Course Syllabus, Fall 1997

Class Description
Schedule of Readings
Reserve List
Possible Seminar Paper Topics

Donne, Jonson and the Metaphysicals
Renaissance Issues
Herbert
Crashaw
Vaughan
Marvell
Carew
Herrick

Seventeenth Century Resources
Voice of the Shuttle Renaissance and Seventeenth Century page
Early 17th-Century English Literature (1603-1660)
Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies
Early Modern Literature Studies Electronic Texts
Electronic Renaissance Timeline
English Devotional Literature (17th religious poet bibliographies)
Early 17th century prose style
Interactive Early Modern Literary Studies
Social Sites of Renaissance Lyrics: graduate-student project from a seminar attempting "to recover the connections between historical places and lyrics [and] to show the poems' attachments to material places and their social environs"; includes transcriptions and annotations of Renaissance lyrics related to historical place [from 16th- and 17th-c. editions], place descriptions based on historical research, fictive dialogues concerning the place, and related graphics and recordings) (Instructor: Jeffrey Powers-Beck, East Tennessee State U.)
Tudors and Stuarts page
Online Literary Resources: Renaissance
Medieval/ Renaissance Wedding Information
Vatican: Renaissance Art
 

John Donne Page
Another John Donne Page
Richard Lovelace Page
Renaissance Women: Courtly Power and Influence (lecture series)
Thomas Carew page
Selected Poems of Crashaw
George Herbert Page
Robert Herrick Page
Ben Jonson Page
Andrew Marvell page
John Suckling Page
Thomas Traherne Page
Henry Vaughan Page

Authors we will read

John Donne: love poems, divine poems, & sermons
Ben Jonson
George Herbert
Traherne
Vaughan
Crashaw
Marvell
Cavalier poets
Women poets
American poets

Possible research topics:
Coteries
Patronage
Jacobean and Caroline Politics
Religion
Baroque Art, Architecture, or Music
Gender, literary misogyny, and sexuality
education
cosmology and science

Readings for Week 1
Friedrich, Carl. "Baroque in Life and Letters."
(We will read the following poems first, doing as many as we can each session)
"The Sun Rising" (62)
"The Canonization" (62)
"The Ecstasy"
"The Flea" (65)
"Valediction: of Weeping" (65)
"The Apparition" (67)
"The Funeral" (68)
"The Blossom" (69)
"Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" (67)
"Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day" (66)
All Elegies (70-72)

A critical approach to a single author, e.g.:
- a feminist reading of Donne, Herbert, or Vaughan, or one of the metaphysicals.
- a new historical reading of any author, such as Herrick, Jonson, or Traherne
- a look at the issues of patronage, hetero- and homoerotic imagery in one poet
- an exploration of paradox in one writer's work
- a reading of one writer's work in terms of contemporary politics (their contemporary, not ours)
- an examination of meditation techniques in one metaphysical poet
- issues of social class in one poet
- An investigation of science images (e.g. cosmology, navigation, medical) in one poet
- An investigation of the political use of masque
- An investigation of one aspect of philosophy or religion in one poet

A comparison of two interesting figures, e.g.
- two metaphysical poets with different backgrounds, such as Herbert and Traherne
- two metaphysical poets with different attitudes toward the body (e.g. Donne and Crashaw)
- a comparison of an English metaphysical poet with an American (e.g. Taylor or Bradstreet, or Michael Wigglesworth)
- a comparison of a male poet with a female (see Kissing the Rod--examples are Aphra Behn and Rachel Speght)
- A comparison of a 17th century religious poet with a 20th century poet, such as T.S. Eliot, Anne Sexton, or Timothy Liu (a Chinese gay mormon poet, just for an extreme)
- A comparison of one poet and one visual or musical artist (presupposes you have some grounding in art history or musical appreciation)
 

Some More Interesting Books (feminist and political); see also attached bibliography
Taylor, Edward W., 1931-
Donne's Idea of a woman : structure and meaning in Anniversaries / Edward W. Taylor. (Feminist theory)

Klawitter, George, 1942-The enigmatic narrator : the voicing of same-sex love in the poetry of John Donne / 1994. (Patronage/ queer theory)

Barbara Everett:  Poets in their time : essays on English poetry from Donne to
Larkin.1986.  (Historical)

Stimpson, Catharine R. (foreword). Rewriting the Renaissance: Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.

Goldberg, JonathanJames I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their 1983.

