ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

FOREWORD
In the interest of general or first-time readers, I have risked, at times,
redescribing or redrawing lines of continuity and change familiar to specialists:
those sometimes connecting poet with poet, those occasionally differentiating
one generation from another. The remarkable shift in generic emphasis and the
poetic line that accompanies the beginning of the seventeenth century still
seems worth observing in some detail, although it is surely possible to minimize
the element of change associated with the death of a particular monarch like
Elizabeth if, for instance, one maximizes a “Republican” view of the Renaissance
that sees the English Civil War and the new government as the culmination of
events and practices initiated with Henrician reform. 1 (Donne and Jonson, of
course, were not Republican sympathizers; indeed, notions of monarchy were
crucial to their authoritative—some would say “authoritarian”—conception of
poetry; and Marvell and Milton are interesting in part because of the Caroline
rule they left behind.)
On occasion, too, I have not been able to resist the temptation of analyzing
in detail some of the century’s better known as well as some of its less familiar
lyrics. Slowing down the pace allows for a more sustained engagement with other
critical points of view. It also interrupts the temporal flow of literary histories
that often succeed at finding compartments for poems but sometimes at the
expense of exploring the verbal nooks and crannies of a particular stanza or
poem—the box “where sweets compacted lie,” to adapt Herbert’s playful phrase
from “Vertue.” But it would be wrong to deny another motive operating as well,
one that could be extended into a partial rationale for having originally agreed
to write this study as part of the Routledge History of Poetry before the series
was disbanded. Lyric poetry frequently invites intimate engagement, an
opportunity to “converse” across time and across cultures, as well as within a
particular culture. The observation is so common that it has almost disappeared
from sight, especially in the criticism of poetry in the early fields (and the
discourse of literary studies more generally.) But in this regard Helen Vendler’s
recent reminder, or rather “defense,” of the lyric as the genre in which “the soul”
speaks—in contrast to a more “socially specified self”—tells an important, if not
the whole, truth about lyric: that it invites immediate identification with the
speaker. “If a poet was a castaway, I too was a castaway; if a poet regretted Fern
Hill, I too had a house I regretted,” writes Vendler, with disarming candor, of
her early encounters with poetry. “Everything said in a poem was a metaphor for
something in my inner life, and I learned about future possibilities within my
inner life from the poetry I read with such eagerness.” 2
Like many potential readers of verse, Vendler is especially drawn to lyric as
personal utterance, and it is not surprising that her own substantial criticism of
the lyric should date back to the poetry of the earlier seventeenth century, or
that her most involved interpretations should center on Shakespeare’s sonnets
and George Herbert’s poetry—those sweetly compacted, complicated, passionate
declarations of amorous subjectivity. But if she is right to draw our attention to
the intimacy of “soul speak” as being different in kind from the language of the
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