- Donne began life as an
outsider, and in some respects remained one until death.
- He was born in London in 1572
into a devout Roman Catholic household.
- The family was prosperous,
but, as the poet later remarked, none had suffered more heavily for its
loyalty to the Catholic Church:
- “I have been ever kept awake
in a meditation of martyrdom.”
- Donne was distantly related
to the great Catholic humanist and martyr Sir Thomas More.
- John Donne’s poems abound with
startling images, some of them exalting and others grotesque.
- With his strange and playful
intelligence, expressed in puns, paradoxes, and the elaborately
sustained metaphors known as “conceits,” Donne has enthralled and
sometimes enraged readers from his day to our own.
- The tired clichés of love
poetry:
- cheeks like roses,
- hearts pierced by the arrows
of love
emerge
reinvigorated and radically transformed by his hand, demanding from the reader
an unprecedented level of mental alertness and engagement.
- Donne prided himself on his wit
and displayed it not only in his conceits but in his grasp of learned and
obscure discourses ranging from theology to alchemy, from cosmology to
law. Yet for all their ostentatious intellectuality, Donne’s poems never
give the impression of being academic exercises put into verse. Rather,
they are intense dramatic monologues in which the speaker’s ideas and
feelings seem to shift and evolve from one line to the next.
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- The poems that belong with
certainty to this period of his life (1590s)
- The five satires and most of
the elegies:
- reveal a man both fascinated
by and keenly critical of English society.
- Four of the satires:
- treat commonplace Elizabethan
topics—foppish and obsequious courtiers, bad poets, corrupt lawyers and
a corrupt court—but are unique both in their visceral revulsion and in
their intellectual excitement.
- Donne uses striking images of
pestilence, itchy lust, vomit, excrement, and pox:
- to create a unique satiric
world, busy, vibrant, and corrupt, in which his dramatic speakers have
only to step outside the door to be inundated by all the fools and
knaves in Christendom.
- Donne argues that honest
doubting search is better than the facile acceptance of any religious
tradition, epitomizing that point brilliantly in the image of Truth on a
high and craggy hill, very difficult to climb.
- What is certain is that
society’s values are of no help whatsoever to the individual seeker.
- In the love elegies Donne seems
intent on making up for his social powerlessness through witty
representations of mastery in the bedroom and of adventurous travel.
- In “Elegy 16”:
- he imagines his speaker
embarking on a journey “O’er the white Alps” and with mingled
tenderness and condescension argues down a naive mistress’s proposal to
accompany him.
- And in “Elegy 19,”:
- his fondling of a naked lover
becomes in a famous conceit the equivalent of exploration in America.
- Donne’s interest in satire and
elegy—classical Roman genres, which he helped introduce to English
verse—is itself significant.
- He wrote in English, but he
reached out to other traditions.
- If Donne’s conversion to the
Church of England promised him security, social acceptance, and the
possibility of a public career, that promise was soon to be cruelly
withdrawn.
- To win the approval of James I,
he penned Pseudo-Martyr (1610), defending the king’s
insistence that Catholics take the Oath of Allegiance.
- This set an irrevocable public
stamp on his renunciation of Catholicism, and Donne followed up with a
witty satire on the Jesuits, Ignatius His Conclave (1611).
- In the same period, he was
producing a steady stream of occasional poems for friends and patrons
such as:
- Somerset (the king’s
favorite),
- the Countess of Bedford,
- and Magdalen Herbert,
- and for small coteries of
courtiers and ladies.
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- Like most gentlemen of his era,
Donne saw poetry as a polite accomplishment rather than as a trade or
vocation, and in consequence he circulated his poems in manuscript but
left most of them uncollected and unpublished.
- In 1611 and 1612, however, he
published the first and second Anniversaries on the
death of the daughter of his patron Sir Robert Drury.
- For some years King James had
urged an ecclesiastical career on Donne, denying him any other means of
advancement.
- In 1615 Donne finally
consented, overcoming his sense of unworthiness and the pull of other
ambitions.
- Donne’s metaphorical style,
bold erudition, and dramatic wit established him as a great preacher in
an age that appreciated learned sermons powerfully delivered.
- As a distinguished clergyman in
the Church of England, Donne had traveled an immense distance from the
religion of his childhood and the adventurous life of his twenties.
- In his sermons and late poems,
we find the same brilliant and idiosyncratic mind at work, refashioning
his profane conceits to serve a new and higher purpose.
- In “Expostulation 19”:
- he praises God as the
greatest of literary stylists: “a figurative, a metaphorical God,”
imagining God as a conceit-maker like himself.
- In poems, meditations, and
sermons, Donne came increasingly to be engaged in anxious contemplation
of his own mortality.
- In “Hymn to God My God, in My
Sickness,”:
- Donne imagines himself spread
out on his deathbed like a map showing the route to the next world.
- Only a few days before his
death he preached “Death’s Duel,”:
- a terrifying analysis of all
life as a decline toward death and dissolution, which contemporaries
termed his own funeral sermon.
- On his deathbed, according to
his contemporary biographer Izaak Walton, Donne had a portrait made of
himself in his shroud and meditated on it daily.
- Meditations upon skulls as
emblems of mortality were common in the period, but nothing is more
characteristic of Donne than to find a way to meditate on his own skull.
