Reading John Ashbery (On “For John Clare”)

  

“For John Clare” follows the essay. 

 

     No one, I have been told, before the twentieth century complained that poetry was incomprehensible [1], yet, in spite of the miniature renaissance in America of community-based readings and the laureateship of Bob Dylan, the art is commonly dismissed as obscure and for most not worth the trouble, even among otherwise educated individuals.  Poetry’s prestige, once immense and universally acknowledged, has diminished not through attacks, but through neglect.

     In ancient times, of course (and among unlettered people yet) poetry was consumed by everyone and, if well done, found to be digestible by all.  Song lyrics remain beloved by mass audiences everywhere, and advertising copy is filled with the devices of poetry.  Yet since the Romantics, poets and artists have been associated with eccentricity, political radicalism, and counter-cultural values and have increasingly eschewed a mass audience.  In the twenty-first century poetry has been abandoned largely to the university mandarins and a tiny handful of lay aficionados.    

     Many common readers think of poetry as a sort of puzzle.  The considerable overvaluation of theme, especially in pedagogical situations, is in part to blame.  “What,” a teacher will ask, “is the poet trying to say?”  In a good many poems, I would consider theme, the implications of a text about the reader’s lived experience, to be among the less interesting of the avenues of approach.  A poem’s center is as likely to be in its sound or the formal play of its images as in its “meaning.”  If a paraphrase will adequately embody its significance, the poem itself is then superfluous. 

     Yet still, readers persist in objecting to the unintelligibility of modern poetry, and the foremost example for many is John Ashbery.  Whether in praise or blame, such comments have become a commonplace, almost a required, initial observation of his work since Ashbery’s career was launched by his selection for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1956.  The judge, W. H.  Auden, had initially failed to find a worthy manuscript among those short-listed and specifically requested Ashbery’s manuscript which had been previously rejected by the in-house editors. [2]  Having crowned Ashbery with laurel, Auden in his introduction seemed oddly ambivalent about his own choice, lamenting the loss of a shared culture and the substitution of idiosyncratic individual vision like that of his selection.  Today the Yale Press’s own publicity cheerfully notes that soon after the book appeared “selecting judge W. H. Auden famously confessed that he didn’t understand a word of it.”   

     The characterization of Ashbery’s work as obscurantist, echoed by Donald Hall and other early reviewers, has become a cliché.  Even Richard Kostelanetz, whose own works have elicited some puzzled reactions, declared, “John Ashbery's poetry is extremely difficult, if not often impenetrable.” [3]  While theme is often subordinated in Ashbery’s work to other elements, just as in the case of Ashbery’s  influence, Wallace Stevens, the texts quite often make perfectly good sense in spite of all the critics. [4]  My intention here is simple, to follow Ashbery through a single poem, taking him at his word, though indirections may fall on every side.  That bare paraphrase may seem flat-footed is no disadvantage since the whole point is to show a poem’s thought process as coherent when read as direct utterance.

     An explication of “To John Clare” is particularly useful as that prose poem defines Ashbery’s poetic process almost explicitly.  Though it lacks the sensual pleasure of the density of palpable images with which he commonly strews his lines, the thematic point is all the more effective for its abstractness.

     The dedication to John Clare marks the piece as a poem about poetry, specifically recalling the earlier poet’s concrete detail illuminated with a visionary glow.  Ashbery imitates not specific phrases of the “Northamptonshire Peasant Poet” but rather his angle of approach.  For each a carefully delineated refraction of reality, a very particular slant, can make any sight an entry point to sublimity.  In addition, Ashbery reminds the reader with this dedication that he, though identified as a “New York poet,” has a distinctly pastoral strain running through the body of his work. [5]  Toward the end of his life, Ashbery affirmed Clare’s significance for him, writing that “the effect of Clare’s poetry, on me at least, is always the same—that of re-inserting me in my present, of re-establishing ‘now’.” [6]

     What it means exactly to speak of re-establishing “now” is the subject of “For John Clare.”   The poem is a narrative of consciousness, the story how of a thought, any thought, arises from the data of perception.  For Ashbery the information delivered by the senses must be linked, though the mediation might tortuous and elusive, with the phenomenal world.  The entire poem might be considered a response to the provocative hyper-skeptical propositions of Gorgias, who argued that nothing can be shown to exist; second, that if anything did exist, it could not be known by people; and third, that if anything were known to a person, it could not be communicated to anyone else.  Ashbery struggles through artful dancing and weaving to escape this nihilistic pit. 

