[In the following excerpt, Korshin outlines Waller's contributions to the development of poetic verse and neoclassical poetic theory.]

As an example of the evolution of neoclassical poetics, Waller presents certain difficulties which we do not encounter in the study of the other precursors of the period, for his career, which starts earlier than Cleveland's, continued until past 1680, when the style which he helped to propagate had achieved considerable influence and great appreciation. His widest reputation has always been as a poetic technician, a refiner of language, a master of sweetness and elegance, but generally lacking in profundity or sublimity. Waller, moreover, avoided controversy rather successfully; with the exception of his two poems on Cromwell, he prosecuted a long career as a successful Royalist, writing leisurely and occasionally. His love poetry and vers de société, since they relate more closely to the Cavaliers than to the Restoration, will not concern us here, though it may be observed that this poetry brought Waller considerable acclaim; the Biographia Britannica even called him “the most celebrated Lyric Poet that ever England produced.”¹ Yet the tendency to associate Waller with merely technical innovation in poetry seriously disparages his contribution to the greater body of poetic theory upon which neoclassical poetry is built. Atterbury, in his “Preface” to The Second Part of Mr. Waller's Poems (1690), credits him with several significant improvements of English verse: greater regularity of diction, a more agreeable cadence and harmony by adding “more polysyllables, and smoother measures,” and new, stronger rhyme-words.² Indeed, the degree of the neoclassicists' acceptance of Waller as one of their chief forbears is so great that contemporary critics habitually regard him with veneration, whether, like Dryden, as the first to make writing “easily” an art, or like Atterbury, as one of the founders of the “Augustean Age” of the English language.³ In view of contemporary critical reaction to Waller's achievement, we may eliminate the bulk of his lyric poetry from consideration in this discussion, for the emphasis of the Restoration and early eighteenth century upon public rather than private poetry tends to isolate Waller's love verses from the rest of his work as largely unimportant in influencing later tastes. Waller's love poetry may not be private in the absolute sense of the word—certainly it is less so than Donne's—but it is distinctly different from the general trend of Restoration poetry. Although he may be best known to students of English verse as the author of stanzaic lyrics like “On a Girdle,” it was not in poems like this that he had his greatest theoretic impact upon neoclassicism, for in this respect Waller is part of an earlier poetic tradition.⁴ This does not mean that the influence and popularity of the lyric poetry should be regarded as slight, for the almost unvarying contemporary praise of Waller's ease, smoothness, regularity, and elegance coupled with the epigonous lyrics which his style continued to inspire well after 1700 indicate its importance. Waller's reputation suffered, however, at the hands of certain eighteenth-century critics; occasionally we find the lyric poetry treated as if it were licentious, as when Dennis complains that Waller's “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.”⁵ We ought to consider the influence upon later poetic theory not only of Waller's lyrics but also of his far more important and unjustly neglected public poems. For the modern view of Waller as a reformer of versification is based upon the artificially narrow criterion of quite recent literary taste: in terms of the formation of neoclassical poetry, it is inevitable that his entire poetic theory and practice was significant to the theorists of the Restoration and earlier eighteenth century.

A key discrimination in the evolution of neoclassicism is the degree of refinement that we may discern in the poetry of the mid-century. I have shown that the index of refinement varies from Cleveland to Denham; there is a similar variation between Denham's poetics of moderation and Waller's stress upon harmony. In a sense Waller is concerned with the reduction of the sprawling Bayeux tapestry of metaphysical wit and allusion to a more organized, compact fabric. Accordingly, even in such an early work as “Upon his Majesties repairing of Pauls” (c. 1635), he employs a comparison which emblematizes the wit of moderation:

That shipwrackt vessel which th'Apostle bore,
Scarce suffer'd more upon Melitas shore,
Than did his Temple in the Sea of Time;
(Our Nation's Glory, and our Nation's Crime)
When the first Monarch of this happy Isle,
Mov'd with the ruine of so brave a pile,
This work of cost and piety begun,
To be accomplish'd by his glorious Son;
Who all that came within the ample thought
Of his wise Sire, has to perfection brought.
He, like Amphion, makes those Quarries leap
Into fair figures from a confus'd heap:
For in his Art of Regiment is found
A pow'r, like that of Harmony in sound.(6)