- Given the shape of Donne’s
career, it is no surprise that his poems and prose works display an
astonishing variety of attitudes, viewpoints, and feelings on the great
subjects of love and religion.
- Yet this variety cannot be
fully explained in biographical terms.
- We do not know the time and
circumstances for most of Donne’s verses, but it is clear that many of
his finest religious poems predate his ordination, and it is possible
that he continued to add to the love poems known as his “songs and
sonnets” after he entered the church.
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- Donne’s Songs and
Sonnets
- have been the cornerstone of
his reputation almost since their publication in 1633.
- title associates them with
the popular miscellanies of love poems and sonnet sequences in the
Petrarchan tradition, but they directly challenge the popular
Petrarchan sonnet sequences of the 1590s.
- contains only one formal
sonnet, the “songs” are not notably lyrical, and Donne draws upon and
transforms a whole range of literary traditions concerned with love.
- Theological language abounds
in his love poetry, and daringly erotic images occur in his religious
verse.
- Like Petrarch,
- Donne can present himself as
the despairing lover of an unattainable lady (“The Funeral”);
like Ovid,
- he can be lighthearted, witty,
cynical, and frankly lustful (“The Flea,” “The Indifferent”);
like the
Neoplatonists,
- he espouses a theory of
transcendent love,
but he
breaks from them with his insistence in many poems on the union of physical and
spiritual love.
- Donne’s repeated insistence
that the private world of lovers is superior to the wider public world,
or that it somehow contains all of that world, or obliterates it, is
understandable in light of the many disappointments of his career.
- Yet this was also a poet who
threw himself headlong into life, love, and sexuality, and later into
the very visible public role of court and city preacher.
- Donne was long grouped with
Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, Marvell, Traherne, and Cowley under the
heading of “Metaphysical poets.”
- The expression was first
employed by critics like Samuel Johnson and William Hazlitt, who found
the intricate conceits and self-conscious learning of these poets
incompatible with poetic beauty and sincerity.
- Early in the twentieth
century, T. S. Eliot sought to restore their reputation, attributing to
them a unity of thought and feeling that had since their time been lost.
- There was, however, no formal
“school” of Metaphysical poetry, and the characteristics ascribed to it
by later critics pertain chiefly to Donne.
- Like Ben Jonson, John Donne had
a large influence on the succeeding generation, but he remains a
singularity.
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BEN
JONSON (1572 – 1637)
- Jonson’s early life was tough
and turbulent.
- The posthumous son of a London
clergyman, he was educated at Westminster School under the great
antiquarian scholar William Camden.
- There he developed his love of
classical learning, but lacking the resources to continue his education,
Jonson was forced to turn to his stepfather’s trade of bricklaying, a
life he “could not endure.”
- In 1616 Ben Jonson published
his Works, to the derision of those astounded to see
mere plays and poems collected under the same title the king gave to his
political treatises.
- Many of Jonson’s contemporaries
shied away from publication, either because,
- like Donne,
- they wrote for small coterie
audiences
or because,
- like Shakespeare,
- they wrote for theater
companies that preferred not to let go of the scripts.
- Jonson knew and admired both
Donne and Shakespeare and more than any Jacobean belonged to both of
their very different worlds, but in publishing his Works he
laid claim to an altogether higher literary status.
- If he was not the first
professional author in England, he was the first to invest that role with
dignity and respectability.
- His published Works, over
which he labored with painstaking care, testify to an extraordinary feat
of self-transformation.
- He was imprisoned in 1597 for
collaborating with Thomas Nashe on the scandalous play The Isle
of Dogs (now lost), and shortly after his release he killed one
of his fellow actors in a duel.
- Jonson escaped the gallows by
pleading benefit of clergy (a medieval privilege exempting felons who
could read Latin from the death penalty).
- Jonson’s fortunes improved with
the accession of James I, though not at once.
- In 1603 he was called before
the Privy Council to answer charges of “popery and treason” found in his
play Sejanus.
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- Little more than a year later
he was in jail again for his part in the play Eastward Ho, which
openly mocked the king’s Scots accent and propensity for selling
knighthoods.
- In 1605 he received the
commission to organize the Twelfth Night entertainment;
- The Masque of Blackness
- was the first of twenty-four
masques he would produce for the court, most of them in collaboration
with the architect and scene designer Inigo Jones.
- In the same years that he was
writing the masques he produced his greatest works for the public
theater. His first successful play,
- Every Man in His Humor (1598),
- had inaugurated the so-called
comedy of humors, which ridicules the eccentricities or passions of the
characters (thought to be caused by physiological imbalance).
He
capitalized on this success with the comedies
- Volpone (1606),
- Epicene (1609),
- The Alchemist (1610),
- and Bartholomew
Fair (1614).
- In 1605, when suspicion fell
upon him as a Catholic following the exposure of the Gunpowder Plot, he
showed his loyalty by agreeing to serve as a spy for the Privy Council.
- Five years later he would
return to the Church of England.
- Although he rose to a position
of eminent respectability, Jonson seems to have been possessed all his
life by a quarrelsome spirit.
- Much of his best work emerged
out of fierce tensions with collaborators and contemporaries.
- Jonson poured invective on the
theater audiences when they failed, in his view, to appreciate his plays.
- The failure of his play The
New Inn elicited his “Ode to Himself” (1629),
- a disgusted farewell to the
“loathed stage.”