     What do we see when we gaze upon the world?  The first verse paragraph opens with the paradoxically qualified adjective “kind of empty” but immediately clarifies that the description is of appearances and not essences: “in the way it sees everything.”  Yet there is no subject or rather the entire event occurs in the subjective, enacted only within the imagination of the persona and thus on the page, and then reflected in the reader’s mind.  For the persona, and thus for the poem, it is the earth itself, the entire planet that is seeing things (as it had already got to its feet and saluted the sky).  The lines are dizzying, even outlandish, perhaps, some might say surreal, but susceptible nonetheless to understanding.

     To say “the earth gets to its feet and salutes the sky” suggests some grand synthesis, the sense of a cosmic order not always discernable, a resolution of high and low, of all dualities, marked by the esprit of a salute.  Such insights are not always accessible; thus, with slightly awkward syntax recalling Gertrude Stein, insight is modest: “more of a success at it this time than most others it is.” 

     The speaker is caught inside subjectivity; in fact, the sky is always only “in the back of someone's mind.”  And it differs in each, so “there is no telling how many there are.”  Yet these various visions, these multiple versions of reality, can be so pleasing, they “grace” everything sufficiently to distract the individual from the routine life pleasures, “to take the roisterer's mind off his caroling.”  “Like a smooth switch back” the mind returns to earlier glimpses of the coherence of things, “to what was aired in their previous conniption fit.”  It seems a thoroughly post-Modern decentered experience, presented not as an alarming chaos but as something one might enjoy like a carnival ride the ticket-holder does not expect to go anywhere in the end.  

     The remainder of this first section of the poem details how elusive reality is, how it vanishes off into several obscure directions.  To begin with, no one can take it all in: “there is so much to be seen everywhere that it's like not getting used to it.”  The immensity of detail is overwhelming and defies analysis: “it never feels new, never any different.”  What impressions the observer may form will decay in time: “certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles. What will it all be like in five years' time when you try to remember?”  Then there is the complication of the relation of one’s own perception with all those other consciousnesses such as “that couple is stopping to look in that window over there.”  Any mental construct, any individual take on the scene, even a photograph, is misleading.  The inadequacy of words closes this section with a confession of language’s shortcoming: “very little gets said.”

     The second verse paragraph asks with poignant awkwardness for a more stable connection between the ego and the things perceived, one with “room for more things,” and a broader application, a “spreading out, like.”  The speaker reveals the inadequacy of his present partial vision, yearning for spontaneous revelation, if only things “came to you at once,” or at least with some reciprocal desire, “then meeting them halfway would be so much easier.”  Lacking a universalizing vision, the separate concrete details of existence are either unnoticed (“we perceive them if at all”) or irrelevant (“meant to be put aside”).  Thus the clues they offer are ignored (“you can do nothing with them”) no matter your own eagerness (“not even offer to pay”). 

     The dialectic between vision and blindness, knowing and not-knowing, continues with the third section.  Having stated the epistemological problem of what to make of the apparent spectacle of the world and having fully detailed both the problems inherent in any answer and the promise of the rewards of an enlightened mind, Ashbery succeeds in providing, if no resolution, at least a means of keeping the potential of such a vision alive.  Perhaps, he suggests, we are wiser than we think: “It is possible that finally, like coming to the end of a long, barely perceptible rise, there is mutual cohesion and interaction.”  The yearning persists for “the whole scene,” “the music all present,” producing a kind of synaesthetic transport, “as though you could see each note as well as hear it.” 

