SOURCE: Waswo, Richard. “Critical Perspectives.” In The Fatal Mirror: Themes and Techniques in the Poetry of Fulke Greville, pp. 155-67. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972.

[In the following excerpt, Waswo examines Greville's critical reception and the problems critics face when evaluating his work.]

The history of Fulke Greville's reputation as a poet may be regarded virtually as a belated footnote to that of John Donne. Critical respect in the poets' own age was shortly followed by almost total neglect. Although Greville passed unnoticed in Dr. Johnson's criticism of “metaphysical” excesses, he shared in the romantic revival of interest in the quaint authors of the Renaissance. By 1870 he was sufficiently identified with the “metaphysical school,” then in general disfavor, for his editor to protest the abusive use of the term.¹ But in the ensuing flurry of scholarly activity on both sides of the Atlantic from about 1890 to 1920 Greville's position became more ambiguous. Most of the ambiguity resulted from using romantic canons of taste in judging him, but some of it proceeded from the revaluation of the metaphysicals and an uncertainty as to whether Greville belonged in their category or not. The definitive direction that the revaluation eventually took—in Eliot's famous review of Grierson's anthology—pretty much ensured that he did not, with the result that scholarship then tended to consider him in the context of its growing historical interest in the Elizabethan sonneteers. Eliot himself once remarked apropos of the dramas that Greville had “never received quite his due.”²

With respect to the lyrics, his due was a long time coming, and is arriving in our own time as the result of yet another revaluation of Renaissance literary history largely expounded for the last thirty years in the work of Yvor Winters.³ Much of the value and the growing influence of Winters' theory of the plain style lies in its (at the time pioneer) approach to the Renaissance lyric in terms of the rhetoric of the period, which scholars have since become willing to take seriously. The theory thus aims to provide an accurate historical understanding of what Renaissance poets were consciously attempting, while furnishing critical standards to judge those attempts in the poetry with which it is concerned. Ironically, however, the theory has been subsequently developed in a way that undervalues, when it does not ignore, certain kinds of lyric performance at which most Renaissance poets excelled. Despite this deficiency, the theory has ultimately widened our perception of the Renaissance lyric in general, and has raised broader critical questions of considerable importance for Greville in particular.

As a gentleman, for whom publication was improper, and as a courtier, for whom it could be dangerous, Greville published nothing in his lifetime.⁴ The lack was mildly lamented in the first critical notice we have of him in 1589 by Puttenham, who catalogued with taste and comprehensiveness the “crew of Courtly makers Noble men and Gentlemen of her Majesties owne servauntes, who have written excellently well as it would appeare if their doings could be found out and made publicke with the rest.” Puttenham, a firm believer in hierarchical degree, lists them in order not of literary merit but of social rank, being careful to supply the titles of those still living. He begins with the Earl of Oxford and includes, among others, “Sir Philip Sydney, Sir Walter Rawleigh, Master Edward Dyar, Maister Fulke Grevell.”⁵ Although seventeen of the Caelica lyrics were set to music between 1597 and 1630 by Cavendish, Dowland, and Peerson, only a few of them found their way into the manuscript collections of the day.⁶

It is hard to believe that this relative scarcity (when compared to the many surviving versions of Sidney's and Donne's poems) does not at least in part result from the prudence of the cautious statesman exercised throughout his long life. A man who burned a play of his lest it offend the queen (Life of Sidney, pp. 155-157) would surely be unlikely to allow copies of anything but the more harmless amorous poems to circulate widely, or even to circulate at all. The situation grew even touchier after Elizabeth's death, when Greville was reduced to writing toadying letters to Cecil for preferment. A man who sought service with James and his favorites would hardly have wished to be known as the author of “Syon lyes waste,” not to mention the treatises.⁷

