Subjectivity in Edward Young

 

 

     Among the trends in English poetry identified as “pre-Romantic” are the rural and nature poets (notably Dyer and Thomson), the archaic or folk-oriented (Burns, Chatterton, Macpherson), the out-and-out visionary (Smart, Blake), and the “graveyard school” (associated with Gray, Cowper, and Young).  While hardly mutually exclusive, each of these points toward a significant Romantic vector, all suggesting deviation from the neo-Classical theory associated with Dryden, Pope, and Johnson.  Among the most influential of the writers pointing new directions for English poetry was Edward Young.

     Young’s The Complaint, and the Consolation; or, Night-Thoughts, the first portion of which was published in 1742, was immensely popular in the U. K. and hardly less on the Continent, particularly in Germany.  When Young later published a collected works [1], the author was identified not by name, but as “the Author of the Night-Thoughts.”  A new edition in 1797 included illustrations by William Blake [2]. 

     The popularity of his poem made Young particularly authoritative [3] and his essay “Conjectures on Original Composition” (1759) allows the reader to juxtapose Young’s theoretical ideas with his poetic practice.  This analysis both in theory and practice clarifies Young’s contribution to the old dispute about whether poets are born or created by training. [4]  

     The primary theme of Young’s essay is the value of originality, revealed by the title and reinforced throughout.  Assuming then a partisan position in the dispute which in France had been called the querelle des anciens et des modernes and in England the Battle of the Books [5], Young insists on his preference for original compositions as opposed to those shaped by the imitation of classics.  He even suggests that moderns may outdo the classics, though he modestly stops short of claiming that they have already, noting that “the modern powers are equal to those before them” yet “modern performance in general is deplorably short.”  He begins his argument with the sensible observation that “human souls, through all periods, are equal.”  [6]  Within each “soul” must be an innate god-given capacity for genius which alone is capable of shaping great art. 

     Young’s notion of genius is considerably mystified, as his use of terms such as vigor igneus and caelestis origo signifies.  Genius, he says, partakes of the divine and “raises his structure by means invisible.”  His notion is not far distant from older ideas of a muse or god of poetry.  Genius, he declares is a surprise even to its possessor who must “contract full intimacy with the stranger within [himself].”  Genius in his view not only makes a great writer; it makes also a virtuous man.  Yet unfortunately Genius explains poetry no more than the “Great Man” theory explains history.  Even Boileau in the very first stanza of his prescriptive manual had declared that a would-be poet born without “Genius” would work in vain.   Genius seems to amount to little more than an afterthought inferred from the poem’s perceived excellence.

     Apart from failing itself to be an original concept, Genius always begs the question since it is already assumed in the author of a work deserving of praise.  The genius may access the profundities of the mind of man: “its bounds are unknown, as those of the creation.”  This bright promise, however, is hedged with hazard.  The innovative poet may find no audience, since “all eminence, and distinction, lies out of the beaten road.”  “the more remote your path from the highway, the more reputable.”  Genius, Young claims, is most likely to be condemned when he has soared highest and gone out of sight of the common reader.  Thus the greater the poet the lesser his reputation.

     One looks, then, to the first installment of Night-Thoughts in search of an example of the novelty the author recommended so highly.  The blank verse form is familiar enough.  Probably the most common meter in English poetry since the sixteenth century, unrhymed iambic pentameter had been the choice of Milton in Paradise Lost, Dryden’s All for Love, and Thomson’s The Seasons.  The personifications that meet the reader in the first lines – Nature, Sleep, Fortune – are thoroughly in the neo-Classical manner as are artificial epithets like “downy pinion” for wing.  His theology is likewise quite orthodox, resisting, though at times with difficulty, the latititudinarianism and deism of his age. 

     What, then, if neither form nor content is innovative, made the author feel he was taking a new literary turn?   In a brief Preface, Young provides the answer: “As the occasion of this Poem was real, not fictitious, so the method pursued in it, was rather imposed, by what spontaneously arose in the Author's mind, on that occasion, than meditated, or designed.”  Here Young takes a stand against Boileau’s clear emphasis on conscious craft. 

 

Gently make haste, of Labour not afraid;

A hundred times consider what you've said:

Polish, repolish, every Colour lay,

And sometimes add; but oft'ner take away.

'Tis not enough, when swarming Faults are writ,

That here and there are scattered Sparks of Wit;

Each Object must be fix'd in the due place,

And diff'ring parts have Corresponding Grace:

'Till, by a curious Art dispos'd, we find

One perfect whole, of all the pieces join'd.

Keep your subject close, in all you say;

Nor for a sounding Sentence ever stray. [7]

 

Whereas Boileau privileges first of all discerning taste, proportion, and unity, a sort of elegant tidiness, allowing some appeal to the intellectual pleasures implied by “Wit,” Young claims that his poem is itself a thing of nature, “real, not fictitious,” and, as a result, is subject not to “meditation” or “design,” but must be governed wholly “by what spontaneously arose in the Author’s mind.” 

