[In the following essay, Calhoun defends Wither's experimentation with a loose style of poetry while acknowledging that the results he achieved were not always praiseworthy.]

Why tell me, is it possible the Mind
A Forme in all Deformitie should find?

—Drayton, England's Heroicall Epistles

The loose style, be it that of Rabelais, Burton, Traherne, Henry Miller, or William Burroughs, has traditionally tormented literary critics, most of whom, it must be conceded, are professedly or secretly schoolmen. Apologists for the style have appeared from time to time, and I wish to place myself among their ranks in order to clarify and defend the principles on which the loose style is based, though not to praise unconditionally the literary results: in this case the poetry of George Wither.

Though traces of logorrhea can be marked in Homer's Nestor and in Herodotus, the loose style, as we know it today, is a child of renaissance anticlassicism, significantly apparent in English literature of the earlier seventeenth century. The apostate style is parodied and epitomized by Robert Burton's Democritus Jr.:

I am aquae potor, drink no wine at all, which so much improves our modern wits, a loose, plain, rude writer, ficum voco ficum et ligonem ligonem, and as free, as loose, idem calamo quod in mente … I respect matter, not words … I neglect phrases, and labour wholly to inform my reader's understanding, not to please his ear; 'tis not my study or intent to compose neatly, which an orator requires, but to express myself readily and plainly as it happens … as the present subject require[s], or as at that time I was affected.¹

As Burton amply documents, the loose style is accompanied by a heavy reliance on the first person, a voice which “soberly” insists on the authority of individual experience and perception. The ornament and composition common to oratory is rejected in favor of self-expression—the normal speaking voice. Burton considers himself, or at least his persona, a disciple of Apollonius and Socrates, not Cicero.

By self-definition, Burton's style is “loose” as well as “plain,” and these two terms ought to be distinguished. Arguments for a plain style are relatively commonplace in the history of English literature, as the term is often used to advocate native, provincial usages. The term is sometimes used synonymously with a “low” or “common” style. For the purposes of this essay, let us confine the term to matters of diction and phrasing, and understand the desirability of a plain style partly as a reaction against ornamental, Ciceronian elegance and partly as a positive effort to achieve an unaffected, conversational manner. The term “loose,” with which I am mainly concerned, may be understood against its antithesis “tight,” as these words are used to define matters of structure or form. If “tight” suggests belief in formal control, order, logical coherence, the loose style presupposes none of these. As Burton says, the loose stylist approves “the present subject” as the proper occasion for writing, and he apprehends the subject directly, typically in the first person, through no necessary exterior or literary medium. Style should be determined by what is experienced, “as it happens.” The admired style is loose in order to imitate and contain that experience which is perceived as freely moving, not rigidly determined, or determinable.

Like many poets of his time, Jonson and Herbert for example, George Wither advocated and exercised a plain style. But most of Wither's poems do not resemble those of his contemporaries at all. One reason for the difference is that Wither also believed in, and then created, a loose style for poetry—a loose poetics. In this essay I wish to examine the means by which the loose style emerged in the poetry written by Wither between 1612 and 1628. The style is realized, I believe, neither by the destruction of prior forms nor by the invention of new literary devices, but by this poet's discovery of new ways to implement old conventions. If the development of Wither's poetics is properly documented, a larger understanding of the aims of the loose style may be gained.

Since Wither's current reputation, such as it is, rests wholly on his earlier, more conventional poems and since it is tempting to regard his later work as prophetic bombast or as subliterary material suited only to a history of popular culture and ideas,² let me acknowledge at the onset the unconventional aspect of my argument. I believe that Wither's full career represents a continuous, understandable, and fascinating experiment in which the poet brings his art closer and closer to the conditions of actual or lived experience. The loose style, with its first-person witness and experiential precepts, develops as his vehicle to accomplish this aim. A chronological study of Wither's books, a study which I undertook some years ago, reveals that the early poetry anticipates and prepares for later poems which Wither writes sui generis:

My Matter, with my Method, is mine owne …
                                        I paint out ev'ry Thought,
As to my heart I feele it to be brought:
I treat of things, as cause conduces them,
And as occasions, unto me, doe show them.(3)

Britain's Remembrancer (1625-28) is the seminal and transitional work.⁴ In this epic account of the horrors of immorality and the plague, Wither purposefully courts a nightmare. The poet places himself in the midst of chaos to observe it keenly and discover what truths it might hold. By his experiment, Wither creates an art which destroys art, but this consequence may be constructive to those of us who, as readers and critics of literature, wish to understand this poet and the loose style which is his particular legacy to English poetry. To remember George Wither as an accomplished Elizabethan versifier is to miss the entire thrust and meaning of his career, and to avoid usefully confronting his greatest failure.

