee; Unmoved, by pinching penury They saw thee torn, And now, (kind souls) with sympathy Thy loss they mourn.39

As the remainder of the poem makes clear, even a poet as gifted and recognized as Burns “died in need” (line 60). Critical and financial success rarely went hand in hand. Laboring-​class poets wrote not only to poets with celebrity status but also to fellow obscure poets, as we see in Duck’s meta-​occasional poem, “To the Author of a Poem on the Duke of Lorrain’s Arrival at Court” or, later in the century, Christopher Jones’s “On a Book of Poems, Published a Few Years Since at Exeter by Mr W —​— ​r (Which the Author Hopes May Now Serve as Some Sort of Apology for His Own)” and his “Ode: Addressed to the Rev Mr Tasker, on Reading the Third Edition of His Popular Pindaric Ode, to the War-​Like Genius of Great Britain.” Sometimes they even wrote (satirically) to or about themselves, as in Robert Tatersal’s “Elegy on a Bricklayer; Written by Himself ” or John Bennet’s “To the Author, on

38 

Goodridge (ed.), vol. iii, pp. 243–​4, lines 43–​8.   

39 

Ibid., p. 33, lines 43–​8.

 

The Poet as Laborer    175 His Book of Poems,” an occasional poem presented as a dialogue with an interlocutor who seems surprised a shoemaker should write: A Shoemaker, d’ye say? I do, what then? A Shoemaker and Poet? True again. Where is the wonder? If you look around, You’ll find some Poets—​Coblers most profound!40

Elaborating a clever analogy between the patching up a cobbler performs on shoes with a poet’s work in language comprises the majority of the poem.

Metapoetic Occasions The need to explain the “wonder” of a cobbler (or a bricklayer or a thresher) writing is often the basis for the last category, the most occasional of occasional verse, detailing the often trivial circumstances of a poem’s composition. Some of the verse in this category might also be categorized as performances insofar as there was an expectation of immediate remuneration for the effort. Writing for pay is often associated with the broader cultural phenomenon of hackdom, and in many respects both the laborer-​poet and the hack poet are the result of the eighteenth-​ century’s reconfiguration of writing as a different kind of work.41 One cannot blame writers for aspiring to be paid and perhaps, eventually, like Duck or Dodsley, being able to trade their day job for creative work. As Dolan observes, occasional poems are often where poets address their ambitions explicitly. Milton’s Lycidas is the most celebrated example of a poet taking a particular occasion to explore his (or her) vocation, but the lesser occasions of laborer-​poets are worth examining in a similar light, such as Duck’s “To a Gentleman Who Requested a Copy of Verses from the Author,” discussed above, which humbly apologizes for the author’s want of skill and for the want of a topic. The poem begins by exploring the forms that the gentleman might hope to see: “some finish’d Ode, | Or sacred song” (lines 5–​6). Instead, “Ill suits such Tasks with One who holds the Plough, | Such lofty subjects with a Fate so low” (lines 9–​10). The poem details all the topics which the poet wishes he could treat—​both classical and Christian—​but which he rejects because “My Fate compels me silent to remain | For Want of Learning to improve my Strain” (lines 37–​8). Instead of elevated subjects in elevated style, simple occasional verse is all that the poet can provide: “Yet my unpolish’d Genius will produce, | And bring forth Something, tho’ of little Use” (lines 41–​2). Even with more humble ambitions the conclusion of the poem sees Duck relinquishing this momentary time of writing and returning to the scene of his primary occupation, whose temporal and more immediate demands take precedence: But why stand I my Fate accusing so? The Field calls me to Labour; I must go:

40 

Ibid., pp. 275–​6, lines 1–​6. See Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–​1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998); and Linda Zionkowski, Men’s Work: Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry, 1660–​1784 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). 41 

 

176   Bridget Keegan The Kine low after Meat; the hungry Steed, Neighing, complains he wants his usual Feed. Then, Sir, adieu: Accept what you did crave, And be propitious to your humble Slave. (lines 47–​52)

The work of animal husbandry trumps the occasions for poetry, and in the struggle between competing occupations the thresher prevails over the poet. Collier’s “Gentleman’s Request to the Author on Reading the Happy Husband and the Old Batchelor” opens by citing the reader’s high praise for her poem and his demand for a new version devoted to the Happy Wife and discontented Maid. Collier cleverly responds that, while she would be happy to oblige, she cannot in fact find many happy wives or discontented maids to write about. Using the premise of the pleasures and freedoms of a single life, she defends her lack of obligations as an artist: “So Rev’rend Sir, I hope you will excuse | The ignorance, And freedom of the Muse.”42 She protects her vocation to the extent of being able to choose her own topics. Henry Jones makes an occasion out of the absence of occasion in the lengthy “To the Reverend Dr Mann, Occasioned by the Author’s Asking Him for a Subject to Write on, and His Saying He Could Think of None.” The poem is occasional but also a moral epistle, much in the style of Jones’s refined role model, Pope. Jones uses the invitation to write as an occasion to reflect upon modern morality and on what it means for him to assume the role of moralizing poet. Jones’s poem to Mann condemns the general abandonment of explicitly moral themes in poetry and enjoins, Let Verse with all her youthful Train appear, And Wit to Virtue serve a Volunteer, At her own Weapons foil the dext’rous Foe And shoot down Folly with her fav’rite Bow.43

The hunting metaphor echoes the lines of the most celebrated moral poem of the century, Pope’s Essay on Man. Less elevated but just as playful are two of Christopher Jones’s poetic performances:  “The Invitation:  A  Jocular Poetic Epistle to a Friend, in Return for a Present of Bacon” and “The Empty Jug: Written at the Request of a Facetious Gentleman, Who, Together with the Author, Chanced to Reflect on the Melancholly Remains of a Social Jorum.” Like Henry Jones’s poem, Christopher Jones’s poem pays homage to a fellow poet, as the first is subtitled, “In Humble Imitation of the Late Ingenious Dr. Goldsmith’s Celebrated Epistle to Lord Clare, (Now Earl Nugent) in Return to His Lordship for a Present of Venison.” The occasion calls for imitation as well as gratitude, and the parody makes two important gestures. First, it demonstrates the journeyman woolcomber’s awareness of and engagement with mainstream literary culture, mirroring closely its convivial and conversational original. Second, it suggests that even Goldsmith relied upon various kinds of noble support, thereby potentially erasing distinctions between the polite and plebeian poets’ ambitions and limitations. The second poem, a humorous and hyperbolic description of the horrors of an empty mug of beer (“Thy dreary cavity; more frightful now | Than ghastly goblins, rang’d in midnight dance | New graves

42 

Goodridge (ed.), vol. i, p. 336, lines 19–​20.

43 

Goodridge (ed.), vol. ii, p. 14, lines 21–​4.

 

The Poet as Laborer    177 around!”)44 is a virtuoso display of Jones’s mastery of classical idioms and figures. Begging for another round from the gentleman of the title, the poem takes the case of a poet’s search for a patron to absurd extremes. Jones dexterously uses humor to be self-​deprecatory and to boast of his talents, expended even in this most trivial of circumstances. Finally, Janet Little’s “Given to a Lady Who Asked Me to Write a Poem” uses the occasion of fulfilling the request, as both Christopher and Henry Jones do, to demonstrate her familiarity with literary culture and imagine her place in it. She begins by looking back to the early part of the century when “Hard was the task to gain the bays … Except that little fellow Pope, | Few ever got near its [Parnassus’s] top.”45 She mentions other great poets of the first part of the century: “Swift, Thomson, Addison an’ Young” (line 11) as well as the great “Doctor Johnson,” whose criticism of the poets showed “Their blunders great, their beauties few” (line 16). The poem, however, takes a dramatic turn in its diction declaring of Johnson: But now he’s dead, we weel may ken; For ilka dunce maun hae a pen, To write in hamely, uncouth rhymes; An yet forsooth they please the times. (lines 17–​20)

Johnson’s death proves liberating for would-​be poets, prime among them “Rab Burns” of whom, Little notes, “An’ what is strange … | Even folks, wha’ re of the highest station, | Ca’ him the glory of our nation” (lines 24–​6). Burns’s example inspires a milkmaid such as Little to “tak up her quill” (line 28). But while Burns “can write wi’ ease, | An a’ denominations please” (lines 35–​6), a “rustic country quean” (line 43) like herself is better fit to “labour at her spinning wheel” (line 47) as “Frae that she may some profit share” (line 49). Little ends her self critique by shifting back to standard English to quote one of her own critics: Does she, poor silly thing, pretend The manners of our age to mend? Mad as we are, we’re wise enough Still to despise sic paultry stuff. “May she wha writes, of wit get mair, An a’ that read an ample share Of candour ev’ry fault to screen That in her dogg’ral scrawls are seen.” All this, and more, a critic said; I heard and slunk behind the shade: So much I dread their cruel spite, My hand still trembles when I write. (lines 51–​62)

Little’s modulation between elevated poetic English and Scots vernacular both in her parody of herself and of her critic enacts the double consciousness definitive of so many eighteenth-​ century laboring-​class poets. She knows her circumstances forever intrude upon her ability to pursue a certain kind of vocation, even as she can play with the limits her social situation imposes on her writing. Her identity as a poet is largely defined by the occasions for its exploration. 44 

Ibid., p. 324, lines 6–​8.

45 

Goodridge (ed.), vol. iii, p. 235, lines 2, 7–​8.

 

178   Bridget Keegan

Future Occasions In providing this overview of laboring-​class occasional poetry, I have omitted many other examples, whether they are poems which have the word “occasion” or “occasioned” in their title or whether they are about particular events to which the poet responds. It would be productive to analyze the complete works of all of the nearly 250 poets in digital format, in order to pursue a large-​scale empirical analysis investigating the frequency or percentage of explicitly occasional verse within their total output (and comparing this dataset with a sample of poets from the polite classes). Bill Overton’s study of the eighteenth-​century verse epistle provides an excellent model for how such an investigation might proceed.46 Long relegated to forgotten corners of research libraries, laboring-​class collections, their poems on many occasions, are likely to profit from the ongoing digitization of eighteenth-​century books, which promises to make these poets more easily available to a modern readership. Perhaps one of the most exciting aspects of the study of laboring-​class poetry is the occasion it gives scholars to appreciate poetry’s importance to all ranks of people during the eighteenth century.

References Burke, Tim, and John Goodridge (eds.), “Retrieval and Beyond: Labouring-​Class Writing,” special number of Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, 8 (2010). Christmas, William J., The Lab’ring Muses:  Work, Writing and the Social Order in Plebeian Poetry, 1730–​1830 (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2001). Christmas, William J. (ed.), “Special Issue: Eighteenth-​Century Laboring-​Class Poets,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 42, no. 3 (Fall 2001). Goodridge, John, Rural Life in Eighteenth-​Century English Poetry (Cambridge:  Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995). Goodridge, John (gen. ed.), Eighteenth-​C entury Labouring-​Class Poets, 3 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003). Greene, Richard, Mary Leapor:  A  Study in Eighteenth-​Century Women’s Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Keegan, Bridget, British Labouring-​Class Nature Poetry, 1730–​1837 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Klaus, H. Gustav, The Literature of Labour: Two Hundred Years of Working-​Class Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1985). Landry, Donna, The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-​Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–​1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990). Landry, Donna, and William J. Christmas (guest eds.), “Special Issue: Learning to Read in the Long Revolution: New Work on Laboring-​Class Poets, Aesthetics, and Politics,” Criticism, 47, no. 4 (Fall 2005). Solomon, Harry M., The Rise of Robert Dodsley: Creating a New Age of Print (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1996). 46  Bill Overton, The Eighteenth-​Century British Verse Epistle (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 32–​65.

 

Chapter 11

T he P oet as T e ac h e r Lorna Clymer Poetry seems in general, An Art of imitating or illustrating in metrical Numbers every Being in Nature, and every Object of the Imagination, for the Delight and Improvement of Mankind.  —​Joseph Trapp1 To render instruction amiable, to soften the severity of science, and to give virtue and knowledge a captivating and engaging air, is the great privilege of the didactic muse.  —​Joseph Warton2

Restoration and eighteenth-​century British culture avidly turned to literature of all kinds for information, guidance, exhortation, and critique, as well as amusement.3 Literary theories, traditions, and readers’ expectations demanded that literature combine aesthetics with ethics and rhetoric to instruct, benefit, improve, and delight. The instructional methods considered most reliable, first defined by traditional rhetoric and then broadly applied to literature, were the precept, a succinct statement of rules or practices, and the exemplum, an illustrative example of moral character and behavior. Because poetry’s sophisticated verbal arts could readily captivate, persuade, motivate, and improve the reader, it was regarded as potentially the most powerful and effective of all the literary kinds. All poems were supposed to instruct and delight. A successful poem deftly combined preceptive and exemplary instructional elements, and enlivened them with delightful poetic devices, such as meter, rhyme, figurative language, irony, description, narration, and imaginative details. “Didactic” poetry was distinctive for its conveyance of instruction or guidance openly and systematically, often extensively.

1  Joseph Trapp, Lectures on Poetry Read in the Schools of Natural Philosophy at Oxford, trans. William Clarke and William Bowyer (London, 1742), p. 13. 2  Joseph Warton, “Reflections on Didactic Poetry,” in The Works of Virgil, in Latin and English, ed. Christopher Pitt, J. Warton, et al., 2 vols. (London, 1753), vol. i, p. 394. 3  J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-​Century English Fiction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), pp. 225–​8.

 

180   Lorna Clymer Poetry was a medium frequently chosen for the exploration of serious subjects, both topical and traditional, quotidian and sophisticated.4 Poetical explorations of life—​its challenges, disappointments, mysteries, necessary skills, and developing knowledge—​were addressed to the reader and by extension to larger communal groups, who shared (or ought to share) the poet’s views. A poet’s public responsibilities defined his task and role: the poet was considered a teacher who used persuasive arts to instruct the reader and guide society. Ambitious poetry received as culturally improving was a reliable means to establish a literary reputation. The identity of the teacher was readily used by those poets who were or strove to be poets by profession, and it authorized many engaged primarily in other pursuits who offered to the public only a modestly sized collection or a handful of poems. A major motivation for the deeply ingrained “cultural urge to versify on virtually any subject that generated personal or national energy”5 was pedagogical. Poetry facilitated the exchange of knowledge, opinion, and advice, challenges to custom, and the preservation of tradition. Any current or traditional topic was considered suitable for a poem of instruction, whether explicit or implicit in style: contemporary occasions, national and international controversies, subjects in philosophy, science, physiology, agriculture, theology, ethics, social mores, the arts, and poetic theory. On the one hand, poets announced and interpreted new developments, sometimes so quickly that publications were reporting the news in poetical form. Contemporary events, such as the death of a public figure or a military victory, were marked in poems that interpreted the event in terms of certain civic values. On the other hand, poets artfully reinterpreted established topics, texts, and traditions—​such as technical arts and skills, orthodox religious tenets, canonical scripture, influential poems in other languages, British history and legends, or common knowledge. The philosophical or moral poem, often in “essay” or “epistle” form, was an effective way to explore enduring questions in terms of current thought. Alexander Pope declared in “The Design” of An Essay on Man (1733) that his exploration of ethics was more effective in rhyming verse than in prose for two reasons. First, “principles, maxims, or precepts so written, both strike the reader more strongly at first, and are more easily retained by him afterwards”; and second, “much of the force as well as grace of arguments or instructions, depends on their conciseness.” Only poetry could so successfully balance both “perspicuity” and “ornament.”6 Poetical instruction sought to interpret, clarify, restore, correct, vindicate, and revise. Poems on both new and established topics offered artful engagement with “nature,” that is, the enduring truths and common values held to shape the world, civic life, and human character. By reflecting or “imitating” what was true, an artful poetical mirror supposedly revealed the underlying meanings of confusing contemporary phenomena and suggested appropriate responses consistent with a shared human nature. Samuel Johnson praised

4  “England, Poetry of: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, 1660–​1789,” in Roland Greene (ed.), The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2012), p. 420. 5  J. Paul Hunter, “Political, Satirical, Didactic and Lyric Poetry (I): from the Restoration to the Death of Pope,” in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–​1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), pp. 172–​7, esp. p. 177. 6  Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–​69), vol. iii, part 1, pp. 7–​8.

 

The Poet as Teacher    181 Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard because it “abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.”7 Some poets created exemplary speakers who demonstrated characters and opinions; without argument or direct address to the reader, such poems offered implicit tutorials in particular values and opinions that critiqued contemporary ways. The meditative, solitary speaker of Elizabeth Carter’s “Ode to Melancholy” (1762) withdraws into dim light and pensive thoughts. She invites Melancholy to clarify her interior vision so that she might see more clearly the vanity of the world, the liberation of death, and the brilliance of religion. Through the course of thoughts reported by the speaker, the reader is indirectly instructed to cultivate the same sensibility; speaker and reader both presumably suffer from a common misperception that can be elucidated by the melancholy that leads to religion, thereby reducing fears of death: “Thy penetrating Beams disperse | The Mist of Error, whence our Fears | Derive their fatal Spring.”8 Many poems using a less convivial or polite tone insistently demanded better behavior, a return to values that all should uphold. “What if, for once, I preach thee quite awake?”; the speaker of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742–​6) challenges his interlocutor and by extension the reader.9 Art cleverly shaped complaint and outrage over contemporary affairs, often satirically, and could mask the source of seditious opposition. Through a series of rapidly published poems on a controversial topic, a heated partisan debate could rage extensively in meter and rhyme. Tones of urgency, exasperation, and despair were often sounded, especially in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries when frequently competitive voices and views contributed to an unprecedented expansion of print.10 Poets presented themselves as civic guides responding to alarming signs of widespread cultural upheaval and moral failures, who taught a public easily distracted, confused, and misled. In poems, prefatory materials, and criticism, readers were often portrayed as in serious danger: they might seek only undiluted amusement from their reading and remain impervious to most kinds of persuasion. Writers acknowledged that not all kinds of poetry had the same instructive potential, but if a poem offered little beyond effervescent levity, let it at least “give no Offense to Good-​manners” (Trapp, Lectures on Poetry, p. 25). For the good of the community, readers were encouraged to eschew easy pleasures for more salutary, bracing benefits. Some poems in the form of dramatic debates between personae critiqued received wisdom. A debate could also be presented as an internalized struggle. A beleaguered, representative individual’s reflections on her own situation could critique her community’s inadequate values or illustrate how to make one’s peace with received wisdom. Occasions—​both public and subjective—​were assumed to be of common interest and the lessons derived from them to have universal applicability. The copious flow of instructional poetry, 1660–​1800, attests to its importance as well as its appeal and to how optimistically literature as a moral force was viewed, despite considerable 7 

Samuel Johnson, The Life of Gray, in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; With Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), vol. iv, p. 184. 8  Elizabeth Carter, “Ode to Melancholy,” in Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1762), p. 82. 9  Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742–​6), ed. Stephen Cornford (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), p. 52 (night ii, line 63). 10  Margaret Anne Doody, “Poetry in the Eighteenth Century,” in Carl Woodring and James Shapiro (eds.), The Columbia History of British Poetry (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994), p. 314.

 

182   Lorna Clymer evidence that society always seemed to need remediation and that the teacher’s public identity could be manipulated for personal advantage. Until the late eighteenth century, poetry itself was infrequently represented as neglected or lacking social impact. Poems had long been accessible to instruct and delight, especially in cheap, simple formats such as broadsheets. Relatively new markets made more poetry in more formats affordable for a wider range of society and thereby expanded both implied and actual audiences. Some poems purported to offer to all readers entrée to elegant, powerful communities. For example, the traditional verse epistle, presented as a record of friends engaged in intimate communication, could suggest a friendship typical of an earlier era’s coterie poetry that had been based primarily in privately circulating manuscript. In restless experimentation, to teach effectively and delightfully, poets imported features from any and all forms of expression, from both prose and poetry, such as the technical manual, the public speech, the sermon, and the meditative lyric. Vigorous experiments in poetic styles and forms were motivated by a determination to influence or at least to capitalize on contemporary events, and by a concern that the forms of literary expression which had probably worked before might not again. Disparate methods were tried to address long-​standing questions about poetry’s proper relationship with knowledge and guidance, the likely impact artful literature may have on its readers, and its power to reflect or provoke cultural change. Unsettled literary tactics, often both innovative and urgent in tone, attest to concerns about recurring threats of civic and dynastic instability.11 Given its complexity and range, therefore, instructional poetry is best understood as a mode, that is, a dynamic set of literary goals, practices, and expectations. The “pedagogical mode” had an adaptive, lively adjectival force: it supported the mixing and unification of conventions associated with discernible genres. When used modally, a genre’s flexibility expanded beyond a collection of certain functions and features and could be refashioned as needed.12

Dispassionate Study of “Didactic” Poetry A dispassionate study of instructional poetry is difficult because it resembles only infrequently what is now typically considered “real” poetry—​that is, short, lyric, personal, and indirect. In one reductive but useful account of literary change from “Augustan” to “Romantic,” “real” poetry emerges triumphant. Influential studies, especially those published in the early and mid-​twentieth century, asserted that rhetorical, ethical, and didactic concerns were replaced by a superior aesthetic that ensured the autonomy of artist and work of art.13 Related transitions included those from “didactic” to “lyric,” from “mirror” to “lamp,” from a mimetic to an expressive aesthetic, from Augustan poetry of “product” to a 11 

J. Paul Hunter, “‘Peace’ and the Augustans: Some Implications of Didactic Method and Literary Form,” in Paul J. Korshin (ed.), Studies in Change and Revolution: Aspects of English Intellectual History, 1640–​1800 (Menston: Scolar Press, 1972), pp. 161–​3. 12  Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 106–​11. 13  O. B. Hardison, Jr., The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1962), p. x.

 

The Poet as Teacher    183 “pre-​Romantic” or Romantic poetry of “process,” from neoclassical to proto-​modern, from rhetorical craft to poetic imagination, from poetry heard to overheard, from public to private, from an often aesthetically awkward poetry of social responsibility to a more eloquent poetry expressive of the poet’s nature, unified and elevated by imagination.14 Subsequent studies have extensively qualified and deepened this narrative of replacement. We can see that the transition from Augustan to Romantic was less comprehensive, abrupt, revolutionary, or triumphant than a narrative of starkly delineated literary periods suggested.15 Writers working in a Romantic mode throughout the eighteenth century, not merely toward the end, retained their predecessors’ deep commitment to a literature of social improvement and to a poetics of instruction,16 even as they vehemently rejected some conventional rhetorical elements of instructional poetry, and adapted others to an emerging aesthetic “in which experience was internalised and imagination led thought from the known into the suggestive.”17 Nevertheless, to a significant degree, implicit evaluations based in this narrative still create a Procrustean bed of pejorative criteria onto which instructional poetry is painfully made to fit. Short, lyric, and apparently personal poems may be criticized for awkwardly mixing “private” and communal concerns. Only a few of the many explicit instructional styles and related genres retain their former canonical status. Satire’s comic distortions for moral ends are quite familiar. Few readers anymore undertake georgic tasks, such as raising sheep or brewing hops, but the georgic poem so thoroughly mixes technical advice with delight by combining practical instruction, cultural commentary, and sensory-​rich, detailed descriptions, that any reader can enjoy levels of meaning supported by an exploration of agricultural skills. More often, however, “didactic” explicitly instructional styles connote abundant artistic faults and scarce pleasures. Late seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century didactic poems may seem unenlightened because they were often preoccupied with subjects supposedly handled more efficiently in prose, such as public affairs or science. Because many pre-​Restoration poems were written in a lyrical mode, conveyed an intimate intensity of thought and feeling, and often presumed an audience less varied and more accustomed to implicit instructional styles than would be customary after the Restoration, the course of “real” poetry may appear regrettably interrupted by the poetical didacticism prevalent in the Restoration and eighteenth century. Facts may seem muffled by apparently superfluous neoclassical poetic drapery; a celebration of “Inoculation, heav’n-​instructed maid,” who triumphs over the “ghastly Plague” of smallpox, is one memorable example.18 Only a few

14  See, for example, M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953); Northrop Frye, “Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility,” ELH, 2 (1956), 144–​52. 15  See, for example, David Fairer, “Lyric Poetry: 1740–​1790,” in Michael O’Neill (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 397–​417; and “England, Poetry of: The Restoration and Eighteenth-​Century, 1660–​1789,” in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, pp. 420–​2. 16  M. H. Abrams described this tension, but subsequent uses of his study often stressed an aesthetics of artistic autonomy. For a useful account of Romanticism’s ambivalence about overt instruction, see David Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), esp. chap. 3, “(Anti-​) Didacticism,” pp. 95–​118. 17  David Fairer, “The Romantic Mode, 1700–​1730,” in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–​ 1789 (London: Longman, 2003), p. 103. 18  William Lipscomb, “Beneficial Effects of Inoculation” (London?, 1772?), pp. 6, 1.

 

184   Lorna Clymer epic-​length poems, such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost, are still regularly read in full. Some poems’ extensive scope may appear obsessively compendious. Unless an anthology selects a snippet, the wearied reader must traverse multiple books, not merely verse paragraphs or stanzas, and encounters an apparently promiscuous array of subjects in what would now be considered distinct disciplines. Did even Samuel Johnson nod when he insisted that the edition of English poetry, for which he wrote the Lives, include Richard Blackmore’s seven-​ book Creation (1712), a physico-​theological (that is, scientific-​medical-​religious-​moral-​ philosophical) epic?19 Unabashedly religious poetry abounded, which presents a challenge for the secular classroom. Translations, imitations, and paraphrases of religious texts are of some interest when of a psalm’s length, but in multiple-​book scope become enervating and provoke questions. For example, what benefit and enjoyment were achieved by Matthew Prior’s Solomon:  On the Vanity of the World (1718), a lengthy paraphrase of several Old Testament books? Shorter didactic poems addressing a controversy through satiric indirection, such as the late seventeenth-​century politically charged “advice to painter” poems, may now need copious explanatory notes to explicate their detailed topicality. Poems grandly celebrating imperialism and patriotism may not match some present-​day ideologies.

Basics: Rhetorical Contexts In response to these questions and concerns, we should consider some of the basic methods, practices, and assumptions that Restoration and eighteenth-​century poets and readers would have recognized as fundamental and that supported the poet’s identity as a teacher. Rhetoric established for all literature, and for British culture generally, the “basic principles of organizing thought and intention into a coherent verbal form, to be varied according to communicative context and audience addressed.” Restoration and eighteenth-​century definitions of literature’s goals and methods were inherited in large measure from classical and Renaissance rhetorical traditions. Combining persuasion, evidence, and verbal arts, literature played an essential role in “individual education and the forming of a good society.”20 Rhetoric had traditionally been sorted into three distinct branches:  epideictic, in which orators persuaded and delivered ethical instruction by vividly praising virtue and attacking vice; deliberative, or persuasion to a course of action; and judicial, or persuasion or demonstration by proof. All three divisions shaped literary organization and style, depending on the work’s situation and intent, real or imagined, but the epideictic branch was of particular interest because of how central the exemplum was to ethical instruction. Imitation and avoidance were explained through an imitative “psychology of reading” (or of viewing or listening). The reader’s response was crucial if the community was to benefit.21 In his treatise On the Orator (55 bce), a primary source for the application of rhetorical theory to 19 

Samuel Johnson, Life of Blackmore, in Lives, vol. iii, pp. 324, 330. Brian Vickers, introduction to English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. 12, viii. 21  Nicholas Cronk, “Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus: The Conception of Reader Response,” in Glyn P. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. iii: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 200–​1. 20 

 

The Poet as Teacher    185 literary matters, Cicero enumerated the three related goals all orators should achieve: docere, “to teach or instruct,” which eventually “came to mean teaching morally informed lessons”; delectare, “to please or interest”; and movere, “to move the emotions.” These goals, which have been described as an “affective triad,”22 were to be accomplished through persuasive verbal expression. Subsequent literary theories made use of this triad repeatedly, and defined the primary task of poet and orator as equivalent: morally directed, engaging teaching. “Instruct and delight,” the two tasks that according to Horace were the poet’s closely related goals, became the cornerstone of an ethical-​rhetorical approach to all literature and a topos for the goals of literary endeavor. A lesser poet might achieve only one of the two related goals, but the accomplished, morally virtuous poet did both. In Horace’s reduced version of the Ciceronian affective triad, “move” was contained in “delight.” His Ars poetica (c.19 bce) was itself read and repeatedly translated for its useful instructions and as a model of delightfully conveyed technical guidance. Its already wide influence was amplified during the Renaissance in the critical treatises of Sir Philip Sidney and others. Seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century writers repeatedly interpreted the Horatian tradition, especially in the development of various guides to achieving the best balance of instruction and delight. Because of its deft integration of pleasure and instruction, poetry transmitted organized knowledge or created compelling examples of virtuous behavior more effectively than other kinds of writing, such as philosophy or history. In his Lectures on Poetry (Latin 1711–​19; trans. 1742), Joseph Trapp, the first Oxford Professor of Poetry, asserted that all poets, not only preceptive ones, are better than philosophers in teaching virtue: “In the dry method of a Teacher [the Philosopher] defines his Subject, he explains his Terms, and then gives you Rules; the other [the Poet] cloaths his Precepts in Examples, and imperceptibly insinuates them under the beautiful Disguise of Narration” (Lectures on Poetry, pp. 24–​5). For the same reason, before turning to the sacred poetry of “the Hebrews” specifically, Robert Lowth, in his Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (Latin 1753, English 1787), also declared the poet superior: “The philosopher and the poet, indeed, seem principally to differ in the means by which they pursue the same end. Each sustains the character of a preceptor.” The philosopher teaches “with accuracy, with subtlety, with perspicuity; the other, with splendour, harmony, and elegance.” The “certain deflections and deviations” used by the poet create a “winding but pleasanter path” to knowledge and morality, which, in their adorned manifestations, we “must love and embrace.”23 The creation of delight was variously described in three ways: as embellishment or disguise that aptly clothed the moral; as an affective aesthetic experience fully incorporated with morality; or as proof of supreme poetic value, in which aesthetic excellence transported the reader without direct persuasion. Once activated by poetic devices, delight initiated a complex series of responses involving moving, persuading, and pleasing that engaged the mind, the imagination, and the emotions. Poetry’s images, ideas, and sounds, created through its pleasing verbal qualities, could arouse sensory and imaginative impressions, which engaged both the mind and the “passions,” that composite set of affective sensitivities and capabilities. In turn, the captivated passions directed and strengthened the will, provoked sustained action (in particular, emulation or avoidance), and supported improvements to character. If poetry’s potential were misused, as when pleasures were merely salacious and not conducive

22 Vickers, English Renaissance Literary Criticism, p. 15. 23 

Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (London, 1839), p. 4.

 

186   Lorna Clymer to virtue or if imaginative heights were not reached, serious civic harm could result. In poetry, therefore, eloquence, persuasion, and benefit were effectively inseparable.24 Learning had an “emotional character,” and the passions played a central role “in rational thought and action.”25 This affective theory was the basis for Johnson’s insistence that literature should exhibit an epideictic “poetic justice” (that is, virtue must be inculcated and vice punished), and for his equally strong demand that “poetry should afford pleasure to the reader.”26 The idea of pleasure as an instrumental, rhetorical force, however, created “practical difficulties” in assessing readers’ responses: what exactly was an adequate, improving literary experience if some readers were pleased too easily or not at all?27 Affective theories were significantly extended in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in works that connected pleasure to passions, sublimity, and the imagination, often for religious purposes, and supported the Romantic mode’s intent to unify through art several levels of observation and experience. Details, description, and narrative, designed to provoke sensory impressions and the flow of feeling and reflection, became increasingly important in theories of the creative imagination. At the least, poetry’s ability to join distinct human capacities made it a powerful source of both pleasure and instruction. This is not to overlook those occasions, exceptions that prove the rule, on which the poet would assert that one task was sufficient, that either the seriousness of a work was free of merely distracting pleasures or was pleasantly liberated from any lesson. Taken from Manilius’s Astronomica, one classical model for didactic poetry, the epigraph to John Dryden’s poetically accomplished “Religio Laici” (1682) announces disingenuously: “Ornari res ipsa negat; contenta doceri. | The subject itself refuses to be ornamented; it is content to be explained.”28 In 1794, in her preface to an edition of Mark Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination, Anna Letitia Barbauld cautioned that poetry typically does not teach a technical subject very well, but the good didactic poet creates pleasure through ornamental art for the reader who already knows a subject and “kindle[s]‌the enthusiasm of those feelings which the truths he is conversant with are fitted to inspire.”29 Earlier recommendations were apt to stress instruction more often than delight, which was variously defined as a trivial sweetening of otherwise unpalatable lessons or a transitory entrée into passionate engagement with the poem’s lessons. Later recommendations often elevated delight over instruction, but “delight” typically in some way connoted an affective involvement of the imagination and an integration of the reader’s senses, the passions, and the will. In the preface to his georgic poem “The Hop-​ Garden” (1799), Luke Booker declared that “he presumes only to furnish his Reader with Amusement; and to kindle in the breast Sentiments of Piety, Patriotism, and Benevolence.”30 24 

“Rhetoric and Poetry,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, pp. 1175–​6. Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-​Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 17. 26  Roger Lonsdale, introduction to Johnson, Lives, vol. i, p. 105. 27  David B. Morris, “Pope and the Arts of Pleasure,” in G. S. Rousseau and Pat Rogers (eds.), The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 104–​5. 28  John Dryden, Selected Poems, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (Harlow: Pearson, Longman, 2007), p. 257. 29  Anna Letitia Barbauld, “Essay on Akenside’s Poem on The Pleasure of Imagination,” in Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination (London, 1794), p. 3. 30  Luke Booker, The Hop-​Garden, a Didactic Poem (Newport, 1799), n.p. 25 

 

The Poet as Teacher    187 The imagination played a crucial role in affective theories. It was defined as a unifying and elevating moral capability or force, and poetry was often declared the imagination’s best agent. Johnson described poetry as “the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.”31 An influential assertion of poetry’s affective function was Joseph Addison’s Spectator essays on the “Pleasures of the Imagination” (1712): art’s imaginative, pleasurable power ultimately fostered our awareness of the delightful beauties God had arranged for the world. A major theme of Mark Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination (1744), his didactic poem on aesthetics, was that “imaginative pleasure, a natural response to beauty in the human mind, in itself indicates a type of moral judgment, or sense of virtue” that is ultimately linked to the “outside world, with its providential nature created for human happiness.”32 Many late seventeenth-​and early eighteenth-​century religious poets and critics, such as John Dennis, called for a rejection of classical apparatus and based their justification in affective theories pertaining to “the sublime,” that imaginative, passionate, elevated intensity provoked by contemplation of forces and things far surpassing human limits. Christian poets and critics often claimed poetry could exert tremendous influence on the reader’s salvation through salutary pleasure. Those poets who supposedly sought only personal gain and neglected their civic duty by crassly selling louche delights to increasingly debased readers were subjected to harsh critiques from Christian poets, such as Richard Blackmore. In several treatises, including The Advancement and Reformation of Poetry (1701), John Dennis asserted both the primacy of instruction and the central role the passions played in poetry’s ethical function. In The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), Dennis posited that certain passions of a higher order were “enthusiastic” and were particularly receptive to sublime subjects. “Poetry attains its final End, which is the reforming the Minds of Men, by exciting of Passion. And here I dare be bold to affirm, that all Instruction whatever depends upon Passion.” Pleasure, “the Business and Design of Poetry,” is its “subordinate End.” Dennis explained major poetical kinds according to the passions they excite, greater or lesser, and set rules for composition accordingly.33 In the preface to his collection of poems, Horae Lyricae (2nd ed., 1706), Isaac Watts declared that his poems demonstrated how to replace fashionable but unsubstantial classical elements in poetry and drama with “the Wonders of our Religion.” A Christian poet could instruct, fully command the reader’s emotional responses, and thereby lead him to higher things. The poet’s “every Line makes a Part of the Reader’s Faith, and is the very Life or Death of his Soul.” Poetry offering “pious pleasures” would “call back the dying Piety of the Nation to Life and Beauty.”34 Religious poetry was regularly described as an intensified, often sublime, version of what all poetry was capable of. Robert Lowth asserted in 1753 that poetry “delivers the precepts of virtue in the most agreeable manner; it insinuates or instils into the soul the very principles of morality itself ” (Lectures, p. 17).

31 

Samuel Johnson, Life of Milton, in Lives, vol. i, p. 282. Adam Rounce, “Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination,” in Christine Gerrard (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth-​Century Poetry, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 240. 33  John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), in The Critical Works of John Dennis, 2 vols., ed. Edward Niles Hooker (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1939), vol. i, pp. 337, 336. 34  Isaac Watts, preface to Horae Lyricae, 2nd ed. (London, 1709), pp. xiii, xiv, xv. 32 

 

188   Lorna Clymer

Styles and Preferences In these contexts, then, rhetorical pedagogical methods and the poetic devices that enlivened them supported particular styles and changing preferences. The precept, a concise statement of rules or practices, transmitted organized knowledge pertaining to skills, arts, and practical cultural wisdom. The exemplum, an example of character and behavior, virtuous or reprehensible, was considered the most effective means of teaching cultural values. For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “preceptive” poetry, frequently synonymous with “didactic,” was considered the best style in which, as Joseph Warton declared in his essay on didactic poetry, “to render instruction amiable,”35 in any organized form, not limited to particular genres. Physico-​ theological preceptive poems, such as Richard Blackmore’s The Creation: A Philosophical Poem (1712), present copious amounts of information as incontrovertibly true but which have to be noticed in a detailed, organized sequence. Without much physical or emotional presence, the speaker is a distant preceptor guiding the reader’s instruction throughout a compendious argument. Deictics and exclamatory punctuation figure prominently: “See, through this vast extended theatre | Of skill divine, what shining marks appear!” (book i).36 Opponents of the poem’s views are addressed briefly but are quickly overcome by the many marks of God’s intentional, creative powers. Other poems on lofty subjects presented speakers experiencing the wondrous discoveries offered to the reader. “I see … !” then replaces “See!” Well into the nineteenth century, preceptive poetry on technical, philosophical, moral, religious, and cultural subjects was a vital literary tradition, but after 1740 its status was repeatedly challenged by those who thought literature should free itself from restrictive rhetorical practices, especially the direct instructional statement. “Profess’d teaching,” declared Warton, was “disagreeable”; precepts ought to be delivered “in a concealed indirect manner, divested of all pretensions to a larger share of reason, and of all dogmatical stiffness.”37 By the end of the eighteenth century, fewer poets used the traditional preceptive style. There were some notable exceptions. Poets offering lessons to children in piety often used a simplified pedagogical style of direct, unembellished statements in pedestrian couplets intended to aid memorization. Such conservative, metrically predictable preceptive poetry was one target of William Blake’s prophetic wrath. In An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (1777), John Aikin called for an immediate infusion of scientific factual detail into poetry that would “add incitements to the study of natural history” and would correct poetry’s clichéd, formulaic, and therefore vague neoclassical parlance.38 Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants (1789) varied explanatory dialogues with dramatic, descriptive episodes from the lives of plant species. Still, a great deal of preceptive poetry published by the mid-​eighteenth century remained canonical, such as Young’s Night Thoughts, as evidenced by multi-​volume

35 

Joseph Warton, “Reflections on Didactic Poetry,” vol. i, pp. 394–​5. Richard Blackmore, The Creation, in Alexander Chalmers (ed.), The Works of the English Poets, from Chaucer to Cowper, 21 vols. (London, 1810), vol. x, p. 339. 37  Joseph Warton, “Reflections on Didactic Poetry,” vol. i, pp. 394–​5. 38  John Aikin, An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (Warrington, 1777), pp. iv, 9. 36 

 

The Poet as Teacher    189 anthologies of British poetry and by the collections of literary extracts or “beauties.” The late eighteenth-​century poetry collection in Vicesimus Knox’s popular Elegant Extracts series, Useful and Entertaining Pieces of Poetry, Selected for the Improvement of Young Persons, like most compendia of shorter poems and excerpts, included substantial “sacred, moral, and didactic” selections.39 Grounded in the aesthetic of mimesis, the exemplum mandated imitation. It vividly showed abiding values in action; if properly engaged by this demonstration, the reader would imitate the exemplum and thereby instantiate the exemplum’s lesson. An example could inspire emulation or avoidance; to prevent misunderstanding, a positive example was preferable to a negative one.40 Although the adjective “exemplary” typically described a kind of teaching and not a kind of instructional poetry per se, it was clearly the poetical counterpart to “preceptive.” A poem representing persons, character, and actions would have been read as potentially morally instructive, intended to illustrate something of common value. Poems of praise and of blame were often discussed as essential for civic good, as were occasional poetic kinds such as the ode or elegy, because they made public those virtues exemplified by illustrious persons. Trapp asserted that one of poetry’s most important contributions resulted from its representations of exempla. Poetry “raises the Mind to Virtue and Honour, by delivering down the Examples of great Men to Immortality. It not only celebrates Heroes, but makes them: and by lively Copies produces new Originals” (Lectures on Poetry, pp. 8–​9). Some poems were explicit about the lesson. Funeral elegies, especially those of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, were generally quite clear about how the virtues of the deceased ought to instruct and improve the characters of the living. A poem praising an individual often blamed the milieu as inadequately imitative of his virtues. The speaker of Anna Letitia Barbauld’s “Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade” (1791) praises and consoles the addressee. “Thy Country” remains shamefully invested in “human traffic,” although “The Preacher, Poet, Senator in vain | Has rattled in her sight the Negro’s chain.”41 Other exemplary poems could be less direct, but conventions and traditions indicated that exemplarity was intended, even if the moral end was only implied. Tracing separately the histories of the precept and exemplum in British poetry is impossible because they were typically used together, in an instrumental arrangement. One complemented, illustrated, or enlivened the other. The exemplum’s moral could be highlighted by the precept, and its potential to compel could be enhanced by arresting details. For example, the fable, a highly condensed representative story, was considered a reliable form by which to teach morals or precepts.42 An exemplary, representative speaker might present to his

39 

Vicesimus Knox, Elegant Extracts; or, Useful and Entertaining Pieces of Poetry, Selected for the Improvement of Young Persons: Being Similar in Design to Elegant Extracts in Prose (London, c.1784). 40  Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study, trans. Matthew T. Bliss et al., ed. David E. Orton and R. Dean Anderson (Leiden: Brill, 1998), p. 12. 41  Anna Letitia Barbauld, Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade (London, 1791), pp. 5, 6. 42  Eventually, so was the novel. See Michael McKeon, “Prose Fiction: Great Britain,” in H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (eds.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. iv: The Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 250, 252.

 

190   Lorna Clymer interlocutor and reader preceptive lessons enlivened with imaginative materials, such as a description or a digression. Even an especially pointed description could convey a lesson. All poetry needed enlivening, not just an overtly instructional poem containing many precepts, or the otherwise unamused reader would fail to learn. Homer’s illustrative digression, the epic simile, provided one useful model for a diverting insertion. In his mock-​epic-​ georgic Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716, 1720), John Gay’s narrator guides the reader (and at times, himself) through a city walk potentially harmful to one’s safety and clean clothing. After a certain number of specific instructions, made vivid by rapidly shifting city sights and sounds, the narrator directs us to “Hark!” to “The voice of Industry,” in this case, a shoe-​shine boy. While our besmeared shoes are being cleaned, we are treated to a mock-​heroic genealogy of this urban worker. “Here let the Muse, fatigued amid the throng, | Adorn her precepts with digressive song” (lines 101, 100, 103–​4).43 Virgil was the master at varying by several means “the Form of Instruction,” and at adding “Life to his Precepts,” especially as demonstrated by the Georgics (Trapp, Lectures on Poetry, p. 195). Joseph Addison praised Virgil’s ability to convey precepts through diverting description and to make delightful needed agricultural activities, however low. “He breaks the clods and tosses the dung about with an air of gracefulness” in a scene made charming, even grand, by well-​chosen detail.44 Details, at first discussed as an effective method of “disguising” a precept, especially in a georgic context, gained increased importance in poetic theories. In “Winter” (1746), James Thomson reworked a Virgilian passage in which an impending dangerous winter storm can be predicted by agitations observable in specific phenomena (e.g., stars, a leaf, a feather, a candle, livestock) when viewed closely. “With broaden’d Nostrils to the Sky upturn’d, | The conscious Heifer snuffs the stormy Gale.”45 The animal is introduced in a close-​up view of the “upturn’d” “broaden’d Nostrils”; the whole animal arrives in the next line, who then with those nostrils “snuffs the stormy Gale.” As the usual neoclassical employment of the definite article reinforces, this is simultaneously a precise image of what in general heifers presumably do, and an image of this particular heifer at this moment in this storm’s arrival. It is thus both instructional and particular, an enlivened precept. A new style of “expressive didacticism”46 emerged in the 1740s that blended preceptive instruction with extended description and particularity in a distinct way. A few relatively young poets, such as Joseph Warton, and a few established poets, such as Edward Young, rejected the relatively direct styles of “moralizing in verse,” illustrated by the poetry of Pope. Instead, in a style supposedly conducive to greater “naturalness,” from a flowing series of sense impressions, thoughts, and feelings, an exemplary speaker—​often presented as the poet-​speaker who is personally involved in the poem’s account of instruction—​extracted precept-​like observations as discoveries. Lessons might be derived serially as observations and thoughts accumulated and were qualified. In the personal lyric, reflections had long been voiced, but a mid-​century poetic discursiveness is distinctive for its extensive 43 

John Gay, Trivia (1716, 1720), in Chalmers (ed.), The Works of the English Poets, vol. x, p. 457. Joseph Addison, “An Essay on Virgil’s Georgics” (1697), in The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, 4 vols. (London, 1721), vol. i, p. 256. 45  James Thomson, “Winter,” lines 132–​3, in The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 208. 46  John Sitter, “Political, Satirical, Didactic and Lyric Poetry (II): After Pope,” in Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Literature, p. 302. 44 

 

The Poet as Teacher    191 projection of a poetic self “into the statement of ideas.”47 As Young’s poet-​speaker declares in the preface to Night Thoughts, the poem’s organization rejects “the common Mode of Poetry, which is from long Narrations to draw short Morals.” Instead, “the Narrative is short, and the Morality arising from it makes the Bulk of the Poem.” This morality is supposedly a natural result of observations and thoughts: “the Facts mentioned did naturally pour these moral Reflections on the Thought of the Writer” (Night Thoughts, p. 35). Over the course of nine “nights,” in which the speaker wrestles with the fear of death and the intensity of grief, he tests the tenets of Christian faith and argues with a few interlocutors or with groups who are inadequately faithful, such as the Deists. Ecstatic moments are quickly followed by painful second thoughts; new questions about initially certain ideas retard the speaker’s progress, and so on. Ultimately, the speaker’s passionate convictions are the proof needed: “To feel, is to be fired; | And to believe, Lorenzo! is to feel” (night iv, lines 199–​200). Despite the poem’s often fervid, apparently “autobiographical melodrama,”48 and its mix of “emotional display and disputation,” physical details of the exemplary speaker’s circumstances while he feels and disputes are nearly always absent. Young used expressive didacticism for his Christian apologetic poem; other poets explored reflections linked to landscape and the aesthetics of imaginative transport. This style indicated growing attention in aesthetics and philosophy to the consciousness of “a continued train of perceptions and ideas,” one basis for Elements of Criticism (1762) of Henry Home, Lord Kames.49 It also reflected a growing dissatisfaction with traditional rhetoric as the basis of literary theory and of earlier authoritative preceptive styles. Hugh Blair’s lecture on didactic poetry, one of his influential Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1784), accommodated less direct styles. Making “some moral observations on human life and characters,” without regular, formal organization, could satisfy “the end of all poetry,” which is to offer “some useful impression on the mind.”50 Increasingly, a Romantic mode conveyed instruction indirectly and in apparently personal terms. When illuminated by pedagogical concerns, the history of poetical speakers is best understood as a transition from “ostensibly fictional ‘personae’ to deceptively autobiographical ‘selves.’ ”51 A “tension between fleeting subjectivity and abiding propositions,” at times intensely “poignant” (as is often the case in mid-​to late eighteenth-​century poems),52 could be said to shape all of poetry. How this tension is managed and represented is one index to characteristic practices. Classical poets modeled how to balance the appearance of subjectivity and significance. “Like other ancient writers,” but in ways later poets would find particularly useful, Horace “chooses to put in a traditional form what he feels most strongly about.” If he speaks about himself, as if from personal experience, as Horace often does in his own poetry, the poem is not necessarily “private” or confessional. Instead, his role as poet makes his representation, however subjective, authoritative and communal in focus; his apparently

47 

Sitter, “Political, Satirical, Didactic and Lyric Poetry (II),” p. 303. Ibid., p. 301. 49  Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (1762), 6th ed., 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), vol. i, p. 21. 50  Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1784), 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1811), vol. iii, p. 138, 137. 51  Howard Erskine-​Hill and Richard A. McCabe, introduction to Presenting Poetry: Composition, Publication, Reception: Essays in Honour of Ian Jack, ed. H. Erskine-​Hill and R. A. McCabe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), p. 5. 52  Sitter, “Political, Satirical, Didactic and Lyric Poetry (II),” p. 304. 48 

 

192   Lorna Clymer individual viewpoint gains additional significance from the poem’s larger, social context.53 Declarations of personal involvement in a poem’s subjects may have been biographically true, insofar as they reveal some of the motivations for composition and describe experiences in which a poet subsequently based a composition. Uniting his own evolving perspectives with his role as public teacher and guide, the poet addressed a variety of communities, whose nature, cultural positions, and circumstances could vary substantially. Although it is often directed to specific audiences, John Dryden’s poetry is not necessarily closed to those readers who may not belong or agree. As the poet who teaches, his use of “we” invites all readers to “join him in his consideration of religious truth, political propriety, and literary excellence” as he addresses the “nation as a whole” or “the particular groups of which [he] was a part … the boys of Westminster School, the employees of the Protectorate, … or the persecuted adherents of the Roman Catholic Church.”54 An “intensely social outlook” and a “startling intimacy of public address” is a hallmark of not only Dryden’s poetry but also of the most successful poems created by poets who teach.55 Such invitations to the reader are made in the deeply rhetorical contexts of seventeenth-​ and eighteenth-​century British poetry. To persuade, teach, and delight, poets created speakers strategically. They were realistic only to the degree demanded by the topic and its particular expression; most speakers were exemplary, intended as persuasive representations of a state of mind, a way of life, or certain experiences. Sometimes the poet gives voice to ideas so common, so obviously of benefit to every reader, that no “personal” representation of the speaker is required. Having bestowed a compelling mask upon a truth and made it speak, the poet has done enough in creating a persona, a prosopopoeia. A vaguely delineated speaker might authoritatively guide the progress of a poem or address a personified entity without being represented as any more than a faint vocal presence. Because a poem might involve several related subjects, scenes, and tones, effectively voiced by distinct viewpoints, a single poem was not limited to a single speaker. The “several ways of speaking” performed in the course of the poem are best understood as “vocal postures.”56 Some poems dramatized direct exchange as conversation, a letter, or a debate with distinct speakers, such as Rochester’s “Satyr against Reason and Mankind” (1679), but in such exchanges a feeble opponent or attentive friend spoke very little, and the first-​person speaker dominated. In addition, although a poem may have only one speaker, he or she may appear in multiple forms or versions in order to best serve the poem’s pedagogical goals. Even the dramatic soliloquy could support vocal postures. As the speaker “carries on the business of self-​ dissection,” Shaftesbury wrote, “he becomes two distinct persons. He is pupil and preceptor. He teaches and he learns.”57 The viewer or reader learns from this dialogic soliloquy.

53  C. O. Brink, Horace on Poetry, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1963–​82), vol. i: Prolegomena to the Literary Epistles, pp. 155. 54  James Anderson Winn, John Dryden and His World (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1987), p. xvi. 55  George McFadden, Dryden the Public Writer, 1660–​1685 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), p. 3. 56  John Sitter (ed.), The Cambridge Introduction to Eighteenth-​Century Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011), p. 35. 57  Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, “Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author,” in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Philip Ayres (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), p. 72.

 

The Poet as Teacher    193 Long poems, such as James Thomson’s Seasons (1726–​46) and William Cowper’s Task (1785), encompassed a poet-​speaker’s ranging tones, moods, and varying levels of apparently personal involvement in episodes and scenes. Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711) used at least three distinct voices that can be explained as versions of the same projected self, but which brought quite distinct moods, stances, and positions to the important topic of what constitutes proper literary art, in which the reader (“you” as well as “we”) is instructed by the speaker in a brisk, conversational manner. The ease by which some poets shifted vocal postures—​and few did this as well as Pope in his best essayistic and conversational poems—​illustrated one of Pope’s tenets for the critic who instructs his readers in matters of taste: “Men must be taught as if you taught them not.”58 Poems that addressed an interlocutor or an unspecified reader usually made clear that at least two audiences were contemplated, the recipient in the created world of the poem, and a larger, public entity, who could be as large as Britain herself or as all readers in need of spiritual guidance. Lyric conventions were adapted as needed. For example, a first-​ person speaker described his apparently innermost thoughts and feelings on one of the most traditional of subjects, such as overcoming the fear of death by rehearsing orthodox Christian doctrine. Some religious lyrics disappoint if we expect to find the writer revealed in intimate depth. Without being autobiographical at all, the first-​person lyrics of James Chamberlaine’s Poems on Several Occasions (1680), printed with his A Sacred Poem and one of the earliest collections by a single author to be entitled as “occasional,” purport to represent intensely personal “lyric moments” every Christian experiences in private. The poet thereby instructs the reader how to make orthodox tenets personal. In doing so, this speaker did not necessarily fail to illustrate a Romantic-​era personal “expressiveness,” but instead may be a compelling vocal posture created by the poet to reinterpret artfully a traditional topic. One passage from Cowper’s Task on a very old theme will close this brief tour of pedagogical poetry. Cowper’s exemplary speaker, often developed in realistic, autobiographic detail, describes his experiences in his rural retreat. Traveling descriptively through the landscape in walks and through his interior states in meditation, he considers Christianity, poetry, and their respective instructive powers, both urgently needed but sorely tested by the times. On a winter morning walk, he sees how the sun’s slanting ray Slides ineffectual down the snowy vale, And tinging all with his own rosy hue, From ev’ry herb and ev’ry spiry blade Stretches a length of shadow o’er the field. Mine, spindling into longitude immense, In spite of gravity and sage remark That I myself am but a fleeting shade, Provokes me to a smile.59

58 Sitter, Cambridge Introduction to Eighteenth-​Century Poetry, pp. 34–​45 passim; Alexander Pope,

Essay on Criticism, line 574, in Poems. 59  William Cowper, The Task, book v, lines 7–​14, in The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), vol. ii, p. 211.

 

194   Lorna Clymer The vanitas motif and the cultural weight of precepts regarding lives and shades are gently contained within the account of the speaker’s amusement at the elongated visual distortion. This miniature encounter in a closely observed natural scene with one of the most frequently taught lessons makes it newly immediate and personal: seen, then felt, and finally instructive.60

References Aarsleff, Hans, “Philosophy of Language,” in Knud Haakonssen (ed.), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-​Century Philosophy, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), vol. i, pp. 451–​95. Cohen, Ralph, “Some Thoughts on the Problems of Literary Change, 1750–​1800,” Dispositio, 4 (1979), 145–​52. Damrosch, Leo, “Generality and Particularity,” in H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (eds.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 4:  The Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 381–​93. Gelley, Alexander (ed.), Unruly Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1995). Kaul, Suvir, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 2000). Sambrook, James, The Eighteenth Century:  The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1700–​1789, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1993). Schmitter, Amy M., “Passions and Affections,” in Peter R. Anstey (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013), pp. 442–​7 1.

60  My thanks go to those whose generous suggestions considerably improved this essay: Helen Deutsch, David Fairer, Jack Lynch, Paul Newberry, and Howard Weinbrot. William Christmas, Jennifer Keith, and Michael Newman were especially helpful.

 

Chapter 12

The P oet as Ma n of Feeli ng Rivka Swenson The Eye … is a Female. —​John Taylor (1761)

The title of this chapter recalls Henry Mackenzie’s novel The Man of Feeling (1771) and its protagonist Harley with his tender heart, impressionable mind, and melting sympathy.1 Mackenzie’s readers learn, “There is a certain poetic ground, on which a man cannot tread without feelings that enlarge the heart.”2 Mackenzie describes this “poetic ground” as conducive to sympathy, even constructive of empathy. On the one hand, then, The Man of Feeling celebrates the cultural benefits of feeling; on the other hand, however, Mackenzie’s novel points to the dangers of sensibility, concluding with Harley’s death after close encounters sicken him. Mackenzie’s novel may look toward the sympathetic agency of the Romantic self, but it also embodies the terrors of the eighteenth-​century empirical man, his hapless emotiveness, his very interiority a supposed effect of exterior causes.3 It is that man of feeling we see enlarged by the ground of eighteenth-​century courtship poetry, wherein the poet as man of feeling produces an insidious aesthetics in which the seen woman is made responsible for the feeling man’s actions. Such poetry describes “sensational subjects” who are not their own men but are “sensation’s subjects”; to put it another way, in the terms of subject theory, the feeling man is presented as an environmental subject, an object acted upon.4 1  I wish to thank Helen Deutsch and John Richetti for generous advice on drafts. I must also thank: the Clark Library/​UCLA and the Folger Shakespeare Library for short-​term fellowships that enabled me to locate archival material; and the Columbia University Faculty Seminar in Eighteenth-​Century European Culture and the CUNY Graduate Center for opportunities to present portions of this work-in-​progress. Thanks also to Jack Lynch for his editorial prowess. 2  Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), p. 61. 3  My essay participates in a recent critical effort to re-​see the status of “interior” and “exterior” in eighteenth-​century ideas about subjectivity. See, for instance, Jonathan Kramnick, Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2010); and Helen Thompson, Fictional Matter: Empiricism, Corpuscles, and the Novel (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming). 4  Manushag N. Powell and Rivka Swenson, “Introduction: Subject Theory and the Sensational Subject,” in “Sensational Subjects,” special issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 54, no. 1 (Summer 2013), 147–​51.

 

196   Rivka Swenson Poets such as Alexander Pennicuik, William Dawson, John Tracy, Charles Hopkins, Thomas Otway, John Dryden, Robert Anderson, and many others (including the “Gentleman” author of the popular collection Poems on Several Occasions: By a Gentleman [1733]) revived and expanded the early modern Petrarchan blazon within the context of empiricism, going beyond sympathy to the matter of empathy, speciously constructing a “feminized” and “penetrated” male gazer who is supposedly powerless to control his responses to what he sees.5 As we shall also see, Jonathan Swift’s infamously invasive salvos self-​reflexively and paradoxically target, in the end, this specious gazer. Indeed, taking aim at the poet as man of feeling, Swift’s satirical counter-​blazons expose how his speakers’ self-​ interested, prurient motivations inform the pernicious aesthetics of supposed female culpability that his poetry both generates and indicts.

The Subjectifying Gaze Surprisingly, for modern minds, the eighteenth-​century gaze as it was theorized by George Berkeley, John Locke, and Isaac Newton did not neatly objectify what it saw, which is precisely why the theory of the always-​already-​overtly objectifying male gaze requires steep modification for the eighteenth-​century context.6 For similar reason, “thing theory” can be an uneasy fit in eighteenth-​century British contexts, when all things were “things.”7 Why? Because sight meant rays of corpuscular matter entering the eye. Thus, the eighteenth-​century gaze, scientifically and literarily, was conceived of as a subjectifying gaze wherein the seen thing was the so-​called active subject, both theoretically and grammatically, while the gazer himself was subjected—​was made, in other words, the object. Optical theory, including corpuscularity, was part of the popular and poetic lexicon:  popular verse was rife with poetic male gazers forced to feel by the “empowered” female objects-​cum-​supposed-​subjects of their gazes. Poems like the anonymous “On His Mistress Who Squints” (1732) conveyed the threat at the heart of things, emerging now from “Sylvia.” Her image “dazzle[s]‌” and “chain[s]” the “helpless swains,” who fecklessly “with wonder gaze”: So porcupines, from every part, Their arrows do let fly, Whilst we, regardless of the dart, Are wounded by’t, and die.8

5 

Poems on Several Occasions: By a Gentleman (London, 1733). For a summary of recent criticism that builds on the important theory of the objectifying male gaze formulated by Laura Mulvey et al.—​and for a caution about historical nuance—​see notes 10–​13 in my “Optics, Gender, and the Eighteenth-​Century Gaze: Looking at Eliza Haywood’s Anti-​Pamela,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 51, no. 1–​2 (2010), 27–​43, at p. 41. 7  According to thing theory, objects become “things” when they are imbued with meaning, charged with power, by people. See Bill Brown’s germinal introduction, “Thing Theory,” in Things (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 1–​22. 8  Anonymous, “On His Mistress Who Squints,” in The Hive: A Collection of the Most Celebrated Songs (London, 1732), reprinted in The Beauties of the English Stage (London, 1756), p. 93. 6 

 

The Poet as Man of Feeling    197 No, the eighteenth-​century poetic male gaze does not simply objectify or act upon what it sees. The alabaster forehead and ruby lip are the source of action. If this penetrated-​eye metaphor was not entirely new, the Newtonian–​Lockean context enabled and inflected the convention’s resurgence: the sensorium was a wax seal, an impressionable metal coin, a room to be entered by ideas/​particles of matter. So poetry, with science’s help, forged a discourse of corpuscular intromittism that could be (as Swift observes) self-​serving; it empowered and strategically obscured the agency of the male gaze. The intentionality ascribed to the seen woman by both intromissionist optical theory and the poetry of the supposed-​feminized male gaze contibuted, naturally, to victim-​ blaming: the seen thing/​woman is the source of seen-​ness, responsible for consequences. The seemingly feminized-​passive male gaze, enabled by the science of the day, operated insidiously to put the seen woman in harm’s way (to borrow Sandra Macpherson’s term) by paradoxically designating her the source of action.9 The eighteenth-​century poet as man of feeling comes into view if we somewhat un-​see a transhistorical male gaze, turning our gaze from (as Janet Todd rightly says) the “eye/​penis” to see instead the male gazer’s eighteenth-​ century so-​called “Female”—​as in my epigraph—​eye.10 Observing that the passive gaze was marshaled as more than metaphor, we can better understand poetry’s actual metaphors. The “poetic ground,” as Mackenzie’s Harley would later term it, proved fertile territory for developing the aesthetics of a feminized male gaze that enlarged and complicated the Petrarchan tradition of the poet as man of feeling. In the climate of corpuscular intromissionism, the convention of the blazon was revived and subsequently thrived beyond the little rooms of sonnet stanzas, finding one of its most interesting legacies in Swift’s self-​critical metapoetics.

Beauty and the Blazon: Backgrounds The eighteenth-​century poet as man of feeling, inflected uniquely by empirical science, emerges from the tradition of the early modern blazon. The blazon is often seen as producing a colonialist-​imperialist aesthetics, a “language of property and appropriation,” as Jonathan Sawday says, “an ever expanding exercise of male wit.”11 The blazon does indeed objectify 9  My use of this phrase invokes Sandra Macpherson’s usage in Harm’s Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2009). 10  Janet Todd, “The Veiled Woman in Freud’s ‘Das Unheimliche,’” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2, no. 3 (1986), 519–​28, at p. 525. My epigraph comes from John Taylor, “Patience or Pleasure: The Oration at Oxford,” in The Life and Extraordinary History of the Chevalier John Taylor: Member of the Most Celebrated Academies, Universities, and Societies of the Learned (London, 1761), pp. 57–​91, at p. 57. 11  Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 27, 193. See also Roland Greene, Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989); Walter S. H. Lim, The Poetics of Colonialism from Ralegh to Milton (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1998); Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers (eds.), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 123–​42; Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995); Nancy Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry, 8, no. 8 (1981), 265–​89; Patricia

 

198   Rivka Swenson and fragment the female form into discursively possessable imagery, as exemplified by John Donne’s “Elegy 2: To His Mistress Going to Bed.” The speaker demands: Licence my roving hands, and let them go Behind, before, above, betweene, below. Oh my America, my newfound land.12

“My Myne of pretious stones, my empiree, | How blest ame I  in this discouering thee!” Donne’s speaker gushes.13 The beloved is made of rose cheeks, pearl teeth, and globe breasts, a vision of beauty grotesquely literalized, something akin to the emblematic portrait in Charles Sorel’s Extravagant Shepherd (1654) (­figure 12.1). But there is more to these images than meets the eye. Catherine Bates, bemused by critics who “rush to” depict the abject courtly lover as “manly … master of his text,” acknowledges complexity.14 But, where Bates meditates on “the lack that constitutes all subjectivity,” a universal “tale of masterlessness,”15 I see a manufactured gendered aesthetics of male vulnerability and female culpability. Intromissionist thought did not have the primacy in early modern England that it would have for long-​eighteenth-​century minds, but Alhazen’s contributions “made the intromission theory viable,” and intromission’s metaphors were in play.16 Struck by seeing their beloveds, speakers responded with stanzas full of speakers’ inky tears and pregnant caesuras alongside their beloveds’ blazoned sun-​eyes and coral-​lips. Deploying the blazon (from the French blasonner and the English to blaze), blasonneurs posed as hapless gazers. Donne’s speaker is blamelessly drawn by the beloved’s “Gems,” “cast” as they are “in mens views.”17 Donne, like his contemporary sonneteers, follows Francesco Petrarch’s tradition in Sonnets to Laura, wherein seeing the beloved, as in Petrarch’s sonnet 84, binds the speaker as figurative arrows enter his heart.18 Sir Philip Sidney’s speaker complains similarly. In Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella (1591),19 the star-​loving speaker labors and fails to contain the wanted woman via the Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 126–​54; and Hannah Betts, “‘The Image of This Queene So Quaynt’: The Pornographic Blazon, 1588–​1601,” in Julia M. Walker (ed.), Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 153–​84. 12  John Donne, “Elegy 2: To His Mistress Going to Bed,” in The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, Volume 2: The Elegies, ed. Gary A. Stringer et al. (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2000), lines 25–​7. 13  Donne, “Elegy 2,” lines 29–​30. 14  Catherine Bates, “Astrophil and the Manic Wit of the Abject Male,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900, 41, no. 1 (2001), 1–​24, at p. 2. 15  Bates, “Astrophil and the Manic Wit of the Abject Male,” p. 8. 16  See Gary C. Hatfield and William Epstein, “The Sensory Core and the Medieval Foundations of Early Modern Perceptual Theory,” Isis, 70, no. 3 (1979), 363–​84, at p. 367. See also David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-​kindi to Kepler (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976). Classical intromittist corpuscular theory came to dominance in the early 1700s (and was superseded in the early 1800s by the wide embrace of wave theory). For medieval backgrounds, see Dana E. Stewart, The Arrow of Love: Optics, Gender, and Subjectivity in Medieval Love Poetry (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2003). 17  Donne, “Elegy 2,” lines 29–​30, 35, 36. 18  Francesco Petrarch, sonnet 84, in The Canzoniere, or Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, ed. Mark Musa (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1999), p. 139. 19  Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, in The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

 

The Poet as Man of Feeling    199

FIG. 12.1  A literalized “sonnet lady,” from Charles Sorel, The Extravagant Shepherd; or the History of the Shepherd Lysis, trans. John Davies (London, 1654). By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

blazon. In sonnet 9, “Stella’s face” is likened to a building made of gold, pearl, red porphyry; captivated by her (or its) “front built of alabaster pure,”20 Astrophil desires to enter and possess. But he is no confident imperial lover. He is a lover who must love, the passive enactor of what Stella has raised in him (however unawares). Because he could not “Leave sense,” he is, like all lovers, one of “sense’s objects.”21 Try though he might to protect himself from the view of Stella’s charms, downright blows did foil [reason’s] cunning fence. For soon as they strake thee with Stella’s rays, Reason thou kneel’dst, and offeredst straight to prove By reason good, good reason her to love.22 20  22 

Ibid., sonnet 9, line 3. Ibid., sonnet 10, lines 11–​14.

21 

Ibid., sonnet 10, line 7.

 

200   Rivka Swenson Astrophil’s courtship strategy consists of depicting himself as an acted-​upon object. To see Astrophil as such is to contribute to a project of “break[ing] open,” as Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass put it, “what can seem a long and monotonous history of the sovereignty of the subject.”23 Inflected with the discourse of erotic penetration, Astrophil’s self-​objectification facilitates Stella’s theoretical empowerment as seen woman. Feminized Astrophil, having seen her, is introduced in sonnet 1 as “great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes”;24 he leaks ink, producing extra, form-​breaking, syllables. Shot through by the Stella-​bolt, Astrophil in sonnet 2 describes how he arrived at his unwillingly impregnated state: Not at first sight, nor with a dribbled shot Love gave the wound, which while I live will bleed, But known worth did in mine of time proceed, Till by degrees it had full conquest got.25

Unwillingly, the star-​lover is brought to heel—​brought to love: I saw and liked, I liked but loved not, I loved, but straight did not what Love decreed; At length to Love’s decrees, I, forced, agreed.26

The speaker suggests a figural eye-​rape, a “conquest” of “force”: he must submit and consent. Similarly, in sonnet 6 he yields (again, extra syllables) to “the force of heavenly beams infusing hellish pain.”27 And, again, in sonnet 30, Stella’s image “breathes out flames which burn within [his] heart”; he is “straw” that “catches fire.”28 Stella’s assault upon his open eye (homonym for “I”) moves him to plead in sonnet 45, “I am not I; pity the tale of me.”29Astrophil takes in rays, producing lines. Emissions are involuntary: in sonnet 37, “My tongue doth water, and my breast doth swell, | My tongue doth itch, my thoughts in labor be.”30 In sonnet 6 his “tears pour out his ink” onto “paper” of “pale despair, and pain his pen doth move.”31 Stella is the alleged generating force. Spenser’s sonnet sequence Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595) amplifies Sidney’s tenor with greedy blazonry, claims of victimization, and an insidious undercurrent.32 The concluding poem, the actual epithalamion (Spenser’s speaker gets the girl), confidently displays the stuff of the seen woman, her sapphire eyes, her apple cheeks, Her brest like to a bowle of creame uncrudded, Her paps lyke lyllies budded, Her snowie necke lyke to a marble towre, And all her body like a pallace fayre.33

23  Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, “Introduction,” in de Grazia, Quilligan, and Stallybrass (eds.), Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 1–​16, at p. 4. 24  Sidney, sonnet 1, line 12. 25  Ibid., sonnet 2, lines 1–​4. 26  Ibid., sonnet 2, lines 5–​7. 27  Ibid., sonnet 6, line 3. 28  Ibid., sonnet 40, lines 13, 14. 29  Ibid., sonnet 45, line 14. 30  Ibid., sonnet 37, lines 1–​2. 31  Ibid., sonnet 6, lines 10, 11. 32  Edmund Spenser, Amoretti and Epithalamion, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram, Einar Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, Thomas H. Cain, Alexander Dunlop, and Richard Schell (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989). 33  Ibid., “Epithalamion,” lines 175–​9.

 

The Poet as Man of Feeling    201 But can Spenser’s speaker ever be master of all he surveys? Allegedly, no. He affects to complain (with a telling extra syllable here and there) in sonnet 37: What guyle is this, that those her golden tresses, She doth attire under a net of gold: And with sly skill so cunningly them dresses, That which is gold or heare, may scarse be told? Is it that men’s frayle eyes, which gaze too bold, She may entangle in that golden snare.34

The beloved “craftily enfold[s]‌” men’s “weaker harts” with “guilefull net.”35 The culpable image thus conquers—​deliberately, with guile—​the unwitting gazer; as Bates explains, even in the speaker’s final success in writing-​to-​woo, the lover’s “social and sexual mastery … continue[s] to be in doubt.”36 More crucially for my purposes, Spenser’s beloved, like Astrophil’s Stella, is liable for consequence; the epithalamion lingers hungrily over “Her lips lyke cherryes charming men to byte.”37 She supposedly authorizes, intrinsically, the speaker’s endeavors to make her intromit his seminal Cupids, his amoretti or “little loves,” his embodied poetic woe. Thus, even before Newtonian theory made dominant the feminized, corpuscle-​assaulted gaze, the metaphors of the early modern gaze tended often enough toward intromittist anxiety, projecting blame onto seen things.

“If We Gaze, We Are Undone”: Popular Verse and the Science of Sight As Nancy J. Vickers has described, the blazon fell out of use during later early modernity.38 But where Vickers sees a rejection of its “inherited, insufficient” abstraction in favor of a “new descriptive language,”39 I take a longer view wherein the early modern blazon finds heirs. As we shall see, the blazon reemerged in popular verse during the Age of Newton. Enabled by widespread interest in optical theory’s lighter, nonmathematical side, the poet as man of feeling operated insidiously under cover of the blazon. Joseph Moxon declared in Practical Perspective (1670) that a man’s sight of “a Person beautifull” was tantamount to “a rape upon his Ey[e]‌”: who should be held accountable for what the poor gazer does next?40 The pernicious and poetic implications of such questions were amplified during the Restoration and early eighteenth century: Berkeley, Locke, Newton, 34 

Ibid., “Sonnet 37,” lines 1–​6. Ibid., “Sonnet 37,” lines 7, 8, 10. 36  Catherine Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), p. 147. 37  Spenser, “Epithalamion,” line 174. 38  See Nancy J. Vickers, “‘The Blazon of Sweet Beauty’s Best’: Shakespeare’s Lucrece,” in Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (eds.), Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Routledge, 1985), pp. 95–​116. 39 Ibid., p. 95. 40  Joseph Moxon, Practical Perspective; or, Perspective Made Easie (London, 1670), p. 5. 35 

 

202   Rivka Swenson and others raised the stakes for the poet’s identity as man of feeling by describing unambiguously the vulnerable gaze. Ironically, the science of vulnerable gazing coincided with an enabling craze for optical adventures; entire shops, such as the one run by “J. Bennett, at the Globe in Crown-​Court, near Golden-​Square, St. James’s, London,” were devoted to peddling “Optical Instruments, as Telescopes, reflecting and refracting; Microscopes, Camera-​ Obscuras; Magic-​Lanthorns, Prisms, Reading-​Glasses, and the best Spectacles.”41 The rise of popular science was absorbed by popular verse, manifesting anew the blazon of yore. Witness, in Alexander Pennecuik’s popular poem “On Corinna Rising from Her Bed, and Dressing to Go to Mass, upon Ash-​Wednesday Morning” (1720), the blazon’s inheritance in all its feminized-​male-​gaze glory.42 Here is Corinna, “Blushing like the Morning Skies,” her hair like “streaming Gold,” her “Eyes” like “All the Stars that’s in the Skies.”43 With roses in cheeks, with breasts like doves, Corinna expands past the confines of the old small sonnet spaces. The speaker is “undone,” he is “ravish’d,” looking on her looks: her “Fan spreads all the Flow’rs, | in that lovely Face,” sending penetrating rays to “melt [his] Soul.”44 These are metaphors made newly vital as the seen thing’s supposed “triumph” is underwritten by the science of the day. Even Berkeley—​who, unlike Locke and Newton, averred that rays were not particulate and that the gazer could not be physically altered—​saw vision as a kind of touch. He discusses the two senses together in his Essay towards a New Theory of Vision (1709): “sight and touch,” he says repeatedly, “sight and touch.”45 The idea of sight as a touching of the gazer, and especially the idea of sight as a conduit for Newtonian–​Lockean materiality, fascinated writers. For instance, Newton’s anxiety about the eye’s moist aperture and its inability to elude the creepy “motion” of “Eel”-​like rays had a corollary in poetry’s supposedly sight-​ravished male speakers.46 Such speakers strike suspiciously passive poses in popular verse, verse that contains the seen woman within the contours of blazonry while seeming to exalt (or condemn, as in the counter-​blazon) as “cause” instead of “effect.” The eighty-​six poems in Poems on Several Occasions: By a Gentleman are really poems about one occasion: the inundation of “the Gazer’s tender Sight” by a retinue of flattened female subjects who resemble nothing more than Pennecuik’s Corinna in a hall of mirrors.47 Seeing and being comprise a single, reactive process for the gazer, whose ontology and verse reflect and reproduce (shades of Sidney et al.) a female subject’s image. In “Cupid Mistaken,” Celia “needs not Cupid’s Arts to make Men burn”; “Her Voice, Air, Steps, Breast, Forehead, Eyes, conspire | To kindle in Mens Souls a constant Fire.”48 Note the image’s agency: make, 41  Items sold by “J. Bennett, at the Globe in Crown-​Court, near Golden-​Square, St. James’s London.” From an advertisement on the back of The Ladies Diary; or, The Woman’s Almanack, for the Year of our LORD, 1745. 42  Alexander Pennecuik, “On Corinna Rising from Her Bed, and Dressing to Go to Mass, upon Ash-​ Wednesday Morning,” in Streams from Helicon; or, Poems on Various Subjects: In Three Parts, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh, 1720), p. 70. 43 Ibid., p. 70. 44 Ibid., p. 72. 45  The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, 9 vols. (London: T. Nelson, 1948–​57), vol. i, pp. 189, 222, et passim. 46  Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks; or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light (New York: Dover, 1952), p. 339. 47  “The Tea-​Table Discourse,” in Poems on Several Occasions: By a Gentleman, p. 23. 48  “Cupid Mistaken,” in ibid., p. 81.

 

The Poet as Man of Feeling    203 conspire, kindle. In “Ode to Celia,” the poet as ravished man of feeling conveys his helplessness to resist the desire generated by yet another Celia: “I gaz’d, I sigh’d, and am undone”; “Such is thy Pow’r, O Fair!, for all, who are not blind, must love.”49 Superficially, such claims are benign. Practically speaking, however, these claims are hazardous—​witness the violence of he who “must love”—​to Celia, pursued by a poet-​lover who insists he was assaulted by Celia’s impression. The verse excerpts, or “beauties,” in The Beauties of the English Stage (1756) are positively rife with metaphors of gendered intromittist gazing. Excerpts from John Tracy, John Oldmixon, Charles Hopkins, George Lansdowne, Francis Beaumont, Thomas Otway, William Shirley, Nathaniel Lee, John Dryden, Charles Sedley, Edmund Smith, Nicholas Rowe, and many others offer variations on a single theme. Where Hopkins queries “Woman! Whence comes your Empire over us?” (Pyrrhus), the others answer:  their “Beauty governs with unbounded Sway” (Tracy, Periander); they are “Fatally beauteous, and have killing Eyes” (Dryden, The Tempest); and “They’re all Enchantment, those who once behold | Are made their Slaves for ever” (Otway, Caius Marius).50 The convention of gendered gazing appears both codified and commonplace, and the blazon—​resurrected in the climate of intromissionist-​corpuscular optics—​offers a weaker bulwark than ever against the gazer’s impression and impressment. Try though male speakers might to abstract and idealize, merely to look upon the “roses that adorn her cheek,” as in Robert Anderson’s “Julia” (1798), is fatal to the fragile man: “I did but gaze, yet was undone.51 The impression of the gazer is inscribed, as implied by references to being “undone,” within sexualized language that conveys the gazer’s supposed feminized submission. In some cases, gazers “yield” happily, “consenting” to what women have, ostensibly, asked for, as in “Love’s Conquest” (1708): Strai[gh]t to my soul, thro’ ev’ry vein, The subtle charms like lightning run: I languish with a pleasing pain, And willing yield to be undone. Whilst then I gaze upon her eyes, Where little armed loves advance.52

In such depictions, to see is to be the recipient of a kind of optical forced courtship that leaves the male gazer “undone.” In William Dawson’s “Pastoral III” (1724), innocent Slouchy rejects the view, turns shepherd, retreats, folds sheep in meadows without molestation: “There I can gaze, and fear no Danger nigh | From the soft Rollings of a Damsel’s Eye.”53

49 

“Ode to Celia,” in ibid., p. 46. The Beauties of the English Stage: Consisting of the Most Affecting and Sentimental Passages, … in the English Plays, Ancient and Modern, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (London, 1756), vol. iii, pp. 282, 288, 272, 274. 51  Robert Anderson, “Song XXV: Julia,” in Poems on Various Subjects (Carlisle, 1798), pp. 183, 184. 52  “Love’s Conquest,” in Oxford and Cambridge Miscellany Poems (London, 1708), pp. 135–​7. These lines appeared again, minus title, in The Charmer: A Collection of Songs, Chiefly Such as Are Eminent for Poetical Merit, 4th ed. (Edinburgh, 1782), vol. ii, p. 184. 53  William Dawson, “Pastoral III: The Brawl: Slouchy, Clouterkin, Colinet,” in The British Swain: In Five Pastorals: To Which Are Added Some Miscellaneous Poems, Design’d as a Specimen of a Larger Work (London, 1724), p. 27. 50 

 

204   Rivka Swenson But the insidious suggestion that gazers are not responsible for their (re)actions to such views suggests the possibility of violence against the supposed source of the action, the seen woman whose experience becomes the consequence of being seen. After all, as in “The Lover’s Plea” (1736), if no man “can behold thee with delight, | And not confess himself thy slave,” the seen woman has no recourse if “by too near approach [she] blame, | A passion [she] did first inspire.”54 Thus, in “The Ladies Choice” (1733), when Melissa complains to Belinda, fresh Pretenders do my Peace invade; They write, they visit, sigh, and serenade, And try all ways to catch a harmless Maid,55

Belinda warns Melissa to retreat before suitors “try” another “way” in: “your Beauty may inspire Their Minds with Love,” she cautions, and “Dangers may from too near a Gaze ensue.”56 The poet as man of feeling has science on his side: exteriors give rise to perception and ideation.

“No Object Strephon’s Eye Escapes”:  Swiftian Self-​S crutiny Constructing the historicized position of the spectacle as symbol or reality requires seeing eighteenth-​century British poetry’s Melissas and Belindas as theoretically empowered subjects who conquer just by being seen. The key word is “theoretically”; the gendered dialectic of penetrating rays and impressionable mind was used to validate a range of oppressions. Swift’s poems “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed” (1734) and “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1732), like his “Cassinus and Peter” (1734) and his “Strephon and Chloe” (1734), are not simple misogynist salvos; sensitive readings by Helen Deutsch and others expose Swiftian nuance.57 I  would add that Swift self-​reflexively explores the aesthetics and the 54  “Song CIX: The Lover’s Plea,” in A Complete Collection of Old and New English and Scotch Songs, with Their Respective Tunes Prefixed (London, 1736), vol. i, p. 131. The poem also appeared in The Compleatest Collection of Old and New English and Scotch Songs, That Have Hitherto Been Published, with Their Respective Tunes Prefixed, 2 vols. (London, 1745), vol. i, p. 131. 55  “The Ladies Choice: In Dialogue betwixt Two Ladies,” in Poems on Several Occasions: By a Gentleman, p. 63. 56  “The Ladies Choice,” in ibid., p. 63. 57  It is certainly possible to see in Swift a misogynist tenor. See, for instance, Carol Houlihan Flynn’s useful discussion in The Body in Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990). On the other hand, as Helen Deutsch observes, Swift is no facile misogynist; his verse meditates on “the experience of loss of an ideal.” See Deutsch, “Swift’s Poetic of Friendship,” in Claude Rawson (ed.), Politics and Literature in the Age of Swift: English and Irish Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 140–​61, at p. 142. Moreover, as Felicity Nussbaum suggests in The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women 1660–​1750 (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1984), an “Antifeminist posture” does not necessarily signal misogyny (p. 18). Margaret Anne Doody, in “Swift among the Women,” thus usefully separates speaker and Strephon in Frank Palmeri (ed.), Critical Essays on Jonathan Swift (New York: G. K. Hall, 1993), pp. 13–​37. See also Doody’s “Swift and Women,” in Christopher Fox (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 87–​111; and Louise Barnett,

 

The Poet as Man of Feeling    205 gender politics of the poet as man of feeling: so doing, he peels back the blazon’s veneer to satirize the self-​interested vision that produces it. Swift’s “Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed” looks at the stock heroine of pastoral verse—​ Corinna—​from a different angle than, say, Pennecuik. Initially Swift’s Corinna appears to be the opposite of Pennecuik’s Corinna. But the two Corinnas are, in Swift’s hands, surface and subsurface, blazon and counter-​blazon. Beneath the lovely, pastoral, pedestaled image of the one lies the other. Their contiguity and overlap are signaled by the compression of urban and pastoral signifiers in Swift’s opening couplet: “Corinna, Pride of Drury Lane | For whom no shepherd sighs in vain.”58 These witty lines invert the classic lass for whom shepherds/​poets/​ lovers sigh with unrequited love; Swift’s Corinna, like an actress, uses costume and makeup to perform the role of “Corinna” for sighing urban gazers who invest in her illusion. The poem brilliantly conveys that Swift’s Corinna is both Corinna and counter-​Corinna; we see the human underbelly, the reality obscured by the rouged veneer of blazonry’s rosy cheeks. Blazon and counter-​blazon are two sides of a coin; as Vickers observes, the Medusa’s image is always “the other side of the beautiful.”59 My image of Sorrel’s “sonnet lady,” with grotesquely literalized charms, compresses both sides into one, and, in its way, Swift’s poem performs a similar compression. Ripping away the bandage of the blazon, Swift’s speaker offers a hideous dystopia wherein ideal abstractions are replaced with unsavory particulars; roses in cheeks are replaced by the specter of cork cheek plumpers used to round out a decayed face. The speaker cautions the reader against sharing his own “dreadful Sight!” of the shop-​worn, life-​worn, prostitute (he “Who sees, will spew”).60 The warning sounds superficially like an indictment of Corinna. The critique seems to swell its misogyny further by bringing all women into the diseased gutter of Corinna’s flesh: inverting love poetry’s panegyrics, this poem was “Written,” its acid subtitle says, “For the Honour of the Fair Sex.” But Swift’s poem, with its counter-blazons, finally indicts its own motivations, and the compliant reader’s. The poem’s appearance in a single pamphlet with “Cassinus and Peter: A Tragical Elegy” and “Strephon and Chloe”—​poems that make their “heroes” look ridiculous for being surprised to learn that women have human bodies—​suggests that the seen woman is not the poem’s target.61 “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed,” reflecting the gazer’s image of Corinna’s awful parts, brings to sight the prurience and hypocrisy of the feeling spectator. The critique’s origin and target are the same thing: the poet as man of feeling. Constructing an urban, deeply embodied Corinna beneath the surface of the pastoral, idealized Corinna, the speaker exposes their linkage in a single sign. Under satire’s microscope, Corinna’s predecessors’ stock features—​golden nets of hair, sun eyes, rose cheeks, pearl teeth, coral lips, globe or alabaster breasts—​are transformed into horrifying

“The Question of Misogyny,” in Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), pp. 125–​53, for extended discussion of recent approaches to Swift and misogyny. 58  Jonathan Swift, “A Beautiful Young Nymph, Going to Bed,” in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), lines 1–​2. 59  Nancy J. Vickers, “This Heraldry in Lucrece’ Face,” in Susan Rubin Suleiman (ed.), The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 209–22, at p. 220. 60  Swift, “Beautiful Young Nymph,” lines 57, 74. 61  Nora Crow Jaffe writes, for instance, that the speaker of “The Lady’s Dressing Room” “seems to excuse Celia and find Strephon at fault for holding his discoveries against her”: see The Poet Swift (Hanover: Univ. Press of New England, 1977), p. 117.

 

206   Rivka Swenson particulars. The view tightens, the counter-​blazon emerging from within the abstractions of poetry’s “Fair Sex.” Counter-​Corinna readies herself for bed, Takes off her artificial Hair: Now, picking out a Crystal Eye, She wipes it clean, and lays it by. Her Eye-​Brows from a Mouse’s Hyde, Stuck on with Art on either Side, Pulls off with Care, and first displays ’em, Then in a Play-​Book smoothly lays ’em. Now dextrously her Plumpers draws, That serve to fill her hollow Jaws. Untwists a Wire; and from her Gums A Set of Teeth completely comes. Pulls out the Rags contriv’d to prop Her flabby Dugs and down they drop.62

This unsavory revelation finally exposes not Corinna, however, but her audience as the site where the mutually informing dialectic of blazon and counter-​blazon, of Corinna and counter-​Corinna (sun eye, glass eye; pearl teeth, false teeth) is mediated. The speaker’s ultimate target is not the gazed-​on woman and her Fleet Ditch-​like “oozy brinks,” but everyone else: the “watchmen, constables and duns, | From whom she meets with frequent rubs” (lines 48, 52–​3); the “religious clubs” whom she “pays in kind” (lines 54, 56); and all the shepherds, poets, lovers, and gazers for whom she performs the ideal “Corinna” all day long before disassembling herself for sleep. Swift forces the reader to be accountable, to join Corinna in probing, with haptic poignancy, her real wounds (she gently touches her skin, applying bandages where necessary), wounds caused by what people (so-​called hapless gazers) call love. Swift’s Celia, in the meta-​satire “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” bears about her a similar poignancy, blamed by ridiculous Strephon for having a body, and, indeed, the satirical target of “The Lady’s Dressing Room” is Strephon. The poem displays him wide, looking below the surface of the feeling poets who invade and expose women and their dressing rooms.63 But Strephon begins with confidence, as he Stole in, and took a strict survey Of all the litter as it lay; Whereof, to make the matter clear, An inventory follows here.64

But what follows is no little list. Katherine Mannheimer, writing about Swift, reasonably observes that “The object of eighteenth-​century satire’s gaze is a woman’s body.”65 However,

62 

Swift, “Beautiful Young Nymph,” lines 10–​22, in Poems, vol. ii, pp. 581–​2. William Freedman offers a useful meditation on the meta-​satirical slippage between Swift and speakers: see “Dynamic Identity and the Hazards of Satire,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900, 29, no. 3 (1989), 473–​88. See also Deborah Baker Wyrick, Jonathan Swift and the Vested World (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1988), who considers both “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed” and “The Lady’s Dressing Room” as enquiries into the nature, and failure, of art and reading (pp. 146–​9). 64  Swift, “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” lines 7–​10. 65  Katherine Mannheimer, Print, Visuality, and Gender in Eighteenth-​Century Satire: “The Scope in Ev’ry Page” (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 15. 63 

 

The Poet as Man of Feeling    207 are not the room’s many Celia-​imbued things (totemic for her body) actually the subjects of that gaze? So it seems: the subjectifying male gaze (as I define it, and as Swift mocks it) positions the gazer (both poet and reader) as object; inheritor of Petrarchan tradition, the lover is acted upon by the sight of the beloved’s things. Lingering obsessively over all that the speaker imagines Strephon sees, we, too, are affected by the items Celia has touched: “when the Eye is but open,” they “force an entrance,” as Locke says of seen things.66 Strephon’s open eye is as passive as Celia’s washstand, and like the “Bason takes whatever comes | The Scrapings of her Teeth and Gums.”67 The indignities done to Strephon’s (and our) tender gaze reproduce the idea of vision as an assault perpetrated on seeing objects by seen things. Strephon no sooner enters Celia’s space than “a dirty smock appeared” (line 11). Initially, Strephon and the smock jockey for control: reasserting himself as the subject, Strephon grasps the smock and “displayed it wide” (line 13). But what has been seen cannot be unseen; epistemology is a one-​way street, and he realizes, too late, “On such a point few words are best” (line 15). Helpless to stop himself, Strephon takes in and reproduces a dreadful, particularized counter-​blazonry of “Sweat, dandruff, powder, lead, and hair” (line 24). His response, like ours, is visceral: “oh! it turned poor Strephon’s bowels” (line 43). Note that Strephon is not the subject; the intromitted thing, the source of action, makes him an object, alters him. The line “No object Strephon’s eye escapes” (line 47) is especially clever, its compression and confusion of subject and object particularly rich. Superficially, it may appear that no object escapes from being seen; in fact, Strephon’s eye cannot escape the objects (properly the subjects) that enter the visual field and are intromitted. The ambiguous grammar echoes the sense. The poem is a warning to “him that looks behind the scene” (line 133), behind the appearance, behind the abstract blazonry of exaltation that is the other side of Strephon’s counter-​blazon microscopy. Strephon is thus exposed as the poem’s target. Metaphorically speaking, he is displayed wide under the poetic microscope: the “frighted Strephon,” who sees his own reflection, his own nose, in “Celia’s magnifying glass,” is both a “giant” and “the smallest worm in Celia’s nose” (line 54). Like Gulliver, he is both little and big in this space. “Celia’s glass,” of course, is Celia’s mirror, although the phrase also suggests that Celia herself is a glass, a mirror, a construct, a reflection and deflection of Strephon himself with his “turned … bowels” (line 43). The speaker protests, “The stockings, why should I expose, | Stained with the moisture of her toes?” (lines 61–​2). The speaker asks, “Why Strephon will you tell the rest | And must you needs describe the chest?” (lines 69–​70). Not only “will” Strephon “tell the rest”; he “must” do it, even though the speaker acknowledges with a disgusting pun that the linguistic diarrhea contains “things which must not be expressed” (line 109). Why? Because Celia has left her “chest,” her toilet, “standing full in sight” (lines 70, 73). And so he “ventured to look in, | Resolved to go through thick and thin” (lines 81–​2). The speaker, in the role of a compelled victim, describes the entirety of his shameful tale. But, as Tita Chico observes, this is a deeply paradoxical poem.68 The speaker points the finger of blame at Strephon as well as himself when Strephon looks inside the chest to view the chamber pot within: “As from within Pandora’s box, | When Epimetheus oped the locks” 66  John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 106–​7 (book II, chapter i, section 6). 67  Swift, “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” lines 39–​40, in Poems, vol. ii, p. 527. 68  Tita Chico, Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-​Century English Literature and Culture (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2004), p. 134.

 

208   Rivka Swenson (lines 83–​4). Pandora is typically blamed for opening her awful box, but, in Swift’s telling, it is Epimetheus—​and Strephon—​who is to blame. Strephon, as Swift’s Epimetheus’s heir, grasps after what appears to be, in fact, his own reflection: So Strephon lifting up the lid, To view what in the chest was hid. The vapours flew from out the vent, But Strephon cautious never meant The bottom of the pan to grope, And foul his hands in search of hope. (lines 89–​94)

Not meaning to do it, he does do it, and we are left with a disgusting image not of Celia but of Strephon. He claims inadvertency, he claims helplessness, but we cry foul. There is nothing more ridiculous than Strephon foolishly cursing Celia just as Swift’s Cassinus did yet another Celia in the poem “Cassinus and Peter”: “Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!” (and, similarly, in Swift’s “Strephon and Chloe,” yet another Strephon is traumatized to learn that “Chloe, heavenly Chloe,” must, like Strephon himself, “piss”).69 Strephon’s final (and predictable) disgrace is his explicit deflection of blame onto Celia herself and all “womankind,” now linked together in the counter-​blazon metonymy of Celia’s box (her “chest,” like Pandora’s box, disguised, a “cabinet to vulgar eyes,” slang in Swift for intimate parts) (lines 140, 121, 70, 77, 78). Fool Strephon blames women for his own “foul imagination”; “blind” now to the “charms of womankind,” he instrumentalizes the old narrative of blame that contemporary optical science, especially corpuscular intromittistm, helped codify (lines 121, 120, 130). Ultimately, the poem is not just an exposure of Strephon, nor just a warning to him who “looks behind the scene” or even, simply, “him that looks” (line 133); it is a self-​critique of the man of feeling, the poet as man of feeling. The speaker self-​indicts, acknowledging his culpability as a lover, poet, gazer. The end of the poem reverses sardonically the opening lines, as the speaker turns from his leavings: “finishing his grand survey, | Disgusted Strephon stole away” (lines 115–​16). Swift’s implied author not only self-​indicts, he also labors to separate himself from the “ravished” Strephon, hoping that he would learn to think like me, And bless his ravished sight to see Such order from confusion spring, Such gaudy tulips raised from dung. (lines 141–​4)

And so the poet as man of feeling is exposed self-​reflexively as the source of a prurient and insidious aesthetic politics. If Margaret Anne Doody is right that Swift “satirizes the tradition of satires about women,” Swift also satirizes the larger, gendered tradition of the poet as man of feeling, the producer of blason and contreblason, thesis and antithesis, Corinna and counter-​Corinna. And yet, despite showing that the counter-​blazon is constructed not against, but within and complexly constitutive of, the blazon, Swift’s speaker in “The Lady’s Dressing Room” does not entirely disavow his own impulse to reassert the “false art,” as Claude Rawson calls it, of the original blazon.70 The speaker reveals the perniciousness that 69  Swift, “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” line 118, exactly reprises the closing line of “Cassinus and Peter” (also line 118); Swift, “Strephon and Chloe,” line 178. 70  Claude Rawson, Order from Confusion Sprung: Studies in Eighteenth-​Century Literature from Swift to Cowper (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), p. 201.

 

The Poet as Man of Feeling    209 lurks beneath the surface of the blazon and the surface of the poet as man of feeling, even as he yearns for those old abstractions, those “tulips” made untenable by the intromissionist optical world of particulate particulars.

References Bates, Catherine, The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992). Deutsch, Helen, “Swift’s Poetics of Friendship,” in Claude Rawson (ed.), Politics and Literature in the Age of Swift: English and Irish Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 140–​61. Doody, Margaret Anne, “Swift and Women,” in Christopher Fox (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 87–​111. Flynn, Carol Houlihan, The Body in Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990). Kramnick, Jonathan, Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2010). Macpherson, Sandra, Harm’s Way: Tragic Responsibility and the Novel Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2009). Nussbaum, Felicity, The Brink of All We Hate:  English Satires on Women, 1660–​ 1750 (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1984). Powell, Manushag N., and Rivka Swenson, “Introduction: Subject Theory and the Sensational Subject,” in “Sensational Subjects,” special issue of The Eighteenth Century:  Theory and Interpretation, 54, no. 1 (Summer 2013), 147–​51. Sawday, Jonathan, The Body Emblazoned:  Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995). Stallybrass, Peter, “Patriarchal Territories:  The Body Enclosed,” in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Brian Vickers (eds.), Rewriting the Renaissance:  The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 123–​42. Swenson, Rivka, “Optics, Gender, and the Eighteenth-​Century Gaze,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 51, no. 1–2 (Spring–​Summer 2010), 27–​43.

 

Chapter 13

The P oet as  G e niu s Marshall Brown The best natural Genius … requires proper Culture. —​George Turnbull, A Treatise on Ancient Painting

“Hut ab, ihr Herrn, ein Genie.” Robert Schumann’s exclamation in his 1831 review of Frédéric Chopin would not have been possible a century earlier. For the word genius underwent a radical shift in meaning in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Even the simple-​ sounding phrase “a genius” would not have been recognized by Alexander Pope and his contemporaries. Chopin’s youth, his exoticism, his very art form—​all point to the Romantic genius type that emerged only late in the previous century. The eventual end point is the notion of genius as a celebrity, to whom one doffs one’s hat, even if one doesn’t bow down, a routinization of charisma.1 Yet Schumann’s bourgeois deference still carries with it more than a whiff of worship. This chapter concerns the era when genius was still a faculty and not yet a personality.

Lexical History Genius is a complex word, and has been extraordinarily mobile in implication and value. The Grimms’ Deutsches Wörterbuch devotes fifty-​four columns to Genie and distinguishes thirteen senses, seventy-​six subheads, and numerous sub-​subheads, chiefly examining usages in the second half of the eighteenth century. The OED, which limits itself to sixteen senses or subsenses, has a succinct summary of the relevant developments that can usefully be quoted in extenso, attached to sense 9: “Innate intellectual or creative power of an exceptional or exalted type, such as is attributed to those people considered greatest in any area

1  One study focusing on the sociopolitical anxieties of Romantic celebrity culture is David Higgins, “Celebrity, Politics and the Rhetoric of Genius,” in Tom Mole (ed.), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–​1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 41–​59.

 

The Poet as Genius    211 of art, science, etc.; instinctive and extraordinary capacity for imaginative creation, original thought, invention, or discovery.”2 The earliest cited instance comes from book i, chap. 14 of Tom Jones (1749), but is clearly sarcastic and not committed to this sense: “By the wonderful Force of Genius only, without the least Assistance of Learning.”3 Here is the discussion: This sense … applied originally to artists and poets to denote that particular kind of intellectual or creative power which appears to proceed from inspiration and arrive at its results in an inexplicable and miraculous manner. Genius is regarded as a higher quality than talent, with which it has often been contrasted, as noted by N.E.D. (1898): “It was by the German writers of the 18th century that the distinction between ‘genius’ and ‘talent’, which had some foundation in French usage, was sharpened into the strong antithesis which is now universally current, so that the one term is hardly ever defined without reference to the other.”

Another sense (OED sense 3) is closely tied to the English word genie, based on assimilation to the French génie of the Arabic word also transliterated as jinn. The mixture of classical, Christian, and exotic motifs was a potent brew leading to an explosion of discussion in the later Enlightenment that resonated throughout the verse of the period. Genius became a focal point for later eighteenth-​century aesthetics across Europe, with a number of prominent books and essays devoted partly or primarily to the topic in Britain, several of them quickly translated and influential on Lessing and Kant. As the OED also indicates, however, the British Romantic sense of genius does not grow directly out of later eighteenth-​century usages, and it can be misleading to read Romantic transcendentalism back into earlier texts. The pivotal work for the eighteenth century was Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). What Samuel Johnson said about this small volume, according to a report by Boswell, seems to me accurate as to fact, yet to miss the point: “he was surprized to find Young receive as novelties, what he thought very common maxims.”4 As I hope to show in this discussion, assembling the commonplaces together put them in a new light, with significant resonance for the poetry of the era. This chapter, consequently, has four aims: to describe the emergent senses of the term genius, to assess the transformations manifested in and promoted by Young’s essay, to distinguish eighteenth-​century British senses of genius from Idealist and Romantic senses, and to present some of the most striking poetic treatments.

2 The OED is cited from the 3rd ed. online, accessed July 11, 2015.

3  Fielding’s sarcasm about genius was more unbridled a decade earlier, at the end of his Champion essay dated December 25, 1739, though ingenium appears verbally only in Latin: “The same Reasoning might conclude, because we have one great Man with a great Head, that it is therefore necessary to every great Man to have a great Head; especially, since I can produce such a Number of very pretty Poets, and judicious Critics, who owe their Excellence to vast Abilities alone, without the least Assistance from Human Literature; and are living Instances of the Falshood of that Assertion of one Horace, which I found in my Father’s Common-​Place-​Book,—​Non rude quid prosit video Ingenium”: Henry Fielding, Contributions to the “Champion” and Related Writings, ed. W. B. Coley (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 89–​90. Fielding’s father, quoting by memory, turns Horace’s alternative (Nec rude … , “Nor do I see what good is a rude genius”) into an absolute (Non rude … , “I do not see …”). 4  Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Together with Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson’s Diary of a Journey into North Wales, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–​64), vol. v, p. 269.

 

212   Marshall Brown

The Genius as Poet Eighteenth-​century genius seems to have been inherently a good thing. Exceptions that sometimes include the sporadically occurring phrase “evil genius” are found only in two contexts: the classical and Christian psychomachia, or contest of good and bad voices—​ evoked, for instance by the “genium malignum” (“mauvais génie” in the contemporaneous French translation) proposing to Descartes at the end of the first book of his Meditationes de prima philosophia that the whole world is an illusion5—​and Oriental tales, where the genius is a genie. On the whole, voices from without and spontaneous inspiration are not the stuff of eighteenth-​century writers; probably none apart from the mad Christopher Smart and the eccentric William Blake believed that poetry was written from supernatural dictation.6 While genius or its equivalent was admired, in the early eighteenth century it played second fiddle to discipline. The touchstone, frequently quoted throughout the century, was a passage from late in Horace’s Ars poetica: Natura fieret laudabile carmen an arte quaesitum est: ego nec studium sine divite vena nec rude quid prosit video ingenium; alterius sic altera poscit opem res et coniurat amice. (lines 408–​11) ’Tis long disputed, whether poets claim From art or nature their best right to fame But art, if not enrich’d by nature’s vein, And a rude genius of uncultur’d strain, Are useless both, but, when in friendship join’d, A mutual succour in each other find.

This translation, one of many, dates from 1746, and it reflects a longstanding priority that recognized “nature” as a mere starting point needing “art” to complete it. The added phrase “of uncultur’d strain” here underscores the hierarchy. Yet a transition was under way. For while the Latin speaks of “ingenium,” this is among the first translations of the passage to include the word “genius,” as became the almost invariable practice within a few years. And when the translation was quoted in 1761 in an essay in the British Magazine (dubiously attributed to

5  Note that Descartes’s word is genius (a spirit, German “der Genius”), not ingenium (a capacity, German “das Genie”). The two Latin terms are juxtaposed as components of English genius in a pamphlet, On Genius, in A Collection of the Occasional Papers for the Year 1716 (London, 1716–​19), vol. iii, no. 10. 6  William Blake to Thomas Butts, April 25, 1803: “I have written this Poem [Milton] from immediate Dictation twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time without Premeditation & even against my Will” (The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970), p. 697). I have found only brief discussions of Blake’s conception of genius (developed in response to Joshua Reynolds) in Paul Kaufman, “Heralds of Original Genius,” in W. R. Castle, Jr. and Paul Kaufman (eds.), Essays in Memory of Barrett Wendell (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1926), pp. 191–​217, at pp. 210–​12; and in Morris Eaves, William Blake’s Theory of Art (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 93–​9. Leonard W. Deen, Conversing in Paradise: Poetic Genius and Community-​as-​Identity in Blake’s Los (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1983), pp. 20–​48, is about Poetic Genius as a figure, not about the concept of genius.

 

The Poet as Genius    213 Oliver Goldsmith), genius comes out on top: “We have seen genius shine without the help of art, but taste must be cultivated by art before it will produce agreeable fruit.”7 Earlier views are well represented by Pope’s Essay on Criticism and the preface to his Works (1717). The opening of the Essay parallels poetic genius with critical taste: “In Poets as true Genius is but rare, | True Taste as seldom is the Critick’s Share.”8 If all critics form judgments of taste, we may presume that all versifiers possess some level of genius for poetry. The special quality here is not yet genius, but truth. In Pope’s occasional usage of “genius” elsewhere in his poems, the word rarely means more than a tendency, and sometimes it can even be the subject of sarcasm, like the Frenchman’s son in the “Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace,” whose father advertises him as a cheap and all-​around servant: “Your Barber, Cook, Upholst’rer, what you please: | A perfect Genius at an Opera-​Song” (lines 10–​11).9 At its best, genius might be thought to “snatch a Grace beyond the Reach of Art” (Essay on Criticism, line 155), except that the savvy creators here are not called men of genius but “Great Wits” (line 152), whose “Lucky License” then becomes “a Rule” (lines 148–​9). Like wit, genius is a relative value subject to the test of success. Genius is what you have, or embody, or enact, and it can be great or small, strong or weak, a triumph or a flop. Fielding nails it in his satire on the “great man” Robert Walpole: “In Civil Life, doubtless, the same Genius, the same Indowments have often composed the Statesman and the Prig.”10 So Pope writes in the 1717 preface: What we call a Genius, is hard to be distinguish’d by a man himself, from a strong inclination [or, indeed, a] prevalent propensity which renders him the more liable to be mistaken.11

On this account, genius is merely your natural bent, closely allied to your ruling passion. 7 

The frequently reprinted 1746 translation, by Philip Francis, is one of twenty up through 1800 identified in Allen R. Benham, “Horace and His Ars Poetica in English: A Bibliography,” The Classical Weekly, 49, no. 1 (Oct. 17, 1955), 1–​5; all are available online. The only earlier complete translation to use the word genius is the 1681 version by John Oldham, which was used by Isaac Watts. The British Magazine essay is cited from Oliver Goldsmith, Works, ed. Peter Cunningham, 4 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1881), vol. iii, p. 320; Cunningham doubts the attribution. Some earlier high estimations of genius are the Duke of Buckingham’s Essay on Poetry (1682), lines 18–​20 (“For all in vain these superficial parts | Contribute to the structure of the whole, | Without a Genius too; for that’s the Soul!”—​punctuated here with an added exclamation point, as quoted by George Coleman, the Elder, in notes to his Horace translation, dedicated to the Wartons), and Richard Fiddes, A Prefatory Epistle concerning Some Remarks to Be Published on Homer’s Iliad (London, 1714): “without that Flame and Force of Mind which constitute the Poetical Genius, how faithfully soever a Pretender to Poetry keep to his Rules, we either throw him by with Contempt, or read him with Distast” (p. 73). Often-​reprinted prose translations of 1750 and 1753 still lack “genius,” as does an anonymous 1784 translation that Benham attributes to John Stedman, M.D., while eight eighteenth-​century translations after Francis (three of them by Christopher Smart) use the word, including an anonymous one that Benham missed, in A Poetical Translation of the Works of Homer (London, 1753), p. 307. 8  Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, lines 11–​12, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–​69), vol. i, p. 240. 9  “A perfect Genius,” in Pope’s Horace imitation, responds to indoctum (untaught) in the facing-​page Latin. 10  Henry Fielding, The History of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild, in Henry Fielding, Miscellanies by Henry Fielding, Esq;, ed. Bertrand Goldgar and Hugh Amory, 3 vols. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1997), vol. iii, p. 21. 11 Pope, Poems, vol. i, p. 4.

 

214   Marshall Brown Genius, then, is close to nature. Shaftesbury calls nature “the universal and sovereign Genius.”12 The parallel, however, is a two-​edged sword. For while the freedom of genius resembles nature’s infinite variety, its limits are also those of nature. Hence “indulgence” to the “mere genius and flowing vein” of modern British authors is misguided. “An English author would be all genius. He would reap the fruits of art, but without study, pains, or application.”13 “The horse alone can never make a good horseman… . No more can a genius alone make a poet, or good parts a writer in any considerable kind.”14 One essay, Addison’s Spectator 160, has often been instanced as an exceptional early exaltation of genius. The OED cites its opening sally as probably the earliest example of sense 8b, “a person endowed with ‘genius’ ”: “There is no Character more frequently given to a Writer, than that of being a Genius.”15 This looks like the sense that Schumann took for granted. But what Nedd Willard noted about French usage also applies to English: “use of the word genius by itself was rare in France until the Revolution. One had a genius rather than being a genius.”16 Addison’s example may have encouraged later developments, but in the context the example sentence is elliptical. It means that writers are often credited indiscriminately with some degree and kind of genius or another, such as “fine Genius,” “great Genius,” or “prodigious Genius.” Despite the superficial appearance of the example sentence in isolation, genius here is not a stand-​alone quality: the essay continues by discouraging emulation of natural genius—​even though “Shakespeare was a remarkable Instance of this first kind of great genius’s” (p. 483)—​ in favor of a second kind of educated genius: “great Genius’s … that have formed themselves by Rules and submitted the Greatness of their natural Talents to the Corrections and

12  Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, “The Moralists” (1709), in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), p. 301. See further M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Norton, 1958), pp. 198–​201. 13  Shaftesbury, “Miscellaneous Reflections” (1711), Characteristics 2: 316–​17. 14  Shaftesbury, “Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author” (1710), in Characteristics, p. 86. 15  Spectator 160, in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), vol. ii, p. 126. 16  “On avait du génie plutôt que d’être un génie.” Nedd Willard, Le Génie et la folie au dix-​huitième siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1963), p. 145. The book is informative, but Willard regards Diderot as giving an account of “le génie,” understood to mean a man of genius, without documenting that usage in him or his contemporaries. The anonymous article “Génie” in the Encyclopédie (1757), by Saint-​Lambert or possibly by Diderot, would be an early instance, or near approach, when it calls Shaftesbury “un génie de premier ordre,” cited in Herbert Dieckmann, “Diderot’s Conception of Genius,” Studien zur europäischen Aufklärung (Munich: Fink, 1974), p. 17. There may have existed a previously unrecorded colloquial use of “a genius” in the modern sense, as reported in William Sharpe, A Dissertation upon Genius, ed. William Bruce Johnson (1755; Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1973), p. 47: “in civiliz’d countries … a singular care is observed to form the bent and genius of young persons to such and such especial improvements; it is even vulgarly called, ‘making a Genius of him,’ and ‘making a bright lad of him.’ ” The book is otherwise a crudely Lockean screed that genius is not an innate ability but the near-​universal (except in idiots) “capacity of improvement” (p. 6). The same jocular usage appears in The Connoisseur, 90 (October 15, 1755), following a translation of the Horatian lines where natura and ars appear as genius and application: “If we consider that part of our acquaintance, whom we remember a Genius … in the modern acceptation of the word … signifies a very silly young fellow, who from his extravagance and debauchery has obtained the name of a Genius, like lucus a non lucendo, because he has no Genius at all.” All unattributed translations in this chapter are my own.

 

The Poet as Genius    215 Restraints of Art” (p. 484). Natural genius came first and is wonderful in its way, but for the most part it is better off when perfected by discipline and method.17

Toward Young’s Inspired Genius The meaning of genius remained long in flux. A case in point concerns two well-​known books with similar titles, though of very different tendencies. The earlier, Joseph Warton’s Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756, 1782), is notorious for having cut Pope down to size. While often expressing admiration for Pope’s elegance and sometimes for his romantic qualities—​especially in Eloisa to Abelard and the Essay on Man, though in those sections avoiding the word “genius”—​Warton’s book breathes the air of Sensibility, with effusive admiration for poetry of emotion and of nature sentiment, for the sublime, the picturesque, fancy, and imagination. These are some, though not all, of the qualities that came to be associated with genius. Yet, while taking time out to praise his friend Young as “a sublime and original genius,” Warton also concedes that he was not “correct and equal,” and “was too often turgid and hyperbolical.”18 Warton’s peroration places Pope just below John Milton—​ one of his top three poets—​and on a par with Dryden: “though Dryden be the greater genius, yet Pope is the better artist” (vol. ii, p. 411). Thus he leaves genius in its customary place as one portion of the equation, and I believe that all his uses of the word are likewise compatible with the older sense, in which genius is a tendency that can be expressed in high or low degree.19 The same can be said of Robert Wood’s very different Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer (1767/​1775), printed later than Warton’s first volume, though Wood was older by five years and based his work on travels in the early 1750s. Like Warton’s work, Wood’s magisterial study associates original genius with the sublime, the picturesque, and

17 

In the best short survey of the topic, “Heralds of Original Genius,” Paul Kaufman stresses Addison’s uniqueness, points out that Addison links genius with natural human capacity with no mention of inspiration, and claims that he sides with “natural fire and impetuosity” leading to “vast conceptions and noble sallies of the imagination” (p. 200, quoting Addison). The last claim, however, is wrong. The quoted phrases praise Pindar alone (as “a great Genius of the first Class”) and are immediately followed by a scathing critique of modern Pindarics, leading to more sustained praise of a second class of more civilized geniuses, “not … inferior to the first,” consisting of Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Cicero, Milton, and Bacon, who ally their genius with order and art. The two other exemplars of the first class, along with Pindar and Shakespeare, are Homer and the Old Testament, but Addison also says that such writers “very much failed in, or, if you will, … they were much above the Nicety and Correctness of the Moderns.” For his readers, Addison advocates the second kind of genius, not the first. The widespread misunderstanding of Addison’s “first” as “best” continues right into Marjorie Garber’s Patronizing the Arts (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2008), pp. 156–​7. 18  Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope, 2 vols. (London, 1756, 1782), vol. i, p. 149. 19  So, for instance, Warton’s second class of poets (out of four) possess “the true poetical genius, in a more moderate degree” (vol. i, p. xi). I suggest that the usage is ironical in a couple of places where “genius” stands unqualified: “a young genius” is at risk from poverty or opulence (vol. i, p. 108), and it is too bad that “no genius” has written an updated satire entitled One Thousand Seven Hundred and Sixty-​ One (vol. ii, p. 357).

 

216   Marshall Brown the sentimental. But his aim is to document the accuracy of Homer’s portrayals of landscape, men, and manners. “To throw light upon his Original Genius,” as he undertakes, means to show how Homer is less original and more responsibly artful than he looks to those with only a shadowy impression of his setting in place and time.20 “Oriental pastoral, though obscure, and defective in the art of composition, affords the boldest flight of genius of this kind; and … Homer stands next in rank for original pastoral beauties, with less sublimity of sentiment, it is true, and less energy of expression, but more picturesque in his scenery, and more delicate in his manners” (p. 110). The phrase “original genius” became so commonplace that it can appear pleonastic. But for writers before Young, “original” clearly designates one kind of genius that was gradually promoted to characterize genius in general. Only in stages did originality come to seem a primary value, displacing any other kind of genius. So it is that neither the learned “realist” Wood (as I might call him) nor the sentimental Warton exalts genius in the absence of art. Young’s Conjectures is crucial, then, not for saying new things about genius but for leading the way in constituting genius as a self-​sufficient gift.21 Genius looks much more mysterious when all its manifold and contradictory potentials are gathered in the same space. First, genius is natural: it “grows, it is not made” (Conjectures, p. 12). But it is also magical, “like Armida’s wand” (p. 10). Genius is “a Magician” and (Young’s most famous line) “the Stranger within thee.”22 It has native roots, with “at least as much Genius on the British, as on the Grecian stage” (p. 79), is as familiar as “a dear Friend in our company under disguise; who, while we are lamenting his absence, drops his mask” (p. 51), yet is also exotic and “may wander wild” in “the fairyland of Fancy” (p. 37). It is beautiful: “a fertile and pleasant field, pleasant as Elysium, and fertile as Tempe; it enjoys a perpetual Spring” (p. 9). And it is “sublime” (p. 103). Genius is everywhere and nowhere: in the heart, in the head (where it is manifested as a “singular natural sagacity, and most exquisite edge of thought,” pp. 34–​5), and in the hands (“Genius is a Master-​workman,” p. 25). And so, as genius follows no rules and imitates

20  Robert Wood, Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer (London, 1824), p. 16. Wood’s stance is described by Kirsti Simonsuuri in Homer’s Original Genius: Eighteenth-​Century Notions of the Early Greek Epic (1688–​1798) (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 133–​42, though the book does not bear directly on the topic of the present chapter. 21  In Germany the expression “ein Genie sein” was naturalized simultaneously, in the Versuch über das Genie by Martin Resewitz (1759), but without the same kind of synthesis; even when they valued genius, the prevalent discussions through the time of Lessing (who died in 1781) continued to subordinate it to rules and decorum. See B. Rosenthal, Der Geniebegriff des Aufklärungszeitalters (Berlin: Ebering, 1933). The subsequent major texts from Lessing through Schopenhauer are thoroughly scrutinized in Jochen Schmidt, Die Geschichte des Genie-​Gedankens, 1750–​1945 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985), vol. i. 22  Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, in a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison (London, 1759), pp. 26, 53. Shaun Irlam, Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-​ Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 221–​34, points out tendencies toward self-​ estrangement in Young’s notion of genius. But barriers in Young tend to dissolve, and meeting or finding a “Stranger within” could entail making friends with him. Other useful essays, all highlighting forms of contradiction, are Joel Weinsheimer, “Conjectures on Unoriginal Composition,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 22 (1981), 58–​73; Robert L. Chibka, “The Stranger Within: Young’s Conjectures,” ELH, 53 (1986), 541–​66; and Matthew Wickman, “Imitating Eve Imitating Echo Imitating Originality: The Critical Reverberations of Sentimental Genius in the Conjectures on Original Composition,” ELH, 55 (1988), 899–​928.

 

The Poet as Genius    217 no predecessors, no formula could encapsulate it. Hence genius is irrational. And that is what carries it into the inspired terrain of lyric verse. While Homer and Milton figure in any list of original geniuses, Conjectures is concerned with style more than with “composition” understood as form, and focuses more interest on Shakespeare and, arguably, on Pindar than on the epic poets. “There is something in Poetry beyond Prose-​reason; there are Mysteries in it not to be explained, but admired” (p. 28). Probably not by calculation but from some combination of instinct and practice, Young’s text itself drifts toward lyrical utterance, where it falls into his characteristically loose and aphoristic pentameter rhythms: “Learning we thank, Genius we revere”; “Genius is from Heaven, Learning from man” (p. 36). From the commonplaces that Johnson despised, that is, Young assembled a new image of the genius as inspired poet. Young’s fairyland of Fancy where the genius wanders wild echoes another touchstone phrase, the lines from “L’Allegro” where Milton evokes “sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child, | Warbl[ing] his native wood-​notes wild.” Young’s genius, too, is a lyricist, or, if an epic poet, then in the form of a bard—​a maker of verses and a singer of tales rather than a composer of plots. Even Milton’s “his” is a telltale marker, for genius is typically associated with “masculine melody” as opposed to the “effeminate decoration” of Pope’s Homer (Young, Conjectures, p. 59).23 Joseph Warton had likewise echoed Milton in praising “the smiling Babe” in an oft-​ quoted moment of “The Enthusiast; or, The Lover of Nature” of 1744 (line 133; lines 130–​1: “What are the Lays of artful Addison, | Coldly correct, to Shakespear’s Warblings wild?”). Yet the echoes can be misleading. Milton does not call his childlike Shakespeare a genius, and I have not found the word “genius” applied to the “L’Allegro” Shakespeare before De Quincey.24 More representative of the Shakespeare cult is Elizabeth Montagu’s enthusiasm for the Shakespearian supernatural, undergirded by a line ripped from Pope’s Essay on Man:

23 

On the common presumption that genius was masculine and on women’s struggle for recognition in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Catherine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (London: Women’s Press, 1989), pp. 71–​102. Coleridge, for instance, once called Mary Robinson “a woman of undoubted genius,” but it has been persuasively argued that “he did not take her work extremely seriously”: Kathryn Ledbetter, “‘A Woman of Undoubted Genius’: Mary Robinson and S. T. Coleridge,” Postscript, 11 (Winter 1993), 43–​9, at p. 49. Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999), paints a more intricate picture, highlighting associations of genius with exceptional sexuality (feminine, androgynous, homosexual), without oversimplifying. 24  Thomas De Quincey, “Shakespeare,” Collected Writings, ed. David Masson, 14 vols. (Edinburgh, 1889–​90), vol. iv, p. 29. August Wilhelm Schlegel went so far as to instance Milton’s lines as a faulty appraisal of the dramatist: see A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black (London, 1846), p. 347. A Google Books search for “warblings wild” brings up a mere half-​dozen other instances from the eighteenth century, one of which applies the phrase to Milton himself; none of the others concern poets. A Google Books search for “sweet and wild” led to one anonymous poem that earnestly echoes Milton’s lines, “The Rapture: On Viewing the Tomb of Shakespeare at Stratford-​upon-​ Avon,” in The London Magazine, 40 (March 1771), 169, and one poem that echoes them in half-​mocking tones: William Hamilton of Bangour, “To a Gentleman Going to Travel,” Poems on Several Occasions (Edinburgh, 1760), p. 228. There is also an “Ode to Genius” (1760) by the satirist Robert Lloyd, which echoes Milton as part of a compendium of ill-​assorted clichés and wise-​cracking attacks on dullness. See also Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 157–​86 (recomposed from Bate’s “Shakespeare and Original Genius,” in Penelope Murray (ed.), Genius: The History of an Idea (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 76–​97).

 

218   Marshall Brown “though it contains some faulty speeches, and one whole scene entirely absurd and improper, which art might have corrected or lopped away; yet genius, powerful genius only, (wild nature’s vigour working at the root!) could have produced such strong and original beauties.”25 As this passage illustrates, eighteenth-​century genius is wild, but not in Milton’s sense. The untutored, naive, inoffensive singer of genius is a Romantic or post-​Romantic construction; pre-Romantic genius is powerfully original or else a rude gift to be advanced by instruction and art.

Genius as a Lyric Species The final consequence of Young’s rhapsody actually appears to have been first drawn in Critical Observations on the Writings of the Most Celebrated Geniuses in Poetry (1770), by the Scottish writer William Duff. So far as I can see, Duff originated the presumption that “a man of Genius is really a kind of different being from the rest of his species.”26 Until then genius was seen in relation to the other attributes of poets, and to some extent to the other categories of genius, especially philosophers and scientists.27 For all its rapturous praise of genius, 25 

Elizabeth Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (1769; London: R. Priestley, 1810), p. 184. Milton’s use of “wild” to mean pleasantly artless is highly unusual. The line about Shakespeare is the first entry in OED sense 14a: “Artless, free, unconventional, fanciful, or romantic in style; having a somewhat barbaric character (usually in good sense, as a pleasing quality).” None of the other quotes suggests sweetness. Nor do the quotes at the only other positive sense, 6a: “Acting or moving freely without restraint; going at one’s own will; unconfined, unrestricted.” “Wild” in the Spectator is often paired with “extravagant” and invariably implies sublime excess, including in the essay on genius (no. 160): “There appears something nobly wild and extravagant in these great natural geniuses that is infinitely more beautiful than all the turn and polishing of what the French call a bel esprit.” For later in the century, a representative instance comes from Hugh Blair’s long-​standard text, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, first published in 1783 (New York, 1830): “In Dr. Barrow … we see a genius far surpassing the common, peculiar indeed almost to himself; but that genius often shooting wild, and unchastised by any discipline or study of eloquence” (p. 325). As Macpherson’s leading supporter in the Ossian controversy, Blair, if anyone, represents the “preromantic” norm. 26  William Duff, Critical Observations on the Writings of the most Celebrated Original Geniuses in Poetry (London, 1770), p. 339. The older usage persists in Duff ’s introduction, which looks toward “the kind and degree of Genius peculiar to each” of his celebrated geniuses (p. 2). His roster is Shakespeare and the great epic poets Homer, Ossian, Spenser, Milton, Ariosto, and Tasso. “Exuberance, wildness, and irregularity of imagination … distinguish every great genius” (p. 13); Shakespeare is distinguished by “invention,” not so much of “incidents” as of “supernatural or ideal beings” (pp. 127–​8); Ariosto, however, adds to invention of incidents and characters a third essential, which is “images” (p. 288), and finally “a sublime, soothing, and pensive melancholy … is indeed the inseparable concomitant of true Genius” (p. 345). The book is a prime example of the age’s lyric reading of epic poetry. Samuel H. Monk’s discussion of Duff in The Sublime (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1960), pp. 130–​3, understandably omits Duff ’s discussion of pensive melancholy, which, indeed, figures prominently only at the end of Critical Observations. 27  Bernhard Fabian, a very careful and learned scholar, argues that the conception of poetic genius was modeled on the scientific genius: “Der Naturwissenschaftler als Originalgenie,” in Hugo Friedrich and Fritz Schalk (eds.), Europäische Aufklärung: Herbert Dieckmann zum 60. Geburtstag (München-​ Allach: Fink, 1967), pp. 47–​68. However, the argument is limited by a focus on invention and by the concession that scientific invention (i.e., discovery) leads to poetic invention only via a “conceptual swindle” (“Begriffsmogelei,” p. 57).

 

The Poet as Genius    219 even Young’s Conjectures denies the possibility of “a general Genius,” saying that “there is no such thing in nature” (p. 84). (In Night Thoughts he had written, “Genius and Art, Ambition’s boasted Wings, | Our Boast but ill deserve”: night vi, lines 259–​60). And while Duff ’s earlier Essay on Original Genius (1767) defines “original Genius as a General talent, which may be exerted in any profession,” he still implies the older usage in saying “that the word Original, considered in connection with Genius, indicates the degree, not the kind of this accomplishment.”28 Similarly, while the phrase “true genius” is not uncommon earlier, it is always consistent with the notion of an innate proclivity to do a particular thing in the best or truest way; hence best in kind rather than of a different kind altogether.29 Duff is likewise the theorist who consolidates the association of genius with lyric poetry. His Essay on Original Genius is subtitled and Its Various Modes of Exertion in Philosophy and the Fine Arts, Particularly in Poetry, and while the long section on poetry is sandwiched between a shorter section on philosophy and another long one on “the other fine Arts,” the primacy is explicit. A philosophy predominantly composed with imaginative genius would amount to “the dreams of a romantic visionary” (p. 102). Like philosophy, eloquence must add “Judgment and Art” to imagination (p. 222), and it joins painting, music, and architecture in depending on “predecessors in the art or science” (p. 263). It is “peculiar to Poetry alone” to arise spontaneously, without requiring “long and sedulous application” (p. 262). And it is in the section on poetry where Duff waxes most eloquently enthusiastic, devoting pages to supernatural topics responsive to “the wildest and most exuberant imagination” (p. 140), more pages to the “blaze of imagery” that can “dazzle and overpower the mental sight” (p. 146) with its “inexhaustible variety of new and splendid imagery” (p. 146), and yet further pages to the “wildness of Imagination” represented by “the most lawless excursions of an original Genius” (pp. 168, 167), culminating in rapturous praise of “the Eastern manner of writing” (p. 187).30 (Early in the century the great scholar of Eastern poetry, William

28  William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius and Its Various Modes of Exertion in Philosophy and the Fine Arts, Particularly in Poetry, ed. John L. Mahoney (repr.; Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1964), p. 87. At one point Blair celebrates Aristotle as “an amazing and comprehensive genius” (Lectures, p. 386). Much earlier, though, he says, “A sort of universal genius, or one who is equally and indifferently turned towards several different professions and arts, is not likely to excel in any” (p. 30). 29  The more exceptional instances of “true genius” that I found in an incomplete pre-​1750 phrase search in Google Books come from the best-​known writers. So, an aphorism in Jonathan Swift’s “Thoughts on Various Subjects” (1706, printed 1711) reads, in its entirety, “When a true Genius appears in the World, you may know him by this infallible Sign; that the Dunces are all in Confederacy against him.” And Henry Fielding, in Tom Jones, book ix, ­chapter 1, writes that “invention and judgment … are called by the collective name of genius.” The notion that genius is a collective term rather than a specific one is unusual, yet even here, as a compound of invention and judgment, it cannot be called a distinctive kind. 30  The distance traveled by the word genius can be appreciated from a moment in Richard Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, as translated by G. Gregory (1787; London, 1815): “Every affection of the human soul, while it rages with violence, is a momentary phrenzy. When therefore a poet is able by the force of genius, or rather of imagination, to conceive any emotion of the mind so perfectly as to transfer to his own feelings the instinctive passion of another, and, agreeably to the nature of the subject, to express it in all its vigour, such a one, according to a common mode of speaking, may be said to possess the true poetic enthusiasm” (pp. 225–​6). This sounds much like Duff. The key phrase in the original Latin, however, is more measured: “Omnis animae humanae Affectio, ubi imperiosius dominatur, est brevis quidam furor: cum poeta ita ingenio vel potius imaginatione valet …” (De Sacra poesi Hebraeorum (Oxford, 1753), p. 154). Not “rages with violence,” but “dominates more imperiously,”

 

220   Marshall Brown Jones, found Eastern poetry predominantly soft and delicate, though also capable of sublimity. Only in the era of genius would it be taken for granted by many that poetry was naturally the expression of “strong passions.”31) From here a further step leads to the Romantic associations of genius with madness and to a revival of the false etymological link with jinns and evil spirits.32 In the sense that Duff ’s ideas were a step toward the different ideas of the Romantics, I have called writings like his preromantic. But the differences from Romanticism remain crucial. On the one hand, Duff ’s wildness is not Satanic. On the other hand, his genius does not produce order; that goal is accomplished with the aid of taste, still regarded as the necessary ally of genius. Kant was the thinker who bequeathed a different notion of genius to the nineteenth century when he defined it as the faculty by which nature gives rules to art. In that conception, order arises spontaneously or (in one sense of the word) “organically.” But Kant’s transcendental and moral sublime differs radically from the Longinian psychological sublime to which Duff adheres, and Kant’s organisms are self-​governing teleological machines and not the rampant jungles that Duff seems to imagine when he writes, “an irregular greatness of Imagination, implying unequal and disproportioned grandeur, is always discernible in the compositions of an original Genius” (p. 166). This is not Romanticism “in embryo.”33 which could be said even of the softer passions. And not “is able by the force of genius, or rather of imagination,” but “by his ingenium [genius? or talent?], or rather, by his imagination, succeeds in … .” 31  William Jones, “An Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern Nations,” in Works, 6 vols. (London, 1799), vol. iv, pp. 527–​48. The mistaken claim that Jones regards the nature of poetry as “the expression of strong passions and feeling” (“Ausdruck starker Leidenschaften und des Gefühls”) comes from an account of Jones’s “Essay on the Arts Called Imitative” by Herbert Dieckmann, “Zur Theorie der Lyrik im 18. Jahrhundert in Frankreich, mit gelegentlicher Berücksichtigung der englischen Kritik,” in Studien zur europäischen Aufklärung, p. 326. Jones places the adjective differently; he conjectures “that poetry was originally no more than a strong, and animated expression of the human passions” (p. 550). 32  Despite differences in vocabulary, a position similar to Duff ’s emerges from the other large treatise on genius, also by a Scotsman, Alexander Gerard’s Essay on Genius (London, 1774). What Duff calls genius, Gerard calls imagination, which he often insists must be tamed by judgment (in scientists) or by taste (in artists). Much of the long book is dedicated to the proposition that genius is mental power in general, explored through detailed discussions of all the modalities of association (i.e., of thought). The different kinds of genius are merely strengths in different aspects of imagining, remembering, and judging. But elsewhere Gerard inclines toward identifying genius per se with imagination, which is the faculty characteristically developed by poets and painters. Representative is this: “Genius is the immediate offspring of the imagination, and … it is attended by judgment in all its exertions” (p. 98, pitting genius against judgment). While he admires romantic epic less than some of his contemporaries, on the whole Gerard admires the same characteristics in poetry. Some of the ideas are anticipated in the short chapter “Of the Connexion of Taste with Genius” in Gerard’s earlier Essay on Taste (1759), though the rest of that book promotes refinement and delicacy rather than imaginative energy. Modern poets are quoted in the Essay on Genius only in the section on satire; otherwise, Cowley is mentioned once in passing, and Milton and a couple of others in the portions added in 1780. 33  The quoted phrase comes from James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981), which insistently presents Sensibility as incipient Romanticism. So, for instance, Gerard offers a notion of judgment “later pursued” by Coleridge, one of Gerard’s utterances “expresses the essential germ of an organic philosophy,” and Duff ’s “Essay on Original Genius contains in embryo several points that later typify romantic criticism” (pp. 82, 83, 85). The argument develops from reading these authors by “points” and not always organically. A more careful account, highly informative, but still clouding the gap between eighteenth-​ century and Romantic usage, is William Keach, “Poetry, after 1740,” in H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson

 

The Poet as Genius    221 Neither the aesthetics nor the poetry of the later eighteenth century can be properly appreciated by the standard of a Romantic, majestic sublimity.

The Genius of Poets While recognized geniuses were typically sublime, towering intellects like Isaac Newton and Milton, that was not the character of poets writing in the age of genius, who belonged rather to other types. One type comprised the rough, untutored figures like Homer and (by some accounts) Shakespeare—​spontaneous versifiers, or wild men. The era was notably receptive to such poets, Ossian first among them. Another type is the more or less naive prodigy like Smart, William Collins, Thomas Chatterton, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (who first toured in England at the age of 8), and Samuel Coleridge. Of course, there had always been exceptionally gifted children and adolescents like Lope de Vega, Milton, Pope, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Georg Frideric Handel, and many others. New in the period, however, was the cultish celebration of such figures on account of their youth and, it seems, the predilection toward artistic rather than intellectual genius. Equally well known is the receptivity to a third type of genius, rustic and “primitive” poets of both sexes, from the urban poor but especially from the countryside, the most famous in this period being Robert Burns.34 Again there were predecessors like John Taylor, the Tudor-​era “water poet.” In the later eighteenth century, though, many more were sought out and encouraged through patronage and publicity. And then poets might count as geniuses by virtue of their social isolation. These include not just the numerous poets notorious for their madness such as Smart, Collins, William Cowper, and William Blake (whereas earlier writers like Torquato Tasso and Richard Savage had been celebrated despite their madness), but others whose solitary nature counted as part of their poetic character, such as Thomas Gray and (in his writing years) Cowper. The concept of genius, that is, colored the perception of poets, and consequently of their writings. The most striking, if belated, example (1812) is undoubtedly the astonishing volume entitled Neglected Genius published in later life by William Henry Ireland. Ireland—​ another prodigy who made his fame in the 1790s by writing and then confessing successful Shakespeare forgeries—​manages to construe as neglected writers the following implausible array, each receiving several pages of well-​wrought rhymed couplets: Milton, Butler, Otway, Dryden, Tate, Waller, Lillo, Hammond, Goldsmith, Savage, and Chatterton. Following the celebrations of his odd collection of neglected geniuses, Ireland proceeds to shorter elegies, acrostics, and virtuoso imitations of Chatterton (in olde and modern Ynglisshe), Spenser, Milton, and Butler, along with general effusions with titles like “Delineation of the Fate of a

(eds.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. iv: The Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 141–​53. 34  Two fundamental studies of unlettered genius are Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-​Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–​1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990); and William Christmas, The Lab’ring Muses: Work, Writing, and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730–​1830 (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2001). See also c­ hapter 10, “The Poet as Laborer.”

 

222   Marshall Brown Modern Poet.” Some lines from the poem on Thomson can illustrate the fate of genius in the wake of Young: The bard of nature through each varied scene, Congeal’d or scorching—​chilling or serene. Yet what avail’d this soul-​subduing sense, This impregnation of Omnipotence? Creative genius nature’s theme imbu’d, He penn’d her dictates, and the task subdu’d; Yes, far from rustic swains and lowing herds, The lap of nature, and the choir of birds; Far from the sun’s bright beams of golden hue, That dart resplendant through ethereal blue;—​ Far from all these the poet sung his strain: No feather’d choristers, no verdant plain, No radiance unobscur’d, no azure bright, Enkindled genius, giving mental light; In London’s vortex he attun’d the string, Through realms of smoke expanded fancy’s wing; Walls were his daisied meads, his vales and hills, Walls were his nodding woods and purling rills. No checker’d scenes his kindling brain inspir’d, Fancy alone the soul of genius fir’d; Mingling with truth an energy divine.35

Ireland’s numerous echoes assimilate Thomson (“varied scene”) to Gray (“far from,” “rustic,” “lap of nature”) and Cowper (“the task”); the negatives convert opportunity into absence and absence into opportunity. Clichés like “feather’d choristers” enhance the circularity through their elegant commonplaceness, thus projecting genius as pure imagination devoid of content: “Fancy alone.” Where Alexander Gerard, in a rearguard action, tried to methodize genius via the mechanisms of Lockean association, Ireland liberates it by erasing all the significant contents of the mind. In a kind of final stage of the relevant aesthetic, genius here becomes a violently negative capability, with the violence having the emptiness of “soul-​subduing sense,” “London’s vortex,” and the kindling fire of a divinity that expends its impregnating energies on smoke. All the aporias of Young’s genius here come home to roost.

The Genius vs. the Hero Much sentimental poetry appears to substitute the genius for the hero. For heroism one has to look outside Britain. The genius of the German Genieperiode was a cynosure—​sometimes a countercultural leader of men like Friedrich Schiller’s robber Karl Moor or Goethe’s visionary Egmont, sometimes the inspiration for a cultural circle of passionate friends like the leading poet Friedrich Georg Klopstock. So, for instance, at the start of Die Räuber the sycophantic Franz Moor portrays the potential of his brother’s “blazing genius” to have made

35 

William Henry Ireland, Neglected Genius (London, 1812), pp. 40–​1.

 

The Poet as Genius    223 him “a warm friend of his friends, an excellent citizen, a hero, a great, great man,” had he not turned instead to extremes of passionate crime. But there is a notable paucity of such genius figures in the sentimental English literature of the period and even later; before the spread of German influence or outside its sphere, genius is typically isolated and retiring. The displacement continues as late as Byron’s Don Juan, whose opening, “I want a hero,” means that while he desires one, he also lacks one. Juan is repeatedly called “hero,” but always with an ironic overtone, and he is clearly an instinctive genius rather than a trained militant. Wordsworth’s solitaries likewise come to mind, but even a genuine military hero, Michel Beaupuy, appears in The Prelude like a blessed soul apart: He thro’ the events Of that great change wander’d in perfect faith, As through a Book, an old Romance or Tale Of Fairy, or some dream of actions wrought Behind the summer clouds.36

Military, political, and scientific heroes continued to be honored, of course, but especially in the context of poetry they give way to solitary natural inspiration. Instead of society the focus is on the individual, instead of accomplishment on inspiration. Young’s “Stranger within” becomes a stranger in view, wandering without home or center. The poet of genius becomes a bard; the consecutive narrative attributed to Aristotelian epic wanders into romance, with episode replacing plot; the Homeric epithet is joined or supplanted by the musical refrain, the quasi-​narrative Homeric simile by the effusion. The only generally recognized cultural genius in Britain after (and above) Pope was a German, and a musician, Handel.37

The Minstrel Falling historically between earlier rationalist suspicion and later Romantic titanism are the presumptions that genius may be manifested in disorder and relegated or self-​relegated to obscurity. Mute, inglorious Miltons or painters without hands38 are not just talented peasants, but evidence of the genius that lies latent in the countryside or in those deprived of the possibility of expression. The most distinctive expression of this creed, and initially one of the most successful, was James Beattie’s Minstrel; or, The Progress of Genius (1771/​1774), and I will conclude this chapter with some comments on it. Following the success of part i of Beattie’s romance in Spenserian stanzas, concerning Edwin’s childhood, the modest author allowed an incomplete second part to be published, mostly containing Edwin’s encounter with a moralizing hermit, then abruptly breaking off 36  William Wordsworth, The Prelude, book ix, lines 305–​9, in The Thirteen-​Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed, 2 vols. (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), vol. i, p. 239. 37  See “Ode, Sacred to the Genius of Handel, by a Gentleman of Oxford” (London, 1784). The extravagant sublimity of this ode was, however, not the majority view even of Handel. See my essay “Moods at Mid-​Century: Handel and English Literature, 1740–​1760,” in “The Tooth That Nibbles at the Soul”: Essays on Music and Poetry (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 2010), pp. 166–​98. 38  Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Emilia Galotti (1772): “Or do you think, Prince, that Raphael would not have been the greatest genius as a painter if he had had the misfortune to be born without hands?”

 

224   Marshall Brown in dejection at the death of a friend of the author’s. There is consequently very little progress actually narrated.39 In particular, Beattie’s conclusion regrets abandoning the story before Edwin’s encounter with Virgil and Homer. Not only is epic kept out of sight, but the hermit’s long homily opens onto a critique of violence. The proper study of mankind is not man, at least not Great Men, but the stranger within: Heroes, alas! are things of small concern. Could History man’s secret heart reveal, And what imports a heaven-​born mind to learn, Her transcripts to explore what bosom would not yearn! (book II, stanza xxxiv, lines 6–​9)

The substitution of the genius for the hero could hardly be more explicit. And the portrayal of the genius exactly represents the tendencies of the period. He remains a youth: driven by a desire to excel, uncorrupted by sophisticated pleasures, and awaiting the regularity that will perfect his innate abilities. At the end, however, the correction too comes from within: Of late, with cumbersome, though pompous show, Edwin would oft his flowery rhyme deface, Through ardour to adorn; but Nature now To his experienced eye a modest grace Presents, where Ornament the second place Holds, to intrinsic worth and just design Subservient still. Simplicity apace Tempers his rage: he owns her charm divine, And clears the ambiguous phrase, and lops the unwieldy line. (book II, stanza lix)

Simplicity apace: the mark of genius is unforced expression. Beattie’s prefatory advertisement praises the delightful music of the Spenserian stanza, but also announces his avoidance of obscure and difficult words. The prosody in this stanza is iconic: gentle inversions produce lines opening with the energy of verbs, closing with the stability of nouns, apart from the exceptional line-​ending, mode-​confirming “deface.” Increasingly mellifluous rhymes (place–​apace, design–​divine) illustrate the natural growth of form, while the tone is relaxed and the imitative grace perfected by the gently mimetic ironies of the harmlessly ambiguous “charm divine” (where “divine” can be either a complement of result or a delayed attributive) and of the unlopped last line. Even in its weaker second part, that is, the poem embodies the workings of a quiet genius from below. Throughout the poem, Edwin appears as a creature of nature. He indulges in wild moments that tame the sublime to a boy’s delights: And oft the craggy cliff he loved to climb, When all in mist the world below was lost. What dreadful pleasure! there to stand sublime,

39  In “Dating Orality, Thinking Balladry: Of Milkmaids and Minstrels in 1771,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 47, no. 2 (Summer 2006), 131–​49, Maureen McLane discusses Edwin’s “march toward Enlightenment” (p. 142), alert to the poem’s imagined itinerary but attributing more dynamism to the poem’s modest two-​step than I feel. There is a refreshingly informative account of the poem’s place in literary history in an old German dissertation: Kurt Püschel, James Beattie’s “Minstrel” (Berlin: Mayer & Müller, 1904).

 

The Poet as Genius    225 Like shipwrecked mariner on desert coast, And view the enormous waste of vapour, tost In billows, lengthening to the horizon round, Now scooped in gulfs, with mountains now embossed! And hear the voice of mirth and song rebound, Flocks, herds, and waterfalls, along the hoar profound! In truth he was a strange and wayward wight, Fond of each gentle, and each dreadful scene. (book I, stanzas xxi–​xxii)

Gentle and dreadful, the last line says, but by the end of the stanza Edwin is pouring “a tear of pity”: A sigh, a tear, so sweet, he wished not to controul. (book I, stanza xxii)

These lines resonated with Wordsworth, who echoes them in the ascent of Snowdon and in a Lucy ballad, omitting only the decorative Spenserianism “wight” and the artsy “embossed.” Beattie was not quite a genius, and never claimed to be one. But his balladesque romance provides the era’s yardstick for the poetic workings of what many considered genius. Edwin also has his Idiot Boy moments: The neighbours stared and sighed, yet blessed the lad: Some deemed him wondrous wise, and some believed him mad. (book I, stanza xvi)

But there is as yet no recourse to demons, no transcendence, no tormented self-​division. The neighbors can be of two minds at once: staring and “yet” simultaneously blessing. Or they can differ without any sense of conflict: some deeming “and” some believing. If we follow the lead of Beattie’s contemporaries by taking his minstrel as the type figure of the genius, then one conclusion follows to encapsulate the portrait I have been painting: genius was easier to live with back then. The preromantic genius figure of course did not die with the emergence of the commanding sublimity of Romantic genius. But it can be tricky to trace the lineaments of the softer and easier figure where the stronger outline dominates. Who can gauge the precise resonance of a word in a remote discourse? Who could ever say, moreover, how it resonated to this or that reader? Still, in one of the collection of aphorisms concluding Goethe’s last novel, Wilhelm Meister’s Journeymanship (1829), one can sense the persistence of the earlier sensibility. The novel celebrates craft labor, which an extended passage late in the novel distinguishes as “strict art,” in contrast to the easier “free arts” of painting, music, and poetry. This is the context for the aphorism: “I deny that [poesy] is an art; it is also not a science. Arts and sciences are achieved through thought, not poesy; for it is inspiration: it was received in the soul at its first stirring. It should be called neither art nor science, but genius.”40 The confusion of pronouns that conflates poetry and the soul (both sie in German) is to the point, but it is not the point. Rather, the striking element for the present purpose is that Goethe’s word for genius here is not the modern French, abstract neuter Genie, but the Roman, masculine Genius.

40 Book iii, chap. 12.

 

226   Marshall Brown Under these auspices, genius remains inspiration, but of the personal and intimate sort. Even here, at the end of Goethe’s long life, genius remains a quiet innerness—​in-​spiration, Eingebung—​and not the revolutionary force that seems to propel (but perhaps not always or not completely?) writers like Byron, Percy Shelley, or Mary Shelley. “Hats off,” Schumann said, “a Genie.” But for others the more humble moonlight of Genius still prevailed.

References Elfenbein, Andrew, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999). Engell, James, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981). Irlam, Shaun, Elations:  The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999). Kaufman, Paul, “Heralds of Original Genius,” in W. R. Castle, Jr. and Paul Kaufman (eds.), Essays in Memory of Barrett Wendell (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1926), pp. 191–​217. Keach, William, “Poetry, after 1740,” in H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (eds.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. iv: The Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 117–​67. Rosenthal, B., Der Geniebegrif des Aufklärungszeitalters (Berlin: Ebering, 1933). Schmidt, Jochen, Die Geschichte des Genie-­Gedankens, 1750–​1945 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985), vol. i.

 

Chapter 14

The P oet as  Frau d Nick Groom Four Forgers, born in one prolific age, Much critical acumen did engage. —​William Mason

In the first half of the eighteenth century, an aspiring young writer claimed to have discovered Roman verses over 1,500 years old inscribed on an ancient monument. He translated and published the poem in an edition that included the original lines, and provided a scholarly commentary. The discovery went largely unnoticed, but the writer himself was ambitious and forging a promising career as a journalist: editing fabricated parliamentary reports, composing dedications for writers he had not met and books he had not read, and spending his nights walking the streets with a convicted murderer. Within a few years of the discovery of the ancient verses this writer was caught up in a literary row about plagiarisms in Paradise Lost and Milton’s attempt to discredit Charles I by deliberately misattributing verses to him. This young writer is, of course, Samuel Johnson. Johnson was the author of the antiquarian discovery Marmor Norfolciense; or, An Essay on an Ancient Prophetical Inscription, in Monkish Rhyme, Lately Discover’d near Lynn in Norfolk, which he published under the name of “Probus Britanicus” in 1739. He concocted speeches supposedly given in the House of Commons as if he was actively reporting the words of Robert Walpole and William Pitt the Elder—​this was in any case an illegal activity, which Johnson circumvented by thinly disguising the debates with Gulliverian names and not actually attending the House: “I never had been in the gallery of the House of Commons but once.”1 He wrote the dedication to Richard Rolt’s New and Complete Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1756), declaring, “I never saw the man, and never read the book [but] I knew very well what such a Dictionary

1 

Jack Lynch, “Samuel Johnson’s ‘Love of Truth’ and Literary Fraud,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900, 42, no. 3 (2002), 601–​18, at p. 602; Arthur Murphy, An Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson, in G. B. Hill (ed.), Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), vol. i, pp. 353–​488, at p. 379.

 

228   Nick Groom should be.”2 Johnson’s chief crony at this time was the maverick Richard Savage, a poet who claimed aristocratic lineage and was obsessed by legitimacy and identity, and who had murdered a man and wounded a maidservant in a “drunken frolic”; Johnson would later write his biography. Johnson also composed the preface to William Lauder’s Essay on Milton’s Use and Imitation of the Moderns, in His Paradise Lost (dated 1750, published 1749), which falsely accused Milton of plagiarizing from Latin poets. Johnson initially supported the fabricated evidence, and although he later recanted in a postscript (presumably when he had actually read the book), he continued to endorse Lauder’s claim that Milton had libeled King Charles with plagiarism by referring to the charge in his Life of Milton—​Lauder himself described this as “a master-​piece of fraud and forgery.”3 John Nichols later recorded, “Certainly, at first, Johnson did give credit (and it is to be feared not reluctantly) to Lauder’s charges of plagiarism.”4 Lest these be thought the indiscretions of a feckless young author, Johnson later entertained the fake Formosan George Psalmanazar (author of the invented Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, 1704).5 Similarly, he tacitly accepted George Steevens’s mischief-​making in the false attributions he provided in notes to their edition of Shakespeare, and was not above devising idiosyncratic or less-​than-​objective definitions in his own Dictionary of the English Language (see, for example, s.vv. lexicographer and dull). Johnson also wrote defenses of the anthologist, poet, and “Macaroni Parson” William Dodd, in an attempt to gain a reprieve for his conviction for financial forgery and save him from the gallows—​including writing The Convict’s Address to his Unhappy Brethren, a sermon delivered by Dodd in the chapel at Newgate on June 6, 1777 and published under his name. And as a professional writer Johnson was himself haunted by plagiarism throughout his career in his Dictionary and in his variorum edition of Shakespeare (1765). He wrote about the problem in Rambler 143 and was, inevitably, accused of plagiarism himself.6 I am not suggesting that Johnson is an example of “the poet as fraud”: it is apparent within a couple of pages that Marmor Norfolciense is a satire on Prime Minister Robert Walpole, for which it was praised by Pope.7 Johnson also later regretted that his parliamentary speeches had 2  James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Together with Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson’s Diary of a Journey into North Wales, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–​64), vol. i, p. 359. 3  Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), vol. i, pp. 254, 366–​7, 386; John Nichols (ed.), Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century, 8 vols. (London, 1817–​58), vol. iv, p. 429; Johnson, Lives, vol. i, pp. 110–​11. 4  John Nichols (ed.), Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 9 vols. (London, 1812–​15), vol. v, p. 43 n. See James L. Clifford, “Johnson and Lauder,” Philological Quarterly, 54 (1975), 342–​56; Nick Groom, “Forgery, Plagiarism, Imitation, Pegleggery,” in Paulina Kewes (ed.), Plagiarism in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 74–​89; and Paul Baines, “Theft and Poetry and Pope,” in the same volume, pp. 166–​80, at pp. 172–​4. 5  See Jack Lynch, Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Aldershot & Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), p. 186. 6  Johnson’s definition of plagiarism is surprisingly mild: “Theft; literary adoption of the thoughts or works of another” (my emphasis): Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (London, 1755). John Bowle accused Johnson of plagiarism in Reflections on Originality in Authors (London, 1766), p. 64. 7 See Boswell’s Life of Johnson, vol. i, pp. 141–​3.

 

The Poet as Fraud    229 been taken as verbatim reports, and compelled Lauder to apologize in the Letter to the Reverend Mr. Douglas, Occasioned by His Vindication of Milton (1751), partly dictating the text of Lauder’s recantation. But Johnson does dominate debates about “misrepresentational literature” here and elsewhere in the period, and by sailing so close to the wind himself efficiently demonstrates that questions of literary authenticity quickly run into other areas, from satire and parody to intellectual property and professional writing to scholarly integrity and personal morality. Moreover, at a deeper level, not only does Johnson seem to have taken delight in confronting and sometimes consorting with writers of dubious reputation, he seems deliberately to have placed himself at the center of these disputes. By doing so his arguments have structured—​and have arguably dominated—​subsequent thinking on plagiarism and literary forgery.8

Forgery and Authenticity Studies The first years of the twenty-​first century saw a wholesale reassessment of the previously anecdotal field of literary forgery and authenticity studies. This work had been brewing for some years, initially inspired by Ian Haywood’s two books, The Making of History and Faking It, “constructivist” work on authorship by Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi, and major reassessments of individual authors such as Fiona Stafford’s Sublime Savage and Howard Gaskill’s Ossian Revisited.9 Contemporary writers, moreover, such as Peter Ackroyd and Peter Carey were stimulated to take the wider implications of this thinking into novels and plays with great alacrity and effectiveness.10 Since then there has been a succession of monographs investigating “fakelit,” notably Paul Baines’s House of Forgery in Eighteenth-​Century Britain, Jack Lynch’s Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-​Century Britain, Margaret Russett’s Fictions and Fakes:  Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–​1845, and Robert Macfarlane’s Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-​Century Literature, in addition to a steady stream of articles and book chapters on individual writers, most notably James Macpherson (Ossian) and Thomas Chatterton.11 It is clear from this wide-​ranging material that the genres of “fakelit”—​forgery, 8 

Lynch, “Samuel Johnson’s ‘Love of Truth,’ ” p. 602. See Ian Haywood, The Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteenth-​Century Ideas of History and Fiction (London: Associated University Presses, 1986), and Faking It (Brighton: Harvester, 1987); Martha Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994); Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (eds.), The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1994); Fiona Stafford, The Sublime Savage: James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1988); and Howard Gaskill (ed.), Ossian Revisited (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1991). 10  Peter Ackroyd’s radio play Chatterton: The Allington Solution (broadcast BBC Radio 4, May 1, 2008) updates his novel, Chatterton: A Novel (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987); Peter Carey, My Life as a Fake (London: Faber & Faber, 2003). 11  Paul Baines, House of Forgery in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); Margaret Russett, Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–​1845 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006); and Robert Macfarlane, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-​Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007). See also Nick Groom, The Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature (London: Picador, 2002). 9 

 

230   Nick Groom plagiarism, counterfeiting (pirate printing), and imposture—​form part of a much wider panorama of activities and practices. Authenticity in the long eighteenth century covers a challenging range of disciplines, from philosophy to the law, from historiography to travel writing, from medical science to literature, and is consequently entangled in questions of subjectivity and identity, legal definitions of coining and forging, antiquarian collecting and scientific experimentation, and the changing conception of the figure of the artist in a mass-​ consumer market. At the same time, there remains a strong aversion to these reconfigurations of the field. For some, such as Christopher Ricks, “crimes of writing” are essentially moral rather than critical issues.12 Fakelit has traditionally been relegated outside the academy of letters as an anecdotal category beyond normal critical attention.13 Instead, these writers are criminal, or somehow deranged, or simply con-​artists manipulating their readers with “chicanery” (a favorite term among the detractors). Revealingly, this position mimics that of Samuel Johnson—​in fact, the Johnsonian agenda is actively maintained by certain critics.14 In other words, the role historically played by Johnson encourages the replication of Johnsonian—​ or quasi-​Johnsonian—​judgments that refute more contemporary forms of analysis, even though the case of Johnson is rather less than clear-​cut. It is this more ambiguous, contrary to Johnson who haunts this chapter, “The Poet as Fraud.”

The Crime of Falsification In “A New Preface by the Booksellers,” added to Lauder’s Essay in December 1750, John Payne and Joseph Bouquet condemned the work but justified their reissue: “we now sell his book only as A curiosity of fraud and interpolation, which all the ages of literature cannot equal.”15 The word “fraud” encompasses both plagiarism (stealing the words of another) and forgery (passing off one’s own work as the work of another)—​although in fact fraud, plagiarism, and forgery were used almost interchangeably at the time.16 Johnson himself defines fraud in his Dictionary with a string of invective: “Deceit; cheat; trick; artifice; subtility; stratagem,” and the now-​obsolete fraudful as “Treacherous; artful; trickish; deceitful; subtle.”17 His predecessor

12  Christopher Ricks, “Plagiarism,” in Kewes (ed.), Plagiarism in Early Modern England, pp. 21–​40, especially p. 37. The phrase “crimes of writing” derives from Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991). 13  Robert Miles, “Trouble in the Republic of Letters: The Reception of the Shakespeare Forgeries,” Studies in Romanticism, 44, no. 3 (2005), 317–​40, at pp. 318–​19. 14  See Howard Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993); see also Thomas Curley, Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009) and the subsequent review in Johnsonian News Letter, 52 (2011), 46–​56. 15  William Lauder, An Essay on Milton’s Use and Imitation of the Moderns, in His Paradise Lost (London, 1751), p. iii. 16  See John Douglas, Milton No Plagiary; or, A Detection of the Forgeries Contained in Lauder’s Essay on the Imitation of the Moderns in the Paradise Lost (London, 1756), p. 54. 17  Dictionary (1755); “subtility” may give us pause.

 

The Poet as Fraud    231 Nathan Bailey has “a Deceit, Guile, Cunning, Cheat, Cousenage,” and subsequently “Craftiness, Knavery.”18 In the case of forgery, Johnson connects it with counterfeiting and falsification—​ specifically “The crime of falsification” (my emphasis)—​and quotes Jonathan Swift: “a Forgery, in setting a false Name to a Writing, which may prejudice another’s Fortune, the Law punishes the Offender with the Loss of his Ears; but has inflicted no adequate Penalty for doing the same Thing in Print, though all and every individual Book so sold under a false Name, are manifestly so many several and multiplied Forgeries.”19 Bailey defines a forger (in law) as “one who makes and publishes false Writings.” So fraud is the work of the devil (Johnson quotes Milton twice, in addition to Richard Hooker and Jeremy Taylor); forgery is focused on the profession of writing—​the arena we would now define as “intellectual property.” Bailey’s definition of plagiarism reinforces this, and also refers back to the word’s classical source in Martial, a kidnapper of books: a plagiary is “one who steals other Peoples Works, and puts them out under his own Name; a Book-​Thief; also one who steals other Mens Children or servants to sell them into a foreign Country; a Kidnapper.” So too Johnson: “A thief in literature; one who steals the thoughts or writings of another,” the shadow of Martial evident in the definition of plagiarism itself: “Theft; literary adoption of the thoughts or works of another.” Johnson quotes John Dryden: Without invention, a painter is but a copier, and a poet but a plagiary of others. Both are allowed sometimes to copy and translate; but, as our author tells you, that is not the best part of their reputation. Imitators are but a servile kind of cattle, says the poet; or at best, the keepers of cattle for other men; they have nothing which is properly their own.20

James Boswell confirms this knot of associations in a digression on “literary fraud” in his Life of Johnson (1791). Richard Rolt, the gentleman for whom Johnson wrote a preface without seeing the book, was a “singular character” not above scraping acquaintance with Johnson: “Though not in the least acquainted with him, he used to say, ‘I am just come from Sam. Johnson.’ ” Dilating on the pathetic vanity of Rolt leads Johnson to recall a story that Rolt published Mark Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination in Dublin under his own name.21 Boswell goes on to recount that “Several instances of such literary fraud have been detected”: Alexander Innes, who published the manuscript of Archibald Campbell’s ΑΡΕΤΗ-​ ΛΟΓIΑ; or, An Enquiry into the Original of Moral Virtue (1728) as his own; William Douglas, who published The Resurrection (1747), a poem by Hugh Blair and George Bannantyne, likewise as his own; and, most remarkably, John Eccles. Eccles was so desperate to be recognized as the author of the cult classic, The Man of Feeling (published anonymously by Henry Mackenzie in 1771), that he “had been at the pains to transcribe the whole book, with blottings, interlineations, and corrections, that it might be shown to several people as an original.”

18  Bailey also has fraudation, a noun omitted by Johnson: see Nathan Bailey, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, 9th ed. (London, 1740). 19  Jonathan Swift, Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, 2 vols. (London, 1727), vol. i, p. 5. Swift defined forgery as a crime in Gulliver’s Travels, a book that actually carries the title Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (London, 1726), and the authorship attribution “Lemuel Gulliver” (vol. ii, p. 57). 20  John Dryden, “A Parallel betwixt Poetry and Painting,” in Select Essays on the Belles Lettres (Glasgow, 1750), p. 316; and Groom, “Unoriginal Genius: Plagiarism and the Construction of ‘Romantic’ Authorship,” in Lionel Bently, Jennifer Davis, and Jane C. Ginsburg (eds.), Copyright and Piracy: An Interdisciplinary Critique (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 271–​99. 21  No copy has been found with Rolt’s name on the title page (ODNB).

 

232   Nick Groom So convincing was Eccles that, after his untimely death, an epitaph in verse duly celebrated him as “The Man of Feeling.”22 Boswell concludes this little disquisition with the observation: The Filiation of a literary performance is difficult of proof; seldom is there any witness present at its birth. A man, either in confidence or by improper means, obtains possession of a copy of it in manuscript, and boldly publishes it as his own. The true author, in many cases, may not be able to make his title clear.23

In all of these Johnsonian anecdotes, authors are categorically denied the authorship of their own works: the cases are extreme examples of plagiarism, or rather they fit Swift’s definition of forgery—​and they are certainly fraudulent. This literary malpractice is, however, really a sister to book piracy: the crime of publishing without consent (or indeed payment) encoded in the Copyright Act of 1709–​10. What Johnson is arguing is that not only booksellers but also bad authors should be prosecuted for copyright infringement and under the wrath of the law. Instead, however, they are likely at worst simply to be publicly humiliated. Campbell, as a case in point, had no legal recourse but could only expose Innes’s “Imposture” and call him “shamefully ignorant.”24 As Paul Baines has pointed out, a spoof bill against literary forgery appeared in the Grub-​Street Journal (1731) against writers “affixing the names of deceased persons to their own works, in order to raise the price thereof,” and “if any person shall be hereof duly convicted … he or she shall suffer the punishment inflicted on persons convicted of forgery.”25 The imitation of living authors was particularly reprehensible—​it was theft, either, as Baines argues, of work produced (plagiarism) or of style (forgery). Although these definitions were never stable, it is worth investigating them further.26

Plagiarism Plagiarism was a charge frequently and often justifiably made in Grub Street, the theater, and the wider literary world, and authorial comments prefaced to plays resound with accusations of and defenses against wrongful appropriation.27 William Philips was accused of plagiarizing The Revengeful Queen (1698) from Sir William Davenant’s Tragedy of Albovine, King of the Lombards (1629); he refutes the charge in his dedication. Nicholas Rowe’s Fair Penitent (1703) was “modelled on, indebted to, and plagiarized from” Philip Massinger’s Fatal Dowry (c.1618); Johnson, however, wrote that “there is scarcely any work of any poet at once so interesting by the fable, and so delightful by the language.”28 Susanna Centlivre’s play Love at a Venture (1706) was promptly plagiarized by Colley Cibber as The Double Gallant (1707), a charge obliquely referred to in Cibber’s address “To the Reader” and the prologue. 22 

23  Boswell’s Life of Johnson, vol. i, pp. 360–​1. Gentleman’s Magazine, 46 (1777), 404, 452. Archibald Campbell, An Enquiry into the Original of Moral Virtue (Edinburgh, 1733), pp. xxxi–​xxxii. 25  Quoted from Memoirs of the Society of Grub-​Street, 2 vols. (London, 1737), vol. ii, p. 174. See Baines, House of Forgery, p. 38, which quotes with variants from the Grub-​Street Journal, 97 (Nov. 11, 1731). 26  See Baines, House of Forgery, p. 96. 27  See Paulina Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660–​1710 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 5–​6, 112–​21. 28 Johnson, Lives, vol. ii, p. 200; and Arthur Sherbo’s biography of Rowe, ODNB. 24 

 

The Poet as Fraud    233 Perhaps most notably, Lewis Theobald’s tragedy The Perfidious Brother (1715) opened with a preface defending the work against the accusation of plagiarism by Henry Mestayer, a watchmaker. According to Theobald, Mestayer had brought a draft of the play to him, and Theobald spent four months rewriting the draft “and believe I may pretend to have created it anew: For even where the Original Matter is continued, I have brought it to Light, and drawn it as from a Chaos.”29 Mestayer responded with a second edition in 1720, sarcastically dedicated to Theobald for his generosity in “Fathering” the play, and noting that “The major Part of the Authors of this Age are a Company of sly, cautious Plagiaries, pilfering here and there a Thought, or a Line, and so compounding an Olio, which they palm on the town for their own.”30 Meanwhile, Edward Kidder’s recipes featured in his Receipts of Pastry and Cookery, for the Use of his Scholars (1740?) were regularly plagiarized throughout the century; John Andrews copied much of his four-​volume History of the War with America, France, Spain, and Holland (1785–​6) from the Annual Register; and Ralph Dodd took most of his Short Historical Account of the Greater Part of the Principal Canals in the Known World (1795) from John Phillips’s General History of Inland Navigation, Foreign and Domestic (1792).31 There were also more creative uses of plagiarism. Thomas Parnell, for instance, played a particularly elaborate plagiarism hoax on Pope. Pope was reading The Rape of the Lock to Swift before it was published, while Parnell, who happened to be in the house, went in and out without seeming to take any notice. However, he was very diligently employed in listening, and was able, from the strength of his memory to bring away the whole description of the toilet pretty exactly. This he versified [into Latin] … and the next day when Pope was reading his poem to some friends; Parnell insisted that he had stolen that part of the description from an old monkish manuscript. An old paper with the Latin verses was soon brought forth, and it was not till after some time that Pope was delivered from the confusion which it at first produced.32

This is a rare example of Pope being bested—​and particularly apt bearing in mind that Pope was perpetually being accused of plagiarism himself and was obsessed with plagiarism in The Dunciad (1728, 1729).33 Pope and his fellow Scriblerians experimented with pseudonyms, authorial ventriloquism, and sharp practice to strengthen their satirical attacks, but The Dunciad is absolutely saturated with plagiarism, from the false imprint “A. Dod” to the paratexts and footnotes that liberally lift lines and sentences from other works to create a variorum edition (1729), and from the hyperallusive and imitative style of the verse to the action itself—​which includes the plagiarist James Moore Smythe.34 “The phantom More” is formed

29  Lewis Theobald, The Perfidious Brother, a Tragedy (London, 1715), sig. A3r. The English Short Title Catalogue attributes the play to Henry Mestayer. 30  Henry Mestayer, The Perfidious Brother, a Tragedy, 2nd ed. (London, 1720), sig. A2r–​v. 31 See ODNB. 32  Oliver Goldsmith, The Life of Thomas Parnell, D.D. Archdeacon of Clogher (London, 1770), p. 46. 33  See Alexander Pope’s “Testimonies of Authors” in The Dunciad, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–​69), vol. v, pp. 23–​47; Baines, “Theft and Poetry and Pope,” p. 167; and Joseph V. Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope, 1711–​1744: A Descriptive Bibliography (London: Methuen, 1969). 34  See John Arbuthnot, John Bull Still in His Senses: Being the Third Part of Law Is a Bottomless-​ Pit: Printed from a Manuscript Found in the Cabinet of the Famous Sir Humphry Polesworth: And Publish’d, (as Well as the Two Former Parts) by the Author of the New Atalantis (London, 1712).

 

234   Nick Groom by the Queen of Dulness from air: “senseless, lifeless! idol void and vain!” as the prize for the booksellers’ race.35 The prize is inevitably won by the cloacal Edmund Curll, whereupon More vanishes—​the plagiarist is disassembled as his work is returned to its sources: Songs, sonnets, epigrams the winds uplift, And whisk ’em back to Evans, Young, and Swift.36

Even his foppish clothes are unpaid for and seized by the tailor: No rag, no scrap, of all the beau, or wit, That once so flutter’d, and that once so writ.37

Moore himself was relentlessly attacked in The Dunciad and Pope’s later work as if Pope were trying to fictionalize him, to make him wholly a product of plagiarism: “No Gentleman! no man! no-​thing! no name!”38 It was an attack that could evidently have had only one cause: an accusation of plagiarism against Pope. Moore Smythe had accused Pope of plagiarism—​and with some justification: Pope took six lines from Moore Smythe’s play The Rival Modes (1727) for “To Mrs. M.B. [Martha Blount]. Sent on Her Birth-​Day” (1728).39 The Moore Smythe suit notwithstanding, Pope’s allusive style and the poetic cult of imitation, not to mention his scathingly accurate parodies, meant that at a time when the definition and understanding of plagiarism were extremely fluid he regularly risked accusations of literary malpractice. This is why plagiarism is woven so deeply into the texture of The Dunciad:  it is a prophylactic. Pope protects himself by constantly invoking and evoking plagiarism. But parody and satire, like allusion and imitation, are not really plagiaristic. Yet Pope is no fraudulent poet; satire is the obverse of the compositional technique of imitation.

Forgery Forgery too was a compelling literary subject, both in and out of books. Samuel Richardson’s rake Lovelace forged letters (Clarissa, 1747–​9); so did Hamlet. Gabriel Odingsells wrote a comic play that turned on a forged will masterminded by Colonel Mock-​Youth and Serjeant Forge-​Proof, who then appears to haunt the salacious old man (in reality the ghost is various other characters in disguise), and anxieties over the authenticity of documents hang over early Gothic novels such as Sophia Lee’s Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times (1785).40 The provenance of texts was frequently manipulated in more daring ways. William Combe edited two collections of the correspondence of Laurence Sterne—​Sterne’s Letters to His Friends on Various Occasions (1775) and Letters Supposed to Have Been Written by Yorick and Eliza (1779)—​which mixed genuine letters with Combe’s imitations and fantasies, thereby embarking “on a lifelong habit of conflating the factual and the fictional and misleading his

35 Pope, Dunciad, book ii, line 46 (vol. v, p. 298).   

36  Ibid., lines 115–​16 (vol. v, p. 301). Ibid., lines 119–​20.    38 Pope, Poems, vol. vi, pp. 326–​7. 39  See Baines, “Theft and Poetry and Pope,” pp. 166–​7 1; Pope, Poems, vol. vi, p. 247 n; the lines were later adapted for Epistle to a Lady: On the Character of Women (1735). 40  Gabriel Odingsells, The Capricious Lovers (London, 1726), pp. 55, 57, 68. 37 

 

The Poet as Fraud    235 contemporaries (as well as subsequent scholars and biographers).”41 Combe’s technique was to cut and paste from the real material he had, and then to expand it liberally. Combe made little secret of his activities and may have thought he was somehow textually engaging with Sterne. Not so the Warton brothers and the careful poetic monument they erected to their father, Thomas Warton the Elder, master of Basingstoke Grammar School. The sons, Thomas the Younger and Joseph, posthumously edited their father’s work for Poems on Several Occasions (1748), and they included among the expected sophisticated and urbane verses many verses of a more introspective nature. Thomas the Elder was subsequently hailed as a pioneer of Romanticism, inspired by nature and antiquity and solitude. David Fairer, however, discovered “not only that Joseph Warton sometimes heavily edited and improved his father’s verses, but that he and his brother wrote at least ten of the poems themselves.”42 Fairer does not use the word “forgery” to describe this, although it is clear that the Wartons were motivated by money (or, more precisely, by debt)—​rather, he sees it as remarkable evidence of the poetic precociousness of the two brothers and tactfully avoids passing judgment. In 1780, Joseph Warton for one eventually expressed his concerns to John Nichols, who was minded to include some of the pieces in an anthology of Miscellaneous Poems: “I must now earnestly entreat you, for many strong reasons, not to select any thing out of the collection you mention of my Father’s, 1748. And I am sure you will oblige me by believing that I do not ask this without reason.”43 The Warton enterprise is clearly a forgery on the grounds expounded by the Grub-​Street Journal (“affixing the names of deceased persons to their own works, in order to raise the price thereof ”), whatever arguments there may be for clemency based on family loyalties. But while the Warton case teeters on the brink of forgery it does not exactly plummet into the abyss of controversy, and other writers exposed themselves to far more legal risk. Henry Fielding, for instance, was related to the earls of Denbigh and Desmond, who claimed descent from the Habsburgs. Consequently, Fielding felt justified in using the imperial eagle of Austria as his seal; however, the ancestral claim relied on papers forged by Basil Feilding, the Second Earl of Denbigh. Mary Barber, meanwhile, an aspiring poet, had caught Swift’s eye and he enthusiastically endorsed her work—​although not to the extent of praising her in a letter to Queen Caroline in 1731: Swift’s signature on the document, it appears, was forged.44 Worse still were Nicholas Tindal and Eustace Budgell. Tindal, a historian and nephew of the deist theologian Matthew Tindal, effectively accused Budgell and the widow Lucy Price of forging his uncle’s will in A Copy of the Will of Dr. Matthew Tindal (1733), a forensic pamphlet that claimed Budgell and Price had inveigled their way into the theologian’s affections in the last weeks of his life. In his attack, Tindal remarked on the odd style in which the

41  Vincent Carretta, ODNB. See Harlan Hamilton, Doctor Syntax: A Silhouette of William Combe, Esq. (1742–​1823) (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1969). 42  David Fairer, “The Poems of Thomas Warton the Elder?,” Review of English Studies, n.s., 26, nos. 103–​4 (1975), 287–​300, 395–​406, at p. 289. 43 Nichols, Anecdotes, vol. vi, p. 171: quoted by Fairer, p. 406. In “The Poems of Thomas Warton the Elder?—​A Postscript” (RES, n.s., 29, no. 113 (1978), 61–​5. 44 See Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington, ed. A. C. Elias, Jr., 2 vols. (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1997), vol. i, p. 391. The letter was dated June 22, 1731; Swift implied that it was a practical joke (Nichols, Illustrations, vol. v, pp. 378, 384) and complained about the affair to Pope (July 20, 1731, see also letter to Lady Suffolk, July 24, 1731) (DNB).

 

236   Nick Groom will was written, the omission of certain words, the curious fact that the will was in Price’s hand and witnessed by Budgell’s footman, the extravagant praise of Budgell it contained, and the equally extravagant legacy it bequeathed him—​a legacy that Nicholas Tindal had been assured would be his.45 Budgell was a character with, as Baines memorably puts it, “a persecution mania of Shelleyan proportions”: he believed, for instance, that Robert Walpole was out to kill him. Consequently Budgell was no stranger to litigation (or to conviction) and responded in his magazine The Bee by attacking Edmund Curll, the notorious pirate printer who had seen his chance and insinuated his way into the row, cashing in with A True Copy of the Last Will and Testament of That Famous Free-​Thinker Matthew Tindall, LL.D. (1733) and supporting Nicholas Tindal’s claim. Budgell shifted the accusation of legal forgery to literary forgery (i.e., Curlliana), thundering: This Curll of all thy Crimes the Measure fills, Thou Forger of Mens Works, and Hawker of their Will All wholesome Chastisements are lost on thee, Thou Scandal to the Rod and Pillory. “Since now the Circle of thy Reign’s compleat, “Thy Ev’ning Glory must at Tyburn set.[”]46

Bizarrely, Budgell now imagined that Pope was behind everything (despite the fact that Pope was one of Curll’s most tireless opponents) and, to confuse matters further, a letter was sent to Walpole signed by Nicholas Tindal, but somehow in the hand of Lucy Price, Budgell’s shadowy accomplice who had also apparently written Matthew Tindal’s will. As Baines argues, the forgery contaminates everything within the case: “forging letters, meddling with texts, misquotation, political propaganda and editing the New Testament all emerged from this single controversy as kinds of literary activity cognate with criminal forgery.”47 Legal action began in 1733 and progressed in fits and starts; four years later Budgell’s body was fished out of the Thames, and speculation about the will was reignited. Not for the only time in the period would literature and forgery be seen as a suicidal combination.

The Poem as Fraud? These examples of literary malpractice strikingly demonstrate that the understanding of plagiarism and forgery not only overlapped but was frankly confused—​and the confusion

45  Nicholas Tindal, A Copy of the Will of Dr. Matthew Tindal, with an Account of What Pass’d concerning the Same, between Mrs. Lucy Price, Eustace Budgell Esq; and Mr. Nicolas Tindal (London, 1733), pp. 8–​9. The forensic evidence analysis throughout this pamphlet, which also includes details of a strongbox, challenges Lynch’s comment on evidence (Deception and Detection, p. 53). In a later compilation of criminal trials, The Bloody Register (London, 1764) such forensic evidence occurs: see Nick Groom (ed.), The Bloody Register, 4 vols. (London: Routledge, 1999), vol. ii, p. 114; vol. iii, pp. 217, 186. 46  Eustace Budgell, The Bee; or, Universal Weekly Pamphlet, 3 (1733), 1554; italics and roman reversed. 47 Baines, House of Forgery, p. 50; one could also add book piracy to this list. Baines also points out that Paul Wells, the guardian of Ann Eustace, Budgell’s natural daughter, was executed for forgery in 1749 (ODNB).

 

The Poet as Fraud    237 increases dramatically when examples are brought in from outside literature. Mary Toft gave birth to seventeen rabbits in 1726 before the extraordinary deliveries were exposed as a somewhat gruesome hoax.48 Elizabeth Canning claimed to have lived on bread and water for a month following her abduction and imprisonment in a brothel; two women were convicted of the crime before being pardoned, and Canning herself was convicted of perjury and transported. This affair provoked a media storm in 1753: the “Canningites” defending Canning and the “Egyptians” attacking her (the latter so named as Mary Squires, one of those originally convicted and sentenced to death, was a Gypsy).49 Johnson meanwhile enquired into the “Cock Lane Ghost” mystery concerning a knocking ghost; the spirit was apparently impersonated by a child, Elizabeth Parsons, acting under the instruction of her father who was exacting revenge for a civil law suit. Johnson’s debunking account was published in the Gentleman’s Magazine (1762); despite this, Johnson was nevertheless accused by Charles Churchill of believing in the manifestation.50 Such medical, legal, and supernatural impostures, compromised as they are by claims and counter-​claims, are liable to muddy further already muddy waters—​and neither do they assist in explaining how poetry may be “fraudulent.” Instead, I propose shifting attention from the poet (who may be a plagiarist or even a forger, but remains a poet) and focusing on the text. If the category of poets as “frauds” in the period is going to be of critical value, it needs clarity, and that clarity is provided by the conceit of textual retrieval: the “found” manuscript, or manuscrit trouvé. What this reveals is the abdication of authorial identity and the authentic poetic voice to the antiquarian practices of research and editing. These writers were not claiming to be writers, but instead presented themselves as part of the media of transmission and dissemination, part of the process by which literature reaches the reading public. Textual retrieval, especially of the manuscrit trouvé, is now chiefly acknowledged as a staple of the sentimental novel, such as Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling (1771), in which it is alleged that the text has been retrieved from papers torn up to provide gun-​wadding, and of the Gothic novel—​most obviously in Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), which purports to be a translation of a printed text discovered in a library. Mackenzie’s novel was furthermore an anonymous publication (which admittedly as described above created its own problems), whereas Walpole’s novel was in the first edition credited to Onuphrio Muralto, as translated by one William Marshall.51 Several poems and plays were also presented as discoveries. Theobald, for instance, claimed that his play Double Falshood (1727) was based on a Shakespearean original, and in the printed version of the play there is an overwhelming emphasis on authenticity. Double Falshood was subtitled Written originally by W. Shakespeare; and now Revised and Adapted to the Stage by Mr. Theobald, the Author of Shakespeare Restor’d. Theobald requested that patron and dedicatee George Dodington “pronounce this Piece genuine” to “silence the Censures of those Unbelievers, who think

48  See Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-​Century England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995); and Lynch, Deception and Detection, pp. 142–​4. 49  See Lynch, Deception and Detection, pp. 91–​6. 50  Boswell’s Life of Johnson, vol. i, pp. 406–​8 n; see also Daniel Defoe, A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal, the Next Day after Her Death: To One Mrs. Bargrave at Canterbury: The 8th of September, 1705 (London, 1706). 51  For anonymity, see John Mullan, Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (London: Faber & Faber, 2008).

 

238   Nick Groom it impossible a Manuscript of Shakespeare could so long have lain dormant,” and Philip Frowde’s prologue thanks the deliverance of Shakespeare’s “last Child,” “Lost to the World.”52 Theobald’s preface presents details of his manuscripts—​their age, handwriting, provenance, and theories of transmission; he considers sources and the possibility that it is actually by John Fletcher—​which he dismisses; and so in doing so, Theobald explicitly presents himself “as an Editor, not an Author.”53 Double Falshood never appeared in any collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays—​not even Theobald’s own (1733–​4). Later scholars, however, have tentatively identified Double Falshood as a rewrite of the lost play Cardenio, supposedly by Shakespeare and Fletcher. So although Double Falshood has been treated as a forgery for centuries, there is nevertheless a “strong counter-​tradition which has characterised the text as an authentic, if mangled, redaction of the lost Cardenio”—​a counter-​tradition that has recently received considerable impetus from Arden publishing an edition of the play as part of the Arden Shakespeare, third series, in 2011.54 Ironically, Theobald’s insistence that despite similarities to Fletcher the text was written by Shakespeare has subsequently strengthened his claim as stylometric evidence for Shakespeare’s collaborations has grown. Johnson’s Marmor Norfolciense was therefore in diverse company. Another antique verse, Colin and Lucy, was published anonymously in 1755, supposedly from an Elizabethan manuscript dated 1564. The author, Andrew Hervey Mills, presented the ballad as if its value was historical: “the reader is left to judge, how different the productions of that time would shew (had more of them been, fortunately, preserved) compared to those of the present age.”55 The ballad told the traditional story of Lucy drowning on the way to her wedding, but three lines were given in variant readings due to the alleged illegibility of the manuscript. This is not obviously satirical but appears to be a modest encomium of unrequited love. “Colin and Lucy” therefore “unparodies,” in Claude Rawson’s resonant phrase, the editorial playfulness of Scriblerian satire to create more serious opportunities for the conceit of the fragmentary or incoherent manuscrit trouvé.56 Inevitably, the medium became part the message—​a reminder of transience, decay, and antiquity—​and the poet became an editor.

The Editor as Fraud James Macpherson’s Ossian took this antiquarian model of composition and magnified it into a controversy on authenticity. Macpherson supplemented manuscript retrieval with the 52 

Lewis Theobald, Double Falshood; or, The Distrest Lovers (London, 1728), sigs. A3v–​A4r, A7r.

53 Theobald, Double Falshood, sig. A5v. The play went through three editions in a year. 54 

Jennifer Richards and James Knowles, introduction, in Richards and Knowles (eds.), Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1999), p. 18; Double Falsehood; or, The Distressed Lovers, ed. Brean Hammond (London: A. & C. Black, 2010); and Tiffany Stern, “‘The Forgery of Some Modern Author’?: Theobald’s Shakespeare and Cardenio’s Double Falsehood,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 62, no. 4 (2011), 555–​93. 55  Andrew Hervey Mills, Colin and Lucy: A Fragment (London, 1755), p. [2]; republished as “Allen and Ella: A Fragment,” in Andrew Hervey Mills, Bagatelles (London, 1767), pp. 32–​9. 56  Claude Rawson, “Unparodying and Forgery: The Augustan Chatterton,” in Nick Groom (ed.), Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 15–​31.

 

The Poet as Fraud    239 contested authority of oral tradition, presenting himself as an editor and translator restoring ancient poems from these shadowy sources: “there only remain a few fragments in the hands of the translator. Tradition has still preserved, in many places, the story of the poems.”57 He refers to manuscripts in the first collection of Fragments of Ancient Poetry, both endorsing and repudiating the manuscript conceit: “In a fragment of the same poems, which the translator has seen, a Culdee or Monk is represented as desirous to take down in writing from the mouth of Oscian [sic] … his warlike atchievements and those of his family”; but Oscian/​ Ossian, the manuscript reports, refuses.58 Those “fragments” that comprised Fragments were subject to revision as more evidence emerged. In Temora Macpherson observes that his sources were occasionally in conflict. Regarding the death of Oscar and his relationship to Ossian, he writes, “A more correct copy of that fragment, which has since come to the translator’s hands, has enabled him to correct the mistake.”59 Subsequently, in the notes Temora (1763), he made his statement of common sense editorial protocols: “The reader will find some alterations in the style of this book. These are drawn from more correct copies of the original which came to my hands, since the former publication.”60 Macpherson also remarked that he had been advised to publish proposals “for printing by subscription the whole Originals, as a better way of satisfying the public concerning the authenticity of the poems, than depositing manuscript copies in any public library.” This he claims he did, but there were no subscribers; however, he still planned to print the “Originals,” and “if this publication shall not take place, copies will then be deposited in one of the public libraries, to prevent so ancient a monument of genius from being lost.”61 But by the publication of Temora, Macpherson declared that it was unnecessary to print any of the original Gaelic of Fingal, “as a copy of the originals lay, for many months, in the bookseller’s hands, for the inspection of the curious.”62 “A Specimen of the Original of Temora” was, however, printed, beginning O Linna doir-​choille no Leigo, Air uair, eri’ ceo tabh-​ghórm nan tón˘.63

There is, then, a thread of manuscript retrieval running through Ossian. The Ossian controversy is too well known to rehearse here. It is arguable, however, that Macpherson should be considered an example of the poet as “fraud.” He was a poet, but Ossian was not exactly poetry: it was written in poetic prose—​a new and potent style that

57  James Macpherson, “A Dissertation concerning the Antiquity, &c. of the Poems of Ossian the Son of Fingal,” in Fingal, an Ancient Epic Poem, in Six Books: Together with Several Other Poems, Composed by Ossian the Son of Fingal (London, 1762), pp. xiv–​xv. 58  James Macpherson, Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Galic or Erse Language (Edinburgh, 1760), p. iv. 59  James Macpherson, Temora extract in Fingal, p. 190 n; see also p. 69 n. 60  James Macpherson, Temora, an Ancient Epic Poem, in Eight Books: Together with Several Other Poems, Composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal (London, 1763), p. 4 n; for variant MSS see Temora, pp. 73, 142. 61  James Macpherson, advertisement, in Fingal, sig. A2r; for oral tradition in Fingal, see “A Dissertation concerning the Antiquity, &c.,” p. xiii. 62 Macpherson, Temora, p. 226; see Howard Gaskill, “What Did James Macpherson Really Leave on Display at His Publisher’s Shop in 1762?,” Scottish Gaelic Studies, 16 (1990), 67–​89. 63  The sample occupies twenty pages (pp. 227–​47).

 

240   Nick Groom electrified readers across Europe.64 Yet revealingly, the works were promptly attacked for imitation: “Dr. Hurd did not believe its general authenticity, and said if it were worth while he could point out a variety of imitations from other writers in it.”65 If it was fraudulent literature, it was fraudulent because it was plagiaristic. Editorial activity was, however, liable to be drawn into the web of fraud. Thomas Percy was severely censured for his sometimes whimsical editing in Reliques of Ancient Poetry (1765). In 1782 Joseph Ritson condemned this as tantamount to forgery: “Dr. (now Bp.) Percy, in printing this song, has taken some liberties with the orthography and language (and where is the piece with which he has not taken such liberties?).”66 Percy’s editing has received extensive consideration elsewhere, but it is worth pausing over his verse “The Friar of Orders Gray,” a densely allusive piece that was composed of untraced ballad fragments quoted by Shakespeare.67 “The Friar of Orders Gray” is not plagiaristic, but it does rework the technique of imitation into a more subtle model of intertextuality that would take at least a century to become accepted. In the meantime, it was soon taken as a genuine Elizabethan song—​or at least circulated with that inference. Furthermore, Percy’s pioneering long narrative ballad The Hermit of Warkworth (1771) was itself actively antiquated in Helen Craik’s novel Henry of Northumberland; or, The Hermit’s Cell (1800). In the preface, Craik describes how an old chest of papers that has lain in a country house is opened up to provide entertainment of the company: “Amongst the number was a manuscript, much torn and defaced; which, on perusal of the contents, I found bore a strong similitude to the principal events mentioned in the modern and very beautiful poem of the ‘Hermit of Warkworth.’ ”68 There is the ghost of a suggestion here that Percy has done the opposite to that which he is usually accused of: passing off a historical work as his own, rather than his own work as historical.69 If Percy trod a fine line between antiquarianism and contemporary taste that sometimes led him to err in his editorial judgment, other editors were far more outrageous in their activities. The Shakespearean George Steevens simply made things up—​earning him the misleading soubriquet, the “Puck of Commentators”; the “Iago of Editors” might suit him better for his sometimes “motiveless malignity.” Steevens’s fraudulent career began in 1763 when the Theatrical Review printed a letter from George Peele to Christopher Marlowe, dated 1600.70 It is strikingly apt that this clumsy forgery (Marlowe and Peele were both dead before 1600) should describe an accusation of plagiarism. Although the attribution to Steevens is

64  Ossian was praised and quoted extensively by Goethe, carried into battle by Napoleon, and read by Thomas Jefferson every day. 65  Quoted by Baines, House of Forgery, p. 104. 66  Joseph Ritson, Observations on the Three First Volumes of the History of English Poetry: In a Familiar Letter to the Author (London, 1782), p. 5, and see elsewhere, e.g., p. 22. 67  See Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s “Reliques” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). 68  Helen Craik, Henry of Northumberland; or, The Hermit’s Cell: A Tale of the Fifteenth Century, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1800), vol. i, pp. xi–​xii, quoted in part by Anne H. Stevens, “Forging Literary History: Historical Fiction and Literary Forgery in Eighteenth-​Century Britain,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 37 (2008), 217–​32, at p. 226. 69  The Hermit of Warkworth had passed through four editions before its authorship was declared in James Dodsley’s anthology, A Collection of Poems (London, 1779). 70  The Theatrical Review; or, Annals of the Drama (London, 1763), p. 64; quoted by Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 241.

 

The Poet as Fraud    241 not, as Arthur Sherbo states, “ironclad,” and may in any case have been a jeu d’esprit full of deliberate errors, it was still being quoted as genuine more than thirty years later.71 The case is not proven. But if Steevens did not write this spoof letter, he was certainly responsible for elaborate libels on two of his neighbors in Hampstead: the Shakespearean John Collins and the Presbyterian minister Richard Amner. Throughout his career as an editor, Steevens victimized Collins and Amner by printing helpful explications of bawdy allusions in his editions, and then attributing these notes to the two of them. The reason for Steevens’s viperish vituperation is not clear, but Collins at least had worked closely with the Shakespearean scholar Edward Capell and was ultimately his literary executor. Moreover, in A Letter to George Hardinge, Esq. on the Subject of a Passage in Mr. Stevens’s Preface to His Impression of Shakespeare (1777), Collins all but accuses Steevens of plagiarizing Capell: “How far lawful borrowing extends, and where unlawful plagiarism begins, I know not. The line that separates them may be too fine for my visual nerve; and I will not run a risque of straining it, in such a search.”72 Steevens delighted in assigning perverse annotations to Collins and Amner. At his most extreme, Steevens attributed a four-​p age note at the end of Troilus and Cressida—​ examining the potato and its associations of luxury, lasciviousness, and lust—​to Collins. The note appeared in the Johnson–​Steevens edition of Shakespeare (1778) and was still being printed in Boswell–​Malone (1821). It is worth recognizing that the Johnson–​Steevens Shakespeare is not the first place one would look for Scriblerian character assassination. Less vindictive but no less influential was Steevens’s account of the deadly Javanese Upas tree, which could supposedly kill off everything within a fifteen-​mile radius. Accounts of the Upas tree date back at least to 1609, but Steevens’s contribution was dramatically to revive interest in this botanical curiosity as the dark side of natural history at a time of ecological idealism.73 His information was deployed by Erasmus Darwin in The Loves of the Plants (1789). It was thenceforth noted by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who imagined “a Tartarean Forest all of Upas Trees,” and by Robert Southey, who included the fatal timber in Thalaba the Destroyer (1801).74 Steevens’s most sophisticated plot, however, was effectively a marmoreal­ ization of Marmor Norfolciense. In 1789 Steevens fabricated the marble tombstone of King Hardicanute inscribed in Anglo-​Saxon, and had it displayed in a Southwark shop window. An illustration of the tombstone had already been engraved for the Society of Antiquaries and Samuel Pegge had even delivered a paper on the discovery to the Society (December 10) before Steevens exposed the forgery in the Gentleman’s Magazine and General Evening Post, writing under the names of “An Antiquary” and “Annius Anglicanus.”75 The whole 71 

Arthur Sherbo, The Achievement of George Steevens (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), p. 58. For later citations see Schoenbaum, pp. 241–​2; and R. Lobb (ed.), Ambulator; or, A Pocket Companion in a Tour round London, within the Circuit of Twenty-​Five Miles: Describing Whatever is Most Remarkable for Antiquity, Grandeur, Elegance, or Rural Beauty (London, 1793), pp. 79–​80. 72  John Collins, A Letter to George Hardinge, Esq. on the Subject of a Passage in Mr. Stevens’s Preface to His Impression of Shakespeare (London, 1777), p. 22. 73  The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (New York: Bollingen, 1957), vol. i, entries 37, 151. See John Livingstone Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955), pp. 14, 18–​19; and Geoffrey Grigson, “The Upas Tree,” in The Harp of Aeolus, and Other Essays on Art, Literature & Nature (London: Routledge, 1947), pp. 56–​65. 74  London Magazine, 52 (1783), 511–​17: quoted by Sherbo, The Achievement of George Steevens, p. 62. 75  Gentleman’s Magazine, 60 (1790), 217–​18, 290–​2; see Nichols, Illustrations, vol. v, p. 431.

 

242   Nick Groom escapade was designed to discredit the president of the Society of Antiquaries, Richard Gough. The proximity of Steevens to the cutting-​edge scholarship of the day—​particularly in editions of Shakespeare—​places his dubious sense of humor in a difficult light. Admittedly Steevens was no poet, but he was an editor who did not scruple to hoax and ensnare; it is but a small step from here to the deceptions of John Payne Collier.76

Rowley Steevens was a sharp commentator on the Rowley controversy, the debate into the authenticity of Poems, Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley, and Others, in the Fifteenth Century (1777).77 This was the first full edition of Thomas Chatterton’s “Rowley” poems, published posthumously and edited by the Chaucerian scholar Thomas Tyrwhitt. The publication of the Rowley Poems inspired a debate as energetic, if less malicious, than the continuing row over Ossian, the volume boasting on the title page, “the greatest part now published from the most authentic copies, with an engraved specimen of one of the mss.”78 But in the case of Rowley there were indeed manuscripts, apparently discovered in the muniment room of St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, and Tyrwhitt’s “Introductory Account” went into forensic textual detail in describing the sources for each piece and recording variants among the different extant versions, whether transcripts or originals—​ several of the pieces were on vellum, written in an antique hand, some of which were passed about among the cognoscenti.79 Chatterton’s Rowley Poems confronted the condition of manuscript retrieval: these were all texts derived from found manuscripts. But to categorize his often highly sophisticated early Romantic verses with Steevensian hoaxes diminishes them: they are extraordinarily self-​contained and paradoxical texts. If this poetry is a fraud, then, it is a fraud wrapped in myth and legend and locked inside antiquarian history, and if there is a key for such poetry, it can best be forged by solving the riddle of artistry and artifice. His compositions do not conclude with the words on the page, but encompass orthography, paleography, writing materials, provenance, relationships between different texts and different writers, contextual details, and editorial practice, with Chatterton adopting the style and authenticating devices of antiquarian scholars in explanatory headnotes and footnotes, knitting together the whole fabric of fifteenth-​century Bristol. Little of the Rowley work was published during Chatterton’s lifetime, but he clearly had plans to do so—​one draft title page survives in manuscript for “Antiquities—​Book 3rd,”

76 

For Steevens and Collier, see Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman, John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2004), vol. i, pp. 184–​6. 77 Sherbo, The Achievement of George Steevens, pp. 169–​98; and Nick Groom, “Forgery or Plagiarism? Unravelling Chatterton’s Rowley,” Angelaki, 1, no. 2 (1993), 41–​54. 78  The “Rowley” works include several writers, often responding to each other. 79  See Nick Groom, “Fragments, Reliques, & MSS: Chatterton and Percy,” in Groom (ed.), Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture, pp. 188–​209. See also Daniel Cook, Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760–​1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 35–​68.

 

The Poet as Fraud    243 and other collections were devised.80 But Chatterton’s attitude to Rowley was not merely complex—​it remains simply impenetrable. He virtually disowned the entire corpus when he arrived in London, remarking that the first African Eclogues were the “only two Pieces I  have the Vanity to Call Poetry.”81 Rowley was not poetry, or at least not Chatterton’s poetry:  fifteenth-​century Rowleyan Redcliffe was an imaginative world that Chatterton occupied in a second life, existing in a realm comparable to the Brontë sisters’ Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal, or J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-​Earth. The Rowley Controversy ran from the early 1770s after the first posthumous publication, The Execution of Sir Charles Bawdin (1772). A buzz developed around Bristol, Bath, and London with “Rowleyans” championing the cause and reading the poetry at salons, before the publication of Rowley Poems in 1777. Almost immediately came Thomas Warton’s response in the second volume of his History of English Poetry (1778)—​Warton’s comments being already prepared for the press before Tyrwhitt’s Rowley Poems appeared.82 Warton devoted a whole chapter (section VIII) to the works, criticizing the paleography, the physical state of the manuscripts, the heraldry, the orthography, the vocabulary, and the historical detail. His findings were conclusive, but Warton quoted Rowley so extensively (over ten pages of solid Rowleyan verse) it suggested that he admired the poetry and he admitted he regretted finding the verses spurious: Antient remains of English poetry, unexpectedly discovered, and fortunately rescued from a long oblivion, are contemplated with a degree of fond enthusiasm: exclusive of any real or intrinsic excellence, they afford those pleasures, arising from the idea of antiquity, which deeply interest the imagination. With these pleasures we are unwilling to part. But there is a more solid satisfaction, resulting from the detection of artifice and imposture. (History, vol. ii, p. 164)

So wrote the co-​editor of the poems of Thomas Warton the Elder.83 If Warton’s aim was to shift the assessment of Chatterton back into antiquarian scholarship, he could not deny the authority of Chatterton’s poetic voice—​something that seemed self-​evident to succeeding generations of poets and artists, from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Dante Gabriel Rossetti.84 The untimely death of Chatterton and the charged word “forgery” tended to eclipse the means of assessing his poetry while fanning the fires of controversy. Chatterton became a cultural touchstone, posthumously incriminated in the affair of the unfortunate Dr. Dodd by the strange coincidence that saw the arrest of Dr. Dodd the day after the publication of Rowley Poems.85 He was also drawn into the despicable doings of Herbert Croft, author of Love and Madness (1780), a book about another criminal case of forgery that entirely gratuitously printed letters written by Chatterton that Croft had stolen from his family and 80  See Ian Haywood, “Chatterton’s Plans for the Publication of the Forgery,” RES, n.s., 36 (1985), 58–​68; and The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. Donald S. Taylor and Benjamin B. Hoover, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), vol. ii, p. 820. 81  Meaning “Narva and Mored” and “The Death of Nicou”: see letter to Thomas Carey, July 1, 1770 (Works, vol. i, p. 641). 82  See Thomas Warton, History of English Poetry, ed. David Fairer, 4 vols. (London: Routledge/​ Thommes Press, 1998), vol. i, pp. 23–​4. 83  For Warton’s own scholarly duplicity, see Freemans, John Payne Collier, vol. i, pp. 186–​91. 84  See Joseph Bristow and Rebecca Mitchell, Oscar Wilde’s Chatterton: Literary History, Romanticism, and the Art of Forgery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 85 Baines, House of Forgery, pp. 157–​63, 158.

 

244   Nick Groom reproduced without permission.86 In the public imagination, the legal and the literary meanings of forgery were being almost inextricably knotted together. Inevitably, the Rowley controversy also inspired a rage for satirical manuscript discoveries, heralding the return of Scriblerian textual pastiche. William Julius Mickle (né Meikle), for instance, had already tried Spenserian imitation (The Concubine, 1767) and was known for his popular Portuguese translation (The Lusiad, 1776) before he revived the satiric manuscrit trouvé conceit in The Prophecy of Queen Emma (1782), satirizing the Ossianic and Rowleyan controversies, both still raging in 1782.87 Queen Emma was presented as “An Ancient Ballad lately discovered” written by Johannes Turgotus, an eleventh-​century Prior of Durham name-​checked by Rowley. In a rather labored postscript longer than the poem itself, Mickle attributes the discovery of Queen Emma to a rather ill-​tempered antiquarian who had already identified Ossianic manuscripts in Lapland and Iceland. Finding a chest of ecclesiastical vestments in Durham Cathedral, this fellow dreams that the chest of rags has a false bottom. However, the chest being cut up and no secret compartment being found, in a passion he strikes the lid with a workman’s axe. He splits it—​and thereby reveals the hidden manuscript: “And while our Antiquarian hugged it, and kissed it for joy, the carpenter wisely observed, there was no wonder it was found in a double lid, for that dreams were always contrary.”88 Mickle is careful to situate his work in relation to Ossian, Rowley, and Thomas Warton, and the original manuscript of Queen Emma has supposedly been available for inspection at a bookseller’s shop (referring to the bookseller Thomas Becket’s alleged exhibition of the original Ossian).89 In another arch observation on Macpherson’s claims, Mickle also remarks that for publication the original manuscript of Queen Emma has been supplemented by better copies held in Lapland. Despite the Scriblerian revival and the Gothic “love that dare not speak its name” for the manuscrit trouvé, the most extreme reworking of Rowleyan motifs came a generation later with the arrival of the “second Chatterton,” William Henry Ireland—​Mason’s “fourth forger.” Ireland’s preposterous antics are effectively a comic coda to the savage row over Ossian and the disturbing darkness of Chatterton’s life and death. The story is well known:  William Henry Ireland presented his father Samuel with his discoveries of Shakespeare manuscripts. This extensive haul included two new plays by Shakespeare, Vortigern and Henry II, and love letters from the bard (including a lock of hair tied in a ribbon), as well as manuscripts of Lear and Hamlet and business memoranda assigning various of Shakespeare’s copyrights to the Ireland family. Amazingly, some of the literati believed this—​including Joseph Warton and James Boswell. A lavish facsimile edition of the manuscripts was published (including the image of the lock of hair tied in a ribbon) and Vortigern was staged. The whole business was, predictably, a disaster.90 Edmond Malone comprehensively (and venomously) demolished the papers in an obsessive monograph, and the Irelands, father and son, became a byword

86 

See Nick Groom, “Love and Madness: Southey Editing Chatterton,” in Lynda Pratt (ed.), Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 19–​35. 87  J. J. Caudle describes the poem as a squib on the American War of Independence (ODNB). 88  William Julius Mickle, The Prophecy of Queen Emma: An Ancient Ballad Lately Discovered, Written by Johannes Turgotus, Prior of Durham, in the Reign of William Rufus (London, 1782), p. 21. 89  See Groom, “Fragments, Reliques, & MSS,” p. 203. 90  Boswell’s acquiescence to the forgery is treated with a certain amount of sangfroid by Johnsonians.

 

The Poet as Fraud    245 for fraud—​not literary fraud, but legal fraud.91 The Gentleman’s Magazine, for example, condemned Samuel Ireland’s actions as inexcusable:  “imposture, whether in literature or in commerce, is imposture; and all the tongues and pens of the ablest writers can never do away its criminality, or recover the lost credit of those who abetted it, whether intentionally or ignorantly.”92 Because William Henry Ireland had made copyright claims, it was difficult not to see this as criminal activity deserving prosecution.

The House of Forgery Horace Walpole famously declared that “All of the house of forgery are relations,” and went on to connect literature with crime: “though it is just to Chatterton’s memory to say, that his poverty never made him claim kindred with the richest, or most enriching branches, yet his ingenuity in counterfeiting styles, and I believe, hands, might easily have led him to those more facile imitations of prose, promissory notes.”93 Yet Walpole had no real evidence for these claims, and despite being initially duped by a Rowley piece Chatterton sent to him, he rapidly investigated, consulted, and declared it forged. But Walpole’s sanctimonious exaggeration is indicative of the intense need literally to criminalize certain literary activities: Walpole needed to distance himself from Chatterton (The Castle of Otranto against Thomas Rowley) as much as Johnson needed to distance himself from Macpherson (Marmor Norfolciense and the rest against Ossian). Moreover, there is also the insinuation that one misdemeanor invalidates an entire body of work. This was something felt very strongly: William Hazlitt, summing up a century’s attitudes, considered that “If an author is once detected in borrowing, he will be suspected of plagiarism ever after.”94 There are no poets in the period who can simply be described as “frauds,” but there are many cases of literary malpractice or misrepresentation: satire and hoaxing, plagiarism and forgery, and book piracy and copyright infringement. In literary criticism it is worth, I think, defining “forgeries” as original works that imitate the style of another, and “hoaxes” as forgeries that deliberately expose themselves as parodic. That clears some of the ground, although the legal terminology is reluctant to budge. It is also worth bearing in mind that the forgeries from this period that have endured are not literary forgeries per se. Charles Bertram has been described as “the cleverest and most successful literary impostor of modern times” for producing Richard of Cirencester’s map and convincing William Stukeley of its authenticity.95 The map, purportedly a fourteenth-​century depiction of Roman Britain with much

91 

See Edmond Malone, An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments, Published Dec. 24, MDCCXCV. and Attributed to Shakspeare, Queen Elizabeth, and Henry, Earl of Southampton (London, 1796). See also Nick Groom, “Malone Unmasking Forgery,” Bodleian Library Record (forthcoming). 92  Gentleman’s Magazine, 66 (1796), 1101, quoted by Miles, p. 323. 93  Horace Walpole, A Letter to the Editor of the Miscellanies of Thomas Chatterton (Strawberry Hill, 1779), p. 24. 94  William Hazlitt, Lectures on Drama and Literature (London, 1820), p. 257. 95  Dictionary of National Biography (1885).

 

246   Nick Groom hitherto unrecorded information—​including place names—​was printed in 1757.96 But even more influential than Bertram, however, was Iolo Morganwg (Edward Williams), the self-​ styled Welsh Bard who essentially invented Druidic and Celtic Wales at the end of the eighteenth century, and whose legacy lives on in, for example, the annual Gorsedd, or gathering of Bards, now part of the Eisteddfod.97 Bertram may have named the Pennines, but Iolo established a clear cultural identity for Wales in general and for Glamorgan in particular. Who will call this “fraud”?

References Baines, Paul, The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). Carnegie, David, and Gary Taylor (eds.), The Quest for Cardenio:  Shakespeare, Fletcher, Cervantes, and the Lost Play (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012). Cook, Daniel, Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760–​1830 (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Groom, Nick, The Forger’s Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature (London: Picador, 2002). Haywood, Ian, The Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton in Relation to Eighteenth-​Century Ideas of History and Fiction (Cranbury, N.J. and London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1986). Lynch, Jack, Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-​ Century Britain (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008). Macfarlane, Robert, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-​Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007). Russett, Margaret, Fictions and Fakes: Forging Romantic Authenticity, 1760–​1845 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006). Ruthven, K. K., Faking Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001). Stafford, Fiona, The Sublime Savage: James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1988).

96  William Stukeley, An Account of Richard of Cirencester, Monk of Westminster, and of His Works: With His Antient Map of Roman Brittain; and the Itinerary Thereof (London, 1757), frontispiece. 97  See Mary-​Anne Constantine, The Truth Against the World: Iolo Morganwg and Romantic Forgery (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Press, 2007); and Ronald Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2011), pp. 146–​82.

 

Chapter 15

T he P oet as P oet e s s Isobel Grundy This chapter attempts a rapid scan of several topics each sufficient for a monograph: the obstacles confronting women poets, the voices and identities available to them, their attitudes to their own writing, and the genres and topics they chose. It does not seek to establish a female canon, but rather rejoices that the canon has been long emerging and still does not exclude scholarly interest in multitudinous “minor” poets. Roger Lonsdale’s anthology includes almost a hundred names and several without names, and Joyce Fullard’s seventy-​ eight including the unidentified. Lonsdale was concerned to validate the worth of “homely” poetry, but also impressed by some of the more ambitious writing he found.1 Margaret Doody’s essay on eighteenth-​century women poets discusses most of the names which critical consensus has brought to the top of the list. She concentrates on the Restoration and earlier eighteenth century, a time of “experiment and playful diversity,” before, she feels, an escalation in anxiety for woman about suitable topics.2 Paula Backscheider, in a more extensive study beginning with 1700, supplies biographies of forty-​three poets, including all but two of those Doody discusses. Susan Staves’s magisterial literary history is organized by designated texts from each successive period, which limits its attention to poetry. Orlando currently has about 150 entries on British women of the period whose thumbnail sketches mention poetry.3 What these key secondary texts establish is that very many women left poetry which is still compelling, readable, and studiable today.

1 

Roger Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-​Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), pp. xliii–​xlvi; Joyce Fullard, British Women Poets, 1660–​1800: An Anthology (Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1990). 2  See Margaret Doody, “Women Poets of the Eighteenth Century,” in Vivien Jones (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–​1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000), p. 228. Doody discusses Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Jane Barker, Anne Finch, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Mary Leapor, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Hannah More, and Ann Yearsley, and mentions a few more poets and balladists. 3  Paula R. Backscheider, Eighteenth-​Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005); Susan Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–​1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006); and Susan Brown, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy (eds.), Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press Online, 2006–​ ).

 

248   Isobel Grundy

Female Voices This is remarkable, since “woman poet” was almost an oxymoron, and the word “poetess,” though often used neutrally or even honorifically,4 could be deeply opprobrious. Even “The Spleen:  A  Pindarick Ode,” which became the most famous work of the highly respected Anne Finch, was introduced anonymously into print by Nicholas Rowe, who offered high praise but likened poetic composition to a fall from chastity as something to hide.5 Several received ideas militated against that of woman-​as-​author: silence as indispensable womanly virtue, public or excessive speech as inherently womanly vice, the masculine as spiritual and the feminine as corporeal, the masculine as dominant and the feminine as subordinate, a patriarchal line of inheritance in classical literature, the erotic relationship between poet and muse.6 A few poets, like Anna Seward, were deemed by their admirers to have achieved the status of Muse in their own right, but this, like Sappho and other honorific titles,7 was a mixed blessing; all of them make of the woman poet an exception, a portent. These titles serve to identify the woman with her writing, which is misleading in several ways. Not many women would have understood “poet” as their primary identity at a time when the writing of verse was not limited to professed or recognized poets but was a popular activity in the lives of literate people of both sexes. Even fewer wrote poetry always in their own voice. The default or male poet was seldom identified with the voices he wrote in, even when they differed widely from himself in every respect including gender. Poetic monologues and dialogues were everywhere, whether in the form of eclogue, epistle, philosophic debate, or narrative poem with inset speeches. Milton gives voice to Mammon and to Belial, Rochester to Artemisa, Pope to Eloisa, and Johnson to a boon companion of Sir John Lade. Women were no less ready to appropriate or invent voices, often in the fundamental satirical technique of mimicry. From Behn onward they often adopt male voices or those of female speakers who have nothing in common with themselves. Their speakers reach easily across class as well as gender barriers. Alicia D’Anvers in her satire Academia relishes giving voice to the bumpkin tourist who is admonished about making noise in the Bodleian

4 

Those applying this word to themselves include the poet published in the Barbados Gazette in the 1730s whom Phyllis Guskin believes to be Martha Fowke (Phyllis J. Guskin, “‘Not Originally Intended for the Press’: Martha Fowke Sansom’s Poems in the Barbados Gazette,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 34, no. 1 (2000), 61–​91, at p. 62). Bill Overton, who edited the poems, thinks Fowke the likely but not certain author: see Overton (ed.), A Letter to My Love: Love Poems by Women First Published in the Barbados Gazette, 1731–​1737 (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2001), pp. 27–​39. 5  Charles Gildon (ed.), A New Miscellany of Original Poems on Several Occasions: Written by the E[arl] of D[orset], Sir C. Sidley, Sir F. Shepheard, Mr Wolesly, Mr Granvill, Mr Dryden, Mr Stepney, Mr Rowe, and Several Other Eminent Hands: Never Before Printed (London, 1701), pp. 53–​70. 6  Isobel Grundy, “The Poet and Her Muse,” in Elizabeth Maslen (ed.), The Timeless and the Temporal: Writings in Honour of John Chalker by Friends and Colleagues (London: Queen Mary and Westfield College, 1993), pp. 173–​93. 7  Those dubbed “Sappho” by themselves or others include Anne Killigrew, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Judith Cowper, Fowke, Hester Mulso Chapone, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Mary Whateley Darwall, Sophia King, Anna Seward, and many more. Elizabeth Singer was Philomel, Mary Jones the Chantress, Anna Seward the Swan of Lichfield, and Caroline Oliphant, Lady Nairne, both the White Rose of Gask and the Flower of Strathearn. See Orlando, passim.

