Every Reader’s Dryden

 

This is the seventeenth in the Every Reader’s Poets series, essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. In these I limit my focus to the discussion of only a few of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes. A general introduction “Why Read Poetry?” is also posted on this site.  For a complete list, see section 5G of the Index which is always posted among the current month’s essays in the archive on the right of the page. 

 

 

     John Dryden dominated the literary scene of his day.  He was the first poet laureate officially named by the crown (in spite of his youthful adherence to Cromwell’s Protectorate) and he, along with Pope, somewhat later, exemplified the era’s neo-Classical taste.  Like Shakespeare he had a financial interest in a theater, the King’s Company, for which he agreed to produce three plays a year, and he supported himself for decades with income from the stage, composing twenty-nine plays, both comedies and tragedies, once popular, but rarely performed today.  His theatrical reputation  is not aided by the fact that he took it upon himself to improve a number of Shakespeare’s plays. 

     He wrote important critical works such as An Essay of Dramatick Poesy and The Art of Satire as well as doing significant work in translation, producing versions of Vergil, Persius, Juvenal, Ovid, Lucretius, and Homer that were widely read and praised.

      Though  he once magisterially dictated taste, as literary standards evolved the appeal  of his own poetry diminished considerably.  A couple of generations after his death, Samuel Johnson, an excellent critic, anticipated many readers since when he found Dryden “not often pathetick,” with little skill in “exhibiting the genuine operations of the heart,” a poet more “of strong reason than quick sensibility.”  This impression has since strengthened, magnified by the Romantic prejudices many literati retain that view his sensibility as lacking in passion, and his style as pedantic and artificial. 

     In addition, the intellectual controversies, political and artistic, that excited his day now arouse only antiquarian interest, and many of his strongest works are long polemical poems that today require a quantity of footnotes intolerable for impatient twenty-first century readers.  The satires for which he is best-known represent a genre almost altogether absent in today’s poetry.

     When Dryden was writing, readers relished lengthy symbolic exercises in wit, even when these were composed in poetry, fueling constant sallies back and forth between controversialists with every exchange sold to the public in what are called “pamphlet wars.”  The topics might be political, theological, or  aesthetic.  Late seventeenth century authors could depend on the common reader’s familiarity with Classical literature, since Greek and Latin were fundamental to the educational system until quite recently.  Most of today’s readers know little either of Dryden’s topical interests or his Classical lore.

     Though the passing of centuries and the variation in taste may have made some of Dryden’s poetry an acquired taste, his masterful skill can still impress and even amuse a modern reader.  One piece that requires no annotation is a passage from Dryden’s translation of Book IV of Lucretius dealing with sexual positions, often reprinted under the title “The Posture.” 

 

Of like importance is the posture too,

In which the genial feat of Love we do:

For as the females of the four foot kind,

Receive the leapings of their Males behind;

So the good Wives, with loins uplifted high,

And leaning on their hands the fruitful stroke may try:

For in that posture will they best conceive:

Not when supinely laid they frisk and heave;

For active motions only break the blow,

And more of Strumpets than of Wives they show;

When answering stroke with stroke, the mingled liquors flow.

Endearments eager, and too brisk a bound,

Throws off the Plow-share from the furrow’d ground.

But common Harlots in conjunction heave,

Because ’tis less their business to conceive

Than to delight, and to provoke the deed;

A trick which honest Wives but little need.

 

     The notion of Dryden as Dryasdust is hardly compatible with this bit of advice in spite of its Latin source.  Lucretius maintains that making love face to face is typical of “Strumpets,” as it is said to be less likely to lead to conception than when women “Receive the leapings of their Males behind,” making this the appropriate position for married couples.  The putative interest in family planning covers an explicitly lubricious tone (“leapings,” “frisk and heave,” “mingled liquors”) as the artfully turned couplets tumble one after another toward the passage’s conclusion.  Its wit does not suffer from the fact that the reader may well think that even “honest Wives” may wish to employ “delight,” for their own sake as well as for their mates. 

