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The Re-Enactment of Edward Young

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The Re-Enactment of Edward Young The Listening Voice The newsletter of the Equi-Phallic Alliance & Poetry F i e l d C l u b Issue 8 / Frimaire CCXVI “Neither Enlightened Nor Half Asleep” The Re-enactment of Edward Young And why we must do it Edward Young & Night Thoughts shameless kind, and his relations with the Edward Young was born in the Duke of Wharton show Hampshire village of Upham in 1683. his utter indifference He is best known as the author of Night to the moral character Thoughts, a poem published in nine parts of his patrons.” Of between 1742 and 1745. The full title of Night Thoughts he says, the poem is The Complaint: or Night-Thoughts “Its atmosphere is on Life, Death & Immortality. It gave rise to … oppressive, its a major series of illustrations by William sentiment hollow, its Blake. Young was also the author of philosophy thoroughly Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) which unwholesome.” anticipated several ideas of the romantics and was especially popular in Germany. S.H. Clark, introducing a selection of Young’s Night Thoughts was translated into many poetry,1 reversed the languages including French, German, perspective. Where Eliot Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish and Detail from a 1797 illustrated edition of Night Thoughts had attempted to diminish Russian. In France it became a classic of containing 43 engravings by William Blake Night Thoughts, Clark puts it the romantic school. The poem had a thus: “…though there may profound influence on the young Edmund be some grief even in Young’s artificiality, Augustan Rome (27 BC — AD 14). The Burke, who’s philosophic investigations the pleasure and power of his text lie not early classical poets had already described and writings on the Sublime and the in an authenticity momentarily brought the secrets of the natural world; it Beautiful were a pivotal turn in Eighteenth on by pressure of bereavement, but in would therefore be presumptuous of a Century aesthetic theory. a linguistic exhibitionism pushed to the poet or any other writer to claim to be George Eliot, in Worldliness and Other- point of paradoxical selflessness.” discovering novelty; the task was instead Worldliness: the Poet Young, did Young an to express old truths in increasingly Clark asserts that Young, in Night inadvertent service by referring to his beautiful and arresting forms. Thoughts, achieves “the lyricism of utter “radical insincerity”. He did not so much estrangement”, he calls it “a supremely The Augustan Ideal obscured reject ‘authenticity’, as not consider it. undidactic poem.” André Breton, in his contradictions within the State behind The absence of autobiographical content Le Manifeste du Surréalisme (1924), declared a pastoral, but the classicism of the in Night Thoughts and the abstract universe that “Young’s Night Thoughts are Augustans was underpinned and also it summons filled Eliot with aesthetic surrealist from cover to cover.” undermined by Terror. It was the theme revulsion. There is no depth in his deeps. that dared not speak it name. It was Contextualising Night Thoughts: John Buchan (1st Baron Tweedsmuir, the shadow of all that emphatically The Augustan Ideal imperialist lacky and author of The Thirty- expressed self-confidence. Terror created Nine Steps) — in his History of English Literature The Augustan Ideal was the first of the divided subjectivities, generating a much (1928, with an introduction by Sir Henry last backward glances of modernity; more complex interiority than had Newbolt), provides a sense of how Young its proponents sought to establish existed before. This was fuelled by the and his work came to be seen. “Young an equivalence between early-mid increasing availability of printed material, was a toady and place-hunter of the most eighteenth century England and newspapers and books. Imagination flourished in the new spaces of the mind. The growth of early modern Terror also sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, shadows the development of paper money. that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, As money became virtual the world or is conversant about terrible subjects, or became that much more imaginary. The operates in a manner analogous to terror, emphatic timelessness of the great country is a source of the sublime; that is, it is houses, with their classical gardens — all productive of the strongest emotion which Euclidean geometry and permanence — the mind is capable of feeling.” screamed Mutability; now they could so easily be unimagined. The ability of Burke’s was an essentially existentialist gentlemen to get into debt, something at viewpoint. He — along with Immanuel which they excelled, was itself a catalyst of Kant — provided the theoretical language the Romantic