JOHN DRYDEN, JOHN WILMOT EARL OF ROCHESTER, KATHERINE PHILIPS, APHRA BEHN, ANNE FINCH COUNTESS OF WINCHILSEA, EDWARD TAYLOR
In the new dawn the great eagle of English poetry is fit, sleek and well fed, but its wings have been clipped—tastefully and painlessly, of course, but the bird finds flight difficult. It will never again convey in its talons a plump and struggling poet like Geoffrey Chaucer to the House of Fame. Next time a poet really flies in the flesh, it will not be on “viewless wings of poesy” but in a machine.
It is hard for a reader arriving at his work in the sequence of English poets not to think ungenerously of John Dryden. Dryden opens verse to a popular readership, what in more cynical moments we call a market. His books sold well. Jacob Tonson—who bought Paradise Lost for £8 from Milton’s widow—says as much; he was willing to pay real money to keep Dryden on his list. Tonson published Addison, and Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare, and an edition of Beaumont and Fletcher (he understood how money could be wrung from drama). Between 1684 and 1708 he published Miscellanies, which Dryden edited until his death in 1700 and which included work by Pope, Swift and Ambrose Philips. He was the secretary of the immortal Kit-Cat Club, which brought together writers and others of a Whig persuasion—Steele, Congreve, Addison, and Vanbrugh among them—to meet at the house of the distinguished pastry cook Mr. Christopher Katt, in Shire Lane (off Temple Bar), whose mutton pies were called kit-cats. Later meetings were held chez Tonson at Barn Elms. Godfrey Kneller painted the club members at less than half-length because the low ceiling of Jacob’s dining room could not accommodate half-size portraits. The portraits are in the National Portrait Gallery, where they look sociable but a little stunted. It was clever of Tonson to draw writers around him in a social way. He could control them and pick off works as they were completed, without danger of losing them to competitors. It is not impossible that he enjoyed the company of writers, and they his.
Dryden was generally a professional and not a troublesome author. He was hugely accomplished, one of the most confident and resourceful poets in the language. Still, he fills the modern reader with misgivings. Something is missing, something that even a minor poet of the earlier age, and some of his minor contemporaries, possess. That impalpable something is palpably lacking in Dryden. We find him more than a symptom of change: he is also a cause.
He held court at Will’s Coffeehouse, as Ben Jonson had done at the Apollo Room; he was sought out by poets and poetasters who wanted to be legitimized. Dryden was more like the despotic French composer Rameau than Jonson. Jonson taught a various discipline, Dryden taught rules by example and precept. “From his contemporaries,” Doctor Johnson remarked, Dryden “was in no danger. Standing therefore in the highest place, he had no care to rise by contending with himself; but while there was no name above his own, was willing to enjoy fame on the easiest terms.”
As the century turned, “a delicate precocious boy” was taken to Will’s and introduced to Dryden. Inspired by Dryden’s clear eminence, the young Alexander Pope wanted it for himself. The quest was for recognized correctness which led to power in a tinpot literary world. Poets were now in competition with one another; there was a pecking order, with rewards according to perceived eminence. There were “objective” yardsticks of propriety, decorum and form. How gentle by contrast the rule of Jonson: a bibulous, cantankerous but generally benign enabler who inspired younger poets and encouraged their verse, as against the severe, mannerly, powdered, snuff-snorting, cosmopolitan poetic pontiff. The characters of both Jonson and Dryden are oversimplified in summary, but there is undeniably a new tone.
Does something happen to the English imagination in the latter part of the seventeenth century, something radical and irreversible? T. S. Eliot thinks so and calls it a “dissociation of sensibility.” It is plausible to locate it in the complex historical events that led to the Commonwealth and the Restoration: a break with cultural and spiritual continuities and political certainties; a wave of influence from the Continent, especially France, from where a king returned; a new spirit of skepticism, new codes of decorum and politeness, that Enlightenment which cast such murky darkness on the world of instinct, intuition and spontaneity. Something happens to the English mind to create the immense gap between Donne and Pope, between poets who feel thought and poets who think. For Donne a thought had a context and an occasion; it modified him, it magnetized other thoughts, it was volatile and in process. For Dryden a thought was something to be tidied up and refined for presentation. Poetry’s function as a synthesizer of experience is first attenuated, then virtually banished in the age Dryden in his maturity inaugurates.
Graves pays him an ambiguous tribute. “He earned the doubtful glory of having found English poetry brick and left it marble—native brick, imported marble.” He recalls Doctor Johnson’s comments on Dryden’s need to flatter: “The inevitable consequence of poverty is dependence. Dryden had probably no recourse in his exigencies but to his bookseller.” It is true: Dryden was compelled to get money from Tonson, his bookseller, and to supplement it from those to whom he dedicated his poems and their relations. His bookseller-publisher had his own fish to fry. A writer could expect a limited income from the printing of his work: like modern poets, he earned real bread from flattery.
