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THE BUSINESS OF THE POET:
POETIC SELF-AWARENESS FROM SIDNEY TO JOHNSON

By

Debra Morris Smith

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1988

ABSTRACT

THE BUSINESS OF THE POET:
POETIC SELF-AWARENESS FROM SIDNEY TO JOHNSON

By

Debra Morris Smith

The purpose of this study is to discover the extent to
which English poets before the Romantic Movement inquired
into the cognitive processes involved in their poetry writ-
ing and to examine their remarks on these processes. I have
considered primarily the prose critical works of poets from
the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries,
although poems and letters figure marginally in my discus-
sion.

Focusing in Chapter 1 on Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for
Poetry, often regarded as the earliest piece of English
literary criticism, and reading it against contemporary
defenses of poetry, I argue that the reflective character of
the A olo , rather than the theories it expresses, sets it
apart as a beginning in English criticism and that this work
paves the way for subsequent poetic self—examination. The
seventeenth century, which I consider in Chapters 2 and 3,
sees gradual development of poetic introspection, particu-
larly in the thought of Jonson and Dryden.

It is in the eighteenth century, however, that reflec-
tion on one's cognitive activities in writing poetry becomes

normative; hardly a poet fails to describe either the

Debra Morris Smith
composing process or the components of good writing in gen-
eral. Chapter 4 examines a number of the critical documents
of this period, especially those of Pope, Young, and
Johnson, comparing each poet's remarks with those of his
contemporaries and his predecessors. Despite this
widespread tendency in the eighteenth century toward poetic
self-analysis, conditions grounding the separation of writ-
ing poetry and reflecting on it emerge as well. Chapter 5
discusses the nascent academization and commercialization of
poetry and concludes that the union of writing poetry and

theorizing about it begins to dissolve just as poetic self-

awareness reaches its peak.

 

Copyright by
DEBRA MORRIS SMITH
1988

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to express my deep appreciation of the guidance I

have received from Jay Ludwig, Roger Meiners, Douglas Peter-

son, and, especially, Robert Uphaus, and of the support and

patience of my family, Wayne, Austin, and Geoffrey.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1
Staking out the Territory:
Sir Philip Sidney on the Poet's Work

Chapter 2

"Discovering" the Ground:

Attitudes toward the Poetic Process
in the Early Seventeenth Century

Chapter 3
Building with Jonson‘s Timber:
The Latter Half of the Seventeenth Century

Chapter 4
Living in the House that Dryden Built:
Poetic Self-Awareness in the Eighteenth Century

Chapter 5
Additions to the Neighborhood:
The Ivory Tower and the Factory

Notes

Works Cited

vi

31

61

97

149

159

178

Chapter 1
Staking out the Territory:

Sir Philip Sidney on the Poet's Work

Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry is clearly a
pivotal document in the history of English literary
criticism. Whether because Sidney's arguments are more com-
pelling or because Sidney himself is, his document on poetry
has succeeded in speaking for the late Renaissance in a way
that Puttenham's or Webbe's or Harington's has not. Con-
sequently, Sidney's Apology has come to be regarded by many
literary historians as the first significant piece of
sustained literary theory in English and has received the
scholarly attention appropriate to this position. Its many
critics have generally been concerned either to demonstrate
the organizational and thematic coherence of the work, or to
discover the Renaissance, medieval, and classical sources of
Sidney‘s ideas.‘ Recently, some attention has been paid its
tone as well, critics chiefly contending that Sidney speaks
ironically in the Apology.a All this attention to the Applr
ppy has implicitly accorded its author an eminence as a
literary theorist that modern students of the work often
assume without debate; critics who in biographical terms
recognize Sidney‘s primary commitment to political life
tend, in critical terms, to forget that he is not an R. P.

Blackmur. Despite the enormous amount of criticism focusing

2
on this work, no one, to my knowledge, has attempted to
answer--in the context of the Apology--the fundamental
question of how seriously Sidney took writing poetry and how
he understood the creative process.

Certainly critics discuss Sidney's preference for
political over poetic activity, but they either dismiss it
as a Renaissance commonplace (as they do so much else in
Sidney) or imply that it has no bearing on his opinions
regarding poetry.3 Likewise, critics writing general inter-
pretations of the Apology discuss Sidney‘s refusal to follow
Plato in a belief in outright inspiration, and there are
discussions of Sidney's idea of the fore-conceit and his
understanding of imitation. But these references to his
ideas about the poetic process either are mere paraphrases
or else come in support of some other inquiry, especially
Sidney‘s understanding of the social and moral good that
poetry does its readers. The fact that gg_regard Sidney's
Applogy with high seriousness seems to encourage us to
assume without much investigation that Sidney did too: in
fact, I think perhaps he did not. Critical treatments of
Sidney's poetics suggest that critics gxpect seminal ideas
from Sidney, given his reputation, and do not quite know
what to do with the commonplace ideas he shares with most of
the rest of the Renaissance. I shall argue that Sidney is
in fact a generative thinker for poets contemplating their

own invention process, but in an oblique manner traceable

3
neither to the summarizable content of the Apology nor to
other poets’ specific enunciations of that process.

What Sidney actually says about the poetic process
falls into two thoroughly conflicting categories--critics
may have done well to steer clear of this particular prob-
lem. On the one hand, Sidney speaks disparagingly of his
career as a poet quite often: in the opening of the Apology
he describes himself as "in these my not old years and
idlest times having slipped into the title of a poet."“
Similarly, in the letter Sidney wrote his sister the
Countess of Pembroke to accompany the 91g Argpgia, he
belittled his accomplishment:

Here now have you . . . this idle work of mine, which, I
fear, like the spider's web, will be thought fitter to
be swept away than worn to any other purpose. For my
part, in very truth, . . . I could well find in my heart
to cast out in some desert of forgetfulness this child
which I am loth to father. . . .if you keep it to
yourself or to such friends who will weigh errors in the
balance of goodwill I hope, for the father's sake, it
will be pardoned. . . For indeed, for severer eyes it
is not, being but a trifle, and that triflingly handled.
Your dear self can best witness the manner, being done
in loose sheets of paper, most of it in your presence,
the rest by sheets sent unto you as fast as they were
done.9
Even on his deathbed Sidney was supposedly anxious that his
reputation as a poet not be preserved. According to Thomas
Moffet, writing a biography of Sidney for the poet's nephew
William Herbert, the dying Philip Sidney implored his

brother to suppress his love poetry.‘

4

0n the other hand, the special pleading for the poet's
work in the Apology is remarkable. Sidney essentially com-
pares the poet's activity to that of God in creating the
world (101). He denies that the poet is directly inspired
by God, but claims something even grander in suggesting that
only the poet of all thinkers is not bound by nature, that
the poet "disdaining to be tied to any such subjection,
lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in
effect into another nature, in making things either better
than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as
never were in Nature" (100). Many critics leap over this
passage to the famous "definition" of poetry and statement
about the poet's activity that follows: "Poesy is therefore
an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word
mimggis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or
figuring forth--to speak metaphorically, a speaking
picture--with this end, to teach and delight“ (101). This,
Sidney says, is a ”more ordinary opening” offered "that the
truth may be more palpable" because the earlier remarks
"will by few be understood and by fewer granted." Critics
taking the imitation passage for the central thesis of the
Apolpgy often fail to read it in light of the previous
explanation of the way in which the poet imitates--that is,
the poet does not imitate nature but rather creates a new
nature and thus imitates God.

Critics have been disinclined to discuss this conflict

between Sidney's lofty view of the poet's work and his

5
casual dismissal of his own poetic endeavors. Some regard
Sidney's modesty as a conventional but disingenuous stance
befitting a Renaissance courtier and substitute their own
Romantic-influenced view of the poet's high calling without
entertaining the notion that Sidney may have genuinely felt
ambivalent about his poetic inclinations. Others acknowl—
edge the doubts Sidney announces but seem able to divorce
their awareness of those doubts from their analysis of his
"thought." Dorothy Connell escapes both modern tendencies
when she points out that Sidney, for whom writing poetry was
part of the courtly game, "made poetry to pass time, without
any pretension to conquering it. He drew back quite
deliberately from accepting the poetic gift as a mantle con-
ferring on him special powers."7 James Osborn, who speaks
frankly of wishing to see Sidney chiefly as a poet but being
forced by historical evidence not to do so, also points out
that Sidney often used intellectual exercise to combat
depression.’ Connell and Osborn are unusual in their
ability to see past modern assumptions about the “set-apart"
character of the poet.

As for Sidney's more laudatory remarks on poetic crea-
tion, the critics who do not just ignore his ideas about the
poet's creation of "another nature” have been more inclined
to speculate about their sources than to consider their pos-
sible motivation by Sidney‘s circumstances or feelings (per-

haps because little is known of his circumstances and less

6
of his feelings). Lewis Soens argues that Sidney is essen—
tially taking a Platonic stance but in doing so modifies the
position of the French Pleiade to mollify Calvinists for
whom only the Bible can be inspired by God.’ Likewise,
Irene Samuels and many others regard Sidney as a Platonic
thinker paradoxically offering a corrective to Platonism.*°
E. R. Curtius says that Macrobius was the first to compare
the poet's work to the creation of the world“: sur-
prisingly, no Sidney critic has yet suggested that it is
Macrobius that Sidney follows on this point.

Definitively reconciling Sidney's high-flown opinions of
the poetic act as expressed in the Apology with his poetic
self-disparagement there and elsewhere (or definitively
demonstrating that they never were reconcilable in the first
place) is probably not possible at this temporal distance,
especially given the poverty of documentation from Sidney's
period of retirement. No amount of source study, no
ingenious thematic interpretation of the Apology will yield
the longed-for resolution of this conflict. Quite simply,
Sidney was torn. Given the ultimate irreconcilability of
his two points of view, I should like to contend that the
Apology for Ppetry is better read as the poet's probing and
justifying of himself to himself than as a Renaissance
manifesto, and that historical and textual evidence (as well
as the principle of Occam's razor) supports such a reading.

In fact, it is precisely Sidney's Janus-like ability to turn

7
from civil servant to poet and back again, to think about
poetry while holding in mind his doubts about it, that gives
the Apology for Poetry its power and seminal character. The
ideas Sidney expresses are indeed much like those of Ascham,
Puttenham, and the rest; it is the reflective, exploratory

character of the Apology that sets it apart from other, dog-

matic, pieces of Renaissance poetics and clears the ground

for the musings on their art of poets to come.

1

That the young Sidney preferred an active political life
to the retirement of the poet admits of no doubt. Not only
do his extant letters--which almost without exception fail
even to mention poetry1=--focus on political and military
concerns: as James Osborn has shown, Sidney did not pursue
literary studies or the acquaintance of poets during his
years studying and traveling on the Continent. Dr. Moffet
offers oblique confirmation of Sidney's general disinclina-
tion to devote himself to poetry: "since he craved to be
wise rather than strong, he would almost have failed in both
had he not given himself over, though unwillingly, to
recreation, and mingled, by way of spice, certain sportive
arts-~poetic, comic, musical--with his more serious studies.
He amused himself with them after the manner of youth, but
within limits: he was somewhat wanton, indeed, but observed

a measure and felt shame” (73-75). So far as is known,

B
Sidney wrote no poetry as a very young man, during the
period of his highest, most idealistic, political aspira—
tions. Only when Elizabeth's refusal to embark
wholeheartedly on Sidney's projects, her failure to employ
him meaningfully at court, and her displeasure at his letter
against her marriage to Alencon forced Sidney to leave
London did he begin his poetic career. Even then, as Osborn
and Roger Howell both point out, Sidney's first impulse was
to return to the Continent to act as a military leader in
the Netherlands. Only after Languet changed his own mind
about such a course of action did Sidney resign himself to
retiring to Wilton with his sister to write the Arcadia.1=
As Howell goes on to say, "it would probably be wrong to
think that initially he did so for much more than its diver-
sionary value: he still thought in terms of service rather
than ease, and the cautions of his friends to forbear the
seductive aspects of withdrawal were, in reality, scarcely
needed" (154).

Moffet, who makes quite a point of the idea that poetry
is an unvalued sport for Sidney, oddly includes a rebuttal
of the notion that Sidney therefore despised poetry as some
members of the court did. Sidney, he says, "kept far away
from those noblemen. . . who, averse to the Muses and in
some degree robbed of their minds . . ., despise literature;
who without sensibility, without the smack of any learning,

gulp down sensual pleasures with their greedy mouths, who

9
actually feel disgust at knowledge . . . and toss it aside"
(83). George Puttenham had expressed this concern about
anti-intellectual noblemen as well: Princes are so taken up
with statecraft that they "haue not one houre to bestow upon
any other ciuill or delectable Art of naturall or moral doc-
trine: nor scarce any leisure to thincke one good thought
in perfect and godly contemplation, whereby their troubled
mindes might be moderated and brought to tranquillitie."*‘
Sidney does seem to occupy a middle position between the
self-acknowledged poets of his day, such as Spenser and
Shakespeare, and the despisers of poetry, who apparently
were many. The fact that Moffet, who has been accused of
negating Sidney's actual poetic interests in order to shape
young Herbert for better things,*° goes to the trouble to
demonstrate that Sidney did not despise poetry and the life
of the mind suggests to me that Moffet's remarks cannot be
so easily dismissed, that there was at least a side of Sid-
ney represented accurately by his picture.

In Sidney's correspondence with Languet, we see an
ambivalence similar to that expressed by Moffet. While both
men generally fail even to mention literary studies, both
also occasionally express a weakness for poetry as well.
Osborn cites a letter from Languet in which the older man
mentions sending some verses composed under the inspiration
of a portrait of Sidney (138-139): this same Languet

ordinarily urges political studies and activities on the

10
young Sidney in every letter, cautioning the young man
against too much leisure when it is his duty to serve the
state. So frequently does Languet send the latter message
that Sidney felt obligated to apologize for his own leisure
in 1578: “the use of the pen, as you may perceive, has
plainly fallen from me: and my mind itself, if it was ever
active in any thing, is now beginning, by reason of my
indolent ease, imperceptibly to lose its strength, and to
relax without any reluctance. For to what purpose should
our thoughts be directed to various kinds of knowledge,
unless room be afforded for putting it into practice, so
that public advantage may be the result, which in a corrupt
age we cannot hope for'?"“3 A. Leigh DeNeef has attempted to
synthesize Sidney‘s political aspirations and his poetic
disposition, suggesting that Sidney's method of enacting the
dreams of Languet's Protestant League was to write the A l-
oqv for Poetry: "there is every reason to believe that Sid—
ney hoped to lead England into the broader European reform
movement. One of the ways he might have planned to do this
was by seeking to reform English literature, and as the
chief ‘manifesto' of that reform he wrote the Applogy some-
time between 1581 and 1583."*’ Appealing as DeNeef's
synthesis is, the publication history of the Apology, the
absence of other tracts by Sidney, and Sidney's own
testimony to Languet simply do not support the view that

Sidney envisioned his own poetic career as his political

11
work, although his discussion of poetry in the Apology might
allow one to establish a poetic career on those grounds.

As for the direct remarks of Sidney disparaging his
poetry, nothing definite can be said. Certainly it is true
that such remarks constitute a "Renaissance commonplace“:
Sir John Harington, for example, writes a cover letter to
his Orlgndo Furipgp much like Sidney's to the Arcadia.
Writing to his mother-in-law, Lady Jane Rogers, late in the
year 1600, Harington says "Madam, I have sent you my long
promised Orlando, and that it maie properly belong to you
and you heire femall, I have added to it as manie of the
toyes I have formerly written to you and your daughter, as I
could collect out of my scattered papers.“ On the same day
he writes the Countess of Bedford in a similar vein, refer-
ring to his contribution as "some shallow meditations of
myne owne.”*° Ronald Levao also cites Greville on this
point; that biographer of Sidney himself dismissed Sidney's
self-effacement as a meaningless courtly gesture.u Clearly
there is evidence for dismissing Sidney's remarks in this
way.

The case of Harington is perplexing, however. Like Sid-
ney, Harington seems to be at least somewhat genuine in his
depreciation of poetry in general. In 1602 he wrote to his
son’s schoolmaster "I desire not that hee [the son] should
bee much addicted to them [verses] least yt hinder him (as

yt hath done mee) of better studies" (96), and early in 1603

12
remarked, after a visit to read verses to Queen Elizabeth in
her last illness, that the Queen warned him that such
"fooleries" would please him less in old age (97). Some
months later yet, Harington writes to Lord Thomas Howard in
both veins, saying first that he is "now settynge for the
country, where I will read Petrarch, Ariosto, Horace, and
such wise ones. I will make verses on the maidens, and give
my wine to the masters," then changing his tone to reflect
on whether his poetry will live on after his death and on
the poor living to be made writing prose or poetry. How
seriously Harington took his poetic work would seem to be as
uncertain as the case of Sir Philip Sidney.

To deny that belittling one‘s poetry is a Renaissance
commonplace would clearly be ridiculous, given the testimony
of Greville and the consensus of centuries of scholarship.
However, the use of a commonplace does not insure the
absence of sincerity: one might surmise that a "commonplace"
becomes common by being widely said gpg_meant, that it only
gradually comes to be understood as polite but insincere.
Even then, some may still genuinely feel the sentiments they
express in a commonplace form. It does not seem to me that
the commonplace nature of Sidney's disparaging remarks about
his work outweighs the other evidence that his commitment to
poetry was partial at best.

It is ironic that the state of Sidney criticism in 1988

requires such lengthy assertion that Sidney was ambivalent

13
about poetry, that his first loyalty was to the active
political life, and that he felt torn between his desire to
write and his sense that writing poetry was a waste of time.
Precisely the opposite arguments were apparently necessary
some fifty years ago. The motivating critical crisis of
Kenneth Myrick‘s seminal book for modern Sidney studies was
the commonplace assumption by critics that Sidney regarded
his literary work as a mere filler of the time between
political activities. Myrick argues that the only evidence
we have for that view is the words of the poet himself, and
he claims that Sidney feigned disinterest in poetry partly
to ward off criticism and partly because he was aware of his
own work‘s shortcomings.20 The whole purpose of his book is
to demonstrate that Sidney is a serious poet and critic, a
purpose in which he succeeded so thoroughly that until the
1970s the oratorical structure of the Apology which he dis-
covered went completely unchallenged, and even now is often
assumed by Sidney scholars. But as the years of this
century have distanced us from the old assumptions about
Sidney's first loyalties, I believe that we have come to
take Sidney gpp seriously as a critic if not as a poet, that
we have attributed to him a kind of definitive philosophical
position and seriousness of intent to convert others to his
views that are beyond the desires or abilities of a man who

was not absolutely convinced of the value of poetry himself.

14
2
By its title, An Apology for Pogggy suggests itself as
the repository for what Sidney really believed about poetry.
Beyond the title, however, the work is more problematic.
While the title and the surface structure of the Apology
imply a clear position addressed to a well-defined audience,

closer examination reveals less coherence and definition
than one would hope to find in such a document.

The first problem with taking the Apology as a unified
presentation of Sidney's ideas to an audience is its actual
lack of unified ideas. Despite the long-accepted analysis
of Kenneth D. Myrick, the concept of oratorical structure
does not adequately deal with the content of the A olo , as
a number of more recent critics have been at pains to
detail. In a 1974 Ph.D. dissertation, for example, Leslie
Donley Foster attacks Myrick's rhetorical analysis and
offers in its place his own "logical analysis" of the Qpplr
ogy for Poetry. “Centrally at issue," says Foster, "is what
is at the heart of the Defence-~is it a speech in praise of
poetry (or as I put it, in praise of the nature of man), or
is it a legal defense against specific charges that have
been brought against poetry?"=1 He finds each of Sidney‘s
arguments progressively more concessive pieces of praise,
with the "man as Maker like God“ section the key to Sidney's
views. The Pugliano story with which Sidney opens the Applr

ogy is, in Foster‘s opinion, an example of a debased view of

15
humankind (36), against which Sidney wishes to argue.
Foster's claims for the Apology seem a bit extravagant;
knowing that Sidney dropped his poetic career in mid-
sentence to take up arms on the Continent, I find it hard to
concede that Sidney rejects "military power as a civilizing

force" (35) on the basis of his European tour and proposes

poetry in its place. A. Leigh DeNeef offers a more modest
rereading of the Apology, in which he finds thematic unity
and "internal consistency” in Sidney‘s understanding of the
concept imitation, which shapes both writing and reading
poetry: "The reader learns to imitate the poet's imitation
of God's imitation."=2 Frank Evans argues that the Fall is
Sidney's starting point and finds coherence in the entire
essay around that topic, as does Andrew Weiner, while for
Neil Rudenstine the thematic key to the work is that it is
also an apology for love.23

For each of these writers, some external agent of
coherence must be imposed on the Apology for Poetry if
Myrick's simpler view that it is a classical oration in
defense of poetry is not adequate to the work. Another
recent method of distancing Sidney criticism from Myrick has
been to note and relish the inconsistencies of the Apology.
In his Renaissange Mings and their Fictions, Ronald Levao
suggests that Renaissance ideas about invention are stated
so decidedly and so often precisely because those ideas are

so completely in question. He examines the Apology with an

16
eye to its self-contradictions and finds that, beneath the
surface organization, Sidney is simply trying out a variety
of ideas. With respect to the description of the poet as a
maker like God, Levao argues that "the passage is something
of an indulgence, a voice he has assumed in order to sound
out certain attractive, if abstruse, arguments. He is not
concerned with proving their validity, and he neither
affirms nor denies them to those who will not grant them."24
Thus far Levao's reading of the Applpgy seems appropriate to
its historical circumstances, but when he goes on to
attribute philosophical intentionality to Sidney, I find his
argument less plausible: "Even as he points out the logical
mistakes of his opponents, Sidney seems to be deliberately
committing his own, making gpy first premise impossible and
so exposing himself to an inevitable regress" (153-154).
Alan Hager takes a tack similar to Levao's. He finds
virtually everything in the Apology to be ironic, suggesting
that the process of the quest for truth, rather than some
specific truth about poetry, is Sidney's interest in the
work. "I think we must conclude," Hager says, "that he has
consciously made it impossible for us to know him in his
works. In fact, he has invited us to look for him, and then
has retired behind his ironic and paradoxical mask.”2° Like
Levao, Hager seems to me to attribute implausible intentions
to Sidney, even if the effect on the sensitive twentieth-

century reader is much as they describe. While one might

17
relish the thought of a philosophically skeptical Sidney
willfully setting English criticism off on a reflexive and
ironical course, the explanation for the contradictions that
Levao and Hager rightly note in the Apology seems to me to
be simpler than their conversion of Sidney into a

deconstructor.

Although Myrick's reading does seem accurate on the sur-
face (and other attempts to find coherence seem strained, at
best), it does not provide incontrovertible evidence for
Sidney's intentions: classically educated Sidney would have
framed any argument in the appropriate structure of his day
just as modern English teachers likely cast letters and pri-
vate journal entries in the thesis-support style they
teach, however unconsciously. Within and among the parts of
Sidney‘s oratory, in any case, the argument is less than
perfectly coherent, as so many critics have pointed out.
Sidney permits himself to use even the crucial term "poetry"
equivocally. Part of his early justification of poetry is
that the ancients used verse for writing all their history
and philosophy, but later he demonstrates that history and
philosophy are different from and inferior to poetry,
generally excluding them as apprOpriate poetic content by
definition. While such commonplace equivocality certainly
does not much affect our understanding of Sidney's argument,
his carelessness in such a matter might mitigate against our

believing that he meant the Applogy to be a careful

1B
marshalling of arguments for a dubious audience, as does the
unclear relationship between the passages on the poet as
maker and the poet as imitator. Depending upon one's own
biases, one can argue that Sidney really sees the poet's
work as creative, based on his discussion of the justness of
the Latin and Greek words for poet; or one can argue that in
Sidney 5 opinion the poet imitates, in a Platonic way, "what
may be and should be" (102). Either way, Sidney goes to no
great pains to defend his terms, explaining by would-be
synonyms--imitate, represent, counterfeit, figure forth,
feign--rather than by definition. In this matter he differs
completely from his contemporary Puttenham (leaving aside
the question of which Puttenham, if any, wrote what is
attributed to the name George Puttenham), who carefully and
at length considers "icastic" as opposed to "phantastic"
imagination in his Art pf English Pogsie,=‘ while Sidney
briefly mentions the terms in a single sentence (125).
Likewise, George Gascoigne, one of the "professional poets"
of the day, carefully goes through the formalities, at
least, of defining his terms as for an audience, peppering
his discussion with such phrases as "by which I mean
"27

Most tellingly, however, Sidney's own secretary, William
Temple, who was a respected Ramist philosOpher at Cambridge
before joining Sidney in 1585, wrote an extensive (and, in

everyone's defense, fairly recently discovered) treatise

19
directly to Sidney, taking the poet to task for his cavalier
use of technical terms without adequate definition and for
other illogical points of his argument. As John Webster
points out, Temple's "Analysis" of the Apology implies
"Temple's feeling that Sidney's definition takes for granted

the whole process by which the poet first conceptualizes and

then embodies the ‘idea' he sets out to imitate."=' In
fact, according to Temple, Sidney's whole treatment of
poetic imitation ignores a crucial factor: because
"fiction-making" is invention of "something that does not
yet exist," it therefore belongs "not to poetry, but to
dialectical invention" (81); "just as often as poets feign,"
he says, "they do so not by some gift peculiar to poetry,
but by the faculty of the art of dialectic” (B3).
Throughout the ”Analysis," Temple focuses on Sidney's
philosophical “errors" while also pointing out a variety of
smaller inconsistencies. Although the precise circumstances
of the composition of the “Analysis" are not known, it seems
likely that a man close enough to Sidney to respond at
length and in writing, but privately, to the Apolpgy would
also be close enough to him to be aware of and remark on any
special intention to demonstrate the sort of philosophical
point that such critics as Samuel and Dowlin or Levao and
Hager would like to find in the work.

The second problem in understanding the Apglogy as a

unified presentation of Sidney's carefully considered

20
opinion is the uncertainty of its intended audience, a prob-
lem linked inextricably to the question of his motivation in
writing it. Sidney writes to a "you," but he does not
attribute sufficiently specific ideas to ”you" for identifi-
cation of his intention. Most critics have simply assumed
that Sidney meant to answer Gosson, who had dedicated his
1579 "Schoole of Abuse" (abusing literary activities in gen-
eral) to Sidney, implying that Gosson was both motivation
and primary audience, though Gosson's own audience would
presumably also be intended as Sidney's. O. B. Hardison,
Arthur Kinney, Neil Rudenstine, and countless others take
Gosson for Sidney's primary target without discussion,”
while Andrew Weiner lists him first in a series of possible
motivations for the Apology: "Whether we owe the Defenge pf
Poesie to the accident of Stephen Gosson‘s logical but ill-
received dedication to Sidney of his Schoole of Abuse
(1579), to Sidney's conversations about poetry with Dyer,
Greville, and possibly Spenser, to Sidney‘s own need to jus-
tify the investment of time he was making on the pig
Arcadia, or to some combination of all these, we are indeed
fortunate that Sidney was for some reason moved enough by
something to sit down, at approximately the same time that
he was in the midst of composing and revising the p;g_
Arcadia, and to write out a formal defence of the art of
poetry embodying those principles he had perhaps reached as

a consequence of his efforts."3°

21

Weiner strikes a note of common sense with respect to
the motivation of the Apology. The possibilities are as
far-flung as he suggests. I should like to add, however,
that if Sidney meant the work primarily as an answer to Gos-
son, he might have been expected to respond to Gosson's own
objections and slant his remarks more clearly at Gosson than
he does, as Geoffrey Shepherd also points out.=51 Thomas
Lodge wrote A Rgply to Stephen GgggonLg Schoole of Abuse in
defence of Poetry. Musickggpd Stage Plays in which he takes
up specific points raised by Gosson, addressing the latter
directly. Lodge's last lines are "lastly I frendly bid Gos-
son farwell, wyshinge him to temper his penn with more dis-
cretion."32--very different from Sidney's universal closing.

The disparate closings epitomizing their documents' wide
dissimilarity, Lodge's defense couldn't be more different
from Sidney's defense of poetry; however, it is rather like
Sidney‘s defense of Leicester in its use of invective and
snideness as well as in its directness toward its target.
In the "Defence of the Earl of Leicester," Sidney opens his
argument quite directly indeed: "Of late there hath been
printed a book in form of Dialog to the defaming of the Earl
of Lester full of the most vyle reproches which a witt used
to wicked and filthy thoughtes can imagin." His closing is
similar: “And this which I wryte, I woold send to thyne own
handes, if I knew thee: but I trust it can not bee intended,

that he shoold be ignorant of this printed in London, which

22
knows the very whispringes of the prive chamber. I will
make dainti of no basenes in thee, that art indeed, the
wryter of this book. And from the date of this wryting,
emprinted and published I will three monthes expect thyne
answer."33 What intervenes takes on the allegations against
his uncle quite specifically, unlike the Apoloqv for Pogtcx
with respect to Gosson. It could be argued that a defense
of poetry differs from a defense of an uncle, but Lodge's
answer to Gosson would seem to belie this position. Given
Sidney's straightforward approach on more immediately con-
troversial matters than the character of poetry--not only

his uncle 5 position, but also the possibility of the

queen's marriage--I find it difficult to believe that he
would not have taken on Gosson or any other well-defined
audience much more directly than he does: surely he has no
more to fear from the enemies of poetry than from Queen
Elizabeth herself.

Some critics incline to the view that Sidney was answer-
ing general Protestant ideas, defending poetry against views
that were "in the air," although there are also critics who
believe he intended his defense against the ideas of Plato
in The Republic." In either case, the fact that he neither
published the Apology nor, apparently, circulated it among
the enemies of poetry is perplexing: why did he bother
defending poetry if its enemies, whoever they might have

been, did not have access to his defense? There is some

23
evidence that John Harington wrote his own "Briefe Apologie
of Poetry,” with a copy of Sidney‘s at hand,39 but Sidney
can hardly have regarded Harington--or Spenser and Dyer and
Daniel Rogers and the rest of his circle, assuming that he
probably circulated his manuscript among his literary

friends--as an enemy of poetry. The A olo , when finally

published in 1595, was treated as a document in the
glorification of the dead Sir Philip Sidney, not as a
serious threat to widely held opinions, as evidence the
absence of any "Answers to The Lately Discover'd Scurrilous
Defense of Poesy by Sir Philip Sidney" in the Short Title
Catalog.3° Taken altogether, the historical evidence for
the view that the Apology was meant as a straightforward
defense of poetry against specific ideas or people is over-
whelmingly negative.

