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Page 301
Poetry in the Eighteenth Century
Margaret Anne Doody
Even when we avoid the two great branches of emotive historical narrative, the Decline and the Progress, we are still hampered by the inevitable version of the eighteenth century as a placid perioda period dominated by a desire for order. A rage for order need not in itself of course issue in calm, but until very recently the order was posited as a calm. That is a tribute to the success of Whig propaganda in the eighteenth century (and later), for it was most certainly to the political and economic interests of the powerful group of Whigs in politics and commerce to make out that English life had a natural and inevitable balanced order, which they had discovered and now represented.
But relatively few people, even Whigs, really bought that for breakfast, dinner, and supper. In the arts in England, and especially in the art of poetry, wherever we encounter order, we can see an experimentor a set of experiments. And one kind of order in a poem may allow the poet to produce certain favored kinds of disorder and dissonance. In histories the "sun of Enlightenment" has too often hidden the private night.
A better key to the period than the opposition between order and disorder can be found in the problems set up by a strongly felt need to make literatureand especially poetry
public
in all its manifestations. That literature at its best, its most effective, deals with public matters in public language had been generally felt, and widely demonstrated, during the Restoration. Dryden was the great exemplar of the public poetry, not because he was a public poet, a one-time poet laureate, but
 
Page 302
because all his best poems deal with public concerns. Dryden could give an official semipersonal or personified personal reaction to a public event. He could keep the private man divorced from his office. For Pope, that was not going to be possible. Pope knew that he was not only to live the public life himself, but that his poetry would have to be expressively public and constantly publicizing.
The eighteenth century knew very well that the private is the politicaland that the public is the political. The advent of "Enlightenment" meant the desire to shed light on all aspects of human life, and to make them public. The number of things "not fit to be mentioned" was perceptibly diminishing. The
Old Bailey Session Papers
and the
Ordinary's Account
rapidly gave the public details that before it had not been thought proper or interesting to observe or record. The condition of sexually molested babies, the stains of menstrual blood on the clothing of an accused murderessthese things found room for statement. Such detailed presentation of small things or dirty things or dull things must have seemed strange to those contemporary readers still not used to the new "scientific" measurement. The New Science, according to which things were to be observed, measured, described aptly and recorded, was able to move from the laboratories and the gentlemanly Royal Society and go out into the world, where light was largely the light of the press.
The scientific doctrines of weighing and measuring suited a mercantile cast of mind, and were part and parcel of the Whig ideology. Yet the purer Whig ideology often soared beyond the interests of actual Whigs, and brought a countermovement of demand for the public communal life, for record of behaviors, moneys and events. Public life after 1700, or at the very latest after 1715, had become more insistent, and more taken for granted. A new generation had absorbed the implications of Locke's essay
Concerning Human Understanding
as well as his
Treatises on Government
. The mind and its working, the inner recesses of what we know as "person" seemed visible in a way they would not have done to a writer or reader of 1670. No tiny crevice of the personality seemed beyond scrutiny. Laurence Sterne's
Tristram Shandy
(17601767) is a paradoxical assertion that the private lifehowever eccentric or masturbatorycan be made public; at the same time, it is a defiance of this view.
Eighteenth-century literature has from time to time been accused of being "obscene." What disconcerts modern readers is not the mention-
 
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ing of things not in accord with some social code, nor the lubricity, but, presumably, the touch of coyness and experimentationthe various reflections of a desire not to be offensivewith which the English of the period refer to sexual or scatological matters, while reminding us that we are bearers ourselves of large, unclean, smelly bodies with all their parts and secretions and discharges. The lightest hint sophisticates. The eighteenth-century writers want to play with our embarrassment, make us know that we are known. That knowingness, that introduction of the public gaze in works of sexuality, would not seem so very surprising if women alone were the objects. But men are included as well as women. We know that women are objects of the male "gaze," but eighteenth-century literature makes
everyone
the object of the public gaze. And the sense of public gaze is present whether or not the subject or object is erotic.
In works as diverse as the poetry of Pope and the fiction of Samuel Richardsonnovelist and printerthe image of the Enlightenment is naturally enough the sun, which in the eighteenth century gets a different meaning from its Platonic one. The Enlightenment sun is busy glaring, ferreting out, strongly lighting up, putting into print. A certain testiness about the sun becomes evident in later Augustan poetry. When Milton's Satan grimly protests against the sun, in
Paradise Lost
IV, he just seems splendidly perverse. But moments of doubt, tones of doubt about the sun and its beams, are scattered throughout eighteenth century literature. There is a sense of the oppressiveness, the too-muchness of the great waves of light that come rolling irresistibly over one, that make everything visible until the tired eyes lose the power of seeing or discerning, as in James Thomson's "Summer":
'Tis raging Noon; and, vertical, the Sun
Darts on the Head direct his forceful Rays
O'er Heaven and Earth, far as the ranging Eye
Can sweep, a dazling Deluge reigns; and all
From Pole to Pole is undistinguish'd Blaze.
In vain the Sight, dejected to the Ground,
Stoops for Relief; thence hot ascending Steams
And keen Reflection pain.
Thomson, one of the chief Whig propagandists of the time, was one of the most enthusiastic exponents of Newtonian physics, of the commer-
 
