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Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-69703-3 - The Cambridge Companion to English Poets Edited by Claude Rawson Frontmatter More information

the cambridge companion to english poets

This volume provides lively and authoritative introductions to twenty-nine of the most important British and Irish poets from Geoffrey Chaucer to Philip Larkin. The list includes, among others, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, Browning, Yeats, and T. S. Eliot, and represents the tradition of English poetry at its best. Each contributor offers a new assessment of a single poet’s achievement and importance, with readings of the most important poems. The essays, written by leading experts, are personal responses, written in clear, vivid language, free of academic jargon, and aim to inform, arouse interest, and deepen understanding.

claude rawson is Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale University. One of the most distinguished eighteenth-century scholars working today, he has published widely on Swift, Pope, Fielding, and many other authors and topics. He is Founding General Editor of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism and General Editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift.

A complete list of books in the series is at the back of this book.

© in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-69703-3 - The Cambridge Companion to English Poets Edited by Claude Rawson Frontmatter More information

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO ENGLISH POETS

EDITED BY CLAUDE RAWSON

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521697033

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2011

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data The Cambridge Companion to English Poets / [edited by] Claude Rawson. p. cm. – (Cambridge Companions to Literature) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-521-87434-2 (hardback) – isbn 978-0-521-69703-3 (paperback) 1. English poetry–History and criticism. 2. English poetry–Irish authors–History and criticism. I. Rawson, Claude (Claude Julien), 1935– II. Title. III. Series. pr503.c36 2011 821.009–dc22 2010045710

isbn 978-0-521-87434-2 Hardback isbn 978-0-521-69703-3 Paperback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

CONTENTS

List of illustrations page viii Notes on contributors ix Preface and acknowledgements xv claude rawson

Introduction 1 claude rawson

1 Geoffrey Chaucer 20 j. a. burrow

2 Thomas Wyatt 37 roland greene

3 Edmund Spenser 53 richard a. mccabe

4 William Shakespeare 72 david bevington

5 John Donne 104 achsah guibbory

6 Ben Jonson 122 colin burrow

7 George Herbert 139 helen wilcox

CONTENTS

8 John Milton 154 martin evans

9 Andrew Marvell 176 nigel smith

10 John Dryden 194 david hopkins

11 Jonathan Swift 213 claude rawson

12 Alexander Pope 235 paul baines

13 William Blake 254 morton d. paley

14 Robert Burns 271 karl miller

15 William Wordsworth 291 simon jarvis

16 Samuel Taylor Coleridge 308 seamus perry

17 George Gordon, Lord Byron 328 anne barton

18 Percy Bysshe Shelley 344 james chandler

19 John Keats 360 susan j. wolfson

20 Alfred Lord Tennyson 376 herbert f. tucker

21 Robert Browning 392 j. hillis miller

CONTENTS

22 Emily Brontë 408 dinah birch

23 Christina Rossetti 422 linda h. peterson

24 Thomas Hardy 439 peter robinson

25 William Butler Yeats 457 james longenbach

26 D. H. Lawrence 475 marjorie perloff

27 T. S. Eliot 491 michael north

28 W. H. Auden 508 edward mendelson

29 Philip Larkin 525 alan jenkins

Further Reading 538 Index 541

vii

ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Januarye from The Shepheardes Calender (1579). By permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. page 56

2 Aprill from The Shepheardes Calender (1579). By permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. 59

3 ‘The Altar’ by George Herbert, from the first edition (1633) of The Temple, p. 18, reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. 145

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

paul baines is a Professor in the School of English, University of Liverpool. He is the author of The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1999), The Complete Critical Guide to Alexander Pope (2000), and many articles in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Edmund Curll, Bookseller, co-written with Pat Rogers, was published in 2007. He is currently working on issues of crime and punishment in the poetry of Pope. anne barton is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Although most of her scholarly work has been on early modern drama, particularly Shakespeare, she has published numerous articles on Byron and the other Romantics, and a short book on Byron’s Don Juan. Her essay ‘Byron and Shakespeare’ was published in The Cambridge Companion to Byron (ed. Drummond Bone) in 2004. david bevington is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1967. His studies include From ‘Mankind’ to Marlowe (1962), Tudor Drama and Politics (1968), Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture (1985), and This Wide and Universal Theater: Shakespeare in Performance Then and Now (2007). He is the editor of Medieval Drama (1975), the Bantam Shakespeare, in 29 paperback volumes (1988, recently re-edited), and The Complete Works of Shakespeare, fifth edition (2003), as well as the Oxford 1 Henry IV (1987), the Cambridge Antony and Cleopatra (1990), and the Arden Shakespeare Third Series Troilus and Cressida (1998). He is a senior editor of the Revels Student Editions, the Revels Plays, the forthcoming Cambridge edition of the works of Ben Jonson, and the Norton Anthology of Renaissance Drama (2002).