The tone of Sidney's Apglogy for Poetry presents a fur—
ther obstacle to regarding this work as a public defense
intended for a wide audience. In themselves, Sidney's
exordium, in which he compares his defending poetry to
Pugliano's praising horsemanship, and his peroration, in
which he wishes a variety of exaggeratedly good or bad ends
on his supposed readers, call into question the seriousness
with which we can take the more straightforward argument
between them. In the opening passage, Sidney compares him-
self to Pugliano, who purportedly spoke out either because

Sidney and Wotton were slow to pay him or because they were

24

such admiring pupils (so Sidney says): what, then, can we
suppose Sidney mean to suggest about his own motivation in
writing the A olo , especially considering that he con-
tinues his remarks by attributing his writing to "self-love”
(95)? Critics universally dismiss this introduction as
"ironic modesty” (except for Foster, whose view of the
Pugliano story I have already mentioned): however, in open-
ing with irony Sidney would have to assume an audience that
believed poetry to be of crucial importance, and in order to
be modest, he would have to be an author already secure in
his poetic identity, which I believe Sidney was not.37 The
dissimilarities of Sidney's and Puttenham's openings and
closings is telling in this regard. Puttenham, who we know
wrote for Queen and Court, opens directly with "A Poet is as
much to say as a maker" and ends with an apology for so long
requiring Her Majesty's attention. That Puttenham, writing
within essentially the same courtly framework as Sidney,
took so utterly different a tone from Sidney's suggests that
Sidney was attempting something radically different in the
Apology from what had gone before and would come shortly
after. (In fact, it may well be that Sidney and Puttenham
were both composing their documents in the early 15805.)
Puttenham's purpose was clearly didactic, Lodge's forensic;
Sidney’s was, by my reading of the evidence, neither.

Not to read the Pugliano passage as ironic seems

ludicrous, but I should like to argue that it seems so to

25
modern literary critics because we take as normative the
idea that poetry is serious and worthwhile indeed. If we
regarded poetry as the (devil's) work of idle hands, as many
of Sidney's contemporaries clearly did, then we very easily
might in all honesty think Pugliano quite superior to Sid-
ney. Neither Gosson and the other radical Protestant
poetry-haters nor the active, unscholarly courtiers who con-
cern Puttenham could have been trusted to read Sidney's
introduction as ironic. The only contemporary audience for
whom Sidney could risk such irony is his close circle--his
sister and the members of what Spenser terms the Areopagus--
who would know that Sidney in fact had a high regard for
poetry and would join him in it. Similarly, only Sidney's

friends would likely have been sympathetic to or amused by

the exaggerated conclusion of the Applogy:

So that since the ever-praiseworthy Poesy is full of
virtue-breeding delightfulness, and void of no gift that
ought to be in the noble name of learning; . . . I con-
jure you all that have had the evil luck to read this
ink-wasting toy of mine, even in the name of the Nine
Muses, no more to scorn the sacred mysteries of Poesy,
no more to laugh at the name of poets, as though they
were next inheritors to fools, no more to jest at the
reverent title of a rhymer; but to believe, with
Aristotle, that they were the ancient treasurers of the
Grecians' divinity: to believe with Bembus . . . , with
Scaliger . . . , with Clauserus . . . , with me . . . ;
lastly to believe themselves, when they tell you they
will make you immortal by their verses.

Thus doing, your name shall flourish in the printers'
shops; thus doing, you shall be of kin to many a poeti-
cal preface: thus doing, you shall be most fair, most
rich, most wise, most all: you shall dwell upon superla-
tives. . . . But if (fie of such a but) you be born so
near the dull-making cataract of Nilus that you cannot
hear the planet-like music of Poetry, . . . then, though

26
I will not wish unto you the ass's ears of Midas, nor to
be driven by a poet‘s verses (as Bubonax was) to hang
himself, nor to be rhymed to death, as is said to be
done in Ireland; yet thus much curse I must send you, in
the behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live
in love, and never get favour for lacking skill of a
sonnet, and, when you die, your memory die from the
earth for want of an epitaph. (141-142)
Curses that have no teeth, wildly improbable claims and
promises that undercut the apparently serious discussion of
poetry would hardly seem designed to reinforce a carefully
delineated argument directed at one's actual opponents. For
Sidney's friends, on the other hand, such a conclusion applg
reinforce what they already knew about his state of mind:
only they could appropriately understand this conclusion
without calling into question all that comes before it.
Given the difficulty with understanding the opening and
closing passages of the Apology as ironic for a public
audience, the differences in tone between Sidney's Apology
for Poetry and either his own “Defence of Leicester" or
other writers’ treatises on poetry, the lack of a clear
position on poetry, and the fact that Sidney never attempted
to publish this work, I can only conclude that Sidney wrote

the Apology for himself and his literary circle and did not

intend it for a wider audience at all.

3
I have wandered far from my original question about what

Sidney might have thought about his own poetic processes. I

27
should have liked to take at face value the remarks that
Sidney makes about the poet's godlike creativity and perhaps
to have explicated them in terms of Renaissance psychology
and philosophy, to have compared them to Sidney's poetic
practice, to have found remarkable uses of imagery unifying
his treatment of poetry in the Apology. But the problems
surrounding the composition and reception of this work as
well as the biographical issues clouding the picture of Sid-
ney the philosopher-poet have made it impossible for me to
believe that Sidney had--much less expressed-~a coherent and
stable understanding of what he did as a poet.

Instead, I suggest, the Apology for Poetry represents
Sidney's attempt to work out for himself and for a small
group of friends how he felt about writing poetry in gen-
eral, barely even beginning to explore just what he supposed
he did when he wrote. In that circumstance, the
inconsistencies in the poet's expressed attitudes toward
poetry and the problems of unity and tone in the work
itself, while still inconsistencies, are explicable--and may
be seen as indicators rather than as flaws. Beginning with
the Swiftean tale of Pugliano makes enormous sense if we
consider Sidney's other self-deprecating testimony about his
composing practices in the letter to his sister as well as
Aubrey's story about Sidney jotting notes for the Arcadia as
he rode out huntings': we cannot simply assume that these

stories are false or exaggerated. If Sidney in fact wrote

28
poetry as casually as he and Aubrey describe, he might well
feel reticent about theorizing loftily. And yet his circum-
stances almost required him to justify his occupation away
from court, since he had been so vocal a proponent of the
active political life before his "exile"--hence the earnest
inquiry into what the poet is and does, how the poetry
affects the reader.

Inguiry, though, seems to me the necessary label for
what Sidney does in the Applpgy. He raises the issue of the
Greek and Roman words for poet and finds an approach--man as
maker like God--that strikes a chord with him, but then he
stops short and says, in effect, "let me get my head out of
the clouds." He goes on to offer almost a caricature of the
standard Horatian definition of poetry, but then drifts back
into his earlier musings about the way the poet works. This
passage follows shortly upon the desciption of the poet's
golden world, after which Sidney pulls himself up with "but
let these things alone, and go to man" (100). To be carried
away with his lofty conception of the poetic process and
pulled down by his own more practical thoughts two times in
as many pages is not suggestive of a coherent conscious
awareness of his own creative impulses or habits. Sidney's
subsequent discussions about the relative merits of poetry,
history, and philosophy and the state of English poetry have
the same unplanned, musing character, and they are peppered

with such expressions as "truly," "I know not,“ "I think,"

29

"if we can,” "may I not presume"--none of which mark Putten-
ham's text, even though Puttenham's ideas and topics of
attention are quite similar to Sidney's, though greatly
expanded. To be sure, Sidney's musings are readable, but
one would not expect a classically educated Renaissance
English gentleman to write like Joyce in Finnegans Wake:
Sidney's arguments are grounded in Renaissance philosophy
and psychology and Italian criticism, but again one would
expect such a foundation in such a man. Even so, at the end
of the Apology, when Sidney seems to find his entire enter-
prise ludicrous, he drops the educated, reasonable voice he
assumed after the exordium and mocks his own need for justi-
fication with extravagant warnings and promises. These, I
believe, are not the strategies of a Renaissance apology
intended to persuade a recalcitrant audience to take an
author's carefully defined view.

It may seem that my argument is calculated to denigrate
the Apology for ngtry and Sidney himself. The opposite, I
think, is true. The Apology seems far more valuable to me
now, reading it as the unfolding of the poet's (undecided)
mind, than it did when I approached it as a Renaissance
manifesto. Instead of adding another formal--and
commonplace-~defense of poetry on classical grounds to the
sixteenth-century canon, Sidney has posed questions that
t~ill concern poets and critics for centuries and has shunned

the easy answers offered by such essentially rhetorical

30
poets as Gascoigne. In the process, he has provided us with
a picture of the poet's mind at work and delivered a charge
to his successors: "they that delight in Poesy itself
should seek to know what they do, and how they do: and espe-
cially look themselves in an unflattering glass of reason,

if they be inclinable unto it” (132).

Chapter 2
"Discovering" the Ground: Attitudes toward the Poetic

Process in the Early Seventeenth Century

Although the last quarter of the sixteenth century saw a
spurt of activity in literary theory, beginning with Gas-
coigne's "Certayne Notes of Instruction" in 1575 and includ-
ing numerous defenses against the likes of Gosson and didac-
tic treatises aimed at improving young minds, only Sir
Philip Sidney's Applogy fpr Eogtry demonstrates much inter-
est in the creative process of the poet. Concerned chiefly
with versification, Gascoigne says no more than that the
poet should "grounde" his verses "upon some fine inuen-
tion"--and there is no reason to believe that he meant any-
thing other than the traditional rhetorical sense of "inven-
tion"--and avoid letting the rhyme scheme lead away from the
theme. Thomas Lodge, who explicitly answers Gosson in his
"Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage Plays,“ takes the idea
of heavenly inspiration literally without any real attempt
at proof. Puttenham, Sidney, Webbe, and Harington all make
more of the poetic process than the two earlier writers, but
what they (even Sidney) have to say depends heavily on
Horace and Aristotle, and (except in Sidney's case) they
seem not to regard the poet's mental processes as bearing
further investigation. All of them hold unquestioningly

together the ideas of the poet as a maker like God and the

31

32
poet as imitator; in fact, Puttenham explicitly says that
the two ideas are not in conflict, although he does not
explain their compatibility. For his part, Harington
regards the issue of poetic creativity so lightly that he
refers his readers to Puttenham and Sidney for more informa-
tion, although he does assert that poetry is a gift and not
an art, using the good theory and bad poetry of Puttenham as
proof for his position. Each of these writers, except for
Sidney, takes a uniformly didactic approach, centered in
rhetorical theory, in discoursing on poetic creation; none,
again except for Sidney, conveys any sense of having derived
his opinion from, or verified it by, his own practice.

The seventeenth century does not witness an immediate
shift in attitude toward the poetic process on the part of
the poets: the old assumptions are still present in the
writings of George Chapman and Henry Peacham, for example,
both of whom simply assert without reflection that poetic
skill is divinely given. However, some other writers of the
first half of the century pay considerably more attention to
the poet's creative process. In prose writings by Henry
Reynolds, Sir William Alexander, William Drummond of Haw-
thornden, and, especially, Ben Jonson, the mental activities
involved in writing poetry come under much greater scrutiny
than ever before in English criticism.

Influenced by Sidney and his generation though they must

have been, the poet-critics of the early seventeenth century

33

clearly belong to a later age. They wrote no prose defenses
of poetry, apparently feeling no need to do so. Nowhere
does any of them attempt to justify being a poet. Jonson
does muse a bit on the advantages of being an amateur poet
rather than a professional,‘ but like most of his con-
temporaries he seems to take for granted the value of poetry
itself. Thus, unlike Sidney, they do not spend their time
explaining poetry's superiority to history and philosophy or
demonstrating the ancient roots of poetry and the godlike
character of the poet; instead, they move on to debate the
value of studying the ancients for poetic composition or
concentrate their attention on the mechanics of writing
poetry in a way that even Sidney simply does not approach—-
and could not, without belying his stance (genuine or
assumed) as a casual dasher-off of poetry in his spare time.

The intended audiences and the approaches of these
seventeenth-century writers vary. Alexander addresses him-
self to Drummond and seems to be a casual theorist with
nothing much to lose and nothing much risked: Drummond and,
to a greater extent, Reynolds seem to invest much more of
their personal integrity and deeply held beliefs in their
discussions of the creative process, though Drummond
addresses a single friend and Reynolds the general popula-
tion. Like Sidney, Jonson seems to be talking to himself
much of the time and specifies no single audience for the

ver' . There is a somewhat defensive quality to a few

34
of Jonson's entries in the Di r'es, notably the discus-
sion of his remark that Shakespeare should have blotted many
lines rather than none, but generally he takes a matter-of-
fact tone. None of the writers of early-seventeenth-century
literary theory demonstrates the self-consciousness of Sid-
ney, the heavy didacticism of Puttenham, or the forensic
tone of Lodge. For all of them, the discussion of poetry
seems to occupy a more clearly delineated intellectual space
than it did a generation before.

Paradoxically, it is precisely in their differences from
Sidney's generation that these poets most follow Sidney,
effectively taking up the challenge issued by the fipplggy,
Knowingly or not, they have enacted Sidney's admonition to
subsequent poets "to know what they do, and how they do; and
especially look themselves in an unflattering glass of
reason.“2 The simple oratorical defense of poetry, after
Sidney, is no longer an available discursive form--perhaps
because Sidney's definitive use of it depleted its pos-
sibilities, perhaps because the issues on which it was based
and audience to which it was directed belonged to the six-
teenth century--even if the anti-Ciceronian Jonson and his
contemporaries were inclined to write one. What is now
available, however, is the essay on poetic theory, the
exploration into the poetic mind which Sidney advocated in
the passage above and himself half-attempted in the Applpgy

but which was submerged under the constraints of the formal

35
apology. This, I believe, is what we get in the early
seventeenth century.
1

It is unfortunate not to be able to include Michael
Drayton in this discussion of early-seventeenth-century
poets who wrote about the poetic process more expansively
than their sixteenth-century counterparts. Drayton seems
likely to have performed an important function in the evolu-
tion of the English poetic mind. Friendly with most of the
poets and dramatists of the late-sixteenth and early-
seventeenth centuries, he apparently spent a good deal of
time eating, drinking, and conversing with his fellow poets,
including Reynolds and Alexander, and he corresponded with
some of them as well, notably with William Drummond of Haw-
thornden.3 However, neither Drayton's extant letters nor
his verse ”Epistle to Henry Reynolds, Esquire, Of Poets and
Poesie" (1627) suggests that Drayton thought more deeply
about his own or other poets' creative processes than did
Gascoigne or Webbe, whatever the biographical evidence of
his friendships with poets and the prolific writings of
those poets on that topic may lead one to imagine.

Drayton‘s friend Henry Reynolds did set down his views

on poetic composition in Mythomygteg, flpgcgip p Shgct Sprygy
is Tpkgn pf ghg Nptprg pnd Vplpg pf Trgg Ppgpy ggg Qgpth pf
tpg Angigntp Appvg Qg: Mpggrp Ppgtg (1632).“ Reynolds'

opinions are a curious mix: anticipating the ancients vs.

36
moderns controversy by more than half a century, his
argumentation nevertheless harks back to the days of IDS
Courtier. It seems clear, in any case, that Reynolds has
reflected at some length upon the poet's work rather than
merely parroting the formulations of earlier writers, open-
ing as he does with the affirmation "I haue thought vpon the
times wee liue in" (144). He also obliquely asserts a kind
of independence from previous works in his preface "To the
Candid and Ingenuous Reader." Others' defenses of poetry,
he says, have dealt with the "Accidents or appendixes" to
poetry--tropes and figures, genres, verse forms--but he will
explore "the Essentiall Forme of true Poesy" (142).

True poesy is indeed Reynolds' concern, and most self-
styled poets, he argues, are not true poets at all. They
write "out of the treasonous mint of their owne imagina-
tions" (145) with no reliance on the ancient learning that
is so much more intimately connected to the ideal realm of
Truth than anything capable of being discerned in the
"decrepit“ modern world. There are some (unnamed) modern
poets Reynolds feels he “must deseruedly commend for those
parts of fancy and imagination they possesse, and should
much more, could wee see them somewhat more force these
gifts and liberall Graces of Nature to the end shee gaue
them, and therewith worke and constantly tire vpon sollid
knowledges; the which hauing from the rich fountes of our

reuerend Auncients drawne” (147-48). Unfortunately, he

37
says, even the best modern poets have looked to the Ancients
for style only and not for substance.
Clearly for Reynolds a key factor in poetic creation is
the study of the substance of ancient poetry. But the com—
positional method of the ancients is also, inevitably, supe-

rior to that of the moderns, because, closer to the

beginning of time, they were closer to the truth of things,
and they were able to discern that truth. Entering into a
hep-Platonic discourse on the ecstasis and subsequent poetic
rapture brought on by intellectual love, he argues that the
ancients' poems "are not the inuentions of men, but gifts
and graces of heauen" (153). Modern poets, by comparison,
are not inclined "to the loue or search of any great or high
truthes, for the Truthes sake meerely": only "worldly profit
or popular eminence“ interests them. "Whence it is that
much time spent in sollid contemplative studies is held
vaine and vnnecessary: and these slight flashes of
vngrounded fancy (ingenious Nothings & meere imbroideries
vpon copwebbs) that the world swarmes with (like sophisti-
cate alchimy gold that will not abide the first touch, yet
glitters more in the eye than the sadd, weightyer, true
gold) are only laboured for and attended too, because they
take best, and most please the corrupt tast and false
appetite of the sordid and barbarous times we liue in”
(154). The state of contemporary poetry is so bad, in

Reynolds' estimation, that he reverses the usual

38
sixteenth-century claim that poetry is maligned or ignored
because people forget its ancient and continuinng relation
to the greatest truths; instead, Reynolds argues, peeple
with any understanding of these truths abhor poetry for its
triviality (155).

In his conflation of Renaissance Platonism and Baconian
science, Reynolds continues his attack on contemporary
poets' creative processes--with no apparent sense of
disjuncture--by accusing them of "generall ignorance . . .
in any the mysteries and hidden properties of Nature, which
as an unconcerning Inquisition it appeares not in their
writings they haue at all troubled their heads with," unlike
the "many Prose-men" who are "excellent naturall
Philosophers in these late times" (162).

The confusion of philosophical perspective is heightened
yet further when Reynolds moves on to cite the Fall as the
cause of man's ignorance, and the pursuit of the knowledge
and love of God as man's, and hence the poet's, highest
calling (163). The poet is to carry out this pursuit "by
laying his burden on him that on his Crosse bore the burden
of all our defectes” and by carefully searching God‘s crea-
tion, which, because they "liugg npgrggg g9 thg tip: pf thg
REES" (though not ng), the ancient poets best understood
(164-65).

Reynolds does not present a clear program for poetic

composition. He throws modern science, religious

39
experience, and Platonic ecstasis together to conclude that
ancient poets practice "true poesy" and moderns do not,
advocating some combination of scientific or mystical inves-
tigation of nature, Christian commitment, and, of paramount
importance, study of the knowledge conveyed in the classical
writers, in addition to the necessary but insufficient
poetic imagination. While one might hope for a more
coherent description of true poetry, the presence of these
disjunctive elements is itself evidence that Reynolds has,
overtly or not, taken up Sidney's challenge to investigate
the poetic act. Eschewing the conventional wisdom about
imitation and inspiration, he has attempted to apply what
seem to be his deeply held convictions to his discussion of
the poetic process (and perhaps it is not so surprising to
find unintegrated science, Platonism, and Christianity among
his convictions in the intellectually turbulent early seven-
teenth century). Looking forward to the controversies over
the relative value of things ancient and modern of the end
of the century, Mythpmygtgs does more than any previously
published work--except perhaps Sidney's Applpgyr-to bring to
the fore the issues surrounding the creative work of the
poet. And, like Sidney, Reynolds recognizes the partiality
of his contribution and solicits further discussion, hoping
to "awake some abler vnderstanding then my owne to the pur-
sute, if they please, of a theame I conceiue well worthy a

greater industry and happyer leisures then I my selfe

40
possesse" (143).
At about the time Reynolds was writing Mythpmyptgg,

poets of the camp he attacks were also reflecting on the

composition of poetry. In Anagriiigg Or, A anpprg pf 5pm;

Epg;g_epg;gp;_ppp_flppggp,' Sir William Alexander takes up a
number of issues relevant to poetic composition. Without
mentioning Mythomystes, he disagrees with Reynolds, finding
modern authors "no Way inferior" (181) to ancient authors.
He finds instead that each author, ancient or modern, excels
at some but not all parts of the poetic process, remarking
on a large number of poets thus: "I like the Phrase, Stile,
Method and discreet Carriage of Virgil; the Vigour and Vari-
ety of Invention in Qyigj the deep Judgement and grave
Sentences of Hpgpgg and Jpvgngl: the Heroical Conceptions,
showing an innate Generosity, in Sgptip§_flppipipppg and

Eggppfi (183). After a good bit of this sort of evaluation,
he reiterates "That every Author hath his own Genius,
directing him by a secret Inspiration to that wherein he may
most excell" (185). In this individualistic approach to the
poetic gift Alexander certainly gives earlier affirmations
of divine inspiration a new emphasis.

He also approaches other issues in a markedly modern
way. Far from feeling he must defend the fictive character
of poetic composition, he argues that the ancients tpppgpg
their poetry was true, though moderns recognize it as

mythic, and that moderns are equally permitted to write

41
historically true poetry (186). It is interesting to note
that, in a similar departure from the concerns of the six-
teenth century, Drummond reports that Jonson condemned
Bartas as a Verser and not a Poet because “he wrote not fic-
tion.”‘

Alexander's understanding of poetry-writing as a recrea-
tional pastime also directly confronts a sixteenth-century
assumption. He begins Anpgrigig with a mention of the
politically born fatigue that led to his retirement for a
time "to recreate myself with the Muses," recalling Sidney,
and, particularly, Moffet's description of poetry as "mere
recreation" for Sidney. But Alexander quickly elaborates:
”I may justly say recreate, since they create new Spirits,
which shaking off gross Affections, diving into the Depths,
reaching the Heights, and contemplating both, are
transported with these Things which are only worthy to
Entertain so noble a Thing as the Mind of Man" (181). Sid-
ney‘s conflict between public service and poetry seems
simply not to exist for this courtier-poet.

Another interest in epgggigig is the relationship of
language to the ideas of poetry. "Language,“ says
Alexander, "is but the Apparel of Poesy, which may give
Beauty, but not Strength: And when I censure any Poet, I
first dissolve the general Contexture of his work in several
Pieces, to see what Sinews it hath, and to mark what will

remain behind, when that external Gorgeousness, consisting

42
in the Choice or placing of Words, as if it would bribe the
Ear to corrupt the Judgment, is first removed, or at least
only marshalled in its own Degree. I value Language as a
Conduit, the Variety thereof to several Shapes, and adorned
Truth or witty Inventions that which it should deliver"

(182). Here Alexander's position seems correlative to

Jonson's; using the apparel motif common in Jonson's plays
(in which, however, apparel is often transformed into dis-
guise and the whole matter of revealing and concealing takes
on much more complexity than Alexander expresses), Alexander
tacitly affirms the attitude underlying Jonson‘s practice--
according to Drummond--of writing his works in prose then
casting them in verse.’

Like Reynolds, Alexander has offered no systematic anal-
ysis of the poetic process: rather he offers hints of the
issues that will absorb poets to come. It seems ironic that
Anagrisis was dedicated to William Drummond of Hawthornden,
who in "A Letter on the True Nature of Poetry, Addressed to
Dr. Arthur Jonston," probably of the 1630s, specifically
takes issue with this last, philosophically most substantive
point in Alexander's essay. Drummond denounces those who
have "of late . . . consulted upon [poetry's] reformation,
and endevured to abstracte her to Metaphysicall Ideas and
Scholasticall Quiddityes, denuding her of her own Habites
and those ornamentes with which shee hath amused the World

some thousand yeeres."' Besides disputing Alexander's

43
position on language, Drummond here implicitly also attacks
his countryman's acceptance of different poets' different
skills. But Drummond says nothing directly about what the
poet does when he writes poetry: this brief work scarcely
conveys the probable importance of Drummond to the growing
dialogue among poets about their poetic techniques. Like
Drayton, Drummond knew most of his peers, though in Drum~
mond‘s case that knowledge came from reading more than from
personal acquaintance, from correspondence more than from
conversation. It is difficult to imagine Alexander or
Jonson composing their remarks on poetic composition without
any sort of application to Drummond for his opinions.
2

Informative about the climate of the early seventeenth
century and the specific topics to concern subsequent
writers as the works of Reynolds, Alexander, and Drummond
may be, no one in the early seventeenth century, not
Drayton, not Drummond, surely not Reynolds or Alexander,
wrote so extensively about the poetic process or had so much
influence as Ben Jonson. Of the seventeenth-century writers
with whom we are concerned, only Jonson approaches the mag-
nitude of Sidney as poet or critic, and it is only compara-
tively recently that we have begun to appreciate any other
early-seventeenth-century criticism. In the opinion of
Thomas Rymer in 1674, in the early part of the century "many

great wits flourished, but Bgn Johnspn, I think, had all the

44
Critical learning to himself; and till of late years England
was as free from Criticks as it is from Wplves.’

Born only twenty years after Sidney, Jonson came from a
middle-class family and, after a bricklaying apprenticeship,
earned his living by writing poetry. As a middle-class
professional poet, Jonson is very different from Sidney the
courtier-poet; yet the audiences of their poetry have much
in common. Jonson clearly knew and wrote for Sidney's
nieces and nephews and on at least one occasion was Robert
Sidney’s guest at Penshurst. Like his contemporaries,
Jonson also apparently read Sidney's Apolpgy fpr Ppetcy soon
after its publication in 1595.

His remarks on poetic theory, apart from those in the
plays and poems, occur in the Qiscpvgrigs and in Converss-
gspps with Dcpppppp, especially the former.*° Within the
Discoveries, a number of passages concern poetic creation,
and, more broadly, the poet's formation. Jonson's ideas are
as different from Sidney's as the forms the two men's
remarks take, conveying a stronger element of reflection
about his own processes, and taking up issues more like
those of Reynolds, Alexander, and Drummond.

Published in 1640, three years after Jonson's death,
Tippgr: oc, Qisgpvsries consists of random jottings, some
brief and aphoristic, some lengthy mini-essays. Although
the discussion of poetry in the Qisgoverigs occurs in dis-

crete pieces, Jonson‘s opinions are fairly consistent

45
throughout the collection, and are in many regards closely
related to the opinions of his contemporaries whom we con-
sidered above. Jonson advocates in the first place a rather
intellectual approach to poetry, somewhat like that of
Reynolds, condemning as "the Wretcheder“ any poets who pride

themselves in their ignorance. He frequently admonishes the

would-be poet to study: "Very few men are wise by their
owne counsell; or learned by their owne teaching," he says:
"for hee that was onely taught by himselfe, had a foole to
his Master" (563). He goes on to speak highly of reading
the ancients (567), and in a passage replete with classical
references of his own, says that “the third requisite in our
Eggs, or Maker, is Imitstipn, to bee able to convert the
substance, or Riches of an other Eggs, to his owne use"
(and, driving home the point of the third requisite, the
fourth is “Study," 638).

"Convert," however, is the key word in understanding the
place Jonson gives to the study of authorities, and Jonson
does not deify the ancients after the manner of Reynolds.
"To all the observations of the 3psigpgs, we have our owne
experience: which, if wee will use, and apply, wee have
better meanes to pronounce. It is true they open'd the
gates, and made the way, that went before us; but as Guides,
not Commanders: . . . Truth lyes open to all, it is no mans
sgvgrgll" (567). He condemns indiscriminate use of author-

ities, invention of authorities, and outright copying from

46
other authors (585—586): they are to be read, studied, and
digested into something new--and here Jonson uses the common
apian metaphor (638). To be sure, Reynolds too mentions the
scientists of his age, but his equivocal stance on the merit
of anything modern man can discover is quite different from
Jonson's pragmatic, balanced view of the interaction of

study and experience.