Goldberg, Jonathan "The Politics of Renaissance Literature: A Review Essay." ELH (ELH), Baltimore, MD. Article in: vol. 49 no. 2, 1982 Summer. 514-542
 

Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714. Edinburgh: T. Nelson, 1962.
 DA375.H5 (extra copy in library)

Beer, Patricia. An introduction to the Metaphysical Poets. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972.
 PR431.B4

Women and the English Renaissance. By Woodbridge, Linda.
 PR429.W64 W66 1984

Greer, Germaine, et al., eds. Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of 17th Century Women's Verse. NY: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux 1988.
 TBA.

Rivers, Isabel.  Classical and Christian ideas in English Renaissance poetry : a student's guide.  London ; New York : Routledge, 1994.
 PR535.R4 R58 1994

Protestant poetics and the seventeenth-century religious lyric / Barbara Kiefer Lewalski.  Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1979.
 PR545.R4 L48

John Donne, coterie poet / Arthur F. Marotti. Madison, Wis. : University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.
 PR2248.M28 1986

Summers, Joseph H. George Herbert, his religion and art. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1954.
 PR3508 .S8 1954a

The heirs of Donne and Jonson [by] Joseph H. Summers. New York, Oxford University Press, 1970.
 PR544 .S9

Henry Vaughan : the unfolding vision / Jonathan F.S. Post. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1982.
 PR3744 .P67 1982

Warren, Austin. Richard Crashaw: a study in baroque sensibility. Ann Arbor [Mich.] University of Michigan Press [1957, c1939].
 PR3386.Z5 W1

Religion and the decline of magic / Keith Thomas. New York : Scribner, c1971.
 BR377 .T48 1971b

Harris, Victor. All coherence gone; a study of the seventeenth controversy over disorder and decay in the universe. London, Cass, 1966.
 BT875 .H32 1966

Patronage in the Renaissance / edited by Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1981.
 CB361 .P27 1981

The godly man in Stuart England : Anglicans, Puritans, and the two Tables, 1620-1670 / J. Sears McGee. New Haven : Yale University Press, 1976.
 BX5075 .M3

Main influences:
John Donne, Ben Jonson

Departure:
- Both rebeled against "pictorial fluidity, decorative rhetorical patterns, and half-medieval idealism"
- Highly experimental forms as opposed to conventional (sonnet) forms

Contrasts:
 
 

-  Metaphysical Conceit: Relate "symbolic philosophy" where world symbolizes underlying truths. Herbert uses emblems from emblem books. Man as Microcosm very important to Donne. "Sensuous beauty in the face of things was to be apprehended and then turned to sudden symbolic meaning which obliterated its sensuality"
- conceit typically plays off commonplaces: Donne's method is to take the terms of a convention as actual, and then use his wits. Love's Martyrdom--takes amorous martyrdom in light of actual religious martyrdom of 1590's; Kenner calls this "secondhand bits of machinery employed by a decadent poeticizing"; in particular, left over from Italian sonnet tradition (WS as typical user of conventional imagery)
- Donne used classical realism but no allusions. Irony and cynicism.
- ornament lies in elaborating the figure more formally than in prose discourse, typically individual measuring place in cosmos, and measuring their reality by his experience.
- use of classical witty paradox transforms typical Christian paradox.
- paradox "epigrammatically brief" and thus obscure
- expressive but not beautiful or smooth words/rhythms--often harsh
- reversed feet, harsh alliteration, arbitrary elisions, enjambment
- Marvell and Herbert combines "masculine" or intellectual qualities of Jonson (smooth, succinct language) with Donne (metaphysical insights)
- Metaphysicals are "baroque": finite spaces give way to deeply recessed perspectives.
- variety of subject matter and even personae: two are written in the voice of a woman, one of them arguing wittily for absolute female promiscuity ("Good is not good, unless/ A thousand it possess") and forms of address: advice, satire, celebration, imagines future canonization of self as saint of new Love religion, laments death of loved one, he images his own burial, he makes his will"; explores both scholastic and Neoplatonic metaphysics, yet no sense of the appropriate. Tenderness and justice are rare.