Th’ unhappy man, who once has tailed a pen,
Lives not to please himself but other men:
Is always drudging, wastes his life and blood,
Yet only eats and drinks what you think good...
A rule evolved that poets were not to write “low” any longer. A low style is unsuitable for serious subjects, as for serious patrons. Poets could not write English in the way Chaucer and Skelton and Shakespeare and Jonson had done. An unofficial but pervasive censorship developed. It was called decorum.
In his preface to Fables Ancient and Modern, Dryden reflects on the permanence of Chaucer’s characters: “Mankind is ever the same, and nothing lost out of nature, though every thing is altered.” A confident Augustan sentiment, learned from Lucretius, characterizes the father of the eighteenth century, the man Eliot sees as dividing with Milton the heritage of seventeenth-century poetry into two narrower channels. “In Dryden, wit becomes almost fun, and thereby loses some contact with reality.” Dryden’s mature language is prodigiously efficient. It lacks subtlety, intimacy, doubt and fear. It is a language for discourse and definition, not physical evocation or personal statement. Ford is harsh about his legacy: “It is really to Dryden, writing wholly within the seventeenth century, that the eighteenth owes the peculiar fadedness of all its adjectived nouns and latinised cliché phrases.”
Readers describe his qualities in other than poetic terms. For Johnson he is the “father of English criticism” and speaks in a “tone of adamantine confidence.” Arnold calls him “a classic of our prose.” Through Dryden later ages define their priorities. There are many things he’s not, many things he doesn’t do and can’t do. But there are things he does incomparably well: his place in English poetry, visited grudgingly by new readers but gradually increasing in charm and attraction as they revisit, is a place of lucidity, analysis, critical insight, general “truth.” Coleridge says, “Dryden’s genius was of that sort which catches fire by its own motion; his chariot wheels get hot by driving fast.” The best way to read him, especially the dramatic poems and translations, is not at a student’s dogged pace but headlong. Gerard Manley Hopkins called his nature “masculine”: “his style and his rhythms lay the strongest stress of all our literature on the naked thew and sinew of the English language.” Wyndham Lewis pairs him with Daniel Defoe as a “tongue that naked goes.”
Dryden was born at the vicarage of Aldwinkle, Northamptonshire, of Puritan antecedents, in 1631. Educated at Westminster School under the great Richard Busby (who included John Locke and Matthew Prior among his pupils), he wrote and published at eighteen his first notable poem, “Upon the Death of Lord Hastings.” It is flawed, combining memorable lines with strained—not to say mixed—metaphors and ill-judged effects: the smallpox spots on the diseased lord are compared to
...rose-buds, stuck i’ th’ lily skin about.
Each little pimple had a tear in it,
To wail the fault its rising did commit.
The work is full of promise, a suggestive confusion. A Metaphysical impulse runs through it; a courtly instinct, too. Most effective are the moral conclusions, tightly drawn in efficient couplets.
He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he did not distinguish himself but took his BA in 1654. He attached himself to his rich cousin Sir Gilbert Pickering, chamberlain to Cromwell, and in 1658 wrote his elegy on Cromwell’s death. The metaphors are used decoratively, turned on and off like bulbs to give local illumination, and the matter is uncontrolled in its emotional flow, so that Johnson could declare that Dryden had “a mind better formed to reason than to feel.” With the Restoration, reason told him to get in the front row of flatterers. In “Astrea Redux” he praises the king and Sir Robert Howard, whose daughter he married later. Charles II made him Poet Laureate in 1668. An active dramatist from 1663 onward, he pilloried the king’s foes in plays and satires.
He was made historiographer royal in 1670, a reward for service and for his impressive but overmeticulous Annus Mirabilis, the year of wonders, 1666. He prided himself on accuracy in his description of naval encounters and the great fire of London. This is his first poem with the full authority of the mature style:
Our dreaded Admiral from far they threat,
Whose batter’d rigging their whole war receives.
All bare, like some old oak which tempests beat,
He stands, and sees below his scatter’d leaves.
The move from conventionality to the effectively Homeric simile is masterly: the serene remove of the “old oak” (which is still the ship’s oak mast), in its forest, surrounded by bereaving autumn, is philosophically poised and affecting. His patriotism is of a novel, imperial stamp, and Shakespeare touches his language:
Yet, like an English gen’ral will I die,
And all the ocean make my spacious grave.
Women and cowards on the land may lie,
The sea’s a tomb that’s proper for the brave.
One of the distinctive qualities of Dryden, who seems at times to belong to the following century, is that he is so different in kind from Milton. His English roots are in Chaucer and Shakespeare rather than Spenser.
In 1681 Absalom and Achitophel appeared, the first of our great political satires. It attacked Shaftesbury and the party opposed to the court. A bald, less oblique assault on Shaftesbury, The Medal, followed in 1682. It was Dryden’s most fruitful period. In the same year he published the Anglican Religio Laici (A Layman’s Faith). The allegorical The Hind and the Panther attempts to vindicate his later (1687) turn to Roman Catholicism.
