T h e Ly r i c 

­P o e m

As a study of lyric poetry, in English, from the early modern period

to the present, this book explores one of the most ancient and signifi-
cant art forms in western culture as it emerges in its various modern
incarnations. Combining a much-needed historicisation of the con-
cept of lyric with an aesthetic and formal focus, this collaboration
of period-specialists offers a new cross-historical approach. Through
eleven chapters, spanning more than four centuries, the book pro-
vides readers with both a genealogical framework for the under-
standing of lyric poetry within any particular period, and a necessary
context for more general discussion of the nature of genre.

m a r i o n t h a i n is Reader in English Literature and Culture at

Sheffield University. She has published primarily on late-nineteenth-
century poetry and poetics, and is author of ‘Michael Field’: Poetry,
Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, 2007).
T h e Ly r i c ­P o e m
Formations and Transformations

E di t e d b y
Ma r i o n T h a i n
Sheffield University
 University Printing House, Cambridge C B 2 8 B S , United Kingdom

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First published 2013
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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
The lyric poem : formations and transformations / edited by Marion Thain.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
I S B N 978-1-107-01084-0 (hardback)
1. Lyric poetry–History and criticism. 2. Lyric poetry–Themes, motives.
I. Thain, Marion, editor of compilation.
P N 1356.L 94 2013
809.1′4–dc23
2013015853
i sb n 978-1-107-01084-0 hardback
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 ­Contents

Notes on contributors page vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1
Marion Thain
1 ‘Words for music, perhaps’: early modern songs and lyric 10
David Lindley
2 Neither here nor there: deixis and the sixteenth-century sonnet 30
Heather Dubrow
3 ‘Trewly wrote’: manuscript, print, and the lyric in the early
seventeenth century 51
Thomas Healy
4 Lyric and the English Revolution 71
Nigel Smith
5 Modulation and expression in the lyric ode, 1660–1750 92
David Fairer
6 Eighteenth-century high lyric: William Collins and
Christopher Smart 112
Marcus Walsh
7 The retuning of the sky: Romanticism and lyric 135
David Duff
8 Victorian lyric pathology and phenomenology 156
Marion Thain
9 Modernism and the limits of lyric 177
Peter Nicholls

v
vi ­Content
10 The lyric ‘I’ in late-twentieth-century English poetry 195
Neil Roberts
11 No man is an I: recent developments in the lyric 217
Ian Patterson
Afterword 237
Jonathan Culler

Index 247
 ­Contributors

Jonathan Culler, Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative

Literature at Cornell University, has published widely on contemporary
literary theory. A chapter of his Structuralist Poetics on ‘Poetics of the
Lyric’ and a widely cited article, ‘Apostrophe’, form the point of depart-
ure for the book he is completing, entitled Theory of the Lyric.
H e at h e r D u b row, John D. Boyd, SJ, Chair in the Poetic Imagination
at Fordham University, has published six scholarly books, most recently
The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England, a
co-edited collection of essays, and an edition of As You Like It. A collec-
tion of her poetry, Forms and Hollows, was published by Cherry Grove
Collections.
D avid D u ff is Professor of English at the University of Aberdeen. His
books include Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre
(1994), Scotland, Ireland, and the Romantic Aesthetic (co-edited, 2007),
and Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (2009). He is editor of the forth-
coming Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism.
D avid Faire r is Professor of Eighteenth-Century English Literature at
the University of Leeds. His most recent book, Organising Poetry: The
Coleridge Circle, 1790–1798 (2009) traces the development of English
poetry during the 1790s, building on the concerns of his previous com-
prehensive study, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–1789
(2003). With Christine Gerrard he has edited Eighteenth-Century Poetry:
An Annotated Anthology (second edition, 2003).
T h o m as H e aly is Professor of Renaissance Studies and Head of the
School of English at the University of Sussex. He has published widely
on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, including
studies of Richard Crashaw, Christopher Marlowe, and theory and
Renaissance literature.
vii
viii Notes on ­contributors
D avid L ind ley, Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University
of Leeds, has published monographs on Lyric (1983), Thomas Campion
(1985), and Shakespeare and Music (2006). He has edited Jonson
masques for the Cambridge Ben Jonson (2012), and The Tempest for New
Cambridge Shakespeare (second edition, 2013).
Pe t e r Nic h olls is Professor of English at New York University.
His publications include Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing,
Modernisms: A Literary Guide, George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism,
and many articles and essays on literature and theory. He is currently
US associate editor of Textual Practice.
Ian Pat t e rs on teaches English at Queens’ College, Cambridge, and
is the author of Guernica and Total War (2007), and the translator of
Proust’s Finding Time Again (2003). He has written on a variety of top-
ics in the literature of the last 100 years.
Ne il Ro b e rts is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the
University of Sheffield. He is the editor of the Blackwell Companion to
Twentieth Century Poetry and author of ten books, including Narrative
and Voice in Postwar Poetry, Ted Hughes: A Literary Life, and, most
recently, A Lucid Dreamer: The Life of Peter Redgrove.
Nige l Sm it h is William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of
Ancient and Modern Literature at Princeton University. His major
works are Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (2010), Is Milton Better than
Shakespeare? (2008), the Longman Annotated English Poets edition of
Andrew Marvell’s Poems (2003), Literature and Revolution in England,
1640–1660 (1994), and Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in
English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (1989).
M arion T h ai n is Reader in Literature and Culture at Sheffield
University. Her research interests are primarily in nineteenth-century
and early- twentieth-century poetry and poetics; recent publications
include ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle (2007;
issued in paperback in 2010), and Michael Field, the Poet: Published and
Manuscript Materials (2009).
M a rcus W als h is Kenneth Allott Professor of English Literature at the
University of Liverpool. His research interests focus on eighteenth-
­century poetry, and the theory, practice, and history of editing. His
publications include Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century
Literary Editing (1997), and editions of Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (2010)
and Smart’s Song to David and Hymns and Spiritual Songs (­ 1983).
 ­Acknowledgments

We thank everyone who has advised and commented on draft versions

of these chapters; Marion Thain offers thanks to the Victorian Seminar
group at CUNY. Particular thanks are due also to Stephen Gill for being
so supportive of this project at its inception. ‘Glamour of Gold’ by Olive
Custance is reproduced here with kind permission of John Rubinstein and
John Stratford – literary executors of the Estate of Lord Alfred Douglas –
all rights reserved.

ix
 ­Introduction
Marion Thain

This book is a study of the concept of ‘lyric’ poetry, in English, from the
early modern period to the present. It is a study of one of the most ancient
and significant art forms in western culture, as it emerges in its various
modern incarnations. As David Lindley notes in our opening chapter,
‘The Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded uses of “lyric” as an adjec-
tive or noun come from the 1580s’ (p. 10).
In recent years, literary study has seen something of a return to ques-
tions about the aesthetic, in which genre has begun to emerge as one
important focus. Indeed, as the most historically and culturally reflexive
incarnation of text’s rhetorical operation, genre is well placed to reflect the
continuing importance of historical methodologies to literary study while
at the same time enabling an insistence on the importance of aesthetic
and formal considerations of text. Within the recent renewed interest in
literary genre more generally there has been a particular focus on the lyric
poem. Some explore key features of lyric by anchoring themselves pri-
marily in a particular historical milieu or author, and others take a more
aesthetic orientation in relation to a contemporary understanding of lyric.
Those studies that are anchored in a particular historical milieu include
Heather Dubrow’s The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early
Modern England (2008), G. Gabrielle Starr’s Lyric Generations: Poetry and
the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (2004), and Virginia Jackson’s
Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005). Of the primarily aes-
thetically situated type there are two books that stand out over the last five
years or so: Susan Stewart’s Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002); and
Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s study, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and Pleasure of Words
(2007). Recent work by Simon Jarvis marks another important recent
critical dimension. The issues he poses about the rhetorical operations
of poetry are primarily philosophical, and although he doesn’t use the
term, his work on verse asks questions about the relationship between, for
example, music and language, that are entirely relevant to thinking about
1
2 Marion ­Thain
the nature of lyric.1 Offering a complementary focus within this burgeon-
ing field of studies of lyric and the lyrical (and the above are just a few
examples of a rapidly growing field), we explore the development of the
concept of lyric over a long historical trajectory through eleven separate
case studies. Through this approach we aim to take on a broad temporal
remit while avoiding the imposition of a generalised grand-narrative of
lyric constructed through a particular historical perspective, or any fixed
definition of the genre.
As a work of historical poetics, this book is a long way from the ‘genre
theory’ of the 1970s. Drawing on a tradition of genre theory from E.
D. Hirsch and Croce, William Elford Rogers’ The Three Genres and the
Interpretation of Lyric states its aim as a delineation of ‘lyric’ as an inter-
pretive category: one that aids current classification.2 Yet lyric is as much
a historical category of production as of interpretation, and one whose
changing conceptualisation has affected the work of poets as well as the
way we read their texts. Moreover, in these days of frequent polarisation
between ‘historical’ and ‘theoretical’ literary methodologies, genre might
have a particularly interesting role to play in determining a reconsider-
ation of this binary. As Friedrich Schlegel put it, the study of genre can
be nothing short of ‘a classification which at the same time would be a
history and theory of literature’.3 It is this simultaneous history and theory
of literature that we aim to reflect in our engagement with the concept of
lyric.
As Derek Attridge, amongst others, notes, ‘the history of English poetry
could be written as a history of the gradually increasing importance of its
visual dimension – but always as this interacts with its aural dimension’.4
The term ‘lyric poem’ has come today to denote a genre of poetry perhaps
most commonly circulated primarily in print, and read, whether silently
or aloud, from the page. It is the conceptualisation of lyric poetry that
has, in addition to an investment in oral forms, a significant and inde-
pendent life on the page that we trace in this study. While the genre has
its origins in a sung form of Classical antiquity, the term had certainly
come to acquire, in addition, a textual meaning by the time it was used
in Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry in 1595. So, this is a study whose remit is
not defined by ‘song’ as such, but by the shifting conceptualisation of the
lyric poem, which in the period we study must be linked particularly to
the development of textual and print cultures. The historical boundaries
of the lyric we study coincide with modern printing methods that mark a
specifically modern phase in textual history. It is this printed incarnation
that over time was to bring a characteristic embodiment of, and particular
 ­Introductio 3
possibilities for, the lyric poem in the contemporary world. While seeing
this as a central thread to our study, however, we also reflect the import-
ance of manuscript culture and the continuing potential of lyric in its
textual embodiment to contain as a palimpsest an aural echo: sometimes
actual, sometimes an imagined memory.
In 1970, René Wellek called for critics to ‘abandon attempts to define
the general nature of the lyric or the lyrical’.5 To begin with a fixed def-
inition of the lyric genre would be to beg the question. Although the
significance of its origins in Classical and medieval song forms provides
a necessary touchstone for this study, they do not provide a yard stick
against which to measure subsequent forms. This book does not aim to
present a ‘definition’ of the lyric poem, but something more like a loose
genealogy. It is only in this way that we can begin properly to understand
how this concept has shaped the production and reception of literary
texts past and present. Each chapter uses sources contemporaneous to the
poetry studied in order to give evidence for the meaning and significance
of the term at that time, with a particular awareness of whether it refers to
a form, a mode, or a genre. Where ‘lyric’ is a form, it has often been used
to denote primarily song forms of poetry; as a ‘mode’, it has described a
particular type (or types) of writing that could be found within a variety
of forms and genres; as a genre, lyric represents one overall type of poetry
in distinction to others such as ‘epic’ or ‘dramatic’. The genealogy of the
concept of ‘lyric’ that we trace is not a smooth or consistent movement
from one type of meaning to another: indeed the term might be used, in
different instances, in all three of these ways within the same historical
period. Yet this messiness is a part of what makes the concept of lyric so
interesting an object of study.
Current orthodoxy regards some ages as more ‘lyrical’ than others. High
points are generally thought to include notable early modern writers, the
Romantic period, modernism, and contemporary poetry (now poetry has,
in the minds of many, become synonymous with definitions of the lyric).
In contrast, the earlier eighteenth century is seen as an age more interested
in political commentary than in the personal introspective effusion that
came to be associated with lyric. The Victorians too, with the popular-
ity of the novel and poetic forms that turned away from lyric, are more
readily associated with other genres. Are these characterisations based pri-
marily on a retro-projected definition of lyric, or are they rooted in con-
temporaneous experience? To what extent does the conceptualisation of
lyric respond to the dominant concerns of the age, waxing and waning in
connection with changing political, cultural, or philosophical contexts?
4 Marion ­Thain
These are questions we will be investigating in order to interrogate current
characterisations of the lyric tradition. This book will not only chart the
shifting conceptualisation of lyric in a series of contexts, but will discover
something of the interconnections between the aesthetics of lyric form
and the context of its production in order to read the cultural and intel-
lectual concerns inscribed in the contours and fortunes of the concept.
More specifically, an established critical narrative sees our current
understanding of the lyric genre as originating largely in the Romantic
period. Most recently, Scott Brewster begins his study of lyric with that
claim that our current understanding of the lyric as a textual poetic genre
was ‘developed in the later eighteenth century, which defined lyric in
terms of heightened emotion and authentic sentiment, and presented it
as a (usually brief ) moment of intensified awareness’.6 This was the point,
argues M. H. Abrams, at which ‘lyric’ became not just a poetic genre,
including under its umbrella a variety of poetic forms that might previ-
ously have been considered to have separate trajectories, but the poetic
genre: the pre-eminent form of poetry.7 Yet was this point in lyric history
a revolution or an evolution?8 If ‘lyric’ was first recorded as an adjective or
noun in the late sixteenth century, what did it mean before the Romantic
codification of genre? And what about the investment in this Romantic
understanding of lyric in the following centuries? From at least the 1960s
the following formulation has been dominant: ‘from the late eighteenth
century the lyric impulse became diffused over an ever-widening area, till
today one could almost say there is no lyric poetry since every poem has
a lyrical quality’.9 More recently, Virginia Jackson has taken up this idea
to describe a process of ‘the lyricization of poetry itself – the historical
transformation of many varied poetic genres into the single abstraction of
the post-Romantic lyric’.10 Jackson has suggested that ‘the lyric takes form
through the development of reading practices in the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries that become the practice of literary criticism’.11
Jackson’s work appears with other position papers (mainly from scholars
whose own specialisms lie in post-Romantic literature) in the 2008 PMLA
issue that put the ‘New Lyrical Studies’ on the map. Here, in response to
challenges to the notion of ‘lyric’ as a transhistorical category, Jonathan
Culler responded with cautious optimism that an essential core of qual-
ities might characterise the genre over time, and with a call for an inves-
tigation.12 This call has begun to be taken up by critics in various forms,
but not yet in a longitudinal study.13 The current book aims to provide
an arena for the historical investigation of the concept of lyric spanning
more than four centuries, undertaken by scholars qualified to make this
 ­Introductio 5
assessment in their particular historical area of expertise. In this way, we
provide the first book-length study to respond to these questions.
In what follows we present no definitive single narrative of lyric for-
mation. Rather, we present evidence drawn from many sources in many
different ways to establish a multi-vocal, multi-perspectival history that
we hope will raise more questions than it answers. This method responds
to the need to avoid a retrospective mapping of a ‘lyric’ tradition in the
image of any one moment in that history. Presenting case studies within
a broadly chronological structure, we also aim to avoid a homogenising
survey of literary periods. In each chapter a different author engages with
what they identify as a key moment of formation or transformation in the
idea of lyric poetry. While grounding the argument in a historicised under-
standing of ‘lyric’ that will orient the non-period-specialist reader, each
author seeks to present an original reflection on it. In this way, a substan-
tial historical and collective endeavour is given a tight focus within each
chapter that enables its theme to be worked out in detailed and specific
arguments. Each chapter takes, as its central object of study, a small num-
ber of poems – sometimes canonical and sometimes little known. Close
reading is a key shared methodology and will unite the studies, grounding
the analysis in a focus on the works themselves. The chapters take diverse
approaches and methodologies, and we have also tried to highlight dif-
ferent issues within the concept of lyric within each chapter (each par-
ticularly relevant to the historical period in question) at the same time as
attending to a shared remit. Overall, however, these studies collectively
offer a sustained interrogation of the concept of lyric that focuses around
an exploration of its historical conceptualisation and, at times, the rele-
vance of current definitions of the genre to reading poetry from the past.
David Lindley’s opening chapter explores the relationship between early
modern ‘lyric’ poetry and the crucible of song and text in which it was
formed. Analysing the experience of song in the period, he highlights dis-
tinctions, are crucial (although often overlooked) to our understanding of
lyric, between metrical regularity on the page and the musicality of lyrics
written to a particular tune. Heather Dubrow continues many of the same
concerns while using an analysis of deictics to offer a very different kind of
reflection on lyric in the sixteenth century. Interrogating generic assump-
tions of lyric immediacy, she questions the relevance of twentieth-century
definitions of lyric to reading sixteenth-century poems, at the same time as
exploring what it might mean to think about ‘lyric’ in the period. Moving
on thematically from lyric’s generative connection with song, and moving,
historically, into the seventeenth century, Thomas Healy explores what it
6 Marion ­Thain
means for lyric to exist in both print and manuscript cultures. Focusing
on the work of John Donne, he looks at how the instabilities of both text-
ual media create not only fluidity of meaning and interpretation but also
interesting challenges for reading poetic subjectivity that have profound
consequences for our understanding of what it might mean to read ‘lyric’
poems in this period. Nigel Smith offers a complementary focus on sev-
enteenth-century poetry through an exploration of lyric’s fate and func-
tion in a time of intense unrest. Through an original account of the new
wave of song study among the musicographers of the seventeenth century,
Smith finds a discourse on the idea of lyric within a poetic landscape in
which the epic and heroic formed a more recognised focus. In spite of
lyric’s subordinated position within poetics of the period, he finds it play-
ing an innovative role both in political action and in the understanding
of a time of ‘deep perplexity’. Considering the eighteenth century, David
Fairer traces the conscious translation of lyre music into ‘modern’ poetry,
identifying an understanding of ‘lyric’ poetry not as a formal genre but as
the playing of an instrument in a textual medium. Revealing how poets
sought in the modal and expressive features of poetry an equivalent for
something derived from the ancient lyrists, Fairer argues that the idea of
lyre music was taken up in ways that could ‘make the transition to mod-
ern lyric poetry and become a defining aspect of it’ (p. 94). In the context
of an eighteenth-century shift from the satiric modes associated with Pope
towards a poetry of the imagination, Marcus Walsh takes as his focus the
ode. Identifying this form as central to an attempt to ‘reconstitute the
high lyric as a leading genre for British poetry’ (p. 113), Walsh explores the
potential for such poems themselves to offer a commentary on the devel-
opment of a poetics of affect and imagination, and, more generally, on the
difficult status of the modern lyric poet in relation to an inheritance of
multiple Greek, Hebraic, and English models.
David Duff takes as his focus the Romantic expansion of ‘lyric’ as a
generic term that included a rapidly growing number of different poetic
forms. Yet, far from presenting a single, unified conceptualisation of lyric,
his chapter considers the relationship between different Romantic ideas of
lyric, and how they overlap or, sometimes, combine. Focusing both on the
idea of lyric as an introspective mode, and the reassertion of a tie between
lyric poetry and music, Duff looks in detail at poems by Burns and Shelley
in order to argue for the complexity and multiplicity of lyric in this period
(from popular song to a return to ancient forms). In my own chapter, I
turn away from the centrality of music to lyric in order to think about
the importance to Victorian poetry of a constitutively printed rather than
 ­Introductio 7
sung conceptualisation of lyric, and what this means for the identity of
a genre recognised at the time to be in tension with cultural modern-
ity. Struggling with a conceptualisation of lyric they frequently identify
as inherited from the Romantics, mid-Victorian poets such as Browning
pathologise the form, yet later Victorian poets, I argue, reclaim the idea
of lyric through the very terms of that sickness. Exploring the work of
Pound and twentieth-century modernism, Peter Nicholls interrogates the
binary that sees modernist lyric as affiliated with the eye in opposition to
the ear. While arguing for the continuing significance of sound (and of
Swinburne) to Pound’s melopoeia, Nicholls also highlights the profound
scepticisms around lyric musicality present not only in high modernism
but also in the work of the following generations. From Oppen’s distrust,
to Susan Howe’s sense of the limits of lyric, Nicholls considers the ways in
which lyric has come to seem to some poets a damaged or compromised
form. The final two chapters both address issues of lyric subjectivity and
can be seen to work as parallel reflections on two very different traditions
of poetry that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. Neil
Roberts’ analysis draws together Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes, arguing
that ‘Both poets combine a conservative-seeming attachment to the idea
of lyric with a historically inevitable suspicion of its integrity’ (p. 214).
Moreover, however opposed the two poets may appear stylistically, he rec-
ognises in both the need to seek strategies for the escape of the ego via
the construction of the lyric ‘I’ through language and through something
similar to what Blasing describes as the rhythmic pulse that ‘makes aud-
ible an intending “I”’ (p. 195).14 Finally, Ian Patterson turns to a major
strand of contemporary poetry that might be called ‘late modernist’ (with
J. H. Prynne a major focus), and that Patterson defines in opposition to
the ‘mainstream’ of contemporary British poetry explored in the previ-
ous chapter. Ultimately, Patterson’s analysis shows that however patholo-
gised, broken, irrelevant, or, now in Patterson’s terms ‘fragmented’, lyric
has become, it persists as an uncanny echo in contemporary poetry: a
force that is never completely rejected. ‘Lyric’ has become for Patterson
too intrinsic to the process of articulating the subject in poetic language.
The volume ends with a reflection on the whole, and on the utility of
genre categorisations, from a scholar seminal to our critical study of lyric:
Jonathan Culler.
This book aims to offer a fresh approach to the study of lyric by taking
a long historical remit and employing a multi-authored approach in order
to maintain the specificity and expertise throughout. Collaboration of
this type amongst scholars of English literature is surprisingly rare. Such
8 Marion ­Thain
connections do not easily fall under the banner of ‘interdisciplinarity’,15
but nor are they fostered by conferences and groupings within univer-
sity disciplines that are predominantly historically based. Marjorie Perloff
has written about the dangers of a current configuration of the discip-
line in which the ‘“merely” literary is so suspect’.16 The casualties of this
have sometimes been the formal features of the text itself as an aesthetic
object and the larger literary trajectories or frames of reference in which
those texts might be located. There is a danger of leaving scholars without
enough of a sense of the larger trajectory in which they are working; this is
the reason why certain questions remain unanswered, and why historical
parochialism is a real risk for current scholarship.
It should by now be clear that this book is not an introductory guide
or a comprehensive historical survey of lyric poetry. It achieves what can
only be achieved through a collective, bringing together many scholars
and giving a shape to a long period of literary history. In short, this book
attempts to offer a combination of qualities usually polarised between
the frequently very specialist academic monograph and the less narrow,
but often simplified, overview of the historical survey or guide book. The
authors involved in this project reflect a range of additional interests cru-
cial to the topic: as well as being eminent critics, some also bring with
them an editor’s understanding of the importance of genre (for example
David Fairer, Neil Roberts, Nigel Smith, Marcus Walsh), some are pub-
lished lyric poets themselves (such as Heather Dubrow and Ian Patterson),
some bring a particular understanding of the development of print culture
(for example Thomas Healy) and of the relationship between literature
and music (David Lindley), some bring expertise in Anglo-American lit-
erature that is crucial to understanding twentieth-century developments
in English poetry (for example Peter Nicholls), and some specialise in
genre theory itself (David Duff). The focus of the book on ‘English’ lit-
erature means, for most of its historical range, a focus on poetry within
the British Isles. The sheer range and diversity of poetries in English in
contemporary literature is a subject for another book, but the later chap-
ters reflect the significance of, particularly, North American poetry to the
English lyric. Although this collection cannot attempt to reflect the reach
of contemporary global criticism, its historical breadth aims to appeal to
any reader interested in poetry and the concept of lyric. Readers who have
a particular interest in poetry of any one of the historical periods covered
will gain an important context for their study, while the book also pro-
vides a necessary framework for thinking about the nature of genre.
 ­Introductio 9
­Notes
1 Simon Jarvis, ‘Musical Thinking: Hegel and the Phenomenology of Prosody’,
Paragraph 28.2 (2005), 57–71 (passim).
2 William Elford Rogers, The Three Genres and the Interpretation of Lyric
(Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 56.
3 Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, trans. Ernst
Behler and Roman Struc (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1989), p. 76.
4 Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 2.
5 René Wellek, ‘Genre Theory, the Lyric, and Erlebnis’, in Discriminations:
Further Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), pp.
225–52 (pp. 251–2).
6 Scott Brewster, Lyric (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 1–2.
7 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, (Oxford University Press, 1963),
pp. 84, 96.
8 See David Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009), p. 210; Brewster, Lyric, p. 72.
9 C. Day Lewis, The Lyric Impulse (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), p. 13.
10 Virginia Jackson, ‘Who Reads Poetry?’, PMLA 123.1 (2008), 181–7 (p. 183).
11 Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery (Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 8.
12 Jonathan Culler, ‘Why Lyric?’, PMLA 123.1 (2008), 201–6 (p. 202).
13 See, for example, Rachel Cole’s essay, ‘Rethinking the Value of Lyric Closure:
Giorgio Agamben, Wallace Stevens, and the Ethics of Satisfaction’, PMLA
126.2 (2011), 383–97, in which she posits lyric’s formal closure as part of
its ‘transhistorical’ nature and asks how we might think about that feature
ethically.
14 Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and Pleasure of Words (2007),
p. 55.
15 For example, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council classes the study
of English literature across all historical periods as one subject area.
16 Marjorie Perloff, ‘Presidential Address 2006: It Must Change’, PMLA 122.3
(2007), 652–62 (p. 655).
 ­c h apter one

‘Words for music, perhaps’

Early modern songs and lyric
David Lindley

In the sixteenth century most people made their primary contact with
poetry or verse when it was accompanied by music. Whether in the bal-
lads sold by itinerant sellers such as Shakespeare’s Autolycus in The Winter’s
Tale, or in the metrical Psalms that were the only music permitted in the
average parish church, or in the songs heard in the theatre, or in music
sung for domestic entertainment, verses came most frequently attached
to tunes.
The Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded uses of ‘lyric’ as an adjec-
tive or noun come from the 1580s.1 It is very evident that the label had
very little direct connection with modern, or post-Romantic, definitions
of lyric by its individual and personal utterance. Instead, virtually all the
uses of the term until well into the seventeenth century made their pri-
mary connection to Classical tenets, and especially to metrical distinctions
of one literary kind from another. The early modern generic definition
was, therefore, much less by subject matter or by forms of address than we
expect. Above all, ‘lyric’ was a category prescribed by metrical form. At the
same time, most definitions in the period, either explicitly or implicitly,
also gesture towards the etymological connection of ‘lyric’ to the lyre, and
therefore to music. Puttenham’s generic categorisation is entirely typical of
the period, and therefore instructive:
As the matter of poesy is diverse, so was the form of their poems and man-
ner of writing, for all of them wrote not in one sort, even as all of them
wrote not upon one matter. Neither was every poet alike cunning in all as
in some one kinde of poesy, nor uttered with like felicity. But wherein any
one most excelled, thereof he tooke a surname, as to be called a Poet Heroic,
Lyric, Elegiac, Epigrammatist or otherwise. Such therefore as gave them-
selves to write long histories of the noble gests of kings and great Princes
… they called poets Heroic, whereof Homer was chief and most ancient
among the Greeks, Virgil among the Latins. Others who more delighted
to write songs or ballads of pleasure, to be sung with the voice, and to

10
 Early modern songs and ­lyric 11
the harpe, lute, or citheron and such other musical instruments, they were
called melodious poets [melici] or by a more common name Lyric Poets, of
which sort was Pindarus, Anacreon and Callimachus with others among the
Greeks: Horace and Catullus among the Latins. There were another sort,
who sought the favour of fair ladies, and coveted to bemoan their estates at
large, and the perplexities of love in a certain pitious verse called Elegie, and
thence were called Eligiack: such among the Latines were Ouid, Tibullus,
and Propertius.2
There is a very general sense here of particular subjects attached to genre
or mode, but Classical love poems, which we would certainly label ‘lyrics’,
are called ‘elegies’ entirely on metrical grounds, while the highly formal
odes of Pindar, precisely because of their musical connection, earn the
generic title of lyrics.
Metrical discrimination is also the marker for Thomas Campion in his
treatise on Classical, quantitative metres in English verse, where he writes:
‘To descend orderly from the more simple numbers to them that are more
compounded, it is now time to handle such verses as are fit for Ditties or
Odes, which we may call Lyricall, because they are apt to be soong to an
instrument, if they were adorn’d with convenient notes.’3 He continues
with examples of the Sapphic, a dimeter, and a five-line stanza; his basic
point is that it is complex, or compound metres, that are ‘lyrical’, and they
are so because of their suitability for musical setting.
It is on the same metrical basis that the Psalms of David were catego-
rised as lyrics. Thomas Churchyard, in a marginal note to his A musicall
consort of heauenly harmonie, writes that: ‘David sung the Liricke verses to
his harp and those ebrue songs consisted of divers feet and unequall num-
bers’.4 Philip Sidney commented in similar terms:
And may I not … say that the holy David’s Psalms are a divine Poem? If
I do, I shall not do it without the testimony of great learned men, both
ancient and modern. But even the name psalms will speak for me, which,
being interpreted, is nothing but songs; then, that it is fully written in
metre, as all learned hebricians agree, although the rules be not yet fully
found.5
The versions of the Psalms by Sidney and his sister, Mary, are themselves
notable for their metrical virtuosity, no doubt intended at some level to
represent the rhythmic qualities ascribed to the original language. Sidney’s
best-known and most often-quoted formulation on lyric poetry, however,
defines the poet himself as one who ‘cometh to you with words set in
delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well
enchanting skill of Music’.6
12 David ­Lindley
His assertion of the close link between music and poetry is a persistent
one in definitions of lyric both as a mode and as a genre. Heather Dubrow
quotes the twentieth-century poet C. Day Lewis: ‘A lyric is a poem writ-
ten for music – for an existing tune, or in collaboration with a composer,
or in an idiom demanded by contemporary songwriters, or simply with
music at the back of the poet’s mind.’ But, as she observes, ‘the interdis-
ciplinary linkage Day Lewis posits is … fraught and sometimes debat-
able’.7 Nonetheless, this is the definition of lyric that early modern writers
would most readily have acknowledged, and it is important to tease out
the potential implications of that understanding of lyric, both for writers
at the time, and for modern critics.
Some of the problematic nature of the critical observations that can – or
cannot – be drawn from the frequently asserted connection of words and
music can be illustrated by considering briefly the case of Thomas Wyatt.
Poets, from the Classical writers onwards, may often gesture towards the
notion that they are writing ‘songs’, and Wyatt is no exception, appearing
explicitly to acknowledge his accompanying lute in a number of poems.
Exactly what this might mean, however, is not transparent. John Stevens
sets out the problem:
A theory that words were written to be set to music in this period will
probably rest on one of the following beliefs: the poet wrote words in a
special way – either, because he was himself a creative musician and able
to set them; or because he worked in close collaboration with a com-
poser and could be told what was needed; or because the active music-
making of his environment forced him to think imaginatively in terms
of music.8
According to this definition, Wyatt, he concludes, ‘blames his lute, or not,
as the fancy takes him, but never talks about it in the way of a man who
really understands and cares for it’.9 It is, for Stevens, merely a conven-
tional gesture towards lyric’s musical origin.
Winifred Maynard attempted to revise this opinion by considering
a rather different possibility: that Wyatt wrote words with actual tunes
of a more popular cast in his mind, though she notes the problem that
‘since many of the metres are common ones, it is easy to find possible
partners for many lyrics, but hard, theoretically at least, to tell whether
a poem was really made for a specific tune, or simply happens to go
to it’.10 This does not dissuade her from pursuing the possibility that
Wyatt did have particular tunes in his head as he composed some of his
lyrics.
 Early modern songs and ­lyric 13
Elizabeth Heale is more cautious, noting that ‘the question of how
much English courtly verse was, or was intended to be, sung, and in what
manner, is a vexed and to some extent an unanswerable one’.11 While she
does cite evidence that poems might have been fitted to known tunes, she
concentrates her discussion of music’s influence on verse forms that origin-
ally were explicitly associated with musical settings, and that then could
be imitated, whether or not a writer knew anything of individual musical
examples, and whether or not a poet had an ounce of actual knowledge
of or interest in music. Here she is connecting Wyatt with the medieval
fashion of writing poems in stanzas, such as the virelai, ballade, and ron-
deau, whose patterns of formal repetition originate in their preparedness
for musical setting.12 Her argument is that new models were imported,
especially from Italy, and focuses on the musically derived form of the
frottola as inspiration for some of Wyatt’s lyrics. But this is a term that
encompasses both a stanzaic song with refrain and a number of other lyric
forms, and is therefore perhaps too general a label for any great claims to
be made for specifically musical influence in particular individual cases.
Nonetheless, Wyatt’s work manifests some of the ways in which newer
verse forms found their way into early Tudor poetry, and were almost
certainly assisted in their assimilation by the international circulation of
music and musicians.
The problem with using Wyatt as an example, however, is that it is virtu-
ally impossible to demonstrate that he possessed any actual musical know-
ledge, or to identify any specific piece of music that might have influenced
him. There is surer ground to be discovered in various different kinds
of verse writing spanning all social classes across the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, where words are explicitly linked to named tunes,
or clearly destined for musical performance. For the populace at large this
meant both the ballad, where a repertoire of familiar tunes was invoked at
the top of a printed broadside, and also the Psalms in their metrical form,
which were accommodated to a limited range of well-known tunes.13 In
both genres some tunes came to have specific association with particular
subjects or words. The popular tune ‘Fortune my foe’, for example – a
gravely melancholy air – was regularly invoked for ballads dealing either
with the execution of criminals or else with religious meditation.14 The
‘Old Hundredth’, a hymn tune associated with the hundredth Psalm in
the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter, is still sung to the words ‘All people
that on earth do dwell’ today. But there are significant differences between
the poetry in the two genres of ballad and Psalm.
14 David ­Lindley
The first four lines of Psalm 1 in the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter edi-
tion of 1564 read:
The man is blest that hath not ­bent,
To wicked rede his ear,       rede: counsel
Nor led his life as sinners do
Nor sat in scorner’s chair.
This is in the metre that is the most frequently employed throughout the
book, with lines of alternating eight and six syllables. In its time it was
known as ‘Sternhold’s metre’, and has persisted as ‘common metre’ in
hymn books down to the present. It is relentlessly iambic and insistently
regular.
Compare that with the opening of ‘The Famous Battle between Robin
Hood and the Curtal Friar: To a New Northern Tune’:
In summer time when leaves grow green
And flowers are fresh and gay
Robin Hood and his merry men,
Were disposed to play.
Then some would leap and some would run,
And some would use Artillery,
Which of you can a good Bow draw,
A good Archer for to be.15

If these lines are to be interpreted as forming two four-line stanzas, they

have roughly the same shape as the Psalm, but each stanza is realised
slightly differently, with more or fewer syllables than the norm and with
frequent departures from a regular stress-pattern. These are words written
with a tune in mind, but a tune that the singer can modify by introducing
extra notes, omitting upbeats and the like. This illustrates very clearly the
significant difference between verse timed by beats with an indeterminate
number of intervening syllables on the one hand, and accentual-syllabic
metres, describable in the language of Classical prosody, on the other. For
Northrop Frye, indeed, this was a key differentiator for poetry that could
be considered ‘musical’, as he suggested: ‘When in poetry we have a pre-
dominating stress accent and a variable number of syllables between two
stresses … we have musical poetry, that is, poetry which resembles in its
structure the music contemporary with it.’16
This formulation has an obvious appeal – and Derek Attridge’s excellent
study, The Rhythms of English Poetry, might seem to afford it some sup-
port as he begins his analysis with nursery rhymes and other stress-timed
verse.17 It is, however, an oversimplification, since it takes no account of
 Early modern songs and ­lyric 15
the crucial difference between, on the one hand, writing for a musical set-
ting and, on the other, writing to an existing tune. Both activities might
be expected to show the potential influence of music on poetry, and both
offer challenges and opportunities to poets, but they do so in quite ­distinct
ways. In the former case a poet might choose to employ existing metrical
and stanzaic forms that had already been set to music. As we have seen in
the discussion of Wyatt, poets need have no musical knowledge in order
to produce such verbal structures, since they can model their poems on
other texts whose rhythms and shapes are discernible without recourse to
any supporting music. There will be technical demands if the poet actu-
ally imagines a musical destiny for the poem, in particular in confronting
the problem of making the rhythms and patterns of second and subse-
quent stanzas analogous to the first.
Where the music exists before the words, however, poets face a very dif-
ferent challenge, and one that writers of more sophisticated poems than
the average ballad were ready to take on. Such a poet must consider the
music carefully, and match both overall form and local stress-patterns to
its dictates. One form of such an exercise is the provision of English words
to the Continental music that was increasingly being collected by musi-
cians, amateur and professional, during the sixteenth century.
Nicholas Yonge, a chorister at St Paul’s, produced in 1588 an anthology
of translated madrigals, and his collection was rapidly followed by others,
including the poet Thomas Watson’s Italian Madrigals Englished (1590),
which on its title-page informed the user that the madrigals were Englished
‘not to the sense of the dittie, but to the affection of the note’. Here the
poet departed on occasion entirely from the sense and subject of his ori-
ginal, providing, for example, an elegy on Philip Sidney in place of a ‘love
message a young goatherd sends with a nosegay to his beloved’.18 At one
level this illustrates very obviously the ways in which quite different words
may be perfectly satisfactorily accommodated to the same music. This pos-
sibility is exploited, for example, in the composition of contrafacta supply-
ing religious words to secular tunes, a practice that stretches from ‘Sumer is
icumen in’, to which the words ‘Perspice Christicolas’ were supplied in the
thirteenth century; through the Lutheran appropriation of ‘the devil’s best
tunes’ in the sixteenth century; to modern hymnody, where, for example,
folk tunes are invested with new religious lyrics. The capability of music to
sustain such adaptation, even where the words have quite different subjects,
is explained by William Mahrt: ‘Even in the most explicit word-painting, it
is the link between the musical gesture and the connotation given it by the
text which accounts for its concreteness. It should not be surprising, then,
16 David ­Lindley
that the same musical figure can bear texts of diverse meaning and still be
received as word-painting.’19 This is, of course, even more true when a tune
is relatively characterless or implies only the most general of moods. The
sense that it is words that nail down the generalised emotion that music
generates is an axiom frequently invoked in the musical treatises of the
period. Words, as it were, make music ‘safe’.
Such exercises in translation may have encouraged experimentation
with line and phrase length, but they scarcely produced poems that might
stand on their own. The opening six lines of the fourth madrigal from
Yonge’s collection make this evident:
False Love, now shoot and spare not,
Now do thy worst, I care not; and to dispatch me
Use all thine art and all thy craft to catch me.
For youth amiss bestowed
I now repent me, and for my faults I languish
That brought me nothing else but grief and anguish …20
Apart from its struggle with Italian feminine endings, the lyric, after a
promising enough opening, limps in the third and sixth lines with the
effort of producing a single unit of continuous sense that could fit the
melodic contours of Palestrina’s madrigal.
The most studied of such words-to-existing tunes are the poems of the
Sidneys, Philip and Robert. Frank Fabry’s identification of some of the airs
to which Sidney, in Certain Sonnets, wrote new words is complemented by
Gavin Alexander’s work on a poem of Robert Sidney.21 The latter’s asser-
tion that ‘each time an English song was made out of imported material,
the relations between music and poetry, and the styles and structures of
English song, were extended and altered’ (p. 381) is in many ways con-
vincing – it is generally claimed, for example, that Philip Sidney’s words-
to-music introduced trochaic metres into English verse. But it is not as
straightforward a matter as he suggests.
Anthony Munday, in the ‘Address to the Gentle Reader’ of his Banquet
of Daintie Conceits (1588) wrote:
Fyrst, thou art to consider, that the Ditties heerein contained, are made to
seuerall set Notes, wherein no measure of verse can be obserued, because the
Notes will affoorde no such libertie: for looke how they rise and fall, in iust
time and order of Musique, euen so haue I kept course therewith in making
the Ditties, which will seeme very bad stuffe in reading, but (I perswade me)
wyll delight thee, when thou singest any of them to thine Instrument.22
Rather later, in 1629, Edward Filmer, in his preface to French ­Court-Aires,
writes equally anxiously about the challenges in fitting words to notes:
 Early modern songs and ­lyric 17
Now, because translated Ditties and Originals differ chiefly in this
Preposterous Point, that, whereas the Musicall Notes are fitted to the
Originals, the Translations are, contrarily, to be fitted to the Musicall
Notes, I have been forced by this new Taske, for the more even Accord
with the Musicke, in divers Aires, to alter the Naturally first Cast of the
Verse, and to ordaine, in the proper place of an Iambicke Foot, a dissonant
Trochaicke, as more sutable to the nature of the Note. For this cause, when
the most busie Examiners shall, in some of the Ditties, find heere and there
Iambick Meeters that seeme to faulter in their Pace, through the unlawfull
frequencie of Troachaike motions let them forbeare Censure till they have
tried them with the Streame of the Aire or Note.23
The important thing registered by both writers here is the way that words
written to fit existing music are often rhythmically problematic to a reader
who is simply contemplating them as a lyric poem on the page. In the
absence of a tune one might grope with difficulty after the underlying
rhythm. This is true for the modern poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson,
which is rhythmically indecipherable to anyone not familiar with dub-
reggae, or with the poet’s own readings, and it was true in the early mod-
ern period for many of these lyrics written as contrafacta. The praise that
has been offered to Sidney’s efforts could scarcely be given to many of the
words provided for the instrumental pieces of Dowland. His most often-
quoted song, ‘Flow my teares’, for example, is evidently a lyric provided to
fit the music of the already existing Lachrimae pavan, and illustrates exactly
Filmer’s ‘faltering pace’ in the first and third lines of the first stanza:
Flow my teares fall from your springs,
Exilde for euer: Let me morne
where nights black bird her sad infamy sings,
there let mee liue forlorne.24
To anyone who knows the music the emphasis in the first line on both
‘teares’ and ‘fall’, and ‘sad’ and ‘infamy’ are unproblematic when the tune
is in one’s ear, whereas the unknowing reader might well hesitate over the
allocation of stresses.
Even more obviously, in the thirteenth song from the Second Book of
Airs a reader will struggle to find any metrical shape (or even coherent
sense) in the following lines:
   One faith one ­loue,
Makes our fraile pleasures eternall, And in sweetnesse proue.
   New Hopes new ioyes,
Are still with sorrow declining, Vnto deepe anoies.25
The almain dance-form of the song suggests that the tune was written
first and the words rather desperately seek to accommodate themselves
18 David ­Lindley
to its rhythm – though even then not particularly successfully, since the
articulation of the lyrics is almost as difficult in singing as it is in read-
ing. Dowland might well himself have supplied these words, and other
similar lyrics, to already-existing dance tunes, and their conventionality
of sentiment, awkwardness of expression, and elusive metrics do not in
any way prevent them from being perfectly successful as words for a song.
Whether a poet could learn anything from them of use in writing ‘literary’
lyrics, however, might seem doubtful indeed. Dowland illustrates vividly
the abiding paradox that lyrics having the most demonstrably close con-
nection to music are yet frequently those whose metrical shape, or verbal
‘music’, is most incoherent when simply read on the page.
While the impulse to provide words for music has always been an active
one, the motivation for supplying words to these existing dance tunes in
this period may have been a commercial one, as the advent of printed
music (of which more later) offered a market in which songs and mad-
rigals might well have had wider appeal than instrumental ensembles.
This is certainly the case in Campion’s published version of The Lord Hay’s
Masque of 1607, where he supplied words to pre-existing tunes at the end
of the description of the entertainment, explaining that ‘though the last
three Ayres were devised onely for dauncing, yet they are here set forth
with words that they may be sung to the Lute or Violl’.26 This publica-
tion, then, is both a memento and a record of a fleeting court occasion
(masques were generally performed only once before a select audience),
and at the same time one that offers its readership the opportunity to
translate courtly pastime into domestic entertainment. These, it must be
said, are not amongst Campion’s best lyrics, exhibiting some of the same
awkwardnesses as have been noted in other contrafacta. The first is made
of straggling long lines; the third manifests in its eighth and tenth lines a
similar metrical ‘faltering pace’ to that exhibited in Dowland’s ‘Flow my
teares’. But Campion, of course, made special claim for himself as both
poet and musician in the address ‘To the Reader’ prefaced to Two Bookes
of Ayres (?1612/13), where he wrote: ‘In these English Ayres, I have chiefely
aymed to couple my Words and Notes lovingly together, which will be
much for him to do that hath not power over both.’27 If even he could find
accommodating words to existing tunes a problematic activity, it ­suggests
that the significance of contrafacta in stimulating metrical innovation in
the early modern lyric has been somewhat overstated.
And yet, though in general it would seem likely that Campion’s lyr-
ics were written before the music to which they were then set, and are
examples, therefore, of words written for rather than to music, a lyric like
 Early modern songs and ­lyric 19
‘Faire, if you expect admiring’, from A Booke of Ayres, usefully signals what
can still be claimed for music’s influence. Its first stanza runs:
Faire, if you expect admiring,
Sweet, if you provoke desiring,
Grace deere love with kinde requiting/
Fond. but if thy sight be blindnes,
False, if thou affect unkindnes,
Flie both love and loves delighting.
Then when hope is lost and love is scorned,
Ile bury my desires, and quench the fires that ever yet in vaine have burned.28
The first six lines are straightforwardly trochaic – the metre, we have seen,
whose musical origin is claimed for Sidney’s contrafacta. But what of the
last straggly line? The rhymes might tempt one to relineate it as:
Ile bury my desires,
And quench the fires
That ever yet in vaine have burned.
But the analogous final line of the second stanza is rather differently
shaped by rhyme:
Ile flie to her again, and sue
For pity to renue
My hopes distressed.
No conventional, Classically derived prosodic description will serve. But
consider the musical setting (see Fig. 1). Here the ‘spondee’ at the begin-
ning of the third and sixth lines becomes much more obvious – an indica-
tion of Campion’s attention to ‘quantity’ as well as rhythm, which found
its expression in the Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602)29 – but
it is the organisation of the final line, in which the rhyme words are, as it
were, incidental chimes rather than structuring sounds, that most clearly
indicates the way in which thinking ‘musically’ might affect the writ-
ing of verse. It is, of course, possible that Campion had written the tune
first, but it is much more likely that word and tune evolved together, the
rhythmical contrast of the rapid movement in the second section with the
steady crotchet pace of the first being a fairly standard musical climactic
quickening.
There are, then, at least two important ways in which this song sug-
gests things that might be especially significant in the influence of music
on poetry. The first is the way the larger structure of the poem might
be suggested by, or reflect, a musical pattern. When Shakespeare wrote
Ariel’s song of freedom, ‘Where the bee sucks’, he presumably did so
20 David ­Lindley

Faire, if you ex - pect ad - mi - ring - Sweet, if you pro - voke de - si - ring,

Fond, but if thy sight be blind-ness, False, if thou af - fect un - kind - nes,
5

Grace deere love with kinde re - quit - ing. Then when hope is
Flie both love and loves de - light - ing.
10

lost and__ love is scorn - ed, Ile bu - ry my de-sires, and

14

­ quench the fires that ev - er yet in vanine have bur - ned

Figure 1 Thomas Campion, A Booke of Ayres (London: printed by

Peter Short, 1601), no. 11

before it was set by a composer; but its shift into a dactylic triple rhythm
at ‘Merrily, merrily, shall I live now’ feeds naturally into a setting such as
that by Robert Johnson, which may have been used at an early perform-
ance. The second is the more interesting, and the more difficult to tie
down explicitly to musical influence. In Campion’s lyric, units of sense
of different lengths are counterpointed against the rhyme units, with the
patterning of accent and stress further enriching the mixture. And it is
precisely the way in which music might suggest and prompt relationships
between shorter and longer phrasal units within an overall organisation
of syntactical sense and chimings of sounds in rhyme that is fundamen-
tal to the richness of, for example, Herbert’s poetry. His widely varied
stanza forms manifest continuously an almost unparalleled sensitivity to
and control of these relationships. He was, as Izaak Walton informs us,
an adept musician.
His chiefest recreation was Musick, in which heavenly Art he was a most
excellent Master, and, compos’d many divine Hymns and Anthems, which
he set and sung to his Lute or Viol; and, though he was a lover of retired-
ness, yet his love to Musick was such, that he went usually twice every
week on certain appointed dayes, to the Cathedral Church in Salisbury;
and at his return would say, That his time spent in Prayer, and Cathedral
Musick, elevated his Soul, and was his Heaven upon Earth: But before his
return thence to Bemerton, he would usually sing and play his part, at an
appointed private Musick meeting; and, to justifie this practice, he would
often say, Religion does not banish mirth, but only moderates, and sets
rules to it.30
 Early modern songs and ­lyric 21
It might, then, seem entirely probable that Herbert learnt his verbal
and metrical artistry in part at least from the frequent exercise of musical
performance. It is, however, impossible to demonstrate as a fact. For Ben
Jonson – an author who seems to me not to have been particularly enam-
oured of practical music,31 and one who, in any case, claimed in conversa-
tion with William Drummond ‘that he wrote all his [verses] in prose, for
so his master Camden had learned him’32 – could yet write odes in com-
plex quasi-Pindaric metres, and lyrics of delicate verbal music such as the
poem ‘Her Triumph’ in the Celebration of Charis in Ten Lyric Pieces, with its
adept deployment of triple- and duple-time beats. Drummond reported,
indeed, that Jonson ‘said to the King his master, Mr G. Buchanan, had
corrupted his ear when young, and learned him to sing verses when he
should have read them’.33 To the dichotomy of reading–singing we will
return, but for the moment Jonson is sufficient evidence that it is not
necessary to be immersed in music to write ‘musical’ poems.
Though Frye considered it was the roughness of Donne’s verse that
actually could be considered ‘musical’, most readers have counterposed
his conversational rhythms with the measured quality of Herbert’s lyrics
to suggest quite the opposite. And yet consider, for example, the familiar
opening lines of Donne’s ‘Sun Rising’:
Busy old fool, unruly sun,
   Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains call on us?
The extension of the third line and delightful postponement of the arrival
of the rhyme word manifest precisely the kind of control that the lyric
quoted above from Yonge’s collection cannot quite bring off – and might
signal some kind of relationship with music.34 Many of Donne’s lyrics were
resistant to setting until a more flexible, declamatory musical style came
into being in the mid seventeenth century, but yet, according to Walton,
he commanded his ‘An Hymne to God the Father’
to be set to a most grave and solemn Tune, and to be often sung to the
Organ by the Choristers of St. Pauls Church, in his own hearing, especially
at the Evening Service; and at his return from his Customary Devotions in
that place, did occasionally say to a friend, The words of this Hymne have
restored to me the same thoughts of joy that possest my Soul in my sick-
ness when I composed it.35
This implies not merely that Donne was sensitive to music but, in its
suggestion that it was when the words were actually set that he was ena-
bled to recall their original feeling, that this account stands in interesting
22 David ­Lindley
relationship to his earlier lyric, ‘Triple Fool’, and leads this chapter on to
consider what the musical relationship of lyric poetry might mean for the
transition from manuscript to print. In ‘Triple Fool’, having argued that
writing a love poem ‘tames’ grief, the second stanza continues:
Some man, his art and voice to show,
Doth set and sing my pain,
And, by delighting many, frees again
Grief, which verse did restrain.
To love and grief tribute of verse belongs,
But not of such as pleases when ’tis read,
Both are increased by such songs:
For both their triumphs so are published,
And I, which was two fools, do so grow three;
Who are a little wise, the best fools be.
And I, which was two fools, do so grow three;
Who are a little wise, the best fools be.36
This stanza presents a layered view of the purposes and effects of poetic
composition, musical setting, and publication. For the individual poet, writ-
ing is represented as a therapeutic activity, softening the pains of love and
grief. But when set to music the complications are several. First, such setting
subjects the poem to the self-display of the musician, thereby taking it out
of the control of the writer. But then, whereas Donne’s hearing of his music-
ally clothed religious poem reawakened the original joy, it seems that here
it merely releases grief again. Yet it does not do so directly – since the song’s
listeners take pleasure in the singing, rather than re-enacting the originary
grief. Instead it ‘publishes’ the triumph of both love and grief, in part to the
humiliation of the poet at the broadcasting of private emotion.
The tension between private and public purposes is exposed here.
And the songbooks share with a good deal of published verse a problem-
atic sense of the relationship between the two. Thomas Healy considers
Donne’s poem in the light of this tension in his chapter below (pp. 63–5).
Campion may stand for many other writers when, in the address to the
reader for Two Bookes of Ayres he writes: ‘Out of many Songs, which,
partly at the request of friends, partly for my owne recreation, were by
mee long since composed, I have now enfranchised a few.’37 Yonge, in his
dedication of Musica transalpina, claimed that he had received the trans-
lated lyrics from a high-placed gentleman, and then recorded that when
he had collected
sufficient to furnish a great sett of Bookes, diuers of my friends afore-
said, required with great instance to haue them printed, whereunto I was
 Early modern songs and ­lyric 23
as willing as the rest, but could neuer obtaine the Gentlemans consent,
though I sought it by many great meanes. For his answere was euer, that
those trifles beeing but an idle mans exercise, of an idle subiect, written
onely for priuate recreation, would blush to be seene otherwise then by
twilight, much more to bee brought into the common view of all men.38
These are, of course, perfectly conventional protestations, which can
be met with again and again in the published works of the period. At one
level they confirm simply that music and poem belong to the same cul-
tures. But yet there are important distinctions to be made. Poems in print
can be read by anyone who is literate, where songs demand a performing
skill if they are to be realised in their musical form. Even in the case of A
handefull of pleasant delites (1584), a collection made of ‘pleasaunt songs to
ech new tune’,39 the address of ‘The Printer to the Reader’ encouragingly
writes:
Here may you haue of sundrie sorts,
Such Songs as you require
Wherefore my friend, if you regard
such Songs to reade or heare:
Doubt not to buy this pretie Booke.
In this collection the tunes were not printed but, like the broadside ballad,
were simply identified and, presumably, were well known to the major-
ity, at least, of purchasers. Nonetheless, the compiler, Clement Robinson,
offers the poems equally to the ear or the eye. At an artistically higher
level, the 1590s saw the fitful beginnings of the publication of solo airs
in England (well behind the European Continent), and the creation of
a market for printed music. Nonetheless, Campion himself issued a very
similar invitation to the dedicatee of his Two Bookes of Ayres, Francis, earl
of Cumberland:
These Leaves I offer you, Devotion ­might
Her selfe lay open, reade them, or else heare
How gravely with their tunes they yeeld delight
To any vertuous, and not curious eare.40
Campion’s comment raises significant questions about the audience for
printed songbooks, about the ways in which they might have been used,
and therefore about the nature of the musical lyric itself.
The shift from manuscript to print at the very least meant that compos-
ers, like poets, could take charge of the structuring of their works. At the
simplest level, these two books of Campion’s compositions are divided into
the ‘grave and pious’ and the ‘amorous and light’. Long ago I argued for
24 David ­Lindley
the thematic coherence that might be found in the organisation of most
of Campion’s books.41 Those claims now seem perhaps overstated, but I
would still suggest that the Third Booke, which is explicitly offered to his
patron, Thomas Monson, on the occasion of his release from the Tower,
and which claims that its songs were conceived privately under his patron-
age, makes in its structure a comment on the misfortunes that he and his
patron had suffered in the Overbury affair. The printed collection then
retains some of its private relationship with the individual patron, and,
indeed, after this very high-profile misfortune, may have been an attempt
to vindicate Monson in the public eye. But, inevitably, at the same time it
offers itself differently to the general music-buying public.
Kirsten Gibson has explored the implications of publication for
Dowland’s First Booke of Songes or Ayres, and makes interestingly simi-
lar claims. She notes Dowland’s apparent reluctance to commit songs to
print, but argues: ‘When the songs and their associated texts were trans-
ferred from specific socially situated instances of performance to the pages
of a printed book, they became, like the book itself, material objects,
whose interpretation might be refigured by their new form and context.’42
And she observes that: ‘The songs, moreover, become mutually informing
of each other as they are gathered together to form a discrete collection.’43
From this perspective a published book of songs is not unlike the contem-
porary sequences of sonnets, with their very varying degrees of coherent
narrative or thematic organisation. The importance of such connections
should not, therefore, be overstated.
In other respects, however, the print publication of songs raises sig-
nificant questions about the nature of lyric itself, and about the kinds of
experience song might offer to its performers and to its audience. There are
questions that arise about the way in which a singer positions him or her-
self in relation to the ‘I’ of a song when performing musically, rather than
reading the lyric. So, too, there are interesting problems in ­formulating
exactly what it is that audiences are responding to when they hear a song
in a performative context.
Heather Dubrow has valuably questioned many of the assumptions
that have characteristically been made about the relationship of a reader
to the ‘I’ of a lyric. She writes persuasively about ‘the unstable fluidity of
audiences that is so central to early modern lyric’,44 thereby unsettling the
notion that a reader simply absorbs the voice of a lyric to him or herself,
identifying with the first person of the lyric.
Songbooks add further dimensions. A song, or a Psalm, like a poem,
might be performed privately and solitarily, and an individual certainly
 Early modern songs and ­lyric 25
might take on the voice of the poem for him or herself. Margaret Hoby,
for example, recorded that on 26 January 1600, ‘to refresh my selfe being
dull, I plaied and sunge to the Alpherion’.45 But, as Donne’s ‘Triple Fool’
makes evident, there is always, precisely because of the element of per-
formance, a distance established between the spoken voice of the poem
and the sung voice of its performer. Sarah Iovan follows through some
of the implications of the performative nature of the experience for the
lyric speaker in a suggestive discussion. She notes that ‘at first glance the
musical setting seems to simplify the traditional questions surrounding
the lyric speaker by giving the speaker and listener physical presence. At
the most basic level, the singer enacts the position of speaker, and the
audience enacts the position of listener.’ She argues that this simple binary
is always disturbed by the dialogic relationship between the singer and the
accompanying lute.46 There are, as it were, simultaneously the voices of
the poet and composer, of vocalist and accompanist, being experienced by
the song’s audience.
One might go further and say that even if the song is sung for solitary
recreation, the very fact of taking pleasure in the act of singing means
that the relationship with the lyric can never be simply one of identifica-
tion; the ‘I’ of the lyric is always someone else, the emotion always medi-
ated. Even more obviously is this the case if one considers the physical
form that the printed books of songs frequently took. One page offered a
melody and accompaniment, which could be used either by a solo singer
accompanying him or herself, or else by a singer and an accompanist side
by side. The facing page arranged alto, tenor and bass parts on the page
so that it would be possible for a quartet standing round a table, with or
without lute, to sing together.
Campion explained why he provided this arrangement:
These Ayres were for the most part framed at first for one voyce with the
Lute, or Violl, but, upon occasion, they have since beene filled with more
parts, which who so please may use, who like not may leave. Yet doe wee
daily observe, that when any shall sing a Treble to an Instrument, the stand-
ers by will be offring at an inward part out of ther owne nature; and, true
or false, out it must, though to the perverting of the whole harmonie.47
The note of regret is unmissable, and Campion clearly would have pre-
ferred to keep the purity of his coupling of word and note by confining
performance to one singer. But his comments demonstrate the fundamen-
tal sociability of the act of singing, and, though publication in this form
might have been undertaken for the benefit of sales, it obviously responds
to something very basic in our response to lyric-as-song.
26 David ­Lindley
How to describe the experience of song is a much contested matter.
Mark W. Booth, writing of the member of an audience listening to a song
recital, contends that ‘because song comes to us in a voice, without dra-
matic context, to pass through the consciousness of the listener, it fosters
some degree of identification between singer and audience’, arguing that
‘we are drawn into … the self offered by the song’. But he adds to this
perhaps rather solipsistic account the claim that ‘the individual member
of the audience enters into a common pattern of thought, attitude and
emotion, and achieves by it concert with his society’.48 Jeanette Bicknell is
even more categoric: ‘The fact that music can have a private or individual
use does not make it any less a social product … Communing with music
is a form of communing with human reality, and that is social.’49
Following Classical theory and medieval practice, then, the lyric is
defined in the early modern period principally through its relationship
with music, whether actual, or only notional. The connection with its
sister art contributed significantly to the development of varied metrical
and stanzaic forms, assisting in opening up the ears and eyes of poets to
Continental forms, and in freeing lyric verse from the tyranny of jog-trot
metres. The exercise of providing words to fit existing tunes, however,
exposes also the difference between verse written for music and that writ-
ten to an already existing tune. In the absence of the music such verse can
be problematic for a reader to negotiate. Music, like poetry, moved from
manuscript to print, and the process emphasised its essentially commu-
nal nature, complicating the nature of the relationship of performers and
audience to the lyric ‘I’. If this offers a definition at variance with stand-
ard post-Romantic assumptions about the individual and personal nature
of the lyric as a genre, it is well to remind ourselves that song is still the
dominant mode in which the majority of the population experience any
poetry at all.

Notes
1 Though there is at least one antedating, from Drant’s translation of Horace
in 1567.
2 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), pp. 19–20.
3 Thomas Campion, The Works of Thomas Campion, ed. Walter R. Davis (London:
Faber and Faber, 1969), p. 309.
4 Thomas Churchyard, A musicall consort of heauenly harmonie (compounded out
of manie parts of musicke) called Churchyards charitie (London, 1595), p. 35.
5 Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Nelson,
1965), p. 99.
 Early modern songs and ­lyric 27
6 Ibid., p. 113.
7 Heather Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern
England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), p. 5. And see her
chapter below, pp. 30–50.
8 John Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London: Methuen,
1961), p. 108.
9 Ibid., p. 134.
10 Winifred Maynard, ‘The Lyrics of Wyatt: Poems or Songs?’, Review of English
Studies, n.s. 16 (1965), 1–13 (p. 2). Stevens also notes that poems were writ-
ten to fit existing tunes, but is dismissive of the significance of this (Stevens,
Music and Poetry, p. 131). That lyrics might fit a variety of tunes is exempli-
fied in Ross Duffin, Shakespeare’s Songbook (New York and London: Norton,
2004), where tunes are selected for the plays’ lyrics, with no claim that they
were in Shakespeare’s mind as he wrote them.
11 Elizabeth Heale, Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry (London and New York:
Longman, 1998), p. 78.
12 For a witty exemplification of these and other stanzaic forms, see John
Hollander, Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse, rev. edn (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2001).
13 On the metrical Psalms and their music see Nicholas Temperley, The Music of
the English Parish Church, 2 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1979).
14 The tune can be heard sung to a variety of ballads in the English Broadside
Ballad Archive at http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/.
15 ‘The Famous Battle between Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar: To a New
Northern Tune’, http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/30375/xml.
16 Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1957)
p. 255.
17 Derek Attridge, The Rhythms of English Poetry (London: Longman, 1982); see
also his Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
18 Winifred Maynard, Elizabethan Lyric Poetry and Its Music (Oxford University
Press, 1986), p. 45. She discusses, but is dismissive of, the poetic value of such
translations, pp. 40–5. Rather more positive insights into the two translators
are offered by Laura Macy, ‘The Due Decorum Kept: Elizabethan Translation
and the Madrigals Englished of Nicholas Yonge and Thomas Watson’, Journal
of Musicological Research 17 (1997), 1–21; and William Peter Mahrt, ‘Yonge
versus Watson and the Translation of Italian Madrigals’, John Donne Journal
25 (2006), 245–66.
19 Mahrt, ‘Yonge versus Watson’, pp. 265–6.
20 E. H. Fellowes, English Madrigal Verse, 1588–1632, ed. F. W. Sternfeld and
David Greer, 3rd edn (Oxford University Press, 1967) p. 320.
21 Frank J. Fabry, ‘ Sidney’s Verse Adaptations to Two Sixteenth-Century Italian
Art Songs’, Renaissance Quarterly 23 (1970), 237–55, and ‘Sidney’s Poetry
and Italian Song-Form’, English Literary Renaissance 3 (1973), 232–48; Gavin
Alexander, ‘The Elizabethan Lyric as Contrafactum: Robert Sidney’s “French
Tune” Identified’, Music and Letters 84 (2003), 378–402.
28 David ­Lindley
22 Anthony Munday, ‘Address to the Gentle Reader’, in Banquet of Daintie
Conceits (London: printed by I. C[harlewood] for Edwarde White, 1588),
sig. A3r.
23 Edward Filmer, French Court-Aires With their Ditties Englished … Collected,
Translated, Published by Ed. Filmer, Gent (London, 1629), sig. A4r.
24 John Dowland, ‘Flow my teares’, in Lyrics from English Airs 1596–1622, ed.
Edward Doughtie (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 101.
25 John Dowland, ‘Now cease my wand’ring eyes’, in ibid., p. 106.
26 Campion, Works, p. 230.
27 Ibid., p. 55.
28 Ibid., p. 33.
29 For the most comprehensive treatment of Campion’s ill-fated efforts to intro-
duce Classical quantitative metres into English poetry, see Derek Attridge,
Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge
University Press, 1974). See also Christopher R. Wilson, ‘Number and Music
in Campion’s Measured Verse’, John Donne Journal 25 (2006), 267–89.
30 Izaak Walton, The lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard
Hooker, Mr. George Herbert (London, 1670), pp. 59–60 (each of the lives is
paginated separately). For a very different take on Herbert’s use of musical
imagery, which argues that he is not interested in the actual performance of
music, see Andrew Mattison, ‘“Keep Your Measures”: Herrick, Herbert, and
the Resistance to Music’, Criticism 48 (2006), 323–46.
31 See David Lindley, ‘Music’, in Ben Jonson in Context, ed. Julie Sanders
(Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 162–70.
32 Ben Jonson, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David
Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson, 7 vols. (Cambridge University
Press, 2012), Vol. v, p. 378.
33 Ibid., p. 386 (my italics). Jonson is here echoing Quintilian.
34 Helen Gardner suggested that Donne wrote some poems with tunes in mind.
See her edition of John Donne, The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 238. On the settings of Donne’s poetry see Bryan
N. S. Gooch, ‘Music for Donne’, John Donne Journal 15 (1996), 171–88.
35 Walton, Lives, p. 55.
36 Donne, Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets, p. ­81.
37 Campion, Works, p. 55.
38 Nicholas Yonge, Musica transalpina (London: printed by Thomas East, 1588),
sig. A2r.
39 As John Ward authoritatively demonstrated, neither words nor tune were
‘new’; see his ‘Music for A Handefull of pleasant delites’, JAMS 10 (1957),
151–80.
40 Campion, Works, p. 54.
41 David Lindley, Thomas Campion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986), pp. 3–29.
42 Kirsten Gibson, ‘The Order of the Book: Materiality, Narrative and Authorial
Voice in John Dowland’s First Booke of Songs or Ayres’, Renaissance Studies 26
(2012), 13–33 (p. 19).
 Early modern songs and ­lyric 29
43 Ibid., p. 24.
44 Dubrow, Challenges of Orpheus, pp. 69, 77.
45 Margaret Hoby, The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady
Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605, ed. Jane Moody (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), p. 56. The
‘Alpherion’ is the orpherion, a wire-strung, lute-like instrument.
46 Sarah Iovan, ‘Performing Voices in the English Lute Song’, SEL 50 (2010),
63–81.
47 Campion, Works, p. 55.
48 Mark W. Booth, The Experience of Songs (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1981), p. 15.
49 Jeanette Bicknell, Why Music Moves Us (London: Palgrave, 2009), p. 93.
 ­c h apter t wo

Neither here nor there

Deixis and the sixteenth-century sonnet
Heather Dubrow

Directions, definitions, delimitations

[Mad] in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme,
A bliss in proof, and prov’d, [a] very woe,
Before, a joy propos’d, behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.1
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 evokes desire, sliding from a straightforward
condemnation to a representation of its dream-like allures and a challenge
to the didactic agenda of the poem. All that the critical world well knows,
yet few or none knows well why the deictic ‘this’ appears twice in the
couplet – and why we have devoted so little attention to the deictics that
establish, or appear to establish, temporal and spatial positions in early
modern lyric, notably here/there, now/then, and this/that.2
Despite that neglect, other critics have engaged with deictic practices
in narratives and dramas of this and many other periods. Deixis, narra-
tologists have repeatedly demonstrated, establishes positionalities consti-
tutive of narrative, notably the relationship between story and discourse
and between an external world and the mind of an observer.3 ‘Deixis is
immensely important to the drama, however, being the primary means
whereby language gears itself to the speaker and receiver … and to the
time and place of the action … as well as to the supposed physical envir-
onment at large and the objects that fill it’, Keir Elam announces, a
position seconded by many other students of theatre.4 In encouraging
cognate inquiries into lyric, arguments like Elam’s foreshadow poten-
tial comparisons and contrasts. Henry V’s ‘Then call we this the field of
Agincourt’ (4.7.90) at once intensifies the pretence that ‘this’ is already
a battlefield and reminds us that he is miming the work of theatre in
turning a stage into a battlefield, much as he transforms French property
into English booty.  Yet, as the final sonnet reminds us, all these charms
30
 Deixis and the sixteenth-century ­sonnet 31
are eventually o’erthrown in both the political and theatrical realms. In
other words, deictics in performed drama often code representation in
terms of the material stage. As we will see, lyric deixis draws attention to
the material page, a practice that in more senses than one rhymes with its
analogue in drama.
Comparisons like these risk evoking the expectation that contrasting
dramatic and lyric deixis can conveniently crystallise representations of
lyric in the sixteenth century, thus extending arguments in the chapter
that opens this volume (David Lindley’s powerful analysis of song) by
slotting in clear-cut definitions and descriptions of lyric in its print and
manuscript versions.5 Not so. To be sure, such an argument would con-
veniently enable a trajectory that could aptly structure this entire volume
by historicising changing conceptions of lyric. But, as Hemingway’s Jake
puts it in The Sun Also Rises, ‘isn’t it pretty to think so’. For in fact the
category of lyric, if indeed it should be called a category in its sixteenth-
century incarnations, was discussed too sporadically and inconsistently in
that period to produce that sort of clear-cut trajectory. Indeed, commit-
ted to interpreting lyric as a label serving poetic and critical ends rather
than an objectively discerned and stable entity, many students of later
periods would distrust such a trajectory on other grounds.6 Nonetheless,
deixis can in fact illuminate the development of lyric both by directing
our attention to sixteenth-century practices that characterised it in that
era and by anticipating more theoretical representations of the mode in
subsequent centuries.
All discussions of genre demand caveats. Genres are, as so many crit-
ics have observed, variable and volatile. Hence, the family resemblance
model that Alastair Fowler’s Kinds of Literature influentially adapts from
Wittgenstein can resolve many problems through defining forms as labile
as, for example, the sonnet, epigram, and lyric itself, as well as success-
fully bracketing additional dilemmas.7 But it remains all too easy to pre-
sent the texts on which one is focusing as normative; thus statements
rendering solitary meditation as the sine qua non for the genre ignore
the communal renditions of lyric in the Greek ode, and Jonathan Culler’s
instantiation of apostrophe as the signature trope of lyric is rooted in
the Romantic poetry in which he specialises.8 Particularly important is
distinguishing twentieth- and twenty-first-century usages from those in
the culture one is exploring. Witness, for example, the ways the polem-
ical rejection of a hypostasised version of lyric by LANGUAGE poets has
shaped – and misshaped – perceptions of that form by both critics and
defenders.
32 Heather ­Dubrow
But how about the specific subject of this chapter, lyric in the sixteenth
century?9 A useful analogue is the status of the Classical epigram, which
could vary in content from a gravestone memorial to a satirical commen-
tary and was variously inscribed, written, and spoken.10 The extent of the
analogous challenge posed by this chapter registers in the fact that some
critics have even claimed that the very term ‘lyric’ was virtually unknown
in the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries; but in fact it does
appear very occasionally. As the preceding chapter by Lindley has effect-
ively indicated, however, such references are very rare, and these and the
few other surviving allusions to lyric per se either use the term in relation
to music, as in the passage from Puttenham that he cites, or in relation
to metre, which was the determinant of generic classifications in many
Classical texts; in particular, those texts often refer to ‘melic’, or song-like
poetry. Thus, anticipating the triadic division of modes that we also find
in the mid seventeenth century in Milton’s Reason of Church Government,
Roger Ascham’s Scholemaster divides poetry into comic, tragic, epic, and
melic. We might well see this adoption of the Classical category of melic
poetry as signalling the emphasis on song discussed by Lindley, though
presumably it would also need to encompass such unsong-like forms as
that slippery epigram.
Despite their rarity elsewhere, we do also find references to lyric per
se in statements by George Puttenham and Sir Philip Sidney, as well as
two later writers, Michael Drayton and John Milton. The influence of
Classical metrical practices is especially apparent when Sidney writes, ‘Is
it then the Pastoral poem which is misliked? … Or is it the lamenting
Elegaic? … Is it the bitter but wholesome Iambic? … Is it the Lyric that
most displeaseth?’11 As these rhetorical questions indicate, Sidney’s cat-
egories are primarily based on metre, not the characteristics related to lyric
in its later and expanded sense in other chapters in this volume; pastoral,
the exception to that generalisation about Sidney’s classifications, reminds
us yet again that lyric, when discussed at all, was not discussed consist-
ently in the sixteenth century.
Although they cannot yield a more definitive argument about how
lyric was seen in the period, statements on related subjects are germane.
References to the Pindaric ode, which were very common in the period,
may suggest that it offered a potential prototype for lyric – that is, cele-
bratory public poetry – much as the ode and lyric were often conflated
in later eras. The association of poetry with iconic mythological figures –
notably Orpheus but also Pan and Arion – variously connected that mode
with, paradoxically, both rhetorical power and failure; arguably such
 Deixis and the sixteenth-century ­sonnet 33
characters were especially linked to what we today would call lyric. And
the use of words like ‘air’ and ‘turn’ also brought to bear a range of asso-
ciations, some relevant to cultural anxieties about the erotic temptations
of love lyrics. ‘Turn’, for instance, could suggest both the skill with which
Jacobean furniture was designed and the deceit with which seductive songs
were associated; moreover, the sexual undertow of ‘turn’, neglected in my
exposition of it in the book cited above, demonstrates ambivalences and
ambiguities surrounding lyric, thus further complicating definitions.
Similarly, perceptions of lyric in its many and volatile incarnations
were surely informed, in the several senses of that term, by the sonnet
and pastoral. Pastoral drew attention to the dialogic characteristics denied
in many commentaries on lyric, as well as that problematical connection
with song. And the propensity of both the genre of shepherds and that of
lovers to participate in groupings of poems – a shepherd’s calendar, a series
of replies like those attracted by Marlowe’s ‘Passionate Shepherd to His
Love’, and of course the many varieties of sonnet cycles and sequences –
complicates the project of defining the mode in terms of length. The puta-
tive immediacy of lyric is not the only apparent signature of the form that
is liable to misreadings and even forgeries.
In exploring such issues, I rely especially on the sonnet, in part
because it offers a convenient microcosm of issues that arise in other
versions of lyric as well – and, paradoxically, in part because it simul-
taneously involves intriguing potentialities for distinctive forms of
deixis. As I argued in detail elsewhere, a transhistorical comparison of
the sonnet and lyric yields predictable connections among their putative
characteristics, notably the sonnet’s propensity to represent heightened
emotion and intense personal experience. (As the example from Samuel
Daniel below reminds us, however, the sonnet often is not overheard
but rather implicitly or explicitly addressed to human listeners, thus
challenging a characteristic so often attributed to lyric.)12 Moreover, the
special status the sonnet variously enjoyed for both readers and writ-
ers in the early modern period gestures towards connections with some
ways lyric was represented then and later. If, as David Lindley’s chap-
ter argues, audiences in that period often encountered lyric in the form
of song, in the sixteenth century the sonnet was arguably the principal
genre in which they encountered written poetry focusing on personal
experience. And so many of that era’s authors felt inspired or impelled
to experiment with the sonnet, whether to assert nationalistic claims
over a Continental form; or to demonstrate their skill with a difficult
one; or to explore love, a subject central to the writings of their period.
34 Heather ­Dubrow
Hence arguably they associated this literary type with the potentialities
of poetry in general and with how they may have conceived lyric in
particular, to the extent that they held such a conception. Several chap-
ters in this volume, notably Marion Thain’s ‘Victorian Lyric Pathology
and Phenomenology’, scrutinise practices of representing the lyric as a
synecdoche for all poetry; arguably in the sixteenth century the sonnet
often occupied a similarly synecdochal role.
This does not of course guarantee that analysing the sonnet, that reposi-
tory of images of storm-tossed seas, is itself smooth sailing. In approach-
ing this form we encounter no paucity of direct references to its workings,
but, like the more sporadic allusions to lyric, they too prove slippery and
inconsistent in the sixteenth century. To be sure, the pervasive impact of
not only Petrarch but his commentators and Continental imitators had
established a conception of a fourteen-line poem following predetermined
rhyme schemes. But the term ‘sonnet’, etymologically a ‘little song’, was
by no means confined to the types of fourteen-line poems that our own
handbooks typically specify. Witness, inter alia, the assignment of the title
Songs and Sonets to Donne’s posthumous publication, while Sir Philip
Sidney’s Apology for Poetry similarly refers to ‘that lyrical kind of songs
and sonnets’.13 Yet as Donne’s volume and collections like Mary Wroth’s
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus conclusively remind us, poems called ‘sonnets’
were sometimes distinguished from those labelled ‘songs’. In any event,
the fact that the term ‘song’ was itself multifarious and inconsistently
used, as David Lindley’s chapter has demonstrated, further complicates
issues about the sonnet. Hence describing lyric in general or the sonnet
in particular as ‘song-like’ involves blithely skiing down one of many slip-
pery slopes in this perilous terrain.
But all these problems in addressing sixteenth-century conceptions of
lyric, song, and even the sonnet do not mean that I need to take my deic-
tics and go home again. Fortunately, useful analogues abound in the crit-
ical literature on periods other than the early modern, as a few instances
winnowed from many can demonstrate, and they begin to suggest some
ways deixis can be relevant to the study of lyric. Commentaries on deictics
often focus on pronouns in particular, as does Jonathan Culler when argu-
ing that these usages help establish the distinctive literariness of poems;
although those pronouns are largely outside the purview of this chapter,
their implications for studying the fraught issue of lyric subjectivity are
evident.14 Analysing T. S. Eliot, David Trotter argues that ‘this’ and ‘that’
serve less to locate an object precisely than to indicate its relationship to
the speaker; his emphasis on a scale of proximity anticipates my point
 Deixis and the sixteenth-century ­sonnet 35
about degrees of deixis, though he does not develop that observation at any
length.15
A handful of exceptions to the relative neglect of scholarly discussions
of deixis in early modern lyrics hints at directions for future study and
crystallises the need for further work. Astute and subtle, Scott Newstok’s
analysis of ‘here’ in epitaphs has many implications for the cognate but
distinct arenas of lyric that are outside the scope of his own study. In par-
ticular, his suggestion that the ‘here’ of epitaphs resembles its cousin in
theatre in its insistence on a presence that doesn’t exist anticipates and
buttresses my own argument that lyric deixis, paradoxically, often turns
place in the sense of a determined and delimited region into space in the
sense of the unbounded.16 In one of the most important discussions of
lyric deixis, Roland Greene establishes its centrality to Petrarchism; his
problematical emphasis on binary patterns, however, invites the chal-
lenges below.17
A revisionist examination of deixis in sixteenth-century lyric can, there-
fore, draw attention to transhistorical issues about that mode, notably
its putative immediacy and internalisation within a single consciousness.
Equally important, that examination crystallises characteristics distinctive
of, though not always unique to, the period in question; most relevant to
this volume are the workings of metatextuality and spatiality, especially in
relation to print culture, and the cultural conditions that triggered these
and additional subterranean issues within deictics. Varied though these
arenas in which deixis operates are, affects and effects of instability and
multi-directionality unite them: here, this and similar words often both
define and destabilise space through multiple referents, and they interact
with a whole range of sixteenth-century cultural practices, from the habits
of printers to the rituals of priests.

