SOURCE: Gilbert, Jack G. “Waller's View of Art and His Place in English Literature.” In Edmund Waller, pp. 109-40, Boston: Twayne, 1979.

[In the following essay, Gilbert discusses the influence of the myth of Orpheus on Waller's aesthetic and analyzes the reception of his work by his contemporaries and by present-day commentators.]

I WALLER'S VIEW OF ART

A. THE ORPHIC FORCES

Little attention need to be paid to the commendatory verses which good nature prompted him [Waller] to address to such of his friends as were authors,” wrote G. Thorn-Drury in his brief commentary on the poetry.¹ For several reasons I believe the judgment to be wrong. Waller wrote a number of poems to and about artists: “To Mr. Henry Lawes,” “To Mr. George Sandys,” “To Vandyck,” “Upon Ben Jonson,” “To Sir William Davenant,” “To His Worthy Friend, Master Evelyn,” “Upon the Earl of Roscommon's Translation of Horace.” Reflections upon art are a persistent theme in diverse poems throughout his career; and, as I shall try to show in the second part of this chapter, his poems to artists and about art elucidate his position in English literature.

Still another reason may be adduced as refutation of Thorn-Drury's dismissal of the poems to authors (and, as the topic naturally broadens, about art). Waller is essentially a poet of powers. Either every subject is a potent agency, or he discovers potency in it—whether a beautiful woman, a king, the British navy, a work of art, God. Their virtue (or power) is their capacity to affect, to move. Poetry, rhetoric, all arts, thus regarded in terms of their impact, naturally appear analogous to persons who amaze by means of some characteristic—beauty, nobility, power. A poem about such a person is a curious replication of his effect in the real world. Art imitates nature in its effects, which are most analogous to the effects of art.

Orpheus and Amphion are the mythic loci of the “powers”—the power of art, artists, ladies, political leaders.² Waller's interest in their myths is almost exclusively in what with music they effected,³ just as audience impact is his major concern in art. In most of his poems he directly or indirectly teases with ideas of the relationships among diverse powers of art and nature. Consider a poem that is perfectly representative and that was probably written about the time of the “Panegyric” on Cromwell:

“OF A TREE CUT IN PAPER”

Fair hand! that can on virgin paper write,
Yet from the stain of ink preserve it white;
Whose travel o'er that silver field does show
Like track of leverets in morning snow.
Love's image thus in purest minds is wrought,
Without a spot or blemish to the thought.
Strange that your fingers should the pencil foil,
Without the help of colours or of oil!
For though a painter boughs and leaves can make,
'Tis you alone can make them bend and shake;
Whose breath salutes your new-created grove,
Like southern winds, and makes it gently move.
Orpheus could make the forest dance; but you
Can make the motion and the forest too.
A poet's fancy when he paints a wood,
By his own nation only understood,
Is as in language so in fame confined;
Not like to yours, acknowledged by mankind.
All that know Nature and the trees that grow,
Must praise the foliage expressed by you,
Whose hand is read wherever there are men:
So far the scissor goes beyond the pen.

The poem charms in spite of its almost absurd compliment; indeed the challenge to the poet is to present that lady's art form as, paradoxically, the ultimate one. Waller's ingenuity, the poet's fine scissors work, is to discover argument, application, image which prove the superiority of her metier. First is the innocence that nevertheless creates; paper is wrought, without stain, into art, with the implication of superiority to literature, which involves a stain on the virgin sheet. The image of leverets in the snow identifies her art with the agency of nature, while the next couplet (comparing her art to chaste ideas of love) makes a connection with transcending Platonic forms, beyond nature. The rest of the poem (7-22) consists of more direct comparisons to other kinds of artists. The central device is a chiasmus or double turn (Puttenham's antimetabole) on the idea make-image and move-image. The superiority to written art (established earlier in the poem) is extended to painting, which the lady-artist outdoes by being able not only to make trees but also to move them (by blowing or shaking). Orpheus could move but not make trees. Last, the lady's art exceeds the poet's for here is a universal language, understood by “All that know Nature and the trees that grow.”

Of course it is Waller the poet whose art discovers or creates such all-powerful significance in the lady's craft. In such a poem, as in “lapidary inscriptions” (to borrow Johnson's authority), “a man is not upon oath.” The subject is slight, the tone gallant, but ironic. The poet's devices imply a thorough subjectivity and intellectual sleight-of-hand. The reader, the poet, and the lady know that the magnification is specious, but the awareness does not undercut the lady's, nor the poet's, serious intention and capability to delight with dainty craft. Also, if the images are reversed—Orpheus, poets, painters are like this slight artist—the irony turns full circle to the ultimate triviality and ephemerality of all art.

Confirmation of the presence of this theme exists in a sequel to the poem, the title of which explains the connection:

“TO A LADY, FROM WHOM HE RECEIVED THE FOREGOING COPY WHICH FOR MANY YEARS HAD BEEN LOST.”

Nothing lies hid from radiant eyes;
All they subdue become their spies.
Secrets, as choicest jewels, are
Presented to oblige the fair;
No wonder, then, that a lost thought
Should there be found, where souls are caught.
          The picture of fair Venus (that
For which men say the goddess sat)
Was lost, till Lely from your look
Again that glorious image took.
          If Virtue's self were lost, we might
From your fair mind new copies write.
All things but one you can restore;
The heart you get returns no more.

The lady's power now is the power to preserve art. The poet's lost poem is imagined as held in ideal form, by the lady: “No wonder, then, that a lost thought / Should there be found, where souls are caught.” A central image again relates the arts and nature: the painter Lely remakes the image of Venus from her. Thus she has served art in recapturing beauty—the beauty of the previous poem (a rather outdoing compliment of the poet to himself!); and she has the potentiality of furnishing, to art, ideas or forms of virtue, should they be lost. Last, the poet calls the reader's attention to the power of the lady's attractiveness, which is neatly presented as an antithetic limit on her powers of restoration.

The orphic understanding of art pervades Waller's poetry, early and late, especially (as noted earlier) the Sacharissa poems. “On My Lady Dorothy Sidney's Picture” gives the effect of looking at an object reflected through a series of opposed mirrors. The speaker discovers in the picture that Dorothy excels the representation of beauty in two heroines created by her famous great-uncle, Sir Philip Sidney. In his Arcadia, the pictures alone of the heroines, Philocla and Pamela, had been sufficient to inspire Pyrocles and Musidorus to love. In Waller's poem, Dorothy's picture (art) has the same effect on him, with the complimentary difference that her image embodies in one the beauty her kinsman could not reduce to fewer than two forms. In “fact” the niece accomplishes what art could not: “Just nature, first instructed by his thought, / In his own house thus practised what he taught; / This glorious piece transcends what he could think, / So much his blood is nobler than his ink!” Dorothy is a refutation of Sidney's aesthetic idealism: the brazen world exceeds the golden. Or, at any rate, the lady is so to understand. But her beauty is here (in the poem) represented; the poet invents the outdoing analogies, he uses the resources of Sidney's art in his own, so that, ironically, Sidney's aesthetic triumphs, after all, as the golden beauty of Dorothy is realized by the painting and in the poem.

“To Vandyck” seems to undercut the power of art, the lady more beautiful than her portrait.

Yet who can tax thy [Vandyck's] blameless skill,
Though thy good hand had failed still,
When nature's self so often errs?
She for this many thousand years
Seems to have practised with much care,
To frame the race of women fair;
Yet never could a perfect birth
Produce before to grave the earth,
Which waxed old ere it could see
Her that amazed thy art and thee.

The poet has found a cosmic solution to an apparent problem; the painter had needed several sittings—more than usual—for the portrait. In this, as revealed in the lines just quoted, he can be seen (honorifically) as simply imitating nature, which has struggled so long to bring forth such beauty. Also, gallantly, the speaker suggests the painter wanted more sittings in order to enjoy the lady's beauty—and thus by such craft to lose the reputation of mastery of his art: “Confess, and we'll forgive thee this; / For who would not repeat that bliss? / And frequent sight of such a dame / Buy with the hazard of his fame?” The poem begins and ends with emphasis on the power of art:

Rare Artisan, whose pencil moves
Not our delights alone, but loves!
                                                  O let me know
Where those immortal colours grow,
That could this deathless piece compose!
In lilies? or the fading rose?
No; for this theft thou has climbed higher
Than did Prometheus for his fire.

