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Lives of the Poets

THE STORY OF
ONE THOUSAND YEARS

OF ENGLISH
AND AMERICAN POETRY

Louis Untermcycr

SIMON AND SCHUSTER
NEW YORK • 1959

IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORM

PUBLISHED BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER, INC.

ROCKEFELLER CENTER, 630 FIFTH AVENUE

NEW YORK 20, N. Y.

FIRST PRINTING

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER! 59-11205
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY H. WOLFF BOOK MFG. CO. INC., NEW YORK, N. Y.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the following for permission to reprint the copyright
material included in this volume. In the event of any unconscious errors, he
will he pleased to make the necessary corrections in future editions of the
hook.

E. E. CUMMINGS for the quotations from Poems: 1923-1954 by E. E. Cum-
mings. Published by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.; copyright by
E. E. Cummings.

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC., for the verses from "The Quaker
Graveyard at Nantucket" and "Where the Rainbow Ends" from Lord
Weary' 3 Castle, copyright, 1944, 1946, by Robert Lowell; Quotations
from The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot, copyrignt, 1930,
1950, by T. S, Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Brace and
Company, Inc.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS for the poems from The Poems of Emily
Dickinson, edited by Thomas H, Johnson. Published by The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press; copyright, 1951, 1955, by the Presi-
dent and Fellows of Harvard University.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY, INC., for "Cool Tombs" from Comhuskers by
Carl Sandburg. Copyright, 1918, by Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
Copyright, 1946, by Carl Sandburg; for "Fire and Ice" from Complete
Poems of Robert Frost. Copyright, 1943, 1949, by Henry Holt and
Company, Inc. Copyright, 1951, by Robert Frost. By permission of the
publishers.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY for "The End of the World*' from Col-
lected Poems: 1917-1952. by Archibald MacLeish. Copyright, 1917-
1952, by Archibald MacLeish.

ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC., for the lines from "Peter Quince at the Clavier"
from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, copyright, 1931, 1954,
by Wallace Stevens; for the lines from "Here Lies a Lady" from
Selected Poems by John Crowe Ransom, 1945. By permission of the
publisher.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY for "Afterwards" from Collected Poems by
Thomas Hardy; for the lines from "The Second Coming" from Col-
lected Poems by William Butler Yeats.

NEW DIRECTIONS for the selections from The Cantos of Ezra Pound. Copy-
right, 1934, 1937, *94°» 1948, by Ezra Pound; for lines from Collected
Poems of Dylan Thomas; copyright, 1939, 1952,, 1953* Reprinted by
permission of New Directions.

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS for the selections from The Poems of Gerard
Manley Hopkins— "Heaven-Haven," "Hurrahing in Harvest," "Pied
Beauty"— Published by Oxford University Press.

RANDOM HOUSE, INC., for "Shine, Perishing Republic" from The Selected
Poetry of Robinson Jeffers; copyright renewed 1953 by Robinson
Jeffers, published by Random House, Inc.; for lines from The Collected,
Poetry of W, H, Aud&n and Collected Poems by Stephen Spender.

CHARLES SCRIBNBR'S SONS for "Miniver Cheevy" from The Town Down the
River by Edwin Arlington Robinson, with permission of Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons. Copyright, 1910, by Charles Scribner's Sons; renewal copy-
right 1938 by Iluth Nivison.

THE SOCIETY OF AUTHORS for "The Moth" by Walter de la Mare, Per-
mission granted by The Literary Trustees of Walter de la Mare and
The Society of Authors as their representative.

I am especially grateful for the constant encouragement, critical acumen,
and error-spotting alertness of my two editors: Henry W. Simon, who is also
my friend, and Bryna Ivens, who is also my wife.

for

BRYNA
first and last

Contents

I FOREWORD: THE BACKGROUND i

II FATHER OF ENGLISH POETRY 9

Geoffrey Chaucer

III THE MORNING STARS 41

William Langland . . . The Pearl Poet . . . Sir Gawain and. the
Green Knight . . . Gower, Hoccleve, and Lydgate . . . Dunbar,
Henryson, James I ... Miracles and Moralities . . . Poetry of

the People

IV THE RISING SUN 55

John Skelton . . . Wyatt and Surrey . . . Sir Walter Raleigh

. * , "Edmund Spenser . . . Sidney, Daniel, and Drayton . . .

Christopher Marlowe

V NATURE'S MIRROR 75

William Shakespeare

VI THE GILDED AGE 112

Ben Jonson . , . Nashe and Campion , . . Beaumont and

Fletcher

vii

CONTENTS

VII THE METAPHYSICAL MAN

John Donne

VIII AFTER THE RENAISSANCE 137

George Herbert . . . Richard Crashaw . . . Abraham Coivley
. . . Henry Vaughan . . . Thomas Trahernc

IX PURITANS AND CAVALIERS 152

Andrew Marvell , . . Robert Herrick . . . Thomas Carew . . .
Edmund Waller . . . Sir John Suckling . . . Richard Lovelace

X BLIND VISIONARY 170

John Milton

XI THE ART OF ARTIFICE 193

John Dryden

XII THE WORLD AS WIT 210

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester . . . Margaret Luca$> Duchess of
Newcastle . , . Aphra Behn . , . Anne Finch, Lady Winchtlsea
* . * Charles Sedley, Richard Leigh, Ambrose Philips, Thomas
Parnellj John Byrom . . , John Gay . . . Jonathan Swift , . *

Matthew Prior

XIII GIANT DWARF 227

Aleocander Pope

XIV THE DECLINE OF ELEGANCE 258

Samuel Johnson . . . Charles Churchill . . , Matthew Green,
John Dyer, James Thomson . . . William Collins, William
Cowper, George CraVbe . , . Thomas Gray * . , Oliver Gold-
smith . . . Christopher Smart . » , Thomas Chatterton

viii

CONTENTS

XV THE MARRIAGE OF

HEAVEN AND HELL

William Blake

XVI POET AND PEASANT 3I2

Robert Burns

XVII LOST UTOPIAS 338

William Words-worth . . . Samuel Taylor Coleridge . . . Robert

Southey

XVIII INSPIRED ODDITIES 37,

Walter Savage Landor . . . John Clare . . . Thomas Lovell

Beddoes

XIX VICTIM OF A LEGEND 383

George Gordon, Lord Byron

XX REBEL AGAINST REALITY 4i8

Percy Bysshe Shelley

XXI "OH, WEEP FOR ADONAIS" 444

John Keats

XXII VICTORIAN LOVE STORY 478

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning

XXIII NINETEENTH-CENTURY

LIGHTS AND SHADOWS 503

Alfred, Lord Tennyson . . , Emily Bronte . . . Arthur Hugh
dough . . . Matthew Arnold . . , The Pre-Raphaelite$ , . .
Coventry Patmore . . . Dante Gabriel Rossetti , . . Christina
Rossetti , . . Algernon Charles Swinburne . . , Thomas Hardy

CONTENTS

XXIV THE NEW WORLD 538

William Cullen Bryant . . . Ralph Waldo Emerson * . . John

Greenleaf Whittier . . . Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . . ,

James Russell Lowell . . . Edgar Allan Poe

XXV GLORY OF THE COMMONPLACE 558

Walt Whitman

XXVI THE SOUL SELECTS 578

Emily Dickinson . . . Gerard Manley Hopkins

XXVII TURN OF THE

TWENTIETH CENTURY 601

"Fin de Si£cle" . . . Francis Thompson , . . A. E. Ilousman
. . . Rudyard Kipling . . . William Kutler Yeats

XXVITI NEW TRENDS IN AMERICA 623

Edwin Arlington Robinson , . . Robert Frost . . . Carl Sand-
burg . . . Vachel Lindsay . . . Robinson Jeffers . . . Edna St.

Vincent Millay

XXIX NEW TRENDS IN ENGLAND 648

The Georgians * . . W. H. Davies . . . Ralph Hodgson . . .

Walter de la Mare . * . Charlotte Mew . . . John Masefield . . .

D» H. Lawrence

XXX WASTE LANDS 666

Ezra Pound . . . T. S. Eliot

XXXI THE AGE OF ANXIETY 680

W. H. Auden . . . Stephen Spender . * . William Empson
. . . Edith Sitwell . , . Wilfred Owen * , . Robert Graves . . .
Wallace Stevens . . . William Carlos Williams . * * Marianne
Moore . . . John Crowe Ransom . . . Conrad Aiken . . . Archi-
bald MacLeish , . . E, E. Cummings , . » ffart Crane . , .
Robert Lowell . . . Dylan Thomas

INDEX 723

Foreword: The Background

THE ANCIENT BRITONS left no history of themselves or their works;
there was no recorded literature, not even a primitive one, before
the Roman conquest. We know about the builders of Stonehenge
and Avebury only because of the remains of their huge, mysterious
megaliths and a few small artifacts. It was not until the tenth century
A.D. that indigenous legends and foreign narratives — all of them orally
communicated — were translated, or transformed, into written poetry.
Egyptian priests and Hebrew psalmists made noble and lasting poems
thousands of years ago, Greece perfected a pattern of great classic
dramas as early as five centuries before the birth of Christ. Rome de-
lighted in the cultivated lyrics of Catullus and the sophisticated
satires of Horace seven hundred years before Augustine came north to
convert the heathen in barbarian Kent. English culture, with its re-
flection in literature, was a comparatively late arrival.

Early English — or, to be more exact, Anglo-Saxon — literature begins
with Beowulf and Cacdmon. All the surviving writings of the period
are contained in four scattered manuscript books. One (Beowulf) is in
the British Museum in London* The second (the so-called Caedmon
collection) is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford* The third (containing
'The Seafarer/' 'The Wanderer/' "Widsith," odd riddles and gnomic
verses) is in the cathedral library at Exeter. The fourth (the highly

LIVES OF THE POETS

imaginative 'The Dream of the Rood" and other poems ascribed to
Cynewulf) unaccountably found its way to Italy, where it remains in
the cathedral library of the town of Vercelli. Although these collections
were transcribed about 1000 A.D., they were unavailable to the general
reader until recent times; the first edition of Beowulf was published
as late as 1815, and the invaluable contents of the Exeter manuscript
did not appear in print until 1 842.

Anglo-Saxon poetry may be divided into two main types: the heroic
and the devotional. The heroic poetry is pagan in character and Teu-
tonic in origin. Most of the fabulous legends, stories of warriors and
monsters, emanated from Germany and Scandinavia; they are part of
the English heritage only by adoption and adaptation. The devotional
poetry, i.e., Christian, consists chiefly of Biblical paraphrases, religious
meditations, sermons and spiritual exaltations.

Although it contains Christian elements and seems to be a monkish
poet's retelling of Scandinavian saga material, Beowulf is a magnificent
piece of paganism, undoubtedly the greatest extended work of Old
English heroic, or heathen, poetry. It is a thoroughly fatalistic epic,
combining a stirring narrative with amoral folklore and fairy-tale leg-
endry. A definitely Germanic talc, containing episodes which parallel
those in the Saga of Grettir the Strong, it was brought to England by
the Angles in the sixth century. Reshaped and reassembled, with
priestly additions in the seventh century, it was written down about
three hundred years later. The fren/icd plot has some of the unity as
well as the discursiveness of the traditional epic. Its hero is a young
prince of the Geats, a tribe that lived in southern Sweden. Pledged to
adventure, Beowulf goes to Denmark and in the King's hall overcomes
Grendel, a murderous and seemingly invulnerable creature, who had
been ravaging the land. Beowulf then slays Grendcl's mother, an un-
derwater monster, at the bottom of a lake. Later (in the second part
of the poem) Beowulf is glorified, becomes king of the Geats and, de-
fending his country in his old age, is killed in combat with a vengeful
fire-dragon. The noblest part of the poem concerns the death of the
great-hearted warrior, his funeral rites, and the burning of the body of
Beowulf, "kindest of kinsmen and keenest for fame/'

Written in a language incomprehensible today to all but scholars, an
obsolete vocabulary bristling with strangely shaped letters, Beowulf
presents considerable difficulties for the reader even in the competent
modern translations by R B. Gummcre, J. Duncan Spaeth, and G K.
Scott-Moncrieff, It is not only the language hazards but the compli-

FOREWORD: THE BACKGROUND

cated devices of Anglo-Saxon poetry which make the poem hard to
follow. The rules are strict and the form is inflexible. Anglo-Saxon
poetry does not rhyme, hut, to compensate for the lack, each line con-
tains four accented syllables with an irregular number of unaccented
ones. Each line, moreover, is composed of two half-lines separated by
a strong caesura, or pause. To tie the halves together and, at the same
time, to make the verse more resonant, the first three accented syl-
lables arc forced to begin with the same sound. The alliteration consists
not only of consonants but of vowels — any word beginning with a
vowel alliterates with any other word beginning with a vowel. This is
the way the original version of Beowulf begins:

we Gar-Dena in geardagum
]?eodcynmga t>rym gefrunon,
hu 8a ac]?elingas ellen fremedon!
Oft Scyld Sccfing sceaf>ena }>reatum
moncgum macg]?urn meodosetla ofteah;
egsode eorlas, sy38an serest wearS
fcasceaft funden; he J?ses frofre gebad . . .

This is a modern approximation of those seven lines:

Lo, we have listened to lays of the Spear-Danes,
Full of the fame of fabulous leaders,
Hearing how honors were won by the heroes.
Often Scyld Scefing, the Shield-Sheaf, conquered
Raiders and rebels, ruining their mead-halls,
Checking their chiefs. As a child he lay,
Frail and unfriended, found on the shore*

The stressed alliteration proved so attractive as well as effective that
poets were loath to surrender it. The device persisted long after the
Anglo-Saxon bards. Refusing to die, it reached into fourteenth-century
verse, notably in Sir Gawam and the Green Knight, a romantic alle-
gory which, in Theodore Banks's translation, begins:

When the siege and assault ceased at Troy, and the city
Was broken, and burned all to brands and to ashes,
The warrior who wove there the web of his treachery
Tried was for treason, the truest on earth.
Twos Aeneas, who later with lords of his lineage

LIVES OF THE POETS

Provinces quelled, and became the possessors

Of well-nigh the whole of the wealth of the West Isles.

Another characteristic device of Anglo-Saxon poetry is the use of
"kennings." A 'Icenning" is a curious figure of speech — the surprising
yet seemingly inevitable union of likeness and unlikencss that is the
secret of metaphor, the full development of which did not occur until
the Elizabethans. Instead of giving a person or a thing its simple name,
"kenning" is a phrase or a compound word which describes its quality,
function, or essence. Thus man is an "earth-dweller"; the sea is "the
whale's road" or "the gannet's bath"; the body is "flesh-coat" or "the
bone-house"; a ship is "sea-wood" or "sea-horse"; a sword is "the warrior's
friend" or "the light of battle"; a battle is "spear-play," "tumult of
swords," "clash of standards"; the lord is "the ring-giver," "the bcstowcr
of treasure"; the sun is "the rapture of heaven" and "the sky-candle";
a wife is "the weaver of peace," The harp was known as "glee-wood,"
an ancient justification of the poet, for the harp player, who was also
the song maker, was a bringer of joy. Metaphor, the very heart of
poetry, lives in such epithets, "picture names" which, while quaint and
whimsically imaginative, are also curiously accurate.

Although much of Anglo-Saxon religious poetry is of interest only to
the scholar and antiquarian, two names still hold their antique magic:
Cacdmon and Cynewulf . Cacdmon was an unlettered laborer, a cowherd
connected with a monastery. Bede, the eighth-century historian, tells
that Gaedmon was so illiterate that, although at feast days every man
was supposed to sing to the harp, Cacdmon had never even "learned a
song." One night in his old age Cacdmon, shamefaced, had left the feast
and was lying asleep in the cattle stall, when "there appeared a man
unto him," relates Bede, "and hailed him and saluted him and called
him by his name: 'Caedmon, sing me something/ Then he answered and
said, 'I cannot sing, and so I left the feasting and came hither because
I could not/ He who spoke to him again said, 'Nevertheless, thou canst
sing to me/ He said, What am I to sing?' He said, 'Sing me the
Creation/ When he received that answer, then straightway Cacdmon
began to sing in praise of God, the Creator, verses and words which he
had never heard before. This is the order of them:

Now hail with honor the heavenly Guardian,
The might of the Maker, the thought of His mind.
The gifts of a glorious God, our Father —

FOREWORD: THE BACKGROUND

He, the Lord Everlasting, worked every wonder
He, the holy Creator, first lifted the heavens
As a roof for man's children, then fashioned the earth
As a floor for their feet. All this he performed —
Lo, the Lord Everlasting, all-powerful Prince.

"Then Csedmon rose up from sleep and clearly remembered all he
had sung while he slept, and straightway added in the same meter
many words of the song worthy of God. He was received into the
monastery of Whitby under the Abbess Hilda, and there he passed the
rest of his life in making poetry/'

Since Bede went on to say that Casdmon sang "first of the Creation
of the World and the beginning of Mankind/* the extant manuscripts
("Genesis," "Daniel," and others) were usually ascribed to Csedmon,
However, it is now believed that practically all of Caedmon's work has
been lost and that the nine lines quoted by Bede (and first translated
by King Alfred) are all that may safely be assumed to be Caedmon's.
A considerable body of Anglo-Saxon religious poetry has come down
from the time of Csedmon; but nothing in this early English poetry is
as vivid as die poems already cited, except 'The Dream of the Rood,"
in which the Cross itself complains of its reluctant role in the Cruci-
fixion, and "The Fall of the Angels," in which the rebellious Satan
takes on the character and speaks in the defiant accents which Milton
uplifted in Paradise Lost,

Lacking a Bede to give us details, we know nothing of Cynewulf.
However, in contradistinction to our ignorance about Csedmon's work,
we know a great deal about Cynewulfs poetry. There is, moreover,
certainty about his authorship, for Cynewulf added his "signature,"
an acrostic in old runic letters, to such poems as "Juliana," "Elene," and
the middle part of "Christ." All are remarkable evocations of a devout
spirit deeply affected by the growing appeal of Christianity but richly
colored by the associations of a pagan ancestry. "Juliana" tells the story
of the virgin saint whose love of God was so great that she refused
marriage, faced her father's wrath, fearlessly confronted the demon
who had tempted Eve and Cain and prompted Judas to betray Christ;
she was imprisoned, tortured, and martyred. "Elene" is uplifted by
Emperor Constantino^ vision and quickened by the strange adventures
connected with the finding of the Cross by St. Helena two hundred
and thirty-three years after the burial of the holy relic. The second
section of "Christ" deals with the Ascension and is definitely by Cyne-

LIVES OF THE POETS

wulf; but, although we cannot be certain about the authorship, the
first part (devoted to the Advent) and the third (The Day of Doom)
also show the dramatic if diffused power typical of Cynewulf, the
ardent exhorter and the impassioned poet.

Coexistent with the writings of the Christian poet-priests, there
developed a secular poetry. This poetry was not written by holy men
or scribes but composed and sung by the scops, or "shapcrs," who
unlocked their "word-hoard/' Their lyrics and ballads, chanted to the
accompaniment of a small harp or sung to viols, were mostly doleful
and elegiac in character. "Deor's Complaint," one of the most touch-
ing of the laments, is the song of a poet discarded in favor of another
singer. A victim of unhappy times, Deor comforts himself by remem-
bering the misfortunes of dead Germanic heroes, the wrong of op-
pressed people, and the strength with which others have endured
suffering. At the end of each stanza there appears a consoling line:
"That passed away; this may too" or "Their troubles went by; so can
mine."

This early use of a "refrain" or "chorus" — so called because audiences
presumably joined in with each repetition — brought poetry closer to
die people. Adding their voices to the voice of the glccman and the
plangent chords of his harp, people ceased to be merely listeners and
became participants in the shaping of a poem. The insinuating device
of the refrain is employed in "Wulf and Eadwaeer," another non-
Christian poem which harks back to Norse Icgendry. The speaker is a
woman. Married to a man she loathes, she longs for her lover. Both are
captives — she on one island, he on another. 'Will they feed him there
if he should want?" she grieves with repeated sorrow. "Alas for us."

Like "Deor's Complaint," "Widsith" ("The Far-Traveler") and "The
Wanderer" are poems about, and presumably written by, displaced
poets. "Widsith," the lay of an itinerant minstrel, recounts episodes of
glorious times gone by, fierce invasions, tribal lore, and a veritable
catalogue of warrior-kings — proper material for the professional poet
of his age. It was apparently composed in the sixth century and is,
therefore, one of the oldest of Anglo-Saxon poems. 'The Wanderer/'
bewailing the fact that "recalling happier days is sorrow's crown of
sorrows," mixes semireligious and purely pagan elements. The palaces,
the "high treasure-givers" and "proud pleasure-seekers" have gone;
Fate (implacable Wyr£) has plunged the speaker into a dark melan-
choly; to him the light of God comes not so much as a salvation as an
afterthought* Similar in tone, "The Seafarer" is also a poem of wander-

FOREWORD: THE BACKGROUND

ing which alternates between the fascination of the sea — the irresistible
call of "the whale's road" — and a weary longing for a life that is finished
with voyaging. In common with other poems of the period, "The
Wanderer" and "The Seafarer" are marred by incongruous didacticisms,
pious reflections that seem to be interpolated by later and less vigorous
hands. This is only natural One could scarcely expect Christian clerics
to leave intact long glorifications of heathen codes and customs; one
•should be grateful that, in spite of the editing and expurgations, so
much of the vigor, as well as the purely pagan material, persists.

Two battle pieces by unknown bards vibrate with a spirit which is
heroic and, although there are references to Christian virtues, brutally
heathen. Both depict tenth-century battles: one commemorates a defeat,
the other celebrates a victory. "The Battle of Maldon" is a truncated
part of a large poem, but it is a magnificent fragment. "The Battle of
Brunanburh" rejoices in the victory won by ^thelstan against Con-
•stuntinus, King of Scotland, in the year 937. In a translation into
modern English, Tennyson captures the atmosphere, the muscular
language, and some of the alliteration of the original. Here is the first
verse of Tennyson's version of "The Battle of Brunanburh":

^Ethclstan King,
Lord among Earls,
Bracclct-bestowcr and
Baron of barons,
He with his brother,
Edmund Athcling,
Gaining a lifelong
Glory in battle,
Slew with the sword-edge
There by Brunanburh,
Brake the shield-wall
Hewed the linden-wood,
Hacked the battle-shield,
Sons of Edward with hammered brands.

Dynamic energy characterizes the poetry of the Old English period.
With few exceptions the subject matter is passionately heroic and grim.
Reflecting the conditions of life at that time, the manner of writing is
stern and often savagej the vocabulary is correspondingly strong and
explosive.

LIVES OF THE POETS

There was no common language. The dialect of Dorset was almost
unintelligible to Lancastrians; those who relished Layamon's Saxon-
tongue, Beowulf-flavored Brut (for Brutus, grandson of Aeneas and
the mythical founder of Britain) could not understand the Agenbite of
Inwit (The Biting Back, or Pangs, of Conscience), composed in home-
spun Kentish. Then slowly the Southeast Midland dialect grew domi-
nant. It spread through the universities, was favored in London, and
became the common language of the court. It did not, however, become
the standard of cultured speech until the fourteenth century and
Geoffrey Chaucer. With Chaucer, English literature took an important
and dramatic turn: it achieved a native poetry and acquired a new
language.

Father of English Poetry

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

FATHER OF ENGLISH POETRY and perhaps the prince of it" (Dryden's
lordly phrase), Geoffrey Chaucer touched every level in the life
of his country and, in effect, all mankind. He broke away from
the stock patterns of literary artifice and turned the pages of poetry into
a bustling and even boisterous pageant, a full-length picture of the
human comedy. It might be said that people did not exist in English
literature before Chaucer. There were epic figures, mythical heroes
larger than life, abstractions that accomplished wondrous feats. But
there were no distinct individuals. In his earlier work Chaucer followed
the prescribed static conventions, but in the later Troilus and Criseyde
and The Canterbury Tales he achieved something unprecedented. He
brought to these works the hitherto unknown gift of characterization.
Understanding man's guile as well as his gullibility, tolerant of his
foibles and perversities, his planned fraudulences and casual adulteries,
Chaucer invested his characters with every variety of human behavior.
He endowed them with life-giving frailties, with natural sins and
naive repentances, with recognizably frank instincts that warred stub-
bornly against reason and religion and, above all, with an inextinguish-
able love of life* No one before Chaucer, and only a few writers after
him, combined so critical an observation with so kindly a shrug, so

LIVES OF THE POETS

lofty a tribute to love and so mocking an attitude to sex. Although
Chaucer's invented personages are now six hundred years old, they
are flesh and blood today; they are, in fact, the people whom we have
known all our lives.

A conscientious author, Chaucer was unconsciously a catalyst. He
synthesized the changes that had been taking place for almost a
century before his birth. The Norman Conquest was not, like preced-
ing invasions, one more adventure in occupied territory; it was a com-
plete revolution, accomplished and stabilized on many fronts. New
customs as well as new social standards were established. The very
speech of the country was altered; enriched by French infusions, it
became freer and far more flexible. As a consequence, the tone of
English literature grew lighter, more limber and alive. Inspired by
Gallic buoyancy, the poetry of medieval England left die gloom of
pagan fatalism and Anglo-Saxon preoccupation with death in favor
of sprightly romanticism and worldly persiflage, It luxuriated in play-
ful parables, in elaborate masques (in which art improved upon nature)
and in curiously exaggerated rituals of love. Chaucer changed the
game of make-believe into vivid and, at times, violent reality.

Born in London about 1340, Chaucer was bred to a life of constant
activity. The name Chaucer, apparently derived from "chaussier"
indicates that the family were once French shoemakers; but both
Chaucer's father and his grandfather were busy brewers and purveyors
of wine. By a pleasant appropriateness, the Chauccrs lived in the parish
of St. Martin's-in-the-Vintry; Chaucer's father was not only a supplier
to taverns but, for a time, Deputy Butler to the King. Chaucer's mother
fancied herself something of a patrician; her uncle was one of the
officers of the Royal Mint. The family, however, were middle class in
background, taste, and training.

It is assumed, although there are no records to prove it, that young
Geoffrey attended St. Paul's Almonry, where he learned his lessons in
French, since French was not only the language of the court but the
language of literature, general culture, and international trade. His
English, at least the Midland dialect which was spoken in London
and which Chaucer was to use with such pioneering effect in his poetry,
was picked up at home and along the Thames waterfront. He learned
grammar, which was wrapped up in moral precepts, and absorbed
religion at the same time. He also studied music, mathematics and the
sciences, and he was, like most of his contemporaries, a fascinated
believer in astrology. A voracious reader in his teens, he delighted in

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

the Latin storytellers, especially in Ovid, whose candor and dexterity
he envied all his life.

Chaucer was about eight years old when the bubonic plague, the
Black Death, struck London. Pestilence was not uncommon in England,
but this particular visitation destroyed almost one third of the popula-
tion. To escape it, the Chaucers moved to Southampton for two years.
After the plague had lost its virulence, they returned to London,
then a dirty, disease-ridden medieval town of barely forty thousand
people, smaller than European cities like Ghent and Florence, but by
far the largest city in England.

We know nothing about Chaucer's next few years, but the family
must have made important contacts, for at seventeen Geoffrey was part
of the household of the Countess of Ulster, who became Duchess of
Clarence, wife of Lionel, son of King Edward III. An entry shows that
the Countess furnished her young attendant with a fashionably fine
jacket, new shoes, and a pair of tight-fitting black-and-red breeches. As
page, Chaucer's duties were light and the position was highly coveted.
He did little besides carry candles, light the guests to their chambers
and make their beds, run errands, deliver letters and love poems, join
the singers at festivities, and enjoy himself hugely. Meanwhile, he
was learning to be not only a well-mannered youth but a fairly well-
accomplished courtier. Among those on whom he waited attendance
was the Duke of Clarence's brother, John of Gaunt, Earl of Richmond.
John was to become Chaucer's patron, his protector and, after marrying
the poet's sister-in-law, his "pseudo-brother."

Chaucer was nineteen when, a soldier in Lionel's division, he had his
first taste of military service. He found it anything but glorious. The
Intermittent wars with France had been interrupted by the plague.
England resumed the Hundred Years' War when Edward invaded the
Continent with the objective of bringing both countries into a single
empire, while France alternately surrendered and liberated large por-
tions of its soil. Both sides were soon exhausted. The English be-
sieged but failed to capture Rheims; Edward made a shabby deal with
the Duke of Burgundy and relinquished his claim to the French crown.
Meanwhile, Chaucer had seen action, had mingled with ruffians and
soldiers of fortune as well as men of high degree, and had felt the
impact of another sort of life when he was taken prisoner during the
siege of Rheims. After the bargaining that was part of the usual
business of war, he was ransomed upon payment of sixteen pounds,
paid by the Keeper of the King's Wardrobe*

LIVES OF THE POETS

Shortly after his return to England, Chaucer became a member of
the King's household. By the time he was twenty-seven he had been
promoted to so high a rank as courtier that his royal master referred to
him intimately as Dilectus Valettus noster, "our very dear Valet," and
gave him a pension for life. The King's Valet was not, as the term had
previously implied, a custodian of the regal wardrobe, but a diplomat,
an emissary and, at times, a confidential agent, Chaucer was to attain
eminence in all these roles. Soon after his promotion he was sent abroad
on diplomatic conferences, military conferences, and "the King's secret
affairs."

No record of Chaucer's marriage has been found, but a joint pen-
sion from John of Gaunt to Geoffrey Chaucer and his wife is dated
1374. Historians believe that the couple had been wed a few years
before the pension was conferred, so it is likely that Chaucer was
married at about thirty. Chaucer's wife was a gentlewoman in at-
tendance on the Queen. She was Philippa de Roct; her sister, Catherine
Swynford, after having been John of Gaunt's mistress, became his
third wife. Unlike her sister's union, Philippa's was not a passionate
one; the fact that Chaucer married considerably later than most men of
his time indicates that it was scarcely a love match of impetuous youth.

Nor does it seem to have been a particularly happy marriage. A man
could be a contented husband without being a romantic one; according
to custom it was not expected that romance should have any place in
marriage. The husbands portrayed by Chaucer are uniformly un-
romantic and pathetically unheroic. Rarely in literature have males
been so roundly ridiculed, so easily cajoled, and so blandly cuckolded.
Chaucer's married men are regularly henpecked, humiliated, beaten,
betrayed, and exhibited as objects of defenseless servility. In a few
rare instances—The Knight's Tale" and "The Franklin's Talc" are
two of them — Chaucer allows that marriage and love can flourish in
the same bed. But the poor husband is at peace only if he relinquishes
the role of master and remains a servant to his termagant spouse.

One cannot deduce an author's private life from his writings, but
Chaucer's published attitude to the other sex is not only frank but
significantly unpleasant. His poetry draws a hard line separating
women as symbols and women as women. According to the code of the
courtly love — a code to which Chaucer's early poems gave lip service —
women as symbols were ideal creatures, lovely allegorical figures, pat-
terns of patience and unblemished purity, unreal human beings
elevated far above the crude commonplaces of everyday life. Women as

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

women, however — and, in particular, women as wives — were terrible
realities. They were not merely shrewish but shameless, garrulous,
greedy, disloyal, and licentious. Worse, they were united in an un-
written but universally recognized conspiracy to subject their husbands
to every possible indignity. The husband of Philippa cannot be defi-
nitely identified with the creator of The Canterbury Tales, but it is
unlikely that a happily married author would speak so scurrilously of
the marital state and take obvious pleasure in so many humiliating
incidents, grimly detailing the triumphs of wifehood and the ignomin-
ious capitulation of the woman's miserable partner.

Whether or not Chaucer's married lot was a happy one, his career as
emissary was increasingly successful. At thirty-two he transacted the
King's business with skill and dispatch in Genoa. This Italian mission
was a turning point in Chaucer's life, for it took him to Florence, the
only metropolis and the first great center of culture he had ever en-
countered. Dante, esteemed as a politician when he was alive, was now,
fifty years after his death, celebrated as a poet. Boccaccio was living
in Florence, lecturing on Dante in his native tongue instead of Latin,
the language employed for classical discourse. It is likely that this
innovation, following Dante's own example, emboldened Chaucer to
put the speech of people rather than that of scholars into the poetry
he was beginning to write.

Chaucer was already a poet, although unknown to all except his
friends, when he went to Italy. By the time he returned to England he
had learned to tell stories in a new kind of verse that would have been
startling and all but incomprehensible to the troubadours of the Middle
Ages. However, it was not in recognition of his poems but as a reward
for his services that Chaucer was made Comptroller of the Customs for
the Port of London. Since the position made him responsible for taxed
commodities — principally wool, skins, and hides — he was given a fitting
salary, together with a house at Aldgate, one of the chief entrances
through the city wall Here, for the first time, Chaucer could luxuriate
in an unusually well-equipped home and indulge in his two passions:
the insatiable reading of books and the writing of poetry. The two
preoccupations fused into one. Everything he read about astronomy,
astrology, alchemy, history, poetry, medicine, physics, religion, classical
and current literature — and he read everything — was eventually dis-
tilled into poems,

Chaucer omitted nothing from his poetry, not even himself. He
wanted his readers to know what he felt, what he enjoyed, what he

LIVES OF THE POETS

considered noble or ridiculous, even what he looked like. There is a
pen portrait in The House of Fame which is mocking, but there is no
reason to believe it is a distortion when Chaucer speaks of himself as
six feet in height but decidedly round, slow and dull in conversation.
In the Canterbury Tales the likeness is emphasized. The Host, Harry
Bailey, pokes fun at Chaucer's girth, his sobriety, his studied manner
and his air of abstraction. Turning from the rest of the company to
Chaucer, the Host, who has appointed himself master of ceremonies,
teases die writer:

What man is this with such a curious air,

Scanning the ground as though to spot a hare!

Come closer, man, and look up gallantly.

Make room, good sirs, this man should have his place.

Look now — he has an ample waist like me —

A pretty puppet, small and fair of face,

The kind that any woman might embrace.

Yet, though he wears the semblance of an elf,

He keeps himself severely to himself.

Although we have no portrait of Chaucer drawn during his lifetime,
there are various pictures painted shortly after his death. The earliest
surviving likeness, on which all the others seem to have been based,
was painted from memory and was used to embellish the early-fifteenth-
century Regimen of Princes by Thomas Hocclcve, Chaucer's devoted
disciple. Another miniature, one of the finest of the period, shows
Chaucer reading his poems to a company of nobles, including a queen
and an attendant prince. The portraits reveal an expansive brow, small,
quizzical eyes, an aquiline nose, and a sensitive mouth above a small,
neatly parted beard.

Renewed proof of Chaucer's diplomatic capabilities came in 1376,
when he was given leave of absence to help negotiate a peace between
England and France, Then, five years after his first visit to Italy, he
was an important member of a military-financial mission to Milan,
where the powerful Visconti brothers were persuaded to contribute
funds toward what had become a chronic conflict with France.
Although Chaucer called Bernabo Visconti "the scourge of Lombardy,"
and although Bemabo had been suspected of poisoning Chaucer's
former master, Lionel (who died of an excess of carousing rather than
drugs), the English were willing to forget crimes, hate, and hot

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

passion for cold cash. Chaucer maintained the proper diplomatic de-
tachment. He did this the more easily since the Viscontis were patrons
of art and literature. Their palace had been decorated by Giotto, and
Bernabo possessed a justly famous library. Here Chaucer renewed and
enriched his acquaintance with Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch. This
second Italian journey equipped him to act as a conductor of culture
between two civilizations.

Between his chores as comptroller and his duties as roving diplomat,
Chaucer somehow managed to keep on writing poetry. Before he went
to Italy he had been at work on a translation of The Romance of the
Rose, one of the period's favorite books. But it was not until he was
about thirty that he ventured an original work, The Book of the
Duchess, and he was almost forty when he found his own idiom with
The House of Fame. He also undertook and completed a conscientious
if unexciting prose translation from the Latin of Boethius' Consola-
tion of Philosophy, popular since the ninth century, which King Alfred
had translated into Anglo-Saxon and which, two hundred years after
Chaucer, Queen Elizabeth also translated. Among larger labors he
wrote various light exercises, including a series of "Complaints/' and
a long, vivacious allegory, The Parliament of Fowls. It was in his
forties that Chaucer attained full power. He began The Legend of
Good Women and abandoned it when it grew tedious. He created
what has been called "the first English novel" when he wrote the
extraordinarily rhymed Troilus and Criseyde.

In his forty-seventh year he ceased being Comptroller of Customs.
It is said that he was deprived of the office while John of Gaunt was
in Spain and the young King Richard II yielded to the Duke of
Gloucester, who wanted jobs for his henchmen. It is, however, more
likely that, tiring of his clerical work and anxious to get on with an
idea which had been goading him for years, Chaucer resigned. In any
case, he was now free to work on his masterpiece.

Chaucer never finished The Canterbury Tales. It is conjectured that
the writing of his major opus stretched over a period of ten or twelve
years, during which time Chaucer held various official positions,
received fluctuating favors and suffered financial insecurity. In 1388
he seems to have raised money by assigning his pension to someone
else. Later in the same year a warrant was issued for his arrest —
either he could not or would not pay a debt — but he enjoyed the royal
favor and the summons was never served. In the summer of 1389
King Richard assumed full power, and Chaucer was appointed Clerk

LIVES OF THE POETS

of the King's Works at Westminster. He held the office for two years,
during which he supervised repairs, took charge of the accountings,
inspected bridges, walls, and sewers. Besides his salary, he was given
rent-free lodgings in a house near Westminster Palace. After his wife's
death there was a revival of old gossip concerning a charge of abduc-
tion of a young girl, a technical charge from which he was finally freed,
since he had acted only as a go-between. But Chaucer had lived down
a turbulent past along with his "lecherous lays," and he spent most of
his days in creative as well as official works and the education of a
young man believed to be his son, Lewis, whom he gladly taught. It
was for Lewis that he wrote his treatise "On the Astrolabe," the fore-
runner of the sextant, which not only described the instrument in
simple terms but showed the contemporary relation between astronomy
and astrology.

During his brief term as Clerk of the Works, Chaucer was twice
robbed of government money but, after prolonged investigations and
much loss of time, he was freed of responsibility and any obligation to
repay the loss. Nevertheless, he resigned his offices and, within a few
months, was appointed Deputy Forester in the royal forest at North
Pethcrton in Somerset. There he acted as an executive rather than, as
the title seems to imply, watcher or game warden. In 1398 another suit
for debt was instituted against Chaucer, and again the King intervened
to protect him. A grant of an annual tun of wine signaled the king's
continuing sponsorship, the last favor he was to confer upon the poet.

Chaucer's later poems voice a thinly veiled anxiety. The teasing
"Envoy to Scogan" ends with an appeal to the man who "kneels at the
stream's head" to help one whose fortunes are as "dull as lead'*; the
half-jesting, half-elegiac ballade, "Complaint to His Purse/' addressed
to the new sovereign, Henry IV, is equally significant. Although not too
lugubrious and actually genial in tone, the envoy hints that Chaucer
would appreciate a little healing help. The appeal was heeded; the
monarch doubled the pension and, although the poet was about sixty,
Chaucer signed a fifty-threc-year lease for a house in the garden of St.
Mary's chapel at Westminster.

Fie did not live long enough to enjoy cither the money or the situa-
tion. Ten months after establishing himself in the new home, Chaucer
was stricken — the plague was virulent again that year — and on October
25, 1400, he died. As a tenant of Westminster, he was entombed in the
Abbey, the first person to be buried in that part which became known
as the Poet's Corner.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

Chaucer's translation of The Romance of the Rose is an obviously
early work. An elaborate thirteenth-century French allegory, the first
part, written by Guillaume de Lorris, is a composite of the literary
conventions of the period. The central figure is the traditional poet-
dreamer who wanders through a garden dedicated to courtly love.
There he encounters Sir Mirth, the ladies Gladness, Idleness, and other
handsomely clothed abstractions, learns the rules of love (paraphrased
from Ovid's Art of Love and properly purified), is threatened by
Danger, is helped by Fair Welcome, and looks forward to a favorable
turn of Fortune. The dreamer does not attain the desired consumma-
tion, for Lorris never finished his saga. Half a century after his death,
another French poet, Jean de Meun, went to work on it. Jean de Meun
was as completely cynical as Lorris was incurably romantic. Light-
heartedly, Meun decided to forget the original story. He added a series
of acrid epigrams on life, barbed squibs alternately extolling and con-
demning women, and peppered it all with aphorisms on pleasure,
predestination, and the difficult pursuit of happiness. Begun in
Chaucer's early twenties, The Romance of the Rose is an unfinished
piece of apprentice work.

Having learned to use the tools of his craft, Chaucer went on to
undertake (and finish) an original allegorical poem. He was nearly
thirty when he produced The Booh of the Duchess, an elegy on the
death of Blanche, first wife of John of Gaunt. Composed in the same
meter as The Romance of the Rose and echoing the spirit of the first
part of that poem, it also employs the device of a dream and exhibits
all the trappings displayed in the embellishment of courtly love.

It was not until he was almost forty that Chaucer discovered he
could make his own music and give a new sound as well as freedom
of movement to his lines. Part of the music was achieved by his con-
tinuing the poetic convention of sounding the letter e at the end of a
work, making it a delicate but definitely extra syllable, as is still the
custom in French verse. Part of it was attained by using — and trans-
fusing— the ordinary language of his day. Scholars have agreed that the
vowel sounds of Middle English were broad, the long vowels con-
siderably longer than ours. The long a was pronounced as in father;
the closed e was pronounced like a in fate and the open e had the value
of e in where; the short vowels were the same as ours but somewhat
more clipped; gh was similar to the German guttural ch. The combined

LIVES OF THE POETS

sonority and tartness, a rich legato spiced with staccato accents, was
— and is — particularly effective when the lines are heard rather than
read.

On the printed page, the Middle English that Chaucer used looks
only remotely related to modern English. Here, for example, are die
first lines of the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath pcrccd to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu cngendred is the flour. * . .l

It is in The House of Fame that the Chaucerian flexibility of sound
first manifests itself. Even at forty Chaucer could still not rid himself
of the established mode. There is the persistent allegorical pattern
framed in the familiar dream device — but there is a lambency, a light
playfulness, an easy affability unheard in the preceding poems. The
speaker represents himself being transported from a temple of Venus
by an eagle who serves as a loquacious master of ceremonies, a patron-
izing guide, and a caustic critic. Chaucer, according to the eagle, has
written a great deal about love without knowing much about it. The
resplendent creature, Jove's messenger shining "with feathers as of
gold/' has been commissioned to carry the poet to the abode of "Love's
folk."

The eagle conducts him on a circuitous journey, punctuated with
rambling scholarly disquisitions and a panoramic survey of favorite
narrators and historians of the past At last eagle and man arrive at a
house built of twigs where Chaucer is to learn important tidings from
"a man of great authority." Here the poem comes to an abrupt end or,
rather, to no ending since this is another of the many poems which
Chaucer left unfinished. Nevertheless, although The House of Fame
is unshapely and confusing, proceeding from one digression to another,
it is typically Chaucerian in idiom, as well as a fresh treatment of the
bird-and-beast fable. The touch is delicate and many of the digressions
are as humorous as they are unexpected. In a kind of "aside," apparently
referring to his wife Philippa, Chaucer remarks that the eagle's voice
is familiar, though softer and less peremptory than the voice which
wakes him every morning. The fantasy sometimes gets out of control,

1 See page 23 fox a modern English version.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

but much of it conveys a half-pitying, half-teasing understanding of
man's follies, presaging the offhand, informal tone which Chaucer was
to use with unsurpassable skill.

In his next work, The Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer once more takes
advantage of the dream mechanism to project a vision of a great
congress of birds who, according to an ancient legend, gather on St.
Valentine's Day to select their mates for the coming year. Although
the device was old, the presentation was new. Chaucer experimented
with a seven-line stanza revolving around three rhymes — actually a
quatrain with an added rhyme and a concluding couplet. The pattern
had been tentatively used before, but only for trivialities. The form
suited Chaucer so well that he turned to it again and again; some of
his most characteristic narratives are told in what has become known
as both "Chaucerian stanza" and, after King James of Scotland used it
for his Kingis Quair, "rhyme royal/' The following verse, a partial cata-
logue of the assembled birds, is a small sample of the stanza form:

The vigilant goose; the cuckoo most unkind;

The popinjay, proud of his delicacy;

The drake, a menace to his kith and kind;

The stork, avenger of adultery;

The cormorant, all greed and gluttony;

The raven wise, the crow with voice of care;

The ancient thrush, the frosty old field-fare . . .

In the comedy of Chanticleer and his Pertelote ("The Nun's Priest's
Talc" in The Canterbury Tales) Chaucer brought the bird-and-beast
fable to its highest pitch; but if The Parliament of Fowls is not so great
a masterpiece, it is one of the loveliest and liveliest of the poet's fan-
tasies* The animals are humanly characterized; the plebeian ducks, for
example, are not at all impressed by the affected airs of the more aristo-
cratic fowl. Chaucer was conscious of the demands of the new form:
'The life so short, the craft so long to learn," he says at the start.
Craftsmanship rather than inspiration is evident in his adaptation of
passages from Boccaccio and allusions to a royal courting — King
Richard II, Anne of Bohemia, and Marie of France are the favored
possibilities — but the main episodes, the clamorous debate and the com-
petition for the Formel (female) Eagle, are fresh and graceful, full of
play, lightly ironic but barely malicious.

The same stanza form which lightened The Parliament of Fowls was

LIVES OF THE POETS

used to tighten and strengthen the enormously long narrative of Troilus
and Criseyde. The name of Troilus had come down from The Iliad:
he was one of the sons of Priam who, during the siege of Troy, had
been killed by Achilles. There is, however, nothing in Homer's epic
concerning the young prince's passion for Cressida, or, as Chaucer calls
her, Criseyde. Troilus' unhappy love for the faithless girl is a legend
made up by a twelfth-century French poet, Benoit de Saintc-Maurc. A
century later it was retold and amplified by Boccaccio in 11 Filostrato.
Boccaccio added the character of Pandarus, and the romance became
the basis of Chaucer's poem as well as Shakespeare's play.

Chaucer's Criseyde is a fickle girl who breaks her vow of constancy,
but she is not a promiscuous slut. Chaucer's Pandarus fulfills the part
of a complaisant go-between, but he is essentially a comic creation, a
chatty but ironic observer, a shrewd commentator and a glib proverb-
quoter with a touch of Polonius. In Shakespeare's hands Cressida turns
into a harlot and Pandarus becomes what the word pander implies
today. Shakespeare has Pandarus say: "Let all pitiful goers-betwcen be
called to the world's end after my name/' while the character of
Cressida is summed up by herself in a bitter set of comparisons:

As false

As air, as water, wind, or sandy earth,
As fox to lamb, as wolf to heifer's calf,
Pard to the hind or stepdame to her son;
"Yea," let them say, to stick the heart of falsehood,
"As false as Cressid!"

Only Troilus survives in Shakespeare as pure, as constant, and as
heartbroken as he was conceived in the twelfth century. "After all the
comparisons of truth," says Shakespeare,

"As true as Troilus" shall crown up the verse,
And sanctify the numbers.

It was, however, Chaucer rather than Shakespeare who gave the
tale vitality and its characters new dimensions. Before Chaucer lifted it,
the story was a legend, little more than a tale of intrigue* Chaucer
took the plot and made it come alive* The chief figures are no longer
a showman's puppets but human beings quivering with young love,
suffering with suspense, agonized with betrayal. Their struggles form

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

a complicated drama: a poignant tragedy which, because of Pandarus,
is also a masterpiece of comedy, broad in meaning and subtle in
manipulation, a frankly sexual and, at the same time, a deeply psy-
chological love story.

Here, in a translation by Theodore Morrison, is Chaucer's introduc-
tory plea to the reader:

You lovers who now bathe in happiness,

If in your veins a pitying drop there be,

Reflect upon the outlived heaviness

That you have suffered, and the adversity

Of other folk. Remember feelingly

How you, too, Love dared sometimes to displease,

Or else you won him with too great an ease!

And pray for all those who are in the plight
Of Troilus, as you may duly hear,
Pray that in heaven Love may their pains requite,
And pray for me, to God whom we hold dear,
That by these words of mine it may appear
Through Troilus, whose fortune turned to woe,
What suffering Love's people undergo.2

Before accepting the challenge of his greatest conception, Chaucer
produced a large installment of another love poem, The Legend of
Good Women, which, since it concerns women whose chief goodness is
their accomplishments in love-making, was also known as The Legend
of the Saints of Cupid. Written, it is said, at the request of King
Richard's wife, Anne of Bohemia, as an atonement for the portrait of
the unfaithful Criseyde, Chaucer attained a new tempo by using a five-
stressed line in rhyming pairs, a swift medium of poetic narration which
became known as the "heroic" couplet. According to the Prologue,
the poet intends to make amends for having implied that women were
more inconstant than men; but the most charming portions of the
Prologue are those in which Chaucer describes his meanderings in the
meadow, his pleasure in the richness of bountiful nature, the colored
fields, and, especially, his delight in that radiant common flower, the
daisy:

*From The Portable Chaucer. Translated and edited by Theodore Morrison.
Published by TTie Viking Press. Copyright, 1949, by Theodore Morrison.

LIVES OF THE POETS

. . . Whenever the month of May
Comes in, and I can hear the sweet birds sing,
And all the little buds begin to spring,
Farewell my book and my devoti6n!
Then, such it seems, is my conditi6n
That, of all the flowers in the mead,
Chiefly I love those flowers white and red,
The kind that men call day's-cyes in our town.
For them I have a deep affecti6n.
As I said first, as soon as it is May
Up from my bed before the break of day
I roam the meadow, seeing every one
Of those bright flowers mirroring the sun,
Uprising prompt and early every morrow.
That blissful sight sof teneth all my sorrow.
I am so happy in its very presence
That I can feel a reverence of its essence;
Like her, who is the very flower's flower,
Who wears all virtues like a shining dower,
In all ways fair, and always fresh of hue.
My love for it is something ever-new,
And shall be so until my heart shall die.
And this I swear — of this I would not He,

— Modern version by L,!/*

As the Prologue progresses, the daisy assumes the form of an enchant-
ing lady led by the Love-God, who accuses Chaucer of being a misog-
ynist, a heretic who has not only failed to worship women in the proper
courtly way but has dared to scoff at them. Whereupon the poem begins
with Cleopatra, one of Love's most eminent "martyrs." It then proceeds
to consider the lives of other "saints of Cupid/' Thisbe, Dido, Medea,
Lucrece, Ariadne, and many more. The strain of cataloguing women's
virtues was too much for Chaucer. Later he balanced the account with
the Wife of Bath's hearty vices in The Canterbury Tales, but even
before he had reached the halfway mark in The Legend of Good
Women he tired of it. He shrugs off the accumulated pathos of Philo-
mela by saying, "I am weary of hym for to telle"; he finds the story of
Phyllis frankly boring; he never gets around to the promised tale of
Alcestis, The Legend of Good Women remains a large but unsatisfac-
tory production, another of Chaucer's unfinished projects* According to

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

one of his followers, John Lydgate, it "encumbered his wits" to have to
keep on thinking of so many good women.

Chaucer must have had the plan for The Canterbury Tales in the
hack of his mind for a long time; several of the sections show evidence
of having been written many years before he undertook the work as a
whole. In his mid-forties Chaucer was ready for it.

The Prologue opens with one of the loveliest salutes to spring in any
language. Here, still fresh with the poet's clear and innocent vision,
are the rain-strengthened early flowers, the west wind's sweet breath,
the small birds singing through the night, waking the wanderlust in
every human breast. In a few lines Chaucer creates an eternal April.

When the sweet showers of April follow March,
Piercing the dryness to the roots that parch,
Bathing each vein in such a flow of power
That a new strength's engendered in the flower —
When, with a gentle warmth, the west-wind's breath
Awakes in every wood and barren heath
The tender foliage — when the vernal sun
Has half his course within the Ram to run —
When the small birds are making melodies,
Sleeping all night (they say) with open eyes
(For Nature so within their bosom rages) —
Then people long to go on pilgrimages,
And palmers wander to the strangest strands
For famous shrines, however far the lands.
Especially from every shire's end
Of England's length to Canterbury they wend,
Seeking the martyr, holiest and blest
Who helped them, healed their ills, and gave them rest.

— Modern version by L*U.

Chaucer thereupon introduces his dramatis personae. All of them are
going to visit the shrine in Canterbury where Thomas & Becket was
murdered. It is not known whether Chaucer actually took part in such
a pilgrimage, but in his poem he is decidedly one of the company.

The group consists of thirty pilgrims. It is an extremely mixed com-
pany, and each member of it is so sharply individualized that the
identities are immediately and unmistakably established. Among them
are Harry Bailey, the large, rough Host of the Tabard Inn, a seemly

LIVES OF THE POETS

man, fit to have been "a marshall in a halle" ... a Knight back from
the wars but meek in manner as a maid, "a vcrray parfit gentil knight"
. . . his son, a youthful Squire, "a lovyere and a lusty bachelor," with
his embroidered raiment like a flowering meadow and his locks curled
as though "they were leyd in prcssc" ... a coy Prioress who speaks
French with an English accent, whose "gretteste ooth was but by scynt
Lyo," and whose table manners are so dainty that she never dropped
a morsel of food and "ne wette hir fingrcs in hir sauce depe" , . . a
worldly Monk, fond of hunting, fine clothes and rich food — "a fat swan
loved he best of any roost" ... a Reeve, a steward who was also a kind
of overseer, a "sclendrc colcrik man" ... a popular and wanton Friar,
full of "dalliaunce and fair language," who played the fiddle, sang
merrily, and affected a slight lisp because he thought it fetching . . .
a Clerk from Oxford, whose horse was lean and who himself "was nat
right fat," but (an obvious favorite of Chaucer) a lover of books rather
than fine garments or gold, who spoke only when he had something to
say, "ful of hy sentence," for thoughts of moral virtue filled his speech
— "and gladly wold he learne, and gladly tcche" , , * a Franklin, a
country gentlemen, a good companion and a gourmet, "for he was
Epicurus' ownc sonne" ... a Summoner, paid to serve summonses
on sinners and bring them to trial, a rogue with an easy conscience and
one whose mind was as "hottc and lecherous as is a sparrow" ... a
Pardoner, a hypocrite who sold pardons and false indulgences and who
got money from his victims by exhibiting spurious "relics" (a pillow-
case he swore was Our Lady's veil, a piece of common cloth he claimed
was a piece of "the seyl that Saint Peter hadde")> and whose piping
voice and smooth, beardless face made Chaucer call him "a gelding or
a mare*' . . . the red-faced, broad-hatted Wife of Bath who, although
deaf, seems to have heard everything and who had had five legal hus-
bands, not including "other companyc in youthe" ... a thick-set,
short-shouldered Miller with black nostrils and beard as» rod as any
fox, a man sturdy as the stones, who excelled at wrestling and playing
the bagpipe, roaring out lewd jokes from a mouth as broad "as a greet
furnace" . * . a drunken Cook . , . a Yeoman flaunting his bow and
arrow as gaily as Robin Hood . . , a doctor, a haberdasher, a weaver,
a dyer, a carpenter, a plowman. . * .

All are mirrored in the poet's loving scrutiny: the little tricks of
gesture and the large generalities, die homely accents, the very shades
of complexion, the rare virtues and the human vices—not a whisper, not
a wart, is omitted. Chaucer towers above the writers of his times not by

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

transcribing but by transmuting the looks and lives of his people, by
uplifting characteristics into character.

Here, in the present writer's translation into modern English, are
four of the pilgrims introduced by Chaucer in the Prologue:

A PRIORESS

There also was a nun, a Prioress

Whose smile was simple. Quiet, even coy,

The worst oath that she swore was, "By Saint Loy!"

And she was known as Sister Eglantine.

Sweetly she sang the services divine,

Intoning through her nose the melody.

Fairly she spoke her French, and skillfully,

After the school of Stratford-at-the-Bow —

Parisian French was not for her to know.

Precise at table and well-bred withal

Her lips would never let a morsel fall;

She never wet her fingers in her sauce,

But carried every tidbit without loss

Of even the smallest drop upon her breast.

Manners and good behavior pleased her best.

She always wiped her upper lip so clean

That not a speck of grease was ever seen

Upon the cup from which she drank. Her food

Was reached for neatly; she was never rude.

Though her demeanor was the very best,

Her mood was amiable, she loved a jest;

She always tried to copy each report

Of how the latest fashion ran at court,

And yet to hold herself with dignity.

But, speaking of her inner nature, she

Was so devout, so full of sympathy,

She would lament if she would have to see

A mouse caught in a trap, or it had bled.

A few small dogs she had, and these she fed

With roasted meat, or milk and sweetened bread,

And wept aloud if one of them were dead,

Or if a person struck and made them smart —

She was all goodness and a tender heart*

LIVES OF THE POETS

Her wimple draped itself a modest way;

Her nose was straight, her eyes transparent grey,

Her mouth was small, but very soft and red,

Hers was a noble and a fair forehead,

Almost a span in breadth, one realized;

For she was small but scarcely undersized.

Her cloak was well designed, I was aware;

Her arm was graced with corals, and she bare

A string in which the green glass beads were bold,

And from it hung a brilliant brooch of gold

On which there was engraved a large, crowned A,

Followed by Amor vincit omnia.

A MONK

A Monk there was, a monk of mastery;
Hunting he loved — and that exceedingly.
A manly man, to be an abbot able.
Many a worthy horse was in his stable;
And,, when he rode, his bridle all might hear
Jmg-jingling in a whistling wind as clear
And lingering-loud as rings the chapel-bell
Where he himself was keeper of the cell.
The rules of Saint Maurice or Benedict,
Because they were both old and somewhat strict,
This monk passed by, let what was outworn go;
New' times demand new customs here below.
He scorned that text not worth a poor, plucked hen
Which says that hunters are not holy men.
Or that a monk, of walls and cloister free,
Is like a fish that's out of water. He —
That is to say a monk out of his cloister —
Considered such a text not worth an oyster.
A good opinion, thought I, and it fits.
What! Should he study till he lose his wits
Poring on books he scarcely understands,
Always at work or laboring with his hands? , * «
Therefore he rode and hunted as he might.
Greyhounds he had, swift as a finch in flight;
Rousing the game and hunting for the hare
Was his delight and no cost would he spare,

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

His sleeves, I saw, were fitted near die hand
With the grey squirrel's fur, best in the land;
And, to attach the hood beneath his chin,
He had, all wrought in gold, a curious pin:
A love-knot at the larger end there was.
His head was bald and shed the sun like glass,
Likewise his face, as though anointed, shone —
A fine, stout monk, if ever there was one.
His glittering eyes that never seemed to tire
But blazed like copper caldrons in a fire —
His supple boots, his well-appointed horse —
Here was a prelate! fairness linked with force!
He was not pale or hollow, like a ghost;
He loved a fat swan best of any roast

A STUDENT

A Student came from Oxford town also,
Wedded to lore and logic long ago.
The horse he rode was lean as any rake;
Himself was scarcely fat, 111 undertake,
But hollow in his sad sobriety.
His overcoat was threadbare, too; for he
Was yet to win a single benefice,
And worldly thoughts of office were not his.
For he would rather have at his bed's head
Twenty great books, all bound in black or red,
Of Aristotle and his philosophy
Than rich robes, fiddle, or gay psaltery.
Though a philosopher, he could not proffer
A treasury of gold from his scant coffer;
Anything he could borrow from a friend
On books and learning he would quickly spend,
And constantly he prayed for those who'd give
Help for the means by which his soul might live,
He gave most care to study and most heed;
Never a word he spoke beyond his need.
His speech was framed in form and reverence,
Pointed and quick and always packed with sense.
Moral his mind, and virtuous his speech;
And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.

LIVES OF THE POETS

A MILLER

The Miller, stout and sturdy as the stones,

Delighted in his muscles, big of bones;

They served him well; at fair and tournament

He took the wrestling prize where'er he went.

He was short-shouldered, broad, knotty and tough;

He'd tear a door down easily enough

Or break it, charging thickly with his head.

His beard, like any sow or fox, was red,

And broadly built, as though it were a spade.

Upon the tiptop of his nose he had

A wart, and thereon stood a tuft of hairs,

Bright as the bristles of a red sow's ears.

His nostrils matched the miller, black and wide.

He bore a sword and buckler by his side,

His mouth was broad as a great furnace door,

He loved to tell a joke, and boast, and roar

About his many sins and harlotries.

He stole, and multiplied his thefts by threes.

And yet he had a thumb of gold, 'tis true,

He wore a white coat and a hood of blue,

And he could blow the bagpipe up and down —

And with a tune he brought us out of town*

The framework for The Canterbury Tales was not new. It had been
the supporting structure for Boccaccio's Decameron as well as the
Oriental Arabian Nights, and it would serve many other collections of
unconnected narratives, such as Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside, Inn
and William Morris' The Earthly Paradise. All these compilations
consist of stories strung together by some arbitrary but unifying device.
There is the barest excuse for a plot. A few people meet at a villa
because of a plague, or at a tavern for convenience, and each member
of the group tells a tale to while away the time.

In The Canterbury Tales the Host of the inn, who acts as inter-
locutor and master of ceremonies, proposes that each pilgrim tell two
stories on the trip down, and two more on the way back. The one who
tells the best tale is to be rewarded by a free dinner upon the return.
Thus one hundred and twenty tales would have been related had the
plan been carried out; but, like so many other of Chaucer's works,

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

The Canterbury Tales was never completed. As it has come down to
us, there are only twenty-three stories and a fragment of another. But
the effect is overwhelming. Never has there been so astonishing a set
of contrasts. Delicacy is pitted against indecency; noble spirits and
howling caricatures are purposefully opposed and are as brilliantly
illuminated as though the stained-glass figures in the cathedral at Can-
terbury had leaped into life. Everything is in motion — the tales sweep
by in great eddies, bearing the breathless reader with them — saints and
scapegraces, mythical heroes and miserable wretches, kings, clerks,
priests, impious frauds, devils and day laborers are carried along on a
swelling river of talk. Only one other Englishman charted so many
shifting courses of the human mind, and even Shakespeare scarcely
covered a wider territory.

Any attempt to give the quality of The Canterbury Tales apart from
the poetry is as vain as trying to "explain" a melody. But an appreciation
of the variety and vitality of the narration may be obtained by brief
summaries of the tales themselves.

The first tale is told by the Knight. He is not elected to tell it because
of his social standing but because — by fate or, Chaucer says slyly*
accident — he wins the draw. As befits his station, the Knight chooses
to tell a patrician romance (which Chaucer borrowed from Boccaccio's
Le Teseide*), the story of two prisoner-knights, Palamon and Arcite,
and their love for Emilia, sister-in-law to their captor, the Duke of
Athens. To preserve the courtly amenities, a tournament is arranged
which is won by Arcite, aided by the god of war; but Palamon, favored
by Venus, wins the prize of love*

Having created, in his pilgrims, a party of actual people, Chaucer
lets them speak for themselves. Between the tales, there are interludes
enlivened with commentary and discussion; there are times when the
stories are interrupted and even rejected. It is in the interludes that
the characters expand and take on full dimension; they grow more
human and more differentiated with each encounter. They take over
the stories and make them their own.

At the end of the Knight's long but appropriately elegant story, the
company is well pleased. The Host, declaring that everything is going
well, calls upon the Monk, probably because of his rank, for the next
tale. The Miller, already so tipsy that he can scarcely sit upright, pro-
tests that he, too, has a "noble" story to tell, one about an old carpenter
and his pretty wife and a young student, obviously a tale of cuckoldry.
Although the Reeve objects to a story of "lewed dronken harlotrie" on

LIVES OF THE POETS

moral grounds, the Miller will not be stopped. Chaucer makes a mock
apology for the tone of the narrative, reminding the reader that the
Miller was a churl and was, therefore, speaking in character. Besides,
he adds, any reader who finds it offensive can turn the page and choose
another tale. After all, concludes the poet, all of this is only a kind of
game — and who takes a game seriously! Whereupon the Miller begins
his account of a double and exceedingly ribald deception.

'The Miller's Tale" is actually two stories, one shameless and the other
frankly scatological. In the first the old husband is grossly put upon,
sexually cheated, and physically maltreated by his wife, Alison, and her
lover, Nicholas. In the second, the illicit couple have obscene fun with
Absalon, a parish clerk who desires Alison. The plot is an unalleviated
piece of pornography, but the depictions of the characters are gems of
genre portraiture. Every detail is a triumph of miniature painting.
Alison, small and supple as a weasel, skittish as a colt, her smooth little
body decked out in silk, is described to the last fluttering ribbon and the
smallest plucked eyebrow, Nicholas, the scamp, is shown as a lad made
for love-in-idleness, perfuming his breath with licorice while, ac-
companying himself on a harp, he sings seductively in his lady's car,
Absalon is seen as the village fop, resplendent in golden curls spread
out like "a fanne large and brode," his scarlet hose showing through
openwork shoes, his tight jacket flounced at the waist, a merry knave
whose singing and dancing are a byword in every tavern.

After the end of the Miller's libidinous "lark," there arc diverse
comments, but all the listeners laugh; even the Prioress joins in the
uninhibited response. The only one who shows active displeasure is the
Reeve, who objects to the story not because he is squeamish but
because, like the old carpenter-husband, he is, besides being a steward,
a carpenter. In retaliation, the Reeve offers to tell a story about a miller
in the Miller's own "churlish" terms, hoping, incidentally, that the
Miller will break his neck*

Once launched on his narrative, the Reeve outdoes the Miller in
filthincss. In its original form the story occurs on the eleventh day in
Boccaccio's Decameron and is also one of the most broadly erotic fa-
bliaux of the period* Therefore Chaucer puts it in the mouth of a
member of the lower class. The Reeve's miller, Simon Simkin, is not
only a stupid husband but an arrogant thief. His specialty is stealing
corn that has been brought to be ground. In an effort to catch him red-
handed, John and Alan, two sharp-eyed scholars, carry sacks of corn
from Cambridge, determined that their college will not be cheated.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

The story then grows wildly farcical. One of the young fellows stands
at the hopper and the other watches at the trough below; Simkin causes
their horse to run away. When the youths go to catch it, Simkin sub-
stitutes half a bushel of coarse meal for their fine flour. In revenge Alan
seduces the miller s daughter while John, by a subterfuge, gets the
miller's wife in his bed. Just before dawn a general mix-up ensues. It
ends in a brawl: the miller is beaten; the young students recover their
flour and, in addition, a cake made of stolen meal. Thus with this tale,
jeers the Reeve, I have paid off the Miller. Chaucer's keen ear for
repartee and the nuances of language is revealed in the casual conversa-
tions; the Cambridge youths, for example, speak with a definite
northern accent — the first use in English of dialect for comic effect.

It is Roger the Cook's turn to tell the next narrative and, since the
last two pilgrims have told stories at each other's expense, Roger warns
that his story will be at the Host's expense, for the Cook's story will be
about an innkeeper. "The Cook's Tale" concerns a jolly victualer's
apprentice appropriately named Perkin Reveller, who is given to danc-
ing, dicing, and wenching. The story, which promises to be as bawdy
as its predecessors, suddenly stops as the Host observes that time is
getting on.

From this point on the tales proceed in a less logical manner. Some
are fragmentary narratives, some are apparently first drafts. It is obvious
that Chaucer never placed most of them in anything like a final form;
it is even doubtful that, after the first four tales, Chaucer arranged them
at all — a later hand seems to have put them together. Many show
curious inconsistencies. For example, the Man of Law, who follows the
Cook, draws up a kind of catalogue of Chaucer's poems and declares
that, since Chaucer is an efficient if rather crude versifier, the lawyer
will leave rhyme to the poet and speak in plain prose. However, in
spite of this explicit announcement, the Man of Law tells his story in
the seven-line strictly rhymed verse form, the "Chaucerian stanza." It
is a dull story, a confused sermon on resignation. Melodrama is
combined with unctuousness to glorify the much-wronged but finally
rewarded (and significantly named) Constance — a long treatment of a
theme which Shakespeare varied in All's Well That Ends Well.

"The Shipman's Tale/' which follows the Man of Law's, is another
which Chaucer left in an ambiguous state. A reference to women as
"we" indicates that it was originally meant to be told by a feminine
narrator, probably the Wife of Bath, and the jest of a merchant
tricked by his wife comes inappropriately from the mouth of the burly

LIVES OF THE POETS

Shipman. His narration is immediately succeeded by that of the
Prioress, who, as might be expected, tells a story of a completely oppo-
site nature. This is the tale of a boy who, praising the Holy Virgin,
sang "O Alma Rcdemptoris" on his way to and from school and who,
passing through the Ghetto, is murdered by Jews who consider it an
affront. Even after the boy's death the song issues from the cut throat
until the abbot touches the child's tongue and releases the soul. The
incident, later proved to be completely false, was said to have had its
origin in 125:5 — the apocryphal story and its refutation are preserved
in the Lincoln cathedral — and a ballad concerning little St. Hugh of
Lincoln was already in existence in Chaucer's time. Chaucer, again
resorting to the placid seven-line iambic stanza, gave it the clear color
and naive purity of a primitive stained-glass window. Line for line
"The Prioress' Tale'* is, in spite of its violent anti-Semitism, a limpid
and pathetic poem.

Chaucer himself is the next speaker. lie elects to contribute 'The
Tale of Sir Topaz/' an absurd parody in the jogtrot meter of a medieval
ballad. It is a windy, rhetorical burlesque of the type of romance
popular in his day, but it is so interminable (and, incidentally, so
critical of contemporary taste) that the Host interrupts him, crying
out, "No more of this, for Goddes digmtce!" When Chaucer insists on
continuing, the Host agrees on condition that he discard his intolerable
nonsense and dispense with the doggerel rhymes which make the ears
ache. Relate something in prose, he commands, preferably something
which is mirthful or contains a moral* "Gladly," says Chaucer, adding
that he knows a story which contains more doctrine than the pilgrims
ever heard* Whereupon he proceeds to tell "The Tale of Melibeus,"
Chaucer may be suspected of having fun with the Host by giving him
more than he bargained for; for Chaucer proceeds to pile up doctrine,
dialectic, and pedantic instruction to the extent of more than a thousand
lines of heavy-handed prose. The story, such as it is, is an adaptation of
a French version of the Latin Liber Consolatlmm ct Concilis* but
Chaucer changes the tale into a debate concerning man's right to take
revenge upon his enemies. He turns the half-gory, half sanctimonious
legend into a parade of homilies, cites dozens of churchly authorities,
and quotes well over a hundred more or less relevant proverbs*

It is not known whether this argumentative disquisition pleases the
company, for the Host contrasts the figure of Melibcus' wife, Pru-
dence, with his own importunate wife. He bewails being married to
a termagant who nags her husband because he refuses to avenge every

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

fancied slight upon her dignity. Suddenly realizing he may be boring
the company, he drops the subject and calls upon the Monk, who
volunteers to raise the tone of the conversation with a series of uplifting
tragedies. Changing pace by changing the meter, Chaucer has the
Monk present his list of famous victims of misfortune. In a three-
rhymed, eight-line stanza (a variation of ottava rima) the Monk out-
lines a great number of those brought down by the mutability of life,
including such Scriptural figures as Lucifer, Adam, Samson, Nebu-
chadnezzar, Holofernes, Belshazzar; such Greek and Roman heroes as
Caesar, Nero, and Alexander; historical and mythological personages
— Hercules, Croesus, Zenobia, Ugolino, Bernabo Visconti. . . . The
roster, based on Boccaccio's De Castribus Virorum Illustrium, threatens
to go on forever. After some seven hundred lines, the Monk is still
going strong when he is stopped by the Knight; the Host adds that only
the clinking of the bridle bells kept him awake. Not wishing to give
offense to the Church (his language having been a little rough), the
Host looks for another churchly person and, seeing a priest beside a
nun, asks him to spin a yarn which "may our hertes glad/' Whereupon
Chaucer gives the world the gay, gallant, and completely captivating
'The Nun's Priest's Tale."

"The Nun's Priest's Tale" is a half-humorous, half-didactic drama
of talking animals, one of the loveliest and liveliest of all beast fables.
Told in mock-heroic style, it is the story of the Cock and the Fox, a
variant of Aesop's sly Raven and the gullible Fox. The hero is Chanti-
cleer (brought to life and Gallicized almost six hundred years later in
Rostand's romanticized Chantecler^ and the heroine is his favorite wife,
Pertelote. The villain is, of course, the treacherous fox and, although
the plot centers about the cock's clever escape from his hungry captor,
there is room for satirical asides and scenes of marital disputes common
to all husbands and wives. Although Chaucer tells of robbery and
murder in increasingly exciting rhythms, the tale remains a comedy.
Perhaps the most anthologized of all the tales, the adroit mixture of
light merriment and easy moralizing is Chaucer at his happiest.

After praising the Nun's Priest for his virility as well as his story,
the Host turns to the Physician, who regales the company with a
Roman legend handed down by Livy. It is the classic tragedy of the
beautiful Virginia, claimed as a slave by the lecherous and corrupt Lord
Appius. Before Appius can possess her, Virginia is killed by her father,
who, after being condemned to die, is saved by an uprising of the out-
raged citizenry. In spite of its heroic theme, Chaucer does not seem

LIVES OF THE POETS

deeply interested; he lets the Physician make a routine condensation of
the legend and has the Host turn to the Pardoner for a funny but not a
ribald story.

The Pardoner refuses to follow the Host's suggestion. Instead of
being laughable, his tale is bitterly macabre. First of all, the narrator
takes grim pleasure in self-exposure as well as in indignant but
obviously relished descriptions of sensual orgies. His prologue is a
detailed account of shady transactions, charlatanries, sham relics, and
general unscrupulousness. It is the boasting of a clever quack who
expects everyone to applaud his shameful cleverness. The tale itself is
a symbolic horror story popular in the Orient and familiar to west-
erners by way of an Italian collection entitled One Hundred Antique
Tales. Three tavern brawlers decide to avenge their friend's death by
killing the one who committed the act, a thief who goes by the name
of Death. An old man informs them that he has seen Death sitting
under a nearby tree. Under the tree the plotters discover a heap of gold
and, although the three agree to share the treasure, each plans to cheat
his confederate. One of the men is sent to the village to procure food
and drink; while he is gone the other two decide to murder him when
he returns. The third, equally reluctant to share the windfall with his
partners, puts poison in their wine. After he is disposed of, the re-
maining two drink to their good fortune, and die. Thus the old man's
prediction is fulfilled. All three have actually found Death beneath
the tree. Less elevated in style than most of the other tales and severely
uncompromising in the telling, 'The Pardoner's Talc" is a masterpiece
of cumulative tension.

The next tale is the first of the so-called "marriage group," but the
story is not nearly as enlivening as its amazing Prologue. This is a long
discourse delivered by the irrepressible Wife of Bath, and her introduc-
tion, a remarkable monologue on virginity and matrimony, is almost a
thousand lines in length. In itself, the subject matter is diverting —
chiefly a set of recipes guaranteed to keep any husband in a state of
total subjection — but the sheer animal vitality is what has made many
commentators compare the Wife of Bath to Falstaff. Chaucer had lav-
ished a wealth of illuminating detail on the fun-loving Wife and her
five husbands in his General Prologue, but it is not until the Prologue
to her own story that she speaks for her outrageous self with unsur-
passed joy of life and unforgettable vigor of language. The Wife is
exuberant, gossipy, and gamesome, sleek with self-confidence, stuffed

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

with proverbs handily turned, gloriously intimate with the great uni-
verse and the smallest creature in it.

After her rollicking and completely candid introductory monologue,
the story itself is an anticlimax. Instead of being bold and bawdy, as
might have been expected, it is not even jovial. On the contrary, it is a
highly idealistic example of what relations between husband and wife
should be. A knight of King Arthur's court is to lose his life unless he
correctly answers the question "What thing is it that women most de-
sire?" After an almost hopeless search, he marries an ugly old woman
who knows the secret. She tells him that, of all things, women like
best to have their own way. In turn, she asks him whether he would
prefer her old, ugly, and loyal or young, pretty, and faithless. Whereat
the knight tactfully replies that whatever pleases her will please him.
She smiles and, having won the victory, throws off her disguise and
reveals herself as not only young but beautiful and ardent.

The next speaker, the Friar, suggests that such intimate and delicate
queries should be left to debating societies and authorized preachers.
He warns that his tale will show up the Summoner as a paid informer
and, when the Host demurs, the Summoner urges that the Friar should
say what he likes — and adds that he will be paid back double. "The
Friar's Tale" is a vicious showing-up of Summoners as peddlers, pan-
ders, and rascally cheats. The plot — taken from the Latin Promptu-
arium Exemplorum — is about a wily summoner who tries to induce
the devil (in the guise of a yeoman) to become his partner and who,
after a couple of grotesque adventures, becomes, instead, the devil's
prey.

In the next story, the real Summoner retaliates by beginning with a
scatological joke about friars and proceeds to make obscene fun of
greedy mendicants. It is an inconceivably vulgar tale; the point of it
is a planned, prodigious breaking of wind which becomes the subject
of grotesque dialectics.

"The Clerk's Tale," which follows, seems to be an atonement for the
Summoner's dirty anecdote. The Clerk devotes himself to a glorification
of Griselda, model of perfect patience. Chaucer got the plot from the
tenth tale told on the tenth day in Boccaccio's Decameron. (Petrarch,
who disliked most of the Decameron, liked this tale of long suffering so
much that he translated it from Italian into Latin, the language read by
the cultivated majority.) The heroine, Griselda, is tried in every pos-
sible manner. Her husband takes away her two children and tells her

LIVES OF THE POETS

they have been murdered. He sends Griselda home, divorces her, and,
years later, informs her that he is going to marry a much younger
woman. Griselda is forced to wait on the prospective bride. There is no
limit to the ruthlessness, but Griselda bears it all with saintly fortitude.
Her reward comes when her husband tells her it was just «i test. He
assures her that the children are not only alive but at hand, that his
"bride" is her daughter, and that Griselda herself will remain through
time as the exemplary wife, a symbol of forbearance and Christian
humility.

Displaying a less attractive side of marriage, the Merchant tells a
story about an excessively impatient and thoroughly deceitful young
wife, appropriately named May, married to January, a withered but
still lecherous old man. It is a question which is the more loathsome:
the senile satyr licking his lips over "The Song of Songs" as an aphro-
disiac, or the married harlot making a noble speech about her honor
and, at the same time, lewdly conspiring with her lover so that the old
man, who has grown blind, may be heartlessly cuckolded. Seldom has
there been so cynical and disgusting an exhibit of an unwholesome pair
united in unholy matrimony.

'The Squire's Tale" is a welcome relief to all Called upon to say
something about love, the Squire obliges with a romantic fairy tale as
full of marvels as anything in The Arabian Nights, This story of King
Cambuscan and his lovely daughter, Canace, promises a great deal of
entertainment — Milton refers to it in "II Pcnscroso" — but it grows
prolix and repetitious. Chaucer tired of it; it breaks off just after the
Squire begins the third part of the tale.

Either because of the character of the story or because the teller
spared the company by stopping it, the Squire is praised, complimented
on his wit and gentle breeding, and the Host turns to the Franklin.
The Franklin is a freeholder, a member of the gentility though not o£
the nobility. He chooses to vary another tale from Boccaccio's De-
cameron by placing it in Brittany. Originally a Hindu romance, it is a
noble and uplifting story. Dorigan is deeply in love with her husband,
Arveragus, but she is also greatly loved by the handsome and popular
Aurelius. Aurelius pleads so fervently for her favor that at last she
promises to yield to him when he achieves the impossible, which is to
remove the last stone from the rocky coast of Brittany. With the help
of a magician the rocks are made to disappear and Dorigan is in despair-
Axveragus, to whom she has told everything, insists that she must keep
her plighted word* But when the honorable Aurelius sees her weeping,

GEOFFREY CHAUCER.

he feels so great a surge of pity that he refuses to take advantage of the
bargain and with great dignity sends her back to her husband. . . . The
Franklin underscores the integrity as well as the import of the tale by
asking the company, "Who was the nobler man?" There is no reply, and
the Host designates the next storyteller, the Second Nun.

In no hurry to begin, the Second Nun prefaces her story with a
little homily on idleness, an invocation to the Virgin Mary, and a
series of erudite interpretations of the name Cecilia. All of these, as
well as the tale which follows, are in "rhyme royal/' a stanza form
which Chaucer seems to have reserved for his moral tales, such as the
Clerk's narration of the patient Griselda and the Man of Law's glori-
fication of the wronged Constance. The Second Nun finally tells about
the Christianized Cecilia, descended from Roman nobles, and her hus-
band, Valerian, both of whom have visions, are visited by an angel,
and suffer martyrdom. Valerian succumbs first, but Cecilia endures
"a bath of flammes red/' survives "three strokes in the nekke," and
continues to preach for three days before she dies and is buried by
St. Urban. In spite of its unequivocal piety, the tale is one of Chaucer's
least accomplished. It seems to have been written at an earlier period
than the rest of the tales and, compared to the others, is pedestrian and
rather perfunctory, the very opposite of the next tale, which is told by
the Canon's Yeoman.

The Canon and his servitor, the Yeoman, had joined the party
shortly after the tale of St. Cecilia had come to an end, and the Yeo-
man quickly assures the pilgrims that his lord is no mere cleric but a
strange being equipped with subtle powers, a kind of "scientific" ma-
gician— in short, an alchemist. When the Canon suspects that his
secrets may be revealed, he withdraws or, as Chaucer says more dra-
matically, he "fledde away for verray sorwe and shame.'* Free now
to speak, the Yeoman launches into a bitter complaint against the
Canon, charges him with being a cheat as well as a charlatan, lists
the tricks of the trade, including the transmutation of metals and,
betraying one fraud after another, exposes not only the Canon but
himself. This vindictive episode is one of Chaucer's most unpleasant
disclosures, but it is also one of his greatest triumphs of character
portrayal.

The pilgrimage threatens to get out of hand. The Host, seeing that
the Cook is drunk, tries Jo sober him up by calling for a story. But
the Cook is too far gone; he reels and falls off his horse. The Man-
ciple, a buyer of food who also acts as steward, comforts the Cook

LIVES OF THE POETS

with some of his own wine, and takes over. The Manciple treats the
company to a mythological as well as a moral fable. Using a segment
of Ovid's Metamorphoses, he tells the story of the original crow which
was once pure white and had been taught to speak by Phoebus, One
evening when Phoebus returned home, the crow cried "Cuckoo!
Cuckoo!" and told his master that his wife had cuckolded him that
very afternoon. Outraged, Phoebus slew his wife but, immediately
after, was so furious with himself that he broke his bow and arrows
as well as his harp. Whereupon he turned against the crow, condemned
him and all his issue to wear nothing but black, and took away not
only his gift of speech but his ability to sing. Today all crows, funere-
ally black, can do nothing but croak their ominous tidings. And this,
concludes the Manciple, presumably quoting Solomon, teaches us to'
refrain from harmful babbling: "a jangler is to God abominable/'

Whereso thou come, amonges hyc or lowe;
Kepe wel thy tonge, and think upon the crowc.

The sun is sinking and the Host suggests that the Parson should
have the last word. While the Parson assents, he warns the company
that they will get a tale of reverence rather than a romance, that he
cannot abide poems crammed with alliteration — Chaucer makes fun
of the fashion by calling it "rum, ram, ruf" — and that he likes rhyme
little better. Therefore, he adds, he will "telle a mcry tale in prose."
The tale is anything but merry— it is, in fact, no talc at all— but it
is undeniably in prose. Adapted in part from a French religious manual,
it is an interminable and almost intolerable preachment on the seven
deadly sins, the need for repentance, and the necessary preparation for
confession.

The mood of penitence leads into a concluding "Retractation," which
has been the subject of a long and inconclusive controversy. In this
recantation, Chaucer (if he really wrote it) asks pardon for everything
in his work which may be irreligious, including not only his rough
irreverences but also the courtly romances. Among his sins Chaucer
lists The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowfe, The House
of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, Troilus and Criseyde, the
pages in The Canterbury Tales which tend toward shameful thoughts,
his love songs, and other 'lewd" poems* The only works for which
Chaucer does not apologize and for which he offers thanks are his
translation of Boethius' Consolations and a few homilies.

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

Some commentators believe that Chaucer, obsessed like most of his
generation with a sense of sin, wrote the retraction as a sincere pen-
ance which was also an act of contrition. Others contend that the
poet was making a routine gesture, a specious plea for mercy for hav-
ing committed translations and writings that "concern worldly matters"
— in short, for having been a poet — and that it was almost as pre-
scribed a formula as the wording of a last will and testament. There
are also those who maintain that the entire document is a spurious
appendage, a forgery added at a later time to give the reader the pleas-
ure of enjoying Chaucer's prodigality and also the sanctimonious after-
satisfaction of finding it reprehensible. "As for these last words/' wrote
A. W. Ward in the English Men of Letters series, "it would be un-
bearable to accept them as genuine. . . . One prefers to believe that
the poet remained himself to the last. He had written much which a
dying man might regret; but it would be sad to have to think that,
^because of humility/ he bore false witness against an immortal part
of himself."

Chaucer exulted in the vast variety of man's appetites and accom-
plishments. Even if the "retraction" was actually written by Chaucer, it
is obvious that he enjoyed relating the most questionable as well as
the most uplifting tales, that he relished the direct thrust of every
brutal word as much as the music of every delicately phrased sentence
and ennobling thought. The taste of the times was for unbridled free-
dom of expression; the broad innuendoes and outright indecencies won
chuckles not only from the bawdy Miller but from the modest Prioress.

Chaucer may not have been exactly like any of the pilgrims — not
even identical with the deprecating self-portraits he occasionally drew
— but he was enough like all of them to share their lives, understand
their wistful or wild fancies, and enjoy telling their stories with un-
flagging gusto. His was a world of secret fear and scurrilous bravado, a
clashing hurly-burly world, but Chaucer cherished every man and
woman in it

Chaucer's love of people was certainly reciprocated. People listened
raptly to everything he composed, awaiting each new work with eager-
ness. Knowing that poetry was primarily an oral art, Chaucer read his
poems in private houses, taverns, and courtyards, as well as at the court
itself. Although much of his verse is musical in the most memorable
way, showing the skill of a master-craftsman, most of it is poetry that
talks rather than poetry that sings. The Canterbury Tales are in them-
selves an extended conversation, sometimes bantering, sometimes bitter.

LIVES OF THE POETS

Chaucer loved lusty anecdotes, earthy proverbs and coarse jokes; he was
never squeamish about grossness or silent concerning the daily demands
of nature. Never before, and rarely since, has poetry talked with such
candor and conviction.

Like Brueghel, Chaucer crowded his canvas with the swarming pa-
geant of man. The pattern emerges through a conflict and harmony of
figures which includes the magnificent and the absurd, the grotesque
and the gorgeous. Through the mouths of these people are heard not
only contemporary science, philosophy, ethics, art, morals, and manners,
but the inexhaustible wonders of existence anywhere, any time.

Although Chaucer's artistry accomplished innovations in subject mat-
ter and language, his was not a revolutionary mind. He was a social
thinker, not a social reformer. Neither a political radical nor a religious
dissident, he accepted the status quo without protest except in rare
instances when it conflicted with his ideals. A true conservative, he was
also a true believer; he was, in fact, so zealous that his few bitter writ-
ings were directed against those who affronted and abused the dignity
of the Church, especially when they happened to be churchmen. Alx>ve
everything else, Chaucer worshiped honesty, declaring his devotion to
truth with fierce candor, stubborn lack of equivocation, and ihe poet's
pure eloquence.

In the seventeenth century John Dryden wrote one of the earliest ap-
praisals of Chaucer. "A perpetual fountain of good sense" surcharged
with "God's plenty/' wrote Dryden. "lie must have been a man of a
most wonderful comprehensive nature because, as it has been truly said
of him, he has taken into the compass of his Canterbury Tales the vari-
ous manners and humors of the whole English nation in his age/'

Now, more than half a millennium after Chaucer's death, the estimate,
generous though it is, seems an understatement. Thv Canterbury Tales
is unquestionably Chaucer's masterpiece; in its totality, it encompasses
not only "the English nation in his age" but all humanity through the
ages.

Ill

The Morning Stars

ArER CHAUCER the character of English literature underwent a
complete change. Audiences grew larger as they responded to
a wider range in subject matter, a simpler vocabulary, and an
increasing concern with workaday people. The fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries prepared the way for the great Renaissance in England. Uni-
versities rose and were enlarged; villages turned into towns; court and
country were brought closer to each other; and, as the old edged Anglo-
Saxon sentences were rounded with French elegance, a new and flexible
language began to shape itself. Chaucer's Southeast Midland dialect,
approved and popularized by Londoners, developed into a standard
speech, the precursor of modern English, a speech natural not only to
the ordinary fourteenth-century citizen but, two hundred years later,
to Shakespeare.

The changes in style were not immediately recognizable, nor were
they altogether accepted. Various writers contemporary with Chaucer
combined the new techniques and the old traditions; others adhered to
the old dialects. In the south of England a Dorset poet, usually identified
as Nicholas of Guildford, composed The Owl and the Nightingale, a
debate-poem of almost two thousand lines written in country speech. In
it the owl defends the severe and traditional and, by inference, the old
didactic verse, while the nightingale speaks up for whatever is fresh

LIVES OF THE POETS

and sprightly and, by indirection, the new romantic poetry. In the west
the alliterative romance was revived, or maintained most notably by
William Langland and the anonymous author known as the Pearl Poet.

WILLIAM

Although Langland did not actually sign his major poem, The Vision
of Piers Plowman, he called attention to his name by means of a pun:
"I have lived lang [or long] in the land: Lang Witt men call me," It is
supposed that he was born about 1330 near Malvern and was educated
in the nearby monastery, after which he became a priest of one of the
minor orders, attended Oxford, then settled in London, where he made
a precarious living by singing vespers and matins for the departed, "I
sing for the souls of those who help me and those who provide me with
food and make me welcome in their houses once a month or so, some-
times with him, sometimes with her. I beg in this way, since I have no
purse for food, no bottle for drink except my own belly/' Langland's
long acquaintance with poverty equipped him to write The Vision of
Piers Plowman, which is filled with compassion for the poor and in-
dignation for their oppressors. A social critic, Langland was not only a
reporter but a reformer; his pity for the exploited is exceeded only by his
hatred of the parasites: lawyers who care nothing for justice, clerics who
fatten on the gullible, officials corrupted by wealth*

The first and shortest version of the poem dates from about 1360; it
was altered and enlarged to more than seven thousand lines fifteen years
later, and revised again toward the end of the fourteenth century* Some
scholars believe the various texts represent the labors of three to five
men; others maintain that all the versions are the work of one author.
In any case, The Vision became so popular that it has come down to us
from the fifteenth century in as many as fifty-two surviving manuscripts.

The Vision of Piers Plowman uses the old dream device and revives
the long alliterative line popular before Chaucer* In modern English
the introductory lines would read as follows:

In the season of summer when the sun was softest,
I clad me in clothing akin to a shepherd;

WILLIAM LANGLAND

In hermit-like habit, not holy in living,

I went to the wide world to watch and to wonder.

But on a May morning on a hillside in Malvern

I met with a marvel, a fairy-tale magic.

Weary of wandering, I wanted to rest

By the side of a brook where the bank was the broadest;

And lo, as I lay and looked down at the water,

It sounded so sweetly I sank into slumber.

— Modern version "by L.U.

What follows is a unique creation, a starding cross between an alle-
gory and a protesting piece of realism. After a placid opening the
dreamer plunges us into his first vision: "a fair field full of folk . . .
with all manner of men, the mean and the wealthy." Here are the
workers and the wastrels: tailors, tinkers, and traitors, ditchers and
delvers, pilgrims, priests, minstrels, masons, miners, barons and beggars,
butchers, bakers, and scandal-makers — a rolling panorama of every
phase of English life in the fourteenth century. Gradually the picture
of a country merges into a symbolic panorama of the world. There are
eleven revelations which fall into four complicated but separable divi-
sions. The first vision of Piers is that of the poet as layman; it concerns
the ordinary man and the state in which he lives. In the second the
dreamer becomes the seeker; hoping to discover something beyond the
sphere of mundane affairs, he sets out to find Do Well, the moral life.
In the third vision the poet-plowman is transformed into a priest, a phi-
losopher who is an active combatant for Do Better, the life of contem-
plation and religious ardor. The fourth vision, in which Piers assumes
a Christlike guise, is devoted to a final unity, a spiritual affirmation, the
life of eternal truth, the dream of Do Best.

Even in a modern translation, the poem bristles with complexities
and countless digressions — the shriving of the Seven Deadly Sins, a set
of instructions to the various classes of society, the Harrowing of Hell
are some of them. Although the parts are cumbersome and the author
is compulsively verbose, the over-all effect is one of driving power, a
relentless search for truth. Compared to Chaucer, Langland is chaotic
as a storyteller and confusing as a stylist; where Chaucer is mellifluous
and urbane, Langland is harsh and implacable. Chaucer wrote to entice
his audiences with wit and grace; he charmed them with his bonhomie
and an avoidance of the terrible events which were happening about

LIVES OF THE POETS

them. Langland did not write to reassure his readers but to rouse them.
In the background of The Vision are the horrors of the Black Death,
the inglorious Hundred Years' War that weakened all Europe, the
greeds and schisms which brought about the ominous Peasants' Revolt
under Wat Tyler, and the collapse of the feudal system. With these
catastrophes in mind, it is no wonder that Langland's readers were
sympathetic to lines that were tense with anger, to excoriations of eco-
nomic injustice, probing and pitiless in their exposure of corruption, and
exalted in their contemplation of the world of the spirit.

THE PEARL POET

The anonymous author already cited as the Pearl Poet seems to have
been responsible for a manuscript containing four remarkable poems.
There are several reasons for believing that one poet rather than four,
as sometimes claimed, composed Pearl, Patience, Purity, and Sir Genvain
and the Green Knight. All four are written in a peculiar West Midland
dialect; all have unifying images and the same tricks of style; all have
interrelated references, particularly to pearls. Moreover, certain features
of the three first mentioned poems appear in the fourth. Purity concerns
man's predilection to sin. As examples of God's way with sinners the
author selects stories from the Old Testament: the Deluge, Sodom and
Gomorrah, the feast of Belshazzar, the fall of Nebuchadnezzar. Patience,
in a somewhat lighter key, illustrates its theme by retelling the tale of
Jonah, Both poems are delicately designed and dexterously accomplished,
but they are minor works compared to Pearl and Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight,

Commentators have been puzzled by the central ambiguity of Pearl.
They cannot determine whether the work is an elegy or an allegory, an
extended dirge for a daughter who died at the age of two or an allegory
of one who, after two devotional years, had lost faith and finds peace in
the hope of heaven. The pearl is used not only as a mystical decoration
throughout the poem but is personified as Marguerite, which means not
only a girl, a flower, and a pearl, but also a symbol of perfect holiness*
Asserting in Glee-Wood that Catholic poetry is a many-dimensional
thing, Margaret Williams notes that Pearl has been claimed as "a poem

SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT

of Our Lady, a poem of the Blessed Sacrament, a poem on grace and
free will. It is all of these, and it is also a personal poem. It is the poem
of a man, and a lyric Everyman. For whether the poet is a bereaved
father or a cloistered mystic, the path that he takes is the same. It is the
path from grief to peace, from earth to heaven, along which Everyman
is stumbling/' There is, however, no evidence of stumbling in the poem
itself. Far from being awkward, it is mellifluous in progress and exquisite
in pitch. Built on an intricately rhymed twelve-line stanza with an
interlinking refrain, it is a composition of matched effects and un-
matched brilliance.

SIR GAWAIN:

AMD THE GREEK KMIGHT

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an equally brilliant tour de force.
It consists of long four-stress alliterative stanzas interrupted by short
(five-line) rhymed verses. The novel result is an alternation of slowly
accumulating narrative and brisk lyrics, combining to keep the reader
in a continual state of suspense. Suspense is the very element of Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight, for it is a tale of adventure, a code of
conduct, and a mystery story fused into a single work of great artistry.
It is also a typically English masterpiece. Beowulf was the legendary
prototype of the warring Scandinavians; Lancelot was the knightly ideal
of the French romantic writers; Parsifal was the pure and guileless
Teutonic hero; but Gawain was the favorite of the English romancers.

The time of the poem is that of King Arthur, to whose court there
comes an unknown knigjit "all garbed in green/' The stranger dares any
knight to strike off his head, adding that, after a year and a day, the
knight must offer his own head for a similar blow. Upholding the honor
of Arthur's Round Table, Sir Gawain accepts the challenge and wields
his ax. Picking up his severed head, the Green Knight reminds Gawain
of his promise and rides off. A year later Gawain bids farewell to
Arthur's court and goes forth to perform his "anxious deed/' After much
travail, including battles with dragons, encounters with lurking trolls,
wild bulls, bears and boars, as well as ogres that pursue him over preci-

LIVES OF THE POETS

pices, he comes to a magnificently appointed castle. There he is made
welcome by the lord, his lovely wife, and an old woman. A pact is made
between the men: whatever his host brings down in the forest is
Gawain's, and whatever Gawain is offered at the castle is to be given
back to the lord. While his host goes hunting, Gawain is tempted by
the wife. Courteously resisting her amorous advances, he accepts a single
kiss which he returns to his host when the latter offers him the trophy
of the hunt. On the second day, the lady is more importunate; but
Gawain takes only two kisses, which, when presented with a boar's head,
he gives to the husband. On the third day, the wife almost succeeds in
seducing Gawain but, though he evades her advances, he cannot help
accepting three soft kisses and a gold-green belt, which wards off harm
and protects the man who wears it. In the evening Gawain greets the
lord with three kisses but is silent about the belt. The time comes for
the original bargain to be fulfilled, and Gawain, reluctantly leaving the
castle, goes to the Green Chapel. There, summoned by his unseen ad-
versary, he bows his head. But he is mocked by two blows that do not
fall, and though the third draws blood, it barely nicks his flesh. Where-
upon the Green Knight laughingly reveals his identity, He is the lord
of the castle who tested Gawain's courage while his wife put Gawain's
honor to the proof. Moreover, the knight invites him to return to
the castle, make merry with the ladies of the court, and learn magic
from the old woman, actually the enchantress Morgan le Fay, who
planned the whole adventure. But Gawain, a knight without fear and
without reproach, is ashamed that he weakened when he accepted
the belt to save his life. He declines the invitation and returns to King
Arthur's Court.

Although the poem is full of savage incidents and promises gory
violence, the tone is quiet, the mood is intimate, and the manner
throughout is one of the greatest gentility. It is, however, never cloying;
the action is swift-footed, and the details of the attempted seduction as
well as the hunting scenes are painted with small but vividly graphic
strokes. The virtues of knighthood are exemplified without becoming
pompous or pedantic; Gawain's chastity does not detract from his mas-
culinity and his bravery never descends to bravado. If the author of
Sir Gctwain and the Green Knight is not as humanly realistic as Chaucer
or as righteously rousing as Langland, he is die essential teller of tales;
his very detachment as a narrator enables him to turn an incredible
phantasmagoria into one of the most delightful of Arthurian romances*

GOWER, HOCCLEVE, AND LYDGATE

GOWER, HOCCLEVE,
AMD LYDGATE

Chaucer was the first English poet to attract emulators. Glad to admit
that they were following or "counterfeiting" the style of their master,
such men as Gower, Hoccleve, Lydgate, and the group known as the
Scottish Chaucerians (William Dunbar, Robert Henryson, and King
James I) showed the indubitable and often crippling influence of their
model.

Contemporaneous with Chaucer and overshadowed by him, John
Gower (c. 1330-1408) wrote voluminously in three languages: Latin,
Norman-French, and finally, yielding to the lure of the vernacular, Mid-
dle English. Middle English was the vehicle for his best-known work,
Confessio Amantis, a massive collection of stories in verse. Writing, it
is said, at the command of Richard II, who suggested Love as the gen-
eral theme, "moral Gower" (as Chaucer teasingly called him) borrowed,
translated, and infrequently transformed his subjects. Among them is
the tale of Pericles, appropriated by Shakespeare, who acknowledged the
debt by bringing Gower himself on the stage as Chorus. The narratives,
filling eight books of thirty-four thousand lines, are interesting but,
compared to the Canterbury Tales, far from enlivening; the construction
is wooden and the characters are not only bloodless but stuffed with
sawdust and rhetoric. The first version of Confessio Amantis includes a
charming tribute to Chaucer's pre-Canterbury courtly preoccupations.
In it, Venus speaks of Chaucer as "mi disciple and mi poete" and urges
him to complete his career with a crowning "testament of love" — an
exhortation Chaucer declined to heed.

Historian and autobiographer, Thomas Hoccleve (c. 1370-1450) be-
came a poet because of his overweening admiration for Chaucer, his
"maister deere and father reverent." Chaucer apparently tried to teach
or at least guide his disciple — "but I was dull, and learned lite or
naught." Hoccleve wrote chiefly about himself as a man-about-town,
usually in love and almost always in debt; but he is cited by literary
historians for something he did not write. It is because of Hoccleve that

LIVES OF THE POETS

we have the only authentic portrait of Chaucer. Among the embellish-
ments for a translation of Aegidius' Regiment of Princes, Hoccleve had
an artist make a miniature of his dear master and confirmed the linea-
ments in an explanatory couplet:

To putte other men in remembrance

Of his persone, I have here his lylcncssc.

John Lydgate (c. 1370-1449), a Benedictine monk of Saint Edmund's
Bury, is one of the casualties of literature. The Story of Thebes, The
Court of Venus, Troy Book, The Temple of Glass, and The Complaint
of the Black Knight were once extremely popular — the last was, for
many years, attributed to Chaucer — but of Lydgate's almost two hun-
dred thousand lines nothing has survived. If critics refer to him at all it
is with a mixture of condescension for his facility and derision for his
failures. Lydgate was well aware of his lack of skill. 1 le recognized how
far he fell short of Chaucer's happy style; he spoke of his preceptor's
gently corrective admonition: "Hym liste not pinchc nor gruche at every
blot/' If Lydgate is too fluent and too fulsome — and he is unquestion-
ably both — he is important for the smooth narrative manner which held
a multitude of readers for almost a century and showed another facet
of Chaucer's influence.

DUMBAR, HENRYSOM, JAMES I

Among the Scottish Chaucerians, William Dunbar (c, 1460-1520)
was the most accomplished. Like Chaucer, Dunbar was a civil servant;
he acted as the king's emissary, received a pension and, as a writer, en-
livened classical subjects with common speech.

Dunbar's work discloses two almost opposed manners. "The Goldyn
Targe" uses the old courtly form to describe a model garden in the
tradition of 'The Romance of the Rose"; 'The Thrissill and the Rois"
relies on the even older dream device for its allegorical machinery;
'The Merle and the Nychtingall" is an elaborately moralizing dialogue
with formal alternating refrains. But 'The Tretis of Tua Mariit Women
and the Wedo" ('The Treatise of Two Married Women and the

DUNBAR, HENHYSON, JAMES I

Widow"), "Dance in the Queen's Chalmer," and 'To the Merchantis
of Edinburgh" present a violent contrast which comes with an almost
physical shock after the high-flown and artificial elegance known as
''aureate" diction. Adapting Chaucerian material to the harsher climate
of his own country, Dunbar attempted to surpass his model in earthiness.
However, where Chaucer is gay and lusty, Dunbar is hard and bitter.
The sardonic colloquy among the two married women and the widow
has no parallel for grossness; the participants, getting progressively
drunker, descend to the lowest level of bawdiness. A three-part com-
plaint about man's lack of virility, it recalls Chaucer's outspoken Wife
of Bath, without any of her natural warmth and good humor.

For one whose vocabulary could be so unreservedly coarse, Dunbar
was a surprisingly dulcet lyricist "To Abcrdein" and "To the City of
London" are a matched pair of beauties, the former with the final alliter-
ative line of each verse, "Be blyth and blisfull, burgh of Aberdein,"
complementing the latter's "London, thou art the flour of cities all."
"The Meditation in Winter" is a touching personal document, and
Dunbar's "Nativitic" is more moving than Milton's "Hymn" on the
same theme. Most sonorous (and most famous) is his "Lament for the
Makaris" (Makers, or Poets), a set of lovely elegiac stanzas, each of
which ends in a one-line Latin dirge, like the slow-solemn beating of
a muffled drum.

He takis the campion in the stour,1
The capitane closit in the tour,
The lady in bour full of bcwt<$;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

He sparis no lord for his piscenco;3
Na clerk for his intelligence;
His awfull steak8 may no man flcj
Timor mortis conturbat ma.

He has done petuously devour,
The noble Chaucer, of makaris fl<

1 conflict,
'power,
* stroke.

LIVES OF THE POETS

The Monk of Bury,4 and Gower, all thre;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

Neglected not only because of his obsolete language but because of
the difficulties of his crabbed style, Robert Henryson (c. 1430-1506),
who seems to have taught at a Benedictine grammar school at Dun-
fermline, accomplished more with Chaucerian verse forms than his fel-
lows. Author of three long and thirteen short poems, he is remembered
chiefly because of his Fables, happy human adaptations of Aesop, and
the Testament of Cresseid, an extension of Chaucer's Troilus and Cri-
seyde. Henryson's tragic heroine is a pathetic contrast to Chaucer's light-
o'-love. The Scottish poet takes her past her errant amours to an end
which is not merely bitter but horrifying.

Cast off by Diomede, for whom Cresseid had deserted Troilus,
Cresseid returns to her father. Still a rebellious beauty, she blames Venus
and Cupid for her misfortunes. Out of patience with her blasphemy,
the deities vent their wrath with the greatest punishment a beauty can
suffer — Cresseid wakes to see her once lovely face fouled with leprosy.
She is condemned to the lazar house and must beg for her very existence.
The climax is as grim as it is unforgettable. One day Troilus in all his
glory rides by "with greit tryumph and laudc victorious." Without rec-
ognizing the beggar, he throws the poor creature a few coins, only dimly
aware that her face recalls someone whom he had once known. Nothing
remains to comfort Cresseid* As she dies, another leper snatches the
ring which had been the gift of Troilus* In spite of the language barrier,
the Testament of Cresseid is one of the most moving poems of the pe-
riod, and its originality is proved by Hcnryson's ability to take material
from his acknowledged master and still maintain a distinct individuality*

King James I of Scotland (1394-1437) has been called "the best poet
among kings and the best king among poets*" Although a monarch,
he was not too mighty to admit his indebtedness to his "dear masters,
Chaucer and Gower/' for whom he prayed at the end of his much
celebrated The Kingis Quair ("The King's Book"). It has been sug-
gested that the king was not the sole author of this poem, if he wrote
it at all, and that he was credited with authorship in the same way that
the collection of anonymous love songs became known as the "Song of
Solomon." Nevertheless, although the poem is full of echoes and bor»

* John Lydgate.

MIRACLES AND MORALITIES

rowed accents, the expression is dear, the manner is courtly, and tlie
tone is obviously autobiographical.

MIRACLES AMD MORALITIES

A crude form of poetry went into playwriting. At first the actors in
the medieval plays were priests and monks, and the plays were elabora-
tions of church ceremonies and dramatizations of the holidays, chiefly
Christmas and Easter. Gradually, as the plays broadened in character,
the audiences increased and the presentations moved from the church-
yard to the inn courtyard. Interpretations of Holy Writ became more
and more secular and, although the subject matter continued to be
Biblical, the personnel of the casts changed from priests to everyday-
people. The actors were not only amateurs but workers, and the spec-
tacles, known as Miracle or Mystery plays, were sponsored by various
guilds. It was, for example, appropriate that the play about Noah and
the Flood was put on by mariners and fishermen, The Garden of Eden
by clothmakers and carpenters, The Baptism of Christ by barbers, and
The Last Supper by bakers. Sub-plots were introduced, homely details
were interpolated — Noah's shrewish wife insisted on finishing her spin-
ning and refused to enter the Ark until the water reached her knees and
Noah beat her — all in amiable if ambling rhythms and rhymes that
were gentle to jolly. Traveling companies carried the "drama on wheels"
all over the country, and the plays became real pageants with lavish
properties; thunder-barrel drums, man-made lightning, fire-belching
dragons, angels that literally fell, hell that yawned sulphurously and
heaven that opened spectacularly.

An outgrowth of the Miracle plays, the Morality plays were longer
and less obviously religious. Instead of centering about Biblical legends
performed by amateurs, the Moralities were allegorical and were usually
performed by professionals. Full of favorite medieval abstractions — Vice,
Virtue, Wit, Fellowship — the plots concerned man's desire to escape
death and his hope to be saved from damnation. In Everyman, the most
popular and viable of the Morality plays, Death itself is a central char-
acter. When Death calls for Everyman, his dose companions, Beauty,
Strength, Discretion, Fellowship, and Five-Wits, abandon him and he

LIVES OF THE POETS

goes to his inevitable end accompanied only by Good-Deeds, ... In
common with the various cycles of Miracle plays, the Morality plays
were composed by group enterprise over a period of time and can be
attributed to no particular authors.

POETRY OF THE PEOPLE

Reading was largely confined to a class. Priests and scholars read from
manuscripts; other people were only beginning to read for pleasure.
Gutenberg invented printing from movable type toward the middle of
the fifteenth century. In 1477 Caxton brought out the first volume to be
printed in English; The Canterbury Tales appeared ten years later. The
printing and broad dissemination of books served two great ends; it
standardized the language and brought about an incalculable change in
the development of English literature.

Meanwhile there began to accumulate a poetry that was popular in
the sense that it belonged to the populace. It came from everywhere —
overseas, across the Scottish borders, out of the smallest counties— and
it had many forms. One of its lesser but by no moans insignificant
manifestations became known as Goliardic verse, cither after Bishop
Golias, a legendary patron of renegade priests and wandering scholars,
or from Gula, meaning "Gluttony." A motley group, errant ecclesiastics,
vagrant minstrels, and boisterous students wandered through the coun-
tryside spreading the blasphemous gospel of loose living, happy aban-
don, intemperance and amorality. They celebrated an imaginary Land
of Cockaigne, a roistering Utopia, paradise of idlers and scapegraces,
where nothing was revered except Wine, Women, and Song— wine in-
stead of water, gay girls rather than plaster saints, and, in place of
monotonous hymns, frankly carnal lyrics and lusty drinking songs. Here,
in a translation by George F. Whicher, is an example of the Goliard
poets' carefree singing:

Pen and ink and copy-book.
How funereal they look;
Ovid's songs, how dull with age,
Still more any other's page.
Never mind what's not allowed,

POETRY OF THE PEOPLE

Love is youth's temptation:
Here we go, a glorious crowd,
Hell-bent for vacation,6

The Goliards were the Bohemians of the Middle Ages. Their echoes
are heard all the way from rollicking lyrics, like the medieval Gaudea-
mus igitur, still a favorite with students, and the uncensored Carmina
Burana, modernized in the music of Carl Orff, to the three volumes of
Songs from Vagabondia, which had so great a vogue at the very end of
the nineteenth century.

Less restricted to a single group and far more wide-spreading than the
songs of the Goliards, the ballads of the Middle Ages attracted ever-
growing audiences. Unlike the ancient gleemen or the courtly minne-
singers who celebrated the deeds of knights and warrior-lords, the ballad-
makers spoke the language of the common folk. The ballads' origin was
among the people rather than princes or prelates, and the tales were
sung on street corners, in taverns, market places, and fairs, rather than
in great mansions or kings' castles. The balladeers paraphrased old leg-
ends and gave current events the feeling of antiquity; they recorded the
poor man's history of the world as well as his news of the day.

Refrains ("burden" or choruses) crept into the ballads, and these were
sung as responses by the hearers. Words and music were often accom-
panied by choral dancing, for the ballad was a communal affair; orally
communicated, it united an assembly of listeners. The soloist would
start a ballad, others would join in, swelling the chorus. Improvisations
might be suggested, lines interpolated, variations tentatively added and,
if good, finally established — and what began as the product of an indi-
vidual ballad singer became the expression of a clan, a community, a
country. Varied through repetition, enlarged by contributors with a gift
for improvements, the ballad was the people's property — a form which
had been not only molded for the people but, in a measure, created by
them,

A few of the rhymed story-songs were already old in the fourteenth
century. In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer imitated some of those of an
elder day; in The Vision of Piers Plowman Langland spoke satirically
of the slothful man who knew ballads about Robin Hood and Randolph,
Earl of Chester, but could not repeat the Pater Noster. Many of the ear-
liest English ballads came down from the hills bordering on Scotland —

8 From The Golittrd Poets, translated by George E Whicher and copyright by
him in 1949. Published by New Directions.

LIVES OF THE POETS

the harpers were proverbially said to hail from "the North Countrie" —
and they were adapted to fit different scenes and situations. Thus they
did not carry the stamp of an individual creator; they were, in fact,
continually re-created, amplified, and when, after several centuries, they
were transported to the New World, they were so adapted to local set-
tings that they made themselves at home in the hills of Kentucky and
the Carolinas.

Greatly varied though they are in time, place, and subject matter,
ballads have certain characteristics in common. Since the ballad is essen-
tially a short story — and, moreover, a story to hold casual listeners rather
than leisurely readers — its prime purpose is immediate comprehension.
There is no room for fine nuances; the crowd, unresponsive to subtlety,
reacts to what is sudden, emotional, and swif tly dramatic. There arc no
preliminaries; no time is wasted in description or explanation. There are
no ornate figures; there are almost no digressions. The first line plunges
the hearer into the heart of the situation and things happen imme-
diately. Before the third stanza is completed the characters come to life.
The action is swift and the plot is correspondingly paced Everything
about the ballad is straightforward — simple rhythm, simple rhyme, sim-
ple speech. The measure is that of a jingle, a cross between a hymn tune
and a nursery rhyme. The words are plain; most of them are words of
one syllable. Even more important is the tone, which is strictly imper-
sonal. The ballad-maker is the perfect storyteller in the sense that he is
outside the story; he tells the tale for what it is worth. He does not pass
upon its quality or even its credibility; he does not comment upon the
motives of his characters or the rights and wrongs in which they are in-
volved. He leaves all judgment (if any is indicated) to his listeners.

Such spirited ballads as the traditional "Lord Randal," "Edward,
Edward/' "Sir Patrick Spens/' "Johnnie Armstrong/' "Bonny Barbara
Allen/' "True Thomas/' "The Douglas Tragedy/' "The Mill Dams of
Binnorie/' to name but a few, are among the glories of early English
poetry and, by adoption, our own literature. They maintain their popu-
larity not only because of the simplicity of their stories but because of
the primary response of simple people. The rhythm of the world's work
is in the lines — the pull of the rope, the turn of the wheel, the swing
of the ax, the fall of the hammer. They lie close to man's heart; they
beat in his pulse every time they axe heard.

The Rising Sun

TRENGTHENED BY CHAucEK, poetry began to suffer from his influ-
ence. For almost a century after The Canterbury Tales poets felt
no necessity for daring or difference; they contented themselves
with imitations, paraphrases, and echoes. A new voice was needed, a
forceful utterance which would break down one tradition and establish
another. Such a voice, it seemed, was heard in that extraordinarily can-
did, persistently original, and unwarrantably neglected poet, John
Skelton.

]OHH. SKELTOH

John Skelton, who, in his peculiar way, combined medieval severity
and Elizabethan sprightliness, was born about 1460. Although nothing
definite is known about his forebears, it is assumed that he came of Cum-
berland folk, living in Norfolk. By the time he was thirty, the univer-
sities of Oxford and Cambridge, as well as Louvain, had recognized
him as an outstanding scholar; he was honored with a crown of laurel
and given the title of "laureate," although the official laureateship was

LIVES OF THE POETS

not instituted until the seventeenth century when Ben Jonson re-
ceived the award, a subsidy of two hundred pounds a year, and a tun of
wine. In spite of being outspoken to the point of lose majesty, Skclton
became tutor to Prince Henry and was appointed court poet when the
prince ascended the throne as King Henry VIII. The ceremonies and
politics of court life must have palled upon the poet, for, after being
admitted to holy orders in his late thirties, he became Rector of Diss in
his native Norfolk. It is not known whether he had married before or
after becoming a priest but, since churchmen were not permitted to
have wives, Skelton's personal life provoked a scandal. There is a story
that, rather than ignore the whispers, Skelton decided to confound the
gossipers. According to the Merie Tales, Skelton faced his congregation
one Sunday and declared, "You have complained of me to the bishop
that I do keep a fair wench in my house. ... I have a fair wench, of
which I have begotten a fair boy, as I do think and as you nil shall see.
'Thou wife/ said Skelton, That hast my child, be not afraid. Bring me
hither my child to me/ The which was done. And he, showing hiss child
naked to all the parish, said, 'How say you, neighbors all? Is not this
child as fair as the best of yours? It hath nose, eyes, hands, and feet as
well as any. It is not a pig nor a calf nor like no foul nor monstrous
beast. ... I would never have blamed you to have complained to the
bishop of me. . . , But to complain without a cause, I say you be and
have been and will and shall be knaves!' "

Skelton's dauntlessness extended to the very top of the Church. I Ic
was an implacable foe of Wolsey and, although his station was nothing
more elevated than that of a country preacher, he dared again and again
to attack the Cardinal, one of the most powerful men in England, In
his early fifties Skelton returned to the court as Orator Royal, but his
satires against Wolsey grew more scurrilous and vituperative than ever,
Wolsey struck back, and to protect himself from prosecution Skelton
took sanctuary in Westminster, where he died at the age of seventy.

The poet's life as well as his characteristically rough-and-tumble writ-
ings provoked extremes of praise and opprobrium. The usually aloof
Erasmus spoke warmly of Skelton as "the only light and glory of English
letters," while Pope condemned him with a single adjective, "beastly."
In The Court of Henry VIII one historian remarked that "the instruction
bestowed upon Prince Henry by his preceptor Skelton was calculated to
render him a scholar and a churchman," while in Lives of the Queens
of England another historian held that the wickedness of Henry VIII
was largely due to Skelton's pernicious influence: "How probable Is it

JOHN SKELTON

that the corruption imparted by this ribald and ill-living wretch laid the
foundation for his royal pupil's grossest crimes!"

It is, of course, unlikely that Skelton was responsible for the monarch's
excesses, but it is apparent that the poet and his royal pupil had more
than ribaldry in common. They shared a gusty appetite for life as well
as a lusty humor, a vigorous use of language, and a deeply serious spirit
beneath the boisterousness. Humor, broad and subtle, is such a source
of entertainment in Skelton's poetry that the reader is likely to under-
estimate the other values. "The Tunning [Brewing] of Elynour Hum-
ming" is written in appropriately uncouth verse. The meter is short and
scraggly, the tone is brisk, the language as full of strong flavor as the
stuff dispensed by the alewife to her blowzy and foul-mouthed cus-
tomers. Elinour herself is a rude but classic creation. Dirty and ob-
scenely discursive, a creature of the lower depths, she joins the sisterhood
of such gross, uninhibited, and wonderful women as the Wife of Bath
and Molly Bloom. Yet, although this characterization is considered
typically "Skeltonian," it presents only one side of the poet's genius.

If the picture of Elinour Rumming and her pungent crew reminds
one of the scarifying brilliance of Hogarth and Rowlandson, the por-
trait of Jane Scroupe and her pet bird in 'The Booke of Phyllyp
Sparowe" suggests the tender refinement of Watteau. Here is all modesty
and sweetness and gentle humor as Jane daintily describes the appeal of
her velvet-capped sparrow that would lie between her soft breasts, feed
upon white bread crumbs, and "would gasp when he saw a wasp."

And prettily he would pant

When he saw an ant;

Lord, how he wolde pry

After the butterfly!

Lord, how he wolde hop

After the grasshop!

And whan I sayd, "Phyp! Phyp!"

And he wolde lepc and skyp

And take me by the lyp.

The hushed bittersweet memory is followed by an exaggerated excori-
ation* There is a delightful wildness of rhetoric as Jane calls down ven-
geance upon Gib, the cat, who has slain little Phyllyp:

* . * an exclamation
On all the whole nation

LIVES OF THE POETS

Of cattes wylde and tame;

God send them sorowe and shame . , .

The leopardcs savage,

The lyons in their rage,

Myght catch thee in their pawes,

And gnawe thee in their jawes!

The serpentes of Lybany

Myght stynge thee vcnymously!

The dragons with their tonges

Myght poyson thy liver and longcs!

The mantycors of the montayncs

Myght feed them on thy brayncs!

Both poems are distinctive because of the oddity of their form, which
consists of sharp, staccato lines, many of them only four syllables long,
in what has become known as the "Skcltonic meter." A few lines after
the opening of "Colyn Cloutc," Skelton discloses his aim us well as an
estimate of his own curt and unconventional verse structure:

My name is Colyn Cloutc,

I purpose to shake outc

All my conning bagge,

Lyke a clerkcly haggc.

For though my ryme be ragged,

Tattered and jagged,

Rudely rayne-beaten,

Rusty and moth-eaten,

If ye take well therewith,

It hath in it some pith.

Skelton was reacting against the elegant diction and stylized smooth-
ness of his immediate predecessors and most of his contemporaries. I lis
vulgarities are purposeful, the dissonances are deliberate rebukes to the
decorum, the prettified allegories and polished figures of speech which
had reduced die art of poetry to artifice. Skclton's satires are particu-
larly harsh, rich in recklessness and abuse. The lines may be short, as
in the whimsically charming tributes to Mistress Margaret Hussey and
Mistress Isabel Pennell and also in the angry "Colyn Cloute," an as-
sault upon the rich ecclesiastics by an ordinary laborer. They may be
long, as in the religious "Wofully Arrayd," "Speke, Parrot/' which is

WYATT AND SURJREY

in rhyme royal and is a sophisticated but open attack on Wolsey, and in
"The Bowge of Courte," which is a psychological treatise disguised as
an allegory. But they all triumph in their cantering liveliness, their ec-
centric but unaffected f orthrightness.

It was the eccentricity which, diverting and momentarily arresting,
kept Skelton from holding an audience beyond his generation. Writing
in the 19205 Robert Graves concluded that there were three things
which explain the neglect of Skelton: his wide though undeserved repu-
tation as a specialist in obscenity; a misreading of his verse structure, due
to the dropping of the final e and other changes in pronunciation which,
occurring shortly after his death, made Skelton's rhythms seem wild
and crudely contrived; and the fact that the few available editions of
his work were a hodgepodge of faulty guesses and flagrant errors. In
any case, the novelty of Skelton's cut-and-thrust manner was against
him; he dropped out of public regard and private interest until the mid-
dle of the nineteenth century when a diligent scholar, the Reverend
Alexander Dyce, produced the first standard text of his idiosyncratic
verse. This, too, was little noticed until a few modern poets enthusias-
tically discovered the range of Skelton's variety, the virtuosity of his
technique, and the brusque power of his personality — four hundred
years after he was buried.

WYATT AMD SURREY

Too unconformablc to serve as a model, Skelton failed to be an in-
fluence. Instead of following him, the poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries looked for an older and more stable tradition. They found it,
as their predecessors had found it, in Italy, and especially in the sonnets
of Petrarch. Two poets in particular succeeded in transplanting the
flower of Italian poetry so well that they made it seem a product of
English soil

Paired almost as frequently as Keats and Shelley, Sir Thomas Wyatt
and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, made their mutual appearance in
print in 1557. This was in Tottel's Songs and Sonnets (generally known
as Tottel's Miscellany), the first anthology of English verse, a collection
which included, among other poems by Wyatt and Surrey, the first
sonnets printed in English. The venture was so successful that it set the

LIVES OF THE POETS

fashion not only for the next fifty years, with such colorful compilations
as The Paradise of Dainty Devices, A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant In-
ventions, The Forest of Fancy, and A Handful of Pleasant Delights, but
(with less picturesque titles) for centuries to come.

Born almost a generation apart and developing styles of their own,
Wyatt and Surrey may be considered explorers in difficult terrain. They
came at a time when the changing language was altering the entire con-
cept of English prosody, when there were various ways of pronouncing
the same syllable, when accent and scansion were uncertain, and when,
as a result, poetry was in a state of confusion. They helped stabilize
poetry and, in so doing, gave it a regularity of meter which made it
recognizably modern. In The Arte of English Poesie, a critical treatise
published in the sixteenth century, George Puttenham wrote: "Having
traveled into Italy, and there tasted the sweet and stately measures of
the Italian poesie as novices newly crept out of the schools of Dwite,
Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely man-
ner of vulgar poesie from that it had been before, and for that cause
may justly be said to be the first reformers of our English metre and
style."

Estimates of their separate achievements have varied. Both men were
more than ordinarily accomplished; both were the products of an age
when every gentleman was expected to play an instrument, compose a
three-part melody or at least lend his voice to one, and express himself
as fluently in poetry as in prose. It might be said that every well-born
person was not only a patron of poetry but an amateur poet. The time
had not yet come when a poet would seek publication — it was enough
that his manuscripts were copied and circulated among his friends. The
idea of receiving royalties was an inconceivable fantasy, and payment
for a poem was held to be degrading. Poetry, being a common avoca-
tion, had to assume uncommon importance to make the work of Wyatt
and Surrey seem significant to their fellows.

Thomas Wyatt's reputation rests, rather heavily, on the fact that he
brought the sonnet to England. This characterization presents one small
feature rather than a full picture of the man* Born about 1 503 at Ailing-
ton Castle in Kent, Wyatt was a precocious childj he was barely thirteen
when he entered St. Johns College, Cambridge, in 1516, the year of its
opening. Verses written as an undergraduate were cited when he re-
ceived his M.A. at seventeen. At twenty-five he was sent as an ambas-
sador to Italy, and it was there that he became fascinated with the
idealized love poetry and its apotheosis in the sonnets of Petrarch. Wyatt

WYATT AND SURREY

had married the daughter of Lord Cobham when he was eighteen, hut
this did not prevent him from becoming Anne Boleyn's lover before she
was married to Henry VIII, and he was imprisoned in the Tower of
London after Anne's later infidelities were discovered. Attaining his
freedom, he got in fresh trouble during his missions to France and Spain
and, once again, he was sent to prison. However, his royal master appre-
ciated a good servant although a hot-blooded courtier, and Wyatt was
absolved of all the charges, including adultery and a suspicion of trea-
son. Having survived every other vicissitude, he was struck down by ill-
ness before he had reached forty.

Wyatt's best-known poem records the painful memory of a forsaken
lover. Contrasting the unhappy present with the passionate past, think-
ing of "once in special," he complains:

They flee from me, that sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking within my chamber:
Once I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild, and do not once remember . . .

Other love poems, such as the ones beginning "Forget not yet the
tried intent/' "My lute awake! Perform the last labor that thou and I
shall waste," "Tangled was I in love's snare," "Patience, though I have
not the thing that I require/' and "If in the world there be more woe,"
display genuine feeling put to fluid music. Wyatt's metrical experiments
and his blending of colloquial and elevated phrases set a pattern for
Surrey, his young disciple, and for countless lyrists that followed.

Far more than an adapter, Wyatt was an initiator. Although he took
over the fourteen-Iinc structure from the Italian, he did not merely imi-
tate the sonnet standardized by Petrarch. He usually adhered to the
strict Petrarchan rhyme scheme of the first eight lines (the "octave"), but
he altered the pattern of the concluding six lines (the "sestet") in var-
ious ways, chiefly by bringing the poern to an emphatic close with a
clinching couplet, a trick that Shakespeare used with effective finality.
Wyatt also departed from Petrarch's rule of keeping the two parts of the
sonnet sharply defined and divided. He often let the eighth line run
over into the ninth without the conventional break, thus setting an ex-
ample for the unified and remarkably integrated sonnets of Milton and
Wordsworth,

Wyatt's sonnet-making marks a milestone in the history of English
literature. Such sonnets as those beginning "Who lists to hunt, I know

LIVES OF THE POETS

where is an hind" (presumed to refer to Anne Boleyn), the disillusioned
"Farewell, love, and all thy laws forever," and witty "I find no peace
and all my war is done" (that chain of contradictions which started a
vogue for paradoxes) show his proficiency as a technician and establish
his place as a poet.

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was about fourteen years younger
than Wyatt. Like his illustrious forerunner, Surrey lived his short life
with prodigality. He was born about 1517 and his blood was richly
royal; his father was descended from Edward the Confessor, and his
mother from Edward III. Brought up at court, he was companioned by
princes; his most intimate comrade was the Duke of Richmond, the
illegitimate son of Henry VIIL The two boys went to France when
Surrey was fifteen; a year later they were recalled to England, where
Richmond married Surrey's sister, Mary Howard.

During the next dozen years Surrey was one of the most active as
well as one of the most fascinating members of the court. He helped
suppress a rebellion; he took command of a naval campaign against
France; he jousted, quarreled continually, and wrote intermittently. I lis
temper was easily roused — a record of 1539, when Surrey was twenty-
two, describes him as "the most foolish and proud boy that is in Eng-
land." His pride was his undoing. A foolish joining of the heraldic em-
blem of Edward the Confessor with his own was interpreted as a claim
to succeed Henry VIIL The charge seemed frivolous, but Surrey's im-
pulsiveness had made many enemies. Jealously at first, savagely at last,
they testified against him, and he was convicted. Wyatt, in spite of
shifting alliances, had managed to keep his head until he died of a fever;
Surrey, a less adroit politician, lost his prematurely on the scaffold, He
was in his thirtieth year when he was beheaded on Tower HilL

Surrey lacked the daring and originality of his master, but he sur-
passed him in range and refinement. His sonnets are smoother than
Wyatt's, his lyrics rounder, and if they are more self-conscious they are
also more controlled. "Set me whereas the sun doth parch the green"
and "Brittle beauty that nature made so frail" make the rigid fourteen-
line structure suddenly malleable; "When raging love with extreme
pain" is a lyric which is a miracle of logic, a complete departure from
the inflated diction of the aureate and alliterative schools of poetry*

Although Surrey's precision established a new standard of verse-
making, it was neither his sonnets nor his lyrics which entitled him to
a freehold on Parnassus. He invented a new poetic speech; he made all
succeeding poets his debtors when he translated two books of the Aeneid

SIR WALTER RALEIGH

into iambic pentameters and fashioned the decasyllabic line now known
as "blank verse." None of Surrey's contemporaries was aware that a
revolution had happened in poetry; half a century had to pass before
blank verse became the medium for the Elizabethan dramatists. Its
potency grew until the steady beat of its ten pulsing syllables became
the normal measure of English diction, a measure that grew into the
natural language of Marlowe and Shakespeare and Milton.

SIR WALTER RALEIGH

Following the success of Tottel's Miscellany, poetry became a profit-
able affair for publishers and, occasionally, for poets. Poets who had
been happy to be regarded as gifted amateurs turned professional.
George Gascoigne (1525-1577), for example, not content with having
his poetry printed and paid for, made his own anthology, and his in-
fluence increased when he added his stepson, the pastoral poet Nicholas
Breton, and the rakish George Whetstone to his circle.

It was an age of awakened vigor and violent contrasts, of national
expansion and cultural excitement. A bankrupt England had to replenish
its empty coffers by way of voyages of discovery, new territories over-
seas, half-concealed piracy and war. Elizabeth inherited all the contra-
dictions of the age: its religiosity and its cruelty, its experimental art
and its desperate industry, its happy recklessness and its unhappy in-
telligence. It was an age epitomized in person by Sir Walter Raleigh.

The calculating Muse of History allowed herself a romantic digression
when, as Queen Elizabeth stepped over Raleigh's cloak, Sir Walter
himself stepped into mythology* Whether or not the pretty story is more
than an apocryphal episode, Raleigh was the sort of person to whom
legends attach themselves. He was die typical cultivated, heaven-favored,
many-gifted, multiple man of the English Renaissance: soldier, sailor,
statesman, adventurer, explorer, and poet.

Born in 1552 at Hayes Barton, in the southern part of the delightful
county of Devonshire, Raleigh completed his education at Oriel College,
Oxford, without taking a degree. He fought in Spain and Ireland but,
unable to purchase a higher rank, achieved nothing better than a cap-
taincy. His surprisingly quick rise to eminence was as great as his fall;
ten years encompassed his entire career. Elizabeth looked kindly upon

LIVES OF THE POETS

him* The great navigator, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, was his half-brother,
and Raleigh was given command of the vessels when Gilbert made his
first voyage to America in 1578. After Gilbert went down on his ship,
The Golden Hind, Raleigh set out "to discover and conquer unknown
lands/' and, so doing, founded the colony which, in honor of the Virgin
Queen, was named Virginia.

Suddenly he fell out of favor. It is said that Elizabeth was jealous
of his attentions to Elizabeth Throckmorton, one of her maids of honor,
rumored to have been dishonored by Raleigh. In any case she disap-
proved of his relations with the girl and ordered him to marry her. The
marriage seems to have been a happy one, but the Queen never forgave
him for either his transgression or his preference. Raleigh was brought
back from an expedition to Panama and imprisoned on a flimsy charge.
Although bribery got him out of the Tower, it was years before he got
back into the good graces of his sovereign.

He was always in trouble. He tried to erase the shame of his prison
sentence by a series of daring voyages, hoping to win approval through
colonizing expeditions. Restored to Elizabeth's favor, he was made Gov-
ernor of Jersey in his late forties, but the Queen died two years later,
and fortune once more turned against him.

After James I ascended the throne, Raleigh was suspected of plot-
ting against the new monarch and, although the accusation was pat-
ently false, the judges played cat and mouse with the suspect. Rnloigh
was again committed to the Tower, this time sentenced to death. lie
was then reprieved, freed two days before he was to be executed, and
then sentenced to prison for fourteen years. Past sixty when he was re-
leased, he had the courage to undertake an exploration of the Orinoco
in search of gold. Tragedy accompanied the voyage. The expedition
was a failure, and upon his return Raleigh was arrested — the Spanish
Ambassador insisted that Raleigh was responsible for wantonly burning
a Spanish settlement. The old charge of conspiracy was revived, and
Raleigh was once more taken into custody. He was tried, found guilty,
and beheaded on October 29, 1618,

One of the great spirits of his day, Raleigh's character is manifest in
his prose as well as in his poetry. It shines through his accounts of
journeys, and in his The History of the World, which was written for
the instruction of the young Prince of Wales during Raleigh's thirteen-
year imprisonment. But, although his repute as poet has been engulfed
by his fame as courtier and explorer, it is in Raleigh's poetry that his
nobility is most apparent. Raleigh turns persiflage into common sense

EDMUND SPENSER

in "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd/' a reasonable if unromantic
response to Christopher Marlowe's impassioned plea; on the other hand
he braves the opinion of the worldly in 'The Lie," mixes grimness and
humor in 'The Wood, The Weed, The Wag," and changes bitterness
into resignation in 'The Passionate Man's Pilgrimage," which bears the
subtitle "Supposed to be Written by one at the Point of Death" and may
well serve as Raleigh's own elegy. The technique is so accomplished
that it is regrettable that the poetry, like his colonization, was another
project that never attained its full possibilities.

EDMUKD SPENSER

Edmund Spenser differed from most of his contemporary fellow poets
in lineage and literary aims. He was not born to the purple and, dis-
daining to lift the language of everyday into serious poetry, he sought
to make English as rich and resounding as Latin. Hoping to emulate
the classics, he dreamed of creating epics that could be compared to the
Odyssey and the Aeneid. Spenser's most successful imitation of the an-
tique mode is not his panoplied major opus, The Faerie Queene, but
the lighter and, at times, more colloquial Shepherd's Calendar, whose
inspiration came from the eclogues of Theocritus and Virgil, and which
began a wide vogue of English pastoral verse.

Born in 1552, son of a clothmaker, Spenser received his early educa-
tion at the Merchant Taylors' School, from which he was sent to Cam-
bridge. He took his M.A. at twenty-five, and his charm plus his intelli-
gence procured him the position of secretary to the Earl of Leicester,
one of Queen Elizabeth's favorites. With Sir Philip Sidney, Leicester's
nephew, Spenser founded a little literary group, and the two friends
tried to outdo each other in metrical experiments. The intimate associa-
tion did not last long for, in spite of Leicester's influence, Spenser failed
to advance himself by finding employment at court. At twenty-eight he
went to Ireland as secretary to the ruthlessly dictatorial Lord Deputy,
Lord Grey de Wilton. Grey was recalled after two years, but Spenser
remained in Ireland, accepting a clerkship in Dublin and another in
Munster, and later, a fair salary as sheriff. Yet he always regarded
Ireland as a place of exile; he disliked the Irish, sympathized with the
ruthless methods of the Lord Deputy, defended his policies in prose

LIVES OF THE POETS

and idealized him as a knight-errant of Justice in The Faerie Queene.
Meanwhile, he longed for England and kept on hoping vainly for ad-
vancement there.

In his mid-thirties, prohably profiting by Lord Grey's methods, Spenser
acquired an estate of three thousand acres in County Cork and moved
into Kilcolman Castle. Raleigh visited him, listened approvingly to the
first part of The Faerie Queene, which was dedicated, with unabated
hope of preferment, to Elizabeth, ineffectually disguised as Gloriana,
the "mighty and magnificent Empress/' Fairy Queen, Virgin Queen, and
Virgin Mary all in one. In his early forties Spenser married Elizabeth
Boyle, a relative of Sir Richard Boyle, who became first Earl of Cork,
and it was for her that Spenser wrote the much-quoted wedding song,
"Epithalarnion," with its murmurous refrain:

To which the woods did answer and your echo ring.

Four years after the marriage, the Irish rebellion of 1 598 broke out
and Kilcolman Castle was burned to the ground. Precious manuscripts
were destroyed, and Spenser saved himself, his wife, and his four chil-
dren by flight. He arrived in London on Christmas Eve, a broken, prac-
tically destitute man, and put up at a cheap lodging house. Less than a
month later, on January 16, 1599, he died. The funeral expenses were
borne by the Earl of Essex, and Spenser's body was placed in West-
minster Abbey. There is a legend that his fellow poets honored the
author with memorial poems and buried the elegies, as well as the pens
which wrote them, in the grave with Spenser's coffin*

Today Spenser is more honored than read* Spellbound by sound, he
loved language to excess; words intoxicated him and, in the end, he
was betrayed by them. Aiming for grandeur he often fell into grandil-
oquence. For all its colors The Faerie Queene began to fade rapidly.
Most readers soon found it a dull tapestry of archaic figures and baffling
abstractions, while the tone of The Shepherd's Calendar seemed far re-
moved from its bucolic title. On the other hand, Spenser's form and
finesse have always been appreciated by critics and craftsmen. A poet's
poet, he fascinated Coleridge and Keats; motifs from The Faerie Queene
echo through the ghostly magic of The Ancient Mariner and the hushed
sensuousness of The Eve of St. Agnes. Moreover, Spenser endeared him*
self to hundreds of poets by inventing a wonderfully flexible nine-line
form with an intricate but fluent set of rhymes — a-b-a-b-b-c-b-c-c — which
became known as the Spenserian stanza. The first eight lines are ten

SIDNEY, DANIEL, AND DRAYTON

syllables long and a particular shapeliness is achieved by the lengthen
ing of the last line to twelve syllables, called an alexandrine. Here is ai
illustrative stanza from The Faerie Queene:

It was an hill placed in an open plain
That round about was bordered by a wood
Of matchless height that seem'd th'earth to disdain,
In which all trees of honor stately stood
And did all winter as in summer bud,
Spreading pavilions for the birds to bower,
Which in their lower branches sung aloud;
And in their tops the soaring hawk did tower,
Sitting like kings of fowls in majesty and power.

Spenser's historical importance is not minimized by editors of Surveys
of Literature, while anthologists are not unmindful of his conveniently
separable Amoretti, that sequence of eighty-eight sonnets celebrating
Elizabeth Boyle, and particularly his "Prothalamion," written "in honor
of the double marriage of two honorable ladies," each verse ending
with the placid and perfect repetition:

Sweet Thames, run sof tly, till I end my song.

It is the by-play of aesthetic pleasure which delights the devotees
of Spenser* For those who have the love and industry to work their way
through the remote references and unrecognizable allusions in The
Shepherd's Calendar and the inordinate length, immense apparatus, and
fleshless complexities of the allegorical Faerie Queene, there is the re-
ward of suddenly transparent passages, prolonged musical pageantry,
and infrequent but pure illuminations of beauty.

SIDNEY, DANIEL,
ANT> DRAYTON

The names of Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Walter Raleigh are fre-
quently joined to form the perfect pattern of an Elizabethan man. But
Sidney was Raleigh's antithesis. Raleigh's life was (if the paradox may

LIVES OF THE POETS

be permitted) a succession of failures, while Sidney's was an accumu-
lating series of triumphs. Raleigh moved in a circle of conniving ene-
mies; Sidney was surrounded by worshipful and influential friends.
Sidney's surroundings were in keeping with his high birth. Born in
1554, he was the son of Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy of Ireland,
and Lady Sidney, sister to the Earl of Leicester. His education, begun
in his father's luxurious country place in Kent and furthered at both
Oxford and Cambridge, was completed when at eighteen he made the
Grand Tour, met such painters as Tintoretto and Veronese, studied with
the humanist Languet, and traveled with him through Europe.

Sidney returned to England as a court favorite. Everyone succumbed
to his charm; "his very play," wrote the poet Fulkc Grcvillc, "tended to
enrich his mind, so that even his teachers found something in him to
observe and learn." At Kenilworth during the celebrated reception for
Queen Elizabeth by his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, Sidney met Lord
Essex's daughter, Penelope Devercux, to whom he seems to have lost his
heart, at least to the extent of addressing the lovelorn Astrophcl and
Stella to her. This set of 108 interrelated sonnets attained so great a
popularity that it was largely responsible for the steady stream of sonnet
sequences that rose to flood proportions during the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries. It will never be known whether Penelope reciprocated
Sidney's passion; she married another (whom she divorced for the Earl
of Devonshire) and before he was twenty Sidney married the daughter
of Sir Francis Walsingham.

Sidney did not have to run after fame; fortune pursued him. I Ic sat
in Parliament, Elizabeth knighted him, and in his thirtieth year he was
appointed Governor of Flushing. Favored by an auspicious birth, crowned
by a brilliant career, Sidney was immortalized by a noble end. Wounded
at the battle of Zutphen, he was about to put a cup of water to his lips
when he saw a dying soldier staring at him. Sidney, according to Grc-
ville, refused the drink, saying, "Thy necessity is greater than mine,"
Sidney died after a few days of suffering, on October 7, 1586. In an-
other month he would have been thirty-two.

Although Sidney's famous sonnet sequence is polite rather than pas-
sionate, the work of a gifted and self-controlled gentleman instead of
an overpowering poet, there are moments when a cry of genuine anguish
breaks through the gracefulness. The forty-seventh sonnet of Astropkel
and Stella, in which the tortured lover complains of his lady's cruelty,
is echoed in one of Hamlet's soliloquies and in his unhappy rejection
of Ophelia. Macbeth's apostrophe to Sleep is anticipated in a sonnet

SIDNEY, DANIEL, AND DRAYTON

which places romantic love against a realistic background of social
content:

Come, Sleep! O Sleep, the certain knot of peace,

The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,

The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release,

Th' indifferent Judge between the high and low . . .

A sonnet on Desire (not to be found in the Astrophel series) is
equally remarkable, a harsh dissonance in the midst of dulcet harmonies.
In a sudden revulsion against passion, Sidney inveighs against its re-
lentless power with fierce invectives and a final twist of paradox which
only Shakespeare could surpass,

Thou blind man's mark, thou fool's self -chosen snare,

Fond fancy's scum, and dregs of scattered thought;

Band of all evils, cradle of causeless care;

Thou web of will, whose end is never wrought;

Desire, desire! I have too dearly bought,

With price of mangled mind, thy worthless ware;

Too long, too long, asleep thou hast me brought,

Who should my mind to higher things prepare.

But yet in vain thou hast my ruin sought;

In vain thou mad'st me to vain things aspire;

In vain thou kindlest all thy sinoky fire;

For virtue hath this better lesson taught —

Within myself to seek my only hire,

Desiring nought but how to kill desire.

Like many of his aristocratic contemporaries, Sidney wrote for pleas-
ure, not for profit. He was known as a good poet the way another man
might be known as a good talker, but he never planned to publish his
poetry. A courtier does not bring his gifts to market, and Sidney's poems
were not collected and presented to the public until some years after
his death. His many innovations — mingling blank verse and rhyme,
attempting to vary orthodox rhythms with experimental measures, play-
ing with intricate and internal rhyme schemes — were not appreciated
until much later, and it is only recently that the unfading freshness of
his lyrics has been rated as high as his sonnets. One of the briefest of
Sidney's poems is also one of his most unsullied; "My True Love Hath

LIVES OF THE POETS

My Heart, and I Have His" has the accents of something simple and
inevitable, the anonymous authenticity of a perfect folk song.

Sidney has another claim upon all poets. He is the author of An
Apology for Poetry, which is not really an apology but a defense that
has the tone of a defiance. Sidney insists that the poet is superior to the
philosopher and the historian because, where the philosopher is preoc-
cupied with the abstract and the historian with the merely factual, the
poet deals with the universal. What is more, he entices even as he
teaches. "Now therein of all sciences is our poet the monarch. For he
doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way
as will entice any man to enter into it. Nay, he doth, as if your journey
should lie through a fair vineyard, at the very first give you a cluster of
grapes, that full of that taste you may long to pass further. He cometh
to you with words set in delightful proportion . , . and with a talc
which holdeth children from play and old men from the chimney-
corner." Nor has any poet advised another poet more cogently concern-
ing the moot matter of how to achieve a style:

"Fool!" said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and write."

Astrophel and Stella set a fashion of dedicating entire cycles of son-
nets to some real or disguised or wholly imaginary mistresses; and, as
fashion is prone to do, it established a set of stereotypes. There was a
strict convention to which the poet was supposed to conform. The mis-
tress was always superlatively beautiful, superhumanly unattainable
and inhumanly disdainful; the lover always suffered the tortures of fire
and ice, burning with hope and freezing with despair. The very figures
of comparison were conventionalized. Shakespeare mockingly summed
up the catalogue of conceits in a sonnet beginning, "My mistress* eyes
are nothing like the sun," and as early as 1578 Barnabe Kicbc satirised
the poets who praised their mistresses according to the current cliches:
"She must be a Pallas Athena for her wit, a Diana for her chastity, a
Venus for her face. . . . Her hairs are wires of gold, her cheeks are
made of lilies and red roses, her brows be arches, her eyes sapphires,
her looks lightnings, her mouth coral, her teeth pearls, her paps alabaster
balls, her belly soft; from thence downward to her knees I think is made
of sugar candy — her hands, her fingers, her legs, her feet, and all the
rest of her body shall be so perfect and so pure that, by my conscience,
the worst part they will leave in her shall be her soul"

Samuel Daniel (1562-1619) was one of the sonneteers who, while

SIDNEY, DANIEL, AND DRAYTON

employing similar verbal knickknacks, managed to break through the
formalized style and prescribed sentiments. It is true that he, too,
pictured a world of extravagant languors and no apparent labor, a
world in which a gentleman occasionally occupied himself with pastoral
ditties that bore the same relation to English soil as Marie Antoinette's
beruffled milkmaids did to French farms, a realm in which the poet's
lady — whether a court nymph or a country Nell — was celebrated for
her whiteness or her redness, her softness or her hardness, her artful
coyness and her equally artificial cruelty. But Daniel's Delia is a set of
interlocking sonnets which are full of individualized humanity. Their
smoothness is deceptive, for the easygoing lines are offset by a recogni-
tion of time's tragedies, the end of youth and all short-lived joys. Daniel's
contemporaries also admired his Civil Wars, comprising eight books,
the first four of which were printed in 1595 and the other four fourteen
years later. They were understandably impressed by Daniel's ability to
sustain so long an effort which could, at the same time, teach history,
preach morality, and create poetry, even though the work as a whole
is dishearteningly dull.

Michael Dray ton (1563-1631), born a year later than Daniel, was>
like his colleague, a sonneteer who wrote and made history. His Polyol-
Jyion is an epic survey detailing the physical charms of England; its
thousands of twelve-syllable couplets add up to an enthusiastic but
wearying combination of patriotism and topography. Drayton also wrote
quantities of historical narratives, plays, pastorals, legends, satires, and
religious meditations. His fictive England's Heroical Epistles, a chain of
imaginary love letters purportedly written by famous lords and ladies,
was enormously popular; it went through more than a dozen reprintmgs
in little more than a decade. The Battle of Agincourt is a great war
horse of poetry, a bravura set-piece, vibrant with energy and aflame with
heroism.

Since Drayton's historical chronicles and parables suffer from the
limitations of their very timeliness, it is not surprising that modern
readers have turned away from his larger works in favor of his less volu-
minous and more personal communications. Drayton's more forceful
utterance is heard in the sonnet sequence, Idea, presumably prompted
by Ann, the younger daughter of Sir Henry Goodere. Concentrated
passion burns fitfully through the cycle. It smolders in the lines begin-
ning "To nothing fitter can I thee compare" and "How many paltry,
foolish, painted things/' flames fitfully in the torture of "You're not alone
when you are still alone," and blazes out in the anguished "Since there's

LIVES OF THE POETS

no help, come, let us kiss and part," one of the greatest emotional out-
bursts ever captured in the confines of a sonnet.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

Christopher Marlowe's life, setting a model for his headlong style,
was a short burst of flamboyance. His career was conceived in terms of
drama, and everything written about him was attended by superlatives.
His fellow poets referred to him as "the Muses' Darling/' Shakespeare
praised him unreservedly; Jonson paid tribute to his "mighty line";
Drayton wrote that Marlowe had in him "brave translunary things."
Three centuries after his death, Swinburne spoke of him as "crowned,
girdled, garbed and shod with light and fire, first born of the morning,
sovereign star," and in 1955 a heavily documented if inaccurate book,
The Man Who Was Shakespeare, attempted to prove that Marlowe
was the author of the thirty-six plays, one hundred and fifty-four son-
nets, and two long poems usually attributed to the man from Stratford,

Born two months before Shakespeare, in February, 1564 — the only
definite date is that of his christening, February 26 — Marlowe's origins
were humble. His father was a shoemaker, his grandfather a tanner*
There were four younger sisters in the little crowded Canterbury house
in which the boy was reared. At fifteen he received a scholarship to at-
tend King's School in Canterbury; at seventeen another scholarship
enabled him to enter Corpus Christi College at Cambridge, During the
six years he lived there he was almost continuously in trouble. He was
supposed to be a divinity student, but he was more devoted to the thun-
dering Jehovah of the Old Testament than to the gentle Jesus of the
New. Rebelling against the rigorous discipline of his ecclesiastical sur-
roundings, he took xef uge in the fancied lawlessness of the pagan world.
At twenty, while studying for holy orders, he regaled himself by pro-
ducing loose and lighthearted translations ftom Ovid, which, when pub-
lished, had the distinction of a public burning by the Bishop of London
as well as by the Archbishop of Canterbury, In the next two years Mar-
lowe continued to seek heathen dramatists rather than Christian fathers
for his inspiration; he translated part of Lucan and went to Virgil for the
plot of his first play, The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage,

The revolt from orthodoxy was inevitable* Refused his MA because

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

of intransigence, Marlowe left Cambridge for London, where he made
friends with other poets, playwrights, actors, and less reputable folk that
hung about the theater. Allying himself with two theatrical companies,
Marlowe wrote four astonishing plays in the short space of six years:
Tamburlaine the Great, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, The
Jew of Malta, and Edward the Second. Never before had rhetoric been
used with such sonority and luxuriance. Marlowe gave blank verse an
exuberance that made it seem a new language; he was the first to use
speech as though it were an orchestra. Even when Marlowe rants — and
no one ever ranted more fervidly — he passes beyond bombast. Tambur-
laine is full of savage splendor; Doctor Faustus, his greatest achieve-
ment, surges with sounds never before heard in English poetry.

Marlowe the nonconformist identified himself with his heretical
Faustus and brought fresh troubles upon himself. Agnosticism was bad
enough, but atheism was a crime — and Marlowe was charged with
being an atheist. His conversation was full of skepticism, reckless badi-
nage, and irreverent quips. The doubts and dissipations were overlooked,
but what had been tossed off as bawdy persiflage was defined as blas-
phemy. At twenty-four he was arrested on a flimsy complaint. At twen-
ty-nine he was again in trouble. This time the Privy Council was about
to investigate a detailed report of Marlowe's "atheistic teachings" when
on May 30, 1593, he was killed. It was hinted, and the rumor often re-
peated, that he was slain in a brawl over a tavern wench. However,
twentieth-century research by Leslie Hotson has established the fact that
Marlowe was killed by Ingram Frizer, a drinking companion, in a tavern
at Deptford, across the Thames from London. The argument centered
about payment of the bill. Marlowe, whose temper was always short,
grew irascible, and Frizer (later claiming he had been attacked) stabbed
Marlowe in the head. The poet died instantly.

Marlowe was pre-eminently a dramatist, but his name would have
lived had he never written a play. A small reputation could rest on The
Passionate Shepherd to his Love, one of the most imitated of Elizabethan
lyrics, and a greater one on Hero and. Leander, an uninhibited erotic
poem completed by George Chapman, whose translation of Homer
evoked Keats's reverberating sonnet. Perhaps the favorite passage in the
Chapman is one which concludes with what has become a household
quotation:

It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is overruled by fate . . .

LIVES OF THE POETS

The reason no man knows; let it suffice,
What we behold is censured by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight;
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?

Shakespeare, whose indebtedness to Marlowe's The Jew of Malta is
manifest in The Merchant of Venice, gave further recognition to the
dead poet. Marlowe is probably "that affable familiar ghost" in the
eighty-sixth of Shakespeare's sonnets, and his spirit appears unmistak-
ably in As You Like It when Phebe quotes the famous line with appro-
priateness and true appreciation :

Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might:
"Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?"

But though Marlowe could be, when occasion demanded it, a lyricist,
he is essentially a playwright, and if his plays do not attain the peaks
and stand serenely on the summits, they struggle desperately toward the
heights. The tragedies, if not the goriest ever put together, arc "sprin-
kled with the brains of slaughtered men/' compounded of cruelty,
strewn with individual murders and wholesale massacres. Theirs is a
horror incongruously joined with beauty, as in the freezing reply of
Mephistophilis to Faustus' query, "Where is hell?"

Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells!

The very violence of Marlowe's plays is a measure of the driven,
frantic seeker who, getting no answers to his fearful questions, flails
about in fury. Sharing the doom of Tamburlaine and the damnation of
Faustus, Marlowe lived, wrote, and died at top pitch — wresting, with his
compelled creatures, the last note of extremity from passion in poetry.

Mirror

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

WITH THE EXCEPTION of the Bible, no book has been so widely
read and so often quoted as the works of William Shake-
speare, yet we know next to nothing about the author him-
self. What little we have learned about Shakespeare the man is due
entirely to modern research; a scattering of documents unearthed many
years after he lived offers hints and clues toward the shaping of a
figure with which we have become dubiously familiar. However, unlike
a statue put together from disjecta membra, most of the important pieces
are missing, and the reconstruction remains largely conjectural* No man-
uscript by Shakespeare is known to exist — not a play or a poem. No
preface has been discovered, nor, in an age noted for its correspondence,
a single letter. Except for a half-dozen signatures, no certain evidence
of his handwriting has ever been found. A few records show purchases
of properties, printing of plays, and legal processes. There are passing
tributes to the playwright by his fellow craftsmen, but nothing like a
reliable memoir was published during his time.

The first biography of Shakespeare was not prepared until almost one
hundred years after his death. It was written by a Restoration poet,
Nicholas Rowe, in connection with the first edited compilation of
Shakespeare's plays. This was in 1709. Rowe obviously could not have
known Shakespeare, and most of his "Life" was concerned with an ap-

LIVES OF THE POETS

praisal and appreciation of the work. What personal details emerged
were derived from an old actor, Thomas Betterton, whose memories of
the dramatist were colorful but scarcely accurate. Fragmentary com-
ments by that great gossip, John Aubrey, and the antiquarian William
Oldys, were available in manuscript but, although entertaining, they
were equally unreliable. Eighty years after Rowe, Edmund Malone col-
lected all the data, rumors, and reminiscences, and published his con-
clusions, on which most subsequent biographies are based. Scholars have
searched through the sonnets for the key with which Shakespeare sup-
posedly unlocked his heart; others have probed the plays for bits of hid-
den autobiography. But Shakespeare was a many-moodcd poet. More-
over, he was a dramatist who identified himself with everything he
touched and was all things to every audience. A Life of Shakespeare is,
therefore, a shaky structure built on a minimum of fact and a maximum
of memorials, imaginative interpretations, shrewd deduction, and sheer
guesswork.

It is not hard to trace Shakespeare's immediate ancestry. His grand-
father, Richard Shakespeare, farmed in Snitterficld, a few miles from
the town of Stratford-on-Avon, as a tenant of Robert Arden. The
Ardens were well established — the family had prospered in Warwick-
shire for generations — and Richard Shakespeare considered himself for-
tunate when his son, John, married Robert Arden's daughter, Mary.
Land and a well-furnished, commodious house in the village of Wilm-
cote went with the bride, a woman so capable that her father made her
one of the executors of his will. John Shakespeare had been working
in Stratford before his marriage; after his father-in-law's death, he
bought two houses with his wife's inheritance and enlarged his business
in town* He was a glovemaker and whittawer, a whitcner and softener
of leather, but he also did some butchering and dealt in com, wool, and
timber. He was, in short, an adaptable tradesman of some means and
repute and, shortly before the birth of his first child, was appointed a
member of the Stratford Corporation. The community liked him so
well that, within a year, he was made ale-taster (an official who super-
vised the quality and price of beer and bread), affecror (assessor of
minor penalties), and constable. Shortly afterward, he became co-
treasurer, alderman, and high bailiff, a position corresponding to mayor.

Eight children were born to John and Mary Shakespeare. The first,
Joan, born in 1558, died after a few months, and the second, Margaret,
did not survive childhood. The third child and. their first boy, William,
was boxn in a comfortable, half-timbered, lattice-windowed house (now

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

a national museum) on Henley Street. The church records show that
he was baptized on April 26, 1564, and it is generally assumed that he
was born three days earlier, on April 23. There were two more girls and
three other boys, one of whom, Edmund, sixteen years younger than
William, became an actor.

Of Shakespeare's boyhood we know nothing. From the lavish images
of nature in his plays and poems it is thought that he loved to play
about the surrounding farms, the water meadows, and the adjacent
woodland pardonably exaggerated into the Forest of Arden. Undoubtedly
he participated in the village sports and games common to all growing
boys everywhere, and it is more than likely that he attended the Gram-
mar School founded by the Guild of Holy Cross in the thirteenth cen-
tury. He must have studied the Bible and Latin, but we can only guess
at the rest of the curriculum. It is usually taken for granted that he was
a precocious reader and that the favorite authors of his youth were Ovid,
Seneca, and Plautus, who furnished plots for the later playwright.
Jonson's much quoted remark that Shakespeare had "small Latin and
less Greek" merely indicates that he was not the dedicated classical
scholar that Jonson was.

By the time the boy was in his teens, his father was worried about
taking care of a rapidly enlarging family. There were business reverses.
John abandoned his offices, and it is supposed that William never fin-
ished his schooling in Stratford; it is apparent that, unlike most of the
literati of his day, he had no university training. There is a legend that
Shakespeare dreamed of being an actor and was a passionate speech-
maker in his youth. Aubrey passed on the story that, as the son of a
butcher, young Will "exercised his father's trade, and when he killed a
calf, he would do it in a high style and make a speech." Other gossips
claimed that, since legal terms abound in his plays, Shakespeare was ap-
prenticed to an attorney. It has been explained that he was drawn to
the theater by his first fascinated sight of the strolling players who visited
Stratford, that he saw and never forgot the spectacular entertainment
which the Earl of Leicester arranged for Queen Elizabeth at nearby
Kenilworth when Shakespeare was twelve years old. Another role as-
signed to him is that of temporary country schoolmaster, with pupils
not much younger than himself.

All this is surmise, unsupported by a single fact. We can be sure of
nothing between Shakespeare's birth and his eighteenth year, when we
are confronted with the first authentic record of his youth: a marriage
license. The circumstances were strange. The bride was twenty-six, an

LIVES OF THE POETS

age at which Elizabethan unmarried women were considered pass6e;
the bridegroom was eighteen. It is not unreasonable to assume that, since
Anne Hathaway was eight years older than her spouse, the union may
well have been prompted and the marriage forced by a determined
woman rather than by a dreamy, irresponsible boy. Whether or not
Shakespeare was seduced, the wedding seems to have been a hasty one,
so hurried that the clerk got the name wrong and wrote "Whatelcy" for
"Hathaway/' No record of the solemnization has been found, but a
christening record of "Susanna, daughter of William Shakespeare," gives
the date May 26, 1583, a bare six months after the marriage license was
issued. Before he was twenty-one, Shakespeare was again a parent, this
time the father of twins, Hamnet and Judith. There are no further
evidences of domestic life. This, together with the fact that in a period
of large families there were no other children, points to a separation.
It is a plausible conjecture, for when we next encounter Shakespeare
he is in London alone. Except for visits to his birthplace, he remained
in one London lodging or another until his retirement, more than a
quarter of a century later.

Although many now believe that Shakespeare gladly left an unloved
home to find himself in the adventurous capital, the tale of an unwilling
expulsion from Stratford still persists. According to this well-preserved
story, young Shakespeare fell into bad company and associated with a
band of fellows whose specialty was stealing hare and venison. Poaching
in Sir Thomas Lucy's park, Shakespeare was caught and, according to
the Reverend Richard Davies, who died in 1708, "Lucy had him whipt
& sometimes imprisoned & at last made him fly his native country."
Shakespeare had his revenge, continues Davies, by caricaturing Lucy
as the rustic Justice Shallow and punning on "luce" (a fish) and "louse."
Other writers supplied further details, and by the eighteenth century
the deer-stealing episode was accepted as part of the canon — until 1931,
when it was challenged by Leslie Hotson, who, in Shakespeare versus
Shallow, made out a good case for a certain "covetous and insatiable"
William Gardiner as the original of the braggart Justice.

In any event the date of the London hegira cannot be fixed. We hear
nothing factual of Shakespeare until 1592, at which time the first part
of Henry VI is produced and, at twenty-eight, its author is so eminent
that he is attacked by an envious and embittered celebrity, Robert
Greene, a roistering poet, pamphleteer, and playwright, had outdone
his fellows in drinking and debauchery; but, as he lay poverty-stricken
and dying in the summer of 1592, he repented all his excesses. His re-

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

cantation took the form of a remorseful, self-castigating pamphlet which
ended with an admonition to three colleagues "that spend their wits in
making plaies." "Base minded men, all three of you, if by my miserie
you be not warnd: for unto none of you (like mee) sought those burres
to cleave: those Puppets (I meane) that spake from our mouths, those
Anticks garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange that I, to whom they all
have beene beholding: is it not like that you, to whom they have all
beene beholding, shall (were yee in that case as I am now) bee at once
of them forsaken? Yes trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow,
beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players
hyde, supposes he is as well to bombast out a blanke verse as the best
of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his own con-
ceit the only Shake-scene in a countrey. O that I might entreat your
rare wits to be imploied in more profitable courses, & let those Apes
imitate your past excellence, and never more acquaint them with your
admired inventions."

The three writers thus warned are Greene's friends, Christopher
Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and George Peele. Greene is exhorting them
to give up playwrighting which gives employment to low-class actors
("Apes and Puppets"), who are applauded for scenes they did not in-
vent and lines they "spake from our mouths . . . garnisht in our col-
ours." Shakespeare is one of those rude actors — worse, he has also had
the presumption to write plays which are enjoyed by the crowd. The
identification is established in the pun on his name, and in the slurring
phrase, "an upstart Crow," one who, just arrived, wearing borrowed
plumes, was already crowing about his success. It is emphasized in the
sneering "Johannes fac totum" a "Johnny-come-lately" and a "Jack-of-
all-trades," who not only acts but supposes he can turn out better and
more bombastic blank verse than any professional playwright. The
phrase "Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde*' makes the identification
complete, for it is a parody of "O tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's
hide/' from the third part of Henry VI, which was then on the London
stage.

Like most scandal sheets, Greene's Groatsworth of Wit had a ready
sale; but there were many protests from Shakespeare's friends, possibly
from Shakespeare himself. Within a few months the publisher, Henry
Chettle, issued a mollifying statement in Kind-Hans Dream, saying that
he should have "moderated the heat" of Greene's attack, but that he
hesitated to edit the work, especially since the author was dead. Con-
cerning Marlowe, whom Greene had accused of atheism, Chettle merely

LIVES OF THE POETS

remarked that he was not acquainted with him and never cared to be;
but he made amends to Shakespeare. He did not know Shakespeare, but
"I am as sorry as if the originall fault had beene my fault, because my
selfe have seene his demeanor not less civill than he excellent in the
qualitie he professes. Besides, divers of worship have reported his up-
rightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace
in writing which aprooves his Art." Chettle is not only saying that
Shakespeare is a splendid actor ("excellent in the qualitie he professes")
as well as a skillful ("facetious") writer whose art has been demon-
strated, but that persons of importance ("divers of worship") have spoken
of his integrity.

Greene's attack and Chettle's apology prove that in 1592 Shakespeare
was already a well-known performer, a recognized dramatist, and a man
who made friends with people of position because of his demeanor, his
quiet dignity and forthrightness. All this could not have been attained
overnight. Shakespeare probably wrote poetry, perhaps a play or two,
before he left Stratford. But acting demands training as well as applica-
tion, and the difficulty of getting a play produced was as great then as
it is now. Obviously Shakespeare must have been in London before
1592 — probably several years before — but it is not likely that we will
ever know when he arrived or how he was employed.

We must resign ourselves to wonder; except for entries of births and
the date of a marriage license, history is silent concerning Shakespeare's
first twenty-eight years, more than half his life. The eight years between
the birth of the twins (February, 1585) and Greene's attack (September,
1592) must have been a crucial period; if accounted for, they might solve
the mystery of Shakespeare's personality. Much must have happened
during those "lost" years— experiences which changed the callow coun-
try lad into the cultivated Londoner and the glover's inconspicuous son
into a member of the most important theatrical company in England, a
leading actor and a playwright at the peak of his fame. But there is a
complete absence of data, and biography again retreats behind clouds
of legendry.

There is the story originally told by William Davcnant, who was
to become Jonson's unworthy successor as unofficial poet laureate and
who, when in his cups, broadly hinted he was Shakespeare's illegitimate
son. According to Davenant, Shakespeare arrived in London penniless
and without friends. Asking for work at the door of the theater, he
was told that the only employment available was taking care of the

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

horses of the gentlemen who came to the plays. Shakespeare not only
undertook the task but did it so well that he soon had more business
than he himself could manage and hired young fellows who became
known as "Shakespeare's boys." Some of the players, noticing him,
"found him so acute and such a master of conversation that, struck there-
with, they recommended him to the house, in which he was first ad-
mitted in a very low station."

The "low station" was probably that of an extra player, an actor with
a few lines, one who, in a small cast with plays calling for many charac-
ters, doubled in two or more parts. If Davenant is to be trusted and the
manager found Shakespeare "so acute and such a master of conversa-
tion," he was probably permitted to "doctor" some of the company's
repository of plays, bring them up to date or add a scene or two. Such
revisers were not considered "hacks," for there was nothing reprehensible
about polishing up old scripts. Plays were bought outright from their
authors and became the property of the acting companies. There was
no obligation to preserve pristine texts — plays were not yet considered
literature — and they were continually "mended," "pointed," and gen-
erally reshaped. When Shakespeare's emendations were successful, he
was probably allowed to collaborate with other dramatists; for, with
nearly a dozen theaters competing with one another, there was a con-
tinual demand for new or refurbished plays. In any case, there must
have been work on other men's plays (as well as experiments of his
own, which have disappeared) before young Shakespeare became known
as the author of such varied plays as the gory Titus Andronicus, which
is only partly his, the early historical Henry the Sixth, and the farcical
Comedy of Errors, based on Plautus' The Menxchmi or an English
translation of it

There may have been other activities besides writing before Shake-
speare the dramatist emerged. In The Essential Shakespeare J. Dover
Wilson almost convinces us that the young playwright was in the per-
sonal service of the still younger Earl of Southampton, and that the
tradition of Shakespeare's being a country schoolmaster may refer to a
presumable stay at Southampton's country seat in the capacity of tutor,
On the other hand, G. B. Harrison contends that Shakespeare may well
have seen active military service during the time that the Spanish Ar-
mada threatened England, when Shakespeare was twenty-three, or at
the period of the great naval expedition into Portugal, when he was
twenty-five. The intimate knowledge of soldiering is seen again and

LIVES OF THE POETS

again, says Harrison, in casual military phrases and technical references,
while equally notable is Shakespeare's vivid and continual use of images
of the sea.

To leave speculation for certainty, we reach 1593, when Shakespeare
was twenty-nine and Venus and Adonis was published. With the ex-
ception of The Rape of Lucrece, which followed a year later, it is the
only work which Shakespeare saw through the press, authenticating
the book with a dedication and his signature. It was an immediate suc-
cess, and no less than ten editions were printed while Shakespeare was
still living. His star rose so swiftly that, within ten years' time, in
Palladis Tamia, published as early as 1 598, Francis Meres, the sixteenth-
century scholar, listed twelve plays by the thirty-four-year-old Shake-
speare, including one entitled Love's Labour's Won, which may bo cither
a vanished sequel to Love's Labour's Lost or All's Well that Ends Well.
After praising Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, and Marlowe, Mercs,
who made a point of comparing every English writer with a Greek or
Roman author, wrote: "As Plautus and Seneca arc accounted the best
for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare is the most
excellent in both kinds for the stage." As for Shakespeare's poems,
Meres concluded that "the sweete wittie soul of Ovid lives in the
mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare."

It was to Ovid's Metamorphoses that Shakespeare was indebted not
only for the plot but for some of the details of Venus and Adonis.
Yet there are many points of difference. Perhaps the most striking dis-
similarity is in the character of Adonis. Ovid's Adonis is by no means
hostile to Venus, whereas Shakespeare's beautiful boy, substituting
repugnance for shyness, actively loathes the "quick desire" and "vulture
thought" of the temptress. Is it possible (since it is never too late for
conjecture) that the young Shakespeare identified himself with young
Adonis, the unwilling victim, seduced by an experienced and aggressive
woman? Is the choice of subject without significance, especially since
it was Shakespeare's poetic debut ("the first heir of my invention")
linked with Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, who, like most
young Elizabethan patricians, enjoyed love poems, especially if they
were erotic?

Critics writing about Venus and Adonis have outdone themselves in
extremities of opinion. Coleridge, for example, concluded that in this
narrative poem Shakespeare wrote as if he were a visiting god from
another planet "charming you to gaze on the movements of Venus
and Adonis as you would on the twinkling dances of vernal butterflies."

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

But Hazlitt, at the other extreme, complained that both Venus and
Adonis and the subsequent Lucrece were, in spite of their torrid
subjects, "a couple of ice-houses ... as hard, as glittering, and as cold/'
It is true that in Venus and Adonis Shakespeare commits every fault
of poetic youth: overwrought sentiment, excessive detail, set-pieces of
rhetoric. But youth is also responsible for its charm, its irresistible sense
of wonder, its physical candor, its magnificent sensuality, at its height
in the passage describing the mating of the "breeding jennet" and
Adonis's "trampling courser":

His ears up-prickt, his braided hanging mane
Upon his compass'd crest now stands on end,
His nostrils drink the air, and forth again
As from a furnace, vapors doth he send:
His eye which scornfully glisters like fire,
Shows his hot courage, and his high desire*

The prime virtue of Venus and Adonis is the essence of its poetry:
the fusion of observation and imagination, of sight and insight. Rising
clear of the overelaborate speech and the padded conceits, there are
the cameo-clear miniatures of "the purblind hare" outrunning the wind,
the boar with "frothy mouth bepainted all with red," the snail "whose
tender horns being hit, shrinks backward in his shelly cave," the
milch-doe "hasting to feed her fawn," and the boar-hounds:

Clapping their proud tails to the ground below,
Shaking their scratched ears, bleeding as they go.

The poem often drags, weighed down with verbal trappings and
Renaissance excesses; but it is also enlivened with wild-hearted beauty,
with what Masefield called "images of delicate quick-blooded things
going swiftly and lustily from the boiling of April in them."

Venus and Adonis was dedicated to the handsome and much adu-
lated Earl of Southampton, an ardent theatergoer, to whom Shake-
speare was probably introduced backstage. The dedication is deferential
but not servile. "Right Honourable," it begins in the conventional style,
yet with dignity, "I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my
unpolisht lines to your Lordship, nor how the world will censure me
for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden; only if your
Honour seems but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to

LIVES OF THE POETS

take advantage of all idle hours till I have honoured you with some
graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I
shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather. . . ."

Shakespeare had found a patron who, within the year after the
publication of Venus and Adonis, became his intimate friend. The
dedication to Lucrece reveals a complete change in relations between
the nineteen-year-old noble and Shakespeare, who was nearing thirty.
Instead of the formal address which headed Venus and Adonis, the
dedication to Lucrece (undoubtedly the promised "graver work") begins
impetuously: "The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end,
whereof this pamphlet without beginning is but a superfluous moiety.
. . . What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours, being part in
all I have, devoted yours."

The central situation of Lucrece is that of Venus and Adonis,
although the actors are reversed. This time the despoiler is a man, but
the poet is again preoccupied with the savagery of desire and the horror
of the lusting flesh. Once more he turns against the act in an extended
amplification of two lines from his preceding poem:

Call it not love, for love to heaven is fled,
Since sweating lust on earth usurpt his name.

To say that the "plot" of Lucrece, like that of its predecessor, may be
found in Ovid, scarcely explains why Shakespeare selected two such
similar subjects — unsuccessful seduction and hideously successful rape
followed in both cases by death — nor does it account for the intensity-
Intense Lucrece is, whatever its other failings* It is verbose, almost ten
times as long as Venus and Adonis; it is too ingenious, too flashy. At
the moment of crisis it relies on dialectics instead of drama. It whips up
emotion and flogs rhetoric to death. But, in the midst of casuistical
argument and discourses on Night, on Time, on Opportunity, written
(said Edward Dowden) "as if they were theses for a degree in some
academy of wit," there are moments of agonized passion and lines which
suggest the mastery to come. The major music sounds in:

For sorrow, like a heavy-hanging bell,

Once set on ringing, with his own weight goes.

But the leading motif is the betrayal of the body, the tragedy of
headlong concupiscence. The "piece of skilfull painting" showing the

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

bloody fall of Troy, a consequence of Helen's rape, is the excuse for an
almost interminable homily whose text is:

Had doting Priam checkt his son's desire

Troy had been bright with fame and not with fire.

Here, where the accent is again on reckless lust, the poet breaks
through the tapestry.

Shortly after the publication of Lucrece, Southampton came of age,
and it is said that he celebrated the event by making Shakespeare an
outright gift of a thousand pounds, a sum equivalent to about fifty
thousand dollars today. Unfortunately for the definitive biography, the
amount has never been proved, but it is undeniable that the Earl was
bountiful. With this endowment, or with money he had saved as actor
and playwright, Shakespeare bought a profitable interest in the Lord
Chamberlain's company with which he had been connected. From that
time on he devoted himself almost exclusively to the stage. The poet
was transcended and, to some extent, depersonalized by the playwright.

The printers were loath to relinquish so certain a source of profit;
besides the demand for pirated plays, there was a still larger market
for poetry, especially Shakespeare's poetry. Accordingly, five years
after the success of Lucrece, an enterprising publisher got together,
by bribery, cajolery, or outright larceny, an anthology of songs, sonnets,
ballads, and madrigals. The tide was The Passionate Pilgrim; the year
was 1599; the author's name was given as William Shakespeare. Ac-
tually there were several contributors, including Marlowe, Barnfield,
and Griffin, for the collection was an anthology similar to others put
out during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Only five of the
twenty poems can be assigned definitely to the poet whose name
appeared upon the tide page. "Did not the heavenly rhetoric of thine
eye," "If Love make me forsworn, how shall I swear to love?" and "On
a day (alack the day)" were from Love's Labour's Lost; 'When my
Love swears that she is made of truth" and "Two loves I have, of com-
fort, and despair" had been circulated privately among Shakespeare's
friends and were to find their place among the later sonnets. Shake-
speare's name was evidently enough to insure the sale of any volume.

There is no mention of Stratford in the Shakespeare records from
1585 until 1596, In that year one of the twins, Hamnet, died at the age
of eleven. Shakespeare, now thirty-two, must have returned to his
birthplace for the burial of his only son and also to comfort his father,

LIVES OF THE POETS

who was in trouble. He not only settled his father's debts but restored
his father's prestige; he saw to it that John Shakespeare obtained the
coveted coat of arms for which he had dubiously applied twenty years
earlier and which now gave him the right to call himself "Gentleman."
The following year the family's status was further advanced when
Shakespeare purchased the second largest house in Stratford, a house
called New Place, originally built by Sir Hugh Clopton during the
reign of Henry VIII.

In his thirties Shakespeare could consider himself fortunate. His
increasing popularity as playwright was accompanied by an equally
successful career as a shrewd investor. He took over some property in
adjacent Shottery, his wife's former home, in 1602, and increased his
Stratford holdings by acquiring a large tract of one hundred and
seven acres of arable land. In the same year he "protected" New Place
by buying the plot opposite, which consisted of a large cottage, barns,
orchards, and gardens. He was a shareholder in two theatrical com-
panies and also part owner of the new Globe Theatre when, at forty-
one, he paid four hundred and forty pounds for half the tithes (taxes
originally collected by the church) of Stratford-on-Avon and half of all
the tithes collected in Old Stratford, Welcombe, and Bushopton. This
yielded interest of sixty pounds a year, a return of almost 1 5 per cent,
an excellent investment not only financially but socially when Shake-
speare the actor gave up his "shabby trade" to become the leading
citizen of Stratford.

He continued to invest his money until a few years before his death.
Nearing fifty he bought more real estate — a London dwelling house in
the residential district of Blackfriars — but this time he had three friends
enter the transaction as trustees, evidently to prevent his wife's having
any claim upon the property as part of her dower rights. Although his
only son had died, he still hoped for a male grandchild to bear his name
and continue the line. His daughter Susanna, who had married Dr.
John Hall in her twenty-fourth year, was the mother of a daughter,
Elizabeth, but there was still hope of a son; his younger daughter,
Judith, was to become the wife of Thomas Quiney. The terms of
Shakespeare's will make it apparent that the careful investor constantly
planned for the inheriting male descendant who never came.

Meanwhile Shakespeare continued to act, revise, and write the plays
which were to bring him the fortune he sought and the fame for which,
as a practical playwright, he cared nothing. For almost a quarter of a
century the theater was his life; he enjoyed as well as created its

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

comedies and tragedies. Comedy was his favorite medium for years.
Those who think of Shakespeare only as the creator of such dramas as
Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear, a forbidding monolith, the Great
Stone Face of Tragedy, forget that almost half his work was playful,
lighthearted, full of youthful badinage and ribaldry. The comic spirit
rollicks through The Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It, Twelfth
Night, The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer
Night's Dream. Shakespeare's fondness for horseplay is manifest not
only in a combination of physical burlesque and verbal jugglery but
in his addiction to the most outrageous puns and characters whose very
names are plays on words which suggest their attributes: Malvolio;
Aguecheek; Falstaff; Toby Belch; Pistol; Hotspur; La Vache; Dogberry;
Abhorson; Starveling; Touchstone; Justice Shallow; Doll Tearsheet, a
whore; Dull, a constable; Froth, a foolish gentleman, Costard, a clown;
Pinch, a schoolmaster; Bottom, who logically becomes an Ass.

Making the most of what was common to all healthy-minded human
beings, Shakespeare felt no shame and concealed nothing. Loose
language was relished by Elizabethan women as well as men, and
Shakespeare shared the public taste. He matched heights of nobility
with depths of degradation and contrasted the last note in lyric ecstasy
with unlimited vulgar clowning. The exquisitely poignant Romeo and
Juliet opens with rowdy jokes about maidenheads; the horror of
King Lear's madness is accentuated by a speech packed with images of
copulation; the tragic progress of Hamlet is intensified by teasing
double meanings — the mounting tension before the play-within-a-play
is increased by Hamlet's bawdy badinage with the chaste Ophelia, while
in her song ("Tomorrow *s Saint Valentine's Day") Ophelia loses her
sense of decency as soon as she loses her sanity.

The comedies are naturally more concerned with jokes about sex, a
matter which preoccupied and disturbed Shakespeare. Troilus and
Cressida is composed of wantonness and witchery. There is much ado
with pre-wedding jokes in Much Ado About Nothing. The Taming of
the Shrew is a prolonged game of cross-purposes. Seemingly a tract
against incontinence, Measure for Measure develops into a plea for
leniency toward lechery — 'Why, what a ruthless thing is this: for the
rebellion of a codpiece to take away the life of a man!"

Although there is no way of confirming it, Shakespeare's genius for
the jocular must have extended into his personal life. There is an
amusing though perhaps apocryphal anecdote involving Shakespeare
as a rival in an amorous adventure. Richard Burbage, the leading actor

LIVES OF THE POETS

of the company, was a great favorite, especially with the women. After
a magnificent performance of King Richard the Third, a lady made an
appointment for him to visit her that night. Shakespeare heard the
conversation and, as related in John Manningham's diary, "was enter-
tained, and was at his game ere Burbage came. The message being
brought that Richard Third was at the door, Shakespeare caused
return to be made that William the Conqueror came before Richard
the Third."

More diverting and certainly more persuasive are the tales of bouts
of wit between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. According to Rowe, the
friendship began "with a remarkable piece of humanity and good
nature. Mr. Jonson, who was at that time altogether unknown to the
world, had offer'd one of his plays to the players, and the persons into
whose hands it was put, after having turned it carelessly and super-
ciliously over, were just about returning it with an ill-natured answer
that it would be of no service to their company. Shakespeare lucidly
cast his eyes upon it and found something so well in it to engage him
first to read it through, and afterwards to recommend Mr. Jonson and
his writings to the public." Jonson was not unnaturally grateful to his
sponsor and, though he found fault with Shakespeare for his facility
and his refusal to obey the unities and other rules of classic drama,
he never failed to praise the man who was often extolled while he
himself was neglected — "I lov'd the man, and do honour his memory on
this side idolatry." Shakespeare not only saw to it that the Lord
Chamberlain's company produced Jonson's Every Man in His Humour
but acted in it — the playbill announced Shakespeare as one of the
principal comedians — and some years later when Jonson's Sejanus
was given, Shakespeare and Burbage were listed as "principal trage-
dians*"

Thomas Fuller's History of the Worthies of England is the authority
for a picture which, although presented almost half a century after
Shakespeare's death, has the feeling of sympathetic if not exact portrai-
ture. "Many were the wit-combats betwixt him and Ben Jonson, which
two I beheld like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war —
Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in learning, solid
but slow in his performances; Shakespeare with the English man-of-
war, lesser bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack
about and take advantage of all wind, by the quickness of his wit
and invention/' The quickness of that wit is illustrated by another
(also possibly fanciful) story that, after the christening of one of

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Jonson's children, Shakespeare, who was the godfather, seemed in a
deep study. Asked whether he felt melancholy, Shakespeare, who had
been twitted for his lack of learning, replied, "No, Ben, not I; but I
have been considering what should be the fittest gift to bestow upon my
godchild, and I have resolved at last." "I prithee what?" inquired Jon-
son. *T faith, Ben, Til give him a dozen good Latin spoons — and thou
shalt translate them."

In 1609 there appeared a book called Shakespeare's Sonnets. It
carried a dedication so ambiguous that it has remained one of the great
literary enigmas.

TO THE ONLIE BEGETTER OF

THESE INSUING SONNETS

MR. W. H. ALL HAPPINESSE

AND THAT ETERNITIE

PROMISED

BY
OUR EVER-LIVING POET

WISHETH

THE WELL-WISHING

ADVENTURER IN

SETTING

FORTH

T.T.

Centering about the interpretation of the phrase onlie "begetter and
the identity of "Mr, W. H.," innumerable battles have raged over this
dedication. Scholars have also differed violently concerning the dates
of composition, the arrangement, the "plot," and the subject matter of
the sequence — if it is a sequence. One school believes that the sonnets
are to be regarded as indirect but indubitable autobiography, compact
expressions of the poet's emotional entanglements; another school con-
siders the fourtecn-line stanzas skillful variations and exercises in a
form which was popular at the time.

The signature of 'T.T." is known to be that of Thomas Thorpe, a
piratical publisher, and it has been thought that Thorpe may have
been thanking "Mr. W, H." for having persuaded the holder of the
manuscript (perhaps the person to whom the sonnets were addressed)
to part with them, or for having purloined or otherwise procured them*
In such a case "Mr. W. H/' was the "begetter" in the sense of

LIVES OF THE POETS

procurer or actual "getter/' and was in no sense the personage addressed
in the poems. If the dedication was not Shakespeare's, if (as is
generally conceded) Shakespeare had no hand in the publication, "Mr.
W. H." (the publisher's thief) is anybody except Shakespeare's friend.

But in the commonly accepted sense begetter meant "inspirer"; more-
over the publisher (according to the more orthodox reading) was
dedicating the book to the one person responsible for its creation, the
"onlie" inspiration. The critics fight with especial fury as they submit
their candidates for this high office. The chief conflicting claims may be
summarized as follows:

Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. Southampton seems to
be the logical claimant because of the history of Shakespeare's intimacy
with his patron, emphasized by the intimate tone of the dedication of
Lucrece. The printer's dedication of the sonnets to the inspirer is a
recognition of the "begetter's" position; it is fittingly respectful, a senten-
tious address to a person of rank and culture. But is this consistent with
"Mr."? And Henry Wriothesley's initials were not "W. H." Neverthe-
less, Southampton adherents point out that many of the sonnets are
only too revealing, and that the transposed initials furnished a valid
clue in a day when acrostics and anagrams were a disguise as well as a
diversion. Furthermore, they make much of the fact that the initial
sonnets urge the youth to wed so that his beauty lives on in his children
and that Southampton had refused to marry anyone, even the grand-
daughter of the powerful Lord Burleigh.