 

The Poet as Poetess    249 Library: “Whop Sir, thought I, and what ado’s here, | About the Nails that in ones Shoes are!”8 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writes the voices of empty-​headed young fashionables of both sexes. The proletarian Elizabeth Hands writes in upper-​as well as lower-​class voices (condemning her “betters” out of their own mouths for ignorance and complacency). The genteel Susanna Blamire has an excellent ear for the less educated voice.9 Non-​human voices, too, sound from women’s pages. Elizabeth Freke gives voice to Satan in “A Diologue between the Serpentt and Eve” (if the poems in her book are indeed her own work): “Nott eate, nott tast, nott touch, nor cast an eye | Upon the fruite of this faire tree? And why? … Did nott the greatt creators voyce proclaime | Whatt ere he made (from the blue spangl’d frame | To the poore leafe thatt trembles) very good?”10 Constantia Grierson adopts the voice of a malign power in her anonymous broadsheet The Goddess Envy to Dr. D—​l—​ y.11 Anna Letitia Barbauld famously writes as a mouse, though she chooses not to write as a caterpillar.12 Experimenting with other voices seems to have been one of the pleasures of imagination. Still, a poet needed an authentic self-​acknowledged voice. Alexander Pope, although he declares he could not “chuse but smile, | When ev’ry Coxcomb knows me by my Style,” honed a highly distinctive voice, familiar yet authoritative. For a poet aiming at such a voice, masculinity might appear to confer advantage. Pope can strike a heroic or a self-​deprecating pose—​“Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see | Men not afraid of God, afraid of me”; “I cough like Horace”13—​without endangering his claim to identity with the voice of reason and moderation. Gray can present the self-​effacing persona of “leaves the world to darkness and to me,” and yet in the same poem pronounce great truths about life (“The paths of glory lead but to the grave”) with as much authority as Samuel Johnson at his most magnificently impersonal.14 For the male poet the robes of the judge or prophet, “the interpreter of nature, and the legislator of mankind,”15 are always available. Yet women poets seem often to have ignored the obstacle of gender. Mary Jones presents herself as socially unpretentious (“Of honest parents, not of great, I came”), yet as critically judicial: “How much of paper’s spoil’d! what floods of ink! | And yet how few, how very few, can think.” Her explicit yardstick throughout this poem is Pope, whose remarkably similar

8 

Alicia D’Anvers, Academia; or, The Humours of the University of Oxford: In Burlesque Verse (London, 1691), p. 22. 9  See Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Essays and Poems, with Simplicity, a Comedy, ed. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 182–​210; Elizabeth Hands, The Death of Amnon, a Poem: With an Appendix: Containing Pastorals, and Other Poetical Pieces (Coventry, 1789), pp. 47–​55; and Susanna Blamire, The Poetical Works of Miss Susanna Blamire, “the Muse of Cumberland,” ed. Henry Lonsdale and Patrick Maxwell (Edinburgh, 1842), passim. 10  The Remembrances of Elizabeth Freke, 1671–​1714, ed. Raymond A. Anselment (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press for the Royal Historical Society, 2001), p. 133. 11  Constantia Grierson, The Goddess Envy to Dr. D—​l—​y (Dublin, 1730). 12  Anna Letitia Barbauld, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2002), pp. 69–​72, 179–​80. 13  Pope, “Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot,” lines 281–​2; “Epilogue to the Satires,” dialogue ii, lines 208–​9; “Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot,” line 116, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–​69), vol. iv, pp. 116, 324, 104. 14  Thomas Gray, Elegy, line 36, in Complete Poems, p. 38. 15  Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, ­chapter 10, in Works, vol. xvi, p. 45.

 

250   Isobel Grundy stance apparently facilitated her claim to authority of judgment as a poet regardless of gender.16 I have written elsewhere that no other poet but Barbauld, late in the period, matches the force and gravitas of Johnson at his most massive. Measuring the authority of these women’s voices against that of male poets still feels natural, because male voices still constitute the established standard against which, even now, women’s poetry finds itself judged.

Female Roles Most of the particular poetic identities discussed in chapters of this book—​clubman, professional, man of feeling, genius, though not of course laborer or teacher—​implicitly or explicitly excluded women. On the other hand, the category of scandalous woman (not poetess but punk), which always gaped to engulf a woman raising her voice in public, had no male equivalent. Clubs—​the Royal Society, the Scriblerus Club, the Lunar Society, and Mr Spectator’s fictitious club—​were all exclusively male (see ­chapter 8, “The Poet as Clubman”). La Belle Assemblée, a women’s debating club, was a London sensation when it opened in 1768 but quickly failed. Almost as quickly the mixed and ladies’ political clubs that sprang up in the dawn of the French Revolution were summarily quashed by the National Convention in October 1793. Informal mixed groups like the Society of Friendship (associated with the poet Katherine Philips) or the Bluestockings were conscious variations on a male model, with a name (chosen by themselves or bestowed by others) and a set of conventions. Professions, too, were male-​only—​though François Poulain (or Poullain) de la Barre had argued in 1673 that women were naturally qualified for them,17 and though Jane Barker staked in print her claim to near-​professional status as a healer (as women prose-​writers did to other professions). Elizabeth Cellier failed in her attempt in writings of 1687–​8 to put midwives on a professional footing.18 The learned professions, closed to women, offered to men the opportunity to charge money for specialized skills without losing the status of gentleman. Their pattern was crucial in the gradual emergence of authorship as a respected profession (especially in proportion as it excluded women). Women’s saleable assets included nothing comparable to professional expertise, and were always in danger of being symbolically equated with sale of their bodies. Nor has the poetic man of feeling an exact female equivalent (see ­chapter 12, “The Poet as Man of Feeling”). His finer sensibilities were felt to be exceptional among men, while for

16 

Mary Jones, Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1750), pp. 6, 1. François Poulain de la Barre, De l’égalité des deux sexes: Discours physique et moral, où l’on voit l’importance de se defaire des préjugez (Paris, 1673). Pursuing an interest in the workings of prejudice, he chose to write about the most pervasive prejudice he knew. 18  The Poems of Jane Barker: The Magdalen Manuscript, ed. Kathryn R. King (Oxford: Magdalen College, 1998), p. 46; Elizabeth Cellier, A Scheme for the Foundation of a Royal Hospital, and Raising a Revenue of Five or Six-​Thousand Pounds a Year, by and for the Maintenance of a Corporation of Skilled Midwives, and Such Foundlings or Exposed Children, as Shall Be Admitted Therein, etc. (London, 1687); and Cellier, A Letter To Dr —​—​, concerning the Colledg of Midwives; Together with the Scheme for a Cradle Hospital, for Exposed Children (London, 1688). 17 

 

The Poet as Poetess    251 women sensitive feelings were a requirement.19 To both men and women, from the mid-​ eighteenth century onward, an unfeeling woman is a monster. While many women poets value themselves or their characters on the intensity with which they feel (particularly in response to beauty or goodness, or the suffering of others), the most telling episode involving sentiment in women’s poetry of the period remains the rush of response to Frances Greville’s notorious “Ode to [or Prayer for] Indifference,” composed about 1756, or fifteen years before the appearance of Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling. Greville begs for a respite from the pain of feeling, and her outcry against it becomes a spur to the production of Hannah More’s influential Sensibility, of Ann Yearsley’s “Addressed to Sensibility” and “To Indifference,” and of almost innumerable other poems by women. More sees sensibility as an artificial, literary self-​indulgence which may stifle natural feeling. Yearsley, who values sensibility very highly, resists what she reads as its rules; she yearns after indifference.20 Prominent among women’s conflicted, highly disparate relationships with ideas of sentiment is the oxymoronic longing to feel less. Genius was a concept equally fraught with undisclosed gender assumptions, and the often unspoken consensus that genius was male (see ­chapter 13, “The Poet as Genius”).21 The Royal Literary Fund made this assumption when it supported male applicants on the basis of creative achievement, but allotted smaller sums to women chiefly on the basis of need: female applicants did better if they downplayed their own writings.22 During the Fund’s early years commentators on poetry (like those on fiction) embarked on a campaign to re-​masculinize the genre, and the admiration formerly accorded the work of leading poets like Robinson and Barbauld gave way to antifeminist sneers. But among women, at least, the accolade of genius stood ready for conferring on poets particularly admired, as can be seen in the elegies by women on women discussed below.23 I know of no poetic forgeries by eighteenth-​century women, though the authorship of various allegedly female autobiographies is contested (see ­chapter  14, “The Poet as Fraud”).24 But woman poets frequently had their authorship doubted or denied. The best-​ known protest against this is Anne Killigrew’s “Upon the Saying that My Verses Were Made 19  See Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986); G. J. Barker-​Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992); Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); and John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 20  See Hannah More, Sacred Dramas: Chiefly Intended for Young Persons: The Subjects Taken from the Bible: To Which Is Added, Sensibility, a Poem (London, 1782); Ann Yearsley, Poems on Various Subjects (London, 1787), pp. 4–​6, 49–​53. 21  See Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1989). 22  See Jennie Batchelor, “The Claims of Literature: Women Applicants to the Royal Literary Fund, 1790–​1810,” Women’s Writing, 12, no. 3 (2005), 513–​29. 23  The magazine poet Elizabeth Gilding showed boldness and perhaps also lack of sophistication in titling her single published volume The Breathings of Genius: Being a Collection of Poems; to Which are Added, Essays, Moral and Philosophical (London, 1776). Kathryn Ledbetter picks up the issue as related to Robinson: see “A Woman of Undoubted Genius: Mary Robinson and S. T. Coleridge,” Postscript: Publication of the Philological Association of the Carolinas, 11 (1994), 43–​9. 24  For example, Mary Carleton, the “German Princess,” cross-​dressed sailors and soldiers, courtesans, and performers.

 

252   Isobel Grundy by Another.” Scepticism denies her the status of poet: worse, “What ought t’have brought me Honour, brought me shame!”25 Elizabeth Thomas presents her battle with one of these doubters (“Nemo,” who thought her poems too good to be by a woman) in “To Mr. R[ichard] G[winnett] in the Country, on Her Receiving a Letter Subscrib’d Nemo.”26 The poems of the enslaved Phillis Wheatley required a testimonial of authenticity from eminent (white male) Boston citizens.27 Charlotte Smith found that the poetic allusions that might be admired in a man were read as plagiarism in a woman.28 Fidelia of the 1730s Gentleman’s Magazine (still unidentified) and the Irish satirist Henrietta Battier explicitly assert their gender. “I feign my name but not my sex.” “I am no mannish, het’rogeneous creature, | But truly feminine in limb and feature.”29 Women may not have been convicted of forgery but they were often suspected of it. Women laborers and women teachers abounded, however, and most of the surprisingly numerous laboring-​class women who wrote poetry drew strength from a nuanced consciousness of both their class and gender position (see ­chapters 10, “The Poet as Laborer,” and 11, “The Poet as Teacher”). Women already embattled on account of inferior rank tended, paradoxically, to be bold in the way they claimed the exalted identity of poet. Mary Collier, Mary Leapor, Elizabeth Hands, Ann Yearsley, and Frances O’Neill—​each makes compelling poetry out of her doubly outsider status. Collier structures The Woman’s Labour as a direct challenge to Stephen Duck (who escapes the contempt of his class superiors by colluding in their contempt for working women). As Collier reshapes the georgic (while incorporating from eclogue the motif of the rival poets, and claiming victory over Duck), so Leapor reshapes the topographical or country-​house poem in “Crumble-​Hall.” Here the house emblematizes the fusty outdatedness instead of the hospitality of the landowning class; productivity belongs to the workers, not the proprietors.30 Elizabeth Hands uses an impersonal voice for her biblical epic, “The Death of Amnon,” cheeky colloquial octosyllabics to satirize the employer class, and seven different canonical styles for pastiche in “Critical Fragments, on some of the English Poets,” where Milton, “in ponder’ous verse, moves greatly on, | Wielding his massey theme” (Hands, The Death of Amnon, p. 126). Ann Yearsley revenges

25 

Anne Killigrew, Poems (London, 1685), p. 45. Elizabeth Thomas, Miscellany Poems on Several Subjects (London, 1722), pp. 204–​5. Other women who made poems out of the need to defend their ownership of their works (whether humbly or assertively, to doubters of both sexes) included Mary Masters, in Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1733), pp. 44–​5; the laboring-​class Mary Collier, in Poems, on Several Occasions (Winchester, 1762), pp. 30–​2; Gilding, The Breathings of Genius, p. 78; Jane Cave, Poems on Various Subjects: Entertaining, Elegiac, and Religious (Winchester, 1783), p. 44; and Mary Robinson, Selected Poems, ed. Judith Pascoe (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2000), p. 42. 27  Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London, 1773). 28 Backscheider, Eighteenth-​Century Women Poets and Their Poetry, pp. 335–​6. 29  Gentleman’s Magazine, 6 (Dec. 1736), 745; Henrietta Battier, The Kirwanade; or, Poetical Epistle: Humbly Addressed to the Modern Apostle! (the Rev. W. B. K —​—​ n) in Consequence of His Very Spiritual Behaviour at the Chapter Held Lately in St. Patrick’s, 2 parts (Dublin, 1791), vol. i, p. 3. 30  Mary Collier, The Woman’s Labour: An Epistle to Mr Stephen Duck, in Answer to His Late Poem, Called The Thresher’s Labour (London, 1739); Mary Leapor, Poems upon Several Occasions, 2 vols. (London, 1748–​51), vol. ii, pp. 111–​22; Valerie Rumbold, “The Alienated Insider: Mary Leapor in Crumble Hall,” British Journal for Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 19, no. 1 (1996), 63–​76. 26 

 

The Poet as Poetess    253 herself on her condescending patrons by continuing to improve as a poet after renouncing their aid, while Frances O’Neill directly lampoons patrons who failed her.31 The confidence and the achievement of these poets depended on their mastery of their craft. Collier has a sure hand with the couplet and knows the conventions of the georgic, however she learned them, as well as she knows her rake and her washtub. She and Leapor are each able to take a sophisticated genre and make it her own.32 All the laboring-​class poets are generically versatile, and Yearsley is the quintessential Romantic in the way her passionate self-​absorption goes with an energetic desire to change the world through poetry. These laboring-​class poets form a kind of microcosm of other women poets in their immense variety; what they all, and most of their socially privileged peers, have in common is the edginess with which they contest their right to poetry. Although women sometimes, as argued above, choose an ungendered voice or voices, occasionally concealing their gender or more frequently assuming its irrelevance, the great majority of them, on some occasions and in various tones—​assertive, plaintive, comical, ironic—​suggest, assert, boast, or apologize for the fact that they are women as well as poets.

Literary Networks Even for many women less penurious than the laborers, their making as poets remains a mystery. On the one hand excellence in poetry presupposes a long apprenticeship. On the other hand, information about women’s education and development is particularly scanty. Every part of this period presents the scholar with traces of women whose scattered manuscripts or single published volumes offer no clue to how they developed their art, yet whose poetry is excellent by any standard. The contested Barbados Gazette poems are a case in point: their author and her formative love-​affair with her young, male rival in poetry are still not pinned down.33 Micro-​climates favorable to women poets in this generally inhospitable culture include the known and the obscure. It was handy for women that verse-​writing was an unremarkable activity, a frequent habit among the many different educated classes, not implying ambition for print or publicity. Women whose lives were entirely private and retired, like the English

31 

Orlando, s.vv. Yearsley, O’Neill. Peggy Thompson, “Duck, Collier, and the Ideology of Verse Forms,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900, 44, no. 3 (2004), 505–​23; Donna Landry, “Mary Leapor Laughs at the Fathers: Reading ‘Crumble-​Hall,’” in Robert DeMaria, Jr. (ed.), British Literature 1640–​1789: A Critical Reader (Malden: Blackwell, 1999). 33  Examples of sparse yet suggestive identified output include Elizabeth Tipper, Elizabeth Freke, Elizabeth Teft, Mary Jones, Mary Savage, Martha Hale, Frances O’Neill, Ann Batten Cristall; examples of obscure lives include also Elizabeth Boyd, “Fidelia,” Mary Deverell, Fanshawe, Battier, Cave, Eleanor Tatlock, Mary Matilda Betham. The work of Maureen Mulvihill appears to have established consensus that Ephelia was Mary Stuart, Duchess of Richmond: see “‘Butterfly’ of the Restoration Court: A Preview of Lady Mary Villiers, the New ‘Ephelia’ Candidate,” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, 9, no. 4. (1996), 25–​40; and “The Eureka! Piece in the ‘Ephelia’ Puzzle: Book Ornaments in Attribution Research and a New Location for Rahir Fleuron 203 (‘Elzevier,’ 1896),” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, 12, no. 3 (1999), 23–​34. 32 

 

254   Isobel Grundy royalist Hester Pulter (d. 1678) or the clergyman’s wife Jane Johnson (1706–​59), and those involved in public affairs, like the Scottish Quaker convert Lilias Skene (1626–​97) or the woman of letters Hester Lynch Piozzi (1741–​1821), were equally convinced of the significance or value of their verse manuscripts. Among mentors or supportive friends of potential poets, few have (like Piozzi’s mentor Samuel Johnson, or Philips’s friendship circle) been recovered or illuminated. Many female networks, of the kind which literary historians label a coterie, looked on poetry as just one topic among others like children, home, weather, illnesses, and shared jokes. A  lot goes unrecorded in such social circles. Even largely male literary networks, like those of Barker or Battier, may be more or less untraceable. But in an intensely sociable century, with correspondence offering communication even with distant friends, poetic isolation may have been rarer than surviving evidence suggests. The court culture of the Restoration was favorable to women’s poetry. Its poets, including Anne Wharton, “Ephelia,” Anne Finch, and Anne Killigrew, have become known, but scholars are still speculating about those unidentified writers who caused Finch in “The Circuit of Appollo” to celebrate Kent as a nerve-​center of women’s poetry.34 The influence of this court culture extended to women living removed from London or from high society: Finch metamorphosed from a court to a country poet. No later court seems to have paralleled this effect, but the theater became another encouraging environment: dramatists like Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Catharine Trotter (later Cockburn), Susanna Centlivre, and much later Hannah Cowley also made their mark as poets. Elizabeth Singer began her poetic career with the support of the newly flourishing periodical genre, and continued it with that of aristocratic patrons, and of her Dissenting co-​ religionists. Each of these kinds of support was vital to women throughout the period. The poetry columns of the Athenian Mercury, fed by Singer (later Rowe) and other women, had many successors: the Gentleman’s Magazine, the Morning Post, the Monthly Magazine, and any number of other journals in London and provincial centers (see ­chapter 4, “Poems in Magazines”). The aristocrat Frances, Countess of Hertford (later Duchess of Somerset), the urbanite Elizabeth Montagu, and the radical publisher Joseph Johnson represent very different styles of patronage, each valuable to a number of aspiring poets. The close-​knit community of Dissenters produced a group of poets including Mary Scott and the hymn-​writer Anne Steele, who have only recently attracted notice,35 and later it nurtured a major poet in Barbauld.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Lady Mary Wortley Montagu makes an interesting case ​study for a woman’s negotiation of poetic identity, partly because her earliest attitudes can, unusually, be traced. As an

34 

The Poems of Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, from the Original Edition of 1713 and from Unpublished Manuscripts, ed. Myra Reynolds (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1903), pp. 93–​4. 35 See Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720–​1840, ed. Timothy Whelan, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011).

 

The Poet as Poetess    255 adolescent she neatly transcribed her poems in an album whose title page addressed them “to the fair hands of the most beauteous Hermensilda by her most obedient Strephon.” This literary cross-​dressing reflects consciousness of distinction between her poetic persona and her quotidian self. She had as precedent the fictional identities assumed for love-​poetry by Waller, Cowley, and Behn: especially the last, whose Voyage to the Island of Love, model for the teenage Lady Mary’s longest surviving work, also calls its protagonist Strephon. Even writing as Strephon, however, Lady Mary did not conceal her actual sex. The album’s preface, a brisk, conventional expression of modesty, begins: “I am a Woman.” For her second juvenile album she chose a new and female literary persona with the title “The Entire Works of Clarinda.”36 Her circle of young women friends, who came from professional as well as gentry families, included some who were her readers.37 Something like this pattern was repeated in her adult poems, which reflect in turn her friendships with Pope and John Gay, with Mary Astell, Henry Fielding, John Lord Hervey, and Francesco Algarotti. Many of them use dramatized speakers in dialogue or monologue. Of those spoken in her own voice, some are impersonal but others employ a persona more or less closely related to the writer as she saw herself in life. For polemic Montagu adopts an ungendered voice presumed male:  using ex cathedra denunciation in Verses Address’d to the Imitator of Horace, and suave jocosity with a couple of self-​referential asides about the craft of writing in her riposte to Swift’s Lady’s Dressing Room. Even the bitter “Written Ex Tempore on the Death of Mrs Bowes,” which judges early death preferable to marriage for a young woman—​and which was composed as half of a project shared with Astell—​gives no hint of fellow-​feeling to identify the writer as female. In a lighter satire, “Epistle [to Lord Bathurst],” where part of the point is role-​reversal (Bathurst’s fickleness versus the speaker’s adamantine fidelity), Montagu settles for implicitly admitting her gender, and in those many other poems that turn on her presentation of herself, her gender is a vital element. “Bathurst” is not her only poem to challenge assumptions about gender distinctions. The male characters in her Eclogues (apart from the doctors who have barely speaking roles) are defined through and limited to their sexual behavior, as women so often were.38 In old age Montagu used the pronoun “his” in explicitly claiming the identity of a poet (in lines borrowed from Congreve).39 But in the same correspondence her declarations that she serves the Muses, or is haunted by the Daemon of Poesie are intertwined with bitter jokes about being taken for a witch among the English expatriates of Venice40—​and her letters from this date to relations as opposed to friends never mention literary writing at all. The knowledge that “I am a Woman” still blocked, for her as well as for her social tormentors, her access to the character of a poet.

36 

Harrowby Manuscripts Trust, Sandon Hall, Stafford, MSS 250, 251. Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 20–​4. 38 Montagu, Essays and Poems, pp. 265–​70, 273–​6, 233, 242–​4, 185–​203. 39  “No Fraud the Poet’s sacred breast can bear, | Mild are our manners and our hearts sincere” (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Complete Letters, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965–​ 7), vol. iii, p. 170, written in 1758). 40 Montagu, Complete Letters, vol. iii, pp. 173, 183–​4, 188–​90. 37 

 

256   Isobel Grundy

Double Voice Critics of several literary periods have by now directed attention to the “double voice” of women’s poetry, which aims on the one hand to “emulate the male poetic models” (in the largest sense of relating to a whole canon of poetry both English and classical), and on the other hand to create “feminine difference”41—​to nurture, perhaps, a “[Feminine] Part the Poet in me.”42 Women set out to do this in every genre and most of all in the mixed genres which were the luxuriant growth of the period. The double voice is often audible even in those genres that were least controversial for them, like the lyric, devotional poem, epistle (close to the female genre of the familiar letter), conduct poem (couched in terms of “we” rather than “you”), and translation. Poetic translation has a similar doubleness: it necessarily adopts an ancillary posture, while also necessarily, and often purposefully, revising its original (see ­chapter 35, “Translation”). Women’s major achievements in this genre include Lucy Hutchinson’s Lucretius, Anna Hume’s Petrarch, Philips’s plays from Corneille, Rowe’s Tasso, and the national recuperative exercises of Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry and Anne Grant’s songs from the Gaelic.43 Among lyrics the courtship poem traditionally features a male wooer and female love-​ object. Women reversed these roles in imitations of Horace and elsewhere.44 Critics have focused recently on the eighteenth-​century love lyric as expression of transgressive same-​ sex desire: a fruitful approach in the case of many from Philips onward.45 Heterosexual love poems could be equally transgressive of normative gender roles, like those of the probable Fowke in the Barbados Gazette, who writes that she and her beloved each attempt to capture the other’s creativity in their poems, rather than leaving it free in its own voice,46 or like Montagu in “Hymn to the Moon,” which pictures the goddess Diana stealing furtively through her own moonlight, drawn by the charms of young Endymion to abandon her “Greatness” and “Coldness” (Essays and Poems, p. 300). In domestic and family poems women often, like Barbauld and Moody, defy male standards of significance to valorize female occupations. Anne Grant’s “Familiar Epistle to a Friend” exhibits not doubleness but multiplicity of conflicting attitudes. She enacts a willing sacrifice of poetry to domesticity (“Quite dead and extinct all poetical fire, | At the foot of the cradle conceal’d lay my lyre”) yet goes on to invoke the returned Ulysses calling once more 41 Backscheider, Eighteenth-​Century Women Poets and Their Poetry, p. 332. 42 

Aphra Behn, The Luckey Chance; or, An Alderman’s Bargain (London, 1687), preface.

43 See Lucy Hutchinson’s Translation of Lucretius, “De rerum natura,” ed. Hugh De Quehen (Ann

Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1996); Anna Hume, The Triumphs of Love: Chastitie: Death: Translated out of Petrarch (Edinburgh, 1644); The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda, ed. Germaine Greer and R. Little, 3 vols. (Stump Cross, Essex: Stump Cross Books, 1993), vol. iii, p. 3; Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Select Translations from Tasso’s Jerusalem (London, 1738); Charlotte Brooke (ed.), Reliques of Irish Poetry: Consisting of Heroic Poems, Odes, Elegies, and Songs, Translated into English Verse: With Notes Explanatory and Historical; and the Originals in the Irish Character: To Which Is Subjoined an Irish Tale (Dublin, 1789); Anne Grant, Poems on Various Subjects (Edinburgh, 1803). 44  Aphra Behn, Poems upon Several Occasions, with a Voyage to the Island of Love (London, 1684), pp. 98–​100; Montagu, Essays and Poems, p. 302. 45  Harriette Andreadis, “Re-​configuring Early Modern Friendship: Katherine Philips and Homoerotic Desire,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900, 46, no. 3 (2006), 523–​43. 46  Grundy, “Against the Dead Poets Society: Living 18c Poets,” Halcyon: A Journal of the Humanities, 15 (1993), 192–​5.

 

The Poet as Poetess    257 for his bow. She writes not of “I” the poet but of “we” the poets, yet she divides other women writers into two groups: the radical and disgraceful, and the admirable but despised (Grant, Poems on Various Subjects, pp. 240, 241). Expectations of domesticity ensure that the ideal of retirement looks different to a woman and to a man, who has an alternative option in public life. Philips’s famous praise of retirement acquires a context in her poems on public events (still less well known than her personal poems). It was the public poems that stood first in her manuscript album and her authorized publication.47 Comparison of public and private produced from women a perceptibly female version of the “choice” genre initiated by John Pomfret, in which women’s choices lean toward singleness as well as self-​sufficiency, liberty, and solitude.

Genres and Topics The old notion that women did not aspire to epic, say, or satire or political poetry, probably no longer needs combating. The biblical narratives of Rowe, Hands, and Scott are epics in concept.48 The bumper crop of Romantic epics features interesting work by women: Eleanor Anne Porden made a conscientious choice of epic over romance.49 But on the whole women were oftener drawn to the mock-​heroic. Mary Collier in The Woman’s Labour describes washerwomen’s work as demanding fortitude and bleeding hands, but Barbauld’s “Washing-​ Day” exploits a gap between high style and domestic labor. Similarly, Elizabeth Moody in “The Housewife; or, The Muse Learning to Ride the Great Horse Heroic” longs to employ “the war-​charger of blank verse” (Orlando, s.v. Moody) to convey the splendor of household preparations for Christmas.50 Women significantly re-​envisioned almost every genre that they practiced. Without claiming to know the poet’s gender by his or her style (and recognizing that female poets found both the Popean heroic couplet and the Swiftian octosyllabic as user-​friendly as they had found the styles of Philips and Behn) one can perceive certain tendencies distinguishing women’s poetry. This is true not only of genres but of topics: women, more than men, write on poetic rivalry between the sexes (especially during the Restoration, when poets were hailed as champions for their sex); childbirth—​the central event in Martha Hale’s “To Mrs. Moore, on the Birth of the First Child Ever Born in Lambeth Palace,”51 extraordinarily pervasive in imagery used by Elizabeth Boyd;52 critique of marriage practices (a theme 47 

Greer, introduction to The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda, pp. ix–​xi. Elizabeth Singer Rowe, The History of Joseph, a Poem (London, 1736); Hands, The Death of Amnon; Mary Scott, Messiah, a Poem in Two Parts (Bath, 1788). 49  Eleanor Anne Porden, Richard Coeur de Lion; or, The Third Crusade: A Poem, in Sixteen Books (London, 1822); Adeline Johns-​Putra, “Eleanor Anne Porden’s Coeur de Lion (1822): History, Epic and Romance,” Women’s Writing, 19, no. 3 (2012), 351–​7 1. 50 Barbauld, Selected Poetry and Prose, pp. 143–​7; Elizabeth Moody, Poetic Trifles (London, 1798), pp. 166–​72. 51  Martha Hale, Poetical Attempts (London, 1800), pp. 44–​5. 52  See Elizabeth Boyd, Variety, a Poem, in Two Cantos: Humbly Offer’d to the God of Change: To Which is Annex’d, an Answer to an Ovid’s Epistle (Westminster, 1727); Boyd, The Humorous Miscellany; or, Riddles for the Beaux (London, 1733), passim. 48 

 

258   Isobel Grundy launched by Katherine Philips); open, non-​condemnatory presentation of the woman writer as a sexual being (notably by “Ephelia,” the Barbados Gazette poet, and Charlotte Smith and later Romantics); reversal of gender stereotypes. But these topics do not constitute the bulk of women’s poetry, and nor are they unknown in male poets. In genres too, women’s preferences are not distinct from those of men. In political poetry they did more striking work in anti-​triumphalist than in triumphal style (though the same may well be true of men). Charlotte Smith combines personal sentiment with scathing public critique in The Emigrants (1793) and Beachy Head (1807). Barbauld brings a tone of tragic dignity to three great poems of defeat: “Corsica,” to which she added a downbeat conclusion after the independence struggle was crushed, her epistle to Wilberforce after a grave setback to the movement for abolishing the slave trade, and Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, an anti-​ war poem condemning the state of her belligerent nation.53 The anti-​war tradition entered women’s poetry from Philips, who lived through the English Civil War. For some, as for the teenage Lady Mary Pierrepont, their own exclusion was an issue. In one juvenile poem Lady Mary wavers between two incompatibles: the view that war is falsely glorified and that peace is better, and the desire to share her lover’s danger and glory (Harrowby MS 251, fol. 30). More often (for instance, during the wars of the late eighteenth century) women write deliberately from the sidelines, often foregrounding bereavement rather than the wounds and death of male anti-​war poetry. In satire, women’s laughter or anger frequently skewers gender conventions and occasionally men themselves. Of course, for a woman, any critical exploring of social relations could hardly avoid tripping on disparities involving women as a class. This produces beautifully understated satiric detail, as in Mary Savage’s sketch of a London merchant: “Success had attended his actions thro’ life, | He had married his daughters, and buried his wife.”54 Women’s satire on men often responds to anti-​feminist attack, particularly attack on women’s right to poetry (see ­chapter 21, “Poems on the Sexes”). When Elizabeth Thomas, in “The True Effigies of a Certain Squire,” trounces a man who said studying would make her old and ugly, she does so fittingly by lampooning his uncouth appearance, taste, and manners. Particularly telling, in the light of the association of women with mirrors and narcissism, are his pocket contents, the “Snuff Box, Comb, a Glass, and Handkercher.”55 This man, while he complacently renounces learning for himself and his future (male) heir, looks forward to forcing his wife, when he has one, to burn her books. Thomas sees women’s intellectual aptitude as under siege from the forces of male ignorance and narcissistic vanity. The squire’s strutting aggression and his unsavory appearance alike imply a critique of male sexuality, which has been less considered than male poetic critique of female sexuality. In women’s poetry, amusement or outrage about male sexuality is almost always about oppression of women too. D’Anvers mocks the university’s “Young Senior Fellows,” so protective of their chastity that “Should you a Naked Woman shew ’em | You’d fright ’em so, 53 Barbauld, Selected Poetry and Prose, pp. 59–​67, 121–​7, 160–​73. 54 

Mary Savage, Poems on Various Subjects and Occasions, 2 vols. (London, 1777), vol. i, p. 92.

55 Thomas, Miscellany Poems, p. 80. Philips praises Rosania for differing not from shallow women but

from shallow “Gallants”; she links the men, not the woman, with looking glasses and vanity (“Rosania Shadowed whilest Mrs. Mary Awbrey,” in Poems by the Most Deservedly Admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda (London, 1667), p. 49).

 

The Poet as Poetess    259 ’twould quite undo ’em.”56 This mockery serves her unflattering depiction, over her two Oxford poems, of the university’s insistent masculinity: it is hostile to the female muses, and mothers grieve at its effect on their sons (D’Anvers, Academia, p. 67). Thomas is not the only poet to hold the mirror up to male disgust at the female body. Close-​stools appear in Mary Davys’s “Modern Poet,” actually predating Swift’s poems of misogynist disgust,57 and in Montagu’s riposte to The Lady’s Dressing Room. Davys uses the poverty of her garret-​ dwelling poet to signify his literary failure, as Pope was to do with the dunces. Montagu presents her “Reverend Lover’s” impotence as explaining his misogyny: after he “Peeps in her Bubbys, and her Eyes, | And kisses both, and tries—​and tries,” he swears satirical vengeance (Essays and Poems, p. 275). Montagu catches Swift’s voice not only in her reverend lover’s complaints about his beloved’s “Dirty Smock, and Stinking Toes” (Essays and Poems, p. 275) but also in the self-​ consciously reasoning, moralizing passages which immediately precede them. Conversely, a note of satire often creeps in when women argue in sternly rational tones their own worthiness to enter dominant (male) literary culture. This happens from at least the time of the precocious Sarah Fyge’s Female Advocate,58 and Ephelia’s role-​reversing doubt whether “Sacred Friendship can | Dwell in the Bosom of inconstant Man.”59 Satire flickers in Elizabeth Tollet’s “Hypatia,” which builds out from a historical figure a defense of women’s learning.60 Anne Irwin informs Pope with tranquil dignity that “In education all the diff ’rence lies; | Women, if taught, would be as bold and wise | As haughty man, improv’d by art and rules”;61 one may suspect that her flattery of Pope as a potential single-​handed reformer of women is probably tongue-​in-​cheek. The still-​unidentified “Mary Seymour Montague,” too, dips into satire while staking her claim to reason: “Concerning Women, Women reason best.”62 Women loved to pick up gendered charges, and throw them back at their accusers, like Ephelia on friendship, or Laetitia Pilkington when she blends satire and argument with jaunty narrative in The Statues, a tale of flagrant male, instead of female, fickleness.63 Many women poets trust their readers sufficiently to rely on burlesquing untenable positions rather than, like Irwin or Montagu, refuting them. Damaris Masham, in a long untitled poem sent in a letter to Locke, mimics and mocks the voice of a formerly insubordinate woman who has now converted and preaches submission to others: The Text you’l find is very Plaine Eve, was made onely for the Man, Then How can you your self Deceive And think you’re not some Adams Eve? 56 

Alicia D’Anvers, The Oxford-​Act: A Poem (London, 1693), p. 18. Mary Davys, The Works of Mrs. Davys: Consisting of Plays, Novels, Poems and Familiar Letters, Several of Which Never Before Publish’d (London, 1725), p. 279. 58  Sarah Fyge, The Female Advocate; or, An Answer to a Late Satyr against the Pride, Lust and Inconstancy &c. of Woman (London, 1686). 59 Ephelia, Female Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1679), p. 85. 60  Elizabeth Tollet, Poems on Several Occasions: With Anne Boleyn to King Henry VIII: An Epistle (London, 1724), pp. 61–​6. 61  Anne Irwin, “An Epistle to Mr. Pope: By a Lady: Occasioned by His Characters of Women,” Gentleman’s Magazine, 6 (Dec. 1736), 745. 62  “Mary Seymour Montague,” An Original Essay on Woman, in Four Epistles (London, 1771), p. 2. 63  Laetitia Pilkington, The Statues; or, The Trial of Constancy: A Tale for the Ladies (London, 1739). 57 

 

260   Isobel Grundy Or on the Man Look with a Frowne Who onely comes to Claime His owne?64

Such purposeful playfulness constitutes a witty claim to wit, parallel to a rational claim to reason. Masham’s poem is also epistolary, like a great deal of women’s output. Bookish poets might choose the Ovidian or Horatian tradition, the former being used for role-​reversal (as in Mary Robinson’s “Petrarch to Laura”)65 or presentations of women’s predicament which are more nuanced than the simple, traditional victim statement of seduction and betrayal. Montagu, for instance, attacks the legal inequity of marriage in “Epistle from Mrs Y[onge] to Her Husband” with a passion that most of Ovid’s original heroines reserve for their seducers (Essays and Poems, pp. 230–​2). While Horatian epistles by Montagu (addressing Bathurst) and Irwin (addressing Pope) adopt a style of formal debate, they are also related to those deliberately disconnected, helter-​skelter verse epistles in which women exploit their gender for comic effect. The domestic intimacy of these informal poems both follows and mocks the convention of abrupt transitions in letter-​writing, and the conventional cliché of women’s scattiness. Most readers today would prefer Anne Grant’s delightful postscript to “A Journal from Glasgow to Laggan” to the body of the poem. The tour-​guide material of this lengthy letter-​journal heavily involves the Muse and other literary and mythological allusion, with inset sonnets composed en route. The postscript (proverbially indispensable in women’s letters) is far more sprightly: “Jean, fetch that heap of tangled yarn, | And bring those stockings here to darn, | And get from Anne the dairy keys, | That I may go and count my cheese.” In these lines poetry is reconciled with the “common useful duties” which the poem’s conclusion depressingly opposes to “the barren laurel” (Grant, Poems on Various Subjects, p. 213). Jane West, too, in “Epistle to Laura” produces something more enjoyable than her “Ode on Poetry” or poems on Napoleon’s conquest of Sicily, when she like Grant addresses the clash between duties and composition: The blackbirds on the cherries seize; The pigs have rooted up the peas; Away the unfinish’d ode is thrown, And Clio yields to country Joan.66

These two poets (both better known as prose writers) are at their best when the vernacular style gives them a temporary respite from the idea that a domestic woman has no business with poetry. Another canonical form, the ode, was for women a means of entering public discourse or contending for poetic honors (see ­chapter 30, “Ode”). The young Mary Astell sent her ecclesiastical patron formal yet self-​revealing poems in the then highly respected Pindaric form—​ nuanced, introspective, moving—​which convey a coherent ideological as well as personal

64  The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. Esmond Samuel De Beer, 8 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976–​89), vol. ii, p. 797. 65  Mary Robinson, Poems (London, 1791), pp. 187–​97. 66  Jane West, Poems and Plays, 4 vols. (London, 1799–​1805), vol. ii, p. 195.

 

The Poet as Poetess    261 creed.67 “The Spleen” brought Finch the fame she did not seek. Elizabeth Carter’s “Ode to Wisdom” was plagiarized by Richardson as the brainchild of his paragon Clarissa.68 The young Anna Aikin’s “Ode to Spring” boldly chooses the unrhymed form of Collins’s “Ode to Evening” and the subject of one of Gray’s best-​known odes (Barbauld, Selected Poetry and Prose, pp. 92–​4). Samuel Johnson learned by heart part of Helen Maria Williams’s “Ode on the Peace” (1783), but she made Napoleon her enemy with her later “Ode to Peace” (1801).69 Between Restoration and Romantic the ode in its changing forms remained a gateway for women into the public sphere of poetry. Women like men greeted royal or national occasions with plenty of forgettable poetry, while radicals used the ode for political critique, like Williams in 1801 or Amelia Alderson (later Opie) in “Ode on the Present Times” (1795), where she weeps for her country’s victories as much as for its defeats.70 But the aptness of the genre for celebrating kingdom, power, and glory ensured that it, like the epic and pastoral, had a thriving mock form. Elizabeth Thomas tacked the definition “An Ode” onto her riposte to Sir J —​—​S —​—​ , who said her books would make her mad.71 The wedding of the future George IV provoked Henrietta Battier’s Marriage Ode Royal, whose title page prints the word “royal” upside-​down in token of reversing the project of celebration.72 Whereas the ode reflected literary ambition, the ballad might seem to imply modesty of aim. Ballads in the early period (often titled “new ballad”) were the common coin of topical critique. James Worsdale offered Laetitia Pilkington two guineas to write a hundred ballads which he planned to print as his own; she indignantly rejected his terms.73 Tollet and Montagu wrote in street-​ballad style for partisan or scandalous effect, Montagu on a fracas in her social circle, and Tollet as one of many who answered “To All You Ladies Now at Land” by Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset.74 Elizabeth Boyd composed a “new ballad” (which, in contrast to Pilkington, cost her a guinea and a half for five hundred copies to sell individually herself) which uses the old motif of a wronged ghost as witness to past evil-​ doing. Boyd’s ghost protests about the familiar topic of women’s wrongs in marriage, in an indignantly “feminist” approach to a current cause célèbre, the famous Annesley inheritance case. The right to inherit turned on the alleged unchastity of Lady Altham (Mary Annesley,

67 

Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 400–​54. 68  Samuel Richardson, Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady, 7 vols. (London, 1747–​8), letter from Clarissa to Anna, March 24. 69  Williams’s earlier ode celebrated the Peace of Paris, with the newborn United States of America, in Sept. 1783. The second, published in the Morning Chronicle on Nov. 17, 1801, welcomed the preliminaries to the Peace of Amiens, with France, which became final in March 1802 but lasted only fourteen months (Helen Maria Williams, An Ode on the Peace (London, 1783); Orlando, s.v. Williams). 70  The Collected Poems of Amelia Opie, ed. Shelley King and John B. Pierce (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 6–​8. 71 Thomas, Miscellany Poems, pp. 181–​6. 72 Battier, The Kirwanade. 73  Laetitia Pilkington, The Memoirs of Mrs. Laetitia Pilkington (1748–​54), ed. A. C. Elias, Jr., 2 vols. (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1997), vol. i, pp. 99–​101, 115. 74 Montagu, Essays and Poems, pp. 216–​21; Edmund Curll (ed.), Whartoniana; or, Miscellanies, in Verse and Prose: By the Wharton Family, and Several Other Persons of Distinction: Never Before Published, 2 vols. (London, 1727), vol. i, pp. 135–​7.

 

262   Isobel Grundy née Sheffield, who died in 1729), and evidence was presented in court that she had been both emotionally and physically abused by her husband.75 The ghost-​ballad here performs the defense function of Montagu’s “Epistle from Mrs Yonge.” Two prominent women later opposed each other in this kind of vigorously partisan ballad. In Bishop Bonner’s Ghost Hannah More encapsulates the Whig view of history through the ironic mouthpiece of a Marian bishop, “a great burner of heretics,” who deplores the modern church’s softness on Dissenters, together with “the spread of literacy, the married [and therefore more humane] priesthood … the approaching abolition of slavery” (Orlando, s.v. More). More spoke for a whole school of political thought, and Anna Barbauld promptly retorted in an answering ballad, pointing to reactionary and oppressive tendencies still latent in such institutions as the Anglican Church.76 Meanwhile the ballad also served the different purposes of folk culture, often folk culture appropriated by more literate classes. Mary Jones, for instance, scored a popular success with a broadsheet ballad she never meant to publish, a seduction story whose milkmaid heroine she presents sympathetically but also with some class condescension.77 Susanna Blamire avoids such condescension through the robustly self-​sufficient uneducated voices in her Scots and English ballads. As regards ballads, Scottish high and low culture seem to have lain closer together than the English. A number of lower-​class Scotswomen who wrote poetry in both formal and informal genres are best remembered for their ballads, while further up the social scale revivalists swam in the stream of collaboration and successive variants as they reshaped traditional songs for the modern age. Their tactful exercise of real creativity is seen in Lady Anne Barnard’s “Auld Robin Gray,” Anne Grant’s “Oh Where, Tell Me Where, Is Your Highland Laddie Gone?,” works by Baillie (a sharer in the projects of Burns and of his successor George Thomson), Lady Nairne’s “Land o’ the Leal,” “The Laird o’ Cockpen,” and many more, Elizabeth Grant of Carron’s “Roy’s Wife of Aldivalloch,” and Elizabeth Hamilton’s “My Ain Fireside” (Orlando). Anne Bannerman, the daughter of a “running stationer” or street ballad-​singer and performer, developed genteel connections and provides a particularly interesting example of Romantic poetry’s roots in traditional ballad.78 Isabel Pagan, who could read but not write, is probably the lead author of the well-​known “Ca’ the Yowes to the Knowes,” though Burns “added some Stanzas to the song, and mended others” before it reached print.79 It is no surprise that other Scottish laboring-​class poets—​Janet Little, Christian Gray, Christian Milne—​favored more ambitious genres which offered better protection against the scorn 75 

Elizabeth Boyd, Altamira’s Ghost; or, Justice Triumphant: A New Ballad: Occasion’d by a Certain Nobleman’s Cruel Usage of His Nephew: Done Extempore (London, 1744); Orlando, s.v. Boyd. 76  Hannah More, Bishop Bonner’s Ghost (Twickenham, 1789); Barbauld, Selected Poetry and Prose, pp. 127–​30. 77  Mary Jones, The Lass of the Hill (London, 1742); Orlando, s.v. Jones. The British Library, only holder of Jones’s original ballad, dates it 1740. 78  Nancy Kushigian and Stephen C. Behrendt (eds.), Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period, http://​alexanderstreet.com/​products/​scottish-​women-​poets-​romantic-​period, s.v. Bannerman; Anne Bannerman, Of Superstition and Chivalry (London, 1802). 79  Orlando, s.v. Pagan. Comment on this song’s latest incarnation, as the core of a musical work by Richard Rodney Bennett in memory of the Queen Mother, tends to call it a “folk song” with no author mentioned—​which would surely not be case were it verifiably by Burns.

 

The Poet as Poetess    263 to which their publications were vulnerable. Gray nevertheless opened her first volume with a ballad of female friendship, “Bessy Bell and Mary Gray, A Legendary Tale,” which invokes the aid of “the lowliest of the Muses,”80 and which seems to have circulated widely. She later wrote answers to traditional ballads, friendly toward Carolina Nairne’s “Land o’ the Leal” but indignant toward the traditional “O Nannie, Wilt Thou Gang wi’ Me?” In the latter the male speaker urges a woman to choose love and poverty with him; Gray answers hard-​headedly: “No! Sandie, I will never gang, | Ye’ll trudge through life alane for me.”81 The courtship ballad naturally invited the kind of robust woman’s-​angle response which is found in every genre. Women’s elegy, according to Kate Lilley, is a particularly “mobile” genre, upsetting boundaries (as do other genres in female hands) between high and low, private and public, occasional and non-​occasional.82 Lilley could find in the period 1640–​1700 only a single woman-​authored elegy on another woman author: the anonymously published tribute to Behn which is now generally ascribed to the young Delarivier Manley. Lilley concentrates on women’s laments for private friends and family, especially babies, and their tributes to male poets, and public figures of both sexes. Not only heart-​rending poems on infant deaths but also public elegies by women abound from after Lilley’s period, from those on Dryden collected by Manley as The Nine Muses (1700), to the poems on fallen heroes with which Seward seized the attention of the public in 1780–​1.83 So too do women’s versions of the kind of elegy which Lilley supposed to be masculine, which exhibit a “persistent concern with vocation, the creation of heroic genealogies and lines of apostolic succession” (Lilley, “The True State Within,” p. 72). The elegist of Behn, as Lilley observes, “expressly laments the impossibility of constructing or sustaining a female tradition” (“The True State Within,” p. 73). This, however, is not true of later works in the genre.84 Behn’s elegist (if she was indeed Manley) was lamented in turn in Aaron Hill’s Plain Dealer by a poet who might have been Eliza Haywood but was more probably Fowke. This “Lady” elegist dwells on her personal friendship with Manley, but also awards her “immortal Honours” and a heroic identity as satirist, in imagery very like that later used by Pope: “Thy Angel Pen, aw’d e’vn unblushing Vice, | And chas’d high Guilt, from its proud Paradise.” She invokes, too, a female poetic succession: Manley is “Life of my Genius!,” “Mistress of My Mind,” a source of immortality by association.85 Fowke’s other elegy on a fellow woman poet, “On Lady Chudleigh,” baldly asserts the superiority of 80 

Christian Gray, Tales, Letters, and Other Pieces in Verse (Edinburgh, 1808), p. 2. Christian Gray, A New Selection of Miscellaneous Pieces in Verse (Perth, 1821), p. 137. 82  Kate Lilley, “True State Within: Women’s Elegy, 1640–​1700,” in Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (eds.), Women, Writing, History, 1640–​1740 (London and Athens: Batsford and Univ. of Georgia Press, 1992), p. 72. 83  Rosemary Foxton, “Delariviere Manley and ‘Astrea’s Vacant Throne,’” Notes & Queries, 231 (1986), 41–​2; Delarivier Manley (ed.), The Nine Muses; or, Poems Written by Nine Several Ladies upon the Death of the Late Famous John Dryden, Esq. (London, 1700); Anna Seward, Elegy on Captain Cook, to Which Is Added an Ode to the Sun (London, 1780); Seward, Monody on Major André, to Which Are Added Letters Addressed to Her by Major André in the Year 1769 (Lichfield, 1781). 84  Some elegies on women poets by women are primarily concerned to mourn a patron or an intimate friend. Most, however, are couched as literary tributes. 85  Aaron Hill (ed.), The Plain Dealer (London, 1724–​5), no. 53. 81 

 

264   Isobel Grundy women. “Apollo mourns not for a Son, so long” as for a daughter. “Man,” she writes, envied Chudleigh’s learning (Savage, Poems on Various Subjects and Occasions, pp. 213–​14). Fowke emphasizes the moral qualities of both her female elegiac subjects, but her most striking, least routine praise goes to their literary achievement. Elizabeth Tollet critically considers the chances of enduring fame when she laments a female poet in “On the Countess of Winchilsea.” Neither the “Sister-​Muses” nor her tombstone can ensure immortality for Anne Finch. As years or generations roll on, only the work itself can guarantee the poet’s fame. “No Verse can speak her but her own, | The Spleen must be her fun’ral Song.”86 Elizabeth Singer Rowe was mourned by Elizabeth Carter, by Frances Lady Hertford, and a generation later by Anna Barbauld. The earlier, shorter form of Carter’s elegy attributes genius to Rowe and credits her with reforming the behavior of her own sex. Her later, expanded version shares a page with an anonymous “Friend” who chooses to praise Rowe exclusively for teaching and practicing virtue. Carter, by contrast, now celebrates Rowe’s virtues through their literary effects (they have rescued the Muses from scandal), and prays her to “be my genius and my guide below” and to “regulate my Muse.” While not downplaying virtue (none of the female elegists does that), Carter makes clear that the point of her poem is her literary discipleship.87 More than twenty years later, in 1772, Anna Aikin (later Barbauld) recalled Carter’s final tribute in her own “Verses to Mrs Rowe,” included in her earliest volume of poems. This poem is an act of discipleship, of placing herself both in the mainstream tradition of poetry and within the Dissenting and female subdivisions. It opens with a line adapted from the opening of Pope’s “Epistle to Robert Earl of Oxford,” which prefaced Thomas Parnell’s posthumous Poems (“Such were the Notes, thy once-​lov’d Poet sung”; “Such were the notes our chaster Sappho sung”; Pope, Poems, p. 313), but whereas Pope laments and pays tribute to a contemporary, Aikin references the very fountain-​head of lyric poetry, and laments a celebrated Dissenting lyricist, both of them women. One more detail invokes a specifically female tradition. She implores Rowe, “be thou my muse” (Barbauld, Selected Poetry and Prose, pp.  96, 97)—​an echo of the couplet with which the still unidentified Irishwoman “Philo-​Philippa” had opened her paean of praise to Katherine Philips: “Let the Male Poets their male Phœbus chuse, | Thee I invoke, Orinda, for my Muse” (Poems by the Most Deservedly Admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, sig. c2r). Here, that is, a poet who was to become a major voice for her age locates a female tradition as one thread of a complex web. Barbauld reminds today’s readers that a women’s tradition is not purely a modern construct. Women poets found ways of writing to fit their concerns and writing practices, and they found discerning critics, too, among their peers. Considering the odds stacked against them, it is astonishing how many might echo “On being charged with writing incorrectly,” by the poet who is probably Martha Fowke: “Writing’s my Pleasure, which my Muse | Wou’d not

86 

Elizabeth Tollet, Poems on Several Occasions, with Anne Boleyn to King Henry VIII.: An Epistle, enlarged ed. (London, 1755), p. 49. 87  Gentleman’s Magazine, 7 (April 1737); 9 (March 1739), 159.

 

The Poet as Poetess    265 for all their Glory lose: | With Transport I the Pen employ, | And every Line reveals my Joy” (A Letter to My Love, p. 61).

References Armstrong, Isobel, and Virginia Blain (eds.), Women’s Poetry in the Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon, 1730–​1820 (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). Backscheider, Paula R., Eighteenth-​Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005). Brown, Susan, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy (eds.), Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press Online, 2006–​ ), http://​orlando.cambridge.org/​ Fairer, David, and Christine Gerrard (eds.), Eighteenth-​ Century Poetry:  An Annotated Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). Gerrard, Christine (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth-​Century Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). Landry, Donna, The Muses of Resistance: Labouring-​Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–​1798 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990). Lavoie, Chantel Michelle, Collecting Women: Poetry and Lives, 1700–​1780 (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2009). Lonsdale, Roger (ed.), Eighteenth-​Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990). Messenger, Ann, Pastoral Tradition and the Female Talent:  Studies in Augustan Poetry (New York: AMS Press, 2001). Prescott, Sarah, and David Shuttleton (eds.), Women and Poetry, 1660–​1750 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Staves, Susan, A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–​1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006).

 

 

Pa rt  I I I

P OE T IC SU B J E C T S

 

 

Chapter 16

P oem s on P oet ry David F. Venturo No era witnessed the writing of more reflexive poems—​poems on poetry—​or more kinds of such poems than the long eighteenth century: instructional poems on the theory, practice, and history of poetry (serious and mock); reputation, ranking, and score-​settling poems; poems tracing literary genealogies (serious and mock); and a variety of poems—​mostly odes—​on poetry’s (and its sister arts’) evocative powers; on the progress of poetry (serious and mock); on the challenges of finding the right invocational fiction; and on discovering and maintaining one’s poetic vocation. This chapter touches on all these kinds of poems on poetry and on various hybrids, which sprang up at a time when poetry was more generically complex and protean than it is today.

The Art of Poetry What gave rise to such a profusion of rhetorically self-​conscious kinds of poems suddenly and prominently after the great era of Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, and Herbert—​an era that, whatever its manifold achievements, rarely engendered poems about the writing of poetry? At the time of the English Civil Wars, in the 1640s, the Baroque mode of literature, ascendant since the 1580s, still dominated. Perhaps most memorably exemplified by the Metaphysical poets, Baroque writers and thinkers conceived of a universe composed of parallel, hierarchical realms united by a single creator-​God. The realms of human beings, animals, birds, fish, plants, minerals—​in fact all creation—​interlocked and complemented one another. Parallels manifested themselves rhetorically in the kind of analogical tropes and conceits that Alexander Pope later satirized in Peri Bathous; or, The Art of Sinking in Poetry (1727) and that Samuel Johnson criticized in the Life of Cowley (1779). Occult similarities almost always trumped obvious differences. Parted lovers, for example, who remained faithfully committed were likened to a jeweler’s ductile “gold to ayery thinnesse beate,” spread but never disunited, and to the legs of a geometer’s compass, capable in their separation of combining to describe a perfect circle, itself symbolizing union.1 After the restoration of 1 

John Donne, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” in line 24, in The Poems of John Donne, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1912), vol. i, p. 50.

 

270   David F. Venturo Charles II in 1660, however, a group of skeptical, empirical thinkers and writers now often known as the Augustans—​whose leaders included Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Butler, and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester—​settled (though without conscious collusion) upon a daring enterprise: to drive the Baroque from public repute. After all, Augustans considered the Baroque both mad and bad; to them, it reflected the same diseases of imagination that led to the political and ecclesiastical strife of the English Civil Wars and German Thirty Years War. Religious enthusiasm and elaborate rhetorical conceits were complementary manifestations of the same pathology. The disruptive energies of Baroque wit required the countervailing restraints of Augustan judgment in state, church, and the arts. The Augustans, scornful of the Baroque, sought to make their writing new and different. If Baroque literature was effusive and ornate, Augustan, ideally, would be lean, spare, concise, correct. (It could, to be sure, also depart wildly from these ideals, as Hudibras, A Tale of a Tub, the Beggar’s Opera, and the Dunciad prove.) This desire helped give rise to one of the first and most important Restoration and early eighteenth-​century genres of poems on poetry—​the versified rhetorical treatise or instructional poem on the theory, practice, and history of poetry. These poems might be described as offering guidelines on how not to write Baroque poetry. The model for all such poems is, of course, Horace’s Epistula ad Pisones, so called because it was composed as a letter to an aristocratic father and two sons with the cognomen Piso, better known as Ars poetica from the title bestowed on it by the Roman rhetorician Quintilian. Written with studied artlessness (Pope remarks that “Horace still charms with graceful Negligence, | And without Method, talks us into Sense”), the poem follows the structure of a Greek or Roman poetic or rhetorical manual—​divided into sections on poesis (general principles of poetry), poema (issues of style, technique, and genre), and poeta (the offices and responsibilities of a poet).2 Horace, whose rhetoric depicts him as urbane, sophisticated, and unpretentious, endorses a poetics of clarity, elegance, and concision that values decorum and tradition. He advises his friends to write carefully, retrenching and revising, and to publish only when their work is focused, orderly, and complete. These virtues are also endorsed and evinced in his Satires I. iv, I. x, and II. i. With the advent of Renaissance neoclassicism, the Ars poetica inspired many epigones, notably the neo-​Latin De arte poetica (1527) of Cremonan humanist-​poet and bishop Marco Girolamo Vida. In the early seventeenth century, Ben Jonson twice scrupulously translated (and expanded) the 238 Latin hexameters of Horace’s Ars into 340 lumbering, verbatim English heroic couplets. Then, just past mid-​century, Nicolas Boileau-​Despréaux decisively transformed the writing of poems on poetry (and translation more generally) when he seized upon an enabling fiction that he discovered in the pseudo-​Longinian Peri hypsous. Boileau, whose French translation of Peri hypsous was published in 1674, began writing satires in the 1650s, based on the poems of Juvenal and Horace. Unlike Jonson, he did not translate verbatim; fired by Longinus’s redefinition of imitation, he gave himself much more latitude. Imitation—​μίμησις—​had usually reflected Aristotle’s definition in Poetics of a poet’s copying, in words, something natural, external, and empirical, such as human action or character. One’s pleasure came from comparing artful copy with original. By contrast,

2  Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, lines 653–​4, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–​69), vol. i, p. 313.

 

Poems on Poetry   271 Peri hypsous took imitation into the realm of the metaphysical. For Longinus, echoing Plato, imitation (in Boileau’s translation) did not involve servile copying of words, “comme des bestes qui regardent toûjours en bas, & qui sont courbées vers la Terre,” but noble emulation, stimulated by reading a great work, of a writer’s spirit.3 Such emulation is likened to the divine inspiration experienced by “la Prestresse d’Apollon sur le sacré Trepié” (p. 33). The very enthusiasm (from ἐνθoυσιασμός, ‘filled with a god’) that Augustans satirized as a form of Baroque madness thus slipped into their aesthetic through a side door: Car on tient qu’il y a une ouverture en terre d’où sort un souffle, une vapeur toute celeste qui la remplit sur le champ d’une vertu divine, & lui fait prononcer des oracles. De mesme ces grandes beautez que nous remarquons dans les Ouvrages des Anciens sont comme autant de sources sacrées, d’où il s’éleve des vapeurs heureuses qui se répandent dans l’ame de leurs Imitateurs, & animent les esprits mesmes naturellement les moins échauffez: si bien que dans ce moment ils sont comme ravis & emportez de l’enthousiasme d’autrui. (p. 33)

As Ruben Quintero observes, “A poet … must intoxicate himself with sublimity.”4 Moreover, the Augustans embraced this new creative process because it was empirically sound—​it worked. Authors enjoyed freedom from the constraints of literalism (John Dryden defended the new approach in his prefaces) and classically trained readers could compare departures from, and parallels with, originals. When John Oldham translated—​or rather imitated—​the Ars poetica in 1681, he explained that he was “putting Horace into a more modern dress … by making him speak, as if he were living, and writing now … the Scene [altered] from Rome to London … [with] English names of Men, Places, and Customs, where the Parallel would decently permit.”5 Oldham’s model for updating his classical source was almost surely Boileau’s Art poétique (1674), which applies Longinus’s theory by transplanting Horace from ancient Rome to contemporary Paris. As Boileau’s Satires and L’Art poétique demonstrated, capturing the spirit, and attempting to write as one imagined one’s source would were he one’s contemporary, were flatteringly empowering fictions:  how pleasing to pretend oneself Virgil, Juvenal, or even Shakespeare. (The weaknesses of these imitations and the gaps in the enabling fiction were not fully exposed until Johnson’s historicist critique of them in the Life of Pope, 1781.) So, paradoxically, these poems that urged correctness, clarity, and restraint and were supposedly grounded in empirical truth depended on a kind of godly invocation—​a channeling, as it were—​of one’s source’s spirit: an activity that Thomas Hobbes, the arch-​Augustan, had mocked in his “Answer of Mr. Hobbes to Sir Will. D’Avenant’s Preface before Gondibert” as “a foolish custome, by which a man, enabled to speak wisely from the principles of nature and his own meditation, loves to be thought to speak by inspiration, like a Bagpipe.”6 3 Longinus, On the Sublime: The Peri Hupsous in Translations by Nicolas Boileau-​Despréaux (1674) and William Smith (1739), intro. William Bruce Johnson (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1975), p. 32. 4  Ruben Quintero, Literate Culture: Pope’s Rhetorical Art (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1992), p. 108. 5  John Oldham, The Poems of John Oldham, ed. Harold F. Brooks and Raman Selden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 87. 6  Thomas Hobbes, “Answer to Davenant’s Preface to Gondibert,” in J. E. Spingarn (ed.), Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908; repr. Bloomington: Univ. of Indiana Press, 1957), vol. ii, p. 59.

 

272   David F. Venturo

Instructing by Pleasing The tension between Augustan correctness and Longinian license helps explain the explosion of Horatian versified rhetorical treatises beginning in the 1670s and culminating in Pope’s great Essay on Criticism (1711). Most of the earliest Horatian imitators were Restoration courtiers—​“The Mob of Gentlemen who wrote with Ease”—​witty arbiters of taste who identified with Horace’s urbanity and court connections in a nation with newly imperial pretensions.7 John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave’s Essay on Poetry (1682, 1691), Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse (1684, 1685), and George Granville’s Essay upon Unnatural Flights in Poetry (1701) all emphasize the importance of rhetorical self-​ control. Mulgrave, whose Horatian opening quickly metamorphoses into a Boileauvian imitation, asserts the importance of craft: Of Things in which Mankind does most excell, Nature’s chief Master-​piece is writing well; And of all sorts of Writing none there are That can the least with Poetry compare; No kind of work requires so nice a touch, And if well done, there’s nothing shines so much.8

Roscommon, a better poet and subtler thinker, whose couplets Pope repeatedly echoes in An Essay on Criticism, emphasizes proper instruction in one’s “arms” before literary combat: Happy that Author whose correct Essay Repairs so well our Old Horatian way, And happy you, who, by propitious fate, On great Apollo’s sacred Standard wait, And with strict discipline instructed right, Have learn’d to use your arms before you fight.9

(Granville’s brief, nugatory Unnatural Flights, just 105 lines, mostly focuses on avoiding rhetorical excesses.) Roscommon, who translated the Ars poetica into blank verse (1680), and Sir William Soames and John Dryden, who collaborated on The Art of Poetry (1684), an imitation in heroic couplets of Boileau’s Horatian imitation, L’Art poétique, all emphasize that poetry’s discriminating readers will not tolerate mediocrity. Yet what really liberates these poets and drives their calls for correctness is the Trojan horse of Longinian imitation. Approving allusions to Longinus abound, no more clearly than in Roscommon’s Translated Verse: When France had breath’d, after intestine Broils, And Peace and Conquest crown’d her forreign Toils, There, cultivated by a Royal Hand,

7 Pope, Imitations of Horace, Epistle ii.1, line 108, in Twickenham Pope, vol. iv, p. 203. 8 

John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, An Essay upon Poetry, lines 1–​6, in Spingarn (ed.), Critical Essays, vol. ii, p. 286. 9  Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, An Essay on Translated Verse, lines 1–​6, in Spingarn (ed.), Critical Essays, vol. ii, p. 297.

 

Poems on Poetry   273 Learning grew fast, and spread, and blest the Land; The choicest Books that Rome or Greece have known, Her excellent Translators made her own; And Europe still considerably gains, Both by their good Example and their Pains. From hence our gen’rous Emulation came, We undertook, and we perform’d the same. But now We shew the world a nobler way, And in Translated Verse do more than they. (lines 29–​40)

As Boileau explains in his translation of Longinus, the path to the sublime “C’est l’Imitation & l’emulation des Poëtes & des Escrivains illustres qui ont vescu devant nous.”10 Both Mulgrave and Roscommon close their essays by invoking this challenge. After rhapsodizing Homer and Virgil (“As much above the rest of humane kind … as a Changeling seems below,” lines 322, 319), Mulgrave, sounding doubtful of success given his opinion of modern epic poets, dares his contemporaries to surpass the two ancients: “But he must do much more than I can say, | Must above Cowley, nay, and Milton too prevail, | Succeed where great Torquato, and our greater Spencer fail” (lines 348–​50). By contrast, Roscommon, after echoing Milton’s sentiment that rhyme is no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poetry, and composing a Miltonic blank verse pastiche, rapturously prays (in heroic couplets) for a poet to outdo not Homer and Virgil, but (in blank verse) Milton: O may I live to hail the Glorious day, And sing loud Pæans through the crowded way, When in Triumphant State the British Muse, True to her self, shall barb’rous aid [i.e., rhyme] Refuse, And in the Roman Majesty [i.e., blank verse] appear, Which none know better, and none come so near. (lines 404–​9)

Published on May 15, 1711, a week short of its author’s twenty-​third birthday, Pope’s extraordinary Essay on Criticism exudes youthful confidence and mature command of its medium, argument, and sources. Johnson—​rarely known for lavish praise—​lauded the Essay: “if he had written nothing else, [it still] would have placed him among the first criticks and the first poets, as it exhibits every mode of excellence that can embellish or dignify didactick composition, selection of matter, novelty of arrangement, justness of precept, splendour of illustration, and propriety of digression.”11 Generically complex and stylistically exquisite, the poem weds Horace to the literary concerns of Queen Anne’s London. Pope loses no time in daringly transforming the Ars poetica into a disquisition on criticism and on justifying the change: ’Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill Appear in Writing or in Judging ill; But, of the two, less dang’rous is th’Offence To tire our Patience, than mis-​lead our Sense: Some few in that, but Numbers err in this, Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss. (lines 1–​6)

10 Longinus, On the Sublime, p. 32.

11  Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), vol. iv, p. 68.

 

274   David F. Venturo Why address the Essay to critics rather than poets? The alteration is warranted, first, by shifting demographics. Since critics, the persona avers, now outnumber poets ten to one, the poem will do greater good. Besides, bad poetry merely annoys us, whereas bad criticism weakens our reason, our judgment. Moreover, Pope feared that critics, through pride, had lost sight of their role as “the Muse’s Handmaid” (line 102) and had set themselves up as competitors (as apothecaries had done with physicians according to Samuel Garth’s mock-​heroic Dispensary). This apologia for the primacy of poetry over criticism, despite the overwhelming numerical odds against poets, had to be made with the greatest tact, especially because of Pope’s youth and then-​modest reputation. The critic must understand both the art of poetry and the science of criticism, and Pope sets out to instruct his auditor without seeming to do so, a task requiring great rhetorical and psychological sensitivity (and exemplifying how Pope would have critics instruct poets). The critic’s chief aim, according the Essay? To help the poet write enduring verse. Following Horace, Pope divides his poem into three sections: lines 1–​200 on the rules of poetry and criticism (poesis); lines 201–​559 on mistakes critics make when applying the rules, mostly by preferring parts to the whole (poema); and lines 560–​744 on the morals (i.e., the demeanor) of the critic (poeta). Pope’s most important advice, for both poet and critic, comes early: First follow Nature, and your Judgment frame By her just Standard, which is still the same: Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, One clear, unchang’d, and Universal Light; Life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart, At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art. (lines 68–​73)

This is the critical keystone of the whole poem. For Pope, a Lockean empiricist, Nature is perhaps equivalent to the laws of Newtonian physics (first published in Principia Mathematica, 1687), which were thought to be true for all times and places. Without nature, art would not exist, since it provides the raw materials (art’s source); its telos (in Pope’s words, art’s end or goal is “To copy Nature,” line 140); and its test (art that reflects nature is aesthetically and morally preferable to the idiosyncratic and unnatural—​about which Pope has more to say in the Dunciad). Furthermore, just as Pope describes Nature as “One clear, unchang’d, and Universal Light” (line 71), artists and critics, he urges, should focus on unity of design rather than pet preferences. Thus, at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, “No monstrous Height, or Breadth, or Length appear; | The Whole at once is Bold, and Regular” (lines 251–​2). This is the main theme of the second section of the Essay, in which the persona entertains by contrasting descriptions or examples of poetry spawned by narrow, partial criticism with descriptions or examples born of a broader, more urbane perspective, such as excessive attention to “Conceit” (figures and tropes) versus “True Wit” (lines 289–​304); “False Eloquence” (ornate diction) versus “true Expression” (lines 305–​36); “smooth or rough” “Numbers” versus “The Sound … an Eccho to the Sense” (lines 337–​83); and various “Extreams” (line 384) including excessive preferences for the ancients or moderns (lines 394–​407); for aristocratic poetasters (lines 408–​23); for popular fashion or learned eccentricity (lines 424–​9); for modish follies (lines 430–​51); and for writers who share one’s own opinions or values (lines 452–​73) versus those with more cosmopolitan tastes. In the end, the critic must be well read and morally courageous, unafraid to defend “true Merit” (line 474) from public opprobrium and “Wit”

 

Poems on Poetry   275 from the attacks of “Ign’rance” (lines 494–​525). (Sir Richard Blackmore had responded to Samuel Garth’s clever Dispensary (1699) with his frumpy Satyr against Wit in 1700.) How can the critic best assist the poet? The third section of the Essay stresses the counterproductivity of overweening didacticism: ’Tis not enough your Counsel still be true, Blunt Truths more Mischief than nice Falshoods do; Men must be taught as if you taught them not; And Things unknown propos’d as Things forgot: Without Good Breeding, Truth is disapprov’d; That only makes Superior Sense belov’d. (lines 572–​7)

The critic, following Horace’s advice to the poet in Ars poetica, must instruct and please, or as Johnson later wrote of Shakespeare, “instruct by pleasing.”12 But critics, like poets, need models. Instruction without example, as Aristotle stressed, is very difficult. As Longinus remarked in Boileau’s translation, writers learn from “l’Imitation & l’emulation des Poëtes & des Escrivains illustres.”13 In a Longinian gesture that differs from any of his predecessors’, Pope presents the character of an ideal critic (not poet) in beautifully balanced, sometimes antithetical, heroic couplets: But where’s the Man, who Counsel can bestow, Still pleas’d to teach, and yet not proud to know? Unbiass’d, or by Favour or by Spite; Not dully prepossest, nor blindly right; Tho’ Learn’d, well-​bred; and tho’ well-​bred, sincere; Modestly bold, and Humanly severe? Who to a Friend his Faults can freely show, And gladly praise the Merit of a Foe? Blest with a Taste exact, yet unconfin’d; A Knowledge both of Books and Humankind; Gen’rous Converse; a Soul exempt from Pride; And Love to Praise, with Reason on his Side? (lines 631–​42)

Still, compared to his Restoration predecessors, Pope perhaps downplays emulation and even gently mocks in two passages (lines 267–​70 and 585–​8) the most famous Longinian critic of the era, the irascible John Dennis. But he plangently closes the poem (lines 643–​744) with an unbroken genealogy of exemplary critics from Aristotle (“The mighty Stagyrite”) to the recently deceased William Walsh, “the Muse’s [i.e., Pope’s] Judge and Friend, | Who justly knew to blame or to commend.” The encomium to Walsh evinces Pope’s extraordinary rhetorical skill, praising the critic while modestly deflecting attention from his own genius, that, he pretends, “in low Numbers short Excursions tries” (line 738). But, of course, the literary edifice Pope built testifies to the joint accomplishment of Pope the poet and Walsh the critic and offers a model that only the daring would strive to emulate. A few features of Pope’s Essay remain to be considered before we move to later examples of the versified rhetorical treatise. The first is the remarkable generic plasticity and variety of 12  The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 21 vols. to date (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1958–​), vol. vii, p. 67. 13 Longinus, On the Sublime, p. 32.

 

276   David F. Venturo the poem. Pope tucks at least three other kinds of poems on poetry into the Essay (not including bits of other versified rhetorical treatises): the progress poem, in this case chronicling the movement east to west (and over time) of classical learning from Greece to Rome to Italy, France, and England; the literary genealogy, tracing the predecessors of Pope’s critical muse from Aristotle and Horace to Mulgrave, Roscommon, and Walsh; and the poem on the power of poetry and its sister arts, here an inscribed ode celebrating Dryden’s St. Cecilia’s Day Pindaric ode, Alexander’s Feast; as well as a host of other genres, which appear in snippets and allusions, then recede into the poem’s fabric, including pastoral, elegy, lampoon, epic (both the Iliad and the Aeneid), and georgic. Mikhail Bakhtin famously observes that the novel cannibalizes other genres.14 Perhaps the Essay’s generic proteanism and absorbency reflect the novelizing tendencies of Pope’s imagination, which delighted in the mundane flotsam and jetsam of life. (One could draw a line of similar authors from Pope and Swift to Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, and Thomas Pynchon.) The poem’s genre briefly, repeatedly changes under pressure of shifting concerns. The voice of the Essay’s persona, even as it pretends to universalize, gives us a good sense of the topical preoccupations of litterateurs in Queen Anne’s London: for example, who is in (Garth); who, out (Blackmore and Dennis); and what constitutes true and false wit (the delightful examples of good and bad writing in section two of the poem). Many critics have remarked on the rise of georgic in the eighteenth century. Pope’s novelizing tendencies might be described as reflecting movements toward “urban georgic.” Traditionally, the genre (though freighted by its founder, Virgil, with allegory and symbolism) provided advice and commentary on agricultural labor—​husbandry—​care of soils and cultivation of crops, livestock, even bees. Pope urbanizes georgic (as perhaps Horace in the Ars poetica already had done to his friend Virgil’s invention) by offering practical instruction to aspiring London authors at the very moment Swift and Gay invented the town eclogue, parodying the rise of what Schiller might have called “sentimental pastoral.” Though Pope never deliberately parodied georgic (unlike his friends Swift in A Description of a City Shower and Gay in Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London), he adapted the form, with its didactic and interpretive conventions, such as reading portents and signs, to the conditions of his own life and times.

A Grub Streeter’s Guide Swift’s delightfully raucous “Directions for a Birth-​day Song” (1729) and On Poetry: A Rapsody (1733), both mock-​rhetorical treatises, reflect the author’s satiric response to what he regarded as the decline of poetry in Hanoverian England. Gone are the suave persona and elegant heroic couplets of Pope’s Essay on Criticism, replaced by rollicking Hudibrastics spoken by demotic poets-​manqués—​wily Grub Street veterans who know how to finagle a pound out of a patron or the literary marketplace. Gone, too, is Pope’s refined advice. “Directions” follows the lead of the advice-​to-​a-​painter poems sometimes attributed to Andrew Marvell that satirize the Duke of York’s conduct in the Dutch Wars and Pope’s hilarious Guardian 78 essay, “A Receit to Make an Epick Poem,” in which the narrator cheerfully

14  M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 5–​7.

 

Poems on Poetry   277 asserts that such “Poems may be made without a Genius, nay without Learning or much Reading” by dutifully mixing the right poetic ingredients as “good Houswives” do in “making Puddings of Flower, Oranges, [and] Plumbs.”15 Designed to needle Swift’s friend, Matthew Pilkington, who had published, seeking royal favor, a poem to George II, “Directions” mocks the servile birthday odes and other flattering stuff that poet laureate Laurence Eusden annually composed, from 1718 to 1730, for the king. The poem’s twenty-​eight verse paragraphs provide simple, foolproof instructions for assembling—​from prefabricated materials—​an ode to George and his family: To form a just and finish’d piece, Take twenty Gods of Rome or Greece, Whose Godships are in chief request, And fit your present Subject best. And should it be your Hero’s case To have both male & female Race, Your bus’ness must be to provide A score of Goddesses beside.16

The poem mostly consists of brief mock-​heroic, mock-​neoclassical tableaux, crude ekphrastic pastiches of clichés, stale images, and outright lies delivered in salty, vernacular English. The speaker, a demotic Horace who seems rudimentarily to grasp the “ut pictura poesis” analogy from the Ars poetica, urges the aspiring flatterer to compare King George to Jove, Apollo, Neptune, and, given his martial pretentions, the god of war: Your Hero now another Mars is Makes mighty Armys turn their Arses. Behold his glitt’ring Faulchion mow Whole Squadrons with a single blow: While Victory, with Wings outspread, Flyes like an Eagle or’e his head; His milk-​white Steed upon it’s haunches, Or pawing into dead mens paunches. As Overton has drawn his Sire Still seen o’r’e many an Alehouse fire. (lines 29–​38)

Halfway through “Directions,” the poet-​manqué briefly lays his irony aside to acknowledge the immorality of pursuing one’s “Int’rest” (line 115)—​the guinea reward for composing a birthday ode—​at the expense of truth: Thus your Encomiums, to be strong, Must be apply’d directly wrong: A Tyrant for his Mercy praise, And crown a Royal Dunce with Bays: A squinting Monkey load with charms; And paint a Coward fierce in arms. (lines 117–​22)

15  Alexander Pope, “A Receit to Make an Epic Poem,” in The Prose Works of Alexander Pope: Vol. 1: The Earlier Works, 1711–​1720, ed. Norman Ault (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press for Basil Blackwell, 1936), p. 115. 16  Jonathan Swift, “Directions for a Birth-​day Song,” lines 1–​8, in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), vol. ii, p. 460.

 

278   David F. Venturo Swift, who had reservations about capitalism and the profit motive, as An Argument against Abolishing Christianity attests, and about kings, as he declares in “Verses on the Death of Dr.  Swift,” emphasizes how easily and perhaps inevitably the poet laureate’s panegyrical duties can lead to the abuse of both honesty and poetic craft. On Poetry: A Rapsody, one of Swift’s best poems, playfully merges elements of Horace’s Ars poetica and Pope’s Essay on Criticism to create an urban georgic Grub Streeter’s Guide to the Life of Writing. In such a poem, as Susanna Morton Braund notes, a “dominating personality” “sets [it]self up as an authority, with information, exhortations, and warnings to deliver.”17 Though Swift consistently keeps the diction and style low, the speaker’s advice varies, sometimes consonant with the author’s own, at others, ironically divergent. The poem begins with a wry proem (lines 1–​76) spoken by a voice close to Swift’s. No species, it avers, harbors such foolish aspirations or behaves as perversely as our own: Brutes find out where their Talents lie: A Bear will not attempt to fly: A founder’d Horse will oft debate, Before he tries a five-​barr’d Gate.18

The “Human Race” is different: “Man we find the only Creature, | Who, led by Folly, [combats] nature” (lines 1, 19–​20). And of all our follies, none more dooms us to unsuccess than pursuit of a poet’s career. As Swift, with a heaping of mock-​grandiloquent anaphora (Not, Not, Not, Not) coupled with low diction and mock-​neoclassical cliché, explains: Not Beggar’s Brat, on Bulk begot; Not Bastard of a Pedlar Scot; Not Boy brought up to cleaning Shoes, The Spawn of Bridewell, or the Stews; Not Infants dropt, the spurious Pledges Of Gipsies littering under Hedges, Are so disqualified by Fate To rise in Church, or Law, or State, As he, whom Phebus in his Ire Hath blasted with poetick Fire. (lines 33–​42)

The remaining 418 lines of the Rapsody are spoken by a grizzled Grub Street denizen—​“an old experienc’d Sinner | Instructing … a young Beginner” (lines 75–​6). Sometimes the advice sounds almost Horatian, as these lines, inspired by the Ars poetica and Satire I. x, on choosing a subject, composing, and revising: Consult yourself, and if you find A powerful Impulse in your Mind, Impartial judge within your Breast What Subject you can manage best; Whether your Genius most inclines

17 

Susanna Morton Braund, “Gay’s Trivia: Walking the Streets of Rome,” in Clare Bryant and Susan E. Whyman (eds.), Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-​Century London: John Gay’s “Trivia” (1716) (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), p. 156. 18 Swift, On Poetry: A Rapsody, lines 13–​16, in Poems, vol. ii, p. 640.

 

Poems on Poetry   279 To Satire, Praise, or hum’rous Lines; To Elegies in mournful Tone, Or Prologue sent from Hand unknown. Then rising with Aurora’s Light, The Muse invok’d, sit down to write; Blot out, correct, insert, refine, Enlarge, diminish, interline; Be mindful when Invention fails, To scratch your Head, and bite your Nails. (lines 77–​90)

The exhortation seems reasonable until one scrutinizes it. Choosing one’s genre is presented innocently enough, but when the speaker slips into mock-​high diction—​“rising with Aurora’s Light” in place of “getting up at dawn”—​we hear Swift laughing at the poet’s pretensions. Moreover, as the imperative verbs pile up in the verse paragraph’s last four lines, the instructions become comically mechanical: as in the prose Directions to Servants, gesture substitutes for action carried out with real knowledge or understanding. Sometimes, the poet’s comments illuminate a Grub Street convention and help us interpret Swift’s own satire. For example, when the speaker explains to the novice, “To Statesmen wou’d you give a Wipe, | You print it in Italick Type” (lines 95–​6), he calls attention to a typographical satiric cliché and prepares us for Swift’s own parodic use of it in the mock-​ neoclassical encomium to Prime Minister Robert Walpole later in the poem: Now sing the Minister of State, Who shines alone, without a Mate. Observe with what majestic Port This Atlas stands to prop the Court: Intent the Publick Debts to pay, Like prudent Fabius by Delay. (lines 441–​6)

The self-​conscious italicks playfully remind us—​if we need reminding—​how closely allied satire and panegyric can be in the slippery, ironic world of Augustan poetry.

Settling Scores The reputation, ranking, and score-​settling poem emerged from the same sources and at the same time as the versified rhetorical treatise. The first distinguished one in English is Rochester’s “Allusion to Horace 10 Sat: 1ST Book,” a Longinian imitation written c.1675 in heroic couplets. These poems (which are more than mere lampoons) reflect the fierce concern for public reputation (especially at the king’s court) among Restoration wits and poets. Just as period comedies, such as The Man of Mode and The Country Wife, distinguish between witwouds and wits, poems such as Rochester’s articulate principles of good writing, then celebrate or ridicule poets for succeeding or failing to live up to them. In the original, Horace praised (for high moral seriousness) and criticized (for prolixity) his great predecessor, the satirist Lucilius. That poem provided Rochester, once Dryden’s patron and friend, with a vehicle for mocking him for logorrhea (“Five hundred Verses every morning writt | Proves you no more a Poet than a Witt”) and for playing to “the false Judgment of an

 

280   David F. Venturo Audience | Of clapping fools” rather than the men of taste.19 Moreover, as Horace had listed contemporary writers that he admired and contemned, so Rochester unfavorably contrasts Dryden, Elkanah Settle, Thomas Otway, John Crowne, Thomas Flatman, Nathaniel Lee, Sir Car Scroope, and John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave (Dryden’s new patron), with Sir Charles Sedley, Thomas Shadwell, Fleetwood Sheppard, Edmund Waller, William Wycherley, George Etherege, Sidney Godolphin (courtier, politician, and Cavalier poet, killed in a Civil War skirmish, 1643); Butler (perhaps, Samuel, author of Hudibras, perhaps John, Lord Butler); Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst (later Earl of Dorset); and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and allies himself and his friends with greats of the previous generation: William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Fletcher. (Mac Flecknoe, discussed below among the genealogy poems, was probably written partly to settle the score with Shadwell’s patron, Rochester, whom Dryden could not attack directly without violating the implicit rules of social class.) Matthew Prior’s Satyr on the Poets (probably written early 1687, first published 1694), which imitates the first 97 lines of Juvenal’s Satire vii, turns the Latin poem’s argument inside out. Whereas the Roman poet complains about the lack of patronage for good poets (except from the emperor) in Hadrian’s Rome, Prior, after praising his own patron, the Earl of Dorset, sneers at bad poets, including in his opinion Dryden, Shadwell, Nahum Tate, Settle, and Thomas D’Urfey, who would be better off pursuing less demanding vocations. Even good poets, however, are cautioned about the vagaries of patronage, as Prior’s examples of Butler, Cowley, Lee, and Otway attest.20 Reputation and score-​settling poems flourished throughout the long eighteenth century. Swift’s On Poetry: A Rapsody gleefully names and depicts (in phrases cribbed from Dryden’s Aeneid) poets madly out-​emulating one another to sink ever deeper into a Longinian mock-​ sublime—​the bathos. Similarly, Pope’s Dunciad crowned, first, Lewis Theobald (1728, 1729), and, later, Colley Cibber (1743), king of the Grub Street hacks. The poem teems with references to poets, playwrights, novelists, journalists, publishers, editors, scholars, and critics who, its author thought, abused the English language. Charles Churchill flayed his literary opponents in poems such as The Rosciad (1761) and The Ghost (1763), and, as late as the Regency, the first canto of Lord Byron’s neo-​Augustan Don Juan (1819) included a mock-​ Decalogue (stanzas 205–​6) of poets he admired and disliked. These lists of poets sometimes metamorphose into genealogical panegyrics, as in Joseph Addison’s early “Account of the Greatest English Poets” (1694), a Horatian epistle addressed to one “Dearest Harry,” perhaps Henry Sacheverell, later Tory cleric, who requested “A short Account of all the Muse possest; | That, down from Chaucer’s days to Dryden’s Times, | Have spent their Nobel Rage in Brittish Rhimes.”21 Perhaps reflecting the categorizing tendencies of England’s first age of systematic, popular criticism, the poem briefly catalogs and lauds the (then) great tradition of poets from Chaucer to “Spencer,” Cowley, Milton, Waller, Denham, Roscommon, Dryden, Congreve, Mulgrave, and Addison’s patron, Dorset. More frequently, the encomiums turn satiric, most famously in Dryden’s mock-​heroic Mac Flecknoe (written 19  John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, “An Allusion to Horace 10 Sat: 1st Book,” lines 93–​4, 13–​14, in The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Harold Love (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 71–​4. 20  Matthew Prior, Satyr on the Poets, in The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, ed. H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), vol. i, pp. 28–​35. 21  Joseph Addison, “An Account of the Greatest English Poets,” in The Annual Miscellany for the Year 1694 (London, 1694), lines 3–​4.

 

Poems on Poetry   281 c.1676, published authoritatively 1684), in which poet Richard Flecknoe, hurt when literary son, Thomas Shadwell, denies his paternity, urges the “hopefull boy” to mock-​Longinian emulation of his real literary forebears, not Ben Jonson: Let Father Fleckno fire thy mind with praise, And Uncle Ogleby thy envy raise. Thou art my blood, where Johnson has no part; What share have we in Nature or in Art?22

Flecknoe insists that Shadwell—​a latter-​day George Herbert or Richard Crashaw, mired in an unfashionably Baroque aesthetic—​has nothing Augustan about him: Leave writing Plays, and chuse for thy command Some peacefull Province in Acrostick Land. There thou maist wings display and Altars raise, And torture one poor word Ten thousand ways. (lines 205–​8)

Satiric Genealogies While Pope closes An Essay on Criticism with a panegyric to the tradition of great classical (and neoclassical) critics, he opens the Dunciad (1728, 1729, 1743) with a satiric genealogy of the goddess of Dulness, as she prepares to anoint the dullest of her scribbling sons king of the dunces. Pope’s shift from real to mock celebration reflects changes in eighteenth-​century poetics and aesthetics that can best be traced in the history of the ode (see c­ hapter 30, “Ode”). By the 1720s, the high mimetic mode of Pope’s Essay on Criticism, founded on artistic recreation of an empirical, universal, uniform nature, had been called into question. In its place, poets and critics unhappy with Augustanism, following the Longinian example of Pope’s old nemesis, John Dennis, preferred a new aesthetic more emotional, expressive, visionary, and Gothic rather than classical in tradition. Pope, intrigued and troubled by this shift, incorporated it into the Dunciad. Though better known as a mock-​epic, the Dunciad also draws on the genre of the progress ode. Such poems, which offer a visionary or historical prospect, can be traced in English at least as far back as Adam’s historico-​prophetic vision witnessed from the Mount of Speculation in book xi of Paradise Lost (1667) and the historic prospect of John Denham’s Progress of Learning (1668), which chronicles the movement of “Streams of Knowledge” (line 223) from Eden to Chaldea, Egypt, Greece, Rome and, after the interruption of the Dark Ages, to the countries of Renaissance Europe. These surveys are also complemented by the rise of locodescriptive poetry, most famously in Denham’s Coopers Hill (1642, 1668). The historical prospect was, of course, also built into the structure of Virgil’s Aeneid, which chronicles the translatio imperii from Troy to Latium. With the transfer of Dulness’s seat of power from Smithfield to Westminster in book the first of the Dunciad, Pope ironizes the transfer, in Aubrey Williams’s words, into a translatio stultitiae.23 22 

John Dryden, Mac Flecknoe, lines 61, 173–​6, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1956–​2000), vol. ii, pp. 55, 59. 23  Aubrey L. Williams, Pope’s “Dunciad”: A Study of Its Meaning (London: Methuen, 1955), pp. 46–​7.

 

282   David F. Venturo When the goddess of Dulness visits the Rag-​Fair garret known as the Cave of Poverty and Poetry, soon to be the seat of her son, Tibbald (Cibber in the New Dunciad), we experience a mock-​sublime glimpse (from Dulness’s ecstatic, enthusiastic point of view) into the fecund mind-​womb of the hungry bard. Pope is both fascinated and horrified by this visionary aesthetic divorced from the mimesis of external nature: Here she beholds the Chaos dark and deep, Where nameless somethings in their causes sleep, Till genial Jacob, or a warm Third-​day Call forth each mass, a poem or a play. How Hints, like spawn, scarce quick in embryo lie, How new-​born Nonsense first is taught to cry, Maggots half-​form’d, in rhyme exactly meet, And learn to crawl upon poetic feet. Here one poor Word a hundred clenches makes, And ductile dulness new meanders takes; There motley Images her fancy strike, Figures ill-​pair’d and Similes unlike. She sees a Mob of Metaphors advance, Pleas’d with the Madness of the mazy dance: How Tragedy and Comedy embrace; How Farce and Epic get a jumbled race; How Time himself stands still at her command, Realms shift their place, and Ocean turns to land. Here gay Description Ægypt glads with showers; And gives to Zembla fruits, to Barca Flowers; Glitt’ring with ice here hoary hills are seen, There painted vallies of eternal green.24

For Pope, once poetry disconnects itself from the stability of Essay on Criticism’s “unerring Nature” (line 70), it becomes an Ovidian phantasmagoria of perpetual, unpredictable metamorphosis independent of time and place. Egypt, Nova Zembla (in the Arctic), and Barca (Libya) become preternaturally fertile; frosty hills and green valleys comfortably abut; genres that should never combine are allowed to copulate, producing monstrous offspring; distinct figures of speech lose their distinction. As John Sitter notes, these “violations of artistic decorum are really violations of Nature.”25 Moreover, the classical tradition of An Essay on Criticism is replaced (in the Dunciad Variorum) by a “gothic Vatican” of Baroque, analogical poets, including “Withers, Quarles, and Blome” (book i, line 126).

Progress Poems The extraordinary power of this vision, which Pope approached with shock, bemusement, and not a little contempt, the ode-​writers of the Age of Sensibility embraced—​with some

24 Pope, The Dunciad, book i, lines 53–​74, in Poems, vol. v, pp. 66–​7. 25 

John Sitter, The Poetry of Pope’s “Dunciad” (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1971), p. 11.

 

Poems on Poetry   283 apprehension. For them, the aesthetic of An Essay on Criticism lacked the daring of Longinus’s sublime and the expanse of Spenser’s, Shakespeare’s, and Milton’s imagination. Mid-​century sentimentalists, such as William Collins and Thomas Gray, longed to recover that power, but feared they lived too late to do so. David Hume articulated this concern in Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences (1742): “when the arts and sciences come to perfection in any state, from that moment they naturally, or rather necessarily decline, and seldom or never revive in that nation, where they formerly flourished.”26 Samuel Johnson, who hated historical determinism, nevertheless seemed to concur through his spokesperson in Rasselas (1759), Imlac: “every other kind of knowledge is an acquisition gradually attained,” whereas poetry “is a gift conferred at once.” Thus, a civilization’s “early writers are [commonly] in possession of nature, and their followers of art: that the first excel in strength and invention, and the latter in elegance and refinement.”27 Collins, in “Ode on the Poetical Character” (written c.1746), celebrates the visionary poetics of his great English predecessors Spenser and Milton in a professedly ecstatic allegory peopled by Fancy, Nature, Wonder, Truth, Mind, even Heaven itself, while lamenting that the vision is forever denied to present and future poets: “Heaven and Fancy, kindred powers, | Have now o’erturned the inspiring bowers, | Or curtained close such scene from every future view.”28 The confidence in emulation that had driven the imitation and fired Boileau and his contemporaries in the 1670s had burned out by the 1740s. The progress poem achieved its greatest popularity at the very historical moment that W. J. Bate’s “burden of the past” seemed weightiest. (The last ode writer after Milton and before Wordsworth—​with the exception of Smart—​to work with deft and convincing confidence was Dryden, in his St. Cecilia’s Day power-​of-​poetry Pindaric odes of 1687 and 1697.) Here we see the dilemma of what Friedrich von Schiller termed the sentimental poet, striving for a simplicity and sublimity made impossible by his own advanced culture and education. Thus poetry, as traced in Gray’s Progress of Poesy (written 1751–​4), has seen its glory move from east to west, through Greece and Rome to England, where it flourished in the hands of Shakespeare and Milton and declined with Dryden, and now, perhaps, to “climes beyond the solar road, | Where shaggy forms o’er ice-​built mountains roam” and “Chile’s boundless forests,” peopled by “savage youth” who sing “Their feather-​cintured chiefs and dusky loves.”29 When Pope, in An Essay on Criticism calls himself “the last, the meanest” of the “Bards[’] Triumphant” sons (lines 196, 189), the rhetorical skill and self-​assurance with which he writes subtly belie his modest claim. When Gray, by contrast, asserts his “daring spirit” in The Progress of Poesy, “Yet shall he mount and keep his distant way | Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate, | Beneath the Good how far—​but far above the Great” (lines 112, 121–​3), his rhetoric fails him. Gray’s and Collins’s allusions also fail them; both discordantly evoke Satan, in the midst of an Edenic scene, by Miltonic quotation.30 Gray, Collins, even Johnson in the Drury-​Lane Prologue (1747) concede the decline of English poetry from Shakespeare’s era to their own.

26  David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, rev. ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), p. 135. 27 Johnson, Works, vol. xvi, pp. 39–​40. 28  William Collins, “Ode on the Poetical Character,” lines 74–​6, in The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), p. 435. 29  Thomas Gray, “The Progress of Poesy,” in The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, lines 54–​5, 59, 60, 62. 30  See Collins, “Poetical Character,” lines 55–​62; and Gray, “Progress,” lines 63–​5.

 

284   David F. Venturo The progress ode also suffers because it stands awkwardly at an aesthetic crossroads between Augustan rhetorical arrangement and Romantic expressionism. Johnson, much to the annoyance of Collins’s and Gray’s admirers, found their odes “laboured.” Collins’s diction “affected the obsolete when it was not worthy of revival”; his syntax was “out of the common order.” Gray writes like a man who is “tall by walking on tiptoe.”31 The oddest of these progress odes, The Praises of Poetry: A Poem (1775), swells into a tumescent giant in the unsure hands of Capell Lofft, who traces the Greek, Roman, and Hebraic genealogies of Western poetry while borrowing clumsily and obviously from Milton and Dryden. The poem begins with the universe’s creation by Drydenic “heavenly harmony” and ends with an apocalyptic vision culled from Isaiah and Revelation with an echo of Pope’s Dunciad tossed in. Lofft’s was the last and most egregious of these mid-​century missteps: empirical, historico-​locodescriptive poems masquerading as metaphysical visions. The poets of sensibility create problems by privileging rhetoric over feeling, or rather, overusing it to try to convey intense feeling. Collins and Gray both believed that the language of poetry should be different—​loftier and more ornate—​than the language of prose and that such hyperbole itself would evoke sublimity. If, as Pope argued in his Essay, “Expression is the Dress of Thought” (line 318), these poetic couturiers outfitted their odes in garments loud and wildly extravagant.

Romantic Inspiration By the end of the century, the Romantics overcame these problems. They discovered how to let emotion drive rhetoric, rather than the reverse. With the partial exception of Byron, they turned from arrangement to fresh Longinian inspiration. Unlike his model Collins in Ode on the Poetical Character, Coleridge in Kubla Khan (composed 1797, published 1816) writes beautifully inspired poetry by ironizing—​that is, pretending incapacity (“could I  revive within me,” line 42) to do so. Moreover, Shelley and Keats take a new kind of Longinian inspiration by professing inferiority before a natural poet or poet-​substitute. By admitting their weaknesses and invoking their source, they liberate themselves to write. For Coleridge, the damsel with the dulcimer; for Shelley, the skylark and west wind; for Keats, the nightingale—​ all free the poet by the enabling fiction of a sympathetic, understanding nature to succor the imagination in the guise of what John Ruskin later termed “the pathetic fallacy.” This new fiction lasted a full century until debunked by the High Modernists, Frost and Stevens. Yeats, the last great Romantic ode writer, could, in 1927, still confidently invoke, echoing Shelley and Keats, a mechanical bird. Wordsworth in Ode: Intimations of Immortality (1807) shows how the poet, by invoking memory, can write a powerful, personal progress ode long after the youthful sublimity of “the glory and the dream” (line 57) has passed.32 Moreover, the Ode succeeds by deftly incorporating Shakespearean allusions (references to Hamlet and other plays abound) instead

31 Johnson, Lives, vol. iv, pp. 122, 183.

32  See James Chandler, “Wordsworth’s Great Ode: Romanticism and the Progress of Poetry,” in James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008), pp. 136–​54.

 

Poems on Poetry   285 of clumsily allegorizing the playwright. Wordsworth naturalizes Gray’s allegorical child-​ Shakespeare back into the actual person of little Hartley Coleridge, conning his Jaquesian parts. By striving, though—​as Coleridge later pointedly demonstrated—​not always succeeding, in imitating the “language really used by men,” Wordsworth, unlike the poets of sensibility, gracefully manages his verse and its fictions as the ode’s moods rise and fall.33 Wordsworth writes great poetry about the struggle to write poetry while combating the numbing exigencies of the modern world inherited from the Augustans. Like Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, he takes pressure off himself by anticipating Robert Frost’s “Oven Bird”: by mastering the art of how in singing not to sing.

References Aden, John, Pope’s Once and Future Kings: Satire and Politics in the Early Career (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1978). Bate, W. Jackson, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970). Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973). Brower, Reuben A., Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959). Doody, Margaret Anne, The Daring Muse:  Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985). Miner, Earl, The Restoration Mode from Milton to Dryden (Princeton:  Princeton Univ. Press, 1974). Parker, Blanford C., The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998). Quintero, Ruben, Literate Culture:  Pope’s Rhetorical Art (Newark:  Univ. of Delaware Press, 1992). Sitter, John E., Literary Loneliness in Mid-​Eighteenth-​Century England (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982). Sitter, John E., The Poetry of Pope’s “Dunciad” (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1971). Weinbrot, Howard D., Alexander Pope and the Traditions of Formal Verse Satire (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982). Williams, Aubrey, Pope’s “Dunciad”: A Study in Its Meaning (London: Methuen, 1955).

33  William Wordsworth, preface to Lyrical Ballads (1850), in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. W. Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), vol. i, pp. 123, 131. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, especially chaps. 14 and 17–​20, disagrees with Wordsworth about poetic diction.

 

Chapter 17

P oem s on P ol i t i c s Christine Gerrard It is impossible to write a critical account of eighteenth-​century poetry in which party politics do not loom large. This was the era which witnessed the birth of party from the crucible of the Civil War; and although recent scholarship has shown political verse of this period to be far more diverse in kind and form than the formal satires of Dryden and Pope,1 it is still true that until at least the mid-​1740s, party politics dominated poetry. Debates over apparently literary matters—​such as the appropriate diction for pastoral poetry, the scope of epic poetry, even the use of blank verse—​were continually underscored by party bias. Literary coteries as diverse as the Buckingham–​Sedley circle of the 1670s, Joseph Addison’s “Little Senate” of the 1710s, Pope and Swift’s Scriblerus Club (1712 onward), and the “Nonsense Club” of the 1760s (Cowper, Churchill, Thornton, Lloyd) were shaped and cemented by political affiliations. The vicissitudes of politics affected, often drastically, the lives of many of the poets who wrote during this period. Some were penalized or persecuted for their political loyalties. In 1688, the year that James II was forced into exile in the bloodless coup that became known as the Glorious Revolution, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea, former maid of honor to James II’s consort Mary of Modena, and her husband Heneage, went on the run. John Dryden’s similar refusal to swear the oaths of allegiance to the new monarchy led to the loss of his public offices of poet laureate and historiographer royal. In the early years of George II’s reign, when paranoia about the Jacobite threat was rife, Swift was the target of government surveillance. His mail was intercepted and he had to safeguard himself against government searches at home. In 1722 Alexander Pope was forced to give evidence in the House of Lords at the trial for treason of his friend Francis, Bishop Atterbury.2 In 1738, the satirist Paul Whitehead was arrested and imprisoned by the Walpole government for his

1 

See, for example, Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681–​1714 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005); Kathryn R. King, “Political Verse and Satire: Monarchy, Party and Female Political Agency,” in Sarah Prescott and David E. Shuttleton (eds.), Women and Poetry, 1660–​1750 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 203–​22; David Womersley (ed.), Cultures of Whiggism: New Essays on Literature and History in the Long Eighteenth Century (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2005); Pat Rogers, Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts: History, Politics, and Mythology in the Age of Queen Anne (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005). 2  See Howard Erskine-​Hill, “Pope and the Poetry of Opposition,” in Pat Rogers (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007), p. 136.

 

Poems on Politics    287 anti-​government satire Manners, a gesture many interpreted as a warning to far more famous poets such as Pope. Such prosecutions became less common after the collapse of the Walpole government in 1742, though Charles Churchill was also forced to resign his clerical offices in 1763. Churchill’s defense of the radical John Wilkes made him what his poetic hero Dryden would have described as a “Pen for one Party,”3 yet in the period after 1745 the relationship between party politics and poetry was rarely as violent as it had been in the period between 1660 and 1745. Although poets continued to address major national and public events such as the Jacobite uprising of 1745, the Seven Years War, the Gordon riots, and revolutions in the colonies and in France, there was a far less conspicuous sense of partisan poetry.

The Political Yet recent scholarship in the long eighteenth century has enlarged the realm of “the political” well beyond party politics. One of the most interesting critical debates is the relationship between gender and politics. To what extent did women, and women poets, consider themselves to be participants in, and commentators on, the political realm? To what extent did the language of gender mirror or define political realities?4 Many women poets of the late Stuart era, such as Aphra Behn, Ann Finch, Katherine Philips, and Jane Barker, were royalist or Stuart sympathizers. Interesting debates have arisen over why so many women poets express a passionate attachment to conservative political ideologies and advocate a Tory ideo­logy of divinely ordered subordination.5 Several “early feminists” in the years surrounding the Glorious Revolution and the Bill of Rights drew on a Lockean language of contracts and rights to challenge the patriarchal limitations imposed on women in domestic, marital, and educational contexts.6 The language of absolutism, tyranny, and slavery, and the plea for gender equality, wielded by female poets such as Sarah Fyge Egerton, Mary Lady Chudleigh, and Mary Leapor, deliberately draws together the public and the domestic realm. The Financial Revolution of the 1690s created another kind of political narrative, raising new questions about the nature of value and the relationship between citizen and state, questions which unsettled traditional social hierarchies based on property and rank.7 The discourse of money is both produced by and yet transcends party politics. The Bank of England was founded in 1694 as a Whig government’s initiative to raise funding for William’s 3  John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel (1681), “To the Reader,” in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1956–​2000), vol. ii, p. 3. 4  Valerie Rumbold, “Rank, Community and Audience,” in Prescott and Shuttleton (eds.), Women and Poetry, 1660–​1750, pp. 121–​39. 5  See Catherine Gallagher, “Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-​Century England,” Genders, 1 (1988), 24–​38; and Carol Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1649–​1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 6  Carol Pateman, “Women’s Writing, Women’s Standing: Theory and Politics in the Early Modern Period,” in Hilda L. Smith (ed.), Women Writers and the Early Modern Political Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 365–​82. 7  See, for example, Tom Jones, “Pope’s Epistle to Bathurst and the Meaning of Finance,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900, 44, no. 3 (Summer 2004), 487–​504.

 

288   Christine Gerrard wars; and the South Sea Company of 1711 by a Tory government’s attempt to fund a spiraling national debt. The descriptive label “capital satires” can be applied to poems as diverse as Pope’s Horatian Epistle to Bathurst, Swift and Gay’s topical ballads on the South Sea Bubble, and the Whig Bernard de Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714, 1723).8 Mandeville’s mock-​georgic Fable is an ironic political take on one of the most recently widely discussed modes of political verse: the eighteenth-​century georgic poem celebrating patriotism, industry, and empire. The mode includes such politically diverse examples as John Philips’s Cyder (1708), James Thomson’s Seasons (1726–​46), John Dyer’s Fleece (1757), and Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head (1807).9 The relationship between the topographical and the political is rooted in seventeenth-​century locodescriptive poems such as John Denham’s Coopers-​Hill and Pope’s Windsor-​Forest. It takes a different turn during the mid-​eighteenth century, drawing on a language of sensibility to explore topics such as social inequality and circumscribed potential, exemplified by elegiac poems such as Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) and Oliver Goldsmith’s Deserted Village (1770). Such concerns cohere around the figure of the laboring or self-​taught poet (Stephen Duck and Mary Collier in the 1730s and 1740s, Ann Yearsley, John Clare, and Robert Bloomfield toward the end of the century).10 It is no coincidence that laboring-​class women poets such Yearsley were also some of the most vociferous supporters of the abolitionist antislavery movement of the 1790s.11 Despite the emergence during this period of the novel—​a new, dynamic form for social expression—​poetry retained its unique status as a vehicle for political commentary. Poetry’s tonal flexibility, generic diversity, and rhetorical range enable it to mediate between the public and the private self, between praise, attack, and empathy. Pastorals, georgics, epics, mock-​epics, lyrics, ballads, verse epistles, Juvenalian and Horatian satires, topographical and prospect poems, biblical and Spenserian allegories: these are but a few of the genres and modes by which the political poetry of the age can be defined.

The Restoration Following the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, royalist poets such as John Dryden, Edmund Waller, and Aphra Behn faced a difficult task in their reconstruction of a poetic mythology which also had to accommodate the disruption and violence of the Civil Wars. They 8 

See Colin Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994). 9  See Karen O’Brien, “Imperial Georgic, 1660–​1789,” in G. MacLean, D. Landry, and J. P. Ward (eds.), The Country and the City Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 160–​79; and Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005). 10  See John Goodridge and Simon Kövesi (gen. eds.), Eighteenth-​Century English Labouring-​Class Poets, 1700–​1800, 3 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), and William J. Christmas, The Lab’ring Muses: Work, Writing, and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730–​1830 (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2001). 11  See Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–​1834 (London: Routledge, 1992).

 

Poems on Politics    289 were involved in a self-​aware process of fabrication, drawing together transhistorical myths from classical and biblical history—​the new Jerusalem, the return of the age of gold and the goddess Astrea—​in a series of unifying fictions which transcend human agency and which offer a reassuringly predetermined narrative of monarchical continuity and stability.12 Despite Dryden’s own critical concern with generic definitions and discriminations, the generic eclecticism of his best public poems such as Annus Mirabilis (1667) and Absalom and Achitophel (1681) testify to his ingenuity in adapting older genres such as the epic or the biblical allegory and creating new forms to suit the times. Yet an overview of the political poetry of the Restoration shows in some respects how unique Dryden was, as both a public poet and a maker of sustaining fictions that manage to incorporate both the tragic and the triumphalist. Astraea Redux (1660) is distinguished from hundreds of other Restoration panegyrics by its sober awareness of the scars and irreparable losses to Dryden’s generation of the Civil War period: Youth that with Joys had unacquainted been Envy’d gray hairs that once good days had seen: We thought our Sires, not with their own content, Had ere we came to age our Portion spent.13

In Absalom and Achitophel, Dryden manages to be both magisterial and risqué, skirting on the borders of offense by revealing the flaws in Charles’s character, yet converting his libidinous nature into a godlike creativity. Many poets in this period, however, came to see Charles’s hedonism in a darker light, as a symptom of weakness and a source of national failure.14 The naval humiliations of the Second Anglo-​Dutch War and the condition of a London destroyed by plague and fire, were linked to the venality of Charles’s court and his neglect of public business. Oppositional verse satires such as the “Advice to a Painter” series by Andrew Marvell and others from the 1670s onward emphasized the lack of national unity and a pervasive sense of degeneration. Many of these poems were highly sexual in nature, representing the king’s physical body as a trope for the body politic, the flagging priapism of the monarch a metaphor for his political impotence: “His sceptre and his prick are of a length.” Like the lampoon from which these lines come, the Earl of Rochester’s notorious “In th’Isle of Brittain,” many of these satires were either circulated in manuscript or published anonymously for fear of censorship or worse. The execution in 1681 of the violently anti-​Catholic poet and pamphleteer Stephen College, author of the “Raree Show,” a satire depicting Charles as a traveling showman carrying Parliament around on his back, showed that political prudence demanded anonymity or pseudonymity. Much of the poetry of the period 1660–​1700 was created not so much by the individual author but by scribes, publishers, and readers. As Harold Love has shown, Rochester’s “sceptre” lampoon on Charles II was the product of an almost communal activity on the part of various scribes, readers, and other writers, who changed and “improved” the poem in a literary version of Chinese whispers. It

12  Steven N. Zwicker and Paul Hammond, The Making of Restoration Poetry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. xiv–​xvi. 13 Dryden, Astrea Redux (1660), lines 25–​8, in Works, vol. i, p. 22. 14  See Steven N. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–​1689 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 90–​129.

 

290   Christine Gerrard is impossible to reconstruct Rochester’s original version.15 Even Dryden avoided attaching his own name to both the scurrilous Mac Flecknoe (1679) and to the politically partisan Absalom and Achitophel. While the fate of Achitophel (Anthony Ashley Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury and leader of the Whigs) hung in the balance as he awaited trial in the Tower, Dryden adopted anonymity as a smokescreen. The only poem published in Rochester’s name in his brief lifetime was the Satyr against Reason and Mankind (1679). Although not as explicitly topical as his court satires, the Satyr’s proposition that man is an irrational “reasoning engine” driven by fear and desire for power makes Rochester’s view of man as a political animal even more pessimistic than that of one of his major influences, Thomas Hobbes. The Satyr shares with other “universal” (as opposed to purely topical) Restoration satires, such as those by John Oldham, Samuel Butler, and Robert Gould, an ironic perception of mankind as fallible and limited. The misanthropy of Robert Gould’s Satyr on Man (1688) was matched by the corresponding misogyny of his Love Given O’re; or, A Satyr against the Pride, Lust and Inconstancy &c. of Woman (1682), in which he depicts women as destructive harpies driven by “boundless Lust”: And now, if so much to the World’s reveal’d, Reflect on the vast Stores that lie conceal’d: How, when into their Closets they retire, Where flaming Dil —​—​does inflame desire, And gentle Lap-​d—​s feed the am’rous Fire: Lap-​d — ​s! to whom they are more kind and free, Than they themselves to their own Husbands be. How curst is Man! when Bruits his Rivals prove, Ev’n in the sacred business of his Love. Great was the wise Man’s saying, great, as true; And well know, than he none better knew; E’en he himself acknowledges the Womb To be as greedy as the gaping Tomb.16

Gould’s poem shares some of the many familiar tropes of Rochester’s more obscene court lyrics such as “Signior Dildo.” The libertine excesses of the Restoration rake are underscored by the anxiety that women’s appetites are insatiable, the “Womb/​Tomb” metaphor recalling the feminized void of Rochester’s “Upon Nothing.” It was a sixteen-​year-​old girl, Sarah Fyge, who had the temerity to attack Gould’s “Spiteful Rhyme,” as she dismissed it, in her long poem The Female Advocate; or, An Answer to a Late Satyr against the Pride, Lust and Inconstancy of Woman (1686). Egerton showed remarkable courage and initiative in managing to get the poem published in London. Her father punished her by sending her away to the country, an exile she deplores in “On My Leaving London.” Her Poems on Several Occasions (1703), dedicated to the famous Whig patron Halifax, appeared soon after the Tory feminist Mary Astell’s Some Reflections upon Marriage

15  Harold Love (ed.), The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 85–​90, 596–​9; and “Rochester’s ‘I’th’Isle of Britain’: Decoding a Textual Tradition,” English Manuscript Studies, 1100–​1700, 6 (1997), 175–​223. 16  Love Given O’re; or, A Satyr against the Pride, Lust, and Inconstancy &c. of Woman (London, 1682), p. 5.

 

Poems on Politics    291 (1700), which transposed the language of contemporary political theory, especially of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, onto the issue of women’s matrimonial subjugation: Because she puts her self entirely into her Husband’s Power, and if the Matrimonial Yoke be grievous, neither Law nor Custom affords her that Redress which a Man obtains. He who has Sovereign Power does not Value the Provocations of a Rebellious Subject, but knows how to subdue him With ease, and will make himself obey’d; but Patience and submission are the only Comforts that are left to a poor People, who groan under Tyranny, unless they are Strong enough to break the Yoke, to Depose and Abdicate, which I doubt would not be allow’d of here. For whatever may be said against Passive-​Obedience in another case, I suppose there’s no Man but likes it very well in this; how much soever Arbitrary Power may be dislik’d on a Throne, Not Milton himself wou’d cry up Liberty to poor Female Slaves, or plead for the Lawfulness of Resisting a Private Tyranny.17

Astell argues, contra Locke, “if all men are born free, how is it that all Women are born slaves?” Sarah Fyge Egerton seems to echo Astell in “The Emulation” (1703) where she complains that “From the first dawn of Life, unto the Grave, | Poor Womanhood’s in every State, a Slave.”18 Egerton’s trenchant satirical couplets elevate the personal to the political:  her poems resonate with the language of liberty, tyranny, and incarceration. Her resistance to the “Fetters of Formality” and the “Gyves and manacles” of female adornment express themselves in fantasies of female empowerment.19 In The Female Advocate she suggests that “Though Man had Being first, yet methink She | In Nature should have the Supremacy”; and in “The Emulation” she asserts “We will our Rights in Learning’s World maintain, | Wits Empire, now, shall know a Female Reign.”20 Other works of the turn of the century which push the poetic boundaries of women’s “proper” place include Mary Chudleigh’s Ladies Defence (1701). Like Egerton’s spirited reply to Gould’s misogynist “Love Given O’er,” The Ladies Defence was a direct though anonymously published retort to John Sprint’s restrictive marriage sermon The Bride-​Woman’s Counselor (1699).21 Chudleigh’s verse essay is cast as a conversation between one female character, Melissa, and three men, including “Sir John Brute,” the wife-​hating misogynist of Vanbrugh’s comedy The Provok’d Wife (1697). The domestic tyranny of marriage and its relationship to the patriarchal order surface repeatedly in women’s poetry throughout the century. The domestic servant Mary Leapor’s “Man the Monarch” (1751) wittily shows through its reworking of the Genesis myth how the Bible has been used throughout history to control women, a patriarchal subjugation which operates in the domestic sphere: Sires, Brothers, Husbands, and commanding Sons The Sceptre claim: and ev’ry Cottage brings A long Succession of Domestic Kings.22

17 

Mary Astell, Some Reflections upon Marriage (London, 1700), pp. 28–​9. David Fairer and Christine Gerrard (eds.), Eighteenth-​Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 15. 19  “The Liberty,” lines 26–​8, in ibid., p. 12. 20  “The Emulation,” lines 32–​3, in ibid., p. 16. 21  See Margaret Ezell, “By a Lady: The Mask of the Feminine in Restoration, Early Eighteenth-​Century Print Culture,” in Robert J. Griffin (ed.), The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 70. 22  “Man the Monarch,” lines 63–​5, in Fairer and Gerrard, pp. 316–​17. 18 

 

292   Christine Gerrard

The Turn of the Century The decade following the Glorious Revolution led to other transformations in poetry, including a reconfiguring of the Restoration poetic canon. Poems on Affairs of State (1697), the anthology which drew mainly on the satirical poetry which had circulated during the reign of Charles II and James II, rewrote recent history from a strongly Whiggish and Williamite perspective.23 The collection attributes sixteen satires to Marvell, thus canonizing him as an anti-​Stuart Whiggish hero, and also exhibits Rochester in his anti-​court vein. The collection also includes several poems which represent the royalist Dryden in a negative light. Recent literary historians have charted the creation of a Whig literary culture in the early years of the eighteenth century, a self-​conscious poetic agenda celebrating a national identity founded on ideas of Protestantism, militarism, and modernity.24 Promoted by Whig critics such as John Dennis and Charles Gildon, it drew on Milton’s legacy as a writer of Protestant as opposed to pagan classical epic. A number of Whig poets—​notably Sir Richard Blackmore in his King Arthur (1697) and Joseph Addison in his Campaign (1708)—​attempted the Miltonic rather than the classical sublime to glorify England’s recent Continental victories abroad. Poetic patronage under William and Mary appears to have been stronger than under the Stuarts. The Kit-​Cat Club, frequented by eminent Whig patrons such as Charles Montague, Earl of Halifax, John, Baron Somers, and Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, supplied an extensive network of sinecures and posts for able writers.25 But the Glorious Revolution also had other far-​reaching poetic consequences. Some of those frustrated by the new regime found an outlet for their hopes and aspirations in the exiled Stuart dynasty; and the taint of Jacobitism, both real and rumored, clung to many Tory poets during the first three decades of the eighteenth century.26 Dryden, who had converted fully to Catholicism in 1685, went into exile, losing his titles and posts, and subsequently another Catholic poet, Alexander Pope, experienced a childhood suffered under the harsh penalties applied to Catholics, “For right hereditary taxed and fined,”27 as well as being frequently targeted for his “Popish” and pro-​Stuart sympathies.28 Poets such as Dryden, Pope, and Swift developed in their defense a myth inherited from their royalist precursors which shows Restoration culture rising from the barbarism of the Civil War. Whig writing is linked to Puritan dissent and becomes associated with low literary culture, ignorance, and “dullness.”29 Pope’s Peri Bathos (May 1728), an opening salvo in his war with the “dunces,” ridicules the failed flights of the Whig sublime in authors of

23 

Zwicker and Hammond, The Making of Restoration Poetry, pp. 24–​7.

24 Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture; David Womersley (ed.), Augustan

Critical Writing (London: Penguin, 1997), pp. xi–​xliv. 25 Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, pp. 216–​40. 26  See esp. Murray Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-​Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994). 27 Pope, Imitations of Horace, book ii, satire ii, line 64. 28  Howard Erskine-​Hill, The Poetry of Opposition and Revolution: Dryden to Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 66–​7 1. 29 Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, pp. 22–​55.

 

Poems on Politics    293 a previous generation—​mainly Blackmore and Ambrose Philips.30 The myth of dullness achieves its fullest incarnation in The Dunciad, in its various versions (1728, 1729, 1742, 1743). As David Womersley has argued, this was a superb piece of propaganda, a partisan piece which unequivocally aligned “Dullness” with Whiggism.31 Yet the trope of “dullness” was permeable enough to permit competing partisan versions of literary history across the period 1670–​1740. Whig poets developed their own counter-​myth of a Whig enlightenment arising from the ashes of the superstitious “dark ages” of monkish Catholic ritual, Stuart monarchy, and divine right of kings.32 Among the unpublished manuscript poems of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is an unfinished fragment of a mock-​epic poem, “Her Palace Placed beneath a Muddy Road,” which redeploys the topography of Dullness from The Dunciad, eliding Dullness with the religious and political beliefs of the Dunciad’s Tory Catholic author Alexander Pope, and champions the modern Hanoverian Whig establishment’s patronage of Enlightenment thinkers including Isaac Newton and Addison: Free from the thraldom of Monastic Rhimes, In bright progression bless succeeding Times, Milton free Poetry from the Monkish Chain, And Adisson [sic] that Milton shall explain, Point out the Beauties of each living Page, Reform the taste of a degenerate Age.33

Whig and Tory Poetics Such partisan Whig/​Tory Stuart/​Hanoverian competitiveness over a central series of rhetorical tropes, properties, and metaphors serves, almost paradoxically, to efface or collapse the ideological distinctions between parties which historians of the revisionist school of the 1980s and 1990s so carefully reinstated into their political histories of the long eighteenth century. It is not always easy to distinguish between Whig and Tory poetics. Dynastic rhetoric for both the Stuarts and the Hanoverians could sound surprisingly similar. Whig poetry celebrating the Williamite and Hanoverian monarchies echoes traditional royalist panegyric, drawing on a language of legitimacy and antiquity to cement dynastic loyalty. Susannah Centlivre’s poem on the accession of George I in 1714, for example, is no less eulogistic than Dryden’s panegyric To His Sacred Majesty: A Panegyric on his Coronation (1661), although the emphasis in Whig panegyric heightens the monarch’s promised protection of the liberty and rights of his subjects.34 Between 1688 and 1745, when the suppression of the Jacobite uprising, the Forty-​five, effectively put an end to most Jacobite hopes, 30  Christine Gerrard, “Pope, Peri Bathous, and the Whig Sublime,” in Womersley (ed.), Cultures of Whiggism, pp. 200–​15. 31  Womersley (ed.), Augustan Critical Writing, p. xiv. 32  Kendra Packham, “Anti-​Popery and ‘Pro-​Catholic’ Representations and Texts in Later Seventeenth and Earlier Eighteenth-​Century England,” D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford (2011). 33  “Her Palace Placed beneath a Muddy Road,” lines 39–​42, in Montagu, Essays and Poems, p. 248. 34  Susanna Centlivre, A Poem Humbly Presented to His Most Sacred Majesty George, King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland: Upon His Accession to the Throne (London, 1714).

 

294   Christine Gerrard it was possible for poets to praise a “Patriot Prince” or the “Prince of Wales” to mean either Frederick Prince of Wales or Charles Stuart. Both Whig and Tory poets under Anne wrote dynastic pastorals, such as Ambrose Philips’s Pastorals and Pope’s Pastorals, both published in Jacob Tonson’s Miscellany (1709); poets on both sides ransacked British antiquity—​the Gothic past, the Elizabethan past—​in order to validate and legitimize their cause. Whig poets such as John Dennis, James Thomson, and Edward Young tended to appropriate Miltonic blank verse’s associations with political liberty, its prosodic valorization of “ancient liberty restored to heroic poem” from the “troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming” (see ­chapter 23, “Blank Verse”). Yet there are plenty of examples of famous Whig poems using rhyming couplets, and the poet who was most successful in popularizing blank verse was the Tory John Philips, author of the Miltonic Splendid Shilling (1701).35 Similarly, it has become a commonplace to view trade and commerce as Whig themes, the stuff of what Bonamy Dobrée famously defined as “Whig Panegyric,” such as James Thomson’s Seasons (1726–​46) and Richard Glover’s London; or, The Progress of Commerce (1739);36 and yet the model for this expansionist patriotic panegyric is the Tory Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis, with its images of a renovated London at the center of a vast network of exotic world trade, the “fam’d Emporium” (line 1205) anticipating the Whig Addison’s description of London as “a kind of Emporium for the whole Earth.”37 Similarly, the Tory Catholic Pope’s Windsor-​Forest (1713), an unmistakably pro-​Stuart poem, manages to glorify London and the Thames at the heart of a vast system of world commerce. Trade’s centrality to Whig or Tory poetics is less a matter of ideology than of timing.

The Alchemy of Money Similar ambiguities are also true of the changing world of monetary relations set in train by the Financial Revolution of the 1690s onward. Tory conservative resistance to the new world of money markets only really gained sway in the years following the spectacular collapse of the South Sea Bubble in September 1720. Although William III’s Whig government established the Bank of England and the national debt to fund the Nine Years War against the French, by 1710, eight years into Queen Anne’s reign, the credit system introduced in the 1690s was rapidly approaching the limits of its capacity. The new Tory ministry led by Robert Harley was forced to borrow on increasingly unfavorable terms. The South Sea Company was established in 1711 as a means of renegotiating the debts of the previous twenty years at a lower rate of interest. Its prospectus closely resembled that of the “East India Company,” and it looked like a perfectly viable investment scheme linked to profits generated by Britain’s growing overseas trade. 35 

For the arguments about blank verse and Whig ideology, see esp. Eric Rothstein, Restoration and Eighteenth-​Century Poetry, 1660–​1780 (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 63–​8; Dustin Griffin, Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), p. 81; Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, pp. 177–​8. 36  Bonamy Dobrée, “The Theme of Patriotism in the Poetry of the Early Eighteenth Century,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 35 (1949), 49–​65. 37  Spectator 69, in The Spectator, vol. i, p. 293.

 

Poems on Politics    295 But initiatives such as the South Sea Company arguably operated in ways that transcended political ideology. Once the state became a potentially profitable commodity in which one could purchase shares, political loyalty might be determined more by ongoing profit potential than by ideological or familial ties. Addison’s Tatler produced enthusiastic accounts of modern financial London, including advice on share-​dealing and descriptions of the Royal Exchange.38 John Gay’s Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716)—​despite exposing the sordid side of commercial London, as did Swift’s early urban georgic poems “A Description of the Morning” (1709) and “A Description of a City Shower” (1710)—​also celebrates commercial energy at play. It took a Dutch physician and philosopher, Bernard Mandeville, in his notorious Fable of the Bees, first published in 1714, to deal frankly with the ideology of self-​interest, captured by the apparently ironic oxymoron of its subtitle, “Private Vices, Public Benefits.” The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest, the couplet poem at the center of The Fable of the Bees, first published by itself in 1705, offers a wry fictionalized account of the rise of modern commercial Britain through an extended georgic analogy with a beehive. Mandeville’s highly anthropomorphized bees exemplify a modern capitalist society which keeps itself afloat through consumer spending. The hive enjoys an unprecedented level of comfort and civilization until a discontented and politically ambitious bee complains that the hive is morally degenerate: “Good Gods, Had we but Honesty!”—​a Whig stab, probably, at Tory opposition moralizing directed at John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, and the wealth he was accused of amassing through the War of the Spanish Succession.39 The hive subjects itself to moral self-​scrutiny. Ashamed of their credit-​based lifestyles, the bees adopt a new self-​sufficient Puritanism. No one spends money on building works or trips to the tavern. Worker bees are laid off work, the economy shrinks, and the hive eventually becomes so attenuated that it can no longer fend off its enemies and retreats into a hollow tree. It is as if modern capitalist Britain has become ancient Sparta. Mandeville’s poem is brutally funny, and also remarkably prescient in its analysis of the rhetorical maneuvers that politicians use to make citizens feel morally culpable for financial downturns. The Fable of the Bees attracted little notice when it was published in 1714, with its apparatus of prose “Remarks” and the cynical Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue. It was not until it was reprinted in 1723, accompanied by an essay on the hypocrisy of charity schools, that the text was presented as a “public nuisance” by the Grand Jury of Middlesex. The extreme response to the 1723 edition must be set in the context of the South Sea Bubble disaster of 1720–​1, still fresh in the public memory. Mandeville’s flagrant endorsement of luxury and self-​ interest had a particular resonance for those investors who had been fraudulently parted from their investments in South Sea stock. The South Sea Bubble inspired some of the most imaginative political poetry of the 1720s and 1730s. The main events which led to the crisis thus bear repeating. South Sea stock was originally promoted in 1711 through the promise of lucrative gains to be made from the slave trade in the South Seas.40 The long continuation of the War 38  See Erin Mackie (ed.), The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from “The Tatler” and “The Spectator” (Boston: Bedford/​St. Martin’s, 1998), esp. pp. 169–​318. 39  Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), vol. i, p. 27. 40  The standard work on the period is John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble, rev. ed. (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1993). See also Julian Hoppitt, “The Myths of the South Sea Bubble,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 12 (2002), 141–​65; and Helen J. Paul, The South Sea Bubble: An Economic History of Its Origins and Consequences (London: Routledge, 2011).

 

296   Christine Gerrard of the Spanish Succession and its conclusion in the Peace Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, which limited trading rights with the Spanish colonies, was disadvantageous to any South Sea trade; and the subsequent outbreak of war with Spain in 1717 meant that the company’s legitimate trade dried up. Instead the directors managed to create a financial pump which sucked up investment and paid investors dividends out of its own new investments. The price of South Sea stock escalated rapidly throughout the summer months of 1720, and created a plethora of “bubble” schemes in its wake as disappointed would-​be investors flocked to make money in other speculative schemes. Eventually when the share price peaked at £1,000 there was a collapse in confidence and a run on the banks which caused numerous bankruptcies, suicides, and government enquiry into the Company’s affairs which lasted for well over a decade. Literary historians often associate turn-​of-​the-​century innovations in speculative finance with the rise of the novel, both products of the new bourgeois financial markets. Ever since Ian Watt defined Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as homo economicus the close relationship between the Financial Revolution and the rise of the novel has become a given—​“where the dynamism of capitalist exchange can be linked to narratives of change, transformation and development.”41 Yet I would argue that it is poetry, rather than the novel, that deals most imaginatively and creatively with the alchemy of money and the various forms of monetary substitutes. The weeks and months following the collapse of the South Sea Bubble spawned numerous poems ranging from popular ballads to play prologues to satires by well-​known authors such as Swift, Gay, Pope, and Ann Finch, all dealing with the crisis in value. John Gay’s Panegyrical Epistle to Thomas Snow (1721) draws explicit parallels between a poet and a banker sharing a cell in an asylum, both driven mad by their own imaginative fantasies of “golden showers.” Poetry’s capacity to accommodate and metaphorically mirror the sudden shifts and flights of the money markets renders it a far more imaginative genre for depicting the new world of finance and credit than the early novel, with its commitment to realism and narrative coherence. Swift’s poem The Bubble (1720) moves rapidly through a series of metaphors which represent the swelling, shrinking, and metamorphosing qualities of South Sea stock. Swift creatively reworks a passage from John Oldham’s Satyr on the Jesuits (1681) to expose the sleight of hand involved in modern financial practice. Oldham had originally depicted Catholic priests as tricksters who duped the masses with the fake doctrine of transubstantiation, the transformation of Christ’s body into the communion wafer.42 In Swift’s version the priest is replaced by the “mountebank” banker who makes money disappear then reappear in different form: Ye wise Philosophers explain What Magick makes our Money rise When dropt into the Southern Main, Or do these Juglers cheat our Eyes? Put in Your Money fairly told; Presto, be gone—​Tis here ag’en Ladyes, and Gentlemen, behold, Here’s every Piece as big as Ten. (Swift, Poems, vol. i, p. 250)

41 

James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-​Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1996), p. 9. See also Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957). 42  John Oldham, A Satyr on the Jesuits (London, 1681), pp. 91–​2.

 

Poems on Politics    297

Walpole The Hanoverian regime was heavily implicated in the collapse of the South Sea Company. In a bid to boost public confidence in South Sea stock in early 1720, George I had been elected governor of the Company, and the royal family had also invested in South Sea stock. In 1721 a committee of enquiry into the company investigated the extent of the scandal—​a trail which led to the heads of the ministry, Lord Stanhope and Sunderland, and would have led higher. Robert Walpole—​the ambitious Whig politician who covered up the scandal, thereby earning one of his soubriquets, “Screenmaster General”—​catapulted himself into power on the back of the South Sea debacle. There was a moral backlash to the crisis which expressed itself in the civic-​humanist language of John Gordon and William Trenchard’s Cato’s Letters of 1720–​1, as well as the capital satires of Swift and Pope. Pope’s Epistle to Bathurst (1734), with its depiction of a low-​born but successful merchant Sir Balaam, who engages in a pact with the devil and ends up being hanged for financial peculation, draws on the magical or Faustian mythologies of the South Sea Bubble years.43 The poem depicts a wizard who prophecies that “Corruption, like a gen’ral flood” (line 137) will spread throughout the land. The political identification of Walpole with necromancy and wizardry spanned popular prints as well as poems.44 This was one of the many guises in which his corpulent figure appeared in the satire of the time—​a richly allusive set of images and metaphors which permeate both high and low literary culture. As Walpole gradually strengthened his hold on power by combining the offices of chancellor of exchequer, leader of the Commons, and close adviser to the Hanoverian monarchs, his opponents came to include not only Tories but also disgruntled Whigs who had resigned or been dismissed from the government. This opposition recruited the best literary talent of the age. Many poets resented Walpole’s apparent ministerial indifference to culture and contempt for poets. There was little evidence of Walpole’s interest in continuing Whig systems of patronage for supporting the arts which had existed during the reigns of William and Anne. The “Literary Opposition to Walpole,” which reached its heights in the last two years of the 1730s is one of the best-​documented examples of the power of the written word to sway public opinion.45 This campaign spanned a range of different literary genres, including journals such as The Craftsman, secret histories (Delarivier Manley’s New Atalantis, Haywood’s Adventures of Eovaai), drama (Gay’s and Fielding’s satirical comedies and Patriot dramas such as Gustavus Vasa and Edward and Eleanora), and poetry. Poetry occupied a pivotal position in this campaign. Opposition Whig poems such as Thomson’s

43  See esp. Vincent Caretta, “Pope’s Epistle to Bathurst and the South Sea Bubble,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 77, no. 2 (1978), 212–​31; and Jones, “Pope’s Epistle to Bathurst.” 44  See Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731–​1743 (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1969), pp. 143–​7; and Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–​1742 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 174–​7. 45  See, for example, Bertrand Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722–​1742 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1976); Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968); and Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole.

 

298   Christine Gerrard “Rule Britannia” and Richard Glover’s “Admiral Hosier’s Ghost” (both 1740) tapped a vein of popular patriotism in their readership. “Rule Britannia,” though first performed during a staging of the Masque of Alfred for Frederick Prince of Wales, the opposition’s royal figurehead, at Cliveden in 1740, soon entered the realm of popular song.46 Glover’s Admiral Hosier’s Ghost was one of the most popular ballads of its day—​printed as a broadside ballad “To the Tune of Come and Listen to my Ditty.” In common with traditional ballads, it shows a ghostly revenant—​the figure of Admiral Hosier, who in 1726 had died from fever with his fleet off the coast of Porto Bello, a victim of government pusillanimity in delaying an attack on Spanish ships. Glover had previously written a highbrow patriotic epic, Leonidas (1737). This mingling of the highbrow and lowbrow was also true of the anti-​Walpole satires produced with increasing outspokenness throughout the 1730s by Pope and the young Samuel Johnson. Both Pope and Johnson imitated classical satirists, but used the “imitation” as a means of both veiling and pointing up topical allusions. Pope’s Imitations of Horace (1733–​8) contained a veiled justification of his opposition to the ministry, and Johnson’s anonymously printed London (1738) was an “imitation” of Juvenal’s third Satire, which made some hits against the ministry in the figure of “Orgilio” (Walpole) and the anti-​Hanoverian innuendo of its closing lines which glanced at George II’s German interests and mistresses. Pope’s satires, like those of Dryden and Marvell, did not scruple to descend to low language and metaphor. In 1738 Pope used a notoriously provocative image in Epilogue to the Satires, dialogue 2, to demonstrate systematized court and ministerial corruption—​the “Hogs of Westphaly” who lick each other’s excrement.47 A number of poems published in the year 1738 merge satire, sentiment, and idealism in their vision of the satirist as hero, single-​handedly wielding his poetic “sword” against corruption. Toward the conclusion of Epilogue to the Satires, dialogue 2, Pope echoes an earlier Civil War poet, Andrew Marvell, in Tom May’s Death, in depicting the poet fighting a rearguard action against the corruption of the times: O sacred Weapon! left for Truth’s defence, Sole Dread of Folly, Vice and Insolence To all but Heav’n-​directed Hands by thee deny’d The Muse may give thee, but the Gods must guide.48

In the last years of Walpole’s ministry, the opposition campaign culminated in a certain type of intense, ideologically committed public poetry. After Walpole’s fall in 1742, satire lost its larger-​than-​life target. The early 1740s, however, witnessed further satires exposing the fallacies of opposition idealism, satires which exposed the self-​seeking political realities behind myths like that of Lord Bolingbroke’s redemptive “Patriot King” figure who, it was promised, would lead a government above party.49 The cynical mood of anti-​Patriot satires of the 1740s is not dissimilar to the gloomy and pessimistic anti-​court satires of the Restoration. In both cases, so many hopes had been pinned on one event (the Restoration of Charles II, the fall of Robert Walpole) that disappointment was inevitable. 46 

See Michael Burden, Garrick, Arne, and the Masque of Alfred: A Case Study in National, Theatrical, and Musical Politics (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1994). 47  Epilogue to the Satires, dialogue ii, lines 180–​1, in Works, vol. iv, p. 323. 48  Epilogue to the Satires, dialogue ii, lines 171–​80, in Works, vol. iv, p. 323. 49  See Robert Harris, A Patriot Press: National Politics and the London Press in the 1740s (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993).

 

Poems on Politics    299

Social Class As the concerns of poetry moved during this mid-​century period from the metropolitan to the provincial, a new set of tensions arise from the contrast not only between the urban and the rural, but between the educated and the uneducated. Anxieties about social class and social opportunity, or lack of opportunity, permeate many of the poems of this period. Arguably some of these themes had already emerged from the poetry of the 1730s. Although Stephen Duck, the thresher poet, was regarded by Swift and others as a tasteless and untalented novelty, a fit emblem of Hanoverian literary taste (celebrity recipient of Queen Caroline’s patronage), his poems and his life foregrounded the gap between humble origins and poetic ambition. This theme was also incorporated into the opposition onslaught on Hanoverian Britain where wealth and influence were seen as the preserve of a corrupt and self-​servingly exclusive metropolitan elite. As the Lichfield schoolmaster Johnson expressed it in London (1738): “slow rises worth, by poverty depress’d” (line 177). When Thomas Gray, part of this elite (an Eton education and a Cambridge Fellowship) addressed a similar theme in his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), he managed to capture within a set of universally accessible images both the pathos and the innocence of rural obscurity. The village Cromwell “guiltless of his country’s blood” (line 60) has remained guiltless for want of opportunity. Far less quietist in its conclusions, and far more polemical in theme and tone, was Goldsmith’s equally popular Deserted Village (1770), a poem which harnesses sentiment and nostalgia to a sustained rhetorical polemic against enclosure and rural depopulation. These themes, at the turn of the century, were to find a poignant personal expression in the poetry of the rural laboring poet John Clare. Goldsmith’s poem oscillates between the political rhetoric and economic language of the 1720s and 1730s—​the attacks on “luxury,” the erosion of the simple virtues of a yeoman class, the equation of population and economic capital, “where wealth accumulates and men decay” (line 52)—​and a more tentative and ambivalent language of personal memory and loss. At one level this becomes a poem about the powerlessness of the poet to shape events: the feminized figure of the old woman gathering watercress on the river bed, the “sad historian of the pensive plain” (line 138), becomes a trope for the poet himself: and the sense too in the closing lines that Poetry, like the sturdy villagers, has been forced to leave the land, echoes earlier ironic “progress” poems of the Walpole period such as Pope’s Dunciad. At the heart of this poem, as with Gray’s Elegy, is the educated and sophisticated poet’s uncertain relationship with the common people whose lives he is attempting to document. Both Gray and Goldsmith have been criticized for their condescension toward the very social groups that they were attempting to represent and memorialize. The idea that writers, and poets in particular, could forge a direct and personal relationship with their readers through the new instruments of publication, is illustrated by the cases of two very different poets, the satirist Charles Churchill and the “milkwoman” laboring poet, Ann Yearsley. Both make interesting case studies for poets whose unconventional, defiant stance sought a poetic independence founded less on patronage and patrons than on public readership. Churchill is an important figure in any account of eighteenth-century political poetry, even though less accessible as a satirist than his predecessors Dryden, whom he admired greatly,

 

300   Christine Gerrard and Pope, with whose legacy he had a deeply antagonistic relationship.50 Churchill was the most outspoken member of the so-​called “Nonsense Club,” which included among its members Bonnell Thornton, Robert Lloyd, and William Cowper, a group whose dynamics recall the Scriblerus Club (see c­ hapter 8, “The Poet as Clubman”).51 Although Churchill’s earliest satires such as The Rosciad (1761) were mainly literary and theatrical, his association in 1763 with the radical MP John Wilkes led him to spearhead a satirical campaign against the unpopular Earl of Bute, the Scottish (and some said pro-​Stuart) adviser to the new monarch George III. Churchill’s violently Wilkite satires, produced in an intense burst between 1763 and 1764, echo something of the political disillusionment of the 1740s with “Patriot” cant. Churchill’s personal lifestyle was as irregular as his poetic style. But there is no attempt in his satire, as there is in Ben Jonson’s and Pope’s, to align the “good poet” with the “good man,” to marry private and public morality. In The Conference (1763) Churchill engages in a ruefully confessional admission that the poet is no better than he should be, like most other men. Churchill describes his own time spent in a debtors’ prison and then throws himself on the mercy of his readers: By Candour more inclin’d to save, than damn A gen’rous Public made me what I Am. All that I have, They gave: just Mem’ry bears, The grateful stamp, and what I am, is Theirs.52

Churchill’s populism and irreverence helped make him the most famous poet of his time, and he earned £3,300 in the two years before he died. Although a world of social, gender, and class difference may seem to divide Churchill and Ann Yearsley, twenty years his junior, their poems—​formally unstructured, rebarbative, intensely political engaged—​and their poetic voices, rebellious, unconventional, dismissive of literary propriety, voicing a characteristic egotism that oscillates between insecurity and exhibitionism—​share some striking features in common. Yearsley could have been speaking for Churchill when she exclaimed … Dauntless Thought I eager seiz’d, no formal Rule e’er aw’d; No Precedent controul’d; no Custom fix’d My independent spirit …53

The story of the evangelical writer Hannah More’s “discovery” of the Bristol milkseller Yearsley and their subsequently vexed relationship is well documented. Yearsley, supporting six children, an indigent husband, and an aged mother, was close to starvation when More rescued her from poverty and obscurity. The preface to Yearsley’s Miscellaneous Poems (1783) revealed More’s and the Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu’s admiration for Yearsley’s talents, yet their reluctance to entrust her with her own financial independence. In a spirited attack on More’s patronage, Yearsley bit the hand that fed her. Like Churchill she felt that her 50  See Brean Hammond and Martin Malone, “Pope and Churchill,” in Colin Nicholson (ed.), Alexander Pope: Essays for the Tercentenary (Aberdeen: Aberdeen Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 22–​38. 51  See Lance Bertelsen, The Nonsense Club: Literature and Popular Culture, 1749–​1764 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986). 52  Charles Churchill, The Conference (1763), in Poetical Works, p. 237. 53  “To Mr ****, an Unlettered Poet, on Genius Unimproved,” in Fairer and Gerrard, p. 491.

 

Poems on Politics    301 “independence” had been compromised and, like Churchill, she felt confident enough of her own popularity to throw herself at the mercy of a reading public, publishing volumes of her poems by subscription. Unlike the Westminster-​educated Churchill, Yearsley lacked a formal education, but her “stubborn and savage will,” as she expressed it, ensured that her voice was heard. In “To Mr ***** an Unlettered Poet” and in “On Mrs Montagu,” Yearsley revisited territory previously explored by Gray’s Elegy, the fate of the rural poor whose native talents are born to waste in obscurity. With characteristic compression, she observes, “Thus rust the Mind’s best powers.”54 Yet Yearsley enlarges the status of the uneducated poet by making a lack of education a positive advantage. Untaught poets, she argues, are also unspoilt poets, their intuitive grasp of poetry closer to true poetry than the artifice of poetic diction—​an ideological position which lies at the very heart of Wordsworth’s revolutionary preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1800).

The Slave Trade Yearsley’s political engagement extended well beyond that of social class, however. Her local connections with Bristol, one of the great slaving ports of England, gave her firsthand exposure to the slave trade and she was one of several women poets, her former patron Hannah More among them, who wrote poems against the slave trade during the 1780s, to coincide with the introduction of Sir William Dolben’s antislavery Bill of 1788.55 More began writing Slavery: A Poem at William Wilberforce’s request. Later that year Yearsley published her A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade. The contrast between the two poems is revealing. Although More advocates the emancipation of slaves, she adopts a socially conservative stance which paints the “mob” (in reference to the recent Gordon riots) as a dangerous force and is unsympathetic to the working classes who participated. Yearsley, conversely, links enslavement of blacks with the larger kinds of enslavements at work within the British class system. She attacks the church for its hypocrisy and “custom, law” for the institutionalized perpetuation of diverse forms of enslavement. The “stubborn and savage will” of Yearsley here comes to the defense of other “savages” oppressed by the forces of law and custom. This association between laboring-​class verse and the treatment of foreign slaves had a far earlier precursor in the works of Stephen Duck, whose verse tale “Amanda and Avaro” of 1736 is a powerful reworking of the far more anodyne “Inkle and Yarico” tale in the Spectator, when a British merchant woos and marries an Indian princess then, on his return to England, sells her and their unborn child into slavery.56 Amanda, the Indian princess, imagines in a nightmare what plantation slavery might be like, the “dejected, servile Race,” made to perform “incessant” tasks with a “Tyrant” overseer.57 The image is not unlike that of the “Tyrant” Master in The Thresher’s Labour, who oversees the “incessant Toil” of the agricultural laborer. 54 

“On Mrs Montagu,” line 56, in ibid., p. 482. See Kerri Andrews, Ann Yearsley and Hannah More, Patronage and Poetry: The Story of a Literary Relationship (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2013). 56  In Mackie (ed.), The Commerce of Everyday Life, pp. 192–​5. 57  Stephen Duck, “Avaro and Amanda: A Poem, in Four Canto’s, Taken from the Spectator, Vol. I, Numb XI,” in Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1736), lines 336, 340. 55 

 

302   Christine Gerrard It is noteworthy that many of the political themes that were to emerge in full force at the very end of the eighteenth century—​the Wordsworthian democratization of poetry in Lyrical Ballads, the idea that the language of the “common man” was closer to true poetry than that of the educated elite, the inclusive sense of social class, of women, and of black slaves—​were already present in some of the laboring-​class poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century. Arguably the progression of political poetry across the long eighteenth century involves an ever-​expanding sense of what constitutes the political, and what the constituency of political poetry might turn out to be.

References Carey, Brycchan, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih, Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760–​1838 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Fairer, David, “ ‘Where Fuming Trees Refresh the Thirsty Air’: The World of Eco-​Georgic,” Studies in Eighteenth-​Century Culture, 40 (2011), 201–​18. Ferguson, Moira, Eighteenth-​Century Women Poets: Nation, Class and Gender (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1995). Gerrard, Christine, “The Country and the City,” in Ros Ballaster (ed.), The History of British Women’s Writing, 1690–​1750, vol. 4 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Hill, Bridget (ed.), The First English Feminist: “Reflections on Marriage” and Other Writings by Mary Astell (Farnham: Ashgate, 1998). Keegan, Bridget, British Labouring-​Class Nature Poetry, 1730–​1837 (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). King, Kathryn M., “Cowley among the Women; or, Poetry in the Contact Zone,” in Katherine Binhammer and Jeanne Wood (eds.), Women and Literary History: “For There She Was” (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2003). Knights, Mark, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005). Landry, Donna, The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-​Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–​1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990). Nussbaum, Felicity, The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women, 1660–​1750 (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1984). Olive, Barbara, “A Puritan Subject’s Panegyrics to Queen Anne,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900, 42, no. 3 (Summer 2002), 475–​99. Rogers, Pat, Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts: History, Politics, and Mythology in the Age of Queen Anne (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005).

 

Chapter 18

P oems on Nat i on and Em pi re Leith Davis In Essay XXIV of the third edition of Essays, Moral and Political (1748), David Hume reflects on the subject of “National Characters,” suggesting “that each Nation has a peculiar Set of Manners, and that some particular Qualities are more frequently to be met with among one People than among their Neighbours.”1 Hume argues that, in determining the character of a nation’s people, moral causes (by which he means “the Nature of the Government, the Revolutions of public Affairs, the Plenty or Penury in which the People live, the Situation of the Nation with Regard to its Neighbours, and such like Circumstances”) trump physical causes (“those Qualities of the Air and Climate, which are supposed to work insensibly on the Temper, by altering the Tone and Habit of the Body”) (p. 268). He concludes, “If we run over the whole Globe, or revolve all the Annals of History, we shall discover every where Signs of a Sympathy or Contagion of Manners, none of the influence of Air or Climate” (p. 275). For Hume, who, as a Scot, was crucially aware of the implications of differences within a nation, national character both in the present age and in the past is a function of social not environmental causes.

A Global Taxonomy In Hume’s account, the particularities of the “Manners” and “Qualities” of each national character can only be derived within a comparative framework; the character of each nation thus depends on its place within a global taxonomy. Hume also outlines the intimate connection between a nation’s character and its imperial possessions: “The same Set of Manners will follow a Nation, and adhere to them over the whole Globe, as well as the same Laws and Language. The Spanish, English, French and Dutch Colonies are all distinguishable, even betwixt the Tropics” (“Of National Characters,” p.  277). “Sympathy” and a “contagion of manners” do not respect geographical boundaries, it would seem, but can “follow” in the

1 

David Hume, “Of National Characters,” in Essays, Moral and Political, 3rd ed. (London, 1748), p. 267.

 

304   Leith Davis footsteps of the nation’s citizens, “run[ning] over the globe” as they traverse its limits. But Hume’s essay also registers a sense of the provisional nature of both nation and empire. His reference to the distinction between his native Scotland and its neighbor, England, for example, implicitly points to the huge differences that existed within the political state of Britain. Moreover, Hume suggests that trade and travel, the same activities that are linked to imperial expansion, also threaten the national character by dispersing it into situations in which it can become intermingled and impure. The slippery connection between the nation and its imperial outposts that fascinates Hume has been the subject of more recent attention by scholars of eighteenth-​century British literature. Felicity Nussbaum, for example, has introduced the concept of “critical global studies,” whose aim is to “resituate eighteenth-​century studies within a spatially and conceptually expanded paradigm” and “to spark more nuanced accounts of the relations among freshly juxtaposed regions, disciplines, and methodologies.”2 Other scholars like Suvir Kaul have attended to the ways that changes within the British Isles, particularly the relationships between the four nations within Britain, inflect and are inflected by circumstances in the nation’s extensions overseas.3 As Kathleen Wilson remarks, “In eighteenth-​century studies … the imperial dimensions of British domestic culture, politics, and social relations are starting to come into focus, significantly revising our conceptualization of Englishness and Britishness.”4 Mapping the intersections of the domestic and the imperial has proved challenging, however, because of the changing nature of both the British nation and the British empire over the course of the long eighteenth century. In 1660, Scotland and Ireland, which had been united with England and Wales under the Cromwellian Protectorate, returned to the status of separate nations. The 1707 Act of Union joined Scotland and England but further marginalized Ireland, which would not be politically joined to Great Britain until 1801.5 Then in 1745, the Jacobite Rebellion sparked a civil war in Britain, which ended with the destruction of the culture of Highland Scotland (Hume’s essay, although it was written a mere two years after the bloodbath at Culloden, makes no mention of the uprising). As for the changing nature of Britain’s overseas possessions, as Miles Ogborn and Charles Withers observe, “Between Oliver Cromwell’s capture of Jamaica in 1655 and the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 there was a fivefold increase in the extent of Britain’s empire.”6 In the same year in which Hume’s essay appeared, the Treaty of Aix-​La-​Chapelle concluded the War of the Austrian Succession, but failed to settle the power struggle between Britain and France over territories in North America, the West Indies, and India. Although Britain eventually proved more

2  Felicity Nussbaum (ed.), The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2003), p. 1. 3  Suvir Kaul, Karen O’Brien, Katie Trumpener, and Janet Sorensen variously examine the way that the national emerged in conjunction with the articulation of the global. 4  Kathleen Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–​1840 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), p. 2. 5  John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), p. 54. 6  Miles Ogborn and Charles W. J. Withers, “Travel, Trade and Empire: Knowing Other Places, 1660–​ 1800,” in Cynthia Wall (ed.), A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 13–​35.

 

Poems on Nation and Empire    305 successful than its European rival, the focus of its empire shifted to India and the Pacific after 1776 when the American colonies declared independence. What is crucial to recognize in this narrative of imperial acquisition and loss is the mutual relation between nation and empire. The development of national identity within the British Isles affected and was affected by Britons’ understanding of their place in the wider world. Not coincidentally, poets from the geographical peripheries of Britain—​John Philips and John Dyer from Wales, and James Grainger from Scotland, for example—​played a crucial role in writing about the nation in an international context.

British National Identity As the century wore on, and a stronger and more cohesive sense of a British national identity developed in conjunction with growing imperial aspirations, poetry served both to encourage and to challenge a notion of hegemonic Britishness, at home and abroad. Benedict Anderson has argued for the importance of print capitalism in the expression of what Hume called “national character,” suggesting that newspapers and novels, in particular, supplied a sense of “homogeneous, empty time” that encouraged individuals from diverse stations and geographical locations to identify with one another as citizens of the same nation.7 Although newspapers and novels may have provided the temporal scaffolding for national identification, it was poetry that encouraged an affective relationship between the literate citizens of Britain and their changing nation and empire. By drawing formal and thematic connections to classical literature, poets encouraged a vision of Britain as the newest player in a series of empires that began with Greece and Rome. Moreover, Britain, they suggested, was chosen by God to assume its globally dominant role. However, whereas poets of the early eighteenth century used the promise of global expansion as a way to unite the diverse citizens of the nation, by the end of the eighteenth century, as knowledge of the darker side of overseas activities was brought home to more of the population of Britain, poets became more direct in both critiquing the imperial vision and offering alternative versions of Britishness, versions that often drew attention to the histories of the peripheries of the nation.

Albion’s Limitless Empire When Charles II landed at Dover on May 25, 1660 after being proclaimed king by the Convention Parliament, he faced not only a fractured realm at home but also an overseas empire that consisted of dissimilar colonial properties.8 In the face of the uncertainty of the 7  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), p. 26. 8 In The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–​1660 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), Alison Games observes that “there was no single colonial template in place, [and] no clear sense yet that people around the world could be lumped together as subjects to be governed in a uniform style under British administrators and governors” (p. 299).

 

306   Leith Davis regime, poets of the Restoration court sought to consolidate national interests by focusing on the monarch as the reconciler of differences and representative of future prosperity. In Astraea Redux: A Poem on the Happy Restoration and Return of His Sacred Majesty Charles the Second, Dryden portrays Charles II on his return to the shores of “Albion” as a contemporary Augustus, capable of enabling the “joint growth of Armes and Arts” in the nation (Astraea Redux, line 322, in Dryden, Works, vol. i, p. 31). For Dryden, it is Britain’s imperial identity that constitutes its national self; he urges the channeling of energy wasted on “parties” and “factious souls” (lines 308–​9) into the project of global domination. The reference to “Our nation with united interest blessed” is followed directly by an image of Britain’s overseas power: “Abroad your Empire shall no Limits know, | But like the Sea in boundless Circles flow” (lines 296–​9). The “happy age” that Dryden celebrates is characterized by the burgeoning of global trade: Their wealthy trade from pirates’ rapine free, Our merchants shall no more adventurers be: Nor in the farthest east those dangers fear Which humble Holland must dissemble here. (lines 304–​7)

Dryden’s description of Britain’s empire as a limitless ocean “drown[ing]” all other seas “in its depths” (line 303) represents an inversion of the actual boundedness of the island nation at the time, at the same time as it foreshadows the emphasis on British maritime supremacy that would be taken up by numerous poets over the next century. Dryden’s emphasis on imperial expansion continues in Annus Mirabilis:  The Year of Wonders MDCLXVI, published in 1667, where he further forges national identity within an imperial framework. Dryden retells the year’s disastrous events in a positive light so that the defeat of the British fleet at the hands of the Dutch navy at the Battle of Lowestoft during the Second Anglo-​Dutch War becomes a story of British valor, while the burning of London is presented as an opportunity to rebuild the capital as a “fam’d Emporium” ready to receive the world’s goods (Annus Mirabilis, line 1205, in Dryden, Works, vol. i, p. 104).

The Glorious Revolution to the Union of 1707 In 1689, a stadtholder of what Dryden had described as the “cruel” Dutch nation, William of Orange, came to Britain with his wife, Mary, daughter of James II, to serve as monarch. The so-​called Glorious Revolution brought profound political and economic changes to Britain, including a more aggressive stance in Continental and colonial wars and the introduction of a system of finance capital to fund those martial enterprises. The print marketplace also grew exponentially when the Licensing Act was allowed to lapse in 1695, and the nature of the “national character” became the subject of much speculation in the popular press. In The Foreigners, for example, John Tutchin takes the English to task for resorting “To Foreign Courts and Councils … To find a King their Freedoms to support.”9 Capitalizing on the animus against the Dutch which Dryden had encouraged, Tutchin depicts the king’s Dutch

9 

John Tutchin, The Foreigners (London, 1700), p. 4.

 

Poems on Nation and Empire    307 advises as a “Foreign Brood” (p. 5) of Gibeonites who have invaded “the Promis’d Land” (p. 7) of Israel.10 In The True-​Born Englishman: A Satyr, Daniel Defoe refutes Tutchin, expressing satirically his surprise that the “discontented land” appears “Less happy now in Times of Peace, than War.”11 Turning the rhetorical tables on Tutchin, Defoe suggests that those in the current regime who “despise the Dutch | And rail at new-​come foreigners so much” are themselves derived from people who were once foreign to British shores. In contrast to Tutchin’s version of the mythological purity of Englishness, Defoe writes a “het’rogeneous” pedigree for the English nation: Thus from a Mixture of all Kinds began, That Het’rogeneous Thing, An Englishman: In eager Rapes, and furious Lust begot, Betwixt a painted Britain and a Scot. Whose gend’ring Off-​spring quickly learn’d to Bow, And yoke their Heifers to the Roman plough. (p. 20)

For Defoe, however, such miscegenation is an indication of the superiority of the English nation. In the “Explanatory Preface” added to later editions of The True-​Born Englishman, Defoe cites the “three nations about us … the Scots, the Welsh and Irish,” who are “as clear from mixtures of blood as any in the world,” as negative examples of ethnic purity, praising English heterogeneity: “if I were to write a reverse to the satire, I would examine all the nations of Europe, and prove that those nations which are most mixed are the best, and have least of barbarism and brutality among them” (n.p.). In part 2 of the poem, the narrator shifts from a “satyr” on national character to a panegyric on William that is delivered by the feminine embodiment of the nation, Britannia. “Britannia’s Song” praises William for coming to her rescue, sending the message not only “around the world” to the “distant Poles, and endless Round,” but also “To distant Worlds of Spirits” (pp. 45–​6). For Defoe, Britain’s new national identity is based not on blood ties, but on present-​day merit and “everlasting” spiritual connection. The True-​Born Englishman proved enormously popular, going through twenty-​two editions within Defoe’s lifetime.12 Fittingly, Defoe was sent by Robert Harley to Scotland to work as a propagandist during the time period leading up to the Act of Union, tasked with persuading the Scots to accept Union with England. Scotland’s attempt to forge its own empire at Darien had ended in disaster in 1698, a disaster which many Scots blamed on William’s neglect of Scottish interests and on the avarice of the East India Company. Defoe’s fluid view of national identity and his interest in making the most of present-​day possibilities rather than harking back to the past was useful in countering anti-​Union appeals to the historical identity of the Scottish nation. Defoe’s Caledonia: A Poem in Honour of Scotland, and the Scots Nation (1706), for example, indicates how Scotland’s current reputation rests “in the Rubbish of her Ancient Fame,” awaiting only “That Blest Hour of Union” within “Whole

10 

Tutchin targets Johann von Keppel and Hans Willem Bentinck in particular. Daniel Defoe, The True-​Born Englishman: The Tenth Edition: With an Explanatory Preface (London, 1701), p. 1. 12  See Matthew Adams, “Daniel Defoe and the Blooding of Britain: Genealogy, Gender and the Making of a National Public,” British Journal for Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 27, no. 1 (2004), 1–​15, at p. 1. 11 

 

308   Leith Davis Brittain” to awaken to her “former Glory.”13 Defoe puts Scotland in global context, suggesting the potential wealth in Scotland’s fisheries and comparing its “Treasure” in the seas to the goods of the other outposts of empire: Not all the Spicy Banks of Ganges Stream, Not Fruitful Nile so oft the Poets Dream, Not Isles of Pearl, not rich Pacifick Seas, Not the more Fruitful Caribbees, Not Africks Wealth or Chilean Stores, The Silver Mountains, or the Golden Shores, Could such an Unexhausted Treasure boast. (p. 17)

It is only through accepting the “Blest Conjunction” (p. 19) of the Union, rather than remaining separate, Defoe urges, that Scotland can restore its “Ancient dear bought Name” (p. 18). Published in Edinburgh the year before the Union, then reissued in London in 1707, Caledonia was designed not only to convince the Scots to accept the Union, but also to introduce the English to their new northern realm. In the poem proper and in its extensive footnotes, Defoe “spread[s]‌” a “Description” of Scotland and its people before “the Eye” (p. 21) of British readers, pointing out, for example, how, compared to “Madagasgar Moors” or “Circassian Boors,” a “Highland-​man’s” “Polite in his Manners, and his Modern Dress” (p. 20). In “Cyder,” a georgic on apple production published the year after the Union, Welsh poet John Philips also promotes the happy “Conjunction.” “Cyder” praises the “native Liquors” of Britain in contrast to the alcoholic beverages of other nations, highlighting in particular the commercial production of his local region in Wales.14 While Philips provides practical advice on the growing and harvesting of apple trees, he also writes a brief history of Britain, tracing the nation’s uneven but inexorable path toward unity from the time of Edgar to the present day and noting: “Too oft alas! has mutual Hatred drench’d | Our Swords in Native Blood” (p. 78). Philips compares Edgar’s unification of the “long-​contending Powers” of the Saxon heptarchy with the 1707 Union, celebrating the era of Anne as a new era of national consolidations and global power for Britain: And now thus leagu’d by an eternal Bond, What shall retard the Britons’ bold Designs, Or who sustain their Force; in Union knit, Sufficient to withstand the Pow’rs combin’d Of all this Globe? (pp. 87–​8)

Philips writes a unique role for Wales within this British “Conjunction,” as his discussion of the Welsh soil leads him to imagine the ancient stronghold of “Fam’d Ariconium” that existed there in the past, “uncontroul’d, and free, | Till all-​subduing Latian Arms prevail’d” (p.  12). This fortress city, he suggests, would still be standing as a “pleasing Monument” “of ancient British Art” had not “the Heav’nly Powers averse | Decreed her final Doom” through lack of rain, then storms, flood, and earthquake. Now all that is left to mark where Ariconium once stood are “Coins, and mould’ring Urns | And huge unweildy [sic] Bones” 13  Daniel Defoe, Caledonia: A Poem in Honour of Scotland, and the Scots Nation (Edinburgh, 1706), p. 5. 14  John Philips, Cyder: A Poem in Two Books (London, 1708), p. 51.

 

Poems on Nation and Empire    309 which “the Plowman haply finds” as he works the “clotted Glebe (pp. 15–​16). The soil on which Ariconium once stood, however, enjoys notably increased fertility: the “Apple-​Tree,” suggests Philips, is “by our Fore-​fathers [sic] Blood | Improv’d” (p. 16). Unlike Scottish and English identity, which was negotiated away into an “eternal Bond” of the political British state, the trace of the ancient Welsh Britons remains in relics and in the land itself, suggests Philips. Whereas Hume denied the connection between material circumstances and national identity, Philips affirms the continuance of national character in material form.

Ireland While Scotland, England, and Wales drew closer together after 1689 and especially after 1707, Ireland’s experience was different. The Glorious Revolution introduced a renewed period of religious strife in Ireland, and the country subsequently became, in John Kerrigan’s assessment, “more a colony as a result of processes sealed by Anglo-​Scottish union” (p. 54).15 Poems like Lilliburlero and The Irish Hudibras that circulated in London worked to depict Ireland as incorrigibly Other to the British Self. The Irish Hudibras, for example, which rewrites the Aeneid as the story of the Irish prince Nees during the Williamite wars, uses a description of the attendees at the funeral of the harper MacShane in order to portray the Irish as inherently superstitious, dirty, uncivilized, and dishonest: Some for their pastime count their Beads, Some scratch their Breech, some louse their Heads; Some sit and chat, some laugh, some weep; Some sing Cronans, and some do sleep; Some pray, and with their prayers mix curses, Some Vermin pick, and some pick Purses.16

By employing a humorous variety of Hiberno-​English and including a liberal sprinkling of Irish bulls (“Thus did they mix their grief and sorrow, | Yesterday bury’d, kill’d tomorrow,” p. 35), The Irish Hudibras renders Ireland foreign but also comprehensible for the English, providing translations of the Gaelic words it employs and describing Irish customs.17 Poetic responses by Irish poets to events in the early eighteenth century were various in their critiques of England. Gaelic Ireland developed its own powerful tradition of verse excoriating England’s oppressive laws and imperial aspirations. Much of this verse adopts a Jacobite perspective that situates the Irish nation either in the nostalgic past or in the distant future.18 Even writers from the dominant Protestant minority expressed ambivalent attitudes to Britain. While they identified with the culture of the “mother-​country,” they also turned a 15  Kerrigan points out that “1688–​9 saw not constitutional reform” in Ireland “but a resurgence of religious warfare” (p. 303). 16  James Farewell, The Irish Hudibras; or, Fingallian Prince, Taken from the Sixth Book of Virgil’s AEneids [sic], and Adapted to the Present Times (London, 1689), p. 35. 17  On Hiberno-​English, see Andrew Carpenter, Verse in English from Eighteenth-​Century Ireland (Cork: Cork Univ. Press, 1998). 18  See Vincent Morley, “The Idea of Britain in Eighteenth-​Century Ireland and Scotland,” Studia Hibernica, 33 (2004–​5), 101–​24.

 

310   Leith Davis critical eye on British political and economic policies regarding Ireland. According to David A. Valone and Jill Marie Bradbury, writers like Jonathan Swift “appealed to a unified ‘Irish’ nation, an alliance of social, economic, and religious interests, to resist oppression by Britain and assert Ireland’s rightful status with respect to, or within, the British Parliament.”19 Swift’s verses, “On the Union,” although not published until after his death, convey his bitter resentment at the new allegiance between England and Scotland: The queen has lately lost a part Of her Entirely-​English heart, For want of which, by way of botch, She pieced it up again with Scotch. Blest revolution! which creates Divided hearts, united states!20

Mary Barber and Constantia Grierson also use verse to express their concern about Ireland’s status. In “To the Hon. Miss Carteret, Now Countess of Dysert,” Barber implores her young addressee, the daughter of the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, to “let each winning Grace | Engage Compassion for my helpless Race.”21 In “To the Honourable Mrs. Percival, on Her Desisting from the Bermudan Project,” Grierson points out the culpability of absentee landlords in institutionalizing Irish “Wretched[ness]” as she notes that the attractions of “Albion’s Court” tempt landowners to “sacrifice their Country to their Pride”: And squander vast Estates at Balls and Play, While public Debts increase, and Funds decay; While the starv’d Hind with Want distracted lives, Nor tastes that Plenty, which his Labour gives. (p. 139)

Grierson draws the reader’s attention to the injustice of economic policies like the tariffs imposed on Irish cattle and wool, noting: “Our Gold may flow to Albion with each Tide; | But let them with that Gold be satisfy’d” (p. 139). While the Irish “long have learnt to bear” such inequalities, she suggests that far worse damage is done when the best and brightest Irish people are compelled to leave their native shores: “But Souls like thine accomplish’d, cannot spare” (p. 139).

Scotland Swift’s representation of the British state as possessing a “double keel” was misleading, for in fact Scotland lost its ability to steer its own ship of state, let alone have an influence on that of Britain, when it traded its own separate parliament for a mere forty-​five seats in a combined British Parliament. The issue of Scottish national identity that had been raised in discussions of the Darien disaster and in the discourse surrounding the Union was continued by Scottish 19  David A. Valone and Jill Marie Bradbury, introduction to Anglo-​Irish Identities, 1571–​1845 (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2008), p. 17. 20 Swift, Poems, p. 56. See also Evan Davis, “The Injured Lady, the Deluded Man, and the Infamous Creature: Swift and the 1707 Act of Union,” in Valone and Bradbury (eds.), Anglo-​Irish Identities, 1571–​1845, pp. 126–​42. 21  Mary Barber, Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1734), p. 1.

 

Poems on Nation and Empire    311 writers in the years following 1707. James Watson brought out the three volumes of his Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems in 1706, 1709, and 1711, drawing attention to the national interest of his project in his preface “To the Reader,” where he comments that his Choice Collection is “the first of its Nature which has been publish’d in our own Native Scots Dialect.”22 The Choice Collection featured a number of poems written in the Scots register, such as “Christ’s Kirk on the Green” and “The Life and Death of the Piper of Kilbarchan,” as well as poems from the time of the separate Scottish monarchy like Alexander Montgomerie’s “Cherry and the Slae.” In the 1721 edition of his Poems, Allan Ramsay also comments on the Scots linguistic register, noting its poetic superiority. While “good Poetry may be in any Language,” he admits, “in [Scots], the Pronunciation is liquid and sonorous, and much fuller than the English, of which we are Masters, by being taught it in our Schools, and daily reading it; which being added to all our own native Words, of eminent Significancy, makes our Tongue by far the completest.”23 But even as he points to ways that Scotland can maintain its identity separate from that of England, Ramsay also writes about the culture of commerce that was increasingly drawing the two nations together after the Union. In The Battel; or, Morning-​Interview: An Heroic-​ Comical Poem (1716), Ramsay builds the “new or foreign” goods that have become part of the day to day life of his nation’s capital into the plot of his poem. Modeled on Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1714), The Battel narrates an amorous encounter set in the building that once housed a separate Scottish parliament (“where once the Three Estates | Of Scotland’s Parliament held free Debates”).24 Like Pope’s Rape of the Lock, which represents Belinda’s dressing-​table as an “emporium” of the world,25 Ramsay describes the goods that decorate the home of his Scottish belle: The Table boasts its being from Japan, Th’ ingenious Work of some great Artisan. China, where Potters coarsest Mould refine, That Light through the transparent Jar does shine; The costly Plates and Dishes are from thence, And Amazonia must her Sweets dispence. (p. 22)

In discussing goods coming from abroad, however, Ramsay seeks to highlight Scotland’s status. Whereas “Amazonia” must give up “the sweet product of her luscious cane,” “Scotia” resists such subordination: Here Scotia does no costly Tribute bring, Only some Kettles full of Todian spring. (p. 23)

The kettles of “Todian spring” that Scotia brings to the table are in fact designed to be mixed with another of the goods that were being imported in ever-​increasing quantities into Scotland during the time following the Act of Union: tea. In The Battel, Ramsay suggests that the Scots have exchanged their parliamentary “free debate” for access to free markets. 22 Watson, Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems (Edinburgh, 1706), n.p. 23 

Allan Ramsay, Poems (Edinburgh, 1721), pp. vi–​vii. Allan Ramsay, The Battel; or, Morning-​Interview: An Heroic-​Comical Poem (Edinburgh, 1716), p. 11. 25  Louis A. Landa, “Pope’s Belinda, the General Emporie of the World, and the Wondrous Worm,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 70 (1971), 215–​35; and Stewart Crehan, “The Rape of the Lock and the Economy of ‘Trivial Things,’” Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 31, no. 1 (1997), 45–​68. 24 

 

312   Leith Davis

A Culture of Consumption Ramsay’s ambiguous attitude to the culture of consumption that was joining the two nations contrasts with Pope’s unabashed promotion of British global trade in poems like Windsor-​ Forest (1713). Published as a tribute “To the Right Honourable George [Granville], Lord Lansdown,” the Tory secretary of war under Queen Anne, and as a celebration of the Peace of Utrecht that ended the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–​13), Windsor-​Forest extols the benefits of “Rich Industry” in Britain. Like Philips, Pope recounts a history of “Albion” in his poem, tracing the history of Windsor Forest from the Saxons through the tyranny of the Norman yoke to the reign of “great ANNA.”26 The poem ends with a prophetic vision by “Father Thames” of an ever more powerful British empire that will be represented through the “increase” of “Augusta’s glitt’ring spires,” as well as the building of Whitehall: There mighty Nations shall enquire their Doom, The world’s great Oracle in Times to come; There Kings shall sue, and suppliant States be seen Once more to bend before a British Queen. (lines 381–​4)

In the conclusion of Windsor-​Forest, Pope imagines the trees of Windsor Forest being made into ships that will travel from the Arctic to the “Southern Skies” (line 391), carrying British goods to new markets. Moreover, he depicts not just the British ships traveling around the globe, but also “Ships of uncouth Form” (line 403) bringing “feather’d people” (line 402) to Britain. Such a reversal results in a temporary defamiliarization of the British as they fall under the gaze of the people of the new world: And naked Youths and painted Chiefs admire Our Speech, our Colour, and our strange Attire! (lines 405–​6)

Pope ends with an appeal to “fair Peace” to “stretch thy Reign … from Shore to Shore, | Till Conquest cease, and Slav’ry be no more” (lines 406–​7). As numerous critics have pointed out, however, the focus on the brutalities of the Spanish empire in the poem detracts from the fact that Britain had just earned the right to sell slaves to the Spanish in South America.

Patriotic Verse Pope’s appeal to “Fair Liberty, Britannia’s Goddess” (line 91) found an echo in the discourse of patriotism employed by Whig patriot writers in the Hanoverian regime that followed the death of Anne, an echo that is notable in the work of the Scottish writer James Thomson. While Ramsay had extended his poetic purview while remaining in Scotland, writers like Thomson used the opportunity of the political union to move to England, using networks

26 Pope, Windsor-​Forest, line 327, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–​69), vol. i, p. 181.

 

Poems on Nation and Empire    313 of friends and publishers to promote their careers there.27 Soon after his arrival in England, Thomson began work on “a Panegyric on Brittain,” which eventually evolved into The Seasons.28 Designed as a “Hymn” praising the “boundless spirit” of God that “pervades” and animates the whole of creation,29 the poem also attends to issues of contemporary politics as in each of the poem’s four parts, Thomson weaves a promotion of the united and imperial nation of “Brittain” into his compendious account of the natural world. In “Spring,” for example, Thomson provides his perspective on the Union, describing how the shepherd’s flocks range over a “massy mound” that once served as a “rampart” “Of iron war, in ancient barbarous times, | When disunited Britain ever bled, | Lost in eternal broil” (“Spring,” lines 788–​91). In contrast to the conflicts of the past, Thomson praises the “deep-​laid, indissoluable state” of a united Britain: Where Wealth and Commerce lift their golden head, And o’er our Labours, Liberty and Law Illustrious watch, the wonder of a world! (“Spring,” lines 793–​5)

Likewise, in “Winter,” Thomson celebrates the “patriot-​band” who in the past have fought against oppressions in Britain and who have tried to stop those who sought to “chain” the “free-​born Briton” (line 352). In the process of “convers[ing] with the mighty dead” who “blest mankind | With arts, and arms, and humaniz’d a world” (lines 420–​4), the narrator connects figures of British national identity with the “Sages of antient time,” depicting “The British muse” (lines 453–​5) walking “hand in hand” with “Great Homer.” While Thomson presents a deeply religious perspective on the world, that perspective includes a privileged role for the British nation in God’s “great eternal scheme” (“Winter,” line 766). In “The Fleece” (1757), the Welsh poet and clergyman John Dyer expands Thomson’s concerns with the spiritual and material aspects of British nationhood into what David Shields refers to as a “theology of trade.”30 Focusing on the production, manufacture and dissemination of British woolen goods (“The care of Sheep, the labors of the Loom, | And arts of Trade”),31 Dyer asserts that engagement in “Commerce” offers an enhanced spiritual perspective: The clearest sense of Deity receive Who view the widest prospect of his works, Ranging the globe with trade through various climes. (pp. 78–​9)

Like Thomson, Dyer suggests that Britain occupies a unique position in the international arena. Britain’s temperate climate, he suggests, makes it singularly suitable for raising sheep with desirable wool and gives it a natural advantage over other regions of the world, even those that grow rare spices. The “Nutmeg, or cinnamon, or fiery clove” of “torrid climes” do not make good pasture, but “Albion” features the “temp’rate air” and “delicious downs” which sheep require (p. 16). Britons are, indeed, chosen people in the global scheme of things. 27 

See Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-​Century Britain, Ireland, and America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2010). 28  Quoted in James Sambrook, James Thomson, 1700–​1748: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 48. 29  James Thomson, “Spring,” lines 801–​2, in The Seasons: A Hymn, a Poem to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton, and Britannia, a Poem (London, 1730). 30  David Shields, Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690–​1750 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 65. 31  John Dyer, The Fleece: A Poem in Four Books (London, 1757), p. 3.

 

314   Leith Davis The Fleece begins with an appeal to the various classes within the national body politic, requesting “Ye rural nymphs, | Ye swains, and princely merchants” as well as “ye, high-​trusted guardians of our isle, | Whom public voice approves, or lot of birth | To the great charge assigns” to “be present at my song” (p. 3). Not only does Dyer interpolate the various classes of the nation’s citizens, he also incorporates the four nations into the service of British national trade, granting each its proper remit. While London serves as the center of commerce, the “sister realms”—​given the Latinate names “Cambria,” “Ierne,” and “Caledonia”—​also have unique roles to play in promoting Britain’s fortune. Dyer goes beyond national borders, however, uniting the various local regions of the British Isles together in his poem. Just as Defoe’s Caledonia presented Scotland to British readers, so Dyer’s Fleece offers a poetic perspective on the outlying locations within Britain, providing footnotes that explain the specific geographical features mentioned in the poem. With its references to peripheral sites such as Derwent, “Plynlymmon,” and “Cader-​yddris,” as well as more well-​known manufacturing centers, The Fleece enunciates the various parts of the nation into a coherent commercial whole. In the final section of the poem, Dyer envisions the products of British manufacturing regions penetrating the far reaches of the globe as ships carrying woven cloth venture to the coasts Of Lusitania, th’ ancient Tharsis deem’d Of Solomon; fair regions, with the webs Of Norwich pleas’d, or those of Manchester. (p. 121)

At the same time as he promotes Britain’s innate superiority, however, Dyer also provides cautionary moments in his poem that question that superiority. Just as Britain herself rose from being the site of Phoenician tin-​mining to being the seat of imperial power, so other nations are waiting in the wings should British industry slacken: … be none secure: Quicken your labors, brace your slack’ning nerves, Ye Britons; nor sleep careless on the lap Of bounteous nature; she is elsewhere kind. See Mississippi lengthen-​on her lawns, Propitious to the shepherds: see the sheep Of fertile Africa. (p. 68)

The Fleece reminds Britons that the work of empire is never-​ending. While Dyer’s Fleece represents an international web of commerce moving out from a British national center, James Grainger’s Sugar-​Cane (1764) offers a much more fluid mixing of the national and imperial. A Scottish soldier (later a doctor) who served the government during the Jacobite rebellion and the War of the Austrian Succession, Grainger eventually took up residence in the West Indian island of St. Christopher. In The Sugar-​Cane, he concerns himself the growth of the sugar cane and the processing and trade of sugar and rum, as well as how to treat “Afric’s sable progeny.”32 More generally, Grainger’s reflection on how British commercial interests (as well as aesthetics) can be adopted and adapted in the plantations of the West Indies33 suggests how, in the words of Hume, the same set of manners will “follow a nation” to its overseas colonies. Consciously using Philips and Dyer as models, 32 

James Grainger, The Sugar-​Cane: A Poem in Four Books: With Notes (London, 1764), p. 3. John Gilmore, The Poetics of Empire: A Study of James Grainger’s “The Sugar-​Cane” (London: Athlone Press, 2000), pp. 5–​6. 33 

 

Poems on Nation and Empire    315 Grainger’s georgic also writes a history of the nation that praises the introduction of “Mighty commerce” (p. 142). Despite the “vast seas” and “endless storms” that separate “Far-​distant kingdoms,” Grainger suggests, Commerce has thrown over “far-​divided nature’s realms” “a chain | To bind in sweet society mankind” (p. 143). Like The Seasons and The Fleece, The Sugar-​Cane depicts Commerce choosing the Thames as “king of streams” (p. 160) and Britain as the superior empire: By thee white Albion, once a barbarous clime, Grew fam’d for arms, for wisdom, and for laws; By thee she holds the balance of the world, Acknowledg’d now sole empress of the main. (p. 143)

Although “every quarter of this sea-​girt globe” pays “tribute” to the Thames and to Britain, Grainger singles out “the world | By great Columbus found,” the world “where now the muse” sings, as the “chief ” suppliant (p. 160). As it is “Wafted to every quarter of the globe,” the West Indian sugar cane extends Britain’s global reach, “Making the vast produce of the world your own” (p. 120). At the same time as presenting the West Indies as an extension of the British nation, however, The Sugar-​Cane also implicitly confirms Hume’s observations regarding the way that trade and travel can undermine the distinction between nations: it depicts the West Indies as a crucible in which the goods, people, and languages of numerous nations have been mixed. Lemons have been brought to the Caribbean by the Spanish, but they themselves had them from the “Saracens” (p. 35). The sugar cane is a “native of the East” (p. 4), unknown to Europeans before being introduced by Arabs. Grainger’s poem, a veritable encyclopedia of information about local flora, fauna, diseases, and cures, including names and etymological derivations from English, French, Spanish, Arabic, and the local language, embodies the miscegenous results of colonialism.

Challenges to the Stadial Model Dyer and Grainger implicitly draw on a stadial model of society more explicitly articulated by Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, a model that traces civilization evolving from hunting and gathering through agriculture to the introduction of “Commerce.” This model was also powerfully challenged by poets from the periphery of Britain. In The Deserted Village, the Irish poet Oliver Goldsmith points to the negative effects of the “Commerce” lauded by his British poetic predecessors. Setting his poem in the fictional village of “Auburn,” Goldsmith depicts the dark side of the “the rage of gain”:34 … trade’s unfeeling train Usurp the land and dispossess the swain; Along the lawn, where scattered hamlets rose, Unwieldy wealth, and cumbrous pomp repose. (lines 63–​6)

Goldsmith’s comment that Britain exports “each needful product” in exchange “For all the luxuries the world supplies” (lines 283–​4) has particular resonances when considered within the context of the long history of English control of Irish trade. The Deserted Village 34 

The Deserted Village, line 424, in Goldsmith, Collected Works, vol. iv, p. 303.

 

316   Leith Davis concludes with lines (supplied by Samuel Johnson) that suggest the transience of imperial prominence, warning that “trade’s proud empire hastes to swift decay, | As ocean sweeps the labour’d mole away” (lines 427–​8). A different kind of challenge to the stadial model of society was offered by the Highlander James Macpherson. In Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760), Macpherson presents a pre-​ commercial Scotland not as rude and primitive, but as a highly polished civilization whose inhabitants speak eloquently and feel deeply. In Fingal (1761) and Temora (1763), Macpherson expands on his earlier “translations,” fashioning national epics that depict “Caledonia” as one of the superpowers of the ancient world, complete with its own colonial possessions in Ireland. Other writers on the peripheries of Britain took inspiration—​and a cautionary warning—​from Macpherson in order to write more positive versions of their own nations’ histories. In Wales, Evan Evans’s Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Ancient Welsh Bards (1764) uses the popularity of the poems of Ossian to stake out a Welsh claim, presenting his collection of “British poems” as proof that while “Europe was enveloped with the dark cloud of bigotry and ignorance,” some of the “light of poetry” shone in Wales as well as in Scotland.35 Meanwhile, Charlotte Brooke compiled her Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789) in order to introduce England to her “elder sister” and to suggest to Britain that “the portion of her blood which flows in our veins is rather ennobled than disgraced by the mingling tides that descended from our heroic ancestors.”36 Like Evans, Brooke avoided the accusations of inauthenticity that were leveled against Macpherson by providing the originals in her volume. Macpherson’s focus on the early literary history of the British Isles also encouraged writers who were concerned to promote the national identity of England. In his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), Thomas Percy reasserts a Teutonic claim on the ancient poetry of Britain, stressing its Saxon rather than its Celtic heritage. The poems collected in the Reliques are, Percy suggests, “select remains of our ancient English Bards and Minstrels, an order of men who were once greatly respected by our [Saxon] ancestors” as well as their “Danish brethren.”37 Percy associates this ancient poetry in particular with Northern England, dedicating his work to Elizabeth, Countess of Northumbria and suggesting that the North retained the “old poetry” (vol. i, p. xxii) longer than the more civilized South. Later in the century, Thomas Chatterton’s fabricated Rowley poems promoted a different kind of Englishness, one associated with the medieval era and with the port of Bristol (see ­chapter 14, “The Poet as Fraud”).

The Genius of Other Nations The debate on the nature of “the first efforts of ancient genius” (Percy, vol. i, p. vi) was also shaped by and helped to shape speculations on the “genius” of other nations, in particular those of the East. In Persian Eclogues (1742), William Collins suggests, “It is with the writings of mankind, in some measure, as with their complexions or their dress, each nation hath a 35  Evan Evans, Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Antient Welsh Bards, Translated into English (London, 1764), pp. iii and i. 36  Charlotte Brooke, Reliques of Irish Poetry (Dublin, 1789), p. viii. 37  Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3 vols. (London, 1765), vol. i, pp. ix, xvi.

 

Poems on Nation and Empire    317 peculiarity in all these, to distinguish it from the rest of the world.”38 Collins draws attention to the stylistic differences between Eastern and British poetry. Whereas the “Stile” of British poets is “Strong and Nervous,” that of the “Arab or Persian” writers, he suggests, is “rich and figurative” (p. iii). Although Collins had no knowledge of Persian or any of the Eastern languages, the increasing involvement of the British East India Company in India after 1757 gave rise to a new generation of officials who made it their business to acquire a linguistic knowledge of the area in order to run it more effectively. In 1768, Alexander Dow, a Scotsman who had earlier shared a residence in London with James Macpherson, published both The History of Hindostan, Translated from the Persian of Mahummud Casim Ferishta and a collection of Tales, Translated from the Poems of Inatulla of Delhi.39 Like Collins, Dow comments on the “florid and diffuse” style of Eastern writers.40 However, it was the Welshman William Jones, author of the Grammar of the Persian Language (1771), who would prove the most talented and well-​known of the “Orientalists.” In “On the Poetry of the Eastern Nations,” one of two essays appended to Poems Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages (1772), Jones offers his sense of the new scholarly and poetic energy that the knowledge of “Asiatick” language and poetry can offer: “we should have a more extensive insight into the history of the human mind, we should be furnished with a new set of images and similitudes, and a number of excellent compositions would be brought to light, which future scholars might explain, and future poets might imitate.”41 While Jones suggests the profits of mind for which “Asiatick” poetry could be exploited, the unseemly material profits that were being extracted from India were also brought home to British readers. In The Task (1785), William Cowper targets Indian nabobs, noting that while “thieves at home must hang,” “he that puts | Into his overgorged and bloated purse | The wealth of Indian provinces, escapes.”42 Cowper’s poem indicates his awareness of the connection between the domestic and the global aspects of Britishness as he ranges from describing a sofa in a drawing room to reflecting on the processes of empire and back again. Cowper lashes out against the general self-​serving nature of British imperial projects in an address to Omai, the Tahitian who had been brought to London for two years after the second expedition of James Cook in the South Pacific: “Doing good, | Disinterested good, is not our trade. | We travel far ’tis true, but not for nought” (p. 35). And although he professes his continuing affection for his country (“England, with all thy faults, I love thee still,” p. 56), Cowper also points a finger at perhaps the darkest element of British overseas trade: the practice of slavery.

Slavery In The Sugar-​Cane, Grainger had urged humane treatment of the “Negroe-​train” (p. 93), suggesting that, after all, “thy slaves are men” (p. 96), and indicating a desire that slavery should 38 

William Collins, preface to Persian Eclogues, in The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), p. 371. 39  Alexander Dow, Tales, Translated from the Persian of Inatulla of Delhi, 2 vols. (London, 1768), p. v. 40  Fiona Stafford, The Sublime Savage: A Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1989), p. 182. 41  William Jones, Poems Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1772), pp. 198–​9. 42  William Cowper, The Task: A Poem in Six Books (London, 1785), p. 39.

 

318   Leith Davis come to an end when “Blacks should cultivate the Cane-​land isles” by “choice” (Sugar-​Cane, p. 137). But for Grainger, this idea produces an imaginative void, as, after gesturing briefly to the notion, he proceeds to a discussion of the “various ills … Which Negro-​nations feel” (p. 137). In the final analysis, slaves for Grainger are a necessary part of the means of production. Keeping slaves in good health is as important as keeping machinery in good working order. Cowper, however, minces no words as he condemns the Englishman who finds his fellow guilty of a skin Not colour’d like his own, and having pow’r T’ inforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey. (p. 46)

The contemplation of cruelty toward slaves leads Cowper to question the nature of humanity itself: Then what is man? And what man seeing this, And having human feelings, does not blush And hang his head, to think himself a man? (p. 46)

Cowper’s criticisms of the slave trade were echoed by other poets who supported abolition as it developed into a political cause at the end of the century. In “Slavery: A Poem” (1788), Hannah More asserts the equality of all human beings in the eyes of God, contending that “th’ immortal principle within” does not “Change with the casual colour of a skin.”43 For More, the “sable race” may be “savage” (p. 74) and “erring” (p. 67), but they, too, have souls to save. Prefaced by a quotation from Thomson’s Liberty, More’s “Slavery” writes a new privileged position for Britain in the international arena not as the queen of the seas, but as the bearer of freedom: O let the nations know The liberty she loves she will bestow; Not to herself the glorious gift confin’d, She spreads the blessing wide as humankind. (lines 253–​6)

Three years later, in the wake of the rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade, Anna Barbauld’s “Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq.” expresses a much more pessimistic perspective. Portraying a Britannia that “knows the sin, and stands the shame!” of slavery,44 Barbauld indicates how the process of empire corrupts the British moral fiber. Desire for commercial goods has an enervating effect on Britons, she argues: it robs them of their energy, kills their desire for knowledge, makes them subject to their passions, naturalizes images of misery for them, and destroys any sense of virtue they possess: “By foreign wealth are British morals chang’d, | And Afric’s sons, and India’s, smile aveng’d” (p. 13). For Barbauld, London, far from being a “fam’d Emporium,” is a symbol of unbounded consumer desire both fueled by and masking the corruption within: “Hence throng’d Augusta builds her rosy bowers, | And decks in summer wreaths her smoky towers” (p. 12). In 1660, Dryden had been able to prophesy a Golden Age for Britain when “Empire shall no Limits know, | But like the Sea in boundless Circles flow”; in 1701 Defoe could depict 43 

Hannah More, Slavery: A Poem (London, 1788), pp. 63–​4. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade (London, 1791), p. 5. 44 

 

Poems on Nation and Empire    319 “Britannia’s Song” circulating round the poles in an “endless Round”; while in 1764, Grainger could proudly point to Britain as “now sole empress of the main.” By the end of the eighteenth century, however, poets were only too aware of the limits of empire and the negative consequences of global trade on what Hume called “national character.” Grainger’s fantasy of the “chain” of Commerce “bind[ing]” mankind “in sweet society” had been replaced by pictures of manacled slaves toiling for the sugar that had become a staple of British consumers. While poetry as a genre was beginning to lose its public prominence, the themes of nation and empire that eighteenth-​century writers explored would continue to occupy the poets who came after them. Cowper’s appeal to the need for “social intercourse,” “Benevolence and peace and mutual aid | Between the nations” (p. 47), More’s vision of a time when “Slavery is no more” (p. 20), and Barbauld’s exposure of the corruption at the heart of Britain would find further expression—​as well as contestation—​in the poetry of what has become known as the Romantic era.

References Carey, Brycchan, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment and Slavery, 1760–​1807 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Carey, Daniel, and Lynn Fest, The Postcolonial Enlightenment (Oxford:  Oxford Univ. Press, 2009). Colley, Linda, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–​1850 (New York: Anchor, 2002). Crawford, Robert, Devolving English Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1992). Gerrard, Christine, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole:  Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–​1742 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Kaul, Suvir, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 2000). Sorensen, Janet, The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-​Century British Writing (Cambridge:  Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000).

 

Chapter 19

P oems on Sc i e nc e a nd Phil os oph y Pat Rogers An eighteenth-​century eye would detect a measure of redundancy in this title. Medieval schoolmen had recognized three branches of philosophy: natural, moral, and metaphysical. In The Advancement of Learning (1605) Bacon substituted divine, natural, and human learning, but the older categories survived. By the late seventeenth century, natural philosophy had become the dominant partner among this group in general English usage. This currency arose partly because of the success of the Royal Society in promoting scientific activities, in pursuit of “natural knowledge,” as fashionable and prestige-​bearing, along with the cachet possessed by its remarkable corps of investigators. In addition, the term science acquired its modern specialized sense (limiting the concept to a particular area of knowledge) in a very gradual process—​the earliest instance cited by OED comes from Isaac Watts’s Logic in 1725. We should remember, too, that the word philosopher entered the language via Anglo-​French in the fourteenth century, while scientist had to wait until 1840 to make its appearance. John Locke, the greatest thinker of his age, was sometimes called a philosopher in his own day, but that expression did not instantly filter out his work as physician, psychologist, economist, educationalist, theologian, or sociologist (to employ modern terms). The word did not in itself point to the branch of learning that modern philosophers study. It follows that literary discourse in the period will often straddle the divide between our two key terms. Few writers had ventured very far into either subject in its post-​medieval incarnation—​you did not go to university in Britain to master Cartesian ideas or to engage in heavy-​ duty scientific experimentation. The divisive quarrel between Ancients and Moderns had largely been fought across temporal spaces, but it played some part in creating two cultures, one guided by traditional authority and one by empirical investigation. The Royal Society had taken as its motto “nullius in verba,” and there is some sense in which the Ancients harked back to words while the Moderns looked more to things. Yet the least trained or technophobic among the educated public would have found it difficult during the long eighteenth century to avoid the accelerating progress of science, even if they had wished to do so. Equally few would have totally escaped the impact of Locke and Hume, though most of them made little effort to come to terms with Berkeley. Even Swift, generally regarded as someone who resisted the advancement of learning unless it derived from the authority of the church or the wisdom of the ancients, proves to have been deeply influenced

 

Poems on Science and Philosophy    321 by recent scientific developments.1 Sometimes a writer would conduct a raid on natural philosophy for opportunistic reasons: thus Aaron Hill in 1721 “deliberately borrowed images from the new astronomy of Newton to increase the horror of his last judgment.”2 Scientific ideas permeated literature in the period, as Marjorie Hope Nicolson showed long ago.3 Equally, as demonstrated by W. K. Wimsatt and others, the language of poetry became infused with “philosophic words,” terms borrowed from scientific discourse.4 Poets found such words exciting coinages which they moved from a concrete sense to one more abstract: among numerous instances are expressions such as acrimony and volatile, taken from the developing science of chemistry. Many of them were defined precisely in the hugely influential Cyclopædia of Ephraim Chambers (1727). But the writer did not need to have a very exact sense of how such technical terms were used in the transactions of the Royal Society. It was enough that gravity and attraction had acquired a new specialized sense in the Newtonian era, and the poet could have his or her merry way while extending their compass in a personal rather physical direction. It must be pointed out that women were to a large degree excluded from this discourse. Hardly anyone in the eighteenth century matched the poetry in the previous era of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who was fully capable of deploying the technical language used in natural philosophy. While women were beginning to contribute to Enlightenment science, notably in fields such as botany, they were not encouraged to invade the masculine prerogative of making sounding declarations about the state of the universe. Usually it was enough for them to imbibe the somewhat patronizing instruction of Francesco Algarotti’s Newtonianismo per le dame (1737), devoted to the physicist’s work on optics and dedicated to the French philosopher Bernard de Fontenelle. In 1739 it was translated by Elizabeth Carter and issued by Edward Cave, Johnson’s early publisher, with subsequent editions appearing in later decades. A partial exception to the rule is Lady Mary Chudleigh, whose verse paraphrase of the Benedicite (1703) draws on contemporary theories about the cosmos. But this was early, and Chudleigh had few real successors. We need to get another complication out of the way. Today the philosophy of religion is mostly studied as a branch of theology, rather than as a part of philosophy. Things were a little different in the eighteenth century. It is true that hundreds of poems in many categories appeared with a simple pious aim. There were hymns, culminating in the durable works of Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, John Newton, and William Cowper. Then there were metrical versions of the Psalms and other books of the Bible: a typical instance is The Song 1  See Gregory Lynall, Swift and Science: The Satire, Politics, and Theology of Natural Knowledge, 1690–​ 1730 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 2  William Powell Jones, The Rhetoric of Science: A Study of Scientific Ideas and Imagery in Eighteenth-​ Century English Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1966), p. 82. Although the history of science has made considerable advances since this book was written, the literary and aesthetic map drawn by Jones has dated remarkably little. 3  See especially Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton’s Opticks and the 18th Century Poets (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1946). 4  Three pioneering studies which have retained their value are W. K. Wimsatt, Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the “Rambler” and “Dictionary” of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1948); John Arthos, The Language of Natural Description in Eighteenth-​Century Poetry (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1949); and Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse (London: Chatto & Windus, 1952).

 

322   Pat Rogers of Solomon Paraphrased; in Lyrick Verse, by Mr. Charles Johnson, of Trinity College, Dublin (1751), which sets out the narrative in nine “scenes.” There were simple expressions of faith in lyric form, where Watts again excels. Versions of the liturgy were produced for the instruction of children, for example A Catechism; or, Collection of Some Points of Christian Faith and Morality, Composed in Verse, the Better to Imprint Them in the Minds of Youth, written by James Bernard in 1786. Other compositions simply retell Bible stories or provide educative fables. One more group of writings engages in theological and sectarian controversy with the (often dubious) assistance of verse: a case in point is The Christian Warrior Properly Armed; or, The Deist Unmask’d: Being a Faithful Defence of the Holy Trinity: For the Use of All Christian Families (1776) by the oddly named William Le Tan’sur. Most such verse makes no serious pretension to being philosophy or science. Elsewhere in this volume attention is given to the major achievements in devotional poetry. Here we shall be concerned only with those forms of religious writing that move away from narrow statements of piety, and move into wider aspects of human thought. One group of poems on religion has been little studied, and deserves mention here. This is what might be loosely called the biblical biography. Among examples of this literary kind are some items by Thomas Parnell, best known as a satirist within the Scriblerian circle, which were posthumously published in the 1750s. They celebrate Old Testament prophets, most extensively David, and consider a number of metaphysical issues concerning God’s design prompted by the spectacle of “Nature’s order” (David, line 175). A more distinguished case is Solomon (1718), the most considerable work by an unjustly neglected writer, Matthew Prior. This poem exerted a major influence on Samuel Johnson’s own finest poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes, and it earned the admiration of William Cowper as well as becoming a favorite with John Wesley. Though it is a serious work, and unfashionably earnest at times, Solomon can appeal to the most secular taste. It displays an astonishing variety of technical skills. The first book contains a miniature bestiary, a view of the Eskimos, a conversation on the plurality of worlds (a philosophic staple, originated by the popularization of the Copernican system of the universe by Fontenelle), a Nosce Teipsum based on the Elizabethan model, and much else. Book ii, concerned with sensual passion, is beautifully paced, and manages the junction of anecdotes with ethical discussion in an adroit manner. But it is the last book, on power, that shows off Prior’s command of the form most completely. Here we have the heroic couplet used not for quick epigrammatic points, as so often, but to create a shimmering surface beneath which lies a play of mind, feeling, and imagination: A Flow’r, that does with opening Morn arise, And flourishing the Day, at Evening dies; A winged Eastern Blast, just skimming o’er The Ocean’s Brow, and sinking on the Shore; A Fire, whose Flames thro’ crackling Stubble fly; A Meteor shooting from the Summer Sky; A Bowl a-​down the bending Mountain roll’d; A Bubble breaking, and a Fable told; A Noon-​tide Shadow, and a Midnight Dream Are Emblems, which with Semblance apt proclaim Our Earthly Course. (book iii, lines 575–​85)

Through the life and strength of poetic resources Prior settles the drift of his argument, establishes his critique of the worship of power, and—​almost accidentally—​reveals the

 

Poems on Science and Philosophy    323 imprint of his age. At such moments an incantatory presence invades the devout tone of a hundred other versifiers.5 Two forms that will be considered here are first the genre of “physico-​theology” and second the theodicy, defined loosely enough to include its most famous embodiment throughout eighteenth-​century Europe and America, Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man. After that comes discussion of the poetry of the cosmic and natural order, exemplified by James Thomson. Similar concerns are prominent in the poems of Mark Akenside, inflected by a parallel interest in psychology and perception. The major work of Edward Young, Night Thoughts, will be seen in the light of its contribution to recurrent themes such as melancholia. We shall conclude with Erasmus Darwin, author of some of the most extraordinary poetry on the subject of science ever written.

Physico-​theology: Blackmore One definition of this term is “Theology or divinity illustrated or enforced by physics or natural philosophy” (Webster). The label was popularized by the Rev. William Derham (1657–​ 1735), a distinguished student of natural philosophy, who used it as the title of his Boyle Lectures for 1711–​12. The lectures were endowed by the great physicist and chemist Robert Boyle, and began a year after his death in 1691 with a controversial series delivered by Richard Bentley, one of the most pugnacious and active scholars of the day. They were in effect sermons, since the lecturer was appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury from among the clergy. However, several of those who took part followed Bentley in taking account of recent scientific thought. Two years later Derham added a treatise on Astro-​Theology. His aim was to carry out “A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, from his Works of Creation,” and this constitutes the key function of physico-​theological writing. For poets this generally meant looking out into the universe and the terrestrial globe, thus celebrating the perfection of God’s design as “proved” by the discoveries of Newton and his fellow cosmologists. Central concerns were the magnitude, order, and plenitude of creation. The workings of the divine mind were to be deciphered by scrutinizing the heavens and the earth. Among the more distinguished poets indebted to this line of thought we may number James Thomson, whose work will be considered in more detail shortly. A less famous but still accomplished writer was John Pomfret (1666–​1702), whose Pindaric odes describe in melodramatically colorful terms the Day of Judgment and other severe infractions of cosmic order. The “sublime” was not yet fully in fashion, but few among the poets who consciously sought this quality in later years managed to achieve over-​the-​top effects as spectacular. The most noteworthy attempt at a fullscale epic treatment of physico-​theological issues comes in Creation: A Philosophical Poem: Demonstrating the Existence and Providence of a God: In Seven Books (1712), highly praised by Joseph Addison in the Spectator in March of that year. Its author was Sir Richard Blackmore (1654–​1729), a leading physician in London who 5  Prior was also responsible for the most successful comic poem of the age on a scientific and philosophic topic. This was Alma; or, The Progress of the Mind (1718), a learned spoof on ill-​starred attempts to locate the seat of the soul, which makes amiable fun of the physiological jargon of the day.

 

324   Pat Rogers had already produced a number of long poems on epic themes. Unfortunately Blackmore had incurred the scorn of the wits, and in 1716 he compounded this when he unwisely launched into an attack on Swift’s Tale of a Tub as the work of an “impious Buffoon.”6 These words sealed his fate. He would be lampooned by Pope in The Dunciad for the “sonorous” strain of his asinine braying verse. The episode permanently affected his reputation despite the appearance of four further editions, and it illustrates the way in which solemn defenses of the mysterious ways of the creator could be vulnerable to satire—​especially if they came from those whom the Tory satirists regarded as complacent Whig rationalists. In fact Blackmore had a definite quasi-​political program in mind. He stated his ambitions in his preface: “I have attempted, as Monsieur Fontenelle has done with great Success in his Plurality of Worlds, to bring Philosophy out of the secret Recesses of the Schools, and strip it of its uncouth and mysterious Dress, that it may become agreeable, and admitted to a general Conversation.”7 This was a close paraphrase of what Addison had written in the Spectator, just a year before. One aim of the physico-​theologians was to wrest intellectual enquiry from the academy, and to recast Newtonian physics as a pattern model for the well-​organized state. No wonder that Newton’s most effective popularizer, John Theophilus Desaguliers (1683–​ 1744), should have come out in 1728 with “an allegorical poem” entitled The Newtonian System of the World, the Best Model of Government. Desaguliers was certainly not a member of the literary establishment. He was a foreigner, a Huguenot in fact, who had combined the career of a negligent Anglican minister with that of an engineer and experimental scientist, acquiring fame as a lecturer to a broad public audience; a freemason and a vehement Hanoverian whose patrons were chiefly loyal Whigs acceptable at court.8 To this extent the physico-​theological movement may be seen as part of a new battle of the books, in which “modern” attitudes to the natural world were pitted against the more conservative views still widely held in the universities and espoused by writers like Swift and his friends. Whatever its motives, Blackmore’s poem hardly achieves the sublimity it strives for, despite a studied attempt to bring in every kind of special effect from lightning storms to plagues, and to confront the ideas of Epicurus and Lucretius with the more lasting design laid out by “th’Artificer Divine” (book ii, line 72). James Thomson would handle these matters more effectively. In the end Pope was right about Blackmore: he seems to be addressing us through a loud-​hailer, and lacks a persuasive argumentative tone. But The Creation is a noble failure, in that it genuinely tries to sum up contemporary ideas about the workings of the universe and the place of humanity amid the vast elemental forces which recent science had opened up for inspection.

Theodicy: Pope The term “theodicy” was first used in 1710 by Gottfried von Leibniz—​a physicist, too, on the side. He meant a justification of the divine on the basis that all seeming flaws in God’s 6 

Sir Richard Blackmore, Essays upon Several Subjects: In Five Parts, 2nd ed. (Dublin, 1716), p. 23. Sir Richard Blackmore, Creation: A Philosophical Poem (London, 1712), p. xxxv. 8  See Audrey T. Carpenter, John Theophilus Desaguliers: A Natural Philosopher, Engineer and Freemason in Newtonian England (London: Continuum, 2011). For Desaguliers’s patrons, notably the princely Duke of Chandos, an entrepreneur as well as a court politician, see pp. 153–​76. 7 

 

Poems on Science and Philosophy    325 design, most notably the existence of evil, can be seen ultimately as necessary components of the most complete and perfect order that could be envisaged. The “whole region of the possible is but a part of the content of his infinite mind.” Or as Pope would paraphrase the central idea: All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; All Discord, Harmony not understood; All partial Evil, universal Good: And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite, One truth is clear, “Whatever is, is Right.” (Essay on Man, epistle i, lines 289–​94)

These were the tenets savagely exposed in the person of Pangloss in Candide (1759), but as Voltaire himself knew, there was more to Leibniz than a facile strain of unconsidered optimism. In fact Voltaire had described Pope in his Lettres philosophiques (1733) as “the most elegant, correct and quite as important the most melodious poet England has produced”;9 but this was written just before the Essay came out. The theodicy was based on the prevailing form of natural theology, and seeks to provide a systematic account of the physical and moral universe which can be deciphered by human beings in order to understand their position within the cosmos. By far the most influential exposition of these ideas across the Western world was An Essay on Man, published anonymously by Pope in four installments (1733–​4). From the start the work had its critics, most significantly the Swiss Calvinist Jean-​Pierre de Crousaz, whose Examen (1737) and Commentaire (1738) subjected the poem to a severe grilling on religious and metaphysical grounds. Crousaz criticized Pope for a lack of logical rigor, and though he had to read the Essay in translation he did score a number of points. The poet’s future literary executor, William Warburton, found it necessary to issue a lengthy Vindication (1738–​9). The Victorians were largely unimpressed, and tended to regard Pope as a shallow raisonneur, parceling out shreds of an argument he did not fully comprehend into neat bundles of verse. Few modern scholars accept Warburton’s views in their entirety, above all his attempts to depict the poem as a coherent and altogether Christian document. The Essay, however, has regained much ground in recent years, and it is now widely recognized as one of the supreme expressions of early Enlightenment thinking, as writers struggled to evolve a new metaphysics in the light of burgeoning scientific discoveries. More than that, it is a brilliantly witty and engaging causerie, which brings an almost conversational ease to the discussion of weighty matters. It can hardly be a total accident that the text yields more famous quasi-​proverbial tags than anything in English outside the Bible and Shakespeare. Consider just a few selected examples: A mighty maze, but not without a plan. (epistle i, line 6) Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish, or a sparrow fall. (epistle i, lines 87–​8) Lo! The poor Indian, whose untutor’d mind Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind. (epistle i, lines 99–​100)

9  Lettres philosophiques par M. de V*** (Amsterdam: E. Lucas, 1734), pp. 111–​12. Translation by the author.

 

326   Pat Rogers In pride, in reas’ning Pride, our error lies. (epistle i, line 123) Hope springs eternal in the human breast. (epistle i, line 95) Or quick effluvia darting through the brain, Die of a rose in aromatic pain. (epistle i, lines 199–​200) Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is man! (epistle ii, lines 1–​2) The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! (epistle ii, line 18) For forms of government, let fools contest; Whate’er is best administer’d is best. (epistle iii, lines 303–​4) Order is Heav’n’s first law. (epistle iv, line 49) An honest man’s the noblest work of God. (epistle iv, line 248) Mark by what wretched steps their glory grows, From dirt and sea-​weed as proud Venice rose. (epistle iv, lines 291–​2) Thou wert my guide, philosopher, and friend. (epistle iv, line 390)

Many more could be cited. The point is that these lines work as more than facile cracker-​ barrel mottoes; they contribute vivid detail to the dramatic and rhetorical texture of the verse, and help to humanize what could be an aridly abstract exposition. Pope did not need to be a great philosopher, which he certainly was not, to create one of the most searching poems on a philosophical theme in any language—​any more than Dickens had to be deeply versed in political theory or Henry James in sociology for them to write magnificent novels on politics and society. The work is divided into four epistles, addressed to the poet’s friend Lord Bolingbroke. (Part of Warburton’s task was to decenter Bolingbroke, a freethinker and dangerously radical critic of the Hanoverian regime, and to substitute a more orthodox line of thought.) Each has its own particular subject matter, considering “the nature and state of man” with respect to different aspects of experience. The first goes into the largest cosmic issues, discussing the relation of human beings to the universe. It is here that the concerns most closely resemble those of a standard theodicy. The second enquires into the responsibilities of the individual, while the third turns to the role of social forms and institutions as they bear on moral choices. In the final epistle we are led through the pursuit of happiness, bringing in the quest for virtue, riches, the benefit and obligations of superior talents, and other matters in the ethics of public and private life. Each section of the poem contains superbly eloquent writing, but the first epistle perhaps makes the most immediate impact with its vivid evocation of nature in all its multiplicity: Far as Creation’s ample range extends, The scale of sensual, mental powers ascends: Mark how it mounts, to Man’s imperial race, From the green myriads in the peopled grass: What modes of sight betwixt each wide extreme, The mole’s dim curtain, and the lynx’s beam: Of smell, the headlong lioness between, And hound sagacious on the tainted green: Of hearing, from the life that fills the flood,

 

Poems on Science and Philosophy    327 To that which warbles through the vernal wood: The spider’s touch, how exquisitely fine! Feels at each thread, and lives along the line: In the nice bee, what sense so subtly true From poisonous herbs extracts the healing dew? How Instinct varies in the grov’ling swine, Compar’d, half-​reasoning elephant, with thine! ’Twixt that, and Reason, what a nice barrier, For ever separate, yet for ever near! (epistle i, lines 207–​24)

Throughout the work Pope is able to energize ideas as few authors dealing with such abstract concepts have ever been able to do. And though there are few direct references to Plato, with an unconcealed scorn for the complicated and often woolly jargon of Neoplatonism, the Essay is in many ways as Platonic a piece of thinking as we can find in any major literature written throughout the century.

