Poets & Writers 2

 

• JOHN DRYDEN

(1631 – 1700)

• Dryden is the commanding literary figure of the last four decades of the seventeenth century.
• He is the least personal of the poets, a citizen of the world commenting publicly on matters of public concern.
• His first important poem, “Heroic stanzas” (1659), was written to commemorate the death of Cromwell.
• The next year, however, in “Astraea Redux,” Dryden joined his countrymen in celebrating the return of Charles II to his throne.
• His nondramatic poems are most typically occasional poems, which commemorate particular events of a public character. They are not written for the self but for the nation.
• Dryden’s principal achievements in this form are:
• The two poems on the king’s return and his coronation
• Annus Mirabilis (1667), which celebrates the English naval victory over the Dutch and the fortitude of people of London and the king during the Great Fire, both events of that “wonderful year,” 1666.
• The political poems
• The lines on the death of Oldham (1684)
• Odes such as “Alexander’s Feast.”
• His one great tragedy, All for Love (1677), in blank verse, adapts Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra to the unities of time, place and action.
• As his Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) shows, Dryden had studied the works of the great playwrights of Greece and Rome, of the English Renaissance, and of contemporary France, seeking sound theoretical principles on which to construct the new drama that the age demanded.
• Samuel Johnson called Dryden: “The father of English criticism.”
• A quarrel with playwright Thomas Shadwell prompted the mock-heroic episode “Mac Flecknoe”
• Out of the stresses occasioned by the Popish Plot (1678) and its political aftermath came his major political satires, Absalom and Achitophel (1681), and “The Medal” (1682), his final attack on the villain of Absalom and Achitophel, the earl of Shaftesbury.

 

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• In 1682 he published Religio Laici, a poem in which he examined the grounds of his religious faith and defended the middle way of the Anglican Church against the rationalism of Deism on the one hand and the authoritarianism of Rome on the other.
• From his new position as a Roman Catholic, Dryden wrote in 1687 The Hind and the Panther, in which a milk-white Hind (the Roman Church) and a spotted Panther (the Anglican Church) eloquently debate theology. The Hind has the better of the argument, but Dryden already knew that James’s policies were failing, and with them the Catholic cause in England.
• To earn a living, he resumed writing plays and turned to translations. In 1693 appeared his versions of Juvenal and Persius, with a long dedicatory epistle on satire; and in 1697, his greatest achievement in this mode, the works of Virgil.
• Two months before his death, came the Fables Ancient and Modern, prefaced by one of the finest of his critical essays and made up of translations from Ovid, Boccaccio, and Chaucer.
• Dryden’s foremost achievement was to bring the pleasures of literature to the ever-increasing reading public of Britain.
• Although Dryden’s plays went out of fashion, his poems did not.
• His satire inspired the most brilliant verse satirist of the next century, Alexander Pope, and the energy and variety of his metrics launched the long-standing vogue of heroic couplets.
• Augustan style is at its best in his poems: lively, dignified, precise, and always musical— a flexible instrument of public speech.

 

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• JOHN BUNYAN (1628-1688)
• John Bunyan is one of the most remarkable figures in seventeenth-century literature.
• The son of a poor Bedfordshire tinker (a maker and mender of metal pots), Bunyan received only meager schooling and then learned his father’s craft.
• Nothing in the circumstances of his early life could have suggested that he would become a writer known the world over.
• Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), his spiritual autobiography, records his transformation from a self-doubting sinner into an eloquent and fearless Baptist preacher.
• Preachers, both male and female, often even less educated than Bunyan, were common phenomena among the sects during the Commonwealth.
• They wished no ordination but the “call,” and they could dispense with learning because they abounded in inspiration, inner light, and the gifts conferred by the Holy Spirit.
• In November 1660, the Anglican Church began to persecute and silence the dissenting sects. Jails filled with unlicensed Nonconformist preachers, and Bunyan was one of the prisoners.
• It was during a second imprisonment, in 1675, when the Test Act was once again rigorously enforced against Nonconformists, that he wrote his greatest work,
• The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come (1678), revised and augmented in the third edition (1679).
• Bunyan was a prolific writer:
• part 2 of The Pilgrim’s Progress,
• dealing with the journey of Christian’s wife and children, appeared in 1684;
• The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, in 1680;
• The Holy War, in 1682.
• And these major works form only a small part of all his writings.

