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ENGLISH POETRY

ENGLISH POETRY

The main currents
from Chaucer to the present

by

DOUGLAS BUSH

NEW YORK

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1952

First Published in 1952

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAQE

INTRODUCTION VH

I. THE MIDDLE AGES 1

II. THE RENAISSANCE 21

III. THE AGE OF REASON AND SENSIBILITY 80

IV. ROMANTICISM 112
V. THE VICTORIAN AGE 153

VI. THE MODERN PERIOD 192

INDEX 219

INTRODUCTION

i N undertaking to survey the English poetry of six
hundred years, from Chaucer to the present, in sixty
thousand words, one could wish for the gift of suc-
cinctness displayed by Thomas Rymer 'Chaucer
refin'd our English. Which in perfection by Waller.'
England, or Great Britain, has been so rich in poetry
that a multitude of writers on the lower levels have
their measure of intrinsic value (not to mention those
of mainly historical importance), but this small book
must concentrate on the best. It does not, however,
attempt to survey even the best poetry with the
Comprehensive and even-handed justice of a text-
book, and it is not an aid for those whose minds are
anxiously divided between poetry and examinations.
It is in part an .historical sketch, in part _a remiiyier
tKat the geaj^jMK&Xj^^ a

reminder of the sources of refreshment, humorous
an^tragic, aesthetic ItnBrreligious, that have out-
lived man^crises in Fhe history of the race. Poetry
is tKe distillation of man's experience in society and
in solitude, of his joys and visions, his suffering and
despair, his wisdom and fortitude, his efforts to
grasp 'the burthen of the mystery'. It is because
poetry is all of these things that in every age some
people must write and read it, and that, while its
spirit is always changing with changing experience in
a changing world, great poetry nevertheless remains
always alive and always 'true'. IJoetry is also a fine
art, since the best-intentioned poem is dead unless it
is an aesthetic expression that evokes an aesthetic

vii

Vlll ENGLISH POETRY

response. In technique and language, as in spirit,
poetry renews its vitality through an inevitable and
endless process of convention and revolt. The
modern poet may recognize that Chaucer and
Shakespeare and Milton are greater than any poet of
recent times, but he could not possibly write in their
way, even if he 'had the mind'. For the reader,
however, there are no such barriers; all great poetry
is, or may be, his present possession.

In such an essay as this, many fundamental things
must be taken for granted or touched very briefly
changes in the physical and social conditions of life,
in religious, philosophical, and scientific beliefs and
doctrines, in the substance and structure of the
language, in conceptions of the nature of poetry, in
reactions to foreign literature and thought both
ancient and modern. Many books could be and have
been written on these subjects, and even in a small
survey it would be possible to let poets and their
works become only illustrations of this or that
mixture of forces, traditions, and influences. But
however important such external and internal
factors are, we shall here be concerned with the
individual poets ajid poems; as they_ are in J^hem-
' selves raTRSMbhan as products of their complex
backgrounds.

On the other hand, while there are nowadays
writers and readers who think that even the least
pretentious approach to poetry should be purely or
mainly aesthetic, formal, and technical, it is assumed
here that the primary motives of both poets and
their audience spring from their total sensibility and
total experience. So far as this book has a continuous
and unifying theme, it is that given by the poetry

INTRODUCTION IX

the varying impulsions of poets towards the actual
and the ideal, the temporal and the eternal. If such
terms are vague and elusive, differences between the
two poles might be further suggested by 'Aristo-
telian' and 'Platonic', 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian',
and of course 'classical' and 'romantic'. 1 Most of
the greater poets, while striving for wholeness and
order and unity, have been drawn in opposed
directions that is one reason for their being the
greater poets. The individual writer's vision of order
may mean acceptance of the world or denial of the
world, acceptance of nature or denial of nature, or,
most often, inner conflicts that demand resolution.
No doubt it is chiefly since the rise of science and
the decline of religion that such conflicts have been
most common and acute. In the medieval poqtSj
who have a fuller spiritual and artistic security,
v^e-se^not so much inner conflicts, but more or less
awareness of the ffulf between the actiml and t f hp.
ideal in a religious society^ We see also the strength
of poetic convention^ if not much revolt, an^tfie
strength of native tradition^ which can stand alone
(not that it itself is purely native) or can absorb
foreign influence and remain English.

1 In the history and criticism of English poetry, this last
pair of words (which are more modern than the phenomena
they are applied to) have had a more fluid significance than
they have on the Continent, and suggest not merely anti-
thesis but characteristically English continuity and com-
promise as Dr. B. Ifor Evans has shown at large in his
Tradition and Romanticism: Studies in English Poetry from
Chaucer to Yeats (1940).

Since a small book cannot carry notes or bibliography, grate-
ful acknowledgement may be made here of the help derived
from the writings of innumerable scholars and critics.

Professors B. .1. Whiting and H. E. Rollins have kindly
read parts of the proof.

CHAPTER I

THE MIDDLE AGES

FOR about two centuries after 1066, French was the
language of the upper classes in England, English
mainly the language of the lower; political conquest
was naturally attended by linguistic and cultural
conquest. But by the time of Chaucer's birth
English had displaced French, English literature had
established itself as against French and Latin
(though it was much indebted to both), and Chaucer
himself represented the emergence of individual
waiters from the forest of anonymity.

The special assimilation of French was not the
only large factor in the development of English.
The shift from an inflected to an uninflected speech
worked drastic changes upon its very fibre. The
extraordinary fluidity of Chaucer's verse is of course
due in part to the syllabic value of the final e (though
other poets who shared that common possession
seldom got the same results). In later times, while
some writers may have had an inkling of the truth,
Chaucer was commonly thought in Dryden's
words to have the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune;
his scansion was not really understood until the
middle of the nineteenth century. The poet whom
Spenser looked back to as a 'well of English un-
defyled' was fortunate also in that his language was
the dialect of the East Midlands and London which
became modern English. Thus his original text gives
little trouble to the uninstructed modern reader,
i l

2 ENGLISH POETJIY

whereas the best contemporary poems Pearl,
(which may be a richly symbolic elegy on 9, dead
child, though it has been interpreted in several other
ways), Gawain and the Green Knight (probably by the
same author), and the Vision of Piers Plowman
were products of the alliterative revival of the North
Midlands and are more or less difficult; so far as these
have been read, it has been mainly in modernized

versions

I Geoffrey Chauccr|( 1340/43-1 400) has remained the
unique poet of realistic acceptance and security; his
name is the very symbol of clear-eyed health and
sanity. He was^ to be sure, a good Catholic in the
age of faith; the ultimate questions had been settled
for him arid left him free to fix his ironic eye upon
the actualities of human nature and existence. Yet
if living in the age of faith were enough, there
would be no explanation for Wyclif and Langland,
and Chaucer's attitude towards life must be ascribed
largely to his own temperament and his background.
He was a man among men, an officer of the court and
a minor diplomat, a Comptroller of Customs and
Clerk of the King's Works, a justice of the peace and
a member of Parliament. He was at home in both
aristocratic and bourgeois worlds. And he was not
of course publishing books for the general public; he
wrote for himself and for the relatively small group
of people who shared his milieu and his tastes. We
could not expect him to have much sympathy with
'Jakke Straw and his meynee'.

In the fourteenth century it was impossible for a
cultivated poet to be insular. Chaucer learned his
art and drew much of his material from foreign
literature, ancient and modern. He was especially

THE MIDDLE AGES 3

attracted by the Romance of the Rose, which nourished
both his fondness for the dream-vision and his
satirical humour; by Boccaccio, who provided the
sources for Troilus and Criseyde and the Knights
Tale (Chaucer apparently did not know the De-
cameron); by Ovid, the supreme story-teller of the
Middle Ages and Renaissance; and by Boethius,
whose Consolation of Philosophy was an abiding
supplement to his Catholic faith. Chaucer read
and borrowed from a multitude of other authors,
major and minor, such as the French poets of his
own age, Petrarch, Dante (who might not have
recognized the professorial eagle of The House of
Fame), and Virgil, whose epic was for Chaucer as for
his fellows the story of the betrayal of the faithful
Dido. In short, he was a poet of cosmopolitan
culture who stood as a matter of course in the full
stream of the European tradition.

It is a commonplace though always a surprising
fact that, in the literary countries generally, the
subtleties of poetic technique have been mastered
earlier than the simplicities of prose, and one
example is the difference between Chaucer's un-
wieldy prose and his supple verse. He was a
sophisticated craftsman in numerous metrical and
stanzaic forms of lyrical and narrative poetry. The
octosyllabics of the House of Fame, the rhyme royal
of Troilus, and the pentameter couplets of most of
the Canterbury Tales were all adapted with flexible
ease to the varying demands of action, description,
and dialogue. Chaucer was apparently the inventor,
and one of the great masters, of what was to be later
known as the heroic couplet, though the name calls
up a clipped antithetical pattern far removed from

4 ENGLISH POETRY

his; Chaucer's couplets flow and ripple and eddy with
the informal artlessness of everyday speech. And
his style and diction have except where a higher
key is wanted a corresponding informality. ^The
reader is seldom made aware that Chaucer was, like
other poets, steeped in the 'colours of rhetoric' that
medieval scholars loved to formulate. Everyone
remembers how the unrhetorical franklin smilingly
pricked his own unwonted bubble of inflation:

For tKorisonte hath reft the sonnc his lyght,
This is as muche to seye as it was nyght!

In his colloquial style and movement, and in his
combining of ironic suggestion with concrete
precision, Chaucer is a very modern writer although
his staple texture is 'prose statement' and cannot
very well be analysed in terms of ambiguity,
paradox, and other modern shibboleths.

Narrative in verse has gone out of fashion nowa-
days, but it was before the advent of the novel
one of the principal genres. Chaucer possessed, in a
superlative degree, the gifts required for both the
short story and the novel and we might add the
drama, since Troilus and Criseyde is largely presented
in dramatic scenes and much of the comedy of the
Tales is dramatic. The story of Troilus, Criseyde, and
Diomede had been created and elaborated by a
succession of medieval writers, and it was in England
the main offshoot of the central romance of Troy.
Such a pseudo-classical tale, reflecting the life and
manners of the Middle Ages, was not a product of
'medieval nawetf\ it was in the tradition of modern-
izing begun *by Oiid, or indeed by Homer himself,
and often carried on in our own time. Chaucer's

THE MIDDLE AGES 5

insight into universal human feelings was not
dulled by a concern for archaeology. Nor was it
distorted by his accepting the conventions of courtly
love. Boccaccio's Filostrato, though it added the
author's personal experience to the traditional story,
was only an erotic romance. Chaucer deepened and
enriched character and motive and gave the romantic
plot new tensions and dimensions. In his poem
Troy is at once a scene of authentic everyday living
and a besieged city with whose fate that of the lovers
is bound up. The widowed Criseyde is a sober
gentlewoman who can realistically weigh the
attractions of independence and surrender, and in
the end she sinks to infidelity, not because she is a
wanton, but because her love is of the kind that
'cannot admit Absence'. Pandarus, now her elderly
uncle, is a humorous man of the world who is willing
to bring Troilus and Criseyde together; yet even he
is stricken by the consciousness of having betrayed
both his niece and his friend. The rules and motives
of courtly love gave Chaucer, not a tissue of artificial
"emotions, but a naturalism of sophisticated refine-
ment. The growth and power of such love which,
it was recognized, had its ennobling side he could
set forth with the imaginative sympathy of a great
artist, and yet, as the moving epilogue makes
explicit, with the ultimate judgment of a Christian
who recoils from the false and fleeting joys of the
world of passion. When Matthew Arnold found
Chaucer wanting in 'high seriousness', he must have
forgotten the poet's finest completed work.

The reader who neglects Troilus and identifies
Chaucer with the Canterbury Tales misses an
essential part of him. In the Tales, of course, his

6 ENGLISH POETRY

comic vision, already active in Troilus, has full
scope. And even the best of the tales are not better
than the descriptions of the dramatis personae in the
General Prologue. After the opening paragraph,
with its delicate and buoyant springtime freshness,
the material is the commonplace world of prose, but
the result is no less obviously poetry. The hetero-
geneous band of pilgrims are thoroughly representa-
tive of the fourteenth-century commonalty (no one
above the rank of a knight would join such a party),
and naturally include a large proportion of ecclesi-
astical figures, from the ease-loving monk and the
dainty prioress and the poor parson to such rascals
as the pardoner, the friar, and the summoner. And
the motive that brings together the genteel and the
uncouth, the devout and the irresponsible, casts an
ironic light upon all the comedy of the road. The
pilgrimage is a sanctified junket, but for many of the
pilgrims sanctity begins and ends at Canterbury.
Chaucer reports on good, average, and bad with
equal minuteness and gusto; they are all human
beings and all children of Mother Church. One
great stroke of originality was the fluid and dramatic
framework, all the business and talk of the journey
the astute and masterful generalship of Harry
Bailly, the quarrels of the drunken miller and the
reeve and the friar and the summoner, the candid
disclosures of domestic tribulations and triumphs.
Some of Chaucer's comic characters, like some of
Shakespeare's and Dickens's, are conscious humorists
who dramatize themselves.

Apart from alleyory, the tales represent about all
the major and minor medieval genres: romance in
several varieties, including the squire's half-told tale

THE MIDDLE AGES 7

that attracted Spenser and Milton, and also the mock-
heroic piece that Chaucer himself recites until
stopped by the host; several fabliaux, those comic
bourgeois tales which are broader than they are
long, and among which the miller's is a masterpiece
of construction and vivid detail; the miracle of the
Virgin; the saint's legend; the sermon excrnplum, in
the macabre talc of the pardoner and the tale of that
lay preacher, the wife of Bath; the beast-fable, in
the tale of the cock and the fox; and so on. Some
stories of unmitigated patience and pathos, and two
large chunks of edification in prose, were evidently
more or less relished by the pilgrims and by the
author, who at such times seems less close to us than
he usually is.

We may wonder also how a poet who could write
the wife's prologue, or the tale of January and May
and the other fabliaux, could treat love in the purely
romantic vein of the knight's or the franklin's tale.
But whereas the modern poet is normally committed
to writing with his whole being, the medieval (or
Renaissance) poet could enjoy himself, or parts of
himself, on quite different planes, without letting
his right hand be cramped by what his left hand did.
Whether this habit of mind implies a dissociated
or a unified sensibility, the masters of the subtle
schools of criticism may determine:' But we might
say that Chaucer's varied instincts, for romantic
idealism and bawdy humour, for pathos and satire,
are all made possible, and are unified, by a secure
religious creed. He can look at his human creations
just as God made them/ %

The serious tales, and the chosen modes of treat-
ment, seldom bring into play the psychological

8 ENGLISH POETRY

tensions and ironic complexities of Troilus. The
pardoner's soul has sometimes been made the scene
of anguished conflict, but the simple truth would
seem to be that he has to go through his professional
act and also has to be shown up as a scoundrel, and
that Chaucer, like Elizabethan dramatists, puts the
exposure, without worrying about consistency, into
the character's own mouth. If comedy anywhere
rises into tragic irony, it is in the wife's prologue.
She is not a mere female Sweeney. With all her animal
grossness, she has her inward twinges, of a sort:

Lord Crist! whan that it remembreth me
Upon my yowthe, and on my jolitee,
It tikleth me aboute myn herte rootc.
Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote
That I have had my world as in my tyme.
But age, alias! that al wol envenyme,
Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith.
Lot go, farewell the devel go therwith! . . .

Alias! alias! that evere love was synne!

The wife's self-revelation is both fuller and briefer
than Mrs. Bloom's and no one would try to elevate
her into an Earth Goddess.

There is really no accounting for Chaucer, for his
compassionate and humorous irony, for the casual
ease and deftness of his poetic art. If he had not
existed, it would not have been necessary to invent
him; we should have accepted his friend the worthy
John Gower as the natural and logical poet of the
later fourteenth century.

Chaucer's satire on ecclesiastical figures and
abuses, lively as it was, did not go beyond what

THE MIDDLE AGES 9

might come from any loyal son of the church; it was
only when the parson rebuked him for swearing that
Harry Bailly smelled a Lollard in the wind. But the
Vision of Piers Plowman (1862-87?) was a work of
bitter protest and earnest exhortation. The dream-
allegory, the frame of so many medieval poems, is
not here put to Chaucer's fanciful and decorative
uses, but is, in its homespun way, Dantesque. Nor
does the clerical William Langland (whether he was
one man or several) survey the field full of folk with
the eager, objective curiosity of Chaucer at the
Tabard Inn or on the Canterbury road ." 'Langland
is a seeker of Christ and salvation, a crusader and
prophet, whose vision of Truth and Love, of what a
Christian England might be, rises out of his harsh
recognition of sin among high and low, secular and
religious. % He is an early Bunyan, intent on describ-
ing what he sees, the world of Vanity Fair, and
on persuading his readers to gain a better world,
here and hereafter. To quote Christopher Dawson
(Religion and the Rise of Western Culture):

V /

t *Langland's poem is the last and in some respects
the most uncompromising expression of the
medieval ideal of the unity of religion and culture,/'
He realized more clearly than the poets and more
intensely than the philosophers that religion was
not a particular way of life but the way of all life,
and that the divine love which is "the leader of
the Lord's folk of heaven" is also the law of life
upon earth.'

The Vision is a work of art, in design and in details,
and it contains passages of a kind quite beyond

10 ENGLISH POETRY

Chaucer's reach; yet it remains, for most of us, a
sombre signpost rather than a poetic possession.
That is partly our fault; but it is partly because
Langland's imaginative, structural, and stylistic
powers are not often enough fused to make poetry
equal to his theme.

While Langland and Chaucer may stand as
exemplars, respectively, of native tradition and
foreign influence, they may also be described if we
adjust our sights as both English and both
European. The same double label must be attached
to the large body of romances, ballads, and religious
lyrics. Arthurian romance, 'the matter of Britain',
was one of the three medieval divisions of European
fiction. Chaucer, whose tales in general were so
typical of medieval taste, used Arthurian romance
only once, and then incidentally, in his version of the
widespread story of 'the loathly lady'. The cruder
romances we take on trust, through Sir Thopas,
but the early tales of such English heroes as Guy of
Warwick and Bevis of Hampton remained popular
for centuries among the unsophisticated. The
sophisticated romance, the diversion of hall and
bower rather than ale-house, has its best representa-
tives in Chaucer's Knight's Tale and in Gawain and
the Green Knight. The latter is by far the finest
English piece of Arthurian romance. It rises above
the type in its skilful plot and dialogue and general
artistic power, in its vivid hunting scenes and its
pictures of nature both benign and wintry, and in its
special mixture of chivalric idealism and innocuous
diablerie. But for^is the other romances of Arthur's
knights and ladies live in the prose of Malory and
some of the modern poems based on him, and we

THE MIDDLE AGES 11

cannot linger with a shelf of verse that enjoys only
the life-in-death of scholarly regard.

To turn to what really lives, there is the body of
lyrical poetry, secular and religious, and the great
fact about most of these poems is that they were
lyrics, that they were sung and composed for sing-
ing. We must neglect miscellaneous secular lyrics,
such as the early and famous Alison, for the more
distinctive English and Scottish ballads, which came
into being especially in the fifteenth century, though
there were some earlier and many later ones. A
popular ballad may be roughly defined as a short
poem that tells or implies a story, commonly of one
episode, and that was sung or recited. The English
and Scottish ballads followed the kind of conventions
usually found in popular poetry. The familiar and
largely typical Sir Patrick Spens illustrates the so-
called ballad metre; there were, however, other
metrical patterns, and many ballads had a refrain.
The poem illustrates also the chief characteristics of
the ballad manner: impersonal and dramatic objec-
tivity; the abrupt alternation of narrative and speech;
parallelism of structure, often with incremental
repetition; the use of stock phrases and epithets; a
stark simplicity of both imagination and style,
effective alike for concrete realism and romantic
glamour, tragic passion and tragic action, for
humour and a pathos rarely softened by senti-
mentality. But the story of Sir Patrick Spens is not
typical of ballad themes. A very large proportion
deal with innocent or illicit love, and the ending is
perhaps more commonly fatal Jthan happy. The
situations may be those of our newspaper scandals
and crimes, but, thanks to style, setting, and

12 ENGLISH POETRY

atmosphere, vice loses half its evil by losing all its
grossness though discovery may lead to brutal
punishment. At least one lover is likely to be of
gentle birth and both may be; and sometimes a mortal
is loved by a fay. Other ballads, like the grim Edward,
tell of personal enmities or family feuds. Then
there are the martial and heroic ballads that have to
do with Border warfare, legitimate or illegitimate.
We may not care to remember that some of the
Border heroes were the gangsters of their day, but
the ballads celebrate individual courage and prowess
like that of Johnie Armstrong:

Saying, Fight on, my merry men all,
And see that none of you be taine;
For I will stand by and bleed but awhile,
And then will I come and fight againe.

Beyond other ballad heroes, Robin Hood, the
great-hearted friend of the poor, the foe of tyrannous
nobles, sheriffs, and oppressive authority, had all the
elements of popular appeal; and the doings of him
and his men in the merry greenwood formed a
miniature epic of high-spirited adventure, boisterous
comedy, and proletarian sympathy.*

The ballads are the mirror of tne English and
Scottish heroic age, Homeric lays that no Homer
came to elevate and unify. They constitute a body
of poetry that is at once realistic and idealized,
savage and sophisticated. Though the outlaw Robin
Hood felt his religious obligations, the ballads in
general, apart from those on religious themes,
contain few conspicuous signs of having been
composed in a Christian land. Heaven and hell,

THE MIDDLE AGES 13

God and Mary and the Saviour, may be appealed
to in moments of stress, and the church exists,
mainly as a place for burial, but the prevailing moral
code is more barbaric than Christian. The sword is
ready to every man's hand and violence and death
are an everyday affair. Love, whether adulterous or
simply lacking the marriage bond, is for lovers its
own justification; and though by husbands and
brothers it may be seen as a crime against family
honour, it is not held up as a sin.

At the other end of the spectrum is the world of
simple and pure devotion reflected in the religious
lyrics. Heaven and Christ and His Mother lose none
of their bright beauty in being brought very close
to earth and man. Many lyrics are of course cele-
brations of Christmas and show all the medieval
Instinct for the human elements of the Nativity.
Two of the most familiar lyrics illustrate the range of
treatment. There is the naivete of adoration so
abundantly poured out before the Virgin:

/ sing of a maiden

That is makeles;
King of all kings

To her son she ches. . . .

Mother and maiden

Was never none but she;

Well may such a lady
Goddes mother be.

In the more complex and dramatic Quia amore
langueo, Christ's love for the soul of man is rendered
in terms of human relations and secular love poetry,
and these contrasts involve the further contrasts

14 ENGLISH POETRY

between his divine love and power and his human
suffering:

My fair love and my spouse bright!
I saved her from beating, and she hath me bet;
I clothed her in grace and heavenly light;
This bloody shirt she hath on me set. . . .

This is the kind of paradox that in a later age we call
baroque (and we think of George Herbert when
Christ says, 'Fair love, let us go dine'). Popular
ballads are still composed in modern times, but the
medieval religious lyrics are inimitable survivals of a
long-vanished world. In them, as in primitive
paintings or the best of the mystery plays, the divine
story is concrete and natural, human and tender,
and transparent purity of style is born of reverent
purity of emotion.

Though medieval strains of thought and feeling
were to flow on into the seventeenth century, the
last full flowering of medievalism was in the Scottish
Chaucerians. The best of them , jRo bert ^Henr^son
(c. 1425-c. 1506) and JWilli^ 1460-

c. 1520), make real claims upon us; so too does
Gavin Douglas's translation of the Aeneid (1513;
printed 1553). They have suffered, however, as
even Burns has, because of the language that is part
of their strength; glossaries are non-conductors of
vitality and flavour. Both Henryson and Dunbar
bring artistic and emotional originality and force to
old traditions. Henryson's Robene and Makyne,
which blends the Charming artifice of the pastourelle
with the homely realities of Scottish life and char-
acter, has a more authentic ring than its English

THE MIDDLE AGES 15

counterpart, The Nut-Brown Maid, which is also
charming but rather too smooth and elegant.
Henryson's Aesopic fables, notably the Horatian
Tale of the Uplandish Mouse and the Burgess Mouse,
show the lively and ironical mixture of human and
animal worlds that we know best from Chaucer.
But it was in the tragic irony of his sequel to Chaucer,
The Testament of Cresseid, that Henrysoii reached
his highest level. No one can forget the conclusion,
the picture of the leprous Cresseid, a beggar at the
town's end, receiving lavish alms from Troilus as he
rides by and is stirred by her disfigured face to a
sudden vision of his old love. Here the poet's
compassionate imagination transcends his moral
judgment.

The courtier Dunbar is less homely than Henryson,
and more diversified, more fantastic, and as in the
piece on the two married women and the widow
more scurrilous. The Ballad of Kind Kittok, whether
it is Dunbar's or not, displays that medieval humour
which familarly embraces heaven as well as earth.
In The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins the ancient
religious theme is quickly submerged in earthly and
earthy realism. Above all, there is the Lament for the
Makers, the great British parallel to Villon's Ballade
of Old-Time Ladies. The names of Dunbar's Scottish
poets are mostly as unfamiliar as FitzGerald's
Jamshyd and Bahrain, but the brief allusions call
up full-blooded men, and the names themselves
are poetry. Then the tolling bell of the refrain,
Timor mortis conturbat me, combines suggestions of
universal destiny and universal ritual with a personal

Skeltonjc. 1460-1529) brings us through the

16 ENGLISH POETRY

first quarter of the sixteenth century, but in spirit
and manner he belongs, with all his original force,
rather to the Middle Ages than to the Renaissance.
He was an almost exact contemporary of Dunbar,
and a world away from his younger English contem-
porary, Sir Thomas Wyatt. He was a transitional
mixture, not so much of the old and the new as of the
old and himself. He celebrated the stock trinity,
Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, but, though many
writers lumped them together or put Lydgate first,
Skelton's warmest praise was given to Chaucer.
While he largely broke away from courtly stereotypes
and aureate language, his subjects and attitudes and
tone were more or less medieval. His favourite metre,
the tumbling, breathless short line that is identified
with him, has been traced to medieval Latin verse
and prose. His uncritical literary learning, poured out
in appropriate or inappropriate places, was that of a
late medieval Latinist, not of a new humanist and
Grecian. Skelton's leaping allusiveness and rhetori-
cal 'amplification' cannot perhaps be called peculiarly
medieval, but at least bear small relation to Italianate
ideals; the reader never knows what is coming next.
At times we are reminded of that great man of
prose, Rabelais, who combined humanism with high
jinks. Skelton's own descriptions of his writing are
the best:

For though my rhyme be ragged,

Tattered and jagged,

Rudely rain-beaten,

Rusty qpid moth-eaten,

If ye take well therewith,

It hath in it some pith.

THE MIDDLE AGES 17

One feels that Skelton, for all his literary prestige
and court connexions, was as artist an isolated
figure, and that isolation nourished his eccentricity.
It is of course his eccentricity, his individual 'pith'
and energetic directness, and his 'sprung rhythm',
that have in our day brought about a Skeltonic
revival.

As a priest and devoted son of the Church,
Skelton was impelled to explosive attacks on
ecclesiastical corruption and Cardinal Wolsey, and
corruption at court as well. In manner he stands
midway between Langland and the Protestant
satirists up through Spenser and Milton. He does not
as a rule use the dream-allegory, and he lacks the
detached dramatic irony of Chaucer; he relies rather
on concrete recital and invective. He is a man of
outraged conscience who lays about him with a flail.
But much of his satire has paid the usual penalty of
minute topicality, and modern readers turn rather to
Philip Sparrow and The Tunning of Elinor Humming.
These two pieces illustrate the range of the poet's
sensibility and manner. In his account of Jane
Scrope's grief for the death of her pet sparrow he can
fuse playful tenderness with liturgical burlesque of
the Goliardic kind; and he can, with a racy toughness
still permitted to clerics, give an unrivalled genre
picture of female topers gathering for a boozing party.
Yet the Tunning is all in one key, the characters are
all seen from the outside; and we may think of how
much richer the subject would have been in the hands
of Chaucer or Dunbar.

<* (in most respects great medieval poetry has the
qualities that make great poetry in any period and
language.,) But if we could imagine its being read by

18 ENGLISH POETEY

someone whose knowledge had been limited to the
poetry of our century, such a reader would be struck
by some large differences. One might be the amount
of freedom possessed by the modern as contrasted
with the medieval poet. While modern poetry has
its own idiom, the assumption is that every poem is
an independent rendering of an individual experience,
and that the theme and mood will dictate the right
form and style. The medieval poet and poets long
after the Middle Ages recognized various estab-
lished genres, which had their special conventions of
form and manner. But we should not assume that
the advantage is all on the side of modern freedom;
acceptance of the genres never fettered the origin-
ality of a good poet, but was rather a positive aid
to him and his readers.

Perhaps the chief surprise for our imaginary
reader would be only a large extension of the
particular contrast just mentioned: that is, the
general absence of the subjective and introspective
and the predominance of the objective and imper-
sonal. A high proportion of recent poetry records
the mental states of poets who feel at odds with the
society and the world in which they find themselves;
a high proportion of medieval poems, long and
short, are narratives, and many of the stories are
the common property of many nations. Of course in
telling stories a poet like Chaucer reveals his atti-
tude or attitudes towards life, but that is not his
aim; he submerges himself in his material, and his
material comes from outside. Not regarding himself
as an articulate vie tim of an abhorrent civilization,
he responds with zest to the widest variety of tales
and characters. Even Langland, who does abhor

THE MIDDLE AGES 19

what he sees in the world, remains in general the
impersonal voice of righteousness. And those
anonymous lyrics and carols that might be called
personal are not expressions of merely private
feelings.

mien our twentieth-century reader, accustomed
to poetry that is acutely sensitive to the meta-
physical, psychological, political, and economic
problems of our world, would find most of the large
body of medieval narrative 'romantic' and remote
from the life and problems of its age} As a general
precaution we may remember that the realities of
the medieval world tend to become romantic for
later ages and also that the realities of our mech-
anized world, from the toaster to television, would
f;or the medieval man be wildly romantic. But in
medieval poetry questions of metaphysical or reli-
gious belief hardly ever come up (though Troilus
feels caught in the toils of necessity) because all
people in their various ways hold the same creed.
Romances and ballads, while they have some basis
in feudalism and chivalry, are more or less stylized
in plot and substance as well as in diction; they do
not answer many of the questions about feudalism,
or about love and marriage and home life, that
interest the modern historian. On these topics we
may of course learn much from Chaucer and others,
though not as a rule from their full-dress romances.
Yet the medieval poet has a strong instinct for the
realistic and concrete, even in stories of impossible
virtue and impossible ordeals, or in stories of the
supernatural. A story is a story, .whether English or
Oriental, realistic or romantic.

Chaucer has been an available if inimitable model

20 ENGLISH POETRY

from the fifteenth century up to the very un-
Chaucerian Imagists and Mr. Masefield, but his
influence in the modern centuries has generally been
too impalpable for demonstration. The recurrent
influence of the ballads is much more obvious. They
have always been there though not always in
print and not always esteemed as an example and
source of elemental strength and economy as well as
a mirror of a world of passion and action. We recall
how Sir Philip Sidney, the first English classicist,
revealed the gap between his instinctive and his
acquired taste:

'Certainly, I must confess my own barbarous-
ness, I never heard the old song of Percy and
Douglas that I found not my heart moved more
than with a trumpet; and yet is it sung but by
some blind crowder, with no rougher voice than
rude style; which, being so evil apparelled in the
dust and cobwebs of that uncivil age, what would
it work, trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of
Pindar? 3

And in the early eighteenth century Addison felt
the need of justifying admiration for the ballads by
citing classical parallels. Bishop Percy's collection,
though mixed with later poetry and though sub-
jected to a smoothing editorial hand, did much
to establish the ballads in their own right. But the
salutary influence of the ballads on romantic poetry
must wait for a later chapter. The essence of medie-
valism, in ballads qr carols, in Chaucer or Langland,
could not be revived.

CHAPTER II

THE RENAISSANCE

ALTHOUGH[SJT ThomarWyat3(1503?-42) began his
diplomatic career^" anTT presumably his writing of
poetry, before the death of Skelton, he belonged to
a new world, the world of the Italian Renaissance.
He was well acquainted with Italy, France, and
Spain. The first considerable collection of his poems,
was published, with those of Henry Howard, |Earl
o7 Surreyj( 1 51 7?-47) and others, in Songs and Sonnets,
commonly known as TotteVs Miscellany (1557), so
that he has often been treated rather as a harbinger
of the Elizabethan age than as a notable poet in his
own right. But, without slighting the historical
importance of Wyatt's introduction of the sonnet
(and the ottava rima, terza rima, the epigram, and
semi-classical satire), modern critics have come to
recognize the power and beauty of his lyrics or
'ballets'. In these he was not self-consciously domes-
ticating an exotic genre but was carrying on, with
distinctive individuality, the native lyrical modes of
the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. For
instance, as Mr. Tillyard points out, the simplicity
of the medieval carol, 'I sing of a maiden' (of which
some lines were quoted in the first chapter), re-
appears in Wyatt's 'What should I say?':

/ promised you,

And you promised me,
To be as true

As I would be.
21

22 ENGLISH POETRY

Whatever the amorous joys and pains of Wyatt the
full-blooded man, no doubt there is often as much
artifice in his lyrics as in his sonnets, but in the many
good ones artifice is handled with assured ease; and
the poet-lutanist is tireless in metrical experi-
mentation. Moreover, at his best he is not labori-
ously plaintive and abject before a disdainful
mistress; rather, as in 'Forget not yet the tried
intent', he pleads or chides with dignity as well as
passion. We are reminded sometimes, if distantly,
of Donne: along with intensity, Wyatt has touches of
outward and inward drama and of self-analysis, and
his staple language is plain, 'unpoetical', often
monosyllabic English. But while Donne's love-poems
are seldom songs, Wyatt works his many variations
within the lyrical frame and rhythm. One triumplj
is the delicately hovering, wondering movement, and
the dramatic mixture of personal involvement and
detachment, in

They flee from me that sometime did me seek,
With naked foot stalking in my chamber . . .

It was no dream; for I lay broad awaking;
But all is turn" A through my gentleness,
Into a bitter fashion of forsaking. . . .

Except in his satires, Wyatt pays little attention
to the external world; the stage of his amatory poems
is his own heart. Surrey one of whose best pieces
is the tribute to his master, 'W. resteth here, that
quick could neve^ rest' shows a wider range of
interest (though not of form), and, in poems of love
as well as others, he is aware of humanity and the

THE RENAISSANCE 23

natural world. A lonely woman thinks thus envi-
ously of happy pairs of lovers:

/ stand the bitter night
In my window, where I may see
Before the winds how the clouds flee.
Lo! what a mariner love hath made me!

But, though Surrey reveals facets of his aristocratic
and forceful personality, his smooth fluency rarely
achieves the poignant concentration and rhythm of
the lines just cited, or of Wyatt. We are not irresist-
ibly drawn to read him; instead we pay our formal
respects to the moulder of the sonnet and the
inventor of blank verse and perhaps heave a sigh
over his propagation of 'poulter's measure'.

From TotteVs Miscellany onward, individual poets
e'merge more distinctly, though even these courtly
makers are mostly amateurs (and though even
seventeenth-century manuscript collections include
many poems of doubtful authorship). When we
survey the great body of Tudor and later song, the
most remarkable fact is the wide distribution of the
lyrical gift. From Henry VIII (who shared with
Wyatt an attachment to the Muse as well as to Anne
Boleyn), and courtiers who otherwise seem hard-
headed worldlings, down to rakehelly Elizabethan
journalists, almost anyone can write beautiful and
moving songs on love and youth and age and death.
At one pole is that early and piercing cry of ballad-
like simplicity:

Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down cqn, rain?

Christ, if my love were in my arms
And 1 in my bed again!

24 ENGLISH POETRY

At the opposite pole is such a later, longer, and
lighter product of anonymity as the courtly and very
popular broadside ballad of 'the Lady Greensleeves'.
But even the work of the great Elizabethan lyrists
whom we know retains a high degree of imper-
sonality. Whereas a lyric of Wordsworth or Shelley
instantly proclaims its author, it would be a bold
critic who could, on internal evidence, sort out the
lyrics of Lyly (or those that pass as his), Peele,
Greene, Lodge, Nashe, Breton, and others, including
Shakespeare. One reason for such impersonality
was that the lyrists were not moved by the desire for
'self-expression' or radical novelty, but were working
within a set of more or less artificial conventions,
literary and musical. Such conventions if we read
right through the song-books, even Campion's -
may become thinly monotonous, since the songs
were written to be heard, and not heard all at once.
But a multitude of songs are satisfying as poetry
without the music.

One convention, which developed as the century
advanced, was Italianate and classical pastoralism,
a convention that came to full flower in the most
charming of Elizabethan anthologies, England's
Helicon (1600). In the idyllic Arcadia of pastoral
song, it is always the merry month of May, and the
pangs of Petrarchan lovers rarely strike Phyllida and
Corydon. Samela combines the bright beauties of all
the goddesses. Rosalind, in whose bosom Love sucks
like a bee, is to soar from pastoral sweets to the
celestial world

*
Like to the clear in highest sphere,

Where all empyreal glory shines.

THE RENAISSANCE 25

If we needed proof of the strength of the convention,
we might remember that it drew from the fiery
spirit of Marlowe what was to be the most famous
of all pastoral lyrics, 'Come live with me and be my
love'. But, although so many men contributed to
the treasury of song, Shakespeare reigns here as
elsewhere; no other poet displayed such variety of
theme and tone on such a high level of felicity.
Many of his lyrics 'Who is Silvia?' 'It was a lover
and his lass', 'O mistress mine, where are you
roaming?' 'When daffodils begin to peer' are
conventional dallyings with the innocence of love,
yet literary pastoralism can extend to robust
realism Dick the shepherd blowing his nail and
red-nosed Marian and greasy Joan. There is moral-
izing on life that ranges from 'Under the greenwood
tree' and 'When that I was and a little tiny boy* to
Tear no more the heat o' the sun'. And there is the
iridescent magic, 'of the water, watery', of 'Full
fathom five thy father lies'. Shakespeare's songs in
general have the simple texture and tunefulness,
the air of easy spontaneity, that belong to popular
tradition.

But Tudor lyricism, though it created a paradise
of amatory and idyllic make-believe, was not
entirely divorced from life (and the pastoral ideal
was in part a rejection of the ways of the world).
As Shakespeare's graver notes remind us, the
hazards of fortune and ambition and death were dark
realities in an age of violence, feud, and capricious
royal favour. And classical humanism furnished
materials and models, such as Horace and Martial,
for ethical reflection that was not merely Polonian.
So we have, from courtiers like Wyatt and Surrey

26 ENGLISH POETRY

and Bacon, and more obscure observers of muta-
bility, distrust of the vainglorious world and praise
of the mean and sure estate. 'My mind to me a
kingdom is', declared Sir Edward Dyer. Chidiock
Tichborne, executed in 1586 for his share in the
Babington plot, gives his meditations a refrain
'And now I live, and now my life is done' that
sounds like thuds of earth into his grave. A genera-
tion later Sir Walter Ralegh (1552?-1618), rewriting
some earlier lines of his own just before his execution,
provides a personal and religious parallel to the great
apostrophe to Death in the History:

Even such is Time, that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust. . . .

Indeed much of Ralegh's verse, so strongly individual
in substance and manner that it cannot be linked
with any school or fashion, is a disenchanted denial
of both the Arcadian dream and the mundane ends
that he himself pursued. To 'Come live with me and
be my love' he replies with a sober recognition of the
fading of youth and love and pleasure. In other
poems, wanton desire is the grave of reason; life is a
'play of passion', a 'short comedy' except in its final
curtain. With explosive directness Ralegh gives the
lie to the court and the world, to the whole fabric
of corruption that society maintains. And, with a
fervour that engenders some bizarre images, the
passionate man would take his scallop shell of quiet,
his staff of faith to walk upon, for his pilgrimage
toward 'heaven's lyibeless hall'.

Along with the deceits and illusions of the stage-
play world there was the stark fact of death, which

THE RENAISSANCE 27

quickened or darkened even celebrations of young
love, and which had both a special horror and an
everyday familiarity in an age of recurrent plagues.
The universal theme could stir the exuberantly
slangy pamphleteer, Thomas Nashe, to a recital of
the great commonplaces, from which rises one stanza
of bare simplicity and rich suggestion:

Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkles will devour;
Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen's eye.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

First comes the theme of a thousand Renaissance
versions of 'Carpe diem'; then an image at once
concrete and meteorological, 1 abstract and magical,
'Brightness falls from the air'; then the tradition of
'Ubi sunt . . . ?' and the dance of Death, who laid
low the queens of the earth, even the most lovely
and glamorous woman of pagan myth; and then a
Christian prayer.

