ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
bald didacticism of Quarles to the picaresque reports of the Water Poet. And
with the exception of Browne, all had more than a moment in the sun.
Michael Drayton (1563–1631)
Michael Drayton would certainly have been proud to be called a Spenserian, but
he would just as surely have winced at having his name mentioned in the same
chapter as John Taylor’s. His more usual companion in literary history has been
the respectable Samuel Daniel, and in some ways this pairing is appropriate. The
two authors were born within a year of each other, Daniel in 1562 and Drayton
in 1563, which means they were born not just in the decade of Shakespeare but
in the decade between Sidney and Spenser (1550s) on the one hand and Donne
and Jonson on the other (1570s). Both are usually regarded as transitional
figures, twin Januses, each bearing an Elizabethan and a Jacobean face; but it is
probably more accurate to think of them as not quite belonging to either, as
representing something of a “lost” generation. At least this situation is certainly
true of Drayton, if not for the poet Spenser consciously designated as his heir in
Colin Clouts Come Home Again (1595). For if the fortunes of the two poets were
intertwined in typically Elizabethan ways in the 1590s, with Daniel’s Complaint
of Rosamond (1592) serving, for instance, as inspiration for Drayton’s Piers
Gaveston (1593) and Matilda (1593)—an intertwining that testifies in each case
to a lifelong interest in British history (the first four books of Daniel’s The Civil
Wars were first published in 1595)—and with both paying homage to Sidney’s
Astrophil in their respective sonnet sequences, Delia (1592) and Ideas Mirrour
(1594), as well as hovering around Lady Bedford, Daniel redirected his energies
under James toward writing masques and his prose history of England, the first
part of which was published in 1613. Drayton’s career as a poet, on the other
hand, was only just getting underway; but he never really became a Jacobean.
The crucial turning point involved his failure to become for James what he
assumed Spenser had been to Elizabeth: the poet of the realm. That Drayton
harbored such ambitions is clear from several remarks he made later in his career,
most publicly in the epistle to the “General Reader” of Poly-Olbion (1612)—a
form of address that by itself distinguishes Drayton’s sense of audience from
either Donne’s or Jonson’s—in which he complains of how he saw his “long
nourisht hopes” for advancement from the king “buried alive before my face”;
and then again in his epistle entitled “To Master George Sandys, Treasurer for
the English Colony in Virginia,” written probably in 1621 or 1622, where he
laments how “it was my hap before all other men/To suffer shipwrack by my
forward pen.” 3
It is not entirely clear what offense Drayton committed. His modern editors
suggest that his problems stemmed from a failure to mourn properly the death of
Elizabeth when he celebrated the arrival of the new king in 1603 (V, 53); but
his own allusion in the epistle to Sandys to his “forward pen” suggests that the
impropriety ought not to be regarded as only a sin of omission. In the years
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