Confronting Impotence in Seventeenth Century Verse

Numbers in parentheses refer to lines of the poems, those in brackets to endnotes.  The poems by Rochester, Behn, and Etherege follow the essay in the order in which they are discussed.

 

      A significant portion of lyric poetry concerns love, and the greater part focuses on the pains of love-longing.  Few poems celebrate the joys of married life.  Yet pitfalls exist for the lover apart from a stand-offish beloved.  Male impotence, though it seems very nearly a human obsession to judge from the array of nostrums (as well as legitimate medical interventions) that claim to treat it, is rarely the subject of poetry.  Indeed, what the advertisements today call E. D. has been considered such a source of shame that the very subject is often tabooed.

     In poetry, of course, language mediates the gap between the reader and experience, and there only rhetoric can ameliorate the world’s woes.  Restoration poets in England, often following the lead of France, devised a variety of strategies to confront sexual failure with language in a series of witty psychologically and socially revealing “imperfect enjoyment” poems [1].  In literary terms, these works represent yet another case of the transformation of convention, illustrating the generative possibilities of literary convention.  While maintaining the same narrative and sharing significant elements of tradition, each seventeenth century poet used rhetoric to develop a distinct tone accompanying significantly different thematic implications.

     In the Ovidian model for these impotence poems [2] the persona, while boasting of past sexual performances, finds himself at a loss.  He considers whether he might be the victim of magical spells [3], a likelihood the lady endorses, though she suggests the real reason may be his having just had sex with someone else.  The poem ends with her poised exit, comely yet as she exits, having given up and bid farewell to the would-be lover.  In spite of her sprightly dismissal of her partner, the reader may infer a certain male defensiveness in the posited causes for his failure.  Neither a magic spell nor sexual exhaustion impugn a man’s identity as simple impotence might, and the poem maintains a tone of sophisticated play in spite of the man’s chagrin.  In the end the woman’s unnecessary washing indicates an agreement to keep the evening’s disappointment to themselves.  As worldly lovers, they have experienced such a scene before.

     The seventeenth century writers who composed what have come to be employ several different strategies to displace the distress caused by impotence.  In the most well-known of these, the Earl of Rochester’s “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” the most significant innovation is to describe the basic difficulty as a case of ejaculation praecox rather than impotentia coeundi.  Thus the problem may be ascribed in part to an excess rather than a lack of erotic excitement.  This crisis occurs in line fifteen of a seventy-two line poem, allowing the author to spend his remaining rhetoric on denouncing his unfaithful member, which he had mock-heroically praised as an “all-dissolving thunderbolt.” (10)  Though he had earlier, with neo-Platonic language, expected his genitals to “convey my soul up to her heart,” (13) (an inversion of the courtly concept of love entering at the eyes), the lover’s sexual enthusiasm outlives his erection which has become a “dead cinder” (33), a “withered flower.” (45)  Having fallen from Jovian lightning-dispensing power, his penis is now “a rakehell villain who shrinks and hides his head” (57), a “base recreant” (61), finally to appear entirely objectified, passive, and disagreeable, “a common fucking-post” (63) for porcine whores to rub against. 

     Rochester’s poem concludes with a grandly extravagant seven-line curse, a comic display in which he calls down venereal disease upon his penis, condemning it never again even to piss.  This malediction is animated by the speaker’s libertinism, apparently undiminished even if he cannot personally participate.  This motive, a kind of disembodied erotic enthusiasm, blends with the blustering tone of an embarrassed sexual failure to construct a sublimely comic picture of sexual ambition and the ridiculous self-denunciation which at once foregrounds and covers his actual lack of satisfactory performance.  The poem may be read as a satiric portrait of both the intensity of sexual desire and the ludicrous male reaction to an encounter that becomes an embarrassing debacle.

     Aphra Behn’s “The Disappointment” resembles Rochester’s in theme and in the implication of premature ejaculation.  The lovers’ disappointment is attributed to an “Excess of Love” (88); he has been “or'e ravish'd” (69), betrayed by “Pleasure, which too much Love destroys” (75).

 

       . . . the Shepherdesses Charms ;

Whose soft bewitching influence,

Had Damn’d him to the Hell of Impotence.

                                        (138-140)

 

     The tone, however, dramatically differs from Rochester.  In literary terms, in spite of the reference to a “Shepherdess” (138), Rochester observes no pastoral conventions, presenting his couple more or less realistically.  Behn’s use of pastoral names for her couple invokes a tradition in which love songs and songs of love-longing are common, a tradition which makes ample allowance for satire as well.  Her conclusion is a scene from Poussin with nymphs, Daphne, Apollo, and Venus added to the use of “Shepherdess.”  In this pretty confection the flurry of references provides ironic distance from the bed, and vituperation, so significant in Rochester’s poem, plays little role in Behn’s.

     A more radical deviation, doubtless the aspect attracting the most comment in recent years, is the greater complexity of the woman’s psychology in “The Disappointment.”  Whereas neither Ovid nor Rochester contains any indication of reluctance on the woman’s part, in Aphra Behn’s poem Cloris’ attitude is more problematical.  Though she submits because she could “defend her self no longer” (4) and she clearly declares that she might as well die as submit to his desire (29), she still “permits his force” (14) and, indeed, seeks through her actions “to draw him on” (17).  This ambivalence is consistent to the end, saying “Cease — cease” (25), yet “each touch” awakens “new Desires” (35).  On the one  hand, the lovers are belligerents and her body a besieged city, (“the Spoils and Trophies of the Enemy” [40]), yet both are “in Transports” (53).  She is a sacrificial victim (46 and 58) yet she seeks to excite him  (103) and finds his genitals like a betraying “snake,” not for their threat but due to inability to perform (110).  She feels in the end ambivalence, “Disdain and Shame” (118) both because of the woman’s place in society which prizes chastity in respectable women while valuing sexual “conquest” in men.  Some critics have thought that the lady is merely expressing conventional objections she does not feel, though it seems far more likely that both her attraction and aversion toward sex are genuine and well-justified, though contradictory.

     Another variation is added to the structural play of the transformation of convention with the playwright George Etherege’s “The Imperfect Enjoyment” though the basic scenario is unchanged: the coming together, the unsuccessful love-making, and the lady’s retreat.  Her psychomachia over consent is dismissed as a becoming pose of “modesty” (3), such that she resists “with pleasing force” (2).  His persona views the woman’s actions as complex and dialectic; her eyes and her arms have different goals, but the entire pursuit is thus rendered only the more titillating, the revelation of her body becomes a lengthy tease, part of their sophisticated mutual erotic game. [4]  “To save a lily she must lose a rose” (14).  Yet, in the end, when about to initiate intercourse, in the martial imagery absent in Ovid but appearing in both Rochester and Behn, the lover finds himself “dead at the foot of the surrender’d wall” (30). 

     Rather than generating a flow of invective as in Rochester or the Classical pastoral tapestry woven by Behn, Etherege exploits the situation to create neatly balanced rhetorical formulae, often paradoxical after the manner of an Oscar Wilde play.   The effect is sparkling wit.   Virtually every line is a bipolar balance in partial self-contradiction.  In the poem’s last twelve lines I count no less than eleven such figures in a rhetorical tour de force.   

 

We’d had more pleasure had our loves been less.            