Cosmic and Natural Design: Thomson, Akenside, and Young At practically the same juncture as Pope’s work there came out another new poem, also issued in four installments and then combined into a single item. This was The Seasons (1726–​30), by the young Scotsman James Thomson. Among the authors considered in this chapter, he was the one who most nearly matched Pope in quality. The manner he developed in The Seasons came closest to achieving a new poetics, where physico-​theology and the religion of nature could be turned towards a wide-​ranging exploration of secular issues, especially those concerned with humanitarian topics such as poverty and debtor’s prisons. To a large extent, Thomson was able to remold his design as he went along. The loose, aggregative style is a help here. What was called by contemporaries the “manner of proceeding” comes across as free and discursive. The poet moves from natural description to meteorological explanation, from moralizing to geology, from rustic idyll to political tribute. In fact, The Seasons does not proceed by temporal or narrative connections. Its logic is inward and thematic, its unity one of feeling. The “plot” enacts the unfolding of the year, stage by stage; the development occurs within mood, emotional temperature, and poetic climate. Charles Peake perceptively observed that Thomson was able to find in the natural world “a kind of vocabulary through which he could express his deepest intuitions more truthfully and exactly than in the language of philosophic or moralistic statement.”10 The basis of Thomson’s style is description. He does not dwell on the natural scene for its own sake, or for moral commentary, as with Cowper’s Task. Instead, he makes the natural order a hieroglyphic statement of eternal processes. Predominantly a visual poet, he is interested in movement and color. His landscapes sometimes remind us of Van Gogh, especially in Winter, with its swirling effects, tumultuous waves, and blustering winds. For Thomson, the 10 

Charles Peake (ed.), Poetry of Landscape and the Night (London: Arnold, 1967), pp. 14–​15.

 

328   Pat Rogers great show of nature is often a melodrama. He runs easily to afflatus, but he can be delicately precise in charting shifting patterns of light: But see the fading many-​coloured woods, Shade deepening over shade, the country round Imbrown; a crowded umbrage, dusk and dun, Of every hue from wan declining green To sooty dark. (Autumn, lines 950–​4)

And while he is frequently rhapsodic, he keeps his most elevated manner for grand effects. He shows great skill in allowing the poetry to register each frisson of response, particularly where admiration is mixed with awe and even terror—​thunder, earthquakes, tempests. He can make the most garish science-​fiction nightmares come alive: Struck on the castled cliff, The venerable tower and spiry fane Resign their aged pride. The gloomy woods Start at the flash, and from their deep recess Wide-​flaming out, their trembling inmates shake. Amid Caernarvon’s mountains rages loud The repercussive roar: with mighty crush, Into the flashing deep, from the rude rocks Of Penmaen-​Mawr heaped hideous to the sky, Tumble the smitten cliffs; and Snowdon’s peak, Dissolving, instant yields his wintry load. Far seen, the heights of heathy Cheviot blaze, And Thule bellows through her utmost isles. (Summer, lines 1156–​68)

Some might find a Cecil B. De Mille quality here, but we need feel neither surprise nor regret at that. The Thomson “prospect” is cinematic in scale, flow, and rapidity. His style allowed him to think big, and yet keep control of the broad vista. Thomson’s most obvious rival was his fellow Scot, David Mallet, with The Excursion (1726). But no one came as close to him in creating a viable manner of linking scientific and philosophic ideas to a survey of nature as Johnson’s friend Richard Savage. His poem The Wanderer (1729) is a strange medley of romance, description, and high-​flown sentiment, written in couplets rather than the blank verse preferred by most physico-​theological writers. It boasts an almost Byronic and alienated narrator, as well as a Wordsworthian recluse, and it is not too surprising that Walter Scott should have found much to praise here, especially its “beautiful and forcible diction, poetical imagery, and animated description.” Savage is particularly good at mountain gloom and glory, anticipating the flight to the hills on which so many poets would embark in the next few generations. Mark Akenside had a number of things in common with Thomson. For one thing, they both attended Edinburgh University, as this institution entered the most distinguished phase of its long history. But his career departed from that of the older man when he chose to pursue medicine, and he went on to complete his studies at Leiden. The point is important, since these were about the best places to go, in Britain and Europe respectively, for a thorough medical training. Unlike many writers with a background in the profession, Akenside continued to practice and to carry out research, ending up as a physician to the queen. This meant that he possessed a greater scientific understanding than any other poet of the era, disregarding the eccentric cases of Blackmore at the start of the century and Erasmus Darwin

 

Poems on Science and Philosophy    329 at its end.11 He even wrote a “Hymn to Science” that sums up the Enlightenment dream of identifying the hidden causes that operate beneath the surface of nature: Give me to learn each secret cause; Let Number’s, Figure’s, Motion’s laws Reveal’d before me stand; These to great Nature’s scenes apply, And round the globe, and thro’ the sky, Disclose her working hand. (lines 19–​24)

But even here scientific truth is less a goal in itself than a handmaiden of a wider enquiry, embracing metaphysics and morality. This composite aim informs Akenside’s major work, The Pleasures of the Imagination. The poem first appeared in three books in 1744, titled more simply The Pleasures of Imagination, and its author worked on it for the remainder of his life, leaving some of his intended revisions in a fragmentary state at his death. His theme is an area of consciousness he places between sensory perception and moral cognition—​in this sense he is attempting to blend John Locke’s epistemology with the aesthetics of Joseph Addison. The ultimate aim is to show the presence of benevolence in the world (here Akenside is drawing on another philosopher, the Earl of Shaftesbury), and to argue for the capacity of art to draw men and women towards a sense of the good. His political leanings for most of his life were strongly Whig, as were those of all the poets here with the exception of Prior and Pope. What this generally means is that the writer believes in the possibility of human improvement, and rejects the authority of traditional forms of religious and social orthodoxy. A key notion is often liberty, and for Akenside this is associated with concepts such as truth, harmony, and order.12 Liberty had flourished in the ancient world, but had been eroded as overweening monarchs and dogmatic prelates came to dominate Europe in more recent centuries. The reclamation of public virtue would lead to a restoration of the arts as well as a kind of moral rearmament, and here England would lead the way. Akenside thought that philosophy and the arts had split apart in a damaging way: From this condition [philosophy] cannot be recovered but by uniting it once more with the works of imagination; and we have had the pleasure of observing a very great progress made towards their union in England within these few years. It is hardly possible to conceive them at a greater distance from each other than at the Revolution, when Locke stood at the head of one party, and Dryden of the other. But the general spirit of liberty, which has ever since been growing, naturally invited our men of wit and genius to improve that influence which the arts of persuasion gave them with the people, by applying them to subjects of importance to society. (book ii, line 30, note f)

To sustain his case, Akenside employs a wide array of poetic devices, including allegory, personification, and apostrophe. The Pleasures remains notable as the fullest enquiry made by any poet before the Romantic era into the workings of the artistic imagination, and the earliest attempt prior to Wordsworth to uncover the role of memory in creative thought. 11 

Wayne Ripley, “Love and Omnipotence: Night Thoughts, the Great Awakening, and Physico-​ Theology,” Eighteenth-​Century Poetry, 1 (2011–​12), 19–​36, at p. 26. 12  Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination: A Poem in Three Books (London, 1744), book i, lines 20–​4.

 

330   Pat Rogers One of the most important poets in this period was unquestionably Edward Young, although he is hard to place exactly. A clergyman who started out in the field of satire, he achieved fame and popularity with The Complaint; or, Night-​Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, again produced in installments (1742–​6). This became a classic across Europe and it may even have played a part in the movement known as Sturm und Drang, which influenced Goethe, Schiller, Haydn, and fitfully Mozart among others. William Blake would supply some striking illustrations. Night Thoughts could be regarded as simply the most durable product of the so-​called “Graveyard” school. At the same time the poem flirts with the “enthusiasm” of the religious revival promoted by John Wesley and the Methodists. It certainly played its part in spreading the taste for melancholia, often no more than a Gothic prop, but sometimes a serious expression of doubt and even alienation in the human psyche. However, the work deserves mention here, since the text also has a strong element of physico-​ theological thought. As Wayne C. Ripley has pointed out, Young’s notion of the divinity “combines Newton’s divine sensorium with the lawgiving God of Exodus, and as stellar distance and God’s infinite extension become one, Young can never move any closer to his creator, just as the moral law keeps one from ever reconciling with God’s justice. Jehovah and the Newtonian God fuse.”13 Newton alone will not suffice to justify the works of God to man. On the face of it, Young was not by nature the kind of man likely to get deeply involved in scientific matters. His background as the son of a prosperous Anglican clergyman and his education at Winchester College and Oxford University would not have provided an obvious basis for such a move. Yet notoriously in the last book of Night Thoughts he yields to the widespread urge to find a path to God through the stars: O for a Telescope His Throne to reach! Tell me, ye Learn’d on Earth! or Blest Above! Ye searching, ye Newtonian, Angels! tell. Where, your Great Master’s Orb? His Planets, where? Those conscious Satellites, those Morning-​Stars, First-​born of Deity! from Central Love, By Veneration most profound, thrown off; By sweet Attraction, no less strongly drawn; Aw’d, and yet raptur’d; raptur’d, yet serene; Past Thought illustrious, but with borrow’d Beams; In still approaching Circles, still remote, Revolving round the Sun’s eternal Sire? Or sent, in Lines direct, on Embassies To Nations—​in what Latitude?—​Beyond Terrestrial Thought’s Horizon!—​And on what High Errands sent?—​Here human Effort ends; And leaves me still a Stranger to His Throne.14

We see here a residual debt to techniques that had served as the basis of Young’s early satiric work in couplets, with a heavy emphasis on rhetorical devices such as antithesis and chiasmus, pointed up by the typography (“Aw’d, and yet raptur’d; //​/​ raptur’d, yet serene”). In fact 13 

For an excellent analysis, see Karina Williamson, “Akenside and the ‘Lamp of Science,’” in Robin Dix (ed.), Mark Akenside: A Reassessment (Madison: Farleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 51–​82. 14  Edward Young, Night Thoughts, ed. Stephen Cornford (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), night ix, lines 1834–​50.

 

Poems on Science and Philosophy    331 this last book, subtitled “The Consolation,” and preceded by sections in which the infidel is reclaimed, achieves the strongest poetic conviction as Young works himself into the full sublime frenzy. At his best he attained a genuine eloquence in conveying the ways in which an awareness of mortality can dignify a well-​conducted life. He wrote near the end of the nine books of “the Two Supports of Human Happiness, | Which some, erroneous, think can never meet; | True Taste of Life, and constant Thought of Death” (night ix, lines 2382–​4). He will never again be a popular poet, but he ought not to be dismissed as a mere historical curio. It was his misfortune that he proved very adept at doing things that modern literature has largely abandoned: consoling, adjuring, pondering. His language is not especially archaic, and he employs a syntax less dependent on Milton than had Thomson. But he performs an obsolete task, one dictated by the historical needs of an age (like the Victorian era to come) when scientific advances made people recalibrate the tenets of their philosophical and theological creed.

Imagination under the Banner of Science: Erasmus Darwin Not many writers tried to give precise technical details of scientific matters in verse. Though Pope, Thomson, Akenside, and Young certainly wrote didactic verse, they did not aim to haul out findings red-​hot from the laboratory. Their job was to interpret broad ideas and to suggest the human significance of the new learning. Almost at the end of our period, however, one remarkable individual sought to expound a highly idiosyncratic view of the workings of nature, and to do this by means of an elaborate mythical system couched in an elaborate poetic idiom that was mostly of his own devising. The individual in question was Erasmus Darwin. His situation in life made him uniquely fitted for the task in hand. Educated at Cambridge and Edinburgh, he did not, like the other poets we have considered, head for London. Instead he set up a medical practice at Johnson’s hometown of Lichfield. There he founded a Botanical Society and initiated a translation of the works of Carl Linnaeus—​one consequence is that the familiar English names of plants were invented or popularized in the process. Here he was following in the footsteps of an earlier translator, William Withering. Even more significant was Darwin’s involvement in the Lunar Society of Birmingham, for a generation the most influential of all learned associations in the nation after its formation in 1765.15 Here Darwin enjoyed the friendship of scientists, inventors, industrialists, and entrepreneurs such as James Watt, Matthew Boulton, Joseph Priestley, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (father of Maria), Withering (another physician and scientist trained at Edinburgh), and Josiah Wedgwood. His son Robert would marry Wedgwood’s daughter Susannah and become the father of Charles Darwin,

15  An outstanding account of the society, vital to an understanding of Darwin’s literary goals, is found in Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002); see pp. 377–​89 on the roots of The Botanic Garden.

 

332   Pat Rogers as well as carrying out physiological researches of his own. Darwin senior imbibed the liberal and humanitarian views of the Lunar men, incorporating in his poetry attacks on slavery and support for the French Revolution. In this respect his outlook differed from that of Linnaeus, who never completely freed himself from the austere ideas of his father, a Lutheran minister. At some stage in the 1780s Erasmus took the decision to relinquish his prose versions of Linnaeus in favor of an ambitious new project. This involved turning botanical taxonomy into a magisterial scheme, but one made less technical and rebarbative by couching it in verse. Here he was probably influenced by his friend and neighbor, the poet Anna Seward, as well as the specimens brought back by Sir Joseph Banks and others from the Pacific voyages of Captain James Cook—​which had themselves owed much of their inspiration to the Linnaean revolution. Hardly anyone can ever have embarked on a literary enterprise with quite such a relevant background of information, insight, or cultural resources. The outcome was The Botanic Garden (1791), whose major component is a work first issued in 1789 as The Loves of the Plants. Inevitably the poem does not live up to the amazingly grand ideas that inspired it, but Lucretius himself could barely have carried off such a thing. Darwin is clear about his intentions from the opening advertisement: “The general design of the following sheets is to inlist Imagination under the banner of Science, and to lead her votaries from the looser analogies, which dress out the imagery of poetry, to the stricter ones, which form the ratiocination of philosophy.”16 What may surprise us is the thoroughgoing way in which Darwin carries through his task of dramatizing the Linnaean system in high-​flown verse. The Loves of the Plants is magnificent in its way, but it is not quite poetry as we ordinarily understand it. Rather it constructs a family romance of natural evolution around the sexual dalliance of male and female plants, as they conduct their reproductive dance of “vegetable loves.” Darwin was undaunted by the fact that Linnaeus had divided the botanical world into innumerable classes, orders, genera, and species, all differentiated by their reproductive organs. There was no possibility of covering all of these taxa, even in the capacious room Darwin had allowed himself. But he does proceed to catalog over eighty species, first by way of an ornate figurative description in verse and then with a flatly informative footnote. The method can be illustrated from a flower covered early in the first canto, as some readers may not get much further: Thy love, Callitriche, two Virgins share, Smit with thy starry eye and radiant hair;—​ On the green margin sits the youth, and laves His floating train of tresses in the waves; Sees his fair features paint the streams that pass, And bends for ever o’er the watery glass. (canto i, lines 45–​50) Callitriche, l. 45. Fine-​Hair, Stargrass. One male and two females inhabit each flower. The upper leaves grow in form of a star, whence it is called Stellaria Aquatica by Ray and others; its stems and leaves float far on the water, and are often so matted

16  Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, Part II: Containing the Loves of the Plants, a Poem: With Philosophical Notes: Volume the Second (Lichfield, 1789), p. iii.

 

Poems on Science and Philosophy    333 together, as to bear a person walking on them. The male sometimes lives in a separate flower.

The notes comprise an encyclopedic survey of contemporary discoveries, with references to figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley, as well as topics ranging from the Gulf Stream and Fingal’s Cave to the Venus flytrap and Richard Arkwright’s cotton mill. With true Enlightenment confidence, Darwin imagines the wonders that will be made possible by modern science. The personification of plants is already implicit, and to a degree explicit, in Linnaeus’s own work. Playfully, perhaps, Darwin compares his mythmaking with the shape-​changing of the Metamorphoses: Whereas P. Ovidius Naso, a great Necromancer in the famous Court of Augustus Cæsar, did by art poetic transmute Men, Women, and even Gods and Goddesses, into Trees and Flowers; I have undertaken by similar art to restore some of them to their original animality, after having remained prisoners so long in their respective vegetable mansions. (p. vi)

His own contribution is to add a romantic frisson and to draw wider socio-​political conclusions based on his own humanitarian sentiments. Janet Browne has perceptively noted a kind of ludic quality in the undertaking: Like all metaphors in the history of science, Darwin’s idea of the personification of plants allowed the fruitful interplay of ideas between one realm (the human) and another (the botanical). We know we are not plants, but it is both amusing and informative to think about why we are not. Darwin invited his readers to consider whether humans were solely natural beings or whether there were also higher spiritual qualities inherent to mankind.

And Browne further describes the link to a broader scientific movement which flourished in Britain over the eighteenth century: Darwin turned the sexual system of Linnaeus to his own purposes and made it embody his metaphysical beliefs, his scientific commitments, his social world, and the intellectual preoccupations and assumptions of the wealthy, freethinking, professional class to which he belonged.17

Such a class had scarcely begun to emerge at the time of Blackmore and Pope. Social progress over the previous decades meant that an educated public had come into existence, ready to learn new ways of deciphering the natural code. It was the dawn of a new era. Most readers today will find Darwin indigestible in bulk, at least on first acquaintance. But it is well worth persevering with The Botanic Garden. Modernists were indebted to Freud, Henri Bergson, and the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach. For that matter, T. S. Eliot had a keen awareness of the works of the cosmologist Arthur Eddington. Some postmodern writers understand, or affect to understand, subatomic physics. Yet Einstein has never properly demanded the muse. It is salutary to be reminded of a time when the most abstruse and advanced branches of science and philosophy could be happily versified.

17  Janet Browne, “Botany for Gentlemen: Erasmus Darwin and The Loves of the Plants,” Isis, 80 (1989), 593–​621, at p. 621.

 

334   Pat Rogers

References Arthos, John, The Language of Natural Description in Eighteenth-​ Century Poetry (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1949). Browne, Janet, “Botany for Gentlemen: Erasmus Darwin and The Loves of the Plants,” Isis, 80 (1989), 593–​621. Carpenter, Audrey T., John Theophilus Desaguliers:  A  Natural Philosopher, Engineer and Freemason in Newtonian England (London: Continuum, 2011). Davie, Donald, Purity of Diction in English Verse (London: Chatto & Windus, 1952). Jones, William Powell, The Rhetoric of Science:  A  Study of Scientific Ideas and Imagery in Eighteenth-​ Century English Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles:  Univ. of California Press, 1966). Lawlor, Clark, “Poetry and Science,” in Christine Gerrard (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth-​ Century Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 38–​52. Lynall, Gregory, Swift and Science:  The Satire, Politics, and Theology of Natural Knowledge, 1690–​1730 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton’s Opticks and the 18th Century Poets (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1946). Peake, Charles (ed.), Poetry of Landscape and the Night (London: Arnold, 1967). Ripley, Wayne, “Love and Omnipotence: Night Thoughts, the Great Awakening, and Physico-​ Theology,” Eighteenth-​Century Poetry, 1 (2011–​12), 19–​36. Uglow, Jenny, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2002). Williamson, Karina, “Akenside and the ‘Lamp of Science,’ ” in Robin Dix (ed.), Mark Akenside: A Reassessment (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2000), pp. 51–​82. Wimsatt, W. K., Philosophic Words:  A  Study of Style and Meaning in the “Rambler” and “Dictionary” of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1948).

 

Chapter 20

P oem s on Pl ac e Donna Landry Writing about land is always political.1 Even the act of referring to land as landscape, and therefore as an aesthetic object, is never a gesture innocent of investments.2 Poetical descriptions of Britain in the eighteenth century, however, are especially resonant of political conflict, whether the legacy of civil violence inherited from the Civil War and Interregnum of the 1640s and 1650s, or the imperial aspirations and international conflicts of the latter decades of the century. Eighteenth-​century topographical poetry reveals spectacularly the connection between representation and the arrangement of nature according to a point of view, one always enmeshed in particular relationships of power and governance.3 This genre also evidences the continuing close connection between poetry of the mid-​seventeenth century and eighteenth-​century verse; all English topographical poetry in fact descends in one way or another from Sir John Denham’s Coopers Hill (first published 1642, substantially revised 1655, published 1668).4 Topographically speaking, the “long eighteenth century” should begin in the 1640s with the Civil War and Denham’s representation of it by means of an emblematic landscape, a prospect view, and a salute to Britain’s embedding in global commerce and imperial ambition.5 No other English poetic genre of the eighteenth century is so intimately bound to a single originary text as is topographical poetry to Denham’s Coopers Hill. 1 

The most intellectually rigorous account remains James [Grantham] Turner, The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry, 1630–​1660 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979). 2 Turner, Politics of Landscape, pp. 6–​35, 36–​48; John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–​1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 1–​3. The terms “country” and “countryside” undergo a similar aestheticization; see Anne Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 3–​4; and Donna Landry, The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking, and Ecology in English Literature, 1671–​1831 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 1, 15–​19. 3  Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), remains the definitive starting point for any investigation of the “arrangement of nature according to a point of view” (p. 123). 4  Denham’s influence has been cataloged by Robert Arnold Aubin, Topographical Poetry in XVIII-​ Century England (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1936), who observes that in addition to numerous reprintings of the poem well into the nineteenth century, “between 1650 and 1841 more than two hundred works in verse or prose either referred to (almost always eulogistically) or borrowed slightly from” Coopers Hill (p. 36). 5  The seminal importance of Coopers Hill for the genre of topographical poetry I argue for here can be understood in terms of the legacy of civil violence described by Steven N. Zwicker in his re-​periodization

 

336   Donna Landry From the later seventeenth century until late in the eighteenth, poets and painters engaged the public with visions of the nation never before equaled in local specificity. Particular places came to be apprehended as valuably distinctive yet somehow simultaneously representative of the whole country, the nation apprehended as a whole.6 By the century’s end, the comprehensive Ordnance Survey mapping of the nation was being undertaken.7 National fitness for defense and expansion could be judged by the state of cultivation, the efficiency of transport, the wealth of landowners, the abundance of sporting opportunities. Moral lessons were to be learned from ancient monuments, including ruins, and the natural bounty and geological variety of the nation. By 1781, therefore, “scarcely a corner of the island” had not been “dignified either by rhyme or blank verse.”8 Not only was the land itself being extensively mapped and improved during this period, but a particular aesthetic vocabulary came to be elaborated whose traces are still legible in the patchwork of estates, parklands, paddocks, arable fields, hedgerows, copses, and woodlands that characterizes the English countryside today.9 The eighteenth century witnessed the intensive capitalization of land use.10 Global commerce and empire were literally inscribed on the topography of the nation in the form of architecturally ambitious new buildings, the enlarging and emparkment of estates, and increasingly genteel provincial towns.11 Poetry kept pace with these developments, especially the genre of topographical poetry, which should be distinguished from more general, universalizing representations of of Restoration and eighteenth-​century studies from the stirring of the Scottish troubles in the late 1630s until the battle of Culloden in 1745, grounded in this very legacy: “Is There a Restoration without the Eighteenth Century?” for the panel “Is There a Restoration without the Eighteenth Century?,” unpublished paper, Modern Language Association Annual Meeting, Seattle, January 7, 2012. For Coopers Hill as a touchstone for poems figuring the land as a sporting ground or walker’s domain, see Landry, Invention of the Countryside, pp. 104–​6, 128–​9. 6  Envisaging the nation in this way has origins in the sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century chorographers William Camden (Britannia) and Michael Drayton (Poly-​Olbion), culminating in Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–​6). See Andrew McRae, “The Peripatetic Muse: Internal Travel and the Cultural Production of Space in Pre-​Revolutionary England,” in Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward (eds.), The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1500–​1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 41–​57; and Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009). 7  Nicholas Alfrey, “Landscape and the Ordnance Survey, 1795–​1820,” in Nicholas Alfrey and Stephen Daniels (eds.), Mapping the Landscape: Essays on Art and Cartography (Nottingham: Univ. of Nottingham Art Gallery and Castle Museum, 1990), pp. 23–​7. 8  Samuel Johnson, Life of Denham, in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), vol. i, p. 238. For a comprehensive survey, see Aubin, Topographical Poetry. Aubin divides his catalog into hill-​poems, sea-​poems, mine-​(and cave-​) poems, estate-​poems, town-​poems, building-​poems, region-​poems, river-​ poems, and journey-​poems. There are 315 English hill-​poems alone (p. 36). 9  See, for example, W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London: Penguin, 1985); Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995); Tom Williamson and Liz Bellamy, Property and Landscape: A Social History of Land Ownership and the English Countryside (London: George Philip, 1987). 10  Robert C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy, 1500–​1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996). 11  Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–​1783 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992); Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–​1770 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

 

Poems on Place   337 “landscape” as such. If the production of landscape empties out the prospect view of its messy particularities in favor of an aesthetic composition—​so that the land represented appears just like a picture of itself—​the topographical, by contrast, is full of antic specificities, stuffed full of local and regional knowledge brought into the national purview. Topographical representation most acutely records an understanding of the places depicted as “contested sites,” where “different versions of what Britain should be grind against one another.”12 Like the georgic, with which it is closely allied, the topographical poem eventually became unfashionable and fell out of favor with English audiences. What had once been seen as grandly heroic eventually came to be felt, at least by some, as embarrassingly grandiose.13 Anxiety regarding the legitimacy of the monarch and the state came to seem a less pressing matter than it once had, replaced by anxiety about European and colonial wars and new fears about domestic social antagonisms. Decades of military ventures abroad, urban migration, rural depopulation, and burgeoning commerce, coupled with new attitudes toward landlordly authority and the laboring poor, gave rise to innovations in literary and artistic taste as well as landscape aesthetics. That this shift should have happened across all the arts of representation of the land, affecting not only poetry but landscape painting and estate portraiture, especially in their relation to mapmaking, suggests its importance as a watershed.14 When William Wordsworth came to compose his Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798, the kind of prospect view he had in mind was very different from Denham’s—​and yet Denham’s lies at the back of it, as we shall see, epitomizing the very topographical tradition that Wordsworth was writing against. Rather than reflecting the governance of the nation, the Wye valley was of interest to Wordsworth primarily for its remoteness from human grandeur and its intensely personal and private associations. Rather than being traditionally concerned with monuments of antiquarian and local-​historical interest, in which the ruins of Tintern Abbey would have been central, and politically as well as historically resonant, Wordsworth’s Lines is a poem in which the abbey never actually appears, suggesting, as Marjorie Levinson puts it, how the “success or failure of the visionary poem turns on its ability to hide its omission of the 12  John Barrell, Edward Pugh of Ruthin, 1763–1813: "A Native Artist,” ed. Mary-Ann Constantine and Dafydd Johnston (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Press, 2013), p. 148. For related arguments, see John Barrell, “Topography v. Landscape,” London Review of Books, May 13, 2010, pp. 9–​11; and Felicity Myrone, “‘The Monarch of the Plain’: Paul Sandby and Topography,” in John Bonehill and Stephen Daniels (eds.), Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2009), pp. 56–​63. 13  On the shift from eighteenth-​century patriotic verse—​which itself combines singing “a nation glorious” with “embarrassing vocational anxieties”—​to “the elevation and visionary sublimities of romantic poetic discourse,” see Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 2000), pp. 275, 276. 14  See Stephen Daniels on the shift from the “bird’s eye” view in estate portraiture—​which, I argue, is highly compatible with the prospect view in poetry—​to a new style of depiction by the mid-​eighteenth century, in which “country houses began sinking to the ground, opening up to the surrounding landscape and a variety of more intimate views,” implying “a relaxation of landed authority only in the sense that country houses and parks now seemed to sit naturally in the countryside, not, as most prospects must now have appeared, to be rigidly imposed upon it”; “Goodly Prospects: English Estate Portraiture, 1670–​1730,” in Alfrey and Daniels (eds.), Mapping the Landscape, pp. 9–​12, at pp. 9, 12. This shift also marks a parting of the ways between estate portraiture and conventions of mapping. See also Daniels, “Re-​Visioning Britain: Mapping and Landscape Painting, 1750–​1820,” in Katharine Baetjer (ed.), Glorious Landscape: British Landscape Painting, 1750–​1850 (Denver and London: Denver Art Museum and A. Zwemmer Ltd., 1993), pp. 61–​72.

 

338   Donna Landry historical”—​and its “suppression of the social.”15 Only by representing what appears to be remote, depopulated, and overgrown, on the very edge of human habitation, Wordsworth’s poem suggests, could the topographical poet hope to avoid being conscripted into transmuting the local into a synecdoche of the nation in a patriotic strain. Here Wordsworth attempts to sidestep and surpass the entire topographical tradition. Regarding the evolution of eighteenth-​century English poetry on place, I  make four claims:  (1)  that English topographical poetry derives uniquely from a single ancestor, Coopers Hill; (2) that this seventeenth-​century poem’s profound influence stems from its acute capturing of the historical circumstances of its production, namely, civil violence and global commerce; (3) that, as memory of the Civil War faded during the eighteenth century, iter poetry recounting journeys, and poetry of private rather than public views, began to offer alternatives to Coopers Hill; and (4) that in Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth, bolstered by these alternatives, rewrote Coopers Hill.

From Coopers Hill to Edge-​Hill: A Legacy of Civil Violence Coopers Hill, first drafted before war broke out and revised repeatedly throughout the next quarter-​century, was a striking innovation that would inspire many eighteenth-​century imitators. In 1779, Samuel Johnson hailed Denham as the founder of English “local” poetry, a “species of composition” that flourished well past the mid-​century: Cooper’s Hill is the work that confers upon [Denham] the rank and dignity of an original author. He seems to have been, at least among us, the author of a species of composition that may be denominated local poetry, of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape, to be poetically described, with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection, or incidental meditation. To trace a new scheme of poetry has in itself a very high claim to praise, and its praise is yet more when it is apparently copied by Garth and Pope; after whose names little will be gained by an enumeration of smaller poets, that have left scarce a corner of the island not dignified either by rhyme, or blank verse.16

By the final decades of the century, Johnson writes, “local” or topographical verse had proliferated to dignify every region of the nation, and the chain of transmission from Denham remained uncontested regardless of verse form—​either rhymed couplets like Denham’s and Pope’s, or Miltonic blank verse in the manner of James Thomson’s Seasons. Johnson alludes to Samuel Garth’s Claremont (1715), in which the poet in a preface claims a shared lineage with Denham and Pope but in the poem itself protests that far too many poets are now writing topographically: So rank our Soyle, our Bards rise in such Store, Their rich Retaining Patrons scarce are more.

15  Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 39, 37. 16 Johnson, Life of Denham, in Lives, vol. i, p. 238.

 

Poems on Place   339 ………………………………………………… So shameless, so abandon’d are their Ways; They poche Parnassus, and lay Snares for Praise.17

Such admonitions deterred nobody, including Garth himself, so powerful was Denham’s example. The very instability of the text of Coopers Hill, so often recrafted between 1640 and 1668, its contents dissected and restitched to respond to political events, reveals the instability of a nation in revolutionary turmoil. Yet what Denham strove to achieve was a vision of harmony between monarch and subjects. Ascending Cooper’s Hill near his childhood home at Egham in Surrey, a vantage point overlooking both turbulent, parliamentarian-​inclined London and royal Windsor, with its monarchical hunting grounds, offered the poet a view of the country unfolded as allegorical tapestry. From this point on, poets would ascend rural heights to contemplate the nation and think of Denham as well as of classical predecessors. “If I can be to thee | A Poet, thou Parnassus art to mee” becomes the mantra of eighteenth-​ century topographical writers.18 Cooper’s Hill would join Parnassus as a rightful haunt of the poetic imagination. Coopers Hill is both a poetic tour de force and memorialization of a specific piece of country. Richard Jago, introducing his contribution to the topographical genre, Edge-​Hill (1767, 1784), speaks for many when he claims that writing such a poem recording the “natural Beauty, and historical Importance” of the locality coincided with “the Affection of the Writer for his native Country,” presenting “to his Mind a Theme for Poetical Imagery, too pleasing to be resisted by him.”19 “Native Country” here deliberately conflates the local with the national. The “Beauty” of a place must be delineated precisely, not generalized and abstracted into a merely generic landscape. Brendan O Hehir confirms the topographical accuracy of much of Denham’s representation. Cooper’s Hill is in fact “a ridge of what is called Bagshot sand,” the view from which “readily embraces four counties (including Surrey), and is said to extend over seven counties in all,” while the Thames and the meadows at the hill’s foot, according to O Hehir, were “retained undeveloped as washland for the river,” inspiring the “general imagery of river floods and river control” so symbolically integral to the poem’s form and meaning.20 Denham provided a model in which engagement with the land’s political meanings was combined with the topographical features themselves playing an “active” rather than “passive” role in “initiating cognition”21—​what we might call the land itself having agency. If the land itself speaks of political events, the poem’s morphing from one version to another, especially between 1642 and 1655, exemplifies political instability as registered by the land. This device, coupled with Denham’s optical imagery—​for instance, Windsor “swells |

17 

[Samuel Garth], Claremont: Address’d to the Right Honourable the Earl of Clare (London, 1715), p. 1, lines 1–​8. 18 Denham, Coopers Hill (“A” text), lines 7–​8, in Brendan O Hehir (ed.), Expans’d Hieroglyphicks: A Study of Sir John Denham’s “Coopers Hill” with a Critical Edition of the Poem (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1969), pp. 109–​10. All further references are to this edition, indicated as either from 1642 (“A” text) or 1668 (“B” text). 19  Jago, A. M., Edge-​Hill; or, The Rural Prospect Delineated and Moralized. A Poem. In Four Books. (London, 1767), p. vi. 20  O Hehir, Expans’d Hieroglyphicks, pp. xxiii–​xxiv, 4–​5. 21 Ibid., p. 5.

 

340   Donna Landry Into my eye,” as if through a magnifying lens (1668, lines 40–​1)—​conveys what James Turner characterizes as a merging of natural philosophy with “the moral security of the countryman”; by conflating these two forms of philosophy, Denham “persuades us that he deals in necessary truths.”22 In Turner’s terms, then, Denham’s appearance of “virtuous objectivity,” for readers of his royalist-​loyalist persuasion at least, “offers them the landscape as a way of coping with the collapse of their political world—​not a random and clumsy allegory, not just a glimpse of idyllic country scenes, but a whole aesthetic system, succinct and adaptable, an elaborate display of the art of prospect.”23 The more the poet seems to be taking his cue from the land itself, the more indisputable become the poem’s proposals, and the more self-​evident its truths. Coopers Hill as published in 1642 embeds a striking image of class resentment within its emblematic topography, suggesting how the moment of Civil War inspired an openness to radically leveling ideas even among the royalist party: And as our surly supercilious Lords, Bigge in their frownes, and haughty in their words, Looke downe on those, whose humble fruitfull paine Their proud, and barren greatnesse must susteine: So looks the Hill upon the streame, betweene There lies a spatious, and a fertile Greene. (1642, lines 245–​50)

These lines appear to contradict Nigel Smith’s claim that regicide rather than class politics is at issue in Denham’s poem.24 Seventeenth-​century revolutionary turbulence clearly includes a class element, and this is a feature that continues to reverberate throughout eighteenth-​ century writing about land—​the sustenance of the contemptuous great is exacted unjustly from the humble. The version published in 1668, based upon the revisions of 1655, however, did not contain these lines. This version codified an “Augustan” aesthetic, harking back to imperial Rome, and embodying in verse the balancing of opposed interests, however tenuously, by means of the concept of concors discordia:  concord or unity forged from discordant or warring forces.25 This version included four lines added in 1655, praised by John Dryden in 1697 for their peculiar “sweetness,” which would be echoed and imitated throughout the eighteenth century.26 Significantly, these couplets describe the Thames, figured in the preceding lines as an artery of commerce that connects Britain with the Indies, both East and West, whose “fair bosom is the world’s exchange” (1668, line 188). This commercially lucrative, agriculturally beneficent river (“No unexpected inundations spoyl | The mowers hopes, nor mock the plowmans toyl,” 1668, lines 175–​6) models the poet’s stylistic and technical ideal: O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream My great example, as it is my theme! Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull, Strong without rage, without ore-​flowing full. (1668, lines 189–​92) 22 Turner, Politics of Landscape, pp. 54–​5.

23 

Ibid., pp. 60, 61. Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–​1660 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 320–​1. 25  Kaul provides the most incisive analysis of the Augustan comparison in Poems of Nation, pp. 24–​30; the locus classicus for Denham’s use of concordia discors is Earl R. Wasserman, The Subtler Language (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 35–​88. 26  John Dryden, “Dedication of the Aeneis” (1697), quoted in O Hehir, Expans’d Hieroglyphicks, pp. 36–​7. 24 

 

Poems on Place   341 What came to be called the heroic couplet of Augustan verse would thus perform the work of harmonizing contradictory forces and irreconcilable political interests: the impossible becomes possible if figured as topographical truth. As Turner comments, “Topographia is a recourse to those who are not prepared for rigorous argument. It is well suited to the emotive politics of the ancien regime, for it allows the old order to seem permanent, orderly, and universally agreeable.”27 Universally agreeable to whom? These couplets come to signify a code for gentlemanly politeness and national ideals. Agreeable they undoubtedly proved for later generations of poets, beginning with Dryden and Pope, and extending to later topographical writers who seek to militate against a legacy of civil violence by shoring up the entitlements of the gentry. The 1668 version of the poem ends by reversing the 1642 ordering of the cautionary and calamitous lines. No longer is violence to be prevented; it has already happened: No longer then within his banks he dwells, First to a Torrent, then a Deluge swells: Stronger, and fiercer by restraint he roars, And knows no bound, but makes his power his shores. (1668, lines 355–​8)

As Smith comments, “The couplets of the later version seem more highly regulated, but the energy they release in their discors concordia is more devastating.”28 All is now discord and disunity, not social harmony, in the body politic. It is the anxious pessimism of Denham’s postwar poem that is most pointedly ignored by subsequent poets such as Pope, intent upon a “happy” version of this story with a Stuart and gentry concors.29 The vantage point of parliamentarian London, repudiated by Denham, could however still be aggressively represented as late as 1743, when “Phileleutherus Britannus” penned A Short Trip into Kent, a topographical poem containing an expostulation against the Church’s observation of the 30th of January, memorializing the martyrdom of Charles I: When Princes lawless Power crave, And strive their Subjects to enslave; Rule without Equity or Right, In Force and Tyranny delight: Should as they ought, the Subjects rise, To vindicate their Properties; And should the Tyrant meet his Fate, Can this a Martyr nominate?30

A Protestant (“Luther-​loving”) Londoner, speaking on behalf of Britain, justified Stuart regicide two years before the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. Memories of Civil War violence persist late in the century in topographical verse. Richard Jago’s Edge-​Hill (first published 1767, revised, expanded, and published posthumously in

27 Turner, Politics of Landscape, p. 106.

28 Smith, Literature and Revolution, p. 324. Ibid., p. 336. 30  Phileleutherus Britannus, A Short Trip into Kent: Containing The Occurrences of Four Summer Days; Calculated as an Antidote Against the Gloominess of the Winter Months, and Particularly That Which Is Occasion’d by the Observation of the 30th of January: In Hudibrastick Verse (London, 1743), pp. 22–​3. 29 

 

342   Donna Landry 1784) and Henry James Pye’s Faringdon Hill (1774, 1778, 1787) exemplify this trend. Jago’s poem climaxes with a description of the famous Civil War battle of Edgehill: As pent-​up Waters, swell’d by sudden Rains, Their former Bounds disdain, and foam, and rage Impatient of Restraint; till, at some Breach, Outward they burst impetuous, and mock The Peasant’s feeble Toil, which strives to check Their headlong Torrent; so the royal Troops, With martial Rage inflam’d, impatient wait The Trumpet’s Summons. At its sprightly Call, The airy Seat they leave, and down the Steep, Rank following Rank, like Wave succeeding Wave, Rush on the hostile Wings.31

Although the poem undergoes a number of revisions and expansions, these lines do not change between 1767 and 1784, remaining a still point in a turning world (the American war has intervened). The deluge, which figured anarchic violence unleashed by Civil War for Denham, has now become one maneuver on the battlefield, more specifically a royalist attack on parliamentary troops that leads to false confidence on the royalist side and eventual defeat: But too secure! And deeming as of Vict’ry cheaply gain’d O’er dastard Minds, in wordy Quarrels bold, But slack, by manly Deeds, t’enforce their Claim; In Chace, and Plunder long they waste the Day, And late, of Order negligent, return.32

If the verse is Miltonic, not Denhamesque, the poem nevertheless aspires to lay the ghost of civil violence in a manner Denham would have recognized. Both sides behave wrongheadedly and bloodily, leaving a residue that now the plowman, who would prefer not to be implicated in this legacy, must contend with more than a century later: Still as the Plowman breaks the clotted Glebe, He ever and anon some Trophy finds, The Relicks of the War—​or rusty Spear, Or canker’d Ball; but, from Sepulchral Soil, Cautious he turns aside the lifted Share, Lest haply, at its Touch, uncover’d Bones Shou’d start to View, and blast his rural Toil.33

The plowman is noticeably “cautious” about what his machinery might unearth, fearing to perform a sacrilege among the unhonored dead. Henry James Pye’s Faringdon Hill, though directed increasingly outward from the Isis valley to far-​flung destinations, cannot avoid memories of Civil War: Contract the prospect now and mark more near Fair Faringdon her humble turret rear,

31 Jago, Edge-​Hill, p. 153. On Jago and Pye, see David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–​1789 (London: Longman, 2003), pp. 203–​7. 32  Ibid., pp. 153–​4. 33  Ibid., pp. 159–​60.

 

Poems on Place   343 Where once the tapering spire conspicuous grew, Till civil strife the sacred pile o’erthrew: For as on hapless Stuart’s ruin bent, Against yon walls their lord his thunder sent, And led with ruthless rage the hostile train, While his own weeping Lares plead in vain; The balls invade, with erring fury driven, The hallow’d structure consecrate to heaven. Such is alas the baleful fruit that springs, From factious subjects and oppressive kings!34

Political intransigence between subjects and heads of state unleashes civil violence, and scars English topography. It was this very scarring that Alexander Pope sought to distract attention from by means of his rewriting of Coopers Hill as Windsor-​Forest.

A Purposeful Detour through Iter Poetry and John Gay Topographical writing in the long eighteenth century can take the form of a journey as well as the writing of place. This tradition can be traced not only to the chorographers William Camden and Michael Drayton, but to a tradition of satirical journey-​writing known as “iter poetry.” Oxford dons figure largely in this story, as does Pope’s contemporary John Gay, whose Trivia (1716, 1720) does for London what Denham and Pope do for London’s Thames valley. Richard Eedes and Richard Corbett could be said to have “fathered,” in the iter poem, “an entire genre of topographical poetry, a special manifestation of rising national self-​consciousness.”35 At the back of this tradition lies Horace’s Sermo i.5, the account of a journey to Brundisium as a member of the rich patron Maecenas’s retinue. The “general dramatic situation of a poet accompanying a Great Man on a journey” leads to portraits of “other members of the company, sights seen along the way, traveler’s hardships,” and “exceptionally good or bad food and lodging.”36 Gay’s Epistle II: To the Right Honourable the Earl of Burlington: A Journey to Exeter (1720) was regarded as a particularly successful example of this kind. Combined with his pioneering narrative of walking the streets of London in Trivia, A Journey to Exeter establishes Gay as an important influence on topographical writing. Gay’s Journey is rich in social as well as geographical detail. Sent on horseback to Devon, some two hundred miles away in the West Country, as an emissary from his patron Lord

34  Henry James Pye, Faringdon Hill: A Poem in Two Books (Oxford, 1774), p. 49. Pye informs his readers in a note that although Faringdon House had a royalist garrison, its owner Sir Robert Pye, married to a daughter of the parliamentary leader John Hampden and himself a colonel in the parliamentary army, commanded the attack on his own property, during which the spire of the church “was beat down by the artillery” (p. 49). See also Poems on Various Subjects by Henry James Pye (London, 1787). 35  Dana F. Sutton, Oxford Poetry by Richard Eedes and George Peele (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995), p. 25. 36 Ibid.

 

344   Donna Landry Burlington, Gay’s poetic narrator begins the journey from Burlington House (today the Royal Academy of Arts), trotting along Piccadilly on a Sunday: ’Twas on the day that city dames repair To take their weekly dose of Hide-​Park air; When forth we trot: no carts the road infest, For still on Sundays country horses rest.37

“At Hartley-​Row the foaming bit we prest,” writes Gay, describing stopping for food and drink as if pulling up on a racecourse.38 The poem offers Epicurean pleasures: Sutton we pass, and leave her spacious down, And with the setting sun reach Stockbridge town. O’er our parch’d tongue the rich metheglin glides, And the red dainty trout our knife divides. Sad melancholy ev’ry visage wears; What, no Election come in seven long years!39

The fellowship of the road oscillates between self-​indulgence and political cynicism. The body politic is composed of “bought and sold boroughs”; politics is popular insofar as candidates must engage in hospitality to purchase their supporters’ loyalty. Crossing into Devon means encountering a summer deluge and gale-​force winds, and the poem ends abruptly once Exeter is sighted: But now the driving gales suspend the rain, We mount our steeds, and Devon’s city gain. Hail, happy native land!—​but I forbear, What other Counties must with envy hear.40

Gay’s witty ending, refusing to celebrate Devon not because the poet is drenched and cold, but because other counties would be made too envious by his praise, is both satirical and polite. A mood of festivity and friendship radiates from the poem, inspiring imitators such as Thomas Maude, whose Viator, a Poem; or, A Journey from London to Scarborough, by the Way of York:  With Notes Historical and Topographical (1782) acknowledges Gay’s influence: “Horace has familiarly descended to give us a poetical Journey to Brundusium; Mr. Gay, from London to Exeter.”41 On the great North Road from London, beyond Enfield Chace, the wheels of commerce induce anxiety in Maude’s narrator: Now chalky heights the Driver’s care employ, While Alps of Commerce, straining, pass your eye. Nor then let Caution sleep, lest dire Mishap, From the dread wheels, thy life or safety sap.*42

37  John Gay, Epistle II: To the Right Honourable the Earl of Burlington: A Journey to Exeter in Poems on Several Occasions, 2 vols. (London, 1720), vol. ii, pp. 280–​8, at p. 281. 38  Ibid., p. 281. 39  Ibid., p. 283. 40  Ibid., p. 288. 41  Thomas Maude, Viator, a Poem; or, A Journey from London to Scarborough, by the Way of York: With Notes Historical and Topographical (London, 1782), p. 3. 42 Ibid., p. 11.

 

Poems on Place   345 The poem appends a note on these heavily laden carts suggesting a comparison between roadways and rivers as Britain’s arterial means of insertion into global commerce: “* Though inconvenience, and sometimes danger, attend passing these broad-​wheel’d waggons, or any other sort, yet it must give a reflecting mind much secret pleasure to behold such numerous proofs of trade as frequent the north roads, by which means, benefits are diffused at home, and comforts carried to all nations.”43 By the 1780s, in the wake of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), such observations had become standard fare. Gay’s Trivia, by contrast, broke new ground, or slogged through new mud, in 1716 by extolling pedestrian adventures. Trivia (the meeting of three ways, a major junction) propels the narrator into the attitude of a London flâneur. The three books treat “Of the Implements for Walking the Streets, and Signs of the Weather,” “Of Walking the Streets by Day,” and “Of Walking the Streets by Night,” a temporal structuring echoed by subsequent poets, including William Cowper in The Task (1785).44 Before detailing the walking gear required and otherwise compiling a manual for pedestrians, Gay makes his bid for national fame in the manner of Denham and Pope: My youthful bosom burns with thirst of fame, From the great theme to build a glorious name, To tread in paths to ancient bards unknown, And bind my temples with a Civic crown; But more, my country’s love demands the lays, My country’s be the profit, mine the praise.45

The guidebook-​for-​tourists approach appeals to readers as aspiring urbanites, to be carefully distinguished from the uninitiated rural newcomers who are bound to fall victim to scams and muck: Careful observers, studious of the town, Shun the misfortunes that disgrace the clown; Untempted, they contemn the jugler’s feats, Pass by the Meuse, nor try the thimble’s cheats. When drays bound high, they never cross behind, Where bubbling yest is blown by gusts of wind: And when up Ludgate-​hill huge carts move slow, Far from the straining steeds securely go, Whose dashing hoofs behind them fling the mire, And mark with muddy blots the gazing ’squire. The Parthian thus his javl’lin backward throws, And as he flies infests pursuing foes. (Trivia, book ii, lines 285–​96)

43 

Ibid., pp. 11–​12. John Gay, Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London in Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1720), pp. 131–​203. See the excellent essays in Clare Brant and Susan E. Whyman (eds.), Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-​Century London: John Gay’s “Trivia” (1716) (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007). Cowper’s Task is not principally a topographical poem, so is not analyzed here. See Tim Fulford, Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006); and Landry, Invention, pp. 55–​6, 59–​60, 120, 122–​4. 45 Gay, Trivia, p. 136, book i, lines 17–​22. 44 

 

346   Donna Landry Allusions to antiquity elevate London’s everyday mishaps to epic dignity, and the countryman unused to avoiding the mud thrown up by cart horses’ heels is, as it were, the victim of a Parthian shot. Polite patriotism, it seems, cannot take itself too seriously without risking pomposity, yet distinguishing what is proper requires the knowledge of a well-​traveled connoisseur, or at least a patron of London’s theaters: Happy Augusta! law-​defended town! Here no dark lanthorns shade the villain’s frown; No Spanish jealousies thy lanes infest, Nor Roman vengeance stabs th’ unwary breast; Here tyranny ne’er lifts her purple hand, But liberty and justice guard the land. (book iii, lines 145–​50)

Like so much other eighteenth-​century topographical writing, Trivia is a rhapsody to British liberty, but with an archness that undercuts jingoistic sentiments. For Gay London is local in its barely negotiable byways and national in its representativeness. In Trivia civil violence has been largely overcome, and pedestrian liberty unleashed. Thus Thomas Tickell, after decades of foreign wars, can celebrate the glories of British womanhood on display in Kensington Garden (1722), where The Dames of Britain oft in crowds repair To gravel walks, and unpolluted air. Here, while the Town in damps and darkness lies, They breathe in sun-​shine, and see azure skies; Each walk, with robes of various dyes bespread, Seems from afar a moving Tulip-​bed.46

The poem’s subsequent allusion to the defeat of the Ottomans in a Hungarian campaign, which was George I’s entry into warfare, casts ironical light on these British “Dames,” luxuriating in sunshine and exotic textiles, gaudy as Ottoman tulips.47 The freedom to roam in topographical writing is never very far from the exigencies of political power.

England’s Bounty, the Poet’s Task, Geopolitics Local poetry weaves a particular piece of terrain into a national fabric, then, and by doing so, entitles the poet to eminence beyond the locality. The standard set by Denham was self-​ consciously followed by the twenty-​four-​year-​old Pope, living at Binfield near Windsor within sight of Denham’s scenes. Pope’s bid to sing the nation as an emerging imperium is explicit. Pope celebrates the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of the Spanish

46 

[Thomas Tickell], Kensington Garden (London, 1722), p. 1.

47 “On Buda’s plains thus formidably bright, | Shone Asia’s sons, a pleasing dreadful sight. | In various

robes their silken troops were seen, | The blue, the red, and Prophet’s sacred green: | When blooming Brunswick near the Danube’s flood, | First stain’d his maiden sword in Turkish blood” (ibid., p. 20).

 

Poems on Place   347 Succession (1701–​13). The poem—​somewhat ironically, given the treaty’s Asiento pact, a thirty-​year British monopoly on the transatlantic slave trade—​ends with a vision of a Pax Britannica once Britain has come benevolently to colonize the globe, freeing native subjects from former slavery: “Oh stretch thy Reign, fair Peace! from Shore to Shore, | Till Conquest cease, and Slav’ry be no more: | Till the freed Indians in their native Groves | Reap their own Fruits, and woo their Sable Loves.”48 This finessing of conquest, annihilation of indigenous populations, and importation of slave labor in Spanish and British colonies is one of many contradictions managed by the poem, which takes its cue from the land itself: Where Order in Variety we see, And where, tho’ all things differ, all agree. …………………………………………………… Here in full Light the russet Plains extend; There wrapt in Clouds the blueish Hills ascend: Ev’n the wild Heath displays her Purple Dies, And ’midst the Desart fruitful Fields arise, That crown’d with tufted Trees and springing Corn, Like verdant Isles the sable Waste adorn. (lines 15–​40)

Here concors discordia is visible even in the mineral and vegetable kingdoms, in which plains and hills, like partisan opponents, pursue unhindered their leveling or hierarchy-​ascending ambitions. E. P. Thompson brilliantly illuminates the agrarian politics of these lines in terms of forest law and the lenient approach to forest economy promoted by Queen Anne, who was keen on hunting but nevertheless allowed locals to make use of traditional forest rights—​ hence that springing corn, a crop to sustain the populace, an eruption of use-​value into a pleasure park.49 Rich Industry sits smiling on the Plains, And Peace and Plenty tell, a Stuart reigns. (lines 41–​2)

The poet’s worthiness to sing the nation is audaciously confirmed by the poem’s conclusion, which continues the rhymes from the couplet in praise of Anne: Enough for me, that to the listning Swains First in these Fields I sung the Sylvan Strains. (lines 431–​2)

These lines are cast as simultaneously rustically humble and ambitious. It will not do to hymn the Peace of Utrecht or a Stuart reign in any less confident way. And thus this poet, poaching on Parnassus and Cooper’s Hill alike, writes himself into literary history. When the ambitious young Christopher Smart makes a bid for patronage at mid-​century in The Hop-​Garden (1752), he follows precedent by coming forward as a poet of Kent, “the Garden of England,” and therefore a microcosm of the nation.50 He laments that his lower

48  Alexander Pope, Windsor-​Forest, lines 407–​10, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–​69), vol. i, p. 192. 49  E. P. Thompson, “Appendix 2: Alexander Pope and the Blacks,” in Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 278–​94. 50  “Kent has provided more pictures at the [Royal] Academy than any other shire county.” It remained very popular until the mid-​nineteenth century, but “since then there has been considerable decline,

 

348   Donna Landry social provenance, when compared with a Sir Philip Sidney, a Denham or a Pope, renders Kentish hops his inevitable subject: Had I such pow’r, no peasants toil, no hops Shou’d e’er debase my lay: far nobler themes, The high atchievements of thy warrior kings Shou’d raise my thoughts, and dignify my song. But I, young rustic, dare not leave my cot, For so enlarg’d a sphere—​ah! muse beware Lest the loud larums of the braying trump, Lest the deep drum shou’d drown thy tender reed, …………………………………………………… Me the voluminous Medway’s silver wave, Content inglorious, and the hopland shades!51

Denham’s and Pope’s Thames ushers in Smart’s Medway. Smart offers hop-​growing and brewing instructions in the manner of John Philips’s Cyder (1708), mentioned in book i, line 272. There is a memorable scene of itinerant hop-​pickers, a metropolitan incursion from London: See! from the great metropolis they rush, Th’ industrious vulgar. They, like prudent bees, In Kent’s wide garden roam, expert to crop The flow’ry hop, and provident to work, Ere winter numb their sunburnt hands, and winds Engoal them, murmuring in their gloomy cells. From these, such as appear the rest t’ excel In strength and young agility, select. (book ii, lines 57–​64)

Despite its georgic advice, Smart’s poem remains a specimen of Johnson’s “local” poetry, naming various landowners and estates, and memorializing the poet’s birthplace as a place of arborial harmony: The tall trees tremble at th’ approach of heav’n, And bow their salutation to the sun, Who fosters all their foliage—​These are thine, Yes, little Shipbourne, boast that these are thine—​ And if—​But oh!—​and if ’tis no disgrace, The birth of him who now records thy praise. (book ii, lines 68–​73)

Taking his place in the lineage from Denham and Pope, Smart ends the poem by making the most of Kent’s strategic positioning as the part of the island of Great Britain most militantly disposed toward France: Now on fair Dover’s topmost cliff I’ll stand, And look with scorn and triumph on proud France. Of yore an isthmus jutting from this coast, Join’d the Britannic to the Gallic shore;

probably the result of suburbanization and the growth of industry.” Peter Howard, Landscapes: The Artists’ Vision (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 99. Apart from Smart, Kent has not been so well served in verse. 51  Christopher Smart, The Hop-​Garden: A Georgic in Two Books, book i, lines 10, 22–​33, in The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, ed. Karina Williamson and Marcus Walsh, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–​96), vol. iv, pp. 41–​65, at p. 42.

 

Poems on Place   349 But Neptune on a day, with fury fir’d, Rear’d his tremendous trident, smote the earth, And broke th’ unnatural union at a blow.—​ ’Twixt you and you, my servants and my sons, “Be there (he cried) eternal discord—​France “Shall bow the neck to Cantium’s peerless offspring, “And as the oak reigns lordly o’er the shrub, “So shall the hop have homage from the vine.” (book ii, lines 293–​304)

Anticipating many an anxious gaze across the Channel later in the century, Smart aspires to write Kent into history geopolitically, thus securing his own place on the English Parnassus.

“So That to Us No Thing, No Place Is Strange” Of all his topographical images, Denham’s figuring of rivers as arteries connecting the island with the globe for both commerce and defense proves the most durable. For the whole of the eighteenth century poets will allude to Denham’s rendering of the Thames as literally global waters. Here is Jago, indicating that Edge-​Hill lies in the hinterland: Britannia’s rural Charms, and tranquil Scenes, Far from the circling Ocean, where her Fleets, Like Guardian Spirits, which round Paradise Perform’d their nightly Watch, majestic ride, I sing.

When Jago comes to particularize his bit of country he describes it as “an inland Sea,” the woodlands spectrally figured as tall-​masted ships: The Summit’s gain’d! and, from its airy Height, The late-​trod Plain looks like an inland Sea, View’d from some Promontory’s hoary Head, With distant Shores Environ’d; not with Face Glassy, and uniform, but when its Waves Are gently ruffled by the Southern Gale, And the tall Masts like waving Forests shew.52

Denham’s Thames scenes haunt Jago’s prospect, yet in Warwickshire, mercantilism as maritimism gives way to mining—​“Hail, native British Ore!”—​the produce of which enables the woollen and steel trades: “By gainful Commerce of her woolly Vests, | Wrought by the spiky Comb; or steely Wares, | From the coarse Mass, by stubborn Toil, refin’d” (book iii, lines 633, 638–​40, p. 120). Thomas Maude expatiates upon the ideal life in Wensley-​Dale (1772) as dependent upon “fleecy bleaters”: A fertile farm, a household debonair, From debt exempt, nor plagu’d with anxious care; The bearded field, the udder-​swelling plain, Some fleecy bleaters, and a fit domain 52 Jago, Edge-​Hill, book i, lines 1–​5, 43–​9, pp. 1–​2, 4.

 

350   Donna Landry For winter’s forage; if the glebe be cold, Manure to warm it from the teeming fold.53

Sheep farming equals perfect sustainability. A few years later, Henry James Pye renders England’s trees simultaneously into commercial vessels and warships. Britain may not produce olives and citrus fruits, writes Pye, “Yet her thick woods unnumber’d trees produce, | Sacred at once to ornament, and use… . | Above the rest her native oak appears; | Whose giant limbs extend her noblest boast, | Pride of her groves, and bulwark of her coast.”54 Pye pleads with his readership never to abandon commitment to the oak, “Which keeps invasion from her peaceful shore.”55 The veneration of oak trees and the consumption of them in shipbuilding appear not to present any contradiction in Pye’s mind. His anxieties congeal around France as the great competitor, and his patriotism around the house of Brunswick as stalwart for peace and liberty, at home and abroad.56 Denham asserted that the great river brought the wealth of far-​flung places to the hinterland, writing an island people into a global geography: When he to boast, or to disperse his stores Full of the tributes of his grateful shores, Visits the world, and in his flying towers Brings home to us, and makes both Indies ours; Finds wealth where ’tis, bestows it where it wants Cities in deserts, woods in Cities plants. So that to us no thing, no place is strange, While his fair bosom is the world’s exchange. (1668, lines 181–​8)

Conspicuous consumption in the eighteenth century would have been impossible without those “flying towers.” There is also an insinuation that with foreign luxuries comes some worldly knowledge, as if the money made by importing and exporting on London’s Royal Exchange, rubbing shoulders with merchants of many nations, somehow guaranteed a certain cosmopolitanism. This vision of a seventeenth-​century Britain enthusiastically absorbing the exotic and foreign gives way to a more nationalist, militarized vision after decades of Continental war and colonial expansion, as can be seen in Jago and Pye. The cosmopolitan vanishes into a vision of imperial command, in which Britons do not need to be so hospitable either at home or abroad. Pye seems particularly keen on Britain’s acquiring empire in India, deploring earlier East India Company traders as mere exploiters “lured by gold, and deaf to nature’s cries,” and applauding how … Britain’s senate, fired with patriot flame, Resolved to vindicate their country’s fame, Bade England’s laws to Ganges’ banks extend, And equal rule the Indian’s life defend.57

53 

[Thomas Maude], Wensley-​dale; or, Rural Contemplations: A Poem, 2nd ed. (London, 1772), p. 42. 55 Ibid., p. 25. 56  The poem ends: “And lovely Faringdon! my voice shall still | Or in thy groves, or on this healthful hill, | In rustic numbers sing the happy plains, | Where Freedom triumphs, and where Brunswick reigns” (ibid., p. 58). 57 Ibid., p. 31. 54 Pye, Faringdon Hill, pp. 23–​4.

 

Poems on Place   351 The defense of British interests is thereby synonymous with the extension of liberty and the rule of law. “Hospitable” becomes a peculiarly fraught term toward the century’s end, as has been shown by Bridget Keegan’s and David Fairer’s analyses of Anne Wilson’s riparian poem Teisa, published in Newcastle in 1778.58 Treating the Tees as part of an arterial system like Denham’s and Pope’s Thames, Smart’s Medway, or Pye’s Isis, Wilson, who has laboring-​class origins and sympathies, departs from Jago’s and Pye’s “estate-​centred” topography, as Fairer puts it.59 Her “opposition to Lord North’s Squirearchy becomes clear,” Fairer writes, when Wilson mourns the death of the elder William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, as “America’s British champion,” and hence the complete opposite of Lord North during the American War of Independence.60 “America’s clay” becomes strangely “hospitable” to displaced Teeside laborers, even if they end up buried in it, Wilson suggests, so harsh have become conditions for the laboring classes in Britain.61 An inhospitable Britain, once again at war with France, as opposed to a cosmopolitan Britain, surely lies at the back of Wordsworth’s mind as he seeks remoteness in Wales in 1798.

The Private Prospect Not all prospect views were quite so public or political as those derived from Denham’s example. James Thomson’s Seasons (continually revised between 1726 and 1746) contains a particularly admired passage about the view from the park at Hagley Hall, the seat of Lord Lyttelton. Thomson’s Miltonic blank verse was the obvious alternative to Pope’s heroic couplets: Meantime you gain the Height, from whose fair Brow The bursting Prospect spreads immense around; And snatch’d o’er Hill and Dale, and Wood and Lawn, And verdant Field, and darkening Heath between, And Villages embosom’d soft in Trees, And spiry Towns by surging Columns mark’d Of houshold Smoak, your Eye excursive roams: Wide-​stretching from the Hall, in whose kind Haunt The Hospitable Genius lingers still, To Where the broken Landskip, by Degrees, Ascending, roughens into rigid Hills; O’er which the Cambrian Mountains, like far Clouds That skirt the blue Horizon, dusky, rise.62

58  See Bridget Keegan’s chapter, “Writing against the Current: Anne Wilson’s Teisa and Labouring-​ Class River Poetry,” in her British Labouring-​Class Nature Poetry, 1730–​1837 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 98–​121; and Fairer, English Poetry, pp. 209–​12. 59 Fairer, English Poetry, p. 211.    60  Ibid.   61  Ibid., pp. 211–​12. 62  James Thomson, “Spring,” lines 950–​62, in The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), p. 47.

 

352   Donna Landry Here the land bespeaks the good stewardship (and hospitality) of the landowner, but the view offered is a private one. John Barrell has meticulously analyzed the relation between Thomson’s syntax and the composition of landscape paintings by Claude Lorrain and others.63 Notice how a sense of privacy is induced by the seeming emptiness of the scene because all human habitations are perceived at a distance and through household smoke. The eye is “snatch’d”—​again the land has agency—​across a topographical scanning of the terrain to the far horizon, with its view of the Welsh mountains, the very mountains which beckoned to Wordsworth. In 1726, contemporaneous with his friend Thomson’s first publication of The Seasons, John Dyer published Grongar Hill, a poem in octosyllabic couplets that immortalized his home turf near the River Towy in Carmarthenshire, in Wales. As Christine Gerrard and David Fairer explain, Dyer’s “enormously popular” poem departs from the Denham–​Pope tradition “by describing a landscape shaped by memory and personal meaning rather than one constructed to yield a consistent political reading.”64 Rivers run like human lives not as arteries of commerce: And see the Rivers how they run, Thro’ Woods and Meads, in Shade and Sun, Sometimes swift, and sometimes slow, Wave succeeding Wave they go A various Journey to the Deep, Like human Life to endless Sleep!65

There is excitement in the distant prospect of an anciently enclosed, still heavily wooded country, anticipating Wordsworth’s excitement at “These hedge-​rows, hardly hedge-​rows, little lines | Of sportive wood run wild” which he views from the Wye.66 How close and small the Hedges lie! What streaks of Meadows cross the Eye! (lines 117–​18)

The poet’s ecstasy continues in a moment of repose: Now, ev’n now, my Joys runs high, As on the Mountain-​turf I lie. (lines 137–​8)

The poet seeks tranquility in remote retirement; listening to the thrush trumps sociability: Grass and Flowers Quiet treads, …………………………………… And often, by the murm’ring Rill, Hears the Thrush, while all is still, Within the Groves of Grongar Hill. (lines 152–​8)

Grongar Hill would succeed, as Dyer hoped, in taking its place beside Coopers Hill.

63 Barrell, The Idea of Landscape, pp. 14–​34.

64  David Fairer and Christine Gerrard (eds.), Eighteenth-​Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 239. 65  John Dyer, Grongar Hill, in ibid., pp. 239–​43, on p. 242, lines 93–​8. 66  William Wordsworth, Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on a Tour of the Wye, July, 1797, lines 16–​17, in Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797–​1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 116–​20, at p. 116.

 

Poems on Place   353 One could thenceforth ascend a hill without having to assess the state of the nation, but rather the state of one’s feelings. Karen O’Brien describes the waning of the Virgilian imperial georgic after the American War of Independence as a “loss of moral confidence in the integrative function” of georgic poems and the empire they celebrated:  no longer could “national greatness” be celebrated “without fear of the politically corrupting effects of national self-​indulgence”: “poets no longer felt exhilarated by seeing an empire in an ear of corn.”67 Consequently, poets, including Ann Yearsley (Clifton Hill, 1785), William Crowe (Lewesdon Hill, 1788), and Charlotte Smith (Beachy Head, 1807), took to the hills for more private reasons, thereby exuding Whig and sometimes radical sympathies. The upwardly mobile carpenter’s son William Crowe, appointed Public Orator at Oxford, insists on pedestrian action up Dorset’s Lewesdon Hill for “morning exercise”: along the narrow track By which the scanty-​pastured sheep ascend Up to thy furze-​clad summit, let me climb.68

Fronting its healthy pleasures, Crowe, like fellow laboring-​class poet Ann Yearsley, associates hill walking with mental expansion and freedom: “Uplifted, on this height I feel the mind | Expand itself in wider liberty,” Crowe writes; Yearsley had written: “my bosom lighter grows, | Shakes off her huge oppressive weight of woes, | And swells in guiltless rapture; ever hail, | The tufted grove, and the low-​winding vale!”69 Yet Crowe still finds it necessary to interweave stories of British shipping—​in this case, the wreck of the Halswell, bound for India, a set-​ piece evoking compassion for the mariners in the manner of Thomson, suggesting the limits of human capability rather than patriotic zeal.70 By 1798, it is as if from Wordsworth’s disaffected vantage point, Britain has been saturated with patriotic associations—​as if by that date, almost all internal travel for purposes of topographical tourism had become, by default, patriotic if not jingoistic tourism. The Wye valley had the virtue of lying in Welsh border country, still relatively remote for metropolitan visitors, devoid of nationalist hauteur. Yet this was the “Silurian” district that figured patriotically in John Philips’s Cyder (1708) and John Dyer’s Fleece (1757).71 That the prospect offered in Wordsworth’s Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey should be as “determined by events of political history” as is Denham’s in Coopers Hill, has been noticed by previous critics.72 Topographical precedents in poetry and prose have also been

67  Karen O’Brien, “Imperial Georgic, 1660–​1789,” in MacLean, Landry, and Ward (eds.), The Country and the City Revisited, pp. 160–​79, at pp. 172, 176. 68  [William Crowe], Lewesdon Hill: A Poem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1788), p. 1. 69  Ibid., p. 4; Ann Yearsley, Clifton Hill: Written in January 1785, lines 196–​9, in Fairer and Gerrard, Eighteenth-​Century Poetry, pp. 483–​9, at p. 487. For more on Crowe and Yearsley, see Fairer, English Poetry, pp. 206–​8; Landry, Invention, pp. 129–​30; and The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-​Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–​1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 120–​85. 70 Crowe, Lewesdon, pp. 10–​13. 71  See Stephen Daniels, Susanne Seymour, and Charles Watkins, “Border Country: The Politics of the Picturesque in the Middle Wye Valley,” in Michael Rosenthal, Christiana Payne, and Scott Wilcox (eds.), Prospects for the Nation: Recent Essays in British Landscape, 1750–​1880 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 157–​81. 72  Karl Kroeber, Romantic Landscape Vision (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1975), p. 91. See also Levinson, Great Period Poems, pp. 17–​37.

 

354   Donna Landry noted.73 I think we can go further, however; Wordsworth is actually rewriting Coopers Hill contrapuntally, while drawing on the tradition of iter poetry and the more private prospects of Thomson, Dyer, and others. The topographical tradition against which he was reacting is threaded through the poem like the river Wye itself. The poet makes no bid for national fame or representativeness, but rather addresses himself and his sister. The abbey itself, with its resident vagrants and beggars, and proximity to charcoal burning and other signs of industry documented by William Gilpin in his guidebook, are pointedly ignored.74 If there is any sign of government, good or bad, to be had in this scene, it lies in those “pastoral farms | Green to the very door” (17–​ 18). What sounds idyllic to the uninitiated—​but how unversed were Wordsworth’s readers regarding agrarian politics?—​could signal to the knowledgeable hardships suffered by cottagers during wartime and the last wave of enclosures of wastes and commons.75 Those excised lines of Denham’s, in which the haughty look down “on those, whose humble fruitfull paine | Their proud, and barren greatnesse must susteine,” haunt this prospect. Even the fact that Wordsworth glosses the river’s “inland murmur” (line 4) with a note to the effect that where he stands, “The river is not affected by the tides,” deliberately disconnects this prospect from any notion of global waters or rivers as arteries of commerce, empire, or war. Coopers Hill remained a touchstone throughout the eighteenth century. The poem did, however, arouse the contempt of Johnson’s friend, the Quaker poet John Scott, in his posthumously published Critical Essays (1785), suggesting that readers’ taste might be about to change: A Descriptive poem ought, of all poems, to be easily intelligible. Cooper’s Hill is so obscure, that repeated perusals are necessary to discover its meaning; which when discovered, is often found to be absurd… . Cooper’s Hill is an uniform mass of dulness, on which the sun has not bestowed its faintest irradiation.76

Scott, a Quaker born in Southwark to a draper’s family, did not approve of Denham’s allegorical style or share his royalist sentiments. He attributed the poem’s fame to Denham’s social rank, the fact that he was “a man of family and fortune.”77 Although by not admiring Coopers Hill, “Scott was emphatically the exception in his century,” as Robert Aubin concludes, Scott’s views might be said to herald things to come.78 By 1820, public taste had definitely shifted, a shift for which Wordsworth could claim some credit. Reviewing a volume of Wordsworth’s, the British Review, and London Critical Journal compared Coopers Hill unfavorably with “the poetry of our own time” which

73 

Mary Jacobus, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, 1798 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 104–​30; and “‘Tintern Abbey’ and Topographical Prose,” Notes & Queries, n.s., 18 (1971), 366–​9. 74  William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, &c. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; Made in the Summer of the Year 1770 (London, 1782). 75  “The second wave, during the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, took advantage of inflated wartime grain prices and aimed primarily at reclaiming untilled lands such as wastes and commons (as distinguished from common fields) for arable”: Rachel Crawford, Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, 1700–​1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), p. 49. 76  John Scott, Critical Essays on Some of the Poems, of Several English Poets: With an Account of the Life and Writings of the Author, by Mr. Hoole (London, 1785), pp. 13, 35. 77 Ibid., p. 35. 78 Aubin, Topographical Poetry, p. 37.

 

Poems on Place   355 may fairly claim the credit of having originated that sentimental manner of describing particular landscapes which carries the picturesque into the heart, and annexes an interior feeling to what was formerly in its most luxuriant dress the source only of a superficial ecstacy and transient delight.79

By 1820, Wordsworth had succeeded in supplanting Denham. In searching for a basis of comparison, however, it was still Coopers Hill that the reviewer instantly thought of. Although by 1820 Denham’s manner of topographical description might be found to lack that annexation of “interior feeling”—​as opposed to public political feeling—​that had become so universally popular, it was still Denham’s Coopers Hill against which Wordsworth’s poems could best be measured.

References Alfrey, Nicholas, and Stephen Daniels (eds.), Mapping the Landscape:  Essays on Art and Cartography (Nottingham: Univ. of Nottingham Art Gallery and Castle Museum, 1990). Barrell, John, Edward Pugh of Ruthin, 1763–​1813:  “A Native Artist” (Cardiff:  Univ. of Wales Press, 2013). Barrell, John, “Topography v. Landscape,” London Review of Books, May 13, 2010, pp. 9–​11. Bonehill, John, and Stephen Daniels (eds.), Paul Sandby:  Picturing Britain (London:  Royal Academy of Arts, 2009). Janowitz, Anne, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). Kaul, Suvir, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 2000). Keegan, Bridget, British Labouring-​Class Nature Poetry, 1730–​1837 (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Landry, Donna, The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking, and Ecology in English Literature, 1671–​1831 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). MacLean, Gerald, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward (eds.), The Country and the City Revisited:  England and the Politics of Culture, 1500–​1800 (Cambridge:  Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999). Kaul, Suvir, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 2000). Smith, Nigel, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–​1660 (New Haven:  Yale Univ. Press, 1994). Turner, James Grantham, The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry, 1630–​1660 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979). Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973).

79  Review of Wordsworth’s River Duddon volume, British Review, and London Critical Journal, 16 (1820), 37–​8, quoted in Aubin, Topographical Poetry, p. 37.

 

Chapter 21

P oems on t h e  Se x e s Catherine Ingrassia Poems on the sexes in the long eighteenth century offer an expansive view of the characters of the two genders, the cultural forces acting upon them, and the consequences of their sexual, social, and personal interactions. Poems address the structural institutions that inform the relationships between the sexes, the gendered expectations that organize them, and cultural spaces for sexuality, emotional intimacy, and desire. They also draw upon the gender characterizations that shape discourse relating to contemporaneous cultural developments: the emergent financial systems and instruments, the imperial project of colonial expansion, aesthetics, emergent literary forms, consumer culture, and the changes within the shifting class structure itself. At its most strident, verse on the sexes envisages a world fundamentally divided by gender, where men regard women as creatures too easily seduced by distracting diversions, beings appropriate for marriage or sexual commerce, but not figured as intellectual or cultural equals. In turn, women characterize men as potential seducers and betrayers or, once husbands, as petty tyrants forcing adherence to the dreaded rule of “custom.” At their most generous, on the other hand, these texts represent emotional exchanges, often marked by loss or absence, that depict the intimate potential of these relationships. And at their most complex these poems suggest—​through language, metaphor, and imagery—​the often androgynous nature of the sexes and the ways in which the cultural pressure to conform to gendered expectations potentially limits the possibility for meaningful interactions between men and women. The cultural position from which the poetic voice speaks deeply informs its attitude. Women, no matter where they are in the social hierarchy, write from a subordinate position within a patriarchal context; as a result they often appropriate language from male poetic genres, ventriloquize male voices, or test the bounds of their prescribed cultural position. Even at their most poetically empowered, women write and publish within a society that constricts their opportunities. In a world of compulsory heterosexuality, beauty and youth circulate as prized, albeit transient, qualities (more prized because of their fleeting nature), something male and female poets alike discuss. At the same time the male poets most associated with the misogynistic verse of the period—​ John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope—​trade on common stereotypes of avaricious women, driven by ephemeral concerns, uncontrolled passions,

 

Poems on the Sexes    357 and a preoccupation with appearance, fashion, and consumer culture. Even those caustic portraits, however, recognize the culturally limiting expectations that make, as Pope describes, “Time and Thought” women’s persistent enemies.1 Female poets represent a patriarchal culture that stifles women’s capacity for individuation, and legal and economic institutional structures (such as marriage) that penalize women, limiting their ability to function as fully autonomous beings. Yet, while many women write persuasively about the challenges created in a world of compulsory heterosexuality, they also reveal the deep passions, affection, and concern for individual men that complicate cultural critique with personal emotions. Throughout, these poems are in dialogue with each other and with the cultural discourses from which they emerge; yet these are not simply antagonistic poems. Until the last few decades, the kinds of verse that were anthologized, reproduced, and readily accessible to scholars caused the poetry about and between the sexes to appear too often as poetry of opposition, as a poetic discourse that contains only the negative elements of heterosexual relationships, real and imagined.2 Such verse certainly captures an important and persistent strain of poetic discourse, but to focus exclusively on this approach ignores more nuanced treatments of gender, sexuality, and intimacy. With the availability of a more representative range of verse, amid the language of adversarial gender roles emerge other representations for the possibilities of male–​female intimacies and an enriched understanding of the power of poetry to present a range of human emotions. This chapter looks at poetry addressing three specific aspects of the sexes and their relationship to each other. First, it explores character and custom. The verse of the period consistently debates whether the characters of men and women were innately different because of nature, or whether they were shaped by “custom” and the cultural expectations for each gender. Second, the chapter considers verse that represents love and marriage. A cultural institution and a lived experience, marriage was, in many ways, the crucible for gender difference and the subject of extensive poetic discourse. For some, marriage was a limiting, perhaps debilitating, state; for others, it was an opportunity for intimacy, support, and meaningful exchange; for all, it was a legal and cultural institution with specific challenges to both genders. Finally, this chapter will consider poetry depicting aging and loss, which reveals a complicated array of emotions and relationships between the sexes. Throughout, we can see how poets of both sexes were working through the often culturally imposed differences to find the commonalities between the genders.

1  Alexander Pope, An Epistle to a Lady, line 112, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–​69), vol. iii, part 2, p. 57. 2  The publication of the works and the anthologizing of the dominant (and minor) male poets of the period has been consistent; yet women poets were largely omitted from nineteenth-​century collections and their coverage in twentieth-​century anthologies was sporadic. The publication of Roger Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-​Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989); Joyce Fullard (ed.), British Women Poets, 1660–​1800: An Anthology (Troy, N.Y.: Whitison, 1990); and, most recently, Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine E. Ingrassia (eds.), British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century: An Anthology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2009), among many anthologies, has helped provide a more comprehensive, measured view of the poetic voices of the period.

 

358   Catherine Ingrassia

Character and Custom “Are we not form’d with Passions like your own?”3 So asks the speaker in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s “Epistle from Mrs. Yonge” (1724), a poem that assumes the perspective of Mary Yonge, a woman divorced by her libertine husband. The poem explores what Susan Staves calls “the sexual double standard.”4 In her description of Yonge’s plight, Montagu asserts the fundamental similarity of the sexes and faults the cultural expectations on women that create their “unjust Distinction” (line 25) from men. Men and women share a capacity for intellectual interests and physical desires, yet men may “persue” their “pleasures” “O’er the wide World” (line 29) for “The Change is justify’d by something new” (line 30). Women, by contrast, “must sigh in Silence—​and be true” (line 31); “The weak submissive sex of womankind” (line 10), regardless of the cause of their marriage—​“force,” “art,” or “stern command”—​must remain constant before “the judging world” (line 14). Custom too powerfully shapes the behavior and expectations of the sexes—​“To custom (though unjust) so much is due” (line 46). “Custom” entailed the traditions and expectations for gendered behavior and the cultural beliefs about the sexes’ capacity for intellectual and emotional development. Women are confined by “Customs Tyranny,” writes Elizabeth Thomas, and “still deny’d th’ Improvement of our Mind!”5 Men “cry, alas, poor Fools!” and relegate them to “domestick Tools” “On purpose made our Toils to share” (lines 5–​7), and “humbly in Subjection live” (line 13). These “customary rules for women’s conduct and entrenched opinions about women’s nature and abilities,” as Paula Backscheider describes them, severely circumscribed women’s behavior.6 Of course the deep-​seated devotion to custom causes it to be naturalized, ascribing resulting differences to “character” and “nature” rather than social milieu. Certainly the dominant male poetic voices of the period, Pope, Swift, and Rochester, characterize women in starkly misogynist terms—​as vacuous, commercially (and perhaps sexually) voracious, easily swayed by cultural distractions, and perpetually endangered by the seductive forces that surround them.7 Unlike Montagu, who works to construct a commonality between the sexes, this kind of verse envisages women as fundamentally and innately different from men. For Rochester, women are demanding sexual vessels that confound and ultimately frustrate his ability to realize an idealized union. His vituperative language reveals a thinly disguised self-​loathing (“A wishing, weak, unmoving lump I ly”); his animosity is directed inwardly as, in “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” he curses himself, damning his penis,

3 

“Epistle from Mrs. Y[onge] to Her Husband: 1724,” line 26, in ibid., p. 278. Susan Staves (ed.), A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–​1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), p. 180. 5  “On S —​—​J —​—​Saying in a Sarcastick Manner, My Books Would Make Me Mad: An Ode,” lines 2, 5, in Backscheider and Ingrassia (eds.), p. 847. 6  Paula R. Backscheider, Eighteenth-​Century Women Poets and their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005), p. 100. 7  Much important work has been done on the misogynist strain in Augustan satire, beginning with Felicity Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women, 1660–​1750 (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1984), a generative study that opened the field for subsequent discussions in a similar vein such as Tita Chico, Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-​Century Literature and Culture (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2005). 4 

 

Poems on the Sexes    359 that “Worst part of me and henceforth hated most,” and hoping it be plagued with “Ravenous Shankers,” “Consumeing weepings,” and “strangury and stone” in light of his inability to perform sexually in the face of “great Love.”8 In his so-​called excremental verse, Swift details the cost of consumer culture for women—​ both their pursuit of consumer goods and their role as circulating objects within a heterosexual marketplace. The seeming animosity of Swift’s characterization of Corinna or Celia remains the dominant image. While the familiar poems such as “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” “A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed,” and “The Progress of Beauty” present a traditional misogynistic rhetorical tradition, condemning female preoccupation with appearance, vanity, and self-​presentation, they simultaneously assail men’s unrealistic expectations or understandings of women. Thus Stephron’s lament, “Celia, Celia, Celia shits” (“Lady’s Dressing Room,” line 118), is less an indictment of the hypocrisy of Celia and her disguised chamber pot than a representation of Stephron’s own misdirected animosity. The real object of Swift’s satire is the men who participate in and perpetuate a culture of dehumanizing expectations for women, the nameless customers for whom Corinna “gathers herself together” each day only to be cannibalized nightly by the animals who invade her chambers. Perhaps the most famous assertion of the power of custom is Pope’s pronouncement in “An Epistle to a Lady” that “Women have no characters at all” (line 2). Pope clearly privileges what Helen Deutsch terms “the opposition between firm masculine soul/​mind and fickle feminine sensibility,” and argues for a fundamental difference in character.9 His portraits of the women he observes, however, document the tyranny of custom. Women possess a dominant passion that is shaped by cultural expectations and opportunities. Unlike ideal(ized) men, whose characters are predictable and consistent even when pursuing faults, women have a fundamental instability that is simultaneously their liability and the source of their desirability: “Ladies like variegated Tulips show, | ’Tis to their Changes half their Charms we owe” (lines 41–​2). Richard Savage similarly characterizes the female sex as “part truth, part fiction, | Some thought, much whim, and all a contradiction.”10 He shares Pope’s opinion on the varied nature of women and, like Swift, recognizes they are “fictions” that spring from the imaginations of the men around them. While Pope asserts difference between the sexes, he too recognizes and details the powerful force of custom on women and their capacities. Unlike men, who have multiple interests and desires, women are guided by two ruling passions—​the “Love of Pleasure” and the “Love of Sway” (line 210). Although the love of pleasure may have been given by “Nature,” it is reinforced by cultural mores that demand women appear submissive, engaging, and pleasant: “where the lesson taught | Is but to please, can Pleasure seem a fault?” (lines 211–​12). Similarly women’s desire for power, their love of sway, is created purely by their “experience” in a culture where they are “curst” “by Man’s Oppression” (line 213). In a culture where beauty, youth, and charm provide powerful if fleeting assets, women live with 8 

“The Imperfect Enjoyment,” lines 36, 62, 66–​8, 60, in The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Harold Love (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 13–​15. While this poem is the most well known, Rochester expresses similar sentiments elsewhere. 9  Helen Deutsch, “‘This Once Was Me’: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Ecstatic Poetics,” The Eighteenth-​Century: Theory and Interpretation, 53, no. 3 (2012), 331–​55, at p. 345. 10  “Unconstant” (i.e., “Verses to a Young Lady”), lines 19–​20, in The Poetical Works of Richard Savage, ed. Clarence Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962), p. 81.

 

360   Catherine Ingrassia the recognition of their inevitable loss of (always elusive) power. Consequently, they seek to dull the pain of such oppression and live seeking “The daily Anodyne, and nightly Draught, | To kill those Foes to Fair ones, Time and Thought” (lines 111–​12). Savage similarly ascribes women’s interest in “songs or novels, dress or cards” as an attempt “to kill time, thought and fame in frolic flight.”11 Pope’s sensitivity to the cultural pressures on women does not undo the strain of misogyny that runs throughout the poem, however, or that characterizes the portrait of Belinda in “The Rape of the Lock.” Belinda is an easily distracted, precariously positioned woman who must be compelled to conform to the expectations of a compulsory heterosexual culture through her capitulation to marriage. Her beauty, while valued, morphs into a liability if deployed inappropriately. Even the woman to whom Pope dedicates “An Epistle to a Lady,” Martha Blount, is (as has oft been noted) described in contradictory terms (“Woman’s at best a Contradiction still”) that simultaneously bespeak the fundamental difference between the sexes and the ultimately limiting possibilities Pope envisages for women. When he describes Blount, he considers her, like “Fav’rite blest,” someone who has qualities “Pick[ed] from each sex” (line 273). Pope simultaneously posits an absolute notion of gender separation—​“each sex”—​while constructing an androgynous ideal that combines the most desirable qualities from both. “Although clear cut distinctions are central to Pope’s outlook,” suggests Carole Fabricant, “we find a curious confounding and intermingling of the sexes in certain of his writings, along with a fascination with sexual possibilities beyond the officially reinforced categories of male and female.”12 His repeated pronoun usage “Your … our” underscores the separation while linguistically and philosophically bridging it. These inflammatory texts generated vociferous responses from female contemporaries and established an adversarial poetic relationship between the two genders. Much as female fiction writers characterize men as shaped by a consumer model of sexuality, participating in a cycle of desire and satiety that results in women’s predictable seduction and abandonment, so too female poets present men as fundamentally unreliable, untrustworthy, and ultimately undeserving of the power they wield over women. As Montagu observes in “On the Death of Mrs. Bowes,” “possession abates desire.”13 Some poets assert the possibility of a man who is less mercurial and more emotionally accessible. Savage’s “candid lays” (line 1) in “Epistle to Damon and Delia” constructs a measured man in Damon who softens faults of a foe, praises perfection in a friend (and in doing so “praise[s]‌his own”), and demonstrates constancy, “most pleas’d when beauty most you please” (lines 18–​19). His love for Delia embodies the moderation that characterizes him and should extend to all male affection: “A passion ever fond, yet never blind, | Glowing, with am’rous, yet with guiltless fires, | In ever-​eager, never gross desires” (lines 12–​14). In her poem “The Lover,” Montagu details the attributes of an ideal and completely imaginary lover as one who similarly harmonizes the extremes commonly ascribed to male behavior and “handsomely mixe[s]” the attributes of “the friend and the lover.”14 Writing about Montagu’s later correspondence, Deutsch notes that Montagu 11 

Savage, “An Epistle to Damon and Delia,” lines 30, 32, in ibid., p. 212. Carole Fabricant, “Defining Self and Others: Pope and Eighteenth-​Century Gender Ideology,” Criticism, 39, no. 4 (1997), 503–​29, at p. 508. 13  “On the Death of Mrs. Bowes,” line 10, in Backscheider and Ingrassia (eds.), p. 14. 14  “The Lover,” line 33, in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Essays and Poems and Simplicity, a Comedy, ed. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), p. 234. 12 

 

Poems on the Sexes    361 “articulat[es] the possibility of different forms of desire and relationship,” an observation equally relevant to that poem (“Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Ecstatic Poetics,” p. 340). Montagu describes both the kinds of balance she seeks (“No pedant yet learned,” line 17) and the kinds of excessive men who populate her world, “the lewd rake” and “the dressed fopling” (line 45). Like Sarah Fyge Egerton, who warns of how men “through Vanity and Pride, | … boast those Favours which they are deny’d,”15 Montagu eschews the all-​too-​common man who fails at intimacy and privileges the male–​male discourse in which he can “meanly boast” or “lewdly design” (line 14) past or future encounters. Rather, she seeks a man she can trust and enjoy who possesses “Good sense, and good nature so equally joined” (lines 11–​12). Her stated desire for a lover and a friend reinforces the shared characteristics and possible equality of the sexes she proposes in “Mrs. Yonge.” Clara Reeve completely rejects such a notion—​“I don’t believe in this equality”—​and holds fast to the idea that there is an “Eternal difference of sexes” with “Due bounds to either sex’s mind.”16 Gender mixing is undesirable suggests Reeve: “For Nature seldom kindly mixes, | The qualities of both the sexes” (lines 118–​19). The result is “unnatural,” with men “Effeminate in form and mind” and women “masculine” in “mind, behaviour, and in mien” (lines 122–​3). She resists the idea “that woman can | Pretend to triumph o’er a man” (lines 7–​8), suggesting “partial heav’n design’d | To them the more capacious mind; | And that their brains, dame Nature’s college, | Are best receptacles for knowledge” (lines 21–​4). She refutes the idea that the inequality of the sexes comes from different “cultivation” of their mental capacities; nature, not custom, is the cause of the inequality. Reeve extends her examples to a world in which women strive to be poets but since “nymphs were always fond of fellows” (line 69), “Few women’s heads have strength” (line 83) to bear the effects of the “sacred Heliconian spring” (line 74). No matter how grave the topic, women’s writings betray their innate characters: Strong markings of the female mind, Still superficial, light and various; Loose, unconnected, and precarious: Life and vivacity I grant, But weight and energy they want; That strength that fills the manly page, And bids it live to future age. (lines 93–​9)

The very qualities poets from Pope, Swift, and Rochester to Savage, Finch, and Thomas ascribe to culture, Reeve places squarely in the camp of nature. She does acknowledge that the cultural milieu exacerbates the discrepancy, lamenting her own situation in which she finds it “requisite to hide” her literary abilities, “those talents that were once” her “pride”: “For what in man is most respected | In woman’s form shall be rejected” (lines 138–​41). Reeve echoes the vision of bifurcated difference between the sexes that we see with a poet like Rochester who characterizes women as “The dullest part of Gods Creation.”17 Men, writes Rochester, should be content with “health, wealth, Mirth, and wine,” and if “buizy Love”—​or,

15  Sarah Fyge Egerton, “The Repulse to Alcander,” lines 49–​50, in Poems on Several Occasions, Together with a Pastoral (London, 1703), p. 27. 16  “To my Friend Mrs. —​—​—​, on Her Holding an Argument in Favour of the Natural Equality of Both of the Sexes Written in the Year MDCCLVI,” lines 20, 12, in Backscheider and Ingrassia (eds.), p. 808. 17  Rochester, “Love to a Woman,” line 4, in Works, p. 38.

 

362   Catherine Ingrassia more accurately, desire—​“intrenches,” “a sweet, soft Page … | Can doe the Trick worth Forty wenches” (lines 13, 15–​16). Other female poets mimic the voices of their female contemporaries who share Reeve’s opinion. Mary Barber ventriloquizes the words of a lady who advised her that “Women should to their Fate submit, | Should in the Needle take Delight,”18 as does Esther Lewis Clark: “She ought to mind domestic cares, | The sex were made for such affairs.”19 Both genders are presented as too frequently indulging in the commercial and social activities that increasingly occupy the time of the leisured, affluent (or aspirational) classes. “Tea and scandal, cards and fashion” Clark continues, “Destroy the time of half the nation” (lines 152–​3). Women are distracted by what Egerton describes as “splendid Gallantry, | Complaisant Pleasures, modish Gaiety; | Airy Delights, imaginary Joys, | Fashions, Entertainments, Wit and Noise.”20 Yet women alone are not susceptible; men can also fall prey to the tyranny of custom. For men, custom permits—​or encourages—​the libertine and rakish behavior as well as the competitive accumulation of conspicuous consumption. It “makes the man with six hundred a year, | Like him with six thousand attempt to appear,” Mary Savage details in “The Tyranny of Custom.”21 The public pursuit of markers of wealth and success drive men. Whether attributing behavior to “custom” or to “nature,” to the power of social forces or to one’s innate tendencies, poets of both sexes speak eloquently on the potentially deadening effects gender difference has on human interactions, public social performances, and personal individuation. While many poets had recognized the force of custom, they could only detail, not diminish, its effects.

Love and Marriage Verse about love and verse about marriage, two very different and at times mutually exclusive conditions, sharply reveal the differences between the sexes both within a relationship and individually. The dominant cultural expectation for women at this time was to marry and have children. As Rochester’s Artemisia says, a husband is “the necessary thing.”22 Pope repeatedly presents marriage as a preferable state for women, as demonstrated by the conclusion of “The Rape of the Lock.” Jane Cave Winscom suggests women are “Toss’d to and fro” like a “light bark on the tempestuous sea” till they “in wedlock a safe anchor find.”23 However, when a woman in late seventeenth-​and early eighteenth-​century England married, her status immediately changed. As William Blackstone describes in Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), “By marriage the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during this marriage… . For this reason,

18  “To a Lady, Who Commanded Me to Send Her an Account in Verse, How I Succeeded in My Subscription,” lines 12–​13, in Backscheider and Ingrassia (eds.), p. 817. 19  “Slander Delineated,” lines 27–​8, in ibid., p. 828. 20  “The Retreat,” lines 1–​4, in ibid., p. 336. 21  Mary Savage, “The Tyranny of Custom,” lines 13–​14, in ibid., p. 599. 22  Rochester, “A Letter from Artemiza in the Towne to Chloe in the Countrey,” line 92, in Works, p. 66. 23  Jane Cave Winscom, “On the Marriage of a Lady, to Whom the Author was Bride-​Maid,” lines 2, 1, 6, in Backscheider and Ingrassia (eds.), p. 625.

 

Poems on the Sexes    363 a man cannot grant his wife anything, … for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence.”24 The implications of this legal reality are tremendous and deeply inform the ways poets—​male and female—​write about love, the inevitability of marriage, and the relationship between the sexes. Love presents challenges for both sexes. Women speak powerfully of the overwhelming force of love, something that provides immeasurable pleasure as well as potential risks. “Mighty Love,”25 as Martha Fowke Sansom terms it, can offer what Anne Finch describes as the “best of Human Joys”;26 “The Poets never found a nobler Theme” than love, suggests Elizabeth Teft, “Nor Beauty cannot wear a brighter Gem.”27 As Aphra Behn details, describing the perspective of the partner who delights in her power: “I thus at random rove | Despise the Fools that whine for Love.”28 Yet one always confronts what Charlotte Lennox calls “the Pangs of hopeless love.”29 The persistent image of battle marks the unequal power accorded men and women and their often adversarial relationship; Pope reminds us how Belinda must prepare herself for male assaults: “awful beauty puts on all its arms.” Yet women are too often vanquished. As Behn asks in the appropriately titled “Love Armed,” “Must we still Love and always suffer too.”30 Montagu describes “the Pains that jealous Fondness brings” (“On the Death of Mrs. Bowes,” line 9). Passion presents a host of dangers for women and reveals the true character of men who act by “needful fraught”; they have a “begging face” that obscures “the barbarous heart.” She continues: They cruel hunters are; we, trembling game. Trust me, dear ladies, (for I know ’em well) They burn to triumph, and they sigh to tell; Cruel to them that yield.31

She advises women: “Secure your hearts” (line 41). Similarly, in “The Repulse to Alcander,” Egerton describes how men’s “seducing Words” (line 3) “at first your Love for vast Respect was told,” until “your base, designing Thoughts” (lines 8–​10) are revealed. Women confront “lewd Abuse” (line 21), “amorous Crimes” (line 29), “rude Love,” and “lawless Flame” (line 27). Although called “fickle” by men, women have the capacity to be “fixt as a rock, as a rock too are strong,” asserts Elizabeth Hands; women can also be as strategic as men who “think that we love, when we only admire.” Pragmatic, women might give in to “A tony, a coxcomb, a beau, or a clown, | Well season’d with money,” but they reserve a spot in their hearts for “the worthy man only.”32 If love is dangerous to women who can be seduced, abandoned, or deceived, it also presents challenges for men who pursue an unrealistic and unattainable image of woman, or who love unrequitedly. In the poem “Love,” Henry Baker characterizes that sensation as “an headstrong 24 

William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1765–​9), vol. i, p. 430. “To My Soul’s Adoration,” line 34, in Backscheider and Ingrassia (eds.), p. 364. 26  “A Song,” line 1, in ibid., p. 362. 27  “On Love,” lines 28–​9, in ibid., p. 363. 28  “A Thousand Martyrs I Have Made,” lines 17–​18, in ibid., p. 380. 29  “A Song,” line 2, in ibid., p. 380. 30  “A Voyage to the Isle of Love,” lines 828–​9, in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols. (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1992–​6), vol. i, p. 123. 31  “Epilogue to Mary Queen of Scots,” lines 30, 32–​6, in Backscheider and Ingrassia (eds.), p. 382. 32  Elizabeth Hands, “A Song,” lines 3–​4, 11–​12, in Paula R. Feldman (ed.), British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 264–​5. 25 

 

364   Catherine Ingrassia wild desire | To possess what we admire.”33 In language reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, Baker details the contradictory and cyclical nature of love. It compels men to abandon reflection and neglect “All that’s just or wise.” It is neither “Pain or Pleasure” but rather an “excess of both together” (lines 4–​6) that drives submissive behavior: “cringing, whining | Vowing, fretting, weeping, pining, | Murmuring, languishing, and sighing” (lines 7–​9). It is a fundamentally contradictory state, “either furious with possessing, or despairing of the blessing | Now transported; now tormented” (lines 15–​16). It can be a desperate state for men as well as women, although without the same social and biological consequences. The threats that accompany the potential relationships do not preclude the powerful desire for emotional intimacy. For example, Rochester reveals a keenly tender longing: “But oh! how slowly minutes rowle | When Absent from her Eyes | That feed my love, which is my soul; | It languishes and dies.”34 Just as Montagu imagines a lover with whom she can find comfort in private, so too Rochester imagines woman as refuge from the world—​with the pointed difference being that Montagu seeks to live with her lover while Rochester looks only for a safe place for retreat and death: “When weary’d with a world of woe | To thy safe bosome I retire | Where love and peace and truth doe flow, | May I contented there Expire” (lines 9–​12). While love elicits extreme emotions, marriage generates sharply different opinions on its cost and benefit, although poets of both genders recognize the potential hazards of marriage for women. Even a poet like Pope, who repeatedly invoked marriage “as a symbolic ideal and as woman’s ‘proper’ destiny,” recognized what Carole Fabricant describes as “its role as an instrument of oppression” (“Defining Self and Others,” p. 508). Elizabeth Foyster has suggested that, during this period, “The institution of marriage was intended to be the bedrock of the patriarch ideal where women were subordinated to men, and husbands ruled over and dominated their wives.”35 Certainly the libertine sensibility affected by a poet like Rochester completely eschews the value of marriage. Rochester details how marriage is the “bane of all bus’ness, the end of all pleasure,” resulting in “the consumption of Wit, Youth, Virtue, and Treasure.” For him, the solution is getting a “gen’rous Wench”: “the worst you can fear is but a disease, | And Diseases, you know, will admit of a cure; | But the Hell-​fire of Marriage the Damn’d do endure.”36 Rochester’s assertions differ little from the descriptions of marriage we see in his female contemporaries, if for different reasons. Although the so-​called “companionate marriage” allegedly emerged at mid-​century, marriages were still primarily financial and civil unions, not romantic ones. Certainly, some female poets wrote with deep affection of the relationship with their spouses. Katherine Philips claims “In my Breast thy Picture drawn shall be … | And none shal know, though they imploy their wit, | Which is the right Antenor, thou, or it.”37 Her husband is deeply a part of her. Similarly, Finch urges her husband to leave his worldly pursuits and “rural joys persue” with her. The poem’s refrain, “Come, and the pleasures of the Feilds, survey, | And throo’ the groves, with your Ardelia stray,” adopts the resoundingly masculine 33 

“Love,” lines 1–​2, in Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-​Century Verse (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), p. 163. 34  Rochester, “Song” (“An Age in her Embraces pas’d”), lines 5–​9, in Works, pp. 27–​8. 35  Elizabeth Foyster, Marital Violence: An English Family History, 1660–​1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), p. 9. 36  Rochester, “Of Marriage,” lines 3–​4, 10–​14, in Works, pp. 40–​1. 37  Katherine Philips, “To My Dearest Antenor,” lines 37–​8, in Backscheider and Ingrassia (eds.), p. 383.

 

Poems on the Sexes    365 imagery of the carpe diem poems of Robert Herrick and the Cavalier poets, and refigures it as a model for marital love.38 Deborah Kennedy characterizes Finch’s verse as “lively paeans to marriage.”39 In the same spirit, Anna Letitia Barbauld, fashioning herself “empress,” invites her husband to “Fancy’s sunny bowers,” where they will “add new feathers to the wings of Time, | And make him smoothly haste away: | We’ll use him as our slave.”40 These women, in a sense, domesticate imagery commonly used by male poets in earlier poems of seduction. While women such as Finch or Philips express affection for a spouse, they do not celebrate the institution of marriage; rather they critique its legal, cultural, and emotional restrictions on women. In “The Unequal Fetters,” Finch details how “Marriage does but slightly tye Men | Whils’t close Pris’ners we remain.”41 Mary Chudleigh’s “To the Ladies” (1703) captures the frustration with the structural inequality of a union: “Wife and Servant are the same, | But only differ in the Name: | For when that fatal Knot is ty’d, | Which nothing, nothing can divide.”42 She suggests that matrimony creates a husband who acts like “an Eastern Prince” (line 9), a “haughty Lord” who must be feared: “Him still must serve, him still obey, | And nothing act, and nothing say” (lines 17–​18). Some women, bound to a man who does not reciprocate her love, become what Elizabeth Thomas calls a “Slave to Passion.”43 Mehetabel Wright describes wives as “Depriv’d of freedom, health, and ease.”44 Her highly autobiographical work characterizes wedlock as a “tyrant”: “Who hopes for happiness from thee, | May search successfully as well | For truth in whores and ease in hell.”45 As Montagu details in “Epistle from Mrs. Yonge,” while the indentured servant or the injured slave can gain their “liberty,” “For Wives ill us’d no remedy remains, | To daily Racks condemn’d, and to eternal chains” (lines 23–​44). Similarly, in “On the Death of Mrs. Bowes,” a poem written following the death of a fourteen-​year-​old who had been married only three months, Montagu celebrates how for her “the sweets of Love were only shewn | The sure succeeding bitter Dregs unknown” (lines 5–​6), characterizing what culture considered the inevitable deterioration of affection within a marriage. Mary Jones uses an inventive mock dialogue to offer a specifically gendered view of the progression of the marital state. The poem purports to be a collaborative effort in which a woman fills in the blanks or the missing words to complete the rhymes “first put down by a gentleman.” The poem cleverly frustrates the anticipated rhymes the “gentleman,” writing with a romanticized view of marriage, might expect or intend. Instead, Jones substitutes language that marks the deterioration of a marriage as the coquette Chloe “let loose her soul to dreams of joy” and “took a husband to her arms,” only to discover that the name of -​-​-​-​-​- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -​ wife Was but another word for -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​strife. . . .

38 

Finch, “An Invitation to Daphnis,” lines 11–​12, in ibid., p. 384. Deborah Kennedy, Poetic Sisters: Early Eighteenth-​Century Women Poets (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2013), p. 30. 40  Anna Letitia Barbauld, “To Mr. Barbauld, November, 14, 1778,” lines 4, 20, 22–​4, in Backscheider and Ingrassia (eds.), p. 389. 41  Finch, “The Unequal Fetters,” lines 16–​17, in ibid., p. 16. 42  Mary Chudleigh, “To the Ladies,” lines 1–​4, in ibid., p. 615. 43  Elizabeth Thomas, “The Monkey Dance,” line 9, in ibid., p. 617. 44  Mehetabel Wright, “Mrs. Mehetabel Wright to Her Husband,” line 69, in ibid., p. 619. 45  Wright, “Wedlock: A Satire,” lines 28–​30, in ibid., p. 621. 39 

 

366   Catherine Ingrassia Those tender words, “my dear, I-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​- die,” The moving tear, and melting  -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​ sigh, Were now exchang’d for something  -​-​-​-​-​-​ new, And feign’d emotions yeild to  -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​true. Reproach, debate, and loss of   -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​ fame, Intrigues, diseases, duns, and  -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​ shame. No single fault He strives to -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​- -​-​-​hide; Madam has virtue, therefore -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​ pride. Thus both resent, while neither -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​spares, And curse, but cannot break their -​-​-​-​-​-​-​snares.46

The word snares echoes the imagery of chains (already powerfully evocative, given Britain’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade) that appears in many descriptions of marriage by female poets. Even poems that ostensibly praise marriage or a specific union draw on that language. Jane Cave Winscom, a resident of Bristol who witnessed activities related to the slave trade, writes, “Hymen’s chains are silken bands.”47 Similarly, Elizabeth Teft ostensibly celebrates a young lady’s nuptials, congratulating her on “the Alteration of your State”; “Gay blooming Joys attend your Change of Life, | At once commence true Happiness and Wife.” Yet her wish, “Long be the Chain of your united Years,” unwittingly sounds an ominous note. While she asserts this “tempting … Connubial State” will “reclaim the railing Libertine,” with the term “libertine” she introduces information about the groom and the risk of subsequent infidelity.48 Winscom does the same when she ostensibly praises a marriage union, while underscoring the cultural construction of men as fundamentally unreliable: “so oft is mov’d Man’s fluctuating mind” (line 5). Certainly more positive representations of marriage exist, but only when they are removed from the preoccupation with dowry, contracts, and financial details that characterize bourgeois arrangements. Elizabeth Hands lauds the simple union in which the marriage articles are “pen’d on the heart”: “Love, the first blessing of blessings below” was “all the kind shepherdess had to bestow, | And all that she wish’d to receive.”49 Such idealized portraits are few and far between.

Aging and Loss Writing about the sexes is often marked by the threat of loss—​the loss of love or the end of a relationship; the deterioration of youth and beauty and their attendant power; diminished sexual potency or desirability because of age or illness; the absence of a partner because of death. The poems reveal a great deal about the hopes and expectations for an individual and for the relationship between the sexes. Many poems that embrace intimacy do so with the known possibility of infidelity or the potential failure of a relationship.

46 

Mary Jones, “Matrimony,” lines 11–12, 15–24, in ibid., p. 623. Jane Winscom, “On the Marriage of a Lady,” line 20, in ibid., p. 626. 48  Elizabeth Teft, “On the Marriage of a Young Lady,” lines 2, 3–​4, 31, 25–​6, in ibid., pp. 621–​2. 49  Elizabeth Hands, “On a Wedding,” lines 19–​20, in The Death of Amnon: A Poem: With an Appendix: Containing Pastorals, and Other Poetical Pieces (Coventry, 1789), p. 85. 47 

 

Poems on the Sexes    367 Earlier verse often details the loss of desire or desirability. Rochester vividly (and repeatedly) describes his loss of potency and its consequences. While some of his poems present impotence as the inevitable result of age, disease, or disillusionment, it is also symptomatic of debased relationships and the near impossibility for emotional intimacy in the world Rochester depicts. “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” perhaps the best-​known poem on a failed sexual encounter, also suggests how diminished physical prowess portends the end of authentic love relations. While a world of libertine sexuality values male potency, erosion or absence of emotional commitment is, as the previous section indicates, the more persistent anxiety for women. Many poets write sensitively about the challenges of aging and detail its effect. Because their (often fleeting) power is predicated on youth, beauty, and sexual desirability, women fear the loss of those valued attributes, and the concomitant social currency, through age or disease. Women feel the passage of time more acutely, for it brings into sharp relief their diminished ability to meet the cultural expectations for women—​whether beauty or reproductive capacity—​and it is felt most keenly by what Mary Savage terms “the fair”: “(forbid to mourn, or boast | their conquests past) regret their loss of charms.”50 Charlotte Smith observes how women’s attitudes toward aging shift as they themselves age. When a young woman of eighteen, one “view’d with mingled scorn and hate; | In whose sharp words, or sharper face, | With thoughtless mirth we lov’d to trace | The sad effects of—​ Thirty-​eight.”51 Yet when confronted with evidence of their own aging, women “learn’d to dread what time might do,” preferring even “to end our days ere that arriv’d; | When (pow’r and pleasure long surviv’d) | We met neglect and—​Thirty-​eight” (lines 12–​17). As Smith details, however, while age diminishes the physical attributes of women, “Reason comes” (line 24): With eye more steady we engage To contemplate approaching age, And life more justly estimate; With firmer souls, and stronger powers, With reason, faith, and friendship ours, We’ll not regret the stealing hours That lead from Thirty—​even to Forty-​eight. (lines 49–​55)

Although women cannot completely shed their awareness of the cultural norm that governs expectations for youth and beauty, they can benefit from the moderation of passions. Age provides what Pope, in “Epistle to a Lady,” describes as “Wisdom’s Triumph,” which is a “well-​tim’d Retreat” from the battles that characterize women’s youth when women seek to “conquer with so wild a rage” (line 225). Pope alludes to the effects of time (one of the two “foes” for women) and the resulting discontent experienced by women. Although beauty initially empowers women, its ephemeral quality can erode their tenuous power: “Beauties like Tyrants, old and friendless grown” details Pope. While some women seek to dull the pain of that loss with “Opium” and “Ratafie,” “The daily Anodyne, and nightly Draught” (lines 110–​11), others “old and friendless grown | … hate Repose, and dread to be alone,” but do not

50  Mary Savage, “On the Difficulty of Growing Old,” lines 30–​1, in Backscheider and Ingrassia (eds.), p. 667. 51  Charlotte Smith, “Thirty-​eight Address’d to Mrs. H[ayl]e,” lines 9–​12, in ibid., p. 659.

 

368   Catherine Ingrassia “leave one sigh behind them when they die” (lines 227–​30). The lauded qualities Pope attributes to Martha Blount—​good sense, intelligence, good nature—​are immune to aging, yet he still works to elide her age—​“(I forget the year) | When those blue eyes first open’d on the sphere” (lines 283–​4)—​reinforcing culture’s relentless focus on youth. (Blount was 45 when Pope wrote the poem.) Swift similarly marks the consequences of aging for women. His Stella poems, written to Esther Johnson, consistently and specifically mark the passage of time—​e.g., “Stella this Day is thirty-​four, | (We won’t dispute a Year or more).”52 Although he details her physical deterioration (“An Angel’s Face, a little crack’t”), he compensates with a description of the intellectual and emotional gains:  how “ev’ry Virtue now supplyes | The fainting Rays of Stella’s Eyes.” For Swift, these virtues of the mind will always triumph over beauty, especially because the woman remaining to “look like Beauty’s Queen” often betrays “the Cracks and Wrinckles of [her] Mind.”53 Despite the generous portrait of Stella’s spiritual and intellectual attributes, which should cause “All Men of Sense” to “crowd to Stella’s,” Swift’s vivid description of the physical effects of aging—​“Stella’s Locks must all be grey” (line 46), and “Age must print a furrow’d Trace | On ev’ry Feature of her Face” (lines 49–​ 50)—​keeps the poems firmly within a recognizable and immovable patriarchal context. Notably, Pope and Swift, concerned with the degree to which their own poetic abilities might be considered “feminine” (through their privileging of imagination, emotion, and intangible work), recognize their own poetic skills might be subject to the same effects of time. In “Stella’s Birthday, 1725,” Swift tellingly likens the cost of aging for a poet to its cost for a woman: As when a beauteous Nymph decays We say, she’s past her Dancing Days; So, Poets lose their Feet by Time, And can no longer dance in Rhyme. (lines 1–​4)

Acutely aware of his own mortality, Swift contrasts the ideal ages for “beauty” and “wit,” 15 and 21 respectively, with his and Stella’s more advanced dates: “At fifty-​six, … | Am I a Poet fit for you? | Or at the Age of Forty-​three, | Are you a Subject fit for me?” Rather than shining with “bright Wit, and radiant Eyes,” they now must be content with being “grave” and “wise.” Although the potential loss of beauty or sexuality haunts many women, men are not immune from the effects of aging and failure. Anna Sawyer’s poem “Lines Written on Seeing My Husband’s Picture” uses a kind of ekphrastic gesture to describe her reaction to a representation of her husband in his youth—​“the smiles, | That first engag’d my virgin heart”54—​ which prompts a meditation on his now diminished state. That memento of the past initiates her own verbal portrait that captures the age, disappointment, and misfortunes that now shade her husband. While the young man is “For ever on my soul engrav’d” (line 5), the new verse portrait that Sawyer draws details his repeated inability to match the cultural

52  “On Stella’s Birth-​day [1718],” lines 1–​2, in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), vol. ii, p. 721. 53  Swift, “Stella’s Birth-​day [1721],” lines 16, 20–​1, 53, 56, in Poems, vol. ii, pp. 734–​6. 54  Anna Sawyer, “Lines Written on Seeing My Husband’s Picture,” lines 1–​2, in Backscheider and Ingrassia (eds.), p. 627.

 

Poems on the Sexes    369 expectations for men—​the accumulation of wealth, a display of social or political power, demonstrated business acumen: “In spite of prudence, spite of care, | Dependence was our bitter lot. | Ill can’st thou bear the sneer of wealth, | Averted looks, and rustic scorn” (lines 19–​22). She writes with great affection and respect, but with a realistic assessment of the vast difference between the public and the personal value of his worth. Their straitened situation demands they embrace private, emotional intimacy rather than fruitlessly seek public validation. Yet even in this private space, custom dictates the shape of their marriage and their relationship. She represents the willing self-​sacrifice of the wife in the face of their undesirable situation: “Thy ev’ning hours to want expos’d, | I cannot, cannot bear to see: | Were but thy honest heart at ease, | I care not what becomes of me” (lines 25–​8). That late-​century verse (1796) suggests the difference in poems on the sexes over the span of the century. Sawyer’s lines detail an alternative economy that can govern a relationship—​ good nature, virtue, benevolence, and love—​the same kind of economy that Swift and Pope attempt to construct for Stella and Martha respectively. A poem of virtue, moderation, and private emotion, it captures the emergent values that would take hold in the verse of the Romantic period while still reflecting, if by their absence, the residual cultural attitudes that privilege the more transient qualities in both genders.

References Backscheider, Paula, Eighteenth-​Century Women Poets and Their Poetry:  Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005). Brown, Laura, Ends of Empire:  Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-​Century English Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993). Chico, Tita, The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-​Century English Literature and Culture (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2005). Doody, Margaret, “Swift among the Women,” Yearbook of English Studies, 18 (1988), 68–​92. Keith, Jennifer, Poetry and the Feminine from Behn to Cowper (Newark:  Univ. of Delaware Press, 2005). Kennedy, Deborah, Poetic Sisters: Early Eighteenth-​Century Women Poets (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2013). Lavoie, Chantel, Collecting Women: Poetry and Lives 1700–​1770 (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2009). Nussbaum, Felicity, The Brink of all We Hate: English Satires on Women, 1660–​1750 (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2014). Prescott, Sarah, Women, Authorship and Literary Culture, 1690–​1740 (New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Prescott, Sarah, and David E. Shuttleton, Women and Poetry, 1660–​1750 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Rumbold, Valerie, Women’s Place in Pope’s World (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989). Thomas, Claudia, Alexander Pope and his Eighteenth-​ Century Women Readers (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1994).

 

 

Pa rt I V

P OE T IC  F OR M

 

 

Chapter 22

C ou pl ets J. Paul Hunter Poetic couplets, in spite of their historical ubiquity and semi-​sexy name, have never been easy to love, even in times like the early eighteenth century, when it seems every man, woman, and child who spoke English or French had couplets rolling off their tongues as if biology had dictated it. The very familiarity of couplets and the prolific facility of their makers may in fact be closely associated with the obstinate historical human resistance to them, for they have repeatedly been attacked, admonished, or patronized as too self-​consciously clever, or too artificial and showy, or just too glib—​qualities easier to tolerate, or perhaps admire at a distance, than fall in love with. Then, too, there have always been ideological objections or emotional associations combined with formal ones: isn’t the form too constricted and constrained, too disciplined and fettered, too chained to systems of order or desires for it? John Milton made such a claim, self-​serving perhaps, but also analogically plausible and persuasive to libertarian sympathizers, when politics and poetry tended to overlap more amiably than they do now and when feelings about form could run both high and deep at the same time. Similar attacks have been launched earlier and later, until the time came that it was hardly necessary to make an attack or acknowledge an engagement. For couplets began to retreat in the later eighteenth century from their involvement in both experimental and traditional new poetry, and by the twentieth century had come to be abandoned almost totally, becoming a curiosity to be examined historically and as a matter of puzzlement more than explanation. The long run of couplet dominance—​and the subsequent near-​disappearance—​has yet to be satisfactorily explained in the context of formal features and their historical and cultural effect. So couplets, in many ages and for many kinds of reasons, often elicit responses that range from suspicious and hostile to indifferent to mildly amused—​but seldom to engagement, adoration, or passionate love. In this chapter I would like to make a series of observations in defense of couplets, to recognize and appreciate their at once simple and forbidding style, and to come to terms with the uneven and inadequate way they have been described and explained in traditional critical and theoretical discourse. What follows is a kind of cumulative account of what couplets represent in terms of their formal attributes, an examination of what couplets can achieve and be at their best, what their potentials and commitments are, what their art and aesthetic appeal can be, and (perhaps most important) what they can tell us about the people and ideas that employ them.

 

374   J. Paul Hunter

A Two-​C entury Domination Couplets have had a long and obtrusive history—​they powerfully ruled the realms of poetry and rhetoric for an astonishing percentage of English literary history. Although I am concerned here with poets who wrote in English, the French were the real pioneers and models in Western couplet poetry, and their formulaically elaborate hexameter couplets in many ways set the standards and directions and impetus, if not the ultimate aesthetic, for the development of the Anglophone couplet. The history of the English couplet continued for some time to be heavily influenced by Francophone practices, though national tensions and distrusts also meant that the English couplet needed to—​and did—​distance itself from French practices and their political and religious associations. If anything, the couplet was even more dominant (one might legitimately use the word hegemonic here) in France than in England—​ and also an early force in other romance-​language poetic traditions, especially Italian. During the entire two-​century domination of the couplet in English—​from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries—​resistance was sometimes strong, and there were always articulate couplet-​doubters (and rhyme-​doubters in general), most famously perhaps Thomas Campion and John Milton early on, but then a virtual chorus throughout the eighteenth century—​from John Dennis and Charles Gildon to Samuel Say and Lord Kames and Joseph Warton. To read the dominant criticism throughout the eighteenth century, in fact, as Richard Bradford has usefully done in Augustan Measures,1 one would get the sense that rhyme was impotent and doomed. There were defenders of course, most famously Samuel Johnson, but even hardcore coupleteers seem to have entertained theoretical if not practicing doubts. John Dryden famously announced that he was giving up “his long-​lov’d Mistris, Rhyme” (but he didn’t),2 and even Alexander Pope claimed near the end of his life that he intended to turn away from rhyme and write an epic in blank verse, though we have only a tiny sample of what that might look like. Meanwhile, couplets poured from the press, in poems long and short, and in private closets still more were written on just about every conceivable topic, but especially on public matters and issues that dominated urban conversation and serious intellectual meditation. But at the very same time that distrust of rhyme and the praise of blank verse were thriving, the couplet was prevailing in practice almost every­ where, certainly in long and serious poems where translations from the Latin and Greek continued to be (oddly) habitually done in couplets. Blank verse had important adherents and exemplars—​John Philips and James Thomson early, John Armstrong middle, and William Cowper late, for example, and included mid-​career switchers like Edward Young. But by far the majority of poetry was written in rhymed couplets, mostly the iambic pentameter couplets that came to be called “heroic” because of their domination in long poems of philosophical, topographical, political, and national import. How to explain the extraordinary difference between criticism and theory on the one hand and practice on the other is one of the great cultural puzzles of the century.

1 

Richard Bradford, Augustan Measures: Restoration and Eighteenth-​Century Writings on Prosody and Metre (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2002). 2  Prologue to Aureng-​Zebe, line 8, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1956–​2000), vol. xii, p. 159.

 

Couplets   375 Just how dominant was the couplet? I confess to have been astonished when I began to read widely among lesser-​known poets and lesser-​known poems at just how ubiquitous couplets were, how early they came to dominate English poetry, and how tenacious they remained when critics flailed away at them; their hold was obviously deep in everyday poetic habits and, for better or worse, in some sense ingrained in the cultural and linguistic psyche. By the final decade of the sixteenth century there was probably already more English poetry being written in couplets than in any other form—​think Chapman, Sandys, Sylvester, Jonson, Hall, Drayton, Daniel, and Donne—​and for two solid centuries thereafter couplets were habitual. Thus for a full two-​fifths of the history of modern English poetry the couplet was both the most common formal choice and the default mode. And those two hundred years were also the times when poetry was one of the central vehicles for engaging in significant discourse on philosophical or public matters of virtually any kind, so that everyday serious discourse about the meaning of both historical and contemporary events was filtered through the disciplined habits of a highly contrived form. And it may be worth remarking that over the same period the prose form that seems to have had the most sustained popularity was the dialogue, in some ways the formal prose equivalent of the poetic couplet. The difficulty of actually measuring the popularity of verse forms and arriving at a sense of the proportionality of couplets to other verse forms is of course daunting and methodologically highly debatable. Do we count published poems only, or try to include private, repressed, manuscript, coterie, clandestine, and informal closet verse? Do we rely on canonical writers who have been edited more rigorously and whose oeuvre as we have it is more likely to represent the total poetic production of individual writers, or do we lean more toward collections, miscellanies, songbooks, and the record of reprints and repeated editions? Do we weight separate publications more heavily because of their dependence on saleability, occasion, and individual and immediate impact? What do we do about thematic collections which in themselves imply some kind of special pleading that might or might not mean demand or the creation of demand? How much weight do we put on repeated editions and reprintings as opposed to poems that exist in single, often small editions? Do we look for indications of popularity, remembrance, and public endorsement of poems as suggested by allusions and echoes and direct quotations? Different kinds of counting yield different kinds of results, of course, and I imagine I have looked quite silly the last few years in the British Library, beating out syllable and stress counts on my fingers and adding up columns of line counts in different poetic forms for volume after volume—​numbers (so to speak) in search of a principle or method. I have especially enjoyed seeking out what you might call “beauties” volumes—​those collections that quote at length poetic passages on different topics, from “absence” and “angels” to “zealots.” Books like Joshua Poole’s English Parnassus (1658), conceived as handbooks for schoolboys learning to write and read poetry, often have long appendices reproducing memorable passages from the best-​known poets, thus providing a pretty good idea of who the best-​known poets were and what they were being remembered for, but in addition offering a rough guide to which poetic forms were most often remembered and appreciated. Some such unintended cultural indexes, such as Edward Bysshe’s Art of English Poetry (1702), went through a series of editions that offer a sense of changing taste over decades. What is most interesting, however, about the competing ways of gathering and sorting evidence is how generally consistent the data is. From the 1590s to the 1790s, about three-​fourths or more of the poetry is rhymed in some way (and in some decades the percentage is much

 

376   J. Paul Hunter higher), while among rhymed lines by far the favorite forms of rhyme are couplets of some kind, dominantly iambic and almost always tetrameter or pentameter, with a very heavy weighting toward pentameter (or so-​called heroic) couplets. All in all, I estimate, couplet production in this two-​century period accounts for more than sixty percent of all English verse, and more than eighty percent of those couplets are iambic pentameter couplets: in other words, half or more of all poetic lines over the period were constructed consciously in heroic couplet form. And almost none—​only the occasional third-​line of a triplet and the far rarer whole poem, the number would be much less than one percent—​were constructed in French-​like hexameter couplets, a matter I will address shortly. Yes, there is some variation from decade to decade and from poetic kind to poetic kind, and yes, blank verse gains some momentum as the eighteenth century slides across its mid-​section and begins to oscillate in different directions, but the numbers are not as great as we might think from the contemporary critical and theoretical championing of blank verse. What we have, then, is two centuries of English writers and readers living with the couplet as their main poetic fare, coping with it as virtually a formal given. The rest of this chapter is about such “coping” and what a pleasure that can be—​aesthetically, for the couplet is surely demanding and at minimum offers the pleasure of seeing craft at work toward art, but also semantically, semiotically, and ultimately ideologically.

Stand-alone Couplets and Verse Paragraphs I want to point to two formal features of Anglophone couplet verse and suggest some of the subtle and appealing effects couplets at their best produce. The first turns on the importance of a single letter in the alphabet, the s at the end of my title: couplets (plural), not just a single couplet. It may seem unnecessary to make a distinction between an individual, stand-alone couplet and couplets as they exist in a body of poetry, and to insist on thinking about couplets in groups rather than as an isolated unit, but traditionally it has been a serious problem, leading to a series of misunderstandings about how form and content interact and creating a false sense of what couplets should be valued for. The critical tendency is to anatomize the structure of an individual exemplary couplet in a search for evidence of discoverable rhetorical figures (such as chiasmus, zeugma, syllepsis, etc.), to praise the concision of thought and form, and to worship at the shrine of zingy and memorable two-​liners. And most of us, I dare say (including myself), would probably cite, if pressed for an example of couplet artistry, some single memorable couplet, probably one illustrating the epigrammatic capabilities of the couplet form. Mine might be Pope’s lines “Engraved on the Collar of a Dog” (c.1736): I am his Highness’ Dog at Kew; Pray tell me Sir, whose Dog are you?3

It hardly needs explication. Literacy here is humiliation; if you can read it, it puts you down, dog to dog. Presumably it is the dog communicating his sense of a certain kind of equality, 3  “Epigram: Engraved on the Collar of a Dog Which I Gave to His Royal Highness,” in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–​69), vol. vi, p. 372.

 

Couplets   377 in this case one that assumes the whole creation has gone, courtier-​like, from polite and civil to fawning and obsequious. The lines are directly addressed to Everyreader, and much of the wit involves choice of persona, the loyal dog as author, philosopher, and leveler. But the art is in the brevity and concision. Not much more needs to be said. Good venue, good observation, good use of form. It’s better than a mirror and a lot wittier. Or I might choose Pope’s famous “Epitaph: Intended for Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey” (1730), again presented as if inscribable or engravable or chippable in marble, two rhymed lines pretending to be complete and sufficient in themselves: Nature, and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night. God said, Let Newton be! and All was Light.4

Quite a compliment, especially if preserved for eternity in Westminster Abbey. The “Night/​ Light” rhyme for this subject seems so appropriate as to be almost inevitable, rather like the “must/​dust” inevitability of rhyme in epitaphs and elegies. And science (with a little sleight of hand) seems here perfectly harmonized with orthodox religion. Quite an achievement for two lines, maybe even a metaphysical overachievement. For the comparison of observer and creator is more clever than persuasive, and once the allusive wit is acknowledged, there is little more to persuade: it is a couplet too complete in itself, and yet its conceit needs more room to operate. More in a moment about how the couplet sometimes insists on its limits. These are both clever uses of a compact, truncated, disciplined form, epigrammatic or epitaphic in the best and truest sense of their economies. You’d better not waste a single word when you’re engraving or etching or carving it out letter by letter, and the method dictates the content, makes sure that pointedness is prized and turned to quick effect. Everything here depends on concision, and the barb at the end in the first case or the allusive grandiose claim in the other both demonstrate the witty powers of comparison—​one everyday apt, one hugely embellished in the panegyric mode. But seldom or never will a single couplet hold the full force of a developed thought, a genuinely powerful observation, or a nuanced argument. A couplet can lay out the basis for the issue—​a slogan or an aphorism or an introductory statement or a thesis or a bullet or an executive summary version—​but not what the mind needs to master and experience a real idea. The major accomplishments of disciplined sets of couplets are in the elaborations and qualifications that groups of them bring to bear on these introductory sallies. For completion, they have to be integrated into the larger contexts of paragraphs and whole poems. An initial couplet “works” to make a quick bumper-​sticker-​like point, but it doesn’t fully satisfy a sense of thoughtful observation. It is one kind of use of concision, brevity, and wit, but only one. There is no doubt that the isolated stand-alone couplet—​asked to do special duty as maxim or bon mot—​can be very engaging, pithy, and memorable, and the epigram is a legitimate poetic kind, but it brings with it the air not only of simplicity but of superficiality and shallowness, an exposure of what clarity and transparency can lead to. What experienced coupleteers do with that limitation is learn to build larger edifices of thought out of couplet units, make them contribute to something larger, rather than be in it just for themselves as catchy mottoes. Take, for instance, Pope’s famous line, “A little Learning is a dangrous Thing,” and its echo, “Drink deep or taste not the Pierian Spring” in An Essay on Criticism (1711). Look

4 Pope, Poems, vol. vi, p. 317.

 

378   J. Paul Hunter what happens to it when its illustration and extension and elaboration and exploration and qualification become a paragraph that builds a case. We have gone from pithy aperçu to constructed argument. Note how these lines labor, play shallow against deep, and lead us experientially (almost physically) through the taxing process of climbing mountains and watching their horizon recede before our eyes: A little Learning is a dang’rous Thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring: There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain, And drinking largely sobers us again. Fir’d at first Sight with what the Muse imparts, In fearless Youth we tempt the Heights of Arts, While from the bounded Level of our Mind, Short Views we take, nor see the Lengths behind, But more advanc’d, behold with strange Surprize New, distant Scenes of endless Science rise! So pleas’d at first, the towring Alps we try, Mount o’er the Vales, and seem to tread the Sky; Th’ Eternal Snows appear already past, And the first Clouds and Mountains seem the last: But those attain’d, we tremble to survey The growing Labours of the lengthen’d Way, Th’ increasing Prospect tires our wandering Eyes, Hills peep o’er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise!5

Competent couplet writers do this repeatedly, paragraph by paragraph, often equating physical and mental labor and graphically illustrating the hard work of discovery. Poems that graphically reproduce this labor are often long and difficult in themselves (the sort of poem that doesn’t conveniently fit into anthologies or “survey” courses), but they are about surveying and following through with meticulous examination. The opening conceit of Pope’s Essay on Man (1734) conveniently lays out the process of empirical discovery and poetic mission, and shows how learning is grounded in small specifics: Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things To low ambition, and the pride of Kings. Let us (since Life can little more supply Than just to look about us and to die) Expatiate free o’er all this scene of Man; A mighty maze! but not without a plan; A Wild, where weeds and flow’rs promiscuous shoot, Or Garden, tempting with forbidden fruit. Together let us beat this ample field, Try what the open, what the covert yield; The latent tracts, the giddy heights explore Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar; Eye Nature’s walks, shoot Folly as it flies, And catch the Manners living as they rise; Laugh where we must, be candid where we can; But vindicate the ways of God to Man. 5 Pope, An Essay on Criticism, lines 215–​32, in Poems, vol. i, pp. 264–​5.

 

Couplets   379 We have to beat the field and ferret out the earth’s secrets, and not expect to soar above them and see them clearly from some superior, authoritative perspective as both science and theology seem to do. Again it is reading and discovery that are equated here; honest labor rather than privilege or easy generalization is the key to success. Here again is learning and discovery grounded in small experiential specifics. The interlocking of couplets into paragraph thought-​units is obvious and compelling in just about any long rhymed poem in the period. Punctuation is one kind of guide to the interlocking of couplets and the semi-​free flow from line to line. An extreme example that suggests how couplets interact is Anne Finch’s Nocturnal Reverie (1713), a fine poem in its own right but also a convenient clinical experiment in couplet accumulation and interaction. Finch’s poem is fifty lines long, and not one of the twenty-​five couplets in the poem ends with a full stop (period). Instead, a lesser pause (comma, colon, or semicolon) indicates the interconnectedness of the two-​line units within the larger context. There are arresting formal accomplishments in epigrams and other short couplet poems, and their stand-​aloneness is more readily visible than the more demanding long poems divided into paragraphs that almost look like prose. But the more complex structures of interaction are what accounts for the domination of couplets for such a long period of literary history. There is almost always a pause marked by some form of punctuation at the end of each couplet in a paragraph, but the hesitation is most often briefer than a full stop, leading smoothly into the next couplet. The poets don’t want us to think we are done when we finish a couplet unit, and their punctuation and syntactical efforts try to get us to see verse paragraphs as a collection of statements and propositions that add up slowly to a meaningful whole.

Couplets in Sonnets One useful way to think about couplet building, accumulation, and interaction is to consider the way couplets were employed early in their development during the sonnet craze of the 1580s and 1590s.6 The so-​called English or Shakespearean sonnet—​a structure of three fairly independent quatrains sealed by a couplet—​came to dominate the older Petrarchan form, which had essentially used two-​stage argument: an octave and then a sestet, with a corresponding two-​stage structural development of some sort (see ­chapter 24, “Stanzas”). Although combinations were possible, and hybrids and variations developed, these two formal alternatives produced very different kinds of results, the Italian form seeming, for example, preferable for a cause-​and-​effect argument, or for a structure involving principle and example, or for the general and the particular, while the English form worked better for laying out an accumulation or sequence of steps and providing a conclusion, summary, or reversal. But, while coming to quite different understandings about how these sonnets actually work, both contemporary readers and early modern critics have been close to unanimous in observing the repeated inadequacy of the final couplets, especially when compared to complex achievements in the first twelve lines of the poem. This is not so much a 6  This section reproduces material I published as “Poetry on the Page: Visual Signalling and the Mind’s Ear,” in Ben Burton and Elizabeth Scott- Baumann (eds.), The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014), pp. 179–​96.

 

380   J. Paul Hunter question of formal achievement in the couplet itself as of the inadequacy of the couplet to come fully to terms with the earlier twelve lines. Shakespeare in particular is often seen to exemplify the contradictions in the couplets at the end of sonnets, and a long, classic tradition of Shakespeare criticism finds the final couplet structurally flawed or inadequate. Anthony Hecht, for example, speaks of a “deeply unnerving couplet”; Yvor Winters praises Shakespeare’s Sonnet 66 “except for the couplet which represents sentimental degeneration”; John Crowe Ransom says that “we must believe that Shakespeare found the couplet too small to hold its matter”; and Stephen Booth says that the couplet “ordinarily gives the impression that the experience of the preceding twelve lines has been a good deal simpler than in fact it has been.” Rosalie Colie even says that Shakespeare’s “couplets … notoriously fail in their relation to the poem as a whole.”7 More recent critics tend to work harder to justify the disappointments and imbalances, but the discrepancies and mismatches clearly are often there, intentionally or no, not only in the Barnabe Barneses and Henry Constables but in Spenser, Sidney, and even Shakespeare. These critics may be right—​they are all unnerved by the same perceived discrepancy—​but that does not necessarily make the sonnets failures. Rather, a good bit of the point in sonnet after sonnet is to contrast the patient, slowly developed content of the quatrains with what happens when you try to do any easy summary or reversal of it much more efficiently. Perhaps Barbara Herrnstein Smith puts it best: a satisfying conclusion, she says, “is not available because a condition of ultimately unresolvable complexity is precisely what the poem is intended to represent.”8 The 12/​2 structure of the sonnet generally presents painfully built discourse, piled-​up argument, or elaborated narrative stretched out over an extended series of lines with dismissive simplicity, so that the English-​style sonnet essentially illustrates a contrast between a fully developed thought and a caricatured quick version of it. We cannot be sure how self-​conscious the various sonneteers were about what that structural analysis consisted in, but at least instinctively they seem to have seen what did and did not work, and to have built a sense of that into the formal choices they made. Here is a quick oversimplification of a complex historical process: the elaborated couplet paragraph of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries essentially reverses the anxiety-​ producing procedure of the late sixteenth-​century couplet. Rather than trying to summarize something complex into a neat and tidy short conclusion, it starts with a simple proposition or statement and complicates it: it moves from simple to complex, rather than the complex-​ to-​simple strategy of the Elizabethan sonnet. I do not of course mean literally that someone, some sunny day in the early seventeenth century, made this conscious decision; rather that, as the couplet began to come into its own as a force, for whatever reason, the couplet paragraph began its mutating existence as a kind of structural inversion of what sonnets were up to. This does not make the sonnet a failure and the couplet a success; it rather suggests

7  Anthony Hecht, “Shakespeare and the Sonnet,” in Melodies Unheard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 15–​50, at p. 23; Yvor Winters, “Poetic Styles, Old and New,” in D. C. Allen (ed.), Four Poets on Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 44–​75, at p. 49; John Crowe Ransom, “Shakespeare at Sonnets,” in The World’s Body (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), pp. 270–​303, at p. 277; Stephen Booth, An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), p. 130; Rosalie L. Colie, Shakespeare’s Living Art (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974), p. 70. 8  Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 143.

 

Couplets   381 a reversal of discursive procedure that fits the growingly empirical sensibilities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it may too begin to imply why the couplet did not survive so well past the eighteenth century when observation and argument began to change again. There is an easy moral to draw here: A single Couplet is a dang’rous Thing; Drink deep, or taste not the refreshing Spring.

Twoness In examining the macro features of verse paragraphs (which are, in both couplets and blank verse, the stand-​ins for stanzas), I have been emphasizing how simple statements and propositions are tested, complicated, and enlarged so that direct prose statement is modified, enriched, poeticized, and resonated. I have been insisting that the larger contexts of the poem affect the way we read individual couplets and provide some cumulative power of evidence and analysis that goes beyond prose statement. I turn now to smaller units, and want to make a parallel suggestion about how sound, rhythm, and form work to complicate the effects of individual couplets, individual lines, and word clusters, leading to an aesthetic of the couplet that is more complicated and sophisticated than the traditional admiring accounts of balance, harmony, and symmetry, and suggesting a special contextual, cultural, and even political difference between couplets in English and couplets in French. Here are two propositions, one about the terms we standardly use to distinguish and admire couplet verse, the other about differences in language and tradition. First, just about all the traditional terms of endearment we use for couplet accomplishments work out of a sense of binaries and their implications—​that is, the basic twoness of couplets, stemming from the fact that they yoke two lines together and make of them a kind of one. I have written elsewhere about the conceptual difficulties criticism seems to have with binary terminology,9 but here I want to notice how a sense of twoness—​one line pitted against another but also yoked to it—​tends to get elaborated formally. Present, usually, are two nearly identically rhythmed lines implicitly compared and contrasted; sometimes these parallels are employed to compare (or more often to contrast) two things, so that there is a form of thesis/​antithesis going, usually without synthesis. And this twoness, reflecting the medial line pause that we usually call caesura, often infects and structures individual lines as well, so that the terms or concepts of the first half of the line are distinguished from (or compared or contrasted with) those in the second half, and this often sets off crossovers of verbal and semiotic fireworks. Famously, Alexander Pope set up his theme and argument this way in The Rape of the Lock (1714): What dire Offence from am’rous Causes springs, What mighty Quarrels rise from Trivial Things.10

9 

See J. Paul Hunter, “Formalism and History: Binarism and the Anglophone Couplet,” in Susan Wolfson and Marshall Brown (eds.), Reading for Form (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 2006), pp. 129–​49. 10 Pope, The Rape of the Lock, canto i, lines 1–​2, in Poems, vol. ii, p. 127.

 

382   J. Paul Hunter Artfully confusing his own plot with Homer’s here (and reverberating throughout the poem), Pope opens with two lines that can be said to set the whole ideational machine in motion, much like lines at the start of the earlier verse paragraph that I quoted from An Essay on Criticism. A lot of meaningful play can be set up by this comparative strategy; the terms balance, antithesis, and symmetry (all making use of a sense of twoness, doubleness, or duplicity) contribute mightily to their effects. But there is more to it than that, especially in English poetry, which (in contrast to French poetry) admits and celebrates its roughness and crags as well as its smoothness and harmony. The second proposition has to do with the conception and execution of the couplet in French. Standard Francophone couplets are in hexameter lines—​that is, lines of six beats or twelve syllables—​and they also operate in foursomes as well as twosomes. That is, two lines linked together by a masculine rhyme are followed by two lines crowned with a feminine rhyme, and this alternation of masculine and feminine couplets continues throughout the poem. English pentameter couplets thus follow the highly symmetrical pattern of French couplets but at some linguistic distance, without quite as much elaboration and extension of balances. They do not pretend to be able to dredge up good feminine rhymes in relatively rhyme-​poor English or to make something consistently serious of feminine rhyme which generally has a comic effect—​perhaps related to the nature of the language. English and French are different not only in the variety of rhymes available but in the tonal effects of brevity and length. In fact, pentameter couplets can’t quite pull off the exact symmetries of line balance as smoothly as hexameter couplets can, either. It’s a question of numbers. When Pope declares that “most by Numbers judge a Poet’s Song” (Essay on Criticism, line 337), he means more than counting the syllables. Numbers (or sets of numbers) are important here in more ways than one. When the pause and pivot of a caesura is placed into the exact middle of an iambic pentameter line we typically get an imbalance because the pause is in the middle of a foot. English poets seem to have instinctively understood (though seldom talked about) the intricacies and inelegancies involved in pausing within a foot or unbalancing slightly the line itself, so that it tends to break 6/​4 or 4/​6 in syllables, rather than 5/​5. The eighteenth-​century English heroic couplet typically positions the caesura anywhere but the exact middle of the line, as in Swift’s “Description of the Morning” (1709): Now hardly here and there an Hackney-​Coach Appearing, show’d the Ruddy Morns Approach. Now Betty from her Masters Bed had flown, And softly stole to discompose her own. The Slipshod Prentice from his Masters Door, Had par’d the Dirt, and Sprinkled round the Floor. Now Moll had whirl’d her Mop with dext’rous Airs, Prepar’d to scrub the Entry and the Stairs. The Youth with Broomy Stumps began to trace The Kennel-​Edge, where Wheels had worn the Place. The Smallcoal-​Man was heard with Cadence deep; ’Till drown’d in Shriller Notes of Chimney-​Sweep, Duns at his Lordships Gate began to meet, And Brickdust Moll had Scream’d through half the Street. The Turnkey now his Flock returning sees, Duly let out a Nights to Steal for Fees.

 

Couplets   383 The watchful Bailiffs take their silent Stands, And School-​Boys lag with Satchels in their Hands.11

This is a poem about time and rhythms—​both those of nature and those of human contemporary urban society—​and it owes deep debts to the idea of pastoral. The form is highly conscious throughout of its capabilities to represent metrically and formally the awakening state of the world in early eighteenth-​century London. The measurings start immediately with the contrastive allusion implicitly comparing the random hackney coaches with the regularity of Phoebus’s fiery car, and throughout we have attention to regularity and predictability and order either as manifested or desired or abandoned. Only three lines pause precisely in the middle. Talented English coupleteers regularly follow the same general pattern—​with so-​called medial breaks occurring usually after the fourth or sixth syllable—​that is, two-​ fifths or three-​fifths of the way through the line—​rather than halfway like a balanced French teeter-​totter. The teasing but meaningful play with caesurae in English takes many forms. Edward Young’s classic line, “Procrastination is the Thief of Time,” for example, offers another kind of balance/​imbalance exercise.12 It is a lovely demonstration line in part because it is about time and its losses, but it also displays time’s intricacies and tricks. You don’t find many pentameter lines starting with a five-​syllable word, or many caesurae that balance a five-​syllable word boldly against five one-​syllable ones. It probably would not be a good idea to do this too often, but it shows balance and imbalance at once: perfect if you are a literal 5/​5 sort of reader, but clearly off-​balance when you think of individual words themselves in their time-​occupation. The word procrastination seems almost to perform itself in the line. And we might well debate just how to scan the line: if scanned in its context of iambic couplets, it can sound perfectly regular, but if read for meaning, the “is” would probably be muted or distressed, even though it is the only verb in the line: it doesn’t need a stress to make the point. Just such tension is of course the stuff of which good sound is made in iambic pentameter; one of the accomplishments of good iambic writing is that we often get more out of the poetry when we deliberately test its meaning pattern against its basic metrical one, and try to make our voice read the dominant metrical pattern and the prose sense at the same time in a kind of tension and ambivalence, making them temporally compete rather than offering a performative definition. A final note on numbers and their different applications in French and English poetry. One self-​conscious English habit at once pays homage to French influence and calls attention to its different practical implications: the practice of creating occasional triplets instead of couplets, and forming the final line of the triplet in hexameter. It is on one level just a pointed national joke: look what I can do in English to mock the long and heavy alexandrine line that “like a wounded Snake, drags its slow length along” (Pope, Essay on Criticism, line 357). But it adds a new, awkward non-​symmetrical number to the array of numbers employed (three); and in its imbalance of lines—​two pentameter ones capped by a hexameter—​it deliberately violates the values of symmetry and balance. All this behaves like a deliberate modification

11 

The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), vol. i, pp. 124–​5. 12  Edward Young, Night Thoughts, night i, line 391, in Night Thoughts, ed. Stephen Cornford (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), p. 47.

 

384   J. Paul Hunter of the French values of perfect symmetry and harmony: an admission both that the rhythms of the English language and the French are different, but also a modest rebellion against over-​refinement and a rigid, virtually mathematical working out of balance and symmetry. Anglophone poetry honors many “neoclassical” values and standards, but they are less rigid and precise, less slavish, less self-​conscious. The assertion of difference is both an admission of a less musical language and a nose-​thumbing at too mechanical a standard. There is one more conscious variation that I want to point to in English couplet poetry, and it is notable only when the poetry is read aloud or imagined through the mind’s ear. Like caesura employment, it also has to do with pauses, but this is a quantitative issue rather than one of placement; it has to do with how line rhythms relate to each other, rather than to balances within the line. It involves the lengths of pauses at various points in a sentence but especially at the ends of lines, and it is something we often pay too little attention to. The rhetorical tradition in England developed some quite specific guidelines about the lengths of pauses expected for different kinds of punctuation. Isaac Watts, for example, in 1721 gave directions to schoolboys for regulating their voices when they come to marks of punctuation, recommending pauses of a one-​count for a comma to a six-​count for a period or end of paragraph.13 Later in the century (reminding us that the traditions of punctuation remained rhetorical rather than grammatical for a very long time), William Cockin advised in The Art of Delivering Written Language (1775): Supposing the comma (,) one time [i.e., count], the semicolon (;) will be two; the colon (:) three, and the period (.) as also the marks of interrogation (?) and admiration (!) four of these times. The blank line (—​or -​-​-​) and the breaks between paragraphs, intimate still greater times[.]‌14

I return to the structure of verse paragraphs to make an obvious, but often overlooked, point. Verse paragraphs do not look alike on the page the way most stanzas do; that is, they are of unequal length and their duration in sense, like their appearance to the eye, varies considerably. It is true that there is a kind of normative length of about fourteen to twenty lines if we look at enough examples in any given period, but in an individual poem they vary substantially, from two-​or four-​line paragraphs to ones of thirty or even more lines. The structural effect of this variation parallels and enforces what I have been isolating in individual couplets; that is, within an overall framework of symmetry and balance, the structure honors variation—​variety within order that is sometimes strong enough to test the ordering principle itself. The aesthetic, then, of the Anglophone couplet is deeply based in traditional values of smoothness, balance, and symmetry, and thus has a deep classical and neoclassical heritage. But its practical application in English poetry involves suspicion of too much regularity, regulation, and regime, so that its commitments are to looser and more elastic angles and structures. The implications here are not only aesthetic but ideological, political, national, and religious.

13  Isaac Watts, The Art of Reading and Writing English; or, The Chief Principles and Rules of Pronouncing Our Mother-​Tongue, Both in Prose and Verse, 2nd ed. (London, 1722), pp. 39–​46. 14  William Cockin, The Art of Delivering Written Language; or, An Essay of Reading: In Which the Subject is Treated Philosophically as Well as with a View to Practice (London, 1775), pp. 100–​1 n. He goes on to describe overuse of the dash as all-​purpose, and predicts it will not last.

 

Couplets   385 The aesthetic, then, developed within the Anglophone couplet is deeply contextual; that is, it is based on sound principles but not inviolable laws; it is flexible and not rigid. In fact, it insists on a limited flexibility as part of its identity, and it insists in nearly every individual couplet or verse paragraph on its own identity and independence from Continental traditions of authority. That is why reading couplets is both a challenge and a pleasure, an art object not just to admire but to love. The point in elaborating these insistent variations on inherited formal constraints is to remind ourselves of the practical performance of inexactitude in couplet poetry, and the way that works to modify our sense of finality and artistic neatness in content and argument as well as form. Poetry is about actual reading, not the working out of mathematical formulas or creating a visual or aural art object. But in adopting or adapting forms, it takes on shapes and values, making reference to the way those forms are applied elsewhere but not necessarily taking all the implications and baggage with them into a new language with new possibilities, requirements, habits, and limitations. Particularly after the Restoration, English poets were anxious to employ and absorb what they thought were the more sophisticated and advanced techniques of the French; the French had an enviable history of literature, and when English poets and critics speak of French models, as they compulsively do, they emphasize the smoothness, musicality, and harmony the French language affords and try to move their own native language, which they think is more aggressive and rough-​hewn, into a symbiotic relationship to the older and more revered Continental traditions. The marriage often seems like an arranged one, and the English, despite their aggressiveness and deep streak of independence, often find the compromise hard to strike. Particularly after the Restoration turned sour politically, resistance to French traditions and ways deepened, and the stronger national spirit that now claimed a literary tradition of England’s own showed less admiration and more contempt or even dismissal. But the dominant couplet was born of the time when the nations, the languages, and the traditions were in a combination of collaboration and collision, of influence and resistance, and the Anglophone couplet is one crucial product and vehicle of those times. One final point. Couplets may lull us with their rich and harmonious pattern of sounds, but they are not designed for easy listening. They are designed for hard work. They expect a lot from readers: close attention, examination, consideration of things not said and rhymes not made—​they represent an active engagement with reading as an evolving art and craft. They require proactive readers; we need to “learn” to read them, using all the kinds of close-​ reading tools that good rhetoric and good poetics require, paying attention to formal issues as well as rhetoric and argument. Couplets are slippery and they are deceptive: they can sound simple, but they complicate; they can seem easy, but it’s an illusion; they can sound smug and satisfied, but they aren’t. Good couplets—​and there were a lot of good couplet makers out there in the early modern period and the long eighteenth century—​require working readers, not passive ones, and they repay the effort.

 

Chapter 23

Bl ank V e rse Conrad BRUNSTRÖM English blank verse—​unrhymed iambic pentameter—​is generally regarded as owing its origin to the translations from Virgil of Henry Howard, Lord Surrey in the mid-​sixteenth century.1 Its primary application before (and even after) Milton was in dramatic writing; Milton himself, who had contributed a commendatory poem to Shakespeare’s Second Folio (1632), defended his own choice of verse form following the example of “our best English tragedies.” His boldness was immediately noted: Thy verse created like thy Theme sublime, In Number, Weight, and Measure, needs not Rhime.2

The Sublime When Andrew Marvell famously offered his prefatory poem in couplets in praise of Paradise Lost, he identified blank verse with two opposite yet interdependent concepts, the “sublime” and bathetic hubris. Writing blank verse corresponds to “flying without a net,” and the blank-​verse poet risks being compared to Icarus, whose attempts to soar too high led to his ignominious downfall. Satan himself risks the same fate as he sets out on his mission: Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while, Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith He had to cross. Nor was his ear less pealed With noises loud and ruinous (to compare 1  See O. B. Hardison, “Blank Verse before Milton,” Studies in Philology, 81, no. 3 (Summer 1984), 253–​74: “The form was, apparently, invented by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, for his translation of Books II and IV of Vergil’s Aeneid, dated around 1540. Except for two set pieces by Grimald and a few lines by Norton, this is the only example of the use of blank verse for heroic poetry prior to Christopher Marlowe’s translation of book i of Lucan’s Pharsalia, issued posthumously in 1600, which, in turn, is the only use of blank verse for heroic poetry until Milton’s Paradise Lost, published in 1667” (p. 254). 2  The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. M. Margoliouth, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), vol. i, p. 132.

 

Blank Verse   387 Great things with small) than when Bellona storms With all her battering engines, bent to rase Some capital city; or less than if this frame Of Heaven were falling, and these elements In mutiny had from her axle torn The steadfast Earth. At last his sail-​broad vans He spread for flight, and, in the surging smoke Uplifted, spurns the ground; thence many a league, As in a cloudy chair, ascending rides Audacious; but, that seat soon failing, meets A vast vacuity. All unawares, Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb-​down he drops Ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour Down had been falling, had not, by ill chance, The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud, Instinct with fire and nitre, hurried him As many miles aloft. That fury stayed—​ Quenched in a boggy Syrtis, neither sea, Nor good dry land—​nigh foundered, on he fares, Treading the crude consistence, half on foot, Half flying; behoves him now both oar and sail. As when a gryphon through the wilderness With winged course, o’er hill or moory dale, Pursues the Arimaspian, who by stealth Had from his wakeful custody purloined The guarded gold; so eagerly the Fiend O’er bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare, With head, hands, wings, or feet, pursues his way, And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.3

This passage reveals some of the expressive possibilities of the form. The second, third, and fourth sentences in this passage commence in a caesura, illustrating false starts and awkward incompletions. The convolutions of this description of Satan’s attempt to fly across the wastes of Chaos serve the dramatic effect of encouraging the reader to empathize with the effect of “two steps forward, one step back” that the protagonist is experiencing. The reader grasps at what looks like a main verb, only to find another subordinate clause. While Satan inhabits a version of linear time, and struggles to find the structuring main verb within his own narrative, the deity is in the trickier position of justifying himself in linear terms while continuing to assert his trans-​temporal omniscience. The effect of this grammatical problem is to create a verse which rocks awkwardly on the caesura: So will fall He and his faithless progeny: Whose fault? Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me All he could have; I made him just and right, Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall. (book iii, lines 95–​9)

3  John Milton, Paradise Lost, book ii, lines 917–​50, in Milton, Poetical Works, ed. Douglas Bush (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 252–​3.

 

388   Conrad BRUNSTRÖM The divinity struggles with tenses as, from a position of timeless awareness, He condemns humanity in the past tense for a crime which has yet to take place. The effect is of a being attempting to plead His own case, although it is unclear to whom. This sort of speech might be compared unfavorably with the couplet peroration of John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, which illustrates how a voice of authority can be made to sound supremely in control of past and future events: Henceforth a Series of new time began, The mighty Years long Progression ran: Once more the Godlike David was Restor’d, And willing Nations knew their lawful Lord.4

A full discussion of Milton’s blank verse would overwhelm this chapter, and perhaps no such discussion has ever surpassed Christopher Ricks’s magisterial Milton’s Grand Style (1963).5 A confluence of stylistic and dramatic criticism of Milton is achieved in the context of Stanley Fish’s reading of Paradise Lost as a poem that deliberately demands a sustained epic job of work from the reader.6 The purpose of Miltonic blank verse is to recreate the reader as the true hero. The conventional wisdom regarding eighteenth-​ century blank verse may be briefly summarized. The form is dominated by the long influence of Paradise Lost, an achievement which is unsurpassable and inimitable. Milton’s influence was therefore baleful and negative. Despite rays of inspiration emanating from James Thomson, Mark Akenside, Edward Young, and William Cowper, it would not be until William Wordsworth’s Prelude and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s conversation poems that a blank verse disencumbered of the anxiety of influence was able to re-​establish itself as the dominant English measure. The extent to which this wisdom can be validated depends greatly on the extent to which literature is to be viewed in terms of “progressive” narratives. If Wordsworth is a telos, the “end” of the eighteenth century in more senses than one, then eighteenth-​ century blank verse stands condemned as dormant and immature, defined primarily in opposition to couplet verse. This is not a negative definition, merely a formal recognition of how all verse forms seek to confront and then either satisfy or confound pre-​existing expectations. A brief examination of the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) reveals approximately 140 book-​length poems published in English in the long eighteenth century with “blank verse” in the title. By contrast, only three poems have title pages that contain the word “couplets,” although the catalog and the criteria are necessarily selective. The implication of this imbalance is not, of course, that blank-​verse poems outnumber couplet poems by nearly fifty to one, but rather that couplet poetry is so dominant that it does not have to distinguish itself on title pages.

4  The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1956–​2000), vol. ii, p. 36. 5  Christopher Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). 6  Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967).

 

Blank Verse   389

Attacks and Defenses One of the most strident defenses of blank verse is Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). Written in part to justify his own Night Thoughts, Young is passionate in his defense of Milton and his denunciation of Pope’s decision to translate Homer into couplets. The central argument of this thesis would reappear (either accidentally or unattributed) in the preface to Cowper’s Homerus of 1791. The blank versifiers, dead and yet to come, are bonding together: It is less pardonable, by that effeminate decoration, to put Achilles in petticoats a second time: How much nobler had it been, if his numbers had rolled on in full flow, through the various modulations of masculine melody, into those grandeurs of solemn sound, which are indispensably demanded by the native dignity of Heroick song? How much nobler, if he had resisted the temptation of that Gothic Dæmon, which modern Poesy tasting, became mortal? O how unlike the deathless, divine harmony of three great names (how justly join’d!), of Milton, Greece, and Rome? His Verse, but for this little speck of mortality, in its extreme parts, as his Hero had in his Heel; like him, had been invulnerable, and immortal. But, unfortunately, that was undipt in Helicon; as this, in Styx. Harmony as well as Eloquence is essential to poesy; and a murder of his Musick is putting half Homer to death. Blank is a term of diminution; what we mean by blank verse, is verse unfallen, uncurst; verse reclaim’d, reinthron’d in the true language of the Gods; who never thunder’d nor suffer’d their Homer to thunder, in Rhime.7

Blank verse is celebrated as a very Protestant form; Pope’s Catholicism is implicitly identified with his choice of verse form. Couplets are described as shackles—​paired chains that constitute a kind of Mosaic old law, no longer binding on those who are born again in Christ Jesus. To walk in the rhythmic footsteps of Milton is, therefore, to reclaim Paradise and to anticipate the millennium. For Young, Milton’s evocation of Paradise in blank verse represents a theological effort to unthink the effects of original sin. The sexual effeminaphobic image of Achilles placed in petticoats by Pope—​traditionally Achilles was cross-​dressed to avoid being drafted—​is telling, and connects with larger sexual anxieties associated with Pope.8 Samuel Johnson has a similar theological concern when discussing blank verse, though from a more negative perspective: Poetry may subsist without rhyme, but English poetry will not often please; nor can rhyme ever be safely spared but where the subject is able to support itself… . But, whatever be the advantage of rhyme I cannot prevail on myself to wish that Milton had been a rhymer; for I cannot wish his work to be other than it is; yet, like other heroes, he is to be admired rather than imitated. He that thinks himself capable of astonishing, may write blank verse; but those that hope only to please, must condescend to rhyme.9

7 

Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, 2nd ed. (London, 1759), pp. 59–​61. For a fascinating and highly sexualized discussion of the role of classical quotation in homosocial bonding, see Carolyn Williams, Pope, Homer, and Manliness: Some Aspects of Eighteenth-​Century Classical Learning (London: Routledge, 1993). 9  Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), vol. i, p. 294. 8 

 

390   Conrad BRUNSTRÖM Johnson apparently believes that the number of poets capable of “astonishing” are likely to be limited to one per generation. Marvell and Johnson, writing nearly a century apart, are both converted to Milton’s (if not Miltonic) blank verse despite severe reservations. Marvell’s endorsement is lubricated by personal friendship, but this very friendship is a cause of anxiety. Johnson, on the other hand, no friend of Milton’s personality or principles, remains defiantly skeptical (though not cynical) regarding the form:  for Johnson, blank versifiers are guilty until proven innocent. Such concerns are allied to his respect for the predictive qualities of couplet verse, which inhabit the same register as his distaste for extempore prayer. Just as Johnson is suspicious of how one can join in the beginning of a prayer without knowing its ending, he is cautious about poetic sentences whose main verb may be endlessly deferred. This chapter considers first some of the less memorable examples of eighteenth-​century blank verse before proceeding to treat the four most influential expressions of the form.

Seriousness and Levity It is almost axiomatic that blank verse of almost any quality is likely to make claims of seriousness. The most inept poem in couplets is liable to be at least unintentionally funny, whereas the entertainment value of a turgid epic in blank verse is harder to detect. When a blank-​verse poem is comic, it is clear that the comedy derives from the dress and pose of high seriousness. The most minutely Miltonic of all eighteenth-​century blank-​versifiers, John Philips, illustrates the ability to use the form for mock-​heroic purposes in The Splendid Shilling (1705): So horrible he seems! his faded Brow Entrench’d with many a Frown, and Conic Beard, And spreading Band, admir’d by Modern Saints, Disastrous Acts forebode; in his Right Hand Long Scrolls of Paper solemnly he waves, With Characters, and Figures dire inscrib’d Grievous to mortal Eyes; (ye Gods avert Such Plagues from righteous Men!) behind him stalks Another Monster, not unlike himself, Sullen of Aspect, by the Vulgar call’d A Catchpole, whose polluted Hands the Gods With Force incredible, and Magick Charms Erst have indu’d, if he his ample Palm Should haply on ill-​fated Shoulder lay Of Debtor, strait his Body, to the Touch Obsequious, (as whilom Knights were wont) To some enchanted Castle is convey’d, Where Gates impregnable, and coercive Chains In Durance strict detain him, ’till in form Of Mony, Pallas sets the Captive free.10

10 

John Philips, The Splendid Shilling: A Poem, in Imitation of Milton (London, 1705), pp. 2–​3.

 

Blank Verse   391 Overelaborate syntax and Miltonic diction are here deployed to effect the traditional comedy of grandiloquent treatment of a petty topic.11 To achieve its effects, the arrival of the demonic duo of Dun and Catchpole has to appear more complex than it really is. Were the impression of syntactic complexity ever to veer into real syntactic complexity, then the effort of the reading would overpower the joke, a fate that may well apply to Philips’s most substantive achievement in blank verse, Cyder (1708). Cyder, incidentally, makes it clear that Philips’s veneration for Milton’s chosen verse form need not elide into any sympathy for Milton’s political preferences. The following passage is doubtless inspired by the loyalist Abdiel’s defiance of Satan’s angelic party from Paradise Lost, book v: Apostate, Atheist Rebells! bent to Ill, With seeming Sanctity, and cover’d Fraud, Instill’d by him, who first presum’d t’ oppose Omnipotence; alike their Crime, th’Event Was not alike; these triumph’d, and in height Of barbarous Malice, and insulting Pride, Abstain’d not from Imperial Bloud.12

Furthermore, Philip’s blank-​verse celebration of the battle of Blenheim argues that Britain is fortunate to have an unambiguously hereditary monarchy, thus avoiding the chaos that attends the elective monarchy of Poland.13 Defiantly royalist blank verse is, however, comparatively rare in the eighteenth century. Dyer’s Ruins of Rome offers a more typical note of admonitory civic republicanism in blank verse: O Britons, O my countrymen beware, Gird, Gird your hearts, Romans once were free.14

Meanwhile, his most substantive exercise in blank verse, the georgic poem The Fleece, uses blank verse to describe patterns of accumulation and expansion of the wool trade. In book i, having gushed patriotically over “our Lockes, our Newtons, & our Miltons,” he immediately offers the spectacle of such specious flocks of sheep, Like flakes of gold illumining the green, What other paradise adorn but thine, Britannia? happy, if thy sons would know Their happiness.15

Given the subject matter, The Fleece occupies a liminal category between pastoral and georgic. Shepherds are first evoked and then retrained as agri-​businessmen and, in place of Milton’s Edenic pastoral, Dyer boldly posits a commercial British paradise on earth. 11 

The joke was not shared by one “Philo-​Milton,” who demands of Philips: “Tell me Fam’d Bard? Why in Miltonic Verse | Advent’rous? You presume to sing? In Verse | Too-​exquisite! For such an abject theme” (Milton’s Sublimity Asserted: In a Poem: Occasion’d by a Late Celebrated Piece, Entitled, Cyder, a Poem [London, 1709], p. 19). 12  John Philips, Cyder: A Poem (London, 1708), p. 79. 13  John Philips, Bleinheim, a Poem (London, 1705), pp. 18–​19. 14  Poems by John Dyer (London, 1761), p. 43. 15 Ibid., p. 59.

 

392   Conrad BRUNSTRÖM An unusual yet very telling example of the genre of shorter blank-​verse poems is the anonymous Bethlem Hospital: A Poem in Blank Verse (1717). The narrator notes that when first viewing the architecture of Bedlam, “The curious Eye observes proportion just,”16 and cannot help contrasting the regularity of the design with the irregularity of the inmates: as a Creature finite must avoid, To soar too high, or dive too deep below: Still bord’ring Frenzy and Despair are found. On what are call’d Extremes, and when our Grief Or Anger does exceed, then does our World, Our little World, a Dissolution feel, Or by a Deluge drown’d, or by a fire Consum’d, and to a Chaos turns our Brain.17

The association between blank verse and madness is implicit in the descriptions of soaring, diving, and chaos, which have become commonplaces in the period, thanks to the long influence of Milton’s Satan. A very successful example of blank verse’s capacity for dramatic phrasing is offered by this passage from The Grave (1743) by Robert Blair: Oft, in the lone Church-​yard at Night I’ve seen By Glimpse of Moon-​shine, chequering thro’ the Trees, The School-​boy with his Satchel in his Hand, Whistling aloud to bear his Courage up, And lightly tripping o’er the long flat Stones (With Nettles skirted, and Moss o’ergrown,) That tell in homely Phrase who lie below; Sudden! He starts, and hears, or thinks he hears The Sound of something purring at his Heels: Full fast he flies, and dares not look behind him, Till out of Breath he overtakes his Fellows.18

The pacing of this short narrative of a child’s shortcut through a graveyard is dramatically rendered in verses that first creep and then sprint, in time with the child’s burst of panic. Blair effectively dramatizes a story that could not have been timed as effectively in couplets. The influence of poets such as Philips, Edward Dyer, William Somerville, and Robert Blair is, however, comparatively circumscribed. The major blank-​verse poets writing between Paradise Lost and The Prelude are using blank verse very self-​consciously, and assert that the form is designed to engage imaginative, philosophical, and political imperatives that couplet verse is inadequately equipped to contain.

Thomson James Thomson’s Seasons (1726–​46) is remarkable for the facility with which classical reflections are combined with natural descriptions. Heroes of classical antiquity emerge 16  18 

Bethlem Hospital: A Poem in Blank Verse (London, 1717), p. 4. Robert Blair, The Grave: A Poem, 2nd ed. (London, 1743), pp. 6–​7.

17 Ibid., p. 6.

 

Blank Verse   393 confidently through the foliage of an English rural landscape like sculpture busts in a garden park: Rous’d at th’inspiring Thought, I throw aside The long-​liv’d Volume; and, deep-​musing, hail The sacred Shades, that slowly-​rising pass Before my wondering Eyes. First Socrates, Who firmly good in a corrupted State, Against the Rage of Tyrants single stood, …………………………………………………. Great Moral Teacher! Wisest of Mankind! Solon the next, who built his Common-​Weal On Equity’s wide Base; by tender Laws A lively People curbing, yet undamp’d Preserving still that quick peculiar Fire, Whence in the laurel’d Field of finer Arts, And of bold Freedom, they unequal’d shone, The Pride of smiling Greece, and Human-​kind.19

William Hazlitt, who devotes an essay to a favorable comparison of Thomson with Cowper, is almost charmed by the juxtaposition between acute realism and stale classicism in Thomson’s work: “He had too little art to conceal his art… . His art is as naked and undisguised as his nature.”20 Thomson’s greatest achievement, which distinguishes him from Philips, is to create a version of blank verse which is not a running commentary on Milton. The Miltonic influence is clear enough, diagnosed by David Reid as a “typical form of the desire for the illimitable in Milton and Thomson is their delight in wandering, straying, erring movement, movement that seeks to lose itself in mazes and intricate tangles.”21 Thomson’s verse, however, is meditative, not narrative, and he achieves this shift of focus with a studied “irrelevance” of detailed natural description. Milton could not (or would not) have written the following: The dripping Rock, the Mountain’s misty Top Swell on the Sight, and brighten with the Dawn. Blue, thro’ the Dusk, the smoaking Currents shine; And from the bladed Field the fearful Hare Limps, aukward: while along the Forest-​glade The wild Deer trip, and often turning gaze At early passenger.22

Hazlitt remarks that “Thomson’s blank verse is not harsh or utterly untuneable; but it is heavy and monotonous; it seems always labouring up-​hill,”23 although it is clear that Hazlitt prefers Thomson’s heaviness to Cowper’s ease.

19  James Thomson, “Winter,” lines 436–​52, in The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 222–​4. 20  The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: Dent, 1930), vol. v, p. 86. 21  David Reid, “Thomson’s Poetry of Reverie and Milton,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900, 43, no. 3 (Summer 2003), 667–​82, at p. 674. 22  “Summer,” lines 54–​60, in The Seasons, pp. 60–​2. 23  Hazlitt, vol. v, p. 90.

 

394   Conrad BRUNSTRÖM Thomson, a pioneer in the field of descriptive, meditative blank verse, still regards it necessary to scatter classical allusions across the page in order to “raise” his theme. The comparison with Cowper (who wears his rather greater learning far more lightly) at the century’s end proves instructive. Thomson can be digressive but never conversational, meandering but never chatty. The Seasons is usually regarded as not merely in the history of blank verse, but a landmark in the history of descriptive verse more generally. Its novelty involves the extent to which natural description emerges as a primary rather than exemplary function of the poem, the application of blank verse to a topic neither “epic” nor commentary on “epic.” Reid notes the “pleasure and exaltation in being so lost.”24 Blank verse is effective at generating a sense of being “lost” because sentence length is so hard to predict. Whereas Pope’s universe is a mighty maze but not without a plan, blank verse is far less predictable, and the reader’s quest for the main verb may be a far more daunting project. For Thomson, Young, and Akenside, feeling “lost” is a far less problematic “pleasure” than it is for Milton. Thomson’s Liberty (1734) is an even more explicit evocation of the claims of blank verse. Notorious as a poem that Samuel Johnson attempted to read but gave up on, it has more recently received sympathetic revision. The poem is dedicated to Frederick, Prince of Wales (the patriot prince of Bolingbroke opposition patriotism) and traces the rise and fall and rise of republican virtue, with a familiar tour through Greece, Rome, and finally Georgian Britain. The goddess “Liberty” is the narrator of most of the poem. The digressive quality of the poem is marked by the goddesses’ nomadic progress across Europe.

Young Edward Young might attempt rant like Milton, but in practice he writes far more like Pope; his enthusiasm on behalf of blank verse is not matched by Miltonic ambition or innovation at the level of praxis.25 His own blank-​verse meditative epic Night Thoughts (1742–​5), though unrhymed, deploys relatively end-​stopped lines that often resemble couplets in terms of their epigrammatic detachability: “Procrastination is the Thief of Time” (night i, line 392).26 “Time” is a major, perhaps the major, theme of Young’s, and his verse is designed to highlight the tense relationship between eternity and death, between endless futurity and sudden closure. Night Thoughts was considerably more successful than either Thomson’s Seasons or Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination, going through many editions in the eighteenth century, although its critical reputation has sunk below either of these poems. Blanford

24 

Reid, “Thomson’s Poetry of Reverie and Milton,” p. 668. Blanford Parker observes “Young’s blank verse generally falls farther from the Miltonic tree than any other of the century”: The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), p. 226. 26  Edward Young, Night Thoughts, ed. Stephen Cornford (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), p. 47. The main title of the work is not Night Thoughts, but The Complaint. It is only the subsequent elevation of the “Night School” that rearranges the subtitle into the familiar name for the poem as a whole. 25 

 

Blank Verse   395 Parker notes that it brought Diderot to tears (Triumph, p. 226). Judged as an epigrammatic theodicist, he is destined to suffer from comparison with Pope, and judged as a blank-​ verse rhapsodist, his lack of innovation is destined to count against him. Young is a better preacher than a practitioner of blank verse. Even by the standards of early eighteenth-​ century religious verse, it is clogged and rhythmically checked by excessive exclamation. Despite invoking Urania and quoting Milton on a number of occasions, Young spends far too much time pausing to congratulate himself to develop truly Miltonic blank-​verse paragraphs: How poor? how rich? how abject? how august? How complicate? how wonderful is Man? How passing wonder He who made him such? Who center’d in our make such strange Extremes? From different Natures marvellously mixt, Connexion exquisite of distant worlds! Distinguish’d Link in being’s endless Chain! Midway from nothing to the Deity! A beam ethereal, sully’d and absorpt! Though sullied and dishonour’d, still divine! Dim Miniature of Greatness absolute! An Heir of Glory! a frail Child of Dust! Helpless immortal! Insect infinite! A Worm! a God!—​I tremble at myself, And in myself am lost! (Night Thoughts, night i, lines 67–​80)

The so-​called “Graveyard School” celebrated obscurity as a meditation aid. As Young declares: “By Night, an Atheist half-​believes a God” (night v). Couplet verse celebrates clarity; blank verse cherishes obscurity. As George Eliot memorably remarked, Young’s religion “knows no medium between the ecstatic and the sententious.”27 The theology of Night Thoughts is typical of a kind of eighteenth-​century non-​dogmatic ecumenism that focuses very little on any of the persons of the Christian Trinity, preferring to extrapolate orthodox Christian belief from the frustrated aspirations of the individual human imagination. Mention of the person of Jesus Christ is almost nonexistent in many books of Night Thoughts (night iv offering a striking exception), and the dignity of “Man” represents the chief focus of theological persuasion. It is always the “rush” of sublime sentiment that is prioritized above formal assent to specific doctrines, yet the “rush” is often asserted more than it is dramatized, with studied repetitions reinforcing the impression that there is a normative and predictive quality to sublime experience. Promiscuous italicization, typical in religious publications of the early eighteenth century, is exacerbated by a plethora of exclamation marks, that suggests a degree of authorial insecurity as to the reader’s ability to recognize key points of religious reflection (as well as slowing down the verse). Anaphora is an overused technique designed to anchor attention around a recurring set of ideas: A Deity believ’d, is job begun; A Deity ador’d, is joy advanced; A Deity belov’d, is joy matur’d. (night viii, lines 713–​15)

27  George Eliot, “Worldliness and Other Worldliness: The Poet Young,” in The Writings of George Eliot, 25 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1970), vol. xxi, p. 4.

 

396   Conrad BRUNSTRÖM Young the orthodox divine and Akenside the heterodox freethinker are alike in their belief that human beings possess “immortal longings,” and that blank-​verse poetry is the best means of expressing such longings. Young, unlike Akenside, believes that quotable nuggets of religious wisdom can be strategically located within a blank-​verse poem to great effect: Read Nature: Nature is a Friend to Truth; Nature is Christian, preaches to Mankind; And bids dead matter aid us in our creed. (night iv, lines 703–​5)

This extract might be said to illustrate the proposition that blank verse favors “natural religion,” were it not for the fact that each of these four lines is end-​stopped, and there is no compelling reason why they could not have been expressed as couplets. Given the predictable liturgical formalism of Young’s verse, it seems that Nature is not only Christian but Anglican. Even when not end-​stopped, Young’s blank verse is balanced on somewhat heavy and predictably centered caesura: Amusement reigns Man’s great Demand: To trifle is to live: And is it then a Trifle, too, to die?—​ Thou say’st I preach; Lorenzo! ’tis confest. What, if for once, I preach thee quite awake? (night ii, lines 59–​63)

The echo of the couplet form persists throughout Night Thoughts in terms of its author’s love of paradox and balanced antitheses. Young is most confident and impressive, however, when striking a note of triumphant auto-​luxuriance: How Great, in the wild Whirl of Time’s pursuits To stop, and pause, involv’d in high Presage, Through the long Visto of a thousand Years, To stand contemplating our distant Selves, As in a magnifying Mirror seen, Enlarg’d, Ennobled, Elevate, Divine? To prophesy our own Futurities? To gaze in Thought on what all Thought transcends? To talk, with Fellow-​Candidates, of Joys As far beyond Conception, as Desert, Ourselves the astonish’d Talkers, and the Tale! (night vi, lines 115–​25)

Young seeks to integrate any evidence for immortality from any source he can. In night vi, Young pays tribute to Thomson by describing the revolving sequence of the seasons as evidence of a divine commitment to the idea of resurrection and immortality.28

Akenside Blank verse is not, meanwhile, the preserve of religious enthusiasts. Mark Akenside, whose religious sensibilities are vague and unfocused enough to be described as deistical, is the 28 

“Thomson’s language here is deftly and purposefully imitated” (Parker, p. 224).

 

Blank Verse   397 most innovative blank versifier writing between Milton and Cowper. Akenside’s career is dominated by the effort to write and then rewrite the same poem—​first as The Pleasures of Imagination, and eventually as Pleasures of the Imagination—​a telling insertion of the article that refocuses the level of abstraction strategically as “Imagination” shifts from being an activity to an abstract noun. The title of the poem evokes the famous papers on aesthetics composed by Addison for the Spectator. It is notable that none of the successful full-​ length blank-​verse poems of the eighteenth century are narrative poems, and all of them, to a greater or lesser extent, are self-​referential. The Seasons, The Pleasures of Imagination, Night Thoughts, and The Task are all about the imagination and about the limits of descriptive ability. Each of these important poems uses blank verse to make a commentary on Longinus. Akenside’s purpose is to trace the nature of aesthetic response from the most basic states of mental approbation of geometric forms to the highest pitch of imaginative transport, the stabbing of Julius Caesar. Regardless of Akenside’s politics, the assertion is made that the sublime is ultimately a human phenomenon, a celebration of humanity’s capacity to “feel.” Akenside’s handling of blank verse enables him to compress much of this trajectory into a single sentence. At its best, Akenside’s verse is expert at balancing end-​stopped lines with enjambment: Look then abroad thro’ Nature, to the range Of planets, suns, and adamantine spheres Wheeling unshaken thro’ the void immense; And speak, O Man! does this capacious scene With half that kindling majesty dilate Thy strong conception as when Brutus rose Refulgent from the stroke of Caesar’s fate, Amid the crowd of patriots: and his arm Aloft descending, like eternal Jove When guilt brings down the thunder: call’d aloud On Tully’s name, and shook his crimson steel, And bade the father of his country, hail! For lo! The tyrant prostrate on the dust, And Rome again is free! (The Pleasures of Imagination, book i, lines 487–​500)29

This quotation summarizes Akenside’s entire project, as well as asserting the higher sublimity of animate over inanimate nature. Elsewhere, Akenside anticipates the most famous line of John Keats: Thus was beauty sent from heav’n, The lovely ministress of truth and good In this dark world: for truth and good are one, And beauty dwells in them, and they in her, With like participation. (book i, lines 372–​6)

Akenside’s chief talent is rhythmic. There is nothing very striking, specific, fresh, or memor­ able about the imagery he employs or the overarching structure he constructs, which is an extrapolation of Addison’s Spectator papers on the same topic.

29 

Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination (London, 1744), p. 26.

 

398   Conrad BRUNSTRÖM The pretensions of blank versifiers could not remain long unpricked in an age so fertile in satirical imagination. If blank verse is associated with the sublime, it is necessarily associated with the ridiculous. When blank verse fails, it fails spectacularly. It becomes a commonplace that it is hard to write “average” or “passable” blank verse, as Johnson famously observed. Most interesting from a political point of view is the attack on the form offered by Charles Churchill, for whom blank verse tends naturally toward abstraction and therefore political quietism. Churchill, the ally of John Wilkes, is writing in opposition to John Bute, and with Wilkes he constructs a grand Caledonian conspiracy of mystification, which is implicitly absolutist and even Jacobite.30 It is notable that Churchill would himself become the subject of a brief elegiac tribute from Byron, himself an obtrusive rhymer in conscious reaction against an earlier generation of conservative blank versifiers. The most declamatory libertarian verse form of the eighteenth century may also be the least democratic, in that it is the least likely to be attempted by those who come to poetry without the benefit of a formal classical education. Stephen Duck, Mary Collier, Anne Yearsley, and other so-​called “peasant poets” all rhyme, regarding poetic diction and well-​ turned couplets as something to master rather than reject. Blank verse by women is also remarkably rare. Radical verse emanating from socially excluded poets rarely if ever regards Miltonic syntax as an appropriate model.

Subjects of a Higher Order The association between blank verse and “the sublime” can be reinforced in quite close technical ways with reference to the mnemonic and detachable qualities of couplet verse. Pope is one of the most quoted poets in the English language, and the detachable quality of his best couplets is largely to be thanked for this. Blank verse, by contrast, is hard to quote from, since it does not respect a semantic unit of roughly twenty syllables, and often lacks a logical start or finish point from a convenient citation point of view. The couplet therefore corresponds to Burke’s association of “beauty” with smallness and sociability (and portability), while a Miltonic blank-​verse paragraph correspondingly associates itself with that which cannot be grasped in one view, that which strains the comprehensive energies. The anxiety of blank verse, particularly Miltonic blank verse, involves the inability to predict when it is safe to take a breather. At its most extreme, the experience of reading Milton is like being forced to swim underwater through a tunnel with only the author’s promise that the reader will be able to come up for air before drowning. By the second half of the eighteenth century, the allocation of measures to genres had become almost standardized. Joseph Warton remarks: “Perhaps rhyme may be properest for shorter pieces; for lyric, elegiac, and satiric poems; for pieces where closeness of expression,

30  See Conrad Brunström, William Cowper: Religion, Satire, Society (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2004), chap. 3, “The Antivisionaries of the Nonsense Club,” pp. 43–​68.

 

Blank Verse   399 and smartness of style, are expected; but for subjects of a higher order, where any enthusiasm or emotion is to be expressed, or for poems of a greater length, blank verse is undoubtedly preferable.”31 Warton’s Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (1756, 1782) is in the business of establishing a premiere league of English poets (Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton). His own brief blank-​verse rhapsody, The Enthusiast (1744), anticipates his key critical point of distinction: What are the Lays of artful Addison, Coldly correct, to Shakespear’s Warblings wild?32

Roughly a century behind their French counterparts, eighteenth-​century English critics became concerned with the national project of a vernacular canon of greatness. Almost inseparable from the effort of anthologizing and celebrating English poets is the effort of establishing a ranking system, and inseparable from this same effort is the positing of formal criteria of greatness. “Artful,” like “artificial,” begins to take on its modern derogatory sense. Like any scrupulous scholar and critic, however, Warton problematizes his categories as soon as he announces them, noting the implications of George Colman’s success at translating Terence into blank verse: Perhaps it may deserve consideration, whether the best manner of imitating these satires and epistles [Horace’s], would not be to adopt the familiar blank verse, which Mr Colman has so successfully employed in his Terence; a sort of verse no more resembling that of Milton, than the Hexameters of Homer resemble those of Theocritus.33

George Colman was, not coincidentally, the close Westminster schoolfriend of William Cowper. In his preface to his Terence, Colman observes that “Nobody will pretend that there is the least similarity between the stile of Horace and Virgil; and yet they both use the same measure.”34 William Cowper would arguably expand (unwittingly) on both Warton’s hint and his schoolfellow’s example to become the most Horatian of eighteenth-​century blank-​ verse poets. The Task (1785) has many satirical elements, but types rather than individuals are attacked, and a position of rural retirement gives the Horatian Cowper his site of moral authority.

Cowper Like Milton, Cowper self-​consciously identified blank verse as something to be attempted only after a long apprenticeship. Having published couplet satires in 1782, and experimented with a variety of verse forms, his blank-​verse “epic” begins as a mock epic before stretching its legs after a hundred lines or so, to accomplish the most wholly satisfying extended

31 Warton, Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 2 vols. (London, 1756–​82), vol. ii, p. 154. 32 

Joseph Warton, The Enthusiast; or, The Lover of Nature: A Poem (London, 1744), p. 12.

34 

The Comedies of Terence, Translated into Familiar Blank Verse: By George Colman (London, 1765), p. x.

33 Warton, Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, vol. ii, p. 331 n.

 

400   Conrad BRUNSTRÖM blank-​verse poem since Milton. Cowper was probably the most consistently popular poet of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and The Task the single most popular poem.35 Cowper’s principal acknowledged literary debts are the unusual pairing of Matthew Prior (significant as a personably digressive poet) and John Milton. The Task opens with deference to Lady Austen’s specific commission to write a poem about a sofa. With deliberately heavy-​ handed Miltonic parody (following Philips), Cowper dutifully traces the history of domestic upholstery before breaking out of the house and occupying his most congenial register of the moving eye. (Cowper was probably unaware of a pre-​existing furniture-​inspired rhapsody in blank verse by his phonetic namesake, the Rev. Edward Cooper, entitled The Elbow Chair, 1765.) Cooper’s poem, like Cowper’s, is digressive and moralistic, and advocates rural (Welsh) retirement in opposition to urban corruption. The later Cowper’s achievement in blank verse is unprecedented in its ability to inhabit a range of registers. Beginning with a mock-​heroic evolution of the sofa, he proceeds to offer a variety of perambulations that can accommodate not merely close natural observations but also a variety of moral and political considerations: To wear out time in numbering to and fro The studs that thick emboss his iron door, Then downward and then upward, then aslant And then alternate, with a sickly hope By dint of change to give his tasteless task Some relish, till the sum, exactly found In all directions, he begins again:—​ Oh comfortless existence! hemmed around With woes, which who that suffers would not kneel And beg for exile, or the pangs of death? That man should thus encroach on fellow-​man, Abridge him of his just and native rights, Eradicate him, tear him from his hold Upon the endearments of domestic life And social, nip his fruitfulness and use, And doom him for perhaps a heedless word To barrenness and solitude and tears, Moves indignation; makes the name of king (Of king whom such prerogative can please) As dreadful as the Manichean god, Adored through fear, strong only to destroy. ’Tis liberty alone that gives the flower Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume, And we are weeds without it.36

35  Robert Bray has established that the young Abraham Lincoln was familiar with William Cowper’s verse: see Bray, “What Abraham Lincoln Read—​An Evaluative and Annotated List,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association, 28, no. 2 (2007), 28–​81, at p. 46. 36  The Task, book v, lines 425–​48, in William Cowper, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. H. S. Milford, 4th ed. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), p. 209.

 

Blank Verse   401 Cowper here offers one of the more effective blank-​verse hymns to liberty of the century. From a technical point of view, it is remarkable for its studied changes of pace. The mental tyranny of being forcibly focused on the single intellectual activity of recounting the number of bolts in a prison door is slowly and painfully communicated in halting phrases. The passage beginning “’Tis liberty alone” accelerates, as the “constraints” imposed by the prison melt away. Cowper’s libertarian blank verse is effective because it describes tyranny in terms of descriptive privation. The prisoner in the Bastille (akin to Laurence Sterne’s prisoner in A Sentimental Journey) is oppressed by a paucity of stimuli, a privation rendered more acute because it is imagined from the perspective of someone the reader has found reinvigorated by the sights and sounds available on a rural perambulation. Like Young, Cowper is not shy of dropping memorable sententiae into the middle of an interior monologue, but unlike Young, this does not make for jarringly end-​stopped verse. Far more than Young, Cowper is capable of using blank verse to describe a thought in process, rather than a prescriptive argument. Cowper’s description of the Bastille also connects with another persistent blank-​verse tradition: Gallophobia. Hostility to French rhymes is perhaps never less subtly addressed than by William Free, vicar from Runcorn, whose Stigand (1750) celebrates nearly seven hundred years of anti-​French sentiment in verse: Untinsel’d be this Verse, nor tagg’d with Rhime, Which trims the very Comedies of France. In English Numbers free, and unconfin’d, Like those, which English Milton erst admir’d, Let me pour forth my Soul uncheck’d, and give, Unbounded, my Affection to the Friends Of English Liberty, those Noble Souls! Who wisely for our jarring Britons found The Name of Union, Antigallican.37

This jingoistic application of blank verse chimes with sentiments expressed by both Young and Cowper. This kind of patriotism usually comes with a defiant ruralism. Blank verse makes the country, and couplets make the town, an over-​generalization tested immediately by the fact that Paradise Lost was written by a Londoner, while Windsor-​Forest is written in couplets. Thomson, Akenside, Young, and Cowper represent different versions of blank-​verse improvisations, but all work within a dominant framework of broadly libertarian endeavor. Akenside used blank verse to celebrate the sublimity of regicide while Cowper used it to salute the fall of the Bastille (a prescient four years ahead of the event). As the story is usually told, the century establishes the blank-​verse epic as a kind of telos within the bildungsroman of an ambitious poet’s self-​definition, something to be attempted once other more limited genres have been tried and exhausted. This teleological paradigm, however, is based on very partial and limited scholarship. Blank verse was far more popular in the eighteenth century than is generally understood. The worst of this poetry is of a truly lamentable standard, however, and it would be hard to exaggerate the extremity of tedium offered by prolix blank verse of the period.

37 

John Free, Stigand; or, The Antigallican: A Poem, in Miltonic Verse (London, 1750), pp. 1–​2.

 

402   Conrad BRUNSTRÖM

Tragedy A full discussion of the context of eighteenth-​century blank verse would also have to take proper account of blank-​verse tragedy. The fact that post-​Shakespearean blank-​verse tragedies are rarely revived on the modern stage should not detract from their contemporary significance. To the procession—​Milton, Thomson, Akenside, Young, Cowper—​should therefore be added a parallel line introducing Dryden, Nicholas Rowe, Thomas Otway, Addison, Henry Home, and Arthur Murphy. Despite the experiments of Dryden in rhymed tragedy, it soon became acknowledged that the very nature of the English language, with its consonantal word endings and correspondingly emphatic end rhymes, made couplet speeches sound unnaturally heavy-​handed, no matter what Corneille and Racine might be able to achieve in French (to the disgust of William Free). Addison’s Cato represents one of the most consistently successful examples of eighteenth-​ century blank verse, and in many ways a very representative example of its strengths and weaknesses. Its theme of incorruptible opposition to tyranny also provokes further comparisons with Thomson and Akenside, whose blank verse it undoubtedly helped to influence. Speeches such as the following echo down the century: Remember, O my Friends, the Laws, the Rights, The gen’rous Plan of Power deliver’d down, From Age to Age, by your renown’d Forefathers, (So dearly bought, the Price of so much Blood) O let it never perish in your Hands! But piously transmit it to your Children. Do thou, great Liberty, inspire our Souls, And make our Loves in thy Possession happy, Or on our Deaths glorious in thy just Defence.38

In the field of tragedy, therefore, blank verse is the dominant, indispensable literary form throughout the period, and drama provides the source of most Britons’ exposure to blank verse. Even Samuel Johnson published more blank verse than couplet verse, if we consider Irene, and was better paid for doing so.

Ideological Assumptions This crude set of associations is rhetorically influential but diagnostically impoverishing. A poet like Young has a defining investment in the concept of detachable moralizing nuggets. The temptation to be “quotable” has been the understandable ruin of many a blank-​verse pretender. Meanwhile, any attempt to generalize about the function, focus, and agenda of eighteenth-​century blank verse provokes any number of unhelpful oppositions. Blank verse is both pious and free​thinking, radical and reactionary, original and

38 

Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy (London, 1713), p. 42.

 

Blank Verse   403 derivative, sublime and bathetic. A further generalization may be posited: that couplet verse is associated with orthodox Episcopal or liturgical religion, while blank verse is associated with Dissent or freethinking deism. As Akenside declared “all things that have life aspire to God.” The tendency toward blank-​verse pantheism would be refuted by Young, hinted at by Akenside, and gently rejected by Cowper, before being properly indulged by Wordsworth: for many days my brain Work’d with a dim and undetermin’d sense Of unknown modes of being: in my thoughts There was a darkness, call it solitude, Or blank desertion, no familiar shapes Of hourly objects, images of trees, Of sea, or sky, no colours of green fields; But huge and mighty Forms that do not live Like living men mov’d slowly through my mind By day and were the trouble of my dreams.39

Oscillating between the physicality of unpoetic diction and the deferrals and abstractions imposed by double negatives, Wordsworth’s blank verse is supremely confident in its refusal to impose definitions upon experiences. Conclusions regarding blank verse are frustrated by the technical properties of a form that resists closure. From a more broad theoretical perspective, one of the great advantages of studying the uses and reception of blank verse in the eighteenth century is to remind us that there is nothing necessarily apolitical about formalist criticism, and that any detailed study of verse form is impregnated with ideological assumptions and challenges. Merely by deciding to reject the couplet form, a poet was making an intervention into a debate about the nature of human freedom based on the supposedly infinite potential of the imagination. Above all, blank verse makes a statement about time itself, dramatizing (for good or ill) the effect of a thought in process, a present-​tense reverie rather than a thought considered, retrieved, and reorganized. Blank verse between 1660 and 1800 may learn to escape the determining or oppressive influence of Milton, but it never fully escapes from the weight of Miltonic expectation. Ever since Milton first ventured “things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,” the unrhymed iambic has made powerful rhythmic claims for the immortal extension, dignity, and destiny of the human soul.

References Attridge, Derek, The Rhythms of English Poetry (London: Longman, 1982). Fulford, Tim, Landscape, Liberty, and Authority: Poetry, Criticism, and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996). Irlam, Shaun, Elations:  The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999).

39  William Wordsworth, The Prelude, book i, lines 419–​28, in The Thirteen-​Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed, 2 vols. (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), vol. i, p. 117.

 

404   Conrad BRUNSTRÖM Monk, Samuel H., The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-​Century England (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1935). Ricks, Christopher, Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). Shaw, Robert Burns, Blank Verse:  A  Guide to its History and Use (Athens:  Ohio Univ. Press, 2007). Weinfield, Henry, The Blank-​Verse Tradition from Milton to Stevens: Freethinking and the Crisis of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015).

 

Chapter 24

Stanz as Rodney Stenning Edgecombe The period under review is marked by the marginalization and then the restitution of the stanza, a graph of decline and ascent that matches the eclipse of “pure” lyric poetry in the Augustan age and its reinstatement in the later decades of the eighteenth century. As we shall see, stanzaic poetry never in fact went out of production, but, for a while at least, it remained the preserve of comparatively minor poets while the major ones, the primary conduits of Zeitgeist, devoted their energies to expository rather than expressive verse.

Quest for Plainness This bias can be explained by the scientism that lay both behind the foundation of the Royal Society and the importation of neoclassical ideals from France, ideals that regulated the disordered arts in the same way that natural philosophers were “regulating” the capricious behavior of natural phenomena. Peter Motteux claimed that the Restoration’s Cecilian odes were intended “to propagate the advancement of that divine Science”1—​an early example of the fission between “scientific” (learned) and popular (instinctual) music that persisted into the nineteenth century. Neoclassicism, which likewise tried to propagate the “divine Science” of literature, arrived in Britain with Charles II and his circle—​that “Mob of Gentlemen who wrote with Ease.”2 The “Ease” of their sprezzatura might have cultivated the amateur, but was very far from being amateurish. A function of lucidity, it was also the project of the scientists in the Royal Society, and Thomas Sprat’s history of that institution might even be taken as an ars poetica malgré lui, recommending that the dialect of the tribe be purified: They have therefore been most rigorous in putting in execution, the only Remedy, that can be found for this extravagance:  and that has been, a constant Resolution, to reject all

1  Richard Luckett, booklet for the CD of Henry Purcell’s Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day 1692: “Hail! Bright Cecilia” (Hayes, Middlesex: EMI, 1986), p. 15. 2  Alexander Pope, “The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated,” line 108, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–​69), vol. iv, p. 203.

 

406   Rodney Stenning Edgecombe amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things, almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members, a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can: and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits, or Scholars.3

A “close, naked, natural way” of speaking lies at the opposite end of the expressive spectrum from the Metaphysicals’ favored stanza forms, the complex entrelacement of which was at odds with any quest for plainness. Those of Cowley were as elaborate as the best of them, and yet, paradoxically, one of his “pindariques” was prefaced to Sprat’s discourse. Entitled “To the Royal Society,” it re-​gendered Philosophy as a man, who, once taken off an unhealthy diet (“the Desserts of Poetry”), will function with new vigour and trenchancy: Instead of solid meats t’ encreas his force; Instead of vigorous exercise, they led him Into the pleasant Labyrinths of ever-​fresh Discourse.

Those “pleasant Labyrinths” (by which Cowley actually meant the debates of the Schools) serve to describe his own mazy stanzas, and his “Ode: Of Wit” provides an epigraph not only for his own strophic inventiveness, but for his predecessors’ as well: “A thousand different shapes it wears.”4 Herbert’s Temple contained no fewer than 111 different stanza forms, and Donne’s Songs and Sonets were almost as various. Labyrinths waylay the traveler instead of leading to swift conclusions, and therefore fall short of the conspicuity desired by scientist and neoclassical poet alike. More damaging still is the way in which the rhyme that plots their outline can often drive an argument off course. Carmen, the Latin for “song,” is also the etymon for “charm,” and points to a nexus between music and poetry at odds with the projected neoclassic marriage of poetry and dialectics. In his preface to the Pindariques, Cowley observed that Pindar verges on insanity with the superaddition of rhyme: “nothing seems more raving. And sure, Rhyme, without the addition of Wit … would but make it ten times more distracted than it is in Prose.”5 Rhyme, acting as music’s “fifth column” within the province of the Logos, can generate impulses that are ultimately counter-​verbal in nature: Yet another effect of the liberation of poetry from music is, paradoxically, a nostalgic yearning for the partner it has lost. This leads to what we sometimes call “pure poetry.” … Carried to its lyrical (and quite permissible) conclusion, this development of the lyric brings us on one hand to the nonsense poetry of Lear, on the other to the poetry of Mallarmé which, as Dr. Elizabeth Sewell has said, “is so pure that it is about poetry and nothing else at all, a form commenting on a form, the content irrelevant.”6

3 

Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones (St. Louis: Washington Univ. Studies; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959), p. 113. 4  Abraham Cowley, The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley in Two Volumes: Consisting of Those Which Were Formerly Printed; and Those Which He Design’d for the Press, Publish’d out of the Author’s Original Copies with the Cutter of Coleman-​Street, 2 vols. (London, 1707), vol. i, p. 3. 5  The Works of Mr Abraham Cowley, vol. i, p. 183. 6  C. Day Lewis, The Lyric Impulse (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965), pp. 18–​19.

 

Stanzas   407 I shall return to the relation of stanza to music in due course, but must first consider why, if rhyme be a handmaid of music, and therefore counter-​scientific, the neoclassicists did not dispense with it altogether. If they had been wholly concerned with the exaltation of reason above instinct, their poetry would certainly have suffered, but there is more to “Ease” than lucidity alone; polish is quite as important, and rhyme can smooth the rough ends of lines. It can also enforce economy (at least within the limited space of the couplet), and compress loose thought into epigram. These properties provided an antidote of sorts to the perceived deficiencies of English, unclassical by virtue of its analytic character, its habit of signifying through word order, prepositions, and auxiliaries instead of through the compact inflections of Greek and Latin. Humdrum words of service, the ancillae humiles of vanished case change, could easily tip lucidity into flatness, and while Donne and his confreres might crabbedly have affected the metaphysics, the average neoclassic poet courted an antithetical danger. As “a very Leveller in Poetry,” Dryden said, he creeps along with ten little words in every line and helps out his Numbers with For to, and Unto, and all the pretty Expletives he can find, till he draggs them to the end of another line; while the Sense is left tir’d half way behind it … . he affects plainness, to cover his want of imagination.7

Pope likewise leveled a charge against this sort of insipidity in An Essay on Criticism, arraigning by enactment: “And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line.”8 Rhyme of itself could not dispel flatness, but it still held, at least potentially, a certain compressive force to offset the qualities of an analytic language that poets with classical aspirations were forced to endure: Tho’ still some traces of our rustic vein And splay-​foot verse, remain’d, and will remain. Late, very late, correctness grew our care.9

Just as Lord Halifax believed that “all good sense hath something of the clown in it, and therefore though it is not to be suppressed it must be soften’d so as to comply with that great beast the world,”10 so Sprat’s “language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants” needed softening (to create smoothness rather than flaccidity) before it could properly issue in poetry. Rhyme, controlled in couplets rather than spread out in the peacock tail of the Metaphysical stanza, could polish the English clown because, as Pope pointed out, “those move easiest who have learned to dance” (p. 155). Nothing, finally, could be done about the quotidian particles and prepositions so damaging to elegance and tournure, but one’s vocabulary could be Latinized up to a point (“purple” and “candid” were sometimes used as nonce versions of purpureus and candidus), and sentences could be inverted with a gentlemen’s pretense that it did not matter to meaning, even though ambiguities necessarily arose—​some quite magical

7 

John Dryden, An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1956–​2000), vol. xvii, p. 11. 8 Pope, An Essay on Criticism, line 347, in Works, vol. i, p. 278. 9  Pope, “The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated,” lines 270–​2, in Works, vol. iv, p. 219. 10  Letter to Henry Savile, 1680, quoted in H. C. Foxcroft, A Character of the Trimmer, Being a Short Life of the First Marquis of Halifax (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1946), p. 105.

 

408   Rodney Stenning Edgecombe in effect: “And all the air a solemn stillness holds.”11 As a medieval invention, rhyme might lack classical credentials, but it could generate an illusion of crispness and lightness, not least by virtue of its mnemonic charge.

Rhyme The couplet, after all, had enjoyed a long tradition as a sealing agent, whether as the sententia that crystallized the scenes of Elizabethan theater or as the editorial climax of the English sonnet. When they came to undo the legacy of the eighteenth century, Romantic poets such as Leigh Hunt (in The Story of Rimini) and John Keats (in “I Stood Tip-​Toe” and “Sleep and Poetry”) overturned the couplet’s tradition of containment, treating it as so many fountain ledges to spill the thought from line to line. While rhyme, however, might serve the needs of “correctness” within a tight, controlled environment, the mist net of a Metaphysical stanza was something else entirely, and, if we leave aside the Cecilian ode for music (to which I shall return), highly wrought, individual designs fell into disuse. William Collins and Thomas Gray alone crafted fine new structures of rhyme and line length in the eighteenth century. The reason for stanza’s eclipse is not hard sought. Aristotle, whose word was law to the Mob of Gentlemen, had recommended the simplest kind of verse for tragedy, which Dryden approximated to blank verse: “For this Reason, says Aristotle, ’Tis best to write Tragedy in that kind of Verse which is the least such, or which is nearest Prose: and this amongst the Ancients was the Iambique, and with us is blank verse, or the measure of verse kept exact without rhyme” (Dryden, “Essay of Dramatick Poesie,” in Works, vol. xiv, p. 66). This was certainly Milton’s solution in Paradise Lost, but Milton stood apart from the neoclassical revival, and, since only Edward Young and James Thomson in the succeeding generation dispensed with rhyme, the heroic couplet became the default form for almost all the major poets of the eighteenth century, up to and including the young Wordsworth (see ­chapter  22, “Couplets”). Even Gray and Collins, whose best work was stanzaic—​even they could pen perfect couplets without hesitation. Gray’s versification of Montesquieu, had it ever been finished, would have challenged comparison with An Essay on Man and even, perhaps, eclipsed it. But, despite its guarantee of polish, the couplet could in fact aspire to being the measure “nearest Prose,” as witness its aptness to the narratives of Chaucer and Crabbe. The recurrent and predictable pulse of rhyme repeats itself into a state of “inaudibility,” and the rhyme becomes more an emphatic means of punctuation than a self-​asserting vector of pattern. Byron and W. S. Gilbert would subsequently treat it as a virtuosic cadenza, but virtuosity is not classical, nor is it gentlemanly; Dryden and Pope used rhyme like the perfect cadences of diatonic music, central but virtually taken for granted. Blank verse, on the other hand, unable to soften and polish the English clown, might be said to have encouraged his uncouthness (see c­ hapter 23, “Blank Verse”). Most obviously, it lacked the formal rhyme that the popular imagination identifies with poetry: “ ‘and friends is dear, and I am heer.—​Which is verse,’ said Mr Peggotty, surprised to find it out, ‘though

11  Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, in The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), p. 118.

 

Stanzas   409 I hadn’t such intentions.’ ”12 Even Shakespeare, its greatest practitioner, had made rhyme the metonym for the whole enterprise of versification: “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments | Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.”13 To compensate for its lack, blank verse dignified itself through what the rhetors called megalopreia, a tendency toward inflation as much at odds with Sprat’s plain speaking as any stanzaic tapestry. The strenuousness of blank verse challenged neoclassic ease, whether construed as fluency or lucidness. One thinks of T. S. Eliot’s notorious (but by no means frivolous) attack on Milton, which centers on “the complication of a Miltonic sentence,” defined as “an active complication, a complication deliberately introduced into what was a previously simplified and abstract thought.”14 Even Joseph Warton reproached Thomson for language “sometimes harsh and inharmonious, and sometimes turgid and obscure.”15 The project of neoclassicism extended also to prose, modern style beginning in effect with Dryden and Joseph Addison, who can be read without the effort of concentration demanded by Milton, say, or Thomas Browne. And just as the complex suspensions of sense in the Asiatic period contrasted with the sententious clarity of Attic style, so did the elaborate stanza (on the one hand) and magniloquent blank verse (on the other) with the couplet. The first two subsist in hypotaxis and interlacing, the third in capsulation and in the forward thrust of parataxis. This shift in emphasis must also be borne in mind in accounting for the couplet’s ascendancy over its theoretically “prosaic” rival. Having come to prominence, the couplet held its ground for more than a century, even when, after the death of Pope, some poets began to explore more spacious strophic alternatives. Its crypto-​stanzaic nature derived from its retention of rhyme, so much so that we could even call it a “stanzetta.” Since “verse” gets its name from the act of turning (vertere), and since it takes a minimum of two lines to create a turn, the couplet functions de facto as a minimal poem. En masse, given its mesmeric, iterative rhyme, it lulls itself into a background hum, but that in no way disqualifies its efficiency setting up a sequence of furnishable spaces. Its advantage to the neoclassical poet is its very restrictiveness, for, by the limitation of scope, it makes feasible its own perfection. Dryden claimed in the preface to Annus Mirabilis that he had “always found the couplet Verse most easie, … for there the work is sooner at an end, every two lines concluding the labour of the Poet: but in Quattrains he has to carry it farther on; and not only so, but to bear along in his head the troublesome sense of four lines together” (vol. i, p. 51). Having chosen the couplet for their instauratio magna, the new classicists worked it in the same way that Jane Austen worked her little piece of ivory. Objects on a small scale not only demand the finest and most delicate kinds of organization, but they also create the context best suited for their appreciation. Stanza did not so much yield to the couplet as vanish into it, making the pretty rooms that Donne had proposed to build in his sonnets—​pretty rooms that, even so, remained palatial in tone and substance, as though an enfilade of Versailles chambers had been reduced to the compass of a doll’s house. 12  Charles Dickens, The Personal History of David Copperfield, ed. Trevor Blount (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 940. 13  William Shakespeare, The Sonnets, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), p. 30. 14  T. S. Eliot, “Milton I,” in Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 127. 15  Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 2 vols. (London, 1782), vol. i, p. 43.

 

410   Rodney Stenning Edgecombe

Stanzas and Stanzettas Stanzas are architectural constructs, and when Drayton reviews the various options he had entertained before settling on ottava rima for The Barrons Wars in the Raigne of Edward the Second, he sounds like a master builder with an archive of blueprints before him. His final choice has the virtue of being a “stanza of all other the most complete, and best proportioned, consisting of eight, sixe inter wouen, and a couplet in base,” whereas the Quadrin doth neuer double, or to vse a word of Heraldrie, neuer bringeth foorth Gemells. The Quinzain too soone. The Sestin hath Twinnes in the base, but they detaine not the Musicke, nor the Cloze (as Musitions terme it) long enough for an Epick Poem; The stanza of seauen is touched before; This of eight both holds the tune cleane through to the base of the columne (which is the couplet at the foote or bottom) & closeth not but with a full satisfaction to the care for so long detention.16

Observe how important twin rhymes were for Drayton, and how, even in the sixteenth century, the couplet had established its grounding, founding function. The alternate rhyme of the ballad quatrain he rejects out of hand for failing to supply one. But at the same time, notwithstanding their capacity to “close,” couplets afford him no room to expatiate, an Elizabethan impulse that distinguishes his sensibility from that of the new classicists. In wanting to “detaine” the music, Drayton exposes the ekphrastic nature of the extended stanza, the way in which The Faerie Queene and “The Eve of St. Agnes” dissipate their narrative drive in static tableaux and vignettes. Nor are shorter stanzas necessarily suited to the discursive verse that dominated post-​Restoration developments, for many song lyrics lace up a thought in each stanza, and this develops an appositional instead of a consecutive relation with its neighbours. One could cut up many of these poems into discrete stanzas and toss them into a hat. Drawn out in random sequence, they would make, instead of a Dada-​esque cacophony, more or less the same poem that went in. Even some of the toughest and most excogitated lyrics—​Donne’s—​would not suffer from this treatment, for “The Canonization” is much more a passacaglia circling upon itself than it is a fugue in pursuit of a goal. Discursive poetry, on the other hand, needs to control and measure its development, and most couplet poets spurned the recurrent luxury of a “resting place”17—​Puttenham’s definition of a stanza. For whether we embrace his or Donne’s alternative etymon of a room, stanzas are necessarily associated with stopping or dwelling. In heroic couplets that habit of pleasant idling yields to a pattern of perpetual arrival and departure, like that in a busy terminal. A character in An Essay of Dramatick Poesie observes that “men of excellent and quick parts may speak noble things ex tempore: but those thoughts are never fetter’d with the numbers or sound of Verse without study, and therefore it cannot be but unnatural to present the most free way of speaking, in that which is the most constrain’d” (Dryden, Works, vol. xvii,

16 

Michael Drayton, The Barrons Wars in the Raigne of Edward the Second: With Englands Heroicall Epistles (London, 1603), sig. A3r. 17  George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doige Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), p. 65.

