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 />
William Browne (1590/1?–1643/5?) and George Wither<br />
(1588–1667)<br />
Drayton was too consciously respectful of the English literary traditions ever to<br />
imagine originating and sealing a tribe of poets about him in the manner of<br />
Jonson, even if he had had anything like the latter’s personal and poetic<br />
power. All the same he became, by accident as well as design, both mentor<br />
and magnet for a succeeding generation of writers who, though conversant<br />
with courtly traditions, were, like Drayton, never of the court and thought the<br />
proper subject of poetry was the larger matter of the “country,” in both the<br />
pastoral and political sense of the word. Of these—and the group would<br />
include Abraham Holland, the son of the great Elizabethan translator,<br />
Philemon Holland—the most interesting are William Browne and George<br />
Wither. Both expressed their allegiance to Drayton by being among the very<br />
few to supply commendatory poems for the second part of Poly-Olbion in<br />
1622. (In turn, Drayton commiserated with Browne about the world being<br />
“All arsey varsey” in a late verse epistle where he criticizes the sudden rise of<br />
the undeserved (III, 209).) But the story of Browne’s and Wither’s affiliation<br />
goes back at least ten years earlier when both poets, born in rural England<br />
fairly late in Elizabeth’s reign (Wither in Hampshire in 1588, Browne in<br />
Devonshire in 1591) and having attended Oxford, came on the literary scene<br />
with elegies to Prince Henry, who had died suddenly in November, 1612. This<br />
act alone hardly separated them from the many who mourned the death of<br />
England’s first heir to the throne in some eighty years; their subsequent<br />
publications, however, did.<br />
Browne’s Britannia’s Pastoral (Book I, 1613; II, 1616; a third book lay in<br />
manuscript until 1851) is the most sustained attempt to write a version of<br />
Spenserian epic romance in the early part of the seventeenth century. To a<br />
small degree, the poem draws on Drayton’s version of Spenser in Poly-Olbion,<br />
that is, the dynastic poet who celebrates Britain’s mythic past and its<br />
legendary founder, Brute, and some of its actual heroes of the more recent,<br />
Elizabethan present, especially those associated with great maritime exploits<br />
such as Sir Francis Drake and Sir Richard Grenville. (Hailing from Devon,<br />
Browne was especially partial to Drake.) To a much greater extent he<br />
exploited other recognizably Spenserian devices: archaic diction, pictorial<br />
imagery, allegory, romantic episodes in a landscape that can be alternately<br />
comforting and threatening. But in Browne, the epic vision has been folded<br />
fully within the pastoral, at least with regard to the action or plot. There is no<br />
presiding figure, no Gloriana, toward which all things point; there is no hero<br />
on a quest, no gentleman to be fashioned into a knight. Browne’s skills,<br />
particularly in the first two books, are essentially those of a lyricist, a Colin<br />
Clout of the Tavy River who has mastered a number of shorter forms.<br />
Anagrams, elegies, echo poems, singing contests, topographical description—<br />
he occasionally produces them with anthology-like elegance:<br />
66