Much has been made of Dryden’s opportunistic shifts of religious and political allegiance. Doctor Johnson justifies the poet’s religious sincerity as a Catholic by pointing to the letters and the life. Dryden’s sons were all unquestionably devout Roman Catholics, two of whom served the Church. As to his political opportunism, Ford Madox Ford makes the case for him: “It is difficult to see what other course a man writing on public matters could have taken if he set the peace of a sufficiently tormented country above all other matters.” When James II was dethroned, Dryden was fifty-seven. He’d found his faith, remained a Catholic, and lost both his royal appointments under William III. In bitter poems he satirized new time servers, famously Thomas Shadwell in MacFlecknoe.
He published two Poetical Miscellanies in 1684 and 1685, which include important poems. Johnson called “On the Death of Mrs Killigrew” “the noblest ode that our language has ever produced.” It is masterly, but must strike a modern reader as a coldly deliberate tribute:
Art she had none, yet wanted none:
For nature did that want supply,
So rich in treasures of her own,
She might our boasted stores defy:
Such noble vigour did her verse adorn,
That it seem’d borrow’d, where ’twas only born.
Convention is refined but not animated. Dryden makes play with the language of virtue; the poem celebrates his subtlety more than it celebrates the unfortunate Mrs. Killigrew.
Pope spent his early years in translation, an apprenticeship. Dryden turned seriously to translation only later in life. With collaborators he rendered Ovid’s Epistles. He was the kind of poet who could maintain an atelier because it was in the nature of his poetic language that it was imitable, a social mode of discourse. In 1692 his outstanding Satires of Juvenal and Persius appeared. Three years before his death, in 1700, The Works of Virgil was published. Some regard this as Dryden’s masterpiece. Pope calls it “the most noble and spirited translation I know in any language.” His last major work, published in 1700, was Fables Ancient and Modern, an anthology of translations from Ovid, Boccaccio and Chaucer, including one of his most celebrated prose prefaces. Tonson ordered verse by the yard, originally asking for 10,000 lines and receiving more than he bargained for. Dryden wrote for money: Tonson’s fee, a patron’s largess. He was an occasional poet in an even more literal sense than Jonson.
Even the plethora of his critical detractors would agree that Dryden is one of those rare writers, like Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth and Eliot, who by example and critical writing redirected the current of English poetry. Without an understanding of his techniques and concerns, it’s hard to make sense of the eighteenth century, on the eve of which he died. Its achievements and longueurs, its stylizations, its manners and mannerisms, are figured or prefigured in his writing. He was the architect of that Augustan mansion in English literature which demands more effort from the modern reader than any other. We must adjust to well-proportioned rooms in which familiar things are rendered unnaturally real in definition and made typical; or to satires in which a familiar world is mercilessly turned topsy-turvy. If we judge him by the effect he had, he is great. If we judge the work itself, we can’t deny him greatness, unless on grounds of limited tonal range (on such grounds Milton himself would fail). Dryden’s technical and formal assurance have few parallels. He is a civic, public, social poet. Our age has a distaste for such work and its values, but if we dismiss Dryden, we dismiss the clearest English poet, and the most accomplished of public poets.
Unlike the Earl of Rochester, who went a certain way with reason, then discarded it in favor of instinct because reason led to a dark dead end, Dryden stuck with reason as a sufficient means of exploration and discourse, leading to the portal of faith. “A man is to be cheated into passion, but reasoned into truth,” he writes in the preface to The Hind and the Panther. Reason has limits, and beyond it faith opens out the way. He evokes the process in one of the most resonant passages in Religio Laici (A Layman’s Faith):
Dim, as the borrow’d beams of moon and stars
To lonely, weary, wand’ring travellers,
Is Reason to the soul: and as on high,
Those rolling fires discover but the sky
Not light us here; so Reason’s glimmering ray
Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way,
But guide us upward to a better day.
And as those nightly tapers disappear
When day’s bright Lord ascends our hemisphere;
So pale grows Reason at Religion’s sight;
So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural Light.
Reason in the civic sphere reveals the need for order and authority. It’s worth remembering that his three important early poems praised or celebrated figures of authority and power: Hastings, Cromwell, Charles II.
Reason is the root of his aesthetic, its formality audible even when the tone is informal. He is seldom grandiloquent or assertive; a vein of wit runs through even his most sober work. He concurs with Hobbes about the place of fancy and judgment in the creative process. “Time and education beget experience; experience begets memory; memory begets judgment and fancy, judgment begets the strength and structure, and fancy begets the ornaments of a poem.” Wit is in the interplay of judgment and fancy. Fancy perceives similitude in things dissimilar, judgment perceives distinctions in things similar. Rhyme, he argues, helps to keep fancy under control.
Such a concept of poetry compels a poet to be exact in his use of image and metaphor in order to illuminate and instruct. The truth of a figure—literal, allegorical or satiric—must be maintained. Implied, too, is a propensity to work toward general truths. This produces an impersonal tone, so that one can hold Dryden responsible for the whole argument of a poem without always being certain of his personal attitude to particulars.