     But this is unrealized at present.  Its harbinger is nothing more than “an uneasiness in things just now.”  This impression, however, is strong: “it's keen, it makes you fall over.”  All the dramatic action of changing weather and rushing seasons without apparent meaning inspires a further pathetic fallacy: “After all it's their time too -- nothing says they aren't to make something of it.”  He lapses again into the vernacular that in this poem signifies excitement in Jenny Wren’s frustrated attempts at communication. [7]  The small bird with its senseless twittering parodies attempts toward articulation and suggests that meaningful discourse may indeed be impossible.  Though the bird strives fruitlessly to be understood, “others” do not even try, since even an attempt would surely prove “the first step of the terrible journey,” ending in “utter confusion and hopelessness,” “east of the sun and west of the moon.” [8]

     The phrase points to another of the poem’s ambiguities.  In the Norwegian fairy tale of this title the wicked stepmother’s castle is located “east of the Sun and west of the Moon.”  There the prince is confined, having been enchanted in the form of a beast, a fitting analogue for the person confined in inexpressible subjectivity.  The folk story’s happy ending in which the prince is rescued by his beloved surely signifies the possibility of gaining that blissful wholeness that remains just out of grasp throughout Ashbery’s poem, but for the poet and reader liberation is rarely as complete as for the prince.  The individual must be satisfied to gain purchase on at least one small corner of the truth allowing a fingerhold on the grand holistic spectacle (“the whole history of probabilities”) that signifies nothing less than everything at once.    

     The concluding image lovely: “the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.”  By evoking a shapely and slender canvas gently bellying out with breeze, Ashbery suggests again the enigmatic grace of things as they are and the sense that one’s life experience is revelatory and beautiful, though always a matter of “probabilities” and manifested only on the constantly mutating cinema screen of time. 

     If “For John Clare” implies that truth is inaccessible, that language is inadequate, and that communication is foredoomed, the poem maintains that making a poem nonetheless, writer and reader alike may glimpse sparks of the scintillating, almost numinous, light cast by the will-of-the-wisp of the possibility of seeing everything at once.  More cool and oblique even than Wallace Stevens, Ashbery was still pursuing the “supreme fiction” that Stevens had sought in song.  If his poem seems to resist its readers, it is because the poem enacts with the fragmented and idiosyncratic imagery of the twentieth century a story in many ways similar to that of the Ox-Herding pictures of Zen in which the bull of reality, while elusive, may be captured, though he vanishes ultimately for the enlightened mind. [8]  Readers frustrated by Ashbery’s poems would be likely to have little patience for koans as well.

     Many of the poet’s works might be clarified when viewed as attempts to burst beyond the limits of the individual consciousness.  Others seem like the roisterer’s caroling or the Jenny Wren’s song, a melody to pass the time in the anteroom of vision, playing the game of perception as an entertainment.  Were the final enlightenment to arrive, a blank page would suffice.  Short of such a thought-ending revelation, what remains is the record of the incomplete struggle to know, pushing always against the mind’s limits, unbowed, feeling the way in all-but-complete darkness.   

         

  

1.  This is a considerable exaggeration.  Self-consciously hermetic styles had been cultivated by the practitioners of trobar clus and by Gongora and his followers as well as by the Symbolists, Italian Hermeticists, and a variety of other Modernist and post-Modernist schools.  Some writers such as Ted Kooser and Billy Collins have found great success bucking the trend.

 

2.  Ashbery had written his senior thesis at Harvard on Auden.  According to Jesse Zuba, Yale’s in-house editors reacted with “confusion” and “outrage.”  See "’Everything Has a Schedule’: John Ashbery's ‘Some Trees’ and the Notion of Career,” Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 59, No. 2 (summer 2013), pp. 260-282.

 

3.  Richard Kostelanetz, “How to Be a Difficult Poet,” New York Times, May 23, 1976.

 

4.  Ashbery's commented that his poems are "accessible if anybody cares to access them." 2005 NPR interview https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4542617.  On another site a critic maintains with statistical evidence that Ashbery’s poems are, in fact, syntactically “simpler” than Ted Kooser’s!  See http://mikechasar.blogspot.com/2010/10/this-just-in-john-ashbery-more.html. 

 

5.  Apart from his youth on a farm (at least when he was not away at prep school), Ashbery’s pastoral interest is evident in titles such as “Eclogue” and “A Pastoral” in Some Trees and “Farm I” and “Farm II” in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.  Of course, Classical and Renaissance pastoralism were always urban phenomena. 

 

6.  Ashbery, Other Traditions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

 

7.  Some readers find a reference here to the character in Our Mutual Friend.  The well-known energetic song and rapid movement of the small bird seem to me sufficient basis for the figure.  A bird is, of course, one of the most common metaphors for a poet. 