In the sixteenth century the word 'sonnet' did not
have its modern precise meaning but was loosely
equivalent to 'song'. Concerning the structure of the
sonnet proper a few bald facts may be noted.
Wyatt normally followed the Petrarchan octave
(abbaabba), though a couple of times he deserted the
Italian form to use new rhymes in the second

quatrain. In the sestet he did not follow Petrarch;

o

1 That is, if Nashe did not write hayre (hair) instead of ayre
(Works, ed. McKerrow, tv, 440). We may prefer magic to
logic.

28 ENGLISH POETRY

in almost all of his more than thirty sonnets the
sestet broke naturally into a quatrain and a couplet.
With such models before him, and with a conscious-
ness of the paucity of rhymes in English, Surrey
developed and regularized the 'English' sonnet
of three quatrains, each with its own rhymes,
and a couplet (ababcdcdefefgg). The Elizabethan
sonneteers commonly adopted this pattern or varia-
tions of it; Milton and later poets generally preferred
the Italian form. The difference involved more than
mere mechanics. Whereas the Italian sonnet has
two more or less distinct sections, in an English
sonnet the thought and images tend to flow into the
triple-quatrain division, and the final couplet is
likely to become an epigrammatic or gnomic
conclusion.

The posthumous and unauthorized publication of
Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella in 1591
started the vogue of sonneteering that drew elaborate
sequences from Daniel, Lodge, Drayton, Spenser,
Shakespeare, and many smaller poets. Petrarch
'poor Petrarch's long-deceased woes', in Sidney's
phrase had now been largely superseded by later
French and Italian models, but the convention
was essentially unchanged; and, although we
have of late been taught more respect for formal
artifice, few of us can respond to the protracted
chills and fevers, self-abasements and adorations, of
Petrarchan love, and to the fanciful and extravagant
conceits that make up the common texture of such
verse. The good poets have of course their successes.
Drayton's two strains of Elizabethan idealism and
anti-romantic revulsion are blended in his late and
famous 'Since there's no help, come let us kiss

THE RENAISSANCE 29

and part'; the forthright dramatic directness of the
first quatrains gives way to a semi-dramatic group-
ing of allegorical abstractions which heighten the
seriousness and suspense of the lover's wavering
and surrender. But even Shakespeare can weary us,
or at least arouse less wholehearted satisfaction than
wonder at his resources of ingenuity. We may look
at his sequence and Sidney's.

While the question of 'sincerity' in the sense of
actual as distinguished from imaginative experience
is irrelevant here as elsewhere, we have Sidney's
word (in his Apology for Poetry) for the genuineness
of his passion; its object was evidently Lady Rich.
Whatever our guess about Shakespeare, we know
nothing. At any rate we have the poems, and we
may glance first at the matter of technique. Earlier
Tudor poets had to face the special prosodic prob-
lems created by post-Chaucerian changes in the
language and not altogether solved by fifteenth-
century writers the definition of the pentameter
line in terms of the number of stresses or the number
of syllables, the nature and extent of variations
from the norm, the harmonizing of the metrical
pattern with the pattern of thought. In the third
quarter of the century perhaps the chief danger was
a wooden regularity. But in Astrophel and Stella
and Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar poetry reached
a maturity from which there was to be no relapse.
Boch poets were conscious students of technique,
and Sidney must have profited from his sometimes
fine experiments in quantitative metre. Among the
virtues of his sonnets is the capacity for flexible
variation and progressive movement that marks
assured control. In more than technical ways the

80 ENGLISH POETRY

opening sonnet, a declaration of independence, is as
fine an example as any of a poet's seeking and finding
freedom for personal utterance within a convention
that rather sustains than hampers him. The com-
bination of simple language and rhetorical artifice at
once reveals and dignifies personal feeling, and the
final couplet is a direct and dramatic climax:

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
'Fool', said my Muse to me, 'look in thy heart and
write S

Apart from technique, what gives dramatic reality to
the whole sequence is the moral and religious conflict
it embodies. A knight of chivalry, a Platonist, and
a Christian loves the wife of another, and he knows,
like a medieval courtly lover, that his love is
ennobling, that it engages his deepest and highest
emotions. Yet if it is bound up with virtue and
honour, it is also a betrayal of both: 'Desire still
cries, "Give me some food." ' In the end if a
separate sonnet can be related to the sequence the
Christian ideal conquers, at least dramatically, and
the renunciation takes us back to the conclusion
of Chaucer's Troilus:

Leave me, love, which reachest but to dust;
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things;
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust,
Whatever fades but fading pleasure brings. . . .

Shakespeare's sonnets, published in 1609 when the
vogue had long subsided, were in the main written,
it may be presumed, in the fifteen-nineties; their
rhetorical amplitude of line and rhythm seems to

THE RENAISSANCE 31

link them with the narrative poems and earlier
plays. Themes, images, and texture range from thin
artifice to 'classical' grandiloquence or 'metaphysical'
density, but language, however poignant, remains
predominantly simple. Happily we cannot go into
the manifold problems that have raised around the
sonnets an almost impenetrable barricade of com-
mentary. Even the arrangement is beset with puzzles;
not all of the first 126 sonnets seem to be addressed
to one young man, and CXXVII-CLII, though
apparently addressed to the Dark Lady, do not form
a consecutive series. While the central situation is
unusual, much of Shakespeare's analysis of love may
be applied to man and woman as well as man and
man. His idealistic view of love appears in the
sonnets to the young man; the sinister Dark Lady
inspires hostile and racking thoughts of 'Th' expense
of spirit in a waste of shame'. Shakespeare can
be deeply moved by a religious consciousness of
sin, though for the most part his joys and griefs
are those of the natural man. The poet-lover has
enemies without and within disloyalty, jealousy,
lust, hate but the ever-present enemy of youth and
love and hope and happiness is remorseless Time.
Although 'Full many a glorious morning' gilds
meadows and streams with heavenly alchemy, the
sun of his life is 'but one hour mine'. He can at
moments utter a defiance

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come

>
yet our dominant impression is not of the lark that

sings hymns at heaven's gate but of an autumnal

82 ENGLISH POETRY

mood of resignation 'Bare ruin'd choirs where late
the sweet birds sang'.

The chief strains of lyrical poetry, the pastoral
amorousness of youth and the ethical sobriety of
age, were writ large, so to speak, in the Ovidian
narrative and the long reflective poem. The best
examples of Ovidian narrative are of course Mar-
lowe's Hero and Leander (1593?) and Shakespeare's
Venus and Adonis (1593). This kind of writing, like
so many other kinds, carried on a European fashion.
The luscious pictorial elaboration of such poems,
which went beyond the highly pictorial Ovid, was a
literary parallel to much Renaissance painting. It
exemplified to the full the aesthetic doctrine crystal-
lized in the phrase ut pictura poesis, the doctrine
that painting is silent poetry and poetry a speaking
picture. Classical mythology was ransacked not only
for the main stories but for allusions, images, and
conceits suggestive of ideal beauty in nature, art,
and the human body. We can measure Italianate
influence by comparing Marlowe and Shakespeare
with mythological descriptions in Chaucer.

Moreover, while medieval poets had been able to
find in Ovid the ideals of courtly love, Renaissance
Ovidians commonly glorified the fleshliness of
neo-pagan eroticism though English poets seldom
did so without a consciousness of orthodox morality.
Marlowe's Leander is at times an innocent and
worshipful lover, at times a libertine philosopher
arguing against conventional restraints, and Hero is
both a Juliet and a coquette; and while the poet
celebrates youthful raptures with full sympathy, he
is also aware of love's cruelty. Venus and Adonis
(which reverses the situation of the Petrarchan lover

THE RENAISSANCE 38

and mistress) perhaps has, on its lower level, more
unity of tone, though Adonis, who seems less chaste
than frigid, can address to the sweating goddess a
little sermon on love and lust. To most readers the
heady ardour and glow of Marlowe's theme and tex-
ture are much more attractive than the cool detach-
ment and skilfully contrived rhetoric of Shake-
speare; what stands out from the artificial tapestry is
an occasional bit of Warwickshire like the dew-
bedabbled hare.

The Ovidian genre had its variations and excep-
tions (indeed some scholars see in Venus and Adonis
a philosophical treatment of the problem of evil, or of
love). In The Rape ofLucrece (1594) the theme is again
lust and chastity and death, and there is much descrip-
tion and declamation, but whereas Venus and Adonis
has affinities with the sonnets, Lucrece is akin to
the earlier tragedies and to Senecan drama. Another
kind of exception was Drayton's Endymion and
Phoebe (1595)' which anticipated Keats's poem in its
'Platonic' fable of the identity of earthly reality
with the heavenly ideal. Such a theme may serve
to remind us of the large debt of Renaissance
poets to the dictionaries of mythology, which were
widely used not merely as collections of myths but
as treasuries of allegorical and symbolic interpre-
tation. These books yielded images and symbols
to such poets as Spenser and especially Chapman
and Jonson. The name of Chapman calls up still
other exceptions to Ovidian eroticism, and that
fashion was indeed condemned by this earnestly
Platonic, Stoic, and Christian poet in the course of
his first work, the difficult Shadow of Night (1594).
Chapman adapted the genre to his own purposes in
3

34 ENGLISH POETRY

Ovid's Banquet of Sense, an abstruse analysis of
sensory experience in terms of Neoplatonic idealism,
and in his elaborate continuation of Marlowe's
Hero and Leander\ this unfinished tale was made over
in accordance with Chapman's sober ethical creed,
and his closely packed, 'metaphysical' style is
equally remote from Marlowe's swift, bright stream
of 'classical' rhetoric.

Chapman brings us to the reflective or philoso-
phical poem. This kind of writing was only the most
direct manifestation of the established view of the
serious poet's function. Poets and critics held with
fervour the didactic conception of poetry that had
come down from the ancients, the belief in the
efficacy of delightful teaching, in the close relation
between good letters and virtuous action, in the in-
spirational power of heroic examples and moral
precepts. If we moderns regard such open and
palpable didacticism as naive, we may remember
that it had the sanction of many centuries and many
great poets and that it was still to animate poets so
different as Milton and Pope.

The reflective poem had been nobly inaugurated
by a man of action, Thomas Sackville, who was to
hold a high place in Elizabeth's councils. His Induc-
tion to his Complaint of Henry Duke of Buckingham
(1563) is the only real poem in The Mirror for Magis-
trates, the patriotic, popular, and repeatedly enlarged
successor to Lydgate's Fall of Princes and Boccaccio's
De Casibus. The Induction is half medieval in its
dream-allegory (and Chaucerian language), though
the scene is bleak winter and the visionary guide is
Sorrow. A Virgilian and Senecan hell discloses such
classical abstractions as Dread, Sleep, Old Age, and

THE RENAISSANCE 35

Death, but these are described in the medieval
emblematic manner (which reappears in Spenser's
allegorical pageants). While we might not expect
poetry from the co-author of Gorbodtw, the Induction
is a massive and moving contemplation of mutability;
Sackville feels the great commonplaces of the theme.
In the decades on each side of 1600, four philo-
sophical poets fall into a group the young lawyer,
John (later Sir John) Davies, Samuel Daniel, George
Chapman, and Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, the
statesman and 'friend to Sir Philip Sidney*. As
thinkers and poets, all have their distinct individu-
ality, but all write within the frame of Christian
humanism. That creed, a fusion of the natural
wisdom of classical antiquity with the supernatural
faith of Christianity, was much less rigorously philo-
sophical, and much more ethical and practical, than
the Thomistic synthesis, but it was a later phase of
the same central tradition, and it embraced many
great names from Erasmus to Hooker, from Spenser
to Milton. The keystone is reason, in its fullest sense.
Reason and hierarchical order are the law of God and
his creation, of society, and of the faculties of the
soul. Every creature and thing has an appointed
place and function. Man's divine endowment of
right reason, though impaired by his fall, is still a
sound guide, up to the point where the truths of
revelation are needed. In Hooker's words, 'The
general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence
of God himself. For that which all men have at all
times learned, Nature herself must needs have taught;
and God being the author of Nature, her voice is
but his instrument.' This metaphysical, social, and
ethical structure, resting on belief in a rational God

36 ENGLISH POETRY

and the rational dignity of man, is inherently optimis-
tic, yet optimism is strongly tempered by a religious
and realistic consciousness of man's sinful frailty and
rebellious will. In the sixteenth and earlier seven-
teenth centuries the Christian-humanist synthesis
was actively or passively accepted by nearly all
writers; but it was pressed hard from one side by the
growing numbers of the irrationally religious, from
the other by the growing number of the irreligiously
rationalistic.

Our four poets are aware of the dangers that
threaten their cultural and religious heritage, though
they differ in focus and emphasis. In Davies's
Orchestra (1596), Penelope's chief wooer is the mouth-
piece for a graceful interpretation of dancing as a
symbol of cosmic Love and an ordered universe;
Nosce Teipsum (1599) is an earnest exposition of the
deceitfulness of human knowledge and of the nature
and immortality of the soul. Daniel's Musophilus
(1599), a debate between a lover of poetry and a
philistine worldling, is likewise a prose essay in
verse, but the poet's humanistic faith kindles some
fire. It is

blessed letters, that combine in one
All ages past, and make one live with all.

And the same faith inspires a vision of the future,
of an English literature arising m America:

What worlds in th> yet unformed Occident
May come refined with th* accents that are ours?
Or who can tell for what great work in hand
The greatness of our style is now ordained?

In his weighty epistles to the Countesses of Cumber-
land and Bedford (and the lyrical Ulysses and the

THE RENAISSANCE 87

Siren), Daniel's themes are more ethical than liter-
ary. He exalts the man of 'resolved powers' who,
while pitying the perplexed state 'Of troublous and
distressed mortality', dwells in secure wisdom above
the turmoil of passion and strife.

The verse of Davies and Daniel has a plain, smooth
clarity of statement that may be called neo-classical,
and that generally maintains a poetic level through
the urgency with which the writers feel the saving
doctrines of their creed. Similar ideas, with varia-
tions, fortify Chapman and Greville witness Chap-
man's Tears of Peace and Greville's Treatie of Humane
Learning but these two poets have more complex
and penetrating minds, a more troubled sense of
discord and evil to be overcome. And their verse has
a tough in Chapman's case a darkly figurative
density of thought and phrasing; they struggle to
realize and communicate their insights into the dis-
astrous contradictions of man's nature. Yet all four
poets face the same problems. Says Davies:

/ know my life's a pain and but a span,
I know my sense is mocked with everything;
And to conclude, I know myself a man,
Which is a proud and yet a wretched thing.

Greville, in a chorus of Mustapha, makes the anti-
theses more acute and arresting:

Oh wearisome condition of humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound:
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity;
Created sick, commanded 40 be sound:
What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws?
Passion and Reason self-division cause.

38 ENGLISH POETRY

Chapman, abhorring both worldly ignorance and
learned pedantry, can plead with confidence for the
translation of humane learning into moral wisdom,
for the rational soul's reign over the mutinous realm
of appetite and passion; and that is the main theme
of his tragedies and strongly colours his great version
of Homer. Greville, weighed down by his Calviri-
istic view of fallen man, goes beyond Chapman and
even beyond Davies in his distrust of mere know-
ledge, although, like Chapman, he demands learning
that is purified, active, and useful. Greville's philo-
sophical and religious earnestness turns even Caelica
into the least amorous of sonnet sequences. One bit
may be quoted (from Sonnet LXXXVIII), partly
for comparison with Donne's 'At the round earth's
imagined corners':

The flood that did, and dreadful fire that shall,
Drown, and burn up the malice of the earth,
The divers tongues, and Babylon's downfall,
Are nothing to the man's renewed birth:

First, let the Law plough up thy wicked heart,
That Christ may come, and all these types depart.

For a concluding survey of the Elizabethan age we
may turn back tojEclmund Spensert(1552?-99), who,
in the unified breadtn of his culture and the bulk,
variety, and centrality of his accomplishment, is the
most complete representative of the English Renais-
sance.

The Shepherd's Calendar (1579) was the manifesto,
as 'E. K.' made cl$ar in his prefaces and notes, of a
new poet. In beginning with pastorals Spenser was
following the career sanctified by Virgil and others,

THE RENAISSANCE 39

and he was naturalizing in English the manner and
themes of the convention, among them ecclesiastical
satire. But, with all his exoticism, Spenser groups his
twelve eclogues under the title of an old rural
almanac and sets up Chaucer as his tutelary genius;
and (like the poets of the Pleiade) he revives old
words. Everywhere, as E. K. points out, the new poet
observes decorum, that is, harmonious fitness of
material, persons, language, tone; thus we have the
high strains of October on heroic poetry and the
November elegy, the half -elegant, half-rustic lyric to
Elizabeth as the pastoral queen, the rude diction and
metre of fable and satire. And almost every poem is
a metrical experiment; the new poet, moreover, has
a new sense of prosodic stress.

Spenser's minor poems of the early 1590's extend
his sway over most provinces of Renaissance verse.
Mother Hubberd's Tale is a comprehensive and
pungent satire; as we might expect, Spenser uses the
medieval beast-fable (and a decorously low style), not
the classical manner that was to be adopted by
Donne, Hall, and Marston. Satire on the corruptions
of the court is one of many elements in the pastoral,
Colin Clout's Come Home Again. Muiopotmos, the
delicately embroidered tale of the fly and the spider,
may be a fable of 'the poet and the politician', but
its mock-heroic and pictorial charm is independent of
ulterior meanings. The Four Hymns, on earthly and
heavenly beauty and love, are the most elaborate
if not a systematic exposition of Christian Platon-
ism in our early poetry. Spenser is sincere in both
his amatory idealism and his tender feeling for the
human story of the Redeemer motives that are
fused in one of the best of the Amoretti, 'Most glorious

40 ENGLISH POETRY

Lord of life', written for Easter. The sonnets in
general, however, lack concentration and salience
Spenser's genius needed ampler room and their
virtues are gathered up, and heightened, in the
Epithalamion.

Few of the world's great love-poems are associated
with marriage, fewer still with a middle-aged poet's
second marriage, but we may think the Epithala-
mion the most beautiful and satisfying love-poem in
the language. (The Prothalamion has, in comparison,
the external and dream-like beauty of pure art.)
Even in this most personal poem Spenser is the
consciously European artist. The Italian canzone is
merged with the classical and Renaissance wedding-
ode. The scries of panel pictures, which follows the
proceedings of the day from before sunrise to the
rise of the moon, forms a processional pageant or
masque of Hymen, and the stately pattern and
rhythm, the refrain, and the tone of the whole are
ritualistic. The actual wedding could hardly have
been such a grand affair; Spenser puts in all the
customs and ceremonies that literary and popular
tradition, Roman and Irish, could supply, and
weaves them into a tapestry both sumptuous and
homely. In the total impression marriage is a su-
preme example of the beauty of order. The Epithala-
mion is indeed a metaphysical poem, however remote
from The Ecstasy or To his Coy Mistress. The love
of two ordinary persons is felt as a part, a splendid
part, of the creative process of a divine world, and all
nature shares in the glorious nuptial. The poet-
bridegroom is so fyied with love and wonder that the
world is transfigured; even the 'trouts and pikes' of
the river Mulla are superlative fish. And Elizabeth

THE RENAISSANCE 41

Boyle is not simply Elizabeth Boyle but the eternal
bride. She comes forth from her chamber like the
sun of the 19th Psalm. Her snowy neck is like a
marble tower, as in the Song of Songs. At the climax
of religious adoration,

Open the temple gates unto my love,
Open them wide that she may enter in,

the poet has created such an atmosphere of reverent
awe that he can without profanation echo another
Psalm: 'Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye
lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory
shall come in.' Yet this devout idealism is rooted in
normal experience through its touches of actuality
(Irish music, shouting boys, bellyfuls of wine), its
ardour of sensuous desire, and the final hope of 4 a
large posterity'.

That huge fragment, The Faerie Queene (1590-96),
with all its artistic and philosophical complexities,
requires a book, not a page or two. The poem has
long suffered from both one-sided praise and unjust
disparagement; the romantic nineteenth century
saw only its decorative romanticism, and for the
'metaphysical' twentieth it hardly exists at all.
Spenser's ethical and allegorical aims have appeared
merely wrongheaded, and this bias has distorted
the appreciation of even his aesthetic qualities.

Some elements of Renaissance ideology have been
touched upon already, such as the principles of
Christian humanism, the didactic view of poetry, the
doctrine ut pictura poesis, and these and other
articles of the creed are united in Spenser. He saw
the whole body of heroic poetry, from Homer to

42 ENGLISH POETEY

Ariosto and Tasso, as philosophy teaching by
examples, and his theory was fully shared by his
contemporaries and his chief disciple, Milton; it is
shared by modern novelists, if not by modern poets
and critics. The Faerie Queene was not an escapist
dream, it was a call to high ideals and high endeavour,
a Renaissance conduct-book in verse; and it was
typical of Christian humanism that the spectrum of
virtues treated should range from Holiness to
Courtesy. Spenser did, to be sure, create an ultra-
romantic world of knights and ladies and magicians
and monsters (a world which, whether we value it or
not, lives in our imagination), but everywhere the
romantic and preternatural are mixed with the
homely and the real. Spenser's store of bright-eyed
ladies remind us of Juliet and Desdemona, Imogen
and Perdita; they have, in varying proportions, the
unearthly beauty of symbols combined with feminine
tenderness, strength, and loyalty. He needs to be
read as the sage and serious and very human poet he
was, and as the great artist he was.

Whatever the order of composition of the larger
and smaller units, in the poem as it stands the first
two books, of Holiness and Temperance, have the
structure of a morality play, a pilgrim's progress;
in the other four, especially the last three, the stories
and groups shift and blend in the manner of Ariosto.
Further, after the first book, Spenser tends to move
away from strict allegory, from narrative with a
double meaning, to the use of ethical types of char-
acter in various situations, as in modern novels.

In the Book of Holiness, conventions of medieval
romance are raised to the religious plane. The
traditional 'unpromising hero* becomes the untried

THE RENAISSANCE 48

Christian soldier, who is led astray from true faith
(Una), falls into sensual sloth and pride, is saved by
grace (Arthur), and, though tempted to suicide in the
great scene with Despair, undergoes purification and,
a true St. George, accomplishes his quest, the slaying
of the dragon of sin. (The historical allegory is too
uncertain to go into.) The knight has at first the
blindness of a Kafka hero, but he attains a vision of
truth and right; one moving incident is his reluctant
return, after the ascent of the hill of contemplation,
to the world of evil and struggle. The last stage of his
quest may illustrate the way in which allegory passes
into symbolism like that of The Waste Land. After
the first day's battle the knight is refreshed by water
from a well; it is the 'pure river of water of life,
clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God
and of the Lamb' (Rev. xxii, I). 1 After the second
day, he is revived by fruit from the tree of life 'To
him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of
life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God'
(Rev. ii, 7). The dragon is Satan, as in Revelation;
the three days of battle are a romance convention
and also the period of Christ's harrowing of hell.
When the knight is brought into the city

With shaumes, and trompets, and with clarions

sweet;

And all the way the joyous people sings,
And with their garments strowes the paved street,

we think of Christ's entry into Jerusalem. Now the
victor over evil may for the first time see Una's face

1 Since verbal echoes are not in question, this and following
texts are quoted from the familiar King James Bible although
as a matter of fact these are almost completely identical with
the versions in the Geneva and Bishops' Bibles.

44 ENGLISH POETRY

unveiled; and she is 'arrayed in fine linen, clean and
white', 'for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and
his wife hath made herself ready 5 (Rev. xix, 7-8).
Thus, out of the staple materials of romance, and
with a multitude of significant details, Spenser
created a religious myth.

The Christian virtue of Holiness receives special
treatment. The other virtues belong to the world
of nature, of classical and Renaissance ethics
although the hero of Temperance, who starts with
Platonic and Aristotelian wisdom, must in a crisis
be rescued by grace. It is also typical of Spenser
and his age that, whereas Chaucer, with all his
scruples, could depict the uncanonical love of Troilus
and Criseyde sympathetically, Spenser presents
courtly love as wholly evil. It is no less typical
that his heroine of Chastity is dedicated, not to
virginity, but to the quest of the man she loves and
is to marry. When, by the way, the two meet in
combat, the poet's candid realism and idealism come
together: Britomart, red-faced and sweating, is still
so lovely that Artegall falls back 'And of his wonder
made religion'.

The sensuous richness of Spenser has for many
readers blurred his less obvious subtlety. Thus
romantic criticism has seen in the Bower of Bliss
(II, xii) an instinctively voluptuous poet letting
himself go in a riot of the senses and then paying
lip-service to virtue in the destruction of the Bower.
If that were so, the normally orthodox poet would
be violating the conception of Circe that ran from
Homer through ,Ariosto and Tasso and Milton.
More important is the positive fact that he uses his
eclectic wealth of sensuous and sensual material with

THE RENAISSANCE

suggestive discrimination. As C. S. Lewis has shown,
the picture is one of pathological sensuality based
on two main lines of contrast, between the evil
beauty of luxurious artifice and the pure beauty of
simple nature, and between the unhealthy lust of the
eye and the full fruition of honourable love. Com-
pared with the Garden of Adonis (III, vi), or with
the Epithalamion, the air of the Bower is heavy with
corruption.

The Garden of Adonis begins with the miraculous
conception of Belphoebe and Amoret, and perhaps
nothing in English poetry makes the reader feel so
drenched with sunlight. (In The Faerie Queene, as in
Paradise Lost, light is a constant symbol of purity.)
The twins are found by Venus and Diana; here
Spenser joins two decorative myths, of the hue and
cry after Cupid and Actaeon. Since Amoret is
brought up by Venus in the natural paradise of the
Garden, Spenser offers a biological myth of the endless
cycle of generation. Then the theme is repeated in
the myth of Venus and Adonis; their eternal love
represents matter for ever receiving form. The
Garden of Adonis is related to the fragment on
Mutability, which, in its mythological symbolism,
its varied display of Spenser's artistic powers, and
its total import, is perhaps the most impressive part
of the whole poem. In the last stanza we hear the
inmost voice of a deeply troubled poet. He longs to
believe, and does believe, the traditional doctrine of
the world's evolving, under Providence, towards
perfection, and yet the undeniable sway of Muta-
bility on earth wrings his heart and evokes an
impassioned prayer for the changeless peace and
order of heaven.

ENGLISH POETRY

The Faerie Queene is not all on the level of these
few passages, though a multitude of other fine things
could be cited. What frightens off the modern
reader is not the legendary terrors of allegory, which
is as essential in Spenser as in Dante, but the mere
length and complexity of the poem. Yet the many
great episodes would not achieve their effect without
the aggregation of detail; Spenser must be allowed
the scope and method of a novelist. And though
the stanza he invented may seem at first to embody
only a uniform and continuous flow of melody, the
attentive reader will observe constant rhythmical
modulations adapted to the various kinds of descrip-
tion, action, and dialogue. The archaisms of dic-
tion, which offended Ben Jonson (and which would
be less conspicuous if Spenser were read, like
Shakespeare and others, in modernized spelling),
are more of an asset than a liability. Language and
rhythm go along with imagination in maintaining
an aesthetic distance, a variable yet consistent
atmosphere and tone that create a world. Finally,
we may remember that no poet has had greater or
more varied disciples, Milton, Dryden, Wordsworth,
Keats, and a host of others, and that Spenser is,
more than any other individual, the father of
English poetry.

We have noted some religious, philosophical, and
literary principles that were a general inheritance,
and, before we move into the next age, we may take
a retrospective glance at a few more technical
matters. The Tudor Englishman was patriotically
and sometimes pathetically eager that the English
language and literature should attain a place, if not
with Latin and Greek (that could hardly be hoped),

THE RENAISSANCE 47

at least with Italian and French; and, though
poetic genius was the gift of God, learning and
discipline could do much. One common possession
of writers and readers in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries, a possession quite alien to us, was
a training in formal rhetoric. If we think of the early
poets as 'just writing', with due regard to rhyme and
scansion, we should look into the formidable analysis
of tropes and figures in George Puttenham's Art of
English Poesy (1589). Since almost every writer and
reader was brought up on Latin, one large element
of poetic discipline and pleasure was the adaptation
and recognition of traditional devices.

During the sixteenth century the language grew
with extraordinary rapidity, and the latter half
was punctuated by the cracklings of the 'ink-horn'
controversy. One party welcomed the free addition
to English of words from other tongues, ancient and
modern; but purists, fearing (in the phrase of E. K.)
'a gallimaufray or hodgepodge of al other speches',
would have the language grow from within, from
the native stock. Providence brought about an
English compromise. As the Book of Common
Prayer and the Bible had already demonstrated, the
special power and beauty of English were to spring
from its combinations of Anglo-Saxon brevity,
weight, and strength with the sonority, speed, and
connotative richness of classical polysyllables.

In this connexion, to anticipate, we may note the
beginnings, in such works as The Faerie Queene,
Sylvester's popular translation of Du Bartas, and
George Sandys' version of the Metamorphoses, of the
'poetic diction' that was to reach its artistic height
in Milton and, during its long decline, to spread all

48 ENGLISH POETRY

over the eighteenth century. Saturation in Latin
verse and verse-making led, not unnaturally, to the
transferring to English of Latin idioms the Gr adus
epithet, adjectives in place of adverbs, extensive
employment of participles, the use of Latin deriva-
tives in their literal sense (e.g. 'error' for 'wander-
ing'). Along with such devices went generic abstrac-
tions, taken partly from Latin, partly from the
language of science, which, while vitalized at first
by specific purposes, came ultimately to be a lifeless
convention. Thus, as Mr. Tillotson has pointed out,
the 'finny drove' of Comus (line 115) directs our visual
imagination to multitudinous fins waving in the
moonlight; later, as a rule, such a phrase is merely a
collective term or elegant euphemism.

The debates over classical metres grew out of
motives similar to those behind the discussion of
ink-horn words. In the latter half of the sixteenth
century it was still possible to hold that English
poetry, commonly based as it was on rhyme and
syllable-counting, needed to be ordered and refined
by the adoption of classical metrics. But existing
confusion about English prosody heightened confu-
sion and conflict over the acceptance of classical
metrics in toto or of an accentual compromise.
When we read Campion's somewhat belated essay
and Daniel's reply (1602-3), we may be wholly on
the side of Daniel's appeal to the native tradition
and genius, but we should recognize that Campion's
plea was limited and not irrational. In spite of the
achievements of the later Elizabethan poets,
Campion, a composer as well as a classicist, saw the
need for more sophisticated principles, for the com-
plex adjustments of metrical, syllabic, and rhetorical

THE RENAISSANCE 49

stress principles that help to explain the delicate
rhythms of his own rhymed lyrics and remind
us, in a general way, of the great advances in
technical mastery and subtlety that were now
being made.

The variety of stanzaic patterns, which soon
became infinite, defies brief description, but two
great prosodic instruments may and must be given
a word. The evolution of blank verse from Surrey to
Milton, an evolution partly epitomized in Shake-
speare, can be briefly summarized. In early or
unsophisticated blank verse the dominant unit is the
single, end-stopped line, and, though Surrey and
other pioneers do have run-on lines, such verse may
be little more than a sequence of unrhymed penta-
meters or couplets. But in parts of Marlowe and,
with the most elaborate and intricate orchestration
in the mature Shakespeare and Milton, the line is a
variable and subordinate unit in a verse paragraph
of unlimited modulations.

The other metrical form is the heroic couplet, not
now of the Chaucerian kind (which is hardly felt as a
couplet), but the closed couplet with balanced and
often antithetical half -lines that was to culminate in
Pope. Blank verse had originated as an equivalent
for the hexameter, and the couplet owed much of its
early development to translation and imitation of
the Latin elegiac distich, Ovid's in particular.
Among other contributions to the growth of the
couplet was Edward Fairfax's Godfrey of Bulloigne,
which had an influence attested by Waller and
Dryden; it was in ottava rima, but^ Fairfax's handling
of the whole stanza and of its final couplets was
important. In the moulding of the couplet, as in

50 ENGLISH POETRY

other things, Jonson was a main force. And some
practitioners stood outside the development of
balanced smoothness; Donne's bold irregularity, in
his satires, elegies, and Anniversaries , was very much
his own.

The so-called Spenserians, Michael Drayton, Giles
and Phineas Fletcher, William Browne, and George
Wither, wrote in the age of Donne and Jonson, and
some of them like some of the Georgians were
resentfully conscious of an over-intellectual and
alien world. The Spenserians except the latest
and greatest, Milton inherited only provinces or
parishes of the master's domain. We can find mild
pleasure in Wither's pastoralism; we all know
Browne's concise epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke
and may have been led through Keats to dip into the
diffuse Britannia's Pastorals. Not much leads us to
Phineas Fletcher, but his brother's baroque poem,
Christ's Victory and Triumph (1610), is a landmark
between Southwell and Milton and Crashaw. The
most versatile, voluminous, and generally attrac-
tive poet of the group is Drayton, whose industry
covered the forty years before his death (1631).
His early Endymion and Phoebe and his famous
sonnet of 1619 (not his only good one) have already
been mentioned. Though he remained an Elizabethan
to the end, Drayton was in his way a conscientious
artist not unresponsive to the growing refinement
of craftsmanship. We cherish the forthright heroic
odes on Agincourt and the Virginian voyage, the
mock-heroic vivacity of Nymphidia, and the buoyant
freshness and grace of his late pastoral verse, The
Musetf Elysium. And some have relished the national
and local patriotism of the huge and heterogeneous

THE RENAISSANCE 51

Poly-Olbion. Dray ton is not the kind of poet upon
whom critics fix a microscopic eye, but he remains
the sturdy bard of both heroic and merry England.
Apart from the conservative and relatively
inconspicuous Spenserians, the dominant poetical
modes of the earlier seventeenth century are of
course represented by Jonson and Donne and their
followers, that is, by the 'cavalier' and 'metaphysi-
cal' poets. Neither of the labels is very accurate
or happy. If, when political cleavage developed,
Jonson's numerous 'sons' were active or passive
royalists, so were almost all other poets, including
the metaphysicals and Waller and Denham. And if
such courtiers as Carew, Suckling, and Lovelace
fulfil our notion of cavalier poets, they were all
disciples of Donne as well as of Jonson (and Herrick
was neither a courtier nor a Donnian). Further, no
definition of 'metaphysical' fits all of even the half-
dozen chief poets who are so grouped. One suggestive
fact is that, while there is a gulf between the typical
Jonson and the typical Donne, a few poems have been
assigned to both authors and are indeed much alike.
In short, there are not two distinct schools; there are
only a crowd of individual poets who in varying
ways and degrees partake of the elements of sensi-
bility and technique that are divided or shared
between Jonson and Donne. Poets of both kinds as a
rule turn away from the long, old-fashioned works of
the Spenserians to concentrate, with a new artistic
pressure, upon short poems and lyrics; their main
themes are the love of woman and the love or fear
of God.

The neo-classicism of Sidney was that of an aristo-
cratic and eclectic amateur of the Renaissance, and

52 ENGLISH POETRY

Elizabethan writing generally absorbed more roman-
tic than neo-classical influence from Italy, France,
and Spain. Ben Jonson (1572-1637), the first great
neo-classical theorist and dictator and the first real
'man of letters' (though he had fought abroad and
killed an actor in a duel), was almost untouched by
continental vernacular literature and drew directly
from the ancients and their Neo-Latin expositors
and imitators. He shared the ethical and especially
Stoic ideals of serious humanism; witness such poems
as Epode, To the World, and the one famous stanza
of the Pindaric ode on Cary and Morison not to
mention the commonplace-book, Discoveries. But
Jonson illustrates the humanist-poet's capacity both
for weighty observations on life and for little jewels
of art remote from life, and we identify him with his
lyrics (many of them from the plays and masques)
and non-satirical epigrams; these last, like Martial's,
include addresses to friends and epitaphs. One
difference between Jonson and Shakespeare is
exemplified by 'Come, my Celia' and C mistress
mine'. Both are variations on the universal theme,
Carpe diem, and both are consecutive arguments; but
Shakespeare's song is pastoral, popular, and 'artless'
and Jonson's is a sophisticated, particularized, and
less obviously singable paraphrase of Catullus.
Another kind of contrast is suggested by A Hymn to
God the Father \ the movement, and some phrases,
may make us think of Herbert's Discipline, but
Jonson's earnest prayer has only hints of Herbert's
metaphorical and paradoxical texture. In general,
Jonson's lyrics anfi epigrams show the virtues and the
limitations of the pure neo-classical artist. On the one
hand we find intellectual and emotional rationality

THE RENAISSANCE 53

and control, lucid and logical symmetry (even
in the organizing of such borrowed conceits as
compose 'Drink to me only with thine eyes'), and
plain English enriched by felicitous echoes of the
classics. On the other hand, we are rarely so stirred
that we forget the conscious manipulation of fancy
and word and rhythm by the skilled artificer.
Amorous rapture and paternal grief are alike tender
and graceful, detached and impersonal.

[Robert Herrickj( 1591-1674), like other 'sons' of
Ben I has a narrower poetical range and nothing of
Jonson's ethical humanism. The pieties of Noble
Numbers express more satisfaction than struggle.
The title of the secular poems, Hesperides, suggests
both the precious golden fruit of Herrick's classical
art and his blending of ancient allusion with the
'May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes' of Devon-
shire; and what is, in some moods, 'the loathed
West', is normally the pastoral Arcadia of Eliza-
bethan song. In his clerical exile from London and
tavern symposia, Herrick can labour with Horatian
patience to perfect his verses. In the dozens of little
poems on his seraglio of dainty mistresses he carries
Jonson's cool amatory art into further, one might
almost say feminine, delicacies of phrase and rhythm.
Now and then there is something like metaphysical
wit, though it is effortless and unobtrusive 'That
liquefaction of her clothes', 'Thy Protestant to be'.
And sometimes fancy rises to the plane of imagina-
tion. If we put the Night Piece to Julia beside what
may have inspired it, Jonson's 'The fairy beam upon
you', we see that in Jonson's simple dramatic song
the items are merely listed, while in Herrick Julia's,
beauty becomes the centre of the natural world. A

54 ENGLISH POETRY

perhaps better comparison is afforded by Jonson's
'Still to be neat, still to be drest' and Herrick's
Delight in Disorder. The former is a little whole of
generalized and almost prosaic statement in which
no detail calls attention to itself; Herrick's piece is a
tissue of visual particulars which are miniature para-
doxes. And while Jons on sets wholesome nature
against artifice, Herrick's praise is given to the arti-
ficial simulation of nature, and in the end his figurine
lady becomes herself a symbol of charming 'wanton-
ness' as opposed to virtuous propriety. In a very
different context Corinna, that 'sweet slug-a-bed',
becomes a somewhat parallel symbol. This elaborate
poem celebrates the merry ritual of May Day, and,
though details seem both conventional and casual,
they work subtle variations on the contrasts between
civilization and nature, Christian morality and
paganism, and finally with a sombre echo of
Catullus between amorous youth and age and death.
The same theme, more lightly treated, is still more
familiar in 'Gather ye rose-buds while ye may'; and
the immediate and lasting popularity of the lyric
attests the perfect expression that Herrick could
give to commonplaces.

We must take for granted the man-of-the-world
insouciance and sprightly humour of 'Natural, easy
Suckling', and the exalted spirit of love and honour
that kindled the best-known poems of the ideal
cavalier, Richard Lovelace, and the poetry of many
other men who deserve their place in the antholo-
gies. JThomas^ perhaps best
exemplifies the assi&lilation of a metaphysical strain
by a Jonsonian amorist. His Elegy on Donne one of
the period's few really critical essays glorifies the

THE RENAISSANCE 55

older poet's revolt against shallow classicism and
his original, tough, masculine wit and style. Such
appreciative insight prepares us for more of Donne in
Carew's own verse than we may observe, though
much is there. In general, and even in A Rapture,
Carew refines and strengthens the attitudes of the
conventional lover through his formal and stylistic
elegance. His poems are preconceived wholes, not
immediate experiences. Touches of wit are subdued
to the dominant pattern and tone, and meta-
phorical is combined with logical symmetry. Thus
To my Inconstant Mistress begins with 'thou, poor
excommunioate' and ends with 'thy false apostasy'.
A Deposition from Love carries a military metaphor
from the opening 'your rebel sex' to the final 'deposed
kings'. In the famous 'Ask me no more where Jove
bestows', successive and traditional metaphorical
hyperboles, in parallel structure and sonorous
rhythm, elevate the woman of a lover's compli-
ments into a cosmic vision. But Carew can be best
enjoyed in occasional tastes; all his technical resources
cannot disguise monotony.