Again, slyly, in the images of the lilies and the fading rose, the poet insinuates a superiority of art, just as earlier he has for his own persuasive designs suggested an advantage in the painting—the lady is kinder there: “Fool! that forgets her stubborn look / This softness from thy [the painter's] finger took.” The application of Prometheus suggests, too, the greater power of artistry, while complimenting the lady. The painter had done the amazing deed, heroically finding the means to recreate the lady's beauty in more permanent form.

The first of two poems entitled “At Penshurst” (beginning “Had Sacharissa lived …”), attributes to the lady all the poetical powers of Orpheus and Amphion; her beauty, like art, is civilizing and harmonizing. She is a true niece of Sir Philip, on whose tree the humble poet carves his passion; and she is of such orphic worth that the speaker dares do no more than admire. The theme of the poem is a turn: a poet's niece and a poet's love have the virtues (powers) of the greatest poets. As noted earlier, these virtues Waller returns to himself in “The Story of Phoebus and Daphne, Applied,” for the lady's rejection causes him to reach an Apollonian fame: “All, but the nymph that should redress his wrong, / Attend his passion, and approve his song.”

In the second “At Penshurst” the orphic attributes transfer to the poet, whose power of song moves everything but the lady, who (with such poetic ancestry) should know how to respond. Nature hearkens now, not to her, but to him: “While in the park I sing, the listening deer / Attend my passion, and forget to fear. / When to the beeches I report my flame, / They bow their heads, as if they felt the same.” He skillfully applies orphic power to the conventions of the courtly situation: he hurts himself with his complaint:

Thy heart no ruder than the rugged stone,
I might, like Orpheus, with my numerous moan
Melt to compassion; now, my traitorous song
With thee conspires to do the singer wrong;
While thus I suffer not myself to lose
The memory of what augments my woes;
But with my own breath still foment the fire,
With flames as high as fancy can aspire!

The Sacharissa poems begin with the poet's accepting a challenge—to win a beautiful woman by the power of verse (by means of poetic beauty). The poetic context of the courtship affords many occasions for complex oppositions and turns on art and reality. A kind of competition between the beauty of woman versus the beauty of art proceeds first in the poet's ironic suggestion of the superiority of his craft, then to the poet's assumption of the powers, and concludes in a (temporary?) renunciation of poetry when its power becomes self-destructive, as Apollo counsels Waller to hang up his lute. Considered as a sequence of poems on a sustained theme, the Sacharissa poems are an account of the poet's falling in love with his craft.

B. MIMETIC ART, PLATONIC FORMS, AND THE GOLDEN WORLD OF POETRY

Waller very likely wrote his tribute to Jonson (“Upon Ben Jonson,” first published in Jonsonus Virbius in 1638) during his courtship of Sacharissa. It is a witty compliment derived from the mimetic theory of art; a central zeugma (“Whoever in those glasses looks, may find / The spots returned, or graces, of his mind”) unifies a fairly complex scheme of techniques including the familiar Wallerian turn, paradox, application. There is a slight parodic effect of Jonson's style, along with an impression that the poem is a bit “got up.” The theme is that Jonson is master of the greatest mimetic art—an art with the power to imitate the real world (of diverse experience) and the ideal world (of absolute value, in the forms of the mind). And in the real world Jonson has become the ideal poet:

Mirror of poets! mirror of our age!
Thou hast alone those various inclinations
Which Nature gives to ages, sexes, nations,
So traced with thy all-resembling pen,
That whate'er custom has imposed on men,
Is represented to the wondering eyes
Of all that see, or read, thy comedies.
Whoever in those glasses looks, may find
The spots returned, or graces, of his mind;
And by the help of so divine an art,
At leisure view, and dress, his nobler part.
Narcissus, cozened by that flattering well,
Which nothing could but of his beauty tell,
Had here, discovering the deformed estate
Of his fond mind, preserved himself with hate.
But virtue too, as well as vice, is clad
In flesh and blood so well, that Plato had
Beheld, what his high fancy once embraced,
Virtue with colours, speech, and motion graced.

As in the Sacharissa poems, the distinctions between art and nature work toward compliment and persuasion (the strategy of the poem is to bring us to accept the praise of Jonson). Jonson's poetry becomes a solution to the old challenge to art, from the philosopher Plato, that it was but an imitation of an imitation. Jonson has mastered both the ephemeral world of convention and the eternal world of ideal forms and absolute truth; and, in his teaching craft, the ideal is made to enter into the real world, as the neat application of Narcissus reveals. Besides being a social historian without equal, Jonson also achieves Sir Philip Sidney's standards of the poet-idealists, who “most properly do imitate to teach & delight: and … range onely reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be. … For these indeed do meerly make to imitate, and imitate both to delight & teach, and delight to move men to take that goodnesse in hand, which without delight they would flie as from a stranger; and teach to make them know that goodnesse wherunto they are moved.”⁴ While the play on ideas of form and mirrors, variety and unity, the conventional versus the ideal, maintains a serious motion of compliment (which has a Jonsonian effect of more verve and spring than a customary Wallerian smoothness)—Waller adds a touch of Jonsonian independence and humor, reminiscent of Carew's crusty Jonsonian rebuke of Jonson in “To Ben Jonson, Upon Occasion of His Ode of Defiance Annex'd to His Play of ‘The New Inn.’”⁵ Waller's tribute works by discovery of claims of the all-encompassing power of Jonson's art; and of Jonson himself, the assertion is,

[thy] fate's no less peculiar than thy art;
For as thou couldst all characters impart,
So none could render thine, which still escapes,
Like Proteus, in variety of shapes;
Who was nor this, nor that, but all we find,
And all we can imagine, in mankind.

Thus his personality is the mirror of his art: various in occupation, achievement, mood. Perhaps more rhetorical than convincing is the parallel of his having all real and imaginary qualities. But Jonsonian in spirit are the directness about his variety of enterprises (does the reader correctly think of bricklaying?) and the pun on the man's size. The poem is a contrivance which keeps on us a rhetorical torsion but ends with an impression that the voice we've heard is wry, ironic, truthful. Waller is here more Jonsonian than usual, except perhaps in the great lyrics.

“To Mr. Henry Lawes, Who Had Then Newly Set a Song of Mine in the Year 1635,” like many of Waller's poems, brings to mind more famous Augustan aftereffects. The theme is the familiar power of music, appropriately figured in the musically related device of a turn: “Verse makes heroic virtue live; / But you can life to verses give.” The secondary themes of the poem reveal a spirit of rational clarity championed by Malherbe in France and a reconciliation of the Ramist division of dialectic and rhetoric (or the opposition between sense and decoration):⁶

As a church window, thick with paint,
Lets in a light but dim and faint;
So others, with division [a “florid melodic passage”] hide
The light of sense, the poet's pride:
But you alone may truly boast
That not a syllable is lost;
The writer's, and the setter's skill
At once the ravished ears do fill.
Let those which only warble long,
And gargle in their throats a song,
Content themselves with Ut, Re, Mi:
Let words, and sense, be set by thee.

The ideals expressed here, if not realized in the verse itself, nonetheless became the highest values in the achievement of Alexander Pope: the vitalization of heroic virtue, the fusion of rhetorical technique and moral sense, and a forceful clarity of expression.

As noted earlier, Waller seems to have been especially sensitive to visual or plastic beauty, which he often figures in imagines of light. The power of the beauty of women is analogous in his mind to that of art; and a number of his poems are about their mutual reinforcement. A nearly perfect statement in miniature of his aesthetics is “On My Lady Isabella, Playing on the Lute,” its theme being the familiar power of beauty (of woman and song) to move. The lady's style is itself Wallerian:

Such moving sounds from such a careless touch!
So unconcerned herself, and we so much!
What art is this, that with so little pains
Transports us thus, and o'er our spirit reigns?