She blush’d and frown’d, perceiving we had done            

The sport she thought we scarce had yet begun.         40

Alas, said I, condemn yourself, not me,  

This is th’ effect of too much modesty.   

Hence with that peevish virtue, the delight          

Of both our victories was lost i’ the fight;             

Yet from my shame your glory does arise,                     45

My weakness proves the vigour of your eyes:     

They did consume the victim ere it came              

Unto the altar, with a purer flame:          

Phyllis, let then this comfort ease your care,       

You’d been more happy had you been less fair.          50

 

 

Here opposed are pleasure and love, the blush (indicating acquiescence) and the frown (suggesting resistance), finish and start, female and male, victory and loss, shame and glory, weakness and strength, presence and absence, comfort and care, happiness and beauty.  All are natural or near antonyms except the first and last, already prominent by position, which thereby receive increased attention.   The neat wit of the concluding line caps a dazzling display of conceptual manipulation in which the “pretty amorous discourse,” while disrupted in the story’s imaginative world, is so adroitly managed on the page that the potency of the poet is restored through his adept use of language.  What ends in railing for Rochester, and in something like a painted screen in Behn, seems in Etherege calculated, part of the set-up for a display of flashy one-liners.

     Rochester found enough potential for variation in the convention to write another poem titled “The Imperfect Enjoyment.”  This version is utterly different in tone from its better-known namesake.  Though the plot-line remains the same, the persona in this piece never loses equipoise.  A rhetoric of balanced periods built of bipolar oppositions presents a resolution in art and sound if not in lived experience. 

     The opening line might puzzle the modern reader: “Fruition was the question in debate.”  At issue is the value of orgasm, often taken as the measure of sexual success.  For D. H. Lawrence and for Norman Mailer in the twentieth century the pursuit of the perfect orgasm acquired immense significance.  Yet in the seventeenth century a small subgenre of poems questioned the value of coming to “fruition.”  For Henry King, for instance fruition is “the bane” that undoes love.  [5]  Rochester seeks a “middle way,” in which sexual denial only heightens pleasure and “feigned virtue” is “but a bawd to vice.” (8)  Again eliding the greater hazard for women in sexual indulgence, he treats his lover’s resistance as coyly coquettish, yet cautions that it may end poorly with “the victor’s fate” being “to die at the entrance of the op’ning gate” (37-38).  He accepts responsibility for the failure of the encounter yet, instead of angry denunciations of his private parts, he adopts a cool position of sly wit.

 

But as a prodigal heir, I spent bye-the-bye,          

What, home directed, would serve her and I.

                                                                       (41-2)

 

The poem concludes with a plea for, of all things, sexual mutuality and even a sort of temperance.

 

For love turns impotent, when strained too high;              

His very cordials, make him sooner die, 

Evaporates in fume the fire too great;    

Love’s chemistry thrives best in equal heat.

        (45-48)

 

 

     Having traced an aggressive and vituperative male voice, half-wild with the very idea of sex, self-obsessed and pushed into transgressive language in Rochester, and a more elegant though also more conflicted female voice in Behn, retreating behind the pastoral stage set, the reader finds in Etherege a more poised and polished response to sexual failure, and finally, in a return to Rochester, a measured and confident compromise.  If the anxieties of sexual performance and the ambivalences of sexual relations in a patriarchal society are not resolved, they seem to dissolve in the poise and polish of these poems. 

     Through alterations in the timbre, as one might say, of the poet’s rhetoric each has dismissed the problems of male/female relations and of sexual ego in the way of art, much as a stage magician will distract the viewer with a flourish of a scarlet handkerchief.  Yet each transformation of the “imperfect enjoyment” convention implies a specific attitude and values.  The ranting anger of one poem by Rochester corresponds to irritable frustration in mood and selfishness in love, justified by what might be called faith in the importance and profundity of sexual experience.  Behn explores female ambivalence, and illustrates the politic considerations she, and not he, must bear in mind.  Then in Etherege the reader encounters the pleasure of structural play, similar to that experienced by listeners to the Goldberg Variations.  While the reader’s interest may be maintained by the subject matter of love, the poet’s aim is less to comment on that topic than to put together becoming structures of language.  The second poem by Rochester presents the theme well-digested, thoroughly processed by a progression of authors, the rhetoric tired out by use, its possibilities plumbed, though the theme is certain to return in new dress.

 

 

 

 

1.  The term was first used by Richard Quaintance in “French Sources of the Restoration ‘Imperfect Enjoyment’ Poem,” Philological Quarterly Vol. 42, No. 2,  (Apr 1, 1963).  The French models for such poems, Quiaintance’s principal topic, is not part of the present inquiry.

 

2.  Amores 3.7 which was translated by Marlowe among others.  While Ovid is by far the most important influence, Petronius (Satyricon, 128-140) and Tibullus (I, 5) may play a role as well.

 

3.  Impotence remains a common reason to suspect witchcraft in Africa today.  The fear of “penis-snatchers” is one contemporary form of this suspicion.

 

4.  Martial provides a neat statement of the idea.  “Do you ask what sort of maid I desire or dislike, Flaccus? I dislike one too easy, and one too coy. The just mean, which lies between the two extremes, is what I approve; I like neither that which tortures, nor that which cloys.” (1,57  “To Flaccus”)

 

5.  King’s “Paradox. That Fruition Destroyes Love” says

Fruition therefore is the bane t'undoe

Both our affection and the subject too.

'Tis Love into worse language to translate,

And make it into Lust degenerate.

Suckling wrote two poems against fruition, and Aphra Behn “To Alexis in Answer to his Poem against Fruition.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Imperfect Enjoyment

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

 

Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms,

I filled with love, and she all over charms;

Both equally inspired with eager fire,

Melting through kindness, flaming in desire.

With arms, legs, lips close clinging to embrace,             [5]

She clips me to her breast, and sucks me to her face.

Her nimble tongue, Love’s lesser lightening, played

Within my mouth, and to my thoughts conveyed

Swift orders that I should prepare to throw

The all-dissolving thunderbolt below.                              [10]

My fluttering soul, sprung with the painted kiss,

Hangs hovering o’er her balmy brinks of bliss.

But whilst her busy hand would guide that part

Which should convey my soul up to her heart,

In liquid raptures I dissolve all o’er,                                 [15]

Melt into sperm, and spend at every pore.

A touch from any part of her had done’t:

Her hand, her foot, her very look’s a cunt.

Smiling, she chides in a kind murmuring noise,

And from her body wipes the clammy joys,                 [20]

When, with a thousand kisses wandering o’er

My panting bosom, “Is there then no more?"

She cries. “All this to love and rapture’s due;

Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?"

But I, the most forlorn, lost man alive,                         [25]

To show my wished obedience vainly strive:

I sigh, alas! and kiss, but cannot swive.

Eager desires confound my first intent,

Succeeding shame does more success prevent,

And rage at last confirms me impotent.                       [30]

Ev’n her fair hand, which might bid heat return

To frozen age, and make cold hermits burn,

Applied to my dead cinder, warms no more

Than fire to ashes could past flames restore.

Trembling, confused, despairing, limber, dry,            [35]

A wishing, weak, unmoving lump I lie.