If the typical cavalier lyric is an ideal, impersonal
creation of pure art, much metaphysical poetry is an
exploration of individual experience set forth with
expressive originality and immediacy. The develop-
ment of such poetry was indeed a chronological and
ideological parallel to the anti-Ciceronian movement
in prose, which grew out of sceptical, empirical, and
scientific distrust of the traditional verities and
traditional 'public' style. The metaphysical temper
or manner appears more distincthie to us at least
to those of us who think they can define it than it
did to its own age, which referred loosely to 'wit* and

56 ENGLISH POETRY

'strong lines'. William Drummond, a follower of
continental and conservative fashions, censured the
new warping of the European tradition into 'meta-
physical ideas and scholastic quiddities', and Dryden
popularized the term in that general sense. The first
full analysis came from Dr. Johnson in his life of
Cowley (1779): he emphasized the violent yoking of
unlike ideas and images, the straining after intellec-
tual subtlety, originality, particularity, and recondite
learning. Though Johnson's neo-classical standpoint
is not ours, nor his hierarchy of metaphysical poets,
his discussion remains the locus classicus which we
can modify as we choose. Modern definitions have
added or redefined various elements and qualities: a
philosophic consciousness; the fusion of thought and
feeling, and of seriousness and ironic wit; internal
tension and conflict; the active revelation of com-
plex mental processes rather than the presentation
of a finished result; the language and rhythms of
speech instead of the 'poetical'; the realistic or
erudite rather than the fanciful or mythological
image, and the functional and organic rather than
the ornamental or illustrative use of it; and so on.
But, as we observed before, no definition covers
poets so diverse as Chapman, the two Herberts,
Crashaw, Vaughan, Traherne, Cowley, Marvell, and
others. Not only are some of these doubtfully meta-
physical names, but there is metaphysical writing
elsewhere, for example, in Shakespeare's plays,
sonnets, and, in quintessence, in the enigmatic
Phoenix and the Turtle.

During this past generation the rediscovery of the
metaphysicals has had a large share in giving poetry
and criticism a new direction. In doing so it has often

THE RENAISSANCE 57

led to excessive and exclusive claims for the meta-
physical virtues and to needless and uncritical
denigration of other modes. Many of the claims

and definitions are based chiefly onpDpnncj (1572-

1631), and some need qualification even in regard to
him. If a philosophical poet is one who, like Chap-
man, has a coherent philosophy to expound, Donne
was not a philosophical poet, though he made con-
stant use of philosophical ideas. He did not banish
'rhetoric', he inaugurated a new kind; or rather, he
carried into the poetry of love the colloquial,
dramatic, ironic realism that decorum had reserved
for satire. If he fused thought and feeling, he did not
always maintain the fusion through even a short
poem, but could lapse into logical hair-splitting.
Donne is a much smaller and in some ways less
complex poet than Spenser. His technique is exciting
but, once grasped, is fairly obvious, and other rewards
are not inexhaustible, whereas Spenser continually
reveals new depths and overtones.

Whether or not the young man about town was as
loose as the poet made himself out to be, Donne was
not a mere libertine but a curious explorer of the
relations of body and soul his own body and soul,
since he has little interest in women's feelings
except as they affect his. The question of personal
involvement, or of philosophical seriousness, is
further complicated by Donne's dramatic method
and his varying admixture of wit and levity; we
remember the Paradoxes and Problems which
devote specious ingenuity to the support of any
unorthodox proposition. One of his tricks is the
turning of accepted ideals upside down as when
constancy in love is a vice or heresy. His moods

58 ENGLISH POETRY

range from the witty defence of promiscuity, or the
denial of anything but physical satisfaction, to sober
argument for the interrelations of soul and body or
for love as a self-sufficient good, the supreme good.
On this last level he can outdo the Pctrarchans in
hyperbole, but he is convincing through his ironic
indirectness, realistic particularity, ratiocination,
and explosive force. In such an unconventional
aubade as The Sun Rising, the great source of light
and life merely regulates the workaday world; the
real centre of the real world is the lovers' bed, and
their love transcends time. The same theme receives
fuller treatment in The Canonization: the private
world of love reduces bustling careerists to insigni-
ficance, and in the quiet conclusion, so different from
the violent opening, the ideal lovers are invoked as
saints. On a still higher plane of idealism are several
poems that Donne presumably addressed to his wife
(the two poems just mentioned may have been also).
'Sweetest love, I do not go' makes it clear that he
can, when he wishes, combine tension with tender-
ness, argument with lyrical melody. A Valediction:
Forbidding Mourning implies a completeness of
relationship between man and woman, and between
soul and body, that needs no proof; the images are
illustrative rather than argumentative. (The famous
conceit or 'emblem' of the compasses which may
have been derived from Guarini is more elaborate
than typical of Donne's scientific images.) And there
is complete security, with no hint of doubt or
laborious demonstration, in the grand style and
sweeping rhythms of The Anniversary, in which love
conquers both time and death.
Donne's two Anniversaries (1611-12), written

THE RENAISSANCE 59

nominally in memory of his patron's young daughter,
Elizabeth Drury, should be read along with the
Cantos of Mutability, Nosce Teipsum, The Tears of
Peace, and the Treatie of Humane Learning. Like
Spenser, Davies, Chapman, and Greville, Donne is,
in an age of growing scepticism and confusion,
taking stock of the human situation. He differs from
the other poets in mind and method and in his
keener and fuller knowledge of scientific discoveries
and speculations; a further source of pessimism is the
widespread doctrine of the decay of nature and man
as the world approaches its dissolution. Donne does
not share Chapman's humanistic faith; he is more
akin to the others, especially Greville, in his dark
view of fallen, helpless man, his ignorant pretensions
to knowledge, and his need of grace. Elizabeth
Drury, like Christ or the Virgin in Roman Catholic
meditations, is the symbol of the perfection that man
has lost. True knowledge, true salvation from sin,
can be attained only in religion and another life.
As usual, Donne expresses general ideas and attitudes
through vividly realized particulars. The obverse
side of that power which appears even in his short
poems is inadequate control of tangential details.
Although, as Mr. Martz has shown, the Anniversaries
are deliberately ordered religious exercises, the First
especially suffers from the difficulties inherent in the
symbolism and from awkward articulation of the
parts. In the Second Donne moves more freely.

Intellectually, Donne had always been a Christian,
but his progress toward assurance was hindered by
his sense of Roman Catholic outlawry, his shift to the
Church of England, his moral lapses, the worldly
disaster of his marriage, and his restless mind. His

60 ENGLISH POETRY

earlier religious poems, though not without the true
accent, were in the main composed in his intellect.
Apart from the Anniversaries, it was chiefly in the
sonnets and several hymns written after his wife's
death (1617) that the intensity of his religious experi-
ence received utterance. The worn, ascetic Dr. John
Donne has the same sensibility and technique as
Jack Donne, egocentric and dramatic violence,
passionate ratiocination, concrete particularity
and occasional ugliness of imagery, simplicity of
language and complication of idea, ironic wit,
boldly expressive irregularities of rhythm. But now
the conflicts and tensions spring from his agonized
consciousness of sin, his fear of death and divine
justice, his desperate faith in the redeeming sacrifice
of Christ. The great Fundamentalist drama is
enacted in the poet's intense imagination, and
centred in himself. For the lover of women the every-
day world had ceased to exist; now it weighs upon
the earth-bound man who cries for salvation. The
lover could triumphantly affirm love's conquest of
time; now he faces judgment and eternity 'What
if this present were the world's last night?' The
macabre strain that touched even poems of love has
full play in the sinner's preoccupation with death
though in the Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness
he feels at last something of calm security, and, flat
on his bed like a map, can see his 'west'.

In comparison with the violent Donne, the quieter
Jntensity and quieter art of his young friendfGeorge
'Herbert |( 1 593-1 633 ) may not take us by storm.
Yet the poetry & Herbert is a record of religious
experience more central and comprehensive, and
more humble, than Donne's, a record of strivings,

THE RENAISSANCE 61

failures, and victories in the practice of the Christian
life. A number of poems, to be sure, come from
the parish priest of Bemerton these are indeed
the classical picture of the beauty of order in the
Caroline church but the many greater poems are
universal. Herbert finds his themes in his own
heart, in his efforts to subdue his high, worldly,
rebellious spirit to the divine will or to rekindle the
inner flame when it seems to flicker low. What makes
Herbert a great religious and metaphysical poet
is this conflict and tension; and even when he is
intimately personal the poems are an impersonal
mirror in which anyone who would live above the
natural level may see himself. Nor is Herbert one
of the sour saints; he is a lover of music and of
'mirth'. Sometimes, happily, he feels his shrivelled
heart recover its greenness, and then he can smell the
dew and rain 'And relish versing'.

Herbert's art is neat and subtle, and to borrow
his adjectives for the Lord's 'returns' fresh, sweet,
and clean. His stanzaic and metrical experimentation
is of remarkable range, but he is avowedly devoted
to plain language and he rarely raises his voice.
Once in a while, as in the dramatically violent
opening of The Collar, he may remind us of Donne,
but even that poem is entirely developed in his own
way. Though he was a scholar and, like many men
of his age, wrote Latin and Greek verse, his images
are drawn largely from everyday life and the Bible;
some of his little shocks of surprise come from his use
of idioms of business and law in regard to the soul's
dealings with God for instance, in the sonnet
Redemption. Herbert is conspicuously fond of the
emblematic technique. The sixteenth and early

62 ENGLISH POETRY

seventeenth centuries produced, all over Europe,
hundreds of emblem books, in which allegorical and
symbolic pictures were interpreted in a versified
gloss, and the fashion affected many English poets.
One famous example is Herbert's 'Love bade me
welcome', an allegorical anecdote of Love enter-
taining a dusty, sinful traveller who hesitates to
accept such hospitality. Bountiful love on one side,
guilty reluctance on the other, are conveyed not
only in words and implications but in quick and
positive, hovering and broken rhythms; and several
climactic turns in the dialogue lead to one of Herbert's
simple, final understatements, 'So I did sit and eat'.
On its first level of meaning, the poem is an emblem
of the Eucharist; more broadly, it is a picture of
God's infinite love for erring man. Whatever their
themes and manner and length, Herbert's best poems
are organized wholes. Usually his battles are fought
under our eyes, and the issue may be in doubt, yet
every image, line, and phrase contributes to the
developing pattern; there is no fumbling or rambling.
The familiar Virtue is detached and reflective rather
than dramatic or analytical; after a series of illus-
trative contrasts, metaphysical wit condenses a life
of conflict, and its reward, into the brief, homely,
and tremendous image of the last lines. But unity
and simplicity do not exclude potent ambiguity.
At the end of The Collar, when the poet hears 'one
calling, "Child!" ' the single word is a tender rebuke
of childish rebellion, a reminder of the former
relation of Father and son, and a forgiving antici-
pation of its renewal; moreover, that word and the
poet's reply give a new meaning to the title and the
whole poem.

THE RENAISSANCE 63

If we base our definition of metaphysical poetry on
Donne and Herbert, or on them and Marvell, it
hardly touches ^Richard Crashaw|( 1 612 /13-49 ) and
must be stretched to include Henry Vaughan (1621/2
-95). Read against the background of all English
poetry, indeed, Crashaw seems to be a 'sport',
although we recognize, in excess, Italianate and
Spanish qualities that had appeared in some Eliza-
bethans and in Giles Fletcher and the early religious
verse of Donne. Crashaw, however, represents a
later wave of more extravagant conceitism, and in
his original as well as his translated work we may be
more conscious of the un-English than of the English
elements in his sensibility and poetic manner. The
first editor of Steps to the Temple (1646) described
Crashaw as 'Herbert's second, but equal, who hath
retrieved poetry of late, and returned it up to its
primitive use; let it bound back to heaven-gates,
whence it came'. But resemblance ends with
Crashaw's title and the fact of his writing sacred
poetry (he wrote some secular and even amatory
verse as well); and to move from Herbert to Crashaw
is to leave the plain little church of Bemerton
'Neither too mean nor yet too gay' for the gaudy
ornaments and pictures of Latin Catholicism.
Without going into the manifold and confusing
definitions of 'baroque' which has become a
terminological maid-of-all-work we may get at a
good part of its meaning for poetry by reading
Crashaw. He can be plain and direct 'She's for the
Moors and martyrdom' or display a genuine if
sophisticated tenderness in the ^Nativity, but his
name suggests flights of flamboyant adoration. We
see Christ, the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene,

64 ENGLISH POETRY

St. Teresa, through dazzling and 'delicious' images
of wounds, blood, fire, tears, doves. One element of
baroque which had appeared in Giles Fletcher is
the ringing of changes on the paradoxical contrasts
between the humble life, suffering, and death of
Christ and the saints and their real power and majesty.
Then there is the use of sexual images in devotional
poetry, which is far older than the Counter- Reforma-
tion, though Crashaw's rapturous intensity is his
own. It is a long way from 'I sing of a maiden' to
The Weeper or The Flaming Heart. If baroque form
is a matter of dynamic association and movement
rather than the overt, logical organization of neo-
classicism, it can easily lapse into formlessness.
There is no apparent reason why The Weeper should
not be half as long, or ten times as long, as it is;
we should prefer the former alternative.

Herbert could hardly have had two disciples more
different from himself and each other than Crashaw
and Vaughan. Vaughan had a second birth in the
two parts of Silex Scintillans ('Sparkling Flint') of
1650 and 1655. The very title, by the way, is an
emblem. Vaughan's 'conversion' was a gradual
deepening and concentration of his spiritual forces
over a period of time; among the causes were the
public and private sorrows of the Civil War, the
death of his brother William and of his wife, his own
illness, and study of the Bible and of Herbert, who
had opened the way for religious poetry. Vaughan
is the great exponent of Christian Neoplatonism in
English, and in the nature of his vision he is linked,
by affinity or debt, with the Neoplatonic and Her-
metic traditions and with such more or less mystical
spirits as Jacob Boehme, Sir Thomas Browne, and

THE RENAISSANCE 65

his own twin brother Thomas, whose Hermetic and
alchemical writings afford some glosses to Henry's
poems. Though Vaughan echoes Herbert constantly,
more so perhaps than any English poet echoes
another, his bond is rather religious than artistic; and
he is akin to Herbert in his earnestly practical piety,
his consciousness of man's and his own sinful will and
weakness and of divine love. While the poems that
stress this theme are not his best, it is his central
Christian faith that keeps Vaughan's mysticism from
dissolving into the nebulous pantheism of some later
'mystics'. He differs widely from the non-mystical
Herbert, and from most poets of the age (except
Marvell and of course Traherne), in his religious
feeling for nature. Though good Christians had the
authority of Calvin and others as well as the Bible
for God's revelation of himself in the secondary book
of his works, few men of the seventeenth century
apart from some real scientists and some occultists
approached God through nature and their senses.
Indeed the pure Neoplatonist would leave all
material things behind in his spiritual ascent; but
Vaughan delights to find the One in the Many. An
exile on earth, he is happiest when he has a glimpse
of the white purity of heaven, or of the presence of
God in bird or tree or flower or stone.

Vaughan's mystical insights cannot well be ren-
dered with the concrete precision that we regard
as a metaphysical quality. He does use colloquial
language, at times with magnificent effect 4 I saw
Eternity the other night'. But the special difficulties
of his quest, of finding a form, imagery, and language
for describing the indescribable, help to make
Vaughan a notoriously uneven craftsman. Only a
5

66 ENGLISH POETRY

few poems, such as The Night, are perfect wholes; even
in the famous, and short, The Retreat, the wording
is seldom inevitable and sometimes slipshod. In
general, and naturally enough, he is inclined to sink
or stumble between the moments of vision that bring
great phrases with them.

It is fitting that a sketch of cavalier and meta-
physical poetry should end with the poet who best
combined the two traditions, [Andrew Marveljj
(1621-78). (We have to omit many fine poems struck
off by the lesser poets, from Henry King's softly
throbbing Exequy to such clever exercises in the
amatory fashion as Cowley's.) Marvell's best poems
were written apparently in the early 1650's. The
Definition of Love and To his Coy Mistress are
among the great metaphysical poems of love, but the
latter is also in the classical tradition, and both have
a spare, clean-cut symmetry and swift, supple sonor-
ity that are very different from the normally staccato
Donne; they are not more simple but they are under
impeccable control. The essence of both poems is
paradox, yet every idea and word is an integral part
of the pattern. The very title, The Definition of Love,
is paradoxical, and the infinity of frustrated love is
rendered in terms of the exact sciences of astronomy
and geometry. Even the phrase 'extended soul' is a
philosophical paradox, and the 'iron wedges' that
follow add a scientific connotation to the Horatian
image of fate. A degree of abstract Latinate diction
and the rhythm raise the poem from a lyrical to a
heroic level. To his Coy Mistress is the period's finest
variation on the heme of Carpe diem. A series of
witty, particular, hyperbolical fancies about un-
limited space and time lead to the grim fact of

THE RENAISSANCE 67

mortality, which is realized in phrases half general
and suggestive, half particular and concrete; and
the lover resolves the antithesis between love and
death with the exhortation to use and conquer time.
The poem has the precise logical sequence of a syllo-
gism, yet it is filled with metaphysical reverberations.
And with all the changes in tone and tempo, it has
the unity and clarity, the ease and grace, of a cavalier
lyric.

But Marvell feels other tensions than those of love.
His religious and moral seriousness, his recognition
of conflict between good and evil, appears directly in
some poems and is between the lines in others; and it
embraces opposed views of nature. For Marvell, as
for Vaughan and Sir Thomas Browne, nature is the
art of God, the God who makes the tropical paradise
of Bermuda a clean Puritan temple. Nature is a
world of quiet and innocence, a refuge and refresh-
ment, yet it may be spoiled by corrupted man.
Marvell is, however, no romantic primitivist. He is
an intellectual and ethical being who, though his
mind can annihilate 'all that's made To a green
thought in a green shade', is always master of his
experience and knows the limitations of such moods.
His usually simple language and images accomplish
miracles of suggestion, as in such an ostensibly slight
poem as The Garden. At the same time Marvell can
see nature as man's corrupter and destroyer. And
ambivalent views of external as well as of human
nature appear even in the Horatian Ode upon Crom-
welVs Return from Ireland, a classical and meta-
physical poem which, for all i1^ originality, comes
closer to the heroic Horace than anything else in
English.

68 ENGLISH POETRY

The massive bulk, power, and complexity ofpbhn

Milton] ( 1 608-74) can be surveyed only from a dis-
tance, through an 'optic glass'. To look back over
the ground we have traversed, Milton's instincts and
training kept him almost untouched by metaphysical
influence though we might ask, for instance, if
'Himself is his own dungeon' (Comus, line 385) is less
metaphysical than Marvell's 'mine own precipice I
go'. He conceived of poetry as 'more simple, sensu-
ous, and passionate' than logic and rhetoric, but his
terms, even if not misconstrued, are not an adequate
description of his own work. Milton was, to put it
roughly, a Spenserian who became the greatest of
European neo-classical poets. In other words, he
belonged to what had once been, and through him
continued to be, the main stream of English poetry.
Spenser was Milton's great forerunner both as artist
and as the heroic poet of religious and ethical themes,
and was (according to Dryden's report) his avowed
master. He paid formal tribute to Shakespeare and
Jonson, and echoed these and lesser predecessors.
Milton moved rapidly from a thin and 'conceited'
Elizabethan sweetness towards concentration, order,
rationality, and restraint. Comus was a unified
mosaic of the earlier and later styles of Milton and
his whole century. The grand style of Paradise Lost
emerged in tycidgg and the heroic sonnets of the
Commonwealth period. But ornate grandeur was
not the final phase. There followed the almost
Biblical plainness of Paradise Regained and the
rugged irregularity of Samson Agonistes. Thus
Milton's art, after a few youthful poems, evolved
within the classical tradition. But while a multitude
of English and European poets became only mirrors

THE RENAISSANCE 69

of neo-classical convention, Milton's thought, feeling,
imagination, and art were conspicuously dynamic
and conspicuously his own. His mature poetry is
not less complex than that of the metaphysicals but
rather more so; its complexity, however, is further
below the surface.

Most poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies were, through the nature of their intellectual
cultivation, not only English but European, and
Milton was the greatest and the last master of that
universal knowledge which the Renaissance de-
manded of the ideal poet and teacher. And if his art
was born of the marriage of individual genius with
all Western culture, from Homer and the Bible to
his own time, it is no less fundamental that he was
not merely an artist but, like the ancients and Dante,
a citizen also. Among English and European poets
Milton was also the greatest and last of Christian
humanists. Even at Cambridge the young man had a
vision, Platonic, Christian, and Baconian, of a new
era in which free inquiry, the full resources of human
and divine knowledge, would create the perfect
society. To the fulfilment of that vision, and the
Puritan ideal of the holy community, Milton gave his
twenty best years and his eyesight. But by the time
of Paradise Lost (1667) the poet, like the age, had
altered. The central motive of the fall was Eve's
yielding to Satan's offer of superhuman knowledge,
and Milton's attitude towards such irreligious pride
aligned him with Davies and Chapman and Greville
and Donne rather than with the confident exponents
of science. %

Milton began as a serene and cloistered scholar
more skilled in Latin than in English verse; he

70 ENGLISH POETRY

revealed, however, both an intensely sensuous tem-
perament and the high ambitions of a poet-priest.
His first great English poem, On the Morning of
Christ's Nativity, written at the time of his twenty-
first birthday, has its youthful exuberance, its
Italianate conceits, but the sequence of themes is
masterfully organized the peaceful setting, the
angelic music (which links the birth of Christ with
the other two supreme events, creation and the
judgment day), and the flight of the pagan gods; and
the rhythm bears out the poet's triumphant joy in
the union and order of heaven and earth. The
Nativity is, for Milton, baroque. V Allegro and II
Penseroso (1631?) are neo-classical in their formal
patterns of parallel and contrast, in their generalized
images, the harmonizing of all details into one central
effect, the impersonal rendering of personal moods.
We might say that the subdued lushness of the
young Elizabethan has been chastened by the
rational urbanity of Jonson, though the pupil
already excels the master in his combination of
civilized grace and freshness and evocative language
and rhythms. There is some irony in the fact that
the most famous picture of Merry England in English
verse came from the great Puritan poet, the hammer
of Church and King.

It was the religious humanist, the man of contem-
plation and action, who on his twenty-fourth birth-
day made the earnest resolve, with a prayer for
sufficient grace, to live as ever in his great Task-
master's eye. The first fruits of this renewed self-
consecration wer$ On Time and At a Solemn Music
and the far longer hymn of adoration, Comics (1634).
The best preface to Comus, and to most of Milton's

THE RENAISSANCE 71

early poetry, is the account he later gave of the
growth of his youthful ideal of chastity and love.
Though he had delighted in the art of Ovid and his
fellows, he had turned from their sensual licence to
the idealism of Dante and Petrarch and the romances
of chivalry; then from 'the divine volumes of Plato 5
he had gained higher insight into the love of know-
ledge and virtue; and above all there had been 'those
chaste and high mysteries' taught by St. Paul and
celebrated in Revelation. Thus Comus is, like other
works of Milton's, at once a private and a public
utterance. The Christian Platonism of the masque
has nothing to do with the Renaissance 'religion of
beauty in women' or with the spurious Platonics of
the Caroline court; as in The Faerie Queene, the pure
light of heaven illuminates active virtue on earth.
To the enchanter's libertine naturalism the Lady
replies at first on the level of the natural reason; but
then, with a 'sacred vehemence', she rises to the
religious plane in her exaltation of 'the sun-clad
power of Chastity', 'the sage And serious doctrine of
Virginity'. And in the epilogue the Attendant Spirit,
who is a guardian angel, recapitulates the same ideas
in allusive and partly Spenserian symbolism. It has
been observed that in Comus' speech on the bounties
of nature the images have a Shakespearian immedi-
acy, and the result is an appropriate suggestion of
'mmoderate disorder; the normal texture is, so to
jpeak, composed in the single-minded assurance of
&e harmonious order of God and nature.

The texture ofjL^cidas^(l687) has the appearance
3f similar 'precomposition', but Beneath the smooth
surface there is conflict. The author of this poem has
experienced his first real shock. The drowning of a

72 ENGLISH POETRY

Cambridge acquaintance rouses the poet to nothing
less than the questioning of God's providence and
justice: why should a man, why should John Milton,
strive to fit himself for God's service when he may be
cut off on the threshold? Emotional tension is at
once heightened and controlled by the impersonal
dramatic medium of the pastoral convention.. The
most heterogeneous and outwardly decorative
details are woven into a whole of solid, objective
density and complexity of suggestion. Thus, follow-
ing the illusory solace of the passage on flowers, the
tremendous surmises on the whereabouts of the
tossing body imply partly in their volume of sound
the helplessness of puny man against the elements
that God could have restrained. In the end Milton
reaffirms the answer he had reached a hundred lines
earlier, but this assured trust in God and the con-
ditions of earthly life comes to him only with the
apocalyptic vision of the soul of Lycidas being wel-
comed into heaven. And the unearthly beauty of
jhg vision carriesthe reader upward with the poet^
During most oTtne twenty years that Miltor^gave
to the defence of liberty on many fronts, he had to
forgo his dreams of the great heroic poem and be
content with occasional sonnets to friends, on
public men and events, on his blindness and his
'late espoused saint'. Some remind us of the Horace
of genial hospitality, some of the Horace of lofty
patriotic odes. The public sonnets are both massive
and fluid, and, as we observed before, they show
features of Milton's developing epic manner.
Periphrasis, for erample, may be seen here, as in
Paradise Lost, to be not automatic inflation but a
method, no less fertile than metaphysical wit, of

THE RENAISSANCE

securing a variety of oblique effects. And the
sonnet on the massacre in Piedmont, in spite of its
especially arresting rhymes, is a structure of run-
on lines and medial pauses that approaches the
wheeling paragraphs of the epic.

The use of blank verse instead of rhyme for a
heroic poem was a bold innovation, and Milton
enlarged and refined its resources with equal
splendour and subtlety. The iambic pentameter is a
half-audible norm, providing both the pleasure of an
expected pattern and the basis of unexpected and
endless variations. The number of stresses varies
from four to six or even more, and from the heavy
to the light; the position and the weight of caesural
pauses constantly shift; and while the line is felt
as a rhythmical unit, the run-on lines and strong
medial pauses tend to make another system of
variable units that begin in one line and end in
another. But a few bald statements about mechanics
do not take us very far into Miltonic harmonies.
Whether or not we scan and consider, much of the
aesthetic effect, and even of the meaning, depends
on our reading Paradise Lost aloud and we can
seldom take breath in less than twenty lines. Since
the metrical necessities and possibilities of an epic
differ greatly from those of dramatic speech, it is
idle to compare Milton with Shakespeare.

That Milton's language and syntax are classical
and un-English is a charge more often repeated than
tested; one may simply read the poem and ask
himself how many really un-English words and
idioms he meets. Alleged classicisms are often only
forcible condensations. Like most great poets,
Milton takes daring liberties of all kinds, and, for

ENGLISH POETRY

the sake of distributing emphasis, pointing contrasts,
and so forth, he can treat long periodic sentences,
subsidiary clauses, and suspended phrases, with the
freedom of Latin arrangement, but the meaning is
hardly ever in doubt for a moment though that
meaning may carry implications and overtones that
demand slower assimilation. One general charac-
teristic of the poem, to which rhythm and diction
both contribute, is the sweeping speed of its onward
movement.

Decorum, v the grand masterpiece to observe', was
not, for a great poet, a negative rule; it was a dyna-
mic principle. And a heroic poem, above all a poem
on the fall of man, required a style of ritualistic
elevation, a style that would lift the reader out of
everyday feelings and affairs. So Milton wears his
singing robes, as Homer and Virgil had done. But he
does not wear buskins. Doubtless, if we think of the
limpid fluidity of Chaucer or Spenser, the Miltonic
manner may seem unduly heightened, even stiff;
but can we conceive of Paradise Lost in the manner
of Chaucer or Spenser (or Donne)? A realistic treat-
ment of Adam and Eve would have made them a
suburban pair practising nudism in the back garden;
Milton kept them, and the rich beauties of Eden, at a
requisite aesthetic distance. Even the universe is
stylized; when Satan, at the gates of hell, looks out
upon the warring elements of chaos, what he sees
is the vast world of astronomy, but the terms of the
description are traditional. Yet within the limits
of stylization there is room for functional variety of
language and rhythm and tone, as in the speeches of
the debaters in hell, or in the humanizing of Satan
before, and of Adam and Eve after, the fall. The

THE RENAISSANCE 75

grand archangel becomes an lago or lachimo; Adam
and Eve, in the process of corruption, speak, not
with the majestic dignity of immortal innocence,
but in the accents of a half-human Mr. and Mrs. John
Doe, calculating, persuading, lusting, quarrelling,
repenting, pleading, and forgiving. Less obvious
perhaps than stylized grandeur and energy, though
not less important, are simplicity of expression and
subtlety of suggestion. Nothing in metaphysical
poetry, or in Dante, is more simply, complexly, and
tragically suggestive in word and rhythm than the
last lines, the picture of the now very human pair,
with their blended feelings of sorrow, fear, and hope,
leaving Eden to begin their life anew in the grim
world of history.

Milton exploited to the full the opportunities for
contrast and at the same time for structural links
afforded by his fable, characters, scenes, and
thematic ideas. We have noticed the earlier and
later Adam and Eve, the earlier and later Satan.
The great rebel is opposed, on different planes, to
God, Christ, and Abdiel; heroic in hell, he shrinks
in the world of good. Heaven and hell embrace
manifold contrasts some of them already used by
Spenser between light and darkness, good and
evil, love and hate, bliss and pain, life and death,
order and anarchy, freedom and servitude, humility
and pride, reason and passion, creation and destruc-
tion. Eden has the pure beauty of nature, Pande-
monium the meretricious beauty of artifice. And
there are contrasts of implicit irony: we first look
upon Eden as we accompany Satan into it, and the
ensuing scenes of idyllic innocence are overshadowed
by his presence. The oftener we read the poem,

76 ENGLISH POETRY

the more, and more minute, bonds of contrast and
correspondence we find.

In addition to many learned or imaginative em-
bellishments of Genesis, there were available the
devices of the classical epics celestial agencies,
councils, recapitulation of the past and prophecy of
the future. The many things, large and small,
that Milton imitated from Virgil and Homer he
re-created for his own purposes, from invocations of
the Muse (which for him became prayers) to epic
similes; no ancient simile has the complex, poignant
beauty of 'Not that fair field of Enna', with its
hinted parallel between Proserpine and Eve. As
artist, Milton was humbly proud to link himself
with the classical masters; as a Christian poet, he
was always conscious of having a higher theme, and
the merely heroic qualities of the epic hero he gave to
Satan. At times even Milton could not altogether
overcome the difficulty of handling such a story as
his in the concrete terms of the heroic poem. The
war in heaven is a dubious mixture of the material
and the symbolic, though it has its great moments
and rises steadily to the climactic onset of Christ
in 'The chariot of Paternal Deity'. The nature of the
' ~roic poem partly explains also why, in spite of
. efforts, God becomes at moments dynastic
Ily less legalistic than theology had made
he poet is vehemently repudiating the
'c Jehovah and vehemently proclaiming
onsible freewill and God's providence and
r hen God himself expounds the case, his
few disastrous lines, is that of John
ning the foes of righteousness. Else-
be a figure of divine sublimity.

THE RENAISSANCE 77

But even if Milton's presentation of the forces of
good is almost inevitably inadequate, we should
not let that, along with his powerful presentation
of evil, distort our view of his total conception. We
must, when we begin the poem, assume that God
represents perfect goodness, love, reason, order,
whatever ideal absolutes we at least wish to believe
in. If we start there, we shall not be carried away
by Satan's first great speech of defiance, which so
many romantic readers of the past and present have
taken as splendidly heroic. Milton often uses the
Elizabethan dramatic method, giving to characters
speeches that violate the assured beliefs and con-
victions of the audience and that will be accordingly
condemned; the poet could count on such beliefs
and convictions in his early readers. When Satan
denounces God as a wicked tyrant, a mere wielder
of superior force, and sets himself up as an injured
and righteous rebel, he is blaspheming all goodness
and order and glorifying pride, passion, and anarchy.
Here, and throughout (candid soliloquy exccpted),
Satan and his followers, being enveloped in spiritual
blindness, are enveloped in dramatic irony. Obviously
Milton had enough dramatic imagination to create
the tremendous figure; we can hardly talk about
the poet's self-projection unless we are prepared
to give the same naive verdict on Shakespeare
and his villains. And the modern reaction against
secular liberalism has made the spiritual climate
much more favourable than it was a generation
ago to the understanding of Milton's vision of
order and humility. Even if we abandon theology
(including the poet's bold heresies and metaphysical
ideas), the poem remains a great and living myth

78 ENGLISH POETRY

of the war between good and evil in the world and
in the soul of man, of irreligious pride and the waste
land it has created, a great affirmation of the power
of good. It is indeed, in its yoking of opposites, its
depiction of conflict, a metaphysical poem on a
grand scale.

The sin of Adam and Eve was the dramatic centre
of Paradise Lost. Paradise Regained (1671) is a
simpler kind of drama, in a style of almost uniformly
simple statement. Alone in the wilderness, but with
light from above, the ideal man, the type of humble
obedience, resists all the allurements of the world
and, finally, of the intellectual pride that had seduced
Eve. It is only with the last temptation and its
swift sequel that the hero's divinity is made fully
manifest. Samson Agonistes (1671) is of course a
drama proper, the one classical tragedy in English
that stands, in conception and texture on a level
with those of the Greeks. The massive, ~se

is still another kind of 'classical' writ
movement notably in the superimp
rhythm upon another which G. M. H
counterpoint has a new kind of '
The real drama goes on in the soul c#
there is more than Sophoclean irony**
from the title and the first line to']
Whatever parallels between Sam s.
kindled the poet, eyeless in Londfl
the Second, the result was compile
Samson, like Christ, resists a ser
tions, but he is a wholly human sinn
odds, and the process of resistance
demands the conquest of self a
Further, as Christ's mission was rr

THE RENAISSANCE 79

Mary and the disciples as well as by Satan, so
Samson, isolated even from his sympathizers, is
alone with God in his inward struggles. Thus in
Milton's three major works not to recall the untried
idealism of Comus the theme is temptation; and the
old, blind revolutionary, whose public hopes had
been crushed, puts his final faith only in God and the
individual soul.

CHAPTER III

THE AGE OF REASON AND
SENSIBILITY

IF Milton's Christian humanism could accommodate
his theological heresies 'and monistic view of matter
and spirit (beliefs which, to be sure, he drew from
the Bible), other men would soon go farther, and
some had already done so. As Milton and earlier
poets had partly seen,, the pressure of science and
scientific rationalism was radically altering the
basis and scope of knowledge and threatening age-old
beliefs and values. The great body of encyclopaedic
information that had united Aristotle, Pliny,
Ptolemy, and Galen with Shakespeare, Donne, and
Browne subsided, with relative rapidity, into limbo.
Although siich leaders- of the Royal Society as Boyle
and Newton were earnestly religious, the experi-
mental method implied, as always, a complex of forces
to be measured rather than a world to be contem-
plated. Then the traditional conception of nature as
the art of God, which' could be held by such medical
men as Vaughan and Browne, encountered the
Hobbesian view of ' nature, and even of mental
experience, as consisting of bodies moving in space
and time. Although Hobbes's mechanistic and
deterministic materialism was assailed on all sides,
it chilled the spiritual and ethical atmosphere
witness the contrast between Paradise Lost and
Dryden's The State of Innocence. Finally, sceptical
thought, which had been rising in strength ever since

80

AGE OF REASON AND SENSIBILITY 81

antiquity, brought forth a formidable series of
deistic arguments for natural religion as against
revelation.

This scientific and critical rationalism, the first
conspicuous English phase of the Enlightenment,
had obvious effects upon poetry. Much great writing
of the age had been born of beliefs, aspirations, and
struggles centred in the unquestionable truths of
sin, grace, and redemption. Now, for advanced
thinkers, God was a theoretical first cause of motion
and the world was a mechanical system of bodies of
which one contained the aggregates of atoms known
as men a very modern version of the old macrocosm
and microcosm which had held God, nature, and man
in close association. But if some poets were disturbed,
others were riot; the veteran Cowley felt no qualms
in glorifying not only Dr. Harvey but Hobbes and
the bold explorers of the Royal Society. Moreover,
if, as Bacon had assumed, truth and reality belonged
to science, and poetry to the unreal world of fancy,
the inevitable result of the new rationalism was to
sap the poet's trust in imagination and intuition,
to banish whatever savoured of the irrational, and to
encourage direct, verifiable comment upon men and
manners, upon unchanged human nature. In other
words, men of letters inclined towards a comfortable
deism, and poetry became to a large degree public,
occasional, mundane, social. Much of it, and much of
the best, was satire. We might remember Yeats's
remark perhaps qualifying his censure that men
make rhetoric out of their quarrels with others,
poetry out of their quarrels with themselves.

Such an ideological revolution, even if few poets
went along with it very far, would affect the language
6

82 ENGLISH POETRY

and tone as well as the motives and themes of
poetry. There was, besides, the concerted effort of
the Royal Society, following Bacon's lead, to establish
a language and style of precise denotation. Neither
the prose of Burton and Milton and Browne nor the
plain prose of more popular writers was a medium
for scientific reports or rigorous thought. And there
was among churchmen of whom a number had
scientific interests a parallel reaction against the
purple eloquence of Jeremy Taylor and his kind; one
scientific cleric proposed an act of Parliament 'to
abridge Preachers the use of fulsom and lushious
Metaphors'. The cult of dry, exact, unfigurative
statement in prose helped to remake the canons of
poetry, with some gains no doubt, and certainly
with great losses. It was not Milton and Dry den
but mainly the spirit of science that brought about
'the dissociation of sensibility' (and metaphysical
poetry had gone to seed anyhow). We might describe
a real change in exaggerated form by saying that
whereas the older poets had thought and felt in
images and symbols, the Augustan poets were
inclined to think in prose and add illustrative orna-
ments. 1

If in some areas the authority of tradition was
undermined by science, in others it was strengthened
by neo-classicism, and sometimes the two creeds
reinforced each other. It was not until the Augustan
age that neo-classical doctrine was fully formulated
the locus classicus is the young Pope's Essay on
Criticism and commanded the general allegiance of

1 'Augustan' refers properly to the Restoration period and
its feeling of kinship with the Rome of Augustus, but it is used
here, as it often is, for the whole age of Dryden and Pope,
roughly 1660-1750.

AGE OF REASON AND SENSIBILITY 83

poets and critics. The key-word is 'nature' that
master-key to a bewildering number of doors in the
history of literature and thought. In brief, nature is
the rational, civilized, traditional norm in every
department of human activity, from metaphysics to
etiquette, and literature exhibits both the ideal and
departures from it. In poetic practice, since the
poet imitates nature, and since the supreme imitators
of nature were the ancients, 'To copy nature,' as
Pope said, 'is to copy them.' The principle of imita-
ting authors which was itself ancient had its good
as well as its bad side. It could discourage originality,
exalt 'judgment' far above 'wit', and engender
academic exercises divorced from life. On the other
hand, for good poets, imitation of the ancients
meant an active consciousness of the European
tradition, of great matter and form and style, of
rational and enduring standards of good sense and
good taste; on a more practical level, it kept alive
the useful distinctness of the various genres and the
principles of decorum. If such a creed recoiled from
the eccentric, whether in metaphysical conceits
or Puritan 'enthusiasm', it was also a civilizing and
unifying force; whatever our possible illusions about
the cultural solidarity and peace of the Augustans,
their standing-ground seemed enviably firm. And
the great English exponents of neo-classicism, from
Dryden or Ben Jonson to Dr. Johnson, had
little or nothing of the formalistic rigour of their
French counterparts. Even in this one period when
neo-classical authority was dominant, English indi-
vidualism and good sense kept application of 'the
rules' within the limits of a healthy flexibility; and
other factors contributed to the same result, from

84 ENGLISH POETRY

Longinus to Shakespeare and the popular ballads.
Dryden, for example, could pronounce Chaucer a
more natural, a more truly classical, poet than Ovid.

When we think of the language of Augustan poetry
we may think first, perhaps unfairly, of 'poetic
diction', of those abstract generalities and inflated
periphrases that give a glossy vagueness to so much
writing of the period, and not merely of bad poets
the great treasury, if not factory, was Pope's trans-
lation of Homer. Such diction, which had begun to
appear at the end of the Elizabethan age, came most
obviously from the study, writing, and translation
of Latin verse; from the uninspired and greatly
exaggerated cultivation of one element in Milton;
and from the effort both to avoid the 'lowness' of
concrete realism (exemplified in Homer and Shake-
speare) and to achieve 'the grandeur of generality',
an approximation to uniform nature truer than that
of particulars. In Milton and earlier writers this
poetic diction was not only much more sparing in
quantity but was more commonly justified by special
purposes; in much Augustan verse it was automatic.
The liking for rhetorical periphrasis and generic
images was not altogether in harmony with the
scientific impulse towards precise denotation, yet the
two could flourish together and even support each
other, since science itself tends to abstraction and
some elements of poetic diction were petrified science.

