ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

IRREMEDIABLY DONNE
just that an action is past and therefore a “fait accompli” that must be accepted
by all parties concerned, but that it has been done by Donne, as if the special
signature gave it a final stamp of authority and thereby removed the dispute from
the realm of worldly contention. Donne has spoken; Donne has done—with the
pun sounding in the final stress position of what turns out to be the one
indisputably pentameter line in the paragraph.
The episode suggests in small much about the person whom Jonson esteemed
“the first poet in the world in some things”: 3 both the supercilious side that
helped to shipwreck his career at court (and, incidentally, sent him drifting in
the direction of the church), and the special concern, manifested in writing,
with exploring new ranges of thought, especially as they reflect, and reflect upon,
his own unique status, his individuality. Donne was the poet who preached his
own funeral sermon before the king. And at his death, he was the preacher-poet
eulogized by contemporaries as “the Prince of wits,” the “Copernicus of poets.”
“To have liv’d eminent, in a degree/Beyond our lofty’st flights, that is, like Thee,/
Or t’have had too much merit, is not safe,” wrote Henry King, Donne’s
executor. 4 “Not safe,” in fact, is exactly the response of Dudley North, the
genteel poetaster of the earlier seventeenth century who, without ever naming
Donne, seemed to have Donne and his coterie in mind when he objected to
those “who thinke nothing good that is easie, nor any thing becomming passion
that is not exprest with an hyperbole above reason…[but]…Like ill ranging
Spaniells they spring figures, and ravished with their extravagant fancies, pursue
them in long excursions, neglecting their true game and pretended affection.”
North preferred “his Magesties mind [King James’s], that the best eloquence is
to make our selves clearly understood,” and his stated model was Sir Philip
Sidney, appropriate enough on one level since it was to Sidney’s niece, Mary
Wroth, that he was writing and, on another, because North assumed poetry
“unsophisticated by Art” and “possessing a free puritie of unadulterated wit” was
what women wanted. 5
Whatever Donne’s critical fortunes have been among later generations of
readers—and few reputations have fluctuated more dramatically—he was
perceived by approving and disapproving contemporaries alike as thoroughly
novel, a kind of Hieronimo or Hamlet of verse (or a Tamburlaine, as John Carey
might have it). 6 Difficulty was one of his hallmarks. Jonson, whose eye rarely
strayed far from posterity, thought Donne would perish for want of being
understood, and the 1633 posthumous edition of Donne’s poems—the first
attempt to collect and publish his verse—was accompanied by an epistle
addressed to the “understanders,” not to the general reader, an epistle that
remained in place until the fourth edition (second issue) was published in 1650.
It was then only to be replaced by a polemic from the poet’s royalist son, who
sought to preserve his father from the “leveling” understanding of indifferent
pretenders to the “chair of wit.”
But difficulty in Donne, as North recognized, was really not the source of the
poet’s novelty, only a feature of it. Rather, it was the hyperbolic quality of
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