ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

PATRIOTIC AND POPULAR POETS
the usual shorter forms in Divine Fancies (1632), epigrams, meditations, and
observations, among others; produced the requisite number of elegies to
important people; and during the early phase of the Civil War made use of
Spenserian pastoral in The Shepheardes Oracle (published posthumously in 1646)
to defend his loyalty to the ancient British church.
The Biblical histories and poems were reprinted often in Quarles’s lifetime
under the general rubric of Divine Poems (five editions by 1642 and frequently
thereafter), and the Divine Fancies were hardly less popular. 45 But the Quarles
who, according to a bemused Walpole, made Milton “wait till the world had
done admiring” him, 46 was rather the less severe Quarles, the Quarles who
moved out from underneath the canonical weight of Scripture and busied
himself with artful presentations of contemporary texts: the Quarles of Argalus
and Parthenia (1629) and the Emblems (1635). Again, both were acts of
“translations,” or to use the author’s organic metaphor, “graft[ings],” 47 not
original compositions; and both were astonishingly successful ventures. The first
was taken from that most popular of prose romances in the seventeenth century,
Sidney’s Arcadia, but it is questionable whose version was the better known
since by the end of the century, Argalus and Parthenia had gone through
twentyone editions as against seventeen for the original. 48 Quarles’s also
generated graftings of its own, as the anonymous Unfortunate Lovers (1700)
reveals upon close inspection. As for the Emblems, although there was English
precedent of a sort for the genre in Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes
and Other Devises (1586) and Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britanna (1612)—the
latter serving in the 1620s as the design for the magnificent ceiling at Blickling
Hall—and although there were soon to be contemporary rivals besides the
collection produced by Withers, it was Quarles who brought the art doubly
“home” to English readers by domesticating a genre with a long history of
popularity on the Continent that dated back to the 1531 Emblemata of Andrea
Alciati and by producing a text that could be “read” by a full household, adults
and children alike. “His visible poetry (I mean his Emblems), is excellent,”
observed his contemporary, Thomas Fuller, in his Worthies of England, “catching
therein the eye and fancy at one draught, so that he hath out-Alciated therein,
in some men’s judgment.” 49 For Christmas, 1634, the Countess of Derby, the
honored patron and subject of Milton’s Arcades, gave what must have been a
first-run copy of Quarles’s Emblems to her twelve-year old grandson, William
Brydges. 50
What was Quarles’s appeal, especially as reflected in these works? For one thing,
even if he conscientiously dedicated his work to aristocrats, he rarely attempted a
complex thought. In the preface to Argalus and Parthenia, for instance, he makes
explicit his distaste for “strong lines” (III, p. 240)—a position he shared,
paradoxically, with his massively learned employer—precisely because, in Quarles’s
view, they are “made for the third Generation to make use of,” and not for the
reader’s immediate pleasure and benefit. The final poem in Argalus, in fact,
reinforces this point exactly where we might expect. Quarles produces a much
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