Typically in Waller's wit, after an antithesis or juxtaposition establishes itself, he works a new twist or reversal out of the ordinary sense of the relationship. Thus, from the equation woman's beauty=beauty in art, he works a number of variations mainly on the topic of the power of both. However, in the poems solely about woman's beauty, the interest has often been the enjoyment of the beauty before it fades. What if this topic is placed back into the equation, if fading is related to art? The result is “Of English Verse,” where the sadness of the death of beauty attaches to art itself. It is a sobering thought (though not one expressed in so many words in this poem) that, eventually on this planet, even Shakespeare's plays will come to dust. The evidence of the loss of art is found in the English language, which was perceived by Waller and his contemporaries as impermanent: “Poets that lasting marble seek, / Must carve in Latin, or in Greek, / We write in sand, our language grows, / And, like the tide, our work o'erflows.” There is an irony in the alleged permanence of Greek and Latin inscriptions, for the older the inscribing, the greater the decay. Is the apparent mixing of metaphors unfelicitous—the conventional writing in sand (with what?) being obliterated by rising water (the growing language)? Perhaps it succeeds against the sense. It is Chaucer who illustrates the point of decay: “the glory of his numbers lost,” a reference to the Renaissance-neoclassical misunderstanding, which Waller shares, of Chaucer's syllabification.

But this circumstance, the loss of art, is not the final one, as the poet surprises the reader by asserting a quaint compensation for art. “And yet he [Chaucer] did not sing in vain,” because the ladies “Rewarded with success his love.” Returning to the equation, it appears that the decay of art may be used again to suggest that beauty should be enjoyed without delay. But not quite—the ladies rewarded the poet because he promised them immortality. That is to say, they were deceived; for, as the first half of the poem establishes, English verse itself will waste and die:

This was the generous poet's scope;
And all an English pen can hope,
To make the fair approve his flame,
That can so far extend their fame.
Verse, thus designed, has no ill fate,
If it arrive but at the date
Of fading beauty; if it prove
But as long-lived as present love.

The two words “so far,” emphasized above, add ambiguity. Do they mean as long as Chaucer's poems have lasted? Or, as the last stanza elaborates, only as long as woman's beauty or a love affair lasts? It is possible that the real strategy of the poem is in the carpe diem mode (and is similar to Robert Herrick's “Corinna”) with a deliberate collapsing of the fates of the poet-speaker and the lady as persuasion toward a further sharing, in the enjoyment of present beauty and present love.

“Of English Verse” is atypical of Waller's poems in which a perception of the golden or good in events and persons usually prevails. The selectivity of his topics itself establishes a pattern as he chooses subjects naturally honorific in themselves: love, heroic action, the creation of beauty. A delightful product of his Pollyanna muse is “To Zelinda,” a poem which recalls the situation with Sacharissa, for Zelinda (a character in a romance by Des Marets) “Expresses her determination to wed none but a Prince.”⁷ Imagining himself as the suitor of the ambitious lady, Waller presents to her arguments for natural as opposed to conventional aristocracy; this argument includes one admirably economical line: “'Tis not from whom, but where, we live.” He then uses the traditional arguments that poets perceive and preserve in golden form the fame of the greatest human beings—just as he is prepared to do for her:

Smile but on me, and you shall scorn,
Henceforth, to be of princes born.
I can describe the shady grove
Where your loved mother slept with Jove;
And yet excuse the faultless dame,
Caught with her spouse's shape and name.
Thy matchless form will credit bring
To all the wonders I shall sing.

As in his carpe diem poems generally, here—in a poem about a woman in a romance—Waller makes me believe in a real woman he is using all his craft to seduce. The most convincing detail is the last couplet, which (after assertion of the poet's power through much of the poem) courteously concedes the greater power of her beauty and, of course, presents a compliment likely to charm a real woman like Zelinda. However, if the woman was Dorothy Sidney, then it did not work, or at any rate did not lead to matrimony.

C. DIDACTICISM AND PROPRIETY

“Upon the Earl of Roscommon's Translation of Horace” is the fullest expression of Waller's poetic creed and is, like the poem to Lawes, at once a harbinger of English Augustanism and a recovery of values from largely classical and neoclassical sources: Roman poetic theory itself in the Horatian expression, the rationalism and self-control (with yet a dash of the Cavalier) typical of Falkland's Great Tew circle, the emphasis on clarity and order, the distrust of inspiration advocated by a generation of French poets after Malherbe,⁸ and the principles and practice of the English poets Sidney and Jonson. Like the longer and greater work which it perhaps influenced, Pope's Essay on Criticism, the poem is open to the censure that it is merely a collection of truisms. They are, however, truisms that were passionately held to be true; and they are doctrines of art that Waller followed closely in most of his poems. The one major poetic activity that does not fit into the scheme of values of the poem to Roscommon is the composition of love lyrics. In an earlier poem to Davenant, Waller assigned to the poet the task of teaching “present youth” how to love. The omission is a prefiguring of the neoclassic seriousness—stooping to truth and moralizing the song.

That the translation of Horace was made by an earl is a reminder of an important phenomenon associated with a gentleman-poet (or nobleman-poet): an aversion to impressions of hard work or odors of the lamp. Waller knows to praise Roscommon for avoiding such an impression, just as his own poems reveal a commitment to what is perhaps very nearly identical with Cavalier insouciance or sprezzatura—the effect, as has been wittily observed, of having composed verses while falling off a horse. Waller hails Roscommon as “Britain! whose genius is in verse expressed, / Bold and sublime, but negligently dressed.” The poem divides, both in its topics and in formal organization, into (a) considerations of the standards of poetry and (b) expression of the social functions or purposes of poetry.

The major worth claimed for Roscommon's translation of The Art of Poetry is that it teaches poets important truths about their craft. The “rules” of writing become clear. One must exercise self-control: “Direct us how to back the winged horse, / Favour his flight, and moderate his force.” Inspiration is destructive without moderation and discipline: the opposition of wit to judgment to which Hobbes gave forceful expression and currency is echoed in: “He that proportioned wonders can disclose, / At once his fancy and his judgment shows.” Characteristically, Waller is able to discover a virtue in a less worthy byproduct of poetic judgment—the words and lines that the poet rejects: “Poets lose half the praise they should have got, / Could it be known what they discreetly blot.”

He insists unequivocally on the importance of the ethical didactic: “Chaste moral writing we may learn from hence, / Neglect of which no wit can recompense. / … Well-sounding verses are the charm we use, / Heroic thoughts and virtue to infuse.” Illustrating the strategy that Dryden and others thought Waller had brought to English verse, Waller asserts the preeminence of management of “sound”:

Well-sounding verses are the charm we use,
Heroic thoughts and virtue to infuse;
Things of deep sense we may in prose unfold,
But they move more in lofty numbers told.
By the loud trumpet, which our courage aids,
We learn that sound, as well as sense, persuades.

A principle more peculiarly his is Waller's denigration of satiric verse (an oddity in a poem about a translation of Horace):

The fountain which from Helicon proceeds,
That sacred stream! should never water weeds,
Nor make the crop of thorns and thistles grow,
Which envy or perverted nature sow.
          The Muses' friend, unto himself severe,
With silent pity looks on all that err.

The social, political, moral purpose of poetry is implicit in the insistence on “chaste moral” content. The purposes further stated are similarly Roman and poignantly utopian, considered in context of the politics of 1680, the date of publication of Waller's poem. Great public achievements, political as well as military, the poet rewards “with his immortal lines.” And though less explicitly stated, more impressively set forth in images, is the power of poets' words to bring unity and harmony to a state:

Such [words] as, of old, wise bards employed to make
Unpolished men their wild retreats forsake;
Law-giving heroes, famed for taming brutes,
And raising cities with their charming lutes;
For rudest minds with harmony were caught,
And civil life was by the Muses taught.
So wandering bees would perish in the air,
Did not a sound, proportioned to their ear,
Appease their rage, invite them to the hive,
Unite their force, and teach them how to thrive,
To rob the flowers, and to forbear the spoil,
Preserved in winter by their summer's toil;
They give us food, which may with nectar vie,
And wax, that does the absent sun supply.

If these lines are read as apology for the panegyrics and political epigrams, and if compared in spirit with Waller's Plot and his parliamentary career, the worthiness of at least the highest intentions can be claimed for the man and his work. The poem contains a unified vision of the poetic and the political, as demonstrated in the movement from the beginning of the poem with its concern for control of poetic “rage” to the conclusion where the poet aims at appeasing public “rage.” Oddly enough, while what Waller intended in his political actions and in his poems emerged in “the peace of the Augustans” after the Glorious Revolution (which he did not live to see), the reduction of “rage” in political life came about in spite of the Stuarts and in spite of Wallerian orphic sounds for harmonious royalism.

