Elizabethan poetry

“ It is not that the spirit of Elizabethan lyric verse is always care-free, even when written by prodigals such as Peele and Greene and Marlowe. Its childlike grasping after sensuous pleasure is often shadowed by the sword, and by quick-coming thoughts of the brevity of mortal things. Yet it is always spontaneous, swift, alive. Its individual voices caught the tempo and cadence of the race and epoch, so that men as unlike personally as Spenser, Marlowe and Donne are each truly "Elizabethan." ”

“ The qualities which especially distinguish the Elizabethan lyrics are fluency, sweetness, melody, and an enthusiastic joy in life, all spontaneous, direct, and exquisite. Uniting the genuineness of the popular ballad with the finer sense of conscious artistic poetry, these poems possess a charm different, though in an only half definable way, from that of any other lyrics. In subjects they display the usual lyric variety. There are songs of delight in Nature ”

“ Indeed, the more we study those 50 or 60 years which embrace the so-called Elizabethan period, the more are we struck by the fact that, ever since, we have been simply making variations upon the themes, which the men of those times gave us. Modern science, [65] modern poetry, modern drama, sat like pages at the feet of the Great Queen. Among these the novel cut but an insignificant figure, although it was the novel which had perhaps the longest future before it. We need not wonder therefore that our first English novelist has been treated by many with neglect. ”

“ BY G. K. CHESTERTON There are signs of a certain stirring in English poetry, a minor Renaissance of which Francis Thompson may be regarded as the chief ensign and example. It is partly the Elizabethan spirit, that permanent English thing working its way again to the surface; but, of course, like every Renaissance, it is in many ways unlike its origin and model. It is as true in art as it is in religion, that when a man is born again, he is born different. And the latest Elizabethanism has differed not only from the actual Elizabethan work, but from other revivals of it. ”

“ SUMMARY. The literary period just studied covers the last three quarters of the seventeenth century. Its limits are very indefinite, merging into Elizabethan romance on the one side, and into eighteenth century formalism on the other. Historically, the period was one of bitter conflict between two main political and religious parties, the Royalists, or Cavaliers, and the Puritans. The literature of the age is extremely diverse in character, and is sadly lacking in the unity, the joyousness, the splendid enthusiasm of Elizabethan prose and poetry. ”

“ As the Elizabethans felt that real life meant activity in exploring a new and interesting world, both physical and mental, they demanded that their literature should present this life of action. Hence, all their greatest poets, with the exception of Spenser, were dramatists. Even Spenser's Faerie Queene, with its abstractions, is a poem of action, for the virtues fight with the vices.
ELIZABETHAN PROSE LITERATURE Variety in the Prose.—The imaginative spirit of the Elizabethans craved poetry, and all the greatest authors of this age, with the exception of Francis Bacon, were poets. ”

“ There are words, fragments, that run in our heads and make us wonder from which great poet they come, until we remember they are hers. They generally recall the Elizabethans, and the verse of the Elizabethans it was whose poetry most affected and most influenced her.
[Pg ix]
In one way these last poems have an especial distinction. They bear the marks of her struggle with bodily misery and marks of the victory she won. They are scarred, but they prove the final dominance of her mind. ”

“ In passing, moreover, from the group of miscellaneous poets to these two schools, if we lose not a little of the harmony and lyrical sweetness which characterise the best work of the Elizabethan singer proper, we gain greatly in bulk and dignity of work and in intrinsic value. ”

“ Even as the Elizabethan lived with all his might and was not troubled about many things, his art was intense and round, but restricted; and as the Victorian commonly views life by the light of a patent reading-lamp, and so, sitting apart, sees much to perplex, the novel gives a more complex treatment of life, with rarer success in harmony. ”

“ These circumstances sufficiently account for the richness and variety of Elizabethan literature. They also help to explain two points which must strike every student of that literature--its native freshness, and its marked unity of style. Elizabethan literature was fresh and native, because it was the utterance of a youthful race, aroused to vigorous self-consciousness under conditions which did not depress or exhaust its energies. The English opened frank eyes upon the discovery of the world and man, which had been effected by the Renaissance. ”

“ He was saturated through and through with learning and with piety; and they gurgled from him together in a great tide of mellifluous language. The ardors and fervors of Elizabethan days seem to have lapped over upon him in that welter of the Commonwealth wars. He has been called the Shakespeare of the pulpit; I should rather say the Spenser—there is such unchecked, and uncheckable, affluence of language and illustration; thought and speech struggling together [140] for precedence, and stretching on and on, in ever so sweet and harmonious jangle of silvery sounds.
A Royalist and a Puritan. ”

“ There can be little doubt that, consciously or no, the Elizabethans, with their quick eye for beauty of every kind, were swayed, as men in all ages have been swayed, by the finely chiselled forms of classical art. The besetting sin of their imagination was the tendency to run riot; and it may well be that, save for the restraining influence of ancient poetry, they would have sinned in this matter still more boldly than they did. ”

“ But the difficulty of unlocking the great Elizabethan poems with any such theory of Art, arises from the fact that it is not the theory of Art, which the great Elizabethan Poets adopted, and whether we approve of theirs or not, we must take it, such as it was, for our torch in this exploration. ”

“ For a long time the poetry of England had been prosy in the extreme, metaphysical, monotonous, remorseful, dark and somber, and the appearance of a poet light, graceful and sentimental, was an event calculated to arouse the nation into joyous enthusiasm. ”