Samuel Daniel: a case study

A well-known sonnet by Daniel aptly introduces patterns traced through-
out this chapter. On the one hand, its deictics unsettle place and time
rather than fixing them – fixing in the sense of both creating stasis and
repairing potential problems. In this and other ways the poem anticipates
how deictics challenge assumptions about immediacy and other putative
lyric characteristics not only in the sixteenth century but also in later eras.
And on the other hand the same practices provide some answers by sig-
nalling the workings of print culture and the material text in the sixteenth
century and by drawing attention to spatiality.
36 Heather ­Dubrow
When Winter snowes upon thy golden ­heares,
And frost of age hath nipt thy flowers neere:
When darke shall seeme thy day that never cleares,
And all lyes withred that was held so deere.
Then take this picture which I heere present thee,
Limned with a Pensill not all unworthy:
Heere see the giftes that God and nature lent thee;
Heere read thy selfe, and what I suffred for thee.
This may remaine thy lasting monument,
Which happily posteritie may cherish:
These collours with thy fading are not spent;
These may remaine, when thou and I shall perish.
   If they remaine, then thou shalt live thereby;
   They will remaine, and so thou canst not dye.18
Less aggressive than other sonnets in its carpe diem tradition, this sonnet
emphasises not the need to respond to the threat of aging through sexual-
ity but rather the ways the poem itself will control that threat through the
devices traced in this chapter: deictics that variously and sometimes sim-
ultaneously perform gestures and establish, or seem to establish, place and
time. Line 5, ‘Then take this picture which I heere present thee’, initiates
these patterns by setting up a contrast between the then and there when
the aged woman will read the poem and the here and now in which it is
presented.
But in a poem that turns on so many binaries, why does the text resist
the obvious alternative of ‘which I now present thee’? In so doing, it acti-
vates the many meanings of here traced throughout this chapter – and
forcefully demonstrates why here and now need to be distinguished. In
other words, ‘heere’ in ‘which I heere present thee’ may refer to an occa-
sion – that is, the time and place when the book is being handed over;
to the volume itself, and thus again to the process of representation; and
arguably it also thus hints at the gestural meaning of here, to which I’ll
return shortly. Notice now, though, that a couple of these meanings intro-
duce spatiality in a way that ‘now’ could not.
Here also can hint at handing the poem to the lady, as in Keats’ famous
conclusion to a poem to which I’ll turn shortly, ‘This living hand’: ‘here
it is— / I hold it towards you’.19 This reading reminds us that ‘here’ both
creates and marks interactions, that it performs hereness through a pro-
cess of leaning and reaching. That is, it establishes an emotive and spatial
relationship between the voice that is speaking and the person to whom
something is being handed. And as in the proffer of Keats’ hand, the per-
son to whom the poem is handed in this putative undertow of meaning
 Deixis and the sixteenth-century ­sonnet 37
is close enough to hear and receive it, and yet may need to draw near – to
be gathered in by the poem and its author – in order actually to receive it.
At the same time that these references to handing something and to that
something as the material text build their versions of immediacy, however,
‘here’ again signals representation, the poem itself.
In any event, the establishment of a here and now when the book is
being given to its recipient introduces an effect of immediacy, intensified
by ‘this’, a classic example of deictics as pointers. But observe again how
that is complicated if ‘heere’ refers to the material book – that is, ‘I am
presenting the poem within this book’. The possibility that the lady is
holding it draws attention to the tactility that can contribute to immedi-
acy; but that possibility also reminds us that the poem exists in the realms
of representation. Moreover, these lines clearly refer primarily to a printed
text (‘Limned with a Pensill not all unworthy’ (6)), but all these interpret-
ations are further complicated in ways traced above when one considers
that the poem might be sung or recited – that is, presented in a perform-
ance as well as a book. For example, whereas visceral reactions to sound
can intensify effects of immediacy, the possibility that a song is performed
by someone other than the original creator of the words and indeed per-
formed by multiple people on multiple occasions vitiates those effects and
their implications for subjectivity, as we will see below.
If ‘heere’ in line 5 thus introduces a range of spatial and other references
while appearing to establish the then/now temporality about which Roland
Greene has written, as the sonnet progresses time becomes as various and
unsettled as space. Thus ‘Heere see’ (7) and ‘Heere read’ (8) primarily
represent commands to examine the poem at a future date – reminding
us of how often, for all the commonplaces about a lyric present, anticipa-
tion is the dominant mode of such poetry. Associated with an anticipated
future, ‘Heere see’ and ‘Heere read’ conflate and confound a spatial here
and a temporal there. At the same time, surely these phrases also function
as imperatives in the present moment at which the lady is receiving the
poem. This conflation uncovers the doubleness, in more senses than one,
of the poem.
And should we read these imperatives in lines 7 and 8 as command or
invitation, recognising that the latter might embed the power plays of the
former? As a suggestion, however authoritarian, that will be fulfilled in
the future, the lines reassure the lady that reading about her beauty will
mitigate the losses of aging. But surely the invitation to read them now
opens up the possibility of a different kind of invitation: the seduction of
the carpe diem motif. Hence the apparent tentativeness of the subsequent
38 Heather ­Dubrow
promises, though qualified by the final assertion, may warn the woman
that she cannot rely completely on being memorialised by poetry. Unsure
that she can gather her poetic posies when she may in the future, she
should gather her roses while she may now.
The possibility that the woman is being invited to read in the here and
now as well as in an anticipated future also in effect asks us to consider the
ghostly traces of a comma after these ‘heere’s’ – in other words, to attrib-
ute to them the gestural force we will encounter shortly in poems by John
Keats and Elisabeth Frost. This reminds us that ‘heere’ both creates and
marks interactions, that it performs hereness through a process of leaning
and reaching. That is, it establishes an emotive and spatial relationship
between the voice that is speaking and the person to whom something is
being handed. And as in the proffer of Keats’ hand, the person to whom
the poem is handed in this putative undertow of meaning is close enough
to hear and receive it, and yet may need to draw near – to be gathered in
by the poem and its author – in order actually to receive it. At the same
time that these references to handing something and to that something as
the material text build their versions of immediacy, however, ‘heere’ again
signals representation, the poem itself.
And that poem also again complicates the trajectories of literary history
and the simplified definitions of lyric by reminding us how often early
modern lyrics address the beloved directly or, as many critics have noted,
implicitly address a coterie of male friends. If, pace John Stuart Mill and
his heirs, the lyric poetry of later eras cannot simply be classified as soli-
tary speech, the sixteenth century offers important antecedents and ana-
logues. Similarly, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, many early modern
lyrics include characteristics that students of nineteenth-century poetry
have seen as unique to the dramatic monologues of their era.20 Marshall
Brown has gone so far as to argue that all poems are in some sense dra-
matic monologues;21 whereas poems by Donne support this tendentious
point better than our sonnet by Daniel, in the silent but felt presence of
the lady and the hints that the speaker is being held up to judgement do
we not find elements of a mode whose origins are sometimes seen as dis-
tinctively Victorian?

Reconceiving lyric: transhistorical implications

The challenge deixis offers to common assumptions about lyric is among
the most compelling reasons for studying it; the recurrent ways it does
so in work as diverse as sonnets by Shakespeare and Wordsworth, a lyric
 Deixis and the sixteenth-century ­sonnet 39
by Keats, and a postmodern poem, encourage contextualing my focus
on ­sixteenth-century poetry with passages like those, thus demonstrating
how frequently and intensely deictics challenge long-standing assump-
tions clinging to the mode of lyric.
Lyric immediacy, often summarised by citing the home address of the
mode as the here and now, remains a staple, even a shibboleth, of criticism,
and one would expect words like ‘here’ conveniently to demonstrate that
imputed characteristic. Yet, as Daniel’s poem reminds us, in many lyrics
here is a moving target, a point that can complicate attempts to define the
mode in other periods as well. To be sure, this deictic often leans towards
herein, hence suggesting enclosure in a stable place, but it also gestures
outwards to encompass multiple contiguous positions. In subtly tracing
the process by which lyric poets from a range of centuries address an invis-
ible listener with what she terms a ‘vertical’ relationship to themselves,
Helen Vendler demonstrates a range of instances of our moving target,
though she does not analyse them in these terms, nor does she fully con-
front their challenge to the isolated, meditative speaker whose norma-
tive status she still asserts.22 Winnowing the sixteenth century itself for
poems that complicate their references to here yields a range of examples.
In adducing the idiom ‘here and there’ in his opening line, ‘Alas, ’tis true,
I have gone here and there’ (110.1), Shakespeare invokes through it not a
single contrast between polar opposites but a vague geography with many
possible coordinates to his ‘here’ and ‘there’. But even passages that do not
rely on the resonances of that idiom have similar effects. Complaining to
the moon about Stella’s disdain, Sir Philip Sidney asks that celestial expert
in couples-counselling, ‘Are Beauties there as proud as here they be?’.23
Whereas the contrasting deictics indubitably invoke the commonplace
contrast between the sublunary world and the sphere above it, the ‘here’
may also refer to the court in general; to the more specific locales in which
Astrophil interacts, or attempts to interact, with Stella; and, as I will main-
tain shortly, to discourse and its material realisation. And although this
volume focuses on English literature, Richard Helgerson’s demonstration
that the ‘Aquì’ in Garcilaso de la Vega’s ‘Sonnet from Carthage’ encom-
passes not only contemporary Carthage, but its predecessor inhabited by
Dido, and Toledo as well.24 Helgerson’s argument that ‘here’ within this
sonnet may attempt to recapture the past, the then, emphasises its multi-
directional workings.
Cognate examples from other periods are thick on the ground (an appro-
priate locale for a ‘here’ in particular). In Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘The Stepping
Stones’, ‘here’ draws attention to a particular locale, the area of the River
40 Heather ­Dubrow
Duddon, but, as the title of the poem indicates, it is used to evoke not a sin-
gle point but movement and change. Similarly, when Robert Lowell intones
‘This is the end of the whaleroad and the whale’ in his ‘Quaker Graveyard in
Nantucket’ (69), the deictic ‘this’ functions like a colon when alluding both
to a particular epistemological recognition (we have learned the relation-
ship among various types of violence and exploitation); but surely it also
refers to neighbouring but separable geographical locales, ranging from that
cemetery itself, to the New England locales to which the poem refers, to the
country as a whole.25 Such deictic usages, then, challenge the immediacy
associated with lyric: often, I maintain, it involves not establishing a static
and single position but moving among a series of points.
Similarly, the gestural propensities of deixis challenge other assump-
tions about lyric, thus again introducing issues relevant throughout this
volume. Here differs from now not least in its ability to suggest handing to
or handing over. Often that gesture is metatextual, as when Daniel writes,
‘Heere read thy selfe, and what I suffred for thee’ (8). But the putative
agency of Daniel’s lyric is transferred to and transformed into that icon of
agency, the human hand, in a hauntingly ambiguous poem (or, some crit-
ics have claimed, fragment) by John Keats:
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood,
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d. See, here it is—
I hold it towards you.
To begin with, although the ‘here’ in the penultimate line mainly signals a
gesture, it also reinforces my earlier point that the word typically marks not
a single point but a series of them: if speaker and addressee were in exactly
the same place, the ‘towards’ would not be necessary. Thus the poem itself
introduces some revisionist approaches to the isolation and immaterial-
ity often associated with lyric: it exemplifies, as does our instance from
Daniel, the presence of more than one person – not just the overhearer
posited in certain traditional theories of lyric – and demonstrates the rele-
vance of embodiment and physical gesture. (All this is of course further
complicated by the possibility that not the living hand but the anticipated
dead one is being held out, in which case the possessor of the hand and
the addressee invited to regard and possibly touch it are indeed in differ-
ent places, ontologically and spatially.)
 Deixis and the sixteenth-century ­sonnet 41
But is that proffered hand accepted? Although one critic asserts that
the reader reaches towards it in sympathy, surely even the possibility
of its being a dead hand is as likely to produce recoil.26 A comparable
reminder of the unstable reactions to gestural deixis occurs in a poem
entitled ‘Happiness’ by the contemporary American poet Elisabeth Frost.
Its speaker is attempting to say – and convey – the concept in the title to
an unreceptive listener, though within a context that itself calls into ques-
tion communication (‘all talk is slippery … Who can say how a thing in
words turns and flowers like that’ (1, 5)).27 The poem ends,
We’re in this room, and you’re not hearing
how I’m still trying to say this thing to you.
I’ll say it again. Here. Happiness.
(13–15)

The ‘Here’ (15) may refer to locale, with ‘this room’ (13) signalling an enclos-
ure of two people who are really far apart, but primarily, of course, it is a
gestural deitic: happiness is being verbally and acoustically handed to some-
one who wants to refuse it. As in Keats’ extraordinary lines and many other
poems, a deictic gesture establishes the presence in some form of a hearer,
and anchors the poem in a space where the gesture may be perceived if
not necessarily accepted, an analogue to the soundscapes to which I’ll turn
shortly. And as in Daniel’s poem, the object that the speaker attempts to
pass on is discursive, involving both a philosophical concept and the word
through which it is conveyed. Above all, in all these cases the deixis estab-
lishes lyric as a process involving more than one consciousness and a com-
plex relationship to space and place. But how are that process, and that
relationship, inflected by the matrices of sixteenth-century lyric poetry?

Deixis and sixteenth-century lyric

Identifying the distinctive forms these and other transhistorical deictic
patterns assume in sixteenth-century poetry involves a centripetal reinter-
pretation of issues traced in the preceding section, especially a re-exami-
nation of metatextuality in relation to the material texts of print culture,
as well as a centrifugal examination of the cultural resonances of deixis in
the sixteenth century. Having successively demonised looking closely at
anything but the text, and looking closely at the text in lieu of looking at
history and culture, the United States academy has recently become more
capacious in accepting and connecting those approaches – a shift appro-
priate to these fraternal twins.
42 Heather ­Dubrow
Although we have seen that deictics are characteristically metatextual
in many periods, in the sixteenth century that characteristic is typically
shaped by early modern versions of spatiality, by their relationship to the
material text, and by the relationship of that text in its printed form to
other means of transmission; references to local literary conventions may
also be at play. Specific to sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century cul-
ture, many resonances of the line cited earlier from Sidney’s thirty-first
sonnet – ‘Are Beauties there as proud as here they be?’ (31.11) – thus dis-
tinguish Sidney’s ‘here’ from the usages by Keats and Frost flagged above.
Not only does cosmology of the period evoke a sublunary world; Sidney’s
‘here’ also gestures towards a series of literary conventions characteristic
of its era, especially Petrarchism, and to their expression on a particular
page of a particular poem printed according to particular conventions.
Thus the types of Petrarchism Sidney variously explores, extends, and
excoriates distinguish his ‘here’ from that of, say, Romantic poets like
Charlotte Smith working with that tradition. But more to my purposes
now, the material page to which the word can refer had distinct and intri-
guing characteristics in Sidney’s day. As Thomas Healy’s contribution to
this collection, ‘“Trewly wrote”: Manuscript, Print, and the Lyric in the
Early Seventeenth Century’, also reminds us, printers often inserted bor-
ders at the bottom or, in many instances, both the top and bottom of
every page. An extreme and extremely interesting version is the 1595 edi-
tion of Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion’ and Amoretti, where each sonnet and each
stanza of the wedding poem is encased in this way. Thus the metatextual
‘here’ as well as ‘this’, both words that frequently appear in that collection,
again become associated with ‘herein’, turning the potentially amorphous
space of the book into a defined and controlled place, and thus encour-
aging us to adduce space/place theory more often when reading lyric. The
contrast throughout the ‘Epithalamion’ between the putatively safe world
of the wedding and the dangers lurking at its borders lend resonance to
that attraction to enclosure, even though its visualisation through print-
ing practices was probably fortuitous. In addition, in the ‘Epithalamion’,
the tension between the borders of the stanzas and the narrativity often
enacted in their content extends the interplay between lyric and narra-
tive elements throughout the poem. More broadly, in other sixteenth-cen-
tury collections using large borders, such as the anonymous and perhaps
satirical collection Zepheria, and Thomas Watson’s Hecatompathia; or,
Passionate Centurie of Love, those borders insistently separate linked
poems, in ­particular countering the connections established in other ways
in groups of sonnets. In instances like these, defining the referent of a
 Deixis and the sixteenth-century ­sonnet 43
metatextual ‘this’ or ‘here’ as the poem at hand rather than its neighbours
as well is encouraged, though the alternative is not precluded.
That signal is, however, complicated, and other issues about representa-
tions of here introduced, through catchwords. Early modern printers regu-
larly relied on these devices: at the bottom of the page, positioned far
right, appears the first word of the next poem, a system that helped keep
the pages in order during composition and production. But this deliberate
placing of a word not in the text at hand in fact operated like a differ-
ent and accidental characteristic of sixteenth-century texts: the propensity
of ink from the succeeding page to bleed into the preceding one, thus
on occasion leaving a ghostly anticipation of what is to come. In both
instances, the trace of the next page is at once here and a reminder of a page
that in one sense is there but still relatively close to here. We also encounter
yet another version of here as contiguous and shifting points. These catch-
words, which at least lack and at times conflict with the authorial agency
expressed in creating closure at the end of a given poem, are, however,
intriguingly analogous to the poetic devices skilfully deployed by writers
to link poems – the repeated line in concatenatio or, of course, the very
concept of groups of poems and of a sonnet sequence or cycle.
Joshua Calhoun has recently demonstrated another way the material
page could interact with pointers like here and this in sixteenth-century
England. Quite literally putting the material back in materialism, he
traces the processes by which paper was made, showing that it often con-
tained discernible fragments of, for example, wood and old clothing.28
Thus when the word ‘here’ refers to the book and page it gestures as well
towards the past life of the incorporated objects, a there that draws closer
and again unsettles the here/there binaries fallaciously seen as normative
in lyric. And, returning to Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion’, the afterlife of those
fragments is serendipitously thematic there. The poem repeatedly gathers
the woods closer to the world of the poem, notably through the refrain
that refers to the woods answering. Calhoun’s work demonstrates that the
physical text, like the refrain, incorporates, gathers the woods into the
song, in the first instance quite literally. In this sense print culture physic-
ally enacts properties of deictics.
But among the most important characteristics of sixteenth-century
print culture is its interaction with coexisting types of transmission, not-
ably manuscript culture and song, the latter recently coming into its own
as a subject of study after its appearance in important but isolated ­volumes.
Deixis both shapes and is shaped by that interaction, whose broader
implications for lyric are cogently discussed in the opening chapter of
44 Heather ­Dubrow
this volume.29 Whereas Fredric Jameson’s commentary on remediation,
the adaptation of a text in a different medium, attempts to position it as
a characteristic of postmodernism, other analyses have noted the vitality
of that practice in preceding centuries as well.30 Indeed, whether or not
one challenges John Guillory’s alternative location of remediation in the
early modern period (claims that a major movement started in the area in
which one specialises should always be greeted with suspicion), his obser-
vation that remediation makes one more conscious of the medium is per-
suasive and germane.31 That consciousness, one should add, is intensified
by deictics: their meaning shifts depending on whether they appear in a
scribal or print context or in a performed song.
What happens if we reinterpret the metatextual meaning of Sidney’s
‘as here they be’ (31.11) as extending to scribal circulation as well as print?
Although some might cite the sales figures on volumes like Spenser’s
Shepheardes Calender (five editions in the sixteenth century, not to men-
tion adoption by Oprah’s book club) to qualify the primacy assigned to
scribal documents in Thomas Healy’s ‘“Trewly wrote”: Manuscript, Print,
and the Lyric in the Early Seventeenth Century’, the pervasiveness of
manuscript versions of poems is unassailable. Given the frequent changes
and errors associated with that mode of transmission, the deictic ‘here’ is
further destabilised, with a reminder that the poem to which it now refers
may differ significantly from a later rendition. Moreover, since manuscript
culture involved passing of poems among members of coteries, the usage
reminds us that besides all the other possibilities traced above – ‘here’ as
the sublunary world but also as Petrarchan discourse, a particular page,
the court, and so on – the word could refer to a small circle examining the
poem. Or to the group attending to it as it is read aloud.
Deictic references are further complicated if the lyric is sung – or even
perceived as a text that might be sung. First of all, Sarah Iovan has dem-
onstrated that the musical accompaniment often functions as a different
voice, not merely an echo of that of the performer.32 Thus a metatextual
‘here’ and ‘this’ could refer to significantly different versions of the text
variously performed by a human voice and an instrument, an intriguing
parallel to the multiple versions and voices encouraged by manuscript
culture. Moreover, expanding the concept of soundscape, developed by
Bruce Smith and others, demonstrates that the process of singing works
like deixis (and is sometimes actually marked by deictics) for the original
singer, a potential subsequent singer, and the audience.33 Song interpellates
all three into complex relationships to spatiality – but also may bestow
more agency than the concept of interpellation usually acknowledges. The
 Deixis and the sixteenth-century ­sonnet 45
original singer helps to create a soundscape, in effect reaching outwards
towards others much as Keats’ and Frost’s poems do. At the same time
the sound reverberates within the body of the singer. As Sharon Harris
cogently puts it, ‘A sound-producer makes a sound that both enters her
ears and travels out away from her into her surrounding soundscape. She
is a participant in that soundscape and shapes and alters her surround-
ings.’34 The audience is drawn into the soundscape, recalling the person
invited to take Keats’ hand or the listener to whom Elisabeth Frost offers
happiness – but if they are in earshot, this, unlike the hand or the concept
of happiness, is an offer they cannot refuse. The visceral power of song
contributes to the imperative force of the invitation.
Moreover, in the instance of song, unlike the analogues in Keats and
Frost, subsequent singers redefine and expand the here and now of the ori-
ginal song so that it includes the potentially different place and inevitably
different time when they are singing. All this implicit deixis is even knottier
when actual deixis is included. Returning to a poem probably written in
the sixteenth century, though by a poet who became an icon of Jacobean
sensibility for an earlier generation of literary historians, John Donne’s ‘The
Indifferent’ includes the line, ‘Venus heard me sigh this song’ (19).35 Recalling
my allusion to Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion’, this deictic conflates the earlier ver-
sion Venus heard, the current rendition if we assume the line in question
is itself part of a song rather than a commentary on one, and a possible
rendition of it by some other singer at some point in the future – perhaps
even someone within the current soundscape who is hearing it and will then
repeat it. In short, in this as other instances, the coexistence of print with
manuscript and sung versions expands the potential references of deictics,
again ensuring in particular that when ‘here’ or ‘this’ or ‘now’ appears in
a given poem, it signals not the single, stable place or time conventionally
associated with lyric but multiple and volatile possibilities. These interac-
tions are, of course, further complicated by the fact that songs were experi-
enced not only through performance but also through the print versions of
them that circulated in the period, thus complicating yet another binary.
The felt presence of a specified emotive speaker, certainly cornerstone
and arguably shibboleth of so much critical analysis of lyric, is thus chal-
lenged as well. Subjectivity also becomes an arena for those volatile pos-
sibilities. My earlier arguments about spatiality do imply a realised voice,
indeed an embodied person. Yet the pervasiveness of song, its status as a
synecdoche for lyric, suggests that even poems that were neither sung nor
written in ways that facilitate musical settings were associated with a first-
person pronoun that could wander among successive voices.
46 Heather ­Dubrow
The second principal reason deictics operate distinctively in sixteenth-
century poetry is their interaction with cultural practices and problems
ranging from the astrological to the theological to the architectural.
Paradigms contrasting the sublunary world and heavenly worlds, explicit
in Sidney’s Sonnet 31, arguably lie behind even contrasts that do not refer
explicitly to that model. More often, however, Christian doctrines are
the whirling undertow in passages that introduce, then blur, the contrast
between here and there. Above all, of course, the Eucharistic debates, a
major if not the major source of controversy in the English Reformation,
sometimes pivot on the ‘hoc’ in ‘hoc est corpus meum’. Does it refer to
Real Presence or to representation? And is the point that Christ is uniquely
present at that holy moment or that, as the doctrine of virtualism would
indicate, that he is always present in the world?36 Intensifying as the seven-
teenth century progressed, millenarianism was also present in England and
on the Continent in the sixteenth century, and of course earlier as well,
and it too drew attention to spatial and temporal binaries, suggesting that
here was rapidly approaching a moment spatially and temporally there.
(Without allowing abstractly theoretical explanations to override the quo-
tidian social conditions motivating groups like the Levellers, might one
speculate that the desired redistribution of property also served to render
literal other types of spatial and temporal volatilities?)37 In short, so potent
and pervasive were a range of theological debates involving versions of
here versus there and now versus then that they informed and on occasion
electrified secular allusions to such concepts.
Architecture and interior design, I maintain, also contributed to early
modern interpretations of deixis by rejecting the simple binaries of here
versus there often cited in analyses of lyric immediacy. Characteristic of,
though by no means unique to, the period were architectural features
such as a moat or the enclosed courtyards created by the common H or E
designs, all of which blurred the distinction between inside and outside,
and hence here and there.38 And how about the bedrooms designed so that
a couple could maintain erotic privacy within the curtains of a four-poster
bed while others still slept within the room? Once again, if the room is
here, it contains many different points.
Turning from the broader culture to the literary cultures of early mod-
ern England, many generic practices interacted with the forms of deixis
I have outlined. As significant here as in many other issues about of the
early modern period is the popularity of the sonnet and pastoral to which
I referred above. I have already indicated how the propensity of the former
to appear in groupings complicates here and there. Pastoral is grounded in
 Deixis and the sixteenth-century ­sonnet 47
interlocking but sometimes antagonistic binaries. Poems that contrast the
here of pastoral tranquillity with the there of busy companies of men often
express their uneasy awareness of another contrast: the there of the ori-
ginal lost Eden versus the here of its latter-day imperfect analogues. That
original Eden may not be regained, but the there of the outer world may
impinge all too effectively, as the invasions by soldiers and brigands in that
protopastoral Virgil’s first eclogue and that metapastoral Book vi of The
Faerie Queene remind us.

From here to there

My initial focus on a poem about invitations, Daniel’s sonnet, is fortuit-
ously appropriate for one of the initial chapters in a volume like this one.
The potentialities and problems of sixteenth-century lyric invite us to see
how historical changes inflect them in the periods to which this volume
now turns; for example, the distinctive workings of print when it coexists
in the ways it does in the sixteenth century invite, indeed impel, further
explorations of how lyric changes because of, and despite, the evolutions
of print. And that pointing device deixis points us as well towards revi-
sionist explorations of concepts fundamental to many definitions of lyric,
from immediacy to interiority.

Notes
1 William Shakespeare, Sonnet 129, 9–14. I cite throughout The Riverside
Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd edn (Boston, MA: Houghton
Mifflin, 1997).
2 Throughout this chapter, I italicise the names of deictics when referring to the
concepts and use quotation marks for a usage within a particular text.
3 David Herman, Basic Elements of Narrative (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009),
pp. 115–16 (pp. 123–4).
4 Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Routledge, 1980),
pp. 26–7.
5 Because of the structure of this volume, my chapter focuses specifically on the
sixteenth century; but I share the widespread perception that in many literary
and cultural arenas periodisation should not posit a firm divide between the
sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries.
6 For this position and analyses of the related issue of lyricisation, see for
example Virginia Jackson, ‘Lyric’, in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry
and Poetics, ed. Roland Greene, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan
Ramazani, Paul F. Rouzer, Harris Feinsod, et al., 4th edn (Princeton University
Press, 2012); Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton University Press, 1999),
48 Heather ­Dubrow
esp. pp. 3–22; and Marion Thain’s chapter, ‘Victorian Lyric Pathology and
Phenomenology’ in this volume, pp. 156–76.
7 Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and
Modes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 40–4.
8 Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 135–74. Culler himself argues
for focusing on those Classical roots in his essay ‘Why Lyric?’, PMLA 123
(2008), 204–5.
9 See my book The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 15–53 for more
detailed discussions of arguments later in this paragraph and in the two sub-
sequent ones; the references to mythological characters appear on pp. 18–26
and the discussion of terminology on pp. 26–39.
10 Niall Livingstone and Gideon Nisbet, Epigram, Greece and Rome: New
Surveys in the Classics 38 (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
11 I cite throughout Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry; or, The Defence of
Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Nelson, 1965). This quotation appears
on pp. 116–18.
12 See my chapter ‘The Sonnet and the Lyric Mode’, in The Cambridge
Companion to the Sonnet, ed. A. D. Cousins and Peter Howarth (Cambridge
University Press, 2001), pp. 25–45.
13 Sidney, Apology, p. 137.
14 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study
of Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 164–70.
15 David Trotter, The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in Modern
American, English and Irish Poetry (New York: Macmillan, 1984), pp. 44–6.
I would also take issue with some implications of his argument for subjectiv-
ity, though doing so is outside the scope of this chapter.
16 Scott L. Newstok, Quoting Death in Early Modern England: The Poetics of
Epitaphs beyond the Tomb (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), esp.
pp. 33–58.
17 Roland Greene, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric
Sequence (Princeton University Press, 1991), esp. pp. 22–62.
18 Samuel Daniel, Sonnet 34. The citation is to Samuel Daniel, Poems and ‘A
Defence of Ryme’, ed. A. C. Sprague (University of Chicago Press, 1965 [1930]).
I have regularised ‘v’/‘u’.
19 John Keats, The Poems of John Keats, ed. J. Stillinger (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1978).
20 Dubrow, Challenges of Orpheus, pp. 9, 236–7.
21 Marshall Brown, ‘Negative Poetics: On Skepticism and the Lyric Voice’,
Representations 86 (Spring 2004), 120–40 (p. 131).
22 Helen Vendler, Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and
Ashbery (Princeton University Press, 2005).
23 Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, 31.11. Throughout, citations from Sidney’s
poetry are to The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).
 Deixis and the sixteenth-century ­sonnet 49
24 Richard Helgerson, A Sonnet from Carthage: Garcilaso de la Vega and the New
Poetry of Sixteenth-Century Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2007), pp. 40–7,
25 I cite Robert Lowell, Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter
(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003).
26 Sympathy is suggested by Lawrence Lipking in The Life of the Poet: Beginning
and Ending Poetic Careers (University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 181.
27 Elisabeth Frost, All of Us, Marie Alexander Poetry Series (Buffalo: White Pines
Press, 2011), lines 1, 5.
28 Joshua Calhoun, ‘The Word Made Flax: Cheap Bibles, Textual Corruption,
and the Poetics of Paper’, PMLA 126 (2011), 327–44.
29 Compare Joshua Calhoun’s observation that the word ‘that’ in Shakespeare’s
Sonnets ‘identif[ies] the text without identifying a specific incarnation of
it’ (‘Ecosystemic Shakespeare: Vegetable Memorabilia in the Sonnets’,
Shakespeare Studies 39 (2011), 64–73 (p. 70)). But whereas I maintain that such
references evoke lyrics’ multiple statuses as written, recited, and sung without
privileging any, he argues that ‘this’ contrasts the flimsiness of paper with the
successful memorialisation the text performs.
30 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 161–80.
31 John Guillory, ‘Genesis of the Media Concept’, Critical Inquiry 36 (2010),
esp. p. 324.
32 Sarah Iovan, ‘Performing Voices in the English Lute Song’, SEL 50 (2010),
63–81.
33 The concept of the soundscape is developed throughout Bruce R. Smith, The
Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (University
of Chicago Press, 1999). Also cf. Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging
Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
34 Sharon Harris, ‘The Orbit of Music and Motion in the Eighth Song
of Astrophil and Stella’, unpublished essay presented at ‘Inarticulacy: A
National Early Modern Conference’, University of California, Berkeley, 12
November 2012.
35 John Donne, ‘The Indifferent’, line 19, in The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets,
ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford University Press, 1965).
36 The Eucharistic controversies have of course been exhaustively analysed by
both theologians and literary critics. For a valuable though not uncontrover-
sial version of those debates, see Judith H. Anderson, Translating Investments:
Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2005), pp. 36–60.
37 For a useful overview of the millenarian movement, see David Loewenstein,
Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary
Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 8–12. Also see the length-
ier analyses in David S. Katz and Richard H. Popkin, Messianic Revolution:
Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1998), esp. pp. 3–57; Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium:
50 Heather ­Dubrow
Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing
on Modern Totalitarian Movements, 2nd edn (New York: Harper and Rowe,
1961 [1957]), esp. appendix.
38 On these styles, see e.g David Watkin, English Architecture: A Concise History,
rev. edn (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), pp. 77–95.
 ­c h apter th ree

‘Trewly wrote’
Manuscript, print, and the lyric in the
early seventeenth century
Thomas Healy

I
In his Civil Wars (1595, extended 1609), Samuel Daniel proclaimed that
the devil’s principal instruments are the printing press and gunpowder. A
wide circulation of texts through printing enables ‘the vulgar’ to grow wise,
‘deepest mysteries debate’, and ‘Controule their betters’.1 Yet even when
chastising print, Daniel’s words convey sentiments that to current ears
seem precisely why the medium might be fêted; its technology allows:
   that instamped Characters may send
Abroad, to thousands, thousand mens intent;
And in a moment may dispatch much more,
Then could a world of Pennes performe before.2
Daniel’s view is an extreme reflection of an anxiety around print and what
may be termed its democratic tendencies.3 Proclaiming about high truths
in eloquent language needing to be veiled from those incapable of appreci-
ating their transcendent qualities is a familiar Renaissance proposition, but
it is a sentiment that other contemporary thinkers rejected. John Foxe, for
example, celebrated printers along with players and preachers as bulwarks
of the Reformation.4 Daniel, too, was hardly reluctant to see his poetry
in print, and in 1601 became the first English poet to gain the distinction
of having his verse published in a dedicated folio volume. Richard Tottel
addresses the readers of his 1557 collection Songes and Sonettes written by
the right honourable Lorde Henry Howard late Earle of Surrey, and others
(the book usually termed Tottel’s Miscellany), acknowledging that while he
may offend some sensibilities in printing these lyrics, he is enabling wide
reading ‘to the honor of the English tong’ in contrast to those ‘ungentle
horders up of such treasure’.5 Yet even when broadly content with a printed
medium, writers often expressed a preference for manuscript circulation.

51
52 Thomas ­Healy
In a playful Latin poetic address, John Donne proposes that printed books
tend to be ignored in contrast to readers’ reverence towards handwrit-
ten ones (‘sed que scripta manu, sunt veneranda magis’).6 Ben Jonson is
much celebrated for his 1616 folio, The Workes of Beniamin Ionson, which
printed selections of his lyrics and epigrams along with his plays, but it
is less acknowledged that Jonson returned to coterie manuscript circula-
tion for his later lyrics after this folio’s publication.7 The relation between
manuscript and print, in which the latter is assumed gradually to replace
the former because it allowed more reliable texts to circulate in greater
numbers, needs to be reassessed. In this chapter I wish to address some
implications for our interpretive practices in thinking about lyric through
manuscript.
Before exploring lyric in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century
manuscript, however, it is useful to reflect upon this era’s understand-
ing of the category of lyric itself. As Heather Dubrow reminds us, while
perceptions and representations of ‘lyric’ exist in this period, they were
‘many and volatile’, and similarly the term ‘song’ was equally ‘multifari-
ous and inconsistently used’.8 Citing The Arte of English Poesie (1589),
David Lindley illustrates how Puttenham classified Classical poets such
as Pindar, Horace, and Catullus as lyric, whereas Ovid and Propertius are
labelled ‘Eligiack’ and considered ‘another sort, who sought the favour of
fair ladies and coveted to bemoan their estates at large’.9 In contrast, our
current perceptions usually consider shorter Renaissance poetic addresses
to lovers as quintessentially exemplifying the period’s lyric verse. Sir Philip
Sidney’s Defence of Poesie (1579/1595) uses poesy broadly to mean any forms
of eloquent, decorous language and not strictly poetry. For Sidney, serious
writers are ‘makers’ – derived from his etymology of the Greek poiein – a
label that carries associations both with the divine (God is also a maker)
and with skilled artisans such as scriveners who copy out texts.10 Samuel
Daniel similarly perceives successful poetry resting in language’s careful
crafting in his essay ‘A Defence of Rhyme’ (1603). Daniel’s remarks about
sonnets may be applied generally to contemporary perceptions of lyric
verse. It is the form’s compactness that gives lyric notable intensity:
For the body of our imagination, being as an vnformed Chaos … if by the
divine power of the spirit it be wrought into an Orbe of order and forme, is
it not more pleasing to Nature, that desires a certaintie, and comports not
with that which is infinite, to haue these clozes rather than not to know
where to end, or how farre to goe … Besides, is it not most delightfull to
see much excellentlie ordred in a small roome … [that] would not appeare
so beautifull in a larger circuite … And these limited proportions, and rests
 ‘Trewly wrote’: manuscript, print, and the ­lyric 53
of stanzes, consisting of six, seven or eight lines, are of that happines, both
for the disposition of the matter, the apt planting the sentence where it
may best stand to hit, the certaine close of delight with the full body of a
iust period well carried.11
The sonneteer is imitating God’s creation of earth in fashioning his poem,
creating an effect that also resonates with musical composition. Although
many manuscripts in which verse circulated in this period also include
prose extracts, one of the things that attracted the compilers to shorter
poems was their language being ‘excellentlie ordred in a small roome’.
As Nigel Smith details, the cultural environment that nurtured poetry
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries developed out of schoolroom
practices in which Classical forms – perhaps most critically the epigram –
provided the building blocks to develop expression that celebrated imita-
tion.12 Copying enabled readers to recognise both similarity and difference
(for instance, by exploiting familiar lines or tropes or generic conventions
in altered contexts), but a consequence is that while the best lyrics power-
fully persuade us of their speakers’ characters, these are inevitably con-
structed personae and it would be misleading to imagine this poetry as
designed to reflect its authors’ authentic experiences. Poetic accomplish-
ment was celebrated for displaying a general capability in eloquentia – the
employment of language correctly, truthfully, and ethically according to
humanist norms. Christopher Marlowe won a scholarship to Cambridge
endowed by Matthew Parker, a former archbishop of Canterbury. It was
gained on merit by a student with high proficiency in grammar and ‘if it
may be such as can make a verse’.13 The premise underlying this stipulation
was that the holder’s ability in composing verses elegantly in Latin (the
language of Elizabeth education) was a likely sign of his moral soundness,
as the recipient was intended to follow a career in the English Church.
Parker scholarships were not envisaged as nurturing an aesthetic sensibil-
ity that might lead to a release of personal thought and feeling into indi-
vidual poetic expression.
The poetic culture that prompted Renaissance lyric was fundamentally
different from that of the Romantic poets and their successors. The lyric
later comes to be envisaged as engaging with singular experience, seeking
subjective expression, voicing individual interiority and vision. An interest
in manuscript around later lyric largely stems from urges better to under-
stand a poet’s singularity and unique authenticity of voice – a manuscript
is sought as an autograph validating an individual’s creative virtuosity. In
contrast, verse manuscripts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England
reveal poetry undertaken as collective enterprises, allowing lyrics to be
54 Thomas ­Healy
employed in manners that fundamentally challenge perceptions of them
as expressions of felt subjective experience.
Samuel Daniel’s principal fear of the printing press is that it gives ‘the
vulgar’ a sense of empowerment above their true station in life – ‘with a
self-presumption ouer-growne’.14 Central to this anxiety is that they will be
incapable of proper comprehension in reading printed matter, a problem
that rests not simply with absorbing content but through understanding
the medium. Print conveys a fixed sense to a written work, whereas manu-
script celebrates textual fluidity. In the preface to his translation of Seneca’s
Thyestes published in 1560 Jasper Heywood considers the faults and errors
in the play that transmission and translation introduce.15 Heywood relates
an imaginary dream in which Seneca appears and offers him a text of the
play ‘trewly wrote’: ‘For here hathe neuer prynters presse / made faute, nor
neuer yet, / Came errour here by mysse of man.’16 But Heywood recognises
his dream is a fantasy; transmission inevitably involves error in the act of
reading as much as in the act of transcription. Readers as well as authors
should be wary of an illusionary textual stability. Shifting forms of inter-
pretation as much as shifting forms of presentation are to be expected.
In a sonnet, Sir Thomas Wyatt proposes:
Eche man me telleth I chaunge moost my devise
And on my faith me thinck it goode reason
To change propose like after the season[.]17

Wyatt suggests that by altering his ‘devise’, or device (a word that conveys
implications from straightforward intention, to legal testament, to heral-
dic or symbolic representation), he is departing from stability and, indeed,
a sense of identity. Such a move is not ‘wyse’ in some understandings;
yet Wyatt proposes it is the condition of his world in which ‘dyvernes’ is
usual, and in which remaining constant is prone to curtailing life. Change
is presented as natural. Wyatt’s sonnet exploits the way ‘oon’ sounds both
as ‘one’ and ‘own’, questioning whether individual uniqueness is desir-
able within his mutable social world: ‘keep still oon gyse’ (line 4); ‘I shall
not be variable / But alwaies oon’ (13–14). This fluctuating environment is
conveyed by the poem’s shifting words. The aural insecurities (heightened
in an environment where there was no educated ‘standard’ English), the
limited punctuation that enables lines to be freshly recombined and newly
stressed with each reading, the vocabulary that simultaneously allows
immaterial states of virtue and visceral sexual innuendo within words and
phraseology, create a sonnet – Wyatt’s device – whose meaning fluctuates
within its form’s dictated structure. Such variability is heightened if we
 ‘Trewly wrote’: manuscript, print, and the ­lyric 55
examine its shifting presence in early collections. This lyric contains some
significant differences in two of the most important early manuscripts of
Wyatt’s writing: British Library, MS Egerton 2711 and the Devonshire
manuscripts of early Tudor verse (British Library, MS Additional 17492),
both contemporary with the poet and the former containing some poems
copied in the poet’s own hand. While the overall design in both versions
is similar, differences in them further confirm Wyatt’s own sense of alter-
ability. For example, Egerton asserts, ‘My word nor I shall not be variable’
(line 13), while Devonshire has ‘my wordes nor I shall never be variable’.18
Wyatt’s poem illustrates a literary environment that preferred the mut-
ability of manuscript transmission to the constancy of print. The poets’
crafting of their lyrics adopts strategies that collude with a transmission
process that expects textual and interpretive instability.
Since the appearance of Harold Love’s Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-
Century England, Arthur Marotti’s Manuscript, Print and the English
Renaissance Lyric, and Henry Woudhuysen’s Sir Philip Sidney and the
Circulation of Manuscripts, scholars increasingly recognise that far more
than print, let alone editions devoted to single authors, contemporary read-
ers encountered English lyric verse of the sixteenth and much of the seven-
teenth century in handwritten manuscripts.19 How lyrics appear in these
manuscripts is astonishingly diverse and it would be misleading to propose
that a simple print–manuscript dichotomy existed. Manuscript collections
extend from single lyrics without any acknowledgment of the author, set
among widely differing prose and poetic texts on a multitude of subjects,
to carefully designed collections of a single author, commissioned from a
professional scribe and fabricated to be presented to a patron or potential
patron. Exceptionally, in some manuscripts lyrics can be identified with
a reasonable level of confidence to be in a poet’s own hand (or corrected
by the poet in a manuscript prepared by another), though more generally
poems have been copied from non-authorial sources, sometimes even from
printed collections. Some manuscript collections reflect distinct coterie
groups often emerging from the universities or the Inns of Court; others
can be traced to family groupings. Many lyrics are copied in common-
place collections that emerged out of an educational training that required
students to develop a store of sententiae or precepts to use in disputations.
Some assemblages reflect a vibrant female literary society that is distinct
from more male-oriented collections. In many collections the copyist has
had no compunction to amend a lyric to accord with his or her own desired
perspectives; in others, poems by established authors are intermixed with
more amateur efforts composed either by the copyist or contemporaries in
56 Thomas ­Healy
his or her circle. Notably, too, the dispersal of lyrics by particular authors in
manuscripts is not particularly related to their reputations, either contem-
porary or subsequent. John Donne’s poetry is currently found in around 250
surviving manuscript collections made both during his life and the 40 years
or so after it. Given the generally low survival rate of such collections, this
suggests a huge circulation (though of course in many cases the poem is
not ascribed to Donne and there is no way of knowing whether the copyist
knew who the author was). In contrast, George Herbert, who was hugely
influential among contemporary devotional poets after the 1633 publication
of his Temple, seems to have been known principally through print.20
The reluctance around print that Daniel articulates can also be observed
when poems are printed. During their lifetimes both Sidney and Donne
acquired substantial literary reputations; yet, given the uneasy social deco-
rums around writers seeking print, their lyrics are printed almost entirely
after their deaths. Their earliest editions, however, reveal printers’ reluc-
tance to depart from conventions associated with manuscript collections,
emphasising links with coterie circulation among familiars. For example,
neither Sidney’s nor Donne’s identity is fully evident on the title-pages
of these early printed collections, and both indicate the authors being
deceased, perhaps to legitimise the recourse to print: Syr. P. S. His Astrophel
and Stella. Wherein the excellence of sweete Poesie is concluded / To the end of
which are added, sundry other rare Sonnets of diuers Noble men and Gentlemen
(1591, 1597); Poems, by J.D. VVith elegies on the authors death (1633, 1635,
1639, 1649, 1650, 1654). It is only in 1669 that an edition of Donne’s poems
distinctly announces the author’s identity on the title-page, while Sidney’s
identity as the author of Astrophil and Stella is first made explicit in the
1598 edition of the Arcadia to which the sonnet sequence is appended.
To some extent, current editorial practices with sixteenth- and seven-
teenth-century lyric recognise that we should not assume the primacy
of print in seeking to establish reliable editions. In the 1980s, editors of
Elizabethan and Jacobean drama started to present variants in plays as
representing different thoughts by authors, or a play’s evolution among its
varying contributors, whose later emendations were often made at dates
substantially after first performances or even a principal author’s death.
This has prompted editors of lyrics, too, to recognise that methodologies
founded on imagined attempts to recover verses as they dropped freshly
from their authorial sources are in need of revision. Michael Rudick’s ‘his-
torical edition’ of Sir Walter Ralegh’s poems sets out to develop a social and
cultural collection. The authority of Rudick’s texts derives from the con-
texts the poems were put into by their collectors instead of from ‘substan-
tive or accidental conformity with hypothesized “true original copies”’.21
 ‘Trewly wrote’: manuscript, print, and the ­lyric 57
If the implications of flexible texts shifting through manuscript trans-
mission are increasingly acknowledged by editors, they appear less so
among critical interpreters who often overlook variant or differing ver-
sions when considering a lyric’s meaning. What alterations might occur in
the ways that we read and understand sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
lyrics if we acknowledge manuscript rather than print as the medium in
which they were envisaged principally to exist? As Arthur Marotti notes
about manuscript transmission: ‘it was normal for lyrics to elicit revi-
sions, corrections, supplements, and answers, for they were part of an
ongoing social discourse. In this environment texts were inherently mal-
leable, escaping authorial control.’22 In approaching a lyric on a printed
page our usual assumption is that it should lead us to an understanding
that at least acknowledges authorial intention. What though of a cul-
tural environment where authors assumed their lyrics would circulate in
the malleable manner Marotti posits? Poets such as Wyatt or Donne are
known for employing protean qualities of voice, elusive word-play, and
generic teasing in their lyrics: facets that become more readily grasped if
understood as emerging from the poet’s anticipation that his lyrics will be
regularly encountered by readers in shifting, copied texts where author-
ial identity appears of no concern. Donne’s constantly varying stanzas,
which can appear overly intricate and ill-suited to the expectations of
standard visual patterns conferred in print, seem more appropriate to the
less formalised and idiosyncratic presentations encountered in manu-
scripts. As Harold Love, citing Walter Ong’s work on orality notes, ‘A
manuscript based culture preserves “a feeling for the book as a kind of
utterance, an occurrence in the course of conversation” … Print “situates
words in space” thus giving them the status of objects rather than experi-
ences and separating off the apprehension of meaning from an awareness
of presence.’23

Ii
Illustrations from John Donne’s poetry elucidate how our interpret-
ive practices may be reconsidered through acknowledging lyrics’ textual
variability. As editors have long recognised, ‘The Canonization’ in many
manuscripts favours a reading in which the lovers ‘extract’ rather than
‘contract’ the world’s soul:
You, to whom love was peace that now is rage;
Who did the whole worlds soule contract, and drove
Into the glasses of your eyes
     (39–41)
58 Thomas ­Healy
Contract, or a variant of it, is found in the 1633, 1635, and 1669 printed
edition, whereas ‘Who did the whole worlds soule extract’ is a more famil-
iar manuscript reading. Conventionally, an editor seeks to decide which
is ‘right’, and the orthodox assessment is to give primacy to the printed
editions. This textual crux may be approached differently, however. In
the Houghton Library’s O’Flahertie manuscript (completed in late 1632
and, with 440 leaves, the largest surviving early manuscript collection of
Donne’s poetry) the scribe decided to have it both ways:
You to whome Loue was peace that now is rage
              con  
who did the whole worlds soule extract, and droue.24

While this may be a copyist attempting to replace ‘extract’ with ‘con-

tract’, no attempt has been made to score through one to give precedence
to the other. The copy allows that either, or both, of the two readings
might function in the lyric – a flexible alternative that manuscript
accommodates but that print conventions nullify. These alternatives may
not fundamentally alter the sense of what Donne is seeking to convey;
yet there are obviously nuanced differences: ‘extract’ takes up alchemical
resonances frequently found in Donne, ‘contract’ equally familiar legal
significances, while both words allow Donne’s premise of intensification
through reduction.
A different issue arises with the conclusion of Donne’s Holy Sonnet,
‘Batter my heart, three person’d God’, with its final lines: ‘Except you
’enthrall mee, never shall be free, / Nor ever chast, except you ravish
mee’ (13–14). This is how the lines appear in the 1633 edition and most
manuscripts. In the 1635 and 1669 editions, ‘chast’ becomes ‘chaste’ and
this is the spelling selected in most modern editions. In certain respects,
‘chast’ and ‘chaste’ appear broadly interchangeable in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries until the latter becomes the standard spelling in
the eighteenth century. Donne’s lines employ a conventional association
of pain and ecstasy acting to lead the soul towards the divine, a topos
familiar in contemporary emblem practice – though Donne’s startling
conjoining of chastity with rape proposes carnal violence, licentious-
ness, and ­immorality, which disturb the narrator’s craving for a euphoric
incorporation into divine love.25 But are ‘chast’/‘chaste’ interchangeable?
Interestingly, the likely current supposition that ‘chast’ emphasises a link
with chastisement – particularly a Calvinistically inclined sinner’s recog-
nition of human unworthiness that returns us to the sonnet’s opening
plea for the heart to be ‘battered’ and theologically valorises the violence,
 ‘Trewly wrote’: manuscript, print, and the ­lyric 59
physical or mystical, that the speaker’s ravishment entails – seems less
pronounced for early modern readers. It is ‘chaste’ as a verb meaning to
punish or inflict discipline upon that appears more readily interchange-
able with the form ‘chasten’ in Donne’s era, with ‘chasten’ only becom-
ing the dominant term later in the seventeenth century. Used as a verb,
‘chaste’ does not appear to be used to mean purify, refine, or make chaste
until the eighteenth century. Rather, it is ‘chast’ that is more readily asso-
ciated with sexual purity in early usage. Conceivably, ‘chast’/‘chaste’ held
slightly differing nuances for early readers of this sonnet: ‘chast’ accen-
tuating the paradox that sexual purity and virtue are achieved through
divine rape; ‘chaste’ a stress on the contradiction that the correction – the
abusive beating – that the heart experiences is also its spiritual mending
that provokes divine rapture. Both implications are potentially present
within each spelling, but selecting one word or the other by compilers
may reflect a poetic disposition similar to the interpretive preference of
a musician who chooses to give a particular emphasis to a note or phrase
in different performances so that it affects listeners subtly differently. This
interpretive presumption around the use of ‘chast’/‘chaste’ in different
versions of Donne’s sonnet is impossible to prove decisively. However,
the textual fluidity familiar in manuscript transmission points to an
aesthetic accommodation of such practices among readers and record-
ers untroubled by anxieties about a single authorial archetype. How
‘chast’/‘chaste’ was articulated and how understood might desirably vary
for a reader on different occasions.
Further implications for a critical practice that acknowledge textual
variability within manuscript culture are raised by Donne’s ‘The good-
morrow’. This lyric explores the spiritual and sensual awakening that
ostensibly occurs when a couple experience genuine mutuality in love.
The closing stanza asserts the immortality that such a relation confers:
My face in thine eye, thine in mine ­appeares,
And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest,
Where can we finde two better hemispheares
Without sharpe North, without declining West?
What ever dyes, was not mixt equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die.
      (15–21)

Donne’s anxiety about mortality is typically matched with an irrever-

ent sexual playfulness. The resoundingly corporeal ‘slacken’ indicates
that the lovers’ ideal matching should theoretically prevent the inevitable
60 Thomas ­Healy
consequence of male sexual orgasm, or ‘little death’, that has the penis
shrivel. The physical reality of intercourse, however, will inevitably expose
as false the poem’s assertion about the lovers’ perfect spherical balance, the
geometric form associated with divine immortality. The male’s carnal readi-
ness will slacken; the poet’s avowed achieving of perfect equilibrium with
this lover is proved unfounded, empowering him to continue his quest for
true love with another partner – a new morrow that his poem will equally
serve to address anew. These lines may further hint at a same-sex possibility,
since ‘none do slacken’ might suggest the mirror imaging of the two lovers
is more apparent if they are the same sex. Of course, Donne is also using
slackening in the paradoxical sense of delaying: proposing that the constant
vigour associated with loving extends life, when usually, according to con-
temporary ideas surrounding sexuality, using up your sexual potency was
envisaged as hastening the end of vitality (as illustrated in Marvell’s appeal
to his coy mistress: ‘Now let us sport us while we may; / And now, like
am’rous birds of prey, / Rather at once our time devour / Than languish in
his slow-chapped power’).26 ‘The good-morrow’’s quest for, and celebration
of, an ideal lover involves a recognition that this search will be futile: the
‘waking soules’ (8) of the lovers cannot escape their somatic actuality that
will inevitably embrace change and decay. As frequently occurs in Donne’s
poetry, whether the sentiments are directed at God or at worldly lovers,
much in the verse undermines the narrator’s avowals, inviting an explor-
ation of concerns underneath the poetry’s surface declarations.
The stanza cited above appears in the 1633 print edition and is also
found in many manuscripts containing Donne’s work, including the St
Paul’s Cathedral manuscript that the Variorum Donne editors propose
was prepared around 1620, speculating that it contains versions of poems
written before Donne entered his Church of England ministry in 1615.27
However, the carefully compiled O’Flahertie manuscript at Harvard
records a d­ ifferent conclusion to the lyric:
What ever dyes was not mixt æqually
If our two loves bee one, both thou and I
Love iust alike in all, none of these loues can dye.28

This reading is also found, sometimes substituting ‘both’ by ‘or’, in a

number of other manuscripts, and significantly it is also the version used
in both the 1635 and 1669 printed editions of Donne’s poetry. No current
reader is likely to prefer this finish to the bodily innuendos generated by
‘slacken’; yet we should not dismiss this as a mistranscription from some
stage in the poem’s existence that was then further copied and altered in a
 ‘Trewly wrote’: manuscript, print, and the ­lyric 61
variant-rich manuscript culture. The 1633 and 1635 printed editions, along
with all editions of Donne until 1650, were undertaken by the publisher
John Marriot at his shop in St Dunstan’s churchyard off Fleet Street, so
there can be little question that those preparing the second text would
be unaware of the reading used in the 1633 edition. While broadly the
sentiment in both versions of the stanza is similar, with the playfulness
in the second version notably resting on the vagueness around ‘just’, the
change transforms the overall poetic effect. The virtual removal of the sex-
ual dynamics in the poem’s conclusion may stem from social and cultural
decorums with which Donne himself may have colluded; but the implica-
tions extend beyond the poet, or some of his admirers, seeking to under-
play the lyric’s carnality to accord with an image of the poet’s sober dignity
as a prominent churchman: a version of the Jack Donne/Dr John Donne
evolution. It suggests more broadly that the brash sexual physicality (and
its consequent heightened awareness of looming morality) that is regis-
tered by ‘slacken’ may have been uncomfortably challenging for some and
that this was readily accommodated through altering the lines to a famil-
iar, if anodyne, commonplace about love. As Moretti reminds us, manu-
script culture prompted a poetics of ‘ongoing social discourse’ in which
‘texts were inherently malleable’.29 In this environment, we confront con-
temporary editorial processes that often show scant interest in pursuing,
or even trying to imagine, what an author’s original design might have
been. Alternative versions allow the cultural preferences of compilers or
editors to emerge, enabling adaptations of lyrics that do not decisively
seek to supplant each other but that concede their mutual coexistence. As
this example indicates, such textual enhancements may not be experienced
as preferable among current readers. Just as Nahum Tate’s sentimentalised
version of King Lear was favoured by audiences after its appearance in 1681,
replacing Shakespeare’s on the stage until the mid nineteenth century and
winning the approval of Dr Johnson over the Jacobean versions, the liter-
ary culture in which ‘The good-morrow’ circulated enabled its concluding
lines to record either a tame affirmation about the longevity of love or
a more socially challenging contention about sexuality. We cannot claim
that either ending of this lyric is closer to Donne’s original as we have no
means to authenticate which was prior. The O’Flahertie manuscript may
record an early version Donne later strengthened in revision just as readily
as one changed later. What we possess in either may be an emendation by
another hand. The critical interest, however, is generated by considering
why the different versions of this lyric appear to have been preferred by
different contemporary readers within the same cultural moment.
62 Thomas ­Healy
Many recent students of Donne will be familiar with his poetry
arranged in an edition that begins with Songs and Sonnets. This conven-
tion follows the 1635 and subsequent early printed editions where vari-
ous love lyrics are collected as Songs and Sonets, a title harking back to
the Tudor printed verse miscellanies that begin with Tottel’s Songes and
Sonettes in 1557. There is no evidence that Donne ever imagined organis-
ing his miscellaneous shorter secular amatory lyrics as a collection. Only
the O’Flahertie manuscript among the major manuscript compendia that
group Donne’s secular poetry together proposes such a dedicated and
named organisation, one that is not followed in the 1633 first printed edi-
tion. Unlike the convention of placing Songs and Sonnets first in editions
of Donne’s poetry that the 1635 volume establishes, most of the larger
manuscript collections of his verse begin either with his devotional poems
(as both the O’Flahertie manuscript and the 1633 printed edition do) or
with the satires. Increasingly, recent editors, including Robin Robbins in
his 2010 Longman edition, arrange these poems in alphabetical order and
group them generically as love lyrics, suppressing implications that they
are designed to be read as an organised unit.30
In manuscript circulation readers encounter poems whose authors are
frequently not cited. Further, compilers often show no inclination to try
to group lyrics according to authorship, with poems by the same writer
scattered throughout collections even when identified. If a contemporary
reader wished to establish authorial identity in many verse miscellanies,
there was rarely any secure way to do so; but concerns about author-
ship often were a matter of indifference. Recognising such contextual
practices offers current readers a different perspective on sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century love lyrics’ declarations, notably providing enhanced
ironic resonances to their narrators’ proclamations about their love’s lon-
gevity through their verse granting lasting reputation. The declaration of
Donne’s ‘The Canonization’ that its lovers’ legend as written in sonnets
will stand comparison with a historical reputation as recorded in chroni-
cles strikes a more sardonic note if we envisage that these assertions were
encountered in a collection where a reader had no sense about who these
lovers might be. Though current readers usually acknowledge that the nar-
rators of Donne’s poems should in no respect be imagined as the actual
John Donne, our sense that the poetic voice is a poetic ‘Donne’ addressing
his lover acts to record an identity on the ‘well wrought urne’ as distinct
as the names we expect to find inscribed upon the memorial stones of
‘halfe-acre tombs’ (29–34). Encountered in a collection where there is no
 ‘Trewly wrote’: manuscript, print, and the ­lyric 63
guide that the narrator is ‘Donne’, the poem’s avoidance of naming the
lovers becomes noticeable, putting their anonymity into explicit contrast
with the lyric’s claim that ‘Countries, Townes, Courts’ (44) shall invoke
them. Invoke whom? Though not always having a title in its manuscript
copies, this lyric’s irreverent application of the Roman Catholic practice
of formally declaring exemplary individuals to be sainted (a process that
since the late Middle Ages was known for its complex and lengthy inquir-
ies into candidates’ legitimacy) is more ironically tinged if Donne assumes
that readers will be unable to fathom these lovers’ identities.31 The wom-
an’s silence has frequently been remarked upon in Renaissance love lyr-
ics where the addressed female lover often has a shadowy presence, partly
in keeping with courtly decorums surrounding not compromising a lover
through identifying her. In contrast, as the male voice becomes identified
with an author through printed editions, the poet’s identity appears more
visible. Later readers lose the perspective that in manuscript circulation
a poetic narrator’s identity was often as obscure as that of his addressed
lover.
Correspondingly, Donne’s ‘A Valediction: of the booke’ affirms that a
study of its lovers’ ‘manuscripts’ will enable a writing of ‘Annals’ that will
produce such agreed records that no ‘schismatique’ will subsequently con-
test them (10–16), developing a similar type of fantasy as Jasper Heywood’s
dream of Seneca’s delivering an uncorrupted manuscript of Thyestes as
‘trewly wrote’. Donne’s imagined book is both ‘all-graved’ (produced
expensively) but written in ‘cypher’ or ‘new made Idiome’ (posing reserva-
tions about its intelligibility among its audience). While the lovers’ book’s
indestructability and longevity are declared, readers are also reminded of
the uncertainties surrounding textual continuance. It is not merely the
cited ancient Vandals or Goths that were responsible for the destruction
of learning; Donne’s poem recalls the considerable loss of manuscripts,
annals, and records in England as a result of the Reformation’s religious
divisions. Manuscript culture might have been more intimate than print,
but it was also fragile, and the poem reflects this precariousness even as its
narrator asserts how ‘Learning were safe; in this Our Universe’ (26): a cos-
mos where we are confronted with the lovers’ anonymity, the condition
that their being recorded in annals should deny. Even as the lyric asserts
the lovers’ uncorrupted reputation recorded throughout time, these poetic
figures are rendered obscure and unknown.
A consideration of ‘The triple Foole’ further illustrates the trenchant
quality to Donne’s self-ironic displays that are posed when imagining
64 Thomas ­Healy
his lyrics circulating in a manuscript culture that shows little regard for
authorship. Usually untitled or simply called ‘Song’ in manuscripts, the
poem expands upon the familiar theme that the lover is doubly ridiculous,
first for loving per se because his desire will not be returned, and then for
‘saying so’ in poetry. However, the poet-lover justifies the wisdom of his
composition because the lyric may convince his desired ‘she’ to recon-
sider the poet, admiring his qualities as a versifier (1–4). In Donne’s poem,
the narrator additionally emphasises the therapeutic qualities of poetry:
‘Griefe brought to numbers cannot be so fierce / For, he tames it, that fet-
ters it in verse’ (10–11).
Unfortunately, for the poet what has been designed as a private exchange
becomes public:

Some man, his art and voice to show,

Doth Set and sing my paine,
And by delighting many, frees againe
Griefe, which verse did restraine.
      (13–16)

This act of adoption, in which the narrator’s verse is utilised by another

for his own purposes as a song set to music, and employs a musical idiom
that he perceives as inappropriate, is a common facet of a culture where
poetry featured as social exchange and where verse was redeployed to suit
the occasion. As David Lindley’s chapter in this volume argues, this poem
illustrates the tension between a lyric’s private and public functions. In
‘The triple Foole’, though, there is a good deal of self-mockery as the
poem invites speculation as to whether ‘some man’ has gained access to
the lyric through the addressed ‘she’; or, indeed, whether ‘some man’ is
the poet himself, the ‘I’ of the poem, now assuming his third ‘foolish’
identity in seeking to gain wider audience for his song. Sidney’s Astrophil
and Stella and Shakespeare’s Sonnets are the best-known instances where
poetic narrators in Renaissance love lyrics betray their absorption in,
and ­preference for, creating accomplished poetry over successful ama-
tory encounters, and much of Donne’s work is similarly cleverly directed.
However, in this ‘song’ Donne details a process whereby a lyric apparently
originally conceived for private delivery becomes distanced from the poet
and ultimately turned back upon him by his future encounter with it in
a public performance or in published form. The art of setting that ‘some
man’ undertakes is a placing of words to music that also gestures at fixing
them in print type.
 ‘Trewly wrote’: manuscript, print, and the ­lyric 65
   To Love, and Griefe tribute of Verse belongs,
But not so much as pleases when ’tis read,
Both are increased by such such songs:
For both their triumphs so are published[.]
        (17–20).

Donne’s meditation on how love and grief are enhanced rather than
restrained by being ‘published’ in this new song playfully echoes the anx-
ieties Daniel articulates about printed matter being fundamentally mis-
understood by vulgar readers. A private lyric designed to purge grief is
transformed by being disseminated in public media, where the poem is
now encountered sung to a different tune or appears in an altered printed
context, becoming a vehicle for ‘delighting many’. The consequence for
the poet is that verses that were designed to function as a remedy enabling
a purging of his ‘paines’ now operate as a toxin that increases his suffering.
Slyly drawing attention to his poetic accomplishments that are adopted by
others, Donne’s narrator also concedes his foolishness in imagining that
the poet has any control over his poem.
Donne’s poetry circulated widely in manuscript and some of his poems
are found in up to seventy separate copies. His elegy ‘Going to Bed’ – now
frequently titled ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’ – is found (copied either
completely or partially) in more extant manuscripts than any other Donne
poem. Yet it was not printed until 1669, perhaps reflecting a similar cul-
tural hesitation around the printing of the more sexually explicit conclu-
sion to ‘The good-morrow’.32 While it would be vastly over-simplistic to
claim that this disparity between printed absence and manuscript abun-
dance reflects a private permissiveness tolerated in manuscript circulation
in contrast to a public prudishness around print, this elegy’s history exem-
plifies how our understanding of Donne’s poetry within the seventeenth
century and subsequently must take account of its manuscript presence.
As the illustrations considered above show, if we somehow presume that
there might be a collection of Donne’s poetry organised and presented so
that it decisively reflects what he ‘trewly wrote’, we are misconceiving the
character of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century lyric verse.

iii
Unlike Donne, most contemporary readers encountered George Herbert’s
poetry in print. A few examples of his poems are found in manuscript
commonplace books but these appear to have been copied from the
66 Thomas ­Healy
printed Temple.33 However, our understanding of Herbert’s poetry, too,
benefits from considering its links with scribal manuscript traditions.
We possess two important manuscript collections that predate the first
edition of The Temple Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, which was
printed in Cambridge in 1633 about six months after Herbert’s death.
The Dr Williams Library manuscript (MS Jones B62) in London and
MS Tanner 307 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford are both carefully pre-
pared and have been linked with the Little Gidding community near
Cambridge, which was led by Herbert’s friend Nicholas Ferrar.34 The
Williams Library manuscript, while it lacks about seventy-five poems
found in the larger Tanner collection which contains the whole of the
printed Temple, nevertheless has corrections to poems that appear to
be in the poet’s hand (as well as a number of poems not found in the
printed Temple). Greg Miller has detailed how both these manuscripts
reflect important features of scribal publication associated with coterie
groups, such as the Pembroke circle at Wilton House in Wiltshire,
which Herbert visited frequently, as well as the Little Gidding commu-
nity.35 Miller proposes that the Williams manuscript, written in a visually
unadorned secretary hand, rather than the more embellished italic hand
usually used within aristocratic circles, was a conscious choice of Herbert
and the Little Gidding community to express the devotional simplicity
that the lyrics themselves celebrate. In contrast to both manuscripts, the
printed Temple employs a range of visual signs – italics, capitalisation of
words, printed borders – that affect readers’ encounters with the poems.
A good example is the use of italic and roman typefaces to separate the
voices within a lyric. God frequently answers the poet in these poems.
The manuscripts deploy a consistent hand for both ‘speakers’, reinforcing
a perception that the godly voice emerges from within the narrator. In
the printed texts the respondent’s voice is designed to look independ-
ent of the poet, making God’s replies to his dilemmas appear to emerge
externally. With typefaces regularised by the printer, Miller suggests that
the visual impact of the printed Temple acts like a contemporary catech-
ism, presenting scriptural quotation in italics so that the reader readily
sees how God – through Scripture – responds to human inquiry in ‘a
sanctioned, stable, more authoritatively self-authorizing text’. In con-
trast, in the manuscripts Herbert seeks to reveal the human impossibility
of thoroughly achieving this divine dialogue.36
A good example of the implications of this presentational difference is
‘Heaven’, the penultimate lyric in the ‘Church’ section of the Temple:
 ‘Trewly wrote’: manuscript, print, and the ­lyric 67
O who will show me those delights on high?
           Echo.        I.
Thou Echo, thou art mortall, all men know.
           Echo.        No.
Wert thou not born among the trees and leaves?
           Echo.        Leaves.
And are there any leaves, that still abide?
           Echo.        Bide.
What leaves are they? Impart the matter wholly.
           Echo.        Holy.
Are holy leaves the Echo then of blisse?
           Echo.        Yes.
Then tell me, what is that supreme delight?
           Echo.        Light.
Light to the minde: what shall the will enjoy?
           Echo.        Joy.
But are there cares and buisnesse with the pleasure?
           Echo.        Leisure.
Light, joy, and leisure; but shall they persever.
           Echo.        Ever.

