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The State of the Art
- The University of Akron Press
- Chapter
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115 The State of the Art the year is 1712, and the state of the art of American poetry is, in a word, provincial. The best-known and best-selling American poem remains Michael Wigglesworth’s The Day of Doom: A Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgment, written some forty years earlier and currently in its fifth edition. A bumpy, ballad-meter ride through Calvinist theology, it will remain popular for decades. When Francis Jenks writes about it in the Christian Examiner in 1828, he’ll remind his audience how much this strange, homespun work once meant to their countrymen. It was, says Jenks, “a work which was taught our fathers with their catechisms, and which many an aged person with whom we are acquainted can still repeat, though they may not have met with a copy since they were in leading strings.” It was, moreover, “a work that was hawked about the country, printed on sheets like common ballads,” and it presented, in language often graceless but equally often vivid “the common theology of New England at the time it was written” (537). The Day of Doom represents a kind of poetry at the service of religion, written by men who do not consider themselves to be, first and foremost, poets. Wigglesworth, having turned down the presidency of Harvard, held the title “teacher at Malden Church in New England,” and saw himself as a man of God who happened to write poetry, not as a poet who happened to believe in God. When he died in 1705, there was not much by way of American institutions to support poetry, and his work 116 The Poet Resigns found its way to readers through the primitive market for written works, carried by peddlers down the roads and river valleys of the land. Poetry in England, of course, is much more sophisticated than in the humble cottages of New England: it’s been just a year since the publication of Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism, a critical exercise the precocious poet had written in orotund heroic couplets back in 1709, at the tender age of 21. Stuffed to bursting with learning from Virgil, Homer, Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus, Pope’s poem holds the classics up as the greatest models for poetry, spurning the rustic form and grim pieties of Wigglesworth. Disdaining novelty for its own sake (“Regard not then if wit be Old or New / But blame the False, and value still the True”), Pope hews to the standards of Horatian decorum, in which the parts of a work unite into a seamless whole, which should both delight and instruct (47). Unlike Wigglesworth, Pope doesn’t see himself as a man who happens to write poetry, he is something new: he’s a poet, in the sense of being a specialized kind of professional writer with a particular place in the evolving literary ecosystem. He’s benefitted from the old system of noble patronage, but he’s had enough success in England’s rapidly growing literary marketplace to take jabs at those literary men who sit “at the Great-man’s Board, / To fetch and carry Nonsense for my Lord” (47). Indeed, he’s done well enough with his new mock-epic The Rape of the Lock to see how a reading public, flush with new wealth from the financial revolutions of the last two decades, hungers for entertaining works that have the kind of classical sheen that could, through the appearance of refinement, lift the mere money-grubbing merchant who reads it into the rising class of cultivated gentlemen. He’s at work on a translation of Homer that will soon make him rich, and in a few years he’ll move to a villa at Twickenham where he’ll set to rewriting Shakespeare, regularizing the verse of the plays and excising errant lines so as to bring the bard closer to the correctness of classical writing. When these projects are complete, the state of the art of English poetry will be what Virgil would have wanted—had Virgil been, like Pope’s typical reader, statusconscious and market-rich, an arriviste Londoner looking to show that he knew an ode from an octave and a fish-fork from a fingerbowl. But it is not 1712. It is 1812, and the embodiment of the state of the art of American poetry lies in a desk drawer in Cummington, Massa- [44.197.251.102] Project MUSE (2024-03-19...