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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.

 

  •  
    •  
      •  
      • 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 centurynotably 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.

 

 

Poets & Writers 1

 

      • JOHN DONNE (1572 – 1631)
    • 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.

 

  • The Masque of Blackness

 

    • 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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The Early Seventeenth Century (1603 – 1660)

 

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 Organonstill 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;
      • spirit does not exist.
    • 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
      • align him with Johnson.

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.