In nearly all respects during his last years Waller was a model of propriety. He was generally sober in an age of heavy drinking. In his parliamentary career, after the Restoration, he exhibited exemplary behavior. It is as if in his life, as in his verse, the pleasant, the good were to be magnified: thus the development out of the Lydian mode of his love poems to the Horatian idealism of the poem on Roscommon; thus the advocacy of the neoclassical didactic, as Knightly Chetwood recorded in “The Life of Virgil” prefixed to Dryden's translation. Chetwood takes note of Vergil's doctrine that poetry should inculcate virtue and adds that this “was the Principle too of our Excellent Mr. Waller, who us'd to say that he wou'd raze any Line out of his Poems, which did not imply some Motive to Virtue.”⁹ Thorn-Drury's Victorian comment is that if Waller's poems “are not didactic throughout, this at least should be remembered in his favour, that he lived through the period of the Restoration without suffering anything he wrote to be disfigured by the slightest trace of obscenity.”¹⁰

Of course, the exemplary way of growing old is to become proper, didactic, pious, and “sage.” One of Waller's last poems, “Of the Last Verses in the Book,” and perhaps his most memorable image, discovers the goods in growing old, the power or virtue in dying:

The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made;
Stronger by weakness, wiser men become,
As they draw near to their eternal home.
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view,
That stand upon the threshold of the new.

And, fittingly, his last large poetic undertaking was Divine Poems, made up primarily of three of his longer (but hardly his better) poems: “Of Divine Love,” “Of Divine Poesy,” and “On the Fear of God.” In the last of the three he brings to proper close his long life and poetical career, penitent and hopeful and, in his customary way, seeing the happy side:

Wrestling with death, these lines I did indite;
No other theme could give my soul delight.
O that my youth had thus employed my pen!
Or that I now could write as well as then!
But 'tis of grace, if sickness, age, and pain,
Are felt as throes, when we are born again;
Timely they come to wean us from this earth,
As pangs that wait upon a second birth.

As the spirit of Stuart restoration wore itself and the kingdom out, Waller, like Dryden, began to see his age in a starker light: he declaimed against “This Iron Age (so fraudulent and bold!)”—and, most significantly, applications to Moses and Deborah replace those of Orpheus and Amphion. Waller tried at the end to recapture for poetry what perhaps he had helped to lose, or what in his application of myth had been slipping away. His was the countercurrent to the mythopoesis of a bard like Milton. Thus, it is in the failure rather than in the example of his Divine Poems that we see the force of John Dennis's observation (The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, 1704): “I have reason to believe, that one of the principal Reasons that has made the modern Poetry so contemptible, is, that by divesting it self of Religion, it is fallen from its Dignity, and its original Nature and Excellence; and from the greatest Production of the Mind of Man, is dwindled to an extravagant and a vain Amusement.”¹¹

II WALLER'S PLACE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

A. WALLER'S “SMOOTHNESS”

If one accepts the validity of John Aubrey's account, Waller established a poetic goal for himself with a specific attitude toward the English tradition: “[Waller was] one of our first refiners of our English language and poetry. When he was a brisque young sparke, and first studyed Poetry; me thought, sayd he, I never sawe a good copie of English verses; they want smoothness; then I began to essay.”¹²

Perhaps one may provisionally separate the fact of Waller's melodiousness from the “achievement” suggested in Aubrey's account and insisted on by a number of contemporaries, until it became what René Welek has called the fable convenue of the Augustans¹³—that the language was crude and the verse harsh until refinement and melody were inaugurated by Waller and brought to perfection by Dryden and Pope.

Setting aside the fable for a moment, I wish to note that there is little basis to doubt Waller's melodiousness, which is apparent to any reader of the songs and lyrical epigrams. It is another matter, however, to assert that he invented it. The earliest critical comments on Waller include, and very nearly consist entirely of, praise of his smoothness. Clement Barksdale (Nympha Liberthris, or the Cotswold Muse—London, 1651) wrote that “Your [Waller's] Name shall be enrolled Sir, among / Best English Poets, who write smooth and strong.” On a number of occasions, over a period of thirty years, John Dryden made a similar claim. In 1664 (“Epistle Dedicatory” to The Rival Ladies), he observed that the “sweetness of Mr. Waller's lyric poesy was afterwards followed in the epic by Sir John Denham.” In 1668 (“An Essay of Dramatic Poesy”), he has a character in a dialogue assert that “nothing [is] so even, sweet, and flowing, as Mr. Waller.” In 1672 (“Defence of the Epilogue”), Dryden attributed to Waller an almost incredible role in English literature: “Well-placing of words, for the sweetness of pronunciation, was not known till Mr. Waller introduced it.” And in 1693 (“A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire”), he put on record a judgment that few can share today: Spenser's verse is “so numerous, so various, and so harmonious” that he is “surpassed” only by Vergil and Waller.¹⁴ Nor does Edward Phillips, Milton's pupil and nephew, differ on this point from Barksdale and Dryden (Theatrum Poetarum—London, 1675): “Edmund Waller … one of the most fam'd Poets, and that not unworthy. … especially, and (wherein he is not inferiour to Carew himself,) in the charming sweetness of his Lyric Odes or amorous Sonnets. … In his other occasional Poems his Verse is Smooth, yet strenuous.”

The writers just quoted, the panegyrists of Poems to the Memory of that Incomparable Poet Edmond Waller Esquire (including Sir Thomas Higgons, Thomas Rymer, St. Evremond, Aphra Behn), Addison, Pope, Elijah Fenton, Goldsmith, Johnson, and many other seventeenth and eighteenth century critics agree Waller's verse was “sweet.” Pope's expression is the most famous: “praise the easy vigor of a line, / Where Denham's strength, and Waller's sweetness join” (Essay on Criticism, ll. 360-61).

With the decline of Waller's reputation in the Romantic era and afterwards, critics grew less enthusiastic about the worth of such a quality in such a poet. Charles C. Clarke (in 1869) describes one of Waller's poems as “a tissue of smooth and musical mediocrity.”¹⁵ Edmund Gosse preferred to think of him as “smooth” and “serried.”¹⁶ The maverick Ezra Pound in our own century has fallen in with the trend visible in Clarke and Gosse: “Waller … was a tiresome fellow. … His natural talent is fathoms below My Lord Rochester's. BUT when he writes for music he is ‘lifted’; but he was very possibly HOISTED either by the composer or by the general musical perceptivity of the time.”¹⁷

B. WALLER'S ROLE IN THE REFORM OF ENGLISH VERSE—THE AUGUSTAN VIEW

It is, however, the corollary claim by Waller's contemporaries and by major figures in Augustan literature that has proved to be the major problem in literary criticism and literary history. What is his role in the two neoclassical programs of refining the language and developing the music of the couplet? A major intellectual experience of the seventeenth century, increasingly so after mid-century, was the sense of release from erroneous views (“false sentiments”) in science and elsewhere, from outmoded methods of argument and obscure language, from clumsy, “low,” and indelicate diction. This experience is prominent in the works of the major British philosophers—Bacon, Hobbes, Locke—and in the major poet of the Restoration, Dryden—and in the values, proceedings, and history of the Royal Society. Restoration literary awareness vibrates with self-gratulation on being more melodious, more correct, more refined than the Elizabethan and Jacobean past. And it became an “official” part of this awareness that Waller was instrumental in the progress made. Both great Dryden himself and the author (perhaps Francis Atterbury) of the Preface to The Second Part of Mr. Waller's Poems (1690) made unequivocal cases for Waller's significance. As noted earlier, Dryden constantly paid tribute to “Mr. Waller.” In the “Epistle Dedicatory” of The Rival Ladies (1664), Dryden wrote, “The excellence and dignity of it [rhyme] were never fully known 'till Mr. Waller taught it; he first made writing easily an art; first showed us to conclude the sense most commonly in distichs, which, in the verse of those before him, runs on for so many lines together, that the reader is out of breath to overtake it.”¹⁸ Twenty-seven years later, after Waller's death, Dryden's praise was heightened (“Preface” to Walsh's A Dialogue Concerning Women): Referring to “Mr. Waller” as “the father of our English numbers,” he added, “I hope the reader need not be told that Mr. Waller is only mentioned for honour's sake; that I am desirous of laying hold of his memory on all occasions, and thereby acknowledging to the world, that unless he had written, none of us could write.”¹⁹

The author of the 1690 Preface mainly echoes Dryden's assertions:

The Tongue came into his [Waller's] hands, like a rough Diamond; he polish'd it first, and to that degree that all Artists since him have admired the Workmanship, without pretending to mend it. … He undoubtedly stands first in the List of Refiners, and for ought I know, last too. … [English poetry before Waller] was made up almost entirely of monosyllables. … Besides, their Verses ran all into one another, and hung together, throughout a whole Copy, like the hook'd Attoms, that compose a Body in Des Cartes. … Mr. Waller remov'd all these faults, brought in more Polysyllables, and smoother measures. … where-ever the natural stops of that [the verse] were, he contriv'd the little breakings of his sense so as to fall in with 'em. … Among other improvements we may reckon that of his Rhymes. … He had a fine Ear, and knew how quickly the Sense was cloy'd by the same round of chiming Words still returning upon it.²⁰

Short comments by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester and Samuel Butler (who were also Waller's contemporaries), some lengthier comments made over a period of years by John Dennis, and Pope's parody of Waller present the sharpest understanding of the nature of Waller's verse and of his “contribution.” Rochester's appraisal is in “An Allusion to Horace,” probably written in the mid-1670s and published in 1680.