 

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• The Pilgrim’s Progress is the most popular allegory in English.
• Its basic metaphor—life is a journey—is simple and familiar;
• the objects that the pilgrim Christian meets are homely and commonplace:
• a quagmire, the highway, the bypaths and shortcuts through pleasant meadows, the inn, the steep hill, the town fair on market day, and the river that must be forded.
• Moreover, this is a tale of adventure.
• If the road that Christian travels is the King’s Highway, it is also a perilous path along which we encounter giants, wild beasts, hobgoblins, and the terrible Apollyon, “the angel of the bottomless pit,” whom Christian must fight.
• Bunyan keeps the tale firmly based on human experience, and his style, modeled on the prose of the English Bible, together with his concrete language and carefully observed details, enables even the simplest reader to share the experiences of the characters.
• The Pilgrim’s Progress is no longer a household book, but it survives in the phrases it gave to our language:
• “the slough of despond,”
• “the house beautiful,”
• “Mr. Worldly-Wiseman,” and “Vanity Fair.”
• And it lives again for anyone who reads beyond the first page.

 

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JOHN LOCKE

(1632-1704)

• John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
• is “a history-book,” according to Laurence Sterne, “of what passes in a man’s own mind.”
• Like Montaigne’s essays, it aims to explore the human mind in general by closely watching one particular mind.
• When Locke analyzed his ideas, the ways they were acquired and put together, he found they were clear when they were based on direct experience and adequate when they were clear.
• Usually, it appeared, problems occurred when basic ideas were blurred or confused or did not refer to anything determinate.
• Thus a critical analysis of the ideas in an individual mind could lead straight to a rule about adequate ideas in general and the sort of subject where adequate ideas were possible.
• On the basis of such a limitation, individuals might reach rational agreement with one another and so set up an area of natural law, within which a common rule of understanding was available.
• Locke’s new “way of ideas” strikes a humble, antidogmatic note, but readers quickly perceived its far-reaching implications.
• By basing knowledge on the ideas immediately “before the mind,” Locke comports with and helps codify the movement of his times away from the authority of traditions of medieval, scholastic philosophy.
• Locke indirectly accepts the Christian scriptures in the Essay in the midst of his famous critique of “enthusiasm,” the belief in private revelation, but his main impulse is to restrain rather than to encourage religious speculations.
• His fullest theological work, The Reasonableness of Christianity, 1695, argues that scriptural revelation is necessary for right-thinking people but not incompatible with ordinary reasonable beliefs gathered from personal experience and history.

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• Locke argues that a person’s sense of selfhood derives not from the “identity of soul” but rather from “consciousness of present and past actions”:
• I am myself now because I remember my past, not because a unique substance (“me”) underlies everything I experience.
• This account drew critical responses from numerous distinguished thinkers throughout the eighteenth century, notably Bishop Joseph Butler (1692-1752).
• Lock spent his life in thought.
• Lock’s background and connections were all with the Puritan movement, but he was disillusioned early with the enthusiastic moods and persecutions to which he found the Puritans prone.
• Having a small but steady private income, he became a student, chiefly at Oxford, learning enough medicine to act as a physician, holding an occasional appointive office, but never allowing any of these activities to limit his controlling passion:
• the urge to think.
• When times are turbulent, so much discretion is suspicious in itself, and Locke found it convenient to go abroad for several years during the 1680s.
• He lived quietly in Holland and pursued his thoughts.
• The Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 and the accession of William III brought him back to England and made possible the publication of the Essay, on which he had been working for many years.
• Its publication foreshadowed the coming age, not only in the positive ideas that the book advanced but in the quiet way it set aside as insoluble a range of problems about absolute authority and absolute assurance that had torn society apart earlier in the seventh century.