Where Puttenham's list aimed at inclusiveness, another contemporary mentioned Greville in a more exclusive company who were explicitly representative of a certain taste, a company “whose English hath in my Conceit most propriety, and is nearest to the Phrase of Court, and to the Speech used among the noble, and among the better sort in London.” The language of Raleigh and Donne, among others, “but especially of Sir Foulk Grevile” is cited as preliminary to the final panegyric: “I never tasted English more to my liking, nor more smart, and put to the height of Use in Poetry, then in that vital, judicious, and most practicable Language of Benjamin Jonson's Poems.”⁸ A sometime member of the court, Sir Thomas Smith, while telling an exciting tale about some iniquitous Russian emperor, wished “for some excellent pen-man,” like Sidney, to render it in poetry, “or in an Earth-deploring, sententious, high rapt tragedie with the noble Foulk-Grevill.”⁹

Taken together, these contemporary notices suggest that in the educated literary opinion of his time Greville was regarded as a conscientious craftsman whose use of language was succinct and socially elevated. That his diction was praised for its “propriety” should be remembered, since what seemed elegant and proper to the standards of 1620 was to be generally scorned by the changing taste of the Restoration. The preference for the pellucid politeness of Waller and Denham became the dominant fashion that consigned Greville, along with all the other more demanding poets of the earlier seventeenth century, to virtual oblivion. In this literary context William Winstanley listed Greville's works, omitting Caelica, and quoted the judgment of Milton's nephew, Edward Phillips, upon them: “in all which is observable a close mysterious and sententious way of Writing, without much regard to Elegancy of Stile, or smoothness of Verse.”¹⁰ In substance, this judgment remained final, and was constantly quoted for over two hundred years.¹¹

The supposedly abstruse mysteries that the neoclassical age detested were of course just what delighted the romantics. Hazlitt found that Greville alone could surpass Chapman “in gravity and mystery,” and wrote a pleasant account of Lamb's desire to call up the ghosts of Greville and Sir Thomas Browne to unravel the “dark hints and doubtful oracles” in their writings.¹² But if the romantic taste for the quaintness of “these old crabbed authors” resulted in little penetrating criticism, it at least acknowledged that the poetry had some kind of power and appeal, and brought it back into public view. The romantic appreciation of Greville, however, was necessarily limited by what it regarded as the tyranny of mind in his verse. Although Lamb found in the dramas “the finest movements of the human heart, the utmost grandeur of which the soul is capable,” his general judgment, echoed in most subsequent scholarship, was that “whether we look into his plays or his most passionate love-poems, we shall find all frozen and made rigid with intellect.”¹³ In addition, Greville's work as biographer made it easy to patronize him, an attitude also echoed in subsequent scholarship. Landor remarked that he “had the virtue and good-sense to found his chief distinction” on his friendship with Sidney.¹⁴

The romantic dislike of the rational combined with the romantic perception of poetic power established the ambivalent tone of most Victorian criticism, which is generally characterized by assertions of distaste and grudging admissions of value. Gosse saw Greville as a “solitary phenomenon … a kind of marsupial in our poetical zoology,” and called his verse “unsympathetic and unattractive, yet far too original and well-sustained to be overlooked.”¹⁵ Saintsbury was more severe on “the strangely repellent character of Brooke's thought,” but later acknowledged the technical achievement of Caelica's metrics, and credited Greville with “central poetic heat.”¹⁶ Mrs. Ward was impressed by his “sheer power of mind,” denied that either his subjects or his manner were those of “true poetry,” and then admitted that “yet at bottom Lord Brooke had many of the poet's gifts.”¹⁷

Since the turn of the century we have of course witnessed the numerous, but usually partial, movements of critical taste away from the romantic position that took the expression of “repellent” notions in rigorously logical structures to be unforgivably unpoetical. Such reaction was an obvious precondition for the popular revival of the metaphysicals. Long before Eliot, however, scholars were appreciating the intricate thought and the mockery of amorous convention in both Greville and Donne.¹⁸ Croll's study, The Works of Fulke Greville, published in 1903, was the first attempt at a thorough understanding of the poet, an understanding which is reflected by Felix Schelling's later treatment of him in English Literature during the Lifetime of Shakespeare (1910).¹⁹ Although today the realization that “many later sixteenth-century poets wrote some more or less metaphysical poetry”²⁰ is commonplace, the vogue for the metaphysicals has continued to focus more on those facets of the style that distinguish it from, rather than on those that link it to, the earlier poetry in the plain style.