          Waller, by nature for the bays designed,
With force and fire and fancy unconfined,
In panegyrics does excel mankind.
He best can turn, enforce, and soften things
To praise great conqu'rors, or to flatter Kings.(21)

An ironic, balanced judgment lies behind the surface praise. The effect is still one of praise, but judicious, perceptive praise, except for the overstated second line; it is precisely force and fire and fancy that post-Romantic readers think that Waller lacks. The term by nature in the first line suggests that it is not by study or effort that Waller wrote—certainly an effect that he intended to give. The question is not whether in fact Waller wrote easily or struggled through many revisions. It will perhaps remain always a question whether unstudied ease is achieved by study or grace. Any one trying to write a poem in imitation of Waller or Sedley quickly discovers the labors in some form of easiness. Rochester means to note the naturalness and ease of the product; or, to be precise, to note that the product suggests a natural and easy talent. Also, he is sensitive to what was more apparent to contemporaries than to the modern reader, the happiness of Waller's “parts,” his ease and felicity of courtesy and language.

The series in line five describes Waller's poetic doings: turn, enforce, soften. That line is perhaps the best critical sentence on Waller. The three verbs with some accuracy describe his poetic practice and excellence. Turn refers to the playing with repeated ideas, words, images, and is but one of the whole battery of rhetorical weapons Waller deployed. Enforce describes the heightening of powers which he was ever seeking (through applications, outdoing compliments, hyperboles, discoveries of honorific hieroglyphs) in the great, the beautiful, the talented. And soften suggests the Lydian mode of his poems to ladies and the concessions he made to feminine perspective as well as his skill in minimizing the faults of the subjects of his panegyrics. The last line grants Waller his excellence in panegyric, but in the third the pun on excel implies that he presents more fiction than truth. Also, the antithesis in the last line, a favorite device of Waller himself, reminds the reader that Waller's praise was fickle.

Although he began to publish his criticism when Waller's reputation was near its height, John Dennis judged his poetry with considerable detachment. Consider the following remarks from The Impartial Critick (1693): “There is no Man who has a greater Veneration from Mr. Waller than I have: … A man may in many places of Mr. Waller's Works, see not only Wit, Spirit, good Sence, but a happy and delicate turn of Thought, with clearness, boldness, justness, sublimeness, and gallantry. For the last of these Qualities, I know not whether he has been surpass'd by any Writer in any Language.” Dennis contrasts the “gallantry” of Voiture with Waller's, which “is more sprightly, more shining, more bold, and more admirable. The French-man's, by the Character of his Country, more supple, more soft, more insinuating, and more bewitching.”²² The word “gallant” suggests at once epic or romantic forces (dashing, spirited, bold), ornateness, delicacy of manner, and amatory strategies; it synthesizes the qualities of the corpus of Waller's poems.

Dennis shared the common opinion that Waller “was the first who us'd our Ears to the Musick of a just Cadence.” But Dennis also noted on several occasions that there is much “Prose in his [Waller's] Verse” as well as improprieties of diction, language, and image. Also, Dennis's gloss on Pope's tribute to Denham and Waller in the Essay on Criticism embodies a longer range or better view of classicism than Pope's: “Now he who is familiar with Homer, and intimate with Virgil, will not be extremely affected either with the Sweetness of Waller, or the Force of Denham. … I will not deny but that Waller has Sweetness, and Denham Force; but their good and their shining Qualities are so sophisticated and debauch'd with these modern Vices of Conceit and Point, and Turn, and Epigram, that 'tis impossible they can affect in an extraordinary manner those who have been long acquainted with the Ancients.”²³ Pope's translation of the Iliad brought, curiously, these “modern Vices” into that poem, where the interest of the translator's art was at once to maximize rhetorical complexity and to sharpen moral point.

Dennis, however, can be called as witness, perhaps a reluctant witness, to prove that Waller succeeds in what was to Waller the highest goal of art. A friend had apparently asked Dennis whether the poem “To Amoret” moved him: “the Verses to Amoret move even the vulgar Passions in me, as they ought to do: It being impossible to take a Survey in them of Mr. Waller's Good-nature, and his Gratitude, without pitying and loving him.”²⁴ One imagines Waller being pleased with that response.

Of Pope's several imitations of Waller, one stands out as an excellent bit of literary criticism: “Of A Lady Singing to Her Lute” was first published in 1717, but said to have been written when Pope was thirteen:

Fair charmer cease, nor make your voice's prize
A heart resign'd the conquest of your eyes:
Well might, alas! that threaten'd vessel fail,
Which winds and lightning both at once assail.
We were too blest with these inchanting lays,
Which must be heav'nly when an angel plays;
But killing charms your lover's death contrive,
Lest heav'nly musick should be heard alive.
Orpheus could charm the trees, but thus a tree
Taught by your hand, can charm no less than he;
A poet made the silent wood pursue;
This vocal wood had drawn the poet too.

In this revised form of the first couplet, Pope achieves the more Wallerian effects of smoother sense (more consonant ideas) and of turn accented by rhyme. The original read: “Fair charmer cease, nor add your tuneful breath / T' o'ercome the slave your eyes have doom'd to Death.”²⁵ The joint effect of sound and sight is not smoothly established, nor is there adequate yoking of their agency. But the revision is a perfect parody. The lines are made to carry the maximal amount of turn or balance consonant with the maximal smoothness. Thus: prize and conquest; cease and resign'd; voice and eyes. Or diagrammatically, charmer, voice, eyes versus prize, heart, conquest form not just a simple chiasmus, but a cross in this form (a = the lady and her powers, b = the lover defeated):

a- — - — -a- — - — -b
b- — - — -b- — - — -a

(In Puttenham's term, this is a complex antimetabole.) Pope plays at the same replication, balance, and ease in the last four lines. The Orpheus-poet appears in each line; charmed trees become tree charming, in perfect crisscross; and in the last couplet poet moving wood crosses into wood moving the poet, accompanied by a brightening effect of antithesis between Orpheus' silent wood and the vocal wood of the lady's lute.

The melodic strategies in Pope's parody are somewhat more difficult to isolate. The open vowels abound and constitute every rhyme. The rhymes are figured importantly into the pattern of turn and antithesis, just as the caesuras emphasize oppositions and replications. Alliteration and assonance are part of the sought-for melodiousness, but both function in a strategy of emphasis on echoes of sense: the sound echoes are echoes of ideas, almost literally musical turns. Consider the couplet where the l sounds keep ideas of kill and lover in the ear: “But killing charms your lover's death contrive, / Lest heav'nly musick should be heard alive.” Contrary to the absurd claim of the 1711 Life that Waller had first “introduced” the use of alliteration, Pope understood that Waller had explored a number of artistically challenging possibilities in the use of sound aligned with rhetoric and sense. Pope became the master of these possibilities.

Good reasons exist for considering Samuel Butler's criticism after Rochester's, Dennis's, and Pope's. For one, the criticism (although written before Butler's death in 1680, perhaps during the period 1667-69) was not published until 1759. For another, Pope's parody enables one to comprehend the full force of Butler's mainly hostile view of Waller (which bears some resemblance to Dennis's):

There are two ways of Quibling, the one with words, and the other with Sense; Like the Figurae Dictionis, and Figurae Sententiae, in Rhetorique. The first is don by shewing Tricks with words of the Same Sounds, but Different Senses: And the other by expressing of Sense by Contradiction, and Riddle. Of this Mr. Waller, was the first most copious Author, and has so infected our modern writers of Heroiques with it, that they can hardly write any other way.

