History of English Literature from "Beowulf" to SwinburneLang, Andrew
History
History of English Literature from "Beowulf" to Swinburne
Lang, Andrew
English literature -- History and criticism
It is difficult, or even impossible, to mark out the Caroline from
the Jacobean poets, who, again, overlap with the Elizabethan poets.
The chief schools of the Caroline poets were (1) the writers occupied
mainly with holy things, such as Crashaw, Herbert, and Vaughan.
Next (2) come the crowd of "gentlemen who wrote with ease," now and
then triumphantly well, but often loosely and carelessly, such are
Lovelace, Carew, Suckling, and minor names. Herrick stands by himself
as a consummate lyrist, but his mood is often, though he was a parish
priest, that of the gay cavalier. Marvell had many facets, and Milton,
of course, is apart, a world of poetry in himself.
Crashaw.
Richard Crashaw, the son of a controversial Protestant preacher, was
born in London, early in the second ten years of the seventeenth
century. He went to the Charterhouse School and to Peterhouse in
Cambridge, where he took his Master's degree in 1638. His earlier
verses were Latin exercises. He was expelled from his Fellowship at
Cambridge because he would, not take the Solemn League and Covenant,
in 1644: that odd document was forced on men under "the new liberty".
He had written a hymn to St. Theresa while still a Protestant; when
he retired to France he became a Catholic. In 1646 the poet Cowley,
his friend, found him in great poverty, and induced the almost equally
poor exiled Queen of England to use her influence in his favour. He
obtained a canonry at Loretto, where he died in 1649. His poems, sacred
and secular, "Steps to the Temple," were published in 1646; another
edition, with an interesting preface concerning his saintly life at
Cambridge, is of 1648-1649.
Pope, at the age of 22, criticized Crashaw with much superiority; "he
writ like a gentleman" (that is, like an amateur), not "to establish
a reputation". What Pope did in his anxiety to establish a reputation
was not done "like a gentleman". "Nothing regular or just can be
expected from him," "no man can be a poet who writes for diversion only".
Crashaw's pious outpourings were scarcely "writ for diversion," but
things "just and regular" are not his chief care. A fiery vehemence, an
overloaded ornament are his quality and his defect. For example in "The
Weeper" (St. Mary Magdalen) he writes:--
Not in the Evening's eyes
When they red with weeping are
For the Sun that dies,
Sits Sorrow with a face so fair,
Nowhere but here did ever meet
Sweetness so sad, sadness so sweet.
Here he has his style in hand. But when he calls the Magdalen's tears
Ye simpering sons of those fair eyes
he has certainly found the most inappropriate epithet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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