But despite this distinction, Greville, like the metaphysicals, now enjoys a higher reputation than he has in any period since his own age. The changing taste that has placed him there may be gauged by comparing the extent and nature of his representation in two British anthologies typical of their respective periods. In A Pageant of Elizabethan Poetry, compiled by Arthur Symons in 1906, the lyrics of Campion and Herrick greatly outnumber those of any other poet. Three well-selected lyrics from Caelica are included (sonnets “4,” “52,” “22”), all of which employ the ornate style, two of them with varying degrees of irony. In English Poetry 1550-1660, edited by Fred Inglis in 1965, the lyrics of Greville out-number those of Campion and Herrick put together. None of his ornate poems is included; instead the emphasis is on the great religious lyrics and the more ironic, bitter, and cynical secular ones. The nature and extent of this representation is approximately the same in a recent American collection, English Renaissance Poetry (1963), edited by John Williams.

The editors of both these recent anthologies specifically acknowledge their debt to the criticism of Winters. Douglas Peterson, a former student of Winters, whose book is an attempt to trace in detail the consequences of his theories for literary history, concisely summarizes the revaluation that has brought Greville into greater prominence:

Recognition of the plain and eloquent traditions makes possible a more comprehensive and … a more accurate account of the evolution of the short poem, or lyric, in the sixteenth century than any previously proposed. It makes clear … that the domestication of the sonnet and English Petrarchism, which the standard literary histories have always stressed as being of central importance, are only minor events within a larger context of developments, and that the grouping of Tudor poets by Lewis into a “Drab” and a “Golden” school is arbitrary and at the expense of major continuities. Furthermore, it locates precedents for Donne's anti-Petrarchan sentiments that qualify his position as an innovator and identify him with an anti-courtly movement that is nearly a century old.²¹

This revaluation, while having its own drawbacks (which will be discussed below), has nonetheless suggested lines of inquiry that seem important to pursue. And if Greville is not yet as well known as he perhaps deserves to be, the critical framework Winters outlined has at least provided a context in which Greville's claims to attention may be seriously considered. Most importantly, perhaps, the context has facilitated such consideration by stimulating the reprinting of Greville's text, making Caelica in its entirety now fully available in the general market.²² I have tried to treat the lyrics throughout this study in such a way as to demonstrate the dimension and the resonance they gain by being read as a sequence, as a collection for whose arrangement the poet was himself responsible.

The adequate appreciation of Greville's achievement requires the discussion of three critical problems: two arise from the Wintersian revaluation, the other from the nature of Greville's writing.

The first is the least troublesome, and is the obvious and natural result of a polemical view that seeks to expose what it regards as error. In order to cry up the plain style, it was necessary both to cry down the ornate, labeling it decorative and trivial, and at the same time to acknowledge the technical resources that its experiments made available to the plain. But since the prime object of the argument was to establish the superiority of the plain style, the functional potentialities of the ornate per se were ruled out and its contribution minimized. The ironic result of the polemic for Greville is that it underestimates his range and flexibility, in not allowing for a full awareness of his manipulation of the structures and diction of the ornate style.²³ Winters' polemic, however, has gradually come to be employed in scholarship—in conjunction with an increased sophistication in matters of Renaissance rhetoric and literary theory—as an exploratory tool rather than as an argumentative weapon. So used, it has revealed the depth and variety of purposes in the ornate style, and made it possible to perceive the interaction (and not merely the opposition) of both styles in the work of individual poets.²⁴ For example, one recent critic uses Winters' and Peterson's approach not “to assert the superiority of the plain style to the eloquent style,” since “each has its own virtues and corresponding defects,” but rather to point out that if Greville's best lyrics are not like those of Sidney or Spenser, “in their own stark fashion they are as good as the most eloquent products of his contemporaries.”²⁵