Yet even
after a stroke in 1629 left him partially paralyzed and confined to his home,
Jonson continued to write for the stage, and was at work on a new play when he
died in 1637.
- In spite of his antagonistic
nature, Jonson had a great capacity for friendship.
- His friends included
Shakespeare, Donne, Francis Bacon, and John Selden.
- In later years he gathered
about himself a group of admiring younger men known as the “Sons of
Ben,”
- whose numbers included Robert
Herrick, Thomas Carew, and Sir John Suckling.
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- In “To Penshurst,” a
celebration of Robert Sidney’s country estate,
- Jonson offers an ideal image of
a social order in which a virtuous patriarchal governor offers ready
hospitality to guests of all stations, from poets to kings.
- “To Penshurst,” together with
Aemilia Lanyer’s “Description of Cookham,”
- inaugurated the small genre of
the “country-house poem” in England.
- Jonson tried his hand, usually
with success, at a wide range of poetic genres, including:
- epitaph and epigram,
- love and funeral elegy,
- verse satire and verse letter,
- song and ode.
- More often than not he looked
back to classical precedents.
- From the Roman poets Horace
and Martial:
- he derived not only generic
models but an ideal vision of the artist and society against which he
measured himself and the court he served.
- The classical values Jonson
most admired are enumerated in “Inviting a Friend to Supper,” which
- describes a dinner party
characterized by moderation, civility, graciousness, and pleasure that
delights without enslaving
- all contrasting sharply with
the excess and licentiousness that marked the banquets and
entertainments of imperial Rome and Stuart England.
- Jonson’s best works seethe with
an almost uncontrollable imaginative energy and lust for abundance.
- Even his profound classical
learning manifests this impulse.
- Years of hardship had taught
Jonson to seek his feasts in his imagination, and he could make the most
mundane object the basis for flights of high fancy.
- After James I and Queen Anne
ascended the English throne in 1603, they presided over the development
of the court masque as political entertainment, idealizing the Stuart
court as the embodiment of all perfections.
- Blackness established Jonson and Inigo Jones
as the chief makers of court masques for more than two decades.
- Jonson provided the words and
Jones the spectacle;
- over the years their rivalry
grew ever more intense.
- Blackness also began the tradition of
prodigiously expensive masques:
- the queen’s bills for it came
to around £5,000 (more than five hundred times what the young Jonson
would have made in a year as an apprentice bricklayer).
- These entertainments were
customarily followed by an elaborate feast and all-night dancing (the
revels).
- Court masques differed from
performances in the public theater in most respects.
- Essentially an elaborate dance
form, the masque was a multimedia event combining songs, speech, richly
ornamented costumes and masks, shifting scene panels depicting elaborate
architecture and landscapes, and intricate machines in which gods and
goddesses descended from the heavens.
- On the surface, Blackness asserts
the cultural superiority of the English over non-European peoples and
celebrates the patriarchal power of James, the “Sun King” of Britain, who
can turn black skin to white.
- In many later Jacobean masques,
the glorification of the monarch seems less conflicted.
- Jonson developed a kind of
prologue known as the antimasque, in which wicked, disruptive, or rustic
characters played by professional actors invade the court, only to be
banished by the aristocratic masquers whose dancing transforms the court
into a golden world.
- Caroline court masques, in
which Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria regularly danced, tended to be
longer, more elaborate, more dialogic, more spectacular, and even more
hyperbolic.
- But early to late, many
masques contain features that subtly resist the politics of Stuart
absolutism.
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JOHN
WEBSTER
(1580 –
1625)
- Webster was the son of a London
tailor and a member of the Merchant Tailors’ Company,
- John Webster’s fame rests on
two remarkable tragedies:
- Both set in Roman Catholic
Italy
- Both evoking the common
Jacobean stereotype of that land as a place of sophisticated corruption.
- Both have at their center bold
heroines who choose for themselves in love and refuse to submit to male
authority.
1.
The White Devil:
o first performed
in 1608, is based on events that took place in Italy in 1581-85;
o in this play
Victtoria Corombona defies a courtroom full of corrupt magistrates who convict
her of adultery and murder.
2.
The Duchess of Malfi:
o first performed in
1614 and published in 1623, is based on an Italian novella.
o In this play,
the spirited ruler of Malfi secretly marries her steward for love, defying her
brothers, a duke and a cardinal, who demand that she remain a widow.
§ Their dark
motives include:
§ greed for her
fortune,
§ overweening
pride in their noble blood,
§ and incestuous
desire.
- The play weds sublime poetry and
gothic horror in the devious machinations set in motion against the
duchess by her brothers’ melancholy spy Bosola, in the macabre mental and
physical torments to which they subject her, and in the final scenes in
which the stage is littered with the slaughtered bodies of all the
principal characters.
- He wrote a tragicomedy, The
Devil’s Law Case (1621), and collaborated on several plays with
contemporary playwrights:
- among them Thomas Dekker
in Westward Ho (1607)
- and John Marston in The
Malcontent (1604).
- Of all the Stuart dramatists,
- Webster is the one who comes
closest to Shakespeare in his power of tragic utterance and his flashes.