William Herbert, afterward Earl of Pembroke. The claims in this
case are based on Herbert's initials, on his rank, his reputed handsome-
ness, and on the sixteen years' difference between his age and Shake-
speare's. Furthermore, it has been discovered that he was also a young
bachelor, reluctant to marry a daughter of the Earl of Oxford, and that
his friends were urged to persuade him to make the alliance — which
may (if the hypothesis is correct) account for the opening set of sonnets
recommending marriage. The Herbert faction goes so far as to claim
that Mary Fitton, die Queen's maid of honor and subsequently
Herbert's mistress, was the "dark lady" who delighted in mischief and
the double dealing chronicled by the sonneteer. Unfortunately, proof
exists of Mary Fitton's lack of raven eyes, dark hair, and perilously
"black" beauty.

William Hughes (or Hews). Here the case rests entirely on puns:
on Will (particularly in sonnets 135 and 136) and on Hws in sonnet
20, with its extravagant tribute to "the Master-Mistress of my passion*"

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Tyrwhitt conjectured that, since there was no record o£ anyone by such
a name, William Hughes was an unknown young man whose looks
and demeanor endeared themselves to the poet. Oscar Wilde, in his
entertaining "The Portrait of Mr. W. H.," invented Willie Hughes,
"a wonderful boy-actor of great beauty," whose feminine charm was
the "seemly raiment" of Shakespeare's heart and whose thespian range
extended from Rosalind to Juliet, from Beatrice to Ophelia, an art
supposedly extolled in the lines:

What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strong shadows on you tend?

But one must make allowances for Wilde's idiosyncracy in taste, and
one must remember that the crucial pun may not be a pun at all, but a
literal use of will, or will in the sense of "desire,"

There have been other nominees for the office of "W. H." Among
them the researcher encounters William Hunnis, a member of Eliza-
beth's chapel royal; William Hammond, to whom Middleton dedicated
a play; William Hall, an impecunious printer; and William Harvey, who
was Southampton's stepfather. It has even been ingeniously suggested
that the masked "Mr. W. H/' might be no one else but the author,
literally "the onlie begetter," namely 'William Himself." But specula-
tion becomes so wayward that we are glad to return to the sonnets
themselves. Rather than seek actual dramatis personae one might
regard the sonnets as a loosely organized parable, an allegory of Carnal
Passion contending with Romantic Love — the more so since Keats
insisted "Shakespeare led a life of allegory, and his works are the
comments on it/'

Certain interpreters have worked out an ingenious plan that presents
the sonnet sequence as a coherent drama with a few missing "links/'
According to this scheme, the poet adores a young and noble friend,
his "better angel," from whom he is separated by a woman, "the worser
spirit," and there is an eventual reunion in which love not only con-
quers tribulations but time. The clue to this interpretation is in the
sonnet beginning:

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman coloux'd ill.

LIVES OF THE POETS

To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.

No completely satisfactory arrangement of the sequence has ever
been proposed; it is not even certain that all the sonnets expressing the
poet's trials, despairs, and triumphs were written to the same man.
However, a shadowy if scarcely continuous story emerges, confused by
the likelihood that Shakespeare never intended the sonnets to be ar-
ranged in the order in which we have them. The first group, addressed
to an unusually beautiful youth, calls on him to marry, not for passion
but for posterity — to perpetuate his April beauty through children who
will inherit it — for the poet can promise him immortality only in his
verse. Travel separates die two companions, and the poet is downcast.
He falls into unhappy speculations, feels deeply bereaved, fearful,
jealous, disillusioned, faintly hopeful. For a while he sinks into gloom.
There is a rival poet, whom some have identified with Marlowe, others
with Chapman, and, worse, a mysterious lady (apparently the poet's
own mistress) who has either seduced his friend or has been seduced
by him. She is in no way "fair," either in conduct or complexion,
according to the standards of the day. On the contrary, she is alto-
gether "dark/7 black-haired, raven-eyed, married, tyrannously alluring,
and congenitally unfaithful. Her skill and lawlessness cause an es-
trangement between the writer and his friend, but the poet loves the
youth above all and is willing to surrender everything to him*

Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all —

Finally there is a reawakening and reconciliation — error has tested
enduring friendship — and the series concludes with two sonnets which,
anticlimactic and out of key (being variations on a Greek epigram),
recapitulate the idea:

Love's fire heats water, water cools not love.

Since the major portion of the sonnets reflects the intense devotion
of an older for a younger man, many annotators have felt it necessary
to explain if not apologize for the attachment They stress the Renais-
sance custom of passionate male friendships and cite the intimacy

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

between Michelangelo and Cavalieri, Philip Sidney and Languet,
Montaigne and Boetie. For example, the Victorian Beeching, faced
with the intimacy of Shakespeare and the object of his affection who
may also have been his patron, goes to some length to find a parallel in
the case of the strange friendship between the poet Gray and the Swiss
youth Bonstetten. "If I may put quite shortly what I conceive to be the
peculiar type of this affection," Beeching adds cautiously, "I should
say it was a type not uncommonly found in an imaginative nature."
The platonic ideal of a romantic friendship between men is a salient
feature of Shakespeare's plays. J. Dover Wilson points out how large
a proportion of the dialogue in Shakespearean comedy is taken up with
the business and badinage of young men, and he sees Shakespeare's
intimates reflected in the loving companionship of such young blades
as Mercutio, Romeo, and Benvolio; Berowne and Longaville; Antonio
and Bassanio; Petruchio and Lucentio.

As early as the first century Pliny told of the close friendship between
Alexander the Great and the painter Apelles, a mutual fondness which
was imperiled by Campaspe, the ruler's favorite concubine, said to be
the model for the sculptured Venus Anadyomene. Alexander gave her
up to the painter, his affection for Apelles being greater than his love
for the woman. John Lyly, Shakespeare's contemporary, used Pliny's
plot for his own Alexander and Campaspe; Shakespeare took the situ-
ation and varied the denouement in Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Whether or not the beautiful youth was the glorification of a flesh-
and-blood individual or a still more lovely fiction, the sonnets carry
various implications. There are many curious digressions, seemingly
irrelevant but revealing lines wrung from the heart, passages that tend
to confirm those who consider the poems autobiographical.

Sonnet 36 is unquestionably a personal disclosure. There is a poign-
ant concern for full acknowledgment, but this is countered by an
embarrassing self-abasement and fear of scandal.

Let me confess that we two must be twain,
Although our undivided loves are one:
So shall those blots that do with me remain,
Without thy help, by me be borne alone . . .
I may not evermore acknowledge thee
Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame,
Nor thou with public kindness honour me,
Unless thou take that honour from thy name.

LIVES OF THE POETS

Sonnets no and in reveal another side of Shakespeare, a view dis-
closed nowhere else. Here is the confessed contempt for his profession,
a disgust which may account for the later retirement from the stage;

Alas, 'tis true I have gone here and there,

And made myself a motley to the view,

Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,

Made old offenses of affections new . . .

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,

And almost thence my nature is subdued

To what it works in, like the dyer's hand:

Pity me then, and wish I were renew'd.

Wordsworth was among those who believed that the sonnets solved
the puzzle of Shakespeare's personality. 'With this key/' wrote Words-
worth confidently, "Shakespeare unlocked his heart." To which Brown-
ing rejoined: "Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!" And
Matthew Arnold, in an apostrophe to the Bard himself, suggested that
Shakespeare's secret was inscrutably his own:

Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask. Thou smilest, and art still,
Out-topping knowledge.

Sonnet sequences were in fashion throughout the Elizabethan period.
Jonson's Every Man in His Humour cites the fashionably melancholy
(affected, sophisticated) person who can "take pen and paper presently,
and write you your half score or your dozen of sonnets at a sitting."
By the time Shakespeare cultivated the form, the sonnet had become
a fourteen-line parade of paradoxes. Feeling was too often lost in a de-
liberate display of wit; metaphorical virtuosity culminating in a cadenza
of conceits demanded the sacrifice of genuine sentiment, a sacrifice
that too many poets were only too willing to make. Moreover, the sonnet
had been reduced to a formula, a catalogue of clichds. Trite figures
abounded — hot tears were always flowing to melt an icy heart — and
Shakespeare was not above using them. At his best, however, he either
turned the stock shopworn patterns into energetic life or turned away
from them entirely. Although he spoiled the effect of one of his most
effective protests by conceding a conventional ending, sonnet 130 is a
classic of parody, a brilliant burlesque that is also a realistic rebuke*

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

That in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

Shakespeare changed what had degenerated into a rigid pattern into
a fluid form; he gave it an almost conversational idiom which could
draw actual portraits instead of stuffed idealizations. Discarding a pre-
scribed diction, he made the sonnet alternately brusque and tender,
delicate and abusive, playfully punning and, without leaving the
spoken language, exalted. Love and loss, faith and deceit, the agony
of lust, the joy of music, and the therapy of poetry are the subjects
that serve as counterpoint to the shifting themes. The sonnets are not
all great by any means; uneven in quality, they sometimes lapse into
the very exaggerated rhetoric Shakespeare scorned. But most of them
have the magic of inspired improvisation. One cannot doubt the spon-
taneous speech any more than one can question the depth and inten-
sity of sonnets that begin: 'When I consider every thing that grows/'
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," "Devouring Time, blunt
thou the lion's paws," 'When in disgrace with fortune and men's
eyes," "Full many a glorious morning have I seen," "When to the
sessions of sweet silent thought," "Not marble, nor the gilded monu-
ments," "Tired with all these, for restful death I cry," "That time of
year thou may'st in me behold," "Farewell! Thou art too dear for my
possessing," 'When in the chronicle of wasted time," "The expense of
spirit in a waste of shame," "Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth."

Here the poet is supreme. Yet, with the exception of such sonnets,
the poet is at his best in his plays, nine of which had been completed
before he was thirty. After the early histories and comedies, Shake-
speare's command of his medium is manifest in the increasing achieve^
ments of Mi4ch Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, Julius Caesar,
Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet. This group belongs to what has be-
come known as his lyrical period, and to it also belong the two parts
of Henry the Fourth, Henry the Fifth, and The Merry Wives of
Windsor, said to have been written at the behest of Queen Elizabeth,
who had been so amused by Falstaff that she wanted a whole play

LIVES OF THE POETS

written around him. Her judgment was keen, for, although the fat
knight is a lecherous fool, a shameless cheat, a transparent liar, a
drunkard, and a generally reprehensible scoundrel, he is more than
a mere character. He is a person, a completed individual, whole-
heartedly and outrageously himself. "I have more flesh than another
man, and therefore more frailty." Like the Wife of Bath, Falstaff holds
us by his very amorality, by his unrestrained exploitation of every
opportunity, good and bad, which the rest of us have learned to repress
but about which we continue to dream,

In common with Chaucer, Shakespeare took his plots wherever he
found them, and he found them everywhere. He did not scruple to
use stories and playscripts by his contemporaries, but he was fondest
of ransacking the past: Plutarch's Lives in Thomas North's translation,
Boccaccio's Decameron, Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England,
Scotland, and Ireland, Saxo Grammaticus' Danish History, Frangois de
Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques, Gower's Confessio Amantis, and that
remarkable compilation of racy stories and farfetched moral "applica-
tions/' Gesta Romanorum. Shakespeare was too busy a playwright to
be finicky about his sources. He transformed the scenes and situations,
put blood into the stock figures, and drenched the material in death-
less poetry as part of the day's work. It never occurred to him that
what he wrote for his audiences would pass from generation to genera-
tion. He wished that his poems, narratives and sonnets, might achieve
some sort of permanence; but he never bothered to preserve, much less
print, an "authorized" text of his plays, and he would have been as-
tonished to learn that the lines fashioned for short-lived performances
would go on living as literature. He might conceivably have hoped
that a few of his works might be adapted, following his own example,
for a changing world; but that his dramas should be "taught" in class-
rooms centuries after they were written could never have been imagined
by the greatest imagination of all time.

The vastness of that imagination provoked extremities of commen-
tary. Neglected for a hundred years, rediscovered in the eighteenth
century, Shakespeare has been engulfed and almost drowned in wave
after wave of pedantic scholarship. The bardolatry, which George
Bernard Shaw so vigorously but vainly assailed, assumed a new shape
when the plays were subjected to studies devoted to "problems" and
interpretations which imposed metaphysical meanings on straightfor-
ward speeches. Elizabethan audiences were unquestionably aware of

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

psychological involvements in the dramas, but their appreciation was
not marred by a lack of clinical analysis. That Shakespeare felt no need
to underline his subtleties is obvious in his choice of characters. Hamlet
is not the only "hero" tortured with doubts and indecisions. Macbeth,
Richard II, Angelo, Othello, Lear, Brutus, and even Claudius are men
whose minds are tragically divided, and it cannot be doubted that their
creator shared their excess of sensibility. Unlike his colleague, Ben
Jonson, who was sometimes his rival for public favor, Shakespeare was
truly nature's mirror; he reflected man's confused hungers rather than
his intellectualized humors. Jonson's characters were prompted and con-
trolled by ideas; Shakespeare's were rocked by ungovernable passions.
It was Shakespeare's incalculable powers of personifying the excesses
of sensibility — not merely the theatrical violences as inflated by Mar-
lowe— that put off Hamlet's immediate revenge, kept Macbeth from
unmitigated evil, and unfitted Richard II for rulership. Nowhere have
the accents of mournful mortality been so affectingly sounded as in the
resigned soliloquy in the third act of The Tragedy of King Richard the
Second:

Of comfort no man speak:
Let's talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs,
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
Let's choose executors and talk of wills . . .
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been depos'd, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have depos'd,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping kill'd,
All murdered. For within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king,
Keeps Death his court, and there the Antic sits
Scoffing his state, and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene
To monarchize, be f ear'd, and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh, which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable; and, humor'd thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and— farewell king!

LIVES OF THE POETS

For a while Shakespeare seems to have alternated between lyric
comedy, typified by the mischievous nonsense of A Midsummer Night's
Dream, and dramatized history, at its peak in the blazing patriotism of
Henry the Fifth, an epical subject treated in lyrical style. After this
the mood changed. The Merchant of Venice, intended as a comedy,
is a curious incongruity in which the figure of the stereotyped schem-
ing Jew becomes a dignified and wronged human being, a tragic spirit
surrounded by lighthearted lovers and irresponsible clowns. The holi-
day badinage of Twelfth Night is almost spoiled by the cruelties prac-
ticed on Malvolio, who begins as a fatuous buffoon and ends as an-
other wronged person. The so-called realistic comedies are even more
unpleasant. Bitterness increases and sexual nausea prevails in Measure
for Measure, as well as in Othello, Troilus and Cressida, and King
Lear. Lear in delirium raves about the prevalence of adultery — "The
wren goes to't, and the small gilded fly ... Let copulation thrive!"
In Troilus and Cressida Thersites reduces everything to scurrilous,
foul-mouthed derision; the guileless Troilus inveighs against woman's
infidelity; Pandarus, a disgusting go-between, lubricious as his name,
gibes at his ill-requited trade; the proverbially brave Achilles dwindles
to a sulky homosexual and a blustering coward; Ulysses, a realist con-
cerning lechery, recognizes the coy but common strumpet in Cressida:

Fie, fie upon her!

There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip —
Nay, her foot speaks, her wanton spirits look out
At every joint and motive of her body.
Oh, those encounterers, so glib of tongue,
That give accosting welcome ere it comes,
And wide unclasp the tables of their thoughts
To every ticklish reader! Set them down
For sluttish spoils of opportunity
And daughters of the game.

As in Troilus and Cressida, lust is the subject of Measure for Meas*
ure. Beginning in a troubled and almost tragic key, Shakespeare brings
the problem of incontinence to a serious impasse; then, faced with a
difficult solution Cor tired of the idea), forces the plot into a rigma-
role of contrivances and shamelessly tacks on a happy ending, a pair-
ing off of the principals as absurd as anything in Gilbert and Sillivan.
A single mechanical couplet suffices to make the saintly Isabella give

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

up the convent for the court. The early Comedy of Errors had dis-
played a rowdy reaction to the romantic aspect of sex, but the later
works express a really deep revulsion. Othello's lewd suspicions play
an ugly counterpoint to Emilia's sardonic comment on the coarse ap-
petite of men:

They are all but stomachs and we all but food.
They eat us hungerly, and when they are full
They belch us.

Such sentiments, emphasized by repetition, indicate a basic distaste,
an aftermath of disillusion and disgust. Repugnance is expressed
overtly in the early Venus and Adonis, covertly in the sonnets, but in
the later work it grows into a general weariness bitter to the point of
desperation. Shakespeare loathes not only the actor's trade — "I have
. . . made myself a motley to the view" — but the deceits of love, the
false promise of youth, and the corruption of age. "Tired with all these,
for restful death I cry." In his early forties Shakespeare was already
nearing the end of his creative life.

There were still a few major works to come. Two other Roman plays
followed Julius Caesar, The first, Coriolanus, in which Shakespeare's
dependence on North's Plutarch threatens to impede the action, is
another study of a divided mind. Coriolanus, professional soldier, is
sure of only one thing: the fickleness as well as the physical repulsive-
ness of the mob. While not as misanthropic as Timon of Athens,
Coriolanus is a cruel display of opportunism and partisanship with
scarcely a touch of poetry.

Antony and Cleopatra, a sequel to Julius Caesar, is its very oppo-
site, as it is also the opposite of Shaw's anticipatory sequel, the bril-
liantly intellectual and eminently reasonable Caesar and Cleopatra.
Suffused with a passion that both transfigures and destroys its royal
lovers, Antony and Cleopatra is a long aria of florid magnificence, a
sustained and superbly orchestrated ecstasy. Shakespeare's alchemic
genius may be seen at work in the way he uses his source, which again
happens to be Plutarch's Lives. In North's translation, Shakespeare
found this description of Cleopatra's barge afloat upon the river: 'The
poop was of gold, the sails of purple and the oars of silver, which kept
stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, hautboys, cithers,
viols, and such other instruments as they played upon the barge. And
now for the person of herself: She was laid under a pavilion of cloth-

LIVES OF THE POETS

of-gold of tissue, appareled and attired like the goddess Venus com-
monly drawn in picture; and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretty
fair boys appareled as painters do set forth god Cupid, with little fans
in their hands, with the which they fanned wind upon her."

Taking over this passage, altering only a few words, Shakespeare
had it spoken by the dazzled Enobarbus and transmuted North's silver
prose into the golden blank verse of:

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne,

Burnt on the water: the poop was beaten gold,

Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,

Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made

The water which they beat to follow faster,

As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,

It beggar'd all description: She did lie

In her pavilion (cloth-of-gold of tissue),

O'er-picturing that Venus where we see

The fancy outwork nature: on each side of her

Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,

With divers-colour'd fans, whose wind did seem

To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,

And what they undid, did.

The breathless love scenes between Antony and Cleopatra, Antony's
heart-shaking apostrophe to Eros, Cleopatra's unforgettable dying
speech — these are a few of the glories of an extended lyric, whose sub-
ject is the union of love and lust, triumphant in its very ruin.

In the remaining plays, the flame of Shakespeare's genius flares up,
flickers, and falls* A sense of evil or, at the least, a note of wickedness
underlines most of them, but its power is never as compelling as the
occasional surges of poetry. The tiresome inanity of Cymbeline is al-
most but not quite redeemed by two exquisite songs: "Hark! hark! the
lark" and "Fear no more the heat o' the sun." The Winter's Tale is
another drama conceived in the key of tragedy but completed as a com-
edy. Implausible, at times exasperating, and tedious in the reading, it
is a peculiarly playable play, a fantasy which justifies the storytelling
promise of its title. The terrifying grandeur and colossal weight of
King Lear make it hard for anyone to believe that the same hand that
wrought such a torrential tragedy had anything to do with the triviality

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WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, except for the rough brothel scenes and the
speeches of the archaic Gower, from whom much of the plot was taken.
The Tempest, generally considered Shakespeare's last play, is an en-
tertainment almost as delicate as the moonshine of A Midsummer
Night's Dream, but its idyllic enchantment is both magnified and
marred by Prospero, who acts like the traditional colonizer. Presented
as a lavish Master of the Revels, Prospero is a scarcely benevolent
despot, impatient with the sprite Ariel and brutal to his slave Caliban,
who is understandably resentful not only because of his master's
usurpation of the island but because of his manner of education:

You taught me language, and my profit on't
Is I know how to curse.

The Tempest is also notable for Prosperous final abnegation; his
valedictory address is usually taken to be Shakespeare's farewell to his
art and apparently to the world. A speech in the fourth act has the
accents of a resigned nobility which is easier to identify with its cre-
ator than with the speaker:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself —

Yea, all which we inherit — shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

In the fifth act Prosperous determination to give up his magic has an
even more definite note of Shakespeare's personal resolution:

. . , I have bedimmed

The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war. To the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak

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With his own bolt The strong-based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar. Graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here adjure, and when I have required
Some heavenly music — which even now I do —
To work mine end upon their senses, that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.

Before breaking his staff and drowning his book, Shakespeare quit
London. The friends he had and the diversions he enjoyed there were
apparently insufficient compensation for the never-ending complex of
work, the constant interruption of creative writing with irritating re-
hearsals, putting on one production while preparing another, and the
resulting tension which was routine in a repertoire company faced with
the necessity of producing fresh plays for short runs.

Nevertheless, Shakespeare's abrupt departure for Stratford has never
been satisfactorily explained. His early retirement — he was still in his
young forties — has given rise to countless speculations. It had been
conjectured that he was psychologically sick of London; that he was
physically ill; that the combined strain of writing the great tragedies
and acting in them was too much for him; that, like his misanthropic
heroes, he deliberately turned away from his fellows; that he had a
breakdown and barely saved himself from a complete collapse.

Whatever the truth may be, there is no doubt but that, except for
brief business trips to London, he remained in Stratford until the end.
Some of the last plays were probably composed there; but, after forty-
six, he seems to have stopped writing altogether. According to Rowe,
"the latter part of his life was spent, as all men of good sense will wish
theirs may be, in ease, retirement, and the conversation of his friends/*
This makes Shakespeare sound almost like an octogenarian nodding in
front of the fire with his cronies, an amiable dotard instead of a man
in the proverbial prime of life. Another account pictures him as an
influential force in the life of the community, whereas there is nothing
to indicate that he took any part in civic affairs. There are records of
actions against debtors, a joint petition opposing projected enclosures

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

of some common lands, a Chancery suit concerning the tithes, but
nothing else besides litigation until his last recorded act, the execution
of his will in March 1616.

The will, showing evidences of much correction and revision, was
unusually explicit. It left practically everything to Shakespeare's daugh-
ters and his sister; it provided for unborn grandchildren; it remembered
friends. New Place, two houses in Henley Street, and all other land
went to his older daughter, Susanna. Judith, his younger daughter,
received three hundred pounds (equivalent to about $15,000 today),
half of which was to be held in trust. His sister, Joan Hart, was given
twenty pounds, much wearing apparel, and a lifetime use of the house
she occupied. Money to buy memorial rings was to go to Stratford
friends and his fellow actors Richard Burbage, John Heminges, and
Henry Condell. Five pounds were left to each of his three nephews
(Joan's sons), twenty shillings to a godson, and ten pounds to the poor
of Stratford. There were gifts to the overseers of the will and a special
bequest of a large silver-gilt bowl to Judith.

With the exception of one item, all the rest — which included silver,
plate, linen, household goods, and other residue — was left to Susanna.
The one exception was the second-best bed, which was willed to his
wife, a provision inserted between the lines of one of the three large
parchment sheets. It has been argued that the interpolation of the second-
best bed has no significance, that, instead of being a satirical after-
thought, a slurring comment on married life, it was a sentimental
gesture — the best bed being customarily reserved for guests and the
second-best bed being the family bed. It has been further suggested that
no specific mention of Anne was necessary since, as his widow, she
would have a lifetime dower interest of one third of Shakespeare's
estate. But it has been ascertained that there was no such provision for
a widow's inheritance in Stratford, and, although there was such a
law in London, Shakespeare had taken steps to circumvent it by ap-
pointing guardians for the property purchased there. All that Anne
inherited besides the bed — at the best a symbol of dubious regard —
was the right to be housed in New Place, which, upon Shakespeare's
death, belonged to her daughter, Susanna. Taken together with the
ill-adjusted early marriage, the long separations, and hints of unpleas-
antness in the plays, the failure to add a single affectionate phrase
suggests anything but a happy union.

Death came a few weeks after the signing of the will; Shakespeare
died at fifty-two— ironically enough, on his birthday, April 2,3. The will

LIVES OF THE POETS

began with the stereotyped declaration that the testator was in perfect
health and memory, But Shakespeare's signatures (one on each of the
three pages) are extremely shaky and indicate a greatly debilitated
if not a dying man. The cause of death is utterly unknown. John Ward,
a seventeenth-century vicar of Stratford, reported that even in his re-
tirement Shakespeare continued to supply the stage with two plays
every year, and was therefore in touch with his colleagues. Ward went
on to say that he "had heard" a tale of fatal carousing: "Shakespeare,
Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and it seems drank
too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted." This
scarcely conforms to other accounts of Shakespeare's gentle sobriety —
it was acknowledged that he was not a roistering "company-keeper"
— and it is possible that the "fever" (if there was one) was the result
of a protracted illness which took a sudden fatal turn. However, his
son-in-law, Dr. Hall, kept voluminous notebooks and diaries, and there
is no mention of Shakespeare's illness or a reason for his demise.
Shakespeare's death, like much of his life, remains an unsolved mys-
tery. His body was placed inside the chancel rail of Holy Trinity
Church. An ornate marble monument with a portrait bust was erected
above the grave.

The sculptured bust has given rise to almost as much discussion as
the sonnets. It was executed by Gerard Cor Garratt) Janssen, an Anglo-
Dutch craftsman, who may have known Shakespeare — his shop was
near the Globe Theater — and who may have made the bust from
memory. Objections to the likeness vary from those who contend that,
since the face is expressionless, it must have been made from a death
mask, to those who reject the statue entirely — J. C. Squire termed it
"a pudding-faced effigy," and J. Dover Wilson, calling it "the scandal
of three centuries," scorned the "travesty" as "Jansscn's self-satisfied
pork butcher." Nevertheless, the Stratford bust is die only Shakespeare
portrait that can claim to be authentic — the Droeshut engraving re-
produced in the Folios was copied from it It is a stolid, somewhat
pudgy face that is presented by the monumental bust The forehead
is impressively high — Stephen Spender refers to its prevalence in class-
rooms as a "civilized dome riding all cities" — and the painter (or re-
toucher) who tinted the limestone gave the remaining hair a definitely
reddish tone. There is not the slightest trace of sensitivity or even
delicacy in the stony features. The flabby hand that holds a quill pen
might be that of an accountant rather than a poet.

The uninspired and uninspiring bust, the gaps, inaccuracies, and

104

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

contradictions in the record of Shakespeare's life, the absence of in-
formation regarding his personal experiences — all of these, plus a cer-
tain capriciousness, made many refuse to believe that the unlearned
boy from Stratford could have acquired Shakespeare's extraordinarily
informed, subtle, and overwhelming power. Those who insist that
Shakespeare was an obscure player paid for the use of his name have
gone to unbelievable lengths to support their theory, including an
incredible conspiracy of deception in which, contrary to the facts,
everyone maintained silence. The anti-Stratfordians have been many,
and their candidates have been numerous and surprising. A dozen
names — erudite nobles, titled dilettantes, university-educated scholars
— have been put forward as the real author of the works credited to
Shakespeare. Among the entries are Sir Francis Bacon, formerly the
favorite contender, by virtue of a supposed cryptogram; Edward de
Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, the leading nominee at the mo-
ment; William Stanley, sixth Earl of Derby, representing an upper-
class aristocratic clique with an exalted standard of culture; Christopher
Marlowe, from whom Shakespeare admittedly borrowed; George Peele,
Thomas Kyd, Robert Greene, and others who may have written parts
of the early plays; and two women, the intellectual Countess of Pem-
broke and Anne Whately, a clerk's misspelling of Shakespeare's wife's
name, which appears only as an entry in a parish register. Another
school claiming that Shakespeare could not possibly have written
Shakespeare discovered C"by code co-ordination") that his plays were
put together by a group which held meetings at the Mermaid Tavern
and combined the talents of Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, Walter
Raleigh, Henry Wotton, Christopher Marlowe, Lancelot Andrewes,
and assorted Rosicrucians — a kind of collaborative Shakespeare, Inc.
Those who believe that the poet-playwright was nothing more than an
illiterate actor from Stratford-on-Avon consistently fail to recognize
the essential quality which is the mark of the born writer — the inter-
play of information and intuition, of knowledge picked up God knows
where transformed through the magic of unpredictable but unquestion-
able genius.

Whether or not Shakespeare's works display (or disguise) his own
experiences, his delights, despairs, and final resignation, the man him-
self seems to have lived a life of complex paradox. Never in the history
of literature has there been so strange a union of genius and business-

105

LIVES OF THE POETS

man, of the superlatively natural creator, the accommodating workman,
and the small-town citizen. When he gave evidence in court, Shake-
speare described himself as "Gentleman, of Stratford-on-Avon," not as
poet. Unlike Jonson, he did not think it worth while to publish or
even supervise his works, and he would have been amused to see how
thoroughly his birthplace has become a center of the Shakespeare
industry.

The uncertainties surrounding Shakespeare's life extend to every-
thing which bears his name. It affects the very reading of his plays,
which, filtering through various editors, have come down to us in
strikingly different texts, Elizabethan theater-owners discouraged pub-
lication of their property; it was not good business to let the public
have printed copies of plays that were being performed or might be
revived, the more so since rival companies might well make use of
texts. Nevertheless, there was so much interest in Shakespeare's dramas
that they were issued from time to time, furtively and with little regard
for accuracy. Eighteen separate plays were printed in quarto-size book-
lets during Shakespeare's lifetime, although Shakespeare had no hand
and probably no interest in seeing them through the press. The quartos
were put together in various ways: by bribing actors who had scripts
of their parts and who filled in the rest from uncertain memory, by
getting possession of a prompter's book and combining it with the
actors' cues, by the employment of hacks who attended the perform-
ances and transcribed as much as they could get down in a kind of
rough shorthand. As might be expected, the result was a set of cor-
rupt and confusing texts.

Seven years after Shakespeare's death, two surviving actors of his
company, John Heminges and Henry Condcll, issued a volume of
thirty-six plays, including the eighteen which had been separately
printed. In the introduction to this First Folio, Heminges and Condell
asserted that they were righting the wrong done to Shakespeare's repu-
tation, that die public had been "abused with stolen and surreptitious
copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious
impostors." They went on to claim that the plays they now offered were
"cured and perfect of their limbs . . , as he conceived them. His mind
and hand went together; and what he thought, he uttered with that
easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers."
Nevertheless, the First Folio is unreliable. In spite of the assemblers'
assurances, it is full of typographical errors and inaccuracies; some of
the texts are "cut" or acting versions, eliminating whole scenes, while

1 06

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

others are plainly inferior to some of the later Quartos. The Second
Folio, issued nine years later, and the Third Folio, printed in 1666, are
not much better; the Fourth, published almost seventy years after
Shakespeare's death, not only preserves the major blunders of its prede-
cessors but adds several of its own.

Ever since the seventeenth century, scholars have been at work
amending corrupt readings and correcting faulty transcriptions. Their
carefully minute alterations and shrewd guesses have given us the text
we have today, but it will always remain a question whether this is a
text Shakespeare would have approved had he edited it himself. For
example, to cite one instance among hundreds, when Othello raves
against Desdemona in Act Four he cries, "Ay, there, look grim as hell!"
but in some texts, he reproaches her with "I here look grim as hell!"
If G. B. Shaw put us in his debt with his revealing prefatory essays,
what would we not give for an intimate preface by Shakespeare analyz-
ing Hamlet's metaphysics as well as his complex melancholy, explain-
ing the inconsistencies in the character of Cleopatra, telling how great
(or how small) a part he took in the collaboration of Sir Thomas More
and The Two Noble Kinsmen, whether he conceived the two parts of
Henry IV as a single drama or the second part as an afterthought that
became a sequel.

If Shakespeare cared nothing about presenting his work for poster-
ity, he was equally unconcerned about the matter of novelty or experi-
ments in technique. Refusing to be "different," he scorned stylistic
originality as a kind of pretension. He mocked the verbal extravagances
of Lyly and his high-flown Euphuists. Suiting the manner to the mat-
ter, Shakespeare preferred "russet yeas and honest kersey noes" to all the

Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,

Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,

Figures pedantical — these summer flies

Have blown me full of maggot ostentation.

He reinforced these lines from Love's Labour's Lost with an out-
spoken sonnet which, purporting to be an expression of love, is a de-
fense of his "dressing old words new" instead of tricking them out with
fancy gewgaws:

Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?

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LIVES OF THE POETS

Why with the time do I not glance aside

To new-found methods and to compounds strange?

Why write I still all one, ever the same,

And keep invention in a noted weed,

That every word doth almost tell mv name,

Showing their birth and where they did proceed? . . .

Shakespeare was too much interested in saying things to worry aoout
a new way of saying them. Moreover, he knew that even in its cus-
tomary dress ("noted weed") his verse disclosed his individual touch
— "every word doth almost tell my name."

This is especially true of die songs with which Shakespeare not only
embellished but pointed his plays. The words are straightforward and
direct, the common counters of ordinary speech — "bitter sky," "griping
grief," "warped waters," "stricken deer" — but in their context the simple
epithets are both vivid and inevitable.

Proof of Shakespeare's unaccountable craftsmanship might rest on
his songs, for some of the world's loveliest lyrics were introduced as
theatrical expedients. They were designed to emphasize a situation,
sustain a mood, create suspense, prepare an entrance with a flourish or
dose a scene with an effective cadence. Nevertheless the songs also
stand by themselves as small but superb achievements, uniting the
imaginative sense and the miraculous sound of poetry. Nothing can
surpass the verbal felicity of "Under the greenwood tree," in which
light vowel music serves to mock the New Learning which anticipated
the New Criticism by more than three centuries. "When that I was a
little tiny boy" is put in the mouth of a philosophic clown to bring
Twelfth Night to a whimsically human end. In its pathetic bawdincss
"Tomorrow is Saint Valentine's Day" underlines Ophelia's resentment
of her enforced virginity and her escape into a crude fantasy of sexual
fulfillment. The exquisite "O mistress mine, where arc you roaming?"
is a triumph of incongruity, sung by a fool for a boozing couple, Sir
Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguechcck, who top it off with a drunken
canon, "Take, O take those lips away" — which composers have favored
as a text for music more often than any other poem by Shakespeare —
concludes by turning a commonplace legal figure into a timeless sym-
bol of love. 'When daffodils begin to peer/' which begins so inno-
cently and grows so ribald, is appropriately sung by the amiable rascal
Autolycus. "Full fathom five thy father lies" is Ariel's wisp of melody,
a soft but macabre answer to young Ferdinand, wondering about his

108

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

father's fate. The two matching songs o£ spring and winter in Love's
Labour's Lost are contrasted with proper impropriety. The vernal and
amorous "When daisies pied and violets blue" scarcely bothers to con-
ceal an old pun about cuckoldry, while a forbidding chill is imme-
diately evoked with 'When icicles hang by the wall." All of April is
summoned by the daisies and the gold buttercups or "cuckoo-buds'*;
the larks, which punctually wake the plowman; the querulous turtle-
doves strutting in the loft; the girls getting their dresses ready for the
summer. And all of winter is evoked by poor, shivering Dick trying
to warm his fingers with his scant breath; Tom breathing hard as he
brings in the heavy logs under the icicles; the contrast between the
milkmaid with her frozen milk and Joan stirring her pot in the over-
heated kitchen, emphasizing the iron cold of the outdoors and the
steaming promise of the wine bowl spiced with roasted crab apples.

Apart from their employment as devices, Shakespeare's songs are
also songs for their own sake — it has been estimated that there are
more than four hundred allusions to music in the plays — and, even
without the aid of lutes and viols, the syllables make their own music.
Shakespeare may have conceived the lyrics as theatrical devices, but
they became incantations, heedless and almost artless enchantments,
weaving their spell with nothing more supernatural than the power of
transmuted vowels and consonants.

The unpremeditated magic inherent in the syllables extends to every
phase of Shakespeare's thought. What Shakespeare said cannot be re-
duced to a formula or a philosophy; he seems to have accepted con-
ventional moral standards without religious convictions. As a dramatist
he argued both sides of every question, concealing nothing. In the
depths of despondency Hamlet can still extoll mankind: "What a piece
of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In
form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an
angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The
paragon of animals!" Exactly the opposite note is sounded when Timon,
abjuring civilization, execrates humanity:

Timon will to the woods, where he shall find
The unkindest beast more kinder than mankind.
The gods confound (hear me, you good gods all)
The Athenians both within and out that wall.
And grant, as Timon grows, his hate may grow
To the whole race of mankind, high and low!

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LIVES OF THE POETS

Macbeth pronounces a greater pessimism than Timon; life, he con-
cludes, is nothing more than a "fitful fever":

a walking shadow; a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Hamlet's comforting faith that:

There's a divinity that shapes our ends —
is countered by Lear's disbelief in any protective deity:

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.

If Shakespeare believed in any system it was one built on modera-
tion, tolerance, and decency. In an age of private intrigue, political
treachery, and general turmoil, he upheld conservative law, natural
order, and harmony. Ulysses undoubtedly spoke for Shakespeare in a
speech which suddenly lifts the sordid Troilus and Cressida to an ex-
altation of balance and degree:

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And hark what discord follows! Each thing meets

In mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters

Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,

And make a sop of all this solid globe.

Strength should be lord of imbecility,

And tie rude son should strike his father dead,

Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,

Between whose endless jar justice resides,

Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

Then everything includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite,

And appetite, a universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce a universal prey,

And last eat up himself.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Even the most fanatic bardolator will concede defects in many of
the plays. The blemishes are obvious: plots that strain credulity, too
frequent reliance on ridiculously transparent disguises, women who fall
in love with other women masquerading in "the lovely garnish of a
boy/' discarded mistresses who take the place of wives with bed tricks
that could fool no one. On the other hand there are the startling and
profoundly disturbing insights, the constant awareness of tangled coils
of character, of unfathomable depths sounded in a unique combination
of plain speaking and symbolism. For the specialists, there are con-
tinual surprises and rewards in a study of Shakespeare's recurrent
themes, the associated word patterns, the many-leveled ambiguities and
interrelated clusters of images.

The general reader, however, will rejoice in the exciting progress of
the plays, in a reawakening appreciation of the power of language and
the infinite nuances of meaning and music. The world of Shakespeare
is one that is continually being explored. There the voyager will re-
discover himself and all humanity, its contradictory glories and ignobil-
ities — a world reflected in the writing of one who was the universal
dramatist, the mirror of mankind. We do not merely read a play by
Shakespeare, we become part of it. We can never encompass the uni-
verse he created; it contains us.

Ill

The Gilded Age

ArER THE ELIZABETHAN ERA the status of man, secure for cen-
turies, altered perceptibly and his stature began to shrink, Man's
superiority may have been disputed, but his vital place in the
scheme of things had been unquestioned. The Homeric world was
filled with inexplicable dangers and capricious dooms, but it was also
rich in vast and breathless possibilities. Man might be caught in the
web of Fate, but no one questioned that Fate thought him worth
catching. However else he was doomed, he was not doomed to insig-
nificance; a mortal might become a hero, a demigod, even a bright star
in some constellation that would bear his name forever. If man suffered
strange and sometimes tragic metamorphoses, so did his gods. Without
man, the universe was unthinkable.

Two thousand years later the sense of man's importance, without
which no great art can be achieved, was still maintained. The world
of Shakespeare, beset by continuous wars, confused by unpredictable
plagues and racked by hazardous changes, still counted on the interest
of its Creator. Man might well die for his God since his God had died
for him. Witches and devils were undoubtedly in this world, but so
were angels; and it did not diminish man's dignity to think it was for
him they fought. Earth was the center of the universe and man was

112

THE GILDED AGE

the natural ruler of earth. Man was "the beauty of the world, the para-
gon of animals."

Following Shakespeare, "holy" George Herbert was one of many
who were still convinced that all creation made obeisance to man,
ministered to his needs, and moved worshipfully about him. Herbert
declared confidently:

The stars have us to bed,
Night draws the curtain which the sun withdraws;

Music and light attend our head.

All things unto our flesh are kind
In their descent and being; to our mind

In their ascent and cause.

Even in Shakespeare's time there were signs of change which chal-
lenged his belief that man as well as the cosmos was sustained by a
harmonious government fixed by immutable decrees and established
by definite "degrees" — an interlocking order which included not only
the basic elements, the four "humors" and the hierarchy of angels, but
mankind's entire social system. In his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity,
Hooker had maintained that "obedience of creatures unto the law of
nature is the stay of the whole world," but this, too, was being ques-
tioned. There was a growing suspicion that man was not necessarily
a mere instrument of nature — that, on the contrary, he might learn
to be its master, not its slave.

Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, published six years after Shake-
speare's death, plunged deeply into man's conflicts with nature as well
as with himself. Psychology was at such odds with theology that, as
early as 161 1, Donne wrote that "the new philosophy calls all in doubt"
and that the strictly ordered universe was "all in pieces, all coherence
gone." It was time for a complete reappraisal, for a new adjustment of
the senses and the spirit, but it was still too early for the triumph of
science over superstition. It was an age which relied on alchemy no
less than on astronomy, on magic as well as mathematics, and it was
characterized by an ambiguous blend of traditional religious dogmas
uncertainly amalgamated with new scientific concepts.

It was, nevertheless, a beautifully gilded age if not an age of gold,
and its luster had not worn off while Jonson was alive.

LIVES OF THE POETS

Chronologically Jonson was an Elizabethan, but the tenor of his
thought and the self -contradictory qualities of his style are character-
istic of the literature of the succeeding century. His accomplishments
are equally paradoxical. Heavily erudite yet lively and even scurrilous
(as in Bartholomew Fair), satirically vicious and calmly logical, de-
terminedly classical but instinctively contemporary, he united oppo-
sites — at first reading he seems to be a congregation of craftsmen, a
school of playwrights rather than a single author.

Jonson's father was a minister who had suffered reverses, and the
boy Cwho had been born in 1572 and, although christened Benjamin,
was always known as Ben) was educated at Westminster School,
London, where he was instructed and greatly influenced by William
Camden, a notable antiquarian. Domestic finances prevented him from
attaining a higher education and he worked as a bricklayer for his step-
father, a master mason. It is uncertain how long this occupation lasted
— we know practically nothing of Jonson's life between the ages of nine-
teen and twenty-five. Sometime during that period he served as a sol-
dier in Flanders and it is said that he attended Cambridge, although
there is no evidence of his having gone to any college* Where he
acquired his enormous learning is a mystery, for he seems to have been
almost entirely self-taught. A clue is furnished by his association with
university-trained scholars and dramatists, for, in his twenty-sixth year,
he joined Henslowe's company as an actor, playwright, and, later,
director.

Jonson must have been writing long before becoming connected with
the theater, since in 1598, when he was twenty-six, he was praised
by Meres in Palladis Tamia, and in the same year Henslowe put on his
Every Man in His Humour with Shakespeare in the cast, A tempestu-
ous friend — Shakespeare's colleague as well as his antithesis— and a
vituperative foe, Jonson came near ending his life at the very time he
was enjoying his first success. In 1598, an otherwise auspicious year,
he quarreled with and killed a fellow actor, Gabriel Spencer. For this
he was condemned to be hanged, but he escaped the gallows at the

114

BEN JONSON

last moment through "benefit of clergy" — during his imprisonment
Jonson had become a Roman Catholic — and he was released. How-
ever, all his property was forfeited and his left thumb was branded.
Twelve years later he returned to the Church of England, and his
reconversion was so hearty that he is said to have drained the com-
munion cup as though he were swigging a tankard at the Mermaid
Tavern.

Jonson married early, but this did not inhibit him from having mis-
tresses, chiefly married women, who, he said, were more satisfactory
because they had more experience. Much of the time he lived apart from
his wife, and the intervals between long compositions were spent carous-
ing with his fellows. Arrogant, irascible, and obstinate, he fought with
the playwrights and feuded with the poets. But he was cherished by
Shakespeare, Bacon, Beaumont and Fletcher, Chapman and Donne,
appreciated by such patrons as the Sidneys, the Duke of Newcastle and
the Earl of Pembroke, and so idolized by Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling,
and other young poets that they called themselves "the tribe of Ben"
and made Jonson the first dictator in the history of English literature.

Hot-blooded in youth, he laid about him with slashing self-indul-
gence. The Poetaster and The Fountain of Self-Love, written while
he was still in his twenties, contain spiteful references to Dekker and
Marston, who were not only his associate playwrights but his friends.
Suddenly the tone changed. At thirty Jonson announced that he was
forsaking satire and abandoning comedy, which had become "so om-
inous" to his fortunes. For a while, he wrote historical tragedies, of
which only two dSejanus, His Fall and Catiline, His Conspiracy") have
survived.

Another reversal occurred in 1603, when Elizabeth was succeeded
by James L Jonson, conforming to the monarch's taste for spectacles
and light entertainments, composed a series of masques, which com-
bined elements of opera, ballet, pastoral comedy, allegory, and tableaux
vivants, as well as antimasques, which were fantastic, faintly grotesque,
and harked back to the Greek and Roman satires. These were enacted
in the houses of the nobility, and the performers were mostly titled
amateurs, whose elaborate costumes framed in massive scenes were
designed by Inigo Jones. It was no secret that the panoply of Jones
was awaited with more eagerness than the poetry of Jonson.

The plays by which Jonson is best remembered were done within a
decade. Between his mid-thirties and forties he wrote Votyone, or the
Fox, Ejncoene, or the Silent Woman, The Alchemist, and The Devil

115

LIVES OF THE POETS

Is an Ass. When Jonson was forty-four the king recognized his services
and gave him a pension. Although not formally appointed to the office,
Jonson became the first poet laureate; at least he was the first poet to be
rewarded not with a single grant but with a permanent annual stipend.
Charles I increased the pension and added "one terse of Canary Span-
ish wine" from the royal cellars.

At forty-five Jonson, like Shakespeare, tired of London and its daily
demands. He gave himself a long leave of absence and went to his
ancestral Scotland. There he remained a year and a half, formed a
close friendship with his host, the Scottish poet William Drummond
of Hawthornden, and was made an Edinburgh burgess. But his pros-
perous days were over. He was ill and his body, weakened by dissipa-
tion, no longer accepted every abuse without complaint. The burning
of his library was an added shock from which he never fully recovered.
Needing money as well as restored prestige, he returned to playwrit-
ing. It was a half-gallant, half-desperate attempt to re-establish himself,
but it was futile. Jonson was no longer in fashion; his creative gift had
thinned, and the plays failed. He tried to flourish the old flail of satire,
but it had no force; instead of vigorous indignation there was little
more than petty malice, especially evident in attacks on Inigo Jones,
another co-worker with whom Jonson had quarreled.

At fifty-three Jonson had a seizure which partially paralyzed him;
two years later he suffered a second stroke. He rallied sufficiently to
write half a dozen new plays during the ensuing nine years, but they
scarcely helped, financially or psychologically. He was a very sick and
thoroughly disappointed man when death relieved him in his sixty-
fourth year, August 6, 1637. His interment was not without honor,
Jonson was buried in Westminster Abbey and a terse but touching
phrase was cut in his tombstone: "O Rare Ben Jonson/'

Moody, cantankerous, but stubbornly honest, Jonson was both gen-
erous and insufferably vain. He was the first author to publish his own
Collected Plays, an unprecedented and, to many of his colleagues, an
unwarrantable thing to do. A fellow poet, Thomas Carcw, called at-
tention to his egocentricity in a pointed paragraph. After a dinner
during which Jonson praised himself at everyone's expense, Carcw
complained that "though Ben had barrelled up a great deal of knowl-
edge, yet it seemed he had not read the Ethics, which, among other
precepts, forbid self-commendation." Against this, there is Jonson's de-
votion to Shakespeare, who, though criticized by Jonson for a lack o£
moderation and classic discipline, was hailed by Jonson as greater than

1x6

BEN JONSON

"the merry Greek, tart Aristophanes, neat Terence, witty Plautus," and
acclaimed as the "beloved Master" who was "not of an age, but for
all time."

Today Jonson is respected but not loved, read with interest but with-
out excitement. A master of legerdemain, he does not possess the real
magic, the genius to transform. One has only to compare the way in
which Shakespeare (who, according to Jonson, suffered because he had
"small Latin and less Greek" and who "wanted art") could change a
group of fictional Romans in Julius Caesar into extraordinarily compli-
cated human beings, not confined to a source, time, or place, with
Jonson's Roman reconstruction in Sejanus, in which the characters are
no more moving than they are in Tacitus' Annals, where Jonson found
them. Most of the playwriting is too self-conscious, too eager to display
the author's erudition, while his fear of splendor and unrestraint, and
his insistence on the traditional "unities," ruin the dramas with an al-
most perverse preciosity.

It is the poetry that, like Jonson's fleshy countenance, suggests his
full manliness, his solid but always sensitive response, his alternation
of cautious wit and unreserved tenderness. The virulence of his anger
with mankind, his scornful laughter, and his painful disgust are for-
gotten in the music of a score of small but perfect poems. There are
few finer lyrics in the language than the much-anthologized but un-
withering "Drink to me only with thine eyes," "Queen and huntress,
chaste and fair," the affecting "Epitaph on Salathiel Pavy, a Child of
Queen Elizabeth's Chapel" — Salathiel Cor Salomon) having been a
boy actor in Jonson's company — "Still to be neat, still to be drest,"
"It is not growing like a tree," "Come, my Celia, let us prove," as well
as the less familiar but equally beautiful "See the chariot at hand,"
"Have you seen but a bright lily grow," "Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep
time with my salt tears," and the exquisite song (from The New Inn)
which is a minor miracle of thoughtful imagery and sheer limpidity:

It was a beauty that I saw

So pure, so perfect, as the frame
Of all the universe was lame,

To that one figure, could I draw,

Or give least line of it a law!

A skein of silk without a knot.

A fair march made without a halt.

117

LIVES OF THE POETS

A curious form without a fault.
A printed book without a blot.
All beauty, and without a spot!

HASHE AKD CAMPION.

The bitter taunt of irony echoes through the literature of the 15905;
Jonson's barb of ridicule was felt (and employed) by his fellows. It
rankles with a curious nonchalance in the work of Thomas Nashe
(1567-1601), who, like Jonson, could be both acrid and lyrical. Nashe's
rhetorical invectives earned him the title of "young Juvenal," but later
commentators, drawn to his rowdy burlesques, see him as an Eliza-
bethan Rabelais. In revolt against the approved polite conventions, fed
up with affected "courtliness" and "civility/* Nashe indulged in attacks
that were purposefully crude and corrosive. Passages in The Jsle of
Dogs, a lost play written when he was twenty-nine, savagely exposed
abuses in the state and, as a consequence, Nashe spent several months
in prison.

Nashe's prose was the very opposite of the sugary romances of Lodge
and Lyly, as well as the antithesis of his own verse. The Life of Jack
Wilton, said to have initiated the English picaresque novel, anticipates
the roistering naturalism of Defoe's Moll Flanders and is a streaming
rush of sordid and violent adventures, irresistible even in their ugli-
ness. Never as racy as his prose, Nashe's poetry does not fail to take
account of the contemporary scene; the London of hasty pleasures is
reflected against a background of plague and terror* No poem has ex-
pressed the mutations of time and the fragility of loveliness with simpler
finality than "In Time of Pestilence/' particularly in such lines as:

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 u$l

xx8

NASHE AND CAMPION

The most persuasive as well as the purest of lyrics are scattered
through the Elizabethan-Jacobean songbooks, which have been char-
acterized as "a body of literary work more precious to the English than
any other, apart from Shakespeare and the translated Bible." Many of
the contributors to these lyrical miscellanies were anonymous and have
remained unknown; but some of the poets included were Ben Jonson,
John Donne, John Webster, George Wither, Thomas Carew, and
Thomas Campion. Campion (1567-1620) was an entire anthology by
himself; he was composer as well as lyricist of four exquisite Books of
Airs. Little is known about the life of Campion; his work was forgotten
for three hundred years until it was rediscovered toward the end of
the nineteenth century. Campion studied law, but he was not called
to the bar. Instead, he seems to have taken a degree in medicine, for he
is cited as a "doctor in phisicke." Variously gifted, Campion wrote
masques, hymns, marriage odes, funeral dirges, a guide to musical com-
position, A New Way of Making Four Parts in Counterpoint, and a
critical treatise, Observations in the Art of English Poesy, which urged
a return to the classical, quantitative meters, and (queerly enough, for
a poet who reveled in rhyme) protested against "the vulgar and un-
artificial custom of rhyming."

It is as a poet-musician that Campion began and ended the career
by which he is remembered. A lutenist in youth, he had just turned
thirty when he collaborated with Philip Rosseter, a fellow musician,
in A Book of Airs; Campion wrote not only the lyrics for the first half
but all the musical settings. The success was immediate but, although
Campion published three other similar collections, he devoted himself
as much to medicine as to the muse. He explained the division with
characteristic modesty in the Fourth Book of Airs: "The apothecaries
have Books of Gold, whose leaves, being opened, are so light that they
are subject to be shaken with the least breath; yet, rightly handed,
they serve both ornament and use."

Campion's delicate and almost transparent lyrics are indeed so light
that they can be "shaken with the least breath," but, though they are
sheer enough to float, they have lasting substance* The wavering
rhythms and fluent rhymes of ''Give beauty all her right," 'There is
a garden in her face," "My sweetest Lesbia, let us live and love" (a
flexible paraphrase of Catullus' "Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus"*),
"Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet," "Kind are her answers,"
and the unrhymed "Rose-cheeked Laura, come" — all these and more
of Campion's might well have come from the cherished Books of Gold.

119

LIVES OF THE POETS

BEAUMONT AJS[D FLETCHER

Other lyrics of the period which acquired timelessness by being
countlessly anthologized were, like the Shakespeare songs, written as
interludes and musical "asides" by such dramatists as John Fletcher,
Francis Beaumont, John Webster, George Chapman, and John Ford.
The names of Beaumont and Fletcher have grown as inseparable as
those of the Brownings or, on another level, Gilbert and Sullivan, For
several years the two lived together in what was called "a perfect union
of genius and friendship/' sharing each other's cares, clothes, and the
same mistress. Beaumont (1584-1616), five years younger than Fletcher,
was an infant prodigy whose family was noble and whose future seemed
assured. He entered Oxford at twelve, and it was reported that he had
already written two roaring tragedies in imitation of Marlowe's Tarn-
burlaine and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Having studied law,
Beaumont became a member of the Middle Temple at fifteen; a few
years later he joined the inner circle of London playwrights as Fletcher's
valued partner. It is assumed that Fletcher was the creative force and
that Beaumont supplied the critical faculty — according to Drydcn, even
the arrogant Jonson frequently submitted his work to Beaumont for
censure, and "used Beaumont's judgment in correcting, if not contriv-
ing, all his plots." At least seventeen plays were written with Fletcher
before Beaumont's premature death at thirty-two.

John Fletcher (1579-162,5) outlived Beaumont by nine years and
was the most industrious playwright of the period. Son of a country
minister who became Bishop of London, he was born in the coastal
town of Rye. Educated at Benet College, Cambridge, Fletcher came to
London in his early twenties, consorted with the poets, and won favor
everywhere by virtue of his personal charm and professional talent. A
list of his principal works is, even in a fecund age, imposing. It shows
Fletcher to have been the sole author of sixteen playsj co-author with
Beaumont of seventeen or eighteen (including The Knight of the
"Burning Pestle and The Maid's Tragedy); and no less than fifteen in
collaboration with Thomas Middleton, Philip Massinger, William Row-
ley, and Shakespeare, who probably shared in the creation of The Two
Noble Kinsmen and King Henry the Eighth. Fletcher was planning

120

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER

other dramas in his favorite genre, tragicomedy, when he succumbed
to the plague and died in his forty-sixth year. Beaumont had been
buried in Westminster Abbey near Chaucer's grave; Fletcher was in-
terred in St. Saviour's, Southwark.

As a playwright, Fletcher is always the poet. The touch is light and
the tone lyrical; the lines move with grace, warmth, and spontaneity.
Although his range is not great, Fletcher had a definite influence on
his fellows as well as his followers. The plangent "Take, oh, take those
lips away," which first appeared in Fletcher's The Bloody Brother, was
changed only slightly when it reappeared in Shakespeare's Measure
for Measure; the lovely "Orpheus with his Lute/' (from King Henry
the Eighth*) formerly attributed to Shakespeare, is now credited to
Fletcher. Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess was the inspiration of
Milton's Comus; the fluent couplets of "The River God" suggested
"L* Allegro," and the lines beginning "Hence, all you vain delights"
were amplified in "II Penseroso." "Aspatia's Song" (from The Maid's
Tragedy^ is a model for innumerable little elegies as compact as epi-
grams:

Lay a garland on my hearse
Of the dismal yew;

Maidens, willow branches bear;
Say I died true.

My love was false, but I was firm

From the hour of birth.
Upon my buried body lie

Lightly, gentle earth.

Lyrics like these enriched their settings and made the gilt and tinsel
of the age look like pure gold.

121

VII

The Metaphysical Man

JOHN: DOMME

THE PENDULUM PLAY of fashion has seldom been more strikingly
demonstrated than by the changing reactions to a few writers who
altered the form and spirit of literature in the seventeenth cen-
tury, fell out of favor within a generation, sank out of sight for almost
three hundred years and, triumphantly restored, added a new dimen-
sion to twentieth-century poetry. Dryden, who disapproved of them, was
the first to suggest a term for the unaffiliated group when he wrote that
Donne "affects the metaphysics not only in his satires but in his amorous
verses.'*

Samuel Johnson borrowed the word metaphysical and applied it to
a school of poets who succeeded Donne. Johnson's censure was severe.
In the chapter on Cowley in his Lives of the Poets (1779) Johnson be-
trayed his irritation by saying that "the metaphysical poets were men
of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavor. But,
unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry they
only wrote verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial of the
finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect that
they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables." Johnson
then went on for almost twenty pages to show that the "metaphysicals"
had lost their right to the name of poets because "they cannot be said

12,2,

JOHN DONNE

to have imitated anything, neither nature nor life," and that, although
some "allow them to be wits," their wit was of a grotesque order, "the
most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together. . . . From
this account of their compositions," continued Johnson, "it will be readily
inferred that they were not successful in representing art or moving the
affections. As they were wholly employed on something unexpected and
surprising, they had no regard for that uniformity of sentiment which
enables us to conceive and to excite the pains and the pleasure of other
minds. . . . They wrote rather as beholders than partakers of human
nature; as beings looking upon good and evil, impassive and at leisure;
as epicurean deities, making remarks on the actions of men and the
vicissitudes of life, without interest and without emotion."

Reading the metaphysical poets today, such a judgment appears not
merely inaccurate and intolerant but incredible. It would seem that a
moving energy and ecstasy — an ecstasy heightened by anguish — must
have broken through to any reader. Yet critics echoed Johnson's stric-
tures and complained that the intellectual basis of the metaphysical poets
was so overemphasized, the vocabulary so overelaborate, and the figures
of speech so intricate that the central emotion was dissipated if not com-
pletely lost. As late as its 1940 edition, the Encyclopaedia Britannica
was still maintaining, in the words of Edmund Gosse, that though "the
influence of Donne upon the literature of England was singularly wide
and deep, it was almost wholly malign/'

It remained for the more "advanced" poets and critics of the twentieth
century to rescue Donne and re-establish the metaphysical poetry of
which he was the chief exemplar. It was recognized that the spirit in
which the metaphysical poets wrote was the modern spirit, violently
troubled but anxious to keep personal order in the midst of general tur-
moil, and that, instead of discarding feeling for intellect, these writers
felt with their minds and thought with their emotions. Moreover, the
metaphysical poets possessed, in the words of T. S. Eliot, "a mechanism
of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience." By the middle
of the twentieth century it had become a commonplace to say of Donne
and his followers that poetry had rarely achieved such an interfusion
of sensation and a dissection of the senses, so startling a union of rea-
soned emotion and passionate intelligence.

The chief metaphysical poets were the ingenious, whimsical but
"holy" George Herbert; the completely and often uncontrollably mystical
Richard Crashaw; the radiantly rapt, nature-worshiping Henry Vaughan;

123

LIVES OF THE POETS

the humble illuminator of the commonplace, Thomas Traherne; and,
leader and inspirer of all of them, the incisive and uniquely agitating
John Donne.

The life of John Donne was a long struggle between flesh and spirit,
between the delight in man's body, which is "his book/' and his soul,
which is the undecipherable mystery. As he grew older the intensity of
the conflict increased — Donne's was never a single-minded passion — he
was alternately sensual and austere, cynical and penitential. A prey to
every emotion, he was also emotion's clinical analyst. He was, by turns,
a gallant, a soldier, a man-about-town, a convert, an impassioned
preacher, and a flagellated human being. Izaak Walton, whose classic
Life was first published with the 1640 edition of Donne's Sermons,
spoke of Donne's progress from sense to spirit, from pagan licentiousness
to agonized purity, as a puritan's if not a pilgrim's progress; but recent
commentators have derived other meanings from Donne's abject self-
torture and his preoccupation with a death greater than mortal death.
More than with most, Donne's life is a key to his sharply divided work.

Born in London in 1573, John Donne was the son of a wealthy iron-
monger who had married the daughter of John Heywood, court musi-
cian, playwright, and nephew by marriage of Sir Thomas More, The
social background may have raised Donne's hopes of attaining a career
at court, but his upbringing was something less than patrician. Reared
as a Catholic in a deeply religious household, an alien Roman in a
land of Reform, he felt he had the blood of martyrs in his veins. He
himself said, "I had my first breeding and conversation with men of a
suppressed and afflicted religion, accustomed to the despite of death and
hungry of an imagined martyrdom." At thirty-seven he wrote about his
mother's people: "No family . . . hath endured and suffered more in
their persons and fortunes for obeying the teachers of Roman doctrine."
His education was consequently strict; as a child he was tutored pri-
vately, and was especially well grounded in Latin and French, At eleven
he entered Hart Hall at Oxford, where he stayed three years; at fourteen
he exchanged Oxford for Cambridge and became a student at Trinity
College. There, studying the logic of Euclid and the rapture of the
Spanish mystics, he discovered the split between ratiocination and di-
vination, between pure reason and pure faith.

At twenty, after studying law and being admitted to practice, Donne
abandoned his rigorous regimen. Although still adhering to Catholicism,
he departed from orthodoxy and emerged as a lighthearted adventurer,
a gay blade who was also a challenging poet. It was at this time that

124

JOHN DONNE

most of the half-sensual, half-cynical Songs and Sonnets were written,
as well as the Satires and the incongruously lusty Elegies. In his mid-
twenties Donne went abroad, chiefly on foreign service; with Essex at
Cadiz, he also visited the Azores, Spain, and Italy. On his return, he
became private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the
Great Seal.

It was in the Egerton household that Donne, at twenty-eight, with
every prospect in his favor, brought himself close to ruin. He fell in love
with Lady Egerton's young niece, Anne More, who idolized him. After
a brief affair, Donne eloped with and married Anne, an act which, lack-
ing family consent, was tantamount to abduction. Egerton was furious.
He not only dismissed Donne from his service but had him arrested;
the unhappy husband was kept in prison for several weeks, and it was
a year before the marriage was legalized. Meanwhile, Donne's situation
was desperate. He summed it up in a sentence to his mother: "J°rm
Donne — Anne Donne — Undone."

For the next decade the plight of the young couple was such that
Donne turned to all sorts of expedients. Harassed by poverty and
hounded by debtors, he wrote spasmodically, composed pious epistles
and, compelled by necessity and a growing distrust of the Roman Catho-
lic dogma, penned bitter pamphlets against the Papists. Finally, Egerton
forgave him and set aside an allowance for the support of his family.
The help, however, was meager, and Donne, dependent on charity, sank
into an abysmal depression. All chances of a career at court had van-
ished; the mere making of a living seemed more than he could manage.
He thought of suicide, the "scandalous disease of headlong dying/' He
often had, he confessed in Biathanatos, "a sickly inclination" for it.
"Methinks I have the keys of my prison in my own hand, and no
remedy presents itself so soon to my heart as mine own sword."

Nevertheless, Donne survived poverty, melancholy, and the wish for
release by death. He struggled along, inactive and brooding, for thirteen
years. At thirty-five it seemed that he might obtain a secretaryship to
Ireland, but nothing came of it Still seeking advancement, he com-
mended himself to various personages, but there was no response. There
were short periods of employment, a little travel, and further promises
that were not kept. From time to time, however, the poet was able to
fulfill his function, to continue the Songs and Sonnets, and compose
the first of the religious poems. At forty-two, after painful meditation
and years of indecision, Donne forsook the faith of his fathers and took
orders in the Anglican Church. James I, cognizant of Donne's tracts

125

LIVES OF THE POETS

aimed at converting Roman Catholics to the Church of England, made
Donne his chaplain. Lincoln's Inn accepted him as its preacher and the
following year, when Donne was forty-eight, he became Dean of St.
Paul's.

After a soul-searching struggle, Donne was now a famous preacher.
Comfortably established, he was a fairly prosperous man. But he was
scarcely a happy one. His wife, to whom he was passionately devoted,
had died in her thirties after giving birth to a stillborn infant. Donne
withdrew from the pleasures of the world and gave himself frantically
to preaching. Filled with remorse for the follies of his youth and for his
importunate treatment of Anne, he brooded over man's callousness and
his own recklessness. He believed he had, wrote Hugh I'Anson Fausset,
in John Donne: A Study in Discord, "dragged his wife away from case
to plunge her into poverty, and from life he had hurried her unsparingly
to death." He threw himself into his sermons and tried to liberate his
suffering in two series of religious sonnets, exaltations of sacred and
profane love. Walton summed up this period of Donne's life eloquently :
"He became crucified to the world and all those varieties, those imag-
inary pleasures, that are daily acted on that restless stage; and they were
perfectly crucified to him. . . » Now grief took so full possession of his
heart as to leave no place for joy. If it did, it was a joy to be alone,
where, like a pelican in the wilderness, he might bemoan himself with-
out witness or restraint, and pour forth his passions like Job in the days
of his affliction: *O that I might have the desire of my heart! O that
God would grant the thing I long for! For then, as the grave is become
her house, so would I hasten to make it mine also, that we two might
there make our beds together in the dark.' "

His health failed. A trip abroad gave him a short respite, but Donne
knew he was doomed. "I fear not the hastening of my death, and yet I
do fear the increase of the disease/' In his early fifties he meditated
much on man's precarious mortality. The meditations grew into a series
of "Devotions" which were a cross between sermons and essays. They
were presumably written to help the afflicted, yet they were intended
not so much for the caution and comfort of Donne's listeners as for his
own consolation. Read as a whole, the pages form a record of Donne's
illness. Each "Devotion" is preceded by a "motto" which gives it the
character of a diary: "The Patient takes his bed"; "The Physician is
sent for"; "I sleep not day nor night"; "From the Bells of the Church
adjoining I am daily remembered of my burial in the funerals of others";
"Now this Bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die,"

126

JOHN DONNE

Although Donne tried to bury himself in the "Devotions," he survived
them by some eight years. But his vitality was ebbing — he said he had
"to pay a fever every half-year as a rent for my lif e" — and he collapsed in
his fifty-seventh year, the very year in which he was to have been made
a bishop. He knew he would be a long time dying, but he prepared
himself for dissolution. He had macabre fancies which grew increas-
ingly morbid. He posed for a funeral statue which was set up in St.
Paul's. He had himself painted in his shroud, his eyes shut, his lips
closed, as though he were already in rigor mortis, and, when the picture
was finished, he kept it at his bedside, "his hourly object until his
death." He died on March 31, 1631, and was survived by six of his
twelve children.

While Donne was alive, his verse was widely circulated in manu-
script, but only two poems are known to have been published during
his lifetime — two elegies on Elizabeth Drury: "An Anatomy of the
World" and "Of the Progress of the Soul." The first edition of his
poetry, a haphazard collection, appeared after his death. Even at that
time Donne suffered from the extremes of praise and prejudice which
dogged his reputation for three hundred years until he was rapturously
rediscovered. Donne's continual conflict between anxious hope and
worldly disillusionment made him as characteristic of our age as of his.
It is significant that, three centuries after his death, one of the most
impassioned of contemporary novels, Ernest Hemingway's For Whom
the Bell Tolls, owes its title as well as its central theme to one of Donne's
almost unnoticed "Devotions." In 1942, the forgotten words of Donne's
seventeenth-century sermon were charged with new meaning:

No man is an Hand, intire of itself; every man is a peece of
the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod be washed away
by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie
were, as well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine own
were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved
in Mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.

During the three-hundred-year interval Donne had been neglected or,
when considered at all, condemned for his "misspent learning and ex-
cessive ingenuity," his "farfetched allusiveness," and his coruscating

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brilliance "which elicits amazement rather than pleasure." In The Eng-
lish Poets, a famous nineteenth-century compilation, Thomas Humphrey
Ward spoke of Donne's "pyrotechnic display" and complained that "we
weary of such unmitigated cleverness, such ceaseless straining after nov-
elty and surprise."

Such comments, typical of their times, showed the misapprehensions
by which Donne was judged. No attempt to define the position of
Donne or the precise quality of the metaphysical poets was satisfactorily
made until recently, when Sir Herbert Grierson wrote an introduction
to Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century. "Meta-
physical poetry," said Grierson, "is a poetry which, like that of the
Divina Corn-media and the De Natura Rerum and perhaps Goethe's
Faust, has been inspired by a philosophical conception of the universe
and the role suggested to the human spirit in the great drama of exist-
ence. These poems were written because a definite interpretation of the
riddle . , . laid hold on the mind and imagination of a great poet, uni-
fied and illumined his comprehension of life, intensified and heightened
his personal consciousness of joy and sorrow, of hope and fear, by broad-
ening their significance, revealing to him in the history of his own soul,
a brief abstract of the drama of human history."

Metaphysical poetry is primarily what the term implies — beyond phys-
ics. Since, by its psychological nature, it unites thought and feeling, it
combines opposites; it luxuriates in paradoxical figures of speech, inten-
sification of images, and a stretching of the metaphor to unprecedented
lengths. Mortality is often suggested by the macabre — illumination and
horror are simultaneously achieved in Donne's "bracelet of bright hair
about the bone" — and shock is immediately registered when (in "Love's
Exchange") love is equated with a devil and (in "Twicknam Garden")
with a spider,

. . . which transubstantiates all
And can convert manna into gall.

By nature complex and questioning, such poetry puzzles in its habit
of probing and plunging. It often struggles through dark and tortuous
mazes, feeling its way through labyrinths of thought. However, just
when the reader fears he is lost and the poet seems to have passed be-
yond the borders of expression, he emerges into dazzling light. Brilliance
and assurance surround such a stanza as this, from 'The Dream":

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JOHN DONNE

Dear love, for nothing less than thee
Would I have broke this happy dream.

It was a theme

For reason, much too strong for fantasy.
Therefore thou wakes'st me wisely; yet
My dream thou brok'st not, but continued'st it.
Thou art so true that thoughts of thee suffice
To make dreams truths and fables histories.
Enter these arms, for since thou thought'st it best
Not to dream all my dream, let's act the rest.

First of all, Donne showed his followers a new way of fusing sense
and sensibility. He brought together pieces of a disordered universe and
arranged them in a world of clear vision; he united complexity of
thought and simplicity of language. Even Johnson admitted that if the
conceits of the metaphysical poets were farfetched, "they were often
worth the carriage. To write on their plan, it was at least necessary to
read and think. No man could be born a metaphysical poet, nor assume
the dignity of a writer, by descriptions copied from descriptions, by
imitations borrowed from imitations, by traditional imagery and hered-
itary similes, by readiness of rhyme and volubility of syllables."

Donne carried his originality far beyond a rejection of "traditional
imagery and hereditary similes." He abandoned "descriptions copied from
descriptions" and threw overboard Elizabethan stereotypes of style as
well as speech. Even when the most incongruous ideas were "yoked by
violence together," Donne wrote in an idiom which, crammed with
learning, was as straightforward as conversation. 'The Canonization"
dispenses with poetic proprieties. It explodes into life with the harsh
exasperation of its opening line: "For God's sake hold your tongue, and
let me love" — an expostulation which is followed by a few argumenta-
tive but equally angry lines:

For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love;

Or chide my palsy, or my gout,
My five grey hairs or ruined fortune flout;

With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his honor, or his grace,
Or the King's real, or his stamped face

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Contemplate; what you will, approve,
So you will let me love*

Bitter humor and a brusque urgency are everywhere. An ironic re-
proach ("Elegy VIP) begins: "Nature's lay idiot, I taught thee love/'
Weary of conventional wooing, its elegant approaches and coy retreats
("Elegy XX"), Donne addresses his mistress with unconcealed impa-
tience, plain talk, and rough humor:

Come, madam, come, all rest my powers defy;

Until I labor, I in labor lie.

The foe of ttimes, having the foe in sight,

Is tired with standing though he never fight . . .

Licence my roving hands, and let them go

Before, behind, between, above, below.

O, my America! my new-found-land!

My kingdom, saf eUest when by one man manned.

More delicately and with easy banter Donne begins another lore
poem ("The Good-Morrow") in a teasing colloquial vein:

I wonder by my troth, what thou and I
Did till we loved. Were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the seven sleepers' den?
'Twas so. But this, all pleasure's fancies be.

Resenting the morning sun after a night of love, the poet turns on
the intruder with indignant humor:

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windows and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lover's seasons run?

Saucy, pedantic wretch, go chide

Late schoolboys and sour 'prentices;
Go tell court-huntsmen that the King will ride;
Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

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JOHN DONNE

Here the charge of prying — an impertinence doubled by the sun's
peering through windows and protective curtains — is accentuated by
Donne's sarcastic charges and scornful vocabulary: "pedantic wretch,"
"sour 'prentices/' "country ants/' "rags of time." Casually, almost care-
lessly, Donne heightens the pitch of poetry with the power of common
speech.

Pre-eminently an innovator, Donne experimented in a style which
combined ingenuousness and ingenuity. Pioneering in complicated
rhythms and audacious images, he changed the very inflection of poetry;
he made it difficult for any but an antiquarian to write in the conven-
tions of the past. One of Donne's strangest poems is, at the same time,
one of his most revealing. 'The Flea" recounts a stock situation much
favored by the Elizabethan lyrists: the ardent lover and the hesitant
lady, the pursuing gallant repulsed or, at least, temporarily held off by
impregnable virtue. But Donne completely alters the tone. The image is
gruesome; the implications become monstrous; the courtly metaphors
have grown into coarse mockery. The conventional "flood of rubies"
turns to actual blood; the elegant couch set in a blossomy bower is now
the black body of a flea, whose "living walls of jet" serve as a marriage
temple and a marriage bed.

Mark but this flea, and mark in this
How little that which thou deniest me is:
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead;

Yet this enjoys before it woo,

And, pampered, swells with one blood made of two;

And this, alas, is more than we would do.

Oh, stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we're met
And cloistered in these living walls of jet.

Though use make you apt to kill me,

Let not to that self-murder added be,

And sacrilege, three sins in killing thee.

13*

LIVES OF THE POETS

Undoubtedly such a blending of the bizarre and the casuistic made
Donne's critics see him as a verbal trickster, a quibbling logician, a de-
termined sensationalist who fastens doggedly on an outlandish idea
and clings to it until he has drained it of every grotesque implication.
But even in so queer a mingling of the cerebral and the sensual, where
the figure is aggressively forced and the wit painfully overworked,
where, compared to the easily generated warmth of the romanticists,
Donne seems stiff and chill, Donne is intent on freeing his theme of
customary affectations. He stresses the fact that, while love is the peren-
nial passion, it is also its own opposite; in the very union of love and
loathing, Donne shows the critically active brain appraising the too
willing body. This was not without precedent, for it was not uncom-
mon to compare religious matters with sexual ones; but Donne supplied
a new dramatic tension to the spiritual needs and the physical urgency
of the flesh. He denies himself no experience and does justice to every
detail; in Donne the realist and the amorist join to celebrate both the
poetry of lust and the spiritual passion which transmutes sex. "The
Ecstasy" is perhaps Donne's most rewarding love poem, but it is only
one of many in which the accumulated conceits are transcended by a
superphysical fervency.

Where, like a pillow on a bed,

A pregnant bank swelled up, to rest
The violet's reclining head,

Sat we two, one another's best. , , .

As 'twixt two equal armies, Fate

Suspends uncertain victory,
Our souls (which to advance their state

Were gone out) hung 'twixt her and me.

And whilst our souls negotiate there,

We like sepulchral statues lay;
All day, the same our postures were,

And we said nothing all the day.

Yet, although the uplifting power of the contemplative spirit is glori-
fied in such lines, Donne does not let the reader comfort himself with
a purely disembodied emotion. Remember the body, he counsels, as the
poem builds to a climax; respect the flesh for something more than its
frailties.

132

JOHN DONNE

But, O alas! so long, so far,

Our bodies why do we forbear?
They are ours, though they're not we; we are

Th' intelligences, they the spheres.

We owe them thanks, because they thus

Did us, to us, at first convey,
Yielded their senses' force to us,

Nor are dross to us, but allay*

On man heaven's influence works not so,

But that it first imprints the air;
So soul into the soul may flow,

Though it to body first repair.

To our bodies turn we then, that so

Weak men on love reveal'd may look;
Love's mysteries in souls do grow,

But yet the body is his book.

For every poem of Donne's which seems restless and wrenched, in
which the lines seem to be straining away from each other, there is al-
ways another poem in which the hitherto unrecognized likeness between
unlike things comes as a logical discovery rather than a surprise, and in
which, instead of being deaf to the resonance of language, Donne sounds
a clear if contrapuntal sonority, often as limpid as it is lovely. Without
setting out to oppose the poetic conventions, Donne avoided them; he
was not against rules but indifferent to them, and the indifference made
him seem difficult to those accustomed to a simple progress of ideas and
a prescribed regularity of rhythm. Only after reading Spenser's "Epitha-
lamion," for example, can we appreciate the intellectual and musical
nuances of this stanza from Donne's "Epithalamion" on the marriage of
the Princess Elizabeth in 1613 on February 14:

Up then, fair phoenix bride, frustrate the sun,
Thy self from thine affecti6n
Takest warmth enough, and from thine eye

All lesser birds will take their jollity,
Up, up, fair bride, and call

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LIVES OF THE POETS

Thy stars from out their several boxes, take

Thy rubies, pearls, and diamonds forth, and make

Thy self a constellation of them all,

And by their blazing signify
That a great princess falls but doth not die.
Be thou a new star, that to us portends
Ends of much wonder, and be thou those ends.
Since thou dost this day in new glory shine,
May all men date records from this, thy Valentine.

It is in the "Divine Poems" that Donne is most painfully sensitive and
most painfully self-conscious. The mind is never at rest. Even as it thinks
it watches its operations, pleased and a little proud of its success in in-
tellectualizing. Widening the imagery of religious poetry, Donne also
changed its diction; he sharpened the traditional music with unorthodox
accents and acrid dissonances. Already in youth, in the midst of carnal
enjoyments, Donne had been afflicted with a sense of life's cruel dichot-
omy, a recognition of man's self-division, of natural hunger mixed with
unnatural guilt, of doubt that dulls the edge of delight. The "Divine
Poems" are an enlargement of those hungers, guilts, and doubts; they
smolder with contradictions and burn with the fire of a growing agony.
In these poems Donne does not speak as a confident communicant with
God, but as a troubled soul who is none too sure of Him.

In the religious poems the figures of speech are most violent, the
sensation most inflamed. In an astonishing sonnet beginning "Batter my
Heart" Donne confesses his need of God, but the religious ardor is ex-
pressed in a set of frankly sexual images. In an extended metaphor, the
poet compares himself to a walled city that yearns to open its gates to
the besieger, and to a virgin who longs to give herself but must be forced
before she can make the complete surrender. Here, again, is the Eliza-
bethan theme of the eager lover and the virtuous beloved. But Donne
characteristically reverses the formula as he intensifies it. The poet him-
self becomes the half-willing, half-resisting object; the town, the virgin
body, the loving spirit, must be taken ruthlessly. It is with a series of
forceful paradoxes that Donne ends:

Yet dearly I love you and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

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JOHN DONNE

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Similar paradoxes season Donne's sermons, which reflect the change
of religious concepts from Calvin to Galileo, from medieval superstition
to modern science. Elizabethan prose, as well as poetry, was not a spon-
taneous but a conscious art in which metaphor was not only an ornament
but a compulsion. An expression of wit, the metaphor was therefore a
challenging hazard: it had to find or invent a surprising but plausible
relation between dissimilar things and, at the same time, control the
upsurge of all the associations suggested by the ambiguous figure of
speech. Donne did not discard the artifice — on the contrary, he bran-
dished it about with a bravura flourish unheard since Marlowe — but,
combining intensity and introspection, he gave it voluptuousness. Al-
though his sermons were packed with the severest admonitions, they
were admired and actually applauded; his listeners felt they were hear-
ing magnificent performances of arias which exalted God in coloratura.
When they were not operatic, the preachings vibrated with orchestral
sonority; no congregation could remain unstirred, no heart could fail to
respond to the dark sublimity of Donne's eloquence, with its message
pronounced in the solemn percussive beat of the prose.

. . . for, as God never saw beginning, so we shall never see
end; but they whom we tread upon now, and we whom
others shall tread upon hereafter, shall meet at once where,
though we were dead, dead in our several houses, dead in a
sinful Egypt, dead in our family, dead in our selves, dead in
the grave, yet we shall be received with that consolation, and
glorious consolation: You were dead but are alive.

Death, which became Donne's obsession, was always a leading theme.
It was there from the beginning, beneath the most licentious love song,
underlying the double delight in sensation and speculation. Death had
no horror for the sensual curiosity-seeker, the exhilarated being who
shrank from no excess of impulse or devotion. In a justification that is
reasonable and magnificently daring, Donne cried, "I have not the right-
eousness of Job, but I have the desire of Job; I would speak to the
Almighty, and I would reason with God" — even though the answer
might be death. The seventh of the "Holy Sonnets" triumphantly pro-
claims the victory of faith over fear with its glorious opening:

135

LIVES OF THE POETS

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 ...

The tenth of the "Holy Sonnets" is even more lucent; dispensing with
subtle complexities of thought and image, it is simple and unforgettable:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so;

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy picture be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow;

And soonest our best men with thee do go —

Rest of their bones and souls' delivery!

Thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke. Why swell'st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die.

Such a poem might well serve as epitaph for one who, predestined
to a fierce singularity, united the ecstatic and the austere in a vehemence
of intellectual play and spiritual discipline.

VIII

After the Renaissance

INFLUENCED by Donne's intellectual wit and incited by his analytical
logic, certain seventeenth-century poets developed a style which
leaned toward metaphysical extravagance, sharp casuistry, and the
power of paradox. Although there were many shades of the metaphys-
ical manner, there grew into being a group that was as recognizably a
"school of Donne'* as Jonson's disciples were acknowledged to belong
to the "tribe of Ben." There were many differences in taste and tech-
nique among Donne's followers — the penchant for eccentricity was to
reach astonishing heights and ridiculous depths — but they had in com-
mon an unusually alert imagination, a striking freshness of language,
and a sleight-of-hand dexterity in phrase-making. Spanning half a cen-
tury, they formed a definite "bridge" between Donne and Dryden.

GEORGE HERBERT

Scion of a noble family, born in the Castle of Montgomery in Wales,
George Herbert (.1593-1633) was one of ten children, the eldest son
being Edward, who became the famous historian-diplomat-philosopher,
Lord Herbert of Cherbury. When Edward went to Oxford, the Herberts

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LIVES OF THE POETS

moved to England, and George, at twelve, attended Westminster School
in London. At fifteen he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, as a
King's Scholar. Wavering between a career at court and in the church,
he effected a compromise. In his mid-twenties he accepted the position
of Public Orator at Trinity and held the office for eight years. Still
allured by the example of his brother Edward and the possibility of a
romantic future, he toyed with the idea of an adventurous life. But poor
health and the death of influential friends made him relinquish all
thoughts of personal gain; his mind and heart united in a desire to serve
God. The devotional strain had been there since youth, A letter to his
mother accompanying some early sonnets explicitly stated: 'Tor my own
part, my meaning, dear mother, is, to declare my resolution to be, that
my poor abilities in poetry shall be all and ever consecrated to God's
glory/'

Herbert was strongly influenced in every sense by his mother's good
friend, John Donne — it was said that Donne converted Herbert not
only to poetry but to the church. At thirty-two Herbert took orders, at
thirty-six he was made rector of Bemerton and married Jane Danvcrs,
who, being young, beautiful, and rich, completely satisfied the worldly
side of his nature. The life at Bemerton, where part of Herbert's zeal
went into rebuilding churches, has been tenderly described by Izaak
Walton, who pictures Herbert walking miles to the cathedral at Salis-
bury, singing and playing his part at musical gatherings, so beloved
by his parishioners that even the fanners "let their plows rest when
Mr. Herbert's saint's bell rung to prayers, that they might also offer
their devotions to God with him." Poet and preacher now seemed se-
cure. But it was a short-lived security.

It is not known when Herbert contracted the consumption which
killed him in his fortieth year, but he must have been aware of it for
some time. He made many preparations for the end; like Donne, he re-
garded dying as a ritual. Like Campion, musician as well as poet, Her-
bert sang his own songs and accompanied himself on the lute. On his
deathbed he composed "such hymns and anthems as the angels and
he now sing in heaven,"

It is little wonder that he became known as "holy George Herbert,"
for every commentator stresses his kindness, sweetness, and even saint-
liness. These usually cloying characteristics affected neither Herbert
nor his work with sentimentality. On the contrary, his poetry is dis-
tinguished by odd fancies, tart homeliness, ingenious little shocks, and
continual surprise. Never has there been a poetry at once so pious and

138

GEORGE HERBERT

so playful. A metaphysician like Donne, Herbert was a far milder minis-
ter of the Gospel, a Donne without violence, even without indignation.
Herbert was no less serious when he was making poetic puns than
when he was writing hymns; his verse is often most solemn when it
seems most waggish.

Everywhere there is the play of double meaning; everything fur-
nishes material for a peculiar allegory or a parable as intricate as a
puzzle. The church is not only Herbert's favorite symbol of Christianity,
it is also the source of his metaphors. His poetry is built about it The
physical aspects of the church are equated with its spiritual values.
The church floor is the foundation, the solid footing of faith; the altar
is the heart; the trodden stones represent humility and patience; the
plaster that holds all together is love; the key of the church door re-
minds Herbert of the sin that locks his hands.

Although Herbert delights in metaphorical play, it is never play for
its own sake but play for God's sake. A far deeper thing than quaint-
ness — the term usually applied to Herbert's imagery — makes the author
resort to queer designs and odd devices to establish the uniqueness of
his devotion. It is not mere whimsicality but a union of play and pas-
sion which allows Herbert to embody his most profound reflections in
anagrams and acrostics, shaped stanzas, and picture poems. It is a
singularly witty yet deeply religious mind that can balance a paradox
with an aphorism, that can keep devout thoughts and curious connec-
tions in the air like a juggler's balls; but Herbert accomplishes these
tricks again and again without faltering. He composes a solemn poem,
the point of which is a pun: "Jesu: I-Ease-You." The lines of another
devotional poem, "Easter Wings," are so adroitly spaced that the printed
stanzas look like long, angelic wings. "The Altar" is a typographical
arrangement in which the first four lines represent the top of the altar,
the middle eight lines are the column, and the final four lines are the
stone base. A poem, appropriately entitled "Our Life is Hid," is con-
ventional enough on the surface, but the key words are hidden in an
elaborate acrostic. "Heaven" is an "echo" poem, but Herbert lifts the
humorous device into nobility. One of Herbert's most meaningful
couplets is not only an epigram but an anagram.

MARY 1 GRAM

How well her name an "Army" doth present,
In whom the "Lord of Hosts" did pitch his tent!

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LIVES OF THE POETS

"Paradise" is another poem which is both diverting and devout.
Here Herbert's imagination and ingenuity are perfectly fused. The
rhymes are achieved in the most unexpected manner: the first letter of
each rhyming word is successively dropped ("grow," "row," "ow"), and
what begins as an artful technique ends in quiet dignity.

I bless Thee, Lord, because I grow
Among Thy trees, which in a row
To Thee both fruit and order ow(e).

What open force, or hidden charm
Can blast my fruit, or bring me harm,
While the inclosure is Thine arm:

Inclose me still for fear I start;
Be to me rather sharp and tart
Than let me want Thy hand and art.

When Thou dost greater judgments spare,
And with Thy knife but prune and pare,
Even fruitful trees more fruitful are:

Such sharpness shows the sweetest fr(i)end,
Such cuttings rather heal than rend,
And such beginnings touch their end.

The fusion of solemnity and virtuosity is found not only in those
verses which are technically arresting, but also in the simplest and most
straightforward poems. In the midst of "Man," perhaps the most mem-
orable poem Herbert ever wrote, the poet states his recognition of the
kinship between the Creator and his creation in a kind of glorified quip:

O mighty Love! Man is one world, and hath
Another to attend him.

A similar interpenetration is apparent in such poems as "The Collar/'
with its rebellious impatience, its staccato cry of anguish, and the cul-
minating single word of self-reproof; in "Aaron," with its insistent repe-
tition and its two rhymes ringing through the five verses to sound the
bells implied in the central figure; in "Virtue," distinguished by its even

140

tone and the dramatic effect of the shortened lines that cap each stanza;
in "Easter/* so exquisitely turned, so artlessly melodious; in "Love," with
its extraordinary personification in parable; in "The Elixir/' sometimes
entitled, and with equal appropriateness, "Perfection/' "The Pulley" is
one of the most fanciful yet one of the most forcefully extended figures
ever mastered. The dominant image is arresting, the lines stretch the
metaphor almost beyond its bounds, the play upon the word Rest and
the rest is amusing, but the poem itself transcends entertainment

When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by —
"Let us," said he, "pour on him all we can;
Let the world's riches, which dispersed lie,

Contract into a span."

So strength first made a way,
Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honor, pleasure;
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that, alone of all his treasure,

Rest in the bottom lay.

"For if I should," said he,
"Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in nature, not the God of nature:

So both should losers be.

"Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness;
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness

May toss him to my breast."

'The Sacrifice/' to which William Empson devoted nine ambiguous
pages in his Seven Types of Ambiguity, is a highly original and difficult
poem, although not for the same reasons adduced by the critic. The
difficulties in the way of a full understanding of Herbert (and, by im-
plication, the other metaphysical poets) are expressed in Rosemond
Tuve's A Reading of Herbert. 'We can read Herbert as history without
much help," writes Miss Tuve. "That is, we can understand and sym-

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LIVES OF THE POETS

pathetically follow him in certain mental experiences he had. But it is
very difficult to read him as poetry, filling his metaphors and large
underlying symbols with meaning for our different world, unless we
have found out certain hasic and common meanings of his images, as
one finds out the basic and common meanings of unfamiliar words in
the dictionary/' Yet, without a knowledge of the traditional symbols on
which Herbert relied and even without a key to orthodox Christian
thinking in the seventeenth century, the modern reader can surmount
the difficulties as he accepts the dissonances that prick the music and
the distortions that sharpen the meaning.

Unlike Donne, who was compelled to dramatize every twitch of pain,
Herbert restrains his agonies; even when he argues with God, he does
not, like Donne, imagine himself Job. He protests without resentment;
he grows exalted without theatrical ecstasies. His principles are perhaps
too simple — he draws too easy a line between sin and salvation, be-
tween the weariness of the world and the rejuvenating joys of heaven —
but it is the simplicity of a greatly believing soul.

Humility . . , orderliness . . . serenity . . . grace — these are the
words with which Herbert has been commonly characterized. But be-
neath the humility there is an unquestionably strong individuality; the
orderliness is not the conventional neatness of an undisturbed mind
but a hard-won discipline; the serenity came after internal conflict and
a feeling of inadequacy; and underneath the grace, the wit, and whim-
sicality, there is an unshakable fervor, as reasonable as it is religious.
Quiet, alternately courtly and colloquial, this is a poetry which begins
in wonder and ends in certainty.

RICHARD CRASHAW

Son of an eminent Puritan preacher, the Reverend William Crashaw,
Richard Crashaw (1612-1649) inherited so great a passion for theology
that it brought him to love the Roman Church which his antipapist
father hated. Born in London, educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke
Hall, Cambridge, Crashaw spent his youth among a religious set and
became an intimate friend of the poet Abraham Cowley, to whom
Crashaw was indebted for personal help as well as poetic stimulation.
When, as a result of the Civil War in England, Crashaw was suffering

RICHARD CRASHAW

from poverty and isolation in Paris, it was Cowley who brought him
to the attention of the exiled Queen Henrietta Maria. Through her
patronage, Crashaw — who had been converted some years before —
became private secretary to Cardinal Palotto of Rome, and finally a sub-
canon at the Cathedral of the Holy House at Loreto. Although described
as "a man of angelical life," Crashaw seems to have been seriously and
perhaps fatally involved in political as well as personal intrigues. He
died suddenly in his thirty-sixth year while on a pilgrimage to a shrine.
It was given out that he had succumbed to a fever, but it is possible that
he had been poisoned.

Crashaw's Steps to the Temple, published during his exile, suggests
Herbert's The Temple, but the two volumes are extremely unlike.
Crashaw is Herbert's very opposite. He has none of Herbert's decorum
and sense of proportion. Where Herbert is restrained, Crashaw is volup-
tuous; where Herbert is distinctly English, Crashaw reflects Italian and
Spanish intemperance; where Herbert is a strict observer of ceremony,
never confusing ritual and religion, Crashaw wallows in the debris as
well as the excessive decoration of theatrical properties. Baroque is a
term often applied to Crashaw, but actually he suggests the rococo, with
its profuse and often tasteless ornamentation.

Crashaw's verse is so ornate, so overembellished, that it is sometimes
hard to see the poetry because of the words. His images are alternately
gorgeous and grotesque. Some of his finest sacred poems are so in-
flated that what begins to be grandiose becomes ludicrous. Thus "The
Weeper," which contains a moving portrait of Mary Magdalene, also
contains one of the worst conceits in all literature when Crashaw speaks
of the Magdalen's tears as:

Two walking baths, two weeping motions,
Portable and compendious oceans.

Almost as incongruous and more repellent is Crashaw's way of turn-
ing horror into soft sensuousness. One has the wrong kind of shudder
when, reading a poem entitled "Upon the Infant Martyrs," one is con-
fronted with such a quatrain as this:

To see both blended in one flood,
The mother's milk, the children's blood,
Makes me doubt if Heaven will gather
Roses hence, or lilies rather.

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LIVES OF THE POETS

Even the much-quoted 'Wishes, to His Supposed Mistress" is marred
by farfetched and incongruous metaphors. The poem begins with debo-
nair grace:

Whoe'er she be,

That not impossible She

That shall command my heart and me;

Where'er she lie,

Locked up from mortal eye,

In shady leaves of destiny . . .

But Crashaw's ingenuity runs away with him. He employs elaborate
methods to tell the reader that his supposed mistress' color is not arti-
ficial, and it takes him no less than forty-two stanzas to establish the
simple fact that her beauty is natural and equally her own.

In most of the religious poems, however, the ardor is less induced.
If Crashaw's sensuousness is not always simple, his spirit is clear. The
exaggerations of the poet who was a "fantastic" are refined through the
ineffable mind. Crashaw's greatest poems are undoubtedly those in
praise of Saint Teresa, "The Flaming Heart, Upon the Book and Pic-
tures of the Seraphical Saint Teresa" is a noble apostrophe. The ab-
stractions and cloudy metaphors are blown away in a sweep of pure
exaltation. This is an excerpt:

O thou undaunted daughter of desires,

By all thy dower of lights and fires,

By all the eagle in thee, all the dove,

By all thy lives and deaths of love,

By thy large draughts of intellectual day,

And by thy thirsts of love more large than they,

By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire,

By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire;

By the full kingdom of that final kiss

That seized thy parting soul and sealed thee His,

By all the heaven thou hast in Him —

Fair sister of the Seraphim! —

By all of Him we have in thee,

Leave nothing of my self in me.

Let me so read thy life that I

Unto all life of mine may die.

144

ABRAHAM GOWLEY

ABRAHAM COWLEY

Born in London, son of a well-to-do stationer and bookseller, Abra-
ham Cowley (1618-1667) was almost unbelievably precocious. At ten
he wrote "Pyramus and Thisbe," an "epical romance"; two years later
he composed another epic, "Constantia and Philetus." Both poems were
published in Poetical Blossoms when Cowley was fifteen; at twenty he
had two more volumes to his credit. From that time on Cowley's career
was as varied as it was checkered. His education had begun at West-
minster School and continued at Trinity College, but he was expelled
from Cambridge because of his outspoken Royalist sentiments, and
from there he went to Oxford.

His championship of the Stuarts stood him in good stead, for at
twenty-eight Cowley was in Paris, where, in comfortable exile, he be-
came Henrietta Maria's secretary. For twelve years he acted as diplo-
matic agent and decoder of secret messages, chiefly between the Queen
and Charles. There is little doubt that espionage was one of his activi-
ties, for at thirty-seven he appeared in England as a royalist spy. He
was caught, imprisoned by Cromwell and, after certain dubious deal-
ings, released on bail. The Restoration solidified his position. Returning
to Oxford, Cowley studied medicine, and was given a small estate with
a suitable income. He spent his happiest years at Oldcourt, where he
said he possessed "that solitude which from his very childhood he had
always passionately desired." Death took him early and in "beloved
obscurity," at forty-nine. When he was buried in Westminster Abbey,
Charles II, who did little for the poet during his lifetime, declared that
"Mr. Cowley has not left behind him a better man in England."

Cowley's popularity rose and fell with the flash of a skyrocket. Like
his equally short-lived colleague, John Cleveland, Cowley was a great
favorite with his generation. Little remains o£ his reputation today. The
Davideis, an epic in couplets on the Biblical history of David, was, in
imitation of The Aeneid, to have been in twelve books, but it never
went beyond the fourth. Compounded of strained allegories, overworked
images, and what Johnson called "wit and learning unprofitably squan-
dered," The Davideis is so diffuse as to be unreadable. The Pindaric
Odes are little better. Although they set a fashion for a while and

145

LIVES OF THE POETS

represented the classical spirit to Cowley's contemporaries, Cowley mis-
interpreted the license of Pindar's seemingly rough form, and his loosely
constructed imitation of it attained dignity only when it was strength-
ened by the discipline of Dryden. The odes to Cromwell are both ful-
some and dull. A love cycle, The Mistress, was one of the most popular
books of the period; today it interests us only for its curiosities, the in-
delicacies, "the enormous and disgusting hyperboles" carefully cited by
Johnson.

One must look elsewhere for the best of Cowley. If he has only a
tithe of Donne's wit and passion, he has an ingenuity of his own, mani-
fested in startling openings curbed by an emotion disciplined by the
mind and sharply controlled by its rationalism. It is in the smaller poems
that Cowley is unostentatiously himself, in 'The Prophet," "Ode upon
Doctor Harvey," and "Beauty," with its arresting first couplet:

Beauty, thou wild fantastic ape,

Who dost in ev'ry country change thy shape . . .

Perhaps the most winning of Cowley's verses are those which have
been least praised: his paraphrases from Anacreon, the Greek forerunner
of Omar Khayydm. A lighthearted hedonism finds its perfect echo in
such tripping rhythms and nimble rhymes as those which begin "Fill
the bowl with rosy wine/' "Liberal nature did dispense," "Because, for-
sooth, you're young and fair," "As on a purple quilt I chose," "Talk not
to me of schoolmen's rules," and those which end:

Should ev'ry creature drink but I?
Why, men of morals, tell me why.
and:

Let me alive my pleasures have;
All men are stoics in die grave.

HEHRY VAUGHAM

The elder of twins, Henry Vaughan, called "the Silurist," was born
in 1622 at Newton-by-Usk, Brecknockshire, a district in South Wales
once inhabited by the Silures, an ancient tribe that had harried the

146

HENRY VAUGHAN

Romans. The family lineage was old; it had been represented at Agin-
court, and a Sir Thomas Vaughan had been done to death by Richard
III, "untimely smothered," according to Shakespeare's play. Henry and
his twin brother, Thomas, received their early education at home and
went to Jesus College, Oxford, where Thomas obtained his A.B. and
went on to become an alchemist and dealer in magic. Henry did not
stay long enough to take a degree. Instead, he went to London to study
law, changed to medicine and, at twenty-three, became a qualified physi-
cian. The Civil War interrupted his ministrations; a firm Royalist, he
was one of the Welsh bodyguard of horsemen protecting the king on
the field of Rowton Heath. Two years later he retired to devote the rest
of his life to his patients and his poetry. He practiced first at Brecknock
and thereafter, for almost half a century, in his native Newton-by-Usk,
where, at seventy-three, he died.

Vaughan Js retirement seems to have been impelled by religious con-
viction, if not conversion. It is likely that, saddened by the results of the
Civil War, by illness, the death of his brother, William, and the loss
of several friends, he determined to free himself from the follies as well
as the casual cruelties of the sophisticated world. This is indicated in the
preface to the second part of Silex Scintillans. At twenty-four Vaughan
had published his first volume, Poems, full of pretty, post-Elizabethan
affectations, as well as faint echoes of Donne and Herbert. The first
part of Silex Scintillans ("The Glistening Flint"), published when
Vaughan was twenty-eight — the second part appeared five years later
— reveals an entirely different poet. The airy imitations of Donne's early
amatory style have been discarded in favor of Herbert's straightforward
religious ardor. Vaughan acknowledged Herbert as his master. Herbert,
said Vaughan in the preface to the second Silex Scintillans, was the
first to divert the "overflowing stream" of profane and "frivolous con-
ceits"; it was "the blessed man, Mr. George Herbert, whose holy life
and verse gained many converts, of whom I am the least, and gave the
first check to a most flourishing wit of his time."

Although some see a kinship between the two poets, Vaughan and
Herbert have little in common. Most of Herbert's figures of speech are
inspired by the church; Vaughan's are chiefly those of nature. Her-
bert's afflatus is the result of unpremeditation; Vaughan is less moved
by inspiration than by observation. Where Herbert sustains a concen-
trated image, Vaughan weakens his effects by thinning them out, lack-
ing the ability to maintain the original impetus of the poem.

Although this is characteristic of many of Vaughan's poems, it is less

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LIVES OF THE POETS

true of his major pieces. Differing from Donne, Vaughan was primarily
an emotional rather than an intellectual poet, and, though some of his
stanzas sink to a vaguely sonorous suggestiveness, there emanates from
them a kind of majesty. A lover of natural things, Vaughan was no
mere nature-worshiper; the countryside represented "the sweet fence
of piety and confirmed innocence," but Vaughan loved God's creations
only as they led to the Creator. He affirmed God's living grandeur in
the least of his creatures as well as his unfathomable immanence. Con-
cerned as he was with man's love of God, he was also convinced of
God's need of man, a love beyond logic, an essential mysticism which
the intellect can never explain.

Vaughan's intimacy with God is startling. It remained unmatched
until, two hundred years later, it was sharpened by the feminine pert-
ness of Emily Dickinson. Vaughan wrote not only as men spoke but
as men would like to talk. Poets who followed him appreciated his pe-
culiar freshness and ease. 'The Retreat" is a poem which has borne
many children; Wordsworth borrowed the central idea for his "Ode:
Intimations of Immortality," and Traherne based a whole philosophy
upon such lines as:

Happy those early days when I

Shined in my angel-infancy . . .

When yet I had not walked above

A mile or two from my first love,

And looking back, at that short space,

Could see a glimpse of His bright face , . .

Before I taught my tongue to wound

My conscience with a sinful sound,

Or had the black art to dispense

A several sin to every sense,

But felt through all this fleshly dress

Bright shoots of everlastingness.

'The Revival" and "The Night" are other examples of Vaughan's
intermittent but dazzling perceptions of the world beyond reality. Here
is the reverberating verse with which the latter concludes:

There is in God, some say,
A deep but dazzling darkness: as men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear,

148

THOMAS TRAHERNE

O for that night! where I in Him
Might live invisible and dim!

Intimacy, as well as charm, is achieved by the very beginning of "The
Waterfall," "The Bird/' "The Queer/' and "Cock-crow," with its happy
affirmation:

Father of lights! what sunny seed,
What glance of day hast thou confined
Into this bird!

If timidity or weakness causes a wavering of vision and a failure to
complete the initial conception, there is a shining glory in the Ascension
Hymn, "They are all gone into the world of light," in the contemplative
"Man/' with its tacit borrowing from Herbert, and "The World/' with
its burst of resplendency:

I saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years,

Driven by the spheres
Like a vast shadow, moved, in which the world

And all her train were hurled.

THOMAS TRAHERKE

There is no record of either the date or place of the birth of Thomas
Traherne (i633?-i674), but it has been plausibly conjectured that he
was the son of a Hereford shoemaker of Welsh descent and that he was
born in 1633. The first definite date is 1652, when Traherne was en-
tered as a "commoner" Qplebis filii) at Brasenose College, Oxford, when
he was presumably nineteen. The record also shows that he received
his B.A. in 1657 and was given a parsonage in the country town of
Credenhill. There he lived for ten years until he was appointed chaplain
to Sir Orlando Bridgman and, when his patron became Keeper of the
Seals, went with him to London. When Bridgman retired to his coun-

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LIVES OF THE POETS

try seat, Traherne accompanied him. Following him in death as in life,
Traherne died a few months after the demise of his patron in 1674, at
which time Traherne was forty.

Although Traherne wrote continuously, only one of his books, Roman
Forgeries, was published during his lifetime. None of his poems ap-
peared in print for over two centuries, and the discovery of Traherne's
importance was one of the most surprising of modern "finds." His writ-
ings, preserved by his brother, rejected by libraries, disdained by pub-
lishers, and neglected by his descendants, had passed from one unin-
terested bookseller to another. More than two hundred years after
Traherne's death, the pages of two anonymous manuscripts were tossed
on the shelf of an outdoor bookstall. There they were picked up for a
few shillings by a scholar, Alexander Balloch Grosart, who thought
they were unknown poems of Vaughan. Research revealed Dr. Grosart's
error and established the real author. Even then the poems, edited by
Bertram Dobell, were not printed until 1903.

A minister of the Church of England, Traherne had the hard faith
and proud humility of an early Christian. His style was strange: plain
speaking intensified by prophecy, an exalted primitivism. He regarded
the small happenings of every day with simple wonder; his nostalgia
for childhood and his idealization of that state of "angel-inf ancy" is an
echo of Vaughan's "The Retreat." That Traherne realized his back-
ward yearning is evident not only from his study of "common untutored
things" but from the subtitle of his collection: "Divine Reflections on
the Native Objects of an Infant-Eye." It was as a child that Traherne
observed the world, and it was as a child that he aimed to reflect his
observations with unsophisticated directness. In this he succeeded. If
Traherne is sometimes awkward, he has both the awkwardness and the
grace of an unspoiled child.

Some of Traherne's poems, such as 'Wonder/' "Childhood," and
"Eden" carry overtones of Vaughan, but they exist on a more secure
level of innocence. The first and in some ways the most ingratiating of
these begins:

How like an angel came I down!
How bright are all things here!
When first among His works I did appear.

Sometimes imperfectly finished, often unequal to the demands of
their structure, Traherne's lines are nevertheless naively undistracted.

150

THOMAS TRAHEIUSTE

Shy, curious, quietly absorbed, this meditative mystic wins us by his
complete naturalness; he is so affecting because he is so genuinely with-
out affectations. For him the mere act of wandering is wonderful (cele-
brated in 'Walking/' which is anything but pedestrian) and the com-
mon street is a thing of glory, "paved with golden stones," Traherne's
singular verses are, to use the tide that headed his unpublished volume,
"Poems of Felicity."

Puritans and Cavaliers

I • |HB BITTER Civil War which culminated in the beheading of
I Charles I and the tyranny of Oliver Cromwell racked every part
JL of England. The country which, in the eleven-year period from
i6z9 to 1640, had been ruled without a Parliament, faced another
eleven years (1649 to 1660) without a monarchy. The new Common-
wealth or Free State was anything but popular; Cromwell, who believed
his brutalities, including massacre of entire garrisons, were direct in-
spirations from God, failed to endear himself even to his followers.
The people, resentful of what, in effect, was a military dictatorship,
waited hopefully for the return of the exiled son of the executed mon-
arch but feared the wrath of the Lord Protector. By the time the throne
was restored to Charles II, the nation had been torn apart by political
division and religious dissension.

The confusion was, not unnaturally, reflected in the literature of the
period, which alternated between enthusiasm and cynicism. As a reac-
tion to the didactic Puritans the so-called Cavalier poets rejoiced in
lusty and often (true to the implications of their name) swashbuckling
lyrics. Their neatly joined quatrains and scrupulously polished adapta-
tions from the Latin showed that Ben Jonson was still an influence,
while their elegies, full of intricate dialectics and nimble antitheses,
betrayed how much they were affected by Donne.

152

ANDREW MARVELL

AKDREW MARVELL

Puritan and Cavalier were combined without a struggle in Andrew
Marvell (1621-1678). Struggle was apparently something from which
Marvell never had to suffer. Other careers were wrecked on the wrong
choice of parties or the wrong word, but MarvelTs life was solidly
built upon a set of contradictions. One of the leading Puritan poets, he
preferred Cavaliers as his intimates. He strongly sympathized with
Charles I; yet he was Milton's assistant when Milton became Latin
secretary under Cromwell and, upon Cromwell's return from Ireland,
Marvell wrote an ode in which the Protector was hailed as Caesar.
After Cromwell's death Marvell went into deep mourning and assisted
at the pompous burial in the Abbey; two years later he was a member
of the Restoration Parliament that voted to dishonor Cromwell by dig-
ging up his body and beheading it.

Marvell remained friends with men as opposed in character as Love-
lace and Milton. It has been suggested that Marvell never meant to be
a partisan, that he clung to people rather than to causes, and that he
loved order with such passion that he was willing to sacrifice anything
for it Either an extraordinarily adroit opportunist or a supremely lucky
man, he was able to fasten upon many points of view without impaling
himself on any of them.

Born at Winstead near Hull, Marvell received his early education
from his father, who was a minister as well as master of a grammar
school. Securing a scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge, young
Marvell took his B.A. at eighteen, and immediately started on his
paradoxical course. He began as a stalwart Royalist, but also an up-
holder of the parliamentary cause. A relative of Milton's pupil, Cyriack
Skinner, financed Marvell, introduced him to Milton, and bequeathed
him an estate. At twenty-nine Marvell became tutor to the daughter of
Lord Fairfax, one of Cromwell's chief generals, and when Fairfax, dis-
satisfied with Cromwell's conduct, withdrew from the army and retired
to Nun Appleton in Yorkshire, Marvell went with him. It was at
Appleton House that Marvell wrote much of the verse, notably the
"garden poetry," for which he is most highly esteemed.

In his thirty-fourth year, Marvell was chosen to be the tutor of

153

LIVES OF THE POETS

Cromwell's ward; four years later he became Milton's assistant, and
when the Royalists prosecuted Milton, Marvell defended him. Although
a firm supporter of Cromwell, Marvell could never bring himself to
hate the deposed Charles. When he wrote the "Horatian Ode upon
Cromwell's Return from Ireland," Marvell weighed the qualities of the
two men. Recognizing Cromwell's capabilities as a ruler, even as an
instrument of destiny, he hailed Charles as "a prince truly pious and
religious," and concluded that the Civil War was a disaster that should
never have occurred. He was equally ambivalent when he took his place
in Parliament after the Restoration. Personally mild, he wrote violent
satires, political lampoons which mocked the ministers and the king
himself. He burlesqued the monarch's style in a parody of a speech of
Charles II, in which Charles supposedly went into scandalous detail
concerning his domestic and extramarital affairs — and the king was so
amused that he forgave the audacious lese majesty. Another satire,
"The Last Instructions to a Painter," pictured Charles's corrupt court
and contrasted the lackadaisical English with the enterprising and en-
ergetic Dutch. Marvell was still in public office in London when, at
fifty-seven, he died.

Paradox and polish are outstanding characteristics of Marvell's poetry.
The verse is both worldly and detached from the world, classical and
yet colloquial, rhetorical yet eminently reasonable. This combination is
best illustrated by Marvell's most famous poem, "To His Coy Mistress."
Superficially this is the familiar formula of the urgent lover and the
reluctant lady. But Marvell does not treat the matter with the conven-
tional elegance of the Elizabethans or with the ferocity of Donne. He
argues the difficult case of platonic love versus sexual passion with curi-
ous transitions of wit and irony. It begins with an airy, almost comic,
persuasiveness:

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime,
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shoulds't rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.

154

ANDREW MARVELL

My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow . . .
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

Suddenly the play becomes serious. Unexpected intensity flares up
in the imaginative power of the next two extraordinary couplets:

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near:
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

Beneath the sense of anxious haste, of compulsive love and immediate
need, there is the suggestion that the deepest passion rises from frus-
tration and finally accustoms itself to compromise and incompletion.
The poem ascends on a paradox of resentment and resignation.

Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honor turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Marvell sometimes falls into the same error that led Crashaw to
overestimate the elasticity of his metaphors and similes, and one gets
a conceit as foolish as Marvell's picture of salmon-fishers who

. . . like Antipodes in shoes
Have shod their heads in their canoes.

In the same vein, when, in "Upon Appleton House," the mansion
welcomes its master, Marvell permits himself so gross and grotesque an
exaggeration as:

Yet thus the laden house does sweat
And scarce endures the master great;
But where he comes, the swelling hall
Stirs, and the square grows spherical.

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LIVES OF THE POETS

This blemish occurs in one of the most ingratiating of Marvell's
poems. Gently musing and much too long, "Upon Appleton House" is
a rambling loveliness. The whole poem, scorning momentum, moves
blissfully in its meandering course of banter and beauty. The descrip-
tion of the kingfisher, "the modest halcyon," is particularly delightful.

So when the shadows laid asleep,
From underneath these banks do creep,
And on the river, as it flows,
With ebon shuts begin to close,
The modest halcyon comes in sight,
Flying betwixt the day and night;
And such a horror calm and dumb,
Admiring Nature does benumb;
The viscous air, where'er she fly,
Follows and sucks her azure dye;
The jellying stream compacts below,
If it might fix her shadow so;
The stupid fishes hang, as plain
As flies in crystal overtaken;
And men the silent scene assist,
Charmed with the sapphire-winged mist.

A similar enchantment transforms Marvell's preoccupations with
mowers — "The Mower to the Glow-worms," "The Mower's Song," "The
Mower Against Gardens," with its fusion of gravity and levity — "The
Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn," "The Definition of
Love," which is a kaleidoscope of paradoxes, recalling Donne's brusque
shifts of fantasy, and "The Garden," one of the simplest and, at the
same time, one of the most allusive of MarvelTs nature poems. Adapt-
ing the images of his predecessors, Marvell broadens the idiom and
makes an actual garden a symbol of peace and innocence, an Eden
where ripe apples drop and grapes press their wine upon the mouth,
where the mind withdraws into its happiness:

Annihilating all that's made

To a green thought in a green shade.

Here at the fountain's sliding foot
Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root,

ROBERT HERRICK

Casting the body's vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide:
There like a bird it sits, and sings,
Then whets and claps its silver wings;
And, till prepared for longer flight,
Waves in its plumes the various light.

In such poems Marvell, remembering that the intellect can play with
other things besides fire, enhances secular rather than religious themes
and lightly carries the metaphysical burden from the clergymen to the
cavaliers.

ROBERT HERRICK

Robert Herrick, a seventeenth-century vicar, wrote many of the
blithest and a few of the naughtiest poems of his age. Born in London
in 1591, he came of a family of jewelers, and it may not be too far-
fetched to detect an inherited craftsmanship in the poet's exquisitely
designed, carefully chased, and gem-encrusted stanzas.

It was as a goldsmith that Herrick began. At the age of sixteen, he
was apprenticed to his uncle, William, and he was particularly skilled
in the construction of rings, stickpins, and brooches. Little is known of
his education; his father prospered and young Herrick attended Cam-
bridge for about two years. After studying religion and taking two de-
grees, he was graduated from Trinity Hall in 1616, the year of Shake-
speare's death. He seems to have prepared himself not so much for the
pulpit as for the law, but there is no record of his having practiced the
profession.

In London, he became part of a group that gathered about Ben Jon-
son, who "adopted" Herrick as his literary stepchild. Rumor had him
occasionally roistering at the taverns frequented by the more literate
young blades, and it was as "a son of Ben'* that Herrick began to write
verses that were both witty and wanton. His respect as well as his
admiration for his mentor shines through the little "Ode for Ben
Jonson" and the unaffectedly appealing "Prayer to Ben Jonson."

When I a verse shall make,
Know I have prayed thee,

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LIVES OF THE POETS

For old religion's sake,
Saint Ben, to aid me.

Make the way smooth for me
When I, thy Herrick,
Honoring thee, on my knee
Offer my lyric.

Candles 111 give to thee,
And a new altar;
And thou, Saint Ben, shalt be
Writ in my psalter.

In 1629, when Herrick was thirty-eight, he was considered worthy of
a small ecclesiastical living and was presented with the vicarage of Dean
Prior in Devonshire. There he passed the next eighteen years of his
life. His occupancy of a pulpit in the peaceful countryside should have
been pleasant, but his life in Devonshire was far from idyllic. Herrick
was restless in the country. Although his verse is full of blossoms, birds,
and bowers, he longed for London; no rural scenery delighted him as
much as the streets of tawdry Cheapside. He regarded his bucolic sur-
roundings as an enforced retirement, almost a prison. He made a few
friends but, on the whole, he resented the rural folk, who, not unnatu-
rally, resented him. He characterized his neighbors as:

A people currish; churlish as the seas;
And rude, almost, as rudest savages.

He missed his beloved London with a sense of bitter isolation. He
continued to complain:

More discontents I never had,

Since I was born, than here;
Where I have been, and still am, sad

In this dull Devonshire.

Nevertheless, it was not the town Muse but the country Muse who
inspired him. It was not only a fantastic imagination but an accurate
observation which, in the midst of querulous moods, helped him to
create his carefree poems. He was conscious of the paradox. He con-

ROBERT HERRICK

fessed that he never intended so many "ennobled numbers" as in the
place where he "loathed so much" to be. Almost against his will, he
relished the semipagan customs of the countryside: the rough rustic
games; the undemanding company of his maid, Prue; his teasing little
spaniel, his pet lamb, and his pet pig which he trained to drink beer
from a tankard. He sometimes lost patience with his dull-witted parish-
ioners; it is reported that he once threw the manuscript of his sermon
at the sleepy members of his congregation, with a curse at their inat-
tention. But he was inevitably drawn into the circle of their lives. He
may have objected to the dullness of his surroundings, but he drew
his substance — and his best poems — from the simple earth.

The environment of Dean Prior directed and almost dictated Herrick's
ambling lines. The bucolic wakes and gay wassails, the spring daffodils
and autumn harvests, the merrymakers jostling in farm wagons and
shouting around Maypoles, furnished him with all the drama he needed.
They became his plot and his properties; he acknowledged it in the
couplets appropriately entitled 'The Argument of His Book":

I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers:

Of April, May, of June, and July flowers.

I sing of Maypoles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,

Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes.

I write of youth, of love, and have access

By these, to sing of cleanly wantonness.

I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece

Of balm, of oil, of spice, and amber-greece,

I sing of times trans-shifting; and I write

How roses first came red, and lilies white.

I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing

The court of Mab, and of the fairy king.

I write of Hell. I sing Cand ever shall)

Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.

In his fifty-seventh year, Herrick lost his livelihood. He had supported
the king during the Civil War and was forced to give up his position
during the Commonwealth. He was by no means unhappy to return
to London; it is apparent that he considered himself lucky to escape the
monotonous "confines of the drooping west/' His haven was the metrop-
olis. "I fly," he wrote, "to thee, blest place of my nativity." He said it
before; he reaffirmed it now:

LIVES OF THE POETS

London my home is: though by hard fate sent
Into a long and dreary banishment.

Hoping to re-establish himself among his fellow poets, Herrick pub-
lished a collection of his poems in 1648 entitled Hesperides, a volume
which contained almost everything he had written. It was not a success.
Jonson had died, and his coterie had been dissipated. The critics of
the period regarded Herrick's naive enthusiasms with condescension
and belittled his pastoral simplicities. One contemporary wrote that
True was but indifferently qualified to be a tenth Muse." The next
generation forgot him. It was not until 1796 — more than a century
after Herrick's death — that he was "discovered" by John Nichols and
reread with surprise.

After the Restoration, Herrick regained the pulpit which he had
been forced to give up to John Syms. He was seventy-one when, in
1662, he succeeded his successor and once more resigned himself to
the quiet of Devonshire. He lived there another twelve years, and died
at Totnes in 1674, in his eighty-fourth year.

Herrick is all delicacy and delight; his Muse is light-minded, some-
times petulant but almost always playful. Even when Herrick com-
plains of frustration, he does not really ache; his greatest protest is
little more than a pout. Donne's opposite, he toyed prettily with the
theme of love, mingling naivet6 and licentiousness in a kind of mocking
purity. He is frequently carnal — as in "The Vine," "Love Dislikes
Nothing," "The Description of Woman," "Upon Julia's Washing Her-
self in the River," "Upon the Nipples of Julia's Breast," and more
frankly pagan lines — but he is never gross. Although Herrick has been
compared to Catullus and Propertius, he is actually more akin to Horace.
His is a dalliance which is a refinement of all his models. The parade
of mistresses that relieved the loneliness of Herrick's parsonage is an
entrancing spectacle, but the Julias, Antheas, Electras, Corinnas, Dian-
emes, Sapphos, Silvias, Bianchas, Perennas, Myrrhas, Floras, and
others, are too numerous for truth, too coyly complaisant, too perfect
for reality. Yet, though unreal, they are as haunting and tantalizing as
a recurrent dream. They trail unearthly garments and a rare perfume
through the perennially quoted but unfading "Corinna's Going A-May-
ing," "Delight in Disorder," "The Night Piece," "To Anthea, Who
May Command Him Anything," 'To the Virgins, to Make Much of
Time," and its somewhat less well-known echo, "To Daffodils."

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ROBERT HERRICK

Fair daffodils, we weep to see

You haste away so soon:
As yet the early-rising sun

Has not attained his noon.
Stay, stay,

Until the hasting day
Has run

But to the even-song;
And, having prayed together, we

Will go with you along.

We have short time to stay, as you,

We have as short a Spring!
As quick a growth to meet decay

As you, or any thing.
We die,

As your hours do, and dry
Away

Like to the Summer's rain;
Or as the pearls of morning's dew

Ne'er to be found again.

It has been objected that, dealing with such honeyed stuff, Herrick
gives us a surfeit of sweets. Cautioning the reader not to take too much
of Herrick at one time, Swinburne wrote: 'The sturdy student who
tackles Herrick as a schoolboy is expected to tackle Horace, in a spirit
of pertinacious and stolid straightforwardness, will probably find him-
self before long so nauseated by the incessant inhalation of spices and
flowers, condiments and kisses, that if a muskrat ran over the page it
could hardly be less endurable to the physical than it is to the spiritual
stomach/' Moreover, if Herrick is sometimes too cloying, he is also, in
the very protestations of his amorousness, too cool. Protecting himself
as a bachelor, Herrick imagined a harem of sweethearts, but in actuality
he gave them up for a houseful of pets. He seems to have flirted con-
tinuously— there is an unproved bit of gossip that he was the father of
an illegitimate child — but he kept himself from being deeply involved.
It is more than likely that he dreaded the demands of love and never
really wanted its physical fulfillment. A litde-known dream poem,
"Upon Love," expresses his fears and indicates that he could never
"thrive in frenzy/' In other verses he confesses:

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LIVES OF THE POETS

I am sievelike, and can hold
Nothing hot or nothing cold;
Put in love, and put in too
Jealousy, and both will through.

And again :

I could never love indeed:
Never see mine own heart bleed:
Never crucify my life,
Or for widow, maid, or wife.

There were also the pious pieces which, as a divine, Herrick pub-
lished and called, somewhat vaingloriously, Noble Numbers. Some are
solemn, some sentimental; the best of them are the little verses to and
about children. Even the most devout lack the conviction as well as
the charm of the irresponsible poems which were much more to Her-
rick's taste and reflect his capricious moods.

It is obvious that there was a definite split between Herrick's poeti-
cally publicized sensuality and his private practice. As a poet, Herrick
was one thing; as a deacon, he was another. At the very moment he
succeeds in painting a sprightly picture of himself as an accomplished
libertine, he becomes panicky; fearful that the reader may take the poet
literally, the country clergyman disclaims everything. In a couplet en-
titled "Poets" Herrick confides:

Wantons we are; and though our words be such,
Our lives do differ from our lines by much*

He admits the ambivalence with almost pathetic emphasis. He re-
peats it in what seems to have served as a final confession, his "Last
Words":

To his book's end this last line he'd have placed:
Jocund his Muse was, but his life was chaste.

This is the key to the paradox, the union of naughtiness and niceties,
of wishful sensuousness and practical common sense. It is by no means
a titanic paradox, and the verse which reflects it is not earth-shaking.
Essentially, Herrick's poetry is a triumph of tiny significances. Here are
details almost too small to notice but which, somehow, remain large in
the reader's memory. The lines are bound together with tissues and

162

THOMAS CAREW

textures, with azure robes and careless shoestrings, with a tempestuous
petticoat, a bit of filmy lawn thrown about the shoulders in "a fine dis-
traction/' an "erring lace," and the "brave vibration" of a silken dress.
Never has a writer done so much with such trivial material. It may be
said that Herrick trifled his way from light verse into lasting poetry.

The author of some thirteen hundred poems, Herrick never attempted
the long line. His poems are compact and short; many of them are
thumbnail miniatures. He never tried to tear a passion to tatters; he
was content to be a poet of pleasure, a nimble epicurean. His attitude
to life was simple: beauty was evanescent, love was capricious, time was
swift. Such easy platitudes served instead of a philosophy; Herrick's
fine-spun lines could not have borne anything weightier.

Yet, even when his filigree work is most frail, it is superbly finished.
Herrick's song never has the soaring rapture of Shelley's skylark, nor
has it the pure ecstasy of Keat's nightingale. His is a graceful but
homely strain, a domestic sort of singing. It has the lilt of a small bird,
the house wren, full of the pert and happy repetitions of a songster
that is no less ingratiating and fascinating for being so agelessly familiar.

THOMAS CAREW

Thomas Carew was an aristocrat by birth — the year is usually given
as 1595 — who enjoyed life as the favorite of Charles L Son of the influ-
ential Sir Thomas Carew, Master in Chancery, he entered Merton Col-
lege, Oxford, at thirteen, took his B.A. at sixteen, and a year later was
admitted to practice in the Middle Temple. Before he was twenty he
was sent to Italy in an ambassadorial role. He remained in diplomatic
service until he was made Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and, at
thirty-three, "server" to the king.

A congenial charmer, Carew became one of the chief court poets,
with John Suckling, Richard Lovelace, and William Davenant as his
close associates. He arranged masques, plays, and other entertainments
for the royal household, delighted the court with his "pleasant and face-
tious wit," and allowed himself so many excesses that he was reputed to
be one of the most dissipated courtiers in a time when dissipation was
a matter of small concern. The cause as well as the date of Carew's
death is uncertain; he is supposed to have died in 1639, at forty-four,

163

LIVES OF THE POETS

after a deathbed repentance which ended a life "spent with less sever-
ity and exactness than it ought to have been,"

Carew's reputation for profligacy is sustained by a few poems, chiefly
"A Rapture" and "The Second Rapture," which are lascivious, and a
few trifles like 'The Tinder" and "Love's Courtship," which are lightly
licentious. It is also true that Carew's Muse is, as Suckling charged,
"hard-bound" and that his verse "was seldom brought forth but with
trouble and pain." But a dozen of Carew's short poems are so cunningly
"sleeked," so urbanely controlled and yet so apparently artless that they
are among the best of the period. "To My Inconstant Mistress" is a
Donne-like denunciation tuned to mockery, a shrug put to music. "He
that loves a rosy cheek" neady returns scorn for disdain. "To a Lady
that desired I would love her" is as free as conversation, and there is an
ingenious naturalness in the way Carew freshens the worn properties of
seventeenth-century poetry in "Spring," "Give me more love or more
disdain," and the formal, seemingly extravagant, yet somehow plangent
"Song," which begins:

Ask me no more where Jove bestows,
When June is past, the fading rose;
For in your beauty's orient deep
These flowers, as in their causes, sleep.

Among the minor Cavalier poets, Thomas Randolph (1605-1635),
William Habington (1605-1664), William Davenant (1606-1668), Wil-
liam Cartwright (1611-1643), and John Cleveland (1613-1658) are
frequently mentioned. However, the three favorite Cavalier poets after
Carew are Edmund Waller, Sir John Suckling, and Richard Lovelace,
all of whom justified the characterization by coming of wealthy families,
attaching themselves to the court, and writing in the approved suave
and sophisticated manner.

EDMUHD WALLER

Edmund Waller, born in 1606 in Hertfordshire, was reared in rich
surroundings, and inherited the luxurious estate of Beaconsfield in Buck-
inghamshire. Educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, Waller
was an M.P. at sixteen — he was said to have been "nursed in parlia-

164

EDMUND WALLER

ments." So zealous was lie of remaining in office that he changed sides
with consistent inconsistency. His allegiances were so quickly formed
and so readily broken, his self-seeking so adroit, that he seems to have
had every political sense except a sense of loyalty. A trained sycophant,
he was equally at home in King Charles's court and the recalcitrant
House of Commons. He headed a Royalist intrigue, known as 'Waller's
Plot/' was arrested and sent to the Tower, paid a fine of ten thousand
pounds, recanted, and, in one of the shabbiest confessions ever recorded,
betrayed all his friends.

As a professional poet Waller was scarcely more honorable. In his
fiftieth year, he wrote "A Panegyric to My Lord Protector" and a few
years later a fulsome tribute 'To the King, Upon His Majesty's Happy
Return/' The second piece was obviously inferior to the first, and when
Charles II demanded to know the reason for this, Waller glibly replied,
"Sir, we poets never succeed so well in writing truth as fiction."

At twenty-five Waller married an heiress, who died three years later.
Being a frequent visitor at the lordly Sidney home in Penshurst, he then
courted Lady Dorothy Sidney and praised her in rhyme as "Sacharissa,"
but she refused him, and the untided Mary Bracey became his second
wife. Handsomely provided for, envied by his contemporaries, Waller
outlived most of his generation and, in a period of short lives, survived
until his eighty-second year.

Waller, who began writing at eighteen, was as prolific in verse as he
was proficient in politics, and there are those who consider his later,
little known poetry his best. Nevertheless, it is the early, less serious
verse by which he is remembered. Dryden commended Waller's "pol-
ished simplicity/' and it is held that Waller's smooth measures and
closely organized rhymes led to the stricter couplets of Pope. "The
Dancer," "On a Fair Lady Playing with a Snake," and 'To a Very
Young Lady" are pieces that are sometimes quoted, but Waller lives by
virtue of two continually anthologized proofs of his grace: "On a Gir-
dle" and "Go, Lovely Rose." The latter is an extension of Herrick's
favorite theme and owes much of its popularity to the musical settings
by Henry Lawes and others.

Go, lovely rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me,

That now she knows
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.

LIVES OF THE POETS

Then die! that she
The common fate of all things rare

May read in thee:

How small a part of time they share
Who are so wondrous sweet and fair.

SIR JOHN: SUCKLIJMG

His literate friends greatly esteemed Suckling as a poet; his more
sporting associates worshiped him as their leader* According to Dave-
nant, Suckling was the greatest gallant and gambler of his day. For
two hundred years society remained in his debt, for it was Suckling who
invented the game of cribbage.

Nobly born at Twickenham, Middlesex, February i, 1609, Suckling
went to Trinity College, Cambridge, when he was fifteen. His father,
who had been knighted by James I, died two years after his son's matric-
ulation and bequeathed him a fortune which, even in his affluent cir-
de, was enormous. Suckling immediately left college and, at nineteen,
became one of the most reckless young blades in London. He flashed
through France and Italy, fought in Germany under Gustavus Adol-
phus, and returned from the Continent to dazzle England with one
extravagance after another. Knighted at twenty-one, Suckling's quick
wit and love of loose living made him immensely popular at court,
where he outdid everyone in spendthrift ostentation. When his play
Aglaura was produced in his twenty-eighth year, he refused to let the
actors wear the usual costumes and tinsel; the property lace collars were
real lace, the embroideries were "pure gold and silver." A year later,
when Suckling decided to accompany Charles on the Scottish expedition
of 1639, he raised a troop of one hundred horses at a cost of twelve
thousand pounds and furnished the horsemen with fine white doublets,
soft leather breeches, and luxurious scarlet coats.

In a life of easy triumphs Suckling made one serious mistake. He
conspired to rescue the loyal Strafford after the Earl had been aban-
doned by the irresolute Charles; he failed, was discovered, and fled to
France. There, at the age of thirty-three he died. One account has it

166

RICHARD LOVELACE

that he committed suicide; a more sordid report claims that he was
stabbed to death by a disgruntled servant.

Though Suckling was scarcely a great dramatist, he was one of the
most astute. Determined to win die favor of the public, he gave Aglaura
two different productions in the same year; one version had a tragic
finale and the other a happy ending.

None of the plays survived, and the longer verses, such as "Session
of the Poets," are read only by scholars interested in tracing Suckling's
indebtedness. But a few of die lyrics are sure of permanence. 'The
Constant Lover/' with its wry opening, "Out upon it, I have loved three
whole days together/' and 'Why so pale and wan, fond lover" are
sprighdy and cynical. "Hast thou seen the down i' the air" is an imita-
tion which is also a reply to Jonson's "Have you seen but a bright lily
grow." "A Ballad upon a Wedding" is altogether delightful, with just
a touch of boisterousness in its conversational spontaneity. The picture
of the young bride comes off beautifully in a few ingratiating lines:

Her feet beneath her petticoat,
Like little mice, stole in and out,

As if they fear'd the light:
But O she dances such a way!

No sun upon an Easter-day

Is half so fine a sight

Her mouth so small, when she does speak,
Thou'dst swear her teeth her words did break,

That they might passage get;
But she so handled still the matter,
They came as good as ours, or better,

And are not spent a whit . . *

RICHARD LOVELACE

Like Suckling, Richard Lovelace was the son of a gendeman who
had received his knighthood from James I; also like Suckling, Lovelace
was a child of wealth, a handsome youth, an adventurer, and a court

167

LIVES OF THE POETS

favorite. Unlike Suckling, Lovelace was always in trouble; he spent
much of his time in prison and died in want.

Descended from an old Kentish family, horn in Woolwich about
1618, Lovelace received his education at Charterhouse School and
Gloucester Hall, Oxford. He was the heir to four great estates, his star
was brilliantly in the ascendant, but Lovelace chose the wrong political
faction and, in his twenty-fourth year, was committed to the Gatehouse
Jail There he wrote what was to be his most famous poem, "To Althea
from Prison/' with its memorable last verse:

Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take

That for an hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love

And in my soul am free,
Angels alone, that soar above,

Enjoy such liberty.

After Lovelace was liberated on bail — the amount is variously given
as four thousand and forty thousand pounds — he found friends among
the poets, specifically Andrew Marvell, Thomas Carew, and Charles
Cotton. He was determined to prove himself as a patriot, and although
still a prisoner on parole, Lovelace raised a regiment of men for the
Royalist army, which was disastrously defeated.

Having spent all his patrimony on Cavalier causes, Lovelace found
himself an outcast, and his last ten years were spent in utter poverty.
The courtier who had glittered in cloth of silver became a ragged object
of charity, "poor in body and purse, befitting the worst of beggars and
the poorest of servants." Afraid of his friends, ashamed of himself, he
haunted alleys for scraps of food. His quarters may be imagined when
it is learned that they were in Gunpowder Alley, near Shoe Lane. He
contracted consumption and died in a cellar.

As in the case of Suckling, it is not Lovelace's ambitious works but
his small verses that are cherished. Carefree to the point of carelessness,
the stanzas are so forthright that we feel drawn to the person behind
the poetry. Only a chivalrous courtier and a cultured soldier could have
composed 'To Lucasta, Going beyond the Seas," 'To Lucasta, Going to
the Wars'* ("I could not love thee, dear, so much / Loved I not honor
more"), as well as the more celebrated 'To Althea from Prison/' The

168

BICHABD LOVELACE

Cavalier tone takes on a mocking inflection in "The Scrutiny/* an echo
of Suckling's audacious banter:

Why shouldst thou swear I am forsworn,

Since time I vowed to be?
Lady, it is already morn,

And 'twas last night I swore to thee

That fond impossibility. . . .

The same lightness is heard in "To Gratiana, Dancing and Singing"
and in the endearing 'To Amarantha, That She Would Dishevel Her
Hair," which concludes:

Do not, then, wind up that light
In ribbands, and o'ercloud in night,
Like the sun in's early ray;
But shake your head, and scatter day!

"Ellinda's Glove" — a "snowy farm" in which the fingers are "five
tenements" — is a chain of metaphors straight out of the Metaphysicals'
handbook, and it sustains the perilous conceits with daring skill. Partic-
ularly fresh are the bucolic poems ("The Ant," "The Snail," "The
Grasshopper," and others) which reveal a closeness of study and a whim-
sical use of observation. "A Loose Saraband," undeservedly neglected, is
one of the best of all convivial songs; recalling the Cowley of the Anac-
reontics, it is a gay paean to sex and alcohol.

Now tell me, thou fair cripple,

That, dumb, canst scarcely see
Th'almightiness of tipple,

And die odds 'twixt thee and thee:
What of Elysium's missing?
Still drinking and still kissing;
Adoring plump October;
Lord! What is man and sober!

169

Blind Visionary

JOHN: MILTON.

IT SEEMS unbelievable that the buoyant young author of "L* Allegro"
and "II Penseroso" was the same poet who ended his years — "eye-
less in Gaza at the mill with slaves" — a broken and embittered
Samson. But the liberties he championed always called for defenders
willing to suffer; a nonconformist hatred of tyranny was part of his
heritage. His father had been disowned because he had turned away
from tie strict papism of his ancestors.

John Milton was bom at the Sign of the Spread Eagle in Cheapside,
London, December 9, 1608, and inherited a love of music as well as a
passion for freedom from his father, some of whose compositions are
still preserved in Protestant hymnbooks. There were two other chil-
dren— Anne, an elder sister, the future mother of two sons, Edward and
John Phillips, who became the poet's pupils and biographers; and
Christopher, John's junior by seven years, who grew into the poet's
complete opposite: a Catholic, a Royalist, and an opportunistic lawyer
who had himself appointed one of King James's judges.

Shakespeare was still alive when Milton was a boy playing in the
district of Cheapside. In his standard if sentimentalized Life of Milton,
David Masson speculates that in 1614, "when the dramatist paid his
last visit to London, he may have spent an evening with his old com-
rades at the Mermaid and, going down Bread Street with Ben Jonson,

170

JOHN MILTON

have passed a fair child of six playing at his father's door, and, looking
down at him, may have thought of a little grave in Stratford church-
yard and the face of his own dead Hamnet."

Most of Milton's early education came from his father, a scrivener,
stationer, and notary, who had accumulated a considerable estate. There
were private tutors, particularly the Reverend Thomas Young, and there
was St. Paul's School, where Milton met Charles Diodati and formed
the closest friendship of his life. But his father was his mentor as well
as his model "My father destined me, while yet a little child, for the
study of humane letters," Milton remembered. "I had, from my first
years, by the ceaseless care and diligence of my father (whom God
recompense) been exercised to the tongues and some sciences."

At sixteen Milton went to Christ's College, Cambridge, stayed there
seven years and hated every one of them. He scorned the curriculum
with its prescribed subjects and resented the instructors with their pat
formulas. He wanted only to be left alone with his books and his
thoughts. Diodati, who had gone to Oxford, corresponded with him —
in Greek, which Milton corrected — and urged him not to immure him-
self. "Rouse yourself/' he wrote in effect "Let us have a holiday. The
weather has not been too good, but the sun is out now — the trees and
the breeze, the birds and the streams will rejoice with us." And again,
more urgently: "Why do you scorn the delights of nature? Why night
and day do you droop over your books and exercises? Come — live —
laugh — make the most of your youth— drop those weary studies. Don't
make yourself old with overwork." "My books," replied Milton a little
stiffly, "are my whole life."

This may seem pedantic as well as prescient, but Milton already
knew what his profession was to be. In a Latin ode written at twenty-
one and dedicated to Diodati, he makes it clear that he intends to be a
poet and, moreover, a great poet, a poet who will not only inspire but
instruct, a spirit dedicated as much to Good as to Beauty. Waiting to
fit himself for his appointed task, he marked his twenty-third birthday
with an introspective sonnet which begins in youthful uncertainty and
ends in puritan solemnity.

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three and twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth

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LIVES OF THE POETS

That I to manhood am arrived so near;

And inward ripeness doth much less appear,

That some more timely-happy spirits endu'th,

Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,

It shall be still in strictest measure even

To that same lot, however mean or high,

Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven;

All is, if I have grace to use it so,

As ever in my great Task-Master's eye.

Before composing this poem Milton had been in trouble with his
classmates and with the college authorities. Fellow students teased him
because of his fine features and auburn hair — they nicknamed him
'The Lady of Christ's" — and disliked him because of his obvious su-
periority, which Milton made no effort to conceal. He quarreled with
his teacher and was sent home, but since the period of rustication was
spent in London, he relished the temporary expulsion, walked about
the streets he knew so well and discovered books he never tired of ex-
ploring. Upon his return to Cambridge he did a great deal of versifying,
some of it amatory, most of it in Latin — he had already made Latin
versions of several of the psalms — but one English poem overshadows
everything he composed at Cambridge. This is the "Ode on the Morning
of Christ's Nativity/' an unquestionable masterpiece written at twenty-
one. There are echoes of Spenser in the elaborate imagery, and the
metaphysical poets are recalled in the chain of conceits, particularly
in such a baroque picture as:

So when the sun in bed,
Curtain'd with cloudy red,

Pillows his chin upon an orient wave.

But such lapses are rare. As a whole, the tone is exquisite and the
taste impeccable. After a slow-paced introduction, the Hymn, which is
the poem itself, opens vividly:

It was the winter wild,
While the Heav'n-born child,

All meanly wrapped in the rude manger lies;
Nature in awe to him
Had doff'd her gaudy trim,

With her great Master so to sympathize.

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JOHN MILTON

It was no season then for her

To wanton with the sun, her lusty paramour.

The transitions which bind together the other twenty-six stanzas are
as skillful as they are subtle. The wildness of winter gives way to "the
gentle air*' and harmony of heaven; nature pays homage to "the Prince
of light/' and the shepherds, whose ears are tuned to simple things, hear
the song of the angels suggesting the return of the golden age.

Ring out, ye crystal spheres,
Once bless our human ears

(If ye have power to touch our senses so),
And let your silver chime
Move in melodious time;

And let the bass of Heaven's deep organ blow,
And with your ninefold harmony
Make up full consort to th' angelic symphony.

For if such holy song
Enwrap our fancy long,

Time will run back and fetch the age of gold,
And speckled vanity
Will sicken soon and die,

And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould,
And hell itself will pass away,
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

As the poem reaches its climax, the promised music of the golden
age is given its counterpoint in the rumble of the Last Judgment. The
satanic Dragon is bound and, furious at the fall of his kingdom,
"swinges the scaly horror of his folded tail" — a gorgeously horrendous
image — while Peor, Baalim, and Moloch (fearful names anticipating
the demonic nomenclature of Paradise Lost) and all the other pagan
gods are defeated by the infant Christ

Three years after writing the astonishing "Ode" Milton left Cam-
bridge to luxuriate at Horton. Later he put it this way: "On my father's
estate, where he had determined to pass the remainder of his days, I
enjoyed an interval of uninterrupted leisure, which I entirely devoted
to the study of Greek and Latin authors; although I occasionally visited
the metropolis either for the sake of purchasing books or of learning

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something new in mathematics or in music, in which I, at that time,
found a source of pleasure and amusement."

The "interval of leisure" lasted almost six years, until his mother's
death. Milton had abandoned the idea of becoming a priest, although
ever since childhood his family had hoped he would enter the Church.
But the nonconforming youth realized he was not destined for the min-
istry, and that if he ever preached it would be in poetry. "Perceiving
what tyranny had invaded the Church, that he who would take orders
must subscribe slave and take an oath withal, which unless he took
with a conscience that would retch he must either straight perjure or
split his faith, I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence before
the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and for-
swearing." His nature demanded unregimented learning as well as
spiritual sincerity, and he spent his "retirement" at Horton and Ham-
mersmith (at that time a thickly wooded suburb instead of the present
strident section of London) reading works as varied as records of the
Christian Fathers, accounts of Italy under the Franks and Lombards,
histories of Greece, Rome, and Venice, together with continual study of
the Bible.

It was at Horton that his most endearing if not his most important
poems were produced. Before he was twenty-nine he had not only writ-
ten the "Nativity Ode," the much-quoted lines of Shakespeare (his first
published poem) which appeared in the Second Folio of 1632, and "At
a Solemn Music," a technical tour de force consisting of a single sen-
tence twenty-eight lines long, but "L'Allegro," "II Penseroso," Arcades,
Comus, and "Lycidas."

"L'Allegro" and "II Penseroso," most famous of all paired poems, re-
flect Milton in his happiest as well as his most pensive mood. The first
is a morning poem — the lark begins its flight, and "startles" the dull
night, the dawn brings the breath of sweetbriar and "the twisted
eglantine,"

While the cock with lively din
Scatters the rear of darkness thin,
And to the stack, or the barn door,
Stoutly struts his dames before . , .

Hunting horns rouse the sleepers while the countryside turns cheerily
to its work — the plowman whistles, the milkmaid sings, the mower
whets his scythe, "and every shepherd tells his tale." Everything comes
alive in flashing colors as the poet's eye re-creates the landscape:

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JOHN MILTON

Russet lawns and fallows gray,
Where the nibbling flocks do stray;
Mountains, on whose barren breast
The laboring clouds do often rest;
Meadows trim with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks, and rivers wide.
Towers and battlements it sees
Bosomed high in tufted trees,
Where perhaps some beauty lies,
The cynosure of neighboring eyes.

"U Allegro" is a sunshine holiday with the music of merry bells and
"jocund rebecks'* (fiddles), with dancing and fairy stories, not neglect-
ing "towered cities" and "the busy hum of men," with revelry, pomp,
and (naturally for a poet) with poetry, hearing Jonson's learned plays

Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,
Warble his native wood-notes wild.
And ever against eating cares
Lap me in soft Lydian airs,
Married to immortal verse,
Such as the meeting soul may pierce,
In notes with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out.

The brisk tempo and bright rhymes express the carefree man, walking
confidently with Mirth and Liberty; the syllables trip and glide without
effort, almost without weight Everything is a delight, everything is an
approving pleasure:

Jest and youthful jollity,

Quips and cranks and wanton wiles,

Nods and becks and wreathed smiles . . .

Sport that wrinkled care derides,

And Laughter holding both his sides.

"II Penseroso" reflects another side of the young Milton. Literally
"The Thoughtful Man," "II Penseroso" is an evening meditation — "so-
ber, steadfast and demure," with a nightingale singing beneath a wan-
dering moon, with the sound of far-off waters and a cricket on the

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LIVES OF THE POETS

hearth, while the thinker watches the stars, summons the spirit of
Plato and the poetic fictions of the past, dreams, sleeps, and hopes to
be wakened by music.

Dissolve me into ecstasies,

And bring all Heaven before mine eyes.

Light and shade play through "II Penseroso" and "L' Allegro"; there
are many small and delicate gradations of the "day's garish eye" and a
"dim religious light." Contrasting pictures are emphasized by changes
in pitch. Curiously enough, although the meter of the poems is iden-
tical, the syllables in II Penseroso seem to move more slowly than those
in its companion piece; the words are more heavily charged, the pace
is retarded, and the beat is measured to suggest calm thought and se-
rious contemplation.

It was at Horton that Milton wrote the masque entitled Arcades,
part of an entertainment arranged for the Countess Dowager of Derby,
and performed "by some noble persons of the family who appear on
the scene in pastoral habits." Its purposefully archaic references and
its union of pagan and Christian symbolism foreshadow similar effects
in Comus, while the presiding Genius of the Wood seems a first sketch
for Comus' Attendant Spirit.

Milton's second masque was far more elaborate in both intention
and design. Milton was twenty-six when he created Comus for the
festivities in honor of the Earl of Bridgewater. Henry Lawes, who had
composed the music for Arcades, wrote the score, produced the play,
and acted the part of the Attendant Spirit, while three of the Earl's
children played the Lady and her two brothers. A melange of pageant
and drama, parable and opera, Comus is a curious allegory which is
also a mythical-theological pastoral. It plays variations on Milton's fa-
vorite theme: the old contest between Virtue and Evil. It is, however,
a moral tract which turns against itself. Its subject matter is temperance,
chastity, and self-restraint, but the working out is odd and inconsistent,
Milton invents a son of Bacchus and Circe, makes him (Comus) a
tempter of virtuous mortals, and finally has his heady enchantment
broken by Sabrina, pure spirit of the river Severn. The plot demands
that water should triumph over wine, and reason over sensuality, but
Milton uses every sensuous device and dubious argument to establish
the victory.

If the intellectual content of Comus is cloudy, the poetry is clear.

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JOHN MILTON

It moves with the right combination of hesitancy and assurance, the
imagery is unostentatiously rich, and the Attendant Spirit's farewell is
a brilliantly satisfying epilogue.

Mortals, that would follow me,
Love Virtue; she alone is free.
She can teach ye how to climb
Higher than the sphery chime;
Or, if Virtue feeble were,
Heaven itself would stoop to her.

Milton had lost touch with most of his classmates after he left Cam-
bridge. But there was one whose short life he remembered and whose
death he immortalized. This was Edward King, somewhat younger than
Milton and, like him, one who had been destined for the ministry. In
his twenty-eighth year King sailed from Chester to visit his family in
Ireland; his ship struck a rock, and King was one of the passengers who
was lost. King's friends issued a set of obituary verses, concluding with
a "monody" entitled "Lycidas," signed "J.M." Milton chose the antique
form of a pastoral for his elegy: an invocation, a statement of loss in
which the poet and his dead friend appear as the traditional shepherds,
an appeal to the Muses ("Sisters of the sacred well"), and an assurance
that the ideals of the dead man will be acknowledged by the hosts of
heaven ("Look homeward, Angel") and revered by men. But the
twenty-nine-year-old Puritan poet could not write an elegy without
making the moral plain and pointing it at the evils of his day. The sub-
title of "Lycidas" reads: "In this monody the author bewails a learned
friend, unfortunately drowned in his passage from Chester on the Irish
Seas, 1637; and, by occasion, foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy,
then in their height"

The difficulties of "Lycidas" decrease, if they do not vanish, when
Milton's aims are understood. To carry out his program the poet mingles
pagan mythology and Christian theology, "trifling fictions" and "sacred
truths." In "a dreamy passionate flux" — the phrase is Robert Bridges' —
Milton assembles the blind Furies and Saint Peter ("the Pilot of the
Galilean Lake"), "smooth-sliding Mincius" (the river near Mantua,
birthplace of Virgil) and "Camus, reverend sire" (god of the river Cam,
which flows past Cambridge), Neptune and the Archangel Michael.
But it is not necessary to know that Mona in line 54 is the old Roman
name for the Isle of Man or that the Nereid Panope probably symbol-

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izes the boundlessness of ocean. The names, the remote allusions, are
the properties which build the poem, not the poem itself. The poem is
in the paradox of expression: in the calm tone and the impassioned
feeling, the personal grief and the universal sublimation.

The mixture of pagan and Christian allusions is only one of the
features of "Lycidas" to which Samuel Johnson so violently objected*
"The diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleas-
ing," Johnson began his long castigation. "In this poem," continued the
cantankerous critic, "there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is
no art, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vul-
gar, and therefore disgusting. . . . Surely no man could have fancied
that he read 'Lycidas' with pleasure, had he not known the author."

Victimized by his irascibility, Johnson seems to have been unaware
that Milton's object, here and elsewhere, was to combine the classical
and the Christian world, just as he employed the double meaning of
pastor to suggest both a pagan shepherd and a modern ministerial
keeper of the flock, and invoked Orpheus, the Muse's "enchanting son,"
as an identification with the living poet himself. The mingling of allu-
sions on two levels may be ambiguous and, to the reader unschooled in
mythology, confusing; but the lavish references enrich the poem with
orchestral sonority and intellectual power. "Lycidas" is a unique work,
an elegy which permits anger. Its hero is (or was) an honest shepherd,
an exception in a world of false pastors, wicked leaders, and corrupt
clergymen. Saint Peter praises him and apostrophizes them in a sting-
ing passage:

How well could I have spared for thee, young swain,

Enow of such, as for their bellies' sake

Creep and intrude and climb into the fold!

Of other care they little reckoning make

Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast,

And shove away the worthy bidden guest.

Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold

A sheep-hook, or have learned aught else the least

That to the faithful herdman's art belongs!

At thirty Milton longed for a wider vista and set out for the Conti-
nent, He had just completed "Lycidas" and his need for a different
environment was implied in the final couplet:

JOHN MILTON

At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue:
Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.

His goal was the antique world; the God-fearing Puritan was still en-
chanted with the ghosts of the elder gods. He stayed briefly in France,
chiefly to talk to Grotius, the great Dutch humanist, at that time
Swedish ambassador to the French court. His objective was Italy. Sail-
ing to Genoa, he stopped at Leghorn and Pisa, and arrived in Florence
in September 1638. Society — as well as the literary societies — made
much of the young English poet. Poems were dedicated to him, and
he replied in kind. Milton's Latin verses were highly esteemed, espe-
cially by the Italian intelligentsia. He visited with artists, drank with
noblemen, argued with scholars and conferred with philosophers. In
a villa near Florence he listened to Galileo, seventy-four years old and
blind, surrounded by disciples and spied on by members of the Inquisi-
tion, suspicious of fresh heresies. He went on to Siena and Rome,
where he was lauded by the learned; journeyed to Naples, where he
made a friend of Manso, to whom Tasso had inscribed one of his works;
bought books and manuscripts, including music by Monteverdi; and
continued his journey through Verona and Milan to Geneva, where
Diodati's uncle lived. He had hoped to extend his tour, but bad news
— Diodati's death and the threat of civil war in England — compelled
him to return. He was planning to go to Sicily and Greece when "the
melancholy intelligence which I received of the civil commotions in
England made me alter my purpose; for I thought it base to be travel-
ing for amusement abroad while my fellow citizens were fighting for
liberty at home,"

Back in London, after an absence of a year and three months, Milton
began preparing himself for the coming conflict, but there was no
definite place for him in the dangerously muddled situation. Not yet a
political thinker and certainly not a politician, he became a part-time
teacher. His widowed sister, Anne Phillips, had remarried, and Milton
volunteered to bring up her two sons, Edward, ten years old, and John,
six. Other boys were added to the household, which soon became a
small boarding school. A scholar-teacher, Milton laid out a formidable
curriculum — some idea of it may be gleaned from a pamphlet, On
Education, which indicated his aims. Every student was supposed each
day to read a chapter of the Greek Testament and hear a learned ex-
position upon it; he was to study mathematics, medicine, rhetoric, astron-

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omy, the Greek writers on agriculture and the Roman authorities on
military affairs; he would, it was hoped, learn history in Italian and
geography in French, the Pentateuch in Hebrew and the Targum in
Chaldee, as well as acquaint himself with such abstruse poets as Apollo-
nius Rhodius and (wrote Phillips) "authors scarce ever heard of in the
common public schools." Milton was hard on his pupils, harder on
himself; Phillips suggests that he might have saved his eyesight "had
he not been perpetually busied in his own laborious undertakings of
the book and die pen/'

At thirty-three the private teacher became a public controversialist.
King Charles had been forced to summon the Long Parliament toward
the end of 1640, and the always vexatious problem of the powerful
bishops created a turmoil. Petitions were presented urging the abolition
of all ecclesiastical orders above the status of minister; some were for
exterminating the Episcopacy "with all its roots and branches." Milton
entered the struggle between the defenders of the old order and the
new Puritans. Years later, in his Second Defense, he explained his
activities as pamphleteer:

The vigor of the parliament had begun to humble the pride
of the bishops. As soon as the liberty of speech was no longer
subject to control, all mouths began to be opened against
the bishops; some complained of the vices of the individ-
uals, others of those of the order. They said that it was un-
just that they alone should differ from the model of other
reformed Churches; that the government of the church
should be according to the pattern of other churches, and
particularly the word of God.

This awakened all my attention and my zeal. I saw that a
way was opening for the establishment of real liberty; that
the foundation was laying for the deliverance of man from
the yoke of slavery and superstition; that the principles of
religion, which were the first objects of our care, would ex-
ert a salutary influence on the manners and constitution of
the state; and as I had from my youth studied the distinc-
tions between religious and civil rights, I perceived that if
I ever wished to be of use I ought at least not to be want-
ing to my country, to the church, and to so many of my
fellow Christians, in a crisis of so much danger; I theref ore

1 80

JOHN MILTON

determined to relinquish the other pursuits in which I was
engaged, and to transfer the whole force of my talents and
my industry to this one important object.

Milton's hatred of the hierarchy grew into a denunciation of all forms
of tyranny, and of monarchy in particular. When the Reformation, with
its denial of the divine right of kings and its insistence on the natural
rights of the common man, found its militant leader in Cromwell,
Milton became its agitated champion. Fired with an ideal of service in
a great cause, Milton flung all his energy into the conflict. He turned
from poetry to prose; he issued one defiant pamphlet after another, say-
ing unequivocally, 'When God commands to take the trumpet and
blow a dolorous or a jarring blast, it lies not in man's will what he shall
say or what he shall conceal." He attacked recklessly, even grossly, in
his ardor for freedom. He charged at pedantic opponents with the full
weight of his erudition, and buried churchly antagonists beneath a
flood of religious zeal. He planned a great epic but put it aside for
necessary polemics. He translated an epigram by Seneca with enthu-
siasm:

There can be slain

No sacrifice to God more acceptable

Than an unrighteous and a wicked King.

Suddenly, to everyone's surprise, the confirmed bachelor of thirty-five
married a seventeen-year-old girl. Mary Powell, child of a Royalist
family, was scarcely one to be interested in Milton's preoccupations —
she was, says Phillips half apologetically, "used at home to a great house
and much company and joviality/' The pair were sexually as well as
psychologically mismated. It was apparent to Milton that he had
"hasted too eagerly to light the nuptial torch" and he felt guilty of the
"brutish congress" with 'Wo carcasses chained unnaturally together."
On Milton's part there was fierce conflict between the demanding
flesh and the harshly denying spirit — it is little wonder that his
frightened wife left him within a month.

Milton allowed her to go on what was supposed to be a short visit
to her parents; but Michaelmas, the date agreed upon for her return,
passed and she failed to appear. Milton wrote asking, then command-
ing, her to resume her household duties; she did not bother to answer
his letters. Milton may have been angered, but he determined not to
miss her. Hurt and resentful, he wrote The Doctrine & Discipline of

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Divorce and followed it with an exposition on the Scriptural interpreta-
tions of marriage.

The Cavalier Powells, who owed the poet five hundred pounds,
sided with their daughter. But Milton's pamphlets favoring divorce — a
divorce that could be obtained upon the husband's petition — together
with Cromwell's growing power, persuaded them it would be wise to
heal the breach with a son-in-law who was prominent in the ranks of
the ruling group. They sent Mary to London, and while Milton was
visiting a relation, managed to have her enter the room and throw
herself upon his mercy. She did so literally, on her knees, and a rec-
onciliation was effected. Mary returned to Milton, and meekly bore his
children; she died at the age of twenty-six, a few days after the birth
of her fourth child. Three daughters survived.

Throughout this period Milton was being subjected to pressures as
great from without as from within. In 1643 an intolerant Parliament
determined to stifle all opposition and establish complete conformity.
All those who held to individualistic doctrines were threatened. Striking
at every expression of freedom, Parliament passed an edict requiring
that all books be licensed by an official censor. Milton's pamphlets,
particularly his tracts on divorce, were assailed as "scandalous and
seditious"; it was obvious that, when put into action, the law would
silence freedom of speech throughout the country. Milton's reply
was the Areopagitica— derived from Areopagus, the hill of Ares, meet-
ing place of the highest council — a noble work on an ennobling theme.
This was its central tenet: "Where there is much desire to learn, there
T)f necessity will be much argument, much writing, many opinions; for
opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making." Specifically, the
Areopagitica was an address to Parliament. Combining the skill of
the orator and the eloquence of the patriot, Milton pleaded to protect
literature and liberty against "starched conformity" and the end of truth-
seeking. If it is bad to kill a man, it is worse to kill a book, he argued:

Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image;
but he who destroys a book kills reason itself, kills the im-
age of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a bur-
den to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood
of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to
a life beyond life, . . . We should be wary, therefore, what
persecution we raise against the living labors of public men,
tow we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored

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JOHN MILTON

up in books; since we see a kind of homicide may be thus
committed, sometimes a martyrdom; and if it extend to the
whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execu-
tion ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes
at the ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself;
slays an immortality rather than a life.

By this time Milton had announced, though he had not formulated,
his three freedoms: the right to educate liberally; the right to speak and
print freely; and the right to live happily, including the right to dissolve
a bad marriage.

In his late thirties, almost obscured by the publicist, the poet re-
asserted himself. In 1645 Milton published his first collected edition,
twenty-eight poems, including all his early poems, the best as well as
trivia, with several merely passable sonnets written in Italian. But
politics continued to embroil him; he became the unofficial laureate of
the Puritan Revolution. When the King was brought to trial, Milton
was outspokenly in favor of the regicides. "It is lawful, and hath been
held so through the ages, for any, who hath the power, to call to account
a tyrant or wicked king, and after due conviction, to depose and put
him to death/* After Charles's execution, he was appointed Latin
Secretary of State, Latin being the language used between govern-
ments. When Charles II, exiled in Holland, employed Salmasius, a
Dutch professor of "Polite Learning/* to write a defense of monarchy
and the divine right of kings, Milton was delegated to reply. Both
documents were in Latin, and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes said
he could not decide whose language was the best and whose arguments
were the worst.

Milton's work increased steadily, and his eyesight, always impaired,
grew rapidly worse. For a while he was helped in his duties by another
poet, Andrew Marvell. At forty-eight he married again, Katharine
Woodcock, of whom nothing is known except that she and her child
died fifteen months later. Her husband, remarked Johnson maliciously,
"honored her memory with a poor sonnet" Meanwhile, Milton had
become totally blind.

Scholars as well as ophthalmological experts have failed to agree on
the cause of Milton's blindness. The contemporary clergy held that it
was a judgment from God, a divine punishment for Milton's heresy,
and particularly for his iconoclastic pamphlets on divorce. Lay com-
mentators believed that the constant strain put upon his eyes, com-

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plicated by Milton's poor health, weakened and finally ruined his
vision. Milton had been aware of the impending catastrophe. His doctor
had warned him, but Milton would not listen. 'The choice lay before
me between dereliction of a supreme duty and loss of eyesight. . . .
I could but obey the inward monitor that spoke to me from above. . . .
If my affliction is incurable, I prepare and compose myself accordingly."
Denis Saurat deduced that Milton suffered from congenital syphilis
inherited from his mother, a condition which (Saurat implied) caused
the deaths of two of his wives and several children. On the other hand,
in Milton's Blindness Dr. Eleanor Gertrude Brown disputes Saurat's
theory. Dr. Brown shows that, in spite of many domestic fatalities,
Milton had many survivors, and she suggests that the blindness was
caused by glaucoma or paralysis of the optic nerve, Milton himself
was unable to analyze his affliction, although his work is full of ref-
erences to it. Perhaps the most moving as well as the most often quoted
of Milton's poems is the autobiographical sonnet which is a triumph
of resignation, a fusion of great art and tragic experience.

When I consider how my light is spent

Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,

And that one talent which is death to hide

Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest He returning chide;

"Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?"

I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need

Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,

And post o'er land and ocean without rest;

They also serve who only stand and wait."

In his Second Defense of the English People, referring again to the
charges against him, Milton refuted his maligners in dignified and
explicit prose:

Let the calumniators of God's judgments cease to revile me
and to forge their superstitious dreams about me. ... I
neither regret my lot nor am ashamed of it; I remain un-

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JOHN MILTON

moved and fixed in my opinion. I neither believe nor feel
myself an object of God's anger, but actually experience and
acknowledge His fatherly mercy and kindness to me in all
matters of greatest moment. ... If the choice were nec-
essary, I would prefer my blindness to yours — yours is a
cloud spread over the mind, which darkens both the light of
reason and conscience; mine keeps from my view only the
colored surface of things, while it leaves me liberty to con-
template the beauty and stability of virtue and truth."

Such a statement may seem self-righteous as well as self-conscious —
Milton was scarcely a modest man — but one must remember that he
was an unselfish fighter who never spared himself in the cause of
freedom. Moreover, his courage could not have come into being with-
out a constantly self -assuring confidence. "It is not so wretched to be
blind," he said, "as it is not to be capable of enduring blindness."

Devoted though he was to the Puritan cause and its Protector,
Milton was not overjoyed by Cromwell's usurpation of power. He could
not admit that the destroyer of monarchy might grow into a greater
despot than any king, but in a significant sonnet he reminded the Lord
General Cromwell that much was still to be done, that "free con-
science" must be protected at any cost and, in an immortal phrase, that
"peace hath her victories no less renowned than war." It soon became
apparent that the self-appointed Defender had become a dictator and
the Protector an oppressor. Nevertheless, even when the people turned
against Cromwell, and the Restoration seemed imminent, Milton, con-
temptuous of the risk, continued to speak up for the anti-Royalists.

After Cromwell's death Milton fought hard for the tottering Protec-
torate. But England was tired of factions, and it is doubtful that the
people really cared for self-government. They could hardly wait for the
return of royalty. The House of Lords was restored, and when Charles
II landed at Dover he was greeted with delirium. The right-about-
face was celebrated by the poets, notably by Cowley, Waller, and
Dryden, with unashamed promptness and enthusiasm. But Milton, still
loyal to "our expiring Liberty," refused to recant. He was persuaded
to go into hiding for a few months; but he was arrested and faced the
scaffold, though fortunately he escaped it. His books had been burned
by the public hangman, but through the influence of either Marvell or
Davenant, he was released from prison. Spirited away to the country,
he was saved from the wrath of the Restoration avengers.

LIVES OF THE POETS

Although his life had been spared, his troubles were by no means
over. His private life became increasingly lonely and difficult. His
occupation gone, he was almost penniless; he desperately needed pupils
and amanuenses. He depended on his three daughters, two of whom,
almost illiterate, had been taught to pronounce the six languages in
which they read to their father, although they did not understand any
of them. The older daughters, Anne and Mary, rebelled against the
drudgery of reading aloud, cheated their father, and, with an em-
bezzling servant, disposed of many of his books. When Milton, at fifty-
four, married his third wife, Elizabeth Minshull, thirty years his junior,
Mary remarked that a wedding was no news, "but if she could hear of
his death that would be something." One must bear in mind that at
least two of the daughters resented the already confining life and hated
the prospect of still harsher discipline from a storybook stepmother.
They did not want another parent, although their father felt they
needed one. Mary was spiteful; Anne, who stammered and was "back-
ward/* made no effort to help; Deborah alone was co-operative. She
assisted the pretty, young, quick-tempered bride in effecting an end to
the slovenly housekeeping and, in spite of the gossip, becoming a good
wife.

Milton was in his mid-fifties, but he looked much older. He sat
motionless much of the time and, heavy with contemplation, his facial
muscles sagged. The once auburn hair was a dull brown streaked with
dirty gray, and hung down over his temples. His color was bad, cold
and clayey; except when dictating, his expression was dead — Phillips
put it more pleasantly, saying his features were dignified by a "severe
composure." The sightless eyes were still a deceptively brilliant gray-
blue, cleared of everything but an inner vision.

He was about fifty-seven when he began his most monumental work.
For many years he had been planning something Homeric. He had first
thought of building an epic on a purely English theme, the legend of
Arthur and the Round Table, but nothing had come of it. He con-
sidered other subjects — historical as well as Biblical — and had made
notes for more than ninety dramatic poems; one of them, on the fall of
man, was an outline for a play to be entitled Adam Unparadis'd. By the
time he was ready to write Paradise Lost he had abandoned the idea of a
heroic saga in favor of a moral epic on religious truths. Rather than the
classic conflict engaging oversize mortals and undersize gods, Milton
drew up plans for a battle fought for humanity, waged by angels and
demons, the forces of eternal Good arrayed against the ranks of immiti-

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JOHN MILTON

gable Evil. He was conscious not only of the grandeur of his aim but
its daring. He adjured his Muse to utter "things unattempted yet in
prose or rhyme/* and if this was a somewhat boastful stretching of the
facts, it was no exaggeration when, for the support of his great argu-
ment, he wrote he would:

. . . assert Eternal Providence

And justify the ways of God to man.

For such a colossal project Milton felt that rhyme was too small, too
prettily mellifluous; it needed the long roll and thunder of blank verse.
Criticized by "vulgar readers" for discarding the musical properties of
rhyme, he defended his choice with heat and overstatement. 'The
measure is English heroic verse without rhyme — rhyme being no neces-
sary adjunct or true ornament of a poem or good verse, in longer works
especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched
matter and lame meter; graced indeed since by the use of some famous
modern poets, carried away by custom, but much to their own vexation,
hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the
most part worse than else they would have expressed them."

The oratorical style and the orotund vocabulary of Paradise Lost
roused more objections than the decision to employ unrhymed lines.
Utterly unlike the fluent intimacy and naturalness of Shakespeare's
blank verse, Milton's is stiff and mannered, dry, deliberate, detached
from human sympathy. Twentieth-century critics have been particularly
hard on the magniloquence and lack of movement in Milton's epic.
"Reading Paradise Lost is a matter of resisting/' wrote F. R. Leavis, "of
standing up against the verse-movement, of subduing it into something
tolerably like sensitiveness, and in the end our resistance is worn down;
we surrender at last to the inescapable monotony of the ritual."

The scheme of a grandiose cosmogony dwarfed the human beings;
it was objected that Milton knew little about men and women, and
consequently his Adam and Eve are unreal as mortals and lifeless as
symbols. Yet T. S. Eliot, by no means unreserved in his admiration of
Milton, argued that Milton's Adam and Eve were not meant to be in-
dividuals but prototypes of Man and Woman — "were they more partic-
ularized they would be false, and if Milton had been more interested
in humanity, he would not have created them/'

Dictating Paradise Lost to amanuenses was an aggravatingly slow
process; Milton was fifty-seven before he finished the work. It was

LIVES OF THE POETS

published two years later, in 1667, and Milton was paid five pounds —
a small fraction of what he had received fifteen years earlier for his
reply to Salmasius. Misfortune continued to plague the blind poet who,
as Wordsworth phrased it,

Stood almost single, phrasing odious truth,
Darkness before and danger's voice behind.

Fearing penury but still forced to utter "odious truth," Milton wrote
a History of England. It was promptly censored; the text was bowdler-
ized, and all criticism of the Saxon monks, which might have been
interpreted to apply to Milton's time, was deleted. Other even less
agreeable tasks included a Latin grammar, a textbook on logic, and a
compendium of theology. Four years after the publication of Paradise
Lost, Milton offered its sequel, Paradise Regained. Consistent with his
major poems, this last work also dealt with temptation, the temptation
of Christ in the wilderness. Milton preferred it to its predecessor. No
one else shared his fondness, for although Paradise Regained is
composed on a grand scale and runs to two thousand lines, it is a weak,
unexciting and generally inferior piece of writing. None of this de-
terioration is evident in Samson Agonistes, a curiously undramatic play
on a violently dramatic theme, probably begun after the Restoration
when Milton was either in hiding or in prison, but issued in the same
year as Paradise Regained.

It cannot be determined how closely Milton identified himself with
the heroic figures who, defending their principles, went down to defeat.
Certainly Milton, unlike Samson, never yielded to temptation, although
the poet was fascinated by protagonists who were tempted and over-
whelmed. Yet there can be little doubt that Milton made his creatures
in his own likeness. He had shared the humiliation of an ejected Adam,
he had fallen with a rebellious Lucifer and warred with a proudly
militant Satan. Now he was his own agonized Samson. The struggle
between his broken body and unbroken spirit pitted against an inimi-
cally Philistine world was intensified in the tragedy of that other blind
iconoclast. Even though he felt the world was given over to injustice,
he resisted the inevitable; he could recognize but not accept disaster.
Condemned to servitude — "Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves" —
and "dark, dark, dark . . . irrecoverably dark, without all hope of day,"
he cried out with the enslaved Israelite:

1 88

JOHN MILTON

I, dark in light, exposed
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong,
Within doors, or without, still as a fool,
In power of others, never in my own;
Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half.

In his old age the disappointed poet, "on evil days fallen and evil
tongues/' made a kind of peace with himself if not with the world.
He refused to argue; he declined to attend church and permitted no
religious observances in his home. He sent his daughters out to learn
embroidery or some "sorts of manufacture that are proper for women/'
At sixty-six, on November 8, 1674, he died "in a fit of the gout, long
troubled with the disease." Since Milton's death was scarcely caused by
high living and overindulgence in rich food, it has been thought that
the ailment which finally killed him may have been arthritis. The con-
temporary critics had little to say about his passing; one of them spoke
of him as "a blind old man who wrote Latin documents/'

One of the greatest poets, Milton is also one of the least read. There
are several reasons for this. For one thing, many have failed to find him;
for this multiple poet, politician, propagandist, and pamphleteer has
been hidden if not completely buried beneath almost impenetrable
layers of learning, a tumulus of interpretive texts, annotations, and
intimidating footnotes. Modern scholarship has been so busy making
Milton over in its own image that, unless the reader is a devoted stu-
dent of semantics, irrelevant sources, and the fluctuations in critical
opinions, he will find it hard to discover Milton because of the obscur-
ing clouds of analysis.

Another reason for our failure to find Milton winning, if we find him
at all, is his lack of desire to win us. He stands upon his eminence,
undoubtedly noble but uncompromisingly aloof. He elicits our respect,
even our reverence, but he does not command our love; he is virtuous,
high-minded, courageous, and altogether admirable, yet he is not com-
panionable. In short we do not go to him, as we do to most poets, with
eagerness. We anticipate few pleasures.

Part of our lack of enjoyment comes from a compulsion to admire,
a sense that something close to worship is expected of us. We recognize
the grandeur, but we are not at home with it; the vision is too

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LIVES OF THE POETS

magnificent for ordinary perception, the vastness dwarfs human feeling
and, consequently, deadens our response. "We read Milton for in-
struction," concluded Johnson, "retire harassed and overburdened, and
look elsewhere for recreation."

This is true chiefly of the longer poems. Paradise Lost especially
intimidates us. Lofty and immovable, it is a mountain of literature and,
like an Everest, its ascent is hazardous. There are serene and beautiful
plateaus, but we are not happy in such an altitude; the air is too rarefied
and, though we struggle toward the peaks, we would not choose to live
there. Milton had a penchant for vastness as well as a preoccupation
with height — his very vocabulary reveals his love of the majestic, the
profound and overpowering. His lines expand with such words as:
"celestial," "immortal," "infernal," "royal," "barbaric," bottomless perdi-
tion," "dubious battle," "transcendent brightness," "innumerable force."
Spellbound but not enchanted with such reverberating syllables accen-
tuated by the roll of sonorous proper names, captured but not captivated,
we become surfeited with the panoramic splendors and tired of the
much-praised organ music of magnificence. There is, in the literal as
well as the technical sense, no relief; there is little variety of pitch and
practically no change of pace; there is small consideration for the
cadences of the human voice or concrete human experience. Milton
votaries exult in the splendor and steady accretion of luxuriant effects,
but the result too often is pomposity instead of wonder; the language is
gorgeously allusive, but it lacks the homely and familiar way of speak-
ing which characterized the earlier verse.

Against these strictures it must be remembered that Milton was
perfectly aware of what he was doing. His was a stern integrity that
had no patience with subtlety or sensuousness; he deliberately discarded
the fancy and sprightliness of his early work in favor of an austere sub-
limity. The merely decorative images grew into towering figures, such
as this portrait of Satan:

He above the rest,

In shape and gesture proudly eminent
Stood like a tower; his form had yet not lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
Less than Archangel ruined, and th'excess
Of glory obscured: as when the sun new ris'n
Looks through the horizontal misty air
Shorn of his beams, or from behind the moon

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JOHN MILTON

In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds

On half the nations, and with fear of change

Perplexes monarchs. Darkened so, yet shone

Above them all th' Archangel: but his face

Deep scars of thunder had entrenched, and care

Sat on his faded cheek, and under brows

Of dauntless courage and considerate pride,

Waiting revenge.

During the 19305 and 19405 Milton's reputation suffered a drastic
reappraisal. T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Middleton Murry, and F. R.
Leavis were among the critics who announced Milton's "dislodgement"
after two centuries of predominance. "Our objection to Milton, it must
be insisted," wrote Leavis, "is that we dislike his verse and believe that
in such verse no liighly sensuous and perfect make-believe world* could
be evoked." Eliot added: "As a man he is antipathetic. Either from the
moralist's point of view, or from the theologian's point of view, or from
the psychologist's point of view, by the ordinary standard of likeableness
in human beings, Milton is unsatisfactory." To which Kenneth Muir
replied: "This schoolmasterly report was received with some satisfaction
by the general reader because his reverence for Milton had for some
time been traditional and conventional Between the seventeenth
century and the twentieth two things had happened which had
gradually reduced the enjoyment and even the understanding of Mil-
ton's poetry: the decline of religious faith and the abandonment of the
'grand old fortifying classical curriculum.' "

Once we realize the need of such equipment — a religious faith and
a familiarity with the classics — we cannot properly object to Milton's
obscurities or his remoteness from common experience. We might then
ask why the reading of a poem, especially a long religious poem, should
be a recreation unless we should also demand that a prayer or a psalm
be entertaining. We should also discount the charge against the "un-
reality" of Milton's Adam and Eve. Since Milton was dealing with the
first man and woman, a unique couple without racial knowledge or
previous experience, he did not have the freedom implicit in such epics
as The Odyssey or The Aeneid, which dealt with recognizable beings
and familiar motivations, and it could be argued that his triumph was,
because of the very restriction, all the greater.

Changing literary tastes may minimize but cannot nullify Milton's
burning purpose and the blazing resonance of his style. If the eloquence

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LIVES OF THE POETS

is achieved by the sacrifice of a flexible manner and simple persuasive-
ness, if there is elevation rather than ecstasy, there is no question of
power. It is the power of relentless integrity; and it is also the power
of incantation, of music not divorced from meaning but not wholly
dependent upon it — a verbal wizardry which gives this poetry massive
substance and solidity.

An indefatigable worker for liberty, Milton carved and erected
milestones that still stand on the road to freedom. A religious poet, he
was also a builder. Choosing his phrases as though they were stones for
a cathedral, he raised a great edifice, a monument of words in marble.

192

The Art of Artifice

JOHJ\L DRYDEK

ENGLISH LITEKATUBE presents no greater contrast than that of the
Elizabethan and the Augustan age. The latter term, so called
because Latin culture attained its greatest refinement under
Augustus, was appropriated by those who saw in the century between
1680 and 1780 an English literature comparable to that of the last
century of the Roman Republic. The period was marked by a reaction to
what were considered the excesses, romantic as well as metaphysical, of
preceding poetry. Turning away from riotous imagery and verbal extrav-
agance, it called for neatness, skill, continual control; its primary
demand was for order, maintaining literally, as Pope expressed it poeti-
cally, that "Order is Heaven's first law." The nation was prosperous;
agricultural wealth expressed itself in a surge of building activity; the
countryside luxuriated in great houses around which centered a life of
easy affluence. The social setting fostered a well-bred literature — gen-
teel, civilized, sophisticated — a literature for gentlemen and their ladies.
The period was also one which welcomed new trends in culture and
new discoveries in science. Justifying itself as the Age of Enlighten-
ment, it ranked intellect far higher than imagination and prided itself
both on its elegance and on its disillusioned practicality. Its drama was
characterized by a licentious mockery of marriage, virtue, sobriety, and
all the other moralities honored by its predecessors. Its poetry was alter-

193

LIVES OF THE POETS

nately coarse and overrefined; the subjects were lightly and, at times,
libelously unrestrained. But, if the matter was savage, the manner was
brilliant, and the meters were as stylish as they were severe.

The Age of Reason was synthesized by its most rational poet, John
Dryden. A complete antithesis to the uncompromising Milton, Dryden
was a timid spirit, a born time-server, ready to trim his sail with
every favorable breeze as well as any unfavorable breath. Unlike
Milton, a rebel with a reckless mission and moral pertinacity, Dryden
never protested against the ignobility of his times. His only loyalty was
to the status quo, however repulsive it might be, and his one mission,
as he saw it, was to "improve" the language of English poetry. This he
unquestionably did. To the monolithic grandeur of Milton he added a
baroque efflorescence.

Born August 9, 1631, at the vicarage of Aldwincle All Saints in
Northamptonshire, Dryden was the oldest of fourteen children. Son of
a country squire and grandson of a baronet, he was reared in the
Puritan tradition of his people. His career was foreshadowed by his
predilection for satire while he was still a schoolboy; among other
exercises he made a prize translation of the Latin poet Persius. Entering
Trinity College, Cambridge, at nineteen, he took his Bachelor's degree
four years later; wrote his first original work, an elegy "Upon the Death
of Lord Hastings," as an undergraduate; and flirted with his cousin,
Honor Dryden, to whom he indited an odd epistle, part prose and part
rhyme. Some critics have assumed that, since Honor never married,
a deep attachment existed, but there is nothing to substantiate the
speculation*

When Dryden was twenty-three his father died, leaving property and
a small income to his eldest son. Dryden thereupon decided to relin-
quish a scholarship, leave the academic world, and live in London.
There he became secretary to his cousin, Sir Gilbert Pickering, who
was Cromwell's Lord Chamberlain, and was given a minor position in
the Commonwealth. It is said that he increased his income by writing
prefaces for a publisher who, later, published Dryden's own books; it
was only toward the end of his life that Dryden, in common with other
writers, could hope to escape from fawning dependence on patrons and
earn a livelihood from the sale of his work. In his twenties Dryden was
by no means secure or stable, and his loyalties were easily shifted. A
few days after Cromwell's death and burial in 1658, Dryden glorified
the dictator with a long set of 'Heroic Stanzas: Consecrated to the
Glorious Memory of His Most Serene and Renown'd Highness, Oliver,

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JOHN DRYDEN

Late Lord Protector of This Commonwealth, &c." A little more than a
year later, when the exiled Charles landed at Dover, Dryden wrote
"Astraea Redux: A Poem on the Happy Restoration and Return of His
Sacred Majesty Charles the Second/'1 and followed this with "A
Panegyric on his Coronation," as well as further assurances of his
devotion to the new government in a fulsome address "To My Honor'd
Friend, Sir Robert Howard, on His Excellent Poems." Dryden made
no excuses for his change of party loyalties; the poet's function, he often
indicated, was to write poetry and ignore politics. Moreover, Dryden's
change of political alliances seemed no more discreditable to his con-
temporaries than the nation's change of heart.

Dryden's adulation of Sir Robert Howard's verses won him prefer-
ment and may well have won him a wife. The poet became intimate
with Howard's father, the Earl of Berkshire, and his whole family; at
thirty-two he married the Earl's youngest daughter, the Lady Elizabeth.
The marriage does not seem to have been particularly happy. Elizabeth
was older than her husband and had a reputation for looseness, but she
bore him three sons and improved his position socially as well as
financially. At forty Dryden was affluent enough to lend money to the
king.

Before that time the theaters, which had been suppressed for almost
twenty years, were reopened, and Dryden determined to become a
dramatist. He was thirty-two when he wrote The Wild Gallant, a prose
comedy which promptly failed. Nothing daunted, Dryden changed both
his tone and his technique. The Rival Ladies, presented a year later,
was a more serious play and was composed in a combination of blank
verse and rhyme. He collaborated with his brother-in-law on a "heroic"
tragedy, The Indian Queen, which was so successful that he decided
to mine this profitable vein by himself. The so-called "heroic plays"
were as grandiloquent and full of bravura passages as the romantic
operas they resembled. They were studded with pretty though generally
inappropriate lyrics, and they were written in "heroic couplets" — pairs
of iambic pentameter, ten-syllable lines, coupled with rhymes. In this
vein Dryden turned out a play almost every year for nineteen years:
tragic dramas and semi-tragedies, such as Secret Love, Tyrannic Love,
Amboyna, The Conquest of Granada, Aureng-Zebe, his last rhymed
tragedy, as well as now-forgotten comedies which attempted to combine
extravagant plots, high-flown diction, and debased echoes of Shake-
speare with the pseudo-classical tradition of the French stage, then

1 "Astraea Redux": The return of Astrea, Goddess of Justice.

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LIVES OF THE POETS

much in favor. Artificial but serene in their artifice, the plays are both
pretentious and entertaining; the interspersed lyrics are sometimes
sweetly nostalgic, sometimes piquant, and often more than naughty —
"Beneath a Myrtle Shade" from The Conquest of Granada, 'Whilst
Alexis Lay Prest" from Marriage a la Mode, and "After the Pangs of a
Desperate Lover" from An Evening's Love are not only brilliant but
boldly libidinous. The songs were so popular that some sixty of them
were incorporated in the songbooks of the latter part of the seventeenth
century.

Dryden's plays were made-to-order pieces of dramaturgy, cut to
fashion and trimmed to the gaudy taste of the times. Lacking in inner
conviction and, hence, void of true power, they are marred rather than
embellished by the set speeches which are propelled by nothing more
forceful than bombast which runs down into bathos. Shakespeare had
been out of favor for some time. During the latter half of the seven-
teenth century, audiences which preferred art to nature also preferred
a pastiche of emotion to genuine passion. Naturalism was taboo; but
baseness, intrigue, and even indecency were not only permitted but
relished if they were presented with double-entendres and sniggering
suggestiveness.

