ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

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PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR
POETS
In publishing this Essay of my Poeme, there is this great
disadvantage against me; that it commeth out at this time,
when Verses are wholly deduc’t to Chambers, and nothing
esteem’d in this lunatique Age, but what is kept in
Cabinets, and must only passe by Transcription.
Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion, 1612, “To The Generall Reader”
Donne and Jonson were the most important and influential poets writing in the
first quarter of the seventeenth century. They were the new voices, as the last
two chapters have attempted to show. But their poetry was hardly “popular,” if
we mean by that word a poetry either conceived with a large population of
readers in mind or concerned with exploring issues that might be described as of
broadly public or national interest. Donne’s poetry circulated widely but in
manuscript and, initially at least, among a highly select group of aristocrats and
educated friends. He saved his preaching for the pulpit and for prose. When
financial circumstances forced him finally and for the only time to publish some
verse, it is significant that the “First and Second Anniversaries,” the work he
entitled An Anatomie of the World, appeared without his name on the title page
and that the world he chose to anatomize has little to do with the particularities
of daily life. In this regard, Eliot’s famous description of Donne as possessing the
kind of mind that amalgamates experiences as disparate as falling in love and
the smell of cooking is misleading. 1 Indeed, were it not for the fact that in his
poetry, at least, Jonson wrote for an audience similar (in some cases identical)
to Donne’s, the description might apply better to him, where there is more
cooking and more of the world. But except when Jonson’s purpose is satirical,
his sense of “society,” like Donne’s, does not extend very far downward; and
though his route into print was very different from Donne’s, both ultimately
sought to disguise the vulgar connections binding them to booksellers and
stationers and ultimately to the public. It is not mere flattery that inspired
Jonson to depict Donne as his ideal judge and reader in Epigram 96. “A man
should seek great glory, and not broad” defines a credo the two men held in
common.
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