Ba-lue Mun-deii Ba-lues-Are

Phagocytic Breakdown (Spring–Winter 2022): Nor civill war is found — I meane, to us

I'm probably as familiar with Jacobean literary history and Restoration literary history as the next guy, but, aside from bibliomantic consultations of Robert Herrick,1 I haven't spent much time with the literary history they sandwich. Dean Donne's hearse having dropped me off in Caroline London, I thought I might as well explore the neighborhood.

Poetry and revolution: an anthology of British and Irish verse, 1625-1660, ed. Peter Davidson

(If you'd like a serious, well-informed, useful description of the book, go to Colin Burrow.)

By far my favorite anthology is Jerome McGann's New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse. Not the most important or influential anthology,2 but my favorite, the one I most enjoyed reading straight through and the one I re-read most often — like a book rather than a sampler. Simply by ordering individual poems, regardless of author, by date of first publication, McGann gave music — or, to de-Paterize, an intuited structure whose medium is time — to the whole as well as its parts. Monotony is broken; potential contexts grow; conversations intended and imaginary liven the scene.

In and around the English Civil War, fewer of those conversations were imaginary: the mid-seventeenth-century was a peak of political-religious debate and polemic, with bewilderingly quick switches of side. And so Davidson rightly insisted that the period called for a more flexible structure than the standard Oxford Book of Whatever formula.

Unfortunately, his period can't support as elegant a solution as McGann's: much of the work was circulated in manuscript among an unknown number of readers for an unknown period of time before it reached print, much of it was anonymous or misleadingly credited, and so responses and counter-responses don't drop gracefully into either a by-date or by-author template.

Which forced Davidson into a hybrid approach, clumping poems roughly by topic, and by author (if known) within the clump. This works beautifully for the most contentious, most event-driven topics (spirituality, pre-war nostalgia, during-wars, and after-wars), and not so beautifully for the others. Reading a dozen gather-ye-rosebuds and whiter-than-lilies poems in close proximity may discourage bardolatry but it also numbs pleasure.

So... second favorite anthology, maybe?

English Lyric Poetry: The Early Seventeenth Century by Jonathan Post

Old-school (my-school) analyses/appreciations — nothing revolutionary, but amiable virtual company. It's fun to hear someone champion Thomas Carew and Henry Vaughan.

Poetry and allegiance in the English civil wars: Marvell and the cause of wit by Nicholas McDowell

I enthusiastically recommend this book to anyone who's me but I'm not sure who else would like it.

For starters, putting "Marvell" in the title is like calling Anita Ekberg the star of La Dolce Vita. Marvell's high poetic reputation is a twentieth-century product and his prose only went on public display during the Restoration; he didn't leave much trace in the 1640s or early 1650s. Rather than dishing out 250 pages of wildassed speculation, McDowell's real topic is the community of cosmopolitan humanist intelligentsia during the Civil War(s). That does provide a probable context for Marvell, alongside other learned poets, but the center of that context and the true heroes of McDowell's account are the less canonical but more knowable Thomas Stanley and John Hall.

Hall is particularly attractive: a prodigy dead at 29 and mourned across partisan lines, who shifted political stances several times and openly admitted as much:

Perhaps thou art of an Opinion contrary to what is here written: I confesse that for a Time I myself was so too, till some Causes made me reflect with an impartial eie upon the Affairs of this new Government.

In a plea for Commonwealth support of arts and sciences, he linked his revolutionary intellectual goals with the regicidal Parliament in terms the Russian Futurists might've used:

What meanes were used before, for a bare historical knowledge, must now be turned into a censorious justice upon our old opinions, and into severe and eager disquisitions of new truths; for knowledge hath no limits nor Land-marks but being ubiquitary, and therefore desirous to diffuse it selfe, she endeavours by all means her promotion and dilatation. Nor doth she ever meet with any that would enlarge her Empire, but shee ambitiously encourages them, and willingly crownes them. Now for any one to thinke, that one and the same meanes are to be used to preserve a State, either new curdled and moulded into form, or else by outward violence retired to its last seat and almost first principles, and the same state when it hath overcome either its infancy or misery, and like a wakened Gyant begins to rowze it selfe up, and looke where it may conquer, is utterly unvers’d in the affaires of the world, and below instruction. [...] You that are men of sublime mindes, that have carried before you all the doubts and objections of flesh and blood, above the extent of your owne designs, or almost the latitude of your owne wishes, beyond the dictates of common Law and reason, will not give over while there remains so great a Worke. [...] What better meanes have you to confute all scandalls and imputations of your deadly adversaries, who have not spared to speake you worse then Goths and Vandalls, and the utter destroyers of all Civility and Literature, then by seriously composing your selves to the designe of cherishing of either. What director caus-way could you finde to the arrandization of your owne glory, then entertaining the celebrated care of so many kings, the onely splendour of so many Republicks, the life and lustre of so many Ages?

