ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
and made it a frequent point to sit down to supper with the well-to-do on his
many journeys around England. 60
From more than one perspective, too, Taylor was the great literary sponge
of the period. Not only was poetry the vehicle that helped propel him around
the countryside where he usually made a point of staying in inns and taverns
for free (Taylor initiated the idea of subscription verse as a means of
supporting himself), but his muse readily soaked up the writings of others:
portions of Dubartas (his Works begins with an extended prayer to Urania),
Spenser (in his many river celebrations), Drayton of Poly-Olbion, Wither
(especially of Abuses Stript and Whipt and The Motto, whose meaning Taylor
precisely reversed in giving his own), Donne of The Anniversaries (in The
Fearful Summer, or London’s Calamitie), Thomas Nashe (particularly Piers
Penniless), and most of all Ben Jonson, who was convinced that Taylor’s
journey to Scotland in the same year was undertaken in order “to scorn
him.” 61 It was not, at least if we believe Taylor’s account of the warm meeting
between the two in his Pennilesse Pilgrimage to Scotland (FW, I:138); but had
the poet of “Inviting a Friend to Supper” read any of Taylor’s many renditions
of feasting, like the following, he might well have been only further convinced
that literary foul play was brewing:
Our beere was bravely boyl’d and strongly malted,
Our Pidgeon Pie was pepper’d well and salted,
Most tender Chickins, Pullet, and a Capon,
We (in our fury) did commit a rape on.
(Taylor on Thames his, in W, I: 23)
The repeated dangling eleventh syllable—to say nothing about rhyming “capon”
with “rape on”—was just the kind of artistic slovenliness to put Jonson’s teeth
on edge.
And yet, it would surely be a mistake to think of Taylor as having been deeply
influenced by any single group of authors or a particular literary tradition. (He
is easily the least Spenserian poet to be published by the Spenser Society.)
Despite many allusions to ancients and moderns alike, his is a poetry of the
surface, albeit a rough one: a record of the sights and sounds, preferences and
prejudices emanating from what he refers to in The description of naturall English
Poetry (FW, II: 387) as “the home-spun medley of my mottley braines.” A quick
nod to another writer might generate an entire poem, as happens when he
delivers his own Motto, but his verse, mostly in couplets, rarely engages authors
on generic, stylistic, or lexical grounds, or on what we might think of as “poetic”
issues.
Taylor sought instead to be novel by making a virtue out of a necessity: “My
skil’s as good to write, to sweate, or row,/As any Taylors is to steale or sow” (FW,
II: 386). Or, to phrase it in more sociological terms, his claim to originality lies
in the novel way in which the literary “high” culture is constantly being
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