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THE YOUNG DONNE AND THE SENECAN AMBLE John Murphy John Murphy (PhD., University of Oklahoma) is currently professor of English at the University of Colorado. In recent decades, Donne's five Satyres and his two early epistles or verse-letters The Storme and The Calme have won an ever-widening circle of readers and admirers. Not that they were ever lost in obscurity: Ben Jonson praised the latter and Alexander Pope improved some of the former. Both were admiring readers; and both Jonson and Pope may be thought to be readers of some taste and judgment. But Donne's new and wider audience in our century was first won and continues to be held by the magic of the Songs and Sonnettes. His biography and his prose have sustained continuous interest in the Divine Poems—but criticism has done little, except for Leishman and Kernan, to go beyond fairly enthusiastic notice of the Satyres. This study abjures any design to trace out an adequate account of the Original and Progress of Satire in English verse let alone give a full account of Donne's debut. Imitation of Persius, etymological confusion between satur and satyr, "The Salvage Man," and Donne's being a frequenter of plays all may have played, and most likely did play, a part in fashioning the dramatic, rough, biting manner of these delightful poems. Since satire is a mode of direct address and creates so many of its effects from the mimesis of the wit of the town and its conversational tone, one would suppose that the vigor of the late sixteenth-century drama, heightened especially for the town by the flood of published quartos in 1594, may have outweighed the force of "rough satyrs dancing"; Donne, of course, would not have had far to seek among the gallants of the Inns of Court for "fauns with cloven heel." The present Oxford Professor of the History of Art, Edgar Wind, strongly challenged by implication Byron's judgment that Cervantes "smiled Spain's chivalry away." Wind recalls to us that "in the sixteenth century Ariosto refused to face the fact that firearms had done away with chivalry and thus withdrew into the fantastic world of the Orlando Furioso, in which neither he nor the reader could have any faith." Spenser and his followers attempted to square this particular circle by means of the "darke" or "continued " conceit—that is, by allegory. The literal surface was the fantastic world, the dream world with all of its psychological power; the application dealt with the form and pressure of the age. Yet it has struck centuries of readers as significant that the very decade that saw the Faierie Queene in print, the 1590s, also saw the emergence in print and manuscript of those Latin lyric forms of "satyres" and epistles, then, as in antiquity, filled with a peculiar passion against poetic forms in whose surface or machinery one could not literally believe. The first English imitations of these shorter Latin 164RMMLA BulletinDecember 1969 forms, a smooth Jacob and a hairy Esau, were the Satyres and Epistles of Thomas Lodge (1595), A Fig for Momus, and the MS. Satyres and Epistles of John Donne. With Lodge we are not here concerned. C. S. Lewis' judgment seems apt. We rub our eyes and think we have blundered into the eighteenth century. But the "hairy Esau," young Jack Donne, claims our more immediate concern. These months and years saw the anti-Ciceronian movement, the Senecan Amble, begin its fascinating bid for the stylistic allegiance of the cognoscenti. Not that the bid was always and everywhere successful. The Faierie Queene joined The Arcadia and for a good half-century nymphs and shepherds danced by Thames and Severn, by Wye and Avon; and in the full tide of Bacon and Hobbes, Oberon's world appears again in Herrick, and pastoral seems to take a second life in Marvell. But the witty realism of the Senecan style was, and remained, a powerful competing current. Brevity became the soul of wit; "woulds't thou be witty, be brief." In 1596 Bacon offered his Counsells Civil and Morall in short tries or essays. Ben Jonson put the packed density...

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