If the polemical revaluation furnishes one perspective that requires a correction for its narrowness, it also offers another that requires the same correction for its breadth. This is the whole conception of the plain style as a historically changing, but always distinct, phenomenon. It is much more visible in Peterson's development of Winters' theory than in Winters' own exposition of it. The latter, although it took a historical approach and was intended as a historical corrective, was primarily critical; the historical correction was offered in terms of the critical values by which Winters defined the plain style. Having defined it thus, Winters could freely juxtapose Greville with Wallace Stevens or Robert Bridges, as well as with Jonson or Herbert, to argue for the merits of the style and for the reorganization of literary history on its terms. He did not therefore necessarily have to assert it as a historical continuity; it was treated, in short, more as value than as fact.

Peterson, however, wants to have the plain style equally as fact and value, as a single identifiable attitude toward experience that can be traced from the Middle Ages up to Donne, and even beyond. So far as this attitude can be demonstrated, Peterson demonstrates it well, but he extends it to the point where it becomes both historically inaccurate and critically untenable. By the time the native medieval plain style emerges from its modification by the continental ornate, he must admit that “stylistically, the contemplative or noncourtly tradition is no longer so easily identified.”²⁶ Indeed it is not: we are hard put to detect lines of historical development that can connect the styles of Donne and, say, Barnabe Googe. When the historical interaction of the plain and ornate styles thus erases the individual continuity of the former, Peterson, seeking to preserve it, is forced to appeal to ever more generalized criteria. Two of these are: the examination of feelings in terms of their motives, and the use of logical exposition; and it is on these grounds that he asks us to see Greville using the same “methods of approaching religious experience” as Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw.²⁷ First, it is doubtful that the latter two poets used these “methods” to any great extent; second, even if they all did, the “methods” are so broad that to say so is to tell us very little about the poetry under consideration, and to ignore all the other palpable differences in its movement and effect. The criteria Peterson adduces here may be critical—they might serve to argue that all these men wrote good poems—but they are not historical: their application results in fact in a total obliteration of historical distinctions. The criteria that he implies elsewhere are not even critical. As he passes beyond the point where real historical discrimination between the styles is possible, he insistently repeats such expansive key terms as “honest,” “plain” (now wholly cut loose from its moorings in some single and specific style), “serious,” and “the idiom of integrity.” In so doing, he comes perilously close to the old notion of “sincerity,” partly as a test of literary merit, and partly as glue to hold the splintering plain style together. The terms seem to slide from describing the poems to making dubious postulations about the poets' actual motives, curiously perpetuating the Victorian hostility to literary artifice in the quest for personal biography.²⁸

The overexpanded view of the plain style thus ironically prevents us from making the kinds of discriminations that the original conception of it made possible, discriminations that are essential if we are to arrive at an accurate historical understanding of a poet's manner of writing. The general historical development of the sixteenth-century English lyric reveals a mixture and a modification of both the plain and the ornate styles—a mixture determined in each particular case by whatever reasons a poet may have had for employing either or both. To see Greville as a plain stylist is incomplete insofar as that perspective neglects his use of the ornate style and fails to provide some account of how and why his use of both styles differs from that of other poets.²⁹

I have sought to give such an account by investigating his lyrics in terms of what J. V. Cunningham has called “principles of order,” that is, “schemes which direct the production of works.” Although these include specifically literary conventions, they also derive from theology, logic, rhetoric, or psychology, and consist of abstractions

which belong as abstractions to the province of philosophy and in exemplification to the province of fiction. But all these, though they may be regarded as material or conclusions in other branches of endeavor, are for the man who writes primarily the methods by which he both finds what he has to say and says it in succession and with appropriate emphasis and development.

