ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

Faire, & Learn’d, & good as she,
Tyme shall throw a dart at thee.
PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
69
(II, 342)
With its combination of fine finish and gradually deepening sentiments, it is not
surprising that the poem routinely appeared in early collections of Jonson’s
poetry (although one suspects Jonson would have made something of her name);
but the problem of assigning authorship, in this case at least, 22 also points to the
larger issue of Browne’s near anonymity as a poet.
Anonymity was never an issue with George Wither. A Spenserian by affinity,
not by imitation, and then only in the early part of his career, Wither was one
of the most colorfully busy poets of the century. “He would make verses as fast
as he could write them,” wrote John Aubrey. “And though he was an easie rymer,
and no good poet, he was a good vates. He had a strange sagacity and foresight
into mundane affaires.” 23 Aubrey’s comment points accurately to Wither’s
entrepreneurial energies, especially with print, energies that accounted for his
publishing over one hundred books or pamphlets in his lifetime (mostly poetry),
got him into repeated trouble with authorities (he was frequently imprisoned,
perhaps as many as five times), 24 and made him the apparent enemy of those
poets who valued propriety and form in verse. Jonson satirized him in the figure
of Chronomastix in his 1622 masque, Time Vindicated, and around mid-century
Sir John Denham conferred immortality of a sort upon Wither in one of the
period’s more famous anecdotes. According to Aubrey, Denham “went to the
king, and desired his majestie not to hang [Wither], for that whitest G.W. lived,
he [Denham] should not be the worst Poet in England.” 25
Despite the drubbing Wither has received at the hands of Neoclassicists—
and he inevitably makes an appearance in Pope’s Dunciad—Wither was one of
the most read poets of the early seventeenth century. His Abuses Stript and Whipt
went through five editions alone in the year of its publication (1613) and
another three by 1617; and in conjunction with The Shepherd’s Hunting (three
editions in 1615) and his Motto (seven in 1621), it catapulted him into the
public eye, where he remained for nearly half a century until his death in 1667.
To be “the very Withers of the City” was, in Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy
(1668), to be the ultimate popular poet: the multitudes “have bought more
Editions of his Works than would serve to lay under all their Pies at the Lord
Mayor’s Christmass.” 26
Much of Wither’s extraordinary success must be ascribed to the initial
notoriety he received from Abuses, notoriety that included being thrown in
Marshalsea Prison. (In Charles Lamb’s apt phrase, Wither was “for ever
anticipating persecution and martyrdom; fingering, as it were, the flames, to try
how he can bear them.”) 27 The offended party was in all likelihood Henry
Howard, Earl of Northampton, a staunch Catholic who had long been
attempting to secure an alliance with Spain and one of the most unscrupulous
and powerful men in the Jacobean court. He had also probably been led to mark