Jonson elsewhere specifies precisely the way the poet is

to generate something new on the basis of his digestion of

the authorities:

Egg a man to write well, there are required three Neces-
saries. To reade the best Authors, observe the best
Speakers: and much exercise of his own style. In style
to consider, what ought to be written; and after what
manner; Hee must first thinke, and excogitate his mat-
ter; then choose his words, and examine the weight of
either. Then take care in placing, and ranking both
matter, and words, that the composition be comely: and
to doe this with diligence, and often. No matter how
slow the style be at first, so it be labour'd, and
accurate: seeke the best, and be not glad of the for-
ward conceipts, or first words, that offer themselves to
us, but judge of what wee invent: and order what wee
approve. Repeat often, what wee have formerly written:
which beside, that it helpes the consequence, and makes
the juncture better, it quickens the heate of imagina-
tion, that often cooles in the time of setting downe,
and gives it new strength, as if it grew lustier, by the
going back. . . . For all that wee invent doth please
us in the conception, or birth; else we would never set
it downe. But the safest is to returne to our Judgement,
and handle over againe those things, the easinesse of
which might make them justly suspected. So did the best
Writers in their beginnings; they impos'd upon them-
selves care, and industry. They did nothing rashly.
They obtain'd first to write well, and then custome made
it easie, and a habit. By little and little, their mat-
ter shew'd it selfe to 'hem more plentifully: their
words answer'd, their composition followed: and all, as
in a well—order'd family, presented it selfe in the
place. So that the summe of all is: Ready writing

47

makes not good writing; but good writing brings on ready

writing. (615-616)
Thus Jonson, unlike Reynolds, believes that the poet should
rely on his reading to teach him good style as well as for
ideas, but this reliance on the ancients involves no
simplistic copying. Rather, the poet must transform his
reading of others' work with his own good judgment and a
great deal of practice. In the opinion of C.A. Patrides,
that is what Jonson himself has done in this passage.
Taking issue with the value of the advice Jonson offers in
itself, Patrides says that despite its naivete and mechan-
ical character, the passage demonstrates what it tries to
express, "the virtue of economy that terminates in
clarity."11

Ultimately, however, for all the attention he has gotten
as the learned poet, Jonson regards learning, study, and
practice as inadequate by themselves: "There is no doctrine
will doe good, where nature is wanting" (584). Again and
again in the Discpvgrigs, ”nature" takes precedence over
everything else. In this regard Jonson departs from his
contemporaries and anticipates the concerns of the Restora-
tion and eighteenth century, thus perhaps earning the com-
monly offered appellation “the first neo-classical English
poet." Jonson uses the term nature in two distinct senses:
to refer to the poet's innate abilities, and to refer to
external reality as well: both are important to his

understanding of the poetic process.“-2

48
In his list of the requirements of the poet, Jonson
places first "a goodnes of natural wit," saying that "the
Egg; must bee able by nature, and instinct, to powre out the
Treasure of his minde" (637). Only in this passage do
Jonson‘s terms even approximate the sixteenth-century empha-

sis on furor oeticus; he speaks of the poet working "as by

a divine instinct“ and speaking "somewhat above a mortall
mouth" (637)--but Jonson‘s commitment to this line is
questionable because of his qualifying "as by" and “some-
what" as well as because he is merely quoting and interpret-
ing a remark of Seneca's on this point. He quickly follows
it up with further admonitions to practice, "Exercise of
those parts, and frequent" being his second requisite for
the poet. Going on to describe the third and fourth
requisites of the poet (Imitation and Study, which I cite
above), Jonson warns against the poet's thinking that "hee
can leape forth suddainely a Eggs, by dreaming hee hath been
in Psrnsssus“ (639). His final word on the subject of the
poet's required activities takes us back to nature again:
"all this in vaine, without a naturall wit, and a Poeticall
nature in chiefe. For, no man, so soone as hee knowes this,
or reades it, shall be able to write the better; but as he
is adapted to it by Nature, he shall grow the perfecter
Writer" (640). Nature, for Jonson, seems to have replaced
divine inspiration, but Jonson develops only somewhat ran-

domly what will be an important topic of concern in later

49
seventeenth-century discussion of poetic composition. To
import a Wordsworthian sense of the poet as having a "more
comprehensive soul" than other men‘3 to Jonson's term
"Poeticall nature" would be painfully anachronistic:
certainly there is little evidence for an early-seventeenth-
century conception of the poet as prophet specially set
apart from the common man. And yet, whatever limited idea
of the poet's "nature" Jonson's situation in the first half
of the seventeenth century may afford, this brief
parenthesis in his poetics of study and practice suggests a
reflection on his art that goes beyond the commonplace
assumptions of his day and paves the way for subsequent dis-
cussions of poetic ”genius."

Not only must the poet have a “poetic nature," according
to Jonson, he also must imitate with an eye to nature.
Speaking of poetry and picture, Jonson says that both “are
busie about imitation. . . . For they both invent, faine,
and devise many things, and accommodate all they invent to
the use, and service of nature" (609-10). Then he slips
back into the other sense of nature and says that the poet
and painter are both born, not made; "nature is more power-
ful in them then study,” he says, the isolated quotation
typifying the equivocation on the term nature common
throughout the Qisgpyggigs. Whether by nature Jonson means
innate characteristics or the regulatory power of the

universe (both definitions dating back at least to the

50
middle ages, according to the QED), it is pretty clear that
he does not mean by it the observable phenomenal world. The
QEQ offers confirmation of that usage beginning only in the
mid-seventeenth-century; speaking of natural phenomena
Jonson does not use the term nature: "The conceits of the
mind are Pictures of things, and the tongue is the Inter-
preter of those Pictures. The order of Gods creatures in
themselves, is not only admirable, and glorious, but elo-
quent; Then he who could apprehend the consequence of things
in their truth, and utter his apprehensions as truly, were
the best Writer, or Speaker“ (628). Here Jonson makes clear
his strong sense that the work of the poet is tied to the
phenomenal world, but he does not label it "imitation of
nature” as later poets will do.

While the term ”imitation" figures in Jonson's comments
on poetic composition, his use of it is curious, or, as
Thomas Greene puts it, "strikingly ambivalent."u Again and
again (like Sidney) he fails to tell us what the poet
imitates. Poetry and picture are "both busie about imita-
tion" (609); the poet's art is ”an Art of imitation, or
faining; expressing the life of man" (635); the poet's third
requirement is ” misstipp, to bee able to convert the sub-
stance, or Riches of an other Eggs" (638). Never does
Jonson explicitly say that the poet imitates nature or even,
in so many words, that he imitates other authors. He des-

cribes the task of poetry and picture (following the first

51
quotation) as to "invent, faine, and devise many things, and
accomodate all they invent to the use, and service of
nature" (609-610), and he follows his second mention of
imitation with the injunction to express the life of man. In
the third case, imitation seems to mean converting the sub-
stance of another poet's work. Taken together, these three
uses of the term imply no strong single sense of imitation
at all and suggest that imitation was a fluid concept for
Jonson, one that generally fit the poet's work without pres-
cribing specific activities, in contrast with earlier or
later critical uses of the term, in which it tends to be
used quite precisely.

The ambiguous character of Jonson's use of the term is
the more surprising given the straightforward treatment of
imitation in Ascham‘s Sgppplpssggg, a text--and a
tradition-~Jonson surely knew. Most of Book 2 of ID:
Schpolmssger is directly concerned with imitation, of which,
Ascham says, "there be three kinds . . . in matters of
learning.“ The first kind, pertaining to the imitation of
nature, belongs to tragedy and comedy and is “a perfit
imitation, or fair, lively painted picture of the life of
every degree of man”; the second and third, "to follow for
learning of tongues and sciences the best authors" and to
follow their techniques of acquiring and conveying knowledge
pertain to the imitation of authors.*' Overlaying Ascham

upon Jonson immediately provides a schema for understanding

52
most of what Jonson says about the work of the poet and, to
a point, justifies our critical assumptions about Jonson’s
reliance on and place in the Renaissance tradition. What is
curious, however, is the way that Jonson has scrambled
Ascham's tidy system; he means nothing new by imitation, but

he has separated and elaborated the three activities

described by Ascham as kinds of imitation so that they are
not reducible back to his straightforward terms.

In fact, Jonson's position on imitation has been the
focus of the only real critical disagreement on his literary
theory. In Ben Jpnspn's Ppems; A Stugy pf thg Plpip sgyle,
Wesley Trimpi describes Jonson as uninterested in imitation,
and attributes a general declining interest in the topic to
anti-Ciceronianism; like other proponents of the plain
style, Jonson was concerned with things rather than with
words, so imitating another author was of negligible
value.“ This description, however applicable to Jonson,
certainly suits Alexander's attitude toward language. With
respect to Jonson, however, Richard 8. Peterson implicitly
disputes Trimpi's position by regarding imitation as a key
concept for Jonson. He argues that the passage on the
"third requisite" is "a crucial passage" that "contains in
little several ideas and verbal motifs central to Jonson's
views on imitation.”“7 Similarly, Daniel Calder spent an
article on defense of Jonson's Aristotelianism (with a

Platonic twist) in his concept of imitation, defending the

53
poet against J.W. Atkins‘ opinion that by imitation he meant
mere copying of appearances.*' The general position of
Peterson and Calder has been the basis for other essays
demonstrating that Jonson's expression of imitation in the
Disgovgrigs grounds his practice of it in specific poems.*’
Each of these positions (except Atkins' as Calder expresses
it) seems tenable in light of different passages from the
D‘ ov r’ ; what they suggest to me is what I have already
asserted, that Jonson's understanding of imitation was very
fluid, grounded though it is in Renaissance tradition as
expressed by Ascham.

As a whole Jonson's comments on poetic composition seem
to be motivated less by ideology than by practice, a circum-
stance that would explain his equivocal uses of the terms
nature and imitation and his failure to attempt systematic
definition of his terms. Reflecting in snippets on his
craft, Jonson may have been influenced more by his own day's
work than by philosophers,=° and, practically, what he wrote
may be more useful to poet-aspirants than a philosophical
treatise, despite the scorn heaped on him by so many con-
temporary and subsequent poets. One imagines, reading the
stgpyggigs, that Jonson studied widely, wrote carefully,
and edited at length. As a professional poet, he seems to
have had neither leisure nor inclination for high-flown
musings on the poet's lofty calling, although he does at

least have some sense of possessing an inborn ability to

54
think poetically, but by taking up the challenge of Sid-
ney‘s Apology he, along with Reynolds, Alexander, and Drum-
mond, has moved beyond the concerns of the late sixteenth
century and set the stage for the substantive debates among
poets about their creative processes later in the seven-

teenth and eighteenth centuries.

3

Missing from these critical remarks of the early seven-
teenth century is any serious treatment of the previously
much-invoked term inspiration. In the critical discussions
of the sixteenth century, writers often held the ideas of
imitation and inspiration together, without any sense of
discomfort at their apparent disjuncture, as explaining what
the poet does--or what happens to the poet-~when he writes.
Sidney expressed reservations about inspiration, however,
and in the discussions by Jonson and most other critics of
the early seventeenth century the topic has almost com-
pletely disappeared, except in such works as Peacham's,
which appeal to traditional wisdom rather than attempt to
break new ground. The wellsprings of poetry, for these
seventeenth-century writers, seem to be within the poet him-
self, the poetry of Greece and Rome, and nature; as a con-
cept, inspiration almost ceases to be, leaving only its
shadow in the conventional invocation of a muse in individ-
ual poems.

Intuitively one might expect some appeal to and belief

in heavenly inspiration in a century marked by religious

55
discourse and controversy, and there is historical support
for such an expectation since during the church-dominated
Middle Ages inspiration had certainly been a key term in
describing the production of poetry. Although scripture was
considered to be "more inspired" than subsequent poetry and
certain kinds of poetry more inspired than others, the poet
was generally held to be inspired by God, who, in his
infinite wisdom, took into account the particular talents of
the man he inspired, according to A.J. Minnis.3*

The absence of the religious "metaphysical“ poets in a
discussion of seventeenth-century poets' consciousness of
the poetic process would thus seem unlikely, on these
grounds as well as in light of the powerful self-awareness
conveyed in their poems. Surely the sense of poetic voca-
tion motivating a Donne or Herbert to write intimate con-
versations with God differs from the self-understanding
behind Jonson's worldly, practical remarks on the composing
process, and surely these poets who wrote so much of their
own spiritual experiences would have something to say about
writing poetry. Unfortunately, none of them left a direct
statement of his personal practice or of his advice to
aspiring poets, although Louis Martz has extrapolated con-
siderable insight into their "poetry of meditation" from the
poems themselves.

In fact, the religious poetry of the metaphysicals is in

a sense so religious as to exclude any evidence of a belief

56

that God inspires their work. Because God, rather than a
human audience, is directly addressed in so many of their
poems, there is no occasion for inspiration in the conven-
tional sense of God revealing truth to humanity through the
poet. And, aside from the rhetorical situation, the poets
are concerned with their own religious experience, which
seems almost incidentally expressed in poetry, rather than

with the nature of writing poetry or a sense of themselves

as poets.

In "Jordan (11)" George Herbert offers the most explicit

renunciation of conventional poetics available:

When first my lines of heav'nly joyes made mention,
Such was their lustre, they did so excell,

That I sought out quaint words, and trim invention;
My thoughts began to burnish, sprout, and swell,
Curling with metaphors a plain intention,

Decking the sense, as if it were to sell.

Thousands of notions in my brain did runne,
Off'ring their service, if I were not sped:

I often blotted what I had begunne;

This was not quick enough, and that was dead.
Nothing could seem too rich to clothe the sunne,
Much lesse those joyes which trample on his head.

As flames do work and winde, when they ascend,

So did I weave my self into the sense.
But while I bustled, I might heare a friend

Whisper, How wipe is fill this lpng prgggngg!
There is in love 3 swegtnsssg rgagig pgnn'p:

Cppie out only thst. an v x n 32

Thus Herbert dismisses the activities typical of the poet on
which Jonson spent so much descriptive effort. Every would-
be poetic move--addition of decorative and figurative lan-

guage, the play of fancy, careful revision--is

57
counter-poetic; as in his more oblique "The Posie," Herbert
here denigrates his own abilities in deference to the over-

shadowing perfection of God.

Like the metaphysical poets, John Milton had a strong
sense of writing poetry to glorify God: unlike them, he also

had rather a lot to say about writing poetry. Milton is

the only poet in the seventeenth century who conveys an
explicit belief in inspiration of the poet by God: his
appeal to the "Heav'nly Muse” at the opening of Paragise
gpsg and again in Parpdise ngsined is among the very few
genuinely felt invocations of a muse in English poetry.

Of more interest to me here, however, are Milton's
remarks on poetry in The Resson of Chprgh Qovgrnmeng.
Nowhere in previous English criticism had anyone committed
so personal an account of becoming a poet to print, as
Milton's long excuses for doing so would indicate. Describ-
ing his education and the reception of his earliest verses,
Milton says, "I began thus farre to assent both to them
[Italian admirers] and divers of my friends here at home,
and not lesse to an inward prompting which now grew daily
upon me, that by labour and intent study (which I take to be
my portion in this life), joyn‘d with the strong propensity
of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to
aftertimes as they should not willingly let it die. These
thoughts at once possest me . . ."23 This of course is the

famous passage in which Milton announces his intention to

58
write in English and to do for England what the great
ancient writers did for their countries, but it is the des-
cription of his experience that seems relevant to my
inquiry. Milton did not simply decide to write poetry: he
was "prompted" and "possessed." Later he identifies poetic
abilities as "the inspired guift of God rarely bestow’d, but
yet to some (though most abuse) in every Nation."=‘

Clearly Milton has a strong sense of divine intervention
in his life, an awareness of a poetic, even prophetic, call-
ing. That Milton writes these words in a politico-religious
tract rather than in an "essay on poetry" itself seems
indicative of the marked difference between his poetic self-
understanding and those of his contemporaries or, for that
matter, any other English poets. Yet, unlike the self-
consciously self-effacing metaphysical poets, he describes
his poetic activity in terms much like Jonson's, emphasizing

labor and study, attributing his talent to "the strong

propensity of nature." Even in his invocation of the Holy
Spirit at the beginning of Eggspiss_gpsg_Milton's directive

human voice is clear. Simple inspiration is not what Milton
wants: he asks the muse to sing "Of Man‘s First Disobedience
. . .“ because he has already determined that his song “with
no middle flight intends to soar / Above th' Apnisn Mount,
while it pursues / Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme”
in order "to justify the ways of God to men.“39 In his
understanding of poetic work as well as in the product of

it, Milton is a curious mix of prophet and classicist.

59

Forthcoming as he is about the process of deciding to
become a poet, Milton does not offer us a report of the
activities of his mind "at home in the spacious circuits of
her musings"=° during the actual composition of his poetry.
He anticipates, however, still in Reason of thrgh
Government, that his poems will come not from "the heat of
youth, or the vapours of wine, . . nor . . . the invocation
of Dame Memory and her Siren daughters, but by devout prayer
to that eternall Spirit who can enrich with all utterance
and knowledge, and sends out his Seraphim with the hallow'd
fire of his Altar to touch and purify the lips of whom he
pleases," quickly augmenting his religious fervor with the
more controllable elements of much reading, observation, and
insight.27

After Milton, only the occasional religious poet places
any faith in divine inspiration of his work. Isaac Watts,
the eighteenth-century hymnist, offers the fullest remarks
on the subject between Milton and William Blake: "if the
heart were first inflamed from Heaven, and the muse were not
left alone to form the devotion and pursue a cold scent, but
only called in as an assistant to the worship, then the song
would end where the inspiration ceases."=' The conflation
of heavenly inspiration and some other, presumably secular,
muse here does little to encourage any belief that Watts
subscribed to a well-defined view of inspiration.

Essentially, then, inspiration as a serious element in

poetic composition ends with Milton, except for Blake, who

60
does not enter into this discussion. One might argue that
Milton is as much an aberration from the norm in this regard
as is Blake, since he alone in the seventeenth century makes
a strong case for inspiration; however, the force of Hobbes'
objection to poets' claiming inspiration suggests that a

general tendency to believe in inspiration lingered, though

generally not in print, into the seventeenth century. "But
why a Christian should think it an ornament to his poem,
either to profane the true God or invoke a false one, I can
imagine no cause but a reasonless imitation of custom, of a
foolish custom, by which a man, enabled to speak wisely from
the principles of nature and his own meditation, loves
rather to be thought to speak by inspiration, like a bag-
pipe."2’ Thus Hobbes, to whom I give the last word on
inspiration, transforms the happy coexistence of imitation
and inspiration in the sixteenth century into the poet's
foolish imitation of the wrongheaded notion of inspiration,
which never again surfaces, in its medieval sense, in the

mainstream of English poetic theory.

Chapter 3
Building with Jonson's Timber:

The Latter Half of the Seventeenth Century

Like the poetic theory of the first half of the seven-
teenth century, that of the second is dominated by a single
major figure propounding his view of the poet's work, namely
John Dryden. In a long career of essays and prefaces,
Dryden seems to have discussed all the issues relevant to
poetic invention that Jonson raised in the D'scoveries, as
well the more specifically "neoclassical" concerns expressed
by other Restoration poets. Unlike Jonson's contemporaries,
most of Dryden‘s had at least a little to say about their
poetic processes. It is remarkable, in fact, that in an age
of public, occasional poetry, before self-consciousness and
psychological introspection as we know them were apparently
even systematically possible, so many moments of poetic
introspection burst through an otherwise audience- and
nature-centered criticism. The very act of writing poetry
and sending it out into the world seems to have been suffi-
ciently problematic, as we have already seen especially in
the case of Sir Philip Sidney, to occasion self-doubt and,
as a result, self-examination, even in the process of
promulgating, explicating, and qualifying the newly imported
"Rules," as literary historians have traditionally regarded

the critical work of the so-called hep-classical poets.

61

62

The issue of imitation is probably the most critical in
the poets' understanding of the poetic process during the
second half of the century. The breadth of Jonson's
positions on imitation is still present, but these later
writers on poetic invention attempt explicitly to define and
explain what they mean by imitation, what is and what is not
acceptable imitation, and what precisely is to be imitated--
all tasks that Jonson failed to take up, perhaps because for
him they were not yet differentiated issues, perhaps for
some other reason. In Jonson's writing, we saw that the
verb to imitate almost never took a grammatical object,
though other authors and nature were implicitly understood
in some unspecified way to be the objects of imitation. In
the latter half of the century, what was implicit and
undeveloped becomes explicit and more carefully developed.
In fact, the imitation of nature is the central tenet of
poetic theory, in which all discussions of other critical
topics are ultimately grounded.

On the imitation of nature specifically Dryden has a
good deal to say, although in no single place does he fully
explicate his "theory" of the imitation of nature. The

famous definition of a play established in the “Essay of

Dramatic Poesy,“ "A jpsg sng lively imggg pf hpmgn nsgprg,

rgpresgnging its psssions anp hpmpgrs, sng tpg gpsnggs pf
m to which it is supjegt, fpr 3mg geligh: mg instruc-

 

i n f nk'nd,"‘ which mentions neither imitation nor

63
general nature specifically, is interpreted without chal-
lenge by Neander later in the essay to mean precisely imita-
tion of nature: "For the lively imitation of Nature being
in the definition of a play, those which best fulfil that
law ought to be esteemed superior to the others" (1:68).2
Similarly, in his ”Preface to the Igspslsgspp_pj_gy;p;s
Epistles," he simply assumes as unquestionable truth that
"the imitation of Nature [is] the business of a poet"
(1:233). Likewise in ”A Parallel of Poetry and Painting" he
at least twice asserts, without apparently feeling a need to
prove, that “the way to please [is] to imitate nature"
(2:133) or that "to imitate Nature well in whatsoever sub-
ject, is the perfection of both arts; and that picture, and
that poem, which comes nearest to the resemblance of Nature,
is the best“ (2:136). Examples of the phrase "imitate
nature" could be piled up almost endlessly, but these suf-
fice to indicate its unchallenged place in the general
scheme of critical argumentation.

In each of the passages I cite above, the imitation of
nature is the principle underlying Dryden's opinion on some
issue actually in dispute, invoked to give credence, or at
least ground, to his opinion. The general principle that
the poet imitates nature does not in itself provide any
insight into how poets understood their creative processes
at the end of the seventeenth century. Their application of

it to essentially every disputed issue of poetic practice,

64
however, is suggestive of their cast of mind. This princi-
ple grounds the more pervasive discussion of ancient vs.
modern writing, encompassing such related issues as what
constitutes acceptable imitation of authors--i.e., "servile“
copying as opposed to some imitation of the spirit of
others--and whether it is ideas, words, or both that the
poet imitates. Appeals to and explanations of such concepts
as fancy, judgment, wit, genius, and imagination also come,
explicitly or not, in terms of the imitation of nature, and
it is to the discussion of these issues that we would have
to look to more fully understand what the period means by
the imitation of nature.

The normal mode of critical discourse about the poetics
of this or any period is to isolate terms such as I have
just listed, define them, consider them in relation to one
another, and ultimately formulate a coherent system of them.
The analytical temptation is strong, but I believe that con-
structing a system is, for my purposes, reductive and
counterproductive of an understanding of the poets' felt
sense of the poetic task (although I recognize, of course,
the value of analysis and synthesis for understanding an age
not our own and for determining earlier meanings of terms we
now use differently). Working out of what amounts to
Dryden's assumption that nature's dress changes but nature
stays the same, I find it difficult to conceive that an

impersonal critical system, largely extrapolated by later

65
thinkers, adequately explains what poets did, or thought
they did, in the late seventeenth century because I do not
think that any system accounts for what late twentieth
century poets do or think they do. Having noted the concept
on which all others rest, I am going to resist the
systematizing impulse by examining individual passages from
a number of late seventeenth-century critical works rather
than citing a variety of appearances of the remaining rele-

vant critical terms.

Breaking with the Past: Sir William Davenant

Davenant, besides having written the earliest piece of
criticism in the second half of the century, provides a for-
tuitous starting place in view of the virtual disappearance
of inspiration as a serious critical term in the first half

of the century. Describing the composition of Qpngipert as

time-consuming and painful, he rails against the thought

that poetic composition is a simple matter of inspiration:

Yet to such painfull Poets some upbraid the want of
extemporary fury, or rather in irat' n, a dangerous
word which many have of late successfully us'd: and
inspirsgion is a spiritual Fitt, deriv'd from the
ancient Ethnick Poets, who then, as they were Priests,
were Statesmen too, and probably lov'd dominion: and as
their well dissembling of inspiration begot them
reverence then equall to that which was paid to Laws, so
these who now profess the same fury may perhaps by such
authentick example pretend authority over the people,

. . . yet these, who also fro the chief to the meanest
are Statesmen and Priests, but have not the luck to be

66

Poets, should not assume such saucy familiarity with a
true God.’

Davenant's statement against inspiration in poetry is only

slightly weaker than that of Hobbes in his "Answer to

Davenant." Unlike Hobbes, however, Davenant has given us a

reasonably full picture of what, for him, replaces inspira—

tion. That replacement is

ass; And as; is the laborious and the lucky resultances
of thought, having towards its excellence, as we say of
the strokes of Painting, as well a happinesse as care.
It is a Webb consisting of the subt'lest threds: and
like that of the Spider is considerately woven out of
our selves; for a Spiper may be said to consider, not
only respecting his solemnesse and tacit posture (like a
grave Scout in ambush for his Enemy), but because all
things done are either from consideration or chance, and
the works of Chance are accomplishments of an instant,
having commonly a dissimilitude, but hers are the works
of time, and have their contextures alike.

as; is not only the luck and labour, but also the
dexterity of thought, rounding the world, like the Sun,
with unimaginable motion, and bringing swiftly home to
the memory universall surveys. It is the Souls Ppwpgr,
which when supprest, as forbidden from flying upward,
blows up the restraint, and loseth all force in a far-
ther ascension towards Heaven (the region of God), and
yet by nature is much less able to make any inquisition
downward towards Hell, the Cell of the Devill; But
breaks through all about it as farr as the utmost it can
reach, removes, uncovers, makes way for Light where
darkness was inclos'd, till great bodies are more
examinable by being scatter'd into parcels, and till all
that find its strength (but most of mankind are
strangers to EL; as Inpians are to Ppwggr) worship it
for the effects as deriv‘d from the Deity. It is in
Divines, Humility, Exemplarinesse, and Moderation; in
Statesmen, Gravity, Vigilance, Benigne Complacency,
Secrecy, Patience, and Dispatch: in Leaders of Armies,
Valor, Painfulness, Temperance, Bounty, Dexterity in
punishing and rewarding, and a sacred Certitude of prom-
ise. It is in Poets a full comprehension of all recited
in all these, and an ability to bring those comprehen-
sions into action, when they shall so far forget the
true measure of what is of greatest consequence to

67

humanity (which are things righteous, pleasant, and

usefull) as to think the delights of greatness equall to

that of Poesy, or the Chiefs of any Profession more

necessary to the world then excellent Poets.“
A definition of wit in Davenant's usage would obviously
include time, labor, and luck; summarizing these elements,
however, would overlook the images in which the term is con-
veyed. Wit is as self-sufficient as a spider, spinning out
of itself. It is as omniscient as the sun, if the sun could
see. It is as powerful as gunpowder. Wit blows up, breaks
through, uncovers--and it is wit, not the poet, doing these
things. There is a strong sense in this passage of wit's

being not wholly under the conscious control of the poet,

divine, statesman, or army leader possessing it.

That Davenant's arachnoid wit calls to mind the spider
in Swift's ng_fiss;lg_pi_£pg_§ppss is wholly appropriate.
Swift distinguishes Qpppgpggs by having Homer slay him
first, saying that he "had never once sggp [Homer], nor
understood his strength."° Swift's charge certainly has its
foundation in the "Preface to Gondibert." Davenant
criticizes numerous ancient poets, and argues that everyone
from Homer to Spenser has made the same errors because of
poets' tendency to imitate those who came before them,
although he admits that imitating other authors also keeps a
poet from defective, unnatural excesses. As Thomas Rymer
says of him, Davenant "is for unpesggn grgcks, and ngw wpygs
pf shinking: but certainly in his ungry'd Ssas he is no

68

great discoverer."‘ Davenant does, however, credit his own
"friends" with affecting his poem, claiming to be unlike
most writers, who "are apter to be beholding to Bookes then
to men."7

Davenant, then, has set forth a number of explanatory
remarks about his own composing process. Reliant on wit
rather than inspiration, he attributes his poems chiefly to
time, labor, luck, and the contributions of his friends.
Although he does not provide a systematic guide for writing
poetry, he clearly has reflected at some length on his own
writing process and, except for the term wit, in large part
presents his poetic self-portrait without invoking what we

normally regard as typical mid-century critical terminology.

The Shameful Imitations of Thomas Shadwell

In his "Preface to Thg Spllen vaers, p; Tpg
Im r inents A m ," Thomas Shadwell describes the way

in which he got the idea for Thg Spllgn Lovgrs:

The first hint I receiv'd was from the report of a Play
of upligres of three Acts, called gps Fasghgux, upon
which I wrote a great part of this before I read that:
and after it came to my hands, I found so little for my
use (having before upon that hint design'd the fittest
Characters I could for my purpose) that I have made use
of but two short Scenes, . . . both of them so vary'd
you would not know them. But I freely confess my Theft,
and am asham'd on 't, though I have the example of some
that never yet wrote Play without stealing most of it:
And (like Men that lye so long, till they believe them-
selves) at length, by continual Thieving, reckon their
stolne goods their own, too: which is so ignoble a

69
thing, that I cannot but believe that he that makes a
common practice of stealing other mens Witt, would, if
he could with the same safety, steale any thing else.’
Imitating other authors, not necessarily classical ones, is
apparently a primary mode of invention for Shadwell. The

characters he claims to have designed he subsequently

attributes to imitation of Jonson: "I have endeavour'd to

represent variety of Humours, most of the persons of the
Elsy differing in their Characters from one another, which
was the practise of Ben gphnspn, whom I think all Drammatick
Poegs ought to imitate, though none are like to come near;
he being the onely person that appears to me to have made

perfect Representations of Humane Life."’

Implicit in his praise of Jonson is Shadwell's convic-
tion that his work is to represent human life in the form of
the humors. We get, in the long quotation about Moliere's

play, some sense of his thought processes: Shadwell

receives an "idea," formulates characters to suit the idea,
and contrives scenes to carry out the idea. A simpler char-
acterization of the drama-writing process is difficult to
conceive, but the elements of composition he sees fit to
mention are perhaps an indicator of the depth (or shallow-

ness) of his thought.