On this basis, Cunningham defines “the structure of a poem” as “the principles of order that determine it and their inter-relationships with each other.”³⁰ Poetic structure thus becomes a series of selective limitations, of choices among the principles—which include modes of technical presentation—current in a given tradition. To describe structure in this sense is to consider both the principles which are selected (taking notice of those which are not) and the way in which, in the course of the poem, they are related to each other. Criticism in this sense I take to be an evaluation of the appropriateness of these relationships, an attempt to determine how fine an adjustment exists between the selected principles, or between what I have more loosely called themes and techniques.

The advantage of such an approach is that it compels simultaneous consideration both of what a poet works with and of how he works with it, and thus describes how he is distinguished from the given traditions of his age as well as how he is related to them. Applied to Greville, it shows us his mastery of the traditional style in both its ornate and plain forms, and explains his particular preference for the latter in terms of his refinement of rhetorical, logical, and prosodic principles which were basically grounded in a conception of experience provided by religious ones. The approach also demonstrates that he was frequently capable of writing great poems, whose ordering principles are so exactly adjusted as to provide a precise, complex, and moving apprehension of experience—to provide, in other words, the full meaning that results from the careful observance of decorum. But this statement, which is wholly valid within the context of the approach, where the historical interpretation of meaning is coextensive with aesthetic appreciation of it,³¹ raises the third and final problem, which is simply that of appreciating the kind of apprehension Greville offers, of taking pleasure in the operation of principles of order which are so remote from the traditions of our own time.

Part of the problem has been touched upon before. The relevance of this part (which concerns the nonliterary principles of order per se) to criticism has been identified by R. S. Crane:

The difference between a tragedy or … comedy or novel or lyric poem and a merely sensational, melodramatic, sentimental, or fanciful work is more than a difference in form and technique. It is a difference we cannot very well state without bringing in distinctions between true, comprehensive, or at least mature conceptions of things and false, partial, arbitrary, or simple-minded conceptions; and it is in terms of precisely such distinctions, of course, that we tend to differentiate among … constructions in philosophy, distinct as these are from literary constructions in method and intent.³²

It is inevitable that literary criticism, in seeking to judge a fiction which is constructed partly on nonfictional principles, should at some point consider the intrinsic value of those principles. Certainly our opinion (whether we consider it or not) of their value will color our literary judgment of the fiction: the history of criticism itself is ample evidence of this natural—conscious or unconscious—operation of human prejudice.

Despite its obviousness, this fact has been faced by few modern critics; indeed, there is a tendency in much modern critical theory to deny that it exists.³³ We are presumably intended to rise above our prejudices simply by forgetting about them and by ignoring those aspects of a work of literature which call them into play. We are invited to regard literature as existing in a vacuum, as operating within a closed system according to self-generated and self-sustaining principles. It is perhaps possible that some literature does; it is unquestionable that Renaissance literature does not. More generally, however, to bar criticism from considering the problem as stated by Crane is to blur and curtail one of its principal functions, which is evaluation. It is to refuse criticism its most direct and efficient means of saying why some poems are better than others, or why some should be anthologized or taught before others. For example, I have tried to demonstrate that Greville was a consummate master of the formal and technical skills of his craft; so were Campion and Herrick. But even the most copious of purely “literary” arguments could hardly justify the change of taste in the last sixty years that has given the religious lyrics of Greville an implicitly higher place than the exquisite performances of the other two poets. It can be justified most precisely by an appeal to the “conceptions of things” that Greville offers, to the intrinsic worth of those conceptions in terms of depth, complexity, maturity, comprehensiveness, accuracy, or whatever.

I have of course assumed this worth, and have from time to time suggested what I conceive it to be. It was certainly axiomatic for Greville, who believed with his friend Daniel that only “matter” could satisfy the “judicious.” It is not my place, nor within my competence, to defend the “matter” in detail; the reader will judge it for himself. I wish merely to urge that such a judgment of the value of extraliterary propositions should be made, that it is to some extent a critical judgment, and that it be recognized as such.