The gap between Donne and Dryden could not be wider. Descartes and the new philosophy—and Hobbes—come between them. So does Cromwell and the Restoration, with French habits acquired in exile. Poetry as a serious exercise was called into question. Three modes principally appeal to Dryden, all of them deliberate, public and, in one way or another, “useful.” First are prologues and epilogues, comical, critical, expository or hortatory. Dryden’s comic epilogues are among his best. Mrs. Ellen, “when she was to be carried off dead by the bearers” at the end of Tyrannick Love (1670), exclaims, “Hark, are you mad? you damn’d confounded dog, / I am to rise, and speak the Epilogue.” She addresses the audience courteously as the ghost of the character she has played. She berates the poet:
O Poet, damn’d dull Poet, who could prove
So senseless! to make Nelly die for Love,
Nay, what’s yet worse, to kill me in the prime
Of Easter-term, in tart and cheese-cake time!
I’ll fit the fop; for I’ll not one word say
T’excuse his godly out of fashion play.
A play which if you dare but twice sit out,
You’ll all be slander’d, and be thought devout.
Presumably, having delivered her epilogue, she is carted offstage to general applause.
The second acceptable mode of verse is the consciously decorative, rhetorical poem, usually occasional and celebratory. The “Ode on St Cecilia’s Day” and “Alexander’s Feast” display the virtuosity of the poet honoring an occasion. Third comes the heroic or religious epic, on a large scale, with ceremonious action, contemporary reference, and didactic intent. The obverse of this is the satire, which Dryden develops with a metrical virtuosity and clarity of diction unlike Donne’s, rejecting asprezza and harsher tones. In Absalom and Achitophel satire is cruel and direct, but the prosody impeccable: Achitophel’s human deformity is not spared, but it does not distort the surface of the verse:
A daring pilot in extremity;
Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high
He sought the storms; but for a calm unfit,
Would steer too nigh the sands, to boast his wit.
Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide;
Else, why should he, with wealth and honour blest,
Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?
Punish a body which he could not please;
Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease?
Figurative language is not Dryden’s forte. Often it is not integrated with the argument but runs alongside, decorating and heightening but not collaborating with it at a deeper level. Milton exemplifies another mode. In “lik’ning spiritual to corporeal forms” Milton begins with figure and metaphor and attempts a realization that itself carries moral significance; Dryden teases prose meanings into metaphor. In each case a partial process is enacted. Pope, by contrast, thinks in shapes and forms, exploits reversals, contains his meanings in the figures themselves but works as it were with atomized forms and metaphors, divorced from the expected context and releasing new meanings in an original context. His poetry tends to fragment into brilliant shards. Milton’s procedure comes closest to the “organic” concept of poetic form enunciated by Coleridge and exploited by the Romantics. Dryden’s procedure is remote from this. He distrusts antithesis, paradox and disjunction and is wary of placing excessive confidence in plain narrative, at least for didactic purposes.
His satires are conceived in a different spirit from Pope’s. For Pope the ideal order is no longer tangibly embodied, there is no “right” party, no legitimate order: his satiric exaggerations do not always suggest a norm, his distortions contain more malice than instructive justness. Dryden accepts the status quo as the norm, accepts necessary authority, placing facts rather than values first. This “philosophical actualism” he learned from Hobbes. Fact has more authority than traditional sanction, in politics as in literature: a king’s authority is a formal, not a sacred one; to be of value a poem must be of use. The tendency to stylize material in order to draw its morals, the way attitudes replace passions and figures replace characters, is due in part to Charles II’s own taste. From his French exile he brought back a preference for rhymed, formalized dramas. The king was patron: though he did not call the tune, no doubt he tapped out a rhythm with his foot. Dryden obliged his king and his publisher. Flattery is his worst vice, yet he is so assured that he retains, or regains, his integrity.
Doctor Johnson’s assessment of Dryden is still the most concise and judicious. Dryden rather than Sidney is “the father of English criticism,” especially on the strength of the Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1668). Johnson criticizes the inconsistent approach in Dryden’s essays, the occasional marring casualness and partiality. But these faults don’t imperil a broader achievement, which (unlike Milton’s or Cowley’s) is at root not scholarly but critical. His art is to express clearly what he thinks with vigor. Before Dryden there was “no poetical diction, no system of words at once refined from the grossness of domestic use, and free from the harshness of terms appropriated to particular arts.”
The advent of “diction” was a mixed blessing. Dryden intended refined diction to make language transparent, unobtrusive, capable of general statements of truth without obscurity or vulgarity: hence the excellence of his theory and practice of translation. But for some of his followers, diction came to mean refinement of manner, affectation, not efficient, unencumbered expression. When Johnson claims that he refined the sentiments of poetry, he wishes to praise the public manner and the absence of individual quirkiness. Yet it is the element of individual tone, of apprehensible character or “voice,” that we miss in Dryden. It is overstatement to say that he “tuned the numbers” of English poetry. He refined the heroic couplet and handed it as a vital instrument to his successors. His prosodic virtuosity in the songs from the plays, in odes and elegies, is not in doubt: but he had equals among his predecessors, not least Jonson. When Dryden “refined” language, he rid it of dross, but also of much expressive power. He retuned his instrument to certain harmonies but it was incapable of some older and deeper strains. The loss is felt not so much in his own work as in the work of his heirs.