     The background rhythm of iambic pentameter allows subtle variations to contribute significant sound effects.  For instance, the extra syllable in “genial” sounds like a grace note celebrating the joys of the bed.  The extra foot in “And leaning on their hands the fruitful stroke may try” recalls in sonic cadence the physical movements of love-making.  (The device occurs again a few lines later in “When answering stroke with stroke, the mingled liquors flow, where again the prolongation is palpable.)

     Absalom and Achitophel, a satire of over a thousand lines, is a prominent example of Dryden’s topical work, today much praised by specialists and little scanned by anyone else.  Readers wishing to understand the poem today must not only be more familiar than most moderns with the story from Samuel II of Absalom’s ill-considered rebellion against David, but also with the details of the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-1681 when some parliamentarians sought to exclude Charles II’s brother James from succession because of his Roman Catholicism.  The bills failed and James took the throne only to be deposed (after suspending Parliament and ruling for three years by decree) in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. 

    Understanding Dryden’s own politics is complicated by the fact that, when the Protectorate was in the ascendance, he worked for Cromwell’s government (as Milton and Marvell did) and wrote “Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell” in the praise of its leader in which he depicted the overthrow of Charles I as the founding of a new and better age.  Yet after the Restoration he scrambled to praise Charles II with equal enthusiasm. 

     Perhaps he was primarily a defender of the status quo. In one passage from Absalom and Achitophel he argues that any socio-political change will be for the worse, and therefore defends reaction as a general principle. 

 

If they may Give and Take when e'r they please,

Not Kings alone, (the Godheads Images,)

But Government it self at length must fall

To Natures state; where all have Right to all.

Yet, grant our Lords the People Kings can make,

What Prudent men a setled Throne would shake?

For whatsoe'r their Sufferings were before,

That Change they Covet makes them suffer more.

All other Errors but disturb a State,

But Innovation is the Blow of Fate.

If ancient Fabricks nod, and threat to fall,

To Patch the Flows, and Buttress up the Wall,

Thus far 'tis Duty; but here fix the Mark:

For all beyond it is to touch our Ark.

To change Foundations, cast the Frame anew,

Is work for Rebels who base Ends pursue:

At once Divine and Humane Laws controul;

And mend the Parts by ruine of the Whole.

The Tampering World is subject to this Curse,

To Physick their Disease into a worse.

 

     Thus, while no moralistic pedant, he was definitely conservative politically.  One must imagine a vision of an ignorant mob behind the “they” of the first line of this passage describing those who wish to arbitrarily alter the order of things, though in doing so they are very nearly blasphemous (as the king is the “image” of Godhead).  Radicals are, like Lucifer, rebels against both “Divine and Humane Laws.”   For some this preference for avoiding change is an adequate explanation of his shifting loyalties, and the fear of disorder conveniently conflates with a writer’s appeals for the patronage of the powerful.  The image of reformers as quack doctors who increase rather than relieve suffering must have had resonance for seventeenth century patients.

     A passage from the mock-heroic epic Mac Flecknoe exemplifies Dryden’s vituperative polemical style.  The entire work is devoted to ridiculing Thomas Shadwell, a rival playwright and political opponent whom Dryden considers the Emperor of “all the realms of Non-sense.”   The tone of the work is suggested by the fact that Dryden, by suppressing Shadwell’s name and writing instead “Sh----,” a convention that allows the reader to take the word to be shit as in “But loads of Sh—— almost choakt the way.”  In the following passage Dryden describes the devolution of drama since Elizabethan times, paralleled by the decline in a neighborhood which once included defensive fortifications implying an age of heroism, but which has since become a red-light district.  “Augusta” in  the first line is simply a name for London.  

 

Close to the walls which fair Augusta bind,

(The fair Augusta much to fears inclin’d)

An ancient fabrick, rais’d t’inform the sight,

There stood of yore, and Barbican it hight:

A watch Tower once; but now, so fate ordains,

Of all the pile an empty name remains.

