‘We live in mental representations of the past’, said Wallace Stevens, which might itself appear a very ‘Romantic’ way of looking at things; and ‘Romanticism’ is one of those representations. We live in mental representations of the present too of course, though, as it happens ‘Romantic’ was not a representation that would have seemed important to the ‘Romantics’ themselves: in English letters it is a retrospective category. ‘Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats did not regard themselves as writing“romantic” poems’, Ian Jack observes, ‘and would not – in fact – have been particularly flattered if they had been told that that was what they were doing.’ The word is current within the period, as it still is, in the sense that Johnson’s Dictionary offers (‘resembling the tales of romances’) before moving on to more judgmental uses, both negative (‘Improbable; false’) and more positive (‘Fanciful; full of wild scenery’) – as in the ‘deep romantic chasm which slanted / Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover’ from ‘Kubla Khan’ (lines 12–13). Jack judiciously omits Coleridge from his list of authors for Coleridge did think of some of his poems as ‘romantic’, and not without pride: he recollected his planned contribution to Lyrical Ballads as poems ‘directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic’. But the word as used at the time is hardly a key to the intricacies of the age: it lacks the implicit ‘structure of dogma’ that William Empson identifies as the heart of a ‘complex word’.

This chapter focuses on the works of three post-Romantic poets who present, in their poetry, markedly individual responses to and versions of crises troubling Victorian culture. Emily Brontë appears in Arnold’s ‘Haworth Churchyard’ as one of a band of ‘Unquiet souls’ (line 134), an elegiac salute to the famous close of Wuthering Heights. Writing in free ‘pindarics’, that is, lines that are unrhymed, varying in their number of stresses and arranged in verse paragraphs of differing lengths, Arnold conveys a knotty admiration for the deceased Emily Brontë. ‘(How shall I sing her?)’, his tribute begins in puzzled parentheses, ‘whose soul / Knew no fellow for might, / Passion, vehemence, grief, / Daring, since Byron died’ (lines 93–6). The swaying enjambments and piled-up nouns suggest that Arnold is pulled towards a force from which he seeks to protect himself. Brontë, for Arnold, might be an example of the fate of genius in a ‘Baffled’ culture which had lost its bearings, as she ‘sank / Baffled, unknown, self-consumed; / Whose too bold dying song / Stirred, like a clarion-blast, my soul’ (lines 97–100). The male poet’s soul answers Brontë’s soul at the ends of respective lines across this passage, which alludes to the dead poet’s ‘No Coward Soul is Mine’, a poem which shares with Arnold’s and Clough’s work a sense of disillusion with the ‘thousand creeds / That move men’s hearts’ (lines 9–10), dismissed as ‘unutterably vain’ (line 10).

No doubt, Arnold found ‘too bold’ Brontë’s remarkable invoking of the ‘God within my breast‘ (line 5), an address that flowers out of the pantheism of Wordsworth and the atheism of Shelley, even though, as published in 1850, the boldness of her poem was toned down by the editing of her sister Charlotte. For Brontë’s exultant visionary inwardness, Arnold – also slipping the moorings of traditional belief – substitutes a sense of living through a cultural malaise, reproaching himself and his generation, in ‘The Scholar- Gipsy’, as ‘Light half-believers of our casual creeds’ (line 172).

The Northern Irish Renaissance that brought Seamus Heaney and other poets to prominence in Belfast in the 1960s has been much debated, but another story might begin in Dublin in the 1960s with the meeting at Trinity College of Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Eavan Boland. As Northern Protestants, Mahon and Longley found confirmation of their own complicated sense of belonging in the poetry of Louis MacNeice, while Boland, as a Catholic in the Republic, sought space for her voice in a culture of female passivity and in a poetic tradition still dominated by W. B. Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh. In the intellectual ferment in Dublin in the 1960s, the three poets would share a deep and sustaining interest in the classics and in modern European and American literature, drawing on these resources in ways that would reshape and redirect contemporary Irish poetry. This would be a well-travelled, international poetry. Mahon’s work would be written in London and New York, but also reflect upon his time in France and Italy; Longley would return to Belfast, but also draw inspiration from summers spent in Mayo and from memories of a visit to Japan; and Boland, having already spent part of her childhood in London, would eventually settle in California.

For Mahon and Longley, the replenishment of the imagination through the contemplation of isolated landscapes and seascapes became a salutary and necessary activity as sectarian violence disrupted any secure sense of attachment to Ulster. Poetry might be elevated and energised by a bold encounter with the ferocious political energies of the Troubles, but in such a precarious context it also ran the risk of exhaustion and extinction.

