Liberty and Literature in Early Modern England

In the republic of poetry, poets read to the baboons at the zoo, and all the primates, poets and baboons alike, scream for joy.

Martin Espada (2008)

Liberty for ourselves, Empire over the rest of mankind.

William Gladstone, speech at West Calder, 27 November, 1879)

In a recently acclaimed volume of verse about the fate of liberty in Chile, The Republic of Poetry, the American-born poet Martin Espada gives us a vision that taps into a long-established tradition which places poetry at the center of the making and imagining of the polity of man. The connection between poet and polis is as ancient as the Amphion and Orpheus myths that Horace articulates in his Ars Poetica in terms of the poet’s melic and vatic abilities (resources unfortunately not always in synchrony). The poet—or rather the divine song dictated to him by a lyre-holding god (as in Nicolas Poussin’s classically accurate depiction of the bard in his painting The Inspiration of the Poet)—becomes an instrument of mankind’s self-realization. As Cicero, Quintilian, and Horace report the myth, man—previously a beast of the field (admittedly not Espada’s zoo)—transforms into a maker of cities under the influence of an archetypal pied-piper’s wisdom and eloquence, with no monarch in sight in this founding act of the republic of man. The “primeval poets” (Cheney 2009, 75) help mankind realize the laws unique to it, that aspect of the lex naturalis peculiar to man demarcating the proper place of mankind in the cosmos and comprising the foundation of the law of nations (ius gentium). As Espada recognizes, the happy expression of this law makes poets and animals “alike scream for joy” in an ecologically oriented republic.

This review essay looks at three recent books on Renaissance English culture that, from different perspectives, help us to recognize this classical tradition in which literature and politics come into life together: here the city of man proves to be the consequence of the sublime liberties of song, whose lyric power induces man’s self-realization of the essentially political dimension of his being. Once upon a time, long before Caesar and in a far different manner, the poet performed the role of the unus homo, the “sole man.” Around the poet, men gathered to hear the song through which they discovered their identity as a people, subject only to the power of the song and the laws it revealed. This Orphic, republican vision of man contrasts to the imperialist, Cain-like vision of man as a potentially rebellious servant subject to an artificial sovereign, whose power is based on his monopoly of coercive force in the manner of Thomas Hobbes’s sovereign. This is the realpolitik view that wins out in the politics of the nation-state. The “centrality of fear” motivates the formation of an absolutist sovereignty, and a state of nature in a war of all against all characterizes international relations. “By terror thereof,” the state mandates that would-be members first divest themselves of their natural liberties, as Quentin Skinner compellingly describes out of the works of Hobbes (2008, 160, 198). But what remains of the archetypal lyric power of verse to unite us? And what kind of audience do we need to be to make out its muted, labile song reacting against the commodification of the world, in Theodor Adorno’s influential account of poetry repeatedly revisited in Heather Dubrow’s probing book regarding wht enables and blocks lyricism (1, 116). These three studies recognize various aspects of this sublime challenge, charting the nearly unidentifiable remains of a republican vision lyrically infused by multiple forms of agency and reception, a vision that lost out in the early modern period to the...