From its old Ruins Brothel-houses rise,

Scenes of lewd loves, and of polluted joys.

Where their vast Courts, the Mother-Strumpets keep,

And, undisturb’d by Watch, in silence sleep.

Near these a Nursery erects its head,

Where queens are form’d, and future heroes bred;

Where unfledg’d actors learn to laugh and cry,

Where infant punks their tender voices try,

And little Maximins the gods defy.

Great Fletcher never treads in buskins here,

Nor greater Jonson dares in socks appear;

But gentle Simkin just reception finds

Amidst this Monument of vanisht minds:

Pure Clinches, the suburbian Muse affords;

And Panton waging harmless war with words.

Here Flecknoe, as a place to fame well known,

Ambitiously design’d his Sh—–‘s throne.

 

     In this scene the urban decay is apparent in the “Ruins” of old buildings, moral decline in the proliferation of prostitution, and aesthetic weakness in the popularity of clownish characters like Simkin and Panton.  The scene is for Dryden a “Monument of vanish’d minds.” 

     A song from one of Dryden’s plays provides relief from the rolling pentameters of the preceding three poems.   This piece from Marriage à la Mode was popular enough to have been included in the 1673 book Choice Songs and Ayres for One Voyce, so we can imagine people singing it at home after hearing it in the theater.

 

I

Why should a foolish marriage vow,

Which long ago was made,

Oblige us to each other now,

When passion is decayed?

We loved, and we loved, as long as we could,

Till our love was loved out in us both;

But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled:

’Twas pleasure first made it an oath.

 

II

If I have pleasures for a friend,

And further love in store,

What wrong has he, whose joys did end,

And who could give no more?

’Tis a madness that he should be jealous of me,

Or that I should bar him of another:

For all we can gain, is to give ourselves pain,

When neither can hinder the other.

 

     The Puritans had closed the theaters in 1642 and, in reaction, when drama returned in 1660 following Charles II’s taking the throne, the stage, only just free from several decades of prohibition, filled with libertines and loose women.  Reminiscent of the sophisticated hedonism of Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things” and familiar enough in an age when some espouse polyamory, this song must have offered audiences the thrill of transgression in the late seventeenth century. 

     Perhaps Dryden might object that this selection has leaned on his slightly improper poems.  If so, the intention  has simply been to challenge his reputation as dull and to make him accessible to readers unfamiliar with his work or with the period.  It is not, however, altogether inaccurate. Pepys, after all, hardly a prude himself, objected to Dryden’s play An Evening’s Love as “too smutty.”  Dryden was one of the last who could write of most any topic in verse with a poised and witty tone, constructing elaborate  rhetorical periods well-shaped and balanced, juggling abstractions often, it seems, simply for the fun of it.  At the same time in his own way he assumed the laureateship quite seriously, speaking for the nation in celebrations of royalty in poems like Britannia Rediviva and Threnodia Augustalis. 

     Like his contemporary Milton, Dryden does not enjoy the favor of modern taste.  This may be all the more reason that the reader may find in him something unexpected and once again new.  His craftsmanship and ingenuity remain exemplary in an age when the sound of poetry is largely neglected and rhetoric, long the heart of literary theory, has acquired a bad name.  Dryden’s mastery of the poetic line is evident throughout his work.  His poetry as well as his plays are at their best when read aloud. 

A Question about John Pomfret

 

Pomfret’s “The Choyce” is appended.  Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes, those in parentheses to lines of the poem.  I have here been somewhat casual with the proprieties expected in quasi-scholarly writing.  See note following the essay.  

 

     The novice world traveler is likely at first to make it a point to stop by those sites already over-familiar from a thousand pictures: the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, but later trips may turn to neighborhoods and parklands that attract fewer visitors.  The reader has a parallel experience.  One can only once read for the first time the Iliad or Quixote or Rabelais or Hamlet, and the experience is wondrous and staggering, yet, having encountered such grand prospects, one wishes at times to wander in less-frequented purlieus of literature where the pleasures may be less potent but offer instead a certain piquant novelty.

