A Century of Poetic Diversity
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing A CENTURY OF POETIC DIVERSITY by PHOEBE PETTINGELL The canon of 18th-century poetry seems firmly established. Most of us know what works are likely to make up any anthology. The...
...It was Pope, naturally, who said "The proper study of mankind is man...
...Poets and readers now trusted instinct and feeling as truer sources of the muse than reason...
...Fine by defect, and delicately weak...
...or some black heath, Where straggling stand the mournful juniper, Or yew-trees scathed...
...Ease, Richard, ease, not to be bought with wampum, Nor paper money...
...By 1789, though, Blake's "Songs of Innocence" proved the new simplicity anything but insipid...
...by religious enthusiasms Methodist and Moravian extremes sparked...
...The greatest sameness of 18th-century verse is its structure...
...while in clear prospect round, From the grove's bosom spires emerge, and smoke In bluish wreaths ascends, ripe harvests wave, Low lonely cottages, and ruined tops Of Gothic battlements appear, and streams Beneath the sunbeams twinkle...
...Johnson's ponderous "The Vanity of Human Wishes" and Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard...
...he wanted to be new...
...Editor Roger Lonsdale aims to demonstrate "agreater diversity of style, form, and content in the period, particularly after the death of Pope, than is usually conceded...
...I Breath not the chaos of eternal smoke / And volatile corruption...
...thine eyes full of tears for thy friends, whom the mist of the hills had concealed...
...To begin with, since the previous Oxford anthology covering the era was published in 1926, a major poem was rediscovered (in 1939): "Jubilate Agno" by Christopher Smart...
...They make one understand even the familiar satires and bucolics in a new light: as fragments of a pacific civilization shored against the ruin caused by urban blight and industrializing the rural landscape...
...The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse (Oxford, 870 pp., $25.00), however, has been designed to irrevocably alter that image...
...Halfway through the anthology, an apparently innocuous entry conceals the bombshell that exploded classicism in 1760...
...Depending on the compiler's tastes, we might also find Edward Young's "Night Thoughts, "or perhaps George Crabbe's " Peter Grimes" (the inspiration for Benjamin Britten's opera...
...Republicans exhorted English workers to throw off their chains...
...Ease is the delight of bloody Caghnawagas...
...Elevated language nicely set off their barbs...
...The supreme poet of the age, almost its acknowledged legislator, he characterized our species as "The glory, jest, and riddle of the world...
...Sometimes, prosody appealed in direct proportion to its difficulty...
...Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man spawned, among many parodies, a semiserious plea against the subjugation of pigs, and a lampoon on " The Rights of Infants.'' Several poets deplored the American Revolution as a civil war with "brother by brother slain...
...Still, the final impression of the era left by Lonsdale's anthology remains consistent with at least some of our original picture based on Sterne's and Fielding's novels, Hogarth's paintings, and the poems that reveal people engaged in every facet of human activity and behavior...
...by radical philosophy from Voltaire and Rousseau to Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, and the revolutions it wrought...
...The discovery of his deception led the boy to commit suicide at 17, a tragedy that only whetted the emerging literary appetite for the primitive...
...and Martial's epigrams, with clever alterations, served to puncture reputations at the courts of Queen Anne or the four Georges...
...Their style and sensibility was forecast even while the Augustans were honing epigrammatic couplets...
...Latin Christian hymns also gave rise to a new English Church music and poetry—the creations of Isaac Watts, John and Charles Wesley and William Cowper remain recognizable today to churchgoers of many faiths...
...George III seems to have been a favorite butt because of his putative in-sensitivity, speech mannerisms and general incompetence...
...Classical Augustan poets valued wit and the finely tuned phrase...
...conservatives admonished them by warning about the collapse of an already precarious economy...
...Sapphics rarely sound natural in English, yet the challenge of showing that they could prompted even pious Isaac Watts to try his hand...
...As educated men and women read the classics in the original and translated them, those who knew little Latin and Greek imitated the results...
...thy bosom heaving upon the sight...
...Their happy spots the nice admirer take...
...Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland" by James Macpherson is really the notorious "Ossian" forgery—newborn Romanticism misrepresented as an ancient Celtic answer to Homer...
...These lines from "The Enthusiast: or The Lover of Nature" look ahead to Wordsworth (Lonsdale includes two prescient odes to Tintern Abbey as well...
