ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

IRREMEDIABLY DONNE
law, a path designed to produce scholar-courtiers to serve the state in some
official capacity. Writing poetry was thus not simply an art of “recreation” 11 (to
choose the description Donne’s first biographer, Izaak Walton, applies to
Donne’s early verse); it was economically and socially purposeful recreation, as
a number of recent scholars have emphasized. 12 Crucial to the courtier’s
vocation, verse was a way to advertise one’s wares in front of a selective
audience. The literary credo of the Inns of Court, as presented by Donne’s
acquaintance, John Hoskins, in his Directions for Speech and Style (1599?), makes
explicit the common humanist assumption connecting skillful writing and state
service: “Were it an honor to a prince,” Hoskins asks, “to have the majesty of
his embassage spoiled by a careless ambassador?” The rhetorical question
prepares the way for a second and hence the rationale for the Directions with its
epistolary emphasis: “How shall you look for wit from him whose leisure and
whose head (assisted with the examination of his eyes) could yield you no life
and sharpness in his writings?” 13
Donne, satire, and the 1590s
But it is also clear that for a late Elizabethan the modes of self-presentation were
in considerable, if not radical, flux. The generation of poets immediately
preceding Donne—the generation of Sidney and Spenser, who came of age in
the 1580s—was primarily one searching for an ideal: a golden world of pastoral
romance and heroic action was central to their vision, a vision, moreover, that
was pre-eminently courtly if not court-centered, as was the case with the greatest
Elizabethan poem, The Faerie Queene. The work of these two was made available
in print in the early 1590s, and though there was to be only one Faerie Queene
(in two parts, however), the idealizing legacy was continued in the early 1590s
in the spate of sonnet sequences that began to appear shortly after the
publication of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella in 1591. Samuel Daniel’s Delia was
one of the first to arrive (1592). It was quickly joined by Drayton’s Ideas Mirrour
(1594, tellingly named), Spenser’s Amoretti (1596), and the works of lesser lights
like Bartholomew Griffin (Fidessa, 1596) and William Smith (Chloris, 1596). All
were attempting to use the form to establish their poetic authority with a
particular patron or patroness. And for all, the idealizing mode of the Petrarchan
poem ensured that the poet remained apparently subservient to his mistress, his
noli me tangere whom he pursued in sonnet after sonnet by performing endless
variations on fire and ice, military imagery, sleepless nights, blazons, and radiant
eyes, to say nothing about the odd postures he might assume that signaled his
devotion, whether it was Barnabe Barnes’s wish to be turned into a glove so that
he might range freely over his mistress’s body, or Drayton’s complaint that
unrequited love produced the same pain as an anatomy lesson performed on a
still-breathing criminal.
When Donne began writing in the early 1590s, it was not in but against this
context. Nor was it just against it in the sense of favoring or helping to
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