A Poetics of Conversion in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England

A P o e tic s o f C o n v e r s io n in ihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA M id -E ig h te e n th -C e n tu r y E n g la n d J O H N S I T T E R I want to offer and try to illustrate a few propositions about the perceived role of memory in mid-eighteenth-century English poetry. The first of these is, as the title suggests, that religious conversion becomes the model, usually secularized, for what ought to happen in a poem. A second proposition is that the dramatization of conversion replaces traditional historical material in much of the experimental poetry written from the 1740s onward and figures largely, though mostly unconsciously, in ideas of "pure poetry" which begin to emerge in this period and which sometimes continue into our own. A third proposition is that the various kinds of conversion treated in the poetry reflect both the interest in intensity of experience and dis­ ruption of behavior on the part of the Evangelicals (whom for the moment we can group together as the "New Light" Brigade) and interest in the problem of belief or conviction evident in the work of Hume. And proposition four is that it is easier to describe how these developments parallel each other than to explain why they do. Anyone wishing to make a case for discontinuity in literary history following the "Age of Pope and Swift" is likely to turn to Joseph Warton, whose poetry in the 1740s and criticism in the 1750s dem­ onstrate a self-conscious desire to break—quickly—with the imme­ diate poetic past, which means primarily Pope. Warton's odes of 1746 are intended, he says, to help turn poetry away from the late fashion of moralizing in verse and "into its proper channel," and his E s s a y on 181 182 / SITTER Pope a decade later works out in more detail the idea that Pope and poetry—the highest poetry—are not the same. At one point in that RQPONM E s s a y , Warton argues that the epic, B r u tu s , which Pope projected but never wrote, would have been a failure:yxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA ... it would have appeared . . . how much, and for what reasons, the man that is skillful in painting modern life, and the most secret foibles and follies of his cotemporaries, is, THEREFORE disqualified for representing the ages of heroism, and that simple life, which alone epic poetry can gracefully describe; in a word, that this com­ position would have shown more of the fedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Philosopher than the Poet.1 This passage is interesting for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that it is entirely in the subjunctive: Warton, like many con­ temporary critics, rises to his highest rhetoric when unencumbered by an actual text. Interesting for our purposes is Warton's assumption that what disqualifies Pope for the highest kind of poetry is his mo­ dernity; Warton views Pope, in other words, as too much in history to rise above it. "For Wit and Satire are transitory and perishable, but Nature and Passion are eternal." Warton would not interpret his own remarks as I have just done; in fact, he says that poetry is likely to be better if it is "grounded on true history." But his examples—O e d ip u s , L e a r , R o m e o a n d Ju lie t, as well as Pope's own E le g y to th e M e m o r y o f a n U n fo r tu n a te L a d y — suggest that Warton has in mind stories based on distant, obscure, or private history. Anything recent, documentable, and public is likely not to have "poignancy" enough.2 The opposition of satire and true poetry represents more than the triumph of sentimentalism as that is usually understood. Since satiric poetry is nearly always highly historical poetry, the battle is in large part over whether poetry should be factual or manifestly fictional. A similar desire to divorce poetry from...