A Self-divided Poet: Form and Texture in the Verse of Thomas Hood

253 Pages·2006·1.005 MB·English

by  Rodney Stenning Edgecombe

A Self-divided Poet

A Self-divided Poet
Form and Texture in the Verse of Thomas Hood

By

Rodney Stenning Edgecombe

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PRESS
A Self-divided Poet: Form and Texture in the Verse Of Thomas Hood, by Rodney Stenning Edgecombe

This book first published 2006 by

Cambridge Scholars Press

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2006 by Rodney Stenning Edgecombe

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN 1-84718-070-1
In memory of my beloved mother, Lilian Ruth Edgecombe
25th July 1911 – 2nd September 2006

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Prologue: The Divided Self of Thomas Hood.................................................viii

Chapter One.........................................................................................................1
Hood and the Mock-Heroic Ode: The Odes and Addresses to Great People

Chapter Two......................................................................................................33
Hood and the Capriccio: Whims and Oddities. First and Second Series

Chapter Three....................................................................................................67
Hood's Session Poem: "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies"

Chapter Four....................................................................................................117
Hood's Epyllion Redivivum: "Hero and Leander"

Chapter Five.....................................................................................................146
Hood and the Juvenalian Mode: "Miss Kilmansegg and Her Precious Leg"

Notes................................................................................................................190

Bibliography....................................................................................................211

Index................................................................................................................227
PROLOGUE: THE DIVIDED SELF OF THOMAS
HOOD

In a penetrating article on Thomas Hood, Sara Lodge has argued that it's:
only possible to reconcile the synchronicities of Hood's Keatsian odes and his
comic send-ups (his transmogrification, for example of Gray's 'Ode on a Distant
Prospect of Eton College' into the wonderful 'Ode on a Distant Prospect of
Clapham Academy') if we allow that imitation and parody are points on the
same continuum, and realize that Hood's work in the 1820s and 30s is
continuously involved in a process of self-definition which establishes not only
debts to Romantic and pre-Romantic writing, but also substantive critical
difference.1
This effort to find an overarching coherence in Hood's output has much to
commend it. But while there is no doubt that parody and imitation do in fact
occupy points of the same continuum—both forms keep their eyes on a
secondary model, the first in an act of homage, the second with a motive of
subversion—an essential difference of outlook pushes them apart even as they
line up for correlation. And there lies the fission that bedevils any effort to
integrate Hood's different personae.
D. H. Lawrence observed that we all have several selves clamouring
for primacy—"You are you? How many selves have you? And which of these
selves do you want to be"2—so I shan't even try to unite the oppositional
elements of the poet's writing. Instead, I shall face the split head-on—the split
between the serious and comic aspects of his sensibility, the weighty and the
slight, or (to align Lodge's terms with this antithetic pattern) the imitator and the
parodist. To do this, I have lined up samples of Hood's different modes for close
analysis, examining them on their own terms. Since I haven't spurned the
"serious" poems as failed Keats, nor the weightier comic ones as trivia too smart
for their own good, I have, to that extent at least, been inspired by Lodge's
approach, for she is unique in placing relatively equal value on both poles of
Hood's personality, and in pointing out how the one services the other. Other
commentators have, by contrast, taken sides with the sides, and the majority
have favoured the comic at the expense of pathetic.
There are exceptions, however. An anonymous critic in the Times
Literary Supplement observes that:
A Self-Divided Poet: Form and Texture in the Verse of Thomas Hood ix
Hood's name cannot be left out of the catalogue of humorous poets, and he takes
a leading place there; yet the regret remains that his inclusion should have been
purchased so dearly. It is fortunate for us that while playing the Merry Andrew
for a living, Hood could still be himself: a poet of distinct individuality and
delicacy of inspiration. "Hero and Leander," "Lycus the Centaur," "The Plea of
the Midsummer Fairies"—these were early works, and in some degree inheritors
of the poetical spirit of Keats, Coleridge and the Elizabethans; but they have
Hood's own stamp and, read today, surprise afresh that poetry so pure and simple
could possibly spring in the mind of one so busy with oddities and
whimsicalities.3
The very title of the article from which this extract comes—"Hood: The Poet
Behind the Jester's Mask"—acknowledges a division of selfhood, and even hints
at tragedy by half-alluding to the jester in The Yeomen of the Guard ("It's a song
of a merryman, moping mum, / Whose soul was sad, and whose glance was
glum"4) and the clown in Pagliacci—"Left alone, Canio faces the fact that
despite his private tragedy he has still to be the clown and amuse his public: 'On
with the motley' (Vesti la giubba)."5 However, as we shall see when we turn to
the poems from the 1827 collection, Hood's debt to Keats is not nearly as
extensive as commentators have claimed, while the "serious" pieces often rely
on verbal mannerisms akin to the surface glitter of the comic material. The
dichotomy subsists less between Hood's "Merry Andrewism" and "the poetical
spirit" than between his light and serious verse, and it's over this crux that
evaluations of his achievement tend to wobble.
In 1825, even before "The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies" had left the
press, B. W. Procter thought that Hood had frittered his talent on the Odes and
Addresses: "What a pity it is that Hood should have given up serious poetry for
the sake of cracking the shells of jokes which have not always a kernel!"6 The
idea of his having given up serious poetry was purely notional, however, for he
had so far done nothing in that line. Procter was either relying on hearsay in this
regard, or his regret might simply have sprung from his own conventional —
which is to say, Romantic—idea of the poet's vocation, whether it be the
"Aeolian visitations"7 that Wordsworth records near the start of The Prelude, or
Keats's earnest resolution in "Sleep and Poetry"—

O Poesy! for thee I hold my pen
That am not yet a glorious denizen
Of thy wide heaven—Should I rather kneel
Upon some mountain-top until I feel
A glowing splendour round about me hung,
And echo back the voice of thine own tongue?8

—or the even more oracular moment in the proem to Shelley's "Alastor":