This dart of love, whose piercing point, oft tried,

With virgin blood ten thousand maids have dyed;

Which nature still directed with such art

That it through every cunt reached every heart — [40]

Stiffly resolved, ’twould carelessly invade

Woman or man, nor aught its fury stayed:

Where’er it pierced, a cunt it found or made —

Now languid lies in this unhappy hour,

Shrunk up and sapless like a withered flower.          [45]

 

Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame,

False to my passion, fatal to my fame,

Through what mistaken magic dost thou prove

So true to lewdness, so untrue to love?

What oyster-cinder-beggar-common whore            [50]

Didst thou e’er fail in all thy life before?

When vice, disease, and scandal lead the way,

With what officious haste dost thou obey!

Like a rude, roaring hector in the streets

Who scuffles, cuffs, and justles all he meets,          [55]

But if his king or country claim his aid,

The rakehell villain shrinks and hides his head;

Ev’n so thy brutal valour is displayed,

Breaks every stew, does each small whore invade,

But when great Love the onset does command,    [60]

Base recreant to thy prince, thou dar’st not stand.

Worst part of me, and henceforth hated most,

Through all the town a common fucking-post,

On whom each whore relieves her tingling cunt

As hogs do rub themselves on gates and grunt,    [65]

May’st thou to ravenous chancres be a prey,

Or in consuming weepings waste away;

May strangury and stone thy days attend;

May’st thou ne’er piss, who did refuse to spend

When all my joys did on false thee depend.           [70]

 

   And may ten thousand abler pricks agree

   To do the wronged Corinna right for thee.

 

 

 

The Disappointment

Aphra Behn

 

1

ONE Day the Amarous Lisander,

By an impatient Passion sway’d,

Surpris’d fair Cloris, that lov’d Maid,

Who cou’d defend her self no longer ;

All things did with his Love conspire,

The gilded Planet of the Day,

In his gay Chariot, drawn by Fire,

Was now descending to the Sea,

And left no Light to guide the World,

But what from Cloris brighter Eyes was hurl’d.     10

 

2

In alone Thicket, made for Love,

Silent as yielding Maids Consent,

She with a charming Languishment

Permits his force, yet gently strove ?

Her Hands his Bosom softly meet,

But not to put him back design’d,

Rather to draw him on inclin’d,

Whilst he lay trembling at her feet;

Resistance ’tis to late to shew,

She wants the pow’r to say — Ah! what do you do? 20

 

3

Her bright Eyes sweat, and yet Severe,

Where Love and Shame confus’dly strive,

Fresh Vigor to Lisander give :

And whispring softly in his Ear,

She Cry’d — Cease — cease — your vain desire,

Or I’ll call out — What wou’d you do ?

My dearer Honour, ev’n to you,

I cannot — must not give — retire,

Or take that Life whose chiefest part

I gave you with the Conquest of my Heart.             30

 

4

But he as much unus’d to fear,

As he was capable of Love,

The blessed Minutes to improve,

Kisses her Lips, her Neck, her Hair !

Each touch her new Desires alarms !

His burning trembling Hand he prest

Upon her melting Snowy Breast,

While she lay panting in his Arms !

All her unguarded Beauties lie

The Spoils and Trophies of the Enemy.                    40

 

5

And now, without Respect or Fear,

He seeks the Objects of his Vows ;

His Love no Modesty allows :

By swift degrees advancing where

His daring Hand that Alter seiz’d,

Where Gods of Love do Sacrifice ;

That awful Throne, that Paradise,

Where Rage is tam’d, and Anger pleas’d ;

That Living Fountain, from whose Trills

The melted Soul in liquid Drops distils.                   50

 

6

Her balmy Lips encountring his,

Their Bodies as their Souls are joyn’d,

Where both in Transports were confin’d,

Extend themselves upon the Moss.

Cloris half dead and breathless lay,

Her Eyes appear’d like humid Light,

Such as divides the Day and Night;

Or falling Stars, whose Fires decay ;

And now no signs of Life she shows,  cont

But what in short-breath-sighs returns and goes. 60

 

7

He saw how at her length she lay,

He saw her rising Bosom bare,

Her loose thin Robes, through which appear

A Shape design’d for Love and Play;

Abandon’d by her Pride and Shame,

She do’s her softest Sweets dispence,

Offring her Virgin-Innocence

A Victim to Loves Sacred Flame ;

Whilst th’ or’e ravish’d Shepherd lies,

Unable to perform the Sacrifice.                               70

 

8

Ready to taste a Thousand Joys,

Thee too transported hapless Swain,

Found the vast Pleasure turn’d to Pain :

Pleasure, which too much Love destroys !

The willing Garments by he laid,

And Heav’n all open to his view ;

Mad to possess, himself he threw

On the defenceless lovely Maid.

But oh ! what envious Gods conspire

To snatch his Pow’r, yet leave him the Desire !      80

 

9

Natures support, without whose Aid

She can no humane Being give,

It self now wants the Art to live,

Faintness it slacken’d Nerves invade :

In vain th’ enraged Youth assaid

To call his fleeting Vigour back,

No Motion ’twill from Motion take,

Excess of Love his Love betray’d ;

In vain he Toils, in vain Commands,

Th’ Insensible fell weeping in his Hands.                     90

 

 10

In this so Am’rous cruel strife,

Where Love and Fate were too severe,

The poor Lisander in Despair,

Renounc’d his Reason with his Life.

Now all the Brisk and Active Fire

That should the Nobler Part inflame,

Unactive Frigid, Dull became,

And left no Spark for new Desire ;

Not all her Naked Charms cou’d move,

Or calm that Rage that had debauch’d his Love.      100

 

11

Cloris returning from the Trance

Which Love and soft Desire had bred,

Her tim’rous Hand she gently laid,

Or guided by Design or Chance,

Upon that Fabulous Priapus,

That Potent God (as Poets feign.)

But never did young Shepherdess

(Gath’ring of Fern upon the Plain)

More nimbly draw her Fingers back,

Finding beneath the Verdant Leaves a Snake.           110

 

12

Then Cloris her fair Hand withdrew,

Finding that God of her Desires

Disarm’d of all his pow’rful Fires,

And cold as Flow’rs bath’d in the Morning-dew.

Who can the Nymphs Confusion guess ?

The Blood forsook the kinder place,

And strew’d with Blushes all her Face,

Which both Disdain and Shame express ;

And from Lisanders Arms she fled,

Leaving him fainting on the gloomy Bed.                   120

 

13

Like Lightning through the Grove she hies,

Or Daphne from the Delphick God ;

No Print upon the Grassie Road

She leaves, t’ instruct pursuing Eyes.

The Wind that wanton’d in her Hair,

And with her ruffled Garments plaid,

Discover’d in the flying Maid

All that the Gods e’re made of Fair.

So Venus, when her Love was Slain,

With fear and haste flew o’re the fatal Plain.            130

 

14

The Nymphs resentments, none but I

Can well imagin, and Condole ;

But none can guess Lisander‘s Soul,

But those who sway’d his Destiny :

His silent Griefs, swell up to Storms,

And not one God, his Fury spares,

He Curst his Birth, his Fate, his Stars,

But more the Shepherdesses Charms ;

Whose soft bewitching influence,

Had Damn’d him to the Hell of Impotence.                 140

 

 

 

The Imperfect Enjoyment

Sir George Etherege

 

AFTER a pretty amorous discourse,          

She does resist my love with pleasing force;        

Moved not with anger, but with modesty,            

Against her will she is my enemy.             

