ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FOREWORD
period—indeed, probably questioning the notion of the earlier seventeenth
century as a discrete literary period, except by default, as a time in between “the
Renaissance” and “the Restoration”—as Dryden would have wished. But my
concern has been less to challenge the notion of historical periods in general
than to structure an account of the period that allows room for the particular to
emerge in the process of “reading”: the particularity of an author, of a poem, of a
group of poems. (“Authors to themselves,” as Milton might have said—did say—
with the emphasis in the phrase falling on both the solitary and the collective,
or shared, nature of the literary.)
One way of speaking generally about the first sixty or so years of the
seventeenth century is simply to say that, for whatever complicated historical
reasons, it produced a sufficient number of exceptional poets and poems that
invite sustained analysis. Another, less judicious way, is to hail it as a great age
of lyric experimentation, a period that saw not only a continued interest in the
formal invention that marked the last decades of the sixteenth century,
especially in the hands of Sidney and Spenser, but also a further emphasis on
variety and compression, of saying much in little, and an increasing recognition
later in the century, as the antiquarian John Aubrey understood, that their many
“brief lives” were ripe for collecting: that poets had become a named part of what
historians today would call Early Modern Britain—and women poets too. The
appended nature of that remark indicates the tentative place they were
beginning to be accorded at the end of a work like Edward Phillips’s Theatrum
Poetarum (1675).
In its earliest phase, I had in mind an even broader survey than the one
that appears here, one that might have included a place for Paradise Lost, even
if Cowley’s Davideis or Davenant’s Gondibert might not have garnered much
commentary along the way. But, increasingly, problems of space loomed larger
and larger, along with a concern as to the usefulness of such a book, and in
the end I elected to pitch the study more in the direction of lyric and attempt
to give familiar and less-familiar authors a fuller hearing than they might have
otherwise received. Poets largely popular in their own day only are interesting
for the light they shed on contemporary reading habits and for the context
they provide for understanding a Donne or a Jonson, a Herbert or a Milton,
and for reminding us again of their greater achievements: the varieties of
invention and imagined realities that distinguish poetry at its most
accomplished. Poets barely known in their own day, or not at all, like Martha
Moulsworth, interest us now because of who we have become. The final
decision to allot individual chapters to the authors most deserving of attention
seems scarcely novel, nor does the notion of grouping other poets loosely
together according to a few familiar trends or movements. The method of
apportionment belongs to an earlier version of literary history, although I have
for the most part dispensed with speaking of “schools,” even if the idea of a
coterie or “tribe” of writers is, along with authorship, one of the distinctive
trademarks of the early seventeenth century.
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