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SIR
FRANCIS BACON (1561 – 1626)
- As a literary figure Sir Francis
Bacon played a central role in the development of the English essay and
also inaugurated the genre of the scientific Utopia in his New
Atlantis (1627).
- But he was even more important
to the intellectual and cultural history of the earlier seventeenth
century for his treatises on reforming and promoting learning through
experiment and induction.
- His life span closely overlapped
that of Donne and Jonson, but unlike them he came from a noble family
close to the centers of government and power.
- During Elizabeth’s reign he
studied law and entered Parliament.
- It was under James I that his
political fortunes took off:
- he was knighted in 1603,
- became attorney general in
1613,
- lord chancellor (the highest
judicial post)
- and Baron Verulam in 1618,
- and Viscount St. Albans in
1621.
- That same year, however, he
was convicted on twenty-three counts of corruption and accepting bribes,
and was fined, imprisoned, and forced from office.
- Bacon admitted the truth of
the charges (though they were in part politically motivated), merely
observing that everyone took bribes and that bribery never influenced
his judgment.
- As an essayist Bacon stands at
almost the opposite pole from his great French predecessor:
- Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592),
- who proposed to learn about
humankind by an intensive analysis of his own body and mind and of his
sensations, emotions, attitudes, and ideas.
- Bacon’s essays:
- are on topics “Civil and
Moral.” Montaigne’s are:
- tentative in structure;
- witty, expansive, and
reflective in style;
- intimate, candid, and affable
in tone;
- and he speaks constantly in the
first person. By contrast, Bacon:
- adopts an aphoristic structure
and a curt, often disjunctive style, as well as a tone of cool
objectivity and weighty sententiousness;
- he seldom uses “I,” but instead
presents himself as a mouthpiece for society’s accumulated practical
wisdom.
- Early in his life Bacon
declared:
- “I have taken all knowledge to
be my province.” Whereas Donne, in the First Anniversary:
- saw human history as a process
of inevitable degeneration and decay, Bacon
- saw it as progressive and
believed that his new “scientific” method would lead humankind to a
better future.
- Bacon’s Novum
Organum (1620), written in Latin:
- urged induction—combining
empirical investigation with carefully limited and tested
generalizations—as the right method of investigating nature:
- the title challenged
Aristotle’s Organon, still the basis of
university education, with its heavy reliance on deduction.
- includes a trenchant analysis
of four lands of “Idols”:
- psychological dispositions and
intellectual habits that hold humankind back in its quest for truth and
cause it to cling obstinately to the past.
- Despite his emphasis on
experiment, Bacon generally ignored the major scientific discoveries of
his age, by:
- Galileo, Harvey, Gilbert and
others;
his true
role was as a herald of the modern age.
- Despite his critique of
rhetoric, he used the rich resources of figurative language—and of Utopian
fiction in The New Atlantis—to urge a new faith in experiment
and science.
- The thrust of his method was to
segregate theology and science as “two truths,” freeing science to go its
own way unhampered by the old dogmas and creeds and unrestrained by the
morality they supported.
- He is a primary creator of the
myth of science as a pathway to Utopia; late in the century the Royal
Society honored him as a prophet.
THOMAS
HOBBES
(1588 –
1679)
- The English civil war and its
aftermath raised fundamental questions about the nature and legitimacy of
state power.
- In 1651 Thomas Hobbes attempted
to answer those questions in his ambitious masterwork of political
philosophy, Leviathan.
- Hobbes grounded his political
vision upon a comprehensive philosophy of nature and knowledge. Hobbes
held that:
- everything in the universe is
composed only of matter;
- All knowledge is gained through
sensory impressions,
- which are nothing but matter
in motion.
- What we call the self is, for
Hobbes, simply a tissue of sensory impressions
- clear and immediate in the
presence of the objects that evoke them, vague and less vivid in their
absence.
- As a result,
- an iron determinism of cause
and effect governs everything in the universe, including human action.
- Hobbes argues:
- all humans are roughly equal
mentally and physically,
- they possess equal hopes of attaining
goods, as well as equal fears of danger from others.
- In the state of nature, before
the foundation of some sovereign power to keep them in awe:
- everyone is continually at war
with everyone else,
- and life, in Hobbes’s memorable
phrase, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
- To escape this ghastly strife,
humans covenant with one another to establish a sovereign government over
all of them.
- That sovereign power—which need
not be a king but is always indivisible— incorporates the wills and
individuality of them all, so that the people no longer have rights or
liberties apart from the sovereign’s will.
- The sovereign’s dominion over
his subjects extends to the right to pronounce on all matters of
religion.
- While other versions of covenant
theory, for instance Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates,
insisted that the power transferred by the people to the sovereign could
be limited or revoked, in Hobbes’s system, the founding political covenant
must be a permanent one, since no tyranny can be so evil as the state of
war that the sovereign power prevents.
- Hobbes’s philosophical
materialism led many to suspect him of atheism;
- after the Restoration, the
publication of many of his books, including a history of the civil war
entitled Behemoth, was prohibited for a number of years.
- Undeterred, Hobbes continued to
write on a variety of psychological, political, and mathematical topics,
completing a translation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey at
the age of eighty-six.
- Hobbes’s political theory did
not fit easily into the established patterns of English thought partly
because his perspective was essentially cosmopolitan.
