ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
almost made to order, a visible commentary on, or allegory of, the multiplicity it
seeks to understand.
That metacritical overview of his “art” may offer little comfort to nonspecialists
or those simply wishing for a better controlled poetic line, but in
short stretches Wither’s later poetry can be powerfully eclectic. A poem like
Westrow Revived, a Funeral Poem Without Fiction (1653), for instance, will
never satisfy on the basis of strict poetic merit; but as a work that reflects—
and recirculates—problems of discursive instability more generally, an
instability only fully exploited when it seemed to disappear into the creation
of that new genre, the novel, Westrow Revived can make a strong claim on our
attention. The poet’s ultimate allegiance is to a professed Spenserian ideal of
poetry: “what shall that Musing profit, which affords/Nothing but bare
Relations, or mere Words.” 40 And Wither identifies the muse’s proper or
idealized home with the prince or king, a vision sustained generically, at least,
in the formal division of the poem into cantos, each replete with a rhyming
argument. But the claim is in many ways vestigial. Not merely the specificity
of detail, but the continual admission by Wither that he is writing “truth” and
not some “poetick strain,” 41 and doing so, moreover, from his own parlor in
which casual dialogue is an enduring feature: these elements suggest a poet
feeling his way to the outer edges of the lyric, someone who, without taking
the final step of either a Bunyan or Defoe and abandoning verse, nonetheless
has begun to take the peripheral into the center:
The foll’wing evening, after I had heard
That verifide, whereof I was afeard
The night before, I, then afresh inspir’d,
To give my Musings utterance, retir’d:
And, that no interruptions I might find,
Put all my own concernments, out of mind:
For, he, that honestly one work, would do,
Must not, the same time, be imploy’d on two.
But, on the paper, ere I fixt my pen,
Such things, as possibly by other men
Might be objected, question’d, or alleadg’d,
To hinder that, wherein I was ingag’d,
Rush’d in upon me; and, delaies, had wrought,
Had I not on a sudden kickt them out;
And given some of them, (ere they would go;)
A reasonable civell answer too. 42
Placed against Sidney’s description of writer’s block in the opening sonnet of
Astrophel and Stella, this passage not only reveals vast differences separating
Wither from the courtly ideal of careful invention; it also charts the descent of
the muse into the marketplace in which the need to get the work into print is
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