70

Thomas Rymer on the Rules

Rymer did not, so far as I know, make any penetrating
remarks about his own poetic processes. He deserves a place
in this survey, however, as the most consistent purveyor of
the Rules and as Aristotle's most faithful disciple. Of
particular interest to me are his remarks justifying

Aristotle as a rule-maker:

The truth is, what Aristotlg writes on this Subject are
not the dictates of his own magisterial will or dry
deductions of his Metaphysicks: But the Poets were his
Masters, and what was their practice he reduced to prin-
ciples. Nor would the mpdgrn Pgegs blindly resign to
this practice of the Angiengs, were not the Reasons con-
vincing and clear as any demonstration inMsghe-

maticks. 'Tis only needful that we understand them for
our consent to the truth of them. The Arabians, 'tis
confess'd, who glory in their Epggs and Ppgtry more than
all the world besides, and who, I suppose, first brought
the art of Riming into Epgppg, observe but little these
Laws of r'st t : yet Avgrpis rather chooses to blame
the practice of his Countreymen as vicious than to allow
any imputation on the doctrine of this Philpspphgr as
imperfect. angy with them is predominant, is wild,
vast, and unbridled, o're which their jupgmegt has
little command or authority: hence their conceptions
are monstrous, and have nothing of exactness, nothing of
resemblance or proportion.*°

Rymer is well known among his contemporaries as the
exceedingly correct champion of the Rules, but Dryden, in a
letter to John Dennis, censured him for being too much so:
"Shakespear had a Genius for it [tragedy]; and we know, in
spite of Mr. R-- that Genius alone is a greater Virtue (if I

may so call it) than all other Qualifications put together.

You see what success this Learned Critick has found in the

71
World, after his Blaspheming Shakespear. Almost all the
Faults which he has discover‘d are truly ther; yet who will
read Mr. Rym-- or not read Shakespear?"u The assumption
about the moderns blindly resigning themselves to
Aristotle's rules (via Rapin) that Rymer makes is obviously
inaccurate, given the external evidence of Dryden's specific

contradiction.

Rymer undercuts himself in this passage as well. Des-
cribing Aristotle's work as "reducing" the work of the poets
to principles has the double effect of suggesting not only
synthesis but also diminution; as I have suggested about
modern analysis of neoclassical “principles," Dryden asserts
that these principles are inadequate to the poetic act and
cannot wholly constrain it. In another way, Rymer
demonstrates the limitations of the Aristotelian poetic by
letting in the Baconian sense of fancy and judgment in his
description of Arabian poetry. Still, Rymer takes a line
that others generally grant their assent; the unarticulated
premise of Rymer's enthymeme in justification of the rules
is, as we shall see elsewhere, that the ancients' poetry,
from which Aristotle derived his principles, is the most
perfect expression of the imitation of nature and thus the

most perfect poetry.

72
Wit's Sun Beneath a Cloud:

John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave

John Sheffield's "Essay upon Poetry” has never been
highly valued as a piece of criticism or as poetry.
Although it is in no danger here of being "discovered" as
either, the piece is in fact quite informative about Shef-
field's reflection on his craft. Reminiscent of Davenant's
remarks, it employs the same sort of strong verb and simile

to describe wit.

'Tis not a Flash of Fancy which sometimes
Dasling our Minds, sets off the slightest Rimes,
Bright as a blaze, but in a moment done;

True Wit is everlasting, like the Sun,

Which though sometimes beneath a cloud retir'd,
Breaks out again, and is by all admir'd.

Number, and Rime, and that harmonious sound,
Which never does the Ear with harshness wound,
Are necessary, yet but vulgar Arts,

For all in vain these superficial parts
Contribute to the structure of the whole
Without a Genius too, for that's the Soul,--

A Spirit which inspires the work throughout,

As that of Nature moves this World about:

A heat that glows in every word that‘s writ,
That‘s something of Divine, and more than Wit;
It self unseen, yet all things by it shown
Describing all men, but describ'd by none:

Where dost thou dwell? what caverns of the Brain
Can such a vast and mighty thing contain?

When I at idle hours in vain thy absence mourn,
0 where dost thou retire? and why dost thou return,
Sometimes with powerful charms to hurry me away
From pleasures of the night and business of the day?
E'en now, too far transported, I am fain

To check thy course, and use the needfull rein:
As all is dullness, when the Fancy's bad,

So without Judgment, Fancy is but mad;

And Judgment has a boundless influence,

Not upon words alone, or only sence,

But on the world, or manners, and of men:

73

Fancy is but the Feather of the Pen;

Reason is that substantial, useful part,

Which gains the Head, while t'other wins the Heart.“2
Like Davenant, Sheffield compares wit to the sun, though in
this case the comparison is based on everlastingness rather
than breadth of coverage. Wit gives way to genius in impor-
tance, however, genius being equated with the soul, spirit,

or heat of the work which inspires it as the spirit of
nature moves the world. Yet genius fades into fancy,
presumably a far lesser term, and Sheffield's exploration of
terms becomes a conventional explication of fancy and judg-
ment. Later in the poem he is equally ambiguous about the

place of the ancients in modern invention.

The most interesting lines here, from the perspective of
asking what poets think they do when they write poetry, are
the query lines in which he describes his amazement that the

human mind can contain the genius of a poem and bewails the

fickleness of his own poetic abilities. It is abundantly
clear from his vague and shifting use of terminology that
Sheffield does not possess a systematic explanation of his
own poetic processes--but it is equally clear that he has
attempted to reflect on them and found them largely
undescribable.

Sheffield is not explicit about the meaning of the term
wit, although it seems to refer to something akin to genius

Or fancy if not quite either. Davenant too offered a

74
relatively broad definition of wit, in contrast with the
later famous definition of Pope which has its precursors in
the latter half of the seventeenth century. Robert Wolsey,

for example, defines ”Wit . . . in Poetry, or poetical wit .

. . to be nothing else but a true snd liyglxiexpression of

 

Nature. By Nature 1 do not only mean all sorts of material
Objects and every species of Substance whatsoever, but also
general Notions and abstracted Truths, such as exist only in
the Minds of men and in the property and relation of things
one to another,--in short, whatever has a Being of any
kind."13 CDryden uses the term in a number of ways, his most
famous definition being "a propriety of thought and words,”
which he reiterates a number of times; elsewhere, especially
in his earliest critical writings, he uses wit synonymously

with imagination.

Ancients and Moderns:

Sir William Temple and William Wotton

Like Rymer, Sir William Temple is included here as a
representative of a point of view often argued against by
poets. He has nothing personal to say about poetic inven-
tion, but he takes an attitude about the imitation of the
ancients which often serves as the opponent of poets' dis-
cussions of imitating models-~an attitude almost never

espoused by practicing poets.

75

Temple's position is, in short, that modern poets cannot
write as well as the ancients because they merely copy them:
these modern writings "have little of esteem but what they
receive from the Wit, Learning, or Genius of the Authors,
and are seldom met with of any excellency, because they do
but trace over the Paths that have been beaten by the
Ancients, or Comment, Critick, and Flourish upon them, and
are at best but Copies after those Originals, unless upon
Subjects never touched by them."*‘ Arguing against the idea
that moderns have more knowledge than the ancients because
the former learned from the latter and added to that knowl-
edge the fruit of their own investigations, Temple goes on
in the Essay uppn Ancient and Modern Lesrning to suggest
that the ancients known to his contemporaries benefitted
similarly from now-unknown more ancient writers.

The most curious effect of Temple's veneration of the
ancients is his attitude toward poetry. In the essay Q1
Ppegry, he too, like Davenant and Sheffield, associates the
source of poetry with the sun, explaining that the erroneous
idea of inspiration is explained by appeal to the god who
supposedly inspired, " ppllp, or the Sun," because poetry
requires "a certain Noble and Vital Heat of Temper."*° This
heat effects "that Elevation of Genius which can never be
produced by any Art of study, by Pains or by Industry, which
cannot be taught by Precepts or Examples."*‘ Temple goes on

to discuss the additions the poet must make to genius--care,

76

exactness, elegance, industry, art, application, severity,
labor, time, and "a spritely Imagination or Fancy, fertile
in a thousand Productions, ranging over infinite Ground,
piercing into every Corner, and by the Light of that true
Poetical Fire discovering a thousand little Bodies or Images
in the World, and Similitudes among them, unseen to common
Eyes, and which could not be discovered without the Rays of
that Sun."*7

Never once in his discourse on the work of the poet does
Temple suggest that he should study the ancient poets, nor
does he suggest following the rules extrapolated from their
practice. The absence of these admonitions from the
champion of ancient over modern learning is surprising, but
Temple explains them reasonably enough. As it turns out,
modern poets partake of only a ghost of the genius that
filled the ancients: true poetry died with Virgil, and
Temple's remarks on poetic invention can be taken to refer
only remotely to modern poets, if at all. About the Rules,
Temple is scornful: “It would be too much Mortification to
these great Arbitrary Rules among the French Writers or our
own to Observe the worthy Productions that have been formed
by their Rules, the Honour they have received in the World,
or the Pleasures they have given Mankind. But to comfort
them, I do not know there was any great Poet in Grgege after
the Rules of that Art layd down by Arisipglg, not in apps,

after those by Hprage, which yet none of our Moderns pretend

77
to have out-done. . . . After all, the utmost that can be
atchieved or, I think, pretended by any Rules in this Art is
but to hinder some men from being very ill Poets, but not to
make any man a very good one."*‘

It is remarkable that William Wotton, writing in
response to Temple's remarks, comes to such a different con-
clusion about the moderns' relation to the ancients while
agreeing with Temple about the ancients‘ superiority. Wot-
ton argues that "the best in their kind among the Moderns
have been those who have read the Ancients with greatest
Care and endeavoured to imitate them with the greatest
Accuracy. The Masters of Writing in all these several Ways
to this Day appeal to the Ancients as their Guides, and
still fetch Rules from them for the Art of Writing. Homer,
and Aristotle, and Virgil, and Horscg, and Qyip, and Tgrencg
are now studied as Teachers, not barely out of Curiosity, by
Modern Poets."*’ It is not surprising, in light of this
view, that Wotton also believes that a modern poet cpulp

arise who would surpass the ancients.

Moral Cautions:

Sir Richard Blackmore and George Granville, Lord Lansdowne

The moral purpose of the poet, while not wholly dis-
appearing, is submerged beneath the sea of new terminology
in much of the criticism of the later seventeenth century.

Just after mid-century Abraham Cowley had urged poets to

78
look to scripture for invention purposes, arguing that
poetry need-~indeed should-~not be fictional, but for the
most part the moral fervor of William of Drummond or Henry
Reynolds has disappeared in the work of later critics. Two
exceptions come at the end of the century, Sir Richard
Blackmore and George Granville.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the author of a heroic
poem about King Arthur is anxious to focus on virtue and
vice in poetry. Blackmore devotes a lengthy section of his
preface to the poem to discussing the high aims of tragedy
and epic for the ancients, explaining that poets were in
part thought inspired because their work was "to represent
Vice as the most odious, and Virtug as the most desirable
thing in the World."20

Later, speaking more generally about the work of the
poet, Blackmore's final concern is still moral:

A Poet should imploy all his Judgment and Wit, exhaust

all the Riches of his Fancy, and abound in Beautiful and

Noble Expression, to divert and entertain others: but

then it must be with this Prospect, that he may hereby

engage their Attention, insinuate more easily into their

Minds, and more effectually convey to them wise Instruc-

tions. 'Tis below the Dignity of a true Poet to take

his Aim at any inferiour End. They are Men of little

Genius, of mean and poor Design, that imploy their Wit

for no higher Purpose than to please the Imagination of

vain and wanton People.=*
Not for Blackmore are the rhapsodies of Davenant or Shef-

field: he employs the standard terminology of the age as if

by now (1695) it is indeed standard, but only in service of

79
the moral point. I do not mean to imply that Blackmore's
moral emphasis is foreign to the mind of the late-
seventeenth-century poet--certainly most of them would agree
wholeheartedly with him--but only that his insistence on it,
the effort he expends on it, is uncommon in an age for which
this point is almost as much an assumption as the imitation
of nature in poetry. Perhaps Blackmore's concern is a part
of the growing scorn for contemporary poetry and, espe-
cially, drama, which will culminate in the popularity of

satire in the next century.

The morality concerning George Granville in the first
year of the eighteenth century is somewhat different. Truth

to nature is his concern:

Poets are Limners of another kind,

To copy out Ideeas in the Mind:

Words are the paint by which their thoughts are shown,
And Nature is their Object to be drawn;

The written Picture we applaud or blame,

But as the just proportions are the same.

Who, driven with ungovernable fire,
Or void of Art, beyond these bounds aspire,
Gygantick forms and monstrous Births alone
Produce, which Nature shockt disdains to own;
By true reflection I would see my face: Why brings the
Fool a magnifying Glass?
But Poetry in fiction takes delight,
And mounting up in Figures out of Sight,
Leaves Truth behind in her audacious flight.==

Both of these moralistic approaches to poetry are rejected
by Dryden at various points in his critical career; that he

will reject them in places and advocate them in others is a

80
part of a general tendency on his part toward what critics
have called doubleness, reflecting an all-encompassing
flexibility that comes as a part of more poetic self-
understanding than has been evidenced by the critical writ-

ings of any poet we have yet considered.

John Dryden

The opening remarks of Dryden's earliest piece of
criticism reflect an awareness of his own poetic processes
that characterizes Dryden's prefaces and critical essays

throughout his career:

My Lord, This worthless present was designed you, long
before it was a play; when it was only a confused mass
of thoughts, tumbling over one another in the dark: when
the fancy was yet in its first work, moving the sleeping
images of things towards the light, there to be distin-
guished, and then either chosen or rejected by the judg-
ment; it was yours, my Lord, before I could call it
mine. And, I confess, in that first tumult of my
thoughts, there appeared a disorderly kind of beauty in
some of them, which gave me hope, something worthy my
Lord of Orrery might be drawn from them: but I was then
in that eagerness of imagination, which, by overpleasing
fanciful men, flatters them into the danger of writing:
so that, when I had moulded it into that shape it now
bears, I looked with such disgust upon it, that the
censures of our severest critics are charitable to what
I thought (and still think) of it myself.23

Wrapped in the conventional modesty of poet to patron, the
description of his play's unfolding is nevertheless one of

the most explicit descriptions of the poet's mental

processes we have yet seen. Here the commonly used term

81

fancy takes on a more concrete sense than is usual, that of
sifting through an unorganized body of thought, as does the
term judgment, which choses and rejects the thoughts brought
to light by the fancy. This description is not incompatible
with other poets' usage of the terms, but it gives a much
clearer indication of Dryden‘s genuine reliance on something
he calls fancy and something he calls judgment than do such

remarks as Blackmore's admonition to the poet to "Exhaust

all the Riches of his Fancy.“

Dryden does share with other poets of his age the atti-
tude that fancy is an attribute that requires constant sur-
veillance and repression. In the same essay in which this
piece of poetic self-awareness occurs, Dryden speaks of the
fancy as needing bounds. He justifies the use of rhyme
rather than blank verse on the grounds that rhyme "bounds
and circumscribes the fancy. For imagination in a poet is a
faculty so wild and lawless, that like an high-ranging
spaniel, it must have clogs tied to it, lest it outrun the
judgment. The great easiness of blank verse renders the
poet too luxuriant: he is tempted to say many things, which
might better be omitted, or at least shut up in fewer words;
but when the difficulty of artful rhyming is interposed,
where the poet commonly confines his sense to his couplet,
and must contrive that sense into such words, that the rhyme
shall naturally follow them, not they the rhyme; the fancy

then gives leisure to the judgment to come in, which, seeing

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so heavy a tax imposed, is ready to cut off all unnecessary
expenses."2‘

Fancy and imagination are synonymous in this passage,
but a couple of years later, in the Preface to Annps
Mirabilis, Dryden separates them and considers imagination
to contain both fancy and judgment as well as other poetic
atttributes, using the spaniel again, now without clogs, to
illustrate his sense of the imagination, which is now

synonymous with wit.

"The composition of all poems is, or ought to be, of
wit; and wit in the poet, or Wit wriging, (if you will
give me leave to use a school-distinction), is no other
than the faculty of imagination in the writer, which,
like a nimble spaniel, beats over and ranges through the
field of memory, till it springs the quarry it hunted
after; or, without metaphor, which searches over all the
memory for the species or ideas of those things which it
designs to represent. Wig wrigtep is that which is well
defined, the happy result of thought, or product of
imagination. But to proceed from wit, in the general
notion of it, to the proper wit of an Heroic or His-
torical Poem, I judge it chiefly to consist in the
delightful imagining of persons, actions, passions, or
things. 'Tis not the jerk or sting of an epigram, nor
the seeming contradiction of a poor antithesis (the
delight of an ill-judging audience in a play of rhyme),
nor the jingle of a more poor paronomasia; neither is it
so much the morality of a grave sentence, affected by
Lucan, but more sparingly used by Virgil: but it is some
lively and apt description, dressed in such colours of
speech, that it sets before your eyes the absent object,
as perfectly, and more delightfully than nature. So
then the first happiness of the poet's imagination is
properly invention, or finding of the thought; the sec-
ond is fancy, or the variation, deriving, or moulding,
of that thought, as the judgment represents it proper to
the subject: the third is ilocution, or the art of clo-
thing and adorning that thought, so found and varied, in
apt, significant, and sounding words: the quickness of
the imagination is seen in the invention, the fertility
in the fancy, and the accuracy in the expression.39

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No longer is imagination a wild and lawless faculty: now
that Dryden is not attempting to justify rhyme he builds the
checking function of judgment into poetic wit or imagination
and requires no externally imposed boundary. Now fancy and
judgment together comprise only one of three aspects of

poetic composition.

On the first aspect, invention, Dryden has more to say
elsewhere. Although in the 1666 passage he offers a tradi-
tional rhetorical definition of invention, which seems
rather like the fancy of his Epistle Dedicatory to Orrery,

later he comes to associate the term with genius:

Invention is the first part, and absolutely necessary to
them both [the painter and the poet]; yet no rule ever
was or ever can be given, how to compass it. A happy
genius is the gift of nature: it depends on the
influence of the stars, say the astrologers; on the
organs of the body, say the naturalists: it is the par-
ticular gift of Heaven, say the divines, both Christian
and heathens. How to improve it, many books can teach
us; how to obtain it, none; that nothing can be done
without it, all agree . . . Without invention, a
painter is but a copier, and a poet but a plagiary of
others. Both are allowed sometimes to copy, and trans-
late; but, as our author tells you, that is not the best
part of their reputation. Imigsiors are but s serviig
kind of attle, says the poet; or at best, the keepers
of cattle for other men: they have nothing which is
properly their own: that is a sufficient mortification
for me, while I am translating Virgil. But to copy the
best author is a kind of praise, if I perform it as I
ought: as a copy after Raphael is more to be commended
than an original of an indifferent painter.

Under this head of Invention is placed the disposi-
tion of the work; to put all things in a beautiful order
and harmony, that the whole may be of a piece. The
compositions of a painter should be conformable to the
text of ancient authors, to the customs, and the times.
And this is exactly the same in Poetry; Homer and Virgil
are to be our guides in the Epic: . . . in all things we

84
are to imitate the customs and the times of those per-
sons and things we represent: not to make new rules of
the drama, . . . but to be content to follow our
masters, who understood Nature better than we. But if
the story which we treat be modern, we are to vary the
customs, according to the time and the country where the
scene of action lies: for this is still to imitate
Nature, which is always the same, though in a different
dress.=‘

The transformation of invention by the end of this passage

into what seems more like the arrangement or dispositio of
classical rhetoric is an indicator of the fluidity of
Dryden's terms. ‘As John C. Sherwood has pointed out,
Dryden‘s use of the term invention was particularly shifty,
traceable in part to his purpose in invoking the term.27
This fluidity, what Ker labels scepticism, tentativeness,
disengagement, Edward Pechter doubleness, Ralph Cohen adap
tation, refinement, overexpansion, and redefinition, and
Ruth Salvaggio dualities,=' is a strong indicator to me that
the work of the poet genuinely was under constant investiga-
tion by Dryden, more so than for any of his predecessors,
although certainly there is precedent for self-

investigation.

This passage also illustrates another “problem” with
Dryden's criticism, namely the impossibility of separating
out critical issues for identification and discussion. Pre-
sent here, and interwoven, are invention, genius, imitation
of nature, good and bad imitation of the ancients, the rela-

tionship of nature and culture, and the Rules. Almost every

85
passage in which Dryden discusses the poetic process in gen-
eral (as opposed to his discussions of specific works or
writers) is thus entangled, so that sorting Dryden's
"thought" into tidy categories is a gargantuan task that one
can only admire a Hume or a Pechter or a Cohen for attempt-
ing. For the purposes of determining Dryden's level of
introspection about his poetic processes, however, this
entanglement is informative in itself. Clearly he does not
ask himself about imitating other authors in a vacuum;
instead, he is sufficiently self-aware to see that his
exploration of that question impinges upon his understanding
of the workings of his own fancy and judgment, but that the
revision of those concepts affect his ideas about the rela-
tionship between the work and nature, which in turn
influence his attitude toward the use of other authors'
works. What Dryden does in his criticism thus amounts not
to a project of defining key terms toward a poetic manifesto
so much as to a number of turns around the hermeneutic cir-
cle, with the whole process of poetic composition (and
reception, but that is not my topic here) the object of
interpretation. Hence I reiterate the undesirability, given
the question of poetic self-understanding, of trying to sort
out Dryden‘s concepts and relate them categorically to those
of his contemporaries, and I return to a more or less
chronological and holistic examination of the passages from

his criticism most relevant to this question.

86

The implications of the passage cited above for imita-
tion need to be sorted out. Dryden begins with the notion
that copying is not the best work of the poet, and that
imitators are keepers of the ideas of others. But imitation
of the best authors is a kind of praise, if done correctly,
and, in fact, in composition it is a positive virtue to fol-
low the guide of the ancient poets or painters. Following
them in this matter is in fact to follow nature, because the
ancients understood nature better than the moderns
understand it, but imitation of the ancients breaks off when
the poet comes to represent customs in a story set in the
present, since these are the dress of nature and not nature
itself. Although it has not occurred to him that what he
takes for nature has been culturally transmitted, Dryden is
clearly aware of the tension between nature and culture in
the admonition to imitate the ancients. Still, he offers no
specific breakdown of matters of nature and matters of
custom. This problem of imitating an ancient writer while
writing a modern poem is one that, as we shall see, receives
more systematic consideration in the eighteenth century.

Dryden has not been coy about his own imitations of
ancient poets--Shadwell's approach is not for him. Speaking
of Annus Mirabilis, he admits that Virgil

has been my master in this poem. I have followed him

everywhere, I know not with what success, but I am sure

with diligence enough: my images are many of them copied

from him, and the rest are imitations of him. My
expressions also are as near as the idioms of the two

87
languages would admit of in translation. And this, Sir,
I have done with that boldness, for which I will stand
accomptable to any of our little critics, who, perhaps,
are not better acquainted with him than I am. . . . In
some places, where either the fancy or the words were
his, or any other's, I have noted it in the margin, that

I might not seem a plagiary; in others I have neglected
it, to avoid as well tediousness, as the affectation of

doing it too often."=’

Dryden admits to both c0pying and imitating the images of

Virgil, an interesting distinction between letter and
spirit, as well as following his language and adopting his
"fancy" in places. As was the case with his discussion of
the terms fancy and judgment, Dryden's practical, personal
treatment of the imitation of another author is much more
concrete than his more theoretical discussions of the issue.
His exposure of the motivation for noting or not noting

imitations seems a further indication of a growing poetic

self-consciousness.

If we could take Crites in the essay ”Of Dramatick
Poesy" to speak for Dryden, we could adduce "much labour and
long study" as part of Dryden's claim to poetic skill, for
such is required "to imitate the Ancients well,“ he says,
quickly following with the proposition that the ancients
were “faithful imitators and wise observers of that Nature
which is so torn and ill represented in our plays."3° The
interplay among the speakers in the essay, especially as
their various concerns and opinions relate to the imitation

of nature, through or beside the ancients and the Rules,

88
seems more to the point of Dryden's interest in the poetic
process than does any single speaker‘s position on any
topic, although Eugenius and Neander do arguably have the
favored positions--i.e., the last word. It seems sig-
nificant that Eugenius does not deny the truth of what
Crites says but rather adds to it: admitting that modern
writers have profitted by the rules and example of the

ancients, he points out that

to these assistances we have joined our own industry;
for, had we sat down with a dull imitation of them, we
might then have lost somewhat of the old perfection, but
never acquired any that was new. We draw not therefore
after their lines, but those of Nature; and having the
life before us, besides the experience of all they knew,
it is no wonder if we hit some airs and features which
they have missed. I deny not what you urge of arts and
sciences, that they have flourished in some ages more
than others; but your instance in philosophy makes for
me: for if natural causes be more known now than in the
time of Aristotle, because more studied, it follows that
poesy and other arts may, with the same pains, arrive
still nearer to perfection; and, that granted, it will
rest for you to prove that they wrought more perfect
images of human life than we: which seeing in your dis-
course you have avoided to make good, it shall now be my
task to show you some part of their defects, and some
few excellencies of the Moderns.3*

In a few decades, Pope will dismiss the debate between
imitating the ancients and imitating nature directly with
the enigmatic "to imitate nature is to imitate them," but

for Dryden the two are still fundamentally in conflict and

deserve exploration.

Although imitation is the starting point for any discus-

sion of what the poet does, Dryden does not allow it to be

89

taken too literally or applied indiscriminately. Admitting
that rhyming talk among characters is "unnatural," he argues
that "'tis true, that to imitate well is a poet's work: but
to affect the soul, and excite the passions, and, above all,
to move admiration (which is the delight of serious plays),
a bare imitation will not serve. The converse, therefore,
which a poet is to imitate, must be heightened with all the
arts and ornaments of poesy; and must be such as, strictly

considered, could never be supposed spoken by any without

premeditation." In fact, writing dramatic dialogue in prose
would be top natural: "one great reason why prose is not to

be used in serious plays, is, because it is too near the
nature of converse: there may be too great a likeness; as
the most skilful painters affirm, that there may be too near
a resemblance in a picture: to take every lineament and fea-
ture is not to make an excellent piece, but to take so much
only as will make a beautiful resemblance of the whole: and,
with an ingenious flattery of nature, to heighten the
beauties of some parts, and hide the deformities of the
rest.”32 Thus, in the process of preventing nature from
deterring him in his sense of what should be done in the
drama, Dryden hits upon the distinction, though he does not
so name it here, between particular and general nature.
Still, even imitation of general nature does not adequately
account for the poet‘s purpose, “for moral truth is the

mistress of the poet as much as of the philosopher; Poesy

90
must resemble natural truth, but it must _l:i_e_,ethical."33

In his Preface to An Evening's Love: or; The Mogk
Astrologer, Dryden again takes up the question of his own
reliance on other poets in response to contemporary attacks

on him for adapting the stories of others:

But these little critics do not well consider what is
the work of a poet, and what the graces of a poem: the
story is the least part of either: I mean the founda-
tion of it, before it is modelled by the art of him who
writes it; who forms it with more care, by exposing only
the beautiful parts of it to view, than a skilful
lapidary sets a jewel. On this foundation of the story,
the characters are raised: and, since no story can
afford characters enough for the variety of the English
stage, it follows, that it is to be altered and enlarged
with new persons, accidents, and designs, which will
almost make it new. When this is done, the forming it
into acts and scenes, disposing of actions and passions
into their proper places, and beautifying both with des-
criptions, similitudes, and propriety of language, is
the principal employment of the poet; as being the
largest field of fancy, which is the principal quality
required in him: for so much the word [poietes] implies.
Judgment, indeed, is necessary in him; but 'tis fancy
that gives the life-touches, and the secret graces to
it: especially in serious plays, which depend not much
on observation. For, to write humour in comedy (which
is the theft of poets from mankind), little of fancy is
required; the poet observes only what is ridiculous and
pleasant folly, and by judging exactly what is so, he
pleases in the representation of it."

Dryden speaks in similar terms in the Preface to Trpiigs sng
Cressida, in which he describes his excavation of
Shakespeare's "heap of rubbish”: "I new-modelled the plot,
. . . improved . . . characters, . . . made . . . an order
and connexion of all the scenes . . . [and] refined his lan-

guage." Although Dryden has certainly waxed poetical on the

finding of ideas elsewhere, in this passage and the previous

91
one his focus of poetic activity seems to be the disposition

or arrangement of elements.

The idea that the poet is a maker like God has its
precedent in Sidney but has been generally absent from
English criticism since the Apology. It arises again in
Dryden 5 ”Parallel of Poetry and Painting": "the artful
painter and the sculptor, imitating the Divine Maker, form
to themselves, as well as they are able, a model of the
superior beauties; and reflecting on them, endeavour to cor-
rect and amend the common nature, and to represent it as it
was at first created, without fault, either in colour, or in
lineament."3° But Dryden is quoting Bellori here, and com-
ments wryly on these ideas that "in these pompous express-
ions, or such as these, the Italian has given you his Idea
of a Painter; and though I cannot much commend the style, I
must needs say, there is somewhat in the matter. Plato him-
self is accustomed to write loftily, imitating, as the
critics tell us, the manner of Homer; but surely that
inimitable poet had not so much of smoke in his writing,
though not less of fire. But in short, this is the present
genius of Italy."3‘ Dryden goes on to cite Philostratus as
"somewhat plainer," advocating that the painter must
understand and represent human nature. It is curious that
Dryden neither elaborates on nor argues against the position

of Bellori; he seems concept-deaf, so to speak, to the

92

difference between imitation of nature and imitation of God

creating nature.