This is familiar Stuart panegyric, within the usual contexts of the actions of a public figure, but the clear analogic mode relates Charles II, the “glorious Son,” founder of churches, to the effective musician of Theban myth, Amphion. For Waller proposes an essentially disordered world: the double shipwreck, first of the Apostle and now of his Church, symbolizes the unrest and uncertainty in English life which extend far beyond the cathedral itself. The reference to Amphion is a studied example of Waller's allusiveness, subtle without being obscure; a contemporary audience would have recognized at once the mixture of optimism and irony in such an allusion. While Amphion was traditionally ranked with David as one of the three great divinely inspired, effective musicians of antiquity, Waller presents him ironically in this context, since Amphion was known for using the power of his music to build the walls of Thebes, fortifications rather than a temple.⁷ This allusion, then, evokes the ironic picture of a church suffering from more than neglect to its external structure. Charles's “Art of Regiment,” which Waller ostensibly identifies with the King's futile attempts in the 1630's to reconcile the disorders in church and state, establishes the monarch as an ordering force, for in the image of the “confus'd heap” transformed into “fair figures” we have a clear reference to the popular doctrine of concordia discors. But this passage also contains the earliest hint in Waller's poetry of his theoretical conceptions of his art, since the musician imagery evidently is meant to exploit the conventional relationship between poet and lyrist. Hence the “perfection” wrought from confusion yields an epitome of neoclassical poetry; the “fair figures,” now analogous to rhetorical figures, are important to the whole but do not gain precedence. For in Waller's theoretic context the immediate goal is harmony, order out of chaos; allusion, consequently, must embody ideals of clarity and moderation. What Waller accomplishes, then, in an early passage like this, is the creation of a poetic entity which fulfills the theoretic dicta which it simultaneously recommends. The effect of Waller's moderate intellection, allusive without being obscure, is to transcend the genre of descriptive poetry to attain an idealized version of quasi-historical narrative in which classical and historical allusions coalesce.

Such indirect, symbolic flattery of the King is based not so much upon the idea of the divine right of kings as it is upon the more moderate conception of order. Consequently, we need not be surprised that Waller's best known and most controversial political poem is an exaltation of Cromwell, A Panegyrick to my Lord Protector (1655), where the historical context involves an impressive series of comparisons between Cromwell and the military heroes of the Old Testament and Augustan Rome.⁸ It may be argued that the Cromwell-David analogy, which Marvell had used four years earlier, recalls the typological relationship which had become a standard Royalist device by the 1640's and which was greatly amplified in the post-1649 regicide sermons. But Cromwell was not a king, so the familiar typological analogy must yield to the mundane context of the poem; hence Waller articulates the personal rather than the divine attributes of Cromwell throughout. For the context in which he evokes David is, characteristically, more representative of David as public man and politician than as spiritual leader:

Your Private Life did a just Pattern give,
How Fathers, Husbands, Pious Sons should live;
Born to Command, your Princely Vertue slept
Like Humble David, whilst the flock he kept.(9)

Gardiner later observed that Waller “had celebrated in his facile verse, not the spiritual hopes and fears, but the earthly glory of the Protector”;¹⁰ the truth of this is borne out by the nature of his allusions, which attempt to establish historical parallels between the rise of Cromwell and similar figures in antiquity, for Cromwell must be seen as a leader called to command rather than as an usurper. Nowhere else, in fact, does Waller better respond to the demands of epideictic poetry, for when praising Cromwell he found that the analogic arguments traditionally used in praise of rulers were unsuitable to a person of the Protector's condition. Hence he combines elements from the genres of Panegyricon and Laus, as outlined by the theorists of the Renaissance, to form an intermediate genre. Scaliger, for example, regards panegyric as the public praise of a great or noble man, while the Laudatio or encomium is devoted primarily to recalling noble qualities of the subject.¹¹ The changes which Waller has made in the conventional mode of panegyric may go almost unnoticed unless his poems on Cromwell are compared with the characteristics of the genre both before and after the Interregnum. What is perhaps most important, however, is that Waller accommodates his theoretical conceptions to the climate of ideas around him so that the aesthetic of moderation, which he already favored in matters like language and imagery, becomes the predominant force behind his poetry.

