Routledge Anthology of Poets on Poets: Poetic Responses to English Poetry from Chaucer to Yeats

288 Pages·1994·0.9 MB·English

by  David Hopkins

THE ROUTLEDGE ANTHOLOGY OF
POETS ON POETS

THE ROUTLEDGE ANTHOLOGY
OF POETS ON POETS
Poetic responses to English poetry from
Chaucer to Yeats
Selected, arranged, edited,
annotated, and introduced
by
DAVID HOPKINS
London and New York
First published in hardback as English Poetry by Routledge 1990
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
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Paperback edition first published 1994 by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1990, 1994 David Hopkins
All right reserved. No part of the this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 0-203-36011-7 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-37267-0 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-11847-6 (Print Edition)
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii Sir John Denham (1615–69) 158
Preface ix Abraham Cowley (1618–67) 158
Introduction 1 Richard Lovelace (1618–57) 164
Poets of the later 17th
PART ONE: ON POETRY and early 18th centuries 165
English poets’ reflections on the art of John Dryden (1631–1700) 168
poetry 19 Thomas Shadwell (?1642–92) 175
John Wilmot, Earl of
PART TWO: ON POETS Rochester (1647–80) 176
English poets’ responses to their peers, John Oldham (1653–83) 177
from Chaucer to Yeats 69 Anne Finch, Countess of
Winchilsea (1661–1720) 178
Poets of the 14th and Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) 178
15th centuries 71 Thomas Parnell (1679–1718) 179
Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343–1400 72 Edward Young (1683–1765) 179
The ballads 83 Alexander Pope (1688–1744) 181
The early Tudor poets 84 John Dyer (1699–1757) 190
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–42) 84 James Thomson (1700–48) 190
Henry Howard, Earl of Poets of the mid-18th century 193
Surrey (?1517–47) 85 Samuel Johnson (1709–84) 193
Edmund Spenser (c.1552–99) 86 William Shenstone (1714–63) 194
Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) 93 Thomas Gray (1716–71) 194
Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86) Mark Akenside (1721–70) 197
and Mary Herbert, Countess William Collins (1721–59) 197
of Pembroke (1561–1621) 95 Christopher Smart (1722–71) 198
George Chapman (?1559–1634) 96 Thomas Warton (1728–90) 199
Edward Fairfax (d. 1635) 98 William Cowper (1731–1800) 199
Christopher Marlowe (1564–93) 98 Charles Churchill (1732–64) 202
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) 100 Thomas Chatterton (1752–70) 203
The ‘metaphysical’ poets 116 George Crabbe (1754–1832) 204
John Donne (1572–1631) 118 William Blake (1757–1827) 207
Ben Jonson (1572–1637) 124 The Regency and ‘Lake’ poets 209
George Sandys (1578–1644) 133 William Wordsworth (1770–1850) 211
George Herbert (1593–1633) 135 Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) 227
Edmund Waller (1606–87) 136 Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Sir Richard Fanshawe (1608–66) 138 (1772–1832) 228
John Milton (1608–74) 139 Robert Southey (1774–1843) 230
Richard Crashaw (?1612–49) 156 James Henry Leigh Hunt
Samuel Butler (1612–80) 157 (1784–1859) 231
vi CONTENTS
The post-Wordsworth generation 232 George Meredith (1828–1909) 258
George Gordon, Lord Byron William Morris (1834–96) 259
(1788–1824) 233 Algernon Charles Swinburne
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) 238 (1837–1909) 260
John Clare (1793–1864) 244 Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) 261
John Keats (1795–1821) 247 Robert Bridges (1844–1930) 262
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92) 252 Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) 262
Robert Browning (1812–89) 254 William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) 263
Emily Brontë (1818–48) 257 Indexes 267
Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–61) 258
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks are due to the following for permission to reproduce material in
this book: Baylor University for Browning’s epigram on Swinburne from
Robert Secor, ‘Swinburne at his lyre; a new epigram by Browning’, Studies
in Browning and His Circle, (1974) 2, 2, pp. 58–60; Collins Publishers for
Edmund Blunden’s The Death Mask of John Clare’ from Poems of Many
Years (1957); the executors and estate of C.Day Lewis and The Hogarth
Press and Jonathan Cape for C.Day Lewis’s ‘Birthday Poem for Thomas
Hardy’ from Complete Poems (1954); Faber & Faber Ltd for W.H.Auden’s
‘New Year Letter’ from Collected Poems and ‘In Memory of W.B.Yeats’ from
The English Auden, for quotations from T.S.Eliot’s The Metaphysical Poets’
in Selected Essays and from Ted Hughes’s Poetry in the Making and his ‘Note’
in A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse; London Magazine for the interview between
Philip Larkin and John Haffenden from London Magazine (1980) n.s. 20;
Longman for Roger Lonsdale’s text of William Collins’s ‘Ode on the Popular
Superstitions of the Highlands’ from the Longman Annotated English Poets
series; Macmillan Publishing Company, New York for Thomas Hardy’s ‘A
Singer Asleep (Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1837–1909)’ and ‘George
Meredith (1828–1909)’—both from The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy,
edited by James Gibson (New York, Macmillan, 1978)—for W.B.Yeats’s The
Symbolism of Poetry’, ‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’, ‘The Tragic
Theatre’, ‘Edmund Spenser’, ‘William Blake and the Imagination’, and The
Happiest of Poets’—all from W.B.Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York,
Macmillan, 1961) and Autobiography (New York, Macmillan, 1970); Professor
Eric Robinson and Curtis Brown for John Clare’s ‘Shadows of Taste’ and
‘Lines on Cowper’ from John Clare (Oxford Authors) and his ‘To the Rural
Muse’ from The Later Poems of John Clare (Oxford English Texts) and ‘To the
Memory of Keats’ from The Early Poems of John Clare (Oxford English Texts);
Stanley Thornes (Publishers) Ltd for Ted Hughes’s Introduction to Here
Today.

