The Poetry of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and Irving Layton
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Prague Journal of English Studies TOMÁŠ JAJTNER Volume 5, No. 1, 2016 ISSN: 1804-8722 (print) '2,10.1515/pjes-2016-0002 TOMÁŠ JAJTNER is Assistant Professor of English literature at the English ISSN: 2336-2685 (online) Department at the Faculty of Arts, University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice. He completed his Ph.D. in 2006 at Charles University, Prague Two Pole-Vaulters of Their Times: The Poetry (dissertation: Concepts of Harmony in Five Metaphysical Poets, publ. 2012). In of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and Irving 2013 he received his second doctorate, in theology, from the Faculty of Catholic eology also at Charles University, Prague. He was Assistant Professor Layton at New York University, Prague and at Metropolitan University, Prague. He has published several book reviews, essays and articles on English and Elena Sánchez Hernández Czech literature and modern Catholic spirituality. He has also been active as a translator from English, German and French into his native Czech. His is article compares the poetic output of the Anglo-Canadian writer Irving Layton recent research interests include early modern English literature (drama and with that of the famous Restoration rake and court poet John Wilmot, Earl of poetry), modern British conservatism and relations between literature and Rochester. Layton himself provided the connection in his wholehearted vindication of spirituality and literature and music. the seventeenth century as a time of “intellectual ferment”, “criticism and impatience tjajtner@ff .jcu.cz for change”. Layton’s debt to Nietzsche and Rochester’s to his contemporary philosopher Hobbes, respectively, provide the thread through which a striking similarity of values and thematic concerns, of the quality of the amatory experience described; of their criticism of mankind, its institutions and even of themselves, on the one hand, and, on the other, of shared poetic formulas, sources of inspiration (classical, Elizabethan, satiric) and idiom string together in creative work that displays quite striking affi nities, the product of similar vital stances. Keywords Dissention; classical/Elizabethan/Restoration/French seventeenth-century literatures; Anglo-Canadian 20th century literature; lyricists; satirists; trauma; organic poetry; Übermensch/libertine/rake/true wit/hero vs. Massenmensch/ clown/outcast. 1. Introduction … and rather than be less cared not to be at all (Paradise Lost II, 47-48) Irving Layton dedicates one of his books of poetry to the “pole-vaulters” of the world; to those dissenters whose imagination and courage have contributed to its redemption ( e Pole-Vaulter ix)1 and, by stating his vocation as the vital necessity to dream and interpret mankind’s dreams, he includes himself among them. Another poet who deserves such a title is John Wilmot, Earl of 26 27 ELENA SÁNCHEZ HERNÁNDEZ TWO POLE-VAULTERS OF THEIR TIMES Rochester, whose intellectual and emotional honesty made him a great non- an aristocratic wit permitted him to strain the rhetorical possibilities of the conformist of his time. existing literary fashions. ey also borrowed freely from what most appealed e connection that inspired this article originated not only from Layton’s to them. e result reveals a more emotional than intellectual compromise with wholehearted vindication of the seventeenth century as a time characterized their sources of inspiration and a poetry full of tensions between convention by an “intellectual ferment” parallel to the atmosphere of “criticism and and imagination, the ideal and the real, instinct and passion, on the one hand, impatience for change” (1972: 9) that assisted the birth of his own literary and intellect and reason, on the other; between life and death or creation and career, his debt to Nietzsche as well as Rochester’s particular interpretation destruction. of Hobbes’s philosophy also provide very interesting points of engagement eir poetry ranges from the urbane lyricism of their love songs and between two poets whose literary outputs show such striking similarity in the anecdotal simplicity of many of their epigrams to the vituperation of their use of poetic formulas, themes and in the terms that give voice to their their satires whose sexual explicitness and bawdy language, resembling, in literary and vital concerns. Roskolenko’s words, “a cannon rather than a sword” (Mayne 27) and mainly Both men witnessed severe socio-political changes which contributed devised to shock and awaken their readers, have elicited the same grudging to altering their worlds. On the one hand, the English Civil War and the acceptance and wide critical abuse as their other polemical writings and defi ant execution of Charles I brought about a period of confusion but also of intense behaviour. e most eff ective weapon they wielded against their enemies was intellectual reforms which favoured a reaction against the Puritan repression their outspoken arrogance, presenting themselves as poetic outcasts, either and the Cavalier