The Earlier Seventeenth Century Flashcards
Donne and Jonson were both 27 at the turn of the century; the two figures would take different paths of departure (both influential) from the previous period. But they were united by their departure from the ….. of the Elizabethans. They moved toward….
Flowing amplitude; toward a compressed, concise, more charged style, perhaps best characterized as epigrammatic.
Early 17th-c. appreciation for epigram likely arose from
Growing knowledge of the Greek canon; the way this was incorporated into university and school education.
Jonson and the Metaphysicals alike tend to use a dramatic voice that is intellectually acute, and quick to impart intimate thoughts. Intimate speech entails…
low or plain diction.
One of the chief features of Donne’s poetry, and that of his best imitators, that the figures are organized around
A single dominating idea, or conceit (concetto; ‘device’)
How are Donne’s conceits very different from the Spenserian or Shakespearean type?
They bring things together that are primarily unlike, so the comparison seems far-fetched, unpoetic, novel. Second, a single set of tenor items usually matches a single set of vehicle items. (Perhaps compare Shakespeare’s “My Mistress’ Eyes are Nothing…” where the tenor jumps from vehicle to vehicle)
Analyze: “you must sit down, says Love, and tste my meat.”
The doctrine of love (milk before meat), but also the communion host–“take, eat, this is my body.” There’s an unostentatious quietness belying the horrific word play in “my meat.” There’s also a slight taste of irony, if we are thinking of Catholic transubstantiation.
Ben Jonson (1572-1637) usually rejects the Metaphysical way of…
pretending to think aloud ‘spontaneously,’ preferring the sincerer fiction of one who openly makes a poem.
One of the great innovations of the 17th c. was to revive the georgic, neglected by Elizabethans and sometimes not even considered poetry. Describe georgics.
A loose conception of digressive poetry in the poet’s own voice, instructing in arts or morals, describing landscape, or recommending the good life of retirement.
One of the great innovations of the 17th c. was to revive the georgic, neglected by Elizabethans and sometimes not even considered poetry. What sources were used for models in this revival?
Several sources: Virgil’s Georgics or Hesiod’s Works and Days, and other didactic classics.
What might Dr Johnson and Dryden have disliked in Donne’s poetry, say, Songs and Sonnets?
Impurity of kinds: Songs and Sonnets often feel like elegies compressed and sharpened into something epigrammatic. Its diction may have also seemed to low for its figures. Finally, an epigrammatic compression could be thought to put too much pressure on the syntax for poems meant to move the emotions.
The 17th-c’s epigrammatic transformation was “a revolution in literature,” leaving a lasting inheritance. What did it achieve?
New closeness of texture, economy of language; it is the density many have come to expect from literature. It also included the idea of a single, flexible style that can be applied to almost any subject. Before the 17th century only the epigram was subject-free; since, much of poetry has come to be so. (Cf epithalamion, pastoral, etc.)
Senecan prose was an influence in the 17th c. It is
terse, pregnant, majestic, oracular. Rejects the Ciceronian rhetoric of longwinded superfluity and affected ornament.
17th-c. Senecan or Attic prose had two contrasting styles; name and describe
Loose and Curt. Loose keeps the fluency of CIceronian style, but adds naturalness and spontaneous changes of direction. Easy, colloquial, plain. Curt style is pointed and compressed. (From the copresence of these sprang many of the individual effects we admire in 17th-c. prose.)
Bacon’s prose is marked by ….
Compression: maxims, aphorisms and the moral ‘sentences’ popularly used as inscriptions.
Bacon’s syntactic style is
Paratactic; juxtaposing
