Renaissance Poetry

Cristina Malcomson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317899983
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book, the first single volume to collate essays about sixteenth and seventeenth century poetry, explores the remarkable changes that have occurred in the interpretation of English Renaissance poetry in the last twenty years. In the introduction Cristina Malcolmson argues that recent critical approaches have transformed traditional accounts of literary history by analysing the role of poetry in nationalism, the changing associations of poetry and class-status, and the rediscovered writings of women. The collection represents many of the critical methodologies which have contributed to these changes: new historicism, cultural materialism, feminism, and an historically informed psychoanalytic criticism. In particular, three diverse readings of Spenser's 'Bower of Bliss' canto illustrate the different approaches of formalist close-reading, new historicist analysis of cultural imperialism and feminist interpretations of the relation of gender and power. The further reading section categorizes recent work according to issues and critical approaches.

Part One

The Bower of Bliss: Formalism, New Historicism, Feminism

1 Mode in Narrative Poetry^*

PAUL J. ALPERS

Paul Alpers has been and continues to be a leading formalist critic. His book The Poetry of the Faerie Queen (1967) was an important example of reader-response criticism. This methodology broke with the exclusive textual emphasis of New Criticism by claiming that poetry was structured in order to influence the reader, not to achieve organic unity. Nevertheless, one of the central characteristics of New Criticism still remained: a close attention to poetic detail and pattern which marginalized biographical and historical issues. In this essay, Alpers develops an account of the term ‘mode’ in order to argue that literary works can be classified according to the kind of human abilities that the text attributes to its hero and its reader. The classic critical problem of the Bower of Bliss, in which the Knight of Temperance intemperately destroys the Bower, cannot be explained in terms of the Canto’s internal coherence, but in terms of the reader’s developing knowledge of the difficulties of exercising spiritual strength. Alpers’ essay maps out a pattern of ‘anticipating, enduring, and understanding a spiritual danger’ which illuminates the organization of the Canto. In his recent book What Is Pastoral? (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), Alpers argues that formalism continues to offer a legitimate and valuable approach to literature.

I

In this paper, I want to analyze the meaning and argue for the importance of the critical term ‘mode’. Critics resort to this term and use it in crucial places, because it uniquely fuses formal and thematic considerations. It is the term to use when we want to suggest that the ethos of a work informs its technique and that techniques imply an ethos. Hence one critic writes an article on The Augustan Mode in English Poetry’¹ – not the Augustan style or ethos. Another writes on The Comic Mode of Measure for Measure’² – not the comic style or form or structure or vision. When Helen Vendler, in her fine study of Wallace Stevens, wants to point out the difference between the so-called thought of a poem and the poem itself, she says, ‘Such a paraphrase of the poem does not reveal its mode.’³ Robert Garis uses ‘mode’ when he wants a single word to indicate the basic subject of his The Dickens Theatre – a book which concerns not style or characterization or dramaturgy or symbolism taken by themselves, but the human implications and dimensions of all these as they exist in whole novels.⁴

Clearly ‘mode’ is felt to be a powerful and comprehensive term. Yet, with one notable exception, there has been no theoretical discussion of it, and of the many writers who use it, hardly one defines it. The word does not appear in the Preminger-Warnke Dictionary of Poetry and Poetics. You will not find a definition of ‘mode’ in Josephine Miles’ Eras and Modes in English Poetry or in Angus Fletcher’s Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode or in Earl Miner’s two books on seventeenth-century poetry, The Metaphysical Mode and The Cavalier Mode. Indeed, what seems remarkable about the word is that it can be used reliably and with great resonance, even without prior definition. Hence the purpose of this paper is less to correct or modify the ad hoc uses of the term than to explain and justify them. As an epigraph in Richards’ Practical Criticism has it, ‘Let us get closer to the fire and see what we are saying.’

To begin, I want to put aside two uses of ‘mode’ that are related to, but not the same as, its use as a critical term. The first is the musical term ‘mode’, which in both Greek and Church music refers to a diatonic scale that is selected out of a larger set of possibilities. Each mode was supposed to have certain inherent characteristics which gave rise to certain predictable emotional effects in the listener: hence one writer defines ‘mode’ as an ‘ethically informed musical pattern’.⁵ This suggests interesting parallels with the critical term, but we must remember that they are simply parallels; no modern critic who uses ‘mode’ thinks of himself as adopting the musical term.