[Of the two ways of quibbling] The first is already cried down, and the other as yet prevails; and is the only Elegance of our modern Poets, which easy Judges call Easiness; but having nothing in it but Easiness, and being never used by any lasting Wit, will in wiser Times fall to nothing of itself.²⁶

By quibbling with sense Butler means using the favorite rhetorical devices of neoclassicism: antithesis, zeugma, turn—which have been illustrated often in the analyses of Chapters 2 and 3. Butler himself parodies the Wallerian turn, in the last passage quoted, by means of the repetition of easiness. But the value of his comment is in the connection of rhetorical play (quibbling with sense) with easiness. One of the innate qualities of those devices is a kind of smoothness or flow, especially in turn, zeugma, and antithesis, which is absent in some forms of pun and paradox. Puns often are forced; or they slow down or puzzle the reader or hearer. Thus, nearly all of Waller's puns are rendered unobtrusive, never causing the “sense” to stumble and disrupt the melody. Butler's insight into the ease realized in rhetoric of this kind reinforces the truth illustrated in Pope's parody that the intention of the Wallerian line is to maintain maximal rhetorical play consonant with maximal smoothness.²⁷ Waller may have succeeded too well in the easiness, as the common reader sees only the gleam of surface polish and little of the rhetoric and sense, and is only too eager to accept the justness of Addison's parody. In Tatler 163, Ned Softly consults Mr. Bickerstaff on alternate phrasings in his poem “To Mira.”

I fancy, when your song you sing,
          (Your song you sing with so much Art.)
or,
I fancy, when your song you sing,
          You sing your song with so much Art.

Bickerstaff's reply is “Truly … the Turn is so natural either way, that you have made me almost giddy with it.” It is to be noted (1) that Bickerstaff's reply is in the form of a graceful pun on the word turn, and (2) that Addison's prose style (in elegance, ease, melodiousness, and rhetorical devices) parallels Waller's in verse.

C. A SURVEY OF MODERN OPINION

The two late Victorians who concerned themselves in detail with Waller are G. Thorn-Drury and Edmund Gosse. As Thorn-Drury had almost no interest in the poetry, he devoted only the last four and a half pages of the introduction to his edition to a critical commentary on the poems. And Gosse was one of those, so aptly described by James Sutherland, who saw the neoclassical age “as a rather dull plain lying between two ranges of Delectable Mountains.”²⁸ Gosse would perhaps prefer his own words: Waller led a revolt against Elizabethan poetry which “shut it [poetry] in a cage for a hundred and fifty years.” Or, in a more elegant image, Gosse declared, “English poetry was a widow who married Shakespeare for love, and now consented to marry Waller for position.” On the question of Waller's role in developing the “classical couplet,” Gosse made some sensible points: “It is, of course, obvious that Waller could not ‘introduce’ what had been invented, and admirably exemplified, by Chaucer. But those who have pointed to smooth distichs employed by poets earlier than Waller have not given sufficient attention to the fact (exaggerated, doubtless, by critics arguing in the opposite camp) that it was he who earliest made writing in the serried couplet the habit and fashion.”²⁹

Gosse's statements find parallels in the judicious A History of English Prosody by George Saintsbury: “let nobody interject any doubt about Waller's actual part in a certain rather questionable ‘reform of our numbers.’ The people who followed that reform believed in his part in it for a century and a half, and that is the point of importance. … More than half the modern readers who are indignant with ‘Waller was smooth’ are so because their ideal of smoothness and Pope's or Johnson's are two quite different things.” Somewhat derivative of the 1690 Preface, Saintsbury's examination of the technique of the Wallerian couplet also deserves quotation: “Keeping the pause as close to the middle as possible naturally causes a slight opposition, or antithesis, of motion in the two halves, and this as naturally invites a slight antithesis of sense.” But the verse is insipid, according to Saintsbury; “both measure and diction are flaccid; there is no throb, no quiver, no explosive and jaculative quality about them.” And he furnished his own metaphor to place Waller in English poetry: “his genius prompted him continually in the direction of the smooth, stopped, antithetic couplet. He was, of course, not its Columbus; nobody was. It was only an island lying off the inhabited continent, which had been visited now and then, but never regularly colonized till, about his time, the chief seat of prosodic civilisation and government was transferred to it.”³⁰

In the 1930s there were three significant studies of Waller's place in the prosodic movement of the seventeenth century. Those by George Williamson and Ruth Wallerstein begin from different premises but make similar discoveries about the nature of “couplet rhetoric”; in the words of W. K. Wimsatt, the two discerned the following characteristics: “the sententious closure, the balanced lines and half-lines, the antithesis and inversion, the strict metric and accordingly slight but telling variations, the constantly close and tensile union of what are called musical with logical and rhetorical effects.”³¹ The same could be said of an earlier study, a Cambridge dissertation (1931) by Margaret Deas Cohen, a part of which is devoted to an analysis of Waller's style and the influences on it. From Fairfax's translation of Tasso Waller learned much: “all the mannerisms which give the air of modernity:—the regular couplet swing, the balancing of phrase with phrase, and word with word, the antithesis of line with line, and half line with half line, the contrasted simile, the frequent and colourless personification, all these are common to Fairfax and Waller.” Related refinements derive from the Latin elegiac distich: “All that Ovid may have taught Waller is that in a closed couplet points may be effectively and concisely made by the balancing of half line with half line, either reinforcing each other, or by contrast indicating the container of both: that adjectives and nouns may be used in the same way: and that zeugma is a useful construction when the sentence can have no larger abiding place than one line. But in the contrast of half lines Ovid is more often indicating the anomaly of the contrast in the person or thing, Waller more often the reconciliation of the contrast in them. He may also have strengthened Waller's native habit of compliment.”³²

Ruth C. Wallerstein's “The Development of Rhetoric and Metre of the Heroic Couplet, especially in 1625-1645” is a detailed analysis of specific qualities of poets who wrote in or influenced the development of the closed couplet. Stipulating that the couplet “originated as a naturalization of the Latin elegiac distich,” she begins with the development before and at the turn of the seventeenth century, in (1) Drayton's imitiation of Ovid, England's Heroicall Epistles (which had its English predecessors in translating or imitating Ovid), published in 1597, and in (2) Fairfax's translation of Tasso, published in 1600. Both of these, Wallerstein argues, demonstrate a definite if various strategy of combined rhetorical and metrical balance. It is difficult to do justice to her study in a brief summary. The perceptions in it, supported by a complex of particularities, may be generalized as follows: (a) the characteristics of the closed couplet are observable in a number of writers from 1597 to 1646; (b) attributing the achievement of the consummate closing of it to any one writer is problematic or erroneous, as those writing in the form (the little-known as well as the widely touted) share in varying degrees a number of practices—as shown in statistics concerning the placement of caesuras, the balance of half lines, the number of monosyllables and polysyllables; (c) Michael Drayton, Edward Fairfax, Ben Jonson, George Sandys, Viscount Falkland, Waller, John Denham, Martin Lluelyn and others are to be observed in the development. Jonson is seen as employing most of the devices of the perfect closed couplet without having the rigidity of that form as practiced afterwards. A peculiarity of Wallerstein's study is a high claim for Falkland's verse, as showing “a full and unflagging hold of the closed couplet design and of the integration of its rhetoric and music and rapid energy and freedom.” The two qualities assigned to Falkland—“rapid energy and freedom”—distinguish him from Waller, whose “‘smoothness’ is on the whole an evenness of tension beyond what we have seen in anyone else.” Wallerstein uses extraordinarily sharp terms to delineate Waller's peculiarities, in a description of three of his poems: “Their oft-noted smoothness is dependent first upon the almost constant repetition of the twenty-syllable unit in the closed couplet, and upon the prevalent repetition of the half-line pattern with medial caesura (an element present also in Drayton and Sandys, and typical of Jonson and Falkland) and upon the flexible syllabication and the little variation in stress. All this is sustained in a way not quite found in any previous case we have been considering, by the unemphatic, direct, smooth-flowing, conversational ease of expression, deliberate and perfectly neatly defined, which makes every word duly weighty, though it prevents any word from attaining a thrilling emphasis.”³³