 

8.  First recorded in the Mahā Gopālaka Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 33) dating from perhaps two thousand years ago.  Perhaps best-known is the twelfth century Chinese version by Kuòān Shīyuǎn.

 

 

 

   

 

For John Clare

 

     Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet and salutes the sky. More of a success at it this time than most others it is. The feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone's

mind. Then here is no telling how many there are. They grace everything--bush and tree--to take the roisterer's mind off his caroling--so it's like a smooth switch back. To what was aired in their previous conniption fit. There is so much to be seen everywhere that it's like not getting used to it, only there is so much it never feels new, never any different. You are standing looking at that building and you cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles. What will it all be like in five years' time when you try to remember? Will there have been boards in between the grass part and the edge of the street? As long as that couple is stopping to look in that window over there we cannot go. We feel like they have to tell us we can, but they never look our way and they are already gone, gone far into the future--the night of time. If we could look at a photograph of it and say there they are, they never really stopped but there they are. There is so much to be said, and on the surface of it very little gets said.

       

     There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like.  Being immersed in the details of rock and field and slope --letting them come to you for once, and then meeting them halfway would be so much easier--if they took an ingenuous pride in being in one's blood.  Alas, we perceive them if at all as those things that were meant to be put aside-- costumes of the supporting actors or voice trilling at the end of a narrow enclosed street. You can do nothing with them. Not even offer to pay.

        

    It is possible that finally, like coming to the end of a long, barely perceptible rise, there is mutual cohesion and interaction.  The whole scene is fixed in your mind, the music all present, as though you

 could see each note as well as hear it. I say this because there is an uneasiness in things just now. Waiting for something to be over before wind--and yet it's keen, it makes you fall over. Clabbered sky.

Seasons that pass with a rush. After all it's their time too--nothing says they aren't to make something of it.  As for Jenny Wren, she cares, hopping about on her little twig like she was tryin' to tell us somethin', but that's just it, she couldn't even if she wanted to--dumb bird. But the others--and they in some way

must know too--it would never occur to them to want to, even if they could take the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon. So their comment is: "No comment."  Meanwhile the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.

Menus

 

 

I have long thought that much of my house’s aesthetic decision-making occurs in meal preparation yet the products of the culinary art are consumed and thus more obviously ephemeral than other cultural artifacts.  To me, who ate these dishes, they form a sort of poem of imagined tastes.  What follows is a single week of recipes.  I made no special preparations and edited nothing, beginning this list without mentioning it to Patricia.  In summertime we use a good deal of produce from our deck garden.  I note these ingredients as “garden” vegetables.  Our herbs are mostly fresh and home-grown as well.     

 

 

chilaquiles with poblano peppers, Mexican cheese, and garden cilantro

 

tabbouleh with mint and pumpkin seeds, strawberries and Greek yoghurt

 

chicken and mushrooms Chinese-style dumplings, brown rice

*

Carolina barbecue hash, boiled egg, orange juice

 

homemade baguette with brie, green salad, cauliflower puree soup, almond flour brownie

 

moussaka with eggplant and garden zucchini and potatoes

*

scrambled eggs with ham and peppers, orange juice, roll

 

garden zucchini cheese casserole, corn on the cob, pistachio ice cream

pizza with garden zucchini and basil

*

blueberry pancakes

 

ahi tuna, broccoli and cauliflower, cucumber yogurt salad, boiled red potatoes

 

avocado whole wheat toast, garden green beans, tomato, pear and Gouda cheese

*

corn cakes with pepper and onion

strip steak pieces au jus with mixed garden greens (chard, beet, kale), beetroot, cucumber blue cheese salad, mashed potatoes

panir and peas with potato samosas

*

dilled eggs, fried potatoes, roll

 

zucchini casserole with three cheeses

 

barley beef vegetable soup, peaches and cherries

*

millet cakes with kale, green salad with blue cheese

 

seafood risotto with haddock, mussels, and squid

 

roast pork with vegetable, rice, and beans

The Hazardous Lives of the Sonneteers

  

This essay is an attempt to be more popular and journalistic than usual.  I shall be curious to see what readership the following piece attracts. I am contemplating a similar article on the scandals of the Romantic poets.