     A bookish flâneur, I sought just such a mental excursion by reviewing a few passages in what is surely one of the finest works of general applied criticism, Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets.  While his theory may be creaky, Johnson’s taste is generally on the mark, and, more than many old critics, he provides evidence for his reactions.  I determined to simply select at random a poet of whom I was wholly ignorant and have a look to see what Johnson saw in him (all fifty-two if Johnson’s choices are men).

    One of the poets whose names meant nothing to me, but whom Johnson considered important, drew my attention.  Johnson’s account of John Pomfret runs less than a page but includes a startling claim: “Perhaps no composition in our language has been oftener perused than Pomfret's Choice.”  Pronouncing a well-formulated dictum (as was his habit) that expresses skepticism of the poet’s worth, Johnson then declares “He pleases many; and he who pleases many must have some species of merit.”  Even the word “peruse,” the reader realizes, had been chosen to suggest a more casual engagement the reader requires from “great” literature. 

     Johnson’s observation about Pomfret’s popularity is substantiated by the fact that his works went through sixteen editions during the eighteenth century.  In a magisterial tone, Johnson accounts for the poet’s popularity by the patronizing comment that he “has been always the favourite of that class of readers, who, without vanity or criticism, seek only their own amusement.” 

     Johnson was not alone in feeling that the poet enjoyed more prestige than sophisticated readers would think he deserved.  In 1753 Theophilus Cibber noted those who held Pomfret’s work “in very great esteem” were specifically the “common” readers, “people of inferior life” who appreciate the fact that “there is little force of thinking in his writings” as that makes the poems “level to the capacities of those who admire them.” [1]  The ambiguity of Pomfret’s standing is evident in Southey’s question in 1807: "Why is Pomfret the most popular of the English poets? The fact is certain, and the solution would be useful.” [2]  Leigh Hunt’s “The Choice” (1823) imitates Pomfret, but Hunt opens by calling his model “trivial” and his poem “A pretty kind of -- sort of -- kind of thing.”

    The poem that “sort of” inspired Hunt was Pomfret’s most popular composition, “The Choyce,” a piece in  heroic couplets outlining an idealized life plan in retirement from London in  a country estate.   The poem had an impeccable pedigree, with influence from Horace, as well as sharing its theme with other respected poems such as Cowley’s “The Wish.”

    The sentiments Pomfret expressed in the poem were far from original; they emphasized moderation and temperance in all things, “not little, nor too great” (6), the old ideal of nothing in excess, μηδὲν ἄγαν as the oracle once put it.  [3]  the writer wishes only for what is “Useful, Necessary, Plain,” (10) which to him must include “a Clear and Competent Estate,/ That I might live Genteelly, but not Great.”  Eschewing “The needless Pomp of gawdy Furniture” he will feed on “healthful, not luxurious Dishes” .  Pomfret spends fourteen lines assuring his reader that he would  not drink too much (53-64).  Rather, he would enjoy books of “the Noblest Authors,” both ancient and modern, dispense charity so that “the Sons of Poverty” might not “Repine” “Too much at Fortune.”  He describes his chosen friends at length, using balanced  periods to reaffirm that they, too, follow “the middle way,” as they are, for instance, “Merry, but not Light” (82), “Close in Dispute, but not tenacious”(88), “Not Quarrelsom, but Stout enough to Fight” (93).  The reader feels something of the sensation of riding a see-saw.

     In an even longer passage (98-139), Pomfret describes his ideal female company, some “Modest-Fair” from whom he may obtain “Fresh Vital Heat” [3].  She, too, is the soul of temperance.

 

No Fear, but only to be proud, or base:

Quick to advise by an Emergence prest,

To give good Counsel, or to take the best.