Augustan prosody could allow of lyrical forms,
simple or elaborate, and of miscellaneous measures,
notably the tetrameter couplet, and the Miltonic
revival stimulated pseudo-Miltonic blank verse, but
the main interest centred in the heroic couplet, the
closed, balanced, often antithetical pattern that was

AGE OF REASON AND SENSIBILITY 85

touched upon in the preceding chapter. Such
masters as Dryden and Pope could, like Milton, vary
the number and weight of stresses and pauses, and
could mix run-on and end-stopped lines and couplets,
yet these and other variations, while handled with
expressive skill, were confined within relatively
narrow limits. We might almost say of the Augustan
couplet what has been said of Macaulay's prose
style, that it is impossible to tell the truth in it not
that that would have troubled the satirists who used
it with such pungent brilliance. The prosodic and
other qualities the Augustans admired they traced
especially to 'those Standard-bearers of Wit and
Judgment, Denham and Waller'. According to
Dryden' s famous eulogy, the excellence and dignity
of rhyme

'were never fully known till Mr. Waller taught it;
he first made writing easily an art: first showed us
to conclude the sense most commonly in distichs,
which, in the verse of those before him, runs on
for so many lines together, that the reader is
out of breath to overtake it. This sweetness of
Mr. Waller's lyric poesy was afterwards followed in
the epic by Sir John Denham, in his Cooper's Hill,
a poem which your Lordship knows for the majesty
of the style is, and ever will be, the exact standard
of good writing.'

The orthodox verdict identified Waller with sweet-
ness and Denham with strength, or, as we might put
it, with smooth regularity and conciseness. It is
almost an obligation of piety to recall Denham's
quatrain on the Thames, which was long admired
as the epitome of the virtues it described:

86 ENGLISH POETRY

O could 1 flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without overflowing full.

This kind of writing may not excite us, but the lines
do sum up a classical ideal. In general, with regard
to matter, style, and versification, we must remem-
ber, and respect, what was comprehended in the
ideal of 'correctness'. Part of it is contained in
'What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd',
and the number of semi-proverbial lines from
Augustan poets that are lodged in our minds are
rough evidence of the finality they could give to the
expression of general experience. It was natural
that they should especially cherish Horace, the poet
of rational moderation, urbanity, and chiselled
commonplaces.

We must turn to some poets, or kinds of poetry.
The amatory lyrics of the Restoration wits, Roches-
ter, Sedley, Dorset, and others, are the trifles tossed
off by gentlemen who wrote with ease, and they
seldom rise above a conventional piquancy. A
man-about-town polish replaces the delicate art and
the idealistic note of the cavalier poets. On that
contrast, and the still larger contrast between
Restoration and metaphysical poems of love, we may
remember Dryden's canonical remark that Donne

'affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires,
but in his amorous verses, . where nature only
should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair
sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he
should engage their hearts, and entertain them
with the softnesses of love'.

AGE OF REASON AND SENSIBILITY 87

In the songs in Dryden's plays, nature undoubtedly
reigns.

Although the Augustan age did not yield very good
or very much lyrical verse, it was, or brought in, the
age of hymn- writing; and not many of even the great
English lyrics have been so widely known as 4 O
God, our help in ages past', 'When I survey the
wondrous Cross', 'Jesus, lover of my soul', *O for a
closer walk with God', and many others. As poetry
the hymns of Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, and
Cowper are not very near the medieval hymns and
carols, or the poems of Herbert, but they have the
intensity of earnest evangelicalism and are perhaps
more moving than the calm deistic assurance of
Pope's Universal Hymn and Addison's Ode.

While the secular lyric rarely soared (and might
be represented at its unpretentious best by Prior's
vers de societe), many versifiers, even Watts, joined
in what Dr. Johnson called 'the Pindarick folly then
prevailing'. We, who have Keats if not Pindar in
mind, have difficulty in appreciating even the
best of these grandiose, brassy odes. Alexander's
Feast, the product of Dryden's old age, has cer-
tainly strength of a kind, though it seems a libretto
less appropriate for Handel than for Sousa. The
elegiac ode on Anne Killigrew (1685) is really a
celebration of the divine art of poetry (and perhaps
the most impressive lines are the not blameless
dramatist's rebuke of the licentious stage). This
highly organized, highly civilized ode has been
regarded as a masterpiece, and yet despite its
larger theme it suggests a public orator citing a
gifted young woman for a celestial degree. It is
typical of the age that many beliefs and ideas, while

88 ENGLISH POETRY

remaining more or less usable, have lost much of
their older religious and imaginative actuality and
authenticity. At the climactic picture of the day of
judgment,

When rattling bones together fly
From the four corners of the sky,

we cannot help remembering

At the round earth's imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go.

Dryden's use, in his Song for St. Cecilia's Day, of
traditional ideas of cosmic love and music may also
awaken memories of an earlier time, say, of the
young Milton's At a Solemn Music. As for Pope's ode
on St. Cecilia, some passages might have claimed
prominence in the author's discourse on the art of
sinking.

While our Pindaric pinions are spread, we might
fly on a generation to the two mid-century poets
especially associated _with the ode, {Thomas GravJ

/ i f-i * rvi \ ^ _ 1 IfXTMl! /^ _ll_t!^T' : / 1 rve\t t?r\\~" TfV^TjuL ~ C

(1716-71) and {William Collinsi;(1721-59)TB<^ of

course illustrate early phases in the transition from
neo-classtcism to romanticism. Gray's Sonnet on the
Death of Richard West

In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,
And reddrtng Phoebus lifts his golden fire

was, we remember, pilloried in Wordsworth's Preface
of 1800 though we may remember also that the

AGE OF REASON AND SENSIBILITY 89

trite images and language expressed real grief. Gray's
early odes were elegant compounds of platitudes,
inert conventions, and poetic diction. In the poem
on the death of the cat (which becomes a symbol of
woman), inflation is adapted to mock-heroic use
with humorous irony; but that piece stands apart.
No one could have predicted that the author of these
things would produce what was to be for many
generations, and perhaps still is, the best-known
secular poem in the language.

The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751)
compelled even Dr. Johnson to put aside his dislike
of Gray and 'concur with the common reader':
'The Churchyard abounds with images which find
a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to
which every bosom returns an echo.' Images and
sentiments are general, and poetic diction and
abstractions still abound, but if any theme justifies
generalities, it is the life and death of the humble and
unknown. A scholar-poet's feeling for such people
may have been 'pre-romantic', but Gray did not
know that; he did know that death, worldly fame,
poverty, frustration, and contentment were universal
facts and feelings, and the Elegy is a mosaic of
traditional motifs, classical and modern. The
general statements have much Augustan antithesis,
and most nouns have their foreordained epithet.
Apart from some elaborate periods and inversions,
the line or the distich is the unit, and the stanzas are
mainly self-contained units (which sometimes could
just as well be in a different order); they do, however,
have a more contemplative flow*than the Augustan
couplet allowed. The slow pace and melancholy
tone are partly a matter of long vowels and internal

90 ENGLISH POETRY

assonance and alliteration. But these things do not
explain why the Elegy remains a great poem while its
many congeners are dead. One obvious reason is a
power of style which makes almost every line an
example of 'What oft was thought, but ne'er so well
express'd'. Images, though generalized, can be none
the less evocative. The antitheses are more than
antitheses; they are a succession of dynamic and
ironic contrasts between ways and views of life. And
all this inward force comes from a full sensibility
working under precise control. In its combination
of personal detachment and involvement, as well as
in its generalized texture, the Elegy is in some sense
an eighteenth-century Lycidas.

In his later Pindaric odes Gray wrote, with energy,
in 'the big bow-wow strain' the genre prescribed,
though his scholarly knowledge or conscience far
excelled his predecessors'. The Progress of Poesy, in
title, theme, and substance, may be said to look
backward, while The Bard was symptomatic of the
growing interest in medieval and Celtic lore and
bardic poetry (of which Homer was now becoming
the great prototype). Further, in The Progress of
Poesy touches of 'wildness' stand out from general
conventionality; in The Bard, conventionalities are
included in a general wildness. In the still later
odes, The Fatal Sisters and The Descent of Odin,
which were free translations, Gray's increasing hold
upon Norse poetry enabled him to escape from
Augustan rhetoric into something like a stark heroic
vein:

*

Now the storm begins to lower
(Haste , the loom of Hell prepare), . . .

AGE OF REASON AND SENSIBILITY 91

Since Gray had from the first echoed Milton's early
poems, it is of interest to find him doing so even in
The Bard and The Descent of Odin.

Although Collins, unlike most of his Latinist
predecessors and contemporaries, profited from
Greek poetry, he did not bind himself to the Pindaric
chariot. He praises the Greek simplicity that fled
from Augustan Rome, and at his best he avoids both
the turgid and the tepid modes of eighteenth-century
verse. If The Passions is an exception, its personi-
fications are partly redeemed by lines like these
(which, along with other things in Collins, must have
been remembered by Keats):

They would have thought who heard the Strain,
They saw in Tempers Vale her native Maids,
Amidst the festal sounding Shades,
To some unwearied Minstrel dancing. . . .

The titles of most of Collins' odes Pity, Fear,
Simplicity, the Poetical Character, Evening, The
Passions, Popular Superstitions of the Highlands
indicate his prime concern with inward emotion, both
normal and 'romantic', rather than with external
and public themes. The melodious, unrhymed
To Evening and 'How sleep the Brave' are lyrical
meditations, not orthodox odes. And in creating
moods Collins uses particulars as well as generali-
ties; compare, for instance, the third stanza of To
Evening with the second of Gray's Elegy.

While he is most original and attractive in his
simpler and quieter pieces, Ct)llins' impassioned
imaginative flights show other 'romantic' impulses.
It is characteristic, of him at least, that whereas

92 ENGLISH POETRY

Gray salutes Shakespeare as 'Nature's Darling', the
painter of spring and joy (though horror, fear, and
tears do squeeze in), Collins invokes him as the
supreme poet of fear. Numerous writers, the War-
tons and others, were celebrating solitude, revery,
enthusiasm (this was now a virtue!), but none of
them approached Collins in sensibility and ex-
pressive power. In the ode on Highland supersti-
tions he leaves not only the city but what was
commonly regarded as the country for a world of
primitive mystery and terror that stirs and feeds
the poetic imagination. Remembering the orthodox
Augustan view of 'nature', we appreciate the poet's
conscious extension of it to

scenes like these, which, daring to depart
From sober truth, are still to nature true. . . .

If in this ode the raw material has not been sufficiently
melted down, the same essential spirit is distilled in
the Poetical Character. Starting from the magic
girdle of Spenser's Florimel, Collins revives, with
daedal freshness, the traditional idea of the poet
as a creator akin to God:

The Band, as Fairy Legends say,

Was wove on that creating Day,

When He, who calVd with Thought to Birth

Yon tented Sky, this laughing Earth,

And drest with Springs, and Forests tall,

And poured the Main en girting all. . . .

Here is the renatcence of wonder. No other poets
of the century have such visions except two who,
like Collins, were 'mentally deranged', Christopher

AGE OF REASON AND SENSIBILITY 98

Smart and Blake. In Smart's magnificent canticle,
Song to David (1763), enthusiasm and imagination
are fused in a religious flame, and as for Gerard
Hopkins the world is charged with the grandeur of
God.

The early eighteenth century yields a quantity of
light and humorous verse, from Prior, Gay, and Swift
(in his genial moods) up to Goldsmith and Cowper.
And there are miscellaneous things of more or less
interest, ranging from Lady Winchilsea's 'romantic'
musings on nature to Pope's 'romantic' Eloisa to
Abelard, which made Ovidian rhetoric the medium
of religious tension. But the overwhelmingly pre-
dominant kinds of verse were the satirical and the
reflective, and the best of the former has much more
vitality than the best of the latter. Elizabethan
satire including most of Donne's was the one
really dull product of that golden age, but satire was
the great channel of Augustan genius. However
anti-heroic its method, satire in any age is likely to
spring rather from idealism than cynicism, and in
Augustan satire perhaps the only real cynic was
Rochester. The traditional motive of satire, the
chastisement and correction of folly, hypocrisy, and
vice, implies a rational and positive and usually
conservative standard, and we have observed the
central place of reason, nature, and uniformity in
the Augustan view of man and society. But however
sincerely that ideal, and the didactic motive, were
held, we need not discount the satisfaction derived
from the exercise of a gift for exposing human weak-
nesses, especially in individuals cJne dislikes. Pope
was not merely the zealous instructor of mankind
when he exultantly proclaimed:

94 ENGLISH POETEY

Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see
Men not afraid of God, afraid of me:
Safe from the Bar, the Pulpit, and the Throne,
Yet touched and shamed by Ridicule alone.

Some men, Samuel Butler and Pope in verse,
Shadwell in a play, and Swift in prose, made fun,
with varying degrees of seriousness, of the pursuits
of the Royal Society and the pretensions of science,
but the main areas of Augustan satire were man and
society, religion and politics, and literature and
writers. Since the classical theory of satire and the
temper of the age set up nature and reason as the
standard of judgment, there might seem to be
discord between the strong Augustan instinct for
generality and satire's essential need of incisive,
arresting particulars (a need that has often led
to a fatal excess of topical detail). Augustan
satirists, like the ancients, did not all follow the
same method.

While we do not read the complimentary odes that
welcomed back Charles II, we do read at least the
first canto of a livelier celebration of Royalist-
Anglican triumph, Butler's Hudibras (1663). Com-
pared with later, or with Elizabethan, satires on
Roman models, Butler's portrait of the Puritan
enthusiast, hypocrite, pedant, fool, and knave was
sui generis. The author stood apart from neo-classical
modes in his burlesque use of Don Quixote and
chivalry, his octosyllabic metre, the boisterous high
spirits that gave birth to fantastic rhymes and other
surprises, and th# rough but pointed terseness of his
wit. He might almost be said to belong to the
metaphysical line, at any rate the Cleveland branch,

AGE OF REASON AND SENSIBILITY 95

in his linking of dissimilar ideas and images and his
reliance upon a mixture of commonplace and erudite
particulars. But, like the Puritan preachers, Butler
did not know when to stop.

We would give Marvell's satires many times over
for one more lyric (what a change the Restoration
worked in him!), and we would much rather read
Dryden's noble elegy on Oldham than Oldham's
satires on the Jesuits, but Absalom and Achitophel
and MacFlecknoe (1681-2) are among their versatile
author's chief claims to greatness. In his elaborate
comparison of Horace and Juvenal (A Discourse
concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, 1693),
Dryden put Horace first for moral instruction, but
found him less elevated and public-spirited, less
vigorous, sharp, and witty than Juvenal. And yet,
he concluded, however powerful the angry declama-
tion of Juvenal, 'still the nicest and most delicate
touches of satire consist in fine raillery', and that
comes from inborn genius. 'How easy is it', he
observes, 'to call rogue and villain, and that wittily!
But how hard to make a man appear a fool, a block-
head, or a knave, without using any of those oppro-
brious terms!' This is the satirical genius that we
see in Dryden, who preferred to see it in the noble
lord of his dedication. He did, though, cite his own
'character' of Ziniri (the Duke of Buckingham),
which gave its original amusement rather than
offence because, instead of railing at crimes, the
satirist touched 'blindsides, and little extravagan-
cies'.

If^we do not agree that Zimrhis worth the whole
poem, it is only because the other characters and
much of the narrative and speeches manifest such

96 ENGLISH POETRY

rhetorical skill, energy, and tartness. One general
couplet epitomizes the anti-Puritanism of Hudibras:

A numerous Host of dreaming Saints succeed,
Of the true old Enthusiastic^ Breed.

It is, however, the characters that we come back to
David (King Charles), who so prodigally 'Scatter'd
his Maker's Image through the Land'; Achitophel
(Shaftesbury), who like other themes inspires
lines that transcend topical satire:

A fiery Soul, which, working out its way,

Fretted the Pigmy Body to decay,

And o'r informed the Tenement of Clay;

arid Shimei (Sheriff Bethel),

whose Youth did early Promise bring
Of Zeal to God and Hatred to his King;
Did wisely from Expensive Sins refrain,
And never broke the Sabbath, but for Gain.

Despite his own comment, Dry den is hardly less
good on public than on private faults and vices, and
he so merges the individual with the typical that not
only the restless, changeable Zimri but the others
stand as 'all Mankind's Epitome'. Further, Dryden
keeps his temper, no matter how strong his contempt
or abhorrence, and his emotional and artistic control
intensifies the effect; he displays to vary Chester-
ton's phrase about Matthew Arnold's prose the
provoking forbearance of a teacher in an idiot
school. When he comes, in the Second Part, to deal
with his literary enemies, Settle (Doeg) and especially
Shadwell (Og), he is moved to something more than
fine raillery Tor ev'ry inch that is not Fool is

AGE OF REASON AND SENSIBILITY

97

Rogue' but he is most blistering in making the pair
absurd. And throughout MacFlecknoe (written in
1678), he had wrapped Shadwell in mock-heroic
laughter, and literary criticism, rather than abuse.
As. for the satirist's poetical skill, even our few and
brief quotations recall the polished plainness and the
suggestive irony of his diction, his variety of move-
ment and tone, and the antithetical shocks so often
driven home by forceful rhymes. And even here, as
in his more sober poems, Drydcn's heroic effects
were heightened by imitation of his beloved Virgil.
Satire bulks much larger in the work of Pope
(1688-1744) than in Dryden's. There are not
only The Rape of the Lock (1712-14"), The Dunciad
(1728-43), and the imitations of Horace and Donne
(1733-8), but also more or less of the Essay on Criti-
cism (1711), Moral Essays (1731-5), and Essay on
Man (1733-4). 'I was not born for Courts or great
Affairs', said Pope, in that very witty, sometimes
moving, and sometimes disingenuous apologia for a
satirist, the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735), and his
satire is chiefly social and literary. He professed,
sincerely enough, the orthodox motives; but if his
satires were in the tradition of 'delightful teaching 1 ,
the delight was felt in different ways and degrees by
the poet and his few friends who were above reproach,
by those victims who could forget their wounds in
the enjoyment of others', and by the general literary
public. Members of the third class, if they were not
'in the know', would miss a good deal of personal and
topical allusion, and modern readers are still farther
from coffee-house gossip. Whereas Dryden so general-
izes the particular that we get on with a modicum
of facts, we must read the Dunciad and much else

98 ENGLISH POETRY

with one eye on footnotes. Of course the special
brilliance of Pipe's satire depends to a large extent on
his pointed particulars

Now Night descending, the proud scene was o'er,
But liv'd, in Settle's numbers, one day more

yet he, or the reader, does encounter the law of
diminishing returns. At any rate the more we know
of classical and later literature the more we enjoy
Pape, since he is a very literary poet who gets some
of his best results in echoing others.

The Dunciad was the offspring of MacFlecknoe
especially, but, much more than Dryden, Ppe
'stinks and stings', or at least stings. In his most
comprehensive effort to work off his partly justi-
fiable grudges, it is a question if the mock-heroic
machinery and the often obscure details are quite
witty enough to prevent some tedium though a
number of good critics have no doubts. Whatever
may be urged on the ground of Pipe's genuine zeal
for high standards in literature, the reader may be
kept less conscious of positive values than of a great
and successful artist's pursuit of a shoal of small
fry. As for the conclusion, which made the author's
voice falter in the reading, and affected Dr. Johnson
in the same way, it may seem to us to have more
grandiose rhetoric than sublimity.

Pipe's 'characters', in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot
and Moral Essays, are partly in line with Dryden's,
in that some features belong to human nature in
general

Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike

AGE OF REASON AND SENSIBILITY 99

but they may differ in their total effect. Pope is likely
to focus his eye so sharply upon his sitters that the
typical is more submerged in the individual. And,
though he can treat minor victims with something of
Dryden's careless contempt, when he wants to draw
blood his voice grows shrill. Pope evidently felt a
special affinity with Horace, but he seems still more
remote from him than from Dry den. The Imitations
of Horace are commonly read, and well may be, as
independent English poems, yet comparison with
Horace's satires and epistles enhances our respect for
the skilful ease with which Pope transliterates or
re-creates the originals in terms of Augustan London.
Not that he was much like Horace, except in devo-
tion to his art. Instead of following the ambling pace,
the colloquial tone, and the mellow moralizing of
Horace, Pope hurries along with a machine-gun in his
hands, discharging gibes and aphorisms with equal
briskness. However colloquial much of his language
and idiom, the steady succession of well-wrought
phrases and snapping couplets gives little illusion of

casual talk.

\The RapeofiheJLacittis a perfect if not a complete
expression of Pope's poetic and satirical genius. It is
among other things a classical display of nature and
reason as the basis of manners and of departures
therefrom as the basis of satire. Both sides in the
squabble have been foolish, and their folly is made
manifest, but with cool urbanity and grace, since
there is nothing here to involve the poet himself and
ruffle his temper. (One or two of the dramatis
personae were ruffled, and Sir 3*lume, who inspired
one of the most exquisite bits, was moved to threats
of violence.)

100 ENGLISH POETRY

The mock-heroic scheme, which has a tincture of
its opposite, burlesque, was not of course original.
The Augustan age had carried on, generally with
more crude gusto than art, the comic treatment of
classical poems and epic 'machines' which, in Eng-
land as elsewhere, was a natural reaction from uni-
versal veneration, although, as with Boileau and
Ppe, it did not necessarily imply any lack of real
reverence. But Pepe went far beyond any prede-
cessor in the polished, pointed refinement and 'dead-
pan' irony of his epic adaptations, classical and
Miltonic, in the complex wit and elegance of his
whole conception and texture. And here footnotes
are seldom needed, at least if we know the classics;
most of the countless particulars are as clear and
bright as ever, though they may carry overtones and
undertones. It is in such mock-heroic satire, in the
witty yoking of opposites, that the Augustans come
closest to the metaphysical tradition, though their
materials and purposes are so different, and though
all things are controlled by a stricter decorum.

I, O ,_ - JL. -.

In Slbg-Jt^G-Jlfjlht J^ockl strict control rather
heightens than diminishes ironical complexity. The
world of fashion has a code, shallow and confused
though it is, and is shocked by a trifling violation of it.
The alternatives of staining 'her Honour, or her new
Brocade' belong, by orthodox standards, to very
different sets of values, but, in this special world, to
the same one. Similar irony envelops husbands and
lapdogs and other antithetical conjunctions. As
Mr. Tillotson says, the disorder on Belinda's dressing-
table Tuffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux*
is fundamentally a moral disorder; it carries us
back to the sly hints of Herrick's Delight in Disorder

AGE OF REASON AND SENSIBILITY 101

and ahead to the dressing-table in The Waste Land.
There are contrasts between the natural sun and the
'tinsel Insects' it shines upon, between their irre-
sponsible triviality and the actual world in which
'Wretches hang that Jury-men may dine'. And there
are, at once contrasted with and modified by their
context, gleams of unspoiled nature, of ideal beauty.
To Sir Plume's stuttering expletives the peer replies
with an asseveration that parodies Achilles' oath on
the leafless staff he held, and yet one couplet on the
lock of hair

Which never more its Honours shall renew,
Clipt from tlie lovely Head where late it grew

holds a momentary parallel with FitzGerald's

That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
Dropt in her Lap from some once lovely Head.

Or, if we take a couplet of transparent simplicity,

On her white Breast a sparkling Cross she wore,
Which Jews might kiss, and Infidels adore,

we have a network of paradoxes: the contrast be-
tween nature and art (as in Milton and Spenser, but
with a difference); the most sacred and tragic of
religious symbols as the conventional ornament of a
court beauty; the struggle of the Crusaders against
the foes of their faith reduced to the plane of amorous
gallantry; and the conversion of Jews and infidels
into Christians through the power, not of the Cross,
but of the white breast. *

If the wit of Pope's more masculine satires is
much less delicate than this, it is still much more

102 ENGLISH POETRY

nimble than that of Samuel Johnson's two imitations
of Juvenal, London (1738) and The Vanity of Human
Wishes (1749). As we might expect from Johnson's
criticism, he refuses to dress his general thoughts
about general nature with the spice of particulars,
and posterity has been fond of deflating

Let Observation, with extensive view,
Survey mankind, from China to Peru.

Yet these serious, sober satires especially the
second, whose title pretty well sums up Johnson's
sombre outlook do, with all their abstractions and
monotonous antitheses, leave an impression. Even
generalities can be moving when concentrated phrases
carry the weight of common and painful experience
'Slow rises worth, by poverty depress'd'; 'Toil,
envy, want, the patron, and the jail'.

The other main body of Augustan verse, after
satire, is the didactic and descriptive, which, like a
wounded snake, or a snake of many segments, drags
its slow length along the pages of the anthologies.
(Dry den's translated Fables were uniquely brilliant
examples of narrative, but the modern world seems
to have lost the old taste for mere stories.) The
writing of versified essays and treatises had been
practised extensively by the ancients and revived
during the Renaissance. Of the products of the
Augustan fashion, some are or partake of poetry,
but the majority must be labelled verse (and might
be divided into the flat and the concave). Yet their
prominence and bulk, and the number of their
authors, some of them illustrious, constitute a set
of claims that cannot be entirely ignored; even the
inferior works are a quarry for the historian of ideas,

AGE OF REASON AND SENSIBILITY 108

indeed for any serious student of the period. We can
only glance at a representative few. There were two
chief categories. One comprised poems of pure
argument or reflection, like Dryden's Religio Laid
(1682) and The Hind and the Panther (1687) and
Pope's Essay on Criticism and Essay on Man. The
other and looser group includes works that mix, in
varying proportions, reflection with natural and
topographical description. This line stretches from
Denham's Cooper's Hill (1642-55) through Pbpe's
Windsor Forest (1713), Thomson's Seasons (1726-30),
and many lesser poems up to (and beyond) The
Traveller (1764), The Deserted Village (1770), and
The Task (1785). One source of this tradition was
Virgil's Georgics, though imitators were about as far
from him in quality as in time. So strong was the
didactic impulse that even Prior responded, with
the sceptical and playful Alma; or, the Progress of the
Mind and the dreary Solomon on the Vanity of the
World. John Gay, the cheerful cxtravert who made a
delicious opera on the lines of 'a Newgate pastoral',
showed originality also in the authentic bucolicism of
The Shepherd's Week and in his adaptation, in Trivia,
of the topographical genre to the streets of London.
Dryden has been praised for his skill in conducting
an argument in verse, and, though his sobriety is not
Lucretian, the praise is deserved, at least for Religio
Laid. The Hind and the Panther has its fine passages,
but the whole is long and heavy, and the design was
not a happy revival of the old beast-fable. Whatever
the connexion of the two works with changing royal
policy, they represent stages in tire quest of a genuine
sceptic; and two lines in the earlier poem fore-
shadowed his embracing of Catholicism:

104 ENGLISH POETRY

Such an Omniscient Church we wish indeed;
'Twere worth Both Testaments -, and cast in the Creed.

It is a reminder of the century's preoccupation with
the grounds of knowledge and authority, the rela-
tions of reason and faith, that Religio Laid begins,
impressively, with the image that Donne had used
in Biathanatos: reason is as dim to the soul as the
moon and stars, and these grow pale before the sun
of supernatural light. In his early Essay of Dramatic
Poesy, Dry den had rejoiced in the progress of science,
which in the preceding hundred years had made
greater advances than in 'all those credulous and
doting ages' since Aristotle; his poetic defence of
Catholicism appeared in the year of Newton's
Principia.

During this and the next generation there de-
veloped, most fully and influentially in Shaftesbury's
prose, the doctrines that were more and more to in-
spire, or dilute, the thought and literature of the age
until, along with other impulses, they culminated in
the romantic revolt. The age of reason had hardly
developed a solid consciousness of being the age of
reason when it began to be the age of sentimentalism.
Though the new gospel had a Platonic strain, Plato
would not have recognized the total result. To over-
simplify the matter, we may say that, in opposition
to Hobbesian egoism and materialism and scientific
rationalism on the one hand, and to irrational Calvin-
istic pessimism on the other, the new doctrine set up
the conception of the natural goodness of man living
in responsive harmony with a benevolent universe.
Whereas Christian and classical ethics were built on
the recognition of a conflict between spirit and flesh,

AGE OF REASON AND SENSIBILITY 105

reason and sense, in sentimental ethics the conflict
was resolved, or dissolved, through a moral sense that
was rather feeling and taste (a mild substitute for the
traditional 'right reason'). And whereas for orthodox
Augustans the proper study of mankind was man in
society, human nature, now external nature acquired
new values. Dcistic sentirnentalism, assimilating
Newtonian science, was happy to see in cosmic and
terrestrial nature, in the great chain of being, the
grand design of the Creator. Thus, though not quite
in Browne's sense, nature became again the art of
God.

More or less Shaftesburian ideas were basic ele-
ments in both the Essay on Man and Thomson's
The Seasons, different as the two works were. Con-
fronted with growing deism, divines had been
labouring to make natural religion an ally and not a
foe of Christianity, and the public armoury was well
equipped with arguments, classical and modern,
rational and religious. At such a time, and for such
a poet as Pope, the vindication of God's ways to men
invited, not a great imaginative work (a 'myth', as we
say nowadays), but a persuasive summary of ac-
cepted ideas. Pope was perhaps a more logical, and
more orthodox, thinker than he has commonly been
said to be. Some of his doctrines, like the much-
abused 'Whatever is, is right', were, when rightly
understood, clearly and essentially Christian. Others,
like that of the great chain of being, had long been a
part of Christian thought. But what chills the modern
reader is not so much Pope's beliefs and ideas in
themselves as the way in which they are held and
presented. If we set his exposition of order and
degree in nature, of the war between good and evil

106 ENGLISH POETRY

in man, of human pride and ignorance, of the whole
human predicament, beside, say, the poems of
Davies, Chapman, and Greville (not to mention
Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton), Pope's facile
glibness is no less apparent than his verbal brilliance.
And both effects are heightened by the metrical
movement. The older poets of abstract argument
stir our emotions as Pope's bouncing epigrammatic
couplets never do. The Essay is not a meditation but
a declamation.

If Pope was, as Joseph Warton called him, the
'poet of reason', the deism of the young Scot, James
Thomson (1700-48), flowed chiefly into the new
channel of feeling. And while Pope wrote in his
study, Thomson took poetry into an outdoor world
that had not been much frequented by Augustan
writers, who preferred to keep nature in its place
and its place was seldom in pastorals. Moreover, as
his poem on Newton shows in brief, Thomson has, or
puts into verse, a more active awareness of science
than Pope. Thanks to Newton, he understands as
well as admires the rainbow, and he never wearies of
extolling the great system of the Newtonian Deity
whose hand rolls the planets and stirs every atom, the
'Universal Soul' that 'fills, surrounds, informs, and
agitates the whole'. The 'whole' is the great chain of
being, which now, in the age of Thomson and Pope,
includes sub-microscopic life. But in Pope's static
chain of being, any change would be fatal to the
ordered scale; Thomson believes in progressive
development, up (to quote The Castle of Indolence
again)

from unfeeling mould

To seraphs burning round the Almighty's throne.

AGE OF REASON AND SENSIBILITY 107

Some such view had been set forth by Milton's
Raphael, and it was brought nearer to scientific
evolution by Akenside.

It was, though, as a poem of nature that The
Seasons was long and widely read. In spite of Thom-
son's generally pedestrian blank verse and pseudo-
Miltonic diction, he does really love and observe the
manifold and changing phenomena of earth and sky,
and along with vague rhapsodizing he has precise
description inspired by warm sympathy with man
and beast and bird. Like Pope, he has his incon-
sistencies. He sees nature as beautiful and beneficent,
and also as cruel and destructive. He is a primitivist
who believes in progress: humanitarian and cultural
and commercial progress has been made possible by
urban knowledge, though cities are the nurseries of
man's vices, and man's natural goodness thrives in
the unspoiled ignorance and simplicity of the country.
But while Pope's attitude towards the ills of life is
one of resigned acceptance, Thomson is in the main
on the side of humanitarian effort and benevolent
optimism.

When, a generation later, Oliver Goldsmith
(1730?-74) perched in the Alps to take a pensive
'prospect of society', he did not share Thomson's and
the general faith in British progress and prosperity.
A survey of Britain as of other nations drove home
the moral that, wherever we may live, 'Our own
felicity we make or find'. Though he was allied at
some points with the growing humanitarianism of
the age, Goldsmith's impersonal moralizing was in
much of its substance as conservative as his manner.
His didactic generalities were enclosed in regular
couplets, and, without being told, we should not be

108 ENGLISH POETRY

able to guess which eight lines his friend Johnson
contributed. Goldsmith's dislike of commercialism
was more central in The Deserted Village. However
nostalgic fancy may have operated, his instinctive
sympathy and sentiment not philosophic sentimen-
talism gave the picture a warmth and charm that
won it immediate and lasting popularity. In this
poem the metrical movement and the manner have
exchanged much of their gnomic stiffness and
generality for a more natural and varied ease, more
concrete detail, and simpler language. Finally, a
paragraph on Goldsmith may overlook 'When lovely
woman stoops to folly* (which may be known to
young readers nowadays chiefly through The Waste
Land), but not Retaliation; the characters of Burke,
Garrick, and Reynolds, impromptu sketches in
comparison with Dryden's and Pope's engravings,
combine insight with good humour.

In the verse of William Cowper (1731-1800) 4 a
stricken deer, that left the herd' the instinct for
self-expression, and direct expression, is just emerg-
ing from the public concerns and manner of neo-
classicism. Boadicea and 4 I am monarch of all I
survey' may be called half-romantic. The hymns, if
outwardly impersonal, link themselves with such
revelations of Cowper's unhappy and despairing self
as The Shrubbery and The Castaway. His translation
of Homer, aiming at plainness, achieved a pseudo-
Miltonic stiffness, and lacked Pope's energy. The
minor didactic poems and the satires retained much
of the older style. But when Cowper's amiable
psychiatrist, Lady Austen (who had told him of
John Gilpin's ride), made the playful suggestion that
he write on a sofa, he found happy freedom in

AGE OF REASON AND SENSIBILITY 109

interspersing everyday rural scenes with comment on
the world. Doubtless in these days The Task is read
only in samples under academic pressure, but it is an
agreeable sedative. Cowper's blank verse and style
vary with his topics, and are most attractive on the
desultory conversational level. He records, with
affectionate intimacy, the familiar ways of nature
and man, from the gipsy kettle slung on poles and
the lure of hips and haws and bramble-berries to the
tea urn, a radish, and an egg by the warm hearth. As
a devout Christian, he does not philosophize, like the
earlier deists, about benevolent nature and the cosmic
design. He respects science, 'baptized' science, but
abhors the vain pretensions and measurements of
godless research, and the notion of God as a remote
First Cause; the 'soul in all things', the 'ceaseless
force' that impels all matter, is

One Spirit-- His
Who wore the platted thorns with bleeding brows.

And while Cowper is a stout patriot, his humanitar-
ian feelings are outraged by war and negro slavery
and men who 'Build factories with blood'.

In general, when we survey the long discursive
poem from Dryden to Cowper, we see a movement
away from the impersonal treatise towards self-
expression, although Cowper would not have
thought of this as his aim. It needed a more con-
fidently self-conscious poet to set about a Prelude.
But we must resist, for the present, the historian's
impulse to catalogue the symptoms of romanticism
apparent in the eighteenth century. What matters
for readers of poetry is the absolute value of the
representative body of writing that has just been

110 ENGLISH POETRY

reviewed; or, since absolutes are out of reach, the
value it has for us in the middle of the twentieth
century. The nineteenth-century estimate of Dryden,
Pope, and the rest was the mainly hostile estimate of
the romantic poets, who themselves came in time to
embody the ideal of poetry. According to this view,
as it was standardized by later critics, the best of the
Augustans were the talented versifiers of an age of
prose and reason. Modernist criticism, reacting
against the romantic tradition and its poetic criteria,
has not only canonized the metaphysicals but has
rehabilitated Dryden and Pope as great arid 'good'
artists whose virtues are a rebuke to romantic
weaknesses. Such a revaluation has been, up to a
point, very wholesome, although we may demur at
some excessively zealous claims and assumptions.
Without going into these, we might offer some un-
fashionable queries or judgments: that the nine-
teenth-century estimate holds as much truth as the
modern one, if not more; that Dryden and Pope were
brilliant artists in satire, but that satire does not
rank very high in the poetic scale; that these poets
hardly approach the regions where the modern spirit
lives; and that the keen pleasure given to a part of
our mind by their best work is not at all of the sort
that we get from the really great poets, or indeed
from many minor ones who have felt the pains and
exaltations and mysteries of life.

If these remarks arouse the ire of some readers, let
us put Augustan poetry beside that of the sixteenth
and the earlier seventeenth century. We need not
look at heroic poetry, in which the successors of
Spenser and Milton were Blackmore, Glover, and
Wilkie and James Macpherson; nor at lyrical and

AGE OF REASON AND SENSIBILITY 111

short poems, of which the Augustan age produced a
handful that may be called great, while the earlier
period has an almost infinite wealth and variety of
great writing. We may grant at once the immense
superiority of the Augustans in satire, but with the
proviso mentioned above. As for the large division
of reflective verse, Dryden and Pope are doubtless
finer artists than some of the earlier men, but can
they, and others from Thomson to Cowper, be read as
to repeat we road Daniel, Davies, Chapman, and
Greville? The Elizabethans are grappling with
problems of culture, knowledge, ethics, religion, that
are still our problems, and that are felt in a way we
understand and respond to; the problems, or the
attitudes, of the later writers are simply dead. All
this is not to say that Augustan verse does not con-
tain a good deal of interest in itself and as a partial
mirror ot an important span in intellectual history;
but much of it bears about the same relation to
poetry that the period's family groups on canvas
bear to great painting.

Incidentally, although the clarity of general truth
was a conscious aim of the eighteenth- century
writers, the extreme obviousness of their reflective
and most other verse suggests some decline in the
mental equipment of readers if not of poets. When
we think of both the knowledge and the intelligence
that the older poets in general assumed, must we
invoke that good old standby, the rise of the middle
class, as an explanation of the lower level of cultiva-
tion and acuteness and sensitivity?

CHAPTER IV

ROMANTICISM

THE artistic and philosophical tenets of neo-classicism
can be completely summarized, as indeed they were
by Pope, and can be readily applied, notwithstanding
qualifications and exceptions, to Augustan poetry.
But what common denominator links together, as
'romantic', Burns, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
Scott, Landor, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and such
lesser poets as Southey, John Clare, Leigh Hunt, and
that isolated realist of rural life, George Crabbe? The
label which, like 'metaphysical', was not used by
the poets themselves means so many things that it
may seem at first to have no meaning at all. And the
fullest statement of the romantic creed, Biographia
Liter aria (1817), though parts of it are alive in the
critical theory of our time, has, in comparison with
Pope's Essay on Criticism, a limited and erratic
helpfulness for the understanding of the romantic
poets; it is infinitely suggestive on some central
matters and slights others. But, if we put along with
it Keats's letters, Wordsworth's Preface to the
second edition (1800) of Lyrical Ballads, and Shelley's
fence of Poetry, and add Hazlitt's Lectures on the
'*h Poets, we do find the common denominator
reatest poets, that is, a new and intense faith
agination.

'he abundance and variety of genius, there
sons for the complexity of romanticism,
an age poets, critics, and literary public
112

ROMANTICISM 113

were united in relative harmony of judgment, and
the general view of the contemporary poetical
hierarchy was much the same as ours. But in the
romantic age there were marked divisions of taste
and outlook among poets, critics, and readers. The
poets whom we think of as dominating the scene
were a small, loose group of avant-garde writers who
had small, if growing, audiences. Blake, whom nowa-
days some worshippers would place on the throne,
was ignored even by most of his fellow poets though
we may remember Crabb Robinson's remark, 'There
is no doubt this poor man was mad, but there is
something in the madness of this man which inter-
ests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron or
Walter Scott!' The briefest and best picture of the
general cleavage comes from Byron, the self-conscious
patrician who shared the conservative taste of
gentlemen. As late as 1819, speaking in scorn of 'the
Lakers', and summing up both critical and popular
orthodoxy, Byron said:

Scott, Rogers, Campbell, Moore, and Crabbe, will

try
'Gainst you the question with posterity.

Posterity did decide the question within a few
decades, although in 1879 Matthew Arnold, in his
essay on Wordsworth, could still, perhaps in partial
deference to tradition, count not only Scott but
Campbell and Moore among 'our chief poetical
names' (in a list of seventeen that did not include
Marlowe, any of the metaphysicals, or Blake).

