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