John Garrett

Other Victorians: Browning, Hopkins and Hardy

While Tennyson felt duty-bound to celebrate Britain’s providential destiny and affirm his faith that the expansion of Empire and the performance of God’s will were one and the same thing, his fellow poets, free of the burden of the laureateship, did not labour under the necessity of resolving all the contradictions of Victoria’s buccaneering empire.

Romanticism: Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron and Shelley

Towards the end of the 18th century a growing disgust among writers with the rationalistic bias of their predecessors can be discerned. The wit that was once so fresh and vigorous in the writings of Pope and Swift had become dull and predictable. The edge had gone off it. For inspiration writers began to turn towards more mysterious or numinous aspects of experience and towards the world of their dreams, territories which had been out of bounds to the Augustans. The Gothic novelists gave a further impulse to the writer to follow the impromptu, ‘irrational’ leading of his imagination and to body forth in words the images of his deepest fantasy, however grotesque and horrible these might be.

The Later 17th Century: Andrew Marvell

There was great social upheaval in Britain in Marvell’s lifetime. He grew up amid mounting tension between the rapidly rising bourgeoisie class, made rich from the trade and investments that had been increasing apace since the middle of the previous century, and the old-established landed-aristocrat class, defenders of the king’s divine right to absolute rule and of their own privileged position as feudal landlords. The former, who became known as ‘Roundheads’ from the shape of the helmets they wore when civil war finally broke out in 1642, tried to assert themselves through the one channel that was open to them - parliament. Their attempt to use their access - through their elected members in the House of Commons - to parliament as a means of curbing the powers of the king and the aristocracy led to their being dubbed with the additional epithet of ‘Parliamentarians’. The king’s party were known as ‘Cavaliers’ or ‘Royalists’.

War and its Aftermath: W. H. Auden

The splendour of Britain’s imperial progress in the 19th century and the success, by and large, of her armed forces blinded most of her poets to the technological revolution that had been going on in the weapons and methods of warfare and rendered them unfit to make the kind of black and ominous prognostications of impending Armageddon that had been issuing from the pens of their Continental (particularly German) confreres since the 1890s. The Prusso– Austrian War of 1866, with its demonstration of the ruthless efficiency of the new needle-gun, had made European poets outside the British Isles much more susceptible to the tremors of a world war. While Continental poets were prophesying this dire event, British poets, with few exceptions, went on trilling notes of pastoral roundelay until the outbreak of hostilities in 1914.

The Early 17th Century: Donne and Herbert

The sonnets of Sidney and Shakespeare have suggested some of the ways in which the English sonneteers modified the form that they inherited – Sidney by introducing a tone of acidic complaint against women and Shakespeare by doing away with the octave/sestet division and replacing it by a structure of three quatrains and a couplet, thereby concentrating the conclusion of the sonnet into an effectively terse and pithy epigram. Donne confers an even more distinctive ‘English’ voice upon the Italian form.

A Tilt towards Romanticism: Thomas Gray

The dominant spirit of the 18th century was a controlled and rational scepticism. Poets did not expect great or noble deeds from their fellows nor even from themselves. Fears about man’s inherent incapacity for self-improvement and doubts about his ability to alter his environment for the better led to a laisse?-faire attitude towards politics. Man, in Pope’s words, was a ‘chaos of thought and passion, all confused’ and any alteration in the structure of his government must, given mankind’s centrifugal tendency towards anarchy, be an innovation for the worse. Hence the conservatism for which the 18th century is renowned. As such attitudes became more entrenched the longer the century advanced, it was not surprising that they invited reactions. The most notable of these was the French Revolution of 1789, which wiped out the French monarchy and aristocracy and challenged all the previously held assumptions about the sacred and inviolable structure of society. This event had repercussions throughout Europe, causing many a monarch to tremble on his throne; and it was probably the French Revolution that encouraged the nascent Romantic movement in Britain to burst forth into full flower at the end of the century.

The Early 18th Century: Pope and Swift

The 17th century had witnessed a long and exhausting struggle for supremacy. The fluctuations between royalist fervour and republican yearnings and between Catholic ‘legitimacy’ and Puritan iconoclasm, to all of which much of Dryden’s verse bears witness, finally levelled off, in the last decade of the century, into a general feeling of religious and political tolerance. The 18th century, the era of the ‘Great Peace’, has its roots in the Restoration and really begins with the accession of William and Mary to the throne in 1688.

The Last Romantic: W. B. Yeats

Prufrock’s self-denigration disguises an innate slothfulness, an unwillingness to accept that great ends are commensurate with the immense expenditure of energy and self needed to attain them, a collapse in the belief that had hitherto held sway in previous, more unwaveringly Christian centuries: the belief that through commitment, effort, discipline and self-sacrifice man could transcend the infirmities of his nature and win through to a worthy goal. This belief underlay in particular the endeavours of the Romantic poets, who held that through a concentrated output of imaginative energy the individual could break through to a higher self, a clearer reality and ‘leave the world unseen’ far behind or beneath him. Such faith was common to most 19th-century poets, writing in the shadow of the Romantic mountain range that had miraculously pierced the clouds in the early years of the century. But Prufrock remains nonplussed at the prospect offered by such creative endeavour, merely muttering, ‘And would it have been worth it, after all?’

The Dawn of the Augustan Age: John Dryden

Marvell’s poem shows a concern for the orderly presentation of an argument, albeit a falsely-reasoned one. This concern for order and ratiocination was, perhaps, symptomatic of a yearning for the restoration of peace and health to the body politic of Britain, which had been stretched and exhausted by the outbreaks and internal conflicts of the Civil War period. With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 the nation hoped that the era of self-destructive squabbling was at an end. A desire for stability had been generated by the upheavals of almost twenty years of republican government.

Poetry in the Nuclear Age: Ted Hughes

In recent years it has become increasingly difficult for a young writer to pledge himelf, as Auden had done in his undergraduate days, to a career as a poet. The days when poetry was accorded high significance among the social mores – the times when the young Keats could make the romantic gesture of abandoning a profitable career in medicine to plunge himself into the serious but uncertain business of sculpting poems – are long since gone. The years when new instalments of verse-narrative were awaited avidly by a public for whom there was no alternative mode of amusement– when a fledgeling poet like Lord Byron could ‘awake one morning and find himself famous’ – seem unlikely to return. The aspiring poet nowadays knows that his slim volumes of verses might attract a trickle of sales and a notice in the Sunday newspapers at most.