 

Stanzas   411 pp. 65–​6). This might seem to damn the couplet out of hand, but Dryden has an adversarius quickly adduce a counterargument. Rhyme, the solvent of blank-​verse amplitude, necessarily enforces an epigrammatic, summary utterance: But Verse, you say, circumscribes a quick and luxuriant fancy, which would extend it self too far on every subject, did not the labour which is requir’d to well turn’d and polish’d Rhyme, set bounds to it. (vol. xvii, p. 67)

The decision to valorize the confining double rhyme also enjoyed the immediate “sanction” of the French neoclassicists, whose practice obviously weighed heavily with Charles’s Francophile court. It was not possible to take over the Alexandrine altogether, for, given the accentual-​syllabic character of English verse, the six-​foot line, “like a wounded Snake, drags its slow length along” (Pope, Essay on Criticism, line 357). Still, the heroic couplet provided the next best thing to “the beauty of their Rhime,” which Dryden’s Lisideius prefers for “writing in Tragedies before ours in Blanck-​verse.” He adds: “For our own [plays] I doubt not but it will exceedingly beautifie them, and I can see but one reason why it should not generally obtain, that is, because our Poets write so ill in it” (Dryden, Works, vol. xvii, p. 43). One of the poets that Dryden had in mind was clearly Chaucer, whose narrative couplet, with all its amiable laxity and unashamed deployment of “low words” (“And if thou kanst nat tellen it anon, | Yet wol I yeve thee leve for to gon”18), lacked the polish and concision demanded by its neoclassic practitioners. But while it might help toward securing those qualities, it could not guarantee them: Pope, after all, gave “rhyme” some dire bedfellows in “All ryme, and scrawl, and scribble, to a man.”19 Additional mechanisms of internal order were needed to shape and refine the couplet as conventional stanzas shape and refine the comparatively inchoate paragraphs of blank verse. In Chaucer’s hands, rhyme might seem a “Gothic” barbarism, but, sophistically viewed through a classical lens, it could even pass itself off as faux homoioteleuton: Homoioteleuton [Quintilian] defines: “when clauses conclude alike, the same syllables being placed at the end of each … correspondence in the ending of two or more sentences … .” The similarity could come, presumably, from similar terminations of any sort, not just similar inflections. In terms of English use, then, it would mean simply rhymed verses.20

And even if that pretense broke down on inspection, it was still possible to polish up the homely, shambling rhyme of the Chaucerian couplet—​almost habitually catalectic by virtue of the terminal e’s—​into clean, emphatic, “masculine” cadences. New-​classic poets despised “the liberty of making any part of a Verse for the sake of Rhyme, or concluding with a word that is not currant English, or using the variety of Female Rhymes, all which our Fathers practis’d” (Dryden, vol. i, p. 51). Nor would they court the bathos of allowing humdrum details into their new-​anointed vehicle: “what is more unbefitting the Majesty of Verse, then to call a Servant, or bid a door

18  Geoffrey Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1957), p. 85. 19  Pope, “The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated,” line 188, in Poems, vol. iv, p. 211. 20  Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms: A Guide for Students of English Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1969), p. 54.

 

412   Rodney Stenning Edgecombe be shut in Rhime?” (Dryden, vol. xvii, p. 67). Unless the content were also to pass through a lexical filter, the sow’s ear of the Chaucerian couplet would not only resist the neoclassical project of the silken purse but actively mock it. Doors are not shut in Augustan poetry unless for mock-​heroic effect (“Shut, shut the door, good John! fatigu’d I  said”);21 and if they’re admitted to echt-​heroic verse, they are glamorized out of recognition (“Full in the Passage of each spacious Gate”).22 That, however, is to trench on the issue of poetic diction, and for the purpose of this chapter, we need only consider how the couplet, having trumped both blank verse and the extended stanza as the form of choice, discharged its new, post-​Chaucerian function as a default “stanzetta.” Denied the largesse of more spacious strophic forms, it made a virtue of necessity, and turned its potential constrictiveness into an actual trenchancy. As a stanza both embryonic and vestigial, it displaced rhyme-​braiding with internal patterns that, less exigent but no less exacting, imparted the muscularity that Cowley promised to a reformed Philosophy. Donne had used antimetabole to riddling ends in “The Good Morrow,” a cat’s-​cradle with all the compacture and mental challenge of the “strong line”: “My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares.”23 Denham, in his famous lines about the Thames (the Baptist cry of neoclassicism), makes the same figure the instrument of analysis. It is stanzaic engineering in a nutshell: O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream My great example, as it is my theme! Thou deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull, Strong without rage, without ore-​flowing full.24

Clearly, then, the heroic couplet offered a via media between extremes. On the one side loomed the Scylla of blank verse, a measure that, lacking the discipline of rhyme, sometimes erred toward the “turgid and obscure”; and, on the other, the Charybdis of the extended stanza, its vortex of rhyme perpetually threatening the shipwreck of plain speech. While Dryden argued that rhyme ought properly to be “a part of the Verse, that it should never mis-​ lead the sence, but it self be led and govern’d by it” (vol. xvii, p. 14), there could be no denying that stanzaic complexity sometimes straitjacketed the poet’s line of thought. Take the case of Donne: in the first stanza of most of the Songs and Sonnets thought and feeling are allowed to shape their metrical mould unhampered by any convention of tradition. In the following stanzas, the position is completely reversed: thought and feeling are at great pains to fit themselves into the now hardened mould.25

Not only that, but elaborately patterned stanzas presented the same deficiency that the new classicists saw in Gothic architecture, its fretted vaults “O’erwrought with Ornaments

21 

Pope, “An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,” line 1, in Poems, vol. iv, p. 96.

22 Pope, The Temple of Fame, line 145, in ibid., vol. ii, p. 253.

23  John Donne, “The Good-​Morrow,” in The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 70. 24  Sir John Denham, Coopers Hill (“B text”), lines 189–​92, in Brendan O Hehir (ed.), Expans’d Hieroglyphicks: A Study of Sir John Denham’s “Coopers Hill” with a Critical Edition of the Poem (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1969), pp. 150–​1. 25  Albert Hayes, “Counterpoint in Herbert,” Studies in Philology, 35 (1938), 50.

 

Stanzas   413 of barb’rous Pride.”26 The quatrain represented a ne plus ultra for most lyric poets between Dryden and Byron, the more extended forms reserved for such gentle burlesques as William Shenstone’s “Schoolmistress” and Thomson’s “Castle of Indolence.” And even though there is huge stanzaic inventiveness in the odes of Collins and Gray, it has none of Donne’s showiness, being less individualistic and more concerned with the generation of classical effect. The act of tossing off new patterns whenever one put pen to paper would have smacked of self-​advertisement, whereas neoclassicism demanded the artist’s “continual self-​sacrifice” and “continual extinction of personality.”27 Couplet rhyme, while still enforcing structure, resembled a musical ostinato, the half-​audible servitor of the homophonic theme above it. Extended stanzas were more like distracting counter melodies. The surface luxuriance of Gothic art can, as in the reductio ad absurdum of Milan cathedral—​an architectural rhyme scheme run riot—​lose the outline of a building in a forest of ornament. No doubt the new-​ classicists viewed elaborate stanzas in the same way. They strove to suppress the intrusive personality of the Gothic artist (not the less intrusive for his anonymity) by submitting their invention to inherited forms instead of crafting novelties ad hoc and ex nihilo. In fact, eighteenth-​century couplet poems resemble the balanced buildings (many of them also composed of bricks) that went up at the same time, for just as their ease came from narrowed focus in preference to intrinsicate knots of rhyme, as Shakespeare might have called them, so the symmetries of Andrea Palladio appealed “to the civilized taste and polite learning of the Georgian gentry than that of any other architect.”28

Metaphysical Stanzas Many Metaphysical stanzas, moreover, had favored linear inequalities. Their hour-​glass pinchings and expansions disconcerted the neo-​Palladian eye with effects unstable at best and rollicking at worst. Consider Warton’s objection to the “comic song” with which Addison had “so strangely debased and degraded his elegant opera of Rosamond” (Warton, Essay, vol. i, p. 57), and his outrage that the same template (2a2a4b2c2c4b) should figure in Pope’s “Ode for Musick, on St. Cecilia’s Day”: “the numbers that conclude this stanza are of so burlesque and ridiculous a kind, and have so much the air of a drinking song at a county election, that one is amazed and concerned to find them in a serious ode” (vol. i, p. 56). His irritation is prompted not only by the anapestic jog—​“Thus Song could prevail | O’er Death and o’er Hell, | A Conquest how hard and how glorious” (lines 87–​9, in Pope, Poems, vol. vi, p. 33)—​but also by the veerings in and out of the stanza silhouette, though Pope, at least, had rhymed commensurate lines, in contrast to the unequal ones harnessed by Herbert and Donne—​an effect that recalls the disparate towers on the west fronts of Chartres and Rouen: “If souls be made of earthly mold | Let them love gold.”29 Pope no doubt meant the “ill-​matched” tercet (5a5a6a) of “On Silence” to burlesque Rochester’s

26 Pope, The Temple of Fame, line 120, in Poems, vol. ii, p. 252. 27 

Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose, p. 26. Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1943), p. 217. 29  George Herbert, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), p. 111. 28 

 

414   Rodney Stenning Edgecombe isometric tercet in “On Nothing.” The fact that Warton should object to a brindisi in the context of an ode tells us that it and other stanzaic forms continued to flourish in popular culture even while serious poets devoted their energies to perfecting the couplet. Here is one such, its roistering, elastic outline similar to the “blot” on Pope’s ode. It even contains a line of “scatting,” which scans both as spondaic and pyrrhic tetrameter, depending on whether the laugh be coarse or light, and the tetrachord sung andante or presto: There’s Madam Faustina, Catso! And eke Madame Catsoni; Likewise Signior Senesino, Are tutti Abbandonni; Ha, ha, ha, ha; Do, re, mi, fa, Are now but Farce and Folly, We’re ravish’d all, with Toll, loll, loll, And pretty! Pretty Polly.30

In The Beggar’s Opera, Gay contrafacted satiric texts to popular songs, keeping to the original stanza shapes all the while. The duet between Peachum and Lockit, a (literal) parody of “Packington’s Pound,” has a contour like that in “Thus Song could prevail”: But if by mishap, They fail of a Chap, To keep in their Hands, they each other entrap.31

Some of the Beggar’s Opera songs used a ballad meter (4a4b4a4b) cousined with the more “orthodox” measure (with alternating trimeters) that Percy brought to wider public attention in 1765. His Reliques of Ancient Poetry prepared the ground for the sublime antiquarian pastiche of Coleridge and Keats, but its immediate progeny was Cowper’s benign mock-​ heroic effort, “The Diverting History of John Gilpin, Showing How He Went Farther Than He Intended, and Came Safe Home Again.” Although Samuel Johnson reproached Matthew Prior for his readiness “to descend from the dignity of the poet and statesman to the low delights of mean company,”32 the latter chose rather to powder and corset the fifteenth-​century ballad of “The Nutbrown Maid,” and turned its douzain (an aggregate of three ballad stanzas) into heroic couplets. The frigidity of “Henry and Emma” declares itself from the very start: “Where beauteous Isis and her Husband Tame | With mingl’d Waves, for ever, flow the Same.”33 Comparing the vigor of the original’s “low delights” (“Be it right or wrong, these men among | On women do complain”34), one wishes that Prior had chosen rather to stoop and conquer. Quatrains certainly 30  Henry Carey, “Polly Peachum,” in Poems on Several Occasions: The Third Edition, Much Enlarged (London, 1729), pp. 151–​2. 31  John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera, in Dramatic Works, ed. John Fuller, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), vol. ii, p. 47. 32  Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), vol. iii, p. 58. 33  Matthew Prior, “Henry and Emma, a Poem, upon the Model of the Nut-​Brown Maid,” lines 39–​40, in The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, ed. H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), vol. i, p. 279. 34  “The Nut-​Brown Maid,” lines 1–​2, in John Matthews Manly (ed.), English Prose and Poetry (1137–​ 1892) (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1907), p. 88.

 

Stanzas   415 gave him adequate service in his wersh, respectable vers de société, and they also served other poets of the second rank. Ambrose Philips’s “Fragment from Sappho” fails to burn à la Byron, not least because of the insipid tetrameter couplets that he has clustered into four-​line units: Blest as th’immortal gods is he, The youth who fondly sits by thee, And hears and sees thee all the while Softly speak and sweetly smile.35

The quatrain, however, was destined for better things in the eighteenth century. Because, like the medieval bishops, Charles Wesley adapted popular ballads so as to deny the devil all the good tunes, that form also exerted an aerating influence on Augustan hymnody. Compared with the massive Gothic fortresses of the chorale—​“Ein’ feste Burg” scans at 87.87.66.667, with an unrhymed terminal “widow” (“Auf Erd ist nicht seins gleichen”36)—​ hymns in common meter (8686) and long (8888), have an altogether more graceful shape, though one would hesitate to call them Palladian. Hymnic meter ostensibly centers on syllable counts, but there can be no doubting the kinship of 8686 with the traditional ballad stanza, and of 8888 with its all-​four variant. Cowper’s Olney Hymns can be viewed as baptized ballads after a fashion, and sometimes rise to real lyric heights. Look at the way the participles in “Lovest Thou Me” function both in the nominative and accusative cases, another happy consequence of the Augustan drive toward Latinity: I deliver’d thee when bound, And, when wounded, heal’d thy wound.37

Gray for his part did more than merely dignify the ballad quatrain; by replacing the tetrameter with a five-​beat line, he ennobled it into an instrument for sonorous meditation. The heroic couplet, with its perpetual drive toward epigram, often sacrifices heart to head, its closure, its assurance, its mannered and mannerly parisons, the rhetorical term for patterns of equivalent balance, all creating an effect of artifice. When asked to expand with passion, as Pope asks it to in Eloisa to Abelard, it suffers from narrowed arteries, made unequal to the task by its traditional strategies of containment, “As though a tongueless nightingale should swell | Her throat in vain, and die, heart-​stifled, in her dell.”38 Gray found a way round this perceived deficiency, however, as witness Ian Jack’s experiment when he recast the stanzas of the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard into couplet quatrains à la Philips, and recorded the loss of “the great suspended chords that sound through the poem and give it its characteristic inevitability.”39

35 

W. Peacock (ed.), English Verse, 5 vols. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1929), vol. iii, p. 77. H. G. Fiedler (ed.), A Book of German Verse from Luther to Liliencron (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916), p. 1. 37  William Cowper, Poetical Works, ed. H. S. Milford, rev. Norma Russell (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 444. 38  John Keats, “The Eve of St. Agnes,” lines 206–​7, in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1978), p. 308. 39  Ian Jack, “Gray’s Elegy Reconsidered,” in Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (eds.), From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. 156. 36 

 

416   Rodney Stenning Edgecombe

Quantitative Meter One might wonder why, in an age that revered classical form to the point of idolatry, no significant effort was made to force English verse on to the Procrustean bed of quantitative meter. The answer must rest in the good sense of the “mob of Gentlemen,” doubtless aware that all the earlier experiments along these lines had failed. English repels the imposition of “correct” quantities, as witness—​to take one example of thousands—​the way we pronounce “bona fide” with long o and i vowels, and any attempt to force the horse to drink is generally futile. Rhyme might have been a “Gothic” invention, but it provided a more appropriate way of polishing English roughness than the droning clausulae that quantitative metrists force on its resistant texture. As George Sampson points out, the writer of English hexameters is … in a difficulty. If he gives us line upon line of “strawberry jam-​pots” he risks monotony; if he tries to avoid the “strawberry jam-​pots” by variation of stress or of foot he risks metrical unintelligibility.40

Pope’s dismissal of the Sapphics and elegiacs in Arcadia—​“Sydney’s verse halts ill on Roman feet” (p. 639)—​says it all. Which is not to deny that some fine quasi-​stanzaic poems were created by these means in the course of the eighteenth century. Isaac Watts’s “Day of Judgement,” subtitled “An Ode Attempted in English Sapphics,” is short enough and majestic enough not to vex the reader with that repeated Adonic clausula (the notorious “strawberry jam-​pot”). Cowper even makes a virtue of its heaviness. It becomes a convulsive sob in the “Lines Written during a Period of Insanity,” which poem also turns the congestedness of faux-​quantitative verse to good effect, catching the cadence of Hopkins avant la lettre in its eccentrically pointed stresses: Him the vindictive rod of angry justice Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong; I, fed with judgment, in a fleshly tomb am Buried above ground. (p. 290)

Also “echt” classical after their fashion, the unrhymed odes of the Wartons were prompted by the translation that Milton made of Horace’s Carmina i.5, and found their consummation in Collins’s masterly “Ode to Evening.” Here the stanza dilates and contracts at will, moving on its own music like a graceful strand of waterweed. Even so, it remains something of a lusus naturae with respect to the dominant trend of the century.

Stanzaic Options So let us retrace our steps down this unproductive cul-​de-​sac, and glance at the other stanzaic options available to those who shunned the discipline of the couplet, or who found it

40  George Sampson, The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1949), p. 749.

 

Stanzas   417 too cramping. Some monostrophic odes embraced the quatrain as a measure well suited to their purpose, and Gray’s “Elegy” is ranked by many (including Tennyson) among the greatest poems in the language. That should not blind us, however, to Gray’s two highly wrought Pindarics, the first “correct” (which is to say rigorously structured) approximations to their Greek originals. Cowley’s wild attempts had been wide of the mark. The polystrophic organization of “The Progress of Poesy” and “The Bard” is one of several original Augustan innovations in stanza form, but to grasp the full range of the “variegated” ode, we must return to Dryden, whose Cecilian odes served the “divine science” of poetry no less than they did that of music. Warton had no doubt about his significance as the founder of a line: [Pope] used to declare, that if Dryden had finished a translation of the Iliad, he would not have attempted one after so great a master; he might have said with more propriety, I will not write a music-​ode after Alexander’s Feast, which the variety and harmony of its numbers, and the beauty and force of its images, have conspired to place at the head of modern lyric compositions. (vol. i, p. 52)

Warton’s compound “music-​ode” gives a cue for us to consider the relation between music and stanzaic form at this point. Poetry derives from the Greek πoιέω “to make,” a neutral factitive verb not exclusively concerned with aesthetic production. However, the word for lyric poetry (μέλη) firmly links that making to a musical context, μέλη being the plural of μέλoς “melody.” The muse of tragedy, Melpomene (“singer”), was named for her musical rather than verbal prowess, and μέλoς accordingly played an important part in μίμησις. Consider John Thompson’s observation about the ontology of verse: What metre adds to language is precisely the element of imitation that makes of the two, when they are joined, the art of verse. “Imitation” here is used in its simplest physical sense. The metrical pattern is a copy, a mimicry, a counterfeit without intention to deceive, of the basic elements of our language and of their order. When this metrical pattern is placed in conjunction with some words or phrases, a tension exists between them, a strained state of mutual relations.41

In Greek poetry, meter and music were one and the same thing, but, in the course of time, lyres dwindled into metonyms, and when Horace mentions the “cithara,” he does so with a stylus rather than a plectrum in hand: praecipe lugubres cantus, Melpomene, cui liquidam pater vocem cum cithara dedit. [Teach me a song of mourning, O Melpomene, thou to whom the Father gave a liquid voice and music of the lyre!]42

Poetry had by this time absorbed the regulatory patterns of music and largely dispensed with its parent. But when the parent reasserted its authority—​as in those cantatas known as

41 

John Thompson, The Founding of English Metre (London: Routlege & Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 9.

42 Horace, The Odes and the Epodes, trans. C. E. Bennett (London: William Heinemann, 1968),

pp. 68–​9.

 

418   Rodney Stenning Edgecombe Cecilian odes—​it effortlessly reclaimed its authority. The musical phrase trumps the verbal at every turn, supplanting the vertical experience of stanza with the lateral one of the stave, which dissolves rhyme into itself. It is impossible, for example, to tell from a musical text if one is dealing with an internally rhymed tetrameter or two consecutive dimeters; and in Morley’s “It was a lover and his lass,” the setting “defies” the official rhyme (“spring”) by setting up quasi-​rhymes (“ding”) at the ends of successive phrases.

Music and Poetry Pulled apart, however, music and poetry retain the formal outlines of their severance like the echoic coastlines of Africa and South America. The language of music remains phatic to the extent that it recognizes the Gestalt of a conversation (“a distinct relation between an announcing phrase and an answering one is set up”43), and even in Beethoven’s Bagatelle no.  6, Op.  33, written at a time when periodic melody had supplanted the declamatory melodies of Versailles opera, we still encounter the directive “con una certa espressione parlante.”44 Even so, adducing his definition of poetry in 1588, Puttenham acknowledged that music had achieved a greater power of consonance than its erstwhile partner: Poesie is skill to speake & write harmonically: and verses or rime be a kind of Musicall utterance, by reason of a certaine congruitie of sounds pleasing the eare, though not perchance so exquisitely as the harmonicall concents of the artificial Musicke, consisting in strained tunes, as in the vocall Musike, or that of melodious instruments, as Lutes, Harpes, Regals, Records and such like.45

This implies that φάσις “speech” had been colonized by μέλoς from within to forge a compound—​call it “melophasis”—​the differentia that brackets poetry from unmusical prose. We have little knowledge of Greek music beyond the theory of the modes, but it almost certainly took the form of recitative, the words dictating its shapes and underpinning its organization in the same way that they did in early Baroque opera: “The French, in the operas of Rameau and Lully, placed more importance on declamation, so that to experience one of their performances was to hear an almost endless succession of recitatives.”46 This, however, is a judgment made with post-​nineteenth-​century ears. Lully did not dispense with melody; he simply conceived it differently: “Lully … considered musical expression to lie in melody alone. His Airs are square-​cut and well-​defined. The words were never made to fit the music, and there are, consequently, many instances of irregular rhythm.”47 The greatest melodists

43  Stuart Macpherson, Form in Music with Special Reference to the Designs of Instrumental Music (London: Joseph Williams, 1915), p. 25. 44  Ludwig van Beethoven, Sept Bagatelles Op. 33 (Braunschweig: Henry Litolff, n.d.), p. 11. 45 Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, pp. 64–​5. 46  Brian Adams, La Stupenda: A Biography of Joan Sutherland (Richmond, Victoria: Hutchinson of Australia, 1980), p. 48. 47  Norman Demuth, French Opera: Its Development to the Revolution (Sussex: Artemis Press, 1943), p. 154.

 

Stanzas   419 have necessarily reversed this emphasis. At the court of the Sun King, by contrast, the symbiosis of dramatic music tilted wordward, so much so that, before long, French vocalism became intolerable to Italian ears: “The singing, likewise, had deteriorated into what the Italians called the urlo francese or the French howling.”48 Recitative stands in the same relation to blank verse as arias to stanzaic poetry, and, as Western music evolved in the course of the eighteenth century, homophonic music brought with it the essentially stanzaic formations of periodic melody which, as its name implies, still retained a connection with verbal forms. In recitative, cadences come at will; in periodic melody, they are built in, and to that extent provide an analogue for rhyme. The duple phrase at the heart of musical structure has the same kind of finalizing force: “We come here to the foundation of musical structure, to the two-​measure group. This is the unit by which musical form is measured. As one measures the length of an object by inches, so one measures the extension of a melody by two-​measure groups.”49 When Wagner returned to melody the more phatic graph it had enjoyed during the infancy of opera, he loosened the melodic period into the same flexible, half-​regulated units that we find in Anglo-​Saxon verse—​to whose alliterative format his own libretti bear a marked resemblance: Rossini turns to the subject of “mélopée déclamatoire.” Wagner’s defence of the flexible, personally involving, declamatory style is full and impassioned. “The funeral oration of melody,” Rossini rejoins, but Wagner merely restates his case, attacking “symmetrical periods, persistent rhythms, predictable harmonic progressions, and obligatory cadences.”50

Pure recitative actually had a place in the eighteenth-​ century cantata. In Gray’s “Installation Ode,” it is labeled, and the (unmarked) recitative in Pope’s Cecilian ode prompted Warton to exclaim “what follows is hardly rhyme, and surely not poetry” (vol. i, p. 52 n). But in the Cecilian ode, Dryden and his Restoration imitators created something altogether different—​a wholly flexible stanzaic design that has been shaped to a composer’s mandate. We could call “A Song for St CECILIA’s Day,” expressly conceived as verbal music, the “the acorn from which the oak tree grew”51—​Tchaikovsky’s description of the Kamarinskaya—​and, remembering the specialized tradition begotten upon it, could add Constant Lambert’s rider: “an acorn that … produced a series of larger and more decorative acorns” (p. 118). Among them are Nicholas Brady’s delightful effort—​who could possibly resist its aerial trees? (“When to the Thracian Lyre with leafy Wings they flew”52)—​Pope’s even better essay, and Gray’s “Installation Ode,” all of them cantata-​like in nature and therefore designed to support swags of diverse music. Some of that music survives even when pressed and dried upon the page, for stanza preserves the music of versified language as

48 

William L. Crosten, French Grand Opera: An Art and a Business (1948; repr. New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), p. 37. 49  Hugo Leichtentritt, Musical Form (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), p. 7. 50  Richard Osborne, Rossini (London: J. M. Dent, 1986), p. 110. 51  Quoted in Constant Lambert, Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948), p. 118. 52  Purcell (above, note 1), p. 14.

 

420   Rodney Stenning Edgecombe a lungfish preserves its life in a capsule of notional water. Only when immersed again in that “destructive element”—​destructive insofar as the exigencies of melody trump the stanza’s native emphases and cadences—​is the containing membrane released, and floats away on the tide. More than any that preceded them, these efforts of Dryden illustrate the dictum that “All art aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.”53 In any symbiosis of music and word, music will always exert its sway, and even recitative, the most accommodating and flexible mode of setting text, could make polished Alexandrines to freeze the blood, as when Lully, “striking a few cords, sung in recitative … four lines in the Iphigenia of Racine” in such a way that “the notes with which [he] accompanied these words, erected the hair of [his auditors’] heads with horror” (Warton, vol. i, pp. 63–​4).

Counting Syllables To summarize, then: the marginal position of stanza in relation to couplet between 1660 and 1800 is to some extent an illusion. The larger form does not vanish so much as go to ground like the Arethusa, its regulatory function absorbed into, and miniaturized by, the smaller. It was brought to such a state of polish, to such a condition of ease and fluency, that it achieved a numerositas (musicality) no less tangible than the more ostentatious virtuosity of the ode for music that flourished alongside it, and which engendered a line of poly-​ and monostrophic odes. These last represent the apogee of the form in its public modality before the Romantics turned it into a private meditation, Wordsworth’s “Ode to Duty” being a Janus creation in respect of the different traditions. When Johnson passed judgment on the Metaphysical poets, the heroic couplet supplied his yardstick, and it shows how inherently musical (or, to put it differently, crypto-​stanzaic) it had become by the end of the century. Music, after all, is felt on the pulse, not tried on the finger, and the Metaphysical strophes that married unequal lines and delayed their rhymes were of a piece with the jagged stress patterns that privileged speech above melody. Johnson used “modulation” in the musical sense of a well-​managed transition, but, as one reads his indictment, one cannot help thinking also of modules, of those compact regulating envelopes that stanza is tasked to provide for the passage of a poem: The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to shew their learning was their whole endeavour; but, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they only wrote verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect, that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables.54

53 

Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1910), p. 135.

54 Johnson, Lives, vol. i, p. 200.

 

Stanzas   421

References Addison, Catherine, “Little Boxes: The Effects of the Stanza on Poetic Narrative,” Style, 37, no. 2 (2003), 124–​43. Bradford, Richard, “Rhyming Couplets and Blank Verse,” in Christine Gerrard (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth-​Century Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 341–​55. Ingham, Mike, “‘The True Concord of Well-​ Tuned Sounds’: Musical Adaptations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Shakespeare, 2 (2013), 220–​40. Kaminski, Thomas, “Edmund Waller’s ‘Easy’ Style and the Heroic Couplet,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900, 55, no. 1 (2015), 95–​123.

 

Chapter 25

Free Ver se a nd Prose P oet ry Richard Bradford Most would assume that notions of free verse and prose poetry in English were inconceivable prior to early twentieth-​century modernism, aside from the rare cases of unorthodoxy in the works of William Blake and Walt Whitman. In fact the debate on the nature of the metrical line, on whether it must conform to any regular, abstract pattern, began with the publication of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton’s note on “The Verse” is the first-​ ever defense of English nondramatic blank verse. It anticipates objections to his use of the form, regarded by general consensus as a somewhat vulgar hybrid of verse and rhythmical prose and thought suitable only for drama. The early debate involved those who supported Milton’s break with tradition and those who did not, and neither side founded their arguments on a thorough analysis of what Milton had done and what his precedent might involve for the future of English verse.1 This came with the formation of the so-​called “Elocution Movement” in the mid-​eighteenth century. The elocutionists were critics who treated interpretation as synonymous with oral performance: the silent text on the page was the equivalent of a piece of sheet music. Thomas Sheridan, in Lectures on the Art of Reading (1775), invented the notion of the “pause of suspension,” a subtle performative device which enabled the unrhymed pentameter of nondramatic blank verse to be heard in the same way that rhyme marked off the line for the listener in conventional poetry. This was Sheridan’s counterargument against those who averred that if the pentameter—​particularly the iambic pentameter—​did not rhyme, it ceased to be recognizable as verse: the line, they contended, was the definitive formal feature of poetry. The most famous adherent of this principle was Samuel Johnson, who proclaimed in his Life of Milton that Paradise Lost was “verse only to the eye.”2

1 

See Richard W. Bradford, Augustan Measures: Restoration and Eighteenth-​Century Writings on Prosody and Metre (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 1–​96. 2  Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), vol. i, p. 294.

 

Free Verse and Prose Poetry    423

Conservative Critics Johnson is today the best known of what I refer to below as the “conservative” or “prescriptive” critics, those who contended that verse must satisfy abstract formal criteria to qualify as genuine poetry, in particular that the line on the page should be a record of an audibly detectable unit of meter; during the eighteenth century the most influential conservative critic was Henry Home, Lord Kames, author of Elements of Criticism (1762).3 Sheridan, with the “pause of suspension,” seeks to resolve the problem of visual or silent versus aural interpretation. Paradise Lost: —​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​and durst abide Jehovah thundering out of Sion thron’d Between the cherubim. (book i, lines 385–​7)

Were this read as prose, the undoubted natural pause between “Sion” and “thron’d” would be the only one acknowledged, and the latter word would lose its visual isolation. But supply the “pause of suspension”: and what sublime ideas does not a single monosyllable excite by its position? bounded on one side by a cesural, and on the other by a final pause. And what more exalted idea could have been conceived of the Deity, than is expressed by that single word? which, after the description of his executing just vengeance on the rebellious, and darting his thunders at their heads, shews that this required no unusual exertion for the Godhead; He performed these wonders—​thron’d!4

Thus, through Sheridan’s exegesis, we find that Milton exploits the potentialities of poetic form in the printed line to create extra-​syntactic emphases not merely for localized stylistic effects but in order to illuminate larger thematic features of the poem. These insights uncannily anticipate the conclusions of Hollander in conferring upon certain stylistic subtleties of Paradise Lost a density of Joycean proportions—​a possibility also considered by Christopher Ricks.5 For example: Now conscience wakes the bitter memory Of what he was, what is, and what must be Worse. (book iv, lines 24–​6)

Sheridan comments: “What an amazing force does this position give to the word worse! and in what strong colours does it paint the desperate state of reprobation into which Satan had fallen!” (vol. ii, p. 248). Sheridan, based on his readings of Milton, evolved a notion of a metrical contract between the poet and the reader. Milton’s blank-​verse line might not correspond with the abstract

3 

See Bradford, Augustan Measures, pp. 97–​129. Thomas Sheridan, Lectures on the Art of Reading, in Two Parts: Containing Part I. The Art of Reading Prose, Part II. The Art of Reading Verse, 2 vols. (London, 1775), vol. ii, pp. 249–​50, quoting Paradise Lost, book i, lines 385–​7. 5  John Hollander, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 96–​8; Christopher Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), esp. pp. 40–​3. 4 

 

424   Richard Bradford model of the iambic pentameter, but his use of syntax and typography was, Sheridan contended, a signal to the reader to locate inherent and intended complexities of form and meaning. The subtleties of his interpretive technique were prescient; he was a close reader a century and a half before the term was invented. Many of his contemporaries, however, treated Milton’s precedent very differently, regarding it as disclosing English as a language more suited to improvisational form than regular meter, and I will examine their work below.

The Ten-​Syllable Line The status and efficacy of the pentameter line is the single concern underlying the great majority of eighteenth-​century prosodic criticism. To define the rationale of the “conservative” prosodists as “syllabism,” as Paul Fussell does,6 tells the twenty-​first-​century reader very little. “Syllabism” itself was not the central aesthetic focus of anyone’s theory. The ten-​syllable line was established in the first place because of the necessary connection it was thought to have with sense. This was reinforced by the development of the heroic couplet where the line often became not only a metrical category but a syntactic component in a fixed rhetorical figure. The English foot was regarded by practically everyone as (predominantly) disyllabic and, if the governing principle of the line length were the meter only, then it would be theoretically possible to write in lines of any even number of syllables. But of course it was not: I wou’d prefer the Verse of ten Syllables, which we call the English Heroique, to that of Eight. This is truly my Opinion. For this sort of Number is more Roomy. The Thought can turn itself with greater ease, in a larger compass.7

Or, in Alexander Pope’s formulation, A needless Alexandrine ends the Song, That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow length along.8

The ten-​syllable line was a convenient rhythmic basis for a poetic “thought.” It must be borne in mind, however, that these considerations of length drew much of their significance from the mechanical structure of the couplet (see ­chapter 22, “Couplets”). The rhyme and its propensity for suggesting closure “organized” the meter. But what considerations of form would prevail if the rhyme were removed? The “metrical” identity of the popular heroic line, its balance and iambic ground-​beat, was organically linked to the particular rhetorical framework of the couplet, but for the conservative critics it was a formal desideratum in itself. Thus the syntactically limited, balanced, predominantly iambic pentameter was metamorphosed, rather in the manner of the Doric column, from a condition of utility to the status of an abstract aesthetic standard. The problem remained that if, in its unrhymed version, 6  Paul Fussell, Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-​Century England (New London: Connecticut College, 1954), pp. 1–​33. 7 Dryden, Discourse of Satire, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1956–​2000), vol. iv, p. 83, 8  Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, lines 356–​7, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–​69), vol. i, p. 280.

 

Free Verse and Prose Poetry    425 the conditions of form which defined such a line were flouted, as they sometimes were in Paradise Lost, then the unit would be seen by many as a meaningless concession to the conventions of the printer. And it is this view which governed much of the elocutionist criticism which opposed itself to Sheridan. As early as 1709 William Coward could observe that loosely textured blank verse owed something of its effect to the printer: ’Tis true the Fiction’s wonderfully done, And the whole Clue of Thoughts completely spun. But like an Image cast in Curious Mould, Tho’, ’tis compos’d of finely-​polish’d Gold, Yet wants that Breath of Life to make It live, Which should right Vigour and true Spirit Give. For fine Romances may be made the same, If but the Printer please to set the Frame. And Declamations ty’d to Measur’d Feet, May yield an Harmony as truly sweet. But how can such Exactness Fancy Raise, More than loose Prose, and undesign’d for Lays?9

John Mason regarded the “Printer’s” measure, except where it coincided with rhyme, or a grammatical or metrical hiatus, as irrelevant to the interpretation of the poem,10 but the first attempt to trace the full implications of this problem came from John Rice in 1765. His work is dedicated to William Kenrick for his advice on the improvement of reading. There is a certain consistency here, since in Kenrick’s Dictionary there is the complaint that many poets failed to reconcile the rules of “oratorical declamation with the rules of artificial versification.”11 Rice too seems aware of this failure and is determined that, in interpretation, the sense should not be sacrificed to abstract form. The error of artificial versification—​that is, the imposition of an iambic rhythm and the application of the terminal pause—​ may be imputed, in a great Degree, to their dealing generally in Poetry and Blank Verse. It is, nevertheless, a very whimsical Reason for mouthing out the Writings of an Author, because they consist of Couplets, or are printed in Lines of ten Syllables.12

The most significant points in this passage are his distinction between “Poetry” and “Blank Verse” and his emphasis on “printed,” because it is revealed later in the work that he regarded blank verse as partly a creation of the printer. He is aware of the influence of the visual text. “The Lines drawn up in Rank and File, with a capital Initial at the Head of each, look formidable, and seem to demand a peculiar Degree of Sound and Energy” (Rice, p.  16). 9  William Coward, Licentia Poetica Discuss’d; or, The True Test of Poetry: Without Which It Is Impossible to Judge of, or Compose a Correct English Poem (London, 1709), pp. 65–​6. Compare Coward’s “Declamations ty’d to Measur’d Feet” with Samuel Johnson’s observation in the Life of Milton: “The variety of pauses, so much boasted by the lovers of blank verse, changes the measures of an English poet to the periods of a declaimer”: see Johnson, Lives, vol. i, p. 294. 10  John Mason, An Essay on Elocution: Intended Chiefly for the Assistance of Those Who Instruct Others in the Art of Reading and Those Who Are Often Called to Speak in Publick (London, 1749), pp. 26–​7. 11  William Kenrick, “Rhetorical Grammar,” in A New Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1773), p. 51. 12  John Rice, An Introduction to the Art of Reading with Energy and Propriety (London, 1765), p. 15.

 

426   Richard Bradford Quoting from an unidentified source that, if verse were read as prose, the “Harmony” of the “Numbers” would be lost,13 Rice answers: In reading Poetry, if the Numbers interfere with the Harmony of the Period, there is a Defect in the Composition: For though the Harmony of prosaic Periods is different, or will admit a greater Latitude and Variety than those of Poetry; yet the Laws of Diction require that the Sense and Meaning of the Writer should be consistent with both. (p. 17)

Rice was one of the first to attack the glib conflation of English accent and quantity; each syllable, he suggests, being a confusing amalgam of “long or short, loud or soft, harsh or smooth” (p. 141). His chapter “On the Mechanism and Harmony of English Verse” is, to a large degree, concerned with attacking the assumptions which often derived from simplified views of accent. Rice’s point seems to be that there is an unbridgeable gap between abstract concepts of English prosodic structure and the actualities of performance. The iambic line is, he says, a confused approximation of its classical equivalent. He admits that English is governed by accent but that the conflicting influences of lexical stress, quantity, and rhetorical emphasis tend to rob it of its intended function as a structural device. Accent, he says, is a rhythmic principle and cannot produce an effect of temporal equality in lines. There is a “Confusion … occasioned by the Want of having made a proper Distinction between Tone and Time, in treating Subjects of rhetorical and poetical Harmony.”14 He is also aware that the prescriptive critics had erected an abstract syntactic framework to shore up the structurally unsound accentual line. And he says, in reference to Kames and Johnson, that “Now I should be pleased to know from what natural Principles it is that they deduce their Rule for pausing at some particular Parts of the Verse, in Preference to others?” (p. 154). He says, referring to Samuel Say’s essay on Paradise Lost, that an almost endless variety in pauses and accentuation can take place in blank verse; “But of what kind is this Advantage? I believe it will be found rather an advantage to the Writer than the Reader” (p. 160). The central tenet of Rice’s system rests upon his confidence in the metrical properties of rhyme. He sees it, much as others had done, as a historical necessity filling the formal gap left by the decay of temporal meters (pp. 161–​74). Thus “variety” of pauses and accents can only really occur in couplet verse, since it is the only form of poetry with an inherent formal definition against which variations could take place “without diminishing any Part of that Harmony, of which Rhime is productive” (p. 161). The implication for blank verse is that its “harmony,” and by this he means the relationship between rhythmic groups separated by natural pauses, should not be reduced to the condition of the couplet: That the Shortness of the Periods, or Intervals between the natural Pauses, really form, in a great Degree, poetic Measures, is farther evident, from the poetical Turn which we find in all Writings of this Kind (The impassioned sections of Paradise Lost), where the Stile is any Degree elevated above the terms of Common Discourse. Thus, it is the quick Succession of a few flowing Syllables that constitutes the Harmony of our English blank Verse, and not its perfect Coincidence with the arbitrary Rules laid down as a Standard for heroic Verse. (p. 176) 13  The reference may be to the as-​yet-​unpublished opinions of Sheridan which must have been known to other elocutionists, such as Rice, through his public lectures. 14  Rice, p. 151. He admits that on certain occasions in Glover’s Leonidas, Pope’s Homer, and Addison’s Cato, tone and time do coincide, but that such monotony is “intolerably tiresome” (pp. 153–​4).

 

Free Verse and Prose Poetry    427 Each blank verse line “must be composed of more than one poetic Period,” and it seems as absurd for “a Verse to end in the middle of a Foot or Measure, as to suppose a Sentence to end in the middle of a Word” (p. 177). This regularity is an artificial ideal and “all artificial Pauses are destructive of true Harmony” (p. 177). Blank-​Verse, therefore, does not consist in Lines of ten Syllables, as the regular Couplet generally does; unless, indeed, we suppose the Standard of Verse erected in the Printing-​House, and that a Compositor can convert Prose into Verse at Pleasure by printing it in detached Lines of ten Syllables. (p. 177)

New Arrangements The evidence of Rice’s oral readings tells him that the rhythmic basis of blank verse is interlineal, consisting of the syntactically defined rhythmic phrase. Rice’s solution to what he sees as an inconsistency forms the basis of the third category of prosodic analysis in the period. The prescriptive prosodists had offered the solution of constructing all verse to meet the abstract requirements of the balanced line, which would resolve the contradiction of formal expectation versus performance. Sheridan and those of like mind developed the idea of the metrical contract wherein the reader resolved the contradiction according to his own belief in the poet’s intention. Rice rids himself of the contradiction altogether by suggesting that the pentameter line is an organic concomitant of the couplet, a unit of sense and rhetoric rather than purely of meter, where the rhyme can “enforce or disturb the natural Expression” (p. 164). Thus the unrhymed version of this line is a fiction of the printing house, and Rice invents a third category of verse, somewhere between poetry and prose, where the main formal components, the lines, are determined not by a priori limitations but by the duration of the rhythmic or syntactic phrase. He suggests that blank verse should be printed in effect as free verse. He demonstrates this by reprinting Paradise Lost, book v, lines 275–​87, according to its “true harmony.” The original text divides the beginning of the passage this way: on the eastern Cliff of Paradise He lights, and to his proper Shape returns A Seraph wing’d: Six Wings he wore to shade His Lineaments divine; the Pair that clad Each Shoulder broad, came mantling o’er his Breast With regal Ornament.

Rice turns Milton’s six lines into five: On the eastern Cliff of Paradise he lights, And to his proper Shape returns a Seraph wing’d: Six Wings he wore, to shade his Lineaments divine; The Pair that clad each Shoulder broad, Came mantling o’er his Breast with regal Ornament. (p. 179)

The lines in question here reform themselves into groups of between eight and twelve syllables, but Rice’s intention is not merely to recast the verse into a new quasi-​pentameter form

 

428   Richard Bradford since later on in the section he finds no difficulty in changing lines to fourteen or four syllables. Again, lines 283–​5 in Milton’s original lineation: The third his Feet Shadow’d from either Heel, with feather’d Mail Sky tinctur’d Grain. Like Maias Son he stood.

In Rice’s version, this becomes: The third his Feet shadow’d from either Heel with feather’d Mail, Sky tinctur’d Grain. (p. 179)

The parallels between this and Pound’s, “In a Station of the Metro,” are stunning; Imagism, it seems, was born in the eighteenth century. Rice says that these new arangements would, “be of great Use to common Readers; who are apt to pause at the End of a Line in reciting Verse, whether the Sense will admit of it or no… . nor do I conceive they [the lines] would be deprived of any Part of their poetical Beauty” (pp. 178–​9). There are, I believe, several problems involved here. On a purely metrical level it can be argued that Rice’s rearrangements are admirably rational reflections of the true movement of the verse, yet in several instances there is a case for the applicability of Sheridan’s metrical contract. In lines 276 and 277 of the original format, the printed text plays an important part in clarifying the peculiarities of the syntax. The phrase “A Seraph wing’d” is a summation, a completed picture of the process begun on the “eastern Cliff of Paradise,” and its visual—​ or, if one applies Sheridan’s contract, “metrical”—​isolation emphasizes this status. But when the apparent rhythmic movement is rationalized by Rice, the verb returns seems to take on an intensified transitive meaning and the paraphrase seems to be that “he returns a wing’d Seraph to his proper Shape.” In his penetrating essay “Milton’s Participial Style,” Seymour Chatman notices the poet’s “disposition to convert verbs into noun-​modifying participles.”15 The above transformation is of a slightly different but related category, but what is most important is that in many cases the typographical line is used as a pivot between two different meanings. Rice’s version also loses that satisfying effect of stasis achieved by the isolated foot “He lights” and the flicker of anticipation caused by the detached verbs “shade” and “clad,” which enliven what is inadvertently revealed by Rice to be a rather flat descriptive passage. But Rice, because he saw the original lines merely as a convention of the printer, would not have recognized these as effects at all. Further on in the work, in his chapter “Of Pause, Cadence, Tone and Gesture,” he attacks the legislative strictures laid down by Lord Kames on the parts of speech capable of division by the “musical” pause. He does this simply because, to him, every pause is a natural one, and whereas in some measures, such as the couplet, the natural pauses often fit a certain balanced pattern, he sees no reason why this pattern should be abstracted and applied to blank verse.16 It may be said in mitigation of Rice that his intention was to create a standard for a new type of verse rather than to destroy the movement of Paradise Lost. He was attempting to define the limits of unrhymed English meter, which he saw as depending “very little, in

15  16 

Seymour Chatman, “Milton’s Participial Style,” PMLA, 83 (1968), 1386–​99. Rice, pp. 340–​8.

 

Free Verse and Prose Poetry    429 any Case, on its mechanical Division into Lines, consisting of a certain Number of Syllables” (Rice, p. 181). He was disinclined, as a reader, to “interpret” the conventional or symbolic significance of the line, and he went on to say that “It is, indeed, not easy to reduce the Mechanism of English Verse to such positive Rules, as might determine exactly the Number of Syllables to be admitted in a Foot or Measure; this Number, as well as the Melody of the Verse, depending on the Facility with which such Syllables succeed each other” (p. 181). In other words, the size and proportion of each rhythmic phrase should be determined by the quality and duration of the inspiration which creates it. As if to set himself entirely against the more conservative critics he suggests that Young’s Night Thoughts—​which sometimes appears to be comprised of unrhymed couplets—​was bad blank verse: the “Periods” are “too short to flow” (pp. 182–​3). John Walker’s first major elocutionary work, the Elements of Elocution (1781), is dedicated to Samuel Johnson, and it is not surprising that in the section “Rules for Reading Verse,” much space is given over to an attack on Sheridan (a lengthy disquisition upon the “pause of suspension,” for instance, takes up pp. 206–​21). It may strike modern readers as odd that the question of the terminal pause in unrhymed verse should have occupied the minds of eighteenth-​century critics to such an extent. The reason is that this one point represented a summation, a nexus of all the separate and often contradictory concerns of contemporary prosodic criticism. It suggested that the unrhymed, enjambed English line was, despite the empirical evidence to the contrary, a legitimate literary device. Walker is well aware of the most significant aspects of Sheridan’s case. In the first place, there is the crucial concept of the author’s intention: If the author has so united the preceding and following lines in verse as make them real prose, why is a reader to do that which his author neglected to do, and indeed seems to have forbidden by the very nature of the composition.17

Next he suggests that the value of the pause as a symbol of metricality to be conveyed to the listener is negligible. He says that in heavily enjambed blank verse with strong grammatical medial pauses it would be impossible for the ear pick up the true relationship between the hemistichs. Thus the claim that the pause of suspension allowed the listener to discern the expressive syntactic and metrical variations within the line would be disproved since there would be confusion between its boundaries and its central division (vol. ii, pp. 207–​16). He attacks the “affectation” of most writers of blank verse for “extending the sense beyond the line, whether necessary or not” and suggests that this fashion has led printers to omit lineal punctuation even where it is necessary, and readers to either “run the sense from one line into another” where there is a grammatical pause or to pause where there is none (vol. ii, pp. 216–​17): Even if we were to use no pauses at all at the end of the lines, they would not on this account entirely lose their poetic character; for at worst they might be called numerous or harmonious prose, and that the greatest part of blank verse is neither more or less than this, it would not be difficult to prove. (vol. ii, p. 210)

17  John Walker, Elements of Elocution: Being the Substance of a Course of Lectures on the Art of Reading Delivered at Several Colleges … in Oxford, 2 vols. (London, 1781), vol. ii, p. 207.

 

430   Richard Bradford In a later work, The Melody of Speaking (1787), Walker demonstrates this principle with a couplet from Pope: Súch plays | alòne | should pleàse | a Brítish ear, | As Cáto’s | sèlf | had nòt | disdáin’d | to hèar.18

Here Walker really comes to terms with the problem of accentual feet. Most modern readers would, I think, scan these lines as iambics, as many people would have done in the eighteenth century. This is not so much incorrect as uninformative; the suggestion is that each stress is equal, whereas a performance of the lines would reveal that they are not. One way out of this problem would be to apply the Trager–​Smith method of “degrees” of stress, while still retaining an iambic framework. In my opinion attempts to fix degrees of stress to, say, four are as fatuous as limiting them to two, since there are still fluctuations of syntactic position and semantic weight to be considered which make variation almost infinite. What Walker did was to clear the confusion by counting only the unambiguously heavy syllables and allowing them to control the structure: Here we shall find the word plays is pronounced like an unaccented syllable of the word such; should, of please; a, and ear, of British; As, of Cato’s; had, of not; and to, of hear. If, therefore, we were to arrange the unaccented words with the accented ones as if they were one word, we should present to the eye the same union which is actually made by the ear. Suchplays alone shouldplease abritishear. AsCato’s self hadnot disdain’d tohear[.]‌(p. 13)

The structural damage done to the closed couplet by such analysis is slight, since there is always the natural sense of completion engendered by the rhyme to establish the line as a discrete unit. But for blank verse, where such cadences often cross line boundaries, the implications are more serious. In his Rhetorical Grammar (1785) he prints the first twenty-​six lines of Paradise Lost according to his approximation of its rhythmic movement.19 The first three lines are recast as four, ending at “disobedience,” “tree,” “taste,” and “Eden,” according to the major rhythmic or syntactic groupings. The reprinting is eminently rational and, in terms of contemporary theory, defensible; but the marvelous feeling of tension generated by the isolation of “Fruit” in the original is lost (pp. 309–​10). There is a small but significant substratum running through eighteenth-​century criticism that identified the pentameter, in the abstract, as either meaningless or an accidental convention of the printer.

Poetic Prose, Prosaic Poetry Daniel Webb, in his Observations on the Correspondence between Poetry and Music (1769), develops a theory of poetic construction which runs on from a work he published seven years earlier in which he had attacked the couplet, not specifically for its rhyme, but for the metrical limitations it had brought upon English verse. Rhyme, he suggests, presupposes a 18  John Walker, The Melody of Speaking Delineated; or, Elocution Taught like Music, by Visible Signs, Adapted to the Tones, Inflexions, and Variations of Voice (London, 1787), pp. 12–​13. 19 Walker, A Rhetorical Grammar or Course of Lessons on Elocution (London, 1785), pp. 343–​5.

 

Free Verse and Prose Poetry    431 pause, and it is upon the “balance” between this and the medial pause “that the monotony of the verse depends.” But in blank verse the “second pause is sunk.”20 The implication is that blank verse is simply a system of varied rhythmic movements cutting across the (meaningless) printed pentameter. In the later work Webb develops this empirical observation into a rationale of the origins of poetic form. “Let us imagine ourselves in a state not far removed from the origin of things. Let our voice follow freely the impulse of sentiment, and run uncontrolled into the natural variations of emphasis and accent. We have traced in these variations the origin of measure.”21 The pause will make the measures act in “certain times and proportions.” If the relationship between these “times and proportions” admits of no system of order at all then they are prosaic. But the “constant and even tenor” of the “balanced” iambic line moves too far in the direction of form for its own sake, and is only appropriate to the rational, argumentative poem: Strong passions, the warm effisions of the soul, were never destin’d to creep through monotonous parallels; they call for a more liberal rhythmus; for movements, not balanced by rule, but measured by sentiment, and flowing in ever new yet musical proportions. (Webb, Observations, p. 113)

It would not be taking this form of reasoning much further to suggest that the accentual pentameter was an irrelevance. William Belsham in 1789 launched a scathing attack on notions of regular abstract prosody, advocated by Lord Kames. He says that “a priori it is impossible to prove by any speculative reasoning, that those principles possess more of innate propriety than the opposite ones.”22 Belsham, however, stops short of abandoning the pentameter entirely, preferring the “unbounded liberty” of the pauses in blank verse to “such performances as Selemaque and Fingal” (p. 221), which veer too far toward the prosaic. John Herries, with the benefit of an elocutionary approach, sees the heroic line merely as a convenient method of printing what is, in effect, a “loose and unconfined rhythmic movement”: Many of our celebrated poets, have, from the impulse of a fine ear; introduced the utmost freedom and variety into their versification. This may be found even in our iambics … the harmony of the accent appears in our prosaic as well as poetical productions. As we often find a line of hexameters, sapphic, &c. in Cicero or Livy, which have mingled with their periods unknown to the author, so it might be easy to produce a variety of the most perfect iambic or anapestic verses in Addison, Bolingbroke, and other harmonious English writers. This shews that the use of rhyme is not in the least essential to that agreeable flow of language which results chiefly from the situation of the accent, and which constitutes the harmony both of verse and prose.23 20 

Daniel Webb, Remarks on the Beauties of Poetry (London, 1762), pp. 9–​10.

21 Webb, Observations on the Correspondence between Poetry and Music: By the Author of An Enquiry

into the Beauties of Painting (London, 1769), p. 84. 22  William Belsham, “On English Versification,” in Essays Philosophical and Moral, Historical and Literary (London, 1789), p. 219. 23 Herries, The Elements of Speech (London, 1773), pp. 187–​8. Like Sheridan and Walker, Herries appears to have lectured on the subject in Oxford, though in less exalted surroundings. See his brief Analysis of a Course of Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Speaking … to Be Delivered (by Permission) at the Great-​Room, at the Mitre, Oxford (Oxford?, 1773).

 

432   Richard Bradford William Mitford too considers the gray area between iambic poetry and rhythmic prose, and finds a considerable number of regular pentameters in Bishop Tillotson’s sermons: Now a single complete verse, scattered here and there, will never offend if its beginning and ending are not too strongly marked by pauses; but three complete members of a period together approaching so nearly a verse, will always displease.24

In the work of John Mason, both elocutionary and critical, there is little respect for the conventional conception of the poetic line. In his Essay on the Power and Harmony of Prosaic Numbers he attempts to define separate categories of “poetic Prose” and “prosaic Poetry” in the hope of clarifying the difficult formal distinctions involved in the canonical dispute. In the category of prosaic poetry he places the “Oriental” or Hebrew poetry, in which he can locate “strong and generous Numbers” but whose variations in line length render it “prosaic.” But it is significant that he locates Milton’s blank verse as the midpoint between the “too strict” numbers of the modern couplet and the laxity of the “Oriental” verse. The inference seems to be that it is only the organization of the rhythm into groups of ten syllables which allows blank verse to be regarded as poetry at all.25 In Mason’s scansions—​in attempting to demonstrate the great variety and flexibility of the Miltonic line and its superiority to the couplet—​he failed to suggest how such disruptive movements as the double pyrrhic or the fourth-​foot trochee could establish the pentameter as a discrete unit of meter. In the light of this it can be seen that Mason was less interested in the rhythm of the pentameter or “meter” than simply “rhythm” itself, as an undifferentiated “heightening” of a prose movement. This was the focus of the long-​running argument on the unrhymed pentameter throughout the century. There could, in the absence of syntactic strategies or continual rhythmic disturbance, be no “mark” at the end of the pentameter to establish it as a verse—​unless, of course, the reader chose to interpret the printed line as such a “mark.”

Verse Only to the Eye? Several important questions are raised by the branch of prosody represented by the above critics. It is suggested, especially by Walker, that the interpretation of the typographical format of the poem by the oral reader is both a literary impropriety and a practical impossibility. In an absolute sense it would be for a reader to convey the metrical integrity of the enjambed pentameter to the ear of a listener entirely unfamiliar with the printed text. But in a culture becoming dominated by the printed text, Walker’s position must be regarded as an abstract hypothesis—​there can have been few people at this time who had not seen a printed version of Paradise Lost. There is evidence that a subtle relationship existed in this period between the reader, his audience, and the visual format of the text.

24 

William Mitford, An Essay upon the Harmony of Language, Intended Principally to Illustrate That of the English Language (London, 1774), p. 203. 25  John Mason, An Essay on the Power and Harmony of Prosaic Numbers: Being a Sequel to One on the Power of Numbers and the Principles of Harmony in Poetic Compositions (London, 1749), pp. 38–​47.

 

Free Verse and Prose Poetry    433 Thomas Barnes, in “On the Nature and Essential Characters of Poetry as Distinguished from Prose” (1785), takes up Sheridan’s case in defending blank verse from Samuel Johnson’s “verse only to the eye” charge: The musicalness, and flow of numerous composition, which charms the ear of every judicious reader, is certainly felt most strongly, where it is read aloud, with taste and expression. But when read with the eye only, without the accompaniment of the voice, there is a fainter association of the sound, the shadow of the music, as it were, connected with the words; so that we can judge exactly of the composition as if it were audible to the ear. This habit of associating sound with vision, is formed gradually by habit… . And some Gentlemen are said to have acquired this art of mental combination so perfectly, as to read, even the notes of a musical composition with considerable pleasure … Surely the verse of Milton is not “verse only to the eye.”26

In one important branch of poetic tradition the critics under discussion in this chapter hold an important yet unexamined position. The Romantic poetic, and this is a very broad rubric, was to a great degree the precursor of free verse, or rather a particular kind of free verse. It must be credited with playing some part in loosening the grip of accentual syllabism on English poetry. But if the arbitrary limit of ten syllables was not the “measure” of the line, then some other criterion than abstract form would have to be applied. The rational approach was to equate form with substance—​to make the tone, the spirit of the verse, congruent with its formal expression. This is at the heart of Coleridge’s “accentualism.”27 But a clearer picture of the change is presented by Blake in his introduction to Jerusalem: When this Verse was first dictated to me, I considered a Monotonous Cadence, like that used by Milton and Shakespeare and all writers of English Blank Verse, derived from the Modern bondage of Rhyming, to be a necessary and indispensible part of Verse. But I soon found that in the mouth of a true Orator such monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I therefore have produced a variety in every line both of cadences and of number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place; the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts, the mild and gentle for the mild and gentle parts, and the prosaic for inferior parts; all are necessary to each other. Poetry Fetter’d Fetters the Human Race.28

The import of Blake’s discussion is the lack of necessity for an arbitrarily or aesthetically determined poetic line. But such enjambments as “Life lives on my/​Consuming”29 suggest that the tensions possible in such lines are still part of his repertoire. Metrical tension can really be exhibited by enjambment only when the poet consciously wishes to distinguish between his unit of meter or form, the line, and his units of syntax. The eighteenth-​century prescriptive critics wanted to retain a strong commitment to form and subdue syntax to its condition. The prosodic theories of Walker, Rice, and Blake moved toward a concept of form

26 

Thomas Barnes, in “On the Nature and Essential Characters of Poetry as Distinguished from Prose,” Memoirs of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, 1 (1785), 54–​7 1, at pp. 69–​7 1. 27  See the preface to Christabel, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poetical Works: Poems (Reading Text), ed. J. C. C. Mays, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001), vol. i, pp. 482–​3. 28  William Blake, The Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. 621. 29 Blake, Jerusalem, plate 10, lines 55–​60.

 

434   Richard Bradford as defined by and responsive to the unconstrained development of poetic inspiration. This concept did not achieve its most unequivocal expression until 1855. As Walt Whitman writes: The rhyme and uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws and bud from them as unerringly and loosely as lilacs or roses on a bush, and takes shapes as compact as the shapes of chestnuts and oranges and melons and pears and shed the perfume impalpable to form.30

It is interesting that enjambment in its strongest form seemed to some eighteenth-​century elocutionists to render the pentameter superfluous. In Leaves of Grass, the most famous set of poems to embody their counterproposals, one finds possibly the only example of “free” verse which employs no enjambment whatsoever. Rice’s and Walker’s theories of poetic form are directly traceable through a subsequent literary period. Writers such as Blake and Alexander Smith31 seemed to have responded, theoretically at least, to the elocutionist skepticism concerning the value of the pentameter and combined it with a specifically Romantic disposition towards organic form. There were others whose influence, far from negligible in their own time, is now unrecognized. John Thelwall was an associate of both Wordsworth and Coleridge and an active literary as well as political figure in the early nineteenth century. He was also what might be termed a second-​generation elocutionist. Like Walker, he adopts the method and terminology of Sir Richard Steele, preferring the rhythmic “cadence” to the traditional foot. As would be expected the shift of focus from the structurally sound iamb to the more contingent form of the cadence leads Thelwall to a definition of verse that seems to lean heavily upon the notion of meter as determined by syntax: Verse is constituted of a regular succession of like cadences, or of a limited variety of cadences, divided by grammatical pauses, emphases, and cæsuræ, into obviously proportioned clauses; so as to present sensible responses, at proportioned intervals, to the ear.32

The overall system of organization depends heavily upon such words as “proportion,” which in the work of Rice and Walker simply meant the sort of system which the poet thought appropriate to the meaning.

30  Walt Whitman, preface to Leaves of Grass (1855), in The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, ed. G. W. Allen and S. Bradley (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1965), vol. v, p. 714. 31  “It is well known,” writes Smith, “that emotions express themselves in different tones and inflections of voice from those that are used to communicate mere processes of thought, properly so called; and also that, in the former case, the words of the speaker fall into more smooth and rhythmical combinations than the latter. Our feelings are conveyed in a melodious succession of tones, and in a measured flow of words; our thoughts (and in a greater degree the less they are accompanied by feeling) are conveyed in irregular periods, and at harsh intervals of tone. Blank verse and rhyme are but more artificial dispositions of the natural expressions of feeling, i.e., suitable for poetry—​but not necessary to it” (Alexander Smith, “The Philosophy of Poetry,” in R. A. Foakes (ed.), Romantic Criticism, 1800–​1850 (London: Edward Arnold, 1968), pp. 180–​1). 32  John Thelwall, Selections for the Illustration of a Course of Instructions on the Rhythmus and Utterance of the English Language: With an Introductory Essay on the Application of Rhythmical Sciences to the Treatment of Impediments (London, 1812), p. lvi.

 

Free Verse and Prose Poetry    435 In a similar vein is J. Odell’s Essay on the Elements, Accents, and Prosody of the English Language (1806), where a debt to Walker is acknowledged.33 Odell objects to the a priori designation of the syntax–​meter relationship, stating that the rules governing the broader organization of “rhythmical cadences” form “a system which has never yet been fully investigated.” One person who grasped this particular nettle was William Forde, who applies the Rice–​Walker approach to Paradise Lost to the whole of the first book, which he reprints according to its “true” rhythmus.34 If these savants seem to linger in the backwaters of Romantic theory, there is evidence that the rationale of their method was not unattractive to the more eminent figures of the period. Wordsworth and, to a lesser extent, Coleridge are, in their remarks on prosody, much concerned with the ontology and effect of rhythm or meter as an undifferentiated continuum of communication, and are usually more phlegmatic on the matter of the actual structure and status of the poetic line. In “Satyrane’s Letters,” however, first published in the Friend and later appended to ­chapter 12 of the 1817 edition of Biographia Literaria,35 Coleridge relates a conversation between himself, Wordsworth, and the German poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, which would seem to contain Wordsworth’s only recorded analysis of the form he used so extensively. Klopstock had suggested that the blank verse of Glover’s was superior to that of Milton: B —​—​[Wordsworth] and myself expressed our surprise: and my Friend gave his definition and notion of harmonious verse, that it consisted (the English iambic blank verse above all) in the apt arrangement of pauses and cadences and the sweep of whole paragraphs, and with many a winding bout Of linked sweetness long drawn out and not in the even flow, much less in the prominence or antithetic vigour, of single lines which were indeed injurious to the total effect, except where they were introduced for some specific purpose. Klopstock assented, and said that he meant to confine Glover’s superiority to single lines.

Wordsworth’s own record of this conversation in his manuscript journal is more economical and perhaps even more revealing. “He preferred the blank verse of Glover (each verse separately considered) to that of Milton—​but agreed with me that the true harmony of blank verse consisted in the periods and not in a succession of musical lines.”36 Coleridge himself in suggesting some qualifications for Wordsworth’s theory of meter echoes Johnson: It will happen … that the metre itself, the sole acknowledged difference [between verse and prose], will occasionally become metre to the eye only. The existence of prosaisms, and that they detract from the merits of a poem, must at length be conceded, when a number of

33 

Odell, pp. 93–​123. True Spirit of Milton’s Versification (1831). 35  The Friend, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. B. E. Rooke (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), vol. ii, pp. 239–​40. 36  The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and J. J. Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), vol. i, p. 91. 34 

 

436   Richard Bradford successive lines can be rendered, even to the most delicate ear, unrecognizable as verse, or as having even been intended for verse, by simply transcribing them as prose: when if the poem be in blank verse, this can be effected without any alteration, or at most by merely restoring one or two words to their proper places, from which they had been transplanted.37

To illustrate his case Coleridge does just this with some lines from Wordsworth’s Brothers, and in the case of that poem at least it must be conceded that he has a point. However, by implying that all blank verse could be submitted to this rearrangement without changing its effect, he does both Milton and the Wordsworth of The Prelude a disservice. This does not mean Coleridge was deficient in his critical faculties; merely that he chose to read in a different way from Sheridan. This difference of attitude is significant, since it is an acknowledgment in the work of a major literary figure, of the end of a prosodic milieu. Sheridan’s analyses succeeded because he was prepared to search for thematic justifications for the pentameter where no metrical ones were apparent. He did this because he believed in the purely aesthetic value of the line. Coleridge regarded meter not as the formal disposition of linguistic material to an arbitrary aesthetic end but rather as a response by the poet to the contingent nature of his inspiration. Thus the search for a justification of the metric pentameter when it seemed to have disappeared into expansive rhythms would have seemed to him a retrograde step.

Structure and Meaning It is a tribute to Milton’s mastery of prosody that both schools of criticism should locate the paradigm of their analyses as Paradise Lost. No unrhymed poem in the eighteenth century could respond so fruitfully both to the criticism of Sheridan and to that of Rice. Thomson, Young, Cowper, Pemberton, Dodsley, and others used enjambment but it was never so daring and it never quite threatened, as Milton’s did, both to disrupt and to intensify the sense of an entire passage. But more significant than this was the service done to poetic tradition by these critics. The development of the Whitmanesque line of unlimited formal differentiation determined by sense can be traced back through the Romantic movement to the elocutionists of the eighteenth century. There is also, I think, a degree of influence to be drawn between this line and certain types of free verse such as D. H. Lawrence’s. But this does not represent the rationale behind the free verse of, say, William Carlos Williams, where each line, instead of submitting to a larger rhythmic or rhetorical movement, actually impresses its own rhythmic identity and, more important, stands in oblique relation to the movement of syntax: a relation that must be integrated with a wider theme by the reader. Through the study of the criticism of the eighteenth century it can be seen that blank verse, especially that of Milton, suggested two separate departures for a new English prosody. On the one hand it suggested to some (Rice, Walker, and so on) that the syllabically limited line was a redundant relic of an ill-​assimilated classical or French influence. On the other hand it 37  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983), vol. ii, pp. 79–​80.

 

Free Verse and Prose Poetry    437 revealed that the printed pentameter could serve a purpose as an emblem of prosodic form and an extra lever on sense. As T. S. Eliot put it, “Verse, whatever else it may or may not be, is itself a system of punctuation; the usual marks of punctuation themselves are differently employed.”38 In the blank verse of Milton and Wordsworth and in some of the more experimental pre-​free-​verse meters such as those of Blake and Hopkins, the two concepts of form managed to coexist. Meter managed, just, to resist either becoming congruent with or subdued to the emblem of its own existence. In free verse, however, the Whitmanesque line seemed at first to have won. “Your rhythmic structure should not destroy the shape of your words,” says Ezra Pound in an early manifesto, echoing Rice, Walker, and Blake.39 In a more recent manifestation of free verse, however, form itself seems to have become the handmaiden of the poet as printer. Charles Olson, the precursor of Corman, seems to have been the first to declare a manifesto: for only he, the man who writes, can declare, at every moment, the line, its metric and its ending—​where its breathing shall come to, termination.40

Christopher Ricks can speak of “the fluidity and supplement of line endings in blank verse” created by the combination of an extended rhythmic cadence, the verse paragraph, and its punctuations by “white space.” In Charles Olson’s free verse the “white space” is all that is left of the form, a symbol to be deployed by the poet but long divorced from its origins in the pentameters of Milton—​it becomes something like the smile on the Cheshire Cat. In an influential essay called “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One” (1980), Stanley Fish describes how, when teaching a course on the religious lyric, he asked his class to interpret a modern lyric chalked on the classroom blackboard. The “poem” is actually a list of surnames left over from a previous class on linguistics but, by coincidence, the vertical-​ horizontal dimensions of the list, along with the diverse, double-​edged semantics of the surnames themselves, cause it to resemble a radical version of the free-​verse poems of Corman and Olson. Fish’s students respond impressively to their tutor’s ruse and produce a variety of interpretive accounts involving all of the analytical and scholarly frames of reference which could be found in essays and monographs on postmodern free verse. Fish uses this anecdote to support his general claim that “acts of recognition” are not triggered by inherent formal characteristics; rather that the latter are illusions sustained by the interpretive routines of the reader. This is the equivalent of stating that no, it is not you “the man who writes” who will “declare at every moment the line,” and so on, but me, the sophisticated reader. To an extent Corman leaves himself open to such indictments by shifting the balance away from typography as a supplement to intrinsic formal structure toward shape as a replacement for form. And in doing so his verse also provides Fish with an implicit precedent for his anecdote involving the names on the blackboard. Fish would not have been able to conduct his experiment with blank verse or with the more traditional types of free verse produced by 38 

T. S. Eliot, letter, TLS, Sept. 27, 1928, p. 687. Eliot objects to the notion of printing verse as prose, and thus seems to acknowledge the influence of the visual format. 39  “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” Poetry, 1 (1913), 200–​6. In later poetry Pound’s “shape of his words” seems to have destroyed his “rhythmic structure.” 40  Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” in G. Perkins (ed.), American Poetic Theory (New York: International Thomson Publishing, 1972), pp. 336–​42. This essay, first published in Poetry New York, 3 (1950), is a major landmark in the history of free-​verse theory.

 

438   Richard Bradford figures such as Eliot or Robert Lowell, for the simple reason that this would invalidate his main thesis. The verse forms of Milton, Eliot, or Lowell might produce different interpretive responses to their formal intricacies, but it would be impossible to find such intricacies in words left on a blackboard. The relevance of the eighteenth-​century critics to the issues considered above is central, for it was they who, through the study of blank verse, first raised the fundamental questions about the nature of verse structure and its relationship with meaning which have been at the core of the massive prosodic upheavals of the twentieth century.

References Barnes, Thomas, “On the Nature and Essential Characters of Poetry as Distinguished from Prose,” Memoirs of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, 1 (1785), 54–​7 1. Bradford, Richard W., Augustan Measures: Restoration and Eighteenth Century Writings on Prosody and Metre (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). Chatman, Seymour, “Milton’s Participial Style,” PMLA, 83 (1968), 1386–​99. Fish, Stanley, Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980). Fussell, Paul, Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-​Century England (New London: Connecticut College, 1954). Hollander, John, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985). Mason, John, An Essay on the Power of Numbers, and the Principles of Harmony in Poetical Compositions (London, 1749). Odell, J., An Essay on the Elements, Accents and Prosody of the English Language (London, 1806). Olson, Charles, “Projective Verse vs. the Non-​Projective,” Poetry New York, 3 (1950), 13–​22. Pound, Ezra, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” Poetry, 1 (1913), 200–​6. Ricks, Christopher, Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). Trager, George L., and Henry Lee Smith, An Outline of English Structure (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1951). Wimsatt, W. K., and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Concept of Meter: An Exercise in Abstraction,” PMLA, 74 (1959), 585–​98.

 

Pa rt  V

P OE T IC  G E N R E S

 

 

Chapter 26

Pastora l David Hill Radcliffe Eighteenth-​century pastoral poetry is scarce in modern anthologies; neither has it received sustained critical attention.1 Its history would be difficult to write since tens of thousands of pastorals were published in a bewildering variety of modes: eclogues, idylls, bucolics, elegies, songs, and pastoral dramas. Pastoral inflected the whole range of genres from epigrams to multi-​volume romances. Theories of pastoral also abounded; these at least have had a chronicler in J. E. Congleton, who with typical disdain for the genre concluded in 1952 that “Perhaps never has such mediocre poetry received so much critical attention.”2 Yet the amount of criticism had less to do with the poems than with the foundational status of the genre. Since theories of pastoral were more prescriptive than descriptive it is better to consider the poems themselves as implicit criticism. I will take disputation in the pastoral eclogue as a point of departure, presenting the form as an extended singing ​contest in which the contending parties were series of poems competing for readers’ attention.

Altered Perspectives We might think of pastoral as a device for presenting familiar things in altered perspectives narrowing the field of vision in ways that make small objects seem large and remote 1  An important exception is the work by Raymond Williams and his school. Williams’s seminal The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973) is the place to begin; it informs A Book of English Pastoral Verse (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), edited by John Barrell and John Bull, an anthology that gives eighteenth-​century pastoral its proper due in the evolving history of the genre. Williams’s critical approach was extended in Marxist-​inflected studies such as John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–​1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1972); and James Turner, The Politics of Landscape (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979). 2  J. E. Congleton, Theories of Pastoral Poetry in England, 1684–​1798 (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1952), p. 295. Discussions of pastoral are a rich and important subject but because grounded in seventeenth-​century French theory tend to shed more light on the history of criticism than on the practices of eighteenth-​century British poets. Congleton’s still-​useful survey might be supplemented by the introduction and examples in Thomas Perrin Harrison, Jr., The Pastoral Elegy: An Anthology edited with Introduction, Commentary, and Notes (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1939).

 

442   David Hill Radcliffe objects near. The artifice of pastoral diction might be used to impart brown tints suggestive of ruggedness or antiquity, as with a Claude-​glass, or to soften the focus, as in an erotic scene painted by Watteau. Like a kaleidoscope, pastoral fragments the familiar world into prismatically patterned, repetitive forms: monologue and dialogue, singing contests, riddles, complaints. Critics objecting to artificiality and distortion in pastorals rather miss the point: selecting, coloring, and patterning a field of vision was simply what pastoral did—​just like other genres, only more so. Pastoral speakers were typically drawn from persons in humble life whose understanding is narrowly fixed on private obsessions of love and jealousy, ambition and loss. By contrast, pastoral writers typically engage public matters of politics and history, art and economics—​ as filtered through the limited understandings of their simple speakers. The gap between the characters’ natural sentiments and the poet’s artful presentation varied in kind and degree but was basic to pastoral. Diction might be rendered “simple” through universalizing abstraction or local particularity; characters ranged through all walks of life. Poets might imitate particular models or burlesque general modes. Poets developed subgenres by quarrying a particular vein; they extended pastoral by introducing repertoire from other genres into pastoral, and by interjecting pastoral into other forms.3 Pastoral eclogues sometimes appeared as singletons but were always members of series, at least implicitly. All genres involve family resemblances, but pastoral eclogues are a particularly tight-​knit group because the number of source texts was small and the formal patterning strong. Pastoral was a primary medium used by poets to talk about poets and poetry. Ambitious pastoral writers from Pope to Wordsworth used imitation to make statements about their identity as writers and to locate themselves in relation to tradition. Less ambitious pastoralists adopted fashionable modes to position themselves socially, gossip about the state of literature, and work patronage networks. It is not very useful to think of the strong patterning typical of pastoral as a product of rules or convention, much less as false consciousness or nostalgia. Eclogue-​writers inherited a disparate repertoire they could use, abuse, refashion, or ignore as best suited their purposes. They tended to be a contentious lot, favoring the singing contest as a primary rhetorical form: when shepherds compete the eclogue dramatizes the moral and aesthetic choices made by the writer who created the singers. The notion, derived from prescriptive criticism, that pastoral poets were obsessed with convention mistakes means for ends and obscures the fact that there were always competing ways to sing a song or write a poem.

Philips and Pope Eighteenth-​century pastoral might be said to begin with the paradigmatic singing contest between Ambrose Philips and Alexander Pope framing Poetical Miscellanies: the Sixth 3  On the sprawling variety of eighteenth-​century pastoral forms, see the still-​useful philological studies by Richard F. Jones, “Eclogue Types in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century,” JEGP, 24 (1925), 33–​60; and Marion K. Bragg, The Formal Eclogue in Eighteenth-​Century England (Orono: Maine Univ. Press, 1926). An even larger survey is to be found in a database I compiled, Spenser and the Tradition: English Poetry 1579–​1830, with texts and criticism.

 

Pastoral   443 Part (1709). As Philips noted, collections of eclogues had been scarce of late: “It is strange to think, in an Age so addicted to the Muses, how Pastoral Poetry comes to be never so much as thought upon.”4 The choices made by these two poets would preoccupy poets and critics for the next century. The issue was less whom to imitate (both imitated ancient Virgil and modern Spenser) than how. From Edmund Spenser, Philips took the names of speakers but also, intermittently, his alliteration and rusticity: “Ah, well-​a-​day! How long must I endure | This pining Pain?” (p. 2). Colin Clout appears as a character in the fifth pastoral, while the sixth alludes to the famous fountain in the Bower of Bliss in the Faerie Queene: As Marian bath’d, by chance I passed by; She blush’d, and at me glanc’d a sidelong Eye: Then swift beneath the crystal Wave she try’d Her tempting Form, but all in vain, to hide. (p. 45)

Philips’s couplets resemble Pope more than Spenser, but in proposing Spenser as a stylistic model for English poetry, Philips was going where Pope did not wish to follow. In his “Discourse on Pastoral Poetry” (1705?, published 1717) Pope wrote: If we would copy Nature, it may be useful to take this Idea along with us, that pastoral is an image of what they call the Golden age. So that we are not to describe our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be conceiv’d then to have been. (Pope, Poems, vol. i, p. 25)

Virgil would be his stylistic model in verse he intended to be refined rather than rustic and universal rather than time-​or place-​specific. He pursues refinement by close-​writing and compression, distilling the essence of his two models into four poems from ten (Virgil) and twelve (Spenser). Rather than imitate Spenser’s mannerisms, Pope emulates his melancholia; like Spenser he concludes with a somber elegy (as opposed to Philips’s singing contest), and like Spenser he ruminates on time and loss. To condense twelve months into four seasons was clever, and to vary those by times of day was both clever and elegant. In the quality of the verse as well as in skill in reading and appropriating tradition, Pope was the easy winner in the contest, but in the ensuing debates about pastoral and British poetics his victory proved less than decisive. The 1713 essays on pastoral in the Guardian (nos. 22, 23, 28, 30) were long believed to have been the work of Addison, lending great authority to the discussion of decorum in no. 30: There are some things of an established Nature in Pastoral, which is essential to it, such as a Country Scene, Innocence, Simplicity. Others there are of a changeable kind, such as Habits, Customs, and the like. The difference of the Climate is also to be considered, for what is proper in Arcadia, or even in Italy, might be very absurd in a colder Country… . It is easie to be observed that these Rules are drawn from what our Countrymen Spencer and Philips have performed in this way.5

Guardian 32 develops an allegorical progress of the poets illustrating how “Theocritus … left his Dominions to Virgil, Virgil left his to his Son Spencer, and Spencer was succeeded by 4  Ambrose Philips, “Pastorals,” in Poetical Miscellanies: The Sixth Part: Containing a Collection of Original Poems, with Several New Translations (London, 1709), sig. B2r. 5  The Guardian, ed. John Calhoun Stephens (Louisville: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1982), p. 129.

 

444   David Hill Radcliffe his eldest-​born Philips” (p. 137). Guardian 40 likewise praises Philips at the expense of Pope, particularly in the matter of locality: I should think it proper for the several Writers of Pastoral, to confine themselves to their several Counties. Spencer seems to have been of this Opinion: for he hath laid the Scene of one of his Pastorals in Wales, where with all the Simplicity natural to that Part of our Island, one Shepherd bids the other Good-​morrow in an unusual and elegant Manner. “Diggon Davy, I bid hur God-​day: Or Diggon hur is, or I mis-​say.” (p. 164)

This latter contribution was of course by Pope himself—​whose irony was lost on many a reader who preferred the raciness of locality to Arcadian civility.

Responses The immediate response to Philips, Pope, and the Guardian essays was to return to basics by elevating the status of Theocritus. The best-​known of this series is John Gay’s Shepherd’s Week (1714), the most accomplished set of English pastorals since Spenser. Gay’s burlesque of “the right simple Eclogue after the true ancient guise of Theocritus” extends to an apparatus modeled on the Shepheardes Calender with proem, arguments, learned notes, glossary, even the woodcuts. Gay pays rustic Philips the backhanded compliment of over-​going him in locality, as in the west-​country superstitions described in “Thursday, or The Spell”: This Lady-​fly I take from off the Grass, Whose spotted Back might scarlet Red surpass. Fly, Lady-​Bird, North, South, or East or West, Fly where the Man is found that I love best. He leaves my Hand, see, to the West he’s flown, To call my True-​love from the faithless Town. With my sharp Heel I three times mark the Ground, And turn me thrice around, around, around. (Gay, Poetry and Prose, vol. i, p. 111)

Gay’s characters have vigorous and lively probability without sacrificing any of the patterning typical of pastoral (“And turn me thrice around, around, around” makes a wonderfully dizzy refrain). The poetry is more than just local: the notes draw point-​for-​point correlations with ancient models to suggest the timelessness of folkways and pathos of the human condition. The humor is self-​deprecating: the poet is diminished by his pedantry and low subject (notice how the shepherd’s “week” is reduced from the canonical year of Spenser and Pope) while the illiterate Hobnelia rises in our estimation by her masterful display of erotic arcana. Theocritus’s fifteenth Idyll, “The Syracusian Gossips,” likely suggested the “Town Eclogues” by Mary Wortley Montagu, a set of manuscript pastorals leaked into print in 1716. Montagu attempts to do for pastoral what Pope had done for epic in The Rape of the Lock, her humor consisting in the application of ancient formulae (the singing contest, etc.) to the diminished world of modern consumption. Of the same vintage are the manuscript pastorals of Abel Evans, of which a handful were published in the 1780s. So rustic are they, so plain their diction, that they seem to belong to the era in which they were printed. Evans is

 

Pastoral   445 all in for rural realism, as in this glance at equine artifice: “Mehap it good to him may seem | To make thee lag-​horse of the teem, | While Ball or Whitefoot lead the way, | With tinkling bells, and trappings gay.”6 In an entirely different register is William Diaper’s Nereides; or, Sea-​Eclogues (1712), in which the speakers are not fishermen as in piscatory, but mermen and mermaids, fantastic yet oddly probable creatures derived from Theocritus; they are moved by human passions yet un-​human in their watery manners and studied indifference to mankind. These poems weave “Habits, Customs, and the like” into circumscribed little worlds whose small details imply larger meanings. The writer who most fully developed ideas expressed in the Guardian essays was Thomas Purney in A Full Enquiry into the True Nature of Pastoral (1717), a long and learned treatise, all but unique in engaging with Shakespeare and the Faerie Queene.7 Purney argues that the leading characteristic of pastoral should be not rusticity or tranquility, but “softness.” His program, illustrated in Pastorals (1717), resulted in some of the more eerie pastoral ever written. The characters are eroticized children: Sooth, ever and anon, as Soflin spoak, Paplet in extasie would hide her Look. Then asken more; yet shamed to asken more, (Of Men and Love) but long’d to know so sore. Sometimes she’d fling her self epon the Grass: Then up, and catch in Arms her Fellow-​lass. Why may’nt we Men, yquoth the youngling Mey, And why may’nt we grasp them? Us graspen they! So pleased she was, and eager still to know, In sooth so pleased, she knew not what to do.8

Purney emulated Spenser by inventing a personal system of diction and syntax, but the idea of writing eclogues about children was original. The ordinary of Newgate (for such he was) recalls “the simple Manner of Theocritus” by making his little innocents as crafty as their Sicilian prototypes: “Oh!—​if to put my hands a-​hind he goes: | May strive pull ’way, and that will pull him close!” (p. 24). Pastoral was taken up with gusto in Edinburgh where a coterie of poets, chief among them Allan Ramsay, employed it in eclogues, elegies, and convivial verse written in Scots dialect. In the preface to Keitha: A Pastoral (1721) Ramsay explained: “The Scotticisms, which perhaps may offend some over-​nice Ear, give new Life and Grace to the Poetry, and become their Place as well as the Doric Dialect of Theocritus, so much admired by the best Judges.”9 Ramsay was less interested in transcribing vulgar speech than in reviving Scots as a literary diction, akin to Spenser’s archaisms. He incorporated two such eclogues into The Gentle Shepherd: A Scots Pastoral Comedy (1725), the most successful pastoral drama of the eighteenth century. If the “gentle” shepherd was unknowingly genteel, his lust for literature was not unusual among Scots of humble origins like Ramsay himself, originally a wig-​maker.

6  Abel Evans, “Pastoral Eclogues,” in A Select Collection of Poems: With Notes, Biographical and Historical, 8 vols. (London, 1780–​4), vol. v, p. 98. 7  Thomas Purney, A Full Enquiry into the True Nature of Pastoral (London, 1717). 8 Purney, Pastorals: After the Simple Manner of Theocritus (London, 1717), p. 18. 9  The Works of Allan Ramsay, ed. B. Martin and J. W. Oliver, 6 vols. (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1945–​74), vol. i, p. xix.

 

446   David Hill Radcliffe One of the earlier attempts at recording a specific rural diction (as opposed to Ramsay’s literary Scots) was made across the border when Josiah Relph wrote pastorals in “the Cumberland dialect” posthumously published in Glasgow in 1747.10 The fashion for dialect verse would come and go in eighteenth-​century Scotland, but Ramsay’s experiments with language had the enduring effect of rendering geographical, social, and literary boundaries porous and complex.11 In their various ways these Theocritean eclogues all responded to the Guardian essays by becoming place-​specific: instead of a generically rural setting they are British, or Scottish, set in an invented world, or in the case of Lady Mary, the more familiar purlieus of the Court of St. James. Specificity of place, like specificities of time, diction, and occupation, was a georgic element imported into pastoral repertoire, though it accorded nicely with the pastoral fascination with limited perspectives. Mermen, children, card-​playing aristocrats, horse-​drivers, and Scots peasants: while such characters knew what they knew, in comparison to the writers who drew their portraits such persons were “simple.” As the century progressed and local knowledge came to be thought of as older, richer, and more authentic than classical learning, the series of poems developed out of these early examples of eighteenth-​century eclogue would unfold in unanticipated ways.

Complex Developments Having set the board, we now proceed to a more longitudinal view of the matter. Developments in eighteenth-​century pastoral were not linear, as though progressing in a graded sequence from a less-​natural Philips to a more-​natural Wordsworth. The eclogue was dialectical and recursive, interacting with contemporary modes, returning to previously discarded models, and introducing new themes, characters, and metrical schemes; there were multiple lines of development going on at any given time. Connections among pastorals and their antecedents and successors could be one-​to-​many or many-​to-​many: in some cases, a prominent source text is reworked while in others a new order seems to emerge spontaneously from a cloud of minor poems. One series extending throughout the century consists of imitations of Virgil’s first eclogue, in which the dispossessed shepherd Meliboeus converses with the more fortunate Tityrus. Annabel Patterson discusses imitations of this poem to argue that neoclassical pastorals were politically engaged, which they certainly were.12 Emigration was a recurrent theme in topical verse throughout the century. In Murroghoh O Connor’s Pastoral in Imitation of the First Eclogue of Virgil (1719), Virgil’s characters are recast as Milesian

10 

Josiah Relph, A Miscellany of Poems (Glasgow, 1747). I develop this thread in a survey of pastoral writing about locality and nationality in “Sawney and Dermot: Locality and National Identity in Irish and Scottish Eclogues,” in David A. Valone and Jill Marie Bradbury (eds.), Anglo-​Irish Identities, 1571–​1845 (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2008), pp. 84–​103, and in a discussion of Spenserianism in the writings of self-​taught poets, “Crossing Borders: The Untutored Genius as Spenserian Poet,” John Clare Society Journal, 22 (2003), 51–​67. 12  Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), pp. 193–​214. 11 

 

Pastoral   447 gentlemen dispossessed by the trustees of Trinity College in Dublin.13 In Edward Lonergan’s “Dean and the Country Parson” (1739), Tityrus is Jonathan Swift and Meliboeus an Irish pastor driven into exile by the corruptions of the Irish Church.14 In “Damon and Thyrsis” (1757) an American colonist flees from the depredations of the French and Indians; Thomas Coombe treats the same topic in Edwin; or, The Emigrant: An Eclogue (1775), a sequel to the Deserted Village in which Goldsmith’s characters are slaughtered in an Indian massacre.15 The Highland clearances are the topic of Henry Erskine’s “Emigrant: An Eclogue” (1776), Jacobite emigration following the Forty-​five is the subject of “The Exile” by T. Nisbet (1776).16 Later poets blasted the slave trade in emigration pastorals, among them Thomas Chatterton and George Gregory, though the most successful of these works was West-​ Indian Eclogues (1787) by the remarkable Edward Rushton who lost his sight while serving on a slave-​ship. Two notable collections of anti-​ imperialist emigration eclogues were composed by future poets laureate. In 1745 a very young Thomas Warton published Five Pastoral Eclogues:  The Scenes of Which Are Supposed to Lie among the Shepherds, Oppressed by the War in Germany, afterward suppressed. Robert Southey published four Jacobinical “Botany Bay Eclogues” that began appearing in 1794. These contributed to a major revival of eclogue-​writing in the 1790s, when discourse by and about proletarian characters had particular resonance. In “Cornish Dialogue between two Old Men” by the Quaker Charles Fox, the speakers declare their intention to receive French invaders as they formerly had British soldiers: “And when ale the soadgers ded toady their guns, | I made the purpoashals to dost ’am weth stoans. | Soa we cobb’d et awey jest like lyants and tygars | Till we made am at laste fale a snapping the trigars.”17 Laboring-​class poets, for whom emigration was a familiar aspect of life, also expressed themselves in political pastorals (see c­ hapter 10, “The Poet as Laborer”): John Learmont and James Hogg in Scotland, Samuel Thomson in Ireland. In “Patrick and Dermot, or the Emigrators,” Thomas Atkinson, a surgeon’s apprentice, takes up the proposal O Connor had considered long before: “The thoughts of lovely France my bosom chears, | And hope expels the force of slavish fears. | There we no more shall yield to rev’rend knaves, | For there the Irish are not view’d as slaves.”18

13  Murroghoh O Connor, A Pastoral in Imitation of the First Eclogue of Virgil: Inscrib’d to the Provost, Fellows, and Scholars, of Trinity College, Dublin (Dublin, 1719). 14  Edward Lonergan, “The Dean and the Country Parson: An Imitation of Virgil, Ecl. I,” Gentleman’s Magazine, 9 (March 1739), 157. 15  “Damon and Thyrsis,” Universal Magazine, 22 (Feb. 1758), 94–​6; Thomas Coombe, Edwin; or, The Emigrant: An Eclogue (Philadelphia, 1775). 16  Henry Erskine, “The Emigrant: An Eclogue,” Weekly Magazine; or, Edinburgh Amusement, 31 (March 21, 1776), 399–​400; W. Nisbet, “The Exile,” in Poems, Chiefly Composed from Recent Events (Edinburgh, 1780), pp. 95–​106. 17  Charles Fox, “Cornish Dialogue between Two Old Men,” in R. Polwhele, Biographical Sketches in Cornwall: By the Rev. R. Polwhele, of Polwhele, 3 vols. (Truro, 1831), vol. ii, p. 63. This manuscript poem is a good example of a poet working traditions: as in the Virgilian original, the Cornish farmers are under threat (by “rud-​coats” and “Papishes”—​the elderly speaker confuses Jacobins with Jacobites) but in a 1790s topical topic-​reversal the issue is invasion as opposed to emigration. 18  Thomas Atkinson, Hibernian Eclogues: To Which Are Added, Miscellaneous Poems (Dublin, 1791), p. 15.

 

448   David Hill Radcliffe In this series one observes a general trend from allegory to reportage, from eclogues paraphrasing Virgil to pastorals that are little more than versified political dialogues. But to generalize so is to risk losing sight of contextual differences. Irish emigration was a different matter from Highland clearances, much less the Atlantic slave trade. The kind and degree of reportage varies among contemporary poems and so do modes of expression: Fox, a learned philologist, thumbs his nose at the French in local, demotic verse, while Learmont, a semi-​literate gardener, drops the dialect he otherwise uses to express solidarity with citizens across the Channel in cosmopolitan couplets. Yet elsewhere the choice of couplets might indicate nostalgia and parochialism, as in imitations of Goldsmith’s Deserted Village. The blank verse adopted by young Warton and Southey sent opposing signals:  Warton was rejecting neoclassicism for the Gothic mode embraced by academic poets, Southey was rejecting Della Cruscan tinsel the better to empathize with the swinish multitude—​ surprising choices given how much Pope was admired in Warton’s Tory circles and that Robert Merry was a cause célèbre among Southey’s democratic associates. In poetry so dialogical the choice of a formal quality turns on the rhetorical situation, not the adoption of a prescriptive rule. The series of emigration poems, while it has many members, does not display much internal coherence; it is little more than a busy series of topical poems. By contrast, the series of oriental eclogues launched by William Collins has a clearer line of development. The “orientalism” of Collins’s early Persian Eclogues (1742) was obviously suggested by the discussion of decorum in the Guardian 30: adjusting the pastoral optics, Collins imitates the melancholy Pope while doing something new and different with locality. He was less than happy with this youthful performance, changing the title in 1757 to Oriental Eclogues and referring to them disparagingly as “Irish eclogues.” But the experiment in cultural geography took root and these slight eclogues became among the most frequently reprinted and anthologized poems of the century. The key innovation, which Collins felt was imperfectly accomplished, was to use pastoral as a device for ethnographic description. Some imitators pursued this insight and some did not. The oriental eclogue could be merely an occasion for high-​colored description and rhetorical excess, as in newspaper verse and in “Hinda, an Eastern Elegy” composed at Oxford by the future Orientalist Thomas Maurice. But poets could also use the form to impart information, as does the Anglo-​Indian Eyles Irwin in a description of suttee, Bedukah; or, The Self-​Devoted:  An Indian Pastoral (1776). Poets also used strong patterning as a frame to compare one society with another. John Scott of Amwell’s three oriental eclogues, published in 1782, are written on Arabian, Hindoo, and Chinese subjects, while Hugh Mulligan’s Poems Chiefly on Slavery and Oppression (1788) explores the rights of man in eclogues set in the continents of Africa, Europe, Asia, and America. The significant development in ethnographic pastoral was to reimagine simplicity as a “pattern of patterns” rendering the manners and beliefs of remote societies probable and comprehensible. Thomas Chatterton’s “African Eclogues” use imagery to connect traditional story, climate, landscape, and supernatural belief: “Vichon disdainful bade his lightnings fly, | And scatter’d burning arrows in the sky; | Threw down a star the armor of his feet, | To burn the air with supernatural heat” (Chatterton, Complete Works, vol. i, p. 591). In ethnographic pastoral the valence of simplicity begins to shift from mere deprivation to a positive coherence of mind and manners peculiar to non-​literate societies.

 

Pastoral   449

“A Pastoral Ballad” “My banks they are furnish’d with bees,” wrote William Shenstone in “A Pastoral Ballad,” “Whose murmur invites one to sleep.”19 If modern readers are prepared to yawn, it was otherwise in the eighteenth century when “A Pastoral Ballad” seems to have been imitated and parodied even more often than Gray’s Elegy. Like Collins in the Persian Eclogues, Shenstone follows the four-​eclogue pattern established by Pope but he rejects the couplet, taking as his model Nicholas Rowe’s “Colin’s Complaint,” often regarded as a traditional ballad. Rowe’s pulsing anapestic meter offered a rustic alternative to couplet refinements, the supernumerary words Shenstone adds to fill out his quatrains adding a winning note of balladic barbarism (“My banks they are furnish’d with bees”). Another source was George Lyttelton’s Progress of Love: In Four Eclogues (1732), but Shenstone drops the “progress”: like Pope’s, his eclogues are cyclical, evoking the brooding melancholy of Colin Clout and terminating in a dirge. There is little variation in tone and whole stanzas could be swapped among parts with little loss of sense. Shenstone’s diction is constricted and his imagery repetitive, circumscribed, and deliberately unparticularized: “From the plains, from the woodlands and groves, | What strains of wild melody flow” (vol. iv, p. 357). “A Pastoral Ballad” is particularized in a different way. The lover, Corydon, happens to be a gardener like Shenstone himself, a most unusual employment for a shepherd: One would think she might like to retire To the bow’r I have labour’d to rear; Not a shrub that I heard her admire, But I hasted and planted it there. (vol. iv, p. 357)

It appears that the fictional shepherd is in fact an impoverished country gentleman concealed behind a façade of balladic rusticity. His Phyllis may be a lady of high degree or just a figure for the “rural elegance” that was the real-​life object of Shenstone’s desire. If so, squire Lyttleton of neighboring Hagley seems a likely identification for Corydon’s rival Paridel. But it was less Shenstone’s sophisticated play with pastoral repertoire and aesthetic emulation than his moody lyricism that enthralled contemporary readers. Shenstone opens by invoking an audience of potential poets, “Ye shepherds so chearful and gay,” and so initiated a singing contest that would go on for decades and extend to all corners of the English-​speaking world. What made “A Pastoral Ballad” the wellhead of such an extensive series of imitations? Like Gray’s Elegy, it was a poem with an easily recognizable rhythmic pattern. Shenstone’s eclectic, seemingly casual diction and cloying, redundant imagery were equally distinctive. Perhaps no better example exists of strong patterning: his murmuring streams, jessamine bowers, smiling vales, and groves of discontent were echoed and elaborated by imitators until the mere mention of “eglantine” might set a heart to throbbing in anapestic measure. If such patterning was an open invitation to burlesque (as in Edward Drewe’s “My beds are all furnish’d with fleas”),20 the pastoral ballad itself verged 19 

William Shenstone, “A Pastoral Ballad, in Four Parts,” in A Collection of Poems in Four Volumes (London, 1755), vol. iv, pp. 354–​63, at p. 356. 20  Edward Drewe, “A Pastoral Ballad,” in Richard Polwhele (ed.), Poems, Chiefly by Gentlemen of Devonshire and Cornwall, 2 vols. (Bath, 1792), vol. ii, pp. 103–​4, at p. 103.

 

450   David Hill Radcliffe on self-​parody, quizzing the reader by spicing its sentimentality with irony and appeals to nature with studied artifice. It was a mode appropriate to the age of Sterne, very slippery and quite contagious. The ensuing singing contest transpired in “the plain,” an undifferentiated imaginary space accessed through metropolitan and provincial newspapers. The St. James’s Chronicle was largely responsible for launching the series. In its pages first appeared John Cunningham’s “Corydon: A Pastoral” (1763): On purpose he planted yon Trees, That Birds in the Covert might dwell: He cultur’d his Thyme for the Bees, But never once rifled their Cell. Ye Lambkins that play’d at his Feet, Go bleat—​and your Master bemoan: His Musick was artless and sweet, His Manners as mild as your own.21

That is to say, Shenstone, himself original, served up flowers of rhetoric from which a swarm of imitators might suck poetical honey—​which they did, prodigiously. Every component of “A Pastoral Ballad” was artfully plundered and amplified, turned and re-​turned, sometimes with considerable ingenuity. Pastoral allegory provided cover for coy maidens to venture into print and for sly youths to accost them, as occurred in the pages of the Edinburgh Weekly Magazine in 1774, when an elegy for Robert Fergusson (imitating Cunningham imitating Shenstone) set off a verse conversation in which C.K. suggested a graveyard assignation with Stella, who the following week turned him down flat: “Young Corydon’s friends are so dear, | Oh! how shall I bid you adieu? | It must be for ever, I fear; | May heav’n be propitious to you!”22 If not productive of immortal verse, this series was not inconsequential. By means of the diurnal and hebdomadal prints a dispersed community of like-​minded readers made itself visible and encouraged others to join; pastoral was easy and the poetical agony columns eager for contributions. The newspaper poets participating in this spontaneously erupting collectivity struck poses and responded to fashion in ways that set the ground for the youth culture of later generations. The consumption of patterned poetry itself became a pattern repeated in the Della Cruscan phenomenon of the 1790s (newspaper poets imitating “Il Penseroso”) and the Byronic poetry of the 1810s (newspaper poets imitating Childe Harold). With the Shenstone series the forlorn figure of Colin Clout became a type not just of poetic melancholia but of disaffected youth specifically. Location, or rather placelessness, operated in a similar way in the contemporary series of periodical verses imitating Ossian. In Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760) James Macpherson takes to heart Pope’s injunction that “we are not to describe our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be conceiv’d then to have been” (Pope, Poems, vol. i, p. 25). He imagines a state of society prior to divisions of labor and consequently to generic distinctions between pastoral, georgic, and epic. In his pastoral-​inflected poetry structures of 21 

John Cunningham, “Corydon: A Pastoral: To the Memory of William Shenstone, Esq.,” St. James’s Chronicle; or, British Evening Post (March 12, 1763). 22  Stella, “To Mr. C. K. of Montrose,” Weekly Magazine; or, Edinburgh Amusement, 19 (December 1, 1774), p. 306.

 

Pastoral   451 repetition that in georgic poetics discriminate place, time, and causality are repurposed to indicate states of mind and intensity of feeling—​much as in Shenstone’s “Pastoral Ballad”: The wind and the rain are over: calm is the noon of day. The clouds are divided in heaven. Over the green hills flies the inconstant sun. Red through the stony vale comes down the stream of the hill. Sweet are thy murmurs, O stream! but more sweet is the voice I hear. It is the voice of Alpin the son of song, mourning for the dead. Bent is his head of age, and red his tearful eye. Alpin, thou son of the song, why alone on the silent hill? why complainest thou, as a blast in the wood; as a wave on the lonely shore? (Macpherson, Poems, p. 24)

Elements in this fragmentary welter—​rain, streams, clouds, tears, winds, voices, and songs—​ become reciprocal components in a description interfusing subject and object, past, present, and future, natural and supernatural agency. Any one item can stand for the others, resulting in a potent holism and a new understanding of “simplicity”23 that recalls Richard Hurd’s remark in Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762): “the poet has a world of his own, where experience has less to do, than consistent imagination.”24

Upsetting the Hierarchy of Genres The rejection of historical and geographical particularity in Shenstone’s and Macpherson’s balladic pastorals is an instance of a mid-​century turn toward lyric that sent a tectonic shiver through the hierarchy of genres. Because pastoral and georgic shared generic constituents, changes in one were likely to produce changes in the other. As Philips and Pope had earlier set pastoral on a new footing by introducing georgic particularity into pastoral diction and description, so the rejection of particularity by Shenstone and Macpherson had an impact on pastoral-​inflected georgic verse. In Oliver Goldsmith’s Deserted Village (1770) and James Beattie’s Minstrel (1771, 1774), undifferentiating simplicity challenges georgic understandings of progress and material history. In scale and substance The Deserted Village is a conventionally georgic discussion of political economy, a word whose primary sense was then housekeeping. Goldsmith presents a series of houses:  the clergyman’s “modest mansion,” the schoolmaster’s “noisy mansion,” and the “tottering mansion” that was the alehouse. But instead of drawing distinctions, as in georgic verse, the pattern only amplifies the uniformity of rustic simplicity. Readers trying to identify the village of Auburn with some literal place seem doomed to disappointment. “Sweet” Auburn is the “loveliest village of the plain”—​a phrase from pastoral balladry used to indicate a locus no more to be found on a map than Brigadoon. Goldsmith’s couplets are as hypnotic as Shenstone’s quatrains, and his incantatory repetition of “sweet,” “charming,” and “lovely” works to similar effect. Like the division of parts in “A Pastoral Ballad,” structural repetitions in the description of Auburn amount to distinctions without a difference, underscoring the as-​yet unspoiled holism and continuity of village life. In his dedication Goldsmith insists that “I sincerely believe what I have written,” another quiz, since to assert 23  David Hill Radcliffe, “Ancient Poetry and British Pastoral,” in Fiona Stafford and Howard Gaskill (eds.), From Gaelic to Romantic: Ossianic Translations (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 27–​40, at p. 39. 24  Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (London, 1762), p. 93.

 

452   David Hill Radcliffe something as a belief is not the same as to assert it as a material fact. In the concluding apostrophe the reader is encouraged to believe that “sweet” poetry, “loveliest” maid, is a proper guide to political economy—​despite the fact that she has left her devotee impoverished and in want. There is no arguing with sincerity like that. Shortly after the second book of The Minstrel appeared in 1774 James Beattie wrote to Elizabeth Montagu, “I know all its faults; but I cannot remedy them, for they are faults in the first concoction; they result from the imperfection of the plan.”25 Inspired by Thomas Percy’s Reliques (1765), the idea had been “to trace the progress of a Poetical Genius, born in a rude and illiterate age, from the first dawnings of fancy and reason, till that period at which he may be supposed capable of supporting the character of a Minstrel”26—​a georgic program. The three books were to have “progressed” from pastoral to heroic poetry; certainly the first is pastoral in scope and the second georgic. But the progress narrative runs afoul of a second design, to contrast the simplicity of former times with modern luxury and corruption. The pastoral canto recalls Spenser’s “December,” a poem then all but unique in describing the childhood and education of a poet, which Beattie amplifies with mountain sublimity, traditional ballads, fairy visions, and atmospheric phenomena derived not from Spenser or Percy but from Macpherson’s Ossian. But Edwin, an illiterate if gentle shepherd, recoils from the loss of innocence formal education would require (“Perish the lore that deadens young desire!”). Readers are left preferring the timeless uniformity of village life to georgic discrimination and epic purposefulness. Sidetracked by his excursus into pastoral, Beattie seems to have been unable or unwilling to carry his “progress” through the Virgilian cycle.

Town Eclogues and Political Pastorals It is time now to reverse the field and look at pastorals describing what Goldsmith and Beattie found distasteful: the social consequences of commerce and divisions of labor. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Guardian had rejected Jacopo Sannazaro’s fishermen as alien to pastoral; by its end, unlikely as it may seem, there was a whole pastoral series devoted to urban laborers. The form seems to have originated with Swift’s “Town Eclogue” (1711), a dialogue between a young urban professional and his pregnant mistress, a prostitute. Characters in town eclogues discourse about money, status, and material goods—​the luxury berated by champions of rural virtue. Most argued their points in the pages of those self-​acknowledged engines of commerce, the public prints. Rather than ringing changes on familiar images and diction, as in pastoral ballad, the object here was to make as yet unrecorded observations about characters, manners, and places. The inspiration for this project was likely John Philips’s Splendid Shilling (1701). Though a descriptive ode, its humor is pastoral, turning on the amusing disproportion between the speaker’s hapless simplicity and the poet’s ponderous Miltonic diction: “Happy the Man, who void of Cares and Strife, | In

25  Sir William Forbes, An Account of the Life and Writings of James Beattie, LL.D., Including Many of His Original Letters, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1806), vol. i, p. 352. 26  James Beattie, The Minstrel; or, The Progress of Genius: A Poem: Book the First (London, 1771), p. v.

 

Pastoral   453 Silken or in Leathern Purse retains | A splendid Shilling … .”27 Eclogue-​writers were irresistibly drawn to the idea of describing the social and economic complexities of urban life as refracted through the narrow understandings of bewildered citizens.28 While these poems are too many to enumerate, a short list of titles will suggest what was going on: “Warbletta: A Suburban Eclogue” (1733); “The Billingsgate Contest: A Piscatory London Eclogue” (1734); “A Covent-​Garden Eclogue” (1735); “A Scarborough Eclogue” (1735); “A Stage Eclogue, in imitation of Virgil’s 3d Pastoral” (1736); “The Attorney’s Clerk: An Eclogue” (1737); “A Wapping Eclogue” (1739). The series fired up again after mid-​century with increased emphasis on professions and money: “The Parsons: An Eclogue” (1750); “The Scavengers: A Town Eclogue” (1758); “The Chairmen: A Town-​Eclogue” (1760); “The Forsaken Milliners: A Town Eclogue” (1767); “The Poets: A Town Eclogue” (1769); “The Drivers: A Dialogue” (1770); “The Court-​Chaplain” (1772); “The Chimney-​Sweepers, a Town Eclogue” (1773); “Reynard; or, The Gambler: A Town Eclogue” (1773); “The Auction: A Town Eclogue” (1778). The best work in urban pastoral was done by two Scots, Andrew Erskine and Robert Fergusson. Erskine’s “Street-​Walkers” (1773) considers the economics of prostitution: Nigh where St. Clement’s church contracts the Strand, Two females took their solitary stand, Their painted cheeks afar diffus’d a glare, Their eyes possess’d the meretricious stare, Their flaunting garments show’d in tatter’d trim, While many a splash of dirt adorn’d each limb. Three hours the theatres had empty been, Hardly a mortal on the streets was seen, Thieves now began their trade of picking locks, And drowsy watchmen snored in every box.29

Erskine lightly touches on art (“tatter’d trim”) and nature (“splash of dirt”) before pursuing the high–​low dialectic as the streetwalkers compare their present situation to the opera-​ house glories they enjoy on a good night; there follows a singing contest in which the ladies (from Kent and Yorkshire, respectively) speak with undiminished ardor of their first seducers. The sentimentality dissipates abruptly, “When, lo! a drunken buck came reeling by,” and hauls them off “nothing loath.” Readers are left to ponder unexpected intersections between country and city, leisure and labor, simplicity and vice—​and burlesque and sentimental pastoral. Edinburgh’s Robert Fergusson takes locality and georgic materialism to the limit by making the very stones speak in “Mutual Complaint of Plainstanes and Causey,” in which Plainstanes lords it over his more proletarian companion: “from Arthur’s-​seat I sprang.”30

27 

John Philips, “An Imitation of Milton” [The Splendid Shilling], in A Collection of Poems (London, 1701), p. 393. On imitations of Philips, see the introduction and bibliography in Richmond P. Bond, English Burlesque Poetry, 1700–​1750 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1932)—​I have collected a good many more in Spenser and the Tradition. Like the town eclogue, the series extends into the nineteenth century. 29  Andrew Erskine, Town-​Eclogues: I. The Hangmen, II. The Harlequins, III. The Street-​Walkers, IV. The Undertakers (London, 1773), p. 12. 30  Robert Fergusson, “Mutual Complaint of Plainstanes and Causey, in Their Mother-Tongue,” Weekly Magazine; or, Edinburgh Amusement, 19 (March 4, 1773), 306–7, at p. 306. 28 

 

454   David Hill Radcliffe Town eclogues shared repertoire so extensively with imitations of Philips’s Splendid Shilling and burlesques of Gray’s Elegy that the choice of eclogue, ode, or elegy begins to seem a mere formality. The series branched in multiple directions. Fergusson’s dialect eclogues were also pastorals of nationality, as are four times-​of-​day poems by J.N. published in the Dublin Mercury in 1771 describing Irish manners and folkways. A series of political pastorals developed out of the town eclogues concerned with professions (one of J.N.’s was “Evening; or, The Politicians”). Charles James Fox figures in “Coalition Eclogues” published in the Morning Post (August 22, 1785), and Pitt and Dundas in Pitti-​Clout & Dun-​Cuddy, a Political Eclogue, published as a pamphlet in 1795. George Canning’s famous “Friend of Humanity and the Knife Grinder” (1797) links the town eclogue to the moral eclogue, the chief promoter of which was the Rev. William Dodd, whose “Moral Pastorals” began appearing in the Christian’s Magazine in 1763. The Quaker John Scott of Amwell published Moral Eclogues in 1778. To the usual georgic themes of labor and domestic economy these add didactic instruction while omitting the burlesque. There were comparatively few moral eclogues—​possibly Dodd’s execution for forgery proved an impediment.

The Rustic Bard A late development was the invention of the “rustic bard,” an Ossian figure for modern times. Bardic poetry was understood to be sublime and the bard a solitary genius (see ­chapter 13, “The Poet as Genius”), characteristics that did not match the general profile of eighteenth-​ century eclogue (though there was a series of Virgilian sublime pastorals of which Pope’s Messiah: A Sacred Eclogue, 1712, is most familiar). The rustic bard descended from Allan Ramsay’s gentle shepherd. While Thomas Gray could imagine a “mute inglorious Milton” the argument of his Elegy is that villagers require a poet to articulate the concerns of those who, lacking literacy, lack a public voice. The stanzas in which Gray imagines his own death depict the rural poet as in the village but not of it—​lifting him abruptly out of the literal churchyard and into the visionary space of “wayward fancies.” In Goldsmith’s Deserted Village “rural mirth and manners” require a poet—​educated, alienated, and visionary—​to unfold their economic significance. In The Minstrel, which codified the Romantic image of the peasant-​ poet, the progress of genius stalls at the moment where Edwin is to cross the bridge from orality to literacy. Such was the state of affairs when Burns composed the “Cotter’s Saturday Night” and “A Vision”—​poems that called the rustic bard to life through an astute, critical reading of eighteenth-​century pastoral. In the “Cotter” Burns presents familiar things in an unfamiliar way, introducing ethnographic pastoral into the higher ode as a way of connecting domestic economy to its informing religious beliefs. The opening description is more graphic than The Minstrel and the succeeding typological reading of Scripture more historical: in Protestant Scotland, where even the poorest of the poor are literate, the Cotter’s faith permeates society and regulates manners even as had bardic song in the time of Ossian. In contrast to Gray’s “short and simple annals of the Poor,” this is a history that makes history, as when Wallace defeated the English, and the covenanters a popish aristocracy. Inspired by what he sees, the poet declares: “A virtuous Populace may rise the while, | And stand a wall of fire around their

 

Pastoral   455 much-​lov’d Isle.”31 Burns recalls Goldsmith’s “bold peasantry, their country’s pride,” but instead of quantifying soldiers he uses the resources of pastoral to demonstrate the political agency of rural tradition, belief, and education. In “A Vision,” the laborer is Burns himself. Coila’s account of his education corresponds point-​for-​point with that of Edwin in The Minstrel—​with the important difference that it involves reading. “A Vision” subtly rearranges the pastoral prisms: it was one thing for Pope to double himself as Alexis or Shenstone as Corydon, but for Burns to double himself as Burns is to link simplicity to sophistication in a novel way, as though cultivating the land depicted on Coila’s mantle were the means of cultivating the mind speaking through Coila’s lips. The two senses of culture are not the same—​one sees (and through the diction hears) the distinction between the literal farmer and the visionary bard—​but appear as two sides of one coin. Readers were inclined to identify them, however, as does Hector Macneill in his bardic Pastoral; or, Lyric Muse of Scotland (1808), a three-​canto progress-​of-​poetry that conflates the design of The Minstrel with that of “A Vision.”32 The development of a series by the sophisticated imitation one observes in Burns is a far cry from the spontaneous order emerging from pastoral ballad and town eclogue, but both are typically pastoral in working the resources of genre through rhetorical emulation. Like the society it imaged, pastoral responded to inputs from tradition and commerce that pushed and pulled in contrary directions. The form does not lend itself to narrative presentation, nor does a “progress of pastoral” seem appropriate to a literary kind so resistant to notions of progress. It is one of the few major areas of early-​modern literature that remains to be properly mapped, a continent few critics have been inclined to explore. I have tried to indicate the kinds of literary work transacted there: reviving elder forms of literature, articulating opposing views of literature and society, making an anonymous reading public visible to itself, shifting the hierarchy of genres in ways that set the stage for Romantic poetry and nineteenth-​century discourses about culture. I have argued that this was accomplished not by individual poems but by poems in series. If eighteenth-​century pastoral left few monuments behind, it was not, by nature or inclination, a monumental genre.

References Barrell, John, and John Bull (eds.), A Book of English Pastoral Verse (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975). Battestin, Martin C., The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1974).

31  Robert Burns, “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” in Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Kilmarnock, 1786), pp. 124–​37, at p. 137. 32  Nigel Leask, Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-​Century Scotland (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), sets about exploding the Burns mythology created by writers like Macneill and in the process makes a significant contribution to the line of enquiry begun by Raymond Williams a generation ago. It does not, however, have much to say about Burns’s uses of eighteenth-​century pastoral.

 

456   David Hill Radcliffe Bragg, Marion K., The Formal Eclogue in Eighteenth-​Century England (Orono: Maine Univ. Press, 1926). Christmas, William (ed.), Eighteenth-​ Century English Labouring-​ Class Poets, 3 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003). Congleton, J. E., Theories of Pastoral Poetry in England, 1684–​1798 (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1952). Elledge, Scott (ed.), Eighteenth-​ Century Critical Essays, 2 vols. (Ithaca:  Cornell Univ. Press, 1961). Jones, Richard F., “Eclogue Types in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century,” JEGP, 24 (1925), 33–​60. Leask, Nigel, Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-​Century Scotland (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010). Patterson, Annabel, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987). Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973).

 

Chapter 27

Georg i c David Fairer Virgil’s Georgics, his great poem about agriculture and the working life of the countryside, offered the eighteenth century not only a poetic model but also a way of thinking about culture, economics, and modernity. In extending its remit to include a range of contemporary subjects, including cider-​making, the human diet, coal-​mining, and the wool and sugar industries, eighteenth-​century georgic often draws directly from its classical source, but without opposing the ancient to the modern. The tendency of this reworked georgic is to avoid letting the one judge or mock the other, and instead to relish the correspondence between them. To a surprising degree the georgic poem transfers Virgilian material directly into a modern context. Texts like John Philips’s Cyder (1708), Robert Dodsley’s Agriculture (1753), and John Dyer’s The Fleece (1757) absorb, recycle, and update Virgil’s advice about agricultural practice, and consciously keep the Georgics alive not only in spirit, but often in the letter. In the preface to his edition of Virgil’s poem in 1746, John Martyn remarked that “though the soil and climate of Italy are different from those of England; yet it has been found by experience, that most of his rules may be put in practice, even here, to advantage.”1 But at the same time eighteenth-​century writers began to use georgic to open up modern topics for poetic discussion, and in so doing to develop a more technical, even manufactured, language with which to tackle contemporary economic subjects. It is this lively interaction between old and new, and the linking of the national project to the poetic project, that makes eighteenth-​century georgic so fascinating.

Cultivation Between the publication of John Philips’s Cyder: A Poem: In Two Books (1708) and James Grainger’s The Sugar-​Cane: A Poem: In Four Books: With Notes (1764), a succession of poets produced ambitious georgic poems, mainly in blank verse, whose subject is the process by which natural resources are harnessed to human needs, and raw materials transformed for

1  John Martyn, Publii Virgilii Maronis Georgicorum Libri Quatuor: The Georgicks of Virgil, with an English Translation and Notes (London, 1746), p. xii.

 

458   David Fairer use or consumption. These practical topics were in tune with Britain’s rapid economic expansion during the period, and reflect a growing interest in Virgilian civic culture, a linking of civis and cultus in which cultivation (in the wider sense of exploiting nature productively) underpins a settled and virtuous state.2 In the closing passage of Cyder, Philips celebrates the Act of Union between England and Scotland ratified the previous year, and his poem looks forward to “the sweet Prospect of a mutual Gain,” in which the “well blended Streams” of pressed cider will help to lubricate the new kingdom’s expanding trade. In return for exotic pearl and gold from the east, Great Britain will export this precious “ruby-​tinctur’d” liquid, so that the old traditions of Herefordshire cider-​making will be relished by the “natives” of India.3 The confidence with which the locally cultivated resource becomes a metonym for a wider national resourcefulness is something that recurs in georgic, whether the raw material be an apple, a fleece, timber, hops, or a sugar cane. It treasures the local while projecting its values universally in a final expansive gesture. Dyer’s Fleece opens, as Virgil’s poem does, with advice on gauging the qualities of different local soils, and it ends with Britain’s woollen manufactures clothing the world: “Britain’s happy trade, now spreading wide, | Wide as th’Atlantic and Pacific seas, | Or as air’s vital fluid o’er the globe.”4 Alexander Pope’s Windsor-​Forest (1713), published to welcome the Peace of Utrecht, also negotiates a move of this kind. After establishing the poet’s childhood landscape as a virtuous retreat entrusted with the nation’s past, it follows the local tributary downstream into the mighty Thames, and finally out to the other side of the globe. In Pope’s closing prophetic vision the timbers of Windsor’s oaks will carry the nation’s products across the ocean to the new world, and in turn “the new World launch forth to seek the Old.”5 In this way the poem links the homely to the exotic, and connects local story, national history, and international future. It is a healing vision: after the isolation and conflict of the long European war, a new organic living order is returning, and as old divisions heal, trade will expand and bring with it a culture that is simultaneously more mixed and integrated. This seemingly paradoxical idea is announced at the beginning of Pope’s poem, in which “Order in Variety we see, | And where, tho’ all things differ, all agree” (lines 15–​16). These well-​known lines are often read as voicing the principle of concordia discors, what Earl Wasserman has called “Nature’s great law” expressing Pope’s “presiding faith in a grand cosmic pattern of harmonious confusion and agreement through difference—​a pattern governing ‘Nature,’ the physical universe, human society, man, and the arts.”6 But Windsor-​Forest is not An Essay on Man (1733–​4), and to make such a grand link to Pope’s later theodicy underplays the early poem’s georgic character in which the reassurance of an all-​embracing “natural order” is tentative at best. Like the Georgics, Windsor-​Forest is a poem of hope rather than faith. Mankind’s impulse toward violence can only be redirected, 2  For a more detailed discussion of the politics of eighteenth-​century georgic poetry, see Juan Christian Pellicer, “The Georgic,” in Christine Gerrard (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth-​Century Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 403–​16. 3  John Philips, Cyder: A Poem: In Two Books (London, 1708), book ii, lines 638, 661–​2. 4  John Dyer, The Fleece: A Poem: In Four Books (London, 1757), p. 156 (book iv, lines 694–​6). 5 Pope, Windsor-​Forest, line 400, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–​69), vol. i, p. 191. 6  Earl R. Wasserman, The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1959), p. 103. See his discussion of the politics of Windsor-​Forest in terms of concordia discors, pp. 103–​13.

 

Georgic   459 not dispelled, and Pope’s hunting scenes are unsettled by echoes of the conflict they inevitably recall: “The Trumpets sleep, while chearful Horns are blown, | And Arms employ’d on Birds and Beasts alone” (lines 371–​2). When Virgil refers to “the weapons (arma) the hardy farmer needs, | Essential for the sowing and raising of crops,”7 he is picturing a similar redirection of energies. After a period of war, the elements of antagonistic difference can be recast as agreeable variety, a more integrated multifariousness. What drives georgic is the urgent need to reach beyond opposed dualities and instead to look around for something varied, enriching, and potentially collaborative and progressive. This Virgilian idea is the credo of georgic, and it is what makes it fervently reject war (sometimes still lurking in the shadows) and urge the constructive works of peace.8 Georgic turns the energies of conflict into productive activity; it rejects binaries and celebrates the organic, adaptive, ingenious, skillful, and useful. The soil, with its many admixtures and different characters, becomes a gauge of adaptability. John Philips’s words in Cyder are virtually a direct translation of Georgics, book i, lines 52–​3: let the Planter, with Discretion meet, The Force and Genius of each Soil explore; To what adapted, what it shuns averse: Without this necessary Care, in vain He hopes an Apple-​Vintage … (Cyder, book i, lines 41–​5)

Individual Genius (“characteristic disposition”) and differences of taste and responsiveness have to be borne in mind. A recognition of this is at the heart of georgic’s mixed form, in which distinctive elements are shown to be combining fruitfully. Virgil’s interest in the art of engrafting typifies georgic’s investment in finding new combinations, with contrasting characters no longer clashing but being brought productively together: Some think, the Quince and Apple wou’d combine In happy Union; Others fitter deem The Sloe-​Stem bearing Sylvan Plums austere. Who knows but Both may thrive? Howe’er, what loss To try the Pow’rs of Both, and search how far Two different Natures may concur to mix. (Cyder, book i, lines 297–​302)

It is not a case of either/​or, but of fruitful mixing and experimentation. As Virgil had suggested:  “often we observe how one tree’s branches | Can turn, with no harm done, into another’s—​| Pear trees transformed to bear engrafted apples, | And plum trees red with the fruit of stony cornels [cherries].”9 It is essentially a hopeful vision of a world in which difference is neither exacerbated nor erased, but exploited for positive ends to form a “happy Union.”

7 Virgil, Georgics, book i, lines 160–​1, in The Georgics, trans. L. P. Wilkinson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 62. 8  In 1708 the European war can be heard in the background of Philips’s Cyder: “May we, remote | From the hoarse, brazen Sound of War, enjoy | Our humid Products, and with seemly Draughts | Enkindle Mirth, and Hospitable Love” (book ii, lines 482–​5). Philips proudly records that his native Herefordshire had fought for King Charles in the English Civil War, though he sees this as resisting insurrection by a “mad, headstrong Rout” of “Atheist Rebells” (book ii, lines 498–​501). 9  Georgics, book ii, lines 32–​4.

 

460   David Fairer

Historical Contexts A state of peace is the prerequisite for this generous curiosity of georgic, and eighteenth-​ century poets understand the historical context. The Georgics (composed 36–​29 bce) is located in an Italy torn apart by civil war and beginning to embark on a process of national recovery. It is leaving the trauma of war behind and confronting the new responsibilities of peace. After his decisive defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 bce, Octavian was setting out to reunite the empire and rebuild a nation that had suffered years of depredation, and Virgil’s poem was in tune with that project. When he read the completed work to Octavian in 29 bce, his words at the close of book i had particular resonance: “everywhere | So many wars, so many shapes of crime | Confront us; no due honour attends the plough, | The fields, bereft of tillers, are all unkempt” (book i, lines 505–​7). This scene of devastation is the backdrop against which Virgil surveys in detail how the “exhausted” soil of Italy can recover, and how remembered skills, traditions, observances, and disciplines can be re-​established, but impelled by a fresh determination to unite the nation in peace and prosperity. The old republican virtues are being embedded in what will turn out to be the new Augustan imperial project. There is a paradox here of tradition driving innovation, and it is one which allowed English georgic of the eighteenth century to welcome progress without discarding the past. The Virgilian skills are those of adjustment, the need to work with particular conditions and make the best out of them. “Trials must decide,” remarks James Grainger when he considers different methods of composting the sugar cane.10 Such activities demand an alertness that is a combination of responsiveness and forethought, experience and planning, and this gives georgic an awareness of the exigencies of time and the importance of knowing one’s situation and materials. In the Georgics, experience (usus), keen observation, and anticipation (i.e., past, present, and future) interlock (book i, lines 252–​8), and what embraces it all is Wisdom, which understands the signs and keeps a sharp eye. Virgil himself looks back seven centuries to Hesiod’s Works and Days (eighth century bce), the founding text of georgic, with its combination of traditional observances and practical advice (“As for the labourers, spur them to thresh Demeter’s holy grain as soon as mighty Orion appears, in a well-​ventilated place and on a well-​rolled floor, and to collect it carefully in the jars with the scoop”).11 In drawing directly from that old Greek poetical handbook Virgil taps into the even older “wisdom” tradition stretching back to ancient Mesopotamia, which also underpins biblical wisdom literature. There is a familial link therefore between the Georgics’ Hesiodic advice about “the time to reap or sow” (book i, line 253) and those famous words of Ecclesiastes, “To every thing there is a season … a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.”12

10  James Grainger, The Sugar-​Cane: A Poem: In Four Books: With Notes (London, 1764), book i, line 246. See John Gilmore, The Poetics of Empire: A Study of James Grainger’s “The Sugar-​Cane” (London and New Brunswick: Athlone Press, 2000), p. 98. 11 Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days, transl. M. L. West (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 54–​5. 12  Ecclesiastes 3:1–​2. See Theogony and Works and Days, transl. M. L. West, p. xvi.

 

Georgic   461

A Sense of Progress Although it has these very deep cultural roots, georgic is the opposite of static: it thrives on growth and remains active and exploratory. “Strain all thy nerves, and ev’ry thought explore,” urges Dyer (The Fleece, book ii, line 472). In this dynamic context human wits are at a premium, sharpened by care, curis acuens (Georgics, book i, line 123). Conscious of the stretch of time, georgic is keenly aware of nature’s primal rhythms, but also of the immediate need to adjust to every situation. Avoiding both grand epic plans and predictable pastoral routines, it values procedures that have been shown to work, whether informed by old skills or new techniques, and is happy sometimes to view them in collaboration. In his Agriculture, Robert Dodsley assesses the latest technical improvements being advocated by Jethro Tull, but he does so with the reassuring thought that they are the product of wisdom and experience: “But new improvements curious would’st thou learn? | Hear then the lore of fair Berkeria’s Son, | Whose precepts, drawn from sage experience, claim | Regard.”13 Tull’s revolutionary seed-​drill is categorized as “lore,” a word that suggests an ancient secret handed down through generations. In such a way Dodsley moves naturally from old to new, conscious that the georgic poet himself offers “precepts” and practical guidelines in his role as preceptor (Latin praeceptor ‘instructor’). The technical details that are a characteristic feature of georgic instruction sometimes emerge more sharply against a background of ancient tradition, with the eighteenth-​century worker filling his archetypal role. However modern the scene, it is often rooted in the timeless fact of labor. In writing about Kentish hop-​growing in his two-​book georgic, The Hop-​ Garden (1752), Christopher Smart takes his reader into the hop-​kiln to view the dry-​roasting process. His scrupulously detailed description wittily superimposes the primal classical scene of Vulcan’s forge and the modern oast house fitted with the latest ventilation system: On your hair-​cloth eight inches deep, nor more, Let the green hops lie lightly; next expand The smoothest surface with the toothy rake. Thus far is just above; but more it boots That charcoal flames burn equably below, The charcoal flames, which from thy corded wood, Or antiquated poles, with wond’rous skill, The sable priests of Vulcan shall prepare. Constant and moderate let the heat ascend; Which to effect, there are, who with success Place in the kiln the ventilating fan.14

And immediately Smart breaks off to pay tribute to his fellow Kentishman, Stephen Hales (1677–​1761), for his valuable invention, one that outdoes the “mystic fan of Bacchus” (book 13 

Robert Dodsley, Public Virtue: A Poem: In Three Books: I. Agriculture; II. Commerce; III. Arts (London, 1753), book ii, lines 48–​51. Only the first book of Dodsley’s ambitious poem was published. Tull hailed from Berkshire (anciently “Berkeria”). On this poem, see Juan Christian Pellicer, “The Georgic at Mid-​ Eighteenth Century and the Case of Dodsley’s ‘Agriculture,’” Review of English Studies, 54 (2003), 67–​93. 14  “The Hop-​Garden. A Georgic,” book i, lines 193–​203, in Poems on Several Occasions: By Christopher Smart, A.M. (London, 1752), pp. 103–​35. See Juan Christian Pellicer, “Christopher Smart’s The Hop-​ Garden: A Satirical Parody of John Philips’s Cyder?,” Notes & Queries, 51 (2004), 400–​6.

 

462   David Fairer i, line 209). At this point Smart’s footnote refers us to Virgil’s “mystica vannus Iacchi” (Georgics, book i, line 166) at a moment when Virgil himself is drawing an amusing parallel between his Italian peasant’s winnowing fan and the paraphernalia of the Eleusinian mysteries. The two poets’ witty allusions become woven together in such a way as to subsume their mock-​heroic images into a richer mix of the everyday and the exotic. Georgic allusion can often have this more complex and layered effect. In linking new to old, and vice versa, georgic draws much from the accumulated past, but it must not risk slipping into nostalgia because that will relax human energies, and in georgic the emphasis is finally on looking to the future. Well-​tried routines are important, but any complacency will be punished: the rigors of climate, the depredations of pests, and the harsh accidents of nature will see to that. Unlike the pastoral shepherd, Dyer’s sheep farmer has forever to keep a watchful eye for symptoms of disease. Reading the tiniest of signs with an expert eye has been at the heart of georgic since Hesiod, who advised: “When the carryhouse [Hesiod’s homely name for the snail] climbs up the plants to escape the Pleiades, then digging of vines is past, it is time to sharpen sickles and wake up the labourers.”15 Dyer’s georgic farmer notices similarly small but vital things, as here when he is able to diagnose the onset of liver rot: That dire distemper sometimes may the swain, Though late, discern; when, on the lifted lid, Or visual orb, the turgid veins are pale; The swelling liver then her putrid store Begins to drink: ev’n yet thy skill exert, Nor suffer weak despair to fold thy arms. (The Fleece, book i, lines 266–​7 1)

At this critical moment, as John Goodridge expertly notes, the poet is taking on the role of veterinary surgeon, “standing astride the animal to lift the eyelid; pointing to the pallor of the blood vessels, explaining how the disease swells the liver and advising the shepherd, with the kind of confidence only doctors and vets can muster, not to panic.”16 Dyer’s landscape is a testing one in which sheep “with hoarse cough | Disturb the music of the past’ral pipe” (book i, lines 23–​4).

Georgic Nature In Virgil’s Janus-​faced poem we do have a bracing sense of progress, but it is edged with the fear of being swept back into anarchy and conflict. Georgic nature tends to be unpredictable rather than reassuring: it offers a rewarding cycle of sowing, cultivation, fruition, and harvest, but it can also turn against you and frustrate all your efforts: So it is: for everything by nature’s law Tends to the worse, slips ever backward, backward. As with a man who scarce propels his boat

15 

Theogony and Works and Days, trans. M. L. West, p. 54. John Goodridge, Rural Life in Eighteenth-​Century English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), p. 147. 16 

 

Georgic   463 Against the stream: if once his arms relax, The current sweeps it headlong down the rapids. (Georgics, book i, lines 199–​203)

Progress, national or individual, comes only with effort, and Virgil presents it as a constant tug of war between energy and entropy. This was something Stephen Duck the Wiltshire thresher well understood when he reworked Virgil’s image to describe his own working routine: “Thus, as the Year’s revolving Course goes round, | No respite from our Labour can be found: | Like Sysiphus, our Work is never done, | Continually rolls back the restless Stone.”17 Duck’s Thresher’s Labour (1730) may not be a formal georgic, but its pictures of the pains and rewards of labor directly evoke Virgil’s poem with its repeated reminders of human effort. In John Barrell’s words, georgic “conceives of nature as niggardly, as reluctant to yield its fruits, as always threatening to run wild, as hostile to us, and so needing to be subdued by work.”18 Nature is not an altogether comforting and easy thing in georgic, but must be effectively harnessed. It rewards attention, effort, ingenuity, experience, and above all care, a term which in Virgil (cura) can combine caring, managing, and toiling: exercising care, taking responsibility, and experiencing cares. All three meanings seem to be present when James Grainger embarks on his ambitious Sugar-​Cane: “What soil the Cane affects; what care demands; | Beneath what signs to plant; what ills await” (book i, lines 1–​2). Taking its place in this list of georgic essentials (soil, care, signs, ills), care is both the painstaking and the painful. The echoing of Cane and care in his opening line makes an immediately telling point about the nature of his poem. But Virgil’s Georgics is also lit by a brief golden vision of how things ought to be, the key point being that it is conveyed as a vision, not an observation. At this point Virgil is not looking around him but is consciously slipping toward fantasy: “O to be | Wafted away to the Thessalian plains | … O who will set me down in some cool glen | Of Haemus under a canopy of branches?” (book ii, lines 486–​9). Critics who detect a leisured agenda of “happy labour” and “grateful toil” in georgic poetry tend to focus on this passage at the close of the second book with its vision of harmony and fruitfulness (“O fortunatos nimium”).19 But Virgil’s tone is complex and we catch a hint of this in John Dryden’s translation of the lines (1697): O happy, if he knew his happy State! The Swain, who, free from Business and Debate, Receives his easy Food from Nature’s Hand, And just Returns of cultivated Land! ………………………………………………… . He feeds on Fruits, which, of their own accord, The willing Ground, and laden Trees afford.20 17 

Poems on Several Subjects: Written by Stephen Duck (London, 1730), p. 25 (lines 278–​81). Duck is alluding to Georgics, book ii, lines 401–​2 (“Thus in a Circle runs the Peasant’s Pain, | And the Year rowls within it self again”) (trans. Dryden). 18  John Barrell, Poetry, Language and Politics (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1988), p. 114. 19  Georgics, book ii, lines 458–​512. To say that georgic celebrates “a traditionalist scheme that equates happy labor with the soil” (Rachel Crawford, “English Georgic and British Nationhood,” ELH, 65 [1998], 123–​58, at p. 135) is to miss the more complex way in which a passage like this works. 20  John Dryden, Georgics, book ii, lines 639–​42, 715–​16, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1956–​ 2000), vol. v, pp. 202, 204.

 

464   David Fairer It is a pastoral vision rather than a georgic record, with the emphasis on paradisal ease rather than necessary labor. In Dryden’s couplets there is a satisfying neatness, almost amounting to contractual satisfaction (“just Returns”), which catches nicely the hint of complacency coloring Virgil’s picture, the sense of the facile behind this facilem victum (“easy Food”). In Virgil’s picture of a golden age, translated directly from Hesiod, Nature is handing out its gifts freely and the swain need only be grateful. At a moment like this Virgil is aware of offering Maecenas and Augustus a positive picture of national recovery. But elsewhere his poem will not conceal the difficulties and struggles that lie ahead. Progress will not be made in a single confident sweep but by innumerable incremental local struggles, in which individual character will be fully tested. Georgic is finally less an optimistic mode than a guardedly hopeful and constructive one. As Juan Christian Pellicer justly remarks, “Critics who represent georgic as sunnily optimistic disregard the shadows accentuating its bands of light” (Pellicer, “The Georgic,” p. 414). The positive thrust of georgic, won against inertia and disorder, repeatedly focuses on human resourcefulness, strength, persistence, adaptation, problem-​solving, initiative, and choice. But setbacks are emphasized as well as progress. Even James Thomson’s Seasons (1726–​46), with its ultimately providential scheme, goes out of its way to include incidents of individual tragedy and disaster, and to raise questions about the cruelty of nature. Plagues, storms, and snowdrifts claim both human and animal lives, and a striking picture like this offers itself almost as a “mock” scene of good husbandry: Th’unconquerable Lightning struggles thro’, … and, stretch’d below, A lifeless Groupe the blasted Cattle lie: Here the soft Flocks, with that same harmless Look They wore alive, and ruminating still In Fancy’s Eye; and there the frowning Bull, And Ox half-​rais’d.21

The dead animals are composed like a pastoral painting; but it is the georgic dimension that supplies the irony, as we also “ruminate” on a scene that is simultaneously one of calm and destructiveness. Georgic nature never remains picturesque for long. In “Autumn,” Thomson can appropriately celebrate fruition and the calm of the season; but at the very moment he does so, the prospect shifts from a pastoral stillness and harmony to a potential georgic anxiety. The weather seems about to change—​a reminder that, unlike pastoral, georgic is located east of Eden, in an uncomfortable world where the fruits of the earth do not simply offer themselves to us: a serener Blue, With golden Light enliven’d wide invests The happy World. Attemper’d Suns arise, Sweet-​beam’d, and shedding oft thro’ lucid Clouds A pleasing Calm; while broad, and brown, below, Extensive Harvests hang the heavy Head. Rich, silent, deep, they stand; for not a Gale

21  James Thomson, “Summer,” lines 1147–​56, in The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 112.

 

Georgic   465 Rolls its light Billows o’er the bending Plain; A Calm of Plenty! till the ruffled Air Falls from its Poise, and gives the Breeze to blow. Rent is the fleecy Mantle of the Sky; The Clouds fly different … (“Autumn,” lines 26–​37)

The landscape instantaneously shifts its character, from a Claude to a Constable. The rich harvest, poised under a golden light, is waiting to be gathered in; but then Thomson subtly reminds us how vulnerable it is, and how a whole year’s labors might in a single hour be rendered useless. Georgic’s consciousness of time and change gives it this unsettling aspect, recognized in Thomson’s all-​embracing title The Seasons. In the above passage his phrase “falls from its Poise” (line 35) deliberately recalls the earlier moment in “Spring” where he had emphasized that our world is not a golden one: But now those white unblemish’d Minutes, whence The fabling Poets took their golden Age, Are found no more amid these iron Times, These Dregs of Life! Now the distemper’d Mind Has lost that Concord of harmonious Powers, Which forms the Soul of Happiness; and all Is off the Poise within … (“Spring,” lines 272–​8, emphasis added)

Thomson’s phrase “these iron Times” comes directly from Hesiod, who records that the Age of Gold when men “lived like gods, with carefree heart, remote from toil and misery” is long past: “For now it is a race of iron; and they will never cease from toil and misery by day or night, in constant distress, and the gods will give them harsh troubles. Nevertheless, even they shall have good mixed with ill.”22 This last concession becomes the ultimate promise of georgic writing: a Hesiodic mixing of “good with ill,” won from the grip of an iron age.

Georgic and Pastoral It is vital to recognize this distinction between georgic and pastoral (see c­ hapter  26, “Pastoral”).23 In twentieth-​century criticism there was an unfortunate tendency to allow the two to merge, and thus to lose sight of the crucial differences in their character. Being a capacious and varied genre, georgic can happily incorporate pastoral elements into the mix; but the reverse would be incongruous. As William Blake understood, Experience is able to reflect on Innocence, but not vice versa. In contrast to pastoral, traditionally

22 

Theogony and Works and Days, trans. M. L. West, pp. 40, 42. On the georgic as a genre distinct from pastoral, see John Chalker, The English Georgic: A Study in the Development of a Form (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969); Alastair Fowler, “Georgic and Pastoral: Laws of Genre in the Seventeenth Century,” in Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (eds.), Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing and the Land (Leicester: Leicester Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 81–​8; and David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–​1789 (London: Longman, 2003), pp. 89–​99. 23 

 

466   David Fairer associated with youthful innocence, the materials of georgic demanded knowledge and experience. In the eighteenth century it became a grown-​up poetry for an age that was becoming busier and wealthier, and a nation that was concerned with how to handle progress. In that way georgic represents the obverse of a poem like The Deserted Village (1770), a powerful expression of pastoral nostalgia in which Oliver Goldsmith laments the effects of “trade’s proud empire”24 and sees progress in terms of loss. The “dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease” (line 5) have been destroyed, and a “bold peasantry” (line 55) disinherited. This very un-​georgic text shows wealth purely in its effects, not in production, with luxury and leisure set against beggary and starvation, with no work in between. In Goldsmith’s dualistic vision the equation is a simple inverse proportion (“where wealth accumulates, and men decay,” line 52), those who produced that wealth are missing. There are no busy fields, coal-​mines, roads, or canals, just pleasure grounds alongside neglected waste. In its final ironic scene, paralleling the expansiveness at the close of a georgic poem, the trading vessel is exporting not British manufactures but the dispossessed peasantry, carried off into exile. In his closing panorama of the inhospitable wilds of America, Goldsmith does not raise the georgic possibility that these dispossessed figures might establish a smallholding, cultivate the land, and become wealthy in their turn. The radical potential of pastoral is evident here, against which georgic is much less amen­ able to forces of division and antagonism. Georgic’s world tends to be one of evolution rather than revolution. Instead of confrontation it looks for ways in which people can live and work together, whatever the strain, with various elements effectively reconciled. Its economy is a mixed one, with the peasant and his ox in harness together, making the best of things. The laborer-​poet can seemingly find moments of satisfaction in a job skillfully done, but here georgic “care” develops especial irony. The Hampshire washerwoman, Mary Collier, handles her employers’ fine clothes delicately, knowing the different characters of each fabric she must clean: Heaps of fine Linen we before us view, Whereon to lay our Strength and Patience too; Cambricks and Muslins, which our Ladies wear, Laces and Edgings, costly, fine, and rare, Which must be wash’d with utmost Skill and Care.25

The “fine” materials offer a heroic challenge, and Collier’s lines, like her hands, treat them with respect. She balances the “Cambricks and Muslins” with her own “Strength and Patience,” the “Laces and Edgings” with her “Skill and Care,” neatly negotiated in the extra care of a triplet. The phrases may be predictable ones, but they are doing a clean job, so tidy that it is easy to overlook the little rueful word “lay”: she can lay only her physical effort on those linen bedclothes, not her tired body. The tactical skills of georgic language are appropriate for its materials. To see it simply as a “poetic diction” designed to make a vulgar topic more refined for polite readers is to get

24 

The Deserted Village, line 427, in The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), vol. iv, p. 303. 25  Mary Collier, The Woman’s Labour: An Epistle to Mr. Stephen Duck; In Answer to His Late Poem, Called The Thresher’s Labour (London, 1739), p. 13 (lines 157–​61).

 

Georgic   467 the idea quite the wrong way round. It is to miss the poets’ own ingenuity and artifice, the deploying of their linguistic resources in a way comparable to the farmer, miner, thresher, or washerwoman. The language of georgic is a working language—​the language of work, and language consciously at work (see ­chapter 10, “The Poet as Laborer”). The poets know that progress is won through resistance, and their language reflects this. The decorum of georgic is the opposite of easy and refined; rather it is to make the reader aware of how difficult refinement is. Georgic recognizes the labor involved in working one’s raw materials: refinement is, after all, an industrial process. Elements of humorous incongruity, mock-​heroic, and awkward syntax are all features of what is in effect a recalcitrant language, which tests the poet to the full.

Toil and Art When Robert Dodsley, in his poem Agriculture, comes to describe a successful harvest, his words about the hay wagon convey simultaneously the rewards of toil but also something of the toil itself: His strong capacious wain, the dull slow ox Drags on, deep loaden, grinding the rough ruts … (book i, lines 95–​6)

With the awkward spondees the verse almost grinds to a halt. The effect is palpable, and the achievement of the gathered harvest is increased by the feeling that it has been a struggle. Dodsley is working the same rutted path as Virgil, whose description in Georgics, book i of the “lumbering wains” is followed in the next line by the labored language of farming tools, “tribulaque traheaeque et iniquo pondere rastri”: “drags, threshing-​sledges and back-​ breaking mattocks” (Georgics, book i, line 164). Richard Jago has the same Virgilian passage in mind when in his poem Edge-​Hill (1767) he follows a loaded cart making its way from the iron-​works through the cobbled streets of Birmingham. It is piled high with iron bars that rattle loudly: Soon o’er thy furrow’d Pavement, Bremicham! Ride the loose Bars obstrep’rous; to the Sons Of languid Sense, and Frame too delicate Harsh Noise perchance, but Harmony to thine.26

Jago’s furrow’d Pavement is a witty idea (bringing cultus and civis together), and the unruly sound of obstrep’rous (Lat. obstreperus ‘clamorous’) offends the sensibilities of the over­ refined. The “harsh Noise” of the working georgic is its equivalent of more conventional poetic harmonies. In georgic, harshness has its proper place. After the spring sowing, says James Thomson approvingly, “the Harrow follows harsh” (“Spring,” line 47). The furrow and the furrowed brow, the harrow and the occasionally harrowing, are all part of the georgic. “The Father himself,” says Virgil, “willed that the path of tillage be not smooth, | And first ordained that skill should cultivate | The land, by care sharpening the wits 26  Richard Jago, Edge-​Hill; or, The Rural Prospect Delineated and Moralized: A Poem in Four Books (London, 1767), p. 113 (book iii, lines 519–​22).

 

468   David Fairer of mortals” (book i, lines 121–​3). Georgic values the care-​full art, which does not preclude elements of anxiety and difficulty. God, says Virgil, deliberately hid away the secrets of fire, honey, bread, and wine, in order to encourage human ingenuity, so that step by step practice and taking thought Should hammer out the crafts, should seek from furrows The blade of corn, should strike from veins of flint The hidden fire. (Georgics, book i, lines 133–​5)

Tools of all kinds were needed to work the materials, but Virgil emphasizes the resistance they encounter: the fisherman “drags through the sea | His dripping trawl. Next hardened iron came | And the creaking saw-​blade (for the earliest men | Split wood with wedges), and last the various arts. | Toil mastered everything, relentless toil” (book i, lines 142–​6). In these early passages in the Georgics, toil and art are deliberately bonded together in the language: the poet does not want to make things look too easy, to disengage himself from the disciplines of his subject. With this in mind, at the mid-​point of The Art of Preserving Health, his georgic of the human body, John Armstrong directly associates his own poetic task with that of the Virgilian laborer: “Thro’ various toils th’ adventurous muse has past; | But half the toil, and more than half, remains.”27 It is as if, with his job half complete, the poet is pausing to rest on his shovel. And Armstrong (well named) is at this moment bracing himself for book iii, entitled “Exercise,” in which he urges the virtues of keeping both body and mind in healthy motion: “By health the peasant’s toil | Is well repaid,” he remarks (book iii, lines 33–​4). The georgic laborer is himself a well-​regulated system: Toil, and be strong. By toil the flaccid nerves Grow firm, and gain a more compacted tone; The greener juices are by toil subdu’d, Mellow’d, and subtilis’d; the vapid old Expell’d, and all the rancor of the blood. (The Art of Preserving Health, book iii, lines 39–​43)

This image of the mellowing of our “greener juices” presents the human body as little different from apples and hops, and makes exercise a process on a par with the labors of the cider-​ press and the mash-​tub. Joseph Addison’s famous praise of Virgil, that in the Georgics he “breaks the Clods and tosses the Dung about with an air of gracefulness,”28 turns back-​breaking work into an elegant gesture. It underplays the labor involved and ignores the degree to which, especially in book i, the poet stresses difficulty. John Dyer, with his practical experience as a farmer, understands that tossing anything about gracefully needs strongly developed arm muscles. Hence his stress throughout The Fleece on the importance of the “labor-​strengthen’d arm,”

27 

John Armstrong, The Art of Preserving Health: A Poem (London, 1764), p. 61 (book iii, lines 1–​2). See Adam Budd, John Armstrong’s “The Art of Preserving Health”: Eighteenth-​Century Sensibility in Practice (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011). 28  Joseph Addison’s much-​reprinted “Essay on the Georgics,” prefixed to the poem in The Works of Virgil … Translated into English Verse; By Mr. Dryden (London, 1697), following p. 48. In The Hop-​ Garden (1752), Christopher Smart is conscious of Addison’s phrase when he addresses John Philips as a model: “Give me to turn | Th’unwieldly subject with thy graceful ease” (book i, lines 272–​3).

 

Georgic   469 the “sinewy arm” (three times), and the “nervous arm” (not in our modern wimpish sense, but nervous as “having tough fibers”).29 In georgic writing, smoothness and ease tend to be dangerous things. For John Philips, a cider that lacks the slightly rough edge has to be treated with suspicion:  “Fallacious Drink! Ye honest Men beware, | Nor trust its Smoothness” (Cyder, book ii, lines 355–​6). Things that are impacted or tightly woven tend to be more reliable than the loose and porous. Dyer recommends a soil of “marl with clay deep-​mix’d … | … where no deceitful veins | Of envious gravel lurk beneath the turf, | To loose the creeping waters from their springs, | Tainting the pasturage” (book i, lines 72–​7).30 The compactness of frozen ground, says Thomson, is part of “the renovating Force | Of Winter.” In his description of the binding frost, the poet’s language is not onomatopoeic (that’s not the point), but is working to the same principles, and compressing itself: … The Frost-​concocted Glebe Draws in abundant vegetable Soul, And gathers Vigour for the coming Year. (“Winter,” lines 706–​8)

The phrase Frost-​concocted wittily assimilates vegetable abundance, by also drawing in the irony of “concoct,” meaning “to ripen through warmth.” The “Frost-​concocted Glebe” is therefore Winter’s own inverse ripening. The language crystallizes the witty idea. Throughout The Seasons Thomson knows when to contract and when expand, and the frost passage is a good example: Is not thy potent Energy, unseen, Myriads of little Salts, or hook’d, or shap’d Like double Wedges, and diffus’d immense Thro’ Water, Earth, and Ether? (“Winter,” lines 717–​20)

At first the words themselves interlock like oddly joined shapes, until with the sudden easy stretching of “diffus’d immense,” the true miracle of frost opens out for us. We become aware simultaneously of the minutely elemental and the universal elements, all bound up together. In writing about the winter frost, Thomson’s language itself has compressed potential. In georgic poetry the subject of human resourcefulness encourages a corresponding in­genuity of language. The humor we find everywhere breaking out in georgic need not be an embarrassed response to its awkward subject-​matter, but rather a delight in turning the topic round so as to reveal a new facet. The wit tends to be generated by a conscious combination of work and play, an amusing effortfulness that shapes material into unpredictable forms, as if testing its principles and looking for potentially ingenious development—​for a new patent, as it were. A choice example is from Philips’s Cyder, when the vintage is being celebrated and the poet joins in the rustic festivities. His working language is consciously at play, as he finds room for a georgic “labouring Elbow” to harness the powers of nature: these among, A subtle Artist stands, in wondrous Bag That bears imprison’d Winds, (of gentler sort Than those, which erst Laertes Son enclos’d.) Peaceful they sleep, but let the tuneful Squeeze 29 Dyer, The Fleece, book i, lines 111, 68; book iii, lines 169, 396; book i, line 558.

30  Dyer later revised “marl with clay deep-​mix’d” to “heavy marl’s deep clay.” See The Fleece, ed. John Goodridge and Juan Christian Pellicer (Cheltenham: Cyder Press, 2007), p. 93.

 

470   David Fairer Of labouring Elbow rouse them, out they fly Melodious, and with spritely Accents charm. (Cyder, book ii, lines 426–​32)

The laborer’s elbow is still playfully at work: his earlier pressing of the apples has now become his squeezing of the bagpipes, a different kind of artistry contributing to a different rural harmony.

Let’s Sing of Rats! A final example of unprepossessing georgic scenarios that put language challengingly to work is the most famous cry that called forth Dr. Johnson’s mockery: “Now, Muse, let’s sing of Rats!” James Boswell recalls the scene at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s house when Grainger’s georgic of the Caribbean sugar plantations was read to Johnson and his friends. (The Sugar-​ Cane’s editor, John Gilmore, doubts the phrase ever formed part of Grainger’s text.)31 The rat-​ poisoning episode in book ii has more recently been singled out for opprobrium by Derek Walcott in the New York Review of Books as an example of the kind of dead poetic legacy that a modern Caribbean poet like himself can do without.32 After evoking the smells, sounds, and rhythms of the cane fields in his own hauntingly lyrical prose, Walcott quotes what he considers Grainger’s lifeless language, one that is “virtually worthless” and cannot, he says, claim to be art. He chooses to focus on the famous rats: With Misnian arsenic, deleterious bane, Pound up the ripe cassada’s well-​rasp’d root, And form in pellets; these profusely spread Round the Cane-​groves, where sculk the vermin-​breed: They, greedy, and unweeting of the bait, Crowd to the inviting cates, and swift devour Their palatable Death; for soon they seek The neighbouring spring; and drink, and swell, and die. (The Sugar-​Cane, book ii, lines 83–​90)

Grainger’s advice on rat-​control would seem more appropriate in booklet form. Walcott’s review quotes this passage for its curiosity value, only to shoulder it aside contemptuously with the briefest comment about “all those bloated carcasses of ‘the vermin-​breed,’ meaning ‘heaps of dead rats’ ” (p. 60). On a first reading Grainger’s lines may appear embarrassingly bad; but they are artful ones, and their art is of the kind that knows when not to talk about “heaps of dead rats.” Visualization is not the purpose here, and the unnamed things that “sculk” among the sugar cane are very much alive. This art knows where vermin breed, and that the word “breed” has an unsettling activity, unlike the more endearing and familial 31 

See Gilmore, The Poetics of Empire, p. 200. Boswell’s secondhand anecdote, which “made all the assembled wits burst into a laugh,” is recorded in Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Together with Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson’s Diary of a Journey into North Wales, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–​64), vol. ii, p. 453. 32  Derek Walcott, “A Frowsty Fragrance,” The New York Review of Books, June 15, 2000, pp. 57–​61. For a fuller discussion, see David Fairer, “A Caribbean Georgic: James Grainger’s The Sugar-​Cane,” Kunapipi, 25 (2003), 21–​8.

 

Georgic   471 “brood.” Preparing to confront the “vermin-​breed” the planter is given specific details of the necessary materials, tools, and processes: the best imported German arsenic (from Meissen) mixes with the staple local food, the ripe cassava, which is thoroughly scraped and shaved with a rasp before pounding. Poison runs through the passage, and the poet understands how it works deceptively in the tricks and trickles of language: the tautology “deleterious bane” is a suspicious concoction of Greek and Germanic. We register the tempting banquet which is “profusely spread” with “inviting cates” (a choice word for delicacies), and we sense its quickening allure as the vermin “sculk,” then “crowd,” and then “swift devour.” It is important that the bait is “palatable,” but the obvious word “food” is quite properly withheld (Grainger is stressing that this is luxury, not necessity); instead the phrase “palatable Death” makes an exquisite oxymoron. From that moment “the neighbouring spring” lets nature take its course, and the final three stages of the procedure are briskly dispatched: “and drink, and swell, and die.” It is a poisonously efficient passage, and it reveals its tricks. The end product may be what Walcott calls “heaps of dead rats,” but it is the process that interests Grainger. This is the kind of poetry that has work to do, and everything must justify its presence. Each word in those eight lines has a specific function. There is no room for poetic delicacies that don’t contribute. Georgic language tends to look beneath efficient systems at the mechanisms that are at work. During decades when new industrial processes were being developed, the georgic was able to extend its range and tackle them without embarrassment. Under the aegis of that distant Virgilian ethos, modern machinery might be naturalized to the extent that it embodied a collaboration of physical forces and skilful design, matter and mind. But behind any picture of ease is a sharp reminder of difficulty and discomfort, as with John Dalton’s description of the Newcomen steam engine which was being used in the 1750s to remove over a million gallons of water daily from the undersea coal mines off Whitehaven.33 In his poem about these mines we have a combination of graceful body and working sinews, ease and labor. Dalton’s poem is generically not a georgic, but in attempting to describe the latest pump technology his lines take on something of a georgic character: High on huge axis heav’d, above, See ballanc’d beams unweary’d move! While pent within the iron womb Of boiling caldrons pants for room Expanded Steam, and shrinks, or swells, As cold restrains, or heat impells …34

The new industrial process offers a mechanism of ease and balance underpinned by hard work. It is an emblem for how the Industrial Revolution will continue to develop, in which 33  The Saltom mine at Whitehaven, sunk in 1730, reached eighty fathoms (480 feet) below the sea. The two Newcomen steam pumping engines (42-​inch cylinder) worked in harness at the Saltom mine 1740–​ 82. See J. V. Beckett, “Newcomen Engines at Whitehaven, Cumberland, 1727–​1740,” Transactions of the Newcomen Society, 49 (1977–​8), 149–​52. 34  John Dalton, A Descriptive Poem, Addressed to Two Ladies, at Their Return from Viewing the Mines near Whitehaven (London, 1755), pp. 10–​11 (lines 121–​6). See the discussion of this poem by Rudolph Beck, “From Industrial Georgic to Industrial Sublime: English Poetry and the Early Stages of the Industrial Revolution,” British Journal for Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 27 (2004), 17–​36.

 

472   David Fairer an efficient system is driven by exhausting toil. High above are the “unweary’d” beams, balancing themselves in response to the alternating impulses of hot and cold, while shut within the cauldron the effort is extreme, like a miner’s lungs fighting for breath. The elements of georgic motifs are there, but the work is now that of a machine. It runs smooth and balanced, but unseen beneath is the pent-​up boiling water expressing the extremes of georgic toil. The forces that would be opened up by Newcomen’s steam engine and its successors take us well beyond the world of Virgil’s Roman farmer, but the long genealogy of eighteenth-​century georgic is discernible even here. This says a lot for the productive potential of a genre that makes resourcefulness its consistent theme, and which is able to adapt itself to various soils and respond to engraftings of different kinds.

References Andrews, Corey E., “ ‘Work’ Poems: Assessing the Georgic Mode of Eighteenth-​Century Working-​Class Poetry,” in Sandro Jung (ed.), Experiments in Genre in Eighteenth-​Century Literature (Ghent: Academia Scientific, 2011), pp. 105–​33. Beck, Rudolph, “From Industrial Georgic to Industrial Sublime: English Poetry and the Early Stages of the Industrial Revolution,” British Journal for Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 27 (2004), 17–​36. Fairer, David, “Pastoral and Georgic,” in English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–​1789 (London: Longman, 2003), pp. 79–​101. Fairer, David, “‘Where Fuming Trees Refresh the Thirsty Air’:  The World of Eco-​Georgic,” Studies in Eighteenth-​Century Culture, 40 (2011), 201–​18. Genovese, Michael, “An Organic Commerce:  Sociable Selfhood in Eighteenth-​ Century Georgic,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 46, no. 2 (Winter 2013), 197–​221. Goodridge, John, Rural Life in Eighteenth-​Century English Poetry (Cambridge:  Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995). Graver, Bruce E., “Wordsworth’s Georgic Pastoral: Otium and Labor in ‘Michael,’” European Romantic Review, 1, no. 2 (1991), 119–​34. Pellicer, J. C., “The Georgic,” in Christine Gerrard (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth-​Century Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 403–​16. Pellicer, J. C., “The Georgic at Mid-​Eighteenth Century and the Case of Dodsley’s ‘Agriculture,’” Review of English Studies, 54 (2003), 67–​93. Sweet, Timothy, American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

 

Chapter 28

Epic Anna M. Foy The history of the eighteenth-​century English epic has long been viewed as a sad tale of decline and dispersal. In this traditional understanding, the epic reached its peak in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). After Milton, the dignity of the formal verse epic gradually gave way to the mischief and pleasure of the mock-​heroic, which borrowed the genre’s lofty style without its lofty substance. The narrative and descriptive energies of the epic were ultimately subsumed into the long poem and the novel, whose “rise” has come to define the age. A primary evidentiary consideration in this history has been the observation that, after Milton, no canonical poets of the long eighteenth century wrote “original” verse epics—​that is, topically innovative epics in the sober spirit of a formal verse tradition. John Dryden and Alexander Pope wrote mock-​heroics, couplet translations of Virgil and Homer, and important critical commentaries, but nothing to rival Paradise Lost. Original epics by the likes of Richard Blackmore have not stood the test of time. In the absence of such writings, and in light of the judgment that other classical genres enjoyed comparative prosperity in the period, the post-​ Miltonic era has been cast as a “unique, epic depression,”1 sustained by substantial knowledge of and interest in the epic, but by no real creative energy until the Romantics infused new life into the genre at the end of the century. This has been the standard view of the subject for some 150 years. It has long structured surveys, anthologies, and local studies of the genre, and it has informed scholarship on both the novel and the mock-​heroic.2

Conventional Wisdom and Alternatives In recent years, however, the commonplace of decline has begun to show its age. Recent scholarship has often resisted expansive literary-​historical narratives that privilege canonical giants at the expense of so many other writers. This change brings to light previously 1 

Peter Hägin, The Epic Hero and the Decline of Heroic Poetry (Bern: Francke, 1964), p. 8. For a recent survey of the commonplace’s persistence, see Michael Rex, “The Nature of Epic: Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies and the Construction of a ‘New’ English Epic Ideology,” in Sandro Jung (ed.), Experiments in Genre in Eighteenth-​Century Literature (Gent and Lebanon, N.H.: Academia Press, 2011), pp. 11–​32, esp. pp. 11–​12. 2 

 

474   Anna M. Foy unnoticed aspects of epic history. While there have so far been no wide-​ranging attempts to remap the epic’s Restoration and eighteenth-​century development, recent findings invite us to reflect on the continuing utility of the idea of “decline” as an expression of our critical priorities and a guide for future research. For one thing, the eighteenth-​century epic landscape now looks less barren than it did even thirty years ago, when Dustin Griffin last took up the question of what happened to the epic after Milton.3 Scholarship on translation has encouraged us to understand creative translations such as Dryden’s Virgil (1697) and Pope’s Homer (1715–​26) as works central, rather than ancillary, to the history of the English epic. The prolific Blackmore is being given a second look, and women writers of epic are being rediscovered. James Macpherson’s Ossianic fragments (1760–​5) have received a wealth of recent attention. More broadly, the cultural turn in literary scholarship has invited us to mine a vast archive of epic writing—​ not only original epics but editions, critical commentaries, and translations of the most ordinary kind—​as a way of gauging the period’s shifting political ideals; conceptions of national and imperial identity (British and otherwise); notions of stadial development and historical change; and concepts of orality, literacy, and authorship. If the long poem, prose epic, and mock-​heroic are added to the mix as extensions of, rather than flights from, epic tradition, eighteenth-​century Britain does begin to look less like a culture in an “epic depression” than a “culture which … produced more epics and poets with epic aspirations than almost any other century in British literary history,” as Michael Rex suggests.4 A second cluster of noteworthy research involves Milton’s writings and reputation. While Paradise Lost is under no threat of losing its status as the great English verse epic, scholars have sought increasingly to view Milton less as a transcendent luminary than as a mortal product of his historical context. Recent scholarship on the mid-​seventeenth-​century epic emphasizes Milton’s responsiveness to less-​known seventeenth-​century English experiments in the genre, and it suggests further that these royalist epics set the norms for the genre beyond the Restoration, over and against Milton’s counter-​formulations.5 Building on Griffin’s work, scholars assessing Milton’s literary legacies have grown ever more cautious about ascribing to his early reception the reverence that gripped later audiences. “The conventional wisdom of the first half of the eighteenth century was that until Joseph Addison … introduced the poet, Milton’s artistic genius had simply gone unrecognized,” John Rumrich writes, noting Samuel Johnson’s description of the “ ‘subterraneous current’ by which early appreciation of [Paradise Lost] stole its way ‘through fear and silence.’ ”6 A movement is also underway in Milton studies to reassess the orthodoxies and certitudes often attributed to Milton’s oeuvre—​a trend echoing the general sense that we have arrived at a moment of re-​evaluation and reflection.7 While this evolving picture of the Interregnum and 3  Dustin Griffin, “Milton and the Decline of Epic in the Eighteenth Century,” New Literary History, 14, no. 1 (Autumn 1982), 143–​54. Pushing back against Bloomian ideas of influence, Griffin offers a useful overview of the commonplace of decline and a nuanced analysis of the challenge of assigning causes. 4  Rex, “The Nature of Epic,” p. 12. 5  I discuss Barbara K. Lewalski below, “Paradise Lost and the Contest over the Modern Heroic Poem,” Milton Quarterly, 43, no. 3 (2009), 153–​65. 6  John Rumrich, “Critical Responses, Early,” in Stephen B. Dobranski (ed.), Milton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 119–​29, at p. 125. 7  Cf. Peter C. Herman and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), The New Milton Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012).

 

Epic   475 Restoration epic may not in itself controvert our impression that the genre endured some kind of subsequent decline, it may alter our sense of what declined, and it will surely encourage us to re-​examine the mechanisms underlying the change. Although it once seemed feasible to imagine Milton frightening his epic successors into submission, recent scholarship has primed us to view the situation in quite another way: given his iconoclastic mix of Puritanism and republicanism, it is surprising that Milton exercised as much influence as he did on subsequent generations. Finally, a conceptual shift in genre studies calls into question the very idea of “epic” as a timeless literary form, and therefore implicitly casts doubt on the coherence of the notion of “decline” long associated with the eighteenth century. Barbara Lewalski, for instance, models an approach to Miltonic epic that recognizes Paradise Lost’s participation in a “mid [seventeenth]-​century and post-​Restoration contest over the proper norms and models for a modern heroic poem.”8 In her deference to early modern terminology, her effort to trace a seventeenth-​century “contest” over epic norms, and her conclusion that Milton did not necessarily win this contest in the terms of his own era, Lewalski resists the temptation to celebrate Paradise Lost as a transcendent pattern of epic perfection. She embraces the instability of “epic” as a poetic category. This emphasis on viewing local debates as their participants might have seen them cuts against a critical habit dominating much twentieth-​century epic scholarship: a tendency to prioritize the ascertainment of universal characteristics of “epic” over the definitions and conceptions asserted by individual authors. The very notion that the epic saw a post-​ Miltonic “decline” characteristically presumes that there is one sublime form of epic production that all ambitious writers were—​or should have been—​striving to achieve: the form of “great,” sober, topically original poetic expression embodied in Paradise Lost and its most revered classical forebears. Other forms of epic composition are rendered inferior by comparison: derivative, formulaic, fragmentary, debased by self-​parody and satire. Perhaps there is no need to elaborate the ways that a rigid adherence to these oppositions can occlude a more pluralistic approach. But it is worth observing that these binaries have exerted particular force in studies of the epic, where an adherence to “greatness” as a category of literary evaluation has dovetailed with a definitional association of the genre with magnificence. The epic’s length, its daunting mimetic scope, its characteristically dignified style, its deep classical roots, and its theorization as a narrative form distinct from the realist novel have helped to reinforce an idea of a genre ambitious to stand outside of history, conversant above all with its generic forebears, its generic descendants, and the universal condition of humankind. This construction of “epic” has had limited utility in the investigation of a period of British literary history that did not always construct the genre this way. Creative translators such as Dryden and Pope took for granted not the timelessness of epic discourse, but its cultural and historical boundedness. Theorists such as the influential René Le Bossu defined the genre not by its communion with some heroic or aesthetic ideal, but by its capacity to shape the “manners” of its readers. The modern understanding of epic gives us no sure means of accommodating these points of historical difference, and it tends to obscure important conceptual changes within the earlier period. After all, even points of classificatory congruence

8 

Lewalski, “Paradise Lost and the Contest,” p. 153.

 

476   Anna M. Foy over time can reflect divergent ideological underpinnings and generic mandates. For seventeenth-​century royalist poets, the epic’s connection with awe-​inspiring dignity was inseparable from the genre’s status as a vehicle for the instruction and celebration of princes; for later poets, epic sublimity took on more narrowly aesthetic connotations, such as in the misty heroic past of Ossianic verse. The classicist Richard Martin, noting the difficulty of arriving at a single definition of “epic” for all ancient periods and civilizations, has recently urged an approach that “begin[s]‌with the assumption that ‘epic’ is a contingent and culture-​ bound category.”9 Restoration and eighteenth-​century scholarship seems to be headed in a similar direction.

New Approaches The question that remains is how best to reorient ourselves in the face of these new methods and insights. Much interesting revisionist work has been done at the local level without reference to broad new theories of the epic’s eighteenth-​century development. In the interest of collating these insights and pointing out new avenues of investigation, I propose an alternative to the story of eighteenth-​century epic depression. I suggest that we recognize in the period not a “decline” in the sense that the commonplace has typically assumed, but a paradigm shift in the way practitioners understood the nature and purpose of epic writing: a transition from a conception of the genre centered on Virgil to an understanding centered on Homer. In the simplest terms, writers of the eighteenth century turned away from an understanding of the genre as a handbook for princes (a Virgilian–​humanist understanding, dominant through much of the seventeenth century), and they came to envision the epic as a long narrative poem that entertained its readers with a bardic summoning of distant, primitive cultures (an understanding reflective of emergent readings of Homeric epic). While this transition has long been recognized in reception histories and in scholarship on the battles between the ancients and moderns, it has so far not been well integrated into surveys of the English epic’s general eighteenth-​century development. I therefore outline this transition, which informed a range of epics, from topically original compositions, to fragmentary experiments, to translations, to critical commentaries. My account does not wholly abandon the tendency to focus on the Restoration and early eighteenth-​century chapter of the genre’s history, a prolific phase that helps to explain the forms of epic writing and refusal that followed. Nonetheless, I hope the story I tell will seem different enough from the familiar Milton-​centered narrative to open up new vistas. Among these, I suggest, mapping the decline of a Virgilian epic ideal alongside the rising fascination with Homer can help us to appreciate the eighteenth century’s role in the birth of an idea of the genre still with us today: a notion of a lengthy, highly stylized verse narrative that describes an unattainable heroic past, populated with larger-​than-​life humans, monsters, and divinities.

9  Richard P. Martin, “Epic as Genre,” in John Miles Foley (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Epic (Chichester: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009), pp. 9–​19, at p. 9.

 

Epic   477

Seventeenth-​C entury Heroic Poetry and the Virgilian Model It takes some imaginative labor to encounter the epic as seventeenth-​century practitioners did. Our modern ideas of epic are conditioned by our familiarity with a variety of masterworks from classical times to the present, Homer foremost among them. But Renaissance practitioners did not always have the same array of epics at their fingertips, and they did not share the same hermeneutic expectations. Their sense of the genre was overwhelmingly dominated by Virgil, whose textual authority was rivaled only by the Bible. The Aeneid inspired ongoing interpretive activity, it spawned numerous imitations and translations, and it remained at the center of humanistic educational traditions throughout the period. Among classical attributes, Aeneas’s pietas was easier to assimilate to Christian ideals of humility than Achilles’ petulance, Odysseus’s wily ruses, or Ovid’s erotic excesses; Virgil’s narrative of divinely sanctioned national origins embodied the translatio studii et imperii, a movement of imperial power and culture from the eastern Mediterranean to Rome and beyond. Writing at the height of the Augustan Age on the eve of Jesus’s birth, Virgil also occupied a critical boundary between Christianity and paganism. His fourth Eclogue was taken as a prediction of the coming of Christ; his Aeneid, it was thought, by lending support to Augustus had helped to usher in the Pax Romana and, as such, presided over the very origins of Christianity.10 Moreover, whereas upper-​class readers were expected to access Virgilian wisdom in the original Latin, Homer’s influence was thwarted by comparative linguistic and textual distance. Even among classicists, Renaissance mythology compendia were “considered far more authoritative than Homer’s epics.”11 George Chapman’s Whole Works of Homer (1616), the first full English translation of the Homeric epics, helped to advance Homer’s vernacular accessibility; however, by then the Aeneid’s influence on perceptions of what heroic writing should be and do was already deeply entrenched in British culture. The Aeneid and the interpretive traditions associated with it therefore strongly conditioned the seventeenth century’s understanding of epic. Foremost among these was the idea of the epic as a handbook for the ruling classes. Commentators saw in Aeneas a series of object lessons in princely behavior, from his hint of self-​doubt in a sea storm, to his abandonment of Dido in pursuit of his godly mission, to his prudence and self-​possession in his encounters with the Latins. In The Defence of Poesy (1595), Philip Sidney encouraged deliberate mimicry of Aeneas’s manner of self-​government: Only let Aeneas be worn in the tablet of your memory, how he governeth himself in the ruin of his country: in the preserving his old father, and carrying away his religious ceremonies, in obeying the god’s commandment to leave Dido though not only all passionate kindness, but even the human consideration of virtuous gratefulness would have craved other of him.12 10  Cf. David Scott Wilson-​Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 70–​3. 11  Harry Vredeveld, “‘Deaf as Ulysses to the Siren’s Song’: The Story of a Forgotten Topos,” Renaissance Quarterly, 54, no. 3 (Autumn 2001), 846–​82, at pp. 863–​4. 12  Philip Sidney, The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-​Jones (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 231–​2.

 

478   Anna M. Foy The epic’s lofty status among Renaissance genres reflected this interpretive history, which honored the Aeneid as part of a poetic career (the Virgilian rota) in which the role of royal counselor was the culmination of a lifetime of writing.13 Even as Augustus and the Augustan age came under increasing scrutiny during the Restoration, Virgilian–​Augustan patronage continued to provide a normative example of what the epic could be and do. This social function literally defined the epic. Whereas modern theorists tend to define the genre by enumerating common stylistic and narrative features, seventeenth-​century theorists defined it by its capacity to shape the “manners” (Lat. mores, Fr. moeurs) of its readers, a civic category that loosely correlates with our modern idea of “culture,” encompassing not only codes of politeness, but also attitudes toward authority, codes of honor, codes of hospitality, gender roles, educational practices, and patterns of belief.14 The epic was classed as “heroic poetry,” an umbrella term for hero-​centered texts that placed “good and exemplarie things and actions” before the eyes of teachable audiences.15 Conceptually, it remained a close neighbor of heroic drama, romance, historical poetry, and the panegyric, which were presumed to serve similar social functions, if not to rely on identical didactic techniques.16 Among these, “epic” was distinguished by its written medium, its textual precedents, and the manner of its absorption. Dryden, a writer competent in multiple heroic genres, declared that “the Epick Poem is more for the Manners, and Tragedy for the Passions,” a distinction that he then elaborated by outlining the differences in the two genres’ reformative effects on “Ill Habits of the Mind.” Whereas an experience of tragic drama was necessarily brief and ephemeral, the epic required protracted close reading, over days, months, or even years. Whereas “One puts off a Fit like the Quinquina, and relieves us only for a time; the other roots out the Distemper, and gives a healthful habit.”17 Recognizing the prominence of this humanist instructional ideal prepares us to appreciate the topical and formal diversity of a genre that was still neither wholly about martial action nor yet given over to escapist fantasies for their own sake. Seventeenth-​century English heroic poems traditionally included in surveys of “epic” do not look much like one another. They vary in length, completeness (several are fragmentary), rhyme scheme, tone, and topical focus. Abraham Cowley’s two epics—​The Civil War (1643) and Davideis, a Sacred Poem of the Troubles of David (1656)—​differ markedly in topic and technique. The former offers a

13  See Robin Sowerby’s apt comment on this issue, “Epic,” in Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins (eds.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 3: 1660–​1790 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005), pp. 149–​72, at pp. 149–​50. 14  For instance, compare the definition of “epic” in the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2000) with Le Bossu’s notion that “The EPOPEA is a Discourse invented by Art, to form the Manners by such Instructions as are disguis’d under the Allegories of some one important Action, which is related in Verse, after a probable, diverting, and surprizing Manner.” See René Le Bossu, Treatise of the Epick Poem, trans. W. J. (London, 1695), reprinted in Le Bossu and Voltaire on the Epic, ed. Stuart Curran (Gainesville: Scholars Facsimiles & Reprints, 1970), p. 6. 15  Alan D. Isler, “Heroic Poetry and Sidney’s Two Arcadias,” PMLA, 83, no. 2 (May 1968), 368–​79, at p. 374. I have benefited from Isler’s discussion of the terminological issue. 16  See Dryden’s “Account” of Annus Mirabilis (1667), in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1956–​ 2000), vol. i, pp. 49–​56; also James D. Garrison, Dryden and the Tradition of Panegyric (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1975). 17  John Dryden, dedication of the Aeneis, in Works, vol. v, pp. 271–​2.

 

Epic   479 journalistic account of several contemporary battles, lists noble participants by name, and bemoans the contemporary “rage” that “does England from it selfe divide” (book i, line 1); the latter, with an elaborate system of Christian “machinery,” imposes a Virgilian “pattern” on its Old Testament material by portraying its hero as “the greatest Monarch that ever sat upon the most famous Throne of the whole Earth.”18 William Davenant’s Gondibert (1651), by contrast to other contemporary epics, is wholly fictional; Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis (1667) reprises the “historical” mode of Cowley’s Civil War but incorporates baldly fictionalized embellishments. Authors differed in their valuation of verisimilitude and their treatment of “sacred” (i.e., biblical) material. Moreover, although heroic couplets were rapidly becoming the default meter of English epic, the seventeenth century utilized the “Gondibert stanza” (a decasyllabic quatrain reprised in Annus Mirabilis) and also blank verse: in Paradise Lost, Milton famously rejected the “barbarous” rhymes of royalist epics. What binds these poems together is a conviction that the genre’s efficacy hinges on a convincing representation of the central hero. In this understanding, the epic narrative involves the prince in a story of national foundation or political discord that confirms his importance to the polity. The genre’s tendency toward idealization renders attractive the prince’s embodiment or pursuit of virtue, so that readers’ imitation of or meditation upon that ideal might contribute to political stability, as by making aristocrats into good stewards or encouraging commoners to admire the ruling classes as natural, righteous leaders.

Avenues for Investigation in the Restoration Epic The clearest example of this Virgilian–​humanist conception is Gondibert, which, though unfinished, was intended as an illustration of the first formal theory of epic in English and, as such, provided a reference point for subsequent authors. Composed during the Interregnum while Davenant awaited trial for treason, Gondibert reads as a philosophical treatise on virtuous conduct, rendered as a heroic narrative. The plot pits “Oswald the great” against “greater Gondibert” as rival claimants to the Lombard throne and rival combatants in the heart of Princess Rhodalind.19 Duke Gondibert is supremely virtuous; Prince Oswald only slightly less so. The narrative offers a sustained juxtaposition between the two princes’ leadership styles, their behavior as lovers, and (even after Oswald’s death) the consequences of their respective models of leadership for their subordinates. Pleasures of the reading experience were presumably intended to consist less in the anticipation of suspenseful plot twists (though there are some of these) than in the ongoing contemplation of manifold forms of virtue in action. An early battle displays valor and soldierly obedience on both sides. Oswald’s defeat precipitates both a revenge plot and, for Gondibert, a convalescence at the court of Astragon, a philosopher’s retreat where he falls in love with the beautiful and virtuous Birtha; darker subplots are introduced relatively late in the story. At the local level, even Davenant’s minor characters beg for emulation. For instance, when the aging Lombard monarch hears 18  19 

Poems Written by A. Cowley (London, 1656), sig. (b)2r. William Davenant, Gondibert, ed. David F. Gladish (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 62.

 

480   Anna M. Foy the news of Gondibert’s victory (for which he had secretly hoped), he remains externally composed: This Arribert with outward patience heares, Though wounded by the cause for which they fought; With mod’rate joy the death of Oswald beares; Yet justly to extremes it inward wrought. (book ii, canto ii, stanza 18)

The lesson offered here, adapted from the Aeneid (book i, lines 208–​9), relates to the practical matter of how to hold one’s face when getting mixed news, or, more abstractly, to the heavy responsibility of maintaining a settled state while reconciling competing public needs. Like many of the poem’s details, the passage also serves obliquely to heighten Gondibert’s virtuous stature: we see his greatness through the eyes of those around him. In this bifold manner, the poem’s narrative arc simultaneously compliments the hero and invites reflection on one of the poem’s guiding themes: the temptation of seeking political power for its own sake. Oswald is a little too ambitious; Gondibert’s seeming impregnability to such longing threatens to detain him from his true public calling—​though one suspects, with David Gladish, that if Davenant had completed the story, he might have “allow[ed] for Gondibert to marry Birtha and get the throne” (p. xxii), thereby sloughing off the Virgilian precedent that would force the virtuous hero to choose between his Dido and his public duty. This Virgilian notion of epic carried with it several expectations worthy of attention. One was an idea of intentionality. Seventeenth-​century theorists saw the epic as a “designed” form of writing: a poem architected on the basis of prior models to achieve appropriate rhetorical and didactic goals, possibly in accordance with a divine plan. Virgil had imitated Homer with a nationalist political design in view, and writers from classical times forward (e.g., Statius, Lucan) imitated Virgil in turn, even when expressing alternate political ideals. A corollary of this understanding is that formal imitation need not be perceived as a weakness of seventeenth-​century heroic poetry. On the contrary, imitation carried with it the opportunity for a self-​aware intertextual dialogue in which each new poet figured forth his own heroic tale as an alternative to the cultural and spiritual lessons of its predecessors. Virgil had been a master of this technique: the Aeneid recycles plot points from both the Odyssey (Aen. books i–​vi) and the Iliad (Aen. vii–​xii) in a condensed narrative of wandering and conquest that makes the Homeric heroes foils for Aeneas’s pietas and circumspection. Viewed intertextually, the Aeneid makes an argument about the necessary qualities of Augustan civilization by comparison to the savagery and pursuit of glory (kleos) in Homer’s Greece. For many medieval and Renaissance epic writers, a crucial intertextual question was how best to Christianize a pagan genre—​a challenge affecting the handling of classical allusions, the use of allegory, the deployment of divine machinery, and the hero’s defining attributes. For Davenant, however, the crucial intertextual issue was less the line between Christianity and paganism than the problem of religiosity. Gondibert famously excludes the supernatural elements traditionally associated with the genre, such as tutelary divinities and invocations of the muse. Although Gondibert is Christian, and although his upright humility satisfies Christian spiritual ideals, he displays no unique status of divine election beyond his obvious fitness for the throne. The agent who arrives to urge Gondibert to pursue his public duty rather than dallying at the court of Astragon is not a divine messenger, as in Virgil’s Carthage, but Goltho, one of Gondibert’s men. In this textual departure, Davenant

 

Epic   481 asserts that monarchical authority comes not from divine anointment, but from bloodlines, natural charisma, and character. A third consideration involves the epic’s capacity to speak to seventeenth-​century English politico-​philosophical dilemmas. This element has received much recent scholarly attention. During the Interregnum, the epic functioned as an activist genre when few other outlets were available for royalist dramaturges. Translations, too, such as the Aeneid (for monarchists) and the Pharsalia (for republicans) resonated with contemporary struggles to define the proper relationship between leaders and their subjects.20 The epic’s representation of a prince in his relation to political subordinates, rivals, divine powers, and nature lent itself to commentaries on good government. It accommodated allusions and à clef associations that flew under the radar of censors during moments of political vigilance. Politics informed the “contest over the proper norms and models for a heroic poem” that Barbara Lewalski traces in the period: an intertextual dispute mediated by metrical choices, book divisions (twelve being Virgilian), and the inclusion or exclusion of divine machinery.21 In this “contest,” entrants like Davenant, with his austere secularism, competed to diagnose the nature and purpose of modern government. To sharpen and extend this line of enquiry, we might look to seventeenth-​century epic theory, which, in the language of neo-​Aristotelian instrumentalism, reveals the genre’s sometimes coded engagements with contemporary politics.

The English Epic and the  Problem of Obedience Consider Davenant’s seminal theory that heroic poetry encourages “obedience,” a theory that subsequent epic writers knew and referred to directly in their own, sometimes contrary formulations of the genre.22 In the “Preface to Gondibert” (Paris, 1650), composed in exile and dedicated to Thomas Hobbes (whose response was appended), Davenant envisions heroic poetry as an agent of civic order superior to Religion, Arms, Policy, and the Law. While these other governmental aides rely on physical and rhetorical coercion, “the persuasions of Poesy in stead of menaces, are Harmonious and delightfull insinuations, and never any constraint; unlesse the ravishment of Reason may be call’d Force. And such Force, (contrary to that which Diuines, Commanders, Statesmen and Lawyers use) begets such obedience as is never weary or griev’d” (p. 38). In Davenant’s trickle-​down theory of dissemination, society’s “Chiefs,” having been improved by their poetic reading, serve as living models for their political subordinates. “Princes, and Nobles being reform’d and made Angelicall by 20  Cf. Anthony Welch, “Epic Romance, Royalist Retreat, and the English Civil War,” Modern Philology, 105, no. 3 (Feb. 2008), 570–​602; Colin Burrow, “Virgil in English Translation,” in Charles Martindale (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 21–​37; and David Norbrook, “Lucan and the Poetry of Civil War,” in Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–​1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 23–​42. 21  Lewalski, “Paradise Lost and the Contest,” p. 153. 22  Dryden cited Davenant’s preface in the introduction to Annus Mirabilis; Milton was said to have assisted Davenant in gaining his freedom while the latter was awaiting trial in the Tower of London; Cowley also had biographical connections with Davenant.

 

482   Anna M. Foy the Heroick, will be predominant lights, which the People cannot chuse but use for direction; as Glowormes take in, and keep the Sunns beames till they shine, and make day to themselves” (p. 38). In content, Davenant’s theory was little more than a variation on the Virgilian–​humanist educational ideal. In his formulation, Gondibert’s virtuous heroes, by improving its (normatively male) ruling-​class readers, would influence the entire body politic. But Davenant provided fodder for contemplation in his Hobbesian vision of government and his unabashed desertion of the “common” reader (e.g., pp. 13, 38), which scorned a burgeoning contemporary print culture. Moreover, his vocabulary was timely: “obedience” was a key term in political and religious treatises. In this, Davenant raised a compelling set of questions about the transformative potential of English heroic poetry. Some of these questions related to the craft of writing. For those who accepted the premise that epic poetry should inspire obedience, was Gondibert, with its parade of virtuous heroes, the most effective means of fulfilling that aim? Some questions involved diagnosing the needs of the polity. Most Englanders assumed that the people’s obedience to God, king, and country was the basis of a settled body politic. Nonetheless, the tumultuous period from the Civil Wars to the 1688–​9 Revolution demonstrated the difficulty of reconciling these loyalties gracefully with one another. In light of these historical circumstances, and in light of England’s status as a nation in which the monarch was technically the head of the Anglican Church, which forms of obedience did English epic writers prioritize? What “manners” should their poems inculcate? Royalist poets tended to prioritize obedience to temporal powers, with all the complexity and contradiction embodied in that choice. They modeled deference to royalty in their prefaces, made secular arguments for respecting monarchical authority, and promoted traditional assumptions that in obeying the monarch one was obeying God. Within this category, political visions ranged from absolutism to mixed monarchy and varied in their religiosity. At one extreme was the writer and printer John Ogilby. Known for his lavish, illustrated “Royal Folio” editions of the classics, Ogilby adopted postures of submission to royal authority so fulsome that he endured ongoing ridicule as “groveling Ogleby.”23 He dedicated his Iliads (1660) to the newly restored Charles II with the inducement that Homer “appears a most constant Assertor of the Divine right of Princes and Monarchical Government”—​hardly a foregone conclusion, as Jack Lynch has shown, for the Iliadic conflict between Agamemnon (claimant to divine right) and Achilles (who challenges him) was read with shifting sympathies by English royalists and republicans, Tories and Whigs.24 With a comparatively democratic sensibility, Dryden relished the role of royal propagandist. In heroic poems like Annus Mirabilis and the best-​selling Absalom and Achitophel (1682), rather than trusting the king’s virtue to speak for itself, as Davenant had advised, Dryden used the delights of poetry to win the people’s obedience. As his laureateship advanced, Dryden playfully absorbed contemporary attacks on the king’s person: Paul Hammond notes that, in Absalom and Achitophel, Dryden’s “astute and even cheeky” portrait of the biblical patriarch David appropriated popular lampoons, recuperating the king’s image by rendering Charles II “attractively energetic” 23 

Commendatory poem attached to Dryden’s Virgil, cited in Dryden, Works, vol. v, p. 59. See Ogilby’s Dedication to Africa (1670) for an instance of prostrate obedience. 24  Jack Lynch, “Political Ideology in Translations of the Iliad, 1660–​1715,” Translation and Literature, 7, no. 1 (1998), 23–​41.

 

Epic   483 rather than threatening in his sexual promiscuity.25 Cowley’s Davideis, which had taken up the same Old Testament story, interlaced it with Christian machinery (Lucifer, Gabriel, etc.) in a manner that threatened to profane the sacred. The Davideis has been described as an exercise in “Christian rationalism” that “deliberately downplays the marvelous elements … in order to display the [hero’s] real virtues”—​a tactic that aligns Cowley’s approach with his friend Davenant’s.26 Although its representational compromises may seem muddy on questions of absolutism or divine right, it can nevertheless be contrasted with its epic successor, Daniel Defoe’s Jure Divino (1706). Jure Divino, also based on the Book of Samuel, attacks ideas of divine right in a twelve-​book “Satyr” promoting a Lockean vision of monarchy and government.27 While mapping this contest, distinguishing sharply between sober “epic” and rowdy, silly “mock-​heroic” may obscure important dialogic continuities. After all, satire was seen as a reformative genre, much like panegyric forms; and there is reason to see Restoration satire like Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1662, 1663, 1667)  participating in the political dialogues that shaped the epic’s seventeenth-​century development. Ashley Marshall reads Hudibras as “a seriously polemical contribution to a contemporary debate about how dissenters of all stripes should be handled in the Restoration period”—​a discussant, in other words, within a broad conversation about how best to manage English disobedience.28 But one of the most striking participants in this conversation must have been John Milton. Against the backdrop of contemporary royalist epics, Milton’s representation of “man’s first disobedience” (book i, line 1) reads as a rebuttal of the very assumption that soliciting long-​ term obedience to earthly leaders is a reasonable political goal. The drama of Paradise Lost (1667), presided over by a monarchic God, revolves around the all-​but-​inevitable plucking of the forbidden fruit. Expository early books establish Satan’s heroic investment in the perversion of mankind; and, from our first sight of Adam and Eve, the principal epic conflict is revealed as the immense psychological challenge of obeying a single paradisiacal rule. In Adam’s words, God hath pronounced it death to taste that tree, The only sign of our obedience left Among so many signs of power and rule Conferred upon us, and dominion given Over all other creatures that possess Earth, air, and sea.29

25 

Paul Hammond, “The King’s Two Bodies: Representations of Charles II,” in The Making of Restoration Poetry (Cambridge and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 107–​36, at pp. 133–​4. 26  Timothy Dykstal, “The Epic Reticence of Abraham Cowley,” SEL, 31, no. 1 (Winter 1991), 95–​115, at pp. 101, 105. 27  Michael Austin, “Saul and the Social Contract: Constructions of 1 Samuel 8–​11 in Cowley’s Davideis and Defoe’s Jure Divino,” Papers on Language and Literature, 32, no. 4 (Fall 1996), 410–​36. Austin builds on Paula Backsheider, “The Verse Essay, John Locke, and Defoe’s Jure Divino,” ELH, 55, no. 1 (Spring 1988), 99–​124. 28  Ashley Marshall, “The Aims of Butler’s Satire in Hudibras,” Modern Philology, 105, no. 4 (May 2008), 637–​65, at p. 641. 29  John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1998), book iv, lines 427–​32.

 

484   Anna M. Foy Robert Filmer had seen in this biblical episode the origins of a divinely instated patriarchal order. Milton similarly traces his readers’ origins from “our general ancestor[s]‌” (book iv, lines 659, 492); he emphasizes the transgression, however, rather than the delegation of dominion, and he showcases the disenfranchised political subordinate. In Milton’s richly detailed reimagining, a reader can sympathize with Eve’s compulsion to taste the forbidden fruit. She is frequently silent or absent during the Archangel Raphael’s tutorials on obedience. Even if these exchanges help to allay Adam’s “thirst … of knowledge” (book viii, line 8), Eve’s goes unsatisfied. Adam, for his part, has been at pains to wrap his mind around a principle out of the realm of his experience. Given this epistemological staging, can we really blame him for choosing love over duty, in defiance of the Virgilian heroic model? Although Milton labels the fateful transgression a “tragic” moment and an expression of free will (book ix, line 6), the psychological complexity of the presentation lends itself to an understanding of the poem as an argument that the inclination to disobey is written into human nature, or at least into human history. This exposition of human frailty departs sharply from Davenant’s virtue-​laden epic model. If a reader of Paradise Lost learns to “obey,” she does so neither by imitating the formal hero (Satan) nor by repeating Adam and Eve’s transgressions, but by resisting that temptation. Stanley Fish has written of the forms of wariness and awareness that “these encounters with demonic attraction” make us feel.30 In this respect, Milton models his epic on Homer rather than Virgil (as they were commonly read): the Iliad rewards readerly skepticism rather than unthinking imitation by presenting Achilles’ wrath and Agamemnon’s bullying tyranny as monitory examples. By extension, Paradise Lost appeals to a nation of self-​assertive individuals, made virtuous by testing their faith against contrary persuasions. It also prioritizes spiritual commitment over temporal placidity. David Quint observes that, by the end of the poem’s concluding educational sequence, “Adam has learned the good of obedience, but only to God, not to the worldly powers he still may subvert.”31 Rather than insisting on obedience to earthly monarchs (who are fallible, in Adam’s image), Milton envisions a commonwealth animated by a concordia discors of disagreement and debate. Nor did Milton have the last word. The flurry of epics that appeared after Paradise Lost (including his own Paradise Regained, 1671) suggested that the jury was still out on how the English heroic poem could best inspire “obedience.” One of these texts was Order and Disorder; or, The World Made and Undone (books i–​v, 1679; books i–​xx, 2001), whose couplet recasting of the Creation and the Fall has long been viewed as a “veiled rebuke of Milton.”32 David Norbrook’s recent attribution of the poem to Lucy Hutchinson, a “fiercely Puritan” writer and a committed republican (pp. xii–​xiii), has cultivated fresh interest in the poem, which has been mined for its complex use of scriptural material and its feminist responsiveness to patriarchism.33 The counterpoint to Hutchinson’s political subversiveness

30  Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost” (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967), p. 22. 31  David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), p. 268. 32  C. A. Moore, “Miltoniana (1679–​1741),” Modern Philology, 24 (1927), 321–​39, at p. 321. 33  Cf. “Order and Disorder: The Poem and Its Contexts,” in David Norbrook (ed.), Order and Disorder (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), pp. xii–​lii; and Shannon Miller, “Maternity, Marriage, and Contract: Lucy Hutchinson’s Response to Patriarchal Theory in Order and Disorder,” reprinted

 

Epic   485 is her determined Christian faithfulness, which arguably even outdoes Milton’s. In this, Order and Disorder stands in contrast to both her own earlier Lucretianism and the secularism of her female predecessor, Margaret Cavendish, whose mid-​century links to epic have received recent attention.34

Le Bossu, the Revolution, and the Final Flourishing of the Virgilian Model A second spurt of epic activity came with the 1688–​9 Revolution, which was widely perceived as a happy conclusion to the problems of obedience that had been plaguing the country for so long. Many onlookers rejoiced that England had finally recovered the proper alignment of church and state: it had banished the threat of temporal and spiritual tyranny embodied in James while avoiding the bloodshed of a monarchical execution or a long civil war. Epics by Samuel Wesley, Richard Blackmore, and John Dryden—​all modeled explicitly on Virgil—​ honored the Revolution as a defining moment in English history. A catalyst for these compositions was René Le Bossu’s neo-​ Aristotelian Traité du Poëme Épique (Paris, 1675), which was translated into English in 1695 with a dedication to Blackmore and quoted approvingly by every epic commentator of the 1690s. Le Bossu’s an­alysis, although focused on classical epic, supplied a vocabulary and focus for modern epic writing. It delineated a procedure for epic composition: poets first determined a “Moral” and then designed their poems to inculcate that lesson35—​a conception that may well have echoed seventeenth-​century practice. In addition, it provided influential readings of Homeric and Virgilian epic. With a historicist bent, it codified and elaborated the idea that the Aeneid was designed to inspire “obedience.” It also offered fresh readings of Homer. (A contemporary praised Le Bossu for unmasking Homer’s “sacred Mysteries.”)36 As proof of the lingering potency of the Virgilian epic model, both Wesley, in Life of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, An Heroic Poem. In Ten Books (1693), and Blackmore, in Prince Arthur: an Heroick Poem in Ten Books (1695), explicitly reprise Virgil’s “Moral” and “Design” as explained by Le Bossu. Both authors arrange their plots to resemble the narrative arc of the Aeneid; both apparently imagined their epics inspiring “obedience” to God and monarch(s) alike. Wesley’s epic, while dedicated to Queen Mary, transmutes Davenant’s secular vision of epic influence into a spiritual project with Jesus Christ at its head. Blackmore, adopting a comparatively earthly focus, revives Arthurian legend in a tale of national foundation and liberation. His virtuous prince is a modern Aeneas, seeking to “enlarge the Christian Empire.”37 in Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550–​1700: Volume 5, Anne Clifford and Lucy Hutchinson, ed. Mihoko Suzuki (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 295–​332. 34 

Rex, “The Nature of Epic,” pp. 11–​32. See A. F. B. Clark, Boileau and the French Classical Critics in England (1660–​1830) (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Édouard, 1925; N.Y.: Russell & Russell, 1965), esp. pp. 243–​8, 256–​9. Clark shows that commentators on Le Bossu emphasized this point. For further background see H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., The Theory of the Epic in England, 1650–​1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1944). 36  John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, An Essay upon Poetry (London, 1682), pp. 20–​1. 37  Richard Blackmore, Prince Arthur: An Heroick Poem in Ten Books, 2nd ed. (London, 1695), p. 13. 35 

 

486   Anna M. Foy Although Prince Arthur picks up where Paradise Lost left off (with the recently vanquished Satan “tortur’d with Despair,” “plot[ting] Revenge,” and “meditat[ing] new War,” p. 1), Blackmore conducts the conflict toward a glorification of the “Pious British Prince” (p. 14), who has God on his side and deserves to be obeyed. Blackmore also incorporates a synopsis of Christian biblical history from the Creation to the Resurrection that normalizes habitual “obedience” rather than disobedience, thereby smoothing out the wrinkles in Milton’s earlier account. A contrary impulse was stirring, however, in an unlikely place: Dryden’s verse translation of the Works of Virgil (1697), which was published as part of a historic subscription venture. Dryden’s Aeneis is in many respects a serviceable, artful rendering of the letter of his Latin original: eighteenth-​century scholars justifiably quote it as a representation of the period’s “Virgil.” Moreover, like Wesley and Blackmore, Dryden discusses Le Bossu’s analysis approvingly and at great length in his critical preface. But as modern studies demonstrate, this translation neither embodies nor seems likely to initiate a wholly “obedient” posture toward royal authority. Dryden dedicated it to a trio of oppositional figures, and scholars have repeatedly noted in Dryden’s Aeneas shadings of character that suggest a skeptical, anti-​Williamite stance.38 It has been easy to view these peculiarities as disillusioned, partisan expressions of despair at William II’s enthronement and Dryden’s attendant loss of the laureateship; however, John Barnard’s recent bibliographical work on Dryden’s subscription list suggests otherwise. Dryden’s supporters included an even balance of Whigs and Tories, an unprecedented array of high-​ranking members of British government and leaders of British culture, and a selection of commoners and female readers whose presence in such a venture would have seemed anathema to Davenant.39 Dryden and others viewed the project as a monumental event, inclusive in its representation of Britain (minus the king). I would therefore posit a theory: that Dryden crafted this translation as a response to the longstanding dialogue about how the epic cultivated obedience to gods and monarchs. His revision of Virgil was authorized by the Revolution, which was seen by many onlookers as a manifestation of Britain’s peculiarly “limited” monarchy, a form of government that required a culture of skepticism to sustain itself. Dryden therefore reimagined the Virgilian hermeneutic experience as a meditation on princely untrustworthiness from the people’s perspective. In neoclassical terms, he renovated Virgil in accordance with a new “moral.”40

Mapping the Development of the Eighteenth-​C entury Epic Thus, far from stifling creativity, Le Bossu’s treatise provided a stimulus and a sense of purpose for epic writing. It remains to be determined how long, and in what forms, this 38  Cf. Steven N. Zwicker, “Politics and Translation,” in Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984); and Tanya Caldwell, Time to Begin Anew: Dryden’s Georgics and Aeneis (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2000). 39  John Barnard, “Dryden, Tonson, and the Patrons of The Works of Virgil (1697),” in Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (eds.), John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 174–​239. 40  I elaborate this theory in chapter two of “Poetry and the Common Weal: Conceiving Civic Utility in British Poetics of the Long Eighteenth Century,” PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2010, pp. 126–​226.

 

Epic   487 influence persisted.41 John Dennis and Joseph Addison adapted Le Bossu’s critical methods in their comments on Blackmore and Milton. Pope called upon Le Bossu while translating Homer. One wonders whether Pope’s friend Jonathan Swift also had in mind the Treatise’s gloss on the Odyssey while writing Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Le Bossu represents the Odyssey as an equivocal argument for princely travel abroad: although exposure to foreign courts may offer “Political Instruction,” the prince’s physical absence can create “disorders” within “his own Kingdom, … which end not till his return” (pp. 23–​4). Does Gulliver’s Travels not offer a cheeky variation on this concept—​a final twist in which Gulliver’s sovereign “disorders,” fostered during his sojourn with the Houyhnhnms, follow him home? In a striking departure from his Homeric model, rather than concluding his tale with a romantic union and the restoration of civilized life, Swift presents a well-​traveled hero so transformed by his final voyage that he is disgusted at the thought of copulating with his wife and consoled only by his daily dose of equine conversation. Henry Fielding almost certainly kept Le Bossu in his sightlines. Neo-​Aristotelian terminology shapes his prefatory assertion in Joseph Andrews (1742) that, “when any kind of Writing contains all its other Parts, such as Fable, Action, Characters, Sentiment, and Diction, and is deficient in Metre only; it seems, I think, reasonable to refer it to the Epic.”42 Fielding has therefore long been seen as a “comic-​epic” writer steeped in the classical tradition and in theories of epic based on that tradition. But to what end? Robert Hume, noting an attenuation of scholarly interest in Fielding in recent years, has pointed out the vexing matter of Fielding’s didacticism as a possible avenue for further exploration.43 Fielding developed a reputation as a Christian moralist, and yet this twentieth-​century view is at odds with contemporary eighteenth-​century worries that Fielding’s works would “entertain none but porters or watermen,” or that his supposedly positive exempla “perhaps invite to vice more than the contrast figures alarm us into virtue” (quoted pp. 226–​7). Locating Fielding’s writings within a longer history of English epic production may help us to make sense of this early reception, and it may help us to achieve a more nuanced appreciation of the didactic aims shaping his works. After all, epic “morals,” in the technical neoclassical sense of the term, had not typically been concerned narrowly with Christian ideals, but had occupied a contested space between what we would now describe as separate forms of civic authority:  religion and politics. Fielding’s prose epics, with their comically flawed characters and their exposé of “Affectation,” attempt to negotiate a compromise between competing didactic ideals:  the spiritual humility deemed necessary for Christian salvation and the political self-​assertion deemed necessary for a happy British state—​a compromise so difficult to achieve in epic writing that Dryden, in 1693, had predicted the impossibility of writing a successful modern epic on foundations laid by the ancients. The subversiveness of Fielding’s contribution 41 

The groundwork has been laid by Loyd Douglas, “A Severe Animadversion on Bossu,” PMLA, 62, no. 3 (Sept. 1947), 690–​706. Also see Clark, Boileau and the French Classical Critics in England, esp. pp. 243–​61; Frederick M. Keener, “Pope, The Dunciad, Virgil, and the New Historicism of Le Bossu,” Eighteenth-​Century Life, 15, no. 3 (Nov. 1991), 35–​57; and Jennifer Snead, “Epic for an Information Age: Pope’s 1743 Dunciad in Four Books and the Theater Licensing Act,” ELH, 77, no. 1 (Spring 2010), 195–​216. 42  Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1967), p. 3. 43  Robert D. Hume, “Fielding at 300: Elusive, Confusing, Misappropriated, or (Perhaps) Obvious?,” Modern Philology, 108, no. 2 (Nov. 2010), 224–​62.

 

488   Anna M. Foy to English epic history, as it was then seen, surely reflected his notion that “the best Men are but little known,” and therefore in need of a “Writer” to “spread their History farther” (Joseph Andrews, p. 17). In justifying an epic that invests its readers in the exploits of a chaste rustic (a lover, not a fighter) and an ale-​drinking, impecunious parson, Fielding has moved so far from Davenant’s century-​old notion of princes as “predominant lights, which the People cannot chuse but use for direction” that it can be easy to miss the political substitution enacted in his didactic concept. Davenant’s heroic poem addressed and supported the highly visible ruling class; Fielding’s comic prose epic makes the unseen commoner the basis of British virtue and prosperity—​a noteworthy development in just a century’s time, even if Fielding’s conciliatory endings appear staid and conservative today. One of the most striking features of eighteenth-​century epic writing was its normative dismissal of the Virgilian–​Augustan paradigm as an appropriate model for British government, culture, and poetic composition. Uneasiness with the Virgilian model arguably began in the Restoration with Milton’s Paradise Lost and the parodies of Virgil that proliferated alongside it.44 But, after the Revolution, the watershed rejection of the Virgilian model came from Dryden, England’s former laureate, whose Virgil resolutely summoned the idea of the epic as a princely handbook only to dismiss it. After Dryden, epic writers repeatedly reenacted this dismissal. Samuel Garth’s mock-​heroic, The Dispensary (1699), took Blackmore as its target, the physician-​poet who still clung to royalist ideals approaching absolutism. Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1712–​17) engaged with the English epic tradition not by championing aristocrats as models for the rest of the population, but by mocking their pretensions to forms of cultural sophistication that denied their human origins. Nicholas Rowe, the poet laureate under George I, translated not Virgil but Lucan (1718), whose rousing defenses of “liberty” accorded with an emergent Whig ideology even if Rowe did not wholly embrace Lucan’s “anti-​Augustan” message.45 Then there was The Dunciad (1728–​43), a work that, for all its strangeness, occupied within Pope’s vocational trajectory the place of a capstone epic performance. Although it is hard to say what positive values The Dunciad asserts, the poem positions itself repeatedly, in multiple versions, as an affront to royal power and authority. The Dunciad Variorum (1729) contained an announcement that on behalf of the poet, Robert Walpole had presented the poem to George II, who had approved it in turn, apparently without reading past the fifth line: “Say from what cause, in vain decry’d and curst, | Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first” (book i, lines 5–​6). In this sense, Pope was himself “the first who brings | The Smithfield Muses to the ears of kings” (book i, lines 1–​2)—​a passage that smacks of impertinence, as does the eventual rewriting of the poem with the then-​poet laureate, Colley Cibber, as its debased protagonist. Jennifer Snead dubs The Dunciad a poem for an “Information Age,” and it was surely this, both in its posture of defiance against the Theater Licensing Act of 1737 and in its printed textuality.46 An alternative conception of the epic poet as an oral performer was just around the corner; The Dunciad, however,

44  Tanya Caldwell, “Restoration Parodies of Virgil and English Literary Values,” HLQ, 69, no. 3 (Sept. 2006), 383–​402. 45  Robin Sowerby, “The Augustan Lucan,” Translation and Literature, 14, no. 2 (Autumn 2005), 148–​ 78, at p. 165. 46  See Snead, “Epic for an Information Age.”

 

Epic   489 follows a Virgilian schema, both in its plot and in its status as written epic. Pope replaces the Aeneid’s traditional hermeneutic of inspiring obedience with a relentlessly enigmatic, text-​based experience that, as Snead observes, encourages readers “to make their own decisions as to literary value” (p. 203). The longstanding epic dialogue about English “obedience” that had begun with Davenant and was later mediated by Le Bossu would not die an immediate death after 1700; it does, however, appear to have been shunted into other genres. Toni Bowers situates the novels of Samuel Richardson within an ongoing “tory” debate over the possibility of virtuous resistance—​a problem of English political philosophy expressed in an emergent novelistic concern for representing the experience of victimized women and female agents. In the simplest terms, “Both Pamela and Clarissa recount the struggle of virtuous Christian protagonists to practice passive obedience and non-​resistance toward authority figures who misuse or abdicate their prerogative.”47 There is more work to do to determine how far, and in what forms, this discourse proliferated in eighteenth-​century letters, and also to what extent it retained purposeful links with the formal verse epic. Concerns with English “obedience” and the maintenance of English “liberty” were not limited to the Tories. Christine Gerrard reads James Thomson’s Liberty (1735–​6) as a sober Whig counterpart to Pope’s Dunciad, with its presiding Goddess Liberty as the guiding spirit behind the historical progress of public virtue, and Richard Glover’s Leonidas (1737), a formal verse epic with a Spartan topic, also thematized liberty and resistance.48

The Eighteenth-​C entury Epic and the Homeric Model The changes in epic activity that characterized the eighteenth century therefore echoed the growing distrust of Augustus Caesar and Augustan Rome that Howard Weinbrot has documented in the period.49 A second shaping influence—​one that sometimes worked in tandem with the decline of the Virgilian–​Augustan ideal to discourage sober epic-​writing and sometimes worked against it—​was the period’s rising fascination with Homer. Latin and vernacular translations of Homer had enhanced his textual availability through the seventeenth century. In addition, Homer’s centrality in the querelles (first in France, then in England) made him a subject of vigorous attention and won him important new advocates. Dueling translations enacted competing theories of classical accommodation: Madame Dacier (1711) vs. La Motte (1714), and Pope (1715–​16) vs. Tickell (1715). Debates over Homer’s authority incorporated a compelling array of topics—​not only the question of the relative qualities of Homer, Virgil, and their modern counterparts, but also the question of what cultures had

47  Toni Bowers, Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–​1760 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), p. 248. 48  Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–​1742 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 74–​5, 80–​1. 49  Howard D. Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in “Augustan” England: The Decline of a Classical Norm (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978).