  

     Were an Elizabethan or Jacobean sonneteer to appear in a cartoon strip, he would probably be depicted as a mincing aesthete, a sort of Percy Dovetonsils in doublet and breeches, yet anyone with the sketchiest knowledge of history would know that poetry was associated with powerful men in those days.   The sonnet form in particular was associated with courtiers who were, of course, warriors as well, suffering the chances of combat, including becoming prisoners of war.  In addition a significant percentage of prominent poets in Elizabeth’s time were imprisoned at home by their own queen, always on the lookout for signs of opposition to her will, while others fell afoul of the ordinary criminal laws.  The life expectancy of members of the ruling class was limited by the fact that under an absolute monarchy in which the will of the ruler is law, a court will inevitably be filled with back-biting and tale-telling among ambitious aristocrats quite willing to sacrifice their rivals while seeking to advance their own prospects.

     The link between high nobility and the arts was emphasized in Castiglione’s The Courtier, published in English translation by Thomas Hoby in 1561, which emphasized that the best courtier, the noblest aristocrat, must cultivate excellence of all sorts, not only athletic and martial abilities, but aesthetic skills as well, including the practice of music, painting, and poetry.  Verbal skills, honed by literary study, Castiglione argues, allow the courtier to be at once more beautiful and more persuasive.    

     Since his own time, Sir Philip Sidney has been considered the embodiment of Castiglione’s ideal.  Strikingly handsome, valorous in war and accomplished in sports, quick and clever in conversation yet discerning in judgement, he was always the faithful servant of the queen.  The center of his career was his work as parliamentarian, soldier, ambassador, and counsellor to Elizabeth.  His masterful sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella was not published until five years after his death and then only because faulty pirated editions were already circulating. 

     Dead before his thirty-second birthday from a wound received at the Battle of Zutphen, his character inspired legends immediately.  He was said to have removed the thigh armor that could have prevented his mortal injury when he noticed that one of the men under his command had incomplete armor.  As he lay bleeding, water was brought which he was said to have declined, offering it to a comrade with the words "Thy necessity is yet greater than mine."

     Despite his conformity to his culture’s standards, even Sidney might have suffered an even earlier end due to his bold advocacy in a time of customs that seem today savage.  Though at the age of eighteen he was a member of the embassy sent to seek to arrange Elizabeth’s marriage to the Catholic Duke of Alençon, as a Protestant partisan he fervently opposed the union and quarreled with Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, to the point of challenging de Vere to a duel.  Fortunately for literary history the queen ordered that they not fight.  The young Sidney persisted in writing a letter detailing his strong opposition to the match, attracting her disapproval of his presumption and prompting his temporary absence at court. 

    The sonnet form had been introduced in England by Sir Thomas Wyatt with translations of Petrarch and original compositions.  Though his father had been incarcerated and tortured under Richard III, the elder Wyatt then became Privy Counsellor when Henry VII and after him Henry VIII succeeded.   By his late teens the son was already a prominent figure in court, taking a ceremonial role, for instance, as the champion of the Castle of Loyalty during the Christmas celebrations of 1526.  As a teenager he was named Esquire of the Body serving as a personal attendant and confidant of the king and a few years later acquired the remarkable title of Sewer Extraordinary. 

     Though popular, Wyatt was known as an impulsive, headstrong individual, and, from the testimony of his contemporaries as well as from his poetry, a passionate lover.  With a reputation as a ladies’ man, he surprised no one when he separated from his wife after three years and accused her of adultery while conceding as well his own infidelity. 

     He was meanwhile active as a negotiator, ambassador, and advisor to the throne.  On a mission to Italy in 1527 he insisted on parting with his company, saying he was “desirous to see the country” and was taken prisoner by forces controlled by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V who demanded a substantial ransom for his release.  A captive of unpredictable soldiers on the edge of mutiny, he was certainly in mortal danger, but he did go free.  It is unclear if the money was paid – some think he was repaying the debt for years --  or if perhaps he escaped, but he did manage to return to his own country unscathed.

    Before long however, he aroused Henry’s ire.  He had been a childhood friend of Anne Boleyn, and some whispered that he was paying particular her attention even when she was the queen consort.  The unfortunate Boleyn had given birth to Elizabeth but subsequently suffered three miscarriages, trying the king’s patience.  Henry turned his attentions to Jane Seymour and sought to remove Boleyn.  She was seized and placed in the Tower of London, accused of a series of ill-documented crimes including treason, and beheaded.

