ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
potentially highly lucrative grant, one requesting that a copy of his most recent
work, The Hymns and Songs of the Church, be bound and sold with each copy of
the popular Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter. Had the patent remained
uncontested by the Stationers, Wither might have realized sales in the range of
90,000 copies over the next ten years. As it turned out, however, the booksellers
not only persuaded Parliament to have the patent repealed, but they initiated a
boycott against Wither that prevented normal publication of any new works of
his for nearly ten years. 30 After 1623, Wither never again managed to command
the kind of readership for individual works that he had had early in his career,
despite his attempt to write for an increasingly broad segment of the population.
But his impulse to write was only partly a condition of the marketplace, and
though many, including Wither himself, have pointed to his evident decline as
a “poet,” there was no decline in his productivity.
However one attempts to describe Wither’s popularity in circumstantial
terms—and one jaundiced contemporary thought his poetry had life only
because it was forbidden—Wither commanded an individual idiom that lent
itself more fully to the “common reader” than did that of the other
Spenserians. At their most inclusive, Drayton and Browne wrote about topics
of national concern, about matters of Britain; but they still conceived of the
poet not only as a privileged sage (for Drayton, this view was practically selfdefining)
but also as still writing for a highly select audience of aristocrats and
fellow poets alike—indeed, one not substantially different from the audiences
of Donne or Jonson. Wither, too, could write the occasional courtly poem. His
frequently anthologized “Shall I, wasting in despair/Die because a woman’s
fair” reveals in miniature what Fair Virtue, The Mistresse of Phil’arete seems
consciously designed to show at no small length: that Wither could woo with
the best. But even in this mode, his idiom has an easy geniality and saucy
immediacy that go well beyond a simple attempt at a kind of Sidneyan
sprezzatura, the use of art to hide art:
Pedants shall not tie my strains
To our antique poets’ veins;
As if we, in latter days,
Knew to love, but not to praise.
Being born as free as these,
I will sing as I shall please,
Who as well new paths may run,
As the best before have done.
I disdain to make my song
For their pleasures short or long.
If I please I’ll end it here;
If I list I’ll sing this year.
And, though none regard of it,
By myself I pleas’d can sit,
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