We talk, rightly enough, about the romantic revolt,
but we recognize that the movement had been

8

114 ENGLISH POETRY

growing throughout the 'age of reason' and that it
was a natural culmination of complex and converging
impulses. What in the first years of the eighteenth
century had been a rivulet of sentimentalism became
in Wordsworth a deep stream, in Blake a foaming
flood. And, just as English neo-dassicism had been
more moderate and flexible than that of the Conti-
nent, so English romanticism (apart from Blake) was
more moderate and flexible than its continental
counterpart. The neo-classical age had been one of
formal schooling in the virtues of intelligence, and it
had achieved those virtues in a degree that made the
best Augustan poetry unique in English literature.
But the finest spirits of a later age were less conscious
of the achievement by which they profited than
of the cost, and a more accurate if more cumbrous
label for romanticism would be 'the anti -rationalist
movement'. The revolt against reason, or against
the actual or supposed eighteenth-century concep-
tion of it, comprehended everything from a revulsion
against a mechanized universe and a mechanized
psychology to a revulsion against the Augustan
heroic couplet, which (as in Keats 's outburst in Sleep
and Poetry) had a mechanistic significance too.

The many related symptoms are familiar: the
turning from reason to the senses, feelings, imagina-
tion, and intuition; from the civilized, modern, and
sophisticated to the primitive, medieval, and natural;
from urban society to rural solitude; from preoccupa-
tion with human nature to preoccupation with the
aesthetic and spiritual values of external nature;
from mundane actuality to visions of the mysterious,
the ideal, and the infinite; from satire to myth; from
the expression of accepted moral truth to discovery

ROMANTICISM

of the beauty that is truth; from realistic recognitK
of things as they are to faith in progress; from beliel
in God and evil to belief in man and goodness; from
established religious and philosophical creeds to
individual speculations and revelations; from normal,
generic abstractions to the variety of concrete par-
ticulars; from impersonal objectivity to subjectivism;
from public to private themes; from formal correct-
ness to individual expressiveness; from the ideal of
order to the ideal of intensity; from the poetry of
prose statement to image and symbol; from poetic
diction to common language; from self-conscious
traditionalism to self-conscious originality; from the
rational sobriety of Latin literature to romantic
Hellenism. ... It is needless to add that these brief
headings need to be qualified in both directions, and
to repeat that these impulses had been more or less
visible from the early eighteenth century onwards,
and that they appear in the romantic poets in partial
and variable permutations and combinations.

Yet however we qualify such a catalogue, it does
constitute a revolutionary change, not only in the
view of the character and function of poetry but in
the whole conception of the nature of man and of the
world in which he finds himself. One large implica-
tion, which has grown more conspicuous in our time,
is the estrangement of the poet, the artist, from
society. No doubt some such separation has existed
ever since the first bard sang and the first audience
grunted, but we think of poets before the romantic
age Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton,Dryden,
Pope as ordinary citizens, sharing the experience
and general outlook of the educated community.
And poets as a rule, at least up through Milton, were

ENGLISH POETRY

.ot merely writers but were more or less involved
with everyday occupations. Most of the chief
romantic poets had no such employment in the
workaday world; and whatever their interest in
public affairs, they were spectators on the sidelines.
Other circumstances contributed to set them apart
from the mass of men. They conceived of the poet
as not merely a man of literary talent describing and
assessing life about him but as a prophet and oracle,
a pilgrim of eternity and infinity (so, to be sure, had
Milton thought of himself, but he was a Christian and
a citizen first and a poet second). Yet, along with a
conception of the poet even more exalted than that
of the Renaissance, went a consciousness that man-
kind was now too much engrossed in getting and
spending to feel the need of poetic illumination. The
industrial revolution was inaugurating what was to
make the greatest change in human life since history
began, and it was founded on ideas and values
altogether alien from those of the artist. The ro-
mantic poets saw developing around them a general
worship of machinery and Mammon, the imprison-
ment and corruption of the natural man. And while
poets sympathized, for a time, with the French
Revolution, or at least cherished hopes of progress,
the mass of their countrymen were frightened into
reactionary suppression of liberty. A still more
significant fact, perhaps, is that, for the first time in
English history, the leading poets stood outside
established religious creeds and sought a working
faith of their own though Coleridge and Words-
worth eventually turned to orthodoxy and others
have been called animae naturaliter Christianae.
Finally, as we observed at the start, the new poetry

ROMANTICISM 117

seemed, to conservative taste, strange and wild and
odd, and it made its way slowly. Thus for many
reasons, whether accidental or essential, romantic
poetry was at first less representative of the general
taste and outlook than the products of Augustan
coteries had been. All these remarks must again be
qualified; but in surveying the poets of any earlier
age one would noj: be led to make them at all.

Romantic poetry does not, like that of the Augus-
tans, fall into two or three large divisions, and we
have to choose between giving thumb-nail sketches
of eight or nine poets and slicing them up under
some of the numerous general headings listed a few
pages back. Possibly the first will be the lesser evil,
if not done in entire forgetfulness of the second; and
we may begin with three poets who, in different
ways, stand relatively apart from the rest.

Allowing for the many 'pre-romantie' manifesta-
tions, from Collins or Pope to Chatterton and
Cowpcr, we commonly date the romantic revolt from
lyrical Ballads (1798). But the earliest and by far
the most revolutionary rebel, and the most difficult
poet, was William Blake (1757-1827). His lyrical
volumes were Poetical Sketches (1783), Songs of
Innocence (1789), and Songs of Experience (1794);
between the last two came The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell and the first prophetic books. The youthful
Poetical Sketches contained both poetical diction
such as 'Phoebus fiVd my vocal rage' and reminis-
cences of Elizabethan and early seventeenth-century
song, 'My silks and fine array' is always cited, and it
does sound a strange note in 1783, though it could
hardly be mistaken for an Elizabethan lyric.
'Memory, hither come' and the Mad Song have

118 ENGLISH POETRY

echoes of Milton and Shakespeare but are not
Miltonic or Shakespearian. In general even the im-
mature singer of pastoral joy reveals a new sensi-
bility and manner. To the Evening Star, with the
hovering movement of its unrhymed verse and such
phrases as 'wash the dusk with silver', makes Collins'
ode seem a little stiff and literary.

But Blake's lyrical development owed less to the
older English poetry than to Isaac Watts 's poems of
childhood, and Songs of Innocence carried his own
peculiar blend of the earthly and unearthly. The
first stanza of the first poem has a lilt and an
imaginative naivett that belong to no one else:

Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me. . . .

It is Blake's lyrics including the late and famous
'And did those feet in ancient time' that most com-
pletely fulfil the definition of romanticism as 'the
renascence of wonder'. The world of nature and
man is the world of love and beauty and innocence
enjoyed by a happy child, or rather by a poet who
miraculously retains an unspoiled and inspired vision.
But in Songs of Experience the serpent has corrupted
Eden, and themes that before had the radiance of
spontaneous purity and joy are darkened by a know-
ledge of age and evil and suffering and oppressive
authority. The most striking if not the most typical
contrast is that between The Lamb and The Tiger,
between a primitive painting of the innocent child,
lamb, and Christ, and a fiery incantation, a symbolic

ROMANTICISM 119

hymn of wonder and terror and power. In the only
earlier poem that can be linked with The Tiger,
Smart's Song to David, the ecstatic catalogue of the
lion's strength and all the other glories of creation
culminates in Christ's redeeming sacrifice; Blake is
celebrating the untamed forces in man and nature
that must shatter unnatural ethical restraints and
mechanistic philosophies.

The paradoxical statement of Blake's creed, The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, does much to explain
the symbolism of The Tiger and the main themes of
the voluminous prophetic poems. The Bible and
sacred codes have divided man into body and soul,
have associated the body with energy and evil and
the soul with reason and good, and have proclaimed
eternal torment for him who follows his energies.
The contrary is the truth. The body is not distinct
from the soul (so, by the way, Milton had said,
though he did not go on to Blake's conclusions); the
body 'is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses,
the chief inlets of Soul in this age'; and 'Energy is the
only life', is 'Eternal Delight'. 'The road of excess
leads to the palace of wisdom.' 'The roaring of lions,
the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea,
and the destructive sword are portions of eternity
too great for the eye of man.' 'The tigers of wrath
are wiser than the horses of instruction.' 'Sooner
murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted
desires.' Whatever the varied sources of Blake's
thought and feeling, his doctrines are obviously the
climactic explosion of eighteenth-century senti-
mentalism, the faith in the spontaneous goodness of
man; and, no less obviously, they are in the tradition
of older and later naturalism. The scientific, logical

120 ENGLISH POETRY

reason and traditional ethics are anathema, and par-
ticular and recurrent objects of denunciation are
Newton and Locke and Bacon, who stand for the
effort to confine cosmic and human energies within
mechanical rules. Two generations earlier, at a time
when science and poetry seemed to be in accord,
James Thomson had linked these and other scientific
thinkers with Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and
Milton; Blake sets Milton and Shakespeare and
Chaucer in opposition to his evil trinity. 'Art is the
Tree of Life . . . Science is the Tree of Death.' In place
of rationalistic and repressive creeds and codes,
Blake exalts imagination, energy, love, as the divine
inward guides. The poet is the only true man, and
every man is a poet, or would be if his vitality and
creative power had not been cramped and deadened
by civilization, conventional religion, and science; he
must burst his mind-forged manacles and fulfil
his potentialities. Great rebels against artificial
authority are Christ and Milton; it is difficult to
recognize either in what are really Blake's projections
of himself.

The gospel is set forth in the huge prophetic books,
in terms of a complex and occult mythology, and
these poems are labyrinths that only devotees
penetrate. Blake has had many learned, acute, and
devout expositors in modern times, and he seems to
be commonly regarded as a supreme poet and myth-
maker and as more Christian than Christians. That
may be so. But the ordinary reader may possibly
find the non-lyrical poet's symbolism baffling and his
prophetic doctrine the great modern expression of a
naturalistic, undiscriminating worship of 'Life'. At
any rate, though the power of his message is muffled

ROMANTICISM 121

by his esoteric manner, Blake appears among the
romantic poets like a force of nature among men
writing with pen and ink.

It is an abrupt reminder of the comprehensiveness
of romanticism to turn from Blake to the least com-
plex and philosophic of the major figures, Burns and
Scott. Robert Burns (1759-96) won immediate fame
with his first Scottish poems (1786), partly because of
the freshness and tang of their substance and dialect,
partly because he looked like the great fulfilment of
the eighteenth-century quest of a primitive poet.
And the author of the Epistle to J. Lapraik, who pre-
ferred 'ae spark o' Nature's fire' to book-learning,
might have seemed to be accepting that role. In fact,
of course, the 'Heaven-taught ploughman' was quite
well-read in the chief English poets and especially in
eighteenth-century literature (even that incompar-
able dramatic monologue, Holy Willie's Prayer, has
an epigraph from Pope); and he was misled into
writing some insipid English verse. Burns was a
warm admirer of Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling,
and The Cotter's Saturday Night and To a Mountain
Daisy mix authentic inspiration with the convention
of sensibility. But Burns was also an avowed dis-
ciple of the less genteel Robert Fergusson and Allan
Ramsay, he was steeped in the whole Scottish
tradition from the Chaucerians downward, and he
recognized the nature of his own gifts. After the
Kilmarnock volume (enlarged in 1787) came Tarn
O'Shanter, that swift masterpiece of the comic super-
natural which is equally far from Sir Calidore's
vision of the Graces and from Peter Bell, and the
large and varied body of songs, re-created and
original, on which Burns spent his later years. In

122 ENGLISH POETRY

these he struck again the simple notes of love that
had not been heard for generations, and of pathos
that had scarcely been heard at all; the bawdy had
an unbroken tradition.

We may link Burns historically with the romantic
movement by virtue of his lyrical genius, his poetical
debt to popular song and folk-lore, his instinctive use
of concrete particulars and images, the sharply
picturesque energy of his homely language, and his
republican and equalitarian sentiments and sympa-
thetic kinship with the lowly, the erring, and the
outcast. But such phrases only begin to explain
why Burns has had such a peculiar attraction for the
plain man who 'doesn't read poetry', and why Burns
Societies have been so different from Browning
Societies. One uses the past tense, uncertainly and
regretfully, because of late outside Scottish circles
Burns seems to have fallen into neglect. He has
been almost entirely ignored by the intellectual
critics of our day, since a prolonged hold upon the
affections of the mass of men is distasteful to the
sophisticated mind. Our somewhat wire-drawn
critical dogmas are not receptive towards either
simple songs, or, say, such a primitive, unabashed,
and, in its squalid way, heroic carnival of anarchic
individualism as The Jolly Beggars a work extolled
by the fastidious Arnold. Besides, as with Henryson
and Dunbar, the language which is so extraordinarily
alive is also a practical barrier. But, for those who can
surmount the glossary, there is a great lyrist, humor-
ist, and satirist, whose warm humanity, spiced by an
aversion to 'the unco guid', is irresistible.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) perhaps lacked, even
more than his predecessor, conscious 'ideas' that

ROMANTICISM 123

belong to the romantic movement (though his total
influence upon ideas was immense). But if Scott was
feudal rather than republican, and cared nothing for
doctrines of universal brotherhood, he was in fact
every man's brother. The closest affinity between
Scott and Burns is in the utter reality, comic or
serious, of the lower-class and 'Robin Hood' char-
acters of the Scottish novels and the metaphorical
raciness of their speech. There was affinity also in
their devotion and debt to Scottish songs and ballads,
and Burns 's work had its complement in Minstrelsy
of the Scottish Border (1802-3). After a flirtation with
German romanticism, Scott came back to his true
love, and it was the Scottish ballads that made him a
poet, for a poet, at times, he was. Modern scholar-
ship would shudder at the merging and revising of
variant versions, but Scott was nearer to Bishop
Percy than to Professor Child, and, like Burns, he
could enter, indeed could not help entering, into
the spirit of his originals. Thus he could re-create
Kinmont Willie and create Elspeth's tale of 'the red
Harlaw' or the purely lyrical Proud Maisie. Scott's
ballads and songs are, as we might expect, more
martial and, in the common meaning of the word,
romantic than Burns 's; the two might be said to
diyide between them the themes Wordsworth imag-
ined for his solitary reaper.

Scott's once very popular romances of the Scottish
past, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and the rest,
which he enjoyed writing but did not take very seri-
ously, are doubtless not much read in our century
(juvenile readers now seem to begin with Donne and
Hopkins). But if they are romantic hokum, they are
hokum of the best quality, the work of a minstrel

124 ENGLISH POETRY

who had a spark of Homer in him if not the full
flame that Thomas Hardy saw.

Burns and Scott had, or found, a more living
popular tradition behind and around them than was
immediately available to their English contempo-
raries. But Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Coleridge
(1772-1834), needing to escape from effete conven-
tion and get a fresh start, went back also to the
ballads not always to pure or authentic specimens
as well as to the great English poets. They began
in orthodox fashion, but discovered their true vein,
of course, in the volume that bore the significant
title Lyrical Ballads. The poetic wedding of Coleridge
and Wordsworth was a quieter affair than The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Yet the world of the
Lyrical Ballads was a world of blended innocence and
experience. It was decided, as we all know (from the
fourteenth chapter of Biographia Literaria), that
Wordsworth should present everyday characters and
incidents in the revealing light of imagination, and
that Coleridge was to give 'supernatural, or at least
romantic' characters 'a human interest and a sem-
blance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows
of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief
for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith'.
Wordsworth's share might, in theory, have been
sanctioned by Dr. Johnson's definition: Toetry is
the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling
imagination to the help of reason'; Coleridge's would
fall under the censure, in Rasselas, of 'the dangerous
prevalence of imagination'. In some of Words-
worth's contributions the light of imagination was
not kindled. But the child of We Are Seven, who
cannot feel the actuality of death, inhabits a corner

ROMANTICISM 125

of Blake's world. And in the poems on 'Lucy Gray 1
in the second edition, ballad-like simplicity ranges
from the thin pathos of the story of her death to the
lyrical sublimity of A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.
Such intimations of immortality are a long way from
the popular ballads.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, for all its use of
the traditional devices, is no less remote from the
archetypes. To keep to the simplest terms of a
theme that has multiple and tantalizing layers of
meaning, the Mariner commits a sin that isolates him
from his kind and that is partly expiated when his
heart is filled with love of God's creatures and he is
restored to harmony with nature, though he remains
a ghostly wanderer. As for the material, The Road to
Xanadu has shown how the most widely scattered
details, from books of travel and science and poetry,
were woven into a unified whole. The extraordinary
vividness and brevity of the concrete images comes
partly from Coleridge's power of phrase, partly from
his 'naive' approach. As in folk-tales and dreams,
the preternatural and supernatural are not built up
by a sceptical poet for a sceptical audience but are
rather assumed as natural or at least possible. In
Christabel, on the other hand, to move beyond Lyrical
Ballads, the atmosphere owes much to the stock
properties of Gothic romance (and of course to the
rhythm), so that the effect, though still potent, is
rather a construction than an unquestioned reality;
and the juxtaposition of innocence and evil lacks
something of the mythic quality of the Ancient
Mariner. In Kubla Khan 'the dangerous prevalence
of imagination' reaches its apogee; the poet surren-
ders to an intoxicating vision of poetic inspiration.

126 ENGLISH POETRY

The popular ballads had been increasingly read
since the time of Addison, and many Augustan
writers had composed elegant or humorous imita-
tions, but their real power did not work until it led
Coleridge and Wordsworth to write poems at once so
differer ., from each other's and from the originals.
Both poets found in the ballads poems of imagina-
tion untrammelled by the artificialities of civilized
life, and models of direct simplicity in language and
tone. \ Wordsworth, dealing with homely modern
incidents, used homely modern language (with the
influence of the ballads may be linked that of Burns);
Coleridge, in keeping with his weird tale, drew a good
deal upon archaism, though that was modified in
revision.

'The theory of poetic language enunciated in
Wordsworth's Preface of 1800 was, as a manifesto
against eighteenth-century poetic diction and a justi-
fication of a return to natural speech, essentially
sound, though the author somewhat overstated it
and left himself open to Coleridge's later criticism of
both his theory and his practice. In his best poems,
and especially in his longer ones, Wordsworth did
not stick even to c a selection' of the language actu-
ally used by men; yet he did virtually destroy life-
less language and give poetry a medium of fresh and
natural vitality. Wordsworth stresses the speech of
country people because it has suffered less from the
deadening uniformity and restraints of sophisticated
intercourse and is the direct expression of feeling.
Thus for him, as for the Augustans, 'nature' is a
norm, though on a different level.

More important still is the setting up, or rather
the restoring, of something like the traditional

ROMANTICISM 127

conception of the high responsibility and wide range
of poetry. The kind of pleasure the poet gives is especi-
ally needed in an age of external excitements and
inward torpor that craves gross and violent stimu-
lants. The poet, *a man speaking to men', can share
his own sensitive and abundant life with others.
Poetry is not an extraneous ornament; it is both 'the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings' and 'the
breath and finer spirit of all knowledge'. And
Wordsworth is so confident of the all-embracing
and quickening power of poetry that he can see it
attending the discoveries of science as these become
absorbed into human experience. He did recoil from
the human or inhuman consequences of the in-
dustrial that is, the scientific revolution, but he
could not foresee the plight of the modern poet,
whom scientific positivism has left to the con-
templation of a great void. Moreover, when we
put Wordsworth's ideal of the poet-teacher beside
that of Spenser and Milton, it is clear that he does
not stand on the once firm rock of the Christian-
classical tradition. His standing ground, like the
modern's, is what the poet can establish for himself,
although, unlike the modern, Wordsworth has few
qualms.

The Wordsworth of the Preface was riding on an
even keel, but he had been storm-tossed in earlier
years. The circumstances of his youth and his tem-
perament had made him an instinctive radical to
whom the French Revolution was a no less natural
than welcome event, and whose sympathy isolated
him from his fellow-countrymen. When Revolu-
tionary zeal became aggressive imperialism, what
had been his great prop was knocked from under him.

128 ENGLISH POETRY

Seeking something positive to believe in, he turned
to thinkers like William Godwin, whose cool analy-
tical reason seemed to promise the millennium. But
doctrinaire rationalism, built on the conception of
man as a head without a heart or senses, gave only
dusty answers, and Wordsworth 'Yielded up moral
questions in despair'. Finally, with the aid of his
sister Dorothy 'She gave me eyes, she gave me ears'
and of Coleridge, he returned, with a new need and
understanding, to his first love, nature, the world
of the senses and feelings and imagination that never
betrayed her votaries. And, while still an obscure
young poet of twenty-eight, Wordsworth was so
convinced of the significance of his process of salva-
tion that he launched upon the vast poem, The
Recluse, which was to record his experience and
philosophy in full. Of this work he wrote large
portions, the personal and preparatory Prelude and
The Excursion (1795-1814), and a first book of which
the noble conclusion was printed as a 'Prospectus'
with The Excursion. It was typical of romantic
self-consciousness that the heroic poem of antiquity
and the Renaissance should have turned into a
poet's spiritual autobiography. The first version of
The Prelude (1798-1805) was somewhat altered,
especially in the direction of orthodox Christianity,
before it was published in 1850. It would be hope-
less to attempt here any formal comment on
Wordsworth's grand testament, though scarcely any
observation can be made about him that is not
partly based on it. That is not to say that the poem
is all poetry.

About the time he began The Prelude, Words-
worth gave a brief account of his development in

ROMANTICISM 129

T intern Abbey, his main contribution to Lyrical
Ballads. The poem was, among other things, the
intensely personal culmination of the eighteenth-
century topographical-reflective genre. It was also
the finest poem in blank verse that had been written
since Milton; Wordsworth's power and purity of
expression are such that we are almost unconscious
of the beautiful medium and share his experience
directly. He saw his association with nature as
having had three stages. First there had been the
animal activity of a boy at large among hills and
woods and streams; with adolescence had come a
wholly aesthetic passion for the beauty and mystery
of nature; and finally, as the capacity for sensuous
ecstasy faded, feeling for nature was more and more
bound up with 'the still, sad music of humanity'
and with the consciousness of a spirit animating and
uniting all things, sky and ocean and green earth
and the mind of man. Whatever these three stages
owed to David Hartley's associationist psychology,
and however retrospection, here or in The Prelude,
may have modified literal fact, the pattern of develop-
ment was Wordsworth's most precious possession
and assurance.

Coleridge also had had millennial dreams, revolu-
tionary and Pantisocratic, and, through disillusion-
ments and vicissitudes, had arrived at a similar faith
in a divine spirit pervading all things and linking
nature with man. That is the philosophic and
religious theme of the series of reflective poems, This
Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Frost at Midnight, Fears
in Solitude, and others. Both poets were reacting
against the scientific, rationalistic, and mechanistic
view of nature and man, and their positive faith
9

130 ENGLISH POETRY

contained elements of eighteenth-century sentimen-
talism and seventeenth-century Platonism. The
poetic imagination transcends mere intellect; it is
'reason' in its highest and purest form, the intuitive
faculty by which man apprehends unity and reality.

In the spring of 1802 the two poets were together,
Wordsworth happily active, Coleridge weighed down
by physical and mental distresses. Now, four years
after T intern Abbey, when moments of sensory
vision were still fewer and dimmer, Wordsworth took
up again the theme of the earlier poem. Intimations
of Immortality was, except in its irregular lines, very
different from Augustan Pindarics (Wordsworth had,
by the way, just been reading Ben Jonson, and he
may have had in mind the rhythms of Jonson's
ode on Gary and Morison). He began with a lament
for his loss of sensuous experience, a loss that
seemed to leave him a dead thing in a world of
life and beauty; but, as in T intern Abbey with the
added and not wholly happy 'Platonic' theme he
went on to recognize the compensation age had
brought, his growth in maturity and humanity, his
deeper understanding of man's joys and sorrows and
of the oneness of man and nature. Coleridge, hearing
the first part of the uncompleted poem, wrote his
melancholy reply, Dejection. He has lost his shaping
spirit of imagination, which alone gives life to nature,
without which the world is a flat and joyless scene;
and he has found no compensation.

The young Pope had imbibed from William Walsh
the ideal of 'correctness', which English poets had
seldom regarded; Wordsworth, when he was about
fourteen, set before himself the depiction of 'the
infinite variety of natural appearances which had

ROMANTICISM 131

been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country',
so far as he knew. The result was, of course, one of
Wordsworth's chief historical claims to greatness, that
he did, in an iron time, re-create the life of nature
and the human senses. In fact, however, his poetry
contains much less precise observation than we
might have expected, and much less than the
'peasant poet' John Clare affords (though Clare
became more than a loving observer); Wordsworth
had less interest in natural phenomena than in his
own spiritual reactions, conscious and unconscious.
And his disillusionment with rationalistic thought,
which found vent in anti-bookish and anti-intellectual
outbursts, intensified his trust in nature's healing
power. Having no positive Christian belief, he could
satisfy his idealistic soul only by making nature
supernatural.

But though it is customary to see much of Words-
worth's finest writing in his poems of wise passiveness
and joy, it may be doubted in spite of centenary
essays of 1950 if the modern reader can bring a
willing suspension of disbelief to the poet's animistic
view of nature or is captured by the smaller voice of
Wordsworth the bird-watcher. Granting his great
historical significance as the poet of nature and the
senses, we may think that he lives chiefly as the poet
of 'man, the heart of man, and human life', whether
in the 'Lucy' poems and The Solitary Reaper or
Michael or parts of The Prelude and The Excursion.
He was, to be sure, rather a lover of man than of
men (and above all, an observer of himself), and his
deserted women, shepherds, beggars, and leech-
gatherers are not so much persons as humble examples
of pathos and fortitude. And though in general

132 ENGLISH POETRY

Wordsworth's utterance may be consummate in
expressions of his 'magical view' of nature, and may
decline when that is exchanged for a stoic view of
human life, we may think that the poetry of simple
joy is rather too simple in comparison with the
poetry of partial doubt and conflict. Wordsworth
began, quite early in 'the great decade', to discover
that neither external nature nor inward spontaneity
of impulse was an adequate support against the ills
of life and death or an adequate moral guide. Many
readers resent the Ode to Duty, the Character of the
Happy Warrior, and Laodamia, but they would at
least admit that there is poetry in Resolution and
Independence, the sonnets of 1802 and a number of
later ones, the Elegiac Stanzas, and even at times
in The Excursion. And if Wordsworth's growth in
wisdom is to be related to his loss of poetic power, in
what way are these poems more overtly didactic,
more composed of plain moral statement, than
Lines Written in Early Spring, Expostulation and
Reply, The Tables Turned, To My Sister, and other
early expressions of the gospel of nature, including
Tinier n Abbey itself?

If we take Wordsworth (allowing for what he
absorbed from Coleridge) as the most germinal
influence in English romanticism, his nearest heir
and affinity, in some matters of thought and feeling
rather than style, was John Keats (1795-1821). We
must add, of course, that their poetry was very
unlike; that Keats felt many influences, from the
Elizabethans to Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt; and that,
in the short process of his growth, he became himself
a master and probably the chief romantic influence
on the poetry of the century. Yet his response to

ROMANTICISM 133

Wordsworth leads us into the centre of some of his
main problems.

Keats's attack on Augustan verse in Sleep and
Poetry (1816) 1 carried echoes of Wordsworth and of
Ilazlitt. In the same poem the young poet's view
of his present and future recalls the stages of Words-
worth's development outlined in Tintern Abbey,
but with characteristic differences. The rock and
cataract of Wordsworth's adolescent passion become
the realm of Flora and old Pan; and, while Words-
worth had already arrived at his third stage, of
human sympathy, the young Keats must drive
himself to contemplate leaving the sensuous luxuries
of nature for 'the agonies, thestrife Of human hearts'.
A similar sequence is elaborated in the letter (3 May
1818) on the mansions of life and poetry, where
Tintern Abbey is cited. And in many letters Keats
reveres or recoils from the older poet. Shakespeare,
the dramatic creator who has no philosophical axe to
grind, is the supreme example of 'negative capability',
and Keats would have him as his tutelary genius.
But he is also powerfully drawn to Milton and
Wordsworth; while Milton is the finer artist, Words-
worth, because of the general progress of thought,
has seen further into the human heart, into common
and tragic experience. On the other hand, Keats
dislikes the Tory egotist that Wordsworth has
become and at times even his poetry, which has a
palpable design upon us. Thus his vacillation between
Milton and Wordsworth is roughly a vacillation
between concern with the art of poetry and concern
with its spiritual value.

1 Dates attached to the poems of Keats and Shelley are
dates of composition, not of publication.

134 ENGLISH POETRY

Wordsworth is more or less involved in related
problems. Must the poet possess formal knowledge
and logical reason, or should he rely on his imagina-
tion and intuition for the kind of knowledge that
eases 'the burthen of the mystery'? Keats can shift
from one principle to the other, though the second
is predominant. If the much-quoted 4 O for a Life of
Sensations rather than of Thoughts' is not simply, as
Mr. Garrod translates it, 'O for the pure gospel of the
Lyrical Ballads', it is a plea for the intuitive life of
the artist. In the same letter (22 November 1817),
written when Endymion is finished, Keats gives his
first clear statement on life and poetry, a very strong
and comprehensive statement that links itself with
Hazlitt's first lecture on the English poets and
though Keats does not know it with Blake:

'I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the
Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination
What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be
truth whether it existed before or not for I
have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love,
they are all in their sublime, creative of essential
Beauty.'

Yet the proclaimer of such a creed can be afflicted,
most acutely in his last long poem, The Fall of
Hyperion, by the question whether poetry is a justifi-
able activity, where it stands in comparison with
simple goodness and humanitarian action. And
what of the ideal artist who has no moral identity
when man needs painful experience to achieve
identity and become a soul? It is the complexity of
Keats 's Apollonian and Faustian tensions and the

ROMANTICISM 185

depth of his aesthetic and ethical insights that make
him the most modern of the romantic poets, the one
who speaks to us most directly. But we must ask
how far the wisdom of the man and the letter- writer
got into his poetry.

We may notice first several poems that are rela-
tively lacking in 'ideas'. Isabella (1818), though it has
some fine bits, is as a whole a tissue of romantic
pathos that has deserved its popularity with school-
girls. The Eve of St. Agnes (1819), the work of a
happy lover, is incomparably better, so rich in
pictorial and verbal beauty that it almost makes us
forget the romantic thinness of the human emotions.
Here 'sensations' remain largely aesthetic and mater-
ial sensations. La Belle Dame sans Merci, whether
or not we give it a personal significance, may be
called both an anti-romantic reply to The Eve of
St. Agnes and a piece of romantic magic. The baleful
love of a fairy for a mortal had been a theme of old
ballads (though Keats seems to have in mind the
first book of The Faerie Queene), but this blend of
love and beauty and evil is nearer to Christabel. With
these poems and the unfinished Eve of St. Mark,
which is distinctive in its precise, restrained detail,
Keats paid his tribute to medievalism.

But most of Keats's good poetry, and some that
is not so good, is more serious and complex than the
romantic narratives. We have observed the self-
consciousness that led Wordsworth to plan and partly
write a vast poem on his own development, and
parallel motives worked on Keats, in less openly
personal ways. From the sonnet on Chapman's
Homer to The Fall of Hyperion, almost all of his
major and many minor poems deal with the nature

136 ENGLISH POETRY

and problems of the poet. That in itself is a remark-
able fact.

There is the further fact that Greek myth and, to
a smaller extent, Greek art and literature provide
either his main themes or numerous allusions.
Keats 's boyish enthusiasm had been nourished by
his Elizabethan reading, by Leigh Hunt, by the
Elgin Marbles, and, again, by Wordsworth. One
reason for Keats 's high regard for The Excursion
would be the account in the fourth book of the Greek
religion of nature and its imaginative expression in
myth. Classical myth, which had been so rich an
element in Renaissance poetry from Spenser to
Milton, had been blighted by Augustan rationalism,
but it revived with the romantic religion of nature
and the imagination. Blake, who hated the classics
and invented, with occult aids, his own mythology,
was the only major poet who did not turn to classical
myth, and even he made some disguised use of it.
If it were not for the bond between myth and nature,
we might think such symbols quite alien to Words-
worth, but, in addition to the passages in The
Excursion, there is such an impassioned sonnet as
'The world is too much with us', which Keats had
echoed in Sleep and Poetry \ the Greeks, who saw
Proteus rising from the sea and heard old Triton
blow his wreathed horn, were nearer religion than
Christian Englishmen intent on money, with no
eye or ear for nature. (As a small reminder of the
renewed vitality of the older poets, we may note
that Wordsworth's Proteus and Triton came from
Spenser.)

In poems both early and late Keats is a true
romantic in seeking, through nature and myth, the

ROMANTICISM 137

senses and imagination, to 'burst our mortal bars',
to win a vision of reality. In Endymion he uses the
'Platonic' fable of Drayton's poem, whether he
knew that work or not. The hero, leaving action for
contemplation, pursues the ideal, learns the lessons
of harmony with nature, humanitarian service, and
love, and eventually finds that the way to the ideal
is through the real, that the two are identical. Yet
the axiom had not been proved on the author's
pulses, and the problem was resumed in Hyperion.
Spenser had used the war of the gods and Titans to
pose the question of providential, ordered evolution
or naturalistic disorder; Keats sees the naturalistic
progress of the race and the poet. Apollo becomes
a god when he has comprehended the pains of
existence. The great and less great odes of the spring
of 1819 are variations on the same essential theme.
Outwardly, in the Nightingale and the Grecian Urn,
the immortality of art is set above the fleeting
actualities of experience, yet the poet feels both the
joys and the sorrows of life too keenly to find escape
and assurance in the ideal; even while he glorifies the
One, his instincts cleave to the Many. In the second
version of Hyperion Keats is tortured by his own
questionings of the nature and value of poetry; but
what he sees in the unveiled face of Moneta is an
answer that seems to rise from pagan towards
Christian myth, that seems to reconcile art and
action, joy and sorrow, the ideal and the actual,
immortality and mortality. Whether or not Keats
had attained this kind of serenity, in his last great
utterance, To Autumn, he has put aside all torment-
ing problems and is enjoying the serenity of purely
sensuous contemplation.

138 ENGLISH POETRY

Thus Keats's themes raise, almost always in
symbolic and poetic terms, questions that his fellow
poets seldom asked; and while these questions have
their romantic roots and colouring, they transcend
their age and reappear in Victorian and modern poets.
But Keats was not only a deeply thoughtful poet,
he was also the most studious and inspired artist
among the romantics. He took a long time as
time is reckoned in the Keatsian calendar to work
free of both his own erratic taste and bad influences,
and even his mature poems were not always flawless.
The massive sonnet on Chapman's Homer, the
spontaneous product of an exciting experience,
stands out from a great deal of poor apprentice
work. And in the longer poems up through Isabella,
momentary felicities stand out from thin, wayward,
and often meretricious lushness and general lack of
style and form. Hyperion (1818-19) was the first
long poem in which, with 110 fumbling or bathos,
Keats displayed sure taste and sustained control
and not only that but a majesty of style and move-
ment that even the hostile Byron pronounced as
sublime as Aeschylus. It is something of a paradox
that Keats's first great work of art should have been
a tour deforce in a manner that, despite imitation, is
not Miltonic and yet is not his own. But in the
fragment of objective epic he had not, unless at the
end, got said what he wanted to say, and when he
came to recast the poem he turned to Dante (in
Gary's translation) as a model for a personal-
symbolic induction; and now he achieved a style
that was at once new and his own. In the rewritten
part of the first version, we may think he lost far
more than he gained, yet he was evidently willing

ROMANTICISM 189

to sacrifice much for more rigorously functional
expressiveness.

The first mature poem in his natural manner was
The Eve of St. Agnes. Keats 's minute revisions in this
and the first Hyperion, and in other works, provide,
as all students know, an education in poetry. They
show him, as W. J. Bate in particular has demon-
strated, replacing relatively flat or feeble words
with suggestive and forcible ones, especially in the
way of epithets and verbs, in general obtaining
heightened intensity, and accomplishing parallel
effects in rhythm. The Ode to a Nightingale, as the
anecdote tells us, was an astonishing ex temporc
production, though the complex stanzas of this and
the other odes apparently grew out of Keats's pro-
longed experiments with the sonnet and his recent
use of the Spenserian stanza in The Eve of St. Agnes.
When he returned in Lamia (1819) to the long
narrative, he wrote, not with the straggling looseness
and prodigality of Endymion, but in the strong,
compact, forward-moving couplets of Dryden's
Fables; here Keats's technical and verbal brilliance
seems to cover an uncertain attitude towards his
theme. In his valediction, To Autumn (1819), the
least ambitious and most perfect of the great odes,
poetry conies as naturally as the leaves to a tree, and
surprises by a fine excess.

While the quality of Keats's best poems and his
whole approach to poetry have kept him relatively
immune from the anti -romantic reaction of our day,
Shelley (1792-1822) has been the whipping-boy of
modern criticism. An age that has insisted on
precision and particularity cannot abide Shelley's
notorious vagueness and abstraction. Besides,

140 ENGLISH POETRY

although some modern poets and critics have had
an active social conscience, Shelley's crusading
humanitarianism and his general outlook on poetry
and life have not been congenial. It might have been
expected that devotees of Blake would be devotees
of Shelley, and vice versa, since both are foes of
priests and kings and repressive authority and
proclaim a roughly similar gospel of love and liberty,
and since Blake's prophetic material and manner are
certainly not less vague, for the inexpert reader, than
Shelley's; yet the two poets appear in the main to
have distinct tribes of followers.

It is no less obvious, and more logical, that few
persons are drawn equally to Shelley and Keats.
To one party and the writer of this book must in
candour avow that he belongs to it Shelley, with
all his manifest intellectual and poetic power, seems
for the most part to be a peculiar and unsatisfying
blend of the prophetic and realistic with the im-
mature and nebulous. As many critics have said in
one way or another, Keats 's experience and wisdom
fit into our own, while Shelley, despite his concern
for humanity, is a remote, unearthly visitant from a
heaven both 'Platonic' and private. Do we read
Shelley's chief poems in the same spirit in which we
read Keats's, as timeless, inexhaustible poetry, or do
we read them, even Prometheus Unbound, rather as
documents of English romanticism or Shelleyan
Platonism or Shelleyan biography?

Parallels and contrasts between Keats and Shelley
run all through their temperaments and their writing.
Shelley's education and environment saved him from
some of Keats's early disadvantages (though not from
a streak of sentimentality or the charnel-house

ROMANTICISM 141

images of Gothic romanticism). The philosophy
of Godwin, h" in some sense an inspiration,' was
a heavier liability than the aesthetic influence of
Hunt was for Keats. Shakespeare, the creator of men
and women, who meant everything to Keats, meant
very little to Shelley; even The Cenci is a drama of
Evil versus Good. To Keats, Milton was chiefly
the great artist; Shelley, though he echoed Milton's
language, saw him as the great rebel. Both Keats
and Shelley cherished their own versions of Words-
worth's religion of nature, but for Keats Words-
worth was above all the poet of the human heart,
while for the young Shelley the poet of nature and
truth and liberty was a lost leader. The Keats who
resented the doctrinaire Wordsworth could not find
Shelley less so, and in his late letter to Shelley
advised him to curb his magnanimity and be more
of an artist.

(Shelley's first long poem, Queen Mob (1812-13),
embodied his revolutionary and metaphysical doc-
trines; Keats 's first long poeps were about poetry.
Shelley's next important work, Alastor (1815), was a
very romantic parable of the frustration and death
of the idealist poet in quest of human love and
sympathy,' a parable to which Endymion may have
been, or may be read as, an answer. (Shelley could
not, like Keats, identify the ideal with earthly
reality. The two poems are no less characteristic in
texture than in theme. )Endymion t though visionary,
and diffuse, is concrete in its multitudinous details;
in Alastor concrete details are lost in the phantas-
magoria of the whole. In general, though Keats has
*a mighty abstract Idea of Beauty', the abstraction
is less real to him than particular beautiful things.

142 ENGLISH POETRY

For Shelley the abstraction is more real than any
particulars (unless perhaps these are women, and
even they are partly abstract). Keats could hardly
have written a Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. Keats's
nightingale is there in the garden, and uis lines move
slowly under a weight of both substantial sensations
and serious questioning of life and death and art;
Shelley's skylark, a bird of the air, is lost in a shower
of iridescent, half-abstract images, and, while the
feeling of joyous song is rendered with spontaneous
exuberance, allusions to human suffering seem almqst
inconsequential. The Ode to the West Wind (1819) is
no less different from Keats's odes. Shelley's inter-
woven images of wind and swift motion are as
typical as Keats's palpable images of stillness. And
while Keats, meditating on the relations of art and
human life, presents conflicts of uncertain outcome,
Shelley is illustrating an idea, humanitarian revolu-
tion, that he is already committed to. Shelley has
nothing of the negative capability that Keats
coveted and in some degree attained. Shelley does
not see an object or emotion in itself but partly as
an idea, and behind all ideas is a vision of infinity
and harmonious oneness that starts far beyond the
actualities of experience. Thus Shelley commonly
demands much more sympathy with his 'meaning'
than Keats, whose direct sensuous apprehension and
power of communication could, one imagines,
capture a reader who had the misfortune to be
indifferent to his ideas.