aesthetic. necessary for the development of Romanticism and all irrationalist enterprises Pope v. Young: enlightenment & that followed. It was not by accident that anti-enlightenment currents Breton praised Young’s Night Thoughts. the end of the conceit of Augustanism: Think of Augustan poetry and up pops Since then, Terror has gone from strength Edward Young’s Night Thoughts came Alexander Pope. His Epistle to Augustus to strength. out between 1742 and 1745; Robert (George II) endorsed if not invented Blair’s The Grave in 1743; James Hervey’s Philip, Duke of Wharton 1698 - 1731 the notion of the Augustan Age. Pope major work, Meditations among the Tombs, attempted to embody the role of the poet When commenting on Young’s early life between 1745 and 1747; Thomas in a style befitting such an idea, his poetry authors such as Buchan refer to his patron, Warton’s On the Pleasures of Melancholy erected displays of ‘wit’ like follies upon a Philip, Duke of Wharton, as if that tells in 1747; and Gray’s Elegy in a Country hill. They were best seen from a distance. us all we need to know. But Young was Church-Yard in 1751. What these works If you peered around the back there was not Wharton. You might as well point at focus on, in sharp contradistinction to likely to be nothing there at all. Although the sun in order to explain the moon. But Enlightenment empiricism, is the severe Pope is absent from his poetry he achieved they are as Sun and Moon in alchemy. Taken limitations of human pretensions to only conventional insincerity. together, their stories read as a Rosicrucian rational understanding of the purposes and parable or a novel by Hermann Hesse. The developing literary market place workings of the cosmos. meant a self divided between the public Wharton was a generous benefactor, but Graveyard poetry was an implicit attack and the private realms. His public works, he accumulated debts. Attempting to clear on those who claimed that nature’s his poems, embody his public image; but it them, he invested in South Sea Company purpose is to serve human needs. For is in his private works, his gardens and his stock. When the Bubble burst in 1720 he the graveyard poet, the nature of destiny letters, that he is revealed. The schematic lost £120,000. The patronage ended badly, and the evolution of the future were far nympholepsy of his poetry becomes with Young nursing grievances. Wharton less comprehensible than that. Although grooming in his letters to young ladies.2 went on to become notorious; Young joined written largely about death, these the church and wrote Night Thoughts. The secret places of his gardens — he was works also served the subtly different an innovator of the picturesque garden — purpose of challenging the ideology of Wharton’s rise was extraordinary, his morbid, gloomy and packed with progress. With the graveyard poets, an downfall terrible and sublime. In the 3 sensation, provided the theatre within anti-Enlightenment current emerged; 1720s he founded the Hell-Fire Club. which the nymphs of his poetry and the the valorisation of reason is replaced Meanwhile, in the House of Lords, he led young women he wrote letters to could by that of feeling, and this leads to a a coalition of “Grumbletonian” Whigs merge. His gardens represented the sense of the sublime, in which the mind and Tories against the ruling Whig elite. machinery of his imagination; they were is overwhelmed by, or swoons before, To divert public attention from the South an interior space, a private world. In his something greater than itself. Sea Bubble scandal and to undermine poems Pope kept his anxieties hidden. Wharton’s political credibility, Lord Edmund Burke, in his Origin of Our Ideas Sunderland and Sir Robert Walpole Edward Young publicly articulated anxiety of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), created a denounced Wharton’s Hell-Fire activities in its modern form. His poetry represents theory of Terror. “Whatever is fitted in any before Parliament, thus alienating his the machinery of his imagination. Night supporters and destroying the coalition. Thoughts disconnects utterly. When you read it, the world you enter has no Even more bizarrely, Wharton became dimensions. The reader is dwarfed by and Grand Master of English Freemasonry, 4 lost within his 10,000 lines on the utter despite being a Jacobite. He lasted only pointlessness of ‘renown’. Ontologically a year. His exit from the Grand Lodge is speaking, Night Thoughts is not so much a obscured behind the dispute that followed requiem for the dead as for the living. it. Masonic minutes merely stating “The late Grand Master went away from the Graveyard Poetry & The Sublime Hall without Ceremony.” 5 In the 1740s a form of poetry appeared In 1724 a series of provocations, aimed at that was radically different from anything the Freemasons, were issued by “the
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