The elegy, satire, eclogue, and song formally comprise Wither's earliest and most popular poetry. But Wither is a professional and serious poet who, like Sidney, is uneasy with finished works in the genres inferieurs.⁵ The tone and high purpose of the teacher, a reformer of morals and of the literature embodying them, are never far from the surface of his early poetry. Consequently he sought to construct contexts for his lyric verse which would make each poem more meaningful as part of a well-defined and ethically oriented whole. He also found it necessary to explain relationships among separate lyrics through a first-person narrator or reader's guide. An early cycle of elegies, Prince Henries Obsequies (1612), is unified and coherent because of the narrative commentary provided by an observer at the young prince's funeral and burial procession. This device becomes the highlight of the cycle. The best elegies are descriptive and function as links between various lamentations. For example:

Then, as he past along you might espye
How the griev'd Vulgar that shed many a teare,
Cast after, an unwilling parting eye,
As loth to lose the sight they held so deare;
When they had lost the figure of his face,
Then they beheld his roabes; his Chariot then,
Which being hid, their looke aym'd at the place,
Still longing to behold him once agen:
But when he was quite past, and they could finde
No object to employ their sight upon,
Sorrow became more busie with the minde,
And drew an Armie of sad passions on;
          Which made them so particularly mone,
          Each amongst thousands seem'd as if alone.

(Elegy 32. Juvenilia, SS X, 393)

This is more than intelligent journalism, or, as John Aubrey suggests, worldly sagacity.⁶ Wither is writing poetry which achieves excellence by isolating the uniqueness of an event and by showing us why the witness is isolated. The enjambment of lines 9 and 10 is appropriate, as is the loose rhyme of lines 10 and 12, 13 and 14. The searching despair of the experience demands this break from the pace and scheme of the poem. The ritual is over, and so is the form that maintained it.

In Abuses Stript and Whipt (bearing the publication date 1613) Wither exercises a first-person spokesman fashioned in the manner of Juvenal. The poet is in character, then, with the satirist as his persona. As others have noticed, however, the “person merges into persona” in an autobiographical prelude to the poem titled “The Occasion of this Worke.”⁷ A more delightful and more obvious persona is the pastoral Philarete of The Shepheards Hunting, an apt apologist and vocal mask for the poet who had just been released from prison. Philarete is also used as a device for linking separate eclogues in a continuous narrative.

By 1622 Wither's literary persona had become a dominant concern rather than simply a useful device. Faire Virtue, considered by many critics as Wither's last successful book, unites the structural principle of linked eclogues or elegies with a narrative and dramatic voice derived, as in The Shepheards Hunting, from the classical eclogue and renaissance pastoral romance. As an experimental combination of genres, Faire Virtue resembles its sources less than it looks ahead to the seemingly spontaneous, loose style of Britain's Remembrancer. Wither is aware of the uniqueness of his poem—perhaps too much so. At nearly every lull in the pastoral order of inquiry, response, and song, he finds an opportunity to talk about himself and his stylistic standards or aspirations. These passages occur not intrusively, but as part of a pattern of digressions within the more traditional framework of the book. The digressions, as “love meanders,” smooth the harsh edges of the poem's basic contrast—Virtue battling Passion—and ultimately control its tone.

One such turn in the course of Faire Virtue, a defense against possible attacks on his verse by fools and imbeciles, provides a rationale for Wither's style.

                              Though sometime my Song I raise,
To unused heights of praise,
(And break forth as I shall please.
Into strange Hyperboles)
Tis to shew, Conceit hath found,
Worth, beyond expressions bound.

(Juvenilia, SS XI, 794)

In the posture of an infatuated pastoral lover, and in typical rebuttal of the frustrations attending such a posture, Wither has asserted from the very beginning that “I am the master of myself.” He now extends the boast to justify his uncontrolled, rapturous hyperboles. Even if the singer isn't making sense, any fool can see that he is demonstrating the limits of language, and suggesting a value beyond those limits as well. In the face of rarest beauty, any lover would be speechless.

Having disposed of potentially imbecilic readers, the poet continues on his meandering, digressive, and rapturous way, switching meter, line, and verse forms as occasions and moods incline him.