The Restoration, which literally restored the theater to the people,
revived Shakespeare by rewriting him. Editors in the Age of Enlighten-
ment continually "improved" Shakespeare according to the prevailing
vogue. Pope printed an edition of the plays omitting lines of which he
disapproved. Dryden "adapted" Troilus and Cressida by transmogrifying
the plot. Shakespeare's strumpet Cressida, whose "wanton spirits look
out at every joint and motive of her body," becomes a modest and faith-
ful heroine who commits suicide when her fidelity to Troilus is
questioned. All for Love, or the World Well Lost, generally considered
Dryden's best play, recasts Antony and Cleopatra in a neoclassical
mold, and completely alters the character of the chief protagonists,
whom Dryden — the sympathetic translator of Ovid's illicit An of Love
— found immoral, "patterns of unlawful love." The difference in poetic
levels is immediately apparent when one compares Cleopatra's dying
speech in Shakespeare's drama — the speech that begins "Give me my
robe, put on my crown. I have immortal longings in me" — with Cleo-
patra's conventional and almost formal last words in All for Love:

Already, Death, I feel thee in my veins;
I go with such a will to find my lord,

JOHN DRYDEN

That we shall quickly meet.

A heavy numbness creeps through every limb,

And now 'tis at my head; my eyelids fall,

And my dear love is vanish'd in a mist.

Where shall I find him? Where? O turn me to him,

And lay me on his breast. Caesar, thy worst;

Now part us, if thou canst.

Playwriting by no means stifled the poet as poet. At thirty-five Dry-
den issued Annus Mirabilis, a poem of more than twelve hundred lines.
A reply to three "seditious" pamphlets, Annus Mirabilis has been
termed a servile tract, a piece of inspired journalism, and also "an
eloquent panegyric to trade, and a noble proclamation of Britain's
manifest destiny/' Actually it is a dull if meaningful document, a
retelling of the Fire of London, the Great Plague, the horrors of war,
especially the Dutch War, and the need of obedience to a wise and
beneficent ruler. Undisturbed by the turgidity and uncritical of its
cliches, Charles II appreciated the purpose of the poem — basically an
appeal to turn away from dissenters who considered the king some-
thing less than divine — and two years later Dryden was appointed poet
laureate. He was thirty-seven when he succeeded William Davenant,
who had called himself "Poet Laureate to Two Great Kings" (James 1
and Charles I), although neither monarch had conferred the tide upon
him. The first official holder of the laureateship, Dryden received the
appointment in the form of a warrant; two years later he was also made
historiographer royal. The king had every reason to be pleased, for no
holder of the office gave a more ample return for the honor. Of the
fourteen poets laureate who followed Dryden, only two were great —
Wordsworth (who, during his tenure, wrote practically nothing in his
official capacity) and Tennyson — while the other twelve range from
the dignified if unexciting Bridges and the early Masefield, whom the
distinction of the office tamed into mere competence, to such medioc-
rities as Nicholas Rowe, Laurence Eusden, Colley Gibber, William
Whitehead, Thomas Warton, Henry James Pye, Thomas Shadwell, and
Nahum Tate, of whom Southey wrote: "Of all my predecessors, Na-
hum Tate must have ranked the lowest of the Laureates if he had not
succeeded Shadwell."

Dryden's greatest services to the king and court, his formidable
satires against the king's enemies, were still to come. Meanwhile, the
poet, in the role of champion, enjoyed royal favor and a pension of two

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LIVES OF THE POETS

hundred pounds, which, a few years later, was increased to three hun-
dred.

As a man Dryden was not much of a personality. Nor was he very
personable. His face was round without being cherubic; red rather than
ruddy; short in stature, plump to the point of pudginess, he was shy
with his friends, taciturn with strangers. "My conversation is slow and
dull/' remarked the author of the most pointed satires of the age. "My
humor saturnine and reserved. In short, I am none of those who
endeavor to break jests in company or make repartees/'

The satirist came of age in 1679. Dryden was in his mid-forties
when he felt he had been insulted by his friend and fellow dramatist,
Thomas Shadwell. Shadwell, who believed in Jonson's rules of classic
restraint, belittled the Dryden dramas, particularly the tumult and
fustian of the "heroic plays/' Although scarcely pleased, Dryden did not
take umbrage until Shadwell publicly praised The Rehearsal, a play
by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, which ridiculed Dryden as a
person, a playwright, and a notoriously bad reader of poetry. Dryden
retaliated with MacFlecknoe.

Richard Flecknoe was a deceased minor poet and, since he was Irish,
Dryden scarcely disguised him by adding the Mac, nor did he spare
his small reputation by declaring that Shadwell had inherited Fleck-
noe's dullness. Dryden was too wrothful to be just to either of his
victims; he particularly refused to see the brisk humor of Shadwell's
Epsom Wells and Bury Fair. Dryden was merciless. Innuendoes keener
than invectives pierce Shadwell's claim to comedy, his dialogues, and
his diction. No poet ever received a more contemptuous dismissal than
the very opening of the poem when MacFlecknoe, supposedly settling
the disposal of his estate, cries:

. . . Tis resolved, for Nature pleads that he
Should only rule who most resembles me.
Shadwell alone my perfect image beiars,
Mature in dullness from his tender years:
Shadwell alone of all my sons is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretense,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.

Shadwell replied with a not surprisingly ill-natured burlesque of
Dryden in The Medal of John Bayes (bays being a traditional symbol

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JOHN DRYDEN

of the laurel-crowned laureate), whereupon Dryden returned to the
attack with another vicious caricature of Shadwell as Og in The Second
Part of Absalom and Achitoyhel:

Now stop your noses, readers, all and some,

For here's a tun of midnight work to come,

Og, from a treason-tavern rolling home.

Round as a globe, and liquor'd ev'ry chink,

Goodly and great he sails behind his link.

With all his bulk there's nothing lost in Og,

For ev'ry inch that is not fool is rogue:

A monstrous mass of foul, corrupted matter,

As all the devils had spew'd to make the batter . . .

The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull,

With this prophetic blessing, "Be ihou dull"

MacFlecknoe was written in 1678 or 1679, but it was not published
until four years later, when it appeared in an anonymous and un-
authorized edition. Meanwhile, the manuscript had circulated freely
among those who were titillated by the scandal and well aware of the
authorship. By this time Dryden had learned the ungentle art of making
enemies. He lost another friend when he ridiculed the dissolute but
influential John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, one of the king's prime
favorites, and his mistress, the Duchess of Portsmouth. Passing
through Covent Garden, Dryden was assaulted and badly beaten
(presumably by Rochester's hired thugs) and, though a reward of
fifty pounds was offered for information concerning the masked men,
nothing was gained. On the contrary, Dryden was the recipient of
veiled diatribes and sneering taunts.

Three years after ridding himself of rancor in MacFlecknoe, Dry-
den again employed the scourge of satire. This time, however, his
purpose was not personal revenge but service to the State. A "Popish
Plot" had been agitating the country; an aroused faction, under the
leadership of the Earl of Shaftesbury, a zealous Whig, challenged the
Tories and spread the fear of Catholic domination in England. In
particular, Shaftesbury urged that the Duke of Monmouth, Charles's
natural son, should succeed Charles rather than James, the Catholic
Duke of York and the king's brother. The king tried to temporize, but,
when the Commons refused to accede to his suggestions, Charles dis-
solved Parliament. The people, torn between fear of civil war and the

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prospect of another Catholic ruler, were apprehensive, restless but not
openly rebellious.

Dryden, a strict Tory at heart, sought a Biblical parallel to the
situation. He found it in the Old Testament, the story of Absalom and
the traitorous counselor, Achitophel, who conspired with him against
David. Dryden's masterpiece, Absalom and Achitophel, was designed
to show the rebellious nature of the Whigs and the actual characters
of the principals involved. David, obviously, was Charles II; Absalom
was the handsome and errant James, Duke of Monmouth; Achitophel
was Lord Shaftesbury; the obnoxious Zimri was the hated Duke of
Buckingham, author of the objectionable The Rehearsal; Corah was
Titus Gates, who invented the "Popish Plot'*; the Jews were the Eng-
lish, and Parliament became the Sanhedrin.

An allegory which is also a tour de force of delineation, Absalom and
Achito'phel excels in a succession of portraits executed with the strictest
economy and the most brilliant brush strokes. The picture of Absalom
immediately discloses Monmouth's appeal, his affability, his weakness,
and his fatal charm:

Whate'er he did was done with so much ease,
In him alone 'twas natural to please;
His motions all accompanied with grace;
And paradise was open'd in his face.

Shaftesbury is depicted as chief of the "ungrateful men" in acrid
and vigorous lines:

Of these the false Achitophel was first;
A name to all succeeding ages curst:
For dose designs and crooked counsels fit;
Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit;
Restless, unfixed in principles and place;
In pow'r unpleas'd, impatient of disgrace;
A fiery soul, which, working out its way,
Fretted the pigmy body to decay,
And o'er-inform'd the tenement of clay*

Buckingham, as Zimri, fares worse. After his brusque sketch of
Shaftesbury, Dryden added a reproachful postscript mingling admira-
tion and regret: "O, had he been content to serve the crown." But he

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JOHN DRYDEN

had no such compunction about Buckingham, who is dismissed with
brutal directness:

A man so various that he seem'd to be
Not one, but all mankind's epitome:
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong;
Was everything by starts, and nothing long;
But, in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon:
Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking,
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.

Nor did Dryden spare his fellow countrymen. Symbolized as Jews,
the English were treated to some of Dryden's choicest (if most re-
actionary) ironies:

The Jews, a headstrong, moody, murm'ring race
As ever tried th' extent and stretch of grace;
God's pamper'd people, whom, debauch'd with ease,
No king could govern, nor no God could please;
(Gods they had tried of ev'ry shape and size,
That god-smiths could produce, or priests devise:)
These Adam-wits, too fortunately free,
Began to dream they wanted liberty.

Perhaps the most ingenious part of Absalom and Achitophel is its
casual beginning. Here, with the lightest possible touch, Dryden
blandly likens Charles's brazen promiscuity to David's:

In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin,

Before polygamy was made a sin;

When man on many multiplied his kind,

Ere one to one was cursedly confin'd;

When nature prompted, and no law denied

Promiscuous use of concubine and bride;

When Israel's monarch after Heaven's own heart,

His vigorous warmth did variously impart

To wives and slaves; and, wide as his command,

Scatter'd his Maker's image thro* the land . . .

Once having enjoyed the acid taste of satire Dryden seemed loath
to feed on anything else. Seven years were given to dissecting and serv-

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LIVES OF THE POETS

ing up his real or fancied enemies, unaware that the very skill of his
operations, intended to be fatal, preserved the victims it purposed to
destroy. The Medal announced its program in a subtitle: "A Satire
against Sedition"; its target once again was Shaftesbury, whom the
government had charged with high treason. When the London grand
jury rejected the indictment, Shaftesbury's adherents had medals struck
in honor of the acquittal and wore them boldly in public. The implica-
tions were particularly offensive to the king, for one side showed
Shaftesbury looking like a Roman emperor, while the other displayed
a view of London with the rising sun dispelling the clouds. A fairly
plausible legend has it that the king sought the services of his laureate
and, during a walk on the Mall, said to Dryden: "If I were a poet, and
I think I am poor enough to be one, I would write a poem on such
a subject." The king, moreover, went on to suggest the manner in
which the satire should be written and, when Dryden brought him the
finished manuscript, gave him "a hundred broad pieces." In spite of its
royal instigation The Medal is not in the same class as either Mac-
Flecknoe or Absalom and Achitophel. But its surgery is as savage as
ever. Once again the victim is Shaftesbury:

Bartering his venal wit for sums of gold,

He cast himself into the saintlike mold;

Groan'd, sigh'd, and pray'd, while godliness was gain,

The loudest bagpipe of the squeaking train.

Absalom and Achitophel had been so widely commended that a
sequel was demanded. Dryden conceded that another installment might
be supplied, but insisted that it be written by someone else. Finally,
when Nahum Tate undertook the task, Dryden supplied some two
hundred lines (by far the most pungent passages) and "touched up"
others. Besides the original cast, Dryden added Shadwell as Og and
the successfully bombastic Elkanah Settle as Doeg. Dryden, in a former
collaboration with Shadwell, had criticized Settle's florid play, The
Empress of Morocco; Settle retorted by assailing Dryden's play,
Almanzor and Almahide. Dryden continued the feud with his carica-
ture of Settle as Doeg:

Doeg, tho* without knowing how or why,
Made still a blundering kind of melody;

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JOHN DRYDEN"

Spurr'd boldly on, and dash'd thro* thick and thin,
Thro* sense and nonsense, never out nor in;
Free from all meaning, whether good or tad,
And, in one word, heroically mad . . .
He needs no more than birds or beasts to think:
All his occasions are to eat and drink.

Dryden believed that though the chief function of a play was to
excite and entertain, the main object of poetry was to admonish and
convince. A poem therefore ought to be "plain and natural/' not "florid
and figurative. ... A man is to be cheated into passion but to be
reasoned into truth." Religio Laid is certainly a piece of plain-speaking;
subtitled "A Layman's Faith," it is a reasoned argument for the Church
of England against the Church of Rome. It is, however, a rhymed
essay rather than a poem; in spite of some sprightly couplets, including
several hits on the priesthood, it lumbers along and ends lamely with
another thrust at Shadwell, this one as gratuitous as it is inappropriate.
Dryden seems to have realized he wrote without charm or much per-
suasiveness:

Thus have I made my own opinions clear;
Yet neither praise expect, nor censure fear:
And this unpolish'd, rugged verse I chose
As fittest for discourse, and nearest prose.

The Spanish Friar (1681) had treated the Catholic clergy with rough
scurrility. Religio Laid (1682) continued to hammer away at the
Papists. Three years later, when James II, a Roman Catholic, succeeded
his brother to die throne, Dryden displayed a remarkable flexibility of
conviction and became a Roman Catholic. He justified his conversion
in The Hind and the Panther. Knowing Dryden's previous history, the
right-about-face is not hard to understand. It is probable that, intellec-
tually as well as spiritually, he needed the support of an unquestioning
faith, the substitution of unwavering dogma for "precarious reason,"
and the security of a rigid and infallible creed. But it is also true that
Dryden always wanted to be on the safe side financially as well as
politically, and that he was willing to employ his talents wherever
they would yield the best return. He was a craftsman, not a crusader;
his business, as he saw it, was not to oppose the existing order but to

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LIVES OF THE POETS

put it to his use. In only one sense was he a reformer: he hoped to
bring more discipline into the writing of verse and "reform its
numbers."

To those not acquainted with the intricacies of the political-religious
imbroglios and the arbitrariness of Church symbolism, The Hind and
the Panther is a difficult poem. Inordinately long — 2,592, lines — it is
both an allegory and a medieval beast fable. The "milk-white Hind,
immortal and unchang'd" represents Dryden's new-found faith, the
Catholic Church, while his old faith, the Anglican Church, is

The Panther, sure the noblest, next the Hind,
And fairest creature of the spotted kind;
O, could her inborn stains be wash'd away,
She were too good to be a beast of prey!

Other sects are symbolized by "the bloody Bear, an Independent
beast," "the bristled Baptist Boar," "the quaking Hare" — Dryden might
be suspected of a pun, for the Quakers, like his Hare, "profess'd
neutrality but would not swear" — "the buffoon Ape," the Atheist,
"th* insatiate Wolf," spawn of "meager Calvin":

His ragged tail betwixt his legs he wears,

Close clapp'd for shame; but his rough crest he rears,

And pricks up his predestinating ears.

After introducing the minor characters, the poem settles down to a
discussion between the two chief figures, and the involved but amiable
debate ends, as might be expected, in victory for the Hind. There is no
plot, no narration to sustain the interest; on the contrary, there are
interminably argumentative passages which weary the reader. But
bursts of satire flash through the tediousness, and the poet communi-
cates his pleasure in the very expressiveness of his loquacity. The Hind
and the Panther has the added value of autobiography. Dryden's
reasoning may be post hoc, but he looks ruefully at his past:

My thoughtless youth was wing'd with vain desires,

My manhood, long misled by wand'ring fires,

Followed false lights; and, when their glimpse was gone,

My pride struck out new sparkles of her own.

Such was I, such by nature still I am;

Be thine the glory, and be mine the shame.

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JOHN DRYDEN

This detail of Dryden's development is preceded by a surge o£ elo-
quence in which the poet, speaking to the Deity, voices a humble and,
somehow, pathetic explanation of his conversion:

What weight of ancient witness can prevail
If private reason hold the public scale?
But, gracious God, how well dost thou provide
For erring judgments an unerring guide!
Thy throne is darkness in th'abyss of light,
A blaze of glory that forbids the sight.
O teach me to believe thee thus conceaTd,
And search no farther than thyself reveaTd.

Not a lyric poet, Dryden sometimes succeeded in preserving the
lyric line. This is exemplified in the ease and sometimes too facile
fluency of his odes, loosely modeled on those of the ancient Pindar.
Of the odes the four best known are the ambling and undistinguished
"Threnodia Augustalis: A Funeral-Pindaric Poem/' written on the
death of Charles II, by the laureate who signed himself "Servant to
His Late Majesty and to the Present King"; the uneven but musical
'To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young Lady, Mrs. Anne
Killigrew," a slightly talented poet-painter; the celebrated "Song for
St. Cecilia's Day"; and "Alexander's Feast," written like the "Cecilia"
ode, for a musical society and set by various composers, including
Handel. The first of these is unremembered and, except by students,
unread. The second is a mixture of pleasantries and absurdities, with
the tenth and last verse a tumble of ornate, macabre, and comic images:

When in mid-air the golden trump shall sound

To raise the nations under ground . . .

When rattling bones together fly

From the four corners of the sky;

When sinews o'er the skeletons are spread,

Those cloth'd with flesh, and life inspires the dead;

The sacred poets first shall hear the sound,

And foremost from the tomb shall bound,

For they are cover'd with the lightest ground.

"Song for St. Cecilia's Day" and "Alexander's Feast," often acclaimed
as Dryden's best poems, have suffered from overpraise as well as their
own inherent artificiality. Spectacular both of them definitely are, with

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LIVES OF THE POETS

their abruptly shifting rhythms and banging repetitions; but they are
obviously manufactured, being, at the best, triumphs of technique,
not of inspiration, feats of virtuosity with little virtue.

Although England was aware of impending revolution, Dryden
seems to have been unprepared for the calamities which struck in his
late fifties. James II had ruled the country with a heavy religious
hand; when his son was born, the people, fearful that the heir would
be another Catholic monarch, became restive again. Even the hitherto
loyal Tories turned against him. When certain bishops, charged with
sedition, were finally acquitted, a great wave of resentment against
James swept across the nation, and an appeal to save England from
Papal domination was sent to William of Orange, who had married
Mary, James's daughter. There were uprisings; James fled, was brought
back for trial, and escaped to France; Parliament reconvened, and the
crown was offered jointly to William and Mary. This meant Dryden's
ruin. A Catholic, he could not take the oath required of all those who
held office under the new regime; he lost his positions as poet laureate
and historiographer royal. The blow, bad enough in itself, carried an
extra bitterness when the laureateship was conferred upon Shadwell,
the very man whom Dryden had so contemptuously derided.

His spirit depressed, his income reduced to almost nothing, an old
man at fifty-eight, Dryden sought to recoup his losses by returning
to play writing, adapting, and translating. He had already tried his
hand at furnishing librettos to operas. One of them, The State of
Innocence, and Fall of Man, was a foolhardy attempt to "enrich" Para-
dise Lost by the addition of rhyme — Dryden received Milton's permis-
sion to "tag his verses." Though it was printed, it was never per-
formed. During the next few years Dryden completed half a dozen
plays. Among them was a new version of Amyhytrion, a farcical com-
edy; King Arthur, an overambitious opera; Don Sebastian, a tragedy,
the best of his later works; the serious Cleomenes and Love Trium-
phant. But taste had changed again, and, although Dryden said that
his tragedies "were bad enough to please," they did not find favor with
a new generation of theater-goers.

At sixty he determined to do what no English author had hitherto
attempted: to live on the sale of his books. For the remaining ten
years of his life he wrote for the market and produced some of the
liveliest and most lasting translations in the language. He had already
paraphrased Horace, Lucretius, and Theocritus. Now he made into
English five satires of Juvenal; three selections from Ovid's Amores

206

JOHN DRYDEN

and Ar$ Amatoria, as well as a few segments from his Metamorphoses;
a section of the Iliad, all of Persius and, with a little borrowing here
and there, a complete Virgil, which was so sought after that it earned
Dryden some twelve hundred pounds.

At sixty-nine, a year before his death, he prepared his final volume,
Fables, Ancient and Modern. It consisted principally of "moderniza-
tions" of Chaucer and stories of Boccaccio put into rhyme. He was
unusually modest about this 'last fruit of an old tree" — in a letter to
a relation, Mrs. Steward, he wrote concerning his health and his pros-
pects: "In the meantime, betwixt my intervals of physic and other
remedies I am using for my gravel, I am still drudging on — always a
poet, and never a good one. I pass my time sometimes with Ovid, and
sometimes with our old English poet, Chaucer; translating such stories
as best please my fancy; and intend besides them to add somewhat of
my own: so that it is not impossible but ere the autumn be passed, I
may come down to you with a volume in my hand, like a dog out of
the water with a duck in his mouth."

In November, 1699, Dryden again wrote Mrs. Steward about the
book and the Duchess of Ormonde, to whom he had dedicated his
version of Chaucer's "Palamon and Arcite." On April u, 1700, he
wrote to her that "the ladies of the town ... are all of your opinion
and like my last book of poems better than anything they have for-
merly seen of mine." Twenty days later, on the first of May, 1700, he
died and was buried in Westminster Abbey, not far from the grave
of his beloved Chaucer.

Three weeks before his death Dryden informed Mrs. Steward that
he had written a new masque to be added to "an old play of Fletcher's
calPd The Pilgrim, corrected by my good friend, Mr. Vanbrook" (i.e.,
Sir John Vanbrugh, dramatist and architect). In The Secular Masque,
his last work, Dryden epitomized the temper of the preceding century
as reflected in the two monarchs under whom he served. The reign
of James II and his love of hunting is symbolized by Diana, and the
chorus chants:

Then our age was in its prime,
Free from rage, and free from crime:
A very merry, dancing, drinking,
Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking time.

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LIVES OF THE POETS

Mars and Venus commemorate the military and amatory conquests
of Charles II. But Momus, god of mockery and censure, rebukes
them all:

All, all of a piece throughout:

Pointing to Diana:
Thy chase had a beast in view

To Mars:
Thy wars brought nothing about;

To Venus:

Thy lovers were all untrue.
Tis well an old age is out,
And time to begin a new.

Here, at seventy, spoke disillusion if not despair. The times, the old
age, had been "all of a piece throughout/' ignoble and futile, a series
of disappointments and deceits. Nor was there any guarantee that the
new age would be any better. Momus already had reminded Mars
that:

The fools are only thinner

With all our cost and care;
But neither side a winner
For things are as they were.

It was this cynicism that equipped Dryden to become the master
satirist and critic of his age. Farcical, insolent, skeptical, or contemptuous,
his was a new kind of denunciation. It was not sly or subtle. Dryden
used satire as a sledge hammer, not (like Pope) as a poniard; he be-
labored his enemies without compunction or good taste. Taste was
reserved for the critic. In this role Dryden was completely at ease;
the prose is plain-speaking but never plodding. His estimates of Chau-
cer and Shakespeare set a mark for all future apprcciators. His occa-
sional dedications, illuminating prefaces, and such pieces as the "Essay
on Dramatick Poesy," with its approximation of a Socratic dialogue,
are a successful union of classical and conversational tones. We owe to
Dryden, said Johnson, "the refinement of our language, and much of
the correctness of our sentiments. By him we were taught to think
naturally and express forcibly."

As a poet Dryden speaks variously and often contradictorily. His
reputation has fluctuated from the extreme of adulation to neglect — the
nineteenth century, in love with the Romantics, would have none of
him — and each new generation renders another verdict. His admirers

208

JOHN DRYDEN

praised him for his open mind; his adversaries condemned him for a
soul which was not only plastic but unscrupulously practical. When
he began, the Metaphysicals were still respected, and such a poem as
the early "Upon the Death of Lord Hastings" is full of strained and
sickening conceits. For example:

Blisters with pride swelTd, which thro's flesh did sprout

Like rosebuds, stuck 1* th* lily skin about.

Each little pimple had a tear in it

To wail the fault its rising did commit

As the Metaphysicals fell out of fashion, Dryden disdained the
vaguely allusive, the ambiguous, and the delicately probing. His aim
was neither subtlety nor profundity, but precision of phrase, firmness
and clarity, neatness of dispatch. He held the winged imagination in
check; he preferred the less soaring flights of reason, which he called
judgment, saying, 'Whereas poems which are produced by the vigor
of the imagination only have a gloss upon them at the first, which
time wears off, the works of judgment are like the diamond: the more
they are polished, the more lustre they receive."

He wrote a little about nature, but without loving and scarcely
observing it. He shared his generation's distrust of the wilder aspects
of the natural scene — mountains were craggy and dangerous, forests
were full of mysterious perils. He sought the arranged symmetry of
clipped privet hedges, espaliered fruit trees, and formal gardens, dis-
liking any object "which is wanting in shades and greens to enter-
tain." So reluctant was he to enjoy the free fancy of a nature which
approached the supernatural that, when with the assistance of Dave-
nant, he "modernized" The Tempest, he gave Ariel a domesticated
sister, named Milcha, and an incongruously pedestrian song.

Nevertheless, Dryden refreshed and extended the poetic idiom. He
made it marvelously flexible; he gave it speed, perfect timing, con-
cision, a clean line and cutting edge. His aim was logic in verse, an
inspired common sense which did not reach after the blindingly radiant
or the inapprehensibly mystical. "He ought to be on our shelves," wrote
Leslie Stephan, "but he will rarely be found in our hearts."

If this is true, it is because Dryden's writing lacks the one element
by which writing is remembered longest: the element of magic. His
is, in its own characteristic way, the sharpest, the most pointed and
perfectly finished kind of poetry, if poetry can be attained without
wonder.

209

XII

The World as Wit

THE HALF CENTURY between Dryden and Pope was a thin period
for poetry. Self-conscious as the prose which followed the Res-
toration, the verse was both arch and sophisticated, artificial with-
out Dryden's skill of artifice. Although it continually spoke of emo-
tions, it rarely evoked them; the tone was socially good-mannered
rather than privately urgent; gallantry served instead of poignancy.
There was no trace of Elizabethan rapture or Metaphysical intensity;
"enthusiasm" was not a tribute but a term of mild opprobrium. The
vogue was for elegance clothed in classical formalism, for antiromantic
rationalism, and (a pre-eminent requisite) reason's sharpest implement,
wit "Wit and fine writing/' wrote Addison, adapting Boilcau, "do
not consist so much of advancing things that are new as in giving
things that are known an agreeable turn/'

It was a time of criticism and commentaries, of pamphlets and
diarists like John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys, and antiquarians like
John Aubrey and Anthony k Wood, Alternations of polite formality
and flippant indecency inhibited the expression of anything painful or
complex. The canon called for smoothness, superficiality, amusement,
and most of the writers stayed well within the convention. Neverthe-
less many of the poets, admittedly minor, accomplished the "agreeable

210

JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER

turn" with badinage and a wit which, while often only amusing, was
sometimes startling.

JOHN. WILMOT,
EARL OF ROCHESTER

Reckless and dissolute, John Wilmot earned his place not only
because of his pictures of a decadent society, but because of the
technical ease with which he thinned and almost erased the line
between serious poetry and light verse. Born April i, 1647, at Ditch-
ley, Oxfordshire, he was twelve when he succeeded his father as Earl
of Rochester. He attended Wadham College, Oxford, and received his
M.A. in the fall of 1661, when he was not yet fifteen. In his late
teens he traveled on the Continent, studied at the University of Padua,
fought in the war against the Dutch, and returned to England, where
he became a favorite of King Charles IL His youth, position, and
endless audacity involved him in practically every scandal at a cor-
rupt court. He said he pledged himself to "the only important business
of the age: Women, Politics, and Drinking," and he fulfilled the
pledge. His intimates were the most profligate young blades and the
most perverse court ladies. The libertine poets Charles Sackville, sixth
Earl of Dorset, Sir Charles Sedley, and George Villiers, Duke of
Buckingham, envied and imitated his inexhaustible talent for follies;
the king himself was his companion in wantonness. On the night that
the Dutch sailed up the Thames and burned the English fleet, the
king was dallying with Lady Castlemaine, and Rochester was reveling
with Mrs. Malet, the wealthy heiress, whom, failing to seduce, he
married.

Rochester's marriage scarcely made him faithful. On the contrary,
the field of his dissipations widened; he pleasured himself impartially
with country wives and common sluts, as well as the king's mistresses.
Like his royal master, he was "soon cloyed with the enjoyment of any
one woman, though the fairest in the world, and forthwith forsook
her." He delighted to plan disreputable adventures for himself and
the king, and then write satires upon the escapade, ribald verses which

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LIVES OF THE POETS

were as entertaining as they were lewd. When his rhymes went too
far — as they often did — Rochester was banished from the court; he
seems to have spent part of each year "in banishment" at his or his
wife's estate. He was, appropriately enough, Gentleman of the Bed-
chamber to Charles II, for whom he furnished an epitaph long before
that monarch's decease.

Here lies our Sovereign Lord the King,

Whose word no man relies on;
Who never said a foolish thing,

Nor ever did a wise one.

At thirty-one Rochester's health gave way. A fever he had con-
tracted wasted his body and broke his gay spirit. Two years later, still
a young man, he repented his sins, made a deathbed repentance, and
died at Woodstock, in his thirty-third year, on July 26, 1680.

During the year he lay dying, he wrote a particularly savage set of
verses, "Farewell to the Court." Variously considered his most moving
and his most hypocritical poem, it stabs with such lines as these:

Tired with the noisome follies of the age,

And weary of my part, I quit the stage:

For who in Life's dull farce a part would bear

Where rogues, whores, bawds, all the head actors are?

Long I with charitable malice strove,

Lashing the Court these vermin to remove.

Yet though my life has unsuccessful been,

(For who can this Augaean stable clean),

My generous end I will pursue in death

And at mankind rail with my parting breath.

It was mankind itself that Rochester pilloried in his most anarchic
poem. Some of his licentious verses seem written by a satyr rather than
a satirist, but "A Satire against Mankind" pierces the pretensions of
the society which Rochester cultivated. In it he does much more than
"rail." No mere misanthrope but a bitter moralist, he attacks humanity,
and especially his own dass, for its fatuous dependence on reason, its
wretched hypocrisies, and indefensible brutalities.

212

JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER

Were I (who, to my cost, already am

One of those strange prodigious creatures, Man)

A Spirit free, to choose for my own share,

What case of flesh and blood I pleas'd to wear,

Fd be a Dog, a Monkey, or a Bear.

Or any thing but that vain Animal,

Who is so proud of being rational. . . .

Be judge yourself, Til bring it to the test:

Which is the basest creature, Man or Beast?

Birds feed on birds, beasts on each other prey:

But savage Man alone does Man betray.

Prest by necessity, they kill for food;

Man undoes Man, to do himself no good.

With teeth and claws by nature arm'd, they hunt

Nature's allowances, to supply their want:

But Man with smiles, embraces, friendships, praise,

Unhumanly his fellow's life betrays:

With voluntary pains works his distress;

Not through necessity, but wantonness.

Rochester left a confused reputation. The eighteenth century rel-
ished his libelous and sleekly sensual verses, but the serious poet was
forgotten. Time scattered his social criticisms as well as the record of
his casual lusts. His poems were published posthumously, many re-
mained in manuscript, and it was not until 1926, more than two and
a half centuries after they were written, that a large collection was pre-
pared by John Hayward, printed in England, and forbidden entry to
the United States.

There is in Rochester a poet who is only glimpsed in the scurrilous
satires and the skeptical address to the "Great Negative" in "Upon
Nothing/' It is an essentially serious poet who is masked by the erotic
playboy-author of 'The Virgin's Desire," "A Pastoral Courtship," "A
Ramble in St. James's Park," "On the Charms of Hidden Treasure,"
and "The Imperfect Enjoyment," a theme which pleased Rochester so
much he wrote two poems on the same subject and followed it with a
variant, "The Disappointment." Ambivalent about sex, Rochester some-
times regarded it with salacious appetite, sometimes with scorn. There
is nothing pretty or the least libidinous in the antipastoral beginning

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LIVES OF THE POETS

"Fair Cloris in a Pig-Sty lay/' the purposely disgusting 'The De-
bauchee," the graphic "Plain Dealing's Downfall," the ironic "Upon
Leaving His Mistress/' or the innocently entitled "Song," which begins:

Love a woman! You're an ass!

'Tis a most insipid passion
To choose out for your happiness

The silliest part of God's creation.

Such poems, written to amuse, to shock, or to disgust, may be
shallow and cheap; they are singularly free of passion. Even when
most lascivious, the lines do not stir us; they are the cold carnalities
of a desiccated heart. Rochester's facility and insouciance have been
overemphasized at the expense of his sensitive lyrics, few wholly in-
gratiating. Yet only a natural singer could have composed the songs
that begin "All my past life is mine no more," "An age in her embraces
passed/' "Nothing adds to your fond fire," and the exquisite:

Absent from thee I languish still;

Then ask me not, when I return?
The straying fool 'twill plainly kill

To wish all day, all night to mourn.

Dear, from thine arms then let me fly,

That my fantastic mind may prove
The torments it deserves to try,

That tears my fixt heart from my love.

When wearied with a world of woe,

To thy safe bosom I retire,
Where love and peace and truth does flow;

May I contented there expire.

Lest once more wand'ring from that heaven,

I fall on some base heart unblest,
Faithless to thee, false, unf orgiven,

And lose my everlasting rest

An underrated poet — or overrated for the wrong thing — Rochester
expressed himself in many and often opposed moods: sordid and
witty, indignant and indifferent, daring, vulgar, and always himself.

214

MARGARET LUCAS, et al.

MARGARET LUCAS,

DUCHESS OF NEWCASTLE;

APHRA BEHM;

FIKCH, LADY
WIHCHILSEA

Samuel Pepys's summary of the mercurial Margaret Lucas, Duchess
of Newcastle — "the whole story of this lady is a romance and all she
does is romantic" — is, to a large extent, also true of two other women
poets of the period, Aphra Behn and Anne Finch, Countess of Win-
chilsea.

Less noted for her poetry than for her eccentricity, Margaret Lucas
was born about 162,3, t^ie Pet °f a large and well-esteemed family. As
her tombstone attested: "All the brothers were valiant and all the
sisters virtuous." Romance was her natural element; she stepped into
it almost as soon as she could walk. When the Civil War forced
the royal family into exile, Margaret Lucas went along as maid of
honor to Queen Henrietta Maria. When the Duke of Newcastle, a
widower of fifty, admired her, she promptly married him. When New-
castle deserted the king's cause after the crucial defeat at Marston
Moor, the couple again went abroad, living most of the time in Ant-
werp, in the luxurious house which once had been the home of Rubens.
After the Restoration, they returned to England, where Charles wel-
comed them with a dukedom and Margaret, never reticent, threw
herself into the role of duchess with unrestricted enthusiasm. She
dressed in spectacular clothes which she designed, was calculatingly
late for court engagements and, after keeping the company waiting,
would enter dramatically with a retinue of half a dozen young women
carrying her train. She forced her way into a meeting of the Royal
Society — the first woman to do so — and published her differences with
Descartes, Hobbes, and other philosophers. She tried her hand at prose,
poems, and plays — Hobbes paid her the dubious tribute of saying that

215

LIVES OF THE POETS

the last contained "more and truer ideas of virtue and honor than any
book of morality I have read." After living at concert pitch, she ended
her bravura existence at fifty, in December, 1673.

Although her poetry is that of the recognizable amateur, it is more
than a wealthy woman's pastime. Margaret Lucas is less concerned
with form than with fantasy, and she plays charming variations on the
theme. In a poem which considers the possibility of trees coming to
life as animals, she muses whimsically:

Large deer of oalc might through the forest run,
Leaves on their heads might keep them from the sun;
Instead of shedding horns, their leaves might fall,
And acorns to increase a wood of fawns withal.

The women apostrophized by the poets of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries seem to be a composite of honey, roses, and ala-
baster, creatures perennially desirable, unobtainable, and removed from
all reality. Aphra Behn was no such idealization. She was a spy.

Daughter of John and Amy Amis, a barber and a lady's maid, she
was bom in 1640 in Kent. Her early career was so exotic that one
commentator calls it "obscure and probably improper." As a child she
lived (or said she lived) in Surinam, Guiana, then an English posses-
sion; at eighteen she returned to England and married a merchant of
Dutch extraction. At nineteen she was known as "the Incomparable"
for her wit and skill in intrigue. Her husband died when she was
twenty-six, and, avid for adventure, she went as Charles IFs spy to
Antwerp at the outbreak of the Dutch war. Becoming expert in mili-
tary espionage, she obtained some secret information of utmost im-
portance. There were, however, enemies at home as well as abroad;
cabals were formed against her. Suddenly she fell out of favor into
poverty and a debtor's prison.

Unused to neediness but refusing to succumb to it, she determined
to earn her living by writing. Fortunately, she was equipped with
natural fluency and the gift of total recall. It required litde effort
for her to fictionalize her adventures, invent wildly romantic situations,
and put them into plays. Within two years she was a celebrity and a
phenomenon: the first woman to support herself by her pen. Between
her early thirties and her late forties she wrote fifteen plays, one of
which (The Rover), a drama about picaresque and amorous cavaliers,
was especially successful. In between plays she wrote poems, tales,

216

MARGARET LUCAS, 6t al.

and novels. Oronodko, or the History of the Royal Slave, supposedly
founded upon her childhood memories, is the story of a slave in Suri-
nam, a piece of philosophical fiction which announced a theme that
was to become the favorite subject of an entire movement: the theme
of the Noble Savage. Sought after as a playwright and pursued as a
person, Aphra Behn again preened herself in the role of prima
donna. She was not to enjoy the renewed popularity long. Suddenly,
in her fiftieth year, she died and, although the center of a scandal at
the time of her death, she was buried in Westminster Abbey.

The plays show one side of Aphra Behn, the poetry another. The
plays, written cold-bloodedly for an audience whose appetites had been
whetted on the gross fare supplied by Dryden, Rochester, Villiers, and
Sackville, are coarse; the poetry is refined to the point of fancifulness.
With the exception of a few concessions to contemporary taste, such
as "Beneath a Cool Shade," the lyrics are light, almost transparent.
The best of them play with paradox as delicately as the well-known
"Song" beginning:

Love in fantastic triumph sate

Whilst bleeding hearts around him flowed,

For whom fresh pains he did create
And strange tyrannic power showed.

Anne Finch was born Anne Kingsmill, in 1661, daughter of Sir
William Kingsmill of Sidmonton, near Southampton. At twenty-one,
she was maid of honor at court. At twenty-three she married Colonel
Finch, later fourth Earl of Winchilsea, and within a few years she left
the excitement of London for the quiet of Eastwell Park in Kent. De-
voted to verse since her childhood, she read Dryden in youth and, in
her forties, discovered Pope. Like her mentors, she avoided anything
extreme; eschewing the headlong and the ecstatic, she sharpened with
a woman's wit the orderly processes of the reasoning mind. Unlike
the urban poets, she sought "absolute retreat" in her large garden. To
(or against) Pope's barbed literature of the town, she proffered the
gentle grace of the countryside. She died at sixty in tlie place she
loved so well.

"By submitting her jaded nerves to the comfortable, the gently
reanimating quiet of the country," wrote Hugh FAnson Fausset, "she
was combating the typical disease of her age, the disease of prescribed
conventions and mental exclusiveness." This contemplative state of

LIVES OF THE POETS

mind is best expressed in her long and leisurely poems: "The Spleen"
— an organ once considered the seat of various emotions — "Ardelia's
Answer to Ephelia" (with its bantering subtitle to a friend 'Who Had
Invited Her to Come to Her in Town, Reflecting on the Coquetry and
Detracting Humor of the Age"), "Fanscomb Barn," which she imag-
ined was an imitation of Milton, and her most characteristic and best-
known poem, "Petition for an Absolute Retreat," with its direct appeal:

Give me, O indulgent Fate,

Give me yet before I die,

A sweet but absolute retreat,

'Mongst paths so lost, and trees so high,

That the world may ne'er invade,

Through such windings and such shade,

My unshaken liberty.

Lady Winchilsea's shorter poems are no less felicitous: "A Noc-
turnal Reverie," commended by Wordsworth for its fresh rural imagery;
"Song: If for a Woman I Would Die"; several of the homespun fables,
such as 'The Atheist and the Acorn"; and "On Myself," which, after
thanking heaven for saving her from the love "of all those trifles which
their passions move," ends modestly but confidently:

If they're denied, I on myself can live,
And slight those aids unequal chance can give;
When in the sun my wings can be displayed,
And in retirement I can bless the shade.

SEDLEY, LEIGH,
PHILIPS, PARKELL, BYROM

The major poets crowd the collections devoted to the period; the
minor poets survive by virtue of one or two small lyrics which, though
unimportant, we would not willingly spare. Among the latter is Sir
Charles Sedley, Rochester's boon companion and one of "a mob of
gentlemen who wrote with ease/' according to Pope's doubleredged

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SEDLEY, LEIGH, PHILIPS, PARNELL, BYROM

phrase. Born about 1639, educated, like Rochester, at Wadham College,
Oxford, Sedley soon joined the "merry gang" that roistered with
Charles II. He attempted the big sound with a couple of worthless
tragedies, did somewhat better with three comedies, and charmed
his listeners with a few fanciful but not extravagant songs. Unknown
to most readers, Sedley deserves better because of such lyrics as "Phillis
is my only joy/' 'To Cloris," ''Love still has something of the sea/' and
the Lovelace-like verses which begin "Not Celia that I juster am, Or
better than the rest" and which end:

Why then should I seek farther store,

And still make love anew;
When change itself can give no more,

'Tis easy to be true.

Richard Leigh (1649-?), Ambrose Philips (1675-1749), and Thomas
Parnell (1679-1718) are also among those whose names are encountered
only in occasional collections. Leigh, a pictorial poet, is at his best in
the delicately suggestive "Sleeping on Her Couch." Philips' Eclogues
were once considered the best in the language; he comes to mind only
because, in spite of the nickname of "Namby-Parnby," he dared to
quarrel with Pope. Yet some of his songs ("Why We Love, and Why
We Hate," for example) have the smoothness and glossy wit which
his generation admired. Parnell has more substance. Born in Dublin
and educated at Dublin's Trinity College, Parnell became archdeacon
of Clogher, a close friend of Swift's and an admirer of Pope, who
returned the compliment of Parnell's introduction to his translation of
the Iliad by posthumously publishing Parnell's odes, narratives, and
pious poems. "A Night Piece on Death," "A Hymn to Contentment"
and "The Hermit" are Parnell's most reflective and ambitious works,
but there is as much discipline and more spirit in "Health: An
Eclogue," with its naive reminders of "L' Allegro," the whimsical "Elegy
to an Old Beauty," "The Book-Worm," and the lighthearted "Bacchus:
or, The Drunken Metamorphosis."

One of the more amusing eighteenth-century oddities, John Byrom
(1692-1763) composed hymns (including "Christians, awake! Salute
the happy morn") pastoral rhymes, dialect verses, and invented (so he
claimed) "the universal English shorthand," which he taught at Man-
chester. A great letter writer, Byrom's Journals and Papers are a racy
and plain-spoken account of the everyday life of the period. In spite

LIVES OF THE POETS

of his activities, he has been forgotten by all but a few anthologists
who allot him just enough space for a single epigram "intended to
allay the violence of party spirit" :

God bless the King — I mean the Faith's Defender.
God bless — no harm in blessing — our Pretender.
But who Pretender is, or who is King,
God bless us all, that's quite a different thing.

JOHN: GAY

A recognized celebrity, John Gay (1685-1732) was another wit who,
with equal facility, wrote plays, librettos for operas, fables, serious and
burlesque pastorals, town poems, and political satires. A poor boy born
in Barnstable, in the west of England, orphaned at ten, he received his
first impressions of the lower strata of metropolitan life when he was
apprenticed to a London silk merchant. At thirty-one he rhymed the
delights and dangers of the city in The Art of Walking the Streets
of London, In his forties Gay turned these memories into the ironic
and highly profitable The Beggars Opera, which, produced by John
Rich, was said to have made Rich gay and Gay rich. The Beggar's
Opera is a pastoral turned upside down. The country nymphs have
become hussies and streetwalkers; the shepherds are thieves; the watch-
ful parents are procurers and receivers of stolen goods. The crew of
highwaymen and cutpurses entertained Gay's audiences on several
levels: they enjoyed The Beggar's Opera as a roaring farce and also as
a transparent satire on the governing classes, as well as a reaction
against Handelian opera, which it virtually killed. (Two hundred years
later Bertolt Brecht explored these levels still further in his proletarian
adaptation, The Three-Penny Opera.") The bandit MacHeath was a
take-off on the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, and the scoun-
drelly Peachums were readily identifiable with the statesmen who lived
on shady transactions.

The popularity of The Beggar's Opera made a sequel inevitable, but
Polly, equally charming and more daring, was banned on political
grounds. Gay^s fortunes continued to rise and fall violently; the money
he had made with his sardonic Fables and other poems had been lost

220

JONATHAN SWIFT

in the financial scandal of his day, the South Sea Bubble. Nevertheless
his short life ended in comfort. When he died at forty-seven he left
more than six thousand pounds. He was, in addition, so much esteemed
that he was buried in Westminster Abbey, where his monument is
brightened by the wry epitaph he furnished:

Life is a jest, and all things show it;
I thought so once, and now I know it.

Without the savagery of Dryden or the cruelty of Pope, Gay
achieved a new kind of satire, a satire without spite. Nimble though
they are, the satirical verses are surpassed by his lyrical pieces; many
of the seventy songs Gay wrote are unquestionably poetry. A small-
town boy fascinated by the big city, Gay was also die townsman who
celebrated the countryside in Rural Sports and The Shepherd's Week,
the latter enlivened by a lively catalogue of country customs, spells, and
superstitions. Thursday, for example, is given to the rustic HobnehVs
fear that she is losing her beloved Lubberkin:

Last May-day fair I searched to find a snail

That might my secret lover's name reveal;

Upon a gooseberry bush a snail I found,

For always snails near sweetest fruit abound.

I seiz'd the vermin, home I quickly sped,

And on the hearth the milk-white embers spread.

Slow crawrd the snail, and if I right can spell,

In the soft ashes mark'd a curious L.

Oh, may this wondrous omen lucky prove!

For L is found in Lubberkin and Love.

With my sharp heel 1 three times mark the ground,
And turn me thrice around, aroundy around.

JONATHAN: SWIFT

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was not primarily a poet Tortured by
a too active mind and a baffled spirit, he turned sporadically to verse
and wrote his most expressive poetry during his last years. Swift, a

LIVES OF THE POETS

cousin of Dryden's, was born in Dublin a few months after the death
of his father and was brought up on the grudging charity of an uncle.
At twenty-two he became secretary to Sir William Temple, a distant
relative who lived at Farnham, England. He hated the servility de-
manded by his position, the more so since Temple was patently his
intellectual inferior. However, hoping for advancement, he remained
with Temple eleven years. When it was evident that preferment was
not forthcoming, Swift returned to Ireland, where, later, in his mid-
forties, he was appointed Dean of St. Patrick's in Dublin.

Living alternately in Ireland and England, dividing his time be-
tween preaching and writing, intimate with such celebrities as Addison
and Steele, Congreve and Pope, Swift became a feared pamphleteer
and a political power. A Tale of a Tub satirized contemporary corrup-
tion in religion and learning; A Modest Proposal JOT Preventing the
Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their
Parents or Country is as fierce an irony as has ever been conceived.
With relentless virulence Swift championed the cause of the peasants,
and his anger had such force that many came to regard him as their
savior.

In Temple's employ he had made the acquaintance of Esther Johnson
when she was a child. Her mother had been Temple's servant, and
gossip hinted that Esther was his natural daughter. Swift had been her
tutor. After he had settled in Ireland, Swift sent for Esther, whom he
called Stella, and established her in Dublin. There he attracted the
attention of the daughter of a Dublin merchant of Dutch extraction,
Esther Vanhomrigh, whom he called Vanessa, and who fell violently
in love with him. When Swift, who accepted her admiration, failed
to return her passion, she wrote Stella (who was accepted as Swift's
mistress and may have been his wife by a secret marriage), demanding
to know her relationship to Swift When Swift saw the letter, it is
said that he threw it at Vanessa and stormed out of the house. Vanessa
died within a few weeks, Stella five years later. Swift survived them
both by many years. Gulliver's Travels, written in his mid-fifties, ap-
peared two years before Stella's death.

In his sixties Swift was aware that he was beginning to fail. Deaf and
full of pain, he wrote to his niece: "I am so stupid and confounded
that I cannot express the mortification I am under both of body and
mind," He managed to reach his late seventies, but guardians had to be
appointed for him. Aphasia followed paralysis, and he died at seventy-
eight* An inscription on his tombstone synthesized his driven life:

222

JONATHAN SWIFT

"Here lies Jonathan Swift . . . where savage indignation can no
longer tear his heart." In a final irony, he left his fortune to found
a hospital for imbeciles.

It is an added posthumous irony that the most quoted lines of Swift
are a quatrain from "Poetry: A Rhapsody," in which the misanthrope
concludes that human beings are not only degrading Yahoos but,
lower even than these, a race of parasitic fleas:

So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.

Grim much of Swift's writing undoubtedly is, but the poetry he
wrote is not compounded of gloom. "A Description of Morning" is a
brilliant little genre piece with quaint and vivid Hogarthian details;
"The Day of Judgment" is a macabre joke in which the poet's ridicule
of peers and bishops jingles with irreverent rhymes; "Cadenus and
Vanessa" is equally important as autobiography and argumentative
teasing. Best of all, his "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift" constitute
a Testament which mingles self-justification and self-mockery, and
which, in spite of almost intimidating length, sets off a serious estimate
of character with humorous scenes and quizzical vignettes. For example:

From Dublin soon to London spread,

'Tis told at Court, "The dean is dead."

And Lady Suffolk, in the spleen,

Runs laughing up to tell the Queen.

The Queen, so gracious, mild, and good,

Cries, "Is he gone? 'Tis time he should." . . *

My female friends, whose tender hearts

Have better learned to play their parts,

Receive the news in doleful dumps:

"The dean is dead — pray, what is trumps? —

The Lord have mercy on his soul!

Ladies, Til venture for the vole. —

Six deans, they say, must bear the pall —

I wish I knew what king to call. —

Madam, your husband will attend

The funeral of so good a friend?

223

LIVES OF THE POETS

No, madam, 'tis a shocking sight,
And he's engaged tomorrow night;
My Lady Club will take it ill
If he should fail her at quadrille.
He loved the dean — I lead a heart —
But dearest friends, they say, must part.
His time was come; he ran his race;
We hope he's in a better place."

After such mordant banter, Swift grows seriously defensive:

Perhaps, I may allow, the dean

Had too much satire in his vein,

And seem'd determin'd not to starve it

Because no age could more deserve it.

Yet malice never was his aim;

He lash'd the vice, but spar'd the name;

No individual could resent

Where thousands equally were meant;

His satire points at no defect

But what all mortals may correct.

Even when it comes to the coda Swift cannot resist ending with a
half-wistful, half-waggish farewell:

He gave the little wealth he had
To build a house for fools and mad;
And showed by one satiric touch
No nation wanted it so much.
That kingdom he hath left his debtor;
I wish it soon may have a better.

MATTHEW PRIOR

The stature of Matthew Prior (1664-1721) was never large; it shrinks
when associated with Dryden, whom he followed, and with Pope,
whom he preceded. Yet Prior was one of the most skillful and least
malicious depicters of the worldly society of his day. Having lost his

224

MATTHEW PRIOR

father — a joiner of Wimborne, Dorset — he was fortunate enough to
receive the patronage of Lord Dorset, who had him educated at West-
minster School and St John's College, Cambridge. A gifted boy, Prior
translated Ovid and Horace before he was thirteen, and he was twenty-
three when he collaborated with Charles Montagu on a fabulous
burlesque of Dryden's The Hind and the Panther. Poetry and politics
went hand in hand with Prior. Appointed secretary to the ambassador
in Holland, he became a secret agent in Paris, joined the Tories when
he was in his mid-forties, and negotiated for them the Treaty of
Utrecht, which became known as "Mart's Peace."

After the death of Queen Anne, Prior's carefully built-up structure
of politics and preferment toppled and crashed. He was imprisoned
by the Whigs but, after two years, was free to repair his fences and
his fortunes, which he immediately did. He was fifty-four when a
folio edition of his Poems was issued, and Prior proved that writing had
become a lucrative profession. The proceeds from the sale of the book
exceeded four thousand guineas. With this amount, together with four
thousand pounds from Lord Harley, Prior purchased Down Hall in
Essex.

Physically unattractive — and as deaf as gloomy Dean Swift — Prior
was so good-natured that he won friends in every circle. He was
equally intimate with common soldiers and kings — Louis XIV would
have made him a companion — but his affability could turn to rankling
wit and, even as a diplomat, he did not withhold the quick thrust.
When asked if the English monarch could boast any monument as
beautiful as Versailles, Prior answered, "The monuments of my master's
actions are to be seen everywhere except in his own house." Although
he was at ease with the nobility, he consorted chiefly with women
of the lower class, and he was on the point of marrying a woman
who ran an alehouse when he died at fifty-seven, leaving her most of
his estate. In spite of lack of rank, his popularity was so great and
his admirers so influential that he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Before convincing a skeptical world that it could be profitable to be
a poet, Prior wrote in almost every form: narrative poetry, occasional
verse, long soliloquies in couplets, dialogues in cantos, satires, essays,
and street ballads which, though lacking literary distinction, are
sprightly products of the Common Muse. It is, however, in the
epigrammatic manner that Prior is happiest and most himself. Light
irony and sheer gaiety are mingled in "A Better Answer: To Chloe
Jealous/' with its delightful opening, "Dear Chloe, how blubber'd is

225

LIVES OF THE POETS

that pretty face," 'To a Child of Quality," "The Female Phaeton," "A
Reasonable Affliction," "Cupid Mistaken," "Jinny &e Just>" which has
all the rude vigor of a broadside, the long "English Ballad, on the
Taking of Namur by the King of Great Britain," and the charmingly
avuncular advice to an angry friend, "An English Padlock," which
contains Priori most quoted couplet:

Be to her virtues very kind;
Be to her faults a little blind.

Characteristic of his times as well as of Prior's own touch are the
tender-trifling verses which Prior mockingly entitled an "Ode":

The merchant, to secure his treasure,

Conveys it in a borrowed name:
Euphelia serves to grace my measure;

But Chloe is my real flame.

My softest verse, my darling lyre,

Upon Euphelia's toilet lay;
When Chloe noted her desire,

That I should sing, that I should play.

My lyre I tune, my voice I raise;

But whilst my numbers mix my sighs:
And whilst I sing Euphelia's praise,

I fix my soul on Chloe's eyes.

Fair Chloe blush'd: Euphelia frown'd:
I sung and gazed: I play'd and trembled.

And Venus to the Loves around

Remark'd, how ill we all dissembled.

Prior prepared his self-estimate in a set of memorial verses, Tor My
Own Monument," but his casual epitaph is both more modest and
more memorable:

Nobles and heralds, by your leave,

Here lies what once was Matthew Prior,

The son of Adam and of Eve.

Can Bourbon or Nassau claim higher?

226

XIII

Giant Dwarf

ALEXANDER POPE

DENOUNCED by many in his day as a hate-filled spider, a malig-
nant creature deformed in body and distorted in soul, Alexan-
der Pope has in our own times been rehabilitated and raised to
glory. The nineteenth century would have none of him — it questioned
whether he was a poet at all and concluded that he was a cold-blooded
technician, a clever essayist with a knack for pert rhymes. Completely
reversing that estimate, many critics of the twentieth century ranked
him with the great wits who turned timely aphorisms into timeless
poetry. In a burst of extravagance one of his most ardent modern
champions, Edith Sitwell, concluded that Pope was not only "a good
and exceedingly lovable man" but also "one of the greatest of our poets,
Cone) who is, in his two finest poems, perhaps the most flawless artist
our race has produced/'

His works constitute a veritable dictionary of thoughts and, with the
exception of Shakespeare, no author is more quoted. People who never
read a poem by Pope speak Pope's lines as though they were traditional
proverbs or fragments out of Holy Writ: 'To err is human; to forgive
divine." "A little learning is a dangerous thing." 'Whatever is, is
right." "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." "Who breaks a
butterfly upon a wheel?" "Damn with faint praise." 'Men must walk
before they dance*" "Hope springs eternal in the human breast." "Order

22,7

LIVES OF THE POETS

is Heaven's first law." 'The feast of reason and the flow of soul." "An
honest man's the noblest work of God." "Pride, the never-failing vice
of fools." "Ease in writing comes from art, not chance." "Man never is
but always to he blest." "All looks yellow to the jaundiced eye." "At
every word a reputation dies." 'Who shall decide when doctors dis-
agree." "He's armed without that's innocent within." 'What so tedious
as a twice-told tale?" "Guide, philosopher, and friend." A single poem
(the Essay on Man) is so stuffed with famous couplets that it seems
composed entirely of quotations.

All nature is but art, unknown to thee;

All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;

All discord, harmony not understood;

All partial evil, universal good . . .

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;

The proper study of mankind is man.

Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,

A being darkly wise and rudely great;

With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,

With too much weakness for the stoic's pride,

He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;

In doubt to deem himself a god or beast;

In doubt his mind or body to prefer;

Born but to die, and reasoning but to err . , »

Created half to rise, and half to fall;

Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;

Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled;

The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.

The author of these superbly balanced paradoxes, Alexander Pope,
was bom in London, May 2,2, 1688, the only child of elderly parents.
Later in life he chose to endow his family with a background of
nobility, but this was a romantic overcompensation. His father was a
linen draper. At birth the boy seemed to be normal — he was said to
have been a pretty little child with unusually sparkling eyes — but he
was frail and an early illness ruined his health. It was soon evident
that he would never attain full growth; he remained a dwarf, crip-
pled and hunchbacked. He was not only burdened by his body, "a
crazy little carcass," and by his religion Che was a Roman Catholic

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ALEXANDER POPE

when this sect could not attend universities or hold public office), but
he was also handicapped by being the son of a commoner at a time
when titles smoothed the way to privilege. Realizing even in childhood
that his life was to be "one long disease/* he exploited his precocity
with a fixed purpose. At ten he translated Greek and Latin; at twelve
he wrote a paraphrase of one of Horace's epodes ("Solitude") which
is still a favorite anthology piece, and began an epic poem, "Alexander,
Prince of Rhodes," full of echoes of all the poets die boy loved: Milton,
Spenser, Cowley, Ovid, and especially Homer and Virgil. "My first
taking to imitating was not out of vanity but humility," he recollected.
"I saw how defective my own things were and endeavored to mend
my manner by copying good strokes from others." Some of the early
couplets found their way into later works, for verse-making came
spontaneously to the youth who "lisp'd in numbers."

Pope had begun the epic when the family moved from London
to the country town of Binfield, in Windsor Forest, and, although he
said he finally burned the poem, some four thousand lines of it were
finished between his twelfth and fifteenth years. At fourteen he wrote
"On Silence," a remarkable echo of Rochester's "Upon Nothing," and
a year later returned to London for the purpose of learning French
and Italian; but, becoming too ill to continue his studies, he returned
to Binfield. There, when he was about sixteen, he wrote a series of
Pastorals which, circulated in manuscript, excited such writers as Con-
greve, Wycherley, and Walsh. Sir George Granville was another who
spread the news that an unknown genius was loose in the forest: "His
name is Pope. He is not above seventeen or eighteen years of age, and
promises miracles. If he goes on as he has begun, in the pastoral way,
as Virgil first tried his strength, we may hope to see English poetry
vie with the Roman, and the swan of Windsor sing as sweetly as the
Mantuan." The news reached the eminent publisher Jacob Tonson,
who requested permission to print the poems in a forthcoming Mis-
cellany? where they were pitted against Ambrose Philips' Pastorals.
Although Philips' coterie made much of his pretty rusticity, there was
no doubt that a new and extraordinarily brilliant poet had arrived.
Before he was twenty-one Pope was a celebrity.

In content as well as conception the Pastorals are scarcely startling.
Facile they are, smoothly rhymed and neatly joined, but they are as
unoriginal as the early epic must have been. Pope's shepherds talk
like sophisticated Londoners and, although the lines are pleasantly
musical — Pope never risked a dissonance — they lean heavily on images

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LIVES OF THE POETS

which have been familiar for more than a century. Birds are "feathered
quires," lilies "hang their heads/' flowers "droop," gales are "gentle,"
strains are "mournful/' hills "resound/' streams "murmur/' and roses
drop "liquid amber." Yet, by the time the Pastorals had appeared, Pope
had learned discipline as well as discrimination. At twenty he drew
up for himself a set of rules of prosody. He began by abjuring all
expletives (like "do" or "does") before verbs — "these bring us against
the usual manner of speech and are fillers-up of unnecessary sylla-
bles/' He determined to avoid too many short one-syllable words —
"monosyllabic lines, unless very artfully managed, are stiff, languishing,
and hard"; he decided not to use the same rhymes within a few lines
of each other, for they "tire the ear with too much of the like sound/'
He also inveighed against the frequent use of the Alexandrine, that
cumbersome twelve-syllable line which, as he said later, 'like a wounded
snake, drags its slow length along," and which is "never graceful but
where there is some majesty added to the verse."

As soon as he had written these prose strictures, he put them, along
with other conclusions, into verse. He was twenty-three when his
Essay on Criticism was published — he claimed to have written it at
twenty — and, with its insistence on decorum, elegance, and wit, it
became a key poem of the period. Pope begins rather pedantically,
maintaining that "it is as great a fault to judge as to write ill," and
meanders along in a slow consideration of rules, taste, and education.
Then suddenly, in a warning against imperfect learning, the reader
is brought up short with the wonderfully weighted passage beginning:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not of the Pierian spring;

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.

Fired at first sight with what the muse imparts,

In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts,

While from the bounded level of our mind

Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind;

But more advanced, behold with strange surprise

New distant scenes of endless science rise!

So pleased at first? the tow'ring Alps we try

Mount o'er the vales, and seem to tread the sky,

Th' eternal snows appear already past,

And the first clouds and mountains seem the last;

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ALEXANDER POPE

But, those attained, we tremble to survey
The growing labors of the lengthening way,
Th' increasing prospect tires our wand'ring eyes,
Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

Acknowledging the place of rules and cautioning against mere
novelty — "Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last
to lay the old aside" — Pope reminds us that the poet is to be judged
not by a theory but by his practice, which may well run counter to
the rules. Pope had found his own cliches so distasteful that he not
only rejected the shopworn stereotypes of verse but made fun of them.

Where'er you find "the cooling western breeze/'
In the next line it "whispers through the trees."
If crystal streams "with pleasing murmurs creep,"
The reader's threatened (not in vain) with sleep.

It was at this time, long before he was called "the wicked wasp of
Twickenham," that Pope became conscious of his sting. He had tried
out its point in a blandly devastating paper on Philips' Pastorals, a
review so ingenuously worded that it was printed as praise. In the
Essay on Criticism he drove the barb in a little deeper. 'Tear not the
anger of the wise to raise; Those best can bear reproof who merit
praise," Pope had written, and then went on to say:

But Appius reddens at each word you speak,
And stares tremendous, with a threatening eye,
Like some fierce tyrant in a tragedy.

This sarcastic but scarcely deadly allusion infuriated John Dennis,
a veteran dramatist, whose Appius and Virginia had been a humiliating
failure and who, in his capacity of critic, thought himself a tremendous
as well as a threatening figure. A month after the publication of Pope's
Essay, Dennis, claiming he had been attacked, published a pamphlet
entitled Reflections, Critical and Satirical, u<pon a Late Rhapsody Called
an Essay wpon Criticism. Never had so slight an aspersion brought forth
so vicious a reply. "I remember a little gentleman whom Mr. Walsh
used to take into his company," wrote Dennis, "and tell me whether he
be a proper person to make personal reflections? He may extol the an-
cients, but he has reason to thank the gods that he was bom a modern;

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LIVES OF THE POETS

for had he been born of Grecian parents, and his father had by law the
absolute disposal of him, his life had been no longer than one of his
poems, the life of half a day. Let the person of a gentleman of his parts
be ever so contemptible, his inward man is ten times as ridiculous; it
being impossible that his outward form, though it be that of a down-
right monkey, should differ so much from human shape as his unthink-
ing immaterial part does from human understanding."

One can imagine how much this cowardly jibe at Pope's physical
defects hurt the sensitive twenty-three-year-old poet, conscious enough
of his deformity. It is not unlikely that the sneer, the first of many
malignant taunts, produced the retaliatory poison in which Pope
learned to dip his darts. He rarely acknowledged his wounds; although
later, after receiving a particularly violent emotional blow, he alluded
to his suffering in an otherwise lighthearted letter to Gay, who had
congratulated Pope on finishing his new house and garden:

What are the gay parterre, the chequered shade,
The morning bower, the evening colonnade,
But soft recesses of uneasy minds,
To sigh unheard in to the passing winds?
So the struck deer in some sequestered part
Lies down to die, the arrow at his heart;
There, stretched unseen in coverts hid from day,
Bleeds drop by drop, and pants his life away.

Affecting though these lines are, they give no indication of Pope's
physical disabilities or the extent of his helplessness. Feeble as a child,
frail as a youth, in maturity so small that a kind of high chair was
required to bring him to table level, he could do practically nothing for
himself when he reached middle age. Johnson, who had the facts from
a servant, says that he was so weak "as to stand in perpetual need of
female attendance; extremely sensible of cold, so that he wore a fur
doublet under a shirt of very coarse warm linen with fine sleeves. When
he rose he was invested in a bodice made of stiff canvas, being scarce
able to hold himself erect till it was laced, and then he put on a flannel
waistcoat One side was contracted. His legs were so slender that he
enlarged their bulk with three pairs of stockings, which were drawn
on and off by the maid; for he was not able to dress or undress himself,
and neither went to bed nor rose without help. His weakness made it
very difficult for him to be dean. . . * The indulgence and accommo-

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ALEXANDER POPE

dation which his sickness required had taught him all the unpleasing
and unsocial qualities of a valetudinary man. He expected that every
thing should give way to his ease or humor. ... In all his inter-
course with mankind he had great delight in artifice, and endeavored
to attain his purposes by indirect and unsuspected methods. He hardly
drank tea without a stratagem."

It is hard to doubt that Pope's irascibility sprang from his infirmity,
and that his vanity was a grotesque overcompensation for the lack of
attributes which make most men vain. His self-assertiveness was a
form of self-defense; always fearful of being slighted or set upon, he
resolved to become the attacker before he was attacked. To do this he
planned campaigns in which elaborate mystifications, rumors which
he himself started, devious hints, false clues, and downright dishonesty
played important parts. There was, for example, the matter of letters
which passed between Pope and Swift. Swift, retreating into his pro-
found gloom, considered them a private correspondence; Pope, never
one to waste a well-turned phrase, wanted them published. To achieve
this objective, Pope devised an almost incredible scheme. He saw to it
that some of the letters, slightly garbled, were printed; whereupon, in
a burst of indignation, he excoriated those responsible for the "treach-
erous" act. There was only one way, Pope claimed, of doing justice
to both the unhappy Dean and himself: publish the correspondence in
its "true" form and in its entirety. Apathetically, Swift consented to
surrender Pope's letters to him and, with a great show of reluctance,
Pope manipulated a publisher into issuing the "correct" version, one
carefully doctored by Pope.

Since there was a large reading public for letters and since epistles
were examined even more carefully than poetry, Pope did not hesitate
to "shape" a large part of his correspondence. If he did not actually
fabricate letters, he revised and often rewrote them before they went
to press. A striking instance is a letter originally sent to Lady Mary
Wordey Montagu, with whom Pope quarreled, and which, when it
appeared in print, was addressed to the Duke of Buckingham. A
letter written to Pope's friend, John Carryl, appeared in the Corre-
spondence readdressed to the more important and influential Addison.
Pope persuaded the old playwright William Wycherley to safeguard
their correspondence by placing the documents in Lord Oxford's library,
and then had considerable trouble persuading Lord Oxford to release
the letters before they were "stolen" by unscrupulous pirates. To protect
himself from libel, Pope assigned (°r pretended to assign) the rights

LIVES OF THE POETS

of The Dunriad to three nobles, Lord Oxford, Lord Bathurst, and Lord
Burlington, all of whom were unassailable if not actually beyond the
law.

Pope's relations with women were more direct but also more dis-
astrous, doomed by his disturbing physical appearance and damned by
his unpredictable personality. There were the two sisters, Theresa and
Martha Blount, whom Pope met at nineteen. Martha was said to have
been the object of a constant devotion and, it was hinted in some
quarters, may have been his mistress. But Pope, always a prey to
suspicions, fancied some disloyalty, and wrote letters to Theresa which
effectively destroyed her friendship and, for a time, alienated Martha's
affection.

More celebrated and more sordid was Pope's quarrel with Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu, a member of the ruling class and well known as a
brilliant letter-writer. For a while she, too, was Pope's friend — there
were quick-witted exchanges of pleasantries in prose and verse — but
their relations ended in a particularly bitter aftermath. Pope claimed
that the quarrel was over a pair of sheets which he had loaned the
lady and which were returned unwashed. Lady Montagu let it be
known that he dared to make passionate love to her and she, "in spite
of her utmost endeavors to be angry and look grave," repulsed him in an
immoderate fit of laughter. From that moment, so runs the legend,
Pope became her implacable enemy. Impartial critics have suggested
that two people who quarreled with everyone else would be likely to
quarrel with each other. In any case, Pope never forgave the humilia-
tion. He pilloried her in poem after poem as Sappho, Lesbia, Flavia,
Fulfidia, the despicable wife of Avidien, and even under her own name.
He charged that she was treacherous, miserly, mean to her invalid sister,
and cruel to her own child; he insinuated that she was not only promis-
cuous but that she infected her lovers with venereal disease. He also
accused her of crooked financial dealings. His scorn of unethical prin-
ciples did not deter him from accepting a large bribe from the Duchess
of Marlborough for promising to suppress a libelous passage in one of
his Epistles — and then printing the stanzas unchanged.

The Rape of the Lock, the first draft of which appeared when the
poet was twenty-four, involved Pope in fresh misunderstandings. Ara-
bella Fermor, a young belle of the period, was beset with beaux, one of
whom, Lord Petre, surreptitiously snipped one of her side curls. Instead
of smiling at the gallant if impetuous gesture, Miss Fermor was furious;
her parents were outraged; Lord Petre's family countered indignantly;

234

ALEXANDER POPE

and the ensuing acrimony threatened to surpass the feud between the
Capulets and Montagues. Hoping to effect a reconciliation, John Caryll,
a friend of both families, urged Pope to write a poem which would
make light of the absurd situation. The first publication of The Rape
of the Lock, which has enchanted every other reader, failed to charm
Miss Fermor, to whom it was dedicated. Feeling she had been made to
look foolish, she was angrier than ever, while other easily identified
characters, especially Sir Plume (in real life, Sir George Brown),
attacked the poem as another instance of Pope's malicious mind.

From every standpoint The Rape of the Lock is one of literature's
minor masterpieces. It is a mock epic and, written in mock-heroic style,
uses the large tone of sublimity to make the silly subject ridiculously
grandiose. The quarrel — a social tempest brewed in fragile teacups —
is treated as though it were a majestic conflict. But the ancient heroes
and heroines are diminished into bickering county families while, in
proper proportion, the Olympian gods are scaled down to gauzy sylphs,
dainty demons, and naughty gnomes. Moreover, by transplanting the
action from the battlefield to the boudoir, Pope took an almost feminine
delight in the patches, the powders, the perfumes, the puffs, and all the
so-important trifles which comprised the ritual of the toilette, as well
as the frilled vanities on which a "smart" Society was founded.

Technically The Rape of the Lock is a most adroit mingling of ex-
quisiteness and incisiveness. It is, seemingly, a texture of trivialities, an
airy nothingness. To Hazlitt it seemed 'like looking at the world
through a microscope, where everything assumes a new character and a
new consequence, where the little becomes gigantic, the deformed
beautiful, and the beautiful deformed. ... It is the triumph of in-
significance, the apotheosis of foppery and folly/' Yet an entire social
system is firmly trapped in this tissue of cobwebs, a shimmering trans-
parency whose strands, gossamer-fine, are made of spun steel. The poem,
transcending its material, is full of unexpected contrasts of tone,
swooping descents from gaiety into grimness. For example, 'The Third
Canto" opens with a comic apostrophe to the formal Tea, attended by
all the nymphs and heroes:

In various talk the instructive hours they passed:
Who gave the ball, or paid the visit last;
One speaks the glory of the British Queen,
And one describes a charming Indian screen;
A third interprets motions, looks, and eyes;

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LIVES OF THE POETS

At every word a reputation dies.

Snuff, or the fan, supply each pause of chat,

With singing, laughing, ogling, and all that

This lightly hantering passage is suddenly followed by four lines of
savage irony and brute cynicism:

Meanwhile, declining from the noon of day,
The sun obliquely shoots his burning ray.
The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches hang that jurymen may dine.

For a moment the intrusion of reality seems to continue with:
The merchant from the Exchange returns in peace . . .

But, as if Pope were aware that the reader would resent further
sordid actualities, the poet resumes his mockery with a simple and ex-
quisitely sarcastic line:

And the long labors of the Toilet cease.

Another repercussion of The Rape of the Lock struct Pope where
he expected it least. Gratified by the stir the poem had caused, Pope
determined to enlarge the first version by adding the delicate "machin-
ery" of the unearthly spirits, an elaboration which made the elegant
inanities of Miss Fermor's circle still more fantastic. Addison, who had
admired Pope and still befriended him, advised against the playful
addition, whereupon Pope accused Addison of jealousy and implied
that the critic was, with the pretext of caution, keeping him from the
eminence which was rightfully his.

The breach widened a few years later when Addison praised both
Pope's and Tickell's translations of Homer but said that the latter had
more of the original. The split was complete when pope aimed a series
of devastating couplets directly against Addison, later changed to
"Atticus," which were slightly toned down when they became part
of the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. The original version contained this
passage;

But should there one whose better stars conspire
To form a bard and raise a genius higher,

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ALEXANDER POPE

Blest with each talent and each art to please,
And born to live, converse, and write with ease;
Should such a one, resolved to reign alone,
Bear, like a Turk, no brother near the throne,
View him with jealous yet with scornful eyes,
Hate him for arts that caused himself to rise;
Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer,
Alike reserved to blame or to commend,
A tim'rous foe and a suspicious friend;
Fearing e'en fools, by flatterers besieged,
And so obliging that he ne'er obliged;
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hit the fault, and hesitate dislike;
Who, when two wits on rival themes contest,
Approves of both, but likes the worst the best
Like Cato, give his litde senate laws,
And sit attentive to his own applause,
While wits and templars ev'ry sentence raise,
And wonder with a foolish face of praise —
Who would not laugh if such a man there be?
Who would not weep if Addison were he?

In the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, published when Pope was forty-six,
the poet recorded, though he did not rid himself of, other animosities.
John Arbuthnot, a Scottish Tory and chief physician to Queen Anne,
was the gentlest member of the Scriblerus Club, which, besides Pope,
included Swift, Gay, and ParnelL Twenty years Pope's senior, Ar-
buthnot had advised Pope to put aside personal animus and stress the
morally perceptive side of his nature. "I make it my last request/' wrote
the elderly Arbuthnot, "that you will continue that noble disdain and
abhorrence of vice which you seem naturally endued with, but still
with a due regard for your safety; and study more to reform than chas-
tise." Almost ten years before receiving this admonition, Pope had
informed Swift that his future poetry would consist largely of a "use-
ful investigation of my own territories . . . something domestic, fit for
my own country and for my own time." He had also contemplated
writing ethical tragedies, instructive fables, and high-minded "Ameri-
can" pastorals. His replies to Arbuthnot predated the Epistle. Thank-
ing him for his advice to be more general, or more generous, and less

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LIVES OF THE POETS

flagellant, Pope added, "I would indeed do it with more restrictions,
and less personally. . . . But general satire in times of general vice
has no force and is no punishment: people have ceased to be ashamed
of it when so many are joined with them; and it is only by hunting
one or two from the herd that any examples can be made/'

Protesting that he hoped to deter if not to reform, Pope assured
Arbuthnot that the Epistle was not meant to express ill will but,
"written by piecemeal many years, and which I now made haste to put
together/' was an attempt to explain "my motives of writing, the ob-
jections to them, and my answers." The poem, one of the greatest ex-
amples of conversational verse, is both a personal history and "a sort
of bill of complaint." It begins with an expostulation:

Shut, shut the door, good John! fatigued I said.

Tie up the knocker, say Fm sick, Fm dead.

The dog-star rages! Nay, 'tis past a doubt,

All Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out:

Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand,

They rave, recite, and madden 'round the land.

The lines develop into a dialogue, and, after Arbuthnot cautions the
poet to be prudent (''Hold! for God-sake — you'll offend — no names!"),
Pope permits himself a backward look which ends in a sudden out-
break of anguish:

Why did I write? What sin to me unknown

Dipt me in ink? My parents', or my own?

As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,

I lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came.

I left no calling for this idle trade,

No duty broke, no father disobey'd.

The Muse but serv'd to ease some friend, not wife,

To help me thro' this long disease, my life.

The Epistle goes on to justify Pope's methods as well as his moral
ideas; but it is evident that the writer takes more pleasure in exposure
than in explanation or sympathetic understanding* In his "Advertise-
ment" Pope claimed that if the poem "have anything pleasing, it will be
that by which I am most desirous to please: the Truth and the Senti-
ment"; but he hastens to add that if there is anything offensive "it will

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ALEXANDER POPE

be only to those I am least sorry to offend, the vicious or the ungen-
erous." With this disclaimer the author pays back old debts. Without
identifying his enemies — "I have, for the most part, spared their names
and they may escape being laughed at" — Pope proceeds to belabor
Edmund Curll, bookseller, purchaser of stolen letters, and purveyor of
pirated editions; Bernard Lintot, who had been Pope's publisher for
fourteen years and with whom he had broken; Ambrose Philips, an
early rival poet; Thomas Burner, John Oldmixon, Thomas Cooke,
Leonard Welsted, Charles Gildon, and John Dennis, writers who had
attacked Pope at various times; Charles Montagu, Earl of Halifax, the
traditionally caricatured literary patron; and, as already cited, Pope's
one-time friend, Joseph Addison.

Pope reserved his most insidious venom for Lord Hervey, son of the
Earl of Bristol, and friend of Pope's once cherished but now hated
Lady Montagu, with whom Hervey had collaborated on some scan-
dalous verses implicating Pope. "There is a woman's war declared
against me by a certain Lord," wrote Pope to Swift. "His weapons are
the same which women and children use: a pin to scratch and a squirt
to bespatter." Pope's first rejoinder was a letter written November 30,
1733, "on occasion of some libels written and propagated at Court in
the year i732,-3/' In it he combined feline subtlety and savagery, say-
ing, for example, "When I speak of you, my Lord, it will be with all
the deference due to the inequality which Fortune has made between
you and myself; but when I speak of your writings, my Lord, I must,
I can, do nothing but trifle. ... I could not have apprehended that
a few general strokes about a Lord scribbling carelessly, a pimp, or a
spy at Court, a sharper in a gilded chariot, etc. — that these, I say,
should be ever applied as they have been, by any malice but that which
is the greatest in the world, the malice of ill people to themselves. . . .
It is true, my Lord, I am short, not well shaped, generally ill-dressed,
if not sometimes dirty. Your Lordship and Ladyship are still in bloom;
your figures such as rival the Apollo of Belvedere and the Venus of
Medicis. ... I know your genius and hers so perfectly tally that you
cannot but join in admiring each other, and by consequence in the
contempt of all such as myself. You have both been like two princes,
and I like a poor animal sacrificed between them to cement a lasting
league. I hope I have not bled in vain."

In his next riposte Pope abandoned the sly sarcasm of "the ignoble
poet" replying to "noble enemies." The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot
reaches scarcely restrained fury as Pope dispenses with innuendoes to

LIVES OF THE POETS

rage openly against the effeminate Hervey. Dubbing him Sporus, one
of Nero's degenerate favorites, Pope does not actually accuse Hervey
of homosexuality, but he implies that sexual ambivalence ("now master
up, now miss . . . now trips a lady, and now struts a lord") was the
least of Hervey's loathsomeness:

Let Sporus tremble — ARBUTHNOT: What? that thing of silk,

Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk?

Satire or sense, alas, can Sporus feel?

Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

POPE: Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings.

This painted child of dirt, that stinks and stings;

Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys,

Yet wit ne'er tastes, and beauty ne'er enjoys:

So well-bred spaniels civilly delight

In mumbling of the game they dare not bite*

Eternal smiles his emptiness betray,

As shallow streams run dimpling all the way.

Whether in florid impotence he speaks,

And as the prompter breathes, the puppet squeaks;

Or at the ear of Eve, familiar toad,

Half froth, half venom, spits himself abroad,

In puns, or politics, or tales, or lies,

Or spite, or smut, or rhymes, or blasphemies.

His wit all see-saw, between that and this,

Now high, now low, now master up, now miss,

And he himself one vile antithesis.

Amphibious thing! that acting either part,

The trifling head or the corrupted heart,

Fop at the toilet, flatterer at the board,

Now trips a lady, and now struts a lord,

Eve's tempter thus the Rabbins have exprest,

A cherub's face, a reptile all the rest;

Beauty that shocks you, parts that none will trust;

Wit that can creep, and pride that licks the dust.

Long before this extended self-justification was written, sometime
between the first and second version of The Rape of the Lock Pope
had composed Windsor Forest. Considering his early talent for pas-
torals and his advance in technique, this should have been a brilliant

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piece of work. It is, however, one of Pope's unquestionable failures.
It is marred by trite concepts and lifeless images — "verdant isles,"
"tufted corn," "joyful reapers,0 "yellow harvests," "green retreats/'
"sylvan maids/' "coy nymphs." Pope sees nature with the eyes of a
landscape gardener, a wild domain to be curbed and clipped, a dreary
desert to be cultivated into pleasant walks, pleached arbors, and
enameled lawns. He said it explicitly in the Essay on Criticism:

These rules of old discovered, not deviz'd,
Are Nature still, but Nature methodized;
Nature, like liberty, is but restraint
By the same laws which first herself ordain'd.

The measure of Windsor Forest may be indicated by the fact that
the two most frequently quoted lines are deliberately comic ones.
Respect to royalty has seldom caused a swifter descent into patriotic
bathos than:

At length great Anna said, "Let discord cease!"
She said! The world obeyed! And all was peace.

Pope was twenty-seven when, with a translation of the first four
books of the Iliad, his financial future was secured. A prospectus of
the project elicited so enthusiastic a response that two publishers bid
for the right to bring out the work, and, though the volumes were
priced at a guinea each, six hundred readers eagerly subscribed. The
king donated two hundred pounds toward the undertaking; the Prince
of Wales subscribed one hundred; statesmen and ministers ordered two
or more copies apiece. It took six years and four assistants to complete
the translation: Parnell, who furnished a Life of Homer and whose
scholarliness was invaluable, Broome, Jortin, and an unknown anno-
tator. Enormously successful — Pope derived more than five thousand
pounds from its sale — there was much grumbling beneath the praise.
Pope took not only all the credit but, underpaying his fellow workers,
practically all the proceeds. Objections were leveled against the au-
thenticity of the version. "A fine poem, Mr. Pope," said the critic
BenrJey, voicing the opinion of others, "but you must not call it
Homer." No one questioned the fluency and verve of Pope's Iliad;
but, though Pope sustained the rapidity of Homer's narrative, he failed
to capture its essential subtle simplicity, its passionate vigor and ma-
jestic stride.

241

LIVES OF THE POETS

The scholars demurred; but Society was untroubled about the ac-
curacy of an ancient epic transformed by Pope's special mannerisms*
It made much of the season's literary lion, now that his roar was so
eminently cultural. Addison's preference for his prot6ge's (TickelTs)
translation of the Iliad, issued in the same year as Pope's, lost him a
friend; but Pope was flattered by the adulation of leaders of fashion.
The man of the moment, he preened himself also in the role of man-
about-town, his tiny figure fluttering in and out of the glittering circle
of condescending lords and ladies greatly aware of their graciousness.

At thirty-one, thanks to the success of the Iliad, Pope moved to
Twickenham, where, with his mother, to whom he was devoted, he
remained the rest of his life. The villa he bought was small, but there
was a handsome garden and — his particular joy — room for a grotto.
This grotto he built, and he embellished it in the approved rococo
style until it resembled the standard artificial Old Ruin, complete with
fancy fossils, assorted statues, marbles, quartz, and crystal, trailing
vines, a temple made entirely of shells, and a properly mysterious un-
derground passage. Here was a true pleasance, a real as well as a ro-
mantic retreat There, as though he were an ancient noble in exile, the
little cripple was visited by the seditious Bishop of Rochester, the
swaggering Duchess of Marlborough, Viscount Bolingbroke, the Prince
of Wales, Voltaire, and other distinguished ones. He offered to take
care of the ailing Dean Swift, but though Swift spent part of a sum-
mer at Twickenham, while each poet was "plodding on a book/' noth-
ing came of the plan. Pope's house was overrun by friends and visitors,
Pope buzzed ineffectually about, and Swift escaped into a dark and
impenetrable silence. Swift himself indicated the situation in a bit of
doggerel verse:

Pope has the talent well to speak,

But not to reach the ear.
His loudest voice is low and weak;

The Dean too deaf to hear.

Despite the temptation of leisure, Pope was unremittingly busy
during the next few years. He published the fifth and sixth volumes
(Books XVII-XXIV) of the Iliad, the Epistle to Addison, and an Epistle
to Robert, Earl of Oxford; edited the Works of John Sheffield, Duke of
Buckingham; presented his six-volume edition of The Works of Shake-
speare. The last was, from every point of view, a disaster. An editorial
as well as a financial failure, it was flashy and full of easily discovered

242

ALEXANDER POPE

faults. Lewis Theobald, a third-rate versifier but a first-rate scholar,
exposed the worst of the misreadings in a booklet entitled Shakespeare
Restored, or A Specimen of the Many Errors as Well Committed as
Unamended Toy Mr. Pope in His Late Edition. Pope was infuriated—
he later revenged himself by making Theobald one of the fools of The
Dunciad — but Theobald was not without his ultimate triumph. When,
a few years later, his own edition of Shakespeare was published, it was
recognized as an imaginative and most important text; often reprinted,
it completely replaced Pope's.

The first three volumes of Pope's translation of the Odyssey appeared
in the same year as his ill-advised Shakespeare; the fourth and fifth vol-
umes were published a year later. Not as spectacularly successful as the
preceding Iliad, it was equally characteristic of its translator: the story
is Homer's, but the accent is Pope's. In a circular announcing the work,
remembering the criticism that his collaborators had been insufficiently
recompensed, Pope declared that the subscription was not solely for his
own use but also for that of two of his friends who had assisted him in
the work. Pope, being Pope, could not let the matter rest without a bit
of disingenuousness. He made one of the "friends," who happened to be
Broome (one of his collaborators), imply that Pope had translated all
but five of the twenty-four books of the Odyssey. Actually Pope had
translated only twelve of the books, although he may have supervised
the work as a whole. Fenton had translated four, Broome had been re-
sponsible for eight, besides the preparation of the notes, and Parnell
had translated the famous "Battle of the Frogs and Mice." Once more
it was charged that Pope had taken advantage of his assistants, and that
he had again ridden rough-shod (or too smoothly shod) over Homer,
One of his critics, Spence, the prelector of poetry at Oxford, wrote an
estimate which, however, was so justly balanced that Pope, who did not
always respond to fairness, sought him out and made him his friend.

At forty Pope issued the first version of The Dunciad, perhaps his
most original and certainly his most rancorous work. Conscious of its
importance, Pope was planning to enlarge it even before it appeared
in the bookshops. "It grieves me to the soul," he wrote to Swift, "that
I cannot send you my chef d'oeuvre, the poem of Dulness which, after
I am dead and gone, will be printed with a large commentary, and let-
tered on the back: Pope's Dulness." Pope had only hinted at the iden-
tity of the "dunces," studding the pages with ambiguous initials and
provocative dashes, a procedure which whetted public curiosity and
allowed the publisher to promise an enlarged, "more perfect" edition.

LIVES OF THE POETS

Having prepared the ground and, incidentally, sunk several pits for his
enemies, Pope then issued a 'Variorum" edition of The Dunciad within
a year of its first publication. Thirteen years later he returned to the
attack with The New Dunciad: As It Was Found in the Year 1741.

Pope had plenty of scores to settle, hut they were never enough. He
was always on the lookout for new or unsuspected enemies, if only be-
cause another antagonist meant another target and another volley of
epigrams. He employed the unfortunate poet and vagabond Richard
Savage, who claimed to be the illegitimate son of an earl, to pick up
back-street gossip and oddments of scandal. He asked a friend, Thomas
Sheridan, to gather trifles about potential victims from his associates in
Ireland. He wrote to Swift for contributions, persuading him "to read
over the text, and make a few [notes] in any way you like best, whether
dry raillery, upon the style and way of commenting of trivial critics; or
humorous, upon the authors in the poem; or historical, of persons, places,
times; or explanatory, or collecting parallel passages of the ancients."
Goading, inciting, and creating new victims, Pope brought to light
more dunces and, in turn, more denunciations.

The hunt for material never seemed to stop; it began with Grub
Street. Grub Street was an actual street which had once been inhabited
by makers of arrows and bowstrings, then used by gamblers, and finally
taken over by "writers of small histories, dictionaries, and contemporary
poems." In Pope's time it had already become a byword for literary
hacks, penny-a-liners, unscrupulous journalists. Pope made it a symbol
of everything that was mediocre, shabby, and scurrilous in literature.
His victims, foes or dupes, were many: Pope's old whipping boys, Ed-
mund Curll, John Dennis, and Ambrose Philips; the wealthy James
Moore Smythe, who, said Pope, had plagiarized from verses Pope had
addressed to Martha Blount; the eccentric Duchess of Newcastle; the
erstwhile friendly Lady Mary Montagu; and others who had criticized,
offended, or hurt the poet. Pope assailed them indiscriminately with
something more reputation-blasting than personal affronts; he castigated
the Grub Street authors for their glibness, lack of learning, and un-
principled methods of writing. His principal object of detestation was
his old opponent Lewis Theobald, whom he flayed as a bad journalist
and worse poet and, most crushingly, as the favorite son of Dulness,
goddess of the dunces.

Swearing and supperless the hero sate,
Blasphem'd his gods, the dice, and damn'd his fate;

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ALEXA3STDER POPE

Then gnaw'd his pen, then dash'd it to the ground,
Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound!
Plung'd for his sense, but found no bottom there;
Yet wrote and floundered on in mere despair-
Round him much embryo, much abortion lay,
Much future ode, and abdicated play;
Nonsense precipitate, like running lead,
That sipp'd through cracks and zig-zags of the head . . .
Next, o'er his books his eyes began to roll,
In pleasing memory of all he stole,
Now here he sipp'd, now there he plundered snug,
And suck'd all o'er, like an industrious bug.
Here lay poor Fletcher's half -eat scenes, and here
The frippery of crucified Moli&re;
There hapless Shakespeare, yet of Tibbald x sore,
Wish'd he had blotted for himself before.

Such a passage shows Pope's desire to humiliate but not (since he
needed assailants for counterassaults) to exterminate. The disparate
elements of Grub Street began a violent campaign of covert as well as
overt vilification. Within a few months there were two dozen sneering
pamphlets accusing Pope of unethical practices, ingratitude, disloyalty,
double dealing, and, for good measure, blasphemy. In his preface to
The Dunciad of 1728 readers were assured that only those were at-
tacked who had printed some scandal against the poet or had done
some injury to him. In that way, Pope told Swift, he would rid himself
of "those insects." This, of course, was a piece of false naivete*, for Pope
knew that the buzzing would be louder than ever.

But, if Pope enjoyed the battle with Grub Street, his friends did not
share his pleasure in what they considered an undignified and unprof-
itable fracas. On the contrary, they chided him for letting slights and
grievances deflect him from his true course: the composition of poetry
which would both delight and elevate. In a letter to his son-in-law,
Bishop Atterbury wrote that others besides himself regretted that the
author of The Dunciad had engaged himself "in a very improper scuffle,
not worthy of his pen at all, which was designed for greater purposes.
Nor can all the good poetry in those three cantos make amends for the
trouble and teasing which they will occasion to him." After the "vario-
rum*' Dunciad appeared, the good Bishop emphasized this point of view

Tibbald: Theobald.

245

LIVES OF THE POETS

in a letter to Pope himself: 'Tour mind is as yet unbroken by age and
ill accidents; your knowledge and judgment are at the height. Use
them in writing somewhat that may teach the present and future times,
and if not gain equally the applause of both, may yet raise the envy of
the one and secure the admiration of the other. Employ not your
precious moments and great talents on little men and little things, but
choose a subject every way worthy of you, and handle it as you can, in
a manner which nobody else can equal or imitate/'

Aaron Hill said much the same thing in a poem, The Progress of
Wit: a Caveat for the Use of an Eminent Writer, and, in a second set
of cautionary verses, repeated his misgivings:

Let half-soul'd poets still on poets fall,
And teach the willing world to scorn them all.
But let no muse pre-eminent as thine,
Of voice melodious and of force divine,
Stung by wit's wasps, all rights of rank forego,
And turn and snarl and bite at every foe.
No — like thine own Ulysses, make no stay:
Shun monsters, and pursue thy streamy way.
Wing'd by the muse's God, to rise, sublime,
What has thy fame to fear from peevish rhyme?

For the time being Pope was content to rest on his triumphs as adver-
sary and artist, especially on the combination of fury and farce which
went into the making of the Dunciad. He was concerned with the cir-
cumspect Essay on Man, with the noncontroversial Moral Essays, and
the retrospective Imitations of Horace. He busied himself with dozens
of activities; in one year (1735) he had something to do with more
than sixty books and pamphlets. But he could not get the overtones of
the Dunciad out of his head, and soon he had new scores to pay off.
Several years before he set to work on it, he planned a "Second Canto,"
which was to become the fourth book of what he considered his chef
d'oeuvre. In the latter part of 1741, when he was fifty-three, Pope was
hard at work on the new Dunciad, anticipating fresh onslaughts from
every side. "I little thought three months ago," he wrote to Hugh
Bethel on New Year's Day, 1742, "to have drawn the whole polite world
upon me (as I formerly did the dunces of a lower species), as I cer-
tainly shall when I publish this poem. An army of virtuosi, medalists,
ciceroni, Royal Society men, schools, universities, even florists, free-
thinkers, and free-masons will encompass me with fury/'

246

ALEXANDER POPE

The new Dunciad had a new target. Pope no longer directed his fire
against Lewis Theobald; he concentrated it on Colley Gibber, play-
wright, actor, biographer, and minor poet who, in 1730, had been made
poet laureate. Gibber was one of those lampooned in Peri Bathous,
characterized by Pope as "a pleasant discourse on the subject of poetry,"
but actually an exposure of the bathetic element in the writings of his
opponents. Gibber had also appeared ingloriously in the third book of
the earlier Dunciad. It is apparent that Pope singled him out not for a
specific grievance but because of a general antipathy: the scorn of the
true poet for the glib poetaster exalted far beyond his merit Gibber
stood for everything Pope loathed: pettiness wrapped up in pretentious-
ness; opportunism smoothing its way with genial blandishments; a wil-
lingness to sell careless workmanship to anyone ready to pay for it

The most critical parts of the fourth book, however, are not the
thrusts at particular persons but the sections in which Pope satirizes the
taste of his times, the follies of the pseudo-intellectuals, die manners of
people of quality, the ceremonious snobbery of the rich, and the ridic-
ulous pursuits of self-satisfied educators, rationalizing deists, virtuosi,
collectors, dilettanti, and fops. Particularly amusing is a picture of the
typical young eighteenth-century Englishman being conducted on the
Grand Tour, a passage unusually beautiful in sound and rich in sen-
suous imagery:

Europe he saw, and Europe saw him too.

There all thy gifts and graces we display,

Thou, only thou, directing all our way!

To where the Seine, obsequious as she runs,

Pours at great Bourbon's feet her silken sons;

Or Tiber, now no longer Roman, rolls,

Vain of Italian arts, Italian souls:

To happy convents, bosomed deep in vines,

Where slumber abbots, purple as their wines:

To isles of fragrance, lily-silvered vales,

Diffusing languor in the panting gales:

To lands of singing, or of dancing slaves,

•Love-whisp'ring woods, and lute-resounding waves.

But chief her shrine where naked Venus keeps,

And Cupids ride the lion of the deeps,

Where, eased of fleets, the Adriatic Main

Wafts the smooth eunuchs and enamoured swain.

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LIVES OF THE POETS

Led by my hand, he sauntered Europe round,
And gathered ev'ry vice on Christian ground.

The Dunciad is a far from perfect poem. It is full of self-flattery; it is
mean; it is too long as well as too vindictive. Many of the gibes have
no meaning for us today. There is no doubt that Pope did not know
when to stop; he kept on flogging his poor nags long after they were
dead. Nevertheless, The Dunciad is unique in English literature. It be-
gins in mockery and ends in madness. The concluding lines, which
show the final triumph of Dulness or Chaos, are filled with a tragic
force; they move toward the inevitable conclusion with a dark — and, if
it were not for the subject, noble — eloquence.

In vain, in vain — the all-composing hour

Resistless falls: the muse obeys the pow'r.

She comes! she comes! the sable throne behold

Of Night primeval and of Chaos old!

Before her, fancy's gilded clouds decay,

And all its varying rainbows die away.

Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,

The meteor drops, and in a flash expires . „ *

Art after art goes out, and all is night.

See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled,

Mountains of casuistry heaped o'er her head!

Philosophy, that leaned on heaven before,

Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.

Physic of metaphysic begs defence,

And metaphysic calls for aid on sense!

See mystery to mathematics fly!

In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.

Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,

And, unawares, morality expires.

Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine,

Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!

Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored;

Light dies before thy uncreating word;

Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall,

And universal darkness buries all.

Pope sometimes displayed a more tender side. Kindness, even deep
concern, is revealed in his friendship for the pathetically self-ruined

2,48

ALEXANDER POPE

Richard Savage; in his wholehearted praise of a potential rival, author
of an anonymous poem, London, a young, unknown satirist by the
name of Samuel Johnson; and in three poems, "To a Young Lady on
Her Leaving the Town/' "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate
Lady," and "Eloisa to Abelard." The first is a teasing missive to Martha
Blount; the second was suggested by the marital difficulties of a Mrs.
Elizabeth Weston, in whom Pope had foolishly interested himself; the
third is a treatment of the unhappy love story which he sent, with coy
notes, to two very different women: Lady Mary Montagu and Martha
Blount. "In the Epistle of Eloisa to Aboard," he wrote coyly to Lady
Mary, "you will find one passage that I cannot tell whether to wish you
should understand it or not." 'The Epistle of Eloisa," he wrote to
Martha amorously, "grows warm and begins to have some breathings
of the heart in it, which may make posterity think I was in love."

Pope was certainly thinking of posterity when he wrote the Essay on
Man. There were to be half a dozen epistles — the finished work con-
sisted of four — dealing with man in the abstract, his qualities and his
place in the creation, his mixture of virtues and vices, his false notions
of happiness, his errors of prodigality, and his need of moderation.
At fifty-one, in December, 1739, Pope confided to his friend John
Caryll: "It is now in my hopes, God knows whether it may ever prove
in my power, to contribute to some honest and moral purposes in
writing on human life and manners, not exclusive of religious regards,
and I have many fragments which I am beginning to put together, but
nothing perfect or finished" Instigated by his friend Henry St John,
Viscount Bolingbroke, the Essay ends with a tribute to Bolingbroke, the
man who not only urged Pope to undertake the work but aided him
during its composition.

Come, then, my Friend! my Genius! come along;

Oh, master of the poet, and the song!

And while the muse now stoops, or now ascends,

To man's low passions, or their glorious ends

Teach me, like thee, in various nature wise,

To fall with dignity, with temper rise,

Formed by thy converse, happily to steer

From grave to gay, from lively to severe . . .

When statesmen, heroes, kings, in dust repose,

Whose sons shall blush their fathers were thy foes,

Shall then this verse to future age pretend

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LIVES OF THE POETS

Thou wert my guide, philosopher and friend?
That urged by thee, I turned the tuneful art
From sounds to things, from fancy to the heart;
For wit's false mirror held up nature's light,
Showed erring pride, whatever is, is right;
That reason, passion, answer one great aim;
That true self-love and social are the same;
That virtue only mates our bliss below;
And all our knowledge is ourselves to know.

In the Essay on Man Pope determined to protest against the ac-
cepted standards of his day, to correct and, if possible, improve them.
But Pope was not a philosopher; he could not sustain a long line of
thought through some twelve hundred lines. As a result the Essay on
Man is not an integrated piece of thinking but brilliant parts of a
poem, not a perfectly wrought chain but a series of exquisitely made
links. Once read, one can never forget the separate trenchant seg-
ments, such as the passage pointing out the limitations of human sensi-
bility:

The bliss of man Ccould pride that blessing find)

Is not to act or think beyond mankind;

No pow'rs of body or of soul to share,

But what his nature and his state can bear.

Why has not man a microscopic eye?

For this plain reason, man is not a fly.

Say what the use, were finer optics giv'n,

To inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav'n?

Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o'er,

To smart and agonize at eVry pore?

Or quick effluvia darting through the brain,

Die of a rose in aromatic pain?

In spite of its tenuous philosophizing and arbitrary jumps, the Essay
an Man is lively reading. It proceeds swiftly from one concision to
another; bursts of epigrams so startle us that we forget how completely
the poem fails in unity. We feel sufficiently rewarded by lines like:

Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law,
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw:

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ALEXANDER POPE

Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite:
Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage,
And beads and prayer books are the toys of age:
Pleased with this bauble still, as that before;
'Till tired he sleeps, and life's poor play is o'er.

And by:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

After the publication of the Essay on Man Pope spent the next five
years (1733 to r738) polishing his Satires and Epistles of Horace
Imitated. He had preached on the use of riches and on the characters of
men and women in his Moral Essays; now he wanted to indulge him-
self in a few more personalities. But his chief interest was in ideas about
the state of letters; he was particularly disturbed by the plethora of bad
verse and saccharine sentiments so lamentably encouraged by court
circles. His philosophy was pragmatic, no more idealistic than Horace's
carpe diem, but his artistic standards were high, and he prided himself
on his independence. In an age of sycophants, he never sought a pa-
tron. In the Imitations Pope remembered his father suffered for being a
Catholic:

For right hereditary tax'd and fined,

He stuck to poverty with peace of mind;

And me the muses help'd to undergo it;

Convict a papist he, and I a poet.

But (thanks to Homer) since I live and thrive,

Indebted to no prince or peer alive.

The first volume of The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope had been
published when the author was not quite thirty; the second volume
had appeared when he was forty-seven, at which time he also issued
Mr. Pope's Literary Correspondence and, two years later, Letters of
Mr. Alexander Pope. It was obvious that Pope never threw away a
scrap of manuscript. Even while he was completing The New Dun-

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LIVES OF THE POETS

clad, he was busy collating his random prose and preparing it for
publication. He was, in fact, too busy to notice he was ill.

It was not until he was in his fifties that Pope became conscious of
dropsical pains. He had been afflicted with asthma for some time; now
he began to worry. He made a will leaving part of his estate to a half-
sister and the rest to Martha Blount. His condition grew worse rapidly.
"I would see you as long as I can see you/' he wrote to his friends
Bolingbroke and Marchmont, in answer to an invitation, "and then
shut my eyes upon the world as a thing worth seeing no longer. If your
charity would take up a small bird that is half dead of the frost and set
it chirping for half an hour, I will jump into my cage and put myself
in your hands tomorrow at any hour you send, Two horses will be
enough to draw me — and so would two dogs, if you had them." Ill
though he was, he planned a comprehensive History of the Rise and
Progress of English Poetry, but it was never undertaken. Pope had not
much longer to live. His little body wasted away and shriveled to a few
frail bones.

Toward the end of March, Martha Blount received his last letter.
He told her that writing had become very painful to him. "In bed, or
sitting, it hurts my breast; in the afternoon I can do nothing, still less by
candlelight. ... I have little to say to you when we meet, but I love
you upon unalterable principles, which makes me feel my heart the
same to you as if I saw you every hour. Adieu." Two months later, at
Twickenham, on May 30, 1744, he died of dropsy and asthma, a few
days after his fifty-sixth birthday.

Rarely is Pope's work what Milton insisted poetry should be: "simple,
sensuous, passionate." Like Dryden, Pope never attempted to sound the
brawling medley of the Elizabethans or the superhuman transports of
the Metaphysicals. Instead of trying to translate translunar beauty, he
arranged consciousness into common-sense harmonies; for impalpable
ecstasy he substituted an almost physical perfection of epithet. Pope
was writing for a public whose taste was coarse even if its culture was
refined. It was an Age of Reason which was also an age of unreasonable
abuse. Any slighting reference, no matter how trivial, evoked a stinging
reply, full of libelous imputations and viciously satirical distortions.

It was to such an audience that Pope appealed, a cultivated audience
equally pleased with common invectives and the classics. There was,
therefore, no contradiction between the bluntness of Pope's content

252

ALEXANDER POPE

and the delicacy of its texture, or between his erudite allusions and the
gossip of the day. Pope's vocabulary was carefully specialized, and his
attitude indicated a complacent acceptance of society's mores if not
of its morals. From time to time Pope seemed to appear in the role of
reformer, but he fought few real battles against conformity. Seldom
indeed did he urge a strenuous effort to test man's circumscribed po-
tentialities, and then (like the Elizabethans) try to go beyond them. On
the contrary, he cautioned his readers against rashness and advised a
sensible recognition of humanity's limited powers.

Be sure yourself and your own reach to know,
How far your genius, taste, and learning go;
Launch not beyond your depth, but be discreet,
And mark that point where sense and dulness meet.

Conservatism, Pope implied, may not be a glorious ideal; yet it is a
manner of living and even a desirable way of life. At least it was for
him. No partisan and certainly no politician, he announced his willing-
ness to compromise in pragmatic terms. He phrased it most appropriately
in his Imitations of Horace (Book i, Epistle I):

But ask not, to what doctors I apply!

Sworn to no master, of no sect am I:

As drives the storm, at any door I knock:

And house with Montaigne now, or now with Locke.

Sometimes a patriot, active in debate,

Mix with the world, and battle for the state . . .

Sometimes with Aristippus, or St. Paul,

Indulge my candor, and grow all to all;

Back to my native moderation slide,

And win my way by yielding to the tide.

If Pope's central philosophic truth seems to be "whatever is, is right/*
it is by no means his poetic credo. As a poet, Pope inveighed against the
facile phrase, the slipshod and redundant thought, the merely com-
petent verse-making. Even if considered only as examples in technique,
Pope's verses are unsurpassed models of creative craftsmanship; only in
Pope could morbid wit and biting hate, the reflection of a cruel age,
be sublimated into transparent poetry.

It is likely that Pope's love of symmetry made him choose the heroic

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couplet as the form in which practically all his verse was cast. The
double lines of matched verse tend to fall into stiff and separate units;
held by its chain of rhymes, the heroic couplet often becomes rigid.
Pope liberated the medium from its restrictive fetters by giving it an
extraordinary flexibility. Within the tightly linked syllables Pope ma-
nipulated the stresses, pauses, and stops with such variability that, in-
stead of growing monotonous in sound and slow in movement, the
couplets are so fluent, so unaffectedly natural, that we are no longer
aware of the form. No one before (or after) Pope used the couplet so
playfully and, at the same time, so purposefully; no one so indelibly
stamped the"rhyme-paired lines with his unmistakable signature. More-
over, the solid sentences and the conclusively capped rhymes have the
ring of authority if not the undisputed finality of truth.

It is true that many if not most of Pope's couplets glitter with corus-
cating little points of ice rather than with the glow of human warmth.
But, though there are practically no fiery sentiments, there are moments
of deep feeling, all the more surprising for being unexpected. There is,
to select a single instance, the unforgettably pathetic picture of the
once popular and powerful George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham —
the Zimri of Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel — a bankrupt who went
through a fortune of twenty-five thousand pounds a year, a derelict
courtier dying a mean and dirty death:

In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half-hung,

The floors of plaster, and the walls of dung,

On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw,

With tape-tied curtains, never meant to draw,

The George and Garter dangling from that bed

Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red,

Great Villiers lies — alas! how changed from him,

That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim!

Gallant and gay, in Cliveden's proud alcove,

The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love;

Or just as gay, at council, in a ring

Of mimicked statesmen, and their merry king.

No wit to flatter left of all his store!

No fool to laugh at, which he valued more.

There, victor of his health, of fortune, friends,

And fame, this lord of useless thousands ends.

254

ALEXANDER POPE

An entirely different portrait is painted in another of the Moral
Essays. In the second "Epistle/* addressed to "A Lady" (Pope's cherished
Martha Blount), there is a devastating delineation of a coldly calcu-
lating woman. Although Pope maintained that the personages in the
Characters of Women were fictitious, readers were quick to identify one
of them, "Chloe," with the mercenary Mrs. Howard, who, as the
favorite mistress of George II, became Countess of Suffolk.

"Yet Chloe sure was formed without a spot" —

Nature in her then erred not, tut forgot.

"With ev'ry pleasing, ev'ry prudent part,

Say, what can Chloe want?" — She wants a heart.

She speaks, behaves, and acts just as she ought;

But never, never reached one generous thought

Virtue she finds too painful an endeavour,

Content to dwell in decencies for ever.

So very reasonable, so unmoved,

As never yet to love, or to be loved.

She, while her lover pants upon her breast,

Can mark the figures on an Indian chest;

And when she sees her friend in deep despair,

Observes how much a chintz exceeds mohair.

Forbid it, Heav'n, a favour or a debt

She e'er should cancel! but she may forget.

Safe is your secret still in Chloe's ear;

But none of Chloe shall you ever hear.

Of all her dears she never slander'd one,

But cares not if a thousand are undone.

Even in the smallest verses Pope achieved density and, more often
than not, intensity. A commentary on patronage, a situation and a
story, are summed up in an epigram engraved on the collar of a dog
which Pope gave to the Prince of Wales:

I am his Highness* dog at Kew.
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?

The same condensed power is evident in fragments like the macabre
four-line dialogue "On Dr. Francis Atterbury"; in the ironic little

LIVES OF THE POETS

tribute "On a Certain Lady/' who is not affected by praise and envy
because "the woman's deaf and does not hear"; in die straightforward
quatrains C& form rarely employed by Pope) occasioned by his sleeping
in the same bed in which John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, had slept;
and the famous epitaph intended for the tomb of Isaac Newton in
Westminster Abbey:

Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night
God said, "Let Newton be!" and all was light

An almost perfect sense of balance is one of Pope's greatest gifts, but
even the most ardent reader sometimes tires of his constant use of
antitheses. Here again Pope's devotion to a symmetrical pattern led him
to a precise if sometimes precarious juggling of opposed thoughts; but it
also brought about dramatically vivid contrasts and miracles of equilib-
rium. Here, for example, are packed and beautifully counterpoised
couplets from the First Ejnstle of the First Book of Horace, The
Odyssey, and the analytically delightful Characters of Women from
Moral Essays:

See him, with pangs of body, pangs of soul,
Burn through die tropic, freeze beneath the pole.

On canvas wings to cut the watery way;
No bird so light, no thought so swift as they.

Wise wretch, with pleasures too refined to please;
With too much spirit to be e'er at ease;
With too much quietness ever to be taught;
With too much thinking to have common thought:
You purchase pain with all that joy can give,
And die of nothing but a rage to live.

Narcissa's nature, tolerably mild,
To make a wash, would hardly stew a child;
Has even been proved to grant a lover's prayer,
And paid a tradesman once to make him stare;
Gave alms at Easter, in a Christian trim,
And made a widow happy, for a whim.
Why dien declare good nature is her scorn,

256

ALEXANDER POPE

When 'tis by that alone she can be borne?
Why pique all mortals, yet affect a name?
A fool to pleasure, yet a slave to fame.

Hypersensitive and pitifully vulnerable, yet perfectly in tune with
the temper of his age, Pope was an accurate recorder of a society that
flourished on cliques and intrigues and countless subterfuges. To this
society Pope was both a victim and a mocking contributor. He was
also its unacknowledged laureate. Controlling the most relentless sav-
agery with the most acute sensibility, Pope perfected a poetry that will
continue to attract admirers even among those who can never be moved
by it. It is a poetry that, speaking almost entirely to the disillusioned in-
telligence, springs from the disenchanted mind — a saddened but a
cynical mind, aware that, while men's machinations may make for
ignoble living, they also make entertaining, and sometimes enduring,
literature.

257

XIV

The Decline of Elegance

ris A POPULAR MISCONCEPTION that eighteenth-century literature
was wholly artificial, snobbish, and sophisticated. The generation
of Pope was devoted to personal involvements, delighted with the
little wars of little cliques. It expressed itself in smart conversation,
highly cultured letters, and clipped disposals of what constituted taste,
manners, and mundane ethics — a way of talking, thinking, and writing
epitomized by Samuel Johnson.

There was, however, another tendency, a current contrary to the
mainstream. Unlike Pope's treacherous rapids, this was a smaller flow,
smooth, gentle, almost turgid. Instead of dashing toward the metropolis,
it meandered through remote villages and uncelebrated fields. New
ground was watered, new soil nourished. Urban brilliance was met, if
not matched, by "suburbanity," and the town's devious double-dealing
was answered by simple sincerity.

Rural England was flourishing, the land was fertile, the pastures cov-
ered with sheep; the farmer prospered and, if he did not disport himself
as willfully as his city brother, he ate better and lived more securely.
It was estimated that four out of five Englishmen were supported by
agriculture. Nature, once forbidding because of its lawlessness, was
being tamed and at least partly understood; the poets discovered the
peace as well as the beauty of a natural landscape that needed no

2,58

SAMUEL JOHNSON

formal aesthetic improvement. The spirit of the countryside was vari-
ously expressed by Matthew Green, James Thomson, Thomas Gray,
John Dyer, William Collins, and William Cowper; the changing moods
of the village were sentimentally voiced by Oliver Goldsmith and, less
idyllically, by George Crabbe.

Other protests against the prevalence of urban wit are found in the
wild exaltation and inspired madness of the poetry of Christopher Smart
and the unhappy inventiveness of the unfortunate Thomas Chatterton.
The final decline of elegance is marked as the century ended with the
clear, unpremeditated songs of Robert Burns and the fiery vision of
William Blake.

Writing of second-rate poets who are well worth reading, T. S. Eliot
said they were of two kinds: "those who, however imperfecdy, at-
tempted innovations in idiom, and those who were just conservative
enough in sensibility to be able to devise an interesting variation on an
old idiom/' Eminent among those who adapted an established idiom
to fit their personalities were Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) and Charles
Churchill (1731-1764). Both were belated wits and both relied on
Pope's characteristic medium, the heroic couplet; but, unlike most imi-
tators, they developed ideas as well as utterances of their own.

SAMUEL JOHNSON:

By no means a well-known poet — not even primarily a poet — Samuel
Johnson was the best-known personality of the Augustan period: essay-
ist, biographer, lexicographer, critic, and conversationalist extraordi-
nary. He was born September 18, 1709, in Lichfield, Staffordshire,
where his father was a bookseller. His was an ailing childhood. At the
age of three he suffered from "the king's evil" and, since it was a tradi-
tion that a touch of the royal hand would cure scrofula, the boy was
taken to London. Queen Anne did what was required, but the disease
persisted and, throughout the rest of his life, Johnson was afflicted with
bad eyesight. In spite of the handicap Johnson acquired knowledge
easily; his memory was remarkable and he did not so much learn Latin
as assimilate it at the Lichfield Grammar School. At nineteen he went
to Pembroke College, Oxford, but after fourteen months was forced to
leave because his family could not afford to continue his education. He

259

LIVES OF THE POETS

was so poor that his shoes were worn out and his feet appeared through
them*

Two years after the end of Johnson's trief college career his im-
poverished father died, leaving his son twenty pounds and no prospects.
Johnson supported himself after a fashion by teaching at a boys' school
at Market Bosworth in Leicestershire, and by writing little pieces for
the Birmingham Journal. For a short while Birmingham was his home;
a bookseller there published his first work, a condensed translation from
the French, A Voyage to Abyssinia. At this time — he was then
twenty-six — he married Mrs. Elizabeth Porter, a widow twenty years
older than himself, and started a boarding school near Lichfield, where
one of his pupils was Richard Garrick. The school failed in less than a
year and, accompanied by Garrick, Johnson set out for London, which
was to become his permanent home.

Unattractive physically, Johnson had already developed a set of
eccentricities which included excessive irritability, indolence, slovenly
dress, and a peevishly arrogant manner* In his mid-twenties he was an
ungainly figure, 'lean and lank," said Boswell, "so that his immense
structure of bones was hideously striking to the eye, and the scars of
his scrofula were deeply visible/' After fifty-three, when Boswell got to
know him, "his appearance was strange and somewhat uncouth. . . .
He had the use of only one eye. ... So morbid was his temperament
that he never knew the natural joy of a free and vigorous use of his
limbs. When he walked, it was like the struggling gait of one in fet-
ters; when he rode, he had no command or direction of his horse, but
was carried as if in a balloon." If Johnson was irascible, he was also
humane; violently prejudiced, he was also sincerely pious and always
anxious to be just. BoswelTs re-creation of the man is a cumulative trib-
ute to an inexhaustible mind, equipped with an uncommon fusion of
powerful reasoning, wit, great learning and gruff humor.

Shortly after arriving in London, Johnson was employed by Edward
Cave, printer and publisher of The Gentleman's Magazine. During a
ten-year association with Cave, Johnson turned out essays, sketches,
poems, and reports of parliamentary debates, many of which were
Johnson's own free variations on what he had heard or, frequently,
failed to hear. London, his first important work, published when John-
son was twenty-nine, is a paraphrase of Juvenal's third satire. Juvenal
Cthe tenth satire) was also the inspiration for The Vanity of Human
Wishes, published eleven years later. Johnson's tart commentary on his
times breaks through the Latin echoes and the Popean rhymed couplets.

260

SAMUEL JOHNSON

It is a sardonically urban and yet urbane poetry which is distilled in
such precise lines as these from London:

Here malice, rapine, accident, conspire,
And now a rabble rages, now a fire;
Their ambush here relendess ruffians lay,
And here the fell attorney prowls for prey;
Here falling houses thunder on your head,
And here a female atheist talks you dead.

By numbers here from shame or censure free,
All crimes are safe but hated poverty.
This, only this, the rigid law pursues,
This, only this, provokes the snarling muse.
The sober trader at a tatter'd cloak,
Wakes from his dream and labors for a joke;
With brisker air the silken courtiers gaze,
And turn the varied taunt a thousand ways.
Of all the griefs that harass the distressed,
Sure the most bitter is a scornful jest;
Fate never wounds more deep the gen'rous heart
Than when a blockhead's insult points the dart.

Equally controlled and even more eloquent are lines like the fol-
lowing, from The Vanity of Human Wishes, in which Johnson con-
siders the soldier's pride and destiny:

No joys to him pacific scepters yield:

War sounds the trump, he rushes to the field;

Behold surrounding kings their pow'r combine,

And one capitulate, and one resign;

Peace courts his hand but spreads her charms in vain;

'Think nothing gain'd," he cries, ''till naught remain,

On Moscow's walls till Gothic standards fly,

And all be mine beneath the polar sky."

The march begins in military state,

And nations on his eye suspended wait;

Stern famine guards the solitary coast,

And winter barricades the realms of frost . . ,

The vanquished hero leaves his broken bands,

261

LIVES OF THE POETS

And shows his miseries in distant lands;

Condemned a needy supplicant to wait

While ladies interpose and slaves debate . . .

His fall was destin'd to a barren strand,

A petty fortress, and a dubious hand;

He left a name, at which the world grew pale,

To point a moral or adorn a tale.

Something of the sound of Johnson's poetry is heard in the many
prose pieces he contributed to The Rambler and its successor, The Idler,
both of which he founded and in which he appeared, to quote Boswell,
as "a majestic teacher of moral and religious wisdom." At forty-six, with
the help of a half-dozen assistants, he brought out his Dictionary of the
English Language, notable for the spirited quotations which illuminate
the words and for Johnson's private taste in the matter of definitions.
Superseded by later and more accurate etymologists, the Dictionary is
remembered today chiefly because it occasioned the classic example of
belated recognition.

Seven years before it was published, a plan of the Dictionary was sub-
mitted to Lord Chesterfield, a patrician statesman and diplomat, whose
dubiously instructive letters to his son became famous, and whose name
was conferred upon an overcoat. Chesterfield never answered Johnson's
appeal — later he claimed the neglect was unintentional — but when the
work was successfully launched, he wrote two reviews that were not
only favorable but were intended to be gratifying to the author. Johnson
rejected the advances. In one of the most famous of all letters, he told
Chesterfield that his notice came too late to be appreciated. "Is not a
patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling
for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him
with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my
labors, had it been early, had been kind. But it has been delayed until
I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary and cannot im-
part it; till I am known and do not want it."

For years Johnson's fortune had fluctuated uncertainly. His blank-
verse tragedy, Irene, had been produced by Garrick and, although
Johnson derived two hundred pounds from it, was a failure. His mother
died when he was fifty, and in order to pay her funeral expenses, John-
son wrote Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. This highly skeptical novel,
which has been compared to Voltaire's Candide, was written in seven
harried days, and is a parable of discontent. A year later, when George

262

CHARLES CHURCHILL

III ascended the throne, Johnson received an annual pension of three
hundred pounds and his financial troubles were over. Nine years went
into the preparation of an eight-volume edition of Shakespeare's plays
which, following the texts of his predecessors, showed a reverence for
scholarship rather than a talent for scholarly discoveries. Lives of the
Poets, his last work, begun at seventy, increased his income by more
than two hundred guineas, and has remained his most living work. For
almost two hundred years readers have been enriched by Johnson's fund
of information about poets and poetry, his critical pronouncements, his
candid opinions and, in spite of some petulant intolerances, his search
for truth.

An undisputed leader of thought for a quarter of a century, a writer
whose prodigious reputation surpassed his output, Johnson died at the
age of seventy-five and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Johnson's shorter poems are come by occasionally and, although none
is remarkable for its invention, not one is without merit of its own. The
''Epitaph upon Claudy Philips" is affecting in its emotional brevity. "A
Short Song of Congratulation" has reminded many of the conversa-
tional tone as well as the brisk movement of Housman's A Shropshire
Lad. "On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet," in memory of an old de-
pendent "obscurely wise and coarsely kind," is both plain-speaking and
pathetic. If Johnson's poetry cannot stand minute analysis, one should
recall a kind of justification in Rasselas: "The business of a poet is to
examine not the individual but the species; to remark general prop-
erties and large appearances. He does not number the streaks of the
tulip or describe the different shades of the verdure of the forest."

CHARLES CHURCHILL

When Johnson was asked about Churchill, he was scornful of the
man and contemptuous of his poetry. He told Boswell that Churchill's
verse had "a temporary currency only from its audacity of abuse/' and
he added that its author was a scandalous fool.

Johnson's animadversions are understandable. In an age that relished
the indelicate and did not flinch at the indecent, Churchill managed
to shock his contemporaries. Born in 1732, son of a clergyman, Charles
Churchill was educated at Westminster School and intended to

263

LIVES OF THE POETS

finish at St. John's College, Cambridge. However, he never bothered
to matriculate, for he married at eighteen and obtained a deaconry at
twenty-two. Four years later his father died and was succeeded by his
son as curate. This did not prevent the young clergyman from living
extravagantly and conducting himself irresponsibly. He was declared a
bankrupt, whereupon he determined to repay his creditors by becoming
— of all things — a poet. At thirty he composed The Rosdad, which,
since Roscius was a fabled Roman thespian, satirized contemporary
actors, backstage gossip, and the state of the drama. Rough and intem-
perate, its slashing manner made it popular, and with an equally
scurrilous sequel, The Apology, brought him over a thousand pounds.
During the next two years Churchill's proceeds from poetry tripled
that amount.

Meanwhile, Churchill left his wife, consorted with all sorts of
women, and, after running off with the young daughter of a trades-
man, installed her as his mistress. He continued to flout his ecclesiasti-
cal vestments, frequent the most rakish circles, and write long poems
attacking politicians ("The Prophecy of Famine")? statesmen ("The
Candidate'')? and fellow writers ("The Author"). In 1764 he was on
his way to France, where he expected to join the dissipated intransigent,
John Wilkes. He never completed the adventure. He was thirty-two
years old when he died during the voyage.

Conceding the limitations of Churchill's rude verses and his oppro-
brious life, many commentators have felt that Johnson's estimate was
much too harsh. One of them, the poet William Cowper, described
and, at the same time, defended his onetime schoolfellow. In the best of
his satires, "Table Talk," pointing to Churchill's short career, Cowper
wrote:

If brighter beams than all he threw not forth,
'Twas negligence in him, not want of worth.
Surly and slovenly, and bold and coarse,
Too proud for art, and trusting in mere force,
Spendthrift alike of money and of wit,
Always at speed and never drawing bit,
He struck the lyre in such a careless mood,
And so disdained the rules he understood.
The laurel seemed to wait on his command;
He snatched it rudely from the muse's hand.

264

GREEN, DYER, AND THOMSON

'Too proud for art" is, of course, a flattering overstatement. Churchill
himself would have made no such claim. In 'The Prophecy of Famine"
he rated his errant gift more modestly though not more accurately:

Me, whom no muse of heav'nly birth inspires,

No judgment tempers when rash genius fires,

Who boast no merit but mere knack of rhyme,

Short gleams of sense, and satire out of time,

Who cannot follow where trim fancy leads

By prattling streams o'er flow'r-empurpled meads;

Who often, but without success, have prayed

For apt alliteration's artful aid,

Who would, but cannot, with a master's skill

Coin fine new epithets which mean no ill,

Me, thus uncouth, thus ev'ry way unfit

For pacing poetry and ambling wit,

Taste with contempt beholds nor deigns to place

Among the lowest of her favored race.

Churchill is one of the forgotten ones, even by the anthologists. He
deserves to be better known, if only for such surprising couplets as those
above, and for such self -illustrated clevernesses as "apt alliteration's art-
ful aid."

GREEK, DYER, AN.D THOMSON

As man began to lose his fear of the forces of nature and turned to
methods for subjecting them to his control, his poetry became both
more meditative and more utilitarian. The mood was pronounced by
many of the eighteenth-century poets. Matthew Green (1696-1737)
exhorted his readers to leave the lures of the city and the reading of
sophisticated literature ("Novels/' he maintained, are "receipts to make
a whore"), and turn to a life of contemplation. John Dyer (1699-1744)
expatiated on the scenic beauty of the groves of Grongar Hill, but he
was not above giving all the necessary particulars for the raising of
sheep and utilization of the wool. James Thomson (1700-1748) rang all

265

LIVES OF THE POETS

the rustic changes on the four seasons, and found no difficulty creating
poetry from the science of Newton.

Matthew Green was horn in London, but the world for him — and,
he implied, for all men — was the green graciousness of the outdoors.
His wit, like his world, was gentle; his simple, straightforward, and
eminently practical diction is disclosed in 'The Seeker" and ''On Bar-
clay's Apology for the Quakers/' a not unnatural result of Green's
having been raised by Quaker parents. Green's whole reputation rests on
a single longish poem, The Spleen, one of the best examples of Au-
gustan reflective poetry. Written in light octosyllabic couplets in-
stead of the weightier ten-syllable lines adopted by Pope and his
followers, The Spleen is a Horatian ode to retirement, with the English
countryside substituted for the Sabine farm.

And may my humble dwelling stand
Upon some chosen spot of land:
A pond before full to the brim,
Where cows may cool and geese may swim;
Behind, a green like velvet neat,
Soft to the eye and to the feet;
Where odorous plants in evening fair
Breathe all around ambrosial air ...
And dreams beneath the spreading beech
Inspire, and docile fancy teach;
While soft as breezy breath of wind,
Impulses rustle through the mind.

John Dyer was born in Wales and spent most of his life there, but
he studied painting in Italy and he looked at the landscape with a
painter's eye. In common with that of his colleagues, his poetry is
packed with literary allusions — almost every noun has its prescribed
adjective — but Dyer, who became a clergyman, combined observation
with moralizing and produced an art not so much for its own sake as
for man's. While he did not abjure the overly poeticized conventions
of his time, he was less bound to the formulas than most of his
contemporaries and handled his material with something like realism.
The Fleece is a seven-hundred-line poem in the manner of Virgil's
Georgics, but the pastoral tone merely accentuates the busy actualities,
the technique and traffic of the wool trade. In his celebration of an in-
dustrialized countryside, Dyer naively idealized the enlarging prospect,

266

GREEN, DYER, AND THOMSON

"the sounding looms" and "the increasing walls of busy Manchester,
Sheffield, and Birmingham, whose reddening fields rise and enlarge
their suburbs/' little thinking that these half-rural towns were growing
into the very places he loathed, the cities where

The cries of sorrow sadden all the streets,
And the diseases of intemperate wealth.

A similar note is heard in Grongar Hill, Dyer's most famous poem,
reiterating the reaction against the artificialities of town poetry, a
wishful return to nature and the poet's identification with it.

Ever charming, ever new,

When will the landscape tire the view!

The fountain's fall, the river's flow,

The woody valleys, warm and low;

The windy summit, wild and high,

Roughly rushing on the sky . . .

O may I with myself agree,

And never covet what I see:

Content me with an humble shade,

My passions tamed, my wishes laid;

For while our wishes wildly roll,

We banish quiet from the soul:

'Tis thus the busy beat the air,

And misers gather wealth and care.

The most romantic reply to the calculated classicism of the day was
pronounced by James Thomson, born at Ednam on the border of Scot-
land. Son of a Scottish minister, Thomson was educated at Edin-
burgh University and prepared for the ministry, but he abandoned
theology in his mid-twenties and moved to London, where he joined
Pope's circle. He found ready patrons, traveled through Italy and France
as tutor to the son of the Lord Chancellor, returned to London as a
successful dramatist, and eventually retired to the placid reward of rural
Richmond. Meanwhile, Thomson wrote five tragedies — one of them
containing the classic example of absurdity, the mathematically meas-
ured ten-syllable blank verse: "Oh! Sophonisba! Sophonisba! oh!" — &
long allegorical poem in Spenserian stanzas, The Castle of Indolence,
and collaborated on a masque, Alfred, which contains the national
anthem, "Rule, Britannia."

LIVES OF THE POETS

In his youth Thomson favored poems showing a love of nature; at
twenty-five he wrote Winter, the first of The Seasons, a work which he
kept revising the rest of his life. The Seasons, completed when Thom-
son was thirty, is notable for several things* It reintroduced blank
verse as a medium for poems of considerable length; it combined a
warmth of feeling rare at his time, an unaffected humanitarianism, with
an appreciation of the new discoveries in science, philosophically
documented. Although Thomson sometimes wrote like a complacent
country parson, his benevolent and often unctuous view of nature is
sharpened by an imagery which is both sensuous and exact. He sees
the autumn sun shedding "weak and blunt, his wide-refracted ray."
The most casual observer as well as the most sharp-eyed botanist will
applaud the precision of "auriculas enriched with shining meal o'er
all their velvet leaves," and

The daisy, primrose, violet darkly blue,
And polyanthus of unnumbered dyes;
The yellow wall-flower, stained with iron-brown , . .

There is nothing sensational in The Seasons, no excess of emotion —
the emotion is inherent in the description — but the lines are full of a
music none other of Thomson's generation attained: a series of slow sus-
pensions and gentle cadences which, even in an atrocious German
adaptation, found universal expression in Haydn's transformed oratorio,
Die Jahreszeiten.

COLLIMS, COWPER,
CRABBE

A pervasive melancholy echoes through the poetry of William Col-
lins (1721-1759). This is no more than natural, for Collins' short life
was a tragedy of vacillation, maladjustment, and madness. Born in the
cathedral town of Chichester, son of a hatter, Collins was educated at
Winchester and Magdalen College, Oxford, and produced a group of
Persian Eclogues while still an undergraduate. A booklet of his verses
had already been published when he was thirteen. A collection of his
Odes, including the now-celebrated "How Sleep the Brave/' appeared

268

COLLINS, COWPER, AND CRABBE

in his twenty-sixth year, and it seemed that the young author was
destined for great things. But Collins was intemperate as well as
irresolute. He wavered between the church and the army, and joined
neither. He plunged into excesses, spent his last penny at twenty-eight,
and only a legacy from an uncle saved him from abject poverty. At
thirty his reason became affected; he spent the last nine years of his life
in mental anguish and physical agony. Confined for a while in an
asylum near Oxford, he saw no one; most of his friends thought he
was dead. When, at thirty-eight, he died in his sister's house in Chi-
chester, no journal carried a notice of his death.

Although Collins* sadly lyrical Dirge in Cymbeline is often men-
tioned, the Odes secure his reputation. Varied in structure and setting,
they are broadly autobiographical, ranging from the grave and almost
impalpable "Ode to Evening/' a forerunner of Gray's "Elegy Written
in a Country Churchyard/' to the dramatic "Ode to Fear," which, with
its evocation of the "mad nymph" and her "ghastly train/' gives a
wild premonitory glimpse into his anxious mind. Collins regarded
nature as a personal communication rather than an aesthetic experience,
and the Odes seem to have been written in a glow of imagination and
apprehension, wistfully holding on to the spell before it broke.

Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat
With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing,

Or where the beetle winds

His small but sullen horn . . .

William Cowper is another poet who could not adjust himself to a
disordered world and who, like Collins, suffered mental derangement
His ancestors were a mixed lot. His mother, Anne Donne, belonged
to the same family as the poet John Donne, and Cowper's father was
chaplain to George II. But Cowper's grandfather, though a judge of the
Court of Common Pleas, was tried for murder and narrowly escaped
the gallows.

Born November 26, 1731, at Great Berkhampstead, Cowper was
afflicted with an ever-increasing sense of guilt, and thus became easy
prey for the boys who bullied him through boarding school. He was
somewhat more at ease at Westminster, after which he was apprenticed
to a solicitor, took quarters in the Middle Temple, and was called to
the bar at twenty-three. A hopeless love for a cousin caused his first
breakdown; a second was brought on by the tensions to which he was

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LIVES OF THE POETS

subjected while preparing his briefs. Suffering from a neurotic con-
viction that he was damned, he could not rise above constant depres-
sions. When, in his thirty-second year, he was offered a clerkship in the
House of Lords, he was so nervously distressed by the thought of what
was expected of him that he attempted suicide. He failed to kill him-
self and was committed to an asylum.

After a confinement of eighteen months, Cowper retired to Hunting-
ton, where he was cared for by the Reverend Morley Unwin and his
wife, Mary. Two years later, when Cowper was thirty-six, the minis-
ter was thrown from his horse and was killed. Cowper moved to Olney
in Buckinghamshire, and Mary went with him, to watch over him and
be his faithful companion. They became engaged; he seemed to have
gained serenity when his mind was unsettled by a fresh tragedy —
Mary's death. Cowper broke down completely. For the rest of his life
he was a victim of intermittent attacks of insanity, but though a
physical as well as mental invalid, he survived until he was almost
seventy. He died April 25, 1800.

It was at Olney that Cowper became strongly affected by the
evangelical curate John Newton, whose almost fanatical austerity
both disturbed and inspired him. As a result Cowper wrote some
sixty-seven devotional poems, now known as the Olney Hymns,
many of which are still Sunday familiars. They include such pro-
foundly felt and perfectly framed expressions as "God moves in a
mysterious way/' "Hark, my soul! it is the Lord," 'The Lord will
happiness divine/' and "Oh! for a closer walk with God/* Even more
personally touching are the poems he wrote to the woman he would
have married. Especially lovely are the lyrics 'To Mary" and the son-
net beginning "Mary! I want a lyre with other strings." It was at Mary
Unwinds suggestion that he temporarily freed himself from dark
thoughts by writing light colloquial verse, with the result that he
composed eight satires, including 'Table Talk," 'Truth," "Conversa-
tion," and "Retirement."

In The Stricken Deer Lord David Cecil traces the progress of
Cowper's melancholy. The title, from the long poem, The Task, is
characteristic of Cowper in that it is pitiful without being self-pitying.

I was a stricken deer that left the herd
Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt
My panting side was charged, when I withdrew
To seek a tranquil death in distant shades.

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COLLINS, COWPER, AND CBABBE

Unlike the work of Christopher Smart, which carries its author's
spiritual excitement into every line, Cowper's poems are not wild or
even fanciful. There is no disorder in 'The Poplar Field," "On the Loss
of the Royal George/' 'Verses Supposed to Be Written by Alexander
Selkirk," "Boadicea," and the compassionate '"Epitaph on a Hare/' all of
which are to be found again and again in the anthologies, along with
Cowper's one sustained burst of high spirits, the rambunctious "]dtin
Gilpin." Most of these, reinforced by his letters, reflect a gentle nature,
an unsentimental sweetness and forthright tenderness, remarkable in
his day and rare in any time.

George Crabbe, whose life story is a tangle of contradictions, was
born December 24, 1754, in the Suffolk coastal town of Aldeburgh. His
father, an uneducated man who had taught himself to read and write,
was a collector of salt duties and owned a grimy warehouse; it was there
that the boy was kept at work until he was fourteen. At fifteen he
became a druggist's apprentice, then a surgeon's assistant, a substitute
midwife, and, after supporting himself by day labor, a doctor in
Aldeburgh. The natives, who remembered him as a poor boy, distrusted
his ability, and Crabbe's medical career was a complete failure. His
attempts to cater to the prevailing taste in poetry were equally un-
successful, and at twenty-six he found himself penniless.

At the point of being sent to a debtor's prison — he had made vain
appeals for relief to various patrons of the arts — he was rescued by
Edmund Burke. Brought to London, Crabbe met Samuel Johnson,
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Charles Fox, and others who helped the youth
determine on a career. Burke advised Crabbe to enter the church and,
nothing loath, Crabbe was ordained at twenty-seven. He returned to
Aldeburgh; but the villagers, who had refused to patronize him as a
doctor, were unwilling to accept him as a curate. Again Burke came to
his aid; at the statesman's solicitation, the Duke of Rutland made
Crabbe his chaplain. He was now able to marry Sarah Elmy, to whom
he had been engaged for ten years, and he received the livings of two
towns in Dorsetshire.

In Dorsetshire Crabbe wrote his first (and, according to many, his
most important) work, The Village, which, with its unsparingly re-
alistic pictures, was a counterstatement and something of a rebuke to
Goldsmith's romantic The Deserted Village. Sir Walter Scott, who
invited Crabbe to visit him at Edinburgh, was so impressed with The
Village that he recited the entire poem from memory ten years after
he first read it. Crabbe's narrative gift grew as he advanced toward

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middle age. The Parish Register, Sir Eustace Grey, a grim portrait of
an inmate in a madhouse, and The Borough, a sequence of twenty-
four letters, are bare of beauty but full of sympathy for the queer, com-
pulsive, and unhappy creatures exposed. (Benjamin Britten's modern
opera, Peter Grimes, is founded on the Twenty-second Letter of The
Borough.^) Bleak and at times unflinchingly brutal, the poems are
accurate and compelling social documents of an unlovely side of
the elegant Augustans.

At sixty Crabbe was inducted as minister of Trowbridge, where he
produced his last work of any consequence, Tales of the Hall, and
where, surrounded by admirers, he spent his terminal years. A cold he
contracted toward the end of 1831 lingered on, developed into a severe
illness, and death came February 3, 1832, when Crabbe was seventy-
seven.

Neglected by the anthologists, too harsh and uncompromising for
the general reader, Crabbe has barely survived. However, those who are
not put off by his unadorned and even unpleasant honesty are devoted
to him. Thomas Hardy confessed that he could not have written his
novels had it not been for The Village. More than a century after its
publication, the American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson praised
the author's "plain excellence and stubborn skill." Conceding Grabbers
lack of winning charm — "Give him the darkest inch your self allows.
Hide him in lonely garrets if you will" — Robinson concluded:

Whether or not we read him, we can feel
From time to time the vigor of his name
Against us like a finger for the shame
And emptiness of what our souls reveal
In books that are as altars where we kneel
. To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.

THOMAS GRAY

It is something of a miracle that Thomas Gray lived beyond infancy.
His mother had twelve children, of whom Thomas, born in London,
December 2,6, 1716, was the only one to survive. As a child he suffered
from convulsions, and it is related that his mother once opened a vein

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THOMAS GRAY

in Bis forehead to relieve pressure on his brain. Gray's father, who was
hrutal and probably mad, contributed nothing to the home except
misery until his wife finally left him, kept a small shop, and earned
barely enough to bring up her child.

Fortunately an uncle on his mothers side was an assistant master at
Eton, where the poet's education was begun. At Eton, Gray became
closely associated with Horace Walpole, son of the Prime Minister,
and Richard West, whose father was Ireland's Lord Chancellor. It
was West's premature death which prompted Gray's first fine poem, a
memorial sonnet conventional enough in conception but dignified by
its affecting tone: "And weep the more because I weep in vain."
At Peterhouse, Cambridge, Gray thought of becoming a lawyer; but he
was so fascinated by the classics that he busied himself with translation
and, failing to study mathematics, left Cambridge without taking a de-
gree. Shortly after, Walpole invited Gray to journey with him through
France and Italy, and the two companions traveled in Europe more
than two years. There was a quarrel — Walpole seems to have taken
advantage of the importunities as well as the privileges of wealth — and
Gray returned to England alone. At twenty-six he re-entered Peterhouse
and was graduated two years later as Bachelor of Laws. He never
practiced the profession.

His mother, who had retired from business, was living in Stoke
Poges, near Windsor, and it was from there that Gray, after a recon-
ciliation with Walpole, sent his friend "a thing to which he had at
last put an end."

The "thing" was the "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," and
the elegiac spirit of the sonnet to West stirred in the muted melan-
choly of the long poem. It had taken Gray seven years to complete;
immediately after its publication, his reputation was made. The man-
uscript had come into the hands of a piratical printer, and it took all
of Walpole's influence to get Dodsley, the publisher, to rush through
an edition. Gray quixotically refused to accept payment, and Dodsley
made more than a thousand pounds out of the "Elegy."

At thirty-seven Gray lost his mother and, for a while, buried him-
self in the country. A recluse who was something of a hypochondriac
and a misogynist, he devoted himself to botanizing, ancient history,
and Icelandic verse. He composed several Pindaric odes which are
intricate and, except for some technical experiments, uninteresting. At
forty-one he refused the laureateship, even though he was assured that
no official poems would be expected of him. The honor went to the

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LIVES OF THE POETS

unknown Cand completely forgotten) William Whitehead, whose
father had been a baker prosperous enough to indulge himself in
ornamenting a plot of land promptly christened "Whitehead's Folly."

Gray had always wanted to teach, but he had been refused a pro-
fessorship. Finally, in his fifty-second year, he became Professor of
History and Modern Languages at Cambridge; he enlivened his work
with little journeys to the Lake District, Wales, and the Scottish High-
lands.

At fifty-three Gray became infatuated with Charles Victor de Bon-
stetten, a handsome Swiss youth who was attending Cambridge — "My
life now is but a conversation with your shadow/' Gray confided to his
"dearest friend." A year later Gray was planning to visit Bonstetten in
Switzerland when he became seriously ill. He suffered a violent attack
of gout, followed by convulsions, and died July 30, 1771, in his fifty-
fifth year. His body was buried at Stoke Poges, supposed to be the spot
pictured in the "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." On the
seventh anniversary of his death a monument to his memory was erected
in Westminster Abbey.

Few poets have achieved so great a repute on so small a production.
Gray's Pindaric imitations were much admired — his contemporaries
thought that the odes "On a Distant Prospect of Eton College," 'The
Bard," and 'The Progress of Poetry" entitled Gray to be ranked with
the best of English poets. "Gray joins to the sublimity of Milton the
elegance and harmony of Pope," wrote Adam Smith. "Nothing is
wanting to render him, perhaps, the first poet on the English language
but to have written a little more."

The aim is undoubtedly high, but there is little actual elevation.
Although these poems reflect the learning on which Gray prided him-
self, the simpler "Elegy" is the one poem which entitles Gray to en-
during fame. In one hundred and twenty-eight lines Gray presents
a series of twilight pictures and condenses a philosophy which is both
sad and soothing. It is a philosophy for those who have failed, a fata-
listic philosophy reminiscent of Omar Khayydm's, although the "Elegy"
is placid and provincial where the Rubdiydt is florid and oriental. Both
poems are epigrammatic in character and construction, and, being
built on small, self-contained units of ideas, both fail to propel a climax
or even a gathering emotion. The "Elegy" is, in fact, a collection of
generalizations, yet the individual quatrains are impossible to forget.
Their smooth but insistent phrases are embedded in our literature, from
the shadowy music of:

274

OLIVER GOLDSMITH

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds . . .

to lines dulled into platitudes by repetition but still remarkable for
their heightened imagery, such as:

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unf athomed caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

The concluding "Epitaph" of the "Elegy" is not, as some have
maintained, a superfluous addition but an integral part of the poem.
The "youth to fortune and to fame unknown" was Gray's schoolfellow,
Richard West

OLIVER GOLDSMITH

Oliver Goldsmith's origins are clouded in speculation. The best that
the historians can do is to say that he was born " sometime" in 1730 —
the year is also given as 1728, the day as November 10 — and the place
"probably" Pallasmore, in the county of Longford, or "perhaps" at
Elphin, Roscommon, Ireland. It is stated with greater definiteness that
he was the son of an Irish clergyman and that, from childhood on, he
had trouble with the world. He was an awkward boy who remained
gauche throughout life, unkempt and pockmarked, widi harsh features
that even Reynolds, for all his sympathetic brush strokes, could not
soften. The butt of his companions, Goldsmith was considered the
village blockhead and, although charitable friends of his father's
found a place for him at Trinity College, Dublin, the young student
paid no attention to the curriculum. He played the clown in class and
ran away to Cork when he was chastised for giving a dance for the
gayer boys and girls of the town. He was persuaded to return to
college, applied himself with a minimum of industry, and took his
degree, the lowest on the list Two years later he applied for holy orders
and was rejected.

LIVES OF THE POETS

By this time the pattern of irregularity had become fixed. Goldsmith
obtained a sinecure position as tutor in a rich family, but lost the place
because of an angry dispute. He taught school and quit because of the
dull routine. His uncle gave him fifty pounds to study law, but Gold-
smith promptly gambled the money away. After a few more failures,
Goldsmith decided to leave England. He started for America, changed
his mind, and went off to the Continent, ostensibly to become a doctor.
He attended classes at Leyden and acquired a medical degree, "possi-
bly" at Louvain. The small inheritance left to him by his father had
been wasted, but Goldsmith said he set out for France, Switzerland,
and Italy "with one shirt to his back, a guinea in his pocket, a flute in
his hand." He seems to have spent much of his time at fairs and dances;
often he earned board and lodging by playing in taverns.

At twenty-six he returned destitute to London, where, according to
Macaulay, he lived "between squalid distress and squalid dissipation,"
and, according to Goldsmith's own not too reliable account, among
beggars. He set himself up as a doctor in one of the meaner districts
but was unable to attract patients. He tried for a medical appointment
in India but failed to get it. Reluctantly — for he regarded writing as the
most confining drudgery — he became an author.

Determined to earn his living as a writer, Goldsmith undertook any-
thing that was proposed. A journalist who was not above being a
literary hack, he did every kind of task work for the booksellers:
memoirs, written under a pseudonym; translations; literary surveys,
such as An Enquiry into the State of Polite Learning and contribu-
tions to various magazines. He edited and published a periodical, The
Bee, which established Goldsmith as an essayist who could be both
grim, as in "A City Night-Piece," and, as in "The Fame Machine,"
whimsical.

Always in debt — when he had money he squandered it on expensive
clothes — he was forever being pursued by sheriffs. In his mid-thirties
he was introduced to Samuel Johnson, who helped him out of more
than one difficulty. Once, learning that Goldsmith was to be evicted
because he could not pay the rent, Johnson sent the impoverished
struggler a guinea. A few hours later the donor discovered that Gold-
smith had spent most of the money on a bottle of old Madeira.
Macaulay relates that Johnson "put die cork into the bottle and en-
treated his friend to consider how money was to be procured/* Gold-
smith murmured that he had been writing a novel and that it was

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OLIVER GOLDSMITH

practically ready for the press. Johnson pocketed the manuscript, took
it to a publisher, sold it for sixty pounds, and paid Goldsmith's land-
lord. The manuscript was The Vicar of Wakefield.

Forced to continue his hack work, Goldsmith turned out a memoir
of Beau Nash, lives of Voltaire, Parnell, and Bolingbroke, an English
grammar, histories of Rome and England. Nearing forty, he decided to
improve his fortunes by writing plays. His first work for the stage,
The Good-Natur'd Man, was not a success; but his second effort, She
Stoops to Conquer, became one of the favorite comedies of the day
and remained in popularity for generations. The Traveller, a long poem
and the first work to appear under his own name, had been well re-
ceived when it was published in Goldsmith's thirty-fifth year. Six
years later The Deserted Village gave the poet immortality.

At forty-five Goldsmith was affluent, but he could not hold on to
prosperity. Dissipation ruined him; he continued to gamble and lose.
His health gave way. He doctored himself, and grew worse under his
own treatment. At the end, he called in professional assistance, but it
was too late. "Is your mind at ease?" he was asked. "No, it is not/*
replied Goldsmith, and died wretchedly. He was about forty-four. The
date of his death is definite: April 4, 1774.

Goldsmith's writings reflect little of his miserable struggles; there is
neither bitterness nor envy in his lucid and often lighthearted style.
Unlike most of his contemporaries, Goldsmith wrote with honest
understanding rather than sophisticated malice; also unlike them, he
wins our affection without demanding our admiration. Unostentatious
and uncomplaining, he presents himself with all his blunt and some-
times blundering simplicity; only occasionally, as in the vicissitudes of
George in The Vicar of Wakefield, do we get a glimpse of auto-
biography.

The most lasting of Goldsmith's writings, his poems are the smallest
part of his work. Goldsmidi distrusted the practice of poetry in general
and, in particular, himself as a poet. He feared to leave his potboiling.
"I cannot afford to court the draggle-tail Muses," he said. 'They would
let me starve." True to the proverbial incalculability of women, the
Muses rewarded him out of all proportion to his other labors. Rarely
has charm so openly manifested itself as in The Traveller and The
Deserted Village. Johnson considered the former the best poem since
Pope, but, since Johnson contributed several lines to it, he may not
have been altogether unprejudiced. The Deserted Village is a con-

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LIVES OF THE POETS

tinuation of, if not a sequel to, The Traveller. The "plot" is sug-
gested by a few lines near die close of the latter:

Have we not seen at pleasure's lordly call,
The smiling long-frequented village fall?
Beheld the duteous son, the sire decayed,
The modest matron, and the blushing maid,
Forced from their homes, a melancholy train,
To traverse climes beyond the western main?

In spite of its program, The Deserted Village is not a piece of
realism. Goldsmith's powers of observation are limited; they are general
rather than precise and, as a logical consequence, his descriptions are
inexact and vague. Washington Irving spoke of Goldsmith's 'indulgent
eye/' and it is a kind of indulgence which allows the poem to progress
with such gentle fluctuations in mood and movement. If the portraits
of the village schoolmaster, the village preacher, and the village itself —
presumed to be his home town in Ireland — are not sharply individual-
ized, they are winning in their very innocence; and, although Gold-
smith, like his own Vicar, seems a model of quiet (and sometimes
incredibly complacent) resignation, there are passages which relieve
the decorous and uncritically sweet tenor of the whole. For example:

There, as I passed with careless steps and slow,
The mingling notes came softened from below;
The swain responsive as the milk-maid sung,
The sober herd that low'd to meet their young;
The noisy geese that gabbled o'er the pool,
The playful children just let loose from school:
The watch-dog's voice that bayed the whispering wind,
And the loud laugh that spoke the vacant mind . , .

After Goldsmith was buried in the Temple Church, a monument
was erected to his memory in Westminster Abbey by members of 'The
Club" he had helped to found and of which Johnson was a member.
It was Johnson who furnished the epitaph. Translated from the Latin
inscription, it reads: "Oliver Goldsmith: A Poet, Naturalist, and
Historian, who left scarcely any style of writing untouched, and
touched nothing that he did not adorn. Of all the passions, whether
smiles were to be moved or tears, a powerful yet gentle master. In
genius, vivid, versatile, sublime. In style, clear, elevated, elegant."

CHRISTOPHER SMART

An inexplicable oddity, a literary hack who wrote one of the most
exalted of all religious poems, Christopher Smart would have been
a fantastic figure at any time in history; in the eighteenth century
he seems incredible. During the first two-thirds of his life he was a
plodding journalist who happened to write occasional and conventional
verse; the latter third was spent in one institution or another, where,
in a mixture of mad ecstasy and unearthly sanity, he composed work
of power and grandeur.

Smart's beginnings were propitious though not extraordinary. He
was born April n, 1722, in the village of Shipbourne, in Kent, where
his father was Lord Vane's steward and owner of a small estate. When
his father died, the eleven-year-old boy came under the protection of
the Vane family, who took him to Raby Casde. The Duchess of
Cleveland, a relative of Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, saw him there
and was so taken with the gifted Christopher that she became his
patron and gave him a substantial annuity. Having written verse
since childhood — he was rhyming at the age of four — Smart soon
found an object to which he could direct his poetizing. She was Lady
Anne Vane, not quite twelve, and when the poet was thirteen he wrote
an "ode" that, according to a letter by Mrs. LeNoir, the poet's daughter,
"had such effect that these young lovers actually set off on a runaway
match together; they were however timely prevented and saved
opportunely." The girl forgot the childish escapade, but Anne's face
remained fixed in the poet's mind, and her name appears again and
again in lines written in his forties.

At seventeen Smart entered Pembroke Hall, Cambridge; after re-
ceiving his degree, he was appointed a Fellow, Lecturer in Philosophy,
and, a little later, Lecturer in Rhetoric. For the first few of the ten
years he lived at Pembroke, he did what many bright young college
men have done: he fell in love again — this time with a Miss Harriet
Pratt — and dedicated half a dozen poems to her. He wrote and pro-
duced a wild comedy, in which he cast himself in five different roles.
He began to drink heavily — he had often slept in the classroom and
seemed to be most awake in a tavern — and he liked to entertain

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LIVES OF THE POETS

lavishly. In his twenty-fifth year Smart was so deeply in debt that he
could not leave his room for fear of creditors.

At twenty-seven he left Cambridge, went to London, and allied
himself with John Newbery, printer, publisher, and purveyor of Dr.
Hooper's Female Pills. It is not recorded that Smart had anything to
do with the children's books for which Newbery is remembered, but
it is known that he contributed to Newbery's various enterprises under
such pseudonyms as Ebeneazer Pentweazle, described as "an old
gentleman in the county of Cornwall," Zosimus Zephyr, Mr. Lun,
and Mother Midnight. Three years after associating himself with
Newbery, Smart married the publisher's stepdaughter, Anna Maria
Carnan.

In the meantime Smart had emerged as a poet of some distinction.
He translated Horace, won the Seaton Prize with On the Eternity of
the Su/preme Being, and received the award four times more during the
next five years. He also amused himself with a burlesque entitled
The Hilliad, a pseudo-Homeric satire against John Hill, who, in the
worst Grub Street style, replied with The Smartiad.

Before he had left Cambridge Smart had begun to show signs of
an overexcited mind. Prodded by constant demands for contributions
to magazines and miscellanies, unable to resist Newbery's importunities
and calculated exploitation, he became seriously ill. Intermittent
attacks of fever preceded a complete collapse; his aberrations were so
pronounced that he was committed to an asylum. For almost seven
years he was kept in various institutions. After one visit, Johnson, un-
convinced that his poor friend was really insane, asserted that Smart's
illusions were "not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying
with him — also falling on his knees and saying his prayers in the street
— but Fd as lief pray with Kit Smart as anyone else/'

It was in the asylum that Smart wrote his one great poem, a burst
of lyrical intensity so vehemently passionate that his first editor ex-
cluded it and a few other outcries from his collection of Smart's
poetry, saying that the omitted work was written "after the poet's
confinement and bears for the most part melancholy proofs of the
estrangement of his mind." That A Song to David was written at all is
something of a miracle. Since Smart was denied the use of pen and
paper, most of the lengthy poem was scratched with a key upon the
wainscot of his room. It was also during Smart's mad years that he
composed that chaotic Jubilate Agno (Rejoice in the Larafe), a

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CHRISTOPHER SMART

mixture of biography and rapture, strangely akin to Blake's Marriage
of Heaven and Hell and his other Prophetic Books.

After his release, Smart was supported by small contributions from
friends, but he drifted further into irresponsibility. Unfit for work,
unwilling to stop drinking, and unable to pay his debts, he was
thrown into King's Bench Prison. Half mad and wholly miserable, he
died there May 21, 1771, a few weeks after his forty-ninth birthday.

For more than a century the reverberating lines of A Song to David
remained unknown until Browning based his Saul upon it, and en-
larged the indebtedness in Parleying^ with Certain People of Im-
portance in Their Day. One of the "parleyings" was entitled With
Christopher Smart, and in it Browning reconstructed the poet's erratic
life and the source of his myriad-minded imagery. The controlled
adoration of all nature and nature's God which uplifts A Song to David
is missing from Rejoice in the Lamb, an incomplete two-part man-
uscript which was not put into print until 1940. But there are flashes of
revelation in the first section (where every line begins with For) on
flowers, colors, the sun, moon, and spiritual music. Particularly gratify-
ing to any aelurophile are the seventy-five lines devoted to Smart's cat
Jeoffry, lines which, in the midst of charming whimsicalities, display
images as exact and daring as 'Tor he camels his back to bear the
first notion of business," and observations as conclusively feline as 'Tor
he is a mixture of gravity and waggery."

For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.

For he has the subtlety and hissing of the serpent, which in goodness

he suppresses.
For he will not do destruction, if he is well fed, neither will he spit

without provocation.
For he purrs in thankfulness when God tells him he's a Good Cat.

A Song to David was reprinted only once during the eighteenth
century; to Smart's contemporaries it seemed a complete proof that
he was mad. The obscurities that troubled them arise from the
kaleidoscopic presentation of one figure after another, figures which
seem independent but actually form a rich counterpoint with a
majestic cadence. Difficult at first reading, the Song is distracting
because of its speed, confusing in its separate but sustained transports. In
no other English poem is there so dazzling a fusion of praise and

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LIVES OF THE POETS

prayer. Revealing new glories with every rereading of these fugal
eighty-six stanzas, A Song to David towers above the careful, ever-so-
reasonable writing of Smart's day. It is a monument of nobility among
memorials of wit.

Strong is the lion — like a coal
His eyeball — like a bastion's mole

His chest against the foes:
Strong, the gier-eagle on his sail,
Strong against tide, th' enormous whale

Emerges as he goes.

But stronger still, in earth and air,
And in the sea, the man of prayer,

And far beneath the tide;
And in the seat to faith assigned,
Where ask is have, where seek is find.

Where knock is open wide.
• • • • •

Glorious the sun in mid career;
Glorious th' assembled fires appear;

Glorious the comet's train;
Glorious the trumpet and alarm;
Glorious th' almighty stretch'd-out arm;

Glorious th' enraptur'd main:

Glorious the northern lights a-stream;
Glorious the song, when God's the theme;

Glorious the thunder's roar;
Glorious hosannah from the den;
Glorious the catholic amen;

Glorious the martyr's gore:

Glorious — more glorious, is the crown
Of Him that brought salvation down

By meekness, calTd thy Son;
Thou at stupendous truth believ'd,
And now the matchless deed's achieved,

Determin'd, dar'd, and done.

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THOMAS CHATTERTON

Whether he was a born forger or a born artist, Thomas Chatterton,
whom Keats called "the marvellous boy/' was one of the greatest
prodigies in all literature. Posthumous son of a poor schoolmaster who
was a lay clerk of Bristol Cathedral, the child (born at Bristol, No-
vember 20, 1752) was brought up in the shadow of the church. A
backward pupil, he refused to be instructed. He did not learn to read
until he was eight, when, according to his mother, he fell in love
with the illuminated letters on an old piece of French music and the
curious characters of a black-letter Bible. In his tenth year he suddenly
began to write strange poems. He had access to a room of deeds in the
church of St. Mary Redcliffe, where the boy familiarized himself with
the old handwriting and archaic spelling. At fourteen he prepared a
pedigree for a Bristol pewterer, a Mr. Burgum, which traced the
merchant's family back to the Norman Conquest Chatterton accom-
panied the genealogy with a poem entitled The Romaunte of the
Cnyghte, saying that it was written by John de Burgham, one of
Burgum's ancestors. Both documents were forgeries.

At fifteen Chatterton, beautiful and sexually precocious, fell simul-
taneously in love with a Miss Rumsey and a few other Bristol girls
who were less respectable. He also wrote several poems to a Miss Hoy-
land, but, turning away from Bristol's "dingy piles of brick," he was
faithful only to the imaginary heroines of the fifteenth-century dream
world in which he longed to live. He was already bound apprentice
to a Bristol attorney, but he paid little attention to office work. St, Mary
Redcliffe contained many papers referring to Thomas Rowley, a priest,
and shortly after his sixteenth birthday Chatterton wrote to Dodsley, the
London publisher, offering to send him copies of valuable medieval
manuscripts, "and an interlude, perhaps the oldest dramatic piece ex-
tant, wrote by one Rowley." He enclosed what he called a "fragment"
from "the tragedy of Aella," and described the work — "the language
spirited; the songs (interspersed in it) flowing and elegantly simple;
the similes judiciously applied and, though wrote in the reign of Henry
the Sixth, not inferior to many of the present age." Dodsley was not
interested. Chatterton next applied to Horace Walpole for help, but

LIVES OF THE POETS

after some evasions, Walpole suspected he was being deceived and re-
fused further encouragement.

In April, 1770, when he was little more than seventeen, Chatterton
went to London with a mass of "Rowley Poems/' songs, dramatic
lyrics, partly finished plays, and fragments of epics. It looked, at
first, like an auspicious venture. Within a month he had articles in
half a dozen magazines; a burlesque opera, The Revenge, was suc-
cessfully produced; the Lord Mayor of London promised to be his
sponsor. But no one was willing to publish Chatterton's antique
"transcriptions'*; he derived little money from his opera; the Lord
Mayor died before he could be of help. Determined not to be de-
feated, Chatterton wrote in a fever of industry: pieces imitating
Smollett, couplets in the manner of Pope, rhymes like Gray's. He
composed eclogues and satires, political letters, lyrics, elegies, and
(his constant preoccupation) more "Rowley" manuscripts, including
the lengthy Eoccelente Balade of Charitie.

Unable to maintain appearances among the friends he had made
in the metropolis, Chatterton lodged in a Holborn garret. He was cold
and hungry, but he continued to write cheerfully to his mother;
he often went without food in order to send her a present. When
his landlady offered to return part of the rent, Chatterton was too
proud to accept the money. Realizing he could not live by literature,
and recognizing his failure as a journalist, he tried to obtain a position
on a ship trading to Africa, but here too he was rebuffed.

On August 24, 1770, his landlady, shocked at the youth's haggard
appearance, and knowing he had been living for a week on a loaf
of stale bread — "bought stale," she said, "to make it last longer" — in-
vited him to eat with her. He refused, saying he was not hungry.
That night he went to the baker and asked for another loaf on credit.
When this was refused, he wheedled some arsenic from a sympathetic
apothecary, claiming that he wanted to rid his garret of rats. Two
days later, no sound having been heard in his room, the locked door
was broken in and his body was found surrounded by torn manuscripts.
He was seventeen years and nine months old when he was interred
as a pauper in the burying ground of a workhouse in Shoe Lane.

Chatterton's artificially archaic vocabulary is a barrier to the ap-
preciation of his poetry. The language, a melange of borrowed and
invented terms, belongs to no particular period — there are reminiscences
of Chaucer and Spenser — but the idiom is Chatterton's. His mixture of
antique syllables and coined words dissuaded readers from enjoying the

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THOMAS CHATTERTON

splendid color and extraordinary vigor of his verse until the nineteenth
century. The romantic poets rediscovered him. Coleridge was influenced
not only by his dark-toned music hut, in Kubla Khan, by the glamour
of his geographical names. Keats inscribed Endymion 'To the Memory
of Thomas Chatterton."

Nothing is known of Chatterton's method of composition. It is
thought that he may have written his poems in ordinary English and
then put them into the supposed tongue of Rowley, but this is no
more than speculation. Nothing of his character can be deduced from
his work; only a few minor poems contain bits of autobiography.

There is, nevertheless, a personal appeal half concealed in the im-
personal lyrics from "Aella," the "Song of the Three Minstrels/' and the
"Ode to Liberty" from Goddwyn, to name three of the more easily
apprehended examples. At its best, apart from the forged mannerisms,
this is a poetry which delights in its very daring. Seemingly objective,
it rises clear of Chatterton's mistaken choice of a mock-medieval manner
with a peculiar orthography, and speaks with the unmistakable voice
of genius.

O! synge untoe mie roundelaie,
O! droppe the brynie tears wyth rnee,
Daunce ne moe atte hallie-day,
Lycke a rynninge ryver bee;

Mie love ys dedde,

Gon to hys deth-bedde,

Al under the wyllowe tree.

Comme, wythe acorne-coppe and thorne,
Drayne mie hartys blodde awaie,
Lyf and all ytts goods I scorne,
Daunce bie nete, or f easte by daie.

Mie love ys dedde,

Gone to hys deth-bedde,

Al under the wyllowe tree.

2,85

The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell

WILLIAM BLAKE

WILLIAM BLAKE was born in London, November 28, 1757, the
second son of a hosiery merchant. He was a visionary from
birth. When four years old he screamed because he saw
God put his forehead against the windowpane. Walking in the fields at
eight, he beheld "a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings
bespangling every bough with stars." Heaven pressed close; years later
he said he could touch it with his walking stick. Only one other
member of the family — Robert, five years younger than William —
shared his gift of vision. The eldest brother, James, eminently practical,
inherited his father's business; the third son, John, drank himself to
death at an early age. Catherine, the only daughter, youngest of the
Blakes, never married and outlived them all.

Blake never attended school. He began drawing as a child, his
head full of fabulous figures and settings distantly related to the
London of his times. London was then not a vast city of stone and
steel, but a town still green with lofty trees and fields with reedy
ponds. The Thames, an easy walk from his home, not only fascinated
him but influenced the shape of his work. Blake's designs seem to
unfold, grow, and gather momentum like the slow curves of the
river, and his larger poems flow with the same streamlike movement.
His father not only recognized his son's talent but, with a tolerance

286

WILLIAM BLAKE

strange for the times, encouraged it. He sent the boy to an art class at
the age of ten, and gave him plaster casts of Greek statues and money to
spend on reproductions of Diirer, Raphael, and the artist who became
his lifelong model, Michelangelo. At twelve he was apprenticed to
James Basire, engraver to the Society of Antiquaries. He copied the
monuments in Westminster Abbey and paid particular attention to the
Gothic ornaments, a preoccupation which never left him. At sixteen
he produced his first original engraving, "Joseph of Arimathea among
the Rocks of Albion/' The landscape is imaginary, but the drawing
of the disciple was suggested by a figure in Michelangelo's "Crucifixion
of St. Peter," and the sixteen-year-old boy appended a description
which might have been written by the mature mystic: 'This is one of
the Gothic artists who built the cathedrals in what we call the Dark
Ages, wandering about in sheep skins and goat skins, of whom the
world was not worthy. Such were the Christians in all ages/*

It was as a Gothic artist rather than a conforming Christian that
Blake lived. In his youth art was condemned as something shameful:
"I remember/' Blake wrote to his friend George Cumberland, "when I
thought my pursuit of art a kind of criminal dissipation and neglect of
the main chance, which I hid my face for not being able to abandon as
a passion which is forbidden by law and religion.3'

At twenty-one, after completing his apprenticeship with Basire,
Blake studied with the Swiss artist George Moser, and learned little.
He particularly disliked drawing from living models and, except for
a few sketches of himself and his wife, never used them. Compared to
the glowing figures he saw with the mind's eye, they seemed cold and
corpselike; he told Moser they smelled of mortality. Although he dis-
dained the study of anatomy, acquiring it by imagination and, second-
hand, through prints by the masters, he was soon able to make a fair
but scarcely ample livelihood by designing book illustrations and
engraving other men's pictures. Two drawings and a water color were
exhibited at the Royal Academy. To this period belongs "Glad Day," a
daring design by a twenty-three-year-old craftsman. Here is the picture
of Eternal Youth which is also Eternal Man. A sense of overwhelming
joy streams from an all-embracing gesture, anticipating the fully devel-
oped artist.

It is thought that the "Glad Day" figure may be a likeness of the
youthful Blake. If so, it is an idealized portrait, for the only thing that
might definitely identify Blake is the crown of bright gold hair. Instead
of the neatly molded mouth in the pictured face, Blake's mouth was

2.87

LIVES OF THE POETS

large, and the sensitive lips were accentuated by small, tightly clenched
nostrils. The forehead was not smooth and low, but heavy and prom-
inently protruding; there was a distinct double chin. The general
effect was stolid rather than spiritual, firm in spite of fleshiness, and
almost antipoetic.

Blake was in his twenty-fifth year when, recovering from a flirta-
tion in which he was jilted, he met Catherine Sophia Boucher, daughter
of a market-gardener. The courtship was brief. "Do you pity me?"
asked Blake. "Indeed I do," replied the sympathetic Catherine. 'Then
1 love you/' said Blake. A year later, on August 18, 1782,, they were
married. Twenty, dark-eyed, and pleasantly proportioned, she was
lovely but illiterate; she had to put a cross in front of her name on the
marriage register. Blake taught her to read and write and, since she
seemed to have aptitude with the brush, to color some of his prints.
Frugal, patient, and undemanding, she made Blake an ideal wife; there
were no children, and she devoted herself to understanding a husband
who spent most of his life among abstractions. "I have very little of
Mr. Blake's company," she told a friend. "He is always in Paradise."
She never complained. Even when there was no money in the house she
said nothing but, when her husband came to the table, put an empty
plate before him.

Robert, the gifted younger brother, lived with William and his
wife in the artists' section in Green Street, near Flaxman, Hogarth,
and Reynolds. Even the modest quarters seemed too luxurious, and
Blake returned to the humbler district in which he had been brought
up and where, after his father's death, his older brother was carrying on
the family trade. Next door, assisted by Catherine and Robert, William
opened a shop to sell prints. A year or so later Robert died, and Blake,
watching at the bedside, saw Robert's soul ascend through the ceiling
to heaven, "clapping its hands for joy." It was only a corporeal death,
for Robert remained alive to William. Thirteen years later Blake
told William Hayley, who (in both senses) patronized him, that he
was in daily communication with Robert's spirit. It was Robert who con-
tinued to be an inspiration and, Blake maintained, told him how to
prepare and print the remarkably illustrated books whose process of
production is only pardy known. Whether or not Robert actually
showed him the method of making the strangely illuminated volumes,
Robert's death determined Blake to explore the spirit world which he
had glimpsed in childhood and which he continued to seek the rest
of his life.

288

WILLIAM BLAKE

The print shop was not a successful venture, and Blake resumed the
making of engravings for publishers. Meanwhile, he was cultivated by
a circle of blue-stockings, literati and liberals, headed by the Reverend
Henry Mathew and his wife, who read Homer and collected Flaxman.
It was Flaxman who, having heard Blake recite his poems, urged
their publication, and it was he who, with the Mathews, shared the
expenses of printing the manuscript. The book was entitled Poetical
Sketches, and the complaisant Preface, supplied by Mathew, began:
'The following sketches were the production of an untutored youth,
commenced in his twelfth and occasionally resumed till his twentieth
year; since which time his talents, having been wholly directed to the
attainment of excellence in his profession, he has been deprived of the
leisure requisite to such a revisal of these sheets as might have rendered
them less unfit to meet the public eye/'

The poems need no such disarming apology. Precocious as
Chatterton but without that unfortunate youth's need to startle with
forged archaisms, Blake in his teens wrote poems that are nothing less
than astonishing. In many of them Blake uses the idiom of his prede-
cessors, in particular the Elizabethan and Jacobean songwriters, but he
surpasses all but the greatest in such lyrics as "How sweet I roamed from
field to field/' reputedly written before Blake was fourteen, "My silks
and fine array," 'To the Evening Star/' 'To Morning," and "Mad
Song." There was also some rhetorical prose in the manner of Ossian,
the Gaelic bard invented by James Macpherson, and a quasi-Eliza-
bethan play. But the poems are the book's glory, and if their diction is
borrowed, the tone owes nothing to anyone. These early songs enrich
eighteenth-century literature with a new freedom and purity, and may
well serve as a bridge between the poetry of the Renaissance and the
Romantic Revival of Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley.

Blake's next publication was a curious and, coining from him, an
incredible composition. It was An Island in the Moon, a rough-and-
tumble satire on Mrs. Mathew's literary circle. Perhaps Blake found her
salon too pretentious, perhaps he considered the Reverend Mathew's
preface too condescending, but there is no doubt about Blake's target
Spotted with a few epigrammatic asperities, enlivened by bits of non-
sense which sound like passages omitted from Mice in Wonderland,
and spiced with songs that range from sheer play to outspoken ribaldry,
An Island in the Moon is a curiosity which only a Blake enthusiast
would care to reread.

It was not until Blake was thirty-two that Songs of Innocence

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LIVES OF THE POETS

appeared. The plain truth of the tide is proved by the concluding
stanza of the introductory poem:

And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.

Any child might well "joy to hear" such songs, for they are not
only happy but simplehearted. Childlike they are also in vocabulary
and subject matter — the objects of the visible world are seen with
candid pleasure and stated with frank delight. Experience has not yet
disturbed the age of innocence; wonder has its own wisdom. With
each rereading the little poems grow in significance. Conventional in
structure, small in compass, they imply far more than they say. An
infant, a flower, a lamb, a village green, a boy lost and found — these are
common subjects that become universal symbols.

Although Songs of Innocence adheres to the traditional form, the
poems make a tradition of their own. They exchange eighteenth-century
ingenuity for ingenuousness, artfulness for divination. Repudiating
measured wit, Blake substitutes immeasurable impulse; he pronounces,
as Mona Wilson puts it, "a return from the idea of Excellence to
that of Ecstasy as the aim and justification of poetical enterprise." The
rediscovery of rapture is implicit in the combined sweetness and power
of 'The Lamb/' 'The Little Black Boy," "On Another's Sorrow," 'The
Divine Image," and "Night," with its exquisitely calm summoning of
angels pouring blessings "on each bud and blossom, and each sleeping
bosom."

They look in every thoughtless nest,
Where birds are covered warm;
They visit caves of every beast,
To keep them all from harm.
If they see any weeping
That should have been sleeping,
They pour sleep on their head,
And sit down by their bed.

When wolves and tigers howl for prey,
They pitying stand and weep;

290

WILLIAM BLAKE

Seeking to drive their thirst away,
And keep them from the sheep;
But if they rush dreadful,
The angels, most heedful,
Receive each mild spirit,
New worlds to inherit

And there the lion's ruddy eyes
Shall flow with tears of gold,
And pitying the tender cries,
And walking round the fold,
Saying 'Wrath, by his meekness,
And hy his health, sickness
Is driven away
From our immortal day."

With the help of his wife, Blake issued Songs of Innocence in a
format unique in the history of printing. The books were made by
hand, not by choice but by necessity, for no one would publish
them. They were not set up and printed in the usual sense of the term.
To make what he called "Illuminated Printing" Blake drew his designs
and lettering on metal plates in acid-proof ink. The plates were then
plunged in acid baths, the parts not covered by the ink were eaten
away, and the remaining letters and designs stood out like engravings.
Blake and Catherine colored them variously, sometimes adorning them
with gold, and bound them in book form. With one exception, all of
Blake's books were so prepared, and his invention (or Robert's in-
spiration) becomes the more astonishing when it is realized that, in
order to appear correctly to the reader, all the words had to be
written in reverse.

Perhaps the most remarkable typographical feature of the work is
its peculiar unity. Blake's calligraphy is based on a cursive script, but it
is embellished with twiglike tails and serifs that grow tendrils; so that
what, at first glance, appears to be a merely graceful penmanship, is
a communication that flows in and out of the background and finally
merges with it, making one all-over design that expresses a single art
and a single personality.

Five years after issuing Songs of Innocence, Blake added a sequel in
the form of a supplementary set of lyrics. The latter was not pub-
lished separately, but was incorporated with its predecessor, and the

291

LIVES OF THE POETS

double offering was entitled Songs of Innocence and of Experience,
showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. The subtitle
indicated the character as well as the principle of the new work: 'With-
out Contraries is no Progression." Almost all the added poems express
the "Contrary State" where innocence is no protection; heedless delight
is threatened by unsuspected dangers, and unrestrained pleasure gives
way to acceptance of pain. Experience is accompanied by unhappy re-
sentment as the innocent soul first discovers evil and then is forced
to accept it.

In Songs of Innocence Blake, like Vaughan and Traherne, was
content to be blithe in the guilelessness of a child's world. But growing
consciousness recognizes, however reluctantly, that the child must
leave its Eden and battle with a world that has lost its Paradise. Wrong-
doing must not only be acknowledged but understood. This is Blake's
central philosophy: a continual union of opposites, a fusion of innocence
and experience, good and evil, flesh and spirit and, as he was to
enunciate with challenging vehemence, the marriage of Heaven and
Hell. In Songs of Experience 'The Clod and the Pebble" symbolizes
Impartially the surrender of the self-sacrificing and the sacred rights of
the protective self. Blake pits the "fearful symmetry" and burning
brilliance of the tiger (Experience) against the placid lamb (Inno-
cence), and finds both equally beautiful, equally framed by the
"immortal hand and eye."

When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Blake accepts the antitheses that make the human condition, but he
cannot give up the vision of pure innocence without grief. Sorrow is
the underlying sentiment of the Songs of Experience. The "Nurse's
Song" (in Songs of Innocence) has this glad beginning:

When the voices of children are heard on the green,
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast,
And everything else is still.

However, the "Nurse's Song" in Songs of Experience expresses a
different and more doleful emotion:

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WILLIAM BLAKE

When the voices of children are heard on the green

And whisp'rings are in the dale,

The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,

My face turns green and pale.

Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,

And the dews of night arise;

Your spring, your day, are wasted in play,

And your winter and night in disguise.

Opposites are likewise presented in the innocently hopeful "Chimney
Sweeper" of the first book and the miserably experienced worker of
the second, in the smiling "Infant Joy" matched by the following 'In-
fant Sorrow*':

Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

"The Little Boy Lost" in Innocence is happily found, but no such
good fortune comes to "A Little Boy Lost" in Experience, who,
seized by a sanctimonious priest, weeps in vain and is burned to death.
Everything shares the sadness which comes with the cognition of time
and its attendant disenchantments. The rose is sick because the in-
visible worm has found out its bed and destroys its life; the tree watered
with fear becomes a tree full of poison; the sunflower is weary of time;
the garden of love ("where I used to play on the green") is defaced
by a chapel and filled with graves. In "London" the sights and sounds
which once delighted the boy who played along the Strand have
changed into cries of despair weighted with the harlot's curse and
the soldier's sigh that "runs in blood down palace walls."

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The man-forged manacles I hear.

These contrasts and antitheses are at the heart of everything that
Blake wrote after his early thirties. He learned to live in two worlds;
and his work, like his life, fluctuated between the world of pure
vision and the world of brute violence. When he ceased to struggle

LIVES OF THE POETS

against reconciling them, he resigned himself to their inescapable and
even needful duality.

During the five years between the appearance of Songs of Innocence
and Songs of Experience Blake composed the first two of his so-called
Prophetic Books: Tiriel and The Book of TheL Tiriel, written when
Blake was a little more than thirty but not published until eighty-five
years later, is the poet's first attempt to announce a New Testament
which, beginning as one man's set of parables, might become every
man's Gospel. Using the rhapsodic manner which he had caught from
Ossian, Blake did not hesitate to construct an entire mythology. His
gods, demigods, and devils shift their ground, utter cryptic and not
always consistent oracles, soar in symbolism, and change attitudes
with human variability. Tiriel (who may symbolize Materialism) is a
blind wanderer, old and embittered, who loses his wife, Myratana, and,
scorned by his children, comes to the valley of Har, where he is
succored by Mentha and encounters his brother Ijim; after many
vicissitudes, he is carried home to die. There is no key to the meaning of
the abstract figures in the poem, which is built on a foundation of
irregular fourteen-syllable lines, but it has been conjectured that Myra-
tana symbolizes Inspiration, Har represents Poetry, Ijim typifies Super-
stition, and Mentha (possibly an anagram for Athena) Reason. The
lesson" seems to be that unless the spirit frees itself from blind custom
and man-made law, it is cursed. Such interpretations are hazardous, for
there is no sure way of elucidating Blake's symbolic system, which is
less of a structure than a fluxion of private myths. In an effort to bring
Blake's free-flowing associations into a fixed focus, searchers have some-
times thrown away caution and scholarship — an extreme case being
that of the author who, telling the "story" of Blake's Prophetic Books,
claimed that Blake (who could scarcely be considered a punster)
derived Urizen from 'Your Reason," Enion from "Anyone," and
Tharmas from "Doubting Thomas."

The Book of Thel, which followed Tiriel within a year, is much
shorter and far more shapely than its predecessor. Pastoral in tone, it
recalls the Songs of Innocence with a wistfulness which makes one
suspect that Blake was loath to abandon the mood of the lyrics. Where
Tiriel suggests despair and the disillusion of age, Thel is vibrant with
youth and hope. There are doubts here too. Anticipation of experience
casts long shadows before the loveliest of the Seraphim, and a sorrowful
voice asks pitiful questions: "Why cannot the ear be closed to its own
destruction?/ Or the glistening eye to the poison of a smile?/ Why are

294

WILLIAM BLAKE

•eyelids stored with arrows ready drawn,/ Where a thousand fighting
men in ambush lie?" Thel's own motto is also an enigmatic query:

Does the eagle know what is in the pit;
Or wilt thou go ask the mole?
Can wisdom be put in a silver rod,
Or love in a golden bowl?

For a while Blake was a follower of Swedenborg, the Swedish phi-
losopher who interpreted God as the Divine Man, infinite in love. But
Blake wearied of Swedenborg's reliance on eternal goodness; Blake
never made much of vice — 'Vice is a negative" — but he did not dis-
count the power, the affirmative force, of evil. He considered honestly
Impassioned evil more constructive than sanctimonious virtue. "Sooner
murder an infant in its cradle," he wrote, anticipating the twentieth-
century psychologists, "than nurse unacted desires." He believed that
""the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," just as the way to
heaven runs through hell. Only by passing beyond good and evil can
man attain the salvation he seeks, a salvation only to be found in liberty
and the life of the imagination.

Turning away from Swedenborg, Blake plunged deeper into his
own strange mixture of heretical and spiritual speculations. The re-
action resulted in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, one of the most
startling works in literature. Here again he amplified his concept of
"'contraries'*; the Marriage is another union of opposites, of free will
and destiny, of revolution and revelation, of everyman's unmorality
and Blake's own amoral unorthodoxy. In his rejection of a smug,
self-satisfied Christianity, Blake promulgated a violently antagonistic
religion in which the angels are hypocrites complacent in their shib-
boleths, while the devils are uncompromising rebels, superior intelli-
gences free of self-consciousness and cant The eternal conflict is
symbolized in a prolonged debate between angel and devil, between
passive obedience and active resistance. The all-forgiving Jesus, sympa-
thetic to man's confused struggle among contrary drives, is pitted
against the punishing Jehovah, the implacable authoritarian ready to
find guilt in all his children. 'The whole of Freud's teachings," said
W. H. Auden, "may be found in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"

Everything is founded on the paradox of duality. Blake's credo is
announced in the "Argument" which opens The Marriage of Heaven
and HelL "Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Re-

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LIVES OF THE POETS

pulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to human
existence. From these contraries, spring what the religious call Good
and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active
springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell." Lest the reader
surmise that Heaven is the source of inspiration as well as the abode
of the blessed, Blake has the Devil announce a creed which only the
ungodly (or the unscientific) would dispute:

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the fol-
lowing errors:

1. That man has two real existing principles, viz., a body
and a soul.

2. That Energy, called Evil, is alone from the body; and
that Reason, called Good, is alone from the soul.

3. That God will torment man in eternity for following
his energies.

But the following contraries to these are true:

1. Man has no body distinct from his soul; for that called
body is a portion of soul discerned by the five senses, the
chief inlets of soul in this age.

2. Energy is the only life, and is from the body; and Rea-
son is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.

3. Energy is Eternal Delight

To implement the devil's gnomic wisdom, Blake fills his illuminated
pages with some seventy vivid "Proverbs of Hell." The following are
a few of the more provocative aphorisms:

Eternity is in love with the productions of time.

The busy bee has no time for sorrow.

Drive your cart and plough over the bones of the dead.

Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity,

No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

Prisons are built with stones of Law, brothels with bricks of
Religion.

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WILLIAM BLAKE

The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.

What is now proved was once only imagined.

The cistern contains: the fountain overflows.

One thought fills immensity.

The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

You never know what is enough unless you know what it
more than enough.

The weak in courage is strong in cunning.
The soul of sweet delight can never be defiled.

When thou seest an eagle, thou seest a portion of genius.
Lift up thy head!

Expect poison from standing water.

As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs
on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.

To create a little flower is the labor of ages.
Damn braces. Bless relaxes.
Exuberance is Beauty.