‘Mode’ as a critical term should also be distinguished from its very common use in such phrases as ‘modes of being’, ‘modes of understanding’, and ‘modes of imitation’. In such usages, the word never stands alone: it always occurs in the formula ‘mode of x’. Its grammar thus directly reflects its meaning: ‘a particular form, manner, or variety (of some quality, process, or condition)’ (OED). The quality, process, or condition of which the thing is a mode must always be specified.

By contrast, the critical term stands independently, and we must now ask what it means. Fortunately, the one treatment of the term is full of insight and suggestion. This is the first chapter of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, entitled ‘Historical Criticism: Theory of Modes’. Frye begins by saying:

In literary fictions the plot consists of somebody doing something. The somebody, if an individual, is the hero, and the something he does or fails to do is what he can do, or could have done, on the level of the postulates made about him by the author and the consequent expectations of the audience. Fictions, therefore, may be classified, not morally, but by the hero’s power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same.⁶

He then goes on to specify five modes – myth, romance, high mimetic (epic and tragedy), low mimetic (comedy and the novel), and ironic – according to the hero’s stature in relation to other men and to the environment of other men. Frye himself never tells us why he calls these categories ‘modes’. But we can find an explanation in Angus Fletcher’s wonderfully illuminating comment on Frye’s term. ‘The term “mode” is appropriate because in each of the five the hero is a protagonist with a given strength relative to his world, and as such each hero – whether mythic, romantic, high mimetic, low mimetic, or ironic – is a modulor for verbal architectonics; man is the measure, the modus of myth.’⁷

From Fletcher’s remark, I want to develop a more adequate definition of ‘mode’. But first, what is inadequate about Frye’s use of the term? Exactly what is inadequate about all his criticism, brilliant and enlivening though it is: he treats literature and literary works as closed systems. He therefore does not account for what is of the essence in ordinary and ad hoc uses of the term ‘mode’ – the sense of the way the mind grasps, assesses, contemplates, and relates itself to all the human and natural phenomena that the work in question presents. Frye of course recognizes that a literary work is the manifestation of a single intelligence and makes its appeal to another intelligence. ‘There can hardly be a work of literature,’ he says, ‘without some kind of relation implied or expressed, between its creator and its auditors.’⁸ But Frye’s account of this relation is very unsatisfactory. At one point he says, very suggestively, that ‘certain standards of normality common to author and reader are assumed.’⁹ But it turns out that he thinks this is true only in the low mimetic mode – that is, when the hero and world of the work are exactly like us and our world. In the other modes, he tends to give the poet the human stature of the hero and leaves the reader sitting in his armchair, still l’homme moyen sensuel.¹⁰ We can fit Shakespeare writing for the groundlings into this scheme of things, but not Milton writing for a ‘fit audience’. Frye never explores the sense in which any work implies its audience. It never occurs to him that his phrase about ‘certain standards of normality common to author and reader’ might be a general truth about mode.

‘Mode’ is so powerful and trustworthy a term because it suggests the presence of unifying attitudes and sensibility in and behind literary techniques and conventions. As a practical critic, Frye knows about this as well as anyone, but as a theoretician he cannot get it steadily in view. The weakness of his large theoretical structures is revealed by a single sentence: ‘As soon as the poet’s personality appears on the horizon, a relation with the reader is established which cuts across the story.’¹¹ Frye sets up an opposition between completely impersonal narrative and the appearance of the poet’s personality. He leaves no room for the figure who is so rightly, if boringly, familiar to us – the narrator who is the ‘I’ who tells the story, but who is not identical with the author in real life. By the same token, Frye treats the relation with the reader as ‘cutting across’ the story, which therefore is assumed to have an independent existence of its own, as if it were a real concatenation of events. Frye of course goes on to say that no work of literature is pure fiction, but the fact is that the sharp and naïve dichotomy suggested by this sentence becomes the basis of his largest theoretical division – that between fictional and thematic modes. The latter category includes all works, like didactic epics and lyric poems, in which the writer impresses his own world view, mind, or voice on the reader.