          My Measures be
          Confus'd (you see)
And will not sute thereto:
          Cause, I have more,
          Brave thoughts in store,
          Then words can reach unto.

(Ibid., 814)

We can excuse the pastoral lover for his speechlessness; the persona is admirably ingenious. But the poet's problem is becoming more acute as a separation between thought and discursive capability is recognized. The distress yields a passage of accurate self-criticism.

And yet soft, (I feare) in vaine,
I have boasted such a Straine.
Apprehensions ever are
Greater, then expression farre.
And, my stryving to disclose
What I know; hath made me lose
My Inventions better part:
And, my Hopes exceed my Art.

(Ibid., 880)

Wither appears to recognize the impossibility of his method, the imminent failure of his art. A lesser, more cautious man would stop while he was ahead. Wither intends to break new ground. Yet in Faire Virtue he can fall back on the conventional situation of his persona. Were I to continue, Philarete argues, and find expression for my vision, “you would know as much as I,” and love's mystery would lose its allure. If the secret of Virtue's beauty remains untold, she will be desirable and therefore pursued by readers who now must engage in the philosopher-lover's quest on their own. Wither finds a graceful exit from a difficult problem.

The satire, elegy, and pastoral eclogue all provide the poet with opportunity to exercise the first person, but traditionally each genre restricts the tone and occasion of the verse. The narrator is a controlled convention, but in each case the convention calls upon the poet to assert, for special reasons, his independence. The satirist should make it clear to his readers that he will speak bluntly to the point, unhampered by the strictures that make fools of others. As a satirist, Wither will spare no one from his scourge; he will speak his mind, and the truth. Scommatic verse provides one entrance for a loose, plain style by the posture it establishes for the first person. The elegy provides another. As an elegist, Wither speaks from the heart, to reveal true sentiment or sensibility. Sincere tribute must be unrestrained, unashamed. Wither's independent spokesman is drawn most explicitly, I believe, from a prefatory convention used in pastorals. For example, Virgil's Tityrus begins, in the manner of his Sicilian muse Theocritus, “I play what I will on my rustic pipe” (Eclogue i, 9-10); then he apologizes for the plainness and rudeness of his “artless strains.” Writers in the pastoral tradition maintain the apologetic convention to designate humility, rustic honesty, innocence, and the pastoral virtue of freedom. The convention is popular in Elizabethan poetry, where it serves some additional purposes. Spenser provides a typical example. To demonstrate his humility and duty to the Queen, he writes:

But ah my rimes too rude and rugged arre,
When in so high an object they do lite,
And striving, fit to make, I feare do marre …

(The Faerie Queene, III, ii, stanza 3)

Sidney's adaptations of the convention appear to be assertions of originality, self-expression, and freedom from tradition. But the customary purpose of honesty, with the aim of turning a compliment and winning our (and a woman's) confidence, is clearly present.

Invention, nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows,
And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
Fool, said my muse to me, look in thy heart and write.

(Astrophel and Stella, sonnet 1, ll. 10-14)

The prefatory convention is still at work, and its traditional sense dominates Sidney's stress on originality. “My muse” dictates the resolution. To be intimate, personal, free from artificial modes of expression, is to be a traditionally honest and convincing lover: Astrophel to Stella. The compliment comes later in the sonnet cycle. If I am so rustic, rude, and free, Sidney queries,

How falls it then, that with so smooth an ease
          My thoughts I speak, and what I speak doth flow
          In verse, and that my verse best wits doth please?
Guess we the cause? What, is it thus? Fie, no.
          Or so? Much less. How then? Sure thus it is:
          My lips are sweet, inspired with Stella's kiss.

(Ibid., sonnet 74, ll. 9-14)

In the hands of Michael Drayton, the emphasis of the convention can be seen to shift from an apology for the “plain” style—unaffected, honest language—to an assertion of the “loose” style. The poet claims his independence from traditions of elegant diction and further emphasizes his freedom in matters of structure and form.

Vouchsafe to grace these rude unpolish'd rymes …
          Yet these mine owne, I wrong not other men …

(Idea's Mirror, prefatory sonnet, ed. Hebel [Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1931], I, 96, ll.1,9)

My wanton verse ne're keepes one certaine stay,
But now, at hand: then, seekes invention far,
And with each little motion runnes astray,
Wilde, madding, jocond, & irreguler;
          Like me that lust, my honest mery rimes
          Nor care for Criticke, nor regard the times.