Conformity became more and more repellent and finally impossible
as Blake grew older. He aligned himself with rebels and reformers;
more extreme than most of them, he considered every curb on the hu-
man spirit an unwarrantable imposition. He challenged all forms of
oppression, whether accomplished by industrial exploitation or in-
dissoluble marriage. After the print shop failed to show a profit, Blake
was forced to pick up odd jobs of designing and engraving. He made
drawings of vases, teacups, and tureens for the Wedgwood catalogue
of china. One of die curiosities in the British Museum is a specimen of
an elaborate advertisement made by Blake in 1790 for "Moore and
Company's Manufactory & Warehouse of Carpeting and Hosiery,
Chiswell Street, Moor-Fields."

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Looking for employment, he found it with Joseph Johnson, a printer
with widely liberal affiliations. At Johnson's, Blake met Thomas Paine,
whose insurgent articles, sweeping across the Atlantic, had inflamed the
American patriots. Learning (or divining) that the author of The
Crisis, which had encouraged resistance to England, and The Rights
of Man, which hailed the French Revolution, was about to be arrested
and would probably he hanged, Blake prevailed upon Paine to leave
the country. Paine fled to France, where he was idolized and was
made a member of the Convention.

Through Johnson, Blake also met the nightmare-driven artist, Henry
Fuseli, and the intransigent Mary Wollstonecraft, the ill-starred rev-
olutionary who died giving birth to a daughter who became Shelley's
wife. Besides printing Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights
of Women, Johnson published her Original Stories from Real Life, for
which Blake made a half-dozen uncharacteristic illustrations.

Another result of Blake's contact with Johnson's set was his vociferous
poem The French Revolution. Written in the seven-foot meter and
Ossianic manner, which he had chosen for most of the Prophetic
Books, the work was to consist of six sections, but only one part was
completed, and this, set up in 1791, was never published during Blake's
lifetime. Buried for one hundred and thirty-four years, its fitful elo-
quence was unheard until 1913. Important Blake items continued to be
rediscovered in the twentieth century. Twenty-eight illustrations for
The Pilgrims Progress, stowed away for more than a hundred years,
were published for the first time as late as 1941.

In 1793 Blake moved to a small house in rural Lambeth, now part
of London. There was a pleasant garden with a patch of flowers and
an arbor with a grapevine, which Blake, seeing it as a symbol of in-
tertwining life, refused to prune. It was in this arbor that Thomas
Butts, a neighbor who became a patron, one evening discovered Blake
and his wife, childless and happy, as unclothed as Adam and Eve before
the Fall. They were, appropriately enough, reading Paradise Lost.

The living at 'lovely Lambeth" (Blake's affectionate alliteration)
was happy, productive, and relatively prosperous. Between his thirty-
sixth and forty-third years Blake worked industriously and contentedly;
he conceived new ideas for allegories and refurbished old ones; he pre-
pared the pages for richly illuminated volumes, and Catherine colored
them. He published two small books of engravings: The History of
England and For Children: The Gates of Paradise; he planned to
follow them with For Children: The Gates of Hell and a Bible of Hell,

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for both of which he made tide pages. At Lambeth Blake also created
two more illuminated long poems celebrating independence: Visions of
the Daughters of Albion, a paean to sexual liberty, and America: A
Prophecy, fired by thoughts of the American Revolution. The first
presents further symbolic forms in Blake's enlarging pantheon: Oothoon
(Pure Instinct) in love with Theotormon (Jealous Desire), ravaged
by Bromion (Raging Religion), and Urizen (Creator as well as Re-
strainer), to whom the Daughters of Albion appeal. A cloudy parable
of Instinct versus Discipline, it reiterates the final line of The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell: "One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression."
America juxtaposes the mythical figures of red Ore (Youth Unfet-
tered) and Urizen with such actual personages as Washington, Frank-
lin, Paine, Warren, Gates, Hancock, and Green.

At home in this self-created realm of myth, Blake found it hard
to return to a world of little people and large problems. He immured
himself successively, if not always successfully, in such protesting fan-
tasies as Europe: A Prophecy, which introduces Los (Genius of
Poetry), Enitharmon (Inspiration, Los's Wife), and their sons, Pal-
amabron (Pity), and Rintrah (Resentment), with a frontispiece, one
of Blake's greatest conceptions, showing Urizen as Creator, the Ancient
of Days, dividing the abyss with golden compasses to form the world;
The First Book of Urizen, to which Blake never added a second;
The Song of Los; The Book of Los; The Book of Ahania* All of these
books, or booklets, show a steady purpose diverted and sometimes de-
feated by uneven accomplishment After The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell the writing is loose, self-indulgent, repetitious, and often pontif-
ical. Much of it seems to be in cipher about a cabala too mysterious for
the reader's understanding. Yet even the least intelligible pages are
shot through with passages that make an unearthly music, and there are
moments of instant perception, an immediate cognizance of a lif e not
only beyond self but, inherently divine, beyond reality.

For several years things went well at Lambeth. Thomas Butts pur-
chased many of Blake's drawings and engaged him to teach the family
the fundamentals of art. George Cumberland, who promoted the
National Gallery and whose experiments in printing were helpful to
Blake, became a close friend for the rest of his life. A London book-
seller employed Blake to illustrate Edward Young's somber Night
Thoughts; Blake was to make several hundred "designs to encircle the
letter press" from which the publisher was to select about two hundred.
Before Blake finished, he had sketched more than five hundred and

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thirty drawings, only forty-three of which were engraved when the first
— and only — part of the work was published. For all his work, as
designer and engraver, Blake asked one hundred pounds. He received
twenty.

At forty Blake began his most ambitious and also his most obscure
symbolic work: The Four Zoos, which he first intended to call Vala.
It took four years to complete this idiosyncratic interpretation of the
Old and New Testaments with Blake's own way of unraveling the
mystery of the earthly creation, the fall of man, die struggle between
God and Satan (Restraint and Revolt), the Crucifixion, and the Last
Judgment — all accompanied by oracular disquisitions on the pitfalls of
religion, reason, sex, and the industrial revolution. Divided into "Nine
Nights/1 The Four Zoos is unintelligible to any reader not equipped
with a clue to the overwhelming Biblical allusions and Blake's per-
sonal applications, which had grown into an incomprehensible con-
fusion of tongues. Arthur Symons tried to explain Blake's later failure to
communicate by saying, "In his earlier work Blake is satisfied with
natural symbols, with nature as symbol; in the Prophetic Books his
meaning is no longer apparent in the ordinary meaning of the words he
uses; we have to read him with a key, and the key is not always in our
hands. He forgets that he is talking to men on the earth in some
language which he has learnt in heavenly places."

In spite of the incredible amount of work done at Lambeth, which
included the invention of an entire cosmogony, Blake's finances were in
a low state. The prosperity of the early eighteenth century had
dwindled, and England was suffering from a depressive dearth. Wheat,
its always staple crop, was scarce; the woolen trade, threatened with the
competition of cheap cotton goods, had fallen off; the once abundant
village industries could not contend with mechanized factories and
were nearing their end. In order to subsist, Blake once more turned to,
for him, menial tasks — designing advertisements, engraving and improv-
ing the sketches of mediocrities like Flaxman and Stothard. (One
thinks of Shakespeare forced to make over other men's adaptations, or
Wagner arranging popular operatic tunes for cornet and piano.) Even
as a skilled engraver, Blake had difficulty finding work. "As to myself,"
he wrote to Cumberland, "I live by miracle. I am painting small
pictures from the Bible. As to engraving, in which art I cannot re-
pcoach myself with any neglect, I am laid by in a corner as if I did not
exist; and since my Young's Night Thoughts has been published, even
Johnson and Fuseli have discarded my graver. . . . Having passed now

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near twenty years in ups and down, I am used to them, and perhaps a
litde practice in them may turn out to benefit"

Blake's hopes for better things — 'lie who works and has his health
cannot starve" — were, for a time, fulfilled. William Hayley, who prided
himself on his taste, his occasional essays, his pallid water colors and
even paler poetry, had been introduced to Blake by FJaxman. For
Hayley, Blake executed three engravings after a bust of Pericles, a
drawing by Hayley's illegitimate son, and a medallion by Flaxman of
the same boy, who was Flaxman's pupil and who died before the
commission was completed. Hayley was critical of Blake's work — he
particularly felt that insufficient justice had been done to the boy's
fine features — but, after a conciliatory visit, he urged Blake to join him
at Felpham on the Sussex coast. In August Blake rented a cottage near
Hayley's villa; a month later he and Catherine settled in. 'It is a perfect
model for cottages and, I think, for palaces of magnificence, only
enlarging, not altering, its proportions. Nothing can be more grand
than its simplicity and usefulness."

Continuing to write in praise of Felpham, Blake felt he had
found his Earthly Paradise. "Now begins a new life, because another
covering of earth is shaken off. . . . Felpham is a sweet place for study,
because it is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all
sides her golden gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapors;
voices of celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard." Work went
on, as he had hoped, with God's grace and with Godspeed. The
visions grew in delight and delicacy. In Felpham he had glimpses of
fairies in his garden and angels coming down ladders to his cottage. For
three years — the only years he spent outside London — he was radiantly
content and vigorously creative. He worked at designs for Hayley's
Life of Cowper, made revisions in The Four Zoos, began the composi-
tion of Milton and Jerusalem, and filled his sketchbook with poems and
fanciful figures.

It was at Felpham that Blake got into serious trouble with the law.
The story is told by Blake in a letter sent on August 16, 1803, to Butts:
"I am at present in a bustle to defend myself against a very unwarrant-
able warrant from a Justice of the Peace in Chichester, which was
taken out against me by a private in Captain Leathes's troop of ist or
Royal Dragoons, for an assault and seditious words. . . . His enmity
arises from my having turned him out of my garden, into which he was
invited as an assistant by a gardener at work therein, without my
knowledge. I desired him, as politely as possible, to get out of the

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garden; he made me an impertinent answer. . . . He then threatened
to knock out my eyes, with many abominable imprecations and with
some contempt for my person. It affronted my foolish pride. I there-
fore took him by the elbows and pushed him before me till I had got
him out. There I intended to have left him; but he, turning about,
put himself in a posture of defiance, threatening and swearing at me. I,
perhaps foolishly and perhaps not, stepped out at the gate, and, putting
aside his blows, took him again by the elbows and, keeping his back to
me, pushed him forward down the road about fifty yards."

No time was lost in retaliation against the poet who, though
visionary, was so unexpectedly muscular. The soldier, humiliated and
vengeful, went to the authorities and swore that Blake (described in
the bill of particulars as "a miniature painter") had damned the king
and all his soldiers, had predicted that the French would conquer
England, that Bonaparte would be Master of Europe, had sneered
at the English for being nothing more than enslaved children, and
had uttered similar seditious remarks. The result was a trial for high
treason. Blake presented an indignant memorandum denying the
allegations, although some of them sound suspiciously like his senti-
ments; Hayley hired a lawyer to present the case for the defendant; and
Blake was cleared of all charges.

Blake was grateful to Hayley, but he had had too much of him.
The demands made upon him by his benefactor outweighed the
kindnesses; the patron began to regard his forty-six-year-old prote'ge' as
a secretarial assistant or a paid companion whose duty it was to listen
and admire while Hayley read his own verses, sang his own tunes,
talked about Cowper, or thought out loud, Blake wrote plaintively
to Butts: "As my dependence is on engraving at present, and partic-
ularly on the engravings I have in hand for Mr. H., I find on all
hands great objections to my doing anything but the mere drudgery
of business, and intimations that if I do not confine myself to this I
shall not live. . . . The thing that I have most at heart — more than life,
or all that seems to make comfortable without — is the interest of true
religion and science, and whenever anything happens to affect that
interest (especially if I myself omit any duty to my Station as a
Soldier of Christ) it gives me the greatest of torments." Continually
irritated by Hayley, Blake could not bring himself to leave and offend
him. He did not want to seem petulant and reproached himself for
his fractiousness. He asked Butts to burn "what I have peevishly
Written about any friend. I have been very much degraded and

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injuriously treated; but if it all arise from my own fault, I ought to
blame myself.

O why was I born with a different face?

Why was I not born like the rest of my race?

When I look, each one starts! When I speak, I offend;

When I'm silent and passive, I lose every friend!"

He expressed his embarrassed confusion about Hayley in a humorously
defensive two-line epigram:

Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache;
Do be my enemy — for friendship's sake.

It took Blake months to free himself from Hayley's soft tyrannies —
he could protect himself from enemies but not from well-wishers.
Finally, making the rupture as gentle as possible, he went back to
London and took up residence near the place where he was bom.
In a letter to Butts (April 25, 1803), Blake confided that he might
now say "what perhaps I should not dare to say to anyone else: That
I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoyed, and
that I may converse with my friends in Eternity, see visions, dream
dreams, prophecy and speak parables unobserved and at liberty from the
doubts of other mortals — perhaps doubts proceeding from kindness, but
doubts are always pernicious, especially when we doubt our friends."

The return to London started auspiciously. Blake began engraving
the plates for new symbolic poems, Milton and Jerusalem, as well as
illustrations for Milton's Paradise Lost. The happy state did not
last long: two years later trouble overtook him again. R. H. Cromek, an
astute commercial artist turned publisher, commissioned Blake to make
designs for Robert Blair's moralistic and lugubrious The Grave, with
the understanding that Blake was also to undertake the more prof-
itable engravings. However, when the drawings were completed,
Cromek hired another and far less capable engraver to carry out the
assignment. The book's edifying introduction by Henry Fuseli scarcely
mollified the aggrieved poet who had expected the engraving work
and badly needed it.

Cromek was equally underhanded in a subsequent transaction. Blake
had made a sketch for a large engraving, 'The Canterbury Pilgrims/'
which he planned to exhibit. As soon as Cromek saw the composition,

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he engaged Stothard to paint the same subject and show it publicly.
Stothard's exhibition was a great success, and when the painting was
praised by Flaxman, Blake was understandably aggravated. The
following epigrams, three among many, show his bitter exasperation.
The first is to Flaxman, the second to Hayley, the third is to Cromek.

You call me mad; 'tis folly to do so,
To seek to turn a madman to a foe.
If you think as you speak, you are an ass;
II you do not, you are but what you was.

I write the rascal thanks, till he and I

With thanks and compliments are quite drawn dry.

A petty sneaking thief I knew.
O! Mr. Cromek, how do ye do?

Blake remained staunch in his defense of the eccentric Fuseli When
Fuseli was attacked by the art critic Robert Hunt, brother to the poet
Leigh Hunt, Blake wrote:

You think Fuseli is not a great painter. I'm glad.
This is one of the best compliments he ever had.

Ignored as a poet, Blake hoped for recognition as a painter. But no
one took his creations seriously; they were, at the best, tolerated*
Almost all the critics found his conceptions farfetched, disturbing, and,
in some instances, offensive. Blake was fifty-two when he grimly de-
termined to face the apathetic public with an exhibition. Taunted
with drawing hallucinations and representing spirits with well-fleshed
bodies, Blake had prepared a Descriptive Catalogue (in itself a
stirring piece of prose), in which he announced: 'The connoisseurs
and artists who have made objections . . . would do well to con-
sider that the Venus, the Minerva, the Jupiter, the Apollo, which
they admire in Greek statues, are all of them representations of
spiritual existences, of Gods immortal, to the mortal perishing organ of
sight; and yet they are embodied and organized in solid marble. ... A
Spirit and a Vision are not, as modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy
vapor, or a nothing; they are organized and minutely articulated be-

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WILLIAM BLAKE

yond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce. He who
does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger
and better light than his mortal and perishing eye can see, does not
imagine at all/' The exhibition was held in his brother James's print
shop and was a failure.

In his mid-fifties Blake slid down into poverty. Far from being
always in Paradise, as Mrs. Blake maintained, he was lost in squalid
obscurity. It is still a mystery how he managed to pay the meager house-
hold expenses. Had it not been for a few collectors, he and Catherine
would have starved to death. Butts, according to Samuel Palmer, one of
Blake's few disciples, "stood between the greatest designer in England
and the workhouse/' He still had about twenty years to live, and some
of his most important work was still to be done. The engravings for the
two books of Milton were being completed; The Everlasting Gospel
was still to come; the Gates of Paradise was to be reissued, with
Prologue, Epilogue, and Key to the Gates; the elaborate Prologue and
Characters of Chaucer's Pilgrims was to be reprinted separately; a large
fresco of The Last Judgment was to be begun; the exquisite woodcuts
for Thornton's translation of Virgil's Pastorals and the extraordinary
designs for the Book of Job, his most minute and most perfectly
achieved compositions, were not yet conceived.

Of these works, Blake's Milton is the most provocative as well as the
most puzzling. Much of it was written at Felpham, during his "three
years' slumber on the banks of the ocean," and Blake considered it a
"sublime allegory for future generations, similar to Homer's Iliad and
Milton's Paradise Lost" He claimed it was written "from immediate
dictation," and '1 may praise it," he wrote to Butts, "since I dare not
pretend to be any other than the secretary; the authors are in eternity."

Milton hardly lives up to Blake's assurance that it is "the grandest
poem that this world contains"; it is, on the contrary, the most con-
fusing of his long parables, an unsuccessful melding of splendid
lyrical ecstasies (as in the dancing passage uniting the birds and the
flowers) with long and ineffective harangues, a rumbling alternation of
the voices of inspiring specters, former inhabitants of earth and cor-
porealized "states," half-disclosing fragments of Blake's most private
experiences. Often inchoate, Milton, in common with the later poetry,
is a bewildering mixture of the conscious and the unconscious. It is
still viable because it is Blake's own justification of God's ways to man
and, perhaps first of all, because of the magnificent "motto" at the
end of the preface:

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And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear. O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

Unquestionably Blake identified himself with Milton, whom he re-
garded as "a sort of classical atheist." In The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell Blake had written: 'Those who restrain desire do so because theirs
is weak enough to be restrained; and the Restrainer, or Reason, usurps
its place and governs the unwilling. And being restrained, it by degrees
becomes passive, till it is only the shadow of desire. The history of
this is written in Paradise Lost, and the Governor, or Reason, is
called Messiah. And the original Archangel, or possessor of the com-
mand of the Heavenly Host, is called the Devil or Satan. . . . The
reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and
at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet, and of
the Devil's party without knowing it"

Unlike Milton, Blake grew more cautious as he grew older. He
did not cease from "mental fight," but he was no longer outspoken
about revolution; sedition was a hanging crime, and he had come
dose to the gallows. The declarations became more timid; they grew
dim and hollow, shrouded in equivocal emblems. The symbols, running
wild, continued to reproduce themselves; proliferating like cancerous
cells, they ate into, malformed, and finally devoured many of Blake's
finest inventions. The Prophetic Books seem to have a common

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vocabulary, but the later ones are written in a language so wayward
that most readers cannot understand the speech, and only a few have
felt rewarded for having mastered it. While his contemporaries thought
of Blake as a self-taught and not always competent craftsman, he was
trying to say what could not be said in any one form or in any one
medium. The lines of his poems and the lines of his drawings flow
into each other, trying to express the full impact of an almost un-
bearably surcharged imagination.

Jerusalem, subtitled The Emanation of the Giant Albion, last of the
Prophetic Books, was begun in 1804 but not printed until sixteen years
later. Even looser than Milton, it is a disjointed protest against neglect,
intolerance, and cruelty; in it Blake calls upon a host of Scriptural,
mythological, and historical figures to deliver the individual from all
systems. The uplifting passages are far from frequent and they are lost
in a welter of recondite allusions, to which no satisfactory key has been
supplied.

Not until Blake was in his middle sixties were there signs of seriously
impaired health. In a letter to John Linnell, a much younger but far
more successful artist, Blake complained of "shivering fits" and "this
abominable ague or whatever it is/' He had to cancel visits to Linnell
and other young friends who became his defenders, because of jaundice
and "torments of the stomach," which, although he did not know it,
were gallstone attacks that were to bring on his end. Nevertheless he
kept on working. He was especially concerned with what was to be his
greatest pictorial triumph, the small but spectacular plates for Job. It
was Linnell who not only suggested the idea but commissioned Blake
to execute a series of engravings based on water-color drawings made for
Butts. Instead of merely illustrating the work, Blake reinterpreted
it by meeting the challenge of the great philosophical riddle of the Old
Testament. Job's simple-minded goodness and his shocking afflictions
parallel Blake's conception of the contrary states of innocence and ex-
perience; the struggle between the Lord and his Adversary is seen as
another instance of the war between the punishing God and the pro-
testing Satan, restraining Reason and repressed Energy. Blake's designs
surpass in compact splendor anything he ever attempted; they begin in
hushed serenity and end in a burst of joyful music.

In April, 1827, Blake wrote to George Cumberland regarding a
calling card which Blake was designing for him. "I have been near the
gates of death," he wrote, "and have returned very weak and an old
man, feeble and tottering, but not in spirit and life, not in the real man,

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the imagination, which Hveth forever. In that I am stronger, as the
foolish body decays." In July, thanking Linnell for a gift of ten pounds,
he wrote, "I find I am not so well as I thought I must not go on in a
youthful style. However, I am on the mend today and hope soon to
look as I did; for I have been yellow, accompanied by all the old
symptoms." This was his last letter. But it was not his last work. Wasted,
weary, his once-heavy frame shrunk to its bones, Blake was busy illus-
trating Dante when he succumbed to the agony of gallstones. Saying
he was going to the country that all his life he had wished to see, he died
August 12,, 1827, three months before his seventieth birthday. He was
given a pauper's funeral in Bunhill Fields. There was no stone to mark
his grave.

Blake may be said to have uttered the swan song of the eighteenth
century when, in his teens, he invoked the Muses in one of his Poetical
Sketches. The poem ends:

How have you left the ancient love

That bards of old enjoyed in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move!

The sound is forced, the notes are few!

Blake's music was a startling departure from that of any of his con-
temporaries. Full of "the ancient love/* it was never languid, never
forced; reminiscent of "the bards of old,1' it announced a new dispensa-
tion, a release that was not only a remission but a release from all false
obligations. One purpose impelled him: the regeneration of man. Al-
ways against self-righteous morality and petrified conventions, Blake
cried out for freedom, for the restoration of rights as well as satisfaction
of the needs of the individual. "Holiness is not the price of entrance into
heaven," he declared in A Vision of the Last Judgment. "Those who
are cast out are all those who, having no passions of their own because
no intellect, have spent their lives curbing and governing other peo-
ple's." He addressed Satan as "the Accuser who is the God of this
world":

Tho' thou art worshiped by the names divine

Of Jesus and Jehovah, thou art still
The Son of Morn in weary Night's decline,

Tne lost traveller's dream under the

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Shunning church services and scorning creeds, Blake made his own
mythology and created his own deities. It was an anarchical-mystical
theology which transcended organized religions, a teaching that
exalted the selflessness preached by Christ and practiced by few
Christians. "Everything that lives is holy/' he exclaimed. Nothing was
without its divine secret, and revelation was everywhere.

To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

Exalting energy above reason, he asserted, in a Nietzschean paradox,
that evil, "the active springing from energy," is superior to good, "the
passive that obeys reason." Science has justified Blake's credo that
matter is identical with energy and that energy has taken the place of
a dim and abstract principle. The material world is the activity of God —
"God only acts, and is, in existing beings and men." Blake told his
friend Crabb Robinson that Christ was the only God, "and so am I," he
added, "and so are you. . . . We are all coexistent with God — all
members of the divine body."

Blake's epigrammatic power is usually glossed over. But his con-
centrated sarcasm is explosive, and his gnomic verses, serious and
satirical, are as Blakelike as his transcendental lyrics.

Great things are done when men and mountains meet;
This is not done by jostling in the street.

They said this mystery will never cease:

The priest promotes war, and the soldier peace.

What is it men in women so require?
The lineaments of gratified desire.
What is it women do in men require?
The lineaments of gratified desire.

The Angel that presided o'er my birth

Said, 'Xitde creature, formed of joy and mirth,

Go, love, without the help of anything on earth."

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LIVES OF THE POETS

He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged lif e destroy;
But he who kissed the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity's sunrise.

His whole life is an epigram, smart, smooth, and neatly penned;
Plaited quite neat to catch applause, with a hang-noose at the end.

Perhaps Blake's most famous as well as his most far-reaching lines
are in his Auguries of Innocence, the opening lines of which have
already been quoted: "To see a World in a grain of sand." The poem
is a long chain of proverbs, a series of inspired protests, indignations,
and resolutions. Some of the verses are obscure, some clear and com-
pelling; the best of them are as incisive as any couplets ever written. For
example:

A dog starved at his master's gate

Predicts the ruin of the state.

A horse misused upon the road

Calls to Heaven for human blood;

Each outcry of the hunted hare

A fibre from the brain does tear . . .

He who doubts from what he sees

Will ne'er believe, do what you please.

If the sun and moon should doubt,

They'd immediately go out . . .

We are led to believe a He

When we see ovitfe, not through, the eye.

Many of Blake's contemporaries thought him mad. Some ridiculed
him; some pitied him. Robert Southey said he was so manifestly insane
that "the predominant feeling in conversing with him, or even looking
at him, could only be sorrow and compassion." Blake's intimates had
no such convictions. They knew that Blake's instinct was strengthened
by an inexhaustible ardor for insight, and his sensibilities so heightened
that ordinary events were translated into extraordinary visitations. If
the arcana of Blake's creation brought him into communication with
superterrestrial voices who prompted the books of a new Bible, he was
not the first to believe he was taking dictation from heaven; and if being
companioned by angels gave Kirn a vision that stretched his sanity be-

WILLIAM BLAKE

yond the mundane senses, he was seeing "through" not "with" the eye.

Concentration was a moral principle with Blake; and it was more: an
inner daily demand, a sacrament, a consecrated concentration. It is not
the poetry or the painting that belatedly brought the world's attention
to the man who asserted that "Inspiration and Vision was then, and now
is, and I hope will always remain my element, my eternal dwelling
place/' but the full intensity, the total impact, and the complete
phenomenon of the creative genius.

Not an easy man, resentful of anyone who might get between his
work and his vision, Blake was, like the figures he loved to draw,
bound to no law of nature but, moving gravely to his goal, employing
the emanations of earth, air, fire, and water, at home among the ele-
ments. The outward creation was a transparent shell through which
Blake beheld the fiery secret, the burning core of ecstasy.

"It will be questioned," he wrote in regard to reality, "when the sun
rises, do you not see a round disk somewhat like a gold guinea?" "Oh,
no, no," Blake replied to the hypothetical question. "I see an innumer-
able company of the heavenly host, crying 'Holy, Holy, Holy is the
Lord God Almighty!'"

311

XVI

Poet and Peasant

ROBERT BURN.S

BIOGRAPHERS of Robert Burns may be divided into two kinds: those
who regard their subject as an intelligent, hard-working, unsuc-
cessful farmer who wrote remarkable (and remarkably uneven)
poetry, and those who worship him as either an untutored or a heaven-
taught plowman, a symbolic figure who became a legendary hero and a
tribal god.

Those who believe that Burns, "Caledonia's Bard/' is the unique
Voice of Scotland have forgotten that there was a considerable body of
Scottish poetry, partly influenced by English models and partly inde-
pendent of them, long before Burns was born. The fifteenth-century
Scottish Chaucerians, William Dunbar and Robert Henryson, proved
that their native dialect contained the elements of a powerful poetic
language, a linguistic vigor that was rediscovered two hundred years
later by a group of antiquarians, philosophers, and poets. Chief among
those who, besides Burns, brought about the eighteenth-century Scot-
tish revival were David Herd, Allan Ramsay, and Robert Fergusson.

Herd was an ardent collector of folk material; Ancient and Modern
Scots Songs was the precursor of many anthologies and songbooks de-
voted to the emergence of a national culture. The range of the vernac-
ular was further explored in The Tea-Table Miscellany by Allan Ram-
say, called 'The Scottish Horace'* — the appellation was flattering but it

31*

ROBERT BURNS

had little significance, for the creaking odes of Dr. Thomas Blacldoclc
earned him the tide of "the Scottish Pindar" and Dr. William Wilkie,
who labored to produce the unreadable Efigoniad, was known as "the
Scottish Homer/' Best of the group was Robert Fergusson C 1750-1 774),
who published a startlingly original book of poems at twenty-three and
who died in a madhouse at twenty-four. Born and reared in Edinburgh,
Fergusson, unlike Burns, was an urban poet, but he knew the country-
side as well as the city streets, and his ear was as exact as his eye. He was
unusually sensitive to the every inflection of the "hamely strain" — his
'The Farmer's Ingle" is far more authentic than Burns's sentimental
imitation of it in 'The Cotter's Saturday Night," and his use of the
lively turns and spirited images of everyday Scottish utterances con-
vinced every reader. Particularly it directed Burns away from the man-
nered phraseology of the English versifiers to the vivid raciness of his
own country's speech.

Robert Burns was born January 25, 1759, in the village of Alloway
in Kyle, a district in the county of Ayrshire, Scodand. His father,
William Burnes, with his own hands had put up the family home, a
double-roomed thatch-and-plaster cottage with a small attic. His fore-
bears on both sides were of peasant stock — his mother was a farmer's
daughter, almost completely illiterate. Besides a younger brother, Gil-
bert, who became Robert's close associate, there were five other
children, so that nine human beings, to say nothing of several animals,
were housed in the two rooms.

Although his mother could not write and was able to read only a few
pages of the Bible, she had a store of folk-stuff with which she de-
lighted the children. There was also her cousin, Betty Davidson, who
helped her from time to time with the chores, and whom Robert re-
membered as having "the largest collection in the country of tales and
songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks,
spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantrips,
enchanted towers, giants, dragons, and other trumpery" — all of which,
he averred, "cultivated the latent seeds of poetry/' The mature poet
never forgot the stories; echoes of old Betty's voice are heard in Tarn o'
Shanter," with its fearful-farcical evocation of "brownies and bogeys."

At six Robert received instruction at the Alloway school from John
Murdoch, a young teacher who was given board and lodging by the
farmers and who stressed the value of "correct English" rather than the
colloquial Scots used by the people. Most of Burns's brief schooling was
received from Murdoch, who believed in a style with fine flourishes —

313

LIVES OF THE POETS

he spoke of the Burns cottage as a "tabernacle of clay," "a mud edifice,"
and "an agrillaceous fabric" — and the poet's later lapses into false ele-
gance may be traced to the literary language which Murdoch culti-
vated. Nevertheless, Murdoch was an earnest teacher, for Robert and
Gilbert, a more tractable pupil, were soon reading the New Testament
and reciting poems by Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, and Gray. Lessons
were continually interrupted; even as a child Burns had to labor along
with the others to keep the farm going. The work was heavy, and when
attendance at school became difficult, Burns's father taught the children
arithmetic by candlelight and obtained textbooks which the boys read
for pleasure rather than for improvement.

As soon as he entered his teens Robert had little time for anything
but physical work; during his fourteenth year his father, who looked
upon Robert as his chief helper, could spare him for only three weeks.
Those three weeks were spent in Ayr, with Murdoch, who had left
Alloway for a better appointment. Burns enlarged his reading and dis-
covered Pope. He began to appreciate the scope of folk poetry when he
acquired "some excellent new songs that were hawked about the coun-
try in baskets or exposed in stalls on the streets/' Most of his education
was accomplished without guidance after working hours; at fifteen,
Robert was the principal laborer on the farm, for, his brother Gilbert
recalled, "we had no hired servant, male or female. The anguish of
mind we felt at our tender years, under those strains and difficulties,
was very great To think of our father growing old (he was now above
fifty), broken down with the long continued fatigues of his life, with
a wife and five other children, and in a declining state of circumstances
— these reflections produced in my brother's mind and mine sensations
of the deepest distress/'

His father's first breakdown and the writing of Burns's first poem
occurred at about the same time. Burns was fifteen when he "com-
mitted the sin of rhyme" by fitting words to a tune sung by Nelly Kil-
patrick, a fourteen-year-old girl who was working with him in the
fields at harvest time. Thus with me," he wrote in a reminiscent letter,
**began Love and Poesy, which at times have been my only and, till
within this last twelvemonth, my highest enjoyment." Burns was not
overstating the case. Falling in love at fifteen, he never fell out of it;
consistently a lover, he was inconstant only to the objects of his affec-
tion. All he knew of Latin, he confessed during one of his later gallant-
ries, was Omnia vincit amor. "At the plough, scythe, or reap-hook, I
feared no competitor, but I spent the evenings after my own heart. . . .

ROBERT BURNS

To the sons and daughters of labor and poverty the ardent hope, the
stolen interview, the tender farewell, are the greatest and most delicious
enjoyments."

Poetry, his other passion, was also his pastime; he never stopped
rhyming about "the sons and daughters of labor and poverty"; he made
poems about their creatures and their crops, about unexpected babies,
drunken young fellows and dancing old women, about peddlers, beg-
gars, rough companions, randy boys and ready girls.

Burns's social dichotomy developed as he grew older, but his lan-
guage ambivalence was with him from the beginning. His uncertain-
ties about the diction of poetry are illustrated in his very first poem.
The poem, "Handsome Nell," begins in the appropriate accents of a
Scottish song ("Oh, once I loved a bonie lass") and proceeds in that
vein for several verses through the fifth stanza:

She dresses ay sae clean and neat,

Both decent and genteel;
And then there's something in her gait

Gars ony dress look weel.

The verse which follows and concludes the poem is a startling
change. It is so prim, so properly Anglicized that it might be mistaken
for an imitation of any of the lesser Augustans:

'Tis this in Nelly pleases me;

'Tis this enchants my soul;
For absolutely in my breast

She reigns without control.

When Burns was nineteen the family moved to a farm at Lochlie for
a stay of seven years. In the nearby town of Tarbolton, the boy grow-
ing out of his adolescence found friends, joined a debating society, and
alternated the diversions of the town with the delights of literature. He
read everything he could beg or borrow — he could not afford to buy and
he drew the line at stealing — absorbing the articles in the Edinburgh
magazines and English periodicals, poring over mythology in Tooke's
Pantheon and Pope's Homer, glutting himself with fiction that ranged
from Sterne's sprightly Tristram Shandy to Mackenzie's lugubrious
The Man of Feeling, the latter two being his "bosom favorites." He be-
came a Freemason, and enjoyed the helpful spirit as well as the drink-
ing camaraderie of his fellow members.

315

LIVES OF THE POETS

He was a strikingly handsome young man. His countenance was al-
ways animated; the color was high; the dark eyes either brimmed with
humor or burned with passion. The mouth was sensually curved,
deeply indented at the corners. The strong chin and bold nose pro-
nounced his masculinity. When he was in good spirits, he was
irresistible.

Before he was twenty, Burns had passed through several "affairs,"
most of them innocent or fumbling toward unsatisfactory fulfillment.
His emotions were not seriously involved until he met Alison Begbie.
She was a servant, and the twenty-one-year-old poet wooed her in a
style intended to dazzle the girl. Unfortunately, the ardent but far too
literary suitor only bewildered the simple lass. He assailed her with
high-flown courting letters, breathing devotion in such involved meta-
phors as: 'The sordid earthworm may profess love to a woman's person,
whilst in reality his affection is centred in her pocket; and the slavish
drudge may go a-wooing as he goes to the horse-market to choose one
who is stout and firm, as we may say of an old horse, one who will be a
good drudge and draw kindly. I disdain their dirty, puny ideas."
Alison's refusal to marry him — he had euphuistically but honestly pro-
posed marriage — surprised and shocked him. But if it hurt the lover it
did not silence the poet. On the contrary, it brought forth his first pair
of pure songs: the tripping "Bonnie Peggy Alison" and the more deeply
felt and exquisitely rounded "Mary Morison."

Farming at Lochlie, physically exhausting and spirit-breaking, be-
came impossible and, at twenty-three, Burns went to Irvine. Irvine
was the distributing center for flax. There Burns hoped to learn about
growing and dressing the profitable plant whose fibers were spun into
linen thread and whose seeds were made into linseed oil. He learned
just enough to discourage him. Sick in body and soul, he comforted
himself with liquor and an adolescent longing for death. He said it ex-
plicitly if extravagantly in an unhappy letter: "I am quite transported at
the thought that ere long, perhaps very soon, I shall bid an eternal
adieu to all the pains and uneasiness and disquietudes of this weary
life," The note of despair sounds theatrical, but there was justification
for it Burns saw himself as a triple-starred unfortunate: a rejected
lover, a failure as a farmer, and a poet with no discernible future. Al-
though he belittled his bodily ailment as a "hypochondriac complaint,"
he was genuinely ill; he did not know that the headaches, palpitations,
aEwt other pains were the first manifestations of the heart disease which
was to kill him fifteen years later.

ROBERT BURNS

There were other troubles. His father, suffering from tuberculosis,
was also riddled with the fear of dying in debt. William Burnes had
made himself worse by becoming involved in a lawsuit, and Robert
returned to Lochlie to watch his father die. A sense of desolation en-
gulfed him. A letter to his friend and landlord, Gavin Hamilton,
sounds a despondent toll: "I have been all my life, sir, one of the rue-
ful-looking, long-visaged sons of disappointment. A damned star has
always kept my zenith, and shed its baleful influence, in the emphatic
curse of the prophet — 'And behold whatsoever he doth, it shall not
prosper!' I rarely hit where I aim: and if I want anything I am almost
sure never to find it where I seek it."

The writer in him 'came to the rescue. He knew he could purge him-
self of the most hopeless thoughts by putting them down on paper. At
twenty-four, shortly before his father's death, he had started a Common-
place Book. In it he intended to preserve every passing reflection. It
began: "Observations, Hints, Scraps of Poetry, &c., by Robert Burns."
The entries were obviously not to be kept private; an audience must
have been envisaged when he described himself not too objectively as
"a man who had little art in making money, and still less in keeping it;
but was, however, a man of some sense, a great deal of honesty, and un-
bounded good will to every creature rational and irrational." Burns
then went on to dramatize himself in what was to become the role he
liked to play for the delectation of the gentry: "As he was but little
indebted to scholastic education and bred at a plough-tail, his perform-
ances must be strongly tinctured with his unpolished, rustic way of
life; but, as I believe, they are really his own, it may be entertainment
to a curious observer of human nature to see how a plough-man thinks
and feels under the pressure of love, ambition, anxiety, grief, with the
like cares and passions which, however, diversified by the modes and
manners of life, operate pretty much alike, I believe, in all the species."

In 1874, a£ter ^e death of their bankrupt father, Robert and Gilbert
moved the family to Mossgiel. They were penniless, but they managed
to lease about a hundred acres on which they continued to struggle
with the grudging soil. Mossgiel may have been bad for Burns's con-
stitution but it was good for his ego. Instead of being known as the
feckless offspring of a luckless cottager, he was called, as befitted the
head of a family and a tenant farmer, "Rab Mossgiel." The farm was
run on a co-operative family basis; the work was heavier than before
and the return less. Burns allowed himself no more than seven pounds
a year; he never exceeded that scanty amount *1 entered upon this farm

317

LIVES OF THE POETS

with a full resolution, 'Come, go to, I will be wise!' — I read fanning
books; I calculated crops; I attended markets; and, in short, in spite of
'the devil, the world, and the flesh/ I believe I would have been a wise
man. But the first year from unfortunately buying in bad seed, the sec-
ond from a late harvest, we lost half of both our crops. This overset all
my wisdom, and I returned 'Like a dog to his vomit, and the sow that
was washed to her wallowing in the mire/ "

Four years of Mossgiel was more than he could stand. The land was
poor, with "a cold wet bottom/' the crops continued to fail, and the
family lost everything, including their investment. Burns was ill much
of the time. He complained of fainting fits and lethargic spells. His
physician, Doctor Mackenzie, mistakenly diagnosed the ailment as a
kind of indisposition, and advised cold baths and more strenuous labor
— the worst possible prescription for a patient who needed rest.

Whenever he could spare himself, Burns went to the neighboring
village of Mauchline. There he found some relief as well as diversion
in the company of lively young men and available young women. An
affair with Elizabeth Paton, another servant, resulted in the first of
Burns's illegitimate children. He did not deny the fact — he never repu-
diated any of his offspring. On the contrary, proud of being a father, he
wrote a poem which one of his editors entitled "A Poet's Welcome to
His Love-Begotten Daughter." Burns spoke of her no less tenderly but
more realistically as his <fbastart wean/* The poem begins with a win-
ning blend of affection and defiance:

Thou's welcome, wean; mishanter fa' me,1
If thoughts o' thee, or yet thy mammie,
Shall ever daunton me or awe me,

My sweet wee lady,
Or if I blush when thou shalt ca' me

Tyta or daddie.

Tho' now they ca' me fornicator,
An* tease my name in countra clatter,
The mair they talk, I'm kend the better,

E'en let them clash;
An auld wife's tongue's a feckless matter

To gie ane fash.2

x Mishanter fa' me: rKsasfgr overtake me.
* Gie ane fash: give anyone trouble.

318

ROBERT BURNS

Welcome! my bonie, sweet, wee dochter,
Tho' ye come here a wee unsought for,
And tho' your comin' I hae fought for,

Baith kirk and queir; 3
Yet, by my faith, ye're no unwrought for,

That I shall swear!

It ends on the same note of warmth and pride:

For if thou be what I wad hae thee,
And tak the counsel I shall gie thee,
Fll never rue the trouble wi' thee —

The cost nor shame o't,
But be a loving father to thee,

And brag the name o't.

The child was brought up by the poet's mother, who patiently cared
for her son's by-blows. Elizabeth Paton went home to her parents;
nothing more was heard of her until she claimed a share of the profits
of Burns's first book of poems, a claim which was setded for twenty
pounds.

Meanwhile Burns was having continued attacks of pain — modern
physicians agree that the cause was rheumatic endocarditis — but this
did not prevent him from filling the Commonplace Book with philo-
sophic jottings, little essays, transcriptions of songs, adaptations of folk-
stufF, such as the robust "John Barleycorn," with its symbolic burial of
the hero, his resuscitation, his cutting-down, cudgeling, and grinding,
and the triumph of his spirit, "his very heart's blood," which, if tasted,
will make any man's courage rise.

Burns's writing acquired a sharper and more indigenous flavor as he
learned to appreciate the contribution of native singers: "I am pleased
with the works of our Scotch poets, particularly the excellent Ramsay,
and the still more excellent Fergusson." His verses began to circulate in
manuscript. The grimly playful 'Death and Doctor Hornbook," the
ironic "Holy Willie's Prayer," and "Address to the Deil" amused the
readers, but no one took them seriously. Yet the thrust of criticism turns
the humor into knife-edged bitterness. "Address to the Deil" mocks the
rigidly orthodox, whose religion is founded on the threat of hell, by
calling Satan Auld Hornie, Nick, or Clootie, and transforming him

* Queir: choir.

319

LIVES OF THE POETS

into a familiar and slightly absurd countryman. "Holy Willie's Prayer"
is a satirical broadside against bigots in general and Scots Calvinists in
particular. N

, 'In common with the verses to his daughter, the last three poems are
written in a form which Burns used so frequendy that it is sometimes
called the "Burns stanza." The pattern, however, is not his invention;
scholars have a more authentic name for it: "Standard Habbie." Habbie
fiimson was a Kilbarchan piper immortalized by the sixteenth century
Scotch poet, Robert Semple, Semple's epitaph had this oddly shaped
sfanza of six lines:

Kilbarchan now may say alas!

For she has lost her game and grace,

Both Trixie and the Maiden-Trace;

But what remead? 4
For no man can supply his place —

Hab Simson's dead.

The peculiar combination of four cannily spaced lines brusquely in-
terrupted by two short rhyming lines proved irresistible, especially to
Burns. He used it for every possible purpose and made it fit every
changing mood* Here, for example, is how Burns employed "Standard
Habbie" to conclude "Holy Willie's Prayer" on a note of broad irony:

But, Lord, remember me an' mine
Wi' mercies temporal an' divine,
That I for grace an' gear may shine,

Excell'd by nane,
An' a' the glory shall be thine.

Amen, Amen!

Here is the way Bums could make the six-line form sound cheerfully
companionable in the "Address to the Deil":

An* now auld Cloots, I ken you're thinkin
A certain bardie's rantin, drinkin,
Some luckless hour will send him linkin8
To your black pit

£M3uC3u* .R'tlK.'vLy*

'Lmkixu moving quickly.

ROBERT BURNS

But faith! he'll turn a corner jinkin,6
An* cheat you yet.

And this is how gently he could handle it in the opening lines which
set the key of "To a Mouse":

Wee, sleelcit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

WT bickering brattle! 7
I wad be laith to rin an* chase thee,

Wi* murd'ring pattle! &

Perhaps the poem that was passed most gleefully from hand to hand
was "The Jolly Beggars," a piece significantly omitted from Bums's
first volume. He gave it a subtitle, "A Cantata/' indicating that the
work was a mockery of the hymns, oratorios, and devout arias sung in
churches on holy days. An account of its origin was given some years
after Burns's death by John Richmond, who had been Gavin Hamil-
ton's clerk and who had joined the poet on his Mauchline excursions.
Burns and his companions had dropped in at a dingy tavern run by a
Mrs, Gibson, known to those who frequented it as Poosie Nansie, and
found themselves part of a mild orgy, during which raucous songs and
ballads were sung by beggars, chimney sweeps, and old soldiers. A few
days after the jollification, Burns showed Richmond portions of what
might be considered a miniature "Beggar's Opera," and what has been
cherished as one of the lustiest pictures ever drawn of a life that was
irresponsible, sordid, and joyful.

In "The Jolly Beggars" no one, from the country parson to the Prime
Minister, is safe. It is an overflow of animal spirits and abandoned
morality. The "cantata" opens with the poet's "recitative." This sets the
scene and focuses upon a ragged old soldier holding his doxy in his
arms and trolling a song that swaggers in every line. The wench follows
him with a rexniniscently ribald list of her lovers, beginning:

I once was a maid, tho* I cannot tell when,
And still my delight is in proper young men.

0 Jinldn: dodging smartly.

7 Bickering brattle: sudden scamper.

8 Parde: a plow stick.

LIVES OF THE POETS

Some one of a troop of dragoons was my daddie:
No wonder I'm fond of a sodger laddie*

The next is a veteran Merry Andrew — he calls himself "a fool by pro-
fession*'— who expresses the accepted disillusion of the crowd. His is a
bitter "air/' a short aria which finds its climax in a sardonic jibe:

Poor Andrew that tumbles for sport,

Let naebody name wi' a jeer;
There's even, I'm tauld, i' the Court

A tumbler ca'd the Premier.

A strange lot follow: "a raucle carlin" Ccoarse female), whose la-
ment for her deceased Highland lad is anything but lugubrious as it
recounts the couple's thieving exploits; "a pigmy scraper, wi' his fiddle,"
who courts the widow with a light country tune, 'Whistle owre the
lave o't"; a brawling tinker, who takes the fiddler by the beard and woos
and wins the widow with a boastful ditty: "My bonnie lass, I work in
brass/' The poet himself then speaks up. In his own person, he com-
bines the jovial amorality, the reckless hedonism and social contempt of
all the others.

I am a bard of no regard

Wi' gentle folks an a' that;
But Homer-like, the glowrin byke9

Frae town to town I draw that . . .

Their tricks an' craft have put me daft,

They've ta'en me in, an' a' that;
But clear your decks, an' here's the sex!

I like the jads10 for a' that.

The entertainment — which the editors Henley and Henderson
characterized as "humanity caught in the act" — involves the participants
in a final defiance of law, order, and particularly the Church, all of
which are dismissed with cheerful impudence. The poem ends in a
drinking song, an uproar of annihilating humor. The cutthroats, misfits,
and outcasts of society join in a paean to anarchy, a derisive chorus (in

* Glownn byfce; staring crowds.
"Jads: jadtes.

ROBERT BURNS

pure English) which treats the moral world as though its existence
were mythical.

What is tide? What is treasure?

What is reputation's care?
If we lead a life of pleasure,

Tis no matter how or where.

With the ready trick and fable,

Round we wander all the day;
And at night, in barn or stable,

Hug our doxies in the hay.

Does the train-attended carriage

Through the country lighter rove?

Does the sober bed of marriage

Witness brighter scenes of love?

Life is all a variorum,

We regard not how it goes;
Let them cant about decorum,

Who have characters to lose.

A fig for those by law protected!

Liberty's a glorious feast!
Courts for cowards were erected,

Churches built to please the priest.

At twenty-six Burns entered into a relationship which, in spite of
sporadic infidelities, lasted the rest of his life. In Mauchline he had met
Jean Armour, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a reputable contractor
and master mason. It was not long before Jean became pregnant, but
this time Robert was not offhand about the situation. He wanted to
marry the girl and, failing to get her family's consent, arranged a clan-
destine legal ceremony. The couple declared themselves man and wife
before witnesses and signed a document stating that they considered
themselves wed. But, although the girl was bearing Robert's child, her
father refused to acknowledge any agreement. He demanded the "in-
criminating" paper, which Jean was forced to surrender, and though,
for some reason, he did not destroy it, he invalidated it — or thought he

3*3

LIVES OF THE POETS

<&(} — by cutting out both signatures. Armour made it all too plain that
he would not have a son-in-law who was an improvident farmer and
(worse) a man who wasted the hours in silly rhyming. Angered by
Jean's submissiveness, which he considered a betrayal, Burns wrote to
Gavin Hamilton: 'Would you believe it, tho' I had not a hope, nor
even a wish, to make her mine after her damnable conduct; yet when
he told me the names were all cut out of the paper, my heart died
within me; he cut my very veins with the news. Perdition seize her
falsehood and perjurious perfidy! But God bless her, and forgive my
poor, once-dear, misguided girl/'

It was the dear, if misguided, girl he loved with concentrated
passion, though not necessarily with constancy. It was Jean who in-
spired the sincerest sentiments and most unaffected phrases of his love
lyrics.

Of a* the airts the wind can blaw,

I dearly like the west,
For there the bonie lassie lives,

The lassie I lo'e best:
There's wild woods grow, and rivers row,

And mony a hill between;
But day and night my fancy's flight

Is ever wf my Jean.

I see her in the dewy flowers,

I see her sweet and fair:
I hear her in the tunef u' birds,

I hear her charm the air:
There's not a bonie flower that springs

By fountain, shaw, or green,
There's not a bonie bird that sings,

But minds me o1 my Jean.

Burns poured his heart out to anyone who would listen. He did not
minimize his humiliation; he talked of leaving the country — there are
several letters which mention plans for going to Jamaica and managing
a sugar plantation. However, he let his bruised heart be soothed by
another woman: Mary Campbell, a dairymaid, whom he celebrated as
'Highland Mary/' and whom he apparently promised to marry. Most
biographer agree that after Cor perhaps before) intercourse, Bibles

3*4

ROBERT BURNS

were exchanged as a token of troth, that Mary was pregnant, and that
she died in childbirth. Burns became ill with self-reproach. Years after
her death, he wrote the lines called "To Mary in Heaven," intensifying
the sadness of the last verse of the earlier poem:

O pale, pale now, those rosy lips

I aft hae kissed sae fondly!
And closed for aye the sparkling glance

That dwelt on me sae kindly!
And mold'ring now in silent dust,

That heart that lo'ed me dearly!
But still within my bosom's core

Shall live my Highland Mary.

Burns was still mourning for "my lost, my ever-dear Mary, whose
bosom was fraught with truth, honor, constancy and love," three years
after his marriage. That consummation, however, did not happen until
he had had further experiences in paternity. He never ceased being
Jean's lover. A month before Mary's death, Jean gave birth to twins; in
spite of her father, she named them Robert and Jean. Bums appeared to
treat the event lightly, but he was deeply disturbed. He postponed the
projected trip to Jamaica, and confided to Robert Aiken, Armour's
lawyer: "My gayety is the madness of an intoxicated criminal under the
hands of an executioner." Even the volatile Muse, who never refused
to come to his call, did not ease "the pang of disappointment, the sting
of pride, with some wandering stabs of remorse, which never fail to
settle on my vitals like vultures/'

Burns had to prove himself somehow. Rejected as a son-in-law by the
respectable Armours, belittled as a plowman by well-established fann-
ers, he determined to justify himself as a poet He made a careful selec-
tion of his poems — omitting most of the scurrilous and antireligious
verses, as well as 'The Jolly Beggars," for fear of spreading scandal —
and had them printed on a small press in the town of Kilmarnocfc. A
circularized "Proposal" promised "a Work elegantly Printed in One
Volume Price, Stitched, Three Shillings"; an added note stated that
"As the Author has not the most distant mercenary view in publishing,
as soon as so many Subscribers appear as will defray the necessary ex-
pense, the Work will be sent to the Press." The response was unex-
pectedly swift, and the venture was an instant success. Everyone who
heard of it bought the book; even farmhands saved up their pennies to

3*5

LIVES OF THE POETS

get it. Six hundred copies, an unusual amount for a little-known local
rhymer, were disposed of within a month. The learned enjoyed it as
much as the illiterate, and at twenty-seven the scapegrace fanner was
fondly dubbed "Caledonia's Bard/'

In spite of the title — Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect — there
are many poems in the stylish English that Burns affected. Even some
of the most popular Scottish poems are interlarded with — and inter-
rupted by — verses in the poetic diction dear to minor English versifiers.
It is evident that Burns wanted to be recognized as a proper English
poet, part of a respected tradition, and also as an innovator who made
poems out of the burred syllables spoken by an outlandish people. Aim-
ing to please readers who had little in common, Burns too often marred
his work with a mixture that refused to blend and, wanting to be all
kinds of a poet to all kinds of people, he was both truculent and
truckling.

Burns was pleased to play the part of "the simple bard," but the
humility with which he begins his Preface has a false ring: "The fol-
lowing trifles are not the production of the poet, who, with all the
advantages of learned art, and perhaps amid the elegancies and idle-
nesses of upper life, looks down for a rural theme, with an eye to Theoc-
ritus or Virgil. . . . Unacquainted with the necessary requisites for
commencing poet by rule, he sings the sentiments and manners he felt
and saw in himself and his rustic compeers around him, in his and
their native language/'

The pretense of being an unsophisticated and almost uncultured
rustic succeeded. Effectively disarmed, the critics refused to attack
Burns where he was vulnerable. On the contrary, he was lauded for
his weaknesses and was accepted on his own terms; it was the redoubt-
able Henry Mackenzie who, speaking of the poet's "humble and unlet-
tered station," conferred upon him the tide of "this Heaven-taught
plowman."

There are forty-four poems in the Kihnarnock volume. Many of
them are trivial; the style is alternately satirical and sentimental. But,
like most of Burns's work, the conversational tone establishes an imme-
diate rapport. Moreover, the volume contains a great proportion of the
work by which Burns is best known, most of it having been written
before he had left his twenties. Although the devastating "Address to
the Unco Guid," the irreverent "Holy Willie's Prayer," "Death and
Doctor Hornbook," and "The Jolly Beggars" were virtuously left out,
there are, for example, the very first poem, "The Twa Dogs," a social

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satire on Londoners, college-bred fools, and card-playing ladies sipping
their potion of scandal; "Scotch Drink" and 'The Author's Earnest
Cry and Prayer," two bacchanalian ferments which might have resulted
had Anacreon been born in Scotland; "The Holy Fair/' a fine genre
piece modeled upon Fergusson's "Leith Races"; the "Address to the
Deil," which hides its assault on Calvinism under a deceptive geniality;
'The Auld Farmer's New Year Morning Salutation to His Auld Mare,
Maggie," saved from mawkishness by Burns's appraising eye and clear
reason. There is also 'To a Mouse," which triumphs over its defects —
the intrusion of English neoclassical locutions and such stereotypes as
"nature's social union," "earth-born companion," "bleak December,"
"fields laid bare" — and ties up a priceless proverb in a stanza of self-
identification:

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane11
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men

Gang aft agley,12
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain

For promis'd joy,

Among the Kilmarnock poems are some of Burns's worst productions.
'The Cotter's Saturday Night," Burns's most overpraised poem, is one
of them. Once more Burns had gone to Fergusson for his model. But
where Fergusson's "The Farmer's Ingle" is a straightforward pictorial
interpretation, "The Cotter's Saturday Night" is a dubious pastiche, a
conglomeration of Gray, Goldsmith, Shenstone, and Pope, artfully —
and artificially — stuck together. Its shoddy construction is glossed over
with a polish of slick moralizing and grease-paint melodrama. In the
midst of the poem the mother learns that the "neibor lad" who comes
to court her daughter is not a "wild, worthless rake"; nevertheless, the
possibility of "ruin" is ever-present, and Burns, that blithe seducer,
shrieks theatrically:

Is there, in human form, that bears a heart,

A wretch! a villain! lost to love and truth!
That can, with studied, sly, ensnaring art,

Betray sweet Jenny's unsuspecting youth?

No thy lane: not alone.
Agley: awry.

3*7

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Curse on his perjur'd arts! dissembling smooth!
Are honor, virtue, conscience, all exil'd?

Is there no pity, no relenting ruth,
Points to the parents fondling o'er their child?
Then paints the ruin'd maid, and their distraction wild?

Thereupon the poet returns to his native Scots and to the supper that
"crowns the simple board" with "halesome parritch, chief of Scotia's
food/' with milk "their only hawkie [cow] does afford," and the "weel-
hain'd kebbuck [well-kept cheese]" which concludes the meaL The
poem, however, does not end until, in addition to a long array of worn
poeticisms, Bums mounts the pulpit, thumbs the Bible, flings out the
banner, and brings everything to a completely incongruous, flag-waving
finale.

O Thou! who pour'd the patriotic tide,
That streamed thro' Wallace's undaunted heart;

Who dar'd to, nobly, stem tyrannic pride,
Or nobly die, the second glorious part,
(The patriot's God, peculiarly thou art,
His friend, inspirer, guardian, and reward!)
O never, never, Scotia's realm desert,

But still the patriot, and the patriot-bard,

In bright succession raise, her ornament and guard!

If The Cotter's Saturday Night" is a case history of the wrong way
to write a poem, turning a promising idea Ceven with a fawning and
faintly ridiculous dedicatory first verse) into a wall calendar chromo,
"A Bard's Epitaph/' "Despondency, an Ode," "Winter, a Dirge," and
*To a Mountain Daisy" are almost as bad. 'To a Mountain Daisy,"
another favorite poem, is no more than a swollen piece of rhetoric, a
pathetic fallacy stuffed with affectations. The poem reaches a nadir of
bathos when a daisy turned down by the plow, a weed that any farmer
'would be glad to exterminate, is compared to a ruined girl.

Such is the fate of artless maid,
Sweet floweret of the rural shade,
By love's simplicity betray'd,

And guileless trust;
Till she, like thee, all sofl'd, is laid
Low i1 the dust

3*8

ROBERT BURNS

Many readers preferred such cloying banalities to the colloquial
songs and epistles in which Burns is happily himself — there are no
fewer than seven rhymed letters in the Kilmarnock collection — or to the
mordant humor of "To a Louse/' an acrid comment on the pretensions
of "class." The contrast between the fine lady and the louse that climbs
the social ladder — in this case a bonnet in church — culminates in one
of Burns's pithiest utterances:

O wad some Power the gif tie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!

It wad f rae mony a blunder free us,

An* foolish notion:
What airs in dress an* gait wad lea'e us,

An* ev'n devotion!

On the whole, Burns's first and most representative volume lived up
to its mock-rnodest preface. Written to please two different audiences,
Bums hoped for a response from the arbiters of poetic fashion and, at
the same time, from his own uncritical people. He won both, and the
plaudits of the former almost ruined him.

Encouraged by the reception accorded to the Kilmarnock volume and
hoping to increase his small income, Burns decided to try his luck in
the capital. He arrived in Edinburgh in late November, 1786, on one
of the coldest days of the year, but he could not have had a warmer
greeting. The established literati, usually cool to aspiring poets, outdid
one another in cordiality. Aristocrats vied with the academics to honor
him. "My Lord Glencairn and the Dean of Faculty have taken me
under their wing/* he wrote, "and by all probability I shall soon be the
tenth Worthy and the eighth Wise Man of the world."

His Worthiness may have been disputed, but a man of the world
Burns certainly became. His conversation and conviviality were conta-
gious; his country charm was as fascinating as his animated verse. "The
rapid lightnings of his eye/' wrote one of the cognoscenti, "were al-
ways the harbingers of some flash of genius." There was, however,
something wrong about the unreserved enthusiasm; something un-
healthy about being a vogue. It was as a singular phenomenon, an
exotic flower growing on the farmyard compost heap, that Bums
flourished. He was embarrassed and worried; he knew that a secure
future could not be built on the novelty of sudden popularity. "Various
concurring circumstances have raised my fame as a poet to a height

3*9

LIVES OF THE POETS

which I am absolutely certain I have not merits to support/' he told
Robert Aiken, to whom 'The Cotter s Saturday Night" had been ded-
icated. To another friend, the Reverend William Greenfield, he con-
fessed, "Never did Saul's armor sit so heavy on David as does the
encumbering role of public notice with which the friendship and
patronage of some 'names dear to fame1 have invested me. ... To be
dragged forth, with all my imperfections on my head, is what, I am
afraid, I shall have bitter reason to repent. "

As the months passed Burns showed his resentment at being the
celebrity of the season. Aware of the "meteorlike novelty" of his ap-
pearance in the fashionable world, he had tried to live up to it. But he
soon wearied of being presented as a poet who, born a peasant, had to
try not to be too aware of his abnormality. Playing a part, he could not
be his natural self in a society which patronized him and which he
instinctively distrusted.

Financially all went well. With the backing of the Earl of Glencairn,
the publisher William Creech brought out a second, or Edinburgh,
edition of the poems. Burns received an advance of a hundred guineas
for the work, and subscription copies were sold so widely that the net
profit to Burns was a gratifying five hundred pounds. A glossary was
added to the original collection, as well as twenty-two poems, the best
being the "Address to the Unco Guid/' "Dealt and Doctor Horn-
book/' and a few lyrics, some of which (like "Green Grow the Rashes,
O") are cleaned-up versions of bawdy folk songs. The Edinburgh edi-
tion, reprinted in London and pirated in New York, spread his reputa-
tion abroad. The only major poem missing is 'Tarn o' Shanter," which
had not yet been composed.

In spite of the plaudits and profits, Burns was not at peace. He
traveled through the Border country, but he was restless. He lived in
two worlds, at home in neither and unhappy in both. He made another
tour, this time in the Argyllshire Highlands, but the mischief had been
done. The contrast between the lavish hospitality of the landed gentry
and the meagerness of the life to which he had been — and would be —
accustomed spoiled his pleasure. He was relaxed only when listening to
the music of the country singers and remodeling their songs. Burns had
been collecting folk tunes and choruses for some time. As early as 1785,
in his Commonplace Book, he had analyzed the quality of country
songs and had noted how superior the uneven rhythms and irregular
rhymes were to the smoother and more "tamely methodical'* measures.
This has made me sometimes imagine/' he wrote, "that perhaps it

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ROBERT BURNS

might be possible for a Scotch poet, with a nice judicious ear, to set
compositions to many of our most favorite airs."

The possibility became a certainty when James Johnson, a printer-
engraver, whom Burns had met in Edinburgh, planned to issue a Scots
Musical Museum and called upon the poet to assist him. Burns was so
pleased with the idea of a definitive anthology of Scottish songs that he
worked on the project without payment. Moreover, he refused to put
his name to the compilation, which ran to six volumes. This has an-
noyed the scholars, for it is difficult to draw the line between what
Burns edited and what he added, and almost impossible to tell where
the folk song ended and where the poet began. Nevertheless, a com-
parison of many of the known originals with Burns's texts will disclose
the justice of his "nice, judicious ear," especially in those lines which
bear his hidden signature, like a faint but authentic watermark.

Bums's preoccupation with the Musical Museum marked a new turn
in his career. From this time on, he became primarily a lyric writer, and
his revised or completely rewritten songs are the most nearly perfect if
not the purest of his productions.

Burns was still unready to return home; he made excursions into the
provinces and went back to Edinburgh. During the second winter in
the capital Burns had an unusual adventure: he became platonically
attached to a Mrs. Agnes Maclehose. This was something unique in his
amatory experiences. She was twenty-nine, respectable, and middle
class. Although separated from her husband (temporarily, it turned
out), she was a virtuous wife. The affair was violently literary; it was
conducted, in the most highfalutin style, chiefly on paper. There were
burning missives — he signed his letters "Sylvander" and she called her-
self "Clarinda" — but, though they teased and tortured each other with
furtive love-making, their relations, while scarcely innocent, were tech-
nically chaste, and their passion remained unconsummated.

Nearing thirty, Burns decided what was the place for him. In June,
1788, he returned to Mossgiel and to farming, "the only thing of which
I know anything, and heaven above knows but little do I understand of
that/' Things were different at home; even the attitude of the Armours
had changed. They now looked favorably if not fondly on the rascal
whose rhymes had, so unaccountably, made him prosperous. Jean wel-
comed him ardently and again became pregnant, but Burns was no
longer in a hurry to get married and settle down. He had been pulling
wires to get an appointment as Officer of Excise, a kind of inspector,
but when it was not forthcoming he bought a farm at Ellisland, near

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LIVES OF THE POETS

Dumfries, on the bants of the Nith. '1 began at Whitsunday to build a
house, drive lime, et cetera," he wrote. "Heaven be my help, for it will
take a strong effort to bring my mind into the routine of business." He
also made a strong effort to reform; he determined to be a good husband
as well as a good husbandman. After Jean had borne a second pair of
twins — only one of the four survived more than a few weeks — he mar-
ried her, or, as he said with a grimace, he gave her "a matrimonal title
to my corpus."

Between chores Burns amused himself with occasional verses, amia-
ble rhymes to a lord advocate, a printer, an innkeeper, a housewife, a
Masonic lodge; but there is little beyond glibness in the verses. Edin-
burgh had taught him how to turn compliments but not how to turn
out distinguished vers de societe. All the epigrams and occasional pieces
sound trifling in comparison to the songs which he continued to write,
especially those to Jean. There was a vast difference between man and
wife — Jean was almost as illiterate as Burns's mother; they had little in
common except their sexual pleasure in each other. But Burns was
now wedded to responsibility as well as to Jean; he may not have been
faithful but he was fixed in his intentions.

I hae a wife o' my ain

111 partake wi* naebody;
111 take cuckold frae nane,

I'll gie cuckold to naebody.

After a long delay and a final examination, his appointment as ex-
ciseman came through. He received fifty pounds per annum to prevent
smuggling over a district of some twelve parishes. A year later his salary
was raised to seventy-five pounds. Jean, who now superintended most
of the farm work, bore him another son.

At thirty-two, due to discontent with the routine of dull work and an
unsocial life, the old incontinence reasserted itself. Burns had a fling of
promiscuity with Anne Park, a good-looking barmaid in a Dumfries
tavern* She meant little more to him than her predecessors, Meg
Cameron and Jenny Clow, both of whom had briefly enjoyed the poet,
with the usual consequences. In Anne's case, however, die fruit of the
union was not only a child but one of Burns's most impulsive and most
candidly physical poems. He considered it "the best love song I ever
composed in my life, though it is not quite a lady's song."

33*

ROBERT BURNS

Yestreen I had a pint o' wine,

A place where body saw na;
Yestreen lay on this breast o' mine

The gowden locks of Anna . . ,

Ye monarchs, take the East and West

Frae Indus to Savannah,
Gie me within my straining grasp

The melting form of Anna.

There 111 despise imperial charms,

An empress or sultana,
While dying raptures in her arms

I gie and take wi' Anna.

Awa', thou flaunting god o' day!

Awa', thou pale Diana!
Ilk star gae hide thy twinkling ray,

When Fm to meet my Anna.

The Kirk an' State may join an' tell

To do sic things I maunna; ia
The Kirk an' State may gae to hell,

An* 111 gae to my Anna.

Anne delivered Burns's child, a boy, nine days before Jean bore
Burns another son. Jean accepted the occurrence without rancor. "Our
Rab should hae had twa wives," she said sweetly, and brought up
Anne's child with her own.

Realizing at last that Ellisland would never show a profit, Burns dis-
posed of his lease with what stock and crops he possessed, and gave
up farming. At thirty-two he moved to Dumfries and supported his
family on the small salary he received as one of the most minor of civil
servants. In Dumfries, where he lived from 1791 until his death in
1796, he interested himself in political issues and civic affairs. He con-
tinued to satirize the complacency of the "unco guid," mocked the
orthodox, praised the American Congress of 1776, and spoke up for
the spirit of the French Revolution until his position was endangered
and he was forced to repudiate his insurgent utterances. In November,
1792,, the ever-fertile Jean gave birth to another child, this time a

uMaunna: Must not

333

LIVES OF THE POETS

daughter, Elizabeth, who, like most of Burns's other children, lived
only a short while.

Fits of illness were partially alleviated hy bouts of drinking. As a
rule, especially when out with festive companions, he made nothing of
occasional drunkenness; but there were times when his addiction
humiliated and sobered him. Once, after being too well entertained at a
social gathering, he must have gone too far, for he wrote a long,
apologetic letter to his hostess, Mrs. Robert Riddell. The letter is
strained and crammed with affected images, but, beneath the histri-
onics, it is unquestionably contrite. "I daresay that this is the first epistle
you have ever received from the nether world/' it begins. "I write you
from the regions of Hell, amid the horrors of the damned. The time
and manner of my leaving your earth I do not exactly know, as I took
my departure in the heat of a fever of intoxication. . . ." After a series
of flowery excuses, the letter concludes: "My errors, though great,
were involuntary — an intoxicated man is the vilest of beasts. . . .
Regret! Remorse! Shame! ye three hellhounds that ever dog my steps
and bay at my heels, spare me! spare me!"

In spite of the carousing, the ensuing remorse, and, worse, the con-
stant illness, Burns managed to compose some of his most characteris-
tic work: "]ohn Anderson, My Jo," an old song which, by a feat of
verbal legerdemain, he changed from an old wife's mean sexual re-
proach to a warmhearted picture of marital felicity; "O my luve's like a
red, red rose/' a lyric which begins in simple tenderness and ends in
calmly underplayed hyperbole; the pastoral "Ca* the yowes to the
knowes" ("Call die ewes to the hills") and the pitifully protective "Oh
wert thou in the cauld blast," almost his last song, written for a woman
who nursed him as he lay dying; "Auld Lang Syne," without which no
nostalgic get-together can come to a proper end.

^ J793> six years after the Kilmamock edition, a new edition of
Burns's poems appeared, containing twenty new poems, one of them
being 'Tarn o' Shanter," that headlong and hilarious gallop which, mix-
ing the grimly realistic and the wildly supernatural, develops into a
boisterous farce unsurpassed in narrative poetry. Burns would have
been happier about the publication, printed in two impressive volumes,
had he been in better health. But even while his suffering increased, he
kept on assembling snatches of folk song and adding to his private col-
lection of ribaldry, The Merry Muses of Caledonia, which disappeared
so mysteriously after his death. "There is, there must be, some truth in
original sin/' he wrote to one of his jovial friends, enclosing some

334

ROBERT BURNS

samples of his rowdy rhymes. "My violent propensity to bawdy con-
vinces me of it. Lackaday! if that species of composition be the sin
against 'the Haly Ghaist/ I am the most offending soul alive."

The illness increased rapidly in Burns's mid-thirties. He was warned
that he would have to be more temperate, but he could not restrain
himself. "I Fear it will be some time before I tune my lyre again/' he
wrote to George Thomson, under whose aegis he had published A
Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs, a more sumptuous set than
the Scots Musical Museum. "Almost ever since I wrote you last, I have
known existence by the pressure of the heavy hand of pain." In the
spring of 1795 he wrote to Maria Riddell, sister of Mrs. Robert Rid-
dell, that he was "scarce able to hold this miserable pen to this
miserable paper." A year later he was much worse. His appetite was
gone; his muscles were flabby and his bones were frail. He tried sea-
bathing again in a last effort to regain his strength, but he continued
to fail.

His end was wretched. To make things more sordid, a creditor,
hearing that Bums was dying, sued him for non-payment of a bill, and
Burns feared he would be dragged off to jail. Although he had refused
to take money for editing the Scottish songs, he now had to ask the
original publisher for help. "After all my boasted independence, curst
necessity compels me to implore you for five pounds/' Jean was gravid
again, and the dying poet summoned up just enough energy to write to
his father-in-law: "Do, for heaven's sake, send Mrs. Armour imme-
diately. My wife is hourly expecting to be put to bed. Good God! what
a situation for her to be in, without a friend." These were his last
written words. He was in delirium for three days when his heart gave
out and he died, July 21, 1796. While his body was being buried, Jean
gave birth to a posthumous son. The boy, named Maxwell, died in
infancy.

Burns derived the substance as well as the texture of his poetry from
two contrary sources: the conventional English images and genteel
measures of Augustan literature, and the unconventional tropes and
rough rhythms of old Scots songs. Sometimes he made a perfect amal-
gam of the two; sometimes he followed current English fashion and
merely pointed up the lines with Scots locutions.

Much of his work reflects the ambivalence which affected the man.
Burns recognized the division in his jealous fear of the circles to which

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he could not belong and the failure to resign himself to the world in
which he was at home. He called himself "a poor, damned, incautious,
duped, unfortunate fool; the sport, the miserable victim of rebellious
pride and bedlam passions." This characterization was self-flagellating
and unbalanced; it omitted the warmth, the instant response, and the
feeling for humanity which rose above distrust and jealousy. Burns's
sensibility was exceptionally quick and keen; his love went out not only
to beggars, friends in difficulty, and simple folk suffering from "honest
poverty," but to a wounded hare, a pet ewe, a mouse beneath the plow-
share.

Burns cannot be named among the very great. He lacks deep insight;
his imagination is limited; his language is often inflated; his thought, as
well as much of his imagery, is generally trite. But he was an extraor-
dinarily skilled craftsman who was often an inspired singer. The best of
his poems transcend their origins. The beguiling narratives and the
spontaneous songs rise above all derivations and speak in the poet's na-
tive accents, in un-English rhythms, phrases, and figures of speech.
"Auld Lang Syne," for example, was a set of stock properties turned by
various poets around various platitudes until Burns transformed it into
an international expression of comradeship, of things remembered and
an understanding never to be forgotten. Here are the first eight lines in
a version reprinted in Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot

Tho* they return with scars?
These are the noble hero's lot,

Obtained in glorious wars.
Welcome, my Varo, to my breast,

Thy arms about me twine,
And make me once again as blest

As I was lang syne.

This is the way Burns lifted the lines from insipidity to immortality:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot

And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot

And auld lang syne?

We two hae run about the braes,
And pu*d the gowans fine;

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ROBERT BURNS

But we've wandered monie a weary foot
Sin auld lang syne.

The all-too-human Burns has been deprecated by some critics,
glorified by some, and virtually (or virtuously) ignored by others. A
few commentators have protested that he was impulsive but not im-
moral; one of them flatly says, "He was in no sense a libertine." Burns
would have been shocked at the efforts to "purify" him. His enjoyment
of the flesh was natural, and it is declared without shame in the Merry
Muses of Caledonia, a much-censored and almost unprocurable vol-
ume. Love, Burns agreed, gave the lover something of divinity, but
love-making was not necessarily holy. He knew that it was the un-
regenerate animal spirit rather than the spiritual life which promised
most men the most immediate — and, for the poor, the only — dependable
and easily obtainable pleasure. In common with Boccaccio and Rabe-
lais, Bums proved that people could not only delight in sex but laugh
at it.

This fondness for the facetious and bawdy is evidenced in the care-
free accomplishment of the Merry Muses. "Godly Girzie" is mockingly
licentious. 'The Court of Equity," an examination of "the fornicator's
honor," twists legal technicalities into scurrility. "Poor Bodies Hae
Nothing but Mow" (copulation) is a lusty piece of lewdness showing
exactly what princes, prelates, and peasants have in common. "I'm
Owre Young," "Wha'll Mow Me Now," and "Andrew an' His Cuttie
Gun" are lightly dissolute love songs. 'The Patriarch," a most un-
Biblical exchange of courtesies between Jacob and Rachel, is downright
pornography. Burns handles obscenity with every device from sly wit to
frank buffoonery, but his irresistible gusto enlivens and distinguishes
every page.

Libidinous by nature and a tippler by force of circumstance, Burns
distilled a pure essence of the crude stuff of life. Like Heine, who
made his perfect little songs from his great pain, out of a struggle with
poverty, illness, and overwork Burns somehow achieved the {lawlessness
of "Ye Flowery Banks o' Bonie Doon," "O Whistle, and 111 Come to
You, My Lad," "Ae Fond Kiss, and Then We Sever," "Flow Gently,
Sweet Afton," "The Birks of Aberfeldy," and a dozen other lyrics. A
conciliation of the regional and the universal was finally accomplished.
The overwhelming conflicts may have resulted in the death o£ the
peasant, but they brought everlasting life to the poet

337

XVII

Lost Utopias

WORDSWORTH,
COLERIDGE, SOUTHEY

FOR ALL THEIR DIFFERENCES in talent and accomplishment, few
poets started with more in common than William Wordsworth,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey. They began as
rebels who, i£ not revolutionists, were hopeful of the Revolution* Burn-
ing with a sense of man's responsibility to man, they planned a Utopia
where social ethics would take the place of politics and where creative
imagination would supply the spiritual energy to shape a better world.
It was too fair a vision to last; the romantic reformers were betrayed
not only by their dream but by events. The movement began with an
exciting promise. The storming of the Bastille in 1789 had loosed the
spirit of revolution and romance. Insurgence became a young man's
duty; poets were only too happy to answer the call. Wordsworth ex-
pressed the mood for all of them:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!

The imminent rescue of mankind was announced with the enthusi-
astic conviction that the dream was real. 'The inert were roused," wrote
Wordsworth, "and lively natures rapt away." But reality soon became
too terrible for its disciples; the revolutionary vision became a night-

338

WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, SOUTHEY

mare of indiscriminate violence. Four years after the beginning of the
French Revolution, England went to war with France; the dawn of the
nineteenth century brought the threat of Napoleon. It was no longer
possible to believe in revolt as liberation or war as a great catharsis. The
intransigent youths grew into middle-aged conservatives. Southey lived
to be a placid renegade and was appointed poet laureate; Coleridge
buried himself in a library; Wordsworth became a turncoat and a Tory.

William Wordsworth, who dedicated himself to "the essential
passions of the heart," was born April 7, 1770, at Cockermouth, Cum-
berland, near the river Derwent in the lovely Lake District. His father
was a lawyer whose ancestry antedated the Norman Conquest. The
Wordsworths were North Country people, sturdy old Yorkshire stock,
and Wordsworth inherited the blunt speech with its burred inflection.
There were five children: an elder brother, Richard; William; Dorothy,
twenty months William's junior; and two younger brothers, John and
Christopher. His mother died in her thirty-first year; on her deathbed
she said that William, who, in contrast to the gende Dorothy, showed
signs of wildness, was the only one who might be "remarkable either
for good or for evil."

As a child William was moody and difficult. Once, in a fit of pique,
he slashed one of the family portraits; at another time, when he con-
sidered himself unfairly treated, he shut himself in the attic and threat-
ened to commit suicide. There were long visits with his mother's
parents, the Cooksons, who lived at Penrith, and it was there, while
attending school for the first time, he became acquainted with his
cousin, Mary Hutchinson. She was to become Wordsworth's wife, but,
far from being his childhood sweetheart, she received no attention from
him. At eight, when his mother died, he was sent to the small grammar
school at Hawkshead and studied dutifully but without distinction. He
learned less from books than from his ramblings among the mountains
of Windennere and Ambleside, a panorama which was to color all his
poetry and remain the only place where he was truly at home. A
hardy boy, he was fond of all sports, especially hunting, rowing, and
skating. In his early teens he formed the habit of taking long walks,
unaccompanied, up the hills and along the lakes he loved. It was then,
as he relates in his autobiographical The Prelude, that he found he was
a poet and discovered the visionary power which

Attends upon the motion of the winds
Embodied in the mystery of words.

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LIVES OF THE POETS

Five years after the death of his mother, his father died and the
family was broken up. William was fourteen when, with his older
brother, Richard, he went to live with the Cooksons, while Dorothy,
who idolized him even as a child, was cared for by one of her mother's
cousins in far-off Halifax, Yorkshire. It was ten years before Words-
worth saw her again.

Feeling that he was an unsought ward, a shabby dependent on an
uncle who resented his charge, Wordsworth was relieved when, at
seventeen, he entered St. John's College. Cambridge, however, was a
disappointment. Wordsworth was not an outstanding undergraduate.
He studied haphazardly and, after four dull years, during which he
was, as he said, "detached internally from academic cares," he failed to
win a fellowship. He also failed to make friends. To the well-groomed
products of Eton and Harrow he seemed an uncouth, unprepossessing
rustic, and he did nothing to alter the impression. He was an awkward,
ungracious youth, who, declining to mix with his fellows, protected
himself with an irritating aloofness. Stiff and self-centered, he pre-
ferred to ramble alone, and was thought queer because he liked to
compose aloud as he swung along the road. Between eighteen and nine-
teen he wrote "An Evening Walk/' a descriptive catalogue of more
than four hundred conventionally rhymed lines. His early taste in
poetry was for the smoothly second-rate. It was a preference he
retained. Although he made proper obeisances to Shakespeare and
Milton, his affection was toward the pleasantly fluid James Beattie,
whose Minstrel may have prompted Wordsworth to write The Prelude,
toward William Collins, John Dyer, Mark Akenside, Lady Winchilsea,
and other lesser luminaries.

The family hoped that Wordsworth would continue at college and
study for the law, but he showed no such inclination. Dorothy, as al-
ways, excused him. "He wishes very much to be a lawyer if his health
will permit," she wrote zealously, "but he is troubled with violent head-
aches and a pain in his side." Neither the pain nor the headaches pre-
vented him from continuing his arduous pedestrianism or considering
an army career. Postponing any decision about a future — the church
promised the most secure living — he drifted to London and then, lured
by the momentous happenings on the other side of the Channel, to
France. The Bastille had fallen two years before, and he was present
when the monarchy was overthrown and the republic established. He
met Michel Beaupuy, an officer stationed at the garrison in Blois, Beaur
puy, as revealed in some of die most vivid pages of The Prelude,,

34°

WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, SOUTHEY

opened up a new world to the young provincial. The soldier's enthusi-
astic predictions may not have completely convinced the Yorkshireman,
but they persuaded the poet; they changed the sulky malcontent into a
selfless revolutionary. He envisioned a great and glorious age, with

France standing at the top of golden hours,
And human nature seeming born again*

Hating the authoritarianism which had made his early life unhappy,
and instinctively opposed to all privilege, he devoutly believed that

. . . a spirit was abroad
Which could not be withstood, that poverty

. . . would in a little time
Be found no more, that we should see the earth
Unthwarted in her wish to recompense
The industrious . . .
And finally, as sum and crown of all,
Should see the People having a strong hand
In making their own laws.

Electrified by the promise of an immediate Utopia, Wordsworth was
born again. Looking for a lodging in Orleans, he had met Paul Vallon
and, since he was seeking someone to teach him French, Paul intro-
duced him to his sister, Annette. In an atmosphere free of inhibitions,
the twenty-one-year-old Englishman fell irresponsibly in love. Annette,
a few years older than Wordsworth, was an apparently level-headed
young Frenchwoman, yet she gave herself unreservedly to her roman-
tically transformed lover. Less than a year later, on December 15, 1792,
Annette was delivered of a daughter, Ann Caroline, and Wordsworth
went back to England to collect funds. His irregular romance had made
him espouse the cause of freedom with particular eagerness, and he was
about to devote himself to the Revolution when war broke out between
France and England. Everything was altered; communications ceased; it
was impossible to send for Annette and the child. In spite of being an
Englishman, Wordsworth considered himself a "patriot of the world,"
but he was separated from the world he had learned to love and the
woman who had become a symbol of that world.

At twenty-three Wordsworth was a tortured man. He was shocked by
the atrocities that accompanied the Reign of Tenor in France, and he

34*

LIVES OF THE POETS

had lost faith in his own country, which now seemed a despotism de-
termined to put down the revolutionary spirit spreading the hope of
liberty throughout the world. The plight of Annette increased the
sense of catastrophe. He told his family of the emotional crisis, but
Dorothy was his only defender. His uncle, who had been trying to
obtain a curacy for him, saw the hopelessness of the father of an ille-
gitimate child becoming a country parson, and refused to let him enter
the house. Annette never complained; there were no appeals for money,
no frantic outcries, no reproaches. Two surviving letters show that she
expected Wordsworth to rejoin her and that, although she already con-
sidered herself married to him, she looked forward to the ceremony that
would legalize their relations and legitimize their daughter. She wrote
that she had been telling her three-month-old baby about "the dearest
and tenderest of men," and that, although she was troubled and un-
happy, she knew that the time would come when "my dear William can
make the trip to France, give me the title of his wife, and I will be con-
soled."

Annette's steadfastness was unrewarded; her affection was a pathetic
contrast to Wordsworth's later callousness. It was unquestionably a lack
of feeling rather than a lapse of memory which was responsible for a
reference to his sojourn in Orleans years after the event. "I wonder
how I came to stay there so long," he blandly remarked to a visitor in
the presence of his wife, who was aware of the circumstance. It was an
"episode" that the respectable older poet did everything possible to ex-
punge. He destroyed all references to it, along with notes and letters; it
remained a well-guarded secret until seventy years after Wordsworth's
death when researchers discovered the evidence which he hoped would
be kept hidden from posterity.

The thought of Annette, however, did not die quickly. Added to a
sense of personal guilt was Wordsworth's identification with her and
the lost cause. He turned his back on the French Revolution for the
same reason that so many believers in an idealized new dispensation
turn against it, horrified by the blood baths that make the revolution
possible and the reality hideous. But it was many years before Words-
worth's disillusion hardened into reaction.

Wordsworth toyed with the idea of tutoring and contributing to a
contemplated magazine, but nothing came of either notion. He never
wanted to tie himself to any fixed routine. From time to time friends
aided him and often supplied the bare necessities. One of them, Wil-
liam Calvert, had a wealthy brother, Raisley, who was dying of con-

342

WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, SOUTHEY

sumption. Wordsworth helped nurse him and, upon his death, received
a legacy of nine hundred pounds.

When she was apprised of the good fortune, Dorothy determined to
leave her cousins and make a home in the countryside for her favorite
brother. Alluring though the prospect was — Wordsworth longed for a
home and someone to spoil him — he did not immediately retire to the
country as Dorothy had hoped. "Cataracts and mountains are good oc-
casional society/' wrote nature's future laureate, "but they will not do
for constant companions." Instead, he went to London and turned the
legacy into an annuity. It took several months for Dorothy to persuade
William that her plan was not only advisable but imperative, and in
1795 they rented a house in Racedown, Dorsetshire.

Much has been made of Dorothy's adoration of her brother. It has
been broadly insinuated that her love was so strongly, though uncon-
sciously, incestuous that existence with anyone else was impossible for
her. One biographer implies that Wordsworth realized they were falling
irrevocably in love with each other and, discovering this, Wordsworth
conceived "the desperate remedy'* of marrying Dorothy's friend, his
early schoolfellow, Mary Hutchinson. That Dorothy was aware she
was deeply in love with her idol is unquestionable and, she confessed,
"to a degree which I cannot describe." She was, according to her biog-
rapher, Ernest de Selincourt, "probably the most remarkable and the
most distinguished of English writers who never wrote a line for the
general public," and her private Journals show countless suggestions,
ideas, and even phrases of which her brother availed himself. She was
delighted when he made use of her mind, but she was full of happiness
when he was merely around. The very tone of her posthumously
published Journals makes it plain. "I went and sat with W. and walked
backwards and forwards in die orchard until dinner time. He read me
his poem, I broiled beefsteaks. After dinner we made a pillow of my
shoulder — I read to him, and my Beloved slept A sweet evening, as it
had been a sweet day. . . ." 'It is about ten o'clock, a quiet night. The
fire flutters and the watch ticks. I hear nothing else save the breathing
of my Beloved. . . ." "Now for my walk. I will be busy. I will look
well, and be well when he comes back to me. O the darling!" This is
not merely the language of affection but of complete infatuation.

In looks, as in temperament, Dorothy was William's opposite. She
was small, thin, and nervously shy. She spoke hesitantly and walked
with a slight stoop, her eyes, described by De Quincey as "wild and
startling," scanning the earth for a hidden flower or a hurrying bird.

343

LIVES OF THE POETS

William, on the other hand, was solid and self-assured. "He talked well
in his way/' wrote Carlyle in his Reminiscences, "with easy brevity
and force, as a wise tradesman would of his tools and workshop. His
voice was good, frank, and sonorous, forcible rather than melodious:
the tone of him businesslike, sedately confident; no discourtesy, yet no
anxiety about being courteous; a fine, wholesome rusticity. ... He was
large-boned, lean, but firmly knit, tall and strong-looking when he
stood/' De Quincey was more reserved about Wordsworth's appearance.
He described him in his early thirties as five feet ten but, for all his
pedestrianism and love of the outdoors, not athletic in build. His chest
was narrow; his shoulders sloped. His legs were badly shaped, "cer-
tainly not ornamental/' But De Quincey found the face as impressive
as many of the portraits of Titian and Van Dyck. "It was a face of the
long order, often falsely classed as oval. . . . The forehead was not
remarkably lofty, but it is, perhaps, remarkable for its breadth and ex-
pansive development His eyes are not, under any circumstances,
bright, lustrous, or piercing; but, after a long day's toil in walking, I
have seen them assume an appearance the most solemn and spiritual
that it is possible for the human eye to wear. The nose, a little arched,
is large. The mouth composes the strongest feature in Wordsworth's
face." It was the face of an unusual personality, half sensual, half
severe, firm in its earnestness, but scarcely lovable.

When Wordsworth was twenty-three, the publisher Joseph Johnson
brought out his Descriptive Sketches and An Evening Walk. Imitative
of the worst Augustan poetry, they were without merit, and practically
no copies were sold. The few reviews were either patronizing or openly
derisive. It was not until Samuel Taylor Coleridge entered his life at
Racedown that a friendship was formed which not only changed the
character of Wordsworth's work but also altered the course of English
poetry.

Coleridge possessed — or was possessed by — a driving imagination.
Two healthy lifetimes would have not been enough to complete the
multiple projects he left unfinished, and Coleridge's life, far from
hardy, was a long struggle with irresolution and laudanum. He was
born at his father's vicarage at Ottery St. Mary in Devon, October 21,
1772, the last of thirteen children. As a boy he was precocious and,
jealously resentful of being the youngest, troublesome. Once, bullied
by an older brother, he fell into a rage and attacked him with a knife.
Running away, he fell exhausted on a river bank and was not found
until next morning, stiff and almost paralyzed with cold. From that

344

WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, SOUTHEY

time on he was subject to rheumatic pains, and remained a semi-invalid
the rest of his life.

A lonely boy, Coleridge retreated into books — he read The Arabian
Nights at six — and fed his mind with adventures so wild and fancies so
morbid that he often feared the coming of the night. Since he disliked
sports, he was teased by his companions, and learned to live with loneli-
ness.

His impoverished father died when Coleridge was nine, and a local
judge had him entered as a charity scholar. It was a shabby school,
crowded with more than seven hundred boys and almost as many girls,
where mind and body were equally starved. Later in life he recalled
some of the details: "Every morning a bit of dry bread and some bad
small beer. Every evening a larger piece of bread and cheese or butter*
For dinner on Sunday boiled beef and broth. . . , Our appetites were
damped, never satisfied, and we had no vegetables. . . . My whole be-
ing was, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple
myself in a sunny corner and read, read, read; to fancy myself on
Robinson Crusoe's island, finding a mountain of plum-cake, and eating
a room for myself, and then eating into the shapes of tables and chairs
— hunger and fancy!"

Fortunately there was one teacher, the Reverend James Boyer, who
literally whipped Coleridge into shape. He goaded him out of loneli-
ness— "Boy! The School is your father! Boy! The School is your
mother! The School is your sister! your brother! all the rest of your
relations!" He taught him to respect the severity of the classics and
abjure the elaborately Artificial circumlocutions of his contemporaries —
"Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? Your
nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian Spring? Oh, aye, the cloister-
pump, I suppose!" Boyer also took care of theological dissensions. He
flogged Coleridge when he found him reading Voltaire, and the young
student lived in "a kind of religious twilight . . My heart forced me
to love Jesus, whom my reason would not permit me to worship."

Coleridge's looks were startling, chiefly because his features seemed
to contradict one another. The eyes were gray, tender, and luminous,
but the eyebrows were thick and coarse. The forehead, framed in curling
black hair, was noble, but the mouth was sensual and slack. "I have the
brow of an angel/' he once declared, "and the mouth of a beast. I can-
not breathe through my nose, so my mouth, with thick lips, is almost
always open. . . . Tis a mere carcase of a face/' Although he was only
a little above middle height, his schoolfellows found him striking. One

345

LIVES OF THE POETS

of them, William Evans, invited him to his home, and at sixteen Cole-
ridge fell in love with Evans* sister, Mary, who worked in a milliner's
shop. He took long walks with her, wrote verses in her honor, and swore
the extravagant oaths which sound ludicrous only when we cease to
be young. His passion for Mary Evans did not, however, prevent ardent
flirtations with other receptive young ladies, to whom he also indited
love-struck lyrics. "Genevieve," the best example of Coleridge's early
verse, was written to another Muse, who, as Boyer had indicated, was
the daughter of the school nurse.

His brother Luke was a doctor and, walking the wards with him,
Coleridge thought of becoming a surgeon. His reading broadened; he
pored over medical books and surgical encyclopedias and, though he
abandoned the idea of practicing medicine, learned enough to be
fascinated by diseases and to acquire, in addition to his illness, an in-
tense hypochondria. His ailments were real enough. Swimming across a
stream and letting his clothes dry on him aggravated the rheumatism to
which he was subject. As a consequence, half his time from seventeen
to eighteen he was kept in bed. It was then he first understood the pain-
relieving power of opium, to which, in the form of laudanum, he be-
came addicted.

At nineteen, Coleridge received a scholarship at Jesus College,
Cambridge, where his looks and loquacity won him new friends. But
Cambridge was damp; it made the rheumatism worse and, often "nailed"
to his bed, Coleridge resorted to the alleviating drug. Conviviality
was another kind of alleviation. Inspired by the French Revolution,
he became an eloquent republican and gathered disciples about him.
Popularity was expensive, and Coleridge was soon in debt. His elder
brothers helped him; but, paying only the most pressing obligations, he
wasted the rest of the money. Hoping to escape his debts, he went to
London — "I fled to Debauchery'* is the way he put it — and, having
gambled futilely in the Irish Sweepstakes, considered suicide. Instead,
he decided to lose himself in the army. At twenty-one he enlisted in the
1 5th Light Dragoons, changing his name (but retaining the initials) to
the bizarre Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. Coleridge immediately re-
gretted his folly, appealed to his brother George, and four months
later the family succeeded in obtaining his discharge. He returned to
Cambridge, where his scholarship was continued, gave up his frivolities,
and worked hard. He accomplished several excellent translations and
composed tte first draft of Lewti, or the Circassian's Love-Chant. At
the end of the term, he met Robert Southey, to whom he was sponta-

346

WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, SOUTHEY

neously drawn by a common love of poetry and practice in the art.

Sou they was born August 12,, 1774, in Bristol. His antecedents were
highly respectable if not notable. His grandfather was a Somerset
farmer, and his father was an unsuccessful cloth merchant whose wife
had somewhat superior social pretensions. It was his mothers well-to-do
sister who brought up the boy. She had the traditional spinster aunt's
eccentricities — she made Robert sleep with her and dressed him in girl's
clothes until he was six — but she gave him a good cultural foundation.
She read Shakespeare to the child and took him to the theater before
he was seven. It did not, therefore, seem remarkable to her that her
nephew, at the age of eight, began to write a tragedy on the life of
Scipio. Young Southey also thought it perfectly natural. "It is the
easiest thing in the world," he said to a friend of his aunt. "You have
only to think what you would say if you were in the place of the
characters, and then make them say it."

From play writing Southey went on to poetry. By the time he had
reached thirteen he had written three long rhymed epistles as well as
a few epics. His schooling started uneventfully* He was proficient
enough in Latin to help some of the other boys with their assignments,
but nothing distinguished him until he was in his senior year at West-
minster School. A magazine, The Flagellant, which he and a fellow
student had founded, published his article on flogging. It was a protest-
ing as well as a precocious piece of writing, and Southey was sum-
marily expelled. His application for entrance to Christ Church re-
jected, Balliol College, Oxford, finally accepted him at nineteen.

War between France and England broke out the very month that
Southey entered Balliol, and instead of becoming an earnest student he
became an ardent republican. He considered it shameful to sit and
study Euclid "at the moment when Europe is on fire with freedom/'
Nevertheless, the seeds of compromise were already taking root. "I
must learn to break a rebellious spirit," he wrote. "I must leam to pay
respect to men remarkable only for great wigs and little wisdom/' First,
however, he glorified the spirit of liberty in an epic, Joan of Arc, al-
though forty years later he admitted that it was the work of a youth
whose notions of freedom "were taken from the Greek and Roman
writers, and who was ignorant enough of history and human nature
to believe that a happier order of things had commenced with the
independence of the United States and would be accelerated by the
French Revolution."

Southey was not so philosophical when he wrote Joan of Arc; at

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LIVES OF THE POETS

twenty he was hopelessly self -divided. In one mood he declared, 'The
more I see of this strange world, the more I am convinced that society
requires desperate remedies." But when the French revolutionists
guillotined the moderates along with the royalists, he became thor-
oughly disenchanted. He was thinking seriously of emigrating to
America when he met Coleridge, succumbed to his charm, and
joined forces with him.

It was Southey who broached the idea of a community of kindred
free spirits, preferably in the United States, which, after a revolutionary
struggle, had freed itself. Two of Coleridge's close friends, Robert
Allen and George Burnett, agreed to emigrate. Other idealistic dis-
ciples were Robert Lovell, a young Quaker, married to Mary Fricker,
who, with her sisters, worked as a milliner. The other Fricker sisters
were also to be an integral part of the scheme. Edith, the youngest,
was secretly engaged to Southey, who had become acquainted with her
when he was eighteen; Sara was earmarked for Coleridge, though he
was still mooning over Mary Evans. Another friend, Tom Poole, whose
experience as a practical fanner was felt to be invaluable, encouraged
the group, although he was not yet ready to leave his own acres.

There were to be twelve couples. Everyone would work three or
four hours a day, and everything would be shared* It was to be a model
state, removed from murderous war, bloody revolution, and the after-
math of violence, a small Utopia where no one would be derided for his
ideas or persecuted for liberating activities. Coleridge gave the pro-
posed union a name: Pantisocracy. Opposed to Aristocracy, the govern-
ment of the self-chosen, self-perpetuating elite, and differing from
Democracy, the government in which the deluded many were ruled by
an elected few, Pantisocracy was to be a social organization in which
everyone had a truly equal voice. The location was to be on the
Susquehanna, an irresistible choice; the very sound of the name was
full of poetry and promise.

For a while everything went smoothly. Coleridge could not forget
Mary Evans, but the project came first, so he paid court to Sara Fricker;
and, while Southey's aunt warned him that if he persisted in marrying
an impecunious hat-maker she would disinherit him, Southey remained
steadfast to Edith. But the sun of Pantisocracy had scarcely risen before
it was obscured by clouds. Coleridge's brother wrote letters of re-
monstrance, and Mary Evans urged Coleridge not to leave England on
"a plan so absurd and extravagant" Before he came to a final resolve,
Coleridge proposed to Mary by mail, and her answer — a reiteration

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WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, SOUTHEY

that she would always feel like a sister to him — forced him to decide.
"I will do my duty," he assured Southey, who was fretting over the
delays; and after another period of procrastination, Coleridge at twenty-
three married Sara Fricker on October 4, 1795.

In spite of the careful planning Pantisocracy was in trouble. A new
war threatened the uneasy peace between England and the United
States, and the hope of a settlement on the Susquehanna was aban-
doned. A farm in Wales was considered, and the prospective partners
tried to raise money by writing, publishing, and lecturing; but instead
of finding capital for the venture the two poets found themselves in
debt. The once-warm enthusiasm grew tepid, then fell to a chill apathy.
The fraternal group ceased to fraternize. Coleridge's rheumatic pains
were intensified; Southey upbraided his colleague because of his un-
punctual appearance at meetings and accused him of backsliding.
When the inevitable break came, each blamed the other for the failure.
Southey, after secredy marrying Edith against the wish of his family,
reconsidered the situation and, promising to study law, accompanied a
wealthy uncle on a long sojourn in Portugal. Coleridge, with the wife
he had married "from principle, not feeling," moved to a cottage in
Clevedon and went back to his poetry.

Visiting Tom Poole at Nether Stowey, Coleridge fell in love with
the place, and, after Sara delivered her first child, David Hartley,
Poole found a home for the Coleridges in the village. Living with a
crying baby, a petulant mother-in-law, and a wife who suspected she
was not loved aggravated Coleridge's neuralgia. The pain raged from
the temples to his shoulders; he said he "ran about the house naked,
endeavoring by every means to excite sensations in different parts of my
body and so to weaken the enemy by creating diversion." He increased
the dosage of laudanum from a few drops to seventy, but the relief was
only temporary and the pain still "niggled/*

A year later, in March, 1797, Coleridge happened to visit Words-
worth at nearby Racedown, and the two poets found themselves in
immediate rapport. They talked about poets in general and about
Southey in particular. Wordsworth maintained that Southey wrote too
glibly, "too much at his ease," that he relied "too much on story and
events in his poems to the neglect of those lofty imaginings that are
peculiar to, and definitive of, die poet." Coleridge agreed, adding that
while Southey made his work "more profitable to him from the fluency
with which he writes," posterity would find his poetry "unseemly"
and even the beautiful passages would suffer "from the bad company

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LIVES OF THE POETS

they keep." It may have been Wordsworth's definiteness, even his
dogmatism, his rough country strength, or the combination of these
characteristics which so appealed to the delicate and indecisive Cole-
ridge; from the first long conversation the younger poet regarded the
el(jer — his senior by only two years — with unreserved and self-abasing
worship. Wordsworth, a taker rather than a giver, accepted the homage
with equanimity. A few months after the first visit, the Wordsworths
moved to Alfoxden in order to be nearer the adulating Coleridge.
Meeting almost every day, the poets, encouraged by Dorothy, planned
new ventures, and the trio became "three persons with one soul/'

In 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge collaborated on a volume en-
tided Lyrical Ballads. Both poets were pledged to the romantic point
of view as opposed to the classical position, but their attitude was
essentially dissimilar. It was agreed that Coleridge was to deal with the
bizarre and make incredible romances seem real, while Wordsworth was
to reveal the romance inherent in the commonplace. It was Words-
worth who stressed the neglect of the poetry of everyday life, and who,
according to Coleridge, determined "to give the charm of novelty to
things of everyday, and to excite a feeling analogous to the super-
natural by awakening the mind's attention to the lethargy of custom,
and directing us to the loveliness and wonders of the world before us —
an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of familiarity,
we have eyes that see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither
feel nor undertstand."

In an enlarged edition of Lyrical Ballads, published in 1800, and in
another revision published two years later, Wordsworth added an
important Preface. Critics have pointed out inconsistencies between
Wordsworth's insistent theories and his imperturbable practice, but if
his speculations on language and the use of "poetic diction'' were con-
troversial, they were — and still are — cogent Too many versifiers be-
lieved that the Muse could be summoned by a prescribed formula, a
routine cantrip, that wonder and beauty could be achieved by the
mere mention of words like wondrous and beautiful, and that the
cliches and circumlocutions of the established poetic diction were in
themselves poetry. Wordsworth inveighed against this. He declared
that poetry was not composed in a special speech which was the
opposite of prose, but, ratter, that it was heightened prose, lifted to
an intensity of communication. Moreover, he contended that poetry
not only could but should be written in "the language really used by
* He considered the poems in the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads

35°

WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, SOUTHEY

"experiments , . . written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the
language of conversation in the middle and lower classes o£ society is
adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure."

The reception accorded to the Lyrical Ballads was such as might have
discouraged spirits even more ardent than Wordsworth's and Coleridge's.
The collection which was to affect the writing of poetry for generations
was almost unnoticed when it first appeared. Coleridge's major poem,
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," one of the glories of English
literature, was derided for its "archaisms/' and Wordsworth's magnifi-
cent soliloquy, "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,"
was wholly ignored. 'Tintern Abbey" justified Wordsworth's interpre-
tation of the romantic nature of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of
powerful feeling" which "takes its origin from emotion recollected in
tranquillity." More than most, this is a poem which recollects and con-
firms, which recalls beloved sights and sensations, and reaffirms the
healing power of meadows, woods, and mountains.

. . . For I have learned
To look on Nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

In a solemn cadence addressed to Dorothy, Wordsworth orchestrates
"the still, sad music of humanity" and repeats his faith in Nature,
which "never did betray the heart that loved her."

„ . . and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights

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LIVES OF THE POETS

Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy . . .

While Lyrical Ballads was being put together for publication Cole-
ridge was experiencing fresh difficulties and frustrations. Of all his
uncompleted works, the unfinished "Kubla Khan" is our greatest loss;
Coleridge himself explained the inspiration, inception, and ruin of the
poem. He had been thinking of ancient tales full of foreboding —
"ancestral voices prophesying war/' He had been quieting his pains with
opium to allay an attack of dysentery and soothing his troubled mind
with the account of the tropical Paradise in The Pilgrimage of Samuel
Purchas. He fell asleep after reading: "In Xamidu did Cubla Can build
a stately palace, encompassing sixteen miles of plain ground with a wall,
wherein are fertile meddowes, pleasant springs, delightful streames,
and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a
sumptuous palace of pleasure, which may be removed from place to
place." During a three-hour sleep Coleridge began shaping a poem
and had, so he tells us in the third person, "the most vivid confidence
that he could not have composed less than from two to three hun-
dred lines . . . without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On
awakening he appeared to himself to have a distant recollection of the
whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote
down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was un-
fortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock and
detained by him above an hour, and on return to his room found, to
his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained
some vague recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet with
the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the
rest had passed away."

Lovers of poetry can never forgive the person from Porlock, even
though Coleridge was able to put some of the "still surviving rec-
ollections" down on paper and achieve a miraculous fragment. Vivid
yet visionary, "Kubla Khan" is sheer incantation, evoking magic
whenever it is repeated. It is also a Gothic triumph of the imagination,
unique and ineffable.

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WOIUDSWORXH, COLEBXDGE, SOUTHEY

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:
\Vhere Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles o£ fertile ground
"With walls and towers were girdled round :
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree,
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place; as holy and enchanted

As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing>

A mighty fountain momently was forced,

Amid whose swif t half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:

And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves;

"Where was heard the mingled measure

From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:

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LIVES OF THE POETS

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Southey had returned to England, a changed man, after six con-
templative months in Portugal. He settled near Bristol and confessed
that he had thought things over and that "little of the ardent enthusiasm
which lately fevered my whole character remains. I have contracted my
sphere of action within the little circle of my own friends, and even
my wishes seldom stray beyond it? He saw Coleridge from time to time,
but their relationship had completely altered. "We are acquaintances
and feel kindliness toward each other," wrote Coleridge, "but I do not
esteem or love Southey as I must esteem and love the man whom I once
dared call by the holy name of friend/' The severance of the old
intimacy with Southey brought Coleridge still closer to Wordsworth.
Coleridge had thought of becoming a minister — he had preached in
nearby Unitarian chapels — and the pulpit seemed his physical as well
as his spiritual salvation: fl suppose I must become a minister as a less
evil than starvation" — but, typically, he soon abandoned the idea of
preaching for a li ving.

In the autumn of 1798 Coleridge and the Wordsworths traveled
to Germany. Coleridge decided to apply himself to the German
language and German literature and, with his insatiable thirst for
knowledge, turned to German philosophy. Wordsworth did not share
Coleridge's passion for studies. Instead, he went on to Goslar, where
he wrote the baffling "Lucy" poems, which may have been inspired by
Dorothy or by some mysterious unknown. Chiefly, however, Words-

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WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, SOUTHEY

worth began making nostalgic notes for the memories of childhood
which were to be incorporated in The Prelude and which would prove
that poetry was "emotion recollected in tranquillity." Unable to learn
the German language or love the Germans, he missed his homeland
with outspoken intensity.

I traveled among unknown men

In lands beyond the sea;
Nor, England, did I know till then

What love I bore to thee.

Tis past, that melancholy dream!

Nor will I quit thy shore
A second time; for still I seem

To love thee more and more.

In December, 1799, Wordsworth and Dorothy settled in Dove
Cottage, Windermere. It was an appropriately named dwelling in a
secluded part of the hilly landscape, small, neat, cozy, a true dovecote.
Chaffinches clustered about the door, and Dorothy fed them from the
kitchen, while William composed himself and his verses in the little
summerhouse at the top of the garden. The poet had exchanged re-
belliousness for respectability, and the integral Yorkshire conservatism
reasserted itself. A few years earlier he had proudly declared, "I am of
that odious class men called democrats, and of that class I shall for
ever continue/' Now, however, he was a passively retired country
gentleman.

Dorothy seemed happy; she had prayed for some such acceptance of
isolation and was glad that her darling and dangerously susceptible
brother had ceased to be exercised about things controversial. "I think
I can answer for William's caution about expressing political opinions/*
she had written even before they retired to Dove Cottage. "He is very
careful, and seems well aware of the dangers of contrary conduct/*
Dorothy saw to it that they lived decently if frugally. She not only
managed the little household and tended the garden, but also cooked,
took care of Coleridge when, during his frequent visits, he suffered
from one of his spells, and made fair copies of Wordsworth's scarcely
legible manuscripts. She told herself that she never was happier; but she
was beginning to feel tensions of which she was only half aware. She
was in love with her brother, but she was afraid of that love and

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equally afraid that he would turn to someone else; she could not be
sure that he had forgotten Annette. She was also fascinated by Cole-
ridge; but Coleridge was married and, although he had never been in
love with his wife, divorce was out of the question and adultery was
•unthinkable. At thirty Dorothy was already beginning to age; within
a few years she declined into the traditionally neurotic spinster.
Although her bodily health remained good, there were signs of the
mental disorder which, after sixty, wrecked her memory, destroyed her
mind, and made her end her days an elderly, insensible child.

It was with some apprehension that Dorothy accompanied William
when, in 1802, after Europe had been pacified by the treaty of
Amiens, he crossed the Channel to meet Annette and his daughter,
Caroline, now ten years old. Nothing apparently was said about
marriage — perhaps by this time neither Annette nor her family desired
it, since the poet presented no prospects as a husband — but Wordsworth
remained in France a month. Many of the days were spent walking
(always his favorite pastime) and now he walked with his daughter.
An unquestionably autobiographical record of one such walk is the
sonnet, "On the Beach at Calais/' addressed to the child. It is a poem
hushed in tone and unforgettably moving.

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free;

The holy time is quiet as a nun

Breathless with adoration; the broad sun

Is sinking down in its tranquillity;

The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the sea:

Listen! the mighty Being is awake,

And doth with his eternal motion make

A sound like thunder — everlastingly.

Dear child! dear girl! that walkest with me here,

If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,

Thy nature is not therefore less divine:

Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year,

And worship'st at the Temple's inner shrine,

God being with thee when we know it not.

Two months after returning to England, Wordsworth, without pre-
liminaries, married his plain and capable cousin, Mary Hutchinson.
The arrangement was eminently comfortable and conventional — there
had been nothing resembling a courtship — and the marriage was un-

356

WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, SOUTHEY

marred by the intrusion of passion. Wordsworth's lyrical tribute to Ms
wife begins romantically enough:

She was a phantom of delight

When first she gleamed upon my sight . . .

but the poem does not, as might have been expected from such an
opening, ascend into ecstasy. On the contrary, the poet goes on to regard
his wife as

A creature not too bright or good
For human's nature's daily food . . .

a being whose "household motions" are light and free and who is

A perfect woman, nobly planned,

To warm, to comfort, and command . . .

a summation which, while commending and comforting, is scarcely
an apostrophe to a romantic ideal.

Mary was Dorothy's intimate friend, and so was her younger and
livelier sister, Sara. Dorothy did not attend the wedding. The entry
of October 4 in her Journal is a curious one: "My brother William was
married to Mary Hutchinson. At a little after 8 o'clock I saw them go
down the avenue towards the church. William had parted from me
upstairs. When they were absent my dear little Sara prepared the break-
fast. I kept myself as quiet as I could; but when I saw the two men
running up the walk, coming to tell us it was over, I could stand it no
longer. I threw myself on the bed, where I lay in stillness, neither
hearing or seeing anything till Sara came upstairs to me and said, They
are coming/ This forced me from the bed where I lay, and I moved,
I knew not how, straight forward, faster than my strength could cany
me till I met my beloved William, and fell upon his bosom."

There was a kind of honeymoon which lasted two days. Dorothy
went along, and when the trio returned, they made their home, as
Dorothy intended, in Dove Cottage. Four children were born, two of
whom died in infancy, and they were cared for by the three women,
for Sara Hutchinson had also become part of the household. It was un-
contestably a marriage of convenience, and convenient comfortableness
was what the poet now preferred above everything — Coleridge spoke of
Mary as one more of 'Wordsworth's petticoats."

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LIVES OF THE POETS

It was Sara who made Coleridge's visits more and more frequent, and
it was to Sara he turned for comfort — he dictated some of his finest
poems to her. Dorothy and Sara were fascinated by Coleridge and
frankly sorry for him; they considered his humdrum wife unworthy of
her scintillating husband. Except for the final intimacy, Sara gave him
everything which his wife could not give: intellectual understanding,
pleasurable conversation, solace, and a half-playful, half-pitying tender-
ness. Coleridge's unrestrained poem, "Love/* is an idealization of his
relations with Sara, for whom he felt a depth of affection which de-
veloped into a disturbing passion. Like much of his poetry, it was an
emotion that was never fulfilled, and for a while, Coleridge continued
to live with a disgruntled wife who considered him a failure. She had
grounds for her displeasure: her husband was none of the things she
had expected of him. He had enjoyed himself in Germany without any
discernible profit; he had not become either a celebrated poet or a
steady wage-earner. Her unconcealed disappointment was almost as
bad for him as the climate of the Lake District The damp mists and
continually rainy mornings plagued him with incessant colds.

Physically wretched and spiritually depressed, Coleridge gave way
to complete misery. 'The poet is dead in me. ... I have forgotten
how to make a rhyme," he wrote in self-pity that was also self-deception.
In Rejection: an Ode," addressed to Sara Hutchinson, he poured out
his hopeless love, a pathetic valedictory. In 1804, Coleridge was per-
suaded to go to Malta for his health, but when he returned three years
later, he was neither healthier nor happier than when he had gone. He
tried to make a home for himself in London and, later, with the
Wordsworths. But he was overcome with a sense of failure, especially
when he thought of his collaborator, "the latchet of whose shoes I am
unworthy to unloose." He proved to be a difficult companion and an
impossible guest; his condition alarmed the Wordsworths when, on one
occasion, he tumbled half stupefied into the cottage, Dorothy and Sara
did what they could to preserve the intimacy; but Wordsworth felt
that Coleridge had become too dependent, too troublesome, and, in
short, a nuisance.

As Coleridge's health grew worse, his poetic power weakened. He
tried to finish the necromantic "Christabel/' begun years before, but
Be floundered from one passage to the next, As poetry became harder
to write he engaged in technical criticism, erudite essays, sporadic
journalism, and political pot-boiling. His refuge was conversation — "the
stimulus of conversation suspends the terror that haunts my mind/' he

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WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, SOUTHEY

confided to his notebook — and Hazlitt said that when Coleridge talked,
he talked on forever, "and you still wished him to keep on talking." He
had become famous for his extempore lectures, but he cared less and less
for applause. Gradually he drifted away from the Wordsworths as well
as from his wife and went to live in London. He never returned. He
enjoyed nothing, but he endured. At forty-five his features, said Lamb,
were essentially untouched. "His face when he repeats his verses hath
its ancient glory, an Archangel a little damaged."

The last eighteen years of Coleridge's life were his least troubled. He
placed himself under the care of the physician James Gillman, lived
with his family, and rarely left the Gillman home. He was pleased
that two of his four children, Hartley and Sara, inherited a small but
definite share of their father's gifts; both wrote poetry which was
praised not merely because it bore the family name. Although al-
ways under treatment, Coleridge was productive during his last years.
His Biographia Literaria was followed by a revised edition of essays
from a periodical, The Friend, and Sibylline Leaves; lectures on Milton
and Shakespeare proved that he had not lost his power to stimulate
audiences. Scientists and philosophers came to confer with him. He
seldom argued with them, for he held, like Blake, that "Reason is much
nearer to Sense than to Understanding: for Reason is a direct aspect of
Truth, an inward beholding." It was "an inward beholding" that
sustained him until his sixty-second year, when he died, July 25, 1834.

Before he died Coleridge had become reconciled with Southey — the
two families shared a house for a while — but the old companionship
could not be revived. Southey had abjured idealism and had told him-
self that all a man needed to be successful was a comfortable religion
and a supply of common sense. He wrote fluently — no one has ever
computed the extent of his activities as author, reviewer, editor,
translator, and anthologist — but facility was no substitute for the al-
most total lack of feeling and the infrequency of an original thought*
The success he hoped for was not long in coining. A revision of Joan
of Arc was received with more enthusiasm than anything written by
Coleridge or Wordsworth. Southey's Letters Written During a Short
Residence in Sfain and Portugal were well liked, and a new volume of
his Poems contained the shorter pieces which are still quoted. During
another visit to Portugal he completed Thcdaba the Destroyer and
another lurid epic, The Curse of Kehama. On his return he became a
leading contributor to The Quarterly Review, the most prominent Tory
sheet of the period.

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Southey was thirty-nine when he was offered the laureateship upon
the death of Henry James Pye, the laureate who, it was said, had
attained the eminence by rescuing the wig of George III while His
Majesty was hunting. Sir Walter Scott had been proposed for the
office, but he had refused it — he concurred with the Duke of Buc-
cleuch's opinion that the position, **by the general concurrence of the
world, is stamped ridiculous." Southey seemed to be politically, if not
poetically, the right -man for the award, and he hurried to accept it.
Byron, full of republican ardor, attacked Southey and his lack of
principles; the mocfcheroic opening of Don Juan excoriates the rene-
gade in "good, simple, savage verse."

Honors and troubles descended simultaneously on Southey. He
was recovering from the loss of several children when he suffered a
new affliction. **I have been parted from my wife by something worse
than death," he wrote at sixty. "Forty years she has been the life of my
life, and I have left her this day in a lunatic asylum/' Three years
later his wife died, and there were family dissensions when, within a
few months after her death, he married the poet Caroline Bowles. An
unhappy creature, struggling between conscience and compromise,
Southey's mind gave way; he died of softening of the brain on March
21, 1843. A bust to his memory was placed in the Poet's Corner of
Westminster Abbey.

Impressive though they are by their mere number, Southey's
more than fifty volumes of prose and verse are examples of haphazard
writing which, removed from their times, are almost unreadable. Haste
and a lack of values account for most of the dissatisfaction; much of
Sourhey's work was flatly sententious, an inevitable target for the
parodists, notably "The Old Man s Comforts/' which Lewis Carroll
caricatured in "Father William." Of the prose, the best is the least
literary: his letters. Of the poetry nothing survives except a ballad or
two, a little didactic verse, and the ironic stanzas on the "famous vic-
tory" at Blenheim.

Although he was the oldest of the three, Wordsworth outlived Cole-
ridge and Southey by many years. After Coleridge had separated from
his collaborator, Wordsworth became increasingly self-centered and
self-satisfied. His talks were monologues; instead of conversing, he
spoke inarguably in pontifical conclusions. When he moved to Rydal
Mount, another part of the Lake District, the liberal in him, growing
feebler with the years, finally died. He refused to comment when the
Spanish people attempted to overthrow their tyrannical government;

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WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, SOUTHEY

he kept silent during the Risorgimento when the desperate Italians
tried to free themselves from Austrian oppression. Placing security-
above liberty, he opposed a free press, and in 1814 he was appointed
Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland, a sinecure which brought
him one thousand pounds a year. Having broken with Coleridge, he
refused to visit De Quincey because, even though he had married
the mother, De Quincey was the father of illegitimate children. In
1818 he supported his patron, the unscrupulous Lord Lowther, and
worked hard against his liberal opponent. As a reward he was appointed
Justice of the Peace for Westmorland. A complete Tory at the age of
seventy-two, he received a pension of three hundred pounds from
the Crown.

He was seventy-three when Southey died and he was named poet
laureate. In his Journals the painter Benjamin Haydon described a
royal levee at which Wordsworth was received by the young Queen
Victoria and for which the laureate had to borrow full-dress regalia.
"Moxon had hard work to make the dress fit. It was a tight squeeze; but
by pulling and hauling they got him in. Fancy the high priest of
mountain and flood on his knees in a court in a dress that did not
belong to him, with a sword that was not his own, and a coat which
was borrowed!"

It was this spectacle that the young poet Robert Browning ridiculed
and lamented. Browning's poem, "The Lost Leader/' pillories the
apostate who accepted the pension C"a handful of silver") in return for
his defection, and repentantly bent the knee as the official court poet
with "a riband to stick in his coat."

We that had loved him so, followed him, honored him,

Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,
Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,

Made him our pattern to live and to die!
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,

Burns, Shelley, were with us — they watch from their graves!
He alone breaks from the van and the freemen,

He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves!

During the final twenty-five years of his life, Wordsworth wrote little
of importance; most of the time was spent revising and augmenting his
early poems. The Excursion, which he had begun in his forties, was
intended to be the major work of a lifetime; but, although it has

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noteworthy and even noble passages, it is in its totality, as Coleridge
implied, neither philosophy nor poetry. It seems to say that virtue and
truth exist only in the countryside — a false conception founded on a
pathetic fallacy. Dorothy's mind had failed when he was in his late
sixties. During the last part of his life he was alone; he withdrew him-
self from people and pleasures. His eyes bothered him and he gave up
reading; he turned away from books not because of his failing eyesight
but, as he told a friend, because of lack of interest. Two weeks after
his eightieth birthday, he died, April 2,3, 1850, and was buried in the
churchyard at Grasmere.

Wordsworth is the most vulnerable and, hence, the most parodied of
poets. Five famous as well as effectively critical parodies are Shelley's
'TPeter Bell the Third"; Hartley Coleridge's "He lived amidst th' un-
trodden way"; Lewis Carroll's lampoon of "The Leech-Gatherer" ("I
saw an aged, aged man a-sitting on a gate"); Horatio and James
Smith's "The Baby's Debut" from Rejected Addresses ("My brother
Jack was nine in May"); and J. K. Stephen's subtly corrosive sonnet
from Lapsus Calami. A sonnet by Wordsworth begins:

Two Voices are there: one is of the sea,
One of the mountains: each a mighty Voice.

Stephen's irreverent paraphrase takes up the theme:

There are two Voices: one is of the deep;

It learns the storm-cloud's thund'rous melody,

Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea,

Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep.

And one is of an old half-witted sheep

Which bleats articulate monotony,

And indicates that two and one are three,

That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep.

And, Wordsworth, both are thine . . .

The two voices accurately represent two attitudes which readers
have taken whenever Wordsworth is considered. For one thing, they
reflect two extremes of criticism: the devout disciples regard their idol
as an unquestionably major poet who was also a profound philosopher;

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while the anti-Wordsworthians look upon him as an objectionable, self-
adulating bore who happened to write a few quotable poems. The
two voices also express two men: a young, reckless radical, shouting
whatever came into his mind; and a domesticated, prematurely old
creature who blotted out all memory of his youthful insurrection and
weighed his every utterance like a maiden aunt who had become a
self-appointed oracle.

Chiefly, however, the two voices symbolize the two poets who were
never quite reconciled in Wordsworth: one almost sublime, one faintly
ridiculous. The voice of sublimity is heard in the "Lines Composed a
Few Miles above Tintern Abbey/' the "Ode to Duty/' "Michael," a
dozen lyrics, the "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," perfect in its
fusion of spontaneity and sustained eloquence, the sonnets on West-
minster Bridge, on Milton, on Toussaint L'Ouverture, on England in
1802, and, if the reader is patient enough to persist, in large segments
of The Prelude, that sprawling example of total recall which Words-
worth subtitled The Growth of a Poet's Mind. The other voice, the
voice of bathos unabashed, affronts us in 'The Sailor's Mother," "Alice
Fell," "Beggars," such long poems as The Waggoner, The Idiot Boy,
The White Doe of Rylstone, The Excursion, which, in its tortuous and
interminable 8,92,7 lines, surpasses even The Prelude in length, and,
except for its brightly fantastic Prologue, the pompously discursive
Peter Bell.

The worst of Wordsworth is clogged by a dull loquacity and a re-
fusal, or inability, to sacrifice a thought, no matter how trivial or
insignificant. The best of it quivers with the sense of discovery and
glows with the clean shine of something just created. Yet the poetry of
his "golden decade" (1797-1807),, which most anthologists prefer, is
not stardingly different from much of his unpopular verse. It is
impossible to strip Wordsworth of his encumbering accumulations; the
good and the bad are inextricably mixed. As the Victorian poet Arthur
Hugh Clough wrote: "Had Wordsworth been more capable o£ dis-
cerning his bad from his good, it is likely enough there would have
been fax less of the bad; but the good, perhaps, would have been very
far less good." One passes over the pretentious but feeble poems of
Wordsworth's old age with embarrassed silence, but one must recognize
that the most characteristic poems of Wordsworth combine heavy-
handed and not too interesting statements with flashes of sudden ex-
altation.

Wordsworth, it must be remembered, believed that every poem he

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wrote had a purpose. "Every great poet is a teacher/' Wordsworth
asserted. '1 wish either to be considered as a teacher or as nothing/'
This emphasis on the moral purpose of poetry at the expense of
other values, including the aesthetic, sensual, and incantatory appeals,
is another reason why so many readers find Wordsworth stodgy. His
poems were designed, he said, "to console the afflicted, to add sunshine
to daylight by making the happy happier, to teach the young and the
gracious of every age to see, to think, and feel, and therefore to become
actively and securely virtuous." In a sense this is true of all poems. Most
poetry is cathartic, something that may console, relieve, and thus make
the reader (to say nothing of the writer) happier. But a poem is not
primarily a therapy; its purpose is not to instruct, although it may do so,
but to delight Wordsworth was too self-conscious about the poet's
mission and especially his own role as tutor; the result is that too
many of his poems read not merely like lessons but like report cards. All
too often the well-intentioned platitudes about conduct fail to rise from
the paper on which they were written. A significant instance of his
determination to be a preceptor, to turn an exercise of the imagination
into a preachment, is his change of the original title of 'The Leech-
Gatherer" to '"Resolution and Independence."

Keats voiced a general objection when, considering Wordsworth's
determination to write poetry which has a palpable design upon us, he
wrote: "For the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages,
are we to be bullied into a certain philosophy engendered in the whims
of an egotist? Every man has his speculations, but every man does not
brood and peacock over them till he makes a false coinage and deceives
himself." That he had seen or felt something, no matter how trivial,
seemed sufficiently important for Wordsworth to record, and it never
occurred to him that a bare observation might not move or even interest
the reader. Unable to distinguish between molehills and mountains,
he could see no difference between truisms and truth.

As he grew older Wordsworth became more and more addicted to
didactic sermonizing; he abjured the dangers of an awakened intellect
for a soporific "holy indolence" and "a wise passiveness." His love of
nature grew into a faith which combined mysticism and nonsense.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can*

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WOBDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, SOUTHEY

This is manifestly absurd. Yet no one has communicated so directly the
living intimacy as well as the omnipotence of nature. Doing this,
Wordsworth anticipates Whitman's belief that "a leaf of grass is no less
than the journeywork of the stars . . . and the running blackberry
would adom the parlors of heaven" while, at the same time, he looks
backward to Vaughan, who greatly influenced him, and to Vaughan's
pantheistic conviction that man's sinfulness can be cured by turning to

The blades of grass, thy creatures feeding,

The trees, their leaves; the flowers, their seeding;

The dust, of which I am a part;

The stones, much softer than my heart;

The drops of rain, the sighs of wind,

The stars to which I am stark-blind,

The dew thy herbs drink up by night,

The beams they warm them in the light,

All that have signature of life , . .

What often wearies us in Wordsworth is his insistence on solemnly
proving, in the words of Stephen's parody, "that two and one are three,
that grass is green, lakes damp/' et cetera; but what annoys us most are
his summaries of the obvious couched in a mathematically rhymed prose
and set to a mechanical, jog-trot rhythm. There is, for example, the
unbelievable third stanza from 'The Thorn," a gravity so measured as
to be unconsciously comic burlesque:

Not five yards from the mountain-path,

The thorn you on your right espy;

And to the left, three yards beyond,

You see a little muddy pond

Of water, never dry;

I've measured it from side to side:

Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.

A sonnet entitled "September i, 1802," begins:

We had a female passenger who came

From Calais with us, spotless in array —

A white-robed Negro, like a lady gay,

Yet downcast as a woman fearing blame * . .

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LIVES OF THE POETS

Another sonnet, written at the same time, has this flabbergasting
opening:

Jones! as from Calais southward you and I
Went pacing side by side . . .

These are a few of the more ridiculous lines, absurdities which are
the painful but logical extremity of Wordsworth's belief that the
vocabulary of poetry should be based on common speech. Coleridge
demurred at Wordsworth's conviction that poetry might model itself
on the language of everyday, and he finally voiced his objection to
the statement that "between the language of prose and that of metrical
composition, there neither is nor can be any essential difference/*
Wordsworth was at his best when his practice refused to conform to his
theory, when, instead of employing the colloquial idiom, he used a
lofty language, a heightened vision, and all the resources he could
summon to elevate his experiences into poetry.

In spite of his program Wordsworth was unable to familiarize him-
self with "the real language of men," and therefore could not use
it with either fluency or conviction. Moreover, unlike such great
poets as Chaucer and Shakespeare, he was not at home with the people
of whom he wrote; the rural folk who were his chosen characters
neither appreciated the poet nor cared for the man. Yet Wordsworth
had no doubts about his understanding of them and their backgrounds.
"1 have hardly ever known anyone but myself," he calmly informed
Aubrey de Vere, "who had a true eye for Nature/' Actually he was
not a close observer. Far from being Nature's Boswell, Wordsworth
regarded nature with a mind to generalities; he looked for handy ser-
mons in stones and moral abstractions in everything. Memory and
Dorothy's eyes served him best; reading his sister's journals, we often
come across vivid details which, like prefabricated units, Wordsworth
built into the very poems which purport to show his power of observa-
tion. The object he contemplated most scrupulously was himself, and
his favorite subject was himself in the act of contemplation. The very
best of his poetry rises from a self-induced nostalgia, a sporadic remem-
bering which yearns to preserve the past.

The critic H. W. Garrod has been credited with the remark that
Wordsworth was Coleridge's greatest work and, like Coleridge's other
works, left unfinished. There is no question about Coleridge's venera-
tion; his overenthusiasm for his idol swept away any reserve of judg-

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WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, SOUTHEY

ment. 'The Giant Wordsworth — God love him!" cried Coleridge. He
shrugged off suggestions that he was too modest and much too fond to
be anything but fatuous in his worship. He told his friend Tom Poole
that the "society- of so great a Being is of priceless value/' "You charge
me with prostration in regard to Wordsworth," he wrote to Poole at
another time. "Have I affirmed anything miraculous of W? Is it
impossible that a greater poet than any since Milton may appear in our
day?"

Wordsworth was unable to return such generous admiration. Al-
though he fed on Coleridge, he did little to encourage and help him.
Wordsworth let it be known that 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,"
perhaps the most completely achieved imaginative poem in the lan-
guage, had, in his opinion, injured the sale of Lyrical Ballads. When he
intimated that "if the volume should come to a second edition I
would put in its place some little things more likely to suit the common
taste," Coleridge was quite willing that his "Jon£& should be thrown
overboard." However, the poem was allowed to appear in the sub-
sequent edition after the archaisms had been revised and a subtitle ("A
Poet's Reverie") added to comply with Wordsworth's desire to make
the poem seem less bizarre. Wordsworth continued to belittle Coleridge's
masterpiece. In a remarkable note to the new edition of Lyrical Ballads,
he wrote: "I cannot refuse myself the gratification of informing such
readers as may have been pleased with this poem that they owe their
pleasure in some sort to me; the author was himself very desirous that it
should be suppressed. This wish had arisen from a consciousness of the
defects of the poem, and from the knowledge that many persons had
been much displeased with it. The poem of my friend has indeed great
defects." After which Wordsworth had the further bad taste to list what
he considered the faults in his friend's major work.

Wordsworth was conscious enough of his collaborator's losing struggle
with his physical demons, but he was blind to the inner battle between
Coleridge's wayward imagination and his critically controlled intellect
— a conflict that ended in the poet's defeat. Wordsworth was also deaf
to the delicate nuances of "Frost at Midnight," the metrical innovations
of the unfinished "Christabel," and, most lamentably, to the unanalyzh
able but inescapable magic of "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner."

Unconsciously but nevertheless effectively Wordsworth undermined
the creative power of his collaborator and helped complete the mm
a poet For a long while Coleridge accepted himself at

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LIVES OF THE POETS

evaluation. Modest as ever, he decided to continue in the role of public
interpreter: "I abandon poetry altogether — I leave the higher and
deeper kind to Wordsworth, the delightful, popular and simply digni-
fied to Southey, and reserve for myself the honorable attempt to make
others feel and understand their writings." Later his discarded critical
judgment asserted itself. He found Wordsworth suffered from a lack
of discrimination and that his poetry showed a "matter-of-factness,"
"inconstancy of style/' "occasional prolixity, repetition, an eddying
instead of a progression of thought," and that the author too often
grappled with "thoughts and images too great for the subject." Cole-
ridge suddenly perceived Wordsworth's indiscriminate enlargement
of every object and his determination to endow the insignificant with
special significance. Yet, in spite of later strictures, Coleridge never
ceased to champion Wordsworth's gift of imagination "in the highest
and strictest sense of the word/' his "austere purity ... a perfect
appropriateness of the words to the meaning ... a corresponding
weight and sanity of the thoughts and sentiments . . . the sinewy
strength and originality of single lines and paragraphs." Above all, he
appreciated and did everything in his power to make others feel Words-
worth's "meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle sensibility."

It is the meditative pathos and deep sensibility which make the reader
tolerant of Wordsworth's sententiousness, his verbosity, and compulsive
dogmatism, and delight in his deliberate concreteness as opposed to
vague figures of speech and stereotyped abstraction, in the power of
intuition which, time and again, transforms an ordinary experience
into an extraordinary vision. We forgive his ponderous respectability,
his sanctimoniousness, and his arrogant superiority for the sake of the
sudden exaltations, and moments of pure clairvoyance. We forget the
poetry of his dotage, the earnest but dull history of the Anglican
Church embedded in the more than one hundred "Ecclesiastical
Sonnets/' the flavorless series of poems "Composed or Suggested during
a Tour in the Summer of 1833," and the endless occasional verses he
could not stop himself from writing. We forget that Wordsworth is the
only major poet who never wrote love poetry and that such seemingly
love lyrics as those to Lucy are sexless and almost bodiless. His marriage
and the poem to his wife ("She was a phantom of delight") might have
promised a new access of emotion; but physical yearnings, the pains,
transports, and what Blake called "the lineaments of gratified desire"
are not to be found in his lines.

Wordsworth's passion was spent in a lifelong preoccupation with

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nature. He believed that nature reciprocated his devotion, and he con-
sidered himself not merely a child of nature but one of her very
favorite sons. He says it explicitly in the fourth book of The Prelude:

My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit

Another passage is equally revealing:

I would stand

In the night blackened with a coming storm,
Beneath some rock, listening to notes that are
The ghostly language of the ancient earth . . .
Thence did I drink the visionary power
And deem not profitless those fleeting moods
Of shadowy exultation . . .

The soul

Remembering how she felt, but what she felt
Remembering not, retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity.

It was the "sense of possible sublimity" which allowed Wordsworth to
feel more than the most meticulous nature-lover can discern, to look
through reality and see, like Blake, heaven in a wild flower. The
conclusion of "Intimations of Immortality" makes it plain:

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Reappraisal has shown that the two voices are not as dissimilar as
they once seemed, that they speak (and sometimes sing) antiphonally
in Wordsworth's spontaneous romanticism and in his conscious — and
consciously enlightening — observations, in the alternately objective and
subjective elements of his writing. We are indebted to him not only
for his sympathy with maladjusted but life-diffusing and enduring
characters — the luckless huntsman, Simon Lee, the lonely mother

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LIVES OF THE POETS

Margaret, the betrayed Ruth, the pitiful Michael, the old Cumberland
beggar, and other misfits and failures — but also for his proof that there
is no "unpoetic" material. "The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the
botanist, the mineralogist," he prophesied, "will be as proper objects for
the poet's art as any upon which he is now employed, if the time
should come when these things shall be familiar to us."

For all his faults — in spite of the early bathos and the later banalities
— Wordsworth remains a "mover and shaker." He altered the course of
English literature by the very contradictions of his theory and practice.
He made us revise our concept of the poetic idiom and, in his re-
vitalization of the language, changed the tone as well as the direction
of modern poetry.

37<>

XVIII

Inspired Oddities

LANDOR, CLARE, BEDDOES

A A TIME of great changes in technique and experiments seeking
a new vocabulary in poetry, a few unaffiliated writers stood
apart from the innovators. Three who resisted the current were
the oddly individualistic Walter Savage Landor, John dare, and
Thomas Lovell Beddoes.

WALTER SAVAGE LAMDOR

A prey to his own eccentricities, Walter Savage Landor was con-
tinually in conflict with himself. The public poet composed some of
the most compact and disciplined poems of the century; the private
person fulfilled all the implications of his middle name. His almost
ninety years were a hurly-burly of petty quarrels and wild rages, libels
and lawsuits, gross humiliations and ungratifying triumphs.

Landor was born in Warwick, of an old Staffordshire family, oa
January 30, 1775, and it gave him pleasure to remember that his
birthday came on the anniversary of the beheading of Charles L His
father was a wealthy doctor who sent his son to school at the age of

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LIVES OF THE POETS

four. At ten, young Landor was considered the best Latin student who
had ever attended Rugby. It was his knowledge of Latin (coupled with
self-assurance) that first got him into trouble. In a dispute with his
teacher over a knotty construction, he grew irritated, then impudent
and, when he refused to retract or apologize, was expelled. He was
equally recalcitrant when, at nineteen, he went to Trinity College,
Oxford. He declined to follow the customary routines — the boys called
him "the mad Jacobin" — and when, in a fit of braggadocio, he fired a
shot at a fellow student, he was suspended- His father pleaded, then
threatened, but he refused to return — "Oxford has nothing to teach me
that I care to know" — and finally, in an outburst of pique, he left home.

For a while he lived in London, where, at twenty, he made his
debut with a book grandiloquently entitled The Poems of Walter
Savage Landor. At twenty-three he published the epical Gebir, the
original version of which was conceived in Latin and was compared to
Milton. Poems from the Arabic anUi Persian followed two years later,
and before Landor was thirty he was launched on a full tide of
creativity which yielded some fifty volumes of verse and prose,

Landor was just thirty when his father died, and he inherited the
patrimony. He traveled restlessly, made an extended tour of the Lake
District, visited Bristol, where he formed a friendship with Southey,
whom he preferred to Wordsworth, and bought a handsome estate in
Wales. Before this he had evinced strong sympathies for the revolu-
tionists in France and, at thirty-three, he volunteered in the Spanish
army to fight against Napoleon. Although he received an honorary
commission as colonel, his war experiences were few; according to his
biographer, "his troop dispersed or melted away, and he came back to
England in as great a hurry as he had left/*

At thirty-six Landor attended a ball at Bath and was fascinated by
a girl sixteen years his junior; although his affections were variously
engaged, he determined to marry her at once. She was Julia Thuiller,
the pretty but penniless daughter of a Swiss banker, and before the
honeymoon was over, it was evident that he had married a little tyrant
whose shrewishness was the least of her vices. Landor became more
intractable than ever. No amount of culture could check his rampant
angers. He stormed at his wife and fought with his Welsh tenants. He
def amed his neighbors and wrote seditious articles against the govern-
ment When he was forced to leave England his wif e refused to ac-
company him.

37*

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR

He went to Italy, where his wife reluctantly joined him and bore
him four children. He affronted an official, an Italian poet, and was
ordered to leave Como. He tried Genoa for a time, then Pisa, and
finally settled in Florence, where he took over the Medici palace.
Irrepressible and litigious, he had to be prevented from fighting a duel
with a neighbor because of the water supply. He once threw a pro-
testing cook out of a kitchen window into a flower bed, then, striking
his forehead, screamed, "My God! I forgot about the violets!*'

In his forties and early fifties he busied himself with prose. Imaginary
Conversations, his celebrated series of historical dialogues, appeared in
two volumes in 1828; Pericles and Asyasia followed a few years later.
At sixty his irascibility gave him a distinctly leonine presence. Carlyle
described him as "a tall, broad, burly man, with gray hair and large,
fierce-rolling eyes; of the most restless, impetuous vivacity, not to be held
in by the most perfect breeding, expressing itself in high-colored super-
latives, indeed in reckless exaggeration, now and then in a dry, sharp
laugh, not of sport but of mockery." Even when Landor was most
violently disturbed he looked venerable. It was his unpredictable can-
tankerousness that prompted Dickens to caricature him genially as
Boythorn in Bleak House.

After twenty-four years of unhappy marriage, Landor found domestic
life impossible; he separated from his wife, who was impudently
housing a lover in a Fiesole villa. He returned to England, resettled in
Bath, made friends with Dickens, Lady Blessington, and John Forster,
who was to be his biographer. He tried to patch up differences with
his children, but they turned from him. His daughter told Browning
that she would not help her father if he were dying in a ditch before
her eyes.

Another lawsuit sent him scurrying back to Italy; a lampoon cost
him a verdict of one thousand pounds damages. The friendship of
Browning and the admiration of such visitors as Ralph Waldo Emerson
saved him from an embittered old age. His Last Fruits Off an Old
Tree appeared when he was nearing eighty; at eighty-three he pub-
lished the ironically entitled Dry Sticks Fagoted Toy the Late Walter
Savage Landor. He died, within three months of his ninetieth birth-
day, September 17, 1864.

Lander's accomplishment is another instance that a man's art does
not always parallel or even begin to reflect his life. Nothing could be
more dissimilar than the perversity of Landor*s career and the cool pre-
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LIVES OF THE POETS

cision of his craft. The Imaginary Conversations are models of a re-
strained, near-classical manner, and, although they lack any sharply
differentiated characterization — all the dramatis personae, from Mene-
laus to Mahomet, talk like Landor- — they are remarkable reconstructions.
Equally fascinating in idea and clear in technique are the conversations
between Petrarch and Boccaccio in Landor's Pentameron. But it is for
his compact stanzas that Landor is best known and properly cherished.
One of his editors, Earle Welby, asserted that Landor was a Latin poet,
born centuries too late — "among the splendid romantic luxuriance of
English poetry he set up a piece of pure, cool marble." There is a firm
aloofness, scorn mixed with dignity, in the famous quatrain written on
his seventy-fifth birthday:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife-
Nature I loved and, next to nature, art.
I warmed my hands before the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart

There is something both proud and preposterous about Landor's
insistence that he "strove with none," but there is no question about his
warming his hands before the fire of life. It is the expression of a
philosophy — now stoical, now sentimental — which, in spite of its pol-
ished inflexibility, charms the reader. Few English lyrics are more chaste
and low pitched than "Rose Aylmer," written when Landor learned
of the death of the daughter of a devoted friend, or the series of poems
to "lanthe," who was Sophia Jane Swift, an early sweetheart, symbol
of Landor's unrealized happiness. Such epigrammatic verses, together
with "Mother, I Cannot Mind My Wheel/' "Dirce," and other short
lyrics, recall fragments of The Greek Anthology as they might have
been translated by Herrick.

Mother, I cannot mind my wheel;

My fingers ache, my lips are dry;
O, if you felt the pain I feel!

But O, who ever felt as I?

No longer could I doubt him true —

All other men may use deceit.
He always said xny eyes were blue,

And often swore my lips were sweet

374

JOHN CLARE,

JOHN: CLARE

Considered a curiosity by his contemporaries, John Clare was for-
gotten until the beginning of the twentieth century and appre-
ciated only in the last four decades. It was not until sixty years after
Clare's death that the poets Edmund Blunden and Alan Porter re-
examined the conflicting legends about him, reread Clare's two
thousand poems, of which two thirds are yet to be published, and pre-
sented a clear picture of the man and his work. As late as 1949, another
hundred poems of his "asylum period" were printed for the first time.

Clare was bom July 13, 1793, at Helpston, Northamptonshire, of an
illiterate mother and a father who could barely read. There was a twin
sister who died a few weeks after birth, another sister who also died in
infancy, and a third sister, Sophy, who grew up to be John's com-
panion. Like his father, a poor farmer, Clare felt condemned to the
soil. He was put to work in the fields when he was twelve, and his little
schooling was acquired at night. At thirteen he saw a neighbor fall
from the top of a hay wagon and break his neck; the sight so affected
Clare that his mind was temporarily unbalanced. At fourteen he
worked for an innkeeper, tended cattle and, a year later, was employed
as a gardener. At sixteen he fell in love with Mary Joyce, daughter of
a thriving farmer, who forbade the girl to meet her impoverished
sweetheart. Clare never recovered from this early hurt; the wound grew
worse with age. Long after she died and Clare had been married, he
held long conversations with Mary under the delusion that she was
alive and his wife. During his madness, it was to Mary that Clare
wrote some of his most affecting poems.

Between his sixteenth and twenty-fourth years Clare worked in a
limekiln, enlisted in the militia, roamed with the gypsies, became a
part-time vagrant, and began to write poetry. Living dose to nature,
it was natural that his favorite book should be Thomson's The Seasons,
and Clare's early verse is an imitation of Thomson's rustic manner. At
twenty-four he became infatuated with Martha (Patty) Turner, the
attractive eighteen-year-old daughter of a fanner, and, hoping to make
enough money to marry her, issued a "Proposal for Publishing by
Subscription a Collection of Original Trifles on Miscellaneous Sub-

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LIVES OF THE POETS

jects in Verse/* Only seven subscribers responded to the appeal, and
Clare was discharged from the limekiln for distributing his prospectus
during working hours. His father was subsisting on charity, and Clare
had to ask for parish relief. Fortunately, a bookseller who had seen
Clare's circular interested John Taylor, publisher of Keats and Shelley,
in the young poet. After an anxious wait of two years, Taylor published
Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery.

The book was an immediate success. The reading public had not
enjoyed a marvel in some years; they eagerly bought the work of one
who was advertised as "an agricultural laborer and poet." Three editions
were sold in as many months, and when Clare came to London, the
effete intelligentsia made as much of him as the Edinburgh coteries had
made of Burns. The sensation of the season, he was entertained by the
influential Lord Milton, had his portrait painted by the fashionable
Hilton, heard one of his lyrics sung by the celebrated Madame Vestris,
and acquired a patron, Lord Radstock. Another member of the
nobility, Lord Fitewilliam, gave him some advice which, said Clare
ruefully, "I had done well to have noticed better than I have. He
bade me beware of booksellers and warned me not to be fed with
promises." Besides the advice, Fitzwilliam gave Clare seventeen pounds,
and upon receiving the gift Clare married Patty Turner shortly before
their first child was born.

Fitzwilliam's warnings were unhappily justified. Drury, the book-
seller, and Taylor, the publisher, saw to it that Clare's royalties were
absorbed in such items as "deductions to agents," "advertisements,"
"commissions," "advertising," and the all-encompassing "sundries/1 They
suspected Clare was a novelty that would not last, and they were right.
Although Taylor published The Village Minstrel and Other Poems a
year after the appearance of the first volume, interest in the poet had
waned. In 1820 Clare had been trotted from one drawing room to
another; people had jostled each other to drink his health; crowds of
visitors had made the cottage at Helpston a sight-seer's resort. A few
years later dare was almost forgotten.

Disheartened, Clare worked doggedly in the fields and, when he
could find the time, hawked his verses from door to door, dragging a
sackful of books as much as thirty miles in a single day. He tried to sell
his future output to Taylor for two hundred pounds, but the cautious
publisher refused the offer with evasive generalities and advised the
poet not to be ambitious but to "remain in the state in which God had
placed him.*

376

JOHN CLABE

Clare began to suffer from overwork, illness, and the necessity of
supporting a family which increased to nine. He drank to escape his
worries, and worried himself into spells of drinking. The Shepherd's
Calendar was reluctantly published in 182,7 and, eight years later,
The Rural Muse. Although these volumes contained some of Clare's best
work, neither sold. His vogue was over.

He was forty when the first fit of insanity struck him. He recovered
quickly, but within a year the malady grew worse. Invited to attend a
strolling company's performance of The Merchant of Venice, he be-
came so emotionally overwrought that he rose from his seat and at-
tempted to attack Shylock. He had hallucinations, saw visionary
creatures, fancied he had assignations with Mary Joyce, by whom he
had several imaginary children, talked with Shakespeare, and held
conversations with himself. He was placed for treatment in private
hands, and for four years was cared for in a sanatorium in Epping
Forest. One day he decided to go home and walked all the way to
Helpston; it took three grueling days to complete the journey. His
account of the "escape" is strangely graphic. Clare tells how, on the
first night, "I lay down with my head towards the north, to show my-
self the steering-point in the morning. . . . On the third day I satisfied
my hunger by eating the grass on the roadside which seemed to taste
something like bread. I was hungry and ate heartily till I was satisfied.
. . . There was little to notice, for the road very often looked as stupid
as myself." Nearing Helpston "a cart met me with a man, a woman, and
a boy in it. The woman jumped out and caught fast hold of my hands
and wished me to get into the cart. I refused; I thought her either
drunk or mad. But when I was told that it was my second wife, Patty,
I got in."

Once again at home, Clare seemed to improve. But, although
Patty did her best to keep him quietly occupied, the mental derange-
ment increased. A few months after freeing himself from confinement,
Clare wrote to his friend, the sympathetic Dr. Allen. It was a long
letter, and it concluded:

I look upon myself as a widowCer) or bachelor, I don't
know which. I care nothing about the women now, for they
are faithless and deceitful. The first woman, when there was
no man but her husband, found out means to cuckold him
by the aid and assistance of the devil — but women being
more righteous now and men more plentiful, they have

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LIVES OF THE POETS

found out a more godly way to do it without the devil's as-
sistance. And the man who possesses a woman possesses
losses without gain. The worst is the road to ruin, and the
best is nothing like a good cow. Man I never did like — and
woman has long sickened me. I should like to be to myself a
few years and lead the life of a hermit. But even there I
should wish for her whom I am always thinking of — and
almost every song I write has some sighs and wishes in ink
about Mary.

Clare's desire that he might be by himself was granted, though not
altogether in the way he might have wished. In his late forties he was
judged hopelessly insane and was taken to the Northampton County
Asylum. He lived, a gentle inmate, another twenty years, and it was in
the asylum that he wrote such lovely and lucid poems as "The Sheep
of Spring," "I Am," 'Invitation to Eternity," and "Qock-o'-Clay."

In the cowslip pips I lie,
Hidden from the buzzing fly,
While green grass beneath me lies
Pearled with dew like fishes' eyes.
Here I lie, a clock-o'-clay,
Waiting for the time o' day.

While the forest quakes surprise,
And the wild wind sobs and sighs,
My home rocks as like to fall,
On its pillar green and tall;
When the pattering rain drives by
Qock-o'-clay keeps warm and dry.

Day by day and night by night,
All the week I hide from sight;
In the cowslip pips I lie,
In the rain still warm and dry;
Day and night, and night and day,
Red, black-spotted docto'-day.

My home shakes in wind and showers,
Pale green pillar topped with flowers,

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JOHN CLARE

Bending at the wild wind's breath,
Till I touch the grass beneath;
Here I live, lone clock-o'-clay,
Watching for the time of day.

For the last twenty years of his life Clare was more alone than he ever
wanted to be. Patty, struggling to cope with a broken home and a
houseful of children, could not come to see him, and there were few
visitors from the outside world. In his late sixties he lost control of his
limbs and was unable to walk. At seventy he was paralyzed, and at
seventy-one he died, May 20, 1864.

Landor kept his eccentricities out of his poetry; Clare was also able
to separate his aberrations from his creative writing. His is a spell pecul-
iarly his own; the outer violence and inner tumults are tamed by a con-
templation which is always controlled. Clare's scenes are familiar, his
objects ordinary, but the consideration of natural things is never
commonplace. Every detail is recorded and revalued as lovingly as
though no one had ever regarded it before. Clare remarked that his
poetry was waiting for him, that he found his poems in the fields and
merely wrote them down.

If Clare's love of nature, children, and lost dreams never rises into
sublimity, it never falls into facility. The range is limited, but the
texture is pellucid and the tone is pure.

The spring is coming by many signs;

The trays are up, the hedges broken down

That fenced the haystack, and the remnant shines

Like some old antique fragment weathered brown,

And where suns peep, in every sheltered place,

The little early buttercups unfold

A glittering star or two — till many trace

The edges of the blackthorn clumps in gold.

And then a little lamb bolts up behind

The hill, and wags his tail to meet the yoe;

And then another, sheltered from the wind,

Lies all his length as dead — and lets me go

Close by, and never stirs, but basking lies,

With legs stretched out as though he could not ri»

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LIVES OF THE POETS

THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES

Thomas Lovell Beddoes was born at Clifton, near Bristol, June
30, 1803. His mother was born Anna Edgeworth, sister of the novelist,
Maria Edgeworth; his father was a famous physician and semi-scientist
who was associated with Sir Davies Gilbert, President of the Royal
Academy, in a series of bizarre experiments. A haphazard home life was
reflected in the boy's adolescence. When he went to Charterhouse at
fourteen he was already a spoiled dilettante who was also something of
a tyrant His "fag," a boy who acted as his servant, recalled that young
Beddoes was "a persevering and ingenious tormentor. . . . Though his
voice was harsh and his enunciation offensively conceited, he read with
so much propriety of expression that I was always glad to listen, even
when I was pressed into the service as his accomplice, his enemy, or his
love, with a due accompaniment of curses, caresses, or kicks, as the
course of his declamation required/'

Before he was seventeen Beddoes had won two prizes, one for Latin
and one for Greek, had written a play, and had a poem published in
the Morning Post. At seventeen he entered Pembroke College,
Oxford, and immersed himself in the lesser Elizabethan and Jacobean
playwrights. A drama, The Improvisatore, was the immediate con-
sequence; it was followed by The Bride's Tragedy. The latter, writ-
ten at eighteen, established Beddoes as a poetic anachronism, a
seventeenth-century dramatist who happened to live in the nineteenth
century.

After receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree, Beddoes discovered
Schiller and fell in love with German literature. He left England and
made the rounds of universities in Germany and Switzerland. Besides
applying himself to philosophy and poetry, he studied anatomy and
indulged himself in a pursuit of morbid extravagances. His tragedy,
Death's Jest Boofe, which he began at twenty-two and which he kept on
revising until the year of his death, is a Gothic horror relieved by
delicately interwoven lyrics. Beddoes thought of himself as a belated
Elizabethan, but he was not influenced by the great playwrights of
the period; rather, said George Saintsbury, "he imbibed from the night-
shade of Webster and Tourneur than ftom the vine of Shakespeare/'

380

THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES

"I am convinced that the man who is to awaken the drama must
be a bold, trampling fellow/' wrote Beddoes, "no creeper into worm-
holes!" But try as he would, his endeavors to live up to his program
resulted in one grotesque failure after another* Living in Europe most
of his life, he determined at twenty-nine to be a political force, and as a
result of a few articles and insurrectionary speeches he was expelled
from Bavaria. The order of deportation includes a vivid if unflattering
picture of the man: "Height 5'/', hair light brown, eyebrows fair,
eyes very dart, nose long and quite pointed, mouth large, chin prom-
inent, face oval, complexion pale, build slight, carelessly dressed either
in the English manner or as a swashbuckling German hero, one boot
black, the other red, and on one of them a gold or gilt spur. Speaks
bad German, has fair moustache and bad teeth/'

One does not have to read between the lines of this description to
sense Beddoes7 affectations, his theatrical self -exile, his unconventional
swagger and extreme attitudinizing. One also gets a glimpse of the
homosexual amid hints of exhibitionism and self-frustration. Visiting
London briefly at thirty-five, Beddoes hired a theater for one night so
that he could play the part of Hotspur in Shakespeare's Henry IV.
Several years later he reappeared in England and called upon his
relatives, gravely riding upon a donkey, and tried to set fire to Drury
Lane Theatre with a five-pound note as a protest against the English
stage.

At forty-four he was convinced he was the last of the Elizabethans
and cultivated a short beard in order to look like Shakespeare. He
became infatuated with a young Swiss baker, named Degen, who was
infatuated with the theater. Beddoes resolved to turn the stage-struck
youth into a great actor, and when the two companions separated,
Beddoes attempted to kill himself. After another quarrel Beddoes opened
an artery in his leg, but he was cheated of a dignified dramatic exit.
The cut became infected, and Beddoes' leg had to be amputated. Six
months later Beddoes again tried to kill himself. This time he was
successful, and after taking poison, he died, January 2,6, 1849. "I am
food for what I am good for — worms," he wrote on a scrap of paper. "1
ought to have been a good poet, but life was too great a bore on one
peg, and that a bad one."

Beddoes* twisted and dilapidated life is entwined in his morbid
plays — entwined without being ennobled. The interspersed lyrics, how-
ever, are impressive and almost perfect. Against the macabre and often
coarse context they seem perhaps more exquisite than they are. Yet,

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LIVES OF THE POETS

whether the mood is sensuous, as in the lines beginning "If I had dreams
to sell," softly elegiac, as in the "Dirge for Wolfram" in Death's Jest
Book, insinuatingly chill, as in 'The Phantom Wooer" with its 'Tittle
snakes of silver throat," or sardonically grim, as in 'The Carrion Crow/'
the music is persuasive even when it seems to be played on a xylophone.
If most of the songs are preoccupied with loss, death, and decay, they
are authentic in their fitful measures. If they are fragments, they are
fragments of flawed but precious metal.

Old Adam, the carrion crow,

The old crow of Cairo;
He sat in the shower, and let it flow
Under his tail and over his crest;
And through every feather
Leaked the wet weather;
And the bough swung under his nest;
For his beak it was heavy with marrow.
Is that the wind dying? O no;
It's only two devils that blow
Through a murderer's bones, to and fro,
In the ghosts' moonshine.

382

XIX

Victim of a Legend

GEORGE GORDON:,

LORD BYROK

GEORGE GORDON, the sixth Lord Byron, had everything to make
him the legendary hero of the whole Romantic movement; his
name and temperament gave it a characterizing adjective'/ A
truly Byronic figure, he was strikingly handsome and flamboyantly
reckless, an aristocrat who lampooned his class, a physically handicapped
and psychologically maimed youth who triumphed over every disad-
vantage, an audacious rehel who loved liberty and could not refuse a
folly, a dreamer courting disaster, an irresistible lover, and an irrespon-
sibly shocking genius. Yet, running counter to the legend, Byron was
also a cynic weary of his own posturings, a reproving realist, and a
determinedly antiromantic poet.

The combination of willfulness, self-indulgence, and self-dramatiza-
tion was part of his heritage, an inheritance which could not have been
worse. His paternal grandfather, Admiral John Byron, was so violent
and luckless that he was nicknamed "Foulweather Jack** His great-
uncle, "the wicked Lord/' from whom Byron inherited the title, had
killed a man — a great-uncle of Byron's childhood sweetheart — in a
duel in a locked room lighted only by a sputtering candle. His father,
"Mad Jack" Byron, a good-looking rakehell captain, had run off with a
marquis* wife, who, after a divorce, married him, bore him a daughter,
Augusta, and died soon after he had squandered all her money. A sec-

383

LIVES OF THE POETS

ond mercenary but scarcely more successful marriage was effected with
a descendant of James I, Catherine Gordon of Gight, an heiress whose
father had committed suicide, and who was vain, hysterical, and de-
structive.

George Gordon, the only child of this second union, was horn in
London, January 22, 1788. He came into the world with a malformed
foot, and suffered for years from unsuccessful operations as well as
from his mother's unpredictable changes of temper, from her over-
whelming caresses and her cruel hanter — she had a habit of calling him
her 'little lame brat" In spite of, or perhaps because of, his affliction
Byron assumed a bravado and cultivated every kind of athleticism; he
was particularly proficient in boxing, cricket Canother boy running for
him), and, what was to be his favorite sport, swimming.

When he was three years old, his spendthrift father, who had de-
serted his second wife and son, died of drink. The child attended gram-
mar school and learned the Bible together with extracurricular activities
from one of his nurses, Mary Gray. It was Mary Gray, a devout but
dissolute Calvinist, who, when the boy was only nine, instructed him
not only in sin but in the mechanics of sex. This experience, acquired
too early and in so ugly a fashion, determined to a great extent his
later attitude to passion: a sudden attraction and equally sudden re-
pulsion, a quickly aroused sensuality in which delight was followed
almost immediately by disgust.

Byron was born only remotely to the tide. His great-uncle, the fifth
baron, an irascible eccentric who, in his quieter moods, liked to play
games and to tame crickets, had a son and a grandson in the direct line,
but both of them died before him. Since Byron's father was no longer
living, George Gordon became the heir-presumptive when he was six.
When he was ten his great-uncle died, and Byron came into the tide.
His mother took him to the family estate, the great but neglected New-
stead Abbey, which had been in the family since the sixteenth century
and was now litde more than a ruin, but a ruin in the grand manner.

After two years at an academy in Dulwich, Byron attended Harrow
School from his thirteenth to his seventeenth year. He was an erratic
pupil, intuitive but undependable. At sixteen he became infatuated
with his cousin, Mary Chaworth, who flirted with him and then mar-
ried a local landowner, Byron said that her heardessness embittered
him for years and prompted the disillusioned tone of his poetry — vide
The Dream" — but his was a volatile nature and he did not disdain
the sports and other pleasures of Harrow, He excelled in literature, and

384

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

he was proud when his half-sister, Augusta, four years his elder and
almost unknown to him, came to Harrow to hear him declaim part of
King Lear.

Byron was seventeen when he went to Trinity College, Cambridge.
He went in style, for now he had an allowance of five hundred pounds.
He spent it on handsome furnishings for his rooms, a carriage and
groom, the services of a fencing master, and other luxuries required
by a rich young lord. It was not long before he was in debt. "I am
still the schoolboy and as great a rattle as ever," he wrote to a friend,
"and between ourselves college is not the place to improve either morals
or income." Calling a brief halt to his extravagances, he retired for al-
most a year to his mother's house at Southwell — Newstead Abbey had
been rented — but opportunities for dissipation were few and the situa-
tion was drab. He wrote some poetry but the time passed heavily.
'Wine and women have dished your humble servant," he wrote to
his lawyer, "not a sou to be had. ... I am condemned to exist (I can-
not say live) at this crater of dullness till my lease of infancy expires/'

Back in Cambridge he paid little attention to his studies; he idled
away most of the hours, read romantic novels, boxed, fenced, and fol-
lowed whatever path promised an escape from the curriculum. He also
made a few good friends: the witty Scrope Davies, the whimsical
Charles Skinner Matthews, and particularly John Cam Hobhouse, who
was to become a politician, classical scholar, and Byron's executor. With
these companions Byron sampled the gaudier diversions of London,
visited the gambling establishments of Brighton, and soon found him-
self in debt again.

At nineteen he published his first volume, Hours of Idleness. Most
of it had been written much earlier and had been tentatively entitled
Poems on Various Occasions. It was obviously a collection of juvenilia,
but the critic of The Edinburgh Review treated it as mercilessly as
though it were the work of some presumptuous professional. Byron was
badly hurt, but he waited almost two years to reply. After he had re-
ceived his degree in July, 1808, and, eight months later, had taken his
seat in the House of Lords, he published English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers.

English Bards and Scotch Reviewers is a slashing rejoinder in the
style of Pope, whom Byron admired unreservedly as "the greatest name
in our poetry." With the resentment that impelled The Dunciad and
something of its dexterity, the twenty-one-year-old author not only sati-
rizes his detractors but flagellates his detestations: Scott ("And think'st

385

LIVES OF THE POETS

thou, Scott, by vain conceit perchance/ On public taste to foist thy
stale romance"); Southey ("Southey, cease thy varied song!/ A bard
may chant too often and too long!); Coleridge ("Though themes of in-
nocence amuse him best/ Yet still Obscurity's a welcome guest."); and,
his special abomination, Wordsworth ("Who, both by precept and
example, shows/ That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose.").

When, in 1809, Byron attained his majority he might, at the same
time, have attained a fortune. But he owed over twelve thousand
pounds, so the state of his finances was no better than before. This did
not prevent him from inviting his Cambridge friends to a rowdy party
at the reoccupied Newstead. There, to celebrate his coming of age and
also the restoration of the Abbey, everyone was dressed as a monk, al-
though no other monastic habits were observed. Lady Byron was not
amused. There was another of the loud, incessant quarrels which had
gone on since his boyhood, and Byron flew at his mother with the same
lack of control that marked her own rages. "Am I to call this woman
mother?" he complained. "Am I to be goaded with insult, loaded with
obloquy, and suffer my feelings to be outraged on the most trivial occa-
sions? I owe her respect as a son, but I renounce her as a friend!" It
was with unforgiving anger that Byron left her and, accompanied by a
valet and Hobhouse, sailed for Europe and, on July 6, reached Lisbon.

From Lisbon Byron rode five hundred miles on horseback to C&diz —
"a perfect Cytherea" — and the somewhat less aphrodisiac Gibraltar.
Thence to Malta and, after a brief, ambiguous affair, to Albania,
Athens, Smyrna, and Constantinople, where he swam the Hellespont,
"in imitation of Leander, though without his lady." Here Hobhouse
departed, while Byron returned alone to Athens. Thomas Moore, to
whom Byron left his Memoirs, hints in his biography that Byron had
found Hobhouse tiresome; but this was not, Hobhouse declared, the
reason "which induced Lord Byron to prefer having no Englishman
immediately and constantly near him." Hobhouse would have been
embarrassed by Byron's fondness for attractive Levantine youths — at
Cambridge Byron had formed a passionate friendship with a young
chorister, Arthur Edleston, whom he said he loved "more than any
human being," and in Greece Byron was free to enjoy new varieties of
Paphian pleasure. After some dalliance, however, he decided to face the
vague future and his fluctuating fortune in England. He was twenty-
three, and he had been abroad two years when he took rooms in St.
James's Street, London, 'Indifferent to the public, solitary, without the
wist to be social, with a body a little enfeebled by a succession of

386

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

fevers, but a spirit, I trust, yet unbroken, I am returning Tiome* without
a hope and almost without a desire. The first thing I shall have to en-
counter will be a lawyer, the next a creditor, then colliers, farmers, sur-
veyors, and all the agreeable attachments to estates out of repair and
contested coal-pits. In short, I am sick and sorry."

Besides the vexing management of Newstead Abbey, awkward deal-
ings with tenants and servants, some of whom served as part-time con-
cubines, as well as the difficult supervision of properties like coal mines
which yielded "neither coals nor comfort," tragedy greeted him shortly
after his return. His mother died — it was said that her death was caused
by a paroxysm of anger over a renovator's bill — and his good friend,
Charles Skinner Matthews, was drowned, horribly enmeshed in weeds
from which he could not free himself. "Some curse hangs over me and
mine," he wrote in a disheartened and theatrical letter to Scrope Davies.
"My mother lies a corpse in this house; one of my best friends is
drowned in a ditch. What can I say, or think, or do? I received a letter
from him the day before yesterday. ... I am almost desolate — left
almost alone in the world — I had but you, and H(obhouse), and
M(atthews); let me enjoy the survivors while I can."

There were other things, besides the survivors, to enjoy. Byron made
friends with Tom Moore, the grocer's son who was to be hailed as
Ireland's national lyrist, and with Samuel Rogers, the banker's son, who
poeticized endlessly and ambitiously, but who, at eighty-seven, was to
refuse the laureateship. He also made his first speech in the House of
Lords. Weavers in Nottingham had been thrown out of work when
modern machinery had been installed. In retaliation they had destroyed
the manufacturing frames and, to prevent recurrences, a Frame-Break-
ing Bill had been introduced which would punish with the death pen-
alty anyone causing such damage. (In 1922 the German dramatist Ernst
Toller made this die subject of his play, Die Maschinensturmer, "The
Machine-Wreckers.") Byron opposed the bill. He was no friend of the
working classes, but he loathed die emerging caste, the employing indus-
trialists who were to run the country. 'The maintenance and well-being
of the industrious poor is an object of greater consequence to the com-
munity than the enrichment of a few monopolists* . . . My own mo-
tive for opposing the bill is founded on its palpable injustice and its
certain inefficacy. ... I have traversed the seat of war in the Penin-
sula; I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey;
but never, under the most despotic of infidel governments, did I behold
such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return, in the very

387

LIVES OF THE POETS

heart of a Christian country." Byron's maiden address was roundly
applauded; even members of the opposition, who succeeded in passing
the bill, commended his ardor and eloquence. But a greater event was
to catapult him into glory.

During his European trip Byron had begun a long poem in strict
Spenserian stanzas; the first canto had been completed in Greece. Rather
diffidently Byron offered two cantos which he called Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage. They were published in mid-March, 1818, and Byron
awoke, as he said, "one morning and found myself famous." Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage is a rambling piece of work, a rhymed itinerary
which is, at the same time, a slightly disguised autobiography with
glints of European history, politics, and social philosophy. As in every-
thing he wrote, Byron's chief subject was himself, but a romanticized
version of himself. The poem was picturesque, the varied record of a
time and a place, or series of places, but it was pre-eminently the show-
piece for an affected yet arresting individuality. Byron's efforts to recon-
cile a willful temperament and a restless mind with "an all-tolerant, all-
seeing nature" (recalling the Wordsworth he despised) grew as the
poem progressed; the philosophic reflections found a kind of culmina-
tion in such stanzas as:

I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture: I can see
Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be
A link reluctant in a fleshly chain,
Classed among creatures, when the soul can flee,
And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain
Of ocean, or the stars, mingle — and not in vain . , .

Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part
Of me and of my soul, as I of them?
Is not the love of these deep in my heart
With a pure passion? should I not contemn
All objects if compared with these? and stem
A tide of suffering, rather than forego
Such feelings for the hard and worldly phlegm
Of those whose eyes are only turned below,
Gazing upon the ground, with thoughts which dare not glow?

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GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

It was, paradoxically enough, sentiments like these, embellished with
oratorical flourishes, that impressed the elegant Londoners who lived in
a state of "wordly phlegm." The metropolitan bigwigs maneuvered to
meet him, flocked to him, fawned upon him, quoted his smallest con-
versational tidbits, and rekindled his easily fired self-assurance. They
were rewarded, for Byron's presence was in itself a stimulation. He was
sometimes happily responsive, sometimes petulant, but he always ema-
nated charm. In his twenty-fifth year he was in every sense ravishing;
his was the kind of beauty attributed to a Greek god, and he was well
aware of it. Vain about his complexion, he bathed his skin in countless
lotions; fearing unpoetic plumpness, he kept his weight down by exer-
cise, diet, and a constant consumption of laxatives; it was said that his
wavy auburn ringlets were achieved by a nightly use of curl papers.
Not tall, he gave the impression of height because of the way he held
his five feet eight inches and, in an attempt to conceal his lameness,
walked on his toes.

Much has been made of Byron's "ethereal" appearance, but his fea-
tures were more earthy than spiritual. Sir Thomas Lawrence noted the
contradictions: "the forehead clear and open, the brow boldly prominent,
the eyes bright and dissimilar, the nose finely cut and the nostril acutely
formed — the mouth well formed but wide, and contemptuous even in
its smile, falling singularly at the corners, and its vindictive and disdain-
ful expression heightened by the massive firmness of the chin." Actually
the chin was soft, showing a tendency to fleshiness, the eyes were set
too close together and, a further incongruity in a classic head, there
were no ear lobes. But the general effect of his person was that of the
idealized poet, pale, musing, and appealingly melancholy. The image
he evoked, one so memorably caricatured by Max Beerbohm, was that
of a lone figure standing on a diflr, backed by a turbulent sky, con-
fronting the elements with a mixture of desperation and defiance . . -
solitary, superior to fate, disdainful of the crowd, but satisfied that he is
being observed. One of his votaries, Jane Porter, saw him enshrined on
Parnassus and said that his was the most melodious speaking voice she
had ever heard. He was proud of his well-shaped hands and always
wore jeweled rings to accentuate the delicacy of his fingers.

Women were particularly fascinated by the combination of Byron's
masculine assertiveness and feminine sensibilities. They surrounded
him; they could not bear to let him alone. A Don Juan with a difference,
he was more often the pursued than the pursuer. He was the lion of
the hour, and it was only natural that women, determined celebrity-

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hunters, should track him down, set baited traps for him, and try to
tame him. He who, until his triumphant appearance as poet-libertine-
libertarian, had amused himself with casual adventures and common
girls, now enjoyed the favors of the aristocracy. His reputation as amor-
ist made him a legitimate and all the more alluring quarry. Titled ladies
employed their every art in stalking.

None was more artful and intrepid than Lady Caroline Lamb, char-
acterized by a contemporary as "wild, delicate, odd, and delightful."
Lady Caroline, whose husband was to be Prime Minister, was a young,
dissatisfied, and restless girL Infatuated with the Byron legend, she half
feared to meet Byron himself. Nevertheless, she sought him out. The
man, she told her diary, was "mad, bad, dangerous to know/' but, she
added, "that beautiful face is my fate."

Seduction had become too easy for Byron. He much preferred the
role of the one who is tempted, who retreats, and finally allows him-
self to be seduced — the man of the world who owes his triumphs to the
woman in him. Lady Caroline, who had always been sure of herself,
was as persistent as she was wayward. At first her mother-in-law, Lady
Melbourne, was amused and her husband was tolerant; Lady Caroline
and Byron were invited everywhere together, just as if, she commented
naughtily, "we had been married." For a while Byron was flattered that
a lady with the highest connections was so desirous of him, but once
he had achieved his objective, he was satisfied. Not so Lady Caroline.
Her amour propre even more than her amorousness was challenged; she
would not let Byron go. The more importunate she became, the more
Byron resented her possessiveness; he never could bear any claim upon
him. Caroline was undeterred; she was not one to be dismissed or even
discouraged. There were scenes, serio-comic and disgraceful. She fol-
lowed him wherever he went and waited outside houses where he
was dining. He gave orders she was not to be admitted to his house —
and she got into his rooms by disguising herself as a page boy. Even
after she had received her conge she continued to bedevil him in private
and plague him in public. She built a bonfire on her lawn, made an
effigy of the lover who had rejected her, and threw the wax figure in
the flames. Later, at a party Byron was attending, she stopped the
dancing by a hysterical demonstration during which she cut her wrist.
Shameless in her bravado, when her place had been taken by others,
she continued to tempt Byron and tried to cajole him into taking her
back.

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GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

Byron, however, was hoping for quiet. He was not yet twenty-five,
but he envisioned a period of passionless content; he even considered
getting married. He had grown very fond of Caroline's mother-in-law,
and the amiable and worldly Lady Melbourne was now not only his
friend but his confidante. At her home, the splendid Melbourne House,
he became acquainted with her niece and Caroline's cousin by marriage,
Anna Isabella (Annabella) Milbanke. She was Caroline's opposite in
every way: cool, reticent, serious, strait-laced. She had had many
suitors, but she was not interested in any of them. When, at about
nineteen, she met Byron she was, unlike most women, neither charmed
nor impressed by him. She did not like his looks — "his mouth continu-
ally betrays the acrimony of his spirit." Nor did she admire his poetry
— "he is rather too much of a mannerist" — and she was contemptuous
of the women who were so obviously and "absurdly courting him."

Piqued by her unconcern and with the possibility of marriage in
mind, Byron presented the side most calculated to attract her: the peni-
tent rake who wanted to be reformed. He succeeded in persuading her
that, as she recorded in her diary, "he is sincerely repentant for the evil
he has done, but he has no resolution, without aid, to adopt a new
course of conduct." His was an artful yet clear enough appeal, and it
was indicated that Annabella could help most logically as his helpmeet.
But she hesitated, and Byron was not anxious to press on. There was an
exchange of carefully worded, well-constructed letters, a friendship that
was a kind of courtship, but nothing more. He respected her, he ad-
mired her, but he did not desire her. He liked to think of himself as a
lost soul. He said, "She is much too good for a fallen spirit to know,
and I should like her more if she were less perfect."

He turned elsewhere for a semblance of domesticity combined with
sensuality. He found both in Jane Elizabeth, Lady Oxford, who had mar-
ried a man many years her senior and who had a reputation for having
presented her husband with several children, none of whom was (ex-
cept in a legal sense) his. She was in her mid-forties, twenty years older
than Byron, and she made the badgered celebrity happier than he had
ever supposed he could be. Lady Oxford fulfilled the romanticist's
dream: she gave him the consolation of an understanding companion,
the illicit pleasure of an experienced mistress, and the sympathy of a
solicitous mother. However, in less than a year the pattern of attraction
and repulsion was repeated. In her forties Lady Oxford not only made
the mistake of falling desperately in love but committed the greater folly

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of letting Byron know it. She remonstrated, and he grew rude; she made
demands, and he left her. The affair had lasted eight months, longer
than any of the bystanders anticipated.

Once again Byron thought of settling down. Once more he turned
to Lady Melbourne in the matter of Miss Milbanke; he confessed that
he was not in love with Annabella but greatly respected her tempera-
ment and integrity — "whomever I -may marry, that is the woman I would
wish to have married" Besides, he added with sly ingenuity, such a
union would give him the inestimable delight of becoming Lady Mel-
bourne's nephew. Actually Byron was more drawn to the sixty-two-year-
old Lady Melbourne than to her twenty-year-old niece. "If she had been
a few years younger, what a fool she would have made of me, had she
thought it worth her while." Through Lady Melbourne he sent Anna-
bella an offer of marriage, a proposal which was declined with a little
essay on religious principles, the need of goodness, and regard for ideals.
She conceded there were fine qualities behind Byron's fagade of cyni-
cism, but when she married she desired a husband who had warm and
domestic feelings, inflexible respectability, and devotion to duty. These
were desiderata which Byron neither possessed nor wished to acquire,
and he withdrew, not too reluctantly, into uncensored bachelorhood.

He occupied himself with the poetry of escape. During the last six
months of 1813 he completed and published The Giaour and The Bride
of Abydos and, shortly thereafter, The Corsair, which sold twelve thou-
sand copies on the day it appeared. There were also business affairs
that needed his attention. He had sold Newstead Abbey for one hun-
dred and forty thousand pounds, but the buyer had failed to pay the
purchase price, the property reverted to Byron and, after prolonged
negotiations, Byron managed to collect a forfeit of some twenty-five
thousand pounds.

Solitude was almost as stupid as business. Byron thought he would
relish being free of claims or encumbrances; now that he was by himself
he could not endure it. But he was not to be alone for long. His half-
sister, Augusta, whom he had seen only once or twice since he was
twelve, decided to join him in midsummer in his London apartments
and, after living there until January, went with him to Newstead
Abbey. Incompatibly married to Colonel George Leigh, she shared By-
ron's restlessness and his sense of doom. Her eyes, like Byron's, were
dark and dramatic and the forehead bore the family stamp; her features
weie larger than her brothers and her expression was both coarser and
kinder. Like Byron, she had a pagan disregard of conventional morality.

39*

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

She was almost a stranger to him, a woman rather than a sister. The
infatuation was immediate and unresisted. That she was several years
his elder cemented the bond, for, as with Lady Oxford and Lady Mel-
bourne, Byron was most stimulated by older women. No proof has ever
been produced to show that brother and sister had sexual relations, but
Byron made no effort to conceal the attachment to his intimates.

He was not only excited but inspired by the situation; his Turkish
tale, The Bride of Abydos, is the story of two doomed lovers who be-
lieve, erroneously, they are brother and sister. Moreover, when Augus-
ta's child, Elizabeth Medora, was born in April, 1814, ten months after
she had united herself with her brother, Byron pointed out that Augusta
had not been living with Colonel Leigh, and wrote to Lady Melbourne
that the child was "not an ape/' an allusion to the superstition that a
child of incest was likely to be something not quite human. Years later,
in an effort to absolve Augusta from guilt, Byron wrote a mournful
"Epistle to Augusta" which was never published during the poet's life-
time. It contained stanzas as significant as these:

If my inheritance of storms hath been
In other elements, and on the rocks
Of perils, overlooked or unforeseen,
I have sustained my share of worldly shocks,
The fault was mine; nor do I seek to screen
My errors with defensive paradox;
I have been cunning in mine overthrow,
The careful pilot of my proper woe.

Mine were my faults, and mine be their reward.
My whole life was a contest, since the day
That gave me being, gave me that which marred
The gift — a fate, or will, that walked astray;
And I at times have found the struggle hard,
And thought of shaking off my bonds of clay:
But now I fain would for a time survive,
If but to see what next can well arrive.

For thee, my own sweet sister, in thy heart
I know myself secure, as thou in mine;
We were and are — I am, even as thou art —
Beings who ne'er each other can resign.

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It is the same, together or apart,
From life's commencement to its slow decline
We are entwined — let death come slow or fast,
The tie which bound the first endures the last! .

Byron confided in Lady Melbourne. Before the child was born, he
hinted that he was going to Europe with his sister, whereupon his ad-
viser was horrified; he was, she warned, on the point of ruining him-
self by committing a crime for which there was no redemption. In Sep-
tember Augusta temporarily returned to her country home, and Byron
indulged himself in a clandestine but not quite consummated entangle-
ment with the coyly virtuous Lady Frances Webster, whose husband
had borrowed a thousand pounds from Byron.

At twenty-six Byron was frankly worried about himself. Once more,
abetted by Lady Melbourne, he reconsidered matrimony as a haven.
Though she still distrusted Byron, Annabella had become fascinated
by him. Secretly she must have hoped she could save him and make his
reform not only possible but pleasant. There was a fresh exchange of
letters that began as a token of friendship and developed into an
epistolary flirtation. Annabella was a sententious bluestocking, a bit
pompous for a girl of twenty, but she had grace and a turn of phrase
that sounded a little like wit. "What an odd situation and friendship is
ours," Byron wrote, "without one spark of love on either side, and pro-
duced by circumstances which in general lead to coldness on one side
and aversion on the other. She is a very superior woman/* he added in
an effort to be fair, "and very little spoiled, which is strange in an
heiress — a peeress that is to be, in her own right — an only chSd and a
savante, who has always had her own way/'

Meanwhile, Byron did not abstain from less intellectual and more
trifling entanglements. His correspondence teemed with letters from un-
known fame-struck girls, guarded confessions, suggested assignations,
and open avowals of desire. But it was Augusta who ruled his passion
and it was she to whom he remained steadfast. When she rejoined him
at Newstead, there were further rumors of "criminal intercourse." Obliv-
ious of public opinion or "the bubble reputation," Byron let it be as-
sumed that the gossip about his incestuous feelings was justified. He
hinted at it in conversation, and more than intimated it in poetry:

I speak not — I trace not — I breathe not thy name —
ThJere is love in the sound — there is guilt in the fame —

394

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

But the tear which now burns on my cheek may impart
The deep thoughts that dwell in that silence of heart

Too brief for our passion — too long for our peace —
Was that hour — can its hope, can its memory cease?
We repent — we abjure — we will break from our chain —
We must part — we must Sy to — unite it again!

Augusta was alarmed, not for herself, but for her dangerously mer-
curial brother. She wanted him married, as Byron repeated to Lady
Melbourne, because it was "the only chance of redemption for two per-
sons/' and it would also, she foolishly hoped, keep him out of one
scrape after another. Lady Melbourne resumed her good offices, and,
upon Byron's return from Newstead, Annabella renewed the corre-
spondence. Although his other overtures had been rejected, she implied
that a new declaration might be favorably considered. Byron replied
primly but promptly. He visited her parents; he fidgeted and hesitated;
but the avenue of retreat was closed. After a few more cautious months
he was engaged. Annabella was overjoyed. She pledged herself to make
his happiness the first object in her life. 'If I can make you happy, I
have no other consideration. I will trust you for all I should look up
to," she declared with naive resolution. Augusta also was glad. 'Her
only error has been my fault entirely," Byron assured Lady Melbourne,
"and for this I can plead no excuse except passion, which is none." He
went on to say that he intended "to reform most thoroughly and be-
come 'a good man and true* in all the various senses of these respective
and respectable appellations." He had forebodings — Annabella seemed
too reserved, she had too many scruples, and her small mouth and thin
lips gave her face a determined expression. He complained to Hob-
house that "the character of wooer in this regular way does not sit easy
upon me." He hated the fuss and bustle and ceremony; he wished he
could wake up some morning and find himself married without further
demonstrations of affection.

The wedding took place on January z, 1815, in the drawing room of
the Milbanke home; an hour later the couple left for a honeymoon at
Halnaby, the family estate in Yorkshire. It was an ill-fated union from
the start; all the signs pointed to a miserable end. "Never was lover less
in haste," remarked Hobhouse; "the bridegroom was more and more less
impatient*" "Whatever induced you to marry me?" Byron asked his bride
a few hours after they were pronounced man and wife. While they

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were still in the carriage that took them from the church, Byron, she
recorded, burst out: 'What a dupe you have been to your imagination!
How is it possible that a woman of your sense could form the wild hope
of reforming me? It is enough for me that you are my wife for me to
hate you! If you were the wife of any other man, I own you might have
charm." When, on the first night, she timidly asked whether he wanted
her to share his bed, he replied that she might as well, for, as long as
she was young, one woman was as good as another. She thought these
were passing manifestations of a disturbed state of mind; within a few
weeks she was ready to believe that what she had taken for misguided
mockery was madness.

Annabella had heard rumors of Byron's relations with his sister, but
she assumed they were baseless or, at worst, over. If they had happened,
they had occurred before his marriage to Annabella, and no man should
be held accountable for what he did as a bachelor. Moreover, she was
fond of Augusta and more than a little sorry for her. Nevertheless,
Byron goaded her with accounts of his irregularities, particularly with
Augusta; he even blamed his young wife for them. Had Annabella mar-
ried him two years earlier, he asserted, they would not have occurred.
But now, he went on, "no one makes me happy but Augusta." The
poor girl was bewildered by his sudden shifts of mood. Moments of
badinage, even tenderness, were followed by insulting references to
Annabella's inability to rouse a man's ardor, alternated by rages against
himself and "the curse of the Byrons." Annabella could not turn against
him, for she was governed by principle and love; she still hoped to save
him even if, as she feared, he might be seriously deranged. The honey-
moon lasted three wretched weeks.