Later in this essay Dryden offers perhaps his longest
explication of the imitation of nature in relation to pleas-

ing the audience:

To imitate Nature well in whatsoever subject, is the
perfection of both arts; and that picture, and that
poem, which comes nearest to the resemblance of Nature,
is the best. But it follows not, that what pleases most
in either kind is therefore good, but what ought to
please. Our depraved appetites, and ignorance of the
arts, mislead our judgments, and cause us often to take
that for true imitation of Nature which has no resem-
blance of Nature in it. To inform our judgments, and to
reform our tastes, rules were invented, that by them we
might discern when Nature was imitated, and how nearly.
I have been forced to recapitulate these things, because
mankind is not more liable to deceit, than it is willing
to continue in a pleasing error, strengthened by a long
habitude. The imitation of Nature is therefore justly
constituted as the general, and indeed the only, rule of
pleasing, both in Poetry and Painting. Aristotle tells
us, that imitation pleases, because it affords matter
for a reasoner to inquire into the truth or falsehood of
imitation, by comparing its likeness, or unlikeness,
with the original; but by this rule every speculation in
nature, whose truth falls under the inquiry of a
philosopher, must produce the same delight; which is not
true. I should rather assign another reason. Truth is
the object of our understanding, as good is of our will;
and the understanding can no more be delighted with a
lie, than the will can choose an apparent evil. As
truth is the end of all our speculations, so the discov-
ery of it is the pleasure of them; and since a true
knowledge of Nature gives us pleasure, a lively imita-
tion of it, either in Poetry or Painting, must of neces-
sity produce a must greater: for both these arts, as I
said before, are not only true imitations of Nature, but
of the best Nature, of that which is wrought up to a
nobler pitch. They present us with images more perfect
than the life in any individual; and we have the
pleasure to see all the scattered beauties of Nature
united by a happy chemistry, without its deformities or
faults. They are imitations of the passions, which
always move, and therefore consequently please; for

93

without motion there can be no delight, which cannot be

considered but as an active passion." 3’
Here Dryden regards the imitation of nature as the only rule
of pleasing, but says that the rules have been created to
help us recognize the true imitation that should please.
Recipients of art are prone to misjudgment of whether nature
has been truly imitated because, essentially, they are fal-
len, yet somehow artists, presumably also fallen, are able
to discern the perfect image of general nature. Without
even introducing the external conflict of Dryden‘s assertion
in the Preface to Ovid that readers, who feel human pas-
sions, are perfectly suited to judge whether they have been
imitated accurately,3' one may conclude that in his reflec-
tion on poetic creation and reception Dryden's reach has

exceeded his grasp.

Sometimes, however, Dryden suggests, a poet's grasp may
exceed his reach. In a return to very personal description
of his own poetic activity (which characterizes both his
earliest and his latest critical writing, with years of more
objective commentary in between), Dryden opens the "Preface
to the Fables" on that note: “'Tis with a Poet, as with a
man who designs to build, and is very exact, as he supposes,
in casting up the cost beforehand; but, generally speaking,
he is mistaken in his account, and recons short of the
expense he first intended. He alters his mind as the work

proceeds, and will have this or that convenience more, of

94
which he had not thought when he began. So has it happened
to me; I have built a house, where I intended but a
lodge.“3’ We are back, in reverse, to the spaniel of the
Preface to Rival Ladies; this time the imagination breaks
out of initially imposed control. Dryden’s subsequent
remarks in this essay confirm the suggestion that his judg-
ment and his fancy have redistributed themselves in his
makeup and also comprise a poignant finale to a long career

of critical reflection on his own poetic processes:

I think myself as vigorous as ever in the faculties of
my soul, excepting only my memory, which is not impaired
to any great degree; and if I lose not more of it, I
have no great reason to complain. What judgment I had,
increases rather than diminishes; and thoughts, such as
they are, come crowding in so fast upon me, that my only
difficulty is to choose or to reject, to run them into
verse, or to give them the other harmony of prose: I
have so long studied and practised both, that they are
grown into a habit, and become familiar to me.‘°

Aside from explicit remarks in his critical essays and
what may be inferred from poems such as "MacFlecknoe," we
have information about Dryden's understanding of the poet‘s
work only in a few of his letters to young poets. The only
sustained piece of advice comes from very late in his life,
in a letter addressed to Elizabeth Thomas, which reads

The great Desire which I observe in you to write
well, and those good Parts which God Almighty and Nature
have bestowed on you, make me not to doubt that by

Application to Study, and the Reading of the best

Authors, you may be absolute Mistress of Poetry. 'Tis

an unprofitable Art, to those who profess it; but you,

who write only for your Diversion, may pass your Hours
with Pleasure in it, and without Prejedice, always

95
avoiding (as I know you will) the Licenses which Mrs.

Behn allowed herself, of writing loosely, and giving (if
I may have leave to say so) some Scandal to the Modesty

of her sex. . . .

In the mean Time, I would advise you not to trust
too much to Virgil's Pastorals; for as excellent as they
are, yet, Theocritus is far before him, both in Softness
of Thought, and Simplicity of Expression.“

What Dryden has to say here is quite conventional, adding
nothing to our knowledge of his views on writing poetry in
its sketchy adherence to the basic pattern of natural genius
added to consultation of the ancient poets. The character
of the advice, coupled with the moralizing about Aphra Behn,

suggests that Thomas’s gender was a constraint on Dryden's

remarks.

To William Walsh in 1691 Dryden offers considerable
specific critique of a work, admiring the "easy and natu-
rall" style, the “correctness of the English,” the ”disposi-
tion of the piece," and its "thoughts." He discusses
specific word choices and grammatical constructions in
Walsh's work but tells Thomas he has no time for that sort
of critique.42 Later he thanks Walsh on behalf of all pre-
sent and future poets in England for ”freeing them from the
too servile imitation of the Ancients" in a preface of
his.“3

It should be evident that Dryden exhibits in his
criticism a much higher level of poetic introspection than
any poet before him. As John L. Mahoney puts it, "although

he lived and moved in the great tradition of neoclassicism

96
and knew something of ‘the burden of the past' and ‘the
anxiety of influence,’ he is a critic more liberal, more
flexible, and more searching than any in the Renaissance and
seventeenth century."“ But Mahoney goes too far in resign-
ing Sidney, Jonson, and Rymer to "the tradition of author-
ity" against which we measure Dryden," for each of these
poets--along with many others-~has investigated the act of
writing poetry in some way that makes Dryden's more thorough
discussion possible. Edward Pechter comes closer, I believe,
to an accurate assessment of Dryden‘s relationship to the
past: "Though Jonson, in deflecting criticism from its
metaphysical concerns, brought it closer to conversation and
specificity, he only suggested possibilities which, the
exchange between Davenant and Hobbes notwithstanding, were
not realized until Dryden. Dryden organized these pos-
sibilities into a fully working assumption, a new assump-
tion, that the intelligent discussion and evaluation of lit-
erature based upon an understanding of its internal
proprieties--the ‘rules' if you wish--was a pursuit justifi-
able in its own terms."“ And Dryden in turn, I should like
to think, made possible the yet greater poetic self-
knowledge of the eighteenth century and, eventually, that of

the Romantic Movement.

Chapter 4
Living in the House that Dryden Built:

Poetic Self-Awareness in the Eighteenth Century

If the intensity of Dryden‘s reflection on his craft is
anomalous in his century, it nevertheless anticipates the
century to come. Until his career, the amount of concern
poets showed for their own composing processes increased
very gradually over the decades from the late sixteenth
century through the seventeenth; as T. S. Eliot remarked,
"Dryden was the first poet to theorize, on any large scale,
about his own craft.“L But after Dryden, reflection on the
work of the poet suddenly proliferated in exponential rela-
tion to its previous growth.

In fact, the role of the poet in describing the poetic
process becomes an explicit issue early in the eighteenth
century. In his "Discourse Upon Comedy" of 1702, George
Farquhar argues, against the authority of Aristotle, that
poets ought to be responsible for determining the principles
of poetic composition. Aristotle was not a poet, he points
out again and again, and only supposedly based his poetic
principles on the poetry of Homer. "Had Homer himself by
the same inspiration that he wrote his poem left us any
rules for such a performance, all the world must have owned
it for authentic. But he was too much a poet to give rules

to that whose excellence he knew consisted in a free and

97

98

unlimited flight of imagination; and to describe the spirit
of poetry, which alone is the true art of poetry, he knew to
be as impossible as for human reason to teach the gift of
prophecy by a definition.”3

Even if rules for composing poetry could be enunciated,
argues Farquhar, no set of rules for writing poetry could
conceivably apply to both Homer and the eighteenth-century
poet since their cultural circumstances are so different.
Taking to heart his own arguments, Farquhar describes his
dramatic aims but does not pretend to provide universal
rules for writing comedy; for his own day he prescribes
writing "a well-framed tale handsomely told as an agreeable
vehicle for counsel or reproof" while taking the English
audience into consideration and following English common
sense.3

Writing four years later, Isaac Watts provides an amus-
ing counterpoint to Farquhar's self-sufficient poetic com-
position. Watts considers poetry to be essentially a divine
gift and bewails its secularization. By their poetry, the
first poets--David, Solomon, Isaiah--"brought so much of
heaven down to this lower world as the darkness of that dis-
pensation would admit, and now and then a divine and poetic
rapture lifted their souls far above the level of that econ-
omy of shadows, bore them away far into a brighter region,
and gave them a glimpse of evangelic day."‘ Working from

this definition of poetry as inspired, Watts condemns those

99
who denounce poetry and prefer the "driest translation of
the psalm” as well as the secular poets such as Dryden who
could “with little toil and expense . . . furnish out a
Christian poem" rather than "a modern play."° He also bases
his judgment of specific poetic practices--e.g. the use of
visions or machines--on their presence or absence in scrip-
ture.

Watts has a good bit to say about his own composing
processes as well, although he unfortunately does not des—
cribe the sensation of being divinely inspired. Poetry is
only leisure for him, he says, but he has written to "assist
the meditations and worship of vulgar Christians." To this
end he has attempted to avoid any sentiments that might be
interpreted as referring to “wanton passions," and he has
attempted to speak straightforwardly and gently: “When I
have felt a slight inclination to satire or burlesque, I
thought it proper to suppress it. The grinning and the
growling Muses are not hard to be obtained; but I would dis-
dain their assistance where a manly invitation to virtue and
a friendly smile may be successfully employed.“‘ After
explaining his choice of rhyme and meter and apologizing for
the imperfections of his poems, Watts ends his remarks on an
apocalypic note with the prediction that poetic perfection
will never be possible until “the seventh angel has sounded
his awful trumpet, till the victory be complete over the

beast and his image, when the natives of heaven shall join

100
in consort with prophets and saints, and sing to their
golden harps, ‘salvation, honor, and glory to Him that sits
upon the throne, and to the Lamb, forever.'"’

Also standing in opposition--though of a different sort
from Watts'--to Farquhar in the first decade of the eight-
eenth century is Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of
Shaftesbury. In his "Soliloquy: Or Advice to an Author" of
1710, later included in his Characteristigs of Mgn. Manners,
Opinions, Times, Shaftesbury argues that writers ought to
ignore the taste of the age because truth is universal and
to be found in nature, though “nature methodiz'd." The poet
is first to enact the principle ”know thyself,“ then to dis-
cern the universal principles of beauty and truth by study-
ing nature as universally acclaimed artists such as Homer
and the philosophers interpret it. He offers a long
explanation of what the poet does (and does not do):

I must confess there is hardly anywhere to be found a

more insipid race of mortals than those whom moderns are

contented to call poets for having attained the chiming
faculty of a language with an injudicious random use of
wit and fancy. But for the man who truly and in a just
sense deserves the name of poet and who, as real master
or architect in the kind, can describe both men and man-
ners and give to an action its just body and propor-
tions, he will be found, if I mistake not, a very dif-

ferent creature. Such a poet is indeed a second m k r,

. . . he forms a whole, coherent and proportioned in

itself, with due subjection and subordinancy of con-

stituent parts. He notes the boundaries of the passions
and knows their exact tones and measures, . . . distin-
guishes the beautiful from the deformed, the amiable
from the odious. The moral artist who can thus imitate

the Creator, and is thus knowing in the inward form and
structure of his fellow creature, will hardly . . . be

101

found unknowing in himself or at a loss in those numbers

which make the harmony of a mind.“

That the dramatist, religionist, and moralist should
have such differing yet well-defined opinions about the
writing of poetry in the first decade of the eighteenth
century hints at the pervasive character of prose reflection
on the poetic process throughout the rest of the century.
Indeed, the years immediately following the publication of
Shaftesbury's Characteristics see the publication of
numerous pieces on the poetic process--in general or in
regard to particular poets-~in the periodicals as well as in
the prefaces of poets, editors, and translators. This state
of affairs implies a "common reader" more taken with the
work of poetry, and poets more confident of poetry as a
vocation rather than an avocation, than ever before in the
history of English letters.

The periodical remarks of Addison on the poetic process
exemplify both the high level of concern with poetic theory
and the presence of a broad-based reading public. Writing
as the Spectator, Addison generally concerns himself more
with forming and improving the taste of his readers than
with describing the poetic process. Hence several issues of
The Sppcgator, beginning with No. 58, treat the discernment
of true and false wit; it is only as an aside that Addison
consigns Dryden's definition of wit to the "too general"

category and suggests that it is an appropriate description

102
of good writing. Within that overriding concern for the
audience and for taste (which is not atypical of the
century), however, he does touch on the poet's work to some
extent.
While Addison offers no systematic explanation of the
poetic process, his various opinions scattered through the

essays of The Spectator comprise a fairly coherent whole.

His definition of true wit is a good starting point: citing
Locke's definition of wit as "thg Assemblage of Igeas . , .
wherein can be found'snv Resem ance r Con rui " in 122
Spectator, No. 62, he goes on to explicate and illustrate
this definition as it applies to poetry.’ Here Addison taps
into the growing eighteenth-century psychology of the asso-
ciation of ideas, to which Martin Kallich has attributed a
shift away from “the traditional classical ideas of imita-
tion." As Kallich goes on to say, "the analysis of the
plastic imagination upon which genius and the poetic process
depend, together with that of the passive imagination upon
which the esthetic response and taste depend, is a major
contribution of the associationist approach."*P

And indeed it is the case that the concept of genius
looms large in Addison's scattered remarks about the poetic
process, as it does in writing throughout the century.
Later in The Spegtsior, No. 62, Addison explores the con-
sequences of his concept of wit for poetic composition,

saying

103
That the Basis of all Wit is Truth; and that no Thought
can be valuable, of which good Sense is not the Ground-
work. . . . This is the natural Way of Writing, that
beautiful Simplicity, which we so much admire in the
Compositions of the Ancients; and which no Body deviates
from, but those who want Strength of Genius to make a
Thought shine in its own natural Beauties. Poets who
want this Strength of Genius to give that Majestick
Simplicity to Nature, which we so much admire in the
Works of the Ancients, are forced to hunt after foreign
Ornaments, and not to let any Piece of Wit of what Kind

soever escape them.u

Addison devotes the whole of The S t tor, No. 160, to
the question of genius. "My Design in this Paper," he says,
“is to consider what is properly a great Genius, and to
throw some Thoughts together on so uncommon a subject.“‘~2
He identifies two classes of great geniuses, a distinction
that becomes commonplace later in the century, those who "by
the meer Strength of natural Parts, and without any
Assistance of Art or Learning, have produced Works that were
the Delight of their own Times and the Wonder of
Posterity"*3--exemplified by Homer, Solomon, and
Shakespeare-~and ”those that have formed themselves by
Rules, and submitted the Greatness of their natural Talents
to the Corrections and Restraints of Art"*‘--exemplified by
Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Tully, Milton, and Bacon.

Genius for Addison seems clearly to depend on innate
ability, and he warns poets against ignoring their own
abilities in favor of imitating others--unlike Jonson, for
whom following tradition carried the greater importance.

"The great Danger in these latter kind of Genius,“ says

104

Addison, “is, lest they cramp their own Abilities too much
by Imitation, and form themselves altogether upon Models,
without giving the full Play to their own natural Parts. An
Imitation of the best Authors, is not to compare with a good
Original; and I believe we may observe that very few Writers
make an extraordinary Figure in the World, who have not
something in their Way of thinking or expressing themselves
that is peculiar to them and entirely their own."19

Imagination takes precedence over imitation for Addison.
His only remarks about imitation involve warnings such as
that cited above, although he does assume that poetry in
some way presents or represents nature; in fact in this
essay on genius he explicitly denounces imitating without
being true to one's own imagination. Pindar was a great
genius, he says, and a poet “who was hurried on by a natural
Fire and Impetuosity to vast Conceptions of things, and
noble Sallies of Imagination.“ But modern poets, "Men of a
sober and moderate Fancy," who imitate Pindar‘s "singular"
and "inimitable" works, "following Irregularities by Rule,
and by the little Tricks of Art straining after the most
unbounded Flights of Nature“ are simply ridiculous. However
great the poets of the past, their genius is not
reproducible; modern poets must attend to their own imagina-

tions.

105
In the seventh of his essays on "The Pleasures of the
Imagination," Addison offers some reasonably direct remarks

on the workings of the imagination within the poetic mind:

It would be in vain to inquire whether the power of
imagining things strongly proceeds from any greater per-
fection in the soul, or from any nicer texture in the
brain, of one man than of another. But this is certain:
that a noble writer should be born with this faculty in
its full strength and vigor, so as to be able to receive
lively ideas from outward objects, to retain them long,
and to range them together, upon occasion, in such fig-
ures and representations as are most likely to hit the
fancy of the reader. A poet should take as much pains
in forming his imagination as a philosopher in cultivat-
ing his understanding. He must gain a due relish of the
works of nature, and be thoroughly conversant in the
various scenery of country life.

When he is stored with country images, if he would go
beyond pastoral and the lower kinds of poetry, he ought
to acquaint himself with the pomp and magnificence of
courts. . . . Such advantages as these help to open a
man's thoughts and to enlarge his imagination, and will
therefore have their influence on all kinds of writing
if the author knows how to make right use of them.*‘

Near the end of this essay, he ties the imagination
explicitly to the idea of genius, saying that Milton is "a
perfect master in all these arts of working on the imagina-

tion," and that any defects in Psradiss Lpst are the fault

of the English language and not of Milton's genius.‘7

Thus for Addison the key concepts in understanding the
composition of poetry are wit, genius, and imagination, in
contrast to the more prominent nature and imitation in the
critical theory of the previous century. And unlike any of
the ppsgs of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, Addison

grounds his remarks in very distinct explanations of the way

106
the mind works. While previous poets clearly were working
out of some understanding of imagination as mediator between
sensory impressions and reason, none of them ventured to
explicate that connection with reference to poetry beyond
Puttenham‘s and Sidney's defensive remarks relevant to
poetry as lying. By contrast Addison repeatedly cites Locke
or appeals to his readers' psychological experience in his
discussion of the imagination and tries, if in ways that now
sounds naive, to explore the concept more thoroughly.
Despite the attempt at a physiological explanation of
imagination as a product of brain texture, Addison's discus-
sion has much more in common with a Romantic sensibility
than with that of the Renaissance.*'

Like Addison, Pope is very much concerned with the
effect of poetry upon its audience. As a prolific poet,
however, he devotes himself much more intensely than does
Addison to contemplating the production of poetry by the
poet. In fact, within the narrow scholarly world of Pope
studies, it is unnecessary to establish Pope's habit of
reflection about his work as a poet. At least since the
late 1960s this matter has been under investigation; indeed,
a number of recent books are predicated on the assumption
that Pope was poetically quite self-aware and at the same
time less committed to the carefully delineated ”neoclas-

sicism” than earlier critics supposed." Thus Dustin H.

Griffin devotes Algxanggr Pppsg Thg Ppgt in thg Ppems to

107
"recover[ing] some of the personal energy that invigorates
Pope's greatest poems and makes them vividly self-expressive
products of an imagination intrigued with and often at odds
with itself, and yet more sharply at odds with the world,”=°
and Leopold Damrosch considers Pope "an early instance of
the modern poet" in The ImaginativggWorig of Alexander Po e,
arguing that he "consciously put together a self, with much
planning and revision.“23 The existence of such critical
works about Pope and no other poets before him suggests not
that modern Pope scholars have been unusually perceptive
about his self-understanding, but that there is simply more
in Pope to perceive than there is in any previous writers
other than Dryden.

Modern students of Pope, however, aware of his self-
consciousness as they are, tend to dwell on his poetry in
their discussions, or to pay more attention to the poet's
overall self-awareness than to the narrower issue of his
understanding of his own poetic processes. Lillian Feder,
for example, has considered "Pope's Definition of his Art,”
arguing that "in one respect his whole career can be
regarded as an attempt to establish and define the art of
satire as he practiced it."22 As might be expected, she
dwells on the satirical poetry in developing her argument.

The very fact that Pope felt able to convey his
understanding of the art of poetry satirically strongly sug—

gests that he held a well-developed view of that art. (So

108

much of Pope's poetry is in a sense "about“ poetry, indeed,
that carrying out my intention to consider prose about
poetry rather than poetry that may be obliquely about poetry
is justifiable here only because others--notably Griffin and
Damrosch-—have already done so good a job on the poet in the
poetry.) In the satirical Art of Sinking in Ppgirv, Pope‘s
discussion of the "true Profound“ incorporates such terms as
genius and imagination in such a way as to identify not just
wrongheaded poetry-writing but the norm for poetic composi-
tion as well. "If we search the Authors of Antiquity, we
shall find as few to have been distinguish'd in the Esp;
Profound, as in the true Sublime. And the very same thing
(as it appears from Lpnginus) had been imagin'd of that, as
now of this; namely, that it was entirely the Gift of
Nature. I grant, that to excel in the Bathps a Genius is
requisite; yet the Rules of Art must be allow'd so far use-
ful, as to add Weight, or as I may say, hang on Lead, to
facilitate and enforce our Descent, to guide us to the most
advantageous Declivities, and habituate our Imagination to a
Depth of thinking."23 Genius and imagination are,
apparently, the primary elements of poetry, but must be
informed by art in order to function apprOpriately and well.

In his discussion of Shakespeare Pope provides a more
straightforward description of the poetic process, or at
least of Shakespeare's as he sees it. "If ever any Author

deserved the name of an Original, it was Shakespgare. . . .

109
The Poetry of Shakespear was inspiration indeed: he is not
so much an Imitator, as an Instrument, of Nature; and 'tis
not so just to say that he speaks from her, as that she
speaks thro' him."=‘ This passage is curiously anomalous;
nowhere else does Pope treat inspiration or originality as
poetic ideals, nor does he in theory or practice generally
shun imitation of authors or of nature.

To some extent Pope's purpose in this passage may
elucidate his remarks; he is, after all, writing a preface
about a writer whose works he has collected in a book he
hopes to sell--praise is to be expected. Such a departure
from what we think of as standard Popean terminology,
however, is inadequately explained by commercial motives.
It may also be the case that Pope's thinking about the
poetic process is moving away from “neoclassical“ ideas and
terminology, but, if that is so, his thinking moves back
toward those ideas and that terminology rather rapidly.

The most relevant passage to hold up in explanation of

these remarks on Shakespeare, I think, is the following from

An Essay on Criticism:

When first young Maro in his boundless mind

A Work t' outlast Immortal Rpme design'd,
Perhaps he seem'd abpve the Critick's Law,

And but from Naturg's Fopngains scorn'd to draw:
But when t' examine ev‘ry Part he came,

Nature and Hpmer were, he found, the same:

Learn hence for Ancient Rulgs a just Esteem;

To copy Npturg is to copy Thgm.=°

110
The difficulty that I cite in Pope‘s Preface to ngsWorks of
Shakespeare is perhaps a function of temporal and
psychological distance rather than a radical disparity in
Pope's thought. Although imitation was a conscious activity
in the work of eighteenth-century (and earlier) poets, it
was more than that, as we may have extrapolated from
Ascham's description of the third kind of imitation and as
Howard Weinbrot explains in The Formal tra'n: S u 'es in
Augustan Imitstion spd Satire.=‘ Imitation involved being
steeped in tradition and grew naturally out of the way that
the eighteenth-century person perceived the world. It
seems, to judge from Addison's remarks so early in the
century, that empirical philosophy and the new science grad-
ually undermine this cast of mind over the course of the
eighteenth century, although to some extent classically edu-
cated poets persist in it into the twentieth century despite
the predominance of romantic poetic theory. This immersion
in other poets' ways of thinking is difficult to appropriate
in the wholly different late twentieth century, although the
most recent critical theory has come back around, with a
difference, to a similar perspective.2’ Indeed, Pope‘s
statement that to copy nature is to copy the ancients
remarkably anticipates late twentieth-century views on the

"enlanguaged" character of reality as expressed by such

theorists as E. H. Gombrich in his Ac; png Iiipsipn.

111
In fact, Pope had already dealt with the relationship

between the ancients and a person's own ideas in the Preface

to The Works of 1717:

All that is left us is to recommend our productions by
the imitation of the Ancients: and it will be found
true, that in every age, the highest character for sense
and learning has been obtain'd by those who have been
most indebted to them. For to say truth, whatever is
very good sense must have been common sense in all
times; and what we call Learning, is but the knowledge
of the sense of our predecessors. Therefore they who
say our thoughts are not our own because they resemble
the Ancients, may as well say our faces are not our own,
because they are like our Fathers: And indeed it is very
unreasonable, that people should expect us to be
Scholars, and yet be angry to find us so."

Similarly, as Weinbrot points out, Pope had connected imita-
tion of the ancients with inspiration as early as 1712 in a
letter to Steele. Speaking of his "Dying Christian to his
Soul," he says ”You have it (as Cowley calls it) just warm
from the brain. It came to me the first moment I waked this
morning: Yet you'll see it was not so absolutely inspira-
tion, but that I had in my head not only the verses of
Adrian, but the fine fragments of Sapho.”2’ These explana-
tions must be understood to temper Pope‘s remarks on
Shakespeare's originality; it seems more the case that
Shakespeare either bypassed the ordinary studious route to
truth or that he imitated less consciously than most of his
contemporaries and successors than that he had access to

some "truer truth" than anyone else; Pope‘s use of the terms

“originality" and "inspiration“ should probably not be

112
construed as the high praise that would be implicit in
modern usage, nor can they fairly be regarded as the ground-

less invention meant by casual modern speakers.

Pope has something to say about what is as; the poetic
process in reference to the work of Crashaw. In a letter to
Henry Cromwell in 1710, he remarks that "I take him to have
writ like a Gentleman, that is at leisure hours, and more to
keep out of idleness, than to establish a reputation: so
that nothing regular or just can be expected from him. All
that regards design, form, fable, (which is the Soul of
Poetry) all that concerns exactness, or consent of parts,
(which is the body) will probably be wanting . . . no man
can be a great Poet, who writes for diversion only. These
Authors should be consider'd as Versifiers, and witty men,
rather than as Poets."3° Thus Pope seems to share with
Jonson a sense that writing poetry requires long hours of
hard work, and to value a balance, in seventeenth century
terms, of fancy and judgment.

Pope must have forgotten his implicit censure of Crashaw
when he wrote the opening lines of his own poetic self-
defense in the Preface to The Wprks of 1717, although by the
second paragraph of it he has again asserted the importance
of taking adequate time and pain in the production of
poetry:

I confess it was want of consideration that made me an
author; I writ because it amused me; I corrected because

113

it was as pleasant to me to correct as to write; and I
publish'd because I was told I might please such as it
was a credit to please. To what degree I have done
this, I am really ignorant; I had too much fondness for
my productions to judge of them at first, and too much
judgment to be pleas'd with them at last. But I have
reason to think they can have no reputation which will
continue long, or which deserves to do so: for they have
always fallen short not only of what I read of others,
but even of my own Ideas of Poetry.

If any one should imagine I am not in earnest, I
desire him to reflect, that the Ancients (to say the
least of them) had as much Genius as we: and that to
take more pains, and employ more time, cannot fail to
produce more complete pieces. They constantly apply'd
themselves not only to that art, but to that single
branch of an art, to which their talent was most power-
fully bent; and it was the business of their lives to
correct and finish their works for posterity. If we can
pretend to have used the same industry, let us expect
the same immortality: Tho' if we took the same care, we
should still lie under a farther misfortune: they writ
in languages that became universal and everlasting,
while ours are extremely limited both in extent, and in
duration. A mighty foundation for our pride! when the
utmost we can hope, is but to be read in one Island, and
to be thrown aside at the end of one Age.

. . . . I fairly confess that I have serv'd my self
all I could by reading; that I made use of the judgment
of authors dead and living; that I omitted no means in
my power to be inform'd of my errors, both by my friends
and enemies; and that I expect not to be excus'd in any
negligence on account of youth, want of leisure, or any
other idle allegations: But the true reason these
pieces are not more correct, is owing to the considera-
tion how short a time they, and I, have to live: One
may be ashamed to consume half one‘s days in bringing
sense and rhyme together; and what Critic can be so
unreasonable as not to leave a man time enough for any
more serious employment, or more agreeable amusement?3‘

A recurrent theme in Pope's remarks on the poetic process is
the interplay of genius and hard work. In this passage Pope
seems to assume that innate poetic ability underlies a suc-

cessful career as a poet, but he emphasizes reading and

revision to a much greater extent--perhaps because those are

114
matters in his control, as the quality of his genius is not.
Ten years earlier Pope had written to Wycherly on the very
problem of weighing method against art”; in that letter as
in this Preface, he essentially prefers to discuss method.
The problem with genius, he says, is that it "is hard to be
distinguish’d by a man himself, from a strong inclination,
and if it be never so great, he can not at first discover it
any other way, than by that prevalent propensity which
renders him the more liable to be mistaken. The only method
he has, is to make the experiment by writing, and appealing

to the judgment of others.”33

Although Pope problematizes such terms as imitation and
genius in a way that Dryden did not, his career of intro-
spection in prose very much resembles Dryden's. Through
remarks on poetic composition generally, evaluations of
other poets, and descriptions of his own motivation and
habits of composition, he sketches out a fairly complete
picture of his understanding of the poetic process in his
critical essays and letters. And, like Dryden, his sense of
himself as a poet led to retrospective evaluations of him-
self late in life. Like Dryden writing in the Preface to
The Fables, Pope writes what amounts to a slightly premature
post mortem on his career to Swift in 1736:

My understanding indeed, such as it is, is extended

rather than diminish'd: I see things more in the whole,

more consistent, and more clearly deduced from, and
related to, each other. But what I gain on the side of

115
philosophy, I lose on the side of poetry: the flowers
are gone, when the fruits begin to ripen, and the fruits
perhaps will never ripen perfectly. The climate (under
our Heaven of a Court) is but cold and uncertain: the
winds rise, and the winter comes on. I find myself but
little disposed to build a new house; I have nothing
left but to gather up the reliques of a wreck, and look
about me to see how few friends I have left. Pray whose
esteem or admiration should I desire now to procure by
my writings? whose friendship or conversation to obtain
by 'em? I am a man of desperate fortunes, that is a man
whose friends are dead: for I never aim‘d at any other
fortune than in friends."