(England's Heroicall Epistles, appended sonnet 3, Hebel, I, 485)

As a friend of Drayton, Wither was probably familiar with these lusty outbursts. If so, he took them literally, not as expressions of national sentiment and pride, or celebrations of adventurous-seafarer ambitions.

In Wither's case, poetic conventions appear to be responsible for the creation of the individual voice and perspective that will come to life fully in Britain's Remembrancer. From the satirist's directness and abrasive denial of the forms and forces of a diseased society, from the elegist's lament for the distinctive value of individuals, and predominantly from the prefatory convention outlined above, comes the voice of George Wither and his loose style. In 1621, Wither abandoned the formal poetic genres to publish his Motto. Herein the poet creates a first-person speaker by combining characteristics from the conventional satiric, elegiac, and pastoral personae which he had mastered. The object of this poem is “to recreate my selfe … my intent [is] to draw the true picture of mine heart” (Motto, SS XI, 624). Britain's Remembrancer is narrated by this recreated self, the individual himself. His voice has been tuned by various personae who have now been discarded.

Cantos i and ii of Britain's Remembrancer, in abbreviated form, were published first in 1625 and titled The History of the Pestilence.⁸ In the first canto Wither's method is uncertain. Allegorized event mixes with realistic detail, yet the allegory tends to dominate with figures like the hag Famine, Pestilence, and the divine voices of Mercy and Justice. In the first line Wither refers to himself as “Our Author,” an impersonal device which continues through all eight cantos of the finished poem, but this indirect approach is soon lost in the text. At the beginning, Britain's Remembrancer resembles a traditional allegory on an epic scale, but by the second canto Pestilence has become “fever”—its motion and effects are particularized. Fever moves on the earth, to London, and our author now speaks in the first person, as an observer and advisor in common practices of avoiding the sickness (BR, SS XXIX, 91-93). In canto iii Wither becomes both spokesman and subject of his heroic verse. His muse becomes “the things I mused” (BR, 143; 186; 191). Scenes and events are recorded as isolated phenomena, severed from all certainty except that which occurs from within, to the poet. The poem is the man; the author is oracle and hero, dominating all and battling the plague that threatens his body and soul.

Canto v contains Wither's full statement and defense of his poetic principles. Recalling the satirist, then the pastoral poet, Wither proclaims:

… I intend the Method which I use;
And, if they doe not like it, they may chuse.
                                        … it best pleaseth me
To spin out mine owne Bowells, and prepare them
For those, who thinke it not a shame to weare them.
My Matter, with my Method, is mine owne;
                                        … I paint out ev'ry Thought,
As to my heart I feele it to be brought:
I treat of things, as cause conduces them,
And as occasions, unto me, doe show them.

(BR, 275; 276; 277)

If the poet is the first-person witness and hero of his poem, we would expect the “occasion” of the poem to be experiential. Wither has claimed in his Motto,

My private Actions, seriously oreview'd,
My thougts recal'd, and what of them ensu'd:
Are Bookes, which better farre, instruct me can,
Then all the other Paper-workes of Man.

(SS XI, 669)

This is consistent with an earlier claim, from the Epistle Dedicatory to Himself, Abuses Stript and Whipt, that the poetry to come is “honest, plaine matter,” spoken from the authority of real observations. The occasion for Britain's Remembrancer is the plague of 1625, a literalization of the cankered world of satire. If the language is to be “plaine,” without the rehearsed numbers and high conceits of other poets—

… in this Poeme I pursue the story
Of reall Truth, without an Allegory …

(BR, 255)

—one might expect a direct, journalistic approach to experience. As in the funeral-procession passages in Prince Henries Obsequies, Wither pays attention to objective detail to some extent in Britain's Remembrancer. Starvation reduces men to despair; they drink their own urine. Horribly deformed corpses are carted away by indifferent, healthy ghouls. A child lives as the women who nurse him die, one by one. A drunk vomits; prostitutes continue to solicit. Examples of charity merge randomly with events of extreme malice. Wither also writes lengthy and explicit passages of self-analysis. Canto iii is largely an examination of his motives for staying in London, exposing himself to the plague, instead of making the “pastoralist's escape” to the countryside. There are also sections of astute descriptive and critical analysis directed at contemporary institutions: the church, the court, the universities.

Some may complain, Wither recognizes, that he doesn't describe as much as he might. “But what I can, I utter.” Wither's approach to the “reall Truth” is not singularly descriptive, as many would prefer, since scenes, objects, details are to him insubstantial. Images disintegrate before his eyes; they all dissolve to abstract ideas, and separate ideas are reduced in turn to a subservient posture before a final judgment.

