The Columbia History of British Poetry (74 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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Page 313
but also Popereissued a work, they repeatedly lengthened it. The effect of plenitude militates against the sense of restriction in the imagery of loss or death; there is a luxury about the expression of decay largely foreign to the more laconic seventeenth century. Johnson says of Thomson's diction that it is "florid and luxuriant," even "too exuberant"; he praises the "wide display of original poetry" in Young's
Night Thoughts
:
The wild diffusion of the sentiments, and the digressive sallies of imagination, would have been compressed and restrained by confinement to rhyme. The excellence of this work is not exactness but copiousness . . . in the whole there is a magnificence like that ascribed to Chinese plantation, the magnificence of vast extent and endless diversity.
In the
Lives of the Poets
(17701781), looking back with particular attention to the earlier part of the century, Johnson is able to see distinctly and to sum up forcefully some of the creative or aesthetic principles at work in that earlier period. To display originality had become a desideratum by Young's time; Young wrote one of the first texts about "originality" in his
Conjectures on Original Composition
(1759). The duty of the poet is to exhibit originality with energy, to display vigor of mind in digression, to disdain confinement. There is in author and reader a love of ornament and display, a decided taste for the jolt of the unexpected. We see in Johnson's paragraph a Rococo acknowledgment of art and artifacts of exotic (non-European) culture; unexpectedly Young's large poem becomes a Chinese garden.
Copiousness
may be taken as a key word in relation to the poetics of the period. Poems wish to display copiousness, and unstoppability. It is a point of great importance to eighteenth-century writers (not just the poets) to give the impression of unstoppable flow, sweeping like Denham's celebrated Thames in
Cooper's Hill
(1655): "Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull, / Strong without rage, without ore-flowing full." The early eighteenth-century poets wished to incorporate some degree of "rage" in the flow, some principle of energy and inevitable forward movement. The image of life as a river perpetually appears in verse and prose of the entire period. "Think we, or think we not,
Time
hurries on / With a resistless unremitting stream" says Blair (
The Grave
, 479480). Blair's thought had been more pungently expressed by Isaac Watts in
The Psalms of David Imitated
, "Man Frail and God Eternal" (1719): "Time like an ever rolling Stream / Bears all
 
Page 314
its Sons away." Poets and prose writers alike borrow the inevitable forward energy of time itself, and the reader is caught in the stream of unstoppable flow. Copiousness, unstoppabilityand to these we must add "diversity" as in Johnson's striking, almost oxymoronic, phrase "endless diversity."
The poet must be able to surprise and please us by producing unexpected things, moment by moment. The best way to achieve all of these effects and to create the impression of sincere originality is to produce a poem spoken by a personal voice. Pope does this of course in the
Moral Essays
and the
Imitations of Horace
, and Young in
Night Thoughts
but we find the same first-person point of view in short poems as well as long, as a look at either of Roger Lonsdale's two anthologies will tell us. Personal experience is the stuff of the new poetry. Even nonexperience or negative experience will suffice, as in "Verse Epistle" by Jane Brereton (16851740):
I seldom go to Park or Play,
And once a Fortnight drink my Tea
Needle, or Book'twixt Thumb and Finger
Till tuneful voice of Ballad-singer
Will, sometimes, make me throw it by,
And to the Window swiftly fly;
From thence I hear the tatter'd Dame,
To dirty Mob, extol the Fame
'Of glorious 
Charles 
of 
Swedeland
'!
         ("To Mr. Thomas Griffith," 3643)
This poem (written in 1720 but not published until 1744) exhibits a light and ambiguous compliment paid to the old oral culture by one who is well ensconced in the new print cultureto whom new experience comes largely by reading. The clean, modern, middle-class woman sits upstairs reading, but will cast a glance below at the bedraggled oral muse, the "tatter'd Dame."
Copiousness
unstoppability
diversity
. These three words would do very well to describe the new Grub Street world of perpetual publication. The later seventeenth century was the first period to cope with the fact of constant publication affecting common life, but the eighteenth century saw such an expansion of the products and use of the printing press that the people who lived at the time were in many ways justified in speaking of it as an unprecedented phenomenon. In the throes of a
 