I'd have th' Expressions of her Thoughts be such,

She might not seem Reserv'd, nor talk too much;

That shows a want of Judgment, and of Sense:

More than enough, is but Impertinence.        (114-120)          

 

In spite of her exemplary character, he would see her only “seldom” and “with Moderation,” “For highest Cordials all their Virtue lose,/ By a too frequent, and too bold an use” (137).

     With his strong allegiance to social norms, he is, of course, patriotic and willing to serve.

 

T' oblige my Country, or to serve my King,

Whene'er they call'd, I'd readily afford,

My Tongue, my Pen, my Counsel, or my Sword. (143-145)

 

     He anticipates preparation for death and the aid of “Some kind Relation” (157) to take over his affairs “While I did for a better State prepare” (159).  His life plan is so emphatically mainstream that he feels confident that, given the choice, “All Men wou'd wish to live and dye like me” (167).  Far from the Romantic idea of representing himself as a distinct and idiosyncratic genius, he is guided by the neo-Classical ideal familiar from  Pope’s Essay on Criticism: “What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd.” 

    While writers who retread familiar ground may expect, at least at first, a greater readership than those that strike out in new directions, it remains difficult to imagine a writer who so definitively fulfills every reader expectation, who affirms every received idea so perfectly as to become a veritable prince of mediocrity, yet this is Johnson’s explanation of Pomfret’s popularity.  By  definition the bulk of the writing of any age is fundamentally “ordinary,” yet some authors, it seems, please their readers by paradoxically excelling at ordinariness.  For over a hundred years Pomfret was praised and admired for his perfect rendition of the average, the expectable, reassuring readers of their perspicuity and good taste by endorsing their idées reçues.  While his secret for besting dozens of other predictable writers may remain elusive, once he had become popular, his position would naturally reinforce itself.  Just as some of today’s bourgeoises might show they are au courant having attended the most popular Broadway shows, in Pomfret’s day and for a good while after, they could do so by demonstrating familiarity with his work. 

     Some authors’ popularity is more easily explicable: Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, Allen Ginsberg, and Dylan Thomas were public characters who sometimes behaved extravagantly.  In a time when fewer people read poetry, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, and Leonard Cohen won fame by casting their poetry in the genre of popular music.  Perhaps the closest parallel to Pomfret’s celebrity may be found in writers like Edgar Guest, Joyce Kilmer, Ted Kooser, and Billy Collins [4] who have proven comforting and highly digestible to large numbers of readers.  Each of them, like Pomfret, satisfies readers by affirming the correctness of their preconceptions in easy and competent verse.

 

 

1.  Theophilus Cibber, “The Life of the Revd. Mr. John Pomfret,” in The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland vol. III.

2.  Robert Southey, Specimens of Later English Poets, I, 91.

3.  This passage of the poem proved controversial.  Johnson says that, just as Pomfret was about to assume an ecclesiastical “living,” a “malicious” informant delayed his departure, alleging that “The Choyce” suggested a mistress was preferable to a wife.  Remaining in the city to answer the charge, Pomfret (who was himself married) contracted smallpox and died. 

4.  A dramatic example is the synthetic Rumi composed using other English versions by Coleman Barks which proved immensely popular in the 1990s, offering contemporary Americans a Sufism in which they felt instantly at home..  

 

 

An apologia

     The modest liberties of tone I have here allowed myself may seem out of place in a commentary with any scholarly pretensions.  Academic essays are usually written in a rigid form, sometimes betraying an anxious effort to appear learned, sometimes to sound scientific.  Inspired once by a lecture from William Arrowsmith about a French T. S. Eliot poem which he cast as a dialogue among recognizable faculty types, published then as “Eros in Terre Haute: T. S. Eliot’s ‘Lune de Miel’”,  I once proposed a session of conference papers which had in common deviation from the standard thesis-proof format.  None were submitted. 

     I consider this piece pure recreation, though the reader might object that everything I write could be so described.  Opening with a reflection on tourism, I stroll off into a text of Dr. Johnson, finding my way then into Pomfret with divigations toward Horace, Cowley, and others.  To me the exercise constitutes a sort bracing mental dérive, to use the Situationist term.