There is, however, another part of the problem which is really antecedent to this judgment, and which has to do with the way in which the extraliterary propositions are presented and perceived in the work of literature. Before we can judge them with any degree of fairness, we must be willing to entertain them; the work, in other words, must allow for a kind of suspension of disbelief in propositions whose extraliterary statement might permit us to ignore them. In the Aristotelian terms of the Renaissance, the commonplace must be given moving power by its form. The point is nicely illustrated by an anecdote concerning Oliver Wendell Holmes. The great jurist, a notorious agnostic and freethinker, was teased by his wife when she saw him reading a volume of Dante. “Why, Wendell,” she said, “how can you read about heaven and hell? I thought you didn't believe in heaven and hell.” “My dear,” he replied, “I do when I read Dante.”

The question becomes, then, how can the compressed abstractions of Greville's best lyrics secure the same imaginative assent that generations of cultivated readers have granted to the much broader epic narrations of Dante or of Milton? One way that they can do so, as I have been concerned to point out, is by being examined largely in terms of their emotional consequences, by being employed to judge experience that is universally accessible. Another way is simply that which has been universally acknowledged, even by those critics who do not much like it: by the “sheer power of mind” which distinguishes their presentation.

To argue for the poetic value of direct intellectual effort, of rational discourse proceeding by logic, is still unfashionable; but it has been ventured on by one eminent modern critic as follows:

I do not doubt that the language of poetry is very largely that of indirection and symbolism. But it is not only that. Poetry is closer to rhetoric than we today are willing to admit; syntax plays a greater part in it than our current theory grants, and syntax connects poetry with rational thought, for, as Hegel says, “grammar, in its extended and consistent form”—by which he means syntax—“is the work of thought, which makes its categories distinctly visible therein.” And those poets of our time who make the greatest impress upon us are those who are most aware of rhetoric, which is to say, of the intellectual content of their work.³⁴

The ground of the argument is the conceptual nature of language itself, a recognition that the use of language, even in its most poetic indirection, is fundamentally the use of the mind.³⁵ What this leads to, for Trilling, is a response to “intellectual cogency,” whether in poetry or in “ideas” per se, which constitutes an aesthetic pleasure. He further defines this pleasure as “enjoying the power of grace of a mind without admitting the rightness of its intention or conclusion.”³⁶ For appreciation, this is all that is required; for criticism, we need also to see that “delight comes from the wisdom expressed as well as from the expression of wisdom.”³⁷ This kind of delight may be rare enough, but we have all surely been rewarded by it from time to time as we have actively followed the exertions in language of a serious thinker. It depends precisely on the notion of “cogency”: we delight not merely in the mind moving, but in its getting somewhere; not merely in its adroit manipulation of masses of recalcitrant or conflicting material, but in its manipulating them into some mentally coherent shape. We feel not only exhilarated by the effort, but illuminated by its result. If it is not a feeling that we commonly associate with poetry, that is, as Trilling suggests, our loss as well as poetry's.

Greville's lyrics can offer us the pleasures of cogency in a direct and highly pressurized form. To appreciate them we have only to allow poetry a resource possible to any use of language, and to see this resource not as frozen rigidity but as potential liberation, as one of the few and fallible means we have to explore the inner spaces of our nature. For what these pleasures finally imply involves yet another principle of Renaissance orthodoxy and modern heresy: they imply that we delight in learning and that poetry can teach.

