THE METAPHYSICALS TO THE ROMANTICS, AND MORE

THE METAPHYSICALS

Why were they called the ‘Metaphysical Poets’? Why not. You see, that’s the sort of air of mystery they cultivated. If you find yourself having to define the term, fall back on the following words: figurative, visionary, incorporeal. Then change the subject.

JOHN DONNE (1572-1631)

John Donne, ex-Roman Catholic, secret marrier, part-time soldier, Anglican cleric and great preacher, was the greatest of the metaphysical poets, writing verse in which passion and reason are disappointingly interwoven. This is exemplified in one line from his poem ‘The Cannonization’:

For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love.

But, of course, Donne couldn’t hold his tongue. No poet has ever been able to do this. Still, if you can forgive the tricksy cleverness, then Donne’s work can be rather:

1. Energetic:

Batter my heart, three-personed God.
(Holy Sonnets)

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?
(‘The Sun Rising’)

2. Erotic:

Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my new-found-land.
(Elegy XX: ‘To His Mistress Going To Bed’)

3. Entomologic:

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
(‘The Flea’)

JOHN MILTON (1608-1674)

John Milton’s poetry is excellent if you don’t try to read more than 12 lines without a break of at least three weeks.

Having served in Cromwell’s government, Milton was arrested at the Restoration and heavily fined. Shortly afterwards, understandably, he wrote Paradise Lost. Things picked up financially and he wrote Paradise Regained.

Nobody knows why he wrote Samson Agonistes, so you can have a field day here. Be careful, however, about drawing any easy analogies between Samson’s blindness and Milton’s own (he was blind by the age of 44). Nothing, absolutely nothing, is easy in Milton. Nor, for that matter, are there any jokes. At all. And dying of gout – something few poets had achieved since the Roman Ennius – can’t have been much of a laugh either.

If you must read some Milton, steer clear of the 10,000-line Paradise Lost and head for the shorter stuff. Allow your eyes to moisten soulfully as you recite some of the most poignant lines in English literature from sonnets such as ‘On his blindness’ (‘They also serve who only stand and wait’) and ‘On his late deceased wife’ (‘Methought I saw my late espoused saint / Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave’). Alternatively, adopt an air of supreme nonchalance and say, ‘When it comes to Milton, I’m with Pound’, the American modernist poet who wrote him off for his ‘asinine bigotry’ and ‘the coarseness of his mentality’. Some might suggest that Pound was referring to himself.

THE RESTORATION POETS

The Restoration period was best known for its impatience with the lyrical excesses of the Metaphysicals. ‘Clarity’ was the key word. The names to look out for are Herrick, Waller (Edmund, not Fats), Butler, Marvell, Dryden and Anon. But the actual school boundaries are blurred; many academicians, for example, believe that Marvell was a Metaphysical (or are they confusing him with a magician on Great Yarmouth pier?).

ROBERT HERRICK (1591-1674)

Robert Herrick’s poetry appears to be heavily influenced by the horticultural,

Fair daffodils, we weep to see...

I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers...

Cherry ripe, ripe, ripe, I cry...

but is really extremely sensuous. Even one of his most famous ‘flowery’ lines,

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

is the opening of a poem entitled ‘To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time’ and his other titles include ‘No Difference i’ th’ Dark’ and ‘Delight in Disorder’ (‘A sweet disorder in the dress / kindles in clothes a wantonness’). Other poems of Herrick’s – ‘Her Legs’ (‘Fain would I kiss my Julia’s dainty leg’); ‘Upon Julia’s Breasts’ (‘Between whose glories, there my lips I’ll lay’) – might single Herrick out as the Benny Hill of English letters. Were someone to suggest to you such a travesty of critical opinion, you should adopt a tone of gravitas, or what passes for it, as you explain that Herrick was no smutty adolescent but rather, simply, that rarest of rare things, the über-oxymoron: the contented poet.

EDMUND WALLER (1606-1687)

Edmund Waller managed to avoid being executed by the Roundheads by betraying all his Royalist associates (probably in heroic couplets) and spent the rest of his life writing poems of polished simplicity and fawning gratitude to whomever was in power, e.g., ‘Panegyric to My Lord Protector’, ‘His Majesty’s Escape At St Andere’. On the side, he wrote several poems in praise of various women.

SAMUEL BUTLER (1612-1680)

Samuel Butler has the distinction of being the first poet to make a reference to ‘punk’:

And made them fight, like mad or drunk
For Dame Religion as for punk...

This comes from his best-known poem, Hudibras, for which he was given a lump sum of £300 and a pension of £100 a year by Charles II, making it very hard for Butler to die in penury, but, like most poets, he managed to do so.

ANDREW MARVELL (1621-1678)

Like Louise Mensch, Andrew Marvell was first a poet and later an MP – but you would be advised to try this progression the other way round. In the former capacity he wrote many poems in praise of gardens and country life, thus beginning a trend which has unhappily flourished among versifiers ever since. His best-known work is comfortably ‘To His Coy Mistress’, probably the most celebrated example of the carpe diem (or ‘let’s get on with it’) poem, a form – strangely – more favoured by men-versifiers than women. Quite the most wonderful piece of male bluffery (‘Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, Lady, were no crime.’), it is a great pity that history does not relate whether the poem actually did the trick or not.