Waller's poetic theory had developed, by the time of the Restoration, into an elaborate amalgam of traditional methods and contemporary sensitivity. Unlike Denham, whose respect for convention always remains high, Waller's search for a symbolic language adequate to the tastes of the Restoration audience led him to dilute his analogic style with a cleverness reminiscent of the pointed wit popular in Cavalier lyric poetry. Often this approach is quite felicitous, but it can occasionally involve the poet in an exercise in grotesquerie, reminiscent of Donne or Cleveland, as when Waller greets Charles II by assuring him that “Great Britain, like blind Polipheme, of late / In a wild rage, became the scorn and hate, / Of her proud Neighbors,” but now that the King has been restored, “This Giant Isle has got her Eye again.”¹² The remarkable thing about this simile is not the peculiarity of the allusion, which after all is far less recherché than much of metaphysical poetry, but that Waller is unwilling to risk obscurity at the end of his comparison, and so creates a compound, “Giant Isle,” which keeps the England—Polyphemus analogy in its proper perspective. The equation of Charles II with a cyclops' eye is not even intended to carry the full weight of the analogy, for Waller is actually more concerned with recalling the irrationality of England during the Interregnum. This search for ambiguity, with its latent ironies, continues in the same poem as Waller describes how the English people request the restoration of the monarchy:

When straight the People, by no force compell'd,
No longer from their inclination held,
Break forth at once, like Powder set on fire;
And, with a Noble rage, their King require.
So th'injured Sea, which from her wonted course,
To gain some Acres, Avarice did force,
If the new Banks, neglected once, decay,
No longer will from her old Channel stay;
Raging, the late-got land she overflows,
And all that's built upon't to ruine goes.(13)

The ironic ambiguity of Waller's simile is immediately evident if we compare it with the other use of “rage” in his panegyric To the King …, when England, Polyphemus-like, indulges in “a wild rage,” an abstraction which is traditionally hostile to an ordered society and which Waller accordingly views as pejorative. But here the emotion which has been capable of overwhelming order is a meliorative force, though the ironic implication of the tradition of irrationality remains inherent in the word. Furthermore, the representation of “th' injured Sea” as the raging popular will for the restoration of Charles II is almost exactly contrary to its usual signification in seventeenth-century political poetry. For according to conventions derived from classical antiquity, the metaphor of the flooding river or raging sea symbolizes the evils of civil chaos, vast social inequities, and more specifically civil war.¹⁴ Waller's simile here, then, does two unusual things: first, it makes the flooding of the “late-got land” tantamount not to civil disorder but rather to a justifiable regaining by the commonwealth of its natural demesne; second, through the reversal of an accepted metaphoric paradigm, it brings elements of irony and ambiguity fully into his aesthetics. As a theorist, Waller has clearly made certain adjustments in his earlier attitude toward figurative language, for irony (if this is indeed ironical) is one of the most varied and difficult tropes to present. Yet he does not neglect his concerns with clarity and moderation; instead he amplifies them by adopting a complexity of allusion which is consistent with the rise of neoclassical poetry. We may ask whether Waller is merely responding to new poetic styles which he had no part in making or whether his theoretical contribution at this point is genuinely influential. Every precursor must eventually become lost amidst a crowd of emulators, and this is surely the case, to a certain degree, with Waller. But the consistency of his emphasis, in theoretical matters, upon the poetic modes which eventually become neoclassical constants should be insistent proof that even after the Restoration Waller continues to be an innovator in the realm of poetic expression.

His development as a political panegyrist continues in the early years of the Restoration as he competes with Dryden as a kind of semi-official Royalist apologist. Waller's most important poems from this period are the descriptive poem, closest of all his works to Coopers Hill, On St. James's Park, as lately improv'd by His Majesty (1661) and Instructions to a Painter (1665).¹⁵ We have seen that Waller's poetics gradually adjust themselves to intellectual and political changes, a fact which is seldom more clearly seen in his verse than in On St. James's Park, which reflects and applauds England's recently acquired stability. Praise of stability requires different methods from those used formerly to advocate such a state; whereas Denham could recommend the establishment of a mean between warring contraries, Waller employs typological and historical allusions to record the grandeur of the present peace. This accounts for such thematic material as is furnished by the Edenic and Noahic analogies which appear early in the poem. But the most important section of the poem is devoted to serious reflection, which we find in virtually all topographic poetry after Denham. Charles II, meditating upon state affairs within the Park, regards Westminster:

From hence he does that antique Pile behold,
Where Royal heads receive the sacred gold;
It gives them Crowns, and does their ashes keep;
There made like gods, like mortals there they sleep
Making the circle of their Reign complete,
Those Suns of Empire, where they rise they set.
When others fell, this standing did presage
The Crown should triumph over popular rage,
Hard by that House where all our Ills were shap'd,
Th'auspicious Temple stood, and yet escap'd.
So, snow on Ætna does unmelted lye,
Whence rowling flames and scatter'd cinders, flie;
The distant Countrey in the ruine shares,
What falls from Heav'n the burning Mountain spares.(16)