Her eyes the rudeness of her arms excuse,                   5

Whilst those accept what these seem to refuse; 

To ease my passion and to make me blest            

The obliging smock falls from her whiter breast.

Then with her lovely hands she does conceal      

Those wonders chance so kindly did reveal.                  10

In vain, alas! her nimble fingers strove   

To shield her beauties from my greedy love:       

Guarding her breasts, her lips she did expose,    

To save a lily she must lose a rose.          

So many charms she has in every place,                     15

A hundred hands cannot defend each grace.       

Sighing at length her force she does recall,          

For since I must have part she’ll give me all.        

Her arms the joyful conqueror embrace,              

And seem to guide me to the sought-for place:           20

Her love is in her sparkling eyes express’d,           

She falls o’ the bed for pleasure more than rest.

But oh, strange passion! oh, abortive joy!            

My zeal does my devotion quite destroy:             

Come to the temple where I should adore                    25

My saint, I worship at the sacred door;  

Oh, cruel chance! the town which did oppose     

My strength so long, now yields to my dispose;  

When overjoy’d with victory I fall            

Dead at the foot of the surrender’d wall,                       30

Without the usual ceremony, we             

Have both fulfilled the amorous mystery;             

The action which we should have jointly done,   

Each has unluckily perform’d alone;        

The union which our bodies should enjoy,                    35

The union of our eager souls destroy.     

Our flames are punish’d by their own excess,     

We’d had more pleasure had our loves been less.            

She blush’d and frown’d, perceiving we had done            

The sport she thought we scarce had yet begun.         40

Alas, said I, condemn yourself, not me,  

This is th’ effect of too much modesty.   

Hence with that peevish virtue, the delight          

Of both our victories was lost i’ the fight;             

Yet from my shame your glory does arise,                     45

My weakness proves the vigour of your eyes:     

They did consume the victim ere it came              

Unto the altar, with a purer flame:          

Phyllis, let then this comfort ease your care,       

You’d been more happy had you been less fair.          50

 

 

 

The Imperfect Enjoyment

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

 

Fruition was the question in debate,       

Which like so hot a casuist I state,           

That she my freedom urged as my offense          

To teach my reason to subdue my sense;             

But yet this angry cloud, that did proclaim                    5

Volleys of thunder, melted into rain;       

And this adult’rate stamp of seeming nice,          

Made feigned virtue but a bawd to vice;

For, by a compliment that’s seldom known,         

She thrusts me out, and yet invites me home;              10

And these denials, but advance delight, 

As prohibition sharpens appetite;            

For the kind curtain raising my esteem,  

To wonder as the opening of the scene, 

When of her breast her hands the guardians were,    15

Yet I salute each sullen officer:  

Tho’ like the flaming sword before my eyes,        

They block the passage to my paradise; 

Nor could those tyrant-hands so guard the coin,

But love, where’t cannot purchase, may purloin:         20

For tho’ her breasts are hid, her lips are prize,    

To make me rich beyond my avarice;      

Yet my ambition my affection fed,           

To conquer both the white rose and the red.      

The event proved true, for on the bed she sate           25

And seemed to court what she had seemed to hate;       

Heat of resistance had increased her fire,            

And weak defense is turned to strong desire.      

What unkind influence could interspose,              

When two such stars did in conjunction close?            30

Only too hasty zeal my hopes did foil,    

Pressing to feed her lamp, I spilt my oil; 

And that which most reproach upon me hurled, 

Was dead to her, gives life to all the world,         

Nature’s chief prop, and motion’s primest source,      35

In me lost both their figure and their force.         

Sad conquest! When it is the victor’s fate,           

To die at the entrance of the op’ning gate:          

Like prudent corporations had we laid    

A common stock by, we’d improved our trade;            40

But as a prodigal heir, I spent bye-the-bye,          

What, home directed, would serve her and I.     

When next in such assaults I chance to be,          

Give me less vigour, more activity;          

For love turns impotent, when strained too high;      45

His very cordials, make him sooner die, 

Evaporates in fume the fire too great;    

Love’s chemistry thrives best in equal heat.         

Thomas Browne’s Religion of Sensibility

 

Quotations are cited in parentheses by the section (often a paragraph) in which they appear, using the symbol §, as few readers will have a copy like my own, a 1912 Everyman reprint.  A single section reference may refer to several quotations, cited after the last.  One online text with numbered sections is available at https://penelope.uchicago.edu/relmed/relmed.html.

 

     Those with a taste for English prose relish the sonorous rhetoric of Sir Thomas Browne, yet he has a more modest reputation as a thinker.  Indeed, though a physician and something of a Baconian at times, Browne is fundamentally a poet, marveling equally at himself and the curious phenomenal world.   Yet to make his Religio Medici a testament of faith, a sensibility drawn to excavating buried urns and buried thoughts had to accommodate to orthodoxy.  The candid self-reflection which underlies so much of Browne’s musing yields finally to an assertively conventional faith, yet Browne’s aesthetics provide a more heart-felt faith: he marvels at the wonders of creation, in the details of which he spies divine sparks and creates then lovely structures of prose the beauty of which glows, just as the beauties of nature do, with a light not quite numinous, but nonetheless reassuring.

     The essay’s very title, “a physician’s religion,” specifies the dualism.  In the book’s opening line Browne observes that many might assume from his profession that he has no belief at all. (§ 1.1)  To Browne human beings are “amphibious,” caught “betweene a corporall and spirituall essence, that middle forme that linkes those two together,” though people are ultimately “the breath and similitude of God.” (§1.34)  Yet Browne is dissatisfied with simply describing the scientific and the spiritual as wholly separate realms; he finds in his observations of nature inductive proofs of conventional religious principles in plenty.  On the other hand, his evaluation of the evidence of his senses that forms the chief foundation (apart from authority) for his beliefs is highly subjective, impressionistic even, but for that very reason convincing to him.

     Browne does repeatedly acknowledge that he accepts Christianity as a given, revealed in scripture and accepted by the believer with a faith all the more admirable for lacking a rational basis.   Thus he declares his religion “an humble faith” which follows strictly “the great wheel of the Church,” “not reserving any proper Poles or motion from the Epicycles of my own brain.” (§1.6)  He maintains that to believe in something “which indeed my reason would perswade me to be false” is particularly meritorius.”  “And this I think is no vulgar part of faith to believe a thing not only above, but contrary to reason, and against the arguments of our proper senses.” (§1.10)  He argues that “it is an insolent part of reason to controvert the works of God, or question the justice of his proceedings; Could humility teach others, as it hath instructed me, to contemplate the infinite and incomprehensible distance betwixt the Creator and the creature, or did wee seriously perpend that one Simile of Saint Paul, Shall the vessell say to the Potter, Why hast thou made me thus?” (§1.52) 

     Browne may strike the skeptic as a bit self-interested, in his courtier-like efforts to curry divine favor.  In spite of his willingness to read heretical and even atheistic books and his temptation “during the time of his “greener studies” (§1.6) by several quaintly antique heresies, he assures us that what he calls his “discreet beliefe” (§1.21) was never shaken “as to encline me to any point of infidelity.” (§1.20)  His lengthy defense sounds as like an attorney pleading a case (as Browne doubtless was, though it may be only with himself).