In 1934, in common with thirty-nine other poets, Laura Riding was sent six questions by the editor of New Verse, Geoffrey Grigson. A collection of responses, hers among them, were published in the magazine on 11 October. Grigson’s final question was: ‘As a poet what distinguishes you, do you think, from an ordinary man?’ Riding responds: ‘As a poet I am distinguished from ordinary men, first, in that I am a woman’. She goes on: ‘poetry has been a male cult – where the mysteries were verse-rehearsals in sublimity. Those practice days are, however, over: poetry is now a direct matter.’ Nervelessly confirming herself as the only ‘other-than-male voic[e]’, she concludes drily, ‘But one woman goes a long way – in any capacity.’

Both the eldest and the longest-lived of the three poets treated here, the American-born Riding can be said to have gone a long way in various respects. As Robert Nye testifies, this vital poet – first published in 1923 – was still writing a matter of weeks before she died aged ninety in 1991. Her partnership with Robert Graves, which began in the twenties and ceased as World War II threatened, afforded her lasting fame in literary circles, although she would never achieve Graves’s stature. However, as most commentators emphasise, Riding earned widespread respect on both sides of the Atlantic for the influence she exerted on English poetry and letters between the wars. This extended beyond her productive collaboration with Graves on the Seizin Press, the publishing house they co-founded in 1928 and ran from their Mallorcan home until 1938; Epilogue, the journal they set up and co-edited; and several co-authored critical works, not least A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927), the project that first brought Riding over to England at Graves’s urging. There was also Riding’s own critical writing, including The Word Woman, which, Elizabeth Friedmann and Alan J. Clark note, anticipated Simone de Beauvoir by almost two decades.

The last twenty years have been marked by a surge of access to writings by and about Romantic women poets. Specialised anthologies, starting with Roger Lonsdale’s 1989 Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology, have followed each other in quick succession, while the more general anthologies have greatly increased their intake of Romantic women poets. The Brown University Women Writers project textbase and databases such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Literature Online, and others, have facilitated access to texts in ways which were barely conceivable thirty years ago. With the availability of primary texts we have also seen an increase in scholarly editions, well-annotated selections, critical studies and major new biographies. Greatly expanded bibliographical tools (Literature Online, the MLA Database) are useful aids for surveying the field. All of these materials, the improved methods of access and the myriad possibilities of specialised searches highlight the quantity, quality and versatility of women poets of the Romantic period. Technological and editorial enhancements have made it possible to study women poets alongside or in dialogue with male poets, and to think about them in their contemporary literary, cultural and political contexts, thereby integrating them into the larger world of letters.

A major reason for the neglect of Romantic women poets in the twentieth century may be attributed to a radical shift of sensibility in the arts towards a more elitist, Modernist aesthetic. A female sensibility which centred on extended professions of grief became over time associated with overindulgence in unearned emotion. The over-exposure, the surfeit of similar poems and by contrast, the masculinist, more minimalist aesthetic of Modernism with its self-consciously iconoclastic experimentation, all contributed to the waning of interest in the Romantic women poets.

Dryden’s description of Chaucer as the ‘Father of English Poetry’ and Puttenham’s demarcation of late fourteenth-century English poetry as a ‘first age’ have had varied fortunes in recent histories of poetry. Although Chaucer’ sobriquet was roundly defended on the occasion of his sexcentenary, the ‘age of Chaucer’ and ‘Ricardian poetry’, key terms for the New Critics, have yielded to more varied and nuanced periodisations. However, there remain indisputable grounds for regarding the contribution of Chaucer and certain of his contemporaries as foundational in the history of English poetry, and for viewing the late fourteenth century as a distinctive and crucial literary period. Late fourteenth-century England produced the first English poetry that has continued to be read, and responded to, throughout all subsequent periods. We have incontrovertible evidence that the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower and the author of Piers Plowman (whom, following tradition, I shall call William Langland), all composed in the last three, perhaps four, decades of the fourteenth century, has never since fallen out of sight. This chapter outlines the opportunities and constraints that attended the making of poetry in English in the later fourteenth century, and explores the ways in which Chaucer, Gower and Langland responded to them. The final section of the chapter briefly turns to the legacy of these poets and the story of how they first became recognised as founders of a tradition of English poetry.