Style of Jonson and Cavalier poets

- celebration of England using personifications, myths, and legends
- Jonson turned from medieval and romantic to adapt CLASSICAL FORMS: he chose forms which would serve to define and celebrate social ideals, praise of blame good or bad people, to criticize and describe.
- forms were epigram, conversation or epistle, ode (moral statement)
- terse, severe, and tender lines
- normal if formal speech
- myth is used for natural or moral allegory, never for ornament
- whole poem turns on it. Prose language more concentrated.
- Jonson thinks personal love poems are embarrassing and amateurish. Devotional poems are bores

Rise of the city-state in Italy
Solidification of aristocratic system; system of patronage

1. Courtly ideal of the middle class artist
2. Elizabeth as central of court patronage system
3. Platonic love metaphor for courtier/patron relationship.

Forms:
Verse
Sonnet. Calendar. Lyric. Verse drama (closet drama). Epithalamium.
Pastoral, epic.
Prose
Political tracts and literary criticism (Sidney).
Drama
Pastoral, urban, tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, history.
  

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(sent poems to friend Nicholas Ferrar "to be either published or burnt" (died not knowing which--lifelong conflict of pride in fame vs. self-abnegation; so last act is a compelling expression of incompatibility; poems are always both a record of a true struggle and a testament to pride. Gave up the decision)

"Donne's most original disciple"--Kenner
- distinguished Welsh family; mother a friend of Donne's
- married Jane Danvers 1629, took order in church 1630
- known as "holy Mr. Herbert"--3 year stint, died of consumption
- The Temple published posthumously.
- works w. religious imagery and xian typology
- Donne=poet of religious doubt, strain, anxiety; Herbert=poet of religious faith, of submission, of acceptance (outdated?)
- poet of "inner weather"--Aldous Huxley
- Herbert works out conflicts in poems

Doug Bush

- claims of God and the great world (had a distinguished court career first, "too great" a pride in great wealthy welsh family; liked clothes, court-like company; very loyal, even obsequious,  to the king (Walton's biography)
- poems about struggle "to make the will of a proud and passionate Herbert bend gladly"
- impression of being overheard rather than read (seems unaware of audience)
- last illness magnified sense of unfitness and futility; sense of God's distance
- skilled musician
- gives us a picture of order, strength, and beauty of best of 17th c. Anglicanism
- quiet endings "So I did sit and eat"
- friend of Donne and Bacon, but no imagery of science. "Highest truth must be plainly dressed"
- also avoided Jonsonian "surface classicism" (esp. of pastoral)

• tried to be a courtier; as Latin Orator wrote ornamental poems to individuals: King James, Bishop Andrews, Prince Henry, Prince Charles, Queen Anne, Bacon, yet English poems do not mention surviving person
• English poetry addressed, sometimes indirectly but usually directly to God
• The Temple had big impact on Laudians, Puritans, royalists and parliamentarians --first book for which each poem had a title selected by author. Also it is structured as a kind of narrative--unique. "Rash of volumes" after 1633 containing only devotional poems (as opposed to mixed--Donne)--as influential as 1590's Astrophil and Stella sequence
• 3 sections: The Church-porch, The Church, and the Church militant, "long and rather strange 'prophetic' poem about the westward movt. of both the Church and Sin. We should read great lyrics of central section--The Church--in terms of churchporch--long didactic poem 462 lines.
• Opening stanza conceives of a reader "who is a worldly young man of the contemporary ruling class. He assumes his intelligence, his pleasure in verse and wit, and his more-or-less-enlightened self-interest."--so incentive will be in worldly terms.
• Thou, whose sweet youth and early hopes enhance/  Thy rate and price, and mark thee for a treasure;/   hearken unto a Verser, who may chance/   Rhyme thee to go, and make a bait of pleasure.
• begins with Lust, "least important of deadly sins"--will proceed through other flesh sins--to sloth and avarice, which affect society, to spiritual sins, anger, envy, and pride.
• Emphasizes both Aristotelian and Xian virtues which oppose sins; ends with love of neighbors and love of God. This is an ascent, after which youth arrives at Church.
• Stupidity of evil" "It is most just to throw that [third drink] on the ground, / Which would throw me there, if I keep the round." Self defense. "If God's image move thee not, let thine."
• Strives to be engaging and entertaining: Gentry like sheep are "gone to grass, and in the pasture lost."
• Jonsonian: identifies good morals with good manners: "COURTESY is the desire to
• make things easy for others and to please them--and surely that is congruent with charity: "Conversation and argument should be polite, not angry or hoggish.
•   Conversation monopolist=glutton
• You should sacrifice all for a friend, but not if you are married: "married man...has no right to sacrifice primary obligations to sentimental allegiances not to be generous with what does not belong to him
• "sharpness of judgment, examination of popular assumptions, deflation of high-flown sentiments"
• Eclectic: widsom="take all that is given" (love, wealth, language)--you can use it
• POETRY AS PUBLIC PRAYER; Jonsonian--"public has more promises, more love"
• Plainness: When once thy foot enters the church, BE BARE..../Kneeling ne'er spoiled silk stockings: quit thy state."
• Church-porch is pre-xian: Church is xian. first is a "ceremonial cleansing" --no profane or evil readers allowed. "Avoid, Profaneness, come not hear:? Nothing but holy, pure, and clear,/ Or that which groaneth to be so,/ May at his peril further go"--Milton's fit though few; Jonson?
• The church: subject is love of God, not activities of Man--The Altar "built of the poet's broken heart" is emblem of volume.
• First person: reader to identify or overhear voice.
• a PICTURE OF SPIRITUAL CONFLICTS--pictorial
• Forms: hymns, complaints, cries, laments, examinations, quarrels, rejoicings, promises.
• Winding of "The Star" ("Winding is their fashion/ Of Adoration") extends to echo poem "Heaven", hidden acrostic "Our life is hid with Christ in God", poems based on puns on initials, syllables, words, a "pruning" poem--Paradise, "A Wreath" (Marvells' coronet), a circular poem ("Sin's Round"), different kinds of "broken forms ("Denial" and "Grief")
• inner transformation of external form, dissolution of form in Church monuments, pattern poems.
• Except for sonnets, Herbert rarely repeated a form--29 different stanzaic patterns
• "herbert devoted his 'utmost art' to the making of his poems--yet problem in Jordan about writing for the self. Predicament about personal fame. Donne's regrets.
• In some ways best combines Donne and Jonson (personal AND rhetorical) but doesn't really reflect either in style. Donne in conceits, relation to God; Jonson in public sense of religion.  Judgement.
• Great monosyllabic lines: "I struck the board and cried, 'No more" etc.