The print text’s use of italics disembodies the echo from the questioner,
creating a resonance that provides firmer spiritual assurance within the
poem. When the echo answers ‘I’, the reader is aware that, as an echo, the
‘I’ must in some sense be the speaker. But Echo is also a well-known, if
tragic, mythological figure in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, condemned to lose
her independent speech and only able to repeat what she hears. If Echo
has migrated from being a forlorn figure in Classical mythology to a provi-
dential answering God in Herbert, this transformation provides enormous
comfort to a poetic interlocutor struggling over whether promises of heav-
enly immortality apply to him. There is a greater disquiet within the lines,
however, if Echo’s reply of ‘No’ to the questioner’s assertion about Echo’s
mortality is felt to emerge from the questioner himself, who is undeni-
ably mortal as an embodied speaker. Without the alternating typefaces
fashioning a determined separation of the speakers, this lyric expounds
a less assured dialogue about how a human spiritual pilgrim may or may
not ­discover the nature of divinity. As a separate speaker, Echo’s responses
command authority – true echoes, if you wish. When Echo is identi-
fied with the questioner, doubt is occasioned because the speaker may be
said, in effect, to be ‘mishearing’ the echo’s response: for example ‘no’ for
‘know’, ‘holy’ for ‘wholly’. Echo’s final answer of ‘Ever’ in the printed for-
mat proclaims certainty. In contrast, a possible alternative reverberation of
68 Thomas ­Healy
‘persever’ – ‘sever’ – is ignored, an unsettling possibility that readers might
more readily acknowledge if they were less confident about the identity
of the echo that is rebounding back, confronting a more variable aural
experience than is offered by the concrete visual appearance of the printed
text. The vexed question over reading Scripture properly – both through
human understanding and through divine revelation – which was pro-
nounced for Herbert’s era, is displaced by a printed format that indicates
intimacy between God and questioner. The narrator’s initial question:
‘O who will show me those delights on high?’ is answered by a seem-
ing authority who will lead the questioner effortlessly to ‘Heaven’. The
troubling issue about whether, through potentially mishearing the echo,
the questioner is revealing his miscomprehension of what Scripture reveals
is repressed by the poem’s printed form.
As Samuel Daniel agonises, print in early modern England could ‘a
world of Pennes performe’; yet print offered versions of poems that were
ultimately different from manuscript. Print acted to fix and contain a
lyrical flexibility that many poets cherished, embracing the malleability
that manuscript recording and circulation offered their poetic practice.
Even a poet such as Herbert, who envisaged his lyrics grouped within a
tightly structured framework, welcomed the different opportunities that
the copying and scribal production of his poetry afforded.37 Attending to
lyrics’ social and cultural transactions within a manuscript culture that
was the dominant vehicle for the circulation of shorter poetic forms in
England until the mid seventeenth century affords current readers oppor-
tunities to reassess our understanding of how these poems function and
what they may mean.

Notes
1 Samuel Daniel, The Ciuile Wars Betweene the Howses of Lancaster and Yorke
(London, 1609), vi.38 (p. 153).
2 Ibid. vi.37 (p. 153).
3 J. W. Saunders, ‘The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor
Poetry’ Essays in Criticism 1 (1951), 139–64.
4 John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (Sheffield: HRI Online
Publications, 2011), Book ix, p. 1562, available online at www.johnfoxe.org/
index.php?gotopage=1562&realm=text&edition=1570&gototype=modern&x=
1&y=16 (last accessed 23 May 2013).
5 Richard Tottel, Tottel’s Miscellany, ed. Amanda Holton and Tom MacFaul
(London: Penguin Books, 2011), p. 3.
6 John Donne, ‘Doctissimo amicissimoque v. D. D. Andrews’, in Donne’s Poetical
Works, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1913),
Vol. i, p. 397, esp. lines 1–6. All Donne citations are to this edition.
 ‘Trewly wrote’: manuscript, print, and the ­lyric 69
7 A. F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (Cornell
University Press, 1995), p. 245.
8 Heather Dubrow, ‘Neither here nor there: deixis and the sixteenth-­century
sonnet’, above, pp. 33–4; The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early
Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008),
pp. 15–53.
9 David Lindley, ‘Words for music, perhaps: early modern songs and lyric’,
above, pp. 10–11.
10 Margaret Healy and Thomas Healy, ‘Introduction’, in Renaissance
Transformations: The Making of English Writing (1500–1650), ed. Margaret
Healy and Thomas Healy (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 4–5.
11 Samuel Daniel, ‘A Defence of Rhyme’, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. C.
G. Smith, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1904), Vol. II, p. 366.
12 Nigel Smith, ‘Lyric and the English Revolution’, below, pp. 71–91.
13 Cited in A. D. Wright and V. F. Stern, In Search of Christopher Marlowe: A
Pictorial Biography (London: MacDonald, 1965), p. 63.
14 Daniel, Ciuile Wars, iv.38 (p. 153).
15 Seneca, The Seconde Tragedie of Seneca Entituled Thyestes, trans. Jasper
Heywood (London, 1560), pp. 5–17.
16 Ibid., p. 16.
17 Sir Thomas Wyatt, Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. Kenneth Muir
and Patricia Thomson (Liverpool University Press, 1969), p. 11, lines 1–3.
18 British Library, MS Egerton 2711, fo. 11v; MS Additional 17492, fo. 75v. See
Sir Thomas Wyatt, The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry, ed. Richard C.
Harrier (Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 112.
19 Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1993); Marotti, Manuscript, Print; H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir
Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1996).
20 Richard Todd and Helen Wilcox, ‘The Challenges of Editing Donne and
Herbert’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 52 (2012), 187–206.
21 Michael Rudick, in Sir Walter Ralegh, The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: A
Historical Edition, ed. Michael Rudick, Medieval and Renaissance Texts
and Studies 209 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance
Studies, 1999), pp. lxxv–lxxviii.
22 Marotti, Manuscript, Print, p. 135.
23 Love, Scribal Publication, p. 142.
24 O’Flahertie manuscript of Donne’s poems, Harvard University, MS Eng.966.5,
available online at DigitalDonne: The Online Variorum, www.digitaldonne.
tamu.edu/DisplayText, p. 259 (last accessed 23 May 2013).
25 See for example Herman Hugo, Pia Desideria Emblematis, Elegiis & Affectibus
(Antwerp, 1624); many of Hugo’s emblems are used by Francis Quarles in his
Emblems Divine and Moral (London, 1635).
26 Andrew Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’, in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed.
N. Smith, Longman Annotated English Poets (Harlow: Pearson Education,
2003), p. 83, lines 37–40.
70 Thomas ­Healy
27 Bibliographical description of St Paul’s Cathedral Library. MS 49.B.43, avail-
able online at DigitalDonne.
28 O’Flahertie manuscript, p. 291.
29 Marotti, Manuscript, Print, p. 135.
30 John Donne, The Complete Poems of John Donne, ed. Robin Robbins,
Longman Annotated English Poets (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2010).
31 Donne’s employment of canonisation is less heretical within an English reli-
gious context than many currently assume. The Calendar of the Elizabethan
(1559) Book of Common Prayer that Donne’s early English readership would be
familiar with records various saints’ days; but while technically allowing the
idea of ‘canonisation’, the English Church has only ever proclaimed Charles I
as a saint.
32 Todd and Wilcox, ‘The Challenges of Editing Donne and Herbert’,
pp. 188, 192.
33 George Herbert, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1941), p. lvi.
34 George Herbert, The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox
(Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. xxxvii–xl. All citations to Herbert
are from this edition.
35 Greg Miller, ‘Scribal and Print Publication: The Case of George Herbert’s
English Poems’, George Herbert Journal 23 (1999/2000), 14–34.
36 Ibid., pp. 24–6.
37 Herbert, English Poems, pp. 39–40.
 ­c h apter f ou r

Lyric and the English Revolution

Nigel Smith

I
There are very many different ways of describing lyric change and innov-
ation during the mid seventeenth century, as Alastair Fowler has shown
with typical acuteness and authority.1 Change also applies to longer verse
forms, such as epic and satire, and was to some degree part and parcel of
them. These changes relate in different ways to widespread and sometimes
drastic social and cultural transformation. Few pieces of poetry were writ-
ten in the 1640s and 1650s that were not explicitly touched by the Civil
War and the political revolution that followed it. The impact of the ‘scien-
tific revolution’ was widespread and triggered a revival of a non-lyric genre
most associated with agricultural improvement: the Georgic. Jonson’s
classicism released the epigram (which though short was not considered
a type of lyric by every authority at the time) as a fashion, but it also
subsequently became a universal building block, a smaller Roman-sized
brick that could be used with great flexibility in many different larger
configurations. Jonson himself thought that those that relied on ‘tuneing
and riming’ were shallow and in fact ‘have no composition at all’.2 As we
have seen in the previous chapter, he claimed to base his poetry in prose.
Those who looked back into the mid-century from the vantage point of
the Restoration noted the rise then of a certain kind of ‘smooth’ and easy
verse, a civilised painlessness that allegedly took poetry in various genres
to the advantageousness of being like prose. This was where the verse of
Sir John Denham and Edmund Waller in particular was held responsible
for the kind of line that would make the high Augustanism of Alexander
Pope possible. Yet Francis Atterbury’s claim in 1690 that the poets of the
previous age and before wrote ‘down-right Prose tagg’d with Rhymes’, only
in monosyllables – especially Donne – can easily be refuted, while many
other qualities can be discerned in innovative seventeenth-century lyric
that those praising the rise of ‘Augustan verse’ simply did not consider.3

71
72 Nigel ­Smith
Lyric poetry and its history had been discussed with no little ­originality
in Elizabethan and early Jacobean critical discourse. Despite the enor-
mous variety and creativity of mid-seventeenth-century lyric there is by
contrast little or no significant discussion of lyric in the criticism of mid-
seventeenth-century England, or in the two decades that preceded it. J. E.
Spingarn, editor of an influential collection of seventeenth-century critical
writings, saw this as a consequence of the rise of neoclassical priorities,
and added the lofty Baconian principles that were reorganising knowledge
at the time. In Bacon’s view, poetry should only represent the outer world
in an imaginatively heightened way; lyric poetry, with its focus on the
inner emotional life, was as an aspect of philosophy and rhetoric and had
no place in this world.4 Everyone claimed to know what lyric was – short
poetry that was usually set to music, as opposed to heroic verse, some-
times associated with dance, often gentle or sweet in manner, often with
complex and varying metre, and which had descended from the ancient
Greeks (including the famous trio of Alcaeus, Anacreon, and Sappho).
This was a given, not something to be discussed and redefined. Thus, writ-
ing in 1622, Henry Peacham praised Horace as the greatest and unsurpass-
able lyric poet for his acuteness, sweetness, and fluency, where ‘his Stile
is elegant, pure, and sinewie’.5 There are 210 instances of the word ‘lyric’
(usually spelled ‘lyrick’) in 114 separate texts between 1630 and 1660 in
the searchable part of the Early English Books Online website (about one
quarter of the total corpus), almost all of them describing the short and
often sung poem.6 Going further than Bacon, however, in 1650 Thomas
Hobbes denied lyric any status as a discrete verbal entity, while assuming
that poetic genres were naturally produced by their corresponding nurt-
uring environments: heroic (epic and tragedy) by courts, comic (comedy
and satire) by cities, and pastoral (bucolic verse, pastoral comedy) by the
country. He claimed that most lyrics were in fact parts of longer poems
(he was repeating the views of earlier Italian writers like Robortello): ‘but
essayes and parts of an entire poem’ such as epics (and there is plenty of
evidence of this in Milton’s Paradise Lost).7 Otherwise lyrics count for very
little indeed. The focus in criticism is on poetry as a form of philosophy:
one that, through its formal qualities, is particularly well suited to keeping
the insights of antiquity (such as those of Plato) alive. In an age domi-
nated by civil crisis, military violence and the dissolution of Church and
state, it is not surprising that epic and the heroic, as they were addressed
in the tradition of literary criticism, should become the central focus.8
Contemporary Continental discussions of verse, most of them influ-
ential in England, took a similar view. Lyric verse was to be associated
 Lyric and the English ­Revolution 73
with ‘charm and sweetness’, and the term ‘lyric’ should be interchangeable
with ‘melic’ because ‘melos’ means ‘song’, although not from the Greek
name for honey.9 The term was once applied generally to poetry and was
then restricted to lyric because of its special focus on harmony, and the
same was true of other terms applied to lyric: ‘eide’, ‘ode’, and ‘carmen.’
Complex catalogues of lyric types in antiquity, distinguished by formal
metrical characteristics and by the many different occasions for which
they were designed, were established. Mastery of the form of a given lyric
was not considered a guarantee of success: only when the poet is moved,
even if he departs from what is expected, is the audience pleased.
All this sense of the given status of lyric is true in so far as it was a subject
of literary discussion. The scene is very different the moment music becomes
involved. G. J. Vossius, the influential and capacious literary historian and
theorist, is clear that lyric took its name from the instrument that accompan-
ied it: the lyre.10 The use of poetry to make song lyrics was a central part of
Elizabethan cultural achievement, as David Lindley’s chapter in this volume
amply makes clear, not least in his treatment of Thomas Campion, at once
both poet and composer. Elizabethan lutesong – the madrigal – marked
by strong, drawn-out, tuneful melodic lines and polyphonically conceived
accompaniment, was being replaced in the earlier and mid seventeenth cen-
tury by the ‘continuo’ song, a single declaimed voice accompanied by a sin-
gle bass line or chords on lute or theorbo.11 By the middle decades of the
century English song had evolved to the point where the impact of new
kinds of musical composition and performance was beginning to be felt.
Thus, while, as we have seen, Elizabethan poets wrote words for pre-existing
music (this was called contrafacta), Henry Lawes (1585–1662) conversely set
other people’s poems to music, possibly under the influence of the rise of
opera in Italy, and certainly showing a new preference for speech over mel-
ody and rhythm. In this evolved arena of composition the pitch changes
of melody and the rhythms of the music had to be subservient to speech.
Henry Lawes’ music itself has been analysed as exhibiting an interim state:
still obeying the principles of earlier song-setting, but allowing an emphasis
on declamatory style to intrude into the composition:
Modern scholars … now refer to songs in the half-declamatory half-melodic
style denounced by Burney [in the eighteenth century] as ‘declamatory
ayres’ and find much more to admire. Rhythmic distortion is a ‘characteris-
tic feature’ undoubtedly – ‘at first sight [this] seems at odds with the prin-
ciples of good prosody’ – but it had an aesthetic basis in the ‘new principles
of text delivery’ adopted by professional stage singers, rhetorically exagger-
ated rather than naturalistic.12
74 Nigel ­Smith
The first instances of declamatory style in England seem to have been in
songs written by Alfonso Ferrabosco for Jonson’s court masques in 1608–9
and by Nicholas Lanier in 1613, but it would take a while for the style to
become dominant. Robert Johnson expanded declamatory style for the
stage and is usually thought to have most influenced Lawes. Lawes too
registered the change in dominant rhythmic conventions, replacing con-
ventional duple time with the triple time brought by the new French fash-
ion in lute music. This meant that somehow a language that was very
and naturally happy with the iambic foot had to be accommodated to the
three-part foot in 3/4 and 6/8 time.
In his comments on song Lawes was also quite sure that English was
not too clumsy a language, too full of syllables, to be very worthily set
to music; he maintained that visiting foreign musicians regarded English
musical culture as highly as any other in Europe.13 He spoke much of the
attention he gave to fitting music to words, and others felt that his settings
surpassed punctuation in rendering both the sense and the proportion of
the verbal edifice: ‘No pointing Comma, Colon, halfe so well / Renders
the Breath of Sense; they cannot tell / The just Proportion how each word
should go, / To rise and fall, run swiftly or march slow; / Thou shew’st
’tis Musick only must do this.’14 What is now appreciated as the ‘unique
charm’ of the songs of Lawes and his contemporaries – ‘the best affective
settings in the English language before Purcell’ – has to be seen as part of
the history of lyric in this period.15
The total effect of a Lawes setting is overwhelming, arresting melan-
choly, exemplified in the Lady’s opening song, ‘Sweet Echo’, from Milton’s
Comus (1634), lines 230–43. The rhythm of the melody is matched to that
of the words so that it does indeed feel like musical speech as opposed to
song. The Lady’s concern at being lost and the purity of her own soul are
signalled in the modulating chord changes, which suggest moments of
unsettled surprise when they resolve in an unexpected way. The melody
meanwhile stays high or descends only to go higher in accordance with
the Lady’s beautiful state. Liberation from the dark woods and this life
is registered by the change from minor to major key. There is something
‘ravishingly’ beautiful about the poised simplicity of these songs. This is
equally true of Lawes’ setting of Edmund Waller’s comparably famous ‘Go
lovely rose’, even when, as is the case with this song, Lawes failed to make
every musical phrase match the words in accentuation and quantity. Here
the chord progressions suggest the complexity of mood on the speaker’s
part: that desire cannot be left unrequited without pain on the lover’s part.
That quality is carried well, although the music is more challenged by the
 Lyric and the English ­Revolution 75
carpe diem element emphasised in the last stanza, and the music seems
here altogether too melancholy to be a successful persuasion to love. The
rising presence of recitative was registered forcefully by Lawes’ setting of
William Cartwright’s ‘Ariadne’s Lament’ (c. ?1633–9), 195 bars long and
taking 10 minutes to perform. It feels like a musical narrative, despite the
persistence of lyrical musical elements (for example formal cadences) that
interrupt narrative flow.
Thomas Carew’s Poems of 1640 contain some of the most innovative
love lyrics of the era, and his verse was very frequently copied into mis-
cellanies: nearly forty surviving collections contain ten or more poems;
one has more than eighty.16 Lawes put more lyrics of Carew to music
than of any other poet, and they were copied in one sequence in his
manuscript songbook; he himself was acknowledged as the collaborat-
ing composer on the title-page of the third edition of Carew’s Poems in
1651. The volume’s frank articulation of sexual desire is matched by an
easy sprezzatura, seen in the balance of caesurae against rhyme and, in
the second poem, ‘To A. L. Perswasions to love’, in the deliberate mixture
of different metres, even in the opening poem ‘The Spring’, which sets
the scene for the speaker to persuade ‘A. L.’ to love in the next poem.
Carew signals that he is too grand to be slavishly brilliant: he is very
much his own man, loving and writing as he pleases. A poem like ‘A
cruell Mistris’ is notable for its crude treatment of the iambic metre and
the rhyme: ‘WEE read of Kings and Gods that kindly tooke, / A pitcher
fil’d with water from the brooke; / But I have dayly tendred without
thankes / Rivers of teares that overflow their bankes.’ The poem is
redeemed by the classical imagery that follows, when an earlier time is
evoked in which sacrifices in the name of love were honored: ‘Vesta is
not displeas’d if her chast vrne / Doe with repayred fuell ever burne.’17
Perhaps too the dactylic line 4 is a signal of that world and Carew’s power
to evoke it. The awkwardness of the beginning suggests the manner of a
petulant poet-lover, less than his best in the moment of frustration. The
prosody may indeed be rough in the sense of being relatively unrefined
and unlearned, but it does have the advantage of some dramatic energy,
conveying the sense that the author had seen some plays:
   When you returne, pray tell your Soveraigne
And mine, I gave you courteous entertaine;
Each line receiv’d a teare, and then a kisse,
First bath’d in that, it scap’d vnscorcht from this:
I kist it because your hand had been there
But ’cause it was not now, I shed a ­teare.18
76 Nigel ­Smith
This immediacy gave Carew the ability and the freedom to evoke sex-
ual excitement, for which his verse is justly famous and his contempor-
ary reputation not a little tainted. The exposure to French libertine verse
may have been a help along the way as the poetry celebrated intem-
perance: ‘Give me a storme; if it be love, / Like Danae in that golden
showre / I swim in pleasure.’19 The step to Carew’s crowning achievement
in ‘A Rapture’ is short. This poem is not anthologised in two of the best
recent collections, and perhaps this points to an uncertainty of tone that
is absent in Carew’s brilliant elegy on his teacher Donne, whose influence
on Carew’s erotic verse is obvious.20 Its witty frankness and bravado are
nonetheless remarkable:

Yet my tall pine shall in the Cyprian straight

Ride safe at anchor and unlade her fraight:
My Rudder, with thy bold hand, like a tryde,
And skilfull Pilot, thou shalt steer, and guide
My Bark into love’s channel, where it shall
Dance, as the bounding waves do rise or fall.21

Carew’s poetry was of the court and the city, with its theatres and inns,
where the men of letters gathered, and where what Andrew Marvell called
the ‘candid age’ flourished.22
Lawes, however, was challenged by the demands of Carew’s longer
lyrics. Declamatory style was appropriately deployed, but the view has
been that these settings lose direction in too much detail and would have
needed simpler harmonic variation over a longer period of time, together
with a stronger sense of flow that could accommodate rhythmic variation;
in other words the qualities of true recitative.
A very different kind of verse, verse practice, and understanding are evi-
dent in the poetry of Hester Pulter (1605–1678), unknown until 1996 when
her one surviving manuscript was discovered in the Brotherton Library at
Leeds University.23 Her poetry is defined by her role as mother and mis-
tress of a household in Hertfordshire: she was mother to fifteen children,
of whom only one survived her, and she thought of herself as a kind of
secular anchoress, keeping watch over the rhythm of birth and mortality
in a confined community. This did not stop her tackling national themes,
but the quality to note about her verse is its lack of the prosodic discip-
line that would have been provided by a regular humanist education, even
though she is no less wellborn than Carew. Her verse seldom stands up
to Carew’s, even at his weaker moments, if we judge quality in these con-
ventional terms. It has rather an expressive integrity that looks ­forward to
 Lyric and the English ­Revolution 77
modern stream-of-consciousness writing, and perhaps has more in com-
mon in its own time with prose conversion narratives. The poem on the
death of her daughter Jane – she of the ‘sparking Diamond eyes’ – in 1646
is a case in point, where the arresting attention to Jane’s diseased skin sug-
gests the dappled skin of a hunted deer, itself marked again by blood, a
connection that works of course against the hunt as a well-known emblem
of the courtly love quest:
E’ne soe the spots upon her faire skin shows
Like drops of blood upon unsoiled snow
But what a heart had I, when I did stand
Holding her forehead with my Trembling hand
My Heart to Heaven with her bright spirit flyes
Whilst shee (ah mee) closed up her lovely eyes
Her soule being seated in her place of birth
I turnd a Niobe as shee turn’d earth.24
The master of metre, however, was Ben Jonson, and everyone knew it,
especially Jonson himself. He cast a huge shadow over succeeding genera-
tions, having died aged sixty-five in 1637. Jonson’s scholarship; his facil-
ity with ancient languages; and his ability to make effective, appropriate,
and imaginative transitions from Latin to English, meant that he gave to
English lyric a taut, urbane solidity that it had lacked. Few could equal him
though he was much imitated, and perhaps he was the dominant poetic
genius of the kind of line we find in the mid-century miscellanies, even
though he wrote ‘Not of Love’: so dominant in fact that he was commonly
evoked in poetry as a character, an avatar of standards made to live as a
guiding literary presence long after his death.25 As he said of another: ‘so
ample, full, and round, / In weight, in measure, number, sound’.26 Jonson’s
ambition took him to write in later 1629 ‘To the Immortal Memory, and
Friendship of that Noble pair, Sir Lucius Cary, and Sir H. Morison’ the
first proper Pindaric ode in English, achieved by a very strict adherence
to metrical patterns, as opposed to the looser ‘imitation’ of Pindar that
would come with Abraham Cowley in the 1650s. Jonson’s encomium to
a friendship severed by an untimely death keeps the business of imitation
firmly in the reader’s mind, with English names for the formal division of
the triads (originally called strophe, antistrophe, and epode; now ‘turn’,
‘counterturn’, and ‘stand’). This has seemed too formal and inauthentic
for some, showing a literary ambitiousness inappropriate for the occasion
of grief. But in its own terms, terms that were recognised by contempor-
aries, the poem sustains the famous energy of Pindar, achieved by a very
particular prosodic discipline, while ­exercising an appropriate intelligence.
78 Nigel ­Smith
In the third ‘Stand’, lines 85–96, a word-split across lines 92–3 signals the
separation of the heavenly twins Castor and Pollux, who never appear
together as stars (and in myth this was explained by Jupiter half-permit-
ting Pollux’s request that the dead Castor be restored to life, alternately
living and dying every day):27
Jonson, who sung this of him, ere he went
Himself to rest,
Or taste a part of that full joy he meant
To have expressed,
In this bright asterism:
Where it were friendships schism,
(Were not his Lucius long with us to tarry)
To separate these twi-
Lights, the Dioscuri;
And keep the one half from his Harry.
But fate doth so alternate the design,
Whilst that in heaven, this light on earth must shine.
Other members of Jonson’s circle, such as Robert Herrick, with similar
inroads at court but also enjoying city life, for some periods at least, built
on his tonal surety and made an art of fine description, albeit description
driven by the relationship of what one can see and how one is aroused by
it. ‘When as in silks my Julia goes, / Then, then (me thinks) how sweetly
flowes / That liquefaction of her clothes’ (lines 1–3, half the entire poem),
is not merely sexual, and leads to John Creaser’s well-seen affirmative
judgement: Herrick, he claims, ‘is not with Julia in the imagined moment
of uttering the poem, but thinking with a connoisseur’s rapture at how
she enthralls him. The experience is recreated with conscious virtuosity, a
voluptuary yet deliberate pleasure in the language used to recall her erotic
allure.’28 Since poetry and drinking went together, Herrick ominously saw
potential for too much intoxication and loss of control in an imitation
of the bibulous Greek poet Anacreon. Here too a reference to the satirist
Petronius might be concealed in the poem.29 Herrick built careful par-
allels in his verse between Ovid and Jonson, Tibullus or Propertius and
himself; or rephrased Dante, placing Jonson in the radiant glow that sur-
rounded Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan in the Inferno; or like Ovid,
projected himself as an already dead author.30 Thomas Randolph was no
less a ‘Son of Ben’ than Herrick, and his poems took from Jonson’s ease of
tone, just as Randolph allegedly drank himself to death, taking due note
no doubt of Jonson’s love of wine.31 Both Herrick and Randolph accepted
Jonson’s retraction of the poetic line; the tightening of syntax; the refusal
of the pentameter’s liberty, with its valve-like, regulatory caesura. Henry
 Lyric and the English ­Revolution 79
Lawes’ settings of Herrick’s lyrics are noteworthy, not least for the contrast
between the ‘graceful air and rhythmic spice’ in tuneful triple time for
most of the lyrics, and the striking declamatory ayres such as ‘Amaryllis,
by a spring’, where the music is subtly attached to the delicate words,
and where there is a high instance of intense vocal ornamentation that is
intended to be descriptive of the content of the words.32

II
The business of writing lyric verse was undoubtedly most seriously
inflected by the Civil War, the regicide, and the eleven years of experiment
with non-monarchical forms of government that followed. Although
much of his verse was written in the twenty-five years before the wars,
it was Herrick’s lot to let his subtle symposiastic verse speak for com-
promised Royalism when his major printed collection Hesperides first
appeared in 1648, dedicated to the future Charles II. That context includes
many things, such as the association of Royalism with bucolic pastoral: a
poetry dedicated to defending the culture of maypole dancing, Sunday
sport, and Christmas celebration, much of which had been abolished by
the Puritans.33 Early performances of William Lawes’ (brother of Henry)
plangent setting of Herrick’s ‘To the Virgins, to make much of Time’
would have been tinged with an incendiary spirit of resistance: it was a
Cavalier anthem.34 William Lawes himself, especially venerated as a musi-
cian and composer by the king, was shot dead in the rout of Royalists at
Rowton Heath, near Chester, on 24 September 1645, which disgrace the
poet Henry Vaughan managed to survive.35
Hester Pulter felt the same trauma deeply:
if the sun should lose his heat and light
Wee should invaded bee with Death and Night
Soe since our Martred sovere’ngs [sic] spirits fled
Our light, and life; our hopes, and Joyes, are dead
Nay should the Poles or Axes of the skie
Their Raidient luster unto us denie
Or Cinthia cease to wane or to increase
Wee should subsist, t’wold not disturb our Peace
But should we loose the influence of the sun.36
This poem interestingly ends with a section on the death of her daugh-
ter Jane repeated from the other poem quoted just above, and suggests
that Pulter was thinking through the two deaths conjunctly and through
exactly the same poetry. The regicide poems (there are several) come at
the end of a series of longer meditations on the plight of Charles I, as he
80 Nigel ­Smith
lost his cause. ‘The complaint of Thames 1647 when the best of Kings was
imprisoned by the worst of Rebels at Holmbie’ is the poet overhearing the
river talk of her despair and lost pride at the king’s gradual failure. The
anger and frustration of Royalist writers is often expressed in an imagina-
tive revenge on the king’s enemies:
Below this curssed Earth \t/would hide my head
And run amongst the cavers \Caverns/ of the Dead
Where my pure Wave with Acharon should mix
With Leathe, Phlegethon, Cocîtus, Stix;
Then would I waste them to the Stigian shade
Examples unto Reybels to be made.37
The worse things became, the more Royalist manuscript verse acknowl-
edged the pain of the situation as a community of loyalists felt utterly
outrun.38 It is hard to underestimate the extent to which the verse partook
of and embodied a widespread cultural trauma. An English monarch had
not been put to death by his subjects since the Middle Ages, and back
then it had been a matter of dynastic change, not a proclaimed systemic
transformation. It is no surprise that the Royalist mourning elegy has been
seen as a long-term cause of the Romantic-period elegy.39
Even a subject as seemingly impersonal as political service has been
associated intimately with amorous lyric development in this period.
Cowley’s much admired collection The Mistress (1647) has been seen as a
covert response to the need for secrecy during the Civil War and the con-
sequences of secrecy’s violation. Cowley was a secretary for the Royalist
forces, and he would have witnessed at first hand the shocking revela-
tions and political capital generated by Parliament when, after the king’s
baggage train had been seized, sensitive documents were published as The
King’s Cabinet Opened (1645) to the king’s great disadvantage. This is a
strong insight, but to go on and claim that this context was particularly
suited for The Mistress because its poems were a dying or declining form is
very problematic.40 That is only a judgement that can be made with con-
siderable hindsight. Cowley and his followers and imitators did not think
sonnets and associated love poetry were dying, so much as the required
duty of the poet, and a place where imagination had great free range on
the topic of love and in poetic inventiveness. His biographer Thomas
Sprat liked his deft fusion of feminine (smooth) and masculine (rough)
tones, and saw throughout his works a common ‘unaffected modesty, and
natural freedom, and easie vigour, and natural passions, and innocent
mirth’.41 Moreover: ‘If his verses seem in some places not as soft and flow-
ing as some would have them, it was his choice not his fault. He knew
 Lyric and the English ­Revolution 81
that in diverting men’s minds, there should be the same variety observ’d as
in the Prospects of their Eyes.’42
Cowley’s 1650s poetry, his engagements with Pindar and his transla-
tions of Horace, his praise of solitude, his participation in poetry’s Georgic
revolution, are important and usually preferred today, but the lyrics in The
Mistress must also be included in the objects of Sprat’s praise. Tinged with
the Epicurianism Cowley had encountered in Paris, The Mistress at its best
is in Sprat’s terms both rough and smooth, as in ‘The Request’:
Come; or I’ll teach the world to scorn that Bow:
I’ll teach them thousand wholesome arts
Both to resist and cure thy darts,
More then thy skilful Ovid ere did know.
Musick of sighs thou shalt not hear,
Nor drink one wretched Lovers tasteful Tear:
Nay, unless soon thou woundest me,
My Verses shall not onely wound, but murther Thee.43
The tone is abrupt, suggesting sharp male dissatisfaction with perhaps a
hint of ironic presentation of the libertine speaker on Cowley’s part, but
on the other hand, the verse is perfectly iambic, with unbending metrical
regularity, thereby making a fine contrast with the disgruntled sentiments
of the speaker. We do not value this bravura discipline in numbers today,
and have not for a very long time, but Cowley’s contemporaries made
much of it.
The process of shoring up civilisation’s resources, seen by many
Royalists as necessary for any kind of recognisable future, had been begun
long before the king was in any danger of being tried and executed. The
brilliant young gentleman scholar Thomas Stanley, poet, translator, intel-
lectual historian, had installed himself in Gray’s Inn and instituted a semi-
secret literary patronage circle whereby he enabled like-minded poets to
live at this inn of court and keep writing the verse that was so vital, as
they saw it, to national virtue.44 Stanley’s poetic agenda is to use ancient
and Continental exemplars to take English verse to an even more refined
but productive place. He did not hesitate to write in French, or render
the distinctive poetics of other versions of courtliness in his own vernacu-
lar: Montalvan, Ronsard, Guarini, Marino, Lope de Vega, and St Amant.
Here he is in lyric mode, but not translating:
This silent speech is swifter ­far,
Then the ears lazy species are;
And the expression it afford
(As our desires) ’bove reach of words
82 Nigel ­Smith
Thus we (my Dear) of these may learn
A Passion others not discern;
Nor can it shame or blushes move,
Like Plants to live, like Angels love:
Since All excuse with equal Innocence
What above Reason is, or beneath Sence.45
This is certainly ‘smooth’, although flawed by the awkward definite article
in line 19, yet helped by the deft parentheses that add a higher degree of
self-aware reflection on the narrator’s part. One manuscript copy associ-
ated with the author contains annotations to lines 1, 9 and 10 that are
allusions to Catullus lyrics.46 The final poem in the 1651 edition of his
Poems is attributed to Pythagoras, followed by a long scholarly note in
which Stanley explains that Pythagoras’ poems must have been an assem-
blage of fragments gathered by his former students. It is clear that Stanley
greatly respected the even younger scholarly and poetic prodigy John Hall
of Durham, whom he also supported, and John Milton, but by the time
his circle was fully constituted both Hall and Milton were Parliamentarian
apologists and would soon become Republican journalists, although their
shared dislike of the Presbyterians gave them common cause with the
Royalists at this point in the course of events. Like Stanley, Milton had
been learning his art from Continental as well as ancient verse, and, as
is well known in literary history, achieving real success – especially with
the poems written during the 1630s, published in collected form in 1645.
To judge by poetic allusions to it, serious men of letters noted Milton’s
extraordinary talent and insight into the very business of writing poetry
and being a poet.47 Where Stanley, like Marvell, goes to contemporary
European verse, Milton impresses by having such a long, bold reach back
in time. Milton himself was caught at this point in the chasm that opened
as society divided and took sides. The best measure of this is his sonnet
on Henry Lawes, who had written the music for Milton’s Comus and who
may have played the part of the Attendant Spirit in the first performance
at Ludlow Castle.48 As we have seen, no less an integral part of court music
than his brother, Lawes stood for Royalism. Milton had been embattled
with his apparent co-religionists, the Presbyterians, for their attacks on
his divorce tracts and his tolerationist views, and here Milton crosses back
for the length of a sonnet to the other side of the cultural divide, in prefa-
tory verse printed in Lawes’ Choice Psalmes (1648), dedicated to the by-
then imprisoned Charles I and published to commemorate Henry’s fallen
brother William. Line 11 is glossed in this volume with a reference to
Lawes’ setting to music of the ‘Complaint of Ariadne’ by another ardent
 Lyric and the English ­Revolution 83
and influential Royalist poet-playwright, William Cartwright, fellow of
Christ Church, who was involved in the defence of Oxford and who died
of camp fever in 1643.49 Milton praises Lawes’ respect for words in his
musical settings, never matching short notes with long syllables – a qual-
ity that, as we have seen, was often praised in Lawes’ settings. It is perhaps
a piece of Miltonic egotism to compare himself silently with Dante, and
Lawes with Casella, the singer whom the poet meets, singing his own can-
zone, in Purgatorio ii.76–117. Compared with Stanley, Milton’s phrasing is
far more rhythmically assured. He rhymes superbly (pace Dryden’s notori-
ous later judgement), echoing the principles by which Lawes set words to
music:
Thou honour’st Verse, and Verse must lend her wing
   To honour thee, the Priest of Phœbus’ Quire
   That tun’st their happiest lines in Hymn, or Story.
Dante shall give Fame leave to set thee higher
   Then his Casella, whom he woo’d to sing
   Met in the milder shades of Purgatory.50

III
Poetry was also associated with the new regime, and here we see one of the
major functions of poetry as a tool in diplomacy, public deliberation, and,
indeed, as a device in the working of appointments within a world that
still depended on patronage. A presentation poem in a diplomatic con-
text was part of the way in which international relations took place, while
myriad other functions required the writing of poetry. Andrew Marvell
wrote some of his most well-known verse to celebrate occasions within
Puritan households, and Latin verse for important embassies abroad.51
Situating Horatian echoes and ethos within Petrarchan form, Milton
made the English Republican sonnet a reality, while Marvell’s meticulous
ear caught echoes from the poetically virtuous cavalier poets, including
Carew, Cartwright, Sandys, and Waller, in order to build a Protectoral lit-
erature, with a refined prosodic competence but one that was also in tune
with Puritan ideals.52 Before then he had managed to write what many
now feel is the greatest political poem in the language, ‘An Horatian Ode
upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ (June 1650), precisely so because
of its ability to capture the complexity of historical flux in a particular,
very important moment while also revealing the importance of highly
­significant events to different points of view, even as the poem is osten-
sibly in praise of the new free state’s chief military commander, Oliver
84 Nigel ­Smith
Cromwell. This is achieved by what has been called its ‘remarkable think-
ing form’, the shorter couplets in each group of four commenting on the
two longer lines preceding them, and the contraction of syntax facilitating
appropriate ambiguity, with puns operating between English and Latin:
   So restless Cromwell could not cease
   In the inglorious arts of peace,
    But thorough advent’rous war
    Urged his active star.
   And like the three-fork’d lightning, first
   Breaking the clouds where it was nurst,
    Did through his own side
    His fiery way divide.53
Does Cromwell urge his star, or vice versa? The poem is deeply allusive, to
ancient literature and its political resonances, and to contemporary jour-
nalism and political pamphlets. In this respect the vast energies claimed
in Lucan and Lucretius’ epics are relocated within a tightly controlling
Horatian analysis machine. Complexity and enormity are reduced to sharp
points where the reader is made aware of the truth in history. Did Oliver
Cromwell’s fellow MPs, officers, and Puritans enjoy his cutting through
them powered by his own ambition, as Marvell depicts? Marvell’s associ-
ate John Hall translated Longinus’ treatise on the sublime in 1650 (it is ful-
somely echoed in Marvell’s ‘Ode’), an act that has been seen as distinctly
anti-tyrannical (since Longinus says that poets flourish best in a free state).
In making the translation he is also the first translator of Sappho into
English, quoted by Longinus, and praised for her ability to intimate the
passions. Marvell’s use of Horace is well attested, as is his implicit response
to other English Horace imitators (like Sir Richard Fanshawe), but since
he appears to have seen Hall’s translation one wonders if Sappho’s abil-
ity to express the passions found its way too into Marvell’s head: a stanza
that was both highly expressive and facilitated huge artistic control. Says
Longinus (in Hall’s English): ‘where appeares this great skill? she knew
how to call out the greatest and bravest things, and then to mould them
into proportion and correspondencie’:
   How did his pleasing glances ­dart
   Sweet languors to my ravish’d heart!
   At the first sight thou so prevail’d
   That my voice fail’d.
   I’me speechlesse, feav’rish, fires assail
   My fainting flesh, my sight doth fail,
 Lyric and the English ­Revolution 85
   Whilest to my restlesse mind my ears
   Still hum new fears.
The translation goes on:
Wonder you not at this? The soul, the body, the tongue, the ears, the eyes, the
complexion, things so widely different are here by a strange artifice brought
together, and according to her severall contrary agitations; how she burns,
how she freezes, how she raves, & how she deliberates! for either she’s in fear
or at the point of death; so that it appears not a single passion, but a conflux
and general rendezvouz of them all.54
It was such a fusion of control and energy, a kind of ‘raving’, that attracted
Cowley to imitate Pindar (whom he thought close in some ways to
Alcaeus): ‘harsh’, ‘uncouth’, ‘irregular’ in form and yet still with ‘Sweetness
and Numerosity’.55
In their different ways, Marvell, Thomas May, George Wither, Lucy
Hutchinson, Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, John Hall, and
Henry Marten all wrote Republican lyrics. A good amount of verse par-
took of the articulation of the different viewpoints in pamphlets and jour-
nalism, by no means all of it Royalist, and many times in Latin as well as
in English. Is it possible that ‘An Horatian Ode’ was originally planned
for newsbook publication? The role of cited verse in religious and polit-
ical controversial prose remains significantly understudied. In this respect
Marvell was able to exceed the aesthetic dimensions of the by-now elderly
George Wither’s commonwealth verse, faithful to the Parliamentarian and
Puritan causes, but focused on a free verse that few are able to read with
pleasure today.56
I have already quoted Marvell’s insightful verse letter to Richard
Lovelace that prefaced Lovelace’s landmark volume Lucasta (1649). Does
Lovelace’s plangent lyricism, suited both to poems (where he intrudes
speech by way of metrical irregularity) and songs; his bitter sense, perhaps
even at a very early stage, that the king’s cause was fatally damaged; his
careful use of veiled political and religious expression; earn him the title
of greatest cavalier? If that were the case, we could turn to the famous
‘To Althea, from Prison: Song’, with its insistence that enforced confine-
ment is no denial of freedom: ‘Stone walls do not a prison make, / Nor
Iron bars a cage / … / If I have freedom in my love, / And in my soul am
free; / Angels alone that soar above, / Enjoy such liberty.’57 We might also
turn to ‘The Grasshopper’ – also in Lucasta, in the manner of Anacreon,
Jonsonian in subject matter – but even more acutely oblique is one of
the two poems called ‘The Snail’ (‘Wise emblem of our politic world’),
86 Nigel ­Smith
published in 1659, the year after Lovelace died in a garret dressed only in
rags – also Anacreontic, a riddle, emblematic, and where several allegor-
ies are pitched together in a meditation light and dark on the meeting of
observation, description, and interpretation:
Now hast thou chang’d thee saint; and made
Thy self a fane that’s cupola’d;
And in thy wreathed cloister thou
Walkest thine own grey friar too;
Strict, and lock’d up, th’art hood all o’er,
And ne’er eliminat’st thy door.
On salads thou dost feed severe,
And ’stead of beads thou dropp’st a tear;
And when to rest, each calls the bell,
Thou sleep’st within thy marble cell,
Where in dark contemplation plac’d,
The sweets of nature thou dost taste;
Who now with time thy days resolve,
And in a jelly thee dissolve,
Like a shot star, which doth repair
Upward, and rarify the air.
(51–66)

Lovelace’s admirers still compared him to Sidney and Jonson: Lovelace

reminded people of the former’s fusion of fierce chivalry and poetic bril-
liance. Inside Lovelace’s poetry Sidney’s writing remains the arbiter of
excellence: ‘Heav’nly Sydney’, ‘Caelestial Sydney’. Lovelace might not
have been quite so ostentatiously innovative as Sidney, and his verse
is much changed from that of the 1560s and 1570s, but he thought he
was deploying a line and an ethos that went straight back to the high
Elizabethan era.
The shaping of history belongs to the victors; if it had not been for the
fame that quickly gathered about Paradise Lost after it was first published
in 1667 it would have been a much harder task to recover Milton’s views
and full literary achievements from obscurity and contempt, and that of
other Republicans and Puritans. The verse that was increasingly influential
after 1660 (for instance as fuel for Samuel Butler’s very popular burlesque
Hudibras) was in many ways a fugitive poetry during the Commonwealth.
It was a crude poetry that began in drinking clubs and that became the
emblem of cavalier suffering and the will to survive. Devoid of its scur-
rilous subject matter, and when the city or the scene of Civil War and
exile has been replaced by the study and extended retirement, as in the
case of Charles Cotton, the result is a lyric poetry that, all in all, is every
 Lyric and the English ­Revolution 87
bit as ‘light’ as the thin garments worn by Herrick’s Julia. No less learned
than Stanley (Cotton was the son of a famous literary patron, also called
Charles; he translated Montaigne) although perhaps more influenced by
French libertine verse than any other English poet, Cotton manages to
free English poetry from the contexts and prosodic or lexical elements
that make for complexity:
   Hark, the cock crows, and yon, bright star
   Tells us the day himself ’s not far;
   And see where, breaking from the night,
   He gilds the Western hills with light.
   With him old Janus doth appear,
   Peeping into the future year
   With such a look, as seems to say,
   The prospect is not good that way.58
The speaker then finds good cause to welcome the year as day breaks to a
clear sky and despite the adversity that will probably arrive, as it did the
year before. The contrast with Henry Vaughan’s ‘Cock Crowing’ (1650), a
poem that embodies rich Hermetic symbolism, makes Cotton’s strategy
stand out, and justifies the aptness of Lamb’s judgement that these lines
contained ‘the purging sunlight of pure poetry’.59 The drive to ‘empty’ lyric
is paralleled by the ‘downsizing’ that was involved in Cotton’s very popu-
lar travesty of Virgil, although this work was apparently preceded in the
1650s by Reginald Forster’s innovative salty parody of ‘Sappho to Phaon’
(Ovid, Heroides xv), a mini-me to Ovid:60
This note, for which my muse I ­bang’d,
What? if thou canst not reade, be hang’d.
What? know’st thou not my style, although
I had not under-writ Saph-o?
Jugg, Jane, Doll’s company I shun,
At flatts, for thine at the long-run.
For—
Phaon, thou hast a face, o face
Moving mine eyes out of their place!
Thou, of discretion art beside
At yeeres, to make thy whore, thy bride.
Take to thee courage, and a quiver,
Thou art Apollo, the verse-driver.
Through the unhappy years of Civil War and gloomy defeat, the
Royalists could only escape from history in bucolic fantasy or con-
front it in plangent tenderness, bolstered by the state of refinement to
which they had brought the lyric as poem and as song. This mode could
88 Nigel ­Smith
convert readily into triumphalist abandon after 1660. The Republicans
and Commonwealthsmen made the lyric do innovative work in keeping
tyrants at bay while paying court to the awing energy that the times had
released. And even the defeated saw that lyric offered powerful windows
of awareness in a time of deep perplexity. That was their song.

Notes
1 Alastair Fowler, ‘Introduction’, in The New Oxford Book of Seventeenth-Century
Verse, ed. Alastair Fowler (Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. xxxvii–xliii.
2 J. E. Spingarn, ed., Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1908–9), Vol. i, p. 21.
3 Francis Atterbury, ‘The Preface’, in Edmund Waller, The Second Part of Mr.
Waller’s Poems (London, 1690), pp. 3, 7.
4 Spingarn, Critical Essays, Vol. i, pp. xii–xiii.
5 Henry Peacham, ‘The Compleat Gentleman’ (1622), in ibid., Vol. i, p. 126.
6 Early English Books Online, http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home/ (last accessed
25 May 2013).
7 Peacham, ‘The Compleat Gentleman’, Vol. i, p. xxxi. See Francesco Robortello,
In librum Aristotelis poeticam explicationes (Florence, 1548).
8 Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (London and
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Christopher R. Orchard, ‘Politics
and the Literary Imagination, 1642–1660’ (unpublished D.Phil. thesis,
University of Oxford, 1994).
9 Gerardus Joannes Vossius, Poeticarum institutionum libri tres (1647), ed.
and trans. Jan Bloemendal, 2 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), Vol. II,
p. 1057.
10 Ibid., Vol. ii, p. 1059.
11 Ian Spink, Henry Lawes: Cavalier Songwriter (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000), p. 6.
12 Andrew Pinnock and Bruce Wood, ‘A Mangled Chime: The Accidental Death
of the Opera Libretto in Civil War England’, Early Music 36.2 (2008), 265–84
(p. 267).
13 Henry Lawes, The Second Book of Ayres, and Dialogues (London, 1655), sig.
[a1v].
14 John Cobb, ‘To my ever honour’d Friend & Father, Mr. HENRY LAWES, on
his Book of Ayres and Dialogues’, lines 17–20, in Lawes, Ayres and dialogues,
for one, two, and three voices, 3 vols. (London, 1653–8), Vol. i (1653), sig. [A1r].
15 Robert Eisenstein, album cover note (p. 6), in The Folger Consort with
Rogers Covey-Crump, When Birds Do Sing: Music of 17th-Century England
(Bard Records, 1992).
16 I cite and quote from the standard edition of Carew’s works: The Poems of
Thomas Carew, with His Masque ‘Coelum Britannicum’, ed. Rhodes Dunlap
(Oxford University Press, 1949).
17 Thomas Carew, ‘A cruell Mistris’, lines 1–4, 9–10.
 Lyric and the English ­Revolution 89
18 Thomas Carew, ‘My mistris commanding me to returne her letters’, lines 15–20.
19 For temperance and intemperance in verse, see Joshua Scodel, Excess and the
Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton University Press, 2002).
20 Fowler, Seventeenth-Century Verse; and Robert Cummings, ed., Seventeenth-
Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2000).
21 Carew, ‘A Rapture’, lines 85–90.
22 Andrew Marvell, ‘To His Noble Friend Mr Richard Lovelace’, line 5, in Andrew
Marvell, Poems, ed. Nigel Smith, rev. edn (Harlow: Longman, 2007), p. 21.
23 University of Leeds, Brotherton Library, MS Lt q 32.
24 Hester Pulter, ‘Upon the Death of my dear and lovely Daughter J. P.’, lines
41–8. Connections with Marvell’s ‘A Nymph Complaining for the Death of
Her Fawn’ are noted in Marvell, Poems, pp. 67, 71.
25 Ben Jonson, ‘Why I Write Not of Love’, in Cummings, Seventeenth-Century
Poetry, p. 84.
26 Ben Jonson, ‘To the Immortal Memory, and Friendship of That Noble Pair,
Sir Lucius Cary, and Sir H. Morison’ (composed c. late 1629), lines 49–50, in
ibid., p. 98.
27 See Ovid, Fasti, 5.715–20; Cummings, Seventeenth-Century Poetry, p. 100.
28 Robert Herrick, ‘Upon Julia’s Clothes’; John Creaser, ‘“Jocund his Muse was”:
Celebration and Virtuosity in Herrick’, in ‘Lords of Wine and Oile’: Community
and Conviviality in the Poetry of Robert Herrick, ed. Ruth Connolly and Tom
Cain (Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 63.
29 Petronius calls a thin garment ‘woven air’: Satyricon, line 55; see Cummings,
Seventeenth-Century Poetry, p. 161.
30 Syrithe Pugh, ‘Supping with Ghosts: Imitation and Immortality in Herrick’,
in Connolly and Cain, ‘Lords of Wine and Oile’, p. 245.
31 Thomas Randolph, Poems: with the Muses looking-glasse: and Amyntas (Oxford,
1638); see also aspersions cast in the name of another bibulous cavalier poet,
Sir John Suckling: anon., The Sucklington faction or (Sucklings) roaring boyes
(n.p., 1641).
32 Spink, Henry Lawes, p. 27.
33 The classic case for this interpretation is made by Leah S. Marcus, The Politics
of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday
Pastimes (University of Chicago Press, 1986); later rebutted by Marcus herself
and reaffirmed by Achsah Guibbory in Connolly and Cain, ‘Lords of Wine
and Oile’, pp. 65–82, 300–16.
34 See Stacey Jocoy, ‘“Touch but thy Lire (my Harrie)”: Henry Lawes and the
Mirthful Muse of Hesperides’, in Connolly and Cain, ‘Lords of Wine and Oile’,
pp. 250–75 (p. 275).
35 For further evidence of Civil War damage to musical/literary culture, see
Pinnock and Wood, ‘A Mangled Chime’.
36 Hester Pulter, ‘On that Unparraleld Prince Charles the first. his Horrid
Murther’, lines 21–9, in Brotherton Library, MS Lt q 32, fo. 15v.
37 Hester Pulter, ‘The complaint of Thames 1647’, lines 107–12, in Brotherton
Library, MS Lt q 32, fo. 10r.
90 Nigel ­Smith
38 See also University College London, MS Ogden 42; Peter Beal, In Praise of
Scribes: Manuscripts and Their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford
University Press, 1998), p. 148; John McWilliams, ‘A Storm of Lamentations
Writ’: Lachrymae Musarum and Royalist Culture after the Civil War’, YES 33
(2003), 273–89.
39 J. W. Draper, The Funeral Elegy and the Rise of English Romanticism (New York
University Press, 1929).
40 Tim Morris, ‘Cowley’s Lemmon: Secrecy and Interpretation in The Mistress’,
English 60 (2011), 21–41. The classic study of Royalist secrecy is Lois Potter,
Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge
University Press, 1990).
41 Thomas Sprat, ‘An Account of the Life of Mr. Cowley’, in Abraham Cowley,
Works (London, 1668), sig. b[1]r.
42 Ibid., sig. B [1]v.
43 Cowley, ‘The Request’, lines 17–24, 49–56, in Abraham Cowley, Collected
Works, ed. Thomas O. Calhoun, Laurence Heyworth, and Allan Pritchard,
2 vols., Vol. ii: Poems (1656), Part i: The Mistress (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 1993), 21.
44 See Nicholas McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars:
Marvell and the Cause of Wit (Oxford University Press, 2008), especially
Chapters 1–3.
45 Thomas Stanley, ‘Love Innocence’, lines 18–26, in Poems and Translations, ed.
Galbraith Miller Crump (Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 382.
46 Cambridge University Library, MS 7514.
47 Nicholas Von Maltzahn, ‘Death by Drowning: Marvell’s “Lycidas”’, Milton
Studies 48 (2008), 38–52.
48 See above, p. 74.
49 See above, p. 75.
50 John Milton, ‘Sonnet xiii: To Mr. H. Lawes’, lines 9–14. Text taken from John
Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd edn (Harlow: Longman,
1997).
51 Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2010), pp. 113–15, 121–2, 239.
52 See the commentary on Milton’s sonnets on Fairfax, Cromwell, and Vane in
Complete Shorter Poems, pp. 324, 328–9; Marvell, Poems, pp. 54–8, 246–56,
266–312, 316–19. See also Edward Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian
Protectorate: Culture, Politics and Institutions (Oxford University Press, 2008).
53 Marvell, ‘An Horatian Ode’, lines 9–16.
54 Longinus, Peri hypsous; or, Dionysius Longinus of the height of eloquence, trans.
John Hall (London, 1652), pp. xxi–xxiii.
55 Abraham Cowley, ‘The Preface’, in Abraham Cowley, Poems (London, 1656),
sig. b[1]r–v.
56 David Norbrook, ‘Levelling Poetry: George Wither and the English
Revolution, 1642–1649’, ELR 21 (1991), 217–56.
 Lyric and the English ­Revolution 91
57 Richard Lovelace, ‘To Althea, from Prison’, lines 25–6, 29–32, in Richard
Lovelace, Poems, ed. C. H. Wilkinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), p. 79.
I have regularised the spelling. Further citations of Lovelace poems are to this
edition.
58 Charles Cotton, ‘The New Year’, in Charles Cotton, Poems, ed. John Beresford
(London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1923), p. 71.
59 See commentary in Henry Vaughan, The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), pp. 597–9.
60 Reginald Forster, Scarronides; or, Virgile travestie A mock-poem. Being the first
book of Virgils Æneis in English, burlesque (1664); a unique copy of Forster’s
poem survives in British Library, MS 61744. See James Harmer, ‘Reginald
Forster’s Burlesque Ovidian Epistle’, Translation and Literature 16 (2007),
193–204.
 ch apter f i ve

Modulation and expression in the lyric ode,

1660–1750
David Fairer

Begin the SONG! your Instruments advance!

Tune the Voice, and tune the Flute;
Touch the silent, sleeping Lute,
And make the Strings to their own Measures dance.
Bring gentlest Thoughts, that into Language glide,
Bring softest Words, that into Numbers slide …
In these subtle lines, which open For an Anniversary of Musick on St
Cecilia’s Day, John Oldham readies himself and us for the performance
that is beginning.1 The instrumental ensemble are finding their voice, as
are the singers; but it is clear that human language also is attuning itself,
relaxing into metrical arrangement. Music is simply happening: it is not
a divine spirit being invited to descend and inspire, but something being
heard here and now, emerging from silence. The emphasis is on the skill of
the human participants, who include the poet himself and his own instru-
ment of words.2 In these opening lines Oldham’s emphasis is on the power
of poetry to sing and dance, not to be either the master or the slave of its
sister art.
As the performance continues, the audience begins to participate too,
and the affective language conveys how much their responsiveness is inte-
gral to the whole experience. The stringed instruments explore the air, and
as they do so the language conveys a sense of being moved and touched
simultaneously, both spiritually rapt and physically aroused:
Hark! how the waken’d Strings ­resound,
And sweetly break the yielding Air!
The ravish’d Sence, how pleasingly they wound,
And call the list’ning Soul into the Ear!
Each Pulse beats Time, and every Heart
With Tongue and Fingers bears a part.
This goes beyond the old topos of music’s harmony drawing out the soul.3
Here Oldham not only engages the senses directly but insists on turning
92
 Modulation and expression in the lyric ­ode 93
the strings into a seductive lover who exploits the language of wounds,
ravishment, and beating heart. Such a palpable physical response sees the
Pulse and Heart of the listeners as an emotional accompaniment to the
Tongue and Fingers of the performing singers and players. Each bears a
part: the rhythms of the music and the rhythms of the audience’s pump-
ing blood quickening the heartbeat. No-one can be immune from the
emotional atmosphere, which is palpable. The air itself is not only the
medium of arousal but the first victim, broken and yielding.
We may think we are a long way here from the print lyric poem, deal-
ing rather with words for music, not with an independent text, and that as
readers we are limited to imagining our presence at a performance. From
this viewpoint it is easy to say that the ode assumes an aural dimension
whose absence is felt by anyone who merely reads the words; and that
a criticism which ignores the specific musical setting – the melody, har-
monisation, scoring, rhythm, dynamics – will fall short. But it is possible
to think of the poem as having not just a public character (the ode in
performance) but a more direct one, in which the poet has knowingly
made the transition to the page and the act of reading, is conscious of the
potential independence of his words, and incorporates elements of per-
formance into his own text. Oldham does so here: the ‘flute’ exists only
in his lines, since Blow’s scoring is for strings and keyboard and includes
no wind instruments. It would therefore be too simple to assume that a
verbal ‘reading’, such as is being done here, must be inadequate, its mean-
ing somehow limited by the lack of the musical dimension.4 We might
conversely say that Oldham’s deliberate staging of the event in his text; his
awareness of tuning, rhythm, and tone; the timed entry of the voices and
the strings; and the audience response; is in fact to privilege the reader of
the poem and leave the audience at a musical performance conscious of
being given a commentary on what they should be experiencing, on the
state of their pulse and their required ravishment.
In talking about the modal character of some formal lyric poems dur-
ing the Restoration and early eighteenth century, including several odes
that were written for public performance, I want to work along the tricky
borderline between verbal text and music/sound and look at ways in
which the poets negotiated it, some making use of the idea of lyric elo-
quence without thought of any musical setting. My contention is that
poets, acknowledging the ancient roots of lyric in the lyre,5 were aware
of a defining expressiveness in lyric verse, and of an interplay of technical
skill and audience response. During a period when the staging of music
(Chapel Royal anthems, court odes, subscription concerts, opera, etc.)
94 David ­Fairer
was to become increasingly popular, they might introduce performative
elements into their poems, not just looking for specific aural effects but
finding equivalents for some of the techniques of the ancient lyrists. In
default of a lost original music, this was a way of exploiting modal and
expressive features that could make the transition to modern lyric poetry
and become a defining aspect of it.6
The Greek citharode or lyrist could achieve varied, subtle, and dra-
matic effects on his instrument. His fingers could press or pluck individ-
ual strings, or touch a string gently while it vibrated and thus raise the
note slightly; or stop a string to sound a large interval; or by selective
dampening ‘allow different notes to dominate the tone cluster at differ-
ent moments’.7 The character, the ethos, of the music was conveyed by the
modes (harmoniai) – literally the ‘attunements’ – with their distinctive
series of intervals and rhythmic motifs, encompassing most famously the
manly and dignified Dorian, the more varied Phrygian, and the softer,
youthful Lydian.8 In the first half of the fifth century bce the favoured
enharmonic scale, which Pindar exploited, made use of quarter-tones and
allowed for the slightest of modulations.9 A notoriously innovative cithar-
ode of the next generation, Timotheus, specialised in modulating between
all three of the scales – enharmonic, diatonic, and chromatic – within the
same piece, sometimes with flamboyant vocal and physical effects.10
The principles and techniques of ancient Greek music were well known
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through the treatise De
musica, which was attributed to Plutarch and included in his Moralia
throughout this period,11 and British musical theorists of the seventeenth
century specifically linked music’s varied ‘moods’ to the ‘modes’ of the
Greeks.12 Charles Butler wrote in 1636: ‘Musik is the Art of modulating
Notes in voice or instrument, the which having a great pouer over the
affections of the minde, by its various Moodes produceth in the hearers
various effects. These Moodes ar five: Dorik, Lydian, Æeolik, Phrygian, and
Ionik.’13
Given the complexity and subtlety of ancient lyric performance, it is not
surprising that the poets of the 1660–1750 period recognised that ancient
Greek poetry posed a musical challenge, and that English verse could not
hope to reproduce the sounds of the original lyrics (in the words of one
translator) ‘without that additionary Beauty of the Attuning Harp, which
was customary in those days’.14 Metrically also, as Chambers’ Cyclopædia
(1728) pointed out, the Greeks with their 124 named metrical feet (com-
prising from two to six syllables) could achieve effects denied to English
poets. Because of ‘the shortness and uniformity of our Feet … our Poets
 Modulation and expression in the lyric ­ode 95
are fetter’d … it’s no wonder they can make no extraordinary Motions’.
Set against the ancients’ metrical scope and variety, ‘our Quantities make
such poor Music, that we are forced to call in the Gothic Aids of Rhyme
to distinguish our Verse from Prose’.15 Daniel Webb wrote in 1769: ‘We
cannot, it must be confessed, pretend to equal the sweetness of sound or
dignity of motion of the Greek measures.’16
English poets who worked in the tradition of Greek lyric tended to
show a raised awareness of ‘sound’ and ‘motion’, of both cadence and
rhythm, and some bravely tried to widen the dynamic range and cap-
ture the boldness that seemed to be denied them. A sense of musical
challenge is rarely absent, and references to the modern poet’s own ‘lyre’
are a frequent reminder of what they knew was missing. Sometimes the
effect could be an awkward one: ‘Here pause, my Muse! and wind up
higher / The Strings of thy Pindarick Lyre!’17 The link between lyre and
lyric remained so strong that by the mid eighteenth century the word ‘lyr-
ick’ could still be considered an adjective (‘pertaining to an harp’) rather
than a noun.18 With this in mind, poets tried to find an equivalent of that
responsiveness between voice and hand which the Greek lyrist showed,
and to catch what James Thomson characterised as ‘that deep-searching
Voice, and artful Hand, / To which respondent shakes the vary’d Soul’.19
Lyric had to that degree become something of a ‘lost’ art. A few ancient
Greek lyrics of course survived, notably Pindar’s forty-five epinikia, each
of which is metrically different; but these great victory odes were regarded
less as generic models (they were, after all, celebrations of victorious ath-
letes) than as tokens of what might be done if a poet could tune language
to the appropriate pitch.
Rather than regarding ‘lyric’ as a formal genre, poets of the post-1660
period tended to see it as an instrument of range and power that was flex-
ible and capable of a wide variety of music. They were interested in recov-
ering a classic genealogy that consisted of a mixture of lyric modes, each of
which might imprint a different character. The key to lyric lay in its adapt-
ability. The question, ‘How can my Muse with animating Fire / Adapt her
Numbers to the sounding Lyre?’, was one that Horace had famously con-
fronted.20 The skill of adapting one’s numbers, of finding the right notes
and a suitably expressive tone, was the key challenge to a modern lyric poet
of this period.
The precedents were set by the four canonical lyrists of ancient Greece:
Pindar’s finely tuned ‘trembling string’, Anacreon’s relaxed convivial-
ity, Sappho’s passionate strains, and Alcaeus’ martial exhortations.21 Each
spoke with a different accent. This range meant that the notion of a
96 David ­Fairer
generic ‘model’ was more fluid and adaptable, and indeed much of the
poetic skill lay in adapting moods and tones in appropriate ways. What
was being handed over to one’s successors in the lyric line was less a text
or genre than the lyre itself, with the unspoken encouragement: ‘here, see
what you can do’. Lyric was in that sense itself an instrument. In his ‘Ode
on Lyric Poetry’ (1745) Mark Akenside stages an imaginary scene in which
those four Greek poets successively take up the lyre and, inspired by the
Muse, ‘By turns her melody repeat’, each playing in their own style.22 First
we hear the pleasure-loving Anacreon who banishes cares with his jaunty
mood of ‘kind laughter and convivial joy’.23 This is followed by the voice
of patriot liberty, Alcaeus, who ‘With louder impulse and a threatening
hand / … smites the sounding chords’.24 After those warlike notes on the
lyre, Sappho’s ‘plaintive measures’ turn the instrument towards the sor-
rows of love. And finally it is the turn of the daring Pindar, whose verses
soar to the heights ‘as eagles drink the noontide flame’. In Akenside’s ode
we hear in succession the notes of pleasure, freedom, love, and fame. For
the young eighteenth-century poet, the ‘Queen of the Lyre’ could touch
all emotions: ‘Thy strings adapt their varied strain / To every pleasure,
every pain.’25
The adaptiveness of lyric, its ability to turn in a moment from one pas-
sion to the next, was both a challenge and an opportunity. It was com-
mon for poets to combine passages of a contrasting character, so that a
single ode might, on Akenside’s model, display a repertoire of effects, with
the poet showing his/her eloquence in handling the instrument. In a self-
­conscious parade of skill, the poets allude repeatedly to their ability to
produce different sounds and moods. Modern poets had precedent for this
in Horace, whose awareness of ‘the sound of a lighter plectrum’ (modos
leviore plectro), his searching for words ‘to be modulated to the Latin lyre’
(fidibus modulanda Latinis), is one feature of his notable tonal flexibility.26
At moments like these Horace is playing with expectation, consciously
shifting the modus: a term that in music and poetry can mean rhythm,
measure, metre, or mode, but which also, of course, marks a change of
mood, a modulation within the verse form.27 Handling the plectrum in
a lighter way sets a different tone – to use a term that bridges words and
music – and the lyric artist is aware of the skill this needs. In the eight-
eenth century Horace himself could be celebrated for being a responsive
voice of shifting moods and reactions. Particularly in his odes he seemed
to contain in himself all the different strands of the Greek lyric tradition:
This poet … made himself master of whatever was excellent of that kind
in the Grecian lyrics, every one of which he appears to have read. He has,
 Modulation and expression in the lyric ­ode 97
according to the respective subjects, the gravity and dignity of Alcæus …
the sublimity and heat of Pindar, the fire and vivacity of Sappho, and the
softness and sweetness of Anacreon.28
Horace might embody the full range of lyric, and he in turn offered poets
of the 1660–1750 period a congenial example of how the ancient Greek
lyric tradition could enliven the sophisticated and civilised voice of an
Augustan poet.29
All these precedents lie behind the poem that more than any other
established the full possibilities of the so-called ‘higher’ lyric for the next
century: Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast; or, The Power of Musick (1697). Written
for public performance on St Cecilia’s Day,30 this irregular Pindaric works
not only as a public ode but as a tour de force for the individual reader,
who is given an atmospheric description – what amounts to a private sta-
ging – of Alexander’s triumph. The lyrist for the occasion, Timotheus,
holds his audience spellbound from the moment he takes up his instru-
ment (he ‘[w]ith flying Fingers touch’d the Lyre: / The trembling Notes
ascend the Sky’),31 and the poem follows his performance through all its
virtuoso turns. Dryden’s Timotheus is an all-round performer who sings,
plays the lyre and the flute, and displays the full range of lyric modes.32
But the modern English lyrist is also very much on show. By focusing
on the banquet celebrating Alexander’s conquest of the Persian Empire,
Dryden is able to create a scene that combines the four elemental topics of
Greek lyric – fame, wine, love, and war – those subjects mastered in turn
by Pindar, Anacreon, Sappho, and Alcaeus.
At first Timotheus welcomes the emperor’s victory; but the mood begins
to shift with the varied stanzas, and it becomes clear that the ruler himself
is being ruled by the music. His godhead is loudly proclaimed:
The list’ning Crowd admire the lofty ­Sound,
A present Deity, they shout around:
A present Deity the vaulted Roofs rebound.
   With ravish’d Ears
   The Monarch hears,
   Assumes the God,
   Affects to nod,
   And seems to shake the Spheres
(34–41)

The lines are repeated by the full chorus, but as they reverberate sublimely,
the moment of glory slips over into hubris and becomes a challenge to
the gods. It may seem like predictable ‘Pindaric’ flattery, but Dryden,
with masterly suggestiveness, is giving us a distortion of the Greek poet’s
98 David ­Fairer
nuanced celebrations of mortal glory. Pindar’s athletic champion briefly
knows the radiance of the gods, ‘the glory of his desire’; but in capturing
such moments of brilliant illumination Pindar always seems conscious of a
darker track of fate shadowing his human actors. The power of his imagery,
drawing god, hero, and human momentarily into the same context, is the
awareness that the unbridgeable boundaries remain: ‘Seek not to become
Zeus! / You have everything, if a share / Of these beautiful things comes
to you. Mortal ends befit mortal men.’33 The true Pindaric epiphany is
gained in the face of failure, divine disfavour, and destiny. The successful
athlete, a kingly one included, can inherit renown (κλέος) but it is also his,
as a man, to lose.34 Dryden’s Alexander needs to remember this.
Underneath the modern lyric celebration, therefore, a potentially pol-
itical subtext begins to make itself felt. Dryden’s ode was performed, to
the music of Jeremiah Clarke, two months after the Treaty of Ryswick had
finally made William III’s throne secure, ending eight years of war with
France. Clarke’s setting was given two further performances within a few
weeks, and at the second of these it was paired with his Ode on the Peace of
Ryswick (‘Tell All the World’), a setting of an anonymous poem celebrating
the treaty.35 In the ostensible triumph of Alexander’s Feast the national mood
of celebration is evident, but the poet’s strings repeatedly quiver to hints of
excess, indulgence, and instability. As Timotheus displays the ‘many-toned
range’ of the lyric repertoire, his rapid shifts suggest how quickly the polit-
ical tune can alter and the dynamics of power go out of control.
Dryden manages this through modal shifts in the character of his ode.
After the opening Pindaric flourish, the next section gives us the pulse of
intoxication with an anacreontic on the joys of wine: ‘Bacchus Blessings are
a Treasure; / Drinking is the Soldiers Pleasure; / Rich the Treasure, / Sweet
the Pleasure; / Sweet is Pleasure after Pain’ (56–60). The reader can hear
the hands pounding the tables. Alexander is fired up and responds like a
drunken soldier wanting to fight all his old battles again. Fearing the con-
sequences Timotheus (now ‘The Master’) immediately adjusts his music:
The Master saw the Madness rise;
His glowing Cheeks, his ardent Eyes;
And while He Heav’n and Earth defy’d,
Chang’d his hand, and check’d his Pride.
(69–72)

The telling phrase, ‘Chang’d his hand’, catches the essential lyric skill of
modulation: the fingers instantaneously reset themselves to bring a differ-
ent mood, a fresh sound from the instrument. The monarch’s pride needs
 Modulation and expression in the lyric ­ode 99
checking. With a masterly touch Timotheus now laments the fall of the
Persian enemy Darius, and draws responsive tears from Alexander’s eyes.
Having achieved this effect of pathos, the lyrist takes his opportunity
to transpose the song towards love – after all, moving from pity to love
requires, he says, no more than the minimal adjustment of a single note (a
‘degree’), perhaps just a semitone, or even a quarter-tone:
The Mighty Master smil’d to see
That Love was in the next Degree:
’Twas but a Kindred-Sound to move;
For Pity melts the Mind to Love.
   Softly sweet, in Lydian Measures,
   Soon He sooth’d his Soul to Pleasures.
(93–8)

In response to this modal shift (‘Lovely Thais sits beside thee’) Alexander
now becomes the pained lover, his heart softened into a mood that recalls
the frustrations of Sappho: ‘The Prince, unable to conceal his Pain, / Gaz’d
on the Fair / Who caus’d his Care, / And sigh’d and look’d, sigh’d and
look’d, / Sigh’d and look’d, and sigh’d again’ (109–13). But such effeminate
vacillation will not do, and the monarch, whose head has now sunk on
his consort’s breast, has to be roused to action. The mode changes to the
warlike Phrygian, and with the words, ‘Revenge, Timotheus cries!’ (131),
memorably set by Handel in 1736,36 the poet finally introduces the stir-
ring, martial tones of Alcaeus, which quicken the pulse and bring the ode
to its high-decibel climax as Alexander, swept up by anger, hurries off to
put Persepolis to the flames.
As a performance, Alexander’s Feast exploits the full gamut of Greek
lyric poetry, evoking Pindar, Anacreon, Sappho, and Alcaeus in turn.
At the same time Dryden is aware of the particular nervous energy of
Pindaric writing, the sense of being on a knife’s edge, with lines risk-
ing a satiric inflection, brilliance teetering towards madness. Abraham
Cowley famously declared that ‘[if ] a man should undertake to trans-
late Pindar word for word, it would be thought that one Mad man
had translated another’.37 The emotional ebb and flow of the scene is
conveyed through a dramatic poetry that exploits the expressiveness of
lyric rhythms and tonal variations. Not only is the lyric instrument a
virtuoso thing in itself but it mimics the ways the human being can
also be an instrument played on by the passions: ‘Timotheus, to his
breathing Flute, / And sounding Lyre, / Cou’d swell the Soul to rage, or
kindle soft Desire’ (158–60).38
100 David ­Fairer
The mechanisms of human passion were of experimental interest at
this period. The Royal Society was chartered in 1662, and in an intri-
guing way the concerns of lyric poetry and scientific observation can be
seen momentarily to coincide. The mind’s responses to stimuli, and the
intimate processes of action and reaction within the brain, were seen as
underlying an individual’s emotions, and the process naturally expressed
itself through musical analogies. Describing the complex fibres of the ner-
vous system in his ground-breaking work on the anatomy of the brain in
1664, Thomas Willis (FRS 1663) saw them as attuned like the sounding
strings of the lyric instrument: ‘In Sensation the Fibres receive first of all
and immediately the impressions of sensible things, and express the same
(as musical strings do the strikings of a quill or fingers) by an intrinsecal
modification of the Particles.’39 In explaining the intricacies of sensation
Willis reaches for two of the defining concepts of the lyric art, expression
and modification. For him they together form a single responsive move-
ment. In 1699 Lord Shaftesbury developed the idea:
It is the same with the Passions in an animal Constitution, as with the
Cords or Strings of a musical Instrument … the same degree of strength
which winds up the Cords of one, and fits them to a Harmony and Consort,
may in another burst both the Cords and Instrument it self. Thus men who
have the liveliest and exquisitest sense, and who are in the highest degree
affected with Pleasure or Pain, have need of the strongest ground … It
would be agreeable enough to inquire thus into the different tunings (if one
may speak so) the different structures and proportions of different men,
with respect to their passions …40
It is possible to locate here the beginnings of a concept of Sensibility that
would develop into a cultural phenomenon during the eighteenth cen-
tury, but that in embryo had already found a natural home in the fine
‘tunings’ of lyric poetry.
Lyric poets tapped into this kind of exquisite responsiveness, and in
the notion of the tuned string they were able to claim the power of their
verses to express every shade of human emotion. The language of the lyre
became a kind of shorthand through which to set or adjust the tone of
a poem. Searching through the many odes of the 1660–1790 period, it
is fascinating to discover that strings are, on various occasions, sounding,
tuneful, trembling, nervous, untry’d, obedient, according, plaintive, mourn-
ful, tender, sweetly-sounding, softer, swelling, vocal, indignant, bolder, nobler,
martial, applausive, joyful, deep-ton’d, high-set, lighter, sympathetic, grate-
ful, conscious, living, bounding, speaking, tinkling, undulating, twanging,
dancing, and (not least) enchanting. We have here the full spectrum of
 Modulation and expression in the lyric ­ode 101
emotional possibilities, with the poet sometimes indicating a change of
dynamics (softer, lighter, swelling, bolder, nobler), or a specific tone (deep-
ton’d, high-set, tinkling, twanging), an individual character (indignant,
sympathetic, plaintive, mournful, tender, martial, joyful), or a pronounced
rhythm (bounding, undulating, dancing). Simply through this adjectival
vocabulary it is possible to gauge how lyric poets thought of themselves as
playing skilfully on an instrument and also playing on the responses of a
hearer.
The ability of the lyrist simultaneously to convey an emotion and to
arouse it takes us to the heart of the complex notion of expressiveness,
which at this period brought the arts of poetry and music together.41
For the influential Shaftesbury the expressive and responsive were inter-
dependent: ‘Nothing affects the Heart like that which is purely from it-
self.’ For him, the term ‘Men of Harmony’ encompassed both poet and
musician, and they were similar in their artistic powers ‘in vocal Measures
of Syllables, and Sounds, to express the Harmony and Numbers of an
inward kind; and represent the Beautys of a human Soul, by proper Foils,
and Contrarietys, which serve as Graces in this Limning, and render this
Musick of the Passions more powerful and enchanting’.42
The ‘Musick of the Passions’, in which the poet becomes a composer in
words, is nowhere better represented than by William Collins’ ode, ‘The
Passions’, set to music for public performance in the Sheldonian Theatre,
Oxford, in 1750.43 Collins locates his poem in the days when the human
passions were in their primal state, ‘When Music, Heav’nly Maid, was
young, / While yet in early Greece she sung’ (1–2), and he creates from
the start an unruly scene in which the passions try to outdo each other
and show off their virtuoso powers. They are adolescent and combative,
each snatching their favourite instrument in turn and performing on it,
as if finding a voice for the first time: ‘Each, for madness ruled the hour,
/ Would prove his own expressive power’ (15–16). But it is soon clear that
there is a parallel competition for expressiveness going on in the ode,
with poetry challenging music to show what it can do. ‘The Passions’
might seem an ideal example of a poem that needs performance to be
fully appreciated; and a recent recording (the first) of William Hayes’ set-
ting shows a composer who revels in every opportunity the poet has given
him.44 But throughout the piece it is words that lead the way, and music’s
role becomes one of brilliant translation. With his virtuosic language
Collins makes a pre-emptive strike on expressiveness, and in response to
the verbal challenge Hayes’ music cannot avoid onomatopoeia, with every
phrase, occasionally each word, being individually painted in sound. In
102 David ­Fairer
the opening passage, for example, Collins compresses into just eight words
the wide emotional range of what is to come: ‘Exulting, trembling, raging,
fainting’ (5) is followed three lines later by ‘Disturb’d, delighted, rais’d,
refin’d’ (8). In the score each of these words is given its own appropri-
ate phrase where the melody trembles and faints, becomes disturbed and
raised on cue. Hearing the sparkling music confirms that its inventiveness
is more truly ingenuity, and its expressiveness a mode of imitation. Indeed
it was this that Charles Avison criticised in his ground-breaking Essay on
Musical Expression (1752) when he wrote disparagingly of composers who
‘seem to think they have exhausted all the Depths of Expression, by a
dextrous Imitation of the Meaning of a few particular Words’. For Avison
this is ‘trifling Mimickry’, not true ‘Expression’, which lies primarily in the
shaping and harmonising of a melody, avoiding pyrotechnics of perform-
ance and looking for something ‘beyond the Power of Words to express’.45
Collins, however, revels in his verbal powers, confident that he can shift
the mood instantaneously without the need for instruments.46 He even
plays tricks on any potential composer, giving him directions, challenging
him to capture a complex rhythmic effect or a modulation of tone:
Thy Numbers, Jealousy, to nought were fix’d,
Sad Proof of thy distressful State,
Of diff’ring Themes the veering Song was mix’d,
And now it courted Love, now raving call’d on Hate.
(53–6)

