A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry

Christine Gerrard

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118702291, 9781405113168
• eBook ISBN: 9781118835982
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

A COMPANION TO & EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY

A COMPANION TO & EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY
Edited by Christine Gerrard

This wide-ranging Companion reflects the dramatic transformation that has taken place in the study of eighteenth-century poetry over the past two decades. New essays by leading scholars in the field address an expanded poetic canon that now incorporates verse by many women poets and other formerly marginalized poetic voices. The volume engages with topical critical debates such as the production and consumption of literary texts, the constructions of femininity, sentiment and sensibility, enthusiasm, politics and aesthetics, and the growth of imperialism.

The Companion opens with a section on contexts, considering eighteenth-century poetry's relationships with such topics as party politics, religion, science, the visual arts, and the literary marketplace. A series of close readings of specific poems follows, ranging from familiar texts such as Pope's The Rape of the Lock to slightly less well-known works such as Swift's "Stella" poems and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Town Eclogues. Essays on forms and genres, and a series of more provocative contributions on significant themes and debates, complete the volume. The Companion gives readers a thorough grounding in both the background and the substance of eighteenth-century poetry, and is designed to be used alongside David Fairer and Christine Gerrard's Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (3^rd edition, 2014).

PART I

Contexts and Perspectives

1

Poetry, Politics, and the Rise of Party

Christine Gerrard

Party politics and dynastic uncertainty shaped the lives of writers born in the immediate aftermath of the Civil Wars. For poets such as Alexander Pope, Anne Finch, Jonathan Swift, and Matthew Prior, a sense of the political was thus deeply ingrained. Swift, born in 1667 and dying in 1745, lived through the reigns of no fewer than six English monarchs – Charles II, James II, William III, Queen Anne, George I, and George II. On at least two occasions he had a price on his head for his interventions in English and Irish politics. Alexander Pope, born in 1688, the year in which the Dutch Protestant William of Orange's bloodless coup ousted the Catholic James II from the English throne, suffered the direct consequences of that so-called “Glorious Revolution” – the punitive Williamite legislation against Catholics affecting rights of residence, worship, and university education. So did Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661–1720), who lost her Court post serving James's wife Mary of Modena: as non-jurors (those who refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the new regime), she and her husband went on the run, and her husband was arrested for Jacobitism. Matthew Prior (1664–1721), the most important English poet in the decade following Dryden's death in 1700, enjoyed a distinguished diplomatic career under William and his successor Queen Anne. Yet at George I's accession in 1714, Prior, like many of his Tory friends, faced a vendetta from the new Whig administration: refusing to implicate his friends in allegations of support for the Stuart dynasty, he was impeached and spent two years in close custody.

Yet if political events changed the lives of the poets, poets saw themselves as agents of political change. Poetry of all kinds – highbrow and lowbrow, satires, odes, panegyrics, ballads – proliferated during the restored monarchy of Charles II, especially after the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1679. The growing prominence of the poet as political commentator, satirist, propagandist, and panegyrist was both a cause and a consequence of the inexorable rise of party politics during Charles's reign. During the 1670s a two-party political system developed from the clashes between Charles and his political supporters on the one hand and, on the other, the parliamentary pressure group led by the first Earl of Shaftesbury, driven by opposition to the succession of Charles's Catholic brother James. During the “Exclusion Crisis” this pressure group – soon to be known as the Whigs – pushed for legislation to exclude James from the throne. Loyal supporters of the King's cause earned themselves the name of Tories. Both Whig and Tory were originally terms of abuse derived from the Celtic fringe. Like many of the other political terms prevalent in this period – Court, Country, Patriot – they were subject to constant scrutiny, debate, and redefinition. The intensity of political engagement that characterizes poetry of the period 1660–1750 testifies to the growing confidence felt by male and female poets alike in their right to voice political opinions and their ability to change the course of history: a sense of empowerment which was itself a product of the loosening of social hierarchies in the decades after the Civil Wars. Poets between Dryden in the 1660s and Pope in the 1730s – and even as late as Charles Churchill in the 1760s – helped alter the direction of politics, whether it meant (as in Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel of 1681) discrediting the nascent Whig party and affirming Stuart legitimacy, popularizing the new Hanoverian dynasty at German George I's accession in 1714, or compelling the first minister Robert Walpole to declare war against Spain in 1739. To poets of this period, the modern separation of the political and the aesthetic realms would have seemed entirely alien.