First Waller describes the Abbey in traditional terms as the place where eternal suns rise and set, almost analogous to the sea, evocative of the enduring qualities of the monarchy (Charles had been crowned there on 23 April 1661). But the building is more than the repository of England's historical glory: Waller makes it clear that in the recent turbulent past it represented an auspicious stability. The closing simile provides us with an instance of the adaptation of the metaphysical conceit to the Restoration aesthetic of moderation. For the symbolic relevance of Aetna in this context, where it is equated with “popular rage,” touches upon the particular connotation which the volcano had for seventeenth-century Englishmen. Waller probably owes the comparison most immediately to Cowley, who used it in his ode, “To Mr. Hobs,” but he must also have been acquainted with the classical source, Claudian's De Raptu Proserpinae. Claudian recalls the myth of the volcano's origin: it is the monument to Jove's vanquishing of the rebellious Giants, one of whom—Enceladus—lies buried beneath it. Although Claudian does not editorialize on the rebellion, his comment that Aetna “feeds its flame with the dread fruit of its own body” points out the self-destructive torture of internecine strife. The phenomenon of the flames being unable to melt the snow on the mountain-top, so far as Claudian is concerned, is simply a natural peculiarity of the place.¹⁷ Waller makes appropriate changes in the classical story to recommend it more closely to the needs of his audience; according to seventeenth-century imagistic tradition, the erupting volcano, like the earthquake, is usually regarded as a sign of a divine judgment upon mankind, often as punishment for great crimes, as in the Old Testament (Sodom and Gomorrah).¹⁸ It seems clear that Waller introduces the allusion to the eruption-revolt to show that the civil war and Cromwell's usurpation are to be considered as divine judgments upon England, as a kind of purge for its distemper. Simultaneously, however, the unmelted snow closest to the source of rebellion symbolizes the endurance of the English ecclesiastical structure. As a whole, this simile is the prototype of Restoration didactic symbolism: the classical reference, given a deeper meaning, provides both description of, and analogy to, contemporary affairs. This imagistic technique is typical of Waller's poetic theory during the 1660's, for by synthesizing Scriptural, classical, and contemporary historical and political connotations he evokes considerable richness of meaning through the complex texture of his allusion.

Restoring the monarchy ultimately proved easier than restoring political harmony; the re-emergence of dissension during the late 1660's quieted all but the most assiduous of Royalist panegyrists and the stronger polemic of satire rapidly became the dominant poetic genre. The full range of Waller's poetry is surprisingly great, from the lyric grace of the Sacharissa poems and verse trifles to the complexity of the later political works, but satire was clearly alien to his disposition. His last important panegyric, Instructions to a Painter, was influential enough to instigate a minor genre of “painter” poems, but all of them were satirical; hence after around 1665 Waller's immediate influence began to diminish, though the model of his versification and linguistic techniques remained prominent. Atterbury later contended that Waller's poetry was so much of a piece that, “Were we to judge barely by the wording, we could not know what was wrote at twenty, and what at fourscore,” but as we have seen, there are significant changes in Waller's poetic theory during his career.¹⁹ We know comparatively little about Waller's personality, but he comes through to the modern reader as as unaffectedly elegant man of letters.²⁰ This elegance is probably his chief contribution to the growth of neoclassical poetics, for not only is it a harbinger of one of the major aspects of neoclassical taste but it is usually embodied in imagistic, linguistic, and syntactic contexts which are especially adumbrative of Restoration poetics. What distinguishes Waller from other principal precursors is his attempt to establish a symbolic landscape of poetic forms in which certain analogies—typological, historical, classical—become standard referents. Waller succeeds to a limited extent in scattered passages, but he is not capable of sustaining this style for long and hence falls short of producing the metaphorical history which Dryden later achieves. With respect to chronology, the last third of Waller's poetic career falls within the neoclassical age, but his greatest effect upon the principal writers of this period comes much earlier. The most appropriate pronouncement by any neoclassical writer about Waller, in Johnson's Life of Waller, is perhaps the most accurate classification that has yet been made, for Johnson recognizes that Waller is essentially a pre-neoclassical figure who is nevertheless tremendously important in the development of the poetic theories of the age: “But of the praise of Waller, though much may be taken away, much will remain, for it cannot be denied that he added something to our elegance of diction, and something to our propriety of thought.”²¹ …

Notes

1. Biographia Britannica, VI, 4099.

2. (London, 1690), Sig. A3^r-A5^v.