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

dinah birch is a Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University and the general editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature, 7th edn (2009). Her books include Ruskin’s Myths (1988), Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern (1999), and Our Victorian Education (2007). She has also edited texts by George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and John Ruskin, and reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. colin burrow is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He has published widely on Renaissance literature. He edited The Complete Sonnets and Poems for the Oxford Shakespeare and the poems for the forthcoming Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson. He is presently writing the Elizabethan volume for the Oxford English Literary History. j. a. burrow, Fellow of the British Academy, is Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. Of his publications, chiefly on medieval English poetry, the most recent are Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative (2002), a revised edition of Medieval Writers and their Work (2008), and The Poetry of Praise (2008). james chandler is Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English and in the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, where he also serves as Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities. His publications include England in 1819 (1998) and Wordsworth’s Second Nature (1984). He is co-editor of Questions of Evidence (1992) and Romantic Metropolis (2005). Recent publications include The Cambridge History of British Romantic Literature (2009, ed.) and, with Maureen McLane, The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry (2008, ed.). He is now finishing a book about the history of the sentimental mode in literature and cinema. martin evans is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor in the Stanford University Department of English, where he has taught since 1963. His publications include: Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition (1968), Paradise Lost IX–X (Cambridge University Press, 1973), The Road from Horton: Looking Backward in ‘Lycidas’ (1983), Milton’s Imperial Epic (1996), The Miltonic Moment (1998), and John Milton: Twentieth- Century Perspectives (2003). He was selected by the Milton Society of America as Honored Scholar for 2004. roland greene is Mark Pigott OBE Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University. He is the author and editor of several books on early modern literature and poetics, most recently Unrequited

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas (1999). His recent work concerns the baroque, the relations between landscape and rhetoric in the colonial period, and early modern cultural semantics. achsah guibbory, Professor of English at Barnard College, is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to John Donne (2006). She is the author of numerous articles on Donne and seventeenth-century English literature and culture, as well as The Map of Time: Seventeenth-Century English Literature and Ideas of Pattern in History (1986) and Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (1998; paperback, 2006). david hopkins is Professor of English Literature at the University of Bristol. Among his recent publications are the Longman Annotated Poets edition of Dryden (with Paul Hammond, 5 volumes, 1995–2005; one- volume selection, 2007) and (with Stuart Gillespie) an edited facsimile of The Dryden–Tonson Miscellanies, 1684–1709 (2008). simon jarvis is Gorley Putt Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Robinson College. He is the author of Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765 (1995), Adorno: Critical Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge University Press, 2007), as well as of many articles on Wordsworth, on prosody, and on philosophical aesthetics. He is currently working on a study of Pope’s versification. alan jenkins is deputy editor and poetry editor at the Times Literary Supplement. He has taught creative writing in England, France, and the United States. Volumes of his poetry include Harm (Forward Prize for Best Collection, 1994), The Drift (2000), A Shorter Life (2005), and The Lost World (2010). His edition of Ian Hamilton: Collected Poems was published in 2009. james longenbach is the author of several books of poems, including Draft of a Letter (2007), and several works of criticism, including Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (1988) and The Resistance to Poetry (2004). He is the Joseph H. Gilmore Professor of English at the University of Rochester. richard a. mccabe is Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of Merton College. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2007. He is author of Joseph Hall: A Study in Satire and Meditation (1982), The Pillars of Eternity: Time and

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Providence in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (1989), Incest, Drama, and Nature’s Law 1550–1700 (1993), and Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (2002, 2005). He has edited Edmund Spenser: The Shorter Poems (1999) and, with Howard Erskine-Hill, Presenting Poetry: Composition, Publication, Reception (1995). He is currently editing the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser and working on a monograph on patronage. edward mendelson is Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and the literary executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden. His books include Early Auden (1981), Later Auden (1999), and The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say about the Stages of Life (2006). j. hillis miller is UCI Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California at Irvine. His most recent books are Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (2005), For Derrida (2009), and The Medium is the Maker (2009). The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz is forthcoming in 2011. He has published many books and essays about nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and about literary theory. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society, and received the MLA Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award in 2005. karl miller was literary editor of the Spectator and the New Statesman and editor of the Listener. He founded and for several years edited the London Review of Books. From 1976 to 1992 he was Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London. His books include Cockburn’s Millennium (1975), Doubles (1985), Rebecca’s Vest (1993), and Electric Shepherd (2003). michael north is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. His most recent books are Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word (2005), Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (1999), and the Norton Critical Edition of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (2001). morton d. paley has written extensively on Romantic-period writers and artists. Among his books are Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Fine Arts (2008), The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works of William Blake (2003), Coleridge’s Later Poetry (1996), The Apocalyptic Sublime (1986), and Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (1999). He has been awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Distinguished