 

490   Anna M. Foy produced them, and whether the cultures enshrined in ancient epics could be trusted to shape the manners and morals of modern readers.50 This was an important intellectual development. Homer’s emergence as the defining epic author was inseparable from what Donald Foerster called the “historical approach” to the classics: an approach that recognizes Homer’s bucolic landscapes and bloody warfare as representations of a primitive, distant culture. Earlier authors and translators took a presentist approach to the classics. They “cared little whether the Iliad was an ancient or recent poem, or was an adequate or inadequate expression of the Homeric age,” for they remained focused on the epic’s currency as a vehicle for time-​tested lessons to readers through the ages.51 By the late seventeenth century, though, the emerging “historical approach” was gaining traction (see ­chapter 40, “Scholarship”). It was reflected in Richard Bentley’s philological scholarship on the classics, and it infiltrated arguments on both sides of the querelles. Even Le Bossu, whose neo-​Aristotelian treatise followed the instrumentalist logic typical of the humanistic educational traditions, actually offered a carefully historicist analysis of Homer and Virgil as poets whose respective “designs” for influencing the polity reflected the needs and predispositions of their contemporary audiences.52 On both sides of the Channel, epic commentators moved away from what Foerster calls the “neoclassical” understanding of the genre—​an understanding that celebrated the Aeneid as a universal handbook for princes—​in favor of an approach that affirmed the historical and cultural distance of the classical authors. The effects of this trend on the once-​dominant Virgilian epic model have already been mentioned. Precisely because Virgil had previously seemed so relevant to debates about English government, he endured increasing scrutiny as a servile flatterer whose celebration of Roman imperial authority was at odds with British ideals of liberty. But Homer inspired interest and excitement for his cultural foreignness. Longinus had associated him with the “sublime.” Eighteenth-​century readers praised him for his bold genius and his perceived connection with an unadorned stage of human society otherwise difficult of access for polished modern readers. Consider the preface to Pope’s Homer (1715), where Pope locates the pleasure of the modern reading experience in the self-​satisfied contemplation of primitiveness and barbarity: It must be a strange Partiality to Antiquity to think with Madam Dacier, “that those Times and Manners are so much the more excellent, as they are more contrary to ours.” Who can be so prejudiced in their Favour as to magnify the Felicity of those Ages, when a Spirit of Revenge and Cruelty, join’d with the practice of Rapine and Robbery, reign’d thro’ the World, when no Mercy was shown but for the sake of Lucre, when the greatest Princes were put to the Sword, and their Wives and Daughters made Slaves and Concubines? … When we read Homer, we ought to reflect that we are reading the most ancient Author in the Heathen World; and those who consider him in this Light, will double their Pleasure in the Perusal of him. Let them think they are growing acquainted with Nations and People that are now no more; that they

50 

Cf. Kirsti Simonsuuri, Homer’s Original Genius: Eighteenth-​Century Notions of the Early Greek Epic (1688–​1798) (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979); and Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991). 51  Donald M. Foerster, Homer in English Criticism: The Historical Approach in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1947), p. 1. 52  Frederick M. Keener, “Pope, The Dunciad, Virgil, and the New Historicism of Le Bossu,” Eighteenth-​ Century Life, 15, no. 3 (Nov. 1991), 35–​57.

 

Epic   491 are stepping almost three thousand Years back into remotest Antiquity, and entertaining themselves with a clear and surprizing Vision of Things no where else to be found, the only true mirror of that ancient World. By this means alone their greatest Obstacles will vanish; and what usually creates their Dislike, will become a Satisfaction.53

Reading Homer therefore cultivates modern manners because it flatters modern readers in their contemplation of an earlier, inferior stage of civilization. This perception of historical difference may be illusory, Pope hints, but it nevertheless buttresses a contemporary “Satisfaction” in modernity, progress, and relative freedom from physical brutality. Stuart Gillespie notes that Pope’s Homeric project, like Dryden’s Virgil, conceives English translations not as “utilitarian cribs to revered ancient classics,” but as distinctively British masterworks that “allo[w]‌readers to feel that they can dispense with those classics.”54 Enhancing this sense of modernity, Pope provides voluminous annotations on ancient Greek “manners.” Appropriately, this approach to epic translation differs from that of even a century before, when Chapman recommended the Iliad to its dedicatee, Prince Henry (then heir apparent), for its capacity to teach princes how to govern “All traitrous passions.”55 Pope (like Dryden) addresses his work directly to the British public. Moreover, far from insisting that his translation be understood as instruction in stoic emotional self-​governance, Pope represents the passions permissively. Morgan Strawn has shown that despite Pope’s twentieth-​century reputation for neoclassical formality and emotional detachment, his Homeric translation invites its readers to invest themselves in passionate characters. Pope’s gods regard mortal foibles forgivingly, and even when his Homeric heroes display unseemly passions such as anger, Pope portrays these emotions complexly tinged with pity, motivated by friendship, or stirred up by public spirit—​a departure from the moral-​didactic priorities of earlier translations in its valuation of what Strawn calls “sentimentalism” as a basis for community.56 Thus, as the age of sensibility arrived, Homer eclipsed Virgil as Britain’s preferred epic poet. Virgil had once been prized for his civility and his artful didacticism; Homer now gained notice for the opposite characteristics: his perceived proximity to the origins of Western civilization and his trustworthiness as a bardic historian. Shaftesbury (1711) dubbed Homer the “great mimographer.”57 Robert Wood (1767) called him “the most original of all poets,” invoking the sense of “original” as first, and described him as “the most constant and faithful copier after nature” (quoted in Simonsuuri, p. 133). Samuel Johnson in his Life of Milton (1779) wrote of the epic as a narrative that “relates some great event in the most affecting manner”—​a definition that reflects his admiration for Homer as a painter of passions and a poet of “original invention” (Lives, vol. i, p. 282). In due time, seventeenth-​century critiques of Homer’s authorial prowess gave way to a mid-​eighteenth-​century fascination with

53 Pope, The Iliad of Homer, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–​69), vol. vii, p. 14. 54  Stuart Gillespie, “Translation and Canon Formation,” in Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins (eds.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Vol. 3: 1660–​1790 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005), p. 7. 55  George Chapman, Homer Prince of Poets … in Twelue Bookes of His Iliads (London, 1609), sig. π2r. 56  Morgan Strawn, “Homer, Sentimentalism, and Pope’s Translation of the Iliad,” SEL, 52, no. 3 (Summer 2012), 585–​608; and Steven Shankman, Pope’s “Iliad”: Homer in the Age of Passion (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983). 57 Simonsuuri, Homer’s Original Genius, p. 105.

 

492   Anna M. Foy the idea of Homer as a “Blind stroling Bard” (pp. 107–​8) or even a collection of rhapsodists (p. 42) who had preserved for posterity verbal pictures of ancient Greek culture. Enquiries into the scarce data surrounding the historical Homer led to what Maureen McLane and Laura Slatkin have called the “oralization” of the Greek epics: a tendency to conceive them as folk poetry produced by primitive communication technologies—​pre-​print, perhaps even pre-​literacy. The development of the mid-​century English epic reflected the growing potency of “Homer” as an idea and a poetic ideal. Writers of new epics were likely to evoke a Homeric rather than a Virgilian model: William Wilkie’s Epigoniad (1757), Macpherson’s Ossian, Fielding’s sprawling novels. Of course, the period has often been defined by its lack of epic writing. If mid-​eighteenth-​century Britons did, in fact, produce fewer new epics than their predecessors had a hundred years before, this non-​writing reflected a growing tendency to envision “epic” as the genre of a bygone era. Certainly, along with the rise of epic translation, essays on the origins of epic came into their own during the period. McLane and Slatkin observe that “the image of that inescapable Ur-​bard, Homer,” is “Lurking behind” a great deal of mid-​century thought about poetry’s origins and progress: mid-​century antiquarian revivals of ballads and other folk arts, the “bardic nationalism” (in Katie Trumpener’s terms) realized in poems such as Thomas Gray’s Bard (1757), and the conjectural histories of the Scottish Enlightenment that supplied an anthropological consciousness for such endeavors.58 Enlightenment stadial theories imagined a progressive development of society from hunter-​ gatherers to a commercial civilization; Homeric epic expressed a primitive stage. In the mid-​ eighteenth century, critical commentaries on Homer’s person, poetry, and culture were so predictably informed by contemporary explorations of “the history of our species” that “it is hard to escape the suspicion that inquiries into the former are quite often stalking horses for the latter” (p. 690). In this sense, even amid the paradigm shift from the dominance of the Virgilian to the dominance of the Homeric model, the realm of cultural activity constituted by the epic remained constant. Whether constituted primarily by “original” epics or epic commentaries, it never ceased to be about British and European “manners,” old and new. The folklorist project undertaken by James Macpherson in the Scottish Highlands reflected this emergent notion of epic (see ­chapter 14, “The Poet as Fraud”). The very idea of assembling a lost Gaelic epic through the collection of fragmentary manuscripts and interviews with a closed mountain society drew its conceptual focus from primitivist enquiries into Homer. Macpherson had translated Homer, and Hugh Blair dwelled upon Homer in a lengthy “parallel” in his Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763), which understood Macpherson’s Celtic tales as the residue of a “rude” stage of British society that, while postdating Homer by a millennium, represented a less advanced culture than its Greek counterpart. The Virgilian epic model is not irrelevant here: the Ossianic epics have been read as partisan compositions whose methods of tracing obscure British origins are tied to Scottish patriotism and the patronage of the Scottish Earl of Bute (then prime minister).59

58  Maureen N. McLane and Laura M. Slatkin, “British Romantic Homer: Oral Tradition, ‘Primitive Poetry’ and the Emergence of Comparative Poetics in Britain, 1760–​1830,” ELH, 78 (2011), 687–​7 14, at p. 690. 59  Philip Connell, “British Identities and the Politics of Ancient Poetry in Later Eighteenth-​Century England,” The Historical Journal, 49, no. 1 (March 2006), 161–​92.

 

Epic   493 Moreover, the poetry incorporates representations of princely authority and bardic loyalism reminiscent of seventeenth-​century royalist readings of both Virgil and Homer: “Fingal, like a beam from heaven, shone in the midst of his people. His heroes gather around him, and he sends forth the voice of his power. Raise my standards on high.”60 But there is no sense here that modern audiences should emulate this attitude toward royal authority. Blair, distancing his interpretation of Fingal from Le Bossu’s conception of didactic “design,” muses that, “if a general moral be insisted on, Fingal [furnishes the lesson] That Wisdom and Bravery always triumph over brutal force; or … That the most compleat victory over an enemy is obtained by that moderation and generosity which convert him into a friend” (p. 359). We are a long way from Ogilby’s obeisance to the Virgilian–​Augustan model and the divine right of kings. Macpherson’s Ossianic epics—​like the debates over authenticity that surrounded them—​ revel in the possibility that a pure moral sensibility can be recovered prior to the corruptions of civilized society. In the Virgilian–​humanist model, civilization supported poetic art and was enhanced by it. Ossian’s readers, by contrast, suspected that the “refinements of society” merely “disguise[d]‌” the benevolent “manners of mankind” (p. 345).61

Toward the Romantic Epic As Donald Foerster has observed, the “joint dictatorship of Homer and Virgil” in epic theory and practice did not endure into the Romantic period.62 Authors from Wordsworth to Blake to Byron proceeded with as strong a sense of modernity as British letters had ever witnessed. Critics showed a growing tendency to distrust the moral-​didactic arguments made for the classical authors. In an era nourished by a growing suspicion that culture was itself a source of oppression and coercion, it was difficult to countenance an idea of epic as a genre whose raison d’être rested in its capacity to shape the “manners.” For these writers, the genre was defined by its status as narrative poetry, distinct as such from the prose novel. They may also have been motivated by a late eighteenth-​century impression that modern epic energies had reached a low ebb. In An Essay on Epic Poetry (1782), William Hayley announced his “Design” to “remove prejudices which obstruct the cultivation of Epic writing” in contemporary letters. His four-​book poem sketched a method of reinvigorating the genre. He meditated on the potency of Homer’s example and the tendency of criticism to dampen the creative spirit, and he provided a generous bibliography to remind his contemporary readers of the many possible sources of epic influence: in addition to the ancient Greek and Roman poets, an array of epic examples from Provence, Italy, Spain, Portugal, modern France, and England. Hayley also decried the “braggart, Prejudice” for “Forbidding

60 

James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill and Fiona Stafford (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1996), p. 86. 61  See Juliet Shields’s discussion of the Enlightenment-​era discourses about societal progress into which Ossian intervened: “The Ossian Controversy and the Racial Beginnings of Britain,” in Sentimental Literature and Anglo-​Scottish Identity, 1745–​1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 24–​54. 62  Donald M. Foerster, “The Critical Attack upon the Epic in the English Romantic Movement,” PMLA, 69, no. 3 (June 1954), 432–​47, at p. 432.

 

494   Anna M. Foy Female hands to touch the lyre” and praised Anna Seward, author of the Elegy on Captain Cook (1780) and the Monody on the Death of Major Andre (1781), as the “leader of the lovely train” of women poets who threatened to “spread | Poetic jealousy and envious dread” to male poets of the day (pp. 74–​5). That Seward soon produced a poetic novel, Louisa (1784) and a translation of Fénelon’s Télémaque, eventually mirrored by Lady Sophia Burrell’s Thymbriad and Telemachus (1794), suggests a new era of epic-​writing had arrived.63 Moreover, in answer to Hayley’s call, the Romantic era would see a plentitude of new epics, from stories of the evolution of the poet’s mind to pious long poems inspired by Milton to narratives of national identity, including centennial meditations on the Glorious Revolution. Stuart Curran notes that, in the Romantic period, “Every major poet planned an epic (though not all were executed)” and many minor poets wrote them as well.64 Influenced by long poems such as Cowper’s Task (1785), buoyed by an array of new translations and epic examples from Dante to Beowulf, and further stimulated by revolutionary political events on the Continent and in the colonies, the epic was reborn at the end of the eighteenth century. It revealed unprecedented diversity in its influences, civic aims, and textual precedents, and yet it remained identifiable by its characteristic formal features and its narrative staging of humanity in its relation to nature, society, and the divine.

References Gillespie, Stuart, “Translation and Canon Formation,” in Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins (eds.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Vol. 3: 1660–​1790 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005), pp. 7–20. Griffin, Dustin, “Milton and the Decline of Epic in the Eighteenth Century,” New Literary History, 14, no. 1 (Autumn 1982), 143–​54. Hägin, Peter, The Epic Hero and the Decline of Heroic Poetry (Bern: Francke, 1964). Lewalski, Barbara K., “Paradise Lost and the Contest over the Modern Heroic Poem,” Milton Quarterly, 43, no. 3 (2009), 153–​65. McLane, Maureen N., and Laura M. Slatkin, “British Romantic Homer:  Oral Tradition, ‘Primitive Poetry’ and the Emergence of Comparative Poetics in Britain, 1760–​1830,” ELH, 78 (2011), 687–​7 14. Simonsuuri, Kirsti, Homer’s Original Genius: Eighteenth-​Century Notions of the Early Greek Epic (1688–​1798) (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979). Swedenberg, H. T., Jr., The Theory of the Epic in England, 1650–​1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1944). Wilson-​ Okamura, David Scott, Virgil in the Renaissance (New  York:  Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010).

63  Adeline Johns-​Putra, “Gendering Telemachus: Anna Seward and the Epic Rewriting of Fénelon’s Télémaque,” in Bernard Schweizer (ed.), Approaches to the Anglo and American Female Epic, 1621–​1982 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006). Seward’s previously unpublished Telemachus is now available in Lisa Moore (ed.), The Collected Poems of Anna Seward, vol. 1 (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). 64  See also Curran’s ample bibliography, “The Epic,” in Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 158–​79, at p. 158.

 

Chapter 29

Satire Ashley Marshall The cliché about verse satire in this period is that it rose with Dryden, reached its height with Pope, and declined into insignificance after the deaths of Pope and Swift in the middle of the eighteenth century. The reality is that satiric poetry in these 140 years comprises a vast and miscellaneous body of works, hundreds upon hundreds of formal verse satires, lampoons, broadsides, litanies, mock-​prophecies and mock-​panegyrics, epitaphs and epistles, dialogues and dramatic monologues, ghost poems, advices to painters, and elegies. Satire comes in a dizzying variety of forms and sizes, and it appears in a steady flow throughout the entire long eighteenth century. Any in-​depth survey of this material should demonstrate that the concept of “Augustan verse satire” promulgated by critics from Ian Jack to Frederic Bogel is largely mythical. Satire is not a genre but a mode, or a multifarious set of modes, and satiric practice changes drastically and often rapidly several times across the period. This is a messy, wide-​ranging, and enormous corpus, one to which we only now—​thanks to Early English Books Online and Eighteenth-​Century Collections Online—​have anything like full access. Most modern accounts of eighteenth-​century satire have foregrounded John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and a small number of other great writers, and have tended either to describe a dominant mode of satire or to identify a trajectory in which Dryden gives way to Pope and Swift, who in turn give way to Johnson and Charles Churchill. Better, fuller maps can now be drawn, a new history told. If we look to major and minor, known and anonymous practitioners of satire—​to writers like Stephen College, Thomas Durfey, George Villiers (second Duke of Buckingham), Robert Gould, Daniel Defoe, and William Kenrick—​what we find is neither an “Augustan” mode nor a single developmental narrative. Instead we see roughly half a dozen essentially discrete sub-​periods, vivid characterization of which is my aim here. The question, most broadly, is this: what happens to verse satire across the course of the long eighteenth century?

Late Seventeenth-​C entury Satire Scholars tend to characterize the period between the Restoration of Charles II and the ascendance of Alexander Pope as pre-​or proto-​Augustan or to formulate a “Restoration

 

496   Ashley Marshall mode” based on a relatively small number of verse exemplars. There are in fact two distinct sub-​periods, neither of which is anything like uniform but each of which has its own defining features setting it apart from the decades following c.1700. The first sub-​period (“Carolean”) correlates more or less exactly with the reign of Charles II; roughly speaking, the second (“post-​Carolean”) spans the reigns of James II and William III. In many respects 1660 represents an arbitrary starting point to the aetas mirabilis of English satire, but granting continuities from the 1650s,1 satires produced in Charles’s reign do “go” together.2 What sets them apart is largely a matter of the particularities of Carolean court culture and politics, and the world of scribal, almost always anonymous, publication—​ a world brought to light in the groundbreaking work of Harold Love.3 Quite a lot of this satire was produced for immediate consumption. Though widely varied in tone, intensity, form, and purpose, the overwhelming majority of Carolean verse satires are personal, vehement, and abusive; many of them are politicized; and precious few of their writers make moral claims for their condemnation of their targets. The two most prominent Carolean satirists, from a modern viewpoint, are Dryden and John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, who tend to be polarized in critical accounts—​one hailed as the inaugurator of a respectable Augustan satirical tradition, the other regarded as emblematic of the bawdy, cynical, rough-​and-​tumble culture of Restoration court satire. But Dryden is not exactly occupying a Parnassus above the muck. Absalom and Achitophel (1681) is high art, a brilliant biblical allegory defending Tory patriarchalism and monarchical order. Whatever its clear positive agenda, though, it is also a trenchant exemplar of partisan polemic and invidious character assassination: it belongs to “the harsh world of political combat and personal abuse—​anonymous, partisan expression of contempt and hostility intended to damage the target in the eye of the beholder.”4 The Medall (1682) is still more vicious, a frontal assault on Shaftesbury manifestly meant to blacken his reputation, as well as to discredit the Whigs. Mac Flecknoe (wr. 1676–​7) has received something of a critical whitewash, and while Dryden’s thumping of Shadwell might well reflect his desire to shore up a social, political, and literary order perceived as under attack, Carolean readers seem unlikely to have discerned any such grand motives. What the poem actually does is defame a personal enemy and rival author in highly personal terms with malicious relish: From dusty shops neglected Authors come, Martyrs of Pies, and Reliques of the Bum. Much Heywood, Shirly, Ogleby there lay, But loads of Sh —​—​ almost choakt the way. (lines 100–​3)

1  See Harold F. Brooks, “English Verse Satire, 1640–​1660: Prolegomena,” The Seventeenth Century, 3 (1988), 17–​46; Margaret Doody, The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 30–​56; and Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England 1640–​1660 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 295–​319. 2  Brean Hammond usefully traces some of the “extra-​literary factors that created the conditions for the flourishing of satire after 1660”; see “Verse Satire,” in Christine Gerrard (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth-​Century Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 369–​85, at p. 370. 3  Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-​Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), and English Clandestine Satire 1660–​1702 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). 4  Robert D. Hume, “‘Satire’ in the Reign of Charles II,” Modern Philology, 102 (2005), 332–​7 1, at p. 345.

 

Satire   497 Dryden would in the Discourse concerning Satire (1693) offer high-​minded dictates in an effort to make satire reputable—​but that essay belongs to the reign of William, and it has little to do with the practice of Carolean Dryden or his immediate contemporaries. Carolean verse satire has teeth. The literary flytings of Rochester reflect a kind of abusive satire especially popular in the 1670s. In On the Suppos’d Author of a Late Poem in Defence of Satyr and On Poet Ninny, he cudgels Sir Carr Scroope as an ineffectual satirist (“Thou canst not ev’n offend, but with thy face”) and a vain but useless human being (“All Pride, and Uglinesse! Oh how wee loath, | A nauseous Creature soe compos’d of both!”).5 In the scabrous My Lord All-​Pride and elsewhere he ridicules Mulgrave’s artistic and sexual capacities: “his starv’d fancy is compell’d to rake | Among the excrements of others wit | To make a stinking meal of what they shit,” and so on. Satirist upon bawdy satirist goes after court ladies and in particular the merry monarch’s several mistresses. Plenty of these poems are frivolously nasty, quite upbeat in their demolitions—​as for example the Lampoon (wr. 1676), a vulgar put-​down of the Countess of Castlemaine, and the racy On Several Women about Town (wr. 1680).6 Dirt-​flinging is a popular mode, and these salacious insult poems give Carolean satire much of its spice, but they need to be distinguished from the much more substantive attacks apparently written with real authorial conviction. In poems such as A Panegyric (penned against Nell Gwyn in 1681) and The Royal Buss (wr. 1675), the point is not Charles’s promiscuity or his favorite ladies. The author of the latter poem describes the king as “red hot with wine and whore,” distracted by his power-​mongering strumpets, acting as whores’ cully rather than competent sovereign.7 Charles is in fact at the center of much Carolean satire, though he is treated with varying degrees of roughness. Buckingham’s Ducks provides a brief, indirect, but decidedly unflattering portrait of the king, more gutless playboy than able potentate. A flock of witty, clever, fast-​paced satires of the 1670s—​see The King’s Vows (wr. 1670) and The King’s Farewell to Danby (wr. 1672)—​indict Charles as everything from a louse to a tyrannical thug. Such works are rollicking but far from cheerful. Others attack the king in seriously and unrelievedly denunciatory ways. The most famous example is Rochester’s celebrated scepter lampoon, which escalates from jeering at the monarch’s sexual ineffectuality to damning monarchy wholesale (“I hate all Monarchs and the Thrones they sitt on”).8 For a genuinely anti-​Stuart position, however, one must look to the fiery John Ayloffe, whose Britannia and Raleigh (wr. 1674–​5) and Oceana and Britannia (wr. 1681) are fiercely hostile to Charles—​presented as a tyrant, rapist, and murderer—​and to monarchy itself. Much Carolean satire is distinctly serious. The verse satire of the Exclusion Crisis and the Popish Plot reflects profound alarm and anxiety, and its authors are as frightened as they are antagonistic. In Naboth’s Vineyard (1679), John Caryll treats Shaftesbury as a menace to the state, but the more poignant part of the satire is its depiction of Naboth, an innocent falsely accused by the Titus Oates cohort and found guilty. A key point: Carolean satire is often very negative, but most of its writers seem to believe that they are defending something important, worthwhile, even sacred. Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1662–​77)—​long taken as mere 5  The quotations are from On Poet Ninny, in The Works of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, ed. Harold Love (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), p. 107. Subsequent quotation from p. 93. 6  See the poems collected in John Harold Wilson’s Court Satires of the Restoration (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1976), and in the first two volumes of George deF. Lord (gen. ed.), Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660–​1714, 7 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963–​75). 7  Quoted from Poems on Affairs of State, vol. i, p. 265. 8 Rochester, Works, ed. Love, p. 86.

 

498   Ashley Marshall triumphalism, a bit of retrospective Puritan-​bashing—​is in fact a purposeful intervention in the toleration debates of the 1660s and 1670s. Butler shares none of Dryden’s faith in Tory patriarchy or mystical politics, but he does wish Charles to enforce his authority, to restrain the untrustworthy dissenters who appear in Hudibras as bilkers and knaves. “Restoration satire” is often regarded as crude and coarse, but its abrasiveness comes not only from Carolean satirists’ propensity for personal venom but also from the real hostility found in these works, which articulate genuine outrage, fear, and disgust. At no point in the rest of the long eighteenth century does verse satire demonstrate such heat, such partisanship, such anxiety and desperate urgency. The energy and fierce commitment of Carolean satire is all the more apparent when read alongside the verse of the later 1680s and especially the 1690s. Late-​century, immediately post-​Carolean satire has gotten little ink from modern scholars, who frequently jump from Absalom and Achitophel and Oldham’s Juvenalian Satyrs upon the Jesuits (1679–​81) to Pope’s Rape of the Lock. This is not astonishing: much of the verse satire between them is relatively tame. Defoe’s True-​Born Englishman (1701) is a highly effective defense of William but, leaving aside that poem and Samuel Garth’s clever mock-​heroic The Dispensary (1699), the major satiric poets are Robert Gould, Ned Ward, Tom Brown, Richard Blackmore, and John Tutchin—​not exactly a heartening roster for anyone seeking a bridge between Dryden and Pope. The last decade and a half of the seventeenth century is important not for its masterpieces, but because its verse satire reflects considerable experimentation. To the reasons for that experimentation we will return, but first let me offer a brief précis of the kinds of verse satire found in this sub-​period. One is a carry-​over from the Carolean period: political (and religio-​political) satire as practiced by Defoe, Tutchin, and a host of anonymous contemporaries. The difference between these poems and their Carolean predecessors is principally a matter of scope and intensity. Post-​Carolean political satires tend to be displays of triumphalism (especially immediately after 1685 and 1688), complaint, or defense. The most violently antagonistic satires are anti-​Williamite and pro-​Jacobite, but as a rule their authors are more glumly disaffected than hopeful about the prospects of a Stuart restoration. Maynwaring’s Tarquin and Tullia and The Reflection (both wr. 1689) reflect serious discontent, but they are splenetic complaint rather than the kind of animated activism that marks Absalom and Achitophel or Hudibras. Defoe’s Williamite satiric verse is, on the contrary, remarkably positive in its thrust. In A New Discovery of an Old Intreague (1691) he condemns Jacobite petitioners creating unrest under William, and The True-​Born Englishman (like Absalom and Achitophel) defends the current monarchy and snipes at the king’s enemies. Reading those two poems alongside each other demonstrates a major difference between Carolean and post-​Carolean political satire: Defoe is certainly animated, but not nearly as much is at stake in 1701 as had been twenty years earlier. The Exclusion Crisis created a dire political situation and a practical crisis: someone was going to inherit the throne, and who and on what basis had to be decided. In desperately serious terms, writers asked whether England should emend its political foundation to deal with a particular problem. By the 1690s, there was much discontent with William, but nothing like the same degree of severe political instability. In the realm of defamatory satire, one also finds a striking disparity between the 1670s and the 1690s. The best-​known post-​Carolean practitioner of derogatory verse satire is Gould, whose works fall into two broad categories: deprecation of generalized types and

 

Satire   499 particularized lampoons directed at public figures. Dryden is Gould’s principal quarry in The Laureat (1687) and A Satyr against the Playhouse (1689). The latter also excoriates the dissipated stage, playwrights, actors and actresses, and the dissolute audience that cheerfully consumes filth. Most defamatory verse in the late seventeenth century is, however, exceedingly general in its attack—​witness the boom in misogynistic satire as practiced by Gould and Richard Ames (The Folly of Love, 1691, and Sylvia’s Complaint, of Her Sexes Unhappiness, 1692). Like the misanthropic satire likewise prominent in this period—​see Gould’s Jack Pavy, Alias Jack Adams (1689) and Ames’s Sylvia’s Revenge (1688)—​these are sufficiently abstract to be relatively toothless. By comparison with Rochester’s Ramble in St. James’s Park (where Corinna is pronounced “A Passive Pot for Fools to spend in”), they have little sting. The decline of nasty personal lampoonery is disappointing for those who enjoy Carolean scurrility—​but the key is that such tepidity was made all but inevitable by radically altered extra-​literary circumstances. One major change has to do with dissemination and target audience. Carolean satiric verse was on the main the product of and for a relatively small world: much of it was written by members of the court for members of the court about members of the court. It could afford to be highly topical, as it tended to circulate in manuscript among a closely connected coterie. The nature of the court changed with the accession of James, and changed still further after 1688, becoming both less licentious (and so depriving writers of grist for their satiric mills) and bigger, less tightly knit. After the disintegration of the Carolean court, far fewer scribal satirists penned obscenities for a small, specific audience with inside knowledge. After 1688, satiric poets are socially a mixed lot; they are increasingly commercial, writing and publishing for wider consumption by a more disparate readership. In the absence of daily newspapers (until 1702), they can assume relatively little common knowledge among a broader audience. This matters. For political and personal satires to work, they had to treat the most current and well-​known of subjects, as was the case with Garth’s Dispensary, a contribution to a very public controversy. Sweepingly general attacks on abstract concepts, on types rather than individuals, are much more conspicuous in the 1690s than in the previous or following generation. Satirists rail against the lethal spirits (A Satyr against Brandy, 1683), against greed (Gould’s Corruption of the Times by Money, 1693), against ingratitude and all forms of human folly. These diatribes are unexciting, but they do reflect experimental responses to a changing world. The same can be said of Ned Ward’s many popular “journey” satires, vehicles for lightweight satirical reportage that do not depend for their effects on knowledge extrinsic to the text. The bottom line is that satire is on the whole less urgently purposive, written with less individuated ferocity, than was true under Charles II. Transformations in political milieu and publication patterns changed—​ one might safely say revolutionized—​the possibilities for satiric verse.

Verse Satire in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century The norms of the late seventeenth century gave way to different types of satiric poetry in the first two decades of the eighteenth, and the most prominent modes change again in the late 1720s and 1730s. What this means is that we need to distinguish between the first quarter

 

500   Ashley Marshall of the century and the second, and to avoid the all too common temptation to generalize about “early eighteenth-​century” satire on the basis of Gulliver’s Travels, The Dunciad, and The Beggar’s Opera—​two of them not verse, and the third highly atypical. Verse satire in the 1700–​25 period is perhaps more varied, in terms of apparent agenda, than at any other time in the long eighteenth century. Religio-​political satire continues to be written for the purposes of attack and defense. The generalized social and moral satire of the 1690s does not entirely disappear, but most such critique becomes increasingly topical and particularized, centered on specific people or subjects (e.g., the South Sea crisis). But there are at least two “new” modes of satire in the first decades of the century, which flourish briefly and then largely vanish. One is what I would term “monitory”; the other is a kind of ideological argumentation or socio-​philosophical exploration. Exemplars of both tend to be difficult in a way not often associated with satires, which mostly depend upon clear transmission of judgment and easy consumption by the audience. Monitory or cautionary satire is highly visible c.1702–​14, and it tends to deal with religio-​political issues rather than with social or moral ones; almost all of the relevant works have to do with Dissent and toleration. Many of them rely on impersonation. Defoe’s Shortest-​Way with the Dissenters (1702) is the famous prose example, but there are a lot of illustrations in verse. In An Address to Our Sovereign Lady (1704), Arthur Maynwaring (?) has his Tory speaker expose the treasonable machinations of his party, a technique also used in Faction Display’d (1704; by William Shippen?) and The Age of Wonders (1710). The key is that this kind of satire is directed to the audience rather than aimed at the target: the point is instruction and warning, not humiliation or the victims’ reform. That such works relate to toleration debates is unsurprising: both Dissenters and High-​Flyers wish to warn their allies not to be swayed by the duplicitous rhetoric and false assurances of the opposition. The second “new” type of verse satire in the early eighteenth century is more densely argumentative or exploratory. Take Defoe’s Jure Divino: A Satyr: In Twelve Books (1706), a detailed poetic analysis of monarchy and a satirical account of his political philosophy. Defoe poses big questions about royal prerogative, the basis of power, and subjects’ rights; the object of the satire is “enquiry” as much as “verdict.” Not all such satire is political. The targets of Matthew Prior’s Alma; or, The Progress of the Mind (1718) are competing notions of the relationship between mind and body. Prior ridicules the Aristotelian argument that the mind or soul is everywhere in the body: Alma in Verse; in Prose, the Mind, By Aristotle’s Pen defin’d, Throughout the Body squat or tall, Is, bonâ fide, All in All. And yet, slap dash, is All again In every Sinew, Nerve, and Vein.9

This is playful but also ponderous, a more intellectual kind of verse satire than we find earlier or later in the long eighteenth century. The period from the late 1720s through the deaths of Pope and Swift is often hailed as the high moment of eighteenth-​century satire, and justly so. In part this reputation is due to 9  The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, ed. H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), vol. i, lines 14–​19.

 

Satire   501 the prose and dramatic masterpieces of this “Scriblerian” heyday—​Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, The Beggar’s Opera, Fielding’s plays and Jonathan Wild—​but this is also a rich time for verse satire. Pope’s three Dunciads, Moral Essays, and Horatian imitations, Johnson’s London, and Swift’s On Poetry: A Rapsody, The Legion Club, and Verses on the Death make this a prodigious period in the history of satiric poetry. The quality of the major verse satires sets these years apart from the earlier and later parts of the century—​and so do the general patterns reflected in the primary material. There is in fact little continuity between the early twenties and the generation or so beyond them. Dense, argumentative poetry largely disappears; so does monitory satire. The culture of satire changes. The reasons for the transformation are not entirely knowable, but one factor is almost certainly the centrality of Walpole and the corruption associated with him. Verse satire between 1726 and 1745 is much more focused than it had been earlier in the century: almost all of it concerns a small number of issues in the realm of politics, culture, and society. The first two thematic clusters are of course related: one target of cultural satire is the debauched patronage system in which sycophantic hacks like Pope’s dunces are the darlings of the ministry, and in which talented writers have to debase themselves if they are to win favor. The political implications of both cultural and social commentary in this period lend even greater cohesiveness to the verse satire. What is remarkable about this material is tonal fluctuation, the varying intensities with which writers respond to a relatively small and contained set of issues. Political, cultural, and social satire ranges from amusing and frivolous to plaintive and antagonistic to shrill, denunciatory, and despairing. Most exemplars of truly lightweight political and cultural satire are dramatic rather than poetic—​see Fielding’s Tom Thumb and The Welsh Opera—​with only a few exceptions (e.g., The Twickenham Hotch-​Potch, 1728). On the whole, verse satire tends to be higher heat, whether sharply condemning its targets or glumly surveying a state of affairs presumed to be unchangeable. Much of it is complaint rather than purposive intervention in the manner of Absalom and Achitophel: Walpole’s relative security gives a certain sourness to anti-​ministerial screeds, which tend to be uncontrolled abuse and hence not very effective satire. Swift’s English poems of the early 1730s are among the most toxic anti-​ ministerial verse: poems such as To Mr. Gay (1731), On Mr. Pulteney Being Put out the Council (1731), On Poetry: A Rapsody (1733), and An Epistle to a Lady (1733) are savage in their excoriation of the Great Man, a “bloated Minister … | With shameless Visage, and perfidious Leer,” full of “Noise, and Impudence, and Lies.”10 Few of Swift’s contemporaries match his venomous intensity—​Paul Whitehead comes close in The State Dunces (1733) and Manners: A Satire (1739)—​but there is no shortage of dark, choleric satiric verse at the Great Man’s expense. An important distinction needs to be made between the harsh attacks penned by Swift and Whitehead and gloomier, more pessimistic satire. Pope’s Dunciad, in Four Books (1743)—​unlike the significantly lighter Dunciad of 1728—​is solemn denunciation on a wide scale. The problem is not bad art but a “generally collapsing world,” and the satirist is not self-​righteously annoyed but disgusted, despairing, and apprehensive about “the increasing violence of Dulness’s ever-​growing forces.”11 The point I wish to emphasize here is that this 10 

The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958), vol. ii, lines 33–​4, 42. 11  Howard D. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005), pp. 253, 248.

 

502   Ashley Marshall is not a very common mode: only a small number of political and cultural satiric poems are apocalyptic in the manner of Pope’s last Dunciad. Much satiric commentary under Walpole is either bouncy and deflating or pointed and particularized. The same could be said of verse satire in the realm of the social. Quite a lot of writers breezily poke fun at court intrigues, high life, the desire for novelty, and so on—​see the first of Edward Young’s Universal Passion poems (1725), the anonymous Satyr on the Lawyers (1727), and A Trip through the Town (1735). Many moralizing social satirists also thump their tubs with homiletic indignation, as does Thomas Newcomb in Blasphemy as Old as the Creation (1730) and The Manners of the Age (1733). But few satirists—​whether social, cultural, or political—​reach the depths of desolation typified by Pope’s most despondent productions. One cliché about satire in the first half of the eighteenth century is heavily influenced by the “Scriblerian” mode reflected in the works of Pope, Swift, and (to a lesser extent) Gay. In fact, of the three men only Swift really “fits” his satiric milieu, and the considerable differences in their practices and tendencies seriously undermine the notion that they are collectively responsible for setting the tone of eighteenth-​century satire. Until the Dunciad, Pope is only barely a satirist, and what he does produce (The Rape of the Lock, 1712 and 1714, and a couple of squibs) is remote from our notion of him as moral guardian and cultural custodian. Gay’s hand tends to be lighter than either Pope’s or Swift’s: he travesties literary forms, and even his deeply serious social criticism is mitigated by a light, bright, jaunty tone. Like Pope’s, his early verse satire—​Wine (1708), The Fan (1713), The Shepherd’s Week (1714), and Trivia (1716)—​have virtually nothing in common with the satiric modes dominant in the 1710s. Attack, defense, ideological argumentation, and didacticism are not what either Gay or Pope does. Swift’s early-​century practice corresponds more closely with that of many of his contemporaries. He can be jokey and playful (A Ballad on the Game of Traffick, wr. 1702), as well as gratuitously and maliciously negative (Description of a Salamander, wr. 1705). Much of his Queen Anne-​era satire is purposively propagandistic (The Windsor Prophecy, 1711); he attacks his enemies and defends the ministry to which he is so fervently committed. Like his contemporaries in the reign of Anne, he relies on impersonation and indirection, practicing a Swiftian version of monitory satire (see An Excellent New Song, Being the Intended Speech of a Famous Orator against Peace, 1711). In the late 1720s and 1730s also, he seems very much a part of the broader satiric milieu. He contributes to the flood of biting anti-​ministerial satire and spiky cultural commentary, and though much of his attention is on Irish rather than English affairs, his verse satire is similar in kind (if better in quality) to that produced by his contemporaries. Between 1726 and 1745, Gay is only briefly and barely relevant. Pope’s political and cultural satire is very much in line with the concerns of his contemporaries, though his punitive, moralistic, often harsh satires surveying cultural and political corruption are considerably darker and louder than most.12 Perhaps the most important point about the verse satire in the second quarter of the eighteenth century is that it has little connection to what came before or after. The “Scriblerian” masterpieces—​The Dunciad and On Poetry:  A  Rapsody, and, in other genres, Gulliver’s Travels and The Beggar’s Opera—​all too often represent the basis of broader studies of

12  “Year upon year, Pope produced ‘state of the nation’ poems in which his own indomitable, ungaggable voice rings out, as it were from a soapbox in the public square” (Hammond, “Verse Satire,” p. 374).

 

Satire   503 eighteenth-​century satire. The cultural-​cum-​political satire of Pope’s Dunciad or Swift’s anti-​Walpole works represents a relatively short-​lived phenomenon. No less than Carolean court lampoons or monitory satires in Anne’s reign, the harsh cultural satires of Walpolean England are the product of a particular moment.

Verse Satire after Pope That the golden age of satire ended with the deaths of Pope and Swift is a well-​established critical truism. Granting exceptions, the broad shift from harsh to affectionately sympathetic laughter outlined by Stuart Tave in The Amiable Humorist (1960) is difficult to dispute. But satire does not die with Pope and Swift; it morphs. In the second half of the eighteenth century, satire becomes increasingly prominent in fiction and drama (and in visual media). Verse becomes less dominant as a vehicle for satire, but satiric poetry does not disappear until a generation or so into the nineteenth century. In the quarter century following the deaths of Pope and Swift, the only verse satirist to get significant attention from modern critics is Charles Churchill. Churchill is the foremost satiric poet of his moment, but there are in fact several hundred verse satires produced in these years. The problem, as Thomas Lockwood wryly acknowledges at the beginning of Post-​Augustan Satire (1979), is that most of them are just not very good. As poems they fail to exhibit the technical mastery of Pope; as satires they lack the verve and destructive energy of Swift. Leaving aside the work of Churchill, the bulk of verse satires fall into three broad categories:  lightweight jeux d’esprit, usually vehicles for mild social satire; socio-​ethical preachment, often from a highly moral perspective; and particularized political, social, or literary attacks. The first accounts for a much higher percentage of total satiric output than at any other time in the century. Something like The Important Triflers (1748), a breezy poetic diary exposing the follies and inanities of high society sans moral reproach, is typical. Many verse satires reflect the broad cultural changes outlined by Tave (which began to be apparent as early as the late 1730s and 1740s). By mid-​century, there is a prominent mode of sympathetic satire, warm and good-​natured in its social critique. Christopher Anstey’s New Bath Guide (1766) describes the manners and fashions of Bath in genially mocking terms: the spa town is a place of “Fine Balls, and fine Concerts, fine Buildings, and Springs, | Fine Walks, and fine Views, and a Thousand fine Things.”13 The poem’s “amiable satiric flaccidity” is representative of the kind of limpness critics have (wrongly) pointed to as evidence of satire’s demise.14 Abstract moral preachment also looms large in the third quarter of the century. Satirists target political corruption, modern taste, or widespread social failings. Smollett’s Advice (1746) and Reproof (1747) typify a trend recognizable from Pope and Young but much more common in mid-​century—​namely, the fixation not on “ ‘the world’ but ‘the

13  Christopher Anstey, The New Bath Guide; or, Memoirs of the B—​r—​d Family: In a Series of Poetical Epistles (London, 1766), p. 43. 14  The phrase is from Howard D. Weinbrot, “Pope, His Successors, and the Dissociation of Satiric Sensibility: A Hypothesis,” in Eighteenth-​Century Satire: Essays on Text and Context from Dryden to Peter Pindar (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), p. 196.

 

504   Ashley Marshall satirist-​and-​the-​world,’ or perhaps ‘the satirist-​versus-​the-​world.’  ”15 Such poems pass judgment on social ills, but they are also about sanctimonious self-​praise; their subject is the poet’s role in the epic battle between Virtue and Vice. Particularized attacks constitute only a tiny fraction of the verse satires of this period. The most celebrated example is Churchill’s Rosciad (1761), a succession-​of-​players satire mocking Charles Macklin, James Quin, Spranger Barry, and other well-​known actors and writers. This kind of literary in-​fighting is extremely common, especially after the popular Rosciad, which like the Dunciad provoked irate responses from its wounded victims. Arthur Murphy’s Ode to the Naiads of Fleet-​Ditch (1761) lambasted Churchill and his comrades. In the same year, Churchill and his antagonists were collectively targeted by the anonymous poet of The Scrubs of Parnassus, where the battle of the wits is depicted as the dirty play of malicious men. For more personal satire, one might look to Christopher Smart’s demolition of Aaron Hill in The Hilliad (1753) and to Hill’s stinging retort, The Smartiad. Levels of intensity and motives differ—​the satire can be a matter of personal rivalry, gratuitous abuse, self-​defense, expression of jealousy, a desire for publicity, or whatever—​but the bickering of writers, critics, and actors accounts for much of the personal satire in this quarter century.16 What is unique about the verse satire of this period is that—​whether generalized or topical, socio-​political or literary—​it tends to be highly poeticized. Take, for example, Robert Lloyd’s Progress of Envy (1751), the subject of which is William Lauder’s accusation that Milton plagiarized large passages of Paradise Lost. What topical thrust the satire has, however, is obscured by its self-​consciously and self-​indulgently poetic style. The use of the Spenserian stanza form and the rich personification throughout relegate Lauder—​Lloyd’s “victim”—​to a distinctly minor role, rendering the punitive force essentially nil. Like much verse satire of the period, The Progress of Envy is emphatically literary and performative. The result is that—​with the exception of a few lightweight trifles and Juvenalian rants—​much of the satiric poetry in these years “sounds” the same. The style and craft of these works is not just a feature but an end in itself, and the difference between “satirical” poetry written for its own sake and angry topical satire meant as an intervention in current events is enormous. This difference is evident in Churchill’s satiric output. His non-​political satire reflects the major trends in verse satire of this quarter century. He is sometimes aggressively self-​ defensive about the writer’s province, as in The Apology of 1761, where he plays the injured poet responding to the unhappy reception of The Rosciad. Night (also 1761) is another self-​ defense, this time of his modus vivendi rather than his modus scribendi. He preaches from a high pulpit in The Times (1764), a shrill “O tempora, O mores” attack on a wide range of social ills. The poem is full of sound and fury if not very convincing in its indignation. Elsewhere Churchill is more playful. The Ghost (1762–​3) is a lively, digressive, almost Shandean satire on credulity and irrationality, insofar as it has a clear center. It is freewheeling and fast-​moving, mischievous and bantering, apparently meant in part to be a display of the poet’s imaginative powers. In all of these non-​politicized satires, Churchill is inward-​rather than outward-​ looking; like his contemporaries, he is much concerned with the poet’s role. Only when he

15 

Thomas Lockwood, Post-​Augustan Satire: Charles Churchill and Satirical Poetry, 1750–​1800 (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1979), p. 21. 16  On which see Lance Bertelsen, The Nonsense Club: Literature and Popular Culture, 1749–​1764 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).

 

Satire   505 allies himself with John Wilkes does he become unrepresentative of the satire of his time. In the 1750s and 1760s, few satirists use their works as vehicles of serious socio-​political critique, but writing as the poet-​patriot of Wilkes’s anti-​ministerial campaign, Churchill does precisely that. The Prophecy of Famine (1763), The Author (1763), The Duellist (1764), and The Candidate (1764) all have genuine political animus and considerable punitive vigor. His nastiest satire is An Epistle to William Hogarth (1763), a ruthless vilification of its target written in retaliation against a political enemy. In all of his politicized poetry, Churchill writes for personal and political liberty and against Wilkes’s antagonists, producing a kind of negative and positive propagandistic satire familiar from Dryden, Defoe, and Swift. Churchill illustrates something important about the verse poetry of the mid-​century. Almost all of it is reflective, deliberately self-​absorbed, and very poetic, so much so that the Bruiser’s less introspective and more outwardly combative satire jars against the practice of the time. Verse satire in the generation or so after Pope and Swift has, with few exceptions, a good deal less heat, vehemence, and sense of urgency. Instead art seems to trump occasion, and what occasion there is often appears contrived or trivial. This change is probably not wholly explicable, but as a partial hypothesis I would argue that the essential political stability of the 1750s and 1760s, along with Pope’s posthumous influence on poetry, powerfully affects satiric practice. This is satire produced at a time of relative quiescence; it lacks the passionate desire to do damage, to effect change, or to protest the defeat of causes and commitments we find among satirists from 1660 to the fall of Walpole.

Late Georgian Satire The sense of urgency—​unsurprisingly—​returns to satiric verse in the 1780s and 1790s. For a long time, satire was not regarded as very relevant to discussions of late Georgian England. That has started to change, thanks largely to Marcus Wood’s Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790–​1822 (1994), Gary Dyer’s British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–​1822 (1997), and Steven Jones’s Satire and Romanticism (2000), all of which made potent cases for the importance of satire to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Dyer’s long bibliography of primary works offers ample evidence that satire was alive and well in the 1790s and the decades immediately following it—​as does the five-​volume Pickering & Chatto collection of British Satire, 1785–​1840 (2003). The corpus of satiric verse is nothing like as massive or as richly varied as in the period 1660–​1745, but the late 1780s and 1790s do represent yet another sub-​period with its own distinctive features. The revolutionary climate reinvigorates satiric verse: as during the Exclusion Crisis, the toleration debates of Anne’s reign, and the stormy Walpole regime, writers in the last fifteen years or so of the century have a sense of occasion. The enormity of the socio-​political changes at issue generated a kind of exigency and thrust mostly lacking in the 1750s and 1760s. At no point in the second half of the eighteenth century does verse satire show anything like as much formal range as it had in the first, and in the 1780s as in the 1750s there is quite a lot of emphatically poetic satire. Late-​century verse satirists—​unlike many of Churchill’s contemporaries—​manifestly believe that something important is at stake. The three dominant satiric poets of the late century are William Gifford, Thomas James Mathias, and John Wolcot (“Peter Pindar”). Dyer’s tripartite categorization of

 

506   Ashley Marshall “Romantic”-​period satire is perhaps over-​tidy, but nevertheless very useful for our purposes: he divides satire into neo-​Juvenalian (Gifford and Mathias), neo-​Horatian (Wolcot), and radical. The first two modes are essentially politically conservative and the third essentially oppositional, a kind of commentary that “emerged in part because of the tendencies to legitimate the status quo displayed by each of the two established kinds of satiric verse.”17 The great majority of late-​century satire is, of course, implicitly or explicitly related to national and European political controversy. Robert Burns’s Holy Willie’s Prayer (wr. 1785) and The Holy Fair (1786) are cutting exposés of religious hypocrisy among the Kirk elders, and they are also atypical in being relatively local in focus. Most verse satirists in the period, whatever pose they strike, set their sights on big issues. Gifford’s Baviad (1791) and Mæviad (1795) and Mathias’s Pursuits of Literature (1794) are the products of incensed conservatives raging against “the perceived threat of ‘Jacobinism’ in politics and culture” and keen to bludgeon their targets.18 The Baviad and Mæviad blast the Della Cruscan coterie of sentimental poets, and as in the Dunciad the cultural satire has important political subtexts. Gifford goes in for individuated abuse that is blunt, abrasive, and ineloquent: in a footnote to The Baviad he smears Holcroft as “a poor stupid wretch, to whom infidelity and disloyalty have given a momentary notoriety.” His Epistle to Peter Pindar (1800) is a ferocious frontal assault on Wolcot: “False Fugitive! back to thy vomit flee,” and so on.19 The foremost practitioner of neo-​Horatian satire is Wolcot, likewise conservative but more popular, populist, and comic than gravely denunciatory. He is, as Nicholas Mason explains, “largely responsible for fixing in the public’s mind the image of George III as a blundering and absent-​minded but strangely endearing fool.”20 In The Lousiad (1785–​95), he depicts the king at home, a fool more interested in managing his larder than his government. Throughout Wolcot is playfully irreverent: “Let George view Ministers with surly Looks, | Abuse ’em, kick ’em—​but revere his Cooks!”21 This anti-​George satire recalls some of the anti-​ Charles II satire that flourished in the 1670s, flippant and fast-​moving but entirely serious in its judgment: the monarch is a boob incapable of running the country. Elsewhere Wolcot takes aim not at the king but at the king’s loudest antagonist: in the Odes to Mr. Paine (1791), he has his target jauntily detail his traitorous designs. Wolcot, unlike his neo-​Juvenalian and radical contemporaries, almost always keeps his hand fairly light. For contrast one might look to Coleridge’s Fire, Famine, and Slaughter (1798)—​damning Pitt and his ministry, and published anonymously—​or to Thomas Spence’s Burke’s Address to the “Swinish Multitude” (1793), a rabble-​rousing attack on Burke penned by a furious champion of the masses. Indirection there is none: Spence’s satire ends with Burke’s screeching to the people, “Get ye down! down! down!—​Keep ye down!” The fervor surrounding the French Revolution clearly animated satirists (pro and con), as did the broader issues of human rights. Richard Polwhele’s Unsex’d Females (1798), attacking Mary Wollstonecraft, is sharply condemnatory of social and political change; William Cowper’s Sweet Meat Has Sour Sauce and Pity for the 17 

Gary Dyer, British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–​1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), p. 41. 18  Ibid., p. 2. 19  Quoted from John Strachan (ed.), British Satire, 1785–​1840, 5 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), vol. iv, pp. 18, 79. 20  Ibid., vol. i, p. xxx. 21  Ibid., vol. iii, p. 31.

 

Satire   507 Poor Africans (1788) are violently antislavery. One does find some lightweight or generalized or local satire in the 1780s and 1790s, but in the main these writers are addressing subjects sufficiently important to generate real energy and heat.

Discontinuous Histories Let us return to the question posed at the outset: what happens to verse satire between 1660 and 1800? The short answer is “quite a lot.” Satiric poetry in the long eighteenth century is a vast and immensely complex phenomenon. It does not reduce either to a single mode perfected by a few great writers or to an evolutionary trajectory in which Dryden begets Pope who begets Johnson and Churchill and so on. Restoring something like the full milieu in which the most celebrated satirists of the age produced their masterpieces makes clear an important fact: we cannot presume the typicality and connectedness of major satiric poets and works. They do not tell us how to read “the age,” and they do not in any meaningful way represent links in a chain. More than any other kind of writing, satire is occasional, and individual writers—​including the headliners—​tend to be better understood in relation to their immediate circumstances than in relation to earlier or contemporary satirists. Absalom and Achitophel really needs to be read as, among other things, an Exclusion Crisis satire; The Dunciad is a product of the reign of Walpole, and reflects the particular combination of political and cultural tensions of those years; The Rosciad means more, in satiric terms, if one is thinking of the 1760s than if one is thinking of Churchill’s inheritance from Pope. The question of what happens to verse satire beyond 1800 cannot be fully answered here, but a few words on the subject are in order. The major “Romantic” poets did not much go in for what we think of as satire—​partially excepting Blake and Byron—​but a great deal of satire was written in the early nineteenth century. Following Wood, Dyer, and Jones, scholars are only just beginning to try to cope with what turns out to be a rather large and rich corpus of neglected satiric and quasi-​satiric writing. In the first decades of the nineteenth century our “Romantics” unquestionably borrowed from (and adapted to their own ends) the satiric practices of the previous generation. Wood has traced the connections in some detail, pointing out that (for example) Shelley’s “attempts to write popular political satires directed at the Liverpool administration were frequently … modeled upon forms which had been taken up by extreme popular radical propagandists since the 1790s.” His New National Anthem owes much to the anthems of Spence, Eaton, and other mid-​nineties radicals, and his Devil’s Walk (1812) follows in the late eighteenth-​century tradition of “diabolical satires” such as The Devil upon Two Sticks in England.22 By the 1820s and 1830s, Dyer concludes, satire largely disappeared as a distinct literary form or a distinct group of forms, and several factors bear responsibility: publishers needed the reliable profits fiction provided; many in the literary world assumed that satire, like poetry in general, was passé now that Byron was dead; and the public’s desire to reevaluate their political and social institutions entailed a preference for “realistic” discursive forms like the treatise or the lecture over “imaginative” ones like satire.23

22 

Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790–​1832 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 265.

23 Dyer, British Satire, p. 139.

 

508   Ashley Marshall Whatever the causes of the decline of verse satire, the fact remains that never again, after the turn of the nineteenth century, would it be so important and exciting a part of English literary culture. The long eighteenth century saw the production of some brilliant satiric poetry by Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, and others, but what makes it the great age of verse satire is the rich variety of possibilities explored by a huge number of poets. What is popular in one decade can vanish in the next. Conspicuous modes of poetic satire morph or evaporate in ways that seem to leave them without significant influence on what follows. Probably because serious satire tends to be highly topical, the best, most effective, most powerful satire usually springs from crisis, or deep discontent, or bitter hostility—​conditions that tend to obtain at a time of sociopolitical crisis. What we learn from investigating satiric poetry of the long eighteenth century in any depth is that there is no such thing as “Augustan satire.” If we are going to make sense of this material, then we need to take it bit by bit. The true history of satire in its great age is not “a history.” Rather, it is a series of discontinuous little histories—​each what Lyotard calls a “petit récit”—​complex but coherent little narratives from which a larger and more complicated picture of eighteenth-​century satire emerges.24 There are at least six distinct sub-​periods in the 140 years at issue here: the dominant kinds of satire practiced at any point in the period change, often radically and rapidly, and the causes of the transformations have less to do with the influence of particular poets than with ever-​changing extra-​literary circumstances.

References Bogel, Fredric V., The Difference Satire Makes:  Rhetoric and Reading from Jonson to Byron (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2001). Griffin, Dustin, “Dryden and Restoration Satire,” in Ruben Quitero (ed.), A Companion to Satire (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 176–​95. Griffin, Dustin, Satire: A Critical Reintroduction (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1994). Hume, Robert D., “ ‘Satire’ in the Reign of Charles II,” Modern Philology, 102 (2005), 332–​7 1. Jack, Ian, Augustan Satire: Intention and Idiom in English Poetry, 1660–​1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952). Kupersmith, William, English Versions of Roman Satire in the Earlier Eighteenth Century (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2007). Kupersmith, William, Roman Satirists in Seventeenth-​Century England (Lincoln:  Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1985). Love, Harold, English Clandestine Satire, 1660–​1702 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). Marshall, Ashley, The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–​1770 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2013). Nussbaum, Felicity, The Brink of All We Hate:  English Satires on Women, 1660–​ 1750 (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1984). Quintero, Ruben, “Pope and Augustan Verse Satire,” in Ruben Quintero (ed.), A Companion to Satire (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 212–​32. 24  Jean-​François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 60.

 

Satire   509 Rawson, Claude, Order from Confusion Sprung: Studies in Eighteenth-​Century Literature from Swift to Cowper (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985). Weinbrot, Howard D., Alexander Pope and the Traditions of Formal Verse Satire (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982). Weinbrot, Howard D., The Formal Strain:  Studies in Augustan Imitation and Satire (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969). Weinbrot, Howard D., Menippean Satire Reconsidered:  From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005).

 

Chapter 30

Ode Sandro Jung The body of scholarship on the British ode is extensive, but all book-​length studies ranging from Robert Shafer’s English Ode to 1660 (1918) and George N. Shuster’s English Ode from Milton to Keats (1940) to Kurt Schlüter’s Englische Ode (1964) and Paul H. Fry’s Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (1980) are characterized by their narrowness of scope in terms of the number of odes actually examined. Ranging from formalist readings of individual poems to contextual interpretations that highlight the cultic origins of the ode in the classical Greek prayer hymn, as well as those tracing Bloomian anxieties and deliberate misreadings of the literary legacy of the ancients, these studies focus on largely the same examples of odes, exploring peaks. They also argue, as Fry does, that, in moving from John Dryden to William Collins, “a great divide has been crossed.”1 This notion of a divide assumes that no odes were produced in the early eighteenth century, but this is far from the truth if ESTC records for the 1720s and 1730s are examined. None of these studies problematizes the specific rationales underpinning the selection of the odes they examine, and it is apparent that literary historians favor those odes that metatextually engage with the genre of the ode, its history, and the ways in which writers of these poems see themselves as part of an established, albeit wide-​ranging, tradition of formal models. Equally, studies have investigated the cultic origins and tripartite structure of the greater (or Pindaric) ode, either relating the form to the performative moments of the Greek chorus, reflected in the strophe, antistrophe, and epode, or reading it in terms of the prayer hymn as divided into invocation, pars epica (in which the poet develops a myth), and petition. In the past twenty years, case studies of odes concerned with defining generic developments and “phases” have traced ideational clusters or literary strategies, rather than offering formal models to comprehend the eighteenth-​century ode.2 There are striking omissions of odes that represent significant examples of generic variation and the formation and (re)shaping of the genre in these works. One of the most remarkable omissions is “Grongar Hill” (1726) by the Welsh poet and painter John Dyer. The poem’s morphology changed throughout its gestation process, transforming from an irregular Pindaric composition to one structured into regular trochaic tetrametric stanzas. Dyer’s poem is significant for the 1 

Paul H. Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980), p. 60. Margaret Koehler, “Odes of Absorption in the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century,” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 47, no. 3 (2007), 659–​78. 2 

 

Ode   511 formation of a natural-​descriptive ode in which deities such as Fancy feature in the landscape in a way that will be complicated and revised in the mythopoeic odes of the following decades. In these odes poets explore acts of creation, the powers of the imagination, and bardic vision. This chapter will chart a narrative of the ode from 1700 to 1780, focusing on both those odes that have shaped current understanding of the genre in the eighteenth century and on poems from a range of publishing venues not usually considered as of central significance for literary historiography.

The Diversity of the Ode In his monumental English Verse, 1701–​1750 David Foxon provides a list of 116 separately published odes for the first half of the eighteenth century.3 The ESTC lists more than one thousand publications issued between 1700 and 1799 that contain the generic term “ode” in their titles. However, a cursory search of the various miscellanies and anthologies published in the course of the eighteenth century demonstrates that the ESTC figure needs to be doubled at least. Quantifying ode production comprehensively by means of traditional and electronic tools has not yet been attempted because literary historians have usually applied qualitative criteria, concentrating on a small number of ode writers whose productions they contextualized in terms of lyric traditions that date to ancient Greek musical and poetic practices. This qualitative bias has resulted in an imbalanced historiography of the genre of the ode; in order to generate an understanding of the multifarious history of the genre’s mutations in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we must integrate quantitative and qualitative models. Reading the ode as the paradigmatic form of the “greater Romantic lyric” obscures the little-​acknowledged but bibliographically pervasive evidence that far more odes defy the characteristics of the hymnal lyric than comply with them and that, nevertheless, the small number of odes adhering to the conventions of Romantic odic form are usually selected to represent the genre. In fact, the emphasis that previous scholars have placed on the lyric qualities of the ode—​the genre’s relationship with song, musical performance, or a ritual accompanied by the music of the lyre and cithara—​has resulted in important studies of this particular variation of the genre.4 But it has not acknowledged that a significant number of odes do not centrally engage with lyric traditions or the meaning of music for poetic composition. The multifarious types of odes produced in the course of the eighteenth century reveal a range and diversity of generic and modal features that cannot be reconciled with one single notion of the formal-​morphological properties of an abstractly conceived kind. In this respect, it is problematic to treat the ode as a “kind” which, according to Alastair Fowler, “is characterized by an external structure.”5 Fowler’s insistence on structure as constitutive of 3 

David F. Foxon, English Verse, 1701–​1750: A Catalogue of Separately Published Poems with Notes on Contemporary Collected Editions, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), vol. i, pp. 524–​9. 4  See David Fairer, “Modulation and Expression in the Lyric Ode, 1660–​1750,” in Marion Thain (ed.), The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013), pp. 92–​111. 5  Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), p. 60. Fowler insists that “the kinds, however elusive, objectively exist” (p. 73), but his theory of the genre is applicable only to the examples which, as a result of formalist historiography, dominant literary history has sought to single out as most representative of specific genres.

 

512   Sandro Jung genre is underpinned by the conception of literature as elite cultural production, a privileged imaginative discourse that informs traditional and current literary histories of eighteenth-​ century poetry. Versions of genres that cannot be categorized by the criteria of genre criticism established for monolithic works by “major” authors are (deliberately) absent from mainstream literary-​historical narratives. What other approaches, then, can usefully be deployed to understand as diverse a genre as the ode? A modal, as opposed to a formalist, approach accommodates a significantly larger number of odes, but even this approach is limited by the need to define parameters (such as the recurrence of titular terms such as “ode,” “Pindaric,” “Pindarique,” “monody,” or “hymn”) that facilitate the mapping of the ode in the long eighteenth century from a longitudinal, broad-​spectrum perspective. In other words, modes (rather than structures), while defining the heroic, public, contemplative, or encomiastic tonal remit of an ode, do not create a sufficiently cohesive category to define the ode as a kind. The identification of a thematic or subject-​specific repertoire and a particular occasion (the celebration of victory or marriage and the commemoration of individuals of renown) as constituent characteristics of the ode is equally problematic, especially once those odes published in the mid-​1740s and recruited by literary historians are related to those produced earlier and later in the century. While these odes had a significant afterlife in the works of late eighteenth-​century poets, they were the products of an engagement on the part of the university-​educated elite to imitate both classical models and to revisit seventeenth-​and early eighteenth-​century recastings of the ode such as Abraham Cowley’s and William Congreve’s. It appears that approaches, ranging from those tracing the classical impulses in odes and works exploring the mythopoeic character of some odes to readings of these poems as scripts of anxiety or the fragmentary, are insufficient to encompass the mass of odes produced in the century. A method that will facilitate a holistic account of ode production will combine the genre-​theoretical considerations of earlier work on the ode with a cultural materialism that takes into account the print culture which made possible the publication of these poems. The preoccupation of literary historians to construct diachronic narratives and invent canons that are punctuated by examples of particular high points in the genesis of a genre is counterproductive in that histories of the ode from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present aim to select specific examples to illustrate a “rise” of the lyric rather than a more complex, multilateral development of the ode in the eighteenth century. Literary historians, moreover, have detached the odes they frequently discuss from the larger literary, print, and publishing cultures in which they were produced and consumed. As a result, these histories have focused on odes that were published in formats that have been elevated to the status of literary-​cultural monuments. But printed collections of odes or authors’ collected works represent exclusive formats that, at the time they were printed, introduced odes into a literary marketplace and reading communities that were flooded with a far greater number of odes in alternative publication outlets. Compared to the odes of canonical poets of the 1740s and 1750s, the vast majority of odes not considered by literary historiography but recorded in the ESTC represents a more diverse range of subjects, strategies of imitation, authorial stances, and references to the generic history of the ode. These odes are undoubtedly related to, and derive from, alternative non-​elite writing cultures to which, among others, women significantly contributed. The proliferation of print media facilitated the appearance in printed form of increasing numbers of poems identified either through title markers or their

 

Ode   513 subjects as odes. In fact, the appearance of these poems on the page provided a layout and graphic code that often relied on readers’ visual literacy to identify the texts they were reading as related to other examples of odes. Gathered together in anthologies, odes would frequently appear next to other poetic forms; this proximity would encourage readings of different texts alongside each other, rather than as separate entities. At the same time, it promoted a recognition of the intermodal connections between different poems and the processes of generic modulation at work in individual poems as well. Alternatively, odes would be available as single-​sheet cheap print media such as birthday, marriage, or elegiac odes, while an even larger number of them would be printed in periodical publications such as the Gentleman’s Magazine and the Monthly Review, as well as more exclusively literary magazines such as Mark Akenside’s Museum (1746–​7) and such canon-​defining anthologies as Robert Dodsley’s Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1748).6 The last two examples especially illustrate the interrelationship of poems that were published in one format (such as an author’s collected works) at one time and that were subsequently issued in another. In Dodsley’s case, he owned the copyright to most of the poems he included in the Museum and the Collection; he not only gathered together a poetic canon he carefully selected on aesthetic grounds, but also selected poems for the inclusion of which he would not need to pay their authors. Dodsley’s miscellany is a record of the polite taste of the time and of a literary culture that, through poems such as odes, articulated self-​consciously constructed metatextual statements about the nature of poetry, genres, and the modes characteristic of various forms of poetic discourse (see c­ hapter 16, “Poems on Poetry”). While these poems were in no way the exclusive records of a dominant literary culture, the more durable format of the Collection and its central cultural status, even in the mid-​century, ensured that it was privileged by nineteenth-​century (and subsequent) historians of poetry over more ephemeral publications that included far greater numbers of odes.

Toward a New Historiography of the Ode The historiography of the eighteenth-​century ode has been plagued by scholars’ desire to relate the odes produced in the period to classical practice; at the same time, they have to acknowledge that the classical tradition was no longer the dominant force affecting genre formation, but that the print culture of the day and changing reading habits increasingly facilitated vernacular modes of appropriation. Early twentieth-​century scholars sought to identify formal models that helped them to elevate the odes they selected for discussion to the status they conceived of as representative in literary-​historical terms. Robert Shafer represents this tradition, identifying the “prototype” of the English ode in Pindar’s epinician odes, which he defines as “triumphal odes of victory.”7 Far from considering the odes of

6 

See James E. Tierney, “The Museum, the ‘Super-​Excellent Magazine,’” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 13, no. 3 (1973), 503–​15. 7  Robert Shafer, The English Ode to 1660: An Essay in Literary History (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1918), p. 8.

 

514   Sandro Jung Pindar as merely “encomiastic,”8 adulatory, or occasional pieces, he emphasized their “considerable gnomic element.”9 Through the introduction of myth, Pindar “was able to make his odes rise above the individual and above the shows of things into the realms of ideal truth and ideal beauty.”10 Acknowledging the central significance of myth in the ode, Kurt Schlüter, the most nuanced historian of the ode, explored the structural pattern of the classical prayer hymn—​the hymnos kleticos—​in a large number of odes by canonic authors, a pattern that was incorporated not only into odes but into poems such as sonnets as well.11 Ralph Cohen’s essay “The Return of the Ode” (2001) marks a significant moment in modern criticism of the ode, since he, for the first time, explicitly addressed the issue of the genre’s multifarious versions, as well as the often conflicting uses of the generic label “ode” in an age that was characterized by widespread experimentation with literary genres. In the course of the period, the large number of writers who had not received a university education but who nevertheless produced lyric poems, including odes, affected the genre’s redefinition and its shifting away from the classical models of Greek and Latin lyric. The result of the widespread popularization of the ode was a simplification of its ideational and formal make-​up and meaning and its serving as an umbrella term for a number of poetic genres, including songs, elegies, and sonnets. According to Cohen, it was a “collective designation, a genus which contained numerous species.”12 Cohen’s call for a more comprehensive mapping of the generic diversity of the ode echoes Margaret Anne Doody’s notion of the ode as “formless form.”13 The literary and generic practices of seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century writers of the ode were largely uninformed by any detailed knowledge of Pindar’s odes; instead, they relied heavily on translations, appropriations, and paraphrases capturing the “spirit” of Pindar’s poems. Few writers sought to historicize the ode as a form that represented high Pindaric lyric.14 English writers of the ode, ever since Abraham Cowley’s irregular paraphrases of Pindar’s compositions, assumed that the one characteristic feature of the ode was its “expatiating manner” and “spirit,”15 which were reflected in the poem’s irregularity, its counteraction of regular meter, and its abrupt transitions. William Congreve’s “Discourse on the Pindarique Ode” (1706), which he prefixed to A Pindarique Ode, Humbly Offer’d to the 8  William Fitzgerald, Agonistic Poetry: The Pindaric Mode in Pindar, Horace, Hölderlin, and the English Ode (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1987), p. 19. 9 Shafer, The English Ode, p. 20. 10 Ibid., p. 21. 11  Kurt Schlüter, “Shelley’s ‘To Night’ and the Prayer Hymn of Classical Antiquity,” Studies in Romanticism, 36, no. 2 (1997), 239–​60. See also Kurt Schlüter, “The Influence of the Greek Prayer Hymn on the English Renaissance Sonnet: Aspects of Genre in Relation to Form of Verse,” Anglia, 102, no. 3–​4 (1984), 323–​48. The pattern of the Greek prayer hymn was also incorporated in long poems which include apostrophizing passages invoking a mythological deity or patron. See Sandro Jung, “Epic, Ode, or Something New: The Blending of Genres in Thomson’s Spring,” Papers on Language and Literature, 43, no. 2 (2007), 146–​65. 12  Ralph Cohen, “The Return of the Ode,” in John Sitter (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-​Century Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), p. 208. 13  Margaret Anne Doody, The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), p. 250. 14  Penelope Wilson, “‘High Pindaricks upon Stilts’: A Case-​Study in the Eighteenth-​Century Classical Tradition,” in G. W. Clarke and J. C. Eade (eds.), Rediscovering Hellenism: The Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 21–​41. 15  The Monthly Review, 13 (Dec. 1755), p. 526.

 

Ode   515 Queen, on the Victorious Progress of Her Majesty’s Arms, under the Conduct of the Duke of Marlborough, deplored the misconception of writers of odes that the poem “is a Bundle of rambling incoherent Thoughts, express’d in a like parcel of irregular Stanzas, which also consist of such another Complication of disproportion’d, uncertain, and perplex’d Verse and Rhimes.”16 Congreve rejects Cowley’s free imitations of the “Sublimity of his [Pindar’s] Style and Sentiments,” calling his odes “Caricatura’s” of Pindar’s. He diagnoses contemporary writers’ practice correctly by identifying their imitation of the Pindaric manner, which became increasingly popularized in a range of cultural fields, including landscape gardening. He insists that Pindaric odes are regular and that, despite the frequent “Digressions” and the “sudden” “Transitions” in the poet’s compositions, there is always “some secret Connexion … [which] never fails to communicate itself to the Understanding of the Reader.” He discusses the compositional pattern of strophe, antistrophe, and episode, but admits that their originally ritual-​ceremonial function determining the movements of the chorus is obsolete. Congreve advocates a narrow definition of the ode’s subjects, stating that Pindaric odes are “Songs of Triumph, Victory or Success in the Grecian Games.” From the start of the century, the original occasion of Pindar’s odes was redefined to encompass any celebration of victory or triumph. The large number of political odes produced in the 1720s and 1730s addressed to Sir Robert Walpole are variations of the celebratory, public ode in that they repeatedly take the shape of a verse epistle articulating the writers’ requests for patronage. In The Olive: An Ode (1737), which was dedicated to Walpole and “Occasion’d by the auspicious Success of His Majesty’s Counsels, and His Majesty’s Most Happy Return,” the poet praises the sovereign, George II, as the promoter of peace. Unusual in its adoption of the Spenserian stanza, The Olive merely rehearses poetical commonplaces regarding Walpole’s worth, without improving on earlier encomiastic productions. On the whole, the odes dedicated to Walpole (or other politicians) are decidedly different from those addressed to the monarch in that, at least in Queen Anne’s reign still, poets attempted to breathe life into the mythic existence of a divine-​right queen by casting her in various symbolic and mytonymic roles. In this respect, Congreve’s Pindaric Ode is one of a number of poems written either to glorify Queen Anne or to celebrate her reign more generally, as Samuel Cobb does in The Female Reign: An Ode (1709), in which he casts Anne as “British heroine” willing to protect those under threat: “To Thee afflicted Empires fly for Aid | Where e’er Tyrannic Standards are display’d.”17 Congreve’s Pindarique Ode, Humbly Offer’d to the Queen opens with an invocation to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, to choose and inspire a poet to sing “Of Anna’s Name” and the liberty she has secured for her country: Rise, Fair Augusta, lift thy Head, With Golden Tow’rs thy Front adorn; Come forth, as come from Tithon’s Bed With cheerful Ray the ruddy Morn. Thy lovely Form, and fresh reviving State, In Crystal Flood of Thames survey; Then bless thy better Fate, Bless ANNA’s most Auspicious Sway.

16  William Congreve, A Pindarique Ode, Humbly Offer’d to the Queen, on the Victorious Progress of Her Majesty’s Arms, under the Conduct of the Duke of Marlborough (London, 1706), p. 1. 17  Samuel Cobb, The Female Reign: An Ode (London, 1709), p. 5, lines 82, 84.

 

516   Sandro Jung While distant Realms and neighb’ring Lands, Arm’d Troops and hostile Bands On ev’ry Side molest, Thy happier Clime is Free, Fair Capital of Liberty! And Plenty knows, and Days of Halcyon Rest.18

While a heroic image was fashioned for Anne in annual birthday odes and a range of victory poems, the apotheosis of her image as beloved queen and last Stuart monarch is used repeatedly in funeral odes. In A Pindaric Ode upon the Death of Her Late Majesty Queen Anne, of Blessed Memory (1714), the speaker experiences a dream vision in which he witnesses the destruction of “a Noble Oak,” the “Chief Protector of the Wood.” A symbolic representation of the death of Anne, the falling of the oak has a devastating effect on the landscape and its pastoral communities (as well as, by extension, the country). Recalling his dream, the speaker captures the violent destruction of the tree: There as I supinely lay, I saw th’ impet’ous Hurricanes contend, With all the Rage the Winds could send, And circling Eddies round me play. Alas! at length it fell. But oh! how great! Strain’d by the Torrent of resistless Fate, Its lofty Top was levell’d with the Ground, And agonizing Nature sicken’d at the Wound.19

The poet’s dramatic description of the falling of the oak and the agony that Nature experiences as a result are elevated from their natural-​descriptive origin and related to the genuine sense of horror that the queen’s death brought to her subjects. Both as real body natural and the symbolic body politic of the British the monarch had died. Many of the patriotic odes celebrating Queen Anne served as models for the fashioning of notions of Britishness and the nation in subsequent decades. Published in the Observator on December 26, 1705, “A Hymn to Peace” declares Anne to be a “peaceful goddess | She governs in our hemisphere,” an image that in later odes is complicated by recasting her as her country’s guardian and as the mother of the British people. The patriotic tone of this poem emulates productions commemorating military successes such as Anglia Triumphans: A Pindaric Ode on His Grace the Duke of Marlborough (1703) or the better known Ocean: An Ode (1728) by Edward Young, who also penned the prefixed “A Discourse on the Ode.” Whereas odes commemorating military action centrally connected the military heroes with their sovereign, a more problematic relationship with the court is evinced in patriotic Scottish odes, which abound around the time of the Act of Union and again in the mid-​ 1730s, when Jacobite or otherwise nationalist sympathies are strongly felt in the poetry published in Edinburgh. In The Faithful Few: An Ode, Inscribed to All Lovers of Their Country (Edinburgh, 1735) the author invokes Urania to “Select” “The Faithful Few, to grace the deathless Song”: “Thou raisest Heroes to their native Heav’n, | And point’st the Objects of

18 Congreve, A Pindarique Ode, pp. 4–​5, lines 42–​55.

19  A Pindaric Ode upon the Death of Her Late Majesty Queen Anne, of Blessed Memory (London, 1714), p. 4, lines 7, 8, 13–​20.

 

Ode   517 eternal Praise.” The ode features a list of eminent Scottish politicians and links them with a heroic history of independence that is being threatened by England. By contrast, institutionalized poems such as those produced by the poet laureate offered constant praise of the monarch, without recording the frictions between England and Scotland that are felt (largely in Scottish poetry) from the beginning of the century until the mid-​1740s. The laureate’s annual sixpenny birthday ode pamphlets expressed an uncompromising allegiance to the king. In a clear political statement, Colley Cibber’s Ode for His Majesty’s Birth-​day (1731) reads the reign of the Hanoverians as one of continuity, rather than a usurping of the British throne: “From Charles restor’d, short was our Term of Bliss, | But George from George entails our Happiness.”20 Even though the Hanoverians no longer justified their reign through divine right, the rhetoric of sublimity that characterizes their birthday and funeral odes still fashions them as proto-​divine beings, a personification process that becomes standardized and formulaic in the mid-​century.

The Spiritual Function In offering images of British monarchs as proto-​divine rulers, writers of odes capitalized on the association of the ode with the sublime. According to one critic of the period, “The Manner seems to be its most essential characteristic, which of necessity must be extremely bold and sublime, or poetically excursive, where the subject cannot justly admit of sublimity.”21 John Dennis and Sir Richard Blackmore both considered the Pindaric ode as a sacred poem and the ideal means to inculcate morality and virtue by appealing to the passions of men. Blackmore’s combination of “all the Force of Imagination” with “the greater Strength of Reason”22 echoes Dennis’s insistence that sacred poetry be based on rationally revealed rather than imaginatively conjured religion. In The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704) Dennis characterizes “Enthusiastick Passions” as most appropriate for the greater ode, as the ode is a poem capable of conveying sublime rapture. These passions “in Poetry are truly admirable, when the greater and more violent they are, the more they show the largeness of Soul, and greatness of Capacity of the Writer.”23 Since odes frequently engage in establishing relationships between human supplicating speakers and divinities, they function as media of the intercourse between the human and the divine and the emotions that this rapport with the religious-​divine produces. Blackmore holds that it is required that those poetical Productions that are intended to furnish Ideas of Religion and Vertue, and inspire the Heart with devout and generous Passions, ought above others to be accompanied with all the Force of Imagination, the greater Strength of Reason, and the brightest Ornaments of poetical Eloquence, that the distemper’d Fancies of the People may be so gratified, as to receive the Impression of the solid and instructive Sentiments.24

20 

Colley Cibber, An Ode for His Majesty’s Birth-​day, October 30, 1731 (London, 1731), p. 7, lines 32–​3. The Monthly Review, 13 (Dec. 1755), p. 434. 22  Sir Richard Blackmore, A Collection of Poems on Various Subjects (London, 1718), p. xi. 23  John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (London, 1704), pp. 20–​1. 24 Blackmore, A Collection of Poems on Various Subjects, p. xi. 21 

 

518   Sandro Jung Dennis does not deal with the formal requirements of the greater ode but associates it with sacred poetry of religious myth. Although the sublime in eighteenth-​century discussions of the ode is repeatedly mentioned as a central characteristic, by the mid-​century this feature becomes a convention which lacks the spiritual function that Dennis assigns to it. By that time, it has become a style rather than a cathartic expression of religious enthusiasm. To Dennis, the ode is a specifically Christian genre; he focuses on the need to re-​sacralize it and remove profane elements such as its classical machinery and polytheism. Dennis’s stance on the religious is central to understanding the sacred ode. Deborah:  A  Sacred Ode (1704), Moses Browne’s Throne of Justice:  A  Pindaric Ode (1721), John Pomfret’s “Dies Novissima; or, The Last Epiphany: A Pindaric Ode, on Christ’s Second Appearance, to Judge the World” (1731), Thomas Newcomb’s “Consummation:  A  Sacred Ode” (1752), John Brown’s “Cure of Saul:  A  Sacred Ode” (1767), and William Willis’s “Sacrifice: A Sacred Ode” (1779) are important examples of the genre, frequently offering biblical paraphrases of the kind that would grow out of rhetorical exercises undertaken by students at the universities. They negotiated the classical heritage and the Christian monotheistic focus that Dennis introduced in his generic redefinition of the ode. At the same time, poets variously imitated Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (1629), and Samuel Wright’s Hymn to the Incarnation: A Pindaric Poem on Our Saviour’s Nativity (1705) was one of the first that was submitted as a prize poem. Unlike Dennis, Robert Lowth interprets the ode less in terms of the Christian revelation of God than as a sublime song of praise, emphasizing its rapturous and encomiastic nature. It is, according to Lowth, “an effusion of praise to … [the] great Creator,” characterized by “a suitable energy and exaltation.”25 The ode focuses on “the celebration of … religious Mysteries.”26 To Lowth, the ode is the oldest lyric genre, and “the origin of the ode may be traced into that of poetry itself, and appears to be coeval with the commencement of religion, or more properly the creation of man.”27 While Dennis understands the ode in individualistic terms, as a medium through which the speaker experiences the revelation of the divine, thereby participating in an unmediated sublime experience, Lowth emphasizes the ritualistic function of the ode as an encomiastic mode, celebrating—​through the praise of the creator—​the creation, including man.

New Contexts The eighteenth-​century historiography of the ode is characterized by the large number of conflicting views of the genre but also by the almost continuous complaint in the first sixty years of the century, at least, that the ode has been degraded. In a farce entitled The Modern Poetasters; or, Directors No Conjurers (1721), Goose, a scribbling character, asks Smart: “Can you peruse any Performance of mine, where I don’t strike out with a surprizing Strength of Poetical Fury?—​And in my Odes, my Flights are very Extraordinary.”28 The “Flights” of 25 

Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, 2 vols. (London, 1787), vol. ii, p. 190. 27  Ibid., p. 192. Ibid., pp. 191, 192. 28  Isaac Bickerstaff Jun., The Modern Poetasters; or, Directors No Conjurers: A Farce: On the Famous Ode Writers, Satyrists, Panegyrists, &c. of the Present Times (London, 1721), p. 9. 26 

 

Ode   519 Goose’s odes are the abrupt transitions of Cowley and the vehement manner of Dennis. They are features relating to the character of the ode, rather than its form, and to eighteenth-​ century readers embodied the simplification of a genre that should have represented divine truth and religious sublimity. Fifty years later, Thomas Warton published his “Ode to Horror:  In the Allegoric Descriptive, Alliterative, Epithetical, Fantastic, Hyperbolical, and Diabolical Style” in The Student,29 satirizing the poetic practice of his contemporaries, including those whose odes today enjoy canonic status. In the mid-​1740s three poets—​Mark Akenside, William Collins, and Joseph Warton—​ published collections of odes within two years of one another. Their volumes represent transitional interventions in the formation of the descriptive-​allegoric ode, a type of ode that centrally revolves around a fiction featuring a personified abstraction. Published in 1745, Akenside’s Odes on Several Subjects was the earliest collection. A fourth volume of poetry, which also included a number of odes, deserves mention: Joseph Warton and his brother, Thomas, edited their late father’s poems for publication and contributed original lyric poems—​their authorship of which, however, they did not acknowledge. A meeting ground of early eighteenth-​ century poetic practice and new trends in the writing of odes that Joseph Warton and William Collins were fostering at the time, Poems on Several Occasions (1748) features a range of poems by Joseph. In “Retirement: An Ode” the poet sings of “Nature’s various Charms,” while in “Ode, Written in a Grotto near Farnham in Surry, Call’d Ludlow’s Cave” the poet requests from the deity to share the “deep Retreat,” “Shelter’d from the sultry Day,” with her. Warton’s poetry promotes the imaginative exploration of a proto-​mythic world made up of allegorical deities that inhabit idealized landscapes in which a prelapsarian vision can be sustained. Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1746) is a monument in the history of the eighteenth-​century ode. The poet successfully used the conventions of the Greek prayer hymn and adapted the ode to new (discursive, aesthetic, and political) contexts. The “descriptive” of the title of his collection refers to a particular mode of perception that encouraged an associative and synaesthetic poetics of “the silent eye.”30 The odes had been conceived as part of a planned joint venture that Collins and his Winchester College friend, Joseph Warton, wanted to undertake. In the event, however, Warton published his less formally varied odes separately as Odes on Various Subjects (1746). Collins’s “Ode on the Poetical Character,” “Ode to Simplicity,” and “Ode to Evening” were to have a lasting influence on the development of verse in the second half of the century, were frequently reprinted, and Collins was regularly referenced in odes of later writers as the originator of a new kind of lyric. His “Ode to Evening” is a prime example of the atmospheric poem in which the speaker is taken to an evening scene in which he has to apprehend both his surrounds and the divinity with all his senses. Collins’s speaker apostrophizes Eve, “the calm Vot’ress,” to lead him where some sheety Lake Cheers the lone Heath, or some time-​hallow’d Pile, Or up-​land Fallow grey Reflect it’s last cool Gleam.31 29 

The Student; or, The Oxford and Cambridge Monthly Miscellany, 2 (1751), 313–​15. See Sandro Jung, “William Collins’s Odes, Description, and the ‘Silent Eye,’” Revue de la Société d’Etudes anglo-​américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 64 (2007), 287–​306. 31  William Collins, The Works of William Collins, ed. Richard Wendorf and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 45. 30 

 

520   Sandro Jung The “Gleam” the poet wants to witness is the last reminder of his earthly existence which, once he is enveloped by the evening setting, is suspended. Collins’s odes create mythopoeic realms in which the speakers’ imagined encounters with divinities of inspiration (such as Fancy, Eve, or Simplicity) are being performed. They feature an interconnected genealogy of abstractions and facilitate Collins’s vision of the creative poet.32 Fancy, Simplicity, Health, Music, and Nature provide stimuli to the poet’s imagination, which in their turn enable him to experience the terrifying powers of the sublime depicted in “Ode to Fear.” The speaker seeks to establish close, petitioning relationships with Fancy and Eve, who are capable of admitting him to realms of new experience such as Milton’s “fancied glades” or the allegorical train of followers of Eve who, by the end of the ode, has transformed from divinity to longed-​for lover. Collins invents myths and reuses earlier literary sources such as the Florimel episode in The Faerie Queene to devise his own myth of poetic creation by means of a “cest of amplest power,” based on the grace-​bestowing cestus of Venus. An ode that Collins did not publish in his lifetime was his verse epistle to the “Scottish Shakespeare,” John Home. The “Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland” (c.1749) domesticates the mythopoeia of classical odes and explores the lore of Scotland, including folk beliefs in such legendary creatures as the kelpie. Scotland, to Collins, represents a primitive culture that is alive, rather than reconstructed, and that inspired such supernatural beings as the “weird sisters” in Macbeth. For Collins, the ode is a uniquely suitable kind to facilitate historical recovery and a celebratory medium bridging past poetic practices and those of the present. Thomas Gray’s odes likewise represent the reshaping of the genre into a historical medium of cultural memory. His poems trace both developments in the rise of letters in Europe and the ways in which bardic selfhood underpinned national identity in Wales. Gray’s “Progress of Poesy” (1757) is probably the most self-​conscious attempt at embedding the genre of the ode within a tradition of high literary achievement. “The Bard”—​with its opening imprecation “Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!”—​serves as an example of the dramatic potential of odes, a fact that was utilized by the blind Welsh harp player John Parry who performed at Cambridge. William Mason recalled that Parry “scratched out such ravishing blind harmony, such tunes of a thousand years old, with names enough to choke you, as have set all this learned body a-​ dancing, and inspired them with due reverence for Odikle.”33 Subsequently, in the 1780s and 1790s, odes frequently featured in the repertories of elocutionists and public recitalists of poetry. The modal connectedness of works such as Gray’s “Bard,” the odes that were part of Mason’s drama Caractacus (1759), and the pseudo-​epic productions of James Macpherson, is evident. But it also illustrates that oral forms such as ballads, if embedded within an heroic remit, could be contextualized as odes, as John Pinkerton does in his essays on ancient Scottish song. Close friend of Gray, Mason had published his Odes, a volume generically strongly influenced by both Collins and Gray, in 1756. In Mason’s ode “To Memory,” the “Mother of Wisdom” invokes the shade of Milton and recalls his relationship with Memory and the Muse, while “To Melancholy” also focuses on another imagined encounter with a 32  Ricardo Quintana, “The Scheme of Collins’s Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects,” in Carroll Camden (ed.), Restoration and Eighteenth-​Century Literature: Essays in Honor of Alan Dugald McKillop (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 371–​80. 33  The Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), vol. ii, p. 502.

 

Ode   521 great poet in an environment where he can indulge in melancholy musings and be “Wrapt in some strain of pensive Gray.”34 Rather than exploring national or bardic history, Mason uses his odes for the celebration of friendship, especially Gray’s. While odes in the 1740s and 1750s demonstrate the reorientation of the genre to promote a poetry of vision, cultural memory, and Britishness, this view obscures the variety of odes that had been published in anthologies by those decades, for by the mid-​1740s anthologies and periodical publications such as The Museum illustrated the great range of odes and their numerous variations. Miscellanies and writers’ collected works had increasingly, from the beginning of the century, comprised odes. Compiled by Richard Savage, Miscellaneous Poems by Several Hands (1726), a volume of coterie verse, contained, among others, the Pindaric version of “Grongar Hill,” Aaron Hill’s ode “The Vision,” and “A Winter’s Day” by Mallet. In 1733, The Bee printed numerous odes, including “Sir Isaac Newton’s Apotheosis: A Pindarick Ode.”35 And two years later Hildebrand Jacob included ten poems entitled “ode,” three “hymns,” and a number of Horatian productions in his Works (1735); in his “Ode to Philomel” he deploys the elegiac-​pastoral to make his speaker complain of lovesickness and state his resolution to withdraw from the world. Few collections of poems published between 1710 and 1780 do not feature productions that are either entitled “ode” or relate to one of its cognates or that invoke the genre by association with the generic repertoire of the rhetorical sublime.

Elegiac Odes and Odes of Retirement Taking Dodsley’s four-​volume Collection as an example, it becomes clear how popular the genre of the ode had become by the mid-​century. The volumes reprinted odes by well-​known poets but also productions by lesser-​known writers such as, among others, Samuel Merrick, Francis Fawkes, Mr. Marriott of Trinity College Cambridge, and Robert Nugent.36 Very few of the odes included in the Collection subscribe to the generic tripartite patterns that previous scholars of the Pindaric ode have examined. Many follow the isometrical structure of the Horatian model, while loosely invoking the retirement topos. A cursory search of the volumes of Dodsley’s Collection alone will turn up odes in the form of epistles such as “An Ode to the People of Great-​Britain: In Imitation of the Sixth Ode of the Third Book of Horace: Written in 1746,” poems of occasion (other than those celebrating events of national importance) such as William Whitehead’s “Ode to a Gentleman, on His Pitching His Tent in His Garden” or a funeral ode such as William Mason’s “Musæus: A Monody to the Memory of Mr. Pope, in Imitation of Milton’s Lycidas.” In addition to mythopoeic subjects related to the positioning of aspiring poets within an economy of the imagination, a large number of odes deploy the elegiac and pastoral modes, as William Shenstone does in his ode, “Rural Elegance,” which he dedicated to Frances, Duchess of Somerset. The mixture of pastoral with 34 

William Mason, Odes by Mr. Mason (Cambridge, 1756), p. 17, line 54. Eustace Budgell (ed.), The Bee; or, Universal Weekly Pamphlet, 9 vols. (London, 1733), vol. iv, p. 343. 36  Michael Suarez, “Trafficking in the Muse: Dodsley’s Collection of Poems and the Question of Canon,” in Alvaro Ribeiro, S.J. and James G. Basker (eds.), Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-​Century Canon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 297–313. 35 

 

522   Sandro Jung the elegiac is also central to Collins’s Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson (1748), a poem that was imitated by Shenstone, Burns, and Wordsworth, although none of these poets chose to retain the generic title that Collins had adopted. Collins’s ode offers an image of Thomson as “Druid,” as bardic singer, Nature’s poet, and author of The Seasons. Collins’s elegiac ode introduces death conventionally in that Thomson’s demise has resulted in a barrenness that prevents the creative imagination from establishing a Paradisal view of the kind Collins evoked in “Ode on the Poetical Character.” In his ode to Thomson, he sees “the fairy valleys fade; | Dun night has veiled the solemn view!” He bids a fond farewell to the “dear parted shade” of a close friend but also invokes him as “Meek nature’s child,” thereby emphasizing Thomson’s otherworldliness as sacerdos musarum. Other elegiac odes, while published and anthologized in the mid-​century, rework earlier examples of the genre that had been published in England and Scotland in large numbers in the first two decades of the century. The most celebrated mid-​century elegiac ode is Lord George Lyttelton’s: in “To the Memory of a Lady lately Deceased: A Monody” (1747), Lyttelton laments his wife, Lucy, retiring to “the gloom of this embow’ring shade | This lone retreat, for tender sorrow made” where he will “pour forth all my stores of grief.”37 Lyttelton’s Miltonic irregular ode captures the natural environment in a way other early eighteenth-​ century writers, including Joseph Mitchell and David Mallet, did in their pastoral-​elegiac odes. Like Robert Shiels’s Musidorus (1748), the poet’s elegy on Thomson, Mason’s Musæus (which had been published as a pamphlet in 1747) does not mark as personal a record as Lyttelton’s, but it demonstrates the tonal and lyric possibilities of the elegiac ode at a time when even a poet like Pope, the author of Pastorals, could be commemorated in an “ivy chaplet,” which Mason hopes will be “worthy of the sacred Bard” and “equal to the shepherd’s love.”38 Elegiac odes are often closely related to the ethical project of ode writers, for they are frequently concerned with contributing to the ethical education of readers. Collins’s odes thus revitalize not only classical literature but a classical ethos, when in “Ode to Simplicity” Collins recommends simplicity as a means to health and societal well-​being.39 Pastoral-​elegiac odes remove the reader from the urban culture of the public, political odes to a realm of the private and regularly affect a metaphorical fusion between speaking subject and deity invoked. Concerned with external nature, often romanticized and internalized, but also with states of mind, retirement odes routinely feature trains of personifications associated with solitude. As Margaret Koehler has noted, in “To Solitude” Joseph Warton “summons an internal state of mind by imagining an unreal scene, detached from distinct time” and, above all, detached from the public occasion that inspired the production of patriotic, funeral, or dedicatory odes.40 Thomson’s “Hymn to Solitude,” written and revised at the same time as “Grongar Hill,” between 1725 and 1726, reflects the shaping of the genre as a platform for imaginative encounters between the human and the otherworldly. The poet dramatizes the intimate encounter between the speaker and the goddess Solitude, the “Companion of the wise and good.” Thomson’s Solitude, in its chameleon-​like and shape-​shifting character (“A thousand shapes you wear with ease, | And still in every shape 37 

George Lyttelton, Poems (Glasgow, 1775), p. 72, lines 5–​6, 8. William Mason, Musæus: A Monody to the Memory of Mr. Pope (London, 1747), p. 21, lines 98, 99, 100. 39  Sandro Jung, “William Collins and Haplotes,” Studies in Philology, 107, no. 3 (2010), 416–​28. 40  Margaret Koehler, “The Ode,” in Christine Garrard (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth-​Century Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 386. 38 

 

Ode   523 you please”), stands paradigmatically for a male speaker’s erotic fantasy of entering into a relationship with a potently inspiring female figure. In the 1725 variant of Thomson’s “Hymn” the poet wishes to imbibe the essence of Solitude: O how I love with you to walk! And listen to your silent talk Which innocence and truth imparts And melts the most obdurate hearts. …………………………………….. O let me peirce your secret cell! And in your deep recesses dwell Forever from the world retir’d Forever with your raptures fir’d.41

The “Hymn” concludes with the speaker’s desire to be admitted to the privacy of Solitude’s “secret cell” to experience the proto-​sexual power of firing “raptures.” At the same time, the goddess’s ability to assume numerous guises and personalities, emanations of an all-​ encompassing original mother, enables her to represent the creative principle that Dyer’s Fancy, “darting notice through the eye | Forming thought and feasting sense,”42 embodies. Solitude, like Fancy, possesses a plastic power of the imagination the effect of which on the retired speaker is health-​giving and life-​affirming, while at the same time encouraging internalization of the goddess’s divinity and spirituality. In “Grongar Hill” the speaker’s imperative “come,” a typical verb implying the need for the deity’s physical or imagined presence in the prayer hymn, invites Fancy to inspire the poet. In “original liturgical usage the speaker of the classical hymn thought the deity’s presence to be necessary for the deity to be able to put his [or her] powers into effect and grant the plea that occasioned a particular prayer.”43 In the course of the invocation, the physical environment of the hill is transformed into a locus resembling Mount Ida, the classical seat of the muses. While Pope’s early “Ode to Solitude” (1708) did little more than revisit the Horatian beatus ille topos, later writers of odes frequently seek solitude, as it facilitates encounters with the deities their speakers invoke or wish to experience. Variously apostrophized as “pensive virgin,” “blest retreat,” and “silent Solitude,” the goddess of Solitude is characterized as a mythic figure capable of affecting the welfare of mankind. Excerpts from two anonymously published odes will illustrate the various functions that poets assigned to Solitude: Fair woodland nymph! when all is still, Thou climbs [sic] the high adjacent hill, And oft, by Thames’s rushy side, Delights [sic] to hear the smooth wave glide; Sister of peace and piety, Sweet nun, I long to visit thee.44 41  A. D. McKillop (ed.), James Thomson (1700–​1748): Letters and Documents (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1958), pp. 10–​11. 42  John Dyer, “Grongar Hill,” ed. Richard C. Boys (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1941). For a discussion of the different versions of “Grongar Hill,” see Garland Greever, “The Two Versions of Grongar Hill,” JEGP, 16 (1917), 274–​81. 43  Schlüter, “Shelley’s ‘To Night,’ ” p. 243. 44  “Ode to Solitude,” in The Poetical Calendar: Containing a Collection of Scarce and Valuable Pieces of Poetry: With Variety of Originals and Translations, by the Most Eminent Hands: Intended as a Supplement

 

524   Sandro Jung To thee along the lonely vale Afflicted Virtue pours her grief, And, like the mournful nightingale, Finds some relief.45

Not only does Solitude serve as therapeutic agent to “Afflicted Virtue” and those who retire to seek her, but in her guise as “Sweet nun” she has the ability of sharing religious faith and prayer, as well as dispensing the healing balm of sweetness to those in need of it. Solitude pervades the environment and generates an atmosphere in which reflection (usually on the vanity of urban existence) can occur. A turn to Solitude entails a withdrawal from the realm of pride and a move to that of contentment: While Reason is my faithful guide, And Nature fair my plan: For calm Content I’ll barter Pride, And strive not Heav’n to scan.46

Admission to the realm of Solitude entails a novel access to life force. Those entering the grottoes and groves of solitude-​loving deities are invited to a communion with the spiritual, an experience of the purity of faith and imagination in the mental landscape of Joseph Warton’s “Retirement: An Ode”: Nymphs of the Groves, in green array’d, Conduct me to your thickest Shade, Deep in the Bosom of the Vale, Where haunts the lonesome Nightingale; Where Contemplation, Maid divine, Leans against some aged Pine, Wrapt in stedfast Thought profound, Her Eyes fixt stedfast on the Ground.47

The Musical Ode The realms of retirement are often cast as pastoral settings of harmony and music. In fact, music is seen as a pre-​rational language of inspiration that, through its sublimity, facilitates absorption of and by the deity. Music played a more centrally ceremonial role in public odes, the numerous birthday and New Year’s odes by the poet laureate (following John Dryden’s appointment to the office in 1670, even though it was Shadwell who started producing birthday and New Year’s odes), and the odes on the patron saint of music, St. Cecilia, which were occasionally accompanied by musical scores. Pope’s “Ode for Music to Mr. Dodsley’s Collection: Written and Selected by Francis Fawkes, M.A. and William Woty, 12 vols. (London, 1763), vol. viii, p. 19, lines 21–​6. 45  Samuel Rogers, “Ode to Solitude,” in Poems on Several Occasions, 2 vols. (London, 1764), vol. i, p. 29, lines 9–​12. 46  “Solitude: An Ode,” in The Laurel-​Wreath: Being a Collection of Original Miscellaneous Poems, on Subjects Moral, Comic, and Divine, 2 vols. (London, 1766), vol. i, p. 89, lines 25–​8. 47  Thomas Warton, Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1748), p. 15, lines 25–​32.

 

Ode   525 on St. Cecilia’s Day” (1708) provided a model that was widely imitated. Mason’s “Ode Performed in the Senate-​House at Cambridge July 1, 1749, at the Installation of His Grace Thomas Holles Duke of Newcastle Chancellor of the University” appropriates the ode to institutional use. It was set to music by William Boyce. In music odes, poets repeatedly introduced the ode as the product of an instrument or as the instrument itself. Likewise, in Polymnia; or, The Charms of Musick (1733), the speaker dramatized his appeal to the instrument to produce divinely inspired music: “Awake! Awake! My Silent, Sleeping Lyre, | Shake into trembling Voice, thy vocal Strings.” Some music odes were ambitious compositions produced for instrumental and vocal performance. The ten-​page pamphlet, The Power of Musick. An Ode for St. Caecilia’s Day (1720), exemplifies in what way the physical appearance of a music ode could differ from the print format of an ode published in the periodical press or a miscellaneous collection of verse. It was dedicated to the Marquis of Carmarthen and featured on its title page an ornately executed copper-​engraved vignette containing a cartouche with the poet’s name and which is flanked by St. Cecilia and Apollo. Like other music odes, it traces the progress of Music, in this case following the rise of tragic-​elegiac music from Orpheus’s lamenting Eurydice’s death to the songs of Bacchus and later love songs, while centrally examining the role that St. Cecilia had in shaping music: Tune ev’ry String, your Voices raise, Joy dwell on each melodious Tongue, Of bright Caecilia be your Song, In smoothest Lines, in softest Lays: Look down, harmonious Saint, whilst we Do celebrate thy Art and Thee.

Some of these music odes developed into ambitious oratoria, as did Collins’s ode “The Passions,” which was set to music by several composers, notably Thomas Arne and John Calcott.

Improper Uses From the mid-​century and especially once reviewers in review journals can directly engage with published ode, numerous polemics regarding the improper use of the ode are launched. In the preface to An Ode on Beauty (1749), Thomas Cooke argued that the “classical Purity” of Pindar’s odes should not only be emulated by imitating Pindaric “manner”; rather, by introducing Akenside’s Odes, the first dedicated collection of odes in the period, as an excellent example of Pindaric practice, he insists that any poet desiring to write odes must immerse himself in the works of his classical forebears, the structure of their compositions, and the recitative or oratorical features of the prayer hymn. The kind of “licentiousness in verse”48 that is frequently criticized in imitations of the manner of the Pindaric ode still, in 1782, induces John Pinkerton to declare in the advertisement to his odes that, “Ever since the days of Cowley, irregular Odes have had more pretensions to the irregularity of chaos than 48 

The Monthly Review, 12 (Nov. 1754), p. 385.

 

526   Sandro Jung to that of nature.”49 To Pinkerton, this kind of irregular Pindaric ode represents “a badge of indignity”50 in that it does not “observe … any settled respondence or order in the rhymes.”51 It is these criticisms that are applied to Michael Wodhull’s Ode to the Muses (1760). The “unequal and arbitrary length [of the stanza], the metre and rhyme being also irregular, in the manner of those improperly called Pindaric”52 are subjects of complaint that repeatedly occur in reviews of odes published in the Monthly Review and other review journals. While the insistence on metrical harmony is central to most criticism of the eighteenth-​century ode, the triadic structure is mentioned by some, but is usually not considered as significant and genre-​defining as issues of regularity or the sublime manner of Pindar. Ironically, the reviewer of Wodhull’s Ode defines the thematic sequences of invocation and pars epica without realizing that it is this pattern that structurally relates the ode to the Greek prayer hymn.53 The early emphasis on the sublime manner of the ode and the popularization of the ideas and subjects, rather than the formal structure characteristic of the genre, from the early eighteenth century facilitated intergeneric modulation and mixture; ode writers adopted elegiac elements into the modal repertoire of their poems which frequently included religious paraphrases or commemorative verse productions such as (illustrated) broadside funeral elegies.54 The numerous elegies commemorating the death of Queen Anne and the end of the Stuart dynasty, for instance, assume the typographical layout (at times using a funeral framing device) that since the early seventeenth century had been used for the printing of odes. Also, the single-​sheet broadside format would have ensured far greater dissemination than a more expensive gathering of elegiac poetry. Despite the prominence of Collins’s mythopoeic odes, and the significant influence they exerted on poets (such as John Ogilvie who, in the late 1760s, authored odes to Melancholy; the Genius of Shakespeare; Time; Sleep; Evening, and Innocence) deploying allegorical personification within the setting of the prayer hymn to rework their knowledge of classical literature and to fashion their own realms of inspiration, the second half of the century is largely characterized by a departure from the allegorical ode. However, poets such as Mary Robinson revive it in their own, gendered versions of Hellenism. With his Odes Descriptive and Allegorical (1761) Richard Shepherd clearly aligned himself with the title of Collins’s volume, but in the preface he indicated his expansion of the subject range of the ode by focusing on “moral and sentimental topics.”55 Others, including Gray in “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes,” created further generic experiments by appropriating the genre to comic purposes. Compared to the odes generally studied by author-​centered scholars, the majority of ode writers who contributed their poems to miscellaneous, occasional, and periodical publications are generally neglected, specifically because they were largely published anonymously. In order to comprehend the range and variety of odes, as well as the ways in which the genre morphed during the eighteenth century, however, it is essential to undertake quantitative research and relate those hitherto “obscured” poems to those that are enshrined in the canon of eighteenth-​century poetry.

49 

John Pinkerton, Two Dithyrambic Odes: I. On Enthusiasm, II. To Laughter (London, 1782), n.p. The Monthly Review, 12 (Nov. 1754), p. 385. 52  The Monthly Review, 13 (Dec. 1755), p. 525.    53 Ibid. 54  Sandro Jung, “Early Eighteenth-​Century Scottish Funeral Elegies, Memorialization, and the Ephemeral,” Publishing History, 70 (2011), 33–​62. 55  The Monthly Review, 13 (April 1755), p. 139. 50 Pinkerton, Two Dithyrambic Odes, n.p.   51 

 

Ode   527

References Bloom, Harold, “From Topos to Trope, from Sensibility to Romanticism:  Collins’s ‘Ode to Fear,’ ” in Ralph Cohen (ed.), Studies in Eighteenth-​Century British Art and Aesthetics (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985), pp. 182–​203. Fry, Paul H., The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980). Jung, Sandro, The Fragmentary Poetic: Eighteenth-​Century Uses of an Experimental Mode (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh Univ. Press, 2009). Pittock, Murray G. H., “Robert Fergusson and the Romantic Ode,” British Journal for Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 28, no. 1 (2005), 55–​66. Schlüter, Kurt, Die englische Ode: Studien zu ihrer Entwicklung unter dem Einfluss der antiken Hymne (Bonn: Bouvier, 1964). Shafer, Robert, The English Ode to 1660: An Essay in Literary History (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1918). Shuster, George N., The English Ode from Milton to Keats (New  York:  Columbia Univ. Press, 1940). Teich, Nathaniel, “The Ode in English Literary History: Transformations from the Mid-​ Eighteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century,” Papers on Language and Literature, 21, no. 1 (1985), 88–​108.

 

Chapter 31

Eleg y James D. Garrison The extraordinary popularity of Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard renders every other elegy published between the time of Milton and Shelley at least relatively obscure. Samuel Johnson’s “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet,” for example, is not even mentioned in the companion volume to this one, The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, nor does it figure in Esther Schor’s influential book Bearing the Dead. It is relegated to a footnote in Peter M. Sacks’s English Elegy, and discussed only briefly in W. David Shaw’s Elegy and Paradox. Shaw finds the poem “conventional” for its own time and “too patterned and sententious to be trusted” by modern readers.1 Perhaps accordingly, it is not included in Sandra M. Gilbert’s Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies, where (apart from brief selections by John Gay and William Collins) the eighteenth century is represented exclusively by Thomas Gray.2 The absence of Johnson’s poem from current discussions of elegy suggests the extent to which the prevailing narrative, which runs from Lycidas to Adonais, usually stopping on the way only to visit Gray’s churchyard, achieves its almost ruthless efficiency by excluding poems that might serve to complicate and enrich understanding of the genre. My intention here is therefore to offer a more historically inclusive account, taking the popularity of Gray and the authority of Johnson as recurring points of reference. A survey of the genre from the predominantly couplet form of elegy in the first half of the period to the stanzaic elegies of the second half will reveal that both forms struggle to resist the almost gravitational pull of irony (see ­chapter 39, “Irony”), which would draw elegy toward burlesque, parody, and satire. The poems that most successfully resist such devolution are those that self-​reflexively contemplate the significance of elegy itself. It is no accident, for example, that in the famous remarks that close his Life of Gray, Johnson—​who, in general, objects to the genre’s repetitive iterations of the commonplace—​calls specific attention to those lines of the Elegy that most directly address the nature and function of the genre: The Church-​yard abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo. The four stanzas beginning Yet even these bones,

1  W. David Shaw, Elegy and Paradox: Testing the Conventions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 190, 169. 2  Sandra M. Gilbert (ed.), Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).

 

Elegy   529 are to me original: I have never seen the notions in any other place; yet he that reads them here, persuades himself that he has always felt them.3

The stanzas referred to reflect on memorials to the obscure, a category that might well include Johnson’s own Dr. Levet. Johnson’s poem might even be read as a fulfillment of the obligation implicit in Gray’s “Some pious drops the closing eye requires … .”4 The first three of the poem’s nine stanzas lament the death of Levet from a human perspective, while the last three offer consolation from a divine perspective, that of the Eternal Master who judges Levet’s single talent to have been well employed. The central three stanzas, which praise the deceased as he was in life, are particularly revealing as an expression of what elegy is about. Evident in Johnson’s praise is a resonant analogy between elegist and physician: When fainting nature call’d for aid, And hov’ring death prepar’d the blow, His vig’rous remedy displayed The power of art without the show.5

Poet and doctor both bring the “power of art” to the occasion of “hov’ring death,” art that is vigorous without being pretentious, a fitting description of the poem itself. Johnson here conceives of elegy in terms of its healing function, formally achieved through measured expressions of lament, praise, and consolation.

“The Track of Elegy” Writing over thirty years earlier, Johnson had commended Richard Savage for recognizing that “the track of elegy had been so long beaten, that it was impossible to travel in it without treading in the footsteps of those who had gone before him.”6 Taking up Johnson’s claim toward the end of his Night Thoughts, Edward Young replies: “This is a beaten Track.”—​Is This a Track Should not be beaten? Never beat enough, Till enough learnt the Truths it would inspire… .7

For Young the elegy is a didactic as well as a spiritually healing form, and what it has to teach cannot be repeated often enough. Published between 1742 and 1746, The Complaint; or, Night-​ Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality is best understood (in the words of Lorna Clymer) 3 Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), vol. iv, p. 184. 4 Gray, An Elegy Written in a Country Church-​Yard, line 90, in The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), p. 133. 5 Johnson, “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet,” lines 13–​16, in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 21 vols. to date (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1958–​), vol. vi, pp. 314–​15. 6 Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), vol. iii, p. 171. 7  Edward Young, Night Thoughts, night viii, lines 98–​100, in Night Thoughts, ed. Stephen Cornford (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), p. 221.

 

530   James D. Garrison “as an extensive funeral elegy, in which mourning, praise and consolation are extensively represented in spiritual and psychological terms consistent with Protestant devotional treatises.”8 The forbidding length of the poem finds its justification for Young in the obstinacy of mankind, represented by the adversarius figure of Lorenzo, in declining to learn the truths of elegy: “Dost ask Lorenzo, why so warmly prest, | By Repetition hammer’d on thine Ear, | The Thought of Death?” (night v, lines 682–​4). An elegy about the nature and necessity of elegy, Young’s poem gives extravagant formulation to a very present concern of neoclassical poetry, which addresses “The Thought of Death” with both urgency and frequency. The recurrence of this concern can be illustrated from the most familiar poems of the period. The celebration of Barzillai’s son, the hero who dies young in Absalom and Achitophel, for example, places the poet very much in the role of elegist: “His Eldest Hope, with every Grace adorn’d, | By me (so Heav’n will have it) always Mourn’d.”9 Dryden’s couplets proceed from this initial expression of mourning to a consolation that locates the soul of the deceased in heaven, there poised to come to the aid of his earthly king. Dryden’s imaginative recital of the functions of elegy here offers an occasion for royalist apologia. In the rather different world of The Rape of the Lock, Pope contemplates several possible occasions for elegy: “And Wretches hang that Jury-​men may Dine” might be one; “When Husbands or when Lap-​dogs breathe their last” could be another (or two); and, most relevant of all: “And she who scorns a Man, must die a maid.”10 Even in the face of Clarissa’s reminder of smallpox and old age, the poem’s heroine is concerned in the end only for the loss of her locks, thereby prompting the poem’s admonitory conclusion: “Then cease, bright Nymph! To mourn thy ravish’d Hair” (canto v, line 141). From Belinda as mourner in a trivialized version of elegy, Pope turns to Belinda as mourned, capturing her mortality in images—​the setting sun and the tresses now turned to dust—​that repeat and stress the significance of the poem’s basic metaphors. The day that passes over her, from her late awakening to her afternoon tea, measures the time of her life, her tresses—​so carefully tended and so much admired—​her vanity. This is a world in which it is not just wretches, husbands, and lapdogs that die, but even Belinda herself, to whom this reminder is directly addressed. The role of the Muse here is again unmistakably that of the elegist: to consecrate and immortalize are essential functions of elegy, but so too in the eighteenth century is its duty to admonish. Not very latent in Pope’s conclusion is the traditional vanitas topos, which considers death as the moment for contemplating life’s transience and the inherent impermanence of all earthly things. Just as Pope takes the end of the day, the setting sun, to observe this tradition, so James Thomson takes the end of the year, the freezing of winter, in a similar way. In a powerfully elegiac passage that completes his poem’s inexorable progression through the seasons, Thomson translates the “desolate domain” of the dead time into metaphor: “And

8  Lorna Clymer, “The Funeral Elegy in Early Modern Britain: A Brief History,” in Karen Weisman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press), 170–​86, at p. 181. 9  Absalom and Achitophel, lines 831–​2, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1956–​2000), vol. ii, p. 211. 10  The Rape of the Lock, canto iii, lines 22, 158; canto v, line 28, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–​69), pp. 170, 180, 201.

 

Elegy   531 pale concluding Winter comes at last | And shuts the scene.”11 Whereas Pope’s admonition is addressed to the poem’s heroine, Thomson’s injunction is aimed at a generically foolish mankind, characterized a few lines later in the manner of Young’s Lorenzo as “Ye vainly wise! Ye blind presumptuous” (line 1050), here instructed on how to read The Seasons as elegy. Thomson’s preceding inventory of vain human wishes discloses through his sequence of rhetorical questions the “restless cares” and “busy bustling days” (line 1036) that are both the perceived means and evident consequences of pursuing such ultimately empty goals as greatness, wealth, and fame. There is a very similar feel of bustle and restlessness in The Vanity of Human Wishes: “Unnumbered suppliants crowd preferment’s gate, | Athirst for wealth, and burning to be great.”12 In Elegy and Paradox, Shaw offers a perceptive account of Johnson’s poem, which he describes as “an elegiac meditation on vanity in the biblical tradition” (p. 193). The poem provides ample evidence for this line of argument, especially in the portrait of Cardinal Wolsey. Mediated by a host of writers, including Shakespeare and Swift, the psalmist’s advice—​“Put not your trust in princes”—​here marks the end of a misguided career and illustrates what Shaw aptly calls the “pathos of mortality and short-​sightedness” (p. 193). Johnson concludes by turning the exemplum into a warning, death as an occasion for moral instruction: “Shall Wolsey’s wealth, with Wolsey’s end be thine?” (line 122). Although Johnson’s poem of 1749 brings this account of the elegiac down to the middle of the eighteenth century, nothing in the selections advanced so far suggests an evolving history. Rather, the passages cited represent variations on a consistent and stable theme: death as the moment of accounting. Similar passages can be found in later eighteenth-​century poetry—​in Goldsmith and Crabbe, for example, and in the “elegiac sonnets” of William Bowles and Charlotte Smith—​but there is a marked displacement of this theme after the middle of the century.13 Expressions of mourning continue to be important, but in later eighteenth-​century English literature the most memorable elegiac passages are in prose rather than in verse. Nothing in the poetry of the period can quite match the force of Belford’s lament for Clarissa Harlowe, for example: “I mingle my tears and my praises with those of the numerous spectators. I accompany the afflicted mourners back to their uncomfortable mansion; and make one in the general concert of unavailing woe; till retiring, as I imagine, as they retire, like them, in reality, I give up to new scenes of solitary and sleepless grief.”14 The force of the elegiac here derives, of course, not from these words alone but from the cumulative power of the narrative that precedes them, the case as well in the final pages of the Life of Johnson, where Boswell borrows words from one of those present at the deathbed: “He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up.—​Johnson is dead.—​Let us go to the next best:—​there is nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson.”15 Still other passages come readily to

11 

James Thomson, Winter, lines 1028, 1031–​2, in The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), p. 250. 12  The Vanity of Human Wishes, lines 74–​5, in Johnson, Works, vol. vi, p. 95. 13  See Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 60–​9. 14  Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 1409. 15  James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Together with Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson’s Diary of a Journey into North Wales, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–​64), vol. iv, pp. 420–​1.

 

532   James D. Garrison mind, any number from Gibbon (“The spectator who casts a mournful view over the ruins of ancient Rome”), Burke (“But the age of chivalry is gone … and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever”), and with various inflections from Sterne, including “the mortality of Trim’s hat” (“Are we not here now,—​and gone in a moment?”), thrown to the floor on the occasion of Master Bobby’s death.

“With Elegies, the Town is Cloy’d” The canonical literature of the period thus provides striking instances of the elegiac, but at the same time few enduring examples of formal elegy, of poems that bear the name of elegy, defined in the Dictionary of 1755 first by affect (“a mournful song”) and second by occasion (“a funeral song”), the latter illustrated from Dryden’s translation of Ovid’s Dido to Aeneas (Heroides 7). Although Dryden is one of the poets most often cited in the Dictionary, here he is asked to vouch for the meaning of a word that he almost never uses, either in his poetry or his literary criticism. The lone instance of the singular elegy in Dryden’s original (as opposed to translated) poetry occurs toward the end of To Her Grace the Dutchess of Ormond that prefaces the Fables. Reflecting on the illness that had recently threatened the life of his subject, Dryden observes that if she had in fact died “Ev’n this had been Your Elegy, which now | Is offer’d for Your Health, the Table of my Vow” (lines 129–​30). Dryden here assumes that encomium and elegy are essentially similar, one form of praise converted to the other with the death of the subject. The lines that immediately precede this couplet are reminiscent of Upon the Death of the Lord Hastings, Dryden’s first published poem of fifty-​one years earlier and the only other original poem in the Dryden canon that summons the term elegy, here in the plural: Grief makes me rail; Sorrow will force its way; And, Show’rs of Tears, Tempestuous Sighs best lay. The Tongue may fail; but over-​flowing Eyes Will weep out lasting streams of Elegies. (lines 89–​92)

These lines swell by accumulation to equate elegies with tears, presumably a spontaneous outpouring of emotion that makes the expression of inexpressible “Sorrow” the defining characteristic of the genre. Between the frantic grief of 1649 and the refined homage of 1700, Dryden wrote several well-​known funeral poems, none of them titled an elegy. The evasion of the term appears to be almost deliberate, as Dryden reaches for a range of alternative generic labels: threnody (Threnodia Augustalis), ode (An Ode, on the Death of Mr. Henry Purcell), panegyric (Eleonora: A Panegyrical Poem Dedicated to the Memory of the Late Countess of Abingdon), and epitaph (An Epitaph on the Lady Whitmore). Still more often he retreats from any sort of overt generic identification into such introductory phrases as “Upon the Death of …” and “To the Memory of … .” Why? One possible answer, necessarily speculative, is that Dryden disdained to rely on a term that had been so overworked, so vulgarized that it inevitably evoked unwelcome associations and low artistic expectations. The evidence for this lies in the seventeenth-​century broadsides, which seem to have cornered the market on elegy during the Restoration. In A Century of Broadside Elegies, John W. Draper comments on their abundance, journalistic

 

Elegy   533 purposes, often minute and lurid detail, and the resultant “Tory ridicule of the elegiac genre.”16 Although Draper’s collection ends in 1700, broadside elegies continued to flourish into the early eighteenth century, aggressively staking their claim to represent the genre in titles that manage to be at once formulaic (“An Elegy on the Much Lamented …”) and individual (name plus details, usually including date and cause of death). Hence: An Elegy on the Much Lamented Death of Harry Gambol, Who Dy’d of a Pleurisy, Aug. 31. Often enough these details are absurdly elaborated, usually in rather crude couplets, concluding with a conventional and separately marked epitaph. Typically four to twelve lines long, these epitaphs provide a summary account of relevant virtues, very often extolling the deceased person’s kindness or charity toward the poor, and thereby affirming his or her right to a place in heaven. The logical consequence of such popularity was to drive the form toward various kinds of travesty. Eventually the devolution of the genre becomes itself the subject of comment within the elegy, as in An Elegy on the Much Lamented Death, of Madam Bently: Since it’s a Fashion grown so Common, That not a Whore, or Huckster Woman, Or Bawd, or Butcher of the Town, Nor Theif, nor Raschal of Renow[n]‌; But sometimes Living, sometimes Dead, Their Elegy’s are sung or said: And Ballad-​makers for small Fees, Do sing their Funeral Obseques.17

Elegy has been reduced to a set of commonplaces that can be gathered easily enough to celebrate—​or disparage—​anyone, including Madam Bently, who (the concluding lines inform us) “went away | To take a Nap till Judgment-​Day, | Nor cares one Farthing, what all Mankind say” (lines 50–​1). Here, significantly, it is not the subject but the genre itself that is ridiculed (“What signifies how Mortals Die, | Or when, or where indeed?”), confirming by example Swift’s claim that elegy has been co-​opted by Grub Street: “Now Grub-​Street Wits are all employ’d; | With Elegies, the Town is cloy’d.”18 Swift’s response to this situation is to write his own versions of broadside elegies. A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General, for prime example, takes its cue from such broadsides as An Elegie upon Mr. Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, Lately Deceased, which begins: Is he then dead at last, whom vain report So often had feign’d Mortal in meer sport? Whom we on Earth so long alive might see, We thought he here had Immortality.19

16 

John Draper (ed.), A Century of Broadside Elegies (London: Ingpen & Grant, 1928), p. xvii. An Elegy on the Much Lamented Death, of Madam Bently, Who Broak Her Neck Rideing towards Doney-​brook, on Saturday the 2nd of this Inst. August 1729 (London, 1729), lines 1–​8. 18  Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, lines 165–​6, in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), vol. ii, p. 558. 19  An Elegy upon Mr. Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, lines 1–​4, in Draper (ed.), A Century of Broadside Elegies, p. 135. 17 

 

534   James D. Garrison Swift follows suit with respect to Marlborough: His Grace! Impossible! What, dead! Of old age too, and in his bed! And could that Mighty Warrior fall? And so inglorious, after all!20

The anonymous author of the Hobbes elegy rebukes his subject for atheism, concluding his epitaph with a colloquially telling couplet: “Here lies Tom Hobbes, the Bug-​bear of the Nation, | Whose Death hath frighted Atheism out of Fashion.”21 Although Swift does not label his last lines an epitaph, he does separate them from the elegy proper and constructs them as direct address to the reader in the form of an epitaph: Let pride be taught by this rebuke, How very mean a thing’s a Duke; From all his ill-​got honours flung, Turned to that dirt from whence he sprung. (lines 29–​32)

Death puts an end to pride just as it does to atheism. Swift here confronts the popular claim on elegy by imitation and parody for purposes of satire. An Elegy on the Supposed Death of Mr Partridge, the Almanac Maker has at least topical affinities with the broadside titled An Elegy upon the Death of Mr. William Lilly the Astrologer, for further example, and Swift varies his ironic versions over the course of his career to include not only a satirical elegy but also a tragical elegy and a quibbling elegy—​all in rather sharp contrast to contemporaneous literary criticism, where the usual formulation is soft elegy.

“Design’d for Grief and Tears” Eighteenth-​century commentary on elegy is anchored by arguments derived and often repeated from the artes poeticae of the Restoration:  Horace as translated by Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, in 1680 and again by John Oldham in 1683; Boileau in William Soames’s translation of the same year; and the Essay on Poetry of 1697 by John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave. Dryden lurks in the background of all of these works: a literary collaborator with Mulgrave, Dryden revised Soames’s translation of Boileau, commented in verse on Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Poetry, and wrote the greatest elegy of the Restoration, To the Memory of Mr. Oldham. Dryden’s poem is anything but soft; it does not invoke elegy for its title; nor does it at all resemble the popular elegies later parodied by Swift. Its restrained couplets, controlled metaphors, and classical allusions distinguish Oldham even from Dryden’s several other memorial poems. Compared to the elegiac lines on Barzillai’s son, for example, the memorial to Oldham minimizes any sense of lament and in the end declines to offer divine consolation of the kind found in the passage from Absalom and Achitophel: Once more, hail and farewel; farewel thou young, But ah too short, Marcellus of our Tongue; 20 Swift, A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General, lines 1–​4, in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), vol. i, p. 296. 21  Lines 70–​1, in Draper (ed.), A Century of Broadside Elegies, p. 135.

 

Elegy   535 Thy Brows with Ivy, and with Laurels bound; But Fate and gloomy Night encompass thee around. (lines 22–​5)

Whereas death becomes freedom in the earlier poem (“Now, free from Earth, thy disencumbred Soul | Mounts up”), as it does later in the conclusion to Johnson’s “Levet” (“Death broke at once the vital chain, | And freed his soul the nearest way”), Dryden here rigorously follows out the logic of the poem’s Roman allusions, addressing the final ave atque vale to Oldham, here cast in the role of Virgil’s Marcellus. The poetic evocation of the Virgilian underworld follows naturally from allusion to the epic games, in which Nisus and Euryalus compete to honor Anchises, thus lending classical gravity and dignity to the modern occasion. The occasion of Oldham’s death and the publication of his Remains … in Verse and Prose are for Dryden, above all, an opportunity for praise—​not lament, not consolation. Yet Dryden’s praise is hardly uncritical, as the extended ripeness metaphor carefully demonstrates: “O early ripe! to thy abundant store | What could advancing Age have added more?” (lines 11–​12). What appears to be a rhetorical question turns out to have a complex answer that weighs the means against the ends of satire, Oldham’s favored poetic mode, and concludes in the poem’s one triplet: Thy generous fruits, though gather’d ere their prime Still shew’d a quickness; and maturing time But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of Rime. (lines 19–​21)

Familiar from the opening of Lycidas, the ripeness metaphor here presents life and premature death by reference to a specifically literary career, now concluded in the publication of the book for which Dryden’s verse provides the proem. The syntax of qualification (“though … still”) and the diction contrasting youth and age are complicated by the more basic contrast between “Thy” and “we,” marked by the strong caesura in the middle of the second line. Whereas the first pronoun expresses the unique identity of Oldham, the second speaks for Dryden himself but also for the community of poets to which he belongs. The honor that the poem accords to Oldham is finally admission to this select group (“Thy Brows with Ivy, and with Laurels bound”), a community dignified, even exalted, by the sustained analogy to classical epic. This in itself, as Sacks has argued, may provide a kind of consolation: “in this consummately Augustan poem the figure of the dead is elevated to the domain of the classics.”22 Dryden’s poem is a quite different sort of elegy from those described by his contemporaries, whose commentaries appeal not to Virgil but rather to Horace. This includes Oldham himself, who enlarges upon Horace’s distinction between epic and elegy in his imitation of the Ars poetica, in the process providing many later writers with the standard adjective to designate the genre. In his commonplace book of English poetry, titled The British Parnassus and published in 1714, Edward Bysshe runs together Oldham (“Soft Elegy, design’d for Grief and Tears”) and Sheffield (“The Elegy, of sweet, but solemn Voice”) to circulate the received critical wisdom, a venture repeated four years later by Charles

22  Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985), p. 132.

 

536   James D. Garrison Gildon.23 In The Complete Art of Poetry, Gildon intersperses verse citations with prose comments that are entirely conventional (“There ought to be in the Elegy a native Elegance … as well as Softness of Expression”) and accurately descriptive of such contemporary elegies as Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s On the Death of Mr. Thomas Rowe, which begins: “In what soft language shall my thoughts get free … ?”24 Yet Gildon is quite assertive in expressing his preference for classical elegy, dismissing even those English elegies that meet his own criteria for the genre as “flat and insipid.”25 Although the citations and commonplaces of Bysshe and Gildon are repeated right to the end of the century, the disdain for English elegy implicit in Swift’s parodies and overtly expressed in Gildon’s criticism is eventually countered by a strong claim for the exemplary status of Pope’s Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady. In John Newbery’s mid-​century Poetry Made Familiar and Easy to Young Gentlemen and Ladies, to take an important illustration, his dialogic discourse on elegy leads finally to the interlocutor’s question: “Cannot you give me a good Elegy or two by way of Example?” Answer: “Yes; I shall chuse one written by Mr. Pope to the Memory of an unfortunate Lady, which I believe will be sufficient to give you a just Idea of the tender and mournful Character of this Kind of Poem.”26 Newbery’s choice is repeatedly confirmed, emphatically so in W. H. Dilworth’s Life of Pope (1759): “It may be asserted, that it is not in the power of our language to go beyond this poem in tenderness and harmony.”27 The praise thus conferred on Pope’s poem is maintained throughout the century, as it was many times anthologized and variously imitated in poems bearing such titles as Written on the Grave-​stone of an Unfortunate Lady, and Elegy: A Midnight Scene: An Apostrophe to the Memory of an Unfortunate Young Lady, or Verses, on Visiting the Tomb of an Unfortunate Young Lady. The poem was twice translated into Latin and routinely taken in critical discourse to illustrate not only the meaning of elegy but also to define literary pathos. In one of his Dialogues of the Dead, George Lyttelton even has Boileau confess the superiority of Pope’s elegy to his own poems: “You excelled in the Pathetic, which I never approached.”28 In 1746 Thomas Blacklock added to the several elegies already circulating on the occasion of Pope’s death a poem that takes a selection from the closing lines of the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady as its epigraph: Poets themselves must fall, like those they sung; Deaf the prais’d ear, and mute the tuneful tongue. Ev’n he, whose soul now melts in mournful lays, Shall shortly want the gen’rous tear he pays; Then from his closing eyes thy form shall part, And the last pang shall tear thee from his heart,

23 

Edward Bysshe, The British Parnassus; or, A Compleat Common-​Place-​Book of English Poetry, 2 vols. (London, 1714), vol. ii, p. 702. 24  Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Upon the Death of Mr. Thomas Rowe, line 1, in Roger Lonsdale (ed.), Eighteenth-​Century Women Poets (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), p. 49. 25  Charles Gildon, The Complete Art of Poetry, 2 vols. (London, 1718), vol. i, p. 172. 26  John Newbery, Poetry Made Familiar and Easy to Young Gentlemen and Ladies, 3rd ed. (Dublin, 1752), pp. 77–​8. 27  H. W. Dilworth, The Life of Alexander Pope, Esq; with a View of His Writings (London, 1759), p. 33. 28  George Lyttelton, Dialogues of the Dead (London, 1760), p. 123.

 

Elegy   537 Life’s idle business at one gasp be o’er, The Muse forgot, and thou belov’d no more!29

Such use of these lines offers a genuine insight into a poem that all too often prompted eighteenth-​century commentators to distract their readers with speculation about the unfortunate lady herself and invited Pope’s imitators to dwell on the ghost and the other atmospherics of the opening lines. The real interest in the poem derives from the very absence of information about the lady, which distinguishes it from the popular elegies of the day and opens the poem to reflection on the nature of elegy itself. In the end this comes to self-​reflection: the elegist as subject of his own elegy. In these closing lines the initial axiom about all poets gives way to the very specific poet of this poem (“Ev’n he”), as Pope transfers the conventional reference to the soul of the deceased (“So flew the soul to its congenial place”) to the elegist himself (“whose soul now melts in mournful lays”) as a way of describing the very process of writing elegy. He then hands off this role in imagining his own death, reversing the situation of the elegy so that the unfortunate lady appears at the deathbed of the poet, her form departing only as his eyes are closed. Or, more literally, as the next line suggests, the lady will be preserved in the poet’s heart as long as he lives, torn from him only at the moment of his own death. The penultimate line then voices the traditional moral judgment of earthly things, which governs the ultimate pairing of the elegist and the elegiac subject in the final line. In contrast to the conclusion of The Rape of the Lock, where “the Muse shall consecrate to Fame,” here the “Muse” is herself “forgot.” In his Latin translation of the poem, James Beattie captures one possible meaning of this phrase by reading it sub specie aeternitatis: “Aeternum oblitus musae.”30 By this account and from this perspective it is not just the individual poet who dies with all others; even the “idle business” of poetry itself is subject to the inevitable. Beattie’s is not the only way of construing the last line, of course, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that Pope here reflects on the limitations of elegy generally and of this elegy in particular. These limitations are evident in the way the closing lines respond to the question raised earlier in the poem: “What can atone (oh ever-​injur’d shade!) | Thy fate unpity’d, and thy rites unpaid?” (lines 47–​8). It is at least plausible to think that the elegy itself is intended to answer this question and serve this function, making up for the failings of the funeral ritual: “No friend’s complaint, no kind domestic tear | Pleased thy pale ghost, or graced thy mournful bier. | By foreign hands thy dying eyes were closed” (lines 49–​51). But if the elegy is asked to provide the missing tear, in doing so it gravitates less toward Vergil’s sunt lacrimae rerum than to Ovid’s inania morti | munera dant lacrimas—​“a fruitless tribute” (in the phrasing of a contemporary translation) to the dead: for in the end the lady is reduced to dust (“A heap of dust alone remains of thee”), while elegist and elegy are alike called to eternity, and the Muse herself is “forgot.” Although Pope never wrote another elegy, perhaps belatedly following the advice of his friend Henry Cromwell (“Leave elegy and translation to the inferior class”), this single poem gives him a significant place in the canon of the genre, which even Johnson’s criticism does not succeed in disturbing. The famous sentence in the Life of Pope—​“Poetry has not often

29  Thomas Blacklock, Poems on Several Occasions (Glasgow, 1746), citing Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, lines 75–​82. 30  James Beattie, Essays and Fragments in Prose and Verse (Edinburgh, 1794), p. 82.

 

538   James D. Garrison been worse employed than in dignifying the amorous fury of a raving girl”31—​was often disputed out of deference not only to Pope but also to the reputation of the anonymous lady. By James Callendar, for example: “On this subject, it appears that Dr. Johnson was as destitute of information, as void of humanity.”32 And by William Hayley: “There is a savage barbarity, to my feelings, in this passage, that I want words to express.”33 Johnson’s failure to appreciate Pope’s Unfortunate Lady is all the more remarkable when considered in light of elegies contemporary with Pope’s that he did admire. These include Edmund Smith’s elegy on the death of John Philips: “In 1709 … died John Philips, the friend and fellow collegian of Smith, who, on that occasion, wrote a poem, which justice must place among the best elegies which our language can shew, an elegant mixture of fondness and admiration, of dignity and softness.”34 And Thomas Tickell’s To the Earl of Warwick: On the Death of Mr. Addison: “nor is a more sublime or more elegant funeral poem to be found in the whole compass of English literature.”35 Surprising as these judgments are, it should be acknowledged that Johnson’s immoderate praise for poems that have long since disappeared into the non-​canonical ether is contextually hedged by his doubts about occasional poetry generally, well expressed in the Life of Dryden: The occasional poet is circumscribed by the narrowness of his subject. Whatever can happen to man has happened so often, that little remains for fancy or invention. We have been all born; we have most of us been married; and so many have died before us, that our deaths can supply but few materials for a poet. (Johnson, Lives, vol. ii, p. 126)

These observations that conclude with the problem of writing elegy—​“our deaths can supply but few materials for a poet”—​are illustrated with reference, not to Dryden, as it happens, but rather to the Grub Street figure of Elkanah Settle. Johnson’s characterization of Settle is nevertheless very moving, itself an instance of the elegiac in later eighteenth-​century prose. Johnson reflects with gravity on the demise of the hack, “who died forgotten in an hospital; and whose latter years were spent in contriving shows for fairs, and carrying an elegy or epithalamium, of which the beginning and end were occasionally varied, but the intermediate parts were always the same, to every house where there was a funeral or a wedding” (Johnson, Lives, vol. ii, p. 102). The elegist here becomes the subject of elegy (Johnson even imagines an inscription for his tombstone), a figure of genuine pathos, like one of Gray’s “unhonoured dead.” The futility of saying anything new in this conventional form is here expressed in the life—​and death—​of the Grub Street hack reduced to pandering occasional poetry for occasional bread.

31 Johnson, Lives, vol. iv, p. 9.

32  James Thomson Callender, Deformities of Dr. Samuel Johnson: Selected from His Works (London, 1782), p. 49. 33  William Hayley, Two Dialogues: Containing a Comparative View of the Lives, Characters, and Writing, of Philip, the Late Earl of Chesterfield, and of Dr. Samuel Johnson (London, 1787), p. 145. 34 Johnson, Life of Smith, in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), vol. ii, p. 176, emphasis added. 35 Johnson, Life of Tickell, in Lives, vol. iii, p. 115, emphasis added.

 

Elegy   539

Alternate Measure The status of English elegy in the first half of the eighteenth century is thus problematic at best: reduced to parody and satire in Swift, belittled in the poetic commonplace books, English elegy can hardly be raised in esteem by appeal to such names as Smith and Tickell. Even the one enduring instance of elegy from this period, Pope’s Unfortunate Lady, ends by expressing the limitations of the genre. It was, even so, against this historical background that the most popular of English elegies, and one of the most popular poems in the English language, came to be published in 1751. An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, though unique among English elegies in its formidable power to please many and please long, represents the culmination of a renewed and even reinvented interest in elegy that emerges in the 1740s. Young’s claims on behalf of elegy’s “Balsamic Truths, and healing sentiments” (night iii, line 262) represent one dimension of this revival, giving fresh life to the genre not only in the larger design of the poem, which proceeds from lament or complaint to consolation, but also in such particular passages as the elegy on Narcissa in night iii: And on a Foreign Shore! Where Strangers wept! Strangers to Thee, and more surprising still, Strangers to Kindness, wept: Their eyes let fall Inhuman Tears; strange tears! that trickled down From marble Hearts! obdurate Tenderness. (night iii, lines 154–​8)

Here rewriting Pope’s “By foreign hands thy dying eyes were closed,” the poet would (as he says) a “Harvest reap” (night iii, line 270) from the grave of his unfortunate lady, a harvest of wisdom that informs his own imagined death: “Then welcome, Death! thy dreaded Harbingers … | will toll the Bell | That calls my few Friends to my Funeral; | Where feeble Nature drops, perhaps, a Tear” (night iii, lines 487–​92). Looking at once backward to Pope and forward to Gray, Young represents the death of the elegist as the triumph of life: “When shall I die?—​When shall I live for ever?” (night iii, line 536). Young’s poem affords Gray a number of significant phrases, but the Elegy owes its signature quatrain form to James Hammond and William Shenstone. Hammond’s Love Elegies, published posthumously in 1742, deliberately sets out to reclaim the genre’s classical origins,36 the title a reminder that in Latin literature elegia was the favored form for love poetry. Freshly endowed with this classical prestige, the English elegy now directs to new purposes the heroic stanza of the later seventeenth century. Shenstone commends Hammond’s choice of this stanza in the preface to his own elegies of later in the decade: “Heroic metre, with alternate rhyme, seems well enough adapted to this species of poetry … The world has an admirable example of its beauty in a collection of elegies not long since published; the product of a gentleman of the most exact taste, and whose untimely death merits all the tears that

36 

James Hammond, Poems of Hammond, in David P. French (ed.), Minor English Poets, 1660–​1780: A Selection from Alexander Chalmers’ “The English Poets,” 10 vols. (London: Benjamin Blom, 1967), vol. iii, p. 415.

 

540   James D. Garrison Elegy can shed.”37 Shenstone’s alignment of meter and subject is well illustrated in his elegy honoring Alexander Pope and dated 1745: Where is the dappled pink, the sprightly rose? The cowslip’s golden cup no more I see: Dark and discolour’d every flower that blows, To form the garland, Elegy! for thee!—​(lines 37–​40)

To celebrate the century’s greatest couplet poet in quatrains is, in itself, of interest, especially in light of the concluding comment of the preface: “The public ear, habituated of late to a quicker measure, may perhaps consider this as heavy and languid; but an objection of that kind may gradually lose its force, if this measure should be allowed to suit the nature of elegy” (vol. iv, p. 497). Shenstone here seems to recognize this as a moment of transition in literary history, staking a claim for the appropriateness of the quatrain form to elegy. This transition is implicitly confirmed by William Mason, who calls specific attention to the connection between the form and the subject of Gray’s poem: “He originally gave it only the simple title of ‘Stanzas written in a Country Church-​yard.’ I persuaded him first to call it an Elegy, because the subject authorized him so to do; and the alternate measure, in which it was written, seemed peculiarly fit for that species of composition.”38 Other eighteenth-​century commentators on the poem regularly characterize its subject as the reflections, meditations, or contemplations of the poem’s narrator, “who, mindful of the unhonoured dead, | Dost in these lines their artless tale relate” (lines 93–​4). This is the poem’s own self-​referential statement of its subject, which in turn introduces the poem’s concluding elegy “For thee” (line 93), as Gray adopts the phrase from Shenstone and beyond him, in Henry Weinfield’s cogent argument,39 from John Donne. The genre of the poem is then inscribed in the epitaph: Here rests his head upon the lap of earth A youth to fortune and to fame unknown. Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth, And Melancholy marked him for her own. Large was his bounty and his soul sincere, Heaven did a recompence as largely send: He gave to Misery all he had, a tear, He gained from Heaven (’twas all he wished) a friend. No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode, (There they alike in trembling hope repose) The bosom of his Father and his God. (lines 117–​28)

The three stanzas of the epitaph sequentially express lament, praise, and consolation, the lines rising from earth to heaven on the soft language of pathos. The central image of the tear recalls not only the “pious drops” of stanza 23, but also invokes the traditional 37 

William Shenstone, Poems of Shenstone, in French (ed.), Minor English Poets, vol. iv, p. 496. William Mason, The Poems of Mr. Gray: To Which are Prefixed Memoirs of His Life and Writings (London, 1775), p. 108. 39  Henry Weinfield, The Poet without a Name: Gray’s Elegy and the Problem of History (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 131–​4. 38 

 

Elegy   541 correlation between tears and elegies themselves. From Dryden’s “the over-​flowing Eyes | Will weep out lasting streams of Elegies”—​lines originally published in a volume titled Lachrymae Musarum—​to Shenstone’s “all the tears that Elegy can shed,” the image of the tear comes to stand for elegy itself, so that Gray’s line might be read as an oblique way of praising the elegist for this very elegy. The corresponding “recompence” of a friend recalls the conventional language of such earlier elegies as those commended by Johnson. Witness the closing couplet of Tickell’s elegy on Addison: “Farewel! Whom join’d in fame, in friendship try’d, | No chance could sever, nor the grave divide.”40 Or, with even more overlap in diction, Smith’s elegy on Philips: “But you, his darling Friends, lament no more, | Display his Fame, and his Fate deplore; | And let no Tears from erring Pity flow, | For One that’s blest above, immortaliz’d below.”41 Conjuring with the same vocabulary of grief as his predecessors, Gray separates the epitaph from the main body of the poem in the manner of the popular broadsides. From this perspective “He gave to Misery all he had, a tear” evokes the assurance of charity to the poor that recurs in the broadside epitaphs. In almost every possible way, Gray rehearses the conventions of English elegy in these last lines almost as if to justify the poem’s late-​chosen title. And yet the poem itself can hardly be called conventional. The stanzas that Johnson specifically identified as original represent a rethinking of the possibilities and obligations of the genre: Yet even these bones from insult to protect Some frail memorial still erected nigh, With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked, Implores the passing tribute of a sigh. Their name, their years, spelt by the unlettered muse, The place of fame and elegy supply: And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the rustic moralist to die. For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey, This pleasing anxious being e’er resigned, Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, Nor cast one longing lingering look behind? On some fond breast the parting soul relies, Some pious drops the closing eye requires; Ev’n from the tomb the voice of nature cries, Ev’n in our ashes live their wonted fires. (lines 77–​92)

There is much that is uncertain in these controversial lines, which have been variously interpreted, most recently in a compelling essay by Helen Deutsch, who argues that “The power of Gray’s poetry here infuses the ancient trope of prosopopoeia—​in which the epitaph inscribed on the tombstone speaks, calling the traveler to halt—​with universal affect (the

40 

Thomas Tickell, To the Earl of Warwick, lines 113–​14, in Poems of Tickell, in French (ed.), Minor English Poets, vol. iii, p. 396. 41  Edmund Smith, A Poem to the Memory of Mr. John Philips, lines 233–​6, in Poems of Smith, in French (ed.), Minor English Poets, vol. ii, p. 164.

 

542   James D. Garrison final shift to ‘our ashes’ is crucial here).”42 If the “epitaph inscribed on the tombstone speaks,” then what it speaks about is the function of poetry as it relates to the occasion of death. The fitful but still clear direction of the first two stanzas is a motion from inert stone to articulate language, which is asked to perform three distinct functions: to protect, to implore, and to teach. As Gray here recasts the traditional formula, he privileges the pathetic and the didactic over the celebratory and the comforting, in the process restricting the idea of praise to a defense against derision. The pathos of the phrase “Implores the passing tribute of a sigh” shifts the focus of lament from mourning the loss of someone known—​Philips or Addison, for example—​to mourning the loss of those destined to be unknown, confirming a main line of the poem’s argument, famously expressed in an earlier quatrain: Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed, Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre. (lines 45–​8)

Several parallels have been cited for “celestial fire,” but perhaps the most apposite comes from book vi of Night Thoughts: “And learn humiliation from a soul | Which boasts her Lineage from Celestial fire” (night vi, lines 378–​9). The context of the passage in Young is a meditation on ambition, even “blind Ambition”—​“Ambition! powerful source for Good and Ill” (lines 393, 399). And that is precisely the sense that Gray would lend this passage, as he continues in a modulated key to recognize all that “Their lot forbade” (line 65), crimes as well as virtues, in lines that recall the earlier indictment of ambition—​“Let not Ambition mock their useful toil”—​and pride—​“Nor you, ye Proud, impute to these the fault | If Memory o’er their tomb no trophies raise” (lines 29, 37–​8). As Gray pursues this thought, he subverts the generic imperative of praise, reducing it to mere “Flattery” and even to “incense kindled at the Muse’s flame” (lines 44, 72), which (as the poem argues) is futile against the power of death in any case. Praise is here subordinate to instruction, specifically instruction that teaches “the rustic moralist to die.” Though far from rustic, the greatest moralist in English literature defines the term in his Dictionary as “One who teaches the duties of life.” One of those duties, Gray’s succeeding lines suggest, is to prepare to leave “the warm precincts of the cheerful day,” sustained by the complementary duty to mediate this passage for others. If, as Roger Lonsdale has argued (p. 132 n), “dumb forgetfulness” here signifies the oblivion that follows death, then the one “prey” to this ultimate and inevitable condition is the same as “the parting soul” in the next stanza. The two stanzas together illuminate the precise moment of death first from the perspective of the dying (the potential subject of elegy), and then from that of the living (the potential elegist), the “fond breast” who accords “pious drops” to the deceased, and finally from that of the collective “our” (including the potential reader of elegy). Having thus constructed the situation of the genre, Gray illustrates it by concluding the poem with the elegy on the elegist himself, finally petitioning a reader to enact within the poem the role of the poem’s own reader: “Approach and read (for thou can’st read) the lay, | Graved on the stone 42  Helen Deutsch, “Elegies in Country Churchyards: The Prospect Poem In and Around the Eighteenth Century,” in Karen Weisman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 187–​205, at p. 189.

 

Elegy   543 beneath yon aged thorn” (lines 115–​16). It is worth noting that what the reader is asked to read here is a lay, a carefully chosen word that Gray shares with both Dryden and Pope. To appeal once again to the Dictionary, where Johnson circles back to his definition of elegy as a “funeral song”: “Lay. It is said originally to signify sorrow or complaint, and then to have been transferred to poems written to express sorrow. It is derived by the French from lessus, Latin, a funeral song.” In this sense, then, the word points both to the epitaph and its rehearsal of elegiac conventions and at the same time to the earlier correlation between inscription and elegy: “The place of fame and elegy supply.” An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard evolves from contemplation of a country churchyard and reflection on the lives of those buried there to meditation on the nature of the genre itself, concluding, like Pope’s Unfortunate Lady, with an elegy on the death of the elegist. Considered in light of these prominent examples of the genre, Johnson’s illustrative quotation from Dryden’s Ovid now seems remarkably appropriate: “The mournful swan sings her own elegy.”

“For Thee, O Grub-​Street” As Gray’s poem is, in the end, about reading as well as writing elegy, it is important to recognize just how enthusiastically Gray’s own readers responded to his stanzas. An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard went through edition after edition and prompted a host of imitations, bearing such titles as An Elegy Written at a Carthusian Monastery, Netley Abbey: An Elegy, and An Elegy Among the Ruins of an Abbey, almost all of them disproportionately preoccupied with the poem’s setting. The circumstances of death, so important to the popular elegists of earlier in the period, are supplanted in the elegies of their post-​churchyard successors by the circumstances of writing, personal characterization by description of place, often with a Gothic inflection. In the words of John Brand, author of An Elegy on a Pile of Sacred Ruins, “Elegy may be termed, with metaphorical Propriety, the eldest Daughter of Meditation … When her Theme contemplates the short Duration of all earthly Grandeur in the awful Ruins of Temples, Towers, and other superb Edifices, become a Prey to Time, we are naturally led by her to a Reflection on … the changing Inconstancy and Vicissitude of all sublunary Things.”43 As shrines, ruins, tombs, and abbeys mark the fictional place of composition, so the quatrain now becomes the standard form for that composition (see ­chapter 24, “Stanzas”), so standard, in fact, and so accessible that it invites parody as well as imitation. As early as 1768, for example, a work was published with the title Sentiments on the Death of the Sentimental Yorick: By One of Uncle Toby’s Illegitimate Children and bearing the inevitable epigraph: “Alas Poor Yorick.” Among the “rules” given to the would-​be elegist is this bit of misspelled irony: “Let him be sure to use Mr. Grey’s Stanza … the most lullaby Kind of Versification yet invented.”44 Soft elegy has now become, in the satiric words of John Wolcot’s “Poet’s Farewel,” “drowsy Elegy.”45 It also sustains a subversive vitality by re-​adaptation to the

43 

John Brand, A Collection of Poetical Essays (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1765), p. iii. Sentiments on the Death of the Sentimental Yorick: By One of Uncle Toby’s Illegitimate Children: With Rules for Writing Modern Elegies (London, 1768), p. 18. 45  John Wolcot, “The Poet’s Farewel,” in The First Part of Peter Pindar’s Poems (Dublin, 1791), p. 96. 44 

 

544   James D. Garrison purposes of satire. Wolcot himself, known to contemporaries as “Peter Pindar,” wrote dozens of elegies answerable to his question from a few lines later in the same poem: “Why may not I, and with as good a grace, | For thee, O Grub-​street! Thrum my resty muse?”46 The appropriation of Gray’s “For thee” here succinctly captures this moment of literary declension in which Wolcot assumes the role of a latter-​day Swift. Wolcot’s invectives against the alleged licentiousness of his age focus on the failure of the state, represented by its politicians and nobles, to recognize and support poetry, especially Walcot’s own. In response to this failure Wolcot ridicules the monarch in The Royal Bullocks: A Consolatory and Pastoral Elegy, and diverts the energies of the genre away from the great, as announced in a Shandean footnote to his collection More Money of 1792: “I, the Lyric Peter, assert, that I have written a most beautiful Elegy to an old Friend, a Dying Ass, with more feeling than I could compliment the deaths of half the Kings in Christendom.”47 And indeed, he did write an elegy on a dying ass (“Thy lot is that of all”), with evident recollection of Gray and in accord with the considerable late eighteenth-​century vogue for elegies written with varying degrees of irony on birds, cats, dogs, and other pets. Wolcot even added to this repertoire elegies on fleas and bats, so far have the mighty subjects of elegy fallen by the end of the eighteenth century. Wolcot adapts the elegy for purposes of satire that can be literary (Elegy to Apollo) as well as political (Carlton-​House Fete; or, The Disappointed Bard; in a Series of Elegies: To Which Is Added, Curiosity in Rags, an Elegy). But the poem that speaks most directly to the condition of the genre at the turn of the nineteenth century is titled simply Elegy, and might be read as an elegy on the death of elegy: In days of yore, the golden days of Rhyme, The mighty Monarch to his Minstrel bow’d; But what is now the character sublime? A blind old Ballad-​singer and low crowd. Kings too were Poets: David to his Lyre Sung sweetest elegy …48

To introduce no less a figure than David as an elegist has the corollary effect of suggesting what elegy once was, now dismissed to compete with the songs of organ grinders and street singers. Reclaimed at mid-​century and fulfilled in An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, the elegy once again sinks to Grub Street to await its nineteenth-​century revival as a consequential literary genre. The forms of this revival will prove to be those of the Renaissance, including the Spenserian stanza and the sonnet, already anticipated by Gray’s own sonnet on the death of Richard West. The persistence of Gray’s quatrain is nonetheless still evident, for example, in Wordsworth’s Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm. The last stanza of this poem indicates that the eighteenth-​century elegists did have something to offer their Romantic and Victorian descendants: But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer, And frequent sights of what is to be borne!

46 Ibid. 47 

John Wolcot, The Works of Peter Pindar, Esq., 3 vols. (London, 1794), vol. iii, p. 138. John Wolcot, Elegy, lines 1–​4, in Peter Pindar’s Poems, ed. P. M. Zall (Bath: Adams & Dart, 1972), p. 69. 48 

 

Elegy   545 Such sights, or worse, as are before me here.—​ Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.49

On the question of hope, Wordsworth’s negatively expressed affirmation—​“Not without hope”—​offers more in the way of elegiac consolation than appears in Gray, who can offer only a trembling hope in the Elegy’s penultimate line (“There they alike in trembling hope repose”), or in Johnson, who categorically dismisses the idea in the very first line of On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet (“Condemn’d to hope’s delusive mine”). But Wordsworth’s concluding phrase—​“we suffer and we mourn”—​expresses a sentiment that Johnson and Gray would both have understood very well. To return by way of conclusion to The Lives of the Poets, where the authority of Johnson and the popularity of Gray converge, it can be observed that Gray’s poem and Johnson’s criticism both belong to a larger conversation about the nature of elegy that extends across the period covered by this chapter. Although not an elegiac age (as the Victorian era has sometimes been called), this period nonetheless evinces a strong impulse toward the elegiac that exists in tension with the even stronger impulse of the period toward satire, and in intermittent contradiction to the theory of elegy advanced by its literary criticism. Elegy receives its most serious critical discussion during the 1740s, when poets would reinvent the genre by at least nominally reclaiming its classical heritage and by abandoning the couplet in favor of the quatrain. Emerging from this immediate literary context, An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard fixes the new standard of what is meant by elegy, its subject now defined by setting, its form by imitation of what comes to be known as the “Gray stanza.” The particular stanzas of the Elegy isolated for praise by Johnson are prefaced by more general praise: “In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 184). Johnson’s literary judgments of elegy have not generally been affirmed by posterity, as will be obvious to any reader of the lives of Milton and Pope, not to mention those of Smith and Tickell, but in the case of Gray generations of common readers have agreed with Johnson and even “the dogmatism of learning” has conferred upon An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard a special status in the literary history of the genre. Its status is in no way jeopardized, and might even be enhanced, by a more inclusive literary history that it has been the intention of this chapter to propose.

References Clymer, Lorna, “The Funeral Elegy in Early Modern Britain: A Brief History,” in Karen Weisman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 170–​86. Deutsch, Helen, “Elegies in Country Churchyards: The Prospect Poem In and Around the Eighteenth Century,” in Karen Weisman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 187–​205.

49 Wordsworth, Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, lines 57–​60, in Poems, in Two

Volumes and Other Poems, 1800–​1807, ed. Jarred Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983), p. 268.

 

546   James D. Garrison Sacks, Peter M, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985). Schor, Esther, Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994). Shaw, W. David, Elegy and Paradox: Testing the Conventions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994). Weinfield, Henry, The Poet Without a Name: Gray’s “Elegy” and the Problem of History (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1991).

 

Chapter 32

Ball ad Ruth Perry Ballads are very far from being primitive poetry, indeed; they are rather the flower of an art formalized and developed among people whose training has been oral instead of visual. ​ —Gordon Hall Gerould, The Ballad of Tradition

Ballads were still a living form in eighteenth-​century Europe. Sung in fields and on city streets, hawked at fairs and on street corners, they were sold on slips or broadsides throughout the British Isles by peddlers who covered the length and breadth of the country on foot. Ballads were sung by ordinary people in their cottages at night before the fire or in local taverns to entertain of an evening. John Clare’s father knew more than a hundred ballads, and would sing them as requested over a pint in the local pub on a Saturday night.1 Women sang ballads as they spun thread or yarn, felted cloth, or milked cows. People pasted the broadsides up on the walls of their cottages, even when they could not read, for the pleasure of the decorative woodcuts which adorned the top or bottom of the sheet. Youngsters learned ballads from members of their families, their neighbors, and from peddlers and hawkers. They are one of the oldest forms of narratives in English, probably dating from the Middle Ages, a recent relative of the oral epic. They provided stories for the imagination to dwell on long before more modern forms of literary fiction.

Origins How traditional ballads originated is not known. Several editors of ballad collections published in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—​notably Thomas Percy and Walter Scott—​believed that they had been composed originally by professional bards, attached to the great houses of the aristocracy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Percy described

1  John Clare by Himself, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Ashington: Mid Northumberland Arts Group; Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1996), p. 2.

 

548   Ruth Perry them as “an order of men … who subsisted by the arts of poetry and music and sang to the harp verses composed by themselves, or others.” Successors to the much-​admired scalds of Scandinavia, these minstrels were prized by their patrons in the centuries following the Norman conquest.2 According to this understanding, the passing down of ballads in the oral tradition from these exalted beginnings inevitably entailed some degradation. That is, each successive rendering entailed some forgetting and or the substitution of inferior lines or phrases. Cecil Sharp, in the early twentieth century, believed conversely that, although talented individuals may have originally composed these ballads, the reiterated performance of them by generations of singers perfected them by small evolutionary improvements made by each practitioner, the best saved by the next singer and added to, with a concomitant dropping away of the awkward phrases that did not work or were not memorable.3 This argument was joined by Francis Gummere, who believed that ballads were collectively composed by people who shared them over time: “it is the effacing fingers of tradition herself which sweep gradually away a hundred original marks and make, in course of time, a new impersonality, a new objectivity.” He claimed that choral elements, the residue of this process of group composition, were evident in the refrains.4 Louise Pound, on the other hand, resisted the idea that ballad improvisation ever transpired in throngs, or that just because songs survived among the humble and unlettered folk that they originated there. Referring to songs composed by cowboys or lumbermen, she remarked, “The real songs emerging from the unlettered are too crude, ungrammatical, fragmentary, uninteresting to attract any one but the student of folk-​ song.”5 Like Percy in the eighteenth century, she believed that the “finished, well-​constructed narrative” of ballads such as “Edward,” perfect “as regards cohesion, cumulative effect, economy of words, use of suspense and climax,” were works of art composed by poets with skill and experience rather than lucky hits tossed off by medieval peasants (Poetic Origins, p. 115). In constructing a history for the ballad, Gummere refers to the Germanic improvised warrior “boast song,” to monastic records in the early Middle Ages of gratuities paid to minstrels, to stories of knights in the thirteenth century disguised as minstrels, and to the Robin Hood cycle of the fifteenth century. Percy tells of King Alfred masquerading as a minstrel in 878 and infiltrating the Danish camp and serenading the king. He recounted the story of Richard I, returned from the Crusades but detained in an Austrian prison, who, upon hearing his minstrel Blondel singing outside his dungeon, sang an answering verse, thus revealing his whereabouts. These attempts to construct a medieval lineage for the ballad have been variously contested; nonetheless, Francis James Child, the great ballad collector of the nineteenth century, traced references to the Robin Hood songs to the 2  Thomas Percy, The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, ed. George Gilfillan, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1858), vol. i, pp. xxxii–​xxxiv. This formulation, more careful than the author’s earlier assertion in the first edition, represents Percy’s capitulation to Joseph Ritson’s criticism in the preface to Ancient Songs, from the Time of King Henry the Third, to the Revolution (London, 1790 [i.e., 1787]). Ritson claimed that in France there had been minstrels, Provençal troubadours, but that they were French, attached to the Norman court, and not English. 3  The clearest exposition of this position is probably still Cecil Sharp, English Folk-​Song, Some Conclusions (London: Simpkin, 1907). 4  Francis B. Gummere, The Popular Ballad (London: A. Constable, 1907; repr. New York: Dover, 1959), pp. 287, 331–​2. 5  Louise Pound, Poetic Origins of the Ballad (New York: Macmillan, 1920), pp. 91–​2.

 

Ballad   549 thirteenth century as well as the probable origin of Hugh of Lincoln, the ballad “Judas,” and “Sir Patrick Spens.” Others, such as “The Hunting of the Cheviot” and “The Battle of Otterbourn,” he said, referred to historical incidents of the fourteenth century.6 Most of the 305 ballads tabulated by Child, however, were collected in the eighteenth century, whatever their provenance. For this reason, Bertrand Bronson called the eighteenth century “the golden age of balladry.”

Singers and Broadsides However—​and whenever—​they were composed, ballads were kept alive in the sixteenth century by professional, paid singers—​singers hired by guilds and corporations of the City to entertain and by theaters as well as by individual gentry or noblemen. Ballad singers performed at fairs and markets and in pubs and often sold single-​sided sheets, or broadsides, with the texts of their ballads for a half penny. Although an act of 1597 outlawed these “roving” minstrels because they were presumed to be vagrants or beggars, street singers continued to work and to peddle their wares. Sometimes they sang traditional ballads, and sometimes they sang recently composed songs about current events, stories about criminals about to be publicly executed or “libels” about well-​known political figures—​and they carried sheaves of broadsides to sell.7 Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale (1611) and Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614) feature such ballad singers in their catalogs of lowlifes. Broadside ballads and traditional ballads are overlapping categories, but some distinction should be drawn between them. Some traditional ballads, of course, were printed on broadsides or broadsheets and circulated both orally and in print. David Atkinson claims that we owe more than a third of the ballad types tabulated by Child to the “broadsides and garlands” (booklets of song texts) that are “the sources, and often the oldest or sole texts” for these ballads.8 There is no question that traditional ballads went in and out of print alongside their oral transmission over the centuries. But broadside ballads can often be distinguished from traditional ballads by their wordiness, their topicality, and by the fact that they were relatively ephemeral and tended to be forgotten rather than passed along from generation to generation. Some broadside ballads that survive in print do not scan and were probably never sung at all. As Julie Henigan succinctly describes them, the term is used to denote a printed narrative song, composed by professionals of varying credentials—​but often conceived of as “hacks”—​and characterized by such traits as journalistic objectivity and prolix attention to detail, use of the “long measure” quatrain (with an aabb rhyme, employing

6  Anonymous essay on “Ballad Poetry” originally printed in Frederic A. P. Barnard et al. (eds.), Johnson’s New Universal Cyclopædia (New York, 1877), vol. i, pp. 365–​8, and reprinted in Francis James Child (ed.), The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 2nd ed., 5 vols. (Northfield, Minn.: Loomis House Press, 2001), vol. i, pp. xxvii–​xxxiv. 7  Two sources on actual ballad singers from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century are Gerald Porter, “The English Ballad Singer and Hidden History,” Studia Musicologica, 49, nos. 1–​2 (2008), 127–​42; and Andrew C. Rouse, The Remunerated Vernacular Singer (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005). 8  David Atkinson, The English Traditional Ballad (Burlington and Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 19.

 

550   Ruth Perry up to seven stresses), subjective and moralistic narrative voice, realistic and contemporary settings and situations, and a narrative approach that is reportorial rather than dramatic.9

Antiquarians and Collectors Toward the end of the seventeenth century, a few antiquarians and collectors began to interest themselves in the earliest specimens of these printed broadsides, the so-​called “black-​ letter” ballads, printed in heavy gothic typefaces dating back to the Renaissance and beyond to the dawn of printing. Even as they bought up the older sheets, newer “white-​letter” ballads in lighter, cleaner typefaces were being turned out and sold by the thousands. But as literacy spread and the musical tastes of urban dwellers became more sophisticated, ballads were increasingly associated with the rural poor, the old, the illiterate—​the socially marginal. As they disappeared from the daily life of the upwardly mobile classes, they began to interest the literati as early examples of English poetry from an age of oral composition. And so it was that the beginnings of ballad-​collecting and of nascent ballad scholarship coexisted in the eighteenth century with the waning of ballad singing as a popular, familiar, everyday practice among well-​to-​do city dwellers. As living traditions begin to disappear, they reappear, framed, on the walls of museums or printed between the covers of books. Edwin Muir wrote of ballads, “The singing and the harping fled | Into the silent library.”10 The collection that introduced ballads and balladry to poets and collectors alike and instigated the first widespread mania for ballads was, of course, Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). Percy was hardly the first scholar to be interested in ballads; Allan Ramsay’s collections in Scotland and the anonymous, three-​volume Collection of Old Ballads (1723–​5) in England were significantly earlier. Percy’s collection was much indebted to A Collection of Old Ballads.11 But Percy’s volumes with his essay on ancient minstrelsy struck a note that resounded through Europe. Johann Gottfried Herder’s interest in Volkslieder followed his reading of the Reliques; Walter Scott bought these volumes with his first money and read them over and over as a boy; Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, famously, acknowledged their debt to Percy’s collection in their own first book of poetry, The Lyrical Ballads (1798), which inaugurated Romanticism and changed the direction of English poetry forever. James Beattie’s Minstrel, Coleridge’s “Tale of the Ancient Mariner” and “Christabel,” Keats’s “Belle Dame sans Merci,” and Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–​3), not to mention many of his novels and poems—​all can be traced to the influence of Percy’s Reliques and the simple, incantatory diction that it introduced into formal, written poetry.

9 

Julie Henigan, Literacy and Orality in Eighteenth-​Century Irish Song (London and Brookfield, VT: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), p. 152. 10  This line is from Edwin Muir, “Complaint of the Dying Peasantry,” in Collected Poems (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965). 11  See Dianne Dugaw’s pathbreaking article, “The Popular Marketing of ‘Old Ballads’: The Ballad Revival and Eighteenth-​Century Antiquarianism Reconsidered,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 21, no. 1 (Fall 1987), 71–​90, especially pp. 77, 80, 83.

 

Ballad   551 As Percy tells the story, he was visiting his friend, Humphrey Pitt, in Shropshire in 1753 when he saw the maids lighting fires with a sheaf of old papers. Curious about the manuscript, he retrieved what turned out to be pages of an old commonplace book from the mid-​ seventeenth century. It had been owned by an antiquarian lawyer named Thomas Blount, whose library had been sold to an ancestor of Humphrey Pitt. It was a folio of some 500 pages, containing “seventeen romances, twenty-​four metrical histories, about a hundred miscellaneous songs, some broadside ballads, and forty-​five of what Child described as ‘popular ballads.’ ”12 Percy then showed the manuscript to Samuel Johnson, who encouraged him to publish parts of it, and to William Shenstone, who he had hoped would collaborate with him on it. (Shenstone did advise him, but died before the project was finished.) He spent the next five years consulting collections of ballads in libraries of antiquities, both manuscripts and broadsides; he even sifted the Diceys’ broadside ballad warehouse in London for texts.13 Aided by such eminent writers and scholars as Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Gray, David Garrick, Shenstone, Thomas Wharton, James Grainger, Thomas Birch, and Richard Farmer, he sought ballads in the far-​flung corners of the British empire—​including Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and the West Indies. David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, sent him quite a number of Scottish ballads. Percy’s discovery and subsequent researches were timely, for the public appetite for ancient oral poetry had been whetted by James Macpherson’s publication of the Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760). Macpherson’s texts were translations of Gaelic verses collected orally in the Scottish Highlands; he claimed as their source a bard named Ossian who had lived in the third century. The publication of this and the subsequent epic, Fingal, by Ossian aroused great interest in Scottish cultural antiquity from intellectuals in both England and Scotland, especially Hugh Blair in Scotland. In England, a number of men of letters, led by Samuel Johnson, condemned Macpherson’s translation as a forgery, because he could not produce a manuscript source for this oral epic (see ­chapter 14, “The Poet as Fraud”).14 Percy’s Reliques was the answering volley, backed by Johnson’s literary authority, meant to establish English literary precedence and provide an English antidote to the enthusiasm for Macpherson’s discoveries. Percy met with Johnson in London in what he called a “council of war” when he came to negotiate a contract with James Dodsley to publish the Reliques (Groom, Making, p. 33). Ironically—​since Scotland is the source for the majority of our ballads in English—​ Percy “restored the ballad its dignity by placing it in the evolving canon of English literature,” as Nick Groom has written. “He gave minstrels a voice, ballads a pedigree, and English literature a heritage” (Making, p. 104). After the publication of Percy’s Reliques, a number of significant collections of ballad texts were collected and produced in Scotland. David Herd’s riposte to the Reliques was a volume of The Ancient and Modern Scots Songs, Heroic Ballads, &c. (1769), enlarged to two volumes in a second edition of 1776. In Aberdeen, a woman named Anna Gordon was directed by 12 

Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s “Reliques” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 40. This excellent book tells the complete story of Percy’s famous book—​how it was put together, what was omitted, his sources, influences, and effects. 13 Dugaw, “Popular Marketing of ‘Old Ballads,’ ” pp. 80–​4. 14  See Fiona Stafford’s excellent introduction to Howard Gaskill (ed.), The Poems of Ossian and Related Works (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1996), for an account of Macpherson’s translations and the inappropriateness of calling his work a “forgery.”

 

552   Ruth Perry her father, professor of humanity at King’s College, to record the ballads she had learned as a girl from her mother, maternal aunt, their maid, and rural workers on her aunt’s estate. He wanted them written down for his friend, the antiquarian and scholar, William Tytler, who had asked to see them. From there, manuscripts of “her” ballads found their way into the hands of Matthew Lewis, Walter Scott, and Robert Jamieson, all of whom reproduced them in their respective ballad collections. Finally, in the nineteenth century, in the last stages of this golden age of balladry initiated by Percy’s volumes, Peter Buchan and then William Motherwell in Scotland began to seek out rural people reputed to know ballads, and to write them down as they remembered them.15

Francis James Child The ballads Percy published in the Reliques—​like those published by Scott in his Minstrelsy—​ were hardly authentic, untouched specimens from the oral tradition. His editorial “improvements,” particularly on the folio manuscript that he began with, are scandalous by modern editorial standards. He “antiqued” his texts, changing their spelling, punctuation, and lineation. He combined multiple versions of some ballads, presenting the resulting collage as a single text. He silently corrected a word here and there, entirely rewrote lines, omitted and added lines, smoothed and regularized prosody, emended and invented. It may be that without his embellishing hand, these old ballads would never have found favor with a reading public raised on the smooth numbers of Pope and Dryden. Nevertheless, such was his manipulation of his folio find that, in the mid-​nineteenth century, when Francis James Child came to collect what he hoped would be “every known ballad” in the popular tradition (by which he meant ballads that had been actually sung and remembered by people in the oral tradition), he went to great lengths to pry Percy’s marked-​up manuscript from the possession of his heirs in England and have it edited properly by John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnival so that he could rely on what he transcribed from it into The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882–​98).16 Child’s collection of ballads has never been surpassed, although inevitably critics note its omissions and the fact that he died before writing an introduction that set out a definition of “ballad.” Nonetheless, his conception of a ballad came from eighteenth-​century specimens; his earliest copy-​texts tend to be from Percy’s re-​edited Reliques, from the cycle of ballads about Robin Hood collected by Joseph Ritson in the eighteenth century, or else from the 15  Peter Buchan, Scarce Ancient Ballads (Peterhead, 1819); Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland, Hitherto Unpublished with Explanatory Notes (Edinburgh, 1828); William Motherwell (ed.), Minstrelsy: Ancient and Modern (Glasgow, 1827). According to William McCarthy, Motherwell was the first field collector, the first to reproduce the ballads he collected as he found them without “improving” them: William B. McCarthy, “William Motherwell as Field Collector,” Folk Music Journal, 5, no. 3 (1987), 295–​316. 16  Child, the first professor of vernacular English literature at Harvard, made his first attempt at collecting ballads in 1857–​9, his second in 1860, and his final, definitive collection 1882–​98. He added £50 to Furnival’s offer of £100 to Percy’s grandchildren for the right to borrow the manuscript and make a copy of it, so that Furnival could edit it properly. See Sigrid Rieuwerts, “‘The Genuine Ballads of the People’: F. J. Child and the Ballad Cause,” The Journal of Folklore Research, 31, nos. 1–​3 (1994), 1–​27.

 

Ballad   553 ballads of Anna Gordon (later Mrs. Brown), collected by 1800. Child’s essay on ballad poetry in Johnson’s New Universal Cyclopædia spells out what he thought was the essential quality of this species of poetry. Because ballad poetry arose before the division of high from low culture, and expressed a “common human nature” from a society that shared a “community of ideas and feelings,” Child believed that the “fundamental characteristic of popular ballads is … the absence of subjectivity and of self-​consciousness.” These texts, he continued, “Being founded on what is permanent and universal in the heart of man and now by printing put beyond the danger of perishing … will survive the fluctuations of taste, and may from time to time”—​as in England and Germany in the late eighteenth century—​“recall a literature from false and artificial courses to nature and truth.” He went on to speak of ballad poetry across Europe, how Spaniards, Scandinavians, and Germans had best preserved their stock of popular poetry, and what were the most important collections of ballads in these national cultures as well as in the Slavic, Lithuanian, Breton, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, and Turkish languages. Very few ballads have come to light since Child’s collection: M. J. C. Hodgart counted just eight worth considering, of which “The Bitter Withy” and “Still Growing” are best known.17 “The Bitter Withy” is based on a story from the apocryphal gospels, in which the young Jesus misuses his power to best some rich boys who mock him, and his mother switches him with a willow branch, which explains why the willow is the first tree to “perish at the heart” or to die from the inside. “Still Growing,” or “My Bonny Boy is Young,” told from the point of view of a young woman married to a much younger boy, is apparently based on the marriage Sir Robert Innes arranged between his eldest daughter and his young ward, Lord Craighton, in 1631. A playing field at the University of Aberdeen has been pointed out to me as the place where the speaker’s young husband in the ballad could be seen “playing at the ba’.” The contemporary singer Brian Peters sings another ballad, “The Brake of Briars,” also missing from Child’s collection, about a woman who dreams that her brothers have killed her lover and through the dream discovers where his body lies.18

Generic Conventions Like any other literary genre, ballads have a characteristic structure, diction, tone, method, and a propensity for certain themes or preoccupations. They are narratives, stories dealing with complex familial or political situations, compressed into a small compass by their repetitive musical form. The tale is typically quickly told up to the last quarter or so, and then it slows down and expands into a few brightly illuminated scenes, in which the main characters speak and act succinctly, showing the listener what happened in the events of that day by enacting it dramatically in the telling. Dialogue alternates with impersonal third-​person descriptions of actions. The settings for these scenes are described casually—​a garden, the 17 

M. J. C. Hodgart, The Ballads (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1962), pp. 19–​26. Brian Peters sings this ballad on his album Gritstone Serenade. In his note to the song he observes that the story can be found in Boccaccio’s Decameron as “Isabella and the Pot of Basil”; unlike that earlier version, however, the bereaved heroine of “The Brake of Briars” does not cut off and preserve her lover’s head. 18 

 

554   Ruth Perry sea, a castle, a bower—​and the language is plain and simple. As with fairy tales, descriptions are formulaic rather than particular: the maids are fair; they sew silken seams or they milk their father’s cows; their gowns are scarlet or brown; and horses are milk-​white or gray. The main characters, too, lack specificity. They are mothers or lords or sailors or sisters, inhabiting symbolic familial or social positions in the story rather than with individualized personalities. This is not to say that they are symbols: they do not stand for a whole culture, society, or even a class. They are particular people and we are often told their names, but it all happened so long ago that we only have a few details left. Thus there is no character development and no narrative of psychological or emotional response. The narration is all done from the outside, so to speak; we are told what the characters do and say, not what they think or how they feel. This way of telling the story leaves plenty of room for the listener to project him or herself into the tale and to imagine it as it happens. The gaps in the telling, the many things that are left unexplained, are filled in and understood in different ways by different listeners, as is apparent in any group discussion of a ballad after it has just been sung. This structure to the telling—​the compression, the focus on one or two episodes that occur near the end of the story, the general lack of specificity about setting or characters but with an occasional vivid detail, the quick and unexplained movement across great swathes of time (“seven long years”) and space (“he left the sea and came to the land”) to settle into the complications of a single vivid scene—​is like nothing so much as dreaming. The history of the events does not matter, nor how they led to the present situation, but we watch the scene slowly unfold in word and deed before dissolving into the next scene without comment or summary. Gummere called this pattern “leaping and lingering” (The Popular Ballad, p. 91); our attention leaps across time and space from one scene to another and then lingers in a single illuminated moment. Ballad diction, too, is characteristic. Samuel Johnson mocked its simplicity in his parodic lines: I put my hat upon my head and walkt into the Strand And there, I met another man, With his hat in his hand.19

Johnson has captured the impassive tone and plain language here, but not the content. The starkness of the exposition in ballads contrasts with emotionally charged action which it neither qualifies nor competes with. The diction allows a listener to take in what is happening without ambiguity. The impersonal tone characteristic of ballad narration, without moral comment, judgment, or sentimentality, retails the events without pushing or pulling at the listener. Famously descriptive rather than prescriptive, this deadpan exposition makes it bearable to hear the devastating events of the story, even as its directness and simplicity make it impossible to look away or to ignore what is happening. Child theorized that the popular ballad, as he called it, was a “distinct and very important species of poetry,” whose “historical and natural place is anterior to the appearance of the poetry of art.”20 It was an oral verse form, he wrote, which expressed a communal and 19  “Stanzas in Ridicule of the Modern Ballad Stanzas by Dr. Johnson,” National Library of Scotland, Acc 4796/​89r. 20  Child, “Ballad Poetry,” in English and Scottish Popular Ballads, vol. i, p. xxvii.

 

Ballad   555 national spirit and was shared by a society not yet divided “by political organization and book-​culture into markedly distinct classes.” Unlike the poetry of art, it exhibited the “mind and heart of the people as an individual” rather than the subjectivity or self-​awareness of any one person. But as book culture increased class division, and the literate classes increasingly looked for entertainment from printed matter, this popular poetry was no longer “relished” by all, but was “abandoned to an uncultivated or not over-​cultivated class.” This is how Child explains how the laboring classes came to be the custodians of ballad literature, these artifacts that were left over from a time when they were the national literature of the whole society. Much of what is distinctive about ballads, of course, comes from the fact of their being oral poetry, a category much discussed and debated in the eighteenth century. Stock epithets and adjectives—​“grass-​green sleeve” or “milk-​white steed”—​were part of a ballad singer’s arsenal, to be drawn upon to fill out a line whenever a description was called for. They were more easily remembered than more idiosyncratic descriptions, and were easily slotted into a line to fill out the rhythm or give a rhyme. Familiar to the listener, these formulaic epithets and descriptions using poetic and often archaic words, signal an imaginative, fairytale realm into which to project one’s own fantasies and ascriptions. Moreover, familiar phrases do not distract from the story. As with these lines showing time passing—​“He had not gone a year a year | A year but barely three”—​the listener can rest in the customary phrase and concentrate on what is happening in the plot. These common phrases also function—​in David Atkinson’s words—​as a “system of connotation and self-​reference”; that is, they are cues that tell the listener what is coming.21 When a character tells his mother to “make my bed long and narrow,” you know that he is going to die on the morrow. And when the young woman has “kilted her kirtle a little aboon her knee,” or tucked up her skirts, it means that she is about to do something significant, and connotes her energy and determination. And when a man takes a woman “by the milk-​white hand,” you can be sure that next he will lay her on the mossy bank and “speir nae for her leave.” These phrases carry with them layers of feeling from other song texts in the repertoire of traditional ballads, which intensifies their meaning and resonance. Commonplaces, as these formulaic phrases are sometimes called, are only one kind of recurring pattern which is a hallmark of oral verse. There is a great deal of parallelism, both of speech and of action, in these narratives. Characters say they are going to do something in one verse, and then in the next verse they do it—​in exactly the same phrases—​which then feels like a kind of internal proof or validation. Or a character thinks he sees his sister coming and then his brother coming and then his father coming and so on. Repetition of this sort, in which every time the phrase is repeated a new detail is added so that the narrative proceeds in increments, has been called “incremental repetition,” and is very common in ballad poetry.22 The incantatory repetition builds up tension and holds the listener’s attention while pacing the story. The repetition also ensures that the listener knows where she is in the oral narrative—​since it is not possible to go back and check for details, as in a printed narrative. There have been debates as to how foundational this feature is to the ballad—​whether it is an essential hallmark of the genre or simply one of several characteristic features.

21 Atkinson, The Traditional English Ballad, p. 5 22 

Gummere even argued that incremental repetition is the sine qua non of ballad verse.

 

556   Ruth Perry Refrains are another kind of repetition; these give listeners a chance to join in the song as well as giving the singer a breather, a little space to remember what comes next. The refrain often comments on the action—​sometimes ironically, sometimes poignantly, sometimes simply reinforcing the mood. Refrains can also be nonsense syllables, jumbled, misheard words, or else vocables taken from “mouth music,” the folk music that people sang to accompany dancing when they had no instruments. Three more elements of oral poetry—​alliteration, assonance, and rhyme—are also to be found in most ballads. Aides-​memoires in the oral transmission of long texts, almost every line has repeated sounds that please the ear and help the memory. Frequent alliteration might also be the mark of an older style, according to Sir Walter Scott. He wrote in his “Introductory Remarks on Popular Poetry” that the “passion for alliteration, which formed a rule of the Saxon poetry, was also retained in the Scottish poems of a more elevated character.”23 There is much internal rhyme in ballad stanzas, as well as the end rhymes to be found usually at the end of the second and fourth lines in a quatrain or at the end of each line in a couplet. Often these end rhymes survive multiple variations; that is, even when the wording of a line changes over time with improvisation, the rhyme scheme is retained because those end words are more easily remembered and hold the rest of the line in place in memory. The standard ballad stanza is either understood to be a couplet in iambic pentameter with seven stresses in each line, or a quatrain with four stresses in the first and third lines and three stresses in the second and fourth lines. This is the common-​measure quatrain, the standard prosody of hymn texts. In ballads, words are sometimes wrenched out of their spoken rhythm in order to fit them to the musical line. The melody of the ballad often smooths over the irregularities in prosody, which is one reason why ballads are often more compelling when sung than they are on the page as poetry.

Oral Transmission and Performance The memorization or oral transmission of ballads has been subject to debate in ballad studies. In trying to account for the proliferation of variants, and even multiple versions produced by a single singer, scholars have assumed either that the memorization process was faulty or that conscious “re-​creation” was at work. Folklorists have asked whether variation occurs because singers memorize their ballads imperfectly or whether they re-​create their ballads anew each time they sing them by an oral formulaic method, like that of the “singers of tales” of Yugoslavia described by Albert Lord.24 In this “oral formulaic” method, a combination of memory and oral composition, the narrative sequence of verses and some of the ending rhyme words are remembered; but the singer—​who is an oral poet of sorts—​is not 23  Sir Walter Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, ed. Thomas Henderson, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1902), vol. i, p. 20. 24  Bertrand Bronson, “Mrs. Brown and the Ballad,” in The Ballad as Song (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1969), pp. 64–​78; David Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk (East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 1997), pp. 51–​73; Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960).

 

Ballad   557 fixated on particular words, as are literate poets who insist on one correct sequence of words for their poems. The wording of a line might vary quite a bit from time to time, as the singer draws on a more or less conventional stock of phrases and images, improvising as she goes along. In other words, the story is an idea that can be spun out of a variety of materials and does not rely on a particular memorized text. The specific language is ephemeral, although the essence of the tale is not. Despite the fact that early collectors such as Percy and Herd collected only ballad texts, melody is essential to the form. No ballad is a ballad unless it is sung. The music carries the text along, both in the sense that the music helps the singer remember the words, but also insofar as it provides a firm foundation undergirding and supporting the long and often repetitious story. These lovely tunes have their own appeal and run in the mind long after the ballad has ended. Like other forms of repetition, they pace the tale, permitting listeners to take in and process what they have just heard. The contours of the melody often accentuate the dramatic structure of the text, with pauses at climactic moments and the final tonic resolution at the end of each verse coinciding with intermediate stopping places in the text. The musical phrase shapes what the listener takes in and apprehends at each step, controlling understanding. Not enough has been done to theorize the effect of the music on ballad poetry for, like a catalyst on a chemical compound, it dramatically changes the literary effect of the verses. The melody carries the mood of the ballad; singers often swap around tunes, using one they think better fits the text as they become more familiar with it rather than the tune they first heard with it. These tunes, powerful enough to be sung without accompaniment, are generally based on modal rather than chromatic scales, similar to the modal scales of Gregorian plainsong, which gives them a haunting and antiquated quality. It has been said that these melodies are older than the words they carry—​because singers tend to modernize the words they sing, but do not always modernize the melodies in the same way unless they accompany themselves on a instrument such as the guitar, which forces the modal scale of a song into a minor or major scale.25 These modal and often pentatonic melodies, intensified by their narrow compass, have a stark simplicity compared with the more elaborate and decorative lyric melodies of English or Scottish songs. Made to carry complex narratives, they are strong, simple, and often hypnotic. It has been said that the highly condensed literary form of a ballad comes from the necessity of fitting the words to its melody—​eliminating the non-​essentials and paring it back to its skeletal form. The melody also accentuates the meter of the verse, and words that do not look on the page as if they will scan can be sung perfectly fluidly by a practiced ballad singer, revealing internal rhymes and assonance by the shape and rhythm of the melody. The repeated melody can also make an unusual word or detail stand out against the lullingly familiar tune when it comes and gives it more dramatic force than it has on the page. Finally, the sense of inevitability of fate, or the working out of destiny that pervades these texts with their incremental repetitions is reinforced by hearing the same melody moving in the same way over and over.

25  The chordal structure of a guitar forces the flatted 7th note of the Mixolydian scale up a half tone or the flatted 3rd note of the Dorian scale to a whole step, thus changing the quality of the melody.

 

558   Ruth Perry

Ballad Subjects The subjects of ballads include tales of otherworldly domains of fairyland and fairies, revenants returned from the dead to comfort or chide the living and other supernatural manifestations; there are ballads retailing clever tricks or wit-​combat; ballads celebrating feats of heroism and recording bloody battles between feuding lairds or between the English and the Scots; there are ballads of hunting and poaching and trespassing; there are romantic ballads telling stories of true or fickle love, interfering families, jealousy, abduction, and revenge. Many ballads on historical subjects can be traced to events occurring in the century between 1550 and 1650 (Hodgart, The Ballads, p. 70). The more than three dozen Robin Hood ballads can be traced to manuscripts and broadsides of the sixteenth century. A few ballads are descended from Arthurian legends; a few are comic; a few are on Christian subjects. There are a number of ballads on the same subjects as medieval romances such as “Hind Horn,” “Thomas Rhymer,” and “Sir Lionel.” W. Edson Richmond believed that ballads might be decayed versions of romances or epics.26 Some scenes in “Hind Horn,” for example, are recognizeable from the Odyssey, as when Hind Horn returning from the sea exchanges clothes with a beggar man, as Odysseus did with Eumaeus, and goes forth disguised. Of the heroic ballads, “The Hunting of the Cheviot” or “Chevy Chase” is undoubtedly the most famous.27 Sir Philip Sidney lauded it in his Defense of Poesy, and Ben Jonson is said to have remarked that he had rather written this ballad than all of his other works. Joseph Addison called it “the favourite Ballad of the common people of England,” and wrote several essays praising it for The Spectator in 1711, the first literary treatment of a ballad in English.28 A “border ballad,” it recounts a battle between the forces of Percy, the Earl of Northumberland, and those of Douglas, a Scottish earl, following Percy’s invasion of Douglas’s territory ostensibly to hunt. The incidents in the ballad bear some resemblance to incidents from the fifteenth and possibly the fourteenth centuries; the English and Scots were traditional rivals, and there are several different historic battles that it could be referring to. Told from the English point of view, the ballad recounts the bravery of men on both sides, the admiration of the leaders for one another, and the appreciation of their respective monarchs. But the underlying message of this ballad is the terrible waste of lives, the senseless killing of men on both sides, to satisfy the rivalry of their feudal lords; the last line calls out for “foule debate twixt noble men to ceaze.” Addison’s essays compare the “majestick Simplicity” of the poetry to the epic numbers of Homer or Virgil. Other famous ballads of

26  W. Edson Richmond, “The Development of the Popular Ballad: A New Theory,” Genre, 3 (June 1970), 198–​204. 27  Francis James Child gives it the name “The Hunting of the Cheviot,” and lists it as no. 162 in his collection. 28 See Spectators 70 and 74, in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), vol. i, pp. 297–​303, 315–​22. For more of the history of this ballad, see my “War and the Media in Border Minstrelsy: The Ballad of Chevy Chase,” in Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini (eds.), Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500–​1800 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 251–​70.

 

Ballad   559 heroism are “Sir Patrick Spens,” about a doomed sea voyage taken at the order of the king in the wrong season of the year, and “Johnny Armstrong,” about a powerful Scots clan leader whose reiving raids across the border into England were an embarrassment to the Scottish king. The king promised Johnny Armstrong safe conduct if he came to court to meet with him; Armstrong took it as a great honor to be so summoned, but when he arrived he and his men were captured and killed. “Tam Lin” and “Thomas Rhymer” are well-​known ballads of fairies and magic. In “Tam Lin,” a young woman (often named Janet) is warned not to go into the woods of Carterhaugh, but she disregards the warning and, when she is there, plucks a rose. She meets Tam Lin, who asks her what she is doing there, and the next thing we know she is pregnant—​for after she has been in her father’s hall for a while she becomes as “green as ony glass.” She returns to Carterhaugh—​in some versions to seek for an abortifacient, in others just to find Tam Lin again—​and he reveals to her that he has been stolen by the fairies and bewitched but that she can save him. He tells her that the next night he will ride by on a milk-​white steed, and that she must pull him off and throw her cloak over him and hold him tight as he turns into a greyhound, a red hot iron, a lion, a snake, an adder, and finally a naked man. Then she must dip him first in milk and then in water, and he will again become a mortal man—​a mate for her, and a father for her child. All of this comes to pass, just as he told her it would. And in the last verses, the queen of the fairies speaks out and says that, if she had known a lady would have “borrowede” Tam Lin, she would have taken away his gray eyes and replaced them with wooden ones, and she would have taken out his heart of flesh and put in a heart of stone. “Thomas Rhymer” is also about a mortal man taken off to Elfland by the queen of the fairies for seven years, from whence comes his gift of prophesy and in some versions, his gift for poetry and song. Grim betrayals within families furnish another theme of these ballads. In “The Cruel Brother” a young woman asks for permission to marry from each of her family members except her brother, who then stabs her. In “Twa Sisters,” a jealous elder sister pushes her younger sister into a river to drown her; in some variants, a harp or a fiddle is made of her breastbone and it plays a song of its own accord, exposing the murderer. Two revenant infants come back to accuse their unwed mother who killed them at birth in “The Cruel Mother.” In “Andrew Lammie or the trumpeter of Fyvie,” a young woman—​the Mill o’ Tifty’s Annie—​will not renounce her love for the trumpeter of Fyvie castle, and so her parents beat her, her brother breaks her back, and she dies. There are ballads of true love and fickle love: “Little Musgrave,” “Lord Thomas and the Brown Girl,” “Barbara Allen,” “Lady Elsbeth,” “The Flower of Northumberland,” and “Lord Bateman.” “The Flower of Northumberland” tells of a young Englishwoman who is persuaded to free a Scottish prisoner from her father’s jail and to flee with him across the border. He then spurns her, telling her he is already married, and abandons her. After much difficulty (different variations give different accounts of it) she returns home. Her father castigates her but her mother protects her and tells her she is not the first woman to be tricked by a Scotsman. “Lord Bateman” also begins with a young woman—​this time a Turkish lady—​ freeing her father’s prisoner. They vow that for seven years they will wed no other—​and he sails away. At the end of seven years she crosses the ocean to find him, just as he is on the verge of marrying another. But when the “proud porter” announces this fair visitor and he

 

560   Ruth Perry sees that his “Sophia” has crossed the sea for him, he sends home the almost bride and marries his Turkish lady. Ballads, too, migrate geographically and wherever they take hold they develop different features just as birds or animals that start from the same ancestor evolve different features in different environments. “Twa Sisters,” for example, has three distinct and well-​developed strains: the Scandinavian, Anglo-​Scots, and American traditions.29 The Scandinavian variants are much more punitive: the elder sister is found out and her painful punishment is triumphantly spelled out. In British versions, the status of the family, the fact that they are the king’s daughters, is emphasized. In American versions of this ballad, the supernatural elements have dropped away; no instrument made of some part of the dead girl—​her breastbone, her finger bones—​that plays a song all by itself revealing the identity of the murderer occurs, as in the Scandinavian and British variants. It is often said of American versions of British ballads that the supernatural elements disappear or are rationalized, leaving little or no magic behind, although there are plenty of exceptions to this rule. Another feature of Americanized British ballads is the way hierarchical references to lords and ladies are often replaced by more democratic references to ordinary men and women, place names are localized, and the drama is sometimes moralized or sentimentalized.30 According to David Atkinson, two other generalizations about national differences hold true: Scottish ballads retain a stronger sense of the “immediate physical presence of the otherworld,” whereas “ballads recounting Christian legends seem to be much more widespread in England” (English Traditional Ballad, p. 242).

Vernacular Art Another feature of the ballad genre is how the tone often changes in the final verses of traditional ballads. The deadpan quality of narration is replaced by more personal tones of voice, whether mocking, bold, teasing, triumphant, or knowing. The singer suddenly steps out of the dramatic frame and speaks directly to the listener. “The bridegroom thought he had the bonny bride wed | But Hind Horn took the bride to his bed.” It is sung with a wink and a nod. The tone returns the audience to their everyday lives; it lets them down gently and guides their re-​entry into ordinary life. These final verses also help the singer to break the spell, for it is difficult to react normally for a while after delivering a dramatic ballad. As Willa Muir has observed, “The spoken word, or the sung word, seems to penetrate more immediately, more directly, into the underworld of feeling than the word looked at on a printed page.”31 These ballads are literally enthralling, and their final verses often seem designed to break the enchantment.

29  Paul G. Brewster, “The Two Sisters,” FF Communications, 62, no. 147 (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia/​Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1953), pp. 3–​83. 30  Tristram P. Coffin, The British Traditional Ballad in North America, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1963), pp. 12–​16. Coffin warns against most such generalizations, pointing out the wide range of variation in the American versions of these ballads and the exceptions to every generalization. 31  Willa Muir, Living with Ballads (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), p. 33.

 

Ballad   561 Neither the literary qualities of individual ballads nor their myriad narrative lines have been adequately analyzed by literary theorists, partly because they have never been deemed adequately “important” as poetry to be treated formally, and also because they occur in multiple versions rather than a single text, making them difficult to approach from a traditional formalist point of view. In the decades following Child’s compilation of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, literary historians traced the lineage of a few of the better-​known ballads and much of the early ballad scholarship comes from this period.32 In the second half of the twentieth century, folklore scholars have produced studies of the repertoires of a few tradition-​bearers.33 But ballad texts, while acknowledged to be an important part of the cultural landscape in the eighteenth century, have remained largely ignored by contemporary eighteenth-​century scholars because their manifestations are scattered and intermittent, their origins uncertain, and because literary critics of the period ignored them as vulgar and ephemeral—​rather like trashy comic books in the later twentieth century. Ballads were denounced in the same terms as novels were a generation later, because they filled the mind with vicarious experience not suitable for respectable youth.34 But this vast untapped reservoir of vernacular art has surprising power. The stories are compelling and their narratives unfold in such a way that images come unbidden to the mind, one after another, when one hears a ballad sung. The imagination then lingers on these images and their sequence long after the ballad is finished. The oral texture of the narration makes many of the lines memorable. Whether composed in the sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth centuries, this popular literature exerted significant influence on large parts of the population in eighteenth-​century Britain. Ballads were sung by the literate and the illiterate, memorized and read, passed around, bought and sold in enormous numbers. Many writers of the time recognized the power of the form. The ballad was imitated by celebrated authors such as Burns and Goldsmith who wrote in the idiom they had heard all their lives. Their work then entered the tradition and enriched the stream from whence it came. Men like Scott and Wordsworth, whose first experience of reading came from reading ballads, whose imaginations had been shaped by ballads, took a leaf from that old tradition in their own literary productions. By changing the conception of what was “literary,” they shifted the course of literary history, incorporating elements from the ballad tradition into the new direction. Ballads are thus a meaningful source of our poetic traditions, a significant stratum in our literary heritage. They are also an important part of our cultural commons, inherited from an unspecified past, belonging to everyone, available to us as they were to our forebears, enchanting stories that help us think about who—​and what—​we are.

32 

Walter R. Nelles, “The Ballad of Hind Horn,” Journal of American Folklore, 22, no. 83 (Jan.–​March 1909), 42–​62; Walter Morris Hart, “Professor Child and the Ballad,” PMLA, 21, no. 4 (1906), 755–​807. An exception is the work of Emily Lyle on “Tam Lin,” “Thomas Rhymer,” and “King Orpheus,” gathered conveniently into one volume called Fairies and Folk (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2007). 33  See, for example, David Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), on the repertoire of Anna Gordon (Mrs. Brown), and William B. McCarthy, The Ballad Matrix: Personality, Milieu, and the Oral Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1990), on the repertoire of Agnes Lyle. 34  Arthur Bedford, The Great Abuse of Musick (London, 1711). Thanks to Julie Henigan for this reference.

 

562   Ruth Perry

References Anderson, Flemming, Commonplace and Creativity: The Role of Formulaic Diction in AngloScottish Traditional Balladry, University Studies from the Medieval Centre, vol. i (Odense: Odense Univ. Press, 1985). Atkinson, David, The Anglo- Scottish Ballad and its Imaginary Contexts (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2014). Atkinson, David, and Steve Roud (eds.), Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America: The Interface between Print and Oral Traditions (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2014). Bronson, Bertrand Harris, The Ballad as Song (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1969). Brown, Mary Ellen, Child’s Unfinished Masterpiece: The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Champaign: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2011). Friedman, Albert, The Ballad Revival (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961). Gammon, Vic, Desire, Drink and Death in English Folk and Vernacular Song, 1600–1900 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). Renwick, Roger DeV., English Folk Poetry: Structure and Meaning (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1980). Toelken, Barre, Morning Dew and Roses: Nuance, Metaphor, and Meaning in Folksong (Champaign: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1995).

 

Chapter 33

Devotional  P oet ry Emma Mason For SOUND is propagated in the spirit and in all directions. —​Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno Repeat the sounding joy. —​Isaac Watts, “Joy to the World” Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound) —​John Newton, Hymn 411

Critics perennially return to the affective content of eighteenth-​century poetry: sensibility, sentimentality, the “affections,” and the “passions” dominate discussion of the way feeling functions in and through form. In her book on reading eighteenth-​century poetry, Patricia Meyer Spacks offers a series of chapters on “matters of feeling,” drawing attention to the “body of passionate poetry” that flourishes throughout the period. Beginning with Isaac Watts’s intensely emotive hymns, Spacks argues that the feeling these poems assert is always hidden in the “background of its representation,” serving to generate a response from the reader rather than convey the “speaker’s feeling for its own sake.”2 This chapter considers what kind of affective response eighteenth-​century devotional poetry invites from the reader, a figure that the text assumes to be a committed believer, an active worshiper, and a practicing Christian. Poems that express a feeling and experience of devotion deliberately and self-​consciously ask readers to feel and repeat their faith through meter and

1  Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno (1759–​63), B 226, in The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, ed. Marcus Walsh and Karina Williamson, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), vol. i, p. 50; Isaac Watts, “Psalm XCVIII. Second Part. The Messiah’s Coming and Kingdom,” in The Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, And apply’d to the Christian State and Worship (London: J. Clark, R. Ford, and R. Cruttenden, 1719), p. 253; John Newton, “Amazing Grace,” in John Newton and William Cowper, Olney Hymns, in Three Books (London: T. Wilkins, 1783), p. 48. 2  Patricia Meyer Spacks, Reading Eighteenth-​Century Poetry (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009), pp. 20–​1.

 

564   Emma Mason rhythm: the sound the poem makes, measured through prosody, forges a path to God. The subject of how this devotional sound is transmitted and received is the subject of my discussion here. I explore the relationship between devotion and poetry, sound and faith, to argue for eighteenth-​century devotional poetry as a genre of affective listening able to tune the believer to God’s presence and love. Three poems constitute the focal points of the chapter—​ Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno (1759–​63), Isaac Watts’s “Joy to the World” (1719), and John Newton’s “Amazing Grace” (1779)—​all texts that incarnate God’s voice as happy, joyous, and loving. After outlining the aural significance of devotional poetry, I turn to prosody, the Psalms and the hymn as contexts in which to explore an auditory divine sensibility.

Devotional Sound Hymnody, biblical paraphrase, and religious lyric alike all claim to summon a “sound” that is sweet, joyful, and all-​reaching—​both prosodic, created through its often rhythmic and easily remembered song-​like form, and also experiential, enabling engagement with God through the conjuring of immaterial moments of grace, the “spirit,” and divine love. For the modern reader, the “sound” of devotional poetry can feel didactic and rigid, theatrical and overplayed, a far cry from the contemporary sense of the devotional as mellifluousness and ebullient; for the eighteenth-​century believer, that sound embodied and yielded God’s love. As William Law argued, listening to and singing out refrains of Scripture “create a sense of delight in God, they awaken holy desires, they teach you how to ask, and they prevail with God to give. They kindle a holy flame, they turn your heart into an altar, your prayers into incense, and carry them as a sweet-​smelling savour to the throne of grace.”3 Law suggests that “devotional” words, consecrated as such by the composer or speaker, allow the immateriality of the spirit to effect a material impact on the believer’s body: the heart is not a symbol of the altar here, it is an altar; sung praise is not an overflow of feeling, it is material feeling, raised up to God like a trail of incense. If Romantic verse conceives of poetry as the trigger for an emotional response that allows the reader to reflect on the self and its relation to the world, pre-​Romantic devotional poetry emits an impassioned sound internalized by the believer as faith. Devotional words seem always to sound “sweet” to eighteenth-​century believers because they engender a sensory experience of joy, grace, and love, reverberating through them up to God and radiating outward through space. The sound of confident belief had the ability to reach into the universe and measure the immeasurable, chorused by a choir of planets and stars “For ever singing, as they shine, | ‘The Hand that made us is Divine.’ ”4 For the believer, this sound was rational and joyous, as well as affective and experiential. As Paul declares in his second epistle to Timothy, the believer must courageously turn toward God and refuse to be “ashamed of the testimony of our Lord … Hold fast the form of sound words, which thou hast heard of me, in faith and love which is in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 1:8, 13).5 Sound words at 3 

William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 168. Joseph Addison, “Hymn: The Spacious Firmament on High,” in Spectator 465, in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), vol. iv, p. 145. 5  All biblical quotations are from the King James Version. 4 

 

Devotional Poetry   565 once expound and voice the believer’s faith in and love for God. For Paul, the believer’s relationship to God should be rationally thought through in a “sound” or reasonable way, and fine-​tuned by listening to the words of Jesus and his followers as recorded in Scripture. At the same time, Paul understands this relationship as one that champions the spirit as well as the letter: while faith should be “sound,” it should also be intuited as “sound,” listened to as an aural guide heard within the heart. No wonder Christopher Smart, entranced by language games, rhythm, and cadence, valued Paul as a figure willing to define Christianity as a belief system based on sensory perception and reason, letter and spirit. So too does Harriet Guest draw on Paul for the title of her study, A Form of Sound Words: The Religious Poetry of Christopher Smart (1989). For Guest, Smart is a poet who makes sense only when understood as a man of sound mind, reasoning, writing, and doctrine, and not an eccentric who used religion as a justification for strangeness. And yet as a firmly Christian poet, whose poetry reads like biblical paraphrase, Smart can alienate modern secular readers unfamiliar with the devotional tradition from which he emerged. Smart precedes that other assumed religious eccentric, William Blake, who bewildered readers with prophecies like Milton: A Poem (1804–​10) and Jerusalem: Emanation of the Great Albion (1804–​20) as Smart did with Jubilate Agno. Blake, however, granted access to his complexity through art: the engravings that accompany his texts engender a religious poetics dependent on the visual. Smart, by contrast, writes a religious poetics dependent on sound: his are “sound words” in multiple ways, communicating as they do a faith position through the lyrical euphoria of hymns, songs, and psalm translations. This reliance on the sound of words to translate the divine into a human language is, as John Dennis argued, borrowed from the Bible, endlessly heard, translated, and reworked throughout the eighteenth century. The very writing of English poetry was also increasingly considered alongside a developing tradition of critical prosody founded on carefully articulating and listening to words and rhythms in a way that exemplified prayerful attention to God. As Smart declares in Jubilate Agno, the believer must “attend unto” the Lord’s “commandments” by convincing him to “hear my prayer” by praying with a voice both “from the body and the spirit” and which “is a body and a spirit.”6 In being constituted of body and spirit, Smart’s poetic voice speaks directly to Paul’s understanding of the contingent relationship between the letter and spirit. While Paul states that the “letter killeth” and the “spirit giveth life” (2 Cor. 3:6), he does so within a letter: his epistolary form enables expression. Eighteenth-​century devotional poets were so aware of this that the form in which they chose to write says as much about their faith and beliefs as the content of their poems. As Guest argues: “Religious truths are a part of the fabric of eighteenth-​century life; they do not, in themselves, surprise, delight, or instruct, and their treatment in poetry therefore gives an exceptional prominence to their presentation and interpretation, the manner of their delivery.”7 I am less concerned here with texts that either inscribe or contest religious “truths” in their poetry—​Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–​4) or Moral Epistles (1731–​5), for example, or Thomson’s Seasons (1726–​46), or Johnson’s satiric commentaries—​than with texts that voice devotion, that is, a love of God.

6 

Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno, D 41, B 231, in Poetical Works, vol. i, pp. 111, 51. Harriet Guest, A Form of Sound Words: The Religious Poetry of Christopher Smart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 9–​10. 7 

 

566   Emma Mason Devotional poetry connotes a category of verse more concerned with the affective content of religion than with its dogmatic, doctrinal, or cultural grounds. As such, it tends toward the expression, variously meditative, reflective, or rhapsodic, of the believer’s love of God, carefully unfolded before the reader as a constant, habitual, and repeated act. As Anna Barbauld argued in Thoughts on the Devotional Taste (1775), religion “is a habit, and like all other habits, of slow growth, and gaining strength only by repeated exertions,” an “affair of sentiment and feeling,” and so “properly called Devotion.”8 The genre was popular, too: the Presbyterian theologian Samuel Miller wrote that Britain’s entire poetic output of this period was “distinguished by the Devotional poetry which it produced,” a prominence that was in part dependent on its shared emotional relationship with the sublime.9 Dennis even argued that the sublime borrowed its very intensity from Christian ecstasy, a model of feeling that shaped the violent rush of emotion associated with sublimity and enthusiasm. Secured within the formal frame of the poem, the devotional signified both enthusiastic and ethical piety, its linguistic expression a consecration of faith. For Dennis, poetry excites passion to “satisfie and improve, to delight and reform” the believer: poetic language was most suited to religion, religion best expressed through poetry, and so poetry “the worthiest Language of Religion.”10

“Hear Him” The question of how believers hear the word of God shapes the history of devotional poetry. The complexity of parallelism and poetic sound patterns that mark the Hebrew Bible are matched by the insistence of all translations of the Bible that the believer listen. God’s appearance to the disciples in the Gospels, for example, is signified through a booming voice that reverberates from a cloud: “This is my beloved Son: hear him” (Luke 9:35). There are countless commands to pay attention to the possibility of hearing God, climaxing in Revelation’s “He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith” (Rev. 3:6). The sound of God’s voice was seen as well as heard in the Bible. One of the earliest references to synesthetic listening in the Old Testament appears in Exodus, wherein the Hebrew version describes God’s encounter with Moses witnessed by a crowd who see sound: “And all the people saw the sounds of the thundering,” included in the King James as “And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they removed, and stood afar off ” (Exodus 20:18). Commenting on this passage, John Wesley reminded his reader that “God has many ways of speaking to the children of men by his spirit, conscience, providences,” implying that listening was an act, not just of

8  Anna Barbauld, Devotional Pieces, Compiled from the Psalms and the Book of Job: To Which Are Prefixed, Thoughts on the Devotional Taste, on Sects, and on Establishments (London, 1775), in William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (eds.), Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2002), pp. 209–​34, at p. 211. 9  Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century in Two Volumes: Containing a Sketch of the Revolutions and Improvements in Science, Arts, and Literature During that Period, 2 vols. (New York, 1803), vol. ii, pp. 194–​5. 10  John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (London: George Straban, 1704), pp. 8, 23.

 

Devotional Poetry   567 the senses, but of faith.11 Literary critics and historians alike have traced a specific relationship between listening and religion in the eighteenth century, one that predates modernity’s obsession with the ocular. Leigh Eric Schmidt, for example, maps a history of hearing in the American Enlightenment to show how Christians of various denominations preserved an authentic discipline of hearing to counter acoustic illusions like ventriloquism or the auditory tricks of spiritualism. The reliance on a printed as well as an oral tradition of poetry to teach and train the believing ear suggests that aurality was not simply linked with religion against an emergent modern visual culture. Eighteenth-​century poetry in particular called attention to the sound of verse through regular meter, precise rhyme schemes, linguistic artifice, and a dependence on the couplet to encourage memorization. This in turn allowed for ready recitation, in the pulpit, field, or chapel, as well as a return to the page in order to learn a poem’s diction and intonation. As Wendy Roberts argues: “The sound of poetry became so important that performing it correctly could entail artificial elocution—​observing elisions and contractions in one’s pronunciation or fully rhyming a slant rhyme depending upon one’s elocutionary theory.”12 Prosodists and theologians alike used a meticulous concern for sound as the basis of a return to an order and regularity upset by the previous century’s forays into the possibility that the world was a random and confused place ruled by blind chance. Prosody thus offered a way to organize and classify the world as God had done during the Creation. As Charles Gildon argued in The Complete Art of Poetry (1718): “the Particles and Seeds of Light in the Primocal Chaos strugled [sic] in vain to exert their true Lustre, till Matter was by Art Divine brought into order, and this noble Poem of the Universe compleated in Number and Figures, by the Almighty Poet or Maker.”13 For Smart, the experience of rejoicing in the auditory resonances of words granted him access to the divine, as he writes in his paraphrase of Psalm 98: “For SOUND is propagated in the spirit and in all directions,” the voice the completion of the human, while “all whispers and unmusical sounds in general are of the Adversary.” For Smart, rhythmic, measured sound wins out over irregular, sibilant sound because the former is closer to his understanding of God: the “hiss,” he wrote, is “God’s denunciation of death,” while the “clapping of the hands” is the “natural action of a man on the descent of the glory of God.”14 Dennis made a similar argument, declaring that poetry was pedagogically useful not only because of its capacity for softening the promotion of virtue, morals, and laws, but also because it “restored” the reader “to Paradise,” allowing him or her to hear “Immortal Beings. Transported, he beholds the Gods ascending and descending, and every Passion, in its Turn, is charm’d, while his Reason is supremely satisfied” (Critical Works, vol. i, pp. 257, 264.). Devotional poetry was dependent on regularity, not to beat ideas into the reader, then, but to create a firm foundation from which anyone could be lifted toward religious joy. This was a particular concern of Robert Lowth in his De sacra poesi Hebraeorum (1753), delivered in Oxford between 1741 and 1750, and translated as Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the 11  John Wesley, “Exodus 20,” in Wesley’s Notes on the Bible [1754–​65] (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2010), p. 762. 12  Wendy Raphael Roberts, “Demand My Voice: Hearing God in Eighteenth-​Century American Poetry,” Early American Literature, 45, no. 1 (2010), 119–​44, at p. 126. 13  Charles Gildon, The Complete Art of Poetry: In Six Parts, 2 vols. (London, 1718), vol. i, p. 95. 14 Smart, Jubilate Agno, B 228, B 231, B 231, B 233, in Poetical Works, vol. i, pp. 50–​1.