This special demand on the reader lessens at
times, notably when Shelley's remarkable myth-
making instinct has relatively free play. He can
become the cloud, or Apollo, or Alpheus and

ROMANTICISM 148

Arethusa, or Pan (though Pan is a frustrated lover
more Shelleyan than shaggy); and one might add
that complex but playful and graceful poem on
the poetic imagination, The Witch of Atlas (1820),
written in the vein of Shelley's translations of the
Homeric Hymns. But in many lyrics, and in some of
his longer poems that are lyrical in spirit, the author's
vision, amatory, humanitarian, or metaphysical,
lapses into the revery of idyllic wish-fulfilment or
self-pity. There are exceptions of course. To men-
tion only two, 'Life of Life! thy lips enkindle' carries
abstractions to a rare pitch of intensity; and in
Shelley's 'Messianic eclogue', 'The world's great age
begins anew' (which in turn inspired one of Yeats's
finest lyrics), radiant hopes end in a moving cry of
despair. But such lyrics on poetry and love as 'On a
poet's lips I slept' and 'My soul is an enchanted boat'
(both in Prometheus Unbound), especially when put
beside parallel passages in Plato's Symposium and
/on, and Statesman respectively, suggest the melting
of serious myths into day-dreams. We, having grown
up on seventeenth-century poetry, like bone and
muscle, and Shelley has little of either. We often
wish for something of the plain vigour that found
vent chiefly in Shelley's journalistic verse 'An old,
mad, blind, despised, and dying king.'

Prometheus Unbound (1818-19) and Keats's
unfinished Hyperion are the pre-eminent examples of
the romantics' revival of Greek myth. Prometheus
was a favourite theme of continental romanticism,
and Byron had already put into the Titan's mouth one
of his defiances of heaven. Shelley's lyrical drama is
a vision, akin to Blake's, of humanity's emancipa-
tion from the tyranny of Jupiter, who represents

144 ENGLISH POETRY

the religions, moral, and political shackles that man
has forged for himself. Progress is a subsidiary
theme in Hyperion, and it is treated in generalized
and aesthetic terms. If Jupiter and Prometheus are
Shelley's usual black and white, one of Keats's
difficulties is that his gods could hardly surpass the
nobility of his chief Titans. But both poets, in their
opposed groups and figures, are objectifying the
process and conflicts of individual growth. Keats's
central theme is Apollo's becoming a god, a mature
poet, through his realization of the ills of the world;
and Jupiter's real overthrow occurs when love
supersedes hate in the regenerated soul of the
suffering Prometheus. Thus there is some affinity,
but still more dissimilarity.

While Shelley had a knowledge of Greek that
Keats had not, he naturally did not choose to follow
Aeschylus very far in theme or structure. Aeschy-
lus's solution, that ultimately Prometheus and
Zeus would each learn moderation and wisdom and
be reconciled, was of course abhorrent to the
Manichean revolutionary. And the normal texture
of his poetry is hardly less un-Greck. What elements
of concreteness there are appear chiefly in the first
act. For the most part Shelley's personages are
indistinct phantoms and mouthpieces compared
with those of either Prometheus Bound or Hyperion,
where the setting is substantial and the characters
are simply superhuman. Asia is one of Shelley's
many symbols of Nature, Love, and Beauty, and
her reunion with Prometheus is the restoration of
harmony between nature and man and within man.
Although Shelley had been moving from Godwinism
toward a kind of Platonism, the millennium he

ROMANTICISM 145

envisions is still Godwinian: the abolition of priests,
kings, marriage, and other restraints leaves man
exempt from awe, guilt, and pain, and free to
exercise his natural virtue. But Shelley's vision is
not limited to the moral regeneration of man and
society; it is also Baconian. Perfected man will
learn to control the forces of nature. Shelley's faith
in science, like his amateurish but considerable
knowledge, goes far beyond that of the other
romantic poets ( Keats' s medical training hardly
touched his poetry); indeed many images in the drama
that look at first like bubbles of Shelleyan gas have
been shown to be scientific. Finally, although he
longed for a perfect world, Shelley could not of
course admit the Christian Deity as a symbol or
guarantee of an ultimate triumph of right. Instead
he sets up the shadowy Demogorgon, who dethrones
Jupiter and who is given the concluding speech,
of which the last stanza provides the standard
conclusion for essays on Shelley. It, and the drama
as a whole, have often been said to embody the
teaching of Christ, a view that may puzzle many
readers.

The impassioned urgency of Adonais (1821) springs
from the elegist's weeping his own fate in another's,
but what resemblance the poem has to Lycidas ends
there. The lack of concrete substance and edge; the
diffuse, rhetorical, and artificial handling of the
myth of Adonis and the Greek pastoral conventions;
the quite factitious use of the author's friends, Byron
and Moore, as mourners; the shrillness of the attack
on the reviewers; the sentimentalizing of Keats and
the egotistic sentimentalizing of Shelley himself (he
and his heroes must always be pallid weaklings in a
10

146 ENGLISH POETRY

brutal world) all this makes a sad contrast with
the control, the 'decorum', the impersonality, the
central conflict, and the substantial beauty of
Lycidas, Adonais is no doubt partly redeemed by the
conclusion, where, soaring beyond the world of
wrong and death, Shelley celebrates the poet's
immortal oneness with the nature he made more
lovely.

In his last work, the unfinished Triumph of Life
(1822), a partial parallel to The Fall of Hyperion,
Shelley's despair is relieved only by the thought of
Plato and Bacon and 'the sacred few' presumably
such pure spirits as Socrates and Jesus who
'touched the world with living flame'. The poem as a
whole is a pageant of the corrupt many, conquerors
and conquered, deceivers and deceived, the multi-
tude who have served the Mammon of unrighteous-
ness. We might not expect Voltaire and Rousseau
in such a throng, a Rousseau, moreover, who is
conscious of having benefited mankind and of having
been overcome, not, like the rest, by Life, but by his
own extravagant heart. The poem is a moving
arraignment of human history, a moving reassertion
of the poet's ideals, and yet, in being such, it proves
more clearly than any other work of his that he
could not escape from insubstantial fluency, since
here if anywhere we might look for bone and muscle.
Like Keats in his last testament, Shelley has Dante
in mind (as well as Petrarch's Trionfi), but even in
this poem the lines that well up from profoundly
disenchanted bitterness of spirit have much of his
usual light and thin transparency. He cannot help
singing (though his voice is subdued), when he needs
weighted speech.

ROMANTICISM 147

In the early decades of the nineteenth century
Byron (1788-1824) was first and the other romantic
poets nowhere; and he was the only one who made
an impact on the Continent, both in his own day and
for a long time afterwards. Of the cloud of witnesses,
none denned Byron's earth-shaking power more
succinctly than Arnold, in his Memorial Verses (1850)
on Wordsworth and Stanzas from the Grande
Chartreuse (1855):

When Byron's eyes were shut in death,
We bow^d our head and held our breath.
He taught us little: but our soul
Had felt him like the thunder's roll.
With shivering heart the strife we saw
Of Passion with Eternal Law;
And yet with reverential awe
We watch' d the fount of fiery life
Which served for that Titanic strife.

What helps it now, that Byron bore,
With haughty scorn which mocked the smart,
Through Europe to the Aetolian shore
The pageant of his bleeding heart?
That thousands counted every groan,
And Europe made his woe her own?

Although in the second passage Byron is dismissed
as of no avail to modern man (we recall Carlyle's
earlier 'Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe'), in his
essay of 1881 Arnold put Wordsworth and Byron
at the head of the romantic poets. Keats, he said,
had probably a more consummate poetic gift than
either, but he died too young; Coleridge was 'wrecked
in a mist of opium'; Shelley was a 'beautiful and

148 ENGLISH POETRY

ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous
wings in vain'. But 'Wordsworth and Byron stand
out by themselves. When the year 1900 is turned,
and our nation conies to recount her poetic glories
in the century which has then just ended, the first
names with her will be these. 5

This prophecy was not fulfilled in 1900 and holds
still less perhaps for 1952. Byron is on the whole an
extinct volcano. The force of his personality and the
glamour of his career remain a fascinating pheno-
menon that calls forth innumerable biographies, and
he takes a pre-eminent place in any picture of the
early nineteenth century, yet of his writing little
outside the satires and the letters still has a life of
its own. We are all aware of 'the Byronic hero*
(who was older than Byron or Mrs. Radcliffe), but
nobody would embark on the romantic narratives
that Byron scribbled in the intervals of his London
dissipations; one exception might be the late, short,
and different Mazeppa. Nobody reads the dramas,
in which Byron was partly following Alfieri. We
have in our minds some lyrics, such as She Walks in
Beauty and So, We'll Go No More A-Roving (not to
mention 'The Assyrian came down like a wolf on
the fold'); and Prometheus, the shortest and most
impressive statement of Byron's quarrel with the
Calvinistic Jehovah; and if we have no clear memory
of The Prisoner of Chillon, at least we have seen the
castle. When we are 'doing the romantic movement',
we look through some minor things and read, with a
modicum of inward commotion, the third and fourth
cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1816-18) and
Manfred and Cain. In Manfred (1817) the Byronic
hero has become a darker embodiment of nameless

ROMANTICISM 149

guilt (nowadays no longer nameless, though the
poet's experience was blended with Gothic conven-
tion). Cain (1821) may be called a large-scale
Prometheus. Though he rebelled against it, Byron
had a sense of sin that was deficient in some of the
other romantic poets.

As Byron's wit (another quality lacking in his
fellow poets) and his championship of Pope remind
us, he was in part a man of the rational and rhetorical
eighteenth century. Childe Harold, for all its
personal world-weariness, was in the tradition of the
old descriptive and reflective poem. With Napoleon
under lock and key, travellers were bowling about
Europe, and Byron supplied a highly readable
Baedeker, describing the Waterloo Ball and deliver-
ing eloquent speeches to mountains and the sea,
the Coliseum and three-starred statues. If his
sensibility and expression are unmistakably of the
romantic age, he can make us think of such things as,
say, Thomson's Liberty. Like the earlier poets, he
gets his effects much stronger effects than theirs
by the page rather than by the line or the phrase.
In other words, he has a fatal want of concentration
and distinction of style. We can still feel something
of the force and fire that enabled him, without
becoming absurd, to apostrophize the grand monu-
ments of nature and art, but he was only rarely and
by accident a poet. His qualities, good and bad,
are those of a rhetorician. That is one reason why he
may lose little, and even gain, in being translated,
whereas a translation of Keats is impossible though
foreign critics attempt it.

Byron was the last of the gentlemen who wrote
with ease, and satire was a genre that brought out

150 ENGLISH POETRY

his best gifts and made his slipshod facility less
conspicuous. The Vision of Judgment (1822) is a
masterpiece of agile wit and tone. So too is Don Juan
(1819-24), though it has its dull passages. As a
successor, in the romantic age, to the old heroic
poem, a comic epic was much less logical than The
Prelude, but, if such a thing was to be written, it
could be done only by the ex-lion of London society,
the hero of many scandals, the cosmopolitan aristo-
crat who had been everywhere and seen and done
everything, and who could look back with amused or
angry contempt at the levity, vacuity, and hypo-
crisy of the life he had shared. The social, literary,
and political sophistication and wit of the brilliant
letter- writer are channelled into stanzas and a style
of colloquial energy. Whatever he learned from Pulci
and Hookham Frere, Byron made the medium his
own. Some of the best-known parts, of course, are
not satirical the grim shipwreck, the idyll of
Haide*e and Juan though Byron can flick these
episodes with mockery. And the impassioned
rhetoric of 'The Isles of Greece' carries us to
Missolonghi. Yet Byron's final, noble gesture cannot
elevate his love of freedom into either philosophic
wisdom or philosophic anarchism; his impatience of
all restraint extended to nations the liberty he
wanted for himself.

Instead of the general summary with which this
chapter should end, we must take the briefest glance
at a figure whose turbulence, unlike Byron's, shook
only those in his immediate vicinity, and whose
literary presence we are apt to forget, that is, Walter
Savage Landor (1775-1864). Landor's writings in
verse and prose, English and Latin, covered nearly

ROMANTICISM 151

seventy years. He published Gebir, an epic of rather
cryptic density, in the year of Lyrical Ballads, and
lived to receive, as an aged libertarian and neo-pagan,
the excited homage of Swinburne. As a person and
an author, Landor belonged to the eighteenth
century, the romantic age, and the Victorian age,
and in all three periods he was a lion who walked by
himself. He was an eighteenth-century aristocrat
and a republican; a romantic poet whose theory
and practice were classical; a man of explosive
personality and opinions whose poetry was
austerely impersonal and almost sufficiently detached
from life and ideas to be called 'pure poetry' or
Imagism.

But these and other paradoxes are resolved in the
central fact that Landor's highest and most com-
pelling ideal was literary and technical. While the
romantic and early Victorian poets wrote with
Elizabethan prodigality and colour, Landor, setting
before himself such models as Pindar, strove for the
compact and 'diaphanous' not, however, because
he believed, with the young Arnold, that the high and
heavy spiritual responsibility of poetry required bare
strength, but because he felt no such responsibility
and cherished a pseudo-classical notion of form and
style as ends in themselves. Many of Landor's poems
treat classical myths, but whereas for the other poets
myths are symbols charged with meaning, Landor
is usually content to retell the stories, and usually
without much human interest. The craftsmanship
that shuns the realities of experience, and concen-
trates on expression when there is little to express,
is not even facing the problems of the craftsman.
Thus, though critics periodically deplore the neglect

152 ENGLISH POETRY

of Landor, we cannot really say, in spite of a few fine
poems, that neglect is unjustified.

Finally, perhaps the best summary of romantic
achievements and shortcomings will be an attempt to
see what the Victorian poets were able and eager
to carry on, and what they modified or rejected or
lost.

CHAPTER V

THE VICTORIAN AGE

THE Victorian age covered a wider span than even
the good queen's long reign. It may be said to have
extended from about 1829-33, the time of the first
real development of railways, the Catholic Emanci-
pation Act, the first Reform Bill, the abolition of
slavery, the beginning of the Oxford Movement, and
the publication of LyelPs Principles of Geology, to
the eve of the First World War. Not of course that
those eighty-odd years were all of a piece; but, in
comparison with the periods before and since, they
had a relatively stable continuity and character. Yet
if we, who have had two world wars and have come to
accept international conflict and chaos as normal, look
back on the Victorians as placid and comfortable, we
make a serious error. International enmities and
scientific slaughter (with which they had some ac-
quaintance) are not the only spectres that can dismay
mankind, and the many great and less great Vic-
torians furnish abundant evidence of outward and
inward disturbance and suffering.

The Victorian poetical scene is as crowded as
Frith's painting of Derby Day, and a multitude of
minor poets must be neglected. Moreover, the chief
works and general character of the major poets are
relatively familiar to everyone, and what little can be
said here may be focused on four topics: the Vic^
torians' partial acceptance and modification of their
romantic inheritance; their reactions to the social,

ENGLISH POETRY

.gious, and philosophical problems of a progressive,
sceptical, and scientific age; their conception of the
place and function of the poet, in the modern world;
and the aims and qualities of their poetic art. These
related topics, to be sure, embrace almost every-
thing, but the discussion of them will not.

Among the few authentic poets who arose in the
early Victorian age one cause of depression might
well have been the low estate of poetry and of public
taste. In literate circles, in and outside the univer-
sities, the great romantics had come into their own
(and Byron had always been a force), but an unso-
phisticated public fed on a thin and decorous roman-
ticism and edifying pietism. When Tennyson and
Browning were publishing their early volumes, there
were a number of respectable or distinctive minor
poets, survivals or new arrivals, such as Leigh Hunt,
John Clare, George Darley, Hartley Coleridge,
Thomas Hood, Elizabeth Barrett, Thomas Lovell
Beddoes (though Death's Jest Book did not appear
till 1850); but the standard poets on the drawing-
room table were likely to be Campbell and Moore,
Mrs. Hemans and 'L. E. L.', Keble and Sir Henry
Taylor. And versifiers now forgotten were even
more popular. Macaulay wielded his vorpal sword
in vain upon the religious poems of Robert Mont-
gomery; Robert Pollok's The Course of Time (1827),
an epic culminating with the terrors of the Judg-
ment, reached its seventy-eighth thousand in 1868;
and from 1838 onward Martin Tupper was putting
forth slices of his Proverbial Philosophy. If we avert
our eyes from The May Queen, Enoch Arden, and the
like, we should remember how often and how greatly
Tennyson rose above popular taste, and how much he

THE VICTORIAN AGE 155

did to raise it. Moreover, until the advent of Arnold,
the authoritative criticism of the great reviews was
both forcible and feeble; such policemen of letters
as Croker and John Wilson, who had bludgeoned
Keats, were there to give a similar welcome to
Tennyson.

The two supreme problems that confronted the
serious Victorian mind were both born of science, the
industrial revolution and the religious revolution.
The industrial revolution, while making England the
workshop of the world, was yielding a full and grow-
ing harvest of wealth and misery and strife. What
Carlyle called 'the condition of England' was a prime
anxiety of awakened consciences among Evangelicals,
Broad Churchmen, humanitarian liberals, social
critics, novelists, and some poets, from Tennyson
down through Mrs. Browning to Ebenezer Elliott.
During the first half of the century sporadic out-
breaks of violence, the Chartist movement, and other
symptoms of economic distress led to real fear of
revolution. But 1848, the year of European up-
heaval, passed, and in 1851 came the Great Exhibi-
tion, a reassuring proof of peace, prosperity, and the
wonders of applied science.

Most of the romantic poets had held, with varying
degrees of confidence and concreteness, a belief in
progress. The Victorian poets who inherited that
belief had to face a far larger body of painful and
insistent facts. In general they did not offer much in
the way of direct social and political comment. The
important exception was Tennyson. Locksley Hall
(1842), which does not much attract us, had, accord-
ing to Charles Kingsley, 'most influence on the minds
of the young men of our day' as a call to social action;

156 ENGLISH POETRY

Tennyson's vision of air-borne commerce and aerial
battles has been more amply fulfilled than his vision
of 'the Parliament of man, the Federation of the
world'. If we respond to the violently prejudiced
political utterances of Byron and Shelley, we may not
be stirred by Tennyson's Burkeian principles; but
Love Thou Thy Land contains an exact picture of our
present world and some deeply felt wisdom that is
still wisdom. That cannot be said of the Laureate's
patriotic songs. (The Ode on the Death of the Duke of
Wellington is a mixture of editorial obituary and
noble poetry.) To pass by the well-meant Princess,
there was social comment in In Memoriam and angry
protest in the 'spasmodic' Maud (1855) and Locksley
Hall Sixty Years After (which outdid the original
in bluster). The hero of Maud, even more than
the hero of the early Locksley Hall, is a rebel
against the Mammonism of society. In addition to
its technical novelties, structural and symbolic,
Maud is a remarkable anticipation of psychological
conflicts that have become more familiar in the age
of Freud and frustration. The neurotic hero is one of
the mid- Victorian 'lost generation', a sort of Heming-
way character (though much more conscious and
complex) who oscillates between apathy and violence,
love and death, self and a selfless cause.

The romantic poets, revolting against a scientific
view of the world, had found reality in a religion of
nature, or, more broadly, in poetic intuition. In the
course of the nineteenth century the gulf between
scientific rationalism and poetry only widened and
deepened. While science was making immense pro-
gress, it had its own 'Fundamentalism', an obsession
with mechanical law that affected even ethical

THE VICTORIAN AGE 157

thought of the period. At any rate the Wordsworth-
ian religion of nature could have little meaning for
most Victorians. Tennyson, a zealous student of
science from youth to old age, for the most part saw
in nature only what his acute senses or scientific
knowledge reported. One result was much accurate
and beautiful description of the varied appearances
of sky and earth and sea; another was glimpses of
nature red in tooth and claw, of a globe shifting its
contours through ages of geological change, of a
universe in which that globe was a microscopic dot.
To Browning nature was a minor interest and mainly
an occasional background for love and death and
heroic striving, but his pictures of it were character-
istically sharp, rugged, and violent. Arnold at times
came nearest, if not very near, to the Wordsworthian
attitude, though he saw nature as an enemy as well
as a refuge.

But science threatened much more than the roman-
tic religion of nature and the imagination, and the
earlier Victorian poets experienced more distress
than their predecessors because they had a stronger
family inheritance of religious belief and because the
tide of scientific scepticism had risen so much higher.
Physical science, represented by Sir Charles Lyell,
the popularizer Robert Chambers (Vestiges of tJie
Natural History of Creationist), and other men up
through Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall, developed a
picture of the world in which God seemed unneces-
sary and man irrelevant. Most of the philosophical
oracles, such as Bentham, Carfyle, Mill, and Spencer,
and multiplying exponents of the new science of
Biblical criticism, contributed in their various ways
to the undermining of Christian faith. Throughout

158 ENGLISH POETRY

the Victorian age, whatever misconceptions of both
religion and science were involved, there was spirit-
ual anguish and tragedy for many of those people
who were caught in the conflict the overwhelming
sense of falling from solid ground into a dark abyss,
of being thrust out from filial membership in a provi-
dential order into a meaningless universe of natural
law or chaos, of having to turn from belief in immor-
tality to the idea of the final dissolution of lumps of
carbon and water. Although many people could
embrace the secular 'religion of humanity', and some
Anglo-Catholicism, others, with the ebbing of the
sea of faith, remained in shivering loneliness on the
naked shingles of the world.

But we must leave background for the chief figures
in the foreground, Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold.

The most representative is of course Tennyson
(1809-92), whose publications ran from 1827 to the
year of his death, and whose religious and meta-
physical questionings covered a still longer span. In
the large body of his youthful verse (some of the most
precocious was not printed until 1930-81), there was
a marked vein of more than normal adolescent
melancholy. Sir Charles Tennyson's biography (1949)
revealed the prolonged and acute strains that home
life centring around a disinherited, embittered,
and often deranged father brought upon the sensi-
tive boy; and, with the father's death, the young man
had to leave Cambridge and steer a numerous
and problematical family through difficult waters.
Tennyson's sense of isolation was aggravated by
concern about his poetic direction, by harsh reviews,
by religious problems, and by the shock of Arthur
Hallam's death.

THE VICTORIAN AGE 159

For one thing, the legacy he inherited from the
romantic poets was an already embarrassed one.
Even while they had been declaring their faith in
the poetic imagination, in the almost divine office
of the poet, the doctrine had gained ground that
poetry was essentially primitive and must inevitably
decay with the progress of science and civilization;
and civilization was becoming more and more domi-
nated by Gradgrinds and Bounderbys. In Tennyson's
Cambridge prize poem, Timbuctoo (1829), the spirit
of imagination, the creator of the body of fable by
which man has lived, anticipates the shrinking of her
fair palace, under the pressure of 'keen Discovery',
into mud-walled huts, barbarian settlements. A
remarkable number of his early poems, among them
some of his best, deal with personal or poetic isola-
tion or both, and with the dilemma of aesthetic
detachment and social responsibility. There are
Mariana; The Poet, which expresses a messianic and,
one might say, Shelleyan confidence (though The
Defence of Poetry was not yet published); The Poet's
Mind; that extraordinary incantation, The Hesper-
ides, which seems to celebrate precious seclusion;
The Lady ofShalott, in part a parable of the cloistered
artist encountering actuality; CEnone; Tithonus, per-
haps the most splendid and moving of Tennyson's
classical poems; and those pieces in which conflicting
claims are openly debated, The Lotos Eaters, The
Palace of Art, and Ulysses. If sometimes the elabo-
rate beauty of style might suggest lack of complete
seriousness, the reality of the poet's inward tensions
is shown by the persuasive power with which he
could present the case for aesthetic retreat from the
world. In short, Tennyson went through, in his own

160 ENGLISH POETRY

way, the conflict of poetic aims that had tormented
Keats.

Tennyson's youthful consciousness of the religious
problem was of course greatly intensified by the death
of Hallam (1833). Although Hallam was a dearly
beloved friend, as Edward King had not been for
Milton, the extinction of a promising life crystallized
for the later as for the older poet the whole question
of God's government of the world and the destiny of
man; but two centuries of scientific rationalism had
made an affirmative answer much more difficult.
Tennyson's first reactions could vary from the
suicidal mood of The Two Voices to the resolution of
Ulysses, from vain longing for the dead man in Break,
Break, Break to vain longing for his own death in
Tithonus; and In Memoriam (1850) contained the
lyrical meditations of seventeen years.
1 Victorian readers welcomed In Memoriam as a
much-desired reconciliation of science and religion,
but our generation responds more fully to Tennyson's
utterances of stark despair. Astronomy, geology, and
biology join to picture a boundless, timeless world of
natural law or anarchy that has no place for God
or man, no concern with man's physical survival
or his traditional beliefs and aspirations. Tennyson's
answers, his attempts to find some faith to live by,
are of quite different kinds. He did look, through a
long future, for the evolutionary progress of man to
higher levels of being (he was not dealing with the
problem of the origin of species that had occupied
biologists and was to be expounded by Darwin in
1859). If nowadays we look askance at ideas of
progress, some such faith had animated the march
of mind ever since Bacon; and, though Tennyson's

THE VICTORIAN AGE 161

'larger hope' had a partly religious basis, it was no
more vague than Hardy's melioristic hope (nor was
Tennyson's vision of a Godless world less bleak and
grim). But Tennyson's most earnest affirmation
rested on the evidence of his own consciousness; the
human capacity for love is an unshakable reality that
attests a greater reality beyond the human grasp.
Whatever modern positivists may say, that may be
thought a tenable position. Tennyson was not,
apparently, a quite orthodox Christian; in 'the night
of fear' he clung with passionate intensity to two
supreme convictions, a providential Deity and indi-
vidual immortality.

Idylls of the King (including the early Morte
d' Arthur), which bulked so large in Tennyson's later
work, and which especially made him a popular
prophet, are not much read in our time. The hand-
ling of the romantic material and the spiritual alle-
gory 'Sense at war with Soul' and the stylized
elegance are alike unreal to us. King Arthur seems
to wear the white flower of a blameless life in the
lapel of a Prince Albert. Yet, in the midst of artifice,
Tennyson can still paint nature, and his pictures of a
society in decay have their moments. The Holy Grail
is impressive as a whole, as a Victorian Waste Land,
in its presentation of decadence and neurosis, the
quest of spurious spirituality and excitement.

We are inclined to have a mental image of the
older Tennyson, the uniquely famous oracle of the
English-speaking world, but it is well to remember
that In Memoriam and many of the best short poems
were written by a poor, lonely, obscure, and pro-
foundly troubled young man. We should remember,
too, that in his later years he produced many fine

XI

162 ENGLISH POETRY

things, both typical and novel, and that, for all the
outward security and adulation, the poet's soul could
still have glimpses of a hideous darkness. And,
among the poems that testify to his rich diversity,
we may recall a minor genre, his familiar addresses
to friends 'Old Fitz', F. D. Maurice, Edward Lear,
Mary Boyle poems that have the easy, graceful
Tightness of an English Horace.

As artist, Tennyson has an imagination less dra-
matic than lyrical; he is usually at his best when he is
kindled by personal emotion, personal experience.
But this, like other generalizations we are tempted
to make, is open to many exceptions. It is at any
rate indisputable that he was not only a master of
style and rhythm but a master of various styles and
rhythms; these range from, say, the delicately evo-
cative and elusive Hesperides to the solid earthiness
of the Northern Farmer. In two areas in particular
Tennyson achieved almost unfailing felicity, the
poems on classical subjects and the large body of
lyrics; and he worked in both veins from youth to
old age. In charging classical themes with his own
feelings and ideas Tennyson was especially in the
Keatsian tradition. He was Keatsian also in the
deliberate richness, not unmixed with deliberate
simplicity, that characterizes these poems, and in the
blank verse of most of them; the slow movement, in
which the line is the dominant unit, is more Keatsian
than Miltonic. The inlaid beauty of Tennyson's
phrasing, the impression it gives of conscious com-
position, is even more Virgilian than Keatsian.
Virgilian too is 'the passion of the past', the lacrimae
rerum, that weighted Tears, Idle Tears and many
other notable lyrics. Love, the universal theme oi

THE VICTORIAN AGE 163

lyric poetry, inspired the ecstasies and the grief of
the lover of Maud, but most of Tennyson's lyrical
verse gives utterance, to quote Newman's saying
about Virgil, 'as the voice of Nature herself, to that
pain and weariness, yet hope of better things, which
is the experience of her children in every time'.
Since he was more of a lyrist than a metaphysician,
it was well that In Memoriam grew as a sequence of
lyrics. Even in that work, with its relative uniformity
of ritualistic tone, Tennyson moves between the
ornate and the simple. His simplicity, to be sure,
may, like his ornateness, be contrived, but in most
contexts contrivance of each kind may be appro-
priate and effective. In Memoriam contains, too,
a good deal of studied periphrasis and studied
condensation; both habits of mind can resemble
'metaphysical wit' and, as in the metaphysicals
themselves, can be hazardous.

Robert Browning (1812-89) was apparently less
plagued than Tennyson by questions about the nature
of poetry and the function of the poet, but he did
feel them; and his formulations and answers, like
Tennyson's, carry on from the romantics. Two prose
documents are the essays on Chatterton (Foreign
Quarterly Review, July, 1842) and Shelley (1852); as
Donald Smalley, the editor of the former, has said,
Browning in both essays was intent upon viewing a
romantic rebel as a prodigal son of evangelism. In
the very introspective Pauline (1833), Browning him-
self was a sort of reclaimed prodigal, exposing his
youthful struggle against scepticism and egocen-
tricity. In the more objective and assured Paracelsus
(1885) he set forth some main tenets of what was to
be his lifelong creed. Paracelsus the scientist

164 ENGLISH POETRY

Browning already has an instinct for the out-of-the-
way arid dubious hero has pursued knowledge
without love, and Aprile the Shelleyan poet has
sought beauty and love without knowledge. Brown-
ing does not simply declare for poetic intuition, nor
does he add two and two to make an ideal four.
Both men are one-sided. But the dying scientist
sees a larger truth than either had grasped: that
finite man, while he aspires and evolves from below
towards fuller knowledge and love, must also sur-
render to the infinite knowledge arid love and power
that stoop from above to raise him. Thus for Brown-
ing the romantic quest of the infinite exemplified in
Alastor is given a Christian reinterpretation.

A related problem, which we associate with Keats
rather than Shelley, is the choice between humani-
tarian action and aesthetic detachment. Whether
or not moderns read Sordello (1840; revised 1863),
Browning's contemporaries may be forgiven for not
discerning the poet's view of the problem, since the
subject of the poem had gone through various
phases of growth in his mind and was wrapped in a
bewildering excess of historical detail. He was to
return to questions of art and the artist in Parleyings
with Certain People of Importance in their Day (1887),
but in his best work, the shorter poems of his middle
years (and doubtless The Ring and the Book must be
included among the 'best'), Browning concentrated
on dramatic and psychological studies, especially of
love, religion, and art. Such practice of what was
his true vocation was in keeping with the portrait of
the poet in How it Strikes a Contemporary (1855):
the curious observer of everybody's doings is one
of God's spies, the town's conscience and its real

THE VICTORIAN AGE 165

master. What is here put, ironically, into the mouth
of an uncomprehending gossip was to become, one
might say, the hostile judgment of Yeats (a judgment
anticipated by some early reviewers), that Browning
saw the world as a great boarding-house with people
coming and going in a confused kind of way and
took their clatter and chatter as life and joy itself.

Browning dealt with problems of belief in various
ways and in many poems, from Christmas Eve and
Easter Day to A Death in the Desert 9 from Rabbi Ben
Ezra to the Pope's speech in The Ring and the Book.
With all his variety of material and his frequent
subtlety of exposition, he may be said in general to
have rung the changes on the central article of faith
he had enunciated in Paracelsus. The dramatic ven-
triloquist could take account of intellectuals from
Cleon to Strauss and Renan, but his answers came
from his own soul, with support from his agile mind.
He recoiled from a merely intellectual approach to
what was a cardinal fact of his consciousness. His
general position was indeed much like Tennyson's:
the human capacity for love is the irrefragable proof
of the all-embracing reality of divine love. Brown-
ing's faith in human and divine love carried with it
his special emphasis on 'apparent failure', on the
worth of aspiration, on the finite imperfection of
earth and man and the infinite perfection of heaven.
If Tennyson can be criticized for seeing immortality
in terms of reunion with Hallam, Browning's
symbols of the highest felicity are much less satis-
fying; he seems to envisage heaven as a scene of
incessant busyness. His hearty optimism has of
course long been under a cloud of damnation, and not
always, perhaps, quite fairly. He did write much

166 ENGLISH POETRY

besides 'God's in his heaven All's right with the
world' (and even that is the dramatic utterance of a
simple girl); and he did not merely glorify man and
woman and love and adventurous energy but ex-
plored many twisted and damaged souls that dwelt
beyond the usual Victorian horizon. Yet the essence
of the charge remains. Much of the Browning gospel
does grate upon us. His appetite for 'solid vulgar
life' seems undiscriminating and undisciplined. For
all his studies in moral ugliness, he seems to lack a real
sense of evil. And his triumphs of religious faith seem
to be rather easily won; he has little of the despair
and naked fear that can be so moving in Tennyson.
Browning's technique, if not his sensibility, might
warrant such a label as 'the Victorian Donne', though
the parallel cannot be carried very far. Somewhat
like Donne, Browning found himself at the start
among a crowd of small poets who cultivated thin
romantic themes and a thin 'poetical' style (he was
able to admire his future wife's rather gushing vein),
and he had a strong instinct for the direct, dramatic
rendering of character and situation; and drama of
course demands realistic colloquialism of speech and
rhythm. Yet Browning's style and tone and rhythm,
while always distinctive, vary greatly with his wide
range of subject, from

Gr-r-r there go, my heart's abhorrence!

Water your damned flower-pots, do!
to

Where the apple reddens

Never pry
Lest we lose our Edens,
Eve and I.

THE VICTORIAN AGE 167

For evidence of his rich variety one has only to recall
(as with Tennyson) a random list of poems and the
style and rhythm their themes evoke the single-
hearted ecstasy of Abt Vogler and the emotional
tensions of A Toccata of Galuppi's; the artistic gifts
and frustrations of the genial Fra Lippo Lippi and
the defeated Andrea del Sarto; the over-ripe classical
culture of Clcon and the medical lore of the humble
Karshish, which are linked by the strange tale of an
obscure Nazarene; and many other familiar poems.
In such creations it is only now and then that the
dramatic illusion is broken by the voice of the poet
declaring his own creed; in some others we may be
chiefly aware of Browning.

He is at his undidactic and artistic best in such a
poem as The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's
Church, and there is no better illustration of one
source of his incomparable vividness, the concrete
particulars that his minute and heterogeneous
learning can assemble for the depiction of background
and character. 'Peach-blossom marble', 'paltry
onion-stone', 'brown Greek manuscripts', and a
hundred other details bring to life the neo-pagan
aestheticism of a Renaissance bishop. It can be said,
roughly, that Browning's success varies with the
plenitude or the paucity of such particulars. But if
this power was one of his great assets, it was also,
along with the power of minute psychological
analysis, a liability. The reading of Sordello and of
some later long poems is like wading through glue.
On a smaller scale, there is the contrast between two
such satires on aspects of Victorian religious thought
as Caliban upon Setebos and Bishop Blougram's
Apology: while Caliban's speculations are dramatized

168 ENGLISH POETRY

with animal energy and even more than Browning's
usual instinct for tactile imagery, in the Apology
particulars fail to animate what becomes a tedious
tissue of dialectical subtleties and ironies. Happily
a multitude of the shorter poems are triumphs of
both concrete and psychological drama.

But Browning grew less and less able to select the
significant and more and more the victim of his own
volubility. He complained, like some other poets, of
the externality of Tennyson's Idylls 'the castle, and
the effect of the moon on its towers' but his own late
works can be no less oppressive with their rubble of
both factual and psychological data. The bulldozer
sweeps everything before it. Even The Ring and the
Book would be a much better poem, and would have
more and more eager readers, if it were half as long as
it is. However, we may be grateful for Browning's
powerful originality, which, in adding to the realm
of poetry the rich territory of the novelist, added
new and 'prosaic' resources to poetic language and
rhythm. If the influence of his colloquial idiom was
not much felt immediately, it worked upon some
modern poets, notably Ezra Pound, and thereby had
a share in creating the natural speech of recent
poetry.

Matthew Arnold (1822-88) had much more to say
than Tennyson and Browning about the general
problems of the poet, and much of what he said,
especially in the years of his chief poetical activity
just before and after 1850, sounds like 1950. In his
letters to Clough one recurring theme is the utterly
arid, unpoetical character of the age, of modern
civilization. What ground can a modern poet stand
on? What nobility or beauty can he still see? (One

THE VICTORIAN AGE 169

may wonder, by the way, if the image in The Future,
of the black line of cities crowding upon the river of
Time, embodies a recollection of Tennyson's Tim-
buctoo, in which Arnold had early discerned poetical
power.) Then, to the modern soul that seeks an
integrated ethical and spiritual life, traditional
religion yields no valid answers; the central convic-
tions of Tennyson and Browning mean little to the
son of Dr. Arnold. Yet in a practical world given
over to bustling activity, in a metaphysical world
that seems a meaningless chaos, man must achieve
inward order; he must ally himself with what order
he can find in the universe and in the traditional
wisdom of man. Such self-discipline, however,
requires the suppression of the natural, spontaneous
senses and emotions of youth, although these in their
very intensity seem to attest some profound kind of
Tightness. Above all, there is love; and while love
for 'Marguerite' may entail the pangs of renuncia-
tion, love can also awaken one's buried life and bring
some sense of reality and security to one lost in the
dark. But Arnold had been put, and put himself,
under the guidance of rigorous modern teachers and
ancient Stoics, and now, past thirty, he feels three
parts iced over; he could not have done otherwise,
and yet to use another of his epistolary metaphors
he has been shorn of his beams in the process.
Most of Arnold's great poetry is a series of variations
on this many-sided conflict, spontaneity and dis-
cipline, emotion and reason,faith and scepticism, the
rich youth and the dry age of the individual and the
race. A victim of modern unfaith, disintegration,
complexity, and melancholy, he can only long for
primitive faith, wholeness, simplicity, and happiness.

170 ENGLISH POETRY

This central conflict, though Arnold did not know
it, was his version of Keats's dilemma, of 'sensations'
versus 'thoughts', of the artist's 'negative capability'
versus the moralist's attainment of 'identity', of 'a
soul'. Keats, to be sure, was a poet of sensation
groping towards thought, and Arnold was a stoic
hungering for a life of sensation (not that, any more
than Keats, the author of The New Sirens craved
mere excitement). Moreover, Arnold's melancholy
was greatly darkened by his very modern sense of
spiritual isolation and by his religious predicament;
Keats wrote no Dover Beach or Stanzas from the
Grande Chartreuse. Arnold did see some of his
complex tensions in Words worthian terms. As a
lover of nature, who had grown up in the shadow of
Rydal Mount, he gladly recognized the 'healing
power' of Wordsworth, who in an iron time had
saved the joy and wisdom of natural feeling from the
desiccating intellect; and in Arnold's poetry Words-
worthian impulses are constantly active, though they
bring more nostalgia than present satisfaction. At
times he could turn from man's feverish busyness to
the ordered movements of the stars, to the 'general
Life' of nature 'Whose secret is not joy, but peace',
to a half-Wordsworthian, half-Platonic vision of an
ultimate source and haven of the spirit that is often
symbolized by 'the infinite sea'. But in sterner
moods he could declare that Wordsworth had averted
his ken from half of human fate, and could see
nature as a cosmic force indifferent to man or as a
lawless and insidious foe of man's integrity.

In various early letters and poems Arnold offers
hints and judgments that add up to a view of poetry
both positive and incomplete. The young 'Strayed

THE VICTORIAN AGE 171

Reveller', intoxicated by Circe's potion, has a series
of painless imaginative visions, but the poet who can
express tragic experience must live through it him-
self. If 'Not deep tbe Poet sees, but wide', neverthe-
less Sophocles 'saw life steadily, and saw it whole';
that is, his view of life was integrated as well as
comprehensive. In contrast with that, Tennyson
dawdles with the painted shell of the universe, and
Keats and Browning are immersed in a confused
multitudinousness; such verdicts, if unfair, explain
Arnold's own ideal. Yet the impossibility of that
ideal is the theme of his fullest statement of the
problem, Empedocles on Etna (1852). The philoso-
pher is driven to suicide because he cannot achieve
unity and wholeness; his sceptical intellect has dried
up the springs of simple, natural feeling, and he
remains an arid shell. Browning could fuse and
transcend the insights of Paracelsus and Aprile (and
reply to Empedocles in Cleon), but there is an un-
bridgeable gulf between Empedocles the elderly
thinker and Callicles the young singer, who represent
Arnold's conflicting impulses. The child is no longer
father of the man; nor can Arnold, like Ben Ezra,
grow old in the belief that 'The best is yet to be'.
Incidentally, Empedocles' situation, and the con-
trasted figures, might have started from the early
scenes of Manfred.

