LYRIC AND THE ART OF PERSUASION

The early modern period is marked by a great variety of lyric practices and definitions of lyric. This chapter begins by discussing the major influence of the Petrarchan tradition on English lyric in the sixteenth century. The courtly lyric is characterised by rhetorical display rather than ‘personal’ feeling, and it also depends heavily upon a performance element. The chapter then considers more explicit versions of lyric performance, such as dramatic soliloquy and the metaphysical lyric of John Donne. (The central relationship between poetry and song in the Elizabethan period is examined in Chapter 6.) The chapter goes on to trace the development of the Ode, including the Horatian, the Pindaric, elegy and hymn, in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and ends by tracing the gradual move towards the Romantic conception of lyric in the later eighteenth century. Despite the differences between these forms of lyric, they consistently present a speaker who embarks on a process of persuasion. In the previous chapter, we saw how the ritual and communal

functions of mainly anonymous medieval lyrics offered a sharp

contrast to later ideas of an individual consciousness that speaks through the poem. As Lindley argues, the modern distinctions between lyric and narrative, and between the poet speaking ‘directly’ and the poet speaking through a persona, would have been unrecognisable to medieval and early modern poets. In the early modern period, the notion of an unmediated lyric voice speaking is also largely absent: the ‘personal’ voice of the lyric is explicitly a product of rhetorical devices. As Stephen Greenblatt has argued, rather than developing a unique or inimitable poetic voice, court poets are ‘as much written by their conventional lyric as writers of them’ (Greenblatt 1980: 139). Lyric practice, and the construction of a poetic voice by poets trained in rhetoric, such as Wyatt and Donne, is governed by ‘a habit of mind which saw language as an instrument of persuasion, and poetry as a branch of epideictic rhetoric, a means of instruction through praise or blame’ (Lindley 1990: 192). Renaissance poets have a clear sense of audience and conditions of address, and in almost all poetry of the period, ‘there is a self-conscious, public dimension’ (ibid.). While a modern idea of the self is clearly in formation in lyric texts of the sixteenth century, manuscripts circulated among small groups of friends, and poems were written in praise of patrons or influential figures and could function as a strategy for self-advancement. While lyric was ascribed a serious role in the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries, it was also often regarded as a relatively minor poetic genre. Tottel’s 1557 Miscellany provided a model for rival collections in the Tudor period, such as George Turberville’s Epigrams, Songs, Epitaphes and Sonets (1567) and George Gascoigne’s A Hundredth Sundrie Flowers (1573), which stressed the moral and civic aims rather than the metaphysical or psychological dimensions of lyric (Waller 1993: 81). Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry (1595) emphasises the epideictic and morally instructive purposes of lyric: the lyric poet ‘with his tuned lyre and well-accorded voice, giveth praise, the reward of virtue, to virtuous acts; gives moral precepts, and natural problems … sometimes raiseth up his voice to the height of the heavens, in singing the lauds of the immortal God’ (Sidney 1965: 118). In contrast, Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poetry (1589) depicts lyric as the ‘meanest sort’ of poetry, ‘used for recreation only’ (Waller 1993: 70). In the

seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, lyric was subjected to similarly contradictory valuations. As we shall see later in this chapter, it was associated with ‘higher’ public forms, such as the ode, but many of its manifestations were relegated to the status of entertainment and diversion. Joshua Poole, writing in 1657, sees the lyric genre as encompassing ‘Madrigals, Sonnets, Hymns, Ballets, Odes, whereof some are amorous, some rural, some military, some jovial, made for drollery and drinking’ (Curran 1986: 24-25). In an echo of Aristotle’s hierarchy, whereby lyric is an interlude in the drama and also subordinate to epic, Thomas Hobbes declares that lyrics ‘are but essays and parts of an entire poem’ (Whitmore 1918: 586). Yet, as Gary Waller observes, the very qualities that left lyric at

the bottom of Puttenham’s poetic hierarchy in the late sixteenth century are precisely those that attract the modern reader to the poetry of Wyatt, Sidney, Donne and others. Schooled in close reading techniques deployed in the classroom, and influenced by the Romantic definition of lyric, readers now seize on shorter early modern poems for their privileging of passionate, exquisite personal feeling. These moments of poetic intensity and apparent intimacy prove an attractive alternative to longer poems such as The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, which present major challenges to the contemporary reader. Lyric in the period was perceived as the pastime of the amateur, and this apparent lack of seriousness would seem to confirm the habitual view of lyric as timeless and unworldly, remote from historical conflict. Yet it is the proximity of lyric to the major struggles for power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – whether in the court, in wider political life, or in the religious conflicts of the period – that demands our attention. As Waller argues: ‘Despite its apparent superficiality and marginal social role the lyric was uncannily able to articulate the significance of the complex relations between language and power, literary text and social text’ (Waller 1993: 73).