English Poetry of the Seventeenth Century

George Parfitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317896685
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Provides a comprehensive and entertaining account of the vitality and variety of achievement in seventeenth-century English poetry. Revised and up-dated throughout, Dr Parfitt has added new material on poets as varied as Marvell and Traherne. There is also a completely new chapter on women poets of the seventeenth century which considers the significant contributions of writers such as Katherine Philips and Margaret Cavendish. The proven quality and success of Dr Parfitt's survey makes this the essential companion for the teacher and student of seventeenth-century verse.

Chapter 1

The Lyric

The significance of Donne and Jonson

Sixteenth-century English lyric is usually now seen as a tale of two styles – the ‘courtly’ and the ‘plain’¹ – and such a view has its uses, provided we remember that the styles are not always readily distinguishable. Most sixteenth-century poets were capable of working in both veins, and Sidney is an example of a writer who often mixes styles. Although, perhaps mainly because of Spenser, it has been traditional to see the courtly manner as dominant, recent work has reminded us of the importance of plain style, particularly in the poetry of Wyatt, Raleigh, and Gascoigne.² It is also important to remember that although accounts of seventeenth-century lyric emphasize either the newness of the Donne manner, or regard his poetry as bringing the plain style to the fore, the courtly mode continues to be found deep in the seventeenth century. Campion, one of the most neglected lyric poets of talent in our culture, is usually seen as Elizabethan, but his books of ‘ayres’ are chronologically mainly Jacobean, while the inclination of critics to read seventeenth-century verse in the light of Donne and Jonson has obscured how strong is the influence of Sidney upon such poets as Thomas Carew.

For most readers of seventeenth-century lyric, however, the story nevertheless starts with Donne. He began his writing career before the end of the 1590s and his secular verse, at least at first glance, seems to mirror fashionable genres of the late Elizabethan period – epigram, verse satire, epistle, lyric. But his poetry shows little interest in sonnet, allegory, or Ovidian epyllion: Donne is the ‘new’ poet of the late sixteenth century, alert to Martial, Juvenal, and the Roman writers of erotic elegy.³ Being such a poet it is not surprising that his secular lyrics show a turning away from sonnet and, indeed, from the most common Elizabethan lyric forms. Remembering that many of Donne’s Songs and Sonets were written before Elizabeth’s death in 1603,⁴ his ‘novelty’ can be seen by comparing his forms, and treatment of forms, with the habits of the anthology England’s Helicon, which first appeared in 1600. Donne’s rejection of sonnet in his secular poetry, together with his neglect of stock Elizabethan lyric forms, has led critics to present him as a new voice in the history of English lyric, and so we have had Leavis’s famous remarks at the beginning of Revaluation and a Pelican Guide to English Literature volume called From Donne to Marvell.⁵ Provided we remember that this sort of clarity is fiction, a matter of emphasis rather than the whole truth, the break which is suggested can be a useful tool, and we can begin to look at Donne’s achievement in secular lyric by contrasting that achievement with sixteenth-century courtly lyric, while always remembering that there are clear anticipations of Donne’s achievement in the sixteenth century and equally clear continuations of the courtly manner in the seventeenth.

Courtly lyric is social, public poetry. All poetry, of course, is public in so far as it presupposes an audience, but courtly lyric is public in a more specific sense than this. It is public in using, in effect, a plural rather than a singular voice, participating in the codes of address and behaviour of the social unit which is the court. Such lyric may be written from within the court itself, by such as Sidney, or may be an imitation of courtly codes by a poet from outside court, but what matters is that the voice is that of a group. This group, made up of the Elizabethan court proper, together with aspirants and snobs, is not numerically large, but its importance is not numerical. Court centres on monarch and represents (at least officially) the social, cultural, and political aspirations of society at large. To participate in court, even vicariously, is to be part of an élite and this involves knowing the codes and rituals of that élite. This suggests a private world rather than a public one, and Elizabethan courtly poetry is never public in the sense of actually being the voice of the population at large (any more than the Elizabethan homilies can properly be construed as expressing the nation’s views about political obedience). But such lyric is public in two important ways, in voicing ‘official’ cultural values and aspirations (as defined by those with power and wealth) and in being accessible to any educated reader.

So Elizabethan courtly lyric, usually concerned with some aspect of love, works to fit the particular case (whether imagined or real) to the general or the ideal. Typically, Sidney’s sonnet ‘Queen Virtue’s court’⁶ presents Stella as absolute, in images which do not define her individual moral or physical nature, but which present her in terms of achieved ideals. This explains the famous conventions of language, attitude, and behaviour in the Elizabethan sonnet: the individual temperament and experience are valued in relation to the values and attitudes of courtly society. So we have generalization and the extreme. Spenser writes on the stock theme of his lady’s eyes by invoking the standard absolutes of sun and moon, diamond and crystal, and, at the other end of the emotional spectrum, defines her stock cruelty with the standard image of the ‘Tygre that with greedinesse/Hunts after bloud’.⁷ This is, however, a double process. It operates by placing the particular in the context of the general, as a way of elevating the subject, but simultaneously it is a device to make the subject accessible to everyone who understands the relevant codes, which are esoteric enough to exclude the unsophisticated but open enough to admit a sizeable body of initiates. Inclusion calls for such literacy in verse as to allow response to the poem’s patterning and to share in the field of ideas and beliefs which defines the lady’s social and ‘spiritual’ power. Even the fact that courtly lyric is so much focused on love is significant here, since it implies leisure to contemplate and enact love, and to codify and refine its aspects, moods, and manifestations.