     Doubtless suspicious about the dashing courtier’s relationship with his wife, and likely thinking that he could at any rate get some useful information about her from Wyatt, Henry had the poet put into the Tower of London, accused of an affair with her.  From his cell, Wyatt probably witnessed Boleyn’s death and must have felt that his own survival was again in doubt. 

     Surely shaken by this experience, Wyatt stayed out of trouble for a time, but in a few years he was again arrested and himself charged with treason.  The poet’s charm may have saved his life, as the current queen consort Catherine Howard intervened on his behalf and obtained his release with the condition that he must reconcile with his wife.  It was not long before Howard in her turn was led to the executioner’s block.   After her death, it was whispered that the king had his eye on Wyatt’s wife, but, as it happened, Wyatt died of natural causes shortly thereafter.  (His sole legitimate son, Thomas Wyatt the Younger, was executed under Queen Mary.)

     Though Wyatt managed to avoid the headsman, the other poet credited with introducing sonnets to the English language (and the originator of the English or Shakespearean sonnet rhyme pattern) the contentious Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, did not.  The poet, well aware of the dangers of royal service as a first cousin of both Boleyn and Howard, was made Lieutenant General of the King on Sea and Land and fought in France.

    His pride and temper were as well-known as his gallantry under fire.  Though he (and his father as well) had taken the crown’s part in opposing the Lincolnshire rebels who had taken up arms against the dissolution of the monasteries, a fellow courtier suggested that he had been in fact sympathetic to their cause.  Offended, Surrey struck the man in the park at Hampton Court and was imprisoned for breaking the peace in the king’s domain. 

     After his release he was for a time absent from court but he returned to royal favor after a few years.  In 1543 he was accused by the Privy Council of a nighttime adventure in which he (in company with Wyatt and others) broke windows of London homes using a sort of crossbow that could hurl stones in what must have been a drunken revel, and a second charge – eating meat during Lent – was added.  Once again, his friends were able to secure his release.  In “A Satire on London” he makes the unlikely claim that his disorderly actions were meant to awaken the citizens to their sins. 

    The poet’s ego, however, led eventually to his downfall.  Though immensely proud of his descent from the Plantagenets, he and his family had long been loyal to Henry and the Tudors.  As the king aged, afflicted by health problems, he became increasingly suspicious that Surrey meant to usurp the throne from his son, the future Edward VI.  When Surrey’s sister, Mary FitzRoy, widow of Henry’s illegitimate son, was to be married to Jane’s brother Thomas Seymour with the blessings of her father and of the king, she and Surrey objected and the match was called off.  According to her statements, Surrey then tried to persuade her to seduce the king, suggesting that she might as a palace mistress "wield as much influence on him as Madame d'Etampes doth about the French King."  In response, she flatly declared that she “would sooner cut her own throat.”

     With the tensions over succession rising, in 1546 at Kenninghall Surrey chose to include on his quartered shield (quartering allowed more visible connections to highly placed lines of descent) the arms of Edward the Confessor.  In spite of the fact that the rules of heraldry allowed this usage and that Surrey had collared the leopards in the royal arms and placed them in the secondary quarter of his shield, he was arrested on the excuse that he had symbolically indicated his own ambitions on the throne.  Once he was prisoner, he was questioned not about his arms but only about his attempted use of his sister as an informer, his supposed plans to depose Henry, claims of his heterodoxy, and his preparations to leave the country.  He mounted a full defense of his innocence, yet was executed.  His father would have been beheaded as well had Henry VII not died whereupon the Privy Council removed the death penalty but seized his lands and kept him locked up for years.  

     Another of the group known as the “silver poets” for their eloquence was Sir Walter Ralegh, whose name is known in this hemisphere for his role in early colonization.  He campaigned in France for the Huguenots, and for his service in suppressing the Irish received considerable estates there, but he had little success in inducing English tenants to emigrate.  He turned his attention to the New World, sponsoring the failed settlement that became known as the Lost Colony of Roanoke.   Dubious about his ability to fund settlements that, beyond being self-supporting, could make him rich, he set out to find El Dorado in South America but there too had little success. 