George Williamson's essay “The Rhetorical Pattern of Neoclassical Wit” begins with the admission, as in Gosse, Saintsbury, and others, that it is difficult to determine who the sole inventor of the neoclassical couplet was: The “urges” of it “were in the air, and manifested themselves occasionally in various poets, being most persistent in Waller. … the connecting link was less the couplet itself than the informing force of the couplet, which was a manner of saying things ultimately derived from Latin rhetoric.” After illustrating the connection with Latin rhetoric, mainly by means of George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie (1589), Williamson concludes that Waller was “a consolidator of a poetic development and … the acknowledged leader of a restrictive movement. … Waller turned the balance from paradox to antithesis in the poetic wit which centered in contradiction.” In contrast to the metaphysical poets, the wit depends “less upon startling reconciliations and more upon surprising oppositions. From the surprising opposition of ideas wit passed into verse as opposition of structure.”³⁴

These useful and objective analyses were followed by attacks from two prominent scholars. In English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century 1600-1660 (1945), Douglas Bush dispensed in few words with Waller, whose reputation has been “completely and irreparably eclipsed”—“the classicism of Waller and Denham was only the ghost of Jonson's. … they were but superficial signs of a larger movement” of neoclassicism. The decline in verse was, according to Bush, paralleled in an attenuation of music: “There was in general a movement away from bold imaginative freedom towards regularity which was roughly parallel to the movement in verse associated with Waller and Denham; one representative of the new tendencies was Henry Lawes.”³⁵

F. R. Leavis, sensitive alike to the loss of “vitality” and an unfortunate shift in musical appeal from what he calls the “inner” to the “outer ear,” had in an earlier study (1936) left Waller totally out of the line of wit (which, according to him, runs from Carew to Pope) and objected to Waller's bringing upper-crust social modes into art. Conceding that Waller was influential, he found the influence baleful: Waller's reform is “inseparable from a concept of ‘Good Form,’ … the ease, elegance and regularity favoured belong, we feel, to the realm of manners; the diction, gesture and deportment of the verse observe a polite social code; and the address is, as has been said already, to the ‘outer ear’—to an attention that expects to dwell upon the social surface.”³⁶

Thus, shortly before mid-century, Waller's declined reputation fell further; or, if it had pulled up from a Victorian nadir, it fell again—to judge by the pronouncement of these two academic authorities on both sides of the Atlantic—and to judge also by Ezra Pound, a nonacademic transatlantic critic, whose views were mentioned earlier. According to these three, Waller was insignificant, superficially polite, and dull. It was time, to say the least, for “A Word for Waller” by F. W. Bateson in 1950,³⁷ for H. M. Richmond's perceptions of Waller's impressive relationships to European poetic tradition (considered in Chapter 2), and for two balanced book-length studies of Waller in the 1960s: Alexander Ward Allison's Toward an Augustan Poetic: Edmund Waller's Reform of English Poetry (1962) and Warren L. Chernaik's The Poetry of Limitation: A Study of Edmund Waller (1968).³⁸

Allison presents four major propositions: (1) Waller “reveals … the deliquescence of the early seventeenth-century sensibility … anticipating the tone-quality of compliment in an age of ‘taste.’” (2) Waller's “refinement” of the language consisted of elegance and preciousness of diction, periphrasis, the use of Latinate words with etymological overtones, the preference for generalized epithets which nonetheless are selected to enhance pathos or sympathy, the use of a number of rhetorical devices (zeugma, turn, and the like) common to Ovid and Spenser, and the establishing of polite discourse as the model for the language of poetry. In several of these, Allison argues, the influence is Edmund Spenser, via Fairfax: Waller sought to “recreate Spenser's achievement without incurring Spenser's faults.” (3) Waller's work illustrates the “metamorphosis of the Jacobean wit into the neoclassical. … The neoclassical wit is like the Jacobean in that it continues to perceive arresting relationships between things apparently unlike, distinguished from it in that it is as sensitive to differences as to similarities.” (4) Allison's most original argument, indebted to modern linguistics, is that Waller's achievement was an “accommodation” of essentially foreign metrical patterns to the genius of the English language: “one means of domesticating the decasyllabic line in particular was to marry an iambic meter to the accentual and phrasal balance which had characterized a purely native poetry.”³⁹

Chernaik devotes his last chapter to the Augustan view of Waller as “Parent of English Verse.” In Waller's verse Chernaik finds a strategy of the “well-plac'd word,” a Latinate diction and syntax, Vergilian epithets and heightening of effects, a “concentration on technique as an end in itself,” “elaborate patterns of parallel and contrasting elements,” including, of course, the turn. “Waller's ‘smoothness’ is partly an evenness of tone: his effects are all muted, small-scale. Metrically his verse is regular and harmonious.” (The reader must of course refer to that chapter for the wealth of supporting evidence and valuable bibliographic reference.)⁴⁰

Both Allison and Chernaik end their studies with praise of Waller for developing potentialities in poetry which Dryden and Pope were to realize. And they do not find the development itself lacking in poetic interest.

III WALLER'S ART IN PRACTICE AND THEORY AND HIS PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY

At a social level, Waller's verse is tuned to normative values as well as to melody. He adapts a primitive understanding of poetry—as powerful sound—to an idealism he inherited from some Renaissance poets. A program of mythic bardic potency and an idealizing purpose suffer a diminution or dislocation when focussed on actual and immediate events within a small and well-informed society.

To put the matter another way, the balance which Waller praises Jonson for maintaining, the balance between art as imitative of the deformed actual world and as yet imitative of ideal principles, this Waller himself sacrifices in panegyric verse which attempts to use orphic powers to elevate the actual into the ideal. A question of sincerity arises; the resources of the myth become subject to “skeptical doubts.” This problem, discussed in Chapter 3, parallels a spirit (or, more precisely, an anti-spirit) of demythologization which is the essence of the Enlightenment. The tone of such an art becomes that of the sophisticate—urbane, “rational,” skeptical. Waller's infusing historical trivialities with orphic hieroglyphs nonetheless induced, consciously or unconsciously, precisely this tone, a detachment for which the Augustans had, to say the least, a relish.⁴¹

By Dryden's day, Waller's manner was a model of poetic self-understanding. The earlier part of this chapter presents the aesthetic principles implied or stated in his works, which principles are obviously the pattern of a fairly large part of English Augustan poetry. It is Waller's felicitous combination of these principles, as well as his artistry in the use of the couplet, that provides the elucidating context for Dryden's assertion, “unless he had written, none of us could write.” One may summarize these principles in a few sentences: In poetry as in rhetoric, the concern is moving the auditors and coloring the subject (or that it is the poet's task to effect the acceptance of fictions); aggrandizing, idealizing, goldenizing are presumed to be proper goals. Except in amatory verse, and sometimes there, the “official” duty of the poet is an overstated didacticism; the poet is the guardian of public morals and, in his public personage, the model of propriety not only in private and political duties but also in piety. The social role implies a social manner, influenced by the French, of ease, elegance, and unstudied gracefulness. Ideas and expression are limited to modes of clarity, intelligibility, immediacy of cognition. All of these, which are nearly always present and often obtrusive in Waller, explain in part the high reputation he enjoyed for almost a century and a half.

The point to insist on is that Dryden and Pope (and many others in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) praised Waller because he did a number of things well. He wrote with a grace that disguised the art. The texture of his verse, when perfect, balances maximal smoothness with maximal rhetorical play. He was sly and civilized at once. He applied a musical instinct and a poetic cunning to a number of technical problems of his craft (diction, “numbers”) and to his favorite intentions in art (to seduce, to magnify, to gild, to enhance, to discover powers).

He ought to stand in merit as a rare minor poet,⁴² near to Herrick. But he does not, mainly because of a number of unfortunate, and in some cases, nonpoetic circumstances: his wealth, his compromising at certain times in politics, his plot and his shameless zeal to escape, the subjects he chose for some of his panegyrics (the Stuart kings), his becoming the official harbinger of an “age of prose.” But most important for the modern reader, unaware of any of these circumstances, who picks up one of the score or so of great lyrics, is the easy simplicity of what appears to be idle song—or, in Chernaik's phrase, “mindless song.” There is, instead of the immediately perceivable charm of Herrick, a surface of bland urbanity. The maximized smoothness, like a highly polished surface, succeeds too well and diverts one from the sense below. But, as represented in Chapters 2 and 3, ironic play and complexity of wit do work and charm, in many poems. As a craftsman in irony and nuance, as the crafty discoverer of truth-through-rhetoric, as a devotee of grace and ease who determined to make his verse harmonious and civilized—Waller deserved to be respected by Dryden and Pope and deserves to be read today.