The types of writing done by Pope and Addison are typi-
cal of eighteenth-century poetic theory. No longer do
remarks on the poetic process come primarily in self-
justifying prefaces or in privately disseminated pieces,
although, as Pope’s Preface to The Works of 1717 and his
letters demonstrate, those occasions for reflection on the
poetic process are still available. Prefaces to another
poet's works and periodical essays, however, present so many
opportunities for reflection on the composing process to so
wide an audience--and writers clearly avail themselves of
these opportunities--that it seems reasonable to assume a
higher level of interest than ever before among poets and
their audience in the writing process itself.

Attempting to find and discuss every published mention
of the poetic process in the eighteenth century is a task
beyond the scope of this chapter, but I should like to
examine a few examples from early in the century, apart from
those of the better-known Addison and Pope, as an indicator

of the prevalence of such remarks. In his six-volume

116
edition of the works of Spenser (1715), John Hughes included
his own "Remarks on the Fairy Queen," and "Remarks on the
Shepherd's Calendar, etc." A poet himself, Hughes allows
something of his own understanding of the poetic process to
filter through his discussion of Spenser. Perhaps not sur-
prisingly, Hughes emphasizes the issues of imagination,
genius, and imitation in his discussion, opening his
"Remarks on the Fairy Queen" by saying that the poem's
"chief merit" is "that surprising vein of fabulous invention
which runs through it." Working out of the rhetorical
tradition, in which Spenser was certainly at least partially
situated, we might interpret "fabulous invention“ to mean
the finding of appropriate fables, but the rhetorical tradi-
tion has been tempered enough in Hughes that he goes on to
attribute possession by "a kind of poetical magic“ and "tor—
rent[s] of . . . imagination" to him.39 This “range of
fancy which was so remarkably his talent," this "genius,“
accounts for Spenser's choice of models in the Faerie
Queens, as Hughes explains at some length:
It may seem strange indeed, since Spenser appears to
have been well acquainted with the best writers of
antiquity, that he has not imitated them in the struc-
ture of his story. Two reasons may be given for this.
The first is that at the time when he wrote, the Italian
poets, whom he has chiefly imitated, and who were the
first revivers of this art among the moderns, were in
the highest vogue and were universally read and admired.
But the chief reason was probably that he chose to frame
his fable after a model which might give the greatest
scope to that range of fancy which was so remarkably his

talent. There is a bent in nature which is apt to
determine men that particular way in which they are most

117

capable of excelling and though it is certain he might
have formed a better plan, it is to be questioned
whether he could have executed any other so well.

It is probably for the same reason that among the
Italian poets he rather followed Ariosto, whom he found
more agreeable to his genius, than Tasso, who had formed
a better plan, and from whom he has only borrowed some
particular ornaments; yet it is but justice to say that
his plan is much more regular than that of Ariosto. In
the Orlando Furioso we everywhere meet with an exuberant
invention joined with great liveliness and facility of
description, yet debased by frequent mixtures of the
comic genius, as well as many shocking indecorums.
Besides, in the huddle and distraction of the adventures
we are for the most part only amused with extravagant
stories, without being instructed in any moral. On the
other hand, Spenser's fable, though often wild, is, as I
have observed, always emblematical, and this may very
much excuse likewise that air of romance in which he has
followed the Italian author.3‘

Aside from the remarks about genius as a "bent in nature,"
what interests me here is Hughes' implicit awareness of his
readers‘ expectations. "_i_psy_sgsp_si;spgsfl that Spenser
does not imitate Greek and Roman writers; in the preceding
paragraph Hughes had dealt with what he perceived to be an
issue in Spenser's departure from the ”rules" of an epic as
practiced by Homer and Virgil. Apparently, then, thanks
perhaps to Dryden and his contemporaries as well as to the
poets of the early eighteenth century, the reading public
had its own sense of what poets were to do in writing
poetry, and Hughes felt an obligation to attend to his

readers‘ expectations yet to educate them further.37

The terms genius and imitation do not always fall into
mutually supportive positions as they do in the thought of

Hughes or of Pope. For Leonard Welsted, imitation is the

118

bane of genius. In the "Dissertation Concerning the Perfec-
tion of the English Language, the State of Poetry, etc.“
(1724), he blames the practice of imitating other authors
for the underdevelopment of the English genius. Further,
the Rules as derived from other poets are useless, because
writing poetry simply cannot be taught. Welsted takes his
contemporaries to task for attempting to describe the poetic

process-~and, in doing so, offers his own implicit version

of that process:

As to the numerous treatises, essays, arts, etc., both
in verse and prose, that have been written by the
moderns on this groundwork, they do but hackney the same
thoughts over again, making them still more trite. Most
of these pieces are nothing but a pert insipid heap of
commonplace; nor do any, or all of them put together,
contribute in any considerable degree, if they con-
tribute at all, towards the raising or finishing a good
genius. The truth is they touch only the externals or
form of the thing, without entering into the spirit of
it; they play about the surface of poetry but never dive
into its depths; the secret, the soul, of good writing
is not to be come at through such mechanic laws; the
main graces and the cardinal beauties of this charming
art lie too retired within the bosom of nature, and are
of too fine and subtle an essence to fall under the dis-
cussion of pedants, commentators, or trading critics,
whether they be heavy prose-drudges, or more sprightly
essayers in rhyme. These beauties, in a word, are
rather to be felt than described. By what precepts
shall a writer be taught only to think poetically, or to
trace out among the various powers of thought that par-
ticular vein or feature of it which poetry loves, and to
distinguish between the good sense which may have its
weight and justness in prose and that which is of the
nature of verse. What instruction shall convey to him
that flame which can alone animate a work and give it
the glow of poetry? And how, or by what industry, shall
be learned, among a thousand other charms, that delicate
contexture in writing by which the colors, as in the
rainbow, grow out of one another, and every beauty owes
its luster to a former and gives being to a succeeding
one? Could certain methods be laid down for attaining

119
these excellencies, everyone that pleased might be a
poet, as everyone that pleases may be a geometrician if
he will but have due patience and attention. Many of
the graces in poetry may, I grant, be talked of in very

intelligible language, but intelligible only to those
who have a natural taste for it, or are born with the

talent of judging.3'
Welsted apparently has no sympathy with the idea that fol-
lowing time-honored guidelines improves the products of the
poet's imagination. A bit later in the essay he provides
specific examples of these rules he denounces: "What I con-
tend against is the common traditionary rules; such as, for
example: ‘Poetry is an imitation. It has nature for its
object. As an art it has some end, and consequently means
or rules to attain that end. . . . Be not witty in the
wrong place. Correct and alter incessantly. And so on.'"3’
Here for almost the first time in print (attacks to inspira-
tion excepted) is direct confrontation between differing
opinions about poetic composition; although unanimity has
never characterized poets' opinions, they have previously

tended to write as if in a vacuum.

Of the "journalists," Lewis Theobald deserves at least a
mention here since his famous censurer receives so much
attention above. In fact, Theobald is not nearly so dull as
Pope would like us to believe, and the criticism he pub-
lished in The Censor does indicate, if obliquely, his
understanding of the poetic process. The poet's chief aim,

apparently, should be to instruct his reader or hearer in

120

morality while presenting plausible characters; it is in
these terms that he discusses Shakespeare's artistry in Eipg
pssg, for example, and on these grounds that he argues in
favor of "mixed" tragic characters rather than wholly good
or evil ones.‘°

The most important document from the middle years of the
eighteenth century is surely Edward Young's Conjectures on
Origippl Composition, which summarizes the interests of the
whole century in the poet‘s composing process and represents
the fullest, most singleminded "answer" to Sidney's chal-
lenge to poets to "know what they do" before the Romantic
movement. Indeed, the very origin and dissemination of the
Conjectures epitomize the character of reflection on the
poetic process in the eighteenth century. The project was
apparently suggested to Young by his friend Samuel
Richardson, and Richardson was closely involved in the pro-
duction and revision of the work, as his letters to Young-—
which include numerous specific revisions--indicate. In
fact, the essay itself occurs in the context of a letter to
Richardson. Once written, the essay was read in the company
of Samuel Johnson, as Boswell reports in Ths Journal of a
Tour to the Heprides.“L The conversation about poetry that
I hypothesize in Drayton's time, to which we have testimony
but of which no specific details in Dryden's time, is thus
clearly documented in the mid-eighteenth century.

Opening the Qonjecipres itself, Young conveys the same

lack of awareness that others have covered this ground that

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we have seen again and again. "I begin with Qgigipsi Com
position; and the more willingly, as it seems an original
subject to me, who have seen nothing hitherto written on
it."‘2 Difficult as it is to believe that Young had seen
nothing on originality, given the numerous remarks as early
as Pope's on Shakespeare, he writes as if everyone in the
eighteenth century shares the assumption that the whole work
of the poet is to imitate works of classical poets, as if
there has been no debate, internal or public, about what
~imitating may involve.

Young's task in the essay is twofold; he describes the
poetic process as pg believes it should occur, and he
admonishes poets to be more introspective about their writ-
ing. In regard to the first, and more weighty, part of his
task, he works primarily by definition, contrast, and anal—
ogy to establish what he means by genius and how it
operates, with or without the aid of learning, to produce
works of originality rather than of imitation.

His earliest explanation of genius suggests that the
poet is completely independent of external stimuli. "How
independent of the world is he, who can daily find new
acquaintance, that at once entertain and improve him, in the
little world, the minute but fruitful creation, of his own
mind?" (5). Later, in the same vein, he distinguishes
originals from imitations on the basis of the materials from

which they are made: "An Originpl may be said to be of a

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vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root
of genius; it rows, it is not psgs: Imitations are often a
sort of psnuiscturg wrought up by those mechanics, psi, and
labour, out of preexistent materials not their own" (7). In
both cases, Young implies almost greatip ex nihilo by the
poet of genius. Between these two remarks, however, he has
tied originality to imitation of nature: "The mind of a man
of genius is a fertile and pleasant field . . .; it enjoys a
perpetual spring. Of that spring, Originpls are the fairest
flowers: Imitptions are of quicker growth, but fainter
bloom. Imitations are of two kinds; one of nature, one of
authors: The first we call Ori inals, and confine the term
Imitstion to the second" (6). Hence, presumably, originals
are imitations, and Young introduces--inadvertently, it
seems--an unresolvable conflict in what he presents as a
coherent system.

The proposition that poets ought to imitate nature and
not the ancients is of course old news in the history of
poetic theory, but Young seems to expect it to startle his
audience, so much so that he devotes quite a number of pages
to explaining precisely what the relationship of modern to
ancient writers ought to be. In the first place, he says,
arguing that the classical writers were originals and there-
fore better than modern imitators is invalid: the non-
imitators only were so because they had no predecessors to

imitate, and many who seem to write originals actually

123
imitated other works now lost (8-10). In the second place,
Young seems to regard all men, ancient and modern, as
equally capable of the kind of genius and exertion necessary
to the best writing, but argues that moderns have the
advantage of greater learning: “Consider, my friend! knowl-
edge physical, mathematical, moral, and divine, increases;
all arts and sciences are making considerable advance; with
them, all the accommodations, ornaments, delights, and
glories of human life; and these are new food to the genius
of a polite writer; these are as the root, and composition,
as the flower; and as the root spreads, and thrives, shall
the flower fail?" (33).

But Young does not advocate ignoring the ancients. He
devotes a long passage to explaining how to put them to the
best use (which he later summarizes as emulating rather than
imitating [29]) and to answering the questions he imagines

his opponents putting to him:

Let us be as far from neglecting, as from copying, their
admirable compositions: Sacred be their rights, and
inviolable their fame. Let our understanding feed on
theirs; they afford the noblest nourishment; But let
them nourish, not annihilate, our own. When we read,
let our imagination kindle at their charms; when we
write, let our judgment shut them out of our thoughts;
treat even Homer himself as his royal admirer was
treated by the cynic; bid him stand aside, nor shade our
Composition from the beams of our own genius; for
nothing Original can rise, nothing immortal can ripen,
in any other sun.

Must we then, you say, not imitate antient authors?
Imitate them, by all means; but imitate aright. He that
imitates the divine Liisp, does not imitate Homsr; but
he who takes the same method, which Hpmgr took, for
arriving at a capacity of accomplishing a work so great.

124

Tread in his steps to the sole fountain of immortality;
drink where he drank, at the true Helicon, that is, at
the breast of nature: Imitate; but imitate not the Opp-
osition, but the fléfl- For may not this paradox pass
into a maxim? viz. ‘The less we copy the renowned
antients, we shall resemble them the more.‘

But possibly you may reply, that you must either
imitate Homer, or depart from nature. Not so: For sup-
pose you was to change place, in time, with Homer; then,
if you write naturally, you might as well charge Hpmer
with an imitation of you. Can you be said to imitate
Homer for writing sg, as you would have written, if
Homer had never been? As far as a regard to nature, and
sound sense, will permit a departure from your great
predecessors; so far, ambitiously, depart from them; the
farther you are from them in similitude, the nearer are
you to them in excellence; you rise by it into an
Original; become a noble collateral, not an humble
descendant from them. Let us build our Compositions
with the spirit, and in the taste, of the antients; but
not with their materials . . . All eminence, and dis-
tinction, lies out of the beaten road; excursion, and
deviation, are necessary to find it; and the more remote
your path from the highway, the more reputable. (10-12)

It is difficult to imagine that Young could be writing the
last paragraph of this passage with anything more in mind
than Pope's “to copy Nature is to copy them." Underlying
his answer to this hypothetical objection seems to be the
assumption that human perception is always the same, that we
need not copy the ancients because we are as capable of
understanding nature as they are and in the same way; the
sense that I have suggested Pope conveys seems not to be
possible any longer, at least for Young, in the middle of

the scientific eighteenth century.

Learning, then, is not to be eschewed by the poet, but
lfieither is it to be overvalued, and Young launches into an

(Explanation of the relative merits of genius and learning.

125

"By the praise of genius we detract not from learning; we
detract not from the value of gold, by saying that diamond
has greater still. He who disregards learning, shows that
he wants its aid; and he that overvalues it, shows that its
aid has done him harm. Overvalued indeed it cannot be, if
genius, as to meppsiiipp, is valued more. Learning we
thank, genius we revere; That gives us pleasure, This gives
us rapture; That informs, This inspires; and is itself
inspired; for genius is from heaven, learning from man:. . .
Learning is borrowed knowlege; genius is knowlege innate,
and quite our own" (17). Throughout this section of the
essay, he depends heavily on analogy for his discussion.
Genius is to learning as virtue is to riches. Genius is to
learning as physical strength is to arms. Genius is to the
intellectual world as conscience is to the moral world. All
this, however, is simply to say that genius is innate and
therefore essentially better than supplementary learning,
which is superseded entirely when "heaven, . . . rejecting
all human means, assumes the whole glory to itself" (13).

The equivocal nature of originality--pure inner world or
imitation of nature?--for Young takes a new twist in this
contrast of genius and learning as he introduces the term
inspiration into his definition of genius. Genius is from
heaven; it is inspired. Yet Young seems not actually to
trust the inspiration of the poet, for he warns against

trying to portray heavenly things in poetry: "In the

126
fairyland of fancy, genius may wander wild; there it has a
creative power, and may reign arbitrarily over its own
empire of chimeras. The wide field of nature also lies open
before it, where it may range unconfined, make what discov-
eries it can, and sport with its infinite objects
uncontrouled, as far as visible nature extends, painting
them as wantonly as it will: But what painter of the most
unbounded and exalted genius can give us the true portrait
of a seraph? He can give us only what by his own or others
eyes, has been seen" (18). It seems curious that Young
should espouse inspiration by God and then immediately limit
what it can produce.

The internal conflicts in Young's understanding of
imitation, originality, and genius undermine the sense he
conveys (despite his title) that he alone has discovered how
poetry ought to be composed. Like the rest of the poets we
have seen theorizing about their own processes, Young offers
his ideas without grounding them in a coherent epistemology.
In fact, Young seems to have done what he most ardently
warns against doing--imitate another author. That "wild
field of nature" where genius "may range unconfined" bears a
striking verbal resemblance to the "field of nature" where
Dryden's spaniel-imagination "ranges"‘3; whatever Young may
think about original composition, his tenets seem more dif-
ficult to enact than to enunciate.

Despite its failings as a definitive program for the

work of the poet, Young's Qpnjecturgs pn Original meposi-

127
Lisp certainly takes up the relevant issues scattered
through the other works of poetic theory in the eighteenth
century. It serves the additional purpose of showing us how
early the stereotypic conception of neoclassical thought
developed; considering what Pope, Addison, Johnson, and the
others actually have to say, I am not sure whether to accuse
Young of creating a straw man to attack or to conclude that
the consensus of the reading public, despite the complex
views espoused by poets over a period of nearly two hundred
years, was that “servile copying" pretty well summed up what
poets do.“

The specific issues that absorb Young and his generation
differ markedly from those of concern to Sir Philip Sidney.
But Young takes up the call for poetic introspection that
Sidney first issued. Some people, he says, must imitate
because they have inadequate genius for originality, but

others have enough "inventive genius" to avoid imitation.

Whether our own genius be such, or not, we should
diligently inquire; that we may not go a begging with
gold in our purse. For there is a mine in man, which
must be deeply dug ere we can conjecture its contents.
Another often sees that in us, which we see not in our-
selves; and may there not be that in us which is unseen
by both.?". . .

Since it is plain that men may be strangers to their
own abilities; and by thinking meanly of them without
just cause, may possibly lose a name, perhaps a name
immortal; I would find some means to prevent these
evils. Whatever promotes virtue, promotes something
more, and carries its good influence beyond the moral
man: To prevent these evils, I borrow two golden rules
from thic , which are no less golden in meposigion,

than in life. I. Know thysglf; 2dly, vasrsnce
thyself: . . . [With regard to the first,] dive deep

128
into thy bosom; learn the depth, extent, bias, and full
fort of thy mind; contract full intimacy with the
stranger within thee; excite and cherish every spark of
intellectual light and heat, however smothered under
former negligence or scattered through the dull, dark
mass of common thoughts; and collecting them into a
body, let thy genius rise (if a genius thou hast) as the
sun from chaos; and if I should then say, like an
Indisn. quship it, (though too bold) yet should I say
little more than my second rule enjoins, (viz.)

Reverence thyself.
That is, let not great examples, or authorities,

browbeat thy reason into too great a diffidence of

thyself: Thyself so reverence, as to prefer the native

growth of thy own mind to the richest import from

abroad; such borrowed riches make us poor. (20-24)

The nature of poetry continues to receive considerable
attention throughout the second half of the century; the
hypothetical "neoclassical” definition is as elusive in
poets' remarks as ever. Sir William Jones takes on the
assumption that poetry (along with painting and music) is
essentially mimetic in his essay "On the Arts Commonly
Called Imitative" (1772): instead, he argues, poetry
originates in expression of the passions, imitating sec-
ondarily but not necessarily.‘° Two years later, Alexander
Gerard devotes himself to An Essay on anips, arguing, based
on association psychology, that the necessity of imitating
arises from a weak genius. Dealing with the balance of
fancy and judgment in the imagination and with the role of
the passions, he derives his opinions in large part from
Locke‘s E s Concernin Human Und r tandin , but

unfortunately for our purposes here he is concerned with

genius in general and not with its strictly poetic

129
manifestation, a distinction which Dr. Johnson also makes
but then allows to break down.
Imitation is not dead as a governing principle for the
production of poetry, however, and the interest in
Aristotle's rules is almost as strong as ever. Bishop Hurd

wishes to do for "universal poetry” what Aristotle did for

tragedy, and Thomas Twining, in Aristotle's Treatiss pn

Poetry (1789), attempts to sort out what is meant by imita-
tion in poetry as opposed to painting or music.

Henry MacKenzie's first essay on Falstaff in The Lpunger
epitomizes the amalgam of genius and imitation of nature
that characterizes the late-eighteenth-century idea of the
poetic process. MacKenzie opens by simply assuming "that
‘poet and creator are the same' . . . and that without the
powers of invention and imagination nothing great or highly
delightful in poetry can be achieved."“ Further, he says,
”of all poets Shakespeare appears to have possessed a fancy
the most prolific, an imagination the most luxuriantly fer-
tile."" It is not only in creating imaginary unearthly
beings, however, that Shakespeare exhibits this remarkable
genius; ”by a very singular felicity of invention he has
produced in the beaten field of ordinary life characters of
such perfect originality that we look on them with no less
wonder at his invention than on those preternatural beings.
. ., and yet they speak a language so purely that of common

society that we have but to step abroad into the world to

130
hear every expression of which it is composed.“" MacKenzie
offers no explanation for the juxtaposition of, essentially,
Pope's famous remarks on Shakespeare and Johnson’s.
Instead, he throws them together and expects us to believe--
as may be the case--that the perfect manifestation of
originality is in the representation of general nature.
Little wonder that the Romantic poets felt a need to begin
afresh with the project of describing the work of the poet
(although part of the purpose of my enterprise is to provide
evidence that they are no more original in their poetic

theory than Shakespeare is in his plays).

But the dominant figure of the second half of the eight-
eenth century was of course Samuel Johnson. Just as Addison
and Pope dominate the early years of the eighteenth century,
so Samuel Johnson takes precedence, in output and in impor-
tance, over anybody else in the middle and later years of
the century. Indeed, Johnson's contributions to criticism
are immeasurable, at least in this context, and have been
the subject of a number of recent studies, notable among
them Weinsheimer's Imitation, cited above, Leopold Dam-
rosch‘s The Uses of Johnson’s Criticism (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1976), and Paul Fussell's
Ssppsl Johnson snd she gife pf Writing (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1971). Although I regard Johnson‘s
reflection on widely diverse topics not directly concerned

with literary production as enormously relevant to his

131
self-understanding as a poet, he has plenty to say specifi-
cally about the poet's composing processes, offering charac-
terizations of different poets' habits of mind, analysis of
key terms for discussion of the invention process, and judg-

ments about the moral obligations of poets which affect the

composition of poetry.

About his own composing process Johnson has very little
explicit to say. He eschews the confessional mode in his
letters as well as in his periodical essays; even his
prayers belong more to the Book of Common Pcsys; than to
self-revelation." The closest he comes to describing his
own writing process is in The Adventurer No. 138, where he
speaks neither in the first person nor specifically of
poetry but rather in the third person about “the writer."
Nevertheless, this passage provides a clear view of the nuts
and bolts of composition for Johnson. The pleasures of

being an author

may sometimes be indulged to those, who come to a sub-
ject of disquisition with minds full of ideas, and with
fancies so vigorous, as easily to excite, select, and
arrange them. To write, is, indeed, no unpleasing
employment, when one sentiment readily produces another,
and both ideas and expressions present themselves at the
first summons: but such happiness, the greatest genius
does not always obtain; and common writers know it only
to such a degree, as to credit its possibility. Com-
position is, for the most part, an effort of slow
diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is
dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the
attention is every moment starting to more delightful
amusements.

It frequently happens, that a design which, when con-
sidered at a distance, gave flattering hopes of facil-
ity, mocks us in the execution with unexpected difficul-

132
ties; the mind which, while it considered it in the
gross, imagined itself amply furnished with materials,
finds sometimes an unexpected barrenness and vacuity,
and wonders whither all those ideas are vanished, which
a little before seemed struggling for emission.
Sometimes many thoughts present themselves; but so
confused and unconnected, that they are not without dif-
ficulty reduced to method, or concatenated in a regular
and dependent series: the mind falls at once into a
labyrinth, of which neither the beginning nor end can be
discovered, and toils and struggles without progress or
extrication.°°
Here we get a glimpse of the day-to-day work of the poet,
the joys of the full mind and ready fancy as well as the
frustrations of vanishing ideas, ideas so numerous and
interrelated that they are difficult to sort out, struggles
without progress. Both luck and diligence seem to play a

part in his work, and one apparently can write from either

internal or external compunction.

Johnson comments extensively on the work of composition
in his Lives of the English Ppsts. In the life of Milton he
claims to do so simply for entertainment, saying that there
could be no "more delightful entertainment than to trace
[great works'] gradual growth and expansion, and to observe
how they are sometimes suddenly advanced by accidental
hints, and sometimes improved by steady meditation."91 In
the life of Pope he similarly attributes desire to
understand the poet's work to "literary curiosity," noting
that "of such an intellectual process the knowledge has very
rarely been attainable."°= Implicit, however, in his

examination of poets' peculiar habits of mind, is the idea

133
of the poet as model, for Johnson is now approving, now con-
demning in his remarks about specific behaviors or traits.
On several poets‘ particular invention processes he
remarked at length. With respect to Milton Johnson notes
that "invention is almost the only literary labour which
blindness cannot obstruct, and therefore he naturally
solaced his solitude by the indulgence of his fancy, and the
melody of his numbers." Besides indulging his fancy, Milton
prepared to write by study of "seemly arts and affairs," by
learning many languages, and by reading and writing a great
deal in English.°3 As far as putting words on paper,
according to Johnson,
Of his artifices of study, or particular hours of com-
position, we have little account, and there was perhaps
little to be told. Richardson, who seems to have been
very diligent in his enquiries, but discovers always a
wish to find Milton discriminated from other men,
relates, that "he would sometimes lie awake whole
nights, but not a verse could he make; and on a sudden
his poetical faculty would rush upon him with an impggus
or 0 str m, and his daughter was immediately called to

secure what came. At other times he would dictate per-
haps forty lines in a breath, and then reduce them to

half the number."°‘
Johnson does not regard these circumstances with the awe he
attributes to Richardson, pointing out that any person doing
any job manages it better at some times than at others.
Furthermore, he notes that Milton's daughters apparently did
not know how to write, and, while admitting that all writers
of "fertile and copious mind" have to edit, Johnson dis-

credits the particulars of Richardson's final sentence.”

134
Of Dryden's poetic mind, Johnson offers a tersely worded
summary:
In a general survey of Dryden's labours, he appears to
have a mind very comprehensive by nature, and much
enriched with acquired knowledge. His compositions are

the effects of a vigorous genius operating upon large
materials.

The power that predominated in his intellectual
operations, was rather strong reason than quick
sensibility. Upon all occasions that were presented, he
studied rather than felt, and produced sentiments not
such as Nature enforces, but meditation supplies. With
the simple and elemental passions, as they spring sepa-
rate in the mind, he seems not much acquainted; and
seldom describes them but as they are complicated by the
various relations of society, and confused in the
tumults and agitations of life.°‘

Dryden's comprehensive mind is responsible for his acquired
knowledge, though, lest one suppose that he has studied
diligently. Johnson says ”I rather believe that the knowl-
edge of Dryden was gleaned from accidental intelligence and
various conversation, by a quick apprehension, a judicious
selection, and a happy memory, a keen appetite of knowledge,
and a powerful digestion; by vigilance that permitted
nothing to pass without notice“ rather than by "the silent
progress of solitary reading.“"7 Johnson goes on to des-
cribe Dryden's fondness for disputation in a way that
recalls Johnson himself "talking for victory.“ Finally,
Johnson remarks on Dryden's impatience as a poet. Satisfied
that he was the greatest poet, Dryden did not care "to rise

by contending with himself but while there was no name

above his own, was willing to enjoy fame on the easiest

135
terms." Johnson points out that there is no evidence of
Dryden's correcting or improving his works after publication

and concludes that "he was no lover of labour."°'

Not surprisingly, the nearer his own time Johnson comes
in the piyss, the more he finds to say about the composing
processes of the poets. Of Pope's he knows an enormous
amount. He notes Pope's childhood desire to be a poet and
his distinction of Dryden as the best model.°’ But where
Dryden's favorite habit of mind was ratiocination, Pope's
intellectual character was marked by "the constituent and
fundamental principle [of] Good Sense, a prompt and intui-
tive perception of consonance and propriety." (Johnson had
also remarked, without the elaboration we find about Dryden
and Pope, on the particular talents of earlier poets. Of
Cowley he notes simply that "if he was formed by nature for
one kind of writing more than for another, his power seems
to have been greatest in the familiar and the festive."‘°
Similarly, he argues that imagination was Milton's great
strength and that its fruit was sublimity.‘1) Despite his
predominating good sense, Pope did not lack genius, accord-
ing to Johnson, for he had “a mind active, ambitious, and
adventurous, always investigating, always aspiring; in its
widest searches still longing to go forward, in its highest
flights still wishing to be higher," as well as "great

strength and exactness of memory" to assist his genius and

good sense.‘2

136
As for Pope's actual writing, Johnson says that "the
method of Pope, as may be collected from his translation,
was to write his first thoughts in his first words, and
gradually to amplify, decorate, rectify, and refine them."“-'3
Unlike Dryden, he goes on, Pope was not satisfied with his
productions at first:
He is said to have sent nothing to the press till it had
lain two years under his inspection: it is at least
certain, that he ventured nothing without nice examina-
tion. He suffered the tumult of imagination to subside,
and the novelties of invention to grow familiar. He
knew that the mind is always enamoured of its own pro-
ductions, and did not trust his first fondness. He con-
sulted his friends, and listened with great willingness
to criticism; and, what was of more importance, he con-
sulted himself, and let nothing pass against his own
judgment.“
Johnson seems here to have preserved the vestiges of the
seventeenth-century bifurcation of fancy and judgment, but
it is with revision that he is particularly concerned. Ear-
lier in the life of Pope he examines in detail Pope's revi-
sions of his translation of the liipd, finding, as with

Milton's Paradise Lost, that the changes an author makes are

most instructive about his composing processes.

Revision appears again as Johnson's chief interest in
describing the composing processes of Thomas Gray. Unlike
Pope, Gray "had this peculiarity, that he did not write his
pieces first rudely, and then correct them, but laboured
every line as it arose in the train of composition; and he

had a notion not very peculiar, that he could not write but

137
at certain times, or at happy moments; a fantastick foppery,
to which my kindness for a man of learning and of virtue
wishes him to have been superior.""