3. See the Preface to The Rival Ladies (1664), in Essays, ed. Watson, I, 7; Preface to The Second Part of Mr. Waller's Poems, Sig. A4^r. Examples of these opinions are numerous: see Sir Thomas Pope Blount, De Re Poetica (London, 1694), p. 245; Addison, Account of the Greatest English Poets (1694) in Works, ed. Richard Hurd (London, 1854), I, 25; Dennis, The Impartial Critick (1693), in Critical Works, I, 13-14. The principal modern study of Waller, Alexander Ward Allison, Toward an Augustan Poetic: Edmund Waller's Reform of English Poetry (Lexington, Ky., 1962), is largely devoted to an analysis of versification and technique.

4. For an instance of Waller's functioning in an earlier tradition, see Hugh M. Richmond, The School of Love. The Evolution of the Stuart Love Lyric (Princeton, 1964), pp. 63-66.

5. Reflections … upon … An Essay Upon Criticism (1711), in Critical Works, I, 408. Although Dennis does not specify the kind of poetry he is referring to, these qualities best describe Waller's lyrics.

6. Poems, & C. Written upon Several Occasions, 5th ed. (London, 1686), pp. 19-20. Robert A. Aubin, Topographical Poetry in XVIII-Century England (Ann Arbor, 1949), pp. 350-364, omits this poem from his list of some 300 building-poems. Seventeenth-century editions at present offer the most reliable text of Waller; the first modern edition since that of George Thorn-Drury (1893) is in preparation by Philip R. Wikelund.

7. See John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky. Ideas of Music In English Poetry, 1500-1700 (Princeton, 1961), pp. 14, 84. The analogy between Amphion and the reigning sovereign occurs, most notably, in Marvell's The First Anniversary of the Government under O.C. (1655), ll. 45-74.

8. See Warren L. Chernaik, “Waller's Panegyric to My Lord Protector and the Poetry of Praise,” SEL. IV (1964), 113-121. See also Mr. Chernaik's forthcoming The Poetry of Limitation: A Study of Edmund Waller (New Haven, 1968).

9. The Second Part of Mr. Waller's Poems, p. 69.

10. See Samuel R. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649-1656, 4 vols. (London, 1903), IV, 193.

11. See Poetices (1561), pp. 159-161 (III.cix-cx): “Panegyricus igitur est oratio laudatoria quae dici consuevit apud multitudinem congregatam. Différtque ab aliis orationibus demonstrativis: propterea quod scribi possunt de cuiuspiam laudibus, quae nunquam recitatae, sola lectione contentae sunt” (p. 160). O. B. Hardison, Jr., The Enduring Monument. A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill, 1962), pp. 196-198, provides a convenient summary of Scaliger's epideictic types.

12. To the King, upon his Majesty's Happy Return (1660), in Poems (1686), p. 173.

13. Poems (1686), pp. 174-175.

14. E.g., see “Upon Appleton House,” Stanza LIX; Coopers Hill, ll. 343-348. Don Cameron Allen, Image and Meaning. Metaphoric Traditions in Renaissance Poetry (Baltimore, 1960), pp. 132-134, discusses some of the background of this image.

15. See Poems on Affairs of State, I, 20-21, for an account of Waller's intentions in the first of the “Painter” poems; except for the poet-painter analogy and the ut pictura poesis imagery, the poem is conventional panegyric.

16. Poems (1686), pp. 163-164.

17. See De Raptu Proserpinae, in Claudian, trans. Maurice Platnauer, 2 vols. (London, 1922), II, 305. Cowley describes Hobbes's vigorous old age in terms similar to those of Waller, but without the political analogy:

                        So Contraries on Ætna's top conspire,
    Here hoary Frosts, and by them breaks out Fire.
    A secure peace the faithful Neighbors keep
    Th'emboldned Snow next to the Flame does sleep.

    (Works, 6 pts., [London, 1668], iii, 28 [stanza 6])

18. There were seventeen eruptions of Aetna during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the worst being in 1537 and 1669; see The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1955), III, 539, on the eruption of 18-21 May 1669; Heneage Finch, A True and Exact Relation of the Late Prodigious Earthquake & Eruption of Mount Ætna (London, 1969), pp. 11-25. Neither of these accounts mentions the phenomenon of the unmelted snow.

19. The Second Part of Mr. Waller's Poems, “Preface,” Sig. A5^r.

20. Bonamy Dobrée conceives of Waller along these lines in an imaginary conversation; see “A Conversation between Bishop Henry King and Edmund Waller,” As Their Friends Saw Them (London, 1933), pp. 13-30.

21. Lives (1905), I, 296.