Critical Debates

Scholarship of the past three decades has enriched and complicated our understanding of eighteenth-century political history. Debates that began in the 1980s and still reverberate today have challenged traditional preconceptions of the eighteenth century as a period of stability and complacency. Linda Colley's pioneering work on Britishness, which stimulated wide-ranging discussions of national identity, examined the ways in which the 1707 Act of Union forged a sense of nationhood in which distinctive Scottish, Welsh, and Irish allegiances were subsumed under a larger sense of Britain as a Protestant nation pitted against Catholic France (Colley 1992). Britain's growing confidence as an imperial power has been the subject of some broad-ranging studies of empire [see ch. 2, “Poetry, Politics, and Empire”]. Revisionist historians such as J. C. D. Clark, debating the nature and impact of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, have argued controversially that England remained a static, confessional state, still dominated by the Anglican Church and not altered substantially by secularization, urbanization, or proto-democratic parliamentary change (Clark 1985). Both revisionist historians and historians of nationhood placed a renewed emphasis, for different ends, on the importance of monarchy: its rituals, its court culture, its literature. The tradition of Tory political satire centered on Dryden, Pope, Swift, and Johnson was reanimated by debates over the extent to which any or all of these writers remained secretly committed to the exiled House of Stuart. Jacobitism, once dismissed as an antiquarian idyll, was again taken seriously by some (not all) historians and literary scholars. Critics such as Howard Erskine-Hill and Murray Pittock mined the writings of all the major male poets in the canon for evidence of Jacobite innuendo and symbolism (Erskine-Hill 1981–2, 1982, 1984, 1996; Pittock 1994). Other critics compensated for the comparative neglect of the literary culture of the Whig party which dominated British political life between 1688 and 1760 (Womersley 1997, 2005; Williams 2005). Their work established the contours of a modern, forward-looking Whig cultural agenda embracing piety, politeness, and patriotism. Poets such as Richard Blackmore, Thomas Tickell, and Ambrose Philips, familiar as the butt of Pope's satire on “dull” writers, are now seen to have participated in, and even prompted, a dialectic with Tory poetry and criticism.

Pioneering work by critics such as Carol Barash, Kathryn King, and Sarah Prescott has enlarged the field of enquiry to include the work of women poets, once entirely absent from critical accounts of poetry and politics in this period. Barash's seminal work on late seventeenth-century women poets – Aphra Behn, Katherine Phillips, Mary Chudleigh, Jane Barker, and Anne Finch – emphasized their Tory, royalist, and Jacobite affiliations and their associations with queens and consorts such as Mary of Modena and Queen Anne (Barash 1996). More recent work has begun to reconstruct the lives and works of female poets writing in the Whig tradition. As Prescott has shown (2005b), Elizabeth Singer Rowe and Susannah Centlivre greeted the new order under William III with enthusiasm, advancing a cultural and political agenda that was essentially Protestant, militaristic, and modern. Centlivre, a firm supporter of the Hanoverian succession, subsequently produced some stringently anti-Jacobite verse. George II's intellectual and ambitious consort, Caroline of Anspach, became a muse figure for male and female Protestant Whig poets as well as the satiric butt of male Tory satirists. As King asserts, women poets participated in a wide range of different political discourses – republican, Whig, Tory, Jacobite – and a range of genres: satire, pamphlets, panegyrics, and odes (King 2003).