Johnson has more to say about forces pp; relevant to the
composing process in the life of Milton. In the space of a
few paragraphs, he takes up and dismisses the common
seventeenth-century beliefs about the influence of weather,
the decay of nature, and the degree of latitude on poetry.
All of these Johnson regards as unreasonable fancies, but he
acknowledges that what we believe governs what we can do:
"while this notion has possession of the head, it produces
the inabililty which it supposes.““ On the other hand,
Johnson does admit some external forces in the composing

process. Speaking of some lines of Pope on Gay, he remarks

that

As Gay was the favourite of our author, this epitaph was
probably written with an uncommon degree of attention;
yet it is not more successfully executed than the rest,
for it will not always happen that the success of a poet
is proportionate to his labour. The same observation
may be extended to all works of imagination, which are
often influenced by causes wholly out of the performer's
power, by hints of which he perceives not the origin, by
sudden elevations of mind which he cannot produce in
himself, and which sometimes rise when he expects them
least."7

For all he professes to know about how poets in general work
and how his subjects in particular worked, Johnson still

allows that the poetic process is ultimately mysterious.

138

Besides his efforts to describe the composing habits of
poets and to elucidate the habits of mind that characterize
the poets, Johnson contributes to our understanding of the
poetic act by discussing topics common in eighteenth-century
discussions of literary theory. Genius is the most widely
recurrent of such topics. Johnson uses the word to refer to
poetic abilities again and again in the Liygs of thgiPoggs,
but he also explains what he means by it, incorporating into
his explanation other common terms such as invention,
imagination, fancy, and wit.

The life of Cowley offers a definition of genius very
early on. Describing Cowley's youthful interest in 122
Faerie Queene, which purportedly led to his becoming a poet,
Johnson elaborates: "Such are the accidents, which, some-
times remembered, and perhaps sometimes forgotten, produce
that particular designation of mind, and propensity for some
certain science or employment, which is commonly called
Genius. The true Genius is a mind of large general powers,
accidentally determined to some particular direction.”"
Here he suggests that we are to understand genius as a gen-
eral label for intellectual excellence, and not as a pecu-
liarly designated attribute, as genius-for-something, but
later in the life of Cowley he seems to take the opposite
position. Milton and Cowley, he says, are "two great Poets,
. . . of dissimilar genius, of opposite principles,"" In

the life of Pope, he overtly changes his definition of

139
genius: ”Of genius, that power which constitutes a poet;
that quality without which judgement is cold and knowledge
is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies,
and animates; the superiority must, with some hesitation, be
allowed to Dryden [over Pope]." And, later in the life of
Pope, he offers a veritable catalog of the sub-qualities

that comprise genius:

Pope had, in proportions very nicely adjusted to each
other, all the qualities that constitute genius. He had
Inygntion, by which new trains of events are formed, and
new scenes of imagery displayed, as in the Rspe of thg
Lock; and by which extrinsick and adventitious embel-
lishments and illustrations are connected with a known
subject, as in the Essay on Qriticism. He had Imsgina-
tion, which strongly impresses on the writer's mind, and
enables him to convey to the reader, the various forms
of nature, incidents of life, and energies of passion,
as in his Eloisa, Winds r Forest, and the Ethick
Epistles. He had Juggement which selects from life or
nature what the present purpose requires, and, by sepa-
rating the essence of things from its concomitants,
often makes the representation more powerful than the
reality: and he had colours of language always before
him, ready to decorate his matter with every grace of
elegant expression, as when he accommodates his diction
to the wonderful multiplicity of Homer's sentiments and
descriptions.7°

In the life of Thomson, Johnson associates genius with
originality. “As a writer," he says, Thomson "is entitled
to one praise of the highest kind: his mode of thinking,
and of expressing his thoughts, is original." With regard
to that mode of thinking, "he thinks in a peculiar train,
and he thinks always as a man of genius; he looks round on

Nature and on Life, with the eye which Nature bestows only

on a poet; the eye that distinguishes, in every thing pre-

140
sented to its view, whatever there is on which imagination
can delight to be detained, and with a mind that at once
comprehends the vast, and attends to the minute.""‘1 Indeed,
this passage contains similar sentiments to those in the
analysis of Pope's genius, except for the term "original,"
which until the life of Thomson does not figure in Johnson‘s
discussion of the poetic process.

Other terms concern Johnson earlier in the givgs,
however. Not surprisingly, in discussing the seventeenth-
century poets he interests himself in the term wit, offering
a lengthy discussion of it in the life of Cowley, where he
considers the "metaphysical poets and their claim to wit."
Finding Pope‘s famous definition of wit erroneous and reduc-

tive, Johnson offers his own musings on the subject:

If by a more noble and more adequate conception that be
considered as Wit, which is at once natural and new,
that which, though not obvious, is, upon its first pro-
duction, acknowledged to be just; if it be that, which
he that never found it, wonders how he missed; to wit of
this kind the metaphysical poets have seldom risen.
Their thoughts are often new, but seldom natural; they
are not obvious, but neither are they just; and the
reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders
more frequently by what perverseness of industry they
were ever found.

But Wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer,
may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as
a kind of discorgia soncors; a combination of dissimilar
images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things
apparently unlike. Of wit, thus defined, they have more
than enough.72

If Johnson sounds indecisive about the meaning of the term

wit, he confirms his indecision some pages later: "It was

141
about the time of Cowley that Wit, which had been till then
used for Intellection, in contradistinction to Will, took

the meaning, whatever it be, which it now bears.“’3

Other issues which have preoccupied critical theorists
over the centuries also interest Johnson. The issue of
imitating other authors arises from time to time, although
in light of Johnson's ysnity of Humpp Wispgs, it may seem
that his critical remarks on it are somewhat disingenuous.
Of Cowley he remarks "He read much, and yet borrowed little"
in a context of approbation; he goes on to undermine this
praise by noting that “his character of writing was indeed
not his own: he unhappily adopted that which was
predominant.”7‘ Similarly, he remarks of Dryden that "what
he had of humorous or passionate, he seems to have had not
from nature, but from other poets; if not always as a
plagiary, at least as an imitator."7'

Along with genius, the other critical term sprinkled
most liberally through the Livss of ghg English Posts is
nature, particularly the imitation of nature, which we see
here contrasted (as so often before) with the imitation of
other poets. But we must look elsewhere for Johnson's
elaboration of the imitation of nature. The chief feature
of Johnson's position on this subject is the much-cited
admonition to imitate general rather than particular nature.
Indeed, this issue dominates his thought on the poetic

process throughout the 17505, beginning with a sneer in

142

Rambler No. 4 at works of pure ”imagination": authors were
long willing to write out of a "wild strain of imagination,
. . . for when a man had by practice gained some fluency of
language, he had no further care than to retire from his
closet, let loose his invention, and heat his mind with
incredibilities,“ thus producing a book "without fear of
criticism, without the toil of study, without knowledge of
nature, or acquaintance with life,” unlike the works of con-
temporary writers, whose works "must arise from general con-
verse and accurate observation of the living world.""

Rambler 4, of course, goes on to consider the menace of
"mixed" heroes; we must turn to The Adventurgr No. 95 for an
explanation of the imitation of nature. Here Johnson
devotes himself to the general vs. particular imitation of
nature in the context of discussing plagiarism. He opens
with a statement of the ”problem“ of imitation: ”It is
often charged upon writers, that with all their pretensions
to genius and discoveries, they do little more than copy one
another; and that compositions obtruded upon the world with
the pomp of novelty, contain only tedious repetitions of
common sentiments, or at best exhibit a transposition of
known images, and give a new appearance to truth only by
some slight difference of dress and decoration."77 This
accusation is true, he goes on to say, but it is not there-
fore true to conclude that all poets are plagiarists. "We

do not wonder, that historians, relating the same facts,

143
agree in their narration; or that authors delivering the
elements of science, advance the same theorems . . . The
same indulgence is to be shewn to the writers of morality:
right and wrong are immutable."" The relations of social
life--duties, passions--are always the same in every age;
only in particular niceties does the writer have any freedom

to depart from his predecessors. Thus, his apparent

deprecation of imitating authors in the Lives notwithstand-
ing, Johnson would seem to agree with Pope that nature and
Homer are the same.

At the end of the decade, Johnson put the matter more-
succinctly in the words of Imlac: ”‘The business of a
poet,’ said Imlac, ‘is to examine, not the individual, but
the species; to remark general properties and large
appearances: he does not number the streaks of the tulip,
or describe the different shades in the verdure of the
forest. He is to exhibit in his portraits of nature such
prominent and striking features, as recall the original to
every mind.'"”

It is this standard of the representation of nature by
which Johnson judged Shakespeare as well. In the Preface to
Shakgspeare (1765), he argues that “nothing can please many,
and please long, but just representations of general
nature," and “Shakespeare is above all writers, at least
above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that

holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of

144
life. His characters are not modified by the customs of
particular places . . . studies or professions . . .; they
are the genuine progeny of common humanity"'°--Shakespeare's
"mirror" apparently comes from a different glassworks than
the one in Rambler No. 4 which is as undiscriminating as the
naked eye.

Johnson's stand on general and particular nature is one
of his most famous positions, but his character as a
moralist is perhaps even more widely known and, like his
stand on imitating nature, has bearing on his description of
the poet’s work. Of course, most of his moral judgments
about literary works are most directly applicable to
audiences rather than to poets, but his remarks on fiction
and truth, on the political lives of poets, and on the use
of biblical stories in modern poems concern the work of the
poet as well.

Early in the life of Cowley Johnson states a principle
for poetic creation that he adheres to at least through the
life of Milton. The poet, he argues, should not write about
what he has not experienced. "The basis of all excellence
is truth: he that professes love ought to feel its power
. . . . It is surely not difficult, in the solitude of a
college, or in the bustle of the world, to find useful
studies and serious employment. No man needs to be so
burthened with life as to squander it in voluntary dreams of

fictitious occurrences.” Cowley, therefore, is to be less

145
esteemed for writing so much about love because he experi-
enced it only once and did not have "resolution to tell his
passion” even then.'1

Milton receives similar censure for pysigss. A poem
engendered by real passion would not, in Johnson's opinion,
contain "remote allusions and obscure opinions.“ In fact,
nothing is right with this work: "In this poem there is no
nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is
nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar,
and therefore disgusting: whatever images it can supply,
are long ago exhausted; and its inherent improbability
always forces dissatisfaction on the mind.“'2 Whereas in
Cowley's case biographical data demonstrated the fic-
tionality of the poetry, here it is the poetry that calls
into question the truth of Milton‘s avowed feelings.

Johnson is not, despite appearances to the contrary in
the lives of Cowley and Milton, against the use of fiction
entirely. Of course, he devotes much of Rsmbler No. 4 to
the proper use of fiction, but he summarizes his position in
the life of Waller as well. "Poets, indeed, profess fic-
tion; but the legitimate end of fiction is the conveyance of
truth; and he that has flattery ready for all whom the
vicissitudes of the world happen to exalt, must be scorned
as a prostituted mind, that may retain the glitter of wit,
but has lost the dignity of virtue.“'3 The fault of Cowley
in his love poetry and Milton in pygigas, then, would seem

to be that their fictions did not convey truth.

146

Johnson's stricture against flattering those whom the
world has favored reveals another ongoing moral concern in
his writing about the work of the poet. In evaluating the
works of Cowley and Dryden, in particular, he expends con-
siderable effort determining the extent of their sincerity
in praising the Puritans, concerning himself as well with
the degree to which Cowley entered into complicity with the
Puritans and with Dryden's sincerity in religious conver-
sions." It is very clear that, for Johnson, the poet's
life and work are to be marked by sincerity and virtue;
insincere, virtueless works may be wit, but they are not
poetry.

Given his preference for truth over fiction, we might
expect Johnson to advocate, with John Dennis, the adoption
of sacred history for poetic matter. But Johnson does not.
His primary reason is that readers cannot enter stories from
scriptures imaginatively--life itself is so utterly dif-
ferent now that modern people are unable to feel the emo-
tions appropriate to the tale being told. Further, Johnson
regards the poet's attempt to amplify such stories as "friv-
olous and vain, . . . not only useless, but in some degree
profane."'° Here again Johnson‘s belief that the poet
should not write what he has not felt surfaces. Against
Milton's subject in Parsdise Lost, he remarks that "pleasure
and terrour are indeed the genuine sources of poetry; but
poetical pleasure must be such as human imagination can at

least conceive.""

147
Against poetic devotion (a contradiction in terms for

Johnson) he has something to say as well.

Contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and
the human soul, cannot be poetical. Man admitted to
implore the mercy of his Creator, and plead the merits
of his Redeemer, is already in a higher state than
poetry can confer.

The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as,
by producing something unexpected, surprises and
delights. The topicks of devotion are few, and being
few are universally known; but, few as they are, they
can be made no more; they can receive no grace from
novelty of sentiment and very little from novelty of
expression.

Poetry pleases by exhibiting an idea more grateful to
the mind than things themselves afford. This effect
proceeds from the display of those parts of nature which
attract, and the concealment of those which repel the
imagination: but religion must be shewn as it is; sup-
pression and addition equally corrupt it; and such as it
is, it is known already.'7

Rather than detract from his reputation as a religious man,
Johnson's manner of excluding religious topics from the

province of poetry demonstrates his sense of propriety and,

if anything, heightens our sense of his piety.

If Young's Conjectures on Originpl Compositipn

represents the single most direct "response" to Sidney's
advice to poets to “know what they do and how they do," the
career of Samuel Johnson, as a whole, most thoroughly
demonstrates the development, over two hundred years, of
Sidney's skeletal poetic program. In Johnson we find filled
out the inquiry into the mind of the poet that Sidney only

projected, and we see explicitly carried out the investiga-

148
tion of the poet's responsibility with respect to truth-

telling and moral persuasion that Sidney only began.

Chapter 5
Additions to the Neighborhood:

The Ivory Tower and the Factory

The poets' great outpouring of poetic theory in the
eighteenth century and the accompanying interest of the
”common reader" in the work of the poet represent what might
be considered the fulfillment of Sidney's (and Farquhar's)
injunction to poets to "know themselves," and of Jonson and
Milton's vision of the poet's proper place in public life.
Ironically, however, this exaltation of poets brings with it
consequences that will eventually displace or undermine
their authority.

The first of these consequences is the academization of
poetry. Not only does the poetic process receive con-
siderable discussion among poets of the first few decades of
the eighteenth century; this interest is formalized in
English life with the establishment of the first chair of
poetry at Oxford in 1708. Joseph Trapp, the first professor
of poetry, was required to lecture five times per year on
his subject, and these lectures were printed several times
in the eighteenth century (first in Latin in 1711).

Trapp's ideas about the poetic process, and about poetry
in general, are generally categorized as "Aristotelian,"
which seems a fitting appellation since his appointment
represents the return of poetic theory to the Academy, from

which, according to Farquhar, it had so recently been

149

150
wrested. A poet himself, Trapp nevertheless does not offer
any startling new insight into the poetic process in his
Oxford lectures; rather his aim seems to have been to
recapitulate the whole history of critical inquiry in
English, beginning with the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin
understandings of the name “poet."

Inquiring into the origins of poetry, Trapp argues for
"the Love implanted in Mankind of Imitaiipn and Hsrmpny."1L
Unlike the poets presumably writing to their readers, he
feels obliged to look into the origins of these loves of
mankind and to refute other positions on the origins of
poetry. On the idea of some "poetic fire," for example, he
argues that ”it may be reckoned a Concomitant of Poetry, but
not the Cause of it. No more can an Attempt to write
Verses, which is rather the Thing itself in its first State
of Imperfection; much less can the Perfection of any Thing
be the Cause of its being perfected; that's absurd, and a
mere Contradiction in Terms."2 Throughout his lectures,
Trapp demonstrates considerably more attention to logic and
"scientific" investigation into his topic than any poet
since the rhetorical school of the sixteenth century.3

Another topic of particular interest to Trapp is whether
the poet is made or born. With Horace, he finds that the
poet is both made and born, and argues that the proverb
(poeta nascitur, etc.) only means that “the Strength of
Genius enters more into the Composition of a Poet, than the

Refinements of Art."‘ And, he suggests, it is this

151
necessary genius which has been interpreted as inspiration
in preceding ages, but “that this was no real Inspiration in
the ancient Poets, (except in those sacred ones that com-
municated God's Will to Mankind) nor is now so in the
Moderns, I suppose needs no proof."5 Trapp's interests
clearly coincide with those of the other poets of his day;
however, his techniques of investigation seem more
deliberately historical and logical.

Throughout the eighteenth century, the poetry professors
at Oxford continue to lecture on poetry, though not neces-
sarily on the poetic process, and, like Trapp, they tend to
be men who first established their reputations as poets. Of
particular importance, according to D. Fairer, is Robert
Lowth, who moved criticism a long way toward romanticism in
his interest in the lyric and in Hebrew poetry.‘ Other
prominent occupants of the chair include Thomas Warton the
elder and his son Thomas. The careers of these men do not
bring with them the divorce of writing poetry from theoriz-
ing about it that we see in the twentieth century, nor does
poetry become the almost-exclusive province of the scholar
in its early years in the university curriculum. Neverthe-
less, it seems likely that the eighteenth-century poetry
chair at Oxford is at least a contributing cause of the
twentieth-century relegation of poetry to English teachers
and poetic theory to philosophers, a state of affairs par-
ticularly ironic since the popularity of poets and poetry

with the general reading public seems to have inspired the

152
creation of the chair in the first place.

The second contributor to the decline of poets' musings
on the poetic process might be called the commercialization
of poetry, although this issue is extremely complex--
involving both the actual publishing industry and the
beginnings of industrialization in general--and its reper-
cussions for poetic theory ambiguous. At first it seems
that the rise in popularity of poetry inspired more poets to
write about their own composing processes, and the increas-
ing honor accompanying the title "poet" inclined them to
treat their work with high seriousness, but ultimately the
concomitant revolution in the publishing industry and demand
for widely available books of poetry make it difficult for
poets to resist the financial rewards of saying what the
public wanted to hear.

From Sidney's time through the eighteenth century, being
a poet had come to be seen more and more as a "calling," a
vocation in the strong sense, and poets emphasized their
perception of being compelled to write poetry; my assessment
of the Apology in Chapter 1 was essentially that Sidney
first raises the possibility that writing poetry may be a
calling and not merely diversion or means of earning a
living. Pope censured Crashaw for writing verse as a
leisure activity, arguing that a real poet writes from a
nobler motivation than diversion alone. Yet Pope is on the
declining edge of the more Miltonic sense of vocation;

despite his remarks to Swift that he wrote poetry only to

153
procure friends, there is considerable verbal and historical
evidence (chronicled elsewhere) that what he really wrote
for were fame and money.
It is not as though poets had never before earned a
livelihood by writing, but until the eighteenth century
doing so was a straightforward matter, predicated on need

and involving no dissembling. But as poets evolved their

theories of the creative process and the distinction between
aristocratic dabblers in poetry and wage-earning playwrights
blurred, poets lost sight of their simple economic necessity
and emphasized the vocational aspect of their work instead.
At the same time, however, the patronage system was giving
way to the publishing trade, and the great poets developed a
different kind of commercial value than before.

This new financial aspect of writing poetry is a factor
at least as early as Dryden. In his life of Dryden, Johnson
notes the commercial value of the famous poet, remarking
that "his reputation in time was such, that his name was
thought necessary to the success of every poetical or
literary performance, and therefore he was engaged to con-
tribute something, whatever it might be, to many pub-
lications."7

But in Pope we see the first as well as the paradigmatic
example of real conflict between the poet's sense of calling
and his financial motivation. Of the commercial value of

Pope's reputation Johnson provides more specifics:

154

He gave the same year (1721) an edition of Shakespesre.
His name was now of so much authority, that Tonson
thought himself entitled, by annexing it, to demand a
subscription of six guineas for Shakespeare's plays in
six quarto volumes; nor did his expectation much deceive
him; for of seven hundred and fifty which he printed, he
dispersed a great number at the price proposed. The
reputation of that edition indeed sunk afterwards so
low, that one hundred and forty cOpies were sold at six-
teen shillings each.

On this undertaking, to which Pope was induced by a
reward of two hundred and seventeen pounds twelve shill-
ings, he seemed never to have reflected afterwards
without vexation; for Theobald, a man of heavy
diligence, with very slender powers, first, in a book
called Shake eare Restored, and then in a formal edi-
tion, detected his deficiencies with all the insolence
of victory; and, as he was now high enough to be feared
and hated, Theobald had from others all the help that
could be supplied, by the desire of humbling a haughty
character.‘

Pope's edition of Shakes eare, considered as a pub-
lisher’s ploy to sell books, is merely a precursor to the
more elaborate schemes of the latter part of the eighteenth

century. Indeed, Johnson's own pivss pf thg English Ppeis

originated in the desire of a group of booksellers to attach

a great name to their series entitled Works pf ghg English

Poets so that it might better compete with John Bell's
series Ths Ppets of Grsat Brigain.’ Whatever part the rise
of publishing played in establishing the English canon, and
Thomas Bonnell suggests that its role was enormous, the fact
remains that the poets were skeptical about the value of
industrializing poetry, even as they profited by it.

If Johnson‘s description of Pope's experience seems a
cautionary tale, it agrees with the attitudes expressed by
Edward Young and by Pope himself. That the sense of "voca-

tion" in many poets was shifting from something like

155
“vocation to the priesthood" toward something like the voca-
tion implied in "vocational training" is evidenced by the
commercial imagery they use to denounce certain kinds of
poetry. Not surprisingly, Young condemns imitation as
"manufacture," remarking that "an Original may be said to be
of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital
root of genius; it grows, it is not Eggs: mitations are
often a sort of manufacture wrought up by those mechanics,
s53, and labour, out of preexistent materials not their
own."1°

Pope employs the same imagery in a much more extended
fashion in his condemnation of the "profound" in The Ar; of
Sinking in Poeiry. Identifying himself satirically with the
poets of profundity, he opens with remarks on "the flourish-
ing state of our Trade, and the plenty of our Manufac-
ture."** In fact, he goes on, "I doubt not but we shall
shortly be able to level the Highlanders [who, he notes,
"have often committed Petty Larcenies upon our borders . . .
and carried off at once whole Cart-loads of our manufac-
ture], and procure a farther vent for our own product, which
is already so much relished, encouraged, and rewarded, by
the Nobility and Gentry of Great Britain" (376).

The complicity of the nobility and gentry of Great
Britain in the production of bad poetry is clear to Pope,
and he apparently deplores the power of popular taste to
govern poetic production. "If the intent of all Poetry be

to divert and instruct, certainly that kind which diverts

156
and instructs the reatest number, is to be preferred. Let
us look round among the Admirers of Poetry, we shall find
those who have a taste of the Sublime to be very few; but
the Profund strikes universally" (377).

If we have not yet gotten the point, Pope spells it out
for us. Speaking of ”our wiser authors," he states that
"their true design is Profit or Gain; in order to acquire
which, ’tis necessary to procure applause by administering
pleasure to the reader: From whence it follows demonstrably,
that their productions must be suited to the present Taste"
(377-78). These satirical remarks come perilously close to
Johnson's assessment of Pope's own motivation for his edi-
tion of Shakespeare, but Pope seems oblivious to his own

apparent hypocrisy.

Pope drops the industry metaphor in order to catalog his

rules for writing profoundly, but at the end of Pgri Bathous
he returns to it emphatically. In Chapter XIII, ”A Project

for the Advancement of the Bathos," he advocates that

every individual of the Bathos do enter into a firm
association, and incorporate into One regular Body,
whereof every member, even the meanest, will some way
contribute to the support of the whole; in like manner,
as the weakest reeds, when joined in one bundle, become
infrangible. To which end our Art out to be put upon
the same foot with other Arts of this age. The vast
improvement of modern manufactures ariseth from their
being divided into several branches, and parcelled out
to several trades: For instance, in Clock-making one
artist makes the balance, another the spring, another
the crown-wheels, a fourth the case, and the principal
workman puts all together: To this economy we owe the
perfection of our modern watches, and doubtless we also
might that of our modern Poetry and Rhetoric, were the
several parts branched out in the like manner. (414)

157
Here Pope facetiously elaborates the profit motive and the
leveling of poetry-writing to manufacture into a proposal to

form a poetry-producing corporation and operate it as a

rudimentary assembly line.

Sorting out Pope's expressed opinions from his pub-
lishing history is the work of another essay, as is untan-
gling the relationships among publishing, the establishment
of the poetic canon, and the rise of the academic poetry
industry. It is tempting--if premature--to conclude that
the academization and the commercialization of poetry are
intimately connected, and that somehow the eighteenth-
century popularity of poetry results in its twentieth-
century unpopularity, as its philosophical substance is
divorced from its commercial value.

In any case, there seems more to be gleaned from the
ideas of poets about their composing processes than general-
ized definitions of the key terms of literary theory, and
more at work in what they say about those processes than
some general understanding of poetic production held by con-
sensus in the "Renaissance" or "neoclassical" age. Realiz-
ing the impossibility of our knowing what poets “really
thought" through the inevitable linguistic, cultural, and
temporal filters, I have nevertheless attempted, as much as
possible, to let them speak for themselves, after estab-
lishing that there is indeed a self-consciousness about
their poetic work operative in the poets' critical remarks

beginning with Sir Philip Sidney. I have resisted the

158

impulse to derive a pgfi systematic interpretation of poets'
understanding of the poetic process from Sidney to Johnson,
although new interpretations are certainly warranted.

Indeed, while I find the poets' concern with their own
processes and the specific discussions of their work of
intrinsic interest and value, the chief aim of my enterprise
has been to lay the groundwork for new interpretations and
inquiries. The academization and commercialization of
poetry in the eighteenth century and their apparent reper-
cussions for poetic self-understanding certainly deserve
further investigation, as does the role of expected reader-
ship in the whole process of poetic production; these issues
might profitably be pursued back to the Renaissance and into
the twentieth century. In a broader frame of reference, the
development of poetic self-consciousness might be held up
against the development of self-consciousness in general, or
the discussions by poets of their own poetic processes might
contribute significantly to an understanding of the experi-
ence of being a poet in a given age. Whatever specific
inquiries a careful study of the poets writing on their com-
posing processes may inspire, clearly their discussions
reveal less consistency from poet to poet, less internal
coherence within the thought of a given poet, and less
adherence to the poetic program critics have attributed to
each age than has heretofore been generally acknowledged,

and therefore deserve fresh attention in new contexts.

Notes to Chapter 1

1. For a full survey of source and thematic studies of
the A olo , see A. Leigh DeNeef, "Rereading Sidney's Apol-
pgy," Jourpsl of Medieval and Renaissan Stud es, 10
(1980), 155-191.

2. See for example Ronald Levao, Renaissance Minds and
their Fictions: Cusanus, Sidney, Shakespeare (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1985), and Alan Hager,
“‘Sweet Smoke of Rhetoric': The ‘Eiron' and His Irony in
the ‘Defense of Poesie' and Book I of the ‘1590 Arcadia'"
(Ph.D. Diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1978).

3. Lewis Soens, for example, explains any disparaging
remarks about poetry in the Apology as “Renaissance com-
monplaces" in his edition of Sir Philip Sidney‘s Dsfensg of
Poesy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970).
Andrew Weiner, on the other hand, acknowledges Sidney's
doubts in his introduction to Sir Philip Sidney and the
Epstics of Protestantism: A Study of Contexgs (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota, 1978), but goes on to treat his
works as the productions of a confirmed and singleminded
poet with specific public positions to take through his
poetry, as does Neil L. Rudenstine in his Signsy's Ppetig
Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).

But James M. Osborn, biographer, in Young Philip Sidney
1572-1577 (New Haven: Yale University Press for the

Elizabethan Club, 1972), essentially dismisses Sidney as a
poet at least during those years because his loyalties were
to the political arena.

4. Sir Philip Sidney, An Applogy for Ppgtryip: Thg
Defence of Poes , ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Nelson,
1965), 95. Subsequent references to this edition of the

Apology will appear parenthetically in the text.

5. "To My Dear Lady and Sister, The Countess of Pem-
broke," in Sir Philip Sidney, Th nt of Pem ro e's
Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (Harmondsworth, Middlesex,
England: Penguin Books, 1977).

6. Thomas Moffet, Nobilis or A Vigg of the Life and

Death of a Signey and ggssus Lugubris (1592), intro.,
trans., and notes by Virgil B. Heltzel and Hoyt H. Hudson

(San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1940), 91. Subsequent
citations will appear parenthetically in the text.

7. Dorothy Connell, The Maksr's Mind (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1977), 51 and 71-72.

159

160
8. Osborn, 143.

9. Soens, x-xv.

10. Irene Samuels, "The Influence of Plato on Sir
Philip Sidney's Defense of Poes ," Modern Language Quarterly
1 (1940):383-91. See also Cornell March Dowlin, in "Sid-
ney's Two Definitions of Poetry," Modern Language Quarterly
3 (1942):573-581, who agrees with Samuels that it is
Platonism, not Puritanism, against which Sidney argues.

11. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the
Latin MiddlsfiAggs, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Har-

per & Row, 1953), 400.

12. Sidney did write briefly about the use of reading
poetry to his brother Robert in advising him about his
education. ’

13. Osborn, 504, and Roger Howell, Sir Philip Sidney:
The Shepherd Knight (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company,
1968), 153.

14. George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesie, intro.
by Baxter Hathaway (N.P.: The Kent State University Press,

1970), 36.

15. Alan Hager says that “Thomas Moffet's Nobilis . . .
is largely a treatise on University learning, where the dead
Sidney serves, as best he can, the function of exemplum for
his own nephew, William Herbert," 4.

16. Sidney to Languet, March 1, 1578, in [get ref.]
Elsewhere, early in their epistolary relationship, Languet
talks about encouraging Sidney to practice writing, "believ-
ing that the habit of writing was an important part of your
studies. . . I am aware that you were not overfond of writ-
ing when you had more leisure" he concludes (Languet to Sid-
ney, Midsummer 1575), 95.

17. DeNeef, 187-188. Although I disagree with DeNeef's
suggestion, I am sympathetic with the note about it: "There
is, of course, no direct evidence of such an intention, but
we have been stymied so long by assuming that Sidney is
simply answering Gosson that some speculation about his
larger motives seems in order“ (188).