- doctrine of mystic correspondence (analogical relations between the world of creatures and the world of spirits; Welsh country doctor
- felt a strong tie or kinship w. creatures of nature
- published 2 books, Silex Scintellans or the Fiery Flint (1650)
- Olor Iscanus or The Swan of Usk 1651--titles refer to Welsh ancestry
- Herbert big influence; echoes of The Temple
- Vaughan's twin brother, an alchemical philospher, also big influence
- imagery of light (God, Election, Heaven, life, happiness) and darkness (Devil, damnation, death, misery); Sandbank essay "HV's apology for Darkness"
 
Robert Ellrod:

- Vaughan only meets himself in solitude, not in dialogue w. a Mistress or Master. His self-awareness is a self-expression in reverie and sympathy
- like Crashaw, he goes out of himself; unlike Crashaw, he returns
- similes, intensify emotions rather than defining or clarifying
- self-examination (Browne) conducted through allegory, not aimed at self-discovery but a kind of contemplation?
- like Xian mystics, yearns to recapture something lost
- pervasive water-symbolism suggests longing for purity

- 1650 Silex Scintillans "disowned his secular muse" (lots or tragedies, public war, and death of brother, contributed to a "conversion")
- inheritor of Herbert: combines "Herbertian religious poet [of conflict] and the timeless...Neoplatonist" (mysticism)
- strength and centrality of his intuitions of the invisible