Efficiency, his chief virtue, he perfected from his stage writing. What Homer was for Pope, theater was for Dryden. It gave him a public: there he discovered and perfected a “popular” style. He was not “much inclined” by genius to write for the stage, but necessity took him there and instructed him. The many plays contain little of his best writing. One of them, All for Love, based on Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, retains theatrical appeal today. But the stage was his pacing ground. Without that experience I doubt that he could have sustained Absalom and Achitophel, the best political satire in the language. The satires, full of the political and literary life of the time, retain a wider reference. The prologues and epilogues are not remote from common speech. The allegories, too, reflect his age’s intellectual and spiritual concerns. Eliot’s tribute to Dryden is partial and paradoxical: “Dryden appeared to cleanse the language of verse and once more bring it back to prose order. For this reason he is a great poet.” It would be better to say that Dryden suggests an order for poetic language different from his predecessors’. What is prosaic in Dryden is his ideas, not his language. When Eliot suggests that he “once more” brings the language of poetry back to prose order, we are inclined to ask: When in the history of English poetry up to Dryden’s time had the language of poetry followed prose order? Dryden did not take English poetry back but inexorably forward to a new phase. His verse rejects as much as—perhaps more than—it discovers.
Dryden had virulent enemies in his time. His satires and the king’s favor enraged John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, who legend says had him mugged one night in a dark passageway off Garrick Street, near Covent Garden. Did Rochester see Dryden as an upstart? Was he troubled by his religion? Did he fear that Dryden might persuade the king out of his patient affection for his troublesome courtier? Or was he simply jealous of the skills and dogged industry of the greatest poet of his age? We are back to competition between poets. “Mr Andrew Marvell (who was a good Judge of Witt) was wont to say that he [Rochester] was the best English Satyrist and had the right veine. ’Twas pitty Death tooke him off so soon.” Marvell was not alone in speaking up for Rochester, a man by turns in and out of favor at court: volatile, brilliant and unpredictable. Also, at his best, philosophical:
Nothing! thou elder brother even to Shade:
Thou had’st a being ere the world was made,
And well fixed, art alone of ending not afraid.
During his poetic apprenticeship two generations later, Alexander Pope wrote “Upon Silence” in imitation of Rochester’s “Upon Nothing”: “Silence! Coeval with Eternity; / Thou wert ere future’s self began to be.” His piece is a respectful exercise, while Rochester’s is one of the few necessary masterpieces the poet wrote. The young Pope took Rochester to heart as a master. Rochester attempted to think in verse, to think even the darkest thoughts, a feat he performed with appalling lucidity in “Upon Nothing.” He lays bare the philosophical basis for his notorious libertinism. What had seemed vice becomes an expression of something more fashionable in our time, an accepting nihilism.
The poem explains what many see as the saddest squandering of authentic genius in English poetry. When Pope, forty years after his imitation of Rochester, came to sleep in the same bed Rochester had graced at Atterbury, he was “With no poetic ardours fir’d.” No wonder: Rochester left a small oeuvre to suggest what he might have been capable of. The work is formally conservative and eccentric in theme and subject. Pope came to see him and other poets of Charles II’s court—including Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, the beguilingly cheerful and erotic Sir Charles Sedley, Sir George Etherege, William Wycherley and Henry Savile—as a “mob of gentlemen who wrote verses.” Marvell, more amused and forgiving, called his wry and waggish contemporaries a “merry gang.” Merry in company they must have been: Samuel Pepys, on 30 May 1668, joined them: “And so to supper in an arbour: but Lord! their mad bawdy talk did make my heart ache! And here I first understood by their talk the meaning of the company that lately were called Ballers: Harris telling how it was by a meeting of some young blades, where he was among them, and my Lady Bennet and her ladies; and their there dancing naked, and all the roguish things of the world. But, Lord! what loose, cursed company was this, that I was in tonight, though full of wit; and worth a man’s being in for once, to know the nature of it, and their manner of talk, and lives.”
Charles II’s court was hospitable to wit and culture of an aristocratic and Frenchified kind. It was the Indian summer of “court culture.” F. R. Leavis finds the poets lacking in “positive fineness” and “implicit subtlety.” The country house is supplanted by the coffeehouse, the “fine old order” gone. But something is gained in the way of forthrightness, certain social tones that had not been heard before in “polite” circles irrupt into the verse, soon to be snuffed out by strict preceptors for whom purity and propriety of diction were an unbreachable rule.