- The most important prominent
philosophers for Hobbes were also Continental figures:
- The Italian Niccolo
Machiavelli,
- who saw human beings as
naturally competitive and power hungry,
- and Jean Bodin,
- a French theorist of
indivisible, absolute monarchy.
- One English writer who did
influence Hobbes profoundly was Francis Bacon, whose amanuensis Hobbes had
been in Bacon’s last years.
- Hobbes is truly Bacon’s heir,
sharing Bacon’s utter lack of sentimentality and a memorably astringent
prose style.
GEORGE
HERBERT (1593 – 1633)
- Herbert was educated at
Westminster School and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he
subsequently held a fellowship and wrote Latin poetry:
- elegies on the death of Prince
Henry (1612),
- witty epigrams,
- poems on Christ’s Passion and
death,
- and poems defending the rites
of the English church.
- Unlike the learned and witty
style of the work of his friend John Donne, George Herbert’s style in his
volume of religious poetry, The Temple, is deceptively
simple and graceful. But it is also marked by:
- self-irony,
- a remarkable intellectual and
emotional range,
- and a highly conscious artistry
that is evident in:
- the poems’ tight construction,
- exact diction,
- perfect control of tone,
- and enormously varied stanzaic
forms and rhythmic patterns.
- These poems reflect Herbert’s
struggle to define his relationship to God through biblical metaphors
invested with the tensions of relationships familiar in his own society:
- king and subject,
- lord and courtier,
- master and servant,
- father and child,
- bridegroom and bride,
- friends of unequal status.
- None of Herbert’s secular
English poems survives, so his reputation rests on this single volume,
published posthumously.
- The Temple contains
- a long prefatory poem, “The
ChurchPorch,”
- and a long concluding poem,
“Church Militant,”
- which together enclose a
collection of 177 short lyrics entitled The Church, among
which are sonnets, songs, hymns, laments, meditative poems, dialogue
poems, acrostic poems, emblematic poems, and more.
- Herbert’s own description of the
collection (The Temple) is apt:
- “a picture of the many
spiritual conflicts that have passed between God and my soul.
- The Temple
- became the major influence on
the religious lyric poets of the Caroline age:
- Henry Vaughan,
- Richard Crashaw,
- Thomas Traherne,
- and even Edward Taylor, the
American colonial poet.
- Herbert’s small book on the
duties of his new life,
- A Priest to the Temple;
- or, The Country Parson,
testifies to
the earnestness and joy, but also to the aristocratic uneasiness, with which he
embraced that role.
- Herbert locates himself in the
church through many poems that treat church liturgy, architecture, and
art. For example:
- “Church Monuments”
- and “The Windows”
but his
primary emphasis is always on the soul’s inner architecture.
- Unlike Donne’s poems, Herbert’s
poems do not voice anxious fears about his salvation or about his
desperate sins and helplessness;
- his anxieties center rather on
his relationship with Christ, most often represented as that of friend
with friend.
- Herbert struggles constantly
with the paradox that, as the works of a Christian poet, his poems ought
to give fit praise to God but cannot possibly do so—an issue explored in
“The Altar,” the two “Jordan” poems, “Easter,” “The Forerunners,” and many
more.
- His recourse is to develop a
biblical poetics that renounces conventional poetic styles— ”fiction and
false hair”—to depend instead on God’s “art” wrought in his own soul and
displayed in the language, metaphors, and symbolism of the Bible.
- He makes scant use of Donnean
learned imagery, but his scriptural allusions carry profound
significances.
- Shaped poems like:
- “The Altar”
- or “Easter Wings”
- present image and picture at
once; others, like:
- “The Windows,”
- resemble emblem commentary.
- Other poems allude to
typological symbolism,
- which reads persons and events
in the Old Testament as types or foreshadowing of Christ, the
fulfillment or antitype.
- Often, as in “The Bunch of
Grapes,” Herbert locates both type and antitype in the speaker’s soul.
HENRY
VAUGHAN (1621 – 1695)
- Born to a family with deep roots
in Wales, Henry Vaughan was educated at Oxford and the Inns of Court but
returned to his native county of Breconshire at the outbreak of the civil
war and spent the rest of his life there.
- He served as secretary to the
Welsh circuit courts until 1645;
- briefly fought for King Charles
at Chester, just over the border with England;
- and in his later years took up
the practice of medicine without much formal study.
- In a volume of verse published
in 1651, Olor Iscanus (The Swan of Usk), he drew
attention to his heritage by terming himself “the Silurist”:
- The Silures were an ancient
tribe from southeast Wales.
- Some features of Vaughan’s
poetry derive from the rich Welsh-language poetic tradition:
- the frequency of assonance,
consonance, and alliteration;
- the multiplication of
comparisons and similes (dyfalu);
- and the sensitivity to nature,
especially the countryside around the Usk River.
- Some of Vaughan’s poetry is
secular:
- Poems with the Tenth Satire of
Juvenal, Englished (1646),
- Olor Iscanus (1651),
- and a late-published collection
of earlier verse, Thalia Rediviva (1678).
- Vaughan’s modern reputation,
rests almost entirely on his religious poetry.
- In 1650 Vaughan published his
major collection of religious verse, Silex Scintillans
(The
Flashing Flint);
- it was republished in 1655
with a second book added.
- the title of the book is
explicated by the emblem of a flintlike heart struck by a bolt of
lightning from the hand of God.