Several models of composition were available to and valued in late fourteenth-century England. None of these models was English. The metres and figures of the classical poets were transmitted as part of education in grammar and rhetoric. Schoolboys were required to compose Latin verse on set themes in prescribed metres. Valorised models of vernacular composition were available in French and Italian. The nobility and their servants moved in a multilingual environment where French was the language of polite intercourse, diplomacy and letters. War, diplomacy and marriage were among the circumstances that provided for the dissemination of French poetry in England.

Scope and approach

‘And Question five is, God help us, what is my definition of Poetry?’ So Dylan Thomas wrote in 1951 in response to conundrums posed by a student. Among his answers is a reminder of ‘the mystery of having been moved by words’, a ‘mystery’, not a mystification, to which subsequent pages in this volume bear witness, and which coexists with poetry’s ability to provide greater clarification of the human condition. The poet, writes Yeats, ‘is part of his own phantasmagoria and we adore him because nature has grown intelligible, and by so doing a part of our creative power’. The phrasing here may be consciously on its stilts, its affirmations unashamedly ready to disconcert, even to embarrass, but Yeats comes close to smoking out the essence of the hold possessed by poets over their readers.

The poets discussed in this Cambridge History of English Poetry often exercise ways of making ‘nature … intelligible’ that add to their readers’ sense of ‘creative power’. Milton using word-play, paradox and affecting rhythmic intensity to overcome mortality in Lycidas as he describes his drowned fellow poet as having ‘sunk low, but mounted high, / Through the dear might of him that walked the waves’ (lines 172–3); Coleridge making personification a means of mesmerically conveying tragic futility at the close of the reversed sonnet ‘Work without Hope’; Ted Hughes inventively exploiting rhyme and line-endings to evoke how ‘a black- / Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly’ in ‘Wind’ (lines 15–16): the three examples give a taste of how English poetry embodies and irradiates ‘creative power’.

Whether a lyric poem is addressed to a friend, to a lover or to God, its most intimate relationship of all is with the second person singular. It provides, or purports to provide, a privileged glimpse into the speaker’s private thoughts, which are sometimes the writer’s own; but its attention to personal address also has the effect of directing attention away from the poet. For this and other reasons, it defies easy distinctions between private and public. The following chapter will examine a number of issues arising from this continuum, each of which has a particular relevance to seventeenth-century conditions. What does it mean to write with God as your implied reader, in an age so conscious of the difference between religious denominations? How do coteries act to provide a halfway house between an audience of two and a wider, undifferentiated public, and how do the conditions of manuscript circulation reinforce this? How do writers of this era perform, celebrate and fictionalise relationships with their forebears, their contemporaries and their addressees? How did the Civil War inspire poets’ injunctions towards public action, or celebrations of the retired life?

The career of the first poet to be considered, George Herbert, has often been read as epitomising a retreat from public to private. Beginning with Herbert’s first biographer Izaak Walton, commentators on Herbert’s life have noted a seeming imbalance between the glittering prizes of his early years – Public Orator at Cambridge, Member of Parliament – and his modest latter-day role as a parish priest. Walton, and some subsequent biographers, have seen this move towards religious retirement as prompted in the first instance by a failure of worldly hopes. But looking at his English literary remains – the Latin ones tell a rather different story – Herbert’s commitment to religious devotion and devotional writing does coexist with a certain intolerance of secular activity.

On the evening of 17 July 1914, Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell faced each other from opposite ends of a long dinner-table in the Dieu-donné restaurant in London. The occasion brought together most of the poets included earlier that year in the anthology Pound had titled (in pseudo-French) Des Imagistes: H.D., Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint, Allen Upward and Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), among others. The celebratory feeling turned to ritual toasts, but the accomplishments of Imagism(e) gave way in short course to questions about its very identity. Hueffer confessed that he was ignorant of what an Imagist was, or could possibly be (even so, he professed his doubts that Lowell qualified as one). Upward joked that all it took to be an ‘Imagist’ was to be named one by Pound. Aldington then objected that Imagism certainly existed, but only in the signal instance of H.D. (his wife), whose work discovered its proper company, not among the members of the contemporary avant-garde (the Vorticists had also gathered in the Dieu-donné), but with classical prosodists, with archaic Greek poetry in particular.

The scene survives as an emblem of Imagism and, as a narrative for literary history, its parabolic fable. Here Pound and Lowell, sometimes behaving politely in public but usually not, face off in a test of strength for control over an initiative whose identity remains indeterminate. Any representative anthology of Imagism would reflect this uncertainty, showing more as a miscellany than a coherence. Even within the (assignably) Imagist oeuvre of individual poets the inconsistency is striking. Hueffer alternates a verse of horrible doggerel (as bad as the worst barrack-room ballad) with poems of exquisite urban impressionism. Aldington shifts from the songs of a neo- Hellenic ritual myth, which are remarkably adequate to a feeling of ‘primitive’ simplicity and impersonality, to lyrics of the sheerest personal grievance only a few rhythmic beats away from prosaic complaint.

