Notes on the History of English Poetry

What follows are thoughts on the history of English poetry. As I review these, I see how incomplete they are. They reflect a rather time-bound view of literary history, one that has missed the 'advances' in literary studies since about 1975! Oh well.

I would like more on this notion of the change in society and in poetry from the 19th century to now. Certainly 19th century England (and America too, I suppose) valued the individual as opposed to the grouping of individuals. Liberalism was in full sway in terms of the sense of personal responsibility and freedom. Marx and Engels offer something of a counter to the liberal agenda, but for the most part Anglo-American culture valued individual enterprise, what Americans knew as 'rugged individualism.' How this manifests itself in poetry, I am less clear about. A poem such as Browning's "The Bishop Orders His Tomb" indicates the poet's interest in the individual in his or her full complexity. Perhaps this interest in the individual explains, in part, the fashion for the dramatic monologue in the 19th century. But overall, I am not clear on how poetry reflects the interest in the individual over time. The lyric (I am thinking of a poet such as Yeats here) is a form that highlights the individual. I guess my question is: how does poetry reflect a communal as opposed to an individual ideology?

Change in atmosphere. Well a lot changes from the 19th to the 20th century. But one thing remains constant from about 1769 or so until now. The late 18th century sees a challenge to old certainties. The "master plots" that had served western Europe as the ground to stand on (in the sense of that which gave stability to the way people thought of life and its meaning) came under scrutiny. The list of challengers is familiar: science, industry, urbanization, the failure of monarchies, the Higher Criticism, even history itself with its long list of both natural and human disasters. Belief in the old stories, the old verities, was shifting. The ground seemed no longer stable. The earthquake is a common metaphor in the poetry of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The result of so much ferment was a breakdown in belief. How could people restore lost certainty. This is why the poetry since that time is obsessed with myth-building, with examination of the inner life, with revisiting old stories to look for what is worth preserving. We can read "She dwelt among the untrodden ways" as a poem about myth-making in the sense that the poet sees the loss of Lucy as both grievous and also as a revelation of Lucy's continued presence as nature spirit. She continues to exist beside the springs of Dove (should that be the "wings" of Dove?) in that she is the land itself or at least she has become the land. She is the light of hope that nature itself offers. She dies and this is grievous; paradoxically, she dies and this allows her light to shine in a manner it could not shine while she was alive. She allows for a kind of certainty (what kind, you rightfully ask?). 

And the search for certainty only becomes more intense as time passes and we have the first great war, then the second great war, the holocaust, the Korean war, the cold war, the Vietnam War, the discovery of black holes, the Kent State shootings, the scandals involving children and the Church, the first Gulf War (and I neglect the Falklands and Granada), the Trade Tower bombings and later the Trade Towers falling, and so on and on. Jim Jones, Waco, Texas, and so much more. 

And so even a small poem such as Elizabeth Bishop's "Sestina" becomes a statement of hope amid the darkness dropping down. This poem is about, among other things, the preservation of hope that the relationship between child and grandmother can offer. The two of them share jokes from the almanac and they also share a perspective on the almanac that sees it as "Birdlike." Capable of flight. The almanac is a repository of hope in that it contains a review of the year and a guide to how to approach the year - whether to go to sea or not (this is for Tobias).

And so yes, things change, but they also stay the same.

But the history of poetry goes way back beyond the changes that we can see from the 18th century until now. Where to begin? For our purposes, we can begin in the English Middles Ages. Of course, we might go back to Anglo Saxon times and read Caedmon's Hymn or Beowulf, but few read Anglo Saxon now. So we begin with Chaucer and the 15th century. This seems pertinent since Chaucer is contemporary with whoever that guy is who began printing in England around 1480 (my mind has gone blank- oh wait, William Caxton). Anyhow, the coming of print is contemporary with Chaucer, is it not? And poetry in printed form is a rarified thing in that it derives from a privileged segment of the population, more often than not from the court. In Chaucer we have the beginnings of poetry as both high art, and as a development of folk forms. The Canterbury Tales is a collection of familiar folk stories plus some new tales directed at the various professions of the day - especially, but not exclusively, those related to the Church. The standard heroic couplet with its iambic pentameter beat arrives. The history of English verse from Chaucer to Christian Bok or Tom Wayman is the history of migration and transformation. The accumulation of forms, strict forms such as sonnet or ode, becomes progressively looser over centuries until we get to free verse and found verse and anything-goes-verse. Secondarily, poetry moves from the court to the Church to the field. We might say that right up to the mid eighteenth century, poetry remains the property of the privileged. Later 18th century poets such as Thomas Chatterton and, most famously, Robert Burns bring poetry to the people. Of course literacy was expanding by this time. 

