Abstract
My analysis of attention as a central theme and technique in eighteenth- century poetry has prompted me to complicate and refine certain historical and generic boundaries within eighteenth-century poetry—as with mock-heroic in the previous chapter. Indeed, to name attention as a unifying concept in the period’s poetry is not only to reconfigure evolutions within this body of work but to uncover a new coherence across eighteenth-century poetry. Another poetic genre characteristic of the eighteenth century—the ode—emerges differently when examined through the lens of attention. Its two ostensibly dissimilar phases are revealed to have more in common than has been acknowledged, and particular patterns of attention turn out to define the eighteenth-century ode as a form.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See William Congreve, “On Mrs. Arabella Hunt, Singing” (1692) in The Works of William Congreve, vol. 2, ed. D. F. McKenzie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
For an early and important version of this claim, see Martin Price, “The Sublime Poem: Pictures and Powers,” Yale Review 58 (Winter 1969), 194–213. Price notes that in midcentury poetry of personification, “the object becomes less and less simply other, more and more clearly a power within the self” (203).
Dr. Charles Scarborough [Scarburgh] (1615–1694) was a respected physician and natural philosopher in England during the Restoration period. He was appointed first physician by Charles II in the early years of the Restoration and was knighted in 1669. He was present at the deathbed of Charles II and later became physician to James II and to William and Mary. In Abraham Cowley: The Muse’s Hannibal (New York: Russell and Russell, 1931), Arthur H. Nethercot speculates that Cowley’s ode to Scarborough may have been recompense for a generous favor: After Cowley was arrested on April 12, 1655, as a suspected Royalist, Scarborough paid £1000 to bail him out of prison (see chapter 10: “Spy and Apostate,” 142–57). Scarborough later returned the poetic favor by writing an elegy on Cowley. Nethercot notes that Cowley was made a “doctor of physic” at Oxford on December 2, 1657, after training and performing “many anatomical dissections,” likely under the supervision of Scarborough (169–70). Scarborough published a guide to human dissection (Syllabus musculorum) in 1676.
Abraham Cowley, “To Dr. Scarborough,” in The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Abraham Cowley, 2 vols., ed. Rev. Alexander B. Grosart (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 2:22–24. All references to Cow-ley’s poetry will be cited by line number as presented in this edition.
William Collins, “Ode to Fear,” in Thomas Gray and William Collins: Poetical Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 139–41. All references to Collins’s poetry will be cited by line number as presented in this edition.
Norman Maclean, “From Action to Image: Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century,” in Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 408–60; 411.
Maclean chooses this term to include any ode that is “massive, public in its proclamation, and Pindaric in its classical prototype” (408). It has also been called the Pindaric ode, the Cowleyan ode, and the sublime ode. Classifications of the ode during the Restoration and eighteenth century are notoriously muddled, as the term was used loosely to characterize a range of poetic forms. I am confining my inquiry here to the self-proclaimed Pindaric odes that appeared in Cowley’s wake and the midcentury odes that sought, as Joseph Warton put it to “bring back Poetry into its right channel.” See Warton, “Advertisement” to Odes on Various Subjects (1746) (Los Angeles: The Reprint Society, 1979).
Chester Chapin, Personification in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 40. He cites Shepherd from Odes Descriptive and Allegorical, 2nd ed. (London, 1761), iii–iv.
Paul H. Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 60.
Howard Weinbrot, “Growing One’s Own: The British Ode from Cowley to Gray” in Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 329–401.
Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 191. Kaul focuses particularly on the odes of Edward Young.
Richard Wendorf, William Collins and Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981).
Steven Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 2. Although Knapp examines the period that would include the Restoration and early eighteenth-century Pindarics, he does not include them. But his analysis of the ambivalence toward personification throughout the period (and the related “ambivalence toward poetic power”) is relevant to such figures in the Pindaric ode.
Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorial-ism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) makes an insight into James Thomson’s poetry that is relevant to my reading of the earlier Pindaric. He claims that “Thomson used imperatives like ‘see’ and ‘behold’” as “invitations to a reader to contemplate a natural scene” as well as “imperatives like ‘come’ and ‘be present’” as “indications of a posture of prayer before the personified natural object or phenomenon” (269).
William Congreve, “A Pindarique Ode Humbly Offer’d to the King, on His Taking Namure,” in The Complete Works of William Congreve, 4 vols., ed. Montague Summers (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), 1:44–49.
For a fuller exploration of this idea, see John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry 1500–1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961).
Joseph Warton, “To Solitude,” in Odes on Various Subjects (Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint Society, 1979), 46–47.
Anne Finch, “The Spleen,” in Selected Poems of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, ed. Katharine M. Rogers (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1979), 145–49. All references to Finch’s poetry will be cited by line number as presented in this edition.
John Dennis, “The Court of Death: A Pindarick Poem, Dedicated to the Memory of Her Most Sacred Majesty Queen Mary” in The Select Works of John Dennis, 2 vols. (London: John Darby, 1718), 1:33–59. All references to Dennis’s poetry will be cited by line number as presented in this edition.
John Pomfret, “A Prospect of Death: A Pindarique Essay” (London: J. Gardyner, 1703). Pomfret’s ode was later published together with Finch’s “The Spleen” in London in 1709 as The Spleen, A Pindarique Ode. By a Lady. Together with A Prospect of Death: A Pindarique Essay.
Patricia Meyer Spacks’ book The Poetry of Vision: Five Eighteenth-Century Poets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967) treats the subject of vision in eighteenth-century poetic discourse. She argues that two broad understandings of vision had currency in the period: “a power for perceiving reality or for expanding it” (2). The meanings of vision can range from physical sight to supernatural experiences to dreams. Of course, the five poets Spacks treats begin at midcentury: Thomson, Collins, Gray, Smart, and Cowper. Earlier poets also explore the multiple possibilities of vision.
In The Funeral Elegy and the Rise of English Romanticism (New York: Octagon, 1967), John W. Draper notes that Pomfret’s use of horrifying bodily details rejects the more decorous elegiac forms popular during the Restoration in favor of the graphic detail preferred by the Puritans (see 205).
John Dryden, “Threnodia Augustalis,” in The Poems of John Dryden, ed. Paul Hammond (London: Longman, 1995), 3:390–420. All references to Dryden’s poetry will be cited by line number as presented in this edition.
Emily Dickinson, “After Great Grief, a Formal Feeling Comes” in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, reading edition (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999), 170, lines 1–2.
John Dryden, “To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young Lady Mrs Anne Killigrew,” in The Poems of John Dryden, ed. Paul Hammond (London: Longman, 1995), 3:3–18.
Margaret Doody offers a brilliant reading of the Anne Killigrew ode in The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Doody notes that this ode bridges the gap between heaven and earth. She argues that it is written in two distinct voices—a human, mortal voice and a sacred voice—and that their purpose is to negotiate the difference between here and there: “Their job is to create space sufficient to deal with these two regions” (251). Killigrew is, for Doody, located in a kind of in-between space of growth and movement, and yet her voice can harmonize with Dryden’s earthly voice.
John Dryden, “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day,” in The Poems of John Dryden, ed. Paul Hammond (London: Longman, 1995), 3:181–92.
William Wordsworth, “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, eds. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940), 2:259–63.
Copyright information
© 2012 Margaret Koehler
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Koehler, M. (2012). Odes of Absorption. In: Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313607_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137313607_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44072-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-31360-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)