The Monarch of Wit

An Analytical and Comparative Study of the Poetry of John Donne

J. B. Leishman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032102863
• eBook ISBN: 9781000455205
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

First Published in 1951, The Monarch of Wit presents John Donne's poetry in its proper context. The chief purpose of the book is to enable the reader to approach Donne's poetry without preconceptions of what 'metaphysical' poetry is or ought to be. Some of the questions which the author constantly has in mind are these: What are the main resemblances and differences, on the one hand, between Donne's poetry and Ben Jonson's, and, on the other hand, between Donne's poetry and that of poets who are commonly regarded as his disciples? How much of Donne's poetry may be appropriately described as "metaphysical", as personal or autobiographical, or as the expression of what has been called a "unified sensibility"?

This book is a must read for scholars and researchers of English poetry, English literature, and European literature.

CHAPTER I

DONNE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY

IN the historical consideration of literature there are three dangers against which we should be continually on our guard: the danger that we may lose sight of the larger differences and distinctions through concentrating too much attention upon the subsidiary ones; the danger that we may pervert these subsidiary distinctions into antitheses; the danger that within these subsidiary distinctions we may insist too much upon identity and too little upon difference. In the present field of study we have, on the one hand, heard perhaps too much of a School of Jonson and a School of Donne, of the classical and the so-called metaphysical strains in seventeenth-century poetry, and not enough of those larger differences between the characteristic non-dramatic poetry of the Age of Elizabeth and that of the Jacobean and Caroline periods, differences in which both Jonson and Donne equally share; while, on the other hand, we have had, perhaps, too many generalizations about the so-called metaphysical poets and not enough insistence on the very important differences between them. It is, indeed, easier to perceive certain obvious differences between the poetry of Donne and Jonson than to perceive certain important resemblances, just as it is easier to perceive certain superficial resemblances between, say, Donne and Crashaw than to become aware of their fundamental differences. The ultimate purpose of such generalizations, classifications and distinctions is to increase awareness, to enable us, by analysis and comparison, to achieve a clearer recognition, a more intense appreciation, of the peculiar virtue, the essential thisness, of whatever literature we may be studying; this, though, is a strenuous task, and most of us, I fear, tend unconsciously to manipulate these generalizations, classifications and distinctions, disregarding here, over-emphasizing there, until we have spread over everything a veil of custom and a film of familiarity which shall save us as much as possible from the insupportable fatigue of thought. Donne has been too often considered as a so-called metaphysical poet and too little as a seventeenth-century poet (many characteristic seventeenth-century poets began to write during the reign of Elizabeth); let us begin, then, by trying to reach some not too inadequate conception of the characteristics of seventeenth-century poetry in general and of the principal differences and varieties within that fundamental identity.

That such a conception is both real and necessary is proved by the fact that the poetry of those two very individual and very different poets, Ben Jonson and John Donne, who are commonly regarded as the founders of two different schools, has many important characteristics in common. They were—to begin with an important fact which has received too little attention—they were both, in a sense, coterie-poets, poets who made their initial impact not upon the common reader but upon comparatively small circles of intellectuals and literary amateurs. Apart from his contributions to the facetious commendations of Thomas Coryat in the latter’s Crudities (1611) and to the elegies on Prince Henry in Lachrymae Lachrymarum (1613), the only poems Donne printed during his lifetime were the two Anniversaries upon the religious death of Mistris Elizabeth Drury, in 1611 and 1612. The first collected edition of his poems was not published until 1633, two years after his death, and his great reputation as a poet during his life-time was gained entirely through the circulation of his poems in manuscript. Jonson, it is true, was a much more public poet than Donne: he wrote plays, which were not only acted, but published, under very careful supervision, by himself. Nevertheless, the great body of his non-dramatic verse was not published until after his death, and he too, though less exclusively and remotely than Donne, was the master, the arbiter elegantiarum, of a circle, of a coterie, of various young Templars and Courtiers who gathered round him in taverns, hung upon his words, begged copies of his verses, and were proud to be known as his sons.

When we speak, as we often do, of Jonson and Donne as the two great influences on the non-dramatic poetry of the first half of the seventeenth century, and when we think, as we often do, of that poetry chiefly in its relation to either or both of them, we should not forget that we are speaking and thinking only of that portion of seventeenth-century poetry which we now chiefly read and remember, and that much even of this poetry, easy, familiar, harmlos (to borrow a German word) as it now seems to us, may well have seemed quite exceptionally choice and sophisticated to its writers and first readers. There are many seventeenth-century poems which may seem to us only very superficially like Donne’s, but which at the time may well have seemed astonishingly dernier cri and quite beyond the reach of simple-minded admirers of Forests of Arden and Bowers of Bliss. Both Jonson and Donne were superior persons, and both seem to have been well aware of their superiority, but Donne, though far more urbane, was a much more superior person than Jonson, and, except superficially, much less imitable. Contemporary allusions to his poetry are few and far between, and even quite advanced men seem to have remained ignorant of it for an incredibly long time.¹ In the various miscellanies published between 1640 and 1660, whose contents seem to have been derived partly from printed texts and partly from manuscript commonplace-books, and which may be regarded as reflecting fairly accurately the taste of the average cultivated gentleman of the time of Charles I, both the number of Donne’s poems included and any obvious traces of his influence are remarkably small. The influence of Jonson, the epigrammatic rather than the moral Jonson, the Jonson of Still to be neat, still to be drest’, ‘Come my Celia, let us prove’, and ‘If I freely may discover’, is far more striking. It is in the wittily, often impudently, argumentative love-poem, and in the indecently, sometimes obscenely, witty ‘elegy’, epigram, or paradox, that Donne’s influence upon the secular poetry of the seventeenth century is chiefly apparent.¹ Such poems, though, are more frequent in the published works of particular poets (Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, Cowley), and in certain manuscript collections, than in the miscellanies, where the persistence both of the hearty Elizabethan song and of the Elizabethan pastoral tradition is far more noticeable. In the main, Donne’s dialectic is simplified and his wit coarsened by his imitators. One wonders what Donne thought of them. (It must sometimes have been an embarrassment to him that, at the time when he was preaching in St. Paul’s, various obscene epigrams were being handed about and attributed to ‘Dr. Donne’.) Jonson, so often prickly and dogmatic, was probably a more indulgent parent: when he declared that my son Cartwright writes all like a man’, the modern reader finds it hard to know just what he meant, and will perhaps reflect that, after all, it’s a wise father who knows his own children.

