John Burroughs, in his inspiring essay on Walt Whitman entitled ‘The Flight of the Eagle’, quotes the following sentence from a lecture on Burns, delivered by “a lecturer from over seas”, whom he does not name: “When literature becomes dozy, respectable, and goes in the smooth grooves of fashion, and copies and copies again, something must be done; and to give life to that dying literature, a man must be found not educated under its influence.”
Such a man I would say was William Cowper, who, in his weakness, was
“Strong to sanctify the poet’s high vocation”,
and who
“Testified this solemn truth, while phrenzy desolated,—
Nor man nor angel satisfies whom only God created.”
John Keats, in his poem entitled ‘Sleep and Poetry’, has well characterized the soulless poetry of the period between the Restoration and the poetical revival in the latter part of the eighteenth century, but more especially of the Popian period. After speaking of the greatness of his favorite poets of the Elizabethan period, he continues:—
“Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism
Nurtured by foppery and barbarism,
Made great Apollo blush for this his land.
Men were thought wise who could not understand
His glories: with a puling infant’s force
They sway’d about upon a rocking-horse,
And thought it Pegasus.”
(Alluding to the rocking-horse movement of the Popian verse.)
“Ah dismal soul’d!
The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll’d
It’s gathering waves—ye felt it not. The blue
Bar’d its eternal bosom, and the dew
Of summer nights collected still to make
The morning precious: beauty was awake!
Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead
To things ye knew not of,—were closely wed
To musty laws lined out with wretched rule
And compass vile: so that ye taught a school
Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit,
Till, like the certain wands of Jacob’s wit,
Their verses tallied. Easy was the task:
A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask
Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race!
That blasphem’d the bright Lyrist to his face,
And did not know it,—no, they went about,
Holding a poor, decrepid standard out
Mark’d with most flimsy mottoes, and in large
The name of one Boileau!”
It was these lines that raised the ire of Byron, who regarded them as an irreverent assault upon his favorite poet, Pope. In the controversy occasioned by the Rev. W. L. Bowles’s strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope, Byron perversely asks, “Where is the poetry of which one-half is good? Is it the Aeneid? Is it Milton’s? Is it Dryden’s? Is it any one’s except Pope’s and Goldsmith’s, of which ALL is good?”