 

DANIEL DEFOE

(ca. 1660 – 1731)

• By birth, education, and occupations Daniel Defoe was a stranger to the sphere of refined tastes and classical learning that dominated polite literature during his lifetime.
• Middle class in his birth, Presbyterian in his religion, Defoe belonged among the hardy Nonconformist tradesfolk who, after the Restoration, slowly increased their wealth and toward the end of the seventeenth century began to achieve political importance.
• He began adult life as a small merchant and for a while prospered, but he was not overscrupulous in his dealings, and in 1692 he found himself bankrupt, with debts amounting to £17,000.
• Defoe’s restless mind was fertile in “projects,” both for himself and for the country, and his itch for politics made the role of passive observer impossible for him.
• An ardent Whig, Defoe first gained notoriety by political verses and pamphlets, and for one of them, “The Shortest Way with the Dissenters” (1702), in which he ironically defended Anglican oppression, he stood in the pillory three times and was sentenced to jail.
• It is characteristic of Defoe that, after the fall of the Tories in 1714, he went over to the triumphant Whigs and served them as loyally as he had their enemy.
• When he was nearly sixty, Defoe’s energy and inventiveness enabled him to break new ground, indeed to begin a new career.
• Robinson Crusoe, which appeared in 1719,
• is the first of a series of tales of adventure for which Defoe is now admired, but which brought him little esteem from the polite world, however much they gratified the less cultivated readers in the City or the servants’ hall.

 

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• In Robinson Crusoe and other tales that followed, Defoe was able to use all his greatest gifts:
• the ability to re-create a milieu vividly, through the cumulative effect of carefully observed, often petty details;
• a special skill in writing easygoing prose, the language of actual speech, which seems to reveal the consciousness of the first-person narrator;
• a wide knowledge of the society in which he lived, both the trading classes and the rogues who preyed on them;
• and an absorption in the spectacle of lonely human beings, whether Crusoe on his island or Moll Flanders in England and Virginia, somehow bending a stubborn and indifferent environment to their own ends of survival or profits.
• There is something of himself in all his protagonists:
• enormous vitality, humanity, and a scheming and sometimes sneaky ingenuity.
• In these fictitious autobiographies of adventurers or rogues:
• Captain Singleton (1720),
• Moll Flanders (1722),
• Colonel Jack (1722),
• and Roxana (1724)

Defoe spoke for and to the members of his own class. Like them, he was engrossed by property and success, and his way of writing made all he touched seem true.

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JONATHAN SWIFT (1667 – 1745)

• Jonathan Swift—a posthumous child—was born of English parents in Dublin.
• Through the generosity of an uncle he was educated at Kilkenny School and Trinity College, Dublin, but before he could fix on a career, the troubles that followed upon James II’s abdication and subsequent invasion of Ireland drove Swift along with other Anglo-Irish to England.
• Between 1689 and 1699 he was more or less continuously a member of the household of his kinsman Sir William Temple:
• an urbane, civilized man, a retired diplomat, and a friend of King William.
• About 1696-97 he wrote his powerful satires on corruptions in religion and learning, A
• Tale of a Tub and
• The Battle of the Books,
• which were published in 1704 and reached their final form only in the fifth edition of 1710.
• For the rest of his life, Swift devoted his talents to politics and religion—not clearly separated at the time—and most of his works in prose were written to further a specific cause.
• As a clergyman, a spirited controversialist, and a devoted supporter of the Anglican Church, Swift was hostile to all who seemed to threaten it:
• Deists, freethinkers, Roman Catholics, Nonconformists, or merely Whig politicians.
• Welcomed by the Tories, Swift became the most brilliant political journalist of the day, serving the government of Oxford and Bolingbroke as:
• editor of the party organ, the Examiner,
• and author of its most powerful articles as well as writing longer pamphlets in support of important policies, such as that favoring the Peace of Utrecht (1713).
• In Ireland, where he lived unwillingly, he became not only an efficient ecclesiastical administrator but also, in 1724, the leader of Irish resistance to English oppression.