 

“These opinions I never maintained with pertinacity, or endeavoured to enveagle any mans beliefe unto mine, nor so much as ever revealed or disputed them with my dearest friends; by which meanes I neither propagated them in others, nor confirmed them in my selfe, but suffering them to flame upon their own substance, without addition of new fuell, they went out insensibly of themselves; therefore these opinions, though condemned by lawfull Councels, were not Heresies in me, but bare Errors, and single Lapses of my understanding, without a joynt depravity of my will.” (§1.7)

 

With such care to remain orthodox, Browne declares himself confident of his own salvation, though, as “an humble soule,” to avoid presumption he is careful to add that he dares not take an oath on it.  (§1.57)  While claiming to be altogether unafraid of death, he is punctilious about asserting his bona fides as a pious and simple believer. 

     Browne insists that the discoveries of science, far from controverting the claims of religion, strengthen them.  He describes his as a “mysticall Philosophy, from whence no true Scholler becomes an Atheist, but from the visible effects of nature, growes up a reall Divine, and beholds not in a dreame, as Ezekiel, but in an ocular and visible object the types of his resurrection.”  (§1.46)  For him as for those reading the book of nature in the Middle Ages, every natural fact has a symbolic significance.  In his view “this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein as in a pourtract, things are not truely, but in equivocall shapes; and as they counterfeit some more reall substance in that invisible fabrick.”  He is confident that “in this masse of nature there is a set of things that carry in their front, though not in capitall letters, yet in stenography, and short Characters, something of Divinitie.” (§1.12)

     Thus Browne worships god by studying nature – he is religious because of his medical knowledge, not in spite of it.   Meditating on the spectacle of natural phenomena, Browne grandly asserts “Natura nihil agit frustra,” and declares that every circumstance reveals God’s glory.  The evidence of the human body with which as a physician he was intimately familiar, is compelling and readily available.  He studies “the Cosmography of my selfe.”  To his insatiable curiosity “there is all Africa, and her prodigies in us.”  The miracles of scripture are to him less wonderful than “that bold and adventurous piece of nature” which is the human body.  All creatures are to him equally beautiful as all share a divine origin. (§1.15)

     In the tightly wound dialectic of Browne’s thought, religion must rest upon faith rather than reason, though he would like to think that his own belief is based on scientific knowledge.  Yet the reader notices a further twist yet.  Though built on information from natural history, Browne’s reverence arises from a mystical response to those data.  His language clearly indicates the character of his insights.  He has a taste, he confesses for “the mysticall way of Pythagoras, and the secret Magicke of numbers.”  He is an adherent, he says, “of the Philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible.  Attracted always to “Ænigmaes, mysteries and riddles” (§2.6), he is fascinated by “those strange and mysticall transmigrations that I have observed in Silkewormes” and it is in fact the extent to which such facts “seeme to puzle reason” that they turn “Philosophy into Divinity.” (§1.38)  There is an esoteric element: Browne feels he sees “more . . . then the eye of a common spectator doth discover.”  (§1.38)

     Not only does Browne feel that meditation on the creation can vault his consciousness into sublime regions; he can be similarly inspired by works of art.  “I can looke a whole day with delight upon a handsome picture, though it be but of an Horse.” He finds in human works the same potential for  beauty, signaled by a “musicke” that arises “where-ever there is a harmony, order or proportion” reflecting  the “musick of the spheares” whose “well ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the eare, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony.”  He finds indeed that all music “even that vulgar and Taverne Musicke, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in mee a deepe fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first Composer, strikes in mee a deepe fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first Composer.”  (§2.9)      

It is an Hieroglyphicall and shadowed lesson of the whole world, and Creatures of God, such a melody to the eare, as the whole world well understood, would afford the understanding. In briefe, it is a sensible fit of that Harmony, which intellectually sounds in the eares of God. I will not say with Plato, the Soule is an Harmony, but harmonicall, and hath its neerest sympathy unto musicke: thus some, whose temper of body agrees, and humours the constitution of their soules, are borne Poets, though indeed all are naturally inclined unto Rhythme.”  (§2.9)      

 

     The intimations of the divine Browne finds in art are the result of self-reflection; his proof lies in his aesthetic capacity that suggests a divinely ordered cosmos, the universe as a work of art by analogy, more than the data of a given poem, picture, or piece of music.  “The world that I regard is my selfe, it is the Microcosme of mine owne frame, that I cast mine eye on; for the other, I use it but like my Globe, and turne it round sometimes for my recreation.” (§2.12)   

. . . that masse of flesh that circumscribes me, limits not my mind: that surface that tells the heavens it hath an end, cannot perswade me I have any; I take my circle to be above three hundred and sixty, though the number of the Arke do measure my body, it comprehendeth not my minde: whilst I study to finde how I am a Microcosme or little world, I finde my selfe something more than the great. (§2.12)   

     His religion of sensibility, founded on an exhilarated celebration of the creation rather than doctrinal enthusiasm, makes him exceedingly tolerant and liberal for his age.  He finds Catholic ritual affecting in spite of doctrinal differences and is willing even to recognize non-Christian piety (though he retains an uncharacteristically nasty animosity to Jews).  He finds uplift, the reader recalls, even in “Taverne Musicke.” (On the stoics see § 1.43; on pagan philosophers in general  §1.53, on acceptance of all Christians §1.54; on Jews §1.25 and §2.4; on general lack of ethnic prejudice §1.59 and 1.65.)

     Given his spirituality based on aesthetics, it is unsurprising that the good doctor finishes with a spectacular rhetorical flourish on love.  Splitting dualisms with paradox Browne tosses into the air the question of what  is real and what is “a story out of Pliny, an apparition, or neat delusion.” (§ 2.15)  He sounds almost as though he is proposing a koan when he says “a man may bee buried alive, and behold his grave in his owne issue.” (§2.14)  Indeed Browne’s argument embraces self-contradiction as he proceeds in a dialectical manner.  After saying that religion is a matter for faith alone, Browne scrambles to assure the reader that his belief has a rational base as well.  He then suggests that his religion is at base a subjective impression based on a sense of the beautifully organized cosmos, the aesthetic design of which implies a creator.  Just as he insists that each human is a microcosm reflecting the whole of the phenomenal world, his own prose style in this lovely essay reproduces that natural beauty, as for him humanity’s creativity is a god-like quality.  In the end, his protestations of faith seem almost adventitious.  He takes solace, as do his readers, in a variety of the “argument from desire” best-known from C. S. Lewis.  He reminds me as well of a twentieth century nonbeliever, Wallace Stevens, who sought with his notion of a “supreme fiction” to restore a sort of faith without accepting Christian dogma.  Readers unlikely to be swayed by Browne’s reasoning nonetheless may find his sensibility wholly convincing, and words can hardly aspire higher than to portray with accuracy a state of consciousness.  This Browne has done with precision and passion and taste.

Scandals of the Romantic Poets

 

     This, like my piece on “The Hazardous Lives of the Sonneteers,” is meant to be more semi-journalistic and descriptive than scholarly.  This time, though, I did not suppress the endnotes.