idealism a er the monarchic restoration of Charles II. heroes or clowns, and exploiting self-made masks and the explicit opinions Returned from exile, young aristocrats like Rochester began to suff er anxiety others had of them. about the state and to doubt about their own legitimacy, alternatively debating between the assertion and the loss of the privileges traditionally inherited by their class. On the other hand, the traumatic experience of World War II with 2. The two ends of the pole: Nietzsche and Hobbes the mass extermination of Jews by the Nazis, the slave camps of Communist 2.1. Poetry and the role of the poet Russia, and such raids as the one on Hiroshima, revealed an “almost complete apathy [towards] human suff ering and misfortune” ( e Shattered Plinths According to Nietzsche, one of Layton’s greatest vital and literary infl uences, xiii)2, which led Layton to conclude that “the plinths of christianity [sic] and life and art are deeply connected – art being that power that protects life against humanism lie shattered and useless, their broken surfaces possible stoops for itself (Safranski 305). For Layton, as for Rochester, writing poetry revealed doves and pigeons” (SP xv). itself not only an almost organic necessity (PV xi) but as the appropriate As lyricists they wrote love poems celebrating the joy, energy, and passion of means through which they explored and recreated themselves and their the amatory experience and lamented the absence of the loved one. As satirists worlds constantly, poem a er poem, dying and over(be)coming with each they lashed out at the stupidity, hypocrisy, ambition, corruption and numbness new one. of mankind and its institutions, sparing no one, not even themselves. Layton’s view of the poet as “someone who has a strong sense of self eir thematic concerns – poetry, the human predicament, evil, religious and feels his life to be meaningful”, one who “by insisting on that self and orthodoxy, God, death, love, sex – remained as perennial as the necessity for refusing to become the socialized article that bureaucrats, priests, rabbis, and their own exploration, self-discovery, and renewal through the use of a great so-called educators approve of, [… ] off ends the brainwashed millions who variety of poetic forms and patterns whose conventionality both writers are the majority in any country” (1972: 120), has usually been associated with sometimes share. What is interesting is their manipulation of such sources as the gi ed individual in whom the creative urge is strongest, the Nietzschean the classical, the Elizabethan, and those of seventeenth-century England and Übermensch or Overman. France. If Al Purdy defi ned Irving Layton as “a traditionalist, with a good e Übermensch has no master but himself, according to Francis, “he ear for the modern idiom” (211), John Wilmot’s editorial independence as recreates himself through self-knowledge and self-discipline. He is a passionate 28 29 ELENA SÁNCHEZ HERNÁNDEZ TWO POLE-VAULTERS OF THEIR TIMES Rochester, whose intellectual and emotional honesty made him a great non- an aristocratic wit permitted him to strain the rhetorical possibilities of the conformist of his time. existing literary fashions. ey also borrowed freely from what most appealed e connection that inspired this article originated not only from Layton’s to them. e result reveals a more emotional than intellectual compromise with wholehearted vindication of the seventeenth century as a time characterized their sources of inspiration and a poetry full of tensions between convention by an “intellectual ferment” parallel to the atmosphere of “criticism and and imagination, the ideal and the real, instinct and passion, on the one hand, impatience for change” (1972: 9) that assisted the birth of his own literary and intellect and reason, on the other; between life and death or creation and career, his debt to Nietzsche as well as Rochester’s particular interpretation destruction. of Hobbes’s philosophy also provide very interesting points of engagement eir poetry ranges from the urbane lyricism of their love songs and between two poets whose literary outputs show such striking similarity in the anecdotal simplicity of many of their epigrams to the vituperation of their use of poetic formulas, themes and in the terms that give voice to their their satires whose sexual explicitness and bawdy language, resembling, in literary and vital concerns. Roskolenko’s words, “a cannon rather than a sword” (Mayne 27) and mainly Both men witnessed severe socio-political changes which contributed devised to shock and awaken their readers, have elicited the same grudging to altering their worlds. On the one hand, the English Civil War and the acceptance and wide critical abuse as their other polemical writings and defi ant execution of Charles I brought about a period of confusion but also of intense behaviour. e most eff ective weapon they wielded against their enemies was intellectual reforms which favoured a reaction against the Puritan repression their outspoken arrogance, presenting themselves as poetic outcasts, either and the Cavalier idealism a er the monarchic restoration of Charles II.