Byron sank further and further into depths of dejection, and Anna-
bella had to pay for his depressions. He took her to Augusta's home,
where he made both women suffer. He showed her Medora and told
her there was no doubt that she was his child — Colonel Leigh's absence
at the time of conception was adduced as proof. When she expressed
her disbelief, he became more brutal. "Now that I have her again," he
said, indicating Augusta, "you will find I can do without you — in all
ways/* Perhaps the weirdest part of the situation was that it was
Augusta to whom Annabella turned for consolation.

Money problems increased Byron's irritation. Always careless pbout
expenditures, he was deeply in debt, and when creditors grew pressing
there were ugjty, maniacal scenes. Annabella became pregnant and she
was glad that Augusta had come to stay for several months; Augusta

396

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

was the only one who could keep Byron calm. He was tender when he
thought of Annabella bearing his child, but softhearted periods were
interspersed with outbursts of insufferable rudeness and cruelty. Anna-
bella's quiet strength of purpose infuriated him, and he planned out-
rageous things. Thrown back upon himself, unable to find sufficient dis-
tractions, he tormented her for his failures. More than ever she was
afraid he might be dangerously insane.

On December 10, 1815, a daughter, named Augusta Ada, was born.
Byron sent Annabella back to her parents immediately after the child
was delivered, and Augusta remained with him. Annabella wrote to
her "dearest Sis," suggesting that Byron needed constant care. When
the doctor who visited him convinced Annabella that his mind was not
impaired, Annabella came to a bitter decision. She had told her parents
some of the things to which she had been subjected; a lawyer was called
in and a reconciliation was considered. Faced with the child's dubious
future, she told more; she withheld neither the damning facts nor the
unproved but undenied suspicions. There could no longer be a question
of returning to her husband, and, after a marriage that lasted exactly
twelve months, a legal separation was arranged. At first Byron fought
it — he was furious that any woman should dare to give him up before
he had made up his mind to abandon her. Then, his hurt pride speak-
ing, he pleaded. The too often quoted 'Tare thee well," a tearfully
sentimental appeal, is an embarrassing instance of how far Byron could
go to make himself seem pathetic. But, true to her thin mouth and
tight lips, Annabella was firm.

The separation started a gathering flood of scandal. Old rumors were
revived and exaggerated details added. The number of girls Byron had
cultivated and discarded appeared to be countless; he himself once
estimated he had had some two hundred mistresses. There were more
serious charges. Besides the slur of incest, there were whispered imputa-
tions of other perversions, such as homosexuality and "unnatural prac-
tices," the latter being the subject of "Leon to Arabella," an erotic poem
ascribed to Byron. The public gloated unctuously over the new sensa-
tion, and the once envied peer was cut by the social arbiters who, a few
months before, had fawned upon him.

Biographers are by no means agreed on the controversial question of
Byron's incestuous relations with Augusta. Many of them indignantly
deny any suggestion of sexual wrongdoing and insist that, having been
denied the love of a mother, Byron went to his half-sister for the sym-
pathy and maternal care he could get nowhere else. One of the biog-

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raphers, Richard Edgcumbe, goes so far as to contend that the ill-fated
Medora, who was to undergo an appalling series of sordid adventures,
was Byron's love-child by his childhood sweetheart, Mary Chaworth,
during a brief lapse of marital fidelity. Augusta, Edgcumbe surmises,
adopted Medora out of love and loyalty, for had she told the whole
truth "she would have been pressed by Lady Byron to prove it by di-
vulging the identity of the child's mother," whose reputation (according
to this biographer) she had promised to protect

At all events, the lovers of scandal were not interested in ascertain-
ing the truth; professing to be shocked, they enjoyed every disreputable
shred of rumor. It was too much for the once arrogant poet A notorious
gossip himself, largely responsible for his equivocal repute, Byron could
not stand being the target of a hypocritically moral, mud-slinging pub-
lic. On April 25, 1816, he left England with a huge, semi-royal equi-
page, three servants, and young John William Polidori, who went along
in the capacity of friend, personal physician, and keeper of a journal
commissioned by a publisher, Byron never returned. A pet lion who
suddenly found himself the scapegoat of a debased society, he became
an embittered, self-banished exile. He had crowded more experiences
and excitement into his twenty-eight years than the most energetic ad-
venturer could accomplish in a lifetime, and his career was far from
complete.

Free of England, Byron tried to bury his chagrin, but he did not
bother to conceal his sense of grievance. He put on sorrow as though it
were a kind of regalia; he let Europe share what Matthew Arnold
called "the pageant of his bleeding heart" From his travel carriage,
large enough to contain a bed, chair, and writing desk, he saw the Low
Countries and was bored by them. He yawned through Bruges, Ghent,
and Antwerp, which were too tidy for his taste. On the other hand,
Brussels was too disorderly; it is amusing to note that the profligate
Byron was shocked at Rubens' full-bodied carnalities. "I was never so
disgusted in my life as with Rubens and his eternal wives and infernal
glare of color — I never saw such an assemblage of florid nightmares/'
He visited Waterloo, which he enjoyed chiefly because of his identi-
fication with his favorite hero, the defeated Napoleon. Then into Ger-
many, where he made the traditional tour — Cologne, Bonn, the Rhine
— and so to Switzerland.

Staying for a while at S&heron on the Lake of Geneva, he met
Shelley, Shelley's mistress, eighteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft God-
win, daughter o£ the radical philosopher William Godwin, and her

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GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

stepsister, Claire (Clara Mary Jane) Qairmont Byron had already
known Claire. She was one of the pursuing women who had written
alluring letters to him; she had forced an acquaintance and had wormed
her way into his bed though not into his affection. Paradoxically, al-
though Byron was a libertine and a completely amoral sexual opportun-
ist, he objected to free love as a matter of principle. His intimacy with
Shelley, a free lover by nature as well as circumstance, was guarded
and his reaction to Shelley's "atheistic morals" was distinctly cool. On
his part, Shelley was both charmed and disturbed by Byron, especially
by his constant craving to create a sensation — he told Thomas LoveU
Peacock that Byron was "an exceedingly interesting person, and as such
is it not to be regretted that he is a slave to the vilest and most vulgar
prejudices and as mad as a hatter.'*

Without love and with little desire, Byron again allowed himself to
yield to Claire's importunities. Claire, eager to be to Byron what Mary
had become to Shelley, was a nuisance, but she was easier to accept
than repulse, and the four strangely assorted personalities formed a
kind of family group. They usually dined together and, with Polidori,
made an intimate if irregular quintet. The union did not last long. In
the same way that he had freed himself of females who had clung to
him, Byron soon showed his resentment of Claire's company. It was all
he could do to get away from her to visit the castle of Chillon, a visit
which prompted the famous but overwritten poem. The Prisoner of
Chillon, whose heroic Bonnivard represents the "eternal spirit of the
chainless mind/' He slept with Claire but he did not really like her.
Yet, though he mistreated, neglected, and abused her, he did not hesi-
tate to use her as a secretary and an amanuensis who made clean copies
of his almost illegible manuscripts.

Claire announced she was pregnant, and Byron was relieved that
Shelley and Mary, who were leaving for England, volunteered to take
care of her, Glad to be rid of what had become another burdensome
obligation, Byron expressed his feelings in a letter to Augusta, who had
heard rumors that Byron was living like a pasha with a bevy of houris.
"As to all these 'mistresses,' Lord help me, I have but one. Don't scold;
but what could I do? A foolish girl, in spite of all I could say or do,
would come after me, or rather went before — for I found her here —
and I have had all the plague possible to -persuade her to go back
again. . * , I was not in love — but I could not exactly play the stoic
with a woman who had scrambled eight hundred miles to unphiloso-
phise me." Then, as a sort of postscript, Byron sent an additional note:

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LIVES OF THE POETS

"I forgot to tell you that the demoiselle who returned to England from
Geneva went there to produce a new baby B, . . /'

Claire's departure did not cure Byron's tedium. No prospect pleased
him; he grew more fretful than ever. When Hobhouse, the old reliable,
came to see him, Byron let Polidori ("poor Pollydolly") go. Hobhouse's
cool sobriety was welcome after Shelley's heady overstirnulation, but
Byron continued to coddle his darker moods. "You would think/' he
wrote to Augusta, "I was sixty instead of not quite nine and twenty. "
He brooded, "half mad . . . between metaphysics, mountains, lakes,
love unextinguishable, thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare of my
own delinquencies."

There is a power upon me which withholds,
And makes it my fatality to live . . .
For I have ceased

To justify my deeds unto myself —
The last infirmity of evil.

Having unburdened himself in heart-rending letters to Augusta, he
felt more like going on. Specifically he went on to Italy, where his
moodiness vanished as his volatile temperament responded to the grace
and gaily promiscuous life in Milan. At the end of October, 1816, he
was once more on his way, this time toward the Adriatic. He stopped
at Verona, where he inspected the imposing Roman amphitheater and
the legendary tomb of Juliet, and entered Venice on a cold day in the
second week of November.

Venice was damp to the point of saturation, but even when the sky
was overcast, it was never dull or depressing. Venice was not so much
a haven of peace as a heaven of perpetual excitement. It was a new and
dazzling environment, yet Byron came to it with a sense of recognition:
it had always been "the greenest isle of my imagination/' It acted as a
tonic on his frayed and jangling nerves, and his amour propre was re-
stored by a new love interest. It was a rough-and-tumble affair; the
woman was Marianna Segatti, the twenty-two-year-old wife of Byron's
landlord. Libidinous and unprincipled, she was said to have cuckolded
her husband with any willing (or even unwilling) guest, and she soon
annexed the young English lord. Byron was amused at Marianna's pub-
lic display of her capture. He needed diversion and, as he wrote to
Augusta, his most constant correspondent, "I must content myself as
well as I can." His egotism was further reassured when, toward the

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GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

end of the year, there appeared the much-heralded Third Canto of
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and The Prisoner of Chillon, which brought
him some two thousand pounds. He also contemplated a Fourth Canto
of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the mood of which he captured on visits
to Florence and Rome.

Meanwhile he wrote some of his most commended lyrics, including
"So, we'll go no more a-roving," a pretty though overrated song in
Moore's most dulcet manner, with its significant second stanza:

For the sword outwears its sheath,

And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,

And Love itself have rest.

Cooing and cajoling letters continued to arrive from Claire, who was
living with the Shelleys, now married, in Bath, and he learned that his
daughter, Allegra, had been born on January 12, 1817. In spring Byron
rented a cottage on the Brenta, near Venice, and there, without dis-
carding Marianna, who seems to have kept house for him, he acquired
a new inamorata. She was Margarita Cogni, a hotheaded, vulgar, and
dissolute product of the Venetian slums, a girl appropriately known as
La Fornarina, "The Little Furnace." The two women exchanged scream-
ing insults and physical blows, but the altercations were accepted as
normal incidents in the household of a not altogether normal but ob-
viously wealthy "milord."

The wealth was real enough. Byron's publisher was glad to send ad-
vance payments for anything Byron contemplated — and, in the fall of
1818, Byron was thinking of writing a novel on the theme of Don Juan.
He was no longer in debt; thanks to a stroke of luck, Newstead Abbey
had been sold for almost one hundred thousand pounds. By Italian
standards Byron was a plutocrat as well as an aristocrat, and he pro-
ceeded to occupy the spacious Palazzo Mocenigo on the Grand Canal.
His entourage included fourteen servants, numerous horses, which he
could use only on the mainland, dogs, cats, and a considerable menag-
erie of other pets, including a monkey, a peacock, and an Egyptian
crane.

Still he was not happy. News from England, which he eagerly
awaited, was meager, and, when it arrived, it was disconcerting. Augusta
was trying to repair her shattered reputation; Annabella had decided to
help and, at the same time, justify herself. Unable to reform her hus-

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band, Annabella sought out, befriended, and gave herself the satis-
faction of "saving" his sister. After Augusta was persuaded that her re-
lationship with her brother was sinful and must end, Annabella became
her counselor. Augusta dutifully handed over the love letters which
Byron kept on writing and, prompted by Lady Byron, urged him to
desist. Byron was not only grieved but alarmed at Augusta's defection.
"Do not hate yourself," he remonstrated. "If you hate either, let it be
me. But do not — it would kill me. We are the last persons in the world
who ought or could cease to love one another/' He pleaded with her
to join him — "we are just formed to pass our lives together" — but she
refused. Her letters became less frequent and more evasive, and it was
in an agony of spirit, which no amount of concubinage could alleviate,
that he wrote: "My own XXXX — We may have been very wrong, but I
repent of nothing except that cursed marriage, and your refusing to
continue to love me as you had loved me. I can neither forget nor quite
forgive you for that previous piece of reformation; but I can never be
other than I have been, and whenever I love anything it is because it
reminds me of you. It is heartbreaking to think of our long separation,
and I arn sure more than punishment enough for all our sins. ... If
ever I return to England it will be to see you. * . . They say absence
destroys weak passions and confirms strong ones. Alas! mine for you is
the union of all passions and of all affection; it has strengthened itself
but it will destroy me."

Allowances must be made for protestations written under great stress.
Byron evidently believed them when he wrote this, but the poet was
wise enough to know that the separation was not his destruction. After
an apostrophe to Venice, the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrim-
age declares:

All suffering doth destroy, or is destroyed,
Even by the sufferer; and in each event
Ends.

Exiled, loveless, and isolated from all he cherished, Byron went dog-
gedly to his writing and desperately to his diversions — "studious in the
day, dissolute in the evening." Besides his accredited mistresses, there
were other bedfellows — women met at carnivals, shopgirls, prostitutes —
who came and went. His attachments also included male companions
whose sexual habits were, to say the least, ambiguous. Two months after
liis thirtieth birthday, the Shelleys brought Allegra to Byron, who, since
Claire could not support her daughter, was willing to care for the child.

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Byron's household was scarcely adapted to the upbringing of a baby,
and he handed Allegra over to Mrs. Hoppner, wife of the English
consul.

Dissipation combined with distress began to show in Byron's body
although not on his mind. His once-slender frame became heavy, his
face puffy, his proudly pale complexion sallow. He continued to wear
his hair long, but it was turning a premature gray. His creative energy,
however, was unabated; it was actually more youthful than ever. In
spite of its complex structure, his next work, Don ]wm, was composed
as easily as though it were a succession of self-propelled rhymes — Byron
had abandoned the idea of writing it as a novel. A complete departure
from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, it became exactly what he intended
it to be: a combination of persiflage, satire, picaresque adventure, and
light deviltry — "quietly facetious upon everything," he informed Moore.

Whatever faults it may possess — and it is far from flawless — Don
Juan is one of the most personal as well as one of the most enlivening
long poems ever written. Before the quasi-hero is permitted to take
over, Byron the rebel has to pay his disrespect to the turncoat Lake
Poets who had profited so well from their apostasy. He assails Southey,
ridicules Wordsworth, and deflates Coleridge with cruel nonchalance.

Bob Southey! You're a poet — Poet Laureate,

And representative of all the race;
Although 'tis true that you turned out a Tory at

Last — yours has lately been a common case;
And now, my Epic Renegade! what are ye at?

With all the Lakers, in and out of place?
A nest of tuneful persons, to my eye
Like "four and twenty Blackbirds in a pye.1

"Which pye being opened they began to sing"
CThis old song and new simile holds good).

"A dainty dish to set before the King."

Or Regent, who admires such kind of food; —

And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing,
But like a hawk encumbered with his hood —

Explaining metaphysics to the nation —

I wish he would explain his Explanation. . . .

1The pun refers to Henry James Pye, who had become laureate in 1790 and
was the target of much derision.

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Presented as a narrative, Don ]itan is a carry-all for Byron's hurts and
hatreds. Donna Inez, Don Juan's mother, is a caricature of the prudish
Annabella, repugnant in her goodness, who 'looked a lecture, each eye
a sermon ... a walking calculation."

Morality's prim personification,
In which not Envy's self a flaw discovers;
To others' share let "female errors fall,"
For she had not even one — the worst of all.

A synthesis of Byron's characteristics, Don ]uan is a masterly virtuoso
performance. It is aggressively cynical and it is also poignantly defen-
sive; it is, at times, delicately restrained, at others outrageously ribald.
Witty, idyllic, coarse, and completely sure of itself, it is a magnificently
extended improvisation. The Second Canto, for example, is a prolonged
and impudent frolic in which Donna Julia, surprised by her husband,
hides the young hero beneath the bedclothes and, from her embraces,
the boy is transported to the arms of Haidee, a Greek nymph. Yet, for
all the flippancy, Don Juan neatly dissects a society to which the author
belonged and with which he was continually at odds; its selfishness and
hypocrisy is underscored by Byron's own self-justifying indignations.
It is, however, Byron's very enjoyment of the matter which makes Don
Juan so thoroughly enjoyable; the reader cannot stop for critical reser-
vations while he is being swept through the story on wave after wave
of irresistible gusto.

While he was composing Don ]uany Byron also wanted to define him-
self directly and explicitly. He began a book of memoirs, said to con-
tain a complete account of his experiences, including the low and licen-
tious episodes, up to and through the separation. The truth of this will
never be ascertained, for John Murray, the publisher to whom the mem-
oirs were intrusted, was prevailed upon to avoid another scandal, and,
with what must have been more than ordinarily mixed feelings, Murray
burned the manuscript

It was a bad period for Byron. He was nervous and worried; his sys-
tem was upset; he suffered from violent indigestion. Different doctors
diagnosed his trouble differently, but they agreed that Byron should
live a more orderly if not a more continent existence. For once he did
not expostulate. He simplified his habits and his household, said good-
bye to Marianna, got rid of La Fornarina — an almost impossible task—
and packed off the parasites whom he had lacked the courage to dis-

404

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

miss. One of his other mistresses tried to get him to marry her, but
Byron was not tempted to do anything as drastic as obtaining a divorce
and attempting to domesticate himself again. Then, in April, 1819, when
he was thirty-one, he met Teresa Guiccioli.

Byron was introduced to Teresa at a reception in Venice. She was
just nineteen, daughter of Count Ruggiero Gamba, and she had been
married to Count Alessandro Guiccioli for almost a year. Descriptions
vary concerning her looks. One diarist said she was distinguished in ap-
pearance and delicately built; another considered her somewhat dumpy.
To Mary Shelley she seemed "a nice, pretty girl, without pretensions,
good-hearted and amiable/' while Leigh Hunt found her self-conscious
and calculating, "a kind of buxom parlor maid, compressing herself into
dignity and elegance/* It was conceded that her legs were too short for
her rather ample torso. But, plain or pretty, her bright candor and youth-
ful impetuosity captivated Byron at once. Like Caroline and Claire, but
with much more charm and complete insouciance, Teresa threw her-
self at him. There was no hesitancy over morals, propriety, or possible
consequences. Teresa not only desired him but loved him passionately
and, in spite of everything, permanently.

Her attachment to Byron was made easier because of a peculiar code
that prevailed throughout Italy. This was the right of a married woman
to have a Cavaliere Servente, a socially accepted person who, in the
tradition of the ancient Court of Love, combined the qualities of cour-
tier, lover, and servant. The affair had to be conducted with the great-
est decorum — as in the Court of Love, the lover, always on hand to
wait on his lady, was supposed to pine with unconsummated passion —
and the husband acknowledged the artificial relation.

In the case of Byron and Teresa the attachment was more logical and
more dangerous than was customary. The husband was forty years older
than his bride; it was his third marriage; he was avaricious, devoted to
business, and politically ambitious. Until it suited his plans, Guiccioli
was purposely blind to what was happening, and allowed it to continue.
Teresa gloried in her importance. She preened herself in public, proud
of her ability to hold her husband and, at the same time, possess one
of the handsomest, most difficult, and most famous of celebrities. Byron
did not resist her dominance; after the succession of Venetian sluts, he
relished being adored by someone who was intelligent, ardent, and,
above all, patrician. But he was not unaware of the seriousness of the
situation. Deception was imperative, and Byron hated all forms of sub-
terfuge. There were secret trysts, clandestine gondola rides, intimate

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talks, concealed letters, and, with the aid of convenient go-betweens, an
impassioned fulfillment.

Bored as he was by Venice, Byron disliked to leave it; yet he obe-
diently followed Teresa. As he told Hobhouse, "the die is cast, and I
must (not figuratively but literally) pass the Rubicon. Everything is to
be risked for a woman one likes." The risk was implicit, and a strangely
cautious Byron did not want to take it. 'To go to cuckold a Papal
Count," he wrote peevishly to Hoppner, "in his own house, is rather
too much for my modesty, especially when there are several other places
at least as good for the purpose. . . . The Charmer forgets that a man
may be whisded anywhere before, but that after — / A journey in an
Italian June is a conscription, and therefore she should have been less
liberal in Venice or less exigent in Ravenna." But, although Byron
hesitated, he went Two months after meeting Teresa he was at her
bedside in Ravenna. She was suffering from a relapse after a miscar-
riage, and it was considered proper that he should be in attendance.

Ravenna itself, one of the traveler's goals, did not interest him. He
dutifully visited Dante's tomb, but if he saw the architectural Byzantine
triumph of the Church of San Vitale or the mosaic-emblazoned interior
of Sant' Apollinare there is no word of it. After one look at Theodoric's
sixth-century mausoleum he complained to the recovered Teresa: "Pray
instruct me how I am to behave in these circumstances* ... I have
tried to distract myself with this farce of visiting antiquities — it seems
quite intolerably tedious."

Living at an inn conveniently near the Palazzo Guiccioli, Byron
found plenty of opportunities for being alone with Teresa — there were
long rides into the surrounding forests, meetings not altogether by
chance, assignations when the Count took his daily siesta. When Byron
was not with her, he wrote to her. Iris Origo's scrupulously detailed
The Last Attachment is illuminated by about one hundred and sixty
love letters from Byron and by Teresa's private account of Byron's life
in Italy. The letters are unlike anything hitherto composed by Byron.
Written in Italian, they are full of exaggerated phrase-making, florid
little arias in the most operatic style, completely at variance with the
style he used when writing to friends in England. At the very time he
was assuring Teresa that the hours of separation plunged Tii-m into a
hell of agony, he was writing in this vein to Augusta:

I came here [Ravenna] on account of a Countess Guiccoli, a
girl of twenty married to a rich old man, of sixty about a

406

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

year ago. With her last winter I had a liaison according to
the good old Italian custom. She miscarried in May and sent
for me here — and here I have been these two months. She
is pretty — a great coquette — extremely vain — excessively af-
fected— clever enough — without the smallest principle —
with a good deal of imagination and some passion. She had
set her heart on carrying me off from Venice out of vanity
— and succeeded — and having made herself the subject of
general conversation has greatly contributed to her recovery.
... I send you a sonnet which this faithful Lady had
made for the nuptials of one of her relations in which she
swears the most alarming constancy to her husband. Is not
this good? You may suppose my face when she showed it
to me — I could not help laughing — one of our laughs!

In the purest romantic accents, Teresa described one of their horse-
back rides through the woods. Using the third person, she wrote:

They would remain for hours together in the deep forest
shade — dismounting and seating themselves under the great
resinous pines. They walked on thyme and other scented
herbs — his delight was that of a poet, hers that of a happy
young woman.

Teresa's picture is charming, one over which any lover would linger;
but this is the way Byron tells Augusta about their equestrian episodes:

She is a bore in her rides, for she can't guide her horse —
and he runs after mine and tries to bite him. And then she
begins screaming in a high hat and sky-blue riding habit —
making a most absurd figure — and embarrassing me and
both our grooms, who have the devil's own work to keep her
from tumbling.

Two months later, the Guicciolis left Ravenna for a short sojourn
in Bologna, and once again Byron followed. This time he did not bother
to stay at the inn more than a few days, for, at the Count's solicitation,
he moved into rooms on the ground floor of the Palazzo Savioli, the
Count's Bologna residence. Propinquity was a mistake; it dulled the
edge of anticipation. At Bologna Byron felt himself slipping from an

407

LIVES OF THE POETS

illicit excitement into something like conjugality, a lover to whom love-
making had degenerated into a routine. He drifted into aimlessness, and
resented it. "I feel/' he wrote to Murray, "and I feel it bitterly, that a
man should not consume his life at the side and on the bosom of a
woman. . . . But I have neither the strength of mind to break my
chain, nor the insensibility which would deaden its weight, I cannot
tell what will become of me — to leave, or to be left would at present
drive me quite out of my senses; and yet to what have I conducted
myself?"

Again and again he considered saying goodbye to Teresa, especially
when his friends insinuated that she was making a fool of him; but
Teresa was the only person besides Augusta who understood his tem-
peramental quirks and caprices. However, he was furious when his con-
duct was ridiculed. The meanest side of his character showed itself if
he was not sufficiently admired, and the slightest affront to his vanity
turned him into a petulant cad. When Hoppner expressed the fear that
Teresa might be deceiving him, Byron wrote coarsely to Alexander
Scott, a friend who had been with him in Venice:

I never supposed that the G. was to be a despairing shep-
herdess— nor did I search very nicely into her motives. All I
know is that she sought me — and I have had her — there
and here and everywhere. So that, if there is any fool-
making, I humbly suspect that two can play at that.

In the early fall, Count Guiccioli returned to Ravenna on business,
and Teresa, who was having another relapse, decided to consult the
celebrated Dr. Aglietti in Venice. She insisted, as a matter of course
and protocol, that her cavalier should accompany her, and the Count,
who had "borrowed" a considerable sum of money from Byron, con-
sented. The journey across country started as blissfully as a honeymoon
— the lovers stopped off at Arqua, Petrarch's final home, and Byron
looked soulful while Teresa recited one of the poet's sonnets — but the
hymeneal moments were brief. Rumors had preceded the pair, and
Byron was once more the center of a scandal. One report had it that
Byron had kidnaped his faintly protesting hostess; another was to the
effect that the Count had sold her to the wealthy English lord. In any
case, Teresa said she was too fatigued and ill to go to the apartment
which had been prepared for her and that she would stay with Byron
at his villa at La Mira on the Brenta. The Count, to whom Teresa

408

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

wrote blandly and equivocally, did nothing about it; he even gave her
permission to tour the glamorous Italian Lakes with Byron. But Teresa's
father disapproved of Guiccioli's complaisance, and Venice was out-
raged. Teresa and Byron had violated the code of the Cavaliere Servente
— instead of remaining with her husband and pretending that her cava-
lier was merely a good if gallant Amico, as the code demanded, she was
living openly with her lover. This was not only a repudiation of the
rules of the game, but an insult to society.

If Teresa was perturbed, she did not show it; on the contrary, she
kept house at La Mira as if it were her proper home. Byron was less at
ease. If he had ever been enchanted with Teresa — and, in spite of his
rhapsodic letters, there is evidence to the contrary — the spell was wear-
ing off. To his English correspondents he mentioned the possibility of
going to some place as remote as South America; he spoke several times
of Venezuela. He expressed his irritation and hope to Hobhouse:

A man must be a Cicisbeo and a Singer in Duets and a
Connoisseur in Operas — or nothing — here. I have made
some progress in all these accomplishments, but I can't say
that I don't feel the degradation. Better be an unskilled
planter, an awkward settler — better be a hunter — or any-
thing— than a flatterer of fiddlers and a fan carrier of a
woman. ... I have been an intriguer, a husband, a whore-
monger, and now I am a Cavaliere Servente — by the holy!
it is a strange sensation. * . . Yet I want a country and a
home and, if possible, a free one. I am not yet thirty-two
years of age. I might still be a decent citizen. . . .

Although he never admitted it, Byron must have welcomed Count
Guiccioli's arrival in Venice and the husband's determination to take
Teresa back to Ravenna. Moreover, the Count appealed to Byron's
honor not to return there. Byron assented, but Teresa raged. Forced to
obey her husband, she fretted herself into a fever. Her condition was
(or seemed) so serious that her family, who still stubbornly believed
that Teresa's need of Byron was the platonic worship of a neurotic girl,
begged Byron to come and see her. Guiccioli added his voice to that of
the Gambas; and Byron, giving up his dreams of becoming a South
American planter, went back to Ravenna to carry his lady's fan and
resume his duties as a reclaimed Cicisbeo, the recognized lover of a
married woman. "I would like to know who has been carried off — ex-

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cept poor me," lie wrote to Hoppner. "I have been more ravished my-
self than anybody since the Trojan war/*

Teresa immediately recovered. The Count, asking Byron to secure
favors from the British diplomatic corps, insisted on Byron's remaining
with them, and the comedy went on. The uncomfortable lover lived on
one floor of the palace, while his complacent mistress and her enigmatic
husband occupied another. It was an unreal but not unfamiliar situa-
tion: a scene from the old Commedia delV Arte. Byron may have been
more captured than captivated by Teresa but, nevertheless, he had been
as much in love with her as he could be with anyone except himself,
and he saw no way of escaping from his bondage.

Clever though she was, Teresa could not continue to hold both her
husband and her lover much longer. When the Count, who no longer
had anything to gain, faced her with the inevitable choice, Teresa did
not hesitate. Divorce being out of the question, she calmly decided to
leave her husband. Her family, convinced by Teresa that Guiccioli had
cruelly mistreated her, supported her and made a formal petition for a
decree of separation. Teresa had won again, but Byron did not regard
the victory without qualms. Once more he tried to free himself of
what had become a habit and, like all habits, had ceased to delight
or even divert. "I make love/' he said grimly, "by the clock/' He
reasoned with Teresa earnestly and morally. "With me you would be
unhappy and compromised in the eyes of the world. With your hus-
band you would be, if not happy, at least respectable and respected."

Teresa was not to be dissuaded; she would not give in and be the
only woman in Romagna not to have her Amico. When Byron told
her that the only possible course of action was his departure, she wept;
and when, after the separation, Teresa went to her father's house in
Filetto, fifteen miles from Ravenna, Byron became a part of the Gamba
household. Like the Gambas, he became interested in the actions of
the insurgent Carbonari and sided with the liberals. Opposed to the
oppressive clerical faction, he sympathized openly with the republicans
who advocated an end to misrule with "death to the priests."

Because, rather than in spite of, these imbroglios, Byron was busy
with new poetic projects. He wrote best when he was most beset with
difficulties; it might almost be said that excitement was necessary to
provoke him into creative energy. Besides beginning another journal,
he worked on the Fifth Canto of Don ]uan and completed three
tragedies, Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, and The Two Foscari, which
Byron considered his best work but which are almost unbearably tur-

410

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

gid. He also worked on the strident but powerful Cain and The
Vision of Judgment, a libelous burlesque of George IIFs stealing into
heaven and a stabbing parody of a similarly named poem by Southey.

There were sufficient difficulties to keep him worried as well as
busy. His political activities were causing concern, and the authorities
employed agents to spy on him. The future of his daughter Allegra
was an increasing problem. She had been with him part of the time
in Ravenna, but early in 182,1, when she was four years old, Byron
placed her, in spite of Claire's protests, in a Capucine convent at
Bagnacavallo. The place was cold and damp; the child was delicate;
the Shelleys added their petitions to Claire's, but Byron shrugged off
their objections. He was shocked though not conscience-stricken when
he learned that, as the result of an epidemic, Allegra had died suddenly
on April 20, 1822, at the age of five years and three months.

Meanwhile the situation was growing alarming for all liberals, and
when the Gambas were compelled to leave Ravenna, Byron, delaying
his departure as long as possible, joined them in Pisa. The Shelleys
were there, and a friend of theirs, Edward John Trelawny, a menda-
cious soldier of fortune, whose swaggering manner, flashing eyes, and
theatrical gestures made him look as though he had stepped out of one
of Byron's most melodramatic stanzas. Byron also became acquainted
with another member of Shelley's circle, the minor poet Leigh Hunt,
who first flattered Byron, then imposed upon and finally maligned
him. With his insolent wife and his six undisciplined children, whom
Byron found "dirtier and more mischievous than Yahoos," Hunt set-
tled himself in the Lanfranchi Palazzo which Byron had rented and
almost succeeded in driving Byron out of the house. When Hunt
published his memoirs, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries,
he turned upon bis one-time benefactor and pictured him as petty,
vicious, intemperate, dishonest, craven, a half-mad, half-calculating
poseur. A few months later, when the Gambas were again expelled,
Byron, plagued by friends and enemies, was not sorry to follow the
family to Genoa.

The liaison had lasted nearly three years and Byron had tired of it
long before the end. Teresa irked him — she had begun censoring his
work and suggesting how it should be written. She considered Don
Juan an indecent poem and made Byron promise either to end it or to
continue it "in a less immoral and more romantic strain." Despite her
most intimate relations with Byron, Teresa was actually a prig. She
altered his letters and excised passages from them so that posterity

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might see her in the best possible light; she left misleading memoirs
and wrote about herself with a self-righteousness so bland as to be
absurd.

The summer of 182,2, brought Byron into the presence of death with
tragic force. He was brooding about the irrational vagaries of life when
Shelley, who had gone for a sail in his boat, the Ariel, with a copy
of Keats's Poems in his pocket, was drowned near Leghorn. When the
body was recovered, it was cremated on the shore by Trelawny, Hunt,
and Byron, who mourned that Shelley was "the best and least selfish
man I ever knew ... the most gentle, amiable, and least worldly-
minded/*

Miserable, longing to get away from everything and everyone, in-
cluding himself, Byron decided to move on. A furor for freedom was
rousing the Greek, and Greek patriots were training armed bands
against the Turkish tyranny. Byron was skeptical about the integrity as
well as the military aspect of the Greek revolt, but he became a mem-
ber of a combative Greek committee. There was a gesture of bravado
about his action, but at least it was action, a compulsion to perform and
a conviction that, good or bad, foolish or fatal, this was his destiny.

On July 1 6, 1823, Byron left Genoa, accompanied by Trelawny.
Teresa pleaded to go with him, but he refused to take her, and on
August 3 he arrived in Cephalonia. His entry into Greece was not
auspicious. The Greeks were quarreling among themselves; the polit-
ical climate and the weather were equally bad. Byron waited im-
patiently for something to happen.

What happened was the one thing he never anticipated. He became
seriously ill. There were convulsions and, though the seizure passed,
he felt the claims of death and the doom which he always feared was
about to descend. The fears were not exaggerated, but he was re-
solved to make a dramatic exit. He organized a guard of some forty
soldiers and, on November 30, landed at the squalid little town of
Missolonghi. Here Byron felt the last latent stirrings of homosexual
desire and experienced his final passion in an unconsummated love
for a Greek page, Loukas Chalandritsanos. It is supposed that it was to
this youth that Byron wrote a poem, unpublished until sixty years
after his death, which declares:

» . . andyetthoulov^stmenot,
And never will! Love dwells not in our will.

412

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

Nor can I blame thee, though it be my lot
To strongly, wrongly, vainly, love thee still.

It was literally live or die now, he said. "If Greece should fall, I
will bury myself in its ruins. If she should establish her independence,
I will take up residence in some part or other — perhaps Attica."

Byron had arrived in Greece with great prestige and, determined
not to lose it, he planned to prove himself on the scene of conflict The
moment of glory was denied him. His end, after a spectacular landing
with salvos of artillery, was a pitiful anticlimax. He died, not on the
battlefield, but ingloriously on a sickbed. On February 1 5, he fainted;
a few days later he seemed to recover and, although threatened with
pneumonia, he was foolhardy enough to ride out in the rain that had
been drenching the land for weeks. The result was another and more
severe collapse; the attack was variously diagnosed as typhus, acute
rheumatic inflammation, and pernicious malaria. Byron had no faith
in the doctors; he held that the lancet had killed more people than the
lance. Whatever the ailment, his condition was hopeless. He became
incoherent, and on April 19, 1824, still struggling with delirium,
ceased to breathe. His last words were "my child . . . my sister . . ."

The Greeks wanted to give Byron a soldier's burial, but his remains
were disposed of in a curiously macabre manner. His heart and lungs
were buried in a church in Missolonghi. His intestines, placed in four
sealed jars, and his body, enclosed in an alcohol-filled cask, were
shipped to England,

Few writers have led a more public or histrionic life than Byron,
and his poems are an almost exact transcript of his way of living. The
poetry is confessional as well as sensual, but it rarely explores, il-
luminates, or suggests more than it says. It is the very opposite of the
kind of poetry written by a completely sensitive poet like Keats; for
Keats and Byron dwelt on entirely different levels of existence. Keats
lived by and through his senses; Byron lived on sensationalism. His
technique mirrors his temperament, quick, clever, and careless. His
rhyming is hit or rniss, his rhetoric overblown, and his phrasing too
often a flux of maudlin sentiment, false self -deprecation, and bombast.

It is hard to believe that the songwriter who sighs through such
cloying verses as those beginning "Oh! might I kiss those eyes of fire/'

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'Think'st thou I saw thy beauteous eyes/' "Remember him whom
passion's power," and "Maid of Athens, ere we part" is the same poet
who cynically slashes his way through Don Juan and The Vision of
Judgment. 'The swooning love poems fail to move us because of their
very fluency; they slip into their rhythmical grooves with mechanical
fidelity — smooth, lilting, prettily contrived, but never voluptuous or
really impassioned. Even the better lyrics, such as "Stanzas to Augusta/'
"Stanzas for Music/' "She walks in beauty like the night/' are cloyed
with affectations and the simpering turns that Moore might have
written with his left hand. 'Tare Thee Well/' written while the scandal
of the separation was at its height, is a piece of saccharine self-pity
too facile to be touching. Byron's very insensitivity to delicate nuances
and his avoidance of complexities of thought or expression explain
much of his popularity. Such poetry is easily comprehended and
remembered — but its appeal, for all its personal communication, is
limited to a particular time in life, a period of youth, and most readers
outgrow it.

One of the most cogent of contemporary estimates was made, curi-
ously enough, by Byron's wife. Protesting against the allusions to her-
self in his later work, she wrote to a friend: "In regard to his poetry,
egotism is the vital principle of his imagination, which it is difficult
for him to kindle in any subject with which his own character and
interests are not identified . . . and his constant desire of creating a
sensation makes him not averse to be the object of wonder and curi-
osity. , . . Nothing has contributed more to the misunderstanding of
his real character than the lonely grandeur in which he shrouds it,
and his affectation of being above mankind." "His misfortune," she
wrote to Augusta Leigh, "is an habitual passion for excitement."

Excitement is an outstanding feature of the Byronic nature. Byron
was not only a creator but a self-conscious actor, the gilded youth
and also the darkly mysterious figure whose roles he loved to play. His
fondness for theatrics made him prefer the wrong thing in poetry;
his taste in poets was even worse than his taste in women. He liked the
insipid Mrs. Hemans, admired Samuel Rogers, and ranked Tom
Moore far above Coleridge and Wordsworth; he detested "Johnny
Keats's piss-a-bed poetry."

Byron's poetic faults stern from his misapprehension of the purpose
of poetry. Its function, he felt, was to rouse the reader and keep him
roused without relief. 'The great object of life is sensation — to feel
that we exist, even in pain." This was his personal as well as poetical

414

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

credo. He wrote to Moore that a vacation in some Mediterranean
country would do the complacent "homekeeping minstrels/' i.e., the
Lake poets, a world of good. "How it would enliven them and
introduce them to a few of the sensations — to say nothing of an illicit
amour or two, in the way of essay upon the passions, beginning with
simple adultery and compounding it as they went along/'

In spite of the excesses, it is the very sensationalism that keeps
Byron's poetry alive. His best works, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,
Don Juan, Beppo, Manfred, and Cain are full of a glitter and gusto
that keep the narratives going full speed. They vibrate with a nervous
force, the projection of Byron's own sexual energy. Sardonic, auda-
cious, and delightful, Don Juan is a masterpiece of romantic energy;
it rides irreverently over the sacrosanct conventions and extolls the low,
the ignoble, and the much-censored but enjoyable vices. The story
rambles, the narrator discourses continuously on his way through
Greece, Turkey, Russia, and England, and there are countless digres-
sions, but the deviations from any organized "plot" are the most en-
livening as well as the most luminous parts of die work. Byron's Juan
is both a quasi philosopher and an apostle of folly, an ardent lover
and a ruthless libertine — his creator intended him to be both a paragon
and a paradox, an amoral but somehow indignant onlooker who
wants to face a lying world with the truth. Although the narrative
centers about Juan, he is not always the center of interest. We are
amused by his misadventures but we are more fascinated by the in-
cidental passages — the lyrical moments with Haidee, the rhapsody to
the isles of Greece, "where burning Sappho loved and sung/' the
evocation of twilight: "Soft hour, which wakes the wish and melts the
heart."

Similarly in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, sometimes considered the
height of Byron's accomplishment, the reader remembers most vividly
the prelude to the battle of Waterloo ('There was a sound of revelry
by night"), the interpolated lyrics, the glorification of the Venetian
setting ("I stood in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs,/A palace and a
prison on each hand"), the picture of the Coliseum ("A ruin — yet what
ruin!"), and the concluding apostrophe to the sea:

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean — roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain*

Manfred is another poem in which the parts are not only greater
but more interesting than the whole. It is occasionally heard as a

415

LIVES OF THE POETS

"dramatic reading" — Byron conceived it as a three-act play — with back-
ground music by Robert Schumann. Apart from Schumann's setting,
it is seldom read as a piece of dramaturgy but as another fragment of
Byron's autobiography. Manfred, who sells his soul to the Prince of
Darkness, is in love with Astarte, who is unmistakably Augusta, and
Byron's incestuous love is passionately revealed in the passage in which
he implores the witch to summon his beloved:

She was like me in lineaments — her eyes,

Her hair, her features, all, to the very tone

Even of her voice, they said were like to mine;

But softened all, and tempered into beauty;

She had the same lone thoughts and wanderings,

The quest of hidden knowledge, and a mind

To comprehend the universe: nor these

Alone, but with them gentler powers than mine,

Pity, and smiles, and tears — which I had not;

And tenderness — but that I had for her;

Humility — and that I never had.

Her faults were mine — her virtues were her own —

I loved her, and destroyed her!

Cctin is another poem which is often read for its biographical con-
notations. It symbolizes Byron's concern for the Italian revolutionists
and, in his identification with the first rebel, his own rebelliousness.
Condemned for its unorthodox treatment of the Biblical story, Cain
is a melodramatic and almost diabolic drama — Byron subtitled it A
Mystery — in which God is cast as the villain. The Lake poets regarded
it with understandable horror. The ever-reasonable Coleridge explained
the opposed points of view: "The secret of Wordsworth is acquies-
cence; the secret of Byron is in revolt. To him nature and humanity
are antagonists, and he cleaves to nature, yea, he would take her by
violence to mark his alienation and severance from man."

It was this spirit of defiance, of turbulent revolt, which influenced
an entire generation. Even more than his poetry, Byron's personality
made a powerful impact on the imagination of the world. It affected
the emotional life of every reader and conditioned the work of count-
less creators. The theatrical moodiness worked its way through the
novels of the Brontes and Dostoevski, the paintings of Delacroix and

416

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON

Courbet, the music of Berlioz and Tchaikovsky, and, by way o£ its
impact on Goethe, the writings of the German Romantics.

Fascinated by his own wildness, Byron dramatized himself, first of
all, as a lover of liberty and a skeptic about man's worthiness to be a
free agent. He was all his multiple protagonists — the young, wander-
ing Harold, disenchanted, receptive to both good and evil; the lawless
tyrant, Sardanapalus, effeminate, voluptuous, driven to death; the
elegantly pensive Lucifer, and the superior, even noble, Cain; the
desperate, doomed Manfred, defying all the fates; the mocking Beppo,
who reclaims his wife from her Cavallere Servente; the scornful, self-
infatuated, but irresistible Don Juan. An opportunist, a rake, an im-
proviser who was the creature of the moment, Byron was also the
exiled "pilgrim of eternity." He had that within him "which shall tire
torture and time/*

417

Rebel Against Reality

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

| | [HE ENGLAND into which Shelley was born was in the throes of
I an industrially troubled but greatly creative period. Blake, at
JL thirty-five, was composing Songs of Experience; Burns was thirty-
three, writing his most characteristic lyrics; Wordsworth at twenty-
two was in revolutionary France; the twenty-year-old Coleridge was
entering Cambridge; Southey was eighteen, Lamb was seventeen,
Byron was a boy of four.

Shelley's ancestors had shown litde concern for things cultural. The
family tree was of common but widespread growth; some of its roots
were in America. Shelley's great-grandmother, widow of a New York
miller, became the wife of Timothy Shelley, a farmer's son who had
emigrated to the colonies; one of her sons, Bysshe, was born in New-
ark, New Jersey, in 1752. When the Shelleys returned to England,
Bysshe was still a young man, but he wasted no time improving him-
self. At twenty he ran off with the sixteen-year-old daughter of a well-
to-do clergyman, married her, and when she died nine years later
he was left with three children and a fortune. Bysshe's second wife,
who bore him seven children, was still wealthier; her inheritance made
it possible for the oldest son, Timothy, to marry into a good county
family and buy a baronetcy. At forty Timothy became the father of the
first of his seven children, a boy, Percy Bysshe, born August 4, 1792, at
Field Place, Horsham, Sussex, about forty miles from London.

418

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Shelley's father believed in the letter as well as the spirit of the
conventions, but he was not the often-pictured tyrannical father. He
was rather proud of his son, whom he intended to bring up as a future
country squire, and, until baffled by the boy's incomprehensible con-
duct, indulged him. During the first ten years of his life Shelley was
fortunately (or, psychiatrists may contend, unfortunately) protected
from the harshness of a competitive world. He was adored by four
younger sisters (another sister had died in infancy) and a baby
brother. He never played with boys — certain feminine characteristics
seem to have been acquired at this period — and his was a happy,
protected childhood.

Things began to go wrong when, at ten, he went to the middle-
class Syon House Academy. Shelley's delicate features and refined
manners made him fair game for the other youngsters. One of his
classmates was his cousin, Tom Medwin, who became his biographer,
and Medwin remembered Shelley's first day at school. It was a horror
for a boy unused to everyday rowdyism. His companions had a zest
for torture, wrote Medwin.

There was no end to their mockery when they found that
he was ignorant of pegtop or marbles or leap-frog or hop-
scotch, much more of fives or cricket. . . . He was a tyro
in these accomplishments, and the only welcome of the
neophyte was a general shout of derision. To the imperti-
nences he made no reply, but with a look of disdain writ-
ten in his countenance, turned his back on his new associ-
ates, and when he was alone found relief in tears.

Shelley did not continue to take insults meekly. Another fellow
pupil, Sir John Rennie, left a somewhat different picture of the grow-
ing boy. After describing Shelley's appearance — "head well-propor-
tioned, covered with a profusion of brown locks, eyes hazel, restless
and brilliant, complexion fair and transparent, countenance rather
effeminate but exceedingly animated" — Rennie goes on to portray a
hot-tempered youth who, when offended, found relief in something
other than tears.

The least circumstance that thwarted him produced the
most violent paroxysms of rage; and when irritated by other
boys, he would take up anything or even any little boy near
him, to throw at his tormentors. His imagination was always

419

LIVES OF THE POETS

roving upon something romantic and extraordinary, such as
spirits, fairies, fighting, volcanoes, etc., and he not unfre-
quently astonished his schoolfellows by blowing up the
boundary palings of the playground with gunpowder.

The subjects that interested him most were neither literature nor
languages but astronomy, chemistry, and physics; at home he liked to
get the children to join hands so he could send a shock through and
"electrify" them. Shelley's interest in science increased when he was
twelve and Syon House Academy was exchanged for the more aristo-
cratic Eton. It was not, however, a change for the better. The six years
at Eton were a succession of mean and humiliating episodes. The
boys played practical jokes on him, knocked his books from under his
arm, called him "Mad Shelley/* and almost reduced him to madness by
chanting his name in an endless drone up and down the corridors.
There were occasional escapes for the harried sufferer: rambles in the
woods, walks to the churchyard in Stoke Poges, where he found it
appropriate to recite Gray's "Elegy," an appearance in a school play,
the construction of a small steam engine which exploded and won
him a flogging.

During his last years at Eton Shelley added to his escapes by creat-
ing a fantasy land for himself. He wrote two lurid tales, Zastrozzi and
St. Irvyne, studded with Gothic absurdities; a melodramatic poem,
The Wandering Jew; and, with his sister Elizabeth, a collection of
juvenile verse entided Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire. Worried
about the direction Shelley's mind might be taking, his father never-
theless paid a bookseller to print what he called his son's "literary
freaks.**

Shelley's reading was omnivorous and indiscriminate. He admired
both Southey and Chatterton; he liked Benjamin Franklin as much
as he did Lucretius. The first glimmerings of his unorthodox social
philosophy -manifested themselves at this time, and they put an end to
his earliest romance. In his eighteenth year he and his cousin, Harriet
Grove, fell in love, corresponded feverishly, and considered them-
selves betrothed. If there was an engagement, it was terminated when
Mr. Grove, disliking the tone of Shelley's letters, objected to his non-
conformist speculations and forbade further intimacy. A few months
later, Harriet Grove married a -m^n whom Shelley characterized as
"a dod of earth," and for a few bitter weeks he brooded over his first

42O

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

In October, 1810, Shelley entered his father's Alma Mater, Univer-
sity College, Oxford. During his first day there he met Thomas
Jefferson Hogg, who was to become one of his most intimate friends
and whose memoirs give the earliest and most comprehensive, if some-
times overcolored, account of the young Shelley. Shelley's radical
tendencies, barely suggested at Eton and muted in the letters to Har-
riet Grove, became more pronounced at Oxford. He was insubordinate,
posted heretical squibs on the chapel doors, and baited clergymen with
pamphlets signed Jeremiah Stukely and Charles Peyton. These im-
pertinences seemed different only in degree from the pranking of
intellectual undergraduates until it was discovered that Shelley, col-
laborating with Hogg, had written a pamphlet, The Necessity of
Atheism. The clergy was outraged and the college dignitaries resolved
to make an example of the offenders who had fouled "the sacred
citadel." Shelley and Hogg were expelled.

Shelley was not surprised, nor was he altogether displeased. He
had already begun to think of himself as a liberty-loving opponent
of man-made laws and all enforced conventions. Counting on his
grandfather, a staunchly liberal Whig, Shelley wrote: "I am accus-
tomed to speak my opinion unreservedly; this has occasioned me some
misfortune, but I do not therefore cease to speak as I think. Language
is given us to express ideas — he who fetters it is a bigot and a tyrant/*

Placating his father was a more difficult matter. Timothy was con-
fused. He was fond of his gifted but trouble-making son, concerned
about his future, yet afraid of alienating Bysshe (the name used by
all who knew him) by exerting too much parental authority. He
temporized by asking him to cease communicating with Hogg and let-
ting himself be advised by some third party. Shelley demurred, and
his father, informed that blasphemy was a legal offense, called in his
lawyer. This made the eighteen-year-old radical completely intract-
able. He refused to compromise. He volunteered to give up all rights
to his inheritance on condition that Timothy divide the property
equally among his sisters, his brother, and his mother, leaving a
meager annuity for himself. Timothy was shocked. Friends were called
in to reason with the youth, to persuade him to adopt a respectable
career, preferably politics, in which his talent for argument could be
profitably employed. After some maneuvering, Shelley was forgiven,
reinstated, and allowed two hundred pounds per annum. A crisis had
passed and a reconciliation effected, but Shelley's resolution was
changed.

421

LIVES OF THE POETS

Shelley's early affection for Gothic romances never died. Through-
out his life he was susceptible to melodramatic seizures; he believed
he was the object of persecutions and, therefore, the appointed de-
fender of the oppressed. An entry in his Journal reads: "Discuss the
possibility of converting and liberating two heiresses/'

It was the romanticizing emancipator who, after some correspond-
ence, fell in love with the friend of one of his sisters. Harriet West-
brook was the daughter of a wine merchant, proprietor of a coffee-
house, and owner of a country estate. Harriet was little more than
fifteen but unusually intelligent — when Shelley called on her she was
reading Voltaire's Dictionnaire PkUosophique — and she was, accord-
ing to Hogg, "always pretty, always bright, always blooming; smart,
plain in her neatness; without a spot, without a wrinkle; not a hair
out of place/' She was, however, not as placid as the description sug-
gests. Like Shelley, she disdained her humdrum surroundings, hated
school, and made herself the heroine of elaborate dreams which courted
disaster and, the perennial fantasy of adolescence, death. Shelley im-
mediately constituted himself her champion. He swore to save her
from 'tier prison house" — the commonplace school at Clapham — and
her "persecutor" — her father, who had placed her there.

For several months their letters became more intense and their con-
versations more intimate; then, toward the middle of the summer,
when Shelley was nineteen, matters became urgent. Shelley advised
Harriet to refuse to obey orders and to liberate herself by entering into
a free-love relationship with him. Harriet, warned by instinct and her
older sister, Eliza, who saw the advantages of a union with an heir to a
large fortune, declined. Shelley then proposed matrimony and, knowing
that his father would never consent to the marriage, took Harriet to
Edinburgh, obtained a license, and married her on August 29, 1811.

Nothing could have affronted Timothy Shelley more than his son's
runaway marriage at the age of nineteen. The expulsion from Oxford
was bad enough; the elopement was worse; but the mesalliance of a
prospective lord with an innkeeper's daughter was an unforgivable dis-
grace. Timothy refused to receive the impenitent couple. He consulted
a lawyer about disinheriting Bysshe, cut off his allowance, and restored
it only when he learned that the low-class Westbrooks were helping to
support his son.

Once again Shelley discovered that it was not easy to put the
principles of free love into practice. Hogg, who lived with the newly-
weds from time to time, tried to seduce Harriet Shelley was perplexed,

422

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

not because he objected to sharing his wife but because Harriet
demurred. He protested to Hogg that jealousy had no place in his
bosom. "Heaven knows that if the possession of Harriet's person, of
the attainment of her love, was all that intervened between our meet-
ing again tomorrow, willingly would I ... be happy thus to prove
my friendship. But Harriet does not think so ... and on her opinions
of right and wrong alone does the morality of the present case
depend."

At this stage, Eliza, whom Harriet had always considered "more
than a mother," arrived, took over, and managed the household. When
Shelley and Harriet were guests in the Lake District, Eliza went along.
When, early in 1812, Shelley decided to take Harriet to Dublin, Eliza
accompanied the couple.

Shelley's visit to Ireland was not for purposes of pleasure but
propaganda. He had written an inflammatory Address to the Irish
People, and it was offered for fivepence — "the lowest possible price be-
cause it is the intention of the author," so ran the advertisement, "to
awaken in the minds of the Irish poor a knowledge of their real state,
summarily pointing out the evils of that state and suggesting rational
means of remedy: Catholic Emancipation and a Repeal of the Union
Act, the latter die most successful engine that England ever wielded
over the misery of fallen Ireland." Besides sending copies of the
pamphlet to newspapers and taverns and other places of meeting,
Shelley and Harriet distributed copies in person; they handed them
out at street corners and threw some of the leaflets down from their
balcony. Shelley followed this with a Declaration of Rights. He met
many of the Irish radicals but was disappointed in their disinclination
to strike a blow.

Suddenly Shelley felt that he had accomplished nothing; he had
only stirred up a few workers who were already confirmed dissidents.
He did not give up easily — he suspected that his youth was held against
him — but he was discouraged enough to admit that he had mistaken
his mission, at least this particular mission. He wrote to William God-
win, the anarchical philosopher whose Political Justice had become his
Bible: "My schemes of organizing the ignorant I confess to be ill-
timed. ... I shall address myself no more to the illiterate/' Two
months after his unhappy invasion of Ireland, he was back in England.
The campaign for freedom had suffered a setback, but Shelley had not
abandoned his private war against political and religious oppression.

Before he was twenty Shelley had become a suspicious character;

4*3

LIVES OF THE POETS

His servant had been arrested for posting up copies of his Irish broad-
side and adding to the disturbed state of the country; a box of his be-
longings brought to the Custom House was said to contain "pernicious
opinions"; he was accused of dropping into the sea bottles in which he
had inserted "seditious papers."

Notwithstanding reports of government spies, Shelley did not spend
all his time in political activities. He had a less direct but more in-
sidious medium at his disposal for disseminating intransigent theories.
Poetry was his weapon. He employed it in Queen Mob. As a poem
Queen Mob is both a revolutionary document and a crude hodge-
podge of ideas. Over twenty-two hundred lines long, divided into nine
cantos, Queen Mob purports to be a social-political analysis of the
world and a prophecy of things to come — Shelley announced that "the
Past, the Present, and the Future are the grand and comprehensive
topics of this poem." The topics are comprehensive indeed. They in-
clude the theory of evolution, the decline of ancient civilizations, the
horror of war, the corruption of society, a plea to abstain from meat-
eating — Shelley, a practicing vegetarian, had written a tract entitled A
Vindication of Natural Diet — the law of Necessity, a denunciation of
legal marriage, and such other hateful institutions as Christianity and
the church.

And priests dare babble of a God of peace,

Even whilst their hands are red with guiltless blood,

Murdering the while, uprooting every germ

Of truth, exterminating, spoiling all,

Making the earth a slaughter-house.

Queen Mob was violently attacked, pirated, denounced and, later,
cited as a proof that its author was unfit to bring up his own children.
Twenty years after Shelley's death a publisher who included it in a
volume of Shelley's poems was brought into court on the charge that
"he did falsely and maliciously publish a scandalous, impious, profane,
and malicious libel concerning the Holy Scriptures and concerning
Almighty God/'

A few weeks after the publication of Queen Mob, the first of
Shelley's children was born. She was named Eliza lanthe: Eliza for
Harriet's sister and lanthe after the maiden in Queen Mob. But
Shelley's twenty-first birthday was not the happy event that a young
father's coming-of-age should be. Timothy Shelley refused to make a

424

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

definite financial settlement, and the attainment of Shelley's majority
was the signal for creditors to hound him with bills that were due on
that date. Shelley was forced to borrow from moneylenders at out-
rageous rates; there was a child to be cared for, and a second was
expected. Besides, while he was trying to cope with his own debts,
Shelley was assuming Godwin's — he was to be burdened with Godwin's
obligations and demands the rest of his life.

It was as a disciple of Godwin that Shelley met Mary. She was the
seventeen-year-old daughter of Godwin and his first wife, Mary Woll-
stonecraft, the champion of women's rights, who died giving birth to
the child. The rapport that had bound Shelley to Harriet for almost
three years was gone; the cultural evenings and periods of reading
aloud to each other had ended. Although he could not repress his
feelings about Mary, Harriet did not seem to care. He began to live
away from home and, since marriage was scarcely a sacrament to
Shelley, his relations with Mary grew more intimate although in-
hibited by some sense of duty. It was Mary who took the initiative.
Impatient of reticence, she declared her love and, as Shelley wrote to
Hogg, "No expressions can convey the remotest conception of the
manner in which she dispelled my delusions. The sublime and raptur-
ous moment when she confessed herself mine, who had so long been
hers in secret, cannot be painted to mortal imagination."

Writing to a friend, Harriet told the same story but with a somewhat
different emphasis. Mary, she declared, "was determined to seduce him.
She is to blame. . . . She told him she was dying in love for him,
accompanied with the most violent gestures and vehement expostula-
tions. He thought of me and my sufferings, and begged her to get the
better of a passion as degrading to him as herself. She then told him
that she would die." Shelley wavered and was won over. Nevertheless,
he did not want to desert Harriet entirely; he proposed that they
should all live together, Harriet as his sister, Mary as his wife.

At this point the picture becomes blurred. It is clouded over by the
conflicting testimonies of contemporaries, by doctored legends, and by
letters peddled by a man who claimed to be Byron's son by a secret
marriage but who was nothing more than a blackmailing trafficker in
forged documents. After Shelley's death Mary not only bought but
preserved many of these fabricated letters, letters which contained vile
charges against Harriet and, if true, would justify Mary's conduct. Un-
til they were exposed by handwriting experts more than a century after
Shelley's death, the letters were accepted and tellingly reprinted by

4*5

LIVES OF THE POETS

Shelley's biographers, creating a curiously distorted Shelley legend.

The physical events are undisputed. Relying on Godwin's liberal
tenets, and perhaps not unmindful of the extent of Godwin's financial
indebtedness, Shelley disclosed his plan to live with Mary. Instead
of giving the expected blessing or, at least, his tolerant acquiescence,
Godwin was as outraged as the most conventional father. He called
Shelley a conscienceless seducer, and refused to allow him in the house.
Harriet, who wanted to believe that Shelley was only passing through
an infatuation, did nothing antagonistic, and her passiveness led Shel-
ley to believe there could be a -menage a trois. He voiced the hope
that Harriet might learn to appreciate Mary. "I wish you could see
her/' he wrote to Harriet. "To die most indifferent eyes she would be
interesting if only for her sufferings and the tyranny which is ex-
ercised upon her." But, he added generously, "I murmur not if you feel
incapable of compassion and love for the object and sharer of my
passion." This scarcely reassured Harriet. She called on the Godwins,
who sympathized with her and redoubled their efforts to make Mary-
give up Shelley. Mary thereupon promised not to see him again.

This was more than Shelley could bear. He burst into the Godwin
home, thrust a bottle of laudanum into Mary's hands, and told her
that by this means she could escape further despotism. He would then,
he said, shoot himself and join her in death. Godwin was not at home,
but Mary's stepmother and her stepsister, Claire CMary Jane) Glair-
mont, Mrs. Godwin's daughter by her first marriage, managed to quiet
the hysterical lover and get him out of the house. During the next few
days Shelley controlled himself with difficulty. He was sorry for Harriet
but, self-centered and innocently cruel as a child, he was tempera-
mentally incapable of comprehending her feelings. He knew so little
about human beings that he was hurt when she, discarded as a wife,
did not relish the opportunity to become his sister. Unable to accept
reality, Shelley dwelt with disembodied ideas and wrote about ab-
stractions: marriage, which he never respected since it implied enforced
fidelity; money, which he never really lacked; and men, whom he
never understood. He was concerned with large issues, indifferent to
ordinary obligations; he cared about Humanity but not about people.

People, he felt resentfully, were responsible for the condition to
which he was reduced. He was alternately morose and violent; he
said he would not live in a world of people like Harriet who could
not "f eel poetry and understand philosophy."

Here again it is difficult to draw the line between fact and fabrica-

406

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

tion. Harriet's supporters claim that Mary never intended to keep her
word, that she continued to meet Shelley clandestinely, and that she
schemed to run away with him. On the other hand, Mary maintained
that she only consented to go with Shelley when he convinced her that
Harriet had ceased to care for him and, in fact, had a lover. Moreover,
Mary insisted that Shelley would really have killed himself if she
hadn't joined him. It will never be known who was determined and
who was deceived, but at four o'clock in the morning of July 2,8,
1814, Mary and Shelley, accompanied by Claire, went off in a coach to
Dover. The next day they were in France.

The crossing, which took all night instead of the usual two hours,
was racking, the drive from Calais was rough, and when they reached
Paris during a heat wave they were exhausted. Shelley, who had hired
a boat rather than wait for the packet, was without funds and had to
sell his watch for a few francs. When a remittance came they set
out for Switzerland; but the Alps were no compensation for dirty
inns, hard beds, and bad food. In little more than a month, they were
glad to leave.

The situation at home was ominous. Hogg was unpleasantly cold if
not actually hostile, and most of Shelley's other friends had turned
against him. The Godwins would not be reconciled. Harriet refused
to consider joining Shelley's new household and would not accept
the fact that her marriage was over. Shelley seriously contemplated
legal action to compel Harriet to live with him under any circum-
stances. But it was Harriet finally who, when her second confinement
was approaching, saw a lawyer. This was an act which Shelley re-
garded as highhanded betrayal. It was to him, and only to him, that
Harriet should go for advice. He wrote, "I will be your friend in every
sense of the word but that most delicate and exalted one," and he re-
proached her for consulting "selfish and worldly wretches."

Harriet's second child was born November 30, 1814, a month before
it was expected, a lusty boy, Charles Bysshe. Shelley did not learn
about it until a week after the birth, when Harriet wrote a letter
signed "A Deserted Wife!" Three months later Mary was delivered of
a seven-month baby which died in a fortnight. The gloom was some-
what lightened though not dissipated by the sudden relief of financial
pressures. Shelley's forbearing grandfather, Sir Bysshe, died at the age
of eighty-three, and in January, 1815, subject to certain stipulations,
Shelley became the heir to a hundred thousand pounds. All debts
were paid; the bailiffs were called off; Godwin received another

4*7

LIVES OF THE POETS

thousand pounds; and, pending final settlement of the estate, Shelley
was assured of a sizable income.

For a while life was easier. In her Journal, Mary speaks of it as "a
regeneration." Books were read and discussed; projects were planned;
Shelley set assignments in Greek and Latin as well as French and
Italian for Mary and Claire. In the summer of 1815, the trio moved
into a cottage at Bishopsgate near Windsor Park where Shelley, once
more in a creative mood, wrote Alastor. Shelley made the poet, the
central figure of Alastor, a vindication of his own detachment from
the "alienated home" of common reality, sustained hy "solemn vision
and bright silver dream," but doomed by his own idealism. Although
the blank verse in which Alastor is written is less leaden than that of
Queen Mob, it is still insufficiently flexible, and the reader is moved
neither by the poetry nor by the plight of the poet in a world where
"some surpassing spirit" perishes for lack of sympathy. The critics
were united in condemning the work. One of them spoke of its
"sublime obscurity"; another jibed at its "profound and prosing stupid-
ity-

Shelley was disappointed by the reviews, but they did not dis-
hearten him. There were pleasant diversions as well as productive
hours at Bishopsgate. Thomas Lovell Peacock, who became his intimate
friend and executor, was a frequent visitor — Shelley appears amiably
caricatured as Scythrop in Peacock's Nightmare Abbey. The house-
hold rejoiced when, on January 2,4, 1816, Mary's second child was
born, a healthy and happy boy. The joy would have been greater had
Mary's father shared in it; but, although the baby was named William
after him, Godwin still turned his back on the parents. This refusal
did not prevent Godwin from begging for money or, when the ex-
pected amount was not immediately forthcoming, from badgering and
even insulting the donor. Shelley venerated Godwin the philosopher,
but he was disillusioned and repelled by Godwin the parasite. '1
lamented over my ruined hopes," Shelley wrote bitterly, "hopes of all
that your genius once taught me to expect, when I found that for
yourself, your family, and your creditors, you would submit to that
communication with me which you once rejected and abhorred, and
which no pity for my poverty or suffering, assumed willingly for you,
could avail to extort,"

The idyl at Bishopsgate lasted less than a year. Shelley was dis-
contented with life in England. He was sure that everything he did
would be met with derision; he saw enemies everywhere; he fancied

428

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

that his father wanted to have him committed. He made vague plans
to leave the country, to hide himself with Mary "from that contempt
which we so unjustly endure." Restless but lethargic, he needed some-
thing to provoke him to act. The provocation was supplied by Claire,
who, after many rebuffs, had become one of Byron's mistresses in
London and, when Byron left England, had determined to track him
down. She persuaded Shelley and Mary, who were thinking of Italy,
to go to Switzerland. There, in May, 1816, they found lodgings in
S6cheron, a suburb of Geneva, where Byron joined them.

Before long, rumors spread that Byron and Shelley had set up a
tree-love establishment, enjoying each other's mistress and sharing their
adoration. The four were constantly together, riding, taking walks,
sitting before the fire in Byron's quarters in the Villa Diodati, frighten-
ing one another with horror stories. It was there one night, listening to
Byron recite some chilling lines from Coleridge's "Christabel," that
Shelley shrieked and rushed out of the room. He had suddenly remem-
bered a terrifying tale about a naked woman who had eyes instead
of nipples. It was there also that Mary, playing the game of macabre
make-believe, conceived the idea for Frankenstein, which, ironically
enough, has had a wider audience than anything written by Shelley.

Early in September, a few weeks after his twenty-fourth birthday,
Shelley and Mary, taking Claire with them, left Byron in Switzerland.
There were several reasons for their departure. There was to be a
financial settlement with Shelley's father; Godwin was in greater trou-
ble than ever; Fanny Imlay, daughter of Godwin's first wife by a
former lover, had been writing despondently about her future; and
Claire, who was bearing Byron's child, wanted to have it born in
England. Within a month of Shelley's return to London, Fanny
Imlay committed suicide in a hotel room in Swansea, leaving a note
which began: "I have long determined that the best thing I could do
was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was un-
fortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those
persons who have endeavored to promote her welfare."

The shock was violent. Shelley was bewildered, and Mary flagellated
herself that she had done nothing to prevent the tragedy. Much more
catastrophic was the next news: Harriet suddenly disappeared. On
December 10, her body was found floating in the Serpentine River.
She was barely twenty-one at the time of her death. In a pathetic com-
munication which bears every evidence of authenticity, Harriet bade
farewell to Hi??* and made a final appeal to Shelley:

429

LIVES OF THE POETS

works. The romantic event came as a kind of accident In 1844 during
his second journey to Italy, where he visited the graves of Keats and
Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett, an extremely popular poet, had published
a new volume. One of the poems, "Lady Geraldine's Courtship/' con-
tained an unexpected reference to Browning's series of pamphlets:

Or from Browning some "Pomegranate" which, if cut deep

down the middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured of a veined humanity.

Unused to such a gratifying tribute, the rising but as yet unrecog-
nized poet wrote to the author immediately upon his return. "I love
your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett/' he said* Then, after a
page of compliments, he added impetuously, "and I love you, too/'
Miss Barrett was startled. She was also fascinated and a little frightened
— she was a sick woman without hope of recovery — and it was only
after months of correspondence that she granted his request for an
interview. The formal arrangements were made through John Kenyon,
a family friend. On May 20, 1845, Browning mounted the steps of
50 Wimpole Street, swept into a darkened room, and the courtship
began.

Browning had never shown any interest in women of his own age.
Whether or not he had been conditioned by his affection for his
mother, he could only fall in love with women considerably older
than himself. When he was an adolescent of sixteen he had been
infatuated with an editor's daughter, Eliza Flower, who was nine
years his senior. At twenty-four he had developed an intense regard
for Euphrasia Fanny Haworth, who was thirty-six years old, and with
whom he corresponded platonically for years. At the time of their
meeting, Elizabeth Barrett was thirty-nine; Browning was thirty-three.

Elizabeth Barrett was born March 6, 1806, at Durham. Eldest of
eleven children, she was extraordinarily precocious. She read Greek
at eight; at twelve she wrote an "epic" in four books, The Battle of
Marathon, which her father had printed. At fifteen she injured her
spine, either by a fall from a horse or by a strain caused by tightening
the saddle girths. A persistent cough kept her confined in London
with occasional visits to the seashore. The death of a beloved brother
by drowning plunged her into a prolonged melancholy. Approaching
her forties, she seemed doomed to a life of shrouded invaHdism.

Her father, Edward Moulton Barrett, became the model for a cruel

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

sequences of certain differences between them to live separate and
apart from each other/* and he argued that if he had attacked religion
he was punishable, hut not by the loss of his children. At the end of
March, 1817, after taking two months to consider, the Lord Chancellor
decided that Shelley's immoral opinions had led to immoral acts and
that, if Shelley were given custody of the children, he would in all
likelihood inspire in them the same opinions which would inevitably
lead to similar misconducts.

Shelley was depressed by the defeat. He was somewhat cheered
when Claire gave birth to a daughter, Alba (later changed to Allegra),
for he hoped she would be a companion for his young son, William.
There were other small alleviations. He resumed his philosophical
causeries with Godwin and entered Leigh Hunt's circle, which in-
cluded Charles and Mary Lamb; the essayist William Hazlitt; the
witty parodist Horace Smith; and the twenty-two-year-old poet John
Keats, who, while admiring Shelley's poetry, was wary of his influence
and never became intimate with him.

In March the Shelleys moved into a commodious house at Marlow,
near Bishopsgate. There was much company. Mary recovered the
animation natural to a girl of twenty, and, in spite of the loss of his
children, Shelley was happy. He fretted about increasingly repressive
political measures — the right of habeas corpus had been suspended be-
cause of a fancied conspiracy to overthrow the government — but he
devoted himself to his own work. He was vigorously creative. Within a
year he completed thirty short poems, large fragments of Prince
Athanase, a considerable section of Rosalind and Helen, and his
longest poem, the forty-eight-hundred-line The Revolt of Islam, an
idealization of the French Revolution.

This fortunate state did not last long. Godwin's new financial
difficulties made him still more importunate; in spite of pressing letters,
Byron refused to be concerned about Claire or his child. Shelley's
health was far from good — a pulmonary attack had left him heavy and
languid. By the time Mary's third child, Clara Everina, was born in
September, a month after Shelley's twenty-fifth birthday, it had been
decided to leave England again, this time for the healing sun of Italy.

There were unexpected and irritating delays, and it was not until
April, 1818, that the Shelleys, their two children, Claire and Allegra,
and two nurses arrived in Milan. They visited Pisa, Leghorn, Florence,
and Bagni di Lucca, where they remained nine weeks and Shelley
translated Plato's Symposium, close to Shelley's conception of man's

431

LIVES OF THE POETS

pursuit of the "integrity and union which we call love/' In August
the travelers reached Venice, where they were met by Byron, to whom
Shelley had written with delicacy (and, for him, unusual diplomacy)
concerning Claire and little Allegra. Suspicious that Shelley might be
trying to reunite him with his former mistress, Byron refused to have
anything more to do with Claire. However, he volunteered to assume
responsibility for the child, and Claire, without funds and still hoping
for a reconciliation, consented.

Soon the two men were comparing their grievances, assailing their
detractors, and railing against the wrongs and injustices they had suf-
fered in their native England. Byron gave the Shelley entourage the
use of his villa, I Capuccini, at Este, where Shelley began Julian and
Maddalo, the two characters of this conversational poem being approxi-
mations of Byron and Shelley. He also set to work on the first act of
The Cenci, a tragedy of incest, hatred, and horror, written in the
grand manner. A return visit to Venice with Mary and their baby
daughter started auspiciously, but Clara had been ill with dysentery
during the trip and grew alarmingly worse. By the time a doctor was
summoned it was too late to save her; she died within an hour, three
weeks after her first birthday.

Grief-stricken, both parents sought relief in their work. Mary went
back to the translating with which she occasionally occupied herself;
Shelley resumed Julian and Maddalo, plunged into the opening scene
of Prometheus Unbound, and completed seven unhappy short poems
colored by Clara's death. There were long spells of silence between
husband and wife. Mary, who may have blamed Shelley for insisting
on the trip to Venice, was distant to him; relations between them were
dangerously tense. According to one version of the Shelley legend,
during this emotional strain Claire and Shelley became lovers. It will
never be known whether Elena Adelaide Shelley, the mysterious child
placed in a Naples foundling home in February, 1819, was the daugh-
ter of Claire and Shelley, or Claire's child by another man, or merely a
Neapolitan foundling whom Shelley may have adopted in hopes of
alleviating Mary's grief. Fifteen years after Shelley's death, Mary wrote,
"One looks back with unspeakable regret and gnawing remorse to such
periods." Although the domestic crisis did not last long, the mutual
ecstasy which had kept them together was never again recaptured.

Toward the end of 1818, Shelley, Mary, and Claire had moved
south and had settled in Naples. When not writing or reading, the trio
went boating, riding, sight-seeing, excited by the Greek temples at

43*

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Paestum, the eleventh-century cathedral at Salerno, the ruins of Pom-
peii and Herculaneum, the romantic grotto at Posillipo, the summit of
Vesuvius. Shelley had recovered his health and energy. He looked
younger than his twenty-six years. Slender, and perhaps self-conscious
of his more than average height, he walked with an habitual stoop;
awkwardly hesitant in public, he was voluble, even vehement, in
private. His face, faintly freckled, reddened with the least excitement,
and the brilliant eyes, lit with a restless spark, always seemed about to
blaze.

Before the winter's end the Shelleys moved again. Early in March,
1819, just a week after the registration and christening of Elena Ade-
laide, they were in Rome. The social life there was enjoyable and
restored Mary's spirits, but the climate was treacherous. William, two
and a half years old, suffered most; he failed to survive the Italian sum-
mer and died in June. Exhausted and miserable, the Shelleys left for
Leghorn. Mary, who had lost all three of her children, was pregnant
again and had abandoned her writing and most of her reading. In the
Journal which she took up again on Shelley's birthday, she wrote:

We have now lived five years together; and if all the
events of the five years were blotted out, I might be happy.
But to have won and then cruelly to have lost the associa-
tions of four years is not an accident to which the human
mind can bend without much suffering.

In the fall when they reached Florence the outlook was brighter.
Mary's fourth and last child, Percy Florence, the only one of her
children to live to maturity, was born on November 12, 1819. Shelley
had completed The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound, which he said
was "the best thing I ever wrote," but which the critics mercilessly
flayed. The powerful Literary Gazette found The Cenci guilty on
every count. "Of all the abominations which intellectual perversion and
poetical atheism have produced in our time," it began, "this tragedy ap-
pears to us the most abominable." The Monthly Review and Quarterly
Review damned it as obscure, nonsensical, and wholly unintelligible
and, at the same time, disloyal, impious, and clearly subversive. No
attention was paid to the sheer impact of the poem, the dazzling
imagery, the mounting vigor, and such passages as the resurgent ending
of the third act:

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LIVES OF THE POETS

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, undassed, tribeless, and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the ting
Over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man
Passionless? — no, yet free from guilt or pain,
Which were, for his will made or suffered them,
Nor yet exempt, though ruling them like slaves,
From chance, and death, and mutability,
The clogs of that which else might oversoar
The loftiest star of unascended heaven,
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane.

By the end of the year Florence was as hazardous as Rome for those
unused to its severities. The air was raw; it rained continually. Rather
than risk the life of their only child, the Shelleys went to Pisa, the last
city in which the poet was to live. During 1819 and 1820, Shelley's
genius reached a new height. Besides finishing The Cenci and Pro-
metheus Unbound, he wrote The Masque of Anarchy, which was sup-
pressed largely because of its defiant climax:

Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number —
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you —
Ye are many — they are few.

This was also the period of Shelley's pensive 'The Sensitive Plant"
and his most limpid and most quoted short poems: "To a Skylark/*
'The Cloud," "Love's Philosophy," "Arethusa," and "Ode to the West
Wind/* The last displayed a technical skill beyond anything which
Shelley had previously accomplished. The autumnal music is, as
Shelley described the day which inspired it, "at once mild and ani-
mating," suspended through the interlocking terza rima, the linked
"third rhyme" employed so differently by Dante, while the personal
note ascends to an exalted ending:

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

434

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wittered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

A far different but equally Shelleyan declaration, "England in 1819,"
was written at this time, a sonnet which excoriates a disgraceful coun-
try whose exploited poor are governed by debased and insensate rulers.
Yet beneath the poet's mingled grief and disgust is heard his character-
istic ineradicable hope:

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king —

Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow

Through public scorn — mud from a muddy spring;

Rulers, who neither see, nor feel, nor know,

But leech-like to their fainting country cling,

Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow;

A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field —

An army, which liberticide and prey

Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield —

Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay —

Religion Christless, Godless — a book sealed;

A Senate — Time's worst statute unrepealed —

Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may

Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

Escaping the heat of midsummer, the Shelleys and the ever-present
Claire took themselves to the Baths of San Giuliano on the outskirts of
Pisa, but autumn rains, rising rivers, and floods made them return to
the city. Joined by Tom Medwin, Shelley became his loquacious self

435

LIVES OF THE POETS

again. The two talked politics and read poetry to each other; Medwin
recalled that Shelley was sometimes so absorhed in his work that he had
to ask Mary, "Have I dined?"

In his twenty-ninth year Shelley found himself involved with an-
other woman who needed rescuing. She was twenty-two-year-old
Emilia Viviani, the beautiful victim of another tyrant-father who, until
he could arrange a suitable marriage, kept her "imprisoned" in a con-
vent. This was a familiar pattern to Shelley; he could not resist its ap-
peal. He became Emilia's champion; the fact that she wrote poetry
clinched his determination to liberate the caged spirit; Shelley referred
to her as the "poor captive bird." Helping to dramatize the situation,
Emilia wrote long, self-pitying letters, of which the following excerpt is
typical:

* , . What a fate! I suffer heavily and am the cause of a
thousand griefs to others. O God! Were it not better that I
should die? Then I should cease to suffer or at least to make
others suffer. ... I afflict the most courteous and beloved
persons. O my incomparable Friend, Angelic Creature, did
you ever suppose that I should be the cause of so much an-
guish to you? You see what a person you have come to
know. . . . How remorse is torturing me! How many mis-
fortunes have I caused! It would be better if you had never
known me.

Shelley took these theatrics, as he did everything of this nature, with
great seriousness. Emilia had become his spiritual sister; the devotion
remained violently Platonic, which was all the more reason for acting
in her behalf. Emilia's father was the Governor of Pisa, but that did
not deter Shelley from drawing up a petition to the Grand Duke.
When nothing came of his appeal — it is doubtful that it reached the
Duke — Shelley determined that the whole world should know about
his "other self." He wrote Epipsychidion, which might be translated as
"A Soul within a Soul" or "Soul Joined to Soul," and addressed it 'To
the Noble and Unfortunate Lady, Emilia Viviani."

Efiysychicbon seems to be a glorification of Platonic love, but it is
also a defense of free love and sexual passion. A rhymed outburst of
more than six hundred lines, it is an intricate and not readily compre-
hensible presentation of ideal-intellectual beauty personified by Emilia,
the poet's ecstatic recognition of his soul mate ("Spouse! Sister!

436

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Angel!"), and the suggestion that they fly from a world of narrow
prejudices where poor slaves shackled by monogamy

With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and longest journey go.

By the time the poem was ready for the printer, in 1821, Emilia had
escaped her prison by getting married, and a disillusioned Shelley in-
formed his publisher "in a certain sense it is a production of a portion
of me already dead." Shelley also realized that Epipsychidion bristled
with difficulties; the poem was, he said, "for the esoteric few," and only
about a hundred copies were circulated. It was ignored by all except
two periodicals, one of which praised its inventiveness but called atten-
tion to its "lax morality and incoherent fancies."

Stung by the dismissal and goaded by an essay in which Peacock
declared that poetry had no place in the modern world, Shelley put the
very heart of his philosophy in an impassioned Defence of Poetry. In it
Shelley argued for the importance of the poet's function — to 'lift the
veil from the hidden beauty of the world and make familiar objects be
as if they were not familiar" — and the useful power of poetry. ''What-
ever strengthens and purifies the affections enlarges the imagination
and adds spirit to sense. . . . Poets," concluded Shelley, "are the un-
acknowledged legislators of the world."

Adonais, Shelley's last major poem and perhaps his greatest single
work, was written in the spring of 1821. Keats had died in Rome in
February, but news of his death did not reach Shelley until April. The
basic conception of Adonais is another defense, a defense not only of
the spirit of poetry but of a poet; Shelley believed that Keats had been
killed by criticism rather than by consumption, and was, like himself, a
victim of persecution. What lifts the poem above the sense of personal
wrong and makes it the noblest elegy since Lyddas is the perfect fu-
sion of feeling and form. The fifty-five Spenserian stanzas never lose
intensity for a single line; they vibrate on the highest pitch of poetry.
Adonais adheres to the antique elegiac pattern: a memorial idyl with an
invocation, a personification of grief-stricken Nature, a procession of
mourning fellow poets, and a concluding consolation that Intellectual
Beauty is the ultimate and only permanent reality.

The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, earth's shadows fly;

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LIVES OF THE POETS

Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity . . .

That Light whose smile kindles the universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which, through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea7
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

In Adonais the sound of grief is transcended by a note of triumph.
This life of desolation and decay is not the end; the poet, no longer re-
jected and isolated, has become one with the source of his creation:
'Tie is a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely/*

He is made one with Nature; there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where'er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Which wields the world with never-wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.

He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain;
Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

During the winter after Keats died, the Shelleys became part of a
Pisan literary circle. It included Byron, Shelley's cousin and old class-

438

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

mate Tom Medwin, the swashbuckling litterateur Edward John
Trelawny, the amiable Lieutenant Edward Williams and his common-
law wife, Jane. Jane Williams was the last of Shelley's soul mates, and
to her he indited several sentimentally adoring lyrics which Mary did
not appreciate. With the coming of summer, the Shelleys and the Wil-
liamses rented a little house near Lerici on the Gulf of 'Spezia. Shelley
was no swimmer, but he was fond of sailing. Mary loathed the place.
The house was old and shabby; it was crowded with five adults and
four children; the servants were obstreperous; the neighbors were
hostile. But Shelley was finishing a lyrical drama, Hellas, and Williams
was interested in boatbuilding.

In May Shelley purchased a twenty-four-foot craft, the Don }uan,
renamed it the Ariel, and the two friends delighted in the way she
handled. On July i, Shelley and Williams sailed to Leghorn to greet
the Hunts, who had just arrived from England, and two days later ac-
companied them to Byron's residence in Pisa. On July 8, Shelley and
Williams started to return to Lerici. They never reached it. The wind,
which had been high when they hoisted sail, had become a squall. It
has been variously conjectured that the boat capsized, or collided with
some larger vessel, or was run down by pirates.

Two weeks later their two bodies were washed ashore; a volume of
Keats's poems was found in Shelley's pocket. To satisfy the Italian
health laws the bodies were immediately buried in quicklime on the
beach. After some negotiations, permission was obtained to dig up the
bodies and give them suitable cremation. This was done; Shelley's
heart was not consumed, and Trelawny snatched it from the smolder-
ing pyre. The ashes were collected and placed in the Protestant Ceme-
tery in Rome, where the body of Keats had already been interred. Had
he lived another month Shelley would have been thirty years old.

A campaign of sanctification was started soon after Shelley's death.
Friends spoke of the poet with a veneration seldom accorded a mortal.
Leigh Hunt said that he was "divine," a "seraphical king of the ele-
ments/' and, in a preface to Hogg's biography, Mary called herself
"the chosen mate of a celestial spirit ... a priestess dedicated to his
glorification.0

The consecration may have been an exaggerated tribute to the
memory of the man, but it was also an unconscious appraisal of his
unreality. In spite of Shelley's flesh-and-blood activities there was an

439

LIVES OF THE POETS

unearthliness about him. His life was a paradox of reason and irre-
sponsibility, of compassion for the oppressed and a supernal unconcern
for those about him. Breathing an air too rarefied for human beings,
Shelley existed, as suggested in the last lines of a poem to Jane Wil-
liams, in

. . . some world far from ours,
Where music and moonlight and feeling
Are one.

It was this aura of otherworldliness which made Matthew Arnold
speak of Shelley as "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the
void his luminous wings in vain," prompted Andr6 Maurois to compare
Shelley to the sprite Ariel, and hypnotized Francis Thompson into
seeing him as a seraphic child dancing "in and out of the gates of
heaven . . . gold-dusty with tumbling amidst the stars/'

Shelley was hardly these things, neither child nor angel nor sprite
nor (a more tempting comparison) his own skylark; yet he was, some-
how, a human — and sometimes inhuman — composite of all of them. In
the "Ode to the West Wind/* his most subtly autobiographical poem,
Shelley pits his 'Trail form" against the insuperable tasks which one
man has dared to undertake and, in spite of scorn and apathy, an-
nounces the sustaining faith that his ideals will prevail. "Drive my dead
thoughts over the universe. . . * Scatter as from an unextinguished
hearth ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!" Here is the ex-
plicit conviction that he believed his life would be a contribution to
the Intellectual Beauty he served and that, if his work failed to influ-
ence his own generation, it might affect men still unborn.

It is as creator, an "unacknowledged legislator of the world," that he
persuades the reader to respect the poet's role. In the guise of the
Fourth Spirit in Prometheus Unbound Shelley triumphantly proclaims
the poet's useful employment of all the moods and manifestations of
nature:

. . . from these create he can
Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality.

Shelley's insistence on the value of poetry is especially pertinent for
an age that extols technology and regards the creative arts as decorative

440

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

irrelevances. 'The cultivation of poetry," he wrote, "is never more to be
desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calcu-
lating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life ex-
ceeds the power of assimilating them to the laws of human nature/* It
was with this conviction that Shelley rose to his greatest achievement
as propagandist.

Only the most careless reader can fail to sense that there are two
Shelleys. There is the thinker who, in spite of Shelley's abhorrence of
didacticism, devoted himself to the promulgation of ideas or, to be
more specific, the idea of man's destiny. The battle between tyranny
and freedom runs, like a Wagnerian leitmotif, through many of his
poems. It is the basic subject of The Revolt of Islam, which was origi-
nally subtitled The Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the
Nineteenth Century. The same conflict is the underlying theme of
Prometheus Unbound, in which the struggle, assuming titanic pro-
portions, is fought out in heaven. Even Adonais, a lament for another
poet, recalling the earlier Alastorf which was a song of sorrow for him-
self, centers about the oppressors and the oppressed — Shelley "in an-
other's fate now wept his own." To the poet of liberty, freedom was
not an abstraction but a living thing, an inspiration and a source of
supply:

For the laborer thou art bread,
And a comely table spread . . .
Thou art clothes, and fire, and food
For the trampled multitude.

As a thinker, Shelley's hatred of despotism was a constant and crea-
tive provocation. Mary Shelley put it concisely: 'The subject he loved
best to dwell on was the image of One warring with the Evil Principle,
oppressed not only by it, but by all."

Besides the thinker and in some way opposed to him, there was the
"pure" poet. Here again there is a dichotomy, for Shelley wrote some of
the finest lyrics in die language and some of the silliest Many of his
poems lack muscularity as well as maturity, many are passionate but
bodiless, aspiring vaguely without having a real objective. They are the
impalpable yearnings of a youth who never grew up:

The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow.

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LIVES OF THE POETS

There is also an all-too-frequent softness, an overly rapturous inflec-
tion, a curiously feminine attitude which expresses itself in such lines
as:

Let thy love in kisses rain

On my lips and eyelids pale . . .

It is this imperfect concentration of swooning rhetoric, unrelenting
challenge, and visionary 'likeness of what is perhaps eternal" that
makes it hard to see Shelley plain. Shelley's reputation has undergone
the most extreme fluctuations of judgment. A decade after his death his
repute was at its lowest. Since then the poet has heen elevated as a
saint and sent to perdition as a blackguard; he has been presented as a
blasphemous infidel by some and an immortal classic by others. The
school that regarded Shelley as a self-absorbed narcissist succeeded in
belittling Shelley's stature, but the process of denigration stopped dur-
ing the first quarter of the twentieth century. Today, thanks to changes
in aesthetic taste, in sensibility and psychological understanding, there
is a wider tolerance as well as a greater appreciation of both his lyrical
power and his intellectual penetration.

It is the lyrical power that first captures the reader. Once captured,
there is no escape from Shelley's enchantment. Few poets have written
with such absorption, with such closeness to the heart of the poem. In
the best of Shelley it is impossible to separate the poem from the poet.

Effortless and spontaneous as his symbolic skylark, Shelley poured
out his heart fully and profusely with "unpremeditated art." The longer
poems speak to the reader's mind, but his emotions continue to be more
immediately roused by the imaginative sweep of "Ozymandias," "To
Night," and the "Ode to the West Wind," the airy fantasy of "The
Cloud" and "The Sensitive Plant" and, in spite of their familiarity and
occasional mawkishness, the lyrics beginning '1 arise from dreams of
thee," 'When the lamp is shattered," "I fear thy kisses," "One word is
too often profaned," "Rarely, rarely comest thou," "Music when soft
voices die," "The fountains mingle with the river," 'The keen stars are
twinkling," and the grand chorus from Hellas:

The world's great age begins anew,

The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew

Her winter weeds outworn:

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. . . -

Oh, cease! must hate and death return?

Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn

Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past.
Oh, might it die or rest at last!

Such poems convey the very essence of poetry, "an unbodied joy" so
keen that, in spite of every prejudice, the world must listen and re-
spond to it.

443

XXI

"Ok, Weep far AHonais"

JOHN: KEATS

A PREOCCUPATION with mythology, with Grecian urns, Elgin mar-
/\ bles, Homer, Hyperion, Endymion, and Apollo might lead the
X JL uninformed reader to imagine that John Keats was a classical
scholar who, in Byron's words,

Contrived to talk about the Gods of late

Much as they might have been supposed to speak.

But Keats had little learning and there was no classical strain in his
ancestry. His maternal grandfather, John Jennings, ran a London livery
stable, and his father, Thomas Keats, was a common groom who was
lucky enough to marry the proprietor's daughter.

John was the first child of the union. He was born at the Swan and
Hoop stables in 1795 toward the end of October — the thirty-first is the
registered date, but Keats always observed the twenty-ninth as his birth-
day. Three other children survived infancy: two boys, George, born in
1797; Tom, born in 1799; and a girl, Frances (Fanny) Mary, born in
1803, who outlived them all.

Keats's childhood was anything but secure. When the boy was ten
his father, returning from a convivial party, was thrown from a horse
aixd died of a fractured skull. In less than three months his mother mar-
ried a younger Tnan who seems to have been an adventurer out to ac-

444

JOHN KEATS

quire property. Shortly thereafter there was a separation and the chil-
dren were sent to Mrs. Jennings, their grandmother, in Edmonton, a
little north of London. It is said that Keats's mother lapsed into a life
charitably called "irregular," but there is nothing but gossip to substan-
tiate the story. She came back to her mother's often after the children
went to live there, and died of consumption when Keats was fifteen.

Before his mother's death, Keats and his brother George were going
to boarding school at Enfield, a village ten miles from London. Since
she was in her mid-seventies, their grandmother appointed two guard-
ians for the children: John Rowland Sandell, who served for only a
short period, and a strait-laced tea merchant, Richard Abbey. When
Mrs. Jennings died five years later, the children were without relations,
and the money to take care of them was doled out by Abbey. Because
of a faulty will the Jennings estate, amounting to several thousand
pounds, was tied up in litigation for years and was not settled until
after Keats's death.

Fortunately, Keats's early schooling was happy and rewarding. At
Enfield he was attracted to and greatly influenced by the headmaster,
John Clarke, a quiet but courageous man who was sympathetic to new
ideas in politics as well as the arts. Clarke's son, Charles Cowden, was
an instructor at the school; eight years older than Keats, he gave the
boy his first lessons in literature and fostered the feeling for poetry al-
ready beginning to manifest itself. The other pupils did not recognize
the embryonic poet, but they quickly acknowledged the budding
athlete. Keats liked games and he liked physical combat; Cowden
Clarke said "he would fight anyone, morning, noon, and night/* He
was small and slight but, although his features were delicate, there was
no trace of effeminacy. When Keats lost his temper, which was often,
he fought his opponent, regardless of size, with "terrier courage."
Clarke remembered the day when Keats's brother Tom came to the
school, was rude, and had his ears boxed; whereupon "John rushed up
and struck the usher, who could, so to say, have put him in his pocket.7*

At fifteen Keats discovered great books. In an orgy of reading he
absorbed Robinson Crusoe and Pilgrim's Progress, a translation of
Ovid's Metamorphoses and, since he was already fascinated by my-
thology, a Classical Dictionary. He wrote a prose translation of the
Aeneid and won two prizes for application; they were an Introduction
to Astronomy, embellished with quotations from Milton, Pope, Thom-
son, and other poets, and — so that the young star-gazer should keep his
feet on the ground — a Dictionary of Merchandise,

445

LIVES OF THE POETS

A year after his mother's death Keats became apprenticed to Thomas
Hammond, an apothecary who was also a surgeon, while George was
taken into Mr. Abbey's bookkeeping department. Hammond's house
was a short distance from Enfield, and twice a week Keats would take
the two-mile walk to talk with Cowden Clarke and listen to him read.
The two had much in common. Products of a romantic period, they
turned away from the cold satires and chiseled epigrams of the eight-
eenth century, and sunned themselves in the warm luxuriance of
Shakespeare, the grandiose images of Milton, the florid enchantment of
Spenser. Keats reveled in the richly rhymed Spenserian stanza; when he
discovered The Faerie Queene he borrowed it from his friend. Cowden
Clarke said, "He went through it as a young horse through a spring
meadow — ramping!"

In the fourth year of his apprenticeship, Keats was unhappy, home-
sick for a home that no longer existed. His grandmother was dead; his
youngest brother, Tom, joined George in the accounting room; and
their ten-year-old sister, Fanny, was living with the Abbeys. Keats had
tried to accept the idea of doctoring, although at nineteen he definitely
knew he would never practice surgery. He could not get along with
Hammond, There were unpleasant scenes — the apprentice shook his
fist at his master — and a few days before his twentieth birthday, Keats
left Hammond's house and entered Guy's Hospital in London to con-
tinue his medical studies. At Guy's, Keats attended lectures on materia
medica, anatomy, midwifery, and botany — a notebook in the Hamp-
stead Museum is lightened with his flower drawings. But his mind was
elsewhere. Henry Stephens, a fellow student who became an eminent
surgeon, recalled that "in the lecture room he seemed to sit apart and
to be absorbed in something else, as if the subject suggested thoughts
to him which were not practically connected with it. He was often in
the subject and out of it in a dreamy way."

Keats roomed with a cousin of Sir Asdey Cooper, the idol of Guy's,
and, in spite of his "dreamy way/' seems to have applied himself to his
studies, for, nine months after entering the hospital, he was granted a
certificate to practice as an apothecary. He tried to interest himself in
the properties of drugs and potions, but he was growing more and
more obsessed by the power of poetry. 'The other day during a lec-
ture/* he told Cowden Clarke, "there came a sunbeam into the room,
and with it a whole troop of creatures floating in the ray; and I was off
with them to fairyland."

By now Keats realized his complete unsuitability to treat sick people.

446

JOHN KEATS

"My last operation was the opening of a man's temporal artery. I did it
with the utmost nicety, but reflecting on what passed through my mind
at the time, my dexterity seemed a miracle, and I never took up the
lancet again."

At twenty-one his mind was made up. He had written only a few
poems — an "Imitation of Spenser/' a rhymed letter to George, a sonnet
for Tom's seventeenth birthday — but he knew what he wanted. He
calmly informed his guardian what it was. "I do not intend to be a
surgeon," he said to Abbey.

"Not intend to be a surgeon!" exclaimed the startled dealer in tea.
"Why, what do you mean to be?"

"I mean to rely upon my abilities as a poet."

"John, you are either mad," gasped Abbey, "or a fool to talk in so
absurd a manner!"

There was nothing more for Keats to say. Stung by the scorn, he had
to prevent himself from challenging Abbey with a conviction which he
voiced later: "I think I shall be among the English poets after my
death."

Keats's closest associates were his two brothers, but he made other
friends after he left the hospital. Among these was Joseph Severn, two
years Keats's senior, an excellent painter of miniatures who longed to
paint panoramas. In Severn's loving little portrait we see the living
Keats: the tremulous mouth, wide with a trace of sensuality; the clear,
slightly receding forehead; the red-gold, feathery hair; the small, sensi-
tive nose; the ardent look in the hazel eyes, lustrous, said Severn, "like
those of certain birds which habitually front the sun." Charles Brown's
profile drawing with the head tilted back and the cheek resting
against a knuckled hand is more passive and intellectual, but it presents
the same thoughtful and prematurely grave likeness.

For a while Keats lived with his brothers in the noisy Cheapside
district of London, and it was there that he wrote his first important
poem. Cowden Clarke had shown him Chapman's spirited translation
of Homer; they had spent a whole night in excited discovery, reading
the great passages aloud. At ten o'clock the following morning Clarke,
who had had little sleep, received a communication from Keats, who
had not slept at all. It was the sonnet "On First Looking into Chap-
man's Homer/'

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

447

LIVES OF THE POETS

Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne:

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific — and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise —

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Keats's dreamy mind was wandering when, in his dramatic picture of
the explorer staring at the Pacific, he wrote "Cortez" instead of "Bal-
boa," but his sensitivity to words was never keener. Two manuscripts
of this poem exist. The first is a remarkable contrast to the second. In
the first draft Homer was not "deep-browed" but "low-browed/' and the
"eagle eyes" were merely "wond'ring eyes." The seventh line was origi-
nally 'Tet could I never judge what men could mean," but Keats's fine
ear made him alter the awkward syllables to the unforgettable 'Yet
never did I breathe its pure serene" — "pure serene" being the essence
of Keats distilled in a single phrase.

Clarke recognized that, creatively at least, Keats had come of age. He
showed some of his young friend's poems to Leigh Hunt, critic, poet,
and editor of the liberal journal The Examiner. In 1813 Hunt had
been fined and sentenced to two years' imprisonment for attacking the
Prince Regent — Clarke's father had supplied the rebel with weekly
baskets of food. Among the poems which Clarke took with him was a
Keats sonnet "Written on the Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison/'
Hunt, knowing nothing of Keats, had already printed another sonnet
submitted to The Examiner — the first poem of Keats to be published —
"O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell," and it was Hunt who was re-
sponsible for Keats's public debut. On December i, 1816, in an article
entitled "Young Poets," Hunt heralded the advent of three young
writers "who appear to us to promise a considerable addition of strength
to the new school," a school opposed to Pope and his followers. The
three young men were Keats, Shelley, and John Hamilton Reynolds.
Hunt said litde about Shelley and Reynolds, a pleasant versifier who

448

JOHN KEATS

never justified Hunt's enthusiasm, but he predicted correctly that the
youngest of them would help the new school "to revive nature and put
a spirit of youth in everything." Hunt was quick to applaud Keats's
refusal to consider poetry as a conscious craft but as unconscious inspi-
ration:

A drainless shower

Of light is poesy; 'tis the supreme of power;
Tis might half-slumbering on its own right arm.

Hunt soon became Keats's close friend as well as his sponsor — it was,
said Keats, "an era in my existence" — and the young poet who had just
turned twenty-one was admitted to Hunt's exclusive circle, which in-
cluded the critic-essayist William Hazlitt; the musician Vincent No
vello; the heretical Shelley, whom he disliked; and the painter Benja-
min Haydon, whose huge canvases he greatly admired. After his first
visit with "glorious Haydon" Keats wrote him fervidly: "Last evening
wrought me up, and I cannot forbear sending you the following." The
"following" was a sonnet whose first lines must have particularly
pleased Haydon ("Great spirits now on earth are sojourning")? and
Keats was overjoyed when Haydon promised to send the poem to
Wordsworth, leader of the new dispensation in "natural" poetry. Hay-
don's letter of gratification was, said Keats, "a stimulus to exertion. I
begin to fix my eye on one occasion. . . . The idea of your sending the
poem to Wordsworth put me out of breath — you know with what
reverence I would send my wellwishes to him."

It was Haydon who took Keats to the British Museum, and if Hay-
don did not direct him to the object which inspired the "Ode on a
Grecian Urn," he was responsible for the sonnet, "On Seeing the Elgin
Marbles."

It is an odd turn in Keats's cultural development that his passion for
Greek legendry was given its prime impetus not by another poet but by
a political envoy. Had it not been for Lord Elgin's unscrupulous spolia-
tion of the Parthenon, the famous frieze and pediment by Phidias
would have remained in Athens. A long and acrimonious battle ensued
before the government would permit official acknowledgment of the
pieces — Haydon was foremost among those who fought for the sculp-
tures— but finally they became one of the glories of the British Mu-
seum. Keats sent Haydon two sonnets after seeing them. The finer and
more justly famous begins its tribute with a singular fragment of auto-

449

LIVES OF THE POETS

biography, a premonition of the death which was to overtake its author
less than five years later.

My spirit is too weak — mortality

Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep

Of godlike hardship tells me I must die

Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.

Keats's friendship with Hunt had many rewards. One of them was
an impromptu performance, a challenge that resulted in one of Keats's
most charming small poems. On the last day of December, 1816, the
two men, joined by Cowden Clarke, were seated in front of the hearth;
during a pause in the talk, they listened to the dauntless chirping of a
cricket, "die cheerful little grasshopper of the fireside.*' Hunt proposed
that they should both write competing sonnets "On the Grasshopper
and Cricket/' Cowden Clarke timed them, and Keats won. Hunt wrote
a pretty little tribute to the "sweet and tiny cousins'* of the field and
hearth, but Keats, who modestly preferred Hunt's treatment to his own,
achieved one of his almost perfect effects. The calm finality of the first
line — 'The poetry of earth is never dead" — is not diminished by Keats's
characteristic contrast of hot sun and cool shade, and the sonnet is so
skillfully organized, so perfectly balanced, that it is hard to believe it
was improvised.

It was through the good offices of Hunt that Keats found a pub-
lisher, the new firm of Charles and James Oilier, who had published
Shelley's poems, and in March, 1817, Keats's first small volume ap-
peared. Keats was at a party when the final proof sheets of his book
were brought in with a request to supply the usual dedication. A born
improviser like Schubert, who wrote some of his loveliest melodies amid
clatter of coffee cups and beer mugs, Keats withdrew to a side table
and, with the noise of conversation all about him, wrote the now fa-
mous dedicatory sonnet to Leigh Hunt. It begins rather dolefully,
"Glory and loveliness have passed away," but the end is happy and
characteristically modest:

Aad I shall ever bless my destiny

That in a time, when under pleasant trees,

Pan is no longer sought, I feel a free,
A leafy luxury, seeing I could please

With these poor offerings a man like thee.

450

JOHN KEATS

In spite of the hopes of the Hunt circle, Keats's debut was anythir
but a success. Financially the book was a flat failure, and when Georj
Keats blamed the publishers for doing nothing to help his brother
little volume, the Olliers replied with an abusive letter ridding then
Delves of any responsibility. "We are, however, much obliged to you fc
relieving us from the unpleasant necessity of declining any further cor
nexion with it [the bookl, which we must have done, as 'we think th
curiosity is satisfied and the sale has dropped. By far the greater nurr
ber of persons who have purchased it from us have found fault with i
in such plain terms that we have in many cases offered to take the boo!
back rather than be annoyed with the ridicule which has, time afte
time, been showered upon it."

The reviews were kinder. Three, written by friends, praised th<
book; three others were pleasant if patronizing. Disturbed by the youth
ful sensuousness, the unrestrained and 'leafy luxury, " the latter tool
the occasion to lecture the young poet on what to avoid. Hunt, wh<
was objectionable as a radical thinker as well as a nonclassical versifier
was held up as a particularly dangerous model. After cautioning Keafc
that he should try not "to fatigue his ingenuity and his resources ol
fancy," the reviewer in the Edinburgh Magazine warned him to avoic
conceits, flashy expressions, and "oddness of manner," adding, 'If Mr.
Keats does not forthwith cast off the undeanliness of this school
[Hunt's], he will never make his way to the truest strain of poetry/1
The Eclectic Review, after conceding that the descriptive poem be-
ginning "I stood tip-toe upon a little hill" had "a sort of summer's day
glow diffused over it," went on to speak of the self -revealing "Sleep and
Poetry" as a "strange assay in affectation/* and regretted that "a young
man of vivid imagination should have been flattered into the resolution
to publish verses, of which a few years hence he will be glad to escape
the remembrance."

But the comment which hurt Keats most did not come from a pro-
fessional critic. It came from Keats's guardian, Mr. Abbey, who had
always hoped his ward would earn a living in some reputable profes-
sion. Five years after Keats's death, Abbey told the story to the pub-
lisher John Taylor, who was preparing a memoir. "He brought me,"
said Abbey, "a little book which he had got printed. I took it and said I
would look at it because it was his 'writing; otherwise I should not have
troubled my head with such a thing. When we next met I said, Well,
John, I have read your book, and it reminds me of the Quaker's horse
which was hard to catch, and good for nothing when it was caught/

451

LIVES OF THE POETS

And do you know," continued Abbey, "I don't think he ever forgave me
for uttering this opinion, which, however, was the truth."

As a whole, however, the reviews were encouraging and, although
the book did not sell — "It was read by some dozen of my friends who
liked it," said Keats, "and by some dozen whom I was unacquainted
with, who did not" — Keats made plans for the next book. He was
greatly heartened by Hunt and also by the "dozen" of his friends. He
especially enjoyed the company of those only a few years older than
himself: James Rice, a young lawyer, whom he considered "most sen-
sible and wise"; Benjamin Bailey, studying to be a clergyman but full
of ironic humor; Vincent Novello, through whom Keats came to know
the music of Mozart, Haydn, Bach, and Purcell; the "promising" poet
John Hamilton Reynolds, whose puns have lasted longer than his
poetry, and at whose home Keats heard the lighter tunes of the day
and supplied words to some of them, such as "I had a dove and the
sweet dove died." It was also in the Reynolds household that Keats,
fascinated by the family cat, now retired but once a mighty hunter,
composed the mock-Milton sonnet which begins in the master's orotund
manner:

Cat! who hast pass'd thy grand climacteric . . .

In less than a year Keats's pleasures were unhappily curtailed. His
brother Tom, who had been abroad for some months, returned in poor
health, and in late March, 1817, the three brothers left the bustling
metropolis for the cleaner air of Hampstead, a secluded village now
part of London. They settled in Well Walk, in a cottage belonging to
Bendey, the postman. It was near the Heath, at that time open country,
with violets, wild geraniums, and golden loosestrife crowding the
marshes and meadows. Tom seemed better and Keats's prospects were
brighter. He had found another publisher, John Taylor, who wrote en-
thusiastically to his father: 'We have agreed for the next edition of
Keats's poems and are to have the refusal of his future works. I cannot
think he will fail to become a great poet."

In Hampstead his circle of friends was enlarged and a rewarding
intimacy established when he was introduced to Charles Wentworth
Dilke and Charles Annitage Brown. Dilke, a critic and antiquarian,
and Brown, a retired businessman who had taken up writing, had built
for them Wentworth Place, which consisted of two semi-detached
building with a common garden. Keats was a frequent visitor. He and

452

JOHN KEATS

Dilke read Paradise Lost to each other, and the visits were returned,
Mrs. Dilke being particularly attentive to the three brothers. During
the summer Keats was composing Endymion, but there were too many
distractions. The Bentley children were noisily all over the place, and
he realized it was being written spasmodically, in spurts rather than
with the steady and slowly accumulating movement which could be
achieved only by silent concentration. Long narrative poems were
popular, and Taylor advanced enough money for travel and privacy.
Keats took the first draft of the uncompleted Endymion with him to
the Isle of Wight, to Margate, and to Oxford, where he stayed with
Bailey, who was preparing for his examination, and then to an inn at
Burford Bridge, a retreat in quiet Surrey. The poem was finished
when he returned to Hampstead before the end of the year; Keats was
so happy to have completed it that at the end of the four thousand and
fiftieth line he put down the date: November 28, 1817.

Keats had always wanted to live with poetry; now he knew he could
never live without it for a moment. "I find I cannot exist without
poetry/' he wrote to Reynolds. "Half the day will not do — the whole of
it. I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan. I had be-
come all in a tremble for not having written anything of late. The son-
net overleaf did me some good. I slept the better for it — this morning,
however, I am nearly as bad again." Poetry was his daily bread; he
tasted every variety of it. But it was "eternal poetry" that sustained him
— and "eternal poetry" meant Shakespeare. "I read Shakespeare/' he told
Haydon. "Indeed I shall I think never read any other book much. . . .
I am very near agreeing with Hazlitt that Shakespeare is enough for
us." "Whenever you write a line," he begged Reynolds, hoping for a
letter on Shakespeare's birthday, "say a word or two on some passage in
Shakespeare that may have come rather new to you — which must be
continually happening, notwithstanding that we read the same play
forty times. For instance, the following from The Tempest never
struck me so forcibly as at present:

. . . Urchins

Shall, for that vast of night that they may work
All exercise on thee —

How can I help bringing to your mind the line:

In the dark backward and abysm of time."
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LIVES OF THE POETS

Poetry, however, was not an untroubled pursuit in a world of crea-
tive rivalries. "Everybody seems at loggerheads/' he wrote to Bailey.

There's Hunt infatuated — there's Haydon's picture in status
quo. There's Hunt walks up and down his painting room
criticising every head unmercifully. There's Horace Smith
tired of Hunt ... I am quite disgusted with literary men
— and I will never know another except Wordsworth, no,
not even Byron. Here is another instance of the friendships
of such. Haydon and Hunt have known each other many
years — now they live pour ainsi dire jealous neighbors.
Haydon says to me don't show your lines to Hunt on any
account or he will have done half for you. So it appears
Hunt wishes to be thought When he met Reynolds in the
theatre John told him that I was getting on to the comple-
tion of 4000 lines. Ah! says Hunt, had it not been for me
they would have been 7000!

Annoyed at Hunt's tacit claim that "his corrections and amputations"
could be traced in Endymion and equally disturbed by Hunt's scoffing
about long poems, Keats repeated some sentences he had previously
written to his brother George:

Endymion will be a test, a trial of my powers of imagina-
tion and chiefly of my invention which is a rare thing in-
deed— by which I must make 4000 lines of one bare cir-
cumstance and fill them with poetry. ... I have heard
Hunt say, and I may be asked, why endeavor after a long
poem? To which I should answer — Do not the lovers of
poetry like to have a little region to wander in where they
may pick and choose, and in which the images are so nu-
merous that many are forgotten and found new in a second
reading. . . . Besides, a long poem is a test of invention
which I take to be the polar star of poetry, as fancy is the
sail, and imagination the rudder. Did our great poets ever
write short pieces? I mean in the shape of tales. . . . You
see, Bailey, how independent my writing has been — Hunt's
dissuasion was of no avail — I refused to visit Shelley, that
I might have my own unfettered scope.

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JOHN KEATS

There were other perturbations besides the possible reception of
Endyinion. Abbey was dilatory in dispensing income from the money
left in trust; George, no longer in his employ, was out of work; Tom's
cough was getting worse. Keats saw his sister Frances, now fourteen,
only three or four times a year— "Mr. Abbey," she complained many
years later, "was too careful of me, and always kept me a complete
prisoner, having no other acquaintances than my books, birch, and
flowers." Tom's condition troubled him most. George had taken Tom
to Teignmouth, a river port in rural Devon, while John remained in
London to help Reynolds and dine with Wordsworth.

Reynolds, who had become drama critic for The Champion, was
leaving town for the Christmas holidays and urged Keats to take over
his duties. Keats was only too glad, for he relished the theater, particu-
larly when the characters of Shakespeare became flesh and blood. He
saw the illustrious Kean in Othello, Richard III, and a pastiche of the
three parts of King Henry VI, and praised the actor in all his roles.

His meeting with Wordsworth was less enjoyable. There had been a
convivial dinner at Haydon's at which Wordsworth, aware of his im-
portance, was solemnly condescending. At a later gathering Keats,
surrounded by his friends, was persuaded to recite the ode to Pan from
Endymion. At the end of the impassioned reading, while the ad-
mirers held their breath, Wordsworth made his Olympian pronounce-
ment: "A very pretty piece of paganism/'

It was a dismissal that Keats could not forget. Nor could he forget
the time when, listening to Wordsworth, he had started to agree with
something the bard was saying about poetry, when Mrs. Wordsworth
stopped him. "Mr. Wordsworth," she said, "is never interrupted." It was
a disillusionment as well as a disappointment; when he wrote to Rey-
nolds he could not conceal his pique:

Are we to be bullied into a certain philosophy engendered
in the whims of an egoist? . . . We hate poetry that has
a palpable design upon us and, if we do not agree, seems to
put its hand into its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great
and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and
does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its sub-
ject. How beautiful are the retired flowers! How would they
lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway cry-
ing out, "Admire me, I am a violet! Dote upon me, I am a

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primrose!*' ... I will have no more of Wordsworth or
Hunt in particular. ... I don't mean to deny Words-
worth's grandeur and Hunt's merit, but I mean to say we
need not be teased with grandeur and merit when we can
have them uncontarninated and unobtrusive.

A month after writing this to Reynolds, Keats left London to take
George's place in Teignmouth. Tom's health was slightly improved, but
it worried Keats more than Wordsworth's general misconceptions of
poetry and his own poetry in particular. The sojourn in Teignmouth,
however, was not a success. It rained almost uninterruptedly. Tom be-
gan to spit blood, and Keats, remembering his hospital training, recog-
nized the threatening nature of Tom's disease. Six weeks of wet, win-
try weather drove them back to Hampstead where Tom grew worse and
George, who had been unable to find employment, announced that he
and his fiancee, Georgiana Wylie, were going to try fanning in south-
ern or midwestern America.

In April, 1818, Endymion was published, and the reviews inflicted
a blow on Keats that was, according to Shelley and others, a crippling
shock. Keats had struggled with Endymion. Although he had com-
pleted it five months before, he kept on revising it until a few weeks
before publication. There was to be a lengthy preface, but Taylor
found it both too self-conscious and self-defensive, so Keats rewrote it.
The book finally appeared with a quotation from Shakespeare — "The
stretched metre of an antique song" — a dedication to the memory of
Thomas Chatterton, and an apologetic preface, knowing within my-
self the manner in which this poem has been produced," it began, "it
is not without a feeling of regret that I make it public. What manner I
mean will be quite clear to the reader, who must soon perceive great
inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt
rather than a deed accomplished/' It ended: "I hope I have not in too
late a day touched the beautiful mythology of Greece and dulled its
brightness: for I wish to try once more before I bid it farewell." It was
a wish never to be fulfilled, for, after the devastating attacks on Endym-
ion, Keats could not finish Hyperion, its contemplated companion
piece.

Keats planned to retell the story of Endymion, the beautiful
shepherd boy beloved by the moon goddess and borne away by her to
eternal life. But he was not content with enlarging the single myth; he
added to it the tale of Venus and Adonis, the story of Glaucus and

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JOHN KEATS

Scylla, the legend of Arethusa, and an allegory of the poet's distracted
quest for perfection, a quest hampered by human desires. In Keats's
rough draft, the intended opening was:

A thing of beauty is a constant joy . . .

But the sound was flat. Then, changing one word and shifting an-
other, Keats began the poem with a line which has become a phrase
so familiar as to seem immemorial:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever . . .

Keats was right in his preface, which, in spite of its self-deprecation,
failed to disarm the critics. Endymion was too large an undertaking, "a
feverish attempt rather than a deed accomplished/' It has a spasmodic
instead of an even flow; the Spenserian narrative movement is sug-
gested but never fully attained. Passages of exquisite design are fol-
lowed by pages of uncontrolled efflorescence in which one rococo
excess tries to outdo another. Yet its very luxuriance reveals extraor-
dinary riches; the faults are those of an overabundant creativity rather
than an impoverished imagination.

Before the reviewers hacked Endymion to pieces, Keats set out on a
long walking tour with his Harnpstead friend and neighbor, Charles
Armitage Brown. His brother George had been married and with his
bride, Georgiana, had left for America. It was late June when the two
friends started for the Lake District. Although Keats was an enthusi-
astic sight-seer, it was a disappointing trip. The inns were crowded;
travelers were always intruding; Wordsworth, whom they planned to
visit, was not at home. The view at Ambleside was magnificent, but the
mountains were shrouded in heavy clouds.

From Keswick they went north to Scotland, where they visited the
tomb of Burns at Dumfries, and Keats found the whisky more palat-
able than the people. Writing to his sister Fanny, his spirits rose, and
he brought her up to date on the events of his journey. "We have been
taken for traveling jewelers, razor sellers, and spectacle vendors. . . .
All I hope is that we may not be taken for excisemen in this whisky
country. . . . We are in the midst of Meg Merrilies' country, of whom
I suppose you have heard'* — and he enclosed the first draft of the
charming portrait-poem about the brave old gypsy. He also added "a
song about myself," which, with a nod toward the disapproving Mr.
Abbey, ran through four brisk stanzas and ended:

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LIVES OF THE POETS

There was a naughty boy,

And a naughty boy was he,
He ran away to Scotland
The people for to see —

Then he found

That the ground

Was as hard,

That a yard

Was as long,

That a song

Was as merry,

That a cherry

Was as red —

That lead

Was as weighty,

That fourscore

Was as eighty,

That a door

Was as wooden

As in England —
So he stood in his shoes

And he wondered,

He wondered,
He stood in his shoes

And he wondered.

Keats and Brown crossed over to Ireland, where they intended to
stay a week or more. But the weather was bad and the prices high, and
they left after a walk to Belfast. At Port Patrick, Keats sent Tom a
graphic account of his observations and afterthoughts:

A Scotch girl stands in terrible awe of the elders — poor
little Susannas. They will scarcely laugh — they are greatly
to be pitied and the Kirk is greatly to be damn'd. These
Kirkmen have done Scodand good (?) — they have made
men, women, old men, young men, old women, young
women, boys, girls, and infants, all careful — so that they
are formed into regular phalanges of savers and gainers —
such a thrifty army cannot fail to enrich the country and
give it a greater appearance of comfort than that of their poor

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JOHN KEATS

Irish neighbors. These Kirkmen have done Scotland harm —
they have banished puns and laughing and kissing, except
in cases where the very danger and crime must make it very
fine and gustful. I shall make a full stop at kissing, for
after that there should be a better parenthesis, and go on to
remind you of the fate of Burns.

Poor unfortunate fellow — his disposition was Southern —
how sad it is when a luxurious imagination is obliged in
self-defense to deaden its delicacy in vulgarity, and in things
attainable that it may not have leisure to go mad after
things which are not No man in such matters will be con-
tent with the experience of others. It is true that out of
sufferance there is no greatness, no dignity; that in the most
abstracted pleasure there is no lasting happiness. Yet who
would not like to discover over again that Cleopatra was a
gipsy, Helen a rogue, and Ruth a deep one? . . , We live
in a barbarous age. I would sooner be a wild deer than a girl
under the dominion of the Kirk, and I would sooner be a
wild hog than be the occasion of a poor creature's penance
before those execrable elders.

There had been desultory showers en route, but as they went on to
Ballantrae and across to the Hebrides they encountered days of pour-
ing rain. Keats caught a heavy cold; his throat pained him and he
developed a racking cough. At Inverness his condition was so bad that
he had to see a doctor, and, although he did not recognize the symp-
toms of tuberculosis, he was willing to forgo further exertions and
return to Hampstead.

Conditions at home aggravated the illness, which was to be fatal.
Tom was much worse and Keats spent most of his time taking care of
him. He was, moreover, deeply depressed by the reviews of Endymion.
He had expected a condescending press, although he hoped it would
be tempered with a measure of appreciation. He was totally unprepared
for the fierce denunciation and contempt with which the book was
rejected.

The extreme hostility was caused by Tory opposition to the radical
Hunt and those even remotely connected with him, all of whom were
judged guilty by association. Black-wood's Magazine and The Quarterly
Review were the most vicious. The former had published three articles
entitled 'The Cockney School of Poetry/' and Endymion was the

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target chosen for the fourth. In the first of the series of articles, the
anonymous reviewer (believed to be John Gibson Lockhart, Scott's
son-in-law) had made a slighting reference to Keats; in the fourth he
directed the full fury of his animosity against the youngest of the
"Cockneys." His review began with an observation that far too many
young people have been affected with Metromanie, the disease of
verse-writing. He noted "with sorrow" the case of Keats, who had been
"bound apprentice some years ago to a worthy apothecary in town.
But all has been undone by a sudden attack of the malady to which we
have alluded." The review then went on to attack Keats's early poems,
Hunt's sponsorship of them, Keats's "foaming abuse against a certain
class of English poets whom, with Pope at their head, it is much the
fashion with the ignorant unsettled pretenders of the present time to
undervalue/' and his failure to distinguish "between the written lan-
guage of Englishmen and the spoken jargon of Cockneys." Finally it
got around to Endymion, which it found not only nerveless, mystifying
and seditious, but vulgar. "Notwithstanding all this gossamer work,
Johnny's affections are not entirely confined to objects purely ethereal.
. . . It is a better and wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a
starved poet," it concluded, "so back to the shop, Mr. John, back to
'plasters, pills, and ointment boxes/ "

The Quarterly Review was only a little less venomous. John Wilson
Croker found Endymion almost completely incomprehensible. He
wrote:

It is not that Mr. Keats (if that be his real name, for we
almost doubt that any man in his senses would put his real
name to such a rhapsody), it is not, we say, that the author
has not powers of language, rays of fancy, and gleams of
genius — he has all these. But he is unhappily a disciple of
the new school of what somewhere else has been called
Cockney Poetry, which may be defined to consist of the
most incongruous ideas in the most uncouth language. . . .
This author is a copyist of Mr. Hunt; but he is more unin-
telligible, almost as rugged, twice as diffuse, and ten times
more tiresome and absurd than his prototype. . . . There
is hardly a complete couplet enclosing a complete idea in
the whole book. ... If anyone should be bold enough
to purchase this "Poetic Romance" and so much more pa-
tient than ourselves as to get beyond the first book, and so

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JOHN KEATS

much more fortunate as to find a meaning, we entreat him
to make us acquainted with his success.

The Tory campaign behind these animadversions was obvious. But
there were other and nonpolitical reasons for the critics' condemnation
of Endymion. Adulators of the sharp antitheses and balanced couplets
of Pope, they resented the free progress of the verse, the run-over
rhymes, and, most of all, the unrestrained succession of loose images
instead of clipped epigrams. Since the principal journals could deter-
mine the success of a volume — no attention was paid to such papers as
The Chester Guardian and Alfred, West of England Journal, which
praised Endymion — the work was doomed.

The financial failure of the volume hurt Keats almost as much as
the jeering criticisms. Byron, Southey, and Moore had derived sub-
stantial sums of money from their narrative poems, and Keats had hoped
that his "Poetic Romance" might be a profitable venture. It made him
miserable to realize that he could never hope to make a living from
poetry. One of the few pleasant results of the publication was the re-
ceipt of a sonnet from an anonymous admirer, now believed to be
Richard Woodhouse, Taylor's literary adviser and, later, a Keats expert.
At the end of the sonnet, the reader was advised to "turn over," and on
the other side was a banknote for twenty-five pounds. "If I had refused
it," he wrote to George and Georgiana, who were in Kentucky, "I
should have behaved in a very braggadocio dunder-headed manner —
and yet the present galls me a little."

Keats, a devoted brother, kept George and Georgiana informed of
everything. A many-paged letter sent in October, 1818, was a week's
diary. In it Keats tried to shrug off the effect of the reviews — "It does
me not the least harm in society to make me appear little and ridicu-
lous"— spoke of Byron, told of a lady to whom he was attracted but
who scarcely aroused his passion — "I have no libidinous thought about
her" — and promised to write "as far as I know how I intend to pass my
life; I cannot think of those things now Tom is so unwell and weak.
Notwithstanding your happiness and your recommendation, I hope I
shall never marry."

On December i Tom died of the dread tuberculosis to which his
mother had succumbed and which was to kill Keats and his brother
George — his sister Fanny was the only one not to die of the affliction.
Tom's last days were, as Keats wrote George and Georgiana, "of the
most distressing nature," and his depression did not lift until Brown,

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LIVES OF THE POETS

now his most intimate friend, persuaded him to live with him at Went-
worth Place.

Two months before Tom's death Keats had met Fanny Brawne,
whose mother had rented Brown's half of the semidetached villa at
Wentworth Place while Keats and Brown were away on their walking
trip. By the middle of autumn, when the Brawnes moved to the house
next door, Keats was in love with Fanny; by the end of the year they
were engaged. Nothing of this was transmitted to George and Georgi-
ana in another journal letter begun in mid-December and sent off on
the fourth of January. Remembering that, in his long letter of October,
he indicated he would never marry, Keats was reluctant to display the
full force of his changed emotions. The tone throughout is playfully
flippant. In the midst of facetious gossip — "Have you shot a buffalo?
. . . We went to see ^Brutus/ a new tragedy by Howard Payne, an
American1 — Kean was excellent — the play was very bad" — Keats men-
tions Fanny in an ingenuously careless manner. "Mrs, Brawne, who
took Brown's house for the summer, still resides in Hampstead — she is a
very nice woman — and her daughter senior is I think beautiful and
elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable, and strange — we have a little tiff
now and then — and she behaves a little better or I must have sheered
off."

Still in a teasing vein — ''But now I must speak particularly to you,
my dear sister, for I know you love a little quizzing" — Keats returns to
the Brawnes with an offhand but detailed description of Fanny, done
with a fine pretense of detachment:

She is about my height — with a fine style of countenance
of the lengthened sort — she wants sentiment in every fea-
ture— she manages to make her hair look very well — her
nostrils are fine, though a little painful — her mouth is bad
and good — her profile is better than her full-face which
indeed is not full but pale and thin without showing any
bone — her shape is very graceful and so are her move-
ments— her arms are good, her hands baddish — her feet
tolerable — she is not seventeen2 — but she is ignorant —
monstrous, flying out in all directions, calling people such
names — that I was forced lately to make use of die term
Minx. . . .

1 John Howard Payne, whose plays are forgotten and who is remembered as the
author of "Home, Sweet Home," which he wrote for an opera, Clari.
a She must have seemed that young to Keats. Actually she was eighteen.

462.

JOHN KEATS

Keats was protecting himself from another blow to his pride, for he
was wholly and desperately in love with Fanny. 'The very first week I
knew you I wrote myself your vassal," he told her later, "but burned
the letter as the very next time you manifested some dislike to me."

On the basis of such fragments a legend was built up that showed
Fanny to be frivolous, faithless, and probably heartless. She did not
appeal to most of Keats's friends — they thought her vain and super-
ficial— and a single sentence taken out of context from a letter which
she wrote to Brown when he was preparing a memorial life of Keats
was misconstrued. "The kindest act would be to let him rest for ever in
the obscurity to which unhappy circumstances have condemned him,"
she wrote in a deeply moving reply. She was distressed on several
counts besides Keats's unjustly obscure reputation — he was a complete
failure while he lived and little regarded for twenty years after his
death. Her mother had just died horribly of burns when her dress
caught fire, and the loss reminded her all too vividly of her other loss:
Keats's lonely death. It is a fiction that she never really appreciated
Keats. She was a good-natured, healthy eighteen-year-old girl, high-
spirited, fond of dancing and a bit of flirtation; Keats was unhappily
jealous, a driven and dying man. His passion for Fanny was compli-
cated by the uncertainty of his future, the increasing malignancy of his
disease, and the terror of losing her. When she went to parties, he
agonized about her chastity. Unable to possess her, he became franti-
cally possessive.

In spite of everything, Fanny was unquestionably in love with her
tortured lover. He was an unsuccessful poet — anything but a good
"catch" — and the future held little promise; but, far from treating him
capriciously, she was single and constant in her devotion. A series of
Fanny Brawne's previously unknown letters to Fanny Keats, pub-
lished as recently as 1936, made Middleton Murry and other detractors
completely revise their estimate. These thirty-one letters show her to be
intelligent, often witty, and more than ordinarily sensitive. One of
them, written to his sister just three months after Keats's death, reveals
a depth of feeling and an unsuspected relationship between the two
women whom Keats loved most:

All his friends have forgotten him; they have got over the
first shock, and that with them is all. They think I have
done the same, which I do not wonder at, for I have taken
care never to trouble them with any feelings of mine. But

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LIVES OF THE POETS

I can tell you who, next to me (I must say next to me)
loved him best, that I have not got over it and never shall
— It's better for me that I should not forget him but not for
you, you have other things to look forward to.

Fanny Brawne was not exaggerating; she never fully recovered from
the shock. She cut her hair, wore a widow's cap, and dressed in mourn-
ing for six years. She refused to write or speak about Keats, and, al-
though she married Louis Lindo, a Sephardic Jew, about thirteen years
after Keats had died, she wore his ring the rest of her life. Fanny
Brawne may not have been the inspiration of everything he wrote after
he fell in love with her, but Keats's greatest work coincided with his
greatest passion.

The passion and the poetry grew in ever-increasing intensity. It was
as if Keats were aware of the limited span of his life and had to crowd
everything — a play, parodies, light verse, and deathless poems — into his
two remaining years. Between die autumn of 1818 and the end of 1819
he composed a wonderful reworking of the archaic ballad, "True
Thomas," the magical "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," which, in its ele-
ment of enchantment and doom, establishes a kinship between the be-
witched balladist of the sixteenth century and the doomed poet of the
nineteenth; the richly panoplied "The Eve of St. Agnes," the germ of
which is embedded in an unserious lyric by Keats, the nimbly tripping
"Hush! hush! tread softly"; the brilliantly pictured but uncompleted
companion piece, 'The Eve of St. Mark/' which, Keats wrote to
George, "will give you the sensation of walking about an old country
town on a coolish evening"; "Bright Star," "To Sleep," and other son-
nets; three small odes, "Ode to Psyche," "Ode on Melancholy," and
"Ode on Idolence"; and the three great ones, "Ode on a Grecian Urn,"
'To Autumn," and "Ode to a Nightingale."

The last of these, perhaps the most quoted as well as the most care-
fully elaborated, achieves its spell in the first few lines and sustains it
throughout the eight intricately wrought ten-line stanzas. Brown gives
this account of the poem's genesis: "In the spring a nightingale had
built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy
in her song; one morning he took his chair from the breakfast table to
the grass plot under a plum tree, where he sat for two or three hours.
When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper
in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On

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JOHN KEATS

inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number; the writing was
not well legible, and it was difficult to arrange the stanzas. With his
assistance I succeeded, and this was his 'Ode to a Nightingale/ "

In all these poems there is a new grasp, a greater control of metrics, a
more skillful use of the resources of the English language. There are
still traces of Keats's penchant for overdecoration, but the verse has a
freshness and firmness, a sensuousness yet a solidity only suggested by
the early work. Keats had anticipated his advice to Shelley; he had
loaded "every rift with ore." 'To Autumn," which purports to be noth-
ing but a picture, exudes a "mellow fruitfulness" and a drowsy "fume
of poppies," while small gnats mourn "in a wailful choir . . . and
gathering swallows twitter in the skies." "Ode on Melancholy," one of
the shortest of the odes, communicates a sense of heavy poignance in
the weighted movement of its syllables. In common with some of the
other odes, the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" performs the feat of com-
bining a conventional quatrain with a Petrarchan sestet, but it tran-
scends the others in its double aspect of reality: "Beauty is truth, truth
beauty," the beauty of the sensual world and the truth of the imagina-
tion.

It was at this time that Keats, eagerly expecting to get married, was
again faced with the insoluble problem of earning a living. To make
matters worse George, who had lost most of his money in wild specula-
tions, was in difficulties; Abbey was withholding funds, and Keats was
forced to send George most of his share of Tom's estate. Hoping to help
George and also to support himself and Fanny, he thought of several
expedients. He might try journalism; he might return to the study of
medicine and become a physician; he even considered Mr. Abbey's sug-
gestion to learn the trade of hat-making. It did not take him long to
decide that he could not engage in any of these pursuits and that he
must take his chances with the one thing he might be able to do: write
a play or a narrative poem which would win a public. Separating him-
self from Fanny, he went to the Isle of Wight to do both.

The story-poem was "Lamia" and the play was Otho the Great. The
latter, written in collaboration with Brown, who had produced a drama
that had brought him three hundred pounds, was intended for the
tragedian, Kean. It was purposely melodramatic, thickly plotted, and
full of purple passages to be sonorously declaimed. Unfortunately,
Kean went to America — "that," said Keats, "was the worst news I could
have had." No one would risk a professional production; the play has
never been performed.

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Keats resolved not to return to Hampstead until there was some hope
of a successful future. In September he wrote disconsolately to Fanny:

I love you too much to venture to Hampstead; I feel it is
not paying a visit, but venturing into a fire. . . . Really
what can I do? Knowing well that my life must be passed
in fatigue and trouble, I have been endeavoring to wean
myself from you. . . . As far as they regard myself, I can
despise all events: but I cannot cease to love you.

Try as he would, he could not "wean" himself from Fanny. He
tried living away from her in Winchester and, still thinking of a pos-
sible career in journalism, in London near Westminster Abbey. Week-
ends at Hampstead were both a delight and a despair. On October 1 1
he recalled their hours together:

I am living today in yesterday: I was in a complete fascina-
tion all day. I feel myself at your mercy. Write me ever so
few lines and tell me you will never for ever be less kind
to me than yesterday. You dazzled me. There is nothing in
the world so bright and delicate. . . * I have had a thousand
kisses, for which with my whole soul I thank love — but if
you should deny me the thousand and first, 'twould put me
to the proof how great a misery I could live through.

He wrote to her again two days later:

This moment I have set myself to copy some verses out fair.
I cannot proceed with any degree of content. I must write
you a line or two and see if that will assist in dismissing
you from my mind for ever so short a time. Upon my soul I
can think of nothing else. The time has passed when I had
power to advise and warn you against the unpromising
morning of my life. My love has made me selfish. I cannot
exist without you. I am forgetful of every thing but seeing
you again — my life seems to stop there — I see no further.
. . . Love is my religion — I could die for that. I could die
for you. . . . You have ravish'd me away by a power I can-
not resist; and yet I could resist till I saw you; and even
since I have seen you I have endeavored often "to reason

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JOHN KEATS

against the reasons of my love." 3 I can do that no more —
the pain would be too great My love is selfish. I cannot
breathe without you.

Keats was being literal when he declared he could neither live nor
breathe without Fanny. He ceased to resist the power which ravished
him and, by the end of October, returned to Hampstead. For the time
being he was relaxed; he was, at least, relieved of the struggle to stay
away. He busied himself with The Cap and Bells, a poem of almost
eight hundred lines which was — a curious venture for Keats — a political
satire. It failed to amuse. Keats was further depressed when, early in
January, 1820, George returned to England in hopes of obtaining
capital for new ventures in Kentucky. He succeeded in raising seven
hundred pounds at the cost of a misunderstanding with his brother
concerning the disposal of their patrimony, although, after Keats's
death, George claimed that not one penny of the amount was John's.

The first warning of impending death came on February 3. It had
been unusually cold and damp for weeks. Keats's throat had been
bothering him and, carelessly riding on top of a coach without a coat,
he had come home chilled and flushed. Brown put him to bed; he had
a coughing spell and spat blood. He asked Brown to bring a candle so
he could examine the sheets. "I know the color of that blood/' he said
calmly. ""It is arterial blood — I cannot be deceived in that color. That
drop of blood is my death warrant."

He did not conceal from Fanny how near death he felt he was. "On
the night I was taken ill," he wrote, "when so violent a rush of blood
came to my lungs that I was nearly suffocated — I assure you I felt it
possible I might not survive, and at that moment thought of nothing
but you. When I said to Brown, This is unfortunate/ I thought of
you."

The hemmorhages became more severe; much of the time Keats was
confined to his bed. Nevertheless he managed to write lightheartedly to
his sister Fanny:

I have a very pleasant room for a sick person. A sofa bed
is made up for me in the front parlor which looks on to
the grass plot, as you remember Mrs. Dilke's does. How
much more comfortable than a dull room upstairs, where
one gets tired of the pattern of the bed curtains. Besides, I
see all that passes. For instance now, this morning, if I had
* The quotation is from 'Tis Pity She's a Whore by John Ford.

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LIVES OF THE POETS

been in my own room I should not have seen the coals
brought in. ... Old women with bobbins and red cloaks
and unpresuming bonnets I see creeping about the Heath.
. . . Then goes by a fellow with a wooden clock under
his arm that strikes a hundred and more. Then comes the
old French emigrant (who has been very well to do in
France) with his hands joined behind on his hips, and his
face full of political schemes. Then passes Mr. David
Lewis, a very good-natured, good-looking old gentleman who
has been very kind to Tom and George and me. As for those
fellows, the brickmakers, they are always passing to and
fro. I mus'n't forget the two old maiden ladies in Well
Walk who have a lap dog between them that they are very
anxious about. It is a corpulent little beast whom it is neces-
sary to coax along with an ivory tipp'd cane. . . .

In March Keats seemed much improved, strong enough to go to
London and see Haydon's enormous "Christ's Entry into Jerusalem,"
in which Keats's face stared out of the background and for which Hay-
don made the one life mask of Keats. His sister Fanny sent him a
spaniel, and Fanny Brawne took care of the little dog. When Brown
rented Wentworth Place for the summer, Keats seemed well enough
to live in town and work on his new book of poems.

Lamia) Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, Keats's
third and last volume, was published in July, 1820. It was the only one
of his books which received uniformly good reviews and promised to
have a rewarding sale. But England was in the midst of a nasty, and
therefore highly titillating, political scandal — George IV was trying to
get rid of his wife by asserting that she had committed adultery — and
less than five hundred copies were sold. It is an irony that the book in-
cludes not only the great odes but some of the most quoted (and,
from a publisher's standpoint, most profitable) poems ever reprinted.

"Lamia," which Keats hoped might appeal to a public that liked
narrative poems, was deliberately written in Popeian-Byronic couplets.
There are even occasional cynical, Popelike epigrams, such as;

Love in a hut, with water and a crust.

Is — Love, forgive us! — cinders, ashes, dust;

Love in a palace is, perhaps, at last

More grievous torment than a hermit's fast.

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JOHN KEATS

But "Lamia" never became popular. Its meaning was not clear, and
an audience wary of double meanings could not determine whether
"Lamia" was a mythological story or an allegory about poetry and
science.

"Isabella, or The Pot of Basil" is founded on a story by Boccaccio.
Keats and Reynolds had planned to publish a volume of metrical trans-
lations of the Decameron, but neither got further than the beginning of
the volume. "Isabella" has a Chaucerian movement (including typical
Chaucerian digressions) and, although Keats was fond of it, he felt
there was "too much inexperience of life and simplicity of knowledge
in it."

"The Eve of St. Agnes" is Keats's greatest success as storyteller. The
theme was suggested to him by a Mrs. Isabella Jones, an unconven-
tional member of the intelligentsia, with whom, as a momentary relief
from his unsatisfied passion for Fanny Brawne, Keats may have spent
a night. It is a sensuous tale which is also an opulent, old-world
tapestry, the embodiment of a favorite superstition, and a poet's wish-
fulfillment of young love triumphing over an inimical world. The
kaleidoscope of sensations begins dramatically with the first verse.
St. Agnes' Eve, January 20, is proverbially the coldest of the year, and
the effect of cold is emphasized not only by the "bitter chill" of the first
line, but by the owl hunched miserably in his feathers, the hare limp-
ing and trembling through the frozen grass, the silently huddled flock,
the numb fingers of the Beadsman (literally, a praying man), and the
breath visibly suspended in freezing air.

St. Agnes' Eve — Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman's fingers while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seemed taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin's picture, while his prayer he saith.

The wintry atmosphere is heightened by the hot proclamation of
"silvery snarling trumpets"; a fragrant quiet succeeds the boisterous
revelry; and the lovers vanish in "an elfin-storm from Faery land." "The
Eve of St. Agnes" again employs the Chaucerian manner, but the tale

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LIVES OF THE POETS

has a Shakespearian flavor, a dream-propelled variation of Romeo and
Juliet, in which the lovers, helped by the traditional old nurse, sur-
rounded by bloodthirsty enemies, escape to happiness.

The three great odes surpass analysis. They combine sensation and
thought with a power rarely attained by any writer and are among the
highest achievements of English poetry*

Before his last book was published Keats suspected he had little time
to live. As his illness grew worse the treatment grew more desperate. It
is hard to believe that the doctors administered mercury for tuberculosis,
that a 'lowering" diet was considered beneficial, and that, incredibly,
consumption was supposed to be helped by copious bleedings. All of
these were tried, obviously to no avail. There was talk of a trip to Italy —
Shelley urged him to come to Pisa — but Keats put off the idea. It was
not until this time that the gravity of his condition was realized by
Fanny and Mrs. Brawne, who nursed Keats constantly and anxiously.
"For more than a twelvemonth before quitting England," Fanny told
Tom Medwin, "I saw him every day, often witnessed his sufferings,
both mental and bodily,"

The mental sufferings were by far the worse. They are reflected in
Keats's letters to Fanny, perhaps the most pathetic letters ever written.
They are alternately pitiful and terrible in their revelation of tortured
desire and, since Keats knew he would never marry the woman he so
desperately craved, the fierceness of thwarted passion. A few excerpts
must suffice:

... I see life in nothing but the certainty of your love —
convince me of it, my sweetest. If I am not somehow con-
vinced I shall die of agony. . . , My recovery of bodily
health will be of no benefit to me if you are not all mine
when I am well. For God's sake save me— or tell me my pas-
sion is of too awful a nature for you. Again God bless you.
... I do not want you to be unhappy — and yet I do, I must
while there is so sweet a beauty — my loveliest, my darling!
Goodbye! I kiss you — O the torments!

They talk of my going to Italy. 'Tis certain I shall never
recover if I am to be so long separate from you. . . . Past
experience connected with the fact of my long separation
from you gives me agonies which are scarcely to be talked
of. ...

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JOHN KEATS

... I long to believe in immortality. I shall never be able
to bid you an entire farewell. If I am destined to be happy
with you here — how short is the longest life. I wish to be-
lieve in immortality — wish to live with you forever. . . .

... I appeal to you by the blood of the Christ you believe
in: Do not write to me if you have done anything this
month which it would have pained me to have seen. . . .

Mingled with wild jealousy — "I cannot live without you, and not
only you but chaste you, virtuous you" — are sudden bursts of contrition
and frantic apologies: "If I have been cruel and unjust, I swear my
love has ever been greater than my cruelty which lasts but a minute,
whereas my love come what will shall last forever."

The fierceness of suspicion and the misery of unconsurnmated desire
break out in a sonnet with an almost unbearable concentration of
anguish. The poem is not a smoothly molded work of art but a tortured
self-expression. It stammers in its suffering, stumbles on in a wild
demand, pauses breathlessly to tantalize the unfortunate dreamer with
the "sweet minor zest of love, your kiss/' with the beloved's hands and
her "warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast/' and rushes on
to its fevered conclusion.

I cry your mercy — pity — love! — aye, love!

Merciful love that tantalizes not,
One-thoughted, never-wandering, guileless love,

Unmasked, and being seen — without a blot!
O! let me have thee whole, — all — all — be mine!

That shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest
Of love, your kiss, — those hands, those eyes divine,

That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast, —
Yourself — your soul — in pity give me all,

Withhold no atom's atom or I die,
Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall,

Forget, in the mist of idle misery,
Life's purposes, — the palate of my mind
Losing its gust, and my ambition blind!

Keats's friends and physicians now felt that the one hope lay in the
south. Keats knew that there was no cure for a separation from Fanny,

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and that there could "be no cure for himself. When Fanny volunteered
to go with him to Italy he envisioned the deathbed horror which he
had seen so often in the hospital, and refused to subject her to such a
journey. When the cold September wind struck England, Keats's
physical reaction to the weather was alarming; and it was imperative
that he leave England at once.

On September 18, with money advanced by Taylor, Keats sailed on
the Maria Crowther, accompanied by Joseph Severn, the young painter
who greatly admired Keats and who, having won an award from the
Royal Academy, was eager to go to Rome. It was a cruelly rough trip.
It lasted a month before they landed at Naples; they did not reach
Rome until the middle of November.

Keats's last two months were a physical and mental agony. He was
now beyond jealousy and every minor passion. When he had landed at
Naples Keats had written to Brown about his wretchedness:

. . . The persuasion that I shall see her no more will kill
me. ... I should have had her when I was in health, and
I should have remained well. I can bear to die — I cannot
bear to leave her. O God! God! God! Everything I have in
my trunk that reminds me of her goes through me like a
spear. The silk lining she put in my traveling hat scalds my
head. My imagination is horribly vivid about her — I see her
— I hear her! There is nothing in the world of sufficient
interest to divert me from her a moment. . . . O that I
could be buried near where she lives! I am afraid to write to
her — to receive a letter from her — to see her handwriting
would break my heart — even to hear of her anyhow, to see
her name written would be more than I can bear. My dear
Brown, what am I to do? Where can I look for consolation
or ease? If I had any chance of recovery, this passion would
kill me.

Now pain overcame everything else. He did not write or read. He
could not, or would not, read letters even from Fanny; the agitation
on seeing the envelope made him still more feverish. Severn waited on
him devotedly, took him for an occasional short walk, rented a piano
and played Mozart and Haydn, the music Keats loved best. In Decem-
ber, when Keats had a sharp relapse, it seemed that the end had come,

472

JOHN KEATS

but he lingered on for another two months. "Did you ever see anyone
die?" he asked Severn, and when Severn said no, Keats continued,
'Well, then I pity you, poor Severn. What trouble and danger you
have got into for me. Now you must be firm, for it will not last long."

On the afternoon of February 23, 1821, he called to Severn, "Lift
me up. I am dying. Don't be frightened," he added. cThank God it has
come." For seven hours Keats fought for breath. Then he grew quiet
and, at midnight, died in Severn's arms. Two days later he was buried
in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. He had chosen his own epitaph —
"Here lies one whose name was writ in water" — and, by his own re-
quest, there was no name on his tomb. His life as a poet had lasted
five short years.

It is impossible to separate Keats's letters from his other writings. They
are not merely an appendage to his poems but a part of them. They
show continually what his poems occasionally disclose: the warmth of
his nature, his ready sympathy, his keen common sense, and his great
gift for friendship. They are, moreover, indispensable to the study of
poetic literature; they reveal more about the art of poetry than a dozen
scholarly tomes and all the textbooks ever written. A letter to his pub-
lisher written when Keats was a few months more than twenty-two be-
gins by agreeing with Taylor's suggestions concerning Endymion. Keats
then goes on to state what every reader must consider a credo and any
poet might regard as a revelation:

In poetry I have a few axioms, and you will see how far I
am from their centre, ist, I think poetry should surprise by
a fine excess and not by singularity — it should strike the
reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear
almost a remembrance. 2nd, Its touches of beauty should
never be halfway, thereby making the reader breathless in-
stead of content. The rise, the progress, the setting of im-
agery should like the sun come natural to him — shine over
him and set soberly, although in magnificence, leaving him
in the luxury of twilight. But it is easier to think what poetry
should be than to write it — and this leads me to another
axiom. That if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves
to a tree it had better not come at all. . . .

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LIVES OF THE POETS

Several months later Keats returned to the theme with energy and
a new personal emphasis. On October 27, 1818, he wrote to his friend,
Richard Woodhouse:

As to the poetical character itself (I mean that sort of which,
if I am anything, I am a member — that sort distinguished
from the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime, which is a
thing per se, and stands alone), it is not itself — it has no self.
It is everything, and nothing — it has no character. It enjoys
light, and shade. It lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or
low, rich or poor, mean or elevated — it has as much delight
in conceiving an lago as an Imogen. What shocks the vir-
tuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet It does no
harm from its relish of the dark side of things, any more
than from its taste for the bright one, because they both
end in speculation. A poet is the most unpoetical of any-
thing in existence, because he has no identity: he is contin-
ually in for, and filling, some other body. The sun, the
moon, the sea, and men and women who are creatures of
impulse, are poetical, and have about them an unchangeable
attribute; the poet has none, no identity. He is certainly the
most unpoetical of all God's creatures.

Keats took his work seriously but without vanity; he could be critical
about his own productions. In a self-clarifying letter to James Augustus
Hessey, Taylor's partner, referring to the "slipshod Endymion" he wrote
with insight and humor:

It is as good as I had power to make it — by myself. Had I
been nervous about its being a perfect piece, and with that
view asked advice and trembled over every page, it would
not have been written; for it is not in my nature to fumble.
I will write independently. I have written independently
-without judgment. I may write independently, and with
judgment, hereafter. The Genius of Poetry must work out
its own salvation in a man. It cannot be matured by law
and precept, but by sensation and watchfulness in itself.
That which is creative must create itself. In Endymion I
leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become bet-
ter acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the

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JOHN KEATS

rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped
a silly pipe, and took tea, and comfortable advice.

Keats's genial humor, so seldom appreciated, glints through his letters
as well as through such poems as "There Was a Naughty Boy,"
"Dawlish Fair," and "On Oxford." Keats had not only a Shakespearean
love of puns but a delight in inventing them. Instead of referring to
some verse as "doggerel" he called it <fbitcherel," and he informed Rice
that you could see the wind if you slept in a hog trough with your
tail to the Sow Sow West. In the sleepy "Ode on Indolence," Keats bids
a mock farewell to the three troublesome shadows, Love, Ambition,
and Poesy, humorously declaring:

So, ye three ghosts, adieu! Ye cannot raise
My head cool-bedded in the flowery grass;

For I would not be dieted with praise,
A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce.

Keats never completed his most seriously ambitious work, Hyperion.
Disturbed by criticism, he abandoned it. He began another version,
which he intended to call The Fall of Hyperion, but this too he was
never able to complete. Yet the first few lines of his projected epic of
the overthrow of the elder gods are among his finest accomplishments.
The sense of titanic despair is concentrated in the setting, the lifeless
landscape, the heavy air, and, most evocatively, by the dead leaf which
in its motionlessness expresses the very essence of desolation.

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale

Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,

Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,

Sat gray-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone,

Still as the silence round about his lair;

Forest on forest hung about his head

Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,

Not so much life as on a summer's day

Robs not one light seed from the feathered grass,

But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.

A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more

By reason of his fallen divinity

Spreading a shade: the Naiad 'mid her reeds

Pressed her cold finger closer to her lips.

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LIVES OF THE POETS

Like Blake, Keats exalted the authenticity of Imagination and, like
Shelley, the power of Intellectual Beauty. More than a year before he
ended the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" with "Beauty is truth, truth
beauty," he was writing in this uplifted vein to Bailey, then studying
for the ministry:

I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affec-
tions and the truth of imagination. What the imagination
seizes as beauty must be true — whether it existed before or
not . . . The imagination may be compared to Adam's
dream — he awoke and found it truth. ... O for a life of
sensations rather than of thoughts! It is "a vision in the form
of youth," a shadow of reality to come — and this considera-
tion has further convinced me ... that we shall enjoy our-
selves hereafter by having what we call happiness on earth
repeated in a finer tone and so repeated. And yet such a
fate can only befall those who delight in sensation rather
than hunger, as you do, after truth.

"A life of sensations rather than of thoughts" — this is sometimes
assumed to be the essential nature of Keats's poetry. But it is a false
assumption. Poetry to Keats was far more than a translation of the senses.
It was a transmutation; it was feeling fused with thought, the authentic-
ity of the Imagination. Thought by itself was something to be re-
garded cautiously, and the study of philosophy was not to be taken
with pontifical seriousness. "As tradesmen say everything is worth what
it will fetch/' he teased Bailey, "so probably every mental pursuit takes
its reality and worth from the ardor of the pursuer — being in itself a
nothing." Wanning to the idea, he went on:

Ethereal things may at least be thus real, divided under
three heads: things real — things semi-real — and nothings.
Things real, such as existences of sun, moon, and stars and
passages of Shakespeare. Things semi-real, such as love, the
clouds, et cetera, which require a greeting of the spirit to
make them wholly exist — and nothings which are made
great and dignified by an ardent pursuit. . . . Now, my
dear fellow, I must once for all tell you I have not one idea
of the truth of any of my speculations — I shall never be a

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JOHN KEATS

reasoner because I care not to be in the right, when retired
from bickering and in a proper philosophical temper.

In its very whimsicality this passage points to a cardinal element in
Keats. Unlike Shelley, and in many ways his opposite, Keats distrusted
the tricky intellect and, skeptical of man's notions of truth, did not
"care to be in the right/' He was impelled by an instinctive physical
sensibility, but his love of swiftly changing sensations carried his poetry
far beyond the senses. "To Autumn" uplifts its thought in an un-
paralleled harmony of visual and musical effects; 'The Eve of St.
Mark" illuminates its "interiors" in the manner of the most careful
Dutch painter; the "Ode to a Nightingale" turns reverie into reality.

It was a dream that Keats pursued, a dream of a world made not only
lovelier but worthier of living. It was the pursuit of a dedicated poet,
a tragic lover, and a brave man, who, wounded by derision and weak-
ened by a fatal disease, confronted death with a deathless vision.

477

XXII

Victorian Love Story

ELIZABETH BARRETT

BROWWKG
AMD ROBERT BROWWMG

r CONTRAST to Byron, who died at thirty-six, to Shelley, who barely
survived his thirtieth year, and to Keats, dead at twenty-five, Robert
Browning seems a prime example of longevity. His life spanned an
era. During Browning's seventy-seven years, nineteenth-century Eng-
land underwent a series of quiet revolutions. The Victorian period
was a time of slow but epoch-making changes. At its beginning, labor
had few if any rights — Karl Marx was an unknown thirty-year-old
German Jew spending his days in the reading room of the British
Museum — paupers were shunted into workhouses, women and children
slaved in the mines fourteen hours a day. The aristocracy had not only
the first but the last word in government. It was not until Victoria
ascended the throne in 1837 that a group which called themselves the
Chartists dared to oppose the sacred rights of the peerage, to question
whether the ownership of property was sufficient qualification for
membership in Parliament, and to demand equal suffrage Cby way of
the unheard-of process of secret balloting) for men irrespective of their
possessions. Although Chartism failed as a movement, its aims were
gradually achieved. But it was not until the middle of die century that
child labor was limited and factory conditions improved, thanks in part
to the protesting "Cry of the Children" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
and Thomas Hood's passionate "Song of the Shirt."

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ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING AND ROBERT BROWNING

Theological orthodoxy was assaulted suddenly when Darwin's
Origin of Species pitted science against religion, and the "belief in
special and separate creation — the Bible being accepted not only as the
word of God but as a record of unquestionable fact — was challenged by
the theory of evolution. Indicating a creation with no beginning and
no discernible end, divesting man of his supernatural aura, Darwin
compelled a new and more modest estimate of man's place in the
universe.

The world of literature also underwent a drastic reappraisal. The
Victorian novels did not, like Scott's, devote themselves to a gloriously
glamorized past; they faced a grim and often ugly present. It was a new
kind of fiction that emerged in the reforming didacticism of Dickens
and the searching introspection of the Brontes. Readers were beginning
to wonder whether respectability was more important than morality.

It was into such a world that Robert Browning was born on May
7, 1812, at Camberwell, across the Thames from London. His
ancestry was not, like that of most of the major English poets, native
English. The Brownings (and, by a coincidence, the Barretts) owned
property in the West Indies. Browning's paternal grandmother had
Creole blood — his dark complexion always set him apart from his
fellows. His mother, Sarah Wiedemann, was the daughter of a German-
Jewish sailor — Browning always spoke of him as a shipowner, but he
was actually only a mariner who had married a Scottish woman in
Dundee. Although Browning implied that he derived his love of
music from his mother, nothing is known about her except that she
was strict in the religious upbringing of her son and his younger sister,
Sarianna, and that Browning was closely attached to her.

He was more dependent on his father. As a young man his father had
managed a sugar plantation at St* Kitts in the West Indies, but when he
objected to the cruelties of slave labor he was brought back and put to
work in the Bank of England, There, amid a more genteel slavery,
he prospered sufficiently to become a gentleman, scholar, and bib-
liophile. Like Milton's father, he brought up his son to be a savant.
Reared in a library of six thousand books in many languages, it is no
wonder that the poet took his erudition for granted; he said he became
acquainted with "Paracelsus, Faustus, and even Talmudic personages,
personally."

Browning never forgot what he owed his father, who was a good
draftsman as well as a competent versifier. In an autobiographical poem,
"Development/' he recalled how his father illustrated the siege of

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LIVES OF THE POETS

Troy by piling up chairs and tables for the beleaguered city, placing
the boy in the role of Priam on top of the "wall/' calling the family
cat Helen because she had so often been enticed from home, and
pointing to the pony as Achilles sulking in the stable.

It happened, two or three years afterward,

That — I and playmates playing at Troy's siege —

My father came upon our make-believe.

"How would you like to read yourself the tale

Properly told . . .

Learn Greek by all means, read the 'Blind Old Man,

Sweetest of Singers/ " . . .

Time passed, I ripened somewhat. One fine day,

"Quite ready for the Iliad, nothing less?

There's Heine, where the big books block the shelf.

Don't skip a word; thumb well the Lexicon!"

With his father as mentor there was little need for formal education;
besides, the family were Dissenters, and Cambridge and Oxford would
not take nonconformists* Although young Browning attended London
University for a few months, he learned all he needed to learn at
home, where he was tutored in history, art, philosophy, science, and the
classics. At twelve he already knew what he wanted to be. He completed
a collection of Byronic poems, Incondita, which he later destroyed but
which pleased his father with the knowledge that he had produced a
poet.

A far greater influence than Byron was Shelley, a copy of whose
poems had been given to Robert on his fourteenth birthday. The soar-
ing spirit that refused to conform created a tumult in the unfolding
poet, and he tried to emulate the flight of the rebel skylark. The re-
sult was Pauline, which appeared in his twenty-first year and was
subtitled A Fragment of Confession. Published anonymously, it was so
youthfully exhibitionistic and, unlike his later work, so intensely self-
preoccupied, that Browning did not acknowledge authorship until
thirty-four years later when it was included in the 1867 edition of his
Collected Poems. A turbulent poem, Pauline is histrionic and often
hysterical, but no biographer can mistake the importance of its place
in the growth of a poetic mind. One must respect the ardent tribute
to Shelley even when one smiles at it.

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ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING AND ROBERT BROWNING

Sun-treader — lif e and light be thine for ever;
Thou art gone from us — years go by, and spring
Gladdens, and the young earth is beautiful,
Yet thy songs come not — other bards arise,
But none like thee — they stand — thy majesties,
Like mighty works which tell some Spirit there
Hath sat regardless of neglect and scorn . . «

. . . I was vowed to liberty,
Men were to be as gods, and earth as heaven.
And I — ah! what a life was mine to be,
My whole soul rose to meet it . . .

At twenty-two Browning made the first of his trips abroad. He was
in Russia for about two months, and when he returned he brought with
him the idea for a work about the Renaissance physician Paracelsus,
The outcome was a poem of more than four thousand lines. Paracelsus,
his first characteristic work, appeared in print in Browning's twenty-
fourth year, the expense of publication being borne by his father.
There is a touch of autobiography in it as well as a liberal trace of
Shelley — like Prometheus, its hero hopes to liberate humanity — but
there is no mistaking the voice of Browning in the inflection of its
lines. Here, too, are the accents of the later poet sympathetic to unsuc-
cessful rebels and other failures. In spite of an excess of verbiage, there
emerges a well-defined portrait, the sixteenth-century chemist, alchemist,
dreamer, doctor, and charlatan, who believed he could discover the
secret of life but failed because he could not understand people —

. . . their half -reasons, faint aspirings, dim
Struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies,
Their prejudices and fears and cares and doubts . . .

The actor William Macready had read Paracelsus and, impressed with
its resonances, had urged Browning to adapt or write a play for him.
Browning immediately set to work, and Strafford was published on
May i, 1837, the day it was presented at Covent Garden Theatre. It
was a five-act drama in the manner of a Shakespearean historical play;
its hero was the noble Earl of Strafford whose devotion to Charles I
was his undoing: "Put not your trust in princes, nor in the sons of men,

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for in them there is no salvation/' It was a crushing disappointment;
the piece was withdrawn after five performances. Macready blamed
the play; Browning blamed the actors. The poet swore he would never
again be tempted to write for the theater, but he could not resist it. In
less than two years he was busy with a series of new works for the
stage.

Just before his twenty-sixth birthday Browning made his first trip
to Italy. It was a brief tour and a not altogether happy one. He
succumbed at first glance to the physical beauty of Venice, but con-
ditions there disenchanted him. "The whole poor-devildom one sees
cuffed and huffed from morn to midnight made me prick up my
republicanism and remind myself of certain engagements I have entered
into with myself."

Those "engagements" were met to a great extent if not fulfilled in
Bordello, a rhymed poem of almost six thousand lines. Browning
planned to emphasize the humanistic spirit that rises above the will to
power, but his lengthy thirteenth-century narrative is so interrupted
by digressions, the characters are so confusing, and the style so in-
volved that almost no one could read it with pleasure or even com-
prehension. The poem which had taken Browning seven years to com-
plete became the butt of literary London. The famous journalist and
political economist Harriet Martineau, at whose salon Browning had
been petted, said she was so wholly unable to understand it that she
supposed herself ill. Mrs. Thomas Carlyle remarked that, although she
had read the poem carefully, she had never found out whether
Sordello was a person, a book, or a city. Tennyson said that of
Bordello's 5,800 lines there were just two which he could comprehend.
They were the first line of the poem:

Who will, may hear Bordello's story told
and the last line:

Who would, has heard Sordello's story told

and both, said Tennyson, were lies.

Sordello completed the damage already done by Stratford. Al-
though Browning still retained the friendship of a few men, such
as Alfred Domett, who was to be celebrated in Browning's patriotic yet
tender "Waring," he was no longer welcome in London literary circles,

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and he remained in a twilight obscurity for more than twenty years.

In spite of discouragements, Browning still hoped to write a suc-
cessful play. After all, he was only thirty. For the time being he aban-
doned the writing of oversized poems and composed a short play,
Pippa Passes, the background of which is "delicious Asolo," a town
that, on his first visit to Italy, Browning greatly preferred to Venice.
King Victor and King Charles was written a year later. It was
followed within a twelvemonth by The Return of the Druses and A
Blot in the 'Scutcheon, which was produced at Macready's theater
without Macready and had three performances. Colombe's Birthday
was written in Browning's thirty-third year but was not performed until
ten years later. None of these dramas elevated Browning to the rank of
great playwrights. Pippa Passes (known chiefly for Pippa's lyrics which
stir the other characters to action, and especially the song 'The year's
at the spring"), Colombe's Birthday, and the later In a Balcony are
occasionally revived, but it is in his dramatic monologues that Browning
is the real creator of drama.

Browning first appeared as a lyrical dramatist in two separate small
volumes — Dramatic Lyrics and Dramatic Romances and Lyrics — written
during the composition of his plays. The poems are theatrical in effect,
creating character, achieving tension, and condensing an entire life
in a few stanzas. The two collections included many of Browning's
most popular poems, such as "My Last Duchess," "Soliloquy of the
Spanish Cloister," "Incident of the French Camp," "Porphyria's Lover/'
"In a Gondola," "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," 'Waring," "How They
Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," "Home Thoughts from
Abroad," "The Glove," 'The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St.
Praxed's Church," "The Laboratory," "The Flight of the Duchess"
(suggested by the old folk song, "The Wraggle Taggle Gypsies"),
"Meeting at Night" and "Parting at Morning," the first nine sections
of "Saul," "The Lost Mistress," and 'The Lost Leader," which was
written upon Wordsworth's acceptance of the laureateship ("a riband to
stick in his coat") and a government pension ("a handful of silver")—
Browning could not forgive the older poet's desertion of every liberal
cause. All these, the poems and the plays, together with two subsequent
dramas, Luria and A Soul's Tragedy, were published in pamphlet form
between 1841 and 1846 by Edward Moxon, who had brought out
Sordello. There were eight books, and the entire series, called Bells and
Pomegranates, was, as usual, paid for by Browning's father.

Except for the one famous romance, Browning's life was in his

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Or from Browning some "Pomegranate" which, if cut deep

down the middle,
Shows a heart within blood-tinctured of a veined humanity.

Unused to such a gratifying tribute, the rising but as yet unrecog-
nized poet wrote to tie author immediately upon his return. "I love
your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett," he said* Then, after a
page of compliments, he added impetuously, "and I love you, too/'
Miss Barrett was startled. She was also fascinated and a little frightened
— she was a sick woman without hope of recovery — and it was only
after months of correspondence that she granted his request for an
interview. The formal arrangements were made through John Kenyon,
a family friend. On May 2,0, 1845, Browning mounted the steps of
50 Wimpole Street, swept into a darkened room, and the courtship
began.

Browning had never shown any interest in women of his own age.
Whether or not he had been conditioned by his affection for his
mother, he could only fall in love with women considerably older
than himself. When he was an adolescent of sixteen he had been
infatuated with an editor's daughter, Eliza Flower, who was nine
years his senior. At twenty-four he had developed an intense regard
for Euphrasia Fanny Haworrh, who was thirty-six years old, and with
whom he corresponded platonically for years. At the time of their
meeting, Elizabeth Barrett was thirty-nine; Browning was thirty-three.

Elizabeth Barrett was born March 6, 1806, at Durham. Eldest of
eleven children, she was extraordinarily precocious. She read Greek
at eight; at twelve she wrote an "epic" in four books, The Battle of
Marathon, which her father had printed* At fifteen she injured her
spine, either by a fall from a horse or by a strain caused by tightening
the saddle girths. A persistent cough kept her confined in London
with occasional visits to the seashore. The death of a beloved brother
by drowning plunged her into a prolonged melancholy. Approaching
her forties, she seemed doomed to a life of shrouded invalidism.

Her father, Edward Moulton Barrett, became the model for a cruel

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ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING AND ROBERT BROWNING

parent. Besier's popular play, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, presents
him in the light of a villain, a man from whom his children shrank in
fear and who commanded their obedience but not their love. The
disciples of Freud have made much of a subconscious incestuous attach-
ment and have rung suggestive changes on the paradox of fascination
and fear. Elizabeth, Barrett's favorite daughter, was not, as many
might be led to believe, revolted by her father's love. She returned his
affection not only with the unreckoning simplicity of a child but with
the full understanding of a constant companion.

A collection of her poems carried a dedication which contained
sentences of unquestionable love:

Of all that such a recollection [her childhood] implies, it
would become neither of us to speak before the world; nor
would it be possible for us to speak of it to one another with
voices that did not falter. Enough that what is in my heart
when I write thus, will be fully known to yours. . . . Some-
what more faint-hearted than I used to be, it is my fancy
thus to seem to return to a visible personal dependence on
you, as if indeed I were a child again; to conjure your be-
loved image between myself and the public, so as to be sure
of one smile — and to satisfy my heart while I sanctify my
ambition by associating with the great pursuit of my life, its
tenderest and holiest affection.

Reading such a tribute, one might surmise that this dedication
was a youthful extravagance, a filial acknowledgment of a girl just out
of her teens. But that would be far from fact. The volume that con-
tained this admission of glad dependence, admiration, and unstinted
loyalty was published in 1844 when the author was thirty-eight years
old.

Less than a year later Browning entered the house at Wimpole Street
and all was changed. The indisposed Elizabeth received him lying
on her couch while he sat and talked — talked brilliantly and in-
cessantly— from an armchair. After the visit he sent her a note ex-
pressing the hope that he had not tired her by talking too much and
too loud. Upon being reassured, he sat down and wrote an impassioned
declaration of love. This time she was genuinely alarmed. She told him
that she very much wanted his friendship, but that, in her condition,
love was out of the question and he was never to speak of it again.

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LIVES OF THE POETS

(Years later she confessed, "I had done with living, I thought, when
you came and sought me out.") Browning complied with the letter
of her admonition but he did not believe in its spirit For a year and
a half he wooed her with the greatest subtlety and the most constant
devotion. He brightened the dark house ("Newgate Prison turned
inside out") with flowers from his mother's garden; he quickened her
interest in the outside world with gossip of London; he excited her
imagination with descriptions of Italy. Most of all, he showed her,
by his stimulating companionship, what life, and especially a shared
life, might be.

Up to this time, Barrett had been able to control his jealousy. He
had determined to keep the family from being broken up; he never
wanted any of his children to marry, least of all Elizabeth. Now he be-
came the tyrant unable to conceal his vindictiveness. He resented the
challenge to his authority and did everything he could to prevent
Browning's influence. The doctors agreed with Browning that her
health might be improved by a sojourn in Italy, but Barrett forbade
discussion of the possibility or any suggestion that she should "unduti-
fully" ever leave her home. If she were to go anywhere, he enjoined, it
would be with him and only under his supervision. Suddenly he
announced that Browning's visits had harmed his daughter, that she
needed a prolonged rest, and that he was moving the entire family to the
country within a fortnight. This was too much for the patient Brown-
ing and even for the compliant Elizabeth. On September 12, 1846,
she managed to escape from the house, joined Browning at St. Mary-
lebone Church, and was secretly married to him. The day before the
Barretts were supposed to leave the city, the lovers, accompanied
by Elizabeth's little spaniel, Flush, fled to Paris. From there they went
to Avignon, along the Riviera to Pisa, where they remained during the
winter months, and thence to Florence, which became their home.

Barrett never forgave his daughter. She had no right to think of
marriage, he told Kenyon; "she should have been thinking of another
world/' He did not allow his children ever to mention her name; he
returned her letters unopened; he refused to see her when she returned
to London for occasional visits. When one of her sisters similarly de-
fied her father with a runaway marriage, he disowned her and predicted
an early end of her romance as well as Elizabeth's. His prophecy was,
fortunately, never fulfilled. Elizabeth suddenly and almost miracu-
lously was cured of her partly real, partly self-induced invalidism.
She enjoyed fifteen more years of fulfilled life, bore a robust son,

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ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING AND ROBERT BROWNING

Robert ('Ten") Wiedemann Barrett Browning, in her forty-fourth
year, led a lively social existence, and published seven volumes of
poetry, including Sonnets from the Portuguese.

The poetry of love is, for the most part, the poetry of heartbreak. The
notes of the song may vary, but the love lyric is usually tuned to the
pitch of loss and grief, betrayal and resignation, unrecognized or un-
requited passion. The antique fragments of Sappho have survived
twenty-five hundred years not only because of the legend of the
Lesbian's hopeless love, but because of her passionate and tragic songs
that "move the heart of the shaken heaven and break the heart of
earth with pity." Bonnets from the Portuguese are completely at
variance with those of Mrs. Browning's mournfully singing sisters. They
are the uninhibited expression of a perfect conjugal love. Instead of
frustration, there is fulfillment, the dream brought into daily reality,
the union which is no less ecstatic for being domestic. The utterance
is often too fanciful, diffuse, and unashamedly sentimental, but it is
never without personal dignity.

Begun in London and completed in Italy, Sonnets from the
Portuguese are a set of confessionals reflecting the progress of betrothal
and marriage. Never intended for publication, they have served as a
lover's password for generations. The title was purposely misleading, a
modest effort at concealment. When the poems were about to be
published, Mrs. Browning shyly suggested Sonnets Translated from the
Bosnian, but the tide finally chosen was one more tribute to Browning,
who, because of her olive skin, playfully called her his 'little Por-
tuguese." An account of their presentation was written by the critic
Edmund Gosse, who had the story from Browning himself:

Their custom was, Mr. Browning said, to write alone, and
not to show each other what they had written. This was a
rule which he sometimes broke through, but she never. He
had the habit of working in a downstairs room, where their
meals were spread, while Mrs. Browning studied in a room
on the floor above. One day, early in 1847, their breakfast
being over, Mrs. Browning went upstairs, while her husband
stood at the window watching the street till the table should
be cleared. He was presently aware of someone behind him,
although the servant was gone. It was Mrs. Browning, who
held him by the shoulder to prevent his turning to look at
her, and at the same time pushed a packet of papers into

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LIVES OF THE POETS

the pocket of his coat. She told him to read that, and to tear
it up if he did not like it; and then she fled again to her own
room. Mr. Browning seated himself at the table and unfolded
the parcel. It contained the series of sonnets which have
now become so illustrious. As he read, his emotion and
delight may be conceived. Before he had finished it was im-
possible for him to restrain himself. ... He rushed up-
stairs, and stormed that guarded citadel. He was early con-
scious that these were treasures not to be kept from the
world. "I dared not reserve to myself," he said, "the finest
sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare's/'

Browning's estimate was a husband's commendable overstatement.
Time has dealt kindly with the love sonnets because of the freed emo-
tion which prompted them and the controlled craftsmanship imposed
upon them by the medium, but they are no longer rated among the
masterpieces of the form. Mrs. Browning's literary reputation, once
so great that upon Wordworth's death she was seriously considered for
the laureateship, rapidly declined. Most of her voluminous and diffuse
writings lost their appeal; today she is remembered only for a few
lyrics, "The Cry of the Children," "A Musical Instrument," parts of her
didactic verse novel, Aurora Leigh, and the sequence "from the Por-
tuguese."

In the early 18505, however, she was far better known than her
husband, and it was her popularity that made their apartment in the
Casa Guidi a center for visiting English celebrities as well as such
Americans as the sculptors William Wetmore Story and Hiram Powers,
and Margaret Fuller, one of the transcendentalists who founded the co-
operative Brook Farm.

Even more enthusiastically than his wife, Browning adapted him-
self to the Italian tempo and temperament. He quickly learned the
language, explored its legends, and immersed himself in its literature.
"Italy," he said, "was my university," Browning was at home with the
natives; because of his slight build and swarthy complexion he was
often mistaken for an Italian. Physically he was Elizabeth's opposite.
She was pale and shy; he was dark and vigorously animated —
"bouncing" was a word often applied to him. Psychologically also he
was her complement, a buoyant spirit who was her constant stimulator
as well as her deliverer.

Their financial position when they first came to Italy was precarious.

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ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING AND ROBERT BROWNING

Browning, who had earned next to nothing from his writings, received
occasional small gifts from his father, but most of the money came from
his wife's funds. Their expenses, increased by the birth of a child,
were greater than their income until 1856 when their devoted friend,
John Kenyon, who had helped them from time to time, died and left
them eleven thousand pounds. The bequest came at the end of a ten-
year struggle with worry and the threat of poverty.

In 1849, when the situation was particularly grim, Browning
became a father. A few days later, he lost his mother. Grief -stricken,
unable to return home, he suffered a breakdown. It was some time
before the extremity of his sorrow lessened, and the depression did
not lift until later in the year when the first collection of his poems was
published in two volumes. This time the eminent firm of Chapman
and Hall assumed the risk and brought out all of Browning's works with
the exception of Pauline, Stratford, and Sordello. The Brownings
celebrated the event and their third wedding anniversary in quiet
gratitude. A few days later Elizabeth wrote to her sister:

Since our marriage we have lost some precious things — he
the earthly presence of an adorable affection; I some faith in
attachments I had counted on for tenderness and duration.
But you may thank God for us that we have lost none of
our love, none of the belief in one another . . . and that
indeed we have consciously gained in both these things.
There is more love between us two at this moment than
there ever has been. He is surer of me. I am surer of him. I
am closer to him, and he to me. Ours is a true marriage, and
not a conventional match. We live heart to heart all day
long, and every day the same. Surely you may say thank
God for us. God be praised.

Browning's gratitude was less outspoken but equally fervent. It
was implicit in the restoration of his boyish ardor and a new, maturer
creativity. During the courtship he had written, "I seem to have
foretold, foreknown you!" Knowing her, he learned more about
human beings than he had ever known. His next book proved it.

Men and Women, published in 1855, is a series of psychological
portraits and revealing monologues, triumphs of observation and re-
flection. The fifty poems comprise the ripest harvest of Browning's
best ten years; Browning believed that this work would at last attract the

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public that had hitherto ignored him. Two years before Men and
Women appeared he had written to his friend Joseph Milsand: "I have
not left the house one evening since our return. I am writing — a first
step towards popularity for me — lyrics with more music and painting
than before, so as to get people to hear and see." Browning's hopes
were not to be fulfilled. There were a few enthusiasts among the
younger writers, but most of the reviews were condescending; one of
them sourly warned the reader that "there is no getting through the
confused crowd of Mr. Browning's Men and Women" The manner
was strange, the tone too abrupt, the demands upon the intellect too
many. The disappointed poet saw the sales of his best work dwindle and
die, while his wife's meretricious (but, to his generous spirit, marvelous)
Aurora Leigh went into one edition after another.

Although he was discouraged, he was not to be deterred from
writing the only way he knew he was meant to write. In a defensive
letter to John Ruskin, who had tried to make Browning write more
"acceptably," Browning concluded:

I look on my own shortcomings too sorrowfully, try to rem-
edy them too earnestly; but I shall never change my point
of sight, or feel other than disconcerted and apprehensive
when the public, critics and all, begin to understand and
approve me.

The cool reception seems incredible to modern readers, for Men and
Women contains some of the most modern as well as some of the most
striking poetical achievements of the nineteenth century. Browning
accomplished broadly dramatic effects as well as delicate nuances of
analysis in poem after poem. The most notable are at the same time the
most quotable: "Love Among the Ruins," the first poem in the series;
the sadly nostalgic "Evelyn Hope"; "A Woman's Last Word," a genuine
tour de force, in which Browning surrenders the role of the superior
male to that of the abnegating wife; "A Toccata of Galuppi's" and
"Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha," two bravura pieces on the varying
evocative powers of music; "My Star," a miniature tribute to Elizabeth;
"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," which communicates
the dazzle and desperation of a terrible nightmare; 'The Statue and the
Bust," a "moral" poem about two lovers who failed to consummate their
love, the moral being that their failure to act was a sin; the completed
"Saul " which was suggested by Christopher Smart's "Song to David"

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ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING AND ROBERT BROWNING

and which, like Smart's poem, is a resounding affirmation of the richness
of life and the glory of God; 'Two in the Campagna," which says that,
in spite of the closest companionship, men live alone; "A Grammarian's
Funeral," which is a summation of the Renaissance thirst for knowledge;
the subtly paired "Fra Lippo Lippi" and "Andrea del Sarto."

The last two poems pointedly illustrate Browning's keen under-
standing of art and the human problems of the artist. The monkish
painter's combination of ribaldry and integrity is contrasted with the
tolerant, idealizing, and compromising attitude of Andrea del Sarto.
Lippo pronounces the artist's credo:

If you get simple beauty and nought else,
You get about the best thing God invents . . .

. . . We're made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see . . .

. . . Art was given for that;
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out.

Against Lippo's confident vitality, Andrea del Sarto's twilight con-
victions seem gray, but he speaks for all those who have tried for per-
fection without ever achieving it:

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?

To his Men and Women Browning added an epilogue. Entided "One
Word More" and dedicated to "E. B. B.," it is another proof of his un-
wavering affection and the pride of his love. It begins:

There they are, my fifty men and women
Naming me the fifty poems finished.
Take them, Love, the book and me together:
Where the heart lies, let the brain lie also.

It was as poet no less than as wife that Elizabeth was adored by her
husband. When she praised his ability to draw fine shades of character
and fully express himself, he told her, "My poetry is far from 'the

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completest expression of my being5 . . . You speak out, you. I only
make men and women speak — give you the truth broken into prismatic
hues, and fear the pure white light." "She was the poet/' he told a
friend, "I the clever person in comparison/'

The adoration never ceased, not even after Mrs. Browning's death,
but the mortal attachment was not to last much longer. There were
trips back to England, sojourns in Paris, a summer on the French coast,
and excursions to the hill towns of Tuscany and the baths at Lucca.
There were many visitors, including Hawthorne, with whom Browning
philosophized, and Landor, whom Elizabeth teased about his politics
and his disbelief in spiritualism. The unforgiving father, Edward
Barrett, died in 1857, and Elizabeth was deeply affected. "I believe
hope had died in me long ago of reconciliation in this world/' she
wrote to an old friend, a Mrs. Martin. "Strange, that what I called
'unkindness' for so many years, in departing should have left to me such
a sudden desolation/'

The sense of desolation passed sufficiently for the Brownings to meet
Browning's father and sister in Paris and proceed to Havre for the sea
bathing, but the feeling of loss continued. Elizabeth's paleness became
more pronounced; the fine delicacy grew into dangerous fragility. "He
is not thin and worn, as I am," she wrote to Sarianna after their return
to Italy. "No indeed — and the women adore him everywhere far too
much for decency. In my own opinion he is infinitely handsomer than
when I saw him first, sixteen years ago."

Back in Florence she suffered a return of the enervation which had
kept her invalided so many years. "I am only good for a drag chain,"
she wrote in misery. And again, "I feel myself . . . like a weight around
his neck." She was, she admitted, "nearly as ill as possible — suffering
so much that the idea of the evil's recurrence makes me nervous." Her
cough was worse and her heart acted erratically. She who had always
loved the excitement of travel now dreaded it. The extremes of cold
and hot in her adored Florence were now more than she could bear.
"We only stand ourselves on one foot in Florence — forced to go away in
the summer; forced to go away in the winter." For some years she
had been greatly concerned with Italy's struggle for liberation from
Austria, and the death of the patriot-statesman Cavour was a fresh
distress. When her younger sister Henrietta died in the autumn of
1860 she was devastated. ftl am weak and languid/' she confessed, "I
struggle hard to live on. I wish to live just as long as and no longer than
to grow in the soul." She had eight months to live.

49*

ELIZABETH BABBETT BBOWNING AND BOBERT BBOWNING

Browning knew the meaning of the increasing bronchial attacks, and
though he tried to keep the dark presentiment from her, she realized
he was "beating his dear head against the wall/' On the afternoon of
June 30, 1 86 1, she had another coughing spell. It seemed no worse
than the others, but by the time the doctor came she was dying.
'Then came," wrote Browning, "what my heart will keep till I see her
again and longer — the most perfect expression of her love to me within
my whole knowledge of her. Always smilingly, happily, and with a
face like a girl's, in a few minutes she died in my arms, her head against
my cheek."

Browning survived his wife by twenty-eight years. He would not
stay in the Casa Guidi where he had been happy with her; he never
returned to the city which had been the center of their common life.
With his twelve-year-old son he returned to London and setded near
his wife's sister Arabel, in a house in Warwick Crescent — "that new
stuccoed third house from the bridge" — which was to be his home for
a quarter of a century. He could not shake off the effects of the
catastrophe. "The general impression of the past," he wrote some years
later, "is as if it had been pain. I would not live it over again, not
one day of it. Yet all that seems my real life — and before and after,
nothing at all. I look back on all my life when I look there."

"I want my new life to resemble the last fifteen years as little as pos-
sible," he said, but he could never get the dead Elizabeth out of his
mind. He worshiped her memory and guarded her privacy as though
it were a sacred trust; when her biography was considered, he called the
proposers "blackguards" who were thrusting their dirty paws into his
bowels. Long after her death and less than a year before his own, Brown-
ing's eye caught a passage in the Life and Letters of Edward FitzGerald.
It was part of a scurrilous letter, intended only for FitzGerald's cor-
respondent, and it was utterly unlike the usual kindliness of the par-
aphraser of the Rubdiydt; but the editor had, unfortunately, decided
to print it:

Mrs. Browning's death is rather a relief to me, I must say.
No more Aurora Leighs, thank God. A woman of real gen-
ius, I know; but what is the upshot of it all! She and her sex
had better mind the kitchen and her children, and perhaps
the poor. Except in such things as litde novels, they only
devote themselves to what men do much better, leaving that
which men do worse or not at all.

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Although Mrs. Browning had been dead twenty-eight years, and
FitzGerald himself was no longer alive, Browning's undying love flamed
into fury. He wrote the following, one of his very last poems:

I chanced upon a new book yesterday;
I opened it; and where my finger lay,
'Twixt page and uncut page, these words I read —
Some six or seven, at most — and learned thereby
That you, FitzGerald, whom by ear and eye
She never knew, thanked God my wife was dead.
Ay, dead, and were yourself alive, good Fitz,
How to return you thanks would task my wits.
Kicking you seems the common lot of curs,
While more appropriate greeting lends you grace;
Surely, to spit there glorifies your face —
Spitting — f rom lips once sanctified by hers.