    A few years before his South American venture, he had impregnated and secretly married one of Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting.  When their relationship was discovered, he and his wife were sent to the Tower.  He was temporarily released to oversee the spoils of a ship captured from Spain, but then returned to the Tower, only to be again set free and assume a seat in Parliament.  His influence rose once more, though he was accused (and acquitted) of atheistic views.  He fought to capture Cadiz, to repel the Armada, and became governor of the Isle of Jersey.

     Yet, with the demise of Queen Elizabeth, his loyalty to James was suspected, and he was arrested for involvement in the “Main Plot” to replace James with Lady Arbella Stuart.  The evidence was slight, and Ralegh claimed he could exonerate himself if he were allowed to question his friend the Baron Cobham, the main witness against him, but this was not allowed and he was incarcerated for thirteen years during which he worked on his Historie of the World.  Even in this scholarly enterprise he attracted the doubts of the king who found the book "too sawcie in censuring Princes."

     He was freed in 1617 after thirteen years confinement to lead another expedition to South America during which men commanded by his friend Lawrence Kemys attacked the Spanish outpost of Santo Tomé de Guayana in violation of the Anglo-Spanish treaty and Ralegh’s instructions.  In this conflict his son Walter was killed and Ralegh was arrested when he returned, having spurned chances to flee into exile.  The Spanish demanded his execution, and he was beheaded.  (His subordinate Kemys committed suicide.)

     A sonneteer might encounter all manner of other calamities.  Virtually every biography includes episodes of violence of harsh legal judgements.  The account of all these tumultuous events would be voluminous.  Some are entertaining enough to seem as though written for the stage.  Attorney and Parliamentarian as well as sonneteer, John Davies was disbarred for attacking a colleague with a cudgel upon which he promptly repaired to Oxford for the next year where he devoted himself to literature.  He was later made attorney-general of Ireland.  In 1613 he was the king’s candidate for speaker of the Irish Parliament but was opposed by the Catholic members who instead proposed Sir John Everard.  The dispute led to an absurd scene in which Everard seized the speaker’s chair, refusing to vacate it until Davies’ supporters carried the stout poet and placed him on Everard’s lap.  Edmund Spenser, who wrote the Petrarchan Amoretti, was also an Irish landlord whose castle in North Cork was taken and burned by rebels after which the writer died in London “for want of bread,” according to Ben Jonson (though this statement is surely inaccurate).  Politics also made Henry Constable a convict, largely over his urging of toleration of Catholics.  The prolific Samuel Daniel was praised for his sequence of love sonnets Delia but called before the Privy Council for supposedly seditious implications of his play The Tragedy of Philotas.

     Several were at least suspected of common crimes including murder.  Barnabe Barnes, who wrote a sequence called Parthenophil and Parthenophe (Virgin-lover and Virgin-voiced), engaged in ferocious pamphleteering polemics and was tried for attempting to poison a man, though he escaped custody and was never recaptured, doubtless due to the influence of powerful friends.  The prolific George Gascoigne who came between Wyatt and Surrey, was a noble soldier when taken prisoner during the Siege of Leiden, but a common criminal as well, arrested more than once for debts and apparently also for attempted murder.  He had served in Parliament, but in a re-election bid was disqualified as a man not only “noted for manslaughter" but also "a common Rymer.”  A poet might also be a crime victim.  Fulke Greville, a protégé of Sidney, was stabbed by a servant.  His learned physicians filled the wound with pig fat and he died a lingering death.  A number of writers, including William Percy, the writer of Sonnets to Coelia, and the middle-class Henry Lok who wrote religious sonnets were imprisoned simply for debt.

     A few years later after the tumultuous careers of these poets Hobbes was to describe human life in general as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” characterized by “continual fear, and danger of violent death.”  While everyone half a millennium ago suffered equally from the lack of effective medical knowledge and the draconian, often arbitrary, legal system, and the poor contended with a constant fear of malnutrition, belonging to the power elite was no guarantee of longevity.  Those at the top faced the perils of war, but combat was hardly a greater threat to them than their own monarch’s disfavor.  Perhaps the beauties of their poetry, and the sonnet during this period became one of the most subtle and expressive forms in all of literature, far from conflicting with a hazardous life, proved the best response to uncertainty and danger.  Many of us who are far from courtiers in the great chain  of being have found that, for us as well as them, love and art can make an otherwise intolerable life worth living.