 

 

 

The Choyce

 

If Heav'n the grateful Liberty wou'd give,
That I might chuse my Method how to live:
And all those Hours propitious Fate shou'd lend,
In blissful Ease and Satisfaction spend.
Near some fair Town I'd have a private Seat,
Built Uniform, not little, nor too great:
Better, if on a rising Ground it stood,
Fields on this side, on that a Neighb'ring Wood.
It shou'd within no other Things contain,
But what are Useful, Necessary, Plain:                            10
Methinks, 'tis Nauseous, and I'd ne'er endure
The needless Pomp of gawdy Furniture:
A little Garden, grateful to the Eye,
And a cool Rivulet run Murmuring by:
On whose delicious Banks a stately Row
Of shady Lymes, or Sycamores, shou'd grow.
At th' end of which a silent Study plac'd,
Shou'd with the Noblest Authors there be grac'd.
Horace and Virgil, in whose mighty Lines,
Immortal Wit, and solid Learning Shines.                           20
Sharp Iuvenal, and am'rous Ovid too,
Who all the turns of Loves soft Passion knew:
He, that with Judgment reads his Charming Lines,
In which strong Art, with stronger Nature joyns,
Must grant, his Fancy do's the best Excel:
His Thoughts so tender, and exprest so well;
With all those Moderns, Men of steady Sense,
Esteem'd for Learning, and for Eloquence:
In some of These, as Fancy shou'd advise,
I'd always take my Morning Exercise.                                   30
For sure, no Minutes bring us more Content,
Than those in pleasing useful Studies spent.
I'd have a Clear and Competent Estate,
That I might live Genteelly, but not Great.
As much as I cou'd moderately spend,
A little more sometimes t'oblige a Friend.
Nor shou'd the Sons of Poverty Repine
Too much at Fortune, they shou'd taste of Mine;
And all that Objects of true Pity were,
Shou'd be reliev'd with what my Wants cou'd spare;        40
For what our Maker has too largely giv'n,
Shou'd be return'd in gratitude to Heav'n.
A frugal Plenty shou'd my Table spread,
With healthful, not luxurious Dishes, fed:
Enough to satisfy, and something more
To feed the Stranger, and the Neighb'ring Poor.
Strong Meat indulges Vice, and pampering Food
Creates Diseases, and inflames the Blood.
But what's sufficient to make Nature Strong,
And the bright Lamp of Life continue long,                          50
I'd freely take, and as I did possess
The bounteous Author of my Plenty bless.
I'd have a little Cellar, Cool, and Neat,
With Humming Ale, and Virgin Wine Repleat.
Wine whets the Wit, improves its Native Force,
And gives a pleasant Flavour to Discourse;
By making all our Spirits Debonair,
Throws off the Lees, the Sedement of Care.
But as the greatest Blessing Heaven lends
May be debauch'd, and serve ignoble Ends;                       60
So, but too oft, the Grapes refreshing Juice,
Does many mischievous Effects produce.
My House, shou'd no such rude Disorders know,
As from high Drinking consequently flow.
Nor wou'd I use what was so kindly giv'n,
To the dishonour of Indulgent Heav'n.
If any Neighbour came he shou'd be free,
Us'd with respect, and not Uneasy be,
In my Retreat, or to himself, or me.
What Freedom, Prudence, and Right Reason give,       70
All Men, may with Impunity receive:
But the least swerving from their Rules too much;
For what's forbidden Us, 'tis Death to touch.
That Life might be more comfortable yet,
And all my Joys refin'd, sincere and great,
I'd chuse two Friends, whose Company wou'd be
A great Advance to my Felicity.
Well born, of Humours suited to my own;
Discreet, and Men as well as Books have known.
Brave, Gen'rous, Witty, and exactly free                         80
From loose Behaviour, or Formality.
Airy, and Prudent, Merry, but not Light,
Quick in discerning, and in Judging Right;