Marvell’s second most famous poem may be his ‘Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, which goes so far in eulogising the warty General that it’s hard to believe it isn’t sarcastic:

[The Irish] can affirm his praises best,
And have, though overcome, confest
How good he is, how just,
And fit for highest trust.

Such sycophancy could only lead to a career in politics. Marvell became MP for Hull.

JOHN DRYDEN (1631-1700)

John Dryden was the first official Poet Laureate, though not all his poetry is bad. He wrote an enormous number of poems, many of them unreadably long, but you could try dipping into ‘Absalom and Achitophel’ (only a few thousand lines long) or ‘Alexander’s Feast’ (sometimes known as the ‘Second Song for St Cecilia’s Day’), which contains perhaps his best-known line: ‘None but the brave deserves the fair’; or ‘MacFlecknoe’, a satirical work that attacks one of Dryden’s contemporaries, a poet with the less-than-lyrical name Shadwell. In Dryden’s poem, Shadwell’s pre-eminence in the realm of dullness leads him to being crowned at the Barbican, which shows remarkable foresight on the part of Dryden. He was clearly a man not without wit, but translating the entire works of Virgil must do something to you.

ANON

The best poems of the early period, however, were written by the famous Anon, and include ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ (name-checked in Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: An Ode’), ‘Greensleeves’ (one of Henry VIII’s favourite poems), and ballads such as ‘Robin Hood and Allan-a-Dale’. A ballad is a simple poem, usually spirited, invariably understandable, written in short stanzas and narrating a popular story. Bluffers should point out the shame that we seldom know who wrote poems that are understandable, but we always know who wrote the incomprehensible, and suggest that it probably has something to do with the Meaning of Life.

GOTHIC REVIVAL

This term refers to a part of the eighteenth century when many writers became obsessed with the frightening and supernatural. It’s an exciting phrase, perhaps a desperate attempt to make eighteenth-century poetry sound interesting. It isn’t.

All the poets of the eighteenth century are incredibly dull: Pope, Thomson, Johnson, Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper and a host of others. Don’t bother with any of them. They spent half their time writing dull verse, and the other half criticising the dullness of others. Alexander Pope even wrote an interminable poem on the subject, The Dunciad, a mock-paean to the goddess of Dulness (correctly spelt), daughter of Nox and Chaos; quite quotable (‘A brain of feathers, and a heart of lead’) but maybe a tad knowing and something of a soft target.

ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1744)

Arguably, Pope was the least dull and could be said to have cornered the market in satirical poems of the period. If nothing else, he bequeathed the English language two of its most enduring clichés:

Damn with faint praise...

and

Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

JAMES THOMSON (1700-1748)

James Thomson moved a little away from the artificiality of most of them, but is to be forever condemned for writing ‘Rule, Britannia!’

SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709-1784)

Johnson’s poems are as leadenly witty as was his conversation.

THOMAS GRAY (1716-1771)

Thomas Gray wrote ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’. Any bluffer worth his salt should memorise the opening to this famous and influential poem (which, incidentally, provides the source of the phrase Far From The Madding Crowd which Thomas Hardy was to adopt for his novel over a century later):

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Great stuff. Transcendental and inspired though poets may be on occasion, they are also inveterately incontinent and rarely know when to shut up. Gray, for example, was also responsible for the following, the opening of which is quoted in full – not for you to memorise, but merely to demonstrate that while we all have our off days, at least ours are not preserved for all eternity to snigger at:

Twas on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow,
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.
(‘On The Death Of A Favourite Cat,
Drowned In A Tub Of Gold Fishes’).

OLIVER GOLDSMITH (1730-1774)

Oliver Goldsmith wrote one poem (‘The Deserted Village’) from which most are familiar with:

And fools, who came to scoff, remained to pray.

WILLIAM COWPER (1731-1800)

William Cowper was bullied at school, tried to commit suicide and wrote ‘The Diverting History of John Gilpin’ to divert himself from melancholia. He didn’t succeed.

WORTHY MENTIONS

With the exception of Chatterton (see ‘Poets and Death’), none of the eighteenth-century poets managed to die in an interesting way, and we’ve already told you how dull most of them are. Despite this, you could commend five poems from this period:

1. ‘Tom Bowling’ by Charles Dibdin

Not only a rattling good poem, but a most moving song. George II was so moved that he reportedly granted Dibdin a lump sum of £1,000 and a pension of several hundred pounds a year, simply for writing this one work.

2. ‘The Tyger’ by William Blake

Dreadfully spelt but wonderfully written.

3. ‘Jerusalem’, also by Blake

Moves even atheists and English rugby fans.

4. ‘Tam o’Shanter’ by Robert Burns

Impossible to understand unless you speak old Scots, but none the less enjoyable for a’ that.