 

568   Emma Mason Hebrews in 1787. For Lowth, the poetry of the Bible had the power to affect body and imagination: modest, simple, and readily set to music, Hebrew poetry preserved religious truth by “captivating the ear, … directing perception to the minutest circumstances, and … assisting the memory in the retention of them.” The Greek language is “copious, flowing”—​hissing, Smart might say—​and the Hebrew language is “simple above every other,” its meters “grave, temperate; less adapted to fluency than dignity and force.”15 This force, Lowth argues, derives from the precision of biblical diction, marked by a methodic “labour and accuracy” to enable memorization. While “prose composition” is “loose or free, diffused with no respect to rule; like a wild tree, luxuriant on every side in its leaves and branches,” metrical language is “cut and pruned on every side into sentences, like branches, and distributed into a certain form and order; as vines, which the vine-​dresser corrects with his pruning knife, and adjusts into form.” An Old Testament image of the Jewish nation, the vine is also a symbol of Jesus, “the true vine” tended by God the gardener: “I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit” (John 15:5). With this passage in mind, Lowth reconfigures Paul’s divine body as a poem. For Paul, Christianity is comprised of believers that make up the body of Christ: “the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ” (1 Cor. 12:12). Lowth uses the vine and branches symbolism to turn this body into a neatly trimmed tree that functions poetically, structured by rhythm and held together by those that voice its content. Smart echoes this idea in Jubilate Agno, declaring that God has granted believers a language of brevity and clarity in order that they better understand their faith. Such a rhythmically lucid language keeps believers in trim, reaffirming their faith in simple terms without diminishing them into an irrational club opponents might “clip” off: For God has given us a language of monosyllables to prevent our clipping. For a toad enjoys a finer prospect than another creature to compensate his lack. Tho’ toad I am the object of man’s hate. Yet better am I than a reprobate. (who has the worst of prospects). For there are stones, whose constituent particles are little toads. For the spiritual musick is as follows. For there is the thunder-​stop, which is the voice of God direct. For the rest of the stops are by their rhimes. For the trumpet rhimes are sound bound, soar more and the like. For the Shawm rhimes are lawn fawn moon boon and the like. For the harp rhimes are sing ring string and the like. For the cymbal rhimes are bell well toll soul and the like. For the flute rhimes are tooth youth suit mute and the like. For the dulcimer rhimes are grace place beat heat and the like. For the Clarinet rhimes are clean seen and the like. For the Bassoon rhimes are pass, class and the like. God be gracious to Baumgarden. For the dulcimer are rather van fan and the like and grace place &c are of the bassoon. For beat heat, weep peep &c are of the pipe.16

Smart attempts to recreate God’s language here by showcasing what David Morris calls “the spiritual unity underlying all things:  his multilingual puns embody a principle of verbal

15 

Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, trans. G. Gregory (Boston, 1815), p. 47.

16 Smart, Jubilate Agno, B 579–​94, in Poetical Works, vol. i, p. 80.

 

Devotional Poetry   569 interrelationships, just as the associations among animals, stones, plants, biblical characters and contemporary Englishmen suggest a temporal and spatial web of connection.”17 This connection is forged both by the rigor of Smart’s grammatical restriction and also by his use of parallelism, in which phrases are repeated in changed words, answered by their contrary, or recalled in a different form. In doing so, Smart echoes the form of the Psalm but builds in a series of self-​conscious reminders that “rhimes,” the “beat,” “sound bound,” “moon boon,” and “weep peep”—​music and singing—​are the route to God. Even the lowliest of God’s creations, such as the toad, can hear his “spiritual musick,” barred from the “reprobate” who, bracketed off by Smart, falls outside of the divine body of the poem. The toads, by contrast, are the “constituent particles” of “stones,” a biblical analogy for believers, who are kept together by the “corner stone” of Jesus in an era that sought to atomize them into parties or sects (1 Peter 2:6). Once communally connected to God, all creatures can hear a variety of sounds represented by the list of instruments here, reminding the reader that God’s poetry was there to be prayed through song. Smart balances the communal with the public in Jubilate Agno, drawing the ostensibly specific into the general to find a voice for the individual located within the congregation. As Guest argues, Smart understood poetry and prophecy as “one and the same” (A Form of Sound Words, p. 242) because of his expectation that what is listened to and internalized as divine poetry shapes the on-​going identity of the congregation as they participate in shared praise both inside and out of the church space. The Psalms were at the heart of this shared praise, endlessly paraphrased, prayed, and sung. As William Law wrote in his chapter “Of Chanting, or Singing of Psalms in Our Private Devotions” from A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728), the committed believer should ideally sing or chant a psalm “as a necessary beginning of your devotions, as something that is to awaken all that is good and holy within you, that is to call your spirits to their proper duty, to set you in your best posture toward heaven, and tune all the powers of your soul to worship and adoration” (Serious Call, p. 167). The relationship between singing and prayer was rooted in metrical psalmody, subject to fierce regulation by a Reformed Church that wished its members to worship only in accordance with ritual “that had clear scriptural precedent.”18 Wary of Roman Catholicism’s seeming reliance on extra-​scriptural tradition, some reformers turned to David as a clear “scholar of the Lord,” as Smart called him, as well as a believer who had been tested and found unambiguous deliverance in God’s love. David’s historical legacy was more controversial, contemporary biblical critics divided as to whether he was a heroic king or romantic bounder, while writers of hymns and poems regarded him as an exemplary singer of divine songs. Indicative of a spectrum of spiritual circumstances, the Psalms were amenable to various theological perspectives and to exploration through other biblical books, at once instructive, animating, and pensive. As Smart wrote in his Song to David (1763), the composer of the Psalms embodies the good Christian, “Great, valiant, pious, good, and clean, | Sublime, contemplative, serene, | Strong, constant, pleasant wise!” (lines 19–​21). Like the “clapping” noise that marks the glory of God in Jubilate Agno, David’s

17 

David B. Morris, The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in Eighteenth-​ Century England (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1972), p. 175. 18  Madeleine Forell Marshall and Janet Todd, English Congregational Hymns in the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1982), p. 12.

 

570   Emma Mason voice is like “infinite applause” (line 116), a sound through which the five senses unfold in the poem. With a “soft flute’s iv’ry touch” (line 387), the Lord’s eyes (line 391), a “captive ear” (line 399), incense-​filled prayer (line 403), and a disciplined “taste” (line 411), David embodies “ADORATION,” recalling Smart’s self-​description as the “Lord’s News-​Writer” and “Reviver of ADORATION.”19

Joyful Noise Smart’s Song prefaces his A Translation of the Psalms of David (1765), a text that revealed his allegiance to Anglicanism through its reworking of the Book of Common Prayer psalter. Developing authorized translations of the Psalms by Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins (1562) and Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady (1696), Smart aligned himself with Evangelical hymnody and apologetics by clearly lining out his imitative and expressive versions, as Isaac Watts had done in 1719. Watts was probably the most influential devotional poet, theologian, and hymnodist of the period. Minister at the Independent Mark Lane meeting in London, he initially sought to make poetry work for Calvinism, stressing devotion over form while admitting his own propensity for those “flowry Expressions” and “bright Images” that threatened to prevail “above the Fire of Divine Affection.”20 His ostensibly sentimental confession was in part a ruse to attract a literary as well as devotional readership, and Watts revolutionized the paraphrasing of the Bible by creatively Christianizing its Old as well as New Testament narrative, while softening those stories he considered too violent. Both his Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707) and Psalms of David (1719) dramatized the experience of faith in a manner that appalled some, who thought the content blasphemously distant from Scripture, and delighted others, consoled by its “Simplicity, smoothness, harmony and pious elevation.”21 Critics favored a simple, plain verse song to voice God’s word because it was perceived as a way of enabling private inspiration for multiple believers: hence Lowth’s vocal admiration of Hebrew poetry. Watts deliberately pitched his plain hymns in such a way that they enabled both individual worship, “to assist the devout and retired Soul in the exercises of Love, Faith, and Joy,” and also shared song, instructing the “Minister” to leave out those verses “too poetical for meaner Understandings, or too particular for whole Congregations to sing.”22 His famous definition of Elizabeth Rowe’s hymns as “secret and intense breathings” does not accord to his own stress on lucid, repeated, rhythmic sound, his prosody circling around the worshiper to imitate the embracing solace of his words.23 As Madeleine Forell Marshall and Janet Todd note, Watts’s hymns read like dramatic monologues, operatic recitatives, dramatic scenes of violence or climax, or dizzying moments of passion or fervor.24 In response, the Christian is urged to feel, vent, cry, groan, sigh, shiver, and weep, 19 Smart, Jubilate Agno, B 327, B 332, in Poetical Works, vol. i, p. 63. 20 

Marshall and Todd, English Congregational Hymns, p. 32.

21 Miller, Brief Retrospect, vol. ii, p. 21.

22  Isaac Watts, preface, The Psalms and Hymns of Dr Isaac Watts, ed. Robert Goodacre, 2 vols. (London, 1821), vol. ii, p. 8. 23  Isaac Watts, preface to Elizabeth Rowe, Devout Exercises of the Heart, in Meditation and Soliloquy, Prayer and Praise (Alcester, 1809), p. xviii. 24  Marshall and Todd, English Congregational Hymns, p. 39.

 

Devotional Poetry   571 especially before the cross: “Thus might I hide my blushing Face | While his dear Cross appears, | Dissolve my Heart in Thankfulness, | And melt my Eyes to Tears.”25 Watts’s bringing together of doctrine and emotion, education and passion, feeling and virtue is rooted in the belief that praise finds material form in melody, fulfilling Psalms 98’s injunction to “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise” (Psalm 98:4). While Smart’s paraphrase of the Psalm reminds believers “you the impulse feel” in “harmony divine”26 (lines 32–​4), Watts foregrounds sound as a form of religious joy that both unifies and comforts those who sing: I. Joy to the World; the Lord is come; Let Earth receive her King: Let every Heart prepare him Room, And Heaven and Nature sing.

II. Joy to the Earth, The Saviour reigns; Let Men their Songs employ; While Fields & Floods, Rocks, Hills & Plains Repeat the sounding Joy.

III. No more let Sins and Sorrows grow, Nor Thorns infest the Ground: He comes to make his Blessings flow Far as the Curse is found.

IV. He rules the World with Truth and Grace, And makes the Nations prove The Glories of his Righteousness, And Wonders of his Love.

Using familiar tropes of visual and aural repetition, Watts draws the reader in by presenting the hymn as a conscious work of art while mapping out a clear path to his benevolent, loving God through stressed words: sing, joy, love. Each of these modes of being, musical, joyful, and loving, enables rapture through the voice. As the Psalm on which Watts bases his hymn proclaims: “O sing unto the Lord a new song; | for he hath done marvellous things … Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth … Let the floods clap their hands: | let the hills be joyful together” (Psalm 98:1, 4, 8). Communal rejoicing, as David consistently reminds the reader in the Psalms, is an enactment of a joy that “remembers” God: joy is the active memory of what Philip Doddridge calls an infinite and immortal happiness “in God,” felt like enveloping “beams” of “light.”27 25 Watts, Hymns and Spiritual Songs in Three Books (London, 1773), p. 137.

26  Christopher Smart, “Psalm 98,” in A Translation of the Psalms Attempted in the Spirit of Christianity, and Adapted to the Divine Service (1765), in Poetical Works. 27  Philip Doddridge, The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, in David Lyle Jeffrey, English Spirituality in the Age of Wesley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1987), p. 193.

 

572   Emma Mason Consciously repeating the “sound” of joy in the hymn, Watts gives aural weight to ideas that would otherwise threaten abstraction: the “coming” of the Lord; the Savior’s “reign”; truth, grace, righteousness, wonder, love. At the same time, he closes the gap between a worldly material and divinely immaterial existence: nature and heaven sing together to infinitely “Repeat the sounding Joy” that structures both the landscape (“Fields & Floods, Rocks, Hills & Plains”) and also an emergent global geography (“nations prove”). Harmonizing the natural and national through a note of “joy,” Watts also presents love itself as something to contemplate (to wonder about), to walk through (to wander, Bunyan-​like, in a pilgrimage for salvation), and to be amazed at (awe-​stricken by God’s love). Watts’s paraphrases and hymns, then, convey devotional poetry’s capacity to voice both private and public concerns while encouraging a solitary and communal prayer. The hymn in particular struck a heartfelt chord within worshipers, serving to improve their understanding of religion while simultaneously connecting them to their fellow worshipers. Both Watts and John and Charles Wesley managed to forge a poetry of personal conversion that widely appealed to Protestant congregations, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Unitarian, all moved by the sung expression of intense Christian emotion. This focus on presenting an experience of intense emotion that could be felt at once privately by the believer and communally by the congregation tasked the hymn-​writer with invoking religious emotion in a tempered form. For Watts, this was key to communicating with worshipers: “the preacher must learn to address the passions in a proper manner, and I cannot but think it a very imperfect character of a christian preacher, that he reasons well upon every subject, and talks clearly upon his text, if he has nothing of the pathetic in his ministrations, no talent at all to strike the passions of the heart.” Urging ministers to awaken their own spirits in their prose and poetic compositions, Watts stressed the importance of making their words “powerful and impressive on the hearts” of their “hearers,” using sound to convey passion. For Watts, “song and heavenly melody” were the best forms through which to connect with God’s love because of their capacity to rouse the believer bodily. The body’s complexity delighted him, the human’s “state of flesh and blood” demanding that we “love God” with a “holy passion” (“holy longings” and “holy joys”) in order to fully feel “divine love”: What a rich and artful structure of flesh upon the solid and well-​compacted foundation of bones! What curious joints and hinges, on which limbs are moved to and fro! What an inconceivable variety of nerves, veins, arteries, fibres, and little invisible parts are found in every member! What various fluids, blood and juices, run through and agitate the innumerable slender tubes, the hollow tubes and strainers of the body!28

Here, such hyper-​awareness of the body and its passions forces the believer into an intensity of feeling that directs all his or her attention, body, mind, and soul, toward God. Passion was not to be reveled in but rather undergone to bring the believer closer to God, whereupon all emotion was extinguished. As Anna Barbauld wrote in “Address to the Deity” (1773): “At thy

28 

Isaac Watts, “Of a Minister’s Personal Religion,” in The Life and Choice Works of Isaac Watts, ed. D. A. Harsha (New York, 1857), pp. 289–​90; “Divine Love Is the Commanding Passion,” in The Life and Choice Works, p. 175; “Discourse II: The Happiness of Separate Spirits &c. Attempted in a Funeral Discourse in Memory of Sir John Hartoff,” in The Life and Choice Works, pp. 103, 111.

 

Devotional Poetry   573 felt presence all emotions cease, | And my hush’d spirit finds a sudden peace” (lines 15–​16). Barbauld suggests that believers can tap into this divine serenity by modeling themselves on a sensitive God able to hear the quietest moments of expressed faith: His ears are open to the softest cry, His grace descends to meet the lifted eye; He reads the language of a silent tear, And sighs are incense from a heart sincere. (lines 31–​4)

Watts’s and Barbauld’s shared anatomical and sensory approach to the divine was partly enabled by the Wesleys, hymn-​writers extraordinaire, whose thousands of hymns infected and awakened believers by intensifying the felt experience of faith. In his forging of a new religious movement called Methodism, John Wesley argued that faith could be sustained only by conviction in the love of a personal Savior and communicated by poetry. As Wesley stated in a letter from 1764, lined-​out poetic language is best suited to the expression of God’s message because of its “perspicuity and purity, propriety, strength.”29 His discovery of German Moravian songs on board ship during his voyage to Georgia in 1735 had already proven this to Wesley. His Hymns and Sacred Poems (1738) as well as the popular Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (1780) use rhythm and stress to drum into believers the necessity of care for God and for others, even sinners, serving a faithful as well as political purpose. For both Wesleys, passionate feeling of a simple and vital nature was central to lived faith, and they were insistent that ardency of emotion forged the path to God. “Righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost,” Wesley asserted, “must be felt or they have no being. All therefore who condemn inward feelings in the gross, leave no place either for joy or peace or love in religion, and consequently reduce it to a dry, dead, carcase.”30

Divine Sensibility For some believers, however, such proclamations verged on enthusiasm. Bishop George Lavington accused Wesley of encouraging “Phantoms of a crazy brain” in believers, to which Wesley replied that Methodist enthusiasm connoted a “divine impulse” and not a “disorder of the mind.”31 Still, the controversy surrounding the Wesley brothers’ apparent dependence on excessive feeling caused writers like Barbauld, and later John Newton, William Cowper, and Blake, to turn elsewhere for a model of divine emotion.

29 

John Wesley to Samuel Furley, July 15, 1764, in D. W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 67. 30  Entry for August 12, 1771, in The Journal of the Reverend John Wesley, A.M.: Sometime Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford: Enlarged from the Original MSS., with Notes from Unpublished Diaries, Annotations, Maps and Illustrations, ed. Nehemiah Curnock, 8 vols. (London: Epworth Press, 1938), vol. v, p. 426. 31  Bishop George Lavington, The Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Compar’d (London, 1749), pp. i, 48; John Wesley, “Sermon 37: The Nature of Enthusiasm” (1750), in The Works of John Wesley, gen. ed. Frank Baker, 26 vols. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1985), vol. ii, pp. 44–​60, at p. 48.

 

574   Emma Mason David Hartley’s theopathy filled the bill, an idea that emerged from his associationist philosophy outlined in Observations on Man (1749). Theopathy defined a mode of being in which the human made sense of faith through remembered feelings and perceptions of God: it connotes a divine sensibility regulated by the individual’s moral and psychological makeup and signified God as a happy affective experience. Just as sensibility shaped a literature of virtue and sentiment, so theopathy enabled a joyful hymnody in which believers could safely experience the emotional content of their faith without falling into either enthusiasm or what Watts called “animal nature.”32 For some writers, theopathy became romance, Anne Steele figuring Christ as a love object whose “conqu’ring arms” and “all-​ subduing charms” woo the impassioned believer.33 For Barbauld, however, divine affect was ideally filtered through what she called “devotional taste,” a species of religious feeling founded in “the imagination and the passions,” and that “has its source in that relish for the sublime, the vast, and the beautiful, by which we taste the charms of poetry and other compositions that address our finer feelings.”34 A liberal Presbyterian, drawn toward the new dissenting politics of Unitarianism, Barbauld was eager to separate devotion from a coldly logical appreciation of the divine; at the same time, she was nervous about siphoning off religious experience into organized worship within churches, chapels, clubs, and societies. In Thoughts on the Devotional Taste, she argues that Christianity can be thought through philosophy, humanism, and politics, but that its practice can only be fulfilled in devotional prayer, offered to God by the believer “on the altar of his heart.”35 Barbauld firmly dismisses those who attempt to explain God away as a catalyst for ethics, morals, sublimity, or intellectual debate, arguing, like Smart, that the believer attend to the spirit as well as the letter of faith: We are likewise too scrupulous in our public exercises, and too studious of accuracy. A prayer strictly philosophical must ever be a cold and dry composition. From an over-​anxious fear of admitting any expression that is not strictly proper, we are apt to reject all warm and pathetic imagery, and, in short, every thing that strikes upon the heart and the senses… . upon the whole it is safer to trust our genuine feelings, feelings implanted in us by the God of nature, than to any metaphysical subtleties. He has impressed me with the idea of trust and confidence, and my heart flies to him in danger; of mercy to forgive, and I melt before him in penitence; of bounty to bestow, and I ask of him all I want or wish for… . Too critical a spirit is the bane of every thing great or pathetic. In our creeds let us be guarded, let us there weigh every syllable; but in compositions addressed to the heart, let us give freer scope to the language of the affections, and the over-​flowing of a warm and generous disposition.36

When she instructs her reader to “weigh every syllable” in matters of doctrine and creed, Barbauld invokes Presbyterian and Unitarian debates over the “divine” status of the figure of Christ. Socinian anti-​Trinitarianism encouraged a humanist reading of Christianity, one that transformed its mystical and spiritual elements into benevolence, morality, and sympathy. Barbauld was keen to insist that Christianity was neither “superstition” nor “romantic”

32  Watts, “Discourse II: The Happiness of Separate Spirits &c. Attempted in a Funeral Discourse in Memory of Sir John Hartoff,” in The Life and Choice Works, p. 112. 33  Anne Steele, “Redeeming Love,” in Hymns on Various Subjects (c.1760), in The Works of Anne Steele, 2 vols. (Boston, 1808), pp. 30–​6, at p. 36. 34 Barbauld, Devotional Pieces, p. 211. 35  Ibid., p. 217. 36  Ibid., pp. 217–​18.

 

Devotional Poetry   575 excess, but rather “feelings implanted in us by the God of nature” and accessed through “devotion.” If devotion described the emotional state in which the believer could experience these implanted feelings, then “affection” described the language the believer should use to articulate them, a gentle, empathetic, and warm expression suited to hymns, prayers, and sacred poetry. Devotional taste enabled the believer to affectively read and interpret, as well as write, religious language. Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children (1781), for example, work to produce correct feeling through reading, serving to “impress devotional feelings as early as possible on the infant mind … by deep, strong, and permanent associations.” Her hymns attempt to teach children to “feel” God’s “continual presence” in “habitual piety,” a repeated and rhythmic form of faith of which they are reminded by God’s sounds in the world.37 Asking her reader to “Come let us praise God” in the opening hymn, she writes: The little birds sing praises to God, when they warble sweetly in the green shade. The brooks and rivers praise God, when they murmur melodiously amongst the smooth pebbles. I will praise God with my voice; for I may praise Him, though I am but a little child. A few years ago, and I was a little infant, and my tongue was dumb within my mouth: And I did not know the great name of God, for my reason was not come unto me. But now I can speak, and my tongue shall praise Him: I can think of all His kindness, and my heart shall love Him. Let Him call me, and I will come unto Him.38

Sound is fundamental to the child’s relationship with God here: he or she “knows” him by it and is summoned into faith by God’s “call.” The “sweet” sound of the bird’s trilling warble and melodious “murmur” of water is an auditory introduction to God’s kindness and love: recurring, metrical sound grants the same access to the divine as Watts’s “repeated” sounding joy. By contrast with Watts, however, Barbauld extends God’s sound over longer lines, allowing it to vibrate through those who listen, so that they might feel it in their bodies while contemplating its material and immaterial content. In “Hymn VI,” for example, the child must employ reason to ward against misreading the world around him or her, but fall back on faith to hear God: Didst thou hear nothing but the murmur of the brook? No whispers but the whispers of the wind? Return again, child of reason, for there are greater things than these.—​God was amongst the trees; His voice sounded in the murmur of the water; His music warbled in the shade; and didst thou not attend? I saw the moon rising behind the trees; it was like a lamp of gold. The stars one after another appeared in the clear firmament. Presently I saw black clouds arise, and roll towards the south; the lightning streamed in thick flashes over the sky; the thunder growling at a distance; it came nearer, and I felt afraid, for it was loud and terrible. Did thy heart feel no terror, but of the thunderbolt? Was there nothing bright and terrible but the lightning? Return, O child of reason, for there are greater things than these.—​God was in the storm, and didst thou not perceive Him?39 37 

38 

Anna Barbauld, Hymns in Prose for Children (London, 1864), p. vi. 39  Ibid., “Hymn VI,” lines 6–​9. Ibid., “Hymn I,” lines 4–​11.

 

576   Emma Mason The child believer is urged to rationally dismiss superstitious readings of murmurs, whispers, warbling, growling, lightning, and thunder, and instead “hear” God “in” those sounds, which, properly understood, acoustically lift him or her into the felt joy of faith. Like the “Visionary forms dramatic, which bright | Redounded from their Tongues in thunderous majesty” that mark the end of Blake’s Jerusalem, Barbauld’s hymnal form uses light to expound God aurally rather than visually.40 The moon’s lamp light recalls Mark Akenside’s “Ode to the Evening Star” (1740), in which the star is sung to—​“Oh, listen to my suppliant song” (line 9)—​and heard—​“I hear her liquid tone” (line 43), the “melting note” (line 55) of the light dissolving the distance between the believer and God.41 Light is not, as Coleridge writes in “The Eolian Harp” (1795), “in sound” (line 28), wherein light functions as a signifier of a divine “one life” (line 26) the poet hears in music.42 Desperate to “hear” a God that threatens to disappear, the Romantics strive to conjure twinkly earthbound objects: burning tygers, golden daffodils, gleaming mountains. For their predecessors, light does not symbolize God’s voice but rather proclaims its vibrant sound, a trope apparent in Barbauld’s moon, Blake’s bright visions, Akenside’s star, and Smart’s “Electrical fire.”43

“Amazing Grace” The “sound” of eighteenth-​century devotional poetry, then, lies in its affective exuberance, sweet, joyful, loving, and, in John Newton’s celebrated description, “amazing.” “Amazing Grace” is the forty-​first hymn of the Olney Hymns (1779) by Newton and his friend, William Cowper, a collective expression of worship written for Newton’s destitute parish in Olney. Contrary to the Wesleys, who tended toward emotional extremes of hellfire and heavenly joy, Newton and Cowper offer a more vital and cheerful series of scripturally based compositions, designed to enable congregational life within a specific parish or community. “Amazing Grace,” perhaps the most popular hymn within the Western Christian tradition, is typically read as a public record of conversion to Evangelicalism, conveying God’s forgiveness and grace as “sweet” sound. Introduced with a reference to David (1 Chron. 17:16–​17) to remind the believer of its psalmic sound, the hymn traces a Bunyan-​like journey from hopelessness to consolation figured through the senses: the “wretch” hears, sees, and feels God’s grace through a sensory engagement heightened by “grace” or God’s pardon. The sweet sound of this forgiveness is almost equivalent to “amazing” “grace,” cordoned off as a kind of antiphonal echo in which the first iambic foot reverberates through the brackets, is transformed into sound, and so amplifies the subsequent verses: Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound) That sav’d a wretch like me! 40 

William Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Great Albion (1804–​20), in The Complete Poems, ed. Alicia Ostriker (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 845. 41  Mark Akenside, “Ode to the Evening Star” (1740), lines 9, 43, 55, in The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside (London, 1835), pp. 185–​7. 42  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp,” lines 28, 26, in Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays, 6 vols. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001), vol. i, p. 233. 43 Smart, Jubilate Agno, B 762, in Poetical Works, vol. i, p. 89.

 

Devotional Poetry   577 I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind, but now I see. ’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, And grace my fears reliev’d; How precious did that grace appear, The hour I first believ’d! Thro’ many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come; ’Tis grace has brought me safe thus far, And grace will lead me home. The Lord has promis’d good to me, His word my hope secures; He will my shield and portion be, As long as life endures. Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail, And mortal life shall cease, I shall possess, within the vail, A life of joy and peace. The earth shall soon dissolve like snow, The sun forbear to shine; But God, who called me here below, Will be for ever mine.

The eternal note of the last line invests in the repeated sound of God’s call, one that guides the narrator through emotional and sensory obstacles (blindness, fear, sin) as well as material ones (the demise and death of the body, the sun, and the planet itself). God’s voice seems loudest when the sky is darkest, the final verse’s lack of sunlight guiding the narrator into a personal and continual faith. Where this faith resides, however, is left open in the penultimate line, the “here below” at once the earthly residence of the church, the shadow of hell in which the narrating “wretch” begins his journey, and also its deadening sound (the congregation might sing “hear below” without a text to read from). In no other period does devotional poetry burst with such joyous sound. The Romantics embrace the immateriality of the divine, but their prosody works to “hear” God in silences and aporias as much as in the music and metrics of poetic language. Victorian prosody struggles to rematerialize God’s voice in sound, and ends up regulating faith and feeling rather than allowing for its experience: even Christian prosodic innovators like Coventry Patmore, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Sydney Dobell appear to reduce their faith to poetic experiment. Perhaps Matthew Arnold’s ambivalent instruction to “Listen!” in “Dover Beach” most reminds contemporary readers of the lost sweet sounds of the previous era, choric joy replaced by the “grating roar | Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, | At their return.”44 This pebbly sound acoustically and visually evokes a moment of breaking—​the pebbles from larger stones, and listeners from those around them: Arnold’s image stands in stark contrast to Smart’s toad-​particles that come together in a cornerstone that represents 44  Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach,” lines 9–​11, in Matthew Arnold: Everyman’s Poetry (London: J. M. Dent, 1998), p. 78.

 

578   Emma Mason Christ. So too does Newton’s grace-​giving “for ever” erase the anxiety on which Arnold depends to sound out the melancholic tinnitus of the poem, clinically buzzing with “tremulous cadence slow” as its haunting “eternal note of sadness” drowns out the divine to instead echo the pre-​Christian Sophocles (lines 13–​14). Newton, by contrast, like Smart, Watts, and Barbauld, tunefully rings out God’s voice as “joy and peace.” In doing so, he offers up the sound of God’s voice and “amazing grace” as material presence, not overheard or strained toward, but directly received.

References Forell Marshall, Madeleine, and Janet Todd, English Congregational Hymns in the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1982). Guest, Harriet, A Form of Sound Words: The Religious Poetry of Christopher Smart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Irlam, Shaun, Elations:  The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Stanford:  Stanford Univ. Press, 1999). Mason, Emma, “Poetry and Religion,” in Christine Gerrard (ed.), A Companion to EighteenthCentury Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 53–​68. Morris, David B., The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in Eighteenth-​ Century England (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1972). Rivers, Isabel, Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England 1660–​1780, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991). Watson, J. R., The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997).

 

Chapter 34

Ly ri c Jennifer Keith Lyric poems in the Restoration and eighteenth century explore their era’s greatest passions, passions often sought and found in relation to overtly social rather than ostensibly “private” realms.1 And yet these lyrics are still misread and dismissed by those critics who continue to use post-​eighteenth-​century models—​where intense emotions are associated particularly with inwardness and isolation—​to define and evaluate pre-​1800 lyrics. Such misreadings continue in spite of the fact that “virtually all the qualities on which the category of lyric is based have been challenged” by recent work on the lyric.2 Restoration and eighteenth-​ century lyrics have only sporadically been taken on their own terms, especially unexpected because their own terms teach us about the very era in which lyric came to be identified as the most elevated kind of poetry, with the eventual effect that lyric came to stand for poetry in its “purest” form.3 To restore the character of Restoration and eighteenth-​century lyrics, the central role of passion in this era’s poetry must be considered in relation to its explicit social dimensions. In the social orbits of these lyrics, poets test literary conventions for depicting the passions against social realities, and the epistle shapes representations of passion to be read, not overheard, and even capable of reply. Above all, poetry’s relation to the cultural importance of occasion connects the lyric to a range of shared events that include musical performance, national celebration or mourning, religious worship, and experiences of the sublime and sensibility. Recognizably social contexts and occasions can augment lyric passions. Lyrics are junctures that articulate bonds and breaks between so-​called private and social passions. The often “unusual combination of the private and social” has resulted in these poems’ relative illegibility as lyrics to modern readers.4 1  On the explicitly social dimensions of lyric in this era, see Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–​1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 130–​52; and Steve Newman, Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 2  Heather Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2008), p. 5. 3  Joseph Warton’s Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756, 1782) and his “use of the phrase ‘pure poetry’ ” as the highest kind of poetry became a useful tool for elevating a certain kind of poetry that “came to be identified with lyric” (Douglas Lane Patey, “‘Aesthetics’ and the Rise of Lyric in the Eighteenth Century,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900, 33, no. 3 (1993), 587–​608, at p. 593). 4  J. Paul Hunter, “Political, Satirical, Didactic and Lyric Poetry (i): From the Restoration to the Death of Pope,” in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–​1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), pp. 160–​208, at p. 199.

 

580   Jennifer Keith

The Passions That by the end of the century lyric came to define the “best” or “purest” poetry is not surprising given the widely accepted view of Restoration and eighteenth-​century readers that poetry in general focused on the passions.5 Sir William Temple explained in 1690 that passion was the essential element of poetry: Whoever does not affect and move the same present Passions in you that he represents in others, and at other times raise Images about you, as a Conjurer is said to do Spirits, Transport you to the Places and to the Persons he describes, cannot be judged to be a Poet, though his Measures are never so just, his Feet never so smooth, or his Sounds never so sweet.6

“It is the great art of poetry,” declared Joseph Trapp in 1711, “to work upon the passions.”7 In lyrics such passions might be exposed as the oft-​seen delusions of seduction and desire; in the case of certain odes, any number of occasions and ideas could stimulate the greatest passion. John Dennis’s Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704) presents a commonly held notion of this combination of passionate intensity with an important dimension of eighteenth-​century lyric: instruction. Poetry, writes Dennis, “is an Art, by which a Poet excites Passion (and for that very Cause entertains Sense) in order to satisfy and improve, to delight and reform the Mind, and so to make Mankind happier and better.”8 Significantly, when Dennis describes lyric as typically divided into the higher and lower ends of the poetic hierarchy, he specifies the congruence between passion and didacticism: “The greater Poetry is an Art by which a Poet justly and reasonably excites great Passion, that he may please and instruct; and comprehends Epick, Tragick, and the greater Lyrick Poetry.” “The less Poetry,” Dennis observes, “excites less Passion for the foremention’d Ends; and includes in it Comedy and Satire, and the little Ode, and Elegiack and Pastoral Poems” (Critical Works, vol. i, p.  338). Dennis’s view that the greater passions yield greater instruction participates in the Restoration and eighteenth-​century assumptions that moral, social, religious, and intellectual domains intensify rather than dilute passionate experience.

Generic Relations To speak of the lyric in the Restoration and eighteenth century, we must bear in mind that the category itself fluctuates in relation to a shift in systems for classifying and evaluating it. 5 

My choice of the term passions over emotions is based on Susan James’s analysis of passions in the seventeenth century and on the frequency of the term in the writings of Restoration and eighteenth-​ century England (Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-​Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 4, 29). 6  Sir William Temple, “Of Poetry,” in J. E. Spingarn (ed.), Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 1685–​1700, 3 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1957), vol. iii, pp. 73–​109, at p. 85. 7  Lectures on Poetry (1711, 1715, 1719; trans. 1742), in Scott Elledge (ed.), Eighteenth-​Century Critical Essays, 2 vols. (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1961), vol. i, pp. 229–​50, at p. 242. 8  John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), in The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1939), vol. i, p. 336.

 

Lyric   581 Norman Maclean has analyzed variations in the lyric’s classification within the eighteenth century. Because in this era “lyric poetry is divided into subspecies by the threefold distinction in subject matters [treating gods, demigods and heroes, and men] used in all other instances to separate species from one another, … most of the discussion of the lyric is a discussion of the subspecies and their ingredients.” The genre ranges from the “lowly” song, “little ode,” sonnet, or ballad to the greater lyric, the ode that drew from Pindar or Horace and addressed weighty and often national matters. Consequently, “there is a marked tendency to regard the subspecies of the lyric as separate species and to place the first two lyric kinds—​the divine and the heroic—​near the top of the poetical hierarchy (along with epic and tragedy) and the minor lyric near the bottom.”9 Although lyrics in this era can be placed at these extreme ends in the traditional poetic hierarchy, the classification of lyric repeatedly and increasingly breaks down under writers’ revisions and undermining of this hierarchy.10 In the Restoration and eighteenth century, the older taxonomy that valued poems according to a hierarchy of poetic kinds (based on the rota Vergilii) gradually and intermittently gave way to an organization and evaluation of poems based on certain aesthetic values, particularly the sublime and sensibility, and the poet’s and reader’s demonstration of certain faculties, particularly taste and imagination. Changes in the lyric are part of the era’s wide-​ranging experiments with kinds and modes, which saw increasing numbers of hybrids and new kinds of poems that reorganized and redefined poetic voice and values. Expanding the variety and range that shape the lyric were the wider range of social and educational backgrounds among poets and readers and an increasing interest in native traditions, such as the ballad. A fascination with “untutored” poets with “natural” genius extended the languages of and criteria for all kinds of poetry. Although the ode continued in the eighteenth century and beyond to be associated with topics of highest import, as the criterion of the sublime and the effects of imagination gained greater prominence in the expectations of eighteenth-​century readers, the ode like many other poetic kinds shared ground with formerly less significant ones. This is one of several reasons why, during the second half of the eighteenth century, the sonnet gains importance: its close association with passion and imagination trumps its formerly modest position in the hierarchy of kinds and forms. Whereas G. Gabrielle Starr has argued that during the Restoration and eighteenth century the “lyric was rewritten through the structures, strategies, and spaces of the novel,” Anne Williams contends that the chief principle of development of the eighteenth-​century lyric, particularly the greater lyric, is its appropriation and rewriting of other genres.11 Williams proposes that in this era of “continual generic experimentation,” lyric functions as a mode that appropriates kinds, as exemplified in the lyric’s appropriation of the heroic epistle in Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard (Prophetic Strain, pp. 4, 35). Whether the novel ate the lyric or the 9  Norman Maclean, “From Action to Image: Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century,” in R. S. Crane (ed.), Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 408–​ 60, at p. 410. 10  See Patey’s essay “ ‘Aesthetics’ and the Rise of Lyric” for an analysis of eighteenth-​century critics’ own narrative about the lyric. 11  G. Gabrielle Starr, Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2004), p. 1; Anne Williams, Prophetic Strain: The Greater Lyric in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984).

 

582   Jennifer Keith lyric the novel, the interrelation of lyric to other genres is fundamental to understanding the lyric’s changes and inclusiveness—​rather than its “rise” and “evolution”—​in this era. Richard Feingold not only investigates where the eighteenth-​century lyric crosses several generic borders, but he also aligns it with what some might consider the un-​lyrical element of didacticism (see c­ hapter 11, “The Poet as Teacher”). Feingold convincingly demonstrates that “the didacticism common to the period’s writing is closely associated with the representation of inward experience and that, whatever their ostensible genre, writings structured by that association have a powerfully lyric cast” (p. vii). Feingold concludes about Pope’s imitation of Horace’s Epistle ii. 2, The Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, that “Nowhere else has Pope made himself the subject of so intense an act of self-​scrutiny as in this imitation of Horace,” in this “most inward” of Pope’s poems.12 In applying the criterion of inwardness to tracing lyric elements, Feingold reveals a number of so-​called lyric elements in works that diverge from the lyric’s traditional forms. But his argument depends on a definition of the lyric’s chief characteristic—​inwardness—​based on Romantic-​era models whose influence this chapter hopes to dislodge.

Social Dimensions The social dimensions of this era’s lyrics convey certain qualities to be found in their predecessors. Some Restoration and eighteenth-​century lyrics, for example, revise a substantial body of courtly lyrics and popular ballads, whose social dimensions range from implicit to explicit.13 Lyrics from the Restoration to the end of the eighteenth century can enlist plural voices and multiple addressees and inhabit social spaces, such as the theater, for example, where songs were often heard in plays or other performances and often transmitted again in print (see ­chapter 2, “Poems on the Stage”). On another level, however, the passions appearing in many Restoration and eighteenth-​century lyrics continue earlier dialogues with literary conventions that describe the passions: these communal literary conventions constitute a social imaginary that is tested and revised in new contexts. What George Parfitt has written of lyrics in the earlier and later seventeenth century applies to many lyrics in the Restoration and eighteenth century: that literary conventions can be reanimated “through the accuracy and imaginative quality of the writing” or adjusted “to provide a critical perspective.”14 Narrative elements, however brief, provide a foundation in many songs for recounting the most familiar circumstances of seduction or betrayal. Pastoral names further underscore the timelessness and commonality of the circumstances and emotions. Aphra Behn’s “Song: Love Arm’d” (performed in the theater; first printed in 1677) accumulates the repeatedly experienced power of love’s conventions that continue to surprise: 12  Richard Feingold, Moralized Song: The Character of Augustan Lyricism (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1989), p. 28. 13  On the social dimensions of courtly lyric, which often assumes a plural voice that draws on “the codes of address and behaviour of the social unit which is the court,” see George Parfitt, English Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (London: Longman, 1985), p. 19. 14  Ibid., pp. 31, 39.

 

Lyric   583 Love in Fantastique Triumph satt, Whilst Bleeding Hearts a round him flow’d, For whom Fresh paines he did Create, And strange Tyranick power he show’d.15

The familiar truths that oppose individual experience and desire beget many rueful songs. For every song celebrating ideal love, there is another that pits it against experience. Behn’s “Ode to Love” (1684) rejects and then capitulates to its “powers”: Dull Love no more thy Senceless Arrows prize, Damn thy Gay Quiver, break thy Bow; ’Tis only young Lysanders Eyes, That all the Arts of Wounding know. (lines 1–​4)

Placing and replacing the language of the passions, the lyrics in this era acknowledge the repetition of desire and its pains to expose the difference in this repetition. Faith Gildenhuys has analyzed how Matthew Prior, for example, “exploit[s]‌the potential of conventional modes as vehicles for exploring the function of consciousness in love.”16 Prior’s brief “[Touch the Lyre]” (1741) announces the idealism of earlier lyrics that must reject the real: Touch the Lyre, every String, Touch it Orpheus, I will sing A Song, which shall immortal be; Since She I sing’s a Deity. A Leonora whose blest birth Has no relation to this Earth.17

His two-​line “To Cloe” (date of composition unknown; first published 1907) starkly distills the conventional plot of desire: There’s all Hell in her Heart and all Heaven in her Eye He that sees her must love, he that loves her must Dye.18

The Earl of Rochester racks the conventions of love lyrics with graphic details. In “Song: A Young Lady to Her Antient Lover,” the young Lady promises to bestow the pleasures of love on her beloved’s “ancient” body: On thy wither’d Lips and dry Which Like barren furrowes Lye Brooding kisses I will power Shall thy youthfull heate restore… .19

15 

“Song: Love Arm’d,” lines 1–​4, in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols. (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1992), vol. i, p. 53. 16  Faith Gildenhuys, “Convention and Consciousness in Prior’s Love Lyrics,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900, 35, no. 3 (1995), 437–​55, at p. 451. 17  The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, ed. H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), vol. i, p. 713. 18 Prior, Literary Works, vol. i, p. 717. 19  “Song: A Young Lady to Her Antient Lover,” lines 7–​10, in The Works of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, ed. Harold Love (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), p. 30.

 

584   Jennifer Keith The tone of this song, however, is oddly tender. Better known for the aggressive tone of other songs, Rochester’s libertine perspective exposes ideals as illusions. His “Love to a Woman” defines pleasure based on misogyny and class prejudice: Tis a most insipid passion To Chuse out for thy Happiness The dullest part of Gods Creation. Let the Porter and the Groom, Things design’d for dirty slaves, Drudg in fair Aurelias womb To gett supplies for Age and Graves.20

Pursuing the pleasures of drink instead of sex, the speaker concedes that if “buizy Love intrenches | There’s a sweet soft Page of mine | Can doe the Trick worth Forty wenches” (lines 14–​16). The tradition of anacreontic verse, focusing especially on the pleasures of loving and drinking, provides Rochester with the literary context where aggressive physical desires violate other literary fictions of intimacy. The clash of the physical world with literary and social ideals has an entirely different effect in other lyrics that celebrate quotidian realities against idealized conventions. Samuel Croxall’s “Sylvia” (1721) transforms mythological, pastoral, and Petrarchan ideals into a desire for domestic and urban contexts: Were I invited to a Nectar Feast In Heaven, and Venus nam’d me for her Guest; Tho’ Mercury the Messenger should prove, Or her own Son, the mighty God of Love; At the same Instant let but honest Tom From Sylvia’s dear terrestrial Lodging come, With Look important say—​desires—​at Three Alone—​your Company—​to drink some Tea. Tho’ Tom were mortal, Mercury divine; Tho’ Sylvia gave me Water, Venus Wine; Tho’ Heaven was here, and Bowstreet lay as far As the vast Distance of the utmost Star; To Sylvia’s Arms with all my Strength I’d fly; Let who would meet the Beauty of the Sky.21

Although not itself an epistle, the immediacy and familiarity of Croxall’s poem may be attributed to the powerful influence of the epistle on a range of literary genres, including the lyric.

The Verse Epistle In this era the epistle gained ground as a communicative norm that might specify one correspondent but was often heard or read by many others. Sharing quotidian details and small or large events created intimate bonds precisely in the interchange. The Restoration and

20  21 

“Love to a Woman,” lines 2–​8, in Works, p. 38. Samuel Croxall, “Sylvia,” in The Fair Circassian, 2nd ed. (London, 1721).

 

Lyric   585 eighteenth-​century lyric often drew on the epistle’s ready structure for placing intimate passions in a social and material reality of at least two correspondents. Conversing about and with passion, some of these epistolary poems cannot strictly be called lyrics, but especially in their use of fourteen lines, typically in couplets, these epistles suggest a relation to the sonnet tradition. Pope’s verse epistle “To Mr. Gay” (c.1720) announces the material occasion of its writing—​“Who wrote him a Congratulatory Letter on the Finishing his House”—​in order to move from material progress to wounded love: Ah, friend! ’tis true—​this truth you lovers know—​ In vain my structures rise, my gardens grow, In vain fair Thames reflects the double scenes Of hanging mountains, and of sloping greens: Joy lives not here; to happier seats it flies, And only dwells where Wortley casts her eyes. What are the gay parterre, the chequer’d shade, The morning bower, the ev’ning colonade, But soft recesses of uneasy minds, To sigh unheard in, to the passing winds? So the struck deer in some sequester’d part Lies down to die, the arrow at his heart; There, stretch’d unseen in coverts hid from day, Bleeds drop by drop, and pants his life away.22

Choosing fourteen lines to convey intimate suffering, Pope suggests a revision of the sonnet, especially the suffering Petrarchan lover, into an epistle that places the tradition of idealized suffering in the gardens of his own house. Anne Finch draws attention to the epistle as the best form for expressing passion in several poems, especially in verses to her husband, Heneage, referred to as either Flavio or Dafnis. “A Letter to Flavio” (1713, titled “A Letter to the Same Person”) announces: “Sure of successe, to you I boldly write, | Whilst Love, does e’vry tender line endite” (lines 1–​2).23 In another poem to her husband, “A Letter to Dafnis April 2d 1685,” she defies the cynical social commonplace “that husbands can’t be lovers” (line 6). Revisiting to re-​place commonplace expressions or views of the passions, Finch and her contemporaries clarify the consciousness of love through an epistolary framework. Some of Matthew Prior’s most moving lines on despair and love originally appeared in a letter he wrote to his friend Charles, second Viscount Townshend (1697).24 The poem begins with a question: Who would, says Dryden, Drink this draught of Life Blended with bitter Woes and tedious Strife But that an Angel in Some Lucky hour Does healing Drops into the Goblet pour? (1–​4)25

Here the epistolary structure allows Prior to decant a series of communal passions, especially where desire and despair well from friendship and affairs of state. The bitter “draught of Life” 22  The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–​69), vol. vi, pp. 225–​6. 23  All quotations of Finch’s poems are from Early Manuscript Books, ed. Jennifer Keith and Claudia Thomas Kairoff , assoc. ed. Jean I. Marsden, vol. i of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, gen. ed. Jennifer Keith (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, forthcoming). 24 Prior, Literary Works, vol. ii, p. 874. 25  Ibid., vol. i, p. 159.

 

586   Jennifer Keith referred to by Dryden and others to figure “Woes and tedious Strife” (line 2) is examined for the “healing Drops” poured into it by “an Angel in Some Lucky hour” (lines 4, 3). Prior defines these generalities and passions in physical and social forms: “Some Sparkling Bubble of delight springs up: | My Sov’rein or my friend was heard to tell | I served Him faithfully, or loved Him well” (lines 6–​8). The couplets in these examples show their collaboration with the epistle to shape and be shaped by the lyric. J. Paul Hunter has described the couplet as a structure by which poets could sift and examine “inherited values,” particularly “working with conventional, understood terminology.”26 As such, the couplet is especially compatible with the era’s lyrics that juxtapose the conventional discourses of passion with experience (see ­chapter 22, “Couplets”). Although Hunter has described the couplet’s cultural function of “mediating the developing intellectual complexities of early modernity,” the structure’s appearance in so many lyrics also suggests its role in exploring, moving, and teaching the passions.

Occasion and Community As they re-​contextualized the language of the passions, lyrics in this era expanded their tonal and thematic range not only under the influence of the epistle and the couplet, but also under the influence of a compelling and transformative cultural category: the occasion. Especially important for an understanding of Restoration and eighteenth-​century lyrics, the occasion transforms many poetic kinds and comprises a range of small and large social, political, religious, and perceptual events. Of special interest for the lyric is the occasion’s capacity to galvanize the passions and structure them in a time that is both stretched and commemorated as passing. Thus, unlike the “lyric present,” which has been advanced as a key ingredient in some theories of the lyric, Restoration and eighteenth-​century lyrics frequently draw the passions through the passage of time, including toward the future. One of the fundamental occasions of Restoration and eighteenth-​century lyrics, from the song, to the ballad, to the hymn, to the ode, is their performance. Songs partake of a social setting (even if on an intimate scale) in the framework of a musical performance, often, but not exclusively, in the theater. Theories of the lyric frequently refer to its origins in song, with the words accompanied by a lyre, but in the Restoration and eighteenth century, songs were encountered as part of a performance culture directly heard, repeated at home, or remembered as heard. Songs flourished in this song culture that extended from their appearances in the theater to their multiple appearances in print, including numerous miscellanies collecting “choice songs,” “the best songs,” and so on. As examples of lyric in the era, the very occasion of their appearances highlights their social nature. Behn’s song described above participated in this song culture where experience and public performance test conventions. Some of the songs received specific musical settings by famous or now obscure composers; but perhaps of more significance to their social dimension are the many songs reprinted in this era that receive the note “to the tune of,” followed by the name of a well-​known tune.

26  J. Paul Hunter, “Sleeping Beauties: Are Historical Aesthetics Worth Recovering?,” Eighteenth-​ Century Studies, 34, no. 1 (Fall 2000), 1–​20, at p. 11.

 

Lyric   587 The persistence of musical performance as real or imagined occasion for so many lyrics appears in Mary Leapor’s “Hymn to the Morning” (1748). After a sweeping list of the beauties of the rising day, which Leapor’s persona Mira seeks to ease her sickness, the poem concludes by emphasizing the words as sung—​and singing back: Thus sung Mira to her Lyre, Till the idle Numbers tire: Ah! Sappho sweeter sings, I cry, And the spiteful Rocks reply, (Responsive to the jarring Strings) Sweeter—​Sappho sweeter sings.27

This ongoing conjunction of written song with music belies many literary historical views of the lyric, which have judged the lyric’s connection to music as only vestigial. In his Select Collection of English Songs (1783), Joseph Ritson condemns other collections that do not include the tunes that accompany the poems because these tunes are “so essentially requisite to perfect the idea which is, in strictness and propriety, annexed to the term Song.”28 In “A Dissertation on the Idea of Universal Poetry” (1766), Thomas Hurd describes musical performance as persisting in the lyric, the “secret reference to the sense of hearing and to that acceptation which melodious sounds meet with in the recital of expressive words.”29 Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast; or, The Power of Musique: An Ode, in Honour of St. Cecilia’s Day (1697) owes its existence to the annual occasion of St. Cecilia’s Day, the patron saint of music, as it celebrates music’s divine powers. The ode contains and generates occasions understood as performance and socio-​political events. Considered by many in the eighteenth century to be the best ode in the language, the poem’s composition began with Dryden’s reluctant acceptance of the task. He wrote to his sons that he was composing the poem because he “coud not deny the Stewards of the feast, who came in a body to me, to desire that kindness.”30 The poem’s performance at Stationers’ Hall was part of the “public festivities and worship” that reflected “the social character of music as well as of poetry.”31 Honoring the patron saint of music, Dryden recounts several events in Alexander the Great’s reign, which the poet describes as originating in the powers of music. The sublime transport that characterizes Jove’s earthly descent and impregnation of Alexander’s mother (according to Alexander’s myth) is repeated throughout the ode as the power of music to ravish the listener. Whereas Timotheus “Cou’d swell the Soul to rage, or kindle soft Desire” (line 160), divine Cecilia, “The sweet Enthusiast, from her Sacred Store, | Enlarg’d the former narrow Bounds, | And added Length to solemn Sounds, | With Nature’s Mother-​Wit, and Arts unknown before” (lines 163–​6). The aesthetic value of the sublime here is raised further by the ultimate position of sacred songs, represented by Cecilia.

27 

Mary Leapor, “An Hymn to the Morning,” lines 43–​8, in The Works of Mary Leapor, ed. Richard Greene and Ann Messenger (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003), p. 17. 28  Joseph Ritson, Select Collection of English Songs, 2 vols. (1783), vol. i, p. xi, quoted in Steve Newman, Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 129. 29  Ibid., pp. 6–​7. 30  The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1956–​2000), vol. vii, p. 555. 31  Ibid., vol. vii, p. 555, and vol. iii, pp. 459–​60.

 

588   Jennifer Keith The aesthetic value of the sublime informs devotional poems in a number of lyric forms. Sacred subject matter in the era’s lyric poetry wears a number of labels, from song, to psalm paraphrases, to sacred odes, to hymns meditative and congregational, all of which depend on the musical dimensions of the lyric. The occasion of musical performance shapes innovations in sacred lyrics of this era, particularly in the communal hymn. Among the era’s best known hymnodists are Isaac Watts, John and Charles Wesley, and Augustus Montague Toplady, whose hymns still can be heard in the weekly occasions of church services. Even in the case of meditational sacred lyrics, the performance of song often defines the occasion and performance of worship. Christopher Smart’s Song to David (1763) praises this maker of songs in verse that represents praise of the divine as a musical event where the celebration of earthly kings is exceeded by celebrations of David’s priority and God’s authority: O thou, that sit’st upon a throne, With harp of high majestic tone, To praise the King of kings; And voice of heav’n-​ascending swell, Which, while its deeper notes excell, Clear, as a clarion, rings.32

Supported by David’s significance as the writer and singer of psalms, Smart’s title of “song” for his 516-​line poem, which could be called a sacred ode or hymn, also shows the loosening of the labels and positions of forms and kinds under the pressure of sublime content. The call on communal forms and the occasion of lyrical performance transforms the lyric in this era and contributes in part to the era’s fascination with ballads, whose narratives repeat an event of the past that can stimulate the reader’s or hearer’s cultural and nationalistic community (see ­chapter 32, “Ballad”). Steve Newman has analyzed how elite authors were attracted to “the ballad’s communal voice,” in what has been called the era’s ballad revival, “though, as many have pointed out, it is elite literature and not the traditional ballad itself that is ‘revived.’ ”33 Often in manuscript and print collections of songs we see ballads beside them, and the presence of ballads increases with the eighteenth century’s growing interest in indigenous traditions and dialect poetry. As with many songs, ballads enlist a sense of return to familiar passions and stories, but as representatives of native traditions ballads also support national myths. Joseph Addison’s essays teach his audience to see the ballad not as “the province of a social group paradoxically marked by its lack of distinction (‘the Common People’),” but as “a badge of honor for ‘reader[s]‌of Common humanity.’ ”34 William Cowper uses the ballad’s combination of communal bonds and a central narrative event in his adaptation of the ballad in “The Cast-​Away” (written 1799). The explicit narrative in his poem recounts a relatively recent historical event: a seaman knocked overboard

32 

A Song to David, lines 1–​6, in The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, ed. Marcus Walsh and Karina Williamson, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), vol. ii, p. 129. 33 Newman, Ballad Collection, p. 3. 34  Ibid., p. 29; see also Addison, Spectators 70, 74, and 85.

 

Lyric   589 during George Anson’s voyage around the world in 1741.35 Cowper uses the ballad’s narrative pull and repetition to tell two stories of horrific isolation. One is the sailor’s who, as an expert swimmer, will suffer long: “Nor soon he felt his strength decline | Or courage die away” (15–​16).36 But as terrifying as the sailor’s fate is, Cowper’s ballad is more concerned with a shared fate—​“We perish’d, each, alone”—​where the speaker suffers “beneath a rougher sea, | And whelm’d in deeper gulphs than he” (lines 64, 65–​6). In one of the most moving poetic accounts of isolation, Cowper adapts the ballad because of its social reach in a public song that excludes no one. The deeper the isolation portrayed as this poem proceeds, the more it seeks a public audience for physical and spiritual suffering for an isolation that would not be inward. One of the ways he achieves this is through the figure of personification. Cowper represents the sailor’s particular circumstances with personifications that can be felt by any reader: the castaway “waged with Death a lasting strife | Supported by despair of life” (lines 17–​18). A conduit for sharing passions, personification tropes the very action of sharing even the most isolating condition: “Mis’ry still delights to trace | Its semblance in another’s case” (lines 59–​60).

Personification and Sensibility Cowper’s use of personification here draws on its multiple and powerful uses in the era to convey the greatest passions. It is not surprising that personifications heavily populate the greater ode, which used the trope to yoke important cultural themes to the “internal” action of perceiving the passions. Behn’s “On Desire: A Pindarick” (1688) addresses this personification that resembles the torturing beloved of the Petrarchan tradition. In such an address the poet often tests the abstraction with experience, especially focusing on the detailed perception of that experience. Finch’s Pindaric “The Spleen” (1701) opens with the tension between defining the abstraction she addresses and the complexity of perceptions and experiences of the spleen: What art thou Spleen, which ev’ry thing doest ape? Thou Proteus, to abus’d Mankind, Who never yett, thy real cause cou’d find, Or fix thee, to remain in one continnu’d shape, Still varying thy perplexing form, Now a dead Sea thou’lt represent, A calm, of stupid discontent; Then dashing on the Rocks, wilt rage into a Storm. Trembling, sometimes, thou doest appear Dissolv’d into a Panick fear; On sleep intruding, doest thy shaddows spread, Thy gloomy terrours, roun’d the silent bed, And croud with boading dreams, the melancholy head. (lines 1–​13)

35  The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–​95), vol. iii, p. 357. 36  All quotations of “The Cast-​Away” are from The Poems of William Cowper, vol. iii, pp. 214–​15.

 

590   Jennifer Keith Repeatedly placing the experience of spleen in social and even national contexts, Finch also describes the act of perceiving and discerning true spleen as requiring the powers of imagination and judgment: I feel thy force, whilst I against thee rail, I feel my Verse decay, and my crampt numbers fail; Through thy black Jandies, I all objects see As dark, and terrible as thee…  . (lines 75–​8)

In articulating the speaker’s perceptions under spleen’s influence, the poem exemplifies an increasing tendency in the era to locate passions in this process of perceiving.37 In the era’s many long descriptive poems, the passions figured by personifications journey through landscapes physical and imaginative. Personifications loom large in the greater ode’s attention to occasions that range from the death of a king, a military victory, or other occasions that can be described as events of perception. In pursuing the “psychology” of these passions, poets repeatedly deploy personifications in a narrative of passionate perceiving fueled by empiricism. Although empiricism draws attention to worldly details such as Bowstreet mentioned by Croxall, it also has a centripetal force that returns to the perceiver’s consciousness as another locus of interest and desire. That the figure of personification so often accompanies this focus on the perceiver’s consciousness as the site of passion may be variously explained. The poet’s address, and at times courting, of the personification forms a narrative of perceiving the passions, often described as a movement sublime in its heights. Personification was regarded by many eighteenth-​century writers as the figure demanding the greatest imagination and passion—​ of writer and reader. Thus Thomas Warton specifies that The Pleasures of Melancholy (1747) can be felt only by those who possess sensitive passions and “Elegance of soul refin’d.”38 Personification may be seen as either oppressively anthropomorphizing or generously inclusive in figuring a great variety of ideas and entities in a human form. The poetry often shows these ideas and entities in action, as sources of movement and power, placing human action in a wide frame of forces. Personification can generate this populated experience of the passions, but it can also suggest social retreat in the speaker’s desire to become one with the idea or entity figured, particularly in what John Sitter has described as a “private visionary experience.”39 Thomas Gray’s Bard (1757) depends on personifications to convey the great passions of a historical event where indigenous culture and oral poetry are crushed by political force. Gray chooses the greater ode for his version of the story of the English King Edward I’s conquest of

37  David Fairer describes this attention to perception as it relates to Locke’s theories: “In the decades following Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690), poets found its implications suggestive—​that the mind might be no mere recorder, but a highly sensitised response mechanism to qualities realisable only within itself… . The early decades of the eighteenth century … were a time when the ‘subjective’ was being redefined as a new kind of truth” (English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–​1789 (London: Longman, 2003), p. 106). 38  The Pleasures of Melancholy: A Poem (London, 1747), line 93. 39  John Sitter, “Political, Satirical, Didactic and Lyric Poetry (II): After Pope,” in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–​1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), pp. 287–​315, at p. 310. See also Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid-​Eighteenth-​Century England (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982), especially pp. 104–​53.

 

Lyric   591 Wales and oppression of its bards. The poem develops the social and political ramifications of this historical event in the person of the isolated bard, whose suffering augments his powers: “And with a Master’s hand, and Prophet’s fire, | Struck the deep sorrows of his lyre” (lines 21–​2).40 Historical figures and personifications inhabit the poem when the bard foresees the king attended by “Fell Thirst and Famine” (line 81). Beginning with the bard’s curses upon the “ruthless King” (line 1), the ode’s historical-​political narrative relies on personifications to concentrate the passions connected to these events. Although in this poem Gray’s personifications are characterized relatively briefly, they call on the poet’s and readers’ imaginative habits of visualizing personifications with iconography, literary allusion, and perceptual detail. Only temporarily destroyed by King Edward, poetry will be reborn, as the bard imagines here: “Bright Rapture calls, and soaring, as she sings, | Waves in the eye of Heav’n her many-​colour’d wings” (lines 123–​4). These glowing visions of a future redemption, however, contrast with the Bard’s lot, where the only redemption lies in death: “and headlong from the mountain’s height | Deep in the roaring tide he plung’d to endless night” (lines 143–​4). Although poets’ uses and addresses of personification often magnify the sense of an interiority and isolation, in another respect, personifications can offer a larger social bond.41 David Fairer’s phrase “perceptual sociability,” used by him in a more specific context, aptly describes this phenomenon.42 Through representing, especially addressing, personifications the poet creates a community of imaginative and moral connections. The more detailed the poet’s description is of the personification, the more the figure resembles a wished-​for self or an object of desire. One of the most delicate examples of this desire is articulated in William Collins’s “Ode to Evening” (1746). Collins approaches personified Evening with a tenderness and reserve that seems required by Evening’s own nature. Collins’s winding hesitant syntax completes its initial address of Evening in twenty lines. Attempting to match its address to its addressee, the poem exemplifies the passion of a request characteristic of the eighteenth century—​“teach me”: Now teach me, maid compos’d, To breathe some soften’d strain, Whose numbers stealing thro’ thy darkning vale, May not unseemly with its stillness suit, As musing slow, I hail Thy genial lov’d return!43

In its tentative approach to reserved Evening, Collins’s poem magnifies the imaginative process necessary to encountering a personification: the personification is not pressed into service by the human form, but the speaker stretches in attempting to imagine the figure. Addressing the personification requires an act of imagination better described as ontological emulation. The poem may be described as a love lyric to Evening, where love comprises perceiving and emulating the beloved. 40 

All quotations of Thomas Gray’s work are from The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969). 41  See Clifford Siskin’s “Personification and Community: Literary Change in the Mid-​and Late-​ Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 15, no. 4 (1982), 371–​401. 42 Fairer, English Poetry, p. 108. 43  Collins, “Ode to Evening,” lines 15–​20, in The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, p. 156.

 

592   Jennifer Keith The language of sensing appears frequently in lyrics featuring detailed personifications and in poems of natural description, where the senses seem to search for more space as the mind perceives. The cult of sensibility, with its pendulum of self-​absorption and social consciousness, privileged an individual’s perceptions and feelings that could also extend to sympathy with the sufferings of those oppressed by patriarchy, poverty, or slavery. Bridges of the passions, personifications can support social sympathy in lyrics. One of the most passionate lyrics that relies on these personifying bridges is Samuel Johnson’s “On the Death of Dr Robert Levet” (1783). The poem’s first stanza calls on us to consider collectively our losses, particularly when “By sudden blasts, or slow decline, | Our social comforts drop away” (lines 3–​4).44 Beginning with our toil, set in “hope’s delusive mine” (line 1), Johnson moves to Levet’s work: In misery’s darkest caverns known, His useful care was ever nigh, Where hopeless anguish pour’d his groan, And lonely want retired to die. (lines 17–​20)

Inhabiting “hope’s delusive mine,” the reader senses the proximity of “misery’s darkest caverns” along with the constant aid from Levet. The poem’s most concentrated figure, as many readers have observed, appears in the line “Yet still he fills affection’s eye” (line 9), where the faculty of vision is transformed into passion and compassion. Johnson’s use of a modified ballad form to grieve for his friend not only befits Levet’s humble status but also gathers around the bereft poet a community of mourners, brought together by personifications.

The Sonnet The passions’ connections to social domains that include the epistolary mode, performance, and the cultural bonds of personification resituate the lyric in the forms described above and clarify the changing features of the sonnet in this era. Although the sonnet did not disappear in the Restoration and eighteenth century, the features of the lyric described here begat a range of variations on the sonnet’s usual forms and contents. The widespread use of the sociable and conversational couplet worked against these traditional forms. The number of lines and traditional rhyme schemes are, of course, not the exclusive criteria for a sonnet. In “On the Death of my Brother: A Sonnet” (1688), Jane Barker revises Petrarchan figures to mourn her brother in a sonnet of sixteen lines with alternating rhymes. Epistolary structures shape many sonnets of this era, including, for example, Charlotte Smith’s “Captive Escaped in the Wilds of America Addressed to the Honorable Mrs. O’Neill” (1792) and William Cowper’s “To William Wilberforce” (1792). The epistolary reach and various subject matter shown even by these titles enlarge the range of sonnets in the eighteenth century. Perhaps the most profound shift in the sonnet’s territory is its frequent use of the landscape as a source or correlative of passion. Tiny sonnets provide windows to expanding 44  “On the Death of Dr Robert Levet,” in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 21 vols. to date (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1958–​), vol. vi, pp. 313–​15.

 

Lyric   593 vistas of passions transported through time and space. Elizabeth Tollet’s “On the Prospect from Westminster Bridge, March 1750” invokes Caesar to survey this prospect from his position in the heavens. The eye moves cinematically from “Arches o’er the River bend” to “a Street that intercepts the Eye,” but the poem uses this setting to announce a new order of time: the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.45 In Thomas Warton’s “To the River Lodon” (1777), the landscape provides the setting for the speaker to review the journey thus far of his life, reviewing particularly his childhood memories when “first I trod thy banks with alders crown’d.”46 In the space of fourteen lines, Warton surveys a lifetime “to manhood’s prime mature” (line 13) by defining this life as the memory of sensing nature and ongoing poetic creation. One of the most famous landscapes in eighteenth-​century sonnets appears in Gray’s “Sonnet [on the Death of Richard West]” (written 1742, published 1775). Surrounded by a landscape of pastoral beauty, the speaker enlists its conventional delights, where “Morning smiles the busy Race to chear” (line 9), to contrast his isolation: “I fruitless mourn to him, that cannot hear, | And weep the more, because I weep in vain” (lines 13–​14). Gray’s poem breaks with the social hope of the epistle: in this void all that remains is to be overheard. The eighteenth-​century sonnet frequently relies on the expansive dimensions of the landscape and personification to demonstrate the passions of sensory perceptions and the excitement of their movements. These perceptions typically generate an aesthetic hierarchy: attending to the perceiving consciousness discovers an intensity of imaginative process, and this process can prove the writer’s and reader’s rarefied aesthetic faculty. This aesthetic faculty joins two at times contradictory impulses: fascination with the individual’s sensing consciousness and moral concerns as the senses connect to social passions that seek to understand the sufferings of others. The social dimensions of passion in this era that have been described above in the lyric culminate in the literature of sensibility, where the attention to sensory perception can yield solipsism or social compassion. Many of Anna Seward’s sonnets use the form to explore the perceiving consciousness as she revises conventions associated with the literature of sensibility. Instead of the typical scenario of female virtue in distress, for example, Seward presents a woman’s artistic boldness and varieties of female desire. She frequently works under the greatest formal constraints of the Italian sonnet. In sonnet 1, she inaugurates the conjunction of genius and the sonnet form as the speaker enters the gates of personified Genius and commands the presence of Imagination. In a narrative of transformation indebted to alchemy and the sublime, the poem defines poetic power as perceptions of the soul that shift from dull matter to the light of genius. In her “Sonnet LXXI: To the Poppy,” Seward uses the topos of woman as flower to enter the suffering consciousness of the transgressor. She chooses the poppy, not the rose, to consider the perceptions of a woman tainted by drugs and desire: While Summer Roses all their glory yield To crown the Votary of Love and Joy, Misfortune’s Victim hails, with many a sigh, Thee, scarlet Poppy of the pathless field,

45 

Elizabeth Tollet, “On the Prospect from Westminster Bridge, March 1750,” in Poems on Several Occasions: With Anne Boleyn to King Henry VIII.: An Epistle (London, 1755), lines 4, 6. 46  Thomas Warton, “To the River Lodon,” in Poems: A New Edition by Thomas Warton (London, 1777), line 2.

 

594   Jennifer Keith Gaudy, yet wild and lone; no leaf to shield Thy flaccid vest, that, as the gale blows high, Flaps, and alternate folds around thy head.—​ So stands in the long grass a love-​craz’d Maid, Smiling aghast; while stream to every wind Her gairish ribbons, smear’d with dust and rain; But brain-​sick visions cheat her tortured mind, And bring false peace. Thus, lulling grief and pain, Kind dreams oblivious from thy juice proceed, Thou flimsy, shewy, melancholy weed.47

The conventional object of the literature of sensibility—​female virtue in distress—​appears in a new key, exposing the woman’s “brain-​sick visions” and “false peace.” The reader at once sees the suffering woman-​flower and, because of the poem’s use of apostrophe, the reader is called upon as that suffering object. Functioning as the spectator and double of the metamorphosing woman as well as auditor of Misfortune’s victim, the reader is outside and inside the figure of distress, madness, and moral transgression. The poem’s aggressive address that includes a recognition of the suffering object engages the complexities of sympathy and revulsion. Thus, the poet performs the social passions found in so many eighteenth-​century lyrics, inviting compassion and commonality even in the face of agonizing and repellent experience. If “it is the reader’s sensibility that completes” many sonnets of the 1780s and 1790s, Seward’s poem challenges the reader with the passions of aberrant suffering.48 The literature of sensibility drew on the assumption that passions reached their greatest heights in overtly social domains, as seen in so many lyrics of the Restoration and eighteenth century. But in sensibility’s double focus on the perceiving self and the others perceived, the social bonds of passion could strengthen or break.

References Brewster, Scott, Lyric (London: Routledge, 2009). Culler, Jonathan, “Lyric, History, and Genre,” New Literary History, 40, no. 4 (2009), 879–​99. Dubrow, Heather, The Challenges of Orpheus:  Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2008). Feingold, Richard, Moralized Song:  The Character of Augustan Lyricism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1989). Gildenhuys, Faith, “Convention and Consciousness in Prior’s Love Lyrics,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900, 35, no. 3 (1995), 437–​55. Johnson, W. R., The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1982). Maclean, Norman, “From Action to Image: Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century,” in R. S. Crane (ed.), Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1952), 408–​60. 47 

Anna Seward, “Sonnet LXXI: To the Poppy,” in Original Sonnets on Various Subjects; and Odes Paraphrased from Horace (London, 1799). 48  David Fairer, “The Sonnet,” in Nicholas Roe (ed.), Romanticism: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005), pp. 292–​309, at p. 296.

 

Lyric   595 Patey, Douglas Lane, “‘Aesthetics’ and the Rise of Lyric in the Eighteenth Century,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900, 33, no. 3 (1993), 587–​608. Sitter, John E., Literary Loneliness in Mid-​Eighteenth-​Century England (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982). Williams, Anne, Prophetic Strain: The Greater Lyric in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984).

 

Chapter 35

Transl at i on Tanya Caldwell In his mid-​eighteenth-​century confidence that “Originals are, and ought to be, great Favourites, for they are great Benefactors” extending “the Republic of Letters,” while “Imitators only give us a sort of Duplicates of what we had, possibly much better, before,” Edward Young expresses the ignominy of the genre.1 Before the seventeenth century, when any modern literary effort was inferior to those of the ancients, imitation was seen as the best way of embellishing English letters.2 By the seventeenth century, ancients and moderns had become rivals, and modern emulation of the ancients, as Young also recognizes, was a spur of genius. Then as now, however, whether the translator or imitator ranked among the best writers of the age or was an aspiring hack, the work maintained secondary status, a sequel to a successful first act. Yet, in the period this volume covers—​one characterized by intense original production—​ these literary shadows proliferate. Knowledge and genius, contrary to Young’s proclamations, are furthered through translation and imitation. As Howard Weinbrot says explicitly and many have argued implicitly, imitation is a major achievement of the eighteenth century, and not just for poems like Dryden’s Fables, Pope’s Homer, and Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes, which offer examples of the period’s most remarkable works.3 The history of translation and imitation and theoretical discussions of the practices are central to an understanding of eighteenth-​century literature. As revolutionary political events from the Stuart era on transformed British society, translation offered a much-​needed affirmation of the past, but also, increasingly, an outlet for intense skepticism of the authority of the ancients and revered traditions. Simultaneously, with England’s beginnings under Charles II as an imperial trading power, readers’ interests expanded beyond ancient classics. As Linda Colley

1 

Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition: In a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison (London, 1759), p. 10. 2  Howard Weinbrot discusses the divide between pre-​and post-​seventeenth-​century emulation of ancient texts, and traces changing meanings of the word “emulation,” which came to carry both negative and positive connotations as modern servility became rivalry. See Howard D. Weinbrot, “‘An Ambition to Excell’: The Aesthetics of Emulation in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 48, no. 2 (1985), 121–​39. 3  Howard D. Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), p. 81.

 

Translation   597 argues of the eighteenth century, insularity had no place in the “patriotism and nationalism” that took hold between the Act of Union of 1707 and the accession of Victoria in 1837. The “evolution of Britishness” cannot indeed “be understood,” she declares, “without reference to both European and world history,” for “most of their early modern and modern history, the English have had more contact with more parts of the world than almost any other nation.”4 This multiplicity of national interests coincided with an expanding reading public, who, as Barbara Benedict and others have shown, were driving the book market with their eclectic tastes.5 Translation and imitation offer a nexus of creativity and exploration in an age of fermentation and identity formation, in which generic traditions and boundaries were overridden, new literary forms emerged, and England became cosmopolitan and thoroughly modern.6

Trajectory Countless translations of great variety poured from British presses during this period, which begins with the old impulse to adore the ancients and ends with valorization of moderns, in a way that Young’s comments typify.7 Yet there is no linear trajectory, as Mirella Agorni argues for female translators, pointing out that Elizabeth Carter faced more challenges in the 1730s than Aphra Behn did in the Restoration.8 For Weinbrot, signposts of the major shifts in attitude toward composition as an art are the pedagogies of Roger Ascham, in 1570, for whom “good Latin is the touchstone,” with translation the basis of a gentleman’s education, and Henry Felton, in 1715, for whom “good English is the touchstone.” Between them lies John Dryden, who anchored the notion that moderns could equal the ancients and recognized that Plato had said as much (Weinbrot, “An Ambition to Excell,” pp. 125, 124). At the heart of the divide between faith in the ancients as polestars and post-​Interregnum diversity of foci is also the commercialization of literature, accelerated by the Restoration miscellany culture, in which translation and imitation played a major role. This chapter addresses examples that illustrate these complicated processes. It places emphasis on the Restoration period, where much of the foundation work is laid, particularly by Dryden and his predecessors, and the miscellanies, which played a vital role in eroding old hierarchies. Translation went from being a political tool to a means of transcending 4  Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–​1837, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2009), p. 9. 5  Barbara M. Benedict, Making the Modern Reader: Cultural Mediation in Early Modern Literary Anthologies (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1996). 6  Julie Candler Hayes too concludes that translation “is a prime site for discussion of the historicity of language and the evolution of literary traditions—​and indeed the historicity of translation practice itself ” (Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture in France and England, 1600–​1800 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2009), p. 13). 7  Hayes points out that there is no “complete bibliography of translations into English and French during this period,” and far too many works to cover in a book-​length study (Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture, p. 9). 8  Mirella Agorni, “The Voice of the ‘Translatress’: From Aphra Behn to Elizabeth Carter,” Yearbook of English Studies, 28 (1998), 181–​95, at p. 182.

 

598   Tanya Caldwell political partisanship; it also supplied the taste for variety, authority, and novelty as a buying reading public began to shape literary production. These developments continued in the eighteenth century, when translation facilitated the vogue for storytelling and became a medium for patriotic expression. Conscious of their cultural roles, the best translations and imitations had distinctly original elements in their profoundly dialogic functions, and the art helped to transform the language.

Restoration The Restoration began with acts of cultural translation that were founded on poetic traditions embodying stability, or at least the yearning for it. The astutely timed entrance of Charles II into London on his birthday in 1660 bolstered the political acts designed to turn historical chaos into victory. The processions designed by John Ogilby to imitate Roman ones, and later printed, were inscribed with ancient texts in a historical process that would, as Paula Backscheider says, present “Charles as a deity, not as a symbol of ideal order.”9 In parallel acts of imitation, propagandist poets adopted Virgilian modes. The epic impulse at the heart of the new Augustanism is embodied in the early poems of Dryden who, as James Winn remarks, hoped to serve as Virgil to Charles II’s Augustus (see c­ hapter 28, “Epic”). He begins in Astraea Redux by presenting the king as a “type” of Aeneas, “toss’d by Fate,” but with the significant difference of an emphasis on “Armes and Arts” instead of Virgil’s “Arms and the Man”: Oh Happy Age! Oh times like those alone By Fate reserv’d for Great Augustus Throne! When the joint growth of Armes and Arts foreshew The World a Monarch, and that Monarch You.10

This early recognition of the “civilizing power of arts,” as Winn puts it, would eventually become a source of personal consolation for Dryden.11 Years later, as a political and religious exile in his own land, he put his faith in poetry as a means of transcending the particular; translation, far from being a mere source of income, became the primary medium of this transcendental civilizing discourse. When Dryden finally wrote his epics—​and in so doing set the tone for eighteenth-​century literature—​they were translations, the only mode his circumstances and the age allowed. Even in the Restoration, Dryden’s most Virgilian efforts were fragmentary and experimental. These features were typical of the many pre-​and post-​1660 attempts at translating ancient epic poets that characterized both royalist political endeavors and resistance to the 9  Paula R. Backscheider, Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993), p. 14. Ogilby’s “Entertainments” are reproduced in The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II in His Passage through the Citie of London to His Coronation, ed. Ronald Knowles (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1988). 10  Astraea Redux, lines 320–​3, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1956–​2000), vol. i, p. 31. 11  James Anderson Winn, John Dryden and His World (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1987), p. 110.

 

Translation   599 monarchy. During the Civil War and Interregnum, as Julie Candler Hayes remarks, a small group of exiled royalist supporters produced important translations and critical essays on the poetic practice. Such was the impact of their work, she notes, quoting Nigel Smith, that translation was seen as “the characteristic literary activity of Royalists in defeat.”12 The most overtly partisan of these efforts was Edmund Waller and Sidney Godolphin’s translation, The Passion of Dido for Aeneas: As It Is Incomparably Exprest in the Fourth Book of Virgil (1658). Expressing its political intent through the cavalier mode it signals, the poem’s title and authors evoke a Caroline world of love and authority. The expression of a lost Arcadia is more disillusioned in the works of two other members of the group of exiles, Sir Richard Fanshawe and Sir John Denham. Fanshawe’s translation of Battista Guarini’s Pastor Fido, The Faithful Shepherd, first published in 1647, had an impact well into the Restoration with editions in 1664, 1676, and 1692. Dedicated “To … Prince Charles, Prince of Wales,” the poem is less optimistic than it suggests by its affirmation of Charles’s rightful title and closing wish for “some happy Royall Marriage … thereby uniting a miserably divided people in a publick joy.”13 Fanshawe laments that he must show “his Royall Spectators … the image of a gasping State,” full of horrific scenes. He regrets too his mode, suggesting a parallel between it and the world he and his companions inhabit: “a Translation at the best is but the mock-​Rainbow in the clouds, faintly imitating the true one: into which Apollo himself has a full and immediate influence” (dedication). Fanshawe’s multiple editions, however, help carry into the Restoration John Denham’s now-​famous poem on translation, which embodies his notion of translation as an act of redemption (pp. 68–​9). Denham says of the translator, “Secure of Fame, thou justly dost esteem | Lesse honour to create, then to redeem.”14 In the theories that would consolidate in the Restoration with Denham and Dryden at the center, translation would offer redemption, where politics still failed to, by stressing the vibrancy of the past in a poetic discourse that could shape the future. While Denham proffered translation as a reconstructive act and worked within the Virgilian Caroline mode, he gradually became more skeptical even as his theory became instrumental in the construction of English poetics. His translations were consequently typical of the Stuart era in their fragmentary nature and their inability to maintain any political bedrock. Like Waller, Denham engages during the Interregnum in self-​consciously royalist poetics with his choice of translation fragments from the Aeneid, books ii and iv: “The Destruction of Troy” and “The Passion of Dido for Aeneas.” The former was published alone in 1636 without the translator’s name, in what Lawrence Venuti calls “a distinctively aristocratic gesture … typical of court culture in the Tudor and Stuart periods.”15 In the increasingly cosmopolitan reign of Charles II, however, the same translations toll the death knell of such royalist poetics. Both poems appear in Denham’s Poems and Translations with the Sophy (1668),

12 Hayes, Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture, pp. 62–​3, quoting Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–​1660 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1994), p. 318. 13  A Critical Edition of Sir Richard Fanshawe’s 1647 Translation of Giovanni Battista Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido, ed. Walter F. Staton, Jr. and William E. Simeone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 3. 14  The Poetical Works of Sir John Denham, ed. Theodore Howard Banks (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1928), p. 43. 15  Lawrence Venuti, “The Destruction of Troy: Translation and Royalist Cultural Politics in the Interregnum,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 23, no. 2 (1993), 197–​219, at p. 197.

 

600   Tanya Caldwell where, as with the other miscellanies of the time, the eclectic mix of high and low further frays the Augustan ideals that the translations can no longer contain. Comparing his poetic struggles to Virgil’s in a traditional teleology, Denham juxtaposes his 1654 version of Coopers Hill and “The Destruction of Troy.” As critics have noted in remarking the dependence on Virgil of Coopers Hill and echoes of the poem in “The Destruction of Troy,” both works take on contemporary political disaster for imperial greatness in a divine epic cycle, and Denham’s poetic efforts continue the work of Virgil. In the translation, however, the telos is ultimately unsustainable. In the final line of “The Destruction of Troy,” the king falls with his kingdom: Thus fell the King, who yet surviv’d the State. With such a signal and peculiar Fate. Under so vast a ruine not a Grave, Nor in such flames a funeral fire to have: He, whom such Titles swell’d, such Power made proud To whom the scepters of all Asia bow’d, On the cold earth lies the’unregarded King A headless Carkass, and a nameless Thing. (Poetical Works, p. 178)

The bleakness here is unmistakable. As Venuti remarks of the lines, the poet admits the “signal and peculiar” nature of the king’s survival in a world where “the king lived on but not in his kingdom,” which had become a Commonwealth (“The Destruction of Troy,” p. 208). The mythology that Denham simultaneously props and questions is axed in the last cataclysmic line. In a lost world of sacred hierarchies this most revered body is allowed no distinction; it has sunk below the lowliest living creature. This is no Virgilian world of imperial promises, and Denham did not revise his translation for inclusion in his Poems (1668). That England had moved beyond Renaissance confidences, despite the epic impulse that shaped Charles II’s age, is equally evident in the translations of the lesser poets. In 1661, for example, John Boys translated the two books of the Aeneid that allowed him best to work in the medieval and Renaissance tradition of Virgilian allegory and to advance the Spenserian concept of Virgilian investment in present for the glory of the future. Yet warnings to the king and a sense of the discontinuity of history pervade both his Æneas His Errours; or, His Voyage from Troy into Italy: An Essay upon the Third Book of Virgils Æneis and Æneas His Descent into Hell: As It Is Inimitably Described by the Prince of Poets in the Sixth of His Æneis. Ignoring Ogilby’s Virgil completely, he is plagued too by the question of why there is no complete Virgil for this supposed Virgilian age. Other heroic endeavors from the Restoration that either deliberately or unwittingly subvert the heroic include a couple of Homers. Thomas Hobbes translated both the Iliad and the Odyssey. In his Iliad, published first in 1676, can be heard echoes from Leviathan, as Jack Lynch points out, and “he seems to cast Agamemnon in the role of the Hobbesian sovereign.”16 The opening of his translation focuses on the chaos caused when monarchs fight for their prerogatives: O Goddess, sing what woe the discontent Of Thetis Son brought to the Greeks; what Souls Of Heroes Down to Erebus it sent,

16  Jack Lynch, “Political Ideology in Translations of the Iliad, 1660–​1715,” Translation and Literature, 7, no. 1 (1998), 23–​41, at pp. 26–​7.

 

Translation   601 Leaving their bodies unto Dogs and Fowls: Whilst the two Princes of the Army strove, King Agamemnon and Achilles stout.17

This is indeed a Hobbesian world where life is nasty, brutish, and short. Ogilby’s royalist Iliad, on the contrary, establishes Homer as “most constant Assertor of the Divine right of Princes and Monarchical Government” in its dedication to Charles II. Ogilby also insists that “all Anti-​monarchical Persons [Homer] describes in the Character of Thersites.”18 The lack of critical acclaim of this work, however, along with the 1660 advertisement for Ogilby’s complete Homer, which calls for subscribers, especially those willing to design and bear the cost of “graving of a Plate,” underscores its role as a commercial venture in the new world of book marketing. Ogilby’s emphasis in his Virgil (which also escaped critical notice) was equally on production—​initially of a scholarly work, ultimately of an expensive collector’s item. The first edition of his first translation, The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro, a modest octavo, appeared in 1649 and was republished in 1650 and 1665. The dedicatory material indicates that it was part of a royalist tradition, though the translation itself is noticeably devoid of political implications. The revised 1654 translation is generally recognized as what T. W. Harrison calls “a far more explicitly ‘Royalist’ version.”19 For Ogilby, however, given the variety of his works, the lack of individual acclaim each won, and his mounting interest and skills in marketing expensive volumes, the royalist framework of his epic translations worked best as a means of promoting the translator’s own interests, as a boast about his success in 1670 makes clear. As he surveys the development of his Virgil, he wonders that, from a mean Octavo, a Royal Folio Flourish’d, Adorn’d with Sculpture, and Illustrated with Annotations, Triumphing with the Affixt Emblazons, Names, and Titles of a hundred Patrons, all bold Assertors in Vindication of the Work, which (whate’re my Deserts) being Publish’d with the Magnificence and Splendor, appear’d a new and taking Beauty, the fairest that till then the English Press ever boasted.20

The royal folio was his 1654 translation. Two points stand out: Ogilby’s obvious pride in his authority and social standing as an author, and the idea that the “Royalty” of his folio inheres not in the fabric of the translation but in the embellishments and association with noble names and titles. As early as the 1650 edition, moreover, Ogilby had included a portrait of “Iohannes Ogilvius,” whose head is notably larger than Virgil’s in the frontispiece opposite—​as if Ogilby claims that this poem is as much his as the ancient’s. The 1654 edition has a new, more

17  Thomas Hobbes, Homer’s Iliads in English by Tho. Hobbes: To Which May Be Added Homers Odysses, Englished by the Same Author (London, 1676), p. 1. 18  Hobbes, dedication; Lynch, “Political Ideology,” p. 26. Robin Sowerby also notes, “The Preface to Ogilby’s 1660 Iliad shows how easily Homer could be assimilated to contemporary ideological debate”: see “Epic,” in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2005–​), vol. iii, p. 150. 19  T. W. Harrison, “Dryden’s Aeneid,” in Bruce King (ed.), Dryden’s Mind and Art (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1969), pp. 143–​70, at p. 143. 20 Ogilby, Africa: Being an Accurate Description of the Regions of Ægypt, Barbary, Lybia, and Billedulgerid (London, 1670), sig. c1r.

 

602   Tanya Caldwell glamorous painting of the translator that is, like the 1649 portrait, more than twice the size of the figures in the frontispiece, this time suggesting that, of all the artists from Virgil to Lely to Hollar among whom Ogilby places himself, he is supreme. Such emphasis on the superiority of the translator over the original author became part of the theoretical discussions of translation that began with the group of exiles and developed in England during the Restoration. Hayes attributes primarily to Denham the notion that “the translator is not simply equal but ultimately superior to the original writer” (p. 68). Other translators were expressing similar thoughts. James Harrington, author of The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), used his translation of several books of the Aeneid (1659) to throw into question royalist translation agendas as well as the authority of the ancients by highlighting the implausibility of Virgil’s narrative: Thou never shalt perswade me to inform Our Age, Æneas in thy greatest storm Could raise both palmes, though to the Gods; one hand At least had hold, or there he could not stand.21

At this early stage, he openly suggests that English literary efforts may one day replace these revered poems: “the English reader may sufficiently judge of like translations, without referring himself unto the Originals” (sig. A4r). His prophecy was played out in the 1680s by John Oldham, who, as Weinbrot remarks, “says that his desire to translate Ovid was ‘occasion’d’ by reading Dryden’s own version of Ovid’s Epistles, ‘which gave him a mind to try what he could do upon a like Subject’ ” (Britannia’s Issue, p. 80).

Female Poets The works of the first important female poets to try their hands at the art are further evidence that translations of even those classical authors associated with long traditions of English politics exceeded any political boundaries, and disallowed easy reverence of the ancients. In what was perhaps the most bipartisan (or nonpartisan) translation of this politically riven period, Lucy Hutchinson performed, as Hugh de Quehen remarks, “all six books of the De rerum natura in 7,800 lines of heroic couplets, quite possibly the first complete English version.”22 Increasingly well known is her claim of the informal nature of the translation, carried out “in a roome where my children practizd the severall qualities they were taught with their Tutors, and I  numbred the sillables of my translation by the threds of the canvas I wrought in, and sett then downe with a pen and inke that stood by me” (quoted in de Quehen, p. 288). Critics have wondered, first, that a modest Puritan wife and mother should have elected to translate Lucretius with his racy content; and, second, that the woman who wrote the Memoirs of the republican martyr Colonel John Hutchinson would undertake a work of Epicureanism, which was seen as “a partisan 21 

Virgil’s Æneis: The Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Books, trans. James Harrington (London, 1659), sig. A5r. 22  Hugh de Quehen, “Ease and Flow in Lucy Hutchinson’s Lucretius,” Studies in Philology, 93, no. 3 (1996), 288–​303, at p. 288.

 

Translation   603 affair.”23 Others of this period to take on Lucretius were John Evelyn (who published book i in 1656), Thomas Creech (1682), and John Dryden (who included excerpts in his Sylvae, 1685), all of whom translated the ancient in a courtly, gentlemanly fashion. Even more unexpectedly, Hutchinson’s Lucretius bears traces of Denham’s influence, while her commonplace book preserves not only the 1636 draft of his “Destruction of Troy” but also “the Waller–​Godolphin translation of Aeneid book iv, another pillar of neoclassical translation written by men whose politics she rejected.”24 Hutchinson’s Christian belief provides the answer to both puzzles—​those of decorum and politics. As de Quehen observes, quoting her, “more than most classicists [she] felt separated by the advent of Christianity from ‘the productions of degenerate nature, as they represent to us the deplorable wretchednesse of all mankind, who are not translated from darknesse to light by supernaturall illumination’ ” (“Ease and Flow,” p. 303). Such “supernaturall illumination” was inherent in the Word, which, as Jonathan Goldberg demonstrates, is ultimately “made to explain the creation of a Lucretian nature” despite her repudiation of her Lucretius in the preface to Order and Disorder, published in 1679 (Goldberg, “Lucy Hutchinson Writing Matter,” p. 293). It also made possible her translation of her husband’s life into a biography, for translation is finally the transformation of a material body from one form into another (p. 285). For the aristocratic Katherine Philips—​the “Matchless Orinda”—​translation was a means of participation in a worldly milieu that would otherwise have been closed to her. Her French translations and imitations were also further examples of growing interest in contemporary European languages and exchanges. Lord Orrery, the “second most important man in Ireland,” was so “impressed” with her translation of Corneille’s Pompée that he wrote a laudatory poem, calling it “such an improvement on the original,” as Orrery says, that, “the French to learn our Language now will seek.” Philips’s later renditions of poems by Antoine Girard de Saint-​Amant and Georges de Scudéry help to develop traditions of English lyric poetry that look back through the French to the ancients and lay down precepts for eighteenth-​ century poets.25 Aphra Behn’s translations boldly embrace inherently modern trends that shape the art and literature in general. Like other Stuart supporters, she employed the Arcadian pastoral in what had become a politics and poetics of imitation. As in her Young Jemmy; or, The Princely Shepherd, Being a Most Pleasant and Delightful New Song (1681), however, she subtly undermines the usefulness of the classical tradition she appropriates, as she creates a contemporary frame of reference. The princely shepherd of the title is led astray: “fond Ambition made him to depart; | The Fields to Court.” There, as the poem unfolds, “By flattering fools and knaves betray’d | Poor Jemmy is undone.”26 While Jemmy returns to Arcadia at the end, that innocent world is forever lost for Behn’s readers. The introductory lines prefigure a Beggar’s Opera-​type ambience, with the announcement that this “delightful New 23 

Jonathan Goldberg, “Lucy Hutchinson Writing Matter,” English Literary History, 73, no. 1 (2006), 275–​301, at p. 279. 24 Hayes, Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture, p. 76, citing de Quehen. 25  William Roberts, “The Dating of Orinda’s French Translations,” Philological Quarterly, 49, no. 1 (1970), 56–​67, at pp. 60, 67. 26  Aphra Behn, Young Jemmy; or, The Princely Shepherd: Being a Most Pleasant and Delightful New Song (London, 1681).

 

604   Tanya Caldwell Song” is “To a pleasant New Play-​house Tune,” while the poem sheet’s illustrations depict a bare-​breasted actress and male figures from the corrupt Restoration court and theater world. Behn’s dedication of her translation of Agnes de Castro; or, The Force of Generous Love, Written in French by a Lady of Quality (1688) highlights the paradoxes both of the Restoration with its desire for the stabilities of classical traditions amidst drastic re-​makings of society and literature and of Behn’s own life as a parvenue of dubious background making an anomalous impact in a male world. Doubtless because of her lack of a classical education, Behn’s translations were mostly from French, allowing her to capitalize on the enhanced Europeanization of Restoration society. Yet Behn opens this dedication by placing herself among current “Traders in Parnassus,” an elite group whose efforts cannot be appreciated in the current degenerate age: “Like Homer, we may sing our Verses from Door to Door, but shall find few List’ners that understand their Value, and can receive ’em as they ought. Virgil and Homer had a better Age” (dedication). She ends with an acknowledgment of both the gender of the original writer and the modernity of the languages of exchange. As a woman translating a woman’s work from one vernacular language to another in an attempt to counter the “dull Lewdness” of the age, and in situating her translation works in a noble tradition, Behn subtly shifts attention away from the class or gender of the translator and toward the beauties of the finished product. Similarly indicative of trends in verse translation and of theories that developed in the Restoration are Behn’s insights in her “Essay on Translated Prose,” the preface to her translation of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Entriens sur la pluralité des mondes (1688). This essay too takes an apologetic stance for its female authorship, but it suggests that any limitations on poets are those of time and place. If Behn’s author can employ a female interlocutor, then female translators should be able to speak out: “I thought an English Woman might adventure to translate anything, a French Woman may be supposed to have spoken.”27 This positive example from the French, Behn suggests, derives from an environment in which language itself is rapidly absorbing international fashions: “It is Modish to Ape the French in every thing: Therefore, we not only naturalize their words, but words they steal from other Languages” (sig. A6r). In its focus on languages, the early part of Behn’s essay shares key philosophical tenets with Dryden, who was still working through his theory of translation. In her comparative discussion of languages and nations, Behn here revives Dryden’s emphasis in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), recognizing, as Mirella Agorni says, “the ‘Genius’ of the Nation, a concept to be developed by the Romantic aesthetics more than a century later” (“The Voice of the ‘Translatress,’ ” p. 185). As he will do in the preface to his Fables, she already underscores the rapidly changing nature of language: “I am confident a French Man a hundred Years hence will no more understand an old Edition of Froisard’s History, than he will understand Arabick.” Considering this flux, she congratulates the French, whose “Arms, Money and Intrigues have made their Language very universal of late, for this they are to be commended.” The learned nature of the essay—​and translation that follows—​demonstrates Behn’s engagement in the discourses of her age. The dialogue across nations and between past and present that Behn and her fellow translators desire is embodied in the major verse translation she was involved in: Francis Barlow’s

27  Aphra Behn, A Discovery of New Worlds, from the French: Made English by Mrs. A. Behn (London, 1688), sig. A4r. See also Agorni, “The Voice of the ‘Translatress,’ ” p. 185.

 

Translation   605 Æsop’s Fables, with His Life: In English, French, and Latin, Newly Translated. The translation, Barlow’s note “To the Reader” clarifies, is at the hand of the “Ingenious Mrs. A. Behn [who] has been so obliging as to perform the English Poetry, which in short comprehends the Sense of the Fable and Moral.” It is of such quality to “recommend it self to all Persons of Understanding.” Both the layout and the prefatory materials of Barlow’s text underscore the universality of Aesop’s humble tales, which have taken on exalted literary status. Each fable is outlined in French prose, followed by “Le Sens Moral”; on the opposite page is the fable in Latin prose, with the “Morale” beneath Behn’s verse rendition. The textual riches are adorned by “One Hundred and Twelve Sculptures.” Barlow’s dedication and his “Life” of Aesop emphasize the “Humane Nature Represented in Fable” and the “Mystery” of previous ages in these stories.28 Despite the “covert political criticism” of many renditions, translation of Aesop, especially in a fine verse collection, meant participation in cultural construction. Ogilby apprehended this early on with his Fables of Æsop, Paraphras’d in Verse and Adorn’d with Sculptures (1651), which seems part of his personal ambition as a bookmaker for his time. He recalls in his preface to Africa that, as he undertook his hefty Fables, “I found such Success, that soon I seem’d to tread Air, and walk alone, becoming also a Mythologist” (The English Fable, p. 64). Fables offered a means of participation for those forced into political exile, for the mode allowed transcendence of boundaries in an ongoing discussion about and creation of Western culture, a process best exemplified in the English translation of Abbé Antoine le Banier’s Mythology and Fables of the Ancients, Explain’d from History (1739–​40). This work—​ a translation from French for English readers—​explores Christian and pagan mysteries in large part through interpretation of Scripture and the verse of ancient poets, snippets of whose work appear here in English translations already familiar to readers. The Janus-​faced and pan-​European perspective also shapes Dryden’s Fables (1700), a climactic moment of translation practice and theory.

Translation Theory Translation theory was central to the prefatory essays that pervaded the Restoration and on which the “Father of English literary criticism” founded his critical corpus, and so the basis of English criticism. The origins of Dryden’s theories lie in the debates and experiments of the Interregnum English exiles. T. R. Steiner’s observations from the 1970s on the origins and developments of English translation theory remain pertinent. He emphasizes that in the exchange of ideas there is no true linear development, and that both English and French theorists “posited some kind of … mimesis” of the original that involved “the losses and dislocations involved in change of language.”29 Hayes stresses the centrality of Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt to a “national project dedicated to promoting the preeminence of French language” over classical ones, and the

28 

Francis Barlow, Æsop’s Fables, with His Life: In English, French, and Latin (London, 1666), sig. a1r. Thomas R. Steiner, “Precursors to Dryden: English and French Theories of Translation in the Seventeenth Century,” Comparative Literature Studies, 7 (1970), 50–​81, at pp. 76–​7. 29 

 

606   Tanya Caldwell influence of d’Ablancourt and his circle on the English exiles. Their works emphasize “making the original author ‘speak French’ according to” contemporary “taste,” and these “belles infidèles (lovely unfaithful ones)” ultimately “set the standard for literary translation” (Hayes, Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture, pp.  1–​3). Several key factors emerged and shaped English theory, beginning with Denham and Cowley. These primary elements are incorporated in Denham’s “To Sir Richard Fanshawe upon His Translation of Pastor Fido” (1648) and his preface to The Destruction of Troy (1656). Translation for Denham involved redemption, yet it involved loss for the original author. He praises Fanshawe for the quality of his own poem and for recognizing that of his original: Nor ought a Genius less than his that writ, Attempt Translation; for transplanted wit, All the defects of air and soil doth share, And colder brains like colder Climates are. ……………………………………………… That servile path thou nobly dost decline Of tracing word by word, and line by line. Those are the labour’d births of slavish brains, Not the effects of Poetry, but pains. ……………………………………………… A new and nobler way thou dost pursue To make Translations and Translators too. They but preserve the Ashes, thou the Flame, True to his sense, but truer to his fame.30

Denham emphasizes the equality of translator and original author, exhorting the translator to avoid literal translation and to preserve the spirit of the original. Whether influenced by the French and their belles infidèles or, as Steiner suggests, by Chapman’s insistence that previous translators failed to “search [Homer’s] deepe and treasurous hart” and use “Nature” and “Art | With Poesie to open Poesie,” Denham’s principles are at the heart of Dryden’s first essay on translation theory, his preface to Ovid’s Epistles (1680). Here he makes his famous distinction between metaphrase (“or turning an Authour word by word, and Line by Line, from one Language into another”), paraphrase (“or Translation with Latitude”), and imitation (where the translator may “forsake” both “words and sence”). Dryden ponders Cowley’s groundwork on imitation in his Pindaric Odes, and concludes somewhat uneasily that a “Genius so Elevated and unconfin’d as Mr. Cowley’s, was but necessary to make Pindar speak English.”31 Yet he then reiterates Denham’s belief that “Poetry is of so subtil a Spirit, that in pouring out of one Language into another, it will all Evaporate; and if a new Spirit be not added in the transfusion, there will remain nothing but a Caput Mortuum” (Works, vol. i, pp. 117–​18).32 In this way, Dryden indirectly inscribes into English translation theory his predecessor’s notion that the translator must compensate for inevitable loss through a spiritual exchange with the original.

30  Quoted from Steiner, English Translation Theory, 1650–​1800 (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1975), pp. 63–​4. 31  Dryden, preface to Ovid’s Epistles, in Works, vol. i, p. 117. 32  Steiner notes that “Denham’s reading of D’Ablancourt” in this key passage and others is “most evident in his adaptation of a central metaphor,” which involves the “air” or the “visage” of the original.

 

Translation   607 As Dryden developed his ideas about a “middle way” of translation, an ideal he shared with Denham that was anchored in political imagery extending beyond their translation work, he persists in two notions that shape Cowley’s Pindaric essay too: a consciousness of the difference between places and times (which looks back to his Essay of Dramatic Poesy) and a parallel between translation and painting.33 As Steiner remarks, “Dryden’s view of translation as a mimetic activity analogous to painting never changes” (English Translation Theory, p. 36). In the preface to Sylvae (1685), Dryden makes one move to a freer style, and while translating the Aeneid, he also writes a preface to Du Fresnoy’s De arte graphica, which he entitles “A Parallel of Poetry and Painting” (1695). Laying out his mimetic theory of the “Sister Arts,” he here expresses the eighteenth-​century view of emulation as he consoles himself for the lack of “invention” in his role as translator: “to copy the best Authour is a kind of praise, if I perform it as I ought; as a Copy after Raphael is more to be commended, than an Original of any indifferent Painter” (Dryden, Works, vol. xx, p. 62). At the heart of Dryden’s theory is the idea of a spiritual commerce between poet and translator, who, Dryden reiterates while repeating Denham’s preface to his Virgil almost verbatim, must make the original “speak English … not only as a man of this Nation, but as a man of this age.”34 In order to achieve this, Dryden, like Denham before him, stresses that the translator must share a common “Genius” with his original.35 Hayes attributes this prevalent Restoration notion to the Earl of Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse (1684) with its “oft-​cited line, ‘Chuse an Author as you chuse a Friend’ ” (Hayes, Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture, p. 17). But the recreation of the spirit of the original in poetical genealogy that occurs in a timeless, apolitical space preoccupies Dryden in the 1690s, and culminates in his Fables (1700). Dryden’s quest to be the Virgil of his time had ended not with a Restoration Aeneid but with his translation of Virgil’s Works (1697). A forerunner to Fables, his Aeneis is remarkable not as an accomplished paraphrase of Virgil’s epic, but as a poem that engages the ancient with other voices through the ages in a discussion about history and poetry. As Dryden translates, he has before him a French predecessor, Jean de Segrais. His work is also shaped by Carolus Ruæus’s editions and earlier English translators, including the Earl of Lauderdale’s manuscript attempt.36 Pushing Augustan theories to a breaking point in disguised but unsustained political attacks on William III, he also evokes echoes from poets including Homer, Lucretius, Ovid, Spenser, and Milton. The result is as fragmentary as the Restoration Virgils, and reflects the diversity of the age. Dryden’s practice was at odds with French neoclassical theory perpetuated in England through the works of René Rapin and René le Bossu, both of whose works appeared in English in the 1670s, affirming time-​honored notions of the

33  See my “John Dryden and John Denham,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 46, no. 1 (2004), 49–​72, for a discussion of Dryden’s and Denham’s political imagery. 34  In the Preface to Sylvae (1685), Dryden claims of his commerce with the various authors he has translated that “my own is of a piece with his, and that if he were living, and an Englishman, they are such, as he wou’d probably have written” (Works, vol. iii, p. 4). He was to repeat the same of his translation of Juvenal (1693) and Virgil (1697). This claim is discussed more fully in my “John Dryden and John Denham,” p. 56. 35  I discuss this at more length in ibid., p. 53. 36  Sowerby discusses his use of this translation (“Epic,” in Oxford History, vol. iii, p. 152). See also my Time to Begin Anew: Dryden’s Georgics and Aeneis (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2000).

 

608   Tanya Caldwell divinity of the epic poem, the excellence of its morals, and its didactic role in society. Both these poets’ discourses went through several editions, lasting well into the eighteenth century. That the poetic principles they espoused were out of sync with the times is apparent elsewhere.

High and Low Numerous parodies of ancient poetry, particularly epic, indicated restlessness with, or exhaustion of, the values they embodied and their generic restrictions. Among the most successful are Charles Cotton’s Scarronides; or, Le Virgile Travesty (1664–​6), which generated an outpouring of similar verses. Much more polite were the eighteenth-​century mock-​ Homers, which wished the poet more concise; two were called Homer in a Nutshell. Thomas Parnell, who had assisted Pope with the Iliad, also translated Batrachomyomachia, or The Battle of the Frogs and Mice, “the mock-​epic poem that had attached itself to the Homeric corpus in antiquity” (Sowerby, “Epic,” in Oxford History, vol. iii, p. 164). Further evidence of the persistence of the heroic impulse—​and of its failure—​are the risible imitations of ancient epic by the king’s physician, Sir Richard Blackmore. In attempting for William III the English epic that Dryden had not managed for the Stuarts, Blackmore admitted that the faults of his Prince Arthur, an Heroic Poem in Ten Books (1695) and King Arthur, an Heroic Poem in Twelve Books (1697) were those of poems “written in Coffee-​houses, and in passing up and down Streets; because I had little leisure elsewhere to apply to it.”37 The skeptical nature of the Restoration is also reflected in the spate of Juvenals that graced the presses, culminating in Dryden’s Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis Translated into English by Mr. Dryden and Several Other Hands; Together with the Satires of Aulus Perisus Flaccus Made English by Mr. Dryden, to which was attached his “Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire” (1697). Yet the most forceful resistance to traditional centers of value in this formative period came from the miscellany, the distinctive element of which is variety. From the Restoration on, the collections are remarkable for blending high and low (translations from venerable poets with light original poems) and translations from different languages, different genres, and male and female voices. This variety is demonstrated, for example, in John Dennis’s Miscellany Poems by Mr. Dennis with Select Translations of Horace, Juvenal, Mons. Boileau’s Epistles, Satyrs, &c. and Æsop’s Fables, in Burlesque Verse; to Which Is Added, the Passion of Byblis, with Some Critical Reflections on Mr. Oldham, and His Writings; with Letters and Poems (1697). Also remarkable was the power that these miscellanies imparted to readers as consumers of and participants in literature. The anthologies, in which translations were the chief fabric, “provided,” as Benedict argues, “a space, if only symbolically, for the productions of all members of society.” Readers became involved, for the juxtaposition of different forms, styles, voices, and registers “invites [them] to pass aesthetic judgment” (Making the Modern Reader, pp. 5, 99).

37  Richard Blackmore, preface, Prince Arthur (London, 1697), p. v. This passage is discussed in my Virgil Made English, esp. p. 118.

 

Translation   609 Jacob Tonson was at the forefront of the miscellany industry that shaped literary tastes and made literature a commercial commodity. As Benedict states, if Tonson did not “ ‘invent’ the literary miscellany, he certainly helped to redefine it as a vehicle for literary culture aimed at highbrow as well as popular audiences” (p. 99). Tonson’s first six miscellanies, most of which he collaborated on with Dryden and which included Sylvae (1685) and Examen Poeticum (1693), “launched,” as David Hopkins and Pat Rogers state, “the translating careers of many poets of the ‘school of Dryden,’ ” including William Congreve. Aphra Behn (1685), Nahum Tate (1685), and Charles Gildon (1692) were among editors of other similar compilations.38 With Fables, Dryden turns the miscellany into the epic of the age, in which multiple voices from the ancient and the more recent European past mingle with his own in poems that evoke but transcend partisan politics. Aesthetically, this is a cornucopia of riches, such as the frontispiece of his and Tonson’s Annual Miscellany: For the Year 1694 depicts. In setting a paradigm for literary judgments, however, as Benedict says of the miscellany in general, Dryden “inscribes différance in the Derridean sense: a dislocation of meaning that traces value in the dynamic comparison, contrast, and differentiation between similar or opposing forms and messages” (Making the Modern Reader, p. 12). Chaucer’s place is as important as Homer’s or Boccaccio’s as Dryden inscribes an English tradition within the European one and places himself in it. Much more definitively than the ancients-​vs.-​moderns debate, that is, the miscellanies toppled the supremacy of the ancients. John Gay states the function of mixed works in a poem on Swift and Pope’s Miscellanies (1727): Translations should throughout the Work be sown, And Homer’s Godlike Muse be made our own; Horace in useful Numbers should be Sung, And Virgil’s Thoughts adorn the British Tongue.39

In this passage, as Benedict remarks, Gay suggests that classical authors should “model literary style” and facilitate the making of new classics, but by now they have become adornment for works of “the British Tongue” (Making the Modern Reader, pp. 131–​2). Despite the traditional neoclassical principles espoused in An Essay on Criticism (1711) and The Dunciad (1728–​43), Alexander Pope was, as much as any of his contemporaries, a participant in a literary realm shaped by the commercial and social imperatives that propelled the miscellanies. As Benedict points out, Pope “first appeared in print in the sixth volume of Tonson’s Miscellany Poems, where his Pastorals, following pastorals by John Philips and panegyrics by other authors, were the final item and were thus contextualized as the triumph of the genre” (Making the Modern Reader, p. 128). His homage to ancient epic was, as much as Dryden’s Virgil, an engagement with the present and long traditions of Homeric translation. A commercial venture of subscription publication, like Dryden’s Virgil, his Iliad (1715–​ 20), and Odyssey (1725–​6) enabled Pope to retire to Twickenham and live like a gentleman poet of a former age. His Odyssey involved multiple translators’ voices, for Pope was forced to employ assistants, including Elijah Fenton and William Broome, to finish. Following Dryden, however, such a translation was necessarily a negotiation of contemporary and 38 

David Hopkins and Pat Rogers, “The Translator’s Trade,” in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. iii, pp. 81–​95, at p. 91. 39  John Gay, “On a Miscellany of Poems: To Bernard Lintott,” lines 28–​32, in Poetry and Prose, ed. Vinton A. Dearing, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), vol. i, pp. 38–​9.

 

610   Tanya Caldwell longstanding political and literary debates, and critics have highlighted various aspects of Pope’s multifarious Homer. Peter Connelly, for example, stresses that Pope begins his undertaking in the middle, in a passage resonant with English political significance. Weinbrot has most fully outlined complexities of the poem, particularly its involvement in the ancients-​ vs.-​moderns debate—​now in its second phase—​as it continued on both sides of the Channel. Particularly important were Anne Dacier’s translation and notes to the Iliad (1711; appeared in English 1712, 1714–​22). Her Iliad became “a work so useful for Pope that she is virtually a distant colleague in his comparable effort” (Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue, pp. 198–​9).

Faithfulness Responses to the translation, from its publication onward, reveal that ideas of faithfulness to the original lingered in the expectations of the most sophisticated readers, even if translators were true to the complexities of language and history that made a recognizable “paraphrase” impossible. Richard Bentley said famously, “it is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope; but you must not call it Homer.”40 William Cowper, who produced a blank-​verse translation in what Steiner calls “the closest equivalent to Homer in English poetry,” recognizes his predecessor’s achievement in “giv[ing] us that Tale of Troy divine in smooth verse.” He undertakes his own translation, however, to make up for Pope’s in which the “deviations are many,” and Pope “sometimes altogether suppressed the sense of his author and has not seldom intermingled his own ideas with it” (Steiner, English Translation Theory, pp. 134–​5). Yet Samuel Johnson’s praise of the poem expresses the centrality to English language and literature of translation and the shift in its function since Dryden, in 1680, first advised against the “Extreams” of “Imitation and verbal Version” (Works, vol. i, p. 118). Calling Pope’s achievement “a performance which no age or nation can pretend to equal,” Johnson points not only to Dryden’s influence but also to the layers of poetical exchange that enrich the language: The chief help of Pope in this arduous undertaking was drawn from the versions of Dryden. Virgil had borrowed much of his imagery from Homer, and part of the debt was now paid by his translator. Pope searched the pages of Dryden for happy combinations of heroic diction; but it will not be denied that he added much to what he found. He cultivated our language with so much diligence and art, that he has left in his Homer a treasure of poetical elegances to posterity.41

Johnson’s sentiments about translation are echoed in the major theoretical work of the late eighteenth century, Alexander Fraser Tytler’s Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791). As Hayes observes, Tytler is sympathetic toward “adaptative translation” and critical of close or literal translation, celebrating Dryden for “having opened the floodgates of free translations”

40 

Cited in Samuel Johnson, Life of Pope, in Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), vol. iii, p. 213, n. 2. 41 Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), vol. iv, p. 73.

 

Translation   611 (Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture, pp. 248–​9). In Tytler’s own words, “translation should have all the ease of original composition” (Steiner, English, p. 32). The appeal of Pope’s Homer for many is captured in Sowerby’s assessment that the Odyssey “is at its most successful in the mythical tales, such as those of the Cyclops and Circe, and in responding to the moral and political themes of Homer’s poem” (“Epic,” in Oxford History, vol. iii, p. 163). This is the spirit of Fables, which continued to be published throughout the century. It is also the spirit of Pope’s later imitations, and of the countless Ovids, including Dryden’s, that flowed from Restoration and eighteenth-​century presses. One of the most important was Samuel Garth’s Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Fifteen Books:  Translated by the Most Eminent Hands (1717). Planned originally by Dryden, as Hopkins and Rogers note, Tonson’s “handsome folio” infuses the timeless tales with the morality and bipartisan politics of its translators. The same year Edmund Curll published a rival version, Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Fifteen Books: A New Translation by Several Hands, beating Tonson “to the bookshops by several months” (“The Translator’s Trade,” in Oxford History, vol. iii, p. 92). Contemporary taste for tales as well as the exotic is further demonstrated in the English translation, begun 1706 and completed 1721, of Antoine Galland’s French translation of the Thousand and One Nights (1704–​17). The English translation of a European phenomenon “went through at least forty-​six further editions to 1790” (Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. iii, p. 23).

Nationalism Amidst this interest in generational storytelling, translation provided an outlet for growing British and Scottish nationalism, while georgic imitation enjoyed a revival (see c­ hapter 18, “Poems on Nation and Empire,” and c­ hapter 27, “Georgic”). The tradition went back to the Renaissance, as Scott Cleary recalls, pointing to Denham’s Coopers Hill (1642) and James Thomson’s Seasons (1726–​46) as the most remarkable post-​Renaissance examples. Cleary cites the notes of Pope’s 1736 edition of Windsor-​Forest (first published in 1713)  to demonstrate that the unmistakably nationalist poem “is best understood in the context of the georgic and in particular georgic theory as it emerged at the end of the seventeenth century.”42 One major influence on thinking about the genre was Joseph Addison’s “Essay on the Georgics,” prefixed to Dryden’s translation of Virgil and often reprinted throughout the eighteenth century. Pope’s use of the georgic tradition is complex and subversive, but these were the characteristics of imitation in a period formulating its own poetry. In the georgics of women and lesser-​known poets, subversion of the classical mode in order to create a meaningful form is overt. By 1825, Anna Letitia Barbauld pointedly rejects elevated language and meter as well as masculine subject matter as she domesticates the georgic: The Muses are turned gossips; they have lost The buskin’d step, and clear high-​sounding phrase,

42  Scott M. Cleary, “Slouching toward Augusta: Alexander Pope’s 1736 ‘Windsor Forest,’” Studies in English Literature, 50, no. 3 (2010), 645–​63, at p. 645.

 

612   Tanya Caldwell Language of gods. Come, then, domestic Muse, In slip-​shod measure loosely prattling on Of farm or orchard, pleasant curds and cream, Or drowning flies, or shoe lost in the mire By little whimpering boy, with rueful face; Come, Muse, and sing the dreaded Washing-​Day.43

Unlike Swift’s cynical imitations, “A Description of a City Shower” and “A Beautiful Young Nymph,” which also fill Virgilian modes with harsh realities, “Washing Day” offers a sense of community to an audience, for which everyday life is as harsh as that of the farmers in Virgil’s Georgics. As a woman’s poem, it shares with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s courtly Town Eclogues (1747) the injection of a female perspective into a world shaped by men and their traditional genres. The working-​class poet Mary Leapor also precedes Barbauld in subverting grand modes, as she undercuts the heroic couplet and formal epistle in poems with grand titles but womanly country subject matter (1748). Barbauld’s British country wife’s georgic has a counterpart in James Grahame’s British Georgics (1809), which employs Virgil to offer advice on such topics as “Virtue of honey as a medicine for man—​Nature’s remedies the most simple—​Fever—​Cold affusion [etc.].” Grahame also composes an imitation Horatian ode, “Horace: Ad Virgilium Ode 12. Book 4,” into which he introduces Scots dialect: The westlin wind, the Springtime’s crony Now skiffs alang the sea sae bonny, And fills ilk sail …44

Horace’s original is a celebration of spring and new beginnings addressed to Virgil. Yet it is part of a book that, as Janice M. Benario argues, is “a very real piece of Augustan propaganda,” with Ode 12 contributing to a vision of “peace” and “future destiny.”45 In making such a poem thoroughly British with its rhyming couplets, Scots vocabulary, and domestic subject matter, Grahame rejects Augustan ambitions and, like Barbauld, takes a nationalistic stance. Mid-​century efforts at translation of the Aeneid were also shaped by nationalistic imperatives. Joseph Trapp published in 1718 and 1720 The Æneis of Virgil about the time he vacated his post as inaugural professor of poetry at Oxford University. His translation was, as Malcolm Kelsall says, of “the highest academic authority.”46 He worked at Virgil over the next decade in the English blank-​verse tradition that went back to Milton, and produced a comprehensive Works of Virgil in 1731. This went through two more editions in the 1730s and another in 1755. In 1753, Joseph Warton produced a weightier scholarly Virgil as he reproduced Christopher Pitt’s Aeneid . . . in Two Volumes (1740), swelling the translation into a four-​volume Works of Virgil that included several scholarly essays by eminent 43  Anna Letitia Barbauld, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2002), p. 144. 44  James Grahame, Poems in English, Scotch, and Latin (Edinburgh, 1794), p. 99. 45  Janice M. Benario, “Book 4 of Horace’s Odes: Augustan Propaganda,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 91 (1960), 339–​52, at pp. 340, 346. 46  Joseph Trapp, The Aeneis of Virgil Translated into Blank Verse, 2 vols. (London, 1718–​20); Trapp, The Preface to the Æneis of Virgil, ed. Malcolm Kelsall (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1982), p. iii.

 

Translation   613 classical scholars. Like its predecessors, this Warton–​Pitt endeavor necessarily confronts the Augustan tradition, but its emphasis is on English poetic elegance and the sublime, and Milton’s authority as epic poetry subtly trumps Virgil’s in many places, including the opening lines of the Aeneid. A footnote dominating the page and insisting on contemporary poetic taste, cites a Spectator passage in which Addison claims that the opening lines of Paradise Lost are “perhaps as plain, simple and unadorned, as any of the whole poem.” Such emphasis on England’s epic poet as the translation of Virgil begins is typical of the whole. Reflecting the definitive shift over this period to a valorization of native traditions are the controversial “translations”—​Johnson is prominent among the scholars who questioned their authenticity—​at the heart of the so-​called Scottish Enlightenment: James Macpherson’s enormously popular Ossian poems, published collectively in 1765 as The Works of Ossian (see ­chapter 14, “The Poet as Fraud”). As Weinbrot concludes, “Macpherson’s mingling of Celtic, classical, Christian, continental, English, and Hebrew is a microcosm of the broader mingling within Great Britain” (Britannia’s Issue, p. 479). Despite their challenged authenticity, these translations are able, through their mode, to appropriate the best of the traditions of classical epic and infuse them with, as Weinbrot remarks, “Druid-​Bard wisdom inculcated by Hebrew patriarchs” that is “nobler than classical wisdom” (pp. 478–​9). In the exchange of voices, the native ones become more worldly, more appealing. In Idlers 68 and 69 (1759), Samuel Johnson highlights translation as an invention of the modern world and points out that the first books to be printed in English were translations. Parallel—​almost—​to the explosion of knowledge brought about by the dissemination of print and of ancient and foreign texts through translation, the revolutions in readership, authorship, and literary form in England in the late seventeenth century because of social and political change were facilitated and shaped through translation. In this so-​called Augustan age, translators and poets readily abandon political creeds for the variety and inclusiveness represented by the miscellany culture in which audiences and authors grew steadily wider. Whether with European neighbors, biblical, or classical traditions, translation offered genuine discourse in a way that original composition could not, especially in a period still feeling the need for the authority of tradition. The effect on translation as an art is that poets after Denham and Dryden increasingly shook off “servile closeness,” in Johnson’s phrase, as they engendered new styles, voices, and forms in literature.47 Equally predominant amidst the experimentation and original publications of the eighteenth century were emulation and parody of an increasingly wide range of texts. Both practices, as Michael Suarez says of Swift’s poems, are “forms of evaluative appropriation,” and reflect eighteenth-​ century poets’ negotiation of their relationship to the past and the European present.48 By the late eighteenth century, pride in British achievement was characteristic of imitative as well as original works. Whatever their immediate themes, the translations and imitations addressed here are just a few of the many that enriched English literature across the long eighteenth century.

47 

See Steiner, English Translation Theory, p. 120. Michael F. Suarez, S.J., “Swift’s Satire and Parody,” in Christopher Fox (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 112–​27, at p. 117. 48 

 

614   Tanya Caldwell

References Braden, Gordon, Robert Cummings, and Stuart Gillespie (eds.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English: Vol. 2, 1550–​1660 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010). Brown, Molly, “ ‘Nature and Homer Were, He Found, the Same’: Pope, Cowper and the Trials of Translation,” Unisa English Studies, 33, no. 1 (1995), 35–​9. Dow, Gillian (ed.), Translators, Interpreters, Mediators: Women Writers, 1700–​1900 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007). Gilmore, John, “Tibullus and the British Empire: Grainger, Smollett and the Politics of Translation in the Mid-​18th Century,” The Translator, 5, no. 1 (1999), 1–​26. Hutchinson, Lucy, Order and Disorder, ed. David Norbrook (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). McMurran, Mary Helen, “Aphra Behn from Both Sides: Translation in the Atlantic World,” Studies in Eighteenth-​Century Culture, 34 (2005), 1–​23. Norbrook, David, “Lucy Hutchinson’s ‘Elegies’ and the Situation of the Republican Woman Writer,” English Literary Renaissance, 27 (1997), 468–​521. Potter, Lois, Secret Rites and Secret Writing:  Royalist Literature, 1641–​ 1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989). Suarez, Michael F., “The Production and Consumption of the Eighteenth-​Century Poetic Miscellany,” in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-​ Century England: New Essays (London: Continuum, 2001), pp. 217–​51. Thomas, Claudia, “Pope’s Iliad and the Contemporary Context of His ‘Appeals to the Ladies,’” Eighteenth-​Century Life, 14 (1990), 1–​17. Tytler, Alexander Fraser, Essay on the Principles of Translation (London, 1797; New  York: Garland Publishing, 1970). Weinbrot, Howard D., “Annotating a Career: From Pope’s Homer to The Dunciad: From Madame Dacier to Madame Dacier by Way of Swift,” Philological Quarterly, 79, no. 4 (2000), 459–​82.

 

Pa rt  V I

P OE T IC DE V IC E S

 

 

Chapter 36

Imagery Timothy Erwin To take Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) as an index to the meaning of the terms image and imagery in eighteenth-​century Britain is to see how far literary criticism has drifted from the lexical moorings of the period. Johnson defines an image first as any physical or “corporeal representation” such as a “picture”; then as an “idol” or “false god”; next as “a copy” or likeness; and again as a “semblance,” “show,” or display of something. Johnson arrives at the definition of the image as “a picture drawn in the fancy,”1 the sense most useful to literary criticism, only with the last meaning he assigns the term. He illustrates the sense with two quotations, the first from a passage in Matthew Prior’s Solomon (1718), where Israel responds to a prophecy of woe—​ We and our Fathers from our Childhood bred To watch the cruel Victor’s eye, to dread The arbitrary Lash, to bend, to grieve; (Out-​cast of Mortal Race!) can We conceive Image of aught delightful, soft, or gay?2

—​and the second from Isaac Watts’s Logic (1729), where the author describes the difficulty of distinguishing among complex geometrical figures in the mind’s eye: Some of our Ideas may be very clear and distinct in one Respect, and very obscure and confused in another. So when we speak of a Chiliagonum, or a Figure of a thousand Angles, we may have a clear and distinct Rational Idea of the Number one thousand Angles… . But the Image … is but confused and obscure; for we cannot precisely distinguish it by Fancy from the Image of a Figure that has nine hundred Angles or nine hundred and ninety.3

1  Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (London, 1755), s.v. image. The last sense is introduced by the synonym idea, a term that derives from both empiricist and Neoplatonic discourse. In the Dictionary entry for idea Johnson limits its meaning to sense impressions, a limitation that Hume objects to in Locke. Hume understands the “idea” to indicate all objects of perception, not only the direct impressions of objects and the “faint images” of impressions in “thinking and reasoning,” he says, but also images of things never actually seen (A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary Norton (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), pp. 7 n. 2, 8). 2  Matthew Prior, Solomon, lines 814–​20, in The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, ed. H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), vol. i, p. 383. 3  Logick, or the Right Use of Reason, 3rd ed. (London, 1729), p. 40.

 

618   Timothy Erwin Neither example allows the mental image much latitude, since one describes an affective and the other an intellectual impediment, and the term imagery fares little better. The term is defined first as “sensible representations,” such as one sees on a frieze; next as the “show” or “appearance” of something; and then as “false ideas” or “phantasms.” Again, the definition most amenable to critical practice, “such descriptions as force the image of the thing described upon the mind,” sense 1, is listed last among the meanings Johnson assigns the term. The sequential definitions of Johnson’s Dictionary typically move not forward in time, as in a modern dictionary, but outward from the kernel etymon of a word. Although the Dictionary is much more than a glossary of literary terms, it remains surprising that a sense so important to contemporary criticism should appear so marginal, as if the discarded husk of a grain were only later recognized as vital. In no small part this is a matter of expectations.

Image as Description, Image as Metaphor The expanded idea of poetic imagery is a relatively recent one, its heyday the twentieth century. C. Day Lewis remarks that for half a century the word “image” had assumed an almost “mystical potency”4 in criticism. Ezra Pound made the concept central to Imagist poetics with the publication of “In a Station of the Metro” (1913),5 explaining that the image “presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”6 Whether crystallizing the perceptual moment, generating unsuspected likeness, or alluding to avant-​garde artwork, the image quickly took dominion in Modernist poetics, and Wallace Stevens would celebrate its powers in declaring that poetry is “a satisfying of the desire for resemblance,” adding that a good metaphor intensifies reality (see ­chapter 37, “Metaphor”).7 Adopting a historical view, Lewis finds the main difference between Augustan and Romantic imagery to be the traditional one: the former illustrates a thought unfolding within argument, while the latter ranges free as a personal method of psychological discovery.8 Other commentators meanwhile observe that the terms image and imagery mean something quite different for Augustan and Romantic poets. Where the eighteenth century typically understands imagery to point to the descriptive vividness of sense impressions, later periods understand the term to indicate metaphorical resemblance. Take, for example, Dryden’s “Ode to the Memory of Anne Killigrew” (1685) and Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” (1820). Both address artistic genius via the imagery of transcendence, but in very different ways. Dryden understands the artwork of the young poet-​painter to bear striking

4 

C. Day Lewis, The Poetic Image (London: Jonathan Cape, 1947), p. 17. Poetry, 2, no. 1 (April 1913), 12. See Bartholomew Brinkman, “Making Modern Poetry: Format, Genre, and the Invention of Imagism(e),” Journal of Modern Literature, 32, no. 2 (2009), 20–​40. 6  “A Retrospect,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. with an intro. by T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1954), p. 4. 7  “Three Academic Pieces,” in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1951), p. 77. 8  Albert Gelpi argues that Lewis reshapes the Modernist image in a post-​Romantic mold in order to provide the poet with a “psychological and ethical basis for living in time”: Living in Time: The Poetry of C. Day Lewis (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), p. 113. 5 

 

Imagery   619 witness to anything visible whether real or imagined, and his descriptive sense of imagery, modeled on painting, subtly recalls the original Creation: What Nature, Art, bold Fiction e’er durst frame, Her forming Hand gave Feature to the Name.9

The imagery of Shelley, by contrast, is metaphorical. A process of reciprocal resemblance transforms a vehicle from one canto into a tenor for the following, so that real autumn leaves are likened to virtual ghosts, and real clouds likened to virtual leaves, until the speaker finally asks the personified winds of change to render themselves “through [his] lips to unawakened earth | The trumpet of a prophecy!”10 Ray Frazer naturalizes the lexical shift by tracing the Restoration rejection of rhetorical figurae, and the subsequent substitution of “image” and “imagery” for scores of lost tropes, into the rise of nature poetry and the master-​trope of personification (a Renaissance critic might call these turns in Shelley antistasis and prosopopoeia).11 For other critics the difference between image-​as-​description and image-​as-​metaphor remains intractable. In an extended study of the word, P. N. Furbank notes that while we use the term image for both mental pictures and metaphors, the overlap amounts to a categorical confusion.12 Furbank argues that where metaphors invite us to exercise the imagination, the word image is better understood as a synonym for ekphrasis and best retired from other uses (pp. 9–​24). W. J. T. Mitchell proposes that the literal imagery of daily life need not be strictly separated from the figurative or mental imagery of dreaming or reading. He amends the distinction between a conventional language and a natural imagery to argue rather for intersecting conventions of text and image in literature and criticism alike. From Lockean empiricism forward the prominence of the so-​called “image,” he argues, represents nothing so much as the verbal limits that ideology places upon textual vision.13 Whatever the Dictionary might suggest, Johnson often finds the term “imagery” useful in the Lives of the Poets (1779–​81) to describe the visual appeal of eighteenth-​century writing, and in ways denoting complex ideas as well as sense impressions. In the Life of Thomson Johnson describes the way the poet “imparts to us so much of his own enthusiasm, that our thoughts expand with his imagery, and kindle with his sentiments.”14 Thomson invites the reader of The Seasons to experience the divine order of the natural world as made intelligible by the new science of Isaac Newton, especially the Opticks (1704), which sorts light into its prismatic elements. In “Spring,” Thomson personifies Nature as her own best portraitist, asking “who can paint | Like Nature?” Can Imagination boast, Amid its gay Creation, Hues like hers?

9  The Works of John Dryden, ed. H. T. Swedenberg, Jr. et al., 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1969), vol. ix, p. 113 (lines 123–​4). 10  P. B. Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind,” lines 68–​9, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2002), p. 301. 11  Ray Frazer, “The Origin of the Term ‘Image,’” English Literary History, 27, no. 2 (1960), 149–​61. 12  P. N. Furbank, Reflections on the Word “Image” (London: Secker & Warburg, 1970), pp. 1–​3. 13  “What Is an Image?,” New Literary History, 15, no. 3 (1984), 503–​37; reprinted with additions in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 7–​46. 14 Johnson, The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), vol. iv, p. 104.

 

620   Timothy Erwin … Ah, what shall Language do? Ah, where find Words Ting’d with so many Colours?15

Marjorie Hope Nicolson and Ralph Cohen agree that Thomson imbues “Spring” with coloration as the single aspect of the natural world which, following Addison in the Spectator papers on “The Pleasures of the Imagination” (nos. 411–​18), best figures forth the beautiful.16 For Thomson nature blends her hues more artfully than the confused human imagination, with its “ten thousand wandering Images of Things” (line 463) could ever hope to do. In the Life of Pope, Johnson likewise remarks upon the “dazzling splendour of imagery” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 76) of the Essay on Man, a rhetorical display that he feels conceals a lack of theological discrimination, as well as the “efflorescence of imagery” of the Rape of the Lock, the mock-​epic revealing what Johnson calls Pope’s “boundless fertility of invention.” Johnson is speaking particularly here of the “new race of preternatural agents” (vol. iv, p. 10) that Pope raises in his iridescent army of sylphs. Here and elsewhere in the Lives Johnson distinguishes nicely between descriptive imagery and the workings of metaphor. In commenting upon the extravagant conceits of Cowley, for example, he notes that the poetry is written “with little imagery” (Lives, vol. i, p. 228). Although the lapsarian original of Cowley’s “Tree of Knowledge” is made to sprout propositional leaves and demonstrative fruit, the metaphors are not elaborated by description. In discussing a striking simile from the Essay on Criticism that brings together image and metaphor, Johnson maintains a basic distinction between the two rhetorical features while treating them as complementary. The passage compares the progress of a student mastering a difficult subject to that of a mountain climber who arrives at the crest of one range only to encounter others stretching beyond it: So pleas’d at first, the towring Alps we try, Mount o’er the Vales, and seem to tread the Sky; …………………………………………………. . But those attain’d, we tremble to survey The growing Labours of the lengthen’d Way Th’increasing Prospect tires our wandring Eyes, Hills peep o’er Hills and Alps on Alps arise!17

Pope corrects a presumptuous view of learning as finished and attainable by representing an unexpected perspective in two ways, as the tenor of his metaphor and also as what Johnson calls “a pleasing image.” More than a finishing touch, the imagery of the passage “assists the apprehension,” and “elevates the fancy” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 69). As often among the ancient poets, imagery, says Johnson, completes the metaphor. The practice is so widespread in classical verse that visual detail is sometimes added simply to “fill the imagination” and to create what Johnson, quoting Perrault, calls “comparisons 15 

James Thomson, “Spring,” lines 468–​70, 475–​6, in The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), p. 24. 16  Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton’s “Opticks” and the 18th Century Poets (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1946), pp. 108–​11; Ralph Cohen, The Unfolding of “The Seasons” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 40–​51. On the cultural politics of the poem, see Philip Connell, “Newtonian Physico-​Theology and the Varieties of Whiggism in James Thomson’s The Seasons,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 72, no. 1 (2009), 1–​28. 17  Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, lines 225–​6, 29–​32, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–​69), vol. i, p. 265.

 

Imagery   621 with a long tail.”18 When he goes on to label the simile a “short episode” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 69), Johnson resists ascribing a merely ornamental role to metaphor. Taking up Pope’s translation of Homer, Johnson characterizes imagery as a treasury of “poetical elegances” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 73) to be passed along to posterity. The poet aims to improve upon precedent and at the same time add to its store, so that the imagery of the ancients might be polished, made more apposite, or replaced by something better. Joseph Warton had faulted Pope on precisely this score in his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756, 1782), and Johnson pointedly commends him for his success. Johnson disapproves of the description that strays from illumination toward excessive ornamentation, on the other hand, and even as he praises Mark Akenside for storing his memory “with sentiments and images” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 171), he blames The Pleasures of the Imagination (1744) for obscuring the sense by piling “image upon image [and] ornament upon ornament” (vol. iv, p. 174). The proper role of poetic imagery for Johnson is illustration. When he reminds us that Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy is “enlivened with imagery” and “brightened with illustrations” (vol. ii, p. 119), descriptive features that no doubt include the naval setting of the opening and the heated exchange of the speakers, he extends the role to prose. Johnson applauds both Dryden and, especially, Pope for bringing into the English language new standards of imagery and diction appropriate to the dignity of literature.

Comparative Poetics Joseph Trapp in the Lectures on Poetry (1742), Lord Kames in the Elements of Criticism (1762), and Hugh Blair in the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783) all take up the comparative poetics of metaphor and imagery. Each also draws an early analogy between the visual imagery of painting and the verbal imagery of poetry. The first professor of poetry at Oxford, Trapp takes up verbal imagery under the classical rubric of striking vividness or enargeia before comparing it first to painting and then to prose. Because painting exhibits its objects directly to the senses, he says, and poetry less directly to the “inward Faculties of the Soul,”19 the impressions of imagery are stronger in painting but more subtle and articulate in poetry. Convention permits poetry a figurative dimension denied to prose, and poetic imagery is markedly livelier as a result. Trapp quotes the passage from The Aeneid (book iv, lines 465–​8) where Dido resolves to die: In her Dreams Cruel Æneas persecutes her Soul To Madness. Still abandon’d to herself, Cheerless, without a Guide, she seems to go A long, a tedious Journey, and to seek Her Tyrian Subjects on deserted Coasts. (p. 127)

18 Johnson, Lives, vol. iv, p. 69; Charles Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes (Paris, 1693),

dialogue 4, pp. 42, 101. Johnson follows Addison’s Spectator 303 (1712) in the reference to Perrault: see Lives, vol. iv, p. 327. 19  Joseph Trapp, Lectures on Poetry (London, 1742), trans. from the Praelectiones Poeticae (1711–​19).

 

622   Timothy Erwin Trapp tells us that these lines describe “a mere intellectual Idea not subject to the Senses” no less clearly than if the dreams of Dido were the real objects of sense impression. Thus the “image” may be defined as any mental concept rendered striking by “beautiful Description” (p. 127), and “imagery” in turn as either the expanded description of some object or its indirect illustration. Trapp also says in passing that “every Metaphor” is also a “short description” (p. 17), a claim tacitly allowing for some limited overlap between image and metaphor. For while imagery mediates impressions through description and metaphor represents a striking or unusual resemblance or contrast, readers necessarily recognize the sense of a metaphor by means of description. Trapp implicitly differentiates imagery from the more extensive description of ekphrasis—​in declining to discuss the painted murals of Dido’s temple to Juno from book i, for example, or the more than one hundred lines describing the shield of Aeneas in book viii—​likely for reasons of scale.20 He also distinguishes imagery from such figurative uses of language such as irony, metonymy, synecdoche, and metaphor. Like verbal imagery, however, he also considers these more appropriate to poetry than prose. Metaphor in particular conveys a similar vividness, as when Virgil describes the way in warfare “An Iron Tempest, and a Storm of Darts | Hovers aloft, and blackens all the sky” (Aeneid, trans. Trapp, book ii, lines 283–​4, p. 53). In the Elements of Criticism the Scots jurist Henry Home, Lord Kames places imagery along the subjective unspooling of what, following Hobbes and Hume, he calls the “train of ideas.”21 Kames takes up imagery in both its rhetorical and perceptual senses, but with a special emphasis on perception. The test of imagery for Kames is its conformity to the associative movement of the human mind. He praises the unified action of The Aeneid for always keeping the “expected event” of Rome’s founding in view, explaining that our minds naturally seek “to go forward in the chain of history” (vol. ii, p. 407), and so move easily among the concatenated parts. The action of The Iliad, by contrast, is launched from an initial cause that it is more difficult to keep in mind because, as he says, “looking back is like walking backward” (vol. ii, p. 407). Imagery is also natural insofar as it inspires pleasurable or painful emotions. These feelings may well be mixed, and they are normally qualified by an ethical sense of right or wrong in accord with recognizable patterns of affective association. Imagery can generate action as well as appreciation or disgust. When an emotion is strong enough to lead to action it becomes a passion, and since the passions determine the will in Kames, agency itself is an effect of imagery. As objects of sense perception in the Lockean mold, images may represent either the ideal presence of memory or some real presence observed by the beholder. Ideal presence extends into what he calls the “waking dream” (vol. i, p. 91) of the imagination as, for example, when we read a compelling and detailed account of a battle in a history or epic poem. In selecting some of the “finest images” (vol. i, p. 240) of the sublime from literature, Kames returns us to Longinus on Genesis 1:3 and the command “Let there be light” (vol. i, p. 242), the image suggesting the “infinite power of the Deity” (vol. i, p. 242). He celebrates the description in The Tempest of “cloud-​capt tow’rs, … gorgeous palaces, … solemn temples, [and] the great globe itself ” (IV, i. 170–​1; quoted vol. i, p. 240) in

20 

On the role of these and other extended ekphrases in the Aeneid, see Michael C. J. Putnam, Virgil’s Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1998). 21  Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 6th ed., 2 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1785), vol. i, p. 20.

 

Imagery   623 order to show how “successive images” (vol. i, p. 241) make ever stronger impressions, and so elevate the mind above what any single image could do. Because painting represents imagery in a single frozen instant rather than as a succession of moments, its power to evoke ideal presence is momentarily more affecting but finally less moving than that of poetry. Most affecting of all is staged drama: “Of all the means for making an impression of ideal presence,” he writes, theatrical representation is the most powerful. That words independent of action have the same power in a less degree, every one of sensibility must have felt: a good tragedy will extort tears in private, though not so forcibly as upon the stage. (vol. i, p. 96)

Much as Trapp and Johnson do, Kames keeps the vivifying power of imagery conceptually separate from the surprise of metaphor while allowing for their close cooperation. Kames terms the witty sally the most “elegant recreation” (vol. i, p. 383) of figurative language, and describes its effect thus: “the image enters the mind with gaiety, and gives a sudden flash which is extremely pleasant” (vol. i, p. 383). He also praises an extended metaphor from the Iliad likening the fury and stolid resolve of Hector in battle to a boulder tumbling down a mountainside before coming suddenly to rest, a comparison with a lengthy preamble instead of a long tail: As from some mountain’s craggy forehead torn, A rock’s round fragment flies, with fury borne, …………………………………………………………… From steep to steep the rolling ruin bounds; At every shock the crackling wood resounds; Still gathering force, it smokes; and urged amain, Whirls, leaps, and thunders down, impetuous to the plain: There stops—​so Hector …22

Kames notes that while the imagery here can hardly be called elevating, the simile that follows nevertheless “fires and swells” the mind with its grandeur (vol. ii, p. 201). Imagery represents beautiful as well as sublime objects, and Kames understands beauty to be composed of regularity, uniformity, order, and simplicity, pace Burke. These conventional qualities in fact make it easier to form a mental image of the beautiful object. Where Johnson argues for the just representation of general nature, Kames recommends “distinct and lively images” (vol. ii, p. 329), whether sublime or beautiful. The circumstances of a narration, he says, cannot be described too minutely. The force of language consists in raising complete images; which cannot be done till the reader … be transported as by magic into the very place and time of the important action, and be converted, as it were, into a spectator, beholding everything that passes. In this view, the narrative in an epic poem ought to rival a picture in the liveliness and accuracy of its representations. (vol. ii, p. 329)

Because ideas of sight are naturally more striking than ideas of taste, smell, and touch, the chief sources of imagery will be visual. The further elaboration of imagery remains the unique task of descriptive language. 22 Kames, Elements of Criticism, vol. ii, p. 201, quoting Pope’s translation of the Iliad, book xiii, lines 191–​2, 196–​200.

 

624   Timothy Erwin Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric offers a learned and wide-​ranging overview of contemporary thinking about the arts, and differs from Trapp and Kames by positing a basic representational difference between visual and verbal imagery. Where visual images are imitative, writes Blair, words are descriptive. One enjoys a “natural likeness … to the thing imitated,” the other represents objects by means of “arbitrary … symbols.”23 The means of representation may reach the same ends but along the way “make different impressions on the mind” (vol. i, p. 119). To the temporal succession noted by Kames, Blair adds yet another advantage of descriptive language, that of being able to represent characters and sentiments more noble and uplifting than those appearing to the eye. Blair begins his series of lectures by defining “taste,” “criticism,” and “genius” in terms of their interrelation. The distillation of tradition, taste is a “lasting and general admiration” (vol. i, p. 44) for the beautiful object inherently allied to virtue. By way of explanation Blair invokes the Aeolian lyre of Romanticism: “There is a certain string, which, being properly struck, the human heart is so made as to answer to it” (vol. i, p. 44).24 The role of criticism is to raise and refine the common general level of appreciation, and its rules direct taste away from the channels of ignorance and prejudice toward the reliable standards of nature and reason, whether these are applied to a poem, painting, or musical composition. Initially a gift of nature, genius is a higher power than taste because it requires creative execution as well as the exercise of judgment; and because it tends to find expression in a single art-​form, while taste may be exercised across the arts, genius is also less extensive than taste (see ­chapter 13, “The Poet as Genius”). Imagery enters the discussion as the exercise of taste and more particularly as a relish for the sublime and beautiful. Although Blair more often uses the term imagery in a conventional way to designate descriptive language and likens it throughout to painting, he also makes the term image synonymous with metaphor, a lexical change worth pausing over. After a learned survey of the rise and progress of languages, of writing, of sentences, and of perspicuity and precision in style, Blair turns to figurative language, which he distinguishes by its departure from simple statement. So when the psalmist expresses the plain thought that “a good man enjoys comfort in the midst of adversity” by saying that “To the upright there ariseth light in darkness” (Psalms 112:4), he is speaking figuratively (vol. i, p. 344). Unlike Adam Smith, whose course on rhetoric at Edinburgh he inherited, Blair exalts the extensive use of figurative language. Figures of speech bring four benefits: (1) they add expressive variety; (2) they lend dignity to style; (3) they “give us the pleasure of enjoying two objects presented together to our view” (vol. i, p. 361) without confusing them; and (4) they throw light on the objects of discourse, rendering the intangible concrete and the truth convincing. Remarkably, Blair places the visual aspect of figuration that earlier critics had understood as illustration or elaboration within the operation of metaphor itself, opening

23  Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (London and Edinburgh, 1785), vol. i, p. 118. 24  M. H. Abrams, “The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor,” Kenyon Review, 19, no. 1 (1957), 113–​30; reprinted in The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), pp. 25–​43. Abrams writes that the lyre “is a persistent Romantic analogue of mind, the figurative mediator between an outer motion and an inner emotion” (p. 114). See also Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 86–​112.

 

Imagery   625 the lexical range of the image and imagery onto broad and lasting disciplinary sway.25 A personification from Thomson’s “Summer”—​“But yonder comes the powerful king of day | Rejoicing in the east”—​is described as a “magnificent image” of sunrise (vol. i, p. 360). Another personification, of pale death from Horace—​“Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede, pauperum tabernas | Regumque turres” (“With equal pace, impartial fate, | Knocks at the palace, as the cottage gate”; Odes and Epodes, i.4)—​is said to be painted in such a way as to fill the imagination (vol. i, p. 361). Resemblance becomes an associative mode of visual cognition, where the vehicle of metaphor clarifies the tenor by representing it in “picturesque form” (vol. i, p. 362). The resulting image is an “argument from analogy” in small (vol. i, p. 363), according to Blair, yet another figuration lending “colouring and relievo” (vol. i, p. 364) to resistant abstraction. Blair celebrates the power of figurative language to set mirrors before us, where we may behold objects, a second time, in their likeness. It entertains us, as with a succession of the most splendid pictures; disposes, in the most artificial manner, of the light and shade, for viewing every thing to the best advantage (vol. i, p. 365). Novel observations like these on the pictorial nature of the trope have little precedent in earlier commentary. Blair proposes a visual test for identifying mixed metaphors, “that we should try to form a picture upon them, and consider how the parts would agree, and what sort of figure the whole would present, when delineated with a pencil” (vol. i, p. 392). For three-​quarters of a century after its first appearance the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres was enormously important in Britain and America, running to dozens of editions. There were almost as many abridged as complete versions, and also textbook adaptations of various sorts, as well as European translations.26 The concept of the image-​as-​metaphor in poetry doubtless owes its wide dissemination to Blair both as a record of, and increasingly as a guide to, the formation of tropes.

Pleasures of Imagination The ancient and modern polestars of the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres are Quintilian and Addison. From the Institutio oratoria Blair takes an emphasis on perspicuous style and logical arrangement, an insistence that writing uphold virtue, and a pragmatic attitude toward the more refined differentia of figures and tropes. He quotes Quintilian on the creation of metaphors, warning that writers should avoid introducing “any object which is either obscure or unknown” (vol. i, p. 441) since the purpose of metaphor is to illuminate one thing by comparison to another. Blair also cites the Roman rhetorician on the faultiness of

25  This can be true even when the trope is emptied of visual content. So Robert Bly maintains the centrality of the image in “A Wrong Turning in American Poetry,” in Donald Hall (ed.), Claims for Poetry (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1982), pp. 17–​37, by developing the poetics of the “deep image” as a psychological concept taking inspiration from surrealism and standing in sharp contrast to the Imagism of Pound. Where Imagism is pictorial and derives from reality, the deep image derives from the unconscious. “Where you can actually see ‘petals on a wet black bough,’” Bly explains, “the image, being the natural speech of the imagination, cannot be drawn from or inserted back into the real world” (p. 26). 26  Stephen L. Carr, “The Circulation of Blair’s Lectures,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 32, no. 4 (2002), 75–​104. Carr’s census shows 283 versions between 1783 and 1911, more than three times as many as Kames’s Elements of Criticism, including 112 complete Lectures, 110 abridgments, and 61 translations.

 

626   Timothy Erwin an excessively figurative style (vol. ii, pp. 5–​6), but is nowhere indebted to him for the notion of metaphorical imagery.27 Taking a hint from Smith, Blair repeatedly recommends Addison as an English stylist worth imitating, and he devotes four lectures to a critical examination of as many of the Spectator papers “On the Pleasures of the Imagination” (nos. 411–​14). As the editors of a recent edition of the Lectures indicate, Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric synthesize neoclassical critique from Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks (1711–​14) while adopting progressive attitudes toward taste and expression.28 Blair endorses the development of literary style as a central aim of polite culture, but also believes the mastery of style to be formative of individual genius. Confident in his approach, Blair recasts the aesthetic triad that Addison had called the great, uncommon, and beautiful as beauty, grandeur, and novelty. Blair considers beauty inferior to grandeur, and yet brings to bear a passage from Burke referring to “the soft green of the soul, on which we rest our eyes” (vol. i, p. 363) when brighter objects tire them. Like Addison’s, Blair’s notion of beauty is deeply imbued with coloring. He refers the pleasures of color to the structure of the eye and to the association of ideas, so that green connotes the pleasures of the rural countryside, white indicates innocence, and blue suggests serenity. Grandeur in writing is best exemplified by the magnificent imagery of Homer, Ossian, and Milton in those passages unalloyed by either the trivial or bombastic. Novelty grants curiosity an intense but fleeting satisfaction and is complemented by its opposite number, imitation, which often shows objects neither grand nor beautiful in an attractive light. As the cultural matrix of post-​Augustan imagery, Addison’s discourse of taste releases verbal imagery from the systematic signposts of classical rhetoric. For Addison a “spacious horizon” is the very “image of liberty,”29 and though imagery may sometimes return to the worn path of oratorical tradition, it also wanders free. Anticipating the ideal presence of Kames, Addison shows us in Spectator 417 how even a slight hint can suddenly bring to mind “a whole scene of Imagery” (vol. iii, p. 562). Coloring and scent awaken ideas sleeping in the imagination until they summon up a “Picture” of the place where they were first encountered, bringing a “Variety of Images” in their train (vol. iii, p. 562). Addison limits the terms image and imagery to ideation and description, reserving resemblance for the “noble Metaphor” that he likens to a just portrait in Spectator 421 (vol. iii, p. 578). In Spectator 416

27 

The term imago, which Thomas Elyot’s Latin–​English Bibliotheca Eliotae, ed. Thomas Cooper (London, 1559) defines as “an image, a similitude, a representacion of a thyng, a likenesse, a counterfeyte, a paterne, an example” and so on, is rarely used to indicate metaphor. Latin typically uses figura and its cognates for figurative language, and Elyot lists figurare orationem beneath the verb figuro -​are as meaning “to garnishe an oracion with fygures of eloquence.” The OED finds precedent in the sixteenth-​ century rhetorician Richard Sherry, who writes in the Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, 2nd ed. (London, 1550) that the imago or image is “muche lyke to a similitude” (n.p.), but here the term refers to a figure lending gravity or levity rather than proof to an oration, not to verse. When an image is defined as a similitude more typically an effigy or likeness is meant. 28  Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. Linda Ferreira-​Buckley and S. Michael Halloran (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 2005). In their introduction the editors point to a key difference between the way Quintilian and Blair commend their ancient and modern models of rhetorical excellence (pp. xv–​liv). Where Quintilian takes Cicero for an orator perfectus ever to be imitated, Blair recommends Addison as “a means of improving” in eloquence, but also warns the student against falling into “servile imitation” (quoted at pp. xliv–​xlv), and from time to time finds fault with him. 29  Joseph Addison, Spectator 412, in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), vol. iii, p. 541.

 

Imagery   627 he goes so far as to claim that verbal imagery is superior to images streaming from objects in nature: Words, when well chosen, have so great a Force in them, that a Description often gives us more lively Ideas than the Sight of Things themselves. The Reader finds a Scene drawn in stronger Colours, and painted more to the Life in his Imagination, by the help of Words, than by an actual Survey of the Scene which they describe. In this Case the Poet … so enlivens the whole Piece, that the Images, which flow from the Objects themselves, appear weak and faint, in Comparison of those that come from the Expressions. (vol. iii, p. 560)

The images here are real in the sense that they belong to a primary sensation flowing from objects through the power of sight directly into the mind. They are imagined in the sense that the mind reworks them through language in order to enjoy a secondary pleasure, and they are beautiful insofar as their linguistic reworking heightens their vividness, as if their coloring were somehow brightened and polished in the process. The relation suggests nothing so much as listening to an audio broadcast of a fireworks display: the notion that our objects of perception are mere impressions becomes prevalent enough that Kames feels a need to insist that sense impression is itself imperceptible. Although physiology may tell us that we receive impressions upon the retina or eardrum, he notes, “all we can say, is, that we see that river, or hear that trumpet” (vol. ii, p. 510). Locke provides a substantial rationale for the psychology of perception in the Spectator, to be sure, but Addison’s insistence upon beauty as coloring also suggests modernist ideology or what the age called faction. Continental writers on the sister arts of poetry and painting had made formal values preeminent, naming coloring the lena sororis, or alluring sister, leading the eye to the higher beauty of virtue outlined by design. In elevating coloring above form, Addison turns the tables on the academic tradition of the Continent. In part, Addison’s perceptual model of the imagination is a polemical response to the rhetorical triad that had served as a basis for talking about language as pictures and vice versa. Addison adapts the serial expressiveness of invention, design, and coloring to the new perceptual categories of the great, uncommon, and the beautiful. The first and third parts of classical rhetoric are placed in sharp opposition to the second, so that heightened inventiveness and linguistic coloring replace the shared symmetry of visual–​verbal design. Spectator 412 makes the procreative appeal of coloring in the animal world, where different species reveal different “notions of beauty” (vol. iii, p. 542), an endorsement of the colorist position. Addison points to the way among birds the male is “determined in his Courtship by the single Grain or Tincture of a Feather” (vol. iii, pp. 542–​3). The force of Blair’s skeptical response goes beyond style to substance. Addison might have found a better word than “notion” to ascribe a sense of beauty to irrational creatures like birds (vol. ii, p. 100), he says. Instinctual behavior is a sign of the divine will for Addison, of course, and Spectator 413 refers all delight in the great, uncommon, or beautiful to the final cause of contemplating the deity and his creation. In Spectator 415 he notes how greatness in architecture overwhelms the mind by giving the eye a vast expanse to range over. Concave structures are a case in point, as when you look upward within a dome and “the entire Concavity falls into your Eye at once, the Sight being as the Center that collects and gathers into it the Lines of the whole Circumference”: The Figure of the Rainbow does not contribute less to its Magnificence, than the Colours to its Beauty, as it is very Poetically described by the Son of Sirach: Look upon the Rainbow, and

 

628   Timothy Erwin praise him that made it; very beautiful it is in its Brightness; it encompasses the Heavens with a Glorious Circle, and the hands of the Most High have bended it [Ecclus. 43. 11]. (vol. iii, p. 557)

Addison finds art most affecting under each of his headings as it approaches nature, and it is noteworthy that very little artwork inhabits his model of the imagination, especially by comparison to the cosmopolitan Kames. Emphasizing the divine artifice of all creation, Addison minimizes the distinction between nature and art to the point of rendering all verbal imagery ekphrastic,30 while his sense of the beautiful is referred to language so striking that it renders the objects it describes all but invisible.

Verbal Imagery Trapp and Kames join Addison in extolling the enargeia of Longinus but differ from him in affirming the greater immediacy of the visual arts. Throughout the long eighteenth century Addison is renowned as the elegant draftsman of an aesthetic blueprint accommodating enough to be modified for the purposes of poetry, rhetoric, style, and even for painting. When Constable exhibited Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows at the Royal Academy (1831), a picturesque six-​footer depicting a symbolic rainbow shielding the Gothic structure from the elements, he appended an epigraph from Thomson reflecting the popular influence of the Spectator. On occasion Addison’s aesthetics of empiricism become overextended. Think of the way the nativist model of naturalized perception allows Kames to assert a counterintuitive link between the association of ideas and the ordering of episode in narrative, and hence to neglect the conscious patterning of event. The discourse of imagery in poetry likewise substitutes for the primary creation of descriptive language the secondary reworking of sense impression, an individualized phenomenon eventually leading to Blair’s metaphorical image. Addressing novelty in figurative language, Nelson Goodman defines metaphor as “an affair between a predicate with a past and an object that yields while protesting.”31 The reluctance of a tenor to embrace a vehicle, in other words, is a measure of metaphorical innovation. Goodman instances the unusual phrase “blue picture” as an expression that we can understand in three different ways. We take it for a metaphor, and also for a literal indication of an image like Picasso’s Old Guitarist, say, and even for both at once. The same phrase connotes figurative sadness while denoting real coloration, and for Goodman the latter may in fact intensify the feeling of the former, much as we may imagine Blair’s restorative green lending relaxed rusticity to a cottage scene by Gainsborough or Constable. All along 30 

In the sense that the entire world is an artwork of sorts. Murray Krieger traces a movement during the eighteenth century away from the centrality of the “reproductive picture” toward that of the “affective sequence of words” and finally to the “realm of sound” in Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 25–​6. James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), offers a sustained influential meditation on visual–​verbal relations, reserving ekphrasis for “the verbal representation of visual representation” (p. 3). 31  Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1976), p. 69.

 

Imagery   629 we continue to recognize that these senses are drawn from distinct affective and chromatic schemata. If we subject the phrase “verbal imagery” to the same test, nothing very remarkable happens so long as we understand the term to signify description. Any novelty formerly attached to the phrase has long since become frozen by custom, like the cold pastoral of Keats’s urn. On the empiricist model visual depiction and verbal description both supply the mind with powerful and moving sense impressions. They differ mainly in that visual depiction is instantaneous, arriving in a rush of perception, where verbal imagery reaches us within the slower sequencing of language. Or as Goodman would have it, the texture of depiction is denser and less differentiated than that of description. As we have seen, several period commentators take verbal imagery to be more vivid on the grounds that its sustained impressions multiply its effects. Others add that it enjoys the further advantage of being more flexible and articulate, and so more uplifting. Meanwhile the exact mechanism of ekphrastic transfer from the visual to the verbal realm goes unexamined. It is enough to say that one realm is recognized as mirroring the other, reflecting classical mimesis, or else to follow modernism in positing the influence of optical science. If we understand the phrase “verbal imagery” in the sense given it by Blair, something dramatic happens. After waiting some time in the wings of the theater of the mind, an understudy arrives onstage in a new guise to gather metaphor into a bold embrace. Illustrative description cedes place, the vehicle takes up the task of setting the tenor in a picturesque new light, and imagery becomes internalized as resemblance. Because language is better placed to point selective likeness, description assumes an agency formerly granted to depiction. Affirming the cognitive aspect of metaphor, argument meanwhile becomes a part of imagery and imagery of argument, and we are left with the image as metaphor. Almost as surprising is the way the modifier leaps into the arms of the nominal in the phrase “colorful language,” a figure with little rhetorical precedent other than as a finishing touch. A prime aesthetic trope in Addison, colorful language serves Akenside and Thomson for a rich vein of imagery; taken literally, setting aside recherché examples like the purple patch of Horace or Rimbaud’s “Voyelles,” the phrase approaches nonsense. If the cause of the lexical shift remains obscure, the emergence of the sublime alongside the aesthetics of taste is a contributing factor, as is associationism. Well before the image is redefined as metaphor we see criticism being tailored to suit the subject, scale, and impact of the sublime. It is not that Longinus himself authorizes the shift, of course. Trapp reminds us that Longinus treats sublime imagery as the intense vividness that rhetoric later names hypotyposis, something very different from sublime figuration. The extraordinary mutability of the sublime, a result of its entanglement in the ancients-​vs.-​moderns quarrel, allows the concept to refer to a lively textual presence akin to vision and at the same time a novel modernist insistence on the power of auditory astonishment. Add to that the primary place that resemblance holds in the association of ideas and we should not be surprised that sublime imagery migrates from description to metaphor. Sublime imagery is often seen to operate automatically upon perception, to enlarge the mind by presenting it with an outsized object, but metaphor offers more explicable forms of transfer and effect. Kames draws his most powerful examples of imagery from sublime contexts, speaking for example of the way the countryside viewed beneath a sublime canopy swells the heart and raises the “strongest emotion of grandeur” (vol. i, p. 216). Blair tells us that raising the fancy to a sublime pitch requires the strictest concision. Any expression sinking below “the capital image” relaxes the “tension of the mind” and lessens the “strength of the feeling” (vol. i, p. 84). The communication of emotion is increasingly the

 

630   Timothy Erwin role of metaphor during the later eighteenth century. Although none uses the terms “image” or “imagery” to signify metaphor proper, these remarks frame the sublime in ways that welcome its eventual expression as a trope. In this sense the redefinition of imagery belongs to the birth of aesthetics, that is, to the belief that modernity represents discrete artifacts and their related experience under an aspect distinct from their making and different from the past, as if like objects in nature they were always there, needing only to be appreciated in a new way.

References Abrams, M. H., “The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor,” Kenyon Review, 19, no. 1 (1957), 113–​30; repr. in The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), pp. 25–​43. Bly, Robert, “A Wrong Turning in American Poetry,” in Donald Hall (ed.), Claims for Poetry (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1982), pp. 17–​37. Brinkman, Bartholomew, “Making Modern Poetry: Format, Genre, and the Invention of Imagism(e),” Journal of Modern Literature, 32, no. 2 (2009), 20–​40. Carr, Stephen L., “The Circulation of Blair’s Lectures,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 32, no. 4 (2002), 75–​104. Cohen, Ralph, The Unfolding of “The Seasons” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1970). Collins, Christopher, Reading the Written Image: Verbal Play, Interpretation, and the Roots of Iconophobia (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1991). Connell, Philip, “Newtonian Physico-​Theology and the Varieties of Whiggism in James Thomson’s The Seasons,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 72, no. 1 (2009), 1–​28. Eagleton, Terry, “Imagery,” in How to Read a Poem (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 138–​42. Fogelin, Robert, Figuratively Speaking (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011). Frazer, Ray, “The Origin of the Term ‘Image,’” English Literary History, 27, no. 2 (1960), 149–​61. Furbank, P. N., Reflections on the Word “Image” (London: Secker & Warburg, 1970). Gelpi, Albert, Living in Time: The Poetry of C. Day Lewis (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998). Goodman, Nelson, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1976). Hankins, Thomas L., and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995). Heffernan, James A. W., Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993). Krieger, Murray, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992). Lewis, C. Day, The Poetic Image (London: Jonathan Cape, 1947). Mitchell, W. J. T., “Image,” in W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen (eds.), Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 35–48. Mitchell, W. J. T., “What is an Image?” New Literary History, 15, no. 3 (1984), 503–​37; repr. in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 7–​46. Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, Newton Demands the Muse: Newton’s “Opticks” and the 18th Century Poets (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1946). Pound, Ezra, “A Retrospect,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1954), pp. 3–14.

 

Imagery   631 Putnam, Michael C. J., Virgil’s Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1998). Sherry, Richard, Treatise of Schemes & Tropes, 2nd ed. (London: John Day, 1550). Silverman, Robert J., and Thomas L. Hankins, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995). Stevens, Wallace, “Three Academic Pieces,” in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1951), pp. 69–89.

 

Chapter 37

M etaph or Blanford Parker Figures of Speech, which Poets think so fine, Art’s needless Varnish to make Nature shine, Are all but Paint upon a beauteous Face, And in Descriptions only claim a place.1

The history of the theory and practice of metaphor has not been written, and it cannot be written here. But every thorough reader of the literary situation in Britain (and Europe) after 1640 must recognize, cannot help considering, the peculiar crisis in ideas about metaphor. In Britain the crisis began in a prose revolution spearheaded by Francis Bacon. It grew in sharpness and scope in the works of Kenelm Digby, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Sprat, Joseph Glanvill, and John Locke. Its history in the practice of verse came a bit later but, when it came, it had swift results. The new canon of poets of balanced “judgment”—​Edmund Waller, John Denham, John Dryden, and the Earl of Roscommon—​was well established by Alexander Pope’s time.

Attacks on Metaphor By the first decade of the eighteenth century, attacks on metaphorical language had become commonplace. The idea of the attenuated metaphor—​the Augustan norm—​was the result of many forces coalescing over several generations. Yet we cannot clearly determine how closely connected the enlightened criticism of metaphor in Bacon and Hobbes is to the very different tradition of the moderate metaphor in neoclassical critics and poets. It seems that the classical inheritance, starting with Aristotle and continuing through several remote phases—​late ancient, high medieval, humanist, and neoclassical—​preserved a prejudice against elaboration of metaphor. Whatever may have been the critical norms derived from Greek and Roman sources, we must recognize that from the fourteenth to the seventeenth 1  John Sheffield, “An Essay upon Poetry,” in J. E. Spingarn (ed.), Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1908), vol. ii, p. 291.

 

Metaphor   633 century there was an extraordinary growth of allegory and conceit. We could without exaggeration call that period the age of metaphor. We are presented then with a breach or space between the inherited theory of metaphor and the living practice throughout this long period. Of course, there was a counter-​tradition, closely associated with the fourfold model of figura derived from Augustine, and later defenses of the conceitful style in Giambattista Marino and Francisco de Quevedo, but these traditions seem to stand outside the mainline of traditional criticism. None of the defenders of the Metaphysical styles in Europe are important critics, and they have never been widely read. Even the scholastic critics in the monastery culture of the same period tended to repeat the platitudes of Theophrastus, Horace, and the Rhetorica ad Herrenium. The modern attack on metaphor was not a highly organized movement. Three separate and only weakly connected historical prejudices made it possible. These three attitudes were all flourishing in Britain in the later seventeenth century, and their cooperation was unintentional and intermittent. The first attitude may be connected to the enlightened critique of metaphor in Bacon and Hobbes mentioned above. The second had a long history before 1600 and a special and narrower development afterward. For us this attitude has been associated with the idea of the neoclassical or Augustan. In one sense, the British Augustan movement is a continuation, a particular interpretation of humanist norms. Dryden and his contemporaries were directly influenced by the later French school of humanists including René Rapin and Nicolas Boileau-​Despréaux, and they in turn had a set of opinions connected to an earlier humanism that we may fairly associate with the age of Julius Caesar Scaliger. Scaliger was an interpreter of Italian critics, textualists, and philologists going back as far as Petrarch. He had a rather slavish adherence to the opinions of Aristotle (when he knew them) and the stylistic example of Virgil. Most (but surely not all) of Dryden’s opinions about poetry, which we find in his eloquent prefaces and prologues, were first discovered in the tradition of Scaliger and his French interpreters. With the important exception of the debate over the unities, Dryden may be seen as a neo-​Aristotelian. The differences between neo-​and paleo-​ classicists are often rather small. There is a third and very unlike element in the seventeenth-​century attack on metaphor. This we may call the Protestant version. It is based on a literary iconoclasm, which questioned the use of non-​biblical parable, simile, or conceit. John Bunyan’s prefatory poem to Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) beautifully illustrates the anxiety that Protestant authors had in the use of figurative language. I will be unable to elaborate in this chapter on the details of this branch of anti-​metaphorical discourse.

The Classical Tradition Oedipus: Never let this my father’s city have me living a dweller in it. Leave me live in the mountains near Cithaeron, that’s called my mountain, which my mother and my father while they were living would have made my tomb. So I may die by their decree who sought

 

634   Blanford Parker indeed to kill me. Yet I know this much: no sickness and no other thing will kill me. I would not have been saved from death if not for some strange evil fate. Well, let my fate go where it will.2

These lines may be considered a fair example of Aristotle’s ideal of poetry. It is obvious in reading the Poetics that Aristotle considers Sophocles a corrector of earlier excesses in poetic style.3 In this passage there is only one minor metaphorical expression. That expression connects “my mountain” with the idea of a tomb. This is an example of the first of Aristotle’s four types of metaphors described in the Poetics in which a particular term (εἶδος) is substituted for a generic term (γένος). A modern reader may consider this relationship to be metonymic, but Aristotle makes no distinction between figures of association and figures of comparison. A modern reader may not even think of this verbal transposition as metaphorical at all, but it is the kind of metaphor—​attenuated and simple—​that Aristotle prefers. He considers metaphor primarily as a category of word-​for-​word substitution. He says nothing of extended, multiple, or complex metaphors. If we read him closely we will notice that those traditions of Greek poetry which include elaborate metaphor, especially dithyramb and the ode, are never spoken of with approval.4 Even Homer’s extended similes are not praised in Aristotle or in any of his peripatetic followers. In George Kennedy’s words, “poetry was developed first, and thus prose took on a strongly poetic quality, but Aristotle says that even poetic forms in his time were moving away from poetic language … Even in the Poetics, Aristotle stresses clarity (1458a18), not lyricism. The irrational powers of language have no attraction for him … style must above all be clear or it cannot accomplish its purpose, and it must be appropriate.”5 Paradoxically, it is in rhetoric that metaphors are most useful, because prose argument lacks the rhythmic intensity of poetry. For Aristotle, meter and syntactical arrangement are the chief virtues of verse.

2 Sophocles, Oedipus the King, lines 1450–​59, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 72–​3. 3  “And as the poets, although their utterances were devoid of sense, appeared to have gained their reputation through their style, it was a poetical style that first came into being, as that of Gorgias. Even now the majority of the uneducated think that such persons express themselves most beautifully, whereas this is not the case, for the style of prose is not the same as poetry. And the result proves it; for even the writers of tragedies do not employ it in the same manner, but as they have changed from the tetrametric to the iambic metre, because the latter, of all other metres most nearly resembles prose, they have in like manner discarded all such words as differ from that of ordinary conversation, with which the early poets used to adorn their writings, and which even now are employed by backward writers of hexameters”: Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. J. H. Freese (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1926), 1404a8–​10 (pp. 349–​51). 4  Even as late as 1690, “dithyrambic” could be used to describe extravagant experiments of poetry. William Temple in Of Poetry remarks, “the common vein of the Gothic runes was what is termed dithyrambic, and was of a raving or rambling sort of wit or invention, loose and flowing, with little art or confinement to certain measures or rules.” See Cecil A. More (ed.), Restoration Literature: Poetry and Prose, 1660–​1700 (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1934), p. 470. 5  George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1980), p. 78. See also Stephen Halliwell, “Epilogue: The Poetics and its Interpreters,” in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 409–​24.

 

Metaphor   635 Aristotle seems to believe that poetry represents a more primitive stage of human discourse. After summarizing all the uses of dialectic and rhetoric—​proof, refutation, conveying of emotion, and the other forms of knowledge that are appropriate to prose—​he says: Knowledge or ignorance of these things can support no serious criticism of poetry. Why should anyone think it is a fault where Protagoras criticizes Homer for purporting to pray, but giving a command by saying “sing, goddess of the wrath… .” (To bid someone do or not do something, says Protagoras, is a command. So, let this study be put aside as a study of some other art, not poetry.)6

It is important to remember that for Aristotle, unlike Plato, poetry must not necessarily be wedded to truth. The truth of poetry, unlike that of philosophy and rhetoric, is mimetic, not demonstrative. To return to the question of metaphor, Aristotle has a problem with only one of the four species he describes. That kind of metaphor he calls ἀναλογικόν. For the modern reader, all expressions that we call metaphorical fall under this category. For us, metaphor is the figure of comparison. For Aristotle, while metonymy is safe and lucid, metaphors of an­alogy in which a quality is carried over from vehicle to tenor are always liable to become obscure. From Aristotle, later ancient critics like Theophrastus, Demetrius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and even Longinus receive this fear of extended metaphor. In the earliest expansion of the arguments of the Rhetoric, Demetrius, an obscure critic of the early third century bce, says the following about the uses of metaphor: The diction of the grand style should be distinguished, distinctive and the less usual. It will then have weight, while the normal, usual words will always be clear but in certain cases unimpressive. In the first place, we should use metaphors, for they more than anything make prose attractive and impressive, but they should not be crowded together (or we write a dithyramb instead of prose), nor yet far-​fetched but from the same general area and based on a true an­alogy. For instance, general, pilot, and charioteer are similar in ruling over something, so it would be safe to say that a general is “the city’s pilot” and conversely a pilot “the ship’s charioteer.” But not all metaphors are reciprocal like the above. Homer could call the lower slope of Aida its foot, but never a man’s foot his slope.7

The context of this passage is the proper use of metaphor in rhetoric, but we immediately notice that most of Demetrius’s examples are from poetry. Like Aristotle, his mentor, he can trust a metaphor of analogy only when there is simple reciprocity. Like his master, he also affirms that more than two metaphors in a single passage are never acceptable, and the dithyramb and the epic are again brought under suspicion. Prose must not include the vaguely linked metaphoric constructions of archaic poetry. The concepts of simplicity and reciprocity were to become staple ideas in humanist critics all the way to the seventeenth century. Even while the conceitful style dominated British and European poetry, these critical canons of brevity and reciprocity prevailed. Throughout his discourse on metaphor, Demetrius speaks of the dangers of the analogical type. At one point he says that a simile, because more explicit, is “safer” than a naked metaphor. He attempts to extend metaphor beyond the narrow limits set for it by his master. But if Demetrius praises metaphor, he also fears it. Like 6 Aristotle, Poetics, 1456b12–​18.

7 Demetrius, On Style, trans. Doreen C. Innes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995), 77–​9 (pp. 399–​401).

 

636   Blanford Parker Aristotle, he says that metaphor-​making is the signal quality of a true poet, but he follows this insight by questioning the validity of older styles of conceit. Even Homer cannot be trusted in a lengthy and circuitous comparison. Demetrius is also concerned with metaphors that produce “triviality” (μικροπρέπειαν). He gives as an example from Homer: “all around the mighty heaven trumpeted.” He remarks, “the whole heaven resounding, ought not to have been compared to a resounding trumpet—​ unless perhaps a defense of Homer could be made that the mighty heaven resounded in the way in which the whole heaven would resound if it were trumpeting.”8 Leaving aside the fantastic circularity of Demetrius’s comment, we may see in his analysis of Homer a fear of disproportion. He asks, can a smaller thing be compared to a greater?—​and adds, when can a natural object be compared to a supernatural one? These issues of small and great, of natural and supernatural, are closely connected to the theory of proportion, and they were to become watchwords of critics all the way down to Samuel Johnson. Examples of the enduring critique of metaphor may be found in several passages of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. We find that the chief fault of Plato’s complex style is his use of metaphor. According to Dionysius, Plato mixes the grand and the middle style. At his best, “he expresses himself in a plain, simple, and unartificial language. His style, becomes altogether pure and transparent, like the most pellucid of streams, and compares well in finely drawn precision with that of any other writing in this style.”9 He goes on to say: A sweet breeze emanates from it, as from the most fragrant of meadows, its piercing clarity does not give rise to garrulity, nor its elegance to mere show. But at its worst it darkens what is clear, and reduces it to almost obscurity. It conveys its meaning in a long-​drawn-​out way, when concision and brevity are called for. It abandons itself to tasteless circumlocutions and an empty show of verbal exuberance and, in defiance of correct usage and standard vocabulary, seeks artificial, exotic, and archaic forms of expression. It is in figurative speech that it founders decisively; it abounds in appositions, is inopportune in its metonymies, and harsh and inaccurate in its metaphors. It also admits allegories, whose frequency and length are governed by no considerations of measure or occasion, and revels inappropriately and in a juvenile manner in the conceits of artificial expression.10

It is not surprising, then, that Dionysius, like Aristotle and Demetrius, claims that Plato’s style is at its worst when most poetical and archaic. If we look closely at the passage, there is some humor created in the fact that Dionysius employs heavy-​handed metaphors of his own to describe the better qualities of Plato’s style. But leaving this aside, we will see in the final sentences of the quotation above the essence of the classical phobia for metaphorical language. For the modern reader, Plato is at his best when he employs simile and conceit, and the allegories in book vii of the Republic for example, are among the most memorable passages of his work. Dionysius wishes to remove the fanciful analogies and mythological parallels, which are the very essence of the Platonic imagination. Longinus himself, the finest literary critic of late antiquity and a unique close reader of poetic texts, sometimes makes similar criticisms of the eccentric use of metaphor in Plato.

8 

Ibid., 83 (p. 403). Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Letter to Gnaeus Pompeius, trans. Stephen Usher (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), 2 (p. 363). 10  Ibid., p. 365 (emphasis added). 9 

 

Metaphor   637 On the other hand, he has a much wider and more flexible view of the problem of figurative language. At times he sounds like earlier critics: “that is why the best use of a figure is when the very fact that it is a figure goes unnoticed. Now greatness and passion are a wonderful help and protection against the suspicions aroused by the use of figures: cunning techniques, when overlaid with beauty and passion, disappear from view and escape all further suspicion.”11 On the other hand, it is a peculiarity of Longinus that he seems to reject a number of the ancient prejudices against the use of metaphor. First of all, he disagrees with his interlocutor Caecilius about the appropriate number of metaphors in a given poem. He thinks no rule can be offered to determine the proper density, or multiplicity, of figures: Aristotle and Theophrastus say that the boldness of metaphors can be softened by such phrases as “just as if.” … The apology, they tell us, mitigates the boldness. I accept that but … timely and strong passion, as well as genuine greatness, are a special antidote for both the number and the boldness of metaphors. Their swift onrush naturally drives and sweeps everything before them; they make the comparisons appear quite inevitable; and the hearer who shares the inspiration of the speaker is not given time to examine the number or nature of metaphors.12 Certainly, nothing is more expressive in the treatment of commonplaces, or in descriptions, than a succession of metaphors. Xenophon gives us in this way an impressive picture of the anatomy of man’s bodily dwelling, and Plato does the same even more divinely. He calls the head the citadel, the neck an isthmus between it and the body. The vertebrae, he says, are fixed under it like pivots.13

Longinus goes on to describe other exuberant displays of metaphor, particularly in the works of Plato. He ends this long digression with “those we have quoted are enough to show that figurative language has a natural loftiness, that metaphors contribute to great writing, and that they especially delight us in passionate and descriptive passages.”14 Longinus goes on to explain that, “like all beauties of language, tropes always tend to excess. Plato himself is often criticized for this, and is said to be driven by a kind of word frenzy to use immoderate and harsh metaphors and allegorical bombast.” Longinus points out that some have even preferred Lysias to Plato, but that this judgment was uncritical. In effect, Longinus’s argument is that authors of great genius and preternatural imaginative power, like Homer and Plato, cannot be judged by petty rules of syntax and figuration. Their genius leaps over all critical cavils. Their writing is such that it draws the audience into an irresistible current. The true critic will recognize this quality no matter what smaller blemishes appear in an author. Longinus’s view of metaphor is this: when it is created with proper exuberance, continuity, and energy, all criticism evaporates before a feeling of sublimity. Therefore Homer and Plato in particular should be forgiven for faults which may be more appropriately attached to the works of lesser authors. This might have been a new beginning for classical attitudes toward metaphor. In fact, Longinus mentions that he could write a book as long as the entire treatise on metaphor alone. Unfortunately that treatise does not exist, and we are left with only three or four exemplary paragraphs in a fragmentary work. These paragraphs, however, offer us hints of a view of figurative language more compatible with modern tastes. It is interesting to note that 11 Longinus, On Great Writing, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1957), 17 (p. 29). 12 

Ibid., 32 (pp. 42–​3).

13 

Ibid., 32 (p. 43).

14 

Ibid., 32 (pp. 43–​4).

 

638   Blanford Parker French and English critics did not become familiar with Longinus until Boileau’s translation in the middle of the seventeenth century, and that it was to become a countercurrent to prevailing humanist views only in a much later period. We can end our brief review of classical opinions on metaphor by mentioning two Roman sources. First, Quintilian, though he introduces his comments by saying that he is a great admirer of metaphor, continues the mainline of classical criticism of figurative speech. Although he gives a much longer list of metaphoric types, and seems to admit to the centrality of the metaphor of analogy, he still falls back in the end on the idea of brevity, clarity, and reciprocity. He does not, however, consider metaphor an issue of word-​to-​word correspondence. He extends the concept of metaphor to include an elaboration of clauses and sentences. He explains the relationship between Greek μεταφορά and the Latin translatio. In both cases, there is the transfer of a single quality from vehicle to tenor. This quality may be a word-​to-​word transference, as in personification, or a more elaborate transposition of entire clauses. Although he makes the typical classical distinction between proper (propria) and metaphorical language, he does grant to metaphor a certain intellectual force.15 In the Rhetorica ad Herennium, a work sometimes attributed to Cicero but probably the work of a later author, we get a final summary of typical classical notions about metaphor. The Rhetorica ad Herennium describes ten figures of diction—​the Latin phrase is exornationes verborum. An exornatio is an embellishment or decoration. In the poetic theory of the first century ce, metaphor has been reduced to a decorative element. “They [exornationes verborum] indeed all have this in common, that the language departs from the ordinary meaning of words and is, with a certain grace applied in another sense.”16 The implication is that metaphor and the other figures of diction are essentially non-​literal decorations added for rhetorical enhancement to proper (propria) speech. At this point of development, metonymy, synec­ doche, hyperbole, and catachresis have all been added to the genus which includes metaphor. All of these figures may be reduced to word-​to-​word relationships. In fact, their chief virtue is brevity and variety. They are a way of renaming simple nominal elements in a sentence. Metaphor occurs when a word applying to one thing is transferred to another, because the similarity seems to justify this transference. Metaphor is used for the sake of creating a vivid mental picture. “This insurrection awoke Italy with sudden terror”; for the sake of brevity, as follows: “the recent arrival of an army suddenly blotted out the state”; … for the sake of magnifying, as

15  “It is not merely so natural a turn of speech that it is often employed unconsciously or by uneducated persons, but it is in itself so attractive and elegant that however distinguished the language in which it is embedded it shines forth with a light that is all its own. For if it be correctly and appropriately applied, it is quite impossible for its effect to be commonplace, mean or unpleasing. It adds to the copiousness of language by the interchange of words and by borrowing, and finally succeeds in accomplishing the supremely difficult task of providing a name for everything. A noun or a verb is transferred from the place to which it properly belongs to another where there is either no literal term or the transferred is better than the literal. We do this either because it is necessary or to make our meaning clearer or, as I have already said, to produce a decorative effect. When it secures none of these results, our metaphor will be out of place”: Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1921), 7.4–​6 (p. 303). 16  Rhetorica ad Herennium, trans. Harry Caplan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1954), 4.34.45–​6 (pp. 343–​5).

 

Metaphor   639 follows: “no one’s grief or disaster could have appeased this creature’s enmities and glutted his horrible cruelty” … they say that a metaphor ought to be restrained, so as to be a transition with good reason to a kindred thing, and not seem an indiscriminate, reckless, and precipitate leap to an unlike thing.17

Our author has retreated to a position in which metaphor is once again reduced to the renaming of single verbs and nouns for the purpose of magnifying or minimizing the literal meaning. His warning at the end, of the danger of disproportionate, or nonreciprocal metaphors, brings us back to the age of Demetrius and Dionysius. Again, the metaphor is described as an unnecessary, if not illicit, addition to literal discourse. Its several uses fall far below the level granted them by Longinus, and seem to have become a parody even of the subtle distinctions made by Aristotle. It is this long and complex tradition of minimizing the significance of metaphor that was inherited first by the humanists and reduced even more by the refinements of the age of Rapin. If we were to closely investigate the brief section on metaphor in Scaliger’s Poetices (1561), or the similarly limited comments of Giraldi Cinthio, we would find paraphrases of the opinions of Dionysius, and the author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium. With the possible exception of Ludovico Castelvetro’s commentary on the Poetics (1570), which recognizes the difference between ancient and modern metaphorical practice, and questions the notion of reciprocity, all or most of these later documents preserve the predominant maxims of ancient criticism. In understanding authors of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—​for example, the Pope of the Peri Bathous—​we must see how they have received this perennial tradition. Readers of the Essay on Criticism will recognize the presence of Aristotle, Dionysius, and Horace as chief arbiters of the proper rules of metaphoric language.

The Dangers of Analogy That his own business he might quite forget, They’ amus’d him with the sports of wanton Wit, With the Desserts of Poetry they fed him, In stead of solid meats t’ encrease his force; In stead of vigorous exercise they led him Into the pleasant Labyrinths of ever-​fresh Discourse: In stead of carrying him to see The Riches which doe hoorded for him lie In Nature’s endless Treasurie, They chose his Eye to entertain (His curious but not covetous Eye) With painted Scenes, and Pageants of the Brain. Some few exalted Spirits this later Age has shown, That labour’d to assert the Liberty (From Guardians, who were now Usurpers grown) Of this old Minor still, Captiv’d Philosophy;

17 

Rhetorica ad Herennium, 4.34.45 (p. 343).

 

640   Blanford Parker But ’twas Rebellion call’d to fight For such a long-​oppressed Right. Bacon at last, a mighty Man, arose Whom a wise King and Nature chose Lord Chancellour of both their Lawes, And boldly undertook the injur’d Pupils cause.18

In these lines, Abraham Cowley commends the Royal Society and its patron saint, Francis Bacon, to his readers. In this passage Cowley describes a bloated and ignorant baby who has been hampered and weakened by the “Desserts of Poetry.” The tutors of this baby have misled him almost from birth by inculcating into his juvenile intellect the superstitions of the poetic imagination. They have ignored the “solid meats” of true philosophy, which is to say, natural science. Rather than showing him the plain riches of nature, they have led him into labyrinths of rhetorical deceit. They have chosen to entertain his eye with the miracles of art, rather than his brain, with the true substance of knowledge. They have surrounded him with a painted decor of poetry, and have kept him a perpetual youth, and captive. They have not permitted him to reach his hand to the too-​long-​forbidden fruits of true nature. His guardians, like the scholastic and humanist tutors of the early modern university, have oppressed his natural urge to understand nature and experience. In the eleventh hour of human corruption, Bacon has arisen as a mighty prophet of modernity and has shown the way to true knowledge, both as minister of state and philosopher. He has in fact shown that power over nature is equivalent to power over men. He is the chancellor, both in the royal realm and in the natural one. For the enlightened man of the mid-​seventeenth century, Bacon was offering a novel discourse, which would open a new vista of knowledge. If the modern intellect were to throw off the “idols of the theatre,” it must turn from poetic devices to empirical ones—​it must escape the labyrinth of inward conceit. In this view, nothing was more dangerous than metaphor. In the Advancement of Learning and the Novum Organum, Bacon had inveighed against analogical thought. The danger of ἀναλογικόν touched upon by Aristotle in his treatment of metaphor in the Rhetoric was now expanded. For Bacon, all traditions of analogy were dubious. These traditions included not only metaphor, conceit, and allegory, but the very center of Aristotelian logic, the syllogism. The syllogism was for Bacon and his enlightened contemporaries a deceptive analogy, with the same four-​part ratio that was the root of metaphor. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Bacon looked back on the age of metaphor, which stretched from the late Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, as the lowest moment of human intellectual development. The classical period, though limited, especially by the empty authority of Aristotle himself, nonetheless had a living tradition of true science—​ Archimedes, the Atomists, Epicurus, and Lucretius.19 Here are Bacon’s comments on poetry: Poesy is a part of learning in measure of words, for the most part restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly refer to the imagination; which, being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which

18 

Abraham Cowley, Poems, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1905), pp. 448–​9. Readers of Bacon will recall that he does believe in one form of analogical or cryptic reading, and that is found in the allegorical comments on ancient sententiae. Those sentences, however, always allegorize scientific or natural truths. They are hidden hieroglyphs about natural science. 19 

 

Metaphor   641 nature hath joined; and so make awful matches and divorces of things; pictoribus atque poetis, etc. It is taken in two senses in respect of words or matter; in the first sense it is but a character of style, and belongeth to the arts of speech, and is not pertinent for the present: in the latter it is, as hath been said one of the principal portions of learning, and is nothing else but feigned knowledge, which may be styled as well in prose as in verse.20

A brief consideration of this passage will be sufficient to understand Bacon’s attitude toward the contemporary state of affairs in the world of letters. Bacon had come to believe that the elaborate study of poetry and rhetoric, the core of modern university studies, was of nugatory importance to the development of human knowledge. Not only Aristotle and his vain formulations of logic had hindered mankind, but an appetite for a world made false by the imagined perfections of an heroic world—​a world created by the poet. If the baby that Cowley described in the passage above were to become an adult, he would have to move out of the chamber of his mind, where he heard the pleasant echoes of idealized art. He would have to give up the habit of metaphor by which the imagination joined those things “which were naturally severed.” He would have to enter into a world of imperfect reality. He would have to analyze—​that is, divide and separate the parts of each physical object—​with an eye made sharp by experience. He would have to learn to ignore the temptations of figurative language. Bacon imagined, like Giambattista Vico after him, that there had been a primitive age dominated by figurative speech and by the idealizations of verse; but if Vico thought that this lost world had great and peculiar value to the youth of mankind, Bacon believed it had only extended, for ages, a habit of ignorance. How paradoxical it is that Cowley, one of the most fanciful and elaborate of Metaphysical poets, could in his late middle age decry the very imaginative powers which had built his reputation for thirty years. Cowley had become a celebrity poet at the age of 14; by the age of 20, he had written two of the most famous volumes of the seventeenth century. He was rated by Milton as one of the three finest poets of his age, yet at the time of the writing of “To the Royal Society,” he had become alienated from his own life project. The last preface to his collected poems, written in 1658, was a disclaimer of his earlier works. He now saw them as the record of his own babyhood, and he saw himself embarking in old age upon a new adventure of knowledge. Such a transformation in the mind of Cowley, at an age where most people are beyond serious alteration of thought, shows the peculiar and powerful sense of change that had invaded the atmosphere of Britain in the mid-​century. The same changes can be marked in the career of Bishop Sprat. In his earlier work, he was a defender of conventional eloquence and pulpit oratory, but in the final phase of his career, he was to advocate (along with Glanvill) a new theory of verbal simplification. He was to go so far as to become a member of the Royal Society, and its first historian. He came to believe, like Cowley, whom he elegized, that even theology was injured by anything but univocal speech: nothing may be sooner obtained than this vicious abundance of phrase, this trick of metaphors, this volubility of tongue, which makes so great a noise in the world… . [The Royal Society] have therefore been most rigorous in putting in execution the only remedy that can

20  The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 15 vols. (Cambridge, 1863), vol. vi, pp. 202–​3.

 

642   Blanford Parker be found for this extravagance: and that has been a constant resolution to reject all the amplifications, digressions, metaphors, and swellings of style; to return to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men delivered so many things almost in an equal number of words.21

Sprat is further pushing the implications of a univocal language. Like his contemporary, Thomas Hobbes, he imagines a perfect economy of word and object. If the modern preacher, like the modern physical scientist, can reduce his world to a perfect unity of word and object, he can avoid the deceit and slipperiness of all past discourse. Sprat was to say in his last years that the Bible, like the works of Bacon, was a perfect economy of unqualified meaning. How this applied to a book endowed with so much parable, allegory, and metaphor it is not easy now to say, but it was part of the world of Sprat and his contemporaries to imagine the dream of an unambiguous language.

The Αbuse of Words It was for this very reason that Hobbes in the fifth chapter of Leviathan, in listing the seven causes of “absurd conclusions,” includes the use of “Metaphors, Tropes, and other rhetoricall figures, in stead of words proper. For though it be lawfull to say, (for example) in common speech, the way goeth, or leadeth hither, or thither, The Proverb sayes this or that (whereas wayes cannot go, nor Proverbs speak;) yet in reckoning, and seeking of truth, such speeches are not to be admitted.”22 In this passage Hobbes is going further in criticizing the simplest metaphor than any of his contemporaries. The ancient desire to simplify metaphoric relations to single words was now being replaced by a theory of language in which there would be no equivocal terms whatsoever. The expression “the words proper” recalls the concept of propria in Roman criticism—​the idea of solid and literal speech. If we look closely at the accumulated effect of the arguments of Bacon, Sprat, and Hobbes, we will notice that they are simply a hyperbolic version of the original criticism of metaphor that began with Aristotle. For while Aristotle and his followers wished to have perfect reciprocity and implied identity between vehicle and tenor, the theorists of an enlightened age wished to remove even the possibility of ambiguities in single words and phrases. It is obvious that the urge to simplify metaphor that we saw in the criticism of Dionysius of Halicarnassus has now in the seventeenth century become a desire to purge all ambiguities from speech, however trivial. It was therefore an easy step for writers like Dryden, Roscommon, and Pope, who had internalized the classical canons concerning metaphorical usage, to be touched in a new way by the implications of enlightened discourse. Since the metaphoric practice of the age of metaphor had never been thoroughly theorized, when the contemporary neoclassical poet fell back upon the attenuated theory of metaphor in Greek and Roman sources, he was running (perhaps unconsciously) in the direction of enlightened novelties of thought. He was beginning to court the modern cult of the literal. Resistance to an even more radical criticism of metaphor was therefore very weak. Those who had grown up on the stringent and narrow 21  Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society, ed. J. I. Copes and H. W. Jones (St. Louis: Washington Univ. Studies, 1958), pp. 112–​13. 22  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991), p. 35.

 

Metaphor   643 conceptions of figuration, which culminated in the practice of Horace and in the theory of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, could be easily swayed to take one step further in denigrating figurative speech. This combination of classical and Enlightened views led to a culminating moment in Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding, published on the very doorstep of the eighteenth century: Since Wit and Fancy finds easier entertainment in the World, than dry Truth and real Knowledge, figurative Speeches, and allusion in Language, will hardly be admitted, as an imperfection or abuse of it. I confess, in Discourses, where we seek rather Pleasure and Delight, than Information and Improvement, such Ornaments as are borrowed from them, can scarce pass for Faults. But yet, if we would speak of Things as they are, we must allow, that all the Art of Rhetorick, besides Order and Clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment; and so indeed are a perfect cheat.23

In Locke, as in Bacon and Hobbes, wit and fancy are clearly opposed to truth and knowledge. Figurative speech is no longer to be admitted. It is the last and worst abuse in his long discourse on “The Abuse of Words.” He admits the right of his audience to seek pleasure and delight, but he thinks such pleasure the enemy of improvement. Like Bacon, he imagines a correspondence between simple idea and single word, and he imagines that order and clarity in speech may be attained through the exclusion of metaphor. In fact eloquence—​that is, rhetoric in general—​insinuates into the mind a world of wrong ideas. It may “move the Passions,” but it will always “mislead the Judgment.” The rhetorician and the poet are both exiled from his Some Thoughts concerning Education.24 He is concerned, by his own admission, not only with the abuse of speech but with the accuracy of individual words. The comments that he scatters through his work, on metaphor and simile, like those of his radical contemporaries, no doubt recollect the theory of attenuation of metaphor in antiquity—​but they go much further. Locke believes in an adequation between simple idea and single word which pushes the Baconian theory to its limit. That so many Augustan poets believed that their own views of speech and writing had been clarified by Locke’s project indicates how willing early eighteenth-​century authors were to make a leap from the modest assertions of classical critics to the extreme claims of the moderns.

Adventitious Embellishment The Italian, the French, the Spanish, as well as English, were for a great while full of nothing else but conceit, it was an ingredient that gave taste to compositions which had little of themselves; ’twas a sauce that gave point to meat that was flat, and some life to colours that were fading … However it were, this vein first overflowed our modern poetry, and with so little distinction or judgement, that we would have conceit as well as rhyme in every two lines.25 23 

John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), p. 508 (book iii, chapter x, section 34). 24  John Locke, The Works of John Locke, 10 vols. (London, 1823), vol. ix, pp. 139–​50. 25  Restoration Literature, p. 473.

 

644   Blanford Parker Complaints such as this abound in the critical literature written in England at the opening of the eighteenth century. Critical diatribes against the use of extended metaphor were common in the age of Pope. In his own words we have: Some to Conceit alone their Taste confine, And glitt’ring Thoughts struck out at ev’ry Line; Pleas’d with a Work where Nothing’s just or fit; One glaring Chaos and wild Heap of Wit: Poets like Painters, thus, unskill’d to trace The naked Nature and the living Grace, With Gold and Jewels cover ev’ry Part, And hide with Ornaments their Want of Art.26

Critics as various as Joseph Spence, Isaac Watts, and Joseph Trapp contributed to this attack on the practice of Metaphysical poetry. Perhaps the most circumspect and thorough analysis of the proper limits of metaphor appears in Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism (1761).27 In it, he describes the proper limits of personification, metonymy, simile, and metaphor, with numerous illustrations from Latin and English authors. About two-​thirds of the erroneous examples of metaphor and simile are found in Shakespeare. Kames shows us the whole range of early modern crimes against brevity, reciprocity, and proportion. But it was in Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets (1779–​81) that this tradition of criticism reached its zenith and conclusion. Johnson was capable of a unique synthesis. First, he had read and considered Aristotle and other ancient critics in the original texts. Second, he had a unique knowledge of Italian humanist criticism and commentary. Last, he had considered the whole range of metaphoric practice in English from the period of John Donne down to Thomas Gray. In Johnson, all three of the eighteenth-​century prejudices against metaphor coexist. It will be obvious to the casual reader of the Lives of Cowley, Watts, and Waller that Johnson does not trust the use of metaphorical expression, or any ornamental speech, in dealing with sacred subjects. He asserts that the Bible is a work of transparent simplicity, and that divine revelation cannot be refined or improved upon by human imagination. Therefore, he trusted the sacred authors, while placing the narrowest prescriptions on modern writers who dealt with theological or religious subjects: “Such events as were produced by the visible interposition of divine power, are above the power of human genius to dignify. The miracle of creation, however it may teem with images, is best described with little diffusion of language” (Johnson, Lives, vol. i, p. 223). Further he remarks, “in considering Bible topics, all amplification is frivolous and vain; all addition to that which is already sufficient for the purposes of religion, seems not only useless, but in some degree, profane” (vol. i, p. 224). In the Life of Waller, we find, “contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical. Man admitted to implore the mercy of his Creator, and plead the merits of his Redeemer, is already in a higher state than poetry can confer … The topics of devotion … can receive no grace from novelty of sentiment, and very little from novelty of expression” (vol. i, p. 53). Speaking of Cowley, he says, “from Donne he may have learned that familiarity

26 Pope, Essay on Criticism, lines 289–​96, in Poems, vol. i, pp. 271–​2.

27  Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, ed. James R. Boyd (New York: American Book Company, 1883), pp. 361–​403.

 

Metaphor   645 with religious images, and that light allusion to sacred things, by which readers far short of sanctity are frequently offended” (vol. i, p. 227). Such a view obviously precludes a whole range of religious lyrics. It is important to remember that Johnson never mentions George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, or Andrew Marvell in his elaborate exposition of seventeenth-​century poetry. This editing of tradition did not begin with Johnson—​it can be found in most eighteenth-​century anthologies—​but it is theorized in a new way in the Lives of the Poets. Just as important in understanding Johnson’s attitude toward metaphor is his constant and precise application of classical principles. In the hundreds of pages of text remarking on the details of poetic construction, there are no more than a handful of compliments of individual metaphors, while there are numerous examples of false figuration. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Johnson was the last critic in Europe to apply the principles of transparency, brevity, reciprocity, and proportion derived from the Greek and Roman sources we have reviewed. Like Aristotle, Johnson preferred an energetic and literal poetic style, unencumbered by elaborate similes or difficult metaphors. His own best model seems to have been the Horace of the Epistles and Satires. Those were poems with a minimal metaphorical content, on the borderline of good prose. Like the iambic dialogue of Sophocles, they approach to the ideal of elevated and transparent conversation. When Johnson summarizes the talents of his major authors—​Cowley, Milton, Dryden, Pope—​he uses the following nomenclature to describe their styles: by invention he means “new scenes of imagery displayed”; by imagination he means “those images which strongly impress on the writers mind … various forms of nature, incidents of life, and energies of passion”; by judgment he means “that power of selection which either the present purpose requires,” or which can “separate the essence of things from its concomitants” (Lives, vol. iv, p. 78). As for metaphorical expression, he generally considers it under the heading of “extrinsic and adventitious embellishment” (vol. iv, p. 79). These embellishments are almost a superaddition to the body of the text. In this way, while invention, imagination, and judgment are balancing powers, required in successful literary composition, metaphor is a beneficial but inessential addition. Invention is the power of discovery; imagination is the power of description; and judgment is the power of selection. Each of these powers, when used properly, will moderate and limit metaphor, simile, and other figures of speech. In this way, Johnson is returning to the concept of exornatio, which he would have recalled from Quintilian and the Rhetorica ad Herennium. Exornatio can mean ornament or decoration, but it is always distinguished in the Latin originals from the essential elements of style. It is in this sense that Pope uses the word “ornaments” in the passage quoted above. This language of embellishment appears more than forty times in the chief Lives of the Poets. Johnson remarks that An Essay on Man “disrobed of its ornaments, is left to the power of its naked excellence.” Although that poem has “seductive powers of eloquence” (vol. iv, p. 76), it does not bear up under closer intellectual scrutiny. Pope has attempted to save the poem by seducing the reader by figurative ornaments, and in so doing has lost the main line of his argument. Similarly, in the Temple of Fame, although there is “a great luxuriance of ornaments,” and the “allegory is very skillfully continued” (vol. iv, p. 67), nonetheless, the result of all of its glamorous details, is a text with little relation to general manners or common life. Again the very idea of an elaborate allegorical narrative, with so many incrustations of metaphor, blocks Johnson’s appreciation. Though it is superior to the wild medieval original, it still falls short of Johnson’s ideal of balance.

 

646   Blanford Parker One of the highest praises of Joseph Addison is that he “never deviates from his track to snatch a grace; he seeks no ambitious ornaments, and tries no hazardous innovations. His page is always luminous, but never blazes in unexpected splendour” (vol. iii, p. 38). The last paragraph of that life is a tribute to the idea of the moderate or middle style, in which there is effortless and lucid language unencumbered by gratuitous ornamentation. Throughout the volumes of the Lives we see the constant identification of ornament and decoration with metaphor. Johnson takes delight in showing his reader the faults of individual metaphors. Many of the funniest passages of his work are his dissections of famous conceits. It is easy to see that he admired the facile and sometimes brutal analysis of metaphors which he found in the essays of Dryden. He gives a long treatment of the battle over proper use of metaphor waged between Dryden and Elkanah Settle. And although he purports to believe that Dryden’s mockery of Settle is immoderate, he closely imitates that style in his own Life of Gray. Because of his sympathetic nature, Johnson was always unsure of how far an antagonist in print may go in destroying the reputation of another author, but he found in Dryden a playful brutality which he could not resist. In analyzing the following lines of Settle, “To flattering lightning, our feign’d smiles conform, | Which back’d with thunder do but gild a storm,” Johnson offers the following: Conform a smile to lightning, make a smile imitate lightning, and flattering lightning: lightning sure is a threatening thing. And this threatening must gild a storm. Now if I must conform my styles to lightning, then my smiles must gild a storm too; to gild with smiles is a new invention of gilding to my mind, and to further gild a storm by being backed with thunder. Thunder is a part of the storm; so one part of the storm must help to gild another part, and help by backing; as if a man would gild a thing the better for being backed, or having a load on his back. So that there is gilding by: conforming, smiling, lightning, backing, and thundering. The whole is as if I should say this, I will make my counterfeit smiles look like a flattering stone-​horse, which, being backed with a trooper, does but gild the battle. I am mistaken if nonsense is not here pretty thickly sown. Sure the poet writ these two lines aboard some smack in a storm, and, being seasick, spewed up a good lump of clotted nonsense all at once. (Lives, vol. ii, pp. 84–​5)

We can forgive Johnson for taking delight in this kind of verbal mauling. He practiced it only infrequently in his own work, and he did not stray too far from his general principles, even when he was judging his least favorite authors. Johnson was dedicated to the classical theory of metaphoric reciprocity, and in several Lives he admonishes poets for failing to preserve it. In the Life of Gray, when speaking of “The Progress of Poetry,” he says that “Gray seems in his rapture to confound the images of spreading sound and running water. A stream of musick may be allowed, but where does Musick, however smooth and strong, after having visited the verdant veils, roll down the steep amain …? If this be said of Musick, it is nonsense; if it be said of Water, it is nothing to the purpose” (vol. iv, p. 181). Here we have an example of non-​reciprocal elements in the metaphoric ratio. But we may also notice that Johnson always denies the applicability of synesthesia. He does not believe the metaphors of the different senses can be mixed. In the Gray passage, there are the metaphors of sound and vision. In the Life of Edmund Smith, speaking of one of Smith’s famous Latin poems, he says of the lines: Vestitur hinc tot sermo coloribus Quot tu, Pococki, dissimilis tui

 

Metaphor   647 Orator effers, quot vicissim Te memores celebrarae gaudent. I will not commend the figure which makes the orator pronounce colours, or give to colours memory and delight. (vol. iii, p. 174)

Again, in this relatively clichéd passage, he will not accept the relation of speech (or sound) to color, nor will he grant to the personified color the mental operations of memory and delight. Surely it is a commonplace to say that the poet invests his speech with various colors. Although the Latin passage makes no special demand upon the reader’s imagination, when it is dissected by Johnson it may appear upon reflection to be illogical. In the same sense, there is a long tradition of the relation of music to water, going at least as far back as Ovid, which it is Johnson’s peculiarity to find offensive. A more interesting problem of reciprocity may be found in his analysis of Gray’s “Ode on a Favourite Cat.” Johnson remarks that “The sixth stanza contains a melancholy truth, that a favourite has no friend; but the last ends in a pointed sentence of no relation to the purpose; if what glistered had been gold, the cat would not have gone into the water; and, if she had, would not less have been drowned” (vol. iv, pp. 180–​1). Johnson does not seem to recognize that the lack of reciprocity is created to produce humor. “What female heart can gold despise? | What cat’s averse to fish?” is an obvious attempt to produce laughter through asymmetry. The conceit of the nymph and the cat, or the goldfish and the gold, are incapable of simple transference, yet Johnson believes such word-​for-​word transference is required for an appropriate figure. He similarly claims in the Life of Pope, referring to both Dryden’s and Pope’s musical odes, that “both end with the same fault, the comparison of each is literal on one side and metaphorical on the other” (vol. iv, p. 68). For this reason Johnson apparently finds in the famous line, “Music shall untune the sky,” an illicit combination of an intellectual (or aesthetic) tenor and a physical vehicle. No passage in Johnson can better illustrate his attitude toward metaphor than his explication of the famous lines of Denham in Coopers Hill: “Oh could I flow like thee, and make thy stream | My great example, as it is my theme! | Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull; | Strong without rage, without o’er-​flowing full.”28 Again Johnson remarks, “the lines are in themselves not perfect; for most of the words, thus artfully opposed, are to be understood simply on one side of the comparison, and metaphorically on the other; and if there be any language which does not express intellectual operations by material images, into that language they cannot be translated” (vol. i, pp. 238–​9). The first imperfection that Johnson discovers in the lines is one that we have seen before. In the case of the word “dull,” there is no obvious reciprocity. The other terms—​“deep,” “clear,” “gentle,” “strong,” “o’er-​flowing”—​seem to be equally applicable to both poetic style and the river. But “dull” seems to be applicable only to the poetic side of the comparison. An ingenious reader may say that “not dull” may refer to water which is not stagnant, that is, not moving. But in Johnson’s mind, that reading was unclear or forced. “Dull” for Johnson is a quality of mind and not easily transferable to matter. Johnson may also have believed that “strong without rage” was not equally suited to both sides of the comparison. In fact he claims that “most” of the terms are on one side figurative and the other literal. Nonetheless,

28  I have received a good deal of guidance and advice on this passage and on metaphor in Johnson generally from discussions with my former student, Jason Turetsky.

 

648   Blanford Parker he does show a general admiration for the passage. He is willing to overlook a minor disproportion because of the general force and solidity of the images. But it is in the more general comment that he makes about language that we might discover a novel conception. In questioning the possibility that any language might equally and adequately describe both intellectual qualities and physical ones, he seems to be moving in a new direction. He seems to be questioning, on a deeper level, the nature of metaphorical signification. For if there is always some discrepancy between abstract mental operation and physical description, then we are thrown back to the view of Bacon and Hobbes—​that all metaphorical language is problematic—​the desire of the human mind to find an equation between unlike objects, or unlike states of existence. Johnson’s quest for transparency seems to have moved him, at least in this passage, toward a larger question about the nature of metaphor. He seems to question whether there can be any sufficient adequation between vehicle and tenor, when one is an abstraction and the other a material object. If he is going this far, he is courting the attitude of enlightened literalists. We must remain uncertain about Johnson’s conclusions on this matter, but a close reading of his later essays, and an inspection of empirical and scientific language in the Dictionary, may further tempt us to believe that Johnson hovered on the borderline of deeper skepticism.

References Aarsleff, Hans, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982). Doody, Margaret, The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986). Parker, Blanford, The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998). Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson, “A Deflationary Account of Metaphors,” in Raymond W. Gibbs (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought (New  York:  Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008), pp. 84–​105. Wimsatt, W. K., Jr., Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the “Rambler” and “Dictionary” of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1948).

 

Chapter 38

Allu si on Marcus Walsh For a modern reader, one of the characterizing qualities, and difficulties, of much eighteenth-​century English verse is its pervasive use of allusion, either to persons and events, or (the type of allusion with which this chapter will mostly be concerned) to other writings. This is true of satire, whose targets were often densely local and contemporary, and whose predominant mode was the naturally allusive mock-​heroic. It is also true of some of the century’s most innovative high lyric verse, which drew heavily and also experimentally upon a wide range of literary models, from Pindar, the Psalms, and Horace to Spenser and Milton.

