ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
difficult to escape the shadow cast by Charles himself, whether on or off the
throne.
Part of what is at work here might be simply chalked up to the law of
averages. With a very active manuscript culture, 7 and with so many more poets
now willing to let their works appear in print—despite protests to the contrary—
the harvest is bound to be richer. But we should not underestimate the
productive model of artistic seriousness that accompanied Jonson’s legacy or the
standard of “difficulty” established by Donne. Even if Caroline lyricists wrote on
a smaller scale, they wrote within a now identifiable tradition that specifically
encouraged equating an author with his work, that is, not with the work’s craft
but with its “author,” as in Jonson’s Cary-Morison ode. Nothing points out this
heightened—or rather specialized—sense of authorship more clearly than the
case of Suckling, who spent a good part of his energies debunking Jonson’s
presence—Jonson’s authority—but never relinquished a Jonsonian commitment
to naming himself, Suckling, as the principal player in his own creations.
Caroline poets tended to wear their badges in view; and even if they were not
big ones, they still signaled a sense of difference from each other at the same
time that they established a clear affinity with one or another major poet, Donne
or Jonson, or in Carew’s case, with both. Being “original,” or in Hazlitt’s phrase,
being imaginative and not fanciful, was a distinction of little interest to Caroline
poets. (The example of Drayton alone might have been sufficient to steer them
away from an Elizabethan reach of the imagination.) But being different from
an elder poet was of great importance. In this regard, the story of Caroline poetry
is not Oedipal but fraternal; and if it is a story that at times makes us think
refreshingly of a Drayton or a Taylor, if it seems at times too cozy, too concerned
with who you know rather than what you write, it is also true that the pressure
toward refinement, with its generating impulse coming from the most refined
monarchy England had yet seen, was not incidentally precious. In the hands of
Lovelace, a grasshopper could signal great things.
Thomas Carew (1594/5–1639)
Carew deserves to be at the center of Caroline verse—sometimes subversively
so—simply because he achieved what so many desired in Renaissance England:
a place at court. By 1630, Carew had secured the post of Sewer-in-Ordinary to
the king himself (against the wishes of the whole Scottish nation if Clarendon
is to be believed), 8 an appointment that had been preceded by service abroad
(Italy in 1614–15 and the Netherlands in 1616, under Sir Dudley Carleton; Paris
in 1619 with Sir Edward Herbert), and by some notorious living. Like Donne,
Carew managed to offend his employer Carleton; for reasons yet to be fully
understood, he was dismissed from his service in 1616. He also possibly paid for
his libertine ways by eventually dying from a case of syphilis. In another sense,
though, appointments to the king’s household, while demanding loyalty, were
hardly dependent upon poetic acumen, but that is exactly what Carew possessed
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