- One unifying motif of the
poems in Silex Scintillans is pilgrimage, though the
arrival at the destination is typically deferred.
- A conversion experience may
have prompted Vaughan’s turn to religious themes:
- In the preface to Silex Scintillans:
- Vaughan places himself among
the many “pious converts” gained by George Herbert’s holy life and verse.
- While Vaughan’s secular poetry
recalls Ben Jonson’s, the religious poetry overtly and consciously models
itself on Herbert’s.
- Some twenty-six poems
appropriate their titles from The Temple,
- several owe their metrical form
to Herbert,
- and many begin by quoting one
of Herbert’s lines (compare Vaughan’s
“Unprofitableness”
with Herbert’s “The Flower”).
Yet no one
with an ear for poetry will mistake Vaughan’s long, loose poetic lines for
Herbert’s artful precision.
- Vaughan’s religious sensibility
too differs markedly from Herbert’s.
- Unable to locate himself in a
national Church of England, which was now dismantled by war, he wanders
unaccompanied through a landscape at once biblical, emblematic, and
contemporary, mourning lost innocence.
- Despite his restless solitude,
however, Vaughan finds vestiges of the divine everywhere. “I saw eternity
the other night,” he begins his most famous poem, “The World,” situating
the “ring of pure and endless light” in a specific, quotidian moment of
illumination.
- Eternity hovers tantalizingly
over the human world of strife, pain, and exploitation, apparently
entirely detached from that world but in fact accessible to God’s elect,
who soar from earthly shadows into the light.
- Vaughan’s twin brother, Thomas,
introduced him to Hermetic philosophy:
- an esoteric brand of
Neoplatonism that found occult correspondences between the visible world
of matter and the invisible world of spirits.
- The influence of this
philosophical system, so congenial to Vaughan’s sensibility, is most
apparent in the poem “Cock Crowing.”
ANDREW
MARVELL (1621 – 1678)
- The son of a Church of England
clergyman, Marvell grew up in Yorkshire, attended Trinity College,
Cambridge (perhaps deriving the persistent strain of Neoplatonism in his
poetry from the academics known as the Cambridge Platonists), ran off to
London, and converted to Roman Catholicism until his father put an end to
both ventures.
- Andrew Marvell’s finest poems
are second to none in the 17th century or any other period.
- He wrote less than Donne,
Johnson, and Herbert did, but his range was in some ways greater, as he
claimed both the private worlds of love and religion and the public
worlds of political and satiric poetry and prose.
- Marvell’s
- overriding concern with art,
- elegant, well-crafted, limpid
style,
- cool balance and reserve of
some poems
Yet,
- Marvell’s
- paradoxes and complexities of
tone,
- use of dramatic monologue,
- witty, dialectical arguments
- associate him with Donne.
Above all,
- Marvell
- is a supremely original poet,
- so complex and elusive that it
is often hard to know what he really thought about the subjects he
treated.
- While Marvell’s earliest poems
associate him with royalists, those after 1649 celebrate the Commonwealth
and Oliver Cromwell;
- although he is sometimes
ambivalent, Marvell recognizes divine providence in the political
changes.
- From 1650 to 1652 he lived at
Nunappleton as tutor to the twelve-year-old daughter of Thomas Fairfax,
who had given over his command of the parliamentary army to Cromwell
because he was unwilling to invade Scotland.
- In these years of retirement
and ease (1650-52):
- Marvell probably wrote most of
his love lyrics and pastorals as well as Upon Appleton
House, which:
- opposes the attractions of
various kinds of retirement to the duties of action and reformation.
- His (necessarily anonymous)
antiroyalist polemics of these years (1659-1678) include:
- several verse satires on
Charles II and his ministers,
- his best-known prose work:
- The Rehearsal
Transprosed (1672-73), which defends Puritan dissenters and denounces
censorship with verve and wit.
- He also wrote a brilliant poem
of criticism and interpretation on Milton’s Paradise Lost that
was prefixed to the second edition (1674).
- Many of Marvell’s poems explore
the human condition in terms of fundamental dichotomies that resist
resolution. For example:
- In religious or philosophical
poems like “The Coronet” or “The Dialogue Between the Soul and Body”:
- the conflict is between nature
and grace, or body and soul, or poetic creation and sacrifice.
- In love poems such as “The
Definition of Love” or “To His Coy Mistress”:
- it is often between flesh and
spirit, or physical sex and platonic love, or idealizing courtship and
the ravages of time.
- In pastorals like the Mower
poems and “The Garden,”:
- the opposition is between
nature and art, or the fallen and the Edenic state, or violent passion
and contentment.
- Marvell’s most subtle and
complex political poem, “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from
Ireland,”:
- sets stable traditional order
and ancient right against providential revolutionary change, and the
goods and costs of retirement and peace against those of action and war.
- Marvell experimented with style
and genre to striking effect.
- Many of his dramatic monologues
are voiced by named, naïve personas—the Mower, the Nymph—who stand at some
remove from the author.
- One of his most remarkable
figures—the phrase “To a green thought in a green shade,” from “The
Garden”—derives its power from the unanalyzable suggestiveness the poem
invests in the term “green.”