As heretofore the peopled Fields I walked,
To this effect, my thoughts within me talked;
And though all present Objects gave content,
My heart did such Ideaes represent
Of Judgements likely to be cast upon
So great a City, and a sinful one …

(BR, 247)

What we see here is not really an escape from allegory, but an assimilation of it. Wither's statement of process, from field of vision to object, to idea, to moral judgment, sounds like a version of Spenser's allegorical method. But for Spenser the method was descriptive and literary. For Wither it is personal and visionary.

The one-time pastoral singer has stayed in the city; he will reduce its plagued images to ideas of the heart. The basic material of Wither's poem is his experience of the nature of things. Approached directly, the experience lacks firm structure and coherence. Wither describes it as labyrinthine (BR, 493; 501). To find the clue, to understand such chaos and destruction without falsifying perceived evidence by altering it in any way, Wither maintains that present mutability is a type of the final end of all things—the day of doom. “Write the things which thou hast seen” (Revelation I:19). Wither writes:

And, I am half perswaded, this will one
Of those great Schismes (or earthquakes) cause which John
Foretold in his Apocalyps …

(BR, 494-95)⁹

The subject does not yield to the form of this poem. It determines the form. There is a suicidal appropriateness in this radical version of decorum, a negative aesthetic but dimly anticipated by formal innovations of Wither's Fidelia (1615). The earlier poem is intentionally incomplete, “a fragment of some greater Poeme” because the love affair of its subject has been cheated and cut short. The “occasion proceeds from some mutabilitie.” In Britain's Remembrancer this principle blossoms as fragments of experience are held together, if tenuously, by the poet's associative vision of divine wrath and doomsday. Such a stance instills a terror of endings, and the poem consequently resembles a continuous preface in which digression plays a major role and moral admonitions appear with random fervency. But the style is defensible. The occasion of the poem is the plague, but the subject is the poet witnessing the plague. In the poet's mind, single events are reduced to one essential event. If there is, then, no difference between the “special” and the “type,” it doesn't matter how individual images, scenes, episodes are related spatially. Likewise, the timing, the plot or chronology of Britain's Remembrancer, is impossible to construct by conventional means.

                              Yea, all Times, and all
Those things which wee by severall names doe call,
Our Births, our Lives, our Deaths, and our Salvations,
Our free-elections, and predestinations,
Are all at once with God, without foreseeing;
Ev'n all in one-eternall-present-being.
Which few observing, many men have thought
That Gods eternall actions should be wrought
Like ours in Time, which is, as if they should
Endeavour how the world they might enfold
Within a Nut-shell.

(BR, 115)

The plague is, then, not a special but a typical event which amplifies the wanton destructiveness of immoral, mortal life and in its largest sense represents the nature of things. The idea of corruptibility, variously controlled in satire, elegy, and pastoral, is now loosed to forge its own poetics. The origin of Wither's style is a vision of imperfection, mutability, and doom; the consequence is a poem which virtually destroys itself. Just as it is false to imagine the world in a nutshell, spatially ordered and timed like a clock, so it is false to impose a literary language and order on poetry which intends to represent experiential truth. Burton makes a similar point, and his prose exhibits similar ramifications.

For who is so mad to think that there should be so many circles [in the universe] like subordinate wheels in a clock … as they feign … Tycho Brahe, Nicholas Ramerus, Helisaeus Roeslin, have peculiar hypotheses of their own inventions; and they be but inventions, as most of them acknowledge, as we admit of equators, tropics, colures, circles arctic and antarctic, for doctrine's sake (though Ramus thinks them all unnecessary), they will have them supposed only for method and order.

(Anatomy, II, 50)

What would our perception, and means of expression, be like without these schooled and feigned boundaries? Burton suggests that the French philosopher and rhetorician Peter Ramus can show us a way to find out, and a survey of his methodology is useful at this point. Wither does not cite Ramus in support of his poetics, but he must have found Ramist thought encouraging, especially as it provided a methodological transition from rhetoric and formal logic, which seek a tight poetic expression, to the mode of “insight” which informs the loose style.

