Poetry

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.

My primary reading goal for 2019, if I can find time to read at all, is to greatly deepen my knowledge of Dante Alighieri. I’ve written briefly of La Vita Nuova and extensively of Monarchia, and have previously read the Divine Comedy, but this constitutes the mere highlight reel of his career. Though not terribly prolific, Dante did write more than many people realise and besides, the Comedy itself has such depths that it deserves careful study even on its own. That said, I’d like to begin with by setting the stage with a friend of Dante’s, fellow Florentine and poet Guido Cavalcanti.

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.

Note: This is the final repost from Thermidor, originally published June 5, 2018. As with all of these, this is presented with only minimal editing.

---

Last time we talked about Roman poetry, it was on Catullus’ “stately bawdiness.” Today, we’ll move forward roughly a century to Martial, who was born in what’s now Spain in A.D. 40. He moved to Rome at twenty-four years old to pursue a literary career, with some success, but eventually grew tired of life in the capital and so moved back to Spain in 100. We don’t know the exact date of his death, but it was no later than 104.

There are two important parts of the Christmas holiday; the first, of course, is the Nativity of Our Lord. Second is a focus on family, and children in particular. Christmas puts me, and many others, into a nostalgic mood, thinking back to Christmas Mass, exchanging gifts on Christmas morning, then going over to my grandparents’ house to have dinner and play with my cousins. God willing, I’ll be able to extend these experiences to a new generation, but with last year’s addition of my nephew to the family children are once again part of the Carroll family’s Christmas.

Note: This is another republication from Thermidor, where it first appeared on March 20, 2018.

---

“The classics have more and more become a baton exclusively for the cudgelling of schoolboys, and less and less a diversion for the mature.” Ezra Pound’s observation, from a 1920 essay on translations of Homer, may have been true at the time but has, in the following decades, become somewhat optimistic. Often, schoolboys aren’t really taught the classics at all, but insofar as they are, “cudgelling” is still about right. I can’t completely blame those reluctant to read old books, since the very sight of anything from the Odyssey to The Scarlet Letter is apt to bring back memories of chapter quizzes and book reports due by next Friday.

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.

Note: This is another old Thermidor post, originally published on January 18, 2018.

---

Having covered some of the great Greek poets, including Hesiod and Sappho, it’s time to move on to some of the Romans. With the Greeks, I tried to approach their literature roughly in chronological order, but here I’ll begin in the late Republic with Catullus. He’s among the Classical world’s most popular poets, at least among those who don’t have the mixed blessing of being frequently assigned to bored high schoolers like Homer, and perhaps the best way to introduce Catullus and see why is to jump right into one of his poems:

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.