William Drummond of Hawthornden, a disciple of Spenser and of the Italians, has recorded that when Ben Jonson visited him in 1619 he told him that his poems ‘were all good … save that they smelled too much of the Schooles, and were not after the fancie of the tyme’. Jonson, no doubt, was speaking for himself and for those who agreed with him, but it is really impossible to know just how many did agree with him, or to form even a rough estimate of the proportion of then readers of English poetry who shared this ‘fancie of the tyme’.¹ In saying that the poetry of Jonson and of Donne was in a sense coterie poetry, I want to insist upon the fact that it is almost impossible to know just how far the coterie extended, whom it included, who, so to speak, were in the inner circle and who were merely on the fringe. Where fashion and mode are active the detection and disintrication of ‘influences’ becomes formidably difficult. Milton admired Homer and Virgil and Ovid, Tasso and della Casa, not because anyone had told him to do so, but because he believed that was how great poetry should be written: one often feels, though, that many of his contemporaries admired Donne because to admire Donne was the done thing. Similarly, although to-day one constantly hears it said that contemporary English poets have been greatly influenced by Hopkins, by Mr. Eliot, and even by Rilke, it may well be that future generations will find the business of detecting these ‘influences’ a most baffling task. Generalizations even about those seventeenth-century poets whose work is available in modern editions can at, best be tentative. Not even the well-known poets will fit neatly into categories: even in them we encounter all manner of paradoxes and tergiversations. Cowley has related that it was the discovery of a volume of Spenser in his mother’s parlour that made him irrecoverably a poet; when, however, he went out into the world he discovered that not Spenser but Donne was the man, and set himself to imitate Donne—‘to a fault’, as Dryden said, who himself confessed that Cowley had been the darling of his youth. When, though, one turns from the poets whose works are available in modern editions to the miscellanies and manuscript commonplace books of the age, the task of generalizing about seventeenth-century poetry, seventeenth-century taste, and seventeenth-century sensibility seems almost impossible. If I am now attempting to generalize myself, it is with an almost overwhelming conviction of the vanity of dogmatizing.

Each of these two very characteristic seventeenth-century poets, Jonson and Donne, was born during the reign of Elizabeth, and each had begun to establish his reputation during the last decade of the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, great as are the differences between them, the poetry of each has more in common with that of the other than it has with the poetry of Spenser, or of the Sonneteers, or with the lyrics in the song-books, or with such poems as Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. On the one hand, neither Jonson nor Donne seems ever to have shared the ambition of Spenser and of several of Spenser’s disciples to write a large-scale heroic or narrative poem. On the other hand, they both took the short poem more seriously than the typical Elizabethan poets did. Even if one leaves out of account the great mass of utterly undistinguished Elizabethan lyric, where the same rhymes, phrases, and properties appear over and over again with wearisome iteration, where nymphs and swains on the plains trip at leisure in a measure, view with pleasure Flora’s treasure in meadows fresh and gay where fleecy lambs do play, weave in bowers crowns of flowers, or where fountains spring from mountains sigh and languish in their anguish,—even if one forgets what the great majority of the poems (including Spenser’s and Sidney’s) in, say, Englands Helicon are really like,—even if one confines oneself to the long-sifted contents of modern anthologies, one often feels that even the best Elizabethan poets just tossed off their delightful lyrics: partly, perhaps, because they were generally intended to be sung and therefore ought not to be too weighty or condensed. And one’s general impression of the Elizabethan sonneteers is that they wrote too many sonnets and wrote them too easily. Jonson’s foolish Matheo in Every Man in His Humour would, when melancholy, ‘write you your halfe score or your dozen of sonnets at a sitting’. Both Jonson and Donne seem to have set a new fashion of writing short but very concentrated poems—Donne’s always and Jonson’s often intended to be handed round in manuscript and admired by connoisseurs. For it cannot be too strongly insisted that most of what we now chiefly remember of the non-dramatic poetry of the first half of the seventeenth century was poetry that for years had been circulating in manuscript before it finally found its way into print, while most of the non-dramatic poets who were publishing were either belated Elizabethans or pertinacious disciples of Spenser, and were regarded by the young intellectuals of the Court, the Inns of Court, and the Universities as old-fashioned and out of date. (One can go a good way towards placing the younger Milton among his contemporaries by saying that for him neither the Faerie Queene nor Ovid’s Metamorphoses was out of date.) It is significant and almost symbolic that that grand old Elizabethan, Michael Drayton, who was born a year earlier than Shakespeare and who lived and wrote and published until 1631, should have twice rather bitterly and contemptu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter I Donne and Seventeenth-Century Poetry
• II Donne the Man
• III Epigrams, Elegies, Satires, Verse Letters
• IV The Songs and Sonets
• V The Divine Poems
• Table of Donne’s Poems Quoted or Discussed
• Index