Donne, however, is not so much courtly as Inns of Courtly and the world of his lyrics moves sharply away from that of Sidney and Spenser. His work is marked by extreme variations of rhythm, by its range of imagery, linguistic shock effects, and a general air of iconoclasm. In the Songs and Sonets the effect, when these poems are set beside Amoretti or Astrophel and Stella, is paradoxical, in that the élite world of court is both expanded and contracted, a point best made with reference to imagery.

Rosemond Tuve has pointed out that to contrast the range and handling of imagery in Donne with the courtly Elizabethans can be misleading.⁸ But whereas the courtly poets use imagery, from whatever source, to assert a high valuing of love, Donne uses imagery not only to sharpen the reader’s awareness of categories other than love but to call into question the possibility, durability, and value of love itself, and his way of doing this takes love beyond court.

We can see such expansion, for instance, in ‘The Canonization’. In stanza 2 it is argued that love does not have the influence often attributed to it:

Alas, alas, who’s injur’d by my love?

What merchants ships have my sighs drown’d?

Who saies my teares have overflow’d his ground?

When did my colds a forward spring remove?⁹

And although Donne goes on to argue love’s ‘mystery’, he is here, with typical concision, presenting love in the context of a harsh world of swamped merchant ships, perverted seasons, the plague, war, and litigation. It is the compression and linking of the images which create the sense of love in a context wider than that of court, rather than anything new in any of the individual images.

But there is also contraction here. In ‘Queen Virtue’s court’ Stella is the embodiment of virtue, the realization of the courtly ideal. She defines and comprehends that world. Earlier, the Wyatt of ‘Awake my lute’ and ‘They flee from me’ had seen the poet-figure as isolated from courtly fashion, but court remains focal even for Wyatt: you get exiled from it. In ‘The Canonization’ lovers are divorced from the wider world, making ‘A patterne’ by withdrawal. And although the divorce is not here specifically from the court, it is so on other occasions. Thus, in ‘The Anniversarie’, ‘our love [which] hath no decay’ is set against the aging world of ‘All Kings, and all their favorites,/All glory of honors, beauties, wits’, and in ‘Loves exchange’ the poet-figure is contrasted with ‘your fellowes’ ‘At Court’ who ‘Give th’art of Riming, Huntsmanship, or Play’.

Courtly worlds provide society and reassurance for a Sidney, and if for a Raleigh and a Wyatt they can be menacingly uncertain they are none the less central. Donne, however, has a greater sense of alternatives: court is one reference point but there are others. This may be partly for autobiographical reasons, since Donne was of a Catholic family and thus could not realistically aspire to court favour, but it is also, I think, because social and cultural alternatives are beginning to put pressure upon courtly exclusiveness. Donne is writing at a time of growing mercantile self-confidence, when the Inns of Court and the public theatres are expressing attitudes which challenge the authority of court (however obliquely) and when the House of Commons is beginning to develop independence from the control of court and monarch.

But if Donne’s way with lyric includes the confidence to turn away from courtly modes, it is important to add that such turning away includes a heightened stress on the individual. The confident reference to understood categories of form, image, and allusion which is characteristic of both courtly and plain-style lyric in the sixteenth century is replaced by Donne with a more urgent and individualistic note. Wit and esoteric reference define a coterie for Donne (the world of the Inns of Court), but there is always the danger that the wit and esotericism will work to exclude all but the very few. Donne’s lyrics contain both a tendency to isolation and a fear of this. The speed, frequency, and variety of his images suggest a compulsion to define and communicate which is something more internally urgent than the stylized pressures of the Elizabethan lyricist.

This urgency and individualism are manifest in several ways, but can usefully be seen in the context of sixteenth-century court lyric.

Although the sonnet is capable of great subtlety, it provides a basically predictable pattern, while Elizabethan lyric at large makes heavy use of a small number of forms. By contrast, Songs and Sonets offers a variety of forms and the unpredictable play of stress, this producing the impression that the formal properties of each lyric are unique to the particular experience. Even formally, the Elizabethan lyric tends to work by moving the particular experience towards the generalized mode of expression (and is in this sense public), whereas Donne’s treatment stresses the uniqueness of each experience. Moreover, Donne offers no sequence. Although Elizabethan sequences differ in narrative detail they all focus on a single lady and articulate a sustained relationship with her (Shakespeare’s sonnets being a partial exception). Songs and Sonets, however, is neither made up of sonnets nor has any discernible narrative basis, but is a projection of moods and incidents united only by the poetic personality and style of the writer. The sequences are based upon the notion of fidelity and the belief that love is a difficult but worthwhile activity. Donne calls such views into question. The focal mistress is replaced by an indeterminate number of shadowy figures and the focus itself becomes the poet-lover. Some of Donne’s finest lyrics stress the value of achieved love, but the urgency of the writing recreates the ten...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editors’ Preface
• Longman Literature in English Series
• Author’s Preface to the First Edition
• Author’s Preface to the Second Edition
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 The Lyric
• 2 The Poetry of Place
• 3 Poems of Occasion
• 4 Satire
• 5 The Epic
• 6 Poetry by Women
• Chronology
• General Bibliographies
• Individual Authors
• Index