• Provincial--Welsh culture; early poems of first 2 books 1646 are labored and pretentious, Olor Iscanus 1647--Swan of Usk
• Silex Scintillans (2 parts 1650, 1655) are big departure. Religious poetry, not courtly--137 poems within 7 yr. period. Then no more for 27 years. 1678 more bad secular poems, a few others.
• Vaughan has a story about a Welsh shepherd's bardic seizure: Awen is welsh for Raptus or poetic fervor. Sleep  "in which he dreamt, that he saw a beautiful young man with a garland of green leafs upon his head, and a hawk upon his fist-...[hawk got into his mouth and inward parts, and he woke up scared] but possessed with such a vein, or gift of poetry, that he left his sheep and went about the country...the most famous bard in all the country"
• Title of Silex Scintillans (Flashing, or Sparking, Flint) from Jesuit John Nieremberg: Certain Divine Rays break out of the Soul in adversity, like sparks of fire out of the afflicted flint"--AFFLICTION MAKES FLINT SPARK--death of wife, brother, illness of himself--Also adds that G. Herbert's "holy life and verse" diverted the foul stream.
• No other poet so influenced by Herbert--certainly not Crashaw
• poems less ordered, more shapeless than herbert; also writes like D. Thomas--a lot of description of nature (pastoral?) none in Donne, Herbert, or Jonson
• couldn't display "systems" of thought (Herbert's book)--lack of court polish="oddly unrhymed lines, lines so twisted to achieve their rhymes, such imperfect rhymes, awkward shifts" nor such flights as in "The World"--says first stanza is the best. Miltonic.
• themes of innocence and nautre, light (darkness) and greeness, heavenly and human and even vegetative glory (in Welsh same word for White, fair, and blessed)
• "The Retreat"=WW's Immortality Ode
• Likes to use "shoots" like Thomas--light=vegetative glory
• Loosely associative structure unlike logical Donne structure or near articulated Herbert Jonson structures. "Often framed by a meditation--or a vision--and a prayer, the central section represents various movements of a mind"--we have to intuitively leap.
• "They are all gone into the world of Light"--3 stanzas that describe vision; 1 apostrophe to hope and humility; 1 apostrophe to Death; 1 exemplum of birds nest and negative argument; analogy of star in tomb and application; concludes w. 2 stanza prayer. Yeats' Among School Children--rambling meditation.

- two realities: Love and Strife. For him, unlike Donne and Herbert, Love prevails.
- turns from classical to Jesuit epigram tradition--New Testament religious themes
- "Over-ripeness is all"--Douglas Bush
- mystical tradition of erotic imagery

- communal Christian symbols
- mellifluously musical, lavishly imagistic
- ascetic life, devoting senses to the service of God
- Magdalene "changed her object, not her passion"--Augustine
- uninhibited and uncensored
- little or no classical imagery (like Herbert)--deliberate surrendering of erudition

- paradoxes (Incarnation--father becomes son of Mary who is her father)
- no "homely" fireside images (unlike Herbert)
- financial metaphors
- breakfast (but of angels, not men)
- conventional flora (lily, rose, balsam) and fauna (bee, eagle, dove, lamb, phoenix)
- Colors: red or purple=pasion, fire
  black=sin, mortality, mourning
  white=purity, synthesis of all colors (glory)
  No green (nature) or blue (truth, Virgin)
- Senses -- less sight than sound, especially taste and feeling
 - "sweet" and "delicious" mingle fragrance and taste--symbolic of heightened,
transcended divine senses; liquids can be drunk (milk, blood, water (tears), and wine;
 -touch, similarly (sexual passion, pain, heat, chill--supremities of touch are "experienced in the mystical wound of love in martyrdom and nuptial union)

". . . his aesthetic method may be interpreted as a genuine equivalent of his belief, as its translation into a rhetoric of metamorphosis. If, in the Gospels, water changes to win and wine to blood, Crashaw was but imaginatively extending this principle when her turned tears into pearls, pearls into lilies, lilies in pure Innocents.  Style must incarnate spirit." Crashaw engages senses to "intimate a world that transcends them"--Austin Warren
 
- sensory is transcended, not rejected.
- Poetry frequently unites opposites: fire and water, milk and blood=untion of passion and purity, pain and pleasure
- Frequent phantasmagorical blending of disparate images

- 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)

  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".

"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)

- 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"

First collection published 1681 (by "widow" housekeeper)
- poems are "playful miniatures"--graceful, humours surface
- witty, casual tone--light metrical feel?--exact diction, rhymes ring
- Marvell was assistant to Jon Milton, Latin Secretary to the Commonwealth 1657
- few poems published in his lifetime; known for his satires
- died of overdose of opiates--malpractice
- irony, not the paralyzing kind, is essential to his poems (Summers)
- wrote "An Horation Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland"
- was "vouchsafed the wit, the poise, and the generosity of imagination to inventory and summarize, memorably, in amber language, each of its modes."