In explaining why he had withdrawn Empedocles,
in the preface to the Poems of 1853, Arnold made
his first public pronouncement on poetry and in-
augurated a new era in criticism. We should hardly
guess, from the confident classicism of this manifesto,
that he had been going through years of spiritual
travail. Appealing against mere modernity of theme

172 ENGLISH POETRY

and introspective self-consciousness, Arnold urges
the timeless supremacy of great actions, noble char-
acters, and intense situations. Further, whereas
Keats and others have revived Elizabethan richness,
modern poetry, with its increasing weight of spiritual
responsibility, must (as Arnold had written to
Clough) be very plain, direct, and severe. However
sound his magisterial arguments, Arnold himself
lives as a poet of introspection, not in the works
written to exemplify a theory. Balder Dead is simply
tedious; Sohrab andRustwn, fine as it is in composi-
tion and details and in the grandly symbolic (and
un-Horneric) conclusion, is the story of a distressing
accident rather than the classical tragedy it was
intended to be; and the drama Merope quite misses
tragic significance. Yet Arnold's critical creed, early
and late, was a consistent whole. Poetry is an art,
which must give aesthetic pleasure. But it is also
a criticism of life; the much-discussed phrase pre-
sumably meant pretty much what Arnold had said
of Sophocles. And when he looked in poets for 'high
seriousness', he was not (pace Mr. Trilling) looking for
'solemnity'; he was looking for the finest art com-
bined with the fullest and deepest insight, such as he
found in Homer and Dante and Shakespeare.

We must turn back to the poems. When we con-
sider Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold as artists,
we may alter the title of Bagehot's essay to 'Ornate,
Grotesque, and Plain in English Poetry', though
all three labels must be largely qualified. Arnold's
characteristic and often prosaic plainness came in
part from his theory of poetry, in part from the
nature of his poetic gifts. In setting forth his spirit-
ual troubles he seeks first of all to achieve a true and

THE VICTORIAN AGE 173

adequate statement, bare of non-essential decora-
tion (although starting with a partly symbolic scene
is almost an Arnoldian formula). The reader, while
moved by what is said, may feel that the writing is
not inspired and inevitable, that perhaps he himself
could make improvements in diction arid rhythm.
Though Arnold achieves beautiful and individual
rhythms (not least in the free verse that he may have
derived from Goethe), he has a notoriously unreliable
ear; he can begin a poem, like Memorial Verses or the
Grande Chartreuse, with a brisk gait and pouncing
rhymes that are quite at odds with the theme and
mood.

Yet Arnold might be described as a mixture of
Hardy (or an ungainly Wordsworth) and Keats. His
romantic instincts, his desire for 'feeling', though
half-suppressed, break through the austere or prosaic
surface and flower in images from nature and the
simple worlds of classical and Biblical antiquity.
Such a mixture is the staple Arnold. And at times he
gives free rein to his elegiac-idyllic impulses, as in
The Forsaken Merman and the later Oxford poems;
in these last, the Arnoldian intellectual melancholy
almost melts away into the richly Keatsian back-
ground of scenery and myth. Among the best and
most characteristic examples of the lyrical and the
reflective Arnold are the final song in Empedocles and
Dover Beach. The former, though devoid of explicit
'ideas', is really a glowing reassertion, after the
suicide of the thinker, of the Tightness of simple
feeling as it lived in the primitive religion of myth and
nature. Dover Beach is a troubled and limited affir-
mation of the same kind; here the voice is rather that
of an Empedocles who, conscious of the loss of

174 ENGLISH POETRY

religious faith, can still cling to love. (This poem, by
the way, seems to have been written backwards, from
the last paragraph, with its Thucydidean night-
battle, to the extended metaphor of the sea that
makes up the first part.) Of Arnold's poetry in
general we might use an image that he would not
have relished: a good deal of the time he writes like
an aeroplane gliding, with many small bumps, along
its runway, and he does not always succeed in taking
off, though his intense earnestness is always im-
pressive; but he does often rise from the ground of
analysis and diagnosis into sensuous emotion and
intuition, and then language, imagery, and rhythm
may fuse into something that no reader could think
of improving.

Austere as Arnold's own poetic ideal was, he
criticized his friend Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-61)
for excessive severity and didacticism. While in
Arnold himself Empedocles and Callicles were both
generally present, Clough might be called an Empe-
docles who had long forgotten youth and song (he
has sometimes been taken as a distressing proof of
Dr. Thomas Arnold's effect on sensitive schoolboys).
We are most familiar with those short poems that,
like some of Arnold's, lament a vanished faith and, in
a style as bare as their theme, set up a stoic ideal of
Truth and Duty. Yet Clough had his lighter side,
and he showed it not merely in the 'long- vacation
pastoral', The Bothie of Tober-na- Vuolich, but in the
more elegant Amours de Voyage. Here, in the setting
of Garibaldi's Rome, he developed, in easy conversa-
tional hexameters, a delicately ironic comedy, with
much sceptical commentary on things in general,
love, war, religion, *the British female*.

THE VICTORIAN AGE 175

In the second half of the century, while the veteran
Tennyson and Browning pursued their own lines, and
the social prophets, Arnold in particular, laboured to
penetrate the thick skin of complacent materialism,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82) and other new poets
turned their backs on a philistine world and devoted
themselves mainly to art for art's sake. If their
social protest was thus largely negative, we may
remember the Swinburne of Songs before Sunrise, the
Morris of Chants for Socialists, the Wilde of the Ballad
of Reading Gaol, and some other writers we shall
come to. But the rising poets were more inclined
towards aesthetic detachment, a very literary
romanticism, than towards fulfilling Arnold's de-
mand for a criticism of life. And the poets' cult of
'pure poetry' and Beauty, which had been nourished
by their own instincts and continental preceptors,
found critical support in the high-priests of aestheti-
cism, Pater and Wilde. Whereas Tennyson, Browning,
and Arnold, in their different ways, had experienced
the central conflicts of Keats, the Pre-Raphaelite poets
responded single-heartedly to the sensuous, romantic,
medieval Keats, the poet of The Eve of St. Agnes, La
Belle Dame sans Merci, and what has often been called
the first Pre-Raphaelite poem, The Eve of St. Mark.

If all service ranks the same with God, the classi-
fication of poets is not important, unless for the
desperate author of a small book about them, and a
brief survey of the latter half of the century is made
next to impossible by the sheer number and diver-
sity of figures. Even if we omit a host of minor ones,
the younger generations have no Tennyson, Brown-
ing, and Arnold who stand high above the rest
though various critics might see Hopkins or Hardy

176 ENGLISH POETRY

or Rossetti as such giants. The new aesthetic
romanticism was obviously a main line, and it might
include not only the usual names from Rossetti to
Yeats, but, by partial affinity, the romantic classi-
cist Landor (who was still writing after 1850!) and
FitzGerald; yet such a grouping is too loose to be
helpful. Moreover, while the Oxford Movement
affected the imagery and atmosphere of quite unre-
ligious poets, it also engendered a line of devoutly
religious writers, from Newman and Christina
Rossetti up to the flamboyant Francis Thompson.
Then, if poetry from Swinburne to Housman carried
early Victorian pessimism to new depths, we must
not forget the ebullient humour of Edward Lear
(whom some moderns would include among poets of
tragic vision), Lewis Carroll, Gilbert, and Calverley
and other parodists.

The religious problems which, after 1850, still
beset Tennyson and Browning, Arnold and Clough,
did not exist for most of the newer poets. They were
either whole-heartedly religious or, more often, whole-
heartedly unreligious or irreligious. Rossetti could
take over the legendary lore and picturesque con-
crete imagery of medieval Catholicism, but the
symbols that enveloped the Blessed Damozel were
only colours on his palette. Morris was devoted to
everything in medieval England except its religion.
Swinburne (Arnold's 'sort of pseudo-Shelley 5 ), an
heir of such diverse rebels as Landor and the Marquis
de Sade, was a militant foe of the 'pale Galilean' and
of all restraints. As we move up to the twentieth
century, most of the poets we meet either never had
any religion or lost what they had; and some found
refuge in Catholicism.

THE VICTORIAN AGE 177

The first great manifesto of Victorian neo-pagan-
ism came from Tennyson's friend, Edward Fitz-
Gerald (1809-83). His free translation, or re-creation,
of Omar Khayyam (1859) stands apart from most
poetry of the time; it was, indeed, unaccountably
ignored until, in 1861, it was found by someone in
Quaritch's penny stall and brought to the atten-
tion of Rossetti, who shared the discovery with
Swinburne and others. FitzGerakTs poem was no
Swinburnian narcotic but a sparkling champagne.
Its billowing rhythms, its seductive Oriental atmo-
sphere, the clean-cut richness of its fresh, bright
images, cast their spell whenever one opens the book.
But the hedonism of Omar-FitzGerald carried with
it a defiance of the Victorian Deity more arresting
than Swinburne's rhetoric:

Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make
And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake:

For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken' d Man's forgiveness give and take!

And we may recall an image of life that is almost the
same as one in the last choruses of Tlie Dynasts-.

We are no other than a moving row

Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go

Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held
In Midnight by the Master of the Show.

Incidentally, FitzGerald's elaborate metaphor of the
Potter was taken up and reinterpreted in Rabbi Ben
Ezra a poem that Hardy had read to him on his
death-bed, along with the first of the stanzas just
quoted from FitzGerald.

12

178 ENGLISH POETRY

The Rubdiydt, stealing so quietly into the world,
had nothing like the electric effect of Atalanta in
Calydon (1865) and Poems and Ballads (1866).
Swinburne (1837-1909) centred his drama in a de-
nunciation of 'the supreme evil, God'. (Christina
Rossetti pasted over the words in her copy, and
Tennyson mildly asked the daemonic young man if it
was fair for a Greek chorus to abuse the Deity in the
style of the Hebrew prophets.) Hertha is cited as
proof that Swinburne had, on occasion, a mature
philosophic intellect, but the proof, for all its august,
oracular solemnity, may be thought inadequate; if
Hertha had been written, say, by Emerson, it might
have drawn a parody from the poet who burlesqued
Tennyson's Higher Pantheism. In general, when
Swinburne rose above the raptures and languors of
passion, he carried on, in his own way, the strain
that had been notable in Blake and Shelley, the
worship of Man as God. The gospel appears at its
best in Hertha and the Prelude to Songs before Sun-
rise (1871) 'Because man's soul is man's God still
. . .' On a much lower level there is the noisy non-
sense of the Hymn of Man, 'Glory to Man in the
highest! for Man is the master of things'. Whatever
his and later men's sincerity, it was Swinburne who
started that self-consciously heroic attitudinizing
that is most familiar in Henley's 'Out of the night
that covers me' and with an intensified bitterness
in Housman.

Although John Morley described the Swinburne of
Poems and Ballads as 'the libidinous laureate of a
pack of satyrs', and Robert Buchanan assailed
Rossetti as the leader of the fleshly school, the
commonest modern complaint is that they were

THE VICTORIAN AGE 179

over-literary. There is, to be sure, a gulf between
Swinburne's amazing fluency and Rossetti's often
elaborate density, but both, if we come to them
from either earlier or later poetry, may seem to have
withdrawn from life, Rossetti into a gas-lit studio,
Swinburne into a library of 'curiosd*. Rossetti,
thanks to his 'fundamental brain- work' and creative
agonies and revisions, did produce poems that exist
as substantial, individual works of art; not very
many of Swinburne's can be remembered except as
jets of Swinburne.

Rossetti's output was not large, and it includes the
translations from medieval Italian that coloured his
own sensibility and style. Though all his poems bear
his impress, there is variety the celestial realism of
The Blessed Damozel; the earthly and typically Pre-
Raphaelite realism of My Sister's Sleep; A Last Con-
fession and the rather sentimental Jenny, more or
less in Browning's vein; such macabre balladry as
Sister Helen; and, not to prolong the catalogue, The
House of Life, Rossetti's central work. In these and
other poems he ranges from the plain to the ornate,
but the ornate is his natural medium. While he may
at times remind us of Tennyson, his concentrated
refinement and involution of style, especially in the
sonnets, go beyond Tennyson; if we think of any
English parallels, it is of Shakespeare's sonnets. The
mysticism of the flesh is rendered in the grand man-
ner, and the fleshly is in the main absorbed into intel-
lectualized and symbolic abstractions (and occasional
conceits). It must be admitted that the liturgy of
love, however impassioned and even splendid, can
grow languorous and suffocating, and the reader may
cry out for fresh air, for Coventry Patmore's vision

180 ENGLISH POETRY

of marriage or the realistic analysis of Meredith's
Modern Love.

Like Rossetti, Swinburne has a voice unmistak-
ably his own, but, unlike Rossetti's, his poetry has
no edges, and indeed almost 110 inside. Such images as
'the brown bright nightingale amorous' shimmer and
vanish in a dazzling flood of words and rhythms;
and individual words have no weight or value, the
rhythm is a dithyrambic tune. It all holds a moment-
ary intoxication, and it has been defended as aspiring,
in anticipation of Pater's phrase, towards the con-
dition of music, and as approaching the method of
the Symbolists. But poetry does need more than
hypnotic shimmer and sound, and it is only once in
a while as in the Prelude, or Super Flumina Baby-
lonis, or the elegy on Baudelaire that a generous
passion gives Swinburne substance and maturity.
The youthful Atalanta is a marvel of radiant lyricism,
and of hardly less remarkable blank verse, and yet,
in spite of its serious theme, it is only 'literature'.
The poems that once shocked the bourgeois have
subsided into a place in the history of decadent
romanticism and of abnormal psychology. In
general, if we read more than a page or two of
Swinburne, even when he is at his best, our faculties
are not so much stimulated as blurred and benumbed.

The Defence ofGuenevere (1858) by William Morris
(1834-96) was the first book of Pre-Raphaelite
poetry, and it signalized a kind of medievalism very
different from that of Tennyson's Idylls (1859 f.).
Morris's later voluminous tales, medieval and mytho-
logical, were, unlike the Defence, pitched in a low key
tod focused at a distance; they have the dreamy
charm of a verbal tapestry, but their archaic.

THE VICTORIAN AGE 181

stylized evenness of tone has something of the effect
of Swinburne and water.

The unending process of convention and revolt in
poetic style which is of course only a symptom of
deeper pressures was clearly visible throughout the
century. The decorative richness of Keats and
Tennyson early emerged as the dominant manner.
Then came such exponents of other modes as Mrs.
Browning (who attained her dubious best in Sonnets
from the Portuguese, 1850), Browning, Arnold,
Clough, the 'Spasmodics' (chiefly Sydney Dobell and
Alexander Smith), and FitzGerald, and such diverse,
isolated, and individual writers as Beddoes, Emily
Bronte, William Barnes, and 11. S. Hawker. But the
Keats-Tennyson convention the label carries no
disparagement of either poet in himself remained
dominant and passed into the prolonged and varied
phases that are loosely termed Pre-Raphaelite. In
the latter half of the Victorian age more or less
'literary' poetry was represented by Idylls of the
King and the accumulating work of most of the
newer poets, Rossetti, Morris, Swinburne, Bridges,
Wilde, Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, Francis
Thompson, Housman, Yeats, and many others.
While this tradition yielded much fine poetry (in-
cluding such late pieces by Tennyson himself as the
grandly typical Demeter and Persephone and the sur-
prising Voyage of Maeldune), it was always in danger
of anaemia. The imagination tended to work at
several removes from life, and language developed a
poetic diction of romantic and rather precious vague-
ness. One indication of a 'poetical' atmosphere is the,
treatment of nature. For the romantic poets nature
had been a reality and a religion, for Tennyson and

182 ENGLISH POETRY

Arnold it was a frequent inspiration; but now it was
often observed through glass or in a book. For
Rossetti, the painter-poet, nature when it appeared
was likely to be pure form and colour, or a half-
unreal element in the symbolism of love and death.
Swinburne's rebellious and lyrical impulses re-
sponded especially to the sea, though he could paint
landscape, preferably high-lighted by the breasts of
nymphs and Maenads. Morris turned back from 'six
counties overhung with smoke' to a bright mirage of a
pastoral England. On the whole, the Muse was rather
pallid and in need of blood transfusions; and from
various quarters more and more conscious or un-
conscious rebels appeared, seeking a closer view of
actuality, a stronger and less 'poetical' idiom.

Two rebels, if they can be called that, came from
within the Pre-Raphaelite circle itself, Christina
Rossetti (1830-94) and Coventry Patmore (1828-96).
After The Defence of Guenevere, the next important
Pre-Raphaelite book was Goblin Market (1862), a
homely, rich, and original fantasy of innocence and
evil. But Christina Rossetti stood apart from her
brother and Morris and Swinburne both in her
manner and in her intense religious asceticism. If her
personal'and poetic vision was limited, even morbid,
because of her love and fear of life and love and her
longing for death and heavenly peace, her inner con-
flicts and occasional raptures gave birth to a lyrical
simplicity that is pure, direct, and poignant.

The religious and thrice-married Patmore, on the
other hand, devoted himself to the celebration of
marital love (The Angel in the House, 1854-68) and
its sacramental relation to the love of God (The
Unknown Eros, 1868-90). At first glance The Angel

THE VICTORIAN AGE 183

in the House may suggest only the prattle in the
vicarage garden that moderns take to be one of the
Victorian horrors, but Patmore was trying to render
ordinary life in ordinary language, not without
touches of splendour. In the later irregular odes his
semi-Tennysonian manner gives way to a strongly
individual fusion of plain directness with an exalted
and concentrated fervour of language and image.

The Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-
89), a Roman Catholic convert like his friend Pat-
more, also had a harmonious vision, very much his
own, of the earthly and the divine, but a vision
intensified and tormented by a whole complex of
inward and outward causes. His poems were first
published in 1918 by Bridges, his friend and trustee
(who had previously printed a few in anthologies),
and since then Hopkins has been a major force in
poetry and a major subject of criticism. He began,
as a schoolboy, with the sharply original as well as
Keatsian Vision of the Mermaids: his mature poetry
has no or few nineteenth-century affinities, though
at moments he may remind us of Patmore or
Meredith. While the modern intellectual has grown
more receptive to religious poetry than he used to
be, thanks in part to the metaphysical revival, the
interest in Hopkins has been less religious than
aesthetic and technical, and recent disciples, such as
Dylan Thomas, are remote from their teacher's
creed.

Hopkins' bold violence in the handling of rhythm
and language, which owed something to his know-
ledge of Greek and his acquaintance with medieval
alliterative verse, went far beyond any experimenta-
tion of his century. English prosody has always

184 ENGLISH POETRY

allowed more or less freedom, even in ages of system-
atic metrics; and such different masters as Milton
and Pope had, among other things, varied the
number of stresses in the heroic line, while ordinarily
retaining ten syllables (of which a varying propor-
tion would be unstressed). Hopkins, going back to
the still greater freedom of the alliterative patterns,
combined a relatively regular number of stresses,
which might be juxtaposed, with varying runs of
unstressed syllables. 'Sprung rhythm' was one
principal means of gaining both liberty and concen-
trated energy; there were others, such as a use of
alliteration very different from Swinburne's. Yet,
however right Hopkins' mode of utterance was for
him (and he wrote to be read aloud), a reader who
dwells on this side idolatry may have qualms. The
lack of connective tissue and the forcible emphasis of
everything can at times as in Meredith or Carlyle
give an effect of incessant, artificial straining. Would
it be blasphemy to ask if even The Windhover,
miraculous as it is, does not distract us from its
theme by some excess of violence and eccentricity?
But Hopkins does make words, familiar, un-
familiar, and freshly compounded, act as if they had
never been fully alive before. His descriptive
language is in the Spenserian tradition, especially
the tradition of Milton and Keats, though it is as
near pure Anglo-Saxon as a modern poet can get.
Out of the simplest elements Hopkins can attain a
very rich and individual vividness as well as strength
and movement. Whatever he absorbed from his
reading, poetical or theological, was completely
made over into himself and became a part of his
own vision. To mention one small and apparently

THE VICTORIAN AGE 185

unnoticed item, 'sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine' is surely a religious transfiguration of Virgil's
sulco attritus splendescere vomer (Georg. i. 46). At
times Hopkins seems to find full release and happi-
ness in his response to the beauty of God's creation,
yet his religious joy in nature, his religious sympathy
with humble men, the intensity of his devotional
exaltation, did not save him from spiritual torture.
Indeed his most whole-hearted devotional ecstasies
reveal the quivering sensibility that found utterance
in the almost hysterical despair of the 'terrible
sonnets', which outdo the anguished cries of Donne.
Since Hopkins' poems were unknown outside a
small circle, he had no influence. George Meredith
(1828-1909), whose 'pagan' devotion to nature was
comparable in fervour to Hopkins', was too strange
and difficult to exert the fresh influence he might
have had. During the past generation this strenuous
preacher of realistic optimism has been in disrepute,
while the nay-say er Hardy has enjoyed high favour.
But Meredith was and remains an original and arrest-
ing poet, as individual in style as in thought, and as
intellectual in verse as in prose. He could welcome a
creative view of evolution as a bracing challenge to
the race. With his fusion of half-Stoic ethics and
biology, his gospel of 'inspired sanity', he felt no
religious loss or want; the Meredithian trinity was
'blood' (the senses and animal energies), brain, and
spirit. Meredith was nature's own poet, a buoyant
son of Earth. Like his sage Melampus, he was the
intimate friend of all living creatures and growing
things, a fearless dweller in the Woods of Wester-
main. Much of his best writing belongs to the out-
door world, from the early Love in the Valley (which

186 ENGLISH POETRY

some modern critics have been able to damn) to the
later philosophical poems that contain his reading of
earth and life. His versions of classical myth are far
from the usual imitations of Tennyson; they have
something of the primitive vitality of the myth-
making imagination. In the more reflective poems,
Meredith's ideas become clearer when we have got
hold of his key-words and symbols, though his 'wit'
leaps from metaphor to metaphor, or packs meta-
phors together, with such speed that we may feel
hustled and battered. His language can be concen-
trated, sinewy, tingling with life; it can also be con-
torted, muscle-bound, and ugly.

While Meredith was too highbrow to have much
effect on poetic or popular taste, in the later 1880's
and the 1890's the hot-house flowers of effete Pre-
Raphaelitism bent before the fresh breezes of a new
and robust romanticism. The crippled and explo-
sive editor, W. E. Henley (1849-1903), his friend
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94), the wandering
invalid, and the bespectacled Anglo-Indian journal-
ist, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), were men who, in
fact or imagination, knew far places, who loved high
romance and romantic action and England and the
Empire, and who had no desire to walk down Picca-
dilly with a poppy or a lily in their medieval hand.
If their verse was not often significant poetry, it had
a virile, timely, and wholesome tang of actuality.
Henley was mot original in the poems, some of them
in free verse, which pictured London streets and
hospital wards with colloquial and clinical realism.
Kipling brought a bardic virtuosity and a gift of
pictorial phrase to a multitude of 'unpoeticaF sub-
jects, not only Tommy Atkins and Danny Deever

THE VICTORIAN AGE 187

and M'Andrew but ships and engines and deep-sea
cables. And at times he touched the hem of the true
romance and of poetry.

One kind of opposition to art for art's sake came
through the realistic expression of realistic pessim-
ism (to use a crude but comprehensive word). There
were such rebels against their world as James Thom-
son (The City of Dreadful Night, 1874) and John
Davidson (1857-1909), who was among other things
the apostle of a sort of Nietzschean Titanisrn. As for
the very different kind of poet, A. E. Housman (1859-
1936), he might take a place with the opposition by
virtue of both his cynical hatred of life and his fresh,
clean economy of form and style (which owed some-
thing to Shakespeare's songs and the old ballads).
And yet, as his several volumes (1896, 1922, 1936)
melt into one another and into the past, Housman,
though he wrote some indisputably fine lyrics, seems
more and more a literary poet whose stylistic and
pastoral conventions have the taint of artifice. His
bitterness too, however authentic in itself, carried the
marks of Swinburnian neo-paganism.

The same thing may be said of a bigger poet,
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Hardy derived his
intellectual scepticism from Mill, Spencer, Darwin,
and the rest and he had a nostalgic regard for the
faith that was linked with ancient churches, age-old
country life, and moral ideals but the content, if
not the manner, of his philosophical poems reminds
us of his more exotic predecessors. Though most of
his poetry came much later (1898-1928), the essence
of his view of life, the endurance of 'Crass Casualty',
was set forth in the sonnet Hap of 1866, the year
of Poems and Ballads (and of De Tabley's stoic

188 ENGLISH POETRY

Philoctetes) and the year after Atalanta. And while
Hardy here dissociated himself from vain defiance of
the gods, his fatalism or whatever we wish to call
it remained very much that of Swinburne* and
FitzGerald, as the last paragraph of Tess or, as
we observed above, the last chorus of The Dynasts
sufficiently indicates. But if Hardy's philosophy was
simple, his brooding compassion was large. He saw
nature as a congeries of living and lifeless things
emptied of order and purpose, the work perhaps of a
Godhead dying downwards, a Vast Imbecility, and
yet a world in which beauty may flower out of chaos
and pain and in which man endures with the process
of the seasons.

In contrast with Meredith's swift, elliptical
energy, his mighty opposite often writes like a man
who has just become articulate. He has his moments
of subdued ecstasy, that bring with them a lyrical
note, but in general he seems to be feeling his way
through the puzzles and tragedies of life and feeling
his way through language and rhythm at the same
time. Since he was a tireless experimenter in verse
forms, we may assume that all his effects were de-
liberate. Set against the Keats-Tennyson tradition,
Hardy (a partial disciple of William Barnes) is
homely, prosaic, gnarled, and sometimes odd. But
even awkwardness is an element in his rugged
honesty. A great many of his poems, it must be said,
are slight and unrewarding; some not always those
made most familiar by anthologies have a sombre
rightness and power. The Darkling Thrush, Drum-
mer Hodge, and In Time of 'the Breaking of Nations'
might be compared, by the way, with the first two
lyrics of A Shropshire Lad and the Epitaph on an

THE VICTORIAN AGE 189

Army of Mercenaries. To add one futile sentence,
neither Hardy's miscellaneous verse nor his novels
would have prepared us for the largeness of vision
that sustains The Dynasts. And the size and the
date (1903-8) of The Dynasts prompt a no less
futile reference to the mammoth epics of that iso-
lated figure, Charles Doughty, who is much better
known for his Arabian travels.

Hardy presents the phenomenon of a novelist
returning, in his old age, to poetry and becoming one
of the leaders of young poets, poets who were trying
to shake off moribund Pre-Raphaelitism and get a
fresh start. In our hostile retrospect, Georgian
poetry has become identified with mildly ecstatic
pottering about English lanes and hedgerows, but a
number of the writers included in Sir Edward Marsh's
anthologies (1911-22) do not altogether bear out that
notion and are too diverse to be summarily labelled.
Some names must serve as shorthand, instead of
comments. Poets who appeared in both the first and
the last volumes (and in most of the others as well)
were Lascelles Abercrombie, W. H. Davies, Walter
de la Mare, John Drinkwater, W. W. Gibson, D. H.
Lawrence, and Harold Monro; in the first but not in
the last were Gordon Bottomley, Rupert Brooke
(d. 1915), G. K. Chesterton, James Eiroy Flecker
(d. 1915), John Masefield, Sturge Moore, and James
Stephens; and among newer names in the last were
Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, Richard Hughes,
Peter Quennell, V. Sackville-West, and J. C. Squire.
Intervening volumes had included some of these and
such others as Ralph Hodgson and Siegfried Sassoon,
and one piece by Isaac Rosenberg, whose best work
appeared after his death in France in 1918. Edward

190 ENGLISH POETRY

Thomas and Wilfred Owen (killed in France in 1917
and 1918), Laurence Binyon, Yeats, and the much
older but productive veteran Hardy, and the rising
Imagists, did not appear at all. Some of the Georg-
ians do reflect a very English world of rural peace
and security, a world untroubled by the outward
and inward problems that oppressed Hardy and, in
more modern ways, Yeats and Lawrence. Of the
poetry of rural reflection, probably Mr. Blunden's,
which is not merely that, has worn the best, because
of a concreteness of observation and language that
are both authentic and artistic. For all its unpre-
tentious freshness and variety, much Georgian verse
had by no means got rid of Pre-Raphaelite romanti-
cism and rhetoric. Rupert Brooke's Dust, for in-
stance, was a dilution of Donne's The Ecstasy in
which intensity was attained through phrases like
*your swift hair'. We prefer the very Georgian, and
charming, Old Vicarage, Grantchester.

A number of writers were hardly Georgian except
in time, and not always in that. Sturge Moore (1870-
1944), whose first volume had appeared in 1899, was
a direct heir of the Pre-Raphaelites, but he had an
aesthetic and ethical philosophy, and his pictorial
instinct went along with an individual density of
style. Mr. Masefield (1878- ) had begun with the
Kiplingesque Salt Water Ballads (1902), and in 1911
he fluttered the polite world with the lurid violence
of The Everlasting Mercy. His ties with the past con-
tinued to reveal themselves both in tales of action
and in apostrophes to Beauty; the two strains were
merged in the stirring Dauber (1913). At the oppo-
site pole from Mr. Masefield's rather slipshod muse
was the delicate art of Mr. de la Mare (1878- ),

THE VICTORIAN AGE 191

whose moonlight enchantments are not merely a
withdrawal from a scientific world but create a
world of imagination beyond the limits of the visible;
and his latest meditations on life and time (1950-1)
are a ripe testament of serenity not won by escape.
Edward Thomas (1878-1917), with his blend of
nature and reflection, might seem at first glance to
be only another Georgian, but for him the substan-
tial beauties of the rural scene were only a partial
insurance against a modern mind's consciousness of
loss and negation. Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) had
become something of a legend even before his death
in Scyros; his sonnets on the war, the last echoes,
so to speak, of Henley's England, my England, were
soon submerged in the anti-heroic bitterness of
Sassoon and others. By far the most important of the
war poets was Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) a late
and fervent disciple of Keats whose work had a
deeper note than anger, and whose art helped to
inaugurate the modern movement. And before and
during the war other poets had been charting new
directions.

CHAPTER VI

THE MODERN PERIOD

T\VO world wars and their consequences, and antici-
pation of a more terrible third one, make up the
history of the period 1914-52 and the experience, in
some degree, of all individuals who have lived
through all or part of those years or of the many
who were killed. But even if there had been no
wars, the modern poet would have found himself
in a situation much more difficult than confronted
his predecessors. The reasons have become a set
of cliches, though they are cliches of oppressive,
even paralysing, actuality. Many of the spectres
that have haunted this generation are, directly or
indirectly, the offspring of science, not merely new
weapons of mass-destruction but more insidious,
everyday enemies of traditional order and security
the decay of religious faith and of moral values, the
predominance of a purely naturalistic view of life
and man, the mechanization of both external
existence and the individual personality, the change
from communal stability to the urban atomizing
of society, and so on.

These dislocating and dehumanizing forces were,
to be sure, in operation long before our time, and
they have been encountered in earlier chapters, but
in the last thirty or forty years their momentum has
been greatly accelerated, their impact greatly
widened. The modern literary and philosophical
scene includes, along with confident children of the

192

THE MODERN PERIOD 193

empirical fact, a good many conservatives arid
repentant liberals, and the work of the chief poets
and many lesser ones has been in some form a
revolt against a desiccating scientific positivism.
Modern rebels, however, and modern poets in general,
have, with a very few exceptions, been cut off by
science from some central supports and themes of
earlier poets. Those earlier poets, from Spenser,
Donne, and Milton onward, had abundant occasion
for despair, yet, when we think of the high religious,
metaphysical, and ethical faith that sustained men
of the Renaissance, or of the more secular but still
invincible idealism of the romantic poets, it might
well seem whatever the necessity of accepting
science and its results as if ours is a world of
hollow men, emptiness within contemplating empti-
ness without. And while this has been a common loss,
the poet especially has had further problems,
whether old and intensified or relatively new the
pressure of world events that dwarf the helpless
individual, the alternatives of contemplative detach-
ment or social responsibility, the lack of communal
tradition and experience which the poet can share
and use, the extinction of 'myth' and 'ritual' in our
rationalistic and mechanized world, the difficulties
of expression and communication in an age of dis-
integrated and vulgarized culture. In short, since
poetry must be an act of faith, for both the poet and
the reader, what kind of integration or affirmation
or response can be achieved in a time of radical
scepticism, confusion, anxiety, and fear?

The reactions to such problems, or some of them,
that came from Hardy and Housman have been
touched upon already. Another voice from the past
13

194 ENGLISH POETRY

was that of the aged Robert Bridges (1844-1980),
whose Pre-Raphaelitism, disciplined by an austere
taste, had earlier yielded many short poems of
delicate refinement. But The Testament of Beauty
(1929), an ambitious attempt to fuse naturalism
with idealism, was not a satisfying affirmative De
Rerum Natura for our age; if Santayana was his
Epicurus, Bridges was no Lucretius. Nor was the
poem a modern In Memoriam; whereas Tennyson
had had to overcome stark despair, Bridges had not,
and the aloof serenity and preciosity of his versified
treatise seemed to belong to a noble but not quite
real world.

Even before the First World War new impulses had
begun to work in poetry and criticism, and several
movements were forwarded by the dynamic, erratic,
and flamboyant Ezra Pound (1885- ). One move-
ment was Imagism, which early enlisted the crusa-
ding energies of Mr. Pound and Amy Lowell, and
which attracted a good many of the younger writers,
English and American. But Imagist verse has not
worn very well. Concentration on clear-cut images
and the virtual excluding of traditional reflection
were an effort to strike through the soft haze of
deliquescent romanticism, and the movement did
help to sharpen perception and phrasing and elimi-
nate emotional vagueness. However, it attacked
symptoms rather than the disease, and was a theory
of technique rather than a theory of poetry; the
Imagists on the whole had little to say, and the hard
bright surfaces they saw were not enough. Imagism
dlso helped to break down merely conventional
metrics and allowed poets to write a poem as it
came, to let theme and mood take their ^atural

THE MODERN PERIOD 195

shape. Such emancipation was no doubt a good
thing, though it encouraged an amount of lazy
sprawling that was not poetry by any definition. The
chief modern poets, Yeats, Mr. Eliot, and others,
have combined liberty with rigorous discipline, and
their powerful and individual rhythms are very far
from polyphonic or chopped prose.

The Georgian anthologies were not fully repre-
sentative of the years 1911-22, and typical Georgian
verse came to look more like a mild eddy than a main
current. Perhaps the quickest way of indicating
the emergence of 'modern' poetry from a tran-
sitional mixture of old and new is to recall some
publications of the years 1917-22. Along with books
from a dozen or more orthodox Georgians, there
were: T. S. Eliot's Prufrock (1917), which may be
said to have inaugurated modern poetry; the Poems
(1918) of Gerard Manley Hopkins (d. 1889), which
were to electrify many of the younger writers; the
Poems (1920) of Wilfred Owen (killed in 1918), which
were to have a more 'prosaic' and astringent effect;
several volumes from the unwearied Hardy, whose
prosaic astringency had long been working on his
juniors; several volumes from the tormented
romantic, D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), who,
loathing the scientific intellect and all its works,
sought salvation in the reality of animal energies
and sex, and whose 'vitalist' gospel was to fortify a
number of younger poets; several transitional
volumes from the now converted or modernized
romantic, Yeats; and volumes from the not readily
classifiable Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Aldous
Huxley, and the Sitwells. Then in 1922 came two
works in prose and verse that were to make this year

196 ENGLISH POETRY

a landmark in modern literature, Ulysses and The
Waste Land, although they were not at first received
with general understanding and acclamation.

All these names carry their significance, and some
other names and titles will help to define the spirit
and direction of these and later years. Sir Herbert
Grierson's Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the
Seventeenth Century (1921) made Donne and his
fellows better known among the literati than they
had been. Poetic taste and practice were radically
affected by the critical doctrines of T. E. Hulme
(killed in 1917), T. S. Eliot (The Sacred Wood, 1920),
I. A. Richards (Principles of Literary Criticism, 1924),
and their rapidly growing band of disciples. The
Criterion (1922-39), edited by Mr. Eliot, and
Scrutiny (1932- ), edited by Dr. F. R. Leavis, were
the chief periodical media for the new criticism,
which was intellectual, precisely analytical, and
anti-romantic. Hostility to the romantic tradition
was a conspicuous strain in the new movement,
whether or not it could be justly called a new kind of
classicism. For nearly a century the romantic poets
had been virtually the ideal and definition of non-
dramatic poetry, for critics as well as general
readers. Now they were roughly dethroned and
replaced by Donne and his school; linked with these
were the supreme exemplars of 'good' writing, Dante
and Shakespeare. The new criteria were often
applied with arbitrary and uncritical dogmatism; the
canonization of Donne brought with it the excom-
munication not only of most romantic and Victorian
poets but of Milton. There was, however, a very
positive value in the rediscovery of a body of poetry
that seemed a unique answer to the poetical needs of

THE MODERN PERIOD 197

our time. Metaphysical colloquialism of style and
rhythm, realistic particularity, toughness of sensi-
bility, the complex and often dissonant expression of
tension and conflict, the resources of irony, ambi-
guity, paradox, and wit such qualities helped to
energize and tighten the modern temper and tech-
nique, to create an attitude and a medium suited to a
troubled, sceptical, anti-heroic age.

There are of course reservations to be made about
the metaphysical revival, and there were other
influences at work, from the French Symbolists
to the rhythms of the internal-combustion engine.
While serious modern poetry is obviously far more
colloquial than nineteenth-century poetry normally
was, it has like Donne's its own rhetoric, and can
be quite as literary and unnatural as any previous
poetic idiom; it might be asked, moreover, on what
grounds colloquialism can be set up as an exclusive
poetic absolute. And some main characteristics
of modern technique may be partly attributed to
both the scientific findings and the moral confusion
of our time. Elliptical discontinuity is related to
psychology's account of mental processes, conscious
and unconscious, and also to modern ideas of dis-
continuity in nature (as contrasted with the rigorous
law of nineteenth-century science). Poets, whether
themselves distrusting traditional values and verities,
or aware of general distrust, have been driven back
to the irrefragable truth of concrete particulars and
the data and symbols of private experience. Overt
reflection and affirmation, in the past the products
of relative assurance, have been either drastically
limited in scope or replaced or enveloped by the
oblique and non-committal and ironical. Then

198 ENGLISH POETRY

modern poems are likely to develop around and
through images, instead of having a 'logical' struc-
ture of ideas. Thus, unlike most earlier poetry, a
modern poem may seem to be, in a sense, only
half-written; much more is left to be done by the
reader, and interpretation may (in the useful phrase
of Sir Thomas Browne) admit a wide solution.
Modern poets have often been accused of being
excessively and wilfully difficult, but the same
charge was lodged in earlier periods against poets
who have long been acquitted; and time can always
be relied upon to distinguish between authentic,
inevitable obscurity and mere fashion. It might be
added that there is a parallel difference between
authentic and merely fashionable 'despair'.

In these few pages we can, as usual, look only, and
briefly, at a few conspicuous and representative
figures and tendencies.

Mr. Pound, the brash Western invader of England
and Europe, comes into this sketch for a moment as a
destructive and creative influence. He might be
labelled a sort of romantic anti-romantic. He began
as an heir of the recent past, of both aestheticism
and Browning, and he posed against a fa$ade of
variegated and exotic culture, Chinese, Latin,
Italian, Provensal. Probably not many of his short
poems claim a high place in our memories, and
critics are not agreed on the proportion of poetry
embedded in the ever- multiply ing Cantos, but no one
would dispute Pound's importance as a poetic
trail-blazer and tool-maker. Abjuring violently the
*poeticaP post-romantic legacy, he was a pioneer
labourer in the fashioning of a poetic language and
rhythm based on common speech.

THE MODERN PERIOD 199

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) was in some ways an
independent, self-sufficient explorer, not aligned, at
least in his full maturity, with current fashions and
social creeds. But he also exemplified in some ways
the problems and the evolution of modern poetry.
In the late 1880's, in association with Morris, Wilde,
Lionel Johnson, Dowson, Arthur Symons, and other
members of the Rhymers' Club, Yeats was a disciple
of Rossetti and Pater and Pre-Raphaelite aestheti-
cism, a sort of Irish Morris, weaving into Celtic
legend the soft threads of 'poetical' beauty. In
The Green Helmet (1910), and more clearly in
Responsibilities (1914) and later volumes, we see the
aesthete of the Celtic twilight becoming a poet of
the troubled Irish present and, more largely and
simply, a poet. From first to last he had in his head
Irish characters and folk-lore, on his tongue the
language and rhythms of Irish speech, and, as he
became more and more himself, he shed his coat of
mythological embroidery for a colloquial but
ceremonial nakedness, a precision, strength, and
symbolic density all his own. The richest fruit of
Yeats's second growth came in The Tower (1928), The
Winding Stair (1983), and some pieces in Last Poems
(1940). He had moved from the rank and file to the
head of the procession, to become, most people
would say, the greatest of modern poets, and to
exert a potent influence upon all younger writers
who could absorb it.