This ancient conviction has received a restatement for modern taste from Edmund Wilson, who applies it specifically to lyric poetry, which he defines as “a pattern imposed on the expression of a feeling.” The effect of the pattern is to reduce the chaos of actual experience “to something orderly, symmetrical and pleasing. … And this control of his emotion by the poet has the effect at second hand of making it easier for the reader to manage his own emotions.” To be cured of an “ache of disorder,” to be relieved “of some oppressive burden of uncomprehended events,” is what satisfies us in each “victory of the human intellect”—in philosophy or in poetry.³⁸

What, therefore, the poet communicates, and what we perceive with aesthetic pleasure, is nothing more nor less than an understanding of experience and of ourselves. There are to be sure many ways of understanding, just as there are many kinds of poetry, many kinds of order that can be imposed. Greville's is one kind; indeed, it is the most obvious kind, and for this reason possibly the most efficient. For to express emotions as they emerge from a chain of reasoning is not only to discipline and comprehend those that we may share, but also to enable us to become aware of those that we may not. Our own feelings are often sufficiently baffling; those of others which do not coincide with our own, which are elicited by different objects and formed by different experiences, are wholly so, unless their motives are communicated to us by some mental process which is mutually known or knowable. And to obtain pleasure in the process as it unfolds in a poem is one way by which we may be led to an awareness of what is beyond the narrow limits of our actual experience, or indeed of what is within it had we only noticed. The effect of such poetry is to get us out of ourselves, to enlarge our perception of the world by providing through the understanding not only an understanding but a full, sympathetic, and disinterested contact with other human beings. In whatever guise it presents itself, this is a precious gift: it is the gift of civilization, and we cannot afford to refuse it.

Notes

1. Grosart is attempting to praise Greville's “thought,” though what he is really praising is his piety, and feels it necessary to score off the prevailing contempt for “intellectual” poetry: “Your stupid critic mutters ‘metaphysical School,’ and so there's an end on ‘t” (II, xix).

2. Elizabethan Essays (London, 1934), p. 195.

3. The seminal essay is “The 16th Century Lyric in England,” Poetry, LIII (Feb., Mar., 1939), 258-72, 320-35; LIV (Apr., 1939), 35-51. It is reprinted and enlarged, with a much fuller treatment of Greville, as the first chapter in his last book, Forms of Discovery.

4. A pirated edition of Mustapha appeared in 1609.

5. P. 61 (I.xxxi).

6. This is the opinion of Bullough (Poems and Dramas, I, 38), whose notes identify which lyrics are used in which songbooks.

7. The publication of Religion was in fact prevented in 1633, and when it finally appeared with Monarchy in 1670, Richard Baxter expressed astonishment as “a Poem lately Printed for Subjects Liberty, which I greatly wonder this Age would bear,” quoted in Wilkes, p. vii.

8. Edmund Bolton, Hypercritica, ed. Anthony Hall (Oxford, 1722), pp. 235, 237. The book is a treatise on historiography and was presumably written between 1610 and 1621. The passage is quoted by Thomas Warton in The History of English Poetry, ed. W. C. Hazlitt (London, 1871), IV, 206. It is also quoted by Trimpi, who takes it as an identification of plain-style poets (p. 115).

9. Sir Thomas Smithes Voyage and Entertainment in Rushin (London, 1605), Sig. Kl^v.

10. The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (London, 1687), p. 87. Phillips' book, almost all of which Winstanley borrowed, was Theatrum Poetarum (London, 1675). Phillips' condescending comment on all of Sidney's verse—made after treating him largely as a pattern of chivalry—is further evidence of Restoration taste: “having, if I mistake not, a greater Spirit of Poetry, then to be altogether disesteem'd” (Sig. Gg4^v).

11. Other discussions of Greville which maintain this viewpoint in effect or in citation are: [Elizabeth Cooper, ed.], The Muses' Library (London, 1737), I, 216-17, who is quoted by Southey, Select Works of the British Poets from Chaucer to Jonson (London, 1831), p. 515, and by Grosart, II, vi-vii; Horace Walpole, A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England, Scotland, and Ireland … Enlarged and Continued … by Thomas Park (London, 1806), pp. 220-21, 230-31; Charles Lamb, Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets (London, 1808), p. 296, who is quoted by Grosart, II, xvii, by Hugh de Sélincourt in The Cambridge History of English Literature (London, 1909), IV, 160, and approved by Saintsbury in A History of Elizabethan Literature (London, 1887), p. 99. Both Lamb and Phillips are quoted with approval by Edmund Gosse, The Jacobean Poets (New York, 1894), pp. 195, 198.