Browning was miserable when he had to face a future alone, but he
could not allow himself to sink into lisdessness. His natural ebullience
saved him from morbidity. There were many things that had to be
done. There was the matter of his son's education — "Pen" appeared to
be a dull youth interested only in boating and shooting — there were
Mrs. Browning's Last Poems to be edited, and a new collection of
Browning's own poems to be published.

Dramatis Personae, published in 1864, nine years after Men and
Women and a continuation of the character of that volume, consists
largely of poems written while his wife was alive. In spite of the
tide, it is not as dramatic as its predecessor; it is more philosophic, more
argumentative, and much more ironic. It presents a series of contrasts.
Degrees of tension come through in spurts and flashes, taut phrases
and broken sentences. But there is also the quiet resignation of "Rabbi
Ben Ezra'* and the calm, long-rolling cadences of "the C Major of this
life"in"AbtVogIer":

There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before.

The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good, shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more;

On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.

Browning was a comparatively young man when he wrote "Rabbi
Ben Ezra." But it was like him to choose a subject that, instead of the
celebration of "manhood's prime vigor," pictured the glory of old age

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ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING AND ROBERT BROWNING

in which, false to his feelings of the moment but true to his natural
ajEfirmativeness, "the best is yet to be." "Caliban upon Setebos" is an-
other example of the dramatizing poet struggling with his material.
Browning imagines Shakespeare's brutish slave as a puzzled but dog-
gedly realistic philosopher; he makes Caliban's anthropomorphic mus-
ings a satirical commentary on the God-in-man image of warring faiths.
Perhaps the most curious poem in Dramatis Personae is 'TVIr. Sludge,
The Medium/ " founded on the career of the American medium
Daniel Douglass Home, which, because of Mrs. Browning's belief in
spirit manifestations and his own skepticism, he would not let her read.

These poems, together with "A Death in the Desert," "Youth and
Art," and "James Lee's Wife," a lyrical sequence in nine sections, won
a new audience for Browning. Those who admired the smooth dex-
terities of the popular Tennyson would not subject themselves to what
the poet laureate's elder brother, Frederick Tennyson, described as
Browning's "Chinese puzzles, trackless labyrinths, unapproachable
nebulosities/' But a change of taste had come during the i86os. The
Oxford and Cambridge intellectuals discovered Dramatis Personae.
Its concern with all the "noises and hoarse disputes" of the turbulent
present was hailed as a timely reaction to the longing-back of Tenny-
son's prettified Arthurian idyls and Morris' stained-glass medievalism;
its complexities were held to reflect the complications of the Victorian
conflict between complacent religiosity and the ruthless drive of a
materialistic progress. The book soon went into a second edition. "All
my new cultivators are young men," Browning wrote to Isa Blagden, a
Florentine friend of Mrs. Browning's with whom he continued to
correspond, "More than that, I observe that some of my old friends don't
like at all the irruption of outsiders who rescue me from their sober and
private approval, and take those words out of their mouths which they
'always meant to say/ and never did."

The belated but rapidly growing reputation was greatly enhanced
four years later when the first volume of The Ring and the Book
appeared in November, 1868. Three subsequent volumes, comprising
the entire work, were published in the following three months. The
origin of this monumental work, a poem of more than twenty-one
thousand lines of blank verse, has been told often, but never better than
by Browning himself. One afternoon in June, 1860, strolling through
the Piazza San Lorenzo in Florence, Browning wandered through an
open market. His eye caught and his mind preserved a picturesque
summary of nondescript articles, the pure poetic essence of rubbish:

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LIVES OF THE POETS

'Mongst odds and ends of ravage, picture-frames
White through the worn gilt, mirror-sconces chipped,
Bronze angel-heads once knobs attached to chests,
(Handled when ancient dames chose forth brocade)
Modem chalk drawings, studies from the nude,
Samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyry
Polished and rough, sundry amazing busts
In baked earth (broken, Providence be praised!)
A wreck of tapestry, proudly-purposed web
When reds and blues were indeed red and blue,
Now off ered as a mat to save bare feet . . .

. . . The fond tale

OJ the Frail One of the Flower, by young Dumas,
Vulgarised Horace for the use of schools,
The Life, Death, Miracles of Saint Somebody,
Saint Somebody Else, his Miracles, Death and Life —
With this, one glance at the lettered back of which,
And "Stall!" cried I: a lira made it mine.

The book, part print, part manuscript, which Browning bought
for one lira was an old Latin account of a seventeenth-century murder
trial. He read it as he walked along the crowded streets; by the time he
had reached the Casa Guidi he had thought of ways of dramatizing the
theme and extending its dimensions. He began planning the poem as a
whole, but Mrs. Browning's poor health made him defer work on it,
and it was seven years after her death before The Ring and the Book
was completed. Inexhaustible scholarship, stupendous even for Brown-
ing, was transformed into a story of intense power and spiritual signif-
icance. The plot was indicated on the title page and has been translated
as follows: "A Setting-forth of the entire Criminal Cause against Guido
Franceschini, Nobleman of Arezzo, and his Bravos, who were put to
death in Rome, February 2,z, 1698. The first by beheading, the other
four by the gallows. In which it is disputed whether and when a
husband may kill his adulterous wife without incurring the ordinary
penalty/'

Browning divided the disputed evidence and pleadings into twelve
books. The balance is struck between those who justify the murder as
a husband's duty to avenge his honor, and those who, defending the
wife's virtue, find his action base, degenerate, and diabolical. Using
many voices and painting his multiple portrait from many angles,

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ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING AND ROBERT BROWNING

Browning magnified the original trial until it took on the propor-
tions of classic tragedy. Franceschini is the epitome of such hate that he
has often been compared to Shakespeare's lago. Caponsacchi, a light
and somewhat frivolous gallant in the original, becomes a fearless
soldier-saint. The heroine, Pompilia, one of literature's most lustrous
figures, is also a completely convincing human being. The Pope is an in-
tricately composed personality whose theological utterances speak for
Browning himself. The lawyers, more interested in technicalities than
in justice, the aristocrats, gossips, and riffraff of Rome — all, larger than
life, have grown miraculously from the "old square yellow book" which
Browning picked up on a shabby stall in Florence. Every aspect of the
human heart is exposed: honesty and hypocrisy, meanness and nobility,
dubious motives, casuistical reasonings, and emotions at white heat.
Slowly and deviously the truth is revealed as the poem runs the gamut
of sensations from tenderness to terror and, in spite of its intimidating
length, keeps the reader intent on every conflicting viewpoint.

When Browning was fifty-five his father died, and his sister, Sari-
anna, who remained single, came and kept house for him. Although
Browning was still in his late forties at die time of his wife's death
and had thirty more years to live, he never remarried. He met other
women, corresponded intimately with one, and proposed coldly to
another, but he could not love or learn to live with any of them. There
was a long epistolary intimacy with the socially prominent and somewhat
pretentious Julia Wedgwood, but it never developed beyond a guarded
friendship. He was the guest of the handsome Louisa Lady Ashburton,
widow of Baron Ashburton, heir to thirty thousand acres and a quarter
of a million pounds. Not unaware of her immense wealth, and hoping
to bring up his graceless son in luxury, Browning proposed marriage.
However, he scrupulously (or foolishly) told Lady Ashburton that his
"heart was buried in Florence" and that all he could offer her was the
privilege of being the wife of an important poet. When she, not un-
naturally, refused, Browning was depressed, not because she had re-
jected him but because he had betrayed the dead. He bitterly regretted
the temptation that had caused him to be disloyal to the memory of
Elizabeth, and he continued to goad himself about it for years.
There are echoes of the inner conflict in "Fifine at the Fair," a tangle
of unhappy sophistries, and Parleying with Daniel Baroli," in which
"the Present intercepts the Past."

Like Tennyson, Browning continued to produce voluminously during
the last two decades of his life and, in common with those of his famous

497

LIVES OF THE POETS

fellow poet, his later poems are vigorous, usually surprising, and always
readable. It has been said that as Tennyson's verse became smoother
his appearance grew more and more tangled and unkempt, whereas
while Browning's lines grew increasingly rough and knotted, his
appearance became as smooth and sleek as a stockbroker's. In his mid-
fifties Browning had lost all resemblance to the man who, at thirty-five,
was so obviously a poet; with his proper beard and portly bearing, he
looked like a prosperous surgeon or a bank president. To the casual
eye he had become, according to Henry James's description, the "ac-
complished, saturated, sane, sound man of the London world/' and
John Lockhart meant it as a tribute when he said brusquely, "I like
Browning. He isn't at all like a damned literary man."

There was no longer any question of Browning's eminence. A
celebrity invited everywhere, he was presented to the Queen, who, in
the words of the Court Circular, "had the pleasure of becoming
personally acquainted with two of the most distinguished writers of the
age — Mr. Carlyle and Mr. Browning." The Ring and the Book had
reversed all previous underestimates. The professional critics joined the
unprofessional literati in unstinted and unanimous praise. The Atha-
naeum, which had belitded Browning's previous work, spoke for
all with unprecedented enthusiasm: 'We must record at once our
conviction, not merely that The Ring and the Book is beyond all
parallel the supremest poetical achievement of our time, but that it
is the most precious and profound spiritual treasure that England has
produced since the days of Shakespeare."

The first Browning Society was founded in 1881 by Frederick James
Furnivall, the classical scholar and editor of the Oxford English Dic-
tionary. In a few years Browning societies, Browning clubs, and Brown-
ing discussion groups were hallmarks of culture throughout England
and assumed the proportions of a national industry in the United States.
It became the fashion to smile at the primly trimmed lines of the simple
Victorians and to relish Browning's snarls in syntax, track down his
remotest reference, and find his most jarring cacophonies a guide to
modern music.

At seventy Browning was as full of vitality as ever. He had just
published a new series of Dramatic Idyls, which had been preceded by
the sordid Red Cotton Night-Cap Country — Browning had always been
enormously interested in degradation and the problem of evil. Next
came The Inn Album, the extension of another crime story which
Browning considered making into a play, and Pacchiarotto and How He

498

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING AND ROBERT BROWNING

Worked in Distemper, with Other Poems, which, together with auto-
biographical sidelights, contained the popular story-poem "Herv6 Kiel."
There followed the self-descriptive Jocoseria, published in his seventy-
first year; Ferishtah's Fancies, an "olla podrida" suggested by some
Persian fables, which appeared a year later; then, at seventy-three,
Parleyings with, Certain People of Importance in Their Day.

As a septuagenarian Browning was more active than he was at fifty.
He remained a Liberal, but he attended every important social and cul-
tural function — concerts, art exhibitions, regal gatherings — Tennyson's
son said that it would not surprise him if he were to expire "in a white
choker at a dinner party." His own son, who had surprisingly decided
to become a painter, married an American heiress, Fannie Coddington,
moved to Venice and bought the imposing Palazzo Rezzonico.

At seventy-seven Browning determined to give himself the double
pleasure of revisiting Italy and seeing "Pen" in his palace. A sixteen-
volume set of his works had just appeared when, with Sarianna, he set
out for his beloved Asolo, where he stayed a few weeks with friends.
On the first of November he was in Venice, proud that his son had done
so well with the renovations of his palace. "I wish," he wrote to his
publisher, "you were here to see Pen's doing in this huge house. I am
really surprised at his developing so much ability without any sort of
experience."

Happy and thoroughly at home, Browning setded down to grapple
with another body of work. But he had caught a cold and, walking
home along the Lido one rainy afternoon, he developed acute bron-
chitis. A few days later he had a heart attack and knew it was the end.
His last volume, Asolando, was published on the very day of his
death, December 12, 1889. Pen read the cable from his publisher
announcing the event and saying that all the reviews were most
favorable. "How gratifying," smiled Browning, and died.

He was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey on the last
day of the year.

Browning admired the poets on fire with ecstasy, particularly Keats,
Shelley, and Chatterton, but he had little in common with them. Too
earthbound to soar into the "intense inane," he breathed an air that was
robust rather than rarefied. He was too prolific and too much in a
hurry to stop and refine his writings. Instead of rewriting a poem, he
wrote three others. This meant a loss in finish but a gain in spontaneity.

499

LIVES OF THE POETS

Browning seems to be rushing at the bewildered listener and, somewhat
out of breath, telling him everything, absolutely everything, that has
just come into his mind Analytical and argumentative, he goes to
any length to prove a point. His monologues are interrupted by con-
tinual demands upon the reader; his sentences are crowded with
snatches of conversation, abrupt interjections, intimate asides, esoteric
references, and suddenly remembered trivia. In his own way Browning
developed a half -fluent, half-jolting style unlike anything previously
written, unf elicitous, often harsh, but eminently readable.

It is not only Browning's blurting speech but his hurly-burly manner
which grates on many. Gerard Manley Hopkins objected to Browning's
very physicality, to his "way of talking and making his people talk with
the air and spirit of a man bouncing up from the table with his mouth
full of bread and cheese and saying that he meant to stand no
blasted nonsense/' This is the usual portrait of Browning, the too-
hearty, slap-you-on-your-back, down-to-earth hail-fellow, insensitive to
finer sensibilities. But it is a caricature. Browning is only occasionally
the confident cheerleader, the determined optimist who insists that

God's in his heaven;

All's right with the world.

There is little optimism, let alone indiscriminate gladness, in "Caliban
upon Setebos," "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," "Bad
Dreams," "The Confessional," and a score of other bitter poems, to say
nothing of the tragedies and the painfully probing Ring and the
Book. There is no smugness, none of the Victorian "sweetness and
light" in "Porphyria's Lover," "My Last Duchess," "Soliloquy of the
Spanish Cloister," in which a man (a monk, no less) has fallen in hate
as another man might fall in love, the anti-Victorian "Statue and the
Bust," which deplores any passion, even illicit passion, wasted or un-
fulfilled. This is to name only four of the most popular of Browning's
recognitions of the dark truths of nature, and particularly human
nature. He was not blind to wickedness; he was fascinated by it.

Another charge made against Browning is his willful obscurity. To
quote one of the most recent critics, John Wain, "he roughened the
surface of his verse as a means of disguising the essential simplicity
of its content." And there is the apocryphal remark attributed to
Browning himself: "When I wrote that poem God and I knew what it
meant, but now only God knows." Contrary to the implications of such

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ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING AND ROBERT BROWNING

statements, Browning never tried to impress the reader with the com-
plexities of his mind. A naturally curious and erudite man, Browning
wrote as he thought, with all the associations leaping from the memory
of his experiences, his sensory impressions, and the countless books he
had read. It was not vanity but a kind of flattery that took the
intelligence of the reader for granted and assumed (foolishly, perhaps)
a background of similar associations.

There is also the matter of Browning's peculiar technique, his dis-
location of words and distortion of meters. He sacrificed melodiousness
for the sake of impact, taking particular pleasure in bending to his will
stubbornly halting rhythms and recalcitrant rhymes. "A Grammarian's
Funeral" is an instance of Browning's triumph over unpromising and
seemingly resisting material. The poem pictures the burial of a pedantic
academician whose life has been occupied with Greek roots and
problems in syntax, consumed with a passion for knowledge: 'This man
decided not to Live but Know." No small part of the triumph is the
manner in which Browning conveys the idea. A grave theme is treated
in rhymes which are flippant, wayward, and ridiculous: "fabric — dab
brick," "bargain — far gain/' "failure — pale lure," "installment — all
meant," "unit — soon hit," "based Oun — waist down," 'loosened — dew
send/'

Strange though such rhymes may seem to the reader, they are not
uncommon in Browning. It amused him to force irregular unions on
words that had never coupled before and would never be joined
again. In "The Glove" Browning took a theme which Leigh Hunt, who
borrowed it from Schiller, had handled didactically. Browning turned
it into light irony, pointing the playfulness with rhymes as flexible as
"pastime — aghast I'm," "cloudlets — aloud let's/' "pitside — fits eyed,"
"monster — once stir," 'Psalmist — small mist," "sequel — week well,"
"worst turn — first earn," et cetera. Elsewhere one meets other astonish-
ing verbal matings of hitherto irreconcilable pairs in unholy harmony,
such as "jasmine — alas, mine," "doorway — more weigh," "keepsake —
leaps ache," "examine it — Lamb in it!"

Browning's jocosity, too seldom appreciated, is not only in his
rhymes but in the humor and speed of his special kind of light verse.
Poems like "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,"
'The Pied Piper of Hamelin/' "The Eight of the Duchess/' "Sibrandus
Schafnaburgensis," "Holy-Cross Day," are a series of gallops over rough
ground during which only the poet's skill keeps him from being thrown
by his frolicking subjects.

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LIVES OF THE POETS

The high spirits of such poems have been treated as mere jeux
d'esyrits while his philosophical musings have been regarded as some-
thing close to Scripture. Actually Browning's moralizings are more eth-
ical than religious. His was a code of honorable imperfections, apparent
failures, a striving toward a goal rather than its attainment. He did not,
however, think of himself primarily as a teacher; he considered his
work a record of real or imaginary adventures. Every human being, the
hypocritical as well as the holy, fascinated him, and every created
thing stirred him to create. He regarded poetry not as a manual of
instruction, a social service, but as an intensely personal communication
between the writer and his audience.

That communication never faltered. If Browning's poetry is over-
loaded and sometimes more insistent than the reader can bear, it ex-
presses the complete man who was one of the greatest exemplars of
sheer energy in literature. It is not only a physical zest for life but an
exultation of the spirit which is compact in a few lines from "Saul":

Oh, our manhood's prime vigor! No spirit feels waste,

Not a muscle is stopped in its playing, nor sinew unbraced.

Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock —

The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree — the cool-silver shock

Of the plunge in a pool's living water — the hunt of the bear,

And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.

And the meal — the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust divine,

And the locust's flesh stepped in the pitcher! the full draught of wine,

And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell

That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well.

How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ

All the heart and the soul and the senses, for ever in joy!

Browning's restless energy is inherent in the incalculable range of his
interests. He seems to have determined, as G. K, Chesterton observed,
"to leave no spot of the cosmos unadorned by his poetry," and he al-
most succeeded.

502

XXIII

Lights and Shadows

ris DIFFICULT to see the Victorian vista in its true proportions; the
perspective is blurred by altered vision. Under the ironic scrutiny
of such reappraisers as Lytton Strachey, most of its important per-
sonalities dwindled into small and slightly grotesque figures. The once-
fearsome Philistines who conditioned taste as well as the government
seem merely amusing; the dusty aspidistra, scorned symbol of the period,
has been recognized as a darling antique, rescued from cultural suburbia
and placed among our objets d'art.

"Quaint" is the word we apply most often to the Victorians. We are
condescending about slogans like "high seriousness" and "sweetness and
light" which managed to join moral earnestness and industrial reckless-
ness. We talk with superior wisdom of the sternly disciplined Victorian
family, and smile indulgently when we read that a poet was praised
because he held "the proud honor of never uttering a single line which
an English mother could wish unwritten or an English girl would wish
unread." The year was 1870 and the poet was Tennyson.

But the Victorian world was not united in sanctimoniousness and
love of money, in an impartial worship of power, respectability, and
what Bernard Shaw called the Seven Deadly Virtues. There were
those who, middle class themselves, fought middle-class mores, who
believed with Herbert Spencer that progress was "not an accident but

5°3

LIVES OF THE POETS

a necessity/' There were those who recognized the dangers of un-
checked materialism, and instigated labor legislation, trade unions, and
co-operative movements. Some of them even dared to prophesy univer-
sal brotherhood in a commonwealth of nations.

ALFRED, LORD

The dualism of the Victorian world found an interpretive voice in
the divided poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. He was born August 6,
1809, in the rectory of Somersby, Lincolnshire, fourth of the twelve
children of a country rector. In his seventh year he was sent to a school
at Louth, where the headmaster tried to hasten his pupils' responses
by hitting their heads with a book. He left school before he was twelve,
and until he was nineteen remained under his father's tutelage. His
father, a stubborn teacher, was a worshiper of the classics: Tennyson
told the critic Edmund Gosse that he was not allowed to go to the
university until he was able to recite consecutively all the odes of
Horace by heart Disinherited in favor of a younger brother, his
father suffered from a sense of injustice, and most of his children
were affected by his moody temperament. Two of his sons had nervous
breakdowns; one became addicted to narcotics; and one, who liked to lie
on the floor, would solemnly rise to greet visitors with: "How do you do.
I am Septimus, the most morbid of the Tennysons." One of Alfred's
early poems, "The Two Voices," is a debate on suicide between himself
and his "inner voice."

Poetry came to him before he could read. He composed blank verse
at the age of eight, wrote an "epic" of six thousand lines and, at twelve,
made an analysis of Milton's Samson Agonistes. By the time he was
fourteen he had written two plays and had finished a poem, Armaged-
don, which, a few years later, was rewritten as Timhuctoo and won a
prize.

At fifteen Tennyson was so much moved by the news of Byron's
death that he went into the woods and roughly incised a rock with
the words, "Byron is dead/' At eighteen he made his first appearance in
print. He and his brother Charles, his senior by a year, published
Poems Toy Two Brothers — another brother, Frederick, two years Al-
fred's senior, contributed four poems. Sixty years later, when the

504

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

then-famous poet reprinted the volume in his Collected Work, he
could not tell which poems had been written by whom.

Tennyson was nineteen when, with Charles, he matriculated at
Trinity College, Cambridge. He was not happy there. He admitted
homesickness: "I feel isolated here . . . the country is so disgustingly
level, the revelry of the place so monotonous, the studies so un-
interesting. . . . None but dry-headed, calculating, angular little
gentlemen can take delight in them." Luckily, Tennyson soon met
fellow students who were not angular or calculating. With them he
formed "The Apostles," a club which included Monckton Milnes,
who was to be Keats's first biographer, Edward FitzGerald, who was to
translate the Rubdiydt, and Arthur Henry Hallam, who became Tenny-
son's dearest friend. Like Shelley, Tennyson was interested in science,
but not sufficiently to be an outstanding student. He stayed at Cam-
bridge less than three years and left without taking a degree.

At twenty-one, while still an undergraduate, Tennyson published
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. Its extravagances were obvious and its sweetness
was excessive, but it contained "Mariana" and a few other poems whose
melodies persist. Immediately after leaving Cambridge, Tennyson and
Hallam joined the Spanish insurgents in the Pyrenees, but there is
no record of their ever having taken part in a military engagement.

Three years later Tennyson brought out another volume of poems
and received his first public affront. The same critic who had attacked
Keats in The Quarterly Review derided Tennyson for many of the
faults attributed to Keats: his voluptuousness, his ornate images, and
errors in good taste. He belittled Tennyson's youthful fecundity and
scorned the "self-assured prodigy" as "another star in that galaxy of
poetry of which the lamented Keats was the harbinger." Tennyson
felt his reputation had not been merely injured but blasted. Croker's
scornful review was effective — Tennyson did not publish another
volume for nine years — but it is hard to account for it. Only the most
virulent animus could have blinded the reviewer to 'The Lady of
Shalott," "Oenone," "The Palace of Art," 'The Lotos-Eaters," and "A
Dream of Fair Women," poems unimpeachable in taste, embodying
all the traditional poetic principles. It was a musically pure if purpose-
less poetry.

It was to undergo a sudden change. In September, 1833, Hallam,
who had gone to Vienna with his father, the historian Henry Hallam,
was found dead in his hotel room; there had been no sign of illness,
and death was probably caused by a blood clot. Tennyson, who regarded

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LIVES OF THE POETS

the twenty-three-year-old as his other self, was temporarily incapaci-
tated. He withdrew not only from ordinary activities but from the
world; he was indifferent to everything except his grief. In Memoriam:
A. H. H. is a record of his anguish as well as a conflicting succession
of doubts and affirmations. Tennyson had to resolve within himself the
concept of a God who was good and yet could allow one of the best
and most useful of his creations to be senselessly struck down. Unlike
Milton's apostrophe to Edward King in Lycidas and Shelley's eulogy
of Keats in Adonais, Tennyson's In Memoriam is not put in the form
of the traditional elegy but is written as a more direct and personal ex-
pression. "It must be remembered that this is a poem, not an actual
biography," wrote Tennyson. "The different moods of sorrow as in a
drama are dramatically given, and my conviction that fear, doubt,
and suffering will find answer and relief only through faith in a God
of Love/'

It was not an easy conclusion, and it took Tennyson seventeen years
to arrive at it. The poem shows that it was written in snatches rather
than as a rounded entity. Jotted down as separate stanzas, some touching
and some flatly banal, pieced and put together, In Memoriam was, as
Tennyson said, a series of "short swallow-flights of song." The phrase is
fairly exact, for the long elegiac poem is actually a chain of lyrical
quatrains which sometimes turn into epigrams. For example:

Strong Son of God, immortal Love,

Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,

Believing where we cannot prove . . .

Our little systems have their day;

They have their day and cease to be;

They are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art more than they . . .

Oh yet we trust that somehow good

Will be the final goal of ill,

To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroyed,

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ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete . . *

So runs my dream: but what am I?

An infant crying in the night:

An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry . . .

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

The flying cloud, the frosty light:

The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

It is possible to see in In Memoriam an arrangement of seasons —
Christmas, New Year's, spring — and sequences: a grief-stricken prologue,
a cycle which recalls the past, a second cycle that summons the present,
and a third which suggests the consoling future of a crowning race

Of those that, eye to eye, shall look
On knowledge; under whose command
Is Earth and Earth's, and in their hand

Is Nature like an open book;

No longer half -akin to brute,

For all we thought and loved and did,
And hoped and suffered, is but seed

Of what in them is flower and fruit;

Whereof the man, that with me trod

This planet, was a noble type

Appearing ere the times were ripe,
That friend of mine who lives in God,

That God, which ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,

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And one far-off divine event,
To which the whole creation moves,

In Memoriam is no longer read because of its philosophy, its at-
tempt to present the vexed problems of religion, and its dubious
meditations on life and death, but for its unclouded moments of po-
etry. The reader, struggling through redundant effusions and hollow
profundities, is happy to come on stanzas as concise and graphic as:

Calm is the morn without a sound,

Calm as to suit a calmer grief,

And only through the faded leaf
The chestnut pattering to the ground . . .

Tennyson's father had died when the poet was twenty-two and his
grandfather died four years later. There was a small inheritance, which
tie heirs invested in a machine designed to produce carved wood
cheaply, but which failed disastrously. Charles Tennyson had married
Louisa Sellwood, and Alfred became engaged to one of the brides-
maids, her sister Emily, when he was twenty-seven. There were many
obstacles to their union. A few years after his marriage, Charles had
become addicted to opium and had left his wife, and the Sell woods
were wary of any further connection with the Tennysons. Financially
the outlook was equally grim. There was practically no income to pro-
vide for a wife, especially since there were sisters and a mother to be
supported. The engagement was broken off; meetings and even cor-
respondence was forbidden; the Sellwoods hoped that Emily would
find a more suitable mate. True to their upbringing, the lovers capitu-
lated— there was nothing of the rebellious Shelley in Tennyson — but
though they were separated they remained faithful, and it was not
until the poet became a success and, therefore, a responsible person,
that he was allowed to assume the duties and privileges of a husband.
He was forty-one when, after waiting fourteen years, he married Emily
in 1850-. "The peace of God came into my life when I wedded her," he
said. It was an almost literal truth, for there were to be thirty years of
calm and contented married life.

The year of his marriage was an altogether great year for Tennyson.
Besides the happy consummation of love, the reward of patient forti-
tude, he rejoiced in the enthusiasm which attended the publication of
In Memoriam. A greater tribute came that same year when, upon the

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ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

death of Wordsworth, he was appointed poet laureate. His first child
had been born dead, but a year later he became the father of a son who,
in memory of his still-mourned friend, was christened Hallam.

Tennyson was not yet the people's poet that he became, but he was
famous among the literati. An imposing two-volume collection of his
poems had appeared in 1842, and even the most captious critics
acknowledged its importance. Five years later Tennyson published The
Princess, a curious tour de force which attempted to blend pure music
and the controversial "woman question." Tennyson's thesis that the
liberation of women could not be accomplished through higher
education because of their biological limitations was approved by the
proper Victorians though not by the more progressive. W. S. Gilbert
burlesqued the poem and improved it in his "respectful perversion," the
comic opera, Princess Ida- or Castle Adamant. Today no one reads
the priggish Princess for anything except its interludes, which are
among the choicest of English lyrics: "Sweet and Low," "The splendor
falls on castle walls," "Home they brought her warrior dead," "Ask me
no more: the moon may draw the sea," "As through the land at eve we
went." Three other lyrics from The Princess are remarkable in the way
they sustain their melodiousness without the music of rhyme: "Tears,
idle tears, I know not what they mean," "Come down, O maid, from
yonder mountain height," which ends with a perfect example of allitera-
tion and onomatopoeia:

The moan of doves in immemorial elms
And murmuring of innumerable bees,

and what is perhaps the most picturesque love lyric Tennyson ever
wrote:

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font.
The firefly wakens. Waken thou with me.

Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now lies the Earth all Danae to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.

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LIVES Ut 'JLJfcLfa

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me*

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
And slips into the bosom of the lake:
So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
Into my bosom and be lost in me.

Three years after their marriage the Tennysons moved to the Isle of
Wight There, in the attic of an old house, the poet worked and had
his "two sacred pipes/' one after breakfast and one after dinner, which
marked his privacy and stimulated creation. His moodiness was less
apparent; proud of his strength, he grew more stalwart. On one
occasion he lifted a pony over a fence, leading an onlooker to remark
that it was unfair for anyone to be Hercules as well as Apollo. Tennyson
had always been Apollonian in appearance. Dark, eagle-eyed, and
extraordinarily handsome in youth, he became more striking with
age. Thomas Carlyle's often quoted description is graphically detailed:

One of the finest-looking men in the world. A great shock of
rough, dusty-dark hair; bright-laughing hazel eyes; massive
aquiline face; most massive yet most delicate; sallow-brown
complexion, almost Indian-looking; clothes cynically loose,
free-and-easy — smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musically
metallic — fit for loud laughter and piercing wail, and all that
may lie between; speech and speculation free and plenteous.
... A man solitary and sad, as certain men are ... carry-
ing a bit of Chaos about him which he is manufacturing
into Cosmos.

Maud, which appeared in 1855, troubled the critics. Tennyson
subtitled it A Monodrama; it was his favorite work and he considered it
"a little Hamlet/' The story it unfolds is as morbid as anything a
Tennyson could imagine — Carlyle said that the author dwelt "in an
element of gloom" — for it concerns an hysterical hero whose father has
committed suicide, who falls in love with a girl above his station, kills
her brother, and, in a burst of jingoism, goes off to the Crimean War.
Although it was condemned for its "rampant and rabid bloodthirstiness,"
and a malicious wag suggested that, as a poem, Maud might best be
characterized by omitting either vowel, it sold well. Its very sensation-

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ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

alism, however, made most readers overlook the lyrical interpolations:
"A voice by the cedar tree," "All night have the roses heard/' "Birds in
the high hall-garden," "Go not, happy day," "O that 'twere possible,"
and the much-parodied "Come into the garden, Maud."

In what has been considered his third or mid-Victorian period (1857-
1880) Tennyson produced the curiously bourgeois Idylls of the King,
in which the sixth-century men and women become tea-table Victorian
ladies and gentlemen approved by a virtuous and domestic Queen;
Enoch Arden, originally called Idylls of the Hearth; more tame
Arthurian adaptations whose purity was fashioned to fit the mores of
the day; and a series of wearisome plays. It was the very conventionality
which, in its comforting concessions, increased Tennyson's popularity.
His position as England's favorite poet was now unchallenged. He was
often invited to read before Queen Victoria, and it was said that Her
Majesty turned to Tennyson for her poetry as instinctively as she
turned to Disraeli for her politics. This was natural enough, for Tenny-
son, as G. K. Chesterton tartly observed, "held a great many of the
same views as Queen Victoria, though he was gifted with a more
fortunate literary style."

Tennyson's last phase was, in some ways, his greatest. His most
memorable lyrics were composed before he was forty, but he was
seventy-one when he published Ballads and Other Poems, which in-
cluded the stirring narrative of Sir Richard Grenville at Flores, "The
Revenge," the heartbreaking outcry of "Rizpah," the broad good-
natured humor of "The Northern Cobbler," the high-pitched patri-
otism of "The Defence of Lucknow." In his seventy-sixth year he
brought out Tiresias and Other Ballads, in which the Idylls were con-
cluded; Locksley Hall Sixty Years Later appeared when he was
seventy-seven; and he was past eighty when Demeter and Other Poems
convinced everyone of his continuing vitality. There were others, such
as the posthumous Death of Oenone, still to come.

Honors attended his old age. He had received honorary degrees
from Oxford and had refused die rectorship of Glasgow University. In
his seventies he had become closely associated with Gladstone, then
Prime Minister, and the two had made a voyage together to Norway
and Denmark. Gladstone offered Tennyson a peerage, which, after
some hesitation, the poet accepted. He was eighty when he had his
first attack of rheumatic gout. He rallied, and seemed to be fully re-
covered. But during the next three years he weakened considerably,
and in 1890 was invalided as a result of influenza. He never stopped

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LIVES OF THE POETS

working; he read proof on his last book on his very last day. He was a
little more than eighty-four when, his finger pointing to a passage in
Cymbeline, he died during the night of October 6, 1892. Shakespeare's
play was put in his coffin when he was buried next to Browning in
Westminster Abbey.

Tennyson was not only by far the most popular poet of his period,
but the most widely read of all English poets. His subject matter was
simple, timely, and germane to everyone. He was no pioneer; he did
not stake out an inch of untouched territory. He chose old and well-
plowed fields which he cultivated with such care and industry that they
yielded a succession of rich harvests. Nor was he an innovator in
techniques. His lines were not driven by any demon with a passion
for experiment but controlled by a conscientious craftsman who knew
what he wanted and usually knew how to accomplish it

Besides being popular, Tennyson was one of the best and also one
of the worst of poets — often in the same poem. His worst consisted of a
particular kind of badness, an excess of sentiment which soon de-
generated into sentimentality, like the simpering prettmess of 'The
Miller's Daughter," "Fatima," "The Lover s Tale," and most of the
Arthurian cycle. This resulted in moments of mawkishness hard to
match in the most inept versifiers. "Sea Dreams/' for example, begins
with the bland line, "A city clerk but gently born and bred," and
includes the unbelievably saccharine:

What does little birdie say
In her nest at peep of day?
Let me fly, says little birdie,
Mother, let me fly away.

There are also moments when Tennyson's good taste deserted him
and he lapsed into puerile absurdities. It is embarrassing to read the
dutiful "Ode on the Opening of the International Exhibition/' "The
Lord of Burleigh," with its aristocratic condescension toward the vil-
lage maiden, and the doggerel journalism of "Riflemen Form."

Perhaps Tennyson's greatest fault is not his lack of intellectual pene-
tration but his timidity. He recognized progress, but he was confused
by it. "Lady Clara Vere de Vere," for instance, is a poem of protest
which, in a famous phrase, maintains that "Kind hearts are more than
coronets/ And simple faith than Norman blood/' It concludes with a
characteristic stanza:

512

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Lady Clara Vere de Vere,

If time be heavy on your hands,
Are there no beggars at your gate,

Nor any poor about your lands?
Oh! teach the orphan-boy to read,

Or teach the orphan-girl to sew,
Pray Heaven for a human heart,

And let the foolish yeoman go.

It is significant that, meditating on the need for reform, Tennyson
adopted an easy compromise. The activities of the middle-class gentle-
woman were limited to her domestic duties and parochial Good Deeds;
therefore Tennyson made it clear that one should help an orphan boy
to enter the world of thought but that an orphan girl should stick to
her housework.

Many critics have pictured Tennyson as a cross between the tradi-
tional minstrel and the conventional maiden aunt. There is a large-
scale primness in his transformation of Malory's Morte d'Arthur, a
savage pageant of the Middle Ages, into the Sunday-school picnic of
the Idylls of the King. But the shallow prettiness which is distressing to
modern taste is often countered by rude accents, as in the rustic
cynicism of "Northern Farmer, New Style/'

Doesn't thou 'ear my 'erse's legs, as they canters awaay?
Proputty, proputty, proputty — that's what I 'ears 'em saay.
Proputty, proputty, proputty — Sam, thou's an ass for thy pains;
Theer's moor sense i' one o' 'is legs, nor in all thy brains.

The romantic softening of the past is sometimes challenged by the
recognition of a harsh present and the foreseeing of a finally resolved
future. This, from "Locksley Hall," is Tennyson at his most quotably
prophetic:

Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new:
That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonders that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

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LIVES OF THE POETS

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunderstorm;

Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle flags were f url'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

More stoical if not as prophetic as "Locksley Hall/' "Ulysses" is
Tennyson's highest single achievement. In a dramatic monologue, a
form often considered Browning's own, Tennyson added a new concept
to the old myth. Endowing the aging hero with a determined and
unshakable desire for new experiences, Tennyson identified himself
with the onward-venturing wanderer* The poem was written shortly
after the death of Hallam, and Tennyson said it gave him "the feeling
about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life
perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam." This is its
indomitable conclusion:

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

It is admitted that Tennyson lacked the force of a driving emotion,
that all too often he sacrificed strength for sweetness, and that his
celebrated purity is little more than a reflection of the period's con-
ventionality. Earthy vigor, a coarseness that friends observed in his later
years, was repressed in favor of a refined style. Yet if the style was not

EMILY BRONTE

the complete man, it was the expression of the artist who was a per-
fectionist in verbal felicities. Few poets have had a finer ear for the
delicate nuances of sound, and still fewer have surpassed Tennyson's
undulating ease, his limpid lyricism, and sometimes matchless music.

EMILY BRONTE'

Contemporaneous with Tennyson, the Brontes lived in an entirely
different world from that of the poet laureate. The father of the
family was an Irishman, Patrick Brunty, who, when he came to Eng-
land, changed his name to the more exotic Bronte, took his degree at St.
John's, Cambridge, and obtained a curacy in Essex. He would have
liked to have been a writer — he published two collections of tales and
two of poems — but he had to forgo the exciting hazards of authorship
for the security of the pulpit. He married a Penzance merchant's
daughter who died of cancer after nine years of marriage, leaving six
children. Two of them died before they were twelve; the remaining
four were extraordinarily gifted. The one son, Branwell, was pampered
and brought up to be a genius, but his precocity did not last beyond
youth. He attempted to be a painter but could not discipline himself
to learn the rudiments of art; he failed as a tutor; engaged by a railway
company, he was dismissed for negligence; he was discharged by another
employer for making advances to his wife. Branwell's irresponsibility
and addiction to drink continued to worry his sisters until he was
thirty-one, when he died in a fit of delirium tremens.

The three surviving sisters put to good use the talents Branwell had
thrown away. Anne (1820-1849), the youngest, died at twenty-nine,
having written two novels, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell
Hall, both of which were overshadowed by the work of her sisters.
Charlotte (1816-1855) was the oldest and lived the longest. Author of
Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, and The Professor, she was the only one
to be married, but her wedded life lasted less than twelve months and
she died as a consequence of childbirth in her fortieth year. Emily
Bronte (1818-1848) surpassed her sisters, as she surpassed all other
women in literature, in passionate intensity and bleak stoicism, and
lived a short, practically uneventful life.

Most of the early education was acquired at home. The sisters at-

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LIVES OF THE POETS

tended a Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan's Bridge; in her descrip-
tion of Lowood in Jane Eyre Charlotte has kept an unforgettable pic-
ture of the bad food, brutal discipline, and wretched homesickness.
More than the others, Emily withstood the rigors. She did not turn
away from harshness; she cared nothing for diversions and rarely ven-
tured into the world beyond the dark home at Haworth. She taught
briefly at a seminary for girls and, with Charlotte, went to a girls'
school in Brussels; but she longed to be back on the raw, grim
moors

Where the grey fox in ferny glens are feeding,
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

"Resident in a remote district," wrote Charlotte Bronte, "where
education had made little progress and where, consequently, there was
no inducement to seek social intercourse beyond our own domestic cir-
cle, we were wholly dependent on ourselves and each other, on books
and study, for the enjoyments and occupations of life. The highest
stimulus, as well as the liveliest pleasures we had known from child-
hood upwards, lay in attempts at literary composition." The three sis-
ters showed one another what they wrote, and also collaborated on a
curiously interrelated series of poems and stories.

Until 1941 it was impossible to determine how much of Emily
Bronte's poetry was concealed autobiography and how much was con-
cealed fantasy. The mystery was cleared up in Fanny Elizabeth Ratch-
ford's The Brontes' Web of Childhood, which revealed that as children
the Brontes escaped from the unhappy Haworth parsonage into a
world of shining make-believe. They did not merely dream of an imag-
inary country; they created one. They called it Gondal, made maps of
this fancied island in the Pacific, composed countless poems and legends
of its past, and designed a complete if miniature epic. The poems,
continued into maturity, were not written, according to Miss Ratch-
ford, "as progressive plot incidents, but were merely the poetic ex-
pression of scenes, dramas, and emotions long familiar to her
[Emily's] inner vision, carried over, no doubt, from her prose crea-
tions."

Fiction, allegory, and biography were blended in the poems, most
strikingly in 'The Old Stoic," "The Prisoner," "Plead for Me," and
'TLast Lines" beginning "No coward soul is mine." Many students have
sought to find a secret lover in the intense and apparently personal

EMILY BRONTE

"Remembrance." But the poem is uttered by the grieving Rosina
upon the death of Julius Brenzaida, both of diem leading characters
in the Gondal saga.

Cold in the earth, and the deep snow piled above thee!
Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!
Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,
Severed at last by Time's all-wearing wave?

Only one volume of poems by the sisters appeared during their
lifetime, and that one was intentionally disguised. They hid their
identities in their initials when choosing pseudonyms. "Averse to
personal publicity," explained Charlotte, "we veiled our names under
those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell — the ambiguous choice being
dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names
positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women
because we had a vague impression that authoresses were liable to be
looked on with prejudice." Since no publisher would assume the com-
mercial risk, the volume was brought out at their own expense. Exactly
two copies were sold; most of the edition was used to line trunks.

Consumption had always threatened the Brontes — Emily struggled
desperately against it, and Anne perished of the disease. Standing at
her brother's grave in a sharp wind, Emily took cold, and sank rapidly.
"Stronger than a man," Charlotte wrote, "simpler than a child, her
nature stood alone. I have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have
never seen her parallel in anything." Emily knew she was dying, but
she insisted on getting out of bed and dressing herself before she per-
mitted a doctor to attend her. Stoical to the end, she died at thirty,
December 19, 1848.

Something resembling Emily is glimpsed in the heroine of Shirley:
"Pride, temper, derision, blent in her large fine eye that had the look
of a merlin's . . . sister of the spotted, bright, quick, fiery leopard."
Her independent spirit is in her poetry, which, beneath the unreal
elements, burns with the same passion as her prose. It was a passion
which, in her one novel as in the writings of Charlotte, startled Vic-
torian readers unused to the declaration of violent emotions by a
woman. The wildness, the love of boldness and liberty, ennobles the
poetry with the same fervor that makes Wuthering Heights one of
the greatest novels ever written. With no experience but with spacious
comprehension, with concentrated emotion and unique imagination,

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LIVES OF THE POETS

Emily Bronte created a fantastic world and made it more real than
reality. 'The Old Stoic/' written at twenty-two, epitomizes her in-
domi table quality:

Riches I hold in light esteem,
And love I laugh to scorn;
And lust of fame was but a dream
That vanished with the morn :

And if I pray, the only prayer
That moves my lips for me
Is, "Leave the heart that now I bear,
And give me liberty!''

Yes, as my swift days near their goal,
Tis all that I implore —
Through life and death a chainless soul,
With courage to endure.

ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH

Arthur Hugh Clough lived in a changing world and was unhappy
about it. He regarded the past without illusions and the future without
faith; his career was disturbed from the beginning. He was born January
i, 1819, in Liverpool, but in his fourth year his father, a cotton mer-
chant, took the family to South Carolina. Six years later the boy was
brought back to England, where he entered Rugby and became a
favorite of the noted headmaster, Dr. Thomas Arnold. At eighteen
Clough attended Balliol College, Oxford, and remained at Oxford, tu-
toring at Oriel, until his late twenties, when he determined to see the
world. He was in Paris during the French Revolution and in Rome
when it was besieged. Emerson, with whom he had corresponded,
told him that he could live well in the United States on four to six
dollars a week, so he went to America again.

Although he supported himself by lecturing and translating, the
American venture was not a success. Clough returned to England,
married, and was appointed secretary to a Commission of Report on

ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH

Foreign Military Education. Once more he went abroad; but his health,
never robust, failed, and he succumbed to malarial fever. He died in
Florence, Italy, November 13, 1861.

Clough's life was a continual promise rather than a performance. He
was a passionate searcher for truth; intellectual unrest disturbed his
work. The anthologist Francis Turner Palgrave said that Clough "lived
rather than wrote his poems." Some of his least pretentious poems are
among his best. One never tires of reading the light verse with the
quizzical refrain "How pleasant it is to have money, heigh-ho!" and
the cynical appraisal of his age in 'The Latest Decalogue," which be-
gins:

Thou shalt have one God only; who
Would be at the expense of two?
No graven images may be
Worshipped, except the currency . . .

A recently discovered poem, Amours de Voyage, is both satirical and
serious. A soliloquy of a hesitant young Englishman who cannot make
up his mind about love, travel, revolution, or religion, it is a distinctly
modern piece of mocking self-introspection which has been com-
pared to Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" and Eliot's 'The Love
Song of J. Alfred PrufrocL"

I do not like being moved; for the will is excited; and action
Is a most dangerous thing; I tremble for something factitious,
Some malpractice of heart and illegitimate process;
We are so prone to these things, with our terrible notions of duty.

Of his wholly serious work one poem contains all Clough's spiritual
hopes. Its long echoes continued to be heard not only in plays, poems,
and sermons, but as a dependable peroration for political speeches.

Say not the struggle naught availeth,

The labor and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor f aileth,

And as things have been they remain:

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed,

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LIVES OF THE POETS

Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,

Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,

When daylight comes, comes in the light;

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly.
But westward, look, the land is bright!

MATTHEW ARNOLD

Like Clough, Matthew Arnold was a Victorian who, torn between
belief and doubt, preached wistfully to a skeptical world. His poems
were little gospels, and his canons of poetry were key words of English
criticism. His father, Thomas Arnold, was the headmaster of Rugby,
and Matthew was born at Laleham, in Middlesex, on Christmas Eve,
1822. He entered Rugby when he was fifteen; three years later he
won the Rugby Prize Poem contest with his first publication,
Alaric at Rome. He continued to win honors; granted a scholarship at
Balliol College, Oxford, where he became an intimate friend of Arthur
Hugh Clough, he was awarded the Newdigate Prize for his poem
Cromwell.

Taking his degree at twenty-two, he taught briefly at Rugby, was
elected to a Fellowship at Oriel College and, in his twenty-fifth year,
became secretary to the politician Lord Lansdowne. Marriage at the
age of twenty-nine made him seek a position with an increased income
and, through Lansdowne's influence, he was appointed inspector of
schools. It was a comfortable assignment, with many opportunities for
foreign travel, and, although Axnold complained that it took him
away from home too often, he held the position almost to the end of
his life.

The Strayed Reveler and Other Poems was published in Arnold's
twenty-seventh year and Empedodes on Etna two years later, but

520

MATTHEW ARNOLD

Arnold was not satisfied with his early poems — they were issued anony-
mously "by A" — and he withdrew them from circulation. Although
the volumes contained some of the poems by which he is best known,
his work received little notice until 1853, when his Poems was pub-
lished under his own name. At thirty-three he reprinted many of the
earlier verses in Poems: Second Series and received the Professorship
of Poetry at Oxford. Although he continued to write poems — Mempe,
a tragedy in the classic style and Thyrsis, a pastoral elegy in com-
memoration of Clough, are the most notable — after his forties he was
mainly occupied with criticism. Late in life he went to America and
lectured there. At sixty-five he seemed in excellent health when, with-
out any indication of a weak heart, he died in Liverpool of heart fail-
ure, April 15, 1888.

Apart from his poetry Arnold is remembered because of his criteria
of culture and religion. He attacked the "Philistines" (a word he took
from Heine) and their middle-class complacency; he maintained that
the man who worked for "sweetness and light" (a phrase he borrowed
from Swift) "works to make reason and the will of God prevail/* He
held that poetry had an ethical purpose, that it should be "a criticism
of life/* and he believed that his own verse exemplified it. He said it
explicitly:

It is important to hold fast to this: that poetry is at bottom
a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his
powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life, to the
question: How to live? ... A poetry of revolt against
moral ideas is a poetry of revolt against life; a poetry of indif-
ference towards moral ideas is a poetry of indifference to-
wards life.

"I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson/' he wrote to his
mother, "and less intellectual vigor and abundance than Browning. Yet
because I have more of a fusion than either of them, and have more
regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development,
I am likely to have my turn/'

Arnold had his turn, but his critical philosophy has been found
academic and doctrinaire, and his much-anthologized poetry is respected
rather than loved. There are memorable descriptions of the countryside
around Oxford in Thyrsis and The Scholar Gipsy- there is lively whim-
sicality in "The Forsaken Merman" and dramatic surprise in the nar-

521

LIVES OF THE POETS

rative, Sohrab and Rustum. But the more familiar of Arnold's poems — •
"Quiet Work," 'The Buried Life," "In Harmony with Nature/' 'The
Last Word," "Self-Dependence," "Growing Old" and "Dover Beach"—
are still quoted, as he hoped they would he, for their "high serious-
ness" and, in spite of their melancholy tone, their "message." Arnold's
unhappy acceptance of a disillusioned and worldly age is heard through
"the eternal note of sadness" in the last two stanzas of "Dover Beach":

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night

It is a misfortune that what was once considered Arnold's greatest
virtue is now regarded as his chief defect.

THE PRE-RAPHAELITES

Nothing could better illustrate the ambivalence of the Victorians
than their equal acceptance of Matthew Arnold's pessimistic resigna-
tion, the attitude popularized by FitzGerald's adaptation of Omar Khay-
yam, and their affection for the rhymed commonplace sermons of Mar-
tin Farquhar Tupper, whose cloying Proverbial Philosophy was relished
by hundreds of thousands. They still listened to the poets who had

522

COVENTRY PATMORE

urged devotion to liberty and truth, but they were more responsive to
those who, disliking a disturbing truth, promised them comfort.

In the middle of the nineteenth century there emerged a group
which was definitely anti-Victorian, which challenged the standards
of a period that claimed to be free but kept its workers enslaved and
equated Christianity with prosperity. The group called itself the Pre-
Raphaelites and, in 1850, issued a magazine, The Germ. It began as
a painters' movement, and its credo was a protest against the ugliness
of commercial art, the stultifying effect of mechanization, and the empti-
ness of contemporary life, "It is for us to bring dignity and sincerity
back to art. . . . We must be sincere in our invention, truthful in our
representation." Insisting that sincerity and truth had disappeared after
Raphael and the Renaissance, they declared, "We must be Early Chris-
tian— Pre-Raphaelite." The movement spread and included writers as
well as painters. It was a mixed association. William Holman Hunt,
Edward Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown, and John Everett Millais
were painters; Dante Gabriel Rossetti was both a painter and a poet;
William Morris sought to make over an entire culture: he designed
chintzes and stained-glass windows, created furniture and wrought
iron, printed books, manufactured furniture, tapestries and tools, be-
sides rebuking the smallness of his times with an epic, The Earthly
Paradise, and the socialistic Utopianism of News From Nowhere.

COVENTRY PATMORE

Coventry Patmore was one of the original contributors to The Germ.
He was born July 23, 1823, in Epping Forest, eldest son of an aspiring
but unsuccessful author. His father, who was his closest companion,
was also his tutor. It was hoped that he would become a painter but,
his gift being negligible, Patmore turned to literature. Thackeray hailed
him as a coming genius, but Poems, which was published in his twenty-
first year, was a thin and mawkish collection. However, Patmore's next
four books, which were published as a single volume, The Angel in
the House, greatly impressed his contemporaries. Patmore had become
an assistant librarian in the British Museum and had married at
twenty-four; the long, four-part Angel in the House was an enthralled
celebration of conjugality.

LIVES OF THE POETS

Patmore's wife died when he was forty and, turning away from the
unorthodox Pre-Raphaelites, Patmore became a Roman Catholic, mar-
ried an heiress, and retired to an estate in the country. At fifty-four
he published The Unknown Eros, which, differing from the early
apotheosis of comfortable domesticity, is devoted to bereaved and
spiritualized love. After the death of his second wife in 1 880, Patmore
married for the third time and lived at Lymington until his death on
November 2,6, 1896.

There have been occasional revivals of interest in the untroubled
connubiality of The Angel in the House, with its wifely "rapture of
submission." Most readers, however, enjoy it as a quaint period piece
which unites uxoriousness and religiosity, and contains a few pretty
lyrical passages. Because its language is oversweet and its meter ex-
cessively monotonous it has lost favor; it is generally and unfavorably
compared to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cycle of wedded love, Son-
nets from the Portuguese, and George Meredith's sixteen-line quasi
sonnets, Modem Love, the story of a marriage that had gone wrong,
Patmore is remembered mainly if not solely by one of the shortest of
his poems, 'Truth/' which, more than his other work, approaches
profundity.

Here, in this litde bay,

Full of tumultuous life and great repose,

Where, twice a day,

The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,

Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,

I sit me down.

For want of me the world's course will not fail;

When all its work is done, the lie shall rot.

The truth is great, and shall prevail,

When none cares whether it prevail or not

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

No family had a greater impact on Victorian fine arts and letters
than the alien Rossettis. The father was an Italian poet, a political
refugee who became a professor at King's College; the mother was

524

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

half Italian. Four children were born within four years; all were in-
fluenced by an opulent and exotic culture. The household was
crowded with "good-natured Neapolitans, keen Tuscans, and emphatic
Romans." The oldest child, Maria Francesca, became a nun. The elder
son, Dante Gabriel, established himself as a painter, poet, and leader
of a controversial clan. The second son, William Michael, grew to be
an art critic, biographer, and editor of The Germ. Christina Georgina,
youngest of the children, became an exquisite devotional lyricist.

Born in London, May 12, 1828, Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote and
illustrated his own poems as a child. His father's friends, Italian exiles
and English eccentrics, so inflamed his imagination that he resented
formal instruction and anything resembling academism. At twenty he
planned to paint huge allegorical murals and became a pupil of Ford
Madox Brown. Brown made him learn how to draw pickle jars.

A few months later, with two fellow students at the Royal Academy,
Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, Rossetti formed the Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood. Later they were joined by William Morris,
Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Michael Rossetti, who became
the group's propagandist, and Christina Rossetti, who was never an
active member.

Rosserti's paintings epitomized the character of the Pre-Raphaelites.
They were realistic in detail yet vaguely symbolic, rich with the tones
of stained-glass windows and full of a sexless sensuality. The poetry
was equally strange, languid and sultry. The Brotherhood was vio-
lently attacked; John Ruskin, the most eminent of English art critics,
defended it; but it continued to be assailed as "impertinent" and "sac-
rilegious"— Rossetti was singled out for his "fleshly mysticism."

Rossetti was impervious to the slurs. He had a goal; he was seeking
not only "perfect fidelity" in art but the perfect model. He found the
latter in Elizabeth Siddall. She was seventeen, a milliner's assistant,
with a slight talent as a writer and painter. Her eyes were grayish
green; her hair was a dazzling copper; she was frail and slightly tu-
bercular. "I knew," said Rossetti, "from the moment I met her my des-
tiny was defined." She became his mistress and the Brotherhood's fav-
orite model. Rossetti could not decide whether connubiality was good
or bad for the artist; he was sporadically unfaithful to Elizabeth, and
waited ten years before he married her.

By this time Elizabeth was not only ill but despondent, comforting
herself with large doses of laudanum. Two years after their marriage
Rossetti came home from teaching at a Workingmen's College and

LIVES OF THE POETS

found her dying, with a bottle of the drug on her bedside table. She
never recovered consciousness, and it could not be determined whether
her death was due to an accidental overdose or was a deliberate suicide.
Overcome with grief and remorse, Rossetti put all his unpublished
love poems in the casket. Nine years later, in order to bring out a new
volume of his poetry, the coffin was dug up and the manuscripts ex-
humed.

After Elizabeth's death, Rossetti went to live in the Chelsea section
of London with his brother William Michael and, for a short time,
with Swinburne. But he was a gloomy, guilt-ridden companion. Tor-
tured with morbid suspicions, he drew near the verge of insanity; he
lived on narcotics and delusions. He shunned people and cultivated
the society of beasts; he had visions of his wronged wife reincarnated
in some animal, and thereupon made his home a menagerie. At one
time or another he housed woodchucks, owls, an Irish deerhound, a
raven, an Australian opossum that slept in a centerpiece on the table,
a white peacock that died under a sofa, a zebu, and (without humor-
ous intent) a laughing jackass. A raccoon lived in a bureau drawer,
and an armadillo gnawed its way through a neighbors kitchen. A prey
to insomnia, Rossetti found a new drug, chloral, which made him still
more melancholy and accelerated his end. He died April 9, 1882,
while his best book, Ballads and Sonnets, was being printed.

An unwavering romanticist, Rossetti was opposed to a poetry which
taught, debated public issues, prophesied, or philosophized. In common
with the other Pre-Raphaelites, he believed in the sensuous magic of
Keats rather than in the sober moralizing of Wordsworth. He was not
only a poet's poet but a painter's poet. His lines seem put on canvas
instead of on paper; they are rich in design, ornate, and often stiff with
pigments. Instead of being "fleshly," as charged, his verse is unbodied
and unearthly. The supernatural overtones of "Sister Helen" and "The
Blessed DamozeT recall the hypnotic power of Edgar Allan Poe, and
Rossetti was not unaware of the indebtedness. Referring to "The
Blessed Damozel," a kind of complement to "The Raven," he wrote:
"I saw at once that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do
with the grief of the lover on earth, and so I determined to reverse
the conditions and give utterance to the yearning of the loved one in
heaven/'

A similar note of bereavement is struck in The House of Life, not
precisely a sonnet sequence but a set of sonnets which deal with vary-
ing aspects of love. More than half of the poems were those inspired

526

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

by his dead wife and dug up from her grave, but the later sonnets
disclose the struggle between his burning memories and his passionate
attachment to Jane Burden, William Morris* beautiful wife. In the
best of these, poet and painter unite to depict the mute wonder of
"Lovesight," as in the poem by that name, and the weight and silence
of unhappy moments, even, as shown in "Silent Noon," of silence it-
self.

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass,

The finger-points look through like rosy blooms;

Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms

'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.

All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,

Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge

Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.

Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky:
So this winged hour is dropt to us from above.
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
This close-companioned inarticulate hour
When twofold silence was the song of love.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

Youngest of the Rossettis, Christina Georgina was born December
5, 1830, in London. She was her oldest brother's complete opposite.
Unlike Dante Gabriel, her life was an undramatic succession of wholly
internal experiences; like her sister, who became an Anglican nun, she
found the world evil. She abjured pleasure and, in spite of an ardent
nature, declared, "I cannot possibly use the word *happy' without mean-
ing something beyond this present life/'

She was never a pretty woman, but in youth her face shone with an
ethereal light. At eighteen she posed for the Virgin in Dante Gabriel's
first important picture. The year before she had been acclaimed as a
poet, and, true to the Rossetti tradition of verse-and-picture making,

527

LIVES OF THE POETS

drew as well as composed. But, in spite of her Italian inheritance,
nothing gave her spontaneous delight. "I was/' she remembered, "a very
melancholy girl." Her early asceticism gave her features that typically
Pre-Raphaelite look of sadness which made her a perfect model for
the group.

She was, nevertheless, appealing enough to attract admirers. Twice
she refused to marry; one of her suitors was too religious, the other
was not sufficiently devout. At eighteen she met James Collinson, a
minor member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and became engaged
to him. The engagement was broken off when Collinson decided to
become a Roman Catholic and study for the priesthood. Her brother,
William Michael, wrote that Collinson "had struck a staggering blow
at Christina's peace of mind on the very threshold of womanly life."
Another biographer, Elizabeth Luther Gary, believed that it was the
second suitor who was "responsible for what is most moving and most
exquisite in her poetry."

Christina was a little past thirty when she fell in love with Charles
Cayley, and she remained devoted to him to the end of her life. Their
love was never consummated. "She loved him deeply and permanently,"
wrote William Michael, "but she must no doubt have probed his faith
and found it either wrong or woefully defective."

It needs no analyst to furnish the clue to Christina's withdrawals
from marriage and the fulfillment of love. It is obvious that she could
not surrender to an earthly lover; she was committed — at first uncon-
sciously, later candidly — to a Heavenly Bridegroom. She turned away
from the embraces of Collinson and Cayley to the arms of Christ the
more easily since, to her fixed faith, abnegation and affirmation were
one. Her religion was "far more a thing of the heart than of the
mind: she clung to and loved the Christian creed because she loved
Jesus Christ." But even here her love was shamefaced, saintly but not
serene. Unlike her sister Maria, whom she followed to the very threshold
of the convent, she was confident neither of self nor of salvation. As
she grew older, she retreated further and further into self-abasement.
Her days were a succession of perpetual church-goings and com-
munions, prayers and fasts, submission to clerical direction, oblations,
confessions. She wrote literally hundreds of hymns and devotional
verses whose sincerity cannot conceal their mawkish reiterations.

Meanwhile, without the slightest desire for publicity, Christina
Rossetti had become one of the period's quietest and most exquisite
poets. Goblin Market appeared when she was thirty-two, The Prince's

5*8

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

Progress and Other Poems four years later. Although both volumes were
well received, the poetry was considered inferior to her brother's, an
opinion in which she concurred and which time has reversed. Sing-
Song followed in 1872, A Pageant and Other Poems in 1881. Two other
volumes of verse were published before her death, as well as short
stories, Italian rhymes, tracts, books of devotion, and interminable
hymns.

As she grew older she became a recluse; for fifteen years she rarely
spent a night away from her mother. She had always suffered from a
weak heart, although she never ceased caring for the sick and minister-
ing to the poor. In her early sixties she was operated on for cancer
but, though the surgery was successful, the end was only postponed.
She died in the act of prayer, December 2,9, 1894.

Christina Rossetrf s poems are as uneven as they are voluminous;
there are almost a thousand in her Collected Poems. Her first two
books contain most of her best work. Goblin Market is her fairy
child, unlike anything else she ever conceived. It has something of
"The Pied Piper of Hamelin" with more translucence; it is Hans Chris-
tian Andersen played on an elfin flute. The hopping rhythm enlivens
the childish legend with a most unchildish moral, and its catalogue
of fruits is so exact as to summon particularities of taste. Moreover its
figures are purely Pre-Raphaelite, such as this portrait of a young girl:

White and golden Lizzie stood,

Like a lily in a flood,

Like a rock of blue-veined stone

Lashed by tides obstreperously,

Like a beacon left alone

In a hoary roaring sea,

Sending up a golden fire.

Like a fruit-crowned orange-tree

White with blossoms honey-sweet

Sore beset by wasp and bee,

Like a royal virgin town

Topped with gilded dome and spire

Close beleaguered by a fleet

Mad to tug her standard down.

On the other hand the jingles of Sing-Song are a mixture of delight
and dogmatism, an angel singing with the voice of Dr. Isaac Watts.

529

LIVES OF THE POETS

There are hundreds of poems which uncritically mingle first-rate and
fifth-rate verse, sections like "Songs for Strangers and Pilgrims/' "Some
Feasts and Fasts/' "Gifts and Graces/* most of which are lugubrious.
Her fear of the world and preoccupation with its sins trouble her most
devotional verse. Occasionally it breaks through in painful autobiog-
raphy:

She gave up beauty in her tender youth,

Gave all her hope and joy and pleasant ways;

She covered up her eyes lest they should gaze

On vanity, and chose the bitter truth.

Harsh towards herself, towards other full of ruth,

Servant of servants, little known to praise,

Long prayers and fasts trenched on her nights and days:

She schooled herself to sights and sounds uncouth

That with the poor and stricken she might make

A home, until the least of all sufficed

Her wants; her own self learned she to forsake,

Counting all earthly gain but hurt and loss.

So with calm will she chose and bore the cross

And hated all for love of Jesus Christ.

The contrast between Goblin Market and Christina Rossetti's later
poetry is startling. With few exceptions the later poems are lachry-
mose; the light spirit is gone; the nimble pace slows down to a
measured solemnity. The prevailing note is an echoing melancholy, a
sadness that searches the soul but never probes the mind. There is,
nevertheless, exaltation in "From House to Home/' "Marvel of Mar-
vels/' and "Passing Away/' which Swinburne considered "so much the
noblest sacred poem in our language that there is none which comes
near enough to stand second."

Her technique is unique without being experimental. Some of her
finest sonnets, notably the ones beginning "Remember me when I am
gone away" and "The irresponsive silence of the land/' are achieved
by a dexterous pairing of figures and a repetition that insinuates itself
subtly but powerfully. She dwelt on heartbreak — 'The Convent Thresh-
old" is a cry of suppressed passion — but she escaped the emotional
cliches. She was an ascetic who translated her self-denial into song.
Her fusion of sorrow and lyricism is synthesized in one of her most
often quoted poems:

530

ALGERNON CHARJLES SWINBURNE

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress-tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet:
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,

I shall not feel the rain;

I shall not hear the nightingale

Sing on, as if in pain:

And dreaming through the twilight

That doth not rise nor set,

Haply I may remember,

And haply may forget.

ALGERNON. CHARLES
SWIJSLBURN.E

No writer was a greater affront to Victorian reticence than Algernon
Charles Swinburne, born April 5, 1837, in London. The family was
serenely aristocratic. His father, descended from old Northumbrian
forebears, was an admiral; his grandfather was a lord; his mother
was the daughter of the third Earl of Ashburnham. Spoiled and pre-
cocious, Swinburne was twelve years old when he entered Eton. At
nineteen he enrolled in Balliol College, Oxford, which he hated;
when he failed to win the Newdigate Prize for poetry, he left the
university and returned to London. Drawn to the Pre-Raphaelite poets
and painters, he attempted to outdo them all in eccentricity, but he
was not a successful Bohemian. Excesses merely exhausted him, and
too much drinking was sometimes followed by attacks resembling
epilepsy.

At twenty-three Swinburne published 'his first volume, which con-
tained The Queen Mother and Rosamond, two historical tragedies dedi-

531

LIVES OF THE POETS

cated to Rossetti. The blank verse, interspersed with lyrics, was fluent,
but the volume was stillborn. Swinburne was twenty-eight when At-
alanta in Calydon appeared and caused a sensation; nothing like its
exuberance had been heard since Byron's Childe Harold. The tone
was rebellious, a defiance of every orthodoxy; the lyrical abandon
made the young men of the period declaim to each other the choruses
beginning 'When the Hounds of Spring" and "Before the beginning
of years," with its sonorous ending:

They gave him light in his ways,

And love, and a space for delight,
And beauty and length of days,

And night, and sleep in the night
His speech is a burning fire;

With his lips he travaileth;
In his heart is a blind desire,

In his eyes foreknowledge of death;
He weaves, and is clothed with derision;

Sows, and he shall not reap;
His life is a watch or a vision

Between a sleep and a sleep.

Poems and Ballads appeared a year after Atalanta in Calydon and,
at thirty, Swinburne was famous. He was not only a poet but a con-
troversy. He was attacked for his "lewdness" and "obscenity" and,
worse, for undermining morality with amorality. The self-appointed
censors were alarmed to find Baudelaire's evil flowers transformed into
Swinburne's perverse "roses and raptures of vice," but Swinburne's
was a literary eroticism rather than actual depravity. The second and
third series of Poems and Ballads continue the strain of paganism and
pantheism, but Songs before Sunrise, written in his late thirties, is
free of his earlier celebration of the flesh and full of an enthusiasm
for republicanism — Swinburne had met the Italian patriot Mazzini and
idolized him. Between his forty-second and forty-third years he pub-
lished four strikingly dissimilar volumes: a Study of Shakespeare,
Songs of the Springtides, Study in Song, and The Modern Hep-
tdogia, the last being a set of devastating parodies of Tennyson's
pantheism, Browning's cacophony, Mrs. Browning's sentimentality, and
Swinburne's own alliterative verbalisms.

By the time he had reached his mid-forties, it was apparent that

53*

THOMAS HARDY

Swinburne's dissipations and driving ambitions had been too much for
him. His friend, the poet-novelist Theodore Watts-Dunton, took
charge of him for the last thirty years of his life — Max Beerbohm's "No.
2,, The Pines*' is an irreverent account of Swinburne's declining days.
The poet who had been the enfant terrible of Victorian society, die
mischievous faun with flaming red hair, dwindled into a mild little
country gentleman. He grew deaf; he spoke softly; he adored babies.
He did not, however, stop writing; there were still some half-dozen
volumes of poetry, five verse plays, a novel, and ten volumes of critical
prose to come. His verbosity was cruelly hit off by A. E. Housman,
who declared, "Swinburne has now said not only all he has to say
about everything, but all he has to say about nothing/' He was in his
seventy-third year when he died, after an attack of pneumonia, at the
home of Watts-Dunton, April 10, 1909.

What remains of the huge mass of alliterative stanzas, plays, near-
epics, Greek and Latin imitations, experiments in involved forms,
sestinas, ballades and double ballades, virtuosities in every conceivable
meter"? There remain, chiefly, the meters themselves and their hypnotic
reverberations. Swinburne's philosophy matters little — he was never
much of a thinker — we are no longer concerned with his morality or
immorality. The fury has gone; the sound is left. Even the sound has
to be sampled sparingly if it is to be relished. What is best lives in
the impetuous movement of his lyrics: a zest and an extravagance which
speak to the spirit of ardent youth, and never grow beyond it.

THOMAS HARDY

In achievement as well as years — he lived into his late eighties —
Thomas Hardy bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His
half-romantic, half-realistic novels were the last expression of Victorian
fiction, while his sharp and compact verses were among the first ex-
pressions of modern poetry.

Hardy was born June 2,, 1840, near Dorchester in Dorset, which
became the "Wessex" of his novels. An ailing child — at birth he seemed
stillborn — he was taught by his mother and kept from attending
school until he was eight. When Hardy was sixteen his father, a rural
stonemason, apprenticed his son to an ecclesiastical architect for whom

533

LIVES OF THE POETS

he had worked. At twenty-two the apprentice won a prize from the
Royal Institute of British Architects; in his twenty-seventh year he be-
came a practicing architect. At thirty he went to Cornwall to restore a
church, met the vicar's sister-in-law, fell in love, and married her.

Books had always interested Hardy more than building; he had
been writing poetry since childhood, hut he had little thought of pub-
lishing it. Nevertheless, he was determined to give up architecture;
though there were sermons in stones there was no money in them,
at least none for him. Since poetry was obviously unprofitable, he
turned to fiction as a means of support. His manuscript of The Poor
Man and the Lady was rejected because it did not have enough plot.
Hardy immediately wrote another novel, Desperate Remedies, in which
the plot overwhelmed the characters. The only reaction was a belittling
review and a stubborn resolution to keep on writing. After two more
novels, a magazine commissioned him to write a serial, Far from the
Madding Crowd, which became his first success.

In his mid-thirties Hardy was an interesting but far from arresting-
looking figure. He was slight, less than average size — barely five feet
six inches — and generally inconspicuous. His hair was thatch-colored;
his blue eyes had the sharp gaze of a farmer; a Roman nose gave his
face its chief strength. For a while Hardy and his bride lived in Lon-
don. At forty a series of internal hemorrhages threatened to end his
life. Between the attacks he worked feverishly on his next novel, hop-
ing he would live long enough to forget fiction and resume the only
writing he genuinely loved: the writing of poetry. Two years later he
left London for his native Dorchester and again became an architect
in order to build his home, Max Gate, a landmark for sight-seers.

Between his thirty-fourth and fortieth years Hardy wrote eight novels
and more than thirty short stories, most of which were popular and
profitable, as well as poems which he kept to himself. It was not until
he published Tess of the D'Urbervilles that the critics noticed him,
and turned upon him. In youth Hardy had read Ovid, Terence,
Lucretius, and the Greek dramas — he had marked passages which em-
phasized mischance and suffering — and as a young man he had studied
the works of Darwin and John Stuart Mill. The element of hazard,
the universally bitter struggle for survival, dominated Tess, and the vol-
ume was roughly handled by the conservative critics. Hardy replied
with the still more uncompromising Jude the Obscure. Observing
nature's laws as opposed to man's decrees which are advocated in
preachment and violated in practice, Hardy stressed an amoral earthi-

534

THOMAS HARDY

ness that had little regard for genteel society. The critics shrieked at
Hardy's bleak fatalism and his flaunting of current taboos; they dubbed
the book "Jude the Obscene." One reader burned the book and sent
Hardy the ashes.

Hardy was angry rather than hurt; he said that "the shrill crescendo
of invective" completely cured him of any further desire to write
novels. This was scarcely a hardship for him. He told a correspondent
that he had been compelled to give up his greatest pleasure, the writing
of verse, in order to make a living and referred to his novels as "pot-
boilers" and "wretched stuff." It was with joy as well as relief that, late
in life, he returned to poetry.

He was close to sixty when his first book of verse, Wessex Poems,
appeared. Containing lyrics and ballads written over thirty years, it
was received without enthusiasm. Poems of the Past and Present,
published four years later, fared little better. At sixty-four, after the
critics had decided that nothing of any consequence could be expected
from him, Hardy startled the world with the first part of The Dynasts.
Four years later it was completed, a huge drama of the Napoleonic
wars in three books, nineteen acts, and one hundred and thirty scenes.
When he was seventy-two his wife died; two years later he married a
writer who had been his secretary for years. It has been assumed
that Somerset Maugham's much-debated Cakes and Ale is a disguised
picture of Hardy's domestic life, but the retired author would not
have recognized himself in the amusing but cruel lampoon.

Having held back the poetic impulse most of his life, Hardy re-
leased it with renewed energy in his last years. His three richest books
of verse appeared after he was eighty; he continued to write his
characteristically knotted, delicately acrid, and clean-stripped verse un-
til he was almost ninety. In his eighty-eighth year his throat became
seriously inflamed and he succumbed to a cold, January u, 1928. His
ashes were placed in Westminster Abbey but, as requested in his will,
his heart was buried near Dorchester in the countryside he loved so
well.

An admirer of Darwin, Hardy rejected the flattering concept of man
as center of the universe for something far more humble; he turned
the lessons of science into literature. He knew that the elements are
neither man's friends nor his enemies but are supremely indifferent
to his destiny. Indifference, to Hardy, was at the heart of creation.
Fatalism was his reply to the pastoral idealism of Wordsworth; Hardy
understood nature too well to think it was benign. He pictured the

535

LIVES OF THE POETS

grim warfare of the farmer, the tragedies of drought and disease, the
lifelong struggle and ultimate defeat of beast and man. If the universe
was governed at all, it was governed by accident, by "crass casualty/'
God, according to Hardy, had ceased to be concerned with humanity.
If He thought of the world at all, He thought of it as one of His
failures. Hardy, however, accepted the implacable finalities without
the pessimist's inverted delight. He recorded a period of shrinking
values, but he took no pleasure in the human dilemma. He could not
regard a pitiless cosmos without pity; he knew that man's battle
against insuperable odds gave him importance, and the courage to
face inevitable tragedy made him noble.

It is the sense of nobility which illumines Hardy's poetry. Differing
from his ornately constructed prose, the poetry is stark, gnarled and
natural as an apple tree. There is honesty and strength in "The Dark-
Eyed Gentleman," which is as racy as a folk song; in "Satires of Cir-
cumstance," dramas condensed in startling vignettes; in 'The Con-
vergence of the Twain," a powerful example of Hardy's belief in the
"purblind doomsters" of unpredictable nature; in 'The Lacking Sense,"
with its summoning of the Ancient Mind in an effort to explain
"her crimes upon her creatures." Clumsy at first glance, the most un-
gainly lines have an appealing awkwardness. Besides the unusual con-
tent of his lyrics and narratives, Hardy brought a tart, talk-flavored idiom
to poetry. He gave it salty blood and strong sinews.

The end of Victorianism found Hardy still making new beginnings.
Many years before, in "The Darkling Thrush," he had identified
himself with a storm-tossed bird, "frail, gaunt and small," that had
dared to fling its song through the unrelieved gloom. At seventy-five,
still dubious about human values, Hardy could voice a hope for a fu-
ture of which he was uncertain, and, as in "Afterwards," one of his
few autobiographical poems, express an affirmative philosophy in his
love for the mysterious minutiae of existence.

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,

Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbors say,
"He was a man who used to notice such things"?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
The dewf all-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight

536

THOMAS HARDY

Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
"To him this must have been a familiar sight/'

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,

One may say, "He strove that such innocent creatures should come

to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone."

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the
door,

Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,

"He was one who had an eye for such mysteries"?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,

Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,
"He hears it not now, but used to notice such things"?

537

XXIV

The ew World

THE PILGRIM FATHERS, the first colonists to settle in New Eng-
land, arrived in Cape Cod Bay in 1620, the year of the publica-
tion of Bacon's Novum Organum, a work which proclaimed
man's pioneering conquest of nature through knowledge. A hundred
years later the philosopher George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, wrote
a set of verses "On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in
America," which began with a suggestion that there was new poetic
subject matter in the new world:

The Muse, disgusted at an age and clime

Barren of every glorious theme,
In distant lands now waits a better time,

Producing subjects worthy fame.

Berkeley's poem ended with a flourish of prophecy and a flattering
tribute to what was still a struggling colony:

Westward the course of empire takes its way;

The first four acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama with the day:

Time's noblest offspring is the last.

Westward the course of culture as well as empire took its way. Grad-
ually it began to draw its substance from the fresh soil and native air*

538

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

America did not, however, establish its independence in literature as
completely as it did in government. The young nation expressed itself
in countless imitations before it found a characteristic way of thinking
and writing. Throughout the Colonial period, scenes and situations of
the new world were interpreted in idioms of the old. The first American
poet of any importance was a woman, Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672,),
daughter of one New England governor and wife of another — the pub-
lisher hailed her on the tide page of her book as "The Tenth Muse
Lately Sprung Up in America" — but, instead of Puritan plain-speaking,
her lines are a baroque reconstruction of what she remembered of
Spenser, Raleigh, and, most of all, of the heavily didactic French poet,
Du Bartas. The manuscripts of Edward Taylor (1624-172,9), discovered
more than two hundred years after his death, reveal a metaphysical poet
who used homely and ingenious images to embody religious exaltation
in the manner of Herbert and Donne. With Philip Freneau (1752-
1832) the background shifted from New England to New Jersey; Fre-
neau's "The Indian Burying Ground" and a few other poems deal with
regional material, but the tone is borrowed from popular eighteenth-
century English models. The first recognizably native note was sounded
by William Cullen Bryant, often called "the father of American poetry."

WILLIAM CULLEN: BRYANT

Influenced by a variety of English poets from Pope to Cowper and
largely by Robert Blair and the "Graveyard School," William Cullen
Bryant found a way of speaking which was his own and which imparted
an autochthonous dignity to American poetry. He was descended from
Mayflower stock and was born November 3, 1794, in Cummington,
Massachusetts, the setting for most of his verse. Bryant lived well
into his eighty-fourth year, yet he was so frail at birth that he was not
expected to survive infancy. His head was alarmingly large; it is re-
ported that his father, a country physician, reduced it to normal size
by plunging the boy into a spring of icy water every morning. Dr.
Bryant then built up his son's health by making him take long walks
in the woods, a training which also brought up the boy to be an un-
conscious naturalist.

It is said that Bryant learned to read before he was two. At ten he
composed a poem which was printed in the Hampshire Gazette; at

539

LIVES OF THE POETS

thirteen he improvised an anti-Jefferson satire, The Embargo; it was
printed two years later when, at fifteen, skipping the freshman year,
he entered Williams College as a sophomore. At seventeen Bryant wrote
the uncannily mature and sonorous lines beginning:

To him who in the love of nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language ...

Bryant called the poem "Thanatopsis" (literally "a contemplation on
death") and put it away in his desk. A few years later, his father found
it and gave it to the editor of The North American Review, who had
requested contributions from the elder Bryant, an occasional versifier.
When the poem appeared, Richard Henry Dana, author of Two Years
Before the Mast, told the editor he had been hoaxed. "No one on this
side of the Atlantic," said Dana, "is capable of writing such verses,"

Bryant was never graduated from college. There were financial trou-
bles; the family could not afford further schooling; and, at the end of
his first year, Bryant left Williams to study law in the little town of
Worthington. He was admitted to the bar at twenty-one; at twenty-six
he married Frances Fairchild, "fairest of the rural maids," and with
practically no clientele, struggled along. At twenty-seven his luck began
to turn when a collection of his early poetry was printed. Several of
the pieces were quoted and, encouraged by the reviews, Bryant left
the unpleasant and unprofitable practice of law. His work appeared
regularly in the gazettes and journals; critics hailed him as America's
leading poet; at thirty-five he became editor-in-chief of the New York
Evening Post, a position he held until the end of his life.

Before he was forty Bryant had successfully published five collections
of his poetry; four more volumes appeared by the time he was fifty. His
influence as a poet-journalist was great He raised his voice vigorously
for the insurrectionary John Brown; he was one of the first to back
Lincoln's emancipation program; Lincoln came to hear him and said,
"It was worth the journey to see such a man." Dickens' first question
on landing in the United States was 'Where is Bryant?" At seventy he
was still young in heart and body. He started each day with calisthenic
exercises and a long walk; he continued to compose new poems and
write hymns; at eighty he undertook a revision of the mammoth
Library of Poetry and Song.

In his eighty-fourth year he made an address in New York's Central
Park at the unveiling of a statue to the Italian patriot Mazzini. It was
a hot May day, and Bryant stood with head uncovered, regardless of

540

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

the intense sun. After the ceremony, he became dizzy and fell. Suffer-
ing from a concussion of the brain, he lay in a coma for several weeks,
and died June 12,, 1878.

It has been remarked that in his youth Bryant wrote for elderly peo-
ple, and in his old age for children. Because of his preoccupation with
the landscape he has been called "the American Wordsworth," but
Bryant was more concerned with simple nature than with the com-
plexities of human nature. He was almost too serene, calm to the point
of aloofness; his dignity often congealed not only into austerity but
frigidity. In his playful A Fable for Critics, James Russell Lowell,
essayist and expert writer of light verse, seized upon Bryant's weakness:

There is Bryant, as quiet, as cool, and as dignified,

As a smooth, silent iceberg that never is ignified . . .

He may rank (Griswold says so) first bard of your nation,

There's no doubt that he stands in supreme ice-elation;

Your topmost Parnassus he may set his heel on,

But no warm applauses come, peal following peal on —

He's too smooth and too polished to hang any zeal on.

Such an appraisal is scarcely a just summary. Edgar Allan Poe's
estimate was more balanced: 'In character no man stands more loftily
than Bryant. The peculiarly melancholy expression of his countenance
has caused him to be accused of harshness or coldness of heart. Never
was there a greater mistake. His soul is charity itself, in all respects
generous and noble."

The generosity is implicit in his cumulative writings, the nobility is
manifest in 'To a Waterfowl," 'To the Fringed Gentian," 'The Death
of Lincoln," "The Antiquity of Freedom," as well as in Bryant's in-
digenous narratives. If the poems lack exaltation and are no longer ex-
citing, they seldom fail to satisfy the reader with their unpretentious
but reassuring affirmations.

RALPH WALDO EMERSOK

Emerson, Whittier, and Longfellow comprise the famous New Eng-
land triad. Their utterances shaped the pattern of an evolving culture.
With them the seeds of American poetry, planted, cultivated, and
nourished in native soil, came into full flower.

541

LIVES OF THE POETS

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "God-intoxicated Yankee/' was born May 2,5,
1803, in Boston, Massachusetts, of Puritan stock. His father was a Uni^
tarian clergyman but, although Emerson followed the family tradition
and became a clergyman, his life was an undeviating protest against
dogmas and the acquiescent orthodoxy of little minds. There were dif-
ficulties from the beginning. His father died when Ralph Waldo was
eight years old, and the surviving six of eight children had to live on
contributions from sympathetic parishioners. Influenced by his aunt,
Mary Moody Emerson, a spinster who was something of an eccentric,
something of a saint, the boy learned the character of the Puritan
spirit, a spirit tart and intense, fanatic in its passion for ideas and loyalty
to ideals.

Emerson was not a particularly brilliant student at Boston Latin School
or at Harvard. Although he was graduated before he was nineteen, he
did not rank above the middle of his class. He taught school for a
while and was admitted to the ministry in his twenty-fourth year; at
twenty-six he married Ellen Louisa Tucker and became pastor of the
Second Church of Boston. Three years later his wife died, and he re-
signed from his pastorate. A passion for independence had broken
through the surface conformities. He refused to administer the Lord's
Supper and was convinced that the sacrament had become an outgrown
form. He did not object to the Communion Service for others; he said,
"I have no hostility to this institution: I am only stating my want of
sympathy with it. ... That is the end of my opposition: that I am not
interested in it." This calm statement, writes the American educator
and critic, Arthur Hobson Quinn, "is as though a physician were re-
tiring from practice because he no longer was 'interested' in the circula-
tion of the blood or a lawyer because he was no longer 'interested'
in the Constitution of the United States. There is probably nothing
Emerson ever said that showed more definitely his limitations, just as
the act itself showed his courage and his independence."

A few months after Emerson withdrew from the ministry, he sailed
for Europe. It was the turning point of his career. The self-searchings
and the inner agonies which forced his resignation took him away from
his old environment and brought him closer to the challenging ideas of
Coleridge, the candid simplicities of Wordsworth, and the provocative
turbulence of Carlyle. He visited England, met the Lake Poets, and be-
came an intimate friend of Carlyle's. Although he never again took
charge of a parish, Emerson preached in many churches. In his thirty-
first year he became a resident of Concord, Massachusetts. A year later,

54*

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

he married his second wife, Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, and undertook
the first of a long series of lectures.

It was as a lecturer that Emerson attained his greatest power and
won his widest reputation. His talks on character and conduct were taut
with muscular phrases. "A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots
whose flower and fruitage is the world." 'Whoso would be a man must
be a nonconformist. ... A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of
little minds." "To be great is to be misunderstood. Nothing can bring
you peace but yourself." "An institution is the lengthened shadow of
one man." "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm/'
"Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right" "Hitch
your wagon to a star." "The universe does not attract us until it is
housed in an individual." Anticipating Whitman's plea for cultural in-
dependence, Emerson declared in "The American Scholar," "We have
listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe. We will walk on our
own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own
minds." His address before the Divinity School at Cambridge in 1838
was a challenge, a call for new ideas in religion and a manifesto of self-
reliance. Rejecting the divinity of Jesus, but proclaiming His authority
as teacher of humanity, Emerson said, "In the soul let redemption be
sought. Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for
slaves. Go alone."

Emerson waited until his forty-fourth year before he published his
first volume of Poems; twenty years elapsed before the appearance of
his second, May Day and Other Poems. Two series of Essays had been
printed in his early forties. The doctrine of transcendentalism appealed
to Emerson's nonconformist spirit and he took over the editorship of
The Dial. He made two more trips abroad. His house burned down,
and during his third European visit, admirers rebuilt it. He was cared
for lovingly; he declined to grow old; at seventy-seven he still swam
naked in Walden Pond.

In his late seventies, however, his memory began to fail. He had
trouble recognizing people and the names of objects; he identified them
by their characteristics. Referring to his umbrella, he said, "I can't tell
how it's called, but I can tell its history: strangers take it away." At the
grave of Longfellow he declared, 'That was a sweet and beautiful soul
— but I have forgotten his name," He literally faded away, and died in
his beloved Concord, on April 27, 1882, a month before his eightieth
birthday.

Emerson's philosophy cannot be reduced to a system. A line here, a

543

LIVES OF THE POETS

phrase there — he must be grasped by intuition or not at all. When we
are caught up in his sense of immediacy, we respond to a peculiar veloc-
ity; with him we leap from confusion to clarity. This is particularly true
in the poetry. Uneven in texture, it is, at first glance, hesitant, unmu-
sical, and intellectualized. Yet "Brahma" ("If the red slayer think he
slays") radiates a warm pantheism; "Give All to Love" is a passionate
defiance of conventionality; "Concord Hymn," the textbook favorite, is
quietly fervid; 'The Rhodora" mingles loving observation and didacti-
cism, even though "Beauty is its own excuse for being." There is
genuine if restrained rapture in "Good-bye, proud world, I'm going
home," "Woodnotes," and "Forbearance"; unexpectedly savage irony
strikes out of the "Ode" to W. H. Channing, with its:

The horseman serves the horse,
The neatherd serves the neat,
The merchant serves the purse,
The eater serves his meat.
Tis the day of the chattel,
Webs to weave and corn to grind;
Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.

Emerson's poetry is both rich and casual — Lowell described it as
"homespun cloth-of-gold"; it has a way of astonishing us with singular
daring and delight. In the midst of what seems to be a classroom lesson,
we suddenly

. . . mount to Paradise
By the stairway of surprise.

JOHN: GREENLEAF WHITTIER

Like Emerson, Whittier rebelled against the mumbling acceptance
of current rituals; unlike Emerson and other members of the literati,
Whittier was not descended from a line of scholars and divines. His
father was a farmer, whose forebears had been farmers, weavers, hard-
working Quaker laborers; Whittier was a worker as soon as he was able

544

to walk. Born December 17, 1807, at Haverhill, Massachusetts, he spent
the first eighteen years of his life plowing and planting, attending to
the livestock, and milking cows as part of his daily chores. His was
literally a barefoot boyhood; he was nineteen before he was able to at-
tend school regularly, and his entire formal education lasted less than
two years. He earned money for his tuition by making slippers at eight
cents a pair during the winter; Whittier's first biographer, Samuel T.
Pickard, relates that the boy "calculated so closely every item of expense
that he knew before the beginning of the term he would have twenty-
five cents to spare at its close, and he actually had."

The home library was small and restricted. Besides the Bible, there
were some twenty volumes by and about distinguished Quakers; young
Whittier had to walk miles to borrow an occasional biography, a book
of travel, or a collection of poetry. A schoolteacher gave him a copy of
Burns's Poems which was so deeply cherished by the youthful farm
hand that it remained with the poet to the end of his life. When
Whittier was eighteen his first poem appeared in William Lloyd Gar-
rison's Free Press, and his career was determined. He considered himself
dedicated to poetry and, under Garrison's influence, to the abolitionist
cause.

Between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one Whittier, determined to
earn a living by his pen, published about one hundred and fifty poems.
They were written much too rapidly for excellence, but there was an
earnest forthrightness in them which struggled through the stereotyped
phrases and stock situations. For several years Whittier supported him-
self on journalism in his home town, in Boston, and in Hartford. He
hated his hack work, but he managed to write a poem a week.

The true creator did not emerge until Whittier's twenty-sixth year,
when, at his own expense, he published a pamphlet, Justice and Expe-
diency, and helped to organize the American Anti-Slavery Society. With
this act he devoted himself to a crusading career. He became the poet
and politician of the Anti-Slavery cause. He helped shape its party con-
ventions, wrote countless editorials, and attacked the whole structure of
complacent society. Most of his fellow New Englanders disapproved;
even the free-thinking Emerson ranked the Abolitionists with the luna-
tic fringe. But Whittier challenged an economy founded on injustice,
sanctioned by law, and blessed by the clergy, a system erected on the ex-
ploitation of human beings and 'lield together by cotton." Only failing
health prevented him from taking an active part in the Massachusetts
legislature to which he was sent in his twenty-eighth year.

545

LIVES OF THE POETS

At thirty-one Whittier went to Philadelphia, became editor of the
Pennsylvania Freeman, and consecrated Pennsylvania Hall as a Temple
of Liberty for the Anti-Slavery Society. Three days after the official
opening, an organized mob set the building on fire. Abetted by the
mayor, the firemen refused to extinguish the flames, and a large part of
the press complimented them on their lawlessness.

The contemplative nature-lover had become the fighting reformer.
In his mid-fifties he issued the protesting In Wartime and Other Poems,
which included the ringing "Laus Deo" as well as the more popular
"Barbara Frietchie." He was, however, not altogether happy that he had
left the bucolic scene to turn

The crank of an opinion mill,
Making his rustic reed of song
A weapon in the war of wrong.

Whittier was gratified when, at fifty-eight, he recovered the "rustic
reed of song" and came into his full power with Snow-Bound* An ex-
tended genre picture of rural America in the middle of the nineteenth
century, influenced by Burns and as direct as anything written by the
Scottish poet, Snow-Bound was read by everyone; the first royalties
were ten thousand dollars. The barefoot boy who had stitched slippers
at eight cents a pair was now an affluent as well as an eminent citizen.

In his sixties Whittier became a legendary figure; the combative
politician and the country poet merged into the venerated patriarch. His
seventieth and eightieth birthdays were celebrated as national events.
On September 3, 1892, an apoplectic stroke paralyzed his right side;
four days later the end came. The nurse started to pull down the shades,
but the poet wanted light to the last "No! No!" he said, and died,
September 7, 1892, two months before his eighty-fifth birthday.

Much of Whittier's poetry is commonplace and prolix; the versifica-
tion is often threadbare and thin. But the four-square syllables are
honest and the material is rugged. Its very linsey-woolsey quality is part
of its genuineness, the warp and woof of a fabric unpretentiously but
indubitably native.

In A fable for Critics James Russell Lowell put aside the barb of
satire to summarize Whittier's quality:

There is Whittier, whose swelling and vehement heart
Strains the strait-breasted drab of the Quaker apart,

546

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

And reveals the live man, still supreme and erect,
Underneath the bemummying wrappers of sect.
There was ne'er a man born who had more of the swing
Of the true lyric bard and all that kind of thing;
And his failures arise (though he seems not to know it)
From the very same cause that has made him a poet:
A fervor of mind which knows no separation
'Twixt simple excitement and pure inspiration.

WADSWORTH
LONGFELLOW

The textbooks have done Longfellow incalculable harm. Overpraised
in his time and underrated in our own, he is remembered for his worst.
The poet has suffered from countless repetitions of "A Psalm of Life/'
with its glibly sententious:

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait.

He has been even more adversely affected by stanzas as moral and
absurd as:

"Oh, stay/' the maiden said, "and rest
Thy weary head upon this breast."
A tear stood in his bright blue eye,
But still he answered with a sigh,
"Excelsior!"

Because of such banalities, many readers think of Longfellow as a
dealer in shopworn platitudes, a manufacturer of wall mottoes. The
picture which represents Longfellow seldom is that of the handsome and
ardent young student which he was, but the venerable sage with the
alabaster brow and the classic beard, a little like a plaster Zeus and a
little like the village minister.

547

LIVES OF THE POETS

Yet, though his stature has been woefully diminished by such char-
acterizations as "the household poet" and "the laureate of the hearth,"
Longfellow was one of the most widely circulated writers of the day,
by far the most popular of American poets. Twenty-four English pub-
lishers issued his work; ten thousand copies of The Courtship of Miles
Sta-ndish were sold in London in a single day; The Song of Hiawatha
was translated into every modern language as well as Latin. His finan-
cial success was complemented by the critics' enthusiastic commenda-
tions. With the exception of Poe, whose envy was pathetic, Longfellow's
colleagues could not praise him enough. Even Walt Whitman, who
found Longfellow's excess of verbal melody "almost a sickness/' declared
that Longfellow was "the sort of counteractant most needed for our
materialistic, self-assertive, money-worshiping Anglo-Saxon race, and
especially for the present age in America — an age tyrannically regulated
with reference to the manufacturer, the merchant, the financier, the
politician. ... I should have to think long if I were asked to name a
man who had done more, and in more valuable directions, for America/'

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born February 2,7, 1807, in Port-
land, Maine, a seacoast town lovingly remembered in "My Lost Youth,"
with its:

A boy's will is the wind's will
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.

His ancestors were rock-ribbed Puritans. His mother's people, the
Wadsworths, included four Plymouth Pilgrims. His father's forebears
were more plebeian; one of them had earned his living as a blacksmith.
From his childhood, the boy knew he would be a writer; he wrote an
imitation of Irving's Sketch Book at twelve and, a year later, saw his
first poem, "The Battle of Lovell's Pond," published in the Portland
Gazette. At fourteen he entered Bowdoin College, where he excelled in
everything. The subject assigned for his commencement oration was
"Chatterton and His Poems," but Longfellow, already conscious of the
American heritage, changed it to "Our Native Writers."

After graduation, Longfellow thought of following his father as a
lawyer, but his mind was on Byron instead of Blackstone. He was
happy to stop studying jurisprudence when Bowdoin invited him to
fill a chair which had been established for him, a chair in modern
languages and literature. He was only nineteen when, in order to equip
himself for the position, he made his first trip abroad. He remained

548

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

in Europe almost four years, enraptured by France, sentimentalizing
over Spain, rhapsodizing about Italy, falling in love with the landscape
and romantic legends of Germany. He returned to Europe three times;
most of his life and the greater part of his work were spent in an effort
to translate the European heritage into his own idiom.

At twenty-four his career was assured. He married the fragile but
attractive Mary Storer Potter, and rose in the academic world. Although
he claimed that he never liked teaching, he taught for twenty-five
years. At twenty-seven Longfellow became professor of languages and
belles-lettres at Harvard. He went abroad again, this time to improve
his knowledge of Scandinavian and German. Taking his young wife
with him, he went to London, visited the Carlyles, and cultivated the
literati. He learned Swedish, which reminded him of Lowland Scots,
and studied the Finnish epic, Kalevala, which, years later, was reflected
in the American Hiawatha. Mary Longfellow had been ill most of the
trip. After the premature birth of a child, she collapsed and died in
Rotterdam in 1835.

Within a few months after his return, Longfellow took up residence
in the handsome and historic Craigie House, which had once quartered
Washington, and entertained lavishly. He fell in love with Fanny Eliza-
beth Appleton, a girl some fifteen years his junior. Five years later they
were married. The wedding was an outstanding social event of the
Boston of 1843, and f°r eighteen years the poet and his wife were
idyllically happy. There were five children, two sons, Charles and
Ernest, and three daughters characterized in "The Children's Hour"
as "grave" Alice, 'laughing" Allegra, and golden-haired Edith, who be-
came the wife of Richard Henry Dana. On July 9, 1861, the marriage
came to a tragic end. Mrs. Longfellow was sealing a letter containing
locks of the children's hair. The light summer dress she was wearing
caught fire from a wax taper and, although the poet rushed from an
adjoining room, he did not succeed in putting out the flames. His wife
was so badly burned that she died the next morning. To make the
catastrophe even more poignant, she was buried on her wedding anni-
versary. Longfellow never fully recovered from the shock.

Nothing, however, could stop Longfellow's fertility. His early Ballads
and Other Poems were commended by the critical and continually
quoted by the uncritical. Poems on Slavery, written in 1842, while lack-
ing the fire of Whittier's war poems, were forthright and fearless at a
time when many people feared to speak out. Evangeline, The Song of
Hiawatha, The Courtship of Miles Standish, and many lyrics now num-

549

LIVES OF THE POETS

bered among his most popular, had appeared before his second wife's
death. Some of Longfellow's most famous work was still to come. The
first and in some ways the best series of his Tales of a Wayside Inn
appeared in 1863; the second and third parts were published in 1872,
and 1873.

Longfellow's energy seemed to increase with age; half a dozen vol-
umes appeared in his sixties and early seventies. He drove himself to
nervous prostration at seventy-four, suffered an attack of peritonitis, and
died March 24, 1882. Two years later a commemorative bust was un-
veiled in Westminster Abbey. Longfellow was the first American to be
so honored.

It is generally admitted that Longfellow's facility too often betrays
him into fatuousness; all but his most uncritical admirers concede that
he was often vapid as well as verbose. At his best, however, Longfellow
was a fascinating teller of tales; stories flowed from him as from a New
England mountain stream, musically, inexhaustibly. His ballads, old-
fashioned in cut and texture, have outworn smarter styles. His lyrics
communicate his favorite mood: twilight lengthening into evening, the
children's hour, the Abendstimmung and the sadness which "resembles
sorrow only as the mist resembles the rain," the comforting lamp, the un-
disturbing book. Yet, in his unpretentious way, Longfellow was some-
thing of a pioneer. He was one of the first American writers to break
new soil with the semi-epical Hiawatha, which was dug out of native
clay; with The Courtship of Miles Standish and Evangeline, suspense-
ful if prettified revivifications of the American past; with swinging nar-
ratives like 'The Skeleton in Armor" and "Paul Revere's Ride." Long-
fellow was the romancer of America's adolescence, but he was also a
forerunner of those who gave expression to his country's more difficult
maturity.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

The names of James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes
are often linked. Both were poet-essayists, celebrities who were sons of
noted ministers, and both were more esteemed for their impromptu wit
than for their more considered utterances. But Holmes is resuscitated
only for the patriotic "Old Ironsides/' the humorous extravaganza, "The

550

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

Deacon's Masterpiece," and the pretty exhortation, 'The Chambered
Nautilus" ("Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,/Child
of the wandering sea"), while Lowell is kept alive by the variety of his
work, the deep sincerity of his religious legends, and the timeless force
of his irony.

Lowell was born February 22, 1819, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
His mother, whose maiden name was Spence, claimed descent from Sir
Patrick Spens, and taught her son old ballads and folk songs. Before
lie was eighteen the boy decided he would be a poet. With disarming
simplicity he wrote to his mother, "I am engaged in several poetical
effusions, one of which I have dedicated to you, who have been the
patron and encourager of my youthful muse." He was fifteen when he
entered Harvard and, after being graduated, studied law. At twenty-
one he opened an office in Boston but he never practiced the profession.
Instead of looking for clients he courted editors and began writing for
the magazines which were being started with much enthusiasm and lit-
tle capital. An ardent abolitionist, he contributed anti-slavery editorials
to the Pennsylvania Freeman; the threat of war with Mexico made him
fear an extension of slave-holding states, and he planned a series of
satires which grew into The Biglow Papers. He became engaged to a
young poet, Maria White, and married her shortly after the publication
of his first volume of poems. There were four children; all but one died
in infancy.

In his mid-twenties Lowell published The Vision of Sir Launfal,
which continues to be read for its romantic narration and its highly
quotable Prelude. At the same time he began The Biglow Papers for
the Boston Courier. Using the vernacular with rustic vigor and star-
tling seriousness, Lowell contrasted the crude but effective turns of
speech of a candid young farmer, Hosea Biglow, with the pompous
phrases of the Reverend Homer Wilbur, "Pastor of the First Church in
Jaalam and (Prospective) Member of Many Literary, Learned and
Scientific Societies." He invented a mouthpiece named "Birdofredum
Sawin" — a pun with a New England twang whose point was its ridic-
ulousness— and intensified his attacks on greed, complacency, and mili-
tant hypocrisy. Lowell had already written 'The Present Crisis," a pro-
test against the government's policy in instigating a war against Mexico
and choosing the seemingly prosperous course of evil, but the poem was
composed in heavy, long-winded tropes. The Biglow Papers was direct
and unmistakable in its assault. The abolitionist had become a fighting
pacifist; he struck out in such scathing outbursts as "The Pious Editor's

551

LIVES OF THE POETS

Creed/' "What Mr. Robinson Thinks," and 'To a Recruiting Sergeant,"
which is not only a common-sense diatribe against the Mexican war but
against all wars:

Ez f er war, I call it murder —

There you hev it plain an' flat;
I don't want to go no furder

Than my Testyment f er that.
God he sed so plump an' fairly;

It's ez long ez it is broad;
An' you've gut to git up airly

Ef you want to take in God.

Lowell was barely thirty when he completed A Fable for Critics, in
which his satirical spirit played with a lighter subject. The rhymes are
hit-or-miss, the meter is catch-as-catch-can, the puns are alternately apt
and atrocious, but Lowell's comic delineations of his contemporaries are
amusing as caricatures and keen as critical estimates. He exposed the
foibles of Emerson, Bryant, Poe, and a dozen others; he spared no one,
not even himself:

There is Lowell, who's striving Parnassus to climb
With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme.
He might get on alone, spite of brambles and bowlders,
But he can't with that bundle he has on his shoulders.
The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching
Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching.

At thirty-two Lowell spent a year in Europe; shortly after his return
his wife died and the bereaved man sought relief in uninterrupted work.
He gave a series of lectures, occupied the chair of Modern Languages
previously held by Longfellow and, following Longfellow's example,
went abroad to augment his knowledge of German, French, and Italian.
Upon his return he married for the second time, and became the first
editor of the newly founded Atlantic Monthly. At forty-seven he was
appointed minister to Spain and three years later was transferred to
England; his sojourn there was saddened by the death of his second
wife.

Back in America he busied himself with critical essays, saw his writ-
ings published in a set of ten volumes, and prepared to work until he

EDGAR ALLAN POE

was a hundred. However his health failed when he reached seventy,
and he relinquished hope of becoming "a not too mellow octogenarian/'
He died in the house in which he was born, August 12, 1891.

Much of Lowell's poetry has the fault of the musing organist in
The Vision of Sir Launfal; it begins, and often continues, "doubtfully
and far away." But Lowell was more than an improvising musician; he
had instinctual control of his medium; he gave dialect a kind of dignity.
The comic manner, the trick rhyming, and the inconsequential word-
play are not as foolish as they first appear; Lowell's playfulness and
preaching combine to drive home an essential earnestness. With a
scholar's carefully acquired erudition and an inborn Yankee shrewdness,
he succeeded in integrating the humorist and the humanist.

EDGAR ALLAH POE

The key of Poe's tragic maladjustment to life is found in the dichot-
omy of his work. It is exposed in the opening lines of a poem signifi-
cantly entitled "Alone":

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were. I have not seen
As others saw. I could not bring
My passions from a common spring —
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow — I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone —
And all I loved, I loved alone.

The sense of being removed from the common spring of ordinary
joys and sorrows made him suffer an indefinite sense of wrong, and Poe
became what he imagined himself to be, a haunted, self-doomed "weary,
wayworn wanderer" whose life was a long nightmare.

Son of two itinerant actors, Poe was born during one of their pere-
grinations on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father,
who played minor roles in a traveling stock company, disappeared soon
after his second son was born — the first-born, William Henry Leonard,
was two years Edgar's senior. A year later his mother gave birth to a

553

LIVES OF THE POETS

daughter, Rosalie, and succumbed to pneumonia in Richmond, Virginia.
The children were separated. William Henry Leonard had already been
left in the care of his paternal grandfather; Rosalie was adopted by
friends, the Mackenzies; Edgar was taken into the home of the Rich-
mond merchant, John Allan, and his childless wife.

In spite of the indictment of a few partisan biographers, John Allan
was not an unsympathetic foster father. He was indulgent to the boy,
who, even in childhood, showed signs of the morbidity which motivated
most of his later work. Allan sent him to one of the best schools in
England, and there, at twelve, Poe wrote 'The Lake/' which reveals
how early the abiding sense of loneliness, dread, and the macabre mani-
fested itself .

But when night had thrown her pall
Upon that spot, as upon all,
And the mystic wind went by
Murmuring in melody,
Then — ah, then — I would awake
To the terror of the lone lake.

Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence would solace bring
To his lone imagining . . .

Back in the United States, Poe fell spiritually in love with Mrs.
Stanard, mother of one of his friends — Poe sought a mother all his life
— and, at sixteen, was inspired to write his most haunting lyric:

Helen, thy beauty is to me

Like those Nic^an barks of yore
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,

The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,

Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy naiad airs have brought me home

To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.

554

EDGAR ALLAN POE

Lo! in yon brilliant window niche

How statue-like I see thee stand,

The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which

Are Holy Land!

Entering the University of Virginia at seventeen, Poe gave way to
the weakness and restlessness which were to darken his days and nights.
He drank for excitement, drank too much, ran into debt, and, within a
year, was forced to leave the university. He quarreled with his foster
father and ran away from home. He made a hurried trip to Boston and
spent what money he had on the publication of his first volume,
Tamerlane — the first edition is now one of the rarest pieces of Ameri-
cana. Either as a gesture toward his birthplace or in the hopes of win-
ning commendation from the Boston cognoscenti, he signed the book
"By a Bostonian." It was unnoticed. He then changed his name to E. A.
Perry and enlisted in the United States Army.

Poe remained in the army from his eighteenth to his twentieth year.
He was a reluctant soldier, and he seemed grateful when Allan procured
his discharge. However, within a few weeks after his return to Rich-
mond, Poe's "imp of the perverse" drove him to renewed clashes with
his foster father. Fresh excesses were followed by protestations of regret
He spent a little time with his brother, who was dying of drink and
consumption, and visited his aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm, and her seven-
year-old daughter, Virginia. Allan hoped that a better military training
would reform his adopted son, and got him an appointment at West
Point. Six months later Poe was dismissed for disobeying orders.

At twenty-two Poe turned against Allan, and was rejected by him.
Homeless and penniless, he came to New York and worked as a proof-
reader. From this time on the outcast fought a losing struggle with
poverty, illness, and alcohol. He drove himself to exhaustion; he wrote
desperately in every medium and on every subject: short stories, essays,
poems, analyses of handwriting, a plagiarized book on conchology. At
twenty-four he achieved momentary success when his story "Ms. Found
in a Bottle" won a prize; the award was fifty dollars. At twenty-seven
he married his cousin, Virginia, who was thirteen and tubercular. It has
been thought that he married Virginia to make sure that he would have
Mrs. Clemm as a substitute mother. Mrs. Clemm took care of them
both.

Poe's next ten years were a succession of brief triumphs and long de-

555

LIVES OF THE POETS

feats. He was irregularly engaged as editor and regularly discharged. He
disappeared for days and was brought home delirious; he could no
longer exist without stimulants. For every friend he made he lost two.
He fluttered for a while in and out of the literary dovecotes with the
pretty songbirds housed in Griswold's American Female Poets, a bedrag-
gled raven among the twitterers. The situation became hopeless. In a
frantic effort to live on the little money that he had borrowed and Mrs.
Clemm had begged, Poe moved the battered family to Fordham, then a
little village thirteen miles out of New York. Here Poe was in such
need that he could not afford stamps to mail his manuscripts or wood to
heat the stove. His old army coat served as a blanket, and Virginia was
warmed by a tortoise-shell cat that slept on her bosom. At Fordham
Virginia died, and Poe collapsed completely.

Poe was now thirty-eight, violently neurotic and almost insanely de-
pressed. He turned to various women for platonic friendship, mothering,
and financial assistance. At thirty-nine he became practically engaged
to the widowed Sarah Helen Whitman, who was forty-five; at the same
time he wrote appealing letters to the married Mrs. Richmond. He
attempted suicide, and was saved because his stomach could not tolerate
the overdose of narcotics. Pursued by hallucinations, Poe disappeared
in Baltimore. A compositor on the Baltimore Sun found him in a tavern,
haggard, unwashed, and inarticulate, and took him to the hospital. Poe
was in delirium four days, talking to specters on the wall. When he
died, October 7, 1849, he was not yet forty-one.

Walt Whitman echoed the sentiments of most of his contemporaries
when he wrote, "Almost without the first sign of moral principle or
the simpler affections of the heart, Poe's verses illustrate an intense
faculty for technical and abstract beauty with the rhyming art to ex-
cess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes and a demo-
niac undertone behind every page . . . brilliant and dazzling, but with
no heat." A discerning analyst of other poets' weaknesses, Poe was a
singularly incompetent critic of his own work; he could never separate
the genuinely inspired from the ornate and essentially shallow. Most of
his poetry, like his prose, is cheap Gothic, a flashy mixture of imitation
roses and real gargoyles. He was drawn to the tawdry, which he em-
bellished with tinsel, and to the morbidly melancholic — he considered
the death of a beautiful woman the most poetic of all subjects. Yet
this very predilection made him a specialist in tales of horror and the
grotesque — he started a literary fashion with the combination of terror

556

EDGAR ALLAN POE

and deduction in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," 'The Gold-Bug,"
and 'The Mystery of Marie Roget."

Beneath the aesthetic bad taste, there is something else. What
Poe attempted was a purposeful blurring of rational content for the
sake of verbal excitement; he hoped to achieve a poetry of pure incan-
tation. "A poem in my opinion/' he wrote, "is opposed to a work of
science by having, for its immediate object, an indefinite instead of a
definite pleasure — being a poem only so far as this object is attained/*
This restricted definition accounts for much of Poe's gaudiness, the
theatrical claptrap and elaborate tastelessness. "The Raven" is a decla-
mation piece, in which an eerie idea is made ridiculous by vulgar
rhythms and an incongruous light-verse structure. 'The Bells" is a
childish piling up of sounds, a wearisome echolalia. Emerson spoke of
Poe as "the jingle man," and there is some basis for the term. However,
the best of his poems — "A Dream within a Dream," "Romance," 'The
City in the Sea," "To One in Paradise," "The Sleeper," and a few of the
small lyrics — move with the magic of unreality. They are vague, ghost-
ridden, hallucinatory, but they are as persistent as a recurring dream.
They are full of the music of another sphere, a shadowy half-world,
out of space, out of time, where Poe's spirit was unhappily at home.

557

XXV

Glory of the Commonplace

WALT WHITMAN;

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the

stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and

the egg of the wren,

And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of

heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all

machinery,
And the cow crunching with depressed head surpasses any

statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

THIS FRAGMENT from "Song of Myself" might stand as Whitman's
credo. Its summoning of the immense and the miraculous in the
ordinary has the spirit of Blake's "world in a grain of sand," and
Blake might well have sanctioned the free form in which it was ex-
pressed. It was a credo that broke down barriers, refused to acknowledge
limitations, and, speaking with the voice of one man — "one's self I sing,
a simple separate person" — spoke for all men. To Whitman the cosmic
and the commonplace were synonymous.

558

WALT WHITMAN

The commonplace I sing;

How cheap is health! how cheap nobility!

Abstinence, no falsehood, no gluttony, lust;

The open air I sing, freedom, toleration,

(Take here the mainest lesson — less from books — less from

the schools,)

The common day and night — the common earth and waters,
Your farm — your work, trade, occupation,
The democratic wisdom underneath, like solid ground for all.

The author of the most controversial book of poems ever published
in America was born May 31, 1819, at West Hills, Huntington, Long
Island, and was christened Walter Whitman, Jr. He was the second
son in a family of nine children. His father was a country carpenter
who, looking for steadier work, moved to Brooklyn, where the boy was
brought up among Quakers. Life at home was sordid if not actually
squalid. All of the youngster's affection was centered in his mother, who
was an ailing illiterate. His father was a defeated and almost inarticulate
man who admired Tom Paine and proudly named three of his sons
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson. One sis-
ter, Hannah, was a neurotic slattern. Jesse, the oldest brother, was a
ne'er-do-well who contracted syphilis and died in an insane asylum.
Andrew was shifty as well as shiftless. Edward, the youngest, was a
half-wit. Jeff, like his father, was an awkward, barely competent boy
who, later, became an engineer in St. Louis. George was the most suc-
cessful; he became inspector of iron pipes on the Board of Water Works.
Long after Leaves of Grass had been acclaimed as a pioneering work,
George acknowledged that he cared nothing about his brother's writings.
"I saw the book," he said, "but I didn't read it at all — didn't think it
worth reading. Mother thought as I did."

Whitman's schooling was over at eleven. At that age he ran errands
for a firm of lawyers; at twelve he became a printer's apprentice and
learned to set type; at thirteen he worked at the press of the Long
Island Star. His adolescence was marked by a restlessness which became
a habit and drove him from one place to another. He had to work, but
he hated to be tied down; he wanted, he said, "to just live." At sixteen
he earned a living as a compositor in New York, but at seventeen he
felt he had had enough of journalism and decided to be a school-
teacher. During the next three years young Whitman taught at seven
different country schools while he boarded with families of his pupils.

559

LIVES OF THE POETS

At twenty the youth changed his mind again and determined to be
an editor. He bought a small press and founded the Long Islander in
his home town of Huntington; he did practically all the work of getting
out the paper, including the presswork. Nevertheless, a year after
starting zealously to publish his own paper, he abandoned it and got
employment elsewhere. He seemed unable to hold a job. For six years
he worked on half a dozen dailies and weeklies; at twenty-seven he
became editor of the Brooklyn Eagle.

He had already been writing prose and verse, some of which had
been published. The pieces of fiction were turgid and wallowed in
rhetoric; the short stories bore such lurid titles as "One Wicked Im-
pulse," "Death in the Schoolroom," "Revenge and Requital: A Tale of
a Murderer Escaped," "Wild Frank's Return." The poems were worse.
Composed in conventional rhythms and dogged rhyme, the verse
Cchiefly on lugubrious subjects) was platitudinous in sentiment, stilted
in expression, and, even for a beginner, amateurishly absurd in tone and
technique.

Readers who know only the Whitman of Leaves of Grass would never
recognize the author in the ballad stanzas of "The Inca's Daughter," the
mawkish horrors of "The Play-Ground," the stereotyped moralizing of
"We All Shall Rest at Last," 'The End of All," and, to name only one
more of many equally embarrassing examples, "The Love That Is Here-
after." To be believed "The Spanish Lady" must be read in its entirety,
but its melodramatic childishness is apparent in the concluding
quatrain:

High gleams the assassin's dagger;

And by the road that it has riven,
The soul of that fair lady

Has passed from earth to heaven.

Whitman remained on the Eagle until he was almost thirty. During
this two-year tenure he helped his father build houses, wrote dutifully
dull articles and breezy causeries, attended the theater, went to the
opera — his favorite composer was Donizetti — reviewed books, and wrote
Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate, a temperance tract disguised as a
novel. He also turned out sentimental fillers and other hack work,
promenaded Broadway, and flirted alternately with low politics and high
society. At this period, Whitman conducted himself like a dandy; he
sported a frock coat and high hat, carried a small cane, and wore a
flower in his lapel. A chance acquaintance told him about a position

WALT WHITMAN

open on the New Orleans Daily Crescent and in February, 1848,
Whitman, taking his fifteen-year-old brother Jeff with him, traveled
South over the Alleghenies, across Ohio, and down the Mississippi. His
journalism struck a new low in New Orleans and his connection with
the Crescent lasted less than three months. By June, Whitman was
back again in Brooklyn, where he became editor of the Freeman, a
liberal weekly, which he left with a bitter valedictory at the end of a
year.

More than forty years later, to protect himself from imputations of
homosexuality, Whitman referred loosely to an illicit affair in the South
and to mysterious, unnamed children. The utterance was unsupported
by the smallest scrap of evidence. Nevertheless, some commentators ac-
cepted Whitman's vague and obviously defensive remarks as facts and
agreed upon New Orleans as the scene of a furtive romance. One biog-
rapher unearthed a photograph of a dusky beauty who, she contended,
was Whitman's "dark lady/' The record reveals nothing nearly so color-
ful; there is not the slightest indication of a passionate, or even a
platonic, attachment.

In his late twenties and early thirties Whitman began to experiment
in a poetic style which, if not wholly new in literature, was new for
him. It was altogether different from die crude and clumsy verse he had
published in the newspapers. The form was free; the rhythms were
flexible; the rhymes had all but vanished. The combination of strong
stresses and irregular beat suggested the sonority of the King James
version of the Bible; the balanced repetitions, parallelisms and cadences,
in common with those of the Hebrew psalmists, compensated for the
lack of strict metrical measures. Whitman's notebooks of this period are
full of a new language, part prose, part poetry, which anticipates the
later work. The half -mystical, half-axiomatic idiom which he made his
own is heard in such jottings as:

I will not be a great philosopher and found any
school. . . . But I will take each man and woman of
you to the window, and my left arm shall hook you
round the waist, and my right shall point you to
the endless and beginningless road. Not I — not
God — can travel this road for you.

I am the poet of the body,
And I am the poet of the soul.

LIVES OF THE POETS

I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters

And I will stand between the masters and the slaves . . .

I will buoy you up,

Every room of your house do I fill with armed men.

Lovers of me, bafflers of hell,

Sleep, for I and they stand guard this night;

Not doubt, not fear, not Death shall lay finger upon you.

I have embraced you, and henceforth possess you all to

myself . . .

God and I are now here.
Speak! What would you have of us?

In his thirty-fifth year the germinal experiments became an achieve-
ment when the notebook jottings were distilled into twelve poems. Two
of Whitman's friends, James and Thomas Rome, permitted him to set
the pages in their little Brooklyn printshop. Whitman had already de-
cided on the title. He called it Leaves of Grass, and his celebration of
what he termed the "democratic herbage," which he identified with the
American spirit, was published appropriately on the Fourth of July.
The unheralded appearance of this thin volume in 1855 — the same year
in which Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha was published — marked the
close of one cultural order in the United States and the beginning of
another; with it American poetry broke with tradition and established
its own poetic utterance.

With Leaves of Grass Whitman altered his name and his appear-
ance. He ceased to call himself Walter, Junior, and signed himself
Walt The portrait facing the tide page symbolized the change. The
well-groomed dilettante had disappeared; the slick cane and the tailored
frock coat had vanished in favor of rough workman's clothes, belted
trousers, and hip boots. The poet, slouching deliberately, was shown in
a careless pose, coadess, the shirt open at the throat, revealing a colored
undershirt, and felt hat rakishly tilted across the forehead. The Whit-
man legend had begun.

It was a legend which Whitman cultivated assiduously; he worked
at the book and the legend the rest of his life. With the first publication
of Leaves of Grass Whitman advertised himself as a fellow laborer,
"beloved by the illiterate." It was a time of self-puffery (Barnum was its
genius), and Whitman did not disdain to write his own unsigned re-
views. Hoping for a mass audience and wanting to make sure that the
reader recognized the new democratic person as well as the new poet

WALT WHITMAN

of democracy, he wrote: "Of pure American breed, large and lusty —
age thirty-six years — never once using medicine — never dressed in black,
always dressed freshly and cleanly in strong clothes — neck open, shirt-
collar flat and broad, countenance tawny transparent red, beard well-
mottled with white, hair like hay after it has been mowed in the fields
— a person singularly beloved and looked toward, especially by young
men and the illiterate — one who does not associate with literary people
— never on platforms, amid the crowds of clergymen or aldermen or
professors — rather down in the bay with fishers in their fishing-smacks,
or riding on a Broadway omnibus, side by side with the driver, or with
a band of loungers over the open grounds of the country . . . one in
whom you will see the singularity which consists in no singularity —
whose contact is no dazzle, but has the easy fascination of what is
homely and accustomed, as of something you knew before and were
waiting for — there you have Walt Whitman, the begetter of a new
offspring in literature."

Whitman was obviously protesting too much, pushing exaggeration
to the point of mendacity, especially when, for the sake of popular ap-
peal, he posed as a man in the street, who loved the "free rasping talk
of men." In the United States and Democratic Review, he continued to
picture himself (anonymously) as "one of the roughs, large, proud, af-
fectionate, eating, drinking, breeding, his costume manly and free, his
face sunburnt and bearded, his postures strong and erect." Whitman's
insistence on his maleness was pathological, but he seemed unaware of
the implications when he wrote: "He works the muscle of the male and
the teeming fibre of the female throughout his writings, as wholesome
realities, impure only by deliberate intention and effort. ... If health
were not his distinguishing attribute, he would be the very harlot of
persons." Three of such highly revealing self-attributes were printed as
press notices in the second edition of Leaves of Grass.

There was excuse for some of this puffery. Whitman had to blow his
own trumpet to drown out the jeers which issued from the critics in a
chorus of catcalls. "The book is an impertinence toward the English
language; in sentiment it is an affront upon the recognized morality of
respectable people," wrote the Christian Examiner in one of the more
restrained reviews. 'We leave this gathering of muck to the laws which,
certainly, if they fulfill their intent, must have power to suppress such
obscenity," declared the New York Criterion. "We do not believe there
is a newspaper so vile that it would print extracts." The Boston
Intelligencer outdid the Criterion in viciousness, blasting the book as

563

LIVES OF THE POETS

"this heterogeneous mass of bombast, egotism, vulgarity, and nonsense.
The beastliness of the author is set forth in his own description of him-
self, and we can conceive no better reward than the lash for such a
violation of decency as we have before us. . * . The author should be
kicked from all decent society as below the level of the brute. There
is no wit or method in his disjointed babbling, and it seems to us he
must be some escaped lunatic raving in pitiable delirium."

The English reviewers were only a little less savage. The London
Critic sneered: "Is it possible that the most prudish nation in the world
will accept a poet whose indecencies stink in the nostrils? . . . Walt
Whitman is as unacquainted with art as a hog is with mathematics.'*
The last phrase seemed an echo of a column in The New York Times
which held that the author of Leaves of Grass was ''A centaur, half
man, half beast . . . who roots like a pig among the rotten garbage of
licentious thoughts/'

By a paradoxical act of poetic justice, the first signs of recognition
came from puritan and proverbially tight-lipped New England. Whittier
had thrown the book in the fireplace after one horrified look, and Lowell
considered it nothing more than "a solemn humbug." However, the
scholarly Charles Eliot Norton gave the little volume a sensitively
balanced review, which began: "A curious and lawless collection . . .
neither in rhyme nor in blank verse, but in a sort of excited prose broken
into lines without any attempt at measure or regularity. . . . But the
writer/' continued Norton, "is a new light in poetry." An even more
favorable notice was written by Edward Everett Hale, the famous Bos-
ton clergyman and, later, author of The Man -without a Country. Con-
ceding that the book was "odd and out of the way," Hale contended
that "one reads and enjoys the freshness, simplicity, and reality of what
he reads, just as the tired man, lying on the hillside in summer, enjoys
the leaves of grass about him. . . . There are, in this curious book,
little thumbnail sketches of life — which, as they are unfolded one after
another, strike us as real, so real that we wonder how they came on
paper."

The most unexpected word of commendation came from Ralph
Waldo Emerson. The poorly printed book of twelve effusions by an un-
known poet printed by an unheard-of publisher was acknowledged with
unreserved generosity by the famous man a few days after it was re-
ceived. Emerson did not write to Whitman as a master craftsman to an
untried apprentice, but as one member of a fraternity of poets to an-
other. "Dear Sir," wrote Emerson, "I am not blind to the worth of the

564

WALT WHITMAN

wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find it the most extraordinary piece
of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy
in reading it, as great power makes us happy. ... I give you the joy of
your free and brave thought ... I find incomparable things said in-
comparably well. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us,
and which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the begin-
ning of a great career."

Emerson's salutation had prophetic overtones, but it was a prophecy
that was not fulfilled for many years. The great career was questioned,
derided, interrupted, assailed, and all but destroyed. Whitman himself
was responsible for some of the assaults, especially those which bela-
bored the sexual implications of his work, for Whitman was not above
provoking conservatives and outraging the orthodox with an aggressive
frankness that was close to exhibitionism. "Sex will not be put aside,"
he wrote in one of his thumping estimates of Leaves of Gross, "it is the
great ordination of the universe. . . . Right and left he [Whitman]
flings his arms, drawing men and women with undeniable love to his
close embrace, loving the clasp of their hands, the touch of their necks
and breasts and the sound of their voices. All else seems to burn up
under his fierce affection for persons/'

The affection was not only fierce but all-inclusive. A protagonist of
the common man, "the divine average," Whitman celebrated humanity
— proud, affectionate, sensual, garrulous, and imperious — by celebrating
himself. He declared the unity at the very beginning of his challenging
and, in many ways, his most important poem, "Song of Myself:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

The identification of one man, himself, and all men continued to
grow as the poems grew in number. The second edition of Leaves of
Grass ran to 384 pages; the original twelve poems had increased to
thirty-two. The third edition, published five years after the first, con-
tained 456 pages and 124 new poems as well as drastic revisions of the
old ones. Subsequent editions added other poems and groups of poems,
but nothing of great significance. The ninth edition, completed in
1891, was the last to be supervised by Whitman himself. The essential
quality of the work continued to be misunderstood by most reviewers.
A quarter of a century after the initial publication of Leaves of Gross,

565

LIVES OF THE POETS

the publication of a new and enlarged edition drew repetitions of the
old charges. The New York Tribune referred to it as "the slop-bucket of
Walt Whitman" and said that the basic question was "whether anyone
— even a poet — ought to take off his trousers in the market place."

The publication of Leaves of Grass gave Whitman a reputation, but
it scarcely enhanced his income. He fell back on journalism; in the
spring of 1857 he became editor of the Brooklyn Daily Times. His edi-
torials were more speculative and, at the same time, more searching;
he protested against organized prostitution, legalized chicanery, and so-
cial abuses accepted by the great majority.

Politically he was disillusioned. Distrusting the fanaticism of the
Abolitionists and disgusted with the pro-slavery leaders of the Demo-
crats, Whitman turned against all parties. He angrily described a con-
vention which "exhibited a spectacle such as could never be seen except
hi our own age and in these States. The members who composed it
were, seven-eighths of them, the meanest kind of bawling and blowing
office-holders, office-seekers, pimps, malignants, conspirators, murderers,
fancy men, custom-house clerks, contractors, kept-editors, spaniels well
trained to carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels, disunionists, terrorists, mail-
riflers, slave-catchers, pushers of slavery, creatures of the would-be Presi-
dents, spies, bribers, compromisers, lobbyers, spongers, ruined sports,
expelled gamblers, policy-backers, monte-dealers, duellists, carriers of
concealed weapons, deaf men, pimpled men scarred inside with vile
disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people's money
and harlots* money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the
lousy combings and born freedom-sellers of the earth. And whence
came they? From back yards and bar-rooms; from out of the custom-
houses, marshals' offices, post-offices, and gambling hells; from the
President's house, the jail, the station-house; from unnamed byplaces,
where devilish disunion was hatched at midnight; from political hearses
and from the coffins inside, and from the shrouds inside of the coffins;
from the tumors and abscesses of the land; from the skeletons and skulls
in the vaults of the federal almshouses; and from the running sores of
the great cities. Such, I say, formed or absolutely controlled the forming
of, the entire personnel, the atmosphere, nutriment and chyle, of our
municipal, State and national politics — substantially permeating, han-
dling, deciding, and wielding everything — legislation, nominations,
elections, 'public sentiment,' etc. — while the great masses of the people,
farmers, mechanics, and traders were helpless in their grip."

It was a difficult time. Whitman was not only depressed but dis-

566

WALT WHITMAN

heartened. America had failed to live up to his hopes; not only politics
but humanity had betrayed him. Frustrated but not resigned, Whitman
lashed out against himself and his ideals. The mood of angry despond-
ency increased; it was whipped up in "Respondez!" a poem so bitter
that Whitman did not include it in his final collected works. First pub-
lished in 1856, it was discarded in all editions after 1876 and can be
found only in the "Rejected Poems." A vast irony, furious and unfa-
miliar, cries out of such lines as:

I pronounce openly for a new distribution of roles.

Let that which stood in front go behind! and let that which

was behind advance to the front and speak;
Let murderers, bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new prop-
ositions!
Let faces and theories be turned inside out! let meanings be

freely criminal, as well as results!

Let there be no suggestion above the suggestion of drudgery!
Let none be pointed toward his destination! . . .
Let the people sprawl with yearning, aimless hands! let their

tongues be broken! let their eyes be discouraged! let none

descend into their hearts with the fresh lusciousness of

love! . . .

— Let the theory of America still be management, caste, com-
parison!

(Say! what other theory would you?)
Let them that distrust birth and death still lead the rest!

(Say! why shall they not lead you?)
Let the crust of hell be neared and trod on! let the days be

darker than the nights! let slumber bring less slumber

than waking time brings!
Let the world never appear to him or her for whom it was all

made!
Let the heart of the young man still exile itself from the heart

of the old man! and let the heart of the old man be exiled

from that of the young man!
Let the sun and moon go! let scenery take the applause of the

audience! let there be apathy under the stars!
Let freedom prove no man's inalienable right! every one who

can tyrannize, let him tyrannize to his satisfaction!
Let none but infidels be countenanced!

567

LIVES OF THE POETS

Let the eminence of meanness, treachery, sarcasm, hate, greed,
indecency, impotence, lust, be taken for granted above
all! . . .

Let the earth desert God, nor let there ever henceforth be
mentioned the name of God!

Let there be no God!

Let there be money, business, imports, exports, custom, au-
thority, precedents, pallor, dyspepsia, smut, ignorance,
unbelief!

For a while it seemed as though Whitman had found his place in the
world of journalism and politics. His editorials were provocative; they
often offended the conservatives; but he managed to keep his job on the
Daily Times and began publishing a series of historical articles about
Brooklyn. He had composed no less than twenty-five of these pieces
when the Civil War broke out and his brother George, wounded at
Fredericksburg, was taken to Washington. Whitman hastened there.

Various explanations have been offered to account for Whitman's
failure to enlist and fight for the Union which he had magnified so
vehemently in prose and verse. It has been suggested that Whitman
considered himself too old to become a soldier at forty-two, and also that
he refused to take up arms because of his Quaker upbringing. It is
more likely, however, that his temperamental resistance to enforced dis-
cipline, his lifelong habit of loafing and "inviting his soul," unfitted him
for regimentation. Whitman found that George had not been seriously
hurt; he learned to dress wounds, and remained in Washington twelve
years. He had already had some experience with wounded men in
Brooklyn prisons and New York hospitals; now he devoted himself to
nursing disabled soldiers. Washington was one huge hospital, and Whit-
man gave every moment to his work of mercy. Most of all, he gave
himself. 'There is something in personal love, caresses, and the mag-
netic flood of sympathy/' he wrote in Hospital Visits, "that does, in its
way, more good than all the medicine in the world." Whitman had no
income, but he did enough hack work to keep himself going. He
squeezed out enough money to supply his charges with gifts of tobacco,
stamps, small sums for knickknacks, an apple or orange, or even an
occasional book. Whitman talked intimately with the bedridden men,
wrote letters for them, and was inspired to compose the deeply moving
series Drum-Taps, in which the poet's emotion is controlled and clarified
by saddening experience. From a persistent self-concern Whitman was

568

WALT WHITMAN

moved to a deep concern for others; instead of inditing abstract pa-
triotic paeans to democracy, he framed lines which reveal the beauty
and terror of life, and a practical sharing with humanity.

Whitman's services as a wound-dresser mollified those who had vili-
fied him as a writer. As late as 1865, ten years after the publication of
Leaves of Grass, The New York Times reviewed Drum-Taps and found
that Whitman was deficient on all counts as a poet and that his prod-
uct, whatever it might be called, showed "a poverty of thought pa-
raded forth with a hubbub of stray words." But, continued the Times,
"Mr. Whitman has better claims on the gratitude of his countrymen
than he will ever derive from his vocation as a poet. . . . His devo-
tion to the most painful of duties in the hospitals at Washington dur-
ing the war will confer honor on his memory when Leaves of Grass
are withered and when Drum-Taps have ceased to vibrate."

The gratitude of Whitman's countrymen expressed itself through a
member of Lincoln's cabinet; the poet was given a clerkship in the In-
dian Bureau of the Department of the Interior. A few months after
his position seemed secure, James Harland, Secretary of the Interior,
discovered Whitman's book in a private drawer, read it with horror,
and discharged Whitman in haste. The poet's friends were indignant.
William Douglas O'Connor produced a fiery pamphlet entitled The
Good Gray Poet, and Whitman was "transferred" to the office of the
Attorney General, where he remained until he was fifty-three. At that
age he still had to struggle to survive; he not only had to print but ped-
dle his own books. A notice attached to the fifth edition of Leaves
of Grass informed the reader that Whitman's books (including Passage
to India at one dollar and the panoramic Democratic Vistas at seventy-
five cents) could be obtained from the author.

Nevertheless, although he complained of pains in his head, which
he attributed to germs contracted during his work as wound-dresser,
and spells of alarming faintness, Whitman liked Washington. He con-
tinued to see many of the soldiers he had attended in the wards and at-
tracted young men by his curiously masculine motherliness. "I think
to be a woman is greater than to be a man," he said. He visualized "in-
tense and loving comradeship, the personal and passionate attachment
of man to man," as the key to a richer democracy. He formed a close
attachment with an eighteen-year-old Irish-American boy, Peter Doyle,
who had been a Confederate prisoner of war and was a street-car con-
ductor. Whitman wrote him long letters and their correspondence lasted
more than twelve years.

569

LIVES OF THE POETS

The motherliness of this hearded man has mystified many readers.
Whitman himself created much of the mystification; he seemed to en-
joy playing the double role of man and woman. He told Edward Car-
penter, one of his earliest English admirers, that there was something
conceded in every one of his lines, "some passages left purposely ob-
scure. There is something in my nature furtive like an old hen , . .
something that few, very few, only one here and there, perhaps often-
est women, are at all in a position to share/'

Whitman's self-contradictions extended to his health. He alternately
bragged about his "robustiousness" — he wrote to his mother that he was
like "a great wild buffalo" — and complained of blood poisoning and
spells of deathly weakness. At fifty Whitman felt homeless and alone;
he longed for his family. A scarcely veiled obsession with death, which
had haunted him for years, was now outspoken. He drew up his will;
his poems became increasingly preoccupied with mortality. He lived
twenty more years and continued to make additions to his poems, but
his richly creative days were over.

Turning fifty-four, Whitman paid a visit to his mother, who was liv-
ing with his brother George in Camden, New Jersey. A few days
later his mother died, and Whitman suffered a complete collapse. He
could not be moved. George gave him a room on the upper floor of
his house, and Whitman remained in Camden. His life changed vis-
ibly. He grew suddenly old; spasmodic pains made him look much
feebler than he was. Short bursts of energy were followed by long fits
of depression. "If you write about my books/' he wrote Edward Dow-
den, the English critic who had unreservedly praised him abroad,
"I think it would be proper and even essential to include the impor-
tant facts they and their author are contemptuously ignored by the
recognized organs here in the United States, rejected by the publish-
ing houses, and the author deprived of his means of support." He was
reduced to selling books from a basket in the streets of Camden. Al-
though he got out of doors a little he could not walk any distance.

Whitman never recovered from the seizure suffered in his mid-
fifties, although it took him twenty years to die. For a while in his
early sixties his health seemed to improve. He undertook a journey as
far as Colorado and delivered a lecture on Lincoln — his poem "When
Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" was beginning to be recognized
as a native classic. At sixty-five he lived in a dingy place in Camden
near a railway crossing, in a room littered with old newspapers. Trains
shrieked by and the smells from a fertilizer factory were almost over-
powering. A sailor's widow kept house for him, cooked his meals, and

570

WALT WHITMAN

patched his shirts. Admirers collected sums of money and sent them
to him. To provide him with a means of transportation, he was pre-
sented with a horse and huggy by thirty-two well-wishers, among whom
were Oliver Wendell Holmes and Samuel L. Clemens.

At sixty-nine he suffered a new series of paralytic shocks. Besides
being crippled, he was tortured with kidney trouble. He was able to
rouse himself sufficiently to attend a celebration on his seventieth birth-
day and, a year later, deliver his Lincoln lecture at a dinner in nearby
Philadelphia. Most of the time, however, he lay in his room on the top
floor of the little house on Mickle Street in Camden, dying but not
defeated. After a spell of talking, there would be long silences; he
would sit for hours in front of the stove, aimlessly stirring (or, as Ed-
mund Gosse put it, "irritating") the fire. He thought much about the
end, planned his tomb, and prepared a series of final valedictories.

At seventy-two he put together the 1891 (or Deathbed) edition
of Leaves of Grass, which had grown from the initial twelve poems to
more than three hundred. He described himself as a "hardcased, di-
lapidated, grim, ancient shellfish or time-banged conch — no legs, utterly
nonlocomotive — cast up high and dry on the shore sands." Toward the
end of December 1891, Whitman contracted pneumonia. Somehow,
he hung on through the winter* Then, on March 26, 1 892, two months
before his seventy-third birthday, he died.

The lusty sexuality which shouts its way through Leaves of Grass
contrasts strangely with the "something furtive" in Whitman's life.
The charge of homo-eroticism, often made, has never been proved
but, although Whitman may not have been actively homosexual, he
was drawn to many men. It was not only their youth which attracted
him, for they were all young fellows, but their rugged masculinity and
the rough character of their trades. They were mostly stevedores, bus-
men, drivers, soldiers, and, as in the case of Peter Doyle, car conductors,
He wrote letters to them which could only have been written,
one would imagine, by an anxious mother or a fatuous adorer. Some
of these friendships may have been platonic, but the Calamus poems
are so intensely homosexual as to remove all question of ambiguity.

Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting,
Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose

them,
And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.

571

LIVES OF THE POETS

In Calamus Whitman continually exposed himself with a combina-
tion of recklessness and naivete. Whitman took the calamus, the com-
mon sweet flag grass of America, as a distinct symbol of the male
sexual organ; he used it as the unifying symbol to celebrate manly
love:

O here I at last saw him that tenderly loves me, and returns again,
never to separate from me,

And this, O this, shall henceforth be the token of comrades, this calamus-
root shall,

Interchange it, youths with each other!

Another passage in Calamus is significant of Whitman's confusion
of homosexuality and democracy. In "Behold This Swarthy Face" he
wrote:

Yet comes one, a Manhattanese, and ever at parting kisses me lightly

on the lips with robust love,
And I on the crossing of the street or on the ship's deck give a kiss in

return;

We observe that salute of American comrades land and sea,
We are those two natural and nonchalant persons.

Na'ivet6 alone can explain this fantasy of men kissing each other on
the lips "with robust love" as the normal salute of "natural and non-
chalant" American comrades. Part of Whitman's program, he told
Emerson, was to glorify manly friendship. He made a sharp distinc-
tion between "amativeness," physical love between the sexes, and what
he called "adhesiveness," by which he meant the capacity for friend-
ship and "a personal attraction between men which is stronger than
friendship." Whitman's autoerotic tendencies made him assume an al-
most hermaphroditic attitude. His love poems often show him in a
dubiously dual role, speaking simultaneously as both sexes. His divided
nature sometimes made him misread the meaning of democracy, but it
equipped him with extra sensitivities, an awareness of the infinite va-
rieties of suffering, an elemental pity and participation.

Whitman never married. There was the beginning of what seemed
to promise a heterosexual love affair in a correspondence with Mrs.
Anne Gilchrist, widow of Alexander Gilchrist, whose unfinished life
of William Blake she had completed. When Whitman's poems were

57*

WALT WHITMAN

published in England, Mrs. Gilchrist wrote an enthusiastic review
which was also a thinly disguised confession of love. A correspondence
between the English apostle and her American idol followed. It
started with metaphysical abstractions, but, on Mrs. Gilchrist's part,
quickly developed into fervid worship. Whitman, with the Atlantic
safely between them, encouraged his correspondent and sent her his
photograph.

Mrs. Gilchrist's revealing letter to Whitman, written when she was
forty-two, thanked him for the photograph. It proceeded to relate her
early life and suddenly announced the startling discovery that in Whit-
man's poetry was "the voice of my Mate." "Although," she declared,
"it is the instinct of a woman's nature to be sought, not to seek," she
was frank and open in her avowal of love. "It is not happiness I plead
with God for — it is the very life of my soul, my love is its life. Dear
Walt, it is a sweet and precious thing this love. ... It yearns with
such passion to soothe and comfort and fill thee with sweet tender
joy." This was followed by a second letter, written in October, 1871, in
which Mrs. Gilchrist's passion mounted far beyond literature and
reticence. She not only hinted at a visit to America but proposed mar-
riage and assured Whitman that "I am yet young enough to bear thee
children, my darling, if God should so bless me."

By this time, Whitman was thoroughly disconcerted. He hoped to
evade the issue without losing a disciple; he put off writing. Finally
he realized that his ardent correspondent would not understand silence
as a dismissal. He composed a reply which was a model of tactful
negation. It was a short but by no means uncertain answer, for it said
in effect: "Don't love me. Love my book." Apologizing for the lapse
of time, he wrote: "But I must at least show you without further delay
that I am not insensible to your love. And do you feel no disappoint-
ment because I now write so briefly. My book is my best letter, my
response, my truest explanation of all. In it I have put my body and
spirit. You understand this better and fuller and clearer than anyone
else. And I too fully and clearly understand the loving letter it has
evoked. Enough that there surely exists so beautiful and delicate a re-
lation, accepted by both of us with joy."

It was obvious that Mrs. Gilchrist had mistaken the great book for
the great lover, the mask for the man; but she was not to be dis-
suaded. "I can wait," she wrote in return. "I can grow great and beauti-
ful through sorrow and suffering, working, yearning, loving so, all
alone, as I have done now nearly three years."

573

LIVES OF THE POETS

More years passed. Mrs. Gilchrist, twice put off, would be put off
no longer. She convinced herself that her reluctant lover, now in his
mid-fifties and failing in health, needed her. In March, 1876, she in-
formed Whitman that she and her children were sailing to America in
August. This time Whitman was genuinely frightened. It was too late
for evasions. It was with distinct alarm that the author of "I Sing the
Body Electric" and "A Woman Waits for Me" told her not to come.
He stressed the physical discomforts of life in America; he even men-
tioned the possibility of talking it all over in London, although he
had not the faintest intention of going abroad. "My dearest friend/'
he wrote in hasty deprecation, "I do not approve of your American
trans-settlement. I see so many things here you have no idea of — the
social, and almost every other kind of crudeness, meagerness, here
(at least in appearance). Don't do anything towards it, nor resolve
in it, nor make any move at all without further advice from me."

Here the unhappy little comedy should have ended. But Mrs. Gil-
christ was bent on anticlimax. Nothing could stop her. Taking her
children with her, she arrived in Philadelphia in September, 1876.
There she remained for several years. She never became part of Whit-
man's menage, never broke through his inherent fear of women. How-
ever, there was a happy ending of a sort. Whitman became a frequent
visitor to the Gilchrist household, loved by the family, and honored
by the woman who, failing to become the poet's wife, became his
dear friend. That so unequal a passion could have been transcended
by friendship shows the strange but adaptive power of both natures.
It was the triumph of retreat, of a love that was more "adhesive" than
"amative."

Whitman suffered as a poet almost as much from his partisans as
from his detractors. For those whom Bliss Perry called "the hot little
disciples," Whitman could do no wrong. They considered him the re-
vealer of a new gospel; his book was 'The Word," the "Bible of Dem-
ocracy." They hailed him as though he were Nature itself, a creation
apart, an originator without antecedents. Actually Whitman's philos-
ophy is an amalgam of many sources. Everything he read was funneled
and filtered through his absorptive personality. His prime debt, in-
sufficiently acknowledged, was to Emerson; many passages in the
prose of the older poet are paralleled in the poetry of the younger. For
example, in 'The American Scholar," Emerson concluded: "We have
listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the
American free man is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame.

574

WALT WHITMAN

. . . Not so, brothers and friends, please God, ours shall not be so.
We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we
will speak with our own minds/' Some twenty years after this was writ-
ten, it became Whitman's theme song. Its message — America's independ-
ence of an outworn past — was explicitly restated in Whitman's chal-
lenging "Song of the Exposition":

Come Muse, migrate from Greece and Ionia,

Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts,

That matter of Troy and Achilles' wrath, and Aeneas', Odysseus' wan-
derings,

Placard "Removed" and 'To Let" on the rocks of your snowy Parnassus,

For know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domain awaits,
demands you.

Such lines reflect the poet's program and indicate his influence.
Whitman fathered free verse, but he did much more: he also widened
the gamut, extended the subject matter, and liberated the spirit of
modern, poetry. It is not only because of his technical innovations that
Whitman became the voice of a rapidly developing civilization. In al-
most everything he wrote there is a great urgency, an onward-going
movement, the tempo and forward thrust of a half-idealistic, half -ma-
terialistic, sometimes corrupt, but ever-expanding America.

Whitman committed himself, at least in theory, to a speech which
was indigenous, recognizably American rather than English; he some-
times spoke of the Leaves as a language experiment. Poetry, he
asserted, should be founded on the colloquial tone, with "its bases
broad and low, close to the ground." In An American Primer he
urged more freedom in the use of the voice of the people. 'Ten thou-
sand native idiomatic words are growing, or are already grown, out of
which vast numbers could be used by American writers — words that
would be welcome, being of the national blood. . . . What is the fit-
ness, what the strange charm of aboriginal names? Monongahela — it
rolls with venison richness upon the palate! ... A perfect user of
words uses things — they exude in power and beauty from him — mir-
acles from his hands — miracles from his mouth. . . . We need limber,
lasting fierce words. Do you suppose the liberties and brawn of These
States have to do only with delicate lady words? With gloved gentle-
men words?"

It was a provocative theory. In practice, however, Whitman's vo-

575

LIVES OF THE POETS

cabulary was a queer mixture of living speech and literary patches, an
incongruous blend of freshness and affectation. He championed the vi-
tality of the casual word and praised the creative gusto of slang, yet
he allowed himself such polyglot phrasing as "the tangl'd long-deferred
£claircissement" and "See my cantabile — you Libertad!" as well as such
absurd coinages as "Me imperturbe," "philosophs," and "exalte", the
mighty earth-eidolon." Whitman was not afraid of inconsistencies. "Do
I contradict myself?" he shrugged, "Very well, I contradict myself, I
am large; I contain multitudes."

Whitman repels many readers not only by his lack of taste but by
his garrulousness. He lumped together the startling and the insignificant
in a cluster of sprawling catalogues — "I expected him to make the song
of the nation/' wrote Emerson in a rueful later estimate, "but he seems
content to make the inventories." Nevertheless, the shirt-sleeved prose
of Specimen Days and the stern indictments of Democratic Vistas
shake themselves free of bombast and express a spirit as great as any-
thing which emerged in the nineteenth century. Whitman's lines are
gross and sensual and poignantly tender; as John Burroughs said,
". . . they make you feel the earth was looking at you."

Whitman alternately reveals and reconciles his contradictions. His
indiscriminate acceptance is the very core of his faith; his amplitude
encloses beauty and ugliness, good and evil, in the mystic's circle
of complete affirmation.

More than a hundred years before the publication of Whitman's
epochal work, Alexis de Tocqueville, returning from his visit to
America, wrote:

The poets who lived in aristocratic ages have been eminently
successful in their delineations of certain happenings in the
life of a people or a man; but none of them ever ventured to
include within his performances the destinies of mankind, a
task which poets writing in democratic ages may well at-
tempt.

Whitman set himself to making the destiny of democratic man his
main theme. He was perfectly conscious of his task as he wrote:

Plenty of songs have been sung — beautiful, matchless songs
— adjusted to other lands than these. The Old World has
had the poems of myths, fictions, feudalism, conquest, caste,

WALT WHITMAN

dynastic wars, and exceptional characters, which have been
great. But the New World needs the poems of realities and
science, and of the democratic average and basic equality.
... I have allowed the stress of my poems from beginning
to end to bear upon American individuality and assist it —
not only because that is a great lesson in nature, amid all her
generalizing laws, but as counterpoise to the levelling tend-
encies of Democracy.

Leaves of Grass is Whitman's promise fulfilled. It is an uneven book,
ungainly, even shapeless, but it is a monumental book. It is a na-
tional phenomenon in which a poet identifies himself not only with a
continent but with the cosmos. Uttering the word "democratic, the
word en-masse," he sings seemingly of himself but actually

Of life immense in passion, pulse, and power,
Cheerful, for freest action, formed under the laws divine:
The Modern Man I sing.

'This is no book/' said Whitman. 'Who touches this, touches a
man." Never were book and man more closely integrated; here the book
is the man. In it Whitman emerges a titanic and controversial figure:
messianic, intuitive and often mistaken, roughhewn and lopsided, but
unquestionably the most challenging writer of his time and of ours.

577

XXVI

The Soul Selects

EMILY DICKIHSOH . . .
GERARD MANJLEY HOPKIMS

Two GKEAT IDIOSYNCRATIC nineteenth-century poets, one a Jesuit
priest, the other an immured New England spinster, had in com-
mon extraordinary peculiarities of style as well as the most ex-
treme reticences. Both suffered from well-meaning but misunderstand-
ing mentors and editors. Both retreated from worldly diversions, wrote
voluminously, and refused to publish their work. "Publication is the
auction of the mind/' scornfully wrote Emily Dickinson. Nothing by
Gerard Manley Hopkins and only a surreptitious seven of Emily
Dickinson's more than seventeen hundred poems appeared in print
during their lifetimes. Resentment of public notice was explicit in
Emily Dickinson's lines:

Fm nobody. Who are you?

Are you nobody, too?

Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!

They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog,
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

578

EMILY DICKINSON

EMILY DICKIHSOH

Amherst, Massachusetts, where Emily Dickinson was born Decem-
ber 10, 1830, was scarcely "an admiring bog" as far as the poet was
concerned. It regarded her privately circulated little verses with con-
descension and a kind of pity; they seemed another manifestation of
her eccentricity. Amherst was a rural and somewhat remote community
in the early nineteenth century; Emily's mothers dower had been
brought to the town by a team of oxen. Her father, Edward Dickinson,
was a country lawyer, legislator, and member of the Governor's Coun-
cil. Besides Emily, there were two other children, an older sister,
Lavinia, and a younger brother, Austin, all of whom adored him.
'When father is asleep on the sofa," she said, "the house is full/' and
her pictures of God — pictures that are teasing, often irreverent, but al-
ways affectionately intimate — are father images.

Some commentators have seen a parallel between Edward Dickinson
and Edward Moulton Barrett, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's possessive
father but, unlike the English poet, Emily was a rebellious young per-
son. A nonconforming pupil, she attended Amherst Academy and the
adjacent Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Although she passed the
routine examinations in rhetoric, geometry, chemistry, astronomy, and
languages, her attitude to religious instruction was wayward. The pre-
vailing mood of the period, reflected in the order of the day at Mount
Holyoke Female Seminary, was rigidly pietistic. Emily was unable to
learn the conventional attitudes toward sin and salvation; she would
not echo the prescribed evangelical phrases. Her companions were
quick to repeat sanctimonious platitudes and assume a penitential
tone, especially when they had done no wrong. But Emily took the
phrases more seriously; she examined them and herself. Words, to her,
were weighty, full of significance, not merely rhetorical sounds of pat
responses; the word was a thought, a decision, a deed. When the
austere Mary Lyon, founder and first principal of the Seminary, in-
sisted that "a young lady should be so educated that she can go as a
missionary at a fortnight's notice," and that "fun is a word no young
lady should use," Emily rebelled. When Miss Lyon maintained that
Christmas was not "merry" but should be observed as a fast day, Emily

579

LIVES OF THE POETS

was outraged; she was the one student who stood up and voiced her
objection. When Miss Lyon lectured about total depravity, Emily tried
to think of herself as depraved. She wrote wryly of her need of "con-
version/* declared she had "no particular objection to becoming a
Christian," and concluded, with mock self-condemnation, "I am one
of the bad ones." When she returned home, during the holidays, it was
evident that she was fretful and fatigued. When her father decided
that one year at Mount Holyoke had been enough, she was half re-
gretful, half relieved. At eighteen she faced the future with a quick
and speculative mind in which there was no touch of resignation.

As a girl Emily was said to have had many beaux. She was not
frivolous but she was gay and quick-witted; her earliest writings — a
flippant Valentine, a school composition, some random notes — disclose
an irrepressible fondness for banter. Her face was a contrast of imp-
ishness and primness. Without being pretty, she was pleasingly piquant.
She had dark, bronze-color eyes, white skin, and hair that was richly
auburn. Declining a request for a photograph, she portrayed herself:
"I have no picture, but am small, like the wren; my hair is bold, like
the chestnut burr; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass that the
guest leaves/'

The end of her nonage marked a complete change, a change that
transformed the living girl into the legend and made her haunt the
literary world as mysterious ghost, perverse yet Puritan. Something
occurred in her twenties which made the sociable young woman a soli-
tary shut-in. Poetry became her solace, the one outlet for her frustra-
tion, her confidential diary and her concealed defeat. Written in secret,
kept from prying eyes, it was, paradoxicallyr her "letter to the world/'

Between 1930 and 1932 three biographers offered conflicting evi-
dence to support their claims to four different candidates in the role
of Emily Dickinson's secret lover, for it was agreed that her poetry of
love and loss was the agonized product of experience rather than of
overactive imagination. In The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson
Genevieve Taggard presented two men who seem to have been in-
volved "in some very vital way with Emily's existence as a poet": Leon-
ard Humphrey, who died when she was twenty, and, later, George
Gould, a young man whose prospects were so dim that Emily's father
not only frowned on him but forbade his daughter to meet her suitor.
In Emily Dickinson: The Human Background Josephine Pollitt identi-
fied another and far more surprising person as the man who was re-

580

EMILY DICKINSON

sponsible for the crisis in Emily Dickinson's life and the consequent
love poems: Edward Hunt, a dashing but idealistic lieutenant, husband
of the author Helen (Jackson) Hunt, who was one of Emily Dickin-
son's few intimate friends. In Emily Dickinson Face to Face Martha
Dickinson Bianchi (Emily's niece, the only daughter of Austin and
his wife, Emily s "pseudo-sister" Sue) repeated and embroidered the
gossip about Emily's abortive affair with an anonymous married clergy-
man. Mme. Bianchi enlarged upon the hushed legend; in stage whis-
pers she told of Emily's refusal to elope and ruin another woman's
happiness, of a sudden wild flight, an ardent pursuit, a violent scene,
and a final melodramatic abnegation.

The widely contrasting accumulation of Dickinsonia continued to
grow. In one year alone (1951) there appeared three volumes of vary-
ing interest and value. The first was an extended selection of the
poet's prose: Emily Dickinsons Letters to Doctor and Mrs. Josiah Gil-
bert Holland. These letters, crowded with intimate confidences, do-
mestic details, and strays of poetry, are rich in revelations of the life
and ways of the period, and furnish fresh evidence of Emily's maturing
mind. This was followed by a "shocker," Rebecca Patterson's The Rid-
dle of Emily Dickinson. Based upon a mass of misreadings, irrelevant
surmises, and a completely false hypothesis, Mrs. Patterson attempted
to prove that the poet was a Lesbian, and that her poetry was a long
and doleful compensation for the loss of a young widow (Kate Scott
Turner, Sue's onetime schoolmate) who had paid a few visits to the
Dickinson home. The end of the year produced another biography,
Richard Chase's Emily Dickinson, a dignified, sensitive, and scholarly,
if unexciting, examination of the poet and her writing.

Long before this, in 1938, a book had been published which clari-
fied the "mystery," sifted the tales and conjectures, and established a
convincing relation of the woman to her work. In spite of more recent
reappraisals, it remains the most authoritative as well as the most read-
able biography. In This Was a Poet, George Frisbie Whicher traced the
outlines of a straightforward and inevitable series of events.

In 1862,, when she was thirty-two, Emily Dickinson sent a letter
to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, author and critic and "discoverer"
of her poetry. In it she showed how close — or how distant — had been
the two men who had influenced and affected her most deeply. She
wrote: "When a little girl, I had a friend who taught me Immortality;
but venturing too near, himself, he never returned. Soon after my

LIVES OF THE POETS

tutor died, and for several years, my lexicon was my only companion.
Then I found one more, but he was not contented I be his scholar,
so he left the land."

It is no longer hard to brush aside the fog of distorting conjecture
and see clearly the two men who meant so much to her: the early
friend, the preceptor who died, and the later inspirer who declined
to take Emily as his scholar and, leaving her, 'left the land." The first
was Benjamin Franklin Newton, nine years older than Emily Dickin-
son and, when she met him, a law student in her father's office. They
formed an immediate friendship; he was twenty-seven and she barely
eighteen when she wrote to her future sister-in-law, "I have found a
beautiful new friend!" Newton was not a scholar, but he was an
ardent reader of unorthodox literature, a thinker at odds with his
times. He talked to his young admirer with fire and eloquence on
topics which his contemporaries considered taboo. He wrote revealing
letters and sent her books — she was particularly grateful for a copy of
Emerson's Poems, which provoked new appraisals and helped shape
her peculiar style. But she was not in love with Newton nor was he in
love with her. Three years after meeting her, Newton married a
woman twelve years older than himself. Ill of tuberculosis at the time
of his marriage, he died in 1853, a few days after his thirty-second
birthday.

Newton was, undoubtedly, the "friend who taught me Immortality"
and who, venturing too near it himself, "never returned." This was the
first tragic parting, "mourned and remembered," the first "closing" of
her life so poignantly recorded in her verse:

My life closed twice before its close;

It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil

A third event to me,
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,

As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,

And all we need of hell.

The bitterness of death, the aftermath of loss, and the emptiness
of life alone — a life twice to seem richly companioned and twice de-
nied fulfillment — are repeated with renewed pain and even greater con-

582

EMILY DICKINSON

densation of anguish in the apparently cryptic but essentially candid
lines:

I never lost as much but twice,

And that was in the sod;
Twice have I stood a beggar

Before the door of God.
Angels, twice descending,

Reimbursed my store.
Burglar, banker, father,

I am poor once more!

The first loss, sudden and cruel though it must have been, was
not crippling. It was the second descent of the angels which, promising
to "reimburse" the beggar, left the suppliant at the very door of
heaven, rejected and robbed, poorer and lonelier than ever.

A litde more than a year after Newton's death, Emily Dickinson
took a short trip to visit with her father in Washington. In Philadel-
phia, in May, 1854, when Emily was midway between twenty-three
and twenty-four, she heard a sermon by the Reverend Charles Wads-
worth, met the preacher, and fell in love with him. He was forty,
married, pastor of the Arch Street Presbyterian Church, a quiet but
devoted servant of God. Modest and immersed in his work, he was
probably unaware of the fervor he had roused in the heart of one of
his shyest listeners. But Emily immediately knew what had happened
to her.

Returning to Amherst, Emily Dickinson brooded on the spell woven
by the minister and, unconsciously, by the man. Her hopes for greater
intimacy must have been faint, but they persisted. It is likely that
some of her poems are largely dramatizations of her secret hopes, fears,
and dreams, rather than a record of events; but the breathless anticipa-
tion, the deferred delight, and final disappointment are too powerful
to be imaginary. It is impossible to draw a dividing line between the
wish and the act, the accurate moment and the blurring memory. Be-
sides, the poet warns us:

The vision, pondered long,

So plausible becomes
That I esteem the fiction real —

The real, fictitious seems.

583

LIVES OF THE POETS

The reality, robbed of visionary magnification, indicates that there
were no more than two or three meetings, occasional or chance visits
rather than clandestine reunions, and an intermittent correspondence.
Nevertheless, Emily's mind was fixed and her heart was pledged. In-
fatuation grew into obsession; she dung to some hope of companion-
ship with desperate longing. When she learned that the Reverend Wads-
worth had received a call to a pulpit in San Francisco, she was filled
with terror — Tarting is all we know of heaven/ And all we need of
hell." She said it explicitly in the poem which begins painfully but
calmly:

I cannot live with you,

It would be life,

And life is over there. . . *

and ends brokenly:

So we must keep apart,

You there, I here,

With just the door ajar

That oceans are,

And prayer,

And that pale sustenance,

Despair!

In retrospect, the poet may have heightened the pitch of grief; the
woman compelled by the craftsman may have used the old sorrow as
a crying theme rather than a catharsis. But in most of the love poems
the anguish is as genuine as it is obvious. It is heard, fiercely but
unforced, in such poems as the ones beginning "Dare you see a soul at
the white heat?" 'Who never lost, are unprepared," "Of all the souls
that stand create," Tain has an element of blank," "I dreaded
that first robin so," "The heart asks pleasure first," "Twas a long
parting," 'This merit hath the worst," "At least to pray is left, is
left," "No rack can torture me," and the tight-lipped acknowledgment,
sometimes entitled "Exclusion":

The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.

584

EMILY DICKINSON

Unmoved, she notes the chariot's pausing
At her low gate;

Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
Upon her mat.

Fve known her from an ample nation
Choose one;

Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone.

Equally pathetic is the wish-fulfillment, the unrealized ecstasy in
the stanzas beginning "Our share of night to bear," "I finished that,
that other state," "Mine by the right of the white election/' "I am
ashamed — I hide — What right have I to be a bride," 'Wild nights!
Wild nights! Were I with thee!" which Higginson wanted to omit
'lest the malignant read into it more than the virgin recluse ever
dreamed of putting there," and the oft-repeated dream of consumma-
tion:

A wife at daybreak I shall be —

Sunrise, hast thou a flag for me?

At midnight I am but a Maid;

How short it takes to make it Bride!

Although Emily got so that she could hear Wadsworth's name casu-
ally mentioned without "the stop-sensation in my soul" and could
open the box which contained his letters "without that forcing in my
breath as staples driven through/' it was a long time before she could
resign herself to a Grace ("I think they call it 'God* ") "renowned to
ease extremity." It was not resignation that drove her to make an un-
easy peace and forced her to conclude:

At leisure is the soul

That gets a staggering blow;

The width of Life before it spreads

Without a thing to do.

Emily Dickinson did not see her "dearest earthly friend/' "the fugi-
tive, whom to know was life/' for twenty years. She had dedicated
herself to him all the time. He returned to Philadelphia and came to
see her one day during the summer of 1880. Two years later he was

585

LIVES OF THE POETS

dead, at the age of sixty-nine. His picture and a privately printed book
of his sermons were found among her most guarded possessions. His
death was greater to her than all the other denials. In grief she wrote:
"I do not yet fathom that he has died, and hope I may not till he assists
me in another world."

She had kept herself to herself ever since she was twenty-five. Now,
at fifty-two, she was more than ever alone. She still had a few friends,
but she rarely saw them. Her sister Lavinia was a buffer between her
and a curious world; she withdrew increasingly into a shell of solitude.
She meditated continually on life and eternity but shunned the church.
She loved music but, declining to come in the room where it was played,
remained seated outside in the obscurity of the hall.

An indefatigable letter-writer, many of her curious notes turned into
spare and elliptical poetry. She sent enigmatic little verses with gifts
of flowers to wondering neighbors and uncomprehending children.
After Wadsworth went to California she refused to wear colors and
dressed only in white, her "white election." Neighbors questioned her
sanity; friends of the Dickinson family defended her little eccentricities.
She became the town oddity.

In her forties she had a long and intimate correspondence with her
father's friend, Otis P. Lord, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court
of Massachusetts. It was another platonic love affair, conducted, on
Emily's side, with characteristic raillery, archness, and devotion. She
was still looking for the father she never really knew, the teacher she
Bad lost, and the lover she had never had. Even Higginson, the not
too perceptive critic who she had once hoped would be her "Preceptor,""
found her more than eccentric; he referred to her as "my partially
cracked poetess" and declared her intensities were too much for personal
contact. "I never was with anyone who drained my nerve power so
much," he wrote. "Without touching her, she drew from me, , . . I
am glad not to live near her."

In 1883 her health began to fail. She suffered from nervous prostra-
tion, although she maintained that "the crisis of the sorrow of so many
years is all that tires me." She contracted Bright's disease in her mid-
fifties, and died May 15, 1886.

Since Emily Dickinson had always declined to consider a publisher,,
posthumous publication presented an unusually difficult problem. Her
sister Lavinia, who inherited all the manuscripts, was torn between a

586

EMILY DICKINSON

concern for Emily's privacy and a desire to display her gift. She turned
for help to a neighbor, Mabel Loomis Todd, who had been close to
Emily during the latter part of her life. Mrs. Todd enlisted the aid of
Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, to whom Emily had once
looked for an appreciation which was not forthcoming. Higginson and
Mrs. Todd selected some one hundred and fifteen verses which were
published in 1890 as Poems of Emily Dickinson. A second series of one
hundred and seventy-six poems was published, edited by Mabel Loomis
Todd alone. Mrs. Todd was also responsible for the publication of
Letters of Emily Dickinson in two volumes.

All these books were rather arbitrarily edited. Emily had a way of
jotting down her lines on the backs of recipes, insides of envelopes,
brown paper bags from the grocer, and across small pieces of paper.
From time to time, these scraps were bound together in "fascicules."
There were several different versions of a stanza and many different
choices of words. Sometimes her manuscripts were so crowded with
variants that it was impossible to determine what word or words she
may have preferred. Her editors had to ignore her indecisions and decide
for her. This gave many of Emily Dickinson's printed verses a false
finality. In some cases the words were misread, titles Cnot the poet's,
and often misleading) were added, and even rhymes were changed for
the sake of smoothness and "euphony." While her work was never as
flagrantly "polished" or embellished as Rimsky-Korsakov's alterations of
the roughness of Mussorgsky, nevertheless Emily Dickinson's editors
took unwarrantable liberties.

After 1894 there was a silence and a lapse of twenty years before
more of Emily Dickinson's unpublished work appeared. Lavinia quar-
reled with her neighbors, the Todds, over a few feet of disputed land
adjoining their properties. In 1896 there was a lawsuit which involved
unpleasant recriminations and brought to light gossip concerning the
relations of Emily's late brother, Austin, and the attractive Mrs. Todd.
As a result of the suit and the scandal, Mrs. Todd was no longer per-
mitted to publish any of Emily Dickinson's writings, although she re-
mained in possession of many unprinted manuscripts. Upon the death
of Lavinia, the estate and all the literary properties went to Emily's
niece, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, daughter of Sue and Austin Dickin-
son. In 1914, a new collection of 143 hitherto unpublished poems ap-
peared under the tide The Singh Hound, edited by Martha Dickinson
Bianchi. After another fifteen years, just a few months before the
centenary of the poet's birth, Martha Dickinson Bianchi and a friend,

587

LIVES OF THE POETS

Alfred Leete Hampson, edited and published Further Poems of Emily
Dickinson, with a tantalizing subtitle: 'Withheld from Publication by
her Sister Lavinia."

In 1935, fifty years after the poet's death, her niece put together still
another one hundred and thirty hitherto unpublished poems and poetic
fragments. Mrs. Bianchi died in 1945. Mrs. Todd had died in 1932,
but she had left more than six hundred and fifty unpublished poems to
her daughter Millicent Todd Bingham. These poems appeared in 1945
under die title Bolts of Melody. Finally, in 1955 there appeared a
three-volume compilation, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, the first care-
fully collated and authentic text of Emily Dickinson's seventeen hundred
and seventy-five poems, the best of which were written during the cru-
cial time between her twenty-eighth and thirty-fourth years. In 1862
alone she had written some three hundred and sixty pathetic and often
desperate poems. This was after Wadsworth's departure, putting an end
to any lingering hope of reunion, had caused a psychological crisis. "I
had a terror since September I could tell to none," she confessed to Hig-
ginson, "and so I sing as the boy does by the burying ground, because
I am afraid/' It was this "terror" which heightened her already high-
strung sensibility and quickened the activity of her metaphysical mind.

In 1958 the Dickinson canon was completed when Johnson edited
and published three volumes of her prose, consisting of more than one
thousand letters to some hundred correspondents, letters which reveal
the indisputable mark of the poet

The worst of Emily Dickinson's poetry is often interfused with the
best. Many readers have been irritated by her all-too-frequent coyness,
her excessive whimsicality, and an archness that annoys more than
it amuses. There is, moreover, an embarrassing affectation, a willful
naivet6 in many of the poems, as though the mature person were de-
termined to remain not only a child but a spoiled child. At times she
conceives herself as the supremest sufferer; she calls herself "Queen of
Calvary" and "Empress of Calvary," and the effrontery takes on new
significance when it is known that Emily always referred to Wadsworth
as a "Man of Sorrow" and that the "call" Wadsworth received from
California was from the Calvary Church in San Francisco.

Born in the same year as Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson would
have outraged her English contemporary; Christina Rossetti would have
found her style incomprehensible, her spirit incredible. Here was a
woman, presumably a Christian, who not only questioned her God but
dared tease, berate, rally, and fling herself upon Him in a burst of

588

EMILY DICKINSON

petulance. Yet it was the wayward Emily Dickinson rather than the
worshipful Christina Rossetti who was the true mystic. One, with meek
gratitude, returned to God all she had dutifully learned about Him; the
other, less submissive, gave Him back a conception of Himself that was
a unique creation.

It is Emily Dickinson's manner of handling words that affects the
reader either happily or adversely. In either case she startles. She con-
tinually plays with new ways of saying the same things — "the old
words are numb," she said — with pranks of grammar and experiments
in slant or suspended rhymes, or rhymes placed where one might least
expect them to be, as, for example, at the beginning instead of the end
of a line:

Alter? When the hills do.

Falter? When the sun

Question if his glory

Be the perfect one.

Her poems are not built on any formula but on a pattern that re-
sembles nothing so much as a kaleidoscope. She uses the simple four-
line stanza — the strict measure of the New England hymn-tunes — but
the verses shift from design to design, from one curious metaphor to
another. Nothing is fixed for long; everything changes, dissolves, and
reassembles. Hers is not so much a style as a contradiction of styles, a
paradox of reticence and flamboyance. Her sudden shifts from lean to
rich phrases, her juxtaposition of the trifling and the terrifying, suggest
the dazzling vision of Blake and the daring urgency of Hopkins.

Her themes are few. The instincts of her first editors were not wrong,
although their judgments were arbitrary, when the poems appeared in
print, arranged in four convenient categories: Life, Love, Nature, Time
and Eternity. Yet, within the limitations of her subject matter — an en-
tire poetry confined to short lyrics — the fusion of observation and imag-
ination is so uncanny as to be beyond ordinary consciousness* It is
nothing less than magic that can translate a dog's padding into "belated
feet, like intermittent plush/' that can see a train, like some catlike
monster, "lap the miles, and lick the valleys up," that can watch a storm
provoke "a strange mob of panting trees" and observe evening, "the
housewife in the west," sweep the sky "with many-colored brooms and
leave the shreds behind." Magic it is that condenses emotional excite-
ment in a phrase like "the silver reticence of death" or "death's stiff
stare" or even in a single word — such as the word accent in the tense

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line, 'The accent of a coming foot" — or the word zero to describe the
feeling of horror at encountering a snake: "zero at the bone." Hers is
an audacious idiom in which the homely and the highly imaginative
are joined — noon is "the parlor of the day/' frost is "the blond assassin,"
music is "the silver strife," clouds are 'listless elephants," shadows "hold
their breath," gentlewomen have "dimity convictions," the lightning
"skips like mice."

Emily Dickinson's mind was so much her own that there is nothing
in literature quite like her unpredictable twists of thought and her trick
of changing cryptic nan sequiturs into crystal epigrams. She is inex-
haustible and inimitable.

The brain is wider than the sky,

For, put them side by side,
The one the other will contain

With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,

For hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,

As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,

For, heft them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,

As syllable from sound.

GERARD MAMLEY HOPKINS

Like Emily Dickinson's belated recognition, Gerard Manley Hopkins'
reputation has been wholly posthumous. An unpublished poet while he
lived, unknown until more than a quarter of a century after his death,
and then rapturously acclaimed, Hopkins invented a style which makes
the most modern poet seem old-fashioned. In an unprecedented and
astonishing dazzle of effects Hopkins attempted and often achieved the
impossible: he united the sublime and the seemingly ridiculous in
poems which at first confuse, then challenge, and finally astound the
reader with their bewildering beauty.

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GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Hopkins' family was middle class, conventional, and devout. His
mother's people, die Manleys, had been yeoman-farmers for centuries;
his father was the head of a London firm of accountants, Consul Gen-
eral for Hawaii in Great Britain, and the author of two books of com-
monplace verse. There were brothers and sisters — one brother, Lionel,
lived to be ninety-eight — but Gerard fought a losing battle against poor
health and died before he was forty-five. He was born July 28, 1844,
at Stratford, Essex, now part of London; before he was eight the family
moved to Hampstead. He attended a grammar school at near-by High-
gate and at fifteen won a prize for his poem, "The Escorial."

At nineteen he entered Balliol College, Oxford, where he was taught
to write in Walter Pater's paste-jewel manner by Pater himself, and
where he met Robert Bridges, who was to become poet laureate as well
as Hopkins* editor. Although he loved music, wrote easily, and drew
skillfully, none of the arts satisfied him. He was preoccupied with re-
ligious problems and particularly with his own need of reassurance. The
poetry he wrote at this time, not unusual in phraseology or form, shows
Hopkins' youthful hunger for spiritual sustenance.

Trees by their yield
Are known; but I —
My sap is sealed,
My root is dry.
If life within
I none can show
(Except for sin),
Nor fruit above,
It must be so —
I do not love.

Other early poems include the gracefully decorative "For a Picture
of St. Dorothea/' the celebration of the senses in 'The Habit of Per-
fection," and the mystical "Heaven-Haven/' subtitled "A Nun Takes
the Veil":

I have desired to go

Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail,

And a few lilies blow.

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And I have asked to be

Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,

And out of the swing of the sea.

At twenty-one Hopkins made his decision. Finding it impossible to
remain in the Church of England, he turned away from his family and
became a convert to Catholicism. He was received into the faith by an-
other convert, John Henry Newman, who later became Cardinal New-
man. He abandoned the pleasures of art, burned his poems, made the
long retreat, studied continually, and occupied himself with the duties
of a Jesuit novice. His meditations were heightened by his observations
of nature; Hopkins' notebooks are full of acute transcriptions:

I heard the sound [of a tree being felled] and looking out
and seeing it maimed, there came at that moment a great
pang, and I wished to die and not to see the inscapes of the
world destroyed any more. . . .

Sometimes I hear the cuckoo with wonderful clear and
plump and fluty notes; it is when the hollow of a rising
ground conceives them and palms them up and throws them
out, like blowing into a big humming ewer. . . .

Very hot, though the wind, which was south, dappled very
sweetly on one's face, and when I came out I seemed to put
it on like a gown, as a man puts on the shadow he walks
into and hoods or hats himself with the shelter of a roof, a
penthouse, or a copse of trees. I mean it rippled and fluttered
like light linen; one could feel the folds and braids of it —
and indeed a floating flag is like wind visible and what
weeds are in a current. . , .

At twenty-nine, having completed his novitiate and having passed
his final examinations, Hopkins was appointed professor of rhetoric at
Roehampton. There followed three years of theological studies at St.
Beuno's College in North Wales in preparation for the priesthood. For
ten years Hopkins wrote no poetry. He returned to it only when his
superior suggested that he might compose a poem on the tragedy of the

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GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Deutschland, a German steamer which had foundered in the Thames
with a large loss of life, including five exiled Franciscan nuns. A letter
to his friend, the teacher-poet Richard Watson Dixon, explains the
turning point in Hopkins' poetic life: "I was affected by the account,
and happening to say so to my rector, he said that he wished someone
would write a poem on the subject. On this hint I set to work and,
though my hand was out at first, produced one."

The result was startling. In a language utterly unlike anything pre-
viously employed, Hopkins wove into an account of the event his spir-
itual autobiography, his longing for God's grace, his conversion, and his
dedication to Christ, the "martyr-master." The poem begins in a timbre
and pitch that is uniquely and unmistakably Hopkins':

Thou mastering me
God! giver of breath and bread;
World's strand, sway of the sea;

Lord of living and dead;

Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh,
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

I did say yes

O at lightning and lashed rod;
Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess

Thy terror, O Christ, O God;
Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night:
The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod

Hard down with a horror of height:
And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.

The frown of his face
Before me, the hurtle of hell
Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?

I whirled out wings that spell

And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host.
My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell,

Camer-witted, I am bold to boast,

To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the gtace to the
grace.

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LIVES OF THE POETS

"The Wreck of the Deutschland" reopened the tightly closed flood-
gates. The poetry could no longer be held back, but it had taken on a
new character. Hopkins sent one or two of his strange poems to a
Catholic magazine, The Month, but they were rejected and he ceased
to try for publication. Robert Bridges, his good friend and sympathetic
fellow poet, could not understand why Hopkins chose to be so difficult;
even when he learned to appreciate Hopkins' originality, Bridges con-
tinued to remonstrate with him. Apropos of Bridges' refusal to give the
"Deutschland" poem a considered second reading, Hopkins commented
wryly: "Granted that it needs study and is obscure . . . you might,
without the effort that to make it all out would seem to have required,
have nevertheless read it so that lines and stanzas should be left in the
memory and superficial impressions deepened, and have liked some
without exhausting all. I am sure I have read and enjoyed pages of
poetry that way. Why, sometimes one enjoys and admires the very lines
one cannot understand, as for instance, 'if it were done when 'tis done/
which is all obscure and disputed, though how fine it is everybody sees
and nobody disputes. And so of many more passages in Shakespere and
others. Besides, you would have got more weathered to the style and its
features."

In an earlier letter, Hopkins had replied ruefully to some of Bridges*
suggestions: "I cannot think of altering anything. Why should I? I do
not write for the public. You are my public, and I hope to convert you."
In that hope Hopkins kept on sending to Bridges poems that grew more
involved, more profound and more puzzling.

At twenty Hopkins looked the picture of the traditional dreamy,
starry-eyed poet He wore his hair long, affected wide-brimmed collars,
and indulged in "artistic" ties — he could have passed for one of the
Pre-Raphaelites. Ten years later there was a complete change; the face
matched the habit. It would have been hard to recognize the young
supersensitive and somewhat weak features in the firm mouth, the
piercing eyes, and the ascetic expression. At thirty Hopkins' was a
sharply drawn scholar's face, spiritual but stern.

After his ordination in 1877 Hopkins had a hard time being both a
priest and a poet. His parochial duties were heavy and, though he did
not dislike them, he was not happy with them. He did not distinguish
himself as a preacher; his was an exalted and very private message which
could not be delivered from a pulpit. For twelve years he served in
London, Oxford, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Chesterfield. The large in-
dustrial towns depressed him, but he gave himself to his work in spite

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GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

of increasing ill health. He spent much of his time in the slums, and it
was there that he probably contracted the disease which finally caused
his death.

It was God's world he thought he understood, not man's. Man's world
filled him with fear, even with dreadful doubt. "My Liverpool and
Glasgow experiences laid upon my mind a conviction, a truly crushing
conviction, of the misery of town life to the poor and more than to the
poor, of the misery of die poor in general/' he wrote to Dixon, "of the
degradation even of our race, of the hollowness of the century's civiliza-
tion." In a letter to Bridges, mixing despondency with prophecy, Hop-
kins was even more apprehensive: "I am afraid some great revolution is
not far off. Horrible to say, in a manner I am a Communist. . . . Their
ideal bating some things is nobler than that professed by any secular
statesman I know of. ... Besides it is just — I do not mean the means
of getting it are. But it is a dreadful thing for the greatest and most
necessary part of a very rich nation to live a hard life without dignity,
knowledge, comforts, delights or hopes in the midst of plenty — which
plenty they make. . . . But as the working classes have not been edu-
cated, they know next to nothing of all this and cannot be expected to
care if they destroy it. The more I look, the more black and deservedly
black the future looks."

By the time he was forty Hopkins was suffering from overwork, ner-
vous strain, and long periods of enervation. During two years (1882-
1884) at Stonyhurst College, Blackburn, he taught Latin and Greek,
corrected countless papers, and started various projects he was never to
complete. Poetry became even more of a luxury when he was given the
Chair of Classics at University College, Dublin. He was unhappy be-
cause he could not establish a rapport with colleagues from whom he
differed radically, and because, although he cared little for fame, he
could not devote himself to the fulfillment of his function as poet. He
felt tired, "jaded," he said. "I am a eunuch," he told Bridges, "but it is
for the kingdom of heavens' sake." He did not suffer supinely or without
protest. He could not shake off a heavy cold; he was rheumatic; he was
weakened by diarrhea. But he fought for strength "in that coffin of
weakness and dejection in which I live." "My fits of sadness," he
admitted to Bridges, "resemble madness. Change is the only relief, and
that I can seldom get."

He was sustained for a while by upsurges of poetry. Some of his
boldest poems were written during the last few years of his life. His
sense of identification with his God, his final consolation, is compact

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in "That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resur-
rection," with its apocalyptic ending:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal
diamond,

Is immortal diamond.

At the teginning of his forty-fifth year Hopkins despaired of regain-
ing the thing he had so long desired, a working strength. He weakened
rapidly; typhoid fever was followed by peritonitis; the last rites were
administered. "I am so happy, so happy/' he murmured, and died, June
8, 1889.

The history of Hopkins' manuscript is a curious one. Bridges had been
entrusted with his poetry, but it was not until 1918, almost thirty years
after Hopkins' death, that he published a partial selection, Poems of
Gerard Manley Hopkins, which was accompanied by cautious and
sometimes embarrassing notes. In 1909 Bridges had refused to permit
the publication of a complete edition of Hopkins' posthumous work,
and it was not until 1930 that such an edition appeared. Hopkins' let-
ters to Bridges had been preserved and were eventually printed, but
Bridges destroyed his own side of the correspondence. Hopkins' two
sisters burned his "Spiritual Diaries/' although his "Retreat Notes"
somehow survived.

Coining upon Hopkins for the first time, a reader should expect diffi-
culties. He must be prepared for obstacles that may seem insuperable;
he must be willing to accept musical dissonances, compared to which
the most cacophonous passages in Browning are birdlike. But he will
be amply rewarded. Behind the tortuous constructions and heaped-up
epithets is a vision which is dazzling, "immortal diamond."

To apprehend that vision the reader would do well to concentrate on
the poetry and forget all that has been written about the metrical in-
tricacies, the mathematical formulas, algebraic equations, the problem
of "Sprung Rhythm," a term which Hopkins mistakenly (and perhaps
mischievously) gave to his innovations, and to ignore Hopkins' annoy-
ing and quite unnecessary accent marks. "I had long had haunting my
ear the echo of a new rhythm which I now realized on paper," Hopkins
wrote to Dixon after finishing 'The Wreck of the Deutschland." 'To
speak shortly, it consists in scanning by accents or stresses alone, with-

596

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

out any account of the number of syllables, so that a foot may be one
strong syllable or it may be many light and one strong. I do not say the
idea is altogether new; there are hints of it in music, in nursery rhymes
and popular jingles, in the poets themselves, and, since then, I have
seen it talked about as a thing possible in critics. Here are instances:
'Ding, d6ng, Ml; Pussy's in the wfll; Who put her in? Little Johnny
Thin. Wh6 pulled her out? Little Johnny Stout/ " It is hard to believe
that these elementary classroom marks were meant to be taken seriously.

Nor should the reader be bothered by such Hopkinsese as "inscape/*
which means nothing more than "design," and "instress," which denotes
the impulse or sensation aroused by the "inscape." Hopkins loved the-
orizing almost as much as creating. "No doubt my poetry errs on the
side of oddness," he explained to Bridges. "I hope in time to have a
more balanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody, is what strikes
me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern, or
what I am in the habit of calling 'inscape' is what I above all aim at in
poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or 'inscape' to be dis-
tinctive, and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice
I cannot have escaped."

