Early Stuart poetry and prose
In the early Stuart period the failure of consensus was dramatically demonstrated in the political collapse of the 1640s and in the growing sociocultural divergences of the immediately preceding years. While it was still possible for the theaters to address the nation very much as a single audience, the courtâwith the Baroque style, derived from the Continent, that it encouraged in painting, masque, and panegyricâwas becoming more remote from the country at large and was regarded with increasing distrust. In fact, a growing separation between polite and vulgar literature was to dispel many of the characteristic strengths of Elizabethan writing. Simultaneously, long-term intellectual changes were beginning to impinge on the status of poetry and prose. Sidneyâs defense of poetry, which maintained that poetry depicted what was ideally rather than actually true, was rendered redundant by the loss of agreement over transcendent absolutes; the scientist, the Puritan with his inner light, and the skeptic differed equally over the criteria by which truth was to be established. From the circle of Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, at Great Tew in Oxfordshireâwhich included poets such as Edmund Waller, Thomas Carew, and Sidney GodolphinâWilliam Chillingworth argued that it was unreasonable for any individual to force his opinions onto any other, while Thomas Hobbes reached the opposite conclusion (in his Leviathan, 1651) that all must be as the state pleases. In this context, the old idea of poetry as a persuader to virtue fell obsolete, and the century as a whole witnessed a massive transfer of energy into new literary forms, particularly into the rationally balanced couplet, the autobiography, and the embryonic novel. At the same time, these influences were neither uniform nor consistent; Hobbes might repudiate the use of metaphor as senseless and ambiguous, yet his own prose was frequently enlivened by half-submerged metaphors.
The Metaphysical poets
Writers responded to these conditions in different ways, and in poetry three main traditions may broadly be distinguished, which have been coupled with the names of Spenser, Jonson, and John Donne. Donne heads the tradition that 18th-century critic Samuel Johnson labeled for all time as the Metaphysicals; what unites these poets as a group is less the violent yoking of unlike ideas to which Johnson objected than that they were all poets of personal and individual feeling, responding to their timeâs pressures privately or introspectively. This privateness, of course, was not new, but the period in general experienced a huge upsurge of contemplative or devotional verse.
Donne
Donne has been taken to be the apex of the 16th-century tradition of plain poetry, and certainly the love lyrics of his that parade their cynicism, indifference, and libertinism pointedly invert and parody the conventions of Petrarchan lyric, though he courts admiration for his poetic virtuosity no less than the Petrarchans. A âgreat haunter of playsâ in his youth, he is always dramatic; his verse cultivates âstrong lines,â dissonance, and colloquiality. Carew praised him for avoiding poetic myths and excluding from his verse the âtrain of gods and goddessesâ; what fills it instead is a dazzling battery of language and argument drawn from science, law and trade, court and city. Donne is the first London poet: his early satires and elegies are packed with the busy metropolitan milieu, and his songs and sonnets, which include his best writing, with their kaleidoscope of contradictory attitudes, ironies, and contingencies, explore the alienation and ennui of urban living. Donne treats experience as relative, a matter of individual point of view; the personality is multiple, quizzical, and inconsistent, eluding definition. His love poetry is that of the frustrated careerist. By inverting normal perspectives and making the mistress the center of his beingâhe boasts that she is âall states, and all princes, I, nothing else isââhe belittles the public world, defiantly asserting the superior validity of his private experience, and frequently he erodes the traditional dichotomy of body and soul, outrageously praising the mistress in language reserved for platonic or religious contexts. The defiance is complicated, however, by a recurrent conviction of personal unworthiness that culminates in the Anniversaries (1611â12), two long commemorative poems written on the death of a patronâs daughter. These expand into the classic statement of Jacobean melancholy, an intense meditation on the vanity of the world and the collapse of traditional certainties. Donne would, reluctantly, find respectability in a church career, but even his religious poems are torn between the same tense self-assertion and self-abasement that mark his secular poetry.
Donneâs influence
Donneâs influence was vast; the taste for wit and conceits reemerged in dozens of minor lyricists, among them courtiers such as Aurelian Townshend and William Habington, academics such as William Cartwright, and religious poets such as Francis Quarles and Henry King. The only true Metaphysical, in the sense of a poet with genuinely philosophical pretensions, was Edward Herbert (Lord Herbert of Cherbury), important as an early proponent of religion formulated by the light of reason. Donneâs most enduring followers were the three major religious poets George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and Henry Vaughan. Herbert, a Cambridge academic who buried his courtly ambitions in the quiet life of a country parsonage, wrote some of the most resonant and attractive religious verse in the language. Though not devoid of tension, his poems substitute for Donneâs tortured selfhood a humane, meditative assurance. They evoke a practical piety and a richly domestic world, but they dignify it with a musicality and a feeling for the beauty of holiness that bespeak Herbertâs identification with the nascent Anglican church of Archbishop William Laud. By contrast, the poems of Crashaw (a Roman Catholic) and the Welsh recluse Vaughan move in alternative traditions: the former toward the sensuous ecstasies and effusions of the Continental Baroque, the latter toward hermetic naturalism and mystical raptures.
However, in the context of the Civil Wars, Vaughanâs and Crashawâs introspection began to look like retreat, and, when the satires of John Cleveland and the lyrics of Abraham Cowley took the Donne manner to extremes of paradox and vehemence, it was symptomatic of a loss of control in the face of political and social traumas. The one poet for whom metaphysical wit became a strategy for holding together conflicting allegiances was Donneâs outstanding heir, Andrew Marvell. Marvellâs writing is taut, extraordinarily dense and precise, uniquely combining a cavalier lyric grace with Puritanical economy of statement. His finest work seems to have been done at the time of greatest strain, in about 1650â53, and under the patronage of Sir Thomas Fairfax, parliamentarian general but opponent of King Charles Iâs execution, to whose retirement from politics to his country estate Marvell accorded qualified praise in âUpon Appleton House.â His lyrics are poems of the divided mind, sensitive to all the major conflicts of their societyâbody against soul, action against retirement, experience against innocence, Oliver Cromwell against the kingâbut Marvell sustains the conflict of irreconcilables through paradox and wit rather than attempting to decide or transcend it. In this situation, irresolution has become a strength; in a poem like âAn Horatian Ode upon Cromwellâs Return from Ireland,â which weighs the claims of King Charles and Cromwell, the poetâs reserve was the only effective way of confronting the unprecedented demise of traditional structures of politics and morality.