In Frye’s treatment of mode, plot and thought, Aristotle’s mythos and dianoia, are regarded as separate, antithetical, and ultimate categories. Along with them go the following pairs of opposites: Aristotle vs Longinus, objective vs subjective, catharsis vs response. These antithetical pairs are of the very essence of Frye’s writing and thinking. We do not stop to object as we read, because he is always moving from one to the other, playing them off against each other or intimating their harmonies. But his prose, for all its energy and subtlety, crystallizes out into fixed dichotomies. In this particular list of opposites, he has left a no-man’s-land between the terms in each pair, an uncharted territory between distance and absorption, between objective and subjective, in which lies a great deal of what interests us as critics and readers. Poetic narrative lies almost wholly in this unmapped territory; using Frye’s terms, we can only say that any poetic narrative will be some combination of fictional and thematic modes.¹² But if we transfer Frye’s definition of mode to the poet’s and reader’s relation to a work, I think we shall have a concept that is direct and unforced in application and powerful in implication.

The definition I have in mind is this: mode is the literary manifestation, in a given work, of the writer’s and the putative reader’s assumptions about man’s nature and situation. As a critical concept, this definition provides a question we should put to all works: what notions of man’s strength, possibilities, pleasures, dilemmas, etc., are manifested in the emphases, the devices, the organization, the pleasures, etc., of this work? We can now rephrase Fletcher’s remark in the following way: ‘The term “mode” is appropriate because the poet or reader is conceived as having a given strength relative to his world and the world of the poem; hence he is a modulor for verbal architectonics; man is the measure, the modus, of myth’ However, it would be very misleading to scrutinize a work and arrange its details in order to get a neat answer to the question, ‘What is the mode of this work?’ Rather, I think it much truer to say that when you engage in normal interpretation you will find that you have implicitly been engaged with this question. This would explain why ‘mode’ so often appears as a powerful summarizing term, but is almost never defined analytically, as if to be applied. I therefore want to explore the significance of the term by showing its relevance to two classical problems of interpretation in Renaissance poetry – Guyon’s destruction of the Bower of Bliss, in Book II of The Faerie Queene, and the internal monologue, in Book IX of Paradise Lost, in which Adam decides to join Eve in her fall.

II

Here is the stanza in which Guyon destroys the Bower of Bliss:

But all those pleasant bowres and Pallace braue,

Guyon broke downe, with rigour pittilesse;

Ne ought their goodly workmanship might saue

Them from the tempest of his wrathfulnesse,

But that their blisse he turn’d to balefulnesse:

Their groues he feld, their gardins did deface,

Their arbers spoyle, their Cabinets suppresse,

Their banket houses burne, their buildings race,

And of the fairest late, now made the fowlest place.¹³

Why is the problem this stanza presents a problem of mode? First and most obviously, because qualities of writing and experience are at issue, and it is for these that critics tend to invoke the word ‘mode’. The severity with which Spenser renders Guyon’s action is in sharp contrast to the seductiveness of the Bower itself. Critics who feel something has gone wrong here do so because they feel a sudden shift in the quality of the writing, a shift which they find unjustifiable in terms of the canto itself and unacceptable in its implicit views of human nature. Conversely, Guyon’s action could be justified by arguing, with C.S. Lewis, that the quality of experience in the Bower is consistently sterile and repugnant. Whatever view we take of the canto will be an argument about its mode – that is, to return to our definition, about the literary manifestations of the writer’s and reader’s assumptions about man’s nature and situation. And we shall see, I hope, how useful it is to approach questions of mode by the specific notion – which underlies the connection between modus as manner and modus as measure – of man’s strength relative to his world.

Not only Lewis but many of his opponents assume that in the Bower of Bliss Spenser could not have intended us to feel the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE: THE BOWER OF BLISS: FORMALISM, NEW HISTORICISM, FEMINISM
• PART TWO: POETRY AND THE EARLY MODERN SUBJECT
• PART THREE: SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY AND HISTORY
• Notes on Authors
• Further Reading
• Index