 

      Artists today are often expected to be to some extent counter-cultural, displaying bohemian behavior and radical opinions, but this assumption is largely a recent one in the last two hundred years.  In Great Britain and in Europe, writers associated with the Romantic movement adopted a combative attitude toward their own societies, leading to the use of the term, originally military, avant-garde.  [1]  This general characterization of artists as rebels, often compounded of a mixture of reactionary philistine prejudice and accurate observation, though never encompassing all writers and painters, has been critical in the arts since. 

    In their own day the British Romantic poets were accused of every sort of immorality and, though it has no bearing on the evaluation of their writing, there was a good deal of substance to many of the charges against them. [2]  Many did seek to challenge the received ideas of their day, and these views, along with personal irregularities which may occur among all classes (but are perhaps more highlighted among artists) led to their condemnation by the guardians of propriety.  Drug abuse, irreligious views, and political radicalism, as well as lurid sexual irregularities were all alleged of the writers associated with Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and Byron.  Without inquiry into why many of the principal poets of the day behaved, at least in youth, in ways that strayed so considerably from the norm, an assemblage of some of the data exploited by their critics looks hardly less sensational than stories from the National Enquirer. 

     In the Romantic era, the non-medical use of psychotropic drugs lacked a good deal of the cultural significance it has since acquired.  Opium and cannabis were not associated with artists; they were not even illegal and were soon to be ubiquitous in the formulation of panaceas.  Then as now, many addicts began with a doctor’s prescription.  Yet semi-recreational use existed as well.  Southey and Coleridge joined in “experiments” at the Pneumatic Institute inhaling nitrous oxide with such prominent scientists as Humphry Davy, Thomas Beddoes, and James Watt. [3]   

     With the conquest of India by Great Britain, opium became widely available and closely followed alcohol as the chief active ingredient of patent medicines.  Though consumed throughout English society, the medicinal preparation called laudanum was popular among the poets to such an extent that a number of books have focused on their use. [4]  Coleridge attributed “Kubla Khan” to an opium dream, and the poet’s lifelong use of the drug and his attempts to control, if not to cease, his consumption are documented in letters and memoirs.  Even more notorious was his friend, the essayist Thomas De Quincy, whose Confessions of an English Opium-Eater was a sensation in 1821.  Shelley took to carrying laudanum on his person to take against anxiety.  Crabbe, Jane Austen’s favorite poet and admired in his day by Byron and Scott, took opium for forty years.  Keats’ use of the drug is certain, but his degree of use is not. 

     Scholars continue to debate to what extent opium use influenced poetry.  Though opium’s effects are primarily soporific, many writers reported psychedelic effects on sensation and imagination, perhaps using the drug to justify flights of fancy and sublimity they would have experienced in any event.  Very like the drug users among the Beats, the Romantics drug use both to an expansion of vision and to a view of the artist as transgressive.  Whereas most earlier writers had striven either to cultivate connections with the power structure in the interests of patronage or, by the eighteenth century, to appeal to a bourgeois readership, this group considered themselves a counter-culture, and the subjective heavens and hells of opiate use doubtless intensified their belief in the primacy of the imagination. 

     Though opium consumption was no crime, admitting to unorthodox religious views not only attracted the strongest social opprobrium but was illegal as well. [5]  Shelley was expelled from Oxford for publishing The Necessity  of Atheism. [6]  He developed a sort of pantheism, claiming that “the universe is God” and arguing that Deism was reasonable and Christianity supported only by emotion.  He must “war against [the Christian god] for the sake of truth.” [7]  Wordsworth in his early work sounds very like a pantheist and Coleridge described him approvingly as “at least” “a semi-atheist,” [8] though both came to defend the Established Church later in life. 

     Coleridge himself had become a free-thinker upon reading Voltaire as a schoolboy, before slowly drifting back through Unitarianism to orthodoxy.   Often labeled an atheist, Byron throughout his life expressed an ambivalence about Christianity.  In his preface to his Vision of Judgement, an encomium praising George III, Southey (who had been in political and religious questions as radical as other Romantics) attacks the “Satanic school” of poets as “men of diseased hearts and depraved imaginations, who, forming a system of opinions to suit their own unhappy course of conduct, have rebelled against the holiest ordinances of human society, and hating that revealed religion which, with all their efforts and bravadoes, they are unable entirely to disbelieve.”  [9]  Conservative forces claimed that Byron’s clubfoot indicated his diabolism. [10]  In his youth Southey had been known as an atheist, though he was always willing to acknowledge “an intelligent first cause.” [11]  To the public the poets’ behavior considered along with such literary projections as Byron’s Manfred and Cain and Shelley’s Prometheus to leave little doubt that the whole group were rebels against heaven. 
     In politics virtually all the Romantics were originally supporters of the French Revolution, a view which made them radicals in their day.  Wordsworth made two trips to revolutionary France where he attended meetings of the Jacobin Club and the National Assembly and composed his “Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff” who had criticized the revolutionary regime.  He rapidly turned conservative in politics as well as religion, by 1818 advocating what he called a “softened feudalism” [12]

     Shelley, on the other hand, maintained a consistently revolutionary view.  His “Song to the Men of England” could hardly be plainer:

 

The seed ye sow, another reaps;

The wealth ye find, another keeps;

The robes ye weave, another wears;

The arms ye forge, another bears.

 

And there is perhaps no more bitter line of political poetry in English literature that the first of Shelley’s “England in 1819” which calls George III “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King,”  The poem concludes with a hopeful prospect of a glorious Phantom” which “may burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.”  Indeed Marx’s daughter was proud to claim him as a socialist.  [13] 

     Likewise supporters of France, Coleridge and Southey planned an egalitarian commune in America, to be governed by the principles of "pantisocracy," meaning rule by all and “aspheterism” or the collective ownership of all property.  Unsurprisingly, the project was never far advanced.   The two collaborated on The Fall of Robespierre commenting on the events in France.  In 1796 Coleridge published a short-lived newspaper The Watchman in Bristol which argued for the universal suffrage and the abolition of the slave trade.

     Leigh Hunt, though less read now than his friends Keats and Shelley, was a political influence on the Romantic circle.  In a series of journals beginning with The Examiner he published articles critical of the British government and, in particular, of the Prince Regent, later George IV.  Charles Lamb’s “The Triumph of the Whale” ridiculed the “Prince of Whale’s” corpulence and dissipation.  Hunt’s own piece “The Prince on St. Patrick’s Day” (with epigrams by Lamb) in which the prince is denounced as “a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in debt and disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who had just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country, or the respect of posterity." [14]  This language was sufficient to get Hunt and his brother (the printer) arrested for libel.  Though the Hunts had before been charged with libel, English juries had refused to convict them.  This time, however, the two were found guiltyand sentenced to two years in prison.  Something of a cause célèbre, Hunt took advantage of the corrupt practices of the day to make his accommodations in Surrey County Gaol a comfortable two-room private suite in the infirmary.  There he decorated his living space, concealing the bars behind Venetian blinds, papering the walls with floral prints, painting the ceiling with a cloudy sky, and importing flowers, books, and a piano, as well as comfortable couches.  According to Lamb, “there was no other such room, except in fairy tale.”  Attended by a servant, he there received a stream of visitors including Lamb, Byron and Thomas Moore. [15]  After he had served his term, when he went to Italy at Shelley’s invitation, the motive was in part to publish ta political paper not subject to British censorship. 