Doug Bush

- finest flower of secular and serious metaphysical poetry
- blends "classical and metaphysical, continental and English, epicurean and Puritan, civilized and simple" mingle without fusion (except in his style)
- hard and dry (not damp--romantic)
- nature's cruelty
- aware he is " a man in the world of men"
- uses conceits but "remote from Donne is theme and feeling and music"
- "Definition of Love": "poem is made up of philosophic and verbal paradoxes, or realistic, cosmic, and geometrical images. On the other hand, its thoroughly metaphysical thought and feeling are welded with a classical clarity, rightness, and inevitability of evolution"
- "To His Coy Mistress" (paragraph 1) hyperbole becomes rational--emotion interpenetrated with levity" (p. 2) change of tone: serious theme of time and death developed with"soaring directness" (p. 3) "wit takes over to weave its antitheses of macabre irony"

- exact contemporary of Vaughan
- "On a Drop of Dew" : structure: soul like dew rises up; resolves on comparison of soul with "heaven-sent" dew (or manna): resolution depends on accepting first analogy. "Applies the dew drop to the Xian soul as, in geometry, one triangle can be 'applied' to another and found by a process of reasoning to be exactly congruent with it"
- Soul as Artist of Body: "Dialog between the Soul and Body": uneasy partner, body has last word and "the fullest statement of that predicament of the body. the soul's capacity to hope, to fear, to love, to hate, to know, to remember, are the causes of sin....What the soul does is to transform man's nature and Marvell suggests a parallel with the artificer who transforms nature into art, for instance the gardener's topiary art"
- Appleton House: Fairfax refused to fight Scotland; a general. Garden a topiary arranged in the shape of "forts with 5 bastions" Marvell's poem discusses this in stanza 41 to 45. Garden opposed to war: Marvell's politics important but uncertain.
- emphasizes Marvell less austere than Donne--courtliness (T.C. in a prospect of Flowers) and use of color, esp. green and gold

• Close to centers of power--observed them clearly
• Always able to imitate Donne; quoted his whole life, but never, except in verse satires, does he approach JD's harshness of sound; Jonsonian elegance of tone
• Eclectic: use of many influences. Coronet owes a lot to GH's "A Wreath." "On a Drop of Dew" very close to Vaughan's "A waterfall"
• Wrote early versions of best English poems in Latin
• a poetic "magpie"
• Range of forms: meditations, complaints, persuasions, praises, satires, description of landscapes, definition, epitaph, heroic ode, dialogues or debates, a framed monologue, songs with or without frames (Bermudas), and "Upon Appleton House" which is disguised as Penshurst-like complimentary poem--framed by guided tour) but includes all major themes--even touches of masque and heroic.(?)
• Ethical assoc. w. love, religion, or politics, or a weird combination of two of those.
• Popular poems mark a transition from one to another.
• Romantics (Lamb, Emerson, Poe) loved Marvell first
• in Donne tradition of amateur coterie poet: though self-conscious and experimental aestheticism, didn't seem to intend to publish his poems--last of this kind (Even Dickinson submitted a couple)
• 1660 is a break: before those he wrote the "good" poems; afterwards, the public poems
• (Eliot calls this a "dissociation of sensibility"--Summers Defends these poems
• Jonsonian strain cultivated by those who might become suspicious of "roughness, strength, passionate and  individual" qualities--esp. after 20 years of political chaos. Jonson = discipline; "measured and balanced tone appropriate to rational and compromising public judgments"
• Marvell rejects the impassioned speaker and irregular meter. Generally "metaphysical" poets were either Anglo or Roman Catholic; Marvell hostile to both. Generally they were partisans of Charles; Marvell served Cromwell, though we know he did well also in Restoration.
• We suspect late poems because rhetorical, and therefore without "ironic embracement of contradictory impulses"--but he saw himself after 1659 as primarily a public person.  Ironic admissions would be weakness, not honesty.
• Public poems most interesting if we read them as destroying popular assumptions in order to plant his own.
• Integrity: never praised Charles I nor denigrated him. Never slandered Cromwell after the restoration. Ode to Cromwell was just and balanced.
• Good prefatory poem on PL as bird in flight:
•  and above humane flight dost soar aloft,/  With plume so strong, so equal, and so soft./  The bird named from that Paradise you sing/  So never flags, but always keeps on wing.
•  Same bird as in The Garden? Soul in flight.--Miltonic image.
• Defends Milton's blank verse to Drydenian detractors (Dryden his bete noir):
•  -Well mightst thou scorn thy readers to allure/  With tinkling rhyme..../  I too transported by  the mode offend,/  And while I meant to praise thee, must commend [can't imitate blank]/  Thy verse created like thy theme sublime/  In Number, Weight, and Measure, needs not rhyme.
• Recognizes that Milton's blank verse and high style, divorced from greatness, could be windy or bombastic.
• Subjected private taste to rational examination, "moves towards a balanced and witty poetry of public judgement."