Hopkins' fondness for strange words as well as singular constructions
also tends to alienate the reader who has no time to study the reasons
for Hopkins' obscurities. "The poetical language of an age," he wrote,
"should be the current language heightened, to any degree height-
ened and unlike itself, but not an obsolete one." To achieve this lan-
guage Hopkins used a conglomerate vocabulary consisting of words he
had picked up from farmers and day laborers, dialect words from Wales
and from North England, as well as coined words and archaic words —
"I am learning Anglo-Saxon, and it is a vastly superior thing to what
we have now" — words that would give a precise picture and at the same
time suggest associations beyond the meaning. In "The Candle Indoors,"
for example, more than a single image is created in the line:

Or to-fro tender trambeams truckle at the eye . . .

"Trambeams" are the silk threads that are woven back and forth on a
frame, and hence suggest the flicker, or "truckle," of beams of light
which a candle makes on a "mild night's blear-all black." But "tram-
beams" also suggest the 'yellow moisture," reflections made by streetcars
passing "to-fro" on a misty night.

"The Windhover" is another poem which has been stubbornly and

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LIVES OF THE POETS

variously analyzed. Scholars have differed about its interpretation — as
late as 1955 a controversy raged for weeks in the London Times Sup-
plement— but there was no disagreement about the power of the poem
and the impact of the image of the central figure, the falcon

. . . in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird — the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

In spite of the complexities of his manner, it is clear that Hopkins
was seeking a fresh and invigorating speech. Opposed to the "con-
tinuous literary decorum" and stock poeticisms of the proper Victorians,
he wrote to Bridges: "I cut myself off from the use of ere, o'er, wellnigh,
vikat time, say not (for do not say*) etc. . . ." Yet he did not disdain
any device calculated to lend color and excitement to his lines. Writing
a few years after Swinburne, Hopkins lightly ridiculed Swinburne's
alliterative "delirium-tremendous imagination/' but Hopkins surpassed
him in alliterative riotousness. "The Windhover" begins:

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon . . .

'Tied Beauty" recalls the clanging consonants of the Anglo-Saxon
gleemen in its ecstatic and richly alliterated affirmation:

Glory be to God for dappled things —
For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced — fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Hopkins was not only God-intoxicated but image-drunken. He used
metaphors as explosively as Van Gogh used paint; his poems reel with
comparisons which rush recklessly from one implication to another. A
mountain brook is "a darksome burn, horseback brown," a "rollrock
highroad roaring down"; stars are the "firefolk sitting in the air" or
"flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare"; "silk-sack clouds"
are like "meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies"; aspen trees
have "airy cages" which "quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping
sun"; the thrush's song "through the echoing timber does so rinse and
wring the ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing," and the lark
pours out its music "till none's to spill nor spend." It did not take a
rainbow to make Hopkins' heart leap up. He was all amazement at the
ordinary sight of thrush's eggs "like little low heavens," of a stream with
its "wide-wandering weed-winding bank," and weeds themselves "in
wheels, long and lovely and lush." Even an old horseshoe was to him
a "bright and battering sandal."

Often indeed Hopkins stretched his figures of speech to the breaking
point. Yet there was always a logic in his comparisons, however remote
they seem at first reading. Bridges was one of many who complained
that Hopkins' way with words was sometimes too whimsical to make
sense. If some of his poems, commented Bridges, "were to be arraigned
for errors of taste, they might be convicted of occasional affectation in
metaphor, as where the hills are 'as a stallion, very-violet-sweet.' " Yet
even such an apparently wanton image is not without its understandable
frame of reference. It can be appreciated, as Robert Graves and Laura
Riding wrote in A Survey of Modern Poetry, "as a phrase reconciling
the two seemingly opposed qualities of mountains: their male animal-
like roughness and, at the same time, their ethereal quality under soft
light, for which the violet in the gentle eye of the horse makes the
proper association."

Many of Hopkins' poems, and some of the very best of them, are
crowded with more than they can bear. Yet if they are overcharged,
"barbarous in beauty," they are "charged with the grandeur of God."
What on the printed page seems a hurly-burly of blurred sound and
sense, when read aloud becomes a set of musical climaxes resolving into
a rapt cadence. The opulence may seem excessive, but it compels the
reader, even if he can never quite catch up with Hopkins' racing enthu-
siasm. To Hopkins everything was a smiting vision; nature was a divine
turmoil and God an eternal exuberance. He said it over and over in
"God's Grandeur," 'The Starlight Night," "Spring," "What I Do Is

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Me," "My Own Heart/' "Carrion Comfort," and with a breathless burst
of glory in the characteristically entitled "Hurrahing in Harvest":

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier

Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,

Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;

And, eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love's greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic — as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! —

These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,

The heart rears wings bold and bolder

And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet*

600

XXVII

Turn of
the Twentieth Century

"FIN DE SIECLE"

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY came to an uneasy end with the bour-
geois-shocking 18905. The "genteel tradition" was being opposed
on a dozen different fronts. Young women outraged their elders
by daring to dispute them, brazenly advocating woman suffrage, smok-
ing cigarettes, and proposing to join men in what had always been
considered masculine games and occupations. Young men refused to
attend customary evening prayers and went in for a flaunting Bohemian-
ism. Two English magazines, The Savoy and The Yellow Book, served
as their platform; their leaders were such poets as Ernest Dowson, who
drank himself to death at thirty-three, Lionel Johnson, who, after years
of ill health, died at thirty-five, and John Davidson, who, disillusioned
and dejected, committed suicide at fifty-two; the phenomenally fan-
tastic artist Aubrey Beardsley, dead of tuberculosis at twenty-six; the
poet-essayist Arthur Symons, who, in spite of his prodigalities, lived
until he was eighty; and the sensation-making poet-playwright Oscar
Wilde, imprisoned at fifty-four and self-exiled two years later. Their
intransigence was not, as they claimed, a renaissance but a decadence.
As decadents they had neither a definite goal nor a central philoso-
phy. They had, however, a common aim: to exalt the beautifully useless
and achieve "art for art's sake." They hoped to imbue themselves with
the spirit of the roistering Elizabethans; but where their Mermaid Tav-

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ern models were all for size, the aesthetes were all for small subtleties.
They sighed for any other era but their own and, as W. S. Gilbert
mocked, "uttered platitudes in stained-glass attitudes." They wrote self-
consciously with one eye on the British public, which they wanted to
startle, and the French poets, whom they wanted to impress. To be
heretical and, at the same time, decorative was a chief article in their
unwritten program; they ridiculed the bad taste of their predecessors and
offered nothing better than a bad taste of their own. The street lamps
of London became "the iron lilies of the Strand"; instead of being sen-
timental about virgins they were sentimental about prostitutes; street-
walkers were "soiled doves" and "fallen Magdalenes."

"The Victorian era comes to a close/' wrote Max Beerbohm, "and the
day of sancta simplicitas is ended. . . . Men and women hurled their
mahogany into the streets and ransacked the curio shops for the fur-
niture of Annish days* . . . Into whatsoever ballroom you went, you
would surely find half a score of comely ragamuffins in velvet, mur-
muring sonnets, posturing, waving their hands/'

The very term fin de siecle had a naughtily defiant ring. This was
logical enough, for the French Parnassians were boldly imitated by the
young Englishmen, and the French journals were studied so that insular
virtue could be unfavorably contrasted with continental vice. For a
while the allure of the foreign and exotic attracted a public who had
hitherto been apathetic to belles-lettres and intolerant of preciosity. It
was a gesture of acceptance if not of understanding, "as though," wrote
Holbrook Jackson in The Eighteen Nineties, "the declining century
wished to make amends for several decades of artistic monotony. It may
indeed be something more than a coincidence that placed this decade at
the close of a century, and fin de si&cle may have been at once a swan
song and a deathbed repentance."

The decade had found an audience curious for a cultivated perversity
and hothouse eroticism, an attitudinizing characteristic of decadence and
minor poets. The mood was epitomized by Dowson's artful "Non Sum
Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae," with its sadly cynical "I have
been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion," but it was also prolonged
in such poems as Lionel Johnson's "The Dark Angel" and Arthur
Symons' "London Nights," "Amoris Victima," and "Images of Good
and Evil." However, the vogue did not last beyond a ten-year span.
The reputation of Oscar Wilde, whose audacities had succeeded in
amusing a generation, collapsed beneath a notorious scandal, and the
Aesthetic Movement began to collapse with it. The satire of W. S.

602

FRANCIS THOMPSON

Gilbert's Patience and Robert Kitchens' The Green Carnation supplied
death blows. It was no longer fashionable to be bizarre, and wickedness
as a way of art and life became not only outlandish but ridiculous.

The beginning of the twentieth century marked another dualism in
cultural attitudes. There was a growing impulse to try new expressions
in thought and subject matter, and there was a resisting determination to
cling to approved patterns and established ideals. Sometimes both ten-
dencies were united in the work of one man, but more often the divi-
sion was sharply drawn by opposing schools and creeds. Oscar Wilde
announced the aim of the sensationalists by asserting that "The proper
school to learn art in is not Life but Art/' and Arthur Symons declared
that life and nature were merely the crude materials which were to be
woven "cunningly into beautiful patterns." Those to whom the orthodox
doctrine was sacred hailed as a kind of credo the utterance of Francis
Thompson, who turned away from the search for sensations to a search
for God.

FRAKCIS THOMPSON:

Like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Francis Thompson celebrated a theo-
centric world with passion and a riot of imagery; unlike Hopkins,
Thompson was not a convert but born, December 18, 1859, a Roman
Catholic and brought up in the Catholic faith. His father was a Lan-
cashire doctor, and the boy was sent to Owens College in Manchester to
study medicine. He had, however, no interest in his courses; he failed
three times in his examinations. His family bitterly voiced their cha-
grin, and at twenty-five Thompson cut himself adrift and went to
London.

Failure followed him; no matter what he tried, he could not find a
way to support himself. He was employed as a book salesman and sold
no books; he was apprenticed to the boot trade and could not learn how
to market a pair of shoes; he enlisted as a soldier and was discharged as
unfit for a military career. He ran errands, sold matches at street comers,
called cabs, and sank to the lowest level of poverty. He had begun to
write poetry, but he could not afford to buy writing paper — his first
poem was scribbled on sheets used to wrap sugar. His father sent him
a few shillings a week in care of the Reading Room of the British Mu-

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LIVES OF THE POETS

seum, but Thompson was so shabby that he was refused admittance.
Starving, he slept on the stones of the Embankment until a prostitute
took him to her room, fed him, and gave him a place to live. He be-
came wretchedly ill and spent what money he could get on opium.

He was thirty when he submitted two or three poems to Wilfrid
Meynell, editor of Merrie England. Meynell was eager to publish them,
but his letter of acceptance and encouragement failed to reach Thomp-
son, who had changed his lodging place and had left no forwarding ad-
dress. When Thompson was finally found and urged to come to the
editorial office, he looked like a wild and hounded thing. His shoes were
broken; there was no shirt under his closely buttoned ragged coat. Fi-
nally, according to Wilfrid Meynell's son, Francis Meynell (Francis
Thompson's godchild, and founder of the Nonesuch Press), "he was
persuaded, though with difficulty, to come off the streets, and even to
give up for many years the laudanum he had been taking. For the re-
maining nineteen years of his life he had an existence at any rate three-
quarters protected from the physical tragedies of his starved and home-
less young manhood."

Wilfrid Meynell and his wife, the poet Alice Meynell, arranged for
the publication of Thompson's first volume, Poems,' which appeared
when he was thirty-four. It was received with instant enthusiasm. The
Meynells had induced Thompson to spend two years at Storrington
Priory in an effort to be cured of the effects of his drug-taking. Living
with the Franciscan monks, Thompson wrote a rhapsodic essay on
Shelley and the ecstatic 'The Hound of Heaven." The title was prob-
ably derived from Shelley, who, in Prometheus Unbound, speaks of
"Heaven's winged hound." In a turbulent vision Thompson saw man
as the mortal quarry, the frightened creature running to hide in nature,
and God as the divine hunter, pursuer and rescuer. Hurrying the reader
along the chase, Thompson employed every device to heighten the
effect of the pursuit: a riotous pace and an elaborately ornamented
speech studded with archaic phrases and invented words. Several of
the critics compared Thompson favorably to Crashaw; Coventry Pat-
more did not hesitate to say that "The Hound of Heaven" was "one of
the very few great odes of which the language can boast" It begins:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears

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FRANCIS THOMPSON

I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,

From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat — and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet —
"All things betray thee, who betrayest Me."

Thompson's first volume was followed by Sister Songs, published in
1895, dedicated to the Meynell children, and two years later by New
Poems, which continued the theme of renunciation and adoration. In
his forties Thompson contributed prose to various journals and pub-
lished a treatise, Health and Holiness, but he labored under great strain.
At forty-seven he collapsed. Unable to work, he withdrew from London
and stayed at the country home of a fellow poet, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.
He was too ill to be benefited by the change; too weak to walk, he was
brougnt back to London. He lingered on for a while in the Hospital of
St. John and St. Elizabeth, and died November 13, 1907.

"To be the poet of the return to Nature is somewhat," wrote Thomp-
son, "but I would be the poet of the return to God." That hope was not
fulfilled without difficulties and cumbrous affectations. Thompson al-
lowed himself a prodigality of conceits as wild as any fashioned by
seventeenth-century metaphysicians; he scattered baroque images and
fancy neologisms with wayward extravagance. Playing with the sparkle
of strange words, he often confused glitter with gold; his characteriza-
tion of Shelley is an apt description of himself: 'To the last, in a
degree uncommon even among poets, he retained the idiosyncracy of
childhood, expanded and matured without differentiation. To the last
he was the enchanted child."

It was with the vision of the enchanted child that Thompson re-
vealed a combination of innocence and ingenuity in "The Hound of
Heaven/' "A Fallen Yew," "Any Saint," "Daisy," 'To a Snowflake."
Besides these, there is a posthumous poem which contains some of
Thompson's most inspired lines. It is a reminiscence of the time when
Thompson slept on benches yet, from the depths, saw "the traffic of
Jacob's ladder pitched between Heaven and Charing Cross." The manu-

605

LIVES OF THE POETS

script was found by Wilfrid Meynell among Thompson's papers; it bore
a subtitle: 'The Kingdom of God Is Within You."

O world invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air,
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumor of thee there?

Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars! —
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places;
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces,
That miss the many-splendored thing.

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry — and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry — clinging Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water
Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!

A. E. HOUSMAM

The mood of disillusioned sophistication persisted long after The
Yellow Book ceased publication. The two most popular books of poetry
of the ensuing half century were FitzGerald's paraphrase of Omar Khay-

606

A. E. HOUSMAN

ydm's mocking but basically pessimistic Rubdiydt and A. E. Housman's
A Shropshire Lad, in which a desperate fortitude is pitted against a
hopeless fatalism.

And how am I to face the odds
Of man's bedevilment and God's?
I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.

Alfred Edward Housman was not a native of Shropshire, as A
Shropshire Lad led many readers to assume, but was born at Fockbury,
near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, March 26, 1859, The hilly Shrop-
shire country was merely a background in his youth; it became a sym-
bolic setting against which he placed his fantasies. They were the fan-
tasies of an insecure child, small for his age, and exceptionally quiet;
his companions called him "Mousie," The family was influential — his
mother was related to descendants of Sir Francis Drake; his father was
an important solicitor — and Housman received a scholarship to St.
John's College, Oxford. He was not a co-operative student; he had al-
ready specialized in Greek and Latin and felt that he knew more than
most of his instructors. He neglected history and philosophy and, as a
result, failed in his final examination. Later he claimed that he had
neither tried nor cared; but he had always wanted to teach and, since he
had not received a degree, he could not obtain a university position.
The setback embittered him. He was, he said, a deist at thirteen and
an atheist before he was twenty-one.

Settling in London, Housman found a negligible position as a clerk
in the Patent Office. It was a poorly paid job, but it enabled him to live
and devote most of his time to a study of the classics. Finally, after
eleven years of unremitting research, he achieved his desire. He was
accepted as an academician and was made professor of Latin at Uni-
versity College, London. He held the position for nineteen years, and in
1911 was given the Chair of Latin at Trinity College, Cambridge,
where he taught and lectured until the day of his death.

Housman's London years, the time of his so-called exile, were
wretched. He was the eldest of seven children, four younger brothers
were still at school; his father was seriously ill; the death of his mother,
to whom he had been closely bound, continued to keep him from feeling
affection for any other woman. Moreover, the Housmans were the vic-
tims of genteel poverty — one Christmas found them so poor that they

607

LIVES OF THE POETS

could not afford a few pennies for the carolers — and A. E.'s Civil Serv-
ice salary was the chief means of supporting the family. He was sus-
tained only by his studies and his intimacy with Moses J. Jackson, a
fellow clerk in the Patent Office, whom he had known at Oxford and
whose rooms in London he shared.

Jackson was Housman's complete opposite. He was dark, muscular,
and matter-of-fact, an athlete interested in science, with no use for
poetry and openly contemptuous of the arts. The poet left no record of
their association, hut Housman's edition of Manilius is dedicated to
Jackson, and even after Jackson became principal of a college in Kara-
chi, India, Housman never forgot the man with whom he had formed
his closest and most lasting attachment. Jackson seems to have been un-
aware of the depth and nature of the devotion, and Housman's biog-
raphers have been most circumspect in their references to it. Specula-
tion has been strengthened and given weight by recently discovered
evidence. In My Brother, A. E. Housman, published in 1938, Laurence
Housman maintained that "A. E. was a born bachelor, and he chose
the habit of life which best suited him." But in A. E. Housman: Man
Behind a Mask, published in 1958, Maude M. Hawkins, with the help
of Laurence and his sister, Glemence, says that Housman realized "to
his despair that he was capable of a strange abnormal love which all
the stern upbringing in him abhorred. . . . Jackson's words, expres-
sions, gestures absorbed him. . . . He lost weight. . . . He felt him-
self to be a condemned sufferer/' Mrs. Hawkins prints a letter received
from Laurence Housman stating that he had placed in the British Mu-
seum a document not to be made public until the centenary of Hous-
man's birth in 1959, "a remarkable diary which reveals the most intimate
relations with his friend Moses Jackson. ... It will shock some people
and make them very angry; but I believe that A. E. H. wished it to be
known after his death that he was what he was — a man who gave
more devoted love than he ever received, and as a result was a lonely
man to the end of his days."

It was a lonely man who finally transformed an acknowledged and
unreturned emotion into poetry, "The emotional part of my life was
over when I was thirty-five years old," Housman wrote to a French cor-
respondent Henceforth, aloof from friends, he remained a lecturer on
the Latin writers and an austere classical scholar.

Housman's written work as a classicist is highly specialized. It con-
sists of introductions to Lucan, Juvenal, and Manilius, translations of
Horace's odes, and a large body of textual criticism bristling with savage

608

A. E. HOUSMAN

ridicule of other editors whose texts he found faulty. Of one, Friedrich
Jacob, he wrote:

His virtues are quenched and smothered by the multitude
and monstrosity of his vices. Not only had Jacob no sense
for grammar, no sense for coherency, no sense for sense, but
being himself possessed by a passion for the clumsy and the
insipid, he imputed this disgusting taste to all the authors
he edited . . .

Even when he retreated into the hinterlands of learning, as though
scholarship were a refuge as well as an end in itself, Housman had been
writing poetry. In 1896, when he was thirty-seven, Housman submitted
a collection of lyrics entitled Poems by Terence Hearsay to several pub-
lishers. All of them rejected the manuscript and, changing the disguising
tide to A Shropshire Lad, Housman published the book at his own ex-
pense. At the time it made little impression on the critics, but the public
took to the bittersweet little poems which were, according to Housman's
own definition of poetry, "more physical than intellectual." Housman's
Shropshire was anything but a healing countryside; it was more akin to
Hardy's Nature than to Wordsworth's, for Housman saw the loveliness
of the landscape as a brief irrelevance in a universal tragedy. But the
lilt of the verse was captivating; Housman wrote blithely about murder
and suicide, man's brutality and God's malevolence. Nature, he repeated
again and again, is as inhuman as human nature; the sensible person
trains for ill and not for good. "The troubles of our proud and angry
dust/ Are from eternity and will not fail." The stanzas were relished
not only for their hedonism but for their piquant incongruities: the
most acrid expressions of despair were put into measures as sweet as a
hymn and as gay as a dance tune.

Housman consistently refused to be anthologized. He would not per-
mit single poems to be reprinted because he thought of A Shropshire
Lad as an integrated cycle, which it is not, and because he feared the
verses would be improperly punctuated, which seems farfetched but
plausible, for Housman felt that to be misprinted by a single misplaced
comma was to be misunderstood. Nevertheless, editors who could get
around Housman's objection and the copyright law ransacked the book
to quote such poems as "When smoke stood up from Ludlow/' "Wake,
the silver dusk returning," "Loveliest of trees, the cherry now," 'To an
Athlete Dying Young," "Bredon Hill," "Is My Team Ploughing," 'On
Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble," "On the idle hill of summer/*

609

LIVES OF THE POETS

"Into my heart an air that kills/' 'The chestnut casts his flambeaux/'
and the eight lines which some contend captured the spirit of The
Greek Anthology:

With rue my heart is laden

For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden

And many a lightfoot lad.

By hrooks too broad for leaping

The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping

In fields where roses fade.

Housman claimed to have been surprised when critics referred to his
poetry as having a "classical" origin. He insisted that, although he might
have been unconsciously influenced by the Greeks and Latins, the chief
sources of the book were Scottish Border ballads, Shakespeare's songs,
and Heine's lyrics. Housman was not being argumentative but honest;
the ballad form with a Heinesque twist was his favorite device. "It nods
and curtseys and recovers," for example, has the exact music, syllable
for syllable, and the same meaning as Heine's "Am Kreuzweg wird
begraben" one of the last poems in the Lyrical Intermezzo. Far from
being a classic poet, Housman was an instinctive romanticist who man-
aged to put romantic and even sentimental concepts into a seemingly
classical form.

After A Shropshire Lad there was a long silence. When his pub-
lisher pressed him for another book, Housman replied: "I am not a
poet by trade; I am a professor of Latin." Thirty-six years elapsed be-
tween his first and second volumes; the second was significantly entitled
Last Poems. "I publish these poems, few though they are/' said Hous-
man, "because it is not likely that I shall ever be impelled to write much
more. I can no longer expect to be revisited by the continuous excite-
ment under which in the early months of 1895 I wrote the greater part
of my other book, nor indeed could I well sustain it if it came."

Last Poems was published in 1922, but much of it was composed ten
and even twenty years earlier. Here again the Shropshire lad pipes his
merry-mournful note, the rose-lipt maidens kiss, and the heart out of
the bosom is given in vain. The doomed young men still face "the beau-
tiful and death-struck year" and assume a blasphemous bravado as they
cry:

610

A. E. HOUSMAN

We of a certainty are not the first

Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled
Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed

Whatever brute or blackguard made the world.

Meanwhile, Housman assures us with cheerful mockery, we need not
despair; there is, at least for the moment, a little love and enough liquor
to go round. The philosophy — if it is philosophy — is hard, but it is
meant to be heartening; the judgments are heavy but the tone is light.

Contrary to Housman's own statement, Last Poems were not his last.
His brother, Laurence Housman, assembled two posthumous volumes:
More Poems and Additional Poems. Of these "Easter Hymn/' the lines
beginning "Tarry delight, so seldom met" and "Like mine, the veins of
these that slumber" and one or two others have distinction, but many
of them are imitations, almost parodies, of his earlier verse. These vol-
umes, in common with Last Poems, show that Housman did not grow
either as a thinker or as an artist. His stock of ideas was limited and
his development was nil. His themes are few — personal loss, cosmic be-
trayal, cruelty, waste, war, death — and the mood of a tight-lipped self-
pity prevails. The mannerisms of his sixties differ little from those of
his late twenties. When "Goodnight, Ensured Release" appeared for the
first time after Housman's death in More Poems, Professor Garrod said
that with this poem Housman attained the height of his maturity — yet
these lines were written when Housman was an undergraduate at
Oxford.

A great part of the last twenty-five years of Housman's life was spent
on an analytical edition of Manilius, a particularly crabbed and unre-
warding poet. Weakness overcame Housman on completion of the work.
He recognized the symptoms as a heart condition, but he continued to
conduct his classes with unrelaxing discipline. He had convinced him-
self that teaching was a pleasure rather than a duty, and he prepared
a series of lectures on Horace, one of his favorite poets. He never com-
pleted the course. He suffered a severe attack, spent several months in a
nursing home, left it to visit his classroom, and returned home to die in
his seventy-eighth year, April 30, 1936.

Housman's antisocial attitude was proverbial long before his death.
In My Brother, A. E. Housman, Laurence Housman quotes a passage
which his brother had underlined in T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of
Wisdom:

611

LIVES OF THE POETS

There was my craving to be liked — so strong and nervous
that never could I open myself friendly to another. The
terror of failure in an effort so important made me shrink
from trying. . . . There was a craving to be famous, and
a horror of being known to like being known. Contempt for
my passion for distinction made me refuse every offered
honor.

Next to this passage Housman had written: "This is me." He, too,
had refused proffered friendship as well as honorary degrees and the
Order of Merit. He insisted on separating himself from companionship
and declined to be taken back into a world he had rejected.

Contemptuous of careless work, he was fanatically scrupulous about
his own. His notebooks show how carefully he worked for the precise
epithet. In the first draft of "Eight O'Clock" Housman jotted down a
dozen words to characterize the fateful striking of the quarter hours:
"told," "pitched," 'loosed," "spilt," "dealt," and "cast," among others. He
discarded them all for the lightly ominous "tossed."

He stood, and heard the steeple
Sprinkle the quarters on the morning town.

One, two, three, four, to market-place and people
It tossed them down.

After a period of unreserved popularity, reappraisal is bound to be
severe. In the case of Housman the pendulum has swung from indis-
criminate adulation to the extreme of denigration. He has been accused
of banality of thought and a lack of emotional breadth. His writing has
been found to be overfastidious and repetitive, his style inflexible, his
range narrow, and his subject matter immature. There are poems, like
"I listed at home for a lancer," 'The Queen she sent to look for me,"
and "Oh, sick I am to see you, will you never let me be," which sound
like echoes of Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads, while others seem to be
translations of poems that Heine never wrote. Yet the terse little qua-
trains survive; a score of Housman's lyrics continue to tease the mind
with their taut and epigrammatic lines. The nimble touch is part of
their charm; the intimacy, the trite reminiscences, the troubled youth-
fulness, appeal to the adolescent in everyone,

Housman is not a great poet; he cannot soar, nor can he sustain an
idea for long. He is essentially a master of the short flight who, in his

612

RUDYARD KIPLING

very limitations, was the most persuasive and perhaps the purest minor
poet of his time.

RUDYARD KIPLING

While the vogue of the aesthetes was heing burlesqued out of favor,
Rudyard Kipling completed the rout of the "arty" and archaic. He burst
through doors that had been tightly sealed by the Victorians and threw
open the overdecorated Pre-Raphaelite windows to let in the raw air
of everyday. His world was the world of the prosaic; he emphasized
labor, masculinity, and robust health to the limit of brashness.

Kipling was bom December 30, 1865, in Bombay, India. Although
on both sides his forebears were zealous Methodists, his mother's two
sisters married artists, Edward Burne-Jones and Edward Poynten. His
father was a writer, an accomplished illustrator, professor of architec-
tural sculpture, and curator of the Lahore Museum. At six the boy was
taken to England, put in the care of a harsh, fanatically religious elderly
relative in Southsea, and educated at Westward Ho, in North Devon,
where his experiences furnished the basis for the schoolboy humor and
cruelty of Stalky and Co. He contributed verse to the school magazine
but evinced no desire to surpass his less gifted fellow pupils, and rather
than go on to a university he preferred to return to India.

At seventeen Kipling became sub-editor of the Lahore Civil and
Military Gazette; at twenty-one he published his first volume, Depart-
mental Ditties, a small book of light and occasional verse; and at twen-
ty-two his first book of prose, Plain Tales from the Hills. Before he was
twenty-four he had brought out six collections of short stories which
were universally popular and made Kipling the interpreter of India to
the world. His Under the Deodars and Soldiers Three created charac-
ters which are as racy and vivid as many of Dickens'. His gift of ac-
curate observation grew sharper with maturity; the tales in The Jungle
Books and Kim appealed equally to youth and age, while the poems in
the early Barrack-Room Ballads and the later The Five Nations were
enjoyed because of their ease and gusto.

Kipling was only twenty-four when he sailed for England, went to
London and conquered it with his vigorous stories, his trampling poems,
and his gospel of Britain's "manifest destiny." Famous at twenty-seven,

6*3

LIVES OF THE POETS

Kipling traveled around the world. He married an American, Caroline
Balestier, sister of Wolcott Balestier, with whom Kipling wrote The
Naulahka, and lived for a few years in Brattleboro, Vermont. It is prob-
able that Kipling would have remained in America, where he wrote
several of his most popular works, if a quarrel with another brother-in-
law had not driven him back to England. Suspicious and apprehensive,
he became antisocial. His daughter had died, and the loss of a son
during the First World War embittered him. He secluded himself in the
Sussex village of Bateman's Burwash, and, though he received the
Nobel Prize at the age of forty-two and wrote parts of royal speeches
for King George V, he became a prey to corroding doubts and was
obsessed with failure.

His later work was strident with militant imperialism. It stressed
Duty and Discipline, Authority and Obedience, for Kipling had come
to disdain the unregenerate human beings whose interpreter he had
been; he identified himself with the lords and masters. He was con-
temptuous of the rise of an educated middle class in India; his attitude
to "lesser breeds without the law'* showed his unshaken belief in the
superiority and natural supremacy of the white race. The seeds of fas-
cism were in the mind of the secluded squire dreaming of dominance,
the Kipling who, said Bernard Shaw, "never grew up — he began by
being behind the times."

Yet it was this same man who, in his early thirties, wrote "Reces-
sional." In 1897, at the time of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee,
Kipling reminded the British Empire of the insubstantiality of power
and splendor: "Lo, all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and
Tyre!" The very tide, indicating the hymn sung at the close of a service,
was a warning and a prophecy.

Changes in taste and politics caused a reaction to Kipling's truculent
jingoism; his popularity declined almost as rapidly as it had risen, and
he was regarded as a posthumous author long before his death. Critics
implied that, like one of his most affecting novels, Kipling was The
Light That Failed; an editorial, written when he was in his late sixties,
spoke of him as "the forgotten man of English literature." He was at
work on his autobiographical notes, published as Something of Myself,
when he died suddenly, a few weeks after his seventieth birthday,
January 17, 1936.

Among those who hailed the young Kipling was Robert Louis Ste-
venson, who wrote, "Certainly he has gifts. The fairy godmothers were
all tipsy at his christening. But what will he do with them?" Some of
the gifts were squandered on petulance which took on the proportions

614

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

of a national arrogance. Some were wasted on an inverted nostalgia for
exotic regions "somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the
worst," some went into crudely patriotic drum-banging, but more than
a few were employed in difficult explorations. Kipling pierced the
grimy exteriors of industrialism to reveal the miracles of modern ma-
chinery, the beauty of bridge-building, the triumphs of steam, the
wonders of wireless. He not only composed swinging ballads for soldiers
and sailors but struck up marches for engineers, mechanics, and ditch-
diggers. Nothing, he insisted, was too ugly for art. His contemporaries
complained that his triumph was the triumph of the Philistine, that he
could never appreciate the romantic spirit, Kipling pointed to the ex-
press train and replied:

Confound Romance . . . And all unseen
Romance brought up the nine-fifteen.

Whether Kipling will go down in history as the first genuine short-
story writer in English literature, or as an entertaining ballad-maker,
or as a topical poet, his position is as certain as it is unique. "I can think
of a number of poets who have written great poetry/' wrote T. S. Eliot
in the introduction to his selection of Kipling's poems, "but only of a
very few whom I should call great verse writers." It is as a writer of
full-bodied and active verse that Kipling excels. If he is underrated
today, he will be discovered again and again, and for the same qualities
which originally elicited praise. He will survive not only for such fa-
vorites as "Danny Deever," "Gunga Din," "Fuzzy-Wuzzy," and "Man-
dalay," but for the less frequently reprinted 'The Sons of Martha,"
which celebrates inglorious domesticity, 'The Land," which shows a
penetrating understanding of the nature of the soil and those who live
close to it, and "For to Admire" and 'The Return," which carry nos-
talgic wanderlust to the pitch of high seriousness. For these and at
least a dozen others, Kipling promises to remain a people's poet whose
lines have the common measure and uncommon magic of folk songs.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Admirers of William Butler Yeats are divided into two widely sepa-
rated camps. There are those who, captivated by the fairy touch and
tunefulness of the early lyrics, find his later work dry and overintellec-

LIVES OF THE POETS

tualized; and there is the cult that repudiates the set pieces of his youth
and makes a fetish of the philosophical, anti-Romantic poetry written
after he turned fifty. Both groups, however, agree on the ambiguous
status of Yeats the politician and the importance of Yeats the poet and
playwright.

Yeats was born June 13, 1865, at Sandymount, near Dublin, of a dis-
tinguished Protestant family. His paternal grandfather and great-grand-
father had been Anglican ministers. His father, John Butler Yeats, was
an eminent artist and member of the Royal Hibernian Academy; one of
his sisters established the Cuala Press, which published the work of
writers of the Irish revival; his brother Jack was a landscape painter.
While he was still a child, his parents moved to London, where, at the
age of nine, he went to school; summers were spent in his mother's
County Sligo, the wild background of his Gaelic fantasies. For a while
it seemed that, like his father and brother, Yeats would become a
painter; at nineteen he attended the Metropolitan School of Art in
Dublin; but, although he made some misty pastels in the style of
Turner, he took more pleasure in transcribing the folk tales he had
heard while he sat beside turf fires.

At twenty-one Yeats published his first book, Mosada, and imme-
diately after its appearance returned to London. There, with a Welsh
poet, Ernest Rhys, he founded the Rhymers' Club, which specialized
in the latest literary fashions, chiefly in the suggestiveness of the French
symbolists and the preciosities of the Pre-Raphaelites. During this pe-
riod Yeats was the complete aesthete: Rhys describes him as "extremely
pale and exceedingly thin, a raven lock over his forehead, his face so
narrow that there was hardly room in it for his luminous black eyes."
Winter was coming on, and Yeats was glad to attend the club meetings
not only for intellectual companionship but for physical warmth. His
autobiography recalls how he went about London on foot because he
could not afford to ride, and he remembered that tea with hospitable
friends was not merely a social function but a meal that stayed him
during days when he went without other nourishment. He kept his
mind fixed on the delights of the imagination and turned enforced as-
ceticism into a discipline. He had been deprived of the simple-minded
religion of his youth by the materialism of Huxley and Tyndall, and
so, he related in his Autobiography, "I made a new religion, almost an
infallible church of poetic tradition, of a fardel of stories and of per-
sonages, and of emotions passed on from generation to generation by
poets and painters with some help from philosophers and theologians. I

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

wished for a world where I could discover this tradition perpetually.
I had even created a dogma: 'Because those imaginary people are
created out of the deepest instinct of man, to be his measure of his norm,
whatever I can imagine those mouths speaking may be the nearest I can
go to truth/ "

Yeats's search for a new religion, part myth and part magic, led him
to join the Theosophists. In 1887 he became a disciple of Madame
Blavatsky, the Russian "mistress of the occult," and although she had
been exposed as a fraud, Yeats remained faithful, one of the most de-
voted members of the Esoteric Section of the cult. He was, in fact, so
overzealous — he persuaded his associates to try to summon the ghost of
a flower and to induce definite dreams by putting certain objects under
their pillows — that he was asked to resign. Nevertheless, he never re-
pudiated the philosophy which stressed the value of intuition.

Preternaturally shy, Yeats's self-consciousness was increased by an
awareness of his self -division; he had difficulty uniting the self which
demanded energetic activities and the self that longed to remain content
with dreams. Before he achieved integration he joined another group
of initiates, the Hermetic Students of die Golden Dawn. The rituals of
this cabalistic order intensified his concern with magic, especially since
they seemed to furnish a counter-movement to the increasing material-
ism of the age. His father and several of his friends were alarmed; but
he was not to be deterred from the study which, next to his poetry, he
considered the most important pursuit of his life. With the enthusiasm
of a twenty-seven-year-old adept, he reiterated his conviction to John
O'Leary: "If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have
written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess
Kathleen' ever have come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all
that I do and all that I think and all that I write. It holds to my work
the same relation that the philosophy of Godwin holds to the work of
Shelley, and I have always considered myself a voice of what I believe
to be a greater renascence — the revolt of the soul against the intellect —
now beginning in the world."

Spiritist and nationalist were united when Yeats became a prime
figure in the Celtic revival. Two movements had sprung to life in Ire-
land. The first, the Gaelic League, founded in 1893, had as its object
the study of ancient Irish literature and the preservation of Gaelic
as the racial language. The second, organized a few years later, was a
co-operative movement for "better fanning, better business, better liv-
ing," The social economy implicit in both movements promised a sur-

LIVES OF THE POETS

•vival of national culture. Poets, folklorists, and scholars joined forces
with economists, sociologists, and agronomists. George Russell, who
wrote poetry under the pseudonym "AE," combined agrarianism with
visions; Yeats dealt simultaneously with politics and clairvoyance. As
the movements became more active, they grew more radical. The in-
surrections, suddenly rising and severely put down, were violent; re-
bellion flamed everywhere; the hope of a handful of dreamers became
the battlecry of an embittered nation. The Irish renaissance ended in
revolution; Eire was born of the blood of its poets. A poet, Douglas
Hyde, founder of the Gaelic League, became Eire's first President.

Much of the activity centered about the Irish Literary Theater, with
which Yeats was identified. He had met and fallen in love with a beau-
tifully regal insurrectionary, Maude Gonne; he saw her as "the fiery
hand of the intellectual movement." With Maude Gonne in mind he
wrote his atmospheric but fervid plays, the best of which commu-
nicated, as in a trance, a depth beyond ordinary feeling. Cathleen ni
Houlihan turned allegory into explicit patriotism. Even the most literal-
minded members of the audience could not fail to see in the harried
woman who had lost her fields and for whom men gladly died — a
woman who never aged and who had "the walk of a queen" — the
figure of Ireland. Yeats gradually became the acknowledged literary
leader of the movement. He found the playwright J. M. Synge in Paris
and made him return to Aran and the people of the primitive islands.
"Express a life," said Yeats, "which has never found expression. . . .
Listen to the language which takes its vocabulary from the time of
Malory and of the translators of the Bible, but its idiom and vivid
metaphor from Irish."

By the time Yeats was thirty he had already published six volumes
of verse. In format the books were conventionally slim, as was the fash-
ion of the day, but their contents were strange. Such poems as "The
Rose of the World," "Down by the Salley Gardens," "The Song of Wan-
dering Aengus," "The Sorrow of Love," "When You Are Old," and
'The Lake Isle of Innisfree" are lighted with a pale fire; their music
is dream-heavy, drenched in a Celtic twilight. They evoked a vaguely
necromantic spell which, in its lulling melodiousness, sacrificed strength
to suggestiveness. During this period Yeats depended on a limited set
of symbols and the very rhetoric he condemned. The maturing poet,
however, was not content to capitalize on his charming but restricted
gamut of shadowy loveliness. He ceased to depend on sentiment and

618

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

to rely on a facile rhetoric. "Sentimentality/* he declared, "is deceiving
one's self; rhetoric is deceiving other people/'

Nearing fifty Yeats made a determined effort to discard hoth senti-
mentality and rhetoric. The political upheaval in Ireland altered his
outlook as well as his style. In "September, 1913" he declared:

Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave . . .

The change is implicit in the very title, Responsibilities, in which,
emerging from his "labyrinth of images," Yeats abandoned the earlier
disguises. "A Coat" begins:

I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies . . .

It was this vein which, Yeats complained, readers liked too well —
"the fools caught it,/ Wore it in the world's eyes/ As though they'd
wrought it" — and Yeats turned against it. "My friends and I loved sym-
bols," he wrote in a dedication to his Essays, "popular beliefs, and old
scraps of verse that made Ireland romantic to herself; but the new Ire-
land, overwhelmed by responsibility, begins to long for psychological
truths." The search for psychological truths grew keener in The Wild
Swans at Coole, published when Yeats was fifty-two, and, after an in-
terval of five years, in Later Poems. The tone is sharper, the phrasing
direct instead of merely decorative, sparser in imagery and sterner in
effect.

Besides psychological truth, Yeats sought for spiritual assurance.
A return of his youthful infatuation with the occult led him to an-
other phase of supernaturalism. He attended stances, gazed into crystal
balls, called up departed souls, and believed he had acquired an at-
tendant spirit. During his psychical researches, he met a kindred soul,
Georgie Hyde-Lees and, after a friendship of six years, married her.
Husband and wife collaborated on automatic writing dictated by
"communicators"; the result was A Vision, which Yeats published
when he was sixty and which is so complicated and arcane that it is
incomprehensible to anyone but an initiate. Aware of the general
skepticism, Yeats added a note to a revised printing, issued when he

619

LIVES OF THE POETS

was seventy-two: "I do not know what my book will mean to others —
nothing, perhaps. To me it means a last act of defense against the
chaos of die world/'

Before the second edition of A Vision appeared Yeats was a much-
honored man. He had served the Irish Free State as a senator for six
years; his esoteric inclinations had not affected either his politics or his
poetry. In 1923 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. A citizen
not only of the world but of two worlds, the seen and the unseen,
Yeats was now at the height of his fecund powers. The poetry of his
late fifties and sixties reached a richness, a precision, and an authority
previously unattained. The pastel fairylands and the dim allegorical
gods of his youth were discarded in favor of real people and im-
mediate experiences. In his early Pre-Raphaelite days Yeats "hid his
face amid a crowd of stars"; now he expressed his frank delight "in the
whole man — blood, imagination, intellect, running together." "I am con-
tent to follow to its source every event in action or in thought/' Yeats
wrote in "A Dialogue of Self and Soul/' a poem which concluded
with this Blakelike divination:

When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything;
Everything we look upon is blest.

In his later years Yeats devoted much time to reappraising and re-
writing his poetry. Most of the lines were improved by the reshaping,
but some of the transformations lost the spontaneity of the original
versions. His political life also was subjected to revision. He distrusted
the revolutionary spirit and had nothing but fear for any progressive
movement toward a better social order. He consorted with the rich
and expressed a distinct yearning for an aristocratic system. Yeats had
lost faith in the workaday world and the average citizen he had once
championed. Not a Fascist but suspiciously feudal in viewpoint, he
was revolted by the middle classes who "fumble in the greasy till, and
add the halfpence to the pence/' He railed at the loss of decorum and
courtesy; spasms of anger and impotence alternated with an unhappy,
self-goading bawdiness. Lashed by forces that threatened from with-
out and frustrated by loss of power within, he fell back upon grim-
ness:

620

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

You think it horrible that Lust and Rage
Should dance attendance upon my old age,
They were not such a plague when I was young.
What else have I to spur me into song?

The ladder of fantasy was broken; he was loath to begin the long
ascent again:

I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart

Away from Ireland, living in Rapallo on the Italian Riviera, and in
small towns in southern France, Yeats saw Europe degenerate and
watched "things fall apart. The center cannot hold," he wrote in 'The
Second Coming":

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

. . . somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Although he continued to write until the end, his last important
work was "Byzantium," an extraordinary description of the process of
creating a poem, a set of dazzling images concluding with "that dol-
phin-torn, that gong-tormented sea/' After seventy he suddenly grew
weak; breathing became difficult, pain was constant; he told his wife
that it was harder for him to live than to die. Toward the end of 1938
he could not endure the winter, although it was an unusually mild

621

LIVES OF THE POETS

season. In January he suffered what was obviously a fatal breakdown,
sank into a coma, and died of heart failure at Roquebrune, near Nice,
January 28, 1939.

Yeats's plays, with their "magic" diction and shadowy characters,
failed to outlast their era and are performed only as exotics. The poetry,
however, continued to grow in interest, as evidenced a dozen years
after his death by The Permanence of Yeats, a collection of twenty-
four essays by as many critics. The early moonlit lyrics, languid and
melancholy, are perennially anthologized; the later work, multiply al-
lusive, influenced the idiom of a new generation of poets. In The
Tower and The Winding Stair we hear the utterances of a man, no
longer afraid of contemporary affairs, putting politics into poetry. Such
poetry may have been prompted by disillusion, deflated hopes, and the
decay of beauty, but it is not the passing deception of a dream.
"Among School Children," "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con
Markiewicz," "Easter, 1916," "Leda and the Swan/' and "Nineteen
Hundred and Nineteen" dispense with esoteric incantations. We no
longer listen to the half -conscious music of a trance but to the deliber-
ate and uncompromising note of truth.

622

XXVIII

Trends in America

BY THE BEGINNING of the twentieth century America had reached
its last geographical frontier; the period of adventurous explora-
tion gave way to an era of ruthless competition. In the 192,05 a
President of the United States, Calvin Coolidge, declared that the busi-
ness of a democracy was business, and defined the national economy as
"idealism in its most practical form/' Political freebooters fattened their
bank accounts on government properties; clerks became millionaires
overnight; permanent prosperity, according to a favorite phrase, was
just around the corner. Nevertheless, there were those who considered
the race for monetary success not a blessing but a threat against the
ideals of culture and a portent of doom to the noncompetitive individ-
ual. Edwin Arlington Robinson was one of those.

EDWIN ARLINGTON:
ROBINSON:

He was born December 22, 1869, in Head Tide, Maine, where his
father was a grain merchant, bank director, and owner of the general
store. Before the boy was a year old, the family moved to nearby Gar-

623

LIVES OF THE POETS

diner, a manufacturing town of a few thousand people, and it was here
that Robinson discovered he would have to live in a world ruled by a
set of hard imperatives. There were two older brothers: Dean, who was
schooled to become a doctor, and Herman, who was expected to be a
businessman. Edwin, the youngest, was also the quietest. He retreated
into hours of abstraction and, fearing a hostile world, refused to com-
pete. He said that even as a child, he knew he was "never going to be
able to elbow [his] way to the Trough of Life." He read poetry at
five; at eleven he began to write it. Before the boy was out of his teens,
his father's health began to fail; he seemed to die daily. Dean had been
unsuccessful with a country practice, and as a result of dosing himself
with morphine for neuralgia, had become a drug addict. Shortly after
attaining his majority, Robinson seems to have had premonitions of his
later, lonely life, his self-identification with failure, and a preoccupa-
tion with his fellows in frustration. 'The truth is I have lived in Gar-
diner for nearly twenty-two years and, metaphorically speaking, have
hardly been out of the yard. . . . Solitude tends to magnify one's ideas
of individuality; it sharpens his sympathy with failure. ... It renders
a man suspicious of the whole natural plan and leads him to wonder
whether the invisible powers are a fortuitous issue of unguided cosmos,
or the cosmos itself/'

Determined to be an author, Robinson entered Harvard and sub-
mitted to the Harvard Monthly a dozen poems. They were all rejected.
Two years later, Robinson had to give up college. Mills were shutting
down, banks were closing, established firms were bankrupt; four million
men were out of work when Coxey's unemployed "army" marched on
Washington. The Robinson fortunes had shrunk disastrously. The
father had died. Dean was a tragic ruin, suffering from hallucinations.
Herman, the bewildered businessman, had invested unwisely and was
trying to comfort himself with drink and futile dreams. Edwin, realizing
that he would have to support himself, but also realizing that he was
perfectly helpless "in what the world calls business/' tried his unsure
hand at short stories in the manner of Francois Coppde's contes, stories
about "the humble, the forgotten, the unknown." But sonnets and
villanelles interfered and, though he tried to write plays later in life,
he had no talent for anything except poetry.

A mastoid infection, incurred when he was a boy, had destroyed some
small bones in the ear, and Robinson became fearful about losing his
hearing; he was also worried about his weak eyes. His apprehensions
were aggravated by his feeling of dependence. "You cannot conceive,"

624

EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

he wrote to a friend, "how cutting it is for a man of twenty-four to de-
pend on his mother for every cent he has and every mouthful he swal-
lows.— The world frightens me," he confessed. His prose sketches came
back with a curt comment; a poem now famous ('The House on the
Hill") was accepted without payment hy an inconspicuous quarterly;
another poem was printed in a magazine which reimbursed him with
a year's subscription. The first time he ever received money for a poem
was in 1895 when Lippincott's magazine published a sonnet about
Poe. The fee was seven dollars and Robinson was twenty-six years old.

In 1896 Robinson put together a manuscript of one hundred pages,
entitled it The Torrent and the Night Before, and sent it out hope-
fully. It was twice rejected. Finally an uncle by marriage, who was
connected with the Riverside Press, arranged to have three hundred
and twelve paper-bound copies printed privately for fifty-two dollars.
The book carried a quaint and somewhat self-conscious dedication:
"To any man, woman, or critic who will cut the edges of it — I have
done the top/' The response was not great, but the few reviews were
pleasant enough to encourage the author to try for a wider audience.
Richard G. Badger, a "vanity publisher/' offered to bring out a new
edition for "a modest fee." A few poems were dropped, some new ones
added, a Harvard friend advanceid the money, and The Children of
the Night, containing some of Robinson's most vividly drawn portraits,
was published in 1897.

At twenty-eight Robinson felt he could not stay in Gardiner another
month, "I don't expect to live to be forty/' he wrote desperately to his
sister-in-law. "Whatever I do has got to be done soon/7 Collecting a
hundred dollars, he went to New York. He met a few people in the
publishing world but made little impression on any. Physically he
looked like a thousand others — he might have been a bookkeeper or a
teacher of Latin — his forehead was high and faintly lined, his mouth
was small and set, his inconspicuous eyes were primly spectacled. Not
an easy talker, he was so shy that he had to drink himself into a con-
versation.

Without money, without influential friends, and almost without
personality, he was determined to live by poetry alone.

Robinson composed a long poem about a garrulous derelict who had
become one of his New York cronies. It was refused by one publisher
and accepted by another, but the manuscript was mislaid, lost, and
finally recovered in a brothel where a member of the editorial staff
had left it. Finally Robinson's third volume, Captain Craig, made its

62,5

LIVES OF THE POETS

appearance. He was now thirty-three, and so far the only money he
had earned from writing was the seven dollars he had been paid for
the sonnet on Poe.

Somehow he managed to hang on. He moved from one rooming
house to another, each one meaner and dingier than the last. He fre-
quented saloons and, with a couple of dimes for a glass of whisky, lived
on the free lunch that went with the drink. He refused occasional in-
vitations to dinner because his suit was too seedy. To pay his rent he
took a job in the New York subway then being built; for checking the
material ten hours a day he received twenty cents an hour. He lived,
he said, in his own private hell until the subway was completed.

Out of work, Robinson faced another winter of cold and privation.
He was rescued by an accident that was a kind of miracle. One of Pres-
ident Theodore Roosevelt's sons had given his father Robinson's second
little book, and Roosevelt sent for the poet. Overcoming his guest's reti-
cence, Roosevelt found him a position in the New York Custom House
at the then generous salary of two thousand dollars a year. Now, Rob-
inson informed a friend, he could not only write poetry but own two
pairs of shoes at the same time.

Four years later, when the poet was forty and Roosevelt was
no longer in the White House, Robinson lost his post Another volume,
The Town Down the River, appeared and received cautious reviews;
even the praise was qualified by misgivings about the poet's "crudities,"
"obscurities," and "perversities." Lonely and isolated, Robinson began
drinking again, and much more heavily. He borrowed money from his
circle of bohemian friends. Again he was rescued, this time by the poet
and critic Hermann Hagedorn, who became his first biographer and
who brought him to the MacDowell Colony, a haven for creative art-
ists. Here, deferred to and, as he grew older, idolized, he spent his sum-
mers, dividing his winters between New York and Boston. The poetry
began to flow steadily now, and the poems flowered into books,

A dozen books followed in little more than a dozen years. Robinson's
Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921; twice again, during
the next six years, he received the award. Blank verse had come back
into favor. At the beginning of the century the quasi-Elizabethan plays
of the English Stephen Phillips had been hailed with superlatives and
compared to Shakespeare's, and William Vaughn Moody had success-
fully revived the poetic drama in America. Thirty years later blank
verse was to find an altered expression in the darkly colored and some-
times turbid verse of Lascelles Abercrombie and, after two more dec-

626

EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

ades, a metaphor-studded brilliance in the plays of Christopher Fry.
Robinson had rejected blank verse for the two ineffectual plays he had
written, but in his late fifties he employed it in three book-length nar-
ratives, Merlin, Lancelot, and Tristram. These modernized Arthurian
legends were unexpectedly popular — Tristram was chosen and distrib-
uted by The Literary Guild — and curiously contemporaneous. The
theme, subject, and setting were ancient English, yet the turn of the
phrases and the pitch of the lines made them as recognizably modern
American as Tennyson's Idylls of the King were unquestionably Vic-
torian.

At sixty Robinson was physically tired and creatively drained. Never-
theless, frightened by the past and fearing the future, he kept on writ-
ing for an income. Each year for seven years, until the very month of
his death, he produced another volume in which fatigue was increas-
ingly evident. A lonely man, loneliness was the leading theme of his
work. Toward the end he grew somewhat more companionable, but he
never lost his distrust of most men and almost all women. He never
married, never fell in love. When the irresistible dancer Isadora Dun-
can tried to seduce him, he could not let himself yield to her bac-
chante blandishments. At sixty he was lonelier than ever; he rarely left
his rooms; his last winters were full of suffering. At sixty-six he
weakened alarmingly because of a growth in the pancreas. At die New
York Hospital, where he was brought in a pitiable condition, it was
found that a successful operation would be impossible, and he died
there, April 6, 1935.

Robinson will not be remembered for his long and prolix narratives
but for the shorter poems which challenged the engulfing commer-
cialism and questioned the current price of success. He created an
entire gallery of untypical American figures: Clavering, who fared
"amid mirages of renown and urgings of the unachieved," who "clung
to phantoms and to friends/ and never came to anything"; Richard
Cory, who "glittered when he walked" and fluttered pulses, but who,
one calm summer night, "went home and put a bullet through his
head"; Miniver Cheevy, born too late, in love with the past, sighing
"for what was not," who coughed "and called it fate, and kept on
drinking"; Bewick Finzer, the wreck of wealth, coming for his pit-
tance, "familiar as an old mistake, and futile as regret"; Fernando Nash,
the tortured soul "who lost his crown before he had it"; Mr. Flood,
the battered but ingratiating old ruin, lifting his jug on a moonlit
road above the town

627

LIVES OF THE POETS

Where strangers would have shut the many doors
That many friends had opened long ago.

Not an innovator, Robinson put new meaning into old forms. He
sharpened the outlines of his sonnets with epigrammatic edges, turned
archaic ballads and villanelles into New England patterns, and added
irony to tragedy by recounting disasters in light verse. He made the
unusual and the eccentric seem not merely plausible but familiar by
adapting the stripped honesty of Crabbe and the stern clarity of
Hardy to expose the dilemmas of modern life. He conveyed to the
reader the essential character of the failures, the discarded and the
dispossessed, and triumphed in a poetry of defeat.

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,

Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,

And he had reasons.

Miniver loved the days of old

When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold

Would set him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not,

And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,

And Priam's neighbors.

Miniver mourned the ripe renown

That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,

And Art, a vagrant.

Miniver loved the Medici,

Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly

Could he have been one.

Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;

628

ROBERT FROST

He missed the medieval grace
Of iron clothing.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;

Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, horn too late,

Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,

And kept on drinking.

ROBERT FROST

Often falsely classified as a "nature poet," Robert Frost, like Edwin
Arlington Robinson, was more concerned with people than with places.
Also like Robinson, Frost was an Easterner, in spite of the fact that he
was born in San Francisco, California, March 2,6, 1875. Both his
parents had been schoolteachers in New England, where his fore-
fathers had lived for eight generations. His mother came from a
Scottish seafaring family of Orkney origin. His father, whose ancestors
had migrated from England, was a congenital nonconformist; he gave
up teaching, left Republican Massachusetts, moved to California, and
became editor of a Democratic paper. The Civil War had been con-
cluded ten years before his son was born, but William Frost still sym-
pathized with the South and named his boy Robert Lee. In his early
thirties William Frost died of tuberculosis, and his widow took her
ten-year-old son back to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where she resumed
teaching.

Young Frost inherited his father's nonconformist tendencies but
none of his parents' desire to teach or gladly learn. On the contrary,
he resisted education. After four years in high school, Frost entered
Dartmouth at seventeen and quit after three months. At twenty-one he
tried college again, went to Harvard, but could not manage to stay
more than two years. Meanwhile he had helped to support his mother
and sister. At twelve he had been a piece worker in a shoeshop; at

629

LIVES OF THE POETS

sixteen he was a bobbin-boy in a textile mill; at eighteen he tended
the dynamos and trimmed the carbon-pencil lamps above the spinning
machines. At nineteen he was hired as a reporter to write little pieces
and a sporadic column for the local newspaper. At twenty-one he mar-
ried his high-school sweetheart and co-valedictorian. There were six
children, only two of whom were living when Elinor Frost died in
1938.

In his mid-twenties Frost became a farmer in New Hampshire and
struggled to wrest a living from soil so stubborn that he seemed to be
cultivating rock. Five years of near-starvation were as much as his grow-
ing family could stand, and reluctantly Frost turned to teaching. He
had been writing poems ever since he was fifteen, but not more than a
half dozen had appeared in print. Nevertheless, determined to find out
whether he could survive as a writer, he stopped being a teacher, sold
his acres, and went to England. In 1912 he settled temporarily in
Gloucestershire, for Mrs. Frost had a desire to 'live under thatch." He
began farming again, and found that his friends and neighbors were
poets: Rupert Brooke, Lascelles Abercrombie, John Drinkwater, W. W,
Gibson, and Edward Thomas, who was so influenced by Frost that he
dedicated his first book of poems to him. Frost's first book was not pub-
lished until he was forty, and it is an irony that this collection of
American lyrics, entitled A Boy's Will, after a phrase of Longfellow's,
was published in England.

It was also in England that Frost's characteristically native second
volume, North of Boston, was published. The critics had been mildly
pleasant about A Boy's Will, but when Frost returned to America in
1915, he found himself famous. He was praised for his stern bucolics,
a complete departure from the traditionally soft pastorals, for the ten-
sion of his half-meditative, half-dramatic narratives, and for the natural
power of his language, which, avoiding rhetoric, had the eloquence of
heightened conversation. It was unquestionably a poetry of personal
experience, but it was also a poetry of understatement, suggestive of
more than it said. Teasing-tender, the opening lines of North of Boston
invited the reader to go along with the writer:

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
111 only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may);
I sha'n't be gone long. — You come too.

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ROBERT FROST

North of Boston is appropriately subtitled A Book of People, for
the people, rather than the dominating terrain, take possession of the
reader. Disdaining dialect, Frost captured the nuance of the homely
tone of voice. "Home Burial" is a quietly macabre dialogue; the talk
is the talk of everyday, but the situation is shocking, common in words,
uncommon in experience. Insignificant details, such as the stain of
mud on a man's shoes, take on horrifying significance in their very
matter-of-factness. "The Code" is another example of incongruous ex-
tremes, a comedy and a semi-tragedy, in which a farcical episode un-
covers a grimly laconic principle. 'The Black Cottage" is a portrait of
an innocent, unreconstructed old lady whom the world has passed by,
but who cannot abandon a belief ''merely because it ceases to be true."
'The Fear" is muted melodrama, a subtle achievement in suspense and
surprising anticlimax. 'The Housekeeper" is an instance of talk not
only in poetry but talk as poetry. It is a domestic drama in which four
ordinary people are involved, although the central figure — the extraor-
dinary one — does not disclose her mind and, although she is fully
realized, does not even appear. "A Hundred Collars," "The Mountain,"
and "A Servant to Servants" say all there is to say about isolation and
the precarious balance between pathos and half-pitying humor. "Mend-
ing Wall" is a whimsical one-man debate, a rustic monologue in which
bantering speculations are enclosed between two opposed adages:
"Something there is that doesn't love a wall" and "Good fences make
good neighbors." "The Death of the Hired Man" is told in tense
undertones, a poem which is not so much heard as overheard.

The eight volumes which followed North of Boston furnished new
evidence of Frost's ability to make poetry talk as well as sing. There
were more monologues, ranging from the nostalgic "Birches" and the
deceptively flippant "New Hampshire" to the ironic "Place for a
Third" and the somber "An Old Man's Winter Night." There were
more dramatic dialogues, the best of which are "In the Home Stretch,"
"The Pauper Witch of Grafton," and "The Witch of Coos," a ghost
story of adultery and murder told with comfortable amiability. What
was unlocked for was the quantity and quality of lyrical verse. Un-
like anything Frost had written since A Boy's Will, the short poems
were surprisingly varied in touch and tone; light as 'The Telephone,"
'The Runaway," "Departmental," "A Considerable Speck," "A Drumlin
Woodchuck"; intimate and touching as "Stopping by Woods on a
Snowy Evening/' 'Tree at My Window/* "Come In/' "Good-by and

631

LIVES OF THE POETS

Keep Cold," 'Two Look at Two," 'To Earthward/' 'The Silken
Tent"; broadly humorous as "An Empty Threat," 'The White-Tailed
Hornet," 'The Cow in Apple Time," and "Brown's Descent or The
Willy-Nilly Slide," an extended joke, a New England companion piece
to Cowper's "John Gilpin's Ride"; tersely epigrammatic as

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what Fve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

Such serious tanter is typical of Frost. Answering an inquiry whether
he would like being classed as a Realist, a Classicist, or a Regionalist,
he replied: Tf I must be classified, I might be called a Synecdochist,
for I prefer the synecdoche in poetry — that figure of speech in which
a part is used for the whole." Prodded further about his stand on Real-
ism, he said, 'There are two kinds of realists: the one who offers a good
deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real potato, and the
one who is satisfied with the potato brushed clean. I'm inclined to be
the second kind. To me the thing that art does for life is to clean it,
to strip it to form." In another letter he was drawn into a colloquy on
the power of words and the way they can turn craft into witchcraft.
"Sometimes I have my doubts of words altogether," he wrote, "and I
ask myself what is the place of them. They are worse than nothing
unless they do something, unless they amount to deeds as in ul-
timatums and warcries. They must be flat and final like the show-
down in poker from which there is no appeal. My definition of lit-
erature would be just this: words that have become deeds."

The breadth and quality of Frost's thought were part of his land-
scape, and the landscape shows in his face. Carved out of native
granite, the features are sharp and would have been cold had it not
been for the pale blue and quizzical eyes, the lightly mocking smile,
and the sensual bee-stung underlip. It is a stubborn scholar's face,
masking the irrepressible poet's. Later, in a preface to his Collected
Poems, Frost made the distinction: "Scholars and artists thrown to-

632

ROBERT FROST

gether are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work
from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the
way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious
thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and
as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately,
but let what will stick to them like burrs when they walk in the
fields."

Immediately after his return to America, Frost did a characteris-
tic thing: he bought a farm. Buying farms continued to be his favorite
weakness. The first one he occupied was on a climbing hill outside
of Franconia, New Hampshire, and this was followed by others in
South Shaftsbury, Concord Corners, and Ripton, Vermont. Since he
could not earn a living by farming, he turned to lecturing and let cul-
ture support agriculture. A spontaneous and brilliant talker, he en-
chanted audiences by "saying" the poems which found their way into
countless anthologies and textbooks. He also went back to college, not
as a scholar or a teacher but as a "poet in residence," a campus influence,
"a sort of poetic radiator." He spent much of his time at various in-
stitutions of learning: his longest stays were at Dartmouth, Michigan,
and, principally, Amherst.

Unknown until he was forty, in his sixties and seventies Frost was
the recipient of continual honors. He won the Gold Medal of the
National Institute of Arts and Letters, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize
four times — the only poet ever to achieve the quadruple distinction.
The man who had never been graduated from college received hon-
orary degrees from twenty-eight universities, including two in Eng-
land. In 1955 the state of Vermont named a mountain after him.

Frost's eightieth birthday was marked by Aforesaid, a book of Frost's
poems selected by the poet himself. It included some of his darker mo-
ments, "Directive," 'The Lovely Shall be Choosers," and "Provide, Pro-
vide," but the emphasis was on the quietly lyrical. He hated, according
to the Foreword, "to be caught grooming his brains in public." Un-
willing to discuss the creative process in general and the making of a
poem in particular, he confided to a friend, "A poem is never a put-up
job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a
homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is
at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness. ... It finds its thought
or makes its thought. I suppose it finds it lying around with others
not so much to its purpose in a more or less full mind. (That's why it
oftener comes to nothing in youth before experience has filled the

633

LIVES OF THE POETS

mind with thoughts. It may be a big emotion then, and yet find nothing
it can embody it in.) It finds the thought, and the thought finds the
words."

Because of his subject matter, Frost was often compared to Words-
worth. But, whereas the aging Lake poet grew more prolix and magis-
terial with the years, Frost fashioned some of his sharpest and pithiest
verses in his seventies and early eighties. The skeptic note is more ap-
parent— the possibility of final ruin is faced again and again — but there
is neither breast-beating nor sanctimonious solemnity. On the contrary,
the tone is deliberately and deceptively light, especially in such poems
as "A Cabin in the Clearing/' "My Objection to Being Stepped On,"
"One More Brevity," "Away!" and the "Nocturnes" in Steeplebush.

There were, inevitably, dissenting voices. It was questioned whether
Frost was a wit or a sage, whether he lived with nature rather than
through it, whether he had accomplished an unaffected simplicity
or a deliberate, literary naivet£. "He began to shift his sympathy, with
almost imperceptible slowness, away from wildness and unpredictabil-
ity," complained the critic-poet Louise Bogan, "toward the weather-
safe side of existence. ... He has come to hold so tightly to his
'views' that they at last have very nearly wiped out his vision."

More harmful though more well-intentioned were the commenta-
tors who attempted to turn Frost into the public figure, shrewd and
complacent, the "greenapple genius," the "cracker-box philosopher."
There was, it is true, something of the whimsical wiseacre about
him, and the slick magazines capitalized on his streak of homely wis-
dom by quoting samples from his platform talks. Here are a few:

A poem should begin in delight and end in wisdom. . . .
I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.

People have got to think. Thinking isn't agreeing or dis-
agreeing. That's voting. . . . Somebody said to me the other
day, "Are you a middle-of-the-roader?" I said, 'Well, if you
want to call me bad names. The middle of the road is where
the white line is — and that's the worst place to drive."

How many times it thundered before Franklin took the hint!
How many apples fell on Newton's head before he took the
hint! Nature is always hinting at us. It hints over and over
again. And suddenly we take the hint.

634

ROBERT FROST

Anyone with an active mind lives on tentatives rather than
tenets. , . . Every general who goes into battle wishes he
had more information before he goes in. But each crisis you
go into is on insufficient information.

Ultimately, this is what you go before God for: You've had
bad luck and good luck, and all you really want in the end
is mercy.

The quizzical and ruminative side of Frost's nature increased with
age. A Masque of Reason and A Masque of Mercy, two unusually
long poems, are prime examples of his particular kind of riddling: dry,
brooding, humorously speculative. In an introduction to E. A. Robin-
son's posthumous King Jasper, Frost said that the style was not only
the man but that the style was the way the man takes himself. "If,"
Frost maintained, "it is with outer seriousness, it must be with in-
ner humor. If it is with outer humor, it must be with inner serious-
ness." The sentences, primarily a tribute to Robinson, are an almost
perfect description of Frost's manner. His style, so characteristically
quirky, so colloquial and so elevated, has its own way of uniting op-
posites. It combines observed fact with gently soaring fantasy. Or, rather,
it is not a combination but an alternation in which fact becomes fan-
tasy and the fancy is more convincing than the fact. The inner serious-
ness and the outer humor continually shift their centers of gravity,
or levity, and it becomes plain that Frost's banter is as full of serious im-
plications as his somber speculations.

'The Lesson for Today" is typically Frostian: a fanciful idea which
does not thin out into fantasy, a philosophical poem which does not
sink into academic abstractions. It begins:

If this uncertain age in which we dwell
Were really as dark as I hear sages tell,
And I convinced that they were really sages,
I should not curse myself with it to hell,
But leaving not the chair I long have sat in,
I should betake me back ten thousand pages
To the world's undebatably dark ages,
And getting up my medieval Latin,
Seek converse, common cause, and brotherhood
(By all that's liberal — I should, I should)

635

LIVES OF THE POETS

With poets who could calmly take the fate
Of being born at once too early and too late,
And for these reasons kept from being great . . .

It ends:

I hold your doctrine of Memento Mori.
And were an epitaph to be my story,
Td have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone:
He had a lover's quarrel with the world.

The conclusion — "He had a lover's quarrel with the world" — charac-
terizes the spirit of the man and his poetry. It begins with delight and
ends in wisdom.

CARL SAMDBURG

"Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. . . . Poetry is
the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to
guess about what was seen during a moment ... a series of explana-
tions of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations ... a
search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the
unknowable." These are a few of Carl Sandburg's definitions of po-
etry, and he spent most of his life living up to them. He was born of
Swedish stock at Galesburg, Illinois, January 6, 1878. There was little
time or money for schooling; the boy went to work on a milk wagon
when he was thirteen. Before he was twenty he had supported him-
self as helper in a dingy barbershop, scene-shifter in a run-down theater,
turner-apprentice in a pottery, truck-handler in a brickyard, dishwasher
in a Denver hotel, harvest hand in t}ie Kansas wheatfields. At twenty-
one he enlisted in the Sixth Illinois Volunteers and was in Puerto
Rico during the Spanish-American War. On his return to the United
States, Sandburg entered Lombard College in his native Galesburg,
became editor of the college paper, captain of the basketball team,
and janitor of the gymnasium. After leaving college he was a salesman,
advertising manager, and, for many years, a journalist.

Ever since he was a child Sandburg had been reading poetry and

636

CARL SANDBURG

learning how to write it. At twenty-five he scraped together a few dol-
lars and published a booklet of a few poems, which he called In Reck-
less Ecstasy. The lines owed much to Whitman; they anticipated the
idiom which was to become Sandburg's hallmark. The overtones of
Smoke and Steel, published in 1920, are heard in "Milville," pub-
lished in 1903.

Down in southern New Jersey they make glass.
By day and by night the fires burn on in Milville and bid
the sand let in the light.

For many years the newspaperman worked to keep the poet alive.
Unknown to the literary world until he was thirty-six, Sandburg won
a prize for a group of poems, including the now famous "Chicago,"
and two years later published his first volume, Chicago Poems. The
book jarred the genteel and stirred up a critical controversy. It was
alternately attacked and praised for liberties unusual even in free
verse, for its unrestrained ardor, its athletic language and unflinching
realism. It was apparent that Sandburg was using the common Ameri-
can speech, even slang, with surety, and that he was fulfilling Whit-
man's demand for 'limber, lasting, fierce words." It also became evi-
dent that his fermenting violence was an overcompensation for a streak
of mysticism, and that his toughness usually broke down into un-
ashamed tenderness. "Cool Tombs" is typical of the early work:

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he
forgot the copperheads and the assassin ... in the
dust, in the cool tombs.

And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall
Street, cash and collateral turned ashes ... in the
dust, in the cool tombs.

Pocahontas' body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in
November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does
she remember? ... in the dust, in the cool tombs?

Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries,
cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin
horns . . . tell me if the lovers are losers . . . tell me
if any get more than the lovers , , . in the dust , . .
in the cool tombs.

637

LIVES OF THE POETS

By the time Sandburg had reached his seventies he was the author
of eight volumes of poetry; a collection of folksongs, The American
Songbag a novel, Remembrance Rock; an autobiography, Always the
Young Strangers; several volumes of stories for young people; and a
six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, the last four volumes
(Abraham Lincoln: The War Years') having been awarded the Pulitzer
Prize for the best historical work of 1939. His seventy-fifth birthday
was proclaimed "Carl Sandburg Day" by Governor Adlai Stevenson of
Illinois; more than five hundred admirers attended a dinner in his
honor; a representative of the King of Sweden decorated him with the
Order of the Northern Star. He was also awarded the Gold Medal for
History and Biography by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

More volubly than any poet since Whitman, Sandburg ranged over
the United States. He rhapsodized over the native scene, celebrating
steel mills and cornfields, discovering souls in skyscrapers and noc-
turnes in deserted brickyards. His passionate advocacy of the ordi-
nary man in The People, Yes brought into focus a lifelong, haphazard
accumulation of facts, tall tales, fables, proverbs, and prophecies. As
the so-called 'laureate of industrial America" Sandburg voiced an abid-
ing faith in the instincts of the masses. A small-town citizen, who
had moved from Galesburg, Illinois, to Flat Rock, North Carolina, he
believed in bigness as well as goodness. He was opposed to the pes-
simism of Spoon River Anthology by his fellow Illinoisian Edgar Lee
Masters (1869-1950), a once sensational "expose^ of the hypocrisies and
corrupt practices of life in country towns. Sandburg sought an au-
thentic expression for prairie-dwellers, farmers and villagers, as well as
for millions crowded in metropolitan centers.

Tall, always smiling, with a tumble of white hair falling over his
eyes, Sandburg looks the roving troubadour, a guitar-playing anachro-
nism, an ancient Viking who speaks and sings with a pronounced mid-
western drawl. The drawl is in his writing, the slow, rambling trans-
criptions of the skald who made himself a national bard.

VACHEL LI7SLDSAY

Vachel Lindsay was an extraordinary cultural sport, a freak of po-
etry, an evangelist who used a megaphone to preach the Gospel of
Beauty in jazz tempo. He was born November 10, 1879, of pioneer

638

VACHEL LINDSAY

stock, in Springfield, Illinois, the second of six children, three of whom
died in infancy. As he grew up Lindsay idolized Springfield because
Lincoln had lived there; he also idealized it, dreaming of it as the fu-
ture capital of the United States, symbol of a richer America, wist-
fully suggested in his The Golden Book of Sf ring-field. Springfield
was also the home of the martyred Governor John P. Altgeld, whom
Lindsay memorialized in 'The Eagle That Is Forgotten/'

It was as an artist rather than as a writer that Lindsay hoped to
bring glory to his birthplace. After attending Hiram College, Ohio,
he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the New York School
of Art. Then, after fashioning his own kind of design, an incongruous
fusion of Blake and Beardsley, he devoted himself to crusades. Re-
pelled by bohemianism, he became a fanatical prohibitionist and lec-
tured for the Anti-Saloon League. He saw himself as a missionary,
printed The Village Magazine, and gave away copies wherever he went.
He tramped through the South and the Middle West with a pamphlet
entitled Rhymes to Be Traded for Bread, and went from door to door,
talking to the farmers, reciting his verses, telling stories to the chil-
dren, uplifting the family with his rhapsodies in exchange for a night's
lodging. He was, by turns, St. Francis, John the Baptist, and Johnny
Appleseed singing to convert the goggle-eyed heathen.

His first book, published when he was thirty-four, was a new experi-
ment in the American idiom, for General William Booth Enters into
Heaven is a combination of religion, ragtime, and what Lindsay called
"the higher vaudeville." In his tribute to the founder of the Salvation
Army, Lindsay invented a startling variation of the classic elegy, a set
of verses to be chanted to the rune of 'The Blood of the Lamb"
against a small orchestra of flutes, banjos, bass drums, and tambourines.

The hosts were sandaled, and their wings were fire!
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?^
But their noise played havoc with the angel-choir.
(Are you -washed in the "blood of the Lamb?*)
Oh, shout Salvation! it was good to see
Kings and Princes by the Lamb set free.
The banjos rattled and the tambourines
Jing-jing-jingled in the hands of Queens.

In successive volumes — The Congo and Other Poems, The Chinese
Nightingale, The Golden Whales of California — Lindsay accentuated

639

LIVES OF THE POETS

his effects. He brought into strident verse the blare of military bands,
the rhythms of such dances as the Charleston and the Bunny Hug, the
syncopated beat of jazz sessions, the noise and rush of racing auto-
mobiles, express trains, county fairs, Harlem dives, torchlight parades.
Such poems as "The Congo," 'The Kallyope Yell," "The Santa F6
Trail/' "The Booker Washington Trilogy," 'The Daniel Jazz," "John L.
Sullivan, the Strong Boy of Boston/' and "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan"
were undoubtedly raucous but they were unquestionably exciting.
Moreover, they were part of Lindsay's evangelical program. "The Congo"
begins in a wine-barrel room where ''barrel-house kings with feet un-
stable/ Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table," but it ends
in an African paradise where a million boats with oars of silver sail
through a transfigured land; "The Kallyope Yell" rises from the tan-
bark of the circus ring to become the siren-singing of a dream-haunted,
dream-hunting people; "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan" opens with a
burst of campaign oratory, but it transcends politics in a lament for
the defeat of the idealist, "defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream."

Lindsay incorporated these poems in his public recitals. He did not
lecture, he performed. No one who heard him ever forgot his hypnotic
baritone with its rapid changes of pitch and volume, his head thrown
back at a perilous angle, the eyes half-shut or opening suddenly to
show only the whites, the arms shooting out like inspired pistons.
He startled, soothed, frightened, and charmed in a series of breathless
suspensions and crashing cadences.

For a while Lindsay was not only a national phenomenon but also a
countrywide favorite. The novelty of hearing a poet who was both
minstrel and missionary caught the attention of people who had never
cared to listen to poetry; although they were deaf to the spirit, men
and women were fascinated by Lindsay's interpretation of the sounds of
a hurly-burly America. The visionary teacher had become an enter-
tainer. It was too easy for him, too cheap, too discouraging. His letters,
once full of happy enthusiasm, sounded a note that Lindsay had
never used, the note of disillusion: "The house full; the check promptly
paid; everybody pleasant and nobody giving a damn." At the height of
his fame he was lonely and distressed.

There had been grandiose schemes — a plan to invigorate the written
language with ideograms and modern hieroglyphics, a plan to collabo-
rate with his fellow poets on an epical poem-ballet of the prize ring, a
plan to set up a cultural center of communal art in Springfield — but
Lindsay failed to get the understanding he craved. He began to despise

640

VACHEL LINDSAY

the audiences who refused to listen to his quieter work and only
wanted to hear him "roar in public." "I have recited my own poems
until I am utterly sick of them. If I am to recite, I now want to recite
some other man's work. ... I need a holiday from 'Booth/ The
Congo/ and 'The Santa F£ Trail/ which will drive me mad if I do
them once more."

The emotional maladjustments went on for some years. Lindsay was
deeply in love with Sara Teasdale, the poet of countless love songs,
dedicated several of his books to her, and wooed her to distraction.
His vehement energy was too much for the frail lyricist. "I have been
living under the torrent that flows from Vachers pen for six months
daily/' she wrote disconsolately to a friend, "and now (under the vernal
influence) sometimes twice-daily letters." Lindsay was not Robert
Browning; he could not override the reluctance and semi-invalidism of
his beloved and carry her off to Florence — or Springfield. He was
chained to self-doubt, to a sense of failure, to an inability to find a place
for himself in the workaday world, and to a mother who held him in a
kind of psychic immaturity, safe from the sins of the fleshpots and the
flesh.

Eventually, many years later, Lindsay married. His wife, whom he
had met when she was a schoolgirl, twenty years younger than her
husband, bore him two children and did everything possible to restore
his self-confidence; but he would not be comforted. The insubstantial
fabric of his dream had frayed; he had traded too long in fantasy. He
saw the end of an unreal, wasted life when he confessed:

I feel as though the ground were cut from under me. I stand
for no moral issue, no cause, no golden crusade. Perhaps
Buddhism as I conceive it has more charm than Christian-
ity. . . . Buddha was not as humble or useful as Christ,
but he suffered less, was more impregnable. ... I am
happy when not absolutely in the presence of disaster. And
I am most in harmony then, with that stillest room in my
inner house that is always cold as the stars, no matter how
much noise I may be making. There is a kind of north-star
room in my soul. . . .

Now even that room was closed. All the avenues of escape were
closing. The audiences that had listened and collaborated with him
when he chanted, no longer cared to join in with the rhyming revival-
ist He had given himself too freely and too often. He, once the most

641

LIVES OF THE POETS

demanded poet-performer of his day, was no longer in demand any-
where. He refused to make new friends and feared to meet old ones.
Something in him began to die.

Poverty, which had been an adventure in his youth, was a growing
terror for the harassed householder of fifty; he was sinking deeper
in debt and despair. He began to have hallucinations. The money that
he owed — a few thousand dollars — seemed a quicksand from which he
could never extricate himself. He heard voices; he imagined himself
persecuted; he fought against actuality. He even turned upon his
wife, and yearned to go back to his virgin youth, to his dead mother,
to begin all over again. He, the <fbroncho that would not be broken,"
was broken at last. On the night of December 5, 1931, he drank a
bottle of Lysol, and died.

The big, brawling America Lindsay had hoped to make over would
not take him seriously. Even during his crusading days he was not un-
aware of the obstacles in the way of his mission. While he was apos-
trophizing the common man as the uncommon hero — Lincoln, Jackson,
Bryan, Twain, Johnny Appleseed, John L. Sullivan — he suspected how
difficult it would be to "blow the proud folk low, humanize the dour
and slow." He knew that "the popcorn crowd" would always be fasci-
nated by the current demagogue and worship not only Mammon but
Barnum. Yet it was only toward the end that Lindsay acknowledged
the failure of his vision. Until then he could say:

I am but the pioneer

Voice of democracy;

I am the gutter dream,

I am the golden dream . . .

Listen to my g-o-l-d-e-n d-r-e-a-m . . .

ROBITsLSOM JEFFERS

The dream of a rejuvenated communal America which deceived
Lindsay, the dream of a brotherhood of beautiful souls, never deluded
Robinson Jefiers. "Shine, perishing republic," wrote Jeffers, of a coun-
try whose civilization he regarded as nothing more than a transient
disease.

642,

ROBINSON JEFFERS

While this America settles in the mold of its vulgarity,

heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and

sighs out, and the mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit,
the fruit rots to make earth.

Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripe-
ness and decadence; and home to the mother.

You making haste, haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is
good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly

A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than moun-
tains: shine, perishing republic.

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance
from the thickening center; corruption

Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the mon-
ster's feet there are left the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a

clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught —

they say — God, when he walked on earth.

Unlike Frost, who was born in the West and lived in the East,
Jlobinson Jeffers was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, January 10, 1 887,
and made his home in California. Son of a theologian, he was taken
through Europe by his father on several walking trips; he attended
schools in Germany and Switzerland; his academic education was com-
pleted in Southern California and the state of Washington.

A legacy left by a cousin made it possible for Jeffers to give all his
time to writing; his first and most uncharacteristic volume, Flagons
and Apples, was published at his own expense. At twenty-six he mar-
ried Una Call Kuster and planned to go to England. But the First
World War turned them back to California; when they reached Car-
mel, Jeffers said that "it was evident that we had come without knowing
it to our inevitable place." There Jeffers remained. Years later, with his
own hands and with the help of his twin sons, he built a tower not
of ivory but of headland boulders, a tower in which he could immure
himself and escape the world he contemned.

643

LIVES OF THE POETS

Between his twenty-fifth and sixty-sixth years Jeffers published
eighteen volumes of verse which announce a fearful hatred of life and
an obsession with "self-destructive" love. In lines of uncompromising
negation Jeffers has little to praise in human nature except a stoical
acceptance. Like Hardy, Jeffers begins by denying a compassionate God
and ends by renouncing a God of any kind. His people live violently
and irrationally; they struggle stubbornly, stupidly, tricked by a moral-
ity in which they do not believe but by which they are trapped. Jeffers'
world is not founded on hope or even on illusion but on evil, a world
of

Unmeasured power, incredible passion, enormous craft: no

thought apparent but burns darkly
Smothered with its own smoke in the human brain-vault:

no thought outside . » .

"Unmeasured power, incredible passion, enormous craft" — such phras-
ing is the keynote of Jeffers and a clue to his one-time ardent following.
It gives a sense of strength to Roan Stallion, Tamar, The Women of
Point Sur, Give Your Heart to the Hawks, Be Angry at the Sun, Hun-
gerfield, Medea, and other works which are not as Greek as Jeffers'
adaptations of Euripides suggest but recognizably Californian, wild
and exaggerated, like the coasdine around Jeffers' Carmel. In the thread-
bare nineteen-thirties and the feckless forties there were many who
were impressed by Jeffers' designation of himself as an "Inhumanist —
the recognition of human solipsism and recognition of transhuman mag-
nificence," a recognition of the meaningless beauty of hawks, black
cypresses, insensate headlands, tides, and rocks, all of which are more
important than mankind. It is, however, no longer possible to be awed
by Jeffers' towering intimations of futility, his dark turbulences, and
his oracular prophecies concerning the shabby fate of a humanity
which he implies is not only irresponsible but irrelevant, an absurd and
temporary intrusion. There are few shudders left in the long melo-
dramatic narratives which attempt to justify the statement that "the
human race is bound to defile. . . . Whatever is public — land, thoughts,
or women — is dull, dirty, and debauched."

If one can disregard Jeffers' dubious philosophizing, with its repeated
assertions that all struggle is useless and all values are inconsequential
in a universe which flees "the contagion of consciousness," one can
find tendentious poetry that has established a tradition of its own*

644

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

Between Jeffers the philosopher and Jeffers the poet there is a real
dichotomy. The philosophy is negative, dismal, and disheartening. The
poetry, even at its bitterest, is positive as any creative act must be. It is
a poetry of harrowing movement, of sound effects and verbal fury, force-
ful and compulsive, hard to love, hard to forget.

ST. VIKCEMT MILLAY

In the nineteen-twenties the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay had
an immense popularity. Plain and rhetorical, traditional in form and
unorthodox in spirit, it satisfied the reader's dual desire for familiarity
and surprise. Most of all, it was young; it palpitated with bravado
and sentimentality, with the ecstasies and despairs of a youth that
would never grow old. Of the hundreds of breathless lyrics and sonnets,
only a dozen or so have survived the period of Flaming Youth when
every college campus quivered with 'What lips my lips have kissed,
and where, and why, I have forgotten," "My candle burns at both
ends/' "I had a little Sorrow born of a little Sin," and "And if I loved
you Wednesday/ Well, what is that to you?"

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born February 22, 1892, in Rockland,
Maine. At nineteen she submitted a poem of some two hundred lines
to an anthology contest, The Lyric Year, and, although she did not
win a prize with "Renascence," it was the only poem in the collection
remembered as remarkable. It began nonchalantly, like a child's count-
ing-out rhyme:

All I could see from where I stood
Was three long mountains and a wood;
I turned and looked another way,
And saw three islands in a bay.

The air of childish innocence was maintained until, with scarcely a
change in tone, the pitch imperceptibly increased to bring the poem to
a climax of exaltation:

O God, I cried, no dark disguise
Can e'er hereafter hide from me

645

LIVES OF THE POETS

Thy radiant identity . . .

God, I can push the grass apart

And lay my finger on thy heart!

Nothing Edna Millay wrote after "Renascence" surpassed its simple
intensity, but a headlong romanticism was to be the chief reason for
her vogue. It captured the imagination of countless readers already
devoted to the Keatsian concept of Truth-Beauty, a favorite formula
that came to be the prime requisite if not the complete recipe for
poetry.

Her poetry, her beauty, and her recalcitrance made her a legend
when she attended Vassar College, a legend that became a symbol when
she went to live in Greenwich Village. There she supported herself
by writing short stories under pseudonyms, translating songs, acting
with the Provincetown Players as performer and occasional playwright,
and composing verses (A Few Figs from Thistles) which declared a
woman's right to be as promiscuous as any man. She was both the
emancipated woman and the clever little girl who delighted to shock
her elders. Many applauded her insouciant unconventionality as the
American female Byron, a public role which few women had at-
tempted; others regretted the showy pirouettes which made her suffer,
it was maliciously said, from fallen archness.

Although she published sixteen volumes of poems and plays, the
early Renascence, published at twenty-five, and Second April, pub-
lished four years later, are her most distinguished books* There are
simperings and self-conscious flippancies in both, but there are more
than a few pages where ecstasy is made articulate and almost tangible.
The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems included some of her most quoted
sonnets as well as feminized echoes of A. E. Housman; it won the
Pulitzer Prize in 1923. In the same year the poet married Eugen Bois-
sevain, a businessman, and moved from New York to a home in the
southern Berkshires, which she left only to travel and to read her
poems. Her popularity as a lecturer made too many demands on her
never robust health, and she retired to her mountaintop in Austerlitz,
New York.

Her personality as well as her poetry changed; the once gay, red-
headed rebel became an unhappy seeress, a political commentator
£Make Bright the Arrows, The Murder of Lidice"), and a public
laureate; the unaffected poet declined into the ineffective propagan-
dist. Her later volumes, such as Wine from These Grapes and Hunts-

646

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

man, What Quarry, are variations on the same recurring themes: hunger
for love that is past, defiance of age, and fear of death, the drama-
tization of a self which could not give up youth and accept maturity.
She never lived to face the personal tragedy of old age. Her husband
had died in 1949, and she was alone when a neighbor found her dead
in her large and isolated house, October 19, 1950.

The reappraisals set in even before her death. Her lyrical gift was
conceded and many of her sonnets continued to be praised. But there
were many reservations, many criticisms of her borrowings, her coddled
archaisms, and her exhibitionism. The boys and girls of the 19405
failed to be excited by the once-daring rebelliousness of "To the Not
Impossible Him" and "The Explorer," which they found merely
juvenile posturing, or 'The Penitent/' "She Is Overheard Singing/'
and "The Singing Woman from the Wood's Edge" ("What should I
be but a harlot and a nun"), which pretend to be wicked and are only
pert. They looked away from the protests against war and social in-
justice which she attempted but which her art was too limited to ex-
press, and turned to the more pointed and penetratingly metaphysical
poetry of Elinor Wylie, Louise Bogan, L6onie Adams, and Muriel
Rukeyser.

There remain the successes, shapely, suggestive, and solid in sub-
stance. There is authority and sometimes grandeur in several of
the sonnets whose opening lines are both sonorous and meaningful:
"See where Capella with her golden kids," "Before this cooling planet
shall be cold/' "Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare," "Country of
hunchbacks! where the strong straight spine/ jeered at by children,
makes his way/' "Pity me not because the light of day/' 'Those hours
when happy hours were my estate," "Oh, sleep forever in the Latmian
cave," There will always be readers to cherish such lyrics as "Passer
Mortuus Est," "Spring," "God's World," "Wild Swans/' "Elegy/' 'The
Return," the gently moving 'The Cameo," the personally imploring
"The Poet and His Book," and the mournful valedictory, "Dirge with-
out Music." A figure of passionate feeling, she was a symbol of her
age not only in her life but in the paradoxes of her poetry.

647

XXIX

Trends in England

THE GEORGIAN^

rTHE FIRST DECADE of the twentieth century two dozen English
poets formed a loosely affiliated group and issued a series of collec-
tions, Georgian Poetry. They were published, as the editor, Edward
Marsh, wrote in his Prefatory Note, "in the belief that English poetry
is now once again putting on a new strength and beauty." The con-
tributors never subscribed to a central tenet or made pretensions of
having evolved a distinguishable philosophy, but they emphasized the
"strength and beauty" of the world in which they lived. Their tone
was that of the times; old-fashioned inversions and elaborate apos-
trophes were taboo; rhetorical poetic diction was discarded in favor of
a realistic idiom. The group had no particular program, for it included
poets as dissimilar as — to name some of them alphabetically — Lascelles
Abercrombie, Gordon Bottomley, Rupert Brooke, G. K. Chesterton,
W. H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, John Drinkwater, James Elroy
Flecker, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, Robert Graves, Ralph Hodgson, D. H,
Lawrence, John Masefield, Harold Monro, Siegfried Sassoon, James
Stephens, and W. J. Turner.

Some of the Georgian poets were resolute in their devotion to the
contemporary scene. Masefield wrote with ardor about sailors, day
laborers, hunters, and murderers. W. W. Gibson dramatized stone-
cutters, carpenters, berry-pickers, farmers, and ferrymen, D. H. Law-

648

W. H. DAVIES

rence put the almost inarticulate colliers and overworked townspeople
of his native Nottinghamshire into his early poems. Others, repelled by
the din of the city and the uglier aspects of rural life, evoked a nos-
talgia for a world that would never be spiritually barren.

As an organization, the group was short-lived. Five biennial an-
thologies revealed increasing differences among the Georgians; the First
World War struck down some of them and scattered the others. Rupert
Brooke, symbol of romantic youth and heroic adventure, died at Skyros
in the Aegean at twenty-seven; Flecker lost his life at thirty-one,
Masefield retreated into generalities about death and platitudes about
beauty; Gibson resorted to semi-rural stereotypes; Lawrence, never a
Georgian at heart, beat the jungle of the unconscious and pursued
a nonexistent Ultima Thule. Abercrombie wrote little after 1919; Hodg-
son left England and, except for a lyric or two, ceased to write at all.

The movement, if it was a movement, became a movement of escape.
The lesser Georgians sought the consolation of pastoral dreams in the
sentimental belief that Nature was full of loving kindness, that man
was naturally good, and that the nearer man got to Nature the better
he became. They forgot Matthew Arnold's warning to Nature-wor-
shipers:

Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends;
Nature and man can never be fast friends.

The aftermath faded into a homesickness for the park-pretty, curlew-
calling English countryside. Much of the poetry was a yearning to be
comforted, to avoid the distressing complexities of the uneasy peace
that followed the armistice; much of it was a sort of protracted con-
valescence. The best of the original Georgians were not satisfied with
soothing assurances and went on to develop their own individual char-
acteristics.

W. H. DAVIES

If Bernard Shaw had not discovered him, William Henry Davies
would probably have remained a peddler and a tramp. He was born in
a tavern incongruously named The Church House at Newport, Mon-

649

LIVES OF THE POETS

mouthshire, April 2,0, 1871. His family was Welsh; his father was an
innkeeper with little money to educate his son. Young Davies became
a farm helper and part-time day laborer, but he had no talent or taste
for work and soon drifted into die life of a wandering hobo. At twenty-
four he raised enough money to get to New York, where he met a
professional beggar who taught him the tricks of the "profession."
He made several trips on cattleboats between Baltimore and Liverpool,
tried train-jumping to Klondike gold fields, and lost his right leg board-
ing a fast-moving freight.

When Davies returned to London he found that a small allowance
had been saved up for him; he spent most of it before settling down
to do the most unprofitable thing he could think of: writing poetry.
Living in rooming houses at sixpence a night and earning an oc-
casional shilling by peddling, Davies managed to bring out a thin vol-
ume, The Soul's Destroyer. Bernard Shaw received a copy; and, as
Shaw wrote in the preface to Davies' Autobiography of a Super-
Tramp:

The author, as far as I could guess, had walked into a
printer's or stationer's shop, handed in his manuscript, and
ordered his book as he might have ordered a pair of boots.
It was marked "price, half a crown." An accompanying letter
asked me very civilly if I required a half-crown book of
verses; and, if so, would I please send the author a half-
crown; if not, would I please return the book. This was at-
tractively simple and sensible. I opened the book, and was
more puzzled than ever; for before I had read three lines
I perceived that the author was a real poet. . , , Here, I
saw, was a genuine innocent, writing odds and ends of verse
about odds and ends of things; living quite out of the world
in which such things are usually done; and knowing no bet-
ter (or rather no worse) than to get his book made by the
appropriate craftsman, and hawk it round like any other
ware.

Once discovered, Davies freed himself from vagabondage. He be-
came a celebrity but, unlike Burns and Clare, refused to be pam-
pered by the metropolitan literati. He retired to the country — first to
Surrey, then to Gloucestershire — married quietly, was granted a Civil
List pension, and did nothing but write. Between his thirty-sixth year

650

W. H. DAVIES

and his death, he published thirty-six volumes, twenty-six of verse,
ten of prose. He had been ill for a long time when he died in his
seventieth year, September 26, 1940.

A prolific and almost compulsive writer, Davies unquestionably wrote
too much. His birdlike simplicities and almost mindless fluency made
it difficult for critics to separate what was good, indifferent, and plainly
bad. Davies sang ingenuously rather than ingeniously of happy morn-
ings and evenings sweet with pleasant reveries. He regarded with an
air of discovery things that everyone else took for granted. A butter-
fly sunning itself on a stone, a glowworm at dusk, a rainbow seen
and a cuckoo heard at the same time — these were all Davies needed
for a full life and the life of poetry.

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care

We have no time to stand and stare.

More than most poets of his time, Davies recalls his forerunners. He
has sometimes been compared to the lyrical pre-Elizabethans, more
often to Herrick, occasionally to Blake. But Davies, a charming rather
than a passionate poet, could not frame burning images and prophetic
visions. His poetry was at best a Child's Primer of Innocence, a Blake
in words of one syllable.

LIVES OF THE POETS

RALPH HODGSON:

Ralph Hodgson was an anachronism, a poet who put the moods
of the moment into eighteenth-century measures. He was born in 1871
in Yorkshire and, though never a recluse, lived a life of extreme pri-
vacy in two worlds: the sporting world and the world of literature*
Known to a small circle as a person of few words and the author of a
few poems, he was, in his other role, a breeder of bull terriers and a
judge at dog shows. In his youth he worked as a journalist, was em-
ployed as a draftsman on a London evening paper, and edited Fry's
magazine for some years. He was thirty-six before he ventured to
appear as a poet with a modest little volume, The Last Blackbird.

At forty-two Hodgson, joined by the artist Lovat Fraser and the
literary historian Holbrook Jackson, founded a press, "At the Sign of
Flying Fame." The three men attempted to revive the one-time interest
in broadsides and chapbooks, most of which were written by Hodgson
and illustrated by Fraser. Before the leaflets became collectors' items,
Hodgson had won the Polignac Prize awarded by the Royal Society
of Literature for 'The Bull" and 'The Song of Honor," both of which
were included in his single collection, Poems, 1917.

In his early fifties Hodgson accepted an invitation to visit Japan as
lecturer in English literature at Sendai University, about two hundred
miles from Tokyo. The invitation was renewed in 1928 and Hodgson
remained in the East for several years. Nearing seventy, he came to the
United States with his American wife, whom he had met abroad, and
bought a place — part farm, part bird sanctuary — on the outskirts of
Minerva, Ohio. There, shunning company, he revived the project of a
small press, called it "Packington's Pound," and issued two miniature,
privately circulated booklets, Silver Wedding and The Muse and the
Mastiff.

Hodgson's work is small in quantity but all of it is scrupulously
fashioned. The form is traditional — one can sense traces of Christina
Rossetti's "Goblin Market" in "Eve," and Christopher Smart's "Song to
David" in 'The Song of Honor"— but the spirit is singular, 'The BulF
is not only a poignant description of an aging leader of the herd but it
is also an expression of humanitarian love. In a fanciful lyric the dread

652

WALTER DE LA MARE

figure of Time becomes an old gypsy with a caravan, 'last week in
Babylon, last night in Rome/' "Eve" recounts the oldest of legends but
transforms the mother of mankind into an innocent English country
girl

Eve, with her basket, was

Deep in the bells and grass,

Wading in bells and grass

Up to her knees.

Picking a dish of sweet

Berries and plums to eat,

Down in the bells and grass

Under the trees.

WALTER DE LA MARE

Writing in the language of his day, writing, moreover, in what seemed
to be the world of today, Walter de la Mare created a subliminal king-
dom, a domain of Nurseryland, day-bright children and ghostly night
creatures that never disclosed their true shapes, of simple rustics and
grotesque eccentrics, of fairy-tale elves, mermaids, giants, and evil
shadows too terrifying to name. In this realm of incongruities, reality
changed its shape, stretched monstrously to the borders of madness or
magic, and faded into a dream.

Two worlds have we: without, within;
But all that sense can mete and span,
Until it confirmation win
From heart and soul, is death to man.

Walter John de la Mare was born April 25, 1873, at Charlton in
Kent. His ancestors were Huguenots; on his mother's side, he was re*
lated to Browning. Educated at St. Paul's Cathedral Choir School in
London, he was unable to attend college and at eighteen was compelled
to go into business. He became a clerk in the English branch of the
Standard Oil Company and held the position for almost twenty years.
The rest of his life was spent in the English countryside whose in-
timate moods he knew so well.

653

LIVES OF THE POETS

De la Mare's first book, Songs of Childhood, was not published un-
til he was almost thirty; it then appeared as the work of Walter Ramal,
an anagram of part of his name. At thirty-six he received a Civil List
pension which allowed him to leave the oil company and give all his
hours to writing. After that time, De la Mare wrote, collected, and
edited some fifty volumes of poetry, short stones, essays, and novels.
At seventy-five he was made a Companion of Honor; on his eightieth
birthday he was awarded the Order of Merit. He died at his home in
Twickenham, June 22, 1956, at the age of eighty-three.

It has been said that De la Mare wrote for antiquity rather than
for posterity, that he longed to dwell in an enchanted past rather
than in the sordid present. His poetry confesses the nostalgic wish;
it is conceived in the mood of memory. The movement is slow and
generally sad, the outlines are misty. A sense of the irretrievable runs
through the verses like a whispered refrain; the word gone beats in
bell-like lines, for De la Mare loved all that is little and lost. Again
and again he remembers what never can be recovered: the small
truants, "the children magic hath stolen away," ghosts lingering in
the darkening air — "music hath called them, dreaming, home once more"
— a winter bird sliding through the frosty air, a beautiful dead lady.

But beauty vanishes, beauty passes,
However rare, rare it be.
And when I crumble, who will remember
This lady of the West Country?

"Nature itself/' wrote De la Mare, "resembles a veil over some fur-
ther reality of which the imagination in its visionary moments seems
to achieve a more direct evidence." It is in the "visionary moments"
that De la Mare triumphs; the area just beyond realism is his true
home. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in "The Listeners."
In this poem the adventure story takes on new significance, a modern
"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." It has been interpreted in
many ways: as the record of an actual quest, as a fable of man's eternal
attempt to answer life's riddle, as a courageous challenge to terror.
Few contemporary poems are more provocative, more purely a work of
the imagination which does not explain but never fails to illumine.

Many of De la Mare's smaller poems have the same enigmatic spell.
They seem insubstantial, the texture is almost transparent, but there
is flesh beneath the gossamer fantasies of 'The Song of Shadows," "All

654

CHARLOTTE MEW

That's Past," "Estranged,* "Solitude," 'The Ghost," 'The Scribe," and
the simple but concentrated suspense of "The Moth":

Isled in the midnight air,
Musked with the dark's faint bloom,
Out into glooming and secret haunts
The flame cries, "Come!"

Lovely in dye and fan,
A-tremble in shimmering grace,
A moth from her winter swoon
Uplights her face:

Stares from her glamorous eyes;
Wafts her on plumes like mist;
In ecstasy swirls and sways
To her strange tryst.

De la Mare's stories and anthologies reflect his preoccupation with
reverie, divination, and the power of dreams, "so various in their
shocking disregard of our tastes and ideals." Whatever his medium, De
la Mare was primarily concerned with the conflict between the outer
event and the inward eye, with mystery as mystery. He was Tom o'
Bedlam's "knight of ghosts," at home in a limbo of unearthly fancies,
venturing "ten leagues beyond the wide world's end," and returning
to describe the unknown universe, an old but still wonder-struck child.

CHARLOTTE MEW

When Charlotte Mew died, she was so little known that a local
newspaper spoke of her as "Charlotte New, said to be a writer." Yet
to those acquainted with her work, she was one of the most original
women poets of the period. She was born in Bloomsbury, November
15, 1869, daughter of an architect who died young, leaving his four
children to struggle not only with poverty but with private sorrows that
finally overcame them. Two of them, a son and a daughter, spent most
of their lives in an insane asylum. The house in which Charlotte, a
younger sister, Anne, and their helpless mother lived was dark and

655

LIVES OF THE POETS

gloomy; the top half of it was rented so that they could pay for the
little food needed to keep them alive. One of Charlotte Mew's few
happy excursions was a week end in Wessex as the guest of Thomas
Hardy. Hardy, who said that she was "the least pretentious but un-
doubtedly the best woman poet of our day," joined Walter de la Mare
and John Masefield in recommending a Civil List pension, and the
seventy-five pounds she received in December, 1923, saved her from
starvation. But she was already weak; the death of her sister Anne, who
had always been delicate, caused a complete collapse. She went into a
nursing home but had no incentive to get well. There was no one to
whom she could turn and, unwilling to face an indigent old age or
apply for admission to some charitable Home, she took poison. When
the doctors tried to save her, she said, 'Don't keep me; let me go,"
and died March 24, 1928.

In an obituary note, her executor Sidney Cockerell wrote: "Charlotte
and Anne Mew had more than a little in them of what made another
Charlotte and Anne, and their sister Emily, what they were. They were
indeed like two Bronte sisters incarnate." The comparison is not far-
fetched, for Charlotte Mew had something of the intensity of her
predecessor. Hers was a passion not so much for perfection as for
concentration. Of "The Farmer's Bride/' the title poem of her first
book, Harold Monro wrote: 'The outline would have resolved itself
in the mind of Mrs. Browning into a poem of at least two thousand
lines; Browning might have worked it up to six thousand. Charlotte
Mew tells the whole touching story in forty-six lines."

It will never be known how much of her work she destroyed — her
published poems number no more than sixty — but a posthumous vol-
ume, The Rambling Sailor, reveals the restrained but impassioned
lyricism which her self-depreciation could not repress. Traces of her
anguish may be found in the fretted energy of Anna Wickham (1884-
1947), another insufficiently appreciated poet; but Charlotte Mew's
"In the Fields," "I Have Been Through the Gates," "Sea Love," "Mad-
eleine in Church," 'The Trees Are Down," and "On the Asylum Road"
are uniquely moving. They are not only an intensification but a dis-
tillation of emotion. "Beside the Bed," a brief but solemnly beautiful
dirge, is one of the many short poems which show her gift for making
a tragic experience personal and universal.

Someone has shut the shining eyes, straightened and folded
The wandering hands quietly covering the unquiet breast:

656

JOHN MASEFIELD

So, smoothed and silenced you lie, like a child, not again to be

questioned or scolded:
But, for you, not one of us believes that this is rest.

Not so to close the windows down can cloud and deaden

The blue beyond: or to screen the wavering flame subdue its breath:

Why, if I lay my cheek to your cheek, your gray lips, like dawn,

would quiver and redden,
Breaking into the old, odd smile at this fraud of death.

Because all night you have not turned to us or spoken

It is time for you to wake; your dreams were never very deep:

I, for one, have seen the thin bright, twisted threads of them

dimmed suddenly and broken.
This is only a most piteous pretense of sleep!

JOHN: MASEFIELD

Approaching seventy-five, John Masefield wrote his autobiography,
So Long to Learn. His detractors were quick to seize upon the tide
and declare it was unintentionally appropriate, since it took Mase-
field almost half a century to discover that his metier was not the
studied occasional and official poetry he wrote after his fifties but the
racy and spontaneous verse of his youth. Masefield was born at
Ledbury, Herefordshire, June i, 1878, His father, a solicitor, died while
his son was still a boy, and after a brief schooling in Warwick, young
Masefield was educated on the Conway, a ship which trained young
boys for the merchant service. He was not quite fifteen when he went
to sea as an apprentice on a windjammer and sailed around Cape Horn.
The first overworked twenty years of his life were hard for Masefield,
who was not a natural seaman. Dogged by poverty, venturesome but
not in love with adventure for its own sake, he came to America
and abandoned the life of a sailor. He worked for a while in a bakery,
a livery stable, a carpet factory in Yonkers, and a New York Greenwich
Village saloon.

Just before he returned to England in 1897 Masefield chanced to
read Chaucer's The Parlement of Foules, and the robust humanity of

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LIVES OF THE POETS

the fourteenth-century poet prompted him to try to put his own ex-
periences into realistic verse. His sympathies, made clear in "A Con-
secration," were obviously not with "the princes and prelates and peri-
wigged charioteers/ Riding triumphantly laureled to lap the fat of
the years," but with

The men of the tattered battalion which fights till it dies,
Dazed with the dust of the battle, the din and the cries,
The men with the broken heads and the blood running into
their eyes . . .

Not the ruler for me, but the ranker, the tramp of the road,
The slave with the sack on his shoulders pricked on with the

goad,
The man with too weighty a burden, too weary a load.

The sailor, the stoker of steamers, the man with the clout,
The chantyman bent at the halliards putting a tune to the

shout,
The drowsy man at the wheel and the tired look-out.

Back in England, Masefield inaugurated a column on the Manches-
ter Guardian and, at twenty-four, published his first volume, Salt-
Water Ballads, a blend of raffish humor and sentiment, which in-
cluded several of his best-known short poems, "Sea Fever," "A
Wanderer's Song," "A Ballad of John Silver," "The West Wind," and
'Tewkesbury Road." It was followed by The Everlasting Mercy, a brutal
narrative which created a great stir because of its plain-spoken and
often crude language, although its defenders pointed out that it was
less coarse than much of Chaucer, and that Masefield's physical exult-
ing was mixed with spiritual exaltation* This strain was continued in
The Widow in the Bye Street, Dauber, and The Daffodil Fields, all
written in Masefield's thirties and all sufficiently melodramatic to bring
narrative poetry back into favor.

The First World War seemed to sap Masefield's creative vitality.
After serving with the Red Cross (as recorded in The Old Front Line
and in Galli'poli') he published LollingAon "Downs, Right Royal, and
Reynard the Fox, a poem about hunting by a man who did not hunt,
the sympathy being wholly with the fox. Many considered Reynard
not only the poet's best narrative but also a glowing transcript of the

658

D. H. LAWRENCE

spirit of rural England; it was said that the poem convinced the authori-
ties that Masefield was entitled to the laureateship, an honor which
he received after the death of Robert Bridges in 1930. In 1935, the
year of England's Silver Jubilee, he received the Order of Merit, and
composed "A Prayer for the King's Majesty"; nine months later, he
penned a funereal tribute upon the death of George V.

Whether the role of the laureateship was ruinous to the unfettered
poet, or whether he had already expended his gift, Masefield wrote
little after his forties that one would wish to preserve. However,
Masefield did not feel that he had said all he wanted to say by any
means; by the time he was seventy he had published more than ninety
volumes of poetry, plays, short stories, novels, juveniles, essays, public
addresses, studies of Shakespeare, biographical and historical works,
books written with increasing determination and lessening power. Most
of them are prolix and undistinguished; but the reader can skip the
tediousness of the later variations on such outworn themes as the story
of Troy and Tristram and Isolde, and turn back to the direct appeal of
the early, rejuvenating verse.

D. H. LAWRENCE

The mind of D. H. Lawrence was a battleground of warring per-
sonalities; the contemplative philosopher fought it out with the im-
pulsive poet, the inward-searching seer with the explosive propagandist,
the prophetic artist with the flagellated human being. Lawrence was
aware of his tortured maladjustments, and expressed the problem in
an introduction to Lady Chatterley's Lover:

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragi-
cally. The cataclysm had happened; we are among the ruins;
we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little
hopes. It is rather hard work: there is no smooth road into
the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles.
We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

David Herbert Lawrence was born September n, 1885, in the col-
liery town of Eastwood, a grimy hamlet in Nottinghamshire. There
were five children, three sons and two daughters, of whom David

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LIVES OF THE POETS

Herbert was the next to youngest. They lived in a drab brick house
tilted on a mean little street sliding downhill The father, an illiterate
day laborer, worked all his life in the coal mines and could scarcely
write his name. The mother, a former schoolteacher, was genteel, in-
tolerant, and dominating. Lawrence remembered his father, distorted
by images inherited from his mother, as a drunken brute. Lawrence
was always frail; he never fully recovered from an early attack of
pneumonia, and developed a nervous, hacking cough that never left
him. He was a shy, unimpressive student who, nevertheless, won a
scholarship to the Nottingham High School and, at sixteen, fell in
love with a neighbor, Jessie Chambers. It was a romantically literary
love, later fictionalized and heightened in Sows and Lovers. Devoted
to his mother, the boy had grown up to think of love as a spiritual
thing not to be debased by physical demands.

By the time he was seventeen, Lawrence was a pupil-teacher in
the town of his birth. For four years he served his apprenticeship
teaching the sons of colliers while he continued to study literature,
botany, and French. The last subject was taught by Professor Ernest
Weekley, with whom Lawrence was to become singularly involved a
few years later. At twenty-three Lawrence began teaching an upper
class in the Davidson Road School at Croydon, South London, where
he did not show as much aptitude for teaching literature as for flower
drawing. To disguise his boyishness, he grew a small sandy mustache;
but his delicacy was obvious in the smooth, hairless cheeks, the
weak chin, and the thin sensitive hands, as well as the soft voice which
sometimes rose into unexpected shrillness.

Lawrence was still in his teens when he determined to sublimate his
inner conflicts by writing about them. He began with poems, flower
pieces — "any young lady might have written them and been pleased
with them, as I was pleased with them. It was after that, when I was
twenty, that my real demon would now and then get hold of me and
shake real poems out of me, making me uneasy." His first novel,
started at twenty, suggests the cycle of fulfillment-frustration which
became Lawrence's chief preoccupation. Completed after four years of
spasmodic efforts, The White Peacock is Lawrence's earliest piece of
self-exposure. Set against his native background, full of thick poeti-
cisms and pathetic fallacies, it smolders with anguish, a significant
prelude to all the subsequent works of muffled passion and final defeat,

He was twenty-five, struggling between teaching and writing, when

660

D. H. LAWRENCE

his mother died. Instead of being freed by her death, his deeply cored
love for his mother was more centered than ever. 'The world began to
dissolve around me . . . passing away substanceless — till I almost dis-
solved away myself. . . . Everything collapsed, save the mystery of
death and the haunting of death in life/' During the next two years
the need of being loved drew him to various girls — he became engaged
to one of them — but his attachment to his mother was so strong,
stronger even than when she was alive, that he could not attach him-
self to any other woman. He gave up teaching with a mixture of
fear and relief, a state of mind which persisted for a long time, as im-
plied in his poems and stated explicitly in a letter: "I still dream I
must teach — and that's the worst dream I ever have. How I loathed and
raged with hate against it, and never knew!"

Lawrence was twenty-seven when he met Frieda von Richthofen
Weekley. She was thirty-one, daughter of a German baron, the wife
of Lawrence's one-time professor, and the mother of three young chil-
dren. Lawrence immediately transferred his seemingly fixed filial devo-
tion to the woman who had the authority of mature motherhood fused
with the physical allure of an ardent girl. His liberation was immedi-
ate; he and Frieda left England and went to Germany, Austria, and
Italy, where they lived during more than a year of trouble before she
obtained a divorce and they were able to marry. The experience is com-
pacted in his third volume of poetry (the first two were entitled
Love Poems and Amores), the candidly autobiographical Look! We
Have Come Through!

For Lawrence, love meant struggle, and he accepted all its impli-
cations. "I prefer my strife, infinitely, to other people's peace, havens,
and heavens/' he wrote to a friend. "God deliver me from the peace of
this world. As for the peace beyond understanding, I find it in con-
flict/' The tide of Look! We Have Come Throughl is a wish-fulfillment;
the early hurt breaks through, and the later desperation is anticipated
in "Mutilation/' "In the Dark," "Quite Forsaken/' "Song of a Man
Who Is Not Loved/' "All Souls/' "Why Does She Weep," and "Hymn
to Priapus," which ends:

Something in me remembers
And will not forget.
The stream of my life in the darkness
Deathward set!

661

LIVES OF THE POETS

And something in me has forgotten,
Has ceased to care.
Desire comes up, and contentment
Is debonair.

I, who am worn and careful,
How much do I care?
How is it I grin then, and chuckle
Over despair?

Grief, grief, I suppose and sufficient
Grief makes us free
To be faithless and faithful together
As we have to be.

At twenty-eight, while living above Lake Garda, Lawrence com-
pleted his third and most painfully revealing novel, Sons and Lovers.
A year later he published his first volume of short stories, The Prussian
Officer, and, at thirty, The Rainbow, a work agitated by a wildly
disturbing beauty and penetrating hurtfulness. The Rainbow was the
first of Lawrence's works to run afoul of the law. When it was cen-
sored because of its sexual episodes and a hint of Lesbianism, the
publisher cravenly pleaded that he had not read the manuscript, and
the edition was withdrawn.

By this time Lawrence had formulated his philosophy about a super-
rational way of life. He held that instinct was superior to intelligence,
and that the subconscious generated the only light to save the sick
spirit from "heavy, sealing darkness. . . . My great religion is a belief
in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go
wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says,
is always true."

The First World War drove Lawrence and his wife to the little town
of Zennor on the south coast of England. There he dreamed of found-
ing a community of kindred souls, a realization of Coleridge's and
Southey's abandoned Pantisocracy. But there were no friends in Corn-
wall. Although he tried to be sociable, the townspeople mistrusted the
queer artist who did the cooking and scrubbed the floor of his little
shack; they grew increasingly suspicious of the outsider with his un-
happy air and unconventional ways. It was wartime. Germany was
the enemy, and Lawrence had a German wife, whose brother, Man-

662

D. H. LAWRENCE

feed von Richthofen, was a famous German flyer. It was more than
likely, thought the people of Cornwall, that the Lawrences might be
spies. The likelihood grew into a conviction. Their lights were in-
terpreted as signals, the cottage was searched, and the Lawrences
were driven out.

During the next two years they were harried from one domicile
to another — London, Berkshire, Derbyshire, the Midland hills — until
the war was over, and in the autumn of 1919 the Lawrences left
England for the Continent. In spite of Lawrence's productivity, they
were poorer than ever. Publishers looked on Lawrence as a bad
risk. He continued to write, encouraged by nothing more than his
own frenzied will. At thirty-five he published Women in Love, which
he called "something of a sequel to The Rainbow." In it the Lawren-
tian hero announces the author's ideal of a super-sexual love, a state of
pure being, "the individual soul taking precedence over love and desire
for union, stronger than any pangs of emotion," an acceptance of
"the obligation of permanent connection with others, but which never
forfeits its proud individual singleness, even while it loves and
yields."

The quest for "singleness" drove Lawrence through six years of
wandering. Searching for a security that would be a reaffirmation and
final establishment of self, he left England in 1919 and returned
to it only for brief visits. He ran away. Sometimes he realized that he
was trying to run away from himself. "I wish," he wrote to a friend,
"I were going to Thibet — or Kamschatka — or Tahiti — to the ultima,
ultima, ultima Thule. I feel sometimes I should go rnad, because there
is nowhere to go, no 'new world/" Wherever he was, Lawrence
wanted to be somewhere else, and soon after he arrived at the new
goal he would write, "This place is no good/* Then he would be off
again in quest of the dark magic and the fading illusion. Instead of
ultima Thulc, he went to Baden-Baden, the Abruzzi hills, Capri, Taor-
mina, Sardinia, Austria, then halfway around the world to Ceylon,
Australia, Tahiti, and America.

It was in the southwest of the United States and in Mexico that
Lawrence conceived of himself as prophet and leader. Once again he
dreamed of a phalanstery of creative thinkers, artists, workers. He
had a vision of the Indian as the hope of survival in "a world of
corruption and cold dissolution/' Here was Rousseau's noble savage
whose 'T>lood-stream consciousness" placidly but firmly resisted the
degenerating mechanical toys and tricks of twentieth-century civiliza-

663

LIVES OF THE POETS

tion. Some of Lawrence's consequent celebrations of primitive power
are raptly mystical; some, like his yearning for "the lost magic" and
"the dark Gods," are silly to the point of being nonsensical. It was at
this period, however, that Lawrence, in spite of impending doom,
wrote some of his happiest works. The Plumed Serpent and Morn-
ings in Mexico are full of Lawrence's ecstatic response to nature
and his gift of intimacy with every object as well as every person he
encountered. The books also reveal Lawrence's more vulnerable side:
his exaggerated sun-worship, his grotesque "blood-knowledge," and
his messianic delusions. Worse, his absurd assumptions of leadership
were linked with an anti-democratic hunger for power and a yearn-
ing for an aristocracy of the elite, idiosyncracies which proved him to
be as naive as "proto-f ascist."

In September, 1925, two weeks after his fortieth birthday, Lawrence
left America hoping to return. It was a forlorn hope. Still searching
for sun and health, Lawrence again went from place to place — a town
near Genoa, a suburb of Florence, a spot in Switzerland, Austria,
Germany, the Balearic Islands, and, finally, France. This was Law-
rence's last phase, but in it he wrote some of his most memorable
prose and his noblest as well as his angriest verse. His preoccupation
with physical desire and psychological inhibitions culminated in Lady
Chatterley's Lover, an extension of the duel between the desperate
demand of sex and the serenity of love. Nothing in contemporary lit-
erature roused a greater storm of protest. There are passages of un-
restrained animality, but there is also a deep undertone of pity — Law-
rence first intended to call the book Tenderness. It was attacked,
censored, prohibited (and, consequently, pirated by unscrupulous print-
ers) as an obscene work; but Lawrence maintained that it was written
in an effort to strike a balance between the coarse ugliness, the mental-
spiritual sterility of the modern world, and the quickening phallic
consciousness, "the source of all real beauty and all real gentleness."

Lawrence had two more years to live. During that time he wrote
another novel, a metaphysical-religious inquiry (Apocalypse), which
ends with a magnificat to the sun, several pamphlets (most of them
prompted by the attacks on Lady Chatterley's Lover), more than a
hundred poems, and half a dozen mordant short stories, including
'The Rocking Horse Winner/' the tale of a supernatural child in a
moneymad family, a fable that turns into one of the world's great hor-
ror stories. There were frightening premonitions. His chest pained
him; the tubercular attacks increased; there were bad hemorrhages. Al-

664

D. H. LAWRENCE

though writing was a relief, it was also a strain. News from England
made things harder to bear. A manuscript of his poems, Pansies, was
seized at the order of the Home Secretary, and a show of his paintings
was closed by the police. He kept on writing, trying to fulfill "his
living wholeness and his living unison." Six months later the man
who wanted to exult because "for man, as for flower and beast and
bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly alive/' was dead.
The sun-worshiper had been too ill to appreciate the irony that he
had left a villa named Beau Soleil for one named Ad Astra. It was
there, in the old-world town of Vence, above the French Riviera, that
he died March i, 1930, midway in his forty-fifth year.

During his lifetime Lawrence published almost forty books, which
included not only a body of creative fiction, poetry, and plays but
such critical and controversial works as Studies in Classic American
Literature, Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious, Pornography and Ob-
scenity, and a series of autobiographical travel books — a long record of
suffering, agony, and ecstasy. Almost everything Lawrence touched
was translated into a struggle, a death and resurrection of the flesh;
he wrote as though his throat "were choked in its own crimson." His
utterance, therefore, was fitfully uneven; it ranged from the reverber-
ating to the shrill. Yet, even when the tone is hysterical, the impact
is unforgettable. In a letter written when he was twenty-eight, Law-
rence said, "I have always tried to get an emotion out on its own
course without altering it. It needs the finest instinct imaginable,
much finer than the skill of the craftsmen." At another time he
presented the problem of the poet with characteristic intensity:

One realm we have never conquered: the pure present. One
great mystery of time is terra incognita to us: the instant.
The most superb mystery we have hardly recognized: the
immediate, instant self.

It was "the immediate, instant self" that Lawrence was able to raise
from the printed page, a self incited by "the hot blood's blindfold
art," which affected an entire generation. It was a driven but dynamic
spirit that swayed readers of Lawrence's poetic prose as well as of his
poetry and, in its conflicts of inner turmoil and outer violence, became
a portent of his times.

665

XXX

Waste Land

EZRA POUH~D AMD T. S. ELIOT

CHRENCE'S REPUDIATION of the craftsman in favor of "the hot blood's
blindfold art," his insistence that instinct was more important
than intelligence, was challenged by many of his contemporaries.
They conceded Lawrence's passion, even his persuasiveness, but they
refused to consider him as anything more than a lonely, displaced
rhapsodist. Such poets as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day
Lewis, and William Empson were disciples of a new order which
called for a new orderliness. Theirs was to be a poetry recognizably
modern in thought and idiom, sharp in diction but highly suggestive,
intellectually precise yet rich in allusions. They issued no manifesto
and belonged to no school, but they were essentially stylists, and
acknowledged Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot as their immediate ancestors.

E2RA FOUNT)

Ezra Loomis Pound was born October 30, 1885, in Hailey, Idaho,
of New England forebears. His mother was related to the Longfellow
family; his father, a government employee and something of a pioneer,

666

EZRA POUND

put up the first plaster house in the town of Hailey. In his infancy,
Pound was brought East; he entered the University of Pennsylvania
when he was fifteen. At eighteen he transferred to Hamilton College
in northern New York, specialized in languages and comparative lit-
erature, and being graduated at twenty, taught at the University of
Pennsylvania. Seemingly destined for an academic career, he spent
a year on research in Spain, France, and Italy. Upon his return he
joined the faculty of Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana,
"a town with literary traditions," Pound said satirically, "Lew Wallace,
author of Ben Hur, having died there/1 He was dismissed after four
months because of "bohemianism."

A frustrated teacher, Pound again struck out for Europe, deter-
mined to instruct his fellow Americans — "artists astray, lost in the vil-
lages, mistrusted, spokcn-against" — who had become expatriates. After
publishing a thin volume of echoes, A Lume Syento, in Venice, Pound
took up residence in London, joined a group of advanced young writ-
ers, became their leader, and was appointed literary executor of the
Fenollosa collection of Chinese and Japanese poetry. The precision
and economy of the Chinese poets and the intense condensation of the
Japanese tanka and hokku made an impression so deep that it influ-
enced not only Pound's early poems but also the Cantos written in his
sixties. Before the term Imagist came into use, Pound wrote his first
imagist poem; it was in Paris that, at the age of twenty-six, Pound
employed the aesthetics of Oriental poetry:

I got out of a ''metro" train and saw suddenly a beautiful
face and another and another. ... I tried all day for words
for what that had meant for me. . . . That evening I found
the expression — not in speech but in sudden splotches of
color. It was just that — a "pattern" or hardly a pattern if
by pattern you mean something with a repeat in it . . -
I wrote a thirty-line poem and destroyed it because it was
what we call work of the second intensity. Six months later
I made a poem half that length. A year later I made the
following hokku-likc sentence:

The apparition of these faces in a crowd;
petals on a wet-black bough.

At twenty-nine Pound married Dorothy Shakespear, by whom he
had a son. By this time he was the author of five small books of

667

LIVES OF THE POETS

poetry, the last four characteristically entitled, Personae, Exultations,
Canzoni, and Ripostes. These early poems are an amalgam of Pro-
ven$al, ancient French, and late Victorian influences, Browning, Mor-
ris, and the Pre-Raphaelites; it may be said that Pound's individual
manner derived from the way in which he assimilated his indebted-
nesses. Often the effect is not so much a combination as a contradic-
tion, an alternating freshness and affectation. The rich archaisms of the
ballades, the sestinas, and translations of other French forms are set
off in bold relief by appearing next to the colloquial self-consciousness
of:

Come, my songs, let us speak of perfection —
We shall get ourselves rather disliked . . ,

and the naughty preciosity of:

The gilded phaloi of the crocuses
are thrusting at the spring air.

Pound was playing the young insurgent ("I mate with my free
kind upon the crags"), scorning the bourgeois ("0 generation of the
thoroughly smug")> and, although he had detested Walt Whitman, he
was willing to make a pact, coming to the author of Leaves of Grass
"as a grown child who has had a pig-headed father," "It was you that
broke the new wood," he acknowledged. "Now is a time for carving/'
Within a few years Pound had carved a place for himself. The first
impression he made on the English was an unfavorable one. In his
mid-twenties, he was, according to the painter-essayist-novelist Wynd-
ham Lewis, "an uncomfortably tense, nervously straining, jerky, red-
dish-brown young American. ... He was a drop of oil in a glass of
water. The trouble was, I believe, that he had no wish to mix. He just
wanted to impress"

In this he succeeded. Pound's arrogance and his erudition became
a legend. He lectured in a high and strident voice on new manifesta-
tions in the arts, helped to found Blast, the organ of the English
Vorticists, and was made European correspondent for the magazine
Poetry, which had just been organized in Chicago, He flaunted an ag-
gressive red beard, "and grew," said Lewis, "into a sort of prickly, aloof,
rebel mandarin." He attracted disciples and repudiated them; his ani-
madversions were harsh but not merely destructive* Among those who

668

EZRA POUND

benefited from his criticism was T. S. Eliot, who, at Pound's suggestion,
cut The Waste Land to half its original length and dedicated the poem
to Ezra Pound, as "il miglior fa'b'bro" (the better craftsman). Pound's
influence on Yeats was also considerable. Although Yeats was twenty
years Pound's senior, he asked the younger poet for advice, and Yeats's
later concrete style owes much to Pound's abhorrence of the vague
and abstract. The "modernity" of modern poetry was largely condi-
tioned by Pound's precepts as well as his practice.

In 1914 Pound gathered a little band of poets who were protesting
against the excesses of contemporary poetry, wrote a manifesto, and
gave the group a name. He called them Imagists, partly because they
stressed the importance of the image itself, free from its clutter of ro-
manticism, and partly to adopt a discriminating term. The creed of
the Imagists called for (0 the use of the language of common
speech, but the employment of the exact word, not the merely decora-
tive word; (2) the creation of rhythms based on cadence rather
than on a strict metrical beat, new rhythms that expressed new moods
— "we believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better ex-
pressed in free verse than in conventional forms"; (3) the production
of poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred or indefinite. Emphasis
was also placed on the need for a wide background of international
literature. "Let the candidate," wrote Pound, "fill his mind with the
finest cadences he can discover, preferably in the foreign language,
so that the meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his at-
tention from the movement; e.g., Saxon charms, Hebridean folk songs,
the verse of Dante and the lyrics of Shakespeare. . . ." The credo
thus placed a high value on techniques, on severities of style, on the
cadence rather than the communication.

The statement of principle aroused a storm of argument; news-
papers called it "the free-verse furore." In America Amy Lowell started
an Imagist campaign of her own. Pound accused her of exploiting
the group, violating its spirit, and making the image so static that it
became nothing more than the picture of a lifeless object. Nevertheless,
she managed to kidnap three of the English Imagists, Richard Alding-
ton, F. S» Flint, D. H, Lawrence, and two Americans, John Gould
Fletcher and "H.D." This, with the addition of herself, made six who
were included in Some Imagist Poets, which appeared in 1915, 1916,
and 1917. Scorning the captured elan, which he called "the Amy gist
movement," Pound withdrew from the group, became English editor

669

LIVES OF THE POETS

of The Little Review, sat out the First World War and, at the end of it,
moved to Paris.

In Paris Pound continued to irritate and stimulate by his creative
volatility and perverse bellicosity. He developed a new and acrid style,
conversational in manner, ironic in mood. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,
published when Pound was thirty-five, frankly faces the modern world
with satire and adroit disdain. The poem is a chain of virtuosities, mel-
lifluous passages jarred by purposeful roughness, a great flow of sensu-
ous allusions interrupted and diverted by dissonant recollections. Eliot
called it "a positive document of sensibility. It is compact of the ex-
perience of a certain man in a certain place at a certain time; and it
is also the document of an epoch; it is genuine tragedy and comedy;
and it is, in the best sense of Arnold's worn phrase, a 'criticism of life.' "

Nothing which Pound had previously attempted divided critical opin-
ion so sharply as his Cantos, a series of broken but ambitious monologues,
As they continued to appear over a quarter of a century, they were
hailed by one school as die peak of his achievement, an almost inex-
haustible epic, and by another school as the descent of an eccentric
talent into an abyss of incoherence. There were to be a hundred "chap-
ters" in Pound's major work. The first sixteen were printed in 1925;
others appeared during the next twenty years; the ten Pisan Cantos
(so called because they were composed while Pound was imprisoned
near Pisa in May, 1945) brought the count to eighty-four. Seo
tion: Rock Drill (1956) added ten more. Many who attempted to
read the magnum opus decided that it was written in code and that
there was no way of deciphering it. They were mistaken but not al-
together wrong. Although the Cantos are not incomprehensible, they
are anything but dear. To understand them the reader would have
to plow through encyclopedias, foreign-language dictionaries, cultural
and political histories; he would also have to be aware of forgotten
gossip about Pound's contemporaries and recognize the tenor of his
rambling, disordered, and extremely private associations. (An annotated
Index to the Cantos of Ezra Pound runs to more than three hundred
and twenty pages, an indication of the extreme allusiveness of the
work) Pound's tenuous lines lose all organization in a flooding stream
of consciousness. A jumble of fragments, one statement interrupts
another; contrasting images disclose sudden reversals of mood, as in
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley , and show how deeply Pound was influenced
by Corbi&re and Laforgue. In spite of his admiration for the poet,
Yeats came to this conclusion:

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EZRA POUND

When I consider his work as a whole I find more style than
form; at moments more style, more deliberate nobility and
the means to convey it than in any contemporary poet known
to me. But it is constantly interrupted, broken, twisted into
nothing by its direct opposite, nervous obsession, nightmare,
stammering confusion. . . .

Pound maintained that the scheme of the Cantos is severely formal;
he said that he was writing a Human Comedy in many voices and
dimensions. He began with a precise plan: the work was to be
broadly fugal, with subject and counter-subject, using the repetitions
of history as recurrent themes. But as the Cantos grew in number the
author grew increasingly prolix. Pound assails democratic capitalism
with a petulance that is close to hysteria; the outlines of the quasi-
epic disappear in an agglomeration of Greek myths, Chinese ideograms,
and preoccupation with usury, an obsession which eventually domi-
nates and distorts the whole design. At the beginning Pound gave the
reader to understand that the work had the architecture of Bach; as
it progressed Pound liked to compare it to Dante. He claimed that the
Greek, Renaissance, and First World War passages represent the
Inferno; the sinful history of money and banking forms the Purga*
torio; the climactic finale would reveal the Pamdiso.

Typical of Pound's method is the opening of the second Canto:

Hang it all, Robert Browning,

there can be but the one "Sordello."

But Sordcllo, and my Sordello?

Lo Sordcls si fo di Mantovana.

So-shu churned in the sea.

Seal sports in the spray-whited circles of cliff-wash,

Sleek head, daughter of Lir,

eyes of Picasso

Under black fur-hood, lithe daughter of Ocean;
And the wave runs in the beach-groove:
"Eleanor, 4\kvav$ and A&rroXk!"

And poor old Homer blind, blind, as a bat,
Ear, ear for the sea-surge, murmur of old men's voices . - *

In 1924 Pound left France and settled in Rapallo. He embarrassed
his friends and increased the number of his enemies by comparing

671

LIVES OF THE POETS

Mussolini favorably to Jefferson, by deriding democracy and defending
Fascism. In January, 1941, Pound started to broadcast propaganda by
short wave from Rome* He issued violent diatribes against America,
vilified Roosevelt, spouted anti-Semitism, and counseled Fascist officials
in ways of waging war against his native land. The inspired enfant
terrible had become the public traitor. In May, 1945, he was taken
prisoner and indicted for treason. Brought to Washington, Pound es-
caped trial and a possible death sentence when psychiatrists testified
that he was of unsound mind. Nine months later he was committed
to Saint Elizabeth's Hospital as insane. After twelve years the treason
charges were dismissed on the grounds that Pound would never be
mentally competent to stand trial and that the broadcasts made from
Italy might have been the result of insanity. Friends had agitated for
his freedom, and when he was released from the hospital in July, 1958,
he returned to Italy, hailed his adopted nation with a Fascist salute,
and called the United States "an insane asylum/'

As a political economist, Pound was ineffectual and tragically ab-
surd. As a person, he was erratic, garrulous, and intermittently un-
balanced. The weakness of his theorizing and his eccentric disposals
are obvious, but they do not negate his importance as a poet. Pound
stressed the power of the creative word in contradistinction to the com-
monly accepted and outworn phrase. He was a pioneer of new forms
who experimented in an idiom which he made his own and which he
transmitted to others who learned to use it more flexibly if less force-
fully. A stern, even superb, technician, Pound could not teach his fol-
lowers what to say, but he had a great talent for showing them how to
say it.

T. S. ELIOT

Although the work of Thomas Stearns Eliot had a profound in-
fluence on English writers, Eliot maintained that his poetry belonged
in the American current rather than in the British. Besides being a
critical judgment, this was an acknowledgment of his origin, for, while
Eliot lived most of his life in England, he was born in St Louis,
Missouri, September 26, 1888. He was the youngest of six children in
a family whose ancestors were Puritan New Englanders; his Boston
grandfather founded Washington University and the first Unitarian

672

T. S. ELIOT

church in St. Louis. Sent to New England for his schooling, Eliot at-
tended Milton Academy and Harvard University. At twenty-one he
received his A.B. and, the year following, his A.M. He went abroad,
studied at the Sorbonne and at Merton College, Oxford, and became
an English schoolmaster. He disliked teaching, endured four years of
it, and took a job as a bank clerk. Eight years later he obtained a posi-
tion with the London publishing firm of Faber and Faber, rose to full
partnership, and became a naturalized British subject in his fortieth
year. He declared that he was "Anglo-Catholic in religion, royalist in
politics, and classicist in literature." When he was twenty-seven he
married Viviennc Haigh, who spent the last seven years of her life in
a nursing home and died in 1947. After more than ten years of widow-
erhood, Eliot married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher.

At nineteen Eliot was writing lyrics in the traditional English man-
ner, but before being graduated from Harvard, he discovered the
French symbolists, particularly Verlaine, Laforgue, and Corbi&re. It was
not long before he surpassed his models in the way he twisted light
verse and doggerel into satirical thrusts and bitterly ironic contrasts of
mood. He voiced the creeping disillusion of his time in a style that was
often over-subtle; his admirers hailed him as the founder of the Ellip-
tical School, a designation which he repudiated.

Eliot was still experimenting with an idiom half scholarly, half
colloquial, when at twenty-three he composed his first important poem,
'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock/' It was Eliot's initial employ-
ment of images suggested by life in a monstrous city to present some-
thing beyond the physical scene. With "Prufrock" he shocked and re-
animated the poetry of the English-speaking world. He prefaced the
poem with a quotation from Dante but, unless the reader knew The
Divine Comedy or could read Italian, he could scarcely realize that
Eliot was giving him the key by suggesting that his Prufrock echoes
Dante's Guido da Montcfeltro, who said: "If I thought my story would
get back to the world, then this flame would shake no more. But since,
if what I hear is true, that none did ever return alive from these depths,
I answer you without fear of misrepresentation." Prufrock is not in hell.
But he, too, is in the depths of indecision and disillusion which create
a hell of the modern world, and his story presents an allusive picture
of decadence against the background of a sterile society. Omitting all
but the most powerful images, Eliot portrays a tired world through the
words of a tired, inadequate, ultrafastidious, yet self-sufficient dilettante.
The title sets the mood with its contrast between the alluring "Love

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LIVES OF THE POETS

Song" and the businesslike signature of "J. Alfred Prufrock." The dis-
cord suggested by the incongruity is furthered by the opening stanza.
It begins promisingly, almost romantically:

Let us go then, you and I,

When die evening is spread out against the sky . . ,

This is followed by a simile which is a revulsion, a reminder of a sick
world's desperate condition: "Like a patient etherised upon a table/'
The poem proceeds to emphasize its inherent ironies. Bizarre but
logical images carry the reader into the sordid world of "half-deserted
streets,/ The muttering retreats/ Of restless nights in one-night cheap
hotels,/ And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells" —

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .

The question remains unanswered as the speaker threads his way
through "the yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes"1
and faids himself in a room where "women come and go, talking of
Michelangelo." There he loses himself among trivialities and intensi-
ties; he is aware of great emotions and the failure to measure up to them.
An inhibited, prematurely old young man, a spectator of life but not
a participant — "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons" — Pru-
frock is conscious of passion everywhere about him, but he cannot
rouse himself to respond to it.

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

And should I then presume?

And how should I begin?

Prufrock can live only in terms of evasion. He escapes the invitation
of love, which is a challenge to live, by summoning the dead past.
Retreating from any overt act and the fearful likelihood of his inability
to perform it, Prufrock wishes he were something less than human,

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

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T. S. ELIOT

Most of the poems collected in Prufrock and Other Observations,
published in 1917, are in the vein of the tide poem, dry, crisp, satiri-
cal; they picture a world where the dignified degenerates into the
tawdry and the beautiful is mixed with the banal. It was charged that
Eliot was so fascinated by the ugly and the repulsive in nature that he
was blind to the uplifting elements of existence. In The Sacred Wood
he replied: 'The contemplation of the horrid or sordid or disgusting,
by the artist, is the necessary and negative aspect of the impulse toward
the pursuit of beauty." He amplified the statement in The Use of Po-
etry: 'The essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful
world with which to deal; it is to be able to see beneath both beauty
and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory/'

The exploration of "the boredom, and the horror, and the glory"
was extended in The Waste Land, published when Eliot was thirty-
four. In it he mixed "memory and desire" in an agonized metaphysics
of nostalgia. It is a poem which bristles with difficulties and which has
had many different interpretations. One school considers The Waste
Land a modern corruption of an ancient regeneration ritual, suggestive
of Frazer's The Golden Bough; another contends that it is a chal-
lenging reappraisal of Christianity; a third believes with Robert Graves
that it is merely "a sequence of disparate short pieces, some poems,
some not, like the songs in Blake's Island on the Moon, and experi-
mental only in the sense that Mr. Eliot asks his readers to make a
mythically significant connection between them." Most critics agree
that Eliot's leading theme here, as elsewhere, was a disgust with the
contemporary world and a despair of the complacent creatures who in-
habit it. In The Waste Landt Eliot uncovered death in life everywhere.
He explored a vast region of drouth and the detritus of civilization:
vacant lots cluttered with old newspapers and rusted machinery,
musty parlors and filthy side streets, rats' alleys "where the dead men
lost their bones," and rivers that sweat oil and tar where once a Queen
glided by on a gilded shell. In order to depict a time composed of
splintered cultures, Eliot broke the continuity of his verse into jagged
segments and interrupted die flow of every idea with another fragment
of literature. Many readers were puzzled by the verbal montages, com-
pendiums of quotations without quotation marks, for Eliot embellished
his lines with excerpts, phrases, and "broken images'* from a most re-
markable variety of sources: The Aeneid> Henry James, a sonnet by
Meredith, a biography of Edward FitzGerald, Edmund Spenser, Sher-
lock Holmes — Eliot was a great admirer of Conan Doyle's detective —

LIVES OF THE POETS

Cavalcanti, Dante, Shakespeare and the lesser Elizabethan dramatists,
Jessie Western's From Ritual to Romance, Wagner s music dramas, Fra-
zer's The Golden Bough, Ecclesiastes, the twisted echo of a sentimental
ballad by Theodore Dreiser's brother, a nursery rhyme. . . . Neverthe-
less, Eliot's borrowings amplify the suggestiveness of the passages in
which they were incorporated and created another technique for twen-
tieth-century poets.

'The Hollow Men," which emphasizes the barrenness of The Waste
Land in a still more cruel state of desolation, characterizes the end of
a period. In one of the most hopeless poems ever written, Eliot rivets
our gaze upon an exhausted world: "Shape without form, shade with-
out color,/ Paralysed force, gesture without motion." Men, figures
stuffed with straw, gather on stony soil in a valley of dying stars* They
are empty without vision; they lean together without thought; their dry
voices whisper meaninglessly. The poet proceeds through a land of
stone images and death's dream kingdom. Here man cannot even die
decently. He approaches his shabby end by way of a nursery rhyme
("Here we go round the prickly pear") and. concludes it with another
jingle. A child's game turns into an ironic litany of complete frustra-
tion:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

After "The Hollow Men" Eliot's poetry deepened in tone and breadth.
"Journey of the Magi," "A Song for Simeon," and "Ash-Wednes-
day" trace the progress of the intellectual toward the spiritual. "Ash-
Wednesday," the most imposing poem of Eliot's late thirties, at first
seems a composite of devotional verse, a pastiche of The Book of Com-
mon Prayer, ecclesiastical ritual, and Latin liturgy. There were those
who rated "Ash-Wednesday" as Eliot's turning point, a great poem,
beginning in desperation, rising in hope, and ending in a resigned
peace.

Eliot continued to undergo unexpected changes. He emerged as a
playwright equally deft at suspenseful tragedy and meaningful comedy;
he wrote some of the most provocative essays of the period; he dis-
played an altogether winning playfulness in Old Possum's Book of
Practical Cats, a book enjoyed by every aelurophile and fancier of

676

T, S, ELIOT

light verse. His dramas consisted of The Rock, a pageant play, Murder
in the Cathedral, an impassioned treatment of St. Thomas* martyrdom,
The Family Reunion, which introduced the Greek Eumenides to mod-
ern England, and The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk, and
The Elder Statesman, brilliant, penetrating, and sometimes painful
comedies.

In his sixties Eliot resembled the conventional picture of a conserva-
tive "elder statesman" rather than a poet. Six feet tall, he carried him-
self with a haggard, hawklike elegance; he stooped a little and his
ascetic face was sharp. His beautifully modulated voice recorded many
of his poems with a grave and appropriately sepulchral inflection. The
novelist-essayist, V. S. Pritchett, saw him as "a trim anti-Bohemian
with black bowler and umbrella, the well-known symbol of male re-
spectability, ushering us to our seats in hell."

The first of Four Quartets appeared when Eliot was nearing fifty;
with "Little Gidding," the last of the Quartets, he completed what
many believe to be the most perceptive and possibly the greatest phil-
osophical poem of the century. In a scries of statements, counter-state-
ments, ramifications, recapitulations, and final reconciliation, Eliot ex-
amines the meaning of time and timelcssncss, the sense of the present
and the sense of poetry. The allusions arc remote but not nearly as
complex as those in The Waste Land, and the skillfully interwoven
repetitions furnish a music only tentatively sounded in Eliot's preceding
work. There arc designs within designs, and the patterns are intricately
related in a kind of four-part harmony: the symbols of the four seasons
and the four elements, the alternation of slow-paced unrhymcd mono-
logues and rapidly rhyming lyrics. In a series of contrasts between
the center of existence, "the still point," and "the turning world" of
daily life, Eliot probes into the historical sense which, as he said in
'Tradition and the Individual Talent," "involves a perception, not only
of the pastness of the past, but of its presence." Only in this realm can
the soul find itself: love is still and timeless, perfect in Being, as dis-
tinguished from desire, which is temporal, restless, and uncompleted
in the state of Becoming, The refrain of time present and time past is
accompanied by meditations on the difficulty of communication. As
craftsman Eliot complains of the twenty years, largely wasted, between
two wars —

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

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LIVES OF THE POETS

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In a general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion.

At sixty Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize for "work as a trail-
blazing pioneer of modern poetry/' In the same year he was also hon-
ored by King George VI with the Order of Merit. Eliot's reaction was
characteristic: 'The process of advancement is interesting. One seems
to become a myth, a fabulous creature that does not exist. One does
not feel any different, though. It isn't that you get bigger to fit the
world; the world gets smaller to fit you."

Eliot's seventieth birthday brought forth a salvo of tributes, including
A Symposium, which traced Eliot's career from his early dissections of
ennui and the soul-destroying mechanisms of modern life to the later
penitential poetry and the flexible verse-speech of the plays. A dozen
full-length books analyzed his impact; one bibliography listed 285
critical studies of his contribution. However, Eliot, who evinced more
humor than his votaries, objected to being a cult. He regarded many of
his disciples as embarrassing intellectual snobs and referred to the New
Critics as "the lemon-squeezer school of criticism." In On Pacts and
Poetry he pointed to the widened gap between content and form, and
wrote that "the modern inclination is to put up with some degree of
incoherence ... so long as the verse sounds well and presents striking
and melodious imagery. Between the two extremes of incantation and
meaning, we are I think today more easily seduced by the music of the
exhilaratingly meaningless. And to exceed in one direction or the other
is to risk mistaking the ephemeral for the permanent* ... In an age
like ours, lacking common standards, poets need to remind themselves
that it is not sufficient to rely upon those gifts which are native to
them, and which they exercise with ease, but that good poetry must
exhibit several qualities in proportion, of which one is good sense/'

Such salutary conclusions proved that Eliot had not only felt but
thought his way to wisdom as he had thought his way to religion*
His unique blend of borrowings and original concepts, his individual
consciousness and his preoccupation with man's conscience made him
the pet of the exegetic scholars. Eliot objected that in order to appre-

678

T. S. ELIOT

date and enjoy poetry it was not necessary to explain it, a process
which too often resulted in explaining it away. "Why," he asked,
speaking of Wordsworth, "should we need any more light on the Lucy
poems than the light which radiates from the poems themselves?''

Eliot had already stated the case for poetry in his Selected Essays:
1917-1932. "Poetry may make us see the world afresh, or some new
part of it. It may make us from time to time a little more aware of the
deeper, unnamed feelings to which we rarely penetrate." The total
effect of his work was to enlarge the vocabulary and change the di-
rection of twentieth-century poetry. It permitted the reader to see a new
or unsuspected part of the world with a greater awareness than he had
hitherto thought to enjoy.

679

XXXI

The Age of Anxiety

AIHOUGH THIS is the last chapter in a series of detailed estimates,
it must remain inconclusive. More than two hundred modern
writers of verse have appeared in the American and British
anthologies of the last two decades, far too many for critical considera-
tion in these pages. There is no way of knowing how many of these
hundreds will seem important to the reader a century from now or how
many will be forgotten. I have selected some sixteen contemporaries,
not only because their poetry has special distinction but because they
seem to reflect most significantly the problems and pressures of their
time.

Life in the first half of the twentieth century was shaken by two
major and several minor wars; the intervals between them did not prom-
ise peace but, on the contrary, threatened still more devastating con-
flicts. The possibility of a third and perhaps last World War changed
people's natural good will and instinctive sympathy to intolerance, sus-
picion, and violence. The truth of Thoreau's belief that the mass of men
lead lives of quiet desperation was now obvious to everyone.

The poets' supersensitized seismographs registered the increasing ac-
cumulation of outer clashes and inner tensions. Some of the instruments
merely recorded the shocks; others were thrown out of control; a few
shakily indicated lines of escape.

680

W. H. AUDEN

W. H. AUDEH

W. H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety was not only a key poem but a
characterization of the fears and confusions of an epoch. It exposed and
to some extent explained the harassments, guilt feelings, and frustra-
tions of the modern Everyman.

. . . Factories tred him;
Corporate companies, college towns
Mothered his mind, and many journals
Backed his beliefs. He was born here. The
Bravura of revolvers in vogue now
And the cult of death are quite at home
Inside the city . . .

Of all the poets born in the twentieth century Wystan Hugh Auden
was one of the most influential and unquestionably the most brilliant
craftsman of his day. Son of a retired doctor, Auden was born February
21, 1907, at York, England, and educated at Gresham's School, Holt,
and Christ Church, Oxford. His first volume, Poems, was published
when he was twenty-three. Between his twenty-third and twenty-eighth
years Auden taught school at Malvern, and was one of the so-called
Leftist group of poets which included Stephen Spender, Cecil Day
Lewis, and Louis MacNeice. At twenty-nine he worked with a film unit.
At thirty he served as stretcher-bearer in the Spanish Civil War, wrote
a poem, "Spain/* and was awarded the King's Medal for Poetry. Co-
editor of The Poet's Tongue, an anthology of poetry as "memorable
speech/' Auden was the sole editor of the Oxford Book of Light Verse,
published in 1938. He married Erika Mann, daughter of Thomas
Mann, came to America, and in 1946 became a citizen of the United
States.

By this time Auden was the author of four books of poetry, three
plays, a collection of prose fiction, two books of travel, and three an-
thologies. He was also a center of controversy concerning politics and
poetic techniques* An English magazine had brought out a special
Auden number; a volume Auden and After bore the subtitle The Lib-

681

LIVES OF THE POETS

eration of Poetry. Impugned by one school and upheld by another,
Auden had become the most influential poet since Eliot.

In his turn, Auden, who had written poems since he was fourteen,
had learned, as poets must, from imitating those who had influenced
him. The most valuable of these was Hardy, who, luckily for the young
Auden, "was a good poet, perhaps a great one, but not too good. Much
as I loved him, even I could see that his diction was often clumsy and
forced and that a lot of his poems were plain bad. This gave me hope,
where a flawless poet might have made me despair/'

Another influence was the thousand-year-old poetry of the Anglo-
Saxons. In his fortieth year Auden gave renewed proof of the viability
of the severely stressed, triply alliterated line by casting a book-length
twentieth-century poem, The Age of Anociety, in the antique accents
of Beowulf:

Untalkative and tense, we took off
Anxious into air; instruments glowed,
Dials in darkness, for dawn was not yet;
Pulses pounded; we approached our target,
Conscious in common of our closed Here
And of Them out There thinking of Us.

Both as poet and person Auden felt at home in his adopted country.
"The attractiveness of America to a writer/' he said, "is its openness, its
very lack of tradition. . . . There is no past — there are no roots — in
the European sense. . . . But what is happening here is happening
everywhere." The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him
a medal, and the Institute of Arts and Letters made him a member.
The Age of Anxiety won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. Auden taught at
various colleges and universities in the United States, and in 1956 re-
visited England as lecturer. The London Times Literary Supplement
hailed him as "the most distinguished poet who has held the Chair of
Poetry at Oxford since Matthew Arnold/' Besides writing poetry and
plays, Auden edited a five-volume collection, Poets of the English Lan-
guage, with Norman Holmes Pearson, compiled a Book of Modern
American Verse, and published The Enchafed Flood, three essay-lec-
tures on the romantic spirit as exemplified by authors as varied as Cole-
ridge and Lewis Carroll, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Herman Mel-
ville, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Jules Verne.

Auden's poetry is characterized by its flamboyance, a brilliance of

682

W. H. AUDEN

attack and a bewildering mixture of flippancies and profundities. There
are poems about Freud, Pascal, Voltaire, Henry James, Montaigne,
Einstein, Kierkegaard, Edward Lear, and Ernst Toller — a virtuosity
which allows Auden to show there is nothing he cannot do, and which
tempts him too often to prove it. His early verse, written before a lean-
ing on Marxism had been exchanged for an inclination to Anglo-
Catholicism, is ingenious and self -divided, merciless in condemnation of
"the old gang" which has made the world not only tragic but tawdry,
full of sympathy for those bullied in war and exploited in peace, yet
not wholeheartedly with the victims. Social feeling breaks through
dearly in On This Island, written when Auden was thirty, and An-
other Time, published three years later. The vocabulary becomes sim-
pler, the utterance more direct. Auden juxtaposes staccato commonplace
phrases and an elevated, even noble, diction to reconcile the vulgarities
and occasional exaltations of everyday life; he uses the measures of light
verse, the accents of popular songs, folk ballads and purposely crude
rhymes, to contrast the latest findings of science with the oldest roman-
tic dreams. Dignity and rowdiness dispute each other as Auden appears
one moment as the fastidious scholar and the next as the man-about-
town. The reader is understandably puzzled by Auden's ambidexterity.
He might think of the poet as essentially a wit after the mockery of
"Law, Say the Gardeners, 1$ the Sun," with such a verse as:

Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,

Speaking clearly and most severely,

Law is as I've told you before,

Law is as you know I suppose,

Law is but let me explain it once more,

Law is The Law.

But also finding tenderness and pure sensuousness, the reader might
well conclude that only a naturally lyrical poet could have written such
a love song as the one beginning:

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:

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LIVES OF THE POETS

But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Among his other accomplishments, Auden has been one of the few
modern poets to put new tendencies in old-fashioned forms, ballades,
villanelles, and even that most artificial of structures, the sestina, which
he employed in "Journal of an Airman" and "Hearing of Harvests
Rotting in the Valleys." He also used the epigrammatic couplet with
incisive effectiveness. In The Double Man, a poem of some seventeen
hundred lines, Auden spoke as the bravura performer and the critical
audience, the heavy classicist and the jaunty iconoclast. The poem was
acclaimed as a Return to Order, and the most daring of contemporary
poets was congratulated at having gone to school to Pope.

In common with Eliot, Auden had begun with poetry written out
of revulsion, bitter in burlesque, morose in its sense of imminent catas-
trophe. Like Eliot, Auden progressed from cynicism to mysticism, from
a baffled distrust of civilization to a religious hope for it. The Age of
Anxiety is a macabre morality play which blends casual horror and a
baleful vers de soddte to construct a latter-day Purgatory. In this metro-
politan "baroque eclogue/' as Auden calls it, four people in a New York
bar re-enact the seven ages of man and seven stages of suff ering. They
progress from a morass of reminiscences through a desert of disillusion,
with a lament for the lost leader — the colossal "dad," the vanished God
— to a final frustration which holds only a faint hope of other lives and
other values. The opening of the second section is typical of the tone:

Behold the infant, helpless in cradle, and
Righteous still, yet already there is
Dread in his dreams at the deed of which
He knows nothing but knows he can do ...

Tall, with straw-yellow hair and light hazel eyes, Auden looks like
an attenuated Puck, and it is his puckishncss that worries his more
serious well-wishers. He has done nothing to allay their concern. On
the contrary, he has announced half jestingly that not enough writers
appreciate "the basic frivolity of art People do not understand that it
is possible to believe in a thing and ridicule it at the same time." He
delights in the carelessly dropped tone, the intensities suppressed, mis-
chievously thrown away, or tossed off in doggerel,

684

W. H. AUDEN

In his later work, notably in some of the poems in Nones and The
Shield of Achilles, there is a depth of feeling, a human warmth and hu-
mility barely suggested in the early cerebrations. There is great clever-
ness in 'The Strings' Excitement," "This Lunar Beauty/' and "Who's
Who/' but there is more observation and less gnomic neatness in "Mun-
duns et Infans/' "The Unknown Citizen/' "After Christmas" (from
For the Time Being), "The Lesson/' "A Bride in the '30 V "September
*> *939>" and "In Praise of Limestone." When Auden relinquishes the
role of the disconcerting prankster and menacing mutterer for the musi-
cian, he offers lyrics as inventive and euphonious as "Fish in the un-
ruffled lakes/' "As I walked out one evening," "Cattivo Tempo/'
"Jumbled in the common box," "Look, stranger, on this island now," and
"O what is that sound which so thrills the ear."

Because of his flashing facility, his fondness for recondite classroom
curiosities like "teleost," "sussuration," "anamnesis," "marram/' and
coined words like "soodling," "battering/' and "qualming," Auden is often
irritating. But he is never less than entertaining, always interesting and,
in spite of all the tricks, rewarding. He is, at heart, the social critic
rather than the supreme technician; he shows pity instead of contempt
for those who arc not certain that they like what they have but are sure
they want more of it. His images are frequently chill and ominous, but
they are logical and valid reflections of a troubled age. "In Memory of
W. B. Yeats" contrasts the stature of the poet who sang "of human un-
succcss in a rapture of distress" with the mean state of a shrunken
world:

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Beginning with a sense of estrangement, Auden's poetry moves to-
ward a fulfilled sharing. The progress is from "Doom is dark and deeper
than any sea-dingle" to "We must love one another or die." The most
spectacularly ambivalent poet of the period ends his poem on Yeats
with this simple, affirmative quatrain:

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start;
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

685

LIVES OF THE POETS

STEPHEN: SPENDER

Stephen Spender, whose name is often linked with Auden's, was born
February 28, 1909, in London, of mixed German, Jewish, and English
origins. His father was Harold Spender, a well-known journalist; his
mother was Violet Schuster. At seventeen he supported himself by print-
ing chemists' labels on his own little press; at nineteen he attended
University College, Oxford, where he became an associate of W. H.
Auden, C. Day Lewis, and Louis MacNeice. He joined the Communist
party but, resenting regimentation, finally repudiated it, as chronicled
in his autobiographical The God That Failed.

In his nineteenth year Spender set up a crudely printed, paper-bound
pamphlet, Nine Experiments; two years later, while he was still an
undergraduate, Twenty Poems appeared, anticipating the vigor of his
subsequent verse. At twenty-eight he went abroad and, although he
had been refused a visa, attended the International Writers1 Confer-
ence in Spain, remained there several months, and made translations
of Spanish Loyalist poets. Divorced from his first wife, Agnes Pearn, he
married the pianist, Natasha Litvin, in 1941. With Cyril Connolly he
edited a magazine, Horizon, during the 1940$, and after the Second
World War frequently visited the United States, where he lectured at
colleges and universities. In 1953, with Irving Kristol, he founded an-
other magazine, Encounter, an international monthly sponsored by the
Congress for Cultural Freedom.

Except for some of the later work, Spender's poetry relies on strictly
contemporary material. Much of it incorporates the aspects, functions,
and images of modern machinery — at nineteen he had written "Come,
let us praise the gasworks" — and Poems, published when Spender was
twenty-four, contained "The Express" ("After the first powerful plain
manifesto/The black statement of pistons"), ''The Pylons" ("those pil-
lars, bare like nude, giant girls that have no secret"), and "The Land-
scape Near an Aerodrome," which begins:

More beautiful and soft than any moth

With burring furred antennae feeling its huge path

Through dusk, the air-liner with shut-off engines

686

STEPHEN SPENDER

Glides over suburbs and the sleeves set trailing tall
To point the wind. Gently, broadly, she falls
Scarcely disturbing charted currents of air.

Spender believed what Hart Crane had maintained: that unless
modern poetry can "absorb the machine, i.e., acclimatize it as naturally
and casually as trees, cattle, galleons, castles, and all other associations
of the past, then poetry has failed of its full contemporary function/' It
must, in Spender's words, utilize technological symbols as easily as
"rose and love in a forgotten rhyme." His personal and impassioned
poems incorporate the features of the mechanics of daily life; but he
would also have agreed with Hart Crane, who went on to say that
merely to refer "to skyscrapers, radio antennae, steam whistles, or other
surface phenomena of our time is merely to paint a photograph. I think
that what is interesting and significant will emerge only under the con-
ditions of our submission to, and examination and assimilation of, the
organic effects on us of these and other fundamental factors of our ex-
perience/'

Spender's ability to suggest the impact of machinery on humanity is
shown in "Not Palaces," a call to co-operate with the changes taking
place in a disordered world. The palaces are down, he says; too late to
sentimentalize over family pride and "beauty's filtered dusts."

Drink from here energy and only energy
As from the electric charge of a battery , . .

All faculties must co-operate: the eye, that darting "gazelle, delicate
wanderer, drinker of horizon's fluid line"; the ear that "suspends on a
chord/The spirit drinking timelessness"; "touch, love, all senses." These
equip us to realize a humanity which will no longer be in love with war
and death ("the program of the antique Satan"), but will mean "death
to the killers, bringing light to life." You may wonder, he says, in an-
other poem,

How it was that works, money, interest, building, could ever hide
The palpable and obvious love of man for man.

Spender extends the implications of such lines in "An Elementary
School Classroom in a Slum," in which poetry, as exemplified by a
head of Shakespeare, and beauty, symbolized by travel posters, are con-
trasted with the world of ruthless exploitation :

687

LIVES OF THE POETS

Break O break open till they break the town

And show the children to green fields, and make their world

Run azure on gold sands, and let their tongues

Run naked into books, the white and green leaves open

History theirs whose language is the sun.

The depth of Spender's moral convictions is sounded in an untitled
poem beginning "I think continually of those who were truly great,"
in which the poet praises the pioneers, the unsung fighters, firebringers,
and visionaries who never allowed "the traffic to smother/With noise
and fog the flowering of the spirit":

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields

See how these names are feted by the waving grass

And by the streamers of white cloud

And whispers of wind in the listening sky.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.

Born of the sun they traveled a short while toward the sun,

And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

It is hard to tell where exultation ends and oratory begins in Spender's
Collected Poems: ip2,8-zp53, but the best of them arc buoyed up in
ecstasy. Spender omits some of the early poems as incomplete experi-
ences, but he resists the temptation of making, as he wrote in the Intro-
duction, "more than a discreet minimum of technical tidyings up. . . .
Nothing seems easier when one is older than to correct a rhyme or
rhythm which eluded one's youthful incompetence." Spender was wise
for, although some of the later work gained breadth and the dignity
of sustained emotion, it lacks the excitement and daring of the poems
written during Spender's twenties.

WILLIAM EMPSOH

There were those who regarded Auden's "popular" tone and Spen-
der's emotional warmth with suspicion and even with disdain. They
reacted from what they considered the romantic irrationality of their
times with cold intellectuality and studied detachment. Their leader,

688

WILLIAM EMPSON

William Empson, was respected and often quoted as a poet, but his
critical writings were more arresting and exerted a much greater in-
fluence than his poetry. He was born September 27, 1906, in Yorkshire
and was educated at Winchester and Magdalene College, Cambridge,
where he specialized in mathematics. His first book, Seven Types of
Ambiguity, was published when he was twenty-four; it became a foun-
dation stone of the New Criticism and remained his most discussed
work. A teacher ever since he was twenty-five, Empson lectured in
Tokyo, China, and the United States (at Kenyon Summer School),
as well as in England. At thirty-four he was with the British Broad-
casting Company, editing foreign broadcasts; a year later he organized
and supervised talks in Chinese. Two volumes of his verse had appeared
before the publication of his Collected Poems in 1949, after which
he gave most of his time to prose.
Of his critical works, Empson wrote:

Seven Types of Ambiguity examines the complexity of
meaning in poetry: Some Versions of Pastoral examines the
way a form for reflecting a social background without ob-
vious reference to it is used in a historical series of literary
works; and The Structure of Complex Words is on both
these topics: it offers a general theory about the interaction
of a word's meanings. . . ,

Empson was obviously indebted to his teacher, I. A. Richards, author
of The Meaning of Meaningf Principles of Literary Criticismf and
Basic English; but Empson supplemented explication by probing into
all the complex levels, symbols, experiences, remote associations, and
other "ambiguities." Such levels are consciously sounded in some of
Empson's poems: "Homage to the British Museum/' 'This Last Pain/'
"Legal Fiction," "Let It Go," which, like much of Empson, conceals
its seriousness in offhand chattiness, "To an Old Lady/' "Missing
Dates/' which wraps its complexities in the simple form of a villanelle,
and "Invitation to Juno," whose first two stanzas are likely to intimidate
an unwary reader:

Lucretius could not credit centaurs;
Such bicycle he deemed asynchronous.
"Man superannuates the horse;
Horse pulses will not gear with ours,"

689

LIVES OF THE POETS

Johnson could see no bicycle would go;
"You bear yourself, and the machine as well."
Gennets for germans sprang not from Othello,
And Ixion rides upon a single wheel.

On many writers Empson's influence was good. His teaching em-
phasized an intellectual and even mathematical approach instead of a
vague wandering about the subject. It stressed the free use of scientific
as well as classical allusions rather than worn-out abstractions empty
of significance; it did not flinch from the fear of obscurity since both
reader and writer were dealing with an age of difficult meanings. On
others Empson's influence was bad. It placed too great a value on eru-
dition, on form instead of substance, technique instead of tone, manner
instead of content. In a desire to be intellectual, many poets lost direc-
tion trying to make something a symbol of something else and, preoc-
cupied with textual analysis, sacrificed clarity for subdety. It was often
assumed, although not specifically stated, that poetry should be re-
garded as a verbal pattern, like a non-representational painting, and
should be judged only by aesthetic criteria. Those who detached them-
selves from commonly shared experiences gained an uncommon diction
but found themselves unable to communicate. It became increasingly
difficult to write simply and unself-consciously and, since the general
reader felt himself shut out, the audience for poetry seemed to limit
itself to teachers, critics, and connoisseurs. Separated from men and
women as social beings, failing to stir the pulse and excite the imagina-
tion, many thoughtful poems written during the 19405 and 19505 lacked
the traditional deep values of poetry: vitality, enthusiasm, and emotional
response.

EDITH SITWELL

Enthusiasm, emotional response, and, first and last, vitality were
never lacking in the work of Edith SitwelL One of the most belligerent
of the advance guard of modern poets, Miss Sitwell fought every con-
vention, pushed obliquity to the point of obscurity, quietly enlarged her
range, and finally triumphed over the shrillness of her admirers as well
as her adversaries. With her brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, she threw
herself upon a postwar England with corrosive lampoons, unsparing
satires, and impudent novelties of presentation. She recited her Parade

690

EDITH SITWELL

through a megaphone to music by William Walton, concealing herself
behind a screen painted to represent a woman with a wide-open mouth.
In mannered prose and rakish verse, the three Sitwells ridiculed the in-
genuousness of the Georgians, mocked the prevailing proprieties, fought
the staid London Mercury, and challenged the solid Squirearchy, of
which J. C. Squire was the head. Ridiculing a literature that offered
false comfort, they preferred a literature of nerves.

Edith Sitwell was born September 7, 1887, at Scarborough, the old-
est child of Sir George and Ida Sitwell, granddaughter of the Earl of
Landsborough. Her father boasted that he had captured a spirit at a
London stance, and his daughter carried on the family tradition of
eccentricity by declaring that in early life she "took an intense dislike
to simplicity, morris-dancing, and every kind of sport except reviewer-
baiting." She is a striking-looking woman, almost six feet tall, with
straight hair and cold gray eyes, and she accentuates the peculiarity of
her appearance by wearing medieval dresses and jewels. She left Reni-
shaw Park, the family's imposing six-hundred-year-old estate, to live in
London. Her early poetry was consistent with her personality. The
titles of some of the volumes — Clowns' Houses, The Wooden Pegasus,
Facade — indicate her delight in the fantastic. She invented a strange
heaven and earth, with skies of paper, seas of wool, a world "like a bare
egg laid by the feathered air" lighted by a "reynard-colored sun," with
''barley-sugar children," trees "hissing like green geese," and the "coltish
wind nuzzling the hand." She even heard silence 'like a slow-leaking
tap." Such images evince a dazzling sense of simile and an equally
delightful sense of play. "Aubadc" is an example of Miss Sitwell's vir-
tuosity. In a schcrzolike movement she begins:

Jane, Jane

Tall as a crane,

The morning light creaks down again.

What starts as a nursery rhyme or a scrap of nonsense verse soon
develops into a logical if unusual picture, the picture of the morning
world seen through the eyes of a half-awake but imaginative kitchen
maid. Coming down the stairs, combing her "cockscomb-ragged hair,"
Jane feels each drop of rain creaking and hardening into a "dull blunt
wooden stalactite," while she faces weeding "eternities of kitchen gar-
den," where the flowers "cluck" at her. Even the flames in the kitchen
stove remind her of the carrots and turnips she is forever cleaning, and
her spirits hang limp as "the milk's weak mind."

691

LIVES OF THE POETS

Experimenting with changes in pitch and shifts in tempo, Edith
Sitwell achieved effects which demand to be read aloud. Even on the
printed page the reader can feel the humor in the jazz rhythms of "Sir
Beelzebub/' which clangs its way into the mind with the opening:

WHEN

Sir

Beelzebub called for his syllabub in the hotel in Hell

Where Proserpine fell,

Blue as the gendarmerie were the waves of the sea,

(Rocking and shocking the bar-maid.)

Nobody comes to give him his rum but the

Rim of the sky hippopotamus-glum . . .

Edith SitwelFs later work is far less syncopated. Troy Park and Rustic
Elegies alternate between absurdity and penetrating analysis, Lewis Car-
roll one moment, John Donne the next. The poetry which followed
showed an ability to sustain the long line in serious song. "Still Falls
the Rain," written during the bombing of London, incorporates two
lines from the end of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus to dramatize the con-
trast between the world of legend and the world of nightmare reality.
"Dirge for the New Sunrise" and the lyrics in The Song of the Cold
discard stylized opulence and verbal legerdemain; they arc direct, sol-
emn, and unaffectedly eloquent.

In her forty-sixth year Edith Sitwell was awarded a medal by the
Royal Society of London; in 1954 she was created Dame Commander of
the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II, and in the same year be-
came a Roman Catholic. Besides her poetry she has written several
books of criticism, a novel, a biography of Pope, a nostalgic tribute to
Bath, a compendium of English Eccentrics, and several anthologies. But
it is her Collected Poems which, ranging from the consciously clever
to the calmly sibylline, give her stature and authority.

WILFRED OWEN.

The First World War brought a new group of poets to the world's
attention. Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and Edmund Blunden out-
lived the conflict and outgrew the appellation of "soldier-poet"; but war

692,

WILFRED OWEN

killed Rupert Brooke at twenty-seven, Isaac Rosenberg before he
reached his twenty-eighth year, Wilfred Owen at twenty-five, and, at
twenty, Charles Hamilton Sorley, the extraordinary youth who wrote
so gaily before he felt that "there is no such thing as a just war — we
are casting out Satan by Satan."

Of these poets Wilfred Owen made the greatest impression on the
next generation as well as his own. He was born March 18, 1893, at
Oswestry in Shropshire, and was educated at Birkenhead Institute and
London University. At twenty he obtained a private tutorship in a
French family and lived near Bordeaux for two years. When war came
he enlisted, was wounded in 1917 and sent to a war hospital, where
Siegfried Sassoon, a fellow patient, encouraged him to write. A year
later Owen was sent back to the Western Front as a company com-
mander, was awarded the Military Cross for gallantry, and was killed
while trying to get his men across the Sambre Canal. It was a bootless
sacrifice; the Armistice was signed a week later.

Owen was unknown as a poet until Sassoon unearthed his manu-
scripts and superintended the publication of a posthumous volume. The
restrained passion as well as the controlled bitterness complement Sas-
soon's own angry ironies. "He never/* declared Sassoon, "wrote his
poems (as so many war poets did) to make the effect of a personal
gesture. He pitied others; he did not pity himself/' In an unfinished
notation which served as a preface, Owen had written:

This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit
to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds or lands, nor any-
thing about glory, honor or dominion , . . except War.

Above all this book is not concerned with poetry.
The subject of it is War, and the pity of War.
The poetry is in the pity.

During his short career Owen continually experimented with ways
of widening the gamut of sound effects in English verse. Besides a free
use of assonance and suspension, he sharpened euphony with dis-
sonance, chiefly by matching rhyming consonants with unrhyming
vowels: "lea ves— lives/1 "birds— -bards," "stars— stirs/* "ground-
groaned/' "died — indeed," "frowned— friend." Owen's successful em-
ployment of substitutes for the conventional full rhyme — a device
adopted by Auden, Spender, and other poets — is best illustrated in

693

LIVES OF THE POETS

"From My Diary," 'The Unreturning," 'The Show/' "Futility/' "Ex-
posure/' "Insensibility," the grim sonnet "Arms and the Boy," and
"Strange Meeting," perhaps the most pathetic of all war poems, which
begins:

It seemed that out of the battle I escaped

Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped

Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,

Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.

Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared

With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,

Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.

And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall;

By his dead smile I knew I stood in Hell.

With a thousand pains that vision's face was grained;

Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,

And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.

"Strange friend," I said, "here is no cause to mourn."

"None," said the other, "save the undone years,

The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,

Was my life also . . ."

Owen had many "descendants," none more memorable than Sidney
Keyes (i922,-i943), who left ninety remarkable poems when he died,
not yet twenty-one, in Tunisia during World War II.

"It is impossible," wrote Edmund Blundcn in an enlarged edition
of Owen's Poems, "to become deeply acquainted with Owen's work and
not be haunted by comparisons between his genius and his premature
death and the wonder and tragedy of his admired Keats." Keats had
been Owen's idol in youth. At eighteen he had made a pilgrimage to
Keats's house at Teignmouth, and had written of the sea which seemed
to share his grief for one "whose name was writ in water," But Owen's
full poetic power was not manifest until the last year of his life. The
poems written in the shadow of his death survive him, Sassoon wrote,
"as his true and splendid testament," The poem "Futility'* is his own
unplanned epitaph. It begins:

Move him into the sun —

Gently its touch awoke him once,

694

ROBERT GRAVES

At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

ROBERT GRAVES

An irrefragable individualist, Robert Graves ran counter to the ex-
perimenters and obscurantists of every school. Son of the Irish poet Al-
fred Perceval Graves and Amilie von Ranke, daughter of a Munich
professor, Robert Ranke Graves was born July 26, 1895, in London and
educated at Charterhouse, where he won a scholarship for St. John's
College, Oxford. Instead of entering the university, Graves enlisted in
the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in the same regiment as Siegfried Sassoon;
during the First World War he issued three small volumes of poems.
Convalescing from wounds, he married Nancy Nicholson, daughter of
the poster artist, and, after the Armistice, kept a shop at Boar's Hill
near Oxford, attended St. John's and took his degree in 1926. He went
to Egypt as professor of English at Cairo University, but returned
within a year, separated from his wife, and left England again. In his
thirties he founded the Seizin Press on the island of Majorca with the
American poet Laura Riding, and collaborated with her on several
volumes of critical summaries. After other travels he settled more or less
permanently in Majorca with his second wife and children.

Goodbye to All That is an unusually candid autobiography of his
early wartime experiences. Later volumes of prose works include a series
of historical novels, I Claudius, which won both the Hawthornden
and the Tait Black prizes in 1934, and Count Belisarius, which was
awarded the Femina Vie Heureuse prize in 1939; short stories in Cata-
crock and Steps; pamphlets on The Future of Swearing and The Future
of Humor; The White Goddess, a brilliant reappraisal of the pagan
world and the origins of poetry; The Common Asphodel and other
essays; spirited retellings of the Greek myths; and The Crowning Privi-
lege> a dashing attack on Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Auden, and Thomas, all
of whom he rates (and berates) as the false gods of modern poetry.

Graves's Collected Poems: 1914*1 $47, a compendium of eighteen pre-

LIVES OF THE POETS

viously published volumes, is rich in contrasts. The early verse is full
of innocent play and fancy, quaint archaisms, alternately whimsical and
eerie ballads like "The General Elliott/' "A Frosty Night/' and "The
Bedpost/' the shrewd "Lost Love" and "One Hard Look." The later
poetry proves that Graves is not a disciple of any school — The Crown-
ing Privilege assails Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, and Tennyson as truc-
ulently as it does Graves's modern victims — for it shows that, fairly or
unfairly, he has come to despise rhetoric, obfuscation, and the kind of
poetry which can be enjoyed only after it has been anesthetized and
operated upon. The thoughtful and disturbing poet rises above his an-
tipathies as well as his persiflage in "Mid-Winter Waking/' the pungent
"Climate of Thought/' "A Love Story/' which belies its innocuous title,
"Lost Acres/' "To Juan at the Winter Solstice," the satirical "Dream of
a Climber/' the grotesque, bawdy "Ogres and Pygmies," the ironically
ribald "Down, Wanton, Down!" and the grim "Trudge, Body," which
declares its burden in the opening lines:

Trudge, body, and climb, trudge and climb,
But not to stand again on any peak of time:
Trudge, body.

I'll cool you, body, with hot sun that draws the sweat,

I'll warm you, body, with ice-water that stings the blood,

Til enrage you, body, with idleness, to do

And, having done, to sleep the long night through;

Trudge, body.

WALLACE STEVEHS

Affected by the common anxieties of his fellows but hoping to forget
them, Wallace Stevens stood apart from the mainstream of modern
poetry. He tried to escape the brutal world in which he worked, to live
in a fourth-dimensional sphere of pure fastidiousness. A lawyer, business
executive, and uncommunicative person, Stevens preferred a life of
mental luxuriance fashioned out of an abstract and ambiguous poetry.

He was born October 2, 1879, in Reading, Pennsylvania, of Dutch
and German descent. From his eighteenth to his twenty-first year
Stevens attended Harvard University, where he contributed conven-

696

WALLACE STEVENS

tional sonnets, as well as strictly rhymed quatrains, sentimental songs,
and a ballade or two, to the Harvard Advocate. He studied law at New
York Law School and was admitted to the har in his twenty-fifth year.
After practicing in New York, he went to Connecticut to join the legal
staff of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Insurance Company. He
married and had one daughter. At fifty-five he became the firm's vice-
president, a position he held until his death at the age of seventy-five,
Augusta, 1955.

Stevens disliked being known as a split personality — "I prefer to
think I'm just a man, not a poet part time, businessman the rest." He
liked an occasional convivial evening with friends, especially if they
did not prod him about his way of writing. "Let's talk about politics,"
he told one of them, "or law, or plays, but don't let us argue about poets
or poetry." Poetry, he wrote, "is my way of making the world palatable.
It's the way of making one's experience, almost wholly inexplicable,
acceptable." As to the sense of tragedy hanging over the world, he de-
clared that what the poet has "is not necessarily a solution but some
defense against it. , , . My final point," he added in an essay, "The
Necessary Angel," "is that imagination is the power that enables us to
perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos."

Extremely reserved, Stevens kept himself from publishing a book
until he was forty-four. Attention was first drawn to his curiously mod-
ulated lines when four of his poems appeared in the November, 1914,
issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. His first volume, Harmonium,
was published nine years later. There followed Ideas of Order, The
Man with the Elue Guitar, Parts of a World, Transport to Summer,
The Auroras of Autumn, all incorporated in The Collected Poems of
Wallace Stevens, which received the National Book Award as well as
the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, and Opus Posthumous, published in 1957,

In "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" Stevens wrote:

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes.

This limited choice limited his audience; most readers felt that a man
preoccupied with inflections and innuendoes was "a poet's poet" and
looked elsewhere for a poetry that concerned human beings rather than
a hermetic art sealed against emotion. Stevens fashioned a poetry of
tangents, of elisions and startling sequiturs. He delighted in such titles

697

LIVES OF THE POETS

as 'The Emperor of Ice Cream," "The Worms at Heaven's Gate/1
"Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion," "O Florida, Venereal Soil/' 'The
Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage/' "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,"
"Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour/' and such phrases as "this
auditor of insects, this lutanist of fleas/' "Fictive things . . . wink most
when widows wince/' "in kitchen cups concupiscent curds/' and

Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan
Of tan with henna hackles, halt!

Stevens was so fascinated hy words as symhols, words as sounds, and
sounds for their own sake, that meaning often sank into a rolling sea of
syllables. He furnished no explanations; when charged with obscurity
he replied:

The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully.

Everything in Stevens is oblique or implied; if anything is stated,
it is stated in terms of something else. It progresses toward an "absolute"
poetry which aims to flourish in an air of cool aestheticism. Urbane,
elegant, and aloof, it is so fine-spun that it rarely can carry feeling, so
finicky that it often becomes a parody of itself. Yet there is opulence in
"Sunday Morning," which has the flat but brilliant colors of a Matisse
odalisque, in "To the One of Fictive Music/' which is a summoning of
"the imagination that we spurned and crave," in "Sea Surface Full of
Clouds," whose musical repetitions evoke what Stevens called "the es-
sential gaudiness of poetry/' and in "Peter Quince at the Clavier/' More
effective than most of his other work, the four movements of "Peter
Quince" suggest the four movements of a symphony and, at the same
time, imply relation of all the senses. Sight and sound, touch and taste,
bring together thought and music made visual; they reconcile innocence
and sensuality, the body's death and beauty's deathlessness.

Beauty is momentary in the mind —

The fitful tracing of a portal;

But in the flesh it is immortal.

The body dies; the body's beauty lives.

So evenings die, in their green going,

A wave, interminably flowing.

So gardens die, their meek breath scenting

The cowl of Winter, done repenting.

698

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden's choral.

Much of Stevens' later writing was devoted to poems about poetry
and the poetic process. Three Academic Pieces worry the matter of
metaphor, the multiple shapes projected by the whimsical mind, the
ingenuities which permit the artist to escape ordinary existence, and
the implication that the difficult making of a poem is more important
than the poem itself, Stevens was always against any attempt to simplify
what was complex. I le objected to a poet who lacked 'Venerable com-
plication":

His poems arc not of the second part of life.
They do not make the visible a little hard.

Stevens delighted to "make the visible a little hard" even for the most
literate. He felt that the poet should not merely lead but force his
readers into the world of the imagination. He employed every nuance
of rhetoric, dissolving imagery, and paradoxical epigrams to achieve a
mystical reality, "a supreme fiction," to move his readers "in the di-
rection of fact as we want it to be."

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

A good friend and admirer of Wallace Stevens', William Carlos
Williams did not agree with his theories, Williams loved the very dis-
order of the world and evinced no desire to avoid it. Instead of culti-
vating an elusive suggestibility, he gave force to direct statement — his
credo was "No ideas but in things." Williams was born September 17,
1883, in Rutherford, New Jersey, He was the first child of parents of
mixed ancestry; there was; an English grandmother, but his mother's
family come from St Pierre, Martinique, by way of Bordeaux, France.
"On my mother's father's side there was Jewish blood via some city in
Holland/1 wrote Williams. "Mother had been brought up a Catholic
and father an Episcopalian. They became Unitarians/'

Williams was educated at the Horace Mann High School in New
York, and he studied medicine at a school in Switzerland and at the
University of Pennsylvania, from which he received his M,D. in 1906.
He did graduate work in pediatrics at the University of Leipzig, and

699

LIVES OF THE POETS

published his first volume at twenty-three. He married Florence Her-
man of Rutherford and became the father of two sons, one of whom
eventually took over his medical practice.

Williams began with imitative experiments influenced by Pound and
the Imagists. Gradually he progressed from preciosity to a full accept-
ance of the American idiom and the emotions which cluster about com-
mon things. When the first Collected Poems appeared in 1934, Wallace
Stevens wrote in the preface: "His passion for the anti-poetic is a
blood passion and not a passion for the ink-pot . . . One might run
through these pages and point out how often the essential poetry is the
result of the conjunction of the unreal and the real, the sentimental
and the anti-poetic, the constant interaction of two opposites."

At seventy-five Williams has published more than thirty-seven vol-
umes of prose and poetry, including a combination of both, Paterson,
in five separate books. He has received many honors, the most notable
of which are the 1953 Bollingen Award, the $5,000 Fellowship of the
Academy of American Poets, and the first National Book Award for
Poetry for Book Two of Paterson.

"Flowers by the Sea," 'Tract/' "A Goodnight/' 'The Poor/' 'These/'
and "The Yachts" contain some of the most individualized free verse
of the period. In their unrhetorical and almost matter-of-fact speech
they show that everything in the world is the poet's material. Like Whit-
man, Williams finds nothing that is without use and beauty; in fact, he
regards the objects of his scrutiny with such affection that one feels no
one could love anything so much as Williams loves everything. If Wil-
liams, again like Whitman, lacks discrimination and cannot believe that
there is such a thing as a nonessential detail, he re-creates the present
scene with unquestionable sympathy. He stresses not only the quality
of an object — a newspaper item, a lonely street, a New Jersey park on
a Sunday — but its usually unnoticed significance. If Williams errs on
the side of objectivity, he uses those objects, fragments and disjointed
documentaries, to attain fresh and startling immediacy.

