Top 6 - Fulke Greville

Being a contemporary of Shakespeare, Donne and Ben Jonson might not look like the best way of taking one’s place in posterity’s notebook but, there again, being a minor player in a Golden Age might be a greater honour than having one’s name at the forefront of a less well regarded period. But these shouldn’t be the sort of questions that keep us awake all night.
Picking Neil Powell’s Carcanet edition of Fulke Greville off the shelf at a time when no other book was demanding more immediate attention, I was surprised how several poems still seemed familiar from whenever the last time was I did so. It’s possible to see his dark, personal demons and meditations on a strange universe as not wanting in the least in comparison with the more household names of his contemporaries when some find Shakespeare’s Sonnets ‘sugar’d’ if brilliant, Donne sometimes demandingly intellectual and Ben Jonson reputedly more concerned with Ben Jonson’s reputation than anything else.
Although Powell sees Greville as ‘self-effacing’ and having led a ‘comparatively long and quiet life’, I don’t think we have reason to think it was as quiet as all that but his death, apparently murdered by a servant for whom he had made no provision in his will, seems like a dreadful tactical mistake by the servant. Why would one take steps to bring that will into force so soon when a more pointed act of service might have given the courtier reason to include the faithful retainer in the will. It is, of course, the shadowy remnants of evidence that make these biographical details sometimes as interesting as the poems but I’ll be off to Amazon New & Used to see what other books there are on the subject to shed whatever dubious light there is on the subject.
And, although perhaps it is as Sir Philip Sidney's biographer that he is most remembered, that doesn't mean that represents his just desserts.
Greville’s poems, in Powell’s selection at least, all come from Caelica, which seems to me an ongoing project that includes most of his output, not unlike Shakespeare’s Sonnets or Tony Harrison’s School of Eloquence, titles that anything suitable were included into.
I’m sure that the precious and unnecessary denomination of ‘poem sequence’ would not have occurred to him and I wish it didn’t occur to anybody now either. Poetry either consists of a poem, which can come in several parts, or a collection of poems but there is no need of the ‘sequence’.
Another tremendous thing about the poetry of 400 years ago is the way that poets didn’t seem to strive for their ‘own voice’ in a vainglorious pursuit of individuality or ‘finding themselves’. In fact, it seems, in Gunn’s phrase, that they ‘did not search much for uniqueness of voice’ but, having apparently aspired to some sort of orthodoxy, their personality, if worth having, is still available in the same way that Bach and Handel, or Haydn and Mozart, wrote music very much within the same stylistic constraints but anybody who knows the difference can nearly always see it.
So, I’m delighted to be able to pick a Top 6 of Fulke Greville that goes C, LX, LXXXIV, the seemingly promiscuous LXXI and LXXII, and LXIV, which I’m sure Thom Gunn would have written had he been writing at the time. Never has a poet provided titles that disguise their content quite so mundanely.
Just a little bit of elucidation might help. For instance, C’s first line is ‘In night, when colours all to black are cast’ and ends with a modern-looking psychological insight,
And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils,
Which but expressions be of inward evils.

And LX includes such misanthropic miseries as,
Caelica, ‘tis true, I do in darkness go,
Honour I seek not, or hunt after fame:
I am thought-bound, I do not long to know,

And so on.

It was an auspicious decision to pick this book up for another look. I can hardly recommend him highly enough and I’m going to make sure I have investigated what bargains are available on the subject before you’ve read this.