Selected Poems (1685-1700)

When John Tutchin died on September 23, 1707, he had already created the image of himself which Alexander Pope has transmitted to posterity. There, in Book II of The Dunciad (1728), the Whig journalist appears as one of two figures in a shaggy Tap'stry :
Earless on high, stood un-abash'd Defoe, And Tutchin flagrant from the scourge, below.
Tutchin's first book shows two impulses: the awkwardly lyrical and the directly satiric. He feels compelled, in the Preface, to defend his choice of less serious subjects. His light poems do not, in the least, detract from Virtue ; since I have Read the Poems of Beza , Heinsius , our own Donne , &c. He promises to turn to some Graver Subject. There are other equally significant comments in a Preface that reveals a great deal about changing literary taste. In To the Memory of Mr. John Oldham, Tutchin curiously avoids the main subject of Dryden's finer elegy, namely, Oldham's achievement in rough satire. His praise is that Crashaw and Cowley both did live in thee. However, in his Satyr Against Vice and Satyr Against Whoring, Tutchin has already learned the art of declaiming, from the poet who has been called the English Juvenal, John Oldham.
If contemporary accounts of the Port Royal earthquake are compared with The Earth-quake of Jamaica , the reader becomes impressed by Tutchin's way of adapting the well-known details to a moral comment on life. His scenes are indeed graphic, but they do not have the immediacy of such eye-witness accounts as the following, preserved by Luttrell:
Tutchin's aim is to compare vulnerable nature with vulnerable man: Can humane Race / Stand on their / Legs when Nature Reels? He sees in the disaster a challenge for English sinners to repent: the Hurricane of Fate wails on murder'd Cornish . He had not yet forgotten the Monmouth adventure. For he alludes here to the act of Parliament passed in 1689 reversing the attainder of Henry Cornish, the alderman who had been brutally executed in 1685 for high treason through participating in the Rye House Plot and attaching himself to the Duke of Monmouth. For Tutchin, politics were always relevant.