“ The prose writers of this time are represented by Bishop Hall and Jeremy Taylor, among the clergy, and Selden and Camden among the laymen. The roughness of speech and manners of Elizabeth's time, followed, in the next reign, by a real coarseness and lowness of sentiment, grew rapidly worse under Charles, whose reign was especially prolific in poetry, the tone of which varied from grave to gay, from devotion to licentiousness, from severe solemnity to indecent levity; but no great poet appeared in the crowd. ”

“ If it be true, as we are told on high authority, that the greatest glory of England is her literature, and the greatest glory of English literature is its poetry, it is not less true that the greatest glory of English poetry lies rather in its dramatic than its epic or its lyric triumphs. ”

“ The closer personal acquaintance which we can form with the English of the age of Elizabeth, the more we are satisfied that Shakespeare’s great poetry is no more than the rhythmic echo of the life which it depicts. ”

“ Here are the openings of those reflections on the imagery of nature, in which subsequent poets have so much dealt. They show us to what occasional excellence, both in turn of thought and polish of language, the literature of Queen Elizabeth had arrived; and how little the artificial and incumbered prose of mere scholars of that time exhibits a just specimen of either the sentiment or phrase of the court or people! ”

“ We can ascribe, however, to the poets of Elizabeth's reign the greater merit of excelling in energy and truth of sentiment, in simplicity of diction, in that artless language of nature which irresistibly makes its way to the heart. To excite the emotions of sublimity, of terror, of pity, an appeal to the artificial graces of modern growth will not be found successful ”

“ This Is a delightful characteristic. It is a noble characteristic. It is because of this that we forget and forgive the disagreeable and the savage, and, for we sometimes meet them, the foolish characteristics of the Elizabethan. We forget and forgive all this and express our idealisation of the country of Queen Elizabeth by the phrase "In Merry England." ”

“ They are evidence furnished by a single art, as to a certain mode and coloring of human existence; but every corroboration of that evidence heightens our admiration for the artistic sincerity and insight of the poet. To draw an illustration from a more splendid epoch, let us remind ourselves that the literature of the "spacious times of great Elizabeth"—a period of strong national excitement, and one deeply representative of the very noblest and most permanent traits of English national character—was produced within startlingly few years and in a local territory extremely limited. ”

“ However we may explain the fact, it remains true that outside Shakespeare none of the Elizabethans has really reached the heart of the nation. There is not a single Elizabethan drama, always of course with the exception of Shakespeare’s, which belongs to English literature in the sense in which Samson Agonistes, Absalom and Achitophel, Gulliver’s Travels, The Rape of the Lock, Tom Jones, She Stoops to Conquer, The School for Scandal, belong to it. ”

“ And coming thence to the narrower but firmer ground of historical fact, one saw how shiningly he represented the Elizabethan Age, with its eager, inquisitive, and adventurous spirit; its craving to fulfil to the uttermost a gift of glorious and abundant life. ”

“ What a pity she did not realize that beauty of mind, kindness of heart, nobleness of character, and above all, the true Christian spirit, were much more to be desired than anything so frail and perishable as human beauty. Never, in any reign, has England known such pomp and splendor as in Elizabeth’s time. ”

“ The nephew of Milton, in the preface to his “Theatrum Poetarum,” where the critical touch of the great master so frequently betrays itself, pleads for our ancient poets, who are not the less poetical because their style is antiquated. Writing in the reign of Charles II., in 1675, he says: “From Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the language hath not been so unpolished as to render the poetry of that time ungrateful to such as at this day will take the pains to examine it well. ”

“ And who will maintain, that in force of imagination, in truth of vision, in grasp of the ideal side of things, in beautiful expression of elusive thoughts, in lyric rapture, the Elizabethans are equal to the Georgian and Victorian poets? ”

“ The Elizabethan era is justly regarded as the brightest in English history; not for the number of its great men, or the magnificence of its great enterprises, or the triumphs of its great discoveries and inventions, but because there were then born the great ideas which constitute the strength and beauty of our proud civilization, and because then the grandest questions which pertain to religion, government, literature, and social life were first agitated, with the freshness and earnestness of a revolutionary age. The men of that period were a constellation of original thinkers. ”

“ In the following pages I have continued an attempt, already begun, to lay before the modern reader a wide view, not too much hampered by encyclopædic detail, of how the Elizabethans lived and what they thought about things in general, hoping that this knowledge will help to set the scenes of Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights before the modern audience in a more consistent and rational simplicity.
It may be true that human nature changes but little in its fundamental characteristics from generation to generation, from century to century ”

“ The Elizabethan Men of Letters are men who found in those new and dazzling stores of art and literature which the movements of their age brought in all their freshly restored perfection to them, only the summons to their own slumbering intellectual activities,—fed with fires that old Eastern and Southern civilizations never knew, nurtured in the depths of a nature whose depths the northern antiquity had made; they were men who found in the learning of the South and the East—in the art and speculation that had satisfied the classic antiquity—only the definition of their own nobler want. ”

“ Ninety-nine persons out of a hundred would answer that the poetry of the last century was correct, but cold and mechanical, and that the poetry of our time, though wild and irregular, presented far more vivid images, and excited the passions far more strongly than that of Parnell, of Addison, or of Pope. In the same manner we constantly hear it said, that the poets of the age of Elizabeth had far more genius, but far less correctness, than those of the age of Anne. It seems to be taken for granted, that there is some incompatibility, some antithesis between correctness and creative power. ”

“ The genius of the poet will tell him what word to use (else what use in his being poet at all?) ; and even then, unless the proportion and form, whether of parts or whole, be all that Art requires and the most sensitive taste finds satisfaction in, he will have failed to make what shall vibrate through all its parts with a silvery unison,—in other words, a poem.
We think the component parts of English were in the latter years of Elizabeth thus exquisitely proportioned one to the other. ”