The Restoration court frolicked in the austere shadows cast by the Commonwealth: a continuity had been broken, an old order perished. Court writers and politicians experienced an ambivalent euphoria; the stability that empowers poet or statesman to take, as a matter of course, a long view or undertake a long work, would not return for decades. Idealism of a powerful, defeated sort—the moral high ground—seemed to be occupied by the other party. Divine sanction gone, there was less a sense of right than of success in the air. Hobbes, not Filmer or Hooker, was the philosopher of the day. Hobbes affected Rochester (as he did Dryden) deeply. As a courtier, the poet’s chief allegiance was to “pleasure” conceived in a narrow range, and nihilistic atheism.
Charles II’s court continued its connections with France. The circumstances of his restoration contributed alien elements to his reign. Court writers were inevitably self-absorbed in ways it had never occurred to their predecessors to be. The decline in civic courtesy and the frail imperatives of duty and service, and the apparent liberality of the court milieu attracted the great French philosopher Voltaire. And Voltaire found Rochester’s work congenial. In Lettres philosphiques he says, “All the world knows Lord Rochester’s reputation”; he will introduce the other Rochester, not just a libertine but a man of genius, “le grand poète,” with his “ardent” imagination. Voltaire celebrates the satires, which, whether the ideas expressed are true or false, possess real energy. Boileau, with Cowley, was among the earl’s favorite authors. His satire belonged to a contemporary European tradition.
Rochester experimented on his life as his contemporaries experimented in science. It is fashionable to see him as “essentially serious,” a “radical critic” of his time, even a moral visionary. On the evidence of the verse, apart from “A Satire Against Mankind,” he is neither socially radical nor penetratingly serious. His seriousness of theme emerges in only a few poems, and there more as statement than exploration. Hostile to reason, he denied himself the main avenue of philosophical exploration. Yet this hostility to reason is itself a theme, as in “Tunbridge Wells”:
Ourselves with noise of reason we do please
In vain; humanity’s our worst disease.
Thrice happy beasts are, who, because they be
Of reason void, are so of foppery.
Given this view—and despite his power as a rhetorician—Rochester can’t get far beyond satire. Indeed, within satire he goes only a certain way. He denies himself the scope of the long poem and works within the confines of received forms. His temperament and antecedents make it hard to imagine what other strategy he could have devised.
He was born in Ditchley, Oxfordshire, in 1647. His father, a Royalist general, led an abortive rising in Yorkshire in 1655 and died in exile two or three years later. Rochester’s mother was of a family with Puritan connections. At the age of twelve he went up to Wadham College, Oxford, a center of the new scientific and intellectual developments that led to the foundation of the Royal Academy. In 1661 the precocious young nobleman was made an MA by the incomparable historian Lord Clarendon himself. The restored king granted him a pension in 1660, in recognition of his father’s service. Under such favorable stars, Rochester toured France and Italy and returned to England in 1664. He made himself visible at court. His feelings for Charles II were ambiguous, almost those of a young man for a forceful stepfather. Some of his scathing satires are directed against the monarch. In 1665 Rochester was confined to the Tower for attempting to abduct a Somerset heiress, whom he married two years later (“I’ll hold you six to four I love you with all my heart,” he wrote to her later, during one of his infidelities). Thanks to the plague, he was released from the Tower, joined the fleet, and gave intrepid service, though there is evidence that he was less stalwart ashore.
Always in and out of favor, he became a gentleman of the king’s bedchamber in 1666, an honor more than a duty. The remaining fourteen years of his life passed in a series of unsettled and rash acts, with periods of study and work. If he wrote the notorious play Sodom, it was around 1670. Between 1673 and 1676 his best satires and “Upon Nothing” were composed. In 1675 he was appointed keeper of Woodstock Park. Later in life he claimed to have been drunk for a five-year stretch—country life cannot have been too agreeable. He died, after a dubious conversion exhaustively chronicled by his spiritual monitor, the egregious Gilbert Burnet, in 1680.
We can choose between two versions of Rochester. Sir George Etherege in his play The Man of Mode presents him as the charming, inconstant and self-involved Dorimant. We can embellish this image with the story of the smashing of the sundials in the Priory Gardens and the “murderous affray” at Epsom. On the other hand we have the scholar (on the evidence of Anthony à Wood and of the fragments of his translation of Lucretius). Burnet, who negotiated his reconciliation with God and was at best a Whig rascal, wrote of his good looks, his civility, his intelligence: “He loved to talk and write of speculative matters, and did so with so fine a thread, that even those who hated the subjects” were charmed by his treatment of them. But, Burnet adds, physical led to intellectual dissipation, “which made him think nothing diverting which was not extravagant.”
The real Rochester is closer to Etherege’s version. Johnson praises the “vigour of his colloquial wit”; but “The glare of his general character diffused itself upon his writings.” The very shortness of his pieces reflects the shortness of his periods of sobriety and study: nevertheless, the dots of brilliance in the writing, taken together, add up to a reckonable star.