     It is a measure of the degree to which ideas of radical reform permeated the poetic scene of the day that even Keats, far less an activist partisan than others, left nevertheless no question of what side he was on in the contradiction between the wealthy and the working class.  His sonnet “Written On The Day That Mr. Leigh Hunt Left Prison” attracted an attack from Blackwood’s Magazine.  Perhaps the best statement of his political views is contained in a long letter from September 1819 in which he laments that the French Revolution stimulated a reaction which “spread a horrid superstition against all inovation and improvement – The present struggle in England of the people is to destroy this superstition. What has rous’d them to do it is their distresses – Perpaps on this account the pres’ent distresses of this nation are a fortunate thing – tho so horrid in the[i]r experience.”  To Keats “This is no contest beetween whig and tory – but between right and wrong.” [16]  The primary thrust of the aggressive ridicule of Keats in the conservative journals was his class origin.  The term “the Cockney school” [17] focused with unashamed class prejudice on the “plebian origins and education” of Keats and others.

     Byron defended the Luddites in the House of Lords where he had associated himself closely with radical reform.  For instance, in a stirring speech in 1812 he declared that Luddite demonstrators dismissed as a mob were in fact nothing but the country’s working people.

 

it is the mob that labour in your fields and in your houses – that man your navy and recruit your army – that have enabled you to defy all the world and can also defy you when neglect and calamity have driven them to despair. You may call the people a mob but not forget that a mob too often speaks the sentiments of the people.   [18]

 

 

Byron wrote for the radical British publication The Liberal and joined a secret society of Italian nationalists, and ultimately, of course, he died in service to what might be called an anti-colonial struggle. 

     While drug use and transgressive religious and political beliefs might offend many Britons, they surely took an even greater interest in the writers’ sexual lives.  Wordsworth had had a child with Annette Vallon in revolutionary France, and others of the Romantics had turbulent personal lives, but the real scandals concerned Shelley and Byron, who were accused of immorality based on behavior that, even today, would be condemned by most. [19] 

     Shelley had said of marriage in Queen Mab of marriage that "a system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness.”  Still, he eloped and married Harriet Westbrook, daughter of the owner of a thriving coffee house and schoolmate of his younger sister, in 1811 just after her sixteenth and his nineteenth birthdays.  Though they had two children, they had all but separated by the summer of 1814, when he eloped once more with Mary Godwin, herself sixteen at the time.  Her illegitimate step-sister Claire Clairmont accompanied them to Europe and remained with the ménage becoming Byron’s lover and mother of his child Allegra. 

     The complexities of life among these free-thinkers is suggested by the fact that some biographers think that, while socializing with Godwin’s family, Shelley had also been a lover of Fanny Imlay,  (daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and an American businessman) in 1814.  She committed suicide two years later as did Harriet Shelley, who was five months pregnant (there is debate about who the father may have been).  Meanwhile, Harriet’s sister Eliza had moved in with the couple and Shelley had conceived a passion (apparently unconsummated) for Elizabeth Hitchener, an unmarried schoolteacher, and suggested that she join the household, sharing all property. [20]  T. J. Hogg, the co-publisher with Shelley of The Necessity of Atheism, flirted with Harriet only -for Shelley to assure him he could not be jealous.  Later, he may well have encouraged Hogg and Mary to sleep together. [21]  During Shelley’s residence abroad, he fathered a child in Naples (falsely claiming when registering the birth that his wife was the mother).  He was involved as well in romantic attachments with Jane Williams, who lived with her lover in the same building as the Shelleys, as well as Sophia Stacey, who was staying at the same pension in Italy, and Teresa (Emilia) Viviani, teen-age daughter of the governor of Pisa and the muse of Epipsychidion.

     If providing even a brief summary of Shelley’s erotic involvements is difficult, to do the same for Lord Byron is impossible.  He was constantly pursuing both men and women.  His gay liaisons began the Trinity College choirboy John Edleston during his college days, and included his servant William Fletcher who attended Byron from 1804 until his death.  When he traveled to Greece, he felt much freer about homoerotic relationships and took numerous lovers including the fourteen-year-old Nicolas Giraud.  He indefatigably pursued his teenaged Greek page, Lukas Chalandritsanos, and, finding him uncooperative, managed to locate many who were more complaisant, reporting to his gay friends in England that he had managed over two hundred "pl and opt Cs,” a code for sexual indulgence derived from the phrase "coitum plenum et optabilem" in Petronius's Satyricon.

     He had as well an extraordinary number of heterosexual affairs, becoming perhaps the leading sex symbol of his time.  Most notoriously, he had an affair for years with his half-sister Augusta Leigh and very likely had a child with her.  In his “Epistle to Augusta” he imagines the joy of “a home with thee” and declares sentimentally, “The tie which bound the first endures the last!”

     In the interest of both cash and respectability he married Annabella Milbanke in 1815, but, following the birth of their daughter Ada the following December, she found his constant philandering (during this period he was linked to actress Charlotte Mardyn and Lady Caroline Lamb among many others) and she concluded that she could not live with him and sued for divorce. 

     The combination of his infamy and his debts caused him to go abroad in April 1816.  Though his reputation for sexual misdeeds was known to all, he was doubtless fleeing exposure for his gay lovers.   He was attacked in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in an article describing him as diabolical.  “It appears, in short, as if this miserable man, having exhausted every species of sensual gratification, -having drained the cup of sin even to its bitterest dregs, — were resolved to show us that he is no longer a human being even in his frailties, but a cool, unconcerned fiend, laughing with detestable glee over the whole of the better and worse elements of which human life is composed.”  As a result, Byron complains "I was advised not to go to the theatres, lest I should be hissed, nor to my duty in parliament, lest I should be insulted by the way; even on the day of my departure my most intimate friend told me afterwards that he was under apprehension of violence from the people who might be assembled at the door of the carriage." [22]  In Europe he cultivated an affair with a married woman Marianna Segati in whose house he was staying, then with another married woman, Margarita Cogni.  When he broke up with this last lover, she committed suicide.  He turned then to the Countess Teresa Guiccioli with whom he lived for several years.  At the time of his death he was lavishly patronizing a nine-year-old Turkish Muslim girl. 

     So the bill of particulars one wishing to condemn the Romantic poets might compile is varied, lengthy, and, in large part, well-substantiated.  Since then the actions of the poètes maudits, the Lost Generation, denizens of Greenwich Village, and the Beats have likewise been condemned.  Whatever the ethical lapses in the lives of the poets in any age, their behavior can have no relation to the evaluation of their work.  As much as the perceived contrast in beliefs and lifestyles between unconventional artists and those exemplifying the status quo may reveal about the social codes of their times and our own, such data have nothing to do with the reason we remember these men at all: their work.  In the evaluation of art terms such as immorality or blasphemy, sedition or dissipation can carry no weight.

     Yet the partial displacement of the arts from the central power structures of society has made a difference in both themes and styles.  It may be that a lineage of creative types stretching back to archaic semi-psychotic shamans, through wandering Old English scops like Widsith, gypsy goliards, minstrels and showpeople has long tended to act and think in somewhat more independent fashion than the local masters who, for all their wealth, were obliged to accept the assumptions of their time.  The bourgeois may have envied as well as condemned the free-thinker and free-liver, but it was not until the time of the Romantics that it came to be expected that artists often live by different rules than others. 