MARIAMN.E MOORE

Marianne Craig Moore was born in St Louis, Missouri, November
15, 1887. She was educated at Bryn Mawr, from which she received her
B.A. in 1909, and taught stenography, typing, bookkeeping, English,

700

MARIANNE MOORE

and commercial law at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania until
she was twenty-eight. From her thirty-fourth to her thirty-seventh years
she was an assistant in the Hudson Park branch of the New York Pub-
lic Library. Nearing forty she joined the staff of The Dial and was act-
ing editor until the demise of the magazine in 1929.

Extreme modesty has been a characteristic of Marianne Moore from
the beginning. Two friends, "H. D." and "Bryher," had to "pirate" some
of her verse in order to have her first volume, Poems, published in
London in 1921. Three years later she brought out Observations and
won the Dial Award "for distinguished services to poetry/' Subse-
quently, she was the recipient of many honors. In 1944 she received the
Contemporary Poetry Patrons' Prize and the Harriet Monroe Poetry
Award presented by the University of Chicago, as well as a Guggen-
heim Fellowship the year following. Her Collected Poems, published
in 1951, won all three of the most coveted awards: the Bollingen Prize,
the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. In 1953
she was given the Gold Medal for Poetry by the National Institute of
Arts and Letters. In the face of this acclaim Miss Moore, consistently
self-effacing, declared: "I can see no reason for calling my work poetry
except that there is no other category in which to put it. Anyone could
do what I do; and I am, therefore, the more grateful that those whose
judgment I trust should regard it as poetry."

Marianne Moore's work presents a scries of paradoxes. It owes more
to more sources than any poetry of the period, yet no contemporary
author is more original and less likely to be "dated," Her effects are
accomplished largely by quotations — reference has been made to her
"scissorlike method" — and the phrases in inverted commas are an inex-
tricable part of the poem. Little oddities and scraps of information
about a race horse, a marine shell, a quartz crystal clock, a pangolin,
a watermark, a strawberry, or a skunk are woven into the slenderest yet
most firmly organized patterns* Everything is perceived minutely and
with the most delicate precision. The pangolin, a kind of scaly anteater,
is an "armored animal" whose overlapping scales have "spruce-cone reg-
ularity"; he is a "near artichoke/' a "night miniature artist-engineer."
The lizard is a "nervous naked sword on little feet"; the snake has
"hypodermic teeth"; the elephant with its "fog-colored skin and strictly
practical appendages" is "black earth preceded by a tendril"; waves
are "as formal as the scales on fish/' Elegance and artifice are combined
with wit and whimsicality — "imaginary gardens with real toads in
them." Those who doubt Miss Moore's technical proficiency should

701

LIVES OF THE POETS

examine 'The Wood-Weasel," which is not only a delightful picture
of the much-scorned polecat but is also a rhymed acrostic in reverse.

Hers is a highly special poetry for specialized tastes. Several readings
are required before one feels the warmth beneath the rigid form and
stiff texture. There is little music in the verse; it lacks grace and flexi-
bility. It is as though the syllables were carefully cut and counted, and
the end of each line trimmed with a knife. Many of the poems are so
full of private associations that they seem incomplete without their
glossary of notes; multiple quotations suggest a minutely constructed
montage of scraps from the poet's commonplace books, files, and waste-
basket. Too diffident to challenge her critics, Miss Moore admitted in
"A Note on the Notes" that in almost everything she has written there
are lines "in which the chief interest is borrowed, and since I have not
been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledg-
ments seem only honest."

Whatever the final value of "this hybrid method of composition"
may be, and the very microscopic scrutiny is one of its limitations, it
has had its influence. There is a choice sensibility as well as skilled
artisanship in "England" ("with its baby rivers and little towns"), 'To
a Steam Roller" ("You crush all the particles down into close conform-
ity"), the trickily fashioned 'The Fish," "Poetry," which has more to
say about the art than a shelf of textbooks, "A Grave," one of the finest
of marine poems, "A Carriage from Sweden," with its praise of sturdi-
ness, and "In Distrust of Merits," which reveals Miss Moore's growth
from cleverness and daintiness to moral earnestness. This is a poetry
made of personal notations, verbal niceties, and preserved curiosities,
but it is also playful, surprising, and as penetrating as it is exquisite.

JOHN. CROWE RAHSOM,

THE FUGITIVES,
ANT) THE HEW CRITICISM

John Crowe Ransom was born in Pulaski, Tennessee, April 30, 1888.
His father, a minister, was of Scots-Irish descent; his great-uncle took
part in the organization of the Ku Klux Klan. Receiving his B*A. at

702

THE FUGITIVES

twenty-one at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, Ransom
completed his formal education at Christ Church College, Oxford,
where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and returned to the United States to
teach at Vanderbilt, In 1922 he helped establish the Fugitive Group,

Originally there were seven friends, who published a journal of poetry
called The Fugitive. The contributions were signed with such fancy
pen names as "Henry Feathertop" (Allen Tate), "Robin Gallivant"'
(Donald Davidson), "Dendric" (Merrill Moore), and "Roger Prim"
(John Crowe Ransom). Robert Penn Warren joined a little later. Within
a year the number was increased to sixteen, all poets, and the pseudo-
nyms were dropped. It was never made clear what the Fugitives were
fleeing from, unless it was from an industrial civilization in the hope
of reviving an agrarian economy — a later symposium, Til Take My
Stand, suggested this possibility — and they puzzled the local citizenry
because, although the young men were Southerners, they failed to an-
nounce allegiance to any "cause/* Nineteen numbers of the magazine
were issued before it discontinued publication and the poets went on
with their separate, and in many instances distinguished, careers. Allen
Tatc became an eminent poet-essayist; Donald Davidson, specializing
in regionalism, wrote a two-volume history, The Tennessee; Merrill
Moore improvised some fifty thousand free-rhyming, loosely jointed,
"American" sonnets before he died in 1957 at fifty-four; Robert Penn-
Warren won a Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for his novel, All the King's Men?
and again received the award in 1958 for his book of poems, Promises.

After The Fugitive ceased to exist and its contributors had disbanded.
Ransom moved to Gambier, Ohio, where he became professor of poetry
at Kenyon College, editor of the Kenyan Review, and founder as well
as exponent of the Kenyon School of critics which championed the
New Criticism. Like their predecessors, the Imagists, the New Critics
cleared the air of much affectation, romantic rubbish, and sentimental
untidiness. They insisted on order, control, and attention to craftsman-
ship, objectives which could only have a salutary influence. However,
in their reaction, many of the disciples of the new dispensation de-
veloped a neoclassical academism which was emotionally cold and in-
tellectually strained. It was not altogether surprising that most of the
younger poet-critics were connected with institutes of learning and!
that an erudition resulted which had the look of profundity but was
often little more than the product of ingenuity. The poetry was oblique
in manner, flat in tone, and faintly bitter when not altogether bloodless.
Moreover, the New Critics were preoccupied with analysis, as though

703

LIVES OF THE POETS

the interpreter were more important than the creator and the texture
superior to the text. It seemed to be thought that there was a duly ac-
credited way of making a poem, a piece of work for exposition, and an
equally authorized way of taking it apart. Poetry, in short, seemed to
be written not to delight but to dissect.

One of those who might have been expected to agree with the New
Critics raised his voice in definite protest. In On Poetry and Poets, T. S.
Eliot demurred:

We can ask about any writing which is offered to us as
literary criticism, is it aimed toward understanding and en-
joyment? If it is not, it may still be a legitimate and useful
activity; but it is to be judged as a contribution to psychol-
ogy, or sociology, or pedagogy, or some other pursuit — and it
is to be judged by specialists, not by men of letters. ... If
we place all the emphasis upon understanding, we are in
danger of slipping from understanding to mere explanation.
We are in danger even of pursuing criticism as if it were a
science, which it never can be. If, on the other hand, we
overemphasize enjoyment, we will tend to fall into the sub-
jective and impressionistic. . . . Thirty-three years ago, it
seems to have been the latter type of criticism, the impres-
sionistic, that had caused the annoyance I felt when I wrote
on "the function of criticism." Today it seems to me that
we need to be more on guard against the purely explanatory.

Although Ransom was wary of impressionism, he was usually on
guard against "the purely explanatory." As an essayist, he was both
abstruse and discursive in The New Criticism, but as a poet he was
seldom affected by the strictures of any school. His wit, which shields
serious preoccupations, flickers through such soliloquies and semi-narra-
tives as the macabre "First Travels of Max," "Boris of Britain/' "Arma-
geddon," "Spiel of the Three Mountebanks," the brilliantly ironic
"Eclogue," an epitome of pure bravado, "Captain Carpenter," the slyly
mordant sonnet, "Piazza Piece/' and such half-tender, half-tart lyrics
as "Parting, Without a Sequel," "Janet Waking/' "Blue Girls," "Vision
by Sweetwater," "Antique Harvesters," "Bells for John Whitcside's
Daughter," a masterpiece of understatement, "Lady Lost," which miracu-
lously turns sentimentality into poignancy, and the broadly comic "Sur-
vey of Literature." "Here Lies a Lady" is characteristic of Ransom's de-
ceptive blandness; even death is announced with counterfeit gravity:

704

CONRAD AIKEN

Here lies a lady of beauty and high degree.

Of chills and fever she died, of fever and chills,

The delight of her husband, her aunts, an infant of three,

And of medicos marveling sweetly on her ills.

The sound of Ransom's verse is alternately soothing and stinging; the
modulations arc strange, the cadences often acrid because of their
planned dissonances. Ransom was one of the first of modern poets to
employ the unresolved suspension; he used most effectively such slant
half-rhymes as "feature — nature," "drunkard — conquered/' "little — scut-
tle," "ready — study," "leopard — scabbard," "clergy — orgy." Playing with
a mock mandarin style, he sometimes puts on euphuistic elegance; for
example, a messenger boy becomes a "blue-capped functioner of doom."
But Ransom's twisting of pedantry into a scholar's levity is part of his
odd charm. His inflection is both nervous and drawling, a patrician
softness of speech that mingles cavalier grace with diablerie.

CONRAD

An uncommon and often unearthly music was sounded by Conrad
Aikcn, born August 5, 1 889, in Savannah, Georgia. Many of his fellow
poets had lost the ability to sing, but for more than forty years Aiken
evoked a melodiously wavering Dcbussylike music. When he was ten
years old his father had killed his mother and then committed suicide,
a shock which may account for the melancholy suspensions and desola-
ting cadences which run through Aiken's work.

After the tragedy, a great-great-aunt took the boy to Massachusetts,
where, except for residences abroad, he lived most of his life. At seven-
teen he entered Harvard — T, S. Eliot, Van Wyck Brooks, and Robert
Edmond Jones were among his classmates. As soon as he was graduated
he married a Canadian, Jessie MacDonald, by whom he had three chil-
dren, John, Jane, and Joan. A small income allowed Aiken to escape
teaching and give himself to the financially unprofitable pursuit of
poetry. It took him some time to recover from his influences and find his
own idiom. His first volume, Earth Triumphant, published when Aiken
was twenty-five, is the Keats tradition crossed and vulgarized by Mase-
field; in Turns and Movies, his second, Masefield is mixed with Masters.

705

LIVES OF THE POETS

The instinctive lyricist begins to be heard in the third volume with
"Music I heard with you was more than music" and "All lovely things
will have an ending," while the gathering Weltschmerz, suggestive of
Eliot's world-weariness, is sounded in:

So, to begin with, dust blows down the street,
In lazy clouds and swirls, and after that
Tatters of paper and straws, and waves of heat,
And leaves plague-bitten; under a tree a cat
Sprawls in the sapless grass, and shuts his eye.
And sitting behind closed shutters you hear a beat
Of melancholy steps go slowly by. . . .

In his early thirties Aiken found himself at home on the west coast
of England and, after a brief spell of tutoring at Harvard, remarried and
returned to England with his third wife, Mary Hoover. Under the
pseudonym of Samuel Jeake, Jr. — he lived in Jeake's House in Rye —
Aiken was London correspondent for The New Yorker from 1933 to
1936. In his early fifties he decided to settle down in Massachusetts,
"the proud possessor of an eight-acre plantation of poison ivy in the
midmost jungle of Cape Cod."

By this time Aiken was a much-honored person. His Selected Poems
had won the Pulitzer in 1930; he had occupied the Library of Congress*
Chair in Poetry. His Collected Poems, comprising some eighteen pre-
viously published books, received the National Book Award in 1953;
the Gold Medal for Poetry was given to him by the Institute of Arts
and Letters in 1958. Aiken's prose has never been accorded the same
rank as his poetry — such novels as Blue Voyage and Conversation were
neglected — but his short stories, particularly "Silent Snow, Secret Snow"
and "Mr. Arcularis" are widely reprinted, and the strange Ushant, at
first misunderstood as a disordered autobiography, has finally been rec-
ognized as an autobiographical reconstruction of the creative spirit.

In one of his sixty-three "Preludes" Aiken approvingly quotes Vcr-
laine's adjuration to "take rhetoric and wring its neck," Nevertheless,
Aiken does not disdain to take advantage of every verbal nuance and
elaboration of eloquence; he is, in fact, a most resourceful rhetorician.
It has been objected that he relies too much on the hypnotic power of
his smooth phrases. "He is in love," wrote the poet-critic Randall Jarrell,
"with a few dozen words, and their permutations have assumed for him
a weight and urgency that would be quite incomprehensible to his

706

ARCHIBALD MACLEISH

readers, if it were not for the fact that most of these terms are the tradi-
tional magic-making words of English romantic poetry," Incantation is
part of Aiken's purpose; the very indefiniteness, the nebular music with
its misty resonance, echoes lingeringly through such poems as "This Is
the Shape of the Leaf," "At a Concert of Music," 'Tetflestai," "When
the Tree Bares," "Cloister," the much-quoted "Morning Song" from
Senlin, "The Stepping Stones," many of the "Preludes," passages from
Time in the Rock, and "Annihilation," which concludes:

The world is intricate, and we are nothing,
It is the complex world of grass,
The twig on the path, a look of loathing,
Feelings that pass —

These are the secret; and I could hate you
When, as I lean for another kiss,
I see in your eyes that I do not meet you,
And that love is this.

Rock meeting rock can know much better
Than eyes that stare or lips that touch.
All that we know in love is bitter,
And it is not much.

ARCHIBALD MACLEISH

Archibald MacLeish, born May 7, 1892, in Glencoe, Illinois, is an-
other poet who found it difficult to outgrow his influences- Overtones
of Eliot and the French Symbolists arc heard throughout his early work;
Pound's "Mauberley" casts its shadow over MacLeish's "L'an trentiesme
de won eage"; Whitman's voice, filtered through the loud-speaker of
Sandburg's The People, Yes, reverberates in MacLeish's America Was
Promises and Colloquy for These States. Yet MacLeish's own utterance,
like the man himself, lean and lithe, struggled through and finally
overcame the echoes*

Son of a Scottish merchant and a clergyman's daughter, MacLeish
attended Yale University and Harvard Law School, served in the Field
Artillery during the First World War, became an attorney in Boston,

707

LIVES OF THE POETS

but within three years gave up the practice of law. He had married a
singer, Ada Hitchcock, while still at college; at thirty-one he went
abroad with his family — there were three sons — and lived in France
for five years. Returning to America, MacLeish immured himself on a
farm in upper Connecticut, but his retirement was brief. In his forties
he became a public figure. He joined the staff of the magazine Fortune,
became Librarian of Congress, was appointed Director of the Office of
Facts and Figures during the Second World War, one of President
Roosevelt's confidential advisers, and Assistant Secretary of State. At
the end of World War II MacLeish became one of the more active
Members of UNESCO and served as chairman of the American delegation
at the first international conference. At fifty-seven he accepted the posi-
tion of Boylston Professor of Oratory and Rhetoric at Harvard.

Meanwhile MacLeish never stopped writing. At sixty-two he was
the author of eighteen volumes of poetry and several collections of
plays, essays, and political addresses. At sixty-six he published his most
ambitious single accomplishment: /. B., a rhetorical reworking of the
Book of Job, a dramatically arranged theological debate centering about
the paradox of man's indebtedness to a God in debt to man, and the
affirmation of love in spite of every horrifying injustice. He had won
the Pulitzer Prize twice, in 1933 with Conquistador, a retelling of
Bernal Diaz' True History of the Conquest of Ncav Spain, and, twenty
years later, with his Collected Poems, which also received the Bollingen
and National Book awards.

Both as a poet and as a politician MacLeish has had to sulTer slings
and arrows because of his outrageous good fortune. Me has been ac-
cused of writing to fit the fluctuations of taste and public opinion, of
wanting to be all things to all men of good will. Senatorial adversaries
scoffed at his advocacy of the Rooseveltian New Deal; literary coteries
sneered at his assumption of the role of prophet and Voice of Destiny.
Yet even his most unsparing critics have been willing to admit that
MacLeish is a more than ordinarily gifted craftsman, that his character-
istic interrogatory tone sounds a note unlike any other, and that his
long, suspended sentences and half rhymes create moments of high
tensity. They agree that MacLeish is at his best in his lyrics, naming as
their choices "You, Andrew Marvell/' "Not Marble nor the Gilded
Monuments," "Ars Poetica," in spite of its dubious poetic creed, "Im-
mortal Autumn/' "Epistle to Be Left in the Earth," "Calypso's Island/'
"The Too-Late Born/' and the quietly terrifying sonnet "The End of
the World":

708

E. E. CUMMINGS

Quite unexpectedly as Vasserot

The armless ambidextrian was lighting

A match between his great and second toe

And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting

The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum

Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough

In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb —

Quite unexpectedly the top blew off.

And there, there overhead, there, there, hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the canceled skies,
There in the sudden blackness, the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing — nothing at all.

E. E. CUMMIMGS

A unique and often aggravating blend of lyricist and satirist, of
blistering critic and bewildering clown, E. E. Cummings had the repu-
tation of being the Bad Boy of American letters. Cummings was born
October 14, 1894, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father, before be-
coming minister of Old South Church in Boston, had taught English
at Harvard, and it was from Harvard that Cummings received his MLA.
in 1916. During the First World War he served in an ambulance corps
and, because of a censor's error, spent three months in a detention camp.
It was an experience vividly recorded in The Enormous Room, which,
except for some essays, was one of Cummings' two volumes of prose
and his most popular work. His first book of poems, Tulips and Chim-
neys? announced his peculiar combination of nostalgia and nose-thumb-
ing, of pretty archaisms and contemporary wisecracks. It was hard to
tell whether the opening "Epithalamion" was to be taken seriously as
inspiration or as a burlesque of poetic diction. It began:

Thou aged unrcluctant earth who dost
with quivering continual thighs invite
the thrilling rain the slender paramour
to toy with thy extraordinary lust,

709

LIVES OF THE POETS

(the sinuous rain which rising from thy bed
steals to his wife the sky and hour by hour
wholly renews her pale flesh with delight)
— immortally whence are the high gods fled?

Toward the end of the book Cummings printed a series of sonnets
which seemed only slightly unorthodox in form and language. The first
one began blandly:

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls

are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds

(also, with the church's protestant blessings

daughters, unscented shapeless spirited)

they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead . . *

and ended dryly:

, . . the Cambridge ladies do not care, above

Cambridge if sometimes in its box of

sky lavender and cornerless, the

moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy.

Most of Tulips and Chimneys was composed of outright contradic-
tions: old-fashioned love songs rearranged as typographical oddities,
lyrics broken into fragments without punctuation or with punctuation
where the reader would least expect it Various reasons were given for
Cummings' impressionistic calligraphy: (i) he wanted to emphasize
the power of the significance of words and separated them, or their
syllables, so that they would stand out sharply on the printed page; (z)
he used blank spaces to suggest variations in tempo — slow as in:

a tall

wind

is dragging

the

sea

with
dream
-S
or fast, as in:

710

HART CRANE

and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

If, as was charged, Cummings had taken a hint from the advertiser's
layout, he had improved the design and had added several tricks of his
own. More importantly, he had shown that a sense of play is by no
means inimical to poetry.

At sixty Cummings collected some six hundred poems from ten pre-
viously published volumes and issued Poems: 1923-1954. The book re-
ceived a Special Citation from the National Book Awards Committee;
it was followed in 1958 by 95 Poems. The two volumes showed cumula-
tively how Cummings had refused to accept the conventional modes,
had experimented with new ways of saying old things — his gamut was
never large — and had taken pleasure in manipulating eccentric patterns
which pleased many, infuriated more than a few, and kept all readers
excitedly awake. There was much reliance on the stock properties of
verse, on spring, death, roses, and rhetoric; there was arrogance mixed
with low comedy, and hard-talking slang which sounded particularly
tough because it was surrounded by sentimentalities. But the tricky
technician was also the author of "you are like the snow only/' "my
father moved through dooms of love/* "somewhere i have never trav-
elled," "when god lets my body be," "since feeling is first" — a thinly
disguised romanticist capable of emotional integrity and many moments
of magic.

HART CRAKE

One of the most hazardous efforts to fuse outer complexity and inner
chaos was made by Hart Crane. What made his poetry difficult was
not any rearrangement or distortion of phrases, as in the case of Cum-
mings, but a continual concatenation of images and figures of speech.
Attempting an epical tone-poem, Crane pushed impressionism to the
limit of communication. He perfected a kind of compressed metaphor
in which comparisons were stripped to their skeletal ideas; he spoke of
an instinctive "logic of metaphor" which he claimed antedated "our so-
called pure logic, and which is the genetic basis of all speech." Defend-
ing his odd syntax, grammatical audacities, and elliptical language,
Crane cited a phrase from "Voyages: II" as an example of his method
of telescoping a series of allusions:

711

LIVES OF THE POETS

When I spealc of "adagios of islands/' the reference is to the
motion of the boat through islands clustered thickly, the
rhythm of the motion, etc. And it seems a much more direct
and creative statement than any more "logical" employment
of words such as "coasting slowly through the islands," be-
sides ushering in a whole world of music.

Hart Crane was born July 21, 1899, in Garrettsville, Ohio. His life
was unhappy from the beginning. While he was still a child, his parents
moved to Cleveland and were divorced. Hart sided with his mother,
hated his father on whom he was dependent, and considered himself
doomed. He began to write poetry at thirteen, never finished high
school, and sporadically tried to earn a living. At various times he
worked in a printshop, wrote copy in advertising offices, became a riveter
in a Lake Erie shipyard, reporter on the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and
manager of a tearoom. He even packed candy in his father's warehouse
while his father tried to force the "poetic nonsense" out of him. Be-
tween jobs he lived recklessly, loved indiscriminately, and drank vio-
lently. He traveled to Europe, hounding himself with a sense of guilt
and a mania of persecution, quarreled with everyone, and fought with
the friends who appreciated him most.

At twenty-seven Crane published his first volume, White Buildings.
Its verbal brilliance impressed even those who found the book bizarre;
it was impossible to ignore such flashes of vision as "Where the ccdnr
leaf divides the sky," "the seal's wide spindrift gaze toward Paradise,"
"the willows carried a slow sound, a sarabandc the wind mowed on the
mead," "permit me voyage, love, into your hands," "in sapphire arenas
of the hills," "nimble blue plateaus," suggesting the high flight of an
airplane, and, picturing the sea, "this great wink of eternity."

Crane was undoubtedly influenced by the French Symbolists, espe-
cially by Rimbaud, as well as by T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens; but
he also owed much to an uneducated, poverty-stricken, and completely
unknown poet, Samuel Greenbcrg. Grcenberg had died in 1916, at the
age of twenty-three, and a friend showed Crane Grcenberg's almost
inchoate notebooks. Excited by the elastic phraseology, Crane was en-
thralled by the uncontrolled rush and often unintelligible eruption of
words. He began making his own list of words the way a collector might
list his gems; he was particularly fascinated by the sound of syllables
in such words as corjtoscmt . » , conclcwnant . . . sibilance . * , $yn-

712

HART CRANE

ergy . . . incunabula . . . labyrinthine . . . clustrous . . . galvo-
ihermic , , . transmemberment , » , corynibulous.

In his mid-twenties Crane was groping toward a unifying theme, but
he needed financial security. He found both: a centralizing idea and a
philanthropist, Otto H. Kahn, who made it possible for him to create
his largest work. The Bridge, published when Crane was thirty-one, is
not the epical "Myth of America" which he planned; it is a set of dis-
parate poems united by national symbols, legends, early history, and
modern technology. In his attempt to pack every page with more than
it could bear, Crane turned to suggestions from Blake, the Book of Job,
Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. The result
was kaleidoscopic, disjointed, often hysterical, never meager, and some-
times magnificent.

Like Rimbaud, Crane sought every excess in order to goad himself
into a state of derangement, breaking away from what he considered
dull normality into a fever of creativity. He depended on the roused
subconscious for most of his work. Sharpening his sensibility and
blunting his faculties, he grew more and more unstable. At thirty-two,
thinking of a Latin-American companion piece to The Bridge, he went
to Mexico. But instead of writing, he gave himself up to his old dissipa-
tions: alcohol and homosexuality. Less than a year later Crane had a
revulsion, decided to go back to the United States and begin over again.
He never fulfilled the resolution. On April 26, 1932, he jumped from
a northbound steamer in the Gulf of Mexico. The body was never re-
covered.

Crane's lack of discipline colors (or discolors) his poetry. Discarding
the usual progress of thought, he piled up emotional and pictorial
effects. One image set off another until an entire chain of metaphors
was ignited. It was not only an expansive but an explosive technique
that Crane hoped would express the cultural confusion of the present
with "a great conglomeration of noises analogous to the strident impres-
sion of a fast express rushing by":

Stick your patent name on a signboard

brother — all over — going west — young man

Tintex — Japalac — Certain-teed Overalls ads

and lands sakes! under the new playbill ripped

in the guaranteed corner — see Bert Williams — what?

Minstrels when you steal a chicken just

713

LIVES OF THE POETS

save me the wing, for if it isn't
Erie it ain't for miles around a
Mazda — and the telegraphic night coming on ...

There are those who believe The Bridge is Crane's greatest accom-
plishment. Others consider that it is valuable only for parts of sections,
'Van Winkle," "The River/' "The Dance/' "Cutty Sark/' "Cape Hat-
teras," with "The nasal whine of power whips a new universe/' and the
dedicatory prelude, "To Brooklyn Bridge." Crane's smaller poems are
more controlled and more widely esteemed. "Praise for an Urn/' "Royal
Palm/' "The Air Plant/' "The Hurricane," "The Broken Tower/' and
"Voyages" are clear in structure; they indicate an order which Crane
infrequently was able to make out of his chaos.

ROBERT LOWELL

Robert Traill Spence Lowell, born March i, 1917, in Boston, Massa-
chusetts, was a Puritan in revolt. James Russell Lowell was his grcat-
granduncle; Amy Lowell was a distant cousin. He attended Kcnyon
College, where he studied with John Crowe Ransom, majored in
classics, and taught briefly. When drafted during the Second World
War, he refused to serve on the grounds that the country was not in
danger and that the indiscriminate bombing of civilians was unprinci-
pled murder. He was imprisoned for five months as a conscientious
objector.

His nonconformist tendency is apparent in his first book, Land of
Unlikeness, published when Lowell was twenty-seven; most of the
poems were included in Lord Weary 's Castle, which appeared two years
later and won the Pulitzer Prize. The motivating force is a desperate
yearning for what New England Cand the world) had once been, a
hatred of what it had become, and an exasperated wish for what it could
be. Religion offered a consolation if not a solution — Lowell entered the
Roman Catholic Church in his mid-twenties — and Lowell's poetry is
prompted by a moral purpose. Man, he implies, is undeniably evil, but
there is salvation in hard, unyielding faith.

At thirty Lowell became Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Con-
gress, after which he lectured at various colleges, married the writer

7*4

ROBERT LOWELL

Elizabeth Harwick — his first wife was the novelist Jean Stafford — and
in 1951 published The Mills of the Kavanaughs.

Lowell's poetry is a fusion of direct and tangential effects; the intent
is clear, the forms are familiar, but the images are crowded, imprecise,
and packed with personal allusions. His metaphors are as condensed as
Hart Crane's; his language as symbolic as Hopkins' The background is
New England, the clash of Calvinism and Catholicism, but die vision
is projected

Beyond Charles River to the Acheron

Where the wide waters and their voyager are one . . .

"Salem" is an evocation of the vanished importance of the place and,
in its dirge for all dead seamen, summons not only those who once
fought the British but also the ghostly sailors dumped by Charon's raft
into the harbor-bed. "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" is an elegy
to Warren Winslow, Lowell's cousin, who died at sea when his ship
was torpedoed; the tragedy reminds the poet of the doomed Captain
Ahab, who sailed from Nantucket.

Whenever winds arc moving and their breath
Heaves at the roped-in bulwarks of this pier,
The terns and sea-gulls tremble at your death
In these home waters. Sailor, can you hear
The Pcquod's sea wings, beating landward, fall
Headlong and break on our Atlantic wall
Off 'Sconsct, where the yawing S-boats splash
The bcllbuoy, with ballooning spinnakers
As the entangled, screeching mainshcct tears
The blocks; off Madaket, where lubbers lash
The heavy surf and throw their long lead squids
For blue-fish? Sea-gulls blink their heavy lids
Seaward. The winds' wings beat upon the stones,
Cousin, and scream for you and the claws rush
At the sea's throat and wring it in the slush
Of this old Quaker graveyard where the bones
Cry out in the long night for the hurt beast
Bobbing by AhaVs whaleboats in the East.

Lowell's method is unquestionably elliptical, but there is no escaping
its import. It is a tortured outcry against the corruption of the times, a

715

LIVES OF THB POETS

grim need to find an abiding belief in a world resigned to apathy and
moral bankruptcy. If there is uncertainty in the communication, there
is no lack of control, no softness or insincerity. The rapidly dissolving
images, wrenched phrases, and sudden transitions recall the baroque
metaphysicians of the seventeenth century; but nowhere except in New
England and at no other time than the present could anyone have
written such religious yet revolutionary poems as 'The Holy Innocents,"
"Colloquy in Black Rock," "As a Plane Tree by the Water," "Children
of Light," and 'Where the Rainbow Ends," which concludes:

In Boston serpents whistle at the cold.
The victim climbs the altar steps and sings:
"Hosannah to the lion, lamb, and beast
Who fans the furnace-face of IS with wings:
I breathe the ether of my marriage feast."
At the high altar, gold
And a fair cloth. I kneel and the wings beat
My cheek. What can the dove of Jesus give
You now but wisdom, exile? Stand and live,
The dove has brought an olive branch to cat.

Lowell's disciplined technique marked another trend in twentieth-
century American poetry: a repudiation of 'Tree verse" and a return to
form. The younger poets did not cease to experiment, but their work
was strictly shaped, even elegant in its orderliness. There was much
fantasy but no lack of dignity in Karl Shapiro's V-Letter and Other
Poems, Peter Viereck's Terror and Decorum, Theodore Rocthke's The
Waking, Elizabeth Bishop's Poems: North and South, and Richard Wil-
bur's Things of This World, all of which were awarded Pulitzer Prizes
respectively in 1945, 1949, 1954? 1956, and 1957*

DYLAN: THOMAS

In spite of the efforts of category builders, it is impossible to fit the
fluctuating present into a neatly contrived pigeonhole, and it is equally
impossible to pass final judgment on contemporary writers whose work
is still incomplete. One of the most distinctive of modern poets, how-

716

DYLAN THOMAS

ever, made his unmistakable mark before he died, and it is to him that
the concluding pages of this book are devoted.

In a poem about his childhood, "Once Below a Time," Dylan
Thomas declared:

Up through the lubber crust of Wales
I rocketed to astonish
The flashing needle rock of squatters,
The criers of Shabby and Shorten,
The famous stitch droppers . , .

Thomas might have been making a comment on discomfiting the
critics ("the criers of Shabby and Shorten'), for no poet of his time
"rocketed to astonish" so effectively. He was barely twenty-one when he
erupted upon the world with a violence of emotion and an unmatched
vehemence of expression. Thomas was born October 27, 1914, in the
Welsh seaport of Swansea. Son of an English teacher, he had little
schooling. After attending the local grammar school, he became a re-
porter on the South Wales Evening Post and at twenty published his
first book, Eighteen Poems, which startled readers with its whirling
images and high eldritch music. Edith Sitwell praised its wildness;
other critics murmured "surrealism." Two years later Thomas continued
to bewilder with the clanging exuberance of Twenty-Five Poems.

As a boy he was, said Thomas, "small, thin, indecisively active, quick
to get dirty, curly/' He never cared to learn a trade but, wretchedly
poor all his life, earned a haphazard living as a journalist, actor, script-
writer and, toward the end, public performer. At twenty-two he married
Caitlin Macnamara, by whom he had three children, two sons, Llewelyn
and Colm, and a daughter, Airon, and settled in the fishing village of
Laugharnc, Carmarthenshire. His home, called The Boat House, had
been a ferry landing.

Thomas began reading poems over the air for the British Broad-
casting Company in his mid-twenties. In 1950 he. made his first visit
to the United States, returning two years later, and again in 1953. He
gave recitals in which he half declaimed, half sang the lines. No one
who heard him road poetry — his own or others — ever forgot the rolling
vigor of his voice, its melodic subtlety, and its power of incantation.
There was about him a concurrence of passion and lyrical purity which
was overwhelming. Even those who could not understand his poetry
on the printed page considered him the most persuasive reader of the
day*

717

LIVES OF THE POETS

He made himself at home in America. "I don't believe in New York/'
he said, "but I love Third Avenue." He was especially fond of one sea-
man's bar— Dylan is Welsh for "the sea" — and friends spoke of it as
his literary and social club. There were many parties, at which he drank
heavily; he was either the most gracious or the most besotted of guests.
He went from bar to bar, recovering from one hang-over after another
in a self-betrayal of orgies and obscenities, all of which gave substance
to a gathering legend of the poet who had become the bohemian-on-
the-loose. During this period he took an egg in brandy for breakfast and
often took beer in lieu of either breakfast or brandy; his favorite food
seems to have been candy bars, and his favorite "escape reading" sadistic
shockers. The most morose of manic-depressives, Thomas was also the
most hilarious of comrades. He made up imaginary lectures on such
topics as "A Typical Day in My Welsh Bog" and "A Bard's-Eyc View
of New York by a Dollar-Mad Nightingale." In his serious moods he
was willing to talk about poetry. He said he wanted to write only
"poems of God's world — by a man who doesn't believe in God," but
he had an antipathy to discussions about poetic techniques in what he
considered the jargon of the New Critics.

Past thirty-five, Thomas described himself as "old, small, dark, intel-
ligent, and darting-doting-dotting-eyed . . . balding and toothlessing."
His slimness was gone and he had grown corpulent, but he was heavy
without being gross, slow without losing grace. During his third visit
to the United States he was to confer with Igor Stravinsky concerning
plans for an opera. The beginnings of a plot had already been outlined,
and Thomas expected to elaborate it at the composer's home in Cali-
fornia. His Collected Poems had just become a sensational success, and
he was particularly happy as he celebrated his thirty-ninth birthday in
New York. The festivities, however, ended in illness, followed by a
sudden collapse. Thomas was taken to St. Vincent's Hospital, where it
was discovered that he was suffering from encephalopathy, a virulent
disease of the brain. He died on November 9, 1953, less than two weeks
later. His wife arrived from Wales a few hours before his death*

Memoirs, biographies, and documented accounts of his excesses as
the roaring boy multiplied after Thomas' death. There were John Mal-
colm Brinnin's Dylan Thomas in America; Caitlin Thomas' uninhibited
confessional, Leftover Life to Kill; Henry Treece's revised study, Dylan
Thomas: Dog Among the Fairies; and Vernon Watkins' picture of a
poet in the making, Letters to Vernon Watkins. A note of thanks to
Watkins in 1941 indicates Thomas' almost continuous state of poverty:

DYLAN THOMAS

Thank you for the letter . . . and the round silver trash.
Filthy, damned stuff, the half-crown was the only lovely
money I'd seen for a week and more. And it's still all I've
seen. This is getting ridiculous. The joke has gone too far,
It isn't fair to be penniless every morning. Every morning
but one, okay; but no, every morning!

Besides his poetry Thomas left several volumes of short stories,
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Quite Early One Morning, Ad-
ventures in the Skin Trade, and A Prospect of the Sea (the last three
published posthumously), and a play which is also a prose-poem, Under
Milk Wood. The poetry is Thomas' most singular contribution, de-
monic and Dionysiac, a transmutation of many influences. Acknowledg-
ing his indebtedness to Freud and his free use of the unconscious,
Thomas said, "Poetry is the rhythmic, inevitably narrative, movement
from an ovcrclothcd blindness to a naked vision. . . . Poetry must drag
further into the clear nakedness of light more even of the hidden causes
than Freud could realize," Thomas also owed something to Joyce; he,
too, strewed his pages with invented words and fused puns: "ship-
rackcd gospel," "gallow grave," "minstrel angle," for "ministering angel."
Thomas' greatest influence, however, was Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Without directly imitating him, Thomas excelled in Hopkins' word-
jugglery, his mixture of gaiety and grimness; he echoed the free-flowing
syllables and, like Hopkins, luxuriated in alliterative sentences packed
with compound words: "cool-scrubbed cobbled kitchen" . . . "hymning
a bonnet and brooch and bootlace bow" . . . "the sloe-black, slow,
black, crow-black, fishingboat-bobbing sea/'

His themes were few: childhood, sexual energy, troubled religion,
and death. In Country Sleep, published a year before Thomas' death,
is a renewed justification of his claim that his poetry was "the record
of my individual struggle from darkness toward some measure of light.
... To be stripped of darkness is to be clean, to strip of darkness is to
make clean/' The statement, as well as the book, was a refutation of
the common assertion that Thomas was carefully obscure and purposely
mad. It was also an answer to those who maintained that Thomas was
Auden's deliberate opposite, that, in contrast to Auden's premeditated in-
tellectuality, Thomas lost himself in merely boisterous emotionalism.
On the contrary, Thomas continually sought with complete conscious-
ness for the origin of his ego and identified himself with all the ele-
mental powers of nature: "My world was christened in a stream of

719

LIVES OF THE POETS

milk / And earth and sky were as one airy hill," "I dreamed my genesis
in sweat of sleep/' "I ... suffer the first vision that set fire to the
stars," and:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer.

And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose

My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

Under Milk Wood, Thomas' last work, originally commissioned by
the British Broadcasting Company, was tried out in the United States
in 1953, with the poet himself reading two of the parts. It is not so
much a drama as a lyrical pageant of people; the speech ranges from
pure contemplation to limber, bawdy ballads. Nothing happens except
in the minds of the characters, who, during twenty-four reminiscent
hours from dawn to dawn, are stirred to recall the casual and crucial
moments of their lives. Humorous small talk mingles with terror; vague
desires and rude carnalities overlap; drink and dreams make a rough
chronicle which projects the spirit of a community, the coastal town in
which Thomas lived and which, with an unearthly magic, ho re-creates
and transfigures.

This is its concluding "stage direction":

The thin night darkens. A breeze from the creased water
sighs the streets close under Milk waking Wood. The
Wood, whose every treefoot's cloven in the black glad sight
of the hunters or lovers, that is a God-built garden to Mary
Ann Sailors, who knows there is Heaven on earth, and the
chosen people of His kind fire in Llarcggub's land, that is
the fair-day farmhands' wantoning, ignorant chapel of
bridesbeds, and to the Reverend Eli Jenkins, a green-leaved
sermon on the innocence of men, the suddenly windshakcn
wood springs awake for the second dark time this one spring
day.

His words were written, said Thomas, "for the love of inan and the
praise of God — and I'd be a damned fool if they weren't." The love of
man and the praise of God overflow from the poems, notably those be-
ginning 'When all my five and country senses see," "Light breaks where

720

DYLAN THOMAS

no sun shines/' 'The hand that signed a paper felled a city/' "Espe-
cially when the October wind/' "And death shall have no dominion/'
'Through throats where many rivers meet, the curlews cry/* as well as
from the poignant evocations of "The Hunchback in the Park/' "A Re-
fusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London," the clear
luxuriance of "In Memory of Ann Jones," and the simple, carefree
earthiness of "Fern Hill," with its blithe opening:

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,

Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,

And honored among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light

Thomas' lines are so superabundant and swift that they cannot stop
for analysis or even full understanding. Intemperate and excessive, they
carry the reader along on tumultuous waves of sound. The air that
Thomas breathed was a heady intoxicant. He reeled through the world
with tragic innocence and took a child's irresponsible delight in all its
turmoil.

It is a sense of turmoil which, in the widest possible varieties of ex-
pression, has been sounded by the poets of our time. We can see how
they have interpreted the fevered temper of the age in their very
choice of complex and often chaotic subject matter. Some express di-
rectly or in parable their personal dilemmas and the plight of mankind
— distrust of the past, despair of the present, and fear of the future.
Many of them cast their concepts in contemporary molds, shaping odd
forms, disrupting syntax, playing with typographical arrangements, and
attempting to synchronize their rhythms with the rhythms of a mechan-
ically driven, atom-powered era. Intensive competition increased the
pressures in the sphere of culture as well as in the spheres of commerce
and politics, and many poets, in a deliberate effort to achieve individ-
uality, distorted language, invented techniques, and carried experimen-
tation beyond comprehensibility.

It will take some time before the new idioms and innovations can be

721

LIVES OF THE POETS

fully absorbed. There is always a cultural time lag; gradually our ears
grow accustomed to the logical dissonances of modern music and the
discordances of modern poetry. Once this has been achieved, we will
be able to evaluate the intrinsic importance of the work of the period.
At that time, we will know how much of modern poetry has perma-
nence: the wonder, excitement, and sustained power of enduring art.

722

Index

Titles of short poems are in roman type; titles of
longer literary works and names of publications are
italics; names of people in small capitals.

A. E. Housman: Man Be-
hind a Mask, 608
A Lume Spento, 667
A voice by the cedar tree,

5ii
A wife at daybreak I shall

be, 585
Aaron, 140
ABBEY, RICHARD, 445-47,

451-52,455,457,465
ABERCROMBIE, LASCELLES,

62,6, 630, 648, 649
Abraham Lincoln; The

War Years, 638
Absalom and Achit&phel,

302, 254; quoted, 200-1
Absalom and Achitophel,

Second Part of, quoted,

199, 202-3

Absent from thee I lan-
guish still, 214
Abt Voclcr, quoted, 494
Adam Unparadis'd, 186
ADAMS, LEONIE, 647
ADDXSON, JOSEPH, 210,

222, 233, 236, 239, 242
Additional Poems [Hous-

MAN], 611
Address to the Deil, 319,

327; quoted, 320-21
Address to the Irish Peo-
ple, 4*3
Address to the Unco Guid,

32.6, 33<>
Adonais, 506; quoted, 437-

38,44*
Adventures in the Skin

Trade, 719

Advertisement, 238-39

Ae Fond Kiss, and Then
We Sever, 337

AEGIDIUS, 48

Aella, 285

Aeneid, 62-63, 65, 145,
191, 445, 675

AESOP, 33, 50

^ETHELSTAN, 7

Aforesaid, 633

After Christmas, 685

After the Pangs of a Des-
perate Lover, 196

Afterwards, quoted, 536-

37
Age of Anxiety, The,

quoted, 68 1, 682, 684
Agenbite of Inwit, 8
Aglaura, 166, 167
AGLIETTI, DR,, 408
Agnes Grey, 515

AlKEN, CONRAD, 705-7

AIKEN, ROBERT, 325, 330
Air Plant, The, 714
AKENSIDB, MARK, 340
Alaric at Rome, 520
Alas, 'tis true I have gone
here and there, quoted,

Alastor, 428, 441
Alchemist, The, 115
ALDINGTON, RICHARD, 669
Alexander, Prince of

Rhodes, 229
Alexander and Cwnyaspe,

ALEXANDER THE GREAT,

Alexander's Feast, 205-6
ALFRED, KING, 5, 15
Alfred, 267
Alfred, West of England

Journal, 461
Alice Fell, 363
Alice in Wonderland, 289
All for Love, or the World

Well Lost, quoted, 196-

97
All lovely things will have

an ending, 706
All my past life is mine no

more, 214
All night have the roses

heard, 510
All Souls, 66 1
AH That's Past, 654-55
All the King's Men, 703
ALLAN, JOHN, 554-55
ALLEN, ROBERT, 348
All's Well That Ends

Well, 31, 82
Almanzor and Alxnahide,

202

Alone, quoted, 553
Altar, The, 139
ALTGELD, JOHN P., 639
Always the Young Stran-
gers, 638
Amboyna, 195
America: A Prophecy, 299
America Was Promises,

707

7*3

INDEX

American Female Poets,

556

American Primer, An, 575
American Scholar, The,

543, 574-75
American Songhag, The,

638

AMIS, JOHN, 216
Among School Children,

622

Amores [LAWRENCE], 66 1
Amores [OVID], 206
Amoretti, 67
Amoris Victima, 602
Amours de Voyage,

quoted, 519
Amphitryon, 206
An age in her embraces

passed, 214
ANACREON, 146
Anagram, quoted, 139
Anatomy of Melancholy,

The, 113
Anatomy of the World,

An, 127
Ancient and Modern Scots

Songs, 312
Ancient Mariner, The, 66,

35i, 367

And death shall have no
dominion, 721

ANDERSEN, HANS CHRIS-
TIAN, 529

Andrea del Sarto, quoted,
491

Andrew an* His Cuttie
Gun, 337

ANXHUEWES, LANCELOT,
105

Angel in the House, The,

5*3, 52.4

Annals [TACITUS], 117
ANNE, QUEEN, 225, 237,

241, 259

ANNE OF BOHEMIA, 19, 21
Annihilation, quoted, 707
Annus Mirabilis, 197
Another Time, 683
Ant, The, 169
Antique Harvesters, 704
Antiquity of Freedom,

The, 541
Antony and Cleopatra, 99;

quoted, 100, 196-97
Any Saint, 605
APELLES, 93
Apocalypse, 664
Apology, The, 264
Apology for Poetry, An,

70
APOLLONIUS RHODIUS,

180

Appius and Virginia, 231
APPLESEED, JOHNNY, 642
Arabian Nights, The, 28,

36, 345
ARBUTHNOT, JOHN, 237-

Arcades, 174, 176
Ardelia's Answer to Ephe-

lia, 218

ARDEN, ROBERT, 76
Areopagitica, quoted, 182-

Arethusa, 434

Argument of His Book,

The, quoted, 159
ARIOSTO, LODOVICO, 60
ARISTOPHANES, 117
Armageddon [RANSOM],

704
Armageddon [TENNYSON],

504
ARMOUR, JEAN, 323-25,

33J-35

Arms and the Boy, 694
ARNOLD, MATTHEW, 94,

398, 440, 520-22, 649,

670, 682
ARNOLD, DR. THOMAS,

518, 520
Ais Poetica, 708
Art of Love (.Ar$ Ama-

toria"), 17, 196, 207
Art of Walking the Streets

of London, The, 220
Arte of English Poesie,

The, 60
As a Plane Tree by the

Water, 716

As I walked out one eve-
ning, 685
As on a purple quilt I

chose, 146
As through the land at

eve we went, 509

724

As You Like It, 87, 95;

quoted, 74
Ascension Hymn, The,

149

ASHBURNHAM, EARL OF,
531

ASHBURTON, LOUISA,

LADY, 497
Ash- Wednesday, 676
Ask me no more: the

moon may draw the sea,

509

Asolando, 499
Aspatia's Song, quoted,

121
Astraea Redux: A Poem

on the Happy Restora-
tion and Return of His

Sacred Majesty Charles

the Second, 195
Astrophel and Stella, 68-

70; quoted, 69
At a Concert of Music,

707

At a Solemn Music, 174
At least to pray is left, is

left, 584
At leisure is the soul,

qiMted, 585
Atalanta in Calydon,

quoted, 532
Athanaeum, The, 498
Atheist and die Acorn,

The, 218

Atlantic Monthly, 552
ArrsRBUxar, BISHOP

FRANCIS, 242, 245-46,

255

Aubade, quoted, 691
AUBBBY, JOHN, 76, 77,

210

AUDEN, W, H», 295, 666,
681-86, 688, 693, 695,

7^9
Auden and After: The

Liberation of Poetry,

681-82
Auguries of Innocence,

quoted, 3x0
AUGUSTINE, SAINT, i
Auld Farmer's New Year

Morning Salutation to

His Auld Marc, Mag-

INDEX

gie, 327
Auld Lang Syne, 334;

quoted, 336-37
Aureng-Zebe, 195
Aurora Leigh, 488, 490,

493
Auroras of Autumn, The,

697

Author, The, 264

Author's Earnest Cry and
Prayer, The, 327

Autobiography [YEATS],
616-17

Autobiography of a Super-
Tramp, 650

Away!, 634

Baby's Debut, The, 362

Bacchus: or, The Drunk-
en Metamorphosis, 219

BACH, JOHANN SEBAS-
TIAN, 452, 671

BACON, FRANCIS, 105,
1*5, 538

Bad Dreams, 500

BADGER, RICHARD G., 625

BAILEY, BENJAMIN, 452,
453, 454, 476

BALESTIBR, WOLCOTT,
614

Ballad of John Silver, A,
658

Ballad upon a Wedding,
A, quoted, 167

Ballads and Other Poems
[LONGFELLOW], 549

Ballads and Other Poems
[TENNYSON], 511

Ballads and Bonnets [D.

RoSSETTl], 526

BANKS, THEODORE, 3
Baptism of Christ, The, 51
Barbara Frietchie, 546
Bard, The, 274
Bard's Epitaph, A, 328
Bard's-Eye View of New
York by a Dollar-Mad
Nightingale, A, 718
BARNBFIELD, RICHARD, 85
Barrack-Room Ballads,

6x2, 613

BARRETT, ARABEL, 493
BARRETT, EDWARD MOUL-

TON, 484-86, 492, 579
BARRETT, HENRIETTA,

492
Barretts of Wimpole

Street, The, 485
Bartholomew Fair, 114
Basic English, 689
BASIRE, JAMES, 287
BATHURST, ALLEN, EARL,

234
Batter my Heart, quoted,

134-35
Battle of Agincourt, The,

7i
Battle of Brunanburh,

The, quoted, 7
Battle of Frogs and Mice,

243
Battle of Lovell's Pond,

The, 548

Battle of Maldon, The, 7
Battle of Marathon, The,

484
BAUDELAIRE, PIERRE

CHARLES, 532, 682
Be Angry at the Sun,

644
BEARDSLEY, AUBREY, 60 1,

639

BEATTIE, JAMES, 340
BEAUMONT, FRANCIS, 115,

120-21
BEAUPUY, MICHEL, 340-

Beauty, quoted, 146
Because, forsooth, you're

young and fair, 146
BECKET, THOMAS A, 23
BEDDOES, THOMAS Lov-

ELL, 371, 380-82
BEDE, SAINT, 4-5
Bedpost, The, 696
Bee, The, 276
BEECHING, 93
BEERBOHM, MAX, 389,

533> 602
Before this cooling planet

shall be cold, 647
BEGBIE, ALISON, 316
Beggars, 363
Beggars Opera, The, 220,

321
BBHN, APHRA, 215-17

BELLEFOREST, FRANCOIS

DE, 96

Bells, The, 557
Bells and Pomegranates,

483

Bells for John White-
side's Daughter, 704
Ben Hur, 667
Beneath a Cool Shade,

217
Beneath a Myrtle Shade,

196
BENOIT DE SAINTE-

MAURE, 20

BENTLEY, RICHARD, 241
Beowulf, i, 2, 682;

quoted, 3
Beppo, 415
BERKELEY, BISHOP

GEORGE, 538
BERKSHIRE, THOMAS

HOWARD, EARL OF, 195
BERLIOZ, Louis HECTOR,

417
Beside the Bed, quoted,

656-57

BESIER, RUDOLPH, 485
BETHEL, HUGH, 246
Better Answer: To Chloe

Jealous, A, 225-26
BETTERTON, THOMAS, 76
BIANCKL, MARTHA DICK-
INSON, 581, 587-88
Biathanatos, 125
Bible of Hell, 298
Biglow Papers, The, 551

BlNGHAM, MlLLlCBNT

TODD, 588

Biographia Liter aria, 359
Birches, 631
Bird, The, 149
Birds in the high hall-
garden, 51
Birks of Aberfeldy, The,

337

Birmingham Journal, 260
BISHOP, ELIZABETH, 7x6
Bishop Orders His Tomb

at St. Praxed's Church,

The, 483

Black Cottage, The, 631
BLACKLOGK, DR. THOMAS,

725

INDEX

Blackwood's Magazine,

459

BLAGDEN, ISA, 495

BLAIR, ROBERT, 303, 539

BLAKE, CATHERINE, 286

BLAKE, JAMES, 2,86, 305

BLAKE, JOHN, 286

BLAKE, ROBERT, 286, 288

BLAKE, WILLIAM, 259,
281, 286-311, 359, S^S,
369, 418, 476, 558,
572, 589, 617, 639,
651, 675, 713

Blast, 668

BLAVATSKY, HELENA
PETROVNA, 617

Bleak House, 373

Blessed Damozel, The,
526

BLESSINGTON, MARGUE-
RITE POWER GARDINER,
COUNTESS OF, 373

Blood of the Lamb, The,

639

Bloody Brother, The, 121
Blot in the 'Scutcheon, A,

483

BLOUNT, MARTHA, 234,
244. ^49, 252, 255

Blount, Theresa, 234

Blue Girls, 704

Blue Voyage, 706

BLUNDEN, EDMUND, 375,
692, 694

BLUNT, WILFRED
SCAWEN, 605

Boadicea, 271

BOCCACCIO, GIOVANNI, 13,
15, 19, 20, 28-30, 33,
35, 36, 96, 207, 337,
374, 469

BOETHIUS, ANICIUS MAN-
LIUS SEVERINUS, 15, 38

BOGAN, LOUISE, 634, 647

BOILEAU-DESPBEAUX, NI-
COLAS, 211

BOISSEVAIN, EUGEN, 646

BOLEYN, ANNE, 61, 62

BOLINGBROKB, HENRY
ST. JOHN, VISCOUNT,
243, a49-5o, 252, 277

Bolts of Melody, 588

Bonnie Peggy Alison, 3x6

Bonny Barbara Allen, 54
BONSTETTEN, CHARLES

VICTOR DE, 93, 274
Book of Ahania, The, 299
Book of Airs, A, 119
Book of Common Prayer,

The, 676

Book of ]db, 305, 307
Book of Los, The, 299
Book of Modern Amer-
ican Verse, 682
Book of the Duchess, The,

15; 17, 38

Book of Thel, The, 294;

quoted, 295
Booke of Phyllyp Sparowe,

The, quoted, 57-58
Booker Washington

Trilogy, The, 640
Book- Worm, The, 219
Boris of Britain, 704
Borough, The, 272
Boston Courier, 551
Boston Intelligencer, 563-

64
BOSWELL, JAMES, 260,

262, 263

BOTTOMLEY, GORDON, 648
BOUCHER, CATHERINE

SOPHIA, 288, 291, 298,

305

Bowge of Courte, The, 59
BOWLES, CAROLINE, 360
BOYER, JAMES, 345* 34$
BOYLE, ELIZABETH, 66,

Boy's Will, A, 630, 631
BRACEY, MARY, 165
BRADSTRBET, ANNS, 539
Brahma, 544
BRAWNE, FANNY, 462-64,

466-72

BRECHT, BERTOLT, 220
Bredon Hill, 609
BRETON, NICHOLAS, 63
Bride in the 30'$, A, 68$
Bride of Abydos, The,

392, 393

Bride's Tragedy, The, 380
Bridge, The, quoted, 7x3-

BRIDGES, ROBERT, 177,
197, 59L 594-99» 659

7*6 ,

BRIDGEWATER, JOHN
EGERTON, EARL OF,
176
BRIDGMAN, SIR ORLANDO,

149

Bright Star, 464
BRINNIN, JOHN MAL-
COLM, 718

BRISTOL, EARL OF, 239
BRITTEN, BENJAMIN, 272
Brittle beauty that nature

made so trail, 62
Broken Tower, The, 714
BRONTE, ANNE, 416, 479,

515, 517, 656
BRONTE, BRANWELL, 515
BRONTE, CHARLOTTE,

416, 479, 515-17, 656
BRONTE, EMILY, 416,

479. 5i5-i8, 656
BRONTE, PATRICK, 515
Brontes' Web of Child-
hood, The, 516
BROOKE, RUPERT, 630,

648, 649, 693
Brooklyn Daily Times,

566, 568

Brooklyn Eagle, 560
BROOKS, VAN WYCK, 705
BROOMK, WILLIAM, 241,

243
BROWN, CHARLES ARMX-

TAGB, 447, 452, 457-
59, 461-65, 467, 472

BROWN, DR. ELEANOR
GERTRUDE, 184

BROWN, FORD MADOX,

523. 525

BROWN, Sm GUORGB, 235
BROWN, JOHN, 540
BROWNING, EUJBABHTH
BARRETT, 120, 478,
484-97, 524, 532, 579»
656

BROWNING, ROBERT, 94,
120, 281, 361, 373*
478-502, 512, 514, 5»*>
532, 596, 64*, 653* $56,
668, 671
BROWNING,

WlBDBMANN

487, 493, 494> 497>

499

INDEX

BROWNING, SARAH

WlBDEMANN, 479, 489

BROWNING, SARIANNA,
479, 492, 497, 499

Brown's Descent or The
Willy-Nilly Slide, 632

BRUEGHEL, PIETER, 40

Brut (Brutus), 8

Brutus, 462

BRYAN, WILLIAM JEN-
NINGS, 642

Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,
Bryan, 640

BRYANT, FRANCES FAIR-
CHILD, 540

BRYANT, WILLIAM CUL-
LEN, 539-41, 55*

"BRYHER," 701

BUCCLEUCH, DUKE OF,
360

BUCKINGHAM, GEORGE
VILLTERS, DUKE op,
198, 200-1, 21 x, 217,

254

BUCKINGHAM, JOHN
SHEFFIELD, DUKE o*,

*33> »4*
Bull, The, 652
BURBAGB, RICHARD, 87-

88, 103

BURDEN, JANB, 527
BunoHAM, JOHN DE, 283
BURGUNDY, PHILIPPE DE

ROUVRE, DUKE OF, n
Buried Life, The, 522
BURKE, EDMUND, 271
BURLINGTON, JOHN

BOYLH, EARL OF, 234
BURNB-JONBS, EDWARD,

52>3» 6x3
BUHNBS, WXLUAM, 313,

317

BURNET, THOMAS, 239

BURNETT, GEORGE, 348

BURNS, GILBEET, 313,

3*4» 317
BURNS, ROBERT, 259, 312-

37> 376> 4*8, 457, 459>

$45, 546, 650
BURROUGHS, JOHN, 576
BURTON, ROBERT, 113
Bury Fair, 198
Burrs, THOMAS, 298,

2-99, 3oi-3» 305» 307

BYROM, JOHN, 218-20

BYRON, ALLEGRA, 401-3,
411, 431, 432-

BYRON, AUGUSTA, see
LEIGH, AUGUSTA BY-
RON

BYRON, AUGUSTA ADA,
397

BYRON, CATHERINE GOR-
DON, 384, 386, 387

BYRON, GEORGE GORDON,
LORD, 360, 383-418,
425, 429, 431, 432,
438, 439, 444» 454,
461, 478, 480, 504,
532, 548, 646

BYRON, ADMIRAL JOHN,
383

BYRON, "MAJOR," 425,

430
Byzantium, 621

Ca' the yowes to the
Icnowes tCall the ewes
to the hills), 334
Cabin in the Clearing, A,

634

Cadenus and Vanessa, 223
CAEDMON, i, 4-5
Caesar and Cleopatra, 99
Cain, 411, 415, 416
Cakes and Ale, 535
Calamus, quoted) 571-72
Caliban upon Setebos,

495> 5oo
CALVERT, RAISLBY, 342-

43
CALVERT, WILLIAM, 342-

CALVIN, JOHN, 135
Calypso's Island, 708
CAMDBN, WILLIAM, 1x4
Cameo, The, 647
CAMERON, MEG, 332
CAMPASPE, 93
CAMPBELL, MARY, 324-25
CAMPION, THOMAS, 1x8-

X9> 138

Candidate, The, 264
Candide, 262
Candle Indoors, The,

quoted, 597

Canonization, The,

quoted, 129-30
Cantata, A, 321
Canterbury Pilgrims, The

(engraving), 303-4
Canterbury Tales, The,

9, 13, 15, I9» ", 28-

40, 47, 52, 53, 55;

quoted, 14, 18, 23-28
Cantos, 667, 670; quoted,

671

Canzoni, 668
Cap and Bells, The, 467
Cape Hatteras, 714
Captain Carpenter, 704
Captain Craig, 625-26
CAJREW, THOMAS, 116,

119, 163-64, 1 68
CARLYLE, THOMAS, 344,

373> 498, 5i°» 542-,

549
CARLYLB, MRS. THOMAS,

482

Carmina Bur ana, 53
CARNAN, ANNA MARIA,

280

CARPENTER, EDWARD, 570
Carriage from Sweden, A,

702

Carrion Comfort, 600
Carrion Crow, The,

quoted, 382
CARROLL, LEWIS, 360,

362, 682, 692
CARTWRIGHT, WILLIAM,

164
GARY, ELIZABETH

LUTHER, 528
CARRYL, JOHN, 233, 235,

249
Castle of Indolence, The,

267
CASTLEMATNE, BARBARA

VILLIERS, LADY, 2x1
Cat! who hast pass'd thy

grand climacteric, 452
Catocrocfe, 695
Catkleen ni Houlihan,

618
Catiline, His Conspiracy,

115

Cattivo Tetnpa, 685
CATULLUS, i, 119, 160

INDEX

CAVALCANTI, GUIDO, 676
CAVALIERI, TOMMASO, 93
CAVE, EDWARD, 260
CAVOUR, CAMILLO BENSO

DI, 492

CAXTON, WILLIAM, 52
CAYLEY, CHARLES, 528
CECIL, LORD DAVID, 270
Cenci, The, 432, 433;

quoted, 434
CHALANDBITSANOS, Lou-

KAS, 412
Chambered Nautilus, The,

551

CHAMBERS, JESSIE, 660
Champion, The, 455
CHANNING, W. H., 544
Chantecler, 33
CHAPMAN, GEORGE, 73,

92, 115, 120, -447
Characters of Women,

255; quoted, 256-57
CHARLES I, 116, 145,

152-54, 163, 165, 1 66,

180, 183, I97> 37i»

481
CHARLES II, 145, 152,

154, 165, 183, 185,

*95» J97> 199-2.01,

205, 208, 211, 212,

215, 216, 219
CHASE, RICHARD, 581
CHATTERTON, THOMAS,

259, 283-85, 289, 4*0,

456, 499> 548
CHAUCER, GEOFFREY, 8,

9-41, 43, 46-50, 53, 55,

96, 121, 207, 208, 284,

366, 657, 658
CHAUCER, LEWIS, 16
CHAUCER, PHILIPPA DE

ROET, 12-13, 1 8
CHAWORTH, MARY, 384,

398
Chester Guardian, The,

461
CHESTERFIELD, PHILIP

STANHOPE, LORD, 262
CHESTERTON, G. K., 502,

5", 648

CHBTTLE, HENRY, 79-80
Chicago, 637
Chicago Poems, 637

Childe Harold's Pilgrim-
age, 401-3, 532; quoted,
388, 402, 415

Childe Roland to the Dark
Tower Came, 490, 500,

654

Childhood, 150
Children of Light, 716
Children of the Night,

The, 625

Chimney Sweeper, 293
Chinese Nightingale, The,

639

Christ, 5-6

Christabel, 358, 367, 42.9
Christian Examiner, The,

563

Christians awake! Salute
the happy morn, 219

Christ's Entry into Jeru-
salem (painting), 468

Chronicles of England,
Scotland and Ireland,

CHURCHILL, CHARLES,
259, 263-65

ClBBER, COLLEY, 197,

247

City in the Sea, The, 557
City Night-Piece, A, 276
Civil Wars, 71
CLAIRMONT, CLAIRE, 399-
402, 405, 411, 426-
29> 431, 432-> 435
CLARE, JOHN, 37*» 375-

79, 650
CLARENCE, LIONEL, DUKE

o*, 11, 14
Clari, 4 6 in

CLARKE, CHARLES COW-
DEN, 445-48; 450
CLARKE, JOHN, 445, 448
Classical Dictionary, 445
CLEMENS, SAMUEL L.,

571, 642

CLEMM, MARIA, 555, 556
Cleomenes, 206
Clerk's Tale, The, 35
CLEVELAND, DUCHESS

OP, 279

Cleveland, John, 145, 164
Cleveland Plain Dealer,
The, 712

728

Climate of Thought, 696
Clock-o'-Clay, quoted,

378-79
Clod and the Pebble, The,

quoted, 292
Cloister, 707

CLOPTON, SIR HUGH, 86
Cloud, The, 434, 442
CLOUGH, ARTHUR HUGH,

363, 518-21
Clow, Jenny, 332
Clowns' Houses, 691
Coat, A, quoted, 619
COBHAM, LORD, 6 1
Cock-crow, quoted, 149

COCKERELL, SlDNEY, 656

Cockney School of Poetry,

The, 459
Cocktail Party, The, 677

CODDINGTON, DANNIE,

499

Code, The, 631

COGNI, MARGARITA, 401,
404

COLERIDGE (DAVID),
HARTLEY, 349, 359,
362

COLERIDGE, LUKE, 346

COLERIDGE, SAMUEL
TAYLOR, 66, 82, 285,
338, 339, 344-46, 348-
62, 366-68, 586, 403,
414, 416, 418, 42.9,
542, 662, 682

COLERIDGE, SARA, 349

Collar, The, 140

Collected Plays QONSON],
116

Collected Poems [AIKBN],
706

Collected Poems [BROWN-
ING], 480

Collected Poems [£MP-
SON], 689

Collected Poems [FROST],

632-33
Collected Poems [MAO-

LEISII], 708
Collected Poems [M

MOORE], 701
Collected Poems [E. A.

ROBINSON], 6x6
Collected Poems [C. Ros-

INDEX

SETTl], 529

Collected Poems [E. SIT-
WELL], 692

Collected Poems [W.
STEVENS], 697

Collected Poems [D.
THOMAS], 718

Collected Poems [W. C.
WILLIAMS], 700

Collected Poems: 1914-
1947 [GRAVES], 695-96

Collected Poems: igzB-
1953 [SPENDER], 688

Collected Works [TENNY-
SON], 505

COLLINS, WILLIAM, 259,
268-69, 34o

COLLINSON, JAMES, 528

Colloquy for These States,
37
quy in Black Rock,

Colombe's Birthday, 483
Colyn Cloute, quoted, 58
Come down, O maid,

from yonder mountain

height, quoted, 509
Come In, 631
Come into the garden,

Maud, 511
Come, let us praise the

gasworks, 686
Come, my Celia, let us

prove, 117
Comedy of Errors, 81, 87,

99
Common Asphodel, The,

695
Commonplace Book, 317,

319, 330
Complaint of the Black

Knight, The, 48
Complaint to His Purse,

Complaints, 1 5
Composed or Suggested

during a Tour in the

Summer of 1833, 368
Comus, 121, 174, 176;

quoted, 177
Concord Hymn, 544
CONDELL, HENRY, 103,

106

Confessio Amantis, 47,

Confessional, The, 500
Confidential Clerk, The,

677

Congo, The, 640, 641
Cowgo and Other Poems,

The, 639
CONGREVE, WILLIAM,

222, 229

CONNOLLY, CYRIL, 686
Conquest of Granada,

The, 195, 196
Conquistador, 708
Consecration, A, quoted,

658
Considerable Speck, A,

631
Consolation of Philosophy,

15, 38

Constant Lover, The, 167
Constantia and Philetus,

CONSTANTINB I, EM-
PEROR, 5

CONSTANTINUS, KlNG OF

SCOTLAND, 7
Convent Threshold, The,

53°
Convergence of the

Twain, The, 536
Conversation (novel), 706
Conversation [COWPER],

270

COOKE, THOMAS, 239
Cook's Tale, The, 31
Cool Tombs, quoted, 637
COOLTDGE, CALVIN, 623
COOPER, SIR ASTLEY,

446
COPPEE, FRANCOIS, 624

CORBI&RE, &DOUARD, 670,
673

Corinna's Going A-May-

ing, 1 60
Coriolanus, 99
CORK, RICHARD BOYLE,

EARL OF, 66
Correspondence [Pops],

2<33

Corsair, The, 392
Cotter's Saturday Night,

The, 3*3> 330? quoted,

7*9

327-28

COTTON, CHARLES, 168
Count Belisarius, 695
Countess Kathleen, The,

617
Country of hunchbacks!

where the strong

straight spine, 647

COTIRBET, GUSTAVE, 417

Court of Equity, The,

337
Court of Henry VIII,

The, 56

Court of Venus, The, 48
Courtship of Miles

Standish, The, 548,

549, 55«>
Cow in Apple Time, The,

632
COWLED, ABRAHAM, 122,

142-43, 145-46, 169,

185, 229
COWPER, WILLIAM, 259,

264, 268-71, 539, 632
COXEY, JACOB S., 624
CRABBE, GEORGE, 259,

268, 271-72, 628
CRANE, HART, 687, 711-

14, 7i5
CRASHAW, RICHARD, 123,

142-44, 155, 604
CREECH, WILLIAM, 330
CROKER, JOHN WILSON,

460-61, 505
CROMEK, R. H., 303,

304
CROMWELL, OLIVER, 145,

146, 152-54, 181, 185,

i94-95> 52.0
Crowning Privilege, The,

695, 696
Cry of the Children,

The, 478, 488
Cumberland, George, 287,

299> 3oo» 307
CUMMINGS, E. E., 709-

Cupid Mistaken, 226
CURLL, EDMUND, 239,

244
Curse of Kehama, The,

359
Cutty Sark, 714

INDEX

Cymbeline, 100, 512
CYNEWTILB, 2, 4-6

Daffodil Fields, The, 658

Daisy, 605

DANA, RICHABD HENRY,

54°» 549
Dance, The, 713
Dance in the Queen's

Chalmer, 49
Dancer, The, 165
DANIEL, SAMUEL, 67, 70-

71,82
Daniel, 5

Daniel Jazz, The, 640
Danish History, 96
Danny Deever, 615
DANTE, ALIGHIERI, 13,

15, 60, 669, 671, 673,

676

DANVERS, JANE, 138
Dare you see a soul at the

white heat:1 584
Dark Angel, The, 602
Dark-Eyed Gentleman,

The, 536
Darkling Thrush, The,

536

DARWIN, CHARLES ROB-
ERT, 479, 534, 535
Dauber, 658
DAVENANT, WILLIAM, 80-

81, 163, 164, 166, 185,

197, 209

Davideis, The, 145
DAVIDSON, BETTY, 313
DAVIDSON, DONALD, 703
DAVIDSON, JOHN, 60 1
DAVIES, RICHARD, 78
DAVIES, SCROPE, 385,

387
DAVIES, W. H., 648,

649-53

Dawlish Fair, 475

Day of Judgment, The,
223

De Castrilrus Virorum IJ-
lustrium, 33

De Natwa Renm, 128

Deacon's Masterpiece,
The, 551

Death and Doctor Horn-
book, 319, 326, 330

Death in the Desert, A,

495
Death in the Schoolroom,

560
Death of Lincoln, The,

54i

Death of Oenone, 511
Death of the Hired Man,

The, 631
Death's Jest Book, 380,

382

Debauchee, The, 214
Decameron, The, 28, 30,

357 36, 96, 469
Declaration of Rights, 423
Defence of Lucknow,

The, 511

Defence of Poetry, 437
Definition of Love, The,

156

DEFOE, DANIEL, 118
Dejection: An Ode, 358
Dekker, Thomas, 115
DELACROIX, FERDINAND,

416
DE LA MARE, WALTER,

648, 653-55, 656
Delia, 71

Delight in Disorder, 160
Demeter and Other

Poems, 511
Democratic Vistas, 569,

576
DENNIS, JOHN, 231-32,

239, 244

Deor's Complaint, 6
Departmental, 631
Departmental Ditties, 613
DE QUINCEY, THOMAS,

343-44, 361
DERBY, CHARLOTTE DE

LA TREMOILLB, COUNT-
ESS DOWAGER off> 176
DERBY, WILLIAM STAN-
LEY, EARL o*, 105
DESCARTES, REN&, 215
Description of Morning,

A, 223
Description of Woman,

The, 160

Descriptive Sketches, 344
Deserted Village, The,

271, 277; quoted, 278

730

Desperate Remedies, 534
Despondency, an Ode,

328

DE VERB, AUBREY, 366
DEVEREUX, PENELOPE, 68
Devil Is an Ass, The,

115-16
DEVONSHIRE, CHARLES

BLOUNT, EARL OJF, 68
Devotions [DONNE], 126;

quoted, 127
Devouring Time, blunt

thou the lion's paws,

Dial, The, 543, 701
Dialogue of Self and

Soul, A, quoted, 620
DIAZ, BERNAL, 708
DICKENS, CHARLES, 373,

479, 540, 613
DICKINSON, AUSTIN, 579>

581, 587
DICKINSON, EDWARD, 579,

580, 583
DICKINSON, EMILY, 148,

578-90, 713
DICKINSON, LAVJCNIA, 579,

58687, 588
DICKINSON, SUE, 581
Dictionary o{ Merchan-
dise, 445
Dictionary of the English

Language, 262
Dictionnaire Philosophi*

que> 422

Did not the heavenly rhet-
oric of thine eye, 85
DJCLKE, CHAXU.US WJUNT-

WOJRTU, 45a-53
DILKE, Mns. CHARLES

WfiNTWO&Tii, 453,

467
DIODATI, CHARLES, 171,

179

Dirce, 374
Directive, 633
Dirge for the Now Sun-
rise, 692

Dirge for Wolfram, 382
Dirge in Cymbeline, 269
Dirge without Music, 647
Disappointment, The, 2x3
DISRAELI, BENJAMIN, 5*1

INDEX

Divina Commedia, 128,

673

Divine Image, The, 290
Divine Poems, 134
Divine Reflections on the

Native Objects of an

Infant-Eye, 150
DIXON, RICHARD WAT-
SON, 593, 595, 596
DOBELL, BERTRAM, 150
Doctor Faustus, 692
Doctrine fr Discipline of

Divorce, The, 181-82
DODSLEY, ROBERT, 273,

2,83

DOMETT, ALFRED, 482
Don ]uan, 360, 410, 411,

414, 415; quoted, 403-4
Don Sebastian, 206
DONIZETTI, GAETANO, 560
DONNE, ANNE, 269
DONNE, JOHN, 113, 115,

119, 122-36, 137, 138,

*39» *42> 146, 147, 148,

152, 156, 1 60, 164,269,

539, 692
DOOLITTLE, HILDA

C'H.D."), 669-701
Doom is dark and deeper

than any sea-dingle, 685
DORSET, CHARLES SACK-

VILLE, EARL OP, 211,

217, 225
DOSTOEVSKI, FEDOR MIK-

HAILOVJCH, 416
Double Man, The, 684
Douglas Tragedy, The, 54
Dover Beach, quoted, 522
DOWDBN, EDWARD, 84,

570

Down by the Salley Gar-
dens, 618
Down, Wanton, Down,

696
DOWSON, ERNEST, 601,

602

DOYLE, A. CONAN, 675
DOYLE, PETER, 569, 571
Dramatic Idyls, 498
Dramatic Lyrics, 483
Dramatic Romances and

Lyrics, 483

Dramatis Personae, 494,

495
DRAYTON, MICHAEL, 67,

71-72, 82, 104
Dream, The [BYRON], 384
Dream, The [DONNE],

128; quoted, 129
Dream of a Climber, 696
Dream of Fair Women,

A, 505
Dream of the Rood, The,

a, 5
Dream within a Dream,

A, 557

DREISER, THEODORE, 676
Drink to me only with

thine eyes, 117
DRINKWATER, JOHN, 630,

648

DROESHOUT, MARTIN, 104
Dnimlin Woodchuck, A,

631
DRXIMMOND, WILLIAM,

116

Drum-Tags, 568-69
DRXIRY (London book-
seller,), 376

DRURY, ELIZABETH, 127
Dry Sticks Fagoted by the
Late Walter Savage
Landor, 373
DRYDEN, HONOR, 194
DRYDEN, JOHN, 9, 40, 120,
122, 137, 146, 165, 185,
i93-2°9> 2,10, 217, 221,

222, 224, 225, 252, 254,

314
Du BARTAS, GUILLAUMB

DE SALLUSTB, SEIG-
NEUR, 539
DUNBAR, WILLIAM, 47-

50, 312

DUNCAN, ISADORA, 627
Dunciad, The, 234, 243,

251-52, 385; quoted,

244-48

DURER, ALBRBCHT, 287
DYCE, ALEXANDER, 59
DYER, JOHN, 259, 265-67,

340
Dylan Thomas: Dog

Among the Fairies, 718

731

Dylan Thomas in Amer-
ica, 718
Dynasts, The, 535

Eagle That Is Forgotten,

The, 639

Earth Triumphant, 705
Earthly Paradise, The, 28,

52-3

Easter, 141
Easter Hymn, 611
Easter, 1916, 622
Easter Wings, 139
Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 368
Eclectic Review, The, 451
Eclogue [RANSOM], 704
Eclogues [PHILIPS], 219
Ecstasy, The, quoted, 132-

Eden, 150

EDGCUMBE, RICHARD, 398
EDGEWORTH, MARIA, 380
Edinburgh Magazine, 451
Edinburgh Review, The,

385

EDLESTON, ARTHUR, 386
EDWARD III, n, 62
EDWARD THE CONFESSOR,

Edward the Second, 73
Edward, Edward, 54
EGERTON, SIR THOMAS,

125
Eight O'Clock, quoted,

612
Eighteen Nineties, The,

602

Eighteen Poems, 717
EINSTEIN, ALBERT, 683
Elder Statesman, The, 677
Elegies [DONNE], 125;

quoted, 130
Elegy [MILLAY], 647
Elegy to an Old Beauty,

219
Elegy to the Memory o£

an Unfortunate Lady,

249

Elegy Written in a Coun-
try Churchyard, £69,
273, 274, 420; quoted,
275

Elementary School Class-

INDEX

room in a Slum, quoted,
687-88

Elene, 5

ELGIN, THOMAS BRUCE,
HAUL OF, 449

Elinda's Glove, 169

ELIOT, T. S., 123, 187,
i9*»259, 519, 615, 666,
669, 670, 672-79, 682,
684, 695, 704, 705,
707, 712

ELIOT, VALERIE FLETCH-
ER, 673

ELIOT, VIVEBNNE HAIGH,

673

Elixir, The, 141
ELIZABETH I, 15, 63-64,

65, 66, 68, 77, 91, 95-

96, 115

ELIZABETH II, 692
ELIZABETH, PRINCESS

(daughter of James I),

133

ELMY, SARAH, 271
Eloisa to Abe"lard, 249
Embargo, The, 540
EMERSON, ALLEN LOUISA

TUCKER, 542
EMERSON, LYDIA JACKSON,

543
EMERSON, MARY MOODY,

542
EMERSON, RALPH WALDO,

373. 5i8, $4i-44, 545>

552, 557, 564-65, 57*,

574-75, 582
Emily Dickinson, 581
Emily Dickinson: The

Human Background,

580-81
Emily Dickinson Face to

Face, 581
Emily Dickinson's Letters

to Doctor and Mrs. /o-

siah Gilbert Holland,

58i

Empedocles on Etna, 520
Emperor of Ice Cream,

The, 698
Empress of Morocco, The,

202
EMPSON, WILLIAM, 141,

666, 688-90

Empty Threat, An, 632
Enchafed Flood, The, 682
Encounter (magazine),

686
Encyclopaedia Britannica,

123

End of All, The, 560
End of the World, The,

quoted, 708-9
Endymion, 285, 453"56>

459-61, 473-75J quoted,

457

England, 702
England in 1819, quoted,

435

England's Heroical Epis-
tles, 71

English Ballad on the
Taking of Namur by
the King of Great Brit-
ain, 226

English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers, 385

English Men of Letters,

39
English Padlock, An,

quoted, 226

English Poets, The, 128
Enoch Arden, 511
Enormous Room, The,

709
Enquiry into the State of

Polite Learning, An,

276

Envoy to Scogan, 16
Eyicoene, or the Silent

Woman, 115
Epigoniad, 313
Eptysychidion, 436}

quoted, 437
Epistle to a Lady, 255
Epistle to Addison, 242
Epistle to Augusta, quoted,

393-95
Epistle to Be Left in the

Earth, 708
Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,

quoted, 236-39, 240
Epistle to Robert, Earl of

Oxford, 242
Epistles [POPE], 234
Epitaph on a Hare, 271
Epitaph on Salathiel Pavy,

73*

a Child of Queen Eliz-
abeth's Chapel, 117
Epitaph upon Claudy

Philips, 263
Epithalamion [CuM-

MINGS], quoted, 709-10
Epithalamion [DONNE],

quoted, 133-34
Epithalamion [SPENSER],

Epsom Wells, 1 98
ERASMUS, DESIDERIUS, 56
Especially when the Octo-
ber wind, 721
Essay on Criticism, quoted,

230-31, 241
Essay on Dramatick Poesy,

208
Essay on Man, 246;

quoted, 228, 249-51
Essays [EMERSON], 543
Essays [YEATS!, 619
Essential Shakespeare,

The, 8 1
ESSEX, ROBERT DEVKR-

EUX, EATIL or, 66, 125
ESSEX, WALTJIR DIIVER-

Etrx, EARL 01?, 68
Estranged, 655
Ethics, n 6
EUCLID, 124
Euclid alone has* looked on

beauty bare, 647
Exnupimis, 644
Europe: A Prophecy, 399
EUSDKN, LMmuNow, 197
Evangeline, 549, 550
EVANS, MARY, 346, 348
EVANS, WX&UAM, 346
Eve, 652; quoted, 653
Eve of St. Atfnes, The, 66,

464; quoted, 469-70
Eve of St, Mark, The,

464, 477

EVELYN, JOHN, no
Evelyn Hope, 490
Evening Walk, An, 340,

344

Evening's Love, An, 196
Everlasting Gospel, The,

305
Everlasting Mercy, The,

658

INDEX

Every Man in His Hu-
mour, 88, 94, 114

Everyman, 51-52

Examiner, The, 448

Excelente Balade of Char-
itie, 284

Exclusion, quoted, 584-85

Excursion, The, 361, 363

Explorer, The, 647

Exposure, 694

Express, The, 686

Exultations, 668

Fable for Critics, A,
quoted, 541, 546-47*
552.

Fables [GAY], 220

Fables [HENRYSON], 50

FaHes, Ancient and Mod-
ern, 207

Fagade, 690-91

Faerie Queene, The, 65,
66, 446; quoted, 67

Fair Cloris in a Pig-Sty
lay, 214

FAIRFAX, THOMAS, LORD,

153
Faithful, Shepherdess,

The, 121
Fall of Hyperion, The,

quoted, 475

Fall of the Angels, The, 5
Fallen Yew, A, 605
Fame Machine, The, 2,76
Family Reunion, The, 677
Fanscomb Barn, 218
Far from the Madding

Crowd, 534

Fare Thee Well, 397> 4*4
Farewell, love, and all thy

laws forever, 62
Farewell! Thou art too

clear for my possessing,

95
Farewell to the Court,

quoted, 2x2

Farmer's Bride, The, 656
Farmer's Ingle, The, 113,

327
Far-Traveler, The (Wid-

sith), 2, 6
Fatima, 51 a
FAOSSBT, HUGH I'ANSON

126, 217
Faust, 128
Fear, The, 631
Fear no more the heat o*

the sun, 100

Female Phaeton, The, 226
FENOLLOSA, ERNEST F.,

667

Fenton, Elijah, 243
FERGUSSON, ROBERT, 312,

3i3> 3i9, 327
Ferishtah's Fancies, 499
FERMOR, ARABELLA, 234-

35, *36

Fern Hill, quoted, 721
Few Figs from Thistles,

A, 646

Fifine at the Fair, 497
Fill the bowl with rosy

wine, 146

Final Soliloquy of the In-
terior Paramour, 698
FINCH, ANNE, 215, 217-

18, 279, 340

First Book of Urizen, 299
First Epistle of the First

Book of Horace, quoted,

256

First Travels of Max, 704
Fish, The, 702
Fish in the unruffled lakes,

685

FITTON, MARY, 90
FITZGERALD, EDWARD,

493-94* 5°5> 52-2., 606,

675
FITZWILLIAM, WILLIAM

WENTWORTH, LORD,

376

Five Nations, The, 613
Flagellant, The (maga-
zine), 347

Flagons and Apples, 643
Flaming Heart, Upon the
Book and Pictures of
die Seraphical Saint
Teresa, quoted, 144
FLAXMAN, JOHN, 288,

289, 300, 301, 304
Flea, The, quoted, 131
FLECKER, JAMES ELROY,

648, 649
FLECKNOE, RICHARD, 198

733

Fleece, The, 266; quoted,

267
FLETCHER, JOHN, 115,

120-21, 207

FLETCHER, JOHN GOULD,

669
Flight of the Duchess,

483, 501
FLINT, FRANCIS STEWART,

669
Row Gently, Sweet Af ton,

337

FLOWER, ELIZA, 484
Flowers by the Sea, 700
Follow your saint, follow
your accents sweet, 119
For a Picture of St. Doro-
thea, 591
For Children: The Gates

of Hell, 298
For Children: The Gates

of Paradise, 298
For My Own Monument,

quoted, 226

For the Time Being, 685
For to Admire, 615
For Whom the Bell Tolls,

127

Forbearance, 544
FORD, JOHN, 120, 467^
Forest of Fancy, The, 60
Forget not yet the tried in-
tent, 6 1
Forsaken Merman, The,

521

FORSTER, JOHN, 373
Fortune (magazine), 708
Fountain of Self-Love,

The, 115

Four Quartets, 677
Four Zoas, The, 300, 301
Fourth Book of Airs, 119
Fox, CHARLES, 271
Fra Lippo Lappi, quotedf

49i
FRANCESCHINI, GUIDO,

496-97

Frankenstein, 429
FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN,

299, 42°

Franklin Evans, or The
Inebriate, 560

INDEX

Franklin's Tale, The 12,

36-37

FRASER, LOVAT, 652
FRAZER, JAMES, 675, 676
Free Press, The, 545
Freeman, 561
French Revolution, The,

298

FRENEAU, PHILIP, 539
FREUD, SIGMUND, 295,

485, 683, 719
Friar's Tale, The, 35
FRICKER, EDITH, 348, 349
FRICKER, MARY, 348
FRICKER, SARA, 348, 349*

358

Friend, The, 359
FRIZER, INGRAM, 73
From House to Home, 530
From My Diary, 694
From Ritual to Romance,

676

FROST, ELINOR, 630
FROST, ROBERT, 629-36,

643

Frost at Midnight, 367
Frosty Night, A, 696
FRY, CHRISTOPHER, 627
Fry's (magazine), 652
Fugitive, The (magazine),

703
Full fathom five thy father

lies, 1 08
Full many a glorious

morning have I seen, 95
FULLER, MARGARET, 488
FULLER, THOMAS, 88
FURNIVALL, FREDERICK

JAMES, 498
Further Poems of Emily

Dickinson, 588
FUSBLI, HENRY, 298, 300,

303, 304

Futility, quoted, 694-95
Future of Humor, The,

695
Future of Swearing, The,

695
Fuzzy- Wuzzy, 615

GALILEI, GALILEO, 135,

179
Gallipoli, 658

GAMBA, COUNT RUG-

GIERO, 405, 409, 411

Garden, The, quoted, 156-

Garden of Eden, The, 51
GARDINER, WILLIAM, 78
GARRIOK, RICHARD, 260,

262
GARRISON, WILLIAM

LLOYD, 545

GARROD, H. W., 366, 611
GASCOIGNB, GEORGE, 63
Gates of Paradise, 305
Gaudeamus igitur, 53
GAY, JOHN, 220-21, 232,

2-37

Gebir, 372

General Elliott, The, 696
General William Booth

Enters into Heaven,

641; quoted, 639
Genesis, 5
Genevievc, 346
Gentleman's Magazine,

The, 260

GEORGE II, 255, 269
GEORGE III, 262-63, 360,

411

GEORGE IV, 468
GEORGE V, 614, 659
GEORGE VI, 678
Georgian Poetry, 648-49
Georgics, 266
Germ, The (magazine),

5*3» 5*5

Gesta Romanorum, 96
Ghost, The, 655
Giaour, The, 392
GIBSON, MRS. ("Poosra

NANSIE"), 321
GIBSON, WILFRED WIL-

SON, 630, 648, 649
Gifts and Graces, 530
GILBERT, DAVIBS, 380
GILBERT, SIR HUMPHREY,

64
GILBERT, WILLIAM S.,

98, 120, 509, 6oa, 603
GILOHRIST, A]STNE (Mas.

ALEXANDER), 572-74
GILDON, CHARLES, 239
GILLMAN, JAMBS, 359
GIOTTO, 15

734

Give All to Love, 544
Give beauty all her right,

119
Give me more love or more

disdain, 164
Give Your Heart to the

Hawks, 644

Glad Day (drawing), 287
GLADSTONE, WILLIAM

EWART, 511
Glee-Wood, 44
GLENCAIRN, EARL OF,

3*9, 330

Glistening Flint, The, 147
Glory and loveliness have

passed away, 450
GLOUCESTER, DUKE OF,

Glove, The, 483, 501

Go, Lovely Rose, quoted,
165-66

Go not, happy day, 511

GoUin Market, 528, 530,
652; auotcd, 529

God bless the King—I
mean the Faith's De-
fender, quoted, 220

God moves in a mysterious
way, 270

God That Pailcd, The,
686

Goddwyn, quoted, 285

Godly Gir/ie, 337

God's Grandeur, 599

God's World, 647

GODWIN, MARY, 398, 399,
405, 42-5-33, 436, 439,
44 *

GODWIN, WILLIAM, 308,
423, 4*5-29, 43*> 6x7

GOETHE, JOIIANN WOLF-
GANG vow, 128, 417

Goon, ViNcnNT VAN, 599

Gold-Bug, The, 557

Golden Book of Spring-
feU> The, 639

Golden Bough, The, 675,
676

Golden Whales of Cali-
fornia, The, 639

GOLDSMITH, OLIVER, 259,
271, 275-78

Goldyn Targe, The, 48

INDEX

Goliard Poets, The, 5311.

GONNE, MAUDE, 618

Good Gray Poet, The, 569

Good Morrow, The,
quoted, 130

Good-by and Keep Cold,
631-32

Good-bye, proud world,
I'm going home, 544

Goodbye to All That, 695

GOODERE, ANN, 71

GOODERE, SIR HENRY, 71

Good-Natur'd Man, The,
277

Goodnight, A, 700

Goodnight, Ensured Re-
lease, 611

Gorgeous Gallery of Gal-
lant Inventions, A, 60

GOSSE, EDMUND, 12,3,
487, 504, 571

GOULD, GEORGE, 580

GOWER, JOHN, 47, 50, 96,

101

Grammarian's Funeral, A,

49i> 501

GRANVILLE, SIR GEORGE,
2,2,9

Grasshopper, The, 169

Grave, A, 702-

Grave, The, 303

GRAVES, AX-FRED PERCE-
VAL, 695

GRAVES, NANCY NICHOL-
SON, 695

GRAVES, ROBERT, 59, 599,
648, 675, 692, 695-96

GRAY, MARY, 384

GRAY, THOMAS, 93, 259*
269, 272-75, 284, 3*4>
420

Great spirits now on earth
are sojourning, 449

Greek Anthology, The,
374, 610

GRBBN, MATTHEW, 259,
265-66

Green Carnation, The,
603

Green Grow the Rashes,
O,33o

GRSENBERO, SAMUEL, 712

GREENE, ROBERT, 78-80,

105

GREENFIELD, REV. WIL-
LIAM, 330

GRENVILLB, SIR RICHARD,
5ii

GREVILLB, FULKE, 68

GREY DB WILTON, AR-
THUR, LORD, 65-66

GRIERSON, SIR HERBERT,
127

GRIFFIN, 85

GRISWOLD, RTIFUS WIL-
MOT, 541, 556

Groatsworth of Wit, 79

Grongar Hill, quoted, 267

GROSART, ALEXANDER
BALLOCH, 150

GROTIUS, HUGO, 179

GROVE, HARRIET, 420,
421

Growing Old, 522

GUICCIOLI, COUNT ALES-
SANDRO, 405-10

GUICCIOLI, TERESA, 405-
12

Gulliver's Travels, 222

GUMMERE, FRANCIS BAR-
TON, 2

Gunga Din, 615

GUSTAVUS II (GUSTAVUS

ADOLPHUS), KING OB

SWEDEN, 166
GUSTAVUS V, KING OF

SWEDEN, 638
GUTENBERG, JOHANN, 52

H. D,, see DOOLTTTLB,

HILDA
HABINGTON, WILLIAM,

164
Habit o£ Perfection, The,

59i
HAGBDORN, HERMANN,

626
HALE, EDWARD EVERETT,

564

HALIFAX, CHARLES MON-
TAGU, EARL OF, 225,

239

HALL, ELIZABETH, 86
HALL, DR. JOHN, 86, 104
HALL, WILLIAM, 91
HALLAM, ARTHUR HEN-

RY, 505-8, 514
HALLAM, HENRY, 505
HAMILTON, GAVIN, 317,

321, 324
Hamlet, 87, 95; quoted,

109, no

HAMMOND, THOMAS, 446
HAMMOND, WILLIAM, 91
Hampshire Gazette, 539
HAMPSON, ALFRED LEETB,

588

HANDEL, GEORG FRIED-
RICH, 205, 220
Handful of Pleasant De-
lights, A, 60
Handsome Nell, quoted,

315
HARDY, THOMAS, 272,

533-37, 609, 628, 644,

656, 682

Hark! hark! the lark, 100
Hark, my sould! it is the

Lord, 270

HARLAND, JAMES, 569
HARLEY, EDWARD, LORD,

see OXFORD, EDWARD

HARLEY, EARL OF
Harmonium, 697
Harp-Weaver and Other

Poems, The, 646
HARBISON, GEOB.GB BAG-

SHAWE, 81-82
HART, JOAN SHAKESPEARE,

103

Harvard Advocate, 697
Harvard Monthly, 624
HARVEY, WILLIAM, 91
HARWICK, ELIZABETH, 71$
Hast thou seen the down

i' the air, 167
Have you seen but a

bright lily grow, 117,

167
HAWKINS, MAUDE M.,

608
HAWORTH, EUPHRASIA

FANNY, 484
HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL,

49^
HAYDN, FRANZ JOSEPH,

268, 452, 472
HAYDON, BENJAMIN, 361,

449, 453, 454, 455, 468

735

INDEX

HAYLEY, WILLIAM, 288,

301-4

HAYWARD, JOHN, 2,13
HAZLITT, WILLIAM, 83,

235, 359» 43 1, 449,453

He liv'd amidst th1 un-
trodden way, 362

He that loves a rosy cheek,
164

Health: An Eclogue, 219

Health, and Holiness, 605

Hearing of Harvests Rot-
ting in the Valleys, 684

Heaven, 139

Heaven-Haven: A Nun
Takes the Veil, quoted,
591-92

HEINE, HEINRICH, 337,
521, 610, 612

Helen, thy beauty is to
me, quoted, 554-55

HELENA, SAINT, 5

HELLAS, 439; quoted 442-

HEMANS, FELICIA DORO-
THEA, 414

HEMINGES, JOHN, 103,
1 06

HEMINGWAY, EBNEST, 127

Hence, all you vain de-
lights, 121

HENDERSON, 322

HENLEY, WILLIAM, 322

HENRIETTA MARIA,
QUEEN, 143, 145, 215

HENRY IV, 16

HENRY VIII, 56-57, 61,
62,86

Henry the Eighth, 120,

X2I

Henry the Fifth, 95, 98
Henry the Fourth, 95,

107, 381
Henry the Sixth, 78, 79,

81, 455
HENRYSON, ROBERT, 47,

48, 50, 31 a

HENSLOWE, PHILIP, 114
HERBERT OF CHERBURY,

EDWARD, BARON, 137-

38
HERBERT, GEORGE, 113,

"3, 137-4*, 143? *47»

149, 539

HERD, DAVID, 312
Here lies a Lady, quoted,

704-5

Hermit, The, 219
Hero and Leander, quoted,

73-74

Heroic Stanzas, 194-95
HERRICK, ROBERT, 115,

157-63, 165, 374, 651
Herv6 Kiel, 499
HERVEY OF ICKWORTH,

JOHN, BARON, 239-40
Hesperides, 160
HESSEY, JAMES AUGUS-
TUS, 474-75
HEYWOOD, JOHN, 124
HIGGINSON, THOMAS

WENTWORTH, 581, 585-

Highland Mary, 324
HILDA, SAINT, 5
HILL, AARON, 246
HILL, JOHN, 280
Hilliad, The, 280
HILTON, WILLIAM, 376
Hind and the Panthert

The, 203, 225; quoted,

204-5

Histoires Tragiques, 96
History of England [MiL-

TON], 1 88
History of England, The

[BLAKE], 298
History of the Rise and

Progress of English

Poetry, 252
History of the World,

The, 64
History of the Worthies

of England, 88
HITCHCOCK;, ADA, 708
KITCHENS, ROBERT, 603
HOBBES, THOMAS, 183,

215-16
HOBHOUSE, JOHN CAM,

385, 386, 387, 395,

400, 406, 409
HOGGLEVE, THOMAS, 14,

47-48
HODGSON, RALPH, 648,

649, 652-53
HOGARTH, WILLIAM, 57,

736

288

HOGG, THOMAS JEFFER-
SON, 421-23, 425* 4^7>
439

HOLINSHED, RAPHAEL, 96
HOLLAND, DR. JOSIAH

GILBERT, 581
Hollow Men, The, quoted,

676

HOLMES, OLIVER WEN-
DELL, 550, 571
Holy Fair, The, 327
Holy Innocents, The, 716
Holy Sonnets, quoted,

135-36
Holy Willie's Prayer, 319,

326; quoted, 320
Holy-Cross Day, 501
Homage to the British Mu-
seum, 689

HOME, DANIEL DOUG-
LASS, 495

Home Burial, 631
Home, Sweet Home, 462n.
Home they brought her

warrior dead, 509
Home Thoughts from

Abroad, 483
HOMER, 20, 73, 229, 243,

305, 315, 447
HOOD, THOMAS, 478
HOOKUR, RICHARD, 113
HOPKINS, GERARD MAN-
LEY, 500, 578, 589,
590-600, 603, 682, 715,
719

HOPKINS, LIONEL, 591
HOPPNBR (consul), 403,

406, 408, 410
HORACE, i, 160, 161, 206,
225, 229, 280, 504, 608,
6ix

Horatian Ode upon Crom-
well's Return from Ire-
land, 154

Horizon (magazine), 686
Hospital Visits, 568
HOTSON, LISLIB, 73, 78
Hound of Heaven, The,

quoted, 604-5
Hours of Idleness, 385
House of Fame, The, 14,
*5, *8, 38

INDEX

House of Life, The, 526-

27
House on the Hill, The,

625

Housekeeper, The, 631
HOUSMAN, A,E., 263,

533> 606-13, 646
HOUSMAN, CLEMENCB,

608
HOUSMAN, LAURENCE,

608, 611
How many paltry, foolish,

painted things, 71
How pleasant it is to have

money, heigh-ho!, 519
How Sleep the Brave, 268
How soon hath Time, the

subtle thief of youth,

quoted, 171-72
How sweet I roamed from

field to field, 289
How They Brought the

Good News from Ghent

to Aix, 483, 501
HOWARD, LADY ELIZA-
BETH, 195

HOWARD, MRS. HENRI-
ETTA, see SUFFOLK,

HENRIETTA HOWARD,

COUNTESS o*
HOWARD, LADY MARY, 62
HOWARD, SIR ROBERT,

*9?
HUGH o*» LINCOLN, SAINT,

3^
Hugh Selwyn Mauherley,

519, 670, 707
HUGHES (or HEWS},

WILLIAM, 90-91
HUMPHREY, LEONARD,

580
Hunchback in the Park,

The, 521

Hundred Collars, A, 631
Hungerfield, 644
HUNNIS, WILLIAM, 91
HUNT, EDWARD, 581
HUNT, LEIGH, 304* 4°5»

4XX, 41*, 43*» 439>

448-52, 454, 456, 460,

501

HUNT, ROBERT, 304
HUNT, WILUAM; HOL-

MAN, 523, 525

Huntsman, What Quarry,

646-47
Hurrahing in Harvest,

quoted, 600
Hurricane, The, 714
Hush! hush! tread softly,

464
HUTCKCNSON, SARA, 357,

358

HUXLEY, THOMAS, 616
HYDE, DOUGLAS, 618
Hymn [MILTON], 49
Hymn from a Watermelon

Pavilion, 698
Hymn to Contentment,

A, 219
Hymn to Priapus, quoted,

661-62
Hyperion, 456, 475

I Am, 378

I arise from dreams of

thee, 442
I cannot live with you,

quoted, 584
I chanced upon a new

book yesterday, quoted,

494

I, Claudius, 695

I cry your mercy— pity-
love!— aye, love!, quoted,

471
I dreaded that first robin

so, 584

I fear thy kisses, 442
I find no peace and all

my war is done, 62
I had a dove and the sweet

dove died, 452 ,
I Have Been Through the

Gates, 656
I 'listed at home for a

lancer, 612
I saw an aged, aged man

a-sittmg on a gate, 362
I Sing the Body Electric,

574
I stood tip-toe upon a lime

hill, 451
I strove with none, for

none was worth the

737

strife, quoted, 374

I think continually of
those who were truly
great, quoted, 688

lanthe, 374

Idea, 71

Ideas of Order, 697

Idiot Boy, The, 363

Idler, The, 262

Idylls of the Hearth, 511

Idylls of the King, 511,

513, 627
If I had dreams to sell,

382

If in the world there be

more woe, 61
If Love make me forsworn,

how shall I swear to

love, 85

II Filostrato, 20

II Penseroso, 36, 121, 170,

174, 175; quoted, 176
Iliad, 20, 207, 219, 241-

43, 305
I'll Take Mv Stand (a

symposium;, 703
I'm nobody. Who are

you?, quoted, 578
I'm Owre Young, 337
Images of Good and Evil,

602
Imaginary Conversations,

373: 374
Imitations of Horace, 246;

quoted, 251, 253
Imitation of Spenser, 447
IMLAY, FANNY, 429
Immortal Autumn, 708
Imperfect Enjoyment,

The, 213

Imyrcwisatore, The, 380
In a Balcony, 483
In a Gondola, 483
In Country Sleep, 719
In Distrust of Merits, 702
In Harmony with Nature,

522
In Memoriarn: A.H.H,,

514*, quoted, 506-8
In Memory of Ann Jones,

721
In Memory o£ Eva Gore-

INDEX

Booth and Con Mar-

Mewicz, 622
In Memory of W. B.

Yeats, quoted, 685
In Praise of Limestone,

685

In Reckless Ecstasy, 637
In the Dark, 661
In the Fields, 656
In the Home Stretch, 631
In Time of Pestilence,

quoted, 118
In Wartime and Other

Poems, 546

Inca's Daughter, The, 560
Incident of the French

Camp, 483
Incondite, 480
Index to the Cantos of

Ezra Pound, 670
Indian Burying Ground,

The, 539

Indian Queen, The, 195
Infant Joy, 293
Infant Sorrow, quoted,

293

Inferno, 671
Inn Album, The, 498
Insensibility, 694
Intimations of Immortal-
ity, 148, 363; quoted,

369
Into my heart an air that

kills, 610
Introduction to Astronomy,

445

Invitation to Eternity, 378
Invitation to Juno, quotedt

689-90
Irene, 262
IRVING, WASHINGTON,

278, 548
Is My Team Ploughing,

609
Isabella, or the Pot of

Basil, 469
Island in the Moon, An,

289, 675

Isle of Dogs, The, 118
It is not growing like a

tree, 117
It was a beauty that I saw,

quoted, 117-18

JACKSON, ANDREW, 642
JACKSON, HELEN HUNT,

581
JACKSON, HOLBROOK, 602,

652

JACKSON, MOSES J., 608
JACOB, FRIEDRICH, 609
JAMES I, 64, 115, 116,

125-26, 1 66, 167, i7°>

197

JAMES I, KING OF SCOT-
LAND, 19, 47, 48, 50-51
JAMES II, 199, 203, 206,

207
JAMES, HENRY, 498, 675,

683

James Lee's Wife, 495
Jane Eyre, 515, 516
Janet Walking, 704
JANSSEN, GERARD (or

GARRATT), 104
JARTUSLL, RANDALL, 706-7
JJB., 708
JEFFERS, ROBINSON, 642--

45
JEFFERS, UNA CALL Kus-

TBR, 643
JEFFERSON, THOMAS, 540,

67a

JENNINGS, JOHN, 444
Jerusalem, 301, 303, 307
Jesu: I-Ease You, 139
Jew of Malta, The, 73, 74
Jimmy the Just, 226
Joan of Arc, 347, 359
Jocoseria, 499
JOHN OF GAUNT, n, 12,

*5> *7
John Anderson, My Jo,

334
John Donne: A Study in

Discord, 126
John Gilpin's Ride, 271,

632
John L, Sullivan, the

Strong Boy of Boston,

640

Johnnie Armstrong, 54
JOHNSON, ESTHER, 222
JOHNSON, JAMBS, 331
JOHNSON, JOSEPH, 298,

300, 344
JOHNSON, LIONEL, 60 1,

738

602

JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 122-

23, 129, 145, 146,

178, 183, 190, 208,

232, 249, 2,58-64, 271,
267-77, 280

JOHNSON, THOMAS H.,

585
Jolly Beggars, The, 325,

326; quoted, 321-23
JONES, INIGO, 115, 116
JONES, ISABELLA, 469
JONES, ROBERT EDMUND,

705
Jones! as from Calais

southward you and I,

366
JONSON, BEN, 56, 72, 77,

80, 88, 89, 94, 97,

104-6, 113-20, 137,

152, 157, 167, 170,

*75> 198

JORTIN, JOHN, 241
Journal of an Airman,

684
Journals [of Benjamin

Haydon], 361
Journals [of Dorothy

Wordsworth], 343, 387
Journals and Papers [of

John Byroml, 219
Journey of the Magi, 676
JOYCE, JAMUS, 719
JoYCfl, MARY, 375, 377,

378
Jubilate Agno (Rcjoica in

the I*atnb)> 280; quoted,

281

Jude the Obscure, 534-35
Julian and Madddo, 432
Juliana, 5

Julius Caesar, 95, 99, 117
Jumbled in the common

box, 685

Jungle Books, The, 613
Justice and Expediency,

545

JUVENAL, n8, 206, 260,
608

, OTTO H*, 713
Kalevala, 549
Kallyope Yell, The, 640

INDEX

KEAN, EDMUND, 455, 462,

465
KEATS, FRANCES MARY

(FANNY), 444, 446,

455, 457, 461, 463-65,

467-68
KEATS, GEORGE, 444, 446,

447, 451, 454-57, 4$l,
462, 464-68

KEATS, JOHN, 59, 66, 73,
91, 163, 283, 285, 289,
364, 376, 412-14, 431,
437-39, 444-77, 478,
484, 50;, 506, 526,

694, 705
KEATS, TOM, 444-47, 45*,

455, 456, 458-59, 461-

62, 465, 468
KENYON, JOHN, 484, 486,

489-

Kenyon Review, 703
KEYES, SIDNEY, 694
KIERKEGAARD, SOREN, 683
KILFATRICK, NELLY, 314
Kim, 613

Kind are her answers, 119
Kind-Harts Dream, 79-80
King Arthur, 206
King Jasper, 635
King Lear, 87, 98, 100-1,

385; emoted, 1 10
King Victor and King

Charles, 483

KING, EDWARD, 177, 506
Kingdom of God Is

Within You, The,

quoted, 606
Kingis Quair (The King's

Book), 19, 50-51
KINGSMXLL, SIR WIL-
LIAM, 217
KIPLING, CAROLINE BA-

LHSTIER, 614
KIPLING, RUDYABD, 612,

613-15
Knight of the Burning

Pestle, The, 1*0
Knight's Tale, The, xa,

2,9

KBISTOL, IRVING, 686
Rubla Kkan, 285, 35*,

367; quoted, 353^54
Rn>, THOMAS, 105

La Belle Dame Sans

Merti, 464
LA BO&TIE, ETIENNE DE,

Laboratory, The 483
Lacking Sense, The, 536
Lady Chatterley's Lover,

659, 664
Lady Clara Vere de Vere,

quoted, 512-13
Lady Geraldine's Court-
ship, 484
Lady Lost, 704
Lady of Shalott, The, 505
LAFORGUE, JULES, 670,

673
Lahore Civil and Military

Gazette, 613
Lake, The, quoted, 554
Lake Isle of Innisfree,

The, 618
L' Allegro, 121, 170, 176,

219; quoted, 174-75
LAMB, LADY CAROLINE,

390-91, 405
LAMB, CHARLES, 359,

418, 431

LAMB, MARY, 431
Lamb, The, 290
Lament for the Makaris,

quoted, 49-50
Lamia, 465; quoted, 468-

69
Lamia, Isabella, The Eve

of St. Agnes, and Other

Poems, 468
L'an tcentiesme de mon

eage, 707
LANCASTER, BLANCHE,

DUCHESS OF, 17
Lancelot, 627
Land, The, 615
Land of Unlikeness, 714
LAKDOR, WALTER SAVAGE,

371-74, 379, 49*
LANDSBOROUGH, Earl of,

691

Landscape Near an Aero-
drome, The, quoted,
686-87

LANGLAND, WILLIAM, 42-

44, 46, 53
LANGUET, HUBERT, 68,

739

LANSDOWNE, HENRY PET-
TY-FlTZMAURICE, LORD,

520

Lapsus Calami, 362
Large deer of oak might

through the forest run,

216
Last Attachment, The,

406

Last Blackbird, The, 652
Last Fruits Off an Old

Tree, 373
Last Instructions to a

Painter, The, 154
Last Lines, 516
Last Poems [E. B.

BROWNING], 494
Lost Poems [HOUSMAN],

610; quoted, 611
Last Supper, The, 51
Last Word, The, 522
Last Words, quoted, 162
Later Poems, 619
Latest Decalogue, The,

quoted, 519
Laus Deo, 546
Law, Say the Gardeners,

Is the Sun, quoted,

683-84

LAWES, HENRY, 165, 176
LAWRENCE, D. H., 648-

49, 659-65, 666, 669
LAWRENCE, T. E., 611-12
LAWRENCE, SIR THOMAS,

389
Laws of Ecclesiastical

Polity, The, 113
LAYAMON, 8
Le Monocle de Mon

Oncle, 698
Le Teseide, 29
LEAR, EDWARD, 683
Leaves of Grass, 559, 560,

562-66, 569, 57L 575,

668; quoted, 561-62,

577

LEAVIS, F. R., 187, 191
Leda and the Swan, 622,
Leech-Gatherer, The, 362,

364

Leftover Life to Kill, 718
Legal Fiction, 689

INDEX

Legend of Good Women,
The, 15, 21, 23, 38;
quoted, 22

Legend of the Saints of
Cupid, The, 21

LEICESTER, ROBERT DUD-
LEY, EARL OF, 65, 68,

77
LEIGH, AUGUSTA BYRON,

383, 385, S92.-97, 399-
402, 406-8, 414, 416

LEIGH, ELIZABETH ME-
DORA, 393, 396, 398

LEIGH, COL. GEORGE, 392,

393, 396

LEIGH, RICHARD, 218-19
Leith Races, 327
LsNoiR, MRS., 279
Leon to Arabella, 397
Lesson, The, 685
Lesson for Today, The,

quoted, 635-36
Let It Go, 689
Let me confess that we

two must be twain,

quoted, 93
Letters of Mr. Alexander

Pope, 251

Letters of Emily Dickin-
son, 587
Letters to Vernon Wat-

fans, quoted, 718-19
Letters Written during a

Short Residence in

Spain and Portugal, 359
1 LEWIS, CECIL DAY, 666,

681, 686

LEWIS, DAVID, 468
LEWIS, D, B. WYNDHAM,

668-69
Lewti, or The Circassian's

Love-Chant, 346
Liber Consolationis et

Condlis9 32

Liberal nature did dis-
pense, 146
Library of Poetry and

Song, 540
Lie, The, 65
Life, 124
Life and Letters of Ed-

ward PitzGerald, 493
Life and Mind of Emily

Dickinson, The, 580
Life is a jest and all

things show it, 221
Life ofCowper, 301
Life of Homer, 241
Life of Jack Wilson, The,

118

Life of Milton, 170-71
Light breaks where no sun

shines, 720-21
Light That failed, The,

614
Like mine, the veins of

these that slumber, 611
LINCOLN, ABRAHAM, 540,

569. 57°, 57*> 638,

639, 642,

LJNDO, Louis, 464
LINDSAY, VACHEL, 638-42
Lines Composed a Few

Miles above Tintern

Abbey, see Tintern

Abbey

LINNELL, JOHN, 307, 308
LJNTOT, BERNARD, 239
Lippincott's (magazine),

Listeners, The, 654
Literary Gazette, 433
Little Black Boy, The,

290

Little Boy Lost, A, 293
Little Boy Lost, The, 293
Little Gidding, 677
Little Review, The, 670
LITVIN, NATASHA, 686
Lives [PLUTARCH], 96,

99-100

Lives of the Poets [JOHN-
SON], 122-23, a^3
Lives of the Queens of

England, 56-57
LXVY, 33
LOCKHART, JOHN GIBSON,

460, 498
Locksley Hall, quoted,

5^3-14
Locksley Hall Sixty Years

Later, 511

LODGE, THOMAS, 118
Lollingdon Downs, 658
London [BLAKE], 293
London [JOHNSON], 249,

260; quoted, 261
London Critic, 564
London Mercury, 691
London Nights, 602
London Times, 598, 682
Long Island Star, 559
Long Islander, 560
LONGFELLOW, ALICE, 549
LONGFELLOW, ALLEGRA,

549
LONGFELLOW, CHARLES,

549

LONGFELLOW, EDITH, 549
LONGFELLOW, ERNEST,

549

LONGFELLOW, FANNY
ELIZABETH APPLETON,

549
LONGFELLOW, HENRY

WADS WORTH, 28, 541,

543, 547"5o, 55*, 56a,

630
LONGFELLOW, MARY

STOKER POTTJBR, 549
Look, stranger, on this is-
land now, 685
Look! We Have Come

Through, 66 1
Loose Saraband, A,

quoted, 169
LORD, OTIS P., 586
Lord Byron and Some of

His Contemporaries,

411
Lord of Burlcigh, The,

5x2.

Lord Randal, 54
Lord Weary' $ Castle, 714

LORIUS, GUILLAUME DB,

Lost Acres, 696
Lost Leader, The, 483;

quoted, 361
Lost Love, 696
Lost Mistress, The, 483
Lotos-Eaters, The, 505
Louis XIV, aa$
Love [CQLIIIUDGE], 358
Love [HURBEIIT], 141
Love among the Ruins,

490
Love Dislikes Nothing,

1 60

740

INDEX

Love Poems, 66 1

Love Song of J. Alfred

Prufrock, The, 519,

673-75; quoted, 674
Love still has something

of the sea, 219
Love Story, A, 696
Love That Is Hereafter,

The, 560

Love Triumphant, 206
LOVELACE, RICHARD,

115, 153, 163, 164,

167-69, 219
Loveliest of trees, the

cherry now, 609
LOVELL, ROBERT, 348
Lovely Shall Be Choosers,

The, 633

Lover's Tale, The, 512
Love's Courtship, 164
Love's Exchange, 128
Love's fire heats water,

water cools not love, 92
Love's Labour's Lost, 82,

85, 87, 109; quoted,

107

Love's Labour's Won, 82
Love's Philosophy, 434
Lovcsight, 527
LOWELL, AMY, 669, 714
LOWELL, JAMBS RUSSELL,

541, 544, 546, 55o-53»

564, 7<4
LOWELL, MARIA WHITE,

55*

LOWELL, ROBERT, 714-16
LOWTIHIR, WXLLIAM,

EAUL OP LONSDALE,

361

LUCAN, 73, 308

LUCAS, MARGARET,
DUCHESS o* NEW-
CASTLE, a 1 5-1 6

Luciumus, 206, 420,

Lucy, 354, 368
LUCY, Sm THOMAS, 78
Luria, 483
Lycidas, 174* *77> 437;

506; quoted, 178-79
LYDGATE, JOHN, 23, 47-

48, 5on.
LYLY, JOHN, 93, 107, 118

LYON, MARY, 579-80
Lyric Years, The, 645
Lyrical Ballads, 350, 367;

quoted, 351-52
Lyrical Intermezzo, 610

MACAULAY, THOMAS

BABINGTON, 276
Macbeth, 87; quoted, no
MacPlecknoe, 199, 202,;

quoted, 198

MACKENZIE, DOCTOR, 318
MACKENZIE, HENRY, 315,

326

MACLEHOSE, MRS. AGNES,

33i
MACLEISH, ARCHIBALD,

707-9

MAcNlEGE, LOUIS, 68 1,

686

MACPHERSON, JAMES, 289
MACREADY, WILLIAM,

481-82, 483
Mad Song, 289
Madeleine in Church, 656
Maid of Athens, ere we

part, 414
Maid's Tragedy, The,

120; quoted, I2i
Make Bright the Arrows,

646

MALET, MRS,, 211
MALONE, EDMUND, 76
MALORY, SIR THOMAS,

513, 6x8
Man [HERBERT], quoted,

140

Man [VAUGHAN], 149
Man of Feeling, The, 315
Man of Law's Tale, The,

Man Who Was Shake-

syeare, Thef 72
Man with the Blue

Guitar, The, 697
Manchester Guardian, 658
Manciple's Tale, The, 38
Mandalay, 615
Manfred, quoted, 415-16
MANILIUS, 608, 611
MANN, ERIKA, 68 1
MANN, THOMAS, 68 1
MANNINGHAM, JOHN, 88

MANSO, 179
MARCHMONT, PATRICK
HUME, EARL OF, 252
Mariana, 505
MARIE OF FRANCE, 19
Marino Faliero, 410
MARLBOROUGH, SARAH
JENNINGS CHURCHILL,
DUCHESS OF, 234, 242
MARLOWE, CHRISTOPHER,
63, 65, 72-74, 79, 82,
85, 92., 97, 105, 12-0*
135, 692

Marriage a la Mode, 196
Marriage of Heaven and
Hell, 281, 295, 299,
306; quoted, 296-97
MARSH, EDWARD, 648
MARSTON, JOHN, 115
MARTINEAU, HARRIET,

482

Marvel of Marvels, 530
MARVELL, ANDREW, 153-

57, 168, 183, 185
MARX, KARL, 478
MARY II, 206
Mary! I want a lyre with

other strings, 270
Mary Morison, 316
Maschinensturmer, Die
(The Machine-Wreck-
ers), 387

MASEFIELD, JOHN, 83,
197, 648, 649, 656,

657-59, 705
Masque of Anarchy r, The,

quoted, 434

Masque of Mercy, A, 635
Masque of Reason, A, 635
MASSINGER, PHILIP, 120
MASSON, DAVID, 170
Master Hugues of Saxe-

Gotha, 490
MASTERS, EDGAR LEE,

638, 705
MATHEW, RBV. HENRY,

289

MATHEWS, LUCIA ELIZA-
BETH (MADAME VES-

TRIS), 376
MATTHEWS, CHARLES

SKINNER, 385, 387
Maud, 510-11

INDEX

MAUGHAM, WILLIAM

SOMERSET, 535
MAUROIS, ANDRE, 440
May Day and Other

Poems, 543
MAZZINI, GIUSEPPE, 532,

540
Meaning of Meaning,

The, 689
Measure for Measure, 87,

98-99, 12,1

Medal, The, quoted, 202
Medal of John Bayes,

The, 198-99
Medea, 644
Meditation in Winter,

The, 49
MBDVWN, THOMAS, 419,

435-36, 439; 470
Meeting at Night, 483
MELBOURNE, LADY, 390-

95
MELVILLE, HERMAN, 682,

7i3

Memoirs [BYRON], 386
Men and Women, 489-

90, 491, 494
Men&chmi, The, 81
Mending Wall, 631
Merchant of Venice, The,

74, 98, 377

Merchant's Tale, The, 36
MEREDITH, GEORGE, 524,

675

MERES, FRANCIS, 82, 114

Mene Tales, 56

Merle and the Nychtin-
gall, The, 48

Merlin, 627

Merope, 521

Merrie England, 604

Merry Muses of Cale-
donia, The, 334, 337

Merry Wives of Windsor,
The, 95

Metamorphoses, 38, 82,

a°7> 445

Metaphysical Lyrics and
Poems of the Seven-
teenth Century, 128
MEUN, JEAN DB, 17
MEW, ANNE, 655, 656
MEW, CHARLOTTE, 655-

MEYNELL, ALICE, 604
MEYNELL, FRANCIS, 604
MEYNELL, WILFRID, 604,

606

Michael, 363
MICHELANGELO, 93, 287
MIDDLETON, THOMAS, 91,

120
Midsummer's Night's

Dream, A, 87, 98, 101
Mid- Winter Walking, 696
MILBANKE, ANNA ISABEL-
LA* 39^ 39^ 394-98>

401-2, 404, 414
MILES, MONCKTON, 505
MILL, JOHN STUART, 534
Mill Dams of Binnorie,

The, 54
MILLAIS, JOHN EVERETT,

52.3* 535

MILLAY, EDNA ST. VIN-
CENT, 645-47

Miller's Daughter, The,
512

Miller's Tale, The, 30

Mills of the Kavanaughs,
The, 715

MILSAND, JOSEPH, 490

MILTON, LORD, 376

MILTON, ANNE, 170, 179

MILTON, CHRISTOPHER,
170

MILTON DEBORAH, 186

MILTON, JOHN, 5, 36, 49,
61, 63, i2i, 153, 154,
170-92, 194, 206, 2x8,
229, 252, 274, 3*4>
340, 359, 363. 367,
372, 445, 446, 45»,
479> 504, 5o6, 696

Milton, 301, 303, 305,
307; quoted, 306

Milton's Blindness, 184

MiMle, 637

Miniver Cheevy, quoted,
628-29

MINSHULL, ELIZABETH,
186

Minstrel, 340

Miscellany, 229

Missing Dates, 689

Mr, Arcularis, 706

Mr. Pope's Literary Cor-

respondence, 251
Mr. Sludge, "The Me-

dium," 495
Mistress, The, 146
Modern Hepialogia, The,

532

Modern Love, 524
Modest Proposal for Pre-

venting the Children of

Poor People in Ireland

from Being a Burden

. . . , A, 222
Moll Flanders, 118
Monk's Tale, The, 33
MONMOUTII, JAMES

SCOTT, DUKE OF, 199,

200
MONRO, HAROLD, 648,

656

MONROB, HARRIET, 701
MONTAGU, CHARLES, see

HALIFAX, CZIARLBS

MONTAGU, EARL 03?
MONTAGU, LADY MARY

WORTLEY, 233, 234,

239, 244* ^49
MONTAIGNE, MICHEL

EYQUHM DH, 93, 683
MONTEVERDI, CLAUDIO,

179
Month, The (magazine),

594

Monthly Review, 433
MOODY, WitUAM

VAUGHN, 626
MOORE, MARIANNE, 700-2
Mooxui, MERRILL, 703
MOORB, THOMAS, 386,

387, 403, 4x4, 4*5,

461
Moral Essays, 246; quoted,

MORE, ANN, 125
MORE, SIR THOMAS, 107,

124
More Poe?n$, [HOUSMAN],

6xx

Morning Song, 707
Mornings in Mcocico, 664
MOREIS, WILLIAM, 28,

495> 5*3» W> 5*7>
668

742

INDEX

MORRISON, THEODORE, 21
Morte d' Arthur, 513
Mosada, 616
MOSER, GEORGE, 287
Moth, The, quoted, 655
Mother, I Cannot Mind
My Wheel, quoted, 374
Mountain, The, 631
Mower against Gardens,

The, 156

Mower to the Glow-
worms, The, 156
Mower's Song, The, 156
MOXON, EDWARD, 361,

483
MOZART, WOLFGANG

AMADEUS, 452, 472
Ms. Found in a Bottle,

555
Much Ado about Nothing,

87, 95

Mum, KENNETH, 191
Munduns et Infans, 685
Murder in the Cathedral,

677

Murder of Lidice, 646
Murders in the Rue

Morgue, The, 557
MURDOCH, JOHN, 313-14
MURRAY, JOHN, 404, 408
MURKY, JOHN MIDDXE-

TON, 191 , 463
Muw and the Mastiff,

The, 652,
Music I heard with you

was more than music,

706
Music when soft voices

die, 442

Musical Instrument, A,
MUSSOLINI, BHNITO, 672
MUSSORGSKY, MODEST

PBTROVICH, 587
Mutilation, 66 x
My Brother, A. E. Hous*

man, 608, 6ix
My father moved through

dooms of love, 711
My Last Duchess, 483.

500

My life closed twice be-
fore its close, quoted,

582-83

My Lost Youth, quoted,

548
My lute awake! Perform,

61
My mistress* eyes are

nothing like die sun,

70; quoted, 95
My Objection to Being

Stepped On, 634
My Own Heart, 600
My silks and fine array,

289

My Star, 490
My sweetest Lesbia, let us

live and love, 119
My True Love Hath My

Heart and I Have His,

69-70
Mystery of Marie Roget,

The, 557
Myth of America, 713

NAPOLEON, 339, 398
NASH, RICHARD "BEAU,"

277
NASHE, THOMAS, 79,

118-19

Nativitie, 49
Naulahka, The, 614
Necessary Angel, The,

697
Necessity of Atheism,

The, 421

New Criticism, The, 704
New Dundad, The, see

Dunciad, The
New Hampshire, 631
New Inn, The, quoted,

117

New Orleans Daily Cres-
cent, 561

New? Poems [THOMPSON],
605

New Way of Making
Four Parts in Counter-
point, A, 1 1 9

New York Criterion, 563

New York Evening Post,
540

New York Times, The,

5&4> 569
New York Tribune, 566

743

New Yorker, The, 706
NEWBERY, JOHN, 280
NEWCASTLE, DUCHESS
OF [HOLLES FAMILY],
244

NEWCASTLE, DUCHESS
OF [CAVENDISH FAM-
ILY], see LUCAS, MAR-
GARET

NEWCASTLE, WILLIAM
CAVENDISH, DUKE OF,
115, 215
NEWMAN, JOHN HENRY,

CARDINAL, 592
News from Nowhere, 523
NEWTON, BENJAMIN

FRANKLIN, 582
NEWTON, ISAAC, 256, 266
NEWTON, JOHN, 270
NICHOLAS OF GUILDFORD,

NICHOLS, JOHN, 160
Night, [BLAKE], quoted,

290-91
Night, The [VAUGHAN],

quoted, 148-49
Night Piece, The, 160
Night Piece on Death, A,

219

Night Thoughts, 299, 300
Nightmare Alley, 428
Nine Experiments, 686
Nineteen Hundred and

Nineteen, 622
95 Poems, 711
No rack can torture me,

584

Noah and the flood, 51
NoHe Numbers, 162
Nocturnal Reverie, A, 218
Nocturnes, 634
Non Sum Qualis Eram

Bonae Sub Regno Cy-

narae, 602
Nones, 685
NORTH, THOMAS, 96, 99-

IOO

North American Review,

The, 540
North of Boston, 631;

quoted, 630
Northern Cobbler, The,

5**

INDEX

Northern Farmer, New

Style, quoted, 513
NORTON, CHARLES ELIOT,

564
Not Celia that I juster

am, quoted, 2,19
Not Marble nor the

Gilded Monuments,

[MACLEISH], 708
Not marble, nor the

gilded monuments

[SHAKESPEARE], 95
Not Palaces, quoted, 687
Note on the Notes, A,

702
Nothing adds to your

fond fire, 214
NOVELLO, VINCENT, 449,

452

Novum Organum, 538
Now sleeps the crimson

petal, now the white,

quoted, 509-10
No. 2, the Pines, 533
Nun's Priest's Tale, The,

I9» 33
Nurse's Song, quoted,

292-93
Nymph Complaining for

the Death of Her Faun,

The, 156
Nymph's Reply to the

Shepherd, The, 65

0 Florida, Venereal Soil,

698
O mistress mine, where

are you roaming?, to 8
O my luve's like a red,

red rose, 334
O Solitude, if I must with

thee dwell, 448
0 that 'twere possible,

5ii
O what is that sound

which so thrills the ear,

685
O Whistle, and I'll Come

to You, My Lad, 337
GATES, TITUS, 200
Observations, 701
Observations in the Art

of English Poesy, 119

O'CONNOR, WILLIAM

DOUGLASS, 569
Ode [The merchant, to se-

cure his treasure],

quoted, 226
Ode [to W. H. CHAN-

NING], quoted, 544
Ode for Ben Jonson, 157
Ode: Intimations of Im-

mortality, 148, 363;

quoted, 369
Ode on a Grecian Urn,

449, 464, 465* 476
Ode on Indolence, 464;

quoted, 475
Ode on Melancholy, 464,

465
Ode on die Morning of

Christ's Nativity, 174;

quoted, 172-73
Ode on the Opening of

the International Exhi-

bition, 512
Ode to a Nightingale,

464-65, 477
Ode to Duty, 363
Ode to Evening, 269
Ode to Fear, 269
Ode to Liberty, 285
Ode to Psyche, 464
Ode to the West Wind,

440, 442; quoted, 434-

35
Ode upon Doctor Harvey,

146
Odes [COLLINS], 268;

quoted, 269
Odyssey, 65, 191, 243;

quoted, 256
Oenone, 505
Of a* the airts the wind

can blaw, 324
Of all the souls that stand

create, 584
O£ the Progress of the

Soul, 127

Ogres and Pygmies, 696
Ohl for a closer walk

with God, 270
Oh! might I kiss those

eyes of fire, 413
OK, sick I am to see you,

you will never let me

be, 612
Oh, sleep forever in the

Latmian cave, 647
"Oh, stay," the maiden

said, "and rest,"

quoted, 547
Oh wcrt thou in the cauld

blast, 334

Old Front Line, The, 658
Old Ironsides, 550
Old Man's Comforts, The,

360
Old Man's Winter Night,

An, 631
Old Possum's Book of

Common Cats, 676
Old Stoic, The, 516;

quoted, 518
OLDMIXON, JOHN, 239
OLDYS, Wn-UAM, 76
O'LiiAinr, JOHN, 6:7
OLUHK, CitAur.Ks, 450-51
Ou.tim, JAMKS, 450-51
Olney Hymns, 270
OMAU KitAvrXM, 146,

274, 522, 6067
On a Certain I,a<ly, 256
On a clay (alack tnc day"),

On a Distant Prospect of
Eton Colleges 274

On a Fair I^uly Playing
with a Snake, 165

On a Girdle, 16?

On Another's Sorrow, 290

On Barclay's Apology for
the Quakers, a/>6

On Dr. Francis Atterbury,

179-80
On First Looking into

Chapman's I lomer,

quoted, 447"4&
On Myself, quoted, 218
On Oxford, 47$
Ow Ptxfts and Poetry, 678;

quoted, 704
On Seeing the Elgin

Marbles, 449
On Silence, 229
On the Astrolabe, x6
On the Asylum Road, 656
On the Beach at Calais,

744

quoted, 356

On the Charms of Hid-
den Treasure, 213

On the Death of Dr.
Robert Levct, 263

On the Eternity of the
Supreme Being, 280

On the Grasshopper and
the Cricket, 450

On the idle hill of sum-
mer, 609

On the Loss of the Royal
George, 271

On the Prospect of Plant-
ing Arts and Learning
in America, quoted,
538

On This Island, 683

On Wenlock Edge the
wood's in trouble, 609

Once Below a Time,
quoted, 717

One Hard Look, 696

One Hundred Antique
Tales, 34

One More Beauty, 634

One Wicked Impulse, 560

One word is loo often
profaned, 442

One Word More, quoted,

49i

Opus Posthumous, 697
OJUT, CARL, 53
Origin of Species, 479
Original Poetry by Victor

and Cazire, 420
Original Stories from

Real Life, 298
Omoo, In™, 406
ORMONPXZ, DUCHESS OF,

207
Oronooho, or the History

of the Royal Slave, 217
Orpheus with his Lute,

121

OSMAN, 289, 294
Othello, 98, 455; quoted,

Ofho die Great, 465
Our Life Is Hid, 139
Our Native Writers, 548
OVID, ii, 17, 38, 53,, 74,

77, 82, 84, 196, 206-7,

INDEX

225, 229, 445, 534

OWEN, WILFRED, 692-95

Owl and the Nightingale,
The, 41

OXFORD, EDWARD DE
VERB, EARL OF, 105

OXFORD, EDWARD HAR-
LEY, EARL OF, 225,
233-34

OXFORD, JANE ELIZA-
BETH, LADY, 391-92,
393

Oxford Rook of Light
Verse, 68 1

Oxford English Diction-
ary, 498

Ozymandias, 442

Pacchiarotto and How He
Worked in Distemper,
with Other Poems, 498-

99
Pageant and Other

Poems, A, 529
Pain has an element of

blank, 584

PAINE, THOMAS, 298, 299
Palace of Art, The, 505
Palamon and Arcite, 207
PALGRAVE, FRANCIS TUR-
NER, 519

Palladis Tamia, 82, 114
PALMER, SAMUEL, 305
PALOTTO, CARDINAL, 143
Paltry Nude Starts of a
Spring Voyage, The,
698

Panegyric on His Corona-
tion, 195
Panegyric to My Lord

Protector, A, 165
Pansies, 665
Pantheon, 315
Paracelsus, 481
Paradise, quoted, 140
Paradise Lost, 5, 173, 186-
88, 206, 298, 303, 305,
306, 453J quoted, 190

Paradise of Dainty De-
vices, The, 60

Paradise Regained, 188;
quoted, 189

745

Paradiso, 671
Pardoner's Tale, The, 34
Parish Register, The, 272
PARK, ANNE, 332-33
Parleying with Chris-
topher Smart, 281
Parleying with Daniel

Baroli, 497

Parleyings with Certain
People of Importance
in Their Day, 281, 499
Parliament of Fowls, The,
15, 38, 657; quoted, 19
PARNELL, THOMAS, 218-
19, 237, 241, 243, 277
Parson's Tale, The, 38
Parting at Morning, 483
Parting, Without a Se-
quel, 704

Parts of a World, 697
PASCAL, BLAISE, 683
Passage to India, 569
Passer Mortuus Est, 647
Passing Away, 530
Passionate Man's Pil-
grimage, The, 65
Passionate Pilgrim, The,

85
Passionate Shepherd to

His Love, The, 73
Pastoral Courtship, A, 213
Pastorals [PHILIPS], 229,

231
Pastorals [POPE], 229,

230

Pastorals [ VIRGIL], 305
PATER, WALTER, 591
Pater son, 700
Patience [GILBERT], 603
Patience [THE PEARL

POET], 44
Patience, though I have

not the thing that I

require, 61
PATMORE, COVENTRY,

523-24, 604

Paton, Elizabeth, 318, 319
Patriarch, The, 337
PATTERSON, REBECCA, 581
Paul Revere's Ride, 550
Pauline: A Fragment o/

Confession, 480, 489^

quoted, 481

INDEX

Pauper Witch of Grafton,

The, 631
PAYNE, JOHN HOWAKD,

462
PEACOCK, THOMAS Lov-

ELL, 399, 428, 437
Pearl, 44-45
PEARL POET, THE, 42, 44-

PBARN, AGNES, 686
PEARSON, NORMAN

HOLMES, 682
PEELE, GEORGE, 79, 105
PEMBROKE, MARY HER-
BERT, COUNTESS OF,
105

PEMBROKE, WILLIAM
HERBERT, EARL OF, 90,

Penitent, The, 647
PENNSYLVANIA FREEMAN,

546, 551
Pentameron, 374
People, Yes, The, 638,

707

PEPYS, SAMUEL, 210, 215
Perfection, 141
Peri Bathous, 247
PERICLES, 47
Pericles and Aspasia, 373
Pericles, Prince of Tyre,

101
Permanence of Yeats,

The, 622
PERRY, BLISS, 574
Persian Eclogues, 268
PERSIUS, 194, 207
Personae, 668
Peter Bell, 363
Peter Bell the Third, 362
Peter Grimes [opera], 272
Peter Quince at the

Clavier, quoted, 698-99
Petition for an Absolute

Retreat, quoted, 218
PETRARCH, 15, 35, 59, 60,

61, 374? 408
PETRE, LORD, 234-35
Phantom Wooer, The,

382

PHIDIAS, 449
PHILIPS, AMBROSE, 218-

19, 229, 231, 239, 244

PHILLIPS, ANNE MILTON,

170, 179
PHILLIPS, EDWARD, 170,

179, 180, 181, 187
PHILLIPS, JOHN, 170, 179
PHILLIPS, STEPHEN, 626
Phillis is my only joy, 219
Physician's Tale, The, 33-

Piazza Piece, 704
PICASSO, PABLO, 671
PICKARD, SAMUEL T., 545
PICKERING, SIR GILBERT,

194

Pied Beauty, quoted, 598
Pied Piper of Hamelin,

The, 483, 501, 529
Pilgrim, The, 207
Pilgrimage of Samuel

Purchas, The, 352
Pilgrim's Progress, The,

298, 445

PINDAR, 146, 205
Pindaric Odes, 145-46
Pious Editor's Creed, The,

551-52

Ptypa Passes, 483
Pisan Cantos, 670
Pity me not because the

light of day, 647
Place for a Third, 631
Plain Dealing's Downfall,

214
Plain Tales from the

Hills, 613
PLATO, 176, 431
PLAUTUS, 77, 81, 82,

117

Play-Ground, The, 560
Plead for Me, 5x6
PLINY, 93

Plumed Serpent, The, 664
PLUTARCH, 96, 99-100
POE, EDGAR ALLAN, 526,

541, 548, 552, 553-57*

625, 626

POB, ROSALIE, 554
POE, VIRGINIA CLBMM,

555, 556
POE, WILLIAM HENRY

LEONARD, 553, 554,

555
Poems [ARNOLD], 521

746

Poems [AUDBN], 68 1
Poems [BURNS], 545
Poems [EMERSON], 543,

582

Poems [KEATS], 411
Poems [M. MOORE], 701
Poems [OWEN], 694
Poems [PATMORE], 523
Poems [PRIOR], 225
Poems [SOUTIIEY], 359
Poems [SPENDER], 686
Poems [THOMPSON], 604
Poems [VAUCHAN], 147
Poems and Ballads [SWIN-
BURNE], 532

Poems hy Terence Hear-
say, 609
Poems "by Two Brothers,

504
Poems, Chiefly in the

Scottish Dialect, 326
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical,

505

Poems Descriptive of
Rural Life and Scenery,

366

Poems from the Arabic
and Persian, 372

Poems, 1917, 652

Poems: 1923-1954, 711

Poems: North and South,
716

Poems of Emily Dickin-
son, 587

Poems of Felicity, 151

Poems of Gerard Manley
Hopkins, 596

Poems of the Past and
Present, 535

Poems of Walter Savage
Landor, The, 373,

Poems on Slavery, 549

Poems on Various Occa-
sions, 385

Poems; Second Scries
[ARNOLD], 521

Poet and His Book, The

647

Poetaster, The, 115
Poetical Blossoms, 145
Poetical Sketches, 289*,

quoted, 308
Poetry [a poem], 702

INDEX

Poetry Cmagazine), 668
Poetry: A Magazine of

Modern Verse, 697
Poetry: A Rhapsody,

quoted, 223
Poets (a poem), quoted,

162
Poets of the English Lan-

guage, 682

Poet's Tongue, The, 68 1
Poet's Welcome to His

Love-Begotten Daugh-

ter, A, quoted, 318-19
POLIDORI, JOHN WIL-

LIAM, 398, 399, 400
Political Justice, 423
POLLITT, JOSEPHINE, 580-

Polly, 220
Polyolbion, 71
POOLE, TOM, 348, 349,

367

Poor, The, 700
Poor Bodies Hae Nothing

but Mow, 337
Poor Man and the Lady,

The, 534
Poor soul, the center of

my sinful earth, 95
POPE, ALEXANDER, 56,

165, 193, 196,208,210,

2I7-X9, 221, 222, 224,
227-57, 258, 259, 266,

267, 274» 2-84, 314,
3*5> 385» 445> 44$>
461, 539* 684, 692,
696

Poplar Field, The, 271

Pornography and Obscen-
ity, 665

Porphyria's Lover, 483,
500

Portable Chaucer, The,

Poxvnm, ALAN, 375
PORTER, Mas. ELIZABETH,

260

POUTBR, JANB, 389
Portland Gazette, 548
Portrait of Mr. W.H.,

The, 91
Portrait of the Artist as a

"Young Dog, 719

PORTSMOUTH, LOUISE DE
KEROUALLE, DUOHESS
OF, 199

POUND, DOROTHY SHAKE-
SPEAR, 667

POUND, EZRA, 191, 519,
666-72, 695, 700, 707
POWELL, MARY, 181, 182
POWERS, HIRAM, 488
POYNTEN, EDWARD, 613
Praise for an Urn, 714
PRATT, HARRIET, 279
Prayer for the King's

Majesty, A, 659
Prayer to Ben Jonson,

quoted, 157-58
Prelude, The, 340, 363;
quoted, 339, 341, 355,

369

Preludes, 706, 707
Present Crisis, The, 551
Prince Athanase, 431
Prince's Progress and

Other Poems, The, 528-

29
Princess, The, quoted,

509-10
Princess Ida} or Castle

Adamant, 509
Principles of Literary

Criticism, 689
PRIOR, MATTHEW, 224-26
Prioress' Tale, The, 32
Prisoner, The, 516
Prisoner of Chillon, The,

399. 4°i

PWTCHHTT, V.S., 677

Professor, The, 515

Progress of Poetry, The,
274

Progress of Wit: A Caveat
for the Use of an Emi-
nent Writer, The,
quoted, 246

Prologue and Characters
of Chaucer's Pilgrims,
305

Prometheus Unbound,

43^ 433> 434, 44* >

604; quoted, 440
Promptuarium Exemplo-

rum> 35
PROPERTIUS, SEXTUS, 1 60

747

Prophecy of Famine, The,

264; quoted, 265
Prophet, The, 146
Prospect of the Sea, A,

719

Prothalamion, quoted, 67
Proverbial Philosophy, 522
Proverbs of Hell, quoted,

296-97

Provide, Provide, 633
Prufrock and Other Ob-
servations, 675
Prussian Officer, The, 663
Psalm of life, A, quoted,

547
Psychoanalysis of the Unr

conscious, 665
Pulley, The, quoted, 141
PURCELL, HENRY, 452
Purgatoria, 671
Purity, 44

PUTTENHAM, GEORGE, 60
PYE, HENRY JAMES, 197,

360, 403n.
Pylons, The, 686
Pyramus and Thisbe, 145

Quaker Graveyard in Nan-
tucket, The, quoted,

715
Quarterly Review, The,

359» 433, 459» 460-61,

505
Queen and huntress,

chaste and fair, 117
Queen Mob, 428, 430;

quoted, 424
Queen Mother, Thef 531-

Queer, The, 149
Quiet Work, 522
QUINEY, THOMAS, 86
QUINN, ARTHUR HOBSON,

542
Quite Early One Morning,

719
Quite Forsaken, 66 1

Rabbi Ben Ezra, 494
RABELAIS, FRANCOIS, 1x8,

337

RAJDSTOCK, LOBJD, 376
Rainbow, The, 662, 663

INDEX

RALEIGH, SIR WALTER,

63-68, 105, 539
Ramble in St. James's

Park, A, 2,13
Rambler, The, 262
Rambling Sailor, The, 6$ 6
RAMSAY, ALLAN, 312,

319, 336

RANDOLPH, THOMAS, 164
RANSOM, JOHN CROWE,

702-5, 714
Rage of Lucrece, The, 82-

83, 90; quoted, 84-85
Raye of the Lock, The,

234-3 5, 2,40; quoted,

RAPHAEL, 287

Rapture, A, 164

Rarely, rarely comest thou,

442
Rasselas, Prince of Abys-

sinia, 262, 263
RATCHFORD, FANNY ELIZ-

ABETH, 516

Raven, The, 526, 557
Reading of Herbert, A,

141-42
Reasonable Affliction, A,

226

Recessional, 614
Red Cotton Night-Cap

Country, 498
Reeve's Tale, The, 30-31
Reflections, Critical and

Satirical, upon a Late

Rhapsody Called an

Essay upon Criticism,

231
Refusal to Mourn the

Death, by Fire, of a

Child in London, A,

721
Regiment of Princes, 14,

Rehearsal, The, 198, 200
Rejected Addresses, 362
Rejected Poems, quoted,

567-68

Rejoice in the Lamb, see

Jubilate Agno
Religio Laid, 203
Remember him whom pas-

sion's power, 414

Remember me when I am

gone away, 530
Remembrance, quoted,

5*7

Remembrance Rock, 638

Reminiscences, 344

Renascence, 646; quoted,
645-46

RENNIE, SIR JOHN, 419-20

Resolution and Independ-
ence, 364

Respondezl, quoted, 567-
68

Responsibilities, 619

Retirement, 270

Retractation, 38

Retreat, The, 150; quoted,
148

Retreat Notes, 596

Return, The [KIPLING],

615

Return, The [MILLAY],
647

Return of the Druses,
The, 483

Revenge, The [CHATTER-
TON], 284

Revenge, The [TBNNY-
SON], 511

Revenge and Requital: A
Tale of a Murderer Es-
caped, 560

Revival, The, 148

Revolt of Islam, The, 431,

441

Reynard the Pox, 658-59

REYNOLDS, JOHN HAMIL-
TON, 448, 453-56, 469

REYNOLDS, SIR JOSHUA,
271, 275, 2,88

Rhodora, The, 544

Rhymes to Be Traded for
Bread, 639

RHYS, ERNEST, 616

RICE, JAMES, 452*, 475

RICH, JOHN, 220

RICHARD II, 15, 19, ax,

RICHARD III, 147
Richard the Second,

quoted, 97
Richard the Third) 88,

455

748

RICHARDS, I. A., 689
RICHE, BARNABE, 70
RICHMOND, DUKE OF, 62
RICHMOND, JOHN, 321
RlCHTHOFEN, MANFRED

VON, 662-63

RIDDELL, MRS. ROBERT,

334> 335

Riddle of Emily Dickin-
son, The> 581

RIDING, LAURA, 599, 695

Riflemen Form, 512

Right Royal, 658

RIMBAUD, ARTHUR, 682,
712, 713

RlMSKY-KoilSAKOV, NlKO-
LAI ANDRIiYKV, 587

Ring and the. Rook, The,
495"97» 498, 500;
quoted, 496
Ripostes, 668
Rival Ladies, The, 195
River, The, 714
River God, The, 121
Rizpah, 5x1
Roan Stallion, 644
ROBINSON, CIIAIM*, 309
ROBINSON, DEAN, 624
ROBINSON, EDWIN AR-
LINGTON, 272, 623-29,

635

ROBINSON, HHUMAN, 624
Robinson Crusoe, 445
RocmiSTim, BISHOP OF,

sec ArnmuuftY, FKAN-

cis
RooimsTim, JOHN WIL-

MOT, EARL oi», *99>

211-14, 2x7, axS, 3.19,

229» ^56

Rock, The, 677
Rocking I lorsc Winner,

The, 664

Roimiioj, Tmiorxnuj, 716
ROGERS, SAMUUL, 387,

414

Roman Forgeries, 150
Romance, 557
Romance of the Hose,

The, 15, 17, 48
Romaunte of the Cnyghte,

The, 283
ROME, JAMBS, 562.

INDEX

ROME, THOMAS, 562
Romeo and Juliet, 87, 95,

470
ROOSEVELT, FRANKLIN D.,

672, 708
ROOSEVELT, THEODORE,

626

Rosalind and Helen, 431
Rosamond, 531-32
Rosciad, The, 264
Rose Aylmer, 374
Rose of the World, The,

618
Rose-cheeked Laura, come,

119

ROSENBERG, ISAAC, 693
ROSSETER, PHILIP, 119
ROSSETTI, CHRISTINA

GEORGINA, 525, 527-31,

588-89, 652

ROSSETTI, DANTE GA-
BRIEL, 523, 524-2.7* 53*
ROSSETTI, MARIA FRAN-

OESCA, 525, 528
ROSSETTI, WILLIAM

MICHAEL, 525, 526,

528

ROSTAND, EDMOND, 33
ROUSSEAU, JEAN JACQUES,

663

Hover, The, 216
Rows, NICHOLAS, 75, 88,

102, 197

ROWLANDSON, THOMAS,

ROWLEY, THOMAS, 283

ROWLEY, WILLIAM, 120

Rowley Poems, 284

Royal Palm, 714

Rubdiydt, 2,74, 505, 607

RUBBNS, PETER PAUL,
215, 398

RUKEYSER, MURIEL, 647

Rule Britannia, 267

Runaway, The, 631

Rural Muse, The, 377

Rural Sports, 221

RUSICIN, JOHN, 490, 525

RUSSELL, GEORGE
C'AJB."), 618

Rustic Elegies, 692

RUTLAND, CHARLES MAN-
NERS, DUKE OF, 271

Sacred Wood, The, 675

Sacrifice, The, 141

Saga of Grettir the Strong,

Sailor's Mother, The, 363
St. Irvyne, 420
SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 380
Salem, 715
SALMASIUS, 183, 188
Salt-Water Ballads, 658
Samson Agonistes, 504
SANDBURG, CARL, 636-38,

707
SANDELL, JOHN ROWLAND,

445
Santa Fe" Trail, The, 640,

641

Sappho, 487
Sardanapalus, 410
SASSOON, SIEGFRIED, 648,

692-95
Satire against Mankind,

A, 212; quoted, 213
Satires [DONNE], 125
Satires and Epistles of

Horace Imitated,

quoted, 251
Satires of Circumstances,

536
Saul, 281, 483, 490-91;

quoted, 502
SAURAT, DENIS, 184
SAVAGE, RICHARD, 244,

249

Savoy, The, 60 1
SAXO GRAMMATICUS, 96
Say not the struggle

naught availeth, quoted,

519-20
SCHILLER, JOHANN CHRIS-

TOPH VON, 380, 501
Scholar Gipsy, The, 521
SCHUBERT, FRANZ, 450
SCHUMANN, ROBERT, 416
Scotch Drink, 327
Scots Musical Museum,

33*> 335

SCOTT, ALEXANDER, 408
SCOTT, SIR WALTER, 271,

360, 385-86, 460, 479

SCOTT-MONCRIBF, C. K.,
2

Scribe, The, 655
749

Scrutiny, The, quoted,

169

Sea Dreams, quoted, 512
Sea Fever, 658
Sea Love, 656
Sea Surface Full of

Clouds, 698
Seafarer, The, i, 6-7
Seasons, The, 268, 375
Second April, 646
Second Coming, The,

quoted, 621
Second Defense, 180-81,

184-85
Second Nun's Tale, The,

Second Rapture, The, 1 64
Secret Love, 195
Section; Rock Drill, 670
Secular Masque, The,

quoted, 207-8
SEDLEY, SIR CHARLES,

211, 218-19
See the chariot at hand,

117
See where Capella with

her golden kids, 647
Seeker, The, 266
SEGATTI, MARIANNA, 400,

401, 404
Sejanus, His Fall, 88, 115,

117

Select Collection of Orig-
inal Scottish Airs, A,

335
Selected Essays: 1917-

^932, 679
Selected Poems [AIKEN],

706

Self-Dependence, 522
SELXNCOURT, ERNEST DE,

343

SELLWOOD, LOUISA, 508
SEMPLE, ROBERT, 320
SENECA, 77, 82, 181
Senlin, 707
Sensitive Plant, The, 434,

442
September 1913, quoted,

619
September i, 1802,

quoted, 365
September i, 1939, 685

INDEX

Sermons [DONNE], 124
Servant to Servants, A,

631

Session of the Poets, 167
Set me whereas the sun
doth parch the green,
62

SETTLE, ELKANAH, 202
Seven Pillars of Wisdom,

611-12

Seven Types of Ambigu-
ity, 141, 689
SEVERN, JOSEPH, 447,

472» 473
SHADWELL, THOMAS, 197,

198, 199, 202, 203, 206
SBLAFTESBURY, ANTHONY

ASHLEY COOPER, EARL

OF, 199, 200, 202

SHAKESPEARE, ANNE

HATHAWAY, 78, 103
SHAKESPEARE, EDMUND,

77
SHAKESPEARE, HAMNET,

78, 85, 171
SHAKESPEARE, JOHN, 76,

77,86
SHAKESPEARE, JUDITH,

78, 86, 103
SHAKESPEARE, MARY AR-

DEN, 76
SHAKESPEARE, RICHARD,

76
SHAKESPEARE, SUSANNA,

78, 86, 103
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM!

20, 29, 31, 41, 47, 61,

69. 7°» 73» 74, 75-*i *>
112-17, 119-21, 147,
170-71, 174, 175, 187,
195, 196,208,227,242-
43> 2-63, 300, 314, 347,
359, 366, 377, 380, 381,
44^ 453» 455, 45*> 47$,
488,497*498,51*, ?94»
610, 659, 669, 676, 687
Shakespeare Restored, or
A Specimen of the
Many Errors as Well
Committed a$ Un-
amended lay Mr. Pope
in His Late Edition,

Shakespeare versus Shal-
low, 78

Shakespeare's Sonnets, 89
Shall I compare thee to a

summer's day, 95
SHAPIRO, KARL, 716
SHAW, GEORGE BERNARD,
96, 99, iQ7> 5°3» 614,
649, 650

She gave up beauty in her
tender youth, quoted,

530
She Is Overheard Singing,

647
She Stoops to Conquer,

277
She walks in beauty like

the night, 414
She was a phantom of de-
light, 368; quoted, 357
Sheep o£ Spring, The, 378
SHELLEY, SIR BYSSHE,

418, 42-7
SHELLEY, CHARLES

BYSSHE, 427, 43°-3*
SHELLEY, CLARA EVERINA,

43*» 432

SHELLEY, ELENA ADE-
LAIDE, 43*» 433

SHELLEY, ELIZA IANTHE,
424, 430-31

SHELLEY, ELIZABETH, 420

SHELLEY, PERCY BYSSHE,
59, 163, 289, 362, 376,
398-402,411,412,4*8-

43> 448, 454> 456» 465.
470, 476, 477, 478, 480,

481, 484, 499> 5<>5» 506,
508,604,605,617

SHELLEY, PERCY FLOR-
ENCE, 433

SHELLBY, TIMOTHY, 418,
420-22, 4^4-*5» 4*9

SHELLEY, WILLIAM, 428,
430, 431, 433

Shepherd's Calendar, The
[CLARE], 377

Shepherd's Calendar, The
[SPENSER], 65, 66, 67

Shepherd's Week, The,
quoted, 22 x

SHERIDAN, THOMAS, 244

Shield of Achilles, The,

685
Shipman's Tale, The, 31-

Shirley, 515, 517
Short Song of Congratula-
tions, A, 263
Show, The, 194
Shropshire Lad, A, 263,

609, 6ioj quoted, 607
Sibrandus Schafnaburgcn-

sis, 501
SIDDALL, ELIZABETH, 525-

26
SIDNEY, LADY DOROTHY,

165
SIDNEY, SIR PHILIP, 65,

67-70, 82, 93

Silent Noon, quoted, 527
Silent Snow, Secret Snow,

706

Silex Scintillans, 147
Silken Tent, The, 632
Silver Wedding, 652
SIMSON, HAUBIH, 320
since feeling is first, 711
Since there's no help,

come, let us kiss and

part, 71-72
Singing Woman from the

Wood's Hilge, The, 647
Single Hound, The, 587
SinfrSonf*, 519
Sir Beelzebub, quoted,

692

Sir Eustace Grcy> 272
Sir Gawain and the Green

Kni%ht> 44, 45-46;

quoted^ 3-4
Sir Patrick Spens, 54
Sir Thomas More, xo7
Sister Helen, 53,6
Sister Songs, 60 *?
SITWBLL, EDITH, 1*7,

690-9*, 717
SXTWBLL, Sm GBOHCB,

691

SrrwELL, OsBHur, 690
Srrwttxx, SAOIIBVERSLL,

690
Skeleton in Armor, The,

550

SKBLTON, JOHN, 55-59
Skttch Book, The, 548

750

INDEX

SKINNER, CYRIACK, 153
Sleep and Poetry, 451
Sleeper, The, 557
Sleeping on Her Couch,

219

Slow, slow, fresh fount,
keep time with my salt
tears, 117

SMART, CHRISTOPHER,
259, 271, 279-82, 490-
91, 652

Smartiad, The, 280
SMITH, ADAM, 274
SMITH, HORATIO (HOR-
ACE), 362, 431, 454
SMITH, JAMES, 362
Smoke and Steel, 637
SMOLLETT, TOBIAS, 284
SMYTIIE, JAMES MOORE,

244

Snail, The, 169
Snow-Bound, 546
So Long to Learn, 657
So, to begin with, dust

blows down the street,

quoted, 706
So, well go no more

a-roving, quoted, 401
Sohrab and Rustum, 522
Soldiers Three, 613
Soliloquy of the Spanish

Cloister, 483, 500
Solitude [D£ LA MARE],

655

Solitude [HORACE], 229
Some Feasts and Fasts,

53o

Some Imagist Poets, 669
Some say the world will

end in fire, quoted, 632
Some Versions of Pastoral,

689

Something of Myself, 614
somewhere i have never

travelled, 711
Song [Ask me no more

where Jove bestows],

quoted, 164
Song [Love a woman!

You're an ass!], 214
Song [Love in fantastic

triumph sate], quoted,

217

Song for St. Cecilia's Day,

205-6

Song for Simeon, A, 676
Song: If for a Woman I

Would Die, 218
Song of a Man Who Is

Not Loved, 66 1
Song of Hiawatha, The,

548, 549, 550, 562
Song of Honor, The, 652
Song of Los, The, 299
Song of Myself, quoted,

558, 565
Song of Shadows, The,

654
Song of the Cold, The,

692
Song of the Exposition,

quoted, 575
Song of the Shirt, 478
Song of the Three Min-
strels, 285
Song of Wandering Aen-

gus, 618
Song to David, A, 280,

281, 49°-9i» 652;

quoted, 282
Songs and Sonnets

[DONNE], 125
Songs and Sonnets [Tot-

teVs Miscellany], 59
Songs before Sunrise, 532
Songs for Strangers and

Pugrims, 530
Songs from Vagabondia,

Songs of Childhood, 654
Songs of Experience, 292,

294; quoted, 293
Songs of Innocence, 289,

291, 294; quoted, 290-

91, 292-93
Songs of the Springtides,

*7$
Sonnet to Richard West,

533

Sonnets from the Portu-
guese, 487, 488, 524
Sons and Lovers, 660, 662
Sons of Martha, The, 615
Bordello, 482, 483, 489
SORLBY, CHARLES HAM-
JCLTON, 693

751

Sorrow of Love, The, 618
SowZ's Destroyer, The, 650
SowZ's Tragedy, A, 483
South Wales Evening

Post, 717

SOUTHAMPTON, HENRY
WRIOTHESLEY, EARL
OF, 81, 82, 83, 85, 90,

9i
SOUTHEY, ROBERT, 197,

3*0, 338, 339, 346,

347-49, 354, 359-6i,

368, 372, 386, 403,

411, 418, 420, 461, 662
SPAETH, J. DUNCAN, 2
Spain, 68 1

Spanish 'Prior, The, 203
Spanish Lady, The,

quoted, 560
Specimen Days, 576
Speke, Parrot, 58-59
SPENCE, THOMAS, 243
SPENCER, GABRIEL, 114
SPENCER, HERBERT, 503
SPENDER, HAROLD, 686
SPENDER, STEPHEN, 104,

666, 681, 686-88, 693
SPENS, SIR PATRICK, 551
SPENSER, EDMUND, 65-67,

82, 172, 229, 284, 446,

539, 675
Spiel of the Three

Mountebanks, 704
Spiritual Diaries, 596
Spleen, The [FINCH], 218
Spleen, The [GREEN],

quoted, 266
Spoon River Anthology,

638

Spring [CAREW], 164
Spring [HOPKINS], 599
Spring [MILLAY], 647
SQUIRE, J. C., 104, 691
Squire's Tale, The, 36
STAFFORD, JEAN, 715
Stalky and Co,, 613
STANARD, MRS., 554
Stanzas for Music, 4x4
Stanzas to Augusta, 414
Starlight Night, The, 599
State of Innocence, and

Fall of Man, The, 206

INDEX

Statue and the Bust, The,

490, 500
STEELE, SIR RICHARD,

222

Stecylebush, 634
STEPHAN, LESLIE, 209
STEPHENS, HENRY, 446
STEPHENS, J. K., 362, 365
STEPHENS, JAMES, 648
Stepping Stones, The, 707
Steps, 695

Steps to the Temple, 143
STERNE, LAURENCE, 315
STEVENS, WALLACE, 696-

99, 700,712,
STEVENSON, ADLAI E.,

638
STEVENSON, ROBERT

Louis, 614
STEWARD, MRS,, 207
Stick your patent name

on a signboard, quoted,

7I3-I4

Still Falls the Rain, 692
Still to be neat, still to be

drest, 117
Stopping by Woods on a

Snowy Evening, 631
STORY, WILLIAM WET-
MORE, 488

Story of Thebes, The, 48
STOTHARD, THOMAS, 300,

304

STRACJTEY, LYTTON, 503
STRAPPORD, THOMAS

WENTWORTH, EARL OF,

1 66, 481

Stafford, 481, 482, 489
Strange Meeting, quoted,

694

STRAVINSKY, IGOR, 718
Strayed Reveler and Other

Poems, The, 520
Stricken Deer, The, 270
String's Excitement, The,

685
Structure of Complex

Words, The, 689
Studies in Classic Ameri-
can Literature, 66$
Study of Shakespeare, 532
Study in Song, 532
SUCKLING, JOHN, 115,

163, 164, 166-67, 168,

169
SUFFOLK, HENRIETTA

HOWARD, COUNTESS

OF, 255
SULLIVAN, ARTHUR S.,

98, 120

SULLIVAN, JOHN L., 642
Suinmoner's Tale, The, 35
Sunday Morning, 698
SURKEY, HENRY HOWARD,

EARL OF, 59-60, 62-63
Survey of Literature, 704
Survey of Modern Poetry,

A, 599

SWEDENBORG, EMANUEL,
295

Sweet and Low, 509
SWIFT, JONATHAN, 219,

221-24, 2-2,5, 233, 237,

239, 242-45» 52.x
SWIFT, SOPHIA JANE, 374
SWINBURNE, ALGERNON

CHARLES, 72, 161, 525,

526, 530, 531-33. 598
SWYNFORD, CATHERINE,

Sykilline Leaves, 359
SYMQNS, ARTHUR, 300,

601, 602, 603
Symposium, 431
Symposium, A, 678
SYMS, JOHN, 160
SYNGE, J, M,, 618

Table Talk, 270; quoted,

264

TACITUS, 117
TAGGARD,

580
Take all my loves, my

love, yea take them all,

92
Take, O take those lips

away [SHAKESPEARE],

108
Take, oh, take those lips

away [FLETCHER], 121
Talk not to me of school-
men's rules, 146
Tale of a Tub, A, 222
Tale of Melibeus, The, 32
Tale of Sir Topaz, The,

Tales of a Wayside Inn,

28, 550

Tales of the Hall, 272
Tarn o'Shanter, 313, 330,

334

Tamar, 644
Tamburlaine the Great,

73, 120

Tamerlane* 555
Taming of the Shrew,

The, 87
Tangled was I in love's

snaro, 61
Tarry delight, so seldom

met, 611

Tash> The, quoted, 270
TASSO, TORQUATO, 179
TATO, ALLIVN, 703
TATE, NAITUMT 197, 202
TAYLOU, EDWARD, 539
TAYLOR, JOHN, 376, 451,

452, 453, 456, 461,

472., 473
TCHAIKOVSKY, PIOTR

I UGH, 417
Tears, idle tears, I know

not what they mean,

5«9

TKASDAI.K, SAUA, 641
Tea-Table Miscellany,

The, 312, 336
Telephones The, 631
Tempest, The, 209, 453;

quoted, 10* -a
TitMWJt, Sni WILLIAM,

221

Temple, The, 143
Te.wple of (tittup The, 48
Tenant of Wildfall Hall,

The, 515

Tennessee^ Thct 703
TKNNYKON, Aumitn,

LOUD, 7, 197, 482, 495,

497.99, 503*15, 511,

53*, 617, 6t>6
THNNYKON, CUAUUW, 504,

5»5» *o8
TENNY«ON, Kivn&v SHLL-

WOOD, 508
TBNNYKON,

TENNYSON,

509

INDEX

TENNYSON, SEPTIMUS,

504

TERENCE, 117, 534
Terror and Decorum, 716
Tess of the D'Urbervilles,

534

Testament of Cresseid, 50
Tet&estai, 707
Tewkesbury Road, 658
THACKERAY, WILLIAM

MAKEPEACE, 523
Thalaba the Destroyer,

359

Thanatopsis, quoted, 540
That Nature Is a Hera-

clitean Fire and of the

Comfort of the Resur-
rection, quoted, 596
That time of year thou

may'st in me behold, 95
The blades of grass, thy

creatures feeling,

quoted, 363
The brain is wider than

the sky, 590
the Cambridge ladies who

live in furnished souls,

quoted, 710
The chestnut casts his

flambeaux, 610
The commonplace I sing,

559
The expense of spirit in a

waste of shame, 95
The force that through

the green fuse drives

the flower, quoted, 720
The fountains mingle with

the river, 442
The hand that signed a

paper felled a city, 721
The heart asks pleasure

first, 584
The irresponsive silence of

the land, 530
The keen stars are twin-
kling, 44*
The Lord will happiness

divine, 270
The poetry of earth is

never dead, 450
The Queen she sent to

look for me, 612

The splendor falls on cas-
tle walls, 509

The spring is coming by
many signs, 379

The stars have us to bed,

"3
The year's at the spring,

483
THEOBALD, LEWIS, 243,

244, 247

THEOCRITUS, 65, 206, 326
There are two Voices:

one is of die deep,

quoted, 362
There is a garden in her

face, 119
There Was a Naughty

Boy, 475? quoted, 458
These, 700
They are all gone into

the world of light, 149
They flee from me that

sometime did me seek,

quoted, 61
Things of This World,

716
Think'st thou I saw thy

beauteous eyes, 414
Thirteen Ways of Look-
ing at a Blackbird,

quoted, 697
This Is the Shape of the

Leaf, 707

This Last Pain, 689
This Lunar Beauty, 685
This merit hath the worst,

584

This Was a Poet, 581
THOMAS, CAITLIN MAC-
NAM ARA, 717, 718

THOMAS, DYLAN, 695,

716-22

THOMAS, EDWARD, 630
THOMPSON, FRANCIS,

440, 603-6

THOMSON, GEORGE, 335
THOMSON, JAMES, 259,

265, 267-68, 375, 445
THOREAU, HENRY DAVID,

680

Thorn, The, quoted, 365
THORNTON, 305
THORPE, THOMAS, 89

Those hours when happy

hours were my estate,

647
Thou blind man's mark,

thou fool's self-chosen

snare, 69
Three Academic Pieces,

699
Three-Penny Opera, The,

220
Threnodia Augustalis: A

Funeral-Pindaric Poem,

205
Thrissill and the Rois,

The, 48
THROCKMORTON, ELIZA-

BETH, 64
Through throats where

many rivers meet, the

curlews cry, 721
THUILLER, JULIA, 372-73
Thyrsis, 521
TICKELL, THOMAS, 236,

241

Timbuctoo, 504
Time in the Rock, 707
Timon of Athens, 99;

quoted, 109
Tinder, The, 164
Tintern Abbey, 363;

quoted, 35I-52-
TINTORETTO, 68
Tired with all these, for

restful death I cry, 95
Tiresias and Other 'Bal-

lads 9 511
Tiriel, 294
Tis Pity She's a Whore,

TrnAN, 344

Titus Andronicus, 81, 120

To a Child of Quality,

226
To a Lady that desired I

would love her, 164
To a Louse, quoted, 329
To a Mountain Daisy,

quoted, 328
To a Mouse, quoted, 321,

32.7
To a Recruiting Sergeant,

quoted, 552
To a Skylark, 434

753

INDEX

To a Snowflake, 605
To a Steam Roller, 702
To a Very Young Lady,

165

To a Waterfowl, 541
To a Young Lady on Her
Leaving die Town, 249
To Aberdein, 49
To Althea from Prison,

168

To Amarantha, That She
Would Dishevel Her
Hair, quoted, 169
To an Athlete Dying

Young, 609
To an Old Lady, 689
To Anthea, Who May
Command Him Any-
thing, 1 60
To Autumn, 464, 465,

477

To Brooklyn Bridge, 714
To Cloris, 219
To Daffodils, quoted, 160-

To Earthward, 632
To Gratiana, Dancing and

Singing, 169

To His Coy Mistress,

quoted, 154-55
To Juan at the Winter

Solstice, 696
To Lucasta, Going beyond

the Seas, 168
To Lucasta, Going to the

Wars, 1 68
To Mary, 270
To Mary in Heaven, 32.5
To Morning, 289
To My Honor'd Friend,

Sir Robert Howard, on

His Excellent Poems,

195

To My Inconstant Mis-
tress, 164

To Night, 442

To nothing fitter can I
thee compare, 71

To One in Paradise, 557

To Sleep, 464

To the City of London,

49
To the pvening Star, 289

To the Fringed Gentian,
541

To the King upon His
Majesty's Happy Re-
turn, 165

To the Merchantis of
Edinburgh, 49

To the Not Impossible
Him, 647

To the One of Fictive Mu-
sic, 698

To the Pious Memory of
the Accomplished Young
Lady, Mrs. Anne Killi-
grew, quoted, 205

To the Virgins, to Make
Much of Time, 160

Toccata of Galuppi's, A,
490

TOCQUEVJLLE, ALEXIS DB,
576

TODD, MABEL LOOMIS,

587, 588

TOLLER, ERNST, 387 683
Tomorrow is St. Valen-
tine's Day, 87, 1 08
TONSON, JACOB, 229
TOOKE, 315

Too-Late Born, The, 708
Torrent and the Night

Before, The, 625
TOTTBL, RICHARD, 50
Tottel's Miscellany, 59,

63
TotiRNEUR, CYRIL, 380

TOUSSAINT L'OUVBRTURB,

363

Tower, The, 622

Town Down the Rivet,
The, 626

Tract, 700

Tradition and the Indi-
vidual Talent, quoted,
677-78

Tragedy of Dido, Queen
of Carthage, The, 72

Tragical History of Doc-
tor Faustus, The, 73;
quoted, 74

Traheme, Thomas, 124,
148, X49"5*» *9»

Transport to Summer,
697

754

Traveller, The, 277, 278
Tree at My Window, 631
TREECE, HENRY, 718
Trees Are Down, The,

656

Trees hy their yield, 591
Trelawny, Edward John,

411, 412, 439
Tretis of Tua Mariit Wc-

men and the Wcdo,

The (The Treatise of

Two Married Women

and the Widow), 48-49
Tristram, 627
Tristram Shandy, 315
Troilus and Crcsslda, 87,

196; quoted, 20, 98, no
Troilus and Cressida

(Drydcn adaptation),

196
Troilus and Criscyda, 9,

*5> 38, 50} quoted, 20-

Troy Book, 48
Troy Park, 692
Trudge, Body, quoted, 696
Trwe History of the Con-

quest of New Spain,

The, 708

True Thomas, 54, 464
Truth [Gownm], 2*70
Truth IPATMOUK], quoted,

524
Tulips and Chimneys*

710? quoted, 709 ix
Tunning (Brewing) of

Elynour Humming*

The, 57-58
Tumm, MAIM™ FAR-

QUHAH, 53,2

TURNER, JOSEPH, 6x6
TURNJSR, KATJB Scow,

TURNER, MARTHA

**)» 375> 376, 377, 379
TUHNBR, W. j., 648
Turns and Movies, 705

TUVB, ROSBMONP, X4X

Twa Dogs, The, 326-27
TWAIN, MARK, 57 x> 641
Twas a long parting, 584
Twelfth NigH 87, 98,
1 08

INDEX

Twenty-five Poems, 717
Twenty Poems, 686
Twicknam Garden,

quoted, 128
Two Foscari, The, 410
Two Gentlemen of Ver-
ona, 93
Two in the Campagna,

49i

Two Look at Two, 632
Two loves I have, of com-
fort, and despair, 85;

quoted, 91-92
Two Noble Kinsmen,

The, 107, 120
Two Voices, The, 504
Two Voices are there:

one is the sea, quoted,,

362
Two worlds have we:

without, within, quoted,

653

TYLER, WAT, 44
TYNDALL, JOHN, 616
Typical Day in My Welsh

Bog, A, 718
Tyrannic Love, 195
TYRWXXXTT, THOMAS, 91

ULSTER, COUNTESS OP,

Ulysses, quoted, 514
Under Milk Wood, 7x9;

quoted, 720

Under the Deodars, 6x3
Under the greenwood

tree, 108

United States and Demo-
cratic Review, 563
Unknown Citizen, The,

685

Unknown Eros, The, 524
Unreturning, The, 694
UNWIN, MARY, 270
UNWXN, REV. MORLEY,

270
Upon Appleton House,

quoted, 155-56
Upon Julia's Washing
Herself in the River,
x 60

Upon Leaving His Mis-
tress, 2x4

Upon Love, 161

Upon Nothing, 213, 229

Upon the Death of Lord

Hastings, 194; quoted,

209
Upon the Infant Martyrs,

quoted, 143
Upon the Nipples of

Julia's Breast, 160
Use of Poetry, The, 675
Ushant, 706

VALLON, AJSTNETTE, 341,

342, 356

VALLON, PAUL, 341
VANBRUGH, SIR JOHN, 207
VAN DYCK, ANTHONY,

344

VANE, LADY ANNE, 279
VANE, LORD, 279
VANHOMRIGH, ESTHER

("Vanessa"), 222
Vanity of Human Wishes,

The, 260; quoted, 261-

Van Winkle, 714
VAUGHAN, HENRY, 123,

146-49* 150* 2,92, 363
Venus and Adonis, 82, 84,

99; quoted, 83
VERLAINE, PAUL, 673,

706

VERNE, JULES, 682
VERONESE, PAOLO, 68
Verses on the Death of

Dr. Swift, quoted, 223-

24
Verses Supposed to Be

Written by Alexander

Selkirk, 271
VESTRIS, MADAME, see

MATBEWS, LUCIA ELIZ-
ABETH
Vicar of Wakefeld, The,

277
VICTORIA, QUEEN, 361,

478, 498, 511, 614
VIERECK, PETER, 716
Village, The, 271, 272
Village Maga&ne, The,

639

Village Minstrel and
Other Poems, The, 376

755

Vittette, 515

Vindication of Natural

Diet, 424
Vindication of the Rights

of Women, 298
Vine, The, 160
VIRGIL, 65, 72, 177, 207,

229, 266, 305, 326
Virgin's Desire, The, 213
Virtue, 140-41
VISCONTI, BERNABO, 14-

i5> 33

Vision, A, 619, 620
Vision by Sweetwater, 704
Vision of Judgment, The,

411, 414

Vision of Piers Plowman,
The, 44, 53; quoted,

42-43

Vision of Sir Launfal,
The, 551, 553

Vision of the Last Judg-
ment, A, quoted, 308-9

Visions of the Daughters
of Albion, 299

Vivamus, mea Lesbia, at-
que amemus, 119

VIVIANX, EMILIA, 436-37

V-Letter and Other Poems,
7x6

Volpone, or The Fox, 115

VOLTAIRE, FRANCOIS

MARIE CAROUET), 242,
262, 277, 345, 422, 683

Voyage to Abyssinia, A,
260

Voyages, 7x1, 714

WADSWORTH, REV.
CHARLES, 583-86, 588

Waggoner, The, 363

WAGNER, RICHARD, 300,
676

WAIN, JOHN, 500

Wake, the silver dusk re-
turning, 609

Waking, The, 716

WALES, GEORGE, PRINCE
o*, 241, 242, 255; see
also GEORGE II

WALES, HENRY, PRINCE
o*, 64

Walking, 151

INDEX

WALLACE, LEW, 667

WALLER, EDMUND, 164-
66, 185

WALPOLE, HORACE, 273,
283-84

WALPOLE, SIR ROBERT,
220

WALSH, 229, 231

WALSINGHAM, SIR FRAN-
CIS, 68

WALTON, IZAAK, 124, 126,
128

WALTON, WILUCAM, 691

Wanderer, The, I, 6-7

Wanderer's Song, A, 658

Wandering Jew, The, 420

WARD, A. W., 39

WARD, JOHN, 104

WARD, THOMAS HUM-
PHREY, 128

Waring, 48 2> 483

WARREN, ROBERT PENN,

703

WARTON, THOMAS, 197
WASHINGTON, GEORGE,

£99
Waste Land, The, 669,

675; quoted, 676-78
Waterfall, The, 149
WATKJNS, VERNON, 718
WATTEAU, JEAN ANTOXNE,

WATTS, ISAAC, 529

WATTS-DUNTON, THEO-
DORE, 533

We All Shall Rest at Last,
560

We must love one another
or die, 685

WEBSTER, LADY FRANCES,

394
WEBSTER, JOHN, 119, 12,0,

380

WEDGWOOD, JULIA, 497
WEEKLEY, ERNEST, 660
WEEKXEY, FRIEDA VON

RICHTHOPEN, 66 x
Weeper, The, quoted, 143
WELBY, EARLB, 374
WELSTED, LEONARD, 239
Wessex Poems, 535
WEST, RICHARD, 273
West Wind, The, 658

WESTBROOK, ELIZA, 422,

423, 424, 429, 43°
WESTBROOK, HARRIET,

422-27, 429-3!
WESTON, MRS. ELIZA-
BETH, 249

WESTON, JESSIE, 676
Wha'U Mow Me Now,

337
What are the gay parterre,

the chequered shade,

quoted, 232
What I Do Is Me, 599-

600
What is this life if, full of

care, quoted, 651
What Mr. Robinson

Thinks, 552

"Whately," Anne, 78, 105
When all my five and

country senses see, 720
When daffodils begin to

peer, 108
When daisies pied and

violets blue, 108
when god lets my body be,

711
When I am dead, my

dearest, quoted, 531
When I consider every

thing that grows, 95;
When 1 consider how my

light is spent, 1 84
When icicles hang by the

wall, 1 08
When in disgrace with

fortune and men's eyes,

When in the chronicle of
wasted time, 95

When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloomed, 570

When my Love swears
that she is made of
truth, 85

When raging love with ex-
treme pain, 62

When smoke stood up
from Ludlow, 609

When that I was a little
tuny boy, 1 08

When the lamp is shat-
tered, 442

756

When the Tree Bares, 707
When to the sessions of

sweet silent thought, 95
When You Are Old, 618
Where the Rainbow Ends,

quoted, 7x6
WHETSTONE, GEORGE, 63

WniGinui, GiiOKGE FRIS-

BIJG, 5^-53, 581
While this America settles

in the mode of its vul-

garity, quoied> 643
Whilst Alexis Lay Prest,

196

White Buildings, 712
White Doe of Rylstone,

The, 363

White Goddess, The, 695
White Peacock, The, 660
WHITKIIKAD, WILLIAM,

197, *74
White-Tailed Hornet,

The, 632
WHITMAN, ANIWW JACK-

SON, 559
WHITMAN, GUORGB

WASHINGTON, 559, 568,

570
WHITMAN, SAIIA HIJLBN,

556
WHITMAN, THOMAS JEF-

MittflON, 5«?9» 561
WHITMAN, WALT, 363,

$48, 5*6» 55** 77* <>37>

638,668,700, 707,71 3

Wuirmux, RALJMI GIUJBN-

541, S44'47» 549>

564
Who lists to hunt) I know

where is an hind, 61-61
Who never lost, arc unpre-

pared, 584
Who's Who, 685
Why Does She Wecsp,66i
Why is my verse so barren

or new pride, quoted,

X07-8
Why so pale and wan,

fond lover, 1:67
Why We Love, and Why

We Hate, 3.19
WJCCKHAM, ANNA, 656
in Bye Sftwt,

INDEX

The, 658

Widsith (The Far-Trav-
eler), i, 6

Wife of Bath's Tale, The,

34-35

WILBUR, RICHARD, 716

Wild Frank's Return, 560

Wild Gallant, The, 195

Wild Swans, 647

Wild Swans at Coole,
The, 619

WILDE, OSCAB, 91, 60 1,
602, 603

WILKES, JOHN, 264

WILKIE, DR. WILLIAM,
313

WILLIAM III (WILLIAM
OF ORANGE), 206

WILLIAMS, LIEUT. ED-
WARD, 439

WILLIAMS, FLORENCE
HERMAN, 700

WILLIAMS, JANE, 439,
440

WILLIAMS, MARGARET, 44

WILLIAMS, WILLIAM
CARLOS, 699-700

WILMOT, JOHN, see RO-
CHESTER, JOHN WIL-
MOT, EARL OF

WILSON, J. DOVER, 81,

93, 104

WILSON, MONA, 290
WiNoaiLSEA, COUNTESS

OF, see FINCH, ANNE
WINCHILSEA, HENEAGE

FINCH, EARL OF, 217
Windhover, The, 597;

quoted, 598

Winding Stair, The, 622
Windsor Forest, quoted,

240-41
Wine from These Graces,

646

WXNSLOW, WARREN, 715
Winter, 268
Winter, a Dirge, 328
Winter's Tale, The, 100
Wishes, to His Supposed

Mistress, quoted, 144
Witch of Coos, The, 631
With rue my heart is

laden, quoted, 6xo

WITHER, GEORGE, 119
Wofully Arrayd, 58

WOLLSTONECRAFT, MARY,
298, 425

WOLSEY, THOMAS CAR-
DINAL, 56, 59
Woman Waits for Me, A,

574
Woman's Last Word, A,

490

Women in Love, 663
Wo-men of Point Sur,

The, 644

Wonder, quoted, 150
WOOD, ANTHONY A, 210
Wood, the Weed, the

Wag, The, 65
WOODCOCK, KATHERINE,

183
Wooden Pegasus, The,

691
WOODHOUSE, RICHARD,

461, 474
Woodnotes, 544
Wood-Weasel, The, 702
WORDSWORTH, CHRIS-
TOPHER, 339
WORDSWORTH, DOROTHY,

339> 34o? 342., 343»

350, 35i> 354-58, 362,

366
WORDSWORTH, MARY

HUTCHINSON, 339,

343, 356-57> 455
WORDSWORTH, JOHN, 339
WORDSWORTH, RICHARD,

3397 340

WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM,
61, 94> 148, 188, 197,
218, 289, 338-44» 349-
51, 354-70, 372, 386,
388, 403, 414, 416,
418, 449, 454-57> 474,
483, 488, 509, 526,
535, 541, 542, 609,
634, 679, 696
Works of John Sheffield,
Duke of Buckingham,
242
Works of Mr. Alexander

Pope, The, 251
Works of Shakespeare
(Poye edition), 242-43

World, The, quoted, 149
Worms at Heaven's Gate,

The, 698

WOTTEN, HENRY, 105
Wraggle Taggle Gypsies,

483
Wreck of the Deutsch-

land, The, 594, 596;

quoted, 593
Written on the Day That

Mr. Leigh Hunt Left

Prison, 448

Wulf and Eadwacer, 6
Wuthering Heights, 517
WYATT, SIR THOMAS,

59-63
WYCHERLEY, WILLIAM,

229, 333

WYLIE, ELINOR, 647
WYLIE, GEORGIANA, 456,

457, 461, 462

Yachts, The, 700

Ye Flowery Banks o*

Bonie Doon, 337
YEATS, JACK BUTLER, 616
YEATS, JOHN BUTLER,

616

YEATS, GEORGIE HYDE-
LEES, 619
YEATS, WILLIAM BUTLER,

615-22, 669, 670-71,

685, 695
Yellow Book, The, 601,

606
Yestreen I had a pint o'

wine, quoted, 333
You, Andrew Marvell,

708
you are like the snow

only, 711
You think it horrible that

Lust and Rage, quoted,

621
YOUNG, EDWARD, 299,

300
YOUNG, REV. THOMAS,

171

Young Poets, 448-49
You're not alone when

you are still alone, 71
Youth and Art, 495

Zostrozzi, 420

757

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

An outstanding 'poet, biographer, and essayist, Louis Untermeyer is
also America's best-known and most creative anthologist. His Treasury
of Great Poerns, now in its ninth printing, was followed by the highly
successful A Treasury of Laughter. His collections of Modern American
Poetry and Modern British Poetry, revised and amplified, have sold over
a million copies and are standard textbooks in schools and colleges. He is
said to have introduced -more poets to readers and more readers to poetry
than any other American.

Born in New York City and, as he says, miseducated there, he was
unable to comprehend a single geometry problem and consequently
failed to graduate from high school. For twenty years he acquired cul-
ture by ear and taught himself music, art, and literature while earning
his living in the family's manufacturing- jewelry establishment, Ncaring
forty, he quit his desk at the factory, went to Europe, lived for a while
in England, Austria, and Italy, and returned home to divide his time
writing, lecturing, and farming. (Jrlis lecture fees barely paid for his
farm losses.") He became "poet in residence" at various universities,
writer for the Office of War Information, editor of the Armed Services
Editions and, after the war, editor for a leading record company. By the
time he was sixty, he was the author or compiler of some sixty volumes,
including a novel — Moses — several travel books and stories for young
people — two of which he illustrated — and a quasi-autobiography. From
Another World. His Makers of the Modern World has gone through
three recent printings and has been translated into German, Spanish,
Portuguese and Hebrew.

With his wife, Bryna Ivens, formerly a magazine editor, he makes his
home in a two-hundred-year-old cottage in N&wtown, Connecticut* His
hobbies are collecting live cats, and miniature replicas, and raising iris
and outsize day lilies.

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