- “To His Coy Mistress,” perhaps
the best known of the century’s carpe diem poems:
- is voiced by a witty and urbane
speaker in balanced and artful couplets. But its rapid shifts from the
world of fantasy to the charnal house of reality raise questions as to whether
this is a clever seduction poem or a probing of existential angst, and
whether Marvell intends to endorse or critique this speaker’s view of
passion and sex.
- In Upon Appleton House
- Marvell transforms the static,
mythic features of Jonson’s country-house poem “To Penshurst “ to create
a poem of epic-like scope that incorporates history and the conflicts of
contemporary society.
- ‘s rich symbolism, biblical
events— Eden, the first temptation, the Fall, the wilderness experience
of the Israelites—find echoes in the experiences of the Fairfax family,
the speaker, the history of the English Reformation, and the wanton
destruction of the recent civil wars.
JOHN
MILTON (1608 – 1674)
- As a young man, John Milton
proclaimed himself the future author of a great English epic.
- He promised a poem devoted to
the glory of the nation, centering on the deeds of King Arthur or some
other ancient hero.
- When Milton finally published
his epic thirty years later, readers found instead a poem about the Fall
of Satan and humankind, set in Heaven, Hell, and the Garden of Eden, in
which traditional heroism is denigrated and England not once mentioned.
- In his poems and prose tracts
Milton often explores or alludes to crises in his own life:
- worries about fleeting time,
- the choice of a vocation and
early death,
- painful disappointment in
marriage,
- and the catastrophe of
blindness,
- manifesting in this the
heightened seventeenth-century concern with the self.
- No other major English poet has
been so deeply involved in the great questions and political crises of his
times.
- Milton’s works inscribe and help
construct some basic Western institutions, concepts, and attitudes that
were taking on modern form in his lifetime:
- companionate marriage,
- the new science and the new
astronomy,
- freedom of the press,
- religious liberty and toleration,
- republicanism, and more.
- When he signed himself, as he
often did, “John Milton, Englishman,”:
- he was presenting himself as
England’s prophetic bard, the spokesman for the nation as a whole even
when he found himself in a minority of one.
- No English poet before Milton
fashioned himself quite so self-consciously as an author.
- The young Milton deliberately
set out to follow the steps of the ideal poetic career— beginning with
pastoral (the mode prominent in several of his early English poems) and ending
with epic.
- His models for this progression
were Virgil and Spenser:
- he called the latter “a better
teacher than Scotus or Aquinas.”
- Milton resembles Spenser
especially in his constant use of myth and archetype and also in his
readiness to juxtapose biblical and classical stories.
- Milton is everywhere concerned
with the conventions of genre, yet he infused every genre he used with new
energy, transforming it for later practitioners.
- Milton’s:
- family was bourgeois, cultured,
and staunchly Protestant.
- father was a scrivener—a
combination of solicitor, investment adviser, and moneylender—as well as
an amateur composer with some reputation in musical circles.
- younger brother, Christopher,
practiced law.
- Milton was deeply grateful to
his father for his excellent early education, especially in languages:
- Latin, Greek, Hebrew and its
dialects, Italian, and French
- later he learned Spanish and
Dutch
- In 1625 Milton entered Christ’s
College, Cambridge.
- He was briefly suspended during
his freshman year over some dispute with his tutor, but he graduated in
1629 and was made Master of Arts three years later.
- Milton came to believe more and
more strongly that he was destined to serve his language, his country, and
his God as a poet.
- He began by writing occasional
poetry in Latin, the usual language for collegiate poets and for poets
who sought a European audience.
- Milton wrote some of the
century’s best Latin poems, but as early as 1628 he announced to a
university audience his determination to glorify England and the English
language in poetry.
- In his first major English poem
(at age twenty-one),
- the hymn “On the Morning of
Christ’s Nativity,”
- Milton already portrayed
himself as a prophetic bard.
- Two or three years later,
probably, Milton wrote the companion poems
- “L’Allegro”
- and “II Penseroso,”
- achieving a stylistic tour de
force by creating from the same meter (octosyllabic couplets) entirely
different sound qualities, rhythmic effects, and moods.
- These poems celebrate,
respectively, Mirth and Melancholy, defining them by their ancestry,
lifestyles, associates, landscapes, activities, music, and literature.
- In 1634, at the invitation of
his musician friend Henry Lawes, Milton wrote
- the masque called Comns,
- in which the villain is
portrayed as a refined, seductive, and dissolute Cavalier,
- and which challenges the
absolutist politics of court masques like Ben Jonson’s Masque of
Blackness or Thomas Carew’s Coelum Britannicum by
locating true virtue and good pleasure in the households of the country
aristocracy rather than at court.
- After university, as part of his
preparation for a poetic career, Milton undertook a six-year program of
self-directed reading in ancient and modern theology, philosophy, history,
science, politics, and literature.
- In 1638 Milton contributed the
pastoral elegy “Lycidas” to a Cambridge volume lamenting the untimely
death of a college contemporary.
- This greatest of English
funeral elegies:
- explores Milton’s deep
anxieties about poetry as a vocation,
- confronts the terrors of
mortality in language of astonishing resonance and power,
- and incorporates a furious
apocalyptic diatribe on the corrupt Church of England clergy.
- Milton could always maintain
friendships and family relationships across ideological divides.
- In 1645 his English and Latin
poems were published together in a two-part volume Poems of Mr.