Theory of Allusion Eighteenth-​century readers and writers were certainly familiar with the concept of allusion. Most of the English poets that they came most to admire and emulate were themselves highly allusive. The writings of Spenser and Milton made heavy use of allusion to literary models, and understanding of Shakespeare notoriously required knowledge of the language and customs of his day. The first significant commentary on an English classic, Patrick Hume’s Annotations (1695) on Paradise Lost, concerned itself chiefly with identifying Milton’s many scriptural allusions.1 Successive editions of Shakespeare, particularly those by Lewis Theobald, Edward Capell, Samuel Johnson, George Steevens, and Edmond Malone, copiously and incrementally developed and refined the illustration of Shakespeare, a process which could cease only, as Edmond Malone put it, “When our poet’s entire library shall have been discovered, and the fables of all his plays traced to their original source, when every temporary allusion shall have been pointed out, and every obscurity elucidated.”2 Though both verbal or literary allusion and topical and personal allusion were evidently understood as concepts and practices, it is hard to find any very full and explicit articulation of

1 

See Marcus Walsh, “Literary Annotation and Biblical Commentary: The Case of Patrick Hume’s Annotations on Paradise Lost,” Milton Quarterly, 22 (1988), 109–​14. 2  Edmond Malone (ed.), The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, 11 vols. (London, 1790), vol. i, p. lvi.

 

650   Marcus Walsh a theory of allusion in eighteenth-​century writing. The words “allude” and “allusion” were regularly used in editorial commentary in editions of Shakespeare and of Milton with respect to personal and historical allusion. Only with Malone’s great 1790 edition of Shakespeare, however, would the terms regularly be applied to verbal allusion. Among the few statements of editorial self-​consciousness regarding verbal allusion is Thomas Newton’s promise that, in his edition of Paradise Lost (1749), he would use in illustration only “such passages as we may suppose the author really alluded to, and had in mind at the time of writing.”3 Newton here insists on both the intentional nature of allusion, and the fundamentally intentionalist hermeneutics that underpinned eighteenth-​century explanatory commentary. An anonymous writer, in an essay on Milton’s Paradise Lost published in 1741, provides a slightly more expanded and suggestive statement about allusion, within some familiar contemporary theoretical parameters: Aristotle ascribes the Origin of Poetry to the Pleasure Mankind takes in Imitations … This Pleasure arises from the Comparison the Mind makes betwixt the Imitation and the Thing imitated: For Example, in a Picture or Statue, from comparing them with the Original; and, in Poetry, from comparing the Descriptions with the Objects themselves. Hence it is evident. That, when one good Poet imitates another, we have a double Pleasure; the first proceeding from comparing the Description with its Object: and the second, from comparing the one Description with the other from which it was imitated. That, in every Simile, we have a double Pleasure; the first, in comparing the Image it conveys with its Objects; the other, in comparing it with the Subject it was designed to Illustrate. But, if the Simile be imitated from another Author, we have still one Pleasure more.4

It is significant that this writer, to designate a mode of writing which certainly comprehends what we nowadays understand as allusion, uses the word “imitation,” just as Alexander Pope had done in his mock learned scholia to the Dunciad Variorum (1729). The pleasure given by “imitation” or allusion is underwritten, as one might expect, by Aristotle’s theory of mimesis, and in particular by his account of the characterizing pleasure humans take in the recognition that the imitation resembles its object. In this theoretical move, the concepts as well as the terms of allusion (here revealingly called “Description”) and imitation are approximated. We take a further pleasure from comparing allusion and original, in the perception of discordia concors, of what is new and different in the resemblance. Finally, and perhaps most suggestively of all, just as the rhetorical mode of simile pleases through mimesis, so allusion to a “description” becomes in itself a simile of a simile. This anonymous writer’s persuasive and cogent account perhaps reveals in part why allusion was not more extensively written about. Though his founding principles are familiar, and his argument follows sufficiently readily from them, the writer’s conclusions reveal the figurative tendency inherent in allusion. The words “allude” and “allusion” themselves derive from Latin alludo “to jest or sport with,” and have long carried in English a suggestion of verbal play, of metaphor, of punning, as well as their more modern meaning.5 Allusion 3 

Thomas Newton (ed.), Paradise Lost, 2 vols. (London, 1749), vol. i, sig. a4v. An Essay upon Milton’s Imitations of the Ancients, in His Paradise Lost: With Some Observations on the Paradise Regain’d (Edinburgh, 1741). Extracted in John T. Shawcross (ed.), Milton, 1732–​1801: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 121–​5, at p. 121. 5  OED sense 2 is “A play upon words, a word-​play, a pun,” with examples from 1556 through 1731 (the last from Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary); sense 3 is “A symbolical reference or likening; a metaphor, parable, allegory,” with examples from 1548 through 1781. 4 

 

Allusion   651 may begin in simile, in the setting together of an original and an imitation, but can readily develop into the more figurative modes of metaphor and conceit. To a modern mind, it is precisely the drawing of another writer’s expression into one’s own, with a fruitful and potentially proliferating difference, that gives allusion its power. Eighteenth-​century theorists had principled objections, however, to the allusive, the paronomastic, and the metaphorical. John Locke, in the Essay concerning Human Understanding, rejected “figurative Speeches, and allusion in language” from writings which aimed at truth and knowledge, though he grudgingly confessed that “in Discourses, where we seek rather Pleasure and Delight, than Information and Improvement, such Ornaments as are borrowed from them, can scarce pass for Faults.”6 Joseph Addison and Alexander Pope both abominated false verbal wit and the pun (though Pope was creatively capable of versions of the latter).7 Samuel Johnson complained that the Metaphysical poets failed to observe Aristotelian mimetic principles, seeking “not for images, but for conceits.” He lamented their use of the referential and allusive, insisting that “every piece ought to contain within itself whatever is necessary to make it intelligible.”8 For Johnson, as for Locke, clarity of expression is crucial. A simile must illustrate, as well as ennoble, or aggrandize.9 Where figuration is used it should not damage the articulation of sense. Hence Johnson’s preference for the simile, where tenor and vehicle are clear and distinct, over the identification and fusion inherent in the metaphor.

Quotation and Echo At one end of the spectrum of verbal allusion lies quotation, verbatim or near verbatim, perhaps unconscious and unacknowledged, in some instances a near cousin of plagiarism.10 Merely slavish or mindless quotation or borrowing is a possible characteristic of duncely hack writing, as Pope pointed out: As Virgil is said to have read Ennius, out of his Dunghil to draw gold; so may our Author read Shakespear, Milton, and Dryden, for the contrary end, to bury their Gold in his own Dunghil.11

At the other end of the spectrum lies the echo, which (in John Hollander’s words) “does not depend on conscious intention,” and may or may not be recognized by the reader, who

6  John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 508 (book iii, chapter x, section 34). 7 Addison, Spectator 61; Pope, Peri Bathous, in The Prose Works of Alexander Pope: Vol. 2: The Major Works, 1725–​1744, ed. Rosemary Cowler (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1986), chap. 10, pp. 205–​10. 8  Samuel Johnson, Life of Cowley, in The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets: With Critical Observations on Their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), vol. i, pp. 212, 214. 9  Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (London, 1755), s.v. simile; Johnson, Life of Pope, in Lives, vol. iv, p. 69. 10  An example: in his georgic poem The Fleece (1757), John Dyer writes of “ready Diligence” awaiting the woollen cargo “like strong Briareus, with his hundred hands” (book ii, line 78). The line is stolen with minimal alteration from Pope, in whose four-​book Dunciad “Giant Handel stands, | Like bold Briareus, with a hundred hands”: The Dunciad (B), book iv, lines 65–​6, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–​69), vol. v, p. 348. 11 Pope, Peri Bathous, in Prose Works, chap. 9, pp. 203–​5.

 

652   Marcus Walsh “must have some kind of access to an earlier voice, and to its cave of resonant signification, analogous to that of the author of the later text.”12 Echo may be associated with what Roger Lonsdale calls “a general richness of allusion,” or what I. A. Richards calls “the emotional aura.”13 True allusion, the deliberate putting to use by a writer of words from an earlier literary model, stands between these two extremes. Such allusion is by definition intentional. It may contribute to effect, but (as this chapter will argue) it is also constitutive of meaning. It provides intellectual depth, rather than mere decoration.14 That allusion raises well-​known problems of understanding does not make it any the less an object of interpretation. Allusion is a mode by which an author communicates with a knowing reader—​a reader, that is, who recognizes the object of the allusion, and very possibly its textual context, and is in a position to make sense of the use to which the alluding author has put it. Allusion is (to use Johnson’s words) “that which is spoken with reference to something supposed to be already known, and therefore not expressed.”15 It depends upon (to use a phrase Johnson used in relation to classical quotation) “community of mind,” and its difficulties arise in part from the deliberate or accidental limits of that community.16 A poet may use allusion to create or to define for himself the cultural world in which he is operating, the kind of readership he wants, and his relation to that readership. In this respect allusion raises a familiar type of hermeneutic challenge, the reconstruction of context that enables understanding. Because of the nature of allusion, not all members even of a contemporary readership would have had ready access to the author’s assumed community of mind. With the passage of time, that community of mind—​a familiarity with the writings of Pindar, or David, or Horace, or Shakespeare, or Milton, for example—​inevitably becomes smaller and more fractured. Editorial identification of allusion’s sources may be necessary to understanding at the poem’s own moment, and (for poetry of any significant cultural embeddedness) will certainly be necessary in after centuries. Allusion is a reason why literary texts demand, and respond to, annotation by their author or their editors, or both. Poetry and editing are—​whether the editor is the poet himself or another scholiast—​ reciprocal activities.

12  John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), pp. 64–​5. 13  The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), p. 48; I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 290. 14  I allude to terminology used in Irvin Ehrenpreis’s important essay “Explicitness in Augustan Literature,” in Literary Meaning and Augustan Values (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1974), pp. 1–​48, at p. 11. 15 Johnson, Dictionary, s.v. allusion. 16  Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Together with Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson’s Diary of a Journey into North Wales, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1934–​ 64), vol. iv, p. 102. I have discussed this issue at greater length in “‘Community of Mind’: Smart and the Poetics of Allusion,” in Clement Hawes (ed.), Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 29–​46. For important analyses, see Michael Leddy, “Limits of Allusion,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 32 (1992), 110–​22; Wendell V. Harris, Literary Meaning: Reclaiming the Study of Literature (London: Macmillan, 1996), especially chap. 5, “Hermeneutics” (pp. 90–​131).

 

Allusion   653

The Dunciad Of all eighteenth-​century poets none understood this truth better than Alexander Pope, and in none of his poems is this better exemplified than in his Dunciad. The Dunciad was first published as a three-​book “Heroic Poem” in 1728, as a modest duodecimo. It appeared with relatively few paratextual additions: the title plate, “The Publisher to the Reader,” a small number of relatively straightforward explanatory footnotes. A year later the poem appeared as a handsome quarto, “in all pomp, … attended with Proeme, Prol[e]gomena, Testimonia Scriptorum, Index Authorum, and Notes Variorum.”17 The “Notes Variorum” in fact were presented on each page under two heads, “Remarks” and “Imitations.” The “Remarks” are intended as equivalent to, or rather parodic of, the critical scholia of learned editors in general, for whom the word was a term of art, and of the scholia characteristic of Richard Bentley’s classical editing in particular (“plough’d was his front with many a deep remark”).18 The “Imitations” provide the reader with a running list of the poem’s parodies, imitations of, and allusions to other writings, and especially to epic.19 The “Remarks” and “Imitations” both constitute part of the apparatus of a formally edited text. The editorial voice, in pointing out references and likenesses, is often both speculative and independent (“This has a resemblance,” “there is a general allusion”), and is aware of, and keen to point out, allusive difference and development. Pope has become, behind this mask, his own critic and explicator. In the advertisement to the Dunciad Variorum Pope allows himself to be briefly explicit about the purpose of his commentary: The Imitations of the Ancients are added, to gratify those who either never read, or may have forgotten them; together with some of the Parodies, and Allusions to the most excellent of the Moderns. If any man from the frequency of the former, may think the Poem too much a Cento; our Poet will but appear to have done the same thing in jest, which Boileau did in earnest; and upon which Vida, Fracastorius, and many of the most eminent Latin Poets professedly valued themselves. (Pope, Poems, vol. v, p. 9)

This passage makes clear that “imitations” is used as synonym or near-​synonym for “parodies” and “allusions,” and that Pope thought of the “imitations” as operating at the verbal level. There is evidently a satiric reflection on those who “never read, or may have forgotten” the ancients, which initiates a potentially ironic distinction between those readers who will recognize the poem’s great epic models, and those readers who require the help of a scholarly, or mock-​scholarly, gloss. A “cento” is “a composition formed by joining scraps from other authors” (as Johnson defined the word). To call the poem a cento would have been to allege

17 

Pope to Swift, June 28, 1728, in The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, D.D., ed. David Woolley, 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999–​2007), vol. iii, letter 815. Cf. Swift’s own statement in the Examiner: “For my intention is, that my Hints may be understood, and my Quotations and allegories applied; and I am in some pain to think, that in the Orcades on one side, and the Western Coasts of Ireland on the other, the Examiner may want a Key in several Parts, which I wish I could furnish them with” (Examiner 24, January 11, 1711). 18  Dunciad, book iv, line 204. 19  Though not all such parodies and imitations and allusions are noted and confessed to under the “Imitations,” and some are noted under the “Remarks.”

 

654   Marcus Walsh plagiarism; Pope insists that his allusions are more creative, and more playfully adaptive of their original text, as well as more traditional. The reference to the writer of the Dunciad in the third-​person phrase “Our Poet” establishes this voice of the advertisement, like the various voices of the variorum commentary, as an editorial persona. Allusion is a fundamental method of mock-​epic in the Dunciad. It regularly functions not only as a mechanism of contrast, pitting an often sordid and diminished present against a sometimes heroic past, but also metaphorically, as an articulating conceit. Both allusions and metaphor readily cross the barrier between, and connect, the poem and its “variorum” commentary. On many occasions the commentary, under the head of either “Remarks” or “Imitations,” identifies or explains or exploits an allusion, ensuring that no reader of this found poem can fail to recognize its targets. On many other occasions the commentary is itself “poetic,” introducing new allusions and new ideas into the ramifying satiric structure. Among many possible examples is a pissing c​ ontest from one of the poem’s mock-​heroic set pieces, the games of the dunces (modeled as a whole on Odyssey book xxiv, Iliad book xxiii, and Aeneid book v). It begins as a typical Dunciad pattern of ironic and explained allusion. The goddess Dulness offers as prizes a “China-​ Jordan” and “yon Juno of majestic size,” who is identified in the Dunciad Variorum note (book ii, line 155) as the contemporary authoress Eliza Haywood. This modern “Juno” is characterized by “cow-​like udders, and … ox-​like eyes,” the latter trait an ironic version of Homer’s “ox-​eyed” Hera (Iliad, book iv, line 50 and passim). The Variorum note clarifies the epic allusion, pointing out that in the Iliad “a Lady and a Kettle” are offered together as prizes in the games (book xxiii, lines 262–​5), and taking the opportunity to implicate the French Homeric expert Anne Dacier in the debate about priority in prizes for pissing contests. Dacier had jibbed at Homer’s stated preference for the kettle; the Dunciad, more chivalrously, prefers the lady. The prize is offered to whoever “best can send on high | The salient spout.” The competitors are two booksellers, Edmund Curll and a mighty opposite, in 1728 and 1729 William Chetwood, in the four-​book Dunciad Thomas Osborne. Their strife is made imaginative by literary allusion. Chetwood’s effort “labour’d to a curve at most”: So Jove’s bright bow displays its wat’ry round, (Sure sign, that no spectator shall be drown’d) A second effort brought but new disgrace, The wild Meander wash’d the Artist’s face. (Dunciad [B]‌, book ii, lines 173–​6)

Osborne’s mere curve is dignified by the comparison with the rainbows set by the son of Cronos as a portent to mortals (e.g., Iliad, book xi, lines 27–​8). The allusion allows Pope in his Variorum comment on this passage further to embroil Madame Dacier. In the notes to her translation of the Homeric line Dacier had suggested that “peut-​estre mesme … ces payens avoient entendu parler de ce que Dieu avoit dit à Noé,” that is, God’s identification of the rainbow as a token of his covenant with Noah, and his promise “that the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh” (Gen. 9:13, 15). The allusion in the Variorum note to Dacier’s apparatus thus works reflexively on Pope’s poem itself, insinuating a possible, and blasphemous, expansion of the implication of the promise “that no spectator shall be drown’d.” Tellingly, Osborne’s arc is, in these words of the four-​book Dunciad, imaged as a river, the curving Meander; the wording of the 1728 and 1729 editions, less allusively and

 

Allusion   655 more literally, had been “For straining more, it flies in his own face.” The river conceit is continued, and burgeons more gloriously, in Curll’s performance: Not so from shameless Curl; impetuous spread The stream, and smoking flourish’d o’er his head. So (famed like thee for turbulence and horns) Eridanus his humble fountain scorns; Thro’ half the heav’ns he pours th’exalted urn; His rapid waters in their passage burn. (The Dunciad [B]‌, book ii, lines 179–​84)

“Turbulence” alludes to the notorious contemporary facts of Curll’s publishing career; “horns” alludes, apparently baselessly, to cuckoldom. Eridanus, however, is a literary as well as a literal river (the Po), as the Variorum notes point out. Its forcefulness had been characterized by Virgil (Georgics, book iv, lines 371–​3). The literary Eridanus, like Curll’s spout, flows through the skies themselves, “as the Poets fabled”; the fabling poets include John Denham (Coopers Hill, lines 193–​6), and Pope himself (Windsor-​Forest, lines 227–​30). The simile metamorphoses to metaphor, giving Curll the status not merely of a hero but of a river-​god, as he “pours th’exalted urn.” This familiar poeticism20 gives the Variorum an opportunity to introduce an allusive, and parodic, scholium, product of authorial collaboration between “Scriblerus” and “Lewis Theobald,” in which we are told of a variant final couplet found in a (non-​existent) manuscript: “And lifts his urn thro’ half the heav’ns to flow; | His rapid waters in their passage glow.” The note is generally parodic of Theobald’s method, his alleged editorial bossiness, his readiness to conjecture, and his extended lists of supporting citations, in this case seven instances of “glow” taken from Pope’s Homer (“I am afraid of growing luxuriant in examples, or I could stretch this catalogue to a great extent”).21 The note is more particularly allusive to a passage in Shakespeare Restored, in which Theobald had exposed Pope’s silent omission of two crucial repeated words, in his Shakespeare edition, of a line of Claudius to Hamlet: But you must know, your Father lost a Father, That Father lost, lost his; —​—​22

Theobald had commented that “the Reduplication of the Word lost here gives an Energy and an Elegance, which is much easier to be conceived, than explain’d in Terms.” The Dunciad Variorum scholium skewers Theobald’s rare but excusable descent to literary criticism by presenting it, in near identical words, as a preference for “an elegance, a Jenesçay quoy, which is much easier to be conceiv’d than explain’d.” Theobald however is not the only target of this note. The flow/​glow rhyme of the variant is preferred over urn/​burn, despite “burn” being “the proper word to convey an idea of what was said to be Mr. Curl’s condition at that time,” on the basis that the author of the 20 

Cf. Abraham Cowley, “To the Royal Society,” line 218, in Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-​ Society (London, 1667), sig. B3v. 21  Compare Scriblerus’s note to Dunciad Variorum, book iii, line 272: “I could shew you a hundred just such in him, if I had nothing else to do” (vol. v, p. 182). 22  Lewis Theobald, Shakespeare Restored; or, A Specimen of the Many Errors, as Well Committed, as Unamended, by Mr. Pope in His Late Edition of this Poet: Designed Not Only to Correct the Said Edition, but to Restore the True Reading of Shakespeare in All the Editions Ever Yet Publish’d (London, 1726), p. 13.

 

656   Marcus Walsh Dunciad had too much “humanity”23 to insult a man over a natural misfortune arising from “an unhappy communication with another.” This lengthy excursus, where editors make the allegation on the more generous poet’s behalf, serves only to highlight the narrowly symptomatic, as well as the heroically mythic, implications of the burning occasioned by the passage of Curll’s rapid waters. Literary allusion informs a more significant and a more ominous moment in the poem, the couplet on the goddess Dulness, “coming in her Majesty, to destroy Order and Science,” at the beginning of book iv: She mounts the Throne: her head a cloud conceal’d, In broad Effulgence all below revealed. (Dunciad, book iv, lines 17–​18)

The lines are rich in epic allusion, most apparently to the cloud-​obscured Homeric deities. There is a less obvious but verbally complex and carefully worked-​through allusion to a passage in Paradise Lost, where Milton contrasts God the Father, “Throned inaccessible,” visible only when he shades the blaze of his beams “through a cloud,” with Christ, who is “without cloud | Made visible,” reflecting in his countenance “the effulgence” of the Father.24 In mimicking this divine tableau in Milton’s epic, a poem which was already a scripture for eighteenth-​century readers on its own account, Dulness is guilty of enacting a blasphemy. A further and grimmer blasphemy, however, of an immediately biblical kind, is attributed to Dulness, in an allusion which must have been all too obvious to contemporary readers, and is scarcely missable now, the echo of God’s words to Moses in Exodus 34:23: “thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.”25 The concluding rhyme-​word “revealed” also has its satiric point, emphasizing the poem’s concern with inverted values in the sacred as well as the secular sphere. God’s creation is turned upside down, God’s logos is replaced by Dulness’s uncreating word, the divine light is replaced by darkness, and the attack on dull theology centers on a “gloomy clerk”—​the anti-​Trinitarian divine Samuel Clarke—​who denies mystery and questions revealed religion. Nevertheless, these lines tell us, the sons of Dulness are provided with their own appropriate, and different, revelation. Pope uses allusion to both classical and vernacular epic repeatedly in the Dunciad as a primary device for figuring filiation and inheritance, true and false, heroic and duncely. Such uses are carefully pointed out in the variorum scholia. Repeating a simile from the Aeneid (book vi, lines 784–​7) prophesying its hero’s illustrious progeny, Pope compares with Cybele’s celebration of her hundred divine children Dulness’s survey of her own

23 

The usage itself echoes a word that had been applied sarcastically to Theobald’s editorial father Richard Bentley. See Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. Marcus Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 147, 151, 471. 24  Paradise Lost, book iii, lines 377–​88. Less likely seems an allusion (suggested by Valerie Rumbold and Arthur Sherbo) to Paradise Lost, book x, lines 449–​50, the enthronement of Satan: “At last as from a cloud his fulgent head | And shape star-​bright appeared.” 25  In the New Dunciad of 1742 Pope’s note pointed out that “It was the opinion of the Ancients, that the Divinities manifested themselves to men by their Back-​parts,” citing Aeneid, book i, line 402, where Aeneas recognized his mother Venus by the flash of her rosy neck as she turned away, by the divine odour of her ambrosial hair, and by her godly step. This classical line is a far less apparent or convincing allusion here, and is no doubt cited either (as Valerie Rumbold suggests) “to avert accusations of blasphemy,” or as part of Pope’s obfuscating annotational game.

 

Allusion   657 different Parnassus: “Behold a hundred sons, and each a dunce” (Dunciad Variorum, book iii, lines 129–​30). In this same Pisgah view Dulness invites the dunces to “Mark first the youth who takes the foremost place,” the son of Colley Cibber: “With all thy Father’s virtues blest, be born!” The phraseology echoes prophecies not only in the visionary sixth book of Virgil’s epic, but also in his fourth Eclogue, of the coming of a divine child who would rule a restored golden age.26 That these Virgilian passages were regularly read as prophetic of Christ’s coming (not least in Pope’s own Messiah) lends blasphemous implication to the allusion. In the new fourth book a traveling governor presents to Dulness his charge, the “young Aeneas” who has lost all his classic learning in his Italian travels but gained at least a mistress: Her too receive (for her my soul adores) So may the sons of sons of sons of whores, Prop thine, O Empress! Like each neighbour Throne, And make a long Posterity thy own. (Dunciad in Four Books, book iv, lines 331–​4)

Again, the variorum note ensures we hear the echo, contrasting this dunce’s raddled progeny with the inheritance of imperial Rome: “the house of Aeneas shall lord it over all lands, even his children’s children and their race that shall be born of them” (“et nati natorum et qui nascentur ab illis,” Aeneid, book iii, lines 97–​8). Dulness rejoices above all things in the “sure succession” of otiose emptiness from duncely poetic father to duncely poetic son: She saw with joy the line immortal run, Each sire imprest and glaring in his son; …………………………………………… She saw old Pryn in restless Daniel shine, And Eusden eke out Blackmore’s endless line. (Dunciad Variorum, book i, lines 96, 97–​8, 101–​2)

The allusion is to Paradise Lost: Beyond compare the Son of God was seen Most glorious, in him all his Father shone Substantially expressed, and in his face ………………………………………….. Love without end, and without measure Grace. (Paradise Lost, book iii, lines 138–​42)

As Christopher Ricks points out in a brilliant analysis, Pope’s imaginative allusion asserts his own genuine poetic inheritance from Milton, greatest of English epic writers, in a “true poetic succession,” utterly unlike the “interminable maundering” of Sir Richard Blackmore’s copious sub-​heroic verse.27 The dunces’ patrimony results in an always senseless “endless line,” rather than the divine “Love without end, and without measure Grace” which shine in God the Son. The paradoxical puzzle of duncely patrimony is stated as the poem’s great research question, at the end of the first paragraph of the first book: Say from what cause, in vain decry’d and curst, Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first? (Dunciad Variorum, book i, lines 5–​6)

26  27 

Aeneid, book vi, lines 760–​1; Eclogue iv, line 17. Cf. Eclogue viii, line 17. Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), pp. 36–​7.

 

658   Marcus Walsh The phrasing of the question alludes not only to those asked in epic invocations (“Muse, tell me the causes”; Aeneid, book i, line 8), but also, more specifically to Dryden’s complaint of the succession of one limp poet laureate to another (“For Tom the Second reigns like Tom the First”).28 Again, in the act of satirizing the dunces, Pope claims his affiliation to a greater and earlier poet. The variorum note manages to position Pope’s poem in the line of its distinguished satiric forerunner, Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe, in the act of refuting Curll’s Key to the Dunciad: “Alluding to a verse of Mr. Dryden’s not in Mac Flecno (as it is said ignorantly in the Key to the Dunciad, pag. 1.) but in his verses to Mr. Congreve.”

Ode on the Poetical Character Pope could present himself, in such passages, as a genuine inheritor. The trope of allusion enabled him to express a nuanced as well as a confident sense of that recurrence which (in Peter Hughes’s words) is “the rediscovery of our present selves through reading and writing about past texts.”29 To some poets of a later generation, poetic succession seemed altogether more precarious. A decisive moment had come with Pope’s death in 1744. A key group of younger poets, including the Warton brothers, Gray, Collins, and Akenside, considering “Invention and Imagination to be the chief faculties of a Poet,”30 and not finding those qualities in Pope, would turn away from Pope’s legacy of moral and satiric heroic couplet verse to seek very different, and mainly lyric, poetic inheritances, formal, prosodic, figurative, and linguistic. That anxious quest regularly was underwritten and enabled, as in Pope but in very different ways, by allusion. The new poets developed their theoretical positions less in discursive prose than in the strenuous and often experimental practice of their poetry. No manifesto of the new poetry is more ambitious or more complex, or more radically addresses the issues of poetic function and filiation, than William Collins’s extraordinary “Ode on the Poetical Character,” published in his Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747). Collins’s ode is written, not in the couplet verse of Dryden, but in Pindarics. It follows the model not of Abraham Cowley’s metrically and structurally audacious Pindaric exercises of the previous century (Odes, 1656), but of the sublimely exact regular tripartite form which William Congreve especially had delineated and shown to be characteristic of Pindar,31 and which English poets in the mid-​century would regularly employ. The Pindaric ode commonly consisted of one or more modules made up of strophe, metrically identical answering antistrophe, and metrically contrasting epode (see ­chapter 30, “Ode”). Here, significantly, Collins

28 

John Dryden, “To My Dear Friend Mr. Congreve,” line 48, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1956–​2000), vol. iv, p. 433. The allusive joke is political as well as poetic of course: George II had succeeded George I in 1727. 29  Peter Hughes, “Allusion and Expression in Eighteenth-​Century Literature,” in Louis L. Martz and Aubrey Williams (eds.), The Author in His Work (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 299–​300. 30  Joseph Warton, advertisement, Odes on Various Subjects (London, 1746), sig. A2r. 31  William Congreve, “A Discourse on the Pindarique Ode,” in The Works of William Congreve, ed. D. F. McKenzie and C. Y. Ferdinand, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), vol. ii, pp. 413–​18.

 

Allusion   659 employs the Pindaric structure with a difference, the strophe being followed immediately by a metrically contrasting mesode, before the antistrophe concludes the poem. The mesode is thematically, as it is structurally, central. In it Collins constructs a myth which contains known elements but is, as an account of the poetic imagination for the mid-​eighteenth century, original. For Collins, imagination, which he terms “fancy,” is a faculty associated with the divine act of creation. The personified Fancy, placed by God on the “sapphire throne” of prophecy (Ezekiel 1:26, 28), is endowed with an emblematic girdle, a “hallowed work” woven “on that creating day” when God “called with thought to birth” the sky, the earth, the oceans, and the sun (lines 22–​40). The weaving of the girdle is attended by “ecstatic Wonder” and “Truth,” and the “braided dance” of the “shadowy tribes of Mind” (lines 47, 48). The mesode ends, however, on a note of plaintive enquiry. If the puzzle of the Dunciad had been why, and how, “Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first,” Collins’s problem is to identify any modern “bard” who might justly think that Fancy’s girdle could have been designed for him: “whose soul can now | Its high presuming hopes avow?”32 Though the account of its ritual weaving has been deferred to the mesode, the sacred cestus has in fact already been introduced to us, in an intensively, even obsessively, allusive opening strophe. The strophe opens, as allusive passages so often do, with a simile, or, rather, with the statement of the first of the expected two terms of a simile: As once, if not with light regard I read aright that gifted bard, (Him whose school above the rest His loveliest Elfin Queen has blessed) One, only one, unrivalled fair, Might hope the magic girdle wear, At solemn tourney hung on high, The wish of each love-​darting eye. (lines 1–​8)

The reference is to Edmund Spenser, though he is not named; rather, he is identified at once for readers of literary sensitivity, even before being characterized as “that gifted bard,” through such archaic phrases as “light regard” and “read aright,” which are recognizably taken from the Faerie Queene (cf. Faerie Queene, iii. viii. 14, 6; i. ix. 6, 6), and had become more familiar from their appearance in the verse of such intervening writers as Prior.33 This opening passage refers to the episode of Florimel in book iv of the Faerie Queene, identified in the only footnote Collins supplied to the entire poem, but certainly already familiar to that coterie of readers who knew Spenser’s poem, and were responsive to Collins’s verbal echoes of his original. The girdle, emblematic of “the virtue of chaste love” (iv. v. 3, 1), and wearable only by the truly chaste, having been lost by Florimel, is discovered by Satyrane, who hangs it aloft at “a solemne feast, with publike turneying” (iv. ii. 26, 8; iv. iv. 16, 1–​2). The girdle is competed for by several ladies, and won and tried on by the False Florimel: “but ever as they fastned it, it loos’d | And fell away, as feeling secret blame” (iv. v. 16, 6–​7). This dramatic moment is recast at length by Collins: Lo! to each other nymph in turn applied, As if, in air unseen, some hovering hand,

32  William Collins, “Ode on the Poetical Character,” lines 51–​2, in The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, p. 433. 33  Lonsdale cites Prior, An Imitation of Chaucer, line 3: “Now, and I read aright that Auncient Song.”

 

660   Marcus Walsh Some chaste and angel-​friend to virgin-​fame, With whispered spell had burst the starting band, It left unblest her loathed, dishonoured side. (lines 9–​13)

There are more allusions to Spenser here. “Unblest” echoes the resonant and much-​ remembered phrase “ungirt unblest,” used in relation to the girdle by the Squire of Dames (iv. v. 18, 6–​7). Spenser, however, is not the only elder poet whose presence is shadowed in these lines, or in the strophe as a whole. Collins’s “solemn tourney” and prize “hung on high” evoke, too, “Il Penseroso” (lines 116–​18), and the “love-​darting eye” of each of the competing ladies recalls Comus (line 753). These opening lines of the poem have woven, in fact, an elaborate tapestry of verbal and circumstantial allusion to Collins’s two great predecessors, creating a rich poetic presence where we might have expected only the prompt positing of the simile which the syntax of the first line had promised. And in fact, the second part of the simile is worked through, with further hesitations of subordinate clauses, only from the seventeenth line: Young Fancy thus, to me divinest name, To whom, prepared and bathed in heaven, The cest of amplest pow’r is given, To few the godlike gift assigns To gird their blest prophetic loins, And gaze her visions wild, and feel unmixed her flame! (lines 16–​22)

The simile which overarches the strophe is itself simple: the distinguishing cestus of poetry is likened to the girdle of chastity. Few women, only Spenser’s true Florimel, and Amoret, may wear the girdle of chaste love. Likewise, few poets, only such as Spenser and, by allusive suggestion, Milton, whose “loins” (the word was pronounced “lines”) are both blest and prophetic, are able to wear the cest of visionary poetic power. The simile is complicated however in that neither of its terms is concrete. Florimel’s girdle is a fairy legend. The band of poetry is a product, as we have seen, of Collins’s own act of mythopoesis, set out in the mesode. Further, the immediate apprehension of the simile is deferred by the elaborated prosodic and syntactic structure of the strophe. The comparison is articulated not by direct conjunction, but through an elaborate structure of reference. Allusion has become the enabling means of a various imaginative conceit. The first strophe offers not a simple comparison, but an extended figurative statement of poetic allegiance and aspiration. The question asked at the end of the mesode—​where is the modern bard who might wear the “hallowed work” of Fancy’s band?—​is elaborated in the concluding antistrophe. This time, the poetic voice or spirit summoned up is Milton, alluded to in the first strophe and so already part both of the ode’s cast and of its texture. In the antistrophe Milton is not named for some ten lines, but alluded to at first in Collins’s rapt vision of the oak which is emblematic of his predecessor’s poetry (“Il Penseroso,” lines 59–​60). The oak is found in “an Eden, like his own,” at the top of “some cliff to Heaven up-​piled,” reminiscent of the “craggie cliff ” of Milton’s Paradise (Paradise Lost, book iv, line 546). On one of the oak’s branches is hung Milton’s “ancient trump,” an echo no doubt of the “wakefull trump” of the Nativity Ode (line 156), but suggesting too another instrument poignantly put aside by owners both belated and exiled: … we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows … How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? (Psalms 137:1, 2, 4)

 

Allusion   661 Collins’s ode ends with the poet’s “trembling feet” following in Milton’s footsteps, but: In vain—​such bliss to one alone Of all the sons of soul was known, And Heaven and Fancy, kindred powers, Have now o’erturned the inspiring bowers, Or curtained close such scene from every future view. (lines 72–​6)

The cest of fancy may be worn by few poets; the instrument of Milton’s prophetic verse can never be played again. The poetic bliss given to Milton is irrecoverably lost to his successors, as the bliss of Eden could be known “to one alone.” Collins’s poem ends in an unfortunate poetic fall, imaged by an allusion to the emphatic destruction of the fancied Bower of Bliss—​ “the inspiring bowers”—​at the end of book ii of the Faerie Queene: “But all those pleasant bowres and Palace brave, | Guyon broke downe, with rigour pitilesse” (ii. xii. 83, 1–​2).

Gray In the “Ode on the Poetical Character” allusion articulates reference in complex but exact ways, serving to identify the two poets, Spenser and Milton, to whose models Collins aspires, and by whose poetic and verbal lights he writes. Allusion is used with a characterizing difference by another member of the new experimental lyric school, Thomas Gray. Gray’s poems embody an extraordinary range of allusive method, from highly self-​conscious intentional allusion used with an intensity and precision comparable to Collins, through resonant verbal echo to frank theft and almost unremembering quotation.34 Gray’s “Ode on the Spring,” written in 1742, and first published in 1748,35 written not in Pindaric strophes but in elaborate ten-​line English stanzas, is notable for an extraordinary density of allusion at the level of diction. The ode begins thus: Lo! where the rosy-​bosomed Hours, Fair Venus’ train, appear, Disclose the long-​expecting flowers, And wake the purple year! The Attic warbler pours her throat, Responsive to the cuckoo’s note, The untaught harmony of spring: While whispering pleasure as they fly, Cool zephyrs through the clear blue sky Their gathered fragrance fling.36

34  For an important study of Gray’s uses of allusion, see Robert F. Gleckner, Gray Agonistes: Thomas Gray and Masculine Friendship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997). Gleckner argues in particular that Gray’s allusions are meant to recall their “original contextualization” to the reader, and that they have a semantic function derived from that recollection. 35 In A Collection of Poems in Three Volumes: By Several Hands, 3 vols. (London, 1748), vol. ii, pp. 272–​5. 36  Thomas Gray, “Ode to the Spring,” in The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, pp. 48–​9.

 

662   Marcus Walsh The opening “Lo!” directs our eyes not to a natural scene, but to something like a baroque painting of a mythic subject.37 The stanza is concerned not with the description of a landscape, or credible animals or meteorology, but with a pictorial tableau, made up of pagan goddesses, Greek birds, Greek winds, and a personified English season. The “rosy-​bosom’d Hours” quote Milton: “The Graces, and the rosie-​boosom’d Howres” (Comus, line 986), and appropriately also echo James Thomson’s “rosy-​bosom’d Spring” (“Spring,” line 1010). “Disclose” is a word that had often been poetically used to mean flowering and budding, as by Dryden in his translation of Virgil: “the tender rinds of trees disclose | Their shooting gems” (Georgics, book ii, line 104). The “purple year” is a Latin poetic usage, which had become associated especially with the spring: Virgil writes of “ver purpureum” (Eclogues, book ix, line 40), a phrase translated by Dryden as “the Purple Spring” (book ix, line 52), and repeated less literally by Pope as “the Purple Year” (“Spring,” line 28). The “untaught harmony of spring” echoes Cowley’s “untaught lays” of the birds in the Davideis, “Joyfull, and safe before Mans Luxurie.”38 The “zephyrs … fling” their fragrance, as the west winds in Comus “About the cedarn alleys fling | Nard, and cassia’s balmy smells” (lines 989–​90). Gray here uses allusion to define his heritage altogether more widely and more generally than Collins would do in his “Ode on the Poetical Character.” Gray’s writing aligns itself with a more extensive tradition, from Virgil through Milton and Pope, creating a broad richness of effect, aestheticizing and self-​indulgent. That effect is deliberate, allowing Gray a method of nuanced self-​ironizing. In the next three stanzas the first-​person poet goes on to strike a familiar pose, reclined with the muse “in rustic state”; observes the “busy murmur” of “the insect youth”; and concludes his philosophizing through the personified dignity of “Contemplation’s sober eye,” which muses on the transience of man’s “airy dance.” Yet the poem does not end here, and the poet does not have the last word. The insect youth are given a surprising right of reply: Methinks I hear in accents low The sportive kind reply: Poor moralist! and what art thou? A solitary fly! Thy joys no glittering female meets, No hive hast thou of hoarded sweets, No painted plumage to display: On hasty wings thy youth is flown; Thy sun is set, thy spring is gone —​—​—​ We frolic, while ’tis May. (lines 41–​50)

Comfortable, self-​approving, and traditional moralizing has found an answer. Yet even in this concluding stanza the poem’s poeticizing tendencies—​personification, periphrasis, and thinner but persistent borrowing of poetic diction (“painted plumage,” “thy sun is set”)—​ persist. The poet’s accents and idioms are still audible. Allusion, here in the form of echoing

37  Jean Hagstrum has suggested that James Thomson’s depiction of the coming of the dawn in “Summer” (1744), lines 113–​29, is influenced by Guido Reni’s fresco “Aurora,” and suggests that William Collins’s “Ode to Evening” is pictorial in a similar way: see The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 260, 278. 38  Abraham Cowley, Davideis, book i, in Poems (London, 1656), p. 20 of the separately paginated text.

 

Allusion   663 diction, is one of the means by which the lonely, academic, ascetic, and homosexual Gray can depersonalize himself to the point where he can still be present in these lines, and express himself with a paradoxical and plangent directness. Another and more curious aspect of Gray’s allusive method may be found in this ode, revealing part of the process by which he made his poetry. The third stanza sets out a major theme of the poem, the symbolizing by the insect youth of the transience of human existence: Alike the busy and the gay But flutter through life’s little day, In fortune’s varying colours dressed: Brushed by the hand of rough Mischance, Or chilled by age, their airy dance They leave, in dust to rest. (lines 35–​40)

The first line of the stanza (“To Contemplation’s sober eye”) is keyed, in the reprinting of the poem in Poems by Mr Gray (1768), to a footnote which quotes the opening of a passage from Matthew Green’s Grotto: “While insects from the threshold preach, &c.” The extended passage in Green bears a marked thematic though not verbal likeness to Gray’s stanza. In a letter to Walpole of January or February 1748, Gray quotes in extenso from Green’s poem, and confesses to something like larceny: The thought on which my [“Ode on the Spring”] turns is manifestly stole from hence:—​not that I knew it at the time, but having seen this many years before, to be sure it imprinted itself on my Memory, & forgetting the Author, I took it for my own.39

Gray’s mind was teemingly and actively populated with words and lines from his predecessors, and his act of creation becomes in such moments almost continuous with theirs. Gray’s consciousness of the intentional and semantically directed aspects of allusion is nowhere more evident than in his “Sister Odes,” “The Bard,” and “The Progress of Poesy,” published together in Odes by Mr Gray (1757). These two high Pindaric odes were presented, on their first publication, as for a select and informed audience. The title page bears, immediately below the title, and in uppercase Greek, an epigraph from Pindar’s Olympian Odes (ii. 85), which Gray himself translated, in a letter of 1763, as “vocal to the intelligent alone.”40 The two odes were unattended by notes in 1757, but many readers found them obscure, and for their publication in Poems by Mr. Gray their author provided a running commentary, acceding to the bafflement or ignorance of some readers in an advertisement of scholarly gracelessness: “When the Author first published this and the following Ode, he was advised, even by his Friends, to subjoin some few explanatory Notes; but had too much respect for the understanding of his Readers to take that liberty.”41 The “Progress of Poesy” in particular is concerned, as Collins’s “Ode on the Poetical Character” had been, with poetic descent and inheritance. It selects its audience in substantial part through its use of learned allusion to Pindar and other classical poets, and to the

39  Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, with corrections and additions by H. W. Starr, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), vol. i, pp. 299–​300. Gray quotes lines 19–​76; the passage of Green that he particularly refers to is lines 55–​76. 40  Correspondence, vol. ii, p. 797. 41  The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, p. 158.

 

664   Marcus Walsh English pantheon of Dryden, Shakespeare, and Milton. A number of Gray’s added footnotes clarify how allusion articulates the poem’s account of the transit of the civilizing power of poetry from ancient Greece to England. The poem begins with an identifying apostrophe: “Awake, Aeolian lyre, awake.”42 The 1768 footnote identifies the line as a reference, not (as the Critical reviewer had thought43) to the harp of Aeolus, but to the Pindaric as one of the modes of Greek lyric: “Pindar styles his own poetry with its musical accompanyments, Αἰοληὶς μολπή, Αἰόλιδες χορδαί, Αἰολίδων πνοαὶ αὐλῶν Aeolian song, Aeolian strings, the breath of the Aeolian flute” (Poems, p. 161 n). It points out also an allusion to a defining line of David’s psalms: “Awake, my glory: awake, lute and harp”;44 so Gray states at the outset a vaunting poetic aspiration to the condition of the highest forms of both Hebraic and Greek high lyric. Pindar is nowhere named in the first triad of the ode, but Gray’s editorial commentary alerts the less-​knowing reader to Pindar’s presence. A note to the first line of the antistrophe informs us that its subject will be the “Power of harmony to calm the turbulent sallies of the soul” and acknowledges that “the thoughts are borrowed from the first Pythian of Pindar” (p. 163 n); a note to the last four lines of the antistrophe specifies that “This is a weak imitation of some incomparable lines in the same Ode” (p. 164 n). The strophe and antistrophe of the third ternary take Shakespeare and Milton as their subjects, identified not by name (until terse footnotes in 1768), but allusively. Shakespeare is described, in terms familiar from much eighteenth-​century criticism, as “Nature’s darling,” and associated with “lucid Avon” (lines 84–​5). Milton is characterized in one of allusion’s most intellectually demanding forms, requiring the reader not merely to recognize a source line, but to recall, for full semantic effect, its context: Nor second he, that rode sublime Upon the seraph-​wings of Ecstasy, The secrets of the abyss to spy. He passed the flaming bounds of place and time: The living throne, the sapphire-​blaze, Where angels tremble while they gaze, He saw … (lines 95–​101)

Gray’s 1768 commentary provides, for the fourth line of this passage, a laconic citation of a Latin phrase: “—​flammantia moenia mundi.” Lucretius.

Fully to understand Gray’s elliptical figuring of Milton as intellectual and creative adventurer, the reader must either remember, or locate and read, the extended context of the Latin phrase in its textual source, Lucretius’s celebration of Epicurus: Therefore the lively power of his mind prevailed, and forth he marched far beyond the flaming walls of the world, as he traversed the immeasurable universe in thought and imagination.45 42 

Gray, “The Progress of Poesy,” line 1 in The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, p. 161. 43  Critical Review, 4 (1757), 167. 44  The version of the line in Gray’s Commonplace Book had read “Awake, my Lyre, my Glory, wake,” which more closely resembles the biblical original: “Awake, my glory; awake, lute and harp” (Psalms 57:9). 45  “Ergo vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra | processit longe flammantia moenia mundi” (De rerum natura, i. 72–​3).

 

Allusion   665 The “living throne, the sapphire-​blaze” would surely have been more readily understood by the eighteenth-​century reader as a reference to the sapphire throne described by the prophet Ezekiel, in verses quoted at length by Gray in the 1768 commentary: For the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels—​And above the firmament, that was over their heads, was the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a saphire-​stone.—​This was the appearance of the glory of the Lord. Ezekiel i. 20, 26, 28.

Perhaps less obvious, and unnoted in Gray’s commentary, is the allusion to Christ’s decisive entry into the battle in heaven in Milton’s epic: He on the wings of cherub rode sublime On the crystalline sky, in sapphire throned. (Paradise Lost, book vi, lines 771–​2)

The allusion, and recognition of the allusion, are vital to our understanding of the character that Gray constructs of Milton as divine, sublime, and transgressive poet. Here as regularly in The Progress of Poesy, allusion articulates argument. This later poem also makes pervasive use, as the Ode on the Spring had done, of echo, of allusion at the level of diction, situating the poem more generally within an extensive poetic tradition. In the opening strophe of The Progress, for instance, the “rich stream” of poetry pours Headlong, impetuous … The rocks and nodding groves rebellow to the roar. (lines 11–​12)

Roger Lonsdale shows that “Most such descriptions contain ‘headlong’ and/​or ‘impetuous,’ as well as echoing rocks” (p. 163 n), proving the point from James Thomson. Lonsdale finds occurrences of “rebellow” in Spenser, and in the epic translations of Dryden and Pope.46 Such echoes are not mere memory, but appropriate evocations to an informed ear of earlier English poets, and (in the case of the recollections of Pope and Dryden) of the ancient heroic poets, Virgil and Homer, whose work they translate. They form part of the essential texture and ethos of the poem, and require recognition, and hence commentary. Gray’s richly freighted memory, however, while continually loading the rifts of his poem with poetic ore, is not always safely conscious of connotation. We are told that to Shakespeare “the mighty Mother did unveil | Her awful face.” The “mighty Mother” is Cybele, magna mater, goddess of nature, and hence the appropriate protector of England’s poet of natural genius. Gray intended echoes no doubt of Dryden’s translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “This Earth our Mighty Mother is” (book i, line 528); and of Virgil’s Georgics: “celebrate the mighty Mother’s day” (book i, line 466). The problem for Gray is that Alexander Pope had anticipated him, using the allusion for satiric purposes in the Dunciad, whose four-​book version (1743) begins with the poet’s mock-​heroic statement of the subjects of his verse, the goddess Dulness and her rather different protégé, Colley Cibber: The Mighty Mother, and her Son who brings The Smithfield Muses to the ear of Kings, I sing… . (The Dunciad [B]‌, book i, lines 1–​3)

46  Thomson, “Spring,” line 817; “Summer,” lines 590–​3, 596, in James Thomson, The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 40, 88; Spenser, Faerie Queene, i. viii. 11, 4; iv. x. 46, 4; v. xii. 41, 6; Dryden, Aeneid, book v, lines 1127–​8; Pope, Iliad, book xvii, line 315.

 

666   Marcus Walsh The echo in Gray’s phrase of Pope’s memorable opening brings into play precisely the least helpful analogy, and is as obvious to a modern reader as it was to Gray’s contemporaries and immediate successors. Gilbert Wakefield, editor of The Poems of Mr. Gray (1786), lamented that “Wicked memory brings into the mind the Queen of the Dunces, and destroys all the pleasure of the description by an unlucky contrast” (p. 88). This is a diagnostic case; had Gray recalled Pope’s use of the expression, and its context, he would surely have avoided the association. Similarly, had Gray recalled that it is Satan who, in Paradise Lost, boasts of having first undertaken “To wing the desolate abyss, and spy | This new created world” (book iv, lines 936–​7), he might have phrased differently his line that states the purpose of Milton’s seraphic flight: “the secrets of the abyss to spy.” Gray vividly and vitally remembers poetic words and phrases, and his poetry is perfused with their richness and implication. Occasionally, however, he is less exactly conscious of the informing contexts of his allusive sources and connotation is hence not fully controlled. Collins and Gray chose the high lyric as a favorite genre to some extent as a deliberate reaction to the satiric and moral verse of Pope their great predecessor. Within the high lyric they sought and developed for themselves new forms and new modes of expression. For all these poets, however, including Pope, allusion was both a fundamental and an enabling poetic resource. It allowed them to define and negotiate their different poetic inheritances, models, and allegiances. It invested their writing with intellectual and cultural content. It constituted a powerful figurative resource for suggestive and imaginative expression, offering in both the compressed space of metaphor and pun, and in the larger frame of the conceit, ways of articulating meaning and argument. Allusion offers, because of its teasing and selective difficulty, enriching possibilities of conversation with an engaged audience; it demands interpretation and, in some of its most powerful manifestations, provides its own reciprocal commentary. If poetic allusion challenges its contemporary and later readers, it does so precisely because of its creative affirmation of the cultural present’s continuity with the cultural past.

References Ehrenpreis, Irvin, Literary Meaning and Augustan Values (Charlottesville:  Univ. Press of Virginia, 1974). Folkenflik, Robert, “‘Homo Alludens’ in the Eighteenth Century,” Criticism, 24 (1982), 218–​32. Hollander, John, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981). Hughes, Peter, “Allusion and Expression in Eighteenth-​Century Literature,” in Louis L. Martz and Aubrey Williams (eds.), The Author in His Work (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 297–317. Jauss, Hans Robert, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Brighton: Harvester, 1982). Leddy, Michael, “Limits of Allusion,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 32 (1992), 110–​22. Mack, Maynard, “‘Wit and Poetry and Pope’: Some Observations on His Imagery,” in James L. Clifford (ed.), Eighteenth-​ Century English Literature:  Modern Essays in Criticism (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 21–​41.

 

Allusion   667 Richards, I. A., Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960). Ricks, Christopher, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002). Steiner, George, “On Difficulty,” in On Difficulty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 18–47. Walsh, Marcus, “‘Community of Mind’: Smart and the Poetics of Allusion,” in Clement Hawes (ed.), Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 29–​46.

 

Chapter 39

Irony Jack Lynch Isn’t it ironic?—​that the age that gave us “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” Peri Bathous, the Dunciad, a “Conclusion in Which Nothing Is Concluded,” and “a truth universally acknowledged” should be so unsophisticated when it discussed irony? To be fair, every age has had difficulty discussing irony; it is a difficult subject to discuss. There are at least two good reasons for the bafflement: many concepts are clustered around the word, and many words are clustered around the concept. Banter, burlesque, gibing, humor, invective, jeering, lampoon, mockery, parody, raillery, ridicule, sarcasm, satire, scoffing, wit: all are closely linked to irony, and often difficult to disentangle.1 “For both its devotees and for those who fear it,” Wayne C. Booth writes, “irony is usually seen as something that undermines clarities, opens up vistas of chaos, and either liberates by destroying all dogma or destroys by revealing the inescapable canker of negation at the heart of every affirmation. It is thus a subject that quickly arouses passions.”2

Black is White British writers between 1600 and 1800 had a sound understanding of irony; their works reveal it. For all their demonstrated mastery in practice, though, their theory of irony was still crude, and they struggled to explain what the word meant. Early dictionaries are of little help. The first monolingual English dictionary, Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall (1604), reads only, “ironie, (g) a mocking speech.”3 True, much irony is mocking—​but not all, and not all mockery is ironic. Henry Cockeram’s English Dictionarie (1623) is hardly more useful: “Ironie. Speaking by contraries, saying blacke is white.” Cockeram identifies one essential characteristic of irony, the gap between what is 1  See Norman Knox, The Word Irony and Its Context, 1500–​1755 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 220–​1. 2  Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974), p. ix. 3  Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabeticall, Conteyning and Teaching the True VVriting, and Vnderstanding of Hard Vsuall English Wordes, Borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French. &c. (London, 1604). The “g” indicates a Greek origin.

 

Irony   669 said and what is meant, but his definition does nothing to distinguish it from other varieties of misrepresentation: innocent misstatement, exaggeration, outright lie, and so on. Things are somewhat better in Thomas Blount’s Glossographia (1656): “Ironie (ironia) a figure in speaking, when one means contrary to the significations of the word, or when a man reasoneth contrary to what he thinks, to mock him, whom he argues with; a mocking or scoffing.” Blount identifies irony as a rhetorical figure; he identifies the disparity between what is expressed and what is believed; and he recognizes one of its most common uses, to mock or scoff at an opponent. Edward Phillips’s New World of Words (1658) is significantly better: “Ironical, (Greek) spoken in mockery, or by that Rhetorical figure called Irony, which is a speaking contrary to what a Man means by way of bitter gibing or scoffing, as, He was no notorious Malefactor, but he had been twice on the Pillory. This figure is by Ruffianus called by a Latin name Irrisio or Dissimulatio.” This may be the most accurate and comprehensive definition from the period. It identifies irony as a rhetorical figure; it points out the gap between what is said and what is meant, while indicating its role in ridicule; it includes a (not bad) example; and it likens English irony to two classical rhetorical figures. No English lexicographer before the nineteenth century does better: Elisha Coles, for instance, in An English Dictionary (1676) reads just “Ironie, g. a speaking by contraries or mockingly”; John Kersey’s New English Dictionary (1702) defines it as “An Irony, a figure of Rhetorick, when one speaks contrary to what he means, with a design to mock another”; and Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) makes up for a half-​hearted definition—​“A mode of speech in which the meaning is contrary to the words”—​only with a wicked, illustrative twist: “as, Bolingbroke was a holy man.”4 Rhetoricians were better at expressing the intricacies of irony than the lexicographers. As Richard Spencer put it in 1704, “Ironia Irony, is, when our Meaning is contrary to our Words. This Trope is perceiv’d and understood, by either the Tone of the Voice, or the manifest Disagreement of the Quality of the thing, or Person of which we speak, or by Both. And ’tis generally made use of to Rally, Banter, Jest upon and Ridicule; or, by sly Cavils and close Objections, to expose what we seem to admire.”5 Thomas Gibbons has a comparably precise definition in his Rhetoric (1767): “An Irony is a Trope, in which one contrary is signified by another; or, in which we speak one thing, and design another, in order to give the greater force and vehemence to our meaning,” followed by a fairly sophisticated discussion of “The way of distinguishing an Irony from the real sentiments of the speaker or writer.”6 Still, even the rhetoricians do little to identify the most important qualities of irony or to describe how it functions. Eighteenth-​century writers were bad at describing what irony meant to them, but it is possible to generalize about what they had in mind when they wrote about it. As Norman Knox points out in his thorough account of the word’s meanings through 1755, “By far the most frequently used meaning of irony was, during the English classical period as during the preceding eighteen or nineteen centuries, ‘censure through counterfeited praise’ ” (The Word Irony,

4 

Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (London, 1755), s.v. irony. Richard Spencer of Cobham, Suada Anglicana; or, A Short View of Rhetoric: For the Use of Schools (London, 1704), pp. 6–​7. 6  Thomas Gibbons, Rhetoric; or, A View of Its Principal Tropes and Figures, in Their Origin and Powers (London, 1767), p. 77. 5 

 

670   Jack Lynch p. 12). Knox estimates that, over the course of the long eighteenth century, two out of every three occurrences of the word had this meaning. Censure through counterfeited praise can certainly be found in abundance in the poetry of the period. It was one of the satirist’s favorite tactics, as in this passage from the Dunciad: As Berecynthia, while her offspring vye In homage to the Mother of the sky, Surveys around her, in the blest abode, An hundred sons, and ev’ry son a God: Not with less glory mighty Dulness crown’d, Shall take thro’ Grub-​street her triumphant round; And her Parnassus glancing o’er at once, Behold an hundred sons, and each a dunce.7

Words from the heroic repertoire—​great, mighty, glorious, tremendous, wonder, amaze—​ abound, as do the familiar vocabularies of pastoral (tuneful, sweet) and hymnody (bless’d abode), along with the rhetoric of the sublime and the political panegyric. And yet all of these are repurposed in the Dunciad: these hundred sons are no heroes, Grub Street no locus amoenus. Alexander Pope, pretending to praise, actually censures the dunces—​such is the characteristic ironic mode of the mock-​heroic. Over the course of the century the word irony picked up another sense, the mirror image of the first: not “censure through counterfeited praise,” but “praise through counterfeited blame” (Knox, p. 12). This variety is less widespread, but still easy enough to find. Jonathan Swift is the master here, as when he engages in playful ironic tributes to his friends, confessing to jealousy at their capability: Why must I be outdone by Gay, In my own hum’rous biting Way? Arbuthnot is no more my Friend, Who dares to Irony pretend; Which I was born to introduce, Refin’d it first, and shew’d its Use.8

Writing in 1926, F. McD. C. Turner reads Swift’s ironic declaration about his mastery of irony entirely unironically: “We believe the poet’s estimate of himself … to be very fair and just.”9 Most readers, though, recognize Swift is being typically playful here, and his apparent griping is in fact an affectionate tribute. These meanings—​censure through counterfeited praise and praise through counterfeited censure—​account for nearly all the English uses of the word irony in the long eighteenth century. Other varieties of irony can occasionally be recognized in eighteenth-​century literature, but they almost never went by that name. The term dramatic irony, for example, appeared in English only in 1881,10 though the phenomenon predates the term: Dr. Primrose’s 7 Pope, The Dunciad (B), book iii, lines 131–​8, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander

Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–​69), vol. v, p. 326. 8  Swift, “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift,” lines 53–​8, in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), vol. ii, p. 555. 9  F. McD. C. Turner, The Element of Irony in English Literature: An Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1926), p. 30. 10  See Knox, The Word Irony, pp. 16–​17, 22, 186.

 

Irony   671 naive oblivion about the true state of the world around him in Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield is a good example in prose, and Robert Burns’s “Tam O’Shanter” a good example in verse. Situational irony, too, was never called irony in the eighteenth century. Again, examples are easier to find in sentimental fiction than in verse, though it informs the nostalgia of Goldsmith’s Deserted Village and the Ossianic poems. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries romantic irony, Kierkegaardian irony, and cosmic irony were added to the critical vocabulary, and irony became what Booth calls “a grand Hegelian concept, with its own essence and necessities; or a synonym for romanticism; or even an essential attribute of God” (Rhetoric of Irony, p. ix). By the 1960s there were two very different discourses of irony, and the one that inspired so much excitement among modernist and postmodernist critics is not to be found in our period. The gap between the eighteenth-​and twentieth-​century conceptions of irony shows up even in the tables of contents of important late twentieth-​century works. Ernst Behler starts his Irony and the Discourse of Modernity (1990) with the ancient Greeks and Romans, but then tunes out for a millennium and a half before picking up the thread again with Schlegel, skipping the long eighteenth century entirely.11 Joseph A. Dane’s Critical Mythology of Irony (1991) similarly opens with Socrates and even ventures into the Middle Ages, but then vaults over the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries before plunging directly into Romantic irony.12 If arguments like this mean anything at all, then Behler and Dane must understand by irony something different from what those who have spent their careers reading Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Austen understand.

Irony and Poetic Genres Examples of verbal irony can be found in poetry throughout the whole period from 1660 to 1800, from Andrew Marvell through William Blake, and across the entire range from the most sophisticated “literary” work (“When man, on many, multiply’d his kind, | E’r one to one was, cursedly, confind”) to the lowest popular ballad (“For, by my faith and loyalty, | I never more will faulter, | And George my lawful King shall be, | Until the times shall alter”).13 Not all poetic schools, styles, or dispositions, though, made the same use of it. Irony, for example, was much cultivated by political writers but comparatively neglected by Thomas Gray, William Collins, and William Cowper. Instances are plentiful in mock-​heroic but sparse in lyric and sentimental poetry. There is little irony in the meditative tradition running from Anne Finch, through James Thomson, Robert Blair, and Edward Young, to William Cowper and George Crabbe, and the coterie poetry of Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn rarely indulges in irony (though these same writers are sometimes ironic in their other works). While there are ironic adaptations and appropriations of the forms of the ode and 11 

Ernst Behler, Irony and the Discourse of Modernity (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1990). Joseph A. Dane, The Critical Mythology of Irony (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1991). 13  Absalom and Achitophel, lines 3–​4, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1956–​2000), vol. ii, p. 5; “The Vicar of Bray,” in The Charmer: A Choice Collection of Songs, Scots and English (Edinburgh, 1752), p. 111. 12 

 

672   Jack Lynch the elegy (William Mason’s parodic odes, for example, and Swift’s “Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General”), nary a word of a true ode or elegy is likely to be ironic.14 Devotional poetry rarely resorts to irony; few writers other than Swift have the nerve to introduce sarcasm into discussions of religion. Most have also taken it for granted that there is little irony in children’s verse; as Booth writes, “To use complicated ironies on children is sadistic because even the brightest child lacks the experience … that would enable him to interpret irony” (Rhetoric of Irony, p. 227). Since irony was generally understood at the time as censure through counterfeit praise, it is only natural that it should be found in greatest abundance in the literary kind devoted to censure. Satire is so intimately connected to irony that the two have often been regarded as synonymous. Satirical attacks often assume the form of ironic celebration, whether directed at libidinous monarchs (“Peace was his Aime, his gentleness is such | And Love, he lov’d, For he lov’d Fucking much”), corrupt ministers (“The British Genius is infus’d | In Walpole’s Breast, too wise to be amus’d. | A noble Ardour fills his gen’rous Soul”), overrated poets (“Now Empress Fame had publisht the renown, | Of Sh —​— ​’s Coronation through the Town”), the debased literary marketplace (“Proceed, great days! ’till Learning fly the shore”), vulgar drunkenness (“Gin was the real Soul of Mars: | ’Twas Gin that prop’d his Throne”), even personal foibles (“At length, rush’d forth, two Candidates for fame, | A Scotchman, one; and one a London Dame: | That, by th’ emphatic Johnson, christ’ned Bozzy; | This, by the Bishop’s Licence, Dame Piozzi”).15 It is sometimes asserted that political satirists depended on ironic misdirection when they attacked the powerful: “To the degree that the law discouraged direct criticism of the government and public officials but was lenient with indirection and suggestion,” C. R. Kropf argues, “it did much to encourage satire which thrives on oblique attack.”16 The evidence, though, is unclear. Satirists in the long eighteenth century certainly operated in a more repressive legal climate than most modern satirists, at least in the West. Prosecution for attacks on the monarch or the government could, and did, follow publication; irony, some have suggested, is a way of disavowing sedition. It is possible that irony was sometimes deployed this way; perhaps some poet resorted to ironic panegyric of the king or prime minister, expecting to be able to use that as a defense should he face charges. The surviving evidence, though, suggests this was unlikely to be a successful defense strategy. The lord chamberlain, authorized by the Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737 to reject offensive plays, approved few ironic “celebrations” of George II or the Walpole administration; the censors saw through the irony and recognized it as an attack. There is no reason to assume official readers of verse were any less proficient than official readers of plays. If the widely circulated story is to be believed, Charles 14  “The Comic Elegy and the Satirical Elegy,” writes John Cann Bailey, “have no more to do with that form of poetry called Elegy than a comic history has with that form of prose called History”: J. C. Bailey (ed.), English Elegies (London: Bodley Head, 1900), p. xli. See, however, c­ hapter 31 in this volume, “Elegy.” 15  Rochester, “[In the Isle of Britain,]” lines 8–​9, in The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Harold Love (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), p. 85; A Congratulatory Poem: Humbly Inscribed to the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole (London, 1739), p. 5; Dryden, Mac Flecknoe, lines 94–​5, in Works, vol. ii, p. 56; The Dunciad (B), book iii, line 333, in Poems, vol. v, p. 336; Desolation; or, The Fall of Gin: A Poem (London, 1736), p. 6; “Peter Pindar” [i.e., John Wolcot], Bozzy and Piozzi; or, The British Biographers: A Town Eclogue (London, 1786), pp. 6–​7. 16  C. R. Kropf, “Libel and Satire in the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 8, no. 2 (Winter 1974–​5), 153–​68, at p. 168.

 

Irony   673 II dismissed the superficial panegyric of Rochester’s “In the Isle of Britain” and punished the raunchy poet nonetheless. The feigned celebration—​“Not long since Reign’d (oh may he long survive) | The easiest King and best bred Man alive” (lines 3–​4)—​did nothing to protect Rochester from banishment. Whatever the reason for its use, though, verbal irony features prominently in many political satires—​it is front and center in Absalom and Achitophel, for example—​but not all, and in some satires it hardly figures at all. Swift’s “Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General,” for instance, features moments of passing irony, and the very fact of addressing an elegy to a despised figure reveals a gap between stated and intended meaning. The poem as a whole, though, is a straightforward lampoon, blaming not by counterfeited praise but by good old-​fashioned blame: “This world he cumber’d long enough.”17 Early in the nineteenth century, Percy Bysshe Shelley was even more direct: An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King; Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn,—​mud from a muddy spring; Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know, But leechlike to their fainting country cling Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.18

There is no irony here, no misdirection, merely vituperation. Still, satirical poems on public matters seem to have been especially welcoming of irony. And perhaps because fewer women wrote poems on affairs of state, we find more men than women among the eighteenth-​century masters of irony. Even so, there are enough counterexamples to render this nothing more than a rough generalization: Anna Letitia Barbauld’s “Rights of Woman” (1792), an anti-​Wollstonecraft squib, sarcastically adopts the voice of a man-​hating virago: Try all that wit and art suggest to bend Of thy imperial foe the stubborn knee; Make treacherous Man thy subject, not thy friend; Thou mayst command, but never canst be free.19

Barbauld is similarly effective in her “Epistle to William Wilberforce” (1791), an abolitionist poem that opens by advising the abolitionist movement to give up. Women, too, sometimes introduced irony into less public contexts, as with Mary Barber’s ironic ventriloquizing of her young and naive child, directing his frustration at her, in “Written for My Son, and Spoken by Him at His First Putting On Breeches” (1731): What is it our Mammas bewitches, To plague us little Boys with Breeches? To Tyrant Custom we must yield, Whilst vanquish’d Reason flies the Field.20 17 

Jonathan Swift, “A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General,” line 13, in Poems, vol. i, p. 296. 18  Percy Bysshe Shelley, “England in 1819,” lines 1–​6, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), p. 326. 19  Anna Letitia Barbauld, “The Rights of Woman,” lines 17–​20, in The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Craft (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1994), p. 121. 20  Mary Barber, Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1734), p. 13.

 

674   Jack Lynch

Formal Clues “We comprehend the sense of an Irony,” writes Pierre Ortigue de Vaumorière in The Art of Pleasing in Conversation (1708), “… by a tone of Pronunciation which discovers that we are not in earnest.”21 This invocation of “pronunciation” shows the degree to which irony was conceived as an oral phenomenon. Phrases like “ironical tone of voice” show up in fiction and nonfiction, in poetry and prose and drama. Frances Burney, for instance, writes in Evelina, “The ironical tone of voice in which Sir Clement spoke, entirely disconcerted Mr. Smith”; elsewhere in the novel, “in a drawling, ironical tone of voice, [the prostitutes] asked what had frightened my little Ladyship?”22 “In an ironical tone” features as a common stage direction in the period, suggesting that eighteenth-​ century critics took it for granted that irony could be detected by those who paid attention to intonation.23 Usually we get no information on what this “ironical tone” sounded like, though a few critics are expansive on how they imagine irony sounds. In his analysis of Paradise Lost, book vi, lines 609–​21, John Walker notes that Satan’s “string of puns, and those very bad ones too … affords an excellent opportunity of practicing the pronunciation of irony.” There follows a reading of the lines “into strange vagaries fell | As they would dance; yet for a dance they seem’d | Somewhat extravagant and wild: perhaps | For joy of offer’d peace”: It must begin by an affected surprize, and proceed with a seriousness and seeming sincerity till the seventh line [“As they would dance …”], when the word for is to have an emphasis with the rising inflexion, and to be pronounced with an air of uncertainty whether it were a dance or not. A sneer commences at perhaps, which must be pronounced with a sly arch tone, as if perfectly secure of the consequences of another onset.24

A recognition of how many oral qualities are lost in writing prompted Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist, to propose a typographical substitute for the spoken inflection in 1982: A good many of the posts were humorous (or attempted humor). The problem was that if someone made a sarcastic remark, a few readers would fail to get the joke, and each of them would post a lengthy diatribe in response… . This problem caused some of us to suggest (only half seriously) that maybe it would be a good idea to explicitly mark posts that were not to be taken seriously. After all, when using text-​based online communication, we lack the body language or tone-​of-​voice cues that convey this information when we talk in person or on the phone. Various “joke markers” were suggested, and in the midst of that discussion it occurred to me that the character sequence :-​) would be an elegant solution.25

21 

Pierre Ortigue de Vaumorière, The Art of Pleasing in Conversation: Written by the Famous Cardinal Richelieu: Translated out of French (London, 1708), p. 53. 22  Frances Burney, Evelina, ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 203, 233. 23  See, e.g., Jean Racine, The Victim; or, Achilles and Iphigenia in Aulis: A Tragedy, trans. Abel Boyer (London, 1714), p. 18; and Mr. Sandford, The Female Fop; or, The False One Fitted: A Comedy (London, 1724), p. 28. 24  John Walker, A Rhetorical Grammar, or Course of Lessons in Elocution (London, 1787), p. 143. 25  “Smiley Lore :-​),” https://​www.cs.cmu.edu/​smiley/​history.html.

 

Irony   675 The smiley, the progenitor of the whole family of emoticons, seems a quintessentially modern phenomenon, but Fahlman was hardly the first to propose such marks. In 1668, John Wilkins noted that Irony is for the distinction of the meaning and intention of any words, when they are to be understood by way of Sarcasm or scoff, or in a contrary sense to that which they naturally signifie: And though there be not (for ought I know) any note designed for this in any of the Instituted Languages, yet that is from their deficiency and imperfection: For if the chief force of Ironies do consist in Pronunciation, it will plainly follow, that there ought to be some mark for direction, when things are to be so pronounced.26

Wilkins’s new “philosophical language” therefore sought to capture that aspect of orality in print: The manner of pronouncing words doth sometimes give them a different sense and meaning, and Writing being the Picture or Image of Speech, ought to be adapted unto all the material circumstances of it, and consequently must have some marks to denote these various manners of Pronunciation. (p. 355)

Nearly a century after Wilkins, Edward Capell proposed a different typographical solution to the same problem. His Prolusions (1760) runs riot with eccentric typography. A dash set low indicates a new speaker, while another set high indicates a continuation. Two varieties of dagger have different functions: an obelus with one bar indicates something is being pointed to, while one with two bars indicates something is being handed over.27 Most important for us, though, is the elevated dot: In the first place, there seem’d to be much want of a particular note of punctuation to distinguish irony; which is often so delicately couch’d as to escape the notice even of the attentive reader, and betray him into error: such a note is therefore introduc’d; being a point ranging with the top of the letter, as the full stop is a point ranging with the bottom.28

In practice Capell hardly ever used his raised dot. In his edition of Antony and Cleopatra (1758) it appears only once, and it is nowhere in his Hamlet. Peter Holland points out how odd this is: “Shakespeare is the most ironic of all playwrights … Capell’s refusal to use it more widely is astonishing.”29 Still, even though Wilkins and Capell may have been hesitant to use their typographical innovations, they were clearly thinking about the difficulties of capturing oral intonations in lead type.

26  John Wilkins, An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (London, 1668), p. 356. 27  See Bernice W. Kliman, “Explicit Stage Directions (Especially Graphics) in Hamlet,” in Hardin L. Aasand (ed.), Stage Directions in “Hamlet”: New Essays and New Directions (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2003), p. 81; and Marcus Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton and Eighteenth-​Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 124–​5. 28  Edward Capell, Prolusions; or, Select Pieces of Antient Poetry (London, 1760), p. v. 29  Peter Holland, “Editing for Performance: Dr Johnson and the Stage,” Ilha do Desterro, 49 (2005), 75–​98, at p. 81.

 

676   Jack Lynch Poets, obliged to communicate in type, have sought written substitutes for these oral indicators. It would be impossible to enumerate all the signs a poet might give readers to signal ironic intentions. The most common is a seemingly inappropriate coupling of form and matter: a trivial matter treated in elevated language (John Gay’s Trivia is a famous example) or a serious matter treated in pedestrian language (Samuel Butler’s Hudibras is the most famous) is probably meant to be interpreted contrary to its literal sense. We are sometimes tipped off by a subjective impression of the degree of admiration a topic deserves: if the praise seems immoderate, we can hypothesize that it is not really praise but criticism; if the vituperation seems immoderate, we can hypothesize that it is actually celebration. This depends, though, on a carefully calibrated notion of exactly how much praise or vituperation is acceptable. When an anonymous poet seems to praise Aphra Behn—​“Witness her Golden Age, so fam’d a Piece, | It has at once out done both Rome and Greece”30—​the commendation seems out of proportion, and so we assume Behn has not in fact outdone all the achievements of classical poetry. Some strictly formal features also tip us off. When poets discuss or even deploy irony in verse, triple meters—​dactyls, amphibrachs, anapests—​are common. “Anthony Pasquin” (i.e., John Williams) is typical in The Children of Thespis (1786): When he bellows in Hawthorn, or Sternhold, or Giles, Sweet Poetry shudders, and Irony smiles; Then all murd’rous he foams, like John Kemble in Lear, Or a Goth hacking Wit with his Scythian spear.31

Pasquin is at it again in “Another Serious Epistle from Carlton House to the Pavilion at Brighton”: Your ironical Ode, the loose fancy combin’d, As a novel, amuses the overstrain’d mind: Though varlets, like tendrils, impressively free, Clung around his fair trunk, they’ve not injur’d the tree; Then let not Hypocrisy sneer so malign, Or draw forth her snakes—​the auspicium’s benign: No envy, no meanness could cleave to his will, And his soul ever scorn’d adaptation to ill.32

Not all triple meters are employed ironically, but the proportion is high. The same can be said of iambic tetrameters. Butler was the pioneer of octosyllabic verse, Swift the eighteenth-​ century master, and Charles Churchill the late-​century champion. Ironic intentions are also sometimes signaled in verse by double, even triple, rhymes. This, too, was one of Butler’s favorite techniques in 1663: In Mathematicks he was greater Than Tycho Brahe or Erra Pater

30 

“The Female Laureat,” in Poems on Affairs of State, from the Reign of K. James the First, to This Present Year 1703: Written by the Greatest Wits of the Age, 2 vols. (London, 1703), vol. ii, p. 146. 31  Anthony Pasquin, The Children of Thespis: A Poem, part 3, lines 447–​50, in Poems, 2 vols. (London, 1789), vol. ii, p. 204. 32  Pasquin, “Another Serious Epistle from Carlton House to the Pavilion at Brighton,” lines 1–​7, in The New Brighton Guide; or, Companion for Young Ladies and Gentlemen to All the Watering-​Places in Great Britain (London, 1796), p. 41.

 

Irony   677 .………………………………………. Beside he was a shrewd Philosopher, And had read every Text and gloss over.33

This was still the case a century and a half later when Byron published the opening cantos of Don Juan: His classic studies made a little puzzle, Because of filthy loves of gods and goddesses, Who in the earlier ages made a bustle, But never put on pantaloons and boddices; His reverend tutors had at times a tussle, And for their Aeneids, Iliads, and Odysseys, Were forced to make an odd sort of apology, For Donna Inez dreaded the mythology.34

Triple meters and multiple rhymes are rarely found in serious poetry, and so a poem that presumes to address serious matters in these forms is likely ironic. And yet, even with these formal clues, not every poem clearly signals its ironic intentions in its form—​some, in fact, go out of their way to adopt a form suited to the most serious matter. The heroic couplet was the period’s preferred form for both serious and ironic verse, and judged strictly in formal terms, it is not always possible to tell whether a passage is meant seriously or ironically. Churchill’s sarcastic Rosciad (1761), for instance, a lampoon on actors and dramatic critics—​ There rule secure from critics and from sense, Nor once shall Genius rise to give offence; Eternal peace shall bless the happy shore, And little factions break thy rest no more35

—​is formally indistinguishable from a thousand sincere panegyrics.

Liable to Be Mistaken Both the print-​shop eccentricities of Wilkins and Capell and the search for formal indicators of ironic intention are motivated by anxiety about the prospect of misunderstanding irony. “Considering how much has been written about irony,” writes Booth, “one finds surprisingly little about how we manage to understand it. The first problem is how we recognize that we should even begin reconstruction” (Rhetoric of Irony, p. 49). Because irony involves a mismatch between what is said and what is meant, it is always possible for the ironist to misfire—​ for at least some of the audience to miss the cues that signal an ironic reading. In 1697, the

33  Samuel Butler, Hudibras, part i, canto i, lines 119–​20, 127–​8, in Hudibras, ed. John Wilders (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 4–​5. 34  George Gordon, Lord Byron, Don Juan, canto i, stanza 41, in Byron, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–​92), vol. v, pp. 21–​2. 35 Churchill, The Rosciad, lines 613–​16, in The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill, ed. Douglas Grant (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), p. 20.

 

678   Jack Lynch Abbé de Bellegarde argued that “’Tis difficult to distinguish when Commendation is sincere, and when Ironical. Our Prejudice for our personal Merit, makes us think the Praises bestow’d in pure Complaisance, to be due to us.”36 An anonymous writer in the Jacobite’s Journal in 1748 agreed: I have observed that tho’ Irony is capable of furnishing the most exquisite Ridicule; yet as there is no kind of Humour so liable to be mistaken, it is, of all others, the most dangerous to the Writer. An infinite Number of Readers have not the least Taste or Relish for it, I believe I may say do not understand it; and all are apt to be tired, when it is carried to any Degree of Length.37

There are also poetic invocations of bad readers of poetry, as in this anonymous “Epigram: On a Certain —​—​Who for Some Time Mistook an Ironical Encomium for a Panegyric”: While —​—​listens to the Poet’s Lays, The pointed Satyr pass’d for honest Praise; To clearer Lights, at length the Oafs pretend, And like blind Puppies see at Nine Days End.38

Daniel Defoe’s treatment after the publication of the ironic Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1703) is the paradigmatic example of bad readers misinterpreting ironic declarations and reading them sincerely.39 A few months after the Shortest Way appeared and confused at least some of its readers, Defoe felt obliged to issue another work, A Brief Explanation of a Late Pamphlet: “The Author professes he thought, when he wrote the Book, he shou’d never need to come to an Explication, and wonders to find there should be any reason for it.”40 The real intention, he insists, should have been obvious: “If any man,” he explains, “take the pains seriously to reflect upon the Contents, the Nature of the Thing and the Manner of the Stile, it seems Impossible to imagine it should pass for any thing but an Irony” (p. 1). He ends with a jibe, challenging his opponents’ ability to read: “He also desires that all men who have taken Offence at the Book, mistaking the Authors design; will suffer themselves to think again, and with hold their Censure till they find themselves quallified to make a Venture like this for the good of their Native Country” (p. 4). And yet Defoe’s early (mis)readers, though now used as textbook examples of bad readers, deserve our sympathy. We know that Dissenter Defoe could not have meant to treat Dissenters so cruelly, but his contemporaries, faced with a new anonymous publication, could not make such a confident judgment. In fact we often look outside the text for evidence of a poet’s real-​life beliefs before we commit to an ironic or literal reading. An authentic encomium on a public figure might look on the page exactly the same as an ironic encomium

36 

Abbé de Bellegarde, Reflexions upon the Politeness of Manners; with Maxims for Civil Society. Being the Second Part of the Reflexions upon Ridicule (London, 1707), p. 181. 37  Jacobite’s Journal 17 (March 26, 1748). 38  The Norfolk Poetical Miscellany, 2 vols. (London, 1744), vol. i, p. 91. 39  See L. S. Horsley, “Contemporary Reactions to Defoe’s Shortest Way with the Dissenters,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900, 16, no. 3 (Summer 1976), 407–​20. 40 Defoe, A Brief Explanation of a Late Pamphlet, Entituled, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (London, 1703), p. 1.

 

Irony   679 on the same figure; we know to read some as “mock” only because we know something about their authors’ politics. Mary Leapor’s “Essay on Woman” (1751)—​ Woman—​a pleasing, but a short-​liv’d Flow’r, Too soft for Business, and too weak for Pow’r. A Wife in Bondage, or neglected Maid; Despis’d, if ugly; if she’s fair—​betray’d. ’Tis Wealth alone inspires ev’ry Grace, And calls the Raptures to her plenteous Face.41

—​is formally indistinguishable from Pope’s unironic Essay on Man; we recognize it as ironic partly because we know it was written by a woman. There are therefore many eighteenth-​century texts that leave even skilled readers wondering whether they should be read ironically. Pope’s imitation of “The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace,” for instance, may have been intended more or less seriously in its praise of both politicians and writers—​only fitting, since the Horatian original he is imitating is similarly ambiguous. Even more problematic than reading irony as sincerity is reading sincerity ironically. Booth suspects this error “is most probable where an author’s beliefs differ most from the reader’s” (Rhetoric of Irony, p. 81), and that certainly seems to be the case in one respect where modern readers’ beliefs differ most from those of eighteenth-​century writers. Some readers who find it difficult to fathom any reader celebrating slavery in good faith have considered the possibility that James Boswell’s No Abolition of Slavery; or, The Universal Empire of Love (1791) is not, as it seems to be, a serious celebration of the ownership of human beings, but in fact “an ironic deconstruction of pro-​slavery arguments.”42 Readers also disagree over whether the misogynist clichés of The Rape of the Lock are meant to be read straight. These moments of uncertainty arise not only when writers are espousing principles we find abhorrent. Some authors particularly invite us to read their works satirically. As Robert Uphaus has warned, “we are so conditioned by Swift’s use of irony and satire … that we seek the same rhetorical complexity in much of his poetry when, in fact, that complexity does not exist.”43 This expectation of finding some variety of irony virtually everywhere in Swift has led some to read his sermons and The Sentiments of a Church-​ of-​England Man (1708) as ironic. When a satirist as talented as Dryden seems to praise in earnest, it is difficult not to wonder whether the apparent encomium is in fact a critique. David Vieth, for instance, argues that Dryden’s “Ode to the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew” is in fact a satire: “the picture of Anne is lightly etched with an irony which implicitly concedes that she may not have been an apotheosized being, after all.”44

41  “An Essay on Woman,” lines 1–​6, in The Works of Mary Leapor, ed. Richard Greene and Ann Messenger (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003), pp. 184–​5. 42  Michael Morris, Scotland and the Caribbean, c.1740–​1833: Atlantic Archipelagos (New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 119. 43  Robert W. Uphaus, “Swift’s Irony Reconsidered,” in John Irwin Fischer and Donald C. Mell, Jr. (eds.), Contemporary Studies of Swift’s Poetry (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1981), pp. 169–​77, at p. 173. 44  David M. Vieth, “Irony in Dryden’s Ode to Anne Killigrew,” Studies in Philology, 62, no. 1 (Jan. 1965), 91–​100, at p. 92.

 

680   Jack Lynch Carol Virginia Pohli makes the same case—​in Howard D. Weinbrot’s count of her article, “within eleven pages the poem is called ironic eighteen times and satiric ten times.” Weinbrot is not buying it: “Dryden would have been both inhumane and imprudent to offer an introductory poem which mocks the dead, beloved daughter of a well-​connected royalist family.”45 Whichever reading we find convincing, though, Vieth’s and Pohli’s or Weinbrot’s, the disagreement is itself evidence that even professional readers of the era’s poetry cannot be counted on to pick up all the cues about how a poem should be interpreted. We are generally eager to imagine that those incapable of recognizing irony are unsophisticated cretins, but Booth includes even us among the dupes: “most of us think we are less vulnerable to mistakes with irony than we are. If we have enjoyed many ironies and observed less experienced readers making fools of themselves, we can hardly resist flattering ourselves for making our way pretty well. But the truth is that even highly sophisticated readers often go astray. The difficulty is that our errors are for the most part uncovered only by accident” (A Rhetoric of Irony, p. 1). This concern about misreading has prompted some poets (and more editors) to be all too obvious, but irony usually fails badly when it is explicitly advertised. Perhaps it is no surprise that George Butt’s poem “Spoken at a Public School-​Exhibition” is titled “An Ironical Abuse of Poetry”; Butt seems to have calculated that the unsophisticated schoolboys might miss even the none-​too-​subtle hints that he was not in earnest: Let me see, let me see—​what is here advertis’d—​ More poetical trash—​and is such reading priz’d? Whose are these? oh! some poems, at R—​g school spoken, Of the Rev. G. B.— and his head should be broken For a fool’s, who writes verse, since he certainly knows That his line’s all awry when it wriggles from prose.46

“Fear not, lads!” the title seems to say. “We’re only pretending to dislike poetry!” Too often, though, the explicit identification of poems for grownups as “ironic” serves only to destroy the irony—​it is a too-​obvious stage wink. “An Ironical Encomium on the Unparallel’d Proceedings of the Incomparable Couple of Whiggish Walloons,” for instance, in Poems on Affairs of State (“Go on brave Heroes, you whose Merits claim | Eternal Plaudit from the Trump of Fame …”), is too obvious to be funny, as are Joseph Wise’s “Ironical Advice to a Friend” in Miscellany of Poems (1775) and the anonymous “On Lunardi’s, and Dr.  Graham’s Balloon and Earth-​Bathing Exhibitions:  An Ironical Eulogy” (1790).47 An eighteenth-​ century verse translation of Friedrich Dedekind’s sixteenth-​century Latin Grobianus et Grobiana—​a scatological satire, pitched as an ironic conduct book—​is titled so that no one misses the intention: Grobianus; or, The Compleat Booby: An Ironical Poem (London, 1739). Even a well-​handled irony, though,

45 

Carol Virginia Pohlil, “Formal and Informal Space in Dryden’s Ode ‘To the Pious Memory of … Anne Killigrew,’” Restoration, 15 (1991), 27–​40; Weinbrot’s response is in Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 360–​1. 46  George Butt, Poems by George Butt, 2 vols. (Kidderminster, 1793), vol. i, p. 12. 47  Poems on Affairs of State, from the Year 1640. to the Year 1704, 3 vols. (London, 1716), vol. iii, p. 149; Miscellany of Poems, by the Reverend Joseph Wise, Rector of Penshurst, Sussex (London, 1775), p. 108; Original Miscellaneous Poems (Stockport, 1790), p. 19.

 

Irony   681 can be defanged by a too-​literal paratext. Swift’s prose “Proposal for an Act of Parliament to Pay Off the Debt of the Nation” (1732) is hobbled in one edition by an editorial headnote: “The Reader will perceive the following Treatise to be altogether ironical.”48 The editor was apparently not convinced that all readers would perceive the irony, and therefore treats them like George Butt’s schoolboys. But the possibility of misinterpretation is often the point. If an ironic comment is entirely unsusceptible to misinterpretation, it is not doing its job: irony often depends on the possibility that some dimwitted reader will misread the intention. One function of irony in satirical writing is to create—​or, if not to create, then to highlight the existence of—​a community of those in on the joke. The writer who says one thing while meaning another signals to those in the know that “we”—​the author and his or her in-​the-​know audience—​are better than “them,” the (probably imagined) readers who are in the out-​group. “Often the predominant emotion when reading stable ironies,” Booth explains, “is that of joining, of finding and communing with kindred sprits. The author I infer behind the false words is my kind of man, because he enjoys playing with irony, because he assumes my capacity for dealing with it, and—​most important—​because he grants me a kind of wisdom; he assumes that he does not have to spell out the shared and secret truths on which my reconstruction is to be built” (Rhetoric of Irony, pp. 27–​8). As readers we face the difficult task of navigating potential ironies, hoping to be part of the in-​group, and fearing accusations of cynicism if we read the literal as ironic, and fearing even more accusations of stupidity if we read the ironic literally. Irony is always a possibility, and we are forced to worry that we will misread in one direction or the other. As Swift writes in Tale of a Tub, “there generally runs an Irony through the Thread of the whole Book, which Men of Tast will observe and distinguish, and which will render some Objections that have been made, very weak and insignificant.”49 This is a bold stroke; any possible objection can be blamed on a reader’s inattention to Swift’s ironies, though he refuses to point ingenuous readers in the right direction. We are heading, of course, in the direction of “unstable irony,” in which we know not to believe the literal meaning, but are less sure about what we should believe in its place. This distinction between stable and unstable irony seems to be what F. R. Leavis is gesturing at when he says, “Gibbon’s irony … habituates and reassures, ministering to a kind of judicial certitude or complacency. Swift’s is essentially a matter of surprise and negation; its function is to defeat habit, to intimidate and to demoralize.”50 Irony opens up possible readings. In the case of the crudest sarcasm, the choice of meanings is limited: we reject what is said, and embrace its polar opposite by default. The satirist tells us Sir Robert Walpole is wise and just; we conclude that he is foolish and corrupt. More sophisticated ironists, though, often negate the statements they make without offering an unproblematic alternative. They tell us what they do not believe without ever telling us what they do. These ironists, the ones who “defeat habit,” keep us always on our toes, and force us to be the best readers of poetry we can.

48 

The Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., D.S.P.D., 8 vols. (Dublin, 1741–​6), vol. iv, p. 298.

49 Swift, A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, ed. Marcus Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,

2010), p. 8. 50  F. R. Leavis, “The Irony of Swift,” Scrutiny, 2, no. 4 (March 1934), 364–​78, at pp. 366–​7.

 

682   Jack Lynch

References Alford, Steven E., Irony and the Logic of the Romantic Imagination (New York: Peter Lang, 1984). Booth, Wayne C., A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974). Colebrook, Claire, Irony (London: Routledge, 2003). Collins, Anthony, A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing, in a Letter to the Reverend Nathanael Marshall (London, 1729). Dane, Joseph A., The Critical Mythology of Irony (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1991). Furst, Lilian R., Fictions of Romantic Irony (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984). Hutcheon, Linda, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London: Routledge, 1994). Knox, Norman, The Word Irony and Its Context, 1500–​1755 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1961). Leavis, F. R., “The Irony of Swift,” Scrutiny, 2, no. 4 (March 1934), 364–​78. Mellor, Anne K., English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980). Muecke, D. C., The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen, 1969). Thomson, J. A. K., Irony: An Historical Introduction (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1926).

 

Pa rt  V I I

C R I T IC I SM

 

 

Chapter 40

Schol arsh i p Adam Rounce A discussion of poetry and scholarship from 1660 to 1800 needs to set limits. There was never a shortage of commentary on contemporary English poetry from the beginnings of the period, as indicated by the author’s own notes to Abraham Cowley’s Poems (1656). Rochester’s “Allusion to Horace,” which manages to critique or praise most of literary London (1680), or Oldham’s Horace His Art of Poetry (1681), an account of English poets past and present, form part of the related tradition of poems on poetry, to be followed by such significant works as Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse (1684), itself an influence upon the epitome of the poem as description and exemplar of creativity and scholarship, Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711). This is without even mentioning the ancients-​vs.-​moderns debates, and their expression on poetry in works like Swift’s Battle of the Books (1704). There is also the mid-​eighteenth-​century relationship between poetry and the sublime, with such influential texts as Robert Lowth’s Praelectiones academicae de sacra poesi Hebraeorum (On the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews) of 1753, the Spenserian revival, the “Ossian” controversy, and many other strands of scholarly enquiry. To cover these works and all others associated with scholarship (including glos­saries, indices, collections of beauties, and so on) is beyond the scope of this chapter, which instead offers an introductory summary of some of the most important examples of scholarship associated with poetry. These are chiefly related to the development of scholarly editions of those poets in the period who were given the most critical attention—​Milton and Shakespeare—​along with more brief consideration of the developing interest in scholarship on the nearly contemporary, in the case of Alexander Pope, as well as the interest in antiquarian scholarship that increases during the eighteenth century. Historical narratives about scholarship and editing are often (implicitly or explicitly) teleological, even Whiggish:  progress is made, knowledge accretes, errors are removed, and scholarship moves forward. The present account does not locate such a clear pattern of development, although implicit in its argument is the increasing application to British vernacular poetry of the methodology and apparatus associated with classical and biblical scholarship: a constant in the period is the appearance of the trappings of such scholarship—​ variorum editions, commentary modeled on scriptural traditions, extensive apparatus, glossaries, and lexicons—​in relation to British poetry and plays. Also worth considering is the generally exponential growth of lexicography, most famously in Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755, but also with rhyming dictionaries, grammars, and other works which examined poetry

 

686   Adam Rounce as a highly specialized and central linguistic element of English, and did so with increased precision. In offering an inclusive account, this chapter tries to pose some of the enduring problems and questions raised by poetic scholarship in the period via some of its more significant cases. To this end, a suitably unifying yet disruptive figure is Pope, translator and annotator of Homer and (more contentiously) editor of Shakespeare, but also producer of the Dunciad Variorum, in its various guises a parody and mockery of scholarship, as well as an example of it. Pope’s scholarly feuds feed into his poetry, and he is the central critic of the flaws of a certain editorial approach—​in arguments often dismissed as the difference between the amateur dilettante and the professional scholar—​that is usually assumed to have superannuated his own. Understanding the context of Pope’s complaints, and the scholarly editions and interventions that provoked him and others, remains key to understanding both poetry and scholarship in the period.

Milton and the First Scholarly Editions Of all important English writers between 1660 and 1700, perhaps John Dryden—​through his criticism, poetic and dramatic practice, and acts of translation and adaptation—​most helped to form the idea of a critical sensibility that judged contemporary poetry. Dryden’s promotion of his critical views, through essays, introductions, prefaces, prologues, and epilogues was extensive, though disparate, and involved argument around examples from the classics to Shakespeare. In his most famous critical work, the essay-​dialogue Of Dramatick Poesy (1668), Dryden ensures, through the role of Eugenius (usually said to represent William Davenant), and his comment on the ancients-​vs.-​moderns debate, that the contemporary is as highly valued: there is no man more ready to adore those great Greeks and Romans than I am: but on the other side, I cannot think so contemptibly of the Age in which I live, or so dishonorably of my own Countrey, as not to judge we equal the Ancients in most kinds of Poesie, and in some surpass them; neither know I any reason why I may not be as zealous for the Reputation of our Age, as we find the Ancients themselves were in reference to those who lived before them.1

This was precisely the sort of comment that would earn Swift’s ridicule in the Tale of a Tub and related writings, where Dryden is, unfairly, a symbol of a modern sense of critical debasement.2 For the latter, though, at the end of his career, in the preface to his last work, the poems and translations collected as Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), the same serious attention is paid to modern and contemporary poetry, through the relation of a poetic lineage, or family tree. The result forms something of a canon, linking Chaucer to Spenser to Edward Fairfax to Milton and Edmund Waller, via Fairfax’s translation of Tasso’s

1 

The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1956–​2000), vol. xii, pp. 12–​13. 2  See Ian Higgins, “Dryden and Swift,” in Claude Rawson and Aaron Santesso (eds.), John Dryden (1631–​1700): His Politics, His Plays and His Poets (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2004), pp. 217–​34.

 

Scholarship   687 Gerusalemme liberata, Godfrey of Bulloigne (1600), a great influence on Waller’s harmonious meters.3 This small lineage shows both a critical and creative understanding of the recent poetic past. Moreover, in Fables itself, alongside his own versions of four of the Canterbury Tales and the pseudo-​Chaucerian “Flower and the Leaf,” Dryden places the original Chaucer texts, taken from Thomas Speght’s edition of 1598, and for the first time represented in the roman type used in modern texts, not the black letter conventionally used for antiquarian texts. The result may lack explanatory notes or much apparatus, but it resembles an edition of Dryden’s own contemporary work, as well as performing a curatorial role for its Chaucerian texts. This parallels the scholarly attention which, by 1700, was given to the more recent giants of the poetic past, Shakespeare and Milton. The centrality of Paradise Lost to the developing scholarly tradition of English poetry was already clear. John Dennis made Milton a key part of his theory of true poetry as a reflection of the religious sublime in The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), which is “no less than an Attempt to restore and re-​establish the noblest Art” of poetry.4 Dennis’s chief evidence, in countering wrongheaded views of the present, is drawn from Paradise Lost. In the next decade Joseph Addison, in the less rarefied pages of The Spectator, justified his series of essays on Paradise Lost because “the first Place among our English Poets is due to Milton; and as I have drawn more Quotations out of him than from any other.”5 Addison’s papers on the poem are, in some ways, the foundation of scholarship on Paradise Lost, along with its first significantly annotated edition, by Patrick Hume. Hume’s Paradise Lost (1695) has been overshadowed by the sound and fury produced by Richard Bentley’s later peculiar attempt (1732) and Thomas Newton’s comprehensive variorum (1749). Newton himself was grudging about Hume’s work, remarking that “He laid the foundation, but he laid it among infinite heaps of rubbish,” faint praise which seems somewhat unfair.6 In his modern account of the editors of the period, Marcus Walsh has praised the work of Hume, not least for the general breadth of knowledge which the editor both applies to the poem, and anticipates in its readership. The “most striking feature” is the “volume of knowledge that Hume thinks it necessary and proper to bring to bear on the poem. Classical and modern poets, historians, and natural scientists; philosophers from Plato onward; biblical commentary of all ages and kinds; Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Anglo-​Saxon, and Dutch etymologies”—​all are relevant. As Walsh argues at greater length elsewhere, “no poem seemed closer to the sacred Scripture” than Paradise Lost, and this meant that scholarly editions needed to treat it with the same sort of minute attention that biblical texts required. Hume achieves this through his paraphrases of Milton’s text, which, as Walsh suggests, “closely resemble in their method biblical paraphrases of Hume’s time.” To treat the text in such a fashion set a precedent: “His annotations have generally been considered one of the first systematic and scholarly commentaries on the text of a modern vernacular author.”7 3 

The Poems of John Dryden: Volume 5, 1697–​1700, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (London: Longman, 2005), pp. 49–​50. 4  John Dennis, The Grounds for Criticism in Poetry (London, 1704), pp. 1–​2. 5  Spectator 262, in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), vol. ii, p. 520. 6  Paradise Lost: A Poem, in Twelve Books: The Author John Milton: A New Edition, with Notes of Various Authors, ed. Thomas Newton (London, 1749), vol. i, sig. a2v. 7  Marcus Walsh, “Bentley Our Contemporary; or, Editors Ancient and Modern,” in Marcus Walsh and Ian Small (eds.), The Theory and Practice of Text Editing (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,

 

688   Adam Rounce Hume laid the foundation for scholarship of Milton’s poem, but its most notorious editor was thought by many to be trying to build another edifice in its stead. Richard Bentley’s Paradise Lost: A New Edition (1732) saw the renowned classical scholar take the editorial and conjectural techniques developed for ancient works (whereby a textual history is established, and flaws and omissions in its transmission rectified) and apply them to Paradise Lost. The disastrous results have usually obscured the fact that Bentley was treating Milton on a par with his classical forebears, as the strangeness of Bentley’s suggested emendations has somewhat tarnished the honor. Bentley’s more than 800 suggested emendations to Milton’s epic brought forth responses as part of a wider negative reaction, showing his edition to be atypical of his age. His theory, that both an amanuensis and an editor had betrayed the blind bard and distorted his true words, was untenable. But this idea and his suggested improvements (placed in the margins of his text) opened up a debate in poetic and editorial scholarship. As Walsh summarizes, the one deadly flaw in Bentley’s edition was not so much the unlikely thesis of textual corruption, but what trying to improve it suggested about Bentley’s critical sensibility: when it comes to poetry, he “everywhere rejects, or is blind to, metaphoric levels of discourse and metaphoric logic” (Shakespeare, Milton, p. 169). Of the many renowned follies produced (including the notorious emendation of “darkness visible” to “a transpicuous gloom”), a characteristic one is from book iv, where Ithuriel finds Satan as a toad: Him thus intent Ithuriel with his Spear Touch’d lightly; for no falshood can endure Touch of Celestial temper.

The problem for Bentley was logic: why does Ithuriel “not at once identify as Satan the Toad at Eve’s ear,” being an intruder in the place sacred to Adam and Eve? He gets out his blue pencil accordingly: Him thus intent Ithuriel with his Spear Knowing no real Toad durst there intrude, Touch’d lightly.

This captures the strange pedantry and gratuitousness of Bentley’s scholarly efforts on Milton, unsurprisingly swiftly to destruction doomed. Or, in Walsh’s pithy comment: “This indeed is re-​writing English.”8 Bentley’s two suggested emendations accepted by later editors—​swelling for smelling, soul for foul—​are small misprints that indicate how many nuts were unnecessarily smashed by his editorial sledgehammer.9 Yet his edition shows two in many ways contradictory scholarly trends of the first half of the eighteenth century: the treatment of important recent English poetry as unquestionably classic in status, and the alteration of such poetry to fit in with a contemporary editorial aesthetic. Kristine Haugen, the most recent critic of Bentley’s whole career, has described well the consequence of Bentley’s editorial theory: in taking on Milton

1991), pp. 157–​85, at p. 170; Marcus Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, & Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 53, 58, 57. 8  Paradise Lost: A New Edition, ed. Richard Bentley (London, 1732), pp. 136–​7; Walsh, “Bentley our Contemporary,” p. 168. 9  See Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, p. 70.

 

Scholarship   689 with his classical emendatory tools, he “would expand conjecture from a means of emending individual words into a device for reconceiving a text more fundamentally.” The result is that, as Walsh suggests, “an extraordinary contest of authority takes place, between poet, text, and editor.”10 It is, in some ways, a contest between criticism and creativity, whereby Bentley’s idea of the failings of the poem are ironically revealed by his own creative problems. Yet to take the argument further, his critical rewriting of the poem anticipates the modern and postmodern approaches of the later twentieth century, where a text can be read against the grain, have its absent center revealed, and generally be made to say things very different from its ostensible meaning. Haugen explains this through the consistency of intent: “Bentley’s account of Milton’s textual history” allowed him, via the argument of the interpolating editor, to defend Milton but attack the flaws in his poem, creating “the possibility of bodily separating authors from texts and of directing criticism in practice purely to the latter. By reducing to a vacuous tautology his traditional responsibility to defend his author, Bentley pointed the way toward even further critical innovations, including some that make his own story about Milton’s interpolator look timid and equivocating by comparison.” The result is Bentley’s “virtually authorial power over the poem at hand” (Richard Bentley, p. 228). Paradise Lost is rewritten by Bentley in his historical moment, and for all that readers have found his version absurd, it adumbrates the editorial theories of modern critics such as Jerome McGann, and the idea of the “social text”—​all scholarship offers a historical intervention, and the text is not an abstract ideal but socially received and consumed—​as well as what Walsh calls “advocates of a subjective, poetic experience of the text and creation of the reader’s meaning,” which could include many modern challengers of the essentialized meaning of a text. The so-​called “unediting” carried out in Renaissance and Shakespearean studies, where the ideological and historical determinants of past editorial enterprises are stripped bare, can be fruitfully applied to Bentley’s Milton; uneditors are in some ways his distant descendants, though both sides would dispute the relationship.11 Despite the theoretical consequences of his editing, it has never been claimed that Bentley provided a useful edition of Paradise Lost. It was limited by the relative paucity of allusions to Scripture (considering the subject), and Bentley’s tendency to rely only on himself, the odd classical parallel, or the internal evidence of the poem. In this respect, Thomas Newton’s variorum edition of 1749 had to offset the odd effect of Bentley, and also cover the increasing amount of criticism and commentary on Paradise Lost. He did so by giving what Walsh sees as a “representative indication of the directions of mid eighteenth-​century editing of Milton” (Shakespeare, Milton, p. 94), and of editing more generally. As well as a lengthy index and a clearly presented text, with prominent type for the poetry itself, Newton’s annotation is copious:  this is not surprising, considering that it includes Addison’s Spectator papers—​quoted often, being an instantly accepted critical guide—​along with Hume’s notes, Bentley’s many baroque oddities, and the replies of his adversaries, as well as Newton’s own commentary. This variorum approach, applying a range of authorities

10 

Kristine Louise Haugen, Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2011), p. 219; Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, p. 63. 11  Walsh, “Bentley our Contemporary,” p. 163. For unediting, see Leah Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London: Routledge, 1996).

 

690   Adam Rounce at great length to comment on minute questions of interpretation, is the final stage in the poem’s status as the classic of vernacular English poetry less than a hundred years after its publication. Perhaps its strangest aspect is Newton’s tendency to freely add his own interpretation, in footnotes that would now be seen as evaluative, and overtly directing to a reader. Responding to Bentley’s last quirk, the rejection of the melancholy of the poem’s ending, for instance, Newton refutes him thus: “the subject of Paradise Lost plainly requires something of a sorrowful parting, and was intended no doubt for terror as well as pity, to inspire us with the fear of God as well as with commiseration of Man.”12 It is a world away from modern editorial practice, but also indicates that Milton’s poem was venerated as part religious text, part poetic masterpiece, with no sense of contradiction. Newton’s commentary uses far more of the Bible than the classics or the native English poetic tradition. In Thomas Warton’s edition of Milton’s shorter poems (1785), English poetry is far more prominent in the commentary. This is only natural, given Warton’s role as antiquarian poet and scholar, leading to the revival, through works such as The History of English Poetry (1774–​81), of much of the poetic past that had been neglected or completely forgotten. A brief example from his Milton edition shows how alive Warton was to poetic history: in Comus, the Attendant Spirit’s commonplace “I was all ear” is compared to Catullus, Ben Jonson’s “Musical Strife” (“And all the world TURN EARS”), and (slightly misquoted) A Winter’s Tale: “ALL their other senses stuck in their ears.”13 The examples are mundane, but the range of Warton’s attention to recent English poetic analogies is part of the exponential process of poetic scholarship’s rediscovery of the past. The same time saw the publication of multi-​volume editions of poets (often to circumvent cheap rivals, rather than to produce scholarly texts), forming an ever-​increasing accepted English poetic canon; by 1810, Alexander Chalmers’s edition of The English Poets ran from Chaucer to Cowper.14 Unlike his early editors and critics with their biblical and classical bent, scholarship now saw Milton alongside of what came before and after him in English, though he was commonly compared, in terms of overall consequence and achievement, with Shakespeare, the only poet who received anything like as much scholarly attention in the years from 1660 to 1800.

Competing Versions of Shakespeare It is not difficult to assemble a narrative of Shakespearean scholarship from the Restoration to the end of the eighteenth century that would stress how error and misplaced conjectures are replaced and corrected by matters of fact and texts of greater accuracy. At one end, the Third and Fourth Folios (of 1663 and 1685 respectively) lack textual authority, and (from the Third Folio’s second impression of 1664 onward) include spurious works such as The 12 

Paradise Lost, ed. Newton, vol. ii, p. 430. John Milton, Poems upon Several Occasions, English, Italian, and Latin, with Translations, ed. Thomas Warton (London, 1785), p. 201. Autolycus’s lines are “All their other senses | Stuck in ears” (Winter’s Tale, IV, iii. 604–​5). 14  See Thomas Bonnell, The Most Disreputable Trade: Publishing the Classics of English Poetry, 1765–​ 1810 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008). 13 

 

Scholarship   691 Yorkshire Tragedy and The London Prodigall. At the other, there is the growing commentary and awareness embodied in the painstaking textual and contextual scholarship of figures like Edward Capell and Edmond Malone, which by the end of the eighteenth century had established the texts of most of the plays, offered a chronology for their performance and composition, and added masses of biographical and dramatic sources and other information previously uncollected. There are obvious anomalies in the idea of Shakespeare that eighteenth-​century scholarship represents: while he was repeatedly described as a poet, still his nondramatic works were widely dismissed, and treated with near contempt by editors and scholars before 1800. Yet while the modern reader might think it odd that Malone’s Attempt to Ascertain the Order of the plays (added to the Johnson–​Steevens edition of 1778) places a play now so associated with Shakespeare’s later career and style as the Winter’s Tale in the early 1590s (emended in his 1790 revision to 1604) and ends with Twelfth Night, such exceptions point to the erstwhile accuracy and thoroughness of Malone’s scholarship and reasoning, qualities that Capell applied to his textual work over many years. The implied narrative of gradual order and clarity replacing ignorance and supposition in Shakespearean scholarship, however, does not fully reflect the character of its participants or its details. Marcus Walsh’s excellent account, like that of Simon Jarvis, tends to sort Shakespearean scholars and editors into a linear tradition, which takes the text and other materials and makes an “attempt to establish and develop criteria for valid conjecture,” and to treat it more forensically and scientifically.15 This line of editors would run from Lewis Theobald to Malone, via Samuel Johnson and Capell. Or they might move in a different direction, like the more eccentric orbits taken by the editions of Alexander Pope (1725) and William Warburton (1747). Pope and Warburton, for Walsh, embody “aesthetic” editing, in Peter Shillingsburg’s very useful distinctions between types of editorial approach: the aesthetic editor applies standards of taste, whereas other types may be more contingent on sociological, historical, or authorial factors. Their eccentricity is an exception to the wider movement toward the discovery of hard factual evidence, which Walsh calls the development of “historicizing” scholarship: “a movement away from absorption in the editor’s personal taste and contemporary culture, toward a belief that earlier literature must be interpreted, as well as evaluated, within the horizons of its own moment of production.”16 Pope’s Shakespeare (along with his other editorial schemes) stands at an angle to this development of historical scholarship; he followed Nicholas Rowe’s edition of 1709 (important for its tidying up of texts, including insertions of dramatis personae and some act and scene divisions) but, whereas Rowe had relied upon the (flawed) later folios for his texts, Pope went back to quartos and collated them, albeit not as extensively as later editors, and according to a different principle. “Of all English Poets,” Pope remarked, “Shakspear must be confessed to be the fairest and fullest subject for Criticism, and to afford the most numerous, as well as most conspicuous instances, both of Beauties and Faults of all sorts.”17 His editorial 15 Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, p. 121; Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearean Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–​1765 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 16 Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, pp. 5–​7, 23, quoting Peter Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1986), p. 21. 17  The Works of Shakespear, ed. Alexander Pope, 6 vols. (London, 1723–​5), vol. i, sig. a2r.

 

692   Adam Rounce system would illustrate both faults and beauties, forming his textual choices (including quotation marks of approbation, or dismissal of inferior lines or passages to the bottom of the page) around his personal poetic abilities to identify the genuinely Shakespearean from the counterfeit. Edmund King describes this as a consequence of Pope’s earlier Homer translations, “a conscious attempt to emulate the ancient editors through typography so as to turn Shakespeare into a classic author.”18 Taste and aesthetic judgment would be the basis of his edition. Walsh’s summary—​that Pope’s “decisions were made for essentially aesthetic reasons, rather than to reconstruct an original authorial text,” and that his choices depended on “where it seemed to him to make better poetry or better drama”—​seems accurate,19 yet it also risks reducing Pope’s editorial efforts to a sort of high-​handed expression of personal virtuosity, removed from the cares (or the accuracy) of the wider critical world. This is not borne out by reading Pope’s edition, which is more provocative—​and less predictable—​ than the general condemnations of its scholarship suggest.20 Pope repeatedly makes editorial choices that defy any clear idea of his taste as driven by any rule or theory. Moreover, his approach means that Pope’s choices combine moments of inspiration with the apparently subjective. Two examples can be found in Macbeth which, as a Folio-​only play, encouraged (and in places required) emendation. Pope takes Macbeth’s metaphor of his guilt being as immutable as the blood on his hand: No; this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red. (II, ii. 57–​60)

He alters this to “This my hand will rather | Make the green ocean red.”21 In his account of Lewis Theobald’s Shakespearean works beginning with Shakespeare Restored, Peter Seary quotes this as an example of Pope’s problem with Shakespeare’s style, which he often found “affected and bombastic.”22 Pope’s cutting of the “multitudinous seas incarnadine” is thus a move toward modern refinement and decorum. There are, though, other possibilities: the oddity of the emendation is lessened if Pope is looking instead for tautology. Dramatic awareness of the lines might mean that the same metaphor is repeated for the benefit of an audience in two ways—​one ornate, one plain. Pope may have thought that it takes too long to say the same thing. Few would support the change, but it reveals a different perception of poetic language than the more historically informed scholarship with which Theobald and subsequent critics would rebuke Pope. Pope’s interventions ask significant questions about the meaning of Shakespeare’s poetry, and they have not always been fully answered.

18 

Edmund King, “Pope’s 1723–​25 Shakespear, Classical Editing, and Humanistic Reading Practices,” Eighteenth-​Century Life, 32, no. 2 (2008), 3–​13, at p. 7. 19 Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, pp. 126, 130. 20  Ibid., pp. 126, 130. For the lack of predictability, see A. D. J. Brown, “The Little Fellow Has Done Wonders,” Cambridge Quarterly, 21, no. 2 (1992), 120–​49. 21  Works of Shakespear, ed. Pope, vol. v, p. 541. 22  Peter Seary, Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 45.

 

Scholarship   693 Pope’s emendations also show the effectiveness of critical taste, when applied with a sense of poetic practice. From Rowe, Pope would have inherited the Folio text of the “dagger” speech, where Macbeth remarks on how wither’d murder, Alarum’d by his sentinel, the wolf, Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace. With Tarquin’s ravishing sides, towards his design Moves like a ghost.23

A plausible explanation of why Tarquin’s “sides” are “ravishing” has never been accepted, unlike Pope’s emendation, “ravishing strides,” which solves the problem and (like most good conjectures) would win the benefit of the doubt—​even if it cannot be proved that it was the original word thence mangled in the Folio. It won over most subsequent eighteenth-​century and virtually all modern editors of the play.24 Such emendations are illustrations of Pope’s conception of Shakespeare’s works as “an ancient majestick piece of Gothick Architecture, compar’d with a neat Modern building. The latter is more elegant and glaring, but the former is more strong and more solemn.”25 This veneration of the grandeur of imperfection suggests something of the dialogue with the past which Pope sees in editing, rather than the condemnation and neoclassic improvement of its “Gothick” qualities which caricatures his approach. Pope opens up areas of Shakespeare’s text and meaning through his unpredictability. In some ways, the battle between Pope and Lewis Theobald was a wider struggle over the value of poetry and literature, and over who was best placed to comment upon it, appreciate it, and explicate it. Peter Seary has cataloged how, in contrast to Pope’s aesthetic sense of textual rightness, “Theobald independently evolved a canon of editorial principles,” and “in the establishment of the text he sought to replace taste with fact or probability.” To this “belief that conjecture can be conducted according to principles of rational argument,” Theobald brought to Shakespeare Restored and his edition of 1733 far greater knowledge of Elizabethan linguistic parallels (from his wider reading in Shakespeare’s contemporaries), and a more systematic approach, generally, to recovering the authorial text.26 Theobald’s reward—​ starring as hero of the Dunciad—​ensured that he has become a byword for pedantry, but his own creative endeavors show how the divide between aesthetic and more scientific editors can mislead. Theobald’s Fatal Secret (1735) is a happy-​ending reworking of Webster’s Duchess of Malfi that concedes nothing to Nahum Tate’s more notorious adaptation of King Lear (1681) in ruining a great literary work’s tragic nihilism and despair. Theobald’s refinement of Webster’s supposedly barbarous original is the opposite of his Shakespearean editing, as is made clear by the opening claim that Webster “sometimes conceiv’d nobly, but did not always express with Clearness; and if he now and then soars handsomely, he as often rises into the Region of Bombast.” How this is improved by an ending in which the good characters miraculously reveal their deaths to have been a deceit is unclear, especially when

23 

The Works of William Shakespeare, ed. Nicholas Rowe, 6 vols. (London, 1709), vol. v, p. 2317. Works of Shakespear, ed. Pope, vol. v, p. 539. It is adopted in Theobald’s edition of 1733. 25  Ibid., vol. i, pp. xxiii–​xxiv. 26 Seary, Lewis Theobald, pp. 9, 137. See also pp. 65–​86 (on Shakespeare Restored) and 131–​70 (for the textual basis of his edition and his innovations). 24 

 

694   Adam Rounce expressed through such clunky additions as the Marquis of Pescara’s wish to “gratulate your strange and unhop’d Rescue.”27 Such an odd performance shows that the contentions over editing were not merely setting the bourgeois scholarship associated with Theobald against the mercurial genius of Pope—​ and, more incidentally, that the canonical acceptance of the work might affect the way it was treated, edited, or rewritten: what would be vandalism against Shakespeare or Milton was far more acceptable with the wilder and more obscure Webster. Nevertheless, as editor, Theobald was more scholarly, and it was not spite and sour grapes that made Pope use him as a butt, but a wider cultural critique: Theobald may have been the “better” editor in terms of the science of textual and historical reconstruction, but he showed neither style nor finesse, and represented, for Pope, their wider absence. Howard Weinbrot has argued that Theobald’s correction of Pope and textual restoration of Shakespeare “nonetheless lacked rhetorical elegance” in Pope’s eyes, and showed up precisely “what Pope thought a threat to culture—​a focus on the minute rather than the general by a self-​satisfied pedantic egotist.” The cultural malaise, for Pope, is that pedantry and detail obscure the wider general principles and values of art and culture. The letter killeth, and keeping attention on the spirit, for Pope, is therefore more important. There is also the sense that Pope disliked the Theobaldian editorial grind, as Weinbrot says, because it acted to “diminish the idea of the polite generous critic as handmaid to the muses.”28 The purpose of an editor—​or “dull duty,” in Pope’s view—​was to appreciate and enable through textual choices and commentary; often scholarship appeared to invert this, and to serve itself and its own needs before those of the poet. When Seary remarks that “it is easy to underestimate the distrust or contempt in the early eighteenth century for the minute scrutiny of texts,” he perhaps makes the Popean dismissal of Theobald too cavalier: it was the character of editing, and what it revealed about scholarly attitudes and priorities toward poetry, that were a large part of Pope’s disdain (Seary, Lewis Theobald, p. 49). After Theobald’s correction and edition, Pope’s executor Warburton was the only editor who dared to emend Shakespeare on aesthetic terms—​ones which echo Bentley’s reliance on conjecture and sagacity—​in his edition of 1747. Warburton dressed up his editing behind linguistic schemes, but was not remotely as sympathetic to Shakespeare’s language as Pope could be, and had also fallen out with the previous editors, Theobald and Thomas Hamner, causing Warburton to set himself against and apart from their editorial theories almost by default. Nor was Warburton, for all his undoubtedly vast learning, particularly familiar with Shakespearean English. The result was, in Seary’s words, “primarily an excuse for displaying his own cleverness,” though the effect was more often jibes at the eccentric editor’s neologisms and odd emendations.29 The lawyer Thomas Edwards’s popular satire, The Canons of Criticism (1748), was a response to Warburton’s pompous claim that though he “has often given Scope to critical Conjecture,” he still has “religiously observ’d the severe Canons of literal Criticism.”30

27 

Lewis Theobald, The Fatal Secret (London, 1735), sig. a5v, p. 57. Howard D. Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005), pp. 235, 239. 29 Seary, Lewis Theobald, p. 131. For the problems of Warburton’s edition, see Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen, pp. 120–​7. 30  The Works of William Shakespeare, ed. William Warburton, 8 vols. (London, 1747), vol. i, p. xiv. 28 

 

Scholarship   695 The success of Edwards’s barb was one sign that Warburton’s impressionistic approach toward poetic scholarship could no longer be convincing. One reason for this was that the growing body of Shakespearean commentary, as with Milton, meant that there was more likelihood of scholarship being superseded, or rendered obsolete. In this respect, Samuel Johnson’s edition of 1765 was of the first importance, not just for the vast critical influence shaped by its preface and annotations, but also as a variorum which, in the Johnson–​Steevens revised editions of 1773 and 1778, gathered even more critical material. This accumulation of sources and information shows that scholarship was increasingly collaborative (and, in the editions of figures like Malone, would continue to be so, even if feuds and schisms remained), and that inspired editing based solely on critical judgment was no longer feasible. Johnson not only refuses, on the whole, to attack his editorial forebears—​“I know not why our editors should, with such implacable anger, persecute their predecessors”—​but also argues that such antagonism is damaging and dangerous: It is no pleasure to me, in revising my volumes, to observe how much paper is wasted in confutation. Whoever considers the revolutions of learning, and the various questions of greater or less importance, upon which wit and reason have exercised their powers, must lament the unsuccessfulness of enquiry, and the slow advances of truth, when he reflects, that great part of the labour of every writer is only the destruction of those that went before him.31

Lack of cooperation ensures that we go round in circles, and Johnson thus questions the futility of all scholarship, if such is its way of operating. There is also the practical reflection of the problem, seen in Johnson’s caution in emending the text, which suggests his increasing care about trying to work out, or have faith in, an original version, and not emend for its own sake. Contemporary to Johnson, the textual work of Edward Capell, in his edition of 1768, used modern editorial ideas of collation, going back where possible to the original text, which was, as Walsh puts it, “built directly on the early printed editions” (Shakespeare, Milton, p. 179). Scholarship of Shakespeare, like that of Milton, had reached a point of synthesis, where the most appropriate critical materials could be collected. Concomitantly, more English poets—​ older, modern, and contemporary—​were given scholarly attention, though Pope, the most celebrated, ensured that his own scholarly legacy was double-​edged.

Pope, Parody, and the British Poetic Vernacular Pope’s attention to his own texts has been the subject of much critical attention, and it reflects his wider scholarly interest in the appearance of his work. More than most writers, Pope made every effort to ensure his books were published exactly the way he wanted. This is also true of his two other largest critical works, outside of the Shakespeare edition: his Homer translations and the mock-​scholarly apparatus to the Dunciad Variorum. James McLaverty 31  The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 21 vols. to date (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1958–​), vol. viii, p. 985; vol. vii, p. 99.

 

696   Adam Rounce has described the apparent paradox of Pope: “An editor himself and the supervisor of elaborate editions of his own texts, he nevertheless established himself as the major critic of ‘verbal criticism’ and the scholarship of Bentley and Theobald.”32 It was a paradox Pope was happy to exploit. Pope’s notes to the Iliad of Homer (appearing from 1715) are of particular significance in framing the translation, and directing the reader to its particular stylistic, metaphoric, and cultural riches. Pope debates within the notes with Homeric scholars, but he is always keen to stress his own enthusiasm for the poem, with appreciation the fundamental motive behind the notes. The result, as Seary says, “In so far as Pope’s Homer is an English classic, it is the first English classic to be accompanied by extensive, systematic commentary.” This commentary is directed to a certain end, being a “self-​conscious effort to make scholarship the servant of critical appreciation” (Seary, Lewis Theobald, p. 54). It is also dialogue with a wider humanist tradition. As Weinbrot summarizes, the Iliad annotations “exemplify and embody a large, vibrant, and civil world of European arts and letters.”33 The scholarship that Pope connects himself to here is cosmopolitan and wide-​ranging, in terms of language and culture, with Homer as a lingua franca. It is thus a world away from the pedantry he would later attack in Theobald and Bentley. Pope’s purpose behind the Iliad commentary is clear in the first note: “It is something strange that of all the Commentators upon Homer, there is hardly one whose principal Design is to illustrate the Poetical Beauties of the Author.” This is his chosen task, and its aesthetic bent is appropriate: as Maynard Mack put it, when reading Pope’s Homer, “If we import into our judgments of his scholarship the scruples of the modern scholar, we shall not only misjudge him; we shall miss the most rewarding qualities of his work.” These qualities are a breadth of poetic commentary that is rich in critical insight—​a scholarly work that is alive to the creative potential and vast cultural influence of Homer’s poem. In Weinbrot’s words, “Pope’s commentary is at once engaged and tactful, diligent and elegant.”34 The result is a popular work of scholarship, and an edition of poetry in English that does not confine its arguments to specialists. The gentility and urbanity of the commentary on Homer would change, in the space of fourteen years, with the first appearance of the Dunciad Variorum in its three-​book version of 1729. Between had come the feud with Theobald over Shakespeare, and one basic mode of satire in the poem is the identification of Theobald as the antihero of dullness; furthermore, the tone of the notes of Scriblerus adds another layer of mockery, as the most recent editor of the poem has claimed: “the old-​fashioned, fussy phraseology affected by Scriblerus echoes Theobald’s mannerisms, as well as alluding more generally to stereotypes of narrow-​minded scholarly self-​absorption.”35 Nor would other scholarly enemies be left out: Bentley would be introduced as Aristarchus in book iv from 1742, the model of academic pendantry and symbol of a misguided self-​serving education system. There are other jibes at him and the world 32 

James McLaverty, Pope, Print, and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), p. 88. Howard D. Weinbrot, “Annotating a Career: From Pope’s Homer to The Dunciad: From Madame Dacier to Madame Dacier by Way of Swift,” Philological Quarterly, 79, no. 4 (2000), 459–​82, at p. 460. 34  The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. in 12 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1939–​69), vol. vii, pp. 82, lxxviii; Weinbrot, Menippean Satire, p. 241. 35  The Poems of Alexander Pope: The Dunciad & The Dunciad Variorum, ed. Valerie Rumbold (London: Longman, 2007), p. 113. 33 

 

Scholarship   697 of classical editing. Not the least of these is structural: as James McLaverty has shown, the Dunciad Variorum “is simultaneously an annotated edition of the poem, supplying interpretation and information about context and allusion, and a parody of the scholarly editions of the classics promoted by figures like Bentley.” The mock-​form of the variorum is partly a homage to and parody of Bentley’s edition of Horace, as well as Brossette’s 1717 edition of Boileau.36 The double-​edged presentation of the Dunciad Variorum makes it a mock-​poem that impersonates the style of its targets while satirizing them through its content; both poetry and annotation feed off one another, with the commentary shifting constantly from false ingenuousness to dark sarcasm or outright rudeness. The end of book i sees the mention of John Ogilby’s translation of Aesop (1651) in the main text, which draws forth the note: “Our author shows here and elsewhere, a prodigious Tenderness for a bad writer. We see he selects the only good passage perhaps in all that ever Ogilby writ; which shows how candid and patient a reader he must have been.” Even leaving aside the pretended kindness to Ogilby, the status of “Our author” is deliberately ambivalent, a way for Pope both to hide behind and to stand outside the frame of the poem and the annotation. This is why McLaverty describes it as “a fascinating, doubly inflected book,” since “It ridicules the attempt to supplement and explain the work, even as it supplements and explains it.”37 James Sutherland, an older editor of the Dunciad Variorum, represented a simpler attitude toward the poem: “The art which Pope lavished upon this poem has too often been obscured by an unnecessary concern for his victims.” It is not a widely held view today, Weinbrot’s description of the poem as an “unfashionable defense of high culture by, for some, an ideologically incorrect author” being more accurate. The challenge to Pope’s mockery has been the questioning of whether it is possible for the satirist to stand apart from those he criticizes, or whether Pope too is implicated in the dullness he analyzes so gleefully. Moreover, the evaluative tastes that would have made it apparent as to why Pope thought he could place himself far above a Richard Blackmore or Leonard Welsted (or, in terms of taste and judgment, a Theobald or Bentley) are no longer acceptable in literary scholarship. Pope has had to join the rank and file and come down from his plateau, an ironically delayed revenge, perhaps, by scholarship, for all the mockery he gave it.38 The Dunciad Variorum is at once a monument to mock-​scholarship, a mockery of real scholarship, and a work of scholarship. It remains a vital, ambiguous commentary and satire upon the scholarly need to record and monumentalize, even if its disdain is mainly reserved for the mediocrity of both scholars and poets in a culture that has lost the ability to judge accurately and with proportion. Despite his repeated goading of certain types of scholarship, Pope’s poetic achievement gave him after his death in 1744 a cultural authority, enshrined by

36 

James McLaverty, “The Mode of Existence of Literary Works of Art: The Case of the Dunciad Variorum,” Studies in Bibliography, 37 (1984), 82–​105, at pp. 98–​9. For Brosette, see McLaverty, Pope, Print, and Meaning, pp. 87–​90. 37  The Dunciad, ed. Rumbold, p. 90. 38 Pope, Poems, vol. v, p. xlii; Weinbrot, Menippean Satire Reconsidered, p. 233. For modern attitudes to the poem, see Claudia M. Thomas and Catherine Ingrassia (eds.), More Solid Learning: New Perspectives on Pope’s “Dunciad” (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2000), particularly the introduction, which discusses “tacit acceptance of Pope’s classification of ‘dunces,’ which now seems unexamined and perhaps ‘old fashioned’ ” (p. 24).

 

698   Adam Rounce the appearance of his collected works in 1751. These were edited by Warburton, his executor, who made the most of it, adding two lines and an insulting footnote to the Dunciad Variorum, paying back Thomas Edwards for The Canons of Criticism, and showing how scholarship of English poetry was for him still a battleground for controversy, rather than a collaborative accumulation of knowledge.39 A more significant scholarly work was Joseph Warton’s Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1756 and 1782). Often reductively read only for its opening comments questioning where Pope stands in the ranks of “true poetry,” Warton’s Essay, particularly in its first volume, is an excellent example of contemporary scholarly practice, viewing Pope’s poetry through an eager comparison with other materials brought in miscellaneously. Not the least of the problems with simplified readings of the Essay on Pope as an attack on its subject is that they ignore both the relish with which Warton endeavors to show his regard for Pope, and the enormous range of sources that he draws upon to do so, from all areas of classical, humanist, and modern scholarship. It is an astonishingly learned book, and a reminder of how many areas of cultural and linguistic knowledge scholars in the middle of the eighteenth century could call into their work. It is also indicative of the seriousness with which near-​contemporary poetry was treated.40 The same is also true of a far more famous work, Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1779–​81), which, though written as biographical and critical summaries for a commercial edition, became a vital area of scholarly debate and controversy, as much for those lives where Johnson’s reading was claimed to be harshly unfavorable (Milton and Gray) as those where his accounts became for many the critical standard of judgment (Dryden and Pope). Yet, in another sense, Johnson was an exception. The scholarship of his friends and acquaintances was often concerned with contemporary or older poetry in which he had little or no interest. The modernity of Gray and Collins wearied him, and he seems to have had little sympathy with either the poetry or the antiquarian pursuits of Joseph or Thomas Warton. The researches of Thomas Warton in the History of English Poetry, along with key publications like Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), a work of vast scholarly influence in its promotion of the ballad as a form of artistic authenticity, are part of the many significant scholarly rediscoveries of past poetry which had been going on for decades, producing renewed interest into a wider poetic canon than had been available or of interest to many earlier readers. A scholarly convergence of past and present is the case of Thomas Chatterton (see ­chapter 14, “The Poet as Fraud”). The scholar Thomas Tyrwhitt published Chatterton’s Rowley poems as medieval texts in Poems Supposed to Have Been Written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and Others, in the Fifteenth Century (1777). Thomas Warton had to include discussion of them in his History, and concluded that “On the whole, I am inclined to believe, that these poems were composed by the son of the school-​master before mentioned; who inherited the inestimable treasures of Cannynge’s chest in Radcliffe-​church, as I have already related at large. This youth, who died at eighteen, was a prodigy of genius.”41 The 39 

For this and the responses to Warburton, see Adam Rounce, “A Clamour too Loud to Be Distinct: William Warburton’s Literary Squabbles,” The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, 16 (2006), 199–​217, at pp. 207–​9. 40  See Adam Rounce (ed.), Alexander Pope and His Critics, 3 vols. (London: Routledge, 2003), vol. i, pp. xvii–​xxiii, xxviii–​xxxiii. 41  Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, 4 vols. (London, 1774–​81), vol. ii, p. 353.

 

Scholarship   699 praise for Chatterton’s potential cannot deny the only scholarly conclusion possible: Warton had to conclude that the Rowley poems were forgeries, given his vast, unrivaled knowledge of the poetic past and the literature of the fifteenth century they supposedly inhabited; they cannot fit into his historical narrative of poetry. As Pat Rogers says, “There was no room in Warton’s plan for a Rowley at this point, precisely because a Rowley could not have appeared at this juncture in the form Chatterton devised for him.”42 The Chatterton controversy is in a way evidence for the development of poetic scholarship in the century, as it required scholars to judge materials that tried to enter into their linguistic and historical systems, and in so doing test how far scholarly knowledge had come. It also shows that, as well as distant literary history, scholarship had become more interested in the very recent past, and where appropriate, attached to near contemporary poetry the stature and apparatus of a classic. The example of Thomas Gray (who made notes for a never-​written history of English poetry, supposedly put off by hearing of Warton’s) shows how attitudes had changed. In 1768, Gray collected his poetry, and in a short advertisement declares that, in reference to his two controversial and difficult “Pindaric Odes” of 1757: “When the Author first published this and the following Ode, he was advised, even by his Friends, to subjoin some few explanatory Notes; but had too much respect for the understanding of his Readers to take that liberty.”43 Seven years later, and four years after his death in 1771, Gray the diffident poet, not needing or wanting to insult his readership with annotation, was enshrined in the pages of his executor William Mason’s Poems of Mr. Gray: To Which are Prefixed Memoirs of His Life and Writing, a copious work of scholarship that would be one biographical and critical model for Boswell’s Life of Johnson. It was no longer likely that a significant poet could blush unseen, away from the apparatus of the scholarly edition, and the number of accepted significant English poets had greatly increased since 1660; scholarship on them was, by the end of the eighteenth century, never far behind.

References Bentley, Richard (ed.), Paradise Lost: A New Edition (London, 1732). Haugen, Kristine Louise, Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2011). Jarvis, Simon, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearean Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–​1765 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). McLaverty, James, Pope, Print, and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001). Newton, Thomas (ed.), Paradise Lost: A Poem, in Twelve Books: The Author John Milton: A New Edition, with Notes of Various Authors (London, 1749). Rounce, Adam (ed.), Alexander Pope and his Critics, 3 vols. (London: Routledge: 2003). Rumbold, Valerie (ed.), The Poems of Alexander Pope: The Dunciad & The Dunciad Variorum (London: Longman, 2007). Seary, Peter, Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 42 

Pat Rogers, “Chatterton and the Club,” in Nick Groom (ed.), Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 121–​50, at p. 136. 43  Thomas Gray, Poems by Mr Gray: A New Edition (London, 1768), p. 36; The Poems of Mr. Gray: To Which are Prefixed Memoirs of His Life and Writing, ed. William Mason (London, 1775).

 

700   Adam Rounce Walsh, Marcus, Shakespeare, Milton, & Eighteenth-​Century Literary Editing (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997). Warton, Thomas, The History of English Poetry from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century, 4 vols. (London, 1774–​81). Weinbrot, Howard D., Menippean Satire Reconsidered:  From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005).

 

Chapter 41

Histori e s Philip Smallwood The documents which shape the history of poetry are not the same as historical documents properly so-​called; nor are they analogous to the finds unearthed by archaeologists or prehistorians, where historical imagination works with the evidence to reconstruct a dead world that is no more. In the history of poetry the poems have a dual identity that makes their real identity elusive: they are mediated evidence of the historical situation whence they came. They draw their context with them; they express their Weltanschauung, and in Thomas Warton’s phrase they are means to the end of the “history of society.”1 But they are also foundational events—​immediate ends in themselves; their aesthetic design speaks out of context as if spoken directly to us; they are alive in our world. Regardless of what historians do or fail to do, the ones that survive as poetry do so as present events. This enigma of presence in absence is a symptom of the singularity of the literary text, its unlikeness to the material from which, say, a political history is made. But no survey of the history of poetry in the eighteenth century is immune, critically, from the broader debates surrounding historical enquiry and the theoretical basis of its outcomes—​the histories themselves—​as a mode of knowing the past.2 As new work appears or original discoveries are made, the history of the history of poetry involves repeated rewritings and new kinds of relations. In this chapter I offer evidence that, while its formal varieties in the eighteenth century may be generically marginal or unstable, the history of poetry succeeds as an eighteenth-​century triumph of form accessible within the hermeneutics of history. The works of Thomas Warton and of Samuel Johnson in particular achieve, I suggest, an enduring synthesis of history and criticism, and they record, in Paul Ricoeur’s terms, the place of remembering, and its amnesiac correlative, the place of forgetting, in the making of poetical history.3 Like the poems that compose the subject matter of their histories, historical

1 

Thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry, with introduction by David Fairer, 4 vols. (London: Routledge/​Thoemmes Press, 1998), vol. ii, p. 209. 2  See Lawrence Lipking, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-​Century England (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970); René Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1941). 3  Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004).

 

702   Philip Smallwood curiosity demands we enquire after context and formation: how the history of poetry “was brought into the State in which we now behold it.”4

Augustan Pre-​Histories of Poetry In complementary and contrasting ways Warton and Johnson stand as counterarguments to the false dichotomy of historical contextualism and the critic’s unfiltered response to the unframed genius of the poet.5 But their role in the history of poetry is itself open to contextualization. Aristotle included an account of the history of poetry from Homer onward in ­chapter 4 of his Poetics and, until the middle and later years of the eighteenth century, the classical critics of Greece and Rome and their imitators, translators, commentators, and successors in Italy and France largely define how a changing poetical country of the mind can be diachronically mapped out.6 As we move from the earlier commentators through the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, we can distinguish the older (and wider) senses of “poetry” from newer (narrower) ones; but also the history of poetry from earlier varieties of turn to the past. A perspective on the poetical past sharpens when poets periodize their personal present.7 The paradigm of a progress of poetry, leading to the Augustan present of poetry in the middle and later years of the seventeenth century, appears prominently, for example, in the history made famous by Boileau’s Art poétique (1674). Boileau’s digression, in a work of poetry which itself imitates the ancient poetry of Horace, suggests the self-​conscious pride of the French Augustan project, as the new poets and dramatists of the standing of Molière and Racine compared themselves, and were compared, to the Greek and especially the Roman classics. Here rivalry goes hand in hand with supplementation, and poetry’s historical catalog of English heirs and successors is clear in the way that Dryden (when collaborating with Sir William Soame in 1683) adapts Boileau’s account of this progress to an English inheritance. The crucial passage of poetical history is much expanded from the Horatian original, and offers a lesson in practice to the modern English poets: Our ancient Verse, (as homely as the Times,) Was rude, unmeasur’d, only Tagg’d with Rhimes: Number and Cadence, that have Since been Shown, To those unpolish’d Writers were unknown. Fairfax was He, who, in that Darker Age, By his just Rules restrain’d Poetic Rage; Spencer did next in Pastorals excel, And taught the Noble Art of Writing well;

4 

Preface to the Preceptor (1748), in Samuel Johnson’s Prefaces and Dedications, ed. Allen T. Hazen (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1937), p. 182. 5  See David Perkins (ed.), Theoretical Issues in Literary History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991). 6  See Paul A. Cantor, “Aristotle and the History of Tragedy,” in ibid., pp. 60–​84. 7  For periodization in historical organization, see Jack Lynch, The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), esp. introduction and chap. 1.

 

Histories   703 To stricter Rules the Stanza did restrain, And found for Poetry a richer Veine. Then D’Avenant came; who, with a new found Art, Chang’d all, spoil’d all, and had his way apart: His haughty Muse all others did despise, And thought in Triumph to bear off the Prize …………………………………………………… Waller came last, but was the first whose Art Just Weight and Measure did to Verse impart; That of a well-​plac’d Word could teach the force, And shew’d for Poetry a nobler Course: His happy Genius did our Tongue Refine, And easie Words with pleasing Numbers joyn. All own’d his Laws; which, long approv’d and try’d, To present Authors now may be a Guide.8

Edward Fairfax, Edmund Waller, John Denham, and William Davenant are perhaps now footnotes in the mainstream history of English poetry. Yet at his date Dryden can define their role decisively as agreed marker points in the development of the national heritage that runs from Chaucer, through Spenser, to the personal achievements in original and translated verse that he introduces in his preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700): We can only say [of Chaucer], that he lived in the infancy of our poetry, and that nothing is brought to perfection at the first. We must be children before we grow men. There was an Ennius, and in process of time a Lucilius, and a Lucretius, before Virgil and Horace; even after Chaucer there was a Spenser, a Harington, a Fairfax, before Waller and Denham were in being; and our numbers were in their nonage till these last appeared.9

Dryden, in the poetical translations of his later life, underlines the history of poetry that commences with Chaucer, and the continuity that completes yet challenges and supersedes what has gone before was extended to the criticism of poetry by Pope, who read Thomas Speght’s black-​letter text of Chaucer (1598).10 When Pope, who translated and modernized Chaucer, remodels Horace by following Boileau, as he does in his Essay on Criticism (1711), he stands in cultural continuity with a classic statement of principle, theory, demeanor, and taste. Other prehistorical forms include Thomas Sprat’s “Life of Cowley” (1668) and Bishop Francis Atterbury’s preface to the poems of Waller (1690), where the prefatory material offers a biographical narrative of the respective poets.11 Various genres meanwhile—​dictionaries, separately printed lives, volumes of “beauties,” collections of anecdotal material (such as that

8 

John Dryden, “The Art of Poetry … Made English,” lines 111–​24, 131–​40, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1956–​2000), vol. ii, pp. 127–​8. 9  Works of John Dryden, vol. v, pp. 70–​1. 10  Pope’s own copy of this edition contains his annotations and underlinings. For Pope on Chaucer, see Joseph Spence (1730), Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), vol. i, p. 179. 11  Thomas Sprat, “An Account of the Life and Writings of Mr. Abraham Cowley,” in Works (London, 1668); Francis Atterbury, preface to The Second Part of Mr. Waller’s Poems (London, 1690).

 

704   Philip Smallwood of Joseph Spence), biographical and bibliographical work, editorial commentary, together with alphabetical catalogs of the poets—​contextualize histories as records of information about poets and their works, and they express the heterogeneous forms that exist prior to, and alongside, the narrative “history.” One of the earliest—​John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, Chiefly of Contemporaries … between the Years 1669–​1696—​mingles accounts of poets with sketches of other learned, political, and eminent historical figures to a total of more than 400 biographies. The earliest poet on Aubrey’s record is Chaucer, and his biographical entry extends to about a page. Shakespeare and the Elizabethan poets are entered in large numbers with poets later examined in Johnson’s Lives. These include Abraham Cowley, John Denham, Samuel Butler, the Earl of Rochester, Edmund Waller, and John Dryden (who gets a handful of lines and a blank page with the hope that, as concerns his biography, “He will write it for me himselfe”).12 Among such seminal compendia is Winstanley’s Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687). Winstanley attempts a rough chronological ordering of some 168 poets from “the time of K. William the Conqueror to the Reign of … King James II” (Robert of Gloucester to Sir Roger L’Estrange), with reference to quoted extracts from their work, and he advances some cursory opinions upon them. These are sometimes very general, sometimes partisan, while Winstanley seeks “in so short an Epitome to lay a Groundwork, on which may be built a sumptuous Structure.”13 Giles Jacob’s two-​volume Poetical Register; or, The Lives and Characters of All the English Poets with an Account of Their Writings (1723) resembles Winstanley in its point of chronological departure, is generally fuller in its accounts of individual poets, and in the second volume encompasses some 208 individual poets. The volume also contains an essay on “The Rise, Progress, Beauty, etc. of All Sorts of Poetry.”14 The Theophilus Cibber–​Robert Shiels Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (5 vols., 1753) offers a more developed set of critical biographies. Cibber’s “Lives” not only catalog information but quote extracts and produce evaluations of poets’ work, sometimes reflective of contemporary taste and sometimes of a corrective nature.15 The collection, which commences with Chaucer, was an important source for Johnson’s Lives. In his preface to the General Biography (1799–​1815), John Aikin writes in the wake of Johnson on the problems of valuation that make it difficult to select biographical entries on literary figures: The class known by the general term of writers has presented to us difficulties of selection more embarrassing than any of those hitherto mentioned. It comprehends many whose claims on the biographer are surpassed by none… . Desirous of rendering our work as well a book of reference for the use of men of letters, as a store of biographical reading, we have extended our notices of authors much beyond what the single circumstance of remaining celebrity would warrant… . We are sensible, however, that, with respect to the individuals who come under this description, infinite differences of opinion must prevail.16

12 

“Brief Lives” … by John Aubrey, between the Years 1669 and 1696, ed. Andrew Clark, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), vol. i, pp. 170–​1, 241. 13  William Winstanley, Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (London, 1687), A3v. 14  Giles Jacob, The Poetical Register, 2 vols. (London, 1723), vol. ii, pp. xvii–​xxvi. 15  Theophilus Cibber [i.e., Robert Shiels], The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, 5 vols. (London, 1753). 16  John Aikin, General Biography, 10 vols. (London, 1799–​1815), vol. i, p. 5.

 

Histories   705 Aikin’s entries on authors suggest the movement and manner of certain stretches of biographical writing in Johnson’s Lives, while the conclusion to his entry on “Addison,” for example, offers a literary-​critical summation via direct allusion to Johnson’s work.17 Histories may be used as works of reference from which historical data might be extracted; but as we come to understand the term through Warton and Johnson, works of reference are not histories.18 The developing form of history tells the story of poetry, introduces new kinds of truth-​claim into the critical discussion of the genre, a heightened consciousness of method, and an instinct for generalization in combination with attention to detail. There is a willingness to examine the historical form itself in the process of writing histories, and new narratives arise from the period’s broadening of taste. We encounter “the history of poetry” as a critical genre now able to raise its head above the rampant opinion-​mongering, interest, party, peevishness, and triumphalism of the unregulated criticism that Pope had subjected to criticism. One of the ways in which the critic of poetical literature came to attract serious regard in the eighteenth century, was, then, the closer alignment of the critic and the historian.

Thomas Warton’s History The History of English Poetry from the Close of the Eleventh to the Commencement of the Eighteenth Century (1774–​91) by the poet laureate, Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and the Society of Antiquaries, Thomas Warton, develops the possibilities of a poetical “history” to the point of securing definitive status for his chosen form. Warton’s consciousness of his purpose marks a new scholarly enterprise that is equally part of the history of criticism,19 and with Warton we move from assimilation of the past to its distantiation. Warton’s History of English Poetry in three volumes (with the fragments of a fourth unfinished volume) defines the idea of a history of poetry, just as Boswell’s “Johnson” defines modern biography. His antiquarian perspective enlivens cultural comparison: “We look back,” writes Warton in his preface, “on the savage condition of our ancestors with the triumph of superiority.” And he continues: we are pleased to mark the steps by which we have been raised from rudeness to elegance: and our reflections on this subject are accompanied with a conscious pride, arising in great measure from a tacit comparison of the infinite disproportion between the feeble efforts of remote ages, and our present improvements in knowledge. (vol. i, p. i)

Warton’s formula for the writing of history to some extent resembles the digressive character of his brother Joseph’s method as a literary critic. He describes his historical procedure as walking the line between the thematic and the merely annalistic: I have chose to exhibit the history of our poetry in a chronological series: not distributing my matter into detached articles, of periodical divisions, or of general heads. Yet I have not

17 

Ibid., vol. i, p. 51. For a wider definition of “history” see April London, Literary History Writing, 1770–​1820 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 19  For the making of Warton’s History see History, ed. Fairer, vol. i, pp. 1–​70. 18 

 

706   Philip Smallwood always adhered so scrupulously to the regularity of annals, but that I have often deviated into incidental digressions; and have sometimes stopped in the course of my career, for the sake of recapitulation, for the purpose of collecting scattered notices into a single and uniform point of view, for the more exact inspection of a topic which required separate consideration, or for a comparative survey of the poetry of other nations. (vol. i, pp. iii–​iv)

An alternative scheme for a taxonomic history, devised by Pope, was transmitted to Warton personally via his fellow poets William Mason and Thomas Gray; but he rejected it in favor of the narrative-​digressive compromise he describes here.20 Working to this plan, he determines not to exclude drama from the purview of poetry, but not to deviate too far in its direction either; he defends his practice of lavish quotation (the giving of “specimens” of poetry) on the grounds that many of the early poems are hitherto unknown. His history functions as an act of scholarly mediation between the early native texts and a developing taste in the present of the eighteenth century for nonclassical antiquity: this Warton’s History partly serves and partly calls into being. Johnson famously appeals to, and on one occasion in the Lives of the Poets delights to concur with, the “common reader’s” experience of a favorite poem by Thomas Gray;21 but Warton writes poetical history on the understanding that many will not actually have read the poetical texts he historicizes or know the poets, even when they know of them. In this respect his history falls somewhere between a narrative of poetical development, tradition, and innovation from the eleventh century, and a sampler, an anthology, or a “beauties.” Yet like his brother he cannot resist the temptation to bring more examples in. We find him having consciously to restrain this tendency: I could give many more ample specimens of the romantic poems of these nameless minstrells, who probably flourished before or about the reign of Edward second. But it is neither my inclination nor intention to write a catalogue, or compile a miscellany. It is not to be expected that this work should be a general repository of our ancient poetry. (vol. i, pp. 207–​8)

That said, the temptation to compile a “general repository” regularly gets the better of him—​ there is often an outburst of deeply felt personal enthusiasm which fights against and temporarily retards the narrative flow. Warton feels patriotically duty-​bound to bring all his findings into the light, and he regrets the parlous state of neglect for the jewels of English literary and poetical creativity buried in the archives: “I cannot however help observing, that English literature and English poetry suffer, while so many pieces of this kind still remain concealed and forgotten in our MSS. libraries” (vol. i, pp. 208–​9). In the modern age, writes Warton, historical and critical values are connected closely. The condition of present culture is at stake: “the curiosity of the antiquarian is connected with taste and genius, and his researches tend to display the progress of human manners, and to illustrate the history of society” (vol. i, p. 209).22 The fraternal relation between Thomas and Joseph reflects and encourages the new audience for early texts and binds historical enquiry to the cultivation of taste. But Warton’s

20 

On the rejected scheme, see History, ed. Fairer, vol. i, pp. iv–​v. On Gray’s Elegy Johnson rejoiced to “concur with the common reader”: see Johnson, Lives, vol. iv, p. 184. 22  Cf. John Brown, The History of the Rise and Progress of Poetry through Its Several Species (Newcastle, 1764), whose focus ranges outside the English tradition. 21 

 

Histories   707 appeal to “the curious reader” (vol. i, p. 2 n. d) does not target a naive or uneducated audience. The lavish footnotes and detailed scholarly citation invite specialist verification, and allow Warton to identify sources with the exactness his peers might expect. Drawing on some 700 manuscripts, he suggests parallels between early texts and the borrowings from them made by later English poets. Much of his scholarship is displaced into the notes, though not to the point where the main text is decongested. As explained by David Fairer in the introduction to his facsimile edition, there remains the sense of a “work in progress” (vol. i, p. 34). Mason and Walpole both record their contemporary experience of “wading through” the history as readers (introduction, pp. 37–​8). As in the extended adjudication on Hall’s and Marston’s satires in the fragment of a fourth volume (see esp. vol. iv, pp. 67–​8), much of this history consists of careful, detailed commentaries on individual poems. Such a habit of exposition incorporates many astute critical remarks, and fine formulations expressive of a highly developed poetical taste. But Warton does not overlook the obligation of history (as held in common with criticism) to rise to a totalizing oversight of a whole period or phase of English poetical culture: Warton begins the opening section (XLIV) of the unfinished fourth volume by noting that “More poetry was written in the single reign of Elizabeth than in the two preceding centuries,” and he explains the broader cultural causes of such poetical efflorescence. He insists upon a logic of history operative within the textual disorder and contextual unknowns of the past, and he acknowledges the fertile circumstances for poetical composition, the coming together of diverse conditions whose union is conducive to poetic creativity. However digressive and opportunistic, however weighed down by citations and notes, Warton’s historical method means that he measures the rational relation of historical causes to historical effects: The same causes … which called forth genius and imagination, such as the new sources of fiction opened by the study of the classics, a familiarity with the French Italian and Spanish writers, the growing elegancies of the English language, the diffusion of polished manners, the felicities of long peace and public prosperity, and a certain freedom and activity of mind which immediately followed the national emancipation from superstition, contributed also to produce innumerable compositions in poetry. (vol. iv, p. 1)

Warton, we see, brings a sense of logical concatenation, and an awareness of social context, to the chronological evolution of poetry.

Johnson as Poetical Historian: The Lives of the Poets Pat Rogers has noted that Johnson wrote no such formal history as Warton’s and felt no guilt at not doing so.23 But there is no doubting Johnson’s deep historical interests in the literary 23  See Pat Rogers, Johnson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 105–​8. Johnson projected, but never wrote, a history of criticism. For Johnson’s engagement with historical concepts, see John A. Vance, Samuel Johnson and the Sense of History (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1984).

 

708   Philip Smallwood past. Johnson wrote personal histories in his role as a biographer; he worked on the Harleian Library catalog; he engaged with the Ossian fraud, and with the Chattertonian issues of textual authenticity: all such activities testify to historical, indeed textual-​historicist, concerns not dissimilar to Warton’s. His sense of the history of the language from its earliest manifestations informs his Dictionary etymologies and is resurgent in his notes to the language of Shakespeare. All his works convey an apprehension of the reality and remains of the past, and most prominently the literary past, as a source of comparison with the present. Johnson’s sense of its history is that poetry develops, as Warton had also concluded, from an unimproved to an improved (if far from ideal) state. Wordsworth in the next generation was to conduct a revolt against his own poetical past; but Johnson charts a “progress of poetry”: individual poets, such as Roscommon, give freely of their wares to an appreciative posterity of readers and of other poets and “may be numbered among the benefactors to English literature” (vol. ii, p. 23). Generosity of spirit is accorded to both points on the historical scale. Successive poets each make their contribution independently to this expanding transhistorical community. Originality and innovation are thrown into relief by the historical point of view that sets fresh achievements in time. This pattern comes out memorably in Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare (1765): Shakespeare must have looked upon mankind with perspicacity, in the highest degree curious and attentive. Other writers borrow their characters from preceding writings, and diversify them only by the accidental appendages of present manners; the dress is a little varied, but the body is the same. Our authour had both matter and form to provide; for except the characters of Chaucer, to whom I think he is not much indebted, there were no writers in English, and perhaps not many in other modern languages, which shewed life in its native colours. (Johnson, Works, vol. vii, p. 88)

Again in the same Preface: “To [Shakespeare] we must ascribe the praise, unless Spenser may divide it with him, of having first discovered to how much smoothness and harmony the English language could be softened” (vol. vii, p. 90). This sensitivity to the decisive turns of history, and the credit that is owed to the poets who made them, shapes the narrative of the Lives of the Poets (1779–​81), where historical understanding serves criticism by supplying luminous comparisons.24 Johnson can write of the young William Congreve that, “Among all the efforts of early genius which literary history records, I doubt whether any one can be produced that more surpasses the common limits of nature than the plays of Congreve” (Lives, vol. iii, p. 68); and again, it is Congreve’s originality to which Johnson accords praise: “Congreve has merit of the highest kind; he is an original writer, who borrowed neither the models of his plot, nor the manner of his dialogue” (vol. iii, pp. 70–​1). From the very beginning of the Lives the temporal depth of Johnson’s perspective is apparent as he reassesses the past of the seventeenth-​century poetical scene for the present: “About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets” (Lives, vol. i, pp. 199–​200). Johnson writes historically when he thinks about the impact of the Metaphysicals upon later poets: “When their reputation was high, they had undoubtedly more imitators, than time has left behind. Their immediate successors, 24  For historical “sensibility” in the Lives, see April London, “Johnson’s Lives and the Genealogy of Late Eighteenth-​Century Literary History,” in Philip Smallwood (ed.), Critical Pasts: Writing Criticism, Writing History (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 95–​113.

 

Histories   709 of whom any remembrance can be said to remain, were Suckling, Waller, Denham, Cowley, Cleveland, and Milton” (vol. i, p. 202). We see how a particular phase in poetry bifurcates and trifurcates into different kinds of consequent innovation: Denham and Waller sought another way to fame, by improving the harmony of our numbers. Milton tried the metaphysick style only in his lines upon Hobson the carrier. Cowley adopted it, and excelled his predecessors, having as much sentiment, and more musick. Suckling neither improved versification, nor abounded in conceits. The fashionable stile remained chiefly with Cowley; Suckling could not reach it, and Milton disdained it. (vol. i, p. 202)

Sometimes, noticing how original a poet has been makes Johnson willing to suspend judgments of value to put on record the importance of formal changes. Thus “Cowley was, I believe, the first poet that mingled Alexandrines at pleasure with the common heroick of ten syllables, and from him Dryden borrowed the practice, whether ornamental or licentious” (vol. i, p.  233). Sometimes, literary-​historical knowledge must check unwarranted claims to originality. Of Butler’s Hudibras:  “We must not … suffer the pride which we assume as the countrymen of Butler to make any encroachment upon justice, nor appropriate those honours which others have a right to share. The poem of Hudibras is not wholly English; the original idea is to be found in the history of Don Quixote” (Lives, vol. i, p. 215). Here we apprehend how the historical, political, and social context necessary to appreciate old poetry can erode with the passage of time: Much … of that humour which transported the last century with merriment is lost to us, who do not know the sour solemnity, the sullen superstition, the gloomy moroseness, and the stubborn scruples of the ancient Puritans; or, if we knew them, derive our information only from books, or from tradition, have never had them before our eyes, and cannot but by recollection and study understand the lines in which they are satirised. Our grandfathers knew the picture from life; we judge of the life by contemplating the picture. (vol. ii, p. 8)

Historical knowledge is again the crucial divider between past and present in the Life of Dryden. Johnson is explaining the different conditions of authorship imposed by the changing of taste over time: “in Dryden’s time the drama was very far from that universal approbation which it has now obtained” (vol. ii, p. 97). Observing a historical fact, “The playhouse was abhorred by the Puritans,” transmutes into the controlled employment of historical imagination. What undoubtedly “was” leads to what it is reasonable to deduce “would have been”: “A grave lawyer would have debased his dignity, and a young trader would have impaired his credit, by appearing in those mansions of dissolute licentiousness” (vol. ii, p. 97). Johnson comments with unmitigated admiration on poets who effect changes for the good of poetry that cannot be reversed. Dryden was the great watershed in English poetry for Johnson: the veneration with which his name is pronounced by every cultivator of English literature, is paid to him as he refined the language, improved the sentiments, and tuned the numbers of English Poetry… . There was … before the time of Dryden no poetical diction, no system of words at once refined from the grossness of domestick use, and free from the harshness of terms appropriated to particular arts… . The new versification … may be considered as owing its establishment to Dryden; from whose time it is apparent that English poetry has had no tendency to relapse to its former savageness. (vol. ii, pp. 123–​4)

 

710   Philip Smallwood A little later, after a glance at Jonson, Feltham, Sandys, Holyday, and Cowley, Johnson concludes that “It was reserved for Dryden to fix the limits of poetical liberty, and give us just rules and examples of translation” (vol. ii, p. 125). Thus the great writer builds on the small advances of his minor predecessors; he is the historical effect of a historical cause. Denham “appears to have been one of the first that understood the necessity of emancipating translation from the drudgery of counting lines and interpreting single words” (Lives, vol. i, p. 239). Such pathbreaking poets, quite minor in themselves, give the progress of poetry a helping hand; they prepare the way for great geniuses to thrive and to realize their greatness, and they contribute to the general well-​being of poetry. So Denham (again) wrote versions of Virgil which “are not pleasing; but they taught Dryden to please better” (vol. i, p. 239). Roscommon, “very much to his honour,” is (“perhaps”) “the only correct writer in verse before Addison” (vol. ii, p. 200). John Philips, in The Splendid Shilling, “has the uncommon merit of an original design” (vol. ii, p. 69), while in general it can be said that “if he had written after the improvements made by Dryden, it is reasonable to believe that he would have admitted a more pleasing modulation of numbers into his work” (vol. ii, p. 69). Matthew Prior, commendably, “was one of the first that resolutely endeavoured at correctness” (vol. iii, p. 62) and at the time he composed his verses, “we had not recovered from our Pindarick infatuation” (vol. iii, p. 63): “what he received from Dryden [in versification] he did not lose” (vol. iii, p. 62). Waller, for his part, “added something to our elegance of diction” (vol. ii, p. 55). Johnson in this spirit offers a corrective to general opinion on the overlooked “thoughts” of Waller’s poems, which had “that grace of novelty, which they are now often supposed to want by those who, having already found them in later books, do not know or enquire who produced them first. This treatment is unjust. Let not the original author lose by his imitators” (vol. ii, p. 54). And in order that his reader might see for himself what Waller’s originality amounts to, Johnson then quotes a “specimen” from Fairfax’s translation of the Gerusalemme liberata of Tasso, which “after Mr. Hoole’s translation, will perhaps not be soon reprinted” (vol. ii, p. 55). Johnson was conscious from the example of Dryden that a writer could over time lose himself in his own luster. Like Warton, Johnson is careful to distinguish the knowable from the probable. In the Life of Roscommon he responds to an anecdote attributed by Fenton to Aubrey that “ought not … to be omitted, because better evidence of a fact cannot easily be found than is here offered, and it must be by preserving such relations that we may at last judge how much they are to be regarded” (vol. ii, p. 18). Johnson is willing to correct nonliterary historians when they seem inaccurate on matters pertaining to literature. He takes Clarendon to task in his Life of Waller for mistaking the time when Waller began to write poetry (vol. ii, p. 45).

Method and Audience in  the History of Poetry The major works of Warton and Johnson suggest, then, distinct but related forms of the hybrid—​criticism functioning as history, history as criticism—​that is essential to the history of poetry. But the Lives also functions independently of the historical imperatives that guide

 

Histories   711 Warton. The deficiencies of the biographical procedure, as against the historical, reflect Johnson’s tragic sense of the passage of time in human life: “History may be formed from permanent monuments and records; but Lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing every day less, and in a short time is lost for ever” (Life of Addison, in Lives, vol. iii, p. 18). Johnson’s temperamental difference from Warton’s exuberant delight in novelty and discovery is marked by a philosophical resignation in the face of his contracted task: “To adjust the minute events of literary history is tedious and troublesome; it requires indeed no great force of understanding, but often depends upon enquiries which there is no opportunity of making, or is to be fetched from books and pamphlets not always at hand” (Life of Dryden, in Lives, vol. ii, p. 98). At the cost of a more tensioned argument, Warton frequently reminds us of his personal contact with early books and with original manuscripts, the ones he had “at hand,” with the implicit invitation to check his conclusions and those of other textual historians on whom he has drawn. While Johnson often makes plain enough the origins of the information he has acquired, or comments on its reliability, he does not construct a textual apparatus for his sources. Perhaps because the Lives remains at some level in the implied service to an edition of the poets, he feels no particular obligation to do more. It is not that Johnson did not take trouble or consult widely, particularly on the biographical details of poets’ lives. But the life in literature that is lived by Johnson is less marked by the dusty tedium of the library stacks. It seems more suggestive of the free conversational exchange of critical opinion on the basis of what comes “at hand” in the moment of composition, as a proxy for what—​in the process of talk—​comes to mind. These different methods speak to different, but overlapping, readerships. Both critics use quotation to bring lost literature to the notice of readers. Warton included many long illustrative quotations in his text and yet more in his notes. As in the Life of Cowley, Johnson quotes many poems in part or entire and passages from major poems in the Life of Dryden. He reprints Luke Milbourne’s strictures on Dryden’s Virgil because, although “the world has forgotten his book,” “his attempt has given him a place in literary history” (vol. ii, p. 144). Johnson’s reasons for reproducing long quotations from Dryden’s “Notes and Observations on the Empress of Morocco” resemble Warton’s determination to satisfy the “curious reader”: “as the pamphlet, though Dryden’s, has never been thought worthy of republication, and is not easily to be found, it may gratify curiosity to quote it more largely” (vol. ii, p. 85). The quotation extends to several pages of rant at the expense of the tragedy, and is rounded off with one of the shortest sentences in the entire Lives of the Poets. Johnson can bear the travesty of critical writing no longer: “Enough of Settle” (vol. ii, p. 93). When Johnson at one point quotes some long passages from Pope’s translation of the Iliad in order to compare versions, he checks himself and calls the process to a halt: “Of these specimens every man who has cultivated poetry, or who delights to trace the mind from the rudeness of its first conceptions to the elegance of its last, will naturally desire a greater number; but most other readers are already tired, and I am not writing only to poets and philosophers” (Life of Pope, in Lives, vol. iv, 23). Johnson’s source of information is generally his own memory, or the recollections and findings of other scholars, and often acquired via personal contact, conversation, and correspondence. A great deal that Warton discusses in the early stages of his history has not survived within the literary canon. It may, however, remain of great interest to (say) specialists in medieval literature, and what Warton unearths, prints, or reprints, often inspired the work of poets

 

712   Philip Smallwood who came to be regarded as classics and who have survived better. Johnson, whose curiosity concerning poetry’s past is held in tension with his strong antipathy of good to bad, has by comparison done more to unburden the present of the past. Yet a pattern of development is shared with Warton, who can appeal to a similar process of clarification and refinement of the poetical language. At the commencement of section II he writes: Hitherto we have been engaged in examining the state of our poetry from the conquest to the year 1200, or rather afterwards. It will appear to have made no very rapid improvement from that period. Yet as we proceed, we shall find the language losing much of its antient barbarism and obscurity, and approaching more nearly to the dialect of modern times. (Warton, History, vol. i, p. 43)

As in Johnson, the sense of poetic improvement depends upon the state of the language. The opening of section III seems to suggest what is lost as well as gained as linguistic barbarism is left behind: “the character of our poetical composition began to be changed about the reign of the first Edward… . a taste for ornamental and even exotic expression gradually prevailed over the rude simplicity of the native English phraseology” (vol. i, p. 109). From time to time Warton can suggest how the improvement in historical method is related to a more analytical and skeptical approach to literary evidence: It was indeed the fashion for the historians of these times [the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries], to form such a general plan as would admit all the absurdities of popular tradition. Connection of parts, and uniformity of subject, were as little studied as truth. Ages of ignorance and superstition are more affected by the marvelous than by plain facts; and believe what they find written, without discernment or examination. (vol. i, p. 137)

As a historical vision of how skeptical intelligence informs narrative method, this resonates with the comments in the Preface to Shakespeare, where Johnson reflects on the intellectual context of Shakespeare’s time when “The tales, with which the infancy of learning was satisfied, exhibited only the superficial appearances of action, related the events but omitted the causes, and were formed for such as delighted in wonders rather than truth” (Works, vol. vii, p. 88). In his discussion of the medieval religious drama, Warton objects to the impropriety of treating religious themes comically: “an enlightened age would not have chosen such subjects for theatrical exhibition” (History, vol. i, pp. 242–​3).25 Johnson had likewise objected to the mixing of poetry with religion in certain of the later English poets. The congeniality of mind emerges in Warton’s allusion to the first page of Johnson’s preface to the Dictionary, where he pays an eloquent compliment to Johnson for his combination of historical perspective and critical faculties: “The most illustrious ornament of the reign of Edward the third, and of his successor Richard the second, was Jeffrey Chaucer; a poet with whom the history of our poetry is by many supposed to have commenced; and who has been pronounced, by a critic of unquestionable taste and discernment, to be the first English versifier who wrote poetically” (vol. i, p. 341). Johnson saw himself as contributing to “the history of our poetry” at least partly in Warton’s sense—​as scholarship made manifest in a narrative organization. In the

25 

Cf. Johnson on Cowley’s Davideis: see Life of Cowley, in Lives, vol. i, pp. 223–​4.

 

Histories   713 advertisement to the Lives, while laying claim to historical form for his critical biographies, Johnson can apologize for possible inaccuracies when dating works in the Life of Dryden: “In this minute kind of History, the succession of facts is not easily discovered” (vol. i, p. 189). And he complains at the beginning of the Life of Cowley that in his biography of the poet, Sprat had produced “a funeral oration rather than a history” (vol. i, p. 191). In his own writing about Cowley—​rebalancing praise and blame—​Johnson perhaps thought he had produced something more worthy of the term. He may not have formalized his conception, but Johnson sees how time changes the way time itself is conceived. Thus “the gradual change of manners,” he writes, “though imperceptible in the process, appears great when different times, and those not very distant, are compared” (Life of Dryden, in Lives, vol. ii, p. 110). In Johnson’s historical outlook, resembling that of R. G. Collingwood in the twentieth century, one looks into the self for an understanding of the past: “We do not always know our own motives,” Johnson avers, on the reasons for the “false magnificence” of Dryden’s plays (vol. ii, p. 149), including himself in the plural possessive.

Memorial and Research in Poetical History It is well known that Johnson’s Lives became something other, formally, than their author had first set out to make them, and his great work of literary biography blends the ambitions of literary criticism with what is in practice a history of English poetry covering 150 years. In this, Johnson stands markedly apart from the recent historians of poetry who speak of the waning of the “neoclassical” movement, of the rise of “Romanticism,” or the significance of the “pre-​Romantic.” His critical deliberations start and end as life-​narratives of the poets and the essential human interest of the author is at the center of every discussion. Of course, certain genres, such as epic or pastoral, are recurrent themes in the Lives, and on special topics such as occasional poetry, rhyme as against blank verse, devotional verse, sound and sense, or translation, he can wax almost as digressive as Warton. (The character of “work in progress,” applied to Warton’s History, might be only slightly less apt to account for the diverse materials that are gathered in the Lives, harnessed from other sources, imported, recycled, contracted out, or appended.) The chronological order of the Lives was adjusted after the first edition according to the dates of the deaths of the poets. Johnson had originally intended the Lives should start with Chaucer, and his respect for the orderings of time, as a condition of mental organization, is memorably recorded in his educational essay, the preface to the Preceptor (1748), where he describes “Chronology and History” as “one of the most natural Delights of the Human Mind.”26 When, accordingly, his critical biographies are taken together they express the project of the English poets, with their failures, false starts, and dead ends noted on the way. To this narrative his own verse made a distinguished contribution that he cannot for obvious reasons discuss. But, although he does not obtrude his own role in a developing English poetry, the history within the Lives was informed by his witness testimony to literary-​historical facts, and by

26 

Prefaces and Dedications, p. 182.

 

714   Philip Smallwood the conception of the poetical past he inherited from the previous age. The moral meaning of Johnsonian history builds on the narrative sketched in the lines (earlier quoted at length) that Dryden and Soame translated vis-​à-​vis English poetry from Boileau’s Art poétique (“The Art of Poetry,” lines 111–​20, 131–​42). In their English version Dryden and Soame had substituted Waller for Malherbe. According to Johnson, writing in his Life of Waller a century later: By the perusal of Fairfax’s translation of Tasso, to which, as Dryden relates, [Waller] confessed himself indebted for the smoothness of his numbers, and by his own nicety of observation, he had already formed such a system of metrical harmony as he never afterwards much needed, or much endeavoured, to improve. Denham corrected his numbers by experience, and gained ground gradually upon the ruggedness of his age; but what was acquired by Denham, was inherited by Waller. (vol. ii, p. 28)

This processionary, tutelary, dynastic, collaborative, history embedded within the Lives is conceived with the hindsight of someone seeming to stand at the end of history. Johnson shares with Warton the sense of cause and consequence, of a rise and of a fall, of episodes, of ends achieved, of lines of development exhausted, ancient possibilities closed off for good, and of new avenues cleared.27 Although Warton died before his work was complete, a “grand narrative” is the task of both writers. Thus Dryden, sustained by many minor poets, gave something to English poetry which it had never had before and performed a radical transformation: “What was said of Rome, adorned by Augustus, may be applied by an easy metaphor to English poetry embellished by Dryden, lateritiam invenit, marmoream reliquit, he found it brick, and he left it marble” (vol. ii, p. 155). Pope perfected what Dryden had begun. With Milton we have an English epic that ranks with the classical productions of Greece and Rome and a going forward in European poetry as a regress to its roots. With Gray we see (in Johnson’s considered judgment) a disintegration, a withering and a petering out; with James Thomson—​as if for the first time—​we make contact with the realities of rural nature as one might see them with one’s own eyes. (Wordsworth, who credits Johnson with little or nothing in the development of his own taste, could only agree.) With the “Metaphysicals” we have the exemplar of a poetical fashion which arrived as an Italian import, overwhelmed poetical style for a while in the seventeenth century, and then passed into history, leaving its traces, as such phenomena always must—​ not an aberration quite, but not quite part of the greater continuum either. Roughly speaking, the earlier Lives record the improvements in poetry in the first half of the chronological range they cover; the later ones suggest how poetry has begun to fall away; how a refined style can become overrefined; and how the progress of correctness cools the poetical spirit. The tipping point in this turn of the narrative comes in the Life of Addison at the moment where Johnson is commenting on the success of Addison’s tragedy of Cato, a play which “has introduced or confirmed among us the use of dialogue too declamatory, of unaffecting elegance, and chill philosophy” (vol. iii, p. 27); “The versification which he had learned from Dryden,” writes Johnson, “he debased rather than refined … his lines are very smooth in Rosamond, and too smooth in Cato” (vol. iii, p. 36). 27 

Historical causation can override chronology. In the Life of Pope, Johnson attributes Dennis’s attack on Pope’s Essay on Criticism to Addison’s praise. But as the Yale editor points out, the Essay was published on May 15, Dennis’s Reflections on June 20, Addison’s Spectator 253 on Dec. 20. See Lives of the Poets, ed. John H. Middendorf, in Works, vol. xxiii, p. 1048 n. 5.

 

Histories   715 Throughout the Lives poets are born, write poetry, and die, sometimes prematurely, like Rochester, or at the height of their powers when at the end of their lives, like Dryden; sometimes through tragic and progressive decay, like Swift, but sometimes ludicrously, suddenly, and with a total absence of point, like Edmund Smith, or (depending on which story appeals to you most) like Thomas Otway, the dramatist alleged to have choked on a morsel of bread. Johnson locates texts by these poets within a moral and comic narrative of human aspiration, triumph, absurdity, disappointment, and desire, and while Warton saw the history of poetry as giving access to the history of society, Johnson’s context is more psychological than social. For all their efforts in the search for fame, the work of most poets is very quickly erased by time, relieving the present from the dead weight of the past. The consequence is that for Johnson the moral meaning of poetical history is not, as it is for Warton, preeminently an outcome of the “free exertion of research” (vol. i, p. v)—​the scholar’s heroic struggle against forgetting conceived as an antiquarian effort of cultural completion and inclusion. Nor, similarly, is it the retrieval of as much embalmed or decomposed trace material as Warton can gather from the poetical graveyards of the past to vary, delight, instruct, and enrich the present. The forgetting, as Paul Ricoeur reminds us, lest we forget, throws into relief the need for critical memorials, and as Johnson’s consolatory conception of poetry would suggest, this process is the prerequisite on which life in the present depends.28

References Clingham, Greg, “Life and Literature in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets,” in Greg Clingham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 161–​91. Lipking, Lawrence, The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-​Century England (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970). London, April, “Johnson’s Lives and the Genealogy of Late Eighteenth-​Century Literary History,” in Philip Smallwood (ed.), Critical Pasts: Writing Criticism, Writing History (Lewisburg: Bucknell Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 95–​113. London, April, Literary History Writing, 1770–​1820 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Lynch, Jack, The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (Cambridge:  Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003). Perkins, David (ed.), Theoretical Issues in Literary History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991). Ricoeur, Paul, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004). Rogers, Pat, Johnson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993). Vance, John A., Samuel Johnson and the Sense of History (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1984). Wellek, René, The Rise of English Literary History (Chapel Hill:  Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1941).

28  Greg Clingham writes of Johnson’s “commemorative intelligence”: see “Life and Literature in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets,” in Greg Clingham (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), p. 162.

 

Chapter 42

Reviews Antonia Forster How could these self-​elected monarchs raise So large an empire on so small a base? In what retreat, inglorious and unknown, Did Genius sleep when Dulness seized the throne? —​Charles Churchill, The Apology

As early as 1761, only twelve years after modern book reviewing began with Ralph Griffiths’s Monthly Review and seven years after Smollett’s Critical Review joined the field, Charles Churchill’s annoyance with the Critical’s review of his work inspired The Apology’s reflection on the reviewers and their role, one of what were to be many poems in which poets reviewed reviewing, turning the tables on the reviewers who had the temerity to review their work. As the Monthly Review comments sardonically in 1775 after quoting one poet’s “Recipe to Make a Modern Critic”: To confess the truth, it is a provoking thing, that a man cannot write a bad or silly book, but he must be told on’t by those cursed critics!—​What golden times would Authors have, were it not for this generation of vipers! It is amazing that all Grubstreet does not rise against them, and get them totally exterminated by act of parliament! (MR, 52 (1775), 92–​3)1

Even with the Monthly Review’s initial innocuous-​sounding promise merely to provide information to readers who “would choose to have some idea of a book before they lay out their money or time on it,”2 we see the sowing of seeds of trouble with authors. The reviewers could decline to assess James Kirkpatrick’s poem The Sea-​Piece—​“But as our business is to

1 

Review of Modern Midnight Conversation; or, Matrimonial Dialogues: Adapted to the Times. All references to the principal reviews and magazines with review sections—​the Monthly Review (MR), the Critical Review (CR), the London Review (LR), the English Review (ER), the Analytical Review (AR), the British Critic (BC), Anti-​Jacobin Review (AJR)—​will be thus abbreviated and given parenthetically in the text. 2  This advertisement is bound following the table of contents at the beginning of vol. 1 of the Monthly Review in the Bodleian Library’s copy (Griffiths’s own annotated set), but is bound at the end of the first number, i.e., between pp. 80 and 81, in the British Library’s copy.

 

Reviews   717 enter no farther into the province of criticism, than just so far as may be indispensibly necessary to give some idea of such books as come under our consideration, we shall confine ourselves to a more general view of this …” (MR, 2 (1749–​50), 260)—​but this did not last long. Had the reviewers stuck to this approach and followed the abstract-​and-​extract method in use in the learned journals preceding the Monthly, there would still have been complaints about the nature and extent of abstracts and the choice and length of extracts, neither process being neutral, but of course the Monthly was very soon giving opinions. Acting as “tasters to the public” and apprising “the connoisseur of what is, or is not, fit for his table” (MR, 13 (1755), 399) involves the constant offering of judgments.

A State of Warfare Public battles between and about authors were certainly nothing new at this time but the age of reviewing saw a great increase in this in-​fighting and the reviewers were at the center of it. “The Republic of Letters is in a Kind of perpetual Civil War, and the beginning of every Winter may be considered as the Opening of a new Literary Campaign,” writes one correspondent to the Public Advertiser in 1761. He goes on: One would imagine, that every Author is a natural Enemy to every other Author; and that the Persuit of Letters, which should refine and humanize the Mind, serves only to embitter it. In their own Reputation too they are tender even to Soreness, and do not consider, that all, who court Applause, may, at the same Time, be said to solicit Censure. Other Men differ, and are reconciled in Secret; but the Contention of Authors is studiously carried on in the most open Manner, and they cut each other to Pieces, like Prize-​fighters, for the Diversion of the rest of the World.3

In 1760 Arthur Murphy writes that the “situation of an author has very justly been called a state of warfare,” and explains that this is because “if he writes with success, his less happy contemporaries will be provoked to all the little arts of envy and detraction; if he writes ill, he is sure to be told of it by as bad writers as himself.”4 Such references are many in this decade; Charles Churchill, himself the central figure in a many-​sided battle lasting several years, laments that “Authors, alone, with more than savage rage, | Unnat’ral war with brother authors wage.”5 By 1764 Mr. Puff the publisher, a character in Samuel Foote’s Patron, explains the simple facts to a poet: “Writing, writing is, (as I may say) Mr. Dactyl, a sort of a warfare where none can be victor that is the least afraid of a scar.”6 It may be taken for granted, as the anonymous author (Thomas Letchworth) of A Morning’s Meditation; or, A Descant on the Times: A Poem does, that anyone who “ventures out on the public stage as an author, becomes of course subject to the various criticisms of his observers,” but most authors, even those most at fault themselves in this regard, continue to object to “the keen invectives of satire, and the poison’d arrows of envy … illiberally [directed at an 3 Letter, Public Advertiser, Tuesday, Nov. 3, 1761. 4 

Arthur Murphy, A Poetical Epistle to Mr. Samuel Johnson, A.M. (London, 1760), sig. A2r. Charles Churchill, The Apology: Addressed to the Critical Reviewers (London, 1761), p. 2. 6  Samuel Foote, The Patron (London, 1764), p. 17. 5 

 

718   Antonia Forster author’s] character and productions.”7 The reviewers in all journals8 like to consider themselves above all this, but all suffer to some extent from what a correspondent to the Public Ledger calls “public detections of their partiality, disingenuity, cavil and malevolence,”9 and all make considerable contributions to the store of literary ill-​feeling even when they begin by promising to do the opposite. As “T.X. Y.Z.,” a correspondent to the Public Ledger, points out: The Monthly Reviewers have very frequently and very justly, expressed their Dislike of that illiberal Treatment which Men of Letters too often receive from each other; such Behaviour as is equally unworthy of Gentlemen, and of Scholars. And surely these Gentlemen will not contend, that literary Abuse is the exclusive Property of a Monthly Journalist. They would do well to consider, whether the Admonitions which they address to other Writers on this Head, are not sometimes equally applicable to themselves.10

Churchill’s outraged puzzlement about the “self-​elected monarchs” is echoed time and time again by other writers. A year earlier George Colman had referred, in his preface to Polly Honeycombe, to “the self-​impannelled Jury of the English Court of Criticism”11 but without overt hostility; many others are much more ferocious, beginning with Arthur Murphy. As early as 1754, in the Gray’s-​Inn Journal, Murphy had savaged the Monthly’s reviewers for their presumption in usurping “the Seat of Criticism without declaring who and what they are, without producing their Credentials, to shew the World by what Authority they act, and without previously giving undeniable Proofs of their own Ability and Taste.”12 These points continued to be raised as the century went on, with letters to newspapers expressing anger toward “a Set of Men without any Pretensions to Taste, Wit or Judgement, deciding in a most dictatorial Manner upon every literary Composition which may appear”13 and poets 7 

Thomas Letchworth, A Morning’s Meditation; or, A Descant on the Times (London, 1765), p. i. As I have described in detail in the introductions to Index to Book Reviews in England, 1749–​1774 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1990) and Index to Book Reviews in England, 1775–​1800 (London: British Library, 1997), the ranks of review journals grew and lessened periodically as the century went on and existing and new general magazines, such as the Gentleman’s and London, began to give regular space to book reviewing. The principal review journals after the first two were William Kenrick’s London Review (1775–​80), the English Review (1783–​96), the Analytical Review (1788–​99), the British Critic (1793–​1843), and the Anti-​Jacobin Review (1798–​1821). Both the Critical Review and the Monthly Review continued into the nineteenth century, the former until 1817 and the latter until 1844. For further details of the development of reviewing see also my “Book Reviewing,” in Michael F. Suarez, S.J. and Michael L. Turner (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume V, 1695– 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 631–​48; James G. Basker, Tobias Smollett, Critic and Journalist (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1988); Frank Donoghue, The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-​Century Literary Careers (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996); and Derek Roper, Reviewing before the “Edinburgh,” 1788–​1802 (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1979). Additional information may be found in Alvin Sullivan (ed.), British Literary Magazines: The Augustan Age and the Age of Johnson, 1698–​1788 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983); and British Literary Magazines: The Romantic Age, 1789–​1836 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983). 9  Letter, signed “Honestus,” Public Ledger, Tuesday, Oct. 29, 1765. 10  Letter, signed “T.X. Y.Z.” and dated Dec. 10, Public Advertiser, Friday, Dec. 20, 1765. 11  George Colman the Elder, Polly Honeycombe: A Dramatick Novel of One Act (London, 1760), p. vi. 12  Gray’s-​Inn Journal, 99 (Sept. 7, 1754); repr. 2 vols. (London, 1756), vol. 2, pp. 297–​8. 13  Letter, signed “Candidus” and dated from George’s Coffee-​House, Dec. 24, 1765, Public Advertiser, Friday, Dec. 24, 1765. 8 

 

Reviews   719 attacking “these self-​constituted Critics, these Russian autocrators in literature.”14 In prefaces and lines of verse, reviewers are abused as “snarling Critics, who assume the right | To save or damn, just as your maggots bite,”15 or “self-​named monarchs of the laurel’s crown, | Props of the press, and tutors of the town!”16 The real problem, though, is the success of what so many authors call impostures or usurpation. The Monthly Review points this out in response to an attack in 1791, Modern Poets, a Satire: To Which Is Prefixed a Dedication to the Monthly, the Critical, and the Analytical Reviewers: In his dedication, to the Reviewers, the poet glances at their critical office, by styling them “self-​ created.” The self-​creation of our critical judges has often drawn a sneer from those culprits who have fallen under their censure: but may it not be observed, that by whatever means the rod has been placed in their hands, it seems to be continued there by the common consent of the public?—​no bad sign of its being generally exercised to their satisfaction. Were it otherwise, the decrees of the Court of Criticism would often be reversed:—​but when, and in what instances, has this happened? (MR, n.s., 6 (1791), 228)

Thirty years earlier Robert Lloyd complains of the “monstrous giants, dreadful tall reviews” and notes that there is “No Right of Common now on Pindus’ Hill, | While all our Tenures are by Critics Will,”17 and the problem continues. It is a sad fact that, whatever authors say, far too many readers “submit to be directed in their Choice of new Publications by a Set of reviewers and Compilers of magazines, who without either Taste or Learning, or Common-​sense, presume once a Month, or oftener, to pass Sentence upon every new Performance in the Literary Way.”18

Delusions of Talent With conflicting aims—​for poets, public success bringing fame and profit, and for review journals, public success from persuading the public that their literary judgments were worth paying for—​the relationship between poets and their reviewers was never likely to be peaceful in what the Monthly Review calls “the hazardous lottery of literary publication, in which the blanks are much more numerous than the prizes” (MR, 63 (1780), 400). The misery of toiling through thousands of bad poems is the source of much complaint: The sons of Grub-​street frequently rise in rebellion against our monthly decrees, tax us with partiality and ignorance, and treat us in a very hostile manner upon every occasion: yet, if the truth were known, we are the very best and most constant friends they have in the world; since, let them be never so dull, we are obliged to buy their performances. The rest of the world may forsake them; but they are still sure of one purchaser: and, if upon paying a shilling for a

14  John Sayer, The Temple of Gnidus: A Poem from the French Prose of M. Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (London, 1765), p. v. 15  Retaliation; or, The Reviewers Review’d: A Satirical Poem: By a Lady (London, 1791), p. 1. 16  Modern Manners, a Poem: In Two Cantos: By Horace Juvenal (London, 1793), p. 2. 17  Robert Lloyd, An Epistle to C. Churchill, Author of the Rosciad (London, 1761), p. 10. 18  “A Detection,” Public Advertiser, Wednesday, Jan. 1, 1772.

 

720   Antonia Forster book scarce worth a headless pin, it would be very hard to refuse us the consolation of grumbling a little at our bad bargain. (CR, 8 (1759), 412)

They grumble more than a little, of course. “What a curse upon the Reviewers is that stupid Rabble, which, without common sense, or common decency, pours forth its execrable Billingsgate from the press!” (MR, 29 (1763), 468), exclaims John Langhorne,19 and the London Review, never backward in complaining, makes a point repeated frequently by many reviewers with a reflection on “the horrid fatigue, of poring over the numerous pages of sterility and dullness, which our profession, as Reviewers, obliges us to peruse” (LR, 6 (1777), 321). While the reviewers see themselves as selfless slaves to their duty to protect the public from being cheated into wasting their time or money on worthless books, and, as a subsidiary activity, helpful and kindly dispensers of beneficial and constructive advice to authors, the authors’ view is naturally different. The many terms used by reviewers to describe their role include “tasters to the public” (MR, 13 (1755), 399), “literary pruners” (MR, 65 (1781), 390), “confessors and martyrs to true taste and ingenuity” (CR, 1 (1756), sig. A2r), “beadles of Parnassus” (MR, 38 (1768), 248), “thief-​catchers” (CR, 17 (1764), 439), “monitors to the public” (MR, 46 (1772), 97), “liege knights of the Muses” (MR, 49 (1773), 202), and “circumnavigators on the ocean of letters” (MR, 71 (1784), 12). They are also, as they see it, “watchmen engaged to give notice of whatever is likely to injure” female readers (CR, 38 (1774), 273), “designing to act with constant equity between the Writers [they] review, and the Readers [they] intend to inform or entertain” (MR, 21 (1759), 467), and, while engaged in the “delicate task of directing the public taste” (CR, 8 (1759), 271), they admit to having “inclosed what was once a common field” (CR, 30 (1770), 467). Authors, on the other hand, use many words in prose and verse to attempt to “tread down the arrogance of these literary despots” (LM, 40 (1771), 193) and to convince the world that “those ridiculous Dictators have neither taste, nor learning, nor candour” and are “Vultures who subsist on mangled Fame,” and “calm assassins of poetic worth!”20 It is certainly true that one of the reviewers’ most cherished roles is that of telling authors to stop publishing. “True criticism,” the prefatory essay to volume 11 of the Critical Review informs us, “aims at nothing else but the diminishing the number of useless volumes; first, written by conceit, and afterwards purchased by ignorance” (CR, 11 (1761), 2), and it is, they say, their duty to the public which “obliges [them] to exert [their] utmost endeavours to diminish the number of useless volumes with which it is deluged” (CR, 12 (1761), 363). Often these endeavours are expressed with brisk rudeness, arguing that “the indulgence 19  All reviewing was anonymous during this period, although some good guesses are possible for the London and Analytical reviews and James Basker (see note 8 above) has identified a number of Smollett’s reviews in the early years of the Critical. Definitive identification of reviewers has been possible for most of the articles in the Monthly Review from Griffiths’s marked-​up set now in the Bodleian Library; see Benjamin Christie Nangle, The Monthly Review First Series, 1749–​1789: Indexes of Contributors and Articles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), and The Monthly Review Second Series, 1790–​1815: Indexes of Contributors and Articles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955). Similar information is available for the very beginning of the Critical Review; see Derek Roper, “Smollett’s ‘Four Gentlemen’: The Contributors to the Critical Review,” Review of English Studies, n.s., 10 (1959), 38–​44. 20  John Armstrong, Medical Essays (London, 1773), p. 40; Reviewers Reviewed: A Familiar Epistle to Those Partial Sons of Momus (London, 1779), p. 30; Modern Manners, p. 1.

 

Reviews   721 which is shewn to many trifling performances, and the vanity of the human mind, every day embolden literary pretenders to venture their crudities into light” (CR, 31 (1771), 300) or telling one poet that “his dangling after the Muses was at best but delusive trifling” (MR, 17 (1757), 185), or another that “he will never attain to any merit in poetry,” and recommending that he “think of some other plan of making himself useful to the public” (MR, 44 (1771), 260–​1). Sometimes the advice is given in tones of kindly sorrow: It would really be criminal in us to encourage an honest, and especially a poor, man, to persist in a misapplication of his time and talents, only to increase the herd of Poetasters, with which the Pamphlet-​shops, the Magazines, the Chronicles, the Evening Posts, the Advertisers, the Gazetteers, the Weekly Journals, and even the very Almanacks, are pestered. It is said, a remedy has been found for the epidemical distemper among the cattle;—​we are sorry that no one, in this nostrum-​inventing age, has yet discovered a cure for the poetical murrain, by which so many of his Majesty’s subjects are totally lost—​to society. (MR, 32 (1765), 75)

Few poets are inclined to listen to this advice to “profess poetry no longer” (CR, 17 (1764), 429), of course. “The Gods have denied our author genius; but they have blessed him with perseverance,” writes the reviewer of the Rev. Mr. Moore’s poem A Sea Piece Written on the Coast near Mount’s Bay in Cornwall, and he goes on sadly: “If we mistake not, we admonished the reverend Mr. Moore to lay aside poetry, and confine himself to the instruction of his flock in humble prose; yet still he blunders on, regardless of Minerva and the critics” (CR, 10 (1760), 78). The problem is that so many people have delusions of poetical talent. Reviewing Cuthbert Shaw’s poem Liberty, James Grainger reflects sadly that “A fondness for poetry has deceived many a man into a belief, that he had the talents of a poet” (MR, 14 (1756), 575), and two years later A New Birth-​day Ode for 1758 causes its reviewer to reflect: “It is hard to determine which are the most apt to conceit themselves poets, the madmen, or the fools. The press seems equally obliged to both; but the Reviewers are very little obliged to either” (MR, 19 (1758), 303). There are many expressions of puzzlement, such as “What has unfortunately got into Mr. Marriott’s head, that he will needs think himself a poet, we cannot divine” (MR, 20, (1759), 135), or “How, in the name of Common Sense, did this man ever get into print!” (MR, 17 (1757), 282). Sometimes they spell out the problem in more detail: What in the name of wonder could have induced him to think he could write poetry? we shall take the liberty to tell him, that among many other qualifications, taste, judgment, fancy, and stile are absolutely necessary to a poet; and we cannot think Mr. Slade’s modesty will permit him to imagine he possesses any of them. (CR, 2 (1756), 84)

Worthy of Correction The counterpart to the reviewers’ efforts to counteract delusions and stop poets publishing is the role of helping authors. “To direct our taste, and conduct the Poet up to perfection, has ever been the true Critic’s province” (MR, 16 (1757), 427), writes Oliver Goldsmith in a review of John Home’s anonymous tragedy Douglas, but most authors do not take kindly to this. Sometimes the helpful advice follows a highly destructive review, as when Ralph Griffiths, for example, tears to shreds Thomas Drummond’s Poems Sacred to Religion and Virtue, but

 

722   Antonia Forster expresses the kindly hope that the poet “will endeavour, in his future publications, to avoid the improprieties he has fallen into, in many of the pieces now published” (MR, 15, (1756), 135). At other, less frequent, times, the advice may accompany a favorable review, as when the Critical writes of Anna Seward’s Louisa, a Poetical Novel, “Notwithstanding our high opinion of Miss Seward’s present performance, impartiality obliges us to observe that there are some reprehensible passages, which we hope to see altered in a future edition” (CR, 58 (1784), 31). A poet with some talent, “gifted with a good ear, much sensibility, and no inconsiderable degree of imagination,” may be thought to deserve help: “He is therefore worthy of correction; and we request him to consider our remarks, which have at least the merit of sincerity” (MR, n.s., 12 (1793), 438). A mixed review, such as that of Gleanings, after Thomson; or, The Village Muse in the Anti-​Jacobin Review, may also offer correction and advice: “If he be wise, he will profit by our criticism, and if he be candid, he will thank us for it. We recommend him to persevere in his poetical labours, but before publication, he would act prudently to submit them to the correction of some friendly and judicious hand” (AJR, 4 (1799), 79). The reviewers intermittently expose the pretense involved in all this when they show amazed delight when an author “does [them] the honour to avail himself of such remarks as the haste of Monthly production will permit [them] to offer” (CR, 33 (1772), 489–​90). They may say that an author “needs but to have a fault [with his rhymes] hinted to him, in order to avoid it in his future productions” (MR, 48 (1773), 318), but a more realistic expression of their views is seen in John Langhorne’s review of Thomas Percy’s anonymous ballad, The Hermit of Warkworth: We do not give ourselves the consequence to expect that the Author should alter what we here call faults, in his future editions; or that he should hereafter abandon a species of poetry, the revival of which we cannot but condemn. We give this public criticism in support of public taste, indifferent as to the reception it may meet with from the person whom it most concerns. (MR, 45 (1771), 98)

The “consolation to which every repulsed author has recourse” is described by the Critical Review as “the kind supposition that his performance was damned by those only who are actuated by rancour, envy, and malevolence” (CR, 12 (1761), 405). The idea that the reviews are staffed by hacks envious of the literary success they cannot hope to emulate is popular with authors and is given regular airing. Thomas Underwood, for example, says that the reviewers “scalp poor Authors with an envious Spite,”21 James Scott that they “damn all genius and desert, as stale | And fusty Maids at Youth and Beauty rail,”22 the anonymous author of The Seasons that “Pale Envy ever gnaws the laurel’d Page, | And ’gainst all worthy Wight doth War perpetual wage,”23 and Edward Burnaby Greene that “the monthly upstarts still from merit tear | The bays themselves can never hope to wear.”24 Evan Lloyd, too, is in no doubt that the reviewers’ problem is that “Envy never yet could bear | Those Blessings which she cannot share.”25 Cuthbert Shaw has Smollett describing his own practice in a fictitious address to the goddess Fame: 21 

Thomas Underwood, The Snarlers: A Poem (London, 1767), p. 24. James Scott, The Perils of Poetry: An Epistle to a Friend (London, 1766), p. 17. 23  The Seasons: An Imitation of Spenser (Dublin, 1752), p. 3. 24  Edward Burnaby Greene, The Satires of Juvenal Paraphrastically Imitated, and Adapted to the Times: With a Preface (London, 1763), p. 4. 25  Evan Lloyd, The Powers of the Pen: A Poem: Addressed to John Curre, Esqr. (London, 1766), p. 38. 22 

 

Reviews   723 But if, to crown the labors of my muse Thou, inauspicious, should’st the wreath refuse, Whoe’er attempts it in this scribling Age, Shall feel the Monthly spite of Critic rage; Thus spurn’d, thus disappointed of my aim, I’ll stand a bugbear in the road to Fame; Each future minion’s infant hopes undo, And blast the budding honors of his brow.26

Accusations The idea that the reviewers are corrupt is equally popular. The reviewers, as one author puts it, “write for Booksellers and their own fraternity, and, as is commonly said, will insert any Character of any Publication for a Guinea.”27 One after another, authors make assertions about the critics who “save or damn just as the authors pay,”28 saying that “other rules unknown, one rule they hold, | To deal out so much praise for so much gold,”29 or that they “To these give life, to those immediate death, | As bribes or flattery corrupt their breath.”30 The way for an author to succeed, according to Francis Fawkes and William Woty, is to bribe the Monthly Review: Thou! who art thirsty for a poet’s name, Panting for perpetuity of fame; O! tremble to increase the Muses tribe, ’Till Mother Griffiths has receiv’d a bribe: If praise, like hers, can make thy piece go down, Th’insurance premium is but half a crown; And who can blame her? for the bawd must pay In ready cash the hirelings of a day.31

All of this is suddenly too much for the Critical Review in the middle of the 1760s, and Hamilton, the journal’s printer, offers in an advertisement to pay fifty guineas to an attacker if he can “give legal Proof that Money (though they acknowledge it has been often offered) was ever accepted for the Insertion of any Character of a Book, or Pamphlet, in the Critical Review.”32 The accusations go on, and the Monthly Review writes wearily in 1778, “Insults of this nature, from disappointed and indignant Dulness, are to be expected; but intelligence 26  Cuthbert Shaw, The Race: By Mercurius Spur, Esq. with Notes: By Faustinus Scriblerus (London, 1765), pp. 14–​15. 27  John Sayer, The Temple of Gnidus: A Poem from the French Prose of M. Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (London, 1765), p. v. 28  Retaliation; or, The Reviewers Reviewed, p. 1. 29  Charles Churchill, The Candidate: A Poem (London, 1764), p. 4. 30  Thomas Vaughan, The Retort (London, 1761), p. 19. 31  Francis Fawkes and William Woty, The Poetical Calendar: Containing A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Pieces of Poetry: With Variety of Originals and Translations, by the Most Eminent Hands: Intended as a Supplement to Mr. Dodsley’s Collection (London, 1763), vol. v for May, p. 123. 32  Public Advertiser, Tuesday, Nov. 5, 1765.

 

724   Antonia Forster of the real character of such productions of the press as fall under our notice, is one of the first duties we owe to the Public;—​and if a book be trash, trash be it called” (MR, 59 (1778), 400). In 1791 John Williams (Anthony Pasquin) describes what he sees as the procedure; authors need only “send a copy of their works to the Editor of the Review with a guinea, and then they may either write the criticism themselves (which is done in nine instances out of ten) or receive more praise from the honest editor for their doggrel nonsense, than Virgil would think even just if describing his incomparable Aeneid.”33 The anonymity of the reviewers, “solemn potentates! whose secret trade | Befits the sullen solitude of shade!,”34 a trade “Founded on arts which shun the face of day, | By the same arts they still maintain their sway,”35 is a frequent matter of complaint. There are many references to “those Bush-​fighting-​Lurkers”36 and “ambush’d Critics”37 who “stab in secret, as they write unknown”38 and “level poison’d arrows in the dark.”39 There are a number of longer attacks, in prose and poetry, on this aspect of the reviewing business, but the best is certainly Churchill’s: Conscious of guilt, and fearful of the light, They lurk enshrouded in the veil of night: Safe from detraction, seize the unwary prey, And stab, like bravoes, all who come that way.40

Rules Universally Acknowledged The “Recipe to Make a Modern Critic,” published in Modern Midnight Conversation; or, Matrimonial Dialogues and reprinted in the Monthly’s review, brings up one much-​disputed point concerning reviewing in general but especially the reviewing of poetry: Two drachms of stale sense, and a scruple of wit, A lump of old learning, of taste a small bit; A line or two out of Aristotle’s rules, And a satchel of nonsense glean’d up from the schools… . (MR, 52 (1775), 92)

When pushed to the wall, the reviewers have always one argument on which to fall back—​ The Rules—​and this is seen as unanswerable. After the early years of reviewing, the rules are no longer brought out at every turn but they lie behind the reviewers’ literary pronouncements and judgments and can be flourished when necessary. John Hawkesworth writes that “rules must fashion the man which the poet is to animate; he will otherwise animate

33 

John Williams, Shrove Tuesday, a Satiric Rhapsody: By Anthony Pasquin, Esq. (London, 1791), p. iv. Modern Manners, p. 1. 35  Charles Churchill, The Apology: Addressed to the Critical Reviewers (London, 1761), p. 6. 36  Thomas Underwood, The Snarlers: A Poem (London, 1767), p. 24. 37  The Buck: A Poem (London, 1767), p. 2. 38  Thomas Vaughan, The Retort (London, 1761), p. 19. 39  Edward Burnaby Greene, The Laureat: A Poem, Inscribed to the Memory of C. Churchill (London, 1765), p. 16. 40 Churchill, The Apology, p. 4. 34 

 

Reviews   725 a monster; he will give motion without grace, and exert strength to beat the air” (MR, 41 (1769), 131), and most, probably all, of his fellow reviewers would subscribe wholeheartedly to this view. The rules, as the basis of enduring critical judgments, are seen as vital, and the reviewers’ task, at its grandest and simplest, may be summarized as keeping both literature and the public’s literary judgment in line with these rules. A good description of the reviewers’ position is given by Kenrick in his review of Fingal: The noble flights, and native excursions, of true genius are, indeed, frequently too excentric to be exactly measured by critical rules; nor is it to be wished they should be too strictly subjected to such restraint: it is expedient, nevertheless, that the mechanism and execution of every considerable performance should be compared with that standard, and examined by those laws, which have, for many ages, been allowed to constitute the perfection of that peculiar species of writing, under the denomination of which such performance is presented to the world. Criticism degenerates, otherwise, into a servile echo of the leading voices of the times, and gives encouragement for every rising genius to indulge the luxuriance of his imagination, at the hazard of being hurried, by the impetuosity of unbridled fancy, into bombast, extravagance, and absurdity. At the same time, the taste and judgment of the reader, misled by such general and undistinguishing applause, become gradually vitiated, and the very end and design of all critical institution thereby totally subverted. (MR, 26 (1762), 41–​2)

This is an important passage because it brings together ideas, explicit and implicit, scattered through the review journals’ pages but rarely given such clear expression. In the manifesto for a short-​lived review journal, the Impartial Review, we see the principle expressed very simply: Criticism is founded upon this indisputable Maxim: that in all the liberal Arts and Sciences, there are certain Rules universally acknowledged and approved by the Learned. The more strictly any Author observes these Rules, the nearer to perfection will his work approach; and in proportion as he deviates from them, the more exceptionable will it become.41

The idea of adherence to the rules becomes less fixed as the century goes on, but it continues to be of consequence. In 1752 one poet comments with some puzzlement that “The name of a Critic is become odious; yet a Critic is one who judges of Literary Productions according to the Rules of Art, and a Reader to be coveted by all good Writers.”42 In the 1750s most writers and reviewers accept that every “Species of Poetry has its Rules, which, being founded on Nature, must be observed by every one who would excel in this agreeable Art,”43 and that there “is certainly no kind of writing, either useful or elegant, that does not fall under some sort of rules.”44 As time goes on, however, there is less agreement. We see Thomas Percy arguing in 1765 that “certainly we ought to examine a work only by those principles according to 41 

Jackson’s Oxford Journal, October 27, 1759, quoted by W. Denham Sutcliffe, “English Book-​ Reviewing, 1749–​1800,” unpublished D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1943, pp. 205–​6. 42  Escapes of a Poetical Genius (London, 1752), p. 1. 43  The Beauties of Poetry Display’d (London, 1757), p. iv. 44  Constantia; or, A True Picture of Human Life, Represented in Fifteen Evening Conversations, after the Manner of Boccace: To Which Is Prefixed, a Short Discourse on Novel Writing, 2 vols. (Dublin, 1751), vol. i, p. xii.

 

726   Antonia Forster which it was composed. This would save a deal of impertinent criticism.”45 In the same year we see Edward Thompson rejecting rules with an impatient “Hence with your rules—​I’ll have them not—​begone,”46 and three years earlier Robert Lloyd announces that he laughs at “all those empty fools, | Who cramp a genius with dull rules.”47 By the end of the century we are likely to see a poet demanding, “Must genius then be cramp’d by musty rules, | Nor soar beyond the dogma of the schools; | Must ye be wise, and all the world be fools?”48 But we also see more reviewers commenting favorably on broken rules, as when the Critical remarks that William Lisle Bowles has “ventured to deviate from the established rules of his predecessors, of making the sense end with the second line of every couplet, and we think, with success” (CR, 69 (1790), 354). Perhaps William Wennington’s comment in 1799 expresses the moderate view: “The laws of criticism, similarly with other laws, may be considered as essential blessings, when directed by extensive minds, or as detestable evils, when under the actuation of the shallow or the malevolent speculatist.”49 Rules or not, reviewers are in no doubt that they know what makes good poetry and bad. They may disagree frequently, but they have a great deal to say on the subject. The bad is perhaps easiest, particularly the extremely bad, as with The South Downs, a “most ridiculous poem” described by the Critical as unbeatable for “defectiveness of design—​want of arrangement—​confusion of metaphor—​perversion of grammar and ordinary language, and above all, an impenetrable obscurity” (CR, n.s., 8 (1793), 353). Sometimes the reviewers decline any real comment, as when Ditis Chorus; or, Hell Broke Loose is dismissed with four words, “Too contemptible for criticism!” (MR, 66 (1782), 147), or Plantagenet: A Poem gets ten: “Though short, tedious; and though in rhyme, not a poem” (MR, 73 (1785), 306). William Golden’s Triumph of Friendship inspires the reasonable observation that “Before people undertake to write poems, they ought to have some idea of the difference between verse and prose, or at least to understand something of grammar” (MR, n.s., 9 (1792), 104); a better poem, Mary Robinson’s Ainsi va le monde, inspires consideration of the nature of the near miss: “in poetry, fine words, fine lines, fine titles, fine names, may make fine poems: but, without something else, are not sufficient to make good poems” (MR, n.s., 4 (1791), 223). A poem may be “executed, upon the whole, in tolerable language, and smooth versification” but still be described as stopping “short of the elevation of poetry and true spirit of satire” (MR, 13 (1755), 157). The requirements for success in poetry are so many and so demanding that it is not surprising, as the Analytical Review puts it, that we see “the few, who obtain the object of their exertions, and the many, who experience nothing from their attempts but a consciousness of vain labours and misapplied time.” In this instance, inspired by a new edition of William Cowper’s Poems, the reviewer goes on to spell out in detail what makes an accomplished poet: With a vigorous and exercised imagination, he must possess a peculiar quickness of apprehension, power of combination, exquisiteness of sensibility, and rectitude of taste. Science must 45  Thomas Percy (ed.), Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of Our Earlier Poets, Chiefly of the Lyrick Kind: Together with Some Few of Later Date, 3 vols. (London, 1765), vol. i, p. 127. 46  Edward Thompson, The Courtesan (London, 1765), p. 2. 47  Robert Lloyd, “Epistle to J.B. Esq. 1757,” in Poems (London, 1762), p. 32. 48  Retaliation; or, The Reviewers Reviewed, p. 2. 49  William Wennington, A Translator’s Defence; or, The Man of Nature: A Novel, from the German of Miltenberg, Again Reviewed (London, 1799).

 

Reviews   727 enlarge his mental prospect, and language, in it’s changeful and most beautiful forms, must sit upon his tongue. He must see with eyes, which, commanding a wide horizon, present him with every object distinctly defined, yet variously and splendidly coloured. He must, in short, be the darling of nature, studiously educated and adorned by art. (AR, 28 (1798), 272)

All these qualities and more are discussed and elaborated in review after review. Diction is a constantly recurring subject, whether it is “smooth and easy” (CR, 69 (1790), 115), “frequently animated and energetic” (CR, 58 (1784), 106), “upon the whole, not ill adapted to the elegiac narrative” (MR, 18 (1758), 184), “elegant” (CR, 56 (1783), 311), “polished” (CR, 66 (1788), 489), or “neither flat and prosaic, nor bedecked with the tinsel trappings of the fashionable poetry of the day” (ER, 24 (1794), 469) on the one hand, or, on the other, “generally florid, and sometimes finical” (CR, 61 (1786), 50), “scarce poetical” (MR, 1 (1749), 461), “too diffuse” (CR, 61 (1786), 263), or “frequently too prosaic” (MR, 10 (1754), 31). Other qualities of diction may include its “uncouthness” (CR, 69 (1790), 115) or its “strength and manliness” (CR, 69 (1790), 354). The English Review’s phrase “bedecked with the tinsel trappings of the fashionable poetry of the day” takes us also to another much-​talked-​about necessary element of eighteenth-​ century poetry:  poetic embellishment. The Indignant Muse brings up an interesting one when its review opens with “This author is much less elegant, or correct, than indignant; or possibly too wrathful to regard embellishments” (MR, 12 (1755), 380). If this poet is too angry to provide necessary embellishments, William Hayley, on the other hand, is congratulated for avoiding “the meretricious ornaments of phantastic and far-​fetched epithets” (MR, 64 (1781), 105), as is William Cowper for wasting “no unnecessary attention on grace or embellishment” (MR, 67 (1782), 263). John Wolcot (Peter Pindar), however, is congratulated for having, in The Lousiad, embellished the poem’s central anecdote “with a luxuriancy that evinces the richness of his imagination” (CR, 60 (1785), 315). “A Poet, when speaking in his own person,” according to Edmund Cartwright reviewing the work of Anna Seward, “may be permitted to cloath his ideas in all the splendour of language that the most brilliant imagination can supply,” although he thinks Seward has mistakenly directed her efforts “to accumulate glaring metaphors, and to dazzle by superfluity of ornament” (MR, 71 (1784), 340). Poets need to realize, the reviewers tell them, that Poetical ornaments are undoubtedly necessary. But every thing will not bear embellishment. And continual splendor dazzles and fatigues the reader’s imagination. (CR, 56 (1783), 209)

Thousands upon thousands of observations about these and many other poetical topics fill many pages of the review journals. Versification is naturally a frequent subject, very often given only one or two words. Thomas Gisborne’s, for example, is “not unmusical” (AJR, 5 (1800), 432), William Hayward Roberts’s is “smooth and equal” (MR, 18 (1758), 184), Thomas Nevile’s is “easy” (CR, 1 (1756), 164), Moses Mendez’s is “good” (MR, 4 (1750–​51), 44), and that of the author of The Cave of Neptune is “passable” (MR, 71 (1784), 226). Originality, purity, a good ear, luxuriant fancy, elegance, and correctness and many other topics, separately and together, recur time and time again. The imagery of William Lisle Bowles’s Sonnets, for example, is “chaste, and the language pure, well chosen, and correct,” even if his repetitive stanza form is tiring (ER, 13 (1789), 465); Samuel Rogers “possesses a good ear, a refined taste, and a delicate sensibility” (AJR, 5 (1800), 71); and Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads “has genius, taste, elegance, wit, and imagery of the most beautiful kind” (AJR, 5 (1800), 434). On the other hand, The Vision “does not boast any novelty, either in its design or fable, or

 

728   Antonia Forster in the sentiments it contains” and its poetry is “wild and irregular, and yet frequently cold and prosaic” (MR, 8 (1753), 472), and Richard Paul Jodrell is unlikely to have been pleased to be told that his Rocks of Meillerie has “some lines in it that are tolerable, particularly at the beginning,” especially since the reviewer goes on to say that “The Muse, like a person leaping from an eminence, makes an effort at first, but afterwards her progress is rather a descending than a flight” (MR, 63 (1780), 310). Much space is devoted too to discussing the characteristics of different kinds of poetry, from the epic, “the master-​piece of human wit” (CR, 4 (1757), 27); the ode, “this most difficult species of composition” (BC, 8 (1796), 461); the pastoral, “the least useful of any species of writing” (MR, 5 (1751), 76); descriptive poetry, “doubtless inferior, both in dignity and utility, to ethic compositions” (MR, 18 (1758), 278); and sonnets, “in general harsh, formal, and uncouth” (MR, 71 (1784), 368); to the elegy, the true nature of which is “pathetic tenderness” (MR, 62 (1780), 493).

