100 Friends (100 Poems 100 Poets)

Today, we’ll meet Fr. George Herbert. Our friend was born in 1593, and educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He served briefly in Parliament (1624-5), but retired from public life in 1626, due to health problems that plagued him for the rest of his life. He was ordained an Anglican priest in 1630.

I’ve only looked up a very broad overview of Fr. Herbert’s life, but Mario A. Di Cesare, editor of George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets (my primary source for this post), says that Izaak Watson’s 1670 biography, “recounts many edifying tales which, if not strictly true, probably should be,” which certainly piques my interest in that book.

Today, we’ll meet Mr. Thomas Carew, born in Kent in 1594 or ‘95, the youngest of three children. His early life had its ups and downs - as a young man, he meant to follow his father’s career path into law, but he studied little and that was a dead-end. He was hired into secretarial roles to diplomats in Italy and France, but shot himself in the foot by writing too frankly of a patron’s faults.

Did you forget this series? It’s only been, well, a long while since we met our last friend, but I’m going to reintroduce it now. You needn’t worry about it quickly falling off again, either, because the next few posts have already been written. How’s that for planning ahead?

Anyway, today we’ll meet Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins. He was born in 1844, converted to Catholicism from Anglicanism as a young man, joined the Jesuit order, and worked as a Classics teacher and parish priest around England, Wales, and Ireland. Unsurprisingly, given that he was an old-school Jesuit, his work is a mainstay in Catholic literature curricula.

In ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound wrote that a man can’t fully understand poetry if he reads only one language. Later on, when listing authors important to the development of English poetry he also included a few Frenchman. With both those points in mind, I thought it would be appropriate to include a few French poets even though the focus of this list is on English authors. So, today we’ll meet M. François Villon.

Dans ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound a écrit qu’un homme ne peut pas comprendre la poésie s’il ne lit qu’une seule langue. Il a énuméré des auteurs importants pour le développement de la poésie anglaise et il a inclus quelques Français. En gardant ce point à l’esprit, j’ai pensé qu’il serait approprié de discuter d’un des poètes mentionnés par Pound comme étant importants pour la poésie anglaise. Nous allons donc rencontrer aujourd’hui François Villon.

Our next friend is another one of our good ol’ Cavalier buddies. Sir John Denham was born in Dublin in 1615 and lived to 1669, a lawyer and the son of the Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench in Ireland. That sounds like an impressive title, and when his father died Sir John did inherit a great deal of property. During the English Civil War he was sheriff of Surrey and made a brief attempt to defend Farnham Castle against Parliamentary forces; after the war his estates were confiscated and he lived abroad with Charles II, though Cromwell did give him permission to live in Suffolk in 1658.

Today we’ll meet William Cecil, 1st Lord Burghley. He’s another Elizabethan, living 1520-98, but he’s not well-known as a poet. Rather, his legacy lies in the world of political history, especially as Queen Elizabeth I’s principal adviser. An outline of his political career would be well beyond the scope of this series, but in short he seems to have been quite competent, though as one would expect of an adviser to Elizabeth, one’s ultimate judgement of him comes down to what one thinks of Elizabeth, which often depends on whether one is Catholic or Protestant.

Thomas Randolph was born in 1605 and was another member of the Tribe of Ben. I normally like to write a little about our friends’ “day jobs,” but unfortunately Randolph died young, at twenty-nine years old in 1635. Fortunately, he did see a good deal of success in his own lifetime primarily as a dramatist but also as a poet, as one would expect of a friend of Ben Jonson and his circle, and many expected him to eventually become poet laureate. His short life had its other excitements, though; my personal favourite poem of his is “Upon the Loss of his Little Finger,” which loss occurred during a fight in a tavern.

Today we’ll meet Mr. Thomas Campion, who was born in London in 1567 and lived to 1620. Yes, once again, there was just something about this era in English literature where it seems like every single Englishman couldn’t help but write fine poetry. Mr. Campion’s day job was physician, but he was also a songwriter and musical and literary theorist in addition to being a poet.

A few of our friends, like John Crowe Ransom, did write literary theory but we haven’t covered this much yet, so I think it may be interesting to spend a few moments looking at Mr. Campion’s Observations in the Art of English Poesie. Don’t worry, I won’t get into the nitty-gritty since even I find this type of thing a bit dry (see Aristotle). For most of the pamphlet he discusses the types of poetic metre and which are most apt for use in English, but he opens with an extended criticism of rhymed poetry. Now, today that may not seem like such a big deal, since the large majority of English poetry has been unrhymed, and often not even metrical, for decades now. At the time, though, it was the standard in English verse, and Mr. Campion notes, “whosoeuer shall by way of reprehension examine the imperfections of Rime must encounter with many glorious enemies, and those very expert and ready at their weapon, that can if neede be extempore (as they say) rime a man to death.” He keeps up the hot takes throughout the discussion, too, in a way that would make Ezra Pound proud.  For instance, “the facilitie and popularitie of Rime creates as many Poets as a hot sommer flies.” This holds true even today to some extent; everyone who think they can rhyme a little, which isn’t terribly difficult, has likely produced a bad poem or two.

Today, we’ll meet Mr. Alfred Edward Housman, a popular English poet and a staple of English literature classes, so I assume that most folks are at least aware of him. He was born in 1859 and attended Oxford, but failed his final exam due to emotional turmoil, apparently due in part to struggling with homosexual desires. So, he spent ten years (1882-92) working as a clerk at the Patent Office while spending his free time studying and writing articles about Latin literature. Today that would’ve been the end of it since he didn’t have any official credentials, but those articles did gain scholarly attention and he was hired as a professor of Latin at University College, London, and later at Cambridge. His largest contribution to the Classics from there was in editing and annotating a still respected edition of Marcus Manilius’ Astronomica. He passed away in 1936.