English Literature of the Early Seventeenth Century: Introductory Lecture

NAVIGATION:

English Literature of the Early Seventeenth Century: Introductory Lecture

As the introduction in the Norton Anthology says, the divide between the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (marked by the death of Elizabeth in 1603) is rather artificial in the literary realm. The real cultural (and literary) change came with the English Civil War (1642-49) and Commonwealth (1649-1660); that's why we call it the Early Seventeenth Century, as the period after 1660, the Restoration, is dramatically different.

A quick look at the cultural revolution mentioned above: The Book of Sports.

Two key figures of the Early Seventeenth Century, Donne and Jonson, were both born in 1572, and so were only 8 years younger than Shakespeare.

<< Ben Jonson

John Donne? >>

Cavalier (Jonson) v. Metaphysical (Donne) Poetry: A Collection of Clichés

Cavalier poetry is easy and natural; it uses ideas and figures of speech that are easily understood and have immediate appeal.

Metaphysical poetry is difficult and challenging; it uses ideas and figures of speech that are far-fetched and have to be puzzled out.

Examples of the above: Donne's most famous poem is "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" (p. 1385)

Jonson's is "Song: To Celia" (p. 1548)

More about the historical importance of Jonson:
His kind of comic drama, satirical and local,

The above is an excerpt from Jonson's The Alchemist. The characters are Jeremy (Captain Face), Dapper, Subtle, and Doll Common.

won out over Shakespeare's, and dominated the Restoration and 18th Century. His kind of poetry, easy and natural, was widely praised in the Restoration and 18th Century, though emulated only by Dryden.

More about the historical importance of Donne:
1)—He was respected by his fellow poets in his own time; see Jonson's "To John Donne" (p. 1541) and Carew's "An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of Paul's, Dr. John Donne" (p. 1769), but Dryden (1631-1700), the first critic of English literature, gently mocked him, writing, "He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softness of love."
However, he made a comeback, with a large push from T.S. Eliot

(1888 - 1965), in the 20^th Century, as T.S. Eliot found a counterweight to the lushness of neo-romanticism in the intellectualism of Donne.

In his review article, "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921), after comparing Donne and Tennyson, T.S. Eliot wrote:

The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

2)—He wrote religious poetry, and in all of English Literature, the Early Seventeenth Century has the largest concentration of religious poetry, culminating in Milton's Paradise Lost.