But the important question is: why bother becoming familiar with the history of English poetry? Do we really have to know Chaucer in order to appreciate a poem by Elizabeth Bishop? Or take those relentless heroic couplets by the likes of Dryden or Pope. Why in the world do we have to know these works when no one writes that way anymore - at least no one who has ambitions to be taken seriously as a poet?

Okay, we might like the poetry of Pope or Henry Vaughn or Sir Thomas Wyatt, but why do we have to read this stuff for an understanding of the poetry written today? And if we do not have to read this poetry in order to understand poetry written today, then why not just forget about the stuff?

I am not here to answer my last questions; I am here to sum up so far. Poetry begins with either a narrative structure or a reflective structure. The reflective structure seems closely attuned to matters of love and death. Disgruntled lover, ecstatic lover, lost lover, eager lover, sensitive lover - we meet these in early poems by the likes of Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Donne, and so on. Metaphors that derive from nature, hunting for example, give way in the early 17th century to metaphors that derive from what I might call scientific experimentation (alchemy in Donne's "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning"). Metaphors become conceits in that they are showy, unexpected, elaborate, and witty. John Donne's poetry is a casebook of such metaphoric ingenuity. The poetry is also growing more dramatic as the voice of the speaker registers irritation, frustration, sympathy, melancholy, passion, and irony. Interestingly, as we move on, we will see first a loosening of poetic form, followed by a tightening of poetic form. We might ask why this happens.

We are approaching George Herbert, one of the well-known divines who wrote poetry. Herbert turns to matters of the spirit and the individual's relationship with divinity, but he does so in the spirit of the metaphysical poetry we have been reading in Donne and even Herrick. Actually, Donne had turned his witty brand of poetry to matters of religion earlier in the century. His sonnet, "Batter My Heart, Three-Person God" is worth a moment of your time. Anyhow with Herbert we see poetry changing in that the look of the poem becomes even more pronounced and functional in terms of what the poem is communicating. We might ask why Herbert would create a poem such as "Easter Wings"? Does the shape of the poem serve any function other than being a form of visual wit? Herbert's formal play is perhaps the last gasp of poetic experimentation prior to the Restoration and the coming of the heroic couplet as the dominant form for poetry from about 1660 to about 1760.

Regarding numerology and the syllabic pattern in Herbert's "Easter Wings," I have little to offer. But since we are addressing the history of English poetry, I can note that the 17th century was a hotbed of religious ferment. As we saw in Donne, alchemical imagery was familiar to writers of the time. Dr. Dee reminds us of occult interests of the time, and Francis Bacon reminds us of the advancement of learning. This is the period when modern scientific method was just beginning to emerge, but science was still half empirical and half magical. Anyhow, people like Herbert and later Milton would have been conversant with somewhat secret materials such as the Kabbalah and Talmudic literature. The Cambridge Platonists (the two Vaughans, Traherne, for example) not only knew their Plato and Plotinus, but also mystical writing as well. Jakob Boehme wrote Aurora around the mid century. Mysticism was in the air. Many splinter religious sects, the Fifth Monarchy Men for example, drew on occult writing. All this will lead to a figure such as Emmanuel Swedenborg in the early 18th century and also the English cleric, William Law. My point is simply this: poets in the 17th and 18th centuries did know about numerology, mysticism, and the occult. We do, however, have to be careful not to read such material into poems that do not support such a reading. Some poets rejected such intricate and exclusionary knowledge. Once we get to Dryden, we see poetry beginning to turn from inward concerns to social concerns, from secret knowledge to public knowledge. Poetry as individual meditation becomes poetry as public discourse and debate. In short, we come to the satiric side of poetry.

In our potted history of English poetry, we have made our way from the Middle Ages (aka the Medieval period), to the Renaissance (aka Early Modernist era), and to the Restoration (and the Augustan age that follows closely on Charles 11 coming to the throne of England in 1660.)