Waller's contribution to the couplet was not in smoothing it, or closing it, or balancing it, or in developing in it strategies for rhyme, for alliteration, or for variation in poly- and monosyllables. Rather, it was in bringing the values mentioned in the last paragraph, along with a general concentration on refining rhetorical and musical possibilities, into couplet art. Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Goldsmith excel him, not simply because they continued a poetic tradition which he started, but because they bring energy and more powerful minds into the same craft. We must note the felicity, and the absence of greatness, of his achievement.

But ease in writing flows from art, not chance;
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.(43)

Notes

1. Thorn-Drury, I, lxxiii.

2. For a contemporary restatement of the traditional view of Orpheus, see John Oldham's “Horace's Art of Poetry, Imitated in English,” The Poems of John Oldham, introd. by Bonamy Dobrée ([Carbondale], [1960]), p. 163. Fenton elaborates on the classical background of the myth, in Horace, Ovid, and Vergil—see “Observations,” xxi-xxv. See also “Cities Their Lutes, and Subject Hearts Their Strings” in Ruth Nevo's The Dial of Virtue, pp. 20ff; and the survey of mimetic theories and pragmatic (or, in Waller's term, orphic) theories in M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and Critical Tradition (New York, 1953).

3. Milton's sonnet “Captain or Colonel, or Knight in Arms” borrows from the Cavalier arsenal arguments on the power of verse (his examples being a bit more recondite than theirs) and abandons for the moment the usual view of the poet as inspired communicator or as seer. The humor is that the goal in this case was to have a real “rhetorical” or “Orphic” influence in the real world, upon Cavaliers, who might be expected to be influenced when talked to in their own way.

4. “The Defence of Poesie,” in The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. by Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge, England, 1923), III, 10.

5. Likening Jonson's love of his works to a fondness for one's offspring, Carew wrote, with bluntness: “Though one hand form them, and though one brain strike / Souls into all, they are not alike.” And he concludes, urging Jonson to stop his quarrel with the production of the play and see that he has failed: “the quarrel lies / Within thine own verge: then let this suffice, / The wiser world doth greater thee confess / Than all men else, than thyself only less.”

6. On the French influence, see J. W. H. Atkins, English Literary Criticism: 17th and 18th Centuries (Methuen: London, 1950), pp. 4-32, 45ff. The poet Thomas Gray thought of Waller and Pope as in a school of French verse; see René Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History (Chapel Hill, 1941), p. 165. On the problem in art created by the ideas of Ramus, see W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York, 1957), 223ff.

7. Thorn-Drury, II, 188.

8. See J. W. H. Atkins, English Literary Criticism, pp. 4-32.

9. The Works of Virgil, tr. by John Dryden (London, 1697), sig. **4^r. See also Pope's quotation of this in Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. by James M. Osborne (Oxford, 1966), I, 196 and n.

10. Thorn-Drury, I, lxxiv.

11. The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. by E. N. Hooker (Baltimore, 1939), I, 365.

12. Brief Lives, p. 308, emphasis added.

13. Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History, p. 35.

14. Quotations of Dryden's works are from W. P. Ker, Essays of John Dryden, (New York, 1961), I, 7, 35, 169; II, 28-29.

15. The Poetic Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham (Edinburgh, 1869), p. vii.

16. “Edmund Waller,” Encylopedia Britannica, 11th edition.

17. ABC of Reading (New Haven, 1934), pp. 142-43.

18. Ker, Essays of John Dryden, I, 7.

19. The Works of Dryden, 2nd ed., ed. by Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh, 1821), XVIII, 5.

20. The Second Part of Mr. Waller's Poems (London, 1690), sig. A3^v-A4^r, A5^v-A6^r, A7^r.

21. The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. by David M. Vieth (New Haven and London, 1968), p. 123.

22. The Critical Works of John Dennis, I, 13-14.

23. Ibid., I, 14, 24-28; II, 384; I, 408.

24. Ibid., II, 401-02.

25. See Alexander Pope, Minor Poems, ed. by Norman Ault and John Butt (London and New Haven, repr. Norwich, 1964), p. 7 and n.

26. Characters and Passages from Note-Books, ed. by A. R. Waller (Cambridge, England, 1908), pp. 414-15, 90.

27. I do not intend to improve on, or reapply, Samuel Holt Monk's formula (nor Leibnitz's, which it may echo) that, “At its best, Jacobean poetry unites the maximum of complexity with the maximum of organization, so that no matter how subtle, penetrating, ambiguous, witty, passionate, and imaginative it may be, it is always and in all its parts functional, purposive, organic”—“From Jacobean to Augustan,” Southern Review, 7 (1941-42), 366. Rather I am trying to define the essential quality of verse which, to Monk, in comparison to what one may call High Jacobean or High Donnean, seemed “flat and thin,” p. 366. See Brendan O Herir's comments on the tendency to read seventeenth-century poets as disinherited sons of Donne in his review of Chernaik in Modern Philology, 68 (1970-71), 100-04.

28. James Sutherland, A Preface to Eighteenth Century Poetry (1948; repr. Oxford, 1958), p. 2.

29. From Shakespeare to Pope, 40, 101-02; “Edmund Waller,” Encylopedia Britannica, 11th Edition.

30. George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody (London, 1908), II, 275, 280, 282-83, 286.

31. “Rhetoric and Poems,” in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (University of Kentucky Press, 1954), p. 175.

32. Cohen, pp. 225-26, 232.

33. Publications of the Modern Language Association, 50 (1935), 166-209. William B. Piper, who has extended Wallerstein's analyses, considers Waller as playing a small but important role in the development of the couplet: “We may say, indeed, that he achieved an excessive correctness of versification to express an excessive politeness of address”—The Heroic Couplet (Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1969), p. 90; see also pp. 83-89, 258-72.

34. Modern Philology, 33 (1935), 55-81.

35. (1945; repr. New York, 1952), pp. 166, 165, 169, 102. Ezra Pound presents an altogether different view of the state of music and its relationship to poetry; see note 17, above.

36. Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (1936; repr. New York, 1947), p. 113; see also pp. 30, 33, 101, 112, 114.

37. In English Poetry: A Critical Introduction (London, 1950), 165-74.

38. These books and Earl Miner's The Cavalier Mode (1971) have enabled a sympathetic and informed reading of Waller.

39. Allison, pp. 4-23, 24-46, 59, 71.

40. The Poetry of Limitation, pp. 203-25.

41. See Chernaik for implications, noted in Chapter 3, between Waller's panegyrics and Augustan mock epic, The Poetry of Limitation, pp. 172-202.

42. See V. de Sola Pinto's review of Chernaik in Notes and Queries, 214 (1969), 391: “This useful study [by Chernaik] … completes the process by which he [Waller] is re-established as a minor poet of considerable merit and of very great historical interest.”

43. Alexander Pope, The Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, ll. 178-79. See also his Essay on Criticism,. ll. 362-63.

Works Cited

Aubrey, John. Aubrey's Brief Lives. Ed. Oliver L. Dick. London: Secker and Warburg, 1958. …

Allison, Alexander Ward. Toward an Augustan Poetic: Edmund Waller's “Reform” of English Poetry. [Lexington], University of Kentucky Press: 1962. An essay on Waller's role in the development of neoclassical verse. …

Cohen, Margaret Deas. “A Study of the Life and Poetry of Edmund Waller.” Unpublished diss. Cambridge University, 1931. A valuable study, especially of the life of Waller, with a large bibliography and appendices concerned with his letters, parliamentary activities, and speeches.

T[horn-]D[rury,] G. “Edmund Waller.” Dictionary of National Biography. Lists at the end of the article, in abbreviated form, a number of primary and secondary sources.

———. Manuscript notebooks. Bodley MS. Eng. Misc. d. 347. Notes taken from historical documents; includes a letter from C. H. Firth regarding sources for Waller's biography. …