ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
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PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS<br />
suspicion over the institution of kingship, only concern for the way James was<br />
conducting domestic and foreign affairs. As he remarks to George Sandys, “I dare<br />
not speake of the Palatinate”; but once a new king was on the throne in 1625,<br />
Drayton seems to have quickly rekindled his hopes for preferment. If recent<br />
scholarship has reshaped an earlier image of Drayton as a belated Elizabethan<br />
into a more sharply etched portrait of him as a trenchant critic of Jacobean<br />
policy, then even more recent scholarship has qualified that view by pointing to<br />
the local constraints and interests often influencing Drayton’s ventures. 4 Drayton<br />
is the classic case not simply of a poet in need of an England that no longer (if<br />
ever) was. He was also a poet continually searching for patrons to support his<br />
needs.<br />
And yet in retrospect (the word is almost unavoidable with Drayton), it is<br />
also a little difficult to imagine how his “forward pen” could ever have adapted<br />
itself to the narrow confines of the Jacobean court. Drayton was, above all, a<br />
poet who needed room. He needed room to celebrate the heroic achievements<br />
of English legends; room to celebrate the English landscape with its customs and<br />
traditions; room to speak out; room to experiment with different genres—besides<br />
composing sonnets and historical legends, he also wrote many versions of<br />
pastoral through his long career, attempted several kinds of odes, practiced his<br />
hand at ballads, beast fables, verse epistles, and elegies, and produced the longest<br />
“chorographical” poem in English; 5 room to revise—no poet of the period<br />
reworked his canon in so many different ways. Drayton needed room, in short,<br />
to be an English poet of the heroic vein and in the process to continue the<br />
native line of poetry extending from Chaucer into the present—a tradition, as<br />
he emphasizes in his verse epistle to Henry Reynolds, that equates the grave and<br />
noble with the native and home-spun (III, 226–31). Reading Drayton reminds<br />
us how significantly Donne and Jonson deviated from their immediate<br />
predecessors, how much, in effect, they shrunk the scope of poetry in order to<br />
enlarge it in a different direction.<br />
It is also difficult to conceive of Drayton, bred in the country and a life-long<br />
critic of deforestation, as being very courtly in manner. (In The Worthies of<br />
England (1662), Fuller describes Drayton as “slow of speech, and inoffensive in<br />
company.”) 6 Except for the early sonnets, his verse is marked by plain speaking<br />
and sturdy sentiments, not elegance, wordplay, and wit. Very early on, in fact,<br />
he seems to have disdained anything that might smack of “foreign inventions”—<br />
“foreign,” in his case, includes sartorial or sexual innovations as well as linguistic<br />
ones. Drayton characteristically reserved his most courtly touches for his<br />
pastorals, something that might have pleased Elizabeth but not James; and when<br />
he fully refined this art, to the point of miniaturizing it as he did under Charles<br />
and Henrietta Maria in his most elegantly “Elizabethan” poems—the often<br />
praised song to Sirena that begins “Nearer to the Silver Trent,” Nymphidia, the<br />
Court of Fayrie (1627), and The Muses Elizium (1630)—Drayton was easily the<br />
oldest living poet in England and hardly an obvious candidate for preferment.<br />
And even then, he still bore some rough edges. As much as the new king and<br />
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