The words offer a restless scenario that invites the composer to stray out
of his comfort zone of form and harmony. Throughout the poem there
are echoes, contrasts, modulations, mixtures, and turns. The poet is aware
of the variable tuning of the passions and gives his own indications of
dynamics, phrasing, etc., which are the equivalent of a composer’s key and
time signatures, and markings of staccato, crescendo, andante, or vivace
(‘the brisk awak’ning Viol’ (83)). Alongside these are the stage directions,
indications of movement, gesture, facial expression, and the character of
the voice. Anger rushes in and ‘In one rude Clash he struck the Lyre,
/ And swept with hurried Hand the Strings’ (23–4); Despair vocalises ‘a
solemn, strange, and mingled Air, / ’Twas sad by fits, by Starts ’twas wild’
(27–8); Hope enjoys playing with echoes: ‘A soft responsive Voice was
heard at ev’ry Close’ (37); Revenge and Pity are brought on stage together
in order to heighten the power of each (‘Dejected Pity at his Side, / Her
Soul-subduing Voice applied, / Yet still He kept his wild unalter’d Mien, /
While each strain’d Ball of Sight seem’d bursting from his Head’ (49–52)).
 Modulation and expression in the lyric ­ode 103
In this way the ode employs what Shaftesbury refers to as expressive ‘Foils,
and Contrarietys’. This is evident also in the move from Pale Melancholy
to her contrary Chearfulness. Collins envisages this dramatic change of
mood at the centre of his poem as being carried by a single instrument,
the horn, which alters its character from the Penseroso figure, who ‘pour’d
thro’ the mellow Horn her pensive Soul’ (61) to the Allegro of the bus-
kined huntress Chearfulness, who ‘blew an inspiring Air, that Dale and
Thicket rung’ (73).47
The combination of expressive features in Collins’ ode can be seen in
Melancholy’s scene:
With Eyes up-rais’d, as one inspir’d,
Pale Melancholy sate retir’d,
And from her wild sequester’d Seat,
In Notes by Distance made more sweet,
Pour’d thro’ the mellow Horn her pensive Soul:
And dashing soft from Rocks around,
Bubbling Runnels join’d the Sound;
Thro’ Glades and Glooms the mingled Measure stole,
Or o’er some haunted Stream with fond Delay,
    Round an holy Calm diffusing,
    Love of Peace, and lonely Musing,
In hollow Murmurs died away.
(57–68)

Collins’s word-music goes beyond onomatopoeia to explore the possi-

bilities for mingling different elements of his scene. Aware of the vision-
ary tradition of melancholy, he thinks spatially, imagining a far-off horn
combining sadness and sweetness; then closer at hand he hears the
lively stream dashing soft, with the rocks softening the water into playful
­‘bubbling Runnels’ and giving a new timbre to his subtle orchestration
of nature. With the words join’d, mingled, and diffusing Collins imagines
sinuous interwoven harmonies blending together elements of the furtive
(stole) and the ghost-like (haunted), then moving to calmness, loneli-
ness, and finally slipping into tenuous hollow Murmurs that die away to
nothing (as they do in Hayes’ extraordinarily responsive setting). What
comes across is Collins’ sensitive conducting of the performance, varying
the mood, tone, and tempi, and shaping the material into an emotional
architecture.
A poet’s own lyric performance could in that way use modulated tones
and eloquent phrasing to animate the writing – almost literally. A well
turned line of verse could be shaped into an air or melody that took on
104 David ­Fairer
the qualities almost of a human breath. One of the most advanced musical
theorists of his age, Roger North, advised performers to ‘Learn to fill, and
soften a sound … so as to be like a gust of wind, which begins with a soft
air, and fills by degrees to a strength as makes all bend, and then softens
away again into a temper, and so vanish.’48 This heightened sense of lyr-
ical phrasing was something else that brought music and poetry together.
The young Alexander Pope, in his ‘Ode for Musick’ (c. 1708), seems to be
striving for an expressive effect of just this kind:
Hark! the Numbers, soft and clear,
Gently steal upon the Ear;
Now louder, and yet louder rise,
And fill with spreading Sounds the Skies;
Exulting in Triumph now swell the bold Notes,
In broken Air, trembling, the wild Musick floats;
Till, by degrees, remote and small,
   The Strains decay,
   And melt away
In a dying, dying Fall.49
Pope is confident of his ability to express emotions through metrical vari-
ation, slipping from iambic into the anapaestic and then to a final echo-
ing trochee. He is like a conductor guiding the orchestra over a single
sweeping arc of sound: in only ten lines his numbers steal, rise, fill, spread,
exult, swell, break, tremble, float, decay, melt, and die.
Roger North’s comparison of the expressive phrasing of a musical per-
formance to a gust of wind swelling and subsiding conveys how the lyric
art, in the hands of skilled poets like Pope and Collins, could mimic the
dynamics of Nature. It was an idea taken to an extreme by Anne Finch in
her ambitious irregular ode, ‘Upon the Hurricane’.50 Her subject is the Great
Storm of November 1703, when southern England was ravaged by hurricane-
force winds not matched again till 1987. In Finch’s vision the storm is also
a reminder of God’s power to destroy, and a terrible warning to the British
nation – the culmination of sixty years of bad faith and disturbance in the
State. The poem is packed with cameos of accidental death, of sudden shifts
in fortune, elemental uncertainties, and suspensions of the laws of Nature:
All Rules of Conduct laid aside,
No more the baffl’d Pilot steers,
Or knows an Art, when it each moment veers,
To vary with the Winds, or stem th’unusual Tide.
Dispers’d and loose, the shatter’d Vessels stray …
(263–7)
 Modulation and expression in the lyric ­ode 105
In Finch’s disturbing poem the storm challenges human Art. Both the per-
plexed mariner and the poet are confronting an experience of Nature that
seems to make no coherent sense. In response, the lyric art becomes one of
veering and varying, unpredictably pulling, loosening its hold on the lines.
The fluid dynamics animate the scenes of destruction, not by way of mimicry
(sound echoing sense) but as the reaction of the poem itself, its consciousness
of how things can unpredictably turn, slip, fall. The shock of this elemental
instability is reflected in the unstable elements of the irregular Pindaric. Finch
offers an expressive lyric ‘now’ in which nothing is directed and certain. The
elements of the verse become almost instrumental, conveying the remarkable
power of mere weightless air, once set in motion, to convulse and destroy:
Now find, that even the lightest Things,
As the minuter parts of Air,
When Number to their Weight addition brings,
Can, like the small, but numerous Insects Stings,
Can, like th’assembl’d Winds, urge Ruin and Despair.
(182–6)

There is a sense in which the metre (‘Number’?) has become part of the
impetus of the storm with its bluster and unpredictable gusting and swirl-
ing. Solid words collapse by their own weight (‘Now down at once comes
the superfluous Load’ (73)). Throughout ‘Upon the Hurricane’ the verse
weighs things in its own terms, and has a capacity to turn things round,
turn heavy to light, as if the character of the verse itself is challenging
the foundations of law and regularity: ‘Thus! have thy Cedars, Libanus,
been struck / As the lythe Oziers twisted round’ (51–2). Huge solid trunks
become basket willow. Things are torn from their moorings, wrenched
away from their foundations (‘that awful Fabrick bow’d, / Sliding from
its loosen’d Bands’ (102–3)). The Almighty has spoken in the whirlwind,
and as the lines stretch, turn, and break, the poet is finding her own lyric
equivalent of ‘[t]hese furious Shocks of hurrying Air’ (46).
In a telling allusion to the language of lyric inspiration, the music is here
anarchic and jarring. The unruly winds have become a discordant ensemble:
And in the loud tumultuous Jar
Winds their own Fifes, and Clarions are.
Each Cavity, which Art or Nature leaves,
Their Inspiration hastily receives;
Whence, from their various Forms and Size,
As various Symphonies arise,
Their trumpet ev’ry hollow Tube is made …
(130–6)
106 David ­Fairer
Behind the tumult of the hurricane is the anarchic noise of civil discord.
We sense the bitter tone here as Finch sees how fissures in the state have
been widened and exploited by unruly elements. Every empty vessel has a
noise to make, the hollower the noisier, all disturbing the peace and stir-
ring up contention.51 The passage mimics a badly performed St Cecilia
ode: it is an extraordinary performance, like an ill-disciplined school
rehearsal for the Last Day. In Finch’s ode the language of modulation and
transposition has slipped towards anarchy.
‘Upon the Hurricane’ shows how the lyric winds could change, and
a reader of that ambitious and striking poem would immediately realise
that if it was set to music it would not make the sound an audience would
enjoy. The poetry reaches for a music never yet heard. It shows how far
the expressive range of lyric might stretch, and how a modern poet could
offer a performance that, simply through words on the page and its own
tumultuous silent music, taps into the expressive power of the ancient
lyric tradition.52 Here it merges with the inspired music of the Psalmist, in
which the passionate human voice is swept up into the voice of the Lord.53
That sacred tradition demands its own story; but its elements of praise
and prophecy are not discontinuous with the Greek lyric achievement.
Whether writing for musical setting or not, poets of the 1660–1750 period
drew on the imagined music of the ancient lyre, and they found in the
voices of the Classical tradition a tonal and emotional range that encour-
aged them to be expressive and adaptable. The poets exploited the ability
to move between modes, and achieve subtle, varied, and eloquent effects.
They exploited turns and modulations, appreciating the fluid handling of
tempo, dynamics, and rhythm to capture changing moods, sometimes for
quite dramatic effect.
Choosing the lyric instrument involved testing oneself in performance
against a range of poets who between them had shown the full scope
of the lyre; and the idea of competitive performance was still there,
whether in Akenside’s alpha lyrists, or Collins’ wrangling passions. The
old music may have been lost, but the poets found fresh opportunities
in the baroque ensemble of their own time, and in new writings on sci-
ence and aesthetics, which saw links between the strings of an instrument
and the mechanisms of the human mind. Even when poets offered texts
for musical setting they did so in a challenging spirit, seeing what their
words could do by way of expressive melody, modulation, and tone, and
even to some degree pre-empting the composer. The poets could discover
their own ‘musicality’ without waiting for musicians to bring their words
to life.
 Modulation and expression in the lyric ­ode 107
Notes
1 Text from the earliest printed edition, John Oldham, A Second Musical
Entertainment Perform’d on St. Cecilia’s day. November xxii. 1684 (London: John
Playford, 1685). The 22 November celebrations, featuring the performance of an
ode set for instruments, soloists, and chorus (i.e., members of the royal violin
band, the Private Musick, and the Chapel Royal, sometimes augmented with
male singers attached to the London theatres), were organised by the Musical
Society of London, and held regularly until 1700. See David Hopkins, ‘The
London Odes on St Cecilia’s Day for 1686, 1695, and 1696’, Review of English
Studies 45 (1994), 486–95; and Giovanni Battista Draghi, From Harmony, from
Heav’nly Harmony: A Song for St Cecilia’s Day, 1687, ed. Bryan White, Purcell
Society Companion Series 3 (London: Stainer and Bell, 2010), pp. ix–xvii.
2 Oldham’s commissioned ode was set to music by John Blow (1649–1708),
scored for four-part strings, continuo, soloists (countertenor, tenor, bass), and
chorus (with boy trebles). The first performance almost certainly included a
theorbo (long-necked lute), but no flute. I am grateful to Dr Bryan White
of the School of Music, University of Leeds, for his help and advice with this
chapter.
3 See Gretchen L. Finney, ‘Ecstasy and Music in Seventeenth-Century England’,
Journal of the History of Ideas 8 (1947), 153–86.
4 For a perceptive analysis of the engagement of verbal with musical elements
of the St Cecilia odes of Dryden and Pope, see Clifford Ames, ‘Variations on
a Theme: Baroque and Neoclassical Aesthetics in the St Cecilia Day Odes of
Dryden and Pope’, ELH 65.3 (1998), 617–35.
5 The general reader was familiar with the etymology: Chambers’ Cyclopædia
from its first edition in 1728 defined lyric as ‘something sung, or play’d on the
Lyre or Harp’, and added: ‘The Word is particularly applied to the antient
Odes and Stanza’s; which answer to our Airs or Tunes, and may be play’d on
Instruments’ (Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopædia; or, An Universal Dictionary of
Arts and Sciences, 2 vols. (London, 1728), Vol. ii, p. 477, s.v. ‘Lyric’).
6 For a discussion of the creative use of contrasting lyric modes in the lyric and satiric
poetry of the 1660–1740 period, see David Fairer, ‘“Love was in the next Degree”:
Lyric, Satire, and Inventive Modulation’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 34
(2011), 147–66. The essay develops further some of the points made here.
7 On the playing technique of the Greek lyre, see M. L. West, Ancient Greek
Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 64–70 (the quotation is on p. 68).
My account is indebted to West’s discussion.
8 On the scales and modes of ancient Greek music, see West, Ancient Greek
Music, pp. 160–89. The classic study of the modes is D. B. Monro, The Modes
of Ancient Greek Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894). See also W. R.
Johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1982). Dryden’s use of the Greek modes in ‘A
Song for St Cecilia’s Day, 1687’ is shown by Douglas Murray, ‘The Musical
Structure of Dryden’s “Song for St Cecilia’s Day”,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies
10.3 (Spring 1977), 326–34.
108 David ­Fairer
9 See West, Ancient Greek Music, p. 164. Dionysius of Helicarnassus wrote that
‘The dithyrambic poets used to change the modes also, introducing Dorian
and Phrygian and Lydian modes in the same song; and they varied the melod-
ies, making them now enharmonic, now chromatic, now diatonic; and in the
rhythms they showed the boldest independence’ (Dionysius of Helicarnassus,
On Literary Composition, ed. W. Rhys Roberts (London: Macmillan, 1910),
Chapter 19, p. 197).
10 On Timotheus and the ‘new music’ (late fifth century bce), see Andrew
Barker, Greek Musical Writings, 2 vols., Vol. i: The Musician and His Art
(Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 96–8; West, Ancient Greek Music,
pp. 361–4; and Timotheus of Miletus, The Fragments of Timotheus of Miletus,
ed. J. H. Hordern (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 7–8. A public per-
formance by Timotheus is reconstructed by John Herington, Poetry into
Drama: Early Tragedy and the Greek Poetic Tradition (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1985), pp. 151–60.
11 See Barker, Greek Musical Writings, Vol. i, pp. 205–49. In Plutarch the primal
link between the lyre and lyric poetry is emphasised: ‘Amphion … was the
first that invented playing on the Harp and Lyric Poesie’ (Plutarch’s Morals:
Translated from the Greek by Several Hands, 5 vols., 4th edn (London: Thomas
Braddyll, 1704), Vol. i, p. 99).
12 The etymology of a mental ‘mood’ is of course from the Germanic mod
(Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘Mood’, sb.1), not from modus. See below,
n. 27.
13 Charles Butler, The Principles of Musik (London: John Haviland, 1636), p. 2.
A later example is John Playford’s much reprinted work, An Introduction to
the Skill of Musick (London, 1654), pp. 17–20, where he describes the ‘five
Græcian Moods’ and their different musical characters.
14 ‘S. B.’, ‘Preface’ to Anacreon Done into English Out of the Original Greek
(Oxford: L. Lichfield, 1683), sig. A2v.
15 Chambers, Cyclopædia, Vol. ii, p. 935, s.v. ‘Quantity’.
16 Daniel Webb, Observations on the Correspondence between Poetry and Music
(London: J. Dodsley, 1769), p. 54.
17 John Hughes, The House of Nassau: A Pindarick Ode (London: D. Brown and
A. Bell, 1702), p. 7. A more modest gesture could be awkward too: ‘I quit my
Needle, string my Lyre, / And boldly dare the mighty Theme’ (Jane Brereton,
‘To the Author of the foregoing Verses’, in Poems on Several Occasions by Mrs
Jane Brereton (London: Edw. Cave, 1744), p. 24).
18 Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) defines the adjective ‘Lyrick’ as ‘Pertaining to an
harp, or to odes or poetry sung to an harp’, whereas the noun ‘Lyrick’ is sim-
ply ‘a poet who writes songs to the harp’. But ‘Lyrick’, meaning ‘lyric poem’,
occurs in John Gay’s The Shepherd’s Week (1714; see Oxford English Dictionary,
s.v. ‘Lyric’, n. 3), an instance Johnson overlooked.
19 James Thomson, Liberty, A Poem, Part 2, lines 289–90. James Thomson,
Liberty, the Castle of Indolence, and Other Poems, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 65.
 Modulation and expression in the lyric ­ode 109
20 Horace, Epistles, 2.2.84–6, trans. Philip Francis, in A Poetical Translation of the
Works of Horace, 4 vols., 2nd edn (London: A. Millar, 1747), Vol. iv, p. 195.
21 A full canon of nine lyric poets, including these four, was established by
the Alexandrian critics during the Hellenistic age. The additional five were
Alcman, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Simonides, and Bacchylides, none of whose
works were known in the eighteenth century beyond scattered fragments.
22 Mark Akenside, Poetical Works of Mark Akenside, ed. Robin Dix (Madison
and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated
University Presses, 1996), pp. 284–9. The poem was first published as the
final item in Akenside’s Odes on Several Subjects (London: R. Dodsley, 1745),
pp. 39–44.
23 Anacreon’s texts survive only in fragments, and until the nineteenth century
‘Anacreon’ tends to mean the Anacreontéa, a collection of short poems on love
and joviality dating from centuries later and written in his style. See Stuart
Gillespie, ‘The Anacreontea in English: A Checklist of Translations to 1900
with a Bibliography of Secondary Sources and Some Previously Unpublished
Translations’, Translation and Literature 11 (2002), 149–173; and Patricia A.
Rosenmeyer, The Poetics of Imitation: Anacreon and the Anacreontic Tradition
(Cambridge University Press, 1992).
24 Alcaeus’ eighteenth-century reputation rested on the celebrated freedom
hymn, ‘In a myrtle branch I will carry my sword’, which was erroneously
attributed to him at this period. See Thomas Gray, William Collins, and
Oliver Goldsmith, The Poems, ed.Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969),
pp. 442–3.
25 Akenside, ‘Ode on Lyric Poetry’, 75–6.
26 Horace, Odes, ii.1.40 ; Epistles, ii.2.143.
27 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘Mode’, sb. See n. 12 above.
28 Charles Batteux, A Course of the Belles Lettres; or, The Principles of Literature,
4 vols. (London: B. Law, etc., 1761), Vol. iii, p. 42.
29 Speaking of Horace’s lyric skill, Dryden remarks that ‘there is nothing so
­delicately turn’d in all the Roman Language’ (Preface to Sylvæ; or, The Second
Part of Poetical Miscellanies (London: Tonson, 1685), sig. A6v).
30 Alexander’s Feast was first performed on 22 November 1697 to the music (now
lost) of Jeremiah Clarke. For a full account of the poem with detailed notes,
see John Dryden, The Poems of John Dryden, Vol. 5, ed. Paul Hammond and
David Hopkins. (Harlow: Longman, 2005), pp. 3–18.
31 Dryden, Alexander’s Feast, 22–3. John Dryden, The Poems and Fables of John
Dryden, ed. James Kinsley (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 504.
All quotations from Dryden are from this edition.
32 Dryden’s Timotheus is a conflation of two figures of that name who had
become identified: Alexander the Great’s flute-player, and the fourth-century
citharode Timotheus, famed for his wild lyric performances (see n. 10 above).
See Dryden, Poems, ed. Hammond and Hopkins, pp. 6–7.
33 Pindar, Fifth Isthmian Ode, lines 8, 14–16, in The Odes of Pindar, trans.
Maurice Bowra (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 47. See David A.
110 David ­Fairer
Campbell, The Golden Lyre: The Themes of the Greek Lyric Poets (London:
Duckworth, 1983), pp. 242–8.
34 See Simon Goldhill, The Poet’s Voice: Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature
(Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 135–41.
35 As reported in the London Gazette for 13 December 1697. I am grateful to
Bryan White for this information.
36 Handel’s setting of Alexander’s Feast was first performed at Covent Garden, 19
February 1736.
37 Abraham Cowley, preface to Pindarique Odes (London, 1668).
38 On the long tradition of music’s power to raise and quell the passions, see
John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry 1500–
1700 (Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 162–244.
39 Thomas Willis, Cerebri anatome, cui accessit Nervorum descriptio et usus (1664);
English translation (‘by S. P. Esq.’) in Dr Willis’s Practice of Physick, Being All
the Medical Works of That Renowned and Famous Physician (London: T. Dring,
etc., 1681), p. 128 (‘The Anatomy of the Brain’; my italics).
40 Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning
Virtue (London: A. Bell, etc., 1699), pp. 97–8.
41 In his cognitive analysis of musical expression, Peter Kivy distinguishes
between ‘to express’ and ‘to be expressive of ’. He offers, he says, ‘an account
of how it is that music can be expressive of the emotions … not a theory of
how music can express them’. He therefore maintains that ‘sadness is a qual-
ity of the music, not a power of the music to do things to the listener’ (The
Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Expression (Princeton University Press,
1980), pp. 14, 23).
42 Shaftesbury adds: ‘Let Poets, or the Men of Harmony, deny, if they can, this
Force of Nature, or withstand this moral Magick’ (Anthony Ashley Cooper,
third earl of Shaftesbury, ‘An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour’, in
his Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3 vols. (London, 1711),
Vol. i, pp. 135–7).
43 Collins’ ‘The Passions’ was published in his Odes (1747) and first performed
as part of the annual Oxford Encaenia celebrations on 2 July 1750, to the
music of William Hayes (1708–77), the University’s Professor of Music. See
Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith, Poems, pp. 477–85. For a detailed discussion of
‘The Passions’ see Richard Wendorf, William Collins and Eighteenth-Century
English Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), pp. 135–54.
Wendorf sees Collins’ volume of Odes as organised on ‘a principle of diversity
and modulation’ (p. 105).
44 Performed by Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and La Cetra Barokorchester,
Basel, dir. Anthony Rooley (Glossa, 2010).
45 Charles Avison, An Essay on Musical Expression (London: C. Davis, 1752),
pp. 59, 90, 3. William Hayes responded with his Remarks on Mr Avison’s
Essay (1753), which drew a further reply from Avison. See Charles Avison
and William Hayes, Charles Avison’s Essay on Musical Expression, with Related
Writings by William Hayes and Charles Avison, ed. Pierre Dubois (Aldershot
and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004).
 Modulation and expression in the lyric ­ode 111
46 Collins did not write his ode for Hayes to set and was not present at the
Oxford performance, news of which came to him second-hand. In a letter
of thanks Collins told Hayes: ‘I have another more perfect copy of the Ode;
which, had I known your obliging design, I would have communicated to
you’; William Seward, Anecdotes of Distinguished Persons, 3 vols. (London:
Cadell and Davies, 1798), Vol. ii, pp. 384–5.
47 A contrast well caught by Hayes. On the early development of the horn
and its versatility, see Henry Raynor, The Orchestra: A History (New York:
Scribner’s, 1978), pp. 29–30.
48 North was the author of The Musicall Grammarian and Theory of Sounds
(1728), which has been edited, with introduction and notes, by Mary Chan
and Jamie C. Kassler (Cambridge University Press, 1990). The advice, from
his Autobiography, is quoted by Robert Donington, A Performer’s Guide to
Baroque Music (London and Boston, MA: Faber and Faber, 1973), p. 292.
49 ‘Ode for Musick’, lines 12–20, in Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope,
ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), p. 139. Pope’s ode seems not to have
been set to music until 1730, when Maurice Greene’s setting was performed at
the official opening of the new Senate House in Cambridge on 6 July.
50 First published in Anne Finch, Miscellany Poems (London, 1713), pp. 230–47.
It is included in Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, ed. David
Fairer and Christine Gerrard, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 26–33.
51 Cf. the imagery of Aeolist ‘inspiration’ in Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub
(1704), Section 8.
52 Thomas Gray’s ode ‘The Progress of Poesy’ (1757), charts the tradition of the
Greek ‘lyre divine’, culminating in himself. See Marcus Walsh’s chapter in this
volume (pp. 112–34). For a concise discussion of how eighteenth-century lyric
poets thought of themselves as continuing the ancient tradition, see Dustin
Griffin, Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge
University Press, 2002), pp. 63–7.
53 In Finch’s Miscellany Poems, the ode ‘Upon the Hurricane’ is immediately
­followed by a paraphrase of Psalm 148 (‘Winds and Storms fulfilling his
Word’). On Smart’s A Song to David, see Marcus Walsh’s chapter, pp. 124–6.
 ­c h apter si x

Eighteenth-century high lyric

William Collins and Christopher Smart
Marcus Walsh

Lyric has always been a fluid and evolving genre, and a variable set of
practices. Eighteenth-century conceptions, taxonomies, and hierarch-
ies of lyric are no doubt at least as various as those of any other period,
and as unfamiliar to a modern reader. David Fairer’s chapter has already
pointed out the compelling taxonomy of Greek lyric models set out in
Mark Akenside’s ‘Ode on Lyric Poetry’ (1745): the convivial Anacreontic,
the patriotic Alcaic, the erotic Sapphic, the sublime Pindaric (p. 96). Such
lyric exercises thronged the eighteenth-century magazines. Other forms
used by eighteenth-century British lyric poets included, especially, the
Horatian, and (most voluminously and vitally) the Christian hymn, which
itself derived from centuries of English Psalm versification. Some at least
of these distinct lyric practices, the Pindaric in particular, were underwrit-
ten by their own sophisticated theoretics. There was not, however, and
there could not have been, a theory of the lyric as a unified genre. Some
eighteenth-century lyric sub-genres, the hymn most notably, would flour-
ish and continue. Many, including the eighteenth century’s flagship lyric
form, the Pindaric ode, did not outlive their moment. Some of the most
significant later lyric forms were barely conceived by the eighteenth cen-
tury. The extended Romantic nature lyric, dependent on a subjective epis-
temology, did not exist at all. In this chapter I shall focus on a generic
tendency associated with the circumstances and pressures of a particular
literary historical moment: the attempt in the middle decades of the cen-
tury to find, in ancient Classical and Hebrew poetry, and in some more
recent English forms and modes, a credible way of writing an imaginative
high lyric poetry that might assume a prominent position in the national
literary culture.
It is a familiar truism that at the death of Alexander Pope in 1744 a
younger generation of poets sought not merely to rival his achievement,
but to turn poetry into new formal and generic channels, away from the
moral and satiric modes considered characteristic of Pope, and towards a
112
 Eighteenth-century high lyric: Collins and ­Smart 113
poetry of imagination and natural description. One of the best known and
most representative statements of that ambition, and the anxieties associ-
ated with it, was made by Joseph Warton in the prefatory Advertisement
to his Odes on Various Subjects (December 1746). Insisting that ‘Invention
and Imagination’ are ‘the chief faculties of a Poet’, Warton complained:
‘The Public has been so much accustom’d of late to didactic Poetry alone,
and Essays on moral Subjects, that any work where the imagination is
much indulged, will perhaps not be relished or regarded. The author
therefore of these pieces is in some pain least certain austere critics should
think them too fanciful and descriptive.’1 In seeking adequate form for
a modern poetry of imagination, Warton turned to the high lyric, more
specifically the ode. He was one of a number of poets of his moment to do
so. Mark Akenside’s Odes on Several Subjects had already appeared in 1745.
The Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects of William Collins
would be published a mere fortnight after Warton’s Odes, and were clearly
driven at least in part by the same ambitions. Thomas Gray’s Pindaric
‘sister odes’, ‘The Progress of Poesy’ and ‘The Bard’, followed in 1757, in
Odes by Mr. Gray. Christopher Smart, a more needy and a more prolific
poet than any of these, explored the possibilities of the ode throughout
his career, from the 1740s onwards. This concerted attempt to reconstitute
the high lyric as a leading genre for British poetry involved a variety of
developments and experiments, not always successful or coherent, in lyric
form, figure, method, and language. I shall explore some of the formal,
figurative, and epistemological tendencies and possibilities of the printed
ode in the mid eighteenth century, but I shall focus on two odes that
exploit and develop those tendencies and possibilities in remarkable and
distinct ways: Collins’ ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’ (published in his
Odes in 1746), and Smart’s A Song to David (1765).
Powerful authority and vital formal models were available, for writers of
the high lyric in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the writings
of the Greeks especially. Plato permitted in his ideal state only hymns and
encomia, poems in praise of gods and famous men; Aristotle specified these
two forms of poetry as the first serious poetical kinds.2 The epideictic ode
praises, celebrates, and commemorates gods and heroes. It belonged with
the epic at the highest point of the hierarchy of genres. The chief practi-
tioner of the epideictic ode in Greek antiquity was Pindar, whose Olympian
and Pythian odes, using for the most part an elaborate, repeated tripartite
structure of strophe, antistrophe, and epode, are characterised by a rhet-
oric of amplification and sublimity, by metrical boldness and suddenness
of transition. The vogue for the Pindaric ode was established in England
114 Marcus ­Walsh
by Abraham Cowley’s Pindarique Odes (1656). Cowley ­characterised the
form as obscure, daring, metaphorical: ‘The digressions are many, and sud-
den, and sometimes long … The figures are unusual and bold, even to
Temeritie … the Numbers are various and irregular.’3 Though Cowley him-
self was aware of the regularity of Pindar’s measures, his own odes are vari-
able and unpredictable in line length, rhyme pattern, and stanza form. His
powerful practical example, and the nearly simultaneous rediscovery of
Longinus and the Longinian sublime, gave rise to a vogue that produced at
least in John Dryden’s hands some of the late seventeenth century’s greatest
lyric verse: the ode to the memory of Anne Killigrew (1686), ‘A Song for St
Cecilia’s Day’ (1687), and Alexander’s Feast (1697). In the eighteenth cen-
tury much ‘lax and lawless versification’ (to use Samuel Johnson’s phrase)
was licensed by the Cowleian example of ‘Pindars unnavigable song’.
However, a broader awareness of the regularity of Pindar’s regular form had
been early established by William Congreve’s ‘Discourse on the Pindaric
Ode’, prefaced to A Pindaric Ode, Humbly Offered to the Queen (1706).
Congreve’s poem should be read, he claimed, as ‘an attempt towards restor-
ing the regularity of the ancient lyric poetry … there is nothing more regu-
lar than the odes of Pindar, both as to the exact observation of the members
and numbers of his stanzas and verses, and the perpetual coherence of his
thoughts’.4 Later writers of high lyric followed Congreve’s pursuit of regu-
larity either by adopting the strict Pindaric triad of strophe, counter-stro-
phe and epode (as in Collins’ ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’ and Gray’s
‘The Bard’ and ‘Progress of Poesy’), or by turning to monostrophic forms.
Unlike the triadic ode, the monostrophic ode has no inherent formal prin-
ciple, and poets who employed the form addressed that problem by such
means as mid-point symmetry (in Gray’s ‘Ode on the Spring’ (1748) and
Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (1747)), or by the use of balanced
blocks of stanzas (in Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751)
and, more elaborately, in Smart’s Song to David).5
The eighteenth-century high ode, amongst other characterising linguis-
tic and rhetorical features, was regularly distinguished by prosopopoeia
(more simply but less significantly, ‘personification’), a figure of speech
that would seem undesirable to Romantic writers, and which has been per-
ceived by modern readers as both artificial and alien.6 It was not, however,
a mere historical poetic aberration. It emerged as poets began to turn to
the models provided by L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, poems in which Milton
was understood to have ‘personified almost every object in his view, raised
a great number of pleasing images, and introduced qualities and things
inanimate as living and rational beings’.7 William Collins and his near
 Eighteenth-century high lyric: Collins and ­Smart 115
contemporaries recognised prosopopoeia both in theory and in practice
as one of the most powerful of resources, in terms of emotional power,
representational effectiveness, and mythopoeic creativity. Prosopopoeia
was especially associated with strong feeling. ‘Personification is natural
to the human mind’, James Beattie would write; ‘some violent passions
are peculiarly inclined to change things into persons’.8 It was seen as hav-
ing a particularly powerful mimetic effect, appealing to the sight – that
sense understood by Addison, and almost all his theorising successors, to
be imaginatively most effective. It was thought of as equivalent to such
visually representative forms as medals, history paintings, and sculpture.
Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782) insisted that ‘an allegory’ (he uses
the word here, as many did, as a synonym for personification) ‘is in every
respect similar to an hieroglyphical painting, excepting only, that words are
used instead of colours. Their effects are precisely the same … The repre-
sentative subject is described; and it is by resemblance that we are enabled
to apply the description to the subject represented.’9 The visually mimetic
effect of personification was thought to give it an inherent emotional power.
As Beattie insisted, in the course of his discussion of the figure, the keen-
ness of our emotions ‘is in proportion to the vivacity of the perceptions
that excite them. Distress that we see is more affecting than what we only
hear of … Of descriptions addressed to the fancy, those that are most vivid
and picturesque will generally be found to have the most powerful influ-
ence over our affections.’10 Personification, conceived as prosopopoeia, was
a figure that, for those who admired its use by such forerunners as Spenser
and Milton, as well as those who employed it poetically, allowed scope not
only for convincing and affective mimesis, but also for the imagination, the
fiction-making power. John Hughes, pioneering editor of Spenser, speaks
of this in terms that, in invoking a divine or quasi-divine power for the
poet as maker, echo Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry:

in Works of this kind there is a large Field open to Invention, which among
the Ancients was universally look’d upon to be the principal Part of Poetry.
The Power of raising Images or Resemblances of things, giving them Life
and Action, and presenting them as it were before the Eyes, was thought to
have something in it like Creation.11

The title of William Collins’ Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric

Subjects makes clear his claim to both the prosopopoeic and the mimetic
aspects of personification, daring the ‘austere critics’ to think his new
lyrics, as Joseph Warton had done in the Advertisement to his own
Odes, ‘too fanciful and too descriptive’. Certainly the great majority
116 Marcus ­Walsh
of Collins’ odes are insistently descriptive, exploiting the specifically
pictorial and mimetic. Some of the odes in the collection, notably ‘The
Manners’ and ‘The Passions’, narrate pageants or dramas enacted by
personified human emotions as they function in the musical, dramatic,
and literary arts. The characters of ‘The Manners’ include Humour, rec-
ognisable from ‘The comic sock that binds thy feet!’, and ‘young-eyed
healthful Wit’, wearing ‘jewels in his crispèd hair’.12 Some of the odes
apostrophise the passions, as features of imaginative literature. So, Fear
is addressed as
Thou, to whom the world unknown
With all its shadowy shapes is shown;
Who see’st appalled the unreal scene,
While Fancy lifts the veil between.
(‘Ode to Fear’, 1–4)

These visual personifications are generally presented as vignettes, not in

full detail, but with brief characterising physical attributes such as the ‘red
arm, exposed and bare’ of Vengeance, or with single identifying proper-
ties, such as the ‘Attic robe’ of the ‘decent maid’ Simplicity. Collins’ use
of such brief visual clues was a normal technique in his time, and the
picture-forming faculty of eighteenth-century readers was evidently equal
to such elided depictions.13
Though Collins used so extensively a rhetorical mode that was under-
stood to exploit the affective power of the visual, these are poems about
the depiction of feeling, not poems expressive of feeling. They are poems
primarily about poetics. Fear and pity are discussed not as emotions in
themselves, but as the emotions aroused and purged by catharsis according
to the tragic theory of Aristotle, whose Poetics Collins evidently knew suffi-
ciently well.14 The ‘Ode to Pity’ celebrates Euripides and Otway; the ‘Ode
to Fear’ Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. The ‘Ode to Simplicity’
identifies Simplicity as a specifically literary property:
Though taste, though genius bless
To some divine excess,
Faints the cold work till thou inspire the whole.
(43–5)

In these odes Collins is less a poet of sensibility than a student of the

mechanisms and uses of poetic affect. If personification represents in these
poems the powerful emotional states and transitions that writing can
evoke, the use of the figure is not itself the product of psychic distress. The
‘Ode to Fear’, like other odes, is written in the first person:
 Eighteenth-century high lyric: Collins and ­Smart 117
I know thy hurried step, thy haggard ­eye!
Like thee I start, like thee disordered fly.
(7–8)

That first person, however, is that of the thinking poet, not an expressive
and historical individual William Collins.15
Amongst Collins’ odes on poetry and poetics, the ‘Ode on the Poetical
Character’, while certainly embodying some of the same positions and
employing some of the same methodologies, stands out in its formal ori-
ginality, intellectual ambition, figurative complexity, and mythopoeic
aspirations. This short Pindaric ode presents an extraordinary allegory that
appeals to Spenser and Milton as poetic models, associates the inaugur-
ation of imaginative art with God’s primal act of creation, and concludes
with a declaration that poetic vision and prophecy are gifts no longer
available to the modern poet. It is both a major and original creative
achievement and a major work of theory, at the same time articulating
and exemplifying Collins’ visionary poetics.
The opening strophe of the ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’ works
through a simile, which is figurative on both sides of the comparison. On
one side is the girdle of chastity described and competed for in The Faerie
Queene:
That girdle gave the virtue of chaste loue,
And wiuehood true, to all that did it beare;
But whosoeuer contrarie doth proue,
Might not the same about her middle weare,
But it would loose, or else a sunder teare.

Spenser’s summary of the competition for the emblematic girdle identifies

the true Florimel as its one fit wearer, though at the competition itself the
chaste Amoret is the only lady it fits.16 For this idea of the magical girdle
of chastity Collins invents an equivalent, providing the other side of his
simile: that the gift of poetic creativity, ‘the cest of amplest power’, was
given to a personified Fancy, who
To few the godlike gift assigns
To gird their blest prophetic loins,
And gaze her visions wild …
(‘Ode on the Poetical Character’, 20–2)

In the second part of the ode, structured unconventionally as a mesode,

Collins invents a myth of the origin of Fancy’s magical band.17 The myth
figuratively combines biblical creation account, Spenserian ‘fairy legend’,
118 Marcus ­Walsh
and the Greek pantheon. Fancy, the ‘loved Enthusiast’, is seated alone with
God at the creation. ‘The sainted growing woof ’ takes shape as God calls
into being earth, sky, and sun (‘thou rich-haired youth of morn’, a per-
sonification of the sun that resonates with an imagery associated with the
poet-god Phoebus Apollo).18 The weaving of Fancy’s cestus is attended by
personifications of qualities associated with ideal poetry, ‘ecstatic Wonder’,
‘Truth, in sunny vest arrayed’, and the intellectual and imaginative ‘pow-
ers’, whose intertwinings mimic the band’s texture:
All the shadowy tribes of Mind
In braided dance their murmurs joined.
(47–8)

‘[T]he shadowy tribes of Mind’ is itself a brilliant poetic phrase for the
intellectual personifications that enact this ode’s allegoric drama. The
mesode concludes with a question that brings us back to the privileged
and exclusive nature of the cest of poetic fancy mooted in the opening
strophe:
Where is the bard, whose soul can now
Its high presuming hopes avow?
Where he who thinks, with rapture blind,
This hallowed work for him designed?
(51–4)

This extraordinary prosopopoeic pageant has generally been perceived as

the most troubling section of the poem.19 Anna Laetitia Barbauld, in the
course of a brilliant Prefatory Essay to Collins’ poems, complains that:
it is difficult to reduce to any thing like a meaning this strange and by
no means reverential fiction concerning the Divine Being. Probably the
obscure idea that floated in the mind of the Author was this, that true
Poetry being a representation of Nature, must have its archetype in those
ideas of the supreme mind, which originally gave birth to Nature.20
Barbauld here recognises both the allegorical and the mimetic in the mes-
ode. Her objection is to the impertinence of the construction of a compli-
cated and obscure metaphoric fiction around God’s divine creative act.
The poem’s concluding strophe returns to more local and more imme-
diate matters. The poet locates himself in a scene redolent of Milton’s
Eden, gazing on ‘that oak’ beside which Milton might hear his own celes-
tial music.21 Disavowing an Augustan tradition initiated in ‘[Edmund]
Waller’s myrtle shades’, the poet seeks to follow the footsteps of the poet
of Paradise Lost; but just as only one lady could wear Fancy’s cest, just
as mankind irrevocably fell in the Garden of Eden, just as (a Spenserian
 Eighteenth-century high lyric: Collins and ­Smart 119
image that doubly reminds us of this ode’s other hero) Guyon destroyed
forever the Bower of Bliss,22 so Milton alone could achieve the heights of
divine and imaginative verse:
In vain – such bliss to one alone
Of all the sons of soul was known,
And Heaven and Fancy, kindred powers,
Have now o’erturned the inspiring bowers,
Or curtained close such scene from every future view.
(72–6)

So an ode that has announced the writer’s commitment to the model of

imaginative and prophetic verse associated with Milton and Spenser con-
cludes with the most resonant of statements of poetic loneliness, belated-
ness, and disinheritance.23
Like many another poem that articulates voicelessness and celebrates
failure, however, Collins’ ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’ might paradox-
ically be considered to achieve its own kind of triumph. If the collection
as a whole is concerned with ‘the nature of the True Poet, as Collins con-
ceived it’,24 the ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’ represents its mythopoeic
thematic summation. It is a poem that rises to quite new levels of fig-
urative, formal, and intellectual ambition (on the part of the poet) and
demand (on the part of the reader).
By the mid-century it was certainly not new to use the extended
Pindaric strophic form. Many poets however preferred shorter strophes,
whose metrical shape could be more easily grasped. Thomas Gray wrote to
Thomas Wharton, in 1755, that:
I am not quite of your opinion with regard to Strophe & Antistrophe. set-
ting aside the difficulties, methinks it has little or no effect upon the ear,
wch scarce perceives the regular return of Metres at so great a distance from
one another. to make it succeed, I am persuaded the Stanza’s must not con-
sist of above 9 lines each at the most. Pindar has several such Odes.25
The ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’ is made up of strophe and echo-
ing antistrophe, each of twenty-two lines, and a mesode of thirty-two
lines. Many of the other odes in Collins’ collection use shorter stanzaic
units, such as the romance-six stanzas of the ‘Ode to Pity’. Where longer
Pindaric strophes are used, as in the ‘Ode to Fear’, metrical elements are
synchronised with short, clear, syntactical units; typically the sense is
completed within two or four, at most within six, lines. In the ‘Ode on
the Poetical Character’, in stark and dramatic contrast, syntactical closure
is deliberately, even wilfully, refused and deferred over virtually the extent
120 Marcus ­Walsh
of the stanza. The opening strophe begins by stating the first element of its
highly elaborated simile:
As once, if not with light regard
I read aright that gifted bard,
…
One, only one, unrivalled fair
Might hope the magic girdle wear …
(1–6)

We expect the sense to be completed by the naming of the second element

of the simile, but that does not arrive until line 17, and even that longed-
for resolution is delayed, to line 20, by two intervening relative phrases
and one relative clause:
Young Fancy thus, to me divinest name,
To whom, prepared and bathed in heaven,
The cest of amplest power is given,
To few the godlike gift assigns …
(17–20)

This is all a stretch for the construing mind, for (as Gray insisted) the
ear, and for the eye. A reader of the ode as first printed in 1746, in its
generously sized octavo format, had to read to halfway down the ode’s
second page in order completely to parse the syntax in which this opening
metaphor is conveyed. And indeed, what is offered in the opening line as
a simile will persist as one of the poem’s several involved conceits: cest,
music, dance, weaving, Garden of Eden, fall, prophecy, all of them devel-
oped through imaginative prosopopoeia.
Such metrical and syntactical complexity, such figurative and intellec-
tual energy and stamina, set the ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’ apart
from the rest of its volume. Collins moves away in this poem from the
clear, discrete, visual personifications typical of his other odes, and the
relatively controlled and self-contained syntax in which they are pre-
sented. If he could imply that his other odes were ‘descriptive’,26 the ‘Ode
on the Poetical Character’ is ‘allegorical’. It deals not, even briefly, with
the visual, but with vision, specifically with ‘the Visions wild’ available
only to the privileged followers of Fancy.27 Its personifications function
less as empirical representations of human experience than as symbolic
articulations of ideas.28 More than any poem in his collection, arguably
more than any poem of his time, the ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’ bears
out the argument that Edmund Burke would make a decade later: that,
 Eighteenth-century high lyric: Collins and ­Smart 121
so far from creating, or encouraging the formation of, visual equivalents
for the world, ‘so little does poetry depend for its effect on the power of
raising sensible images, that I am convinced it would lose a very consider-
able part of its energy, if this were the necessary result of all description’.
Descriptive poetry, for Burke, works not by imitation, but ‘by substitu-
tion’. Burke argues for a verbal sublimity that presents ‘no distinct image
to the mind’, where the affections are powerfully moved by ideas that are
‘not presentable but by language’.29 The ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’
exemplifies, I would suggest, this Burkean sublime before Burke himself
stated the precept.
In its failure, or rather its refusal, to offer brevity, clarity, and simplicity,
the ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’ was at odds with a general, if not uni-
versal, contemporary critical preference for a poetry of distinct and appre-
hensible imagery. Even Collins’ colleague Joseph Warton insisted on the
vital importance of the visual in poetic epistemology: ‘The use, the force
and the excellence of language, certainly consists in raising clear, complete,
and circumstantial images, and in turning readers into spectators.’30 Lord
Kames deprecated the mixing of metaphors for this very reason, that they
deprive the reader of clear images: ‘It is difficult to imagine the subject to
be first one thing and then another … the mind is distracted by the rapid
transition; and when the imagination is put on such hard duty, its images
are too faint to produce any good effect.’ In a warning that certainly would
apply to the extended figurative arguments that carry Collins’ ode, Kames
warned that:
a metaphor drawn out to any length, instead of illustrating or enlivening the
principal subject, becomes disagreeable by overstraining the mind. Cowley
is extremely licentious in this way … long allegories … never afford any
lasting pleasure: witness the Fairy Queen, which with great power of expres-
sion, variety of images, and melody of versification, is scarce ever read a
second time.31
It is pertinent that Kames resents the conceit that fails to illustrate its
subject and ‘overstrains’ the mind; that the sinner he cites is Abraham
Cowley, Pindarist; and that his key example of the distasteful in lit-
erature is the great poem of one of Collins’ great heroes, Edmund
Spenser.
In another conception of lyric poetry, however, the strenuous work to
which such writing puts the reader’s mind could be more highly valued.
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, in her Prefatory Essay to Collins’ poems, distin-
guishes the ‘moral painting of men and manners’ such as we find in the
122 Marcus ­Walsh
Essays and Epistles of Pope, from the poetry of imagination that Collins
had undertaken:
The other class consists of what may be called pure Poetry, or Poetry in the
abstract. It is concerned with an imaginary world, peopled with beings of
its own creation. It deals in splendid imagery, bold fiction, and allegorical
personages. It is necessarily obscure to a certain degree; because, having to
do chiefly with ideas generated within the mind, it cannot be at all compre-
hended by any whose intellect has not been exercised in familiar contem-
plations; while the conceptions of the Poet (often highly metaphysical) are
rendered still more remote from common apprehension by the figurative
phrase in which they are clothed. All that is properly Lyric Poetry is of this
kind.32
This praise is aimed at Collins’ odes in general but arguably has a special
propriety to the ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’. Barbauld celebrates a
‘pure Poetry’ that is not primarily or straightforwardly mimetic. She is
prepared to countenance (as Johnson famously was not33) a poetry that
deals in fictions, and represents those fictions through allegorising pros-
opopoeia. She concedes that such a poetry may be necessarily obscure, as
it deals with mental abstractions, and presents those abstractions figura-
tively, in a manner that may be beyond ‘common apprehension’.34 She
understands that, having to do with idea, it requires a degree of intel-
lectual engagement that profoundly challenges the reader’s abilities and
knowledge. She acknowledges that (to use Thomas Gray’s phrase, itself
translated from Pindar) such a poetry may be ‘vocal to the intelligent
alone’.35 And she makes a yet larger, and in literary-historical terms more
challenging, claim: that a poetry of such a formal, epistemological, and
figurative character is constitutive, or should be constitutive, of the lyric
itself: ‘All that is properly Lyric Poetry is of this kind.’
Christopher Smart, Cambridge college fellow, hack writer, journalist,
comic poet, bankrupt, translator, pantomimist, transvestite, committed
evangelical Christian, hymnodist, religious obsessive, children’s writer,
and drunk, was an altogether more various, and variously productive, lit-
erary figure than William Collins. He was also, however, a deeply serious
poet. He was a writer of epideictic high lyric (amongst many other genres
of verse) almost throughout his career. As much of a formal experimenter
as any eighteenth-century poet, he tried his hand at almost all possible
formal models for the ode. In his early years, he thought the irregular
or Cowleian version of the Pindaric an appropriate form for the expres-
sion of ‘arbitrary grief, that will not hear of bounds’, in his ode ‘On the
 Eighteenth-century high lyric: Collins and ­Smart 123
Sudden Death of a Clergyman’;36 and an appropriate form for celebration,
in his ‘Secular Ode’, of the 1743 Jubilee at Pembroke College, Cambridge.
Like Collins and Gray (in ‘The Bard’ and the ‘Progress of Poesy’), Smart
attempted the regular Pindaric triadic form (in ‘To the King’, published in
Gratulatio academiae cantabrigiensis, 1748). Far more frequently, he turned
to long stanzas, in his ode ‘On an Eagle confined to a College Court’,
the ‘Ode to Lord Barnard’, and the odes ‘To Admiral Sir George Pocock’
and ‘To General Draper’.37 Here Smart might have found forerunners in
Pindar’s own occasional use of a regular monostrophic form. He might
have found, too, a more obvious and congenial lyric model in the stanzaic
odes of Horace. Horatian odes appeared from the early years of the English
literary Renaissance. Henry Howard, earl of Surrey (1517–1547), wrote a
version of the tenth ode of Horace’s second book. Milton wrote a version
of Horace’s ‘Ode to Pyrrha’. Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s
return from Ireland’ uses a short, Horatian stanza form, and approximates
the epideictic mode of the ‘Roman’ odes, in praise of Augustus and the
Roman state, of Horace’s third and fourth books. Horace’s poems, more
especially the odes, were hugely popular in translation, imitation, and
paraphrase throughout the eighteenth century.
Smart’s mature work, the poetry published after his release from the
madhouse in the early 1760s, is predominantly and characteristically writ-
ten in a wide variety of shorter stanzas. He was a self-conscious experi-
menter in and exploiter of stanzaic form, perhaps most distinctively in
the Hymns and Spiritual Songs for the Fasts and Festivals of the Church of
England, in the Translation of the Psalms of David, Attempted in the Spirit
of Christianity (both 1765), and in The Works of Horace, Translated into
Verse (1767). He appended to his Translation of the Psalms a set of metrical
variations upon the Gloria Patri, in the twenty-five different measures that
he had used. Such an exercise was not a unique practice, but neither was
it a regular practice in English metrical Psalm books; if Smart undertook
it primarily as an aid to the use of his Psalms in devotion, he no doubt
intended also to draw attention to his own metrical virtuosity.
Smart’s verse translation of Horace was similarly, and self-consciously,
ingenious in its use of various stanza forms. Smart included, in Volume ii,
a list of Horace’s odes arranged by their twenty-two different Latin metres.
Where the Horatian original is stanzaic, so is Smart’s translation (though
the carelessly printed 1767 text does not employ vertical leading to demar-
cate each stanza from the next). For some odes, particularly the Sapphics
(e.g., i.38), he insists that he has employed ‘the original metre exactly’.38
124 Marcus ­Walsh
His verse translation attempts throughout to emulate the curiosa felicitas
of Horace’s odes, and in his preface Smart goes so far as to nominate in
which odes he believes he has succeeded in doing so (Horace, p. 5). It is
in the preface to the verse Horace that Smart makes one of his two state-
ments on ‘the beauty, force and vehemence of Impression … a talent or gift
of Almighty God, by which a Genius is impowered to throw an emphasis
upon a word or sentence’. Impression is identified as peculiarly a property
of epideictic verse: ‘the force of impression is always liveliest upon the
eulogies of patriotism, gratitude, honour, and the like’ (Horace, pp. 6–7).
The verse Horace ranks amongst Smart’s most forceful and inventive
writings, both metrically and linguistically. Nevertheless, the Horatian
lyric fell short, in Smart’s own estimation, of the sublime verse of the
Hebrew Bible: ‘there is a littleness in the noblest poets among the
Heathens when compared to the prodigious grandeur and genuine maj-
esty of a David or Isaiah’ (Horace, p. 9). It is in A Song to David, Smart’s
ode in praise of the Psalmist, that his major achievement in the exploit-
ation of the internal resources, and architectonic possibilities, of the
stanza are to be found.
The stanza used in A Song to David, the tail-rhyme stanza or romance-
six, is made up of two tetrameter couplets, each followed by a trimeter,
rhyming aabccb. It was used in religious and secular verse through the
seventeenth century, and persisted through the eighteenth century as a
popular form. It appears in much magazine poetry; in the hymns of Watts,
Charles Wesley, and others; in Gray’s ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite
Cat’; in Johnson’s ‘Upon the Feast of St Simon and St Jude’; and in poems
by Akenside and Collins.
The romance-six, then, was a common form, but it was also distinct-
ively Smart’s favourite lyric stanza.39 The form suited his habit of expres-
sion just as the heroic couplet suited Pope. The extended compass of its
six lines allowed for syntactical variation and ingenuity. Its short lines,
closely successive rhymes, and two-part structure, connected by the tail
rhymes, enabled the exploitation of a range of powerful rhetorical mecha-
nisms, and encouraged the pointed, elliptical expression that is a signature
of Smart’s most impressive and characteristic later poetry.
All poetry is more or less distinct from prose in lexis or in syntax,
but A Song to David makes denser use of syntactical and verbal pecu-
liarity than most, almost all of it aimed at poetic concentration and
pointedness within the stanza. This is what a linguist would call the
use of ‘deictic lenses’: the tendency of instances of lexical rarity, nov-
elty, or obsolescence, and of syntactic strain and distinctiveness, to draw
 Eighteenth-century high lyric: Collins and ­Smart 125
attention to the texture of the writing and the articulation of mean-
ing. Smart uses a wide range of such lenses throughout the Song; here
are some instances. Apposition, in various forms, is a recurrent feature.
Appositional noun phrases allow parallel gnomic statements of the sub-
jects of David’s singing:
Of man – the semblance and ­effect
Of God and Love – the Saint elect
For infinite applause –
(stanza 20)40

Main verbs are regularly absent or implied:

Good – from Jehudah’s genuine vein,
From God’s best nature good in grain,
His aspect and his heart;
(stanza 8)

Transitive verbs are used intransitively, avoiding (as often in the verse
Horace41) needless prepositions or passive constructions:
The crocus burnishes alive
(stanza 61)

At some points, parallel syntactical structures use the boundaries of the

line and stanza to make points in brief:
In armour, or in ephod clad,
His pomp, his piety was glad;
(stanza 15)

Elsewhere chiasmus allows a similar emphasis:

Controul thine eye, salute success,
Honour the wiser, happier bless
(stanza 48)

The romance-six falls naturally into two halves, providing perfect frames
for separate vignettes:
For ADORATION, beyond match,
The scholar bulfinch aims to catch
The soft flute’s iv’ry touch;
And, careless on the hazle spray,
The daring redbreast keeps at bay
The damsel’s greedy clutch.
(stanza 65)
126 Marcus ­Walsh
Sometimes, however, Smart binds the stanza together, for example, in the
concluding amplificatio, by repetition of the initial word of the line:
Sweet is the dew that falls ­betimes,
And drops upon the leafy limes;
Sweet, Hermon’s fragrant air:
Sweet is the lilly’s silver bell,
And sweet the wakeful tapers smell
That watch for early pray’r.
(stanza 72)

Elsewhere Smart surprises expectation by carrying the sentence over the

stanza’s third-line break, often with a peculiarity of syntax:
Constant – in love to God THE TRUTH,
Age, manhood, infancy, and youth –
To Jonathan his friend
Constant, beyond the verge of death;
(stanza 14)

The sense here at first appears complete after the third line, but as we
read on we find a changed structure. The inversion, and the appearance
of the word ‘constant’ at the start of the fourth line, lend a metrical as
well as a syntactical emphasis to this virtue. Often poeticism is used as an
instrument not of vague verbosity but of concision. In Jubilate agno Smart
invites Thomas to ‘rejoice with the Sword-Fish, whose aim is perpetual
and strength insuperable’ (B129); in the Song, in the rather different poetic
mode of high formal lyric, he writes:
Strong thro’ the turbulent profound
Shoots xiphias to his aim.
(stanza 75)

Here the periphrasis ‘turbulent profound’ gives the sea, home to a part of
God’s creation, a sublimity of wildness and extent, and the Greek name
for the swordfish, ‘xiphias’ (borrowed from Spenser, Faerie Queene, ii.
xii.214), lends poetic strangeness (Smart thought an explanatory footnote
necessary here). Smart used alliteration regularly, binding and emphasising
sense units, underlining rhythms, creating parallelisms: ‘keep from com-
mixtures foul and fond’; ‘wise are his precepts, prayer and praise’ (stanzas
45, 16). Finally, a possibility whose implications I shall wish to explore
later in this chapter: the structure of Smart’s chosen stanza allows the con-
struction of many lists. There are lists that set up the terms of a developed
subsequent anaphora:
 Eighteenth-century high lyric: Collins and ­Smart 127
Great, valiant, pious, good, and ­clean,
Sublime, contemplative, serene,
Strong, constant, pleasant, wise!
(stanza 4)

Other lists set out in themselves the infinite riches of the divine creation:
The world – the clust’ring spheres he made,
The glorious light, the soothing shade,
Dale, champaign, grove, and hill;
The multitudinous abyss …
(stanza 21)

The omission or implying of main verbs of course enables or encourages

this cataloguing tendency.
Smart’s use of the romance-six has a fundamental effect too on over-
all organisation. Stanzaic parts are related to the architectonic whole,
as statement is accommodated to stanzaic form. Smart insisted (in the
Advertisement printed in Poems on Several Occasions, 1763) on ‘the exact
Regularity and Method’ of his poem. ‘Regularity’ is a word that answers to
the long-standing English debate about the form of the ode. In engaging
in this debate, Smart had adopted for his greatest epideictic lyric a more
elaborated solution. As the list of contents he provided carefully sets out,
the poem is divided into a series of thematic stanza blocks, organised by
symbolic numbers, including twelve stanzas on the virtues of David, nine
on the subjects of David’s verse, seven on the pillars of knowledge, ten
on the Decalogue, three on each of the four seasons, five on the senses
(together making up the ADORATION passage), and a concluding
‘amplification in five degrees’ amounting to fifteen stanzas. Each of these
internal frames makes up a subordinate part, and argument, of the poem.
Smart’s uses of formal rhetoric within the poem, almost always in sup-
port and delineation of these larger architectonic structures, are no less
striking. In the contents list he draws attention to what is perhaps the
most dramatic instance of such a rhetoric: the concluding ‘amplification
in five degrees’. For each of these five degrees Smart provides three stanzas.
In each degree the first two stanzas give instances of what is sweet, strong,
beautiful, precious, and glorious, in the natural world (the instances
are virtually all made up of allusions to the Bible, and especially from
the sublime book of Job), in man’s world, and in the man-made world.
Each degree concludes with a stanza finding David is sweeter, stronger,
more beauteous, more precious, and more glorious, as man of praise,
man of prayer, poet, man after God’s own heart, and type of and believer
128 Marcus ­Walsh
in Christ’s salvation. In each stanza of each degree Smart makes use of
anaphora, the repetition of a word at the beginning of a line. The poem’s
climax is effected in part by a movement from relatively varied and light
use of anaphora in the first four degrees, to a drum-beat insistence in the
fifth and last:
Glorious the northern lights astream;
Glorious the song, when God’s the theme;
Glorious the thunder’s roar:
Glorious hosanna from the den;
Glorious the catholic amen;
Glorious the martyr’s gore
(stanza 85)

Indeed, though Smart, keen that his reader should understand the Classical
rhetorical motives of his poem, calls this an ‘amplification’, it is also, in its
intensification from stanza to stanza, an instance of gradatio. Such a use
of gradatio may again more easily be paralleled in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries – for instance in the fifth song of Sidney’s Astrophil and
Stella, which combines gradatio and anaphora, or in Herbert’s ‘Sighs and
Grones’ – than in the eighteenth. No doubt the most significant other use
of anaphora in the Song is in the ‘exercise upon the senses’ (stanzas 65–70),
where the repetition of the phrase ‘For ADORATION’ at the beginning
of the first line of each stanza serves particularly to distinguish this pas-
sage from the ‘exercise upon the seasons’, in which the capitalised word
ADORATION is cycled through the stanzas. Finally, an instance of enu-
meratio, a type of amplificatio in which each detail of the subject is taken
up and expanded: David’s twelve virtues are listed in one half of a single
stanza:
Great, valiant, pious, good, and clean,
Sublime, contemplative, serene,
Strong, constant, pleasant, wise!
(stanza 4)

Each of these virtues is then elaborated by twelve single stanzas, opening

with the name of each virtue in turn.
I have already spoken of Smart’s creation of lists within the boundaries
of the stanza. Lists also operate throughout the poem above the level of
the stanza, not only in the account of David’s virtues, but also in the sub-
jects of which he sang (God, angels, man, ‘trees, plants and flow’rs’, fowl,
fishes, beasts, gems), in the seven pillars, or in the natural vignettes of the
Adoration passage. The Song, like the Jubilate, though in a different poetic
 Eighteenth-century high lyric: Collins and ­Smart 129
mode, presents us with a series of catalogues. I want to argue that, as in
the Jubilate, this is a matter both of meaning and of formal method.
In the Jubilate Smart claimed that ‘the philosophy of the times evn now
is vain deceit’. His particular target was Sir Isaac Newton, whose natural
science, because mathematical rather than scriptural, is ‘more of error
than of the truth’. Newton was αλογοσ, because in his anti-Trinitarianism
he denied Christ the Word; because he denied the power of the creating
Logos; and because he questioned the authority of the Scriptures. Smart,
on the other hand, congratulated himself on defending ‘the philosophy
of the scripture’.42 He drew his philosophy of the Scripture in part (as
Karina Williamson and Albert J. Kuhn have shown)43 from the writings
of the Hutchinsonians. He drew it in part from St Paul, whose exhort-
ation to the Colossians, as Karina Williamson has pointed out, Smart ech-
oes: ‘Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit,
after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after
Christ’ (Colossians 2: 8). And he drew it in part no doubt, as Albert Kuhn
suggests, from the analogical thinking of such evangelical physico-theo-
logians as James Hervey: ‘we should always view the visible System; with
an Evangelical Telescope … and with an Evangelical Microscope: Regarding
Christ Jesus, as the great Projector and Architect; that planned, and
executed the amazing Scheme … Whatever is magnificent or valuable;
tremendous or amiable; should ever be ascribed to the Redeemer. This,
is the Christian’s Natural Philosophy.’44 Smart similarly insists, in the first
stanza of the pillars passage, on Christ as creating logos: ‘His WORD
accomplish’d the design’ (stanza 30).The first and last of the pillars are
alpha and omega, which are Christ. The pillars passage is immediately
followed by the ascription of just such a natural philosophy to David: ‘O
DAVID, scholar of the Lord! / Such is thy science’ (stanza 38). David’s
knowledge is of the infinite life of the creation, a universe ‘FULL of
God’s works’ (Jubilate, B185): that is, a plenum rather than Newton’s vac-
uum. Jubilate agno insists on the infinity of the creation: ‘For the names
and number of animals are as the name and number of the stars’ (B42).
Infinite or enormous number or extent are common themes of the Song:
the Archangel Michael bows in heaven with ‘his millions’, the ‘Saint elect’
offer up ‘infinite applause’, the sea is ‘the multitudinous abyss’, David’s
science earns him ‘infinite degree’ (stanzas 19, 20, 21, 38). This, rather than
the terrible, is Smart’s characteristic sublime, a sublime of the ineffable, of
a divine creation whose scale and number are beyond mortal apprehension
or mathematical description, ‘For nature is more various than ­observation
tho’ observers be innumerable (Jubliate, B53). As Umberto Eco puts it
130 Marcus ­Walsh
in his recent study of the list in verbal and visual art, ‘Faced with some-
thing that is immensely large, or unknown, of which we still do not know
enough or of which we shall never know, the author tells us he is unable
to say, and so he proposes a list very often as a specimen, example, or indi-
cation, leaving the reader to imagine the rest.’45 Such lists may be found
in the Middle Ages, in litanies, or in lists of the attributes of Christ or the
Father. They may be found even earlier, for example in Homer’s list of the
Greek ships in the Iliad (Book xviii). It may be true, as Smart writes in his
hymn on Christ’s Ascension, that:
The song can never be pursu’d
When Infinite’s the theme –
(Hymns and Spiritual Songs, xiv.56–7)

Nevertheless, when the issue is the infinity of the creation, rather than the
mystery of the divine, the poet may attempt a representative list, as Smart
does in the alphabetical and numerical series of Jubilate agno, and in the
poetically structured representative catalogues of A Song to David. These
lists have a different motive than those of natural philosophy. They are
symbolic and allusive, rather than complete or taxonomic. The hierarchies
of Smart’s concluding amplificatio, and of the list of David’s poetic sub-
jects, are not the taxonomies of science, but the hierarchies of God.
The history of the eighteenth-century ode was in part a struggle for
adequate form and answerable style. To the high lyric poets of the mid
eighteenth century may be applied with especial and particular force
T. S. Eliot’s broader-ranging comment that English poets between Pope
and Wordsworth were faced with the problem, and too often failed to
solve the problem, of finding ‘a style of writing for themselves, suited to the
matter they wanted to talk about and the way in which they apprehended
this matter’.46 Collins and Smart had rather different things to talk about.
They had different understandings of the world, and represented it in dif-
ferent ways. Both found, and exploited in their greatest lyrics, appropriate
form and language. The extended strophes of the regular triadic Pindaric
ode gave Collins scope for the ambitious development of a fundamental
figurative method of his time, in a consciously sublime account of the div-
ine origins of imaginative poetry, of the achievements of the two proph-
ets of English verse, and the inevitable inadequacy of their contemporary
disciples. The romance-six afforded Smart not only a hospitable internal
discipline but also the technical resources to articulate, thematically and
rhetorically, his extended ode to the Psalmist who had celebrated the order
and the fullness of the creation, and in doing so had provided Smart with
 Eighteenth-century high lyric: Collins and ­Smart 131
a model for sacred lyric verse. These two odes are innovative and specific
exercises in particular lyric sub-genres, strenuously and ingeniously adapt-
ing Greek, Hebraic, and English models. They answer powerfully to their
respective writers’ emergent expressive needs. They were little valued in
their own time, and they left scarcely a rack behind.

