ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

NOTES TO PP. 250–6
but alass, the shame!/Ill manners soil the lustre of her Fame.” But in the context of
the admittedly obscure syntax of the stanza, the “ill manners” to which Cowley refers
seem to apply to those who speak of Sappho, not to Sappho’s behavior:
They talk of Nine, I know not who,
Female Chimera’s that o’er Poets reign,
I ne’r could find that fancy true,
But have invok’d them oft I’m sure in vain:
They talk of Sappho, but alass, the shame!
Ill manners soil the lustre of her fame:
Orinda’s inward virtue is so bright,
That like a Lanthorn’s fair-inclosed Light,
It through the paper shines where she does write.
Cowley’s elegy “On the Death of Mrs. Katherine Philips” mentions Sappho but,
again, without expressing anxiety over Sappho’s sexual behavior. See The Complete
Works in Verse and Prose of Abraham Cowley, 2 vols, ed. A.B.Grosart, New York:
AMS Press, vol. I, pp. 154, 165.
51 For an extended discussion of these issues, see Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1649–
1714, ch. 2.
52 Quoted from Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600–
1660, 2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962, p. 341, n. 1. Walton’s remarks about
this incident can be found in The Poems of Henry King, ed. Margaret Crum, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1965, p. 22.
53 Quoted from Kissing the Rod, p. 181.
54 Ferguson, “Renaissance Concepts of the ‘Woman Writer,’” in Women and Literature
in Britain, 1500–1700, p. 154.
55 See Alice Fulton, “Unordinary Passions: Margaret Cavendish, The Duchess of
Newcastle,” in Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry, St. Paul,
MN: Grey Wolf Press, 1999.
9 ANDREW MARVELL
1 This remark and subsequent quotations from Marvell’s poetry are taken from The
Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H.M.Margoliouth, 3rd edn, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1971.
2 After three hundred years, the exact boundaries of the Marvell canon are still a bit
up for grabs: but along with those works printed in the Miscellaneous Poems,
including the three Cromwell poems suppressed from all but two of the extant 1681
copies, and those verses printed in his lifetime bearing his signature, the other poems
that scholars generally accept as Marvell’s are “The last Instructions to a Painter”
and “The Loyall Scot.”
3 Quoted from Andrew Marvell, ed. Frank Kermode and Keith Walker, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990, p. xiii.
4 Quoted from Adagia in Opus Posthumous, ed. Milton J.Bates, New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1989, p. 191.
5 Hall, “The Manyness of Andrew Marvell,” Sewanee Review 97 (1989):431.
6 Although Marvell’s skill with the tetrameter line is generally recognized, there is no
detailed study of this feature of his verse, as there is for Milton. Helpful remarks
appear in J.B.Leishman, The Art of Marvell’s Poetry, 2nd edn, London: Hutchinson,
1968, pp. 10, 163–5, 209, 234, 246; and George Saintsbury, A History of English
Prosody, London: Macmillan, 1923, vol. II, ch. 4. See also Elbert N.S.Thompson,
“The Octosyllabic Couplet,” Philological Quarterly 18 (1939):257–68.
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