18. Norman Egbert McClure, Thg setters and Epigrsms of
Sirygohn Harington together with Thg_Praise of Private Lifg
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), 86-

B7.

19. Levao, 184.

161

20. Kenneth Myrick, Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary

Craftsman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1935),
42.

21. Leslie Donley Foster, "Sidney's Praise of Man: A
Reassessment of the Nature of the Literary Theory in The
Defence of Poesie" (Ph.D. Diss, University of Notre Dame,
1974), 23.

22. DeNeef, 190.

23. Frank 8. Evans, "The Concept of the Fall in Sid-

ney's Apologie," Renaissance Papers 1969:9-14; Weiner; and
Rudenstine.

24. Levao, 139.
25. Hager, 176.

26. For an extended discussion of the term "imagina-
tion" in the Renaissance, see Puttenham's modern editor,
Hathaway; William Rossky, "Imagination in the English
Renaissance: Psychology and Poetic," Stugies in the
Renaissance 5 (1958):49-73; and Murray Wright Bundy, ng_
ngory of Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought

 

 

(Urbana: University of Illinois, 1927) and "‘Invention' and
‘Imagination' in the Renaissance," Journal of English and

 

Germanic Philology 29 (1930):535-545.

27. George Gascoigne, "Certayne Notes of Instruction
Concerning the Making of Verse or Ryme in English" (1575),
in En lish Literar Criticism: The Rena‘ssance, ed. 0.8.
Hardison (London: Peter Owen, 1963).

28. John Webster, ed. and trans. William Tsmple's
"Analysis" of Sir Philip Sidney's “Apology for Pogtry"
(Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance
Studies, 1984), 30.

29. 0.8. Hardison, Jr., "The Two Voices of Sidney's

Apology for Pogtry," English Literary Renaissance 2
(1972):83-99; Arthur F. Kinney, "Parody and Its Implications

in Sydney's Defense of Poesie," SEL 12 (1972):1-19;
Rudenstine, 47. Kinney goes so far as to argue that Sidney
parodies "The Schoole of Abuse“ in order to disguise his

actual agreement with Gosson.
30. Weiner, 28.
31. Geoffrey Shepherd, "Introduction,“ in his edition

of An Apology for Pogtry, 3. As Shepherd puts it: “What
Gosson was attacking, Sidney was not defending."

32. Thomas Lodge, A Reply to Stephen Qosson's Schoole

162

of Abusg in defence of Poetrnggsick snd Stage Plays (1580?)
In The Complete Works;9f Thomas Lodgg, vol. 1 (New York:
Russell & Russell, 1963), 48 (each work separately
paginated).

33. Sir Philip Sidney, "Defence of the Earl of
Leicester,” in IDS ProssiWorksiof Sir Philip Sidne , ed.
Albert Feuillerat, vol. 3 (Cambridge: At the University
Press, 1962), 61 and 71.

34. This point of view seems to have been particularly
popular in the 19405. See especially Samuels and Dowlin.

35. T.G.A. Nelson, "Sir John Harington as a Critic of
Sir Philip Sidney,“ Modern Philology 67 (1970):41-56. Nel-
son shows that Harington borrows from Sidney, and catalogs
their disagreements, none of them relevant to the question
of the poetic imagination itself.

36. The only "answer" anyone seems to have unearthed is
Edmund Bolton‘s Thg Cabanet Royal (1627), discussed as a
defense of history against Sidney by Thomas H. Blackburn in
"Edmund Bolton’s The Cabanet Royal: A Belated Reply to Sid-
ney’s Apology for Poetry," Studies in the Renaissanc , 14
(1967), 159-171.

37. I do not believe that Sidney means to convey
"ironic modesty" at all in this passage. He sss modest,
clearly, about his poetry; I simply do not think that he had
the feelings of poetic pride necessary to be ironically
modest. The passage is modest, and it is ironic, but in my
view it is not ironically modest.

38. Aubrey's Brig} Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957), 279.

 

Notes to Chapter 2

1. Ben Jonson, Timbgg: or, Discoveries, in Ben Jonson,
ed. C.H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson, vol. 8: lg;
PoemsL Ins Prose Works (Oxford: Clarendon, 1947), 583.
Subsequent references to this work occur parenthetically by
page number in the text.

2. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Pogtry or Thg

Defence of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Nelson,
165), 132.

3. See Bernard H. Newdigate, Michael Drayton sod his
Circle (Oxford: Printed at the Shakespeare Head St Aldates
& Published for the Press by Basil Blackwell, 1941).

4. Henry Reynolds, M thom stes Wherein a hort Surve
is Taken of the Nature and Value of Trug,Poesy and Dgpth of
EpsiAncignts Aboyg Our Modgrn PogssJ in Critical Essays of
the Seventeenth Cgptury, ed. J. E. Spingarn, Volume I:
1605-1650 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957),
141-179. References to this work appear parenthetically in
my text.

 

5. Sir William Alexander, Anacrisis: Or. A Censure of
Some Poets Ancient snd Modern, in Spingarn, 1:180-89.
References appear parenthetically in my text.

6. From The Conversations of 8gp Jonson snd William
Drummond of ngthorndgp (1619), in Spingarn, 1:211.

7. Conversations, in Spingarn, 1:214.

8. William Drummond, "A Letter on the True Nature of
Poetry, Addressed to Dr. Arthur Jonston," in William Qrpm-
ppnd of Hsgthorpggn: Poems and Prose, ed. Robert H. Mac-
donald (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1976), 191.

9. Thomas Rymer, "Preface to the Translation of Rapin‘s

Reflections on Aristotle's Treatise of Poesie" (1674), in
Spingarn, 2:164. -

10. The Conversations, while informative and entertain-
ing, consist chiefly of Jonson's Opinions of other poets and
their works.

11. C.A. Patrides, “A Poet Nearly Anonymous," in Clas-

sic and Cavalier: Essays on Jonson and tps Spns of Ben, ed.

Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982), 4.

12. I am not unaware of the importance of the term

163

164

nature, or Natura, in the earlier history of philosophy and
literary studies. Jonson's garbled, or at least unselfcon-
sciously ambiguous, use of the term, however, along with the
brevity of his amplification of it, suggests that loading
the term's history onto his usage would be unwarranted.

13. William Wordsworth, "Preface to the Second Edition
of L ri al Ballads," in William Worgswogth: Sglggtgd Pogms
and Prefaces, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mif-
flin, 1965), 453.

14. Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation sgg

Discovery in Renaissance Ppgtry (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1982), 274.

15. Roger Ascham, Thg Schoplmassgr, in The Rgpaissancg
in England, ed. Hyder E. Rollins and Herschel Baker (Lexi-

ngton, MA: D. C. Heath, 1954), 838.

16. Wesley Trimpi, B n n n' P : A d of h
Plsin Style (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1962), 43.

17. Richard S. Peterson, m' a ' n an Pr ‘ ‘n h
Poems pf Ben Jonson (New Haven, CT: Yale Unversity Press,
1981), 6.

18. Daniel G. Calder, ”The Meaning of ‘Imitation' in

Jonson's We: v r‘es." WM. 70
(1969):435-40.

19. See Ira Clark, "Ben Jonson's Imitation," Critigism
20 (1978):107-27, on the way in which the Epigrammes trans-
form Martial; and Mary I. Oates, "Jonson's ‘Ode Pindarick‘
and the Doctrine of Imitation,“ Espg£s_pp_Lspgppgg_spg_Lijr
grsiure 11 (1975):126-48 on Jonson's "discriminating imita-
tion" in the "Cary-Morison Ode."

20. I do not dispute the general critical sense of
Jonson‘s philosophical concern with language and the poet's
use of it, especially as it appears in the plays, nor do I
doubt the heavy influence of other thinkers, Vives and
Aristotle in particular, on Jonson. However, I would stress
that Jonson‘s use of their ideas is practical; while I agree
with Martin Elsky's embroidery of critical language around
the fragments of Timbgr ("Words, Things, and Names:

Jonson's Poetry and Philosophical Grammar," in Summers and
Pebworth, 91-104), for example, I imagine that the articula-
tion would surprise Jonson very much.

21. A.J. Minnis, Me ' v I T r f A h ‘
Sch ' ' r r A i 'n t '
(London: Scolar Press, 1984), 83-84.

165

22. George Herbert, ”Jordan (11)," in Th n i h P ms
of George Herbert, ed. C.A. Patrides (London: Dent; Totowa,
N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1974), 116-117.

23. John Milton, From the Second Book of Ths Reason of
hurch- overn m n Ur 'd A ains Prela (1641), in
Spingarn, 1:195.

24. Milton, Chgrch-Governemgnt, in Spingarn, 1:197.
25. John Milton, Paradise L st, Book I, 11. 1-25, in

John Milton: Complsie Pgems and ngor Prpsg, ed. Merritt Y.
Hughes (Indianapolis: The Odyssey Press, 1957), 211-212.

26. Milton, Church-Governemeng, in Spingarn, 1:196.

27. Milton, Qhurch-Governement, Spingarn, 1: 199.

28. Isaac Watts, "Preface to Hprse Lyrigpg," in

Eighgeenih-Century Criticsl Essays, ed. Scott Elledge
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961), 1:157-158.

29. Thomas Hobbes, ”Answer to Davenant's Preface to
Gpndibert" (1650), in Spingarn, 2:59.

Notes to Chapter 3

1. John Dryden, “An Essay of Dramatic Poesy," in Essays
of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (New York: Russell & Russell,
1961), 1:36. Subsequent references to this essay will
appear parenthetically in the text by Ker's volume and page

numbers.

 

2. Whenever Dryden elaborates on nature, it turns out
to be human, not general, nature that the poet is to
imitate, as Ralph Cohen has implicitly pointed out in his
classification of the meanings of nature for Dryden. The
first two, he says, are ”human nature, that which was shared
by all mankind" and "human potentiality fulfilled, dis-
torted, characterized, or suppressed by a particular cul-
ture.“ (Ralph Cohen, "The Critic: John Dryden's Literary
Criticism," in Philip Harth, Alan Fisher, and Ralph Cohen,
New Homage to John Drydgp [Los Angeles: The Williams
Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California,
1983], 64. Cohen's third category is "a writer 5 style that
expresses his own genius“--irrelevant in a discussion of

nature as imitated.)

3. Sir William Davenant, "Preface to Gondibert" (1650),
in Spingarn, 2:1-53.

4. Davenant, 20.

5. Jonathan Swift, "A Full and True Account of the Bat-
tel Fought last FRIDAY. between the Ancient and the Modgrn

BOOKS ip ST. JAMES'S LIBRARY," in Gulliver's Travels and
Otpsr Writings by Jonathan Swift, ed. Ricardo Quintana (New

York: Modern Library, 1958), 383.

6. Thomas Rymer, "Preface to the Translation of Rapin's

Reflectiogs on Aristotle's Trgatise of Poesie" (1674), in
Spingarn, 2:168.

7. Davenant, 26-27.

8. Thomas Shadwell, "Preface to The Sullen Lovers, or
The Impgrtinents, A Comedy" (1668), in Spingarn, 2:148.

9. Shadwell, “Preface to Sullen Lovers," Spingarn,
2:150. Shadwell also advocates imitating Jonson, who had
”fewer failings than all the English Poets, which implies he
was the most perfect and best Poet" in the "Preface to lug
Humorists” (1671), Spingarn, 2:158.

10. Thomas Rymer, "Preface to the Translation of
Rapin‘s Reflections on Aristotle’s Trestise of Poesie"
(1674), in Spingarn, 2:165.

166

167
11. Letter 31, Dryden to Dennis, [March 1693/4], in The
Letters of John Dryden, With Letters Addressed to Him, col-
lected and edited by Charles E. Ward (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1942), 71-72.

12. John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, Duke of Bucking-
hamshire, An Essaygupon Pogtry (1682), in Spingarn, 2:286-
87.

13. Robert Wolseley, "Preface to Rochester's
Valentinisp“ (1685), in Spingarn, 3:1-31.

14. Sir William Temple, An Essay upon the Ancigpt and
Modern Cgarning (1690), in Spingarn, 3:32.

15. Sir William Temple, Of Ppgtry (1690), in Spingarn,
3:80.

16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 80-81.
18s Ibide, 84—850

19. William Wotton, from Reflectiops upon Ancient and
Modern Lgsrning (1694), in Spingarn, 3:203.

 

20. Sir Richard Blackmore, "Preface to Princg Arthur,
An Heroick Poss“ (1695), in Spingarn, 3:227.

21. Ibid., 229.

22. George Granville, Lord Lansdowne, An Essay upon
Unpstugpl Flighis in Pogtry (1701), in Spingarn, 3:292.

23. John Dryden, "Epistle Dedicatory of The Rival
Ladies, A Trggi-Comedy [1664]: To the Right Honourable
Roger, Earl of Orrery,“ Ker,1:1.

24. Ibid., 1:8.

25. Dryden, "Preface to Annus Migsbilis: The Year of
Wonders MDCLXVI, Ker, 1:14-15.

26. Dryden, "A Parallel of Poetry and Painting,
Prefixed to the Version of Du Fresnoy De Arte Graphica"
(1695), in Ker, 2:138.

27. John C. Sherwood, "Precept and Practice in Dryden s

Criticism,“ Journal of Enlish and Germanic Philology 68
(1969):433.

28. Ker, Introduction, 1:xv; Edward Pechter, Dryden's
Classical Theory of Literatpre (London and New York: Cam-

168
bridge University Press, 1975); Cohen, 84; Ruth Salvaggio,
Dryden‘s Dpslitiss, no. 29, ELS: English Literary Studies,
University of Victoria (Victoria, British Columbia:
University of Victoria, 1983).

29. Dryden, "Preface to Annus Mirsbilis," in Ker, 1:17.

30. Dryden, "Of Dramatick Poesie, An Essay," in Ker,

31. Ibid., 43.

32. Dryden, ”A Defence of An Essay of Dramatic Poesy,
Being an Answer to the Preface of ‘The Great Favourite, or,
The Duke of Lerma' (Prefixed to the Second Edition of The

Indign Emppror, 1668), in Ker, 1:113-114.

33. Ibid., 121. Dryden goes on in this passage to say
that it "is not the best poesy which resembles notions of
things that are not, to things that are: though the fancy
may be great and the words flowing, yet the soul is but half
satisfied when there is not truth in the foundation." It is
a mark of the doubleness or flexibility--or
contradictoriness--of his ideas from essay to essay that in
the essay "0f Heroic Plays" he asserts almost the opposite:
"if any man object the improbabilities of a spirit appear—
ing, or of a palace raised by magic; I boldly answer him,
that an heroic poet is not tied to a bare representation of
what is true, or exceeding probable; but that he may let
himself loose to visionary objects, and to the representa-
tion of such things as depending not on sense, and therefore
not to be comprehended by knowledge, may give him a freer
scope for imagination. . . . their [philosophers'] specula-
tions on this subject are wholly poetical; they have only
their fancy for their guide; and that, being sharper in an
excellent poet, than it is likely it should in a phlegmatic,
heavy gownman, will see further in its own empire, and pro-
duce more satisfactory notions on those dark and doubtful
problems" (Ker, 1:153).

34. Dryden, "Preface to An Evgning's,Lovs; or. Thg Mock
Astrologer," in Ker, 1:146.

35. Dryden, "A Parallel of Poetry and Painting,
Prefixed to the Version of Du Fresnoy De Arte Gra hica," in
Ker, 2:118.

36. Ibid., 2:123.
37s Ibide g 2:136-37s

38. Dryden, "Preface to the Translation of Ovid's
Epistles” (1680), in Ker, 1:233.

169

39. Dryden, “Preface to the Fables“ (1700), in Ker,
2:246.

40. Ibid., 2:249.

41. Letter 68, Dryden to Elizabeth Thomas (Nov. 12,
1699], in Ward, 127.

42. Letter 17, Dryden to Walsh, [early 1691], in Ward,
33-36.

43. Letter 28. Dryden to Walsh, Dec. 12th [1693], in
Ward, 61.

44. John L. Mahoney, The Wholg Internal Universe:
lmitstion and the New Defense of qutry in British Criticism
1660-1830 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), 22.

 

45. Ibid., 23.

46. Pechter, 2-3.

Notes to Chapter 4

1. T. S. Eliot, John Dryden: Tpg Poet. The Dramatist,
The Critic (New York: Terence & Elsa Holliday, 1932), 55.

2. George Farquhar, "A Discourse Upon Comedy, in
Reference to the English State. In a Letter to a Friend“
(1702), in Ei hteenth-Centur Critical Essa 5, ed. Scott
Elledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961), 1:89.
The distance of Farquhar's understanding of imagination from
that of, say, Puttenham, is perhaps an appropriate index of
the amount of reflection upon the creative process that has
transpired in the intervening years, although it is diffi-
cult to credit Farquhar's description of Homer's “knowl-
edge.”

3. Ibid., 91.

4. Isaac Watts, "Preface to Horae Lyricae” (1706), in
Elledge, 1:148.

5. Ibid., 150 and 156.
6. Ibid., 158-159.
7. Ibid., 163.

8. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury,
From Characteristics of Msn. Manners, Opinions, Times
(1711), in Elledge, 1: 183. For a thorough discussion of
Shaftesbury's ideas about poetic creation, see Robert W.
Uphaus, "Shaftesbury on Art: The Rhapsodic Aesthetic,“ in

Journsl of Aesthetics anp Art Criticism 27 (1969): 341-348.

 

9. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Selected Essays
from "The Tatler " "The ectator.“ snpg”Thg Guardian," ed.
Daniel McDonald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), 221-
223.

10. Martin Kallich, The Association of Ideas and Criti-
cal Thgorypin Eightssnth-Century England: A History of s

Psychological Method in English Criticism (The Hague:
Mouton, 1970), 271.

11. Ibid., 226.

12. Ibid., 327.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., 330.

170

171
15. Ibid.

16. Addison, The S ectator, No. 417, June 28, 1712, in
Elledge, 1: 62-63.

17. Ibid., 64.

18. I do not by any means intend to suggest that
Addison is a "pre-Romantic" thinker. John Mahoney offers a
helpful corrective on this point: "often there is a
tendency, while exploring the subjective drift of aesthetics
in Addison and for that matter in the age generally, to sug-
gest that the new emphasis is on the non-representational,
on art as escapist, on the artist as self-indulgent creator
of his own world, a world increasingly remote from reality.
Although there is no denying the subjective emphases of
Addison's ideas on imitation and imagination, at the same
time he never, in turning the focus of criticism inward,
loses sight of art's fundamental mission to capture the per-
sisting truths of nature." (IDS Whols:jnternal Universs:
Imitstiop:snd the New Defense of Pastry in British Criticism
1660-1830 [New York: Fordham University Press, 1985], 38.)

19. 8. H. Bronson describes the breakdown of critical
consensus about neoclassicism in his essay "When Was
Neoclassicism?" in Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics,
1660-1800, Essays in Honor of Samuel Holt Monk, ed. Howard
Anderson and John S. Shea (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1967), 15-16:

However the debt may lie, certain it is that the century
no longer looks so placid as formerly, whether because
we have done more reading, or because events of recent
decades have affected our eyesight, or because the newer
telescopic lenses have altered the range of visibility
and brought things into sharper focus. . . . Wherever
we pause, we are bewildered by the diversity that sur-
rounds us: not alone in the conflict of opinion but
shot through the very texture of every considerable
author's or artist's work. Of even the chief spokesmen
this is probably true. Pope is no exception. The dif-
ficulty of making a consistent pattern of Johnson's
thinking is notorious. Yet when we look at the author-
itative surveys of critical historians, such is not the
impression we receive. Their momentum bears us stoutly
forward, and at any point they tell us where we are, how
many miles we have traveled, how far we have still to go

All the authoritative guides tell us--and we believe
them, do we not?--that the road sets out from "Neoclas-
sicism" and in due course arrives at “Romanticism,"
taking roughly a century to cover the distance. As we
trace it, the landscape visibly alters: it grows less
cultivated, more picturesque, wilder . . .

172

But we have been snatched aloft on the wings of meta-
phor. Let us decline from the resulting oversimplifica-
tion and try to regain our composure. And first,
returning to Neoclassicism, let us acknowledge that, if
regarded as a distinct phase of Art, separate in time
and visible effects, in England it never really existed.
Or, if it ever took palpable shape, that was only in the
pages of certain bloodless theorists, whose for-
mulations, when themselves regarded as efforts of the
imagination or works of art, are the sole extant exam-
ples of its wholehearted enforcement.

20. Dustin H. Griffin, Alsxander Pops: Thg Poet in the
Poems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978),
xiv.

21. Leopold Damrosch, Jr., The Imaginative World of
Alexander Pope (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1987), 4 and 20.

22. Lillian Feder, "Sermo or Satire: Pope's Definition
of his Art," in Anderson and Shea, 140.

23. Alexander Pope, The Art of Sinking in Poetry, in
Ssiected Prosg of Alexander Po e, ed. Paul Hammond (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 175.

24. Pope, "Preface to The Works;of Shskespesre,“ in
Hammond, 158.

25. POpe, An Essa on Critic'sm, in The Poems of
Alexander Po e, A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text
with Selected Annotations, ed. John Butt (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1963), 148, 11. 130-140.

26. Howard Weinbrot, The Formal Strain: Studies in
Augustan Imitstion and Satire (Chicago and London: The

University of Chicago Press, 1969).

27. See, however, for an enactment of Dr. Johnson's
imitative work, Joel Weinsheimer, Imitation (London: Rout-
ledge & Kegan Paul, 1984); by imitating Johnson in the way
that Johnson imitates others, Weinsheimer offers implicit
explication of this imitation that is more than simply hold-
ing up a mirror as well as some provocative reservations
about explicit "explications."

28. Pope, "Preface to The Works of 1717," in Hammond,
149.

29. Cited in Weinbrot, 4-5.

173

30. Pope, Letter to Henry Cromwell, 17 December 1710,
in Hammond, 240.

31. Pope, Preface to Works, in Hammond, 149-150.

32. Pope, Letter to William Wycherley, 29 November
1707, in Hammond, 237.

33. Pope, Preface to Works, 147.

34. Pope, Letter to Swift, 25 March 1736, in Hammond,
285.

35. John Hughes, "Remarks on the Fairy Queen" (1715),
in Elledge, 1:301.

36. Ibid., 1:302.

37. Almost forty years later, Thomas Warton the younger
published his Observations_on thsstFairy Queen" (1754).
Like Hughes before him, Warton is preoccupied with Spenser‘s
"failure” to write by "the rules":

We who live in the days of writing by rule are apt to
try every composition by those laws which we have been
taught to think the sole criterion of excellence. . . .
Spenser . . . did not live in an age of planning. His
poetry is the careless exuberance of a warm imagination
and a strong sensibility. It was his business to engage
the fancy and to interest the attention by bold and
striking images, in the formation and the disposition of
which little labor or art was applied. The various and
the marvelous were the chief sources of delight. . . .
Born in such an age, Spenser wrote rapidly from his own
feelings, which at the same time were naturally noble.
(In Elledge, 2:771)

38. Leonard Welsted, "Dissertation Concerning the Per-
fection of the English Language, the State of Poetry, etc."
(1724), in Elledge, 1:326-327.

39. Ibid., 330.

40. Lewis Theobald, The Censor, Nos. 10 and 36, in

41. Henry Pettit, ed., The Correspondence of Edward
Young 1683-1765 (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1971),
445-451 and 452n.

42. Edward Young's Con'ectures on Ori inal Com osition,
ed. Edith J. Morley (Manchester: At the University Press,
1918), 4. Subsequent references to this work appear

174
parenthetically in the text.

43. John Dryden, "Preface to Annus Mirsbilis: The Year
of Wonders MDCLXVI, Ker, 1:14.

44. In his 1754 Observations on the Fairie Queene,
Thomas Warton also characterizes the eighteenth century as
rule-bound, giving credence, perhaps, to the idea that the
stereotype was already in place. (See note 36 above.)

45. Sir William Jones, "On the Arts Commonly Called
lmitative," in Elledge, 2:872-881.

46. Henry MacKenzie, The Lounger (1785-1787), No. 68,
May 20, 1786. in Elledge, 2:971.

47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., 972.

49. Johnson's reticence about his composing process is
not entirely inexplicable. Aside from the obvious pos-
sibility of personal privacy, John Wain conjectures that
Johnson is not very self-analytical in print since it is the
similarities among men, not individual particularities, that
interest him. Further, despite Johnson's mention of the part
genius plays in writing, according to Wain he does not mean
specific genius ”for" something by the term; he believes in
general genius that enables its possessor to do just about
anything well, so that the production of poetry would seem
to be justifiably formulaic. See John Wain, ed., Johnson on
Johqspp: A Ssisction of the Personal and Augobiographical
Writings of Samuel Johpson (1709-1784) (New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1976), v-vii.

50. Samuel Johnson, The Adventurer No. 138, in “The
Idlerjysnd "Thg Adygnturssl, ed. W. J. Bate, John M. Bul-
litt, and L. F. Powell, vol. 2 of The Yale Edition of the
Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, CT: Yale University

Press, 1963), 494.

 

51. Samuel Johnson, "Milton,“ in his Lives of tpg
English Poets, introd. Arthur Waugh, 2 vols. (London:
Oxford University Press, 1906), 1:88.

52. Johnson, "Pope," Lives, 2:245.

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid., 97.

55. Ibid., 97-98.

56. Johnson, “Dryden," in Lives, 1:323.

175
57. Ibid., 1:292.
58. Ibid., 1:328-29.
59. Johnson, "Pope," Lives, 2:225.
60. Johnson, ”Cowley," Lives, 1:32.
61. Johnson, "Milton," Lives, 1:122-23.
62. Ibid., 2:304.

53. Ibid., 2:305.

64. Ibid., 2:306.
65. Johnson, "Gray," Lives, 2:459.

66. Johnson, "Milton," Lives, 1:96-97.

67. Johnson, "Pope," Lives, 2:341.
68. Johnson, "Cowley," Lives, 1:2.
69. Johnson, "Cowley,” Lives, 1:8.

70. Ibid., 2:325.
71. Johnson, "Thomson," Lives, 2:358.

72. Johnson, "Cowley," Lives, 1:13-14. Just prior to
this passage Johnson remarks that the metaphysical poets,
"instead of writing poetry, . . only wrote verses.“
Similarly, Joseph Warton had remarked that

We do not, it should seem, sufficiently attend to the
difference there is betwixt a man of wit, a man of
sense,, and a true poet. Donne and Swift were
undoubtedly men of wit and men of sense, but what traces
have they left of pure poetry? . . . All I plead for is
to have their several provinces kept distinct from each
other and to impress on the reader that a clear head and
acute understanding are not sufficient alone to make a
poet; that the most solid observations on human life
expressed with the utmost elegance and brevity are
morality, and not poetry . . ., and that it is a crea-
tive and glowing ima ination acer s irits ac vi , and
that alone, that can stamp a writer with this exalted
and very uncommon character which so few possess and of
which so few can properly judge. ("An Essay on the
Genius and Writings of Pope," in Elledge, 2:717-718.)

73. Ibid., 1:29.

176
74. Johnson, "Cowley," Lives, 1:46.
75. Johnson, "Dryden," Lives, 1:325.

76. Johnson, Rambler No. 4, in Johnson as Critic, ed.
John Wain (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 67-68.

77. Johnson, Adventurer No. 95, in Bate, Bullit, and
Powell, 424-425.

78. Ibid., 425.

79. Johnson, Rasselas, in Rasselas, Poems, and Selected
Prose, 3rd ed., ed. Bertrand H. Bronson (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 628. Cf. Johnson‘s discussion
of Gray's Elegy in the Life of Gray.

80. Johnson, “Preface to Shakes eare,“ in Wain, Johnson
as Critic, 151.

 

81. Johnson, "Cowley,' Lives, 1:4-5.

82. Johnson, "Milton,“ Lives, 1:112.

83. Johnson, ”Waller," Lives, 1:186.

84. Johnson‘s political concerns, like so much of his
critical approach, are carried on in present-day critical
circles; the ongOing concern with the World War II loyalties
of such thinkers as Martin Heidegger and Paul DeMan reflects
assumptions similar to Johnson's.

85. Johnson, “Cowley," Lives, 1:40-41.

86. Johnson, "Milton," Lives, 1:126.

87. Johnson, "Waller,“ Lives, 1:202-203.

Notes to Chapter 5

1. Joseph Trapp, Esctures on Postry 1742, introd. Mal-
colm Kelsall (Menston, England: The Scolar Press, 1973),
29.

 

2. Ibid.

3. Since the relationship between academic poetics and
poets' poetics--not, I admit, mutually exclusive
categories--is a minor theme of my own study, I find the
marked difference in argumentative style between Trapp and,
say, Pope, of particular relevance to the subsequent widen-
ing of the gap between poets and critics, although to trace
the development of that gap is unfortunately beyond the
scope of the present work.

4. Trapp, 32.
5. Ibid.

6. David Fairer, "Oxford and the Literary World,” in
ng Eightsgpth antury, ed. L. S. Sutherland and L. G.
Mitchell, vol. 5 of IDS Historygof ths;University of Oxford,
ed. T. H. Aston (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 799.

7. Samuel Johnson, "Dryden," in Lives of tpsiEnglisp
Poets, 2 vols., ed. Arthur Waugh (London: Oxford University
Press, 1906), 1:262.

 

8. Samuel Johnson, "Pope," in Lives, 2:259.

9. See Thomas F. Bonnell, "John Bell's Ppets of Great
Britain: The ‘Little Triflng Edition' Revisited," in Mogern
Philology (November 1987):128-152.

10. Edward Young's Con'ectures on Ori inal Com osition,
ed. Edith J. Morley (Manchester: At the University Press,
1918), 7.

11. Alexander Pope, "Martinus Scriblerus, Peri Bathous:
or of the Art of Sinking in Poetry," in Alexanger Pope:
Selected ngtry:g_Prose, 2nd ed., ed. William K. Wimsatt
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), 375. Sub-
sequent parenthetical page references are to this edition.

177

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