Secret they shou'd be, faithful to their Trust,
In Reasoning Cool, Strong, Temperate and Just.
Obliging, Open, without huffing, Brave;
Brisk in gay Talking, and in sober Grave.
Close in Dispute, but not tenacious, try'd
By solid Reason, and let that decide;
Not prone to Lust, Revenge, or envious Hate;              90
Nor busy Medlers with Intrigues of State.
Strangers to Slander, and sworn Foes to spight,
Not Quarrelsom, but Stout enough to Fight:
Loyal and Pious, Friends to Caesar true
As dying Martyrs to their Maker too.
In their Society I cou'd not miss,
A permanent, sincere, substantial Bliss.
Wou'd bounteous Heav'n once more indulge, I'd chuse
(For, who wou'd so much Satisfaction lose,
As Witty Nymphs in Conversation give)                      100
Near some obliging Modest-Fair to live;
For there's that sweetness in a Female Mind,
Which in a Man's we cannot find;
That by a secret, but a pow'rful Art,
Winds up the Spring of Life, and do's impart
Fresh Vital Heat to the transported Heart.
I'd have her Reason, and her Passions sway,
Easy in Company, in private Gay.
Coy to a Fop, to the Deserving free,
Still constant to her self, and just to me.                   110
A Soul she shou'd have for great Actions fit,
Prudence, and Wisdom to direct her Wit.
Courage to look bold danger in the Face,
No Fear, but only to be proud, or base:
Quick to advise by an Emergence prest,
To give good Counsel, or to take the best.
I'd have th' Expressions of her Thoughts be such,
She might not seem Reserv'd, nor talk too much;
That shows a want of Judgment, and of Sense:
More than enough, is but Impertinence.                   120
Her Conduct Regular, her Mirth refin'd,
Civil to Strangers, to her Neighbours kind.
Averse to Vanity, Revenge, and Pride,
In all the Methods of Deceit untry'd:
So faithful to her Friend, and good to all,
No Censure might upon her Actions fall.
Then wou'd ev'n Envy be compell'd to say,
She goes the least of Womankind astray.
To this fair Creature I'd sometimes retire,
Her Conversation wou'd new Joys inspire,               130
Give Life an Edge so keen, no surly Care
Wou'd venture to assault my Soul, or dare
Near my Retreat to hide one secret Snare.
But so Divine, so Noble a Repast,
I'd seldom, and with Moderation taste.
For highest Cordials all their Virtue lose,
By a too frequent, and too bold an use;
And what would cheer the Spirits in distress,
Ruins our Health when taken to Excess.
I'd be concern'd in no litigious Jarr,                          140
Belov'd by all, not vainly popular:
Whate'er Assistance I had power to bring
T' oblige my Country, or to serve my King,
Whene'er they call'd, I'd readily afford,
My Tongue, my Pen, my Counsel, or my Sword.
Law Suits I'd shun with as much Studious Care,
As I wou'd Dens, where hungry Lyons are;
And rather put up Injuries, than be
A Plague to him, who'd be a Plague to me.
I value Quiet, at a Price too great,                           150
To give for my Revenge so dear a Rate:
For what do we by all our Bustle gain,
But counterfeit Delight for real Pain.
If Heav'n a date of many years wou'd give,
Thus I'd in Pleasure, Ease, and Plenty live.
And as I near approach'd the Verge of Life,
Some kind Relation (for I'd have no Wife)
Shou'd take upon him all my Worldly Care,
While I did for a better State prepare.
Then I'd not be with any trouble vext,                  160
Nor have the Evening of my Days perplext.
But by a silent, and a peaceful Death,
Without a Sigh, Resign my Aged Breath:
And when committed to the Dust, I'd have
Few Tears, but Friendly, dropt into my Grave.
Then wou'd my Exit so propitious be,
All Men wou'd wish to live and dye like me.

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.