.

 

 

1.  The term was first used to describe art by was first used in the cultural sphere in 1825 by the Saint Simonian mathematician Olinde Rodrigues in his essay, “L’artiste, le savant et l’industriel.”

2.  Similar claims have been made concerning virtually every avant-garde movement since, often, as in the originating example, with some reason.  The attacks on Keats and Hunt focused more on their supposed “plebeian origin and education” to quote the letter from Z. (John Gibson Lockhart) in Blackwood’s for May 1818 now so8und thoroughly out of date.

3.  Laughing gas remained a subject of interest.  In the late nineteenth century William James and his associates used it in an attempt to experience mystical states.  See lectures XVI and XVIOI of Varieties of Religious Experience (1901).  James had earlier written an anonymous article on “The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy” in The Atlantic Monthly as well as an 1898 piece in the Psychological Review on “Consciousness Under Nitrous Oxide.”

4. The classic study is still M. H. Abrams The Milk of Paradise (1971), but see also the earlier Opium and the Romantic Imagination by Alethea Hayter (1968) and Elizabeth Schneider’s Coleridge, Opium, and Kubla Khan (1983).  Nicholas Roe claims in his John Keats: A New Life (2012) that Keats, too, was a regular user. 

5.  Britain’s blasphemy laws were not abolished until 2008 in England and Wales and 2021 in Scotland.  A similar law remains in effect in Northern Ireland.  The last conviction in England in 1977 involved a gay publication so doubtless homophobia played a role in that case.

6.  In  1834 a proposal to allow attendance by Dissenters was defeated in Parliament.  Until 1854 in order to matriculate at Oxford a student needed to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of Anglican faith.  In Cambridge the requirement lasted two years further and only in 1871 were non-Anglicans allowed to teach in those institutions. 

7.  Letter to Elizabeth Hitchener, June 20, 1822.

8.  Letter from Coleridge to John Thelwall May 13, 1796.

9.  Byron was then inspired to write his own Vision of Judgment in response and in his own preface he aggressively denounces Southey for rushing in “where he had no business” and accusing him of being a traitor to the progressive views he had once held. 

10.  One example is The Dorchester Guide; or, a house that Jack Built (1819), a satirical pamphlet of 1819.  The anonymous publication warns that “the mind is corrupted” by Byron’s “sweet and harmonious” poetry and says his real identity is revealed to those who “look at his feet,” a reference to his club-foot, for proof of his association with the devil.

11.  Letter of Robert Southey to John Prior Estlin, 9 April 1797.

12.  See his “Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland.”  He had accepted the patronage of Lord Lonsdale since 1813.

13.  Edward and Eleanor Marx-Aveling, “Shelley and Socialism,” To-Day, April 1888.

14.  The Examiner, 22 March 1812.

15.  See Leigh Hunt, Autobiography.

16.  To George & Georgiana Keats, September 17, 18, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 1819.

17.  The term, referring primarily to Keats, Hunt, and Hazlitt, originated in a series of eight hostile reviews in Blackwood's Magazine in 1817 and 1818.

18.  George Gordon Byron, The Works of Lord Byron including the suppressed poems complete in one volume (Paris, A. and W. Galignani, 1828), p. 555.

19.  While far greater latitude in lifestyle had been accepted through the twentieth century, the last few decades have seen a renewed wave of condemnation of certain artists and politicians on the basis of what is deemed by their critics unacceptable sexual behavior.

20.  Bieri, James (2008). Percy Bysshe Shelley: a biography. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 170, 193–5

21.  Richard Holmes, Shelley, the Pursuit (London:1974), pp. 391, 594, 678.

22.  “Some Observations upon an Article in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine,”  Blackwood’s, August 1819.  The response was unpublished until John Murray’s 1833 edition of The Works of Lord Byron.

 

Mike Jurkovic's Mooncussers

 

Mike Jurkovic, Mooncussers, Luchador Press.

      Mooncussers -- the title alone suggests the book poetic qualities of Mike Jurkovic’s new collection.  Jurkovic likes words, he likes to play with words, and this one is odd and unlikely, semi-obscure and yet colloquial, “pop” even, energetic and enigmatic enough to stand at the head of this new volume from Luchador Press. 

     That same affection for words emerges in his occasionally offbeat lexicon (such as “susurrus”) and unpredictable cultural references beginning with whatever share Disney’s feature may have had on the title but continuing through Billy the Kid, Baku the eater of nightmares, the oceanographer Marie Poland Fish, Buddha’s wife, and a dreadful torture device called the Judas Chair. 

     In the Hudson Valley Jurkovic is prominent as a reader and performer, a central figure in Calling All Poets, who continues to cultivate poetry in performance including the mainline hip tradition of poetry with jazz.  His lines should be read aloud, even by someone alone in a room. In that way his breath units are evident, not long Ginsbergian incantatory lines, but more like the musical phrasing of William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley.  

    His sensibility is shaped by jazz and rock, and a good number of the poems exhibit the disciplined but improvisatory measures of a musician “in the groove.”  This is true of his work in general, not only of his explicit celebrations of the music scene (as in “Breaching Aristotle [month 4],” “Brubeck’s Bar #6,” and “Ill Fitting Suit”).

     Jurkovic is capable of the pure lyric note as when he calls “the river a hug of diamonds.”  (“Grey Note”) or, in the lightest of passages

 

A lot of times

 (when rainbows preside)

I find myself dancing

through God’s good hour.

from  “Light Between Buildings”

 

  Now and then his righteous indignation bubbles over, as when he observes “In a Walmart In Kentucky” “that we condemn every besieged democracy/ but our own,” notes in “17 Two Miles North” that “another black kid’s gone down,” or laments the national obsession with guns in “The Merchant’s Receipt.”  As he comments in another piece “Have you read my stuff/ it’s freaking depressing,” but, then, “I don’t see stars anymore/ just bullet holes where the light sneaks in.” (“where the light sneaks in”)

     Most often, though, Jurkovic’s poetic eye is simply gazing reality in the face and managing to do the dance in spite of the fact that everything is marred by the fallenness of the world and it’s all inexplicable in the end: “They never really explain these things.”   (“Scuff Marks”)  Even in a noir world where a girl’s “bright wide eyes” are a moment later “cisterns of dream” (“Hat Check Girl”), watching vision take shape with poise and style is, if not redemptive, at least reassuring.  Mike Jurkovic is on the stage up front soloing all around and about the catastrophe, making big-hearted clever nudges to build another little machine of words, each offering the solace of company if not surcease of sorrow.

 

each mad essay

must cast doubt

on the one before.

            (Gracie)

 

     He places his words like the seamstress in “The Raw Edge,” “giving no inch more/ than one deserves.”   Jurkovic has woven an acute, engaging, and melodious fabric of vision in Mooncussers.   In his verses, so well-crafted as to seem offhand, he offers the greatest comfort we can enjoy here below, a bemused fellow human contemplating how strange it all is.  The reader might find in his poetry rewards similar to what he hears in music.

 

to hear Monk move

and give us

(in his own disturbed grace)

the inside track

on the outside joke

                     (“Breaching Aristotle [month4]”)