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cial globe and maps, of the measurable world, and he also has a steady poetic topic in the relation of the eye to the light. He is a poet of visibility, of sober sanity in Enlightenment. Yet Thomson here, remarkably, announces a point at which light becomes overwhelming. The "ranging Eye" must stop its free movement, oppressed by the oppressive Sun, which seems to shoot at the head, and the entire visible environment is transformed painfully into the flood of light that hurts the eye. Subjected to the "undistinguish'd Blaze," and losing the capacity to distinguish objects, sight has lost itself.
Phrases from Ovid on man walking erect and facing upward stand behind Milton's and Blake's human form sublime. Thomson, in "Spring," draws upon the Ovidian passage: "Man superior walks / Amid the glad Creation." But Thomson knows that man cannot always live up to the sublime posture. In the heat of summer he acknowledges the tentative and circumstantial nature of our superior gaze; we droop. Even looking down provides no retreat, because the rays reflected from the ground still have power to pain. This excellent passage wonderfully captures the entrapment of the seeing eye and the powerful mind in even more powerful light. The wonderful eyethat masterful organand the powerful mind alike prove capable of weariness; they exhibit incapacity. For all his love of light, the poet finds a limit to endurance of light. Thomson, like Pope in the
Second Pastoral
, in talking about the sun's "blaze" captures the dubiousness of enlightenment, the negative side of being enlightened, that is, of being always in the glare of public light, the eye of the public in an arid, public space, dried and burned by the ceaseless hot waves of attention and attentiveness.
We find in the eighteenth-century poets, major and minor, male and female, a tendency to write about twilight and night. The attention given to night pieces might seem to represent a reaction against the surplus of ceaseless public light, a search for "Relief." In a punning allusion to
Hamlet
(I.iv.54) Pope had said James Ralph "makes Night hideous," referring to Ralph's poem
Night
(1728). In Pope's lines Night may be assumed to be hideous; making her more so is a sort of gilding of hell's lily, an offense against the day world. Ralph's poem on a subject increasingly fashionable was probably an influence on Collins's later "Ode to Evening." Ralph certainly praises Night as a source of relief and a benign influence:
 
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Lo! sable night ascends the dusky air,
And spends her deep'ning shadows all around;
Her silent influence stills the noisy world,
And wakes the studious soul to solemn thought.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
thou, whose secret haunt is far remov'd
From all the restless, glaring scenes of day,
Sweet contemplation, daughter of the night!
O deign thy favour to th'adventrous muse. . . .
(I.115)
Ralph is less "hideous" than Pope leads us to expect, and he is certainly in the line that leads from Thomson to Young, Collins, and Cowperbut his prefatory argument for the utter superiority of blank verse to rhyme alone would have sufficed to damn him with Pope.
That there is a paradox in writing about Night (a time that, if properly respected, deprives one of the use of books and writing) did not discourage Augustan poets. Arguably the most successful of their nocturnes is the "Nocturnal Reverie" by Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea. Finch's poem (1713) exhibits a delight in the beauty of a quiet freedom offering new and refreshing relations of objects to each other and to the human present, replacing the order and understandings of day.
When in some River, overhung with Green,
The Waving Moon and trembling Leaves are seen;
When freshen'd Grass now bears it self upright,
And makes cool Banks to pleasing Rest invite,
Whence springs the
Woodbind
, and the
Bramble
-Rose,
And where the sleepy
Cowslip
shelter'd grows:
Whilst now a paler Hue the
Foxglove
takes,
Yet checquers still with Red the dusky brakes.
Everywhere there are images of restoration and refreshment, mingled with the idea of transformation. Metamorphosed by night and moonlight, natural objects are refreshed and revived. The grass is "freshen'd"; the Cowslip, "shelter'd," can fall asleep. Finch's poem is an evidently deliberate proof that images of obscurity can be soothing rather than sublime. The poem as it moves tugs delicately at hierarchies, shifts regular orderings of things, so that even the senses lose their rankings, and the sense of smell is restored, as well as the sense of

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