- "The happiest of English poets"
- Son of prosperous London goldsmith
- Ben Jonson was hero; in "His Prayer to BJ" he calls him "Saint Ben"
- Jonson taught Herrick "the art of the polished trifle, the light touch, and the quiet mood"
- slowly found a career, took orders in church, reluctantly moved to Devonshire
- many exotic imaginary mistresses; housekeeper named Prudence
- drinking, socializing, city loving ("His Farewell to Sack" & "Welcome to Sack" again)
- direct easy lines, rather than "ingenuities and "strong lines"
- central theme of happy reconciliation of nature and nature's god, as in Corrinna
- carpe diem poems
- book title, Hesperides, 1648, "connects the poems' strange bright world of girls and flowers with the land of golden apples at the western end of the world" [Kenner}

Doug Bush
- most classical, least metaphysical; "bricklayer [BJ] has given place to the goldsmith's apprentice, the master of filigree"
- content to mirror timeless epicurean Arcadia
- a "daughter" of Ben! "too sensuously and smoothly Elizabethan for an age of 'strong lines'"
- ideal attitude of the cavalier
- Corinna: "variations on the brevity of youth and love express more sentiment than passion"
- volume of 1648 offered "open challenge to the spirit of civil war"
- Argument of his Book: "I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,/ Of April, May, of June, and July flowers"
- Secular religion, yet argument "sings...Of heaven, and hope to have it AFTER ALL"

Summers on Herrick

• Neither Donne nor Jonson gentlemen, though Donne affected upper-class "anti-gentleman" who didn't want social rules to get in way of sex, and Jonson interested in Literary aristocracy "above" courtly life
• Donne's libertine ideas of love attractive to courtiers, but "speaker of them too passionate as well as too learned--he cared too much." no sprezzatura; new style was "gentleman in moral as well as stylistic deshabille....beyond commitment and surprise and even ridicule, unless he gently and confidently directed the latter at himself."
• Jonson's "linguistic and metrical polish" attractive in style, but Jonson too learned, "overly moral and serious, as well as laughably ambitious"--Suckling's Session of poets
• Herrick wanted to be a courtier but failed
• constructed his "proper speech" on St. Ben and on Latin models (Catullus, Ovid, Horace, etc.), Seneca, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Anatomy of Melancholy
• Son of Ben, but only used his epigrams and lyrics--no masques, etc.
• Herrick wrote 4 poems on BJ's death--mastered lessons but more playful
• comparison of two (bricklayer and goldsmith, big social forms vs. miniaturist, masculine vs feminine sensibility)
• CF. BJ's "Still to be Neat" with Herrick's "Delight in Disorder"--BJ's "elegant, courteous, and devastating masculine judgment on feminine over-neatness"; Herrick's does not judge but is "bewitched into wanton distraction by disorderly (not to say messy) feminine attire"
• Wrote 2500 epigrams and lyrics--like bonbons
• "The Bad season makes the poet sad" --good poem about the Civil War
• Best when writes of EVANESCENCE: "concerned both with the SURFACES of natural and human beauty and with the linguistic surfaces of his poems....A man who so loves the surface beauties of this world almost inevitably comes to feel the poignant brevity of such beauty and of this life"
• "To daffodils"
•   - Faire Daffodils, we weep to see/   You haste away so soon:/   As yet the early-rising Sun/    Has not attain'd his Noon./     Stay, stay,/    Until the hasting day/     has run/    But to the Even-song;/   And, having prayed together, we/    Will go with you along.//   We have short time to stay, as you,/   We have as short a Spring;/   As quick a growth to meet Decay,/    As you, or any thing./     We die,/    As your hours do, and dry/    away,    Like to the Summer's rain;/   Or as the pearls of Morning's dew/    Ne'er to be found again.
• Poet who "accepts evanescence" is also trying to defeat or redeem it
• Carpe Diem poems have this sense. CORINNA: all Herrick's themes together: Goddess Aurora and English "sweet Slug a bed"; All Religions--Apollo is present; flowers "bow toward the east"; Birds sing English matens and thankful hymns; Hebrew and Roman booth constructed of English whitethorne; Priest of betrothal ceremony.
• Conventional restrictive religious attitudes reversed or subordinated: "Tis sin, / Nay,
• profanation to keep in"
• Like Watteau: " Art...is no less valuable because its usual world is remote, idealized, and fragile"