Extracts In support and justification of their judgments, the reviewers give numerous extracts. In the long main articles they give many more of these, but they generally try to give at least a brief extract in the majority of the short, monthly catalog items too.50 In the first number of the Monthly Review we see the general principle of this “agreeable and useful method” of giving extracts: “we shall extract from the work itself a few of such passages as we shall judge proper to give a tolerably adequate idea of the whole” (MR, 1 (1749), 66–​7). They give thousands of extracts, prefaced by a variety of explanations. Harshly critical reviews are particularly likely to have a justification such as “a short quotation from an ode to Autumn, may give weight to our observation” (AR, 2 (1788), 73), “alas, in both he is a miserable dabbler; as may be seen by the following quotation” (CR, 2 (1756), 282), or “in such cases, example is better than comment” (AJR, 7 (1800), 318). In this last case the extract is sixteen lines long, despite the reviewer’s comment: “Without one spark of genius or one grain of knowledge, this versifier, with a magnanimous temerity, rises superior to all ordinary rules of composition, and proudly bids defiance to grammar and to sense” (ibid.). At other times the extracts are to support positive judgments, as in “To convince our readers that we have not bestowed on him more commendation than is lawfully due to him, we shall gratify them with the following extract” (MR, n.s., 4 (1791), 313), or “To justify this decision, and for the gratification of our readers, we shall quote a few stanzas from the former of these pieces” (MR, n.s., 9 (1792), 91). Sometimes, though less and less often as the century goes on, they claim to be leaving readers to their own judgment, with “we shall give our readers three of her poems, of different species, leaving their merit to the decision of the public” (MR, 2 (1749–​50), 15) or “Of this writer’s success the Reader will form his own opinion from the following extract” (MR, 63 (1780), 180). When reviewers explain that they have not selected “the very worst … but one of the shortest Odes of his murdering” (MR, 19 (1758), 94) or are giving “a short extract, nor shall it be the worst, from this extraordinary production” (CR, 2 (1756), 84) or that they “have not

50  For some detailed discussion of the use of the monthly catalog and main articles, see my “Book Reviewing,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. v, pp. 634–​6.

 

Reviews   729 exaggerated [their] punishment, by producing the worst part of it” (MR, n.s., 2 (1790), 460), they are in part insulting the author, of course, but they are particularly anxious to counter the numerous attacks from authors maintaining that all of the reviewers’ actions are motivated by malevolence and that “a thousand arrows [are] ready to whiz at this palpable mark … from the watch-​tower of the frowning lynx-​eyed Aristarch, confederated in their monthly sittings, as sworn by office to let fly at whatever quarry springs up in their way.”51 No matter how often the reviewers say that they take no pleasure in finding fault, authors would not believe them, and one can see why. “We wish we had more frequent occasion for praise than censure; but we must endeavour to be impartial, however our good-​nature may be called in question by the more partial friends or intimates of an author” (MR, 10 (1754), 384), is a comment easily and frequently made, as is “We have made these remarks, not for any pleasure that we have in nibbling, but because it appears to us properly part of a reviewer’s province to mount guard on the language of authors, especially of reputable authors” (AR, 5 (1789), 482), but the pose is often highly unconvincing, as in this example: But let not the reader imagine we can find pleasure in thus exposing absurdities, which are too ludicrous for serious reproof. While we censure as critics, we feel as men, and could sincerely wish that those, whose greatest sin is, perhaps, the venial one of writing bad verses, would regard their failure in this respect as we do, not as faults but foibles; they may be good and useful members of society, without being poets. (CR, 7 (1759), 37)

Lessons The world of eighteenth-​century poetry reviewing, with all its battles, is an instructive one. The most important corrective it offers is to our historically filtered sense of a canon, when we see the work of long-​forgotten poets given far more pages than, for example, the Lyrical Ballads. We also need to remember that although warfare is the most interesting side of the reviewers’ relationship with the literary world, there were many poets who groveled to the reviewers and many booksellers who used review material in advertisements. Poetry is always failing and its decline being lamented, as in this example from the beginning of the period covered here: Indeed it is not without reason that poetry is now generally held in little esteem: in general, modern poetry deserves but little. Since the happy invention of printing, this species of literature has gradually sunk into disregard; and the reason is obvious. Every dull pretender to the muse finds means to get his compositions, be they ever so bad, into print, and then the public is pestered with them, according to the various circumstances and degrees of the author’s necessities or vanity. (MR, 4 (1750–​1), 28)

More than forty years later, with many in between, we see another lament: It is, or it ought to be, the aim of poetry to raise stronger and more lively emotions and ideas in the mind, than can be excited by plain and simple prose. By modern poetry, however, this effect is often very little, if at all, produced. (MR, n.s., 7 (1792), 90)

51 

Samuel Langley, The Iliad of Homer, Translated from the Greek into Blank Verse (London, 1767), p. iv.

 

730   Antonia Forster From an early point in the reviewing age, some authors appear to enjoy creating elaborate fantasies about reviewers “Whose garrets, like some giant’s den of yore, | Are hung with wretch’s limbs, and stain’d with gore,”52 or whose workplace is described thus: Sunk twenty fathom under Ground, Paper’d with Title-​pages round, A Dungeon lies; and plac’d before Stand Printers’ Dev’ls to guard the Door; To this these envious Fiends resort, To hold their Inquisition-​Court. Fix’d in the Middle of the Room, A glimmering Lamp reflects a Gloom; Clust’ring above hang Scalping Knives, By Dulness edg’d ’gainst Poets’ Lives. The Skin of many an Author’s Head, Victims that at their Altars bled, Dangle in Parcels at the Top, Like Dry’d Leaves in a Druggist’s Shop.53

Images of butchery are quite common but James Scott sees the Monthly reviewers as “malicious Monkeys”: Who grin and chatter, and with dirt and dung, Pelt the poor Travellers that scud along: If some indignant wight, more wroth than wise, Stop for revenge, they p—​ss into his eyes; Then skulk behind the boughs, and there unseen With jabbring laughter glut their brutal spleen.54

The struggle can never be resolved, with poets constructing these memorable pictures of reviewers in action and reviewers attempting to remind both the public and authors of their view of the matter: In the distribution of praise and censure to which our office calls us, we have frequently the mortification to find, that our opinions do not exactly correspond with those which authors entertain of their own productions. Unqualified and unsupported applause, as it would be easier for us, would often be more welcome to them, than that diligent and impartial discrimination, which alone can render our labours useful to the public. (MR, n.s., 4 (1791), 118–​19)

References Basker, James G., Tobias Smollett, Critic and Journalist (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1988). Benedict, Barbara M., “Readers, Writers, Reviewers, and the Professionalization of Literature,” in Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740–​1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 3–​23. 52 

The Jumble: A Satire: Addressed to the Revd. Mr. C. Churchill (London, 1763) p. 14. Evan Lloyd, The Powers of the Pen: A Poem: Addressed to John Curre, Esqr. (London, 1766), pp. 38–​9. 54 Scott, The Perils of Poetry, p. 17. 53 

 

Reviews   731 Bloom, Edward A., “‘Labors of the Learned’: Neoclassic Book Reviewing Techniques,” Studies in Philology, 54 (1957), 537–​63. Donoghue, Frank, The Fame Machine:  Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-​Century Literary Careers (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996). Forster, Antonia, “Book Reviewing,” in Michael F. Suarez, S.J. and Michael L. Turner (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume V, 1695–​1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), pp. 631–​48. Forster, Antonia, Index to Book Reviews in England, 1749–​1774 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1990). Forster, Antonia, Index to Book Reviews in England, 1775–​ 1800 (London:  The British Library, 1997). Forster, Antonia, “Review Journals and the Reading Public,” in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-​Century England: New Essays (London: Leicester Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 171–​90. Graham, Walter, English Literary Periodicals (New York: T. Nelson & Sons, 1930). Jones, Claude E., “The English Novel: A Critical View,” Modern Language Quarterly, 19 (1958), 147–​59, 213–​24. Nangle, Benjamin Christie, The Monthly Review, First Series, 1749–​1789: Indexes of Contributors and Articles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934). Nangle, Benjamin Christie, The Monthly Review, Second Series, 1790–​ 1815:  Indexes of Contributors and Articles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955). Roper, Derek, Reviewing before the “Edinburgh,” 1788–​1802 (Newark:  Univ. of Delaware Press, 1979). Spector, Robert D., English Literary Periodicals and the Climate of Opinion during the Seven Years’ War (The Hague: Mouton, 1966). Sullivan, Alvin (ed.), British Literary Magazines: The Augustan Age and the Age of Johnson, 1698–​1788 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983). Sullivan, Alvin (ed.), British Literary Magazines:  The Romantic Age, 1789–​1836 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983).

 

Chapter 43

Honors Daniel J. Ennis Eighteenth-​century Britain was not afflicted with the notion that to be an artist was to be an outsider and that there was an inherent integrity to the poet who eschewed public acclamation and formal recognition. To the contrary, it was an age when poetic distinction was recognized with medals, prizes, and positions, and poets openly jostled for acclaim. The selection of the poet laureate at court was much discussed, and the laureateship was not the only office available to poets. Oxford University established a poetry professorship in 1708, the election of which every five years sparked interest not just among faculty, but in the literary circles of the capital. Institutional recognitions of poetic merit often generated controversy. On the simplest level, the individual merits of proposed candidates were examined, but such discussions often ventured larger questions about the very nature of poetic distinction and the imperfect methods Britons had at hand to recognize such excellence. Besides offices, poetic accolades and emoluments multiplied; the universities, clubs, magazines, and dignitaries underwrote awards for versifiers scribbling on a galaxy of subjects. Such poetic honors existed in a context where patronage was in decline and readership was increasing. In that world, authors sought and embraced public markers of poetic ability, and the commercial potential of honors and awards is attested to by the inevitability of such distinctions being mentioned on the title page of the honoree’s publications. Suspended between nostalgia for the imagined patronage-​rich past and a future of distinction via vox populi, poetic honors lay bare the tensions of an artistic community groping toward literary meritocracy.

The Poets Laureate The laureateship was the most public honor to which a poet could aspire, and even though the eighteenth-​century holders of the office were often derided, the periodic controversies that arose over the appointment of each new poet laureate show how much cultural capital the post retained throughout the long eighteenth century. The honoree usually struggled under the weight of the title’s gravitas—​the laureateship was associated with Virgil, Petrarch, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Edmund Spenser. The Restoration renewed all the royal trappings,

 

Honors   733 and the naming of John Dryden as poet laureate (served 1668–​89) stimulated interest in an office that had been nearly forgotten during the Interregnum.1 Dryden’s appointment as the first “modern” poet laureate posed the question that would linger for more than a century: was the post a distinction for a great poet as defined by the consensus of the age, or a reward for ideological loyalty with little regard for the critical standing of the writer? It was in Dryden’s time that the terms and rewards of the office were formalized: the poet laureate was appointed by the lord chamberlain to serve as a member of the royal household, had defined compositional duties, was paid an annual stipend, and was allowed to draw a generous supply of the royal wine. Dryden’s term as laureate coincided with the emergence of party politics, and Charles II’s chosen laureate had adhered to the royalist cause early enough, and had championed it often enough, that he could not have been expected to act as an apolitical literary artist. But the ideological pressures upon the laureate coexisted with vaguer, more idealistic conceptions of the position. Perhaps because the laurel retained its classical associations, or perhaps because English polite culture longed for an impartial national bard, there recurred in the eighteenth century the hope (usually disappointed) that the poet laureate might be an eminent rhapsode who could speak for the nation. With the death of each poet laureate, the public prints would swell with testimonials for favored potential successors, gossipy accounts of the backroom dealings regarding the office, this rumor, that prediction. Sometimes there were serious debates about the merits of the candidates, as if the appointment of the laureate was a bellwether for the state of national poesy. More often the satirists sharpened their teeth; each time the office was filled by a politically reliable mediocrity, the laureateship itself was deemed degraded. There were ten poets laureate from the Restoration and the Romantic period; they run the gamut of quality and prestige, from Dryden (whom even enemies respected) to Laurence Eusden (whom even friends pitied). Despite the poor reputation of many of the poets laureate of the long eighteenth century, not all were dunces. Thomas Warton (served 1785–​90) was acclaimed not only as a poet, but as a scholar of poetry. As he owed his fame to poetry, however, Warton was exceptional; many eighteenth-​century laureates were known primarily for their contributions to the stage. Nahum Tate (served 1692–​1715) and Nicholas Rowe (served 1715–​18) were busy and successful dramatists, but their official odes have not proven worthy of extended study. Two other theatrical laureates, Shadwell (served 1689–​92) and Colley Cibber (served 1730–​57), were immortalized in great literary jokes; Shadwell was the hapless hero of Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe, whereas Cibber was Alexander Pope’s “King of Dulness” in the 1743 revision of The Dunciad. Neither was as contemptible as the Tory satirists suggested; Shadwell was an effective and clever dramatist, and Cibber was both a serviceable playwright and the most accomplished comic actor of his generation. Further down in public approbation were Laurence Eusden (served 1718–​30) and William Whitehead (served 1757–​85), two obscure but politically reliable poetasters whose undistinguished verse did nothing to raise the prestige of the position. The abuse of Whitehead, in contrast to the colorful scorn heaped

1  William Davenant was poet laureate before Dryden, a holdover from the reign of Charles I. Prior to Davenant, John Skelton, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, and Ben Jonson had all been named laureate, but the terms and expectations of the position were neither fully defined nor consistent over time. Some histories of the position award it to Chaucer after the fact.

 

734   Daniel J. Ennis upon Cibber and Shadwell, was mild:  one contemporary critic called him “sing-​song,”2 another claimed he wrote “odes Cibberian.”3 Henry James Pye (served 1790–​1813) is the saddest of the lot. Like Shadwell and Cibber, he appears in literary histories as the punchline for a better poet’s gag: Byron’s Vision of Judgment, that great satiric blast against poet laureate Robert Southey (served 1813–​43), depicts King George III as quite alarmed that the dull Pye might be lurking nearby, ready to recite a dull ode. Dryden’s appointment, then, was the anomaly—​he was the leading poet of his age, and his reputation waxed, not waned, after his term ended. Had Charles II’s choice of laureate been, say, Samuel Butler—​the bare-​knuckled author of Hudibras who served the court party by riding full tilt against the Puritans—​the history of the laureateship would be very different: less tinged by disillusion, more grounded in the understanding that the poet laureate was verse-​propagandist-​ in-​chief. Throughout his term as poet laureate, Dryden sparred with his literary opponents, comporting himself not as an apolitical poet, but just as he was, an unabashed royalist whose verse often advanced a party agenda. His contempt for Shadwell, “mature in dullness” as Dryden would put it, was actuated not so much by aesthetic but political differences, and when James II’s administration gave way and the Whigs took hold of the levers of power, Dryden was duly replaced as the official court poet, his pen too closely associated with the Stuart cause. Shadwell took up the laurel, and the “True Blue Protestant Poet” collected the stock of wine and modest stipend that was the compensation for the generation of a few odes per year, producing indifferent verse marking royal birthdays and each New Year. Dryden’s example cast his successors in the dimming light of anti-​climax. It was not until William Wordsworth became poet laureate in 1843 that the office was again held by the consensus poet of the age. That Shadwell’s modest achievements as a poet were typical of the undistinguished post-​ Dryden laureates did not, however, make the post inconsequential. With the death of each succeeding laureate, the Augustan commentariat ginned up column inches of controversy, as when Alexander Pope, at his waspish peak, used the occasion of Eusden’s death in 1730 to fling about arch epigrams on the crisis of the laureateship and, by extension, English letters. Pope himself was unable to be laureate, disqualified by his Roman Catholic faith, so instead he took to the pages of the Grub Street Journal and began associating the office with the dunces. Pope’s attacks on Cibber as poet laureate anticipated a widespread ambivalence among Georgian writers toward the very idea of the laureateship. Richard Farmer, vice-​ chancellor of Cambridge and member of Samuel Johnson’s Literary Club, sneered that the poet laureate was merely a functionary who was paid “to remind us of the New Year, and the Birth Day.”4 Edward Gibbon was convinced the job was hopeless, and declared the appointment of the poet laureate to be a “ridiculous custom” that ought to be discontinued.5 Thomas Gray refused when offered the post in 1757, proclaiming that he would “rather be Serjeant-​ Trumpeter, or Pin-​Maker to the Palace.”6 William Mason, offered the laurel in 1785, refused

2 

Reviewers Reviewed: A Familiar Epistle to Those Partial Sons of Momus (London, 1779), p. 21. Peter Pindar, More Lyric Odes, to the Royal Academicians, by Peter Pindar, a Distant Relation to the Poet of Thebes, and Laureate to the Academy (London, 1783), p. 6. 4  Richard Farmer, An Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1767), p. 49. 5  Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley, 3 vols. (London: Allen Lane, 1994), vol. iii, p. 1020 n. 6  Gray to Mason, Dec. 19, 1757, in Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), vol. ii, p. 544. 3 

 

Honors   735 as well, and that year’s discussion of the laureateship succession was enlivened by a popular anthology of bad odes purported to have been composed by the candidates for the position.7 By 1790, in what Robert Folkenflik calls “perhaps the final indignity for the Laureate,” the effective compensation for the position was reduced from £100 plus the wine to just £100, meaning Pye did not even have Eusden’s privilege of drinking from the king’s cellar.8 Yet the office was respected enough that laureate odes were duly printed in The Gentleman’s Magazine and in other venues.9 Every poet laureate’s death was noted in the press, and the print notice of a laureate’s passing usually prompted a (non-​ironic) verse elegy or two, recognitions not afforded the typical expired Grub Street hack. This combination of respect and contempt could distort the perception of a laureate’s career. Tate, for example, was a competent adaptor of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays for the Augustan stage. He reshaped King Lear for the eighteenth-​century stage, allowing Cordelia to live happily ever after; appalling now, Tate’s Lear was the definitive take on Shakespeare’s tragedy for most of the century. When Tate’s appointment was announced, one of his admirers acknowledged Dryden’s shadow, but hoped for the best, instructing the new laureate to See Dryden’s Lamp to our admiring View, Brought from the Tomb to shine and Blaze anew! The British Laurel by old Chaucer worn, Still Fresh and Gay, did Dryden’s Brow Adorn; And that its Lustre may not fade on Thine, Wit, Fancy, Judgment, Tate, in thee combine.10

Tate could not manage to combine wit, fancy, and judgment often enough, and thus a century later, Southey dismissed his laureate predecessor as “poor Nahum,” citing Tate as an example of the decline of English poetics after Dryden, and proclaiming Tate the worst of all laureates, “if he had not succeeded Shadwell.”11 That Southey could trash Tate and Shadwell even as he himself was being branded by Byron as everything that was wrong with the poet laureateship reveals how fraught the appointment could be.

7  John Hawkins [pseud.], Probationary Odes for the Laureatship: With a Preliminary Discourse, by Sir John Hawkins, Knt., 3rd ed. (London, 1785). This satire may well have been composed by Richard Tickell: see R. C. Whitford, “On the Origin of Probationary Odes for the Laureatship,” Modern Language Notes, 35, no. 2 (1920), 81–​4. 8  Robert Folkenflik, “Patronage and the Poet-​Hero,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 79 (1985), 363–​79, at p. 371. 9  There have been a few anthologies devoted to the writing of laureates. The most recent, Verses of the Poets Laureate from John Dryden to Andrew Motion (London: Orion Books, 1999), includes headnotes for each laureate that range from mean-​spirited to apologetic to mildly supportive, presumably the work of Hilary Laurie, who collected the odes. Tate, for example, “was one of the most prolific Poets Laureate but he must be accounted one of the worst” (p. 33). Cibber, we are told, “inherited” the laureateship from Eusden and “did nothing to improve it” (p. 48). Pye is dispatched thus: “Pye announced he was planning to publish his selected works in six volumes. Happily death intervened” (p. 63). 10  R.B., “On Our English Poetry, and This Poem upon TEA,” in Nahum Tate, A Poem upon Tea: With a Discourse on Its Sov’rain Virtues; and Directions in the Use of It for Health: Collected from Treatises of Eminent Physicians upon That Subject: Also a Preface concerning Beau-​Criticism: By Mr. Tate, Poet-​ Laureat to Her Majesty (London, 1702). 11  Robert Southey, “A Life of the Author,” in The Works of William Cowper, Esq., 2 vols. (London, 1836), vol. ii, p. 112.

 

736   Daniel J. Ennis The case of Rowe, Tate’s successor, is instructive. On the one hand, Rowe was a leading tragedian; The Fair Penitent (1703), The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714), and The Tragedy of Lady Jane Grey (1715) were fixtures on the London stage for a century. On the other hand, Rowe must be held solely responsible for loosing upon the world “On Walpole’s Recovery” (1716), an overwrought production devoted to Prime Minister Robert Walpole that is typical of eighteenth-​century laureate poetry: When sad Britannia fear’d of late Her Walpole’s near approaching Fate Wou’d prove her own Undoing, She beat her Breast, and rent her Hair, And offer’d many an humble Prayer To save her self from Ruin.12

Like Tate, Rowe was tapped as laureate in part because he was a successful writer for the stage, following a pattern that started with Dryden and continued through Shadwell. Pope explicitly associated Rowe with Dryden in an epitaph: “Thy reliques, Rowe, to this fair urn we trust, | And sacred, place by Dryden’s awful dust” (Pope, Poems, vol. vi, p. 208). There would appear to be no qualitative difference between the odes of Tate and those produced by Rowe as laureate, so Pope’s willingness to align Rowe with Dryden suggests that it was the author of The Fair Penitent that Pope had in mind for Drydenic proximity. It is a matter of Pope’s personal prejudices that Cibber, whose comedy The Careless Husband (1709) was quite well received and who was no worse a laureate than Rowe, was ridiculed to smithereens by the Scriblerians; the laureateship carried impossible expectations. If in Rowe, Cibber, and Shadwell we see effective dramatists saddled with the unenviable task of writing inspiring odes for uninspiring monarchs, Rowe’s successor Eusden represents another type of laureate, the mediocre poet who was not prominent enough to be satirized with any vigor. Pope’s jibe that Eusden was “a Parson, much be-​mus’d in Beer”13 was mild compared to the abuse heaped on Cibber, and even a Eusden sympathizer, much at pains to point out the parson’s good character, admitted that Eusden “had not the brightest parts.”14 Another commentator called Eusden, not kindly, a “most worthy successor of Tate” who “enjoys the first Preferment in Parnassus, without being envy’d in it.”15 Eusden did his reputation no favors with a celebratory ode that wretchedly plays on Hanoverian naming traditions, marking the coronation of George II thus: “’Tis a GEORGE only can a GEORGE succeed!”16 Interest in the laureateship survived Eusden’s dullness, as evidenced by the lively debate about which writer would collect the royal wine upon Eusden’s death in 1730.17 In the last 12 

Nicholas Rowe, “On Walpole’s Recovery,” in A Collection of State Songs, Poems &c. (London, 1716), p. 8.

13 Pope, Epistle to Arbuthnot, line 15, in Poems, vol. iv, p. 97.

14  Theophilus Cibber [i.e., Robert Shiels], The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, 5 vols. (London, 1753), vol. iv, p. 148. 15  Characters of the Times; or, An Impartial Account of the Writings, Characters, Education, &c. of Several Noblemen and Gentlemen, Libell’d in a Preface to a Late Miscellany Publish’d by P —​— ​P E and S —​— ​F T (London, 1728), p. 26. 16  Lawrence Eusden, A Poem, on the Happy Succession, and Coronation of His Present Majesty, in Three Poems (London, 1727), p. 10. 17  In the early years of the office, the monetary reward was supplemented by an annual tierce of Madeira. Pope, in his various lampoons concerning the laureates of his lifetime, transformed this into a butt of sack. Eventually a cash payment of the value of the wine was substituted for the wine.

 

Honors   737 three months of that year, London newspapers made frequent references to those rumored to be under consideration for the laureateship. The early money was on Stephen Duck, a farm laborer who wrote poetry, had been “discovered,” and was added to Queen Caroline’s household as a curiosity—​the thresher who could rhyme (see c­ hapter 10, “The Poet as Laborer”). Jonathan Swift took Duck seriously as a potential laureate, which says as much about the office as it does about the thresher: “the vogue of our few honest folks here is that Duck is absolutely to Succeed Eusden in the Lawrell, the contention being between Concannon or Theobald, or some other Hero of the Dunciad.”18 Looked upon with favor by the ministry for his 1717 anti-​Jacobite comedy The Nonjuror, Cibber eventually won out; Duck’s fame faded and he died a suicide in 1756, nearly forgotten by the literati. Duck was fortunate not to have been named poet laureate in 1730; his fragile mental state was not suited for the abuse the laureate was bound to attract. Cibber was a less-​troubled soul, and he accepted Pope’s blows with equanimity: Right or wrong, a lick at the laureat will always be a sure bait, ad captandum vulgus, to catch [Pope] little readers. But as a little bad Poetry, is the greatest Crime, he lays to my Charge, I am willing to subscribe to his Opinion of it.19

Posterity has charged most of the poets laureate between Dryden and Wordsworth with “bad poetry.” It was during the 1730 laureateship debate that the Grub Street Journal established a longstanding mode of laureate-​abuse, mocking the laureate by listing the qualifications of the office. The laureate must “be able to make verses extempore, and to pour forth innumerable, if required” and “have a good stomach to eat and drink, whatever his betters think fit.”20 Despite such contempt, the laureateship was never reduced to irrelevance. Thomas Gray recognized the puzzling mismatch between the prestige of the title and the status of its holders, telling William Mason, “I interest myself a little in the History of it, & rather wish somebody may accept it, that will retrieve the credit of the thing, if it be retrievable, or ever had any credit” (Gray, Correspondence, vol. ii, p. 544). The durability of the idea of the laureate was such that despite the uninspiring run of Eusden, Cibber, and Whitehead that preceded him, Thomas Warton was able to move The Public Advertiser to praise: “Perhaps, say some, we are to have no more Odes—​ the custom is to be abolished—​not, we hope, the office, for we should be sorry that an office should be abolished, which affords so fair an opportunity to reward a man genius.”21

Other Laureates The official poet laureate of Great Britain was not the only laureate in the British Isles. “Laureate” as a title was used in cities and at the universities, sometimes facetiously, but usually in an earnest effort to recognize poetic merit. Forty years before he was named George 18  Swift to Gay and the Duchess of Queensberry, Nov. 19, 1730, in Alexander Pope, Correspondence, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), vol. iii, p. 151. 19  Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, Comedian, ed. Robert W. Lowe (New York: AMS Press, 1966), p. 35. “Ad captandum vulgus” means “to attract the masses.” 20  “Ec. VIII,” Grub Street Journal, Nov. 19, 1730. 21  “The Laureat and His Ode,” Public Advertiser, Jan. 14, 1790.

 

738   Daniel J. Ennis III’s poet laureate, Thomas Warton elected the undergraduate poet laureate of Trinity College, Oxford. His duty was to “celebrate in a copy of English verses a lady, likewise annually elected, and distinguished by the title of Lady-​patroness.”22 In 1755, English theater manager and occasional versifier Benjamin Victor was named poet laureate of Ireland, but this exercise in colonial patronage did not catch on, and no new Irish laureate was named when Victor died in 1778. In Edinburgh, Robert Fergusson won popular acclaim as “laureate” for his championship of vernacular poetry.23 Robert Burns was sometimes labeled Scotland’s laureate, but he explicitly denied any interest in such a role: For me! before a monarch’s face Ev’n there I winna flatter; For neither pension, post, nor place, Am I your humble debtor.24

Unlike Victor, who at least had official sanction for his laureateship, neither Fergusson nor Burns was ever named laureate by any royal or civic authority. Burns would have rejected the laureateship if it had ever been offered, but others reached for such distinction; thus the eighteenth-​century phenomenon of “Volunteer Laureates” such as Richard Blackmore and Richard Savage. In 1689, Blackmore auditioned for preferment by greeting the newly arrived William III with Prince Arthur, an epic inspired by Virgil’s Aeneid. Blackmore followed up with King Arthur (1697) and Alfred (1723). Blackmore’s approach in all three epics was to draw explicit parallels between the legendary kings of old with the living monarch whom he hoped to please, thus William III was said to share virtues with Arthur, and George I was implausibly positioned as the second coming of Alfred the Great: “See, George on fair Britannia’s Shores appears, | A second Savior to dispell her Fears.”25 The laureateship was never offered to Blackmore (although Pope associates him with Cibber in the 1743 Dunciad), but he was recognized for his efforts with an appointment as physician-​in-​ordinary, a gold medal, and eventually a knighthood.26 Like Blackmore, Richard Savage hankered to be the royal bard. Enraged that he had not been appointed poet laureate in 1730, Savage began producing odes addressed to Queen Caroline. The effort was successful, and Caroline awarded Savage a stipend, leading the triumphant Cibber to remark that Savage, as “Volunteer Laureate,” might “with equal propriety, style himself a Volunteer Lord, or Volunteer Baronet” (Johnson, Lives, vol. iii, p. 156). For a few decades after the Restoration, London employed a “City Poet” whose duty was to supply verses for the city banquets and pageants. John Tatham was City poet from 1657 to 1664, and when he was not supervising entertainments for the burghers, he found time to author a pro-​royalist comedy (The Rump; or, Mirror of the Times, 1660). One of the most active City poets was Matthew Taubman, who was appointed in 1685. Taubman took 22 

Thomas Warton, The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Warton, B.D., ed. Richard Mant (Oxford, 1802), p. 23. 23  Rhona Brown, Robert Fergusson and the Scottish Periodical Press (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p. 4. 24  Robert Burns, “A Dream,” in Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Kilmarnock, 1786), p. 80. 25  Sir Richard Blackmore, Alfred: An Epick Poem: In Twelve Books: Dedicated to the Illustrious Prince Frederick of Hanover (London, 1723), p. 289. 26  Flavio Gregori, “Blackmore, Sir Richard (1654–​1729),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In The Dunciad Pope associates Blackmore with the laureateship, pointing out that eventually Eusden would “eke out Blackmore’s endless line.”

 

Honors   739 a prominent role in the civic ceremonies of late seventeenth-​century London, and his contributions to these “visually stunning ratifications of the capital’s wealth, status, and influence” are well documented, as Taubman saw to it that a description of each of the events was printed.27 The 1689 celebration for Lord Mayor Thomas Pilkington was particularly elaborate, attended by the new king and queen, and well stocked with Taubman-​penned patriotic odes and declarations of loyalty, to wit: Come, Boys, drink an Health to the Chiefs of the CITY, The loyal LORD-​MAYOR, and the legal COMMITTEE, The Imperial CITY this YEAR that with YOU Hath restor’d us our Lives, and our Liberties too.28

Taubman’s passing cleared the way for Elkanah Settle to take the position in 1691. Settle was a popular and successful playwright, but he was the last City poet. Isaac Bickerstaff, in a facetious book of predictions for 1708, declared that in October of that year “the City Poet will dye for Grief that the Lord-​Mayors have left off being harangued from gilded pageants, in most Heroical Metre.”29 The position had been viewed with the same ambivalence that clung to the laureateship throughout the eighteenth century, but it lacked the longevity and classical heft of the national office. The position of historiographer royal was created in 1661, and while it was not explicitly set aside for a poet, it was held simultaneously with the poet laureateship by both Dryden and Shadwell. After Shadwell’s death, the critic, translator, and occasional poet Thomas Rymer was appointed, the first non-​laureate to hold the office. When Rymer died in 1713, Jonathan Swift wrote to Queen Anne directly, asking that he be named to the post, “that the truth of things may be transmitted to future ages.”30 Ann Cline Kelley argues that Swift’s unsuccessful campaign for the position was a product of his self-​characterization as “an Augustan Laureate” and was consistent with his interest in other offices—​from bishoprics to the poet laureateship itself—​he expected as rewards for his Tory-​friendly writings. Swift was disappointed and the post went to Thomas Madox, a respected historian and archivist, and despite its original connection with Dryden, the office of historiographer royal went the way of the City poet, and fell out of use entirely by 1732.

Professor of Poetry In 1708, Oxford University created the poetry professorship, and this elective position generated far more interest than the typical academic preferment. The first holder of the professorship, the clergyman Joseph Trapp, was known for an innocuous brand of light verse but 27 

Elizabeth Haresnape, “Taubman, Matthew (d. 1690?),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Matthew Taubman, A Description of the Several Pageants, Exhibited on the 29th Day of October, 1689, Being the Day on Which the Late Sir Thomas Pilkington, Knt. Entered a Second Time on His Mayoralty (London, 1761?), p. 25. 29  Isaac Bickerstaff, A Continuation of the Prdictions [sic] for the Remaining Part of the Year 1708: From the Month of September, till the Month of March, Which Compleats the Whole Year (London, 1708), p. 4. 30  Swift to Queen Anne, April 15, 1714, in The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, D.D., ed. David Woolley, 4 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1991–​2007), vol. i, p. 595. 28 

 

740   Daniel J. Ennis an aggressive brand of Tory sermonizing. It is reported that Swift avoided the man, and one of his enemies saw a significant overlap between Trapp’s poetry and his political preaching: When I was pester’d with a Parcel of Tart insipid half-​Sheets, I was always at a loss to find out the Real Authors of so much Dullness, Folly and Impiety; But I was a stupid Rogue, that’s certain; for, had I kept the Sabbath, and gone to St. Martin’s Church, I should have found that T—​—​p was my Man.31

Trapp was followed by a mixed bag of successors, many of whom were prominent public figures in their day, but few of whom were primarily associated with the composition of poems. Joseph Spence, whose Anecdotes, Observations and Characters of Books and Men remains an important contemporary account of Georgian intellectual culture, served two terms (1728–​ 38). The eminent translator and grammarian Bishop Robert Lowth served the same length of time (1741–​51). One of the most prominent holders of the professorship was John Randolph, who served 1776–​83 but is better known as a bishop (first of Oxford, then of London) than a versifier. It would appear that there is truth to the General Evening Post’s declaration that “A Poetry Professorship never made any one a Poet.”32 As with the poet laureateship, the politicking around the poetry professorship could be intense. Thomas Warton the Elder had served 1728–​38, and when his son Thomas Warton the Younger was nominated in 1755, Thomas’s brother Joseph Warton wrote with urgent political advice: This moment Bedingfeild who is most warmly your freind, has shewn me yours by which I see you have a Competitor. Never Despair, but let it sharpen your Canvass. I dine to morrow by Desire with Dr. Markham who wishes you all Success, & Bedingfeild will write to Smallwell. Sir Stewkly has already to Dr Jenner—​You must now muster up all your forces. I hope Trapp has applied to the Warden of New Coll—​I desired it—​Johnson I shall see this evening. Dodsley goes down with me for a few Days. Is Vivian the Brother of the Corpus Man? Is Blackstone absolutely steady to you? Shall we apply to Bigg? Will it be right?33

It would be right for Warton, who, like his father, was one of the few professors of poetry who was acclaimed by his peers as a poet. It was not right for Henry Kett, who was nominated for the post in 1793, but failed to secure enough support from the various colleges: In the late election of Poetry Professor at Oxford, the issue greatly deceived the general expectation. Considerable bets were offered that Mr. Kett would carry the election by a majority of at least 20. But the gentlemen who calculated in this manner, probably forgot to make a comparative estimate of the societies to which the candidates belonged. Magdalen College mustered nearly 70 voters, and Trinity not more than 25. Had these Colleges been restrained from voting, Mr. Kett would have carried the majority in the remaining part of the University.34

31  James Baker, An Admonition Merry and Wise to the Famous Mr. Tr —​— ​p, on His Late Encomiums upon the Bishop of Bangor: For the Use of Young Divines (London, 1717), p. 4. 32  Oxgniensis, “Postscript,” General Evening Post, July 20–​22, 1773. 33  Joseph Warton to Thomas Warton, July 17, 1755, in The Correspondence of Thomas Warton, ed. David Fairer (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1995), p. 47. 34  The World, Nov. 11, 1793. The unnamed commentator is on to something. Of the eleven professors of poetry between 1708 and 1801, four were from Magdalen, two each from Christ Church and New College, and one each from Wadham, Pembroke, and Trinity.

 

Honors   741 The man who beat Kett, James Hurdis, wrote poetry that the Critical Review claimed “abound[ed] with beauties of description and sentiment,” but that “occasionally showed the most bombastic expressions and turgidities of thought.”35 Like the laureateship, Oxford’s poetry professorship survives into the twenty-​first century, still capable of generating the occasional electoral controversy.

Prizes Since the Middle Ages, the universities had awarded prizes for Greek and Latin verses, but in the eighteenth century, poetry written in English was deemed worthy of recognition. At Cambridge, Thomas Seaton bequeathed the proceeds from his Kinglingsbury estate to provide an annual prize for the best poem on a sacred subject. Christopher Smart remains the most famous of the Seatonian Prizewinners, having won it five times in six years, and the prize continued to be well regarded throughout the century, with each winning entry published. The list of winners, however, is not a reliable indicator of future poetic fame. Samuel Hayes bested Smart’s run later in the century, winning the prize three straight years (1776, 1777, 1778) and four more times in the ensuing decade, but his muse was rather stingy, and the Seatonian poems represent almost all of his published poetic output. Besides the Seatonian, the universities sponsored less prominent recognitions. Typical of such awards was a twenty-​pound bounty offered by Oxford’s chancellor for the best poem on “The Conquest of Quebec” (1768), and the same amount offered by “an anonymous gentleman” for the best poem on “The State of the Aborigines of this Island before the Time of the Romans” (1791).36 In 1806, Oxford announced the Sir Roger Newdigate Prize for English Verse, an award that did not restrict the writer to a sacred subject. Trinity College Dublin also sponsored an annual poetry prize. Henry Boyd won it three consecutive years (1775, 1776, 1777), and his winning entries illustrate the types of poetry that won such contests. Boyd’s “Hymn to Silence,” honored in 1775, is six pages of heroic couplets on the wonders of making no noise; Silence is the “nurse of holy Contemplation.” In 1776 Boyd triumphed with “The Genius of the White Rose,” a celebration of the Yorkists, and in 1777 he prevailed with “Woodstock,” a lyrical account of Queen Elizabeth I’s confinement to the hunting lodge of the same name in 1554.37 That university prize poems had propagated by the end of the eighteenth century is suggested by George Croft’s Plan of Education Delineated and Vindicated (1784). In this Shaftesburian compendium of advice for a young man, Croft recommends contending for poetic honors: The Subject for the Prize Poem may be taken, and whether you obtain the Prize or no, your knowledge of quantity will be kept up and improved:  If you succeed, you will consider your success as a small encouragement, and recommendation in your youth, but not to be depended on as a Criterion of distinguished Talents and superior Diligence.38

35 

36  The Morning Post, March 7, 1791. The Critical Review, 34 (1802), 285. Henry Boyd, Poems, Chiefly Dramatic and Lyric (Dublin, 1793). 38  George Croft, A Plan of Education Delineated and Vindicated: To Which Are Added, a Letter to a Young Gentleman Designed for the University, and for Holy Orders (Wolverhampton, 1784), pp. 51–​2. 37 

 

742   Daniel J. Ennis The general lack of correlation between university prizes for poetry and professional achievement as a poet suggests Croft had it pegged. Beyond Christopher Smart, few decorated university poets attempted to live by the pen, and even Smart, arriving in London fresh from Cambridge, found that his Seatonian Prizes did not inure him from the exploitation and penury that was the lot of the Grub Streeter. Most poetry prizes went to clergy who not only held fellowships at the university, but also possessed livings that provided income, shelter, and the leisure to write. By the turn of the nineteenth century, both universities were publishing volumes of their prize poems, ensuring that a certain kind of poetry—​correct, moral, and high-​minded—​was valorized and promoted.39 Outside the universities, the highest profile poetry contests were sponsored by the Gentleman’s Magazine. Few numbers of the magazine did not contain either the announcement of a new contest of the results of a recent one. A contest in 1732 promised a reward for the best poem on Queen Caroline’s grotto. In 1734 the magazine called for readers to submit poems on “Life, Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell,” and set aside fifty pounds to recognize the outstanding submissions. A contest in 1735 for the best poems on “The Christian Hero” included as rewards published collections of sermons by Anglican divines. Many smaller prizes, from a few pounds to bound volumes of the magazine, were offered for epigrams and poems on subjects ranging from theological questions to military victories to current events. By the mid-​century the Gentleman’s Magazine was so closely associated with poetry prizes that it took to republishing poems honored in contests not sponsored by the magazine, including foreign contests.40 The Gentleman’s Magazine’s sponsorship of poetry contests inspired imitators, and notices of literary prizes both foreign and domestic were commonplace in eighteenth-​century periodicals. In 1706 the Daily Courant invited British poets to vie for the French Academy’s Prize of Poetry, writing on the proposition “That the King’s Wisdom renders him Superior to all Manner of Events.”41 In the second half of the eighteenth century, poetry prizes became more and more popular, and publications such as the Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, the Monthly Magazine and British Register, and the Monthly Miscellany sponsored contests and published the prize poems of the public schools and universities. By the end of the century, poetry prizes had become so familiar to English readers that the anonymous novel The Amicable Quixote; or, The Enthusiasm of Friendship featured a mean-​spirited portrait of a would-​be Maecenas, Miss Benwall, who caps a long day of self-​serving good works by proposing a prize poem on the topic of “Haman’s last dying speech before he was hanged.”42 Haman, a notorious persecutor of the Jews featured in the Book of Esther, had intended to execute Jews using an enormous gallows. Miss Benwall hopes the winning poem will include “a very fine simile of hemp.” The history of poetic honors in the eighteenth century would seem to be a story of dreary sexism—​women were neither considered for the laureateship nor allowed into the 39 

Erik Simpson, “Minstrelsy Goes to Market: Prize Poems, Minstrel Contests, and Romantic Poetry,” ELH, 71 (2004), 691–​7 18, at p. 693. 40  The best finding aid for the poetry of the Gentleman’s Magazine is Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, The Poetry of the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1731–​1800: An Electronic Database of Titles, Authors, and First Lines, http://​www.gmpoetrydatabase.org/​db/​index.php. 41  Daily Courant, Dec. 17, 1706. 42  The Amicable Quixote; or, The Enthusiasm of Friendship, 4 vols. (London, 1788), vol. ii, p. 178.

 

Honors   743 universities, much less eligible for the Literary Club, Royal Society, or other culturally influential fraternities. The nadir, perhaps, was Pope’s decision to offer up Eliza Haywood as a prize in the urination contest in book ii of The Dunciad. But if a woman could not be laureate, there were other poetic honors to which she had access. In Batheaston, Anne, Lady Miller, hosted a popular salon that centered on a vase and a poetry contest. Contenders would place their verses in the vase, and Lady Miller and a cohort of judges—​usually locally prominent writers—​would select winners, thus creating a space where, according to Paula Backscheider, female poets could participate “in the artistic, political, and civic life of their time.”43 The contest was for extemporaneous poetry, but a sufficient number of the winning entries were of a quality that Lady Miller was able to publish four volumes of Poetical Amusements at a Villa near Bath (1775–​81). Unique among eighteenth-​ century poetic honors, the Batheaston contest drew on the rhetoric and structures of the normative poetic honors of the eighteenth century, but adapted them to a literary community that welcomed both men and women. As Linda Colley points out, Patriotism of a kind was embedded in the classical curriculum. The emphasis on Greek and Roman authors and ancient history meant a constant diet of stories of war, empire, bravery and sacrifice for the state. School and university prize poems and essays from this period creak under the weight of such themes, as well as exuding a lush appreciation of masculine heroism.44

The Batheaston poems contained the expected classical allusions (one winning poem was an “Ode to the Elegiac Muse”), but the range of subject matter of the winning poems reveals concerns that were never addressed by poets awarded prizes by Oxford or Cambridge; prize topics at Batheaston included “The Month of May,” “A Secret,” “A Glow Worm,” and “To an Absent Friend.” Lady Miller favored the bouts-​rimés form, where the end-​rhymes were supplied and the poet filled in the rest. This departure from the heroic couplet was compounded by the occasional use of the acrostic, in one case a winning poem consisted of a playful attempt to flatter the salon’s hostess by using the initial words of each line to spell out “M-​I-​L-​L-​E-​R.” Lastly, each miscellany contained many “enigma” poems—​in essence, rhyming riddles that required the reader to guess the poem’s subject. As Claudia Kairoff points out, there was a vast gulf between the values and aesthetics of Johnsonian London and Lady Miller’s villa.45 Frances Burney reports that the society at Batheaston was derided in London,46 and there was no shortage of patronizing commentary directed at Lady Miller. In “A Receipt to Make a Bath-​Easton Poet,” the reader is told that the proper individual to contend for Lady Miller’s prize would have none of the qualities associated with a good poet. At Batheaston, ’tis not Wit or genuine Sense That gains deserv’d pre-​eminence; 43  Paula R. Backscheider, Eighteenth-​Century Women Poets and their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005), p. xvii. 44  Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–​1837 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 167–​8. 45  Claudia Kairoff, Anna Seward and the End of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2012), p. 55. 46  Frances Burney, Early Journals and Letters, 4 vols. to date (Montreal: McGill-​Queen’s Univ. Press, 1988–​), vol. iv, p. 127. For the ridiculous company Burney encountered upon visiting Lady Miller in 1780, see Burney, Journal and Letters, ed. Peter Sabor and Lars E. Troide (New York: Penguin 2001), pp. 158–​61.

 

744   Daniel J. Ennis Here Art and Policy obtain What real Genius courts in vain; And Blockheads may by sheer address Triumphant ascertain success.47

Burney herself has little to say about the quality of the poetry honored at Batheaston, but she found Lady Miller’s society to be slightly ridiculous, or at least uncomfortably precious. Yet Mary Savage and Anna Seward found at Lady Miller’s a supportive literary community, and the Batheaston contests were an entrée into the larger literary world. The idea of a female literary counter-​tradition at Batheaston has some validity, but the group’s relationship to the literary power structure of the day was more complementary than revolutionary. A prominent member of Lady Miller’s circle, Christopher Anstey, was known as the “Bath-​Laureat” and had long been admired by Pope, Gray, and Horace Walpole. His contributions to Lady Miller’s miscellanies suggest that the competition at Batheaston was by no means an alternative to the poetic honors of London and the universities, but instead was a variation on what had become a national project to legitimize certain poetic practices in a post-​patronage era. Once the Gentleman’s Magazine started printing winning Batheaston poems in 1779, it became very hard to separate the activites at Lady Miller’s villa and the larger poetic-​recognition machinery already in place. By the fourth volume of Poetical Amusements, the participants in the contest included David Garrick, William Mason, and Lord Palmerston. Batheaston had been mainstreamed.

Cultures of Honor During the eighteenth century, the disparate poetic honors of the era began to intersect, eventually forming self-​reinforcing structures of poetical legitimation. The poet laureate could also be the historiographer royal or Oxford professor of poetry. The professor of poetry selected the topic for each Newdigate Prize. The same periodicals that took potshots at the mediocre laureates printed the laureate odes out of some sense of civic duty. These overlapping gestures of cultural discrimination can be seen in the career of William Hawkins. Hawkins was Oxford professor of poetry (1751–​6), and like his laureate counterparts spent much of his energy on dramatic writing. He composed five plays, but the theater managers were not encouraging, and he set his pen to sermons, translations, and criticism. His collection of verse of 1781 contains an intriguing treatment of poetic honors, “Ode to Drollery.” A good-​natured, Skeltonic romp, the poem reveals a professor of poetry aware of the range of artistry in the capital. The Muse, Hawkins tells his readers, ever shifts her mode—​ Now she appears in Cibber’s Ode; In Hogarth’s print;—​in Garrick’s Brute;—​ In Zany’s lecture; or—​the mimick’ry of Foote.—​48

47 

A Receipt to Make A Bath-​Easton Poet, and to Obtain a Prize from the Vase (Bath, 1777), p. 4. William Hawkins, Poems on Various Subjects (Oxford, 1781), p. 190. “Zany” was George Alexander Stevens, known for the wildly successful Lecture upon Heads. 48 

 

Honors   745 The Muse could travel from the poet laureate’s ode to the transgressive performances of Samuel Foote by way of David Garrick’s great Augustan stage role. The interrelationship between these cultural productions echoes in the career of the poet—​Hawkins used his authority as professor of poetry to assess the state of “Drollery” (as, by implication, critique the laureate, Cibber, who must have allowed Drollery to creep into the putatively solemn odes by mistake). Oxford’s academic appointment was part of a network that included not just the laureateship, but other touchstones of Augustan artistry, from the visual arts to the stage. Poetic honors did cultural work; they helped an age discriminate between the bad and the good, and the good and the great, and filled the vacuum left as patronage receded. As such, universities, ministers, periodicals, and critics endorsed, derided, dismissed, and embraced writers in a cycle of affirmation and rejection that was not so much aimed at manufacturing consensus as it was dedicated to defining poetry as something for which there was still much at stake. Outliers like Stephen Duck and Christopher Smart were contextualized by poetic honors—​Smart as a former prizewinner unable to stay within the charmed circle of academic poetry, Duck as a déclassé writer not quite ready for high-​profile preferment. Colley Cibber used his bully pulpit as poet laureate to promote the works of Laetitia Pilkington, and a generation later Anne Finch was honored when the laureate Tate included her poems in one of his anthologies—​even though Tate was the least honored of the laureates. Cultural communities outside London—​from Dublin to Batheaston to Edinburgh—​employed the vocabulary and practices of the capital when it came to literary distinctions. Booksellers profited from prizes, prizes indicated what kind of poetry was to be preferred, and the cultural values of the panegyric were reinforced at every turn. Perhaps the best place to see this phenomenon at work is in the truly final poetic honor: Poets’ Corner. Recognition at Westminster Abbey was the ne plus ultra of cultural regard, and Poets’ Corner, the place Philip Connell calls “an accretive, legible index of English literary history,” shows how integrated eighteenth-​century poetic honors eventually became.49 Three eighteenth-​ century poets laureate were memorialized in Westminster Abbey (Dryden, Rowe, and Shadwell), and two winners of the competition at Batheaston, Anstey and William Mason, are included in Poets’ Corner as well. Like the laureates and the winners of poetry prizes, the writers included in Poets’ Corner in the eighteenth century made it thanks to political, social, and aesthetic factors which are often invisible to contemporary readers. Even as Poets’ Corner was emerging as a national institution, Pope, in his “Epitaph for One who Would Not be Buried in Westminster-​Abbey” saw its contradictory attractions and potential corruption, and in so doing, summed up the complicated nature of eighteenth-​ century poetic honors: Heroes, and Kings! your distance keep: In peace let one poor Poet sleep, Who never flatter’d Folks like you: Let Horace blush, and Virgil too.50

49 

Philip Connell, “Death and the Author: Westminster Abbey and the Meanings of the Literary Monument,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 38, no. 4 (2005), 557–​85, at p. 559. 50  Alexander Pope, “Epitaph: For One Who Would Not Be Buried in Westminster-​Abbey,” in Poems, vol. vi, p. 376.

 

746   Daniel J. Ennis Pope asserts the integrity of the unpreferred poet, but his gentle reproof of Horace and Virgil is typical Popean contrariness. Horace and Virgil were not cautionary examples of poetic honors gone wrong; they represented for many the perfect alignment of poetic accomplishment, public regard, and official recognition, the kind of alignment that eighteenth-​century poetic honors were conceived to recreate.

References Backscheider, Paula R., Eighteenth-​Century Women Poets and their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2005). Brewer, John, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: HarperCollins, 2004). Folkenflik, Robert, “Patronage and the Poet-​Hero,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 79 (1985), 363–​79. Griffin, Dustin H., Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005). Heaney, Peter F., “The Laureate Dunces and the Death of the Panegyric,” Early Modern Literary Studies, 5, no. 1 (May 1999), 4.1–​24. Hopkins, Kenneth, The Poets Laureate (London: Bodley Head, 1954). Ingrassia, Catherine, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-​ Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998). Kramnick, Jonathan Brody, Making the English Canon: Print-​Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–​1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999). Laurie, Hilary (ed.), Verses of the Poets Laureate from John Dryden to Andrew Motion (London: Orion Books, 1999). Rizzo, Betty, “The Patron as Poet Maker: The Politics of Benefaction,” Studies in EighteenthCentury Culture, 20 (1991), 241–​66. Simpson, Erik, “Minstrelsy Goes to Market: Prize Poems, Minstrel Contests, and Romantic Poetry,” ELH, 71 (2004), 691–​7 18.

 

Index

Abelard, Peter: 79 abolitionist movement: 68–​69, 105, 165, 189, 258, 262, 288, 673, 679 and laboring-​class poets, 165, 288 Ackroyd, Peter: 229 acrostics: 112, 135–​136, 221, 281, 743 Act of Uniformity: 115 Act of Union of 1707: 14–​15, 112, 118, 304, 306–​313, 458, 597 Addison, Joseph: 45, 120–​121, 129, 147, 177, 187, 217, 250, 280, 286, 292–295, 323, 402, 409, 487, 542, 558, 625–626, 628, 710, 714 and Milton, 474, 687, 680 as critic, 28, 31, 187, 190, 611, 613, 620 The Campaign, 45, 292 Cato, 30, 402–​, 425n, 714 on genius, 214–​215 on Virgil’s Georgics, 190, 468 “Pleasures of Imagination” essays, 187, 397, 620, 625–​627 Rosamund, 37, 413, 714 Warton on, 217, 399, 413 Adney, Thomas: 68 advice-​to-​a-​painter poems, 184, 276, 289, 495 Aesop: 604–​605, 608, 697 afterpieces: 35–​38 Agorni, Mirella: 597, 604, 697 Aikin, Anna. See Barbauld, Anna Letitia. Aikin, John: 67, 89, 99, 105, 117–​118, 704–​705 Aikin, Lucy: 105–​107 Aix-la-Chappelle, Treaty of: 304 Akenside, Mark: 118, 187, 328–​329, 331, 396, 402, 519, 576, 621, 629, 658 and blank verse, 388, 396–​397, 401 and the Museum, 61, 63, 513 Pleasures of Imagination, The, 149, 187 Pleasures of the Imagination, The, 186, 231, 329, 394, 621 Alderson, Amelia. See Opie, Amelia. Alexander the Great: 587

alexandrine: 383, 411, 420, 424, 709 Algarotti, Francesco: 255, 321 Alhazen (Abū ʿAlī al-​Ḥasan ibn al-​Ḥasan ibn al-​Haytha): 198 allegory: 276, 285, 339–​340, 324, 329, 354, 443, 519, 525–​526, 633, 636, 640, 642, 645, 653 as component of the epic, 478n14, 480, 600 in political poetry, 288, 339–​340, 448, 496 biblical, 288–​289, 496 in Collins, 283, 519–​520, 658 in Denham, 339–​340, 354 pastoral, 448, 450 Spenserian, 288, 520 Virgilian, 600 Allingham, William: 8 alliteration: 519 and children’s books, 92, 100 as archaism, 556 as quality of oral poetry, 556 in pastoral, 443 allusion: 85, 283, 649–​667 and echo, 651–​652, 663 and metaphor, 650–​651 and parody, 653 and plagiarism, 234, 252, 663 and quotation, 651 as mimesis, 650, 653 classical, 656–​657 in Gray, 661–​666 in Milton, 649–​650 in mock-​heroic, 649, 654 in the Dunciad, 653–​659 literary, 649 personal, 649–​650 scriptural, 649, 656, 658, 660 theory of, 649–​653 to Milton, 656–​657, 660–​662, 666 to Virgil, 656–​658, 662 topical, 649

 

748   Index Alsop, Anthony: 144 Ames, Richard: 499 Altham, Mary Annesley, Lady: 261–​262 American Revolution, 287, 341, 351 Amherst, Nicholas: 129 Amicable Quixote, The: 742 Amner, Richard: 241, 431 amphibrach: 676 amplification: 406, 642, 644 analogy: 167, 175, 277, 295, 529, 535, 569, 621, 635, 640, 666 argument from, 373, 625 as metaphor, 635, 638 dangers of, 635, 639–​642 strained, 269, 640 See also conceit, the. anaphora: 278, 395 ancients vs. moderns: 151, 273–​274, 292, 320, 489, 596–​597, 620–​621, 625, 629, 685 Anderson, Benedict: 305 Anderson, James: 63 Anderson, Robert: 196, 203 Andrews, John: 233 Anglia Triumphans: A Pindaric Ode on His Grace the Duke of Marlborough, 515 Anglo-​Dutch War, the Second: 289, 306 Anne (queen of England): 45–​47, 146, 273, 276, 294, 308, 347, 502–​503, 515–516, 526, 739 Annesley inheritance case, the: 261–​262 annotation: 241, 333, 444, 462, 491, 601, 613, 649, 652, 687, 689, 695–​697, 699, 708, 711 Shandean, 544 Scriblerian, 49, 650, 653 Annual Register, The: 233 Anson, George: 580 Anstey, Christopher: 128, 131, 138n34, 503, 744–​745 Anstey’s measure (anapestic trimeter), 138n34 New Bath Guide, 131, 503 anthologies: 103, 110, 112, 114, 118, 189, 247, 347 antimetabole: 412 antistasis: 619

antithesis: 41–​42, 73, 208, 211, 330, 381–​382, 396 antiquarians: 90, 230, 237, 240, 241–​242, 244, 337, 414, 492, 685, 687, 690, 698, 705–​706, 715 and ballads, 551–​552 and broadsides, 9, 550 artificial antiquarianism, 227, 238, 242–​243 Society of Antiquaries, 241, 705 See also Percy, Thomas. apostrophe: 329, 452, 514n11, 519, 523, 536, 594, 664 Arbuthnot, John: 49, 128, 146–​147, 670 archaism. See diction (archaic). Archimedes: 649 Aristotle: 84, 275, 500, 633–​635, 640, 724 against metaphor, 632 on mimesis, 270–​271, 650 on mind and body, 500 Poetics, 27–​29, 76–​77, 80, 223, 270, 275–​276, 634 See also metaphor (Aristotle on); neo-Aristotelian critics; Arkwright, Richard: 333 Armstrong, John: 374, 468, 720 Arne, Thomas: 35, 37, 525 See also Masque of Alfred. Arnold, Matthew: xix, 577–​578 Art of Dressing the Hair, The: 134 Ascham, Roger: 597 Asiento Pact: 347 assonance: 91, 556–​557 Astell, Mary: 255, 260, 290–​291 Atkinson, David: 549, 555, 560 Atkinson, Thomas: 447 Atterbury, Francis: 286, 703 Aubin, Robert Arnold: 335n4, 336n8, 354 Aubrey, John: 90, 704, 710 Augustan era, the: 270 Charles II as Augustus, 306, 598 skepticism in, 270, 608 transition to Romantic era, 183 Virgilian modes in, 598 Augustan poetry: 340 and Latinity, 415 vs. the Baroque, 270–​271, 281–​282 See also couplets: heroic.

 

Index   749 Austen, Jane: 37, 98, 409, 668, 671 Austen, Lady Ann: 400 Ayloffe, John: 497 Backscheider, Paula: 149, 157, 247, 358, 598, 743 Bacon, Sir Francis: 215n17, 320, 640, 642 doubts about figurative language, 632–​633, 640–​643, 648 on poetry, 640–​641 Bailey, John Cann: 672n14 Bailey, Nathan: 231 Baillie, Joanna: 262 Baines, Paul: 148, 229, 232, 236 Baker, Henry: 363–​364 Bakhtin, Mikhail: 74–​75, 276 ballads: 78, 261, 298, 547–​562 Addison on, 558, 588 and melody, 556–​557 and women writers, 261–​263 as influence on Romantic poets, 262, 561 as oral form, 9n21, 520, 547–​556, 554, 556–​557 as political poetry, 288, 298 bardic composition of, 547 broadside, 547, 549–​551 Colin and Lucy, 238 Collection of Ballads, A, 550 collectors of, 550–​553 definition of, 553 diction of, 550, 554–​555 garlands of, 4, 90, 549 narrative in, 553–​554 origin theories: bardic, 547–​548 collective, 548 individual poets, 547 parody of, 414, 554 pastoral, 449–​450 revised, 414, 582 stanza, 94, 109, 170, 414, 549–​550, 556–​557 topical-​satirical, 288 Scottish revival of, 262 singers of, 7–​9, 90, 262 See also Child, Francis James; Gordon, Anna; Percy, Thomas.

Bancks, John: 169 Banier, Abbé Antoine le: 605 Bank of England: 287–​288 Banks, Sir Joseph: 332 Bannantyne, George: 231 Bannerman, Anne: 262 Barbados Gazette poet, the: 253, 258 possibly Martha Fowke, 248n4, 256 Barbauld, Ann Letitia: 67, 88–​89, 99, 102, 105, 118, 249, 250–​251, 254, 256–​258, 261–​262, 264, 574, 611–​612, 673 and aesthetically stimulated religious feeling, 574–​575 Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq., 105–107, 189, 258, 318–​319, 673 on marriage, 365 on affective poetics, 186, 572–​573, 575 Thoughts on the Devotional Taste, 566, 574–​575 See also Aiken, John. Barber, Mary: 84, 140, 235, 310, 362, 673 bard, the: 14, 244, 282–​283, 316, 476, 522, 659–​660, 738 and nationalism, 338, 345, 492–​493, 520–521, 733 as source of ballads, 547 as historian, 491–​492 as visionary, 455, 511, 522 “come-​all-​ye” introduction, 6 figure of the poetic, 66, 155, 217, 222 Homer as, 476, 491–​492, 688 in Druidic and Celtic Wales, 246, 316, 591, 613 in Gray’s poem, 155, 417, 492, 520–​521, 590–​591, 663 in satire, 391n11, 544 Ossian as, 316, 454, 551 poet of genius as, 222–​223, 454 rustic, 454–​455 Barker, Anthony: 64 Barker, Jane: 78, 81–​82, 85, 250, 254, 287, 592 Barlow, Francis: 604–​605 Barnard, Lady Anne: 262 Barnard, John: 486 Barnes, Barnabe: 380 Barnes, Thomas: 433

 

750   Index Baroque: 19, 259, 269–​270, 662, 689 and disruptive wit, 270 as effusive and ornate, 270 music, 19 opera, 418 vs. Augustan mode, 270–​271, 281–​282 Barrell, John: 337n12, 352, 441n1, 463 Barry, Elizabeth: 29, 34 Barry, Spranger: 504 Barton, Anne: 25 Bate, W. J.: 283 Bates, Catherine: 198 Batheaston Literary Circle: 127–​128, 743–​744 Bathhurst, Allen Bathurst, 1st Earl: 260 bathos: 74, 137, 280, 411 as mock-​sublime, 280 comic effects of, 137 See also Pope, Alexander (Peri Bathos) Batrachomyomachia, 608 Battier, Henrietta: 252, 253n33, 261 Beach, Thomas: 63 Beaumont, Francis: 203 Beattie, James: 20–​21, 76, 119, 537 and genius, 225, 452 Minstrel; or, The Progress of Genius, The, 223–​225, 451–​452, 455, 550 and Ossian atmosphere, 452 as balladesque romance, 225 influence of Percy’s Reliques, 452, 550 Behler, Ernst, 671 Beaupuy, Michel: 223 Beauties of the English Stage: 203 Beckford, William: 74 Beer, Gillian: 79 Beethoven, Ludwig von: 19, 418 Behn, Aphra: 78–​79, 82, 150, 248, 254–​255, 263, 287, 289–​290, 363, 582–​583, 597, 604–​605, 609, 671, 676 and translation, 603–​604, 609 Bell, John: 156, 158 Belle Assemblée, La: 250 Bellegard, Abbé Jean-​Baptiste Morvan de: 678 belles-​lettres: 117, 120 Belsham, William: 431 Benario, Janice M.: 612 Benedict, Barbara: 134, 152, 597, 608–​609 Bennet, John: 174–​175

Bentley, Elizabeth: 67, 173 Bentley, Richard: 47, 49, 146, 323, 490, 610, 653, 687–​689, 696–​697 Bergson, Henri: 333 Berkeley, George: 196, 201–​202, 320 Bernard, James: 322 Berry, Chuck: 21 Bertram, Charles: 245 Betham, Mary Matilda: 253n33 Bethlem Hospital: A Poem in Blank Verse: 392 Betterton, Thomas: 23, 26, 28, 34, 37–​38 biblical verse: 257, 291, 321–​322 Bickerstaff, Isaac: 35, 739 Bickham, George, Sr.: 98 Bill of Rights: 287 Birch, Thomas: 551 Birkhead, Henry: 118 Blair, Hugh: 103, 119–​120, 231 Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-​Lettres, 121–122, 621, 624–​626 on genius, 218n25, 219n28 on Ossian, 492 Blair, Robert: 392, 671 Blacklock, Thomas: 536 Blackstone, William, 362–​363 Blackwall, Anthony: 112 Blackmore, Sir Richard: 112, 275–​276, 292, 324, 333, 473–​474, 487–​488, 498, 517, 697, 738 as volunteer laureate, 738 Creation: A Philosophical Poem, The, 184, 188, 323–​324 in the Dunciad, 324, 657, 738 King Arthur, 292, 608 Prince Arthur, 485–​486, 608 Blake, William: 50, 188, 212, 221, 330, 465, 493, 565, 576, 671 and free verse, 433–​434, 437 illustrates Young’s Night Thoughts, 330 Blamire, Susan: 249, 262 blank verse: 28–​30, 86, 131, 171, 257, 272–273, 290, 298, 328, 336, 374, 376, 386–404, 427 and political liberty, 294, 389, 401–​402 and printing, 424–​426 associated with differing ideologies, 286, 296n35, 402–​403, 479

 

Index   751 in dramatic writing, 30, 386, 408 identified as Protestant form, 289, 403 magniloquence in, 409 Miltonic, 273, 294, 338, 342, 351, 390, 398, 426, 479 pauses in, 422–​423, 426, 428–​429 Thomson and, 148, 393–​394 blazon: 197–​198 and discourse of erotic penetration, 199–200, 202–​204 and intromission theory, 198, 201 projecting blame onto seen things, 201–​204 Petrarchan, 196 Spenserian, 200–​201 Swift’s counter-​blazons, 196–​197, 204–​209 Blenheim, Battle of: 45, 391 Blind Hary: 10 Bloom, Harold: 474n3, 510 Bloomfield, Robert: 288 Blome, Richard: 282 Blount, Martha: 234, 360, 368 Blount, Thomas: 551, 669 Bluestockings, the: 130, 133, 250 Bly, Robert: 625n25 Boccaccio, Giovanni: 553n18, 609 Bogel, Frederic: 495 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, 1st Viscount: 44, 298, 326, 394, 431, 669 Bond, William: 52 Bonnie Prince Charlie. See Stuart, Prince Charles Edward. Boileau-​Despréaux, Nicolas: 270–​273, 275, 283, 534, 608, 633, 638, 653, 697, 703, 714 Book of Common Prayer, 570 “Book of Silvia Cole, The”: 100–​101 Booker, Luke: 186 Booth, Stephen: 380 Booth, Wayne C.: 668, 671–​672, 677, 679–​681 Boswell, James: 63, 119, 211, 231–​232, 244, 470, 531, 679 Boulton, Matthew: 331 bouts-​rimés: 127–​128, 135, 743 Boutell, Elizabeth, 25 Bowers, Toni: 489 Bowles, William Lisle: 67, 531, 726–​727 Boyce, William: 35, 525

Boyd, Elizabeth: 253n33, 257–​258, 261 Boyd, Henry: 741 Boyle, Robert: 323 Boys, John: 600 Boyse, Samuel: 65 Bradbury, Jill Marie: 310 Bradford, Richard: 374 Brady, Nicholas: 419, 570 “Brags of Washington, The”: 6 Brand, John: 543 Braund, Susanna Morton: 278 Braunmuller, A. R.: 23 Brereton, Jane: 63 Breval, John Durant: 145–​147 Briggs, Julia: 95 brindisi. See songs: drinking. broadsides: 3–​9, 11, 16, 18, 80, 135, 140, 298, 495, 526, 532–​534, 541, 547, 549–​551, 558 Brooke, Charlotte: 256, 316 Brooke, Frances: 85 Brooke, Henry: 297 Brontë sisters: 243 Broome, William: 609 Brosette, Claude: 697 Brothers’ Club: 140 Brown, John: 46, 518 Brown, Marshall: 77–​78, 81 Brown, Stephen W.: 61 Brown, Thomas, 57 Brown, Tom: 57, 498 Browne, Janet: 333 Browne, Moses: 63–​64, 156, 518 Browne, Thomas: 409 Browning, Robert: 72 Brutus, Marcus Junius: 397 Bryant, John Frederick: 163 Brydges, Samuel Egerton: 67 Buchan, Peter: 9, 552 Buchanan, George: 15 Buckhurst, Charles Sackville, Lord. See Dorset, Charles Sackville, Earl of. Buckingham, George Villiers, 2nd Duke of: 28, 280, 286, 495, 497 Buckingham and Normanby, Duke of. See Mulgrave, John Sheffield, Earl of. Budgell, Eustace: 235–​236

 

752   Index Bunyan, John: 94, 572, 576, 633 Burke, Edmund: 506, 532 on the sublime and the beautiful, 398, 623, 626 Burke, Richard: 119 burlesque: 85, 129–​130, 413, 444, 668 Burlington, Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of: 148, 342–​343 Burney, Charles: 33–​35, 37 Burney, Frances: 34, 37, 85, 98, 157, 674, 743–​744 Burns, Robert: 10, 20, 43, 51–​52, 67, 142, 130, 165, 168, 174, 177, 221, 262, 522, 454–​455, 506, 561, 671, 738 “Cotter’s Saturday Night,” 454–​455 influence on laboring-​class poets, 174–​175 Scots Musical Museum, 16, 21 Burrell, Lady Sophia: 494 Bute, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of: 300, 398, 492 Butler, Lord John: 280 Butler, Samuel: 147, 270, 280, 290, 704 Hudibras, 270, 483, 497–​498, 676, 709, 734 Ireland’s forgeries of, 221 See also hudibrastics. Butt, George: 680–​681 Button’s coffee house, 129 Byrom, John: 131, 138n34 Byron, George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron: 75, 99, 116, 150, 159–​160, 328, 413, 450, 493 and rhyme, 398, 408 Don Juan, 72, 160, 223, 280, 677 Bysshe, Edward: Art of English Poetry, 83, 112, 167–​168, 375, 535 as source of quotations, 83, 535–​536 Cadell, Thomas: 50–​51 Caesar, Augustus: 333, 469, 489, 464, 714 Caesar, Julius: 48, 144–​145, 397, 593 caesura: 198, 381–​384, 387, 396, 434, 535 Calcott, John: 525 Callendar, James: 538 Cambridge, University of: 50, 118, 146, 148, 299, 331, 520–​521, 525, 734, 741–​743 Camden, William: 336n6, 343

Campbell, Alexander: 20 Campbell, Archibald: 231–​232 Campbell, George: 117, 120–​122 Campion, Thomas: 374 Canning, Elizabeth: 237 Canning, George: 454 Cape Club, the: 130 Capell, Edward: 241 edition of Shakespeare, 649, 674, 691, 695 typographic innovations, 675, 677 capitals: 43–​44 Carey, Henry: 44–​45 Carey, Peter: 229 Carleson, Carl L.: 56 Carmarthen, Peregrine Osborne, 2nd Marquess of: 525 Caroline (queen of Great Britain): 166, 168, 235, 299, 737–​738 carpe diem motif: 364–​365 Carter, Elizabeth: 63, 130, 181, 261, 264, 321 and Richardson, 84, 261 translation by, 597 Cartwright, Edmund: 727 Carryl, John: 497 Castelvetro, Ludovico: 639 Castlemaine, Barbara Palmer, Countess of: 497 Cato’s Letters: 297 Catullus: 690 Cavalier poets: 280, 365 Cave, Edward: 58, 60–​61, 64–​65, 70, 156, 321 Cave, Jane: 132–​133, 253n33, 362, 366, 362, 366 Cawdrey, Robert: 668 Cellier, Elizabeth: 250 Centlivre, Susanna: 32, 129, 232, 254, 293 cento: 653 Cervantes, Miguel de: 709 Chalmers, Alexander: 156, 690 Chamberlaine, James: 193 Chambers, Ephraim: 321. chapbooks: 3–​5, 9–​11, 14, 37, 89 Chapman, George: 375, 477, 491, 606 Charles I (king of England): 227, 341 Charles II (king of England): 27, 34, 270, 288–289, 292, 298, 305, 405, 482, 496–​497, 499, 596, 598, 601, 672–673, 734 as satiric target, 296, 497, 506, 672

 

Index   753 Chatham, Earl of. See Pitt, William (the Elder). Chatman, Seymour: 428 Chatterton, Thomas: 165–​166, 172, 221, 229, 242, 244, 316 African Eclogues, 243, 447–​448 Ireland’s forgeries of, 221 Rowley Poems and controversy, 242–​244, 698–​699 Chaucer, Geoffrey: 242, 280, 408, 411–​412, 609, 659n33, 686–​687, 703–​704, 708, 712–​713, 732 anthologized, 156, 690, 704 as poet laureate, 732, 733n1, 735 editions of, 687, 703 Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of: 151 and Samuel Johnson, 152 as patron for Henry Jones, 166 chiasmus: 330, 376 Chico, Tita: 207 Child, Francis James: 548–​549, 552–​554, 561 Child’s New Play-​Thing, The: 96 children’s poetry: 9, 88–​107 against the slave trade, 105–​106 and moral instruction, 114, 322 and teaching elocution, 103–​105, 384 and teaching reading, 91, 96, 108 anthologies of, 103–​106, 108–​112, 189 children composing verse, 99–​100 devotional verse for, 93–​95, 575–​576 explanation of, 109–​110 in education, 108–​109 instruction vs. delight, 89–​90, 110, 114 memorizing, 104–​105 nursery rhymes, 90-​91 performance pieces, 102–​103 pleasure in, 110, 114 rhyming alphabets, 92, 99 rhyming grammars, 93 riddles, 99 understanding poetry, 108–​109 Chopin, Frédéric: 210 Christmas, William J.: 164, 172 Chudleigh, Lady Mary: 263–​264, 287, 291, 321

Churchill, Charles: 237, 280, 299–​300, 398, 495, 503–​505, 507, 676, 716–​717 and the Nonsense Club, 129, 286, 300 defends Wilkes, 287, 300, 398, 505 Rosciad, The, 280, 300, 504, 507, 677 Cibber, Colley: 26, 34, 96, 232 as poet laureate, 488, 517, 745 in the Dunciad, 280, 282, 488, 657, 734, 738 Cibber, Theophilus: 704 Cinthio, Geraldi: 639 Cicero: 184–​185, 215n17, 397, 431, 626n28, 638 Civil Wars, English: 269–​270, 280, 286, 298, 304, 335, 338, 340–​341 Clare, John: 163, 166, 288, 299, 547 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of: 710 Clark, Esther Lewis: 362 Clarke, Samuel: 656 Cleary, Scott: 611 Cleveland, John: 709 clichés: 222 clubs: 127–​143 drinking, 128, 130, 135–​136 exclude women, 250 homosociality in, 129 offered writers audience, 130 reformist, 130 Clymer, Lorna: 529 Coats, Karen: 92 Cobb, Samuel: 515 Cochran, James, 59 Cockburn, Catherine. See Trotter, Catherine. Cockeram, Henry: 668–​669 Cock-​Lane Ghost, the: 237 coffee-​houses: 129–​131, 153n19–​20, 608 Cohen, Ralph: 514, 620 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: 52, 73, 221, 241, 243, 285, 388, 414, 434, 506, 550, 576, 727 influence of Percy’s Reliques, 550 Kubla Khan, 284 on prosody, 435–​436 See also Lyrical Ballads; Wordsworth, William. Coles, Elisha: 669 Colie, Rosalie: 380 collaboration: 604–​605

 

754   Index Collection of Pretty Poems for the Amusement of Children Three Feet High: 89 Collection of the Best English Poetry, 52 College, Stephen: 289, 495 Colley, Linda: 596–​597, 743 Collier, Jeremy: 33 Collier, John Payne: 242 Collier, Mary: 165, 169, 176, 257, 288, 398 and Georgic, 252–​253, 466 Poems, On Several Occasions, 51, 252n26 The Woman’s Labour, 51, 156, 170, 252–​253, 257 Collingwood, R. G.: 713 Collins, John: 241 Collins, William: 61, 118, 221, 283–​284, 261, 408, 416, 510, 519–​520, 526, 528, 591, 658, 652, 666, 671 madness of, 221 Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects, 519–​520, 658–​659 Persian Eclogues, 316–​317, 448 Colman, George: 128–​129, 138n37, 399, 718 Combe, William: 234–​235 Comenius, Johann Amos: 93–​93 commonplace books: 98–​99 compositor, role of: 41 Concannon, Matthew: 147, 737 conceit, the: 377–​378, 620, 633, 635–​636, 640, 643, 647, 651, 654–​655, 660, 666, 709 as false wit, 269–​270, 274, 644, 646 found manuscript, 238–​239, 244 concordia discors: 340–​341, 458, 484 Congleton, J. E.: 441 Congreve, Sir William: 32, 57, 85, 609, 658, 708 and the ode, 512, 514–​515, 658 consonance: 91, 418 Connelly, Peter: 610 Coombe, Thomas: 447 Cooper, Edward: 400 Corbett, Richard: 343 consonants, masculine: 32 Constable, Henry: 380 Constable, John: 465, 628 contents, tables of: 41, 167, 671 Cook, James (Captain): 317, 332, 494 Cooke,Thomas: 52, 525

Cooke, William: 130 Cope, General Sir John: 12 copyright: and proprietary authorship, 152–​153 copyright act of 1709, 53, 145, 232 copyright act of 1814, 150 fees, 160 held by publishers and booksellers, 50–​52, 152, 155, 513 lawsuits concerning, 52–​53 poets’ ownership of, 52, 148, 152–​153, 159 Shakespeare’s, 244–​245 unauthorized Irish and Scottish reprints, 52 vs. piracy, 52–​53, 152, 232, 245 Corelli, Arcangelo: 16 Corman, Cid: 437 Corneille, Pierre: 256, 402, 603 Cotton, Charles: 608 country house motif, the: 156, 252, 337n14 couplets: 373, 374, 398 enjambment in, 379, 397 heroic, 10, 79, 138, 168, 270, 272–​273, 276, 279, 322, 351, 381–​382, 409–​412, 414–​415, 420, 424, 479, 741, 743 antithesis in, 275, 341 epigrammatic tendency of, 322, 398, 415 position of caesura in, 382–​383 retreat from, 658 syntactical balance of, 424 ubiquity of, 375–​377, 408, 479, 677 women and the, 257, 602, 612 in sonnets, 379–​380 rhyming, 30–​32, 374 standalone (see epigram) See also caesura Coward, William: 425 “Cowboy’s Lament, the”: 7 Council of Parnassus, the: 130 Cowley, Abraham: 85, 112, 254, 273, 280, 406, 412, 417, 512, 606. 639–​641, 685, 703–​704, 709–​710 and pindarics, 406–​, 514, 518, 525, 608, 658, 713 Civil War, The, 478–​479 Davideis, 478–​479, 483, 662 Johnson’s criticism of, 269, 620, 644, 709 satirized, 519 Cowley, Hannah: 67, 254

 

Index   755 Cowper, William: 168, 193, 321–​322, 393, 399–​400, 506–​507, 588–​589, 592, 671, 690, 726–​727 and blank verse, 374, 388, 399–​402 and slavery, 68, 317–​319, 506–​507 and the Nonsense Club, 129, 286, 300 “Diverting History of John Gilpin, The,” 89, 414 fragments of, borrowed by Ireland, 222 madness of, 21, 416 Task, The, 105, 193, 317–​318, 327, 345, 399–401, 494 parodied, 74n7 sapphics, use of, 416 translates Homer, 610 See also Olney Hymns. Crabbe, George: 43, 408, 531, 671 Craik, Helen: 240 Crane, Walter: 93 crambos (capping of rhymes): 99, 141 Crashaw, Richard: 281, 645 Crawford, Robert: 128n3 Creech, Thomas: 42, 603 cribs: 83, 111 Cristall, Ann Batten: 253n33 Crochallan Fencibles, the: 130 Croft, George: 741–​742 Croft, Herbert: 243 Croker, John William: 160 Cromwell, Henry: 136, 537 Cromwell, Oliver: 299, 304 Crossman, Samuel: 94 Crouch, Nathaniel: 94 Crousaz, Jean-​Pierre de: 325 Crowe, William: 353 Crowne, John: 280 Croxall, Samuel: 584, 590 Culloden, battle of: 12–​14, 17, 304 Cunningham, James: 450 Curliad, The: 52 Curll, Edmund, 26, 52, 81, 144–​146, 148, 155, 159, 236, 611 satirized, 52, 234, 654–​658 Curran, Stuart: 494 Dacier, Anne: 489, 490, 610, 654 Dalton, John: 471

Dane, Joseph A.: 671 D’Anvers, Alicia: 248, 258–​259 Dartineuf, Charles: 172 Darton, F. J. Harvey: 89 Darwin, Charles: 331 Darwin, Erasmus: 77, 323, 328, 331–​333 against slavery, 332 Botanic Garden, 67, 332 Loves of the Plants, 188, 241, 332 personification in, 333 Darwin, Robert: 331 Davenant, Sir William: 34, 232, 686, 703 as poet laureate, 28, 703, 733n1 Gondibert, 271, 479–​486, 488–​489 David (king of Israel): 652 Davys, Mary: 259 Dawson, William: 196, 203–​204 Day, Thomas, and John Bicknell: 106 de Grazia, Margreta: 200 de Quehen, Hugh: 602 decline of English poetry, the: 282–​283 decorum: 33, 172, 216n21, 270, 282, 443, 448, 467, 603, 692 Dedekind, Friedrich: 680 dedications: 30, 41, 44, 113, 129n6, 227-​228, 232, 451, 485, 601, 604–​605, 719 deictics: 188 Delany, Patrick: 132, 150, 141n44 Demetrius: 635–​636 Demoniacs, the: 129–​130 Denbigh, Basil Feilding, 2nd Earl of: 235 Denham, Sir John: 96, 281 340, 345, 355, 412, 632, 703–​704, 709–​710, 714 and translation, 599–​600, 606, 613 Coopers Hill, 281, 288, 335, 338–​340, 347, 349, 351, 353–​354, 611, 655 influence of, 337, 339, 355, 603 Johnson on, 338, 647, 710 Dennis, John: 276, 281, 292, 294, 374, 487, 518, 608, 565 Advancement and Reformation of Poetry, The, 187, 517–​518 and the sublime, 275, 281, 566 Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, The, 187, 517, 580, 687 on affective poetics, 187, 517–​518, 567 satirized, 275, 519

 

756   Index Derham, William: 323 Derrida, Jacques: 609 Desaguliers, John Theophilus: 324 Descartes, René: 212 desire: 290, 364, 583–​584, 587, 593, 715 and consumer model of sexuality, 360–​361 and delusions of seduction, 580 helplessness to resist, 203 loss of, 367 personification of, 589, 591 to possess, 199, 364 men and women share capacity for, 358–359, 361 transgressive same-​sex, 256, 362 description: 179, 728 metaphor as, 632 precepts conveyed through, 190 Desolation; or, The Fall of Gin: A Poem, 672 Deutsch, Helen: 204, 359–​361, 541 Devil upon Two Sticks in England, The. 507 devotional poetry: 563–​578 affective poetics of, 187, 518, 564, 566–​572, 574–​575 and biblical paraphrase, 257, 518, 564–​565 and the sublime, 588 as testimony of personal conversion, 572 David’s divine songs and, 569 emphasis on listening, 566–​567 melody of, as praise, 571 relation of letter and spirit, 565 Romantic, hearing God in silence, 577 sound of, creating overflow of feeling, 564–​567, 571, 575–​576 theopathy and, 574 De Quincey, Thomas: 217 dialect: Cornish, 447 Cumberland, 446 dialogue in dialect, 447–​448 Scottish, as “offensive,” 119 Scottish, literary, 445 Scottish, rustic, 177, 445–​446, 448 dialogue: 131, 175, 188, 248, 255, 298, 365, 375, 442, 495, 553, 645 as debate, 192 critical, 76, 686 dramatic, 36, 645, 708, 714

in eclogue, 447, 452–​453 in essay, 686 in dialect, 447 matrimonial, 365–​366, 724 mock, 365 of the dead, 536 political, 448, 483 Diaper, William: 445 Dicey family: 551 Dicey, William, 61 Dickens, Charles: 326 diction: 84, 177, 188, 222, 274, 278–​279, 284, 286, 328, 398, 403, 407, 412, 426, 446, 449, 487, 541, 662, 727 and Burns, 455 and Cicero, 638 and Percy’s Reliques, 550 and the grand style, 635 archaic, 284, 442, 445, 555 artificial, 73, 301, 442 biblical, 568 children and, 109, 445 Dryden civilizer of, 709 heroic, 610 high and low, 278–​279, 411 in allusion, 662–​663, 665 in ballads, 553–​554 in devotional poetry, 567 in georgic, 466–​467 in reviews, 727 Johnson on, 621, 709–​710 Miltonic, 391, 452, 535 pastoral, 286, 442, 445, 451–​452 plain, 442, 444 rustic, 443–​445, 449, 451 Scottish, literary, 445 Scottish, rustic, 177, 445–​446 Spenserian, 225 Wordsworth on, xix, 285, 302, 403, 550 Diderot, Denis: 295 Digby, Kenelm: 532 digression: 190, 273, 394, 406, 515, 642, 702, 706 Dilworth, W. H.: 536 Dingley, Rebecca: 148 Dionysius of Halicarnassus: 635–​636, 639, 642 Dissenting academies, xx, 110–​118

 

Index   757 dithyramb: 634–​635 Dixon, Henry: 93 Defoe, Daniel: 75, 80–​82, 116, 296, 307–​308, 319–​320, 495, 505 Jure Divino, 483, 500 Shortest Way With the Dissenters, 500, 678 True-​Born Englishman, The, 307, 498 “Della Cruscan” poetry: 66, 74, 130, 450, 448, 506 dérimage: 75, 77–​78 Diderot, Denis: 84 Dissenting poets: 254 Dobell, Sydney: 577 Dobrée, Bonamy: 294 Dodington, George: 237–​238 Dodd, Ralph: 233 Dodd, William: 228, 243, 454 Doddridge, Philip: 116, 571 Dodsley, James: 50, 551 Dodsley, Robert: 49–​52, 59, 90, 132, 149, 172–173, 436, 551 Agriculture, 457, 461, 467 as laboring-​class poet, 172–​173, 175 edits Collection of Poems by Several Hands, 43, 132, 155–​156, 513, 521 Museum, The, 56, 61, 149 Preceptor, The, 713 Dolan, John: 165, 175 Dolban, Sir William: 301 Donne, John: 146, 198, 269, 375, 406–​407, 409–​410, 412–​413, 540, 644 Doody, Margaret: 208, 247, 514 double entendre: 69 Douglas, William: 231 douzain: 414 Dorset, Charles Sackville, 6th earl of: 261, 280, 292 Draper, John W.: 532–​533 Drayton, Michael: 336n6, 343, 375, 410 Dryden, John: 24–​26, 34, 42–​43, 57, 85, 116, 192, 196, 203, 215, 231, 263, 279–280, 284, 286, 2289–​290, 292–​293 299, 340, 374, 408–​409, 411–​413, 417, 424, 478, 487, 495–496, 505, 507, 510, 521, 532–533, 586–​587, 603, 618, 632–633, 642, 646651, 686, 704, 709, 714, 739

Absalom and Achitophel, 289–​290, 388, 482–​483, 496–​498, 501, 507, 530, 534, 530, 534, 671, 673 Alexander’s Feast, 276, 283, 417, 587 and blank verse, 402, 408 and elegy, 532–​535, 541 and Horace, 702–​703 and translation, 597, 606–​607, 610, 613 Annus Mirabilis, 289, 289, 294, 306, 318, 409, 479, 482 as poet laureate, 28, 286, 482, 524, 658, 733–735, 745 as Virgil to Charles II’s Augustus, 598 Astraea Redux: 289, 306, 598 conversion to Catholicism, 292 Discourse concerning Satire, 497, 608 Essay of Dramatick Poesie, 28–​29, 407–​408, 410, 604, 686 expectation of irony in, 679–​680 Fables, 532–​543, 596, 604–​605, 607, 609, 611, 686–​687, 703 Ireland’s forgeries of, 221 Mac Flecknoe, 280, 290, 658, 672 Medall,The, 496 Religio Laici, 42–​43, 186 Satires, 48, 608 satirized, 279–​280 To the Memory of Mr. Oldham, 534 translates Virgil, 48, 463, 472, 474–​475, 486, 532, 611 Du Fresnoy, Charles Alphonse: 607 Dublin: 5, 47, 322, 447, 745 artisan workers and poetry, 135 broadsides, 5, 135 “Dublin Thursday Society,” 132, 140 emulated London, 745 magazines, 62, 66 pastorals of nationality, 454 piracy, 53, 231 small-​scale publication, 47 Trinity College, 167n18, 322, 447, 741 See also Faulkner, George; Swift, Jonathan. Dow, Alexander: 317 Drew, Edward: 449 Drummond, Thomas: 721

 

758   Index Duck, Stephen: 46, 51, 163, 165, 169, 171, 174–​176, 288, 301, 398, 737, 745 and patron Queen Caroline, 166, 299, 737 and patron Spence, 166, 172 contemptuous toward working women, 252 The Thresher’s Labour, 60, 165, 301–​302, 463 Duff, William: 218–​219 Duick, John: 63–​64 Duffat, Thomas: 27 Duncan, James Bruce: 7 Dunlop, Frances: as patron for Janet Little, 174 D’Urfey, Thomas: 136, 280, 495 Dyche, Thomas: Guide to the English Tongue, 91, 96 Dyer, Edward: 392 Dyer, Gary: 505–​507 Dyer, John: 113, 129, 305, 313–​314, 354, 391 Fleece, 288, 313–​315, 353, 457–​458, 461–462, 468–​469, 651n10 and imperial aspiration, 314 and pastoral, 391, 462 promotes commerce, 288, 313, 391 Grongar Hill, 352, 354, 510–​511, 521–​523 East India Company: 294, 307, 317, 350 Easy Club, the: 129 Eaton, Daniel Isaac: 507 Eccles, John: 231–​232 eclogue: 252, 255, 443–​447 African, 243, 448 against the slave-​trade, 447 court, 131, 446, 612 dialect in, 447 georgic influence on, 450 imitating Theocritus, 444, 446 imitating Virgil, 446 increasingly place-​specific, 446 in dialogue form, 248, 448, 452–​453 Irish, 454 Jacobin, 447 Jacobite, 447 moral, 454 oriental, 316, 448–​449 pastoral, 441–​442 piscatory, 445, 453 Quaker: 447

sacred, 454 Scots, 445, 447 sea, 445 suburban, 453 town, 276, 444, 452–​455, 612 Virgilian, 446, 447n17, 448, 453–​454, 477, 662 Edgar (king of England): 308 Edgeworth, Maria: 105, 108–​109 See also Edgeworth, Richard Lovell. Edgeworth, Richard Lovell: 103–​105, 331 and children’s understanding of poetry, 108–​109 Poetry Explained for the Use of Young People, 103, 108 Readings on Poetry, 105 Edinburgh: 9, 12, 516 clubs, 130, 136 Jacobite sympathies in, 516 magazines, 61–​62, 66 nationalism. 516 pastoral verse in, 445 pro-​Union verse, 308 publishers, 11, 14, 51–​52, 59 Edinburgh, University of: 21, 328, 331, 624 Edwards, Thomas: 694–​695, 698 Eddington, Arthur: 333 education, poetry in: 111–​115 instead of mere grammar, 115 technical mechanics of verse, 111–​112 use of exemplary poetry, 112 See also children’s poetry; Edgworth, Maria; Edgeworth, Richard Lovell. Eedes, Richard: 343 Egerton, Sarah Fyge: 259, 291, 361, 363 and patriarchal limitations on women, 287, 290–​291 The Female Advocate, 290 Poems on Several Occasions, 290–​291 response to Robert Gould, 290–​291 Einstein, Albert: 333 ekphrasis: 277, 368, 410, 607, 622, 628n30 and imagery, 619, 628–​629 See also advice-​to-​a-​painter poems elegy: 67, 73, 165, 174, 276, 528–​536, 728 as contemplation of vicissitude, 543 broadside, 532–​534

 

Index   759 defined, 532, 534 Horace on, 535 narrative power of, 531 parodied, 534, 536 satirical, 543–​544, 673 softness in, 535–​536, 543 vanitas topos in, 530 Eliot, George: 395 Eliot, T. S.: 333, 409, 437–​438 Elizabeth I (queen of England): 146, 707, 741 Elizabethan literature: 25–​26, 28, 76n11, 134, 238, 240, 294, 322, 380, 408, 410, 693, 704, 707, 735 elocution and poetry: 103, 111–​113, 117–118, 121, 384, 425, 429–​432, 434, 436, 520 and the pause, 423, 427, 429 Rice on, 426–​429 Sheridan on, 422–​424, 427–​429, 432 Walker on, 429–​430 visual (silent) vs. aural interpretation, 423 Elyot, Sir Thomas: 626n27 emblems, 94, 112, 198, 322, 659–​660 Emmerson, Eliza: 168 encomium: 91, 238, 275, 277, 678, 512, 514–515, 518 and elegy, 174, 532 mock, 279–​280, 678–​680 See also panegyric. Enfield, William: 103, 104, 113–​114, 117, 122 Engell, James: 220n33 enjambment: 379, 397, 429, 432–​434, 436 Ennis, Daniel J: 25 Ennius: 651, 703 “Ephelia.” 253n33, 254, 258–​259 epic: 77, 184, 202, 223, 276, 298, 316, 473–​494, 728 and women poets, 257, 474 based on moral lesson, 485 battles in, 85 burlesqued, 85 christianizing the, 485–​487 decline of, 473–​475 encourages obedience, 481, 485–​486, 489 hero in, 10, 189, 389, 478–​485 homecoming in, 85 Homeric, 474, 476–​477, 485, 489–​

in dialogue with satire, 483 Fielding’s comic, in prose, 84, 487 sublimity in, 465 Virgilian, 474, 476–​481, 485–​486, 493 See also Milton (Paradise Lost); mock-​heroic. epic simile: 190, 223 Epicurus: 324, 344, 640 Epictetus: 84 epigrams: 63, 134–​135, 234, 322, 376–​377, 394–​395, 407, 411, 415, 441, 678, 734, 742 epigraphs: 77, 186, 406, 536, 543, 628, 663 epilogues: 23–​27, 30–​31, 33, 36, 63, 67–​68, 298, 686 epistolary fiction and poetry: 78 epitaph: 26, 67, 89, 130, 139–​140, 232, 377, 495, 532–​534, 736, 745 within elegy, 42, 50, 540–​542 epithalamium: 15, 136, 165, 200–​201, 538 epithets: 111, 120, 223, 519, 727 ballad, 555 Homeric, 223 Erskine, Andrew: 453 Erskine, Henry: 447 Essex Head Club, 130 Etherege, George: 279–​280 Eusden, Laurence: as poet laureate, 147, 277, 733–​737 in the Dunciad, 657, 736, 738n26 Evans, Evan: 316, 444–​445 Evelyn, John: 603 example: 188–​189 inspires emulation or avoidance, 189 used together with precept, 189 instruction without, difficult, 275 Exclusion Crisis: 497–​498, 505, 507 expletives: 407 Ezell, Margaret: 56 Fabian, Bernhard: 218n27 fable: as narrative story-​line, 84, 232, 487, 649, 727 as narrative with moral lesson, 63, 76, 90, 98, 189, 288, 295, 322, 727 burlesqued, 608 See also Aesop; Dryden, John (Fables);

 

760   Index Fabricant, Carole: 360, 364 Fahlman, Scott: 674–​675 Fairer, David: 235, 351–​352, 590n37, 591, 707 Fairfax, Edward: 686–​687, 702–​703, 710, 714 Falkirk, battle of: 13 fancy: opposed to truth, 643 Fanshawe, Sir Richard: 599, 606 farce: 23, 36–​38, 146, 282, 414, 518 Farmer, Richard: 551, 734 Farquhar, George: 29 Faulkner, George: 53, 140–​141 Favret, Mary A.: 77 Fawkes, Francis: 61, 521, 723 “feast poems,” 131 Feingold, Richard: 582 Feltham, Owen: 710 Felton, Henry: 597 Fénelon, François: 84, 494 Fenn, Lady Ellenor: 98, 103 Fenton, Elijah: 100, 609, 710 Fergus, Jan: 60 Fergusson, Robert: 62, 130–​131, 450 and urban pastoral, 453 as Scottish laureate, 738 dialect eclogues of, 454 Scots-​language poetry by, 62 Ferreira-​Buckley, Linda: 626n27 Festa, Lynn: 24 fictional poets, 85 Fidelia (Gentleman’s Magazine), 252, 253n33 Fielding, Henry: 76, 82, 85, 211n3, 235, 297, 487, 501 and opposition to Walpole, 297 Jonathan Wild, 213, 501 Joseph Andrews, 84, 487–​488 Tom Jones, 85, 211 Tragedy of Tragedies, The, 37–​38, 501 Fielding, Sarah: 86, 114 figurative language: 73, 117, 169, 177, 179, 198, 200, 274, 317, 332, 340–​342, 349, 376, 412, 424, 449, 454, 535, 567, 574, 589–​592, 617, 619–​626, 628– 629, 632–​638, 641, 643–​645, 647, 650–​651, 657–​658, 660, 666, 669 as false wit, 282, 625–​626, 645 Filmer, Robert: 484

Financial Revolution (1690s): 287–​288 Finch, Anne (Countess of Winchilsea): 141, 254, 264, 286–​287, 294, 361, 363–365, 379, 585, 671, 745 Nocturnal Reverie, 379–​ satirizes London finance, 296 Spleen: A Pindarick Ode, The, 248, 261, 589–​560 Fish, Stanley: 388, 437, 484 Fisher, Ann: 114, 117, 122 Fitzpatrick, Barbara L.: 56 Flatman, Thomas: 280 Flecknoe, Richard: 280–​281 Fletcher, John: 238, 280 Flynn, Carol Houlihan: 204n57 Flynn, Richard: 88 flyting poems: 140, 497 Foerster, Donald: 490, 493 folio. See print format. folk epic: 14 folk music: 20–​21, 550 Folkenflik, Robert: 735 folklore and popular literature: 4, 20 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de: 321–​322, 324, 604 Foote, Samuel: 99, 717, 744–​745 Forde, William: 435 Fordyce, David: 129n4 forgery: 227–​229, 234–​245 and falsification, 231 and provenance of texts, 234 defined, 230–​232, 235, 245 “misrepresentational literature,” 229 See also plagiarism. Fowke, Martha. See Martha Fowke Sansom. Fowler, Alastair: 511–​512 Fox, Charles: 447–​448 Fox, Charles James: 454 Fox, William: 68 Foxon, David: 44–​48, 51–​52, 511 Foyster, Elizabeth: 364 Franklin, Benjamin: 333 fraud: 230 Frazer, Ray: 619 Frederick, Prince of Wales: 294, 298, 394 free verse: 422–​433 Free, William: 401 Freemantle, Bridget:

 

Index   761 freemasonry: 324 Freer, Coburn: 23 Freke, Elizabeth: 249, 253n33 French Revolution: 66, 68, 250, 287, 332 Freud, Sigmund: 333 Froissard, Jean: 604 Frost, Robert: 284–​285 Fry, Paul H. 510 Furbank, P. N.: 619 Furnival, Frederick J.: 552 Fullard, Joyce: 247 Fussell, Paul: 424 Fyge, Sarah. See Egerton, Sarah Fyge. Gainsborough, Thomas: 628 Galland, Antoine: 611 Gallophobia: 91, 348, 350, 384, 401, 448 Games, Alison: 305n8 garlands (collections): 4, 90, 549 Garrick, David: 26, 33, 128, 551, 744 Garth, Samuel: 112, 276 Claremont, 338–​339 Dispensary, The, 274–​275, 488, 498–​499 translates Ovid, 611 Gascoigne, George: 75 Gaskill,Howard: 229 Gay, John: 44, 52, 90, 96, 129, 133, 146–​147, 172–​173, 255, 296–​297, 343–​344, 528, 609, 670 and the town eclogue, 276 as Scriblerian, 128–​129, 502 The Beggar’s Opera, 35, 270, 414, 500–​501, 603–​604 The Shepherd’s Week, 46, 444, 502 Trivia, or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London, 46, 190, 502, 676 as parody of georgic, 276 as journey poetry, 342–​343, 345–​346 flâneur narrative of, 345 satirizes London finance, 295 Gay, Joseph. See Breval, John Durant. Gelbart, Matthew: 20 Gelpi, Albert: 618n8 gender: 249, 253, 287, 359, 361, 363 and aging, 366–​368 and compulsory heterosexuality, 360 and female stereotypes, 258, 356, 359 and social expectations for men, 368–​369

equality, 287, 361 in voice, laboring-​class poets, 253 poems on the sexes: 356–​369 poetic abilities as feminine, 368 reversed stereotypes of, 258 roles transgressed in love poetry, 256 genius: 213–​215, 218nn25–​26 Addison on, 214–​215 as naive prodigy, 221 and marketability, 151 Buckingham on, 213n7 Duff on, 219–​220 Fielding on, 211n3, 219 natural vs. educated, 212, 214–​215 of other nations, 316–​317 replaces the hero, 222–​224 Romantic views on, 220–​223, 225 rustic, untutored, primitive, 211n3, 221, 581 Shakespeare as natural, 214, 221 unpolished or rude, 175, 211n3, 212 Young’s view on, 215–​217 genre: 75–​77, 270, 597 George I (king of Great Britain): 297, 346, 488, 738 George II (king of Great Britain): 49, 277, 286, 298, 488, 517, 672, 736 George III (king of Great Britain): 300, 506, 673 George IV (king of Great Britain): 261 georgic: 183, 186, 190, 288, 337, 353, 369, 457–472, 611–​612 allusion in, 462 as visionary, 463–​465 nature in, 462–​465 of the human body, 468 humor in, 369 irony in, 466 labor in, 183, 253, 276, 301, 313–​314, 450, 454–​455, 463–​471 mock-​georgic: 190, 288 parodied, 276, 470 pastoral, distinct from, 465–​466 pastoral elements in, 451, 464–​465 poetic diction in, 466–​467 productivity in, 458–​459 progress in, 463 subversion of classical mode in, 611–​612

 

762   Index georgic (Cont.) urban, 276, 295 Virgil’s, 457–​460, 463, 467, 611 See also Dodsley, Robert (Agriculture); Dyer, John (Fleece); Philips, John (Cyder); Smart, Christopher (Hop-​Garden) Gerard, Alexander: 220n32, 222 Gerould, Gordon Hall: 547 Gerrard, Christine: 352, 489 Gessner, Salomon: 79 Gibbon, Edmund: 118–​119, 532, 681, 734 Gibbons, Thomas: 669 Gifford, William: 130, 505–​506 Gilbert, Sandra M.: 528 Gilbert, W. S.: 408 Gildenhuys, Faith: 583 Gilding, Elizabeth: 251n23 Gildon, Charles: 292, 374, 536, 567, 609 Gillespie, Stuart: 491 Gilliver, Lawton: 155, 159 Gilmore, John: 470 Gilpin, William: 354 Gisborne, Thomas: 727 Glanvill, Joseph: 632, 641 Glasgow: 11, 13, 61, 260, 446 Gleanings, after Thomson: 722 Gleckner, Robert F.: 661n34 Glorious Revolution, the: 286–​287, 292, 306–​309, 482, 494, 499 Glover, Richard: 294, 298, 435 Leonidas, 298, 426n14, 489 Godolphin, Sidney Godophin, 1st Earl of: 45, 280, 603 Godwin, William: 103 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang van: 75, 222, 225–​226, 330 Goldberg, Jonathan: 603 Golden, William: 726 Goldsmith, Oliver: 26–​27, 33, 37, 42–​43, 113, 130–​131, 138n34, 176–​177, 213, 448, 451, 531, 561, 721 and anapestic tetrameter, 138n34, 139 The Deserted Village, 138, 299, 447, 671 and georgic, 451, 454 on commerce’s negative effects, 315–​316, 451 pastoral elements in, 451–​452

sensibility and social issues in, 288, 299–​300 Ireland’s forgeries of, 221 The Retaliation, 130, 139–​140 The Vicar of Wakefield, 78, 669–​670 Goodman, Nelson: 628–​629 Goodridge, John: 162n1, 165, 172, 462 Gordon, Anna: 551–​552 Gordon, John. See Cato’s Letters. Gordon riots, the: 11, 287 Gothic, the: 27, 73, 79 Gough, Richard: 242 Gould, Robert: 290–​291, 495, 497–​499 Graham, Dougal, of Stirling: 11–​14 Grahame, James: 612 Grainger, James: 205, 319, 551, 721 Sugar-​Cane, The, 314–​315, 317–​318, 457, 463, 470–​471 Grant, Anne: 256–​257, 260, 262 Grant, Elizabeth (of Carron): 262 Granville, George. See Lansdowne, George Granville, 1st Baron. Graves, Richard: 62, 127 Graveyard poetry: 330, 392, 395 Gray, Christian: 262–​263 Gray, Thomas: 49–​50, 103, 113–​114, 118, 221–222, 249, 261, 283, 285, 288, 408, 419, 520, 526, 590–​591, 593, 644, 658, 671, 699, 706 and allusion, 661–​666 and the ballad quatrain, 415, 539, 544 “Bard, The,” 417, 492, 520, 590–​591 burlesqued, 129, 138n37, 454 declines laureateship, 734, 737 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 49–50, 63, 109, 180–​181, 299, 301, 415, 417, 454, 528, 539–​543 and Young, 539, 542 as “lullaby” kind of verse, 543 imitations of, 543–​544 in Wolcot’s satire, 543–​544 Johnson on, 528–​529 moral purpose in, 542 privileges pathetic and didactic, 542 in fragments borrowed by Ireland, 222 Mason’s edition of, 699 Progress of Poesy, 283, 417, 520 Gregory, George: 447

 

Index   763 Gregory, John: 20 Green, Matthew: 663 Greene, Edward Burnaby: 722 Greenwood, John: 103, 110 Greig, Gavin: 7 Grenby, Matthew: 114 Greville, Frances: 251 Greville, Fulke (Baron Brooke): 114 Grierson, Constantia: 140, 249, 310 Griffin, Dustin: 152, 474 Griffiths, Ralph: 79, 716, 720n19, 721–​723 Groom, Nick: 551 Grub Street: 8, 49, 52, 136, 148, 232, 276–280, 533, 538, 543–​545, 670, 719, 735, 742 See also Grub-​Street Journal under Newspapers. Guarini, Battista: 599 Guest, Harriet: 565 Guide for the Child and Youth: 91 Guilleragues, Gabriel Joseph de Lavergne, Comte de: 78–​79 Gummere, Francis: 548, 554 Gwyn, Nell: 25–​26, 34, 497 Habermas, Jurgen: 128, 153–​154, 159 Hailes, Sir David Dalrymple, Lord: 551 Hale, Martha: 253n33, 257 Hales, John W.: 552 Hales, Stephen: 461 half-​sheets. See print format. Halifax, Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of: 45, 290, 292 Halifax, John Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax: 407 Hall, Joseph: 375, 707 Hall-​Stevenson, John: 129–​130 Halloran, S. Michael: 626n28 Hamilton, Elizabeth: 262 Hamilton, Newburgh: 525 Hamilton, William (of Gilbertfield): 10 Hammond, Brean: 496n2 Hammond, James: 221, 539 Hammond, Paul: 482 Hanmer, Sir Thomas: 694 Handel, George Frideric: 34–​35, 221, 223m37, 651n10

Hands, Elizabeth: 131, 169, 171–​173, 249, 252–​253, 247, 257, 363, 366 Hardicanute (king of Denmark and England), 241 Hardison, O. B.: 386n1 Harland, S.: 112 Harlequin Cherokee: 89 Harley, Robert. See Oxford, Robert Harley, 1st Earl of. Harrington, James: 602 Harris, Joseph: 26 Harrison, Stephen: 75 Harrison, William: 148 Harrison, T. W.: 601 Hartley, David: 574 Haugen, Kristine: 688–​689 Hawkesworth, John: 724–​725 Hawkins, William: 744–​745 Haydn, Franz Joseph: 19, 330 Hayes, Julie Candler: 597nn6–​7, 599, 602, 605–​606, 610 Hayes, Samuel, 741 Hayley, William: 128, 493–​494, 538, 727 Haywood, Eliza: 75, 78, 82, 85, 129, 263, 297, 654, 743 Haywood, Ian: 229 Hazlitt, William: 245, 393 Hebrew poetry: 84, 185, 219n30, 432, 518, 566–​568, 570, 613, 685 Hecht, Anthony: 380 Heine, Heinrich: 75 hemistich: 28, 429 Henigan, Julie: 549–​550 Henry Frederick (prince of Wales): 491 Herbert, George: 269, 281, 406, 413, 645 Herd, David: 15, 21, 551, 557 Herder, Johann Gottfried: 550 hero, the: 222 Herrick, Robert: 365 Herries, John: 431 Hertford, Frances Seymour, Countess of: 44, 254, 264 Hervey, John Hervey, 2nd Baron: 255 Hesiod: 460, 462, 464-​465 heteroglossia: 74 hexameter: 376, 383, 416 in classical writers, 28, 270, 399, 431, 634n3 in French verse, 374, 382

 

764   Index Heywood, Thomas: 496 Hill, Aaron: 82, 129, 263, 321, 521 and Smart’s Hilliad, 504 and the Hillarian literary circle, 129–​130 Plain Dealer, 263 Smartiad, The, 504 Hillarians. See Hill, Aaron. Hills, Henry: 52 histories of poetry: 701–​715 See also Johnson, Samuel (Lives of the Poets); Warton, Thomas (History of English Poetry) History of Little Goody Two Shoes, The: 89 hoaxes: 237, 245 Hobbes, Thomas: 270–​271, 290, 481–​482, 533–​534, 600–​601, 622, 632–​633, 642–​643, 648 Hodgart, M. J. C.: 553, 558 Hogarth, William: 168, 505, 744 Hogg, James: 20, 447 Holcroft, Thomas: 67, 506 Holdsworth, Edward: 144–​146 Holland, Peter: 36–​37, 675 Hollander, John: 423, 651–​652 Hollar, Wenceslaus: 602 Holyday, Barten: Home, Henry. See Kames, Henry Home, Lord. Home, John: 520, 721 Homer: 84, 216–​217, 221, 224, 273, 276, 313, 382, 487, 491, 558, 604, 607–​609, 622, 626, 635 and allegory, 480 and the sublime, 490 difficulty in assimilating to Christian ideals, 477 epic simile in, 190, 223 epithet in, 223 translations of, 48–​49, 129, 159, 217, 389, 417, 610–​611, 686, 696 homoioteleuton: 411 homosociality: 130, 135, 139, 154, 389n8 honors: 732–​ British poets laureate, 278, 732–​738 pre-​Restoration Chaucer, Geoffrey, 733n1, 735 Daniel, Samuel, 733n1 Davenant, William, 733n1 Jonson, Ben, 733n1

Skelton, John, 733n1 Spenser, Edmund, 733n1 poets laureate, Restoration and eighteenth-​century, 732–​ Cibber, Colley, 733 Dryden, John, 28, 286, 482, 524, 658, 733–​735 Eusden, John, 147, 277, 733–​737 Pye, Henry James, 68, 734–​735 Rowe, Nicholas, 488, 733 Shadwell, Thomas, 524, 733–​736, 739, 745 Southey, Robert, 734–​735 Tate, Nahum, 733, 735–​736, 745 Warton, Thomas, 705, 733, 737–​738, 740 Whitehead, William, 733–​734 737 Wordsworth, William, 734, 737 satire of laureates, 733–​734 city poets, 738–​739 historiographer royal, 739 other laureates, 737–​ of Ireland, 738 of Scotland, 738 university, 738 volunteer, 738 poetry professorships, xxi, 118, 185, 732, 739–​741, 744 prizes: 741–​742 Westminster Abbey, Poet’s Corner, 745 Hoole, John: 710 Hopkins, David: 609 611 Hopkins, Charles: 196, 203, 577 Hopkins, Gerard Manley: 416, 437 Hook, James: 89 Hooker, Richard: 231 Horace: 98, 185, 191, 399, 608, 625, 629, 633, 639, 643, 645, 649, 652, 679, 697, 703, 745 and journey poetry, 343–​344 Ars poetica, 37, 212, 213n7, 270–​272, 274–278, 534, 639, 702–​703 Bentley and, 697 Boileau and, 271–​272, 702 Dryden and, 271, 535, 702–​703 imitations of, 46, 145, 255–​256, 272, 501, 521, 649 epistles, 42, 213, 260, 280, 288, 582, 679

 

Index   765 odes, 416–​417, 521, 523, 581, 612 satires, 271, 279–​280, 288 instruction and delight as critic’s mandate, 275 as poet’s mandate, 179–​180, 185 in opposition, 89–​90, 110, 114, 186 Oldham and, 271, 535, 685 on genius, 211–​214 Pope and, 46, 145, 249, 273–​276, 288, 298, 355, 523, 639, 679, 685, 703, 745–​746 Rochester and, 279, 685 translations of, 42, 65, 98, 270–​271, 399, 416, 534, 608–​609 satire, 270, 506 use of persona, 191–​192, 270 ut pictura poesis. See ekphrasis). hudibrastics: 276, 341n30 Huet, Pierre Daniel: 76 Hughes, John: 48, 79, 129 Hughes, Linda K.: 55 Hughes, Peter: 658 Hume, Anna: 256 Hume, David: 129n4, 283, 303–​305, 320, 617n1 on national character, 303–​305, 309, 314, 319 on Scotticisms, 119 Hume, Patrick: 649, 687 Hume, Robert: 487 humor: 117 Hunt, John: 160 Hunt, Leigh: 160, 408 Hunter, J. Paul: 49, 128n3, 149, 586 Hurd, Richard: 76, 240, 451 Hurd, Thomas: 587 Hurdis, James: 741 Hutchinson, John: 602 Hutchinson, Lucy: 256, 484–​485, 602–​603 hymns: 60, 94, 254, 321, 415, 518, 556, 563–565, 569–​578, 5878 and children, 94, 100, 102, 575–​576 and secular poetry, 256, 313, 329, 347, 401, 510, 516, 522–​523, 587, 741 and the ode, 511–​512, 514, 519, 521 in performance, 586–​587

the sublime in, 588, 670 See also meter: hymn hypotyposis: 629 illustrations: 48–​49, 100–​101, 103–​104, 444, 547, 601–​602, 605 image: 181, 282, 617–​631 and color, 620, 626–​629, 647 and excessive ornamentation, 621, 645–​647 and taste, 624 as distinct from figurative language, 622 Augustan approach to, 618 empiricist model of, 619, 622, 627–​628 Romantic approach to, 618 as description, 619, 623, 626 as ideation, 626 as metaphor, 619, 622, 624–​625 illustration the proper role of, 621 taste and, 626 verbal vs. visual, 624, 627, 629 See also ekphrasis; metaphor imagination: 117, 187, 627 imagism: 428, 628 imitation. See mimesis. Important Triflers, The: 503 imposture: 230 India: 317, 350, 488 indigenous people: 347, 447 Innes, Alexander: 231–​232 inspiration, poetic: 212, 223, 524, 526, 570, 692 and genius, 211, 215n17, 225–​226 and meter, 429, 434, 436 divine, 168, 271, 520 from other poets, 129, 165, 172, 222, 316, 388, 452 pretended, 271 Romantic, 284–​285 shared with reader, 637 introductions: 41, 433, 481n22, 552, 686 intertextuality: 83, 85, 240, 480–​481 intromission. See under vision. Ireland: 309–​310 English control of trade in, 315 Gaelic verse in, 309, 316 See also Brooke, Charlotte; Dublin; Ireland, Samuel: 244–​245 Ireland, William Henry: 222, 224 forgeries by, 221, 244–​245

 

766   Index Irish Hudibras, The: 309 irony: 35, 80, 179, 215n25, 224, 253, 262, 277, 279, 346–​347, 444, 469, 528, 543–544, 622, 653, 668–​682 absence of, 671–​672, 735 and oxymoron, 295 and satire, 299, 672–​673 as censure through counterfeit praise, 670, 672 as misdirection, 672–​673 as oral phenomenon, 674–​676 as perception of mankind as fallible, 290 as praise through counterfeit blame, 670 as trivial matters in elevated language, 676 cosmic, 671 defined, 668–​669 difficulties in recognizing, 677–​681 dramatic, 670–​671 expectation of, 679 hyperbolical, 84, 676 in annotation, 654 in ballads, 450, 556 in Byron, 223, 677 in Dryden, 679 in Georgic, 288, 464, 466 in Goldsmith, 466 in Swift, 278, 534, 670, 672–​673, 679, 681 Kierkegaardian, 671 metrical signs of, 676 misapprehended, 670, 677–​681 of serious matters in pedestrian language, 676 of trivial matters in elevated language, 676 Romantic, 671 stable and unstable, 681 ventriloquial, 673 verbal, 670–​673 Irwin, Anne: 259 Irwin, Eyles: 448 italic type: 24–​25, 30, 32, 41–​42, 45, 279, 395 for emphasis: 41, 43 in paratext, 41 in poems of instruction, 42 in prologues, 24–​25, 32–​33 indicating dialect, 43 iter poetry. See journey poems. Ivy Head Club, 130

Jack, Ian: 415, 495 Jacob, Giles: 704 Jacob, Hildebrand: 521 Jacobinism: 506 Jacobitism: 292, 498 and emigration, 447 poetry of, 129, 144, 516 risings, Jacobite, 9, 11, 17–​18, 79, 287, 293–294, 304, 314, 341, 447 satire, 498 song: 17–​18 threat, fear of, 286, 398 Jackson, Dan: 140 Jago, Richard: Edge-​Hill, 339, 341–​342, 349–​351, 467 Jamaica: 304 James II (king of England): 17, 286, 292, 306, 496, 499, 704, 734 James, Charles: 74 James, Henry: 72, 326 James, Susan: 580n5 Jamieson, Robert: 552 Jarvis, Simon: 691 Jaszi, Peter: 229 Jennings, John: 116 Jestin, Loftus: 50 jingles: 91, 93 Job, Book of: 84 Job, William: 167–​168 Jodrell, Richard Paul: 728 John-the-Giant-Killer, Food for the Mind, 99 Johnson, Charles: 321–​322 Johnson, Esther: 148, 368 Johnson, James: 16, 21 Johnson, Jane: 96–​97, 98, 254 Johnson, Joseph: 52, 132, 254, 551 Johnson, Ralph: 112 Johnson, Samuel: 3, 43, 46, 61, 63–​64, 109, 117, 131, 136, 138, 140, 158, 170, 177, 186, 211, 217, 232, 237, 248–​250, 261, 275, 283, 298, 316, 321, 331, 354, 420, 423, 426, 429, 435, 470, 495, 507–508, 565, 623, 636, 651–​653, 672, 699, 701–​702, 708, 734, 743 and ballads, 554 and blank verse, 389–​390, 398, 402, 426, 433, 551, 554, 613

 

Index   767 and Chesterfield, 152 and Dodsley, 155–​156 and falsification, 228, 230 and forgery, 231, 245, 551 and Percy, 551 and plagiarism, 228, 231 and Savage, 228, 328, 529, 738 defends rhyme, 374, 389–​390 Dictionary of the English Language, 58, 228, 230, 532, 543, 617–​619, 648, 669, 685, 708 edition of Shakespeare, 228, 649, 691, 695, 708, 712 (see also Steevens, George) early career of, 227 Idler, 613 imitations of Juvenal, 46, 298 Irene, 402 Lives of the Poets, 147–​148, 156, 180, 184, 545, 644–​645, 698, 704, 707–​715, 738 London, 298–​299, 501 Marmor Norfolciense, 227, 238 on Addison, 646, 710, 714 on clubs and clubbability, 129–​130, 133 on Collins, 284 on Congreve, 708 on Cowley, 269, 644–​655, 711, 713 on Denham, 336, 338, 613, 646–​647, 709–​710 on Dryden, 538, 613, 621, 645–​647, 698, 709–​711, 714 on Gray, 180–​181, 284, 528–​529, 541, 543, 545, 646–​647, 698, 706, 714 on imagery, 619 on imitation, 271 on Milton, 228, 422, 425n9, 474, 491, 645–646, 698, 714 on Ossian, 245, 551, 613, 708 on Philips, 710 on Pope, 271, 273, 537–​538, 610, 620–​621, 645, 647, 698, 711 on Prior, 414, 710 on Settle, 538, 546, 646, 711 on Smith, 646–​657, 715 on Swift, 715 On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet, 528–​529, 531, 535, 545, 592 on Thomson, 394, 619, 714 on Waller, 644, 710, 714

on Watts, 644 on Young, 211, 217 preface to Dodsley’s Preceptor, 713 Rambler, 114, 228 Rasselas, 85, 283, 668 The Vanity of Human Wishes, 43, 322, 531, 596 writes for Gentleman’s Magazine, 63–​64 Johnson’s New Universal Cyclopaedia, 553 Jones, Christopher: 174, 176 Jones, Henry (the Bricklayer): 166, 176 Jones, Mary: 141, 248–​249, 253n33, 262 and Pope, 249–​250 as “the Chantress,” 248n7 “Matrimony,” 365–​366 Jones, William: 219-​220, 317 Jonson, Ben: 269–​270, 280–​281, 300, 375, 549, 558, 690, 733n1 and translation, 270, 710 tribe of, 128 journey poems: 336n8, 338, 342–​346, 354, 499, 590, 593 and Horace, 343–​344 satirical, 499 Joyce, James: 276, 423 Juvenal: 130, 288, 504, 607n34, 608 imitations of, 46, 270–​271, 280, 298, 498 translations and editions of, 48, 608 Kairoff, Claudia: 743 Kames, Henry Home, Lord: 191, 374, 402 on metaphor and imagery, 621–​624, 627–629, 644 prescriptive prosody of, 423, 426, 428, 431 Kant, Immanuel: 211, 220 Kaufman, Paul: 215n17 Kaul, Suvir: 304 Kay, Sarah: 75 Keach, Benjamin: 94 Keach, William: 33 Keats, John, 284–​285, 397, 408, 410, 414, 550, 629 Kearsley, George: 50, 551 Keegan, Bridget: 351 Kelly, Ann Cline: 134 Kelsall, Malcolm: 612 Kennedy, Deborah: 365

 

768   Index Kennedy, George: 634 Kenrick, William: 37, 61, 425, 495, 725 Kerrigan, John: 125 Kersey, John: 669 Kett, Henry: 740–​741 Keymer, Thomas: 37 Kidder, Edward: 233 Killigrew, Anne: 251–​252, 254 Kilner, Dorothy: 104 Kilner, Elizabeth: 95 King, Edmund: 692 King, Kathryn R.: 82 Kirkpatrick, James: 716–​717 Kit-​Cat Club, the: 138, 292 Whig alignment of, 129, 292 Klopstock, Friedrich Georg: 222–​223, 435 Knox, Norman: 669–​670 Knox, Vicesimus: 99, 189 Koehler, Margaret: 522 Krieger, Murray: 628n30 Kropf, C. R.: 672 laboring-​class poets: 162–​178 addressing other laboring-​class poets, 174 and ballads, 262 and patronage, 166–​167 and perceptions of the laborer’s time, 165, 167 and the pastoral, 164, 447 and topographical poetry, 353 and piety, 163–​164, 168, 170 eschew blank verse, 398 emigration of, 447 gratitude for books, 166, 168 lack of education confessed, 169 required to defend their creation, 169 ungendered voice in, 253 Scottish, 262 La Calprenède, Gautier de Costes de: 81 Lambert, Constance: 419 La Motte, Antoine Houdar de: 489 lamplighters of Norwich, 125 lampoon: 129, 138, 253, 258, 276, 279, 289, 324, 482, 495, 497, 499, 503, 668, 673, 677, 736n17 Landry, Donna: 163, 169, 171–​173

landscape: 27, 77, 79, 86, 191, 193, 216, 327, 335, 337–​340, 352, 355, 393, 448, 458, 462, 465, 474, 490, 511, 515–516, 519, 524, 572, 590, 593, 662 Langhorne, John: 720, 722 Lansdowne, George Granville, 1st Baron: 203 Lane, William: 168 Larkin, Philp: 438 Latin: translation from and gentility, 597 versification in, 112 Lauder, William: 227, 229–​230, 504 Lauderdale, Richard Maitland, 4th Earl of: 607 Lavington, George (Bishop): 573 Law, Samuel: 164 Law, William: 564, 569 Lawrence, D. H.: 436 lays: 217, 345, 348, 360, 399, 425, 524, 536–​537, 542–​543, 662, 678 Leapor, Mary: 128, 131, 166, 172–​173, 253, 287, 587, 612 and country-​house motif, 252 “Essay on Woman,” 679 “Man the Monarch,” 291 Poems upon Several Occasions, 52, 84 Lear, Edward: 406 Learmont, John: 447–​448 Leavis, F. R.: 681 Le Bossu, René: 475, 478n14, 485–​487, 489–490, 493, 607 Lee, Nathaniel: 203, 280 Lee, Sophia: 66, 234 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhem: 221, 324–​325 Lely, Peter: 602 Lennox, Charlotte: 85–​86, 363 Lesley [Leslie], Charles: 7 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim: 211, 216n21 L’Estrange, Sir Roger: 78, 704 Le Tan’sur, William: 322 Letchworth, Thomas: 717–​718 Levinson, Marjorie: 337–​338 Lewalski, Barbara: 474–​475, 481 Lewis, C. Day: 406, 618 Lewis, Matthew: 27, 73, 552 Lhuyd, Edward: 144 Licensing Act, lapse of: 153, 306

 

Index   769 Lilliburlero: 309 Lillo, George: 30–​31 Ireland’s forgeries of, 221 Lilley, Kate: 263 Linnaeus, Carl: 331–​333 Lintot, Bernard: 49–​50, 52, 145, 159, 551 See also Muscipula. Lintot, Henry: 50, 551 Lipking, Lawrence: xx Literary Club: 130, 133n18, 734, 743 literature as educational subject, 111 Little, Janet: 168, 174, 177, 262 Liverpool, Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of: 507 Livy: 431 Lloyd, Evan: 722, 726 Lloyd, Robert: 61, 128, 138n37, 144, 719 and the Nonsense Club, 129, 286, 300 Progress of Envy, The, 504 Locke, John: 259, 320, 590n37, 627, 632 and association, 222, 622, 528 and empiricism, 274, 617n1, 619 Essay concerning Human Understanding, 643, 651 on vision, 196–​197, 201–​202 Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 95, 543 Two Treatises of Government, 287, 291, 483 Lockwood, Thomas: 503 locodescriptive poetry: 281, 288 See also topographical poetry. Lofft, Capell: 284 Lonergan, Edward: 447 Longinus: 82, 275, 279, 283, 490, 622, 628–​ 629, 635–​639 and Boileau, 270–​273, 275, 638 and Dennis, 275, 281 and Homer, 490, 622 and imagination, 397 and imitation, 270, 272, 279–​281 and inspiration, 283–​284 and metaphor, 635, 637–​639 and the Romantics, 284–​285 Peri hypsous, 270, 272 London: the Great Fire of, 289 plague in, 289 Lonsdale, Roger: 40, 246, 543, 652

Loewenstein, Joseph: 24 Lomax, John: 7 Lope de Vega, Félix: 221 Lord, Albert: 556 Lorrain, Claude: 352, 465 Louis XIV (king of France): 419 Love, Harold: 40n1, 150, 289, 496 Lowell, Robert: 21 Lowestoft, Battle of: 305 Lowth, Robert: 84, 219n30, 740 Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, 185–​187, 518, 567–​568, 570, 685 on affective poetics, 187, 518, 567–​568, 570 Lucan: 386n1, 480–​481, 488 Lucilius: 256, 279, 703 Lucretius: 258, 324, 332, 485, 602–​603, 607, 640, 664, 703 Lukács, Georg: 72 Lully, Jean-​Baptiste: 418–​420 Lunar Society of Birmingham: 250, 331–​332 Luxborough, Henrietta Knight, Baroness: 51 Lynch, Jack: 229, 482, 600 Lynch, Kathleen: 48 Lyotard, Jean–​François: 508 lyric: 78, 451, 511, 564, 579–​595 and love poetry, 582–​585 and the passage of time, 585 as evolving mode, 581 capability of evoking passion, 580 changing language of passion, 583, 594 genres of, 580–​581 origin in song, 586 primarily musical, 417–​420, 587 rhyme proper for, 398 See also odes; songs; sonnets; verse epistles. Lyrical Ballads: xix, 40, 52–​53, 73, 301–​302, 550, 727, 729 See also Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; Wordsworth, William. Lyttelton, George Lyttelton, 1st Baron: 351, 449, 522, 536 as editor of Thomson’s Seasons, 53 parodied by Smollett, 86 Macfarlane, Robert: 229 Mach, Ernst: 333 Mack, Maynard: 696

 

770   Index Mackenzie, Henry: 195, 197, 237, 251 Maclean, Norman: 581 Macklin, Charles: 504 Macneill, Hector: 455 Macpherson, James: 239, 316, 450–​451, 474, 492, 520, 611 Fingal, 76, 239, 316, 551, 725 Fragments of Ancient Poetry, 316, 551 Ossian, 476, 492m 626, 671 and pastoral, 450 controversy over, 218n25, 229, 238–​239, 493, 551, 611, 685 Percy’s Reliques as response to, 551 See also Blair (on Ossian). Temora, 239, 316 Macpherson, Sandra: 197 mad poets: 212, 220–​221 Madox, Thomas: 739 Maecenas: 343, 464, 742 magazine verse: 66 magazines: 56n4 Aberdeen Magazine, 62 Analytical Review, 726 Anti-​Jacobin Review, 722 Arminian Magazine, 60, 66, 68 Bee, 58, 63, 66, 236, 521 Bristol and Bath Magazine, 61 British Critic, 74 British Magazine, 59–​60, 64, 69, 212–​213 British Review, and London Critical Journal, 354–​355 Christian’s Magazine, 60, 454 Connoisseur, 129 Court and City Magazine, 60 Critical Review, 73, 156, 664, 716, 718n8, 720, 722–​723, 741 Cumberland Magazine, 61 Delights for the Ingenious, 57, 63–​64 Diverting Post, 57 Edinburgh Magazine, 56, 61–​62 Edinburgh Magazine and Review, 61–​62 English Review, 727 European Magazine, 59, 66 Farmer’s Companion, and Useful Family Companion, 60 Freeholder’s Magazine, 60 General Magazine, 66

Gentleman’s and London Magazine, 62 Gentleman’s Journal; or, Monthly Miscellany, 55–​57, 61–​62, 64 Gentleman’s Magazine, 4, 27, 56, 58–​59, 61–66, 83–​84, 114, 156, 237, 241, 245, 252, 254, 513, 735, 742, 744 Gospel Magazine, 60 Hibernian Magazine, 62 Impartial Review, 725 Indignant Muse, 727 Juvenile Magazine, 99 Kapelion; or, Poetical Ordinary, 61 Ladies’ Magazine; or, The Universal Entertainer, 59 Lilliputian Magazine, 99 Literary Magazine, 66 Literary Transactions of Europe, 61 Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, 59–​60, 64, 742 London Magazine, 58–​60, 69–​70 London Review, 720 Magazine of Magazines, 49, 62–​63 Matrimonial Magazine, 60 Merchant’s Magazine, 58 Mercure Galant, 57 Mercurius Musicus, 57 Midwife; or The Old Woman’s Magazine, 61 Minor’s Pocketbook, 99 Miscellanies over Claret, 57, 134 Monitor, 57 Monthly Chronicle, 58 Monthly Magazine, 254, 742 Monthly Miscellany; or, Memoirs for the Curious, 57, 742 Monthly Review, 156, 513, 526, 716, 718–720, 723, 728, 730 Muses Mercury, 57 Museum, 56, 61, 513, 521 New London Magazine, 59, 66 New Spiritual Magazine, 60 Northampton Miscellany, 61, 64 Oxford Magazine, 61 Penman’s Magazine, 58 Poetical Calendar, 61 Poetical Courant, 57 Poetical Magazine, 61

 

Index   771 Protestant Dissenter’s Magazine, 60 Publick Register; or, The Weekly Magazine, 59 Review, 57 Rambler, 114, 228 Royal Magazine, 59 Scots Magazine, 59, 61, 66 Sentimental and Masonic Magazine, 62 Sentimental Magazine, 60 Spiritual Magazine, 70 St. James’s Magazine, 63 Student; or, the Oxford and Cambridge Monthly Miscellany, 61 Spectator, 28, 31, 35, 57, 114, 129, 147, 187, 250, 301, 323, 397, 558, 613, 620–​628 Tatler, 57, 129, 295 Town and Country Magazine, 59, 66 Ulster Repository, 62 Universal Magazine, 59, 63–​64 Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, 66 Weekly Amusement, 58 Weekly Entertainer, 61, 64, 66, 68–​70 Weekly Magazine, 61–​62 Weekly Miscellany; or, Instructive Entertainer, 61 Westminster Magazine, 59 Whimsical Repository, 60 Yorkshire Magazine, 61 magazines, editors of. See Anderson, James; Brown, Thomas; Cave, Edward; Cochran, James; Dicey, William; Fawkes, Francis; Kenrick, William; Lloyd, Robert; Marshall, John; Motteux, Peter; Murray, Alexander; Newbery, John; Oldmixon, John; Petiver, James; Philips, Samuel; Pittis, William; Playford, Henry; Raikes, Robert; Smart, Christopher; Smith, Marshall; Tate, Nahum; Tipper, John; Woty, William. male gaze, the: assaulted by female impression, 203 subjectifying, 196, 207 supposedly feminized, 196–​197 vulnerable gaze and optical equipment, 202 Malherbe, François de: 514

Mallarmé, Stéphane: 406 Mallet, David: 119, 129, 133, 328, 521–​522 See also Masque of Alfred, the. Malone, Edmond: 158, 695 edition of Shakespeare, 241, 649–​650, 691, 695 on Ireland’s forgeries, 244–​245 Mandeville, Bernard: 288, 295 man of feeling, the: and the male gaze, 196–​204, 207 benefits vs. dangers of sensibility, 195 male vulnerability and female culpability, 198–​204 no female equivalent of, 250–​251 Petrarchan tradition of, 197–​197 precedents in Sidney and Spenser, 199–​201 See also blazon; Mannheimer, Katherine: 206 Manilius: 186 Manley, Delarivier: 82, 254, 263, 297 Manlius; or, The Brave Adventurer: 79 manuscript circulation: 40, 47, 82, 84, 86, 150–151, 289, 496 manuscripts, “found”: 237, 240, 242, 244 Marchant, John: 89 Marino, Giambattista: 633 Marlborough, John Churchill, 1st Duke of: 45, 138, 295, 515–​516, 534 Marlowe, Christopher: 240, 386n1 marriage: 7, 146, 261, 353, 358, 362, 365, 553 and female subjugation, 291, 356, 360, 364, 66 as economic structure, 357, 364 because a husband is “the necessary thing,” 362 companionate, 364 critique of, 255, 257, 260–​261, 290–​291, 365 language of servitude in poems about, 366 love and, 357, 362–​366 Matrimonial Magazine, 60 positive views of, 364–​366 See also epithalamium; odes (marriage). Marshall, Ashley: 483 Marshall, John: 99 Marshall, Madeleine Forell: 570 Marston, John: 707 Martial: 231

 

772   Index Martin, Richard: 476 Martyn, John: 457 Marvell, Andrew: 276, 289, 292, 298, 645, 671 on blank verse, 386, 390 Mary II (queen of England): 385 See also William and Mary. Mary of Modena (queen of England): 286 Mary Queen of Scots: 15, 20 Marriot, Mr. (of Trinity College Cambridge): 521 masculine verse: 217 melody in, vs. effeminate decoration, 217 Masham, Abigail: 47 Masham, Lady Damaris: 259–​260 Mason, John: 425, 432, 520–​521 Mason, Nicholas: 506 Mason, William: 227, 244, 520–​522, 540, 672, 699, 706–​707, 737, 744–​745 burlesqued, 129, 138n37 Masque of Alfred, The: 298 Masters, Mary: 169–​170, 173 Massinger, Philip: 232 Mathias, Thomas James: 505–​506 Pursuits of Literature, 506 Mattaire, Michael: 47 Matthews, Adam. See Eighteenth-​Century Journals. Maude, Thomas: 344–​345, 349 Maurice, Thomas: 448 Maynwaring, Arthur: 498, 500 McCarthy, William: 102, 118, 552n15 McGann, Jerome: 689 McLane, Maureen: 224n39, 492 McLaverty, James: 159, 695–​697 McDowell, Paula: 8 Medina, John Baptist: 48 megalopreia: 409 melancholy: 66, 79, 93, 121, 136n27, 175, 181, 218n26, 344, 448–​449, 520, 526, 540, 589–​590, 594, 647, 690 Mendez, Moses: 727 mercury (hawker of printed matter): 52 Merrick, Samuel: 521 Merry, Robert: 130, 448 Mestayer, Henry: 233 Metaphysical poets: 269, 406–​408, 413–​414, 420, 633, 641, 644, 651, 709

metaphor: 21, 73, 117, 176, 120, 176, 202, 289–290, 293, 296–​297, 530, 534–535, 632–​648, 666, 688, 692, 696 allusion as, 650–​651 and gender, 356 and simile, 635, 655 Aristotle on, 634–​634, 637, 640 as form of analogy, 635, 638, 640 as form of description, 632 as merely ornamental, 632, 645 as opposed to truth, 640, 642–​643 attacks on, 632–​633, 636, 642, 644 classical, 633–​639, 642 color in, 647 communicating emotion, 629–​630 excessively ornamental, 645–​646 dangers of, 640–​642 defined, 625, 628 faulty, 282, 646, 726–​727 image as, 618–​625, 628–​630 Johnson on, 644–​648 limits of, 625, 644, 642 Longinus and, 637 low, 298 mere renaming, 639 mixed, 625, 646 of analogy, 635, 638 of penetrated eye, 197–​198, 201, 203 pastoral, 422 pleasure received from, 109, 618, 650 proportion and reciprocity in, 636, 647–​648 religious, 170 synaesthesia in, 646 trivial, 636 vs. scientific economy of word and object, 641–​642 See also analogy; personification. Methodism: 330, 572–​573 metonymy: 97, 208, 409, 417, 458, 622, 634–636, 638, 644 metrical journalism: 12 metrification: 77 See also dérimage. Michael, Ian, 111 Mickle, William Julius: 244 Midas (king of Phrygia): 49 Middlesex, Grand Jury of: 295

 

Index   773 Milbourne, Luke: 711 Millar, Andrew: 50–​51, 551 Miller, Lady Ann: 127–​128, 743 Miller, Samuel: 566 Mills, Andrew Hervey: 238 Milne, Christian: 262 Milton, John: 47, 84, 103, 112–​113, 118, 121, 167, 217, 227–​228, 240, 273, 283–284, 291, 474, 487, 518, 607, 649, 651, 685, 709, 714 and blank verse, 273, 294, 386–​388, 402–​403, 408, 422, 425–​427, 432–​438, 612 against rhyme, 373, 479 as champion of Whig enlightenment, 293–​294 as genius, 217–​218, 221 and classical poets, 48, 228, 416, 484 editions of, 685–​690 Ireland’s forgeries of, 221 Lycidas, 175, 521, 528 “Of Education,” 111, 115 Paradise Lost, 47–​48, 53, 184, 281, 386–​387, 483–​484, 687–​ and reading aloud, 422–​428 as prose, 84, 422, 432 charges of plagiarism in, 227–​228 human frailty in, 484 irony in, 674 religious sublime in, 687 scriptural allusion in, 649 sound in, 427–​428 Virgilian, 613 See also Order and Disorder. Paradise Regained, 484 translates Horace, 416 mimesis: 36, 189, 224, 281–​282, 596, 605, 607, 629, 635, 650–​651 and Longinus, 270, 272–​273 in translation, 605 more than mere copying, 271, 480 of Golden age, pastoral as, 443 vs. expression, 182, 596 mirror poems: 140 misanthropy: 290 miscellanies: 40, 67, 75, 129, 130n9, 134, 136–137, 235, 375, 521, 586, 597, 600, 608–​609, 613, 706, 743–​744 and sociability, 133–​135

by Pope and Swift, 132–​133, 140, 231, 609 Honey-​Suckle, 134 Lintot’s, 52 of readings for educators, 112–​113 Miscellanies over Claret, 59, 134 Musapædia, 129 odes in, 511, 521, 525 periodical, 55–​61, 64, 66 Tea-​Table Miscellany, 15–​16, 18, 21 Tonson’s, 294, 609 Tunbrigalia: or, The Tunbridge miscellany, 134 See also Dodsley, Robert (Collection of Poems); Salmagundi. Miscellaneous Poems and Translations, 129 misogyny: 204–​205, 259, 290–​291, 356, 358–360, 499, 584 of Gould, 290 of Pope, 356, 358–​360, 679 of Rochester, 290, 356, 358, 584 of Swift, 204–​205, 259, 356, 358–​359 Mitchell, Joseph: 522 Mitchell, W. J. T.: 619 Mitford, William: 432–​ mock-​epic: 190, 288, 293, 654 mock-​heroic: 66, 145, 274, 400, 412, 473 allusion in, 649 women poets and, 257 mock-​Latin: 140 Molière: 85, 702 Monk, Samuel H.: 218n26 monody. See ode (monostrophic). monologue: 248, 255, 442 dramatic, 495, 570 interior, 401 Montagu, Elizabeth: 254, 300, 452 Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, 217–​218 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley: 249, 254–​256, 259–​262, 358, 363, 365 answers Pope, 255 answers Swift, 259 Court Eclogues, 131, 446 negotiating poetic identity, 254–​255 on qualities of ideal lover, 360–​361, 364–​365 Town Eclogues, 444, 612 unfinished Whig mock-​epic by, 193

 

774   Index Montague, Mary Seymour: 259 Montesquieu, Charles-​Louis Secondat, Baron de: 408 Montluzin, Emily Lorraine de: 56 Moody, Elizabeth: 256–​257 Moore, Fabienne: 79 Moore, (Rev. Mr.): Moore, Thomas: 4, 150 More, Hannah: 103, 130, 262 as patron of Yearsley, 166, 300–​301 Sensibility, 251 Slavery: A Poem, 106, 301, 318–​319 Moretti, Franco: 72 Morganwg, Iolo. See Williams, Edward. Morley, Thomas: Morris, David, 568–​569 Morton, Charles: 116 Mother Goose’s Melody, 90 Motherwell, William: 552 Motteux, Peter, 57, 61, 405 Moxon, Joseph: 41, 43–​44, 201 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: 221, 330 Muir, Edwin: 550 Muir, Willa: 560 Mulgrave, John Sheffield, Earl of: 280, 497 Essay on Poetry, 272–​273, 276, 534 Mulligan, Hugh: 448 Mulvihill, Maureen: 253n33 Murphy, Arthur: 402, 504, 717–​718 Murray, Alexander: 59 Murray, John: 159–​160 Musapædia: 129 music and poetry: 418–​420 Napoleon: 240n64, 260–​261 Nairne, Carolina Oliphant, Lady: 262–​263 as “the White Rose of Gask” and “the Flower of Strathearn,” 248n7 narration: 179 narrative: 72–​73, 79, 408 National Convention of 1793: 250 natural expression: 28–​29 Nature: 23, 33, 43, 146, 169, 179–​180, 220, 278, 281–​284, 291, 314–​315, 322, 325, 328–​329, 331, 359, 361–362, 378, 396–​397, 450, 458, 494, 516, 526, 539, 571–​573, 587, 606, 612, 619, 624, 627–​628, 630, 632, 640, 644, 725

and Newtonian physics, 274, 377 and sentiment, 215. 574–​575 and the making of a poet, 169–​170, 212, 272, 274, 593, 664–​665, 727 enthusiasm for, 217, 519, 574 exploiting productively, 458, 469 genius close to, 214, 218–​219 imitation of, 282, 443, 491 in georgic, 461–​465 in pastoral, 522, 524 in topographical poetry, 335 infinite variety of, 214, 326, 639 personified, 539, 541 poets and, 222, 224, 235, 249, 271, 520, 573 religion of, 327 Thomson as poet of, 522, 619–​620, 714 vital, 573 See also mimesis. neo-​Aristotelian critics: 29, 481, 485, 487, 490, 633 neoclassical criticism: 27–​28, 84, 270, 609, 626 neoclassical verse: 79–​80, 188, 277, 384, 405, 407 New England Primer, 91–​92 Newbery, John: 99, 103, 536 Newbery, Ralph: 92, 113–​114 Newbolt Report, the: 111 Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of: 321, 485 Newcastle, Thomas Pelham-​Holles, 1st Duke of: 525 Newcomb, Thomas: 502, 518 Newcomen steam engine: 471–​472 Newman, Steve: 588 newspapers: 499 Athenian Mercury, 254 Barbados Gazette, 253, 256, 258 Craftsman, 57, 297 Daily Courant, 742 Dublin Mercury, 454 Freeholder, 57 General Evening Post, 241, 740 Gray’s Inn Journal, 718 Grub-​Street Journal, 57, 232, 235, 734, 737 Guardian, 276, 443, 448, 452 London Chronicle, 140 London Journal, 58 Monthly Chronicle, 57 Morning Post, 254, 454

 

Index   775 Northampton Mercury, 51 Observator, 516 Public Advertiser, 140, 717, 737 Public Ledger, 718 St. James’s Chronicle, 450 Universal Spectator, 57 Whitehall Evening Post, 58 Newton, Sir Isaac: xx, 201, 274, 321, 330, 377, 521 as champion of Whig enlightenment, 293 as genius, 221 on vision, 196–​197, 201, 619 Newton, John: 321, 563 “Amazing Grace,” 564, 576–​577 See also Olney Hymns. Newton, Thomas: 687, 689–​690 Nichols, John: 228, 235 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope: 321, 620 Nisbet, T.: 447 Nonsense Club, the: 129–​130, 286 Norbrook, David: 484 North, Frederick North, Lord: 351 Northumberland, Elizabeth Percy, Countess of: 316 novel and poetry: 72–​78 See also Prosimetrum. notes. See annotation. novelty: 117 numbers. See meter. Nugent, Robert: 521 Nussbaum, Felicity: 204n57, 304, 358n7 Oates, Titus: 497 O’Brien, John: 36 O’Brien, Karen: 353 occasional poems: 165, 261, 538 birthday, 68, 140, 277 elegies, 165 epithalamia, 165, 261 See ode. O Connor, Murroghoh: 446–​447 Octavian. See Caesar, Augustus. ode, the: 78, 260–​261, 510–​527, 583, 728 and music, 417, 524–​ as hymn, 510, 514, 519, 522 birthday, 68, 277, 517 Cecilian, 276, 283, 405, 408, 413, 417–​419, 524–​525, 587

changing forms of, 261, 417, 511–​513 comic, 526 descriptive, 452 elegiac, 521–​522 burlesqued, 129, 138n37 discursive, 519 epistolary, 521 funeral, 516–​517, 521, 532 Horatian: 521, 581, 612 Jacobite, 516–​517 mesode in, 659 Miltonic, 522 mock, 261 monostrophic (monody), 417, 420, 512, 521 pastoral, 521–​522 pindaric, 28, 174, 260, 276, 283, 323, 406, 510, 525, 581, 589, 658 and hymn, 510, 514, 519 as sacred, 517–​518 origin of, 513–​514 regular vs. irregular, 406, 514–​515, 525–526, 658 tripartite, 521, 658 political, 515, 519 polystrophic: 417, 420, 510 progress, 281, 284 Scots dialect in, 612 sublimity in, 518, 526 unrhymed, 416 Odell, J.: 435 Ogborn, Miles: 304 Ogilby, John: 482, 493, 496, 598, 600–​602, 605, 697 Ogilvie, John: 526 Oldham, John: 271, 290, 602 Satyr on the Jesuits, 296, 498 Horace His Art of Poetry, 534, 685 Oldmixon, John: 57, 203 Oliphant, Carolina. See Nairne, Carolina Oliphant, Lady. Olive: An Ode, The: 515 Olney Hymns, 415, 576 See also Cowper, William; Newton, John. Olson, Charles: 437 Omai (the Tahitian): 317 O’Neill, Frances: 252–​253 O’Neill, Henrietta: 67 “On His Mistress Who Squints,” 196

 

776   Index opera, 34–34​ aria, 419 recitative in, 35, 418–​420, 570 Opie, Amelia: 261 Opie, Iona and Peter: 89 oral performance, 422, 427, 432, 488, 556–​557, 561 oral tradition: 3–​4, 11n28, 14, 16–​17, 21, 90, 102, 474, 567, 590 and authenticity, 21, 239 broadsides from oral sources, 7 Ossian as oral epic, 551 vs. literacy, 554–​555 See also ballads. orality: 9n21, 21, 153, 224n39, 454, 474, 675–​676 “oralization”: 492 oratory: 116–​117, 641 orientalism: 317, 432, 448 originality: 117, 151 Young on original composition, 151, 219 See also genius. Orlando (Women’s Writing in the British Isles): 247 Orrery, John Boyle, 5th Earl of Cork and: 141n44, 603 Orrery, Robert Boyle, 1st Earl of: 27, 29 Ossian: 221 as rough, untutored genius, 221 See also Macpherson, James. Ottoman Empire: 346 Otway, Thomas: 38, 83, 85, 147, 196, 203, 280, 402, 715 Ireland’s forgeries of, 221 Overton, Bill: 178 Overton, Henry: 277 Ovid: 78, 260, 477, 607, 647 and elegy, 537, 543 Epistles, 257n52, 602, 260 Heroides, 82, 532 Metamorphoses, 282, 333, 477, 611, 665 translations of, 602, 606, 611, 665 Oxford, Robert Harley, 1st Earl of: 9, 128, 307 Oxford, University of: 118–​119, 330, 353, 705 Anglo-​Latin poetry, 144 and satirical journey poems, 343 Professorship of Poetry, xxi, 118, 185, 732, 739–​741, 744

satirized, 129 student poetry, 129 Pagan, Isabel: 262 Paine, Thomas: 506 Palladio, Andrea: 413, 415 Palmerston, Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount: 744 pamphlets: 3, 5, 22, 51, 57, 59, 205, 212n5, 233n33, 235, 236n45, 289, 454, 517, 522, 525, 678, 711, 721, 723 panegyric: 66, 136, 205, 280–​281, 289, 293–294, 296, 307, 313, 377, 478, 495, 532, 609, 670, 645 and satire, 279, 483, 497 as duty of poet laureate, 278 ironic, 672–​673, 677 Whig, 293–​294 See also encomium. pantomime: 89 parable: 633, 642, 650n5 paratext: 41, 53 See also contents; dedications; introductions; notes; prefaces. Parfitt, George: 582 Parker, Blanford: 394–​395 Parnell, Thomas: 114, 233, 264, 322 and translation, 608 as Scriblerian, 128–​129 parody: 92, 95, 129, 167n18, 176–​177, 229, 234, 276, 400, 414, 528, 534, 539, 543, 613, 639, 668, 686, 695–​697 self-​parody, 450, 475 unparodying, 238 Parry, John: 520 Parsons, Elizabeth: 237 Parsons, William: 74 Pasquin, Anthony: 67, 676, 724 Pastoral Elegy … Inscrib’d to the Right Hon. the Lady Luxborough, A: 51 pastoral: 203, 276, 294, 442–​443, 447, 449, 454, 599, 629, 728 allegory in, 450 and laboring-​class poets, 165 and political poetry, 288, 442, 446–​447 and Philips, 442–​443 and Pope, 442–​443 and the ode, 454

 

Index   777 anti-​slavery, 447–​448 complaint in, 82, 442, 449, 453 dialect, 445–​446 drama, 445 elegiac, 521 ethnographic description in, 448, 454 Irish, 446–​447, 454 mixed with georgic, 391–​392 on the topic of poetry, 442 oriental, 216 parody of, 276 Scots, 447, 454 sentimental, 276 singing contest in, 441–​444, 449–​450, 453 softness in, 445 urban, 453. See also eclogue (town). See also eclogue. pathetic fallacy, the: 284 pathos, 109, 299, 444, 531, 536, 538, 540, 542 Patmore, Coventry: 577 patronage: and laboring-​class poets, 166 and poetic careers, 147–​149, 158–​159 and subscription, 48 the decline of, 152, 156 Pattison, William: 148 Peacock, Thomas Love: 93 Peake, Charles: 327 Pemberton, Henry: 436 Pegge, Samuel: 240 Pellicer, Juan Christian: 464 Pennecuik, Alexander: 196, 202, 205 Pepusch, Johann Christoph: 35 Pepys, Samuel: 9 Percy, Thomas: 76, 130, 240, 557, 726 accused of forgery, 240 Reliques of Ancient Poetry, 54, 316, 414, 547–​548, 550–​552, 698, 722 editing of, and diminished authenticity, 240, 552 influence, on diction, 550 influence, on prosody, 414 revised as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 552 See also ballads. Perrault, Charles: 621 Perrot d’Ablancourt, Nicolas: 605–​606 Persius: 48

persona: 181, 191–​193, 274, 278, 654 Peters, Brian: 553 Petiver, James, 57 blazon, 196–​198 Petronius, 75 perriwigs: 24 Perry, Ruth: 8n16 Persius, 48 personification: 43, 589–​592, 619, 625 Petrarch, Francesco: 260, 584–​585, 633, 732 and sensibility, 197 and the blazon, 196–​198 and the torturing beloved, 589 imitations of: 74, 260 influence of, 198, 207, 584, 587, 589, 592 sonnets, 198, 379, 592 translations of, 256 phatic poems: 140 Philips, Ambrose: 129, 147, 415 as target of Pope’s satire, 293 pastorals, 129, 147, 294, 443–​444, 451 Philips, John: 415, 538, 542, 609 and blank verse, 374, 392 and the Union of 1707, 307 and Welsh national identity, 305, 308–​309 Cyder, 46, 288, 308–​309, 353, 391, 457–​458, 469 influence of Milton, 294, 374 Splendid Shilling, 128, 294, 391, 452, 454, 710 Philips, Katherine: 25, 81c82, 150, 250, 258, 264, 287, 671 influence of, 257–​258, 264 on affection in marriage, 364 on domesticity and retirement, 257 on restrictions on women in marriage, 258, 365 translations by, 256, 603 Philips, Samuel, 57 Philips, William: 232 Phillips, Edward: 669 Phillips, John: 233 physico-​theology: 188, 323–​329 Picasso, Pablo: 628 picturesque, the: 121, 127, 215–​216, 353–​355, 464, 625, 629 Pierrepont, Lady Mary: 258 Pilkington, Laetitia: 259, 261, 646

 

778   Index Pilkington, Matthew: 140, 277 Pilkington, Thomas: 739 Pindar: 406, 649, 652, 658 Pindar, Peter (John Wolcot): 67, 505–​506, 543–​534, 544, 672 Lousiad, The: 506, 727 Pinkerton, John: 520, 525–​526 Piozzi, Hester Lynch: 254 piracy: 52–​53, 152, 230 Pitcairn, Archibald: 129 Pitt, Christopher: 612–​613 Pitt, Humphry: 551 Pitt, William (the Elder): 227, 351, 506 Pittis, William, 57 plagiarism, 151, 227–​228, 230–​231, 234, 241, 245, 261 allusion misread as, 252 examples of, 231–​234 vs. imitation, allusion and parody, 234 Plato: 271, 597, 635–​637 Playford, Henry, 57 pleonasm: 216 Poems by a Literary Society: 130 See also Council of Parnassus. Poems Chiefly by Gentlemen of Devonshire and Cornwell, 67 Poems on Affairs of State, 151, 292, 673, 680 poems on poetry: 269–​285 Poems on Several Occasions: By a Gentleman: 196, 202 Poems, Selected and Printed by a Small Party of English: 135 poetasters: 75, 85, 274, 518, 721, 733 See also poet-​manqué. Poetical Amusements at a Villa near Batheaston: 127, 743 poetic justice: 186 poet manqué: 276–​277 poetry as profession: 144–​160 poetry of empire: 303–​319, 335–​336, 350 and the stadial social model, 315–​316 and transience of imperial prominence, 316 classical connections and new empire, 305 corruptions in imperial commerce, 317 Cowper and, 317–​318 Dyer and, 313 Grainger and, 314–​318, 460

hegemonic Britishness in, 305 national identities within, 304–​311 Pope and, 311–​312 promotion of global trade in, 312–​315 Thomson and, 312–​313 See also political poetry: slave trade, the. poetry of instruction: 89–​90, 103–​105, 108–​ 110, 182, 193 affective poetics in, 185–​187 expressive didacticism, 190 forms of delight to aid instruction, 185 impressionistic, 191 moral component of aesthetic delight, 187 preceptive poetry, 188–​190 projection of poetic self, 191 supplanted by aesthetic concerns, 182–​183 poets laureate. See honors (poets laureate): Pohli, Carol Virginia: 680 politeness: 151 signified by heroic couplets, 341 political poetry: 287–​303 and gender, 287 and London finance, 294–​297 and social class, 299–​301, 340 and topographical poetry, 335, 340 and the Restoration, 288–​292 and the slave trade, 295, 301–​302, 317–​319 Whig vs. Tory, 293–​294 See also Walpole, Robert. Polwhele, Richard: 506 Polymnia; or, The Charms of Music: 525 Pomfret, John: 257, 323, 518 Poole, Joshua: 111–​112, 375 Pope, Alexander: 3, 42–​43, 46, 48–​49, 66, 88, 98, 100, 103, 113–​114, 116–​118, 128–​ 129, 132–​133, 136, 140, 148, 152, 155, 165, 174, 177, 215, 257, 260, 286–​288, 296, 299–​300, 329, 331, 333, 338, 341, 343, 345, 351, 361, 368–​369, 374, 376–​377, 394–​395, 398, 408–​409, 416, 419, 430, 448, 455, 473, 495, 500, 505, 507–​508, 521–​522, 540, 545, 522, 582, 585, 596, 632, 642, 651, 658, 662, 665–​666, 703, 705–​706, 724, 734, 736, 743–​747 and Blackmore, 324, 738 and Budgell, 236

 

Index   779 and Cibber, 280, 733, 736–​738 and Curll, 234, 236, 654 and Defoe, 80 and Denham, 343, 346–​347 and Dennis, 275, 281 and Dodsley, 155, 172–​173 and Duck, 172 and Dryden, 610, 714, 736 and Jacobitism, 286, 341, 347 and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 255, 260, 293 and Milton, 657–​658 and plagiarism, 233–​234 and Roscommon, 42, 272 and Theobald, 280, 692–​694, 697 and Virgil, 443, 651, 662, 746 as classic of prose, xix as Roman Catholic, 159, 173, 292–​294, 389, 734 as Scriblerian, 128–​129, 233, 286, 501–​502, 656n25 as model for marginalized poets, 172–​173 career of, 158–​159 Dunciad, The, 37, 52–​53, 80, 137, 147, 157, 162, 172, 233–​234, 270, 280–​282, 284, 293, 299, 324, 488–​504, 507, 609, 653–​656, 666, 670–​672, 734, 743 Dunciad Variorum, The, 49, 52–​53, 282, 488, 500, 650, 653, 686, 695, 697–​698 edits Shakespeare, 655, 686, 691–​693 Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, 536–​539, 543 Eloisa to Abelard, 79, 120, 215, 248, 415, 581 Epilogue to the Satires, 298 Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 49, 249 “Epistle to a Lady,” 357, 359–​360, 367–​368 Epistle to Bathurst, 288, 297 Essay on Criticism: 41–​42, 46, 120, 272–​276, 272, 276, 278, 281, 283–​284, 377–​ 378, 382–​383, 407, 411, 424, 609, 620, 639, 644, 685–​686, 703 on following nature, 274, 281 on poetical and critical genius, 213 voice in, 193 Essay on Man, 44, 46, 120, 173, 217–​218, 323–​327, 378–​379, 408, 458–​459, 565, 620, 645, 679

and elegance, 215 as moral epistle, 176, 180 criticized by Crousaz, 325 defended by Warburton, 325–​326 empiricist opening of, 378–​379 theodicy in, 323–​326, 458 genius of, 210, 221, 223 Homer, translation of, 49, 121, 159, 217, 389, 417, 426n14, 473–​475, 487, 489–​491, 596, 608–​611, 621, 655, 686, 692, 695–​696, 711 Horace, imitations of 42, 45–​46, 145, 249, 270, 273–​275, 298, 411, 501, 523, 582, 679, 746 Johnson on, 271, 273, 620, 645, 647, 711 low language, use of, 298 Messiah: A Sacred Eclogue, 454, 657 Miscellanies by Pope and Swift, 132–​133, 140, 609 misogyny of, 356–​360, 362, 679, 743 moral epistles by, 176, 190, 501, 565, 584 New Dunciad, 46, 500, 656n25 Ode for Musick, 46, 413, 419, 524–​525 on genius, 213 Pastorals, 294, 442–​444, 449–​450, 455, 609 and georgic particularity, 451 imitation in, 442–​443 influence of, 449 Spenserian melancholy in, 443 Virgilian style in, 443, 454 Peri Bathous, 269, 292, 639, 651, 668 Rape of the Lock, The, 37, 46–​47, 49, 132, 145–​146, 233, 311, 364, 381, 444, 498, 502, 530–​531, 620 and epic tradition, 488 as mock-​elegy, 530–​531 couplet structure in, 381–​382 influences and precedents, 145–​146 misogyny in, 360, 362–​363, 679 “Receit to Make an Epick Poem,” 276–​277 retained copyrights, 153, 159 satirized, 46, 52, 146–​147, 259 subscriptions, 133, 609 suspected Jacobitism of, 292 Temple of Fame, 412–​414 Warton on, xix, 215, 399, 413–​414, 419, 621, 698

 

780   Index Pope, Alexander (Cont.) Windsor-​Forest, 45–​46, 288, 346–​348, 351–352, 458–​459, 611, 655 and global trade, 284, 312, 458 British slave-​trade unacknowledged, 312, 347 pro-​Stuart, 294, 347 rewriting Denham, 343, 346 Works, 159, 685, 692 Popish Plot, the: 497 Porden, Eleanor Anne: 257 Porter, Hugh: 141 Poulain de la Barre, François: 250 Pound, Ezra: 428, 437, 618, 625n25 Pound, Louise: 548 Pratt, Linda: 150 precept: 188–​189 prefaces: 10, 42, 60, 134, 163–​164, 169, 230, 238, 240–​241, 255, 300, 307, 324, 338, 406, 526, 603–​604, 641, 686, 695, 703 as biography, 158, 703–​704, 713 as site for critical discourse, 28, 42, 73, 158, 186–​187, 191, 213, 271, 301, 311, 389, 399, 409, 445, 457, 481–​482, 486, 490, 525, 531, 540, 605–​607, 633, 703, 705 by Samuel Johnson, 158, 228, 231, 708, 712–​713 in magazines, 59, 69–​70, 114 italicized, 41–​42 polemical, 324, 718, 719 refuting charge of plagiarism, 232–​233, 241 See also Dryden, John. Pretender, the Young. See Stuart, Prince Charles Edward. Price, Leah: 77 Price, Lucy: 235–​236 Priestley, Joseph: 115–​116, 331, 333 print formats: 44–​50 duodecimo: 45, 48, 653 eighth-​sheets, 47 folio: 40, 44–​46, 48–​50, 133, 159, 386, 551, 601, 611 half-​sheets, 40, 44, 47, 740 quarter-​sheets: 45, 47 quarto: xx, 40, 44–​49, 52, 159, 653, 691

Royal Folio, 482, 601 slips, 16, 40, 44–​45, 547 Prior, Matthew: 45–​46, 48, 57, 112, 118, 129, 131, 133, 138n34, 280, 292, 329, 585, 659, 710 Alma; or, The Progress of the Mind, 323n5, 500 “Henry and Emma,” 414 Satyr on the Poets, 280 Solomon: On the Vanity of the World, 184, 322–​323, 617 proem: 278, 444, 535, 653 progress poems: 52, 223, 269, 276, 281–​284 reversed (devolution), 299 prologues: 23–​27, 30–​31, 33–​34, 232, 238, 279, 283, 296, 633 collections of, 27, 67 published in magazines, 63 prosody: accent, 168, 411, 426, 430–​431, 433, 435 alignment of meter with subject, 540 and faulty meter, 74, 416, 425, 549 and line-​length, 424 and music, 417–​420 and pauses, 422–​423, 426, 428–​431 and sound, 274, 417, 423 and stress, 120, 383, 416, 420, 426, 430, 550, 556 and smooth or rough meter, 264 Aristotle on, 28–​29, 408, 634–​535 cadence-​based, 411, 419, 428, 430, 433–​435, 437, 702 classical, not suited to English, 416, 426 Coleridge on, 435–​436 effect of syntax on, 434–​435 free verse, 433, 437 kinds of verse line adonic, 416; alternate versions, 427–​438 dimeter, 418; elegiac, 416; hexameter, 28, 270, 374, 376, 382–​383, 399, 416, 431, 634n3 octosyllabics, 252, 352, 676 as Swift’s meter, 257, 686 pentameter, 217, 376, 382–​383, 386, 422, 424, 427, 430–​432, 434, 436–​437

 

Index   781 iambic, 28, 374, 376, 382–​383, 403, 422, 424–​426, 430–​432, 556 See also blank verse; couplets (heroic). tetrameter, 36, 414–​415, 418 anapestic, 138–​139 iambic, 376, 635n3, 676 spondaic or pyrrhic, 414 trochaic, 511 sapphic, 431 trimeter, 414 See also blank verse. metrical feet amphibrach, 676 anapest, 138–​139, 413, 43, 449, 676. See also Anstey’s measure. dactyl, 676 iamb, 425, 430–​432, 434, 576, 645 pyrrhus: 414, 432 troche, 432, 511 Pindaric irregularity, 514 quantitative meter, 384, 416, 426, 741 syllabic meter, 375, 382–​383, 415, 420, 424–426, 429 Trager-​Smith scansion, 430 triple meters and irony, 676–​677 Wordsworth on, 435–​436 See also blank verse; couplets (heroic); pentameter; stanzas; tetrameter; trimeter Protagoras: 635 Prosimetrum: 75 prosopopoeia: 192, 541, 619 prospect poems: 288, 335, 348, 351 Psalmanazar, George: 228 Psalms: 84, 92, 94, 649 in works for children, 92 metrical versions of, 321, 570 stanzaic form of, 92 pseudonymous publication: 280, 341 psychomachia: 212 publishers, printers, distributors, and booksellers: Aris, T., 51 Arch, J. and A., 52 Ayres, Mary, 51 Bagford, John, 9 Barber, John, 47–​48

Bickerton, Weaver, 51 Bowyer, William (Jr.), 53 Bowyer, William (Sr.) 46 Chetwood, 654 Coote, John, 56, 59–​60 Cottle, Joseph, 52 Creech, William, 51 Darton and Harvey, 100 Dicey, William, 61, 551 Dodd, Anne, 52 Fairbrother, Samuel, 140 Goggin, William, 5 Harding, John, 47 Keating, J., 51 Moore, A., 52 Morphew, John, 47, 145 Osborne, Thomas, 654–​655 Raikes, Robert, 61 Roberts, James, 51–​52 Ruddiman, Thomas: 52 Strahan, A., 51 Woodfall, Henry, 46 Warren, T., 51 Watson, James, 52 Watts, John, 48 Wright, John, 159 See also Cadell, Thomas; Curll, Edmund; Dodsley, Robert and Joseph; Johnson, Joseph; Kearsley, George; Lintot, Bernard and Henry; Millar, Andrew; and Tonson, Jacob (the Elder and the Younger) Pulter, Hester: 254 puns: 75, 207, 568, 650–​651, 666, 674 Pushkin, Aleksandr: 72 punctuation: 379, 429, 437 and pauses, 384 emphatic, 188, 384, 395 end-​rhyme as, 408 marks to indicate irony, 675 Puritanism: 146, 292, 295, 475, 484, 498, 602, 709, 734 Purney, Thomas: 445 Puttenham, George: 410, 418 puzzles: 64–​65 Puzzlewell, Peter: 99 puritanism: 292, 295, 475, 484, 498, 602, 709, 734

 

782   Index Pye, Henry James: 68, 343n34 as poet laureate, 68, 734–​735 Faringdon Hill, 342, 350–​351 Pynchon, Thomas: 276 Quarles, Francis: 112 quarter-​sheets. See print format. quarto. See print format. quatrains: 409, 413–​415, 417, 449, 451, 539–​ 540, 542–​545 and elegy, 544 common measure, 556 decasyllabic, or Gondibert stanza, 479 in ballads, 6, 410, 415, 556 in burlesques, 413 in hymns, 415 in sonnets, 379–​380 long measure, 549–​550 Quevedo, Francisco de: 633 Quilligan, Maureen: 200 Quin, James: 504 Quint, David: 484 Quintero, Ruben: 271 Quintilian: 270, 411, 625, 626n28, 638, 645 quotability: 396, 402, 687 quotation of verse in fiction: 77, 83–​85 Racine, Jean: 103, 402, 420, 702 Radcliffe, Ann: 67, 72–​74, 77, 86 Radstock, William Waldegrave, 1st Baron: 166 Raikes, Robert, 61 Ram, Titia: 56 Rameau, Jean-​Philippe: 418 Ramsay, Alan: 10, 51, 129, 311–​312 and the Easy Club, 129–​130 collected ballads, 550 Gentle Shepherd, The, 445, 454 Keitha: A Pastoral, 445 Tea-​Table Miscellany, 14–​15, 18, 21 Randolph, John: 740 Ransom, John Crowe: 380 Raphael: 607 Rapin, René: 29, 607, 633, 639 Rawson, Claude: 208, 238 Reading Made Quite Easy, 92 rebus: 140 Reeve, Clara: 76 Reid, David: 393–​394

Relph, Josiah: 446 republican virtue: 394, 460 republicanism: 481–​482, 484, 602 admixture with Puritanism, 475 civic, 391 Restoration, the: and Augustan skepticism, 270, 608 and the epic, 474–​476, 479–​481 and the Laureateship, 732–​733 and literary developments, 23, 41, 83, 85, 179, 183, 247, 272, 385, 405 and manuscript circulation, 151 and theaters, 25, 604 concern for reputation during, 279 discursive verse after, 410 elegies during, 532–​534 court culture and women poets, 254, 257 libertinism of, 290 miscellany culture of, 597 nonconformists during, 80, 94, 158 king’s role in reconciliation and prosperity, 306 political poetry of, 289–​290, 306, 488 satire of, 290, 292, 298, 483, 495–​496, 498 translation during, 598–​608, 611 retirement, ideal of: 66, 257, 399–​400, 519, 521–​524, 609 reviews: 716–​731 and suspicion of corruption, 723 and the misery of reading bad poems, 719–​720 civil war between poets and critics, 716–​719 corrective to modern sense of canon, 729 extracts in, 728 may assist authors, 721 mission of, to reduce useless volumes, 720–​721 on diction, 727–​729 on embellishment, 727 rules of criticism in, the nature of, 724–​ spitefulness of, 722 perform a public service, 720 Rex, Michael: 474 Reynolds, Sir Joshua: 67, 212n6, 470 rhapsody: 218, 276–​278, 280, 328, 346, 399–400, 501–​502 rhetoric: 184–​187, 191, 270 deliberative, 184

 

Index   783 epideictic, 85, 184, 186 judicial, 184 traditional, dissatisfaction with, 191 versified treatises on, 272 Rhetorica ad Herennium: 633, 638, 643 rhyme: 6, 12, 25, 27–​28, 73–​75, 86, 111–​112, 128, 140–​141, 163, 177, 179, 221, 224, 227, 282, 294, 338, 347, 365, 368, 374–​377, 379, 385, 398, 403, 406–​413, 418–​420, 422, 424–​427, 430, 434, 478, 526, 544, 567, 612, 655–​656, 713, 722, 726, 737 alternating, 539, 556, 592, 643 and children, 89–​93, 99–​100 and music, 406–​408, 413, 418 against, 273, 294, 374, 389, 401, 433, 479, 541 as distraction, 406 as Gothic barbarism, 411, 416 as mere jingling defenders of, 374 dictionaries of, 112, 685 double, 410–​411, 676–​677 English poverty of, 382, 401–​402 on stage, 23, 26, 28–​32, 36, 78, 402 enables emphasis, 408 feminine, 382, 411 in ballads, 549, 555–​557 in sonners, 592 internal, 412, 418, 556–​557 laboring-​class poets and, 398 masculine, 32, 382, 411 more effective than prose, 180–​181 triple, 676–​677 See also bout-​rimés; crambo; dérimage. Rhymer’s Club, the: 128 Rice, John: 425–​429, 433–​434, 436 Rich, John: 35 Richards, I. A.: 652 Richards, Thomas: 144 Richardson, Samuel: 73, 76, 78–​79, 82–​85, 234, 261, 489, 531 Richmond, Mary Stuart, Duchess of. See “Ephelia.” Richmond, W. Edson: 558 Ricks, Christopher: 230, 388, 423, 437, 657 Ricoeur, Paul: 701, 715

riddles: 55, 63–​65, 70, 99, 135, 136n27, 140–141, 442, 743 Rimbaud, Arthur: 629 Ripley, Wayne C.: 330 Ritson, Joseph: 90, 240, 552, 548n2, 587 Robert the Bruce (king of Scotland): 11 Roberts, Wendy: 567 Roberts, William Hayward: 727 Robinson, Mary: 44, 66n46, 67, 251, 260, 528, 726 Rochester, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of: 248, 270, 361–​362, 413–​414, 496–​497, 499, 704 and Poems on Affairs of State, 292 “Allusion to Horace 10 Sat: 1st Book,” 279, 685 and the influence of Hobbes, 290 and impotence, 358–​359, 368 lampoons Charles II, 289, 497, 672 libertinism of, 584 misogyny of, 290, 356, 358, 499, 584 pessimism of, 290 reveals longing for emotional intimacy, 364, 584 Satyr against Reason and Mankind, 192, 290 “Signior Dildo,” 290 “Tunbridge Wells,” 131 Rogers, Pat: 148, 609, 611, 699 Rogers, Samuel: 727 Rolt, Richard: 227, 231 Roman Catholicism: 192, 293, 569 and anti-​Catholic writing, 289, 296 Dryden’s conversion to, 292, 734 Pope’s experiences, 159, 173, 292–​294, 389, 734 Romantics, the: 27, 75, 77–​78, 146, 154n22, 182, 193, 218–​219, 223, 242, 258, 261, 319, 329, 369, 454–​455, 473, 511, 544, 576–​577, 582, 604, 618, 671, 713, 733 affective poetics of, 78, 186, 195, 215, 214, 564, 624 and ballads, 262 and epic, 257, 493–​494 and expression, 284 and genius, 210–​211, 220, 225, 604 and inspiration, 284–​285 and preference for indirect instruction, 183n16, 191

 

784   Index Romantics, the  (Cont.) and satire, 506–​507 and self, 78, 253 and the child, 90, 106 and prose, 77–​78 find lack of interior feeling in earlier poets, 355 on poetry’s emotive impulse to reflection, 564 pre-​and proto-​Romantic, 155, 183, 218n25, 220, 235, 713 prosody of, 433, 435–​436 sublimity, 221 transform ode to private meditation, 420 Ronksley, William: 92–​93, 96 Roscommon, Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of: 112, 272, 632, 642, 708, 710 Essay on Translated Verse, 42, 272, 276, 685 translates Horace’s Ars Poetica, 534 Rossetti, Christina: 100–​102 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel: 243 Rossini, Giachino: 419 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques: 79 Rowe, Elizabeth Singer: 254, 257, 264, 536 translates Tasso, 256 praised by Watts, 570 Rowe, Nicholas: 30, 83, 85, 203, 232, 248, 402, 449 as poet laureate, 488, 733, 745 edition of Shakespeare, 48 translates Lucan, 488 Rowley, Thomas. See Chatterton, Thomas. Royal Exchange: 295 Royal Literary Fund: 251 Royal Society: 250, 320–​321, 405–​406, 640–​ 642, 743 Ruaeus, Carolus: 607 Ruddiman, Walter: champions Burns, 62 “Rule, Britannia”: 35, 298 Rumbold, Valerie: 656nn24–​25 Rumrich, John: 474 Ruskin, John: 284 Rushton, Edward: 174, 447 Rymer, Thomas: 27–​30, 739 Sacheverell, Henry: 280 Sacks, Peter M.: 528

Saint-​Amant, Antoine Girard, Sieur de: 603 Salmagundi, a Miscellaneous Collection of Original Poetry, 67 Sampson, George: 416 Sandys, George: 375, 710 Sannazaro, Jacopo: 452 Sandys, George: 375, 710 Sansom, Martha Fowke: 129, 263–​265, 363 See also Barbados Gazette poet, the. Sappho: 415, 587 as honorific title, 248, 264 sapphics, 416, 431 satire: 183, 234, 398, 495–​509 Carolean, 496–​498 defamatory, 498–​499 good-​natured, 503 Horatian, 288, 506 impersonation in, 500 Juvenalian, 120, 288, 504, 506 Menippean, 75 post-​Carolean, 496, 498 Scriblerian mode of, 501–​504, 736 universal, 290 vs. plagiarism, 234 Saturday Club: 140 Satyr on the Lawyers, 502 Savage, Mary: 253n33, 264, 362, 367, 744 Savage, Richard: 82, 129, 133, 229, 328, 359–​361 and Aaron Hill’s circle, 129 and Johnson, 228, 529 as volunteer laureate, 738 compiles Miscellaneous Poems and Translations, 129, 521 Ireland’s forgeries of, 221 madness of, 221 Sawday, Jonathan: 197 Sawyer, Anna: 368–​369 Say, Samuel: 374, 426 Scaliger, Julius Caesar: 633, 639 scalds: 548 Schiller, Friedrich: 80, 222, 276, 283, 330 Schlegel, Friedrich: 77 Schlüter, Kurt: 510 Schmidt, Leigh Eric: 567 scholarship: 685–​715 and canon formation, 690, 698

 

Index   785 and editing, 685, 687–​695 aesthetic approach to, 691–​694 by Pope, 695–​698 collation of texts, 695 conjectural approach to, 688, 694–​695 historicizing approach to, 691–​694 of Milton, 687–​690 of Shakespeare, 690–​ and lexicography, 685–​686 annotations in, 687–​690, 696 biographies of poets, 703–​705 Chatterton controversy and, 687–​699 developing a history of poetry, 704–​715 mock-​scholarly apparatus, 686, 695–​697 pedantry, charged to, 688, 693–​696 See also Johnson, Samuel (Lives of the Poets). Schor, Esther: 528 Schumann, Robert: 210, 214, 226 science: 320–​335 argument from design, 323, 327 Darwin’s imaginative botany, 331–​333 observation of nature and moral topics, 327–​328 women poets and, 321 See also physico-​theology. Scotland: 18, 307, 310, 316 Act of Union and, 14–​15, 112, 118, 304, 306–​313, 458, 597 and “folk” culture, 20–​21, 520 anglicizing Scottish tongue, 119 ballads and songs of, 4, 11, 15, 21, 262, 520 Highland Clearances, 304, 447–​448 laboring-​class poets in, 262–​263 national identity of, 10–​11, 310, 516–​517, 612 oral tradition and authenticity, 21 print culture, 5, 11 use of dialect or vernacular in poetry, 177 See also Culloden, Battle of; Edinburgh; Glasgow; Jacobite (risings) Scott, James: 722 Scott, John: 354 Scott, John (of Amwell): 448, 454 Scott, Mary: 254, 257 Scott, Sir Walter: 12, 77, 150, 158 and ballads, 547, 550, 552, 556, 561 Scotticisms: 119, 445 scribal publication. See manuscript circulation.

Scriblerian techniques: annotation: 38, 696 authorial ventriloquism, 233 burlesque, 130 character assassination, 241, 736 fragmentary “found” manuscripts, 238 pastiche, 244 pseudonyms, 233 Scriblerus Club, the: 128–​129, 140, 250, 286, 300, 501 Scroope, Sir Carr 280, 497 Scrubs of Parnassus, The: 504 Scudéry, Georges de: 603 Seary, Peter: 692–​694, 696 Sedley, Sir Charles: 203, 280, 286 Segrais, Jean Regnault de: 607 Selden, John: 29 Semple, Francis: 15 Sendak, Maurice: 102 sensibility: 182, 195–​196, 215, 225, 282, 288, 359, 491, 594, 722, 726–​727 affective poetics of, 181, 284–​285, 563, 592, 594, 6 and devotional verse, 564–​566, 573–​576, 579 and women poets, 251, 593–​594 in lyric poetry, 581, 593–​594 personification and, 592 primitivist, 493 Settle, Elkanah: 280, 538, 646, 711, 739 Seven Years’ War, the: 287, 304 Seward, Anna: 67, 128, 131, 157–​158, 248, 263, 332, 593–​593, 744 as “the Swan of Lichfield,” 248n7 Elegy on Captain Cook, 494 Louisa, a Poetical Novel, 79, 494, 722 Monody on the Death of Major Andre, 494 translates Fénelon, 494 Sewell, Elizabeth: 406 Shadwell, Thomas: 280, 739 as poet laureate, 524, 733–​736, 739, 745 in Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe, 281, 496, 734 Shafer, Robert: 510, 513 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooer, 1st Earl of: 290, 496–​497 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of: 120, 192, 214, 491, 626

 

786   Index Shakespeare, William: 25, 28–​29, 35, 103, 112, 114, 116, 237–​238, 269, 271, 280, 283, 409, 413, 520, 531, 549, 622, 644, 651–​652, 690, 704 adaptations of, 693 and blank verse, 433 annotations to, 241, 649 as natural genius, 214, 217, 399 cult of, 217–​218 editions of, 48, 228, 238, 241, 649, 685, 690–​ See also under Bentley, Richard; Capell, Edward; Johnson, Samuel (edition); Malone, Edmond; Pope, Alexander; Rowe, Nicholas; Steevens, George; Theobald, Lewis; Warburton, William:38, 221, 380, 690–​691 shape-​poems: 281, 406 Sharp, Cecil: 21, 548 Shaw, Cuthbert: 722–​723 Shaw, W. David: 528, 531 Sheffield, John. See Mulgrave, John Sheffield, Earl of. Shefrin, Jill: 95 Shelley, Mary: 226 Shelley, Percy: 226, 236, 284–​285, 507, 528, 618–​619, 673 Shenstone, William: 51, 65, 166–​167, 173, 451, 521–​522, 539–​540, 551 “Pastoral Ballad, A,” 449–​450, 455 burlesqued, 449–​450 The School-​Mistress, 52, 413 Shephard, Richard: 526 Sheppard, Fleetwood: 280 Sherbo, Arthur: 241, 656n24 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley: 138n34 Sheridan, Thomas: 113, 115, 140 Lectures on the Art of Reading, 422–​423 meter and reading aloud, 423–​424, 436 opposition to, 425–​427 on blank verse, 422–​423, 433 Sherry, Richard: 626n27 Shields, David: 313 Shiels, Robert: 522, 704 Shippen, William: 500 Shirley, James: 496 Shirley, William: 203 Short Trip into Kent, A: 341 Shillingsburg, Peter: 691

Shuster, George N.: 510 Simonsuuri, Kirsti: 216n20, 491 Sidney, Sir Philip: 75–​76, 81–​82, 185, 198, 200, 202, 269, 348, 380, 477–​478, 558 simile: 29, 44, 620–​621, 633, 634–​636, 643–645, 650–​651, 655–​656, 659–660, 742 epic, 190, 223, 623, 634 faulty, 282 Singer, Elizabeth. See Rowe, Elizabeth Singer. Sitter, John: 4n2, 80, 282, 590 Skene, Lilias: 254 Slagle, Judith Bailey: 25, 27 Slatkin, Laura: 492 slavery: 312, 332, 347 British involvement in slave trade, 347, 366, 448 poems concerning, 68, 105–​106, 295, 301–302, 317–​319, 447 See also abolitionist movement; Asiento Pact. slips. See print format. Smart, Christopher: 61, 63, 212, 283, 563, 565, 569–​570, 577, 741–​742, 745 Hilliad, The, and Hill’s Smartiad, 504 Hop-​Garden, The, 347–​348, 351, 461–​462 Jubilate Agno, 563–​569 madness of, 212 Song to David, 569–​570, 588 Translation of the Psalms of David, A, 570–​571 Smedley, Jonathan: 132–​133 Smith, Adam: 120, 122, 345, 624, 626 Smith, Alexander, 434 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein: 380 Smith, Charlotte: 66–​67, 72, 85–​86, 258, 367, 592 allusions by, misread as plagiarism, 252 Beachy Head, 258, 288, 353 Elegiac Sonnets, 77, 531 Smith, Edmund: 203, 538–​539, 541, 715 Smith, John: 24, 32 Smith, Marshall, 57 Smith, Nigel: 340, 599 Smollett, Tobias: 63, 76, 86, 119, 503–​504, 716 Smythe, James Moore: 233–​234 Snead, Jennifer: 488–​489 Soame, Sir William: 272, 534

 

Index   787 Society of Friendship: 250 Socrates: 671 soliloquy: 192 solitary poet, the: 128, 164, 181, 221, 223, 454 solitude, motif of: 235, 257, 400, 522–​524 Somers, John Somers, Baron: 292 Somerset, Frances Seymour, Duchess of: 47, 254, 521 Somerville, William: 46–​47, 392 song slips: 4, 16, 547 songs: and performance culture, 582, 586–​587 drinking, 413–​414 collections of, 586 comic, 131 on stage: 34, 586 Scottish, 4, 11, 15, 21, 520 sonnets: 379–​380, 592–​594, 673, 728 elegiac, 77, 531, 544–​545, 592 emblematic “sonnet lady,” 199 epistolary, 592 mock-​heroic, 66 Mother Goose’s, 91 panegyrical, 66 Petrarchan, 198, 370 Shelley’s “England in 1819,” 673 Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, 198–​200 Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion, 200–​201 topographical, 66, 592–​593 Sophocles: 578, 634–​635 Sorrel, Charles: 198, 205 South Sea Company: 288, 294–​295, 297 and satires of finance, 296 Bubble, 11, 288, 295–​296, 500 George I governor of, 297 Walpole covered up scandal, 297–​298 Southey, Robert: 73, 150, 263, 447–​448, 611 as poet laureate, 734–​735 Sowerby, Robin: 601n18, 607n36, 608 Spacks, Patricia Meyer: 563 Spalding Gentlemen’s Society: 129 Sparta: 295 Spatemen, Thomas: 103 Speght, Thomas: 687, 703 Spence, Joseph: 61, 166, 644, 703–​704, 740 Spence, Thomas: 506–​507 Spencer, Richard: 669

Spenser, Edmund: 48, 224, 273, 380, 410, 600, 607, 665 and allegory, 283, 288 and canon formation, 218n26, 269, 280, 399, 607, 686, 702–​703, 708 allusion to, 649, 659–​661 Amoretti and Epithalamion, 200–​201 as genius, 218n26, 221 associated with laureateship, 732 Faerie Queene, 443, 520, 659 imitation of, 223, 244, 443–​445 influence of, 422n3, 443, 446n11, 452, 602, 649 Ireland’s forgeries of, 221 melancholy of, 443 sonnets by, 380 See also diction (Spenserian); stanzas (Spenserian). Spenserian revival, 685 Sprat, Thomas: 405–​407, 409, 632, 641–​642, 703, 713 Sprint, John: 291 Stafford, Fiona: 229 stage and poetry, the: 23–​39, 203–​204 standard Habbie. See under meter. Stallybrass, Peter: 200 Stanhope, H. See Bond, William. Stanley, Eric: 95 stanzas: 405–​415 ballad, 94, 109, 170, 414, 556–​557, 592 common (hymn), 415 Gondibert, 47, 479 long meter, 415 octave, 379 of the metaphysical poets, 406–​408, 413 ottava rima, 410 quinzain, 410 sapphic, 416 sestet, 379 sestina, 409–​410, 412 Spenserian, 223–​224, 504, 515, 544 standard Habbie, 142, 174 stanzettas See also couplets; quatrain. Starr, G. Gabrielle: 78, 84, 581 Stationers’ Company, the: 5, 587 Statius: 480 Staves, Susan: 247, 358

 

788   Index Steele, Anne: 254, 574 Steele, Sir Richard: 129, 301, 434 Steevens, George: 228, 240–​242, 649, 691, 695 Steiner, T. R.: 605–​607, 610 Stella. See Johnson, Esther. Stephens, Catherine: 66 Sterne, Laurence: 66, 130, 234–​235, 276, 401, 450, 504, 532, 543 Sternhold, Thomas, and John Hopkins, The Whole Booke of Psalmes, Collected into English Meter, 94, 570 Stevens, George Alexander: 131 Stevens, Wallace: 284, 618 Strawn, Morgan: 491 street as “showground,” the: 4, 90 Stuart, Prince Charles (the Old Pretender): 294 Stuart, Prince Charles Edward (the Young Pretender): 12, 17–​20 Stukeley, William: 245 style: 8, 37, 70, 76, 82, 99, 117, 121, 139, 173, 180, 217, 233, 257, 270, 399, 409, 419, 519, 607–​609, 613, 624–​628, 634, 636, 641–​642, 645–​647, 678, 691–​692, 709, 721 allegorical, 354 allusive, 233–​234 and gender, 257 and poetry of instruction, 182–​184, 188–​194 and polite sociability, 83 antiquarian, 242, 414 archaic, 556, 636 as poetic voice, 249, 247 debate as, in epistles, 260 elevated, 171, 175, 328, 426, 475 excessively figurative, 626, 633, 636 impersonation of, 697 inflated, 406, 642 forgery as theft of, 232, 245 high (grand), 257, 388, 473, 635 in pastiche, 252 irregular, 300 loose, 327 low, 12, 37, 278 metaphysical, 633, 651, 709, 714 middle (moderate), 636, 646 multiplicity of, 74 nervous, 317 of broadsides, 6

of satire, 504–​505 oriental, 317 pastoral, 79 plain, 42, 80, 121, 406, 642 poetic prose, 239 street-​ballad, 261 sublime, 84, 515, 518 triumphal, 258 use of participles as, 428 vernacular, 260 wild, fanciful, romantic, 218n25 Styles, Morag: 89 Suarez, Michael: 132, 613 sublime, the: 117, 271 and blank verse, 398 and Christian ecstasy, 566 as quality of genius, 215 mutability of, 629 playful version of, 85 religious, 687 sublime vs. beautiful, 103 Whig, 292 subscription publication: 53, 133–​134, 147–148, 151, 157, 166–​167, 174, 239, 486, 601, 609 and children’s books, 89 and luxury books, 48, 51 and provincial publication, 51 failures, 148 for women poets, 51, 133, 151, 301 Sun King, the. See LouisXIV. suicide: 66, 236 Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of: 386 Sutherland, James: 697Pope Swift, Jonathan: 31, 44, 46–​47, 88, 96, 99, 103, 113, 117, 120–​121, 129, 133, 138n34, 140–​141, 171–​172, 177, 276, 279, 286, 296, 299, 310, 359, 368, 447, 495, 500–​503, 505, 531, 539, 544, 612, 670, 672, 676, 681, 737, 739 “A Description of a City Shower,” 276, 295, 612 “A Description of the Morning,” 295, 382–​383 and town eclogue, 276 and urban georgic, 295 Argument against Abolishing Christianity, 278 as Scriblerian, 128–​129

 

Index   789 Battle of the Books, 685 blazon and counter-​blazon in, 204–​208 Bubble, The, 296 conditions of publication of, 47, 141, 141n44 defines forgery, 231–​232 Description of a City Shower, 276 Drapier’s Letters, 47 expectation of irony in, 679 Gulliver’s Travels, 487, 500–​501 influenced by scientific developments, 320–​321 Journal to Stella, 47, 148 Miscellanies by Pope and Swift, 132–​133, 140 misogyny of, 204–​205, 259, 356, 358–​359 Modest Proposal, 501 On Poetry: A Rapsody, 276, 280, 501 satirizes men’s surprise at women’s bodies, 205–​208, 359 satirizes satires of women: 208 self-​critical metapoetics of, 197, 204–​205 “Senatus Consultum” (Swift’s literary circle), 140 Tale of a Tub, 270, 324, 681, 686 Verses on the Death of Dr Swift, 131, 278, 501, 668 Works of J. S., The, 141 syllepsis: 376 Sylvester, Joshua: 375 synecdoche: 338, 622, 638 syntax: 352, 391, 445, 467 in Blake, 433 in Collins, 591 inverted, 224, 407, 409 meter determined by, 434–​436 Miltonic, 331, 398, 409, 424, 428, 660 obsolete, 284 of qualification, 535 overelaborate, 391 petty rules of, 637 Tapner, John: 98 Tasker, William: 174 Tasso, Torquato: 273 the madness of, 221 translated, 256, 687, 710, 714 taste: and aesthetics, 626, 629 and criticism, 193, 213, 624, 697, 707, 721–​725

and genius, 213, 220, 459, 624, 703 and urbanity, 272 arbiters of, 272, 275, 280, 413, 539, 717–​720 as faculty of good readers, 581 as “elastic virtue,” 122 as component of editing, 691–​693 as quality of reading aloud, 433 as social quality, 104, 606 cosmopolitan, 274 definition of, 624 devotional, 566, 574–​575 essential for poets, 721, 726–​727 formation of, 88, 98, 103, 108–​109, 112–​113, 115, 117–​118, 122, 609, 626, 714 innovations in, 337 literary taste as fashion, 66, 73, 77, 299, 330, 354, 375, 513, 550, 553, 611, 613, 637, 704–​706, 709 literary taste as preference, 60–​61, 240, 322, 354, 566, 597–​598, 644, 678, 712 reform of, 119, 293 requiring discipline, 570 “true” taste, 117, 155, 712, 726 vitiated or bad taste, 28, 258, 299, 503, 721 Tate, Nahum: 57, 280, 570, 609, 693 as poet laureate, 733, 735–​736, 745 Ireland’s forgeries of, 221 Tatersal, Robert: 174 Tatham, John: 738 Tatlock, Eleanor: 253n33 Taubman, Matthew: 738–​739 Tave, Stuart: 503 Taylor, Ann and Jane: 99–​100, 103 Taylor, Charles: 153 Taylor, Ellen: 167 Taylor, Jeremy: 231 Taylor, John (Chevalier): 195 Taylor, John (the Water Poet): 221 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich: 419 Teft, Elizabeth: 253n33, 363, 366 Telarius. See Webb, Foster. Temple, Sir William: 580, 634n4 Tennyson, Alfred, 1st Baron Tennyson: 417 tercet: 413–​414 Terence: 399 Terry, Richard: 150 Theater Licensing Act of 1737: 151, 488, 672 Thelwall, John: 434

 

790   Index Theobald, Lewis: 35, 233, 237, 737 edition of Shakespeare, 238, 649, 655, 692 evolved editorial principles, 693, 696 Fatal Secret, 693 in the Dunciad, 280, 282, 693 Shakespeare Restored, 693 Theocritus: 399, 443–​445 theodicy: 324 Theophrastus: 633, 635, 637 Thicknesse, George: 67 thing theory, 196 Thirty Years’ War: 270 Thomas, Elizabeth: 252, 258–​259, 261, 358, 365 Thompson, Edward: 726 Thompson, E. P.: 165, 347 Thompson, John: 417 Thomson, George: 262 Thomson, James: 66, 82, 113–​114, 116, 118, 133, 148–​149, 167, 177, 294, 312, 331, 338, 393, 402, 409, 413, 436, 469, 522, 530–​531, 619–​620, 625, 628–​629, 671 and blank verse, 338, 374, 388, 393, 408 and physico-​theology, 324, 327–​328 and Virgil, 190, 464–​465, 489 Edward and Eleanora, 297 in fragments borrowed by Ireland, 222 Liberty, 53, 318, 394, 489 on meter, 417 “Rule Britannia,” 298 sale of copyrights, 148 The Seasons, 313, 315, 351–​352, 354, 392–​, 565, 611, 619 additions and revisions to, 53, 351 and physico-​theology, 327 as georgic, 299, 464–​465 classicism in, 190, 313, 393–​394 use of capitals in, 44 subscription publication of, 148 variation of tone in, 193 Virgil reworked in, 190 The Tragedy of Sophonisba, 38n38 Thomson, Samuel: 141, 447 Thornton, Bonnell: 129, 156, 129, 286, 300 Thrale, Hester: 98 threnody: 532 Thurmond, John: 36

Tickell, Thomas: 45, 91, 129, 538–​539, 541 and Addison’s “little senate,” 129 Kensington Gardens, 346 translates Homer, 129, 489 See also Masque of Alfred, The. Tindall, Nicholas: 235–​236 Tindall, Matthew: 235–​236 Tipper, Elizabeth, 253n33 Tipper, John, 57, 63 Tillotson, John: 432 tobacco: 132 Todd, Janet: 197, 570 Toft, Mary: 237 Toldervy, William: History of Two Orphans, 83–​84 Tolkien, J. R. R.: 243 Tollett, Elizabeth: 259, 261, 264, 593 Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-​Book, 90 Tonson, Jacob (the Elder): xx, 42, 45, 47–​49, 50, 551, 611 Miscellanies, 294, 609 Tonson, Jacob (the Younger): 50, 551 Toplady, Augustus Montague: 588 topographical poetry: 66, 79, 252, 288, 293, 335–​355, 396 and empire, 336 and mapping, 336 as conservative, 341 hospitable landscape in, 351–​35 memories of Civil War in, 335, 338, 340–​343 rivers in, 339–​340, 345, 349–​351, 352, 354, 593 See also landscape; prospect poems. Tory: government and the South Sea Company, 288 poets and rumored Jacobitism, 292 satire equates dullness with Whiggism, 293 Tory Brothers Club, the: 129 Townshend, Charles, 2nd Viscount: Tracy, John: 196, 203 tragedy: blank verse in, 402–​404, 408 translation: 42, 184, 244, 494, 596–​ and British nationalism, 611 and faithfulness, 610–​611 and parody, 607

 

Index   791 by Anne Dacier, 489, 490, 610, 654 by Cowper, William, 610 by female poets, 602–​605 creative, 474–​475, 597, 606 Denham and, 599–​600, 602, 607 Dryden and, 598, 602, 604, 606–​610 elegance of, 613 free, 610 French neoclassical theory of, 607 gentility of, 597, 599 Johnson on, 613 mimetic, 596, 607, 610 of Corneille, 256 of Fontanelle, 604 of French poetry, 603 of Homer, 48–​49, 129, 159, 217, 417, 600–601, 609–​610, 696 of Juvenal, 48 of Horace, 42, 65, 98, 270–​271, 399, 416, 534, 608–​609 of Lucretius, 256, 602–​603 of Ovid, 602, 606, 611, 665 of Petrarch, 256 of Tasso, 256, 687 of Terence, 399 of the Thousand and One Nights, 611 of Virgil, 49, 133, 280, 386n1, 481, 599, 602–​ 603, 607, 609, 612–​613, 621 political orientations of, 600–​602, 605 Roscommon on 42, 272–​273, 607 superiority of translator over original author, 602 theories of, 605–​611 Tytler on, 610–​611 Trapp, Joseph: 189, 612, 623, 628, 644, 739–​740 Lectures on Poetry, 179, 181, 185, 190, 580, 621–​622, 628–​629 Trenchard, William. See Cato’s Letters. Trip through the Town, A: 502 triplets: 26, 31, 376, 383, 466, 535 tropes: 19, 289, 290, 299, 541, 589, 625n25, 626n27, 629–​630, 637 658, 669 and the classics, 112, 625–​626 as opposed to “True Wit,” 274 aural, 571, 576 faulty or absurd, 269, 625, 642 lost tropes, 619

political, 293–​294 visual, 725, 571 Trotter, Catherine (later Cockburn): 254 Trumpener, Katie: 492 Tuesday Society of Bath, the: 134 Tull, Jethro: 461 Turnbull, George: 210 Turner, James: 340–​341 Turner, F. McD. C.: 670 Tutchin, John: 306–​307, 498 typography: 41–​42, 279, 330, 675 Tyrwhitt, Thomas: 242–​243, 698 Tytler, Alexander Fraser, 610–​611 Tytler, William: 20, 552 Ulster weaver poets: 141 Underwood, Thomas: 722 Uphaus, Robert: 679 Useful and Entertaining Pieces of Poetry: 189 Utrecht, Treaty of: 47, 296, 312, 346–​347, 458 Valone, David A.: 310 Vanbrugh, Sir John: 291 Van der Gucht, Michael: 48 Van Gogh, Vincent: 327 Vaughan, Henry: 645 Vaumorière, Pierre Ortigue de: 674 venereal disease: 6–​7, 655–​656 Venuti, Lawrence: 599–​600 verse epistles: 131, 176, 584–​586 as political poetry, 288 Horatian, 280, 288 verse epistles. See epistles. verse paragraphs: 139, 184, 277, 279, 379, 381–382, 384–​385, 395, 398, 437 “Vicar of Bray, The,” 671 Vickers, Nancy J.: 201, 205 Vico, Giambattista: 641 Victor, Benjamin: 738 Vida, Marco Girolamo: 270, 653 Vieth, David: 679–​680 Virgil: 190, 224, 273, 281, 558, 581, 604, 633, 651, 703, 745 Aeneid, 48, 53, 276, 281, 309, 477–​478, 480–481, 485–​486, 599–​600, 607, 612, 622–​623, 654, 656–​658, 677, 724, 738 and Christianity, 477, 480

 

792   Index Virgil (Cont.) and obedience, 485, 489 as handbook for rulers, 477, 488, 490 and allegory, 480 and Augustan model of government, 488, 490 Eclogues, 477, 452, 657 Georgics, 457, 460 as visionary, 463–​464 Hesiod, influence of, 460–​465 progress, sense of in, 461–​463 imitations of, 271 parodies of, 488, 608 translations of, 49, 133, 280, 386n1, 481, 599, 602–​603, 607, 612–​613, 621 See also epic (Virgilian). Vision, The: 727–​728 vision, theories of: corpuscularity, 196, 201–​202 subjectivizing gaze, 196 intromission theory, 198–​201, 208 visionary poetics: 219, 222, 281–​283, 337, 454–​455, 511, 576, 590, 657, 660 Voltaire: 325 Von Sneidern, Maja-​Lisa: 31 Wagner, Richard: 419 Wakefield, Gilbert: 117, 666 Walcott, Derek: 470–​471 Wales: 304, 309, 351, 352–​353 and bardic claims, 316, 520 and independence, 144 and national identity, 316, 520 as site for pastorals, 444 invention of Druidic and Celtic Wales, 246 satirized, 145, 444 See also Dyer, John; Philips, John. Walker, John: 429–​430, 433–​435, 674 Wall, Cynthia: 86 Wallace, Sir William: 10–​11, 20 Waller, Edmund: 85, 96, 221, 255, 280, 289–​290, 603, 632, 644, 703–​704, 709–​710 Walpole, Horace: 49–​50, 61, 127, 166, 237, 245, 663, 707 Walpole, Robert: 50, 287, 297, 488, 507, 515, 672, 736 and Budgell, 236 covered up South Sea scandal, 297 the fall of, 298, 505

forgery of speeches of, 227 satirized, 213, 228, 279, 297–​298, 501, 672, 681 Walsh, Marcus: 687–​689, 691 Walsh, William: 129, 275–​276 Warburton, William: and Pope, 325–​326, 698 edition of Shakespeare, 691, 694–​695 Ward, Ned: 135, 498–​499 War of the Austrian Succession, 304, 314 War of the Spanish Succession, 295–​296, 312, 346–​347 Wars of the British Succession. See Civil Wars. Warton, Joseph: 61, 130, 179, 188, 190, 213n7, 217, 235, 244, 374, 399, 409, 413–​ 414, 416–​417, 519, 522, 524, 658, 698, 705, 740 and sensibility, 215, 399, 522 as editor of father’s Poems, 235, 519 as editor of Virgil, 612–​613 Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, xix, 215–​217, 398–​399, 417, 419, 579n3, 621, 698 Warton, Thomas (the Elder): 740 Poems on Several Occasions, 235, 243, 519 Warton, Thomas (the Younger): 61, 130, 213n7, 235, 243–​244, 416, 447–​448, 519, 590, 593, 658, 690, 698, 712 as editor of father’s Poems, 235, 243, 519 as editor of Milton, 690 as poet laureate, 705, 733, 737–​738, 740 as university laureate, 737–​738, 740 History of English Poetry, 420, 690, 698–​699, 701–​702, 705–​715 Wasserman, Earl: 340n25, 458 Watson, James: 15, 311 Choice Collection, 14–​15, 311 Watt, Ian: 296 Watteau, Jean-​Antoine: 442 Watts, Isaac: 172, 321, 384, 416, 563, 574, 588, 644 and affective poetics, 187, 570–​572 and biblical paraphrase, 570 and poetry of personal conversion, 572 Divine Songs, 90, 94–​95 Horae Lyricae, 187 Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 570 “Joy to the World,” 564, 570–​572 Logic, 617

 

Index   793 parodied, 95 praise for Elizabeth Rowe, 570 Psalms of David, 570 Watt, James: 331 Webb, Daniel: 430–​431 Webb, Foster: 65 Webster, John: 693–​694 Wedgwood, Josiah: 331 Weedon, Margaret: 113 Weekes, James Eyre: 166–​167 Weinbrot, Howard: 489, 596n2, 597, 602, 610, 613, 680, 694, 696–​697 Weinfield, Henry: 540 Wennington, William: 726 Weiss, Christian Felix: 89 Welsted, Leonard: 129, 147, 697 Wesley, Charles: 321, 415, 421, 572–​573, 576, 588 and poetry of personal conversion, 572 and divine sensibility, 573 Wesley, John: 322, 330, 566, 572–​573, 576, 588 and poetry of personal conversion, 572 on divine sensibility, 573 on faith sustained by poetry, 573 Wesley, Samuel: 485–​486 West, Jane: 260 West Indies: 147, 304, 314–​315, 447, 470, 551 Westminster Abbey: 377 Weston, Joseph: 66 Wheatley, Phillis: 169, 252 Whig: 17, 129 government founds Bank of England, 287–​288 history, 292 literary culture, 292 myth of enlightenment, 293 panegyric, 294 patriot writers, 294, 297–​298, 300, 312–​315 patrons, 292–​293, 324 writers believe human improvement possible, 329 Wharton, Anne: 254 Wharton, Thomas: 551 Whitehead, Paul: 155–​156, 286–​287, 501 Whitehead, William: 61, 521 as poet laureate, 733–​734, 737 Whitman, Walt: 422, 434, 436 Whyman, Susan: 96–​97

Wilberforce, William: 105–​106, 189, 258, 301, 318, 592, 673 Wilde, Oscar: 159 Wilkes, John: 11, 287, 300 Wilkins, John: 674, 677 Willard, Nedd: 214 Willey, Edward P.: 57 William III (king of England): 46, 306–​307, 309, 496–​497 anti-​Williamite perspective, 486, 498, 607 Williamite perspective, 292–​293, 498, 608, 738 See also William and Mary. William and Mary: 289, 292, 306 Williams, Anne: 581 Williams, Aubrey: 281 Williams, Charles Hanbury: 131 Williams, Edward: 246 Williams, Helen Maria: 72–​73, 86 Julia, a Novel: Interspersed with Some Poetical Pieces, 72, 82 “Ode to Peace,” 261 Williams, John. See Pasquin, Anthony. Williams, William Carlos: 436 Willis, William: 518 Wilson, Alexander: 174 Wilson, Anne: Teisa, 351 Wilson, Kathleen: 304 Wimsatt, W. K.: 37, 321 Winchilsea, Anne Finch, Countess of. See Finch, Ann. Winchester College: 330 Winn, James: 598 Winscom, Jane Cave. See Cave, Jane. Winstanley, William: 704 Winters, Yvor: 380 Wise, Joseph: 680 wit: 151–​ as a form of capital, 151–​152 as a component of artistic genius, 151 opposed to truth, 643 true wit, 274 vs. ignorance, 275 vs. “witwouds,” 279 Wither, George: 282 Withering, William: 331 Withers, Charles: 304

 

794   Index Wodhull, Michael: 526 Wolcot, John. See Pindar, Peter. Wollstonecraft, Mary: 103–​104, 506, 673 Wolseley, Sir Charles: 42 Wolsey, Thomas (Cardinal): 531 women and the professions: 250 women poets: adopt male voices, 248–​249, 255 against war, 258 and contested authorship, 251–​252 and domestic matters, 255–​258 and elegy, 263–​264 and epic verse, 257 and epistolary verse, 260–​ and male disgust for female body, 259 and sensibility, 250–​251 and the ode, 260–​261 as poetic translators, 256 as satirists, 258–​ biblical narratives by, 257, 291 on retirement, 257 poetic identities of, 250 publishing poetry, 149–​150 subscriptions for, 51, 133, 151, 301 write from subordinate position, 356 writing in other voices, 249, 356 Womersley, David: 293 Wood, Robert: Essay on the Original Genius and Writings of Homer, 215–​216, 491 Woodfall, Henry: 46, 51 Woodhouse, James: and Dodsley, 173 and patron Shenstone, 166–​167, 173 Woodmansee, Martha: 229 Wood, Marcus: 505, 507 Wood, Robert: 215–​216, 491 Wordsworth, William: 52, 73, 77, 223, 225, 285, 328, 302, 352–​353, 408, 420, 434, 442, 493, 522, 561, 708, 727, 734 and blank verse, 388, 402 and elegy, 544–​545 as poet of sensibility, 285 Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, 337–​338, 353 on affected poetic diction, xix, 73, 285, 302 preface to the Lyrical Ballads, 40, 52–​53, 73, 301–​302

revises and supplants Denham, 337–​338, 351, 353–​355 The Prelude, 223, 436 World Turn’d Upside Down, The: 89 Worsdale, James: 261 Woty, William: 61, 131, 723 Wright, Mehetabel: 365 Wright, Samuel: 518 Wycherly, William: 31, 33, 279–​280 Xenophon: 637 Yearsley, Ann: 51, 173, 252, 253, 299–​301, 398 and abolitionism, 288, 301 and patron More, 166, 300–​301 on sensibility, 251 Romantic passion of, 253 sensibility and social concerns of, 288 sought independence from patronage, 299 Yeats, William Butler: 284 Young, Edward: 82, 116, 118, 149–​150, 167, 177, 223, 294, 331, 383, 436, 529, 671 and blank verse, 364, 388–​389, 394, 401, 408, 429, 516 and the concept of genius, 211–​217, 222 as portrayed by Ireland, 222 denounces Pope’s rhymed Homer, 389 Complaint; or, Night Thoughts, The, 181, 188, 191, 219, 323, 389, 396 as funeral elegy, 529–​530, 539–​ as graveyard poetry, 330, 395 as meditative epic, 394 conditions of publication of, 46, 149 end-​stopped blank verse in, 394 theology of, 330, 395–​296 Conjectures on Original Composition, 151, 211, 217, 596 rejects direct moralizing in verse, 190 sale of copyrights, 149 Universal Passion, The, 149, 502 use of persona, 181, 191 York, James Stuart, Duke of (later James II): 276 Yost, Calvin D.: 56 zeugma: 376