Johnson on Cowley

Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets (A Selection, ed. J.P. Hardy) was suggested by something I read recently and the library service kindly retrieved it from their store for me. I read Cowley this morning, famous for its summary of Metaphysical poetry as,

the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together;

While Johnson remains an acute and attentive reader and useful in still making Abraham Cowley of interest when he is not so widely read, he is prescriptive and, like most critics, seems to assume that good poetry is that which fits his idea of what poetry should be. While fashions have changed a few times since 1777, commentators only being able to see things from their own manifesto positions has not.

He takes Aristotle as his starting point and justification, who 'rightly denominated' poetry 'an imitative art' but just because it can be and Aristotle said it was doesn't mean it has to be. Thus it is peremptory to announce that, 

these writers will, without great wrong, lose their right to the name of poets, for they cannot be said to have imitated anything

 

To begin to 'unpack' that might begin by saying that not all of us care so much for the 'right to the name of poet' but, if we did, wouldn't see why we would accept his verdict anyway. But opinions have always been rigidly held, then as now, and so the good doctor was only doing what they all did then and I'm sure we still read him now because he was better at it than most.

He makes Cowley the last inheritor of the Metaphysical way of doing things, who 

wrote rather as beholders than partakers of human nature, as beings looking upon good and evil impassive and at leisure 

 

but that may be wherein lies the difference between then and now. There isn't a problem with being a beholder rather than a partaker now.

'Their courtship is void of fondness and their lamentation of sorrow', he says but some ironic distance or detachment is acceptable, if not even desirable, now. One admires the C18th prose style, which one could gladly read for its own sake but expressions of pure fondness or lamentation would be seen as limited now. The point that clever hyperbole is no substitute for genuine feeling might be refuted by genuine feeling not being refracted through the use of language is not of literary interest.

Donne and Cowley, he tells us,

were in very little care to clothe their notions with elegance of dress, and therefore miss the notice and the praise which are often gained by those who think less, but are more diligent to adorn their thoughts

 

but maybe now we admire something more pared down, to the point and less showy. One can't help but wish Dr. Johnson were available to apply his parameters to C20th English poets and see his assessments of Eliot, Auden, Dylan Thomas and Larkin.

He has rules he wants observed in versification and certainly it remains a truism that one best not end a line on a conjunction or other 'weak' word but there are no rules and such things could conceivably be the right thing to do. One has to admire the time and space spent on pointing out the recondite usages of 'does' in Ode: Upon Liberty as 'inelegance of language' without having too much sympathy for Johnson's stylistic objections.

The great thing is that, having read Cowley so closely and found whatever fault he can, he still rates him, not only,

that he was among those who freed translation from servility, and instead of following his author at a distance, walked by his side  

but also,

he left likewise from time to time such specimens of excellence as enabled succeeding poets to improve it.

That suggests he believed that human achievement 'built on the shoulders of giants' and continued to improve on itself. I'm not convinced about that but Dr. Johnson is good enough to assess those things he sees as flaws in Cowley and yet still endorse him.

 

It made me wonder if I could have quite such pre-set ideas about 'poetry'. It might come down to three elements,

The 'sentiment', which is what the poem ostensibly is saying, including all available sub-texts, ironies, ambiguities, however many 'layers' it is supposed to have without, one hopes, being too 'sentimental.

The music. I'd prefer it very much if poems had music in their rhythm, word sounds and overall composition but that has been thought of and so inevitably some have decided, mostly unsuccessfully, not to have.

And the 'argument', the line of thought that makes its way from a beginning to an ending, as Donne did. It makes haiku, in English at least, inadequate because 17 syllables aren't enough to get from one place to another. 

That's only what it is for me. How Dr. Johnson finds things he doesn't like in poems and how I do are 250 years apart. 'All you have to be is any good' is a regularly repeated mantra here and that's all there is to it but I'm grateful to him for enhancing what I think of Abraham Cowley, what there is of it. The next chapter is on Milton, not a poet I've ever appreciated as much as perhaps I should have. I'll look forward to that.