ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
in abundant measure. With the kind of alert intelligence that challenges easy
discriminations between “creative” and “critical” faculties—an intelligence that
was itself a legacy from the poets he most admired—Carew mediated the
individual achievements of Donne and Jonson for a succeeding generation of
courtly readers. No Caroline poet who made his immediate debts so apparent
made the act of assimilation so complete. In the process, Carew also created a
significant if not substantial corpus of verse. When published shortly after his
death in 1640, his Poems became a kind of model for other Caroline poets by
yoking together some “songs and sonnets,” to quote from the title page of the
“fourth” edition (1670), a number of verse epistles, several “country house”
poems, a few epitaphs, and a longer poem, in this case a lengthy masque entitled
Coelum Britannicum. (In the 1640s, poets as different from each other as Milton
and Vaughan were to vary this formula.)
In performing this task, Carew took more seriously than any of the other
“Sons of Ben” or disciples of Donne his sense of vocational responsibility—what
Jonson (following Sidney and earlier classical authors) had in mind when he
identified imitation as the principal ingredient in “making” and urged, along
with “exactness of study and multiplicity of reading,” the Horatian ideal of
drawing honey from the “choicest flowers,” and not from a single stalk. 9 To this
end, Carew merged a genteel eclecticism with a demanding ideal of poetry, a
seriousness of purpose that serves to pry him loose from those designated by Pope
as the “mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease” 10 and to place him with one
foot at least in the company of his near contemporaries, Herbert and Milton.
Carew did not feel as Herbert so powerfully did that he owed his gifts ultimately
to God; nor did he view, like Milton, his talents as part of a larger, intensely
personal drama of election. He wrote, instead, for his more worldly
contemporaries: fellow poets and patrons, male and female alike, at court and in
the country. 11 But had he felt his responsibility to this group any less keenly, he
would not have put into his verse so much thought—so much thinking—and so
much pleasure.
That sense of vocational responsibility is most fully evident in the poems
Carew wrote on Donne and Jonson. Both are powerfully, not incidentally,
occasional. It was a common coterie act to write a poem to one or the other,
slightly less so to write to both. (The two events in the early 1630s that most
stirred fellow poets, including Carew here, were the publication of Donne’s
Poems (1633, 1635) and the debacle involving Jonson and the failure of The
New Inn.) But Carew clearly viewed these separate occasions as opportunities
to make important statements about the present situation of poetry and the
responsibilities of the poet (with a small “p”), and each has been generally
recognized in this century as the most significant act of criticism in verse
either poet has received. The poem to Donne is surely the more expressive in
its passionate celebration and imitation of its subject, and among elegies to
poets written in the seventeenth century, only “Lycidas” has a greater
imaginative reach:
95