PREFACE
This volume contains a collection of poetic responses by the English poets
to one another’s work. It does not attempt to represent the full range of
remarks which English poets have made about their fellow practitioners,
but, rather, concentrates on those moments when, in reflecting on their art
in general, on their own work, or on the work of one or more of their peers,
they have been prompted to exhibit some features of the very activity which
they are describing or commending. The majority of the items included
are full-dress poems, or extracts from larger poems, but I have included
poets’ prose comments in those instances where the writing seems, in whole
or in part, to be ‘aspiring to the condition of poetry’—where the writer is
deploying rhythmical and metaphorical effects, verbal colouring,
heightened diction, or impassioned rhetoric to a degree that one would
not normally expect to find in discursive prose. In the Introduction, I attempt
to suggest the particular interest of poets’ specifically poetic responses to
their art and to their fellow artists.
Any anthologist (particularly one faced with a body of material as large
as that potentially eligible for the present volume) must establish clear and
reasoned principles of selection if the end-product is to seem a coherent
book, rather than merely an arbitrarily assembled collection of snippets.
But an anthologist must also recognise that, however unified he can make
his collection, however much each of his extracts is freshly illuminated by
the new environment in which it finds itself, an anthology can never be
more than a provisional holding-together of a selective body of material,
each item of which is temporarily ‘on loan’ from a number of other contexts
in which it has slightly different kinds of significance.
Many items in this anthology are excerpted from larger works—the most
immediate and important of all the contexts in which they live. Beyond
that, they form parts of their authors’ total oeuvres. But they are also parts
of other larger wholes. The English poets’ responses to one another’s work
can be only very partially represented by collecting their explicit statements.
To gain a complete sense of what the English poets meant to one another,
one would have to take stock of the numerous and diverse ways in which
the work of one poet is present in others’ work: in translation, adaptation,
imitation, parody, allusion, echo—modes which often reveal poets’ reactions
to their peers more fully and intimately than their explicit comments.
English poets have, moreover, been sometimes more deeply inspired
and influenced by foreign poets than by their own compatriots. And the
work of some poets shows that they were deeply affected by peers on whom
they left either little or no direct commentary, or commentary which gives
a very misleading or imperfect sense of the nature of their interest. A