Hughes and Heaney in one chapter? Various arguments to do with nationality or poetic fashion might lead one to expect, let us say, Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn, or Seamus Heaney and Patrick Kavanagh. Indeed, the former coupling was promoted by Faber, who published both Gunn and Hughes in a well-known and much-used joint selection. In retrospect, as we shall see, the combination seems less plausible than it once did. But interpretations which assume the dominance of a cultural and national framework are destined to inaccuracy and limitation. The structure of publishing arrangements and the reading habits of poets in Britain and Ireland from the 1960s to now are such that one simply cannot take the first steps in accounting for poetic relationships and influence without looking at the two countries together. And while there is now some evidence that Ireland as a whole is looking more and more to America, the period with which we are concerned in this chapter was characterised by the substantial overlap of matters poetic in Ireland and Britain – including in the question of what American poets to read. Hughes was an acknowledged influence on Heaney, and became a good friend. Heaney, like Hughes, was published by what was then unquestionably Britain’s premier poetry publisher, Faber. Together, they edited one of the most popular and influential poetry anthologies of the late twentieth century, The Rattle Bag (Faber, 1982). Hughes was always interested in Celtic mythology and folklore, and most of all in Ireland and Irish literature. Both poets understood and drew inspiration from the traditional life of country people, and from the way nature was encountered by them.

In Shakespeare’s early comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Proteus offers Thurio, his rival for Silvia’s favour, some advice on the art of seduction:

There is no doubt the dullard Thurio needs a lesson or two in lovemaking. The above tutorial, however, is offered by one of Shakespeare’s most perfidious lovers. Proteus has himself fallen in love with Silvia, whom he attempts to woo in Act 4 Scene 2. He is met with a frosty response: ‘Thou subtile, perjur’d, false, disloyal man … I despise thee for thy wrongful suit’ (4.2.95, 102). The Two Gentlemen of Verona was written in the 1590s when the vogue for sonnets in England was at its height, and Proteus’s speech captures something of the energy, intensity and artfulness of this brief but important episode in the history of English poetry. Sonnets had developed by this time into a powerful vehicle for exploring the psyche, articulating inward experience and capturing the cadences of emotional turbulence. Usually written in the first person, they offered an opportunity for confessional utterance, each ‘feeling line’ promising to reveal what Proteus calls passionate ‘integrity’ (3.2.75–6). At the same time, however, and thanks to the demands posed by their inflexible form, Elizabethan sonnets are often astonishingly ‘composed’, or contrived, despite their appearance of spontaneity, and are always self-conscious about their mode of expression. They may be spoken by a Proteus whose very name declares his faithlessness; they may be fictionalised, ventriloquised, rehearsed, performed, studied or borrowed.

Byron’s Don Juan begins with disarming directness: ‘I want a hero’ (1.1) and, a few lines later, names this hero as ‘our ancient friend Don Juan’ (1.1). Such a Chaucerian opening is unlike that of any of the great Romantic long poems and, critically, it has never sat easily alongside them.

Don Juan is direct and it does disarm but it relies on multiple indirectnesses to achieve this sustained candour. The relation between directness and indirectness, and between declared improvisation and declared planning, forms the art and life of the poem. In its first published version, the briefest of epigraphical overtures tells us that the poem takes such relationships as its Horatian foundation: ‘difficile est proprie communia dicere’, which Byron himself translated as ‘’tis no slight task to write on common things.’

That is not how the present reader encounters the poem. Depending on the edition, we will find a series of competing overtures before we reach the main text. Some of these were withdrawn by Byron with or against his better judgment; one was unwittingly omitted. Taken together, they invite the reader to make certain helpful presumptions both in what they say, and in the reasons for their omission. We can begin with them.

The lyric poetry of the mid eighteenth century has traditionally been hard to locate in literary history as anything other than transitional, as ‘post-Augustan’ or ‘pre-Romantic’, as decline or anticipation. It has struggled to establish a critical vocabulary in which it can be judged on its own terms. Pinned between the canonical achievements of Dryden-Pope on the one side and Wordsworth-Coleridge on the other, this poetry has often been used to further other agendas, to play a ‘minor’ role in reinforcing ‘major’ achievements, or to exemplify an individual eccentricity. But such tired ‘survey course’ arguments have now begun to look very limited. The old categories need to be set aside, and these poets be allowed to set their own agenda. The challenge is to find critical perspectives that will do justice to them as individual poets while acknowledging their contemporaneity and suggesting lines of connection between them. It should also be possible, through them, to question some of the traditional criteria for literary judgment. These two trajectories will help to guide the discussion that follows.

