[New-Poetry] Taking Kooser's measure

[David Bircumshaw]

I wasa using historical shorthand, Robin, point was that the serious decline
in Donne's reputation was in the C18, yup it began in the Reformation, but
that was because people like JD were considered old-fashioned, that was a
period that, like our own, used to re-write Bill to make him 'contemporary'
(our word). For sure C19 official taste didn't pick up on him either, but
I'd be wary of saying that reflected actual reading, I think I've told you
this, one day, about 10 years ago, when Leicester used to have real
bookshops, I came across a copy of GH's 'The Temple' inscribed by a
gentleman to his lady in the 1870's, point is that the Metaphysicals were
still read, if subterreaneanly to the view of official culture.
Btw it wasn't Eliot who re-invented or authorised Donne, it was Herbert
Grierson. You can though, as of now, see just how official culture works, in
the flood of celebrations on radio and TV of the centenary of the birth of
John Betjeman.

gawd help us all

Grinning in the Gutter

Dave


----- Original Message -----
From: "Robin" <robin.hamilton2 at btinternet.com>
To: "NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &amp;Views"
<new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2006 11:49 PM
Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Taking Kooser's measure


> dave bircumshaw says:
>
> > Now, now, Roger. Donne has not only just been dug out of the wood pile,
as
> > you well know, for sure, in the Augustan period, with its one style
> > hegemony, he was seriously out of fashion, but that was an age that had
> > Dryden as its dubious literary god and forebear, not that the
> > double-dealing
> > bays couldn't write, but ...
>
> And you're wrong too, mate.  Wasn't just the Augustans.  Dryden,
> pre-Augustan to start with, and early Augustan at best, was as you note
> already sceptical about Donne, and for the Romantics (except Coleridge)
and
> the Victorians (except Browning) he might as well not have existed.
>
> He's out of sight and out of mind between Dryden and Eliot.
>
> (The only poem by "Donne" in the all-too-successful attempt by Palgrave to
> stamp the image of Tennyson across the face of English poetry wasn't, in
> fact, by Donne, and is dropped in the second edition.  Blake, as a matter
of
> related interest, gradually accumulates more poems in the course of the --
> is it three? -- editions of +The Golden Treasury+ published while Palgrave
> was alive.)
>
> The odd thing isn't that Sam Johnson only mentions him in +The Lives of
the
> Poets+ under the rubric of Cowley, but that Johnson goes out of his way to
> mention him at all.  Johnson was working to a remit of lives of all those
> poets that the consortium of London booksellers at the time knew would
sell,
> and Donne wasn't one.  Johnson, bless him, sneaks notice of Donne in
through
> the back door.
>
> Didn't do any good at the time -- Donne still had to wait for another
> hundred and more years before he was let in out of the cold.
>
> Robin
>
>
>
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