A Way of Looking at Some Baroque Poems

A Way ofLooking at SomeutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Baroque PoemsMLKJIHGFEDCBA O L IV E R F . S IG W O R T H I wish to make a few suggestions about ways in which we might read some poetry of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries which today is rather unpopular. I refer to what in England at the time was known as the “great ode.” The examples which I hope will occur to you, at least to those readers who are students of literature, are the obvious ones, which I wish to make the center of my discussion for the very reason that they are obvious: Dryden’s “To the Pious Memory of the Accomplisht Young Lady, Mrs Anne Killigrew,” Alexander's Feast, and Eleonora. The latter poem, although in form it is not an ode, may be included by Dryden’s own testimony, since he remarks that the “whole Poem, though written in that which they call Heroique Verse, is of the Pindarique nature, as well in the Thought as the Expression; and, as such, requires the same grains of allowance for it.”1 Dryden’s special mention of the “Pindarique nature” of the poem implies that it is a special kind of poem, and that is indeed the case. I shall briefly discuss below the kind of poem it is, but it is enough to point out here that Dryden himself—and other poets and the audience—saw the genre as distinct, implying that Dryden’s original readers came to the poems with certain expectations, a certain set of mind, difficult for us in the post-Romantic world to share. This sort of poem was not, however, purely an English phe­ nomenon; I shall want to mention at least one roughly analogous French example, and I believe examples could be drawn from other literatures. 31 32 / vutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA OLIVER F. SIGWORTH The problems that most of us have in considering these poems, I think, are in the first place that we generally find it very difficult to shed various preconceptions about poetry, indeed about art, which in the form I intend to discuss them date only from the nineteenth century; and, in the second place, that those of us with literary training, at least literary training in American schools since the early 1940’s, generally owe, however faintly, allegiance to a critical method by which it is exceedingly difficult to do the poems justice. I refer in the first instance to the view that art to be good must be “sincere,” and in the second instance to the literary-critical method most easily brought to mind by the term “the new criticism,” though it is assuredly not new any more. For the benefit of those readers whose chief concern is not with literature, I must mention that some of the chief tenets of the “new critical” approach to a poem are that the poem exists in an autonomous cosmos of metaphor, symbol, and form; that its truth is the truth of coherence rather than of correspondence with something outside itself; and that it can prop­ erly be discussed only in the terms which it itself as an art-object generates. These two critical views should be quite incompatible, since the first asks us to consider the author and his emotions, while the second, in its pure form, requires us to imagine the poem as in effect authorless; yet one occasionally finds them side by side in the same mind. The question of the “sincerity” of these great odes has bothered almost everyone who has commented upon them since the end of the eighteenth century, although we must carefully note that the same question does not seem to have occurred to Dryden’s contemporaries. As a matter of fact, it is clear that in modern, romantic terms the poems are not sincere; that is, they do not, for instance reflect Dryden’s deeply-felt grief at the death of Anne Killigrew or the Countess of Abingdon, and it may be equally true that Alexander's Feast does not reflect a genuinely exalted view of the power of music. This “insincerity” bothers even so sensitive a scholar and critic as Earl Miner...