Thomas Carew
(1595-1640)
Izaak Walton called
him "a poet of note and a great libertine in life and talke"
- Clarendon called him "a person of pleasant and facetious
wit"
- disciple of Jonson
- did not collect or edit his poems (as Jonson, Lovelace did)
- intelligence, poise, and strength--"taugtly imagined celebrations
of pleasurable transience"
- first to combine toughness of metaphysical verse w. polish
and elegant lightness of Jonson; Marvell will do this after
him
- no high spiritual seriousness--Puritans despised this kind
of wit
- clever, amusing, very, very, very obscene
- probably ablest of CAVALIER poets
Douglas Bush:
- narrow range, courtly reserve [unlike
Herrick's excess] and metaphysical strain
- 2/3 of poems deal with love: essentially a "classical
amorist"
- most extravagant conceits; restrained poems are best (Jonsonian
discipline)
Joseph Summers on Carew
1. friend John Hales refused him the sacrament when
he died of syphilis at age 45.
2. like many "cavalier" poets took no active art in
civil war.
3. In Suckling's "session of poets" Carew has no sprezzatura:
Tom Carew was next, but he
had a fault
That would not well stand with a Laureate;
His Muse was hard bound, and th'issue of's brain
Was seldom brought forth but with trouble and pain.
All that were present there did agree
A Laureate Muse should be easy and free..."
Also wrote a dialog between himself (suckling) and Tom Carew--who
"find the placed inspired" but Suckling is "not born,
sir, to the bay".
4. Did care about poetry
5. Elegy on Donne uses Donnian language (his flame "shot
such heat and light,/ As burnt our earth, and made our darkness
bright,/ Committed holy Rapes upon our Will" and enjambs like
Donne, run-on couplets, rough "masculinity"
a. Praises Donne for exiling gods and goddesses,
but doesn't banish from his own work.
6. Carew's reply to Jonson's Ode to Himself ("just indignation"
about audience)
7. Clearer understand of BJ and JD than anyone, but
also departs--imagery
8. Says Carew had no "major fire"--refused elegy on
Death of King of Sweden in 1632 because while Germans may
"bellow for freedom and revenge, the noise/ Concerns nor us,
nor should divert our joys"--because we have peace in England
and Halcyon days--right before English Civil war!--Summers
says tempted fate.
9. Considers switching to religious verse, to "strive
to gain from thence one thorn,/ than all the flourishing wreaths
by laureates worn"
10. wrote most elaborate masque in history: Spaccio
de la Bestia Trionfante: Charles I's courtiers become
new constellations--height of courtly masque. Comus the following
year--a transformed genre.
Contains "neo-Spenserian rejection of Hedone, or Pleasure"
contains admission that the poet knows nothing else:
"Tho thy self art Pain,/ Greedy,
intense Desire, and the keen edge/ Of thy fierce appetite,
oft strangles thee,/ And cuts thy slender thread; but still
the terror/ And apprehension of thy hasty end,/ Mingles
with gall thy most refined sweets;/ yet thy Circean charms
transform the world."
Poems:
"An Elegy upon the Death of Dean
of Pauls's: Dr. John Donne"
- earliest critical vocabulary--masculine; strong lines
: "Thou has redeemed...drawn a line/ Of masculine expression"
- "to the awe of thy imperious wit/ Our stubborn language
bends, made only fit/ With her tough thick-ribbed hoops
to gird about/ Thy giant fancy, which had proved too stout/
For their soft melting phrases"
- No surface classicism: Now Donne's dead, "they will repeal
the goodly exiled train/ Of gods and goddesses...now with
these/ The silenc'd tales o'th' Metamorphoses/ Shall stuff
their lines and swell the windy page"
- Donne is 2 priests:
Here lies a king, that ruled
as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit;
Here lie two flamens [priests], and both those
the best:
Apollos' first [the poet], at last the true god's
priest.
- Donne would be Carew's link to
libertine tradition (Rapture)
"To Ben Jonson" (see BJ's "To Himself")
"A Rapture"
- All about sex; moral is that all
fabled chaste lovers will have sex in Elysium
"There my enfranchised hand on every side/ Shall o'er thy
naked polished ivory slide...but the rich mine to the enquiring
eye/ Exposed, shall ready still for mintage lie,/ And we
will coin young Cupids." (idea that matter is feminine,
form is masculine).
- "Then will I visit with a wandering kiss/ the vale of
lilies and the bower of bliss, / And where the beauteous
region both divide/ Into two milky ways, my lips shall slide/
Down those smooth alleys."
- "Yet my tall pine shall in the Cyprian strait/ Ride safe
at anchor and unlade her freight;/ My rudder with thy bold
hand like a tried/ And skill ful pilot thou shalt steer,
and guide/ My bark into love's channel"
|