Notes
1 Joseph Warton, Odes on Various Subjects, 2nd edn (London: R. Dodsley, 1747),
p. xi.
2 Plato, Republic, 10.606E–607; Aristotle, Poetics, 4.1448b 24ff.
3 Abraham Cowley, preface to Pindarique Odes (1656), sigs. b1r–v.
4 For an account of knowledge in England of the organising principles of the
Pindaric triad, see Norman Maclean, ‘From Action to Image: Theories of the
Lyric in the Eighteenth Century’, in Critics and Criticism, ed. R. S. Crane
(University of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 408–60 (p. 425 and note).
5 For a persuasive account of Gray’s methods, see Thomas Gray, William
Collins, and Oliver Goldsmith, The Poems, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London:
Longman, 1969), p. 114.
6 For a thoroughly documented study, see Chester E. Chapin, Personification
in Eighteenth-Century Poetry (New York: Octagon, 1974); and for a significant
article, see Earl R. Wasserman, ‘The Inherent Values of Eighteenth-Century
Personification’, PMLA 65 (1950), 435–63.
7 John Newbery, The Art of Poetry on a New Plan, 2 vols. (London, 1762), Vol. i,
p. 137.
8 James Beattie, Essays: On Poetry and Music, as they Affect the Mind (Edinburgh,
1776), pp. 277, 279.
9 Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 3 vols. (London and
Edinburgh, 1762), Vol. iii, p. 113.
10 Beattie, Essays, pp. 277–8.
11 Edmund Spenser, Works of Mr. Edmund Spenser, ed. John Hughes, 6 vols.
(London, 1715), Vol. i, p. xxxi.
12 William Collins, ‘The Manners’, lines 50–1, 54–5, in Gray, Collins, and
Goldsmith, Poems, p. 474. All citations of Collins’ poetry are from this
edition.
13 William Collins, ‘Ode to Fear’, lines 20–1, ‘Ode to Simplicity’, lines 11–12
(pp. 419, 424). For discussion of the debate about the relative desirability of
brief personifications (relying upon the highly developed capacity of eighteenth-
century readers for imaginative visual reconstruction), as against more fully
developed and pictorialised visual representations, see Chapin, Personification,
pp. 34–6, 59–60, 63; Wasserman, ‘Inherent Values’, pp. 437–8, 458, 459.
14 Samuel Johnson recounts in his ‘Life of Collins’ that the poet was in 1744
saved from the attentions of a bailiff by ‘the booksellers, who, on the credit
of a translation of Aristotle’s Poetics, which he engaged to write with a large
132 Marcus ­Walsh
commentary, advanced as much money as enabled him to escape into the
country’; Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale, 4 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), Vol. iv, p. 120.
15 For a significant corrective see Richard Wendorf, ‘“Poor Collins”
Reconsidered’, Huntington Library Quarterly 42 (1979), 91–116.
16 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, iv.v.3, 1–5; v.iii.27–8; iv.v.1–20.
17 As Earl R. Wasserman points out (‘Collins’ “Ode on the Poetical Character”’,
ELH 34 (1967), 92–115 (pp. 103–4)), Collins’ myth is not made anew ‘out
of whole cloth’. Wasserman argues for an elaborate Platonic construction,
including, for instance, identification of the neo-Platonic heavenly Venus,
conceived as Mind (nous), as proprietor of the girdle (but Collins does not
mention Venus in the relevant parts of the poem). It is more likely that
Collins’ sources for his idea are English and literary, Spenserian and Miltonic,
and biblical (particularly the scriptural figure of Wisdom from Proverbs),
than unmediatedly Platonic.
18 Langhorne, Barbauld, Woodhouse, and Lonsdale are surely correct in read-
ing the ‘rich-haired youth of morn’ as a personification of the sun, not of the
poet himself. As Lonsdale puts it, Collins is describing ‘the imaginative act
of creation by which God, through the embodiment of his “Fancy”, himself
became the supreme type of the Poet’ (Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith, Poems,
p. 432).
19 For detailed discussions of these lines and their background, see A. S. P.
Woodhouse, ‘The Poetry of Collins Reconsidered’, in From Sensibility to
Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, ed. Frederick W. Hilles
and Harold Bloom (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 93–138;
Wasserman, ‘Inherent Values’; and Lonsdale’s headnote and notes to the
poem in Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith, Poems.
20 In William Collins, The Poetical Works of Mr. William Collins (London, 1797),
pp. xxiii–xxiv.
21 The reference is no doubt to Il Penseroso, lines 59–60.
22 Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ii.xii.83.
23 Amongst other closely contemporary parallels, see Gray, ‘The Progress of
Poesy’, lines 111–13.
24 S. Musgrove, ‘The Theme of Collins’s Odes’, Notes and Queries 185 (1943),
214–17, 253–5 (p. 215).
25 Letter of 9 March 1755. Thomas Gray, Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed.
Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, rev. H. W. Starr, 3 vols. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 420–1. Cf. Johnson’s comment on Gray’s own
odes: ‘His stanzas are too long, especially his epodes; the ode is finished before
the ear has learned its measures’ (Lives, Vol. iv, p. 183).
26 Barbauld reasonably doubts whether Collins’ odes in general have a ‘claim
to the epithet descriptive; by which we generally understand a delineation of
some portion of real nature’, and prefers figurative.
27 Cf. ‘Ode to Fear’: ‘Be mine to read the visions old, / Which thy awakening
bards have told’ (lines 54–5).
 Eighteenth-century high lyric: Collins and ­Smart 133
28 Wasserman persuasively argues that personification died, not as a result of
Wordsworthian distaste, but as a result of ‘the metaphysics that Coleridge
ushered in … It performed its poetic function so long as man assumed that all
human knowledge is empirical and that abstractions are fabricated by mind
to unify human experience’ (‘Inherent Values’, p. 437).
29 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton, rev. edn (Oxford: Blackwell,
1987), pp. 170, 174–5.
30 Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 2 vols. (London,
1782), Vol. ii, pp. 222–3.
31 Home, Elements of Criticism, Vol. iii, pp. 116, 119–20, 124.
32 In Collins, Poetical Works, pp. iv–v.
33 For Johnson’s comment on the ‘disgusting’ (that is, distasteful) fictions of
Lycidas, see Lives, Vol. i, p. 279.
34 Here Barbauld, surely deliberately, puts to approving use an expression
that Johnson had used critically of Thomas Gray’s linguistic peculiarity:
‘finding in Dryden honey redolent of Spring, an expression that reaches the
utmost limits of our language, Gray drove it a little more beyond com-
mon apprehension by making gales to be redolent of joy and youth’ (ibid.,
p. 181).
35 Gray, Correspondence, p. 797. Gray uses Pindar’s phrase, in the original Greek,
as an epigraph on the title-page of his Odes (1757).
36 Christopher Smart, ‘On the Sudden Death of a Clergyman’, Student 2 (1751),
393–4.
37 Christopher Smart, ‘On an Eagle confined to a College Court’, Student 2
(1751), 356–7; ‘Ode to Lord Barnard’, Gentleman’s Magazine (1754), 575); ‘To
Admiral Sir George Pocock’, in Poems by Mr. Smart (London, 1763), pp. 9–13;
‘To General Draper’, in Poems by Mr. Smart, pp. 14–18.
38 Christopher Smart, Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, ed. Marcus Walsh
and Karina Williamson, 5 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1980–96), Vol.
v, ed. Karina Williamson (1996), p. 158. All references to Smart’s Works of
Horace Translated into Verse are to this edition, and are provided within
my text.
39 Smart uses it in his translation of the first ode of Horace’s Book i, ‘To Maecenas’
(Midwife 2 (1751), 165–7); his translation of Psalm 42 in the Universal Visiter
(1756); ‘Ode to the Earl of Northumberland’ (1764); Hymns and Spiritual
Songs (‘The Crucifixion’ and ‘St Mark’); Hymns for the Amusement of Children
(‘Learning’ and ‘Generosity’); verse translation of Horace (i.vi, xxiii; ii.v; iii.
xvi; iv.v); and regularly in his Translation of the Psalms (1765).
40 All references to A Song to David are to my edition in Smart, Poetical Works,
Vol. ii (1983).
41 For example at i.xxiii.12, where Horace’s ‘Et corde et genibus tremit’ is
­translated ‘She trembles heart and knees’.
42 Jubilate agno, B130, B195, B219, B648; Smart, Poetical Works, Vol. i, ed. Karina
Williamson (1980), pp. 49, 44, 84.
134 Marcus ­Walsh
43 Karina Williamson, ‘Smart’s Principia: Science and Anti-Science in Jubilate
agno’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 30 (1979), 409–22; Albert J. Kuhn,
‘Christopher Smart: The Poet as Patriot of the Lord’, ELH 30 (1963), 121–36.
44 James Hervey, ‘Reflections on a Flower Garden’, Meditations and
Contemplations, 2 vols. (London, 1749), Vol. i, pp. 185–6.
45 Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists (London: Maclehose, 2009), p. 49.
46 T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1963), p. 155.
 ­c h apter seven

The retuning of the sky

Romanticism and lyric
David Duff

Lecturing on ‘Various Classes of Poetry’ at the Royal Institution in 1830–1,

the poet James Montgomery remarked that ‘It would be impossible to
define the limits, or lay down the laws, of what passes in our own coun-
try under the title of Lyric Poetry’, a classification now so broad as to be
utterly ‘nondescript’.1 He offers no evidence but his point is illustrated
by a recently published book, Robert Malcolm’s Lyrical Gems: A Selection
of Moral, Sentimental, and Descriptive Poetry, From the Works of the Most
Popular Modern Writers, Interspersed with Originals (Glasgow, 1825). Where
forty years earlier a critical authority such as Hugh Blair could restrict the
term ‘Lyric Poetry’ to just four types of ode,2 Malcolm’s anthology encom-
passes a bewildering variety of poetic forms, including ‘odes’, ‘ballads’,
‘songs’, ‘sonnets’, ‘hymns’, ‘pastoral stanzas’, ‘fragments’, an ‘anthem’, an
‘ancient gaelic melody’, a ‘hebrew melody’, and a ‘poetic sketch’. Alongside
these named forms are many short poems without generic labels, as well
as extracts from longer works such as Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh and
Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan. The common denom-
inator of these heterogeneous compositions is not at all obvious, and the
editor provides no explanation of his principles of selection other than to
refer to the poems as ‘genuine effusions of the muse’ (p. iv), a description
that brings to mind Wordsworth’s ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feel-
ings’ – as good a definition as any of the nebulous term ‘effusion’, though
not intended as such.3
The volume is typical of the anthologies, keepsakes, and annuals that
dominated the British poetry market in the 1820s. As the word ‘popular’
in the subtitle indicates, this is an anthology explicitly attuned to con-
temporary taste, and the type of poetry calculated to satisfy that taste is
called ‘lyrical’. A term once reserved, in formal literary criticism, for a
complex, elevated type of poetry derived from Classical and biblical mod-
els was now being applied to any kind of short poem expressing intense
personal emotion, as well as to extractable passages from longer, narrative
135
136 David ­Duff
works displaying, in short bursts, that same effusive quality (the ‘lyrical
gem’ thereby replacing what an earlier generation of anthologists had
called the ‘elegant extract’, suggesting a further specialisation of read-
ing habits towards pursuit of this specific poetic effect). It is a small step
from Malcolm’s lyric connoisseurship to the full-blown canonisation pro-
gramme of Francis Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (1861), the most famous of
all nineteenth-century anthologies, whose selection of ‘The Best Songs and
Lyrical Poems in the English Language’ made a similar notion of lyric –
melodious, highly polished verse that turns ‘on some single thought, feel-
ing, or situation’ – a touchstone for poetry for all periods.4
In this chapter, I want to explore the genesis of the ‘lyrical gem’ as an
index of supreme artistic value, and the process of colonisation whereby
the category of lyric expanded to include large parts of the genre-spectrum,
and ultimately the notion of poetry itself. Both processes – the crystallisa-
tion of an idea of lyric as exquisite, song-like expression of personal feel-
ings, and the subsuming of other poetic forms – have been seen as part of
an inexorable rise of lyric that began in the Romantic period and contin-
ued more or less unabated until the end of the nineteenth century. Closer
inspection, however, reveals that the ‘rise’ was by no means straightfor-
ward; that ‘lyric’ was a contested term in the Romantic period with many
meanings, not all of them compatible; and that the colonisation process
began earlier, involving both inclusion and exclusion. Crucially, traditional
accounts of Romantic lyric conflate two developments that need to be
viewed separately to be properly understood. The first is the emergence of
an introspective conception of lyric, involving not simply self-expression
but also self-analysis, emotion observed by the ‘self-watching subtilizing
mind’ (Coleridge’s phrase).5 The second is the emergence of a musical idea
of lyric, one that re-establishes the ancient link between poetry and music
but does so on different terms and in ways that vary greatly between dif-
ferent cultural spheres. In what follows I will examine these developments,
offering examples of each and suggesting how different notions of lyricism
compete and sometimes combine in the period.
A first point to note is that many of the developments that shape
Romantic lyric have their roots in earlier poetic theory and practice.
The idea of lyric as the ‘most poetical’ kind of poetry, a Romantic and
Victorian commonplace, first emerges over a century earlier with critics
such as Joseph Trapp and Edward Young, who claim for lyric poetry – the
Pindaric ode in particular – unique stylistic, formal, and cognitive proper-
ties.6 Despite its ‘wild’ and seemingly ‘immethodical’ manner, lyric poetry,
argues Young, possesses an emotional ‘logic’ of its own, and its artistic
 The retuning of the sky: Romanticism and lyric 137
appeal lies in the imaginative risks it takes, and the stylistic distance it
maintains from ordinary prose (pp. 21–2). Later in the eighteenth cen-
tury, this privileging of lyric as a genre that breaks the rules but upholds
a higher artistic rationale crystallises in the doctrine of ‘pure poetry’,
which, as Marcus Walsh showed in the previous chapter, claims for lyric
the strongest features of the poetics of the sublime: emotional power, fig-
urative inventiveness, mythopoeic creativity. The stylistic implications
are spelt out in Thomas Gray’s comments on ‘the true Lyric style’, which,
‘with all its flights of fancy, ornaments & heightening of expression, &
harmony of sound’, is ‘in its nature superior to every other style’, though
‘it could not be born in a work of great length’.7 Primitivism, another
influential strand in eighteenth-century criticism, adds further impetus to
this revaluation of lyric, identifying it as the oldest and most primal form
of poetic utterance, originating in what William Duff calls ‘the effusion
of a glowing fancy and an impassioned heart’ and acknowledging no law
‘excepting its own spontaneous impulse, which it obeys without control’.8
On this view, lyric is at once the most grounded and the most elevated
of genres, the most ‘natural’ form of poetic expression yet also the most
artistic.
The Romantics adopt and develop this theory of lyric and the cultural
mythologies that underpin it, and terms such as intensity, spontaneity,
imagination, and self-expression increasingly displace older critical con-
cepts, making lyric ultimately the norm for all poetry. However, as M.
H. Abrams demonstrated in The Mirror and the Lamp, it is a later, post-
Romantic development in critical theory – represented most influentially
by John Stuart Mill – that severs lyric from its audience and its social
function, removing the ‘expressive theory’ from ‘the network of qualifica-
tions’ in which Wordsworth and others had placed it.9 The paradigm of
Romantic lyric, for Abrams, is not the improvisatory, autotelic ‘effusion’
but the intricately crafted, intellectually complex genre he calls the ‘greater
Romantic lyric’.10 This is a type of writing, he argues, that emerged in the
1790s, displaced what neoclassical critics had called the ‘greater ode’, and
involved the expression not of single thoughts, feelings, or situations, as
in Palgrave’s definition of lyric, but, rather, of shifting mental states: what
Wordsworth calls ‘the fluxes and refluxes of the mind’.11 This type of lyric
is ‘sentimental’ rather than ‘naive’, in Schiller’s distinction: its provenance
lies in highly developed cultural forms such as the sonnet, the Pindaric
ode, the inscription, the loco-descriptive poem, and the seventeenth-cen-
tury poem of meditation. In an act of generic transformation and synthe-
sis itself characteristic of Romanticism, Coleridge and Wordsworth, and
138 David ­Duff
others after them, fuse together these disparate forms and create a new
type of lyric that is able to register, in an unprecedented way, ‘the free
flow of consciousness, the interweaving of thought, feeling, and percep-
tual detail, and the easy naturalness of the speaking voice’ (pp. 211–12).
As I have suggested elsewhere,12 Abrams’ account of the evolution of
Romantic lyric is open to question in so far as it implies a straightfor-
ward movement away from established forms like the ode and sonnet
towards new, hybrid genres such as the one he describes. The mixing of
previously distinct forms is certainly characteristic of this period, but what
is striking in the work of the Romantics is the way new lyric forms are
created without the old ones being destroyed. Writers such as Coleridge
and Wordsworth are as assiduous in their cultivation of existing forms
as they are in their invention of new ones, and some of the key formal
developments of the period involve not innovation but the reactivation
of older forms, or a type of innovation in which traditional properties are
adapted rather than abandoned. An example is the sonnet, a form that
had dropped out of the repertoire in the mid seventeenth century and that
neoclassical critics ignored, but which was revived in the 1780s to become
a vital part of the Romantic lyric spectrum.13 Sonnets undergo every kind
of formal manipulation in the Romantic period, including absorption into
the new kind of complex lyric Abrams describes, but the form is also used
in its traditional configurations, and the most consequential innovation
wrought upon it is not metrical or linear alteration but rather a functional
shift, a deepening of the self-reflexive tendencies already inherent in it, to
make it an autobiographical, or confessional, form. Coleridge provides a
rationale for this new deployment when he talks of the sonnet as a type
of poem ‘in which some lonely feeling is developed’. The structural prop-
erties of sonnet form (intricate rhyme scheme, the volta, and the fixed
number of lines) enable the author to ‘methodize’ his thought through
a progressive transformation of the emotional state that originally gave
rise to the poem.14 It is the ability of the sonnet to chart and analyse these
mental trajectories that recommended it to the Romantics, and led them
to use it as a model for other types of introspective lyric.
Another key feature of this new lyric mode, whether in sonnets or
in larger, more complex forms, is its mimesis of the spoken voice. The
importance of this element has not always been recognised. According to
Cecil Day Lewis, who updated Palgrave’s Golden Treasury in 1954, ‘a true
lyric … will always manifest itself as such by a certain tone and a certain
kind of rhythm. The lyrical impulse makes words sing.’15 Of ‘singing’ lyric
I shall have more to say, but the opposite quality to which Abrams draws
 The retuning of the sky: Romanticism and lyric 139
attention is fidelity to the ‘speaking’ voice, and it is no coincidence that the
earliest examples he gives of the greater Romantic lyric are Coleridge’s ‘con-
versation poems’, a label (applied by Coleridge only to ‘The Nightingale’
but now extended to other poems) that directly signals their vocal and
dialogic character. Though introspective (‘self-watching’), the poems are
addressed to imagined interlocutors, and are crucially shaped by their
sense of an audience. Coleridge’s later term for the group, ‘Meditative
Poems in Blank Verse’,16 highlights two other features that distance them
still further from Day Lewis’s conception of lyric, which regards the ‘sing-
ing tone’ as diametrically opposed to ‘that of the voice reasoning, arguing,
describing’ (as in meditative poetry), and which specifically excludes as
incompatible with lyric rhythm (except in rare instances) a ‘heavy’ metre
such as iambic pentameter (pp. 17–18). Even so rhythmically dextrous a
poem as Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, another blank-verse meditation
whose expressive power partly rests in its ability to move between ‘speak-
ing’ and ‘singing’ tones, and to accelerate or decelerate rhythmically as
feelings intensify and philosophic climax approaches, finds no place in
Palgrave’s anthology, though it is now regarded as a supreme example of
Romantic lyric.
The conversational turn that produces this new variety of lyric does not
mean a total renunciation of the oratorical voice found in earlier modes
of lyric, nor does the domestic focus of conversational lyric imply a retreat
from public engagement, as in the narratives of ‘internalisation’ through
which the careers of the Romantic poets were once interpreted.17 The co-
presence of different rhetorical modes, each responsive to shifting histor-
ical conditions, is illustrated by Coleridge’s Fears in Solitude pamphlet
of 1798, which sets side by side ‘France: An Ode’, an oratorical ode in
the grand Pindaric manner; ‘Fears in Solitude’, a blank-verse lyric that
intersperses conversational self-reflection with odic apostrophes in a much
higher register; and his fully conversationalised meditative lyric, ‘Frost at
Midnight’.18 Oratorical and conversational registers coexist, and the pub-
lic realm is progressively reimagined within the private, the three poems
exemplifying different aspects of the paradox Adorno defines as constitu-
tive of lyric, ‘a subjectivity that turns into objectivity’.19
Though this paradox is never fully articulated in Romanticism’s own
theories of lyric, Coleridge’s friend George Dyer comes close to it in his
essays on ‘Lyric Poetry’ and ‘Representative Poetry’ in his Poems (1802),
where he tries to conceptualise what Anne Janowitz terms the ‘communi-
tarian’ strand in lyric.20 Writing possibly in response to Wordsworth’s sub-
jective definition of poetry in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, Dyer links the
140 David ­Duff
imaginative freedom of lyric to social and political freedom, and describes
poetic composition not as an act of self-centring, as in Wordsworth’s
‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’,21 but as a way for the writer to resign
his individuality and acquire ‘new eyes, new ears, new feelings’, ‘lifting
himself above his ordinary material self ’ to become the spiritual ‘repre-
sentative’ of a larger community.22 A similarly anti-subjective definition
is offered by another important associate of Coleridge and Wordsworth,
John Thelwall, who, in a long and original discussion of lyric poetry in
the journal The Champion, grounds his account of the different varieties
of lyric in an analysis of their different modes of recitation.23 As Judith
Thompson has shown, Thelwall offers an instrumentalist rather than an
expressive account of lyric, one that draws on his experience as an ora-
tor and makes prosody (‘rhythmus’) the crux of all vocal performance.24
As well as putting theory into practice in his own poetry (like Dyer, he
specialised in odes, though experimented with many other forms), he
also applied the same principle in his later profession as a speech ther-
apist, using the recitation of lyric poetry as a therapeutic tool for speech
disorders.
As these examples suggest, the rise of the personal lyric was a more
complex and contradictory phenomenon than standard literary histories
imply. Introspective lyricism led not (or not only) to amorphous effusion
but to rigorous experimentation with the formal and linguistic resources
of lyric, as well as to the development of counter-models that were pro-
fessedly anti-subjective. I want to turn now, though, to another dimension
of lyric that is equally important for Romanticism and that takes us back
to the root meaning of lyric: poetry connected with music. One of the
explanations often given for the rising status of lyric poetry is the revalu-
ation of music, and the emergence, particularly in German Romantic aes-
thetics, of the idea of music as the quintessentially expressive medium to
which all other art forms aspire (an idea later developed and popularised
in England by Walter Pater).25 Lyric, as the type of poetry most atten-
tive to its own acoustic properties, was the genre best able to embrace
this ideal. Accordingly, it is rightly said that lyric poetry of this period
displayed an increased emphasis on what Ezra Pound called the ‘melo-
poeic’ aspect of verse;26 or, to use Boris Eikhenbaum’s more theoretical
formulation, that it manifested a new ‘orientation’ to music, this being the
‘extra-literary series’ that exerted the dominant influence on its linguistic
and formal patterning, in contrast to the orientation to oratory in lyric
poetry of the neoclassical period.27 From a broader historical perspective,
this could be seen as a return, on different terms, to the Renaissance idea
 The retuning of the sky: Romanticism and lyric 141
of lyric explored by David Lindley in an earlier chapter of this book – a
partial reversal of the epochal separation between poetry and music that
John Hollander referred to figuratively as ‘the untuning of the sky’.28
The rapprochement of the two art forms is reflected in contemporary
use of the word ‘lyric’ itself. The most famous usage is in Lyrical Ballads
(1798), a title Wordsworth thought distinctive enough to consider chan-
ging when Mary Robinson published a volume of poems entitled Lyrical
Tales two years later. Critics have used Wordsworth’s 1800 preface to inter-
pret the modifier ‘lyrical’ as signalling the importance of feeling over
action in the poems, a reversal of the traditional priorities of the ballad,
which can be seen as indicative of the authors’ investment in an expres-
sive, psychological conception of lyric.29 However, in his later discussion of
poetic terminology in the preface to his Poems (1815), Wordsworth defines
‘Lyrical’ to mean poems for which, ‘for the production of their full effect,
an accompaniment of music is indispensable’, listing as subsets of lyrical
poetry ‘the Hymn, the Ode, the Elegy, the Song, and the Ballad’.30 By
this classification, ‘lyrical ballad’ is a tautology, and also a contradiction of
his own practice, since there is no evidence that his or Coleridge’s poems
were ever intended for musical accompaniment. By contrast, this was pre-
cisely what was meant when the same phrase was used in another publica-
tion of 1800. Positive John; or, Nothing Can Cure Him: A New Lyric Ballad
is a ‘serio-comic song’, published in Dublin, satirising supporters of the
Act of Union (‘Positive John’ is John Bull, ‘Immerged in Wars / Tattowed
with Scars’ from the struggle with revolutionary France, and determined
to ‘fleece / The Irish Geese’ in an attempt to make himself feel better).
This spirited broadside qualifies as a ‘ballad’ by virtue of the fact that it has
some narrative content and is written in verse (though not in quatrains
and without other traditional balladic features), but it is also a ‘lyric’ in
the sense that it is set to music and intended for singing, the name of the
tune (‘Norah n’ Kheestagh’) appearing beneath the title.
This unlikely comparison alerts us to another, forgotten world of lyric
that surrounds the lyric poetry of Romanticism: the world of popular
urban song. When The British Lyre; or, Muses’ Repository, for the Year 1793
(London, 1793) promises on its title-page to be offering the public a selec-
tion of ‘the Works of the Most Celebrated Lyric Geniuses of the Age’,
it is referring not to canonical Romantic poets but to popular songwrit-
ers and performers who had made a name for themselves in the theatres
and pleasure gardens of the metropolis. There were many such collections
with similar titles, among them Parsley’s Lyric Repository (1788–90), The
New Lyric Repository (1792–5), and Kemmish’s Annual-Harmonist; or, The
142 David ­Duff
British Apollo, being a Complete Lyric Repository and Banquet of Amusement
­(1792–?1795).31 Published annually, these typically contained a mixture of
the season’s favourite new songs together with older songs, songs writ-
ten specially for the publication itself, and a selection of ‘toasts and sen-
timents’. Use of the term ‘lyric’ in anthologies of this kind serves as a
legitimation device linking popular songs to Classical poetry and impli-
citly asserting the literary value of song-texts that were being sold, in most
cases, without their accompanying music.
The tactic is particularly visible in The Lyric Repository of 1787, the first
and most impressive collection to appear under this much imitated title.
Subtitled ‘A Selection of Original, Ancient, and Modern, Songs, Duets,
Catches, Glees, and Cantatas, Distinguished for Poetical and Literary
Merit’, this differs from later ‘lyric repositories’ in interspersing theatre
songs (by Charles Dibdin, John O’Keefe, and others) with lyric poems by
prominent contemporary poets like Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld, and
Peter Pindar, and works by earlier writers such as Shakespeare, Milton,
and Dryden. Here the different worlds of lyric truly come together, ele-
giac sonnets (Smith’s ‘To a Nightingale’, ‘To the South-Downs’, ‘Supposed
to be Written by Werther’) appearing alongside songs from comic operas
(Love in a Village, Summer Amusement, The Double Disguise), and famous
songs, sonnets, and other lyrics by great authors from the past. Despite
its literary aspirations, there is, nonetheless, an air of playfulness about
the collection, as is confirmed by the frontispiece, a satirical engraving by
Thomas Rowlandson depicting not a Classical lyre or Romantic harp – the
usual icons of lyric poetry – but a group of drunken men singing around a
table at a gathering of a ‘convivial society’ or some other gentlemen’s club.
A more routine product of this publishing trend is The Pocket Lyric
Magazine; or, Convivial and Entertaining Vocal Miscellany (single issue,
?1795–1800) – another ‘Complete Repository of Lyric Poetry’, which
retains the playful air but drops the literary pretensions, the only type of
poetry now on offer being songs (and other vocal compositions) ‘Produced
at the Different Public Places of Entertainment For the Past Twenty Years’.
Such unashamedly ephemeral collections typify the ‘modish insipidity’ of
which John Aikin had complained in his Essays on Song-Writing (1772), an
annotated anthology that contained the first extended critical discussion
of song.32 Aikin sought to raise the status of the genre through a rigorous
discrimination of its varieties, a declared aim of the anthology being ‘to
form a barrier’ against the type of song found in comic operas, ‘that vile
mongrel of the drama, where the most enchanting tunes are suited with
the most flat and wretched combinations of words’ (p. iv). In practice, his
 The retuning of the sky: Romanticism and lyric 143
intervention had little effect and the type of theatrical song he deplored
went on to even greater success in the melodramas that dominated the
Romantic stage. But his point about the mismatch between words and
music was one of which many in the entertainment world were keenly
aware. Charles Dibdin, the most prolific singer-songwriter of the time
(and a key figure in the history of popular entertainment), often made
the point – echoed many times before and since – that the best words for
singing were not necessarily the best poems.33 However good a marketing
strategy, the attempt by late-eighteenth-century publishers to equate the
two worlds of ‘lyric poetry’ – literary lyric and popular song – by printing
examples of them side by side risked exposing popular songs to textual
comparisons they could not sustain. It may be no coincidence, therefore,
that the term ‘lyric’, applied to popular music, eventually lost its liter-
ary resonance and came to mean simply the words of a song as distinct
from the music, with no suggestion of poetical merit (the Oxford English
Dictionary dates this usage from 1876, and the plural form, ‘lyrics’, from
the 1930s).
The relationship between Romantic poetry and theatrical song is a
largely unexplored topic, confirming the critical segregation, insisted on
by Aikin and generally upheld since, of these two artistic spheres. By con-
trast, Romanticism’s engagement with another kind of popular song – the
traditional ballad – has been extensively researched, and is regarded not
as a debasement of lyric but as a tremendous enrichment of it. One rea-
son why the balladisation of lyric has met with critical approval, whereas
the theatricalisation of it has not, is that it took place under the sign of
primitivism, presenting itself as a return to an older, purer state of lyric
in which human feelings could find stronger and more natural expression
than in the mannered neoclassical forms then current. Antiquarian collec-
tions such as Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (London,
1765) had, Wordsworth claimed, ‘redeemed’ English poetry by reconnect-
ing it with its earlier traditions.34 His and Coleridge’s poetry is part of
that redemption, a self-conscious revival of literary techniques and poetic
forms (‘chiefly of the lyric kind’, as Percy’s title has it) that had previ-
ously been considered obsolete or marginal. Though these atavistic trends
were not to everyone’s taste, they were inescapably part of the spirit of the
age, and the literary products of this ‘retrograde industry’ (as one sceptical
observer called it)35 carried both popular appeal and cultural authority.
Some recent scholars have detected a tension between Romantic ‘min-
strelsy’ and lyric introspection, Erik Simpson calling these ‘antithetical’
modes of composition ‘that developed in dialogic opposition’.36 Maureen
144 David ­Duff
McLane sees a more symbiotic relationship, interpreting minstrelsy as a way
for Romantic poets ‘to think about the internal workings of poetry as well as
a way to meditate on its legitimating and contextualizing apparatus’, hence
the abundance of editorial subtitles, glosses, footnotes, and other paratex-
tual features that surrounded poetry of this kind.37 Minstrelsy was, none-
theless, a self-contradictory mode: an openly anachronistic form of writing
that was ‘always imminently obsolete’, requiring ‘endless revival and equally
endless burying’, as exemplified by the common Romantic motif of the
‘last minstrel’ (pp. 139, 131). An even more serious problem, argues Terence
Hoagwood, was its deceptive relationship to music. Minstrelsy involves nos-
talgia not only for orality – for the poet as performer, with audible voice and
live audience – but also for musicality, the ancient link between poetry and
music. The desire to restore this link is manifest in many kinds of Romantic
poetry but especially in song, the revival of which was as central to the move-
ment as the revival of romance that gave Romanticism its name. Yet despite
the rage for song-collecting; the large number of new works that labelled
themselves ‘song’ (or some other musical term such as ‘ballad’, ‘hymn’, ‘lay’,
or ‘melody’); and the ubiquity in Romantic poetry of harps, lyres, dulci-
mers, and other musical instruments; what often appeared under this rubric
were not actual songs but ‘pseudo-songs’, words divorced from their music
or words that never had, or were intended to have, any connection with
music. ‘Modern simulacra’, writes Hoagwood, took the place of traditional
songs, and the aspiration to the condition of music often involved no more
than the cultivation of its ‘mirage’.38
Hoagwood’s exposé of the Romantic pseudo-song is unsparing, his
demythologisation of minstrelsy complete (he takes his tone from Harker’s
Fakesong, a comprehensive study of the illusions, deceptions, and frauds
that make up the history of British folk song).39 What this critique does
not allow for, however, is the frequency with which Romantic lyrics ana-
lyse their own musical illusions or aspirations, or use the imagined pres-
ence – but actual absence – of music to foreground their own ‘unheard
melodies’. For Shelley, as for Keats, it is the ‘memory of music fled’ that is
often the starting-point for poetic creation, and the point about the ‘dam-
sel with a dulcimer’ in ‘Kubla Khan’ is that her half-remembered ‘sym-
phony and song’ cannot be revived. The poems, in other words, explore
the very predicament Hoagwood describes, all too aware that verbal mel-
ody, however powerful, is no substitute for musical melody. Such lyrics
are best understood not as pseudo-songs but as poems that, as Hollander
puts it, sing their own song, in emulation of the music they can never
become.40
 The retuning of the sky: Romanticism and lyric 145
A second difficulty with Hoagwood’s approach is that it invokes criteria
of authenticity and originality derived from other areas of Romantic poetics,
and does not take into account that in the sphere of song a very different code
of practice was operative, with different measures of artistic value. ‘National
song’, a type of song widely discussed in this period, brings out these dif-
ferences particularly clearly. The term, introduced by Joseph Ritson in 1783,
refers not to a nation’s official ceremonial song (as in ‘national anthem’, a later
coinage) but to the traditional songs of a nation considered in their entirety.41
The currency of the term reflects growing interest in the cultural origins and
affiliations of genres, and in national canons, but it also underlines the per-
ception of song as a collective rather than an individual mode of creativity:
an art form that originates in and belongs to a community and a tradition.
National song eludes, in this sense, the notions of ownership and originality
associated in Romantic poetics with other types of poetry. Modern concepts
of intertextuality and influence also cease to be meaningful in this context,
so pervasive are the practices of imitation, adaptation, and variation that con-
stitute the history of song. The combination of musical and verbal variabil-
ity amplifies the instability found in all oral literature, and the transfer from
orality to print does little to reduce this, songs continuing to metamorphose
both in their printed form and through performance.42
Nowhere is this variation better demonstrated than in ‘Auld Lang Syne’,
the best known of all national songs. Its attribution to Robert Burns is part
of the popular mythology that surrounds every aspect of this iconic song,
and is likely to prove irremovable from the public imagination. Knowledge
of its actual provenance, however, makes the case even more interesting,
since this is a song Burns collected and transformed, exercising his lyric
gifts not in an act of original creation but in an inspired reworking of an
already much reworked traditional song. The earliest printed form of it is
a broadside, ‘An Excellent and proper New Ballad, Entituled, Old Long
Syne’, conjecturally dated 1701.43 This differs markedly from Burns’ ver-
sion in being double the length; in two parts; written almost entirely in
English, not Scots; and on the theme of emotional rejection. Two lovers,
one named Clorinda (a name Burns would famously use in another con-
text, though not in his version of this song), have been separated from one
another and are living apart: both reflect despairingly on their absent lover,
imagining they have been rejected and forgotten, but vowing eternal fidel-
ity. The song hinges on the idea of remembering and forgetting, as each
lover assumes that only he or she will ever reflect on their time together.
Each of the twelve verses, seven in the male voice (Part i) and five in the
female (Part ii), presents a new stage in the lovers’ confused emotions, and
146 David ­Duff
is followed by a chorus that is not, as later in Burns, about the sharing
of memories, but, on the contrary, about a past happiness that each feels
only he or she will remember – a recollection process that brings, at differ-
ent moments, either great joy (‘My Heart is ravisht with delight, / when
thee I think upon’) or, as here, acute sadness:

Dear will ye give it back my Heart,

since I cannot have thine;
For since with yours ye will not part,
no reason you have mine:
But yet I think I’le let it ly,
within that breast of thine,
Who hath a Thief in every Eye,
to make me live in pain.
For Old long syne my Jo,
for Old long syne,
That thou canst never once reflect,
on Old long syne.
(verse 7)

The male lover’s turmoil is nicely illustrated by these contradictory feel-

ings, a contradiction repeated by Clorinda in the second part and left
unresolved at the end, where the lovers are still apart, reflecting separ-
ately on their plight. In light of what follows, the opening line of the
song, ‘Should Old Acquaintance be forgot’, thus carries a meaning almost
opposite to the one in Burns, since the point here is that an old friendship
has been forgotten, or so the lovers fear; in fact, they are both remem-
bered but never find this out. This tragic irony, and the parallelism of their
lament, are what give poignancy to the song.
The 1701 broadside introduces the ballad as ‘Newly corrected and
amended, with a large and new Edition of several excellent Love Lines’.
The extent of these amendments can be judged from an earlier manuscript
version that has recently come to light in a nobleman’s commonplace book
from the 1660s: this contains several verses that are not found in printed
versions, and a refrain of just two lines: variations on ‘That thou can never
think upon / kind old long syne’, clearly the original hook lines.44 Over the
course of the eighteenth century the song underwent many further changes,
some of which can be traced in surviving song collections. It first reap-
pears, abridged and modified, in James Watson’s Choice Collection of Comic
and Serious Scots Poems Both Ancient and Modern (Edinburgh, 1706–11),
where, confusingly, some of the female verses are transferred to the male,
making it hard to distinguish the two voices (later collections sometimes
 The retuning of the sky: Romanticism and lyric 147
clarify this feature by labelling the second part ‘The Answer’). A few years
later a more drastically transformed version is published by Allan Ramsay
in his Scots Songs (Edinburgh, 1718). Ramsay, a pioneering figure in the
Scottish song revival and an influential literary mediator of popular song,45
completely inverts the original sentiments of the ballad by rewriting it as
‘The Kind Reception’, celebrating a hero’s return from war into the arms of
his faithful lover, in whose voice the whole song is delivered. The refrain is
now reduced to a single phrase, ‘lang syne’, variously incorporated into the
final line of each verse; and unlike the previous pair of lovers, Ramsay’s not
only share their memories but also re-enact them: ‘We’ll please our Selves
with mutual Charms / as we did lang syne’, and ‘We’ll make the Hours run
smooth away, / And laugh at lang syne’ (verses 3, 4). The song ends with
the lovers going to the altar. Though written to the same tune and with the
same opening line, it is debatable whether such a comprehensively altered
version can still be called the same song – an extreme example of the evolu-
tionary process common in the history of song.
In Burns’ hands, the song undergoes further transformation, to acquire
the form by which it is best known today. He published two versions of
‘Auld Lang Syne’, one in Volume v of John Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum
(Edinburgh, 1796), and another, slightly different, in George Thomson’s
Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs (third set, 1799), which appeared
after his death (a third variant exists in manuscript). In a letter to Thomson,
he claims the song had ‘never been in print, nor even in manuscript, until I
took it down from an old man’s singing’,46 the first part of which is palpably
false, since he would have been well aware of previous printings from his
extensive knowledge of Scottish song collections (and indeed a transcrip-
tion of the Ramsay version in his hand survives). His insistence that that
the song derived from oral rather than written sources is typical of ballad-
and song-collectors of the time, and Burns is part of a long tradition of folk
song editors who were economical with the truth. His motives, though,
were artistically complex: by concealing his creative input and presenting
the song as wholly traditional when it had actually been partially rewrit-
ten by himself, Burns absorbs himself into that tradition, an achievement
he appears to value more highly than that of being an original author (a
powerful example of what Janowitz calls the ‘communitarian’ poetics).
In the absence of firm evidence about performed versions he may have
heard, conclusions about the compositional process remain conjectural,
but what seems clear is that Burns mixed elements from previous printed
versions, abridging or deleting some sections, extending or replacing
others, and making a series of artistic adjustments that greatly enhanced
148 David ­Duff
the quality of the song. He follows Ramsay in making it about reunion
rather than separation, but a reunion now of old friends rather than
lovers. Ramsay’s ‘kind reception’ becomes in Burns a scene of exuberant
male camaraderie, the love song metamorphosing into a drinking song
that includes such memorable verses as this last one:
And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!
And gie’s a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll tak a right gude-willie-waught,
For auld lang syne.
(verse 5)47

Burns’ transposition of the song into Scots represents a deepening of its

‘national’ qualities but also an enhancement of its expressive effects, as
illustrated by the multiply alliterative phrase ‘a right gude-willie-waught’
(a hearty drink), which literalises the metaphorical ‘cup o’ kindness’ of the
reinstated chorus and brings to a colourful vernacular climax the drinking
theme that has been building throughout.
Burns’ ear for resonant Scots phrases extends, of course, to ‘auld lang syne’
itself (meaning ‘old long ago’, ‘auld’ acting as a tautological intensifier for the
common Scots phrase ‘lang syne’),48 whose ‘exceedingly expressive’ quality
Burns remarks on in another letter, noting of the original song – in essence,
a lyric fantasia on this phrase – that ‘There is more of the fire of native genius
in it, than in half a dozen of modern English Bacchanalians’.49 Burns uses
his own ‘native genius’ to create a Scots bacchanalian, but he also retains the
pathos of the original love song, converting the lovers’ bitter-sweet reflec-
tions into a poignant nostalgia for childhood friendship that encompasses
the sense both of lost time and lost place. In a few simple words, he evokes an
entire shared world, rooted in a specific national landscape and remembered
all the more fondly for the intervening years of separation (with echoes of the
Highland clearances that so often underpin Scottish parting songs):
We twa hae run about the ­braes,
And pou’d the gowans fine;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fitt,
Sin auld lang syne.
    For auld lang, &c.
We twa hae paidl’d in the burn,
Frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
Sin auld lang syne.
   For auld lang, &c.
(verses 3–4)
 The retuning of the sky: Romanticism and lyric 149
Like Wordsworth in his poetic recollections of a more solitary childhood,
Burns is able to capture the past in precise, seemingly insignificant details
(running over the hillsides, pulling wild daisies, paddling in the stream)
that, focalised and amplified through verse, acquire huge emotional force.
Read as poetry, Burns’ rewriting of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ is a minor master-
piece of Romantic lyric, but it is a lyric ultimately inseparable from the
music to which he set it,50 whether it be the melancholy air of the ori-
ginal song (printed in Johnson) or the more jaunty tune of ‘The Miller’s
Daughter’ substituted in the Thomson edition, which better matches the
mood of his version and is the tune to which it is usually sung and danced
today.
Burns’ unmatched achievements in the making and remaking of
Scottish vernacular song represent one pinnacle of Romantic lyric, and
his poetic career, the last ten years of which were almost exclusively
devoted to song, is a compelling illustration of Tynianov’s thesis about
lyric poetry’s reorientation to music. As a final example, I will turn to
another Romantic poet who was attracted to music, and even wrote a
number of ‘popular songs’ (though not, it seems, for musical accom-
paniment),51 but whose greatest accomplishments were in more elevated,
Classical forms of lyric. Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ shows how the
grandest of all lyric forms – the Pindaric ode – could be remade so as
to sing its own song while losing none of its oratorical power and at the
same time yielding itself as a vehicle for impassioned self-expression and
self-analysis. As such, it marks a synthesis of the different kinds of lyri-
cism I have considered in this chapter, and the fulfilment of Shelley’s
search for ‘a language in itself music and persuasion’.52 Shelley applies
this description to Dante but it also defines his own ideal of poetic com-
munication, an ideal realised in the lyric eloquence of the ‘Ode to the
West Wind’. Implementing this through the medium of the Pindaric ode
meant harnessing the ode’s formal and linguistic conventions in a highly
original way, and ­combining the ode with other lyric forms in an equally
innovative act of genre-mixing.
As so often in Romantic poetry, though, innovation also involves a
return to origins. Shelley restores the apostrophic, mythopoeic, metaphoric
essence of the Pindaric ode. He removes the neoclassical accretions – the
prefabricated grandeur and bombastic formulas of many eighteenth-cen-
tury odes – and attains genuine sublimity and audacity, taking the ode
form to daring new heights. Like Gray and Collins before him, he regular-
ises the Pindaric, but does so in a new way that both enhances its expres-
sive power and strengthens the emotional and imaginative ‘logic’ described
by Young. Of the poem’s apostrophic qualities there can be no doubt. The
150 David ­Duff
whole poem is an extended address to the wind. Each of the five sections
renews the apostrophe, the exclamatory ‘O’ appearing no fewer than eight
times. ‘Thou’ appears eleven times, and there are many other ‘thee’s and
‘thine’s, this accumulation of vocatives enacting the summoning that is
the essence of the figure of apostrophe. This is performative language in its
strongest form: lyric as ‘amplified exclamation in verse’ (Arthur K. Moore’s
apt definition)53 but also as exhortation. The poem begins as an appeal, a
summons, and ends as a prayer.
The high turnover of metaphor, a much discussed feature of Shelley’s
style, is one of the factors that impart imaginative momentum to the
poem. But the dynamism is generated too by its form. This is a Pindaric
ode, but of a highly unusual kind. It has the thematic transitions we would
expect of a Pindaric, and the corresponding emotional transitions, but
structurally the five sections are identical: the poem is regular and mono-
strophic. However, it is regularised in a very special way because each sec-
tion consist of a fourteen-line sonnet, a formal innovation unique to this
poem. Moreover, the sonnet form itself has undergone crucial modifica-
tion: the volta has been removed and the Italian octave/sestet or English
quatrains have been converted into four groups of terza rima followed by
a final rhyming couplet (creating another five-part structure mirroring the
five sections of the poem). The conjunction of ode form and sonnet form,
and of sonnet form and terza rima, creates some interesting effects. The
sonnet is a self-contained form with its own poetic logic, which depends
on rapid exposition, drastic compression, and neat closure (its ‘metho-
dizing’ qualities, in Coleridge’s term). Shelley harnesses this sonnet logic:
each section is a discrete exposition of one aspect of his theme, one mani-
festation of the wind’s power; and each moves to the partial closure of the
final couplet. But it is only a partial closure, because the first three sections
all end on a note of anticipation, with the words ‘O hear!’. These have a
­cumulative anticipatory effect – we listen and wait, ever more urgently –
and indeed metaphors of accumulation abound in the poem. The ‘con-
gregated might’ – or ‘vault’ – of line 26 is a perfect emblem of the poem’s
own formal architecture and compressed power.
The terza rima, meanwhile, contributes its own dynamic energy, the
point about this verse form being that the rhyme always carries forward.
It is thus a perfect formal vehicle for describing motion or journeys (as in
Dante’s Divine Comedy), and by the same token it is a perfect way of sug-
gesting the onward, driving force of the wind. The substitution of quat-
rain for terza rima accelerates the sonnet form, and the sonnet form – the
sonnet sequence – in turn increases the momentum of the ode. No other
 The retuning of the sky: Romanticism and lyric 151
poem captures so effectively the sensation of speed, of raw elemental force.
Yet at the same time the elaborate formal architecture contains that force,
amplifying but also controlling and directing it.
The question of control becomes explicit in the final two sections,
where for the first time in the poem Shelley uses the first person singular.
This is the lyrical ‘I’ to the apostrophised ‘Thou’. It is here that we get to
‘hear’ the poet’s deferred message. At this point, however, the rhetorical
confidence of the earlier sections wavers. Syntactically, we move from the
imperative to the conditional, with an anaphoric sequence of ‘if ’ clauses,
one of many instances of grammatical parallelism in the poem. The three
‘if ’ clauses recapitulate the leaf, cloud, and wave analogies of the earlier
sections, as Shelley imagines himself subject to the wind’s influence and
able to partake of its strength. Only in line 51 is the conditional construc-
tion completed, as Shelley admits that he is not part of the natural cycle
and therefore must, in his ‘sore need’, resort to ‘prayer’. But the prayer
fails, and there is a sudden, near-total collapse: ‘I fall upon the thorns of
life! I bleed!’. This should not be read literally: it is the conventionalised
cry of despair of the poet-prophet, as in the Book of Psalms, another of
his odic models along with Pindar. But it is a collapse nonetheless, and the
section ends at an emotional low-point:
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

Even as he voices his despair, however, the poet regains his lyrical strength,
and, in another spectacular odic transition, the last section returns to the
apostrophic, imperative mode: ‘Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is’. In
a final, bold reversal, Shelley turns the tables on the wind and achieves the
identification deemed impossible moments earlier. Instead of ‘I’ – Shelley –
being like ‘you’ – the Wind – ‘Be thou, Spirit fierce, / My spirit! Be thou
me, impetuous one!’ Shelley is now both wind and winged seed; transmit-
ted and transmitter; his own apocalyptic clarion, blowing the ‘trumpet of a
prophecy’; and his own fire source, whose words are like ‘ashes and sparks’
from an ‘unextinguished hearth’, to rekindle revolutionary hope.
Shelley’s poem, then, is an act both of persuasion and of self-exami-
nation, an oratorical lyric and a confessional one. Like the introspective,
‘self-watching’ lyrics described earlier, it charts an emotional and imagina-
tive trajectory, using the structural devices of the ode and sonnet to take us
through a complex meditative sequence at astonishing speed. Its expressive
mode, however, is declamatory rather than conversational, involving not
the linguistic modulations found in Coleridge’s blank-verse conversation
152 David ­Duff
poems or ‘Tintern Abbey’, but a sustained rhetorical performance in the
highest poetic register. To call this language ‘melodious’ is to give little
idea of either its sonic properties or its signifying power: however carefully
orchestrated, this is poetic language in which no element of meaning has
been sacrificed to pure sound, and in which the grammatical and logical
structure is as tight as the metrical architecture and rhyme scheme. Yet the
sound patterns of the poem have their own expressive function, and the
‘incantation’ referred to in line 65 is an accurate description of the rhyth-
mic and melodic effects of the verse, with its elaborate syntactic and phon-
etic parallelism and insistent forward motion.54 In a quite literal sense, this
is a poem that demands to be heard, not merely read on the page. In this
respect, Shelley’s ode is an example of musicalised lyric too, more than
earning its symbol of the lyre in line 57, even if the music produced in this
retuned sky is irreducibly verbal and message-laden.

Notes
1 James Montgomery, Lectures on Poetry and General Literature (London, 1833),
p. 195.
2 Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 2 vols. (London, 1783), Vol.
ii, p. 355.
3 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads 1805, ed.
Derek Roper, 2nd edn (Plymouth: Macdonald and Evans, 1976), preface
p. 22.
4 Original preface to Francis Turner Palgrave, ed., The Golden Treasury of the
Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language: With an Introduction and
Additional Poems Selected and Arranged by C. Day Lewis (London: Collins,
1954), p. 21.
5 ‘Frost at Midnight’ (first printed version, line 26), in Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Fears in Solitude: Written in 1798, during the Alarm of an Invasion. To which are
added, France, an Ode; and Frost at Midnight (London, 1798), p. 20.
6 Joseph Trapp, ‘Of Lyric Poetry’, in Lectures on Poetry … Translated from the
Latin (London, 1742), pp. 202–9 (p. 203); Edward Young, ‘On Lyrick Poetry’,
appended to Ocean: An Ode (London, 1728), pp. 14–30.
7 Letter to Mason, January 1759, quoted by Penelope Wilson, ‘“High Pindaricks
upon Stilts”: A Case Study in the Eighteenth-Century Classical Tradition’, in
Rediscovering Hellenism: The Hellenic Inheritance and the English Imagination,
ed. G. W. Clarke (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 23–41 (p. 26).
8 William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (London, 1767), pp. 270, 282–4.
9 M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical
Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 23.
10 M. H. Abrams, ‘Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric’ (1965), in
Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New
York: Norton, 1970), pp. 210–29.
 The retuning of the sky: Romanticism and lyric 153
11 Preface to Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, p. 23.
12 David Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford University Press,
2009), p. 204.
13 See Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986), pp. 29–55.
14 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Introduction to the Sonnets’, in Poems, by S. T.
Coleridge, Second Edition. To which are now Added Poems by Charles Lamb,
and Charles Lloyd (Bristol, 1797), pp. 71–4.
15 C. Day Lewis, in Palgrave, The Golden Treasury, p. 17.
16 In his collected poems, Sibylline Leaves (London, 1817).
17 For a lucid critique of such approaches, see Sarah M. Zimmerman,
Romanticism, Lyricism, and History (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1999), pp. 1–37.
18 The link between form and history in the 1798 pamphlet is explored by David
Fairer, Organising Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–1798 (Oxford University
Press, 2009), pp. 285–308.
19 Theodor Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’ (1957), in Poetry in Theory:
An Anthology 1900–2000 ed. Jon Cook (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 343–9
(p. 347).
20 Anne Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge
University Press, 1998), pp. 52–6.
21 Preface to Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, p. 42.
22 George Dyer, ‘Essay on Representative Poetry’, in Poems, 2 vols. (London,
1802), Vol. ii, pp. 4–5. For Dyer’s implicit dialogue with Wordsworth, see
Janowitz, Lyric and Labour, pp. 52–3.
23 John Thelwall, ‘On Lyrical Poetry’, in The Poetical Recreations of The Champion
(London, 1822).
24 Judith Thompson, John Thelwall in the Wordsworth Circle: The Silenced Partner
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 235–53.
25 Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 50–1, 91–4; Walter Pater, The Renaissance:
Studies in Art and Poetry. The 1893 Text (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1980), p. 109. For other examples, see Peter Le Huray and James Day,
eds., Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
(Cambridge University Press, 1981).
26 Ezra Pound, ‘How to Read’ (1927–8), in his Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot
(London: Faber and Faber, 1954), p. 25.
27 Boris Eikhenbaum, The Melodics of Verse (1922), cited by Victor Erlich, Russian
Formalism: History-Doctrine, 3rd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981),
pp. 222–3. See also Yuri Tynianov, ‘The Ode as an Oratorical Genre’ (1927),
trans. Ann Shukman, New Literary History 34.3 (2003), 565–96 (p. 566).
28 John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry
1500–1700 (Princeton University Press, 1961). See David Lindley, ‘“Words for
music, perhaps”: early modern songs and lyric’, above, pp. 10–29.
29 See e.g. Zachary Leader, ‘Lyrical Ballads: The Title Revisited’, in 1800: The New
‘Lyrical Ballads’, ed. Nicola Trott and Seamus Perry (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2001), pp. 23–43.
154 David ­Duff
30 William Wordsworth, Shorter Poems, 1807–1820, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 633.
31 Place of publication in each case is London.
32 John Aikin, preface to Essays on Song-Writing: With a Collection of Such English
Songs as Are Most Eminent for Poetical Merit (London, 1772), p. iv.
33 Cited by Jon A. Gillaspie in the entry for Dibdin (c. 1745–1814) in the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography. For his place in the history of theatrical
song, see Roger Fiske, English Theatre Music in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford
University Press, 1973), pp. 348–59.
34 Wordsworth, ‘Essay, Supplementary to the Preface’ (1815), in Shorter Poems,
p. 653.
35 Imperial Review (November 1804), quoted by John Jordan, Why the Lyrical
Ballads? The Background, Writing, and Character of Wordsworth’s 1798 “Lyrical
Ballads” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 71–2.
36 Erik Simpson, Literary Minstrelsy, 1770–1830: Minstrels and Improvisers in
British, Irish, and American Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2008), p. 1.
37 Maureen N. McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British
Romantic Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 144.
38 Terence Allan Hoagwood, From Song to Print: Romantic Pseudo-Songs (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. xi, xiv.
39 Dave Harker, Fakesong: The Manufacturing of British ‘Folksong’ 1700 to the
Present Day (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985).
40 John Hollander, ‘Romantic Verse Form and the Metrical Contract’ (1965), in
Bloom, Romanticism and Consciousness, pp. 181–200 (p. 182).
41 ‘A Historical Essay on the Origin and Progress of National Song’, in A Select
Collection of English Songs, [ed. Joseph Ritson], 3 vols. (London, 1783), Vol. i,
pp. i–lxxii.
42 See Kirsteen McCue, ‘“An individual flowering on a common stem”: Melody,
Performance and National Song’, in Romanticism and Popular Culture in
Britain, ed. Philip Connell and Nigel Leask (Cambridge University Press,
2009), pp. 89–106.
43 Quotations below are from the copy in the National Library of Scotland,
available in digital facsimile at http://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/broadside.cfm/
id/14548/criteria/old long syne (last accessed 1 June 2013).
44 Manuscript commonplace book of James Crichton, second Viscount
Frendraught, exhibited at The Morgan Library and Museum, New York,
December 2011–February 2012, partially available in digital facsimile at www.
themorgan.org/exhibitions/online/AuldLangSyne/ (last accessed 1 June 2013).
45 See Thomas Crawford, Society and the Lyric: A Study of the Song Culture of
Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1979);
and Steve Newman, Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the
Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2007), pp. 44–96.
 The retuning of the sky: Romanticism and lyric 155
46 Early September 1793: Robert Burns, The Letters of Robert Burns, 2 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), ed. G. Ross Roy and J. DeLancey Ferguson,
Vol. ii, p. 246. Thomson quotes this remark in a later edition of the Select
Collection, remarking that Burns probably said it ‘merely in a playful humour’,
since the song ‘affords evidence of our Bard himself being the author’. In
Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum, Burns modifies his position, signing the
poem ‘Z’, a code denoting ‘old verses, with corrections or additions’. For a
review of the debate about authorship, see introduction to The Songs of Robert
Burns, ed. Donald A. Low (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 25–7, which
concludes contradictorily that Burns’ disclaimer to Thomson ‘ought to be
believed’ but that the song ‘seems to bear his stamp’ (p. 27).
47 The text used here is the Johnson version, as given in Low’s edition of the
Songs, ibid.,
48 My thanks to J. Derrick McLure for advice on the linguistic history of this
phrase.
49 To Mrs Dunlop, 7 December 1788, in Burns, Letters, Vol. i, p. 345.
50 For an exemplary analysis of Burnsian song as ‘text-tune complex’, see
Catarina Ericson-Roos, The Songs of Robert Burns: A Study of the Unity of
Poetry and Music (University of Uppsala, 1977).
51 See Jessica K. Quillin, Shelley and the Musico-Poetics of Romanticism (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2012); and Susan J. Wolfson, ‘Popular Songs and Ballads: Writing
the “Unwritten Story” in 1819’, in The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley,
ed. Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe (Oxford University Press, 2012), pp.
341–58.
52 ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (1821), in Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and
Prose (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 499. All quotations below are from this
edition.
53 Arthur K. Moore, The Secular Lyric in Middle English (Lexington: University
of Kentucky Press, 1951), p. 6.
54 For these features of the poem as agents of ‘lyric transport’, see my ‘Melodies
of Mind: Poetic Forms as Cognitive Structures’, in Cognition, Literature, and
History, ed. Mark Bruhn and Donald Wehrs (New York: Routledge, forth-
coming, 2013).
 ­c h apter ei ght

Victorian lyric pathology and phenomenology

Marion Thain

In 1889, John Addington Symonds declared the significance of the lyric

genre within poetry of the nineteenth century: ‘No literature and no age
has been more fertile of lyric poetry than English literature in the age of
Victoria.’1 Even when we discover that Symonds is loose enough in his
designation of ‘Victorian poetry’ to include much of the Romantic poets’
work, this might still come as a surprise when our established critical
narrative characterises nineteenth-century literature through the grow-
ing importance of the novel and of narrative and dramatic poetic forms.
Critics have long written of a ‘crisis’ in lyric poetry in the nineteenth cen-
tury caused by the dominance of the novel in the literary marketplace. For
example, Carol Christ wrote at length about ‘The Victorians’ concern with
what they feel are the dangers of Romantic subjectivity’ and lyric poetry’s
preoccupation with the self. Christ finds continuities between Victorian
and modernist poetics in the search for more ‘objective’ poetic forms of
expression to engage better with the modern world and a novel-reading
public.2 Herbert Tucker, in what is still one of the most engaging essays
written on dramatic monologue, also argues that Browning’s Dramatic
Lyrics, or what Arthur Hallam described as Tennyson’s ‘graft of the lyric
on the dramatic’, ‘began as a response to lyric isolationism’.3 It is this con-
junction of the apparent pre-eminence of lyric and the threat of its irrele-
vance due to its introspective nature that marks the particular interest of
this period in lyric history.
These can be seen, through closer examination of Symonds’ essay, to be
two sides of the same coin. The essay is ostensibly, as it proclaims through
its own title, ‘A Comparison of Elizabethan with Victorian Poetry’, and
this long piece is an extended analysis, from the end of the era, of the
nature of Victorian lyric poetry. As such it provides a substantial, illu-
minating, and thus far critically overlooked piece of evidence on how the
concept of ‘lyric’ poetry was conceived at this time. In the essay, Symonds
argues for the significance of lyric among the poetic genres on the basis
156
 Victorian lyric pathology and ­phenomenology 157
that the novel has come to occupy the space that used to be taken by other
forms of poetry: ‘just as the novel has absorbed our forces for the drama,
so has it satisfied our thirst for epical narration’. What is left to poetry,
in Symonds’ taxonomy is classified under two headings: the ‘idyll’ and
the ‘lyric’. The idyll includes ‘all narrative and descriptive poetry’, while
lyric encompasses all that poetry which is subjective and introspective:
‘The genius of our century, debarred from epic, debarred from drama, falls
back upon idyllic and lyrical expression. In the idyll it satisfies its objective
craving after art. In the lyric it pours fourth personality.’4 Symonds’ essay
suggests that the growing importance of the lyric genre within poetry is a
result of the same erosion of the importance of poetry within the literary
marketplace as a whole. The more poetry was defined in relation to and
in opposition with the novel, the more it was equated with lyric as its
quintessential form. A key marker of the rise of lyric within the decline
of poetry is the 1861 publication of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. While the
general readership for poetry dwindled, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, a book
aimed at the mass, middle-class, reading public, was thriving. Marjorie
Perloff has noted how the publication marks an important moment in
‘the codification of Romantic theory, with its gradual privileging of the
lyric above the other literary modes’.5 The volume both reflects and is a
formative moment in the Victorian conception of lyric as a short poetic
form (that which can be extracted and printed within the Treasury) and
one associated with introspective subjectivity. To quote the introduction:
‘Lyrical has been here held essentially to imply that each Poem shall turn
on some single thought, feeling, or situation. In accordance with this, nar-
rative, descriptive, and didactic poems – unless accompanied by rapidity
of movement, brevity, and the colouring of human passion – have been
excluded.’6
Yet, in a continuation of the process David Duff describes at the start of
the century (see above, pp. 136–40), ‘lyric’ was simultaneously becoming
an ever more capacious category, and Symonds meditates on the multipli-
city of forms lyric can take:
But what a complex thing is this Victorian lyric! It includes Wordsworth’s
sonnets and Rossetti’s ballads, Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’ and Keats’
odes, Clough’s ‘Easter Day’ and Tennyson’s ‘Maud’, Swinburne’s ‘Songs
before Sunrise’ and Browning’s ‘Dramatic Personae’, Thomson’s ‘City of
Dreadful Night’ and Mary Robinson’s ‘Handful of Honeysuckles’, Andrew
Lang’s Ballades and Sharp’s ‘Weird of Michael Scot’, Dobson’s dealings with
the eighteenth century and Noel’s ‘Child’s Garland’, Barnes’s Dorsetshire
Poems and Buchanan’s London Lyrics, the songs from Empedocles on
158 Marion ­Thain
Etna and Ebenezer Jones’s ‘Pagan’s Drinking Chaunt’, Shelley’s Ode
to the West Wind and Mrs Browning’s ‘Pan is Dead’, Newman’s hymns
and Gosse’s Chaunt Royal. The Kaleidoscope presented by this lyric is so
inexhaustible…7
Lyric, as Symonds notes, was by the end of the nineteenth century not
a particular song form of poetry, but was gradually encompassing a var-
iety of forms and modes. What is interesting about Symonds’ list is that
‘song’ appears within it as something of a dead metaphor for lyric of many
different formal hues, from the ballads and the odes to the chaunts and
hymns.
John Stuart Mill’s earlier and much better known essay – ‘Thoughts on
Poetry and Its Varieties’ – helps to establish this case from the other end
of the period. Originally published as two separate pieces in The Monthly
Repository (1833), in it Mill writes that ‘Lyric poetry, as it was the earliest
kind, is also, if the view we are now taking of poetry be correct, more
eminently and peculiarly poetry than any other.’8 Mill may have been
criticised by his contemporaries and by recent scholars for characteris-
ing all poetry as lyric, but in doing so he was identifying an ongoing
trajectory to lyric’s poetic pre-eminence. Significantly, both Mill and
Symonds emphasise the role of print in defining Victorian lyric. For Mill
it is a ‘soliloquy’ staged for the reader on ‘hot-pressed paper’: a print per-
formance ‘overheard’ not aurally but through the pages and between the
covers.9 Symonds elaborates much more on this essential quality of the
modern lyric, meditating on the separation of the printed lyric poem
from any actual song tradition. He devotes considerable space in this
essay to elaborating the idea that while Elizabethan lyric poems ‘are the
right verbal counterpart to vocal and instrumental melody’, ‘We discover
but little of this quality in the lyrics of the Victorian age.’ ‘It is notice-
able’, he goes on, ‘that those poets upon whom we are apt to set the least
store now, as Byron, Scott, Hood, Campbell, Moore, Barry Cornwall,
Mrs. Hemans, possessed it in greater perfection than their more illus-
trious ­contemporaries.’ In a marked change from the Wordsworthian
description of ‘lyrical’ poems quoted by David Duff in the previous chap-
ter (‘for the production of their full effect, an accompaniment of music
is indispensable’, p. 141), for Symonds it is a mark of the better poetry of
the age that it exploits its textual medium so it can exist complete with-
out added music: ‘the best lyrics of the Victorian age are not made to
be sung’. Symonds recognises that the lyric poem has become a textual
genre that, while it may be set to music, exists on its own terms, find-
ing its melody within itself rather than in an accompanying strain. ‘The
 Victorian lyric pathology and ­phenomenology 159
Victorian lyric’, he concludes, is less spontaneous and song-like than the
Elizabethan, but ‘superior in its range, suggestiveness, variety and rich-
ness’; it ‘corresponds to the highly-strung and panharmonic instrument
of the poet’s spirit which produced it, and to the manifold sympathies
of the reader’s mind for which it was intended’.10 While it is possible to
trace an ongoing song tradition over the Victorian period that would tie
neatly to a preconceived definition of lyric, I want to focus here on how
far lyric has travelled from an identification with song. This chapter is
about what ‘lyric’ poetry becomes when it can no longer so easily find its
core identity in song and when even the figure of oral transaction with an
audience has become a site of anxiety.
To compare Mill’s analysis with Symonds’ is to book-end the Victorian
period, and it is striking how both present Victorian poetry as character-
ised by what we might call, to borrow a term from Matthew Rowlinson,
the ‘totalization’ of lyric in print: ‘only in the nineteenth century does
print become for lyric the hegemonic medium’. This is a process that
gained momentum over the course of the century, and by 1889 Symonds
theorises it more fully than Mill. As Rowlinson notes: ‘by the 1860s British
lyric poetry displays a new sense of confronting the prior history of lyric
as a totality, a sense which I have argued results from confronting it in
print’. Moreover, the Victorian lyric became itself an archive of its own
imagined lyric heritage: ‘print-lyric was able to incorporate the totality of
its own antecedents, becoming the medium for a coherent summing up of
its own history. Such an appearance can only be sustained by innumerable
omissions and forgettings, as we can see by the prominence of fragments
in the lyric canon’.11 I think Symonds refers to something similar when he
writes that ‘Victorian poetry is in large measure the criticism of all existing
literatures.’12
Lyric had become a poetic genre in which the aural (and the manu-
script) incarnation was now combined with and mediated through
print as the mode of transmission that subsumed all others – although
it is important to note that this is not a claim for print providing text-
ual stability. Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, first
published in 1859, went through five different editions up to 1889 (a
posthumous edition, after FitzGerald’s death in 1883), each edition
presenting a rather different text: expanded, revised, and changed in
various, sometimes quite radical, ways. Christopher Decker has doc-
umented the impossibility of identifying one ‘definitive’ text for this
work.13 The text itself is a selection of verses taken from manuscript
sources in the Bodleian and in Calcutta, ‘mashed’ and ‘tessellated’
160 Marion ­Thain
together, as FitzGerald himself described his method. This involved
not only rearranging the order of the quatrains but ‘creating com-
pletely new ones by conflating lines and images from more than one
of the originals’.14 Add to this FitzGerald’s linguistic misunderstandings
of his sources and his attempt to Hellenise and orientalise them,15 and
one sees how the text is an important example of how a rich aural and
manuscript history of lyric was contained within, combined with, and
superseded by a print rendition of it that largely fabricated its own pre-
Romantic generic origins.
When Symonds writes of lyric as a form now written to be read rather
than heard he is identifying an anxiety newly prominent in the age of
mass print,16 which echoes Mill’s earlier formulation of poetry as a pri-
vate, interiorised mode whose isolation on the page renders it ‘overheard’,
rather than heard, by the reader.17 The accepted critical narrative tells a
history of lyric that sees it as progressively more and more isolated from
its addressee – a process that we can see as culminating in the ‘lyric cri-
sis’ of the nineteenth century.18 Jonathan Culler recently summarised this
narrative with reference to work by W. R. Johnson in the following way:
‘the Greek lyric is direct, addressed to its real audience, while the modern
lyric is no longer addressed and is therefore solipsistic’.19 Typically, Culler
asserts, ‘the classical is held up as a norm to suggest the individualistic,
alienated character of the modern’.20 The modern lyric (roughly 1780 to
the present), then, is characterised in this narrative by a failure to connect
with ‘you’. In fact, this is a narrative written by nineteenth-century com-
mentators, from Mill to J. A. Symonds; and late-nineteenth-century poets,
certainly, often show awareness of their own practice as underpinned by
a sense of the lost lyric address.21 There are many possible lines to follow
through the set of concerns traced above, but in the rest of this chapter I
will explore just two responses. The first, which I introduce only briefly,
is what has been seen as an emblematic ‘turn’ to the dramatic monologue
by some Victorian poets in the first half of the period as an escape from
lyric introspection, and the latter a much less well recognised reconsider-
ation of lyric that came along with the influence of Decadence and aes-
theticism in the second half. This emphasis builds on well-established
discussions of a mid-Victorian problematisation of lyric in order to draw
attention to a connected but much less discussed part of Victorian lyric
history. Accounts of lyric history tend to skip from Browning, Arnold,
and Tennyson straight to high modernism, with the strict-form poems of
Decadence and aestheticism often ignored or omitted.22 Yet this poetry
represents a major feature within the period (and is more representative
 Victorian lyric pathology and ­phenomenology 161
than the work of poets such as G. M. Hopkins who are more easily assim-
ilated to our current lyric canon), and is one I deal with in the second half
of this chapter.
Robert Browning’s complex struggle with the concept of lyric poetry,
specifically, is a prominent feature of the mid-Victorian critique that
interests me here. His writing on Shelley presents a dichotomy central to
a consideration of the nineteenth-century lyric: that between the subject-
ive and objective poet. The subjective poet writes a transcendent poetry,
spiritually motivated rather than directed towards the earthly realm. ‘He’
does not craft but rather exudes, and ‘That effluence cannot be easily con-
sidered in abstraction from his personality, – being indeed the very radi-
ance and aroma of his personality, projected from it but not separated.’
The ‘objective poet’ ‘chooses to deal with the doings of men (the result
of which dealing, in its pure form, when even description, as suggesting
a describer is dispensed with, is what we call dramatic poetry)’. The ‘sub-
jective poet’, on the other hand, ‘prefers to dwell upon those external sce-
nic appearances which strike out most abundantly and uninterruptedly
his inner light and power, selects the silence of the earth and sea in which
he can best hear the beating of his individual heart’. Browning makes it
clear that these different modes of poetry are commonly found intermin-
gled, yet it is also clear that the subjective poet is associated here with
the Romantics, and the objective with the dramatic, with Shakespeare,
and by implication with Browning himself.23 Crucially, Browning was
alienated by what he took to be a Romantic introspection, without want-
ing to abandon lyric altogether. The ‘dramatic lyric’ hybrid form is the
best recognised result of his desire to make poetry more socially relevant
(although Britta Martens argues convincingly that even when he doesn’t
use a dramatic persona, the tussle is still evident).24 It is not surprising to
see that the continuing rise of lyric over the nineteenth century went hand
in hand with poets’ desire to find forms newly alternative to the dominant
lyric model – even if lyric’s capacity to absorb those forms back into itself
is also quite astonishing.25 When Browning was using the dramatic lyric it
was part of a self-conscious effort to write something that both was and
was not lyric, as Britta Martens has documented. This ambivalence is well
expressed in a letter to John Kenyon of 1855:
In your remarks on the little or no pleasure you derive from dramatic – in
comparison with lyric – poetry … I partake your feeling to a great degree:
lyric is the oldest, most natural, most poetical of poetry, and I would always
get it if I could: but I find in these latter days that one has a great deal to
say, and try and get attended to, which is out of the lyrical element and
162 Marion ­Thain
capability – and I am forced to take the nearest way to it: and then it is
undeniable that the common reader is susceptible to plot, story, and the
simplest form of putting a matter ‘Said I’, ‘Said He’ & so on.26
Again, lyric is revered while simultaneously in danger of becoming
irrelevant.
Indeed, Browning seems more interested in dramatising a commen-
tary on lyric than in writing it. This is true not just of poems such as
‘Transcendentalism’, in which, as critics have noted, the injunction to
‘sing’ rather than ‘speak’ is not borne out in the poem’s own register.27
In ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church’ we see, to be
sure, a humorous satire of the excesses of the clergy, which has been linked
to various historical sources, but we also surely see a dramatisation of the
lyric subject who insists on fashioning his own immortal monument in
stanzaic form.28 Written in 1845, it was composed before D. G. Rossetti
proclaimed in print the sonnet as a ‘moment’s monument’ – ‘memorial
from the soul’s eternity’, carved in ebony or ivory – yet it is nonetheless
resonant with the idea of lyric Rossetti reflects.29 The charge of ‘Vanity…
vanity!’ might be Browning’s charge to the personal lyric poet as much as
to the luxuriant bishop, and the bishop’s lavish tomb might be equated
with Rossetti’s embellished sonnet. Indeed, Browning’s poem consists
almost entirely of the bishop’s instructions to his interlocutors for the con-
struction of his monument, every detail of which he specifies in a manner
similar to the formal crafting of the lyric poet: the spatial and decorative
construction set up an echo between the elaborate room of the lyric stanza
and the tomb of ‘peach-blossom marble’ with its curlicues of lapis lazuli
and jasper. A poem in key part in blank verse and running to 125 lines,
this is no sonnet but a poem that perhaps refuses the memorialising of the
lyric stanza in order to satirise the voice that might seek to command it.
To read Browning’s interest in the psychology of pathological poetic sub-
jects as commentary on lyric might be to recognise not only the gendered
and social politics of his dramatic monologues, but also a pathologisation
of what the lyric transaction has come to appear in a totalised print poet-
ics. In ‘My Last Duchess’, in the 1842 Dramatic Lyrics collection, the duke’s
need for complete control over his environment – ‘Oh sir, she smiled, no
doubt, / Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without / Much the same
smile? This grew; I gave commands; / Then the smiles stopped together’ –
might be that of the solipsistic lyric subject, separated from meaningful
interaction with the lyric ‘you’ and confined to a damaging introspection
that yields only delusion.30 The lyric stalker of ‘Christina’ (also in Dramatic
Lyrics) also highlights the dangers of living too much in one’s own mind:
 Victorian lyric pathology and ­phenomenology 163
‘She should never have looked at me / If she meant I should not love her!’
His declared possession of her, from just one glance, and his conviction
that he has found the secret to some transcendent experience is presented
here as the sickness of the love lyric.31 Most compellingly as a meditation on
lyric pathology is ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ (again from Dramatic Lyrics), where
the subject’s response to his final certainty that Porphyria ‘worships’ him
is to strangle her with her own hair. This he does to preserve the moment
at which ‘she was mine, mine, fair, / Perfectly pure and good’, and to fend
off the reality that outside this perfect moment she was ‘too weak’ to sever
herself from ‘vainer ties’ and ‘give herself to me for ever’.32 A parody of
the lyric subject’s immortalisation of the beloved lyric addressee in liter-
ary form, the woman is preserved as a love object – idolised, silenced, and
eternally beautiful. Browning again denounces the solipsism of the lyric ‘I’,
who appears pathologically disconnected from society and from the living
reality of any other individual. Originally paired with ‘Johannes Agricola in
Meditation’, neither this poem nor its companion appeared with an indi-
vidual title, both going under the heading ‘Madhouse Cells’. The inspir-
ation for ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ is perhaps the news item from Blackwood’s
Magazine described in the Complete Poems, but the title also enables echoes
of J. S. Mill’s 1833 description of lyric as ‘like the lament of a prisoner in a
solitary cell, ourselves listening, unseen in the next’.33 Browning’s heading
suggests the lyric stanza itself might be the ‘madhouse cell’ in which his
deranged subjects can be found. Mill’s intriguing analogy was erased when
he republished the essay ‘What Is Poetry?’, but it was certainly available as
an intertext for Browning.
While, later in the century, Swinburne’s ‘The Leper’ might be seen
as a continuation and intensification of the experiments of Browning’s
‘Porphyria’s Lover’, it is, crucially, a continuation that reclaims and cel-
ebrates much of what was problematic for the earlier generation. Here the
lyric subject – a clerk – takes in the lady he used to serve when she has
been cast out of her family for carrying plague. While she once scorned
him, she has no choice but to succumb to his sexual attentions as she
lies dying in his ‘care’ – attentions that continue after her death. As with
Browning’s narrators, the clerk’s position is questioned within the poem:
in part through his own nagging feeling that he perhaps hasn’t quite han-
dled things appropriately. Yet aestheticism’s legacy in the final third of
the nineteenth century was precisely to endorse the aesthetics, in spite of
the morals, of the clerk’s position: to unhinge aesthetic appreciation from
moral imperatives, and to be able to find beauty in decay. The textual erot-
ics of the poem enable a reclamation of lyric even within this scenario, the
164 Marion ­Thain
repetition of ‘well’ throughout the first stanza setting up an aesthetic in
which ‘ill’ can become ‘well’. This inversion is worked through the poem,
as the description of the lady in passionate embrace with her old true love
is textually mirrored by the clerk’s interaction with her. The knight ‘held
her by the hair’ while the clerk plaits her hair; the knight ‘with kissing
lips blinded her eyes’ while it is implied that the clerk has ‘worn off’ her
eyelids after her death (her eyes now really blind) with his kisses; her tears
and cries at the knights embrace are mirrored by the lips that ‘turn to cry’
when she asks the clerk to be left in peace; the ‘body broken up with love’
becomes the body broken by plague. The mirrorings and linguistic pat-
terns in the poem set up an erotic logic to the clerk’s acts that has its own
aesthetic momentum.34 While lyric may have been unwittingly, and per-
haps regretfully, pathologised by Mill, and deliberately so by Browning,
Decadence was able to reclaim the genre through its own deep affinity
with the very terms of that pathology.35
Of course many poets in the early part of this period did not question
lyric in the way that Browning, Tennyson, and Arnold did, and, equally,
many dramatic poems continued to be written at the fin de siècle, but the
publication of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (1861) together with the appear-
ance of volumes such as Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads in 1866 marked
something of a new phase in the formation of the genre. I devote the rest
of this chapter to thinking about an engagement with lyric subjectivity in
the final third of the century. Not only did the Treasury begin to cement
a particular definition of lyric and a story of its history, but Swinburne’s
volume was credited by some influential commentators with opening the
door for a new phase of lyric publications.36 Herbert Tucker has writ-
ten of ‘The fin-de-siècle purism of Wilde, Yeats, Arthur Symons, [and]
others’ in the later part of the century, who ‘wanted Mill’s pure lyricism
but wanted it even purer’. For Tucker, this part of the Victorian period
represents a ‘nostalgia for lyric … that never was on page or lip’: ‘It was,
rather, a generic back-formation, a textual constituent they isolated from
the dramatic monologue and related nineteenth-century forms; and the
featureless poems the fin-de-siècle purists produced by factoring out the
historical impurities that had ballasted these forms are now fittingly,
with rare exceptions, works of little more than historical interest.’ For
Tucker, as for many others, this is a blip in the story of poetry before
modernism returned again to ‘the historically responsive and dialogical
mode that Browning, Tennyson and others had brought forward from
the Romantics’.37 Decadent poets appear to regress to the lyric solipsism
that Browning satirised in his sick subjects. Browning’s lyric pathology
 Victorian lyric pathology and ­phenomenology 165
was not disputed by the aesthetes but embraced as they sought the logic
of degeneration at the end of the century. At a linguistic level this has
been seen to result in a petrification of language: the intricate fashionings
of the Parnassians – and a language of craft and bejewelling – direct-
ing attention to the surface materiality of language. Typically seen as the
antithesis of social discourse, Decadent language is often cited critically
as an aesthetic dead end: one that, most importantly for lyric, created a
cynical deadlock between self and other.38
Yet, in what follows, I will argue that when embraced by British aes-
thetes the lyric pathology of the mid-century resulted in a focus on the
body that had the potential to provide a route out of that deadlock.
Walter Pater memorably described experience as ‘ringed round for each
one of us by that thick wall of personality’, ‘each mind keeping as a soli-
tary prisoner its own dream of a world’. That ‘solitary prisoner’ resonates
again with the lyric prison cells of Mill and Browning. Pater’s solution is
to heighten our receptivity to the pulsations the body receives from with-
out: such moments of strange intensity, Pater thinks, can shock one out
of one’s own internal landscape; and it is art’s job to help provide these.39
This introduces the kind of opportunities I suggest one might see for lyric
within poetry of the late nineteenth century. The lyric subject as a sensi-
tised and overstimulated body is still a pathological one, but one whose
pathology is its route to a physical connection with the world. ‘Perverse’
sexual and erotic encounter may have been seen as the Decadent disease
(beautiful or degenerate, depending on the perspective), but it also had the
potential within aestheticist and Decadent poetry to be a route to reinstat-
ing a type of contact or transaction with the world within a mode more
essentially ‘lyric’ rather than dramatic. Poetry of the later nineteenth cen-
tury is full of a language of intimate physical connection. Smell, taste, and
touch characterise much of the most characteristically decadent literature,
in addition to those better-recognised visual impressionist techniques.
This might, I suggest, highlight a mode of transaction and connection
with the world that is more somatic than vocal. While the typical choices
of lyric ‘others’ in a poetry that teems with dancers, the insane, the dead,
eroticised women, and animals might highlight the absence of shared dis-
course or meaningful vocal address, they are also figures with whom the
poet can foreground a sensory encounter.
In the work of Arthur Symons, for example, the dancer poems stress
a mutually experienced beat that enables a connection between the sub-
ject and bodies that frequently don’t share his language (as in ‘Javanese
Dancers’) or whose performance is a bodily mode of expression rather
166 Marion ­Thain
than a linguistic one (as in ‘Nora on the Pavement’).40 In ‘Morbidezza’
smell acts as a synaesthetic expression of tactile desires, as the final exclam-
ation about the ‘alluring scent of lilies’ cannot avoid referring back to the
equation of the woman’s flesh with the lilies made in the first line: ‘your
flesh is lilies’.41 Smell, like touch, is a sense that rests on an experience of
physical intimacy. Symons’ translation of ‘Le chat’ depicts the interaction
between the animal and the pathologically overstimulated body of the
writer in an inhabitation of the kind of lyric subject Browning satirises.
Here the ‘sensual harmonies’ of the diabolical cat’s call become the perfect
lyric, yet the transaction between the subject and the animal is ultimately
rooted not just in pure sound but in the phenomenology of the perfume
of his soft fur that ‘embalm[s] in his delight’.42
Recognition of the importance of haptic experience to twentieth-
­century literature has been growing for some years now,43 but (with the
word ‘haptic’ used, in this sense, for the first time in discourses of the
late nineteenth century)44 it might be worth considering how that kind
of interaction with the world could be relevant to literature of the pre-
vious generation. Here I do this through appeal to a phenomenological
methodology, which draws on a German tradition of thought also rooted
in the late nineteenth century, and which responds to some of the same
questions that were pertinent for lyric. This potential for somatic lyric
connection, rather than direct invocation of ‘you’, in a poetry of phys-
ical contiguity suggests that the lyric other might be rediscovered not
as a separate character, as in the dramatic monologue, but as a neces-
sary part of the poetic ‘I’: something felt as an extension of the self. To
recognise the importance to poetry of the period of something like the
intentionality of consciousness is to bring to the fore a potentiality of the
lyric genre that although not newly available to later nineteenth-century
poetry does appear to hold a particular significance for it. This response
to the increasing threat of solipsism is apparent in poetry before 1860 (as
poems such as Keats’ ‘This Living Hand’ demonstrate), yet in the late
nineteenth century, such gestures acquire an increasing significance and
urgency as the body, and its senses, become a more central problematic
for the lyric genre and for aestheticism more generally. They also, as I will
suggest, acquire a particular phenomenological resonance in relation to a
poetics of degeneration.
So while a poem such as Arthur Symons’ ‘Hands’ may appear a piece
of Decadent fetishisation, it might also demonstrate something of that
phenomenological rediscovery of the other through the body of the lyric
subject:
 Victorian lyric pathology and ­phenomenology 167
The little hands too soft and ­white
To have known more laborious hours
Than those which die upon a night
Of kindling wine and fading flowers;
The little hands that I have kissed,
Finger by finger, to the tips,
And delicately about each wrist
Have set a bracelet with my lips;
Dear soft white little morbid hands.
Mine all one night, with what delight
Shall I recall in other lands,
Dear hands, that you were mine one night!45
The meeting of lips and hands here creates a point of physical con-
tact between two body parts that have maximum tactile sensitivity, and
through the eroticism of this touch we see something of what a twentieth-
century phenomenologist such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes as a
bodily knowledge of the other: ‘it is precisely my body which perceives
the body of another person, and discovers in that other body a miracu-
lous prolongation of my own intentions, a familiar way of dealing with
the world’.46 The encompassing of the fingers in the kiss and the wrist in
the mouth via the ‘bracelet’ of lips suggests a literal physical incorporation
of the object into the subject that resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s sense of
knowing the world through tactile contiguity:
Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is caught in the
fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves
itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex
or prolongation of itself; they are incrusted into its flesh, they are part of its
full definition …47
Read in this way, the eroticism of Symons’ poem might actually represent a
phenomenological reinstatement of the lyric as a transaction with another.
Read as a response to Browning’s and Mill’s criticisms of lyric isolation,
that very pathology is transmuted into a form of lyric encounter.
To read in this way is to revalue the Decadent lyric’s association with
degeneration: regression to a sensual somatic lyric encounter has the
potential to capture an immediate (pre-reflective and pre-linguistic) and
intimate connection with the world that provides something of a response
to the threat of solipsism. Crucially, reading what Tucker calls the ‘pur-
ist’ lyric of the fin de siècle as a kind of phenomenological ‘reduction’ (a
method that ensures we focus simply on what we experience, free from
the prejudice of interpretation)48 shows how the Decadent focus on the
168 Marion ­Thain
materiality of language might ultimately be used to turn attention away
from language and towards an experience of being that exists outside it.
Indeed, the insistent linguistic reality of Browning’s dramatic forms is a
conscious rejection of an aspiration towards spiritual transcendence he
saw as intrinsic to the Romantic characterisation of lyric. Yet I suggest
Decadent lyric phenomenology offers an alternative that nonetheless pre-
serves the genre’s connection with the extra-linguistic. By embracing the
mid-Victorian pathologisation of the lyric subject, the Decadent poetry I
have explored here finds a location for lyric’s discursive ‘excess’ in the pre-
linguistic rhythms of the body rather than the ethereal communications of
the spirit. We do see this earlier in the period: perhaps encountered most
potently through In Memoriam’s search for an alternative to, and more
physical manifestation of, a spiritual communion with the dead. This is
one of the ways in which Tennyson’s pathologised response to a specific
occasion of grief becomes a more general statement about the nature of
lyric in the nineteenth century. This is also why, I think, the grief-stricken
poems of 1912 emblematise something central to Thomas Hardy’s poetic
oeuvre as a whole (as Marjorie Levinson wrote recently, ‘One might even
say that their explicit mourning gives the atmosphere of all the poems a
rational form or brings them under a concept’).49
While my focus so far on the erotics of poets such as Swinburne and
Symons in the second half of the period might suggest this is a strategy
with a particular gender dynamic, ‘Glamour of Gold’ by Olive Custance
helps show how we might see such concerns also reflected in women’s
poetry. Custance was both the wife of Lord Alfred Douglas and the lover
of Natalie Barney, and it is significant that the immediate somatic transac-
tion is imagined between two women in contrast to that sexualised male–
female encounter central to Symons’ work:
The white hands of my lady’s ­maid
Move deftly through the shining hair!
How my heart falters half afraid
Lest they should hurt a thing so fair
As my sweet lady’s head!
And how I wish that I stood there
Twisting the strands instead!
Fortunate fingers those, that hold
The handles of the steels that fret
And dent each heavy tress of gold …
Till all the golden mass is set
With waves bewildering,
 Victorian lyric pathology and ­phenomenology 169
Where fire and dusk together met
Rival day’s sunsetting!
Or so at least it seems to me
While gazing on my lady’s face!
And when with leaping heart I see
Her soft shy breathing ’neath the lace
That falls even to her feet …
The curves of her slim body trace –
See her supremely sweet –
Ah! then love swoons too satisfied
Too passionate for words of praise
With but one prayer, to abide
Safely at her sweet side always!
Even as that maiden there
That staid and silent still delays
Winding the long gold hair! …50

