Lectures on English poets

by James Russell Lowell

Or is it that the spirit of man, of every race of men, has its fatal ebbs and floods, its oscillations between the fluid ideal and the solid matter-of-fact, so that the doubtful line of shore between is in one generation a hard sandy actuality, with only such resemblances of beauty as a dead sea-moss here and there, and in the next is whelmed with those graceful curves of ever-gaining, ever-receding foam, and that dance of joyous spray which knows not, so bright is it, whether it be sea or sunshine.

What English Poetry was between Chaucer and Spenser there is no need to say. Scotland had given birth to two or three poets of that kind which is qualified by the epithet national, which is as much as saying that they took account only of the universe to the north-northeast corner of human nature instead of the whole circumference of it. England in the meanwhile had been enriched with Sternhold and Hopkins, but on the whole, the most important event between the death of Chaucer and the publication of the “Faëry Queene” was the introduction of blank verse. Perhaps the blank poetry suggested it.

Before the “Faëry Queene,” also, two long poems were printed and popular—the “Mirror for Magistrates,” and “Albion’s England.” How the first of these was ever read it is hard to conceive, unless we accept the theory of some theologians that our earth is only a kind of penal colony where men are punished for sins committed in some previous state of existence. The other was the work of one Warner, a conveyancer, and has a certain philological value now from its abounding in the popular phrases of the day. It is worth notice, also, as containing the most perfect example in the English language of what is called a conceit. It occurs in his account of Queen Elinor’s treatment of Fair Rosamond:

With that she dashed her on the lips

So dyed double red;

Hard was the heart that struck the blow,

Soft were the lips that bled.

Which is nonsense and not poetry, though Dr. Percy admired it. Dr. Donne, and the poets whom Dr. Johnson called metaphysical (as if all poets are not so), is thought to be full of conceits. But the essence of a conceit is not in a comparison being far-fetched,—the imagination can make fire and water friendly when it likes,—but in playing upon the meanings of two words where one is taken in a metaphorical sense. This is a mark of the superficial mind always; whereas Donne’s may be called a subterficial one, which went down to the roots of thought instead of playing with its blossoms.

Not long after the “Faëry Queene” were published the “Polyolbion” of Drayton, and the “Civil Wars” of Daniel. Both of these men were respectable poets (especially Drayton), but neither of them could reconcile poetry with gazetteering or chronicle-making. They are as unlike as a declaration in love and a declaration in law.

This was the period of the Saurians in English Poetry, interminable poems, book after book and canto after canto, like far-stretching vertebræ, prodigious creatures that rendered the earth unfit for the dwelling of Man. They are all dead now, the unwieldy monsters—ichthyo-, plesio-, and megalosauri—they all sleep well, and their huge remains are found imbedded in those vast morasses, the “Collections of the Poets.” We wonder at the length of face and general atra-bilious look that mark the portraits of that generation; but it is no marvel when even the poetry was such downright hard work. Poems of this sort might have served to while away the three-centuried evening of antediluvian lives. It is easy to understand how our ancestors could achieve great things when they encountered such hardships for mere amusement. If we agree with Horace in pitying the pre-Homeric heroes because they were without poets, we may sincerely commiserate our forefathers of that generation because they had them. The reading of one of these productions must have been nearly as long a business as the taking of Troy, and deserved a poet to sing it. Perhaps fathers, when their time on earth was up, folded the leaf down and left the task to be finished by their sons—a dreary inheritance.