ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
suspicion over the institution of kingship, only concern for the way James was
conducting domestic and foreign affairs. As he remarks to George Sandys, “I dare
not speake of the Palatinate”; but once a new king was on the throne in 1625,
Drayton seems to have quickly rekindled his hopes for preferment. If recent
scholarship has reshaped an earlier image of Drayton as a belated Elizabethan
into a more sharply etched portrait of him as a trenchant critic of Jacobean
policy, then even more recent scholarship has qualified that view by pointing to
the local constraints and interests often influencing Drayton’s ventures. 4 Drayton
is the classic case not simply of a poet in need of an England that no longer (if
ever) was. He was also a poet continually searching for patrons to support his
needs.
And yet in retrospect (the word is almost unavoidable with Drayton), it is
also a little difficult to imagine how his “forward pen” could ever have adapted
itself to the narrow confines of the Jacobean court. Drayton was, above all, a
poet who needed room. He needed room to celebrate the heroic achievements
of English legends; room to celebrate the English landscape with its customs and
traditions; room to speak out; room to experiment with different genres—besides
composing sonnets and historical legends, he also wrote many versions of
pastoral through his long career, attempted several kinds of odes, practiced his
hand at ballads, beast fables, verse epistles, and elegies, and produced the longest
“chorographical” poem in English; 5 room to revise—no poet of the period
reworked his canon in so many different ways. Drayton needed room, in short,
to be an English poet of the heroic vein and in the process to continue the
native line of poetry extending from Chaucer into the present—a tradition, as
he emphasizes in his verse epistle to Henry Reynolds, that equates the grave and
noble with the native and home-spun (III, 226–31). Reading Drayton reminds
us how significantly Donne and Jonson deviated from their immediate
predecessors, how much, in effect, they shrunk the scope of poetry in order to
enlarge it in a different direction.
It is also difficult to conceive of Drayton, bred in the country and a life-long
critic of deforestation, as being very courtly in manner. (In The Worthies of
England (1662), Fuller describes Drayton as “slow of speech, and inoffensive in
company.”) 6 Except for the early sonnets, his verse is marked by plain speaking
and sturdy sentiments, not elegance, wordplay, and wit. Very early on, in fact,
he seems to have disdained anything that might smack of “foreign inventions”—
“foreign,” in his case, includes sartorial or sexual innovations as well as linguistic
ones. Drayton characteristically reserved his most courtly touches for his
pastorals, something that might have pleased Elizabeth but not James; and when
he fully refined this art, to the point of miniaturizing it as he did under Charles
and Henrietta Maria in his most elegantly “Elizabethan” poems—the often
praised song to Sirena that begins “Nearer to the Silver Trent,” Nymphidia, the
Court of Fayrie (1627), and The Muses Elizium (1630)—Drayton was easily the
oldest living poet in England and hardly an obvious candidate for preferment.
And even then, he still bore some rough edges. As much as the new king and
58