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 popularity of Quarles’s Emblems belongs as much to the gentrification of<br />
the fine arts in England as it does to the enduring enthusiasm for works of<br />
devotional piety. In fact, the immediate personal inspiration behind the<br />
Emblems—the individual whom Quarles, in a bow to the sister arts, credited as<br />
having “put the Theorboe into my hand”—was none other than Edward<br />
Benlowes, the wealthy and eccentric country gentleman from Brent Hall, Essex,<br />
who was to take the art of the book to new and extravagant heights by<br />
producing one of the century’s most lavishly illustrated texts in Theophila, or<br />
Love’s Sacrifice (1652). 52 (The text includes illustrations by England’s first great<br />
engraver, Francis Barlow.) In the late 1620s, this sometime poet and lifelong<br />
patron of the arts made his grand tour of the Continent. Besides putting himself<br />
in touch with much that was current in the arts in both the Netherlands and<br />
Italy, he also encountered two recently published, skillfully engraved, Jesuit<br />
emblem books: the Pia Desideria by Hermann Hugo (1624) and the Typus Mundi<br />
(1627). These were to serve as Quarles’s sources.<br />
In sharp contrast to Theophila, however, or even Wither’s Collection of<br />
Emblems—both folio texts—Quarles’s book is conceived on a thoroughly<br />
modest scale. If not the only reason, this is surely an important one for its<br />
huge success. Whereas both Benlowes and Wither drew on the visual as a<br />
partial sign of their desire to associate with high culture—whether conceived<br />
in learnedly esoteric or courtly terms—and produced enormously expensive<br />
texts, Quarles’s octavo is meant to be cradled in the hand, to be held by the<br />
reader, who can readily take in both picture and text, placed as they are on<br />
facing pages: it is a book designed, that is, to be used and not merely admired;<br />
and it could be purchased for perhaps a little more than the price of a quart of<br />
sack. 53 As for the book’s rationale (and by the early seventeenth century,<br />
thanks largely to the work of Italian humanists like Alciati and Palazzi, there<br />
was a significant body of material associated with emblems and related tropes<br />
like enigmas, symbols, and devices), Quarles’s preface to the reader is<br />
positively anti-Jonsonian in its general appeal: succinct, courteous, and<br />
invitingly simple. It begins by rehearsing Simonides’s familiar argument that<br />
painting is mute poetry; by the passage’s end, author and reader exist in a<br />
happily reciprocal relationship.<br />
An Embleme is but a silent Parable. Let not the tender Eye check, to<br />
see the allusion to our blessed Savior figured in these Types. In holy<br />
Scripture he is sometimes called a sower; sometimes, a Fisher,<br />
sometimes a Physician. And why not presented so as well to the eye as<br />
to the eare? Before the knowledge of letters God was known by<br />
Hieroglyphicks: and, indeed, what are the Heavens, the Earth, nay every<br />
Creature but Hieroglyphicks and Emblemes of His Glory? I have no more<br />
to say. I wish thee as much pleasure in the reading, as I had in the<br />
writing. Farewell, Reader.<br />
(III, p. 45)<br />
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