12. The Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe (London, 1931), VI, 231; XVII, 123-24.

13. Lamb, p. 296.

14. The Works and Life of Walter Savage Landor (London, 1876), IV, 3.

15. Pp. 194-95. W. J. Courthope, on the contrary, was quite able to overlook Greville's verse entirely in his very influential History of English Poetry, II (London, 1897).

16. A History of Elizabethan Literature, p. 99; A History of English Prosody, II, 91-92.

17. The English Poets, ed. Thomas H. Ward (New York, 1906), I, 365-66.

18. See Joseph E. Duncan, The Revival of Metaphysical Poetry (Minneapolis, 1959), pp. 113-15.

19. Pp. 125, 305. William Frost's Fulke Greville's “Caelica”: An Evaluation (1942) deserves credit as a sympathetic appreciation designed to get Greville out from under the shadow of the romantically viewed Sidney.

20. Duncan, p. 6, where he specifically mentions Greville's resemblance to Donne.

21. P. 349.

22. In Selected Poems of Fulke Greville, ed. Thom Gunn, who was also a sometime student of Winters; and in Five Courtier Poets of the English Renaissance, ed. Robert M. Bender (New York, 1967), who places many of Greville's lyrics with “the finest Elizabethan poetry” (p. 479).

23. This kind of underestimation is apparent in the otherwise laudatory view of Greville taken by a British Wintersian, Fred Inglis: The Elizabethan Poets: The Making of English Poetry from Wyatt to Ben Jonson (London, 1969), pp. 101-12.

24. Montgomery credits Winters' historical approach and uses it to demonstrate that Sidney's style is far from dysfunctional. Rudenstine uses it to show that Sidney employed both styles, each of which can only be understood in relation to the other.

25. Peter Heidtmann, “The Lyrics of Fulke Greville,” Ohio University Review, X(1968), 41.

26. P. 355.

27. P. 283.

28. See, for example, his apparent acceptance of Sidney's claims to plainness and honesty (p. 354), and his assertion of the “social” significance of the plain style (pp. 356-57).

29. Trimpi supplies just such an account for Jonson in terms of Renaissance interpretations of classical rhetoric, and can therefore differentiate Jonson's use of the plain style from that of Raleigh, Greville, and Donne: Ben Jonson's Poems, ch. VI.

30. Tradition and Poetic Structure (Denver, 1960), pp. 19-21.

31. I am not at all sure that, as Cunningham impressively argues (pp. 263-70), these are always and necessarily identical.

32. “Literature, Philosophy and the History of Ideas,” Modern Philology, LII (1954), 82.

33. Winters faced it directly and dogmatically, which accounts in large part for the general unpopularity, until recently, of his views. The whole tradition that sees the ethical and aesthetic judgments as inseparable has been defended by Keith F. McKean, The Moral Measure of Literature (Denver, 1961), in which he gives a useful discussion of Winters, both comparing him to and distinguishing him from the neo-Humanists Irving Babbitt and P. E. More.

34. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (London, 1951), p. 290. The poets he has in mind are Yeats and Eliot.

35. This recognition was of course taken for granted by the Renaissance as a part of its classical heritage. It was tirelessly insisted upon by Winters, and is indeed the central principle in his theory. From it he deduced the corollary that since “a poem is a statement in language about a human experience … this statement will be more or less rational or at least apprehensible in rational terms, or else the medium will be violated,” Forms of Discovery, p. xvii.

36. P. 291.

37. Norman Foerster, “The Esthetic and Ethical Judgments,” in The Intent of the Critic, ed. Donald A. Stauffer (Princeton, N. J., 1941), p. 75.

38. “The Historical Interpretation of Literature,” in The Intent of the Critic, pp. 60-61.