He works in four “kinds”; extended satire, libel or squib, racy anecdote, and love poem. Some of the love poems are spoken by women (“I could love thee till I die” and “Ancient Person” being among the best). Love is of a resolutely carnal nature. “Leave this gaudy, gilded stage,” “ ’Tis not that I am weary grown,” “Absent from thee I languish still” and “The Mistress”: these works rank high in English love poetry. Forthright, they have an air of sincerity. The anecdote poems, too, have a forceful, grotesque bawdiness and can be erotic and startling. “Fair Chloris in a pigsty lay” is the best known. We might consider them downmarket eclogues. The squibs and libels marry wit and malice and do some damage to their subjects, notably the king.
In imitating Ovid (“O Love! how cold and slow” and “The Imperfect Enjoyment”) he moves toward satire. It is useful to compare his imitations with Marlowe’s (Elegia, book 2, elegy 9, and book 3, elegy 6). Less than a century separates them. Marlowe’s versions are visualized, and governed by vivid metaphor undeflected by wit. Rochester argues rather than evokes, idea is developed at the expense of metaphor. His language is more conventional and polite than Marlowe’s. In Marlowe there is a sultry, ambiguous sexuality; in Rochester forthrightness, without undertones—what Eliot, writing of Dryden, called “lack of suggestiveness.” Compare Marlowe’s:
Dost joy to have thy hookèd arrows shakèd
In naked bones? Love hath my bones left naked.
So many men and maidens without love!
Hence with great laud thou may’st a triumph move.
with Rochester’s:
On men disarmed how can you gallant prove?
And I was long ago disarmed by love.
Millions of dull men live, and scornful maids:
We’ll own love valiant when he these invades.
Rochester is the more correct; Marlowe, despite—or because of—his awkwardness, the more satisfying. The second line focuses the different genius of each writer, the third epitomizes the radical change in sensibility that has occurred.
Age, “beauty’s incurable disease,” is the key apprehension of Rochester’s harsh vision. He satirizes affectation and the social forms that lead to a squandering of possible or actual pleasure; and he satirizes excesses that themselves foreshorten pleasure and in which he, as much as the king, indulged. He cannot stop attacking reason, that “ignis fatuus,” a contrived and distracting sixth sense: “Huddled in dirt the reasoning engine lies, / Who was so proud, so witty, and so wise.” This sense of mortality is unredeemed by religious certitude. The one virtue Rochester celebrates is love. In “A Letter from Artemisia in Town to Chloe in the Country” he writes,
Love, the most generous passion of the mind,
The softest refuge innocence can find,
The safe director of unguided youth...
It is “That cordial drop heaven in our cup has thrown / To make the nauseous draught of life go down.”
Love a “passion of the mind”? Marlowe would not have understood that Rochester’s satire seeks to free the impulse of love from inhibition and convention. Rochester is the apologist for “sex” rather than courtly or romantic love. Yet underlying even this theme is the pervasive truth presented in “Upon Nothing”:
Great Negative, how vainly would the wise
Inquire, define, distinguish, teach, devise,
Did’st thou not stand to point their blind philosophies.
His satire is directed at court and society at large, in the manner of Juvenal, but the objective of his satire is not social. Unlike Dryden’s, Rochester’s satire is informed by metaphysical despair, not social optimism. The best way of dealing with despair is to laugh, and some of his wicked poems, like those of Sir Charles Sedley, provide a salacious delight not to be found elsewhere in English.
Aubrey chronicles the death of Lord Rochester, with which Burnet filled many sanctimonious pages, in three rapid, telling sentences. “In his last sickness he was exceedingly penitent and wrote a letter of his repentance to Dr Burnet, which is printed. He sent for all his servants, even the piggard-boy, to come and hear his palinode. He died at Woodstock Park, 26 July 1680; and buried at Spilsbury in the same county, Aug. 9 following.”
Among the female poets of their age, Dryden favored “the Matchless Orinda,” Katherine Philips (1632–64), wife of James, who at Cardigan Priory, their Welsh home, set up a kind of intellectual circle called the Society of Friendship and entertained the intelligentsia. “Orinda,” a celebrated translator of Corneille’s plays, wrote her poems to other women, in particular Anne Owen, the Viscountess of Dungannon, with whom she maintained an intense platonic friendship. She can be simperingly sentimental; she also rises to mild satire, though she lacks the vigor of the Duchess of Newcastle. She died of smallpox at thirty-two and became a mildly tragic figure of legend.
Aphra Behn (1640–89) is more Rochester’s kind of poet, feisty and self-reliant, the first English woman to become a professional writer. He was her friend and patron, but irregular in patronage as in everything else. Her colorful life—starting, when she was sixteen, with an eight-year trip to Surinam and beyond with her father, the appointed lieutenant governor, who died en route; her experience of the New World, of a slave rebellion and other adventures that may or may not be true—gives her exotic appeal. She returned to England in 1664, married a merchant and was bereaved probably in the plague of 1665. She became a spy in Antwerp, did her work well but was never properly paid. She saw the inside of a debtor’s prison in 1668 and resolved never to return. So she became a writer. The theater was her main market and she wrote fourteen plays. When this market dried up she started writing fiction, or “faction,” including Oroonoko (1688), with its not altogether believable basis in her early experiences. She died the next year, poor again and in considerable pain, and, like earlier female writers, was forgotten.
