ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
The following chapter seeks to enlarge and complicate our view of the
earlier seventeenth century by exploring a group of poets who, if they
occasionally did seek great glory, nonetheless generally conceived of the role
of poetry in a broader cultural context than did either Donne or Jonson. Most
of the writers discussed here usually appear in literary histories under the
general heading of “Spenserians”; indeed, some owe the most recent
publications of their works—and not very recent at that—to the efforts of the
Spenser Society in the later nineteenth century. 2 And most are generally
placed by modern scholars and anthologists in the second, sometimes third
rank of poets of the period, their diminutive status often indicated, in fact, by
a rubric that locates their collective place on the literary map through a
common parent. We do not regard Donne or Jonson as “Sidneyans,” although
Sidney’s amatory, religious, and Neoclassical concerns anticipate some of the
major interests developed by each poet.
As with all labels, the Spenserian tag is useful up to a point. It reminds us,
for one thing, that although political fortunes in Renaissance England could
change with the breath of kings or queens, imaginative works of literature and
the use to which they were put by later writers did not necessarily die with
their authors. The variegated strain of Elizabethan poetry, especially pastoral
and mythological, survived well into the first three decades of the seventeenth
century, as the frequent reprintings of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander testify, and
its currency helps to explain how authors as fundamentally different from each
other as Milton and Herrick could tap its resources for very different purposes.
So too, nostalgia for the apparently greater, simpler, golden age of Elizabeth
could be summoned, as often happened, in moments of acute political crisis to
offer poets and readers some crumbs of comfort or platforms for criticism.
When the staunch royalist, Izaak Walton, suffering under Cromwell’s
government, recalled Marlowe’s famous shepherd’s song, “Come live with me,
and be my love,” in The Compleat Angler in 1653, it was only one example,
albeit a late one, in a long history of Elizabethan “revivals” in the early
seventeenth century, not all of which identified the pastoral with the peaceful.
But if the Spenserian label is useful as a way to delineate an alternative
tradition to Donne and Jonson, it also should not prevent us from seeing how
different those generally grouped under the heading of Spenserians—Michael
Drayton, William Browne, George Wither, Francis Quarles and John Taylor—
are from each other (as well as from Spenser), or from recognizing their own
popularity in their time. With the exception of George Herbert’s The Temple
(1633), none of the poetry of their now better-known contemporaries appeared
in print with anything approaching the frequency of some of the works produced
by these men. Although only John Taylor, the Sculler, might qualify as a
“popular” poet—that is, as someone who deliberately cultivated his position as
a poet of and for tradesmen—the others sought frequently to engage a broader
readership, often on matters of national interest, in styles that ranged from the
bardic prophecy of Drayton to the combative journalism of Wither, from the
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