John Milton
- From the outbreak of the Civil
War in 1642 until his death, Milton allied himself with the Puritan cause,
but his religious opinions developed throughout his life, from relative
orthodoxy in his youth to ever more heretical positions in his later
years.
- Some of Milton’s treatises were
prompted by personal concerns or crises.
- He interrupted his polemical
tract, The Reason of Church Government Urged Against
Prelaty (1642),
- to devote several pages to a
discussion of his poetic vocation and the great works he hoped to
produce in the future.
- Milton’s tracts about divorce,
which can hardly have seemed the most pressing of issues in the
strife-torn years 1643-45, were motivated by his personal experience of a
disastrous marriage.
- In 1649, just after Charles I
was executed, Milton published The Tenure of Kings and
Magistrates, which
- defends the revolution and the
regicide
- and was of considerable
importance in developing a “contract theory” of government based on the
inalienable sovereignty of the people
- a version of contract very
different from that of Thomas Hobbes.
- Milton suffered a series of
agonizing tragedies:
- Mary Powell (his wife) returned
to him in 1645 but died in childbirth in 1652, leaving four children; the
only son, John, died a few months later.
- That same year (1652) Milton
became totally blind.
- Milton married again in 1656,
apparently happily, but his new wife, Katherine Woodcock, was dead two
years later, along with their infant daughter.
- Katherine is probably the
subject of his sonnet “Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint,”
- a moving dream vision poignant
with the sense of loss—both of sight and of love.
- Milton had little time for
poetry in these years (1656 afterwards), but his few sonnets
revolutionized the genre,
- overlaying the Petrarchan
metrical structure with an urgent rhetorical voice and using the small
sonnet form, hitherto confined mainly to matters of love, for new and
grand subjects:
- praises of Cromwell and other
statesmen mixed with admonition and political advice;
- a prophetic denunciation
calling down God’s vengeance for Protestants massacred in Piedmont;
- and an emotion-filled account
of his continuing struggle to come to terms with his blindness as part
of God’s providence.
- Cromwell’s death in 1658 led to
mounting chaos and a growing belief that a restored Stuart monarchy was
inevitable.
- Milton held out against that
tide.
- His several tracts of 1659 - 60
developed radical arguments for
- broad toleration,
- church disestablishment,
- and republican government.
- The second edition of his Ready
and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth appeared in late
April 1660, scarcely two weeks before the Restoration, when the monarchy
was restored.
- For several months after that
event, Milton was in hiding, his life in danger.
- Milton lived out his last years
in reduced circumstances, plagued by ever more serious attacks of gout but
grateful for the domestic comforts provided by his third wife, Elizabeth
Minshull, whom he married in 1663 and who survived him.
- In such conditions,
- dismayed by the defeat of his
political and religious cause,
- totally blind and often ill,
- threatened by the horrific
plague of 1665 and the great fire of 1666,
- and entirely dependent on
amanuenses and friends to transcribe his dictation, he completed his
great epic poem.
- Paradise Lost (1667/74)
- radically reconceives the epic
genre and epic heroism, choosing as protagonists a domestic couple rather
than martial heroes and degrading the military glory celebrated in epic
tradition in favor of “the better fortitude / Of patience and heroic
martyrdom.”
- offers a sweeping imaginative
vision of Hell, Chaos, and Heaven;
- prelapsarian life in Eden;
- the power of the devil’s
political rhetoric;
- the psychology of Satan, Adam,
and Eve;
- and the high drama of the Fall
and its aftermath.
- In his final years, Milton
published works on grammar and logic chiefly written during his days as a
schoolmaster,
- a history of Britain (1670)
- from the earliest times to the
Norman Conquest,
- and a treatise (1673)
- urging toleration for Puritan
dissenters.
- Milton also continued work on
his Christian Doctrine,
- a Latin treatise that reveals
how far he had moved from the orthodoxies of his day.
- The work denies the Trinity
(making the Son and the Holy Spirit much inferior to God the Father),
- insists upon free will against
Calvinist predestination,
- and privileges the inspiration
of the Spirit even above the Scriptures and the Ten Commandments.
- Such radical and heterodox
positions could not be made public in his lifetime, certainly not in the
repressive conditions of the Restoration, and Milton’s Christian
Doctrine was subsequently lost to view for over 150 years.
- In 1671 Milton published two
poems that resonated with the harsh repression and the moral and political
challenges all Puritan dissenters faced after the Restoration.
1.
Paradise Regained,
§ a brief epic in
four books, treats Jesus’ Temptation in the Wilderness as an intellectual
struggle through which the hero comes to understand both himself and his
mission and through which he defeats Satan by renouncing the whole panoply of
false or faulty versions of the good life and of God’s kingdom.
2.
Samson Agonistes,
§ a classical
tragedy, is the more harrowing for the resemblances between its tragic hero and
its author. The deeply flawed, pain-wracked, blind, and defeated Samson
struggles, in dialogues with his visitors, to gain self-knowledge, discovering
at last a desperate way to triumph over his captors and offer his people a
chance to regain their freedom.
- In these last poems Milton
sought to educate his readers in moral and political wisdom and virtue.
- Only through such inner
transformation, Milton now firmly believed, would men and women come to
value—and so perhaps reclaim—the intellectual, religious, and political
freedom he so vigorously promoted in his prose and poetry.