By taking Hall to exemplify the era's turned coats, so easily dismissed as time-serving hypocrites, McDowell suggests they were instead holding true to special interests which matched no official party line — liberty of thought, nonpartisan scholarship, free intellectual exchange — and their explicit allegiances might accordingly switch to whichever party seemed least dependent on either of those "forcers of conscience" (as Milton called them), the Counter-Reformation Catholic church and the theocratic Presbyterians. That is, they were "Royalists" or "Parliamentarians" or "Puritans" or "Independents" in the sense that, allowed a choice between a public-domain activist and the corporation-tender Dianne Feinstein, I might have been a "Republican" or "Green."

Richard Lovelace: royalist poetry in context, 1639–1649 by Susan Alice Clarke

Davidson's and McDowell's books left me with a new enthusiasm for Richard Lovelace's later poems; references led me to Clarke's papers, which in turn led me to Clarke's Ph.D. dissertation.

Her stated goal was to demonstrate the sincerity of Lovelace's Royalism as expressed in his pre-Regicide verse. But, from my ignorant and amateurish viewpoint, those pages are the tail which wags the blue-medal hound of her first chapter: a no-nonsense scholarly biography of Lovelace which incorporates some impressive original research.

Secret rites & secret writing : Royalist literature 1641–1660 by Lois Potter

Davidson credits Potter's book as helping to justify his own, McDowell references it several times, and its title is certainly enticing.

And also a bit misleading; don't expect much in the way of Black Masses. What we actually have here is a top-notch academic fix-up which starts with a set of entertaining essays on topics relating to secrecy or deniability: deliberately ambiguous or misleading print provenance, genres à clef, literal ciphers, ....

The last two pieces are more of a conceptual stretch, and also the most substantial. (I felt an impulse to write "essential," but the book's too scarce for that to be fair. Maybe someday the Internet Archive will host a copy for digital lending, if the Internet Archive isn't sued out of existence.) Chapter 5, "The Royal Image," would make an excellent standalone guide to Charles I as a brand — the iconography; the dubious attributions — even if Susan Howe had to be excluded.

Most germane to my own secret rites, though, is chapter 4, "Intertextuality and Identity," whose insights apply about equally well to Andrew Marvell, Thomas Nashe, Lester Bangs, &c, &c:

What Nashe, Burton and the stage melancholic have in common is their learning, their wit, and a style which justifies its own self-indulgence on the grounds that it is either expressing or concealing mental disturbance, and is in any case a reflection of the madness of the times. As Taylor put it, in his attack on Wither, ‘Nonsence is Rebellion’. It is a style which creates a strong sense of personality, despite the fact that much of it is made up of other people’s words. [...]

Is it possible that the mystifications of Sheppard and Marvell might be the ultimate secret code, one intended to keep them from understanding themselves? [...]

Drunkenness is a parody of the kinds of irrationality which the drinker really fears. What lies behind this language, I think, is the writer’s desire to escape responsibility for his own state. By depicting himself as ‘irrational’, in fact, he doubly escapes, because the irrationality itself is blamed on ‘the times’. His participation in a common world of images makes him typically rather than individually guilty.

1. "It says we should drink more wine."

2. The anthologies that most influenced me have been the usual bundles of selected-works (one to twenty or so per author), with authors arranged roughly by birth year or location. Stretching across my autodidactic life from, in adolescence, Oscar Williams's Master Poems of the English Language (with otherwise unattested portraits of "Percy Bysshe Shelley" and "John Keats" by "William Blake") to, most recently, Iain Sinclair's Conductors of Chaos, they've filled the role of academic mentor or literary community, helping me decide which writers to seek out next. But because (being slow-witted and having peculiar taste) I gain so much more from a writer's complete volumes than from judicious selections, once I've successfully sought those volumes, the initial anthology tends to dissolve into a scattering of otherwise unavailable singletons within a husk of redundant paper.