Johnson on Dryden

I had thought that Andrew Motion was the first living ex-Laureate, that Carol Ann Duffy was the second and certainly that this is the first time we've had three living laureates. The job had been for life until reformed by Blair and Motion to a 10 year stretch.

But John Dryden was removed from the post in 1689 when Protestant William III came to the throne and,

A papist could now no longer be laureate.

I should have known, it says so in Andrew's Verses of the Poets Laureate (Orion, 1999), but just because I live in a houseful of books doesn't mean I can remember what it says in all of them.

What comes out of Dr. Johnson's highly detailed commentary on Dryden is his own idea of 'poetry', which is perhaps what underlies all criticism, and criticism in its more usually understood meaning is what Johnson does. He doesn't miss a trick but, then again, his idea of poetry might not be mine, yours or ours.

He asserts that,

There was before the time of Dryden no poetical diction, no system of words at once refined from the grossness of domestic use and free from the harshness of terms appropriated to particular arts.

I find that hard to believe and need go no further than Shakespeare's Sonnets and lines such as,

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:  

 

Surely such language is 'refined from the grossness of domestic use' and free from such harshness. Whether that's a good thing or not is another matter but Dr. Johnson is one of those reponsible for putting it about that poetry is a 'heightened form of language'. But so is the prose of James Joyce, to take a paragon example, and so being 'heightened' is not a characteristic only applicable to poetry. If poets and poetry could get over themselves and regard themselves less as something rarified and special they might get some of their audience back.

Johnson offers that,

Every language of a learned nation necessarily divides itself into diction scholastic and popular, grave and familiar, elegant and gross, and from a nice distinction of those different parts arises a great parts arises a great part of the beauty of style.

I don't want to throw that out completely because there might be something in it that expressed in different terms might differentiate between language intended as art and that with a purely functional role but language intended as art doesn't benefit from being restricted to the first of Johnson's binary opposites there. That he and his age thought as much might explain why from his time and for maybe a couple of hundred years afterwards, much of the poetry written seems 'a bit much' and at times unreadable at any length to us now. He seemed to find Donne a bit vulgar and I'm sure he'd find Larkin equally so if he had the chance to read him.

But one can still admire Johnson without agreeing with him. Times have changed. If Bach said he wrote music SDG, Soli Deo Gloria - For the Glory of God Alone, that doesn't prevent us from appreciating it.  

It's not easy to take to Dryden or his poems, which was as expected, but Johnson writing about him is an entertainment in itself and so the 100 pages on Pope should be worth a look before returning the Lives of the Poets, a Selection to Portsmouth libraries and hope that I'm not the last to ever trouble to read it.