Various external and internal causes had combined
to change a dreamer of lovely dreams into a major
poet the general process of ripening, the experience
of love, writing for the stage, the kindling of
nationalistic ardour in the fire of the Irish rebellion,

200 ENGLISH POETRY

and heterogeneous spiritual and literary influences
from Plato and Plotinus to Berkeley and Blake, from
Donne to the Symbolists and Pound. And there was
his own wrestling with problems of art and life. 'We
begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy.'
A man of religious instincts, who had been deprived
of traditional faith by Darwin and Tyndall, Yeats
revolted, like Blake and others, against the 'Grey
Truth' of scientific rationalism. What he craved was
a unity of being provided by a unified culture. And,
like Blake, Yeats saw the disintegration of culture
and of the human personality as beginning in the
later seventeenth century, in the idea of man's
passivity before a mechanized nature as opposed to
impassioned contemplation of a reality that was both
logical and boundless. One clue to his direction is his
setting up, against Locke, of Henry More, the Cam-
bridge Platonist, and the Platonic conception of the
World-Soul. But whereas More's and earlier ages had
inherited a traditional framework of belief and
thought, the 'unchristened' Yeats again like Blake
had to make his own, out of scattered fragments
of mystical and occult lore. A reader who began
with Yeats's exposition of his system, A Vision
(1925-37), might be pardoned for doubting if sub-
stantial poetry could spring from such a strange and
elaborate construction of 'Platonic* cycles of cultural
and individual life. Yet, though Yeats's finest
writing casts its spell even if its 'meaning' is dimly
apprehended, the materials of the Vision filtered
down through the critics do furnish essential
understanding and enrichment of the poet's symbols,
Babylon, Byzantium, the moon, 'The Second
Coming', and the rest.

THE MODERN PERIOD 201

Yeats's greatest poems have to do with the most
central of all tensions, the claims of the flesh and the
spirit, the temporal and the eternal, the Many and
the One. The pagan poet, hating abstractions and
restraints, would feel the pride of life, the raptures
and pangs of the natural man; yet his soul would
escape from the fury and^mire of human veins into
the starlit dome, from bondage to a dying animal
into the artifice of eternity. And both impulsions
were quickened by the sense of oncoming age, the
fear of withering into truth and wisdom. At times,
as in Sailing to Byzantium, Yeats can turn with
relative serenity from the flux of life to the ideal of
enduring art. At other times, the poet who could
mock Plotinus' thought and cry in Plato's teeth was
able to identify the One with the Many, to rejoice,
as in Among School Children, in the contemplation of
man as a part of nature, or the harmonious unity of
all being. Or, in that tremendous sonnet, Leda and
the Swan, the animal, the human, and the super-
natural are fused in one mythical, actual, and
prophetic moment, a pagan parallel, in Yeats's
gospel, to the Annunciation. Yet it may be said that
his experience of these tensions is more violent than
profound, because his poles are too simply aesthetic
and barbaric. His language and rhythms have
become a powerful and magical blend of simplicity,
complexity, and splendour, but the man does not
seem to have attained the maturity of the artist. If
we think of the young Keats, who, with similar un-
resolved tensions, had a warm humanity, a growing
ethical and spiritual wisdom, we may wish that age
had brought to a great poet a creed less devoted to
the glorification of mere animal vitality. The partly

202 ENGLISH POETRY

parallel creed of Lawrence who also lacked physical
vigour was at least a positive faith, however mis-
guided or inadequate; in Yeats, apparently, the
vacuum left by a mainly aesthetic view of life was
open to waves of lust and rage.

T. S. Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888, some
months after the death of Matthew Arnold, and,
stretching Pythagorean (or Yeatsian) doctrine, we
might think of him as a partial reincarnation. He
arrived, at an early age, at a position of much more
oracular authority among the literary intelli-
gentsia than Arnold ever enjoyed, and had a far
stronger and more immediate influence upon the
poetry, criticism, and taste of his period. While in
both men there are^gaps or antinomies between
tiiejDpet ancfthe critic, Mr. Eliot's critical theory has
more closely accompanied and explained his poetry.
The differences between his poetry and criticism and
Arnold's are perhaps more obvious than the resem-
blances, yet Mr. Eliot could call himself^a^lassicist,
and the cosmopolitan outlooKtKat was distinctive in
Arnold has been distinctive in his successor. It was
the American who, along with his more volatile
countryman, Mr. Pound, freed Enyglish poetry from
theproyincialisniJLt had falTeri into and reunited it
with the main stream of the European tradition.

Yeats of course had tapped that tradition at many
points, but many of those points were peripheral or
subterranean. Though Mr. Eliot has been hardly
less eclectic and exclusive in his self-education, the
cultural matrix of his poetry has been composed
painly of orthodox materials, and the result has
been an orthodox as well as individual whole. J3ome
of the formative influences on his thought and

THE MODERN PERIOD 203

technique were Irving Babbitt, T. E. Hulme, and
Mr. Pound; DanTe; Shakespeare *"Sn"cT other" ^liza-
fee1^aTinlramati?ts;T3onne and other metaphyslcals;
and such Drench poe^ftTas Gautier, Saudelaire, and
laforguenRere liave been many others of impor-
YanceTsuch as The Golden Bough and the Bhagavad-
Gita, the Bible and the liturgy, Lancelot Andrewes
and St. John of the Cross. And Mr. Eliot is one of
those highly literary poets who get some of their
most original effects from echoing other writers. In
Sweeney among the Nightingales, for example, the
sinister references to the circles of the stormy moon,
the Virgilian horned gate, and gloomy Orion
apparently come from Marlowe's Doctor Faustus.
In Mr. Eliot's early poems the heroic symbols of an
older day commonly become ironical, either through
a deliberate twist or through remaining heroic in a
debased context. (The half-concealed allusion is
not, by the way, a modern invention; it was effectively
used by Spenser and Milton.)

Most of Mr. Eliot's earlier poetry was a report,
dryly and even lightly satirical, but serious, on the
sick and dying civilization he saw, a series of contrasts
arresting if unhistorical between an ideal heroic
past and an ugly unheroic present. Just as Arnold
turned from the confused, empty busyness of his
age to the fresh, simple Tightness of feeling that he
found in the primitive Biblical and classical worlds,
soQEliot turned back from the physical and spiritual
squalor of the modern city, whether in its 'arty'
drawing-rooms or dingy streets and lodgings A to
times of spiritual health and fullness of life? But
instead of Arnold's direct statement and reflection he
used the shock tactics of an age of speed and the

204 ENGLISH POETRY

cinema objective recital of particulars, sharply
juxtaposed pictures of the actual and th^ ideal,
Mecdotes ~7)f moMajFtt_irony and understatement,
jind wit of^Ia/tinized__edge. The poet might be an
invisible spectator or, as in The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock, merged with the speaker. That
inspired title announces an unheroic theme; Lancelot
and Tristram have given place to a timid, self-
conscious suburbanite who has measured out his
life with coffee spoons. But the speaker is also a
metaphysical poet who can get outside and criticize
himself, and a Jamesian New-Englander who would
break loose from his Puritan tradition. The notorious
opening image, of the evening spread out against
the sky 'Like a patient etherised upon a table' a
great change from, say, 'The holy time is quiet as
a Nun Breathless with adoration' applies to more
than the evening; and at the end the mermaids or
sirens, who ever since Homer had meant sensual
seduction from the heroic life, have become symbols
of heroic emancipation and fulfilment.

In Poems (1920), The Waste Land (1922), and The
Hollow Men (1925), the same technique is exploited,
with more complete assurance and richer density
(perhaps an excess in The Waste Land). \Whether in
deceptively simple quatrains or in free verse of very
individual suppleness and timbre, Mr. Eliot is a
superlatively adroit or inspired master of language
and rhythm. Not a great many English poets have
had such economical, subtle, and magical power over
word and sound and symbol. J The nightingales
singing near the Convent of the Sacred Heart call
up the two great traditions of Western man, the
classical and the Christian, and become a judgment

THE MODERN PERIOD 205

not only on the gross Sweeney and his enemies but
on the modern world not without the further
implication that the world has always been evil.
All these poems, short and long, were pictures of
rootless, restless human beings dehumanized by a
Godless, mechanized, and sterile civilization. But
Mr. Eliot was much more than he was often taken to
be in the 1920's, the voice of post-war defeatism or
the satirist of European decadence. To the pictures
of boredom and horror the longer poems added
gleams of possible glory; Gerontion, The Waste Land,
and The Hollow Men and the 'Ariel Poems'
revealed ^ positive theme, J;he way of religious
salvation. A religious 'message', however, could
hardly stir the modern reader except through a
flank attack. Everyday speech and slang, the
brittle, staccato rhythms of the modern city, are
mixed with the exalted language and symbols and
the slow, weighted, broken utterance of an agonized
religious vision. As in earlier poems, there is almost no
comment or connective tissue; objective particulars,
crude or glamorous, carry their multiple suggestions
of drought and fertility, present and past, lust and
love, pride and humility, sin and redemption.^

If The Waste Land was Mr. Eliot's Inferno, Ash
Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943) were his
Purgatorio and Paradiso. In Ash Wednesday the
poet's vision is turned inward; the ugliness of urban
civilization is blotted out, and the strain and stress
of religious conversion are rendered through
Dantesque symbols and images of nature. Four
Quartets, poems bound together by parallels and
variations in structure and theme and the symbolic
use of the old 'four elements', embody and explore

206 ENGLISH POETRY

further phases of religious experience. The central
subject is the effort of the individual soul to 'redeem
the time', to rise above the flux of life and circum-
stance to full spiritual integration. 'The world' is
present, as symbol and background, in English
and American scenes of historical or personal
memory, and images range from the rose-garden to
the brown Mississippi, from ancient rural peace to
the time-ridden faces in the Underground and an
air-raid; but satire has been replaced by compassion,
and the poems are half-private, half-public religious
exercises. Experience in writing for the stage may
have contributed, as with Yeats, to the moulding
of the poet's later manner. Difficulty remains, in
both elusive symbols and abstractions, but particu-
lars merge with reflection, and the language and
rhythm move from the level of mystical meditation
and lyrical incantation to the deliberately prosaic.
In general, Mr. Eliot's development has carried him
farther and farther away from both conventional
liberalism and poetry of concrete immediacy, and
his later work has been both deplored and acclaimed.
At any rate his religious and artistic evolution has
attested his integrity. And scarcely any English
poet has produced less surplusage; almost every line
he has written has been 'important'.

If Edith Sitwell (1887- ) has not attained the
dominant position and influence of Yeats and Mr.
Eliot, her evolution has been akin to theirs. From
the start sne possessed a highly original sensibility
and craftsmanship. The poems written during and
after the First World War created or re-created a
beautiful private world, aristocratic and romantic,
bucolic and bizarre. Some of the early poems might

THE MODERN PERIOD 207

have been the work of a Ciiristina Rossetti the
Christina Rossetti of Goblin Market who had grown
up in the refinement and confinement of the era
described in Sir Osbert Sitwell's autobiography, and
who had read seventeenth-century and modern
writers and learned to convey both wit and emotion
in hard, sharp images. In that partly fairy-tale
world, childhood memories and dreams and people
and the creatures and things of nature, homely and
real or bookish and exotic, were contemplated under
both the bright sun and the traditional shadows of
time and death. But the pervading sense of loss
embraced more than a vanished childhood. Like
Mr. Eliot, Miss Sitwell had her primitivist or ideal
vision of a past when God walked in the gardens,
when man and life had strength and warmth and
wholeness of being. But, unlike Mr. Eliot's dry-point
etchings of mean streets and mean souls, of cor-
ruption with a cosmopolitan veneer, of emptiness and
sterility, the small, richly coloured world of Miss
Sitwell's earlier poems allowed only glimpses of an
outer civilization in decay. In Gold Coast Customs
(1929) she moved in Mr. Eliot's direction, into poetry
of the public and brutal world. She had already
pictured, in such lines as these from Troy Park (1925),
the same waste land, the same hollow men:

This is my hell; not even fear to keep . . .
So trivial is that hell, no devils weep
Therein; but the maimed dwarfs of this poor

life

Terrible straining mechanisms, crouching
In trivial sands, with laughter like stones

tumbling
They watch, rejoicing at the giants crumbling.

208 ENGLISH POETRY

Like Mr. Eliot too, but in her own way, Miss Sitwell
suggests the loss, in our mechanized age, of an older
idealism and assured belief through ironic echoes of
the Elizabethans 'Then die with me and be my
love' (Serenade: Any Man to Any Woman); 'But
steel wings fan thee to thy rest' (Lullaby). In her
latest writing, such as Three Poems of the Atomic
Age and The Song of the Cold, the fact of hell, the
ultimate cold in the heart of fallen man, are central,
and, while the poet's early preoccupation with time
and death and love and rebirth continues, these ideas
and symbols have now a positively religious depth
and force and austerity. There is still little actual
contemporary reference, such as Eliot and younger
poets use, but abstract images, marshalled in long,
sweeping lines, express a vision of prophetic and
compassionate intensity and elevation. Critical
opinion, however, is not unanimous on the 'genuine-
ness' of Miss SitwelFs poetry.

In the 1980's the established poets continued to
be more or less productive, both the traditionalists
and the eminent modernists whom we have just
glanced at, but the chief phenomenon was the
emergence of a much younger group who were
quickly hailed as the leaders of a new movement.
C. Day Lewis, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and
Stephen Spender, who were born in the years
1904-9, were for some time united by similarity of
background and outlook and by personal ties. These
and other poets belonged to the generation that
came to maturity in the post-war period of exhaus-
tion, economic depression, defeatism, pacifism, and
general confusion and revolt. Many writers of that
generation saw a possible alternative to despair in

THE MODERN PERIOD 209

the hopes for man kindled by popular revolutions,
and some lost their lives in Spain. And then came
the Second World War, in which all England was a
fighting front, and which darkened still further the
already dark world of the poets.

If the poetry of the decade had any one dominant
motive, it was an acute social consciousness, with a
strong infusion of rebellious and divided self-con-
sciousness. In addition to the general evidence in the
poetry, there are such special testimonies as Mr.
Lewis's Transitional Poem (1929) and The Magnetic
Mountain (1933), Mr. MacNeice's Autumn Journal (a
product of the time of Munich), and Mr. Auden's New
Year Letter (1941). Mr. Spender, whose poems, though
reflecting a sick age, have been especially and
earnestly concerned with self-integration, has pro-
vided the fullest document in his minute, candid, and
tormented autobiography, World within World (1951).
For young men who had grown up in what had been a
solid if stuffy society, all things, including themselves,
had got out of joint; conventional beliefs and ideals
and old-school slogans were either shattered or
abominably alive; and nothing seemed substantial
except what was abhorrent, nothing clear or strong
except the forces that submerged both the mass of
people and individual integrity. It was a period of
frustrated modern Hamlets, many of whom to
speak with no lack of sympathy had a strain of
Byron as well.

One might have expected a choir of Shelley s, but
Shelley's revolutionary zeal was not enough to offset
his romantic sensibility and manner, and Wilfred
Owen, Eliot, and modern French poets had taught
a technique of shifting focus and symbols, of
M

210 ENGLISH POETRY

satirical irony and toughness. Mr. Eliot, however,
had contemplated the ugly world with detachment,
and had lately seemed to withdraw from it alto-
gether, and the younger men, though not indifferent
to the timeless themes of poetry, saw a prior neces-
sity of clearing away obstructions left over from a
dead past. They had been immersed from birth in
the actualities of the English and European scene,
they were much more personal and topical in their
utterance, and they carried colloquialism of allusion,
language, and rhythm much farther than their
elders. They carried it so far, indeed, that they
sometimes approach versified journalism; they have
attained rarely, if at all, the classical finality of
Yeats and Mr. Eliot. Incessant outward and inward
agitation allows few moments of repose. To make an
old-fashioned kind of judgment (with which other
readers might disagree), whereas many poems of
Yeats and Eliot compel memorization, hardly any-
thing of the younger poets' does. And, so far at any
rate, we cannot point to any work by any one of the
group as an indisputably major achievement. Their
technical powers may be adequate or brilliant, but,
like other people, they have been moving towards,
rather than standing on, a firm centre of con-
templation. At the least, however, their earlier
poetry made confusion and malaise articulate, and
they have been seeking a way out.

These four poets have gone through a partly
parallel evolution and, though all have had their
individual outlook and manner, there is some degree
of sameness in their early arraignments of their
class and cultural heritage, in their recitals of all the
things in modern civilization that outraged young

THE MODERN PERIOD 211

intellectuals who were trying to break loose from
it. This body of writing is a vigorous and faithful
if one-sided picture of a world in decay, yet in
retrospect it may have more historical than poetical
interest. The question was whether these poets had
the stamina not only to repudiate a hateful and
guilty past and present but to gain a more positive
vision and foundation for the future. While Mr.
Auden has taken a religious direction, Messrs.
Lewis, Spender, and MacNeice have remained, or
become, subdued liberals of a less militant kind.
They have discovered grounds of faith and hope,
limited but relatively sure, where men have found
them before, in individual integrity and courage
and love and in nature. However significant their
'revolutionary' writing, their poems, early or late,
that exist most fully and securely as poetry are
probably those slighter pieces in which angry
reporting has given place to a richer density of
suggestion, to quiet evocations of cherished scenes
and moments, to distilled meditations on time and
life and death, to warm recognition of everyday
humanity.

These general remarks are roughly applicable to
the common elements in the four poets and a
number of their contemporaries. We can look a
little more closely at only one representative,
Mr. Auden (1907- ), who moved to the United
States in 1939. Much of his writing, and of his
fellows', might be comprehended under one of his
later titles, The Age of Anxiety. His development,
except in its latest phase, has been typical of his
generation, of its efforts to find a creed that would
fill the modern spiritual void, that would reintegrate
15

212 ENGLISH POETRY

fragmentary individuals and a fragmentary society.
Against a civilization that was the work of empiric,
economic man, the poet could appeal to youthful
memories (the return to the womb, as some, including
Mr. Auden, would say), to Marx, to Freud, to
Kierkegaard. In For the Time Being (1944), a
Christmas oratorio, Mr. Auden arrived, as some of
his elders had, at a Christian standpoint (which
some would call another version of the return to the
womb). His conception of the difficult role of the
modern poet is of course implicit in all his work, and
it is made more explicit in the New Year Letter,
the speech of Caliban in The Sea and the Mirror, and
in the more or less notable poems on artists and
thinkers, the elegies on Yeats, James, Freud, and
Ernst Toller, and a number of other pieces on authors
from Montaigne to Rimbaud; and the prose of The
Enchafed Flood (1950) creates a picture, in the
romantic tradition, of the solitary Promethean
explorer and builder. One brief statement is the
wish (September 1, 1939) that the poet, composed
like others of Eros and dust, may,

Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

It might perhaps be said that Mr. Auden is the
cleverest poet since Pope, and the remark would be a
tribute, with reservations; some readers are a little
suspicious of technical virtuosity and fluency,
especially when linked with intellectual and spiritual
agility. At -any rate Mr. Auden plays most of the
instruments in the orchestra, and usually several at
once. Metaphysical abstractions and newspaper

THE MODERN PERIOD 218

immediacy, public events and private emotions,
ominous prophecy and satirical clowning, the reality
of evil and the need of love; modern ballads in the
American vein and medieval alliterative verse;
dimeters, trimeters, tetrameters, stanza-forms with-
out number, and loose long lines and straight prose;
dialectic and doggerel, lilting lyricism and dry irony,
high rhetoric and flat undertones, poetical diction,
scientific jargon, and the slang of the street these
and other ingredients bubble in Mr. Auden's preg-
nant pot (and, especially in his longer works, the
alchemical process may be incomplete). Among the
numerous attractive poems, a random example might
be the one that opens the last full collection (1945),
Muste des Beaux Arts, a short meditation in free
verse which is casual, conversational, humorous, and
poignant. However nimble and fertile his brain,
Mr. Auden's best poetry generally springs from his
comprehension of suffering, joy, love, and pity; a
human and religious consciousness of a share in the
world's guilt has added compassion to anger and
disgust.

The work of this group was, at least in its begin-
nings, clearly definable. Since the later 1930's,
however, there have been too many groups, splinter
groups, and individuals to make an obvious pattern.
A random few of the many recent poets of interest
are Alex Comfort, Lawrence Durrell, Roy Fuller,
David Gascoyne, Kathleen Raine, Anne Ridler,
W. R. Rodger s, and D. S. Savage. Probably the
most comprehensive label for some main tendencies
of the last dozen years or more is that which a
number of writers, following Mr. Herbert Read
(1893- ), have inscribed on their banner, namely,

214 ENGLISH POETRY

'romantic*. While that is not the most precisely
helpful of words, it indicates a turning away from
public and social commentary to various kinds of
subjectivism or 'personalism'. Mr. Spender's personal
quest, it might be said, has made him perhaps a more
natural associate or forerunner of this movement
than his early connexions would seem to imply. The
new romanticism embodies a return to private
experience and vision and simple, natural things,
though the response to traditional themes employs
modern techniques and is conditioned by war, by
modern scientific scepticism, and by the modern
religious reaction. The old and central themes of
love and death are still central, as, in a special way,
they were for three poets who were killed in the
Second World War, Alun Lewis, Sidney Keyes, and
Keith Douglas. While Mr. Read has allowed him-
self only the bleak ecstasies of a sober intellectual,
at the other end of the romantic spectrum there are
such apocalyptic or Dionysian poets as the Irish
George Barker (1913- ) and the Welsh Dylan
Thomas (1914- ). A vigorous opponent of the more
extreme manifestations has been Mr. Geoffrey
Grigson (1905- ), who has championed a sort of
modernized and active Imagism that should be
substantial, suggestive, and rational.

Mr. Barker and Mr. Thomas, however unlike each
other, belong to the 'primitive' and 'mystical'
tradition of Blake and D. H. Lawrence, and at first
a reader, baffled by what may seem a wild welter of
words and images, may be reminded (in a non-
political way) of 'The blind hysterics of the Celt.'
But the reader who perseveres may possibly recog-
nize in the fervid violence an effort to find meaning

THE MODERN PEKIOD 215

in or beyond the immediate experience of love and
suffering and death. The world and the unconscious
self are not so much themes for reflection as myths
and metaphors to be felt. One may find both poets
most approachable in the more controlled moods in
which they are closest to actuality and yet transcend
it. Mr. Thomas's preoccupation with birth and rebirth
admits or demands a wealth of images from nature,
and his strange naked intensity of vision carries a
strange expressiveness local if not total of phrase
and rhythm.

We cannot end this sketch of recent English
poetry without taking account of other nations in
and outside the British Isles. Ireland or Eire has a
sufficient and towering representative in Yeats, and
there are others. A notable number of the newest
poets are Welsh (Thomas, Alun Lewis, Vernon
Watkins, Henry Treece, and others) and Scottish
(Adam Drinan, G. S. Fraser, W. S. Graham, Norman
McCaig, J. G. Macleod, S. G. Smith, Ruthven Todd);
and to Scotland belong the older and virtually
English Edwin Muir, who tends to the metaphysical,
and that ultra-nationalist descendant of Sir Thomas
Urquhart and Burns, 'Hugh MacDiarmid'.

In the nations of the British Commonwealth
poetry has attained more or less maturity and
modernity. Diverse representatives of South Africa
though they did not stay there are Roy Camp-
bell, William Plomer, and Charles Madge. Mr.
Campbell's later and more sophisticated verse has
not surpassed the swift exuberance of The Flaming
Terrapin (1924). The Canadian E. J. Pratt (1888- ),
in The Cachalot (1925) and other narratives, heroic or
satiric, displayed a primitive though far from

216 ENGLISH POETRY

naive vitality of imagination and phrase some-
what akin to Campbell's; and he combined a higher
vision and a more austere art in Brdbeuf and His
Brethren (1940). The typical problem in Canada,
and elsewhere, had been to break loose from English
romanticism and achieve authenticity by becoming
local and national without becoming provincial.
Some of the older poets who reflected that process,
or its successful completion, were the over-fluent
Bliss Carman (1861-1929) and the more substantial
Archibald Lampman (1861-99) and Duncan Camp-
bell Scott (1862-1947); poets of the newest genera-
tions have been in full alliance with contemporary
movements. Much the same things might be said of
Australia and of such modern poets as Kenneth
Slessor (1901- ) and R. D. FitzGerald (1902- ).
The older Australian, W. J. Turner (1889-1946), we
associate with English poetry; his real talent,
visionary and intellectual, never reached quite
satisfying fulfilment.

This sketch of the modern scene has included only
some representative names, and even the next
decade may greatly alter the perspective. In fifty
years, when time has done its usual sifting (and if our
world still exists and people are still writing and
reading books), the position of some recent poets
will, we may suppose, remain secure; and some
others will have risen and others will have sunk.
Since literary history is a warning against prophecies,
we need not go beyond the safe prediction that, in
the anthologies and criticism of A.D. 2000, the
poetry of the years 1914-52 will present a picture
that differs from ours. It has been said that that
religion has the best chance of surviving which shall

THE MODERN PERIOD 217

best succeed in fusing the temporal with the eternal,
and the remark is no less true of poetry. Neither
element by itself is enough, but the fusion, whatever
form it takes, can endure.

Looking back over the poetry of six hundred
years, we can hardly summarize in a page a book
that has been in itself a meagre summary. The story
is one of revolt turning into convention and of
convention overthrown by a new revolt. Yet no
convention or revolt such as the classicism or
romanticism of this last generation has been very
much like its predecessors, because the conditions
are always changing. On a level beyond particular
needs and aims, however, there has been a periodical
and inevitable oscillation, both spiritual and techni-
cal, between classical and romantic poles. Modern
poets, unhappily, have to a large degree lost real
contact with the ancient classics, which throughout
all former centuries were a main source of inspiration
and of discipline, but the fundamental opposition is
always there, between objectivity and subjectivity,
between acceptance of established norms and rebel-
lious individualism. Or perhaps it would be truer
to say that the traditional individualism of the
English genius has at times been restrained and
tempered by ideals of discipline. As a rule, to repeat
what was said at the beginning of this book, the
greatest poets have been those who were not simply
one thing or the other but who understood or
contained within themselves the basic conflicts
between order and disorder (not that such conflicts
will make a great artist out of a small one).

The internal evolution of poetry has been pro-
foundly affected by phenomena outside its own

218 ENGLISH POETRY

realm, above all by the steady change from religious
faith to scientific naturalism, from belief in the world
and man as constituting a divine order to belief in
endless and inexplicable natural process. And along
with that have gone other radical changes, ethical,
psychological, social. The spiritual responsibilities
of the poet have increased while the means of ful-
filling them, in comparison with earlier resources,
have been more and more limited, and while his
audience has come to be a smaller and smaller
proportion of the reading public. If the pre-
dicament of the modern artist is to be attributed
mainly to the character of modern civilization, the
poets have perhaps been not entirely blameless, and
we must hope for fuller rapprochement between the
poet and the common reader for the sake of both
poetry and society. And while our civilization is
predominantly scientific, now as in former times
poetry can break through the tyranny of the
positivist intellect and claim to be the breath and
finer spirit of all knowledge. Finally, now as always,
a central criterion of the major poet is his recogni-
tion of the unceasing conflict between good and evil.

INDEX

Abercrombie, Lascelles, 180
Addison, Joseph, 20, 87, 126
Aeschylus, 138, 144
Akenside, Mark, 107
Arnold, Matthew, 5, 96, 113,

122, 147, 151, 157, 158, 168-
74, 175, 176, 181, 182, 202,
203

Auden, W. II., 208-11, 211-13

Bacon, Francis, 26, 69, 81, 82,

120, 145, 146, 160
Ballads, 11-13, 84, 123-6, 179,

187, 213

Barker, George, 214-15
Barnes, William, 181, 188
Bate, W. J., 139
Baudelaire, Charles, 180, 203
Beddoes, T. L., 154, 181
Binyon, Laurence, 190
Blackraore, Sir Richard, 110
Blake, William, 93, 112, 113,

114, 117-21, 124, 125, 134,

136, 140, 143, 178, 200,

214
Blank verse, 23, 49, 73, 84,

129, 162, 180

Blunden, Edmund, 189-90
Boccaccio, Giovanni, 3, 5, 34
Bottomley, Gordon, 189
Breton, Nicholas, 24
Bridges, Robert, 181, 183, 194
Bronte, Emily, 181
Brooke, Rupert, 189, 190-1
Browne, Sir Thomas, 64, 67,

80, 82, 105
Browne, William, 50
Browning, E. B., 154, 155, 166,

181
Browning, Robert. 122, 154,

157, 158, 163-8, 169, 171,

175, 176, 179, 181, 198
Burns, Robert, 14, 112, 121-2,

123, 124, 126
Butler, Samuel, 94-5, 96
Byron, Lord, 112, 113, 138,

143, 145, 147-50, 156, 171

Calverley, C. S., 176
Campbell, Roy, 215-16
Campbell, Thomas, 113, 154
Campion, Thomas, 24, 489
Carew, Thomas, 51, 54-5
Carman, Bliss, 216
Carroll, Lewis, 176
Chambers, Robert, 157
Chapman, George, 33-5, 37-8,

56, 57, 59, 69, 106, 111, 135,

138

Chatterton, Thomas, 117, 163
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 1, 2-8, 9,

10, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 30, 32,

34, 39, 44, 49, 74, 84, 115,

120

Chesterton, G. K., 96, 189
Clare, John, 112, 131, 154
Clough, A. H., 168, 172, 174,

176, 181

Coleridge, Hartley, 154
Coleridge, S. T., 112, 116, 124-

6, 128, 129-30, 132, 147
Collins, William, 88, 91-2, 117,

118

Comfort, Alex, 213
Couplet, Heroic, 3-4, 49-50,

84-5, 99, 106, 107, 114
Cowley, Abraham, 56, 66, 81
Cowper, William, 87, 93, 103,

108-9, 111, 117
Crabbe, George, 112, 113
Crashaw, Richard, 50, 56, 63,

64

Daniel, Samuel, 28, 35-7, 48,

111
Dante, 3, 46, 69, 71, 75, 138,

146, 172, 196, 203, 205
Darley, George, 154
Davidson, John, 187
Davies, Sir John, 35-8, 59, 69,

106, 111

Davies, W. H., 189
Dawson, Christopher, 9
de la Mare, Walter, 189, 190-1
De Tabley, l^ord, 187-8

219

220

ENGLISH POETRY

Denham, Sir John, 61, 86-6,
103

Dobell, Sydney, 181

Donne, John, 22, 38, 39, 40,
50, 51, 54, 55, 57-60, 61, 63,
64, 66, 69, 74, 80, 86, 88, 93,
97, 104, 166, 185, 190, 193,
196, 197, 200, 203

Dorset, Earl of, 86

Doughty, Charles, 189

Douglas, Gavin, 14

Douglas, Keith, 214

Dowson, Ernest, 181, 199

Drayton, Michael, 28-9, 33,
50-1, 137

Drinan, Adam, 215

Drinkwater, John, 189

Drummond, William, 56

Dryden, John, 46, 49, 56, 68,
80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88,
95-7, 98-9, 102, 103-4, 108,
109, 110-11, 115, 139

Du Barter, 47

Dunbar, William, 14-15, 17,
122

Durrell, Lawrence, 213

Dyer, Sir Edward, 26

Eliot, T. 8., 43, 101, 108, 161,
195, 196, 202-tf, 207, 208,
209-10

Elliott, Ebenezer, 155

Fairfax, Edward, 49
Fergusson, Robert, 121
FitzGerald, Edward, 15, 101,

162, 176, 177-8, 181, 188
FitzGerald, R. D., 216
Flecker, J. E., 189
Fletcher, Giles, 50, 63
Fletcher, Phineas, 50
Fraser, G. 8., 215
Frere, J. H., 150
Fuller, Roy, 213

Garrod, H. W,, 184
Gascoyne, David, 213
Gautier, T., 203
Gawain and the Green

2, 11

Gay, John, 93, 103
Gibson, W. W., 189
Gilbert, Sir William, 176
Glover, Richard, 110

Goldsmith, Oliver, 93, 103,

107-8

Graham, W. 8., 215
Graves, Robert, 189, 195
Gray, Thomas, 88-91
Greene, Robert, 24
Greville, Fulke, 35-8, 59, 69,

106, 111

Grierson, Sir Herbert, 196
Grigson, Geoffrey, 214

Hardy, Thomas, 124, 161, 173,

175, 177, 185, 187-9, 190,

193, 195

Hawker, R. 8., 181
Hazlitt, William, 112, 133, 134
Hemans, Felicia, 154
Henley, W. E., 178, 186, 191
Henry VIII, 23
Henryson, Robert, 14-15, 122
Herbert, George, 14, 52, 50,

60-2, 63, 65, 87
Herbert, Lord, 56
Horrick, Robert, 51, 63-4, 100
Hodgson, Ralph, 189
Homer, 4, 38, 41, 44, 69, 74,

76, 84, 90, 108, 124, 172, 204
Hood, Thomas, 154
Hooker, Richard, 35
Hopkins, G. M., 78, 93, 175,

183-5, 195
Horace, 25, 66, 67, 72, 86, 95,

97, 99
Housman, A. E., 176, 178, 181,

187, 188, 193
Hughes, Richard, 189
Hulme, T. E., 196, 203
Hunt, Leigh, 112, 132, 136, 154
Huxley, Aldous, 195

Imagism, 20, 151, 194-5

Johnson, Lionel, 181, 199
Johnson, Samuel, 56, 83, 87,

89, 98, 102, 124
Jonson, Ben, 46, 50, 61-3, 64,

68, 70, 83, 130
Joyce, James, 196
Juvenal, 95, 102

Keatfl, John, 33, 46, 50, 87,
91, 112, 114, 132-9, 140-2,
143-4, 145, 146, 147, 155,
162, 164, 170, 171, 172, 173,
175, 181, 183, 188, 191, 201

INDEX

221

Keble, John, 154
Keyes, Sidney, 214
King, Henry, 66
Kingsley, Charles, 155
Kipling, Budyard, 186-7, 190

Laforgue, Jules, 203
Lampman, Archibald, 216
Landon, L. E., 154
Landor, W. S., 112, 150-2, 176
Langland, William, 2, 9-10,

17, 18, 19
Lawrence, D. H., 189, 190,

195, 202, 214
Lear, Edward, 162, 176
Leavis, F. R., 196
Lewis, Alun, 214, 215
Lewis, C. Day, 208-11
Lewis, C. S., 45
Lodge, Thomas, 24, 28
Lovelace, Richard, 51, 54
Lowell, Amy, 194
Lydgate, John, 16, 34
Lyell, Sir Charles, 153, 157
Lyly, John, 24

Macaulay, Lord, 85, 154
MacDiarmid, Hugh, 215
Mackenzie, Henry, 121
Macleod, J. G., 215
MacNeice, Louis, 208-11
Macpherson, James, 110
Madge, Charles, 215
Marlowe, Christopher, 25, 32-

4, 113, 203
Martz, L. L., 59
Marvell, Andrew, 40, 56, 65,

66-7, 68, 95

Masefield, John, 20, 189, 190
McCaig, Norman, 215
Meredith, George, 180, 183,

184, 185-6, 188
Milton, John, 7, 17, 28, 35, 44,
45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 68-79, 80,
82, 84, 85, 88, 91, 100, 101,
107, 108, 110, 115, 116, 118,
119, 120, 127, 129, 133, 138,
141, 145-6, 160, 162, 184,
193, 196, 203
Monro, Harold, 189
Montgomery, Robert, 154
Moore, T. Sturge, 189, 190

Moore, Thomas, 113, 145, 154
Morris, William, 175, 176,

180-1, 182, 199
Muir, Edwin, 215

Naehe, Thomas, 24, 27
Newman, J. H., 163, 176

Oldham, John, 95

Ovid, 3, 4, 32-3, 47, 49, 71, 84,

93
Owen, Wilfred, 190, 191, 195,

209

Pater, Walter, 175, 180, 199

Patmore, Coventry, 179, 182-3

Pearl, 2

Peele, George, 24

Percy, Thomas, 20, 123

Petrarch, 3, 27-8, 32, 58, 71,

146
Pindar, 52, 87, 88, 90, 91, 130,

151
Platonism, 33, 39, 44, 64-5,

69, 71, 104, 130, 137, 140,

143, 146, 170, 200, 201
Plomer, William, 215
'Poetic diction', 47-8, 84, 89,

115, 117, 126
Pollok, Robert, 154
Pope, Alexander, 49, 82, 84,

85, 87, 88, 93-4, 97-101,

103, 105-6, 107, 108, 110-11,

112, 115, 117, 121, 130, 149,

184, 212
Pound, Ezra, 168, 194, 198,

200, 202, 203
Pratt, E. J., 215-16
Prior, Matthew, 87, 93, 103
Pulci, Luigi, 150
Puttenham, George, 47

Quennell, Peter, 189

Raine, Kathleen, 213
Ralegh, Sir Walter, 27
Ramsay, Allan, 121
Read, Herbert, 213-14
Richards, I. A., 196
Ridler, Anne, 213
Robinson, Crabb, 113
Rochester, Earl of, 86, 93
Rodgere, W. R., 213
Rogers, Samuel, 113

222

ENGLISH POETRY

Rosenberg, Isaac, 189
Kossetti, Christina, 176, 178,

182, 207
Rossetti, D. G., 175, 176, 177,

179-80, 181, 182, 199

Sackville, Thomas, 34-5
Sackville-West, V., 189
Sandys, George, 47
Sassoon, Siegfried, 189, 101,

195

Savage, D. S., 213
Scott, D. C., 216
Scott, Sir Walter, 112, 113,

122-4

Sedley, Sir Charles, 86
Settle, Elkanah, 96, 98
Shadwell, Thomas, 94, 96-7
Shaftesbury, Earl of, 104-5
Shakespeare, William, 24, 25,

28, 29, 30-3, 49, 52, 56, 68,
73, 80, 84, 92, 106, 115, 118,
120, 133, 141, 172, 179, 187,
196, 203

Shelley, P. B., 112, 139-46,
147-8, 156, 159, 163, 164,
178

Sidney, Sir Philip, 20, 28-30,

Sitwell, Edith, 195, 206-8
Sitwell, Sir Osbert, 195, 207
Slessor, Kenneth, 216
Skelton, John, 15-17, 21
Smalley, Donald, 163
Smart, Christopher, 93, 119
Smith, Alexander, 181
Smith, S. G., 215
Southey, Robert, 112
Southwell, Robert, 50
Spender, Stephen, 208-11, 214
Spenser, Edmund, 1, 7, 17, 28,

29, 35, 38-46, 47, 57, 59, 68,
71, 74, 92, 101, 106, 115,
120, 121, 127, 135, 136, 137,
139, 184, 193, 203

Squire, Sir J. C., 189
Stephens, James, 189
Stevenson, R. L., 186
Suckling, Sir John, 51, 54
Surrey, Earl of, 21-3, 25, 28,

49
Swift, Jonathan, 93, 94

Swinburne, A. C., 151, 175,
176, 177, 178-80, 181, 182,
187-8

Symons, Arthur, 199

Taylor, Sir Henry, 154
Tennyson, Lord, 154, 155-6,
157, 158-63, 165, 166, 167,
168, 169, 171, 172, 175, 176,
178, 179, 180, 181, 183, 186,
188, 194

Thomas, Dylan, 183, 214-15
Thomas, Edward, 189-90, 191
Thompson, Francis, 176, 181
Thomson, James, 103, 105,

106-7, 111, 120
Thomson, James ('B. V.'), 187
Tichborne, Chidiock, 26
Tillotson, Geoflrey, 48, 100
Tillyard, E. M. W., 21
Todd, Ruthven, 215
Traherne, Thomas, 56, 65
Treece, Henry, 215
Trilling, Lionel, 172
Tapper, Martin, 154
Turner, W. J., 216

Vaughan, Henry, 56, 63, 64-6,

67,80
Virgil, 3, 14, 39, 74, 76, 97, 103,

162-3, 185, 203

Waller, Edmund, 49, 51, 85

Warton, Joseph and Thomas,
92, 106

Watkins, Vernon, 215

Watts, Isaac, 87, 118

Wesley, Charles, 87

Wilde, Oscar, 175, 181, 199

Wilkie, William, 110

Winchilsea, Lady, 93

Wither, George, 50

Wordsworth, William, 46, 88,
109, 112, 114, 116, 121, 123,
124-32, 133, 134, 135, 136,
141, 147, 148, 157, 170, 173

Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 16, 21-3,
25,27

Yeats, W. B., 81, 143, 176,
181, 190, 195, 199-202, 206,
210, 212, 215