   By saying the poem is “real,” of course, what Young means is that he has attempted to convey in words his own subjectivity, accurately reflecting his own experience, just as Wordsworth had outlined using similar language in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads.  The fogginess of the concept of Genius in the “Conjectures” appears then in a new light.  If access to the sublime is subjectively determined, a natural occurrence, arriving “spontaneously,” obedience to literary rules becomes irrelevant, and analysis is fruitless.  Subjectivity is for him self-justifying. 

     The privilege Young accords subjectivity in theory is suggested in the use of the word “conjectures” in the title which couches his conclusion appropriately in the essai’s language of supposition.  Young’s self-denigrating opening describes the essay as “miscellaneous in its nature, somewhat licentious in its conduct; and, perhaps, not overimportant in its end.”  “Though I despair of breaking through the frozen obstructions of age, and care’s incumbent cloud . . .yet will I hazard some conjectures.”  Though he foregrounds the modesty topos, Young reserves some chance of gravitas, hoping that his observations may “strike the careless wanderer after amusement only, with useful awe.”  A twenty-first century modern may be struck by the assumption that a reader seeking idle entertainment would read a treatise on poetics in the first place, but Young here seizes a bit of high moral ground that places him within the traditional European view of the ends of art as to delight and to instruct. 

     Although Young recognizes that poets may be mistaken, misleading, or simply incompetent, he prescribes no way to discern true Genius and thus separate the sublime from the worthless.  He maintains that one must “leap” to reach new ground but, “by that leap, if genius is wanting, we break our necks.”  While truly original works will “engross” the reader, they may also “prejudice” and “intimidate.”  Young suggests that there may be a purely aesthetic criterion in that the reader will enjoy the work of the gifted with greater pleasure.  Art is, he says, “a delicious garden of intellectual fruits and flowers” affording many beneficial effects: a “respite from care;” it “rescues us from sloth and sensuality,” defending against “the langours of old age.” 

     The Christianity that defined Young’s profession obliges him to add a traditional extra-literary touchstone: moral improvement.  “Wit, indeed, however brilliant,” he says, “should not be permitted to gaze self-enamored on its useless charms” but should “like the first Brutus, it should sacrifice its most darling offspring to the sacred interests of virtue, and real service of mankind.“  This is surely equivalent to the “useful awe” he had also cited to justify poetry.  Yet the appeal of Young’s verse is surely in his vulnerability rather than his faith.  His anxiety not his piety wins our attention because it is more likely to   resemble our own state of mind. 

     Perhaps his faith in subjectivity is the most contemporary element in Young’s thought.  The very idea of the subjective realm had evolved from bare Cartesian dualism to both a bugaboo and an ideal by the eighteenth century.  After Young’s time, however, a good share of lyric poetry has, to one extent or another, shared this self-dramatizing subjectivity in subsequent years.  Since Shelley fell upon the thorns of life, a wide variety of poets from effusive Romantics through decadent aesthetes to Beats, Confessionals, and beyond a passionate expressiveness is considered by many the poet’s Helicon.  The undertone in these later days is evident in grassroots poetry readings where self-expression holds sway.  Even apart from literature, the process is advanced in this age by the proliferation of self-help and mystic notions that encourage the cultivation of individual subjectivities.   

 

 

1.1   1.  The Works of the Author of the Night-Thoughts (1762).

 

2.      2.  Blake painted 537 watercolor designs for the project of which 150 were chosen and engraved.  When sales of the expensive volume proved disappointing, publication halted including only 43 of Blake’s engravings.  The association with Blake has gained Young many of his modern readers.

 

3.      3.  Though Thomas Parnell’s “A Night-Piece on Death” had appeared in 1721, Young’s poem was followed by Robert Blair’s “The Grave” (1743), Thomas Warton’s “The Pleasures of Melancholy” (1747), and Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751), and a good many other poems with a “graveyard” tone.  Young himself remained sufficiently well-known several generations later that in the prefatory essay to an 1853 edition of Night-Thoughts the Rev. George Gilfillan comments “It would be extremely ill-bred in us to suppose that our readers are not acquainted with the facts of Young’s life; they are among the things that ‘everyone knows.’”

 

4.      4.  For a careful history of the idea, see William Ringler, “Poeta Nascitur Non Fit: Some Notes on the History of an Aphorism,” Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 2, No. 4 (Oct., 1941).  A miscellany of figures has figured in the discussions of the issue with writers like Philip Sidney, Coleridge, Robert Graves, and Mary Oliver maintaining that poets are born to their role and, on the other side, Horace, Jonson, and Pope.

 

5.      5.  Following Swift’s usage in the prolegomenon to his A Tale of a Tub.

 

6.      6.  he logic would continue with the realization that people of all countries are equally gifted, a sensible corollary that some resist even today.

 

7.      7.  The Art of Poetry, Canto 1, 171-182 Soames and Dryden’s version.