Thomas Gray (1716–71), William Collins (1721–59), the Warton brothers, Thomas (1728–90) and Joseph (1722–1800), Christopher Smart (1722–71), James Macpherson (1736–96), Thomas Chatterton (1752–70) and Robert Burns (1759–96) offer as wide a range of voices as any group of poets in history; but there are ways in which they can gain from being discussed together. To take one extreme example: the lyric lamentations of Macpherson’s Ossian, the third-century bard who sings in his melancholy rhythmical prose of fallen heroes and a doomed race, could not be more different from Burns’s catchy rhymes, satirically edged and interspersed with responsive tavern laughter or drawing-room applause. Yet each is capturing a mood and is conscious of projecting an expressive, strongly characterised voice that carries the poem so as to reach the heart of the listener. Both are in their very different ways, lyric performances.

From the very beginning of his career, Arthur Miller has engaged with the critical enterprise, but perhaps even more interestingly he has himself been a relentless and passionate critic, in all of his plays, of the human social and psychological condition, and has consistently ascribed a high value to that critical engagement. In fact, Miller’s is a remarkably diverse yet tautly consistent group of major works that have made him, without doubt, the major American dramatic writer of his time, perhaps of the twentieth century. And yet, perhaps not surprisingly, given the nature of the expectations of American theatre audiences, Miller’s critical reception, particularly in his native America, has been mixed, at times downright hostile; Miller has irked critics from the beginning of his career and continues to do so, and it is precisely this irksomeness, along with his relentless will to excavate his own and the general human psyche and to place his discoveries into hypotheses about the human experience that draw broad (and often very critical) conclusions, that make his plays so compelling and powerful. “Great drama,” he declares, “is great questions or it is nothing but technique.” It is this notion of “great questions” that Miller has been most interested to explore, throughout his work. Though many of his plays show a flexibility of form, Miller has on the whole not been primarily interested in attempts at radical innovation in form, or indeed in content, but despite this relative conservatism in an experimental age, most evident in his rigorous and prevailing belief in structure, content, and meaningful communication, Miller has energetically explored a committed liberal humanist agenda, whose great questions are always critical ones, frequently working against the grain of prevailing taste, both critical and public.

There is, of course, no essential reason why our playwrights should also be our novelists, or vice versa. Certainly many of our fi nest writers – from Henry Fielding and Aphra Behn to Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens, from Oscar Wilde and Anton Chekhov to Samuel Beckett and Max Frisch – have made fine use of the double traffic, stepping from page to stage as the occasion demanded, the artistic stimulation prompted, the theatrical opportunity came. Some of our best novelists have been among our very best playwrights; some of our fi nest dramatists have excellently exploited the loose baggy monsterdom of the novel. Equally there have been a good number of major writers who failed with the alliance. A notable example was Henry James, whose unfortunate adventures in theatre at the start of the 1890s, when disillusionment with the novel led him to write various plays, including the costume-drama Guy Domville (promptly booed off the stage), cost us several important late fictional works from the Master – or so we like to believe.

Of the great Western poets, Luis Vaz de Camões (c. 1524-80) remains the least known outside his native land, and, of the premier Western epics, his Os Lusíadas (1572) has the unenviable distinction of continuing to be poetry's best-kept secret. Yet a century and a half after the Portuguese poet's death Voltaire named him the 'Portuguese Virgil', and the nineteenth century, valuing the history and biography embodied in the poem, called him the 'Portuguese Plutarch'. Camões has always had the respect of poets and critics. His poetic eminence was noted by poets such as Torquato Tasso, Góngora, and Goethe, and the dramatist Lope de Vega. In the twentieth century Erich Auerbach called the Lusíadas 'the most beautiful epic of the Iberian Peninsula'. It is 'the great epic of the ocean', he adds, 'which sings of Vasco da Gama's voyage around Africa and the Portuguese colonization of the Indies'. The Lusíadas is universally taken as Portugal's national epic, celebrating the voyages of discovery that, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, made that country a great maritime and imperial power. The 'Lusíadas' of the title are the sons or people of Lusus (the legendary founder of the province the Romans had named Lusitania), that is to say, the Portuguese.