Many of the subsequent essays in this volume – notably those by Suvir Kaul (ch. 2, “Poetry, Politics, and Empire”), John Morillo (ch. 5, “Poetic Enthusiasm”), Brean Hammond (ch. 27, “Verse Satire”), Margaret Koehler (ch. 28, “The Ode”), Juan Pellicer (ch. 29, “The Georgic”), Abigail Williams (ch. 32, “Whig and Tory Poetics”), and Gerard Carruthers (ch. 41, “Poetry Beyond the English Borders”) – show how the relationship between poetry and politics in this period informs genre and permeates, even generates, aesthetic debate. A number of essays in the “Readings” section (Part II) place individual texts or pairs of texts in their context and offer a detailed interpretation of their political implications. The present essay is designed primarily as an introduction to such debates by offering a chronological discussion of poetic responses to major political events and concerns in the period covered by this volume.

The Rage of Party under Queen Anne

Although Matthew Prior heralded the year 1700 with his optimistic panegyric Carmen Seculare, dynastic uncertainty underscored the advent of the new century. Mary Chudleigh's “On the Death of his Highness the Duke of Glocester” mourned the loss that July of eleven-year-old William, last surviving child of Princess Anne, heir to the throne. The child's death also buried Tory hopes for a continuation of a Protestant Stuart dynasty. The following year, 1701, the Act of Settlement decreed that in default of issue to either William or Anne, the crown would pass to Sophia, Electress of Hanover, and to “the heirs of her body being Protestants.” Anne succeeded William in 1702 following his sudden death by a fall from his horse (an act of God, according to some Jacobites). The text from Isaiah 49: 23 delivered at her coronation – “Kings shall be thy nursing-fathers, and their queens thy nursing-mothers” – threw into sharp relief the tragic facts of Anne's maternal failure (seventeen pregnancies and five births) and her increasingly poor health. Finch's “A Pindarick Poem Upon the Hurricane” (Fairer and Gerrard 2004: 26–33), written shortly after the Great Storm of 1703 caused devastation across the south of England, registers a profound sense of unease and dislocation. Unlike her better-known “Nocturnal Rêverie,” “Upon the Hurricane” is a bold public poem – a Pindaric ode – which draws analogies between the natural and political spheres to meditate on the upheavals of post-Civil War England. Finch's storm-damaged landscape subverts the idealized emblematic order of traditional loco-descriptive poems such as Denham's Cooper's Hill and Pope's Windsor-Forest, “Where Order in Variety we see, / And where, tho' all things differ, all agree” (ll. 15–16). The lofty pine tree, destined for British naval service, and the oak (symbol of Stuart monarchy), “so often storm'd,” both fall victim to apocalyptic violence. Finch's poem, echoing the Puritan providentialism that sees the hand of God, the “Great Disposer,” at work everywhere, depicts the hurricane as the “Scourge” of the “Great Jehova” (l. 110).Yet exactly who or what is being punished? In lines 96–111 Finch cautiously ventures (“we think”) that the death from a collapsing chimney of Richard Kidder, new Bishop of Bath and Wells (a recent Whig replacement for the popular non-juror Thomas Ken), may have been a divine judgment. Yet the poem refuses to advance a partisan reading. It contains teasing fragments of seventeenth-century political thought (echoes of Dryden's and Rochester's Hobbesian vision of mankind naturally drawn to “wild Confusion” and “lawless Liberty” in pursuit of their “Fellow-Brutes”), and draws parallels between the destructive forces of the storm and the destructive forces of war (the thunder resembles “The Soldier's threatning Drum,” l. 141). Yet Finch's hurricane transcends the petty world of party politics, placing it in perspective: “Nor Whig, nor Tory now the rash Contender calls” (l. 177). It is an idea t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: Contexts and Perspectives
• PART II: Readings
• PART III: Forms and Genres
• PART IV: Themes and Debates
• Index