 

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• Under the pseudonym “M. B. Drapier,” he published the famous series of public letters that aroused the country to refuse to accept £100,000 in new copper coins (minted in England by William Wood, who had obtained his patent through court corruption), which, it was feared, would further debase the coinage of the already poverty-stricken kingdom.
• Swift is still venerated in Ireland as a national hero.
• He earned the right to refer to himself in the epitaph that he wrote for his tomb as a vigorous defender of liberty.
• Swift’s last years were less happy.
• He had suffered most of his adult life from what we now recognize as Meniere’s disease, which affects the inner ear, causing dizziness, nausea, “and deafness.
• After 1739, when he was seventy-two years old, his infirmities cut him off from his duties as dean, and from then on his social life dwindled.
• In 1742 guardians were appointed to administer his affairs, and his last three years were spent in gloom and lethargy.
• But this dark ending should not put his earlier life, so full of energy and humor, into a shadow. The writer of the satires was a man in full control of great intellectual powers.
• Swift also had a gift for friendship.
• He was admired and loved by many of the distinguished men of his time. His friendships with:
• Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, John Arbuthnot, John Gay, Matthew Prior, Lord Oxford, and Lord Bolingbroke
• Swift was not, despite some of his writings, indifferent to women.
• Esther Johnson (Swift’s “Stella”) was the daughter of Temple’s steward, and when Swift first knew her, she was little more than a child.
• He educated her, formed her character, and came to love her as he was to love no other person.
• While working with the Tories in London, he wrote letters to her, later published as The Journal to Stella (1766), and they exchanged poems as well.
• Whether they were secretly married or never married—and in either case why—has been often debated.
• An enigmatic account of his relations with “Vanessa,” as he called Vanhomrigh, is given in his poem “Cadenus and Vanessa.”

 

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• For all his involvement in public affairs, Swift seems to stand apart from his contemporaries:
• a striking figure among the statesmen of the time, a writer who towered above others by reason of his imagination, mordant wit, and emotional intensity.
• He has been called a misanthrope, a hater of humanity, and Gulliver’s Travels has been considered an expression of savage misanthropy.
• Swift was stating not his hatred of his fellow creatures but his antagonism to the current optimistic view that human nature is essentially good.
• To the “philanthropic” flattery that sentimentalism and Deistic rationalism were paying to human nature, Swift opposed a more ancient view:
• that human nature is deeply and permanently flawed and that we can do nothing with or for the human race until we recognize its moral and intellectual limitations.
• In his epitaph Swift spoke of the “fierce indignation” that had torn his heart, an indignation that found superb expression in his greatest satires.
• It was provoked by the constant spectacle of creatures capable of reason, and therefore of reasonable conduct, steadfastly refusing to live up to their capabilities.
• Swift is a master of prose.
• He defined a good style as “proper words in proper places,” a more complex and difficult saying than at first appears.
• Clear, simple, concrete diction;
• uncomplicated syntax;
• and economy and conciseness of language mark all his writings.
• Swift’s style:
• shuns ornaments and singularity of all kinds,
• grows more tense and controlled the fiercer the indignation that it is called on to express.
• The virtues of his prose are those of his poetry, which shocks us with its hard look at the facts of life and the body.
• It is unpoetic poetry, devoid of, indeed as often as not mocking at, inspiration, romantic love, cosmetic beauty, easily assumed literary attitudes, and conventional poetic language.
• Like the prose, it is predominantly satiric in purpose, but not without its moments of comedy and lightheartedness, though most often written less to divert than to agitate the reader.