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Scholar Award of the Keats–Shelley Association of America, and an Andrew F. Mellon Foundation Emeritus Fellowship. He is co-editor of Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly. marjorie perloff is Sadie D. Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities at Stanford University and Florence R. Scott Professor Emerita at the Univer- sity of Southern California. She is the author of many books on twentieth- century poetry and poetics, including The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), The Futurist Moment (1986), Wittgenstein’s Ladder: The Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996), Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (2004), a cultural memoir, The Vienna Paradox (2004) and, most recently, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. seamus perry is a Fellow of Balliol College and a Lecturer in the English Faculty at the University of Oxford. His books include Coleridge and the Uses of Division (1999), Alfred Tennyson (2005), and a selected edition of Coleridge’s Notebooks (2002). He is an editor of the Oxford journal Essays in Criticism. linda h. peterson is Niel Gray, Jr. Professor of English at Yale University. She has written Victorian Autobiography (1986), Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing (1999), and Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship, Facts of the Market. She has edited The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Elizabeth Gaskell for The Complete Works of Elizabeth Gaskell (2006) and Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography (2007). claude rawson is Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale University and general editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift. His publications on Swift include Gulliver and the Gentle Reader (1973), Order from Confusion Sprung (1985), and God, Gulliver, and Genocide (2001). He is the editor, with Ian Higgins, of the Oxford World’s Classics Gulliver’s Travels (2005) and of the Norton Critical Edition of Essential Writings of Jonathan Swift (2009). peter robinson is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. He is the author of many books of poetry, transla- tions, and literary criticism, including Selected Poems (2003), Twentieth Century Poetry: Selves and Situations (2005), Selected Poetry and Prose of Vittorio Sereni (2006), The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems of Luciano Erba (2007), The Look of Goodbye: Poems 2001–2006 (2008), Poetry and Translation: The Art of the Impossible (2010), and English Nettles and Other Poems.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

nigel smith is Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Study of Books and Media at Princeton University. He is the author of Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640–1660 (1989), Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (1994), and Is Milton Better than Shakespeare? (2008). He has edited Andrew Marvell’s Poems in the Longman Annotated English Poets series (2003, 2006) as well as the Ranter tracts and George Fox’s Journal. A biography of Andrew Marvell is forthcoming. herbert f. tucker teaches at the University of Virginia, where he is John C. Coleman Professor, associate editor of New Literary History, and series co-editor in Victorian literature and culture for the University Press. His books include Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (1988) and Critical Essays on Alfred Lord Tennyson (1993, ed.). To his 1991 and 1992 articles on Idylls of the King he has lately added several discus- sions included in Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse 1790–1910 (2008). Leading arguments from that book inform his chapter on ‘Epic’ in the forthcoming Victorian volume (ed. Kate Flint) of the new Cambridge History of English Literature. helen wilcox is Professor of English at Bangor University, Wales, and Director of the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the universities of Aberystwyth and Bangor. She has published widely on Herbert’s poetry and its reception, and is the editor of the fully annotated English Poems of George Herbert, published by Cambridge University Press in 2007. Her further research interests are in early modern autobiography, seventeenth-century women’s writing, and Shakespeare. She is currently completing an edition of All’s Well That Ends Well for the Arden Shakespeare Third Series. susan j. wolfson, Professor of English at Princeton University, is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Keats (2002) and editions of Keats, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Felicia Hemans. She has published widely on writers, issues, and texts in British Romanticism. Her books include Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry (1997) and Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender (2006), and Romantic Interactions (2010).

xiv

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The idea of this volume is to provide lively and authoritative introductions to twenty-nine of the most important British and Irish poets writing in English. The list is a mainstream or ‘traditional’ one, running from Chaucer to Larkin, and might be said non-controversially to include some of the best poetry in the world. The selection is restricted to poets of what used to be called the British Isles, though one or two exceptions have been allowed, where there is dual nationality or a distinct and historical British identity, as in the vari- ously special cases of Eliot and Auden. No living writer has been included, as in the case of the parallel Cambridge Companion to English Novelists, in accordance with the practice of this series of Cambridge Companions. I have incurred many debts. My assistant Cynthia Ingram has contributed more to the shaping of this book than I can easily describe. Colleagues and friends who have given help and advice include Linda Bree, Colin Burrow, Achsah Guibbory, Stephen Karian, James McLaverty, Ed Mendelson, Marjorie Perloff, Maartje Scheltens, James Woolley, and John Worthen. Claude Rawson