The subject here sees the possibility of a reconnection with the lyric ‘you’
through touch, through a sense of physical contiguity. The figure of the
maid dressing her lady’s hair acts as an image of the kind of lyric connec-
tion that might be found outside language: her silence taking poetry not
towards a spiritual connection that transcends language but to a physical
connection that precedes it. While the subject of this lyric witnesses rather
than experiences this her- or (more likely in the lyric economy when the
subject invokes ‘my lady’) himself, it is interesting how the actions of
dressing hair and writing lyric converge in this poem in the language of
metal working. Andrew Lang’s meditation on ‘Arnold’s jewel-work’ and
Browning’s ‘iron style’ smiting ‘gold on his rude anvil’ lays out a language
of poetic composition that identified it as craft.51 It is no accident that
the working with the hair is described by Custance as a process in which
the steel implements ‘fret / and dent each heavy tress of gold … / Till
all the golden mass is set’. The hair is sculpted and worked like a metal
in the same way that lyric lines are honed, for the aesthetes, out of solid
materials.
Of course, in this poem the lyric subject is in the role of the voyeur.
So, the relationship that I am suggesting provides a new model of lyric
transaction is one only observed. Yet, when one looks again at the poem,
this observed encounter does in fact appear to be enacted formally within
the poem. Just as the hair here is twisted and wound, so too the stanza
form she uses plaits in on itself. Using Spenser’s variation on Chaucerian
rhyme-royal, Custance uses a seven-line form (ababcbc) in which the
170 Marion ­Thain
middle line is both structurally the last line of an abab quatrain while
also being the first line of a second bcbc quatrain. This form emphasises
contiguity and mutuality: the point at which the maid and the lady meet
in physical intimacy, but also the concept of the body as both touched
and touching – both part of the external world and part of our internal
and individual selves. The middle line of each stanza, like the body, sim-
ultaneously faces both ways – playing a role in both the first and second
‘quatrain’, and showing that while they can be seen as distinct they are
inseparable. Formally, the poem enacts this sense that to feel through the
body is necessarily to be of the world and in contiguity with others, even
while acknowledging one’s own individual subjectivity. In this way the
poem points towards the intriguing possibility that the form of the print-
lyric on the page may itself have a haptic presence and capability, provid-
ing a point of contact and mediation between the lyric subject and their
audience.
Whether considering the phenomenology of form in aestheticist writ-
ing, or the actual physical availability of the beloved in Decadent poetry,
late-nineteenth-century poetry offers a fresh emphasis on how lyric might
figure a somatic transaction between the subject and the world at a time
when the poet was less securely invested in even a metaphorical sense of his
or her direct vocal address. In ‘Glamour of Gold’, literary form, the body,
and silence give a powerful indication of the type of connection that might
be sought through a genre that at times recognised itself to be inherently
spatial rather than sung and carried on the airwaves. The growing sense of
lyric as a haptic rather than ethereal experience must be seen in tandem, I
suggest, with its sense of itself as having acquired not just a print medium
but, for many publishing poets, a print character. Yet, of course, this rec-
ognition also generated opposing moves to return poetry to the voice.
Celtic writers are particularly important to this impulse throughout the
century. Maureen McLane has documented the significance of Scotland
to Romantic minstrelsy at the start of the period.52 At the other end, we
might look for their importance through Oscar Wilde’s declaration that
‘We must return to the voice. That must be our test.’53 The linguistic cri-
sis at the heart of Decadence recognises the petrification of language in
print and desires to return to the spoken voice.54 The Rhymers’ Club, with
their strong, self-defined, Celtic roots tested their poetry by reading aloud
to one another at their gatherings in the Cheshire Cheese pub.55 W. B.
Yeats provides a point of reflection on these issues when, in 1893, he claims
that while England is in a lyric period of its development, in which lit-
erature takes in inspiration from the internal, he identifies the Irish as
 Victorian lyric pathology and ­phenomenology 171
a younger nation still in an ‘epic or ballad period’ more associated with
external action and shared voice.56 For publishing poets, finding an asso-
ciation with song in a Celtic tradition acquired a particular significance,
I suggest, in relation to the growing recognition that, at least for a core of
English poetry, print has become formative for the very conceptualisation
of lyric.
I suggest that the much maligned fashion for Parnassian forms of the
later part of the period presents a recognition of and exploitation of the
tangibility of the print-lyric form. Swinburne’s late, and little studied, col-
lection ‘A Century of Roundels’ (1883) offers a commentary on this shift
to a tactile lyric through its very Parnassian forms:
A roundel is wrought as a ring or a starbright sphere,
With craft of delight and with cunning of sound unsought,
That the heart of the hearer may smile if to pleasure his ear
A roundel is wrought.
Its jewel of music is carven of all or of aught –
Love, laughter, or mourning – remembrance of rapture or fear –
That fancy may fashion to hang in the ear of thought.
As a bird’s quick song runs round, and the hearts in us hear
Pause answer to pause, and again the same strain caught,
So moves the device whence, round as a pearl or tear,
A roundel is wrought.57
The roundel form holds a central role in Swinburne’s invocation of lyric
community (another response to the threat of lyric isolation), as I dis-
cuss elsewhere,58 but it is also a physically ‘wrought’ form: a solid ‘ring’ or
‘sphere’, and a carved ‘jewel’. The solid form is twice in the poem offered
incongruously to the ‘ear’: invoking bird song as the archetypal figure for
lyric song, Swinburne ends the poem by distilling the ethereal strains into
the solid form ‘round as a pearl or tear’ of the roundel. Song and shape
oscillate in this poem in a strange synaesthesia where song is felt as a tan-
gible form. Reminiscent of a metaphysical aesthetic, and perhaps the cir-
cle that, as tear, coin, globe, and moon transmutes throughout Donne’s
‘A Valediction of Weeping’, the poem nonetheless imagines the circle
of the roundel as more tangible and objectified than Donne’s expansive
planetary moons and globes. The song of the roundel becomes a sculp-
tural form rather than disembodied music or the vast universals of the
metaphysicals.
In an 1879 review of the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Thomas
Henry Hall Caine acknowledges the importance of ‘the music of sound,
172 Marion ­Thain
not of sight’ to lyric, but goes on to comment on the importance to song
of capturing ‘the undulating swell of a sensation’: something felt rather
than merely heard. Writing of the aestheticist sonnet he says it ‘should
be solid, not spectral, concrete, not ideal in theme’. He continues: ‘Mr.
Rossetti’s sonnets are solid rather than spectral, but of a solidity nearer
akin to that of Michaelangelo [sic] than to that of Wordsworth. His is the
reality of vision, not the solidity of fact. His sonnets embody at once the
spirit of the sensuous and the sensuousness of spirit.’59 This comparison is
primarily with Michelangelo’s sonnets, not his sculpture, but he invokes
the physical presence of a sculptural text in the work of both artists. John
Addington Symonds had, the previous year, published the first rhymed
English translations of Michelangelo’s sonnets, and his introduction also
prefers tactile and physical, rather than aural, descriptors, saying there is
‘no sweetness of melodic cadence’ in this ‘rough’ and ‘violent’ ‘masculine
art of poetry’.60 For poets in the late nineteenth century, lyric was some-
times ethereal music but they also discovered a somatic lyric transaction
that was perhaps more relevant to the genre’s negotiation with its forma-
tion on the page. It is in this way that we might consider the late-nine-
teenth-century engagement with lyric not necessarily as a nostalgic flight
from the problems of lyric solipsism, as a wallowing in the decay of a
genre corrupted by print and the cheap thrills of illicit physical encoun-
ter, or as a regrettable interlude in the steady progress of Victorian poetry
towards a more outward-looking dramatic accommodation to modern-
ity. While Browning’s lyric pathology (and Mill’s somewhat inadvertent
pathologisation of the lyric subject) seemed to mark insuperable problems
for the relationship between the print lyric and modernity, that very path-
ology led, at least at times, back to the body and to the phenomenological
potentiality of lyric form.
To think about poetry of the late nineteenth century as a part of the
story of lyric might be, then, to complicate the idea of a shift between
a nineteenth-century concept of lyric as song and a modernist lyric of
the visual impression. To recognise the importance of tactility to lyric
of the period, in addition to the undoubted significance of aurality and
the visual, is perhaps also to recognise a potential in lyric that the par-
ticular resources of aestheticism and decadence were able to capitalise on
in a distinctive way. Jonathan Crary’s influential account of the dissoci-
ation of touch from sight during this period has resulted in a particular
emphasis on modernity and visuality.61 Yet, much as new technologies of
vision and image-reproduction may have driven apart the body of the
viewer and the object viewed, there was simultaneously an important
 Victorian lyric pathology and ­phenomenology 173
late-nineteenth-century move to value a return to more ‘empathetic’
experiences of perception that drew the two together. Drawing on earl-
ier German aesthetic theory particularly, Pater, Bernhard Berenson, and
Vernon Lee articulated something much more phenomenological – as
Lee’s writing on ‘empathy’, and her experiments with somatic art criti-
cism, demonstrate.62 The somatic potential I recognise may not have pro-
vided any final resolution to the problems of reconciling the concept of
lyric with the conditions of cultural modernity; literary modernism for
the most part defined itself against the poetics of bodily pathology and
the erotics of the fin de siècle. Yet what did remain was that uneasy sense,
formulated across the period, of lyric’s centrality to poetry combined
with its potential incompatibility with modernity. As the following chap-
ters demonstrate, this became something to be reckoned with in many
different ways throughout the twentieth century.

Notes
1 John Addington Symonds, ‘A Comparison of Elizabethan with Victorian
Poetry’, Fortnightly Review 45.265 (January 1889), 55–79 (p. 55).
2 Carol T. Christ, Victorian and Modern Poetics (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 6, and passim.
3 Herbert F. Tucker, ‘Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric’,
in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hošek and Patricia
Parker (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 226–43
(pp. 236, 243).
4 Symonds, ‘A Comparison’, pp. 62, 64.
5 Marjorie Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound
Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 177–8.
6 Francis Turner Palgrave, The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical
Poems in the English Language (Oxford University Press, 1964), p. ix.
7 Symonds, ‘A Comparison’, pp. 63–4.
8 John Stuart Mill (‘Atiquus’), ‘The Two Kinds of Poetry’, Monthly Repository
7.80 (August 1833), 714–24 (p. 719).
9 John Stuart Mill (‘Atiquus’), ‘What Is Poetry?’, Monthly Repository 7.73
(January 1833), 60–70 (p. 65).
10 Symonds, ‘A Comparison’, pp. 67–­9.
11 Matthew Rowlinson, ‘Lyric’, in A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Richard
Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison (Oxford: Blackwell,
2002), pp. 59, 70, 77.
12 Symonds, ‘A Comparison’, p. 65.
13 In Edward FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, ed. Christopher Decker
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), p. xli.
14 Josephine Guy and Ian Small, The Textual Condition of Nineteenth-Century
Literature (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 75.
174 Marion ­Thain
15 Ibid., p. 74.
16 Symonds, ‘A Comparison’, p. 69; see also p. 62: ‘The public of the present
time is a public of readers rather than of hearers.’
17 Mill, ‘What Is Poetry?’, pp. 64–5.
18 See David Lindley on Renaissance lyric as a halfway point in this process,
where we see a ‘direct performance’ that still addressed a certain person with
a certain purpose; David Lindley, Lyric (London and New York: Methuen,
1985), pp. 63–4. See also John Henriksen, who writes of apostrophe in
Romantic poetry as ‘somewhere between address and non-address: Romantic
apostrophe affirms the convention of poetic speaking-to-someone-else, even
as it empties that same convention’; John Henriksen, ‘Poem as Song: The
Role of the Lyric Audience’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 21 (2001),
77–100 (p. 80).
19 Jonathan Culler, ‘Why Lyric?’, PMLA 123.1 (2008), 201–6 (p. 204). See also
W. R. Johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), p. 3.
20 Culler, ‘Why Lyric?’, p. 204.
21 See, for example, Alice Meynell, ‘The Lady of the Lyrics’, in Prose and Poetry,
ed. F. P., V. M., O. S., and F. M. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1947), pp. 49–51.
22 See, for example, Scott Brewster’s recent Lyric (London and New York:
Routledge, 2009), p. 92, which turns from Romantic and mid-Victorian
poetry to high modernism.
23 Robert Browning, Essay on Shelley: Being His Introduction to the Spurious
Shelley Letters, ed. Richard Garnett (London: Alexander Moring, 1903),
pp. 38–40.
24 Britta Martens, Browning, Victorian Poetics and the Romantic Legacy (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2011), pp. 13–20.
25 See David Duff, above, p. 138.
26 Martens, Browning, p. 150: autograph file A.L.s. to John Kenyon, London, 1
October 1855, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
27 Robert Browning, The Poetical Works of Robert Browning, 15 vols.,
Vol. v, ed. Ian Jack and Robert Inglesfield (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995),
pp. 470–2; Joseph Bristow, Robert Browning (Brighton: Harvester, 1991),
p. 17.
28 Browning, Poetical Works, Vol. iv, ed. Ian Jack, Rowena Fowler, and Margaret
Smith (1991), pp. 69–75.
29 D. G. Rossetti, ‘A Sonnet’, in Ballads and Sonnets (London: Ellis and White,
1881), p. 161.
30 Browning, Poetical Works, Vol. iii, ed. Ian Jack and Rowena Fowler (1988),
pp. 186–8.
31 Ibid., pp. 241–3.
32 Ibid., pp. 250–2.
33 Ibid., p. 249; Mill, ‘What Is Poetry?’, p. 66.
34 A. C. Swinburne, Major Poems, ed. Jerome McGann and Charles L. Sligh
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 113–17.
 Victorian lyric pathology and ­phenomenology 175
35 Arthur Symons termed Decadence ‘a new and beautiful and interesting dis-
ease’; Arthur Symons, ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, Harper’s New
Monthly Magazine 87 (June/November 1893), 858–68 (p. 859).
36 See, for example, Edmund Gosse, ‘Mr Hardy’s Lyrical Poems’, Edinburgh
Review 227.464 (April 1918), 272–93 (p. 274).
37 Tucker, ‘Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric’, pp. 237–9.
38 Peter Nicholls, Modernism, 2nd edn (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009),
p. 65.
39 Walter Pater, The Renaissance, in Three Major Texts, ed. William E. Buckler
(New York University Press, 1986), p. 218.
40 Arthur Symons, London Nights, 2nd edn (London: Leonard Smithers, 1897),
pp. 5, 7–8.
41 Arthur Symons, Silhouettes, 2nd edn (London: Leonard Smithers, 1896),
p. 13.
42 Arthur Symons, Decadent Poetry, ed. Lisa Rodensky (London: Penguin,
2006), pp. 52–4.
43 Resulting in books such as Abbie Garrington’s Haptic Modernism: Touch and
the Tactile in Modernist Writing (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
44 Abbie Garrington, ‘Touching Texts: The Haptic Sense in Modernist
Literature’, Literature Compass 7.9 (2010), 810–23 (p. 811).
45 Symons, London Nights, p. 47.
46 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Body, Motility and Spatiality’, in Phenomenology
and Existentialism, ed. Robert C. Solomon (Lanham, MD; Boulder, CO;
New York; and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1972), p. 354.
47 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind,’ trans. Carleton Dallery, in
Phenomenology, Language and Sociology: Selected Essays of Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, ed. John O’Neill (London: Heinemann, 1974), p. 284.
48 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. ix.
49 Marjorie Levinson, ‘Object-Loss and Object-Bondage: Economies of
Representation in Hardy’s Poetry’, ELH 73 (2006), 548–80 (p. 557).
50 Olive Custance, Opals (London: John Lane, 1897), pp. 13–14.
51 Andrew Lang, ‘Ballade for the Laureate’, in Ballads and Rondeaus, Chants
Royal, Sestinas, Villanelles, &c, ed. and intro. Gleeson White (London and
Felling-on-Tyne: Walter Scott Publishing, 1887), p. 30.
52 See Maureen McLane on the importance of Scotland to Romantic minstrelsy:
Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge
University Press, 2008), Chapter 3.
53 Oscar Wilde, The Artist as Critic: The Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed.
Richard Ellmann (University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 351.
54 Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence (Princeton University Press, 1986),
p. 202.
55 George Mills Harper and Karl Beckson, ‘Victor Plarr on “The Rhymers’
Club”: An Unpublished Lecture’, English Literature in Transition 2002.4
(2002), 379–85 (379–80).
176 Marion ­Thain
56 W. B. Yeats, Uncollected Prose, ed. John P. Frayne and Colton Johnson
(London: Macmillan, 1970–6), Vol. i: First Reviews and Articles, 1886–1896
(1970), p. 273.
57 A. C. Swinburne, Collected Poetical Works, 6 vols. (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1904), Vol. v, p. 161.
58 Marion Thain, ‘Desire Lines: Swinburne and Lyric Crisis’, in Algernon
Charles Swinburne: Unofficial Laureate, ed. Catherine Maxwell and Stefano
Evangelista (Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 138–54.
59 T. H. Hall Caine, ‘The Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, New Monthly
Magazine 116 (July 1879), 800–12 (pp. 804, 806, 809).
60 Michelangelo Buonarroti and Tommaso Campanella, The Sonnets of Michael
Angelo Buonarroti and Tommaso Campanella, trans. John Addington Symonds
(London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1878), p. 14.
61 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001
[1990]), p. 19.
62 Carolyn Burdett has explored this aesthetic in ‘“The Subjective Inside Us Can
Turn into the Objective Outside”: Vernon Lee’s Psychological Aesthetics’, 19:
Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 12 (2011), 1–31.
 ­c h apter ni ne

Modernism and the limits of lyric

Peter Nicholls

The priority lyric has acquired among modern poetic forms has provoked
much comment in recent years. Virginia Jackson, for example, observes
in the new edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics that
in the second half of the nineteenth century ‘lyric and poetry began to be
synonymous terms’.1 This modern lyric, says Scott Brewster, ‘is character-
ized by brevity, deploys a first-person speaker or persona, involves per-
formance, and is an outlet for personal emotion’.2 Helen Vendler rather
similarly defines the lyric poem as ‘the representation of a single voice,
alone, recording and analyzing and formulating and changing its mind’.3
It is this form of lyric that has in the modern period become, according
to Mark Jeffreys, ‘the dominant force of poetry’.4 I want to propose here a
qualification of this view, one based on the notion that modernist poems
are designedly hybrid things and that while literary critics have given the
genre a high profile, many modern and contemporary poets have followed
the Victorians in their awareness of the limits of lyric, seeking to frame it
with varying degrees of scepticism and irony.5 The insufficiency of lyric (to
borrow a phrase from Donald Davie) lies, we might say, precisely in trad-
itional assumptions of its self-sufficiency, of its capacity to constitute an
autonomous, seductively suspended world. Yet, as poet John Wilkinson
observes, ‘If it is the fate of lyric poetry to feign the intimacy of the trust-
worthy speech-act and invariably to break trust, at every point exploiting
the potential of language for at-least-duplicity, does not poetry actively
bring about the erosion of the intimacy on which it presumes?’6 In the
poems I shall discuss here, this ‘erosion’ of a presumed intimacy is pro-
duced in part by insistent gyrations of tone and register that in a variety of
ways ‘break trust’ with the assumed proximities of the lyric voice.
I begin with Ezra Pound because it is he who proposes for modern-
ism a model of lyricism that in prizing musicality above interiority tacitly
resists the growing tendency to assimilate all poetic modes to that of lyric
expressivism. ‘Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the
177
178 Peter ­Nicholls
dance’, Pound declares, and ‘poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far
from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music
is dance music or all poetry lyric’.7 I shall return to the caveat with which
this comment ends, but the conjunction of musicality and verbal preci-
sion would remain a prominent feature of Pound’s poetics, underlying his
famous definition of ‘melopoeia’ as ‘a sort of poetry where music, sheer
melody, seems as if it were just bursting into speech’.8 This poetic ‘music’,
which ‘has long been called lyric’, seems, however, to halt at the threshold
of speech; it is, we might say, a lyricism that doesn’t at all project itself as
Vendler’s ‘solitary speech’ but is embodied in ‘Sounds that stop the flow,
and durations either of syllables, or implied between them, “forced onto
the voice” of the reader by nature of the “verse”’.9 The sounds of the poem,
then, may work against emergent contours of normal verbal expression,
and this explains the importance Pound attached to his early study of the
troubadours, since their polyphonic lyricism, frequently mimicking bird-
song, as in Arnaut Daniel’s ‘Doutz brais e critz’, produces a kind of song
that, in the words of critic Robert Stark, ‘becomes dense and opaque; its
musical and rhythmical properties exert their priority and make the sense
more difficult to fathom immediately or directly’.10 This effect of ‘nascent
communication’, as Stark aptly terms it, is central to Pound’s understand-
ing of the function of sound in poetry. Lyric, from this point of view, is
strikingly remote from the forms of dramatic monologue by which, as
Jonathan Culler has argued, it has so frequently been subsumed in mod-
ern criticism.11 Instead, it either borders upon ‘speech’ or supplements it,
as in the account of ‘melopoeia’ where Pound argues that ‘the words are
charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property,
which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning’.12 Pound’s translations
of Daniel have often been considered mere technical exercises, mainly
because of their fascination with the elaborate phonic patternings that ‘set
in cluster / Lines where no word pulls wry, no rhyme breaks gauges’.13 Yet
Pound’s intensive reading of these songs revealed something more than
mere virtuosity, directing him to what he called ‘an aesthetic of sound’:
‘of clear sounds and opaque sounds, such as in Sols sui, an opaque sound
like Swinburne at his best; and in Doutz brais and in L’aura amara, a clear
sound with staccato; and of heavy beats and of running and light beats, as
very heavy in Can chai la feuilla’.14 Elsewhere he emphasised that Arnaut
‘made the birds sing IN HIS WORDS; I don’t mean that he merely
referred to the birds singing … he kept them at it, repeating the tune,
and finding five rhymes for each of seventeen rhyme sounds in the same
order’.15
 Modernism and the limits of ­lyric 179
Several things are notable about this adumbration of ‘an aesthetic of
sound’, not least its emphasis on repetition and echo. The Provençal song
is tightly bound by an intricate rhyme scheme – in that sense it is a form
of lyric ‘moment’ but one that does not so much suspend time as reveal
its contour. The aim, though, is less meditative intensity than, in Pound’s
phrase, ‘to cut a shape in time’.16 When we are told, then, that ‘the art
of En Ar. Daniel is not literature but the art of fitting words well with
music’,17 the distinction is meant to divert emphasis away from content
and self-expression and towards an extreme stylisation that Pound associ-
ates with ‘sheer melody’. In his statement on ‘Vorticism’, this lyricism is
also distinguished from the epic and didactic modes, Pound noting at the
same time, however, that we can find passages of lyric in drama and in long
poems. As Elizabeth Helsinger for one has observed, Victorian poets fre-
quently embedded lyrics in their long poems – Tennyson and Swinburne
are her principal examples – and this interruption by song evokes ‘its own
space and time, differently shaped than that of the surrounding text. Old
songs re-sung create connections with distant, temporally discontinuous
occasions: the song text remembers and invites other performances past
and future, and in so doing constructs communities with singers at other
times.’18 It is the temporal reach of lyric thus considered that we must then
place over against what Pound defines as ‘[t]he other sort of poetry [that]
is as old as the lyric and as honourable, but, until recently no one had
named it’; this is the ‘Image’.19 So much has been said of Pound’s discovery
of the image and of the turn from the auditory to the visual that is gen-
erally taken to characterise the evolution of modernism that we are likely
to forget his continuing emphasis on the ‘fitting words well with music’:
a practice he, somewhat unexpectedly perhaps, associates here with ‘an
opaque sound like Swinburne at his best’.
On the face of it, of course, Pound’s early career, from the Pre-Raphaelite
tonalities of his first collections through to the imagist poems of Lustra,
might seem a clear enactment of that shift from ear to eye that Roman
Jakobson finds at the origins of modernism.20 Pound’s thinking on these
matters was shaped in part by Wyndham Lewis’s arguments for what Lewis
called his ‘philosophy of the EYE’ and the related ‘external method’ of sat-
ire.21 Certainly, Pound’s own attempt to work free of the Browningesque
dramatic monologue resonated with Lewis’s contempt for the forms of
inwardness he associated partly with Freud, and especially with Henri
Bergson.22 As Martin Jay observes in Downcast Eyes, his monumental study
of ‘occularcentrism’ in the western tradition, it was not until Bergson that
‘the rights of the body were explicitly set against the tyranny of the eye’.23
180 Peter ­Nicholls
For Lewis, that turn to the body and to the dark ‘stream’ of the inner life
epitomised the ‘empiric of sensational chaos’ that he saw as the distinctive
feature of contemporary culture. Bergson, he said, ‘is indeed the arch enemy
of every impulse having its seat in the apparatus of vision, and requiring a
concrete world’.24 By way of contrast, the ‘tyrannical’ eye of the painter looks
out upon an intelligible world, where the clear separation of subject from
object allows the operation of intelligence rather than mere sensation. The
main elements in Lewis’s critique of Bergson would also appear in Pound’s
poetics, especially in the latter’s emphatic commitment to the ‘distinct and
geometric’ and in his related attachment to light and clarity. Indeed, the
first version of Canto i announces the visual emphasis in a quite program-
matic way: ‘Mantegna a sterner line, and the new world about us: / Barred
lights, great flares, new form, Picasso or Lewis. / If for a year man write to
paint, and not to music’25 The conjunction of Mantegna, Picasso, and Lewis
registers Pound’s preference for an art of clarity and formal precision – an
art, too, of a certain austerity, purging sentimentality and substituting the
‘stern’ line for the more curvaceous attractions of corporeal form and what
he later called in The Cantos ‘the brown meat of Rembrandt’.26
Yet while Pound was keen to assert his modernist commitment to a
painterly aesthetic, he also recognised in particular prosodic and musical
forms a set of devices by which to readmit the ear as an organising device
of what was to be his long poem. In this aspect of his thinking and prac-
tice, Pound again found himself at the junction between two competing
aesthetics: one prizing a traditional prosody rich in affective and mythic
meanings (we might think parenthetically of Yeats’ suspicion of free verse
as lacking in memory), the other a more clearly modernist one in which
the perceived constraints of metre were yielding to the intoxications of
free verse.27 Pound, like Eliot, was, of course, strongly aware of this con-
junction and of his ambivalent relation to it.28 Metrical features could
certainly survive into free verse, but as something partly hidden, as the
ghost ‘behind the arras’, as Eliot famously put it.29 This ghost, however,
was a far from silent one, and the accumulated knowledge of metre and
rhythm that Pound set himself to master was one that attributed a power-
fully expressive, even thematic function to aspects of poetic form that very
soon younger generations of poets would regard as non-semantic defences
against any reduction of the poem to propositional content. On this mat-
ter, however, as on so many others, Pound was for his part unequivocal:
‘Rhythm MUST have meaning’, he told Harriet Monroe.30
Here we should recall Pound’s identification of his ‘aesthetic of
sound’ with ‘Swinburne at his best’, a comparison that begins to make
 Modernism and the limits of ­lyric 181
sense when we see how the earlier poet’s sophisticated command of
metre and rhythm invested his work with allusive meanings that far
exceeded conventional lyric expectations of interior monologue and a
suspended temporality. Of course, we know that both Pound and Eliot
criticised Swinburne’s writing for its failure of ‘objectivity’; Swinburnian
excess had to be purged if we were to have modernism, so the famil-
iar story runs. Pound did indeed observe of Swinburne’s poem Dolores
that its sound ‘is in places like that of horses’ hooves being pulled out
of mud’, but, more importantly, he also praised the poet’s ‘surging and
leaping dactylics’ and the genius of his ‘rhythm-building faculty’.31
Swinburne is partly forgotten now and little read, but for Pound, as he
moved towards free verse, the older poet’s metrical expertise was some-
thing to cleave to in the face of modernity’s ‘accelerated grimace’. Indeed,
for anyone familiar with Pound’s earlier Cantos the partially concealed
imprint of Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon is
fairly easy to discern, though here it provides the model not for the
narcotic swathes of rhythm the modernists condemned, but for pre-
cise rhythmic phrasing, sound echo, and innovative placing of caesurae.
Examples are legion, but compare, from Swinburne’s Atalanta (36), ‘Sun,
and clear light among green hills, and day / Late risen and long sought
after’;32 and, from Pound’s Canto iii, ‘Light: and the first light, before
ever dew was fallen’.33 And again, from Atalanta: ‘There in cold remote
recesses / That nor alien eyes assail, Feet, nor imminence of wings, / Nor
a wind nor any tune’; and, from Pound’s Canto xvii : ‘Nor bird-cry, nor
any noise of wave moving, / Nor splash of porpoise, nor any noise of
wave moving’.34 Many of Pound’s rhythmic signatures are announced
in Swinburne’s once familiar poems: the trochaic rather than the iambic
opening, for example, along with the use of the spondaic double stress,
the suppression of pronouns and connectives, and the fondness for the
hendecasyllabic line. These amount to more than ‘breaking the pentam-
eter’ (the ‘first heave’ of modernism, as Pound remembered it at Pisa),35
for rhythmic items with strong metrical associations could also have an
allusive, signifying function. This is what Swinburne had in mind when
he contended that ‘There is a science of verse as surely as there is a sci-
ence of mathematics: there is an art of expression by metre as certainly
as there is an art of representation by painting.’36 This ‘science’, which
is based, says Swinburne, on ‘metre, rhythm, cadence not merely appre-
ciable but definable and reducible to rule and measurement’, yields a
conception of ‘form’ or ‘trace’ that is at once vestigial and yet also some-
how impersonal, ‘beyond intention and conscious control’.37
182 Peter ­Nicholls
There is, then, a certain kind of lyric abstraction in Swinburne’s verse
that, ‘at its best’, resonates with the ‘sheer melody’ Pound discerned in
Arnaut’s songs and that similarly exceeds the notion of a single speak-
ing voice. Indeed, as Jerome McGann has noted, the famous ‘monot-
ony’ of Swinburne’s verse is founded in a view he shared with Stéphane
Mallarmé that the ideal poetry is ‘impersonal, toneless, even (in a sense)
without meaning’.38 We can add to this that the two poets shared a com-
mitment to poetic theatre, and that, in Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon
and Erechtheus, Mallarmé discerned something already approximating to
his own ideal alternative to what he called an ‘everyday and national thea-
tre’.39 In his review of Erechtheus, Mallarmé discerned a ‘sublime music’
that lingered in the mind ‘long after its cessation’, a rhythm of ‘pure motifs
moving against a background of the most subtle and noble emotion’.40
This was, crucially, a kind of inner music, a ‘singing within oneself ’, as
Mallarmé put it, the presage of a theatre of which, he said, ‘one is a specta-
tor only within oneself, with a book open or one’s eyes closed’. Elsewhere,
Mallarmé would call it ‘a theatre inherent in the mind’.41
Mallarmé also makes it clear that the music of poetry has no mimetic
relation to music or voice as such (and, implicitly, to the music of
Wagner).42 In fact, it is music reconceived as writing that is the princi-
pal issue, or poetry read silently, rather than recited.43 Yet while Mallarmé
never ceases to emphasise the idea of clarity when he speaks of ‘music’ –
and it is this that he discerns pre-eminently in the work of Swinburne –
Pound and Eliot are both troubled by what they perceive as an exactly
opposite tendency in Swinburne’s verse, to vagueness and loss of focus.
As Eliot puts it in a famous passage: ‘Language in a healthy state presents
the object, is so close to the object that the two are identified. They are
identified in the verse of Swinburne solely because the object has ceased
to exist, because language, uprooted, has adapted itself to an independ-
ent life of atmospheric nourishment.’44 Here we may read not only one
modernist verdict on both Swinburne and Mallarmé, but also the germ of
what would soon become an authoritative version of that modernist ‘turn’
from music to vision. Swinburne thus remains, somewhat paradoxically,
a figure to be reckoned with for both Pound and Eliot precisely because
it is he who so fully and so deliberately seems to deny the power of the
‘sharp visual image’ that, for Eliot, should complement ‘verse intended to
be sung’; Swinburne’s emotion, remarks Eliot, ‘is never particular, never
in direct line of vision, never focused’. If ‘you take to pieces any verse of
Swinburne’, says Eliot, ‘you find always that the object was not ­there –
only the word’.45 Swinburne, he suggests, is guilty of taking his eye off the
 Modernism and the limits of ­lyric 183
object at the crucial moment, allowing it to evaporate in a mere froth of
alliteration. It’s a sort of wilful or self-indulgent blindness, in short, that
the modernist project is designed at all points to correct. Yet the character-
istic absoluteness of Eliot’s terms doesn’t acknowledge that there is a type
of lyricism that operates, like Mallarmé’s poetic theatre, with ‘eyes closed’ –
that is, we might say, premised on a moment of non-visuality. This is the
kind of lyricism we might find in a poet like Rilke, whose blind people,
as Jacques Derrida puts it in his book Memoirs of the Blind, ‘sing of the
poetic condition, namely of lyricism itself insofar as it opens beyond the
visible.’46 Derrida goes on to quote the first lines of Rilke’s poem ‘Gong’:
‘We must close our eyes and renounce our mouths, / remain mute, blind,
dazzled: / Vibrating space, as it reaches us / demands from our being only
the ear.’47
Derrida is concerned here with the art of drawing, an art that com-
monsense tells us is generally mimetic. But what actually happens in the
act of drawing? ‘[I]t is as if ’, says Derrida, ‘just as I was about to draw, I
no longer saw the thing’; and ‘how can one claim to look at both a model
and the lines [traits], that one jealously dedicates with one’s hand to the
thing itself. Doesn’t one have to be blind to one or the other? Doesn’t one
always have to be content with the memory of the other?’48 As the eye
moves from object to figured space, it is memory that suddenly comes into
play. ‘What happens when one writes without seeing?’, asks Derrida – his
answer is that the groping hand finds itself ‘trusting in the memory of
signs and supplementing sight’.49 To write without seeing – isn’t this pre-
cisely the modernist charge against Swinburne and Mallarmé? If so, this
‘memory of signs’ that makes the act of construction possible is perhaps
nothing less than that ‘musicality’ of which I spoke earlier, an inner music
of echo and silence, of ‘strophe and antistrophe’, as Mallarmé finds it in
Swinburne’s Erechtheus.50 This emphasis on formal values entails, in these
terms, a necessary blindness, just as metrical form, with its preordained
feet and turns, creates (in the words of Rilke’s poem) a ‘Vibrating space,
[which] as it reaches us / demands from our being only the ear’. Once
again, Mallarmé’s words might come to mind: ‘To create is to conceive an
object in its fleeting moment, in its absence … We conjure up a scene of
lovely, evanescent, intersecting forms.’51 And while Mallarmé, in marked
contrast to Swinburne, is keen to stress that ‘the great literary rhythms …
are being broken up and scattered in a series of distinct and almost orches-
trated shiverings’,52 his notion of ‘musicality’ does coincide closely with
Swinburne’s sense of what the latter calls ‘the mystic metre’ as a mnemonic
and associative system.53 As Yopie Prins puts it in her Victorian Sappho, ‘the
184 Peter ­Nicholls
automatism of Swinburne’s writing can be understood as another version
of rhythmic transport, the conversion of “natural” rhythms into a metrical
sublime that was implicit, all along, in his Sapphic imitations’.54 So for
all Swinburne’s fascinated attention to the sounds of winds and waters,
the rhythms of nature are ultimately sublimated into the laws of metre, a
movement that once again parallels that shift between vision and figural
space that underpins Derrida’s account of ‘blindness’.
This is not, in Eliot’s terms, ‘bad’ poetry, though it is poetry that
dwells almost exclusively within a world of words rather than of things.
‘The world of Swinburne’, he concludes, ‘does not depend upon some
other world which it simulates; it has the necessary completeness and
self-sufficiency for justification and permanence. It is impersonal, and no
one else could have made it.’55 The comment might seem paradoxical:
at least if ‘no one else could have made’ this poetic world, one might
assume that it bears almost too weighty an imprint of personality. But
by deeming it ‘impersonal’, Eliot signals that the Swinburnian reper-
toire of echo and variation creates merely ‘the hallucination of mean-
ing’, refusing engagement with ‘a world of objects’ in favour of a hopeless
fascination with, in Derrida’s phrase, ‘lyricism itself insofar as it opens
beyond the visible’. This particular ‘self-sufficiency’ and its dependence
on auditory memory are finely exemplified in the ‘mirroring’ of rhyme
sequences in Swinburne’s ‘Anactoria’ (lines 36–58). Here, as Elizabeth
Helsinger observes, ‘Its mirroring, rhyming passages emerge only with
careful attention: two unmarked twelve-line “stanzas” in which not only
syllables but the key words within each set of lines repeat exactly in the
next set, but with shifted or reversed meanings – strophe and counter-
strophe, turn and counter-turn.’56 Jerome McGann concludes of this
intricate modulation that:

The repetition of six couplets with identical rhyme words defines a prosodic
scheme where musical rather than linguistic structure governs the poetic
transformations. The terminal rhyme words epitomize a scheme where ver-
bal units – words, word phrases, and even sentential units – are handled
primarily as prosodic rather than semantic elements, with grammar there-
fore emerging as a formal rather than a logical structure.57

Pound, of course, does not aim at this high degree of formalism, though
his way of intermittently echoing Swinburnian cadences calls into play
a similar pattern of prosodic echoes and allusions. In fact, in The Cantos
lyrical language combines an imagistic directness with a subtle sense of
the experience as a remembered one. As Susan Stewart observes, ‘lyric is
 Modernism and the limits of ­lyric 185
not music – it bears a history of a relation to music – and, as a practice
of writing, it has no sound – that is, unless we are listening to a spontan-
eous composition of lyric, we are always recalling sound with only some
regard to an originating auditory experience’.58 Pound remarks rather simi-
larly on ‘the finer audition which one may have in imagining sound’, and
quotes Remy de Gourmont’s proposal that ‘one reads with the memory of
speech’59 – formulations that, like the ‘sound: as of the nightingale too far
off to be heard’ in Canto xx, work to undermine the kind of presence and
simultaneity associated with the visual model. This music is at once palp-
able and impalpable, heard and unheard; and while the images are crisply
rendered – ‘the stair of gray stone / the passage clean-squared in gran-
ite’, ‘The leaves cut on the air’60 – the recurring elements of this visionary
landscape have about them an elusive quality, something that uncannily
escapes the order of clearly determined meaning that Pound has tended
to associate with the visual analogy. For Pound, as for Swinburne, then, a
certain momentary ‘blindness’ to the object permits a form of ecstatic per-
ception that occurs in a dimension beyond the visual. This is how Pound
puts it in a famous passage from his essay on Cavalcanti where he discov-
ers ‘the radiant world where one thought cuts through another with clean
edge, a world of moving energies, [of ] magnetisms that take form, that
are seen or that border the visible, the matter of Dante’s paradiso, the glass
under water, the form that seems a form seen in a mirror, these realities
perceptible to the sense, interacting’.61
It is the insubstantiality of lyric thus conceived – it ‘border[s] the vis-
ible’, just as melopoeia is ‘poetry on the borders of music’62 – that makes
it, for Pound, just one among the ‘sorts’ of poetry, even if its passionate
and visionary associations give it a special status.63 In The Cantos it would
have to make its way alongside the more demotic modes in which the mat-
ter of ‘history’ entered the poem. Lyric was to be ‘earned’, as it were, with
any transcendence of the prosaic or ‘bust thru from quotidien’ won from a
struggle to penetrate the less tractable opacities of economic and political
reality.64 This was a bold way to reconfigure lyric values but it was one that
also raised questions about the special privilege accorded to the heightened
stylistic register with which it was associated. The Cantos could hardly be
tasked with what poet Charles Olson would later condemn as ‘the lyrical
interference of the individual as ego, of the “subject” and his soul’,65 but
younger poets, partly in reaction to Pound’s later political stance, would
find the sense of lyric occasion in The Cantos increasingly difficult to accept
as a model. George Oppen, for example, regarded Pound’s ‘sheer melody’
as the expression of a lofty aestheticism. ‘A hypnotic art’, he called it, ‘a
186 Peter ­Nicholls
dithyrambic art protected by its special vocabulary etc. – It produces such
a destitute world, such a destroyed world when that music stops.’66 For
Oppen, the ascending, ‘rhythm-building’ set pieces of The Cantos may be
beautiful, but they are so in a negative way, as a paean of praise to art rather
than as an affirmation of being in the world. (We may recall Eliot’s account
of the damaging ‘self-sufficiency’ of ‘[t]he world of Swinburne’.67)
Oppen’s distrust of Poundian melopoeia is amply expressed in the
gnarled and deliberately ‘impoverished’ forms of his own late poems, but
it also reflects a larger anxiety about any too easy investment in what he
calls ‘the lyric valuables’.68 Indeed, for many poets writing in the wake
of The Cantos, Oppen’s worry about the temptations of the ‘dithyrambic’
speaks for a scepticism about lyricism generally and about the ‘comfortable
occupancy’ it allows the conventional poet.69 Oppen’s late work supplies
just one example of an important formal and conceptual shift away from
the melodic conception of the poem – the ‘sheer melody’ as we find that
in the modernist verse of, say, Yeats and Pound, with their dependence
on the rich resources of the auditory memory – to a more purely rhyth-
mic one that brings non-semantic elements to the fore.70 Oppen’s habitual
use of strong caesurae in these poems gestures mutely towards a severance
from tradition, creating an empty moment in which any ascending mel-
ody is abruptly curtailed. Take, for example, the following lines from ‘To
the Poets: To Make Much of Life’:
… (the old men were dancing
return
the return of the sun) no need to light
lamps in daylight working year
after
year the poem
discovered
in the crystal
center of the rock image
and image …71
The syntax is regular – ‘no need to light // lamps in daylight’ – but the
enjambing of the line is deliberately interrupted by the two-line space that
intervenes between ‘light’ and ‘lamps’, while the forward movement is
further checked by the break that occurs between ‘daylight’ and ‘working’.
The lines produce a kind of counter-rhythm to work against the more
familiar contour of a sense-making rhythm.72 Take as another example the
opening lines of ‘The Little Pin: Fragment’:
 Modernism and the limits of ­lyric 187
of ­this
all things
speak if they speak the estranged
unfamiliar sphere thin as air
of rescue   huge
pin-point …73
Here it’s as if one rhythm carries us forwards in the expectation of con-
tinuity, while another sends us back to revise what we have already read.
Is ‘the estranged’ the object of ‘speak’ – to ‘speak the estranged’ – or do we
retrospectively discover a caesura inscribed after ‘speak’? If so the phrase
will run ‘the estranged unfamiliar sphere’. In other words, we read these
lines belatedly, as it were, because a ‘counter-rhythm’ seems to be working
against the rhythm that would produce the familiar shape of a sentence.
Of course, not all poets writing after Pound have adopted Oppen’s strin-
gently ‘impoverished’ style. Yet even those who, like Susan Howe, have
remained keenly responsive to rich phonic and rhythmic effects have also
made their work a register of the constraints and limits of the lyric mode.
Howe’s poetry, in fact, under the pressure of a pervasive and often melancholy
irony, grasps the very matter of lyric – its sounds, cadences, and textures – as
an obstacle to the movements of desire and memory that are its primary con-
cern. The ‘articulation of sound forms in time’ provides a shimmering mesh of
echoes and repetitions that for all its phonic intricacy can never quite ascend
to the kinds of pure lyric ‘occasion’ that Pound offers us in The Cantos.74 The
suspended lyric moment is constantly broken open, revealed once more as
belated and displaced, its ‘sound forms’ and myriad voices exposed as ‘mere’
text. Nowhere is this process clearer than in the volume Pierce-Arrow, and
especially in its coda, Rückenfigur, where the hierarchical impulse of lyric is
repeatedly dissolved in the seriality of writing. Swinburne is a presiding spirit
here, and his version of the legend of Tristram and Iseult is one of the key
strands in Howe’s exploration of love and loss:
He worked over ­Tristram
in fits and starts
Love refrain of wind and
sea its intellectual
purpose in spirit Tristram
is ecstatic song if
printed and confined
Love’s sail is black75
Swinburne’s poem strives, like love itself, to be the pure expression of
‘ecstatic song’, but (again like love) it cannot escape a deadly ‘confinement’;
188 Peter ­Nicholls
like Tristram espying the black sail that falsely announces Iseult’s death,
Swinburne’s lyricism cannot rise above the black print in which its song
takes shape. Lyric becomes instead a mode of looking back – the myth of
Orpheus and Eurydice is central to the poem – but one that is always frus-
trated in its desire to repossess the past. As in the Rückenfiguren of Caspar
David Friedrich’s art, where figures enigmatically present their backs to us,
thereby both partially blocking our view of the landscape and asserting
their own priority, so the language of lyric is fragmented and of uncer-
tain origin. This is not at all the speaking voice of conventional mod-
ern lyric, but one that seems to cancel or disperse itself in the very act of
enunciation:
I have loved come veiling
Lyrist come veil come lure
echo remnant sentence spar
never never form wherefor
Wait some recognition you
Lyric over us love unclothe
Never forever whose move
(p. 144)

This is, as one critic puts it, ‘a lyric voice that is paradoxically predicated on
the loss of voice’;76 it is a language whose ‘lyric valuables’, as Oppen calls
them, have always already suffered the damage and (to use Howe’s word)
the ‘hurt’ of history’s violence and its ‘Iliadic heroism’.77 The lyric might
seem to offer shelter from the storm of epic, but for Howe it is constantly
revealed as at once ‘veil’ and ‘lure’, drawing us on even though the object
sought will never fully disclose itself to memory. As Maurice Blanchot
suggests, ‘Writing begins with Orpheus’s gaze.’78 ‘He loses Eurydice
because he desires her beyond the measured limits of the song, and he
loses himself, but this desire, and Eurydice lost, and Orpheus dispersed
are necessary to the work.’79 And again: ‘the work’s demand is this: that
Orpheus look back. That suddenly, desire should wreck everything’.80 We
are left, says Blanchot, with a relation that ‘is not [one of ] cognition, but
of recognition, and this recognition ruins in me the power of knowing,
the right to grasp’.81 The lines from Rückenfigur quoted above characteris-
tically ‘Wait some recognition’ that is figured in the space between ‘echo’
and ‘remnant’. Phonic repetition may seem to offer continuity and formal
coherence, as in the songs of Arnaut that Pound translated, but here echo
is that of an ‘other’ voice marked now by emptiness and ‘brokenness’.
The birdsong that intimates this otherness is not, as in Pound’s Arnaut,
a sign of formal order; Howe’s nightingale ‘sings in / secret language the
 Modernism and the limits of ­lyric 189
bird / is betrayed when her love / song is made public’. And the linnet,
for all its ‘mimic reputation’, doesn’t actually get to sing.82 All of which
is in line with Howe’s underlying sense that the coherence to which lyri-
cism aspires is always compromised by a contrary desire to expose its lim-
its. ‘This tradition that I hope I am part of ’, she writes, ‘has involved a
breaking of boundaries of all sorts. It involves a fracturing of discourse,
a stammering even. Interruption and hesitation used as a force. A rec-
ognition that there is an other voice, an attempt to hear and speak it.
It’s this brokenness that interests me.’83 Much is contained for Howe in
that idea of hesitation – a word, as she notes, ‘from the Latin meaning
to stick. Stammer. To hold back in doubt, have difficulty in speaking’.84
Like Pound, Howe writes with a keen sensitivity to the nineteenth-cen-
tury prosody that shadows modernist poetry, but this ‘stammering’ effect,
recalling perhaps Oppen’s broken rhythms, denies the fluent mnemonics
of Pound’s ‘sheer melody’. In Howe’s ‘wounded syntax’ we read the traces
of a deep desire for lyric vision – ‘Not look back oh I would’85 – but a
desire that now is bounded, acknowledging its origin in the very ‘hurt’ of
history that disfigures it.

Notes
1 Virginia Jackson, ‘Lyric’, in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
(Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 826–34 (p. 832).
2 Scott Brewster, Lyric (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 1.
3 Helen Vendler, Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and
Ashbery (Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 2. Vendler offers a complication
of this view that stresses the importance of an ‘invisible addressee’ in many
lyric poems. Elsewhere she defines lyric as ‘the genre that directs its mimesis
toward the performance of the mind in solitary speech’ (The Art of Shaksepeare’s
Sonnets (1997), quoted in Jackson, ‘Lyric’, p. 833). For a critique of ‘the fixed
standpoint of the lyrically meditative “I”’, see Donald Davie, Czeslaw Milosz
and the Insufficiency of Lyric (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986),
p. 10.
4 Mark Jeffreys, ‘Ideologies of Lyric: A Problem of Genre in Contemporary
Anglophone Poetics,’ PMLA 110.2 (March 1995), 196–205 (p. 200).
5 See Marion Thain’s account of the perceived limits of lyric in the Victorian
period in the previous chapter (pp. 160–3). We should add too that
poststructuralism and the literary tendencies it has influenced (most notably
Language poetry) have been hostile to lyric’s ‘reference to a single speaker
ensconced in hermetically composed space’ and its apparent dismissal of
forms of ‘otherness’; see Rachel Cole, ‘Rethinking the Value of Lyric Closure:
Giorgio Agamben, Wallace Stevens, and the Ethics of Satisfaction’, PMLA
126.2 (2011), 383–97 (pp. 383–4). Note also the much earlier but caustic critique
190 Peter ­Nicholls
of Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin
Press, 1978 [1916]), pp. 63, 65: ‘only in lyric poetry is the subject, the vehicle of
such experiences, transformed into the sole carrier of meaning, the only reality’,
and ‘In its experience of nature, the subject, which alone is real, dissolves the
whole outside world in mood, and itself becomes mood by virtue of the inexor-
able identity of essence between the contemplative subject and its object.’
6 John Wilkinson, The Lyric Touch: Essays on the Poetry of Excess (Cambridge:
Salt, 2007), p. 8.
7 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (London: Faber and Faber, 1968 [1934]), p. 14.
Cf. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’ (1953), in On Poetry and Poets
(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957), pp. 96–112 (p. 105): ‘The term
“lyric” itself is unsatisfactory. We think first of verse intended to be sung …
But we apply it also to poetry that was never intended for a musical setting,
or which we dissociate from its music.’
8 Ezra Pound, ‘Vorticism’ (1914), repr. in Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (Hessle:
Marvell Press, 1960 [1916]), pp. 81–94 (p. 82).
9 Ezra Pound, Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige
(London: Faber and Faber, 1971), p. 254. Pound’s robust phrasing doesn’t con-
ceal the conventionality of this view; cf. Yopie Prins, ‘Victorian Meters’, in
The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Joseph Bristow (Cambridge
University Press, 2000), p. 91 on Victorian approaches to the ‘metrical medi-
ation of voice’. At the same time, though, as Jonathan Culler notes in ‘Why
Lyric?’, PMLA 123.1 (2008), 201–6 (p. 202), the recent critical emphasis on
lyric as dramatic monologue with its ‘stress on the reconstruction of the dra-
matic situation deprives rhythm and sound patterning of any constitutive role
(at best they reinforce or undercut meaning)’.
10 Robert Stark, ‘Pound among the Nightingales: From the Troubadours to a
Cantabile Modernism’, Journal of Modern Literature 32.2 (Winter 2009), 1–19
(p. 9).
11 Culler, ‘Why Lyric?’.
12 Ezra Pound, ‘How to Read’ (1937), repr. in Polite Essays (Plainview, NY: Books
for Libraries Press, 1966), pp. 155–92 (p. 170).
13 From Pound’s translation of ‘Doutz brais e critz’, in Ezra Pound, The
Translations of Ezra Pound, intro. Hugh Kenner (London: Faber and Faber,
1970), pp. 172–5 (p. 173).
14 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1968),
p. 114.
15 Pound, ABC of Reading, pp. 53–4.
16 Pound, Selected Letters, p. 254. Again, the notion of ‘sheer melody’ has strong
connections with the poetry of Swinburne and Tennyson. See Elizabeth
Helsinger, ‘Song’s Fictions’, YES 40.1–2 (2010), 141–59 (p. 145) on a tendency
to create ‘song as pure otherness to lyric self-expression’ in some of Tennyson’s
more hypnotic poems. Pound’s association of rhythm and space also has con-
nections to the Victorian period ‘when meter was being theorized as a prin-
ciple of spacing that is mentally perceived or internally “felt” as an abstract
form, rather than heard’; Prins, ‘Victorian Meters’, p. 107.
 Modernism and the limits of ­lyric 191
17 Pound, Literary Essays, p. 112.
18 Helsinger, ‘Song’s Fictions’, p. 150.
19 Pound, ‘Vorticism’, p. 83.
20 For a definitive formulation of this ‘turn’, see Roman Jakobson, ‘Marginal
Notes on the Prose of the Poet Pasternak’, in Language and Literature, ed.
Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press,
1993), pp. 301–17 (pp. 302–3): ‘The Romantic slogan of art gravitating toward
music was adopted to a significant degree by Symbolism. The foundations of
Symbolism first begin to be undermined in painting, and in the early days of
Futurist art it is painting that holds the dominant position.’ Even surrealism,
with its fascinated attention to the occulted movements of the unconscious,
saw the historical transition in much the same way, with the editors of the
journal Surréalisme writing, for example, in 1924 that ‘Until the beginning of
the twentieth century, the ear had decided the quality of poetry: rhythm, son-
ority, cadence, alliteration, rhyme; everything for the ear. For the last twenty
years, the eye has been taking its revenge. It is the century of the film.’
21 Wyndham Lewis, Men without Art (1934), ed. Seamus Cooney (Santa Rosa,
CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), p. 99.
22 See ibid., p. 97.
23 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century
French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1994), pp. 191–2.
24 Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled (1926), ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock
(Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), p. 104.
25 Ezra Pound, ‘Canto i’, in Personae: The Shorter Poems, ed.Lee Baechler and A.
Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1990), p. 234.
26 Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996),
p. 531.
27 On Yeats’ association of free verse with the loss of tradition and memory,
see Michael Golston, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 158–9.
28 See Annie Finch, The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free
Verse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), p. 128 for the argument
that The Waste Land’s ‘prosody was an attempt to establish a new metrical
idiom for a generation jaded and disillusioned with free verse, and exhausted
by the apparent lack of any viable prosodic alternative to it’.
29 T. S. Eliot, ‘Reflections on “Vers Libre”’, in Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 86–91 (p. 85): ‘the ghost of some sim-
ple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the “freest” verse; to advance
menacingly as we doze, and withdraw as we rouse’.
30 Pound, Selected Letters, p. 49.
31 Pound, Literary Essays, p. 293.
32 A. C. Swinburne, Atalanta in Calydon: A Tragedy (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1896), p. 36.
33 Pound, The Cantos, p. 11.
34 Swinburne, Atalanta, p. 57; Pound, The Cantos, p. 76.
192 Peter ­Nicholls
35 Pound, The Cantos, p. 538.
36 A. C. Swinburne, ‘Whitmania’ (1887), in The Works of Algernon Charles
Swinburne, ed. Edmund Gosse and Thomas J. Wise, 20 vols. (New York:
Russell and Russell, 1968 [1925]), Vol. xvi, pp. 307–18 (p. 310).
37 The last phrase of this sentence is quoted from Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho
(Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 173.
38 Jerome McGann, Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism (Chicago University
Press, 1972), p. 65.
39 Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Erechtheus: Tragédie par Swinburne’, in Oeuvres com-
plètes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1979),
pp. 700–3 (p. 703).
40 Ibid., p. 702.
41 Stéphane Mallarmé, Crayonné au théâtre, in Oeuvres complètes, p. 328.
42 On this set of distinctions, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica ficta
(Figures of Wagner), trans. Felicia McCarren (Stanford University Press, 1994),
pp. 41–84; and Jacques Rancière, Mallarmé: La politique de la sirène (Paris:
Hachette, 1996), pp. 67–78.
43 See Suzanne Bernard, Mallarmé et la musique (Paris: Nizet, 1959), p. 74.
44 T. S. Eliot, ‘Swinburne as Poet’, in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber,
1972), pp. 323–7 (p. 327).
45 Ibid., pp. 324, 325.
46 Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins,
trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (University of Chicago Press,
1990), p. 39n42. The emphasis is also familiar from Charles Baudelaire’s The
Painter of Modern Life, in Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E.
Charvet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 390–436 (p. 407): ‘all true
draughtsmen draw from the image imprinted in their brain and not from
nature’.
47 Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p. 40 n42. For the text, see Rainer Maria Rilke,
The Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. A. Poulin, Jr (Saint
Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1986), pp. 59–61.
48 Ibid., p. 36 (his emphasis). Cf. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomenon and
Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 62: ‘There is a duration to the blink,
and it closes the eye.’ See also Leonard Lawlor, The Implications of Immanence:
Toward a New Concept of Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006),
p. 32: ‘Without this minuscule hiatus, one would either have the vision of the
model or the vision of the paper, but not drawing on the paper.’
49 Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, p. 3.
50 Mallarmé, ‘Erechtheus’, p. 702.
51 Stéphane Mallarmé, Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters, trans.
Bradford Cook (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), p. 48.
52 Ibid., p. 42.
53 A. C. Swinburne, ‘Epicede’, in Swinburne’s Collected Poetical Works, 2 vols.
(London: William Heinemann, 1924), Vol. i, p. 368.
54 Prins, Victorian Sappho, p. 172.
 Modernism and the limits of ­lyric 193
55 Eliot, ‘Swinburne as Poet’, p. 327. Cf. McGann, Swinburne, p. 73: ‘the uni-
form tone persuades us that all systems of echo and correspondence are real-
ities which stand beyond personality, immutably and eternally “real”’.
56 Helsinger, ‘Song’s Fictions’, p. 152.
57 Jerome McGann, ‘Wagner, Baudelaire, Swinburne: Poetry in the Condition
of Music’, Victorian Poetry 47.4 (2009), 619–32 (p. 627). Helsinger also dis-
cusses the expanded version of this ‘mirroring’ effect in Tristram of Lyoness,
where two forty-four-line passages echo each other from the opening of the
first canto to that of the final one (‘Song’s Fictions’, p. 156).
58 Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago University Press,
2002), p. 68.
59 Ezra Pound, ‘A Study in French Poets’, Little Review 4.10 (February 1918),
p. 27.
60 Pound, Cantos, pp. 69, 99.
61 Pound, Literary Essays, p. 154 (my italics).
62 Pound, ‘How to Read’, pp. 171–2.
63 Pound, ‘Vorticism’, p. 82.
64 Pound, Selected Letters, p. 210. For a detailed working through of this argument
see my Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing (London: Macmillan, 1984).
65 Charles Olson, Human Universe and Other Essays, ed. Donald Allen (New
York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 59. Even in the 1914 essay ‘Vorticism’, Pound
is sceptical about the poem as revelation of some stable self: ‘In the “search
for oneself ”, in the search for “sincere self-expression”, one gropes, one finds
some seeming verity. One says “I am” this, that, or the other, and with the
words scarcely uttered one ceases to be that thing’ (p. 85).
66 George Oppen, Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers, ed. Stephen Cope (Los
Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. 67.
67 See above, p. 184. Pound’s conjuring with ‘How many worlds we have!’ in
the first draft of Canto i shows a similar set of doubts about the autonomy
of lyric: ‘Oh, we have worlds enough, and brave décors, / And from these like
we guess a soul for man / And build him full of aery populations’ (Pound,
Personae, p. 234).
68 George Oppen, New Collected Poems, ed. Michael Davidson (New York:
New Directions, 2008), p. 50. For a discussion of ‘impoverishment’ and
Oppen’s late poetry, see my George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (Oxford
University Press, 2007), Chapters 6 and 7.
69 The phrase ‘comfortable occupancy’ is from J. H. Prynne, ‘Mental Ears and
Poetic Work’, Chicago Review 55.1 (2010), 126–57 (p. 157 n56).
70 The distinction is employed in regard to Hölderlin’s concept of the caesura
in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed.
Christopher Fynsk (Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 234.
71 Oppen, New Collected Poems, p. 260.
72 The term ‘counter-rhythm’ is used in a famous discussion of the caesura by
Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. Thomas Pfau (Albany,
NY: SUNY Press, 1988), p. 102.
73 Oppen, New Collected Poems, p. 254.
194 Peter ­Nicholls
74 I refer to the title of Susan Howe, Articulation of Sound Forms in Time
(Windsor, VT: Awede Press, 1987).
75 Susan Howe, Pierce-Arrow (New York: New Directions, 1999), p. 54. Cf.
Swinburne, Collected Poetical Works, Vol. ii, p. 147: ‘And she that saw looked
hardly toward him back, / Saying, “Ay, the ship comes surely; but her sail is
black.”’
76 Will Montgomery, The Poetry of Susan Howe: History, Theology, Authority
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 151.
77 Susan Howe, The Europe of Trusts (Los Angeles, CA: Sun & Moon Classics,
1990), p. 26: ‘Only / what never stops hurting remains // In memory …’.
Compare Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Other Writings,
trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 38: ‘A thing must
be burnt in so that it stays in the memory: only something that continues to
hurt stays in the memory’ (his italics). For ‘Iliadic heroism’, see Howe, Pierce-
Arrow, p. 27.
78 Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, ed. P. Adams
Sitney (New York: Station Hill, 1981), p. 176.
79 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1982), p. 173. Compare Susan Howe, ‘Sorting
Facts; or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker’, in Beyond Document: Essays
on Nonfiction Film, ed. Charles Warren (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University
Press, 1996), pp. 295–344 (p. 332): ‘A documentary work is an attempt to
recapture someone something somewhere looking back. Looking back,
Orpheus was the first known documentarist: Orpheus, or Lot’s wife.’
80 Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus, p. 14.
81 Ibid., p. 31.
82 Howe, Pierce-Arrow, pp. 101, 140, 139.
83 Susan Howe, ‘Encloser’, in The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy,
ed. Charles Bernstein (New York: Roof, 1990), pp. 175–89 (p. 192).
84 Susan Howe, My Emily Dickinson (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic, 1985), p. 21.
On the association of a ‘rhetoric of obscuration’ with prophecy in the bib-
lical tradition, see Herbert Marks, ‘On Prophetic Stammering’, Yale Journal of
Criticism 1 (1987), 1–19.
85 Howe, Pierce-Arrow, p. 35. The phrase ‘wounded syntax’ is from Montgomery,
The Poetry of Susan Howe, p. 146.
 ­c h apter ten