...In fact, the collection as a whole proves beyond question that the great Romantics—Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth—did not suddenly appear from nowhere, as has been generally assumed...
...Not everyone was enamored of complexity, of course...
...The century also produced The Beggar's Opera, popular ballads on current events, and the Mother Goose rhymes...
...thy hair floating on the wind behind thee...
...Significantly, Lonsdale demonstrates that lesser Scottish poets were already writing dialect verses in a similar vein by then, although it took Burns' lyric genius to capture the attention of London critics...
...In 1725, Henry Carey, author of "Sally in our Alley," parodied the burgeoning plain style in " Namby-Pamby: or A Panegyric on the New Versification...
...The artist no longer wanted to sound like the accepted classical models...
...Lamenting the hardships of barracks life in the wilderness, he writes his friend: Ease is the wish of the sly Canadian...
...Lonsdale has not been able to unearth anything of similar caliber himself...
...Macpherson' s prose-poems are not inspiring to us:" Sad are my thoughts as I sit alone...
...To Lieutenant Montgomery" by Thomas Morris, a British officer stationed on Lake Champlain in 1761 during the French-Indian wars...
...Here is Pope turning his sour misogyny into elegant aphorism: Ladies, like variegated tulips, show, 'Tis to their changes that their charms we owe...
...In any case, Baroque artifice was succumbing to a growing desire for naturalism...
...In 1744 Joseph Wharton contemplated the ornate fountains of Versailles, then decided: Yet let me choose some pine-topped precipice A brupt and shaggy, where a foamy stream, LikeAnio, tumbling roars...
...Juvenal's Roman satires were easily adapted to London's exchanges, theaters, malls, and coffee houses...
...The towering reputation indubitably belongs to Alexander Pope, for the era would be impoverished without his mock-heroic epic, "The Rape of the Lock," his rhymed criticism, or "An Essay on Man...
...Written in Bedlam, London's infamous madhouse, it presages blank verse, and its exuberance teeters between the most sublime passages of Biblical revelation and mania...
...Robert Burns' authentic Scotch poems became a sensation...
...Many looked askance at the transportation of con victs to such outposts of the British Empire as Georgia and Australia...
...Politics provides an amusing sideshow as represented in this anthology, especially for an American reader...
...But he has resurrected numerous "submerged poets"—minor, lost figures— whose works prove that the century's social, political and religious upheavals affected its poetry after all...
...The popularity of "Fragments" was soon encored by Per-cy'si?e/;'9uejofElizabethan(andearlier) songs, enhanced to satisfy Protestant readers possessing a taste for ghosts and gray friars...
...In 1768 the adolescent Thomas Chatterton tried to pass off some ballads he had written in mock Chaucerian English as genuine medieval productions...
...Our overall picture, in short, is of a poetry that is classical, critical, marmoreal in its fixed ideals—devoted to reason rather than feeling...
...When all is said and done, The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse delightfully illustrates those words...
...John Armstrong, in 1736, advised all who cared about their health to "Fly the rank city, shun its turbid air...
...But clumsy as such pieces were, they evoked a primitive wildness in readers of the day, who believed them to be translations and therefore ignored the stylistic crudities...
...Didst thou but appear, O my love, a wanderer on the heath...
...Of the numerous quirky examples Lonsdale provides, my absolute favorite is "At the Mohawk-Castle, Canada...
...I have seen nothing elsewhere quite like the section where Smart considers his cat, Jeoffry...
...Spenser and Milton were the English Olympians: Copying their verse forms and Latinate language constituted a passport to style...
...Thus pastoral poetry came to describe the British peasantry in terms of Theocritus' or Virgil's Stre-phons and Chloes...
...And while verses extolling Noble Savages may have been inspired less by genuine aborigines than by reading Rousseau, native beggars prompted a variety of poetic reactions ranging from social satire—with lowlife thieves pointing a finger at more exalted targets—to social outrage at dehumanizing poverty...
...Inviting his audience to admire "hydraulics new,/Machines and rolling-mills with pleasure view," James Bisset praised progress in 1800 as " the wond' rous workofstillmore wond'rous man...
...No collection would be complete either without a representative selection of Swift's acid satires, Dr...
...Others anticipated Blake's vision of "dark Satanic mills...
Vol. 68 • March 1985 • No. 3