Page 315
similar change now ourselves, we can sympathize better than we used to do with the sense of fear or estrangement that often accompanied this great change. Pope and Swift both famously found fault with the new state of the world that allowed equal access to the printed pageto the authorship of the printed pageto persons who should have been under authority, ready to accept the revelations of their betters.
Authority underwent a metamorphosis. There was no authority in Church or State in the sense there had been before, there was only opinion and then another opinion, blast and counterblast. Of course that had been the case in the Reformation, a movement powerfully aided by the printing press, but the clerical agents of Reform had not really seen prophetically the degree to which their own authority would be upset. Writings by the uneducated, by cranks, by women tumbled off the press. As long as the public would buy, a bookseller would print, with no regard to decorum, no deference to duly constituted leaders. Of course this was not perfectly true, and the government, especially under Walpole in the 1720s, meddled much more than the Church was able to do. Yet even when censorship and downright suppression are taken into account, the press offered a vision of the contemporary world that had never been seen before. It was a self-reflective world. In a way, writings on religion and politics offered less of a challenge to the ideal of authority than did the variety of miscellaneous writings on every subject under the sun. People were being encouraged to have opinions, to express themselves. It must have seemed as though the world were full of writers as well as readers.
We have only recently been taught to regard the demographic factors of English life in the eighteenth century as important to our understanding of the period. But as soon as we consider that the population of England and Wales doubled (or nearly) during that century, we can see that by the end of the first third of the century a great proportion of the population must have been young, and that the proportion of the young would only increase as the century proceeded. Is not the strange fashion of wearing powdered hair and then powdered wigs that came up at this time in western Europeand most noticeably in France and Englanda fashion strongly related to age groups? Wigs appear at other times in history, but the assumption of white or gray hair is unique to the eighteenth century. It may well be that the young people of the governing classes felt an unconscious need to assert their right to do things, while reassuring others, both their elders and their own gen-
 
Page 316
eration, that they were perfectly capablethe fashion is an illustration, an emblem, of the saying "old heads on young shoulders." The white and gray powder cannot long disguise from us the youthfulness and energy of those who most fully participated in the century's activities and changesand among both activities and changes must be counted the writing and reading of the new poetry.
The new kind of reading public included boys born in the lower, the working, classes, like John Gay, Samuel Richardson, and William Hogarth, as well as women of both upper and middle classes. If we look at the poetry of the eighteenth century, we must acknowledge the enormous output. One of the steadily proliferating areas was poetry. Poems were popular and salable in a way not easy to imagine nowadays, and the logic of the marketplace meant, for instance, that women could buy each other's works, and supply audiences sufficient to support a volume. No writer had to depend on an imprimatur.
The new magazines were also arenas of publicationmost important the
Gentleman's Magazine
(founded 1731). Edward Cave, its editor, included in the poetry columns a number of poems by women, from the very beginning. Jane Brereton contributed to it regularly under the pseudonym "Melissa." The regular poetry section of the
Gentleman's Magazine
was reserved for correspondents, unpaid, like writers of Letters to the Editor. The experience of appearing in print was stimulating to provincial ladies as well as to provincial gentlemenand to women and men of ranks below. In an earlier period, the women bold enough to be known to be writers of poetry were generally ladies of the highest birth, such as Katharine Philips ("Orinda"), Anne Killigrew, or the Countess of Winchilsea. In the new period it becomes increasingly common for middle-class women to write and even to appear in print. Some were not even of the middle class.
One of the best artists in the shorter kind of poems of this period is Mary Leapor, who was not entitled to call herself a lady or a gentlewoman. She was the daughter of a gardener, and worked for some time as a cook-maid. In her short life she produced a number of poems, as well as a play that did not succeed in getting produced. Leapor's dying wish was that her poems (which already had an appreciative audience) should be published, and they were published by subscription in April 1748. Subscribers included the Countess of Hertford and Stephen Duck, "the thresher poet," another spectacular success, in contemporary view, exhibiting the poetic capacities possibly to be found in the

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