The lyric ‘I’ in late-twentieth-century

English poetry
Neil Roberts

Writing in 1995, Mark Jeffreys noted that ‘The term lyric has all but disap-
peared from the title pages of anthologies, making it all but impossible to
determine what the contemporary lyric canon – as opposed to a general
poetic canon – might look like.’1 One reason for this, he suggests, is that
anthologists and critics ‘conflate the terms poetry and lyric’.2 In 2000, as if
in confirmation of Jeffreys’ argument, Edna Longley wrote in the preface
to her Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry, ‘This anthology is essentially
an anthology of 20th century lyrics.’ Longley refers back to Yeats’ Oxford
Book of Modern Verse (1936), quoting his Paterian definition of modern
poetry as the expression of ‘life at its intense moments, those moments
that are brief because of their intensity’, and appears to borrow his cri-
terion: ‘The common factor is concentration: language “at its intense
moments”.’3 But she has made a surprisingly silent shift: in her definition,
the intensity belongs to language, not to ‘life’. In the examples of late-
twentieth-century poetry that I shall be considering, I shall argue that the
intensity is indeed one of language, though at least one of the poets would
deny it.
Longley is also at pains to refute the solipsism that lyric has often been
accused of in this period: ‘The drama of lyric poetry begins where the
merely personal ends.’4 A parallel with both these contentions might be
found in Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s more theorised approach in Lyric Poetry:
The Pain and the Pleasure of Words, though not quite in the way Longley
intended. Blasing locates lyric on the borderline between sound, signi-
fication, and formal structure: ‘Poetic rhythm … is a mentally audible
movement of sounds that will not reduce to discursive meanings or formal
effects.’ It ‘makes audible an intending “I”’.5 This ‘I’, however, ‘is not prior
to its words, and its words have nothing to do with “self-expression”’.6 It
is, rather, ‘a rhythmic pulse “between” music and figure; it is neither music
nor figure and without it there is neither music nor figure’.7 A critic of
Longley’s persuasion might protest that this is even more solipsistic than
195
196 Neil ­Roberts
conventional definitions of lyric, but I will argue that in my chosen poets
the lyric is defined by an escape from the ego or social self, and the discov-
ery of another ‘I’ in the act of writing.
Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes are routinely regarded as opposite, even
incompatible, poles of late-twentieth-century English poetry. Despite
their very real differences, some of which will be clear in the course of
my chapter, I wish to draw attention to parallels both in their situations
as poets who strove for lyric utterance in this period, and in some of
their strategies. Although, as the introduction to this book states, this is a
period in which ‘poetry has, in the minds of many, become synonymous
with definitions of the lyric’ (p. 3), most of its major practitioners (among
whom one might include Geoffrey Hill as well as Hughes and Larkin) are
haunted by voices questioning the lyric’s integrity.
Larkin and Hughes were both, at the heart of their endeavours, lyric
poets. Larkin published two novels, which he later claimed were really
poems, and abandoned novel-writing in his early twenties. Thereafter,
apart from a substantial body of lively journalism, he published only short
poems. Many of his best poems have important narrative elements, but it is
telling that his one attempt that might have developed into a lengthy nar-
rative, ‘The Dance’, was left unfinished. Hughes is a more complex case. As
well as several short stories he published one book-length narrative poem,
Gaudete; wrote several verse plays for radio (mostly unpublished); transla-
tions of verse and prose drama; and a number of much more ambitious
works of criticism than Larkin’s, most notably Shakespeare and the Goddess
of Complete Being. If we also consider his writing for children, his achieve-
ments in prose narrative and drama are even more numerous. Yet Hughes
too, I will argue, is centrally a lyric poet. Nevertheless, the work of both
poets was in different ways, as Peter Nicholls has argued for poets of the
modernist period in the foregoing chapter, a ‘hybrid’ lyric.
Blasing’s lyric ‘I’ is in language but is also profoundly somatic, negotiat-
ing between signification and our earliest experience of pre-verbal sound.
Such an approach seems comically incongruous with Larkin’s ‘plain man’
definition of poetry in his essay ‘The Pleasure Principle’:
[The writing of a poem] consists of three stages: the first is when a man
becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is
compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second stage,
namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional con-
cept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time. The third stage is
the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the
device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it.8
 The lyric ‘I’ in the late twentieth ­century 197
Psychoanalytic approaches such as Blasing’s were less common when
Larkin wrote this in 1972, otherwise one might suspect a satirical inten-
tion in his lifting of a Freudian phrase for his title. This is Larkin the
‘philistine’, a role for which Barbara Everett praised him, setting him in a
tradition that ‘has for centuries refused to avail itself of the self-indulgent
securities of “Art”’.9 However, there is a revealing aporia at the centre of
this bluff utterance, in Larkin’s phrase ‘emotional concept’. What ‘the poet
felt when he wrote’ was surely not a ‘concept’, yet Larkin’s repetition of this
phrase indicates that it is not a careless slip. The main thrust of his essay
is that poetry is nothing unless it communicates with an audience, and
one can applaud this while maintaining that this communication is not
the same as a person trying to explain his or her feelings to another. The
odd, borderline phrase, ‘emotional concept’, might betray that Larkin has
in mind something closer to Blasing’s ‘movement of sounds that will not
reduce to discursive meanings or formal effects’ than his manner implies.
I shall hope to demonstrate that Larkin’s genuine lyricism is stranger and
less companionable than the ‘philistine’ would have us think.
In contrast to Larkin, Hughes from an early stage in his career espoused
a conception of the lyric ‘I’ that was much more in line with Eliotic and
New Critical orthodoxy. In 1973 he wrote: ‘Whatever person I’ve pro-
jected, in the body of my poems, will have to bear whatever ideas people
have about him. I’ve freed myself fairly successfully from too great a con-
cern about his fate. What does disturb me, I’m afraid, is to see him identi-
fied with me – in the details of my life.’10 His reference in this same letter
to readers having ‘scraps of [his] hair and nails’ – a well-known motif of
Sylvia Plath biography – betrays the obvious personal motives that sup-
port his espousal of impersonality. Much later in his career, however, when
he published Birthday Letters, he vehemently renounced this stance: ‘My
high-minded principal [sic] was simply wrong – for my own psychological
& physical health.’11 Is not the ‘I’ of Birthday Letters ‘prior to its words’?
This is one case that I shall be investigating.
For both Larkin and Hughes, not surprisingly given the period of their
literary formation, the most significant lyric precursor was Yeats, who,
however, played differently into the poetic formation of each. Hughes’
account of his early development has a home-made feel, and is very con-
vincing. His first model was what he called the ‘lockstep rhythms and
resounding deadlock rhymes’ of Kipling. He gives an example from an
otherwise lost poem: ‘And the curling lips of the five gouged rips in the
bark of the pine were the mark of the bear’.12 This is the style of the first
two poems in Collected Poems, ‘Wild West’ and ‘Too Bad for Hell’. Yet
198 Neil ­Roberts
over the page from the latter in Collected Poems, and first published in
the same issue of the Mexborough Grammar School magazine in Hughes’
eighteenth year, we find this:
O lean dry man with your thin withered feet,
Feet like old rain-worn weasels, like old roots
Frost-warped and sunken on the cold sea beach,
You have a sad world here:
Only the bitter windy rain and bareness of wet rock glistening;
Only the sand-choked marram, only their dead
Throats whispering always in despair:
Only the wild high phantom-drifting of the gulls …13
Hughes’s second great poetic discovery had been The Wanderings of Oisin,
especially its third section, whose long lines struck him as a ‘wilder and
more hauntingly varied’ version of the Kipling metre. The influence is
obvious in this poem, ‘The Recluse’, which has its share of immature
Yeatsian pastiche, but also lines of a rhythmic subtlety to match the best
of his early poetry, such as the last one quoted, and imagery such as that
in the second line, which is redolent of Hughes’ intimacy with the wildlife
of his locality.
Larkin’s early formation was ostensibly more sophisticated, contempor-
ary, and, for its time, mainstream. His first major influence was not Yeats
(and certainly not Kipling) but Auden, and he had an Auden-inspired
poem, ‘Ultimatum’, published in a national journal, The Listener, at the
age of eighteen. His infatuation with Yeats came later, and is pervasively
evident in his first collection, The North Ship, written between 1941 and
1944, when Larkin was between nineteen and twenty-three years old.
Hughes, by contrast, collected only one juvenile Yeats imitation, ‘Song’,
written in 1949 when he was nineteen, five years earlier than any other
poem in his first collection, The Hawk in the Rain. A comparison of ‘Song’
with Larkin’s ‘I dreamed of an out-thrust arm of land’, and of both these
poems with an early Yeats lyric such as ‘A Poet to His Beloved’ shows a
surprising similarity of inspiration:
O lady, consider when I shall have lost ­you
The moon’s full hands, scattering waste,
The sea’s hands, dark from the world’s breast,
The world’s decay where the wind’s hands have passed,
And my head, worn out with love, at rest
In my hands, and my hands full of dust
O my lady.14
I was sleeping, and you woke me
To walk on the chilled shore …
 The lyric ‘I’ in the late twentieth ­century 199
Till your two hands withdrew
And I was empty of tears …15
I bring you with reverent hands
The books of my numberless dreams,
White woman that passion has worn
As the tide wears the dove-grey sands …16
Note that in both cases it is the early, fin de siècle Yeats that the young
poets are drawn to: a version of lyricism already outmoded when they
were writing. Their Yeats-inspired early verse is at the centre of contrast-
ing, but equally suspect, narratives of poetic formation. Larkin’s is well
known. He started trying to write like Yeats ‘out of infatuation with his
music’, but discovering Hardy brought ‘the sense of relief that I didn’t
have to try and jack myself up to a concept of poetry that lay outside my
own life … Hardy taught one to feel rather than to write.’17 It is true that
most of the poems of The North Ship are marked by an affected literari-
ness that is not present in Larkin’s mature work, but as B. J. Leggett has
pointed out, this narrative of development really tells us nothing because it
‘ignore[s] the status of the poems as written texts’.18 Moreover, as Andrew
Motion argued more than thirty years ago, ‘Even in the poems that adopt
primarily Hardyesque neutral tones, there are frequent flashes of rhetoric
which recall Yeats’s grander manner.’19 The important issue, however, is
not which earlier poets Larkin’s work reminds us of, but a recognition that
his mature work is no less lyrical than his juvenilia, and that the ‘intensity’
of this lyricism, as Longley implies, is a quality of the writing, rather than
a Paterian pre-existent moment construed from the writing.
Hughes, as I have said, collected only one Yeats-inspired early poem,
‘Song’, but, far from disavowing it, he made the remarkable claim late in
life that it was ‘the one song I sang in Arcadia – that came to me literally out
of the air … like Aphrodite blowing ashore’, and hinted that it could be a
model for what might have been if his development had not been thwarted
by ‘the critical exhalations and toxic smokestacks and power stations of
Academe’.20 Hughes did not collect any poetry written when he was read-
ing English at Cambridge, and this characterisation of ‘Song’ serves a nar-
rative in which academic study stifles creativity. Whereas Larkin’s narrative
is designed to obscure the continuing presence of Yeats and the essentially
written character of his oeuvre, Hughes is eliding the literary character of
‘Song’ itself, which came, not ‘literally out of the air’, but largely from the
pages of Yeats. Despite the contrast between the poets’ valuations of this
early work, there is a shared motive: a denial of the essentially literary char-
acter of lyric poetry. We can also see that these narratives reinforce their
contrasting poetic personae: while Larkin grounds his in daily life, Hughes’
200 Neil ­Roberts
references to Arcadia and Aphrodite signal the importance of myth and
shamanism to his conception of the poet.
This lyricism inherited from early Yeats was not, however, adequate
equipment for poets writing after the Second World War. Larkin and
Hughes were both (unlike Yeats) admirers of Wilfred Owen, and there-
fore writing in the shadow of Owen’s ‘Above all I am not concerned with
Poetry’ as well as of Eliot’s ‘The poetry does not matter.’21 It is unlikely that
either poet read Theodor Adorno’s influential essay ‘Cultural Criticism and
Society’, but Hughes at least was aware of the famous rhetorical gesture
with which that essay ends: ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to
write poetry today.’22 In his introduction to translations of the Hungarian
poet János Pilinszky, Hughes quotes Pilinszky’s statement, ‘I would like
to write as if I had remained silent’, and comments, ‘The silence of artis-
tic integrity “after Auschwitz” is a real thing.’23 However, both poets were
aware that European culture had already been compromised by its own
barbarism before their birth. Larkin’s references to the First World War are
less frequent and emphatic than Hughes’, but his poem ‘MCMXIV’ con-
cludes, ‘Never such innocence again’ – an innocence that includes such
lyricism as that of the early Yeats.24 Hughes’ work is pervasively haunted
by the post-traumatic stress of his infantryman father. His first collection
includes a pastiche of Owen, ‘Bayonet Charge’, but more telling is the way
imagery drawn from that conflict erupts in places that are ostensibly the-
matically remote from it: crabs emerging from the sea are ‘staring inland
/ Like a packed trench of helmets’; his West Yorkshire birthplace is also
a ‘trench’ under ‘A sky like an empty helmet / With a hole in it’; a dying
salmon is ‘already a veteran, / Already a death-patched hero’ clothed in
‘clownish regimentals’.25
It is no surprise therefore to find that both poets self-consciously fore-
ground, and perhaps parody, received ideas of the ‘lyric’. ‘Sad Steps’ is one
of several Larkin poems that belie his asserted dislike of ‘casual allusions
in poems to other poems or other poets’,26 quoting in its title Sidney’s
Astrophil and Stella, xxxi. As if in reaction to this, like the more fam-
ous ‘This Be the Verse’ (which takes its title from Stevenson’s ‘Requiem’
and begins ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’)27 its opening line
is in Larkin’s most ‘philistine’ register: ‘Groping back to bed after a piss’
(Sidney’s poem begins, ‘With how sad steps, O moon, thou climb’st the
skies! / How silently, and with how wan a face!’).28
Uniquely, however, the ‘philistine’ persona is dropped after a single line.
The poem continues:
 The lyric ‘I’ in the late twentieth ­century 201
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.
Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.29
There is little that is overtly poetic about these lines, but, despite the meto-
nymic gestures of the thick curtains, the time of night, and the domes-
tic gardens, their effect has little to do with referentiality: the referential
meaning is quite banal. The experience of parting the curtains and see-
ing the moon is raised to significance by the exceptional sensitivity of the
language, which lends itself to the speaker’s vision of the scene. Internal
rhyme draws together the two clauses of the first line, emphasising the
contrast between the slight mimetic resistance of the first and the sudden
ease of the second. The moon’s cleanliness is not in itself a particularly
original image, but the dropping of a metrical syllable and consequent
spondee-effect reinforces the consonance to make the phrase stand out
almost literally from the line (compare the weaker effect of the metric-
ally regular ‘moon’s bright cleanliness’). The last line quoted is another
example of the poetry of contrasting sound-values: the open vowels of
‘cavernous’ against the densely consonantal ‘wind-picked’. The phrase is
strictly contradictory: ‘cavernous’ ought logically to signify enclosure and
confinement but the combination with ‘wind-picked’ suggests rather a
vast, draughty space.
This is lyric poetry at its most refined, and the ‘philistine’ persona recoils
from it: ‘There’s something laughable about this.’ Within a few lines he
bursts into what seems like a series of parodic exclamations:
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements!
‘Wolves of memory’ is reminiscent of Dylan Thomas, ‘Medallions of art’
of the early Pound. ‘Immensements’ is a neologism – as far as I know
the only one in Larkin – its cumbersome grotesqueness perhaps a com-
ment on neologism as a poetic device. There is however a French word,
­immensément, and there may be a satirical allusion to modernist franco-
philia. ‘Lozenge of love’ is equally grotesque: a lozenge may be a heraldic
image, a pane of glass, or a facet of a precious stone, but in every case is
rhomboid, hardly a suitable metaphor for the moon. This outburst high-
lights the self-consciousness of the speaker, but emphasises by contrast the
unparodiable subtlety of the poem’s genuinely lyrical passages.
Hughes described his fourth collection Crow as ‘songs with no music
whatsoever’, adding ‘I throw out the eagles and choose the Crow.’30 This
202 Neil ­Roberts
must be an allusion to the poem ‘Crow and the Birds’. This poem is a
single sentence of fifteen lines. Each of the first fourteen names a bird in a
subordinate clause dependent on the main clause, which is deferred to the
fifteenth line: ‘Crow spraddled head-down in the beach-garbage, guzzling
a dropped ice-cream.’ Crow is thus privileged by his status in the sentence
(and by being ‘Crow’ as if a proper name, rather than ‘the crow’), cast-
ing an ironic shadow over the foregoing lines. There may also be an allu-
sion to the sonnet form, and its usurpation by Crow. (This would be an
abstruse link with ‘Sad Steps’, whose title alludes to a sonnet and whose
form could be described as three Petrarchan sestets.)
The poem begins:
When the eagle soared clear through a dawn distilling of emerald
When the curlew trawled in seadusk through a chime of wineglasses
When the swallow swooped through a woman’s song in a cavern
And the swift flicked through the breath of a violet31

Critics routinely describe these lines as parodic. Honesty demands that I

cite myself as an example: ‘The mode of the first stanza is parodic: each
bird is engulfed in a gratuitous romantic idea.’32 I now think the case
is less simple. In each line the verb is precise, energetic, and carefully
chosen. The language is certainly heightened in comparison with what
I have called the refined lyricism of ‘Sad Steps’. But ‘distilling of emer-
ald’ is a far from hackneyed or cheaply glamorised metaphor for dawn;
Hughes had used ‘emerald’ in a completely unironic context in one of
his most admired nature poems, ‘Pike’: ‘[Pike] move, stunned by their
own grandeur, / Over a bed of emerald’.33 ‘A chime of wineglasses’ is a
vivid and accurate representation of a curlew’s song, and ‘the breath of
a violet’ registers the precision of the swift’s flight. Only the ‘woman’s
song in a cavern’ is self-evidently ‘poetic’ in a derogatory sense. This per-
haps casts a shadow over the whole stanza, but the real shadow is cast by
‘Crow spraddled head-down in the beach-garbage, guzzling a dropped
ice-cream.’
We might think that this is Hughes’ equivalent of ‘Groping back to
bed after a piss’ or ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’, but Hughes’
line differs from Larkin’s in that, while Larkin shows consummate skill in
incorporating these lines into works of great lyrical power, they are not
intrinsically of great poetic interest. Hughes’ line is. It is rhythmically
extremely accomplished, stretching a rhythmic unit based on the allitera-
tive line to the limit, nailing it together with actual alliteration, and with
energetic diction (‘spraddled’, ‘garbage’, ‘guzzling’) that has a wide lexical
 The lyric ‘I’ in the late twentieth ­century 203
reach (English dialect, American, English slang). If Hughes were taking
the easy option of opposing parodied conventional poetry to the language
of Crow, the poem’s merit would shrink to its final line. He has actu-
ally achieved something more difficult and interesting: he has composed
genuinely accomplished, though conventional, lyrical verse (allowing for
the lapse of the ‘woman’s song in a cavern’) and challenged it with a new,
harsher, and more quotidian lyricism.
But a poet cannot just go on repeating this kind of gesture. In the rest
of this chapter I will explore the strategies adopted by each poet, in the
face of this self-consciousness and resistance, to approach something like
Blasing’s ‘rhythmic pulse “between” music and figure’ that ‘makes audible
an intending “I”’.
In an early (1977) and influential essay David Lodge argued that
Larkin displaced poetry, ‘an inherently metaphoric mode … towards the
metonymic pole’, which he characterised as ‘an “experimental” literary
gesture’, because such poetry ‘makes its impact by appearing daringly,
even shockingly unpoetic’.34 Lodge perhaps exaggerated the boldness
of a gesture that had been made a generation earlier by William Carlos
Williams, but Larkin’s creation of the kind of ‘philistine’ persona whom
we have seen emerge briefly in ‘Sad Steps’ has a special piquancy because
it is usually framed by conventional, and very skilfully handled, metrical
forms. Williams’ startlingly anti-poetic gestures presuppose an avant-
garde audience, whereas Larkin writes as if for a middlebrow readership.
Lodge concludes his essay by observing that Larkin frequently ‘surprises
us, especially in the closing lines of his poems, by his ability to tran-
scend – or turn ironically upon – the severe restraints he seems to have
placed upon authentic expression of feeling in poetry’.35 It is less a mat-
ter of ‘authentic expression of feeling’ than of language: the abandon-
ment of the ‘philistine’ persona who implicitly or explicitly disavows
‘art’ (‘Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don’t’)36 in favour
of an ‘intending “I”’ that is wholly identified with the art of lyric poetry.
Lodge was misled by the Jakobsonian framework of his book The Modes
of Modern Writing to categorise poetry as ‘inherently metaphoric’. As we
have seen in ‘Sad Steps’ – ‘I part thick curtains, and am startled by / The
rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness’ – the achievement of a lyric style is
not dependent on metaphor.
Larkin did, throughout his mature oeuvre, write more straightforwardly
lyrical poems than is usually acknowledged – ‘Going’ and ‘Absences’ in The
Less Deceived, ‘Water’ and ‘First Sight’ in The Whitsun Weddings, ‘Solar’
and ‘Cut Grass’ in High Windows. But mostly it isn’t in these poems that
204 Neil ­Roberts
we see his lyrical achievement. He made the point himself about ‘Cut
Grass’, which ends:
Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer’s pace.37
He wrote about this poem, ‘Its trouble is that it’s “music”, i.e. pointless
crap … About line 6 I hear a wonderful kind of Elgar river-music take
over, for which the words are just an excuse.’38 ‘Music’, the foregrounding
of sound and rhythm, is of course essential to lyric poetry, but as his men-
tion of Elgar suggests, this is an imitation of an already archaic music –
the euphony of the first line quoted, his choice of the name ‘Queen
Anne’s lace’ rather than ‘wild carrot’, which is an alternative name for the
same plant, and the archaism ‘builded’, with its echo of Blake’s ‘And did
those feet’. Indeed, the effect is of a wholly indulgent and nationalistically
tinged sense of pastness.
Larkin’s distinctive lyrical achievement is more evident in a poem such
as ‘Vers de Société’, which begins,
My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps
To come and waste their time and ours: perhaps
You’d care to join us? In a pig’s arse, friend.
Day comes to an end.
The gas fire breathes, the trees are darkly swayed.
And so Dear Warlock-Williams: I’m afraid – 39
‘And so’ in the final line quoted implies that the foregoing lines have
somehow explained the speaker’s refusal of the invitation, but logically
they seem entirely tangential. ‘In a pig’s arse, friend’ is a performance of
the Larkin persona whom we have already met in ‘Sad Steps’. Here its
main function is to intensify the steep change of mood that follows. This
is one of Larkin’s most striking moves from Lodge’s ‘metonymic’ to the
lyrical, yet is achieved without the aid of metaphor. The line’s simplicity,
its elemental quality, its unexpected brevity and the rhyme emphasising
the contrast combine to create the modulation from the ‘performed’ voice
to something more resonant and pregnant, which continues into the next
line. This effect isn’t dependent on the shift from the social to the nat-
ural, since ‘the gas fire breathes’ wholly belongs in the new tone. There is
in this phrase a touch of personification, the implied silence and stillness
allowing the fire to be heard, and subliminally but perhaps most decisively
an echo of the ‘film, which fluttered on the grate’ of Coleridge’s ‘Frost at
Midnight’, that canonical evocation of poetic solitude.40 The period touch
 The lyric ‘I’ in the late twentieth ­century 205
of the gas fire saves this from preciosity, but there’s nothing parodic about
it, and the feeling is preserved, allowing the more overtly lyrical gesture of
‘the trees are darkly swayed’, echoing from ‘Frost at Midnight’ the motif
of the poet looking out of the window into the darkness.
‘Vers de Société’ is effectively a rewrite of a poem originally writ-
ten twenty years earlier, and unpublished till after Larkin’s death: ‘Best
Society’. The later poem is an improvement, in the liveliness of its comedy,
the refinement of its lyricism, and its more complex feeling, recognising
that solitude can bring ‘Not peace, but other things’. But ‘Best Society’
makes explicit the production of the ‘intending “I”’ by the lyric:
The gas fire breathes. The wind outside
Ushers in evening rain. Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.41
There are a number of fine poetic effects here: as well as the gas fire that
Larkin preserved in the later poem, there are the boldly polysyllabic
‘Uncontradicting solitude’ and the apparently modest substitution of the
snail for the sea-anemone. These effects are more obviously worked-for,
and therefore less distinctive, than in ‘Vers de Société’, but the emer-
gence of ‘what I am’, not just from the solitude to which the poem refers,
but from the lyrical language itself, makes explicit what is implicit in the
later poem.
This solitude, almost a reduction of the subject to a finely perceiving
sensibility, is at the heart of Larkin’s lyricism. Lodge writes of many of
his most characteristic poems ending ‘with a kind of eclipse of meaning,
speculation fading out in the face of the void’.42 Such is the famous ending
of ‘High Windows’:
Rather than words comes the thought of high ­windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.43
‘Rather than words’ is of course a deceptive rhetorical device – these are
words. The phrase ‘high windows’ startles by its complete unexpectedness
and apparent randomness in a poem that has been about the delusiveness
of freedom. ‘Comprehending’ fills the line mimetically, while suggesting
a pun that can’t quite be grasped. The cadence of the final line completes
206 Neil ­Roberts
the feeling of entropy. This is as close as Larkin comes to Symbolist poetry.
The social persona, even the persona who asserts his desire for solitude in
amusing and therefore social terms, has dissolved into something that is
nothing but the subject of these words.
The shift from the philistine or social persona (who starts ‘High
Windows’ with ‘When I see a couple of kids / And guess he’s fucking her’)
to a poignant but strangely comfortless lyricism is the essential signature of
Larkin’s poetry. It is there in ‘But if he stood and watched the frigid wind
/ Tousling the clouds’ of ‘Mr Bleaney’, ‘Man hands on misery to man. / It
deepens like a coastal shelf ’ of ‘This Be the Verse’, the ‘sense of falling, like
an arrow-shower / Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain’ of ‘The
Whitsun Weddings’, and the evocation of ‘money singing’ in ‘Money’.44
These examples are thematically various, but a note of absence, what
Lodge called ‘the void’, is recurrent. It is perhaps most intense in ‘Here’.
This is one of Larkin’s most highly wrought poems, with long elaborate
stanzas running into each other, and an opening sentence of twenty-four
lines. There is no ‘philistine’ persona in this poem, though there are highly
‘metonymic’ lines such as ‘Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced
lollies’. The poem’s lyrical accomplishment is by no means confined to its
conclusion, but as usual it is the final stanza that is most distinctive:
    Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.45
The first half of this stanza is composed of variants of familiar lyrical
motifs – Gray’s Elegy, for example, is somewhere in the vicinity. The
verbs ‘thicken’, ‘flower’, ‘quicken’, and ‘ascend’ combine in an affirmative
­chorus, which may be self-referential (‘here’ in this isolation is where this
poet’s creativity thrives) but somewhat resembles the ‘Elgar river-music’
that Larkin dismissed in ‘Cut Grass’. Unlike that poem, however, ‘Here’
swerves (the dominant verb of its opening stanza) to something more
disconcerting: the vagueness of ‘bluish neutral distance’, the abruptness
of ‘End the land suddenly’, the renewed vagueness of ‘shapes and shin-
gle’. Like ‘High Windows’ the poem ends in a series of negatives. In place
of the plenitude offered in the foregoing lines, ‘Here’ (in the most literal
sense, the locus of the unstated ‘I’ of the poem?) is finally an absence.
 The lyric ‘I’ in the late twentieth ­century 207
In his essay on Coleridge, ‘The Snake in the Oak’, Hughes argues that
the three ‘visionary’ poems, ‘Kubla Khan’, ‘The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner’, and ‘Christabel’, ‘together make a single myth, which is also, as
a poet’s myths always are, (among other things) a projected symbolic self-
portrait of the poet’s own deepest psychological make-up … It is the myth
of what made him a poet. In that sense, it is specifically the ‘creation myth’
of his unique music’.46 It takes no great insight to suspect that Hughes
believed his own work to be informed by such a myth. I have written at
length about what I construe as Hughes’ ‘single myth’ elsewhere.47 Here I
just want to consider its role in the production of his ‘unique music’.
One occasion on which Hughes partially revealed his own myth was
in 1967, in a letter explaining the enigmatic note at the beginning of his
collection Wodwo, instructing his readers that the poems, stories and play-
script in the book are to be read as ‘chapters of a single adventure’. A
perceptive review by Daniel Hoffman48 suggested that this adventure was
shamanistic in character (Hughes enthusiastically reviewed Mircea Eliade’s
Shamanism a few years before Wodwo was published), but generally readers
were baffled by this note until the publication of Hughes’ Letters in 2007.
This volume includes a letter to a friend explaining that ‘The main event
of the book – and of my life from 1961–2 onwards – is [the] invitation or
importuning of a subjective world, which I refuse. I think I did refuse – or
rather I deferred. And I paid for it quite heavily … I refused the invita-
tion, & so was forcibly abducted.’49 The dates tempt a correlation with
the events leading up to Sylvia Plath’s suicide, but I don’t want to pin
Hughes’ myth down biographically. In fact the basic motifs of the myth
are evident in work written long before this period. These motifs are visit-
ation, usurpation, and abduction. I interpret this to signify a challenge to
the ego-consciousness by another that Hughes regarded as a deeper, more
authentic self, and that I name the ‘intending “I”’ of his poetry.
This myth is already at work in the iconic early poem ‘The ­Thought-Fox’,
written in 1955, in which the consciousness of the speaker is visited and
usurped by the fox that ‘enters the dark hole of the head’.50 The poem’s
status in ‘the myth of what made him a poet’ was reinforced when Hughes
in 1994 published an autobiographical story about struggling to write an
academic essay at university (which he considered hostile to his creativ-
ity) and dreaming of a burnt fox that placed a bloody hand-print on the
essay and said, ‘Stop this – you are destroying us.’51 The myth is at work
again in ‘Pike’, written a few years later. For most of its length this poem
is a series of vivid anecdotes evoking the predatory ferocity of the pike in
language of menacing harshness relieved by a hint of grim humour. In the
208 Neil ­Roberts
final four stanzas, however, a musical change occurs, as the lines become
slower, more resonant, echoing, and inward. The poem concludes by nar-
rating a fearful fishing expedition of a younger self, whose imagination
was possessed by tales of ‘immense’ pike that lurked in the depths of the
pond he fished:
The still splashes on the dark pond,
Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,
That rose slowly towards me, watching.52
This is Hughes’ equivalent of the ‘refined lyricism’, not dependent on
metaphor or any very overt poetic devices, that I have identified in Larkin.
It is there in the subtle touches of alliteration and assonance, in the shift
from ‘lighter’ forward vowels to ‘darker’ backward vowels in the first line
quoted, and the progression of ‘dark’ vowels in the next line (intensified
if ‘hushing’ is spoken in the accent of Hughes’ native Yorkshire, to asson-
ate with ‘woods’). This lyricism is evoked by the visitation of the fish,
now unmistakably a psychic entity, and perhaps, as the poem ends on an
uncompleted action, eventual usurpation.
The shift that occurs in this poem is not as drastic as that in Larkin
poems such as ‘High Windows’ and ‘Mr Bleaney’, and Hughes never
(except to a slight extent in Birthday Letters) constructs a clearly defined
social persona, but there is a comparable trajectory. It is however charac-
teristic that whereas the ‘intending “I”’ of Larkin approaches isolation,
that of Hughes moves towards an encounter.
The lyricism of the ending of ‘Pike’, though authentically and unmis-
takably Hughesian, recognisably belongs to the western canon of lyric
poetry. When, in the late 1960s, he wrote the poems that became Crow,
he (uniquely, as it turned out) strove for a style that rejected that canon as
completely as possible: ‘As for the style – I simply tried to shed everything
… My idea was to reduce my style to the simplest clear cell – then regrow
a wholeness & richness organically from that point.’53 Such an ambition is
of course impossible literally to fulfil, but the aspiration has an important
bearing on the style of Crow. Two overt influences on this style are what
he called ‘my tradition … the primitive literatures’54 – most directly the
Native American tales collected in Paul Radin’s The Trickster and the work
of some eastern European poets of a slightly earlier generation than his
own, such as Pilinszky, whom he regarded as first-hand witnesses of the
barbarism at the root of western civilisation. He claimed that his aim was
 The lyric ‘I’ in the late twentieth ­century 209
to write ‘the songs that a crow would sing … songs with no music whatso-
ever, in a super-simple and a super-ugly language’.55
Note, however, that he still described the poems as ‘songs’, a word
that he also used in the full title of the book: From the Life and Songs
of the Crow. Marion Thain, in Chapter 8 of this book, remarks that
for J. A. Symonds in the fin de siècle, ‘song’ has become ‘something of
a dead metaphor for lyric’ that, however, was no longer ‘a particular
song form of poetry, but was gradually encompassing a variety of forms
and modes’ (p. 158). Hughes’ description of his early Yeats-inspired
poem as a ‘song sung in Arcadia’ is a comparatively inert remnant of
this usage. The same word in the title of Crow signals a much more
challenging exploration of different formal directions. That full title
also indicates that the published book was a fragment of an abandoned
project. Hughes’ original intention had been to write what he called a
‘saga’ or ‘epic folk-tale’ into which the poems would be incorporated.
Numerous prose drafts of this are preserved in archives. In an interview
at the time he said, ‘The story brought me to the poems’ – in other
words, he needed a prose scaffolding to construct his lyric utterance,
even if that scaffolding proved redundant.56 The most interesting part
of the ‘saga’, and one of the few that Hughes revealed to his readers,
connects Crow with Hughes’ myth. The story begins immediately after
the creation of the world, when God has a nightmare that mocks his
creation. God challenges the nightmare to do better, and its response
is to create Crow, who becomes a subversive partner in creation. For
example, in the poem ‘A Childish Prank’ (which vividly illustrates the
influence of Trickster mythology) God, unable to endow man and
woman with souls, falls asleep. Crow responds by biting ‘the Worm,
God’s only son, / Into two writhing halves’ and stuffing the halves into
the sleeping humans, thus awakening them by creating sex in the form
of the Worm’s attempts to join itself up.57 This story grounds Crow in
the key mythical motifs of visitation and usurpation: God, who for
Hughes epitomises the ego-consciousness, is visited by the nightmare
and usurped by Crow. Since Crow is not just a narrative persona but is
identified with the style of the book (‘songs that a crow would sing’),
the style itself might be regarded as an expression of the myth: the
canonical norms are usurped by Crow; or alternatively Hughes, in con-
trast to the ‘adventure’ of Wodwo, accepts the invitation.
We have seen an explicit example of this usurpation in ‘Crow and the
Birds’. I will give one more example of the ‘songs with no music’, my main
point being that this is, after all, a form of lyricism, that what emerges
210 Neil ­Roberts
from the mythic struggle is an expression of the ‘intending “I”’. The poem
‘Lineage’ is a parody of the biblical lineage form in which the elemental
‘Scream’ and ‘Blood’ lead to the Christian sequence ‘Adam’, ‘Mary’, and
‘God’. The sequence concludes inevitably with Crow:
Screaming for Blood
Grubs, crusts
Anything
Trembling featherless elbows in the nest’s filth58
As with all the other examples of the lyric that I have cited in this chapter,
it is primarily a matter of language: of rhythm – the transition from the
mimetic anapaestic opening to the compacted spondee of the line’s end,
of ingeniously handled alliteration – the condensation of the vowels of
‘featherless’ in ‘filth’, of the naked and comically human ‘elbows’ project-
ing in the middle of the line. The identification of Crow with the style of
the poems, which occurs frequently in Hughes’ comments on the book, is
perfectly achieved here.
Although he wrote a great deal of discursive prose, Hughes claimed to
hate this kind of writing, believing that it is ‘essentially false’ and even
that it destroyed his immune system.59 It epitomised the rational intel-
lect that he considered the enemy of the ‘animal/spiritual consciousness’,
represented in his myth by the fox.60 A poetic style that combined meto-
nymically the song a crow would sing with the influences of ‘primitive’
literature and the east European poets who bore witness to the barbar-
ity of civilisation corresponds to this ‘animal/spiritual consciousness’, the
‘intending “I”’ of Crow. This explains why Hughes always looked back on
the period of Crow’s composition as one in which he had a ‘free energy’
that he never recovered.61
Hughes gave the most overt creative expression to his myth in the nar-
rative poem Gaudete. According to the terse ‘Argument’ of the first edi-
tion, ‘An Anglican clergyman is abducted by spirits into the other world.
The spirits create a duplicate of him to take his place in this world, ­during
his absence, and to carry on his work.’62 This summary gives little indi-
cation of the overwhelming and disturbing character of the narrative,
which might well be Hughes’ most controversial work if it were not so
little read – a state of affairs perpetuated by its inexplicable omission from
Collected Poems. The narrative lurches between horror and farce as the
‘duplicate’ seduces every woman in the parish in a single day and is hunted
to death by the men. Hughes later said that he thought the ‘underworld
plot’ (the experiences of the abducted clergyman) was ‘the more interest-
ing part of the story’ but was diverted by his desire to write ‘a headlong
 The lyric ‘I’ in the late twentieth ­century 211
narrative’.63 We get only fragmentary glimpses of the ‘underworld plot’,
but after the death of the duplicate the original man returns with a manu-
script of poems. These poems (which are in Collected Poems) form the
‘Epilogue’ of Gaudete. They are brief devotional lyrics, strongly influ-
enced by the Dravidic vacanas that Hughes had read in A. K. Ramanujan’s
Speaking of Siva, but oriented to Hughes’ own religious devotion to (in
the title of his Shakespeare book) a Goddess of Complete Being. They
are addressed to this Goddess, and permeated by a sense of remembered,
dreamed, or imagined encounter, and of actual loss. They may therefore
be said to stand in place of the unwritten narrative of Lumb’s adventures
in the other world: narrative has, as it were, been usurped by lyric. Unlike
all the other examples I am considering in this chapter, it is very difficult
to demonstrate the qualities of these lyrics by analysing their parts. Their
effect is cumulative, and is one of stillness, absence, and absorption, as if
the subject has been emptied by an encounter of overwhelming signifi-
cance. For example:
How will you correct
The veteran of negatives
And the survivor of cease?64
But all it finds of me, when it picks me up
Is what you have
Already
Emptied and rejected.65
And for all the rumours of me read obituary.
What there truly remains of me
Is that very thing – my absence.
So how will you gather me?66

Just as the fiction of Crow released an ‘intending “I”’ in the form of a styl-
istic signature, so has the fiction of Lumb. These signatures could not be
more different – evidence for Blasing’s case that this ‘I’ ‘is not prior to its
words’.
The narrative that enabled my final example of Hughesian lyric, how-
ever, is not a fiction – except in the sense that all reconstruction of the past
is a fiction. When he finally published Birthday Letters in 1998 Hughes
wrote defensively, describing them as ‘so raw, so vulnerable, so unpro-
cessed, so naïve, so self-exposing & unguarded, so without any of the
niceties that any poetry workshop student could have helped me to’.67 I
would argue that the vulnerability of this collection is less a matter of
exposed feeling than of often uninspired writing. Hughes’ revisiting of
212 Neil ­Roberts
his first marriage often takes the form of a leadenly metonymic narrative,
which is particularly vulnerable when it invites comparison with Plath’s
own work, as in the case of ‘The Rabbit-Catcher’, much of which is a
laborious reconstruction of the events that occasioned Plath’s poem of the
same title. The ‘flat and literal’ writing contributed to the ‘affront’ that a
Plath devotee such as Linda Wagner-Martin felt at Hughes daring to write
about his life with Plath.68 Here is an example from the poem ‘Visit’:
   I was sitting
Youth away in an office in Slough,
Morning and evening between Slough and Holborn …
Weekends I recidived
Into Alma Mater. Girl-friend
Shared a supervisor and weekly session
With your American rival and you.
She detested you.69
I shall be returning to this poem. Perhaps the best, certainly one of the
most moving, of the poems that came from Hughes’ communion with
his dead wife is ‘The Offers’, which he inexplicably omitted from Birthday
Letters and included instead in the expensive limited edition Howls and
Whispers. In this poem Plath appears to him three times posthumously,
implicitly in dreams. Each time she seems to be making him an offer that
he twice fails to accept. The poem concludes with the third visitation:
   You came behind ­me
(At my helpless moment, as I lowered
A testing foot into the running bath)
And spoke – peremptory, as a familiar voice
Will startle out of a river’s uproar, urgent,
Close: ‘This is the last. This one. This time
Don’t fail me.’70
Everything about this little scenario is beautifully judged, from the pres-
ence of the ghost ‘behind’ the consciousness of the speaker, his creaturely
vulnerability in a posture every reader will have shared, the wonderful
Wordsworthian note of ‘as a familiar voice / Will startle out of a river’s
uproar’, to the simply conveyed urgency of her voice, concluding with the
half-line of ominous command. This is not only one of the most lyrically
powerful of the poems, but the one that most explicitly represents itself as
a drama of visitation – in this case, as menacing as that of ‘Pike’.
To return to ‘The Visit’, which opens in such a prosaically metonymic
fashion – the structure of this poem, and several others like it in Birthday
Letters, seems almost like an imitation of the classic Larkin poem. Close
 The lyric ‘I’ in the late twentieth ­century 213
to uniquely in these poems, Hughes constructs a self-disparaging, passive
persona: ‘As if a puppet were being tied on its strings, / Or a dead frog’s
legs touched by electrodes.’ This poem concerns an incident immortal-
ised in Plath’s Journals when, after their first meeting, Hughes returned
to Cambridge and with a friend drunkenly flung mud at what they mis-
takenly thought were the windows of her college room. Her journal records
her anguish at knowing he was in Cambridge, and his failure to visit her –
which in Birthday Letters is a foreshadowing of his later more serious fail-
ures. The dramatised occasion of the writing of the poem is Hughes reading
the journal ten years after her death: ‘Your actual words, as they floated /
Out through your throat and tongue and onto your page’. The extraordin-
ary physical immediacy of this account of reading, as if breaking through
the mediation of the written words, is like a visitation, so that
I look up – as if to meet your voice
With all its urgent future
That has burst in on me. Then look back
At the book of printed words.
You are ten years dead. It is only a story.
Your story. My story.71
The language could not be more simple, and it has to be admitted that
its lyrical power is dependent on a knowledge of the ‘story’. The lyric
effect comes from playing the energy of the visionary wish-fulfilment in
‘urgent future’ and ‘burst in on me’ against the deflating factuality of ‘the
book of printed words. / You are ten years dead.’ There may be a disillu-
sioned glance at the would-be triumphant final line of ‘The Thought-Fox’:
‘The page is printed.’72 But for a moment an extraordinary temporality
is evoked, by which the ‘urgent future’ of the 23-year-old Plath, which is
now factually the past, is still a future for them both. Such a temporality,
in which the moment of writing is overwhelmed by the past, marks the
conclusions of several Birthday Letters poems.
     And my life
Forever trying to climb the steps now stone
Towards the door now red
Which you, in your own likeness, would open
With still time to talk.73
And the contemplative calm
I drank from your concentrated quiet,
In this contemplative calm
Now I drink from your stillness that neither
Of us can disturb or escape.74
214 Neil ­Roberts
   But then I sat, stilled,
Unable to fathom what stilled you
As I looked at you, as I am stilled
Permanently now, permanently
Bending so briefly at your open coffin.75
As these examples show, the experience is not necessarily one of illusion.
The most lyrically accomplished moments of Birthday Letters are not (with
a few exceptions) reconstructions of the past, but piercing revelations of
the mourning – or more accurately melancholic – ‘I’ at the moment of
writing. But the poems seem to need the ‘flat and literal’ reconstructions
to arrive at this point.
Birthday Letters differs from the other poems I have considered in that it
owes its very existence to the already known (or mis-known) life-history. It
would be absurd to try to read these poems without reference to that his-
tory. Nevertheless, if the ‘I’ who, for example, was ‘sitting / Youth away in
an office in Slough’ could hardly be said not to be ‘prior to its words’, the
lyrical charge of the passages I have quoted is not dependent on reference.
Like all the examples I have considered by both Hughes and Larkin they
are the effect of breaking through to an intense, linguistically constructed
subjectivity. Both poets combine a conservative-seeming attachment to the
idea of lyric with a historically inevitable suspicion of its integrity. Lyric is
hedged round and interrogated, in different ways, in both their oeuvres,
but at their most distinctive and accomplished both achieve a style that
honours the lyric impulse by its freedom from received ideas of the poetic.

Notes
1 Mark Jeffreys, ‘Ideologies of Lyric’, PMLA 110.2 (March 1995), 196–205
(p. 200).
2 Ibid., p. 202.
3 Edna Longley, ed., The Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry from Britain and
Ireland (Highgreen: Bloodaxe, 2000), pp. 15–16.
4 Ibid., p. 22.
5 Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words (Princeton
University Press, 2007), p. 55. As Ian Patterson points out in Chapter 11 of this
book, citing Simon Jarvis, Blasing herself has been accused of conflating lyric
with all poetry (p. 233 n. 3).
6 Blasing, Lyric Poetry, p. 31.
7 Ibid., p. 86.
8 Philip Larkin, Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982 (London and
Boston, MA: Faber, 1983), p. 80.
9 Barbara Everett, ‘Art and Larkin’, in Philip Larkin: The Man and His Work, ed.
Dale Salwak (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 129–39.
 The lyric ‘I’ in the late twentieth ­century 215
10 Ted Hughes, Letters of Ted Hughes, ed. Christopher Reid (London: Faber,
2007), p. 337.
11 Ibid., p. 720.
12 Ted Hughes, Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, ed. William Scammell (London:
Faber, 1994), p. 5.
13 Ted Hughes, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 2003), p. 6.
14 Ibid., pp. 24–5.
15 Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber, 1988),
p. 267.
16 W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1963), p. 70.
17 Larkin, Required Writing, pp. 29, 175.
18 B. J. Leggett, Larkin’s Blues: Jazz, Popular Music and Poetry (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1999), p. 122.
19 Andrew Motion, ‘Philip Larkin and Symbolism’, in Philip Larkin, ed. Stephen
Regan (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 32–54 (p. 52).
20 Hughes, Letters, p. 617.
21 Wilfred Owen, ‘Preface’ to Collected Poems, ed. C. Day Lewis (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1963), p. 31; T. S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, in Collected Poems
1909–1962 (London: Faber, 1963), p. 198.
22 Theodor Adorno, The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (Oxford: Blackwell,
2000), p. 210.
23 Hughes, Winter Pollen, p. 232.
24 Larkin, Collected Poems, p. 127.
25 Hughes, ‘Ghost Crabs’, ‘First, Mills’, and ‘October Salmon’, in Collected
Poems, pp. 149, 463, 667–8.
26 Larkin, Required Writing, p. 79.
27 Larkin, Collected Poems, p. 180.
28 Gerald Bullett, ed., Silver Poets of the Sixteenth Century (London: Dent, 1947),
p. 184.
29 Larkin, Collected Poems, p. 169.
30 Ekbert Faas, Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe (Santa Barbara: Black
Sparrow, 1980), p. 208.
31 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 210.
32 Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts, Ted Hughes: A Critical Study (London: Faber,
1981), p. 109.
33 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 84.
34 David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the
Typology of Modern Literature (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977), p. 214.
35 Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing, pp. 218–19.
36 Larkin, ‘Church Going’, in Collected Poems, p. 97.
37 Larkin, Collected Poems, p. 183.
38 Philip Larkin, Letters to Monica, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Faber, 2010),
p. 243.
39 Larkin, Collected Poems, p. 181.
40 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge
(Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 240.
216 Neil ­Roberts
41 Larkin, Collected Poems, p. 56.
42 Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing, p. 219.
43 Larkin, Collected Poems, p. 165.
44 Ibid., pp. 102, 180, 116, 198.
45 Ibid., p. 136.
46 Hughes, Winter Pollen, p. 375.
47 Neil Roberts, ‘Hughes’s Myth and the Classics: Gaudete and Cave Birds’, in
Ted Hughes and the Classics, ed. Roger Rees (Oxford University Press, 2009),
pp. 120–33.
48 Daniel Hoffman, ‘Talking Beasts: The “Single Adventure” in the Poems of
Ted Hughes’, in Critical Essays on Ted Hughes, ed. Leonard M. Scigaj (New
York: G. K. Hall, 1992), pp. 143–52; originally published in Shenandoah 19
(Summer 1968), 49–68.
49 Hughes, Letters, pp. 273–4.
50 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 21.
51 Hughes, Winter Pollen, pp. 8–9.
52 Hughes, Collected Poems, pp. 84–6.
53 Keith Sagar, ed., Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar
(London: British Library, 2012), p. 29.
54 Hughes, Letters, p. 296.
55 Faas, Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe, p. 208.
56 Ibid., p. ­206.
57 Hughes, Collected Poems, pp. 215–16.
58 Ibid., p. 218.
59 Ted Hughes, letters to Lucas Myers, Emory University, MARBL, MSS 865,
Box 1, Folder 4; Hughes, Letters, p. 719.
60 Hughes, Letters, p. 581.
61 Ibid., p. 720.
62 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 1199.
63 Faas, Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe, p. 214.
64 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 357.
65 Ibid., p. 362.
66 Ibid., p. 365.
67 Hughes, Letters, p. 720.
68 Linda Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life, 2nd edn (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 142.
69 Hughes, Collected Poems, p. 1047.
70 Ibid., p. 1183.
71 Ibid., p. 1049.
72 Ibid., p. 21.
73 Ibid., p. 1059.
74 Ibid., p. 1071.
75 Ibid., p. 1086.
 ­c h apter el even

No man is an I
Recent developments in the lyric
Ian Patterson

The lyric performs the material ground of language.1

In 1985, when Jonathan Culler summed up the five changes that had
reshaped the study of the lyric since New Criticism (they were ‘attention
to babble and doodle, exploration of intertextuality, interest in voice as
figure, a new understanding of self-reflexivity, and the deconstruction of
the hierarchical opposition of symbol and allegory’), he saw them as defin-
ing ‘a new discursive space for criticism of the lyric’.2 Some twenty years
later, with a new wave of interest in the lyric, he laid his primary emphasis
on lyric’s ‘foregrounding of language, in its material dimensions’, and on
lyric as ‘memorable language’: ‘the power to embed bits of language in
your mind, to invade and occupy it, is a salient feature of lyrics … The
force of poetry is linked to its ability to get itself remembered, like those
bits of song that stick in your mind, you don’t know why.’ While there
is a residual sense of song underlying this, and although Culler sees lyric
continuing to possess an apostrophic function – ‘the poem as discourse
addressed’ – in much of the recent critical discussion of lyric the term has
been broadened out from its generic specificity to mean something more
like ‘poetry’.3 Culler hopes also to see a plurality of lyric typologies as a
way of clarifying critical discourse about poetry, offering as one example
the distinction between poems written in the lyric present and those writ-
ten in the past tense.4 Constructive and suggestive though this is, it is
likely that lyric poetry will continue increasingly to overflow attempts
at categorisation: the changes and developments in poetry and in think-
ing about poetry since modernism seem to require a less programmatic
approach. Indeed, the term ‘lyric’ itself may be better considered as an
aspect of poems – a mode – rather than as a hard and fast generic distinc-
tion. It is true, as Mark Jeffreys has argued, that a late-nineteenth-century
paradigm dominated most accounts of poetry until not very long ago, as
its cultural presence dwindled.5 But that paradigm has been more than

217
218 Ian ­Patterson
adequately challenged in recent years, and it is now time to recognise that
poetry’s remit is more extensive than the discussions of lyric sometimes
allow.6
The problematic here can be framed in various ways. The current period
has been at least as conscious of precedent as any other, and has prob-
ably been freer than others to experiment with relations between present
and past. This self-consciousness has added an additional and occasionally
ironic layer to the functioning and use of the self and the lyric ‘I’, some-
times resulting in the disavowal of ownership of a personal voice beyond
the textures of the poem’s language. Plenty of lyric poems have been writ-
ten during the last fifty years, and they continue to be written, but often
with a new awareness of an irony implicit in the genre, or of a structural
complicity in capitalist oppression, or of a complication of the sense of
self or subjecthood, or of a need to renew the formal procedures of their
composition. The relation between poetry and politics has changed, and
occasional verse tirades in the Guardian newspaper by Harold Pinter and
Tony Harrison, laudable though their sentiments may have been, are very
different from the complex responses to political imperatives in poems by
Douglas Oliver, Denise Riley, or Keston Sutherland. Even the most grace-
ful love lyrics, like some of Frank O’Hara’s, foreground contingency and
accident so as to force the reader to think about what state of being the
poem is celebrating.7
English poetry has probably been as divided during the last fifty years
or so as at any time in the past. An influential mainstream of anti-modern-
ist lyric writing strives, with powerful support from the nationally deter-
mined school syllabus, to sustain a populist tradition of casually accessible
lyric writing: Andrea Brady has characterised its products as ‘poems which
are appropriate to a famished definition of poetry … which exhibits obvi-
ous “technique” in its use of regular metres, meek in its politics, pithy,
witty, accommodating’.8 Its adherents are to be found reviewed or fea-
tured in the press, are likely to be sponsored by the British Council and to
receive literary prizes and other accolades; they constitute, on the whole,
the official, conventional face of English poetry. Away from this main-
stream, the accomplished and various work of many other poets, working
in what might loosely be called a late modernist tradition, demonstrates a
more challenging resourcefulness and ranges across all poetic forms. Some
of these poets are routinely dismissed as ‘difficult’ or ‘marginal’ or ‘incom-
prehensible’ by readers too wedded to premodernist models of poetry to
enjoy the intellectual effort of exploring their work. But much of what
is alive, linguistically inventive, alert to the politics – in the broadest
 No man is an I: recent developments in the ­lyric 219
sense – of living in the modern world, and genuinely exploratory in the
poetry of the last few decades, is to be found in this writing, which traces
its most conspicuous ancestry back to the loose group of poets who par-
ticipated in the small-circulation worksheet, The English Intelligencer, in
the late 1960s.9 Diverse in their practices and interests as they are, it would
not be possible to present a just overview of their work here, nor is that
my intention; but however sketchy it is, some initial contextualisation is
desirable.
The retrenchment of poetic ambition that characterised much British
poetry in the decades after the Second World War – represented by ‘The
Movement’ and a distrust of politics, literary experiment, dream, surreal-
ism, and ungoverned imagination – hegemonic though it became, was
never total: Hugh MacDiarmid, W. S. Graham, David Gascoyne, Gael
Turnbull, Christopher Logue, Rosemary Tonks, Charles Tomlinson, Roy
Fisher, Christopher Middleton, Brian Coffey, Basil Bunting, and others
continued to explore the legacy of modernism, developing their poetics in
the process. If one were to look for lineages and filiations for the writers I
shall be discussing, it is among these, and their international connections,
particularly in the USA, that one should start. Early in the 1960s, the lib-
erating influence of the Beat poets had been complicated by a range of
(mostly male) American writing from Black Mountain, New York, and
elsewhere – notably Charles Olson and Frank O’Hara, but also George
Oppen, Robert Creeley, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, John Ashbery, Leroi
Jones (Amiri Baraka), Ted Berrigan, and Barbara Guest – bringing with
it an openness to a greater range of thought and lived experience, and
‘an awareness of language-as-material’ (the phrase is Anselm Hollo’s).10
The transatlantic connections made by Gael Turnbull and Tom Raworth,
Andrew Crozier and J. H. Prynne, along with Donald Allen’s anthology
The New American Poetry 1946–1960 and a growing presence in England
of an American counter-culture, all had a role to play in the new poetry
of the late 1960s. The sense of connection was intensified by the Vietnam
War, the political upheavals of May 1968, the resurgence of Marxism, the
revolution in music, the rise of feminism, and the explosion of theoret-
ical writing that accompanied or followed these events; they provided
instances of the contingent too pressing for poetry to ignore. The ‘mel-
ancholy of isolation’ in which poetry of the mid-century seemed still
encased was not adequate to the need to respond to the ‘palpable outside
world’.11 Lyric poetry needed to escape the elegiac and find new rhetorics
equal to the social and political questions that seemed so urgent. Similarly,
the recent resurgence of interest in theorising the lyric responds to the
220 Ian ­Patterson
t­ wenty-first-century crises in economics and banking, global warming,
religious fundamentalism, imperialism, and war in the Middle East. As
Michael Davidson puts it in relation to recent American poetry, ‘Perhaps
the greatest challenge to poetry raised by this crisis condition is the ques-
tion of literariness itself, of whether the category that has historically con-
tested the ordinariness of ordinary discourse can claim some distinctness
in an information society.’12 It can, and does. Its distinctiveness consists
in being non-propositional, in constructing its thought in a different
way from information discourses, a process to which the lyric mode is
central.13
Nonetheless, lyric poetry has continued to worry necessarily at the
boundary between public and private. It has been customary to think of
it as the expression of private emotion such as love, desire, loss, pain, suf-
fering, joy, pleasure, hope, praise, shame, sorrow, jealousy, or fear, in words
given memorable intensity through the transformative power of metaphor,
metaphor’s grace being to increase the value of a state by comparing it to,
or transforming it into, something better. The lyric poem’s power has often
been described as conferring a glimpse of some greater alternative ideality
or, as Paul Valéry puts it, communicating ‘an idea of some self miraculously
superior to Myself ’.14 That it has seldom been as simple as this – that self-
deception, or deception of some sort, may be a permanent risk – has latterly
come to be recognised as a condition of lyric itself. And of course, language
not being private, lyric is caught in a fiction between public and private,
between social or political and individual or intimate. And lyric here refers
not only to poems, but equally to moments or elements in poems (which
Sam Ladkin aptly describes as ‘apostrophic turns toward personal incident
and private knowledge, and scenes recuperable by the poet’s memory or
the reader’s sentiment for nostalgic discourse’).15 So it is hardly surprising
that recent critical thinking about the lyric has stressed both its historical
specificity and its cultural mediation: ‘Poetic language is itself a medium
of history. Not only is each word a palimpsest but words and poetic forms
carry communal histories of constantly changing usages and functions.’16
Nor is it surprising that changes in the ways in which the self has been
conceived over the last half-century should also have crucial consequences
for the writing and theorisation of lyric poetry. The whole idea of personal
utterance, the voice of a persona, a subject, or the poet, is refigured in post-
Adornian or post-Freudian mode, where consciousness is always already
alienated from the object world. The conventional view, still widely held,
allows the subject an ontological reality prior to its construction in the
language of the poem, such that (to use a reductive formulation) ‘we are
 No man is an I: recent developments in the ­lyric 221
asked to trust the poet, not the poem’.17 Oren Izenberg similarly points
out that ‘for a certain type of modern poet … “poetry” names an onto-
logical project: a civilizational wish to reground the concept and the value
of the person’; given the crises of civilisation of the late twentieth century
(he cites decolonisation, national formation, consumer culture, genocide,
and ‘the specter of total annihilation’) there is a cultural ‘need to reground
personhood’.18
The nature and pitfalls of the complicated quest for ‘personhood’, and
its implications for the search for ‘one’s own voice’ in lyric poetry, have
been eloquently and perceptively examined by Denise Riley.19 Reminding
us that the materiality of language is ‘packed through and through with its
own historicity’, she locates it in ‘the reiteration, the echoes, the reflexivity,
the cadences, the automatic self-parodies and the self-monumentalising
which, constituting both being called and calling oneself, constitute the
formation of categories of person’ (p. 111). This raises the question of what
it means for a poet to be present in her poem: in what ways do the charac-
teristic syntactic gestures of a poet’s work respond to the deepest rhythms
and drives of the unconscious? The paradox of individuality in language
relies on the deep past of both protagonists, individual and language, and
on the struggle by the poet to shape the poem she wants out of the mater-
ial that arises.
W. S. Graham’s repeated question in his poem of the same name, ‘What
is the language using us for?’, adds another dimension to this, conveni-
ently reminding us that language is external to us as well as internal, and
remains so however virtuosic the poet:
What is the language using us for?
It uses us all and in its dark
Of dark actions selections differ.20

An understanding of the performativity of language itself, and the way in

which we use it, and it uses us, to perform our social and intellectual func-
tions, has necessarily altered the location of lyric authority, and as a conse-
quence has also raised more extensive questions about the politics of lyric
identity, when the language we find ourselves or lose ourselves in is also
the language of a western consumer society whose existence is predicated
on exploitation, aggression, and cruelty elsewhere in the world, as well as
the inequities and indignities of our own society. Lyric here again becomes
the ground of a sometimes painful intersection of private and public.21
The production of affect in lyric verse is not directly dependent on per-
sonal utterance, or at least not on personal expression. Where the lyric
222 Ian ­Patterson
voice of the poem comes from is a creation of the page, brought into
being through the process of intellectual and emotional overload that
comes with reading the poem, and it stays on the page. No appeal to the
accidental authority of the individual writer can be more than a diversion.
So much of our language is other people’s voices, past and present, that it
is not easy to personalise language in the first place. In addition, a number
of poets have deliberately sought out other voices than their own to work
with, either through translation of various sorts or through the incorpor-
ation of words from other mouths and other texts: invisible translations,
like John James’ Letters from Sarah (1973), cast a particular light on the
lyric.
Letters from Sarah is a text in which the slowly developing presence of a
lyric persona has nothing but the serial form of the poem to give it body.
The title signals a relation to the poems of Tristan Tzara, but whatever the
process by which Tzara’s poems have been assimilated into this new work,
no sense of an alien subjectivity is to be found in it. A brief comparison of
one passage with the French ‘original’ is illuminating here:
le football dans le poumon
casse les vitres (insomnie)
dans le puits on fait bouillir les nains
pour le vin et la folie
picabia arp ribemont-dessaignes
bonjour22
This, the final, twenty-first section of ‘Cinéma calendrier du coeur abstrait
maisons’ reappears at the end of section 7 of Letters from Sarah as follows:
there are shafts under the mountains
& my lungs are as wakeful as a trainload of Tottenham supporters
midgets for beer and madness23
It’s clear to see what has been used and what ignored, harder to pin down
the imaginative process of transformation at work; but the cadence is
unmistakably no longer Tzara’s, even though the gesture of the last two
lines of the French might well make an appearance in another John James
poem. This is the case even where the phrasing comes close to absurd-
ity, as in the first line of the second poem: ‘at the frontier we gave ’em a
lot of madam’ (the French is ‘madame prit le galop / coup de sifflet à la
frontière’).24 In the sequence generally, the montage effects of James’ lines
create a cadence as recognisable to the ear as a face to the eye, but one that
displays none of the exposed interiority of the confessional. There is no
particular sense that the instances and utterances of the poem stem from
 No man is an I: recent developments in the ­lyric 223
its writer’s own life – indeed, plenty of suggestions that they may not, that
they are fiction. A sense of ontological steadiness that might in other work
derive from self-contemplation comes from a painterly sense of what can
be left out, what provides the necessary touch of counter-balance.
A recent poem, ‘Pimlico’, appears to be making explicit comment on
cadence and rhythm, and the relation of intrinsic to accidental language
in the following lines:
& I took flatness as my starting point
the line made quicker in its shorter pulse
& slower in its flooded length
the line a slinger to the surface from the depths of things
where a breath touches the slightest branch
& bends the stuff of accident to your will
but the ambiguity in ‘the line’ could just as well be applicable to draw-
ing or walking.25 Where the terms or phrases come from is not the point:
it is the cadence that emerges as ‘the stuff of accident’ that is shaped by
the poem’s will-to-form. Lines in James’ poems, as in Tom Raworth’s or
Prynne’s or Denise Riley’s, are often picked up from elsewhere, sometimes
credited, often not. Sometimes they are altered in the process, like the
Tzara translations; sometimes they are reproduced like words in the air –
    … but then
the air is always calling someone’s name
the voice of Springsteen
drifting from a 1000 radios
– but they all take their place in the poem with equal weight.26 Words
don’t originate in the self. This is a matter not just of lyric cadence,
but of tonality and an acute sense of the relation between tone and
timing, carried out with a curious absence of self-positioning. Writing
about James’ poetry from the 1970s, John Wilkinson observed that he
‘lacks interest even in identity play; he is in thrall to what seduces him
rather than to his own propensity for being seduced, which is somewhat
unusual for a lyric poet’.27 What is performed in ‘Pimlico’ is strung on
metonymically connected occasions and the recollections and thoughts
they prompt, but the poem’s intellectual and emotional coherence, its
lyric grace, stems from the level gaze with which the poem encounters
matters of very differing resonance. It interweaves different degrees of
irony and different kinds of attention in a spectrum from the most per-
sonal to the most painful news items to the most contingent encoun-
ters (‘a black V8 Pilot / on Bruton Place’) in a poem that successfully
224 Ian ­Patterson
confronts the difficulty of the lyric ­sublime, so that the ‘craving beauty’
of line 5, which invites ironic reading, is re-established by the completed
poem and is able to be reread at its full value.
In its overall structure, Letters from Sarah is more than a collection of
lyrics: elements recur across its pages, like the valedictory gesture of ‘we’re
leaving little one’, which finally returns in the last poem as ‘we will go …
leaving the oaktrees to their doom’, pointing to another characteristic fea-
ture of this sort of work – composition by book. An early and important
influence on this conception of the lyric sequence was the San Francisco
poet Jack Spicer, whose work Peter Gizzi describes as ‘compellingly against
the grain of his time [in] its resistance to issues of personality and identity
and its placement of the poet in the frankly clerical position of a fatigued
copyist or at most, a translator’.28 Three aspects of his poetics are signifi-
cant here: his view of writing as ‘dictation’, his sense of the materiality of
language, and his emphasis on the serial poem and on the book as unit
of composition. The emphasis on the book as a formal unity goes some
way towards answering the question Pound was concerned with when he
was wondering about the possibility of the long imagist poem: namely
how the lyrical intensity of the ‘intellectual and emotional complex in
an instant of time’ could be sustained or at least used in a longer poem,
how the lyric could escape a generic association with brevity and com-
pression and inhabit a more ambitious role for poetry. ‘I must speak from
within the blinkers of the first person pronoun’, as Denise Riley has put
it.29 Spicer’s ‘dictation’, or the poet as radio (more than Heidegger’s sense
of language speaking through the poem), points us explicitly to what he
calls ‘the Outside’, but there’s no need to share his mystical view to recog-
nise that writing poems is not an easy or unproblematic task, and that an
important element is ‘to try to keep as much of yourself as possible out of
the poem’.30
Much of the most interesting poetry in this period has been composed
as books rather just collections of individual poems: Andrew Crozier’s Veil
Poem, Douglas Oliver’s The Infant and the Pearl, Tom Raworth’s Eternal
Sections, Peter Riley’s Alstonefield, Barry MacSweeney’s Pearl, Andrea
Brady’s Liberties, John Wilkinson’s Iphigenia, to take a few examples. Most
of these are not exclusively lyric, but a lyric mode is crucial to them all
and to the ways they work as sequences. All are serious interventions in
a complex poetic field. Narrative and argument are not conventionally
part of the lyric, but in these sequences lyric becomes essential to both.
Metonymic rhetorics suit seriality, and encourage connection between
disparate or discrete elements in the series. Parataxis and montage, those
 No man is an I: recent developments in the ­lyric 225
modernist standbys, play an important part in this, as do the variable per-
formances of the personal pronoun and the performativity of language
itself, and structures that use memory, echo, allusion, journeys as ironic
devices that both alienate the subject from itself and structure a will to
make the poems cohere. ‘A rage to be some wholeness gropes / Past dam-
age that it half recalls – / Where it was I will found my name.’31
The echo of Freud in Riley’s lines, the implicit play between ‘found’ and
‘find’, and the almost-rhyme of ‘rage’ and ‘damage’ point to the kind of
subliminal connection that lyric makes all the time. The early poems of J.
H. Prynne do not exploit this as much as his later work does, but the first
obviously lyric sequence, Day Light Songs (1968) uses line endings, mise-en-
page, and a breath-mimicking cadence not only to create lyric desire but
also to bend words and reveal their hidden elements, as in the concluding
lines of the fifth poem: ‘the entire air a nod / to for / tune, who else’, where
the dual sense of ‘air’ as atmosphere and melody opens the way to the split-
ting of ‘fortune’.32 As the poetry becomes less hortatory, more exploratory,
sound and the music in and of language take on a new prominence, as can
be seen in this short lyric from Wound Response (1974):

As grazing the earth

          the sun raises
its mouth to the night
           rick, ox-eye’d
and burning, strewn over
            the phase path
At the turning-places
          of the sun the
head glistens, dew falls
           from the apse line:
O lye still, thou
        Little Musgrave, the
grass is wet
       and streak’d with light33

Visually, the arc created by the displacement of alternative hemistichs mim-

ics the elliptical movement of the earth, and aurally the poem is full of the
music of repeated sounds. The repetition of ‘raise’ from ‘grazing’ to ‘raises’
finds its rhyme in ‘phase’, and further echoes in ‘places’ and ‘Musgrave’, with
the ‘gra’ transforming to ‘grass’; a similar connection can be found between
‘night’, ‘eye’d’, ‘line’, ‘lye’ and ‘light’, ‘strewn’, ‘dew’, and ‘streak’d’; there’s a
rhyme on ‘burning’ and ‘turning’, and ‘apse’ is a paragram of ‘phase’ and
226 Ian ­Patterson
‘place’. The egregious pun on nitric oxide in ‘night / rick, ox-eye’d’, which
suggests the nitric oxide in acid rain and motor emissions, both products
of combustion, eases the transition to ‘burning’. The unmarked quota-
tion from the ballad of ‘Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard’, ‘O lye still, lye
still, thou little Musgrave’, brings death and stillness into a poem primarily
concerned with movement.34 The coincidence of ‘grave’ in Musgrave adds
to the effect created by the sudden opening up of a glimpse into poetry’s
own history to set beside the technically informed phrases, ‘phase path’ and
‘apse line’, but is somewhat offset by the final return to ‘light’ instead of
darkness.
This intense patterning is one of the primary carriers of lyric affect in
Prynne’s poetry. Rod Mengham has argued that Prynne’s work takes a rad-
ically new turn in the 1994 text Her Weasels Wild Returning. In the earlier
poems, Mengham claims:
the organizing strategies of individual consciousness, lodged in the routines
of a speaking voice, were all there, overlapping with, or competing with, or
being sidelined by, or being controlled by, the interests of various discursive
projects. One crucial point was that … it was a challenged individualism
that remained somewhere near the centre of attention. The range of tones
and rhythms encountered in reading were ultimately oriented towards the
speaking voice, towards the resonance of lyric, towards a proverbial round-
ness of phrase, towards a gleefully impacted slang. This is just not so with
Weasels.35
But it may rather be that the ‘challenged individualism’ of the earlier work
was more dispersed into a creative struggle with the exteriority of language
than this allows: fragmented though the cadence of a speaking voice cer-
tainly is in the poems of the last twenty years, it is still textually present,
even in as unpromising-looking a sequence as Streak~Willing~Entourage~
Artesian (2009). But voice may not be the same thing as even a challenged
individualism, and may mark a more evenly distributed encounter between
the subject and the discursive and political world.
I believe, then, that Weasels marks less of a change than Mengham sug-
gests, at least in terms of the lyric component of Prynne’s verse. Although
it’s true that the books since then have seemed more abstract, less con-
trolled by variations on a speaking voice, they still have the power to
arouse a powerful sense of lyric exuberance in the reader, a sense that
is reinforced in Weasels by the titles of each constituent part and by the
undefined or unlocated pronoun ‘she’. ‘She’ and ‘her’ are ubiquitous in
the poem, from the title to the last poem, but ‘she’ never attains narra-
tive personhood. Sometimes evoked through a John Dowland song, as
 No man is an I: recent developments in the ­lyric 227
‘she, she, she, and only she’; sometimes, as in ‘What She Saw There’, the
object of unanswered questions: ‘what did she really see’, ‘can’t she see the
self difference’; ‘she’ operates as a grammatical ghost inviting the reader to
imagine gendered structures, positions, actions, and challenging implicit
assumptions about power and knowledge. The absence of conventionally
clear discursive utterance foregrounds the presence in each stanza of a var-
iety of lyric moments, as we can see from the poem’s final pair of stanzas.
That Now She Knows
Who with he’ll say climbing, to let blood slit imposed
at a turret elevation to buffer high return. I saw
her wings in speedy strip like a shadow in the sand
or in growth like natural reason, her heart so vast
as justly to make cause with the fiery fountain sealed
on track right across terra nullius overhead. I knew
that, she made me see the light level cracking along
her trebled skyline: I held my view. Blizzard loyal
transgenic pulsation she’ll take both up to a dish
off the bone dropping away to a strut canopy, eyes
blue on blue aptitude so sweet. I knew that. Evenly
spaced night fares restore format, leaked to mounting
offshore redemptions; alive droning above tumbled cloud
for my soft convergence, mine only, only mine. Only
too small to hold its blood within her option wrappers
that stake out, spilled through leaves. Light of unclosed
life comes back, true beyond p/e overturning upfront
foliar feeds here, its sherbet nectary. This is now
a near equator or its departure lounge, she closely runs
as animals will breathe out, he grasping at critical
backflow fade. Please delete, don’t sleep yet, not
too sure you get shot through upstream. I know that what
you set under a minded shade tree is hit by first debate
and the air locks in, at a dab rack roaming the field.36
These lyric moments, plastic and volatile as they are, remain potential,
shifting their nature both prospectively and retrospectively; shadowing
the semantic possibilities and connections of the developing stanza as they
come and go; testing the way the poem can be read as encoding and evok-
ing different kinds of utterance, different kinds of value. The phrase that
crosses lines 4 and 5, ‘her heart so vast / as justly to make cause’, besides
being a regular pentameter, invokes a lyric tradition and the momentary
mental state appropriate to it, while ‘I saw / her wings in speedy strip like
a shadow in the sand’ not only gives ‘her’ wings (in semantic association
228 Ian ­Patterson
with ‘climbing’, ‘turret’, elevation’ and ‘high’, and later ‘overhead’) but
divides into two four-stress lines reminiscent of Blake. These rhythmic
hauntings and curtailed upwellings of affect counterpoint the grammat-
ical ambiguity of ‘speedy strip’ or ‘the light level cracking’ so that we are
already prepared to encounter the thought of bombs and rocket explo-
sions when we reach ‘the fiery fountain’; and the line break between ‘eyes’
and ‘blue on blue’ makes space for the ‘sweet’ suggestion of blue eyes to
be superseded by the horror of friendly-fire attack – in NATO parlance
‘blue on blue’. (‘Wild Weasels’ are, or were, US Air Force planes whose
task was to find and destroy hostile anti-aircraft and radar sites: shifting
the adjective to a more ambiguous position in the title phrase allows for
more deconstructive reference, suggesting a fuller contrast between actual
weasels and the prosthetic-human-machines, and underlining the tension
between violence and care in the poem.) The interplay of the phonemic
echoes of ‘She’ and ‘I’ further underscores the relational dialectic that has
developed through the poem. Unusually, this stanza is held together by
four uses of ‘I’ – ‘I saw / her wings’; ‘I knew that’; ‘I held my view’; ‘I
knew that’ – the apparent authority of these phrases, with those in the
second and tenth lines of the second and final stanza, punctuating both
stanzas with a rhythm separate from the prosodic one but contributing to
its effect, and making another level of congruence with the ‘i’/‘ee’ sound
pattern.
The lyric subject is substantially reshaped here, present less as sub-
jectivity itself than as its interplay with the disparate forces acting upon,
limiting, deforming, and forming it. It gives the poem what might be
called a written voice, but one that resists actual vocalisation because
of the energetic volatility of its grammar and the multiple intellectual
and emotional rhythms that make the surface of the poem heave and
shift. Instead, the textual voice draws attention to patterns of affinity
and opposition that echo those at work in the world. The ‘minded shade
tree’ of the last lines is perhaps the best illustration of the evasive pres-
ence of lyric, and the way the reader’s fondness for, and complicity with,
lyric assumptions are unsettled: ‘minded’ can mean ‘recalled’, ‘attended’,
‘intended’, ‘imagined’, ‘found annoying or troublesome’, ‘looked after’,
‘aforementioned’, and other things; and a minded shade tree covers a
spectrum from Marvell’s green shade to the most meagre landscape.37 A
reader’s heart is drawn to the restorative power of the tree’s shade, even if
it is just a mental shadow of a tree, only to be outraged by the ‘hit’ as ‘the
air locks in’, and the echo of Iraq in ‘a dab rack roaming the field’, where
 No man is an I: recent developments in the ­lyric 229
the final word, despite or because of containing a homonym of ‘feel’,
overlays any field we might be wishing for with a recognition of fields of
fire, fields of force, fields of operations, as well as the field of the poem’s
engagement with language itself. Lyric still provides the appeal to emo-
tional values, but mocks the idea of such an appeal being an innocent or
nostalgic one.
All this helps to cast light on how poetry thinks. This is not the mech-
anistic insistence on the abolition of personal voice that characterised
‘Language poetry’ in the United States. In its most extreme form it saw
some proponents of that movement arguing (to put it reductively) that
political freedom could be promoted through text-generating procedures
that allowed the poem’s language to escape from conventional syntactic
conventions. This approach to writing was attacked by J. H. Prynne, who
compared such writing with the supermarket,
where the consumer is generically trained to value a freedom of choice pre-
cisely fetishised by the brand alternatives of late capitalism, the wonder-
fully smart play of vacuity by which the reader of the labels can rustle up
preference, advice, loyalty, thrift, all the bound emotional habits of an old
humanism now afloat in the play of signs within which the consumer’s
arbitration is a highly efficient instrument to maintain market saturation
and to ration the efficiencies of decision control.38
The comparison was an apt one, and pointed again towards the vexed
question of humanism, of the lyric self and the poetic subject, and how
to find a vantage-point in the poem that allows a broader take on the
relation between interiority and exteriority than simple expression allows,
without losing the power of lyric affect. The move from Prynne’s early dis-
cursive and propositional verse, through the more dislocated sequences of
the nineties, to the recent work of Kazoo Dreamboats, demonstrates a shift
in the function and location of lyric practice in Prynne’s work, but not a
rejection of it.
By contrast with Prynne, Michael Haslam has maintained a simpler
coherence to his writing over the last forty years in a process of charting his
life in books of verse in a project he has referred to as one of ‘Continuale
Song’ (Continual Song is also the title of a 1986 collection). His poetry,
though intensely lyrical, escapes confinement to the condition of the lyric
because of its scale. It is explicitly and continuingly a life’s work. Haslam
is also unusual in that he rewrites his work, with the result that its pres-
ence in print can seem, and can be, provisional or fortuitous or regretted.
For although the poems spring from Haslam’s meditations on his daily life
230 Ian ­Patterson
and loves, and his reading and listening and remembering and imagining,
their truth is subject to the test of their poetic form and their success as
poems. Their occasion, that is, is just that: the work of the poem, not its
source, creates its lyric power. This is immediately noticeable in The Quiet
Works, a recent sequence that starts with a sewage works:
The quiet works a treat. The water treatment works
    through falling steps in placid air
on quiet walks by high top reservoir.
    Aqueous eases
as a stallion stales in puddled mud.
A mare for me for equine equanimity
    on flat slack hope, by small worth mere,
down rake head stair
    into a vale of deep deep air
    love brooks despair.
I be prepared to de-aspire, no more in sheets
perspiring pair, no flood of hair,
no mind to mate nor hope to share
the quiet works in disrepair,
    Love brooks the falls endure.
Wet heat, the acid moor, peat sweat
    is sourly sweet, before down-pour
whose gushes thrust to groove the grove
in rushes. Puddles sate the graven delph.
Evacuate what must. Why can’t I
    disabuse myself, of lust?39

This is the first page. Two aspects of the verse strike the reader at once: the
patterning of sound and the repurposing and transformation of words.
Haslam’s work is alive with the poetry of the past, histories of rhyme and
syntax, word-use and word-change: and a sequence like deep, deep air/
despair/de-aspire/disrepair and the tumbling internal rhymes create com-
plex temporalities within the unfolding discourse of the poem. Not in a
conjuror’s performance, though: ‘handkerchiefs on strings, more flutter
/ funny habits fetched up from beneath the hat. / I saw no art in that.’40
His poems explore the musical relation of subjectivity and objectivity
with an involved but dispassionate compositional commitment. As he
has put it, ‘I believe there are what I’d call natural plots, and that we
live them, and that the truth I want to tell is the truth of a natural plot,
which might be realised in art as a musical truth, in language.’41
 No man is an I: recent developments in the ­lyric 231
In the title of another of Michael Haslam’s books, The Music Laid Her
Songs in Language, two recurrent lyric tropes are merged: birdsong and the
many ways in which birds and their flight have figured poetic imagination
and aspiration; and music, the figure of perfect ineffable speech. Haslam
and his verse both know these histories intimately and are not intimidated
by the weight of the past. Indeed, it becomes the matter of affectionate
mockery, self-mockery, and impatience as well as delight.
The Figure One is watching
something ancient in the shape of heavy traffic
through the clearing of the nymphs …
    … His breathing
quickly thickens. Breeding, bleeding, nymphs and months
don’t rhyme. And Music still refuses to Personify.
   The Figure I
can not identify
the brush-head with his stick.42
How the figure of the poet exists in these poems is a function of their
engagement with lyric process: sometimes comic, sometimes serious,
but always part of a simultaneously prospective and retrospective search
for the music in language. The first part of an earlier short sequence of
poems is called ‘Three of My Chasms’, the title phrase a recasting of ‘Mike
Haslam’ indicative of the way in which this autobiographical self is almost
as impossible to separate from the landscape it inhabits as it is from the
moral consequences of the things it has done.
In John Wilkinson’s words:
writing must never be cathartic or an achieved circle of reassurance or rec-
ognition: but neither should it just open the sluices to what dwindles to
the mimetic of a current social awfulness, a storm of part-objects as con-
sumer durables … The danger … is the separation enjoined by an inher-
ited literary body … where cadence becomes the frozen gesture of the
misunderstood.43
Haslam’s work, poised between lyric pain and lyric grace, embraces all
the clumsiness of music and humour as well, in a continually unfolding
poetic drama of a situated, and sometimes clownish, self. Wilkinson’s own
writing provides a very different but equally sustained interrogation of the
potential of lyric. In ‘Iphigenia’, the primary device is tonal-grammatical,
the varying of sentences and their tone from peremptory commands to
genial interlocutions, further modulated too by the poems’ line-endings
and layout.44 Another sequence, ‘The Still-Piercing Air’ (the title from
232 Ian ­Patterson
All’s Well that Ends Well), semantically and lexically overloaded though it
appears, makes lucid beauty from its concatenated lines and stanzas. It
requires thought and rewards it:
Answer peels, unbinds the fool, ­fond
frittering throughput Mint-pole for an
answering current shorted in too-swift
rejoinder.45
It’s hard to give a sense of the more extended echoes, repetitions, and
transformations that give lyric depth to these poems. The final line of this
poem, ‘Love self-tests & fêtes the empty bed’, does something similar in
compressed form: the difficulty of getting your tongue round ‘self-tests’,
the repeated short ‘e’ sounds, the plain short sentence, all work to create a
temporary musical ending before the next poem picks up and makes expli-
cit the musical trope. Later poems use rhythm and stanza form to develop
the ideas of the sequence. The whole sequence is conducted through poem
titles that are variations on each other, another kind of structural repeti-
tion to organise time and reference across the array of lyric gestures, from
concrete object to abstract calculation, in an increasingly complex pattern.
Or in the concluding words of one of the poems, ‘The Line of Betrayal’,
the gulls shriek as devising
ever-new intricacies they reunite
about the clot of air conjectured.46
Through all this work runs a powerful desire to use the resources of lyric
against power, to create détournements of lyric that take on, ironically
embrace, or otherwise critique the violence of late capitalism. The central
demand for the lyric now is to unmask and explore the ubiquity of vio-
lence, invisible or blatant, and defuse or engage its erotics: reading lyrics
has become a sceptical process as well as a constructive one. Andrea Brady,
to take another instance, has articulated a dissatisfaction with lyric as
hampering her attempts to go beyond subjective experience in her poetry,
finding that her use of something like collage, or the poem’s hospitality to
a variety of discourses, worked counter-intuitively to ‘[bring] the exter-
nal world into the space of the personal in order to justify attention to
the personal’. She adds that ‘if the poems have morals, then the moral
always comes afterwards, from the materiality of the language and of the
images’.47 Her most recently published work sets out to avoid the per-
sonal by adopting the form of a ‘verse essay’ on the history of fire – since
Petrarch that most lyric of elements – from ancient times to the contem-
porary use of white phosphorus. In a concluding ‘note on the text’ she
 No man is an I: recent developments in the ­lyric 233
writes: ‘A first step towards liberation from the brands and the boils of the
most horrific dying is a recognition of the ancient complexity of the desire
to burn.’48
How far the recognition of a poet’s implication in war and the ­suffering
of others becomes, ironically, a claim for the ethical force of a poem is
a question that has preoccupied lyric poetry over the last decades, and
different responses reflect different ways of conceptualising, and realising,
the materiality of language. On one hand, ‘to dismiss the materiality of
language is to dismiss the emotionally charged history that made us who
we are – subjects in language, which is the subject of the lyric’.49 If the
lyric ‘I’ is a shifter, a positional relation (in both senses of ‘relate’), it is not
the same as the autobiographical self that, as we’ve seen, is the implied
guarantor of much conventional lyric writing.50 But even where lyric is
fragmented into verse pulses or affective splinters, it entails the struggle
of a person to make the poem work, a struggle encoded in the gestures,
cadences, and syntax of the verse as the stylistic signature of its author, a
lyric identity that is always being re-forged in the language on the page.