Some of her poems are songs uprooted from her plays. Some are lascivious entertainments that pull no punches and are as erotic—in a different key—as Sedley’s. Indeed some of her poems share lines with his. It would be wrong to claim technical originality for Aphra Behn as a poet. But as a woman poet, and as a woman writer, she clears an important space; she breaks as many taboos as Mary Wroth did, and possesses more substantial gifts. Against polite Dryden, impolite Rochester, against proper “Orinda,” the matchless Aphra Behn.
Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661–1720), sourly pondered “the situation of the woman writer.” Her imagination was shaped by the seventeenth century, though it was in the eighteenth that her voice was finally heard. Alexander Pope, who rather liked her, also derided her (with his friends Gay and Arbuthnot) in a play, Three Hours after Marriage, in which she appears as Phoebe Clinket, the loopy lady poet. (Sylvia Plath played the part of Phoebe in a Cambridge University production of the play.) Many of Finch’s contemporaries shared Pope’s ambivalence. The only book she published in her lifetime appeared anonymously when she was fifty-two. She had “the skill to write, the modesty to hide.” Wordsworth prepared a selection of her verse and since that time she has never sunk entirely from sight. He liked her poem “Nocturnal Reverie,” which, he said, contained in its descriptions of groves and meadows at night the only new images of “external nature” between the poetry of Milton and Thomson.
When darkened groves their softest shadows wear,
And falling waters we distinctly hear;
When through the gloom more venerable shows
Some ancient fabric, awful in repose,
While sunburnt hills their swarthy looks conceal,
And swelling haycocks thicken up the vale;
When the loosed horse now, as his pasture leads,
Comes slowly grazing through th’adjoining meads.
Whose stealing pace and lengthened shade we fear
Till torn up forage in his teeth we hear...
It is a vision closer to nature than Pope’s aestheticizing in “Windsor Forest”—a series of observations, not of epithets and qualities.
She is read today for her poems on the friendship of women and on the situation of women, and for the poems of conjugal contentment. No other woman poet of the time so bitterly reflects upon the circumstances that inhibited women from expressing themselves in print.
Another strange voice, new and yet with old and tested tonalities, is Edward Taylor, born around 1642 of prosperous Puritan yeoman stock in Leicestershire during the Civil War. Unable to subscribe to the Act of Uniformity after the Restoration, cast out of his job as a schoolmaster, forbidden to go to Oxford or Cambridge, forbidden to preach or worship, he emigrated to Boston when he was twenty-six. He was already a passionate admirer of Francis Quarles and of the Metaphysical poets—not only Donne and Herbert (whom he echoes) but Vaughan, Traherne and Crashaw as well. And Du Bartas. Like Anne Bradstreet’s, his literary culture suffered a kind of positive arrest on his departure. He attended Harvard College and became a pastor (and physician) in the frontier hamlet of Westfield, a hundred miles west of Boston, retiring in 1725, the father of numerous offspring by two wives and in possession of a library, remarkable for its time, of some two hundred books.
On his death he left a 400-page manuscript of religious poems, composed as part of his spiritual preparation for administering the Lord’s Supper, and including two substantial sequences. In 1937 they were discovered in a library and America had another substantial early poet, a Puritan nourished on the great Anglican Metaphysicals, who began to carve out his own kind of poetry on a physical and spiritual frontier. His nonexistence in American poetry for the two centuries after his death makes it hard to set him in the American frame: his work is sadly without issue until this century, when poets such as Robert Lowell take apprentice bearings from him. To English readers he seems at first an anachronism, his conceits at times outlandish and mechanical. (“Shall Spirits thus my mammularies suck?” or “Be thou my Lilly, make thou me thy knot: / Be thou my Flowers, I’ll be thy flower pot.”) Yet he is a figurative thinker, he has a deep sense of evil and of man’s fallen nature. He uses verse as an instrument of redemption, not—as Milton does—of instruction. He can surprise us into a sudden vision of the divine order, a sense of how we might attain unity with God through the created world. “Shall I not smell thy sweet, oh! Sharon’s Rose?” Or, “Lord, blow the coal: thy love enflame in me.” It is as though his Anglican mentors have leavened his spirit, made him not less severe but more humane, accepting of the forms of grace that pass through the human senses. He is one of those rare Puritans who will risk saying yes to right pleasure.
How sweet a Lord is mine? If any should
Guarded, engarden’d, nay, imbosomed be
In reeks of odours, gales of spices, folds
Of aromatics, Oh! how sweet was he?
He would be sweet, and yet his sweetest wave
Compar’d to thee my Lord, no sweet would have.