5. ‘A Red, Red Rose’, also by Burns

With the possible exception of Dibdin, these poets are well known and many will write off their work as mere songs or popularist, lightweight stuff. What the bluffer needs to do, therefore, is approach the poems in a solemn and heavyweight fashion. Point out, for example, that in ‘Jerusalem’, we have a clear exposition of Blake’s Theory of Imagination, ‘the real and eternal world of which the Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow.’ People will start thinking of artichokes and won’t understand, which is the secret to talking about poetry.

In the case of Burns, make much of the conflict within him: sympathy with the ardour of the French revolutionaries on the one hand, but a propensity to convivial living on the other. Suggest how different things would have been had he taken passage to Jamaica as he planned at the age of 27. He could have been the first Scottish reggae poet and rapper. If all else fails, just recite the odd line of Burns – you’ll be amazed:

a) how much of it you know already

b) how quickly the room is cleared.

As your trump card, have ready the information that Blake never and Burns rarely went to school.

THE ROMANTICS

The Romantics managed to lead appropriately romantic lives. Leigh Hunt was imprisoned for writing a critical article on the Prince Regent in 1813, and also introduced Keats and Shelley. The Irish poet Thomas Moore (no one will have heard of him, so ‘I have always thought the work of Moore rather unfairly eclipsed by his contemporaries’ is pretty much a risk-free bluff) accumulated debts of £6,000 in Bermuda and managed to pay them off. Walter Scott ran up debts of £114,000 and worked himself to death in an attempt to pay his creditors. Southey was expelled from Westminster School for a precocious essay against flogging, spent a life stuffed with domestic misfortunes, and died, as we have heard, of softening of the brain. Charles Wolfe died romantically young, at the age of 32, and some have unkindly called his most famous poem, ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore’, a ‘mere freak of intellect’. Byron liked the poem but reckoned that someone else, probably Thomas Campbell, wrote it, and there has been dispute over the authorship ever since.

THE GIANTS OF POETRY
(OR THE SCHOOL OF ILL HEALTH)

Apart from the Lake Poets (see page 59), the Giants of English Poetry are Byron, Shelley and Keats, who between them managed only 90 years of life. When you consider that Tennyson lived to be 83 all on his own, you can appreciate the full truth of Daniel Defoe’s couplet:

The best of men cannot suspend their fate
The good die early, and the bad die late
(‘The Character of the late Dr S Annesley’)

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON (1788-1824)

Most of Byron’s poetry is described by experts as ‘Byronic’, which shows how easy it is to be an expert on poetry.

Byronic means rebelling against the conventional morality, defying fate, and being contemptuous of the society that Byron scorned and left. But Byron’s poetry was also proud, moody, cynical, defiant, full of revenge, often deeply moving and beautiful. Byron’s great gift was his ability to write immensely long poems which are also totally readable, but you could go for something short like ‘She Walks in Beauty’ – only 18 lines and every one a winner – or the rollicking ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold.

This one is a classic example of the use of the anapest (see ‘Glossary’). Make sure you know what this term means if this poem is going to make an appearance in any of your bluffs.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822)

Shelley, too, led a romantic life. He was sent down from Oxford in 1811 for writing a pamphlet entitled ‘The Necessity of Atheism’. He married at the age of 18 and again (to Mary of Frankenstein fame) at 24, after his first wife drowned herself in the Serpentine. His poetry is ferocious and beautiful, and he used it to great effect in his attacks on Castlereagh’s Tory administration (‘The Mask of Anarchy’) and George IV’s matrimonial affairs (Oedipus Tyrannus; or Swellfoot the Tyrant). It seems a shame that he’s remembered, via English Literature syllabi, chiefly for his softer, admittedly graceful, poetry such as ‘Ode to the West Wind’, ‘To a Skylark’ and ‘Ozymandias’ (pronounced with the stress on ‘mand’ and not on ‘i’ of ‘ias’; a small point, perhaps, but a faux pas many a bluffer has committed).

JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)

The wonder is that Keats wrote any poetry at all in his short life, ravaged by consumption and nursing his brother, Tom, whom he loved and who predeceased him by three years. But Keats wrote several long poems (‘Endymion’, ‘Hyperion’ and ‘Lamia’ – all of them subsequently given as names to famous racehorses), some of the finest odes in the English language (‘To a Nightingale’, ‘To Autumn’, ‘On a Grecian Urn’), and some 40 sonnets (‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, ‘On the Grasshopper and Cricket’ and ‘To Sleep’).

Be unstinting in your praise of Keats, who received only bad reviews in his short lifetime (at the hands of the Tory press because he was a friend of Leigh Hunt), and who has received only glowing tributes since his death. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Keats met only once, in 1819, and then only very briefly. ‘There is death in that hand’, Coleridge recorded himself as having said to his walking companion as he turned away after shaking the young man’s mitt. An impressive example of Coleridge’s medical intuition and gift for empathy? Or simply a tremendous bluff on STC’s part (the passage ends with ‘yet this was, I believe, before the consumption showed itself distinctly’ so was clearly written with the benefit of hindsight)? You decide.