Next we have what used to be called the “pre-Romantics”; Thomas Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," is an example of what used to be called (passive voice - ugh) "pre-Romantic poetry." From there, we romp through the Romantic period to the Victorian Age, and through the Edwardians to Modernists with T.S. Eliot. Here is a list of the "periods" off the top of my head:

1. 13th and 14th centuries - Middle Ages

2. 15th to 17th centuries - English Renaissance

3. late 17th and 18th centuries (1660-1780) - Augustan Age, also known as the Age of Enlightenment

4. 1798-1832 - the Romantic period

5. 1834 to 1901 - Victorian era

6. 1902 to end of the First World War in 1918 - Edwardian age

7. 1920 to the 1960s - Age of Modernism (early and late)

8. 1966 to pretty much the present - Age of Postmodernism

9. Where are we now? And where are we going?

We can refine and define this timeline, should you wish to do so. We might also question the tendency to "periodization." Does such parceling out of literary history make any sense? Nomenclatures such as Romantic or Medieval are not selected by the people living and writing at the time; they are later designations. Then we have a term such as "Victorian"; this one denotes a specific time, the period of Queen Victoria's reign (my dates above will belie this, by the way). Then we have terms that appear during the time; modernism and postmodernism, for example. Can we typify poetry (or literature in general) by such period names? Ought we to typify poetry (or literature in general) by such names?

In my numerical listing above, I neglected to add "pre-Romantic" to the list of periods. "Pre-Romantic" is a strange locution because it implies that the writers of this period somehow knew that they were coming before something that had yet to materialize. Pre-Romantic writers include Thompson, Young, Collins, Gray, Goldsmith, Chatterton, and some others. These guys do not follow the pattern of heroic couplet-poetry we see in Pope and Johnson. Not only do they break away from the rigid form of Augustan poetry, but they also anticipate the themes of Romantic poetry (see for example Young's poem on Originality or Thompson's THE SEASONS). I mean they touch on imagination, nature, individuality, poverty and anonymity. They expand the subject matter of poetry. As Constable said (of painting), they found their subjects under the hedgerow.

If the pre-Romantics wrote about poverty and individualism and selfhood and nature and so on, then why are they 'pre-Romantics' and not Romantics? Good question, and I don't really have a good answer. These poets have yet to organize their thinking into an ideology the way Wordsworth and his contemporaries will. Romantic poetry has a clear political agenda. Also, we have this urge to find auspicious moments and 1789 and 1798 are two of these auspicious moments, the one the date (July 14 to be exact) when the French Revolution begins and the other the date of publication for LYRICAL BALLADS, the "experiment” in poetics by Wordsworth and Coleridge. But pre-Romantic poetry has its own interest. Here we have the beginnings of a sense of the poet as a "bard," a spokesperson for his (or her) people. The poet begins to assume a stature he (or she) had not had before, one that emerges precisely at the time when the poet is beginning to lose ground as a public figure. What the previous sentence says requires some explanation, but explanation can come later.

Above I mentioned a Romantic ideology. And I said the Romantics were political. I wonder how ideology manifests itself in "Kubla Khan" and "Dejection: An Ode." And how are these poems "political"? We can ask the same questions about "Ulysses." 

How do these poems differ from what has come before?

Until at least 1968, Eurocentric society lived inside a Romantic ideology, and we might argue that we still do.

As for “Ulysses,” this poem is an example of Victorian Romanticism. What does this mean? Well, the poem is not unfamiliar in its ballad/lyric fusion that we see in poems like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or Christabel. It also has for a theme a Romantic longing, a longing for those “western isles” where ease and perfection supposedly dwell. But the poem also carries a sensibility closer to Arnold than to Coleridge. I am speaking of the “dejection” theme here. Romantic poetry does have an interest in dejection, a concern that focuses on the interchange between self and other, self and nature. By the time we get to mid century (“Ulysses” dates from 1842), the sense of futility grows stronger. Tennyson’s poem contacts the notion of “noble work” and the restlessness, the longing, the questing for certainty of the Victorian mind. The first person in this poem is not the poet directly as in so many Romantic poems, but rather a persona, either fictional or historical. I might also note the penchant to use history as an echo of the present and both Tennyson and Browning do. The Duke in “My Last Duchess,” for example, may represent the fear of an empty universe. What I man by this is that the Duke, like the Bishop in that other Browning poem, is a person without honour, without scruples, without sympathy for others. In a world drained of belief in anything other than the self, we get these inward-looking, selfish and self-regarding people.

From the perspective of history, we are reading poems that reflect the finding of Sir Charles Lyell and others, and the impending impact of Sir Charles Darwin.