Notes
1 Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pleasure and Pain of Words (Princeton
University Press, 2007), p. 28.
2 Jonathan Culler, ‘Changes in the Study of the Lyric’, in Lyric Poetry: Beyond
New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1985), pp. 38–54 (p. 54).
3 See for example Blasing, Lyric Poetry. Simon Jarvis points out that the ‘oscil-
lation in her important discussion between “poetry” and “lyric poetry”… per-
haps constitutes a kind of practical admission that many of the phenomena
which she discusses … might belong to verse as such rather than only to “lyric”
in particular’; Simon Jarvis, ‘The Melodics of Long Poems’, Textual Practice
24.4 (2010), 607–21 (pp. 620–1).
4 Jonathan Culler, ‘Why Lyric?’, in PMLA 123.1 (January 2008), 201–6 (p. 206).
5 ‘Lyric did not conquer poetry: poetry was reduced to lyric. Lyric became the
dominant form of poetry only as poetry’s authority was reduced to the cramped
margins of culture.’ Mark Jeffreys, ‘Ideologies of Lyric: A Problem of Genre
in Contemporary Anglophone Poetics’, PMLA 110.2 (March 1995), 196–205
(p. 200).
6 For the sake of convenience, though, I shall continue to use the terms ‘lyric’
and ‘lyric poem’ for the poems of short or moderate length that I shall be dis-
cussing in this chapter.
7 This argument is brilliantly pursued in Sam Ladkin, ‘Problems for Lyric
Poetry’, in Complicities: British Poetry 1945–2007, ed. Robin Purves and Sam
Ladkin (Prague: Litteraria Pragensis, 2007), pp. 271–322:
234 Ian ­Patterson
The conflation of the discourse of Being with love is something O’Hara frequently upsets
with his accidentalism … His designation of ‘my life’ performs the lie that we separate
our true or lyric life, the life which I feel to be integral to myself, out from the ruinous
effects this identification causes elsewhere. It makes a farce out of the ethical interleaving
we stage-manage between, for instance, wars carried out ‘in our name’ and the moral
sanctity we reinscribe for ourselves by guiltily a­ cknowledging such contingency. (p. 273)
8 Andrea Brady, ‘“Meagrely Provided”: A Response to Don Paterson’, Chicago
Review 49.3/4 and 50.1 (Summer 2004), 396–402 (p. 399).
9 For further details, see Neil Pattison’s introduction to Neil Pattison, Reitha
Pattison, and Luke Roberts, eds., Certain Prose of ‘The English Intelligencer’
(Cambridge: Mountain Press, 2012).
10 Anselm Hollo, ‘Two New Poetries’, Outburst 2 (1963), n.p.
11 See J. H. Prynne, ‘The Elegiac World in Victorian Poetry’, The Listener (14
February 1963), 290–1.
12 Michael Davidson, ‘Introduction: American Poetry, 2000–2009’,
Contemporary Literature 52.4 (Winter 2011), 597–629 (p. 602).
13 ‘Poetry foregrounds a linguistic nonrational that is not a byproduct of reason;
rather it is the ground on which rational language and disciplinary discourses
carve their territories, draw their borders, and designate their “irrational”
others.’ Blasing, Lyric Poetry, p. 3.
14 Paul Valéry, ‘Poetry and Abstract Thought’ (1939), trans. Denis Folliot, in
Paul Valéry: An Anthology, selected with an introduction by James R. Lawler
(Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), pp. 136–65 (p. 165).
15 Ladkin, ‘Problems for Lyric Poetry’, p. 274
16 Blasing, Lyric Poetry, p. 21n14. See also J. H. Prynne, ‘Poetic Thought’, Textual
Practice 24.4 (2010), 595–606: ‘The language of poetry is [the] modality and
material base [of poetic thought], but whatever its relation with common
human speech, the word-arguments in use are characteristically disputed ter-
ritory, where prosody and verse-form press against unresolved structure and
repeatedly transgress expectation’ (p. 599).
17 Andrew Crozier, ‘Thrills and Frills: Poetry as Figures of Empirical Lyricism’,
in Society and Literature 1945–1970, ed. Alan Sinfield (London: Methuen,
1983), pp. 199–233 (p. 220).
18 Oren Izenberg, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (Princeton
University Press, 2011), pp. 1–2.
19 See especially Denise Riley, Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony
(Stanford University Press, 2000); and Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect
(Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005).
20 W. S. Graham, ‘What Is the Language Using Us For?’, in New Collected Poems,
ed. Matthew Francis (London: Faber, 2004), pp. 199–204 (p. 200).
21 Language acquisition and the persistence of the related early psychic struc-
tures in or beneath language have led theorists like Denise Riley, Jean-Jacques
Lecercle, and Mutlu Konuk Blasing to reaffirm the place of the ‘forcible affect
of language’ (as Riley puts it in Impersonal Passion, p. 1) in lyric poetry, and
the necessary interplay or dialectic between exterior and interior, between
speaking and being spoken. For an illuminating reading of one of Riley’s
 No man is an I: recent developments in the ­lyric 235
poems in these terms, see Jean-Jacques Lecercle, ‘Unpoetic Poetry: Affect
and Performativity in Denise Riley’s “Laibach Lyrik, Slovenia, 1991”’, Textual
Practice 25.2 (2011), 345–9.
22 Tristan Tzara, Poésies complètes, ed. Henri Béhar (Paris: Flammarion, 2011),
p. 159.
23 John James, Collected Poems (Cambridge: Salt, 2002), p. 95.
24 Tzara, Poésies complètes, p. 172.
25 John James, ‘Pimlico’, in In Romsey Town (Cambridge: Equipage, 2011), pp.
38–40 (pp. 39–40).
26 James, ‘On Romsey Rec’, in ibid., p. 308.
27 John Wilkinson, ‘Unexpected Excellent Sausage: On Simplicity in O’Hara,
Lowell, Berrigan and James’, in The Salt Companion to John James, ed. Simon
Perrill (Cambridge: Salt, 2010), p. 188.
28 Jack Spicer, The House that Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, ed.
with afterword by Peter Gizzi (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
1998), p. 50.
29 Riley, Impersonal Passion, p. 46.
30 Spicer, ‘Vancouver Lecture 1: Dictation and “A Textbook of Poetry”’, in The
House that Jack Built, p. 8.
31 Denise Riley, ‘Laibach Lyrik: Slovenia 1991’, in Mop Mop Georgette: New and
Selected Poems 1986–1993 (Cambridge and London: Reality Street, 1993), pp.
7–10 (p. 9).
32 J. H. Prynne, Poems (Fremantle Arts Centre Press; and Highgreen: Bloodaxe,
2005), pp. 26–31 (p. 28).
33 Prynne, Poems, p. 229.
34 ‘Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard’, in English and Scottish Ballads, ed. Francis
James Child, 8 vols., Vol. ii (London: Samson Low, 1841), pp. 15–21 (p. 19).
35 Rod Mengham, ‘After Avant-gardism: Her Weasels Wild Returning’, in Assembling
Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally, ed. Romana Huk
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), pp. 384–8 (p. 384).
36 Prynne, Poems, p. 416.
37 It is worth noting, too, that ‘“mind” connects intimately both with memory
and with love, the latter as affection rather than desire’; J. H. Prynne, ‘Mental
Ears and Poetic Work’, Chicago Review 55.1 (2010), 126–57 (p. 138).
38 J. H. Prynne, ‘Letter to Steve McCaffery’, The Gig 7 (November 2000), 40–6
(pp. 41–2). For a thoughtful and persuasive critique of the adoption of Spicer
by Ron Silliman and other Language poets, see Christopher Nealon, The
Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (Cambridge, MA
and London: Harvard University Press, 2011), pp. 107–39.
39 Michael Haslam, The Quiet Works (Old Hunstanton: Oystercatcher Press,
2009), n.p. [p. 5].
40 Ibid., [p. 14].
41 Michael Haslam, ‘Loose Talk by Way of Introduction to A Second Verse of
Music’, in A Sinner Saved by Grace: The Second Verse of Music (Laid Her Songs
in Language) (Todmorden: Arc Publications, 2005), p. 9.
236 Ian ­Patterson
42 Michael Haslam, The Music Laid Her Songs in Language (Todmorden, Arc
Publications, 2001), p. 12.
43 John Wilkinson, ‘Cadence’, in The Lyric Touch, pp. 143–7 (p. 146).
44 John Wilkinson, ‘Iphigenia’, in Lake Shore Drive (Cambridge: Salt, 2006), pp.
61–82.
45 John Wilkinson, ‘The Still-Piercing Air’, in Contrivances (Cambridge: Salt,
2003), pp. 107–24 (p. 111).
46 Wilkinson, ‘The Still-Piercing Air’, p. 114.
47 Scott Thurston, interview with Andrea Brady, in Talking Poetics: Dialogues in
Innovative Poetry (Bristol: Shearsman, 2011), pp. 103–43 (pp. 105, 107).
48 Andrea Brady, Wildfire: A Verse Essay on Obscurity and Illumination (San
Francisco: Krupskaya, 2010), p. 73.
49 Blasing, Lyric Poetry, p. 6.
50 ‘The activity of thought resides at the level of language practice, and indeed
is in the language and is the language; in this sense, language is how thinking
gets done and how thinking coheres into thought, shedding its links with an
originating sponsor or a process of individual consciousness’; Prynne, ‘Poetic
Thought’, p. 596.
 ­Afterword
Jonathan Culler

In The Political Unconscious Fredric Jameson maintains that genre criti-

cism has been ‘thoroughly discredited by modern literary theory and prac-
tice’.1 While one might contest the idea that a compelling theoretical case
has been made against the notion of genre, it is certainly true that genre
criticism has not fared well of late. Increasingly, what scholars and crit-
ics value in literature is the singularity of a literary work, and to expect a
work to conform to the conventions of a genre or to approach the work
through the lens of genre is to aim at something other than its distinctive
literariness. Still, what has been discredited or at least set aside by mod-
ern criticism is not the concept of genre per se but the idea of genre as a
set of norms to which a work should conform. As readers of Foucault, we
know that norms are productive as well as constraining, necessary to the
functioning of social and cultural meaning; and there is now a long and
varied tradition, running from Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion through
such works as Erving Goffman’s Frame Analysis to recent cognitive science,
demonstrating how essential various sorts of schemata or frames are to
both perception and creation. If singularity is what we value in literature,
it is most perceptible against the background of conventions of genres.
Norms, we might argue, are essential to the identification of singularity;
and generic norms themselves emerge most clearly at points or moments
of their violation or disruption by the distinctive strategies or novel fea-
tures of a work. There is no good reason for the valuing of singularity to
entail the neglect of genre.
Lyric is an ancient form but one of uncertain generic status. ‘Lyric is the
most continuously practiced of all poetic kinds in the history of Western
representation’, writes Allen Grossman.2 Yet it is marginalised by the trad-
itional theory of genres. Aristotle was thoroughly familiar with ancient
Greek lyric and cites many examples in his Rhetoric, but in his Poetics,
which has been foundational for western accounts of genre, he does not
discuss lyric because he was writing a treatise on mimetic poetry, poetry
237
238 Jonathan ­Culler
as an imitation of action, and he recognised – if only he had bothered
to say this explicitly! – that lyric is fundamentally epideictic rather than
mimetic (hence more suitable for treatment in a treatise on rhetoric). It is
really a matter of unhappy chance – the fact that the greatest systematic
philosopher of the West wrote a treatise on mimetic poetry and not on
the other poetic forms that were central to Greek culture – that western
literary theory has neglected the lyric and, until the Romantic era, treated
it as a miscellaneous collection of minor forms, despite the flourishing
of lyric in Greece, ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance.
The discussions in this volume amply demonstrate that lyric was not a
stable or a central concept for poets of most of this period, and that in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when it had become an important
concept for both poets and critics, it remained a contested concept – the
more central the more subject to resistance from various angles. Recent
historicist criticism has challenged the notion of a lyric genre, represent-
ing it as a modern construction imposed retrospectively on earlier ages,
where various types of poetry were produced under conditions quite dif-
ferent from those of the last two centuries.3 But even if poets of the six-
teenth through eighteenth centuries do not use the category ‘lyric’ as the
name of a major genre, they write various sorts of short, non-narrative
poems, which they may call sonnets, songs, epigrams, elegies, odes, epis-
tles – none of which are themselves particularly stable generic categories.
The complaint about the term lyric – that it means different things in dif-
ferent times and places – can be lodged against elegy; ballad; and even ode,
which is rather different in the hands of Pindar, Horace, Ronsard, Collins,
and Keats. The historical disparities that appear to motivate the desire to
abandon the category lyric reappear in the case of more narrowly defined
genres, and do so more insidiously, one might imagine, since while it is
blatantly obvious that the lyric changes, it is less obvious that ode might be
a slippery, even dubious category. Moreover – this is the second disadvan-
tage of any attempt to focus on narrower categories and avoid lyric – there
has never been a comprehensive set of sub-categories. If we scrap lyric we
would always need a further category, such as short poem, to accommodate
all those lyrics that do not fall under one of the other generic headings –
even if we try to include them by multiplying genres defined by content,
adding to aubade or dawn poem, and ekphrasis or poem about a work of
art, praise poem, nocturne, lover’s complaint, valediction, hymn, epitha-
lamion, and so on.
In practice these chapters demonstrate the need for the concept of lyric
or something very much like it in order to launch discussion and make
 ­Afterwor 239
possible a history. The variations that these scholars chart, that is to say,
emerge not just from general thinking about poetry but from the assign-
ment to discuss the lyric in their periods, which they do not find difficult,
much less impossible, to do. If there is circularity here – a discussion of
the lyric illustrates the usefulness of the category of lyric, even if it was not
made central in the period in question – it is a condition of fruitful his-
torical comparison: to expose the differences between literary productions
of one period and another, we need general categories that will produce
groupings where distinctiveness can shine forth. And of course a category
such as lyric can connect the poetry of early modern and modern Britain
with the melic verse of antiquity, which poets frequently aimed to emu-
late, and which exercised influence even when poets sought to evade its
models. Without a category such as ‘lyric’, discussion of the history of
poetry becomes much more difficult.
The story the contributions in this book tell is not that of the formation
of a genre, in which early attempts, with perhaps some false starts, even-
tually lead by gradual increments to the consolidation of a genre, fully
formed, able to realise its rich potential. It is a virtue of these discussions
that they do not try to inscribe their reflections in any such teleological
narrative. If such a story were to be told, it would doubtless have to involve
progress towards a certain modern idea of the lyric, as intense expression
of a dramatic or reflective moment of individual consciousness. In fact,
this idea of the modern lyric, though it is not a telos for these contribu-
tors, is something of an enabling fiction for their stories of earlier periods:
in each case a scholar shows us why it would be wrong to imagine that
the lyric in his or her period fits this model. But this particular, restricted
modern conception of the lyric, if it serves as something of a straw man
for the discussion on lyrics of earlier periods, turns out not to fit very well
the lyrics of the Romantic and post-Romantic age either, as the relevant
chapters demonstrate, and is certainly not a model whose gradual forma-
tion over the centuries the volume records.
In fact, the lyric is already well-formed – splendidly alive – many cen-
turies before our volume takes it up, in Sappho’s only complete poem,
the intricately self-reflexive invocation of Aphrodite, a lyric whose formal
elegance and double perspective on love are not improved on by later lyric
efforts. What these chapters sketch for us, then, is not the gradual histor-
ical formation of a genre that comes into its own in the last two centuries,
but, on the contrary, lyric formations, different historical configurations
of the genre, which do not amount to a linear history. One of the distinct-
ive features of the history of the lyric is that, unlike social and political
240 Jonathan ­Culler
history – which may be irreversible, if not exactly linear – lyric history
consists of variations, possibilities of lyric, most of which remain at least
in principle available to later ages: what falls out of favour and comes to
be neglected is not banished but remains available for reactivation in later
times and places. Just as Petrarch is taken up by the sixteenth-century
English poets considered here, so Horace is reawakened in the seventeenth
century, Pindar in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,
Hebrew Psalms in the eighteenth, early English ballads in the nineteenth
century, and so on. The lyric has a history, a particularly fascinating one:
linked with social, political, and philosophical developments, certainly,
but also involving the repeated reactivation of elements from its own past
that have fallen into neglect.
Several themes are pervasive in these analyses and offer suggestive links
for thinking about the history of the lyric. The first is the relation of lyric
to music, which had long been central to its definition, if usually in a
somewhat nostalgic and retrospective fashion. In the first century bce,
Horace presents himself as a singer accompanied by the lyre, but this is
already conventional: there is no evidence that he knew how to play or
that any of his odes (Carmina) were ever sung. David Lindley describes
a less radical situation in the sixteenth century, as lyric again separates
itself from music and achieves a certain autonomy, despite the frequent
references in lyrics and in comments on them to song, lyres, and so on.
Renaissance lyricists may not in fact have had much musical knowledge,
and Lindley astutely notes ‘the abiding paradox that lyrics having the most
demonstrably close connection to music are yet frequently those whose
metrical shape, or verbal “music”, is most incoherent when simply read’.
In the seventeenth century, though, Nigel Smith maintains, the identifica-
tion of lyric with song is simply a given, part of the Classical heritage. He
singles out Henry Lawes for his success in setting many lyrics of the age
to music, but otherwise music is part of the concept of lyric rather than a
reality of lyric composition. David Fairer describes poets later in the cen-
tury, as they revive the ode and seek to link to its Classical genealogy, once
again bedecking themselves with imagery of songs and lyres: ‘acknowledg-
ing the ancient roots of lyric in the lyre, [poets] were aware of a defining
expressiveness in lyric verse’. What seems a new development here is a
linking in a figurative register of the strings of imaginary lyres and the
strings of the human heart or mechanisms of the mind. The proliferation
in poems of adjectives concerning strings shows, writes Fairer, ‘how lyric
poets thought of themselves as playing skilfully on an instrument and also
playing on the responses of a hearer’. Poets claimed not, as in earlier times,
 ­Afterwor 241
to produce words that should in principle be accompanied by music, but
to explore a new musicality.
In the mid eighteenth century the further exfoliation of the Classical
ode and the quest for sublime effects in the wake of the rediscovery of
Longinus sets the stage for a different link with music. Lyrics, increasingly
self-reflexive – as Marcus Walsh notes – and appealing to Hebrew songs
as well as Pindaric models, deploy a stylised rhetoric and a Miltonic pro-
phetic mode, and rely less heavily on visual imagery. Seeking an adequate
form for a modern poetry of imagination, Collins and Smart, for instance,
transform in their different ways the models of ancient song into a poetry
that is epideictic rather than mimetic, and in its ‘articulation of voiceless-
ness’ may signify musicality, through its evocation of Greek or Hebrew
models, rather than attempt to embody it.
David Duff describes two changing relations to music in the Romantic
period. First, the revaluation of music as the highest of the arts, which
starts in Germany but finds English exponents such as Walter Pater, gives
lyric an abstract, ideal model: music is not an accompaniment but a form
to which lyric can vainly aspire. Secondly, while Shelley produces a power-
ful modernisation of the Pindaric ode, a language that would itself be
music, in his ‘Ode to the West Wind’, there is also a revival of the bal-
lad, imbued with the prestige of origins: in Wordsworth’s adaptations but
also especially in Burns, whose verses not only allude to an ancient native
tradition of song but are themselves frequently set to music as well. These
two quite different relations to music – the nostalgic model of ancient
native balladry and the abstract ideal of the purest art – are at play in the
Romantic expansion of the idea of the lyric.
Peter Nicholls’ splendid ‘Modernism and the Limits of Lyric’ offers an
original reading of the impulses or tendencies of post-Victorian poetry.
Citing Pound, who argues that ‘poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too
far from music’, he highlights the role of Pound’s ‘melopoeia’ – poetry
where ‘music, sheer melody, seems as if it were just bursting into speech’.
He sees this aspiration to an aesthetics of sound, to poetry aspiring to
the condition of music – splendidly exercised by Swinburne, for instance,
or Yeats, as well as by Pound himself – as one force that, along with the
more frequently cited tendency of the modernist promotion of the image,
works to put in doubt or at least severely qualify the notion of lyric as
the intimate speech act of a unified speaking voice. He reminds us that
Mallarmé’s celebration of the music of poetry has no mimetic relation to
music or voice as such: it is not a matter of poetry sung to a musical
accompaniment, for instance, but of a lyricism that can operate ‘with eyes
242 Jonathan ­Culler
closed’, music as writing that is resistant to meaning, as music is. It is
this ­melopoeic lyric that is resisted by the later poets he discusses, such
as George Oppen and Susan Howe, where in broken rhythms may be
detected ‘a deep desire for lyric vision’, as Pound’s sheer melody is denied.
A second topic that appears at various moments in this book is the
question of poetic presence: how does the lyric, this verbal form that often
has a nostalgic or aspirational link with music, relate to a moment of per-
formance or consumption? What, if anything, does the lyric make pre-
sent, and how is the identity of the lyric affected? David Lindley stresses
that there is a constitutive gap: the ‘I’ of the lyric is not just the author but
also the reader or singer, and pleasure in recitation implies a distance and
not just identification. Heather Dubrow further explores the functioning
of deictics in Renaissance sonnets, where the ‘here’ or ‘now’ unsettle the
simple binaries that may be cited in discussions of lyric and, rather than
defining space and time, destabilise them through multiple referents. The
spatial here can refer to the material manifestation of the poem on the
page; as it is presented to someone as it circulates; or, given Renaissance
cosmology, it can refer to the sublunary sphere, here on earth, as well as to
a place of articulation. In the Renaissance there is no presumption of an
isolated lyric speaker, as in the dominant modern model of the lyric.
The circulation of lyric in manuscripts, which some Renaissance poets
preferred to print, not only marks a break with song, Thomas Healy argues,
but enables a certain fluidity that print does not afford. The perform-
ance of reading or of recopying supplants in some respects musical per-
formance. From the Romantics on to our own day, manuscripts embody
authenticity and personal uniqueness, tying a poem not just to a historical
moment of composition but to an authorial intention of that moment
seen as originary and determining, but in the English Renaissance manu-
script practices illustrate the collective functioning of lyrics, as they pass
from hand to hand, separating themselves from a poet and a real or imag-
ined addressee, offering themselves to variable performances and uses in
commonplace books. A poem of Wyatt’s nicely ‘illustrates a literary envir-
onment that preferred the mutability of manuscript transmission to the
constancy of print. The poets’ crafting of their lyrics adopts strategies that
collude with a transmission process that expects textual and interpretive
instability.’
In the mid seventeenth century, it is taken as given, Nigel Smith argues,
that lyric is a genre descended from the Greeks – short poems of charm and
sweetness, of varying, often complex metre – but if it keeps the insights
of antiquity alive, it is also frequently, in a time of political turbulence,
 ­Afterwor 243
entangled with political positioning. These poems are not simply and
­easily either timeless artefacts or utterances tied to a particular moment.
For David Fairer, the lyric, as manifested in the ode, is striving to be itself
an event rather than a representation of an event; and for Marcus Walsh,
whose objects of study are designed to manifest the ‘poetical character’,
with oratorical or ritualistic elements and lexical rarities, there is depiction
but not expression of feeling. The poem makes present something that
never was. In the Romantic poems studied by David Duff, on the con-
trary, we encounter divergent possibilities: imitation of consciousness and
mimesis of speech on the one hand – which looks forward to the dramatic
monologue and the poem as discourse of a fictional character – and, on
the other, the poem as spell or charm.
In Marion Thain’s complex account of the problems of the lyric in the
Victorian period, poets such as Browning seek a more objective and dra-
matic lyric, based on the mimesis of speech, while decadent poets embrace
the idea of a solipsistic lyric but give it a new phenomenological cast,
through attention to the body and somatic sensations. The lyric seeks
to evoke a haptic, bodily presence. But Swinburne and Hopkins, far
more central to the poetry of this period than such Decadents as Arthur
Symons, practise a sensuous engagement with the properties of words that
can scarcely be described as phenomenological. The case of Swinburne
in particular poses the question of whether it is somatic references or the
ritualistic character of this poetry, its foregrounding of sonorous rhythm,
that saves it from the charge of solipsism, giving it a public, collective
character that is frequently ignored in accounts of the lyric.
In the twentieth century we encounter a range of strategies that com-
plicate notions of what a lyric might make present, from the intensifica-
tion of opacity analysed by Peter Nicholls in his account of the blindness
of lyric, to the modes of resistance to any integrity of the lyric ‘I’ deployed
by Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin (though from their complex textual
influences, mythologies, and vulgarity, as Neil Roberts shows, nonethe-
less, an ‘intending “I”’ does emerge). In the more refractory poems Ian
Patterson studies, ‘No man is an “I”.’ As he shrewdly observes, it is not
easy to personalise language in the first place, and the poems he studies
display the fact that words do not originate in the self or present a self. We
encounter not a subjectivity but an interplay of forces that would form,
act upon, and limit a subject. What the lyric presents is a textual surface
in which such forces are imbricated.
This last chapter raises the final question of the boundaries of lyric.
This is not a matter of special concern in the sixteenth and seventeenth
244 Jonathan ­Culler
centuries: when lyric is not a central concept in discussions of poetry
­no-one need argue whether something is or is not a lyric. In the Restoration
and eighteenth century, with revival of Classical models, lyric becomes
instantiated in the ode especially, and set against epic, didactic, narrative
poetry. Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s eloquent preface to Collins’ poems, cited
by Marcus Walsh, speaks of ‘pure Poetry, or Poetry in the abstract. It is
concerned with an imaginary world, peopled with beings of its own cre-
ation. It deals in splendid imagery, bold fiction, and allegorical person-
ages … while the conceptions of the Poet (often highly metaphysical) are
rendered still more remote from common apprehension by the figurative
phrase in which they are clothed. All that is properly Lyric Poetry is of this
kind.’4 At this point lyric seems to be acquiring a distinct identity, dif-
ferentiated especially from the narrative and the didactic, but also from
popular forms that lack the sublime ambitions of lyric. In the nineteenth
century, however, as David Duff and Marion Thain show, when the cat-
egory of lyric comes to the fore in discussions about poetry, a range of
poetic forms, such as the indigenous ballad tradition, are ‘colonised’ as
forms of lyric. The recent historicist critique of the idea of lyric as a mod-
ern imposition sees the ‘lyricisation’ of poetry as a function of modern
criticism but, as Marion Thain explains, if the lyric comes to be the central
poetic form in the nineteenth century it is because narrative and didactic
functions are increasingly taken over by prose, and lyric comes to be set
against the novel as the two major forms of literature. But of course, as
lyric becomes the major form of poetry grounds for resistance to it arise,
from Browning’s desire for a more ‘objective’ form to modernist question-
ing of a unified lyric voice. Browning’s dramatic monologue, though, con-
ceived as a resistance to the lyric, becomes in the twentieth century the
very model of lyric, as mimesis of speech. What is especially striking in
this history, then, is the way in which, from the nineteenth century to the
present, various forms of resistance to the lyric become incorporated into
the broad conception of the lyric.
A unifying theme of the three chapters on lyric in the twentieth century
is this resistance to lyric as central to the practice of lyric. The rich accounts
of particular movements by Nicholls, Roberts, and Patterson describe ways
in which lyric is questioned by its practitioners, but they do not pose the
questions of the limits of lyric. Are the forms of difficult poetry treated by
Patterson still lyric? In so far as they resist association of lyric with voice,
resist vocalisation, one could argue that we are approaching a limit of lyric.
When we have poems where the visual dominates the oral, where the page
rather than the articulable or vocalisable line is the fundamental unit, we
 ­Afterwor 245
have perhaps moved into different territory where the model of lyric is
no longer pertinent. In the twentieth century many poets have rejected
the notion of lyric tied to the notion of the poetic voice. ‘What do we
make of poems like Lyn Hejinian’s or Charles Bernstein’s’, asks Marjorie
Perloff, ‘whose appropriation of found objects – snippets of advertising
slogans, newspaper headlines, media cliché, textbook writing, or citation
from other poets – works precisely to deconstruct the possibility of the
formation of a coherent or consistent lyric voice?’5 They have produced
texts that require reading by other models. A wide range of poems have
resisted a model that presumes the centrality of sound, in the guise either
of a figure of voice or of ritual inscription to be recited. These range from
shaped poems and concrete poems that can scarcely be read, only seen
or described, to poems that refuse in other ways a relation to voice and
an enunciating subject: much L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry for instance.
The question, then, is not so much whether particular poems count as
lyric as to what extent reference to the parameters of that tradition is pre-
supposed, as something to be cited, parodied, deployed, denounced, or
worked against – though whether or not we want to call it ‘presupposed’
may beg the question, since the issue really is whether approaching a given
poem or poetic corpus in relation to the lyric tradition enriches the experi-
ence of and reflection on the poems in question.
In some cases discussed by Patterson the poem seems to ask to be read
in relation to a lyric model, which it is actively resisting and where its
functioning primarily takes the form of that resistance. But if lyric is to
remain a valuable concept we need to recognise that it has limits and
that there are poems that can scarcely be read but must be contemplated,
where even though they are made of language the visual overwhelms the
aural. A positing of boundaries is important for keeping alive the connec-
tions with the vital lyric tradition that the contributions in this volume
describe. This tradition is not a linear history but a series of variations that
provide much scope for new poems, but do not include everything that
we might count as poetry.

Notes
1 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1981), p. 105.
2 Allen Grossman, The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 211.
3 See the papers in ‘The New Lyric Studies’, PMLA 123.1 (January 2008), 181–
234; Virginia Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton
246 Jonathan ­Culler
University Press, 2005); and, most economically, Jackson’s entry for ‘Lyric’, in
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton University Press, 2012),
pp. 826–34.
4 Anna Laetitia Barbauld, ‘Preface’ The Poetical Works of Mr. William Collins
(London, 1797), pp. iv–v.
5 Marjorie Perloff, Poetic License (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1990), p. 12.
 ­Index

‘Above all I am not concerned with Poetry’ Rhythms of English Poetry, 14

(Owen), 200 Auden, W. H., 198
Abrams, M. H., 4, 137, 138–9 ‘Auld Lang Syne’, 145–9
‘Address to the Gentle Reader’ (Munday), 16 authorship, 62
Adorno, Theodor, 139 Avison, Charles, 102
‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, 200
Aikin, John, 142–3 ballads, 13–14, 141, 143–4, 241
‘air’, 33 ‘Auld Lang Syne’, 145–9
Akenside, Mark, 96, 124 Banquet of Daintie Conceits (Munday), 16
‘Ode on Lyric Poetry’, 96 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 118, 121–2, 244
Odes on Several Subjects, 113 ‘Bard, The’ (Gray), 113
Alcaeus, 95–6 ‘Batter my heart, three person’d God’, 58–9
Alexander, Gavin, 16 Beat poets, 219
Alexander’s Feast; or, The Power of Musick Beattie, James, ­115
(Dryden), 97–9, 114 Bergson, Henri, 179, 180
Allegro, L’ (Milton), 114 ‘Best Society’ (Larkin), 205
American poetry, 219–20 Bicknell, Jeanette, 26
‘Language poetry’, 229 Birthday Letters (T. Hughes), 197, 211, 213–14
Amoretti (Spenser), 42 ‘Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s
amplificatio, 126, 130 Church, The’ (Browning), 162
Anacreon, 78, 95–6 Blair, Hugh, 135
‘Anactoria’ (Swinburne), 184 Blanchot, Maurice, 188
anaphora, 128 blank verse, 139, 162
anthologies, 135–6 Blasing, Mutlu Konuk, 1, 195, 196–7, 203
anticipation, 37–8 Bloodaxe Book of 20th Century Poetry, The
Apology for Poetry, An (Sidney), 2, 34 (Longley), 195
apostrophes, 31, 149–50, 174 n18 Blow, John, 93, 107 n2
apposition, 125 bodies, Victorian focus on, 165–7, 172, 179–0
architecture, 46 Booth, Mark W., 26
‘Are Beauties there as proud as here they be?’ Bostock, Anna, 189–90 n5
(Sidney), 39, 42, 44, 46 Brady, Andrea, 218, 232–3
‘Ariadne’s Lament’ (Cartwright), 75 Brewster, Scott, 4, 177
Aristotle, 113 Brown, Marshall, 38
Poetics, 116, 237–8 Browning, Robert, 156, 161–3, 244
Arnaut see Daniel, Arnaut ‘Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s
Arte of English Poesie, The (Puttenham), 52 Church, The’, 162
Ascham, Roger, Scholemaster, 32 ‘Christina’, 162–3
Astrophil and Stella (Sidney), 56, 128, 200 ‘Johannes Agricola’, 163
Atalanta in Calydon (Swinburne), 181, 182 ‘My Last Duchess’, 162
Atterbury, Francis, 71 ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, 163
Attridge, Derek, 2 Burke, Edmund, 120–1

247
248 ­Inde
Burns, Robert, 241 Collected Poems (T. Hughes), 197–8
and ‘Auld Lang Syne’, 145–9 Collins, William, 114–22, 124, 130–1, 241, 244
Butler, Charles, 94 ‘Manners, The’, 116
Butler, Samuel, 86 ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’, 117–21
‘Ode to Fear’, 116, 119
Calhoun, Joshua, 43, 49 n29 ‘Ode to Pity’, 116, 119
Campion, Thomas, 11, 18–20, 25 Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric
‘Faire, if you expect admiring’, 19 Subjects, 113, 115
Lord Hay’s Masque, The, 18 ‘Passions, The’, 101–3, 116–17
Observations in the art of English Poesie, 19 ‘Comparison of Elizabethan with Victorian
Third Booke, 24 Poetry, A’ (Symonds), 156–8
Two Bookes of Ayres, 18, 22, 23 ‘Complaint of Thames 1647, The’ (Pulter), 80
‘Canonization, The’ (Donne), 57–8, 62–3 Comus (Milton), 74, 82
Cantos (Pound), 180, 181, 184–6 Congreve, William, ‘Discourse on the Pindaric
Carew, Thomas Ode’, 114
‘Cruell Mistris, A’, 75 ‘continuo’ song, 73
‘My mistris commanding me to returne her contrafacta, 15–19, 73–6
letters’, 75–6 Cotton, Charles, 86–7
Poems, 75 ‘New Year, The’, 87
‘Rapture, A’, 76 Cowley, Abraham, 77, 85, 99, 114, 121
‘Spring, The’, 75 King’s Cabinet Opened, The, 80
‘To A. L. Perswasions to love’, 75 Mistress, The, 80–1
carpe diem tradition, 36, 37, 75 Pindarique Odes, 114
Cartwright, William, 83 ‘Request, The’, 81
‘Ariadne’s Lament’, 75 Crary, Jonathan, 172
catchwords, 43 Creaser, John, 78
‘Century of Roundels, A’ (Swinburne), 171 Cromwell, Oliver, 83–4
Certain Sonnets (Sidney), 16 Crow (T. Hughes), 201–3, 208–10
Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early ‘Cruell Mistris, A’ (Carew), 75
Modern England (Dubrow), 1 Culler, Jonathan, 4, 31, 34, 160, 178, 190 n9, 217
Chambers, Ephraim, 94–5 ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ (Adorno), 200
‘Chat, Le’ (Symons), 166 Custance, Olive, ‘Glamour of Gold’, 168–70
chiasmus, 1­ 25 ‘Cut Grass’ (Larkin), 204
‘Childish Prank, A’ (T. Hughes), 209 Cyclopædia (Chambers), 94–5
Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots
Poems Both Ancient and Modern (Watson), ‘Dance, The’ (Larkin), 196
146–7 dancer poems, 165–6
Choice Psalmes (Lawes), 82–3 Daniel, Arnaut, 178–9, 1­ 88
Christ, Carol, 156 ‘Doutz brais e critz’, 178
‘Christabel’ (Coleridge), 207 Daniel, Samuel, 35–8
Christian doctrine, 46, 129–30 Civil Wars, 51
‘Christina’ (Browning), 162–3 Defence of Rhyme, A, 52–3
Churchyard, Thomas, 11 and print, 51, 54, 65, 68
‘Cinéma calendrier du coeur abstrait maisons’ on sonnets, 52–3
(Tzara), 222 Davidson, Michael, 220
Civil Wars (Daniel), 51 Day Lewis, Cecil, 12, 138, 139
Clarke, Jeremiah, 98, 109 n30 Day Light Songs (Prynne), 225
‘Cock Crowing’(Vaughan), 87 De musica (Plutarch), 94
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 136, 138, 139, 143, 207 Decadent poetry, 160, 164–5, 166–1, 243
‘Christabel’, 207 Decker, Christopher, 159
‘Fears in Solitude’, 139 declamatory style, 73–4, 76
‘France: An Ode’, 139 Defence of Poesie (Sidney), 52
‘Frost at Midnight’, 139, 204–5 Defence of Rhyme, A (Daniel), 52–3
‘Kubla Khan’, 207 deictic lenses, 124–8
‘Nightingale, The’, 139 deixis, 30–47, 242
‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The’, 207 Daniel, 35–8
 ­Inde 249
Denham, Sir John, 71 epigrams, 32, 53
Derrida, Jacques, 183, 184 ‘Epithalamion’ (Spenser), 42, 43, 45
Dibdin, Charles, 143 Erechtheus (Swinburne), 182, 183
Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading Essay on Musical Expression (Avison), 102
(Jackson), 1 Essays on Song-Writing (Aikin), 142–3
Dionysius of Helicarnassus, 108 n9 Everett, Barbara, 197
‘Discourse on the Pindaric Ode’ (Congreve), 114 eyes, 179–80
Dolores (Swinburne), 181
Donne, John, 21–2, 56, 57, 76 Fabry, Frank, 16
in print and manuscript, 56, 57–65 Faerie Queene, The (Spenser), 47, 117
on printed works, 52 ‘Faire, if you expect admiring’ (Campion), 19
works: ‘Batter my heart, three person’d Fairer, David, 6, 112, 240–1, 243
God’, 58–9; ‘Canonization, The’, Fakesong (Harker), 144
57–8, 62–3; ‘Going to Bed’ (‘To His ‘Famous Battle between Robin Hood and the
Mistress Going to Bed’), 65; ‘Good- Curtal Friar’, 14
morrow, The’, 59–62, 65; ‘Hymne to God ‘Fears in Solitude’ (Coleridge), 139
the Father, An’, 21; ‘Indifferent, The’, 45; Ferrabosco, Alfonso, 74
Songs and Sonnets, 34, 62‘Sun Rising’, 21; Ferrar, Nicholas, 66
‘Triple Fool, The’, 22, 25, 63–5; Filmer, Edward, 16–17
‘Valediction: of the booke, A’, 63; Finch, Anne, ‘Upon the Hurricane’, 104–6
‘Valediction of Weeping, A’, 171 First Booke of Songes or Ayres (Dowland), 24
‘Doutz brais e critz’ (Daniel), 178 FitzGerald, Edward, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,
Dowland, John, 17–18, 226 159–60
First Booke of Songes or Ayres, 24 ‘Flow my tears’ (Dowland), 17
‘Flow my tears’, 17 flutes, 93
Second Book of Airs, 17–18 For an Anniversary of Musick on St Cecilia’s Day
dramatic monologues, 38, 156, 160, 162, 178, 179 (Oldham), 92–3
Drant, Thomas, 26n1 form, lyric as a, 3
drawing, 183 Forster, Reginald, ‘Sappho to Phaon’, 87
Drummond, William, 21 Fowler, Alastair, 31, 71
Dryden, John, 114 Foxe, John, 51
Alexander’s Feast; or, The Power of Musick, ‘France: An Ode’ (Coleridge), 139
97–9, 114 Francis, earl of Cumberland, 23
‘Song for St Cecilia’s Day, A’, 114 free verse, 85, 180–1, 191 n28
Dubrow, Heather, 1, 5, 12, 24, 52, 242 French Court-Aires (Filmer), 16–17
Duff, David, 6, 157, 158, 241, 243, 244 Friedrich, Caspar David, 188
Duff, William, 137 From the Life and Songs of the Crow (T. Hughes)
Dyer, George, 139–­40 see Crow
‘Frost at Midnight’ (Coleridge), 139, 204–5
early modern period, 10–26 Frost, Elisabeth, ‘Happiness’, 41
‘East Coker’ (Eliot), 200 frottola, 13
Echo, 67–8, 74 Frye, Northrop, 14, 21
Eco, Umberto, 129–30
Eikhenbaum, Boris, 140 Gardner, Helen, 28 n34
Elam, Keir, 30 Gaudete (T. Hughes), 196, 210–11
elegies, 11, 15 genre, lyric as a, 3, 4
‘Going to Bed’ (‘To His Mistress Going to Georgics, 71
Bed’) (Donne), 65 Gibson, Kirsten, 24
‘Rapture, A’ (Carew), 76 Gizzi, Peter, 224
Eliade, Mircea, 207 ‘Glamour of Gold’ (Custance), 168–70
Eliot, T. S., 34–5, 130 ‘Go lovely rose’ (Waller), 74–5
‘East Coker’, 200 ‘Going to Bed’ (‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’)
on Swinburne, 182–3, 184 (Donne), 65
emotional concept, Larkin’s, 196–7 Golden Treasury, The (Palgrave), 136, 138, 157, 164
enumeratio, 128 ‘Gong’ (Rilke), 183
epideictic odes, 113 ‘Good-morrow, The’ (Donne), 59–62, 65
250 ­Inde
gradatio, 128 high lyric (eighteenth-century), 112–31
Graham, W. S., 221 ‘High Windows’ (Larkin), 205–6
‘Grasshopper, The’ (Lovelace), 85 Hoagwood, Terence, 144
Gray, Thomas, 113, 122, 137 Hobbes, Thomas, 72
‘Bard, The’, 113 Hoby, Margaret, 25
letter to Wharton, 119 Hoffmann, Daniel, 207
‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat’, 124 Hollander, John, 141, 144
Odes by Mr. Gray, 113 Hollo, Anselm, 219
‘Progress of Poesy, The’, 111 n52, 113 Homer, 130
Greek music (ancient), 94–8 Horace, 72, 95, 96–7, 240
Green, Roland, 35 Smart’s translation, 123–4
Grossman, Allen, 237 ‘Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from
Guillory, John, 44 Ireland, An’ (Marvell), 83–4, 85, 123
House of Nassau: A Pindarick Ode, The (J.
Hall Caine, Thomas Henry, 171–2 Hughes), 95, 108 n17
Hall, John, 82 Howe, Susan, 187–9
Longinus translation, 84–5 Rückenfigur, 187–8
Hallam, Arthur, 156 Howls and Whispers (T. Hughes), 212
Handel, George Frideric, 99 Hudibras (Butler), 86
Handful of Pleasant Delights, A (Robinson), 23 Hughes, John
handing something to someone, 36–7, House of Nassau: A Pindarick Ode, The, 95,
38, 40–1 108 n17
‘Hands’ (Symons), 166–7 on prosopopoeia, 115
‘Happiness’ (Frost), 41 Hughes, Ted, 196–200, 207–14
haptic experience, 166, 170 Birthday Letters, 197, 211, 213–14
Harker, Dave, Fakesong, 144 ‘Childish Prank, A’, 209
Harris, Sharon, 45 Collected Poems, 197–8
Harrison, Tony, 218 Crow, 201–3, 208–10
Haslam, Michael, 229–31 Gaudete, 196, 210–11
Music Laid Her Songs in Language, The, 231 Howls and Whispers, 212
Quiet Works, The, 230 Letters, 207
‘Three of my Chasms’, 231 ‘Lineage’, 210
Hayes, William, 101–2 ‘Offers, The’, 212
Heale, Elizabeth, 13 ‘Pike’, 202, 207–8
Healy, Thomas, 5–6, 22, 42, 44, 242 ‘Recluse, The, 198
Hecatompathia; or, Passionate Centurie of Love Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete
(Watson), 42 Being, 196
Helgerson, Richard, 39 ‘Snake in the Oak, The’, 207
Helsinger, Elizabeth, 179, 184 ‘Song’, 198, 199–200
Henriksen, John, 174 n18 ‘Thought-Fox, The’, 207, 213
Henry V (Shakespeare), 30 ‘Visit, The’, 212–13
Her Weasels Wild Returning (Prynne), 226–9 ‘Hymne to God the Father, An’ (Donne), 21
Herbert, George, 20–1, 56, 65–8 hymns, 13–14, 15, 112, 124
Temple, 56, 66 ‘Hymne to God the Father, An’ (Donne),
‘Here’ (Larkin), 206 21
here and now, 37–8, 45–7, ­242 Hymns and Spiritual Songs (Smart), 123, 130
here/there, 30, 35, 39, 40–7
Daniel case study, 36–8 ‘I’, 24–6, 166, 218, 233, 243
herein, 39 and Browning, 163
Herrick, Robert, 78–9 in ‘Ode to the West Wind’, 151
Hesperides, 79 in ‘The Triple Foole’ (Donne), ­64
‘To the Virgins, to make much of Time’, 79 and twentieth-century poetry, 195–6, 197, 203,
‘Upon Julia’s Clothes’, 78 205, 206, 208, 210, 214
Hervey, James, 129 see also ‘intending “I”’
Hesperides (Herrick), 79 ‘I dreamed of an out-thrust arm of land’
Heywood, Jasper, 54, 63 (Larkin), 198–9
 ­Inde 251
idyll, 157 Ladkin, Sam, 220
Iliad (Homer), 130 Lang, Andrew, 169
immediacy, 35, 37, 39, 40 language, 217–33, 245
Carew, 76 ‘Language poetry’, 229
In Memoriam (Tennyson), 168 Lanier, Nicholas, 74
‘Indifferent, The’ (Donne), 45 Larkin, Philip, 196–7, 198–201, 203–6,
‘intending “I”’, 203 214
Blasing on, 195–6, 203 ‘Best Society’, 205
and Hughes, 207, 208, 210, 211, 243 ‘Cut Grass’, 204
and Larkin, 205, 243 ‘Dance, The ’, 196
interior design, 46 ‘Here’, 206
introspective lyric, 3 ‘High Windows’, 205–06
and Browning, 161 ‘I dreamed of an out-thrust arm of land’,
and ‘Ode to the West Wind’, 151 198–9
and Romanticism, 135, 136, 139–41, 143 ‘MCMXIV’, 200
and Victorian lyric, 157 ‘Money’, 206
see also idyll ‘Mr Bleaney’, 206
Iovan, Sarah, 25, 44 North Ship, The, 198, 199
‘Iphigenia’ (Wilkinson), 231 ‘Pleasure Principle’, 196
Italian Madrigals Englished (Watson), 15 ‘Sad Steps’, 200–01, 203
italics, use in printing, 66–7 ‘This Be the Verse’, 206
Izenberg, Oren, 221 ‘Ultimatum’, 198
‘Vers de Société’, 204–05
Jackson, Virginia, 1, 4, 177 ‘Whitsun Weddings, The’, 206
Jakobson, Roman, 179 late modernist poetry, 218
James, John, 222–4 Lawes, Henry, 73–6, 82–3, 240
Letters from Sarah, 222–3, 224 Choice Psalmes, 82–3
‘Pimlico’, 223–4 Lawes, William, 79
Jameson, Fredric, 44 Lee, Vernon, 173
Political Unconscious, The, 237 Leggett, B. J., 199
Janowitz, Anne, 139, 147 ‘Leper, The’ (Swinburne), 163–4
Jarvis, Simon, 1–2 Letters (T. Hughes), 207
Jay, Martin, 179 Letters from Sarah (James), 222–3, 224
Jeffreys, Mark, 177, 195, 217 Levinson, Marjorie, 168
‘Johannes Agricola’ (Browning), 163 Lewis, Wyndham, 180
Johnson, John, Scots Musical Museum, 147 ‘Liberty, A Poem’ (Thomson), 95
Johnson, Robert, 20, 74 Lindley, David, 1, 5, 31, 32, 33, 34, 52, 64, 73, 141,
Johnson, Samuel, 131–32 n14 240, 242
‘Upon the Feast of St Simon and ‘Line of Betrayal, The’ (Wilkinson), 232
St Jude’, 124 ‘Lineage’ (T. Hughes), 210
Johnson, W. R., 160 lists, 126–7, 129–30
Jonson, Ben, 21, 52, 71, 74, 77–8 ‘Little Pin: Fragment, The’ (Oppen), 186–7
‘To the Immortal Memory’, 77–8 Lodge, David, 203, 205, 206
Workes of Beniamin Ionson, 52 Longinus, 114, 241
Jubilate agno (Smart), 126, 128–9 translation by Hall, 84–5
Longley, Edna, 195
Kames, Henry, Lord Home, 115, 121 Lord Hay’s Masque, The (Campion), 18
Kazoo Dreamboats (Prynne), 229 Love, Harold, 55, 57
Keats, John, 36–7 ‘Love Innocence’ (Stanley), 81–2
Kenyon, John, 161 Lovelace, Richard, 85–6
Kinds of Literature (Fowler), 31 ‘Grasshopper, The’, 85
King Lear (Tate), 6­ 1 Lucasta, 85
King’s Cabinet Opened, The (Cowley), 80 ‘Snail, The’, 85–­6
Kivy, Peter, 110 n41 ‘To Althea, from Prison: Song’, 85
‘Kubla Khan’ (Coleridge), 207 Lowell, Robert, ‘Quaker Graveyard in
Kuhn, Albert, 129 Nantucket’, 40
252 ­Inde
Lucasta (Lovelace), 85 Comus, 74, 82
lutes, 25, 74 and Horace, 123
lyres/lyrists, 10, 93, 94, 95, 100–1 Paradise Lost, ­86
lyric (origin/use of term), 1, 2–3, 10–11, 32, 72, Il Penseroso, 114
217, 238 Reason of Church Government, 32
Romantic period, 135–6, 143 ‘Sonnet xiii: To Mr. H. Lawes’, 83
Lyric Poetry: The Pain and Pleasure of Words ‘Sweet Echo’, 74
(Blasing), 1, 195 mimetic poetry, 237–8
Lyric Repository, The (1787), 142 minstrelsy, 143–4
Lyrical Ballads (Dyer), 139–40 Mistress, The (Cowley), 80–1
Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth), 141 modes
Lyrical Gems (Malcolm), 135 lyric as a, 3
Lyrical Tales (Robinson), 141 (or moods) of Greek music, 94
modernism, and music, 177–89
McGann, Jerome, 182, 184 modulation, 92–106
McLane, Maureen, 143–4, 170 ‘Money’ (Larkin), 206
madrigals, 15–16 monostrophic odes, 114
Mahrt, William, 15–16 Monroe, Harriet, 180
Malcolm, Robert, Lyrical Gems, 135 Monson, Thomas, 24
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 182–3, 241–2 Montgomery, James, 135
‘Manners, The’ (Collins), 116 Moralia (Plutarch), 94
manuscript, 44–5, 242 ‘Morbidezza’ (Symons), 166
and the move to print, 51–68 Motion, Andrew, 199
Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance ‘Movement, The’, 219
Lyric (Marotti), 55, 57, 61 ‘Mr Bleaney’ (Larkin), 206
Marlowe, Christopher, 33, 53 Munday, Anthony, 16
Marotti, Arthur, Manuscript, Print and the music, 240–2
English Renaissance Lyric, 55, 57, 61 contrafacta, 15–19
Marriot, John, 61 and deictics, 44–5
Martens, Britta, 161–2 early modern, 10–26
Marvell, Andrew, 76, 83–4 and the English Revolution, 73–6
‘Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from and modernism, 177–89
Ireland, An’, 83–4, 85, 123 printed, 18
‘To His Coy Mistress’, 60 Restoration to early eighteenth century,
Maynard, Winifred, 12–13 92–106
‘MCMXIV’ (Larkin), 200 Romanticism, 136, 140–52
melic poetry, 32, 73 see also musical instruments
melopoeia, 178, 185, 186 Music Laid Her Songs in Language, The
Mengham, Rod, 226 (Haslam), 231
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 167 Musica transalpina (Yonge), 22–3
metaphor, in Shelley, 150 musical instruments, 10, 144
metre lutes, 25, 74
and declamatory style, 74 lyres, 93, 94, 95, 100–1
and early modern music, 11, 14, 17–21, 26 Musicall Consort of Heavenly Harmonie, A
in Greek music, 94–5 (Churchyard), 11
Sidney and, 32 ‘My Last Duchess’ (Browning), 162
‘Sternhold’s’, 14 ‘My mistris commanding me to returne her
Michelangelo, 172 letters’ (Carew), 75–6
Mill, John Stuart, 137, 160 mythological figures, 32–3
‘Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties’, 158
millenarianism, 46 national songs, 145–9
Miller, Greg, 66 Nature, 104–6
‘Miller’s Daughter, The’ (tune), 149 New Criticism, 217
Milton, John, 82–3 ‘New Year, The’ (Cotton), 87
L’Allegro, 114 Newstok, Scott, 35
 ­Inde 253
Newton, Sir Isaac, 129 pathology in poetry, 156–73
Nicholls, Peter, 7, 196, 241–2 Patterson, Ian, 7, 243, 245
‘Nightingale, The’ (Coleridge), 139 Peacham, Henry, 72
norms, 237 Penseroso, Il (Milton), 114
North, Roger, 104 Percy, Thomas, Reliques of Ancient English
North Ship, The (Larkin), 198, 199 Poetry, 143
novels, 156, ­157 performance, 24–6, 242
now/then, 30, 36–8 Perloff, Marjorie, 8, 157, 245
see also immediacy personification see prosopopoeia
Petrarch, Francesco, 34, 35
Observations in the Art of English Poesie ‘philistine persona’, 197, 200, 203, 204, 206–7
(Campion), 19 ‘Pike’ (T. Hughes), 202, 207–8
‘Ode for Musick’ (Pope), 104 Pilinszky, János, 200
‘Ode on Lyric Poetry’ (Akenside), 96 ‘Pimlico’ (James), 223–4
‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat’ Pindar/Pindaric odes, 32–3, 95–6
(Gray), 124 Alexander’s Feast; or, The Power of Musick
‘Ode on the Poetical Character’ (Collins), 117–21 (Dryden), 97–­9
‘Ode to Fear’ (Collins), 116, 119 Cowley on, 85, 99, 114
‘Ode to Lord Barnard’ (Smart), 123 and eighteenth-century high lyric, 112,
‘Ode to Pity’ (Collins), 116, 119 113–14, 130
‘Ode to the West Wind’ (Shelley), 149–52, 241 ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (Shelley), 149–50
Odes by Mr. Gray (Gray), 113 ‘To the Immortal Memory’ (Jonson), 77–8
Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects Pindarique Odes (Cowley), 114
(Collins), 113, 115 Pinter, Harold, 218
Odes on Several Subjects (Akenside), 113 Plath, Sylvia, 197, 207, 212–14
Odes on Various Subjects (Warton), 113, 115 Plato, 113
‘Offers, The’ (T. Hughes), 212 ‘Pleasure Principle, The’ (Larkin), 196
O’Flahertie manuscript, 58, 60, 61–2 Plutarch, 94
O’Hara, Frank, 218 Poems (Carew), 75
Oldham, John, 92–3 Poems (Dyer), 139
For an Anniversary of Musick on St Cecilia’s Poems (Stanley), 82
Day, 92–3 Poems (Wordsworth), 141
Oliver, Douglas, 218 Poems and Ballads (Swinburne), 164, 181
Olson, Charles, 185 ‘Poet to His Beloved, A’ (Yeats), 198–9
‘On an Eagle confined to a College Court’ Poetics (Aristotle), 116, 237–8
(Smart), 123 Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Stewart), 1, 184–5
‘On that Unparraleld Prince Charles the first’ Political Unconscious, The (Jameson), 237
(Pulter), 79 Pope, Alexander, 112–13
‘On the Sudden Death of A Clergyman’ ‘Ode for Musick’, 104
(Smart), 122–3 popular song, 141–3
Ong, Walter, 57 ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ (Browning), 163
Oppen, George, 185–7, 188 Positive John; or, Nothing Can Cure Him: A New
‘Little Pin: Fragment, The’, 186–7 Lyric Ballad, 141
‘To the Poets: To Make Much of Life’, 186 Pound, Ezra, 140, 177–82, 188–9, 241
Ovid, 78 Cantos, 180, 181, 184–6
Owen, Wilfred, 200 ‘Vorticism’, 179
primitivism, 137
Palgrave, Francis Turner, 136, 138, 157, 164 Prins, Yopie, 183–4
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (Wroth), 34 print
Paradise Lost (Milton), 86 and deixis, 35, 41–4
Parker, Matthew, 53 and manuscript, 51–68
Parnassians, 165, 171 music in, 18, 22–6
‘Passions, The’ (Collins), 101–3, 116–17 use of italics, 66–7
pastoral, 33, 46–7 and Victorian lyric, 158–60, 170–1, 172
Pater, Walter, 140, 165, 241 ‘Progress of Poesy, The’ (Gray), 111 n52, 113
254 ­Inde
pronouns, 34–5 Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (FitzGerald), 159–60
see also ‘I’ Rückenfigur (Howe), 187–8
prosopopoeia, 114–21 Rudick, Michael, 56
Protectoral literature, 83
Prynne, J. H., 225–9 ‘Sad Steps’ (Larkin), 200–1, 203
Day Light Songs, 225 Sappho, 95–6
Her Weasels Wild Returning, 226–9 ‘Sappho to Phaon’ (Forster), 87
Kazoo Dreamboats, 229 Schlegel, Friedrich, 2
Wound Response, 225–6 Scholemaster (Ascham), 32
Psalms, 10 scientific research, 100
of David, 11, 13–14, 123 Scots Musical Museum (Johnson), 147
and Shelley, 151 Scots Songs (Ramsay), 147
and ‘Upon the Hurricane’ (Finch), 106 Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century
Pulter, Hester, 76–7, 79–80 England (Love), 55, 57
‘Complaint of Thames 1647, The’, 80 Second Book of Airs (Dowland), 17–18
‘On that Unparraleld Prince Charles the ‘Secular Ode’ (Smart), 123
first’, 79 Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs
Puttenham, George, 10–11, 32 (Thomson), 147
Arte of English Poesie, The, 52 self see introspective lyric
Pythagoras, 8­ 2 Seneca, Thyestes, 54, 63
sensibility, 100
‘Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’ Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl
(Lowell), 40 of, 100, 101, 103
Quiet Works, The (Haslam), 230 Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being
(T. Hughes), 196
Radin, Paul, 208 Shakespeare, William, 19–­20
Ramsay, Allan, 148 Henry V, 30
Scots Songs, 147 Sonnet 129, 30
Randolph, Thomas, 78 use of ‘here’ and ‘there’, 39
‘Rapture, A’ (Carew), 76 use of ‘that’, 49n29
reading–singing dichotomy, 21 ‘Where the bee sucks’, 19–20
Reason of Church Government (Milton), 32 Shamanism (Eliade), 207
‘Recluse, The’ (T. Hughes), 198 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 144
regicide poems, 79–80 ‘Ode to the West Wind’, 149–52, 241
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (Percy), 143 Shepheardes Calender (Spenser), 44
remediation, 44 Sidney, Mary, 11
‘Request, The’ (Cowley), 81 Sidney, Robert, 16
Restoration, 93 Sidney, Sir Philip, 2, 16, 56
Revolution (English), 71–88 Apology for Poetry, 34
Rhymers’ Club, 170 Are Beauties there as proud as here they be?, 39,
Rhythms of English Poetry, The (Attridge), 14 42, 44, 46
Riley, Denise, 218, 221, 224, 225 Astrophil and Stella, 56, 128, 200
Rilke, Rainer Maria, ‘Gong’, 183 Certain Sonnets, 16
‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The’ Defence of Poesie, 52
(Coleridge), 207 influence on Lovelace, 86
Ritson, Joseph, 145 on metre, 32
Robbins, Robin, 62 Psalms of David, 11
Roberts, Neil, 7 use of ‘here’ and ‘there’, 39, 42, 44
Robinson, Clement, 23 Simpson, Erik, 143
Robinson, Mary, 141 Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of
Rogers, William Elford, 2 Manuscripts (Woudhysen), 55
romance-six stanzas, 124, 127, 130–1 Smart, Christopher, 122–31, 241
Romanticism, 135–52 Horace translation, 123–4
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 162, 171–2 Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 123, 130
Rowlandson, Thomas, 142 Jubilate agno, 126, 128–9
Rowlinson, Matthew, 159 ‘Ode to Lord Barnard’, 123
 ­Inde 255
‘On an Eagle confined to a College Stevens, John, 12
Court’, 123 Stewart, Susan, 1, 184–5
‘On the Sudden Death of A Clergyman’, ‘Still-Piercing Air, The’ (Wilkinson), 231–2
122–3 ‘Sun Rising’ (Donne), 21
‘Secular Ode’, 123 Surrey, Henry Howard, earl of, 123
Song to David, A, 124–31 Sutherland, Keston, 218
‘To Admiral Sir George Pocock’, 123 ‘Sweet Echo’ (Milton), 74
‘To General Draper’, 123 Swinburne, A.C., 163–4, 180–3, 184, 243
Translation of the Psalms of David, 123 Eliot on, 182–3, 184
Smith, Bruce, 44 embedding of lyrics, 179
Smith, Nigel, 6, 53, 240, 242–3 influence on Howe, 187–8
‘Snail, The’ (Lovelace), 85–6 works: ‘Anactoria’, 184; Atalanta in Calydon,
‘Snake in the Oak, The’ (T. Hughes) (essay), 207 181, 182; ‘Century of Roundels, A’, 171;
solipsism, 163 Dolores, 181; Erechtheus, 182, 183; ‘Leper,
and Decadent poetry, 164, 166, 167, 172 The’, 163–4; Poems and Ballads, 164, 181
and twentieth-century poetry, 195–6 Symonds, John Addington, 156, 159
solitude ‘Comparison of Elizabethan with Victorian
Cowley on, 81 Poetry, A’, 156–8
‘Fears in Solitude’ (Coleridge), 139 Michelangelo’s sonnets, 172
‘Frost at Midnight’ (Coleridge), 204–6 on printed poetry, 158–9, 160
‘Song’ (T. Hughes), 198, 199–200 ‘song’, 209
‘Song for St Cecilia’s Day, A’ (Dryden), 114 Symons, Arthur, 165–6, 243
Song to David, A (Smart), 124–31 ‘Hands’, 166–7
songs, 12, 52, 144 ‘Le chat’, 166
Hughes’, 209
national, 145–9 tail-rhyme stanzas see romance-six ­stanzas
and Victorian Lyric, 159 Tate, Nahum, 61
Songs and Sonnets (Donne), 34, 62 Temple (Herbert), 56, 66
sonnets Tennyson, Alfred, first Baron Tennyson, 156
Coleridge on, 1­ 38 embedding of lyrics, 179
Daniel on, 52–3 In Memoriam, 168
defined, 34 terza rima, 150–1
sixteenth-century: and deixis, 30–47; Sonnet Thain, Marion, 6–7, 34, 209, 243, 244
31 (Sidney), 39, 42, 44, 46; Sonnet 34 theatrical songs, 142, 143
(Daniel), 36; Sonnet 129 (Shakespeare), 30 Thelwall, John, 140
‘Sonnet xiii: To Mr. H. Lawes’ (Milton), 83 then and there, 36
soundscapes, 44–5 then/now, 30, 36–8
spatiality, 35–8, 41, 45 there/here, 30
Collins and, 103 Third Booke (Campion), 24
see also here/there ‘This Be the Verse’ (Larkin), 206
Spenser, Edmund, 121 ‘This living hand’ (Keats), 36–7
Amoretti, 42 this/that, 30, 34–5, 49 n29
‘Epithalamion’, 42, 43, 45 Thompson, Judith, 140
Faerie Queene, The, 47, 117 Thomson, George, Select Collection of Original
Shepheardes Calender, 44 Scottish Airs, 147
Spicer, Jack, 224 Thomson, James, 95
Spingarn, J. E., 72 ‘Thought-Fox, The’ (T. Hughes), 207, 213
Sprat, Thomas, 80–1 ‘Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties’ (Mill), 158
‘Spring, The’ (Carew), 75 Three Genres and the Intrepretation of Lyric, The
Stanley, Thomas, 81–2 (Rogers), 2
‘Love Innocence’, 81–2 ‘Three of My Chasms’ (Haslam), 231
stanzas, 13, 26 Thyestes (Seneca), 54, 63
romance-six, 124 Timotheus, 94
Stark, Robert, 178 Dryden’s, 97–9
‘Stepping Stones, The’ (Wordsworth), 39–40 ‘To A. L. Perswasions to love’ (Carew), 75
‘Sternhold’s’ metre, 14 ‘To Admiral Sir George Pocock’ (Smart), 123
256 ­Inde
‘To Althea, from Prison: Song’ (Lovelace), 85 Walton, Izaak, 20, 21
‘To General Draper’ (Smart), 123 Wanderings of Oisin, The (Yeats), 198
‘To His Coy Mistress’ (Marvell), 60 Warton, Joseph, 121
‘To the Immortal Memory’ (Jonson), 77–8 Odes on Various Subjects, 113, 115
‘To the Poets: To Make Much of Life’ Watson, James, Choice Collection of Comic
(Oppen), 186 and Serious Scots Poems Both Ancient and
‘To the Virgins, to make much of Time’ Modern, 146–7
(Herrick), 79 Watson, Thomas, 15
Tottel, Richard, 51 Hecatompathia; or, Passionate Centurie of
Translation of the Psalms of David (Smart), 123 Love, 42
Trapp, Joseph, 136 Webb, Daniel, 95
Trickster, The (Radin), 208 Wellek, René, 3
‘Triple Fool, The’ (Donne), 22, 25, 63–5 Wharton, Thomas, letter from Gray, 119
Trotter, David, 34–5 ‘What Is the Language Using us For?’
Tucker, Herbert, 156, 164, 167 (Graham), 221
‘turn’, 33 ‘Where the bee sucks’ (Shakespeare),
Two Bookes of Ayres (Campion), 18, 22, 23 19–20
Tynianov, Yuri, 149 ‘Whitsun Weddings, The’ (Larkin), 206
Tzara, Tristan, 222–3 Wilde, Oscar, 170
Wilkinson, John, 177, 223, 231–2
‘Ultimatum’ (Larkin), 198 ‘Iphigenia’, 231
‘Upon Julia’s Clothes’ (Herrick), 78 ‘Line of Betrayal, The’, 232
‘Upon the Feast of St Simon and St Jude’ ‘Still-Piercing Air, The’, 231–2
(Johnson), 124 Williams, William Carlos, 203
‘Upon the Hurricane’ (Finch), 104–6 Williamson, Karina, 129
USA see American poetry Willis, Thomas, 100
Wither, George, 85
‘Valediction: of the booke, A’ (Donne), 63 words for pre-existing music see contrafacta
‘Valediction of Weeping, A’ (Donne), 171 Wordsworth, William, 135, 137, 143, 241
Valéry, Paul, 2­ 20 Lyrical Ballads, 141
variations in print and manuscripts, 55–61 Poems, 141
Vaughan, Henry, 79 ‘Stepping Stones, The’, 39–40
‘Cock Crowing’, 87 Workes of Beniamin Ionson (Jonson), 52
Vendler, Helen, 39, 177, 178 Woudhuysen, Henry, 55
‘Vers de Société’ (Larkin), 204–5 Wound Response (Prynne), 225–6
‘verse essays’, 232–3 Wroth, Mary, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus,
Victorian period, 156–73, 243 34
Victorian Sappho (Prins), 183–4 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 12–13
‘Visit, The’ (T. Hughes), 212–13 variants in texts, 54–5, 242
voice
oratorical, 139–41 Yeats, William Butler, 170–1, 180
speaking, 138–9 influence on Larkin, 198–­200
‘Vorticism’ (Pound), 179 ‘Poet to His Beloved, A’, 198–9
Vossius, G. J., 73 Wanderings of Oisin, The, 198
Yonge, Nicholas, 15–16, 21
Wagner-Martin, Linda, 212 Musica transalpina, 22–3
Waller, Edmund, 71 Young, Edward, 136–7
‘Go lovely rose’, 74–5
Walsh, Marcus, 6, 137, 241, 243 Zepheria (anon.), 42