The Poet Resigns: Essays on Poetry in a Difficult Time

When Poets Dream of Power

88 When Poets Dream of Power it is difficult to know where to begin a discussion of poets and their relations to power: Longinus identified the decline of sublimity in Latin poetry with the political crisis of the Roman Republic; and Dante’s hell is populated in large measure with figures consigned to the inferno as matters of political score-settling. Closer to our own age, and in our own language, we find the Elizabethan poets, many of whom were in one way or another members of the power elite of their time and place: Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard (the Earl of Surrey), Sir Edward Dyer, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Campion, Sir Henry Wotton, John Hoskins, Edmund Spenser. All those “sirs” give a picture of the situation: to a degree difficult for us to imagine, the literary elite and the power elite overlapped. Of the non-knighted and non-noble, Spenser rose from a humble background to become a significant landowner in Ireland, and Hoskins was a member of parliament. Campion, a successful physician, was an exception to the power elite rule. The overlap between power elite and poetry elite was considerable. There was a long, slow differentiation of elites in the centuries that followed. But it is worth pausing in the eighteenth century, with Alexander Pope, among the first English poets to make money from putting poetry in the marketplace. He lived in a liminal period, when the system of relying on aristocratic patronage hadn’t yet died off, and the market 89 Poetry in a Difficult World system was just beginning to show its potential for the right sort of author. The actual relation Pope had with power may, in fact, have been as a kind of housecat—one noble patron liked to stop Pope during readings and revise lines, such being the patron’s prerogative. But Pope dreamed of himself as a kind of spiritual and moral advisor, not speaking directly on matters of immediate political urgency, but offering general principles that might inform the decisions of the powerful. Consider the opening of An Essay on Man: Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things To low ambition, and the pride of kings. Let us (since life can little more supply Than just to look about us and to die) Expatiate free o’er all the scene of man; A mighty maze! but not without a plan; A wild, where weeds and flowers promiscuous shoot, Or garden, tempting with forbidden fruit. Together let us beat this ample field...(47) The “St. John” is Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, and one of Pope’s most powerful friends. Pope envisions himself as a companion of the good Viscount Bolingbroke, and imagines the two of them engaged in aristocratic activities together (to beat the field was to send runners out into it with sticks to send birds flying up so they could be shot by the noble hunter and his companions). The tone is friendly, if a bit deferential , and the relationship to his Lordship is as philosophical guide: the world is a maze, but not without a plan—a plan the poet will explain to the Great Man in ways that will enable him to carry out his duties of state in a philosophically informed manner. If the deference might make some of us cringe, now, the proximity to power would make more than a few poets blanche with envy. We start to get closer to a recognizably modern relationship of poetry and power with the Romantics—if only because the Romantics were often either radical bohemians with no direct influence on power (like Shelley) or government-sponsored former radicals whose views now appeared less threatening (like Wordsworth). The document of the time that seems most representative of the poet’s dream of his relation to power is Shel- 90 The Poet Resigns ley’s “Defense of Poetry.” It was never published in his lifetime, but has had a huge allure for generations of poets since—and why wouldn’t it? It lets poets have their cake and eat it too. On the one hand, the poet is responsible only to his private vision, not the demands of the market or any kind of patron. On the other hand, the poet has enormous influence : his ideas shape the consciousness of the ages to come. All of this has its origins in Shelley’s...