Ramist method secures a degree of individual freedom in the selection of an argument or subject by insisting that “invention” belongs properly to the realm of logic, rather than rhetoric. The writer trained in logic, then, “thought of himself as securing his arguments from the ‘nature of things,’ with which his mind somehow came into direct contact.”¹⁰ Ramism also encouraged a degree of objectivity and plainness of diction, and included a “cryptic” method of disposition, organizing a composition inductively by starting with particulars, description, and then moving to general truth.¹¹ I accept Rosamond Tuve's difficult discussion of the importance of Ramus' Dialecticae for renaissance poets. She believes that this teaching approximated a freedom of expression for them by placing compositional principles, in effect, within the province of the individual mind. The dominion of schooled rhetoric was seriously weakened. “The Ramist is against deceitful and frivolous and vainglorious eloquence which does not delineate the true nature of things.”¹² Miss Tuve states that there is no systematic Ramist aesthetic, but the implications of Ramus make all the arts very purposeful. The capacity of poetry to teach is emphasized above its ability to delight. “No one may be less forgetful of the pursuit of Wisdom than the Ramist, but no one must be more hospitable to those evidences of it which lie on every hand.” The Ramist pursues an understanding of order in the universe, but he is not intent on a particular pattern, “reality be hanged.”¹³

Ramus proposes a way of thinking rather than a conclusive statement of what to think. As demonstrated by Walter Ong, Ramus bases his logic on the recognition of a bipolarity in nature, a division by two's of spirit and substance, matter and form, special and general. This thinking is described as a kind of class logic, “which approaches logical structure by considering primarily the way in which certain classes include other classes, each of these latter still further classes, and so on, indefinitely.”¹⁴ The process of bifurcation can be carried out to include all evidence, all special cases. At its limits would be every conceivable bit of perceived data. But Ramus insists that we see the generic nature that extends to all special items, and can effectively reduce them all to one essential unit. Diagrammatically, his process looks like the tournament roster for an athletic championship. An unlimited number of contestants can participate, but by pairing and elimination there will be only one winner.

Wither's style is anticipated by Ramist precept in many ways, beginning with the assumed need for liberalized expression and plain speech. Wither denounces school rhetoric, textbook invention, and conceited language; he abandons the artifice of a persona. His perception is distorted by no acknowledged convention. He is interested in morality and the usefulness of poetry and cares little about pleasing anybody; he secures his arguments from “the nature of things” with which his eye and mind come into direct contact. Frequently Wither considers subject matter in dyads, but the grouping of data in disjunctive pairs appears to be residual logic in Britain's Remembrancer. It is convenient to contrast mercy and justice, health and sickness, free election and predestination, ordinary and extraordinary callings, reason and faith, city and country living, so Wither indulges in this practice. But his poetics aim at the immediacy of actual perception. As the mind instantly reduces pairs of images to a single depth perception, so Wither understands experience according to a single and basic division of phenomenon/noumenon. His demonstrations, then, resemble a kind of intuitive typology which Ramism was bound to encourage. A description of the Pestilence provides a typical example.

The Pestilence doth show her selfe inclin'd
So variously, she cannot be defin'd.
She neither certaine forme, nor habit wears,
But, partly metaphysicall appears,
And partly naturall.

(BR, 116)

For Wither the “naturall” image projects a “metaphysicall” truth of the same kind, as species are conjunctively related to types. His art, then, becomes incapable of anything but a repetition or re-creation in another medium of the nature and process of life. Physical mutability is a type of universal decay. Furthermore, the very act of transfer from special to type, from object to essence, becomes a mode of physical dissolution: image is dissolved to concept. The processes of the mind, functioning in imitation of worldly mutability and in accord with the apocalyptic law that all change is a decay, annihilate things. A dramatic example occurs in the fourth canto of Britain's Remembrancer. Wither walks a near-deserted London street. As he passes various empty buildings, he sees the triumphal arches, planned to celebrate the crown of Charles I.

… as I wandred on, my eye did meet,
Those halfe-built Pageants which, athwart the street,
Did those triumphant Arches counterfeit,
Which heretofore in ancient Rome were set …
But when those works, imperfect, I beheld,
They did new causes of sad musings yeeld,
Portending ruine …
My fancy did present to me that hour
A glimpse of DEATH ev'n in his greatest power.

(BR, 220; 221)

History demonstrates the rule of change, away from original perfection, toward imitative fraud and imperfection. The pageant is nearly transparent; its meaning is obvious. Object and meaning are not related by analogy or metaphor, but by what Wither calls “portending”: a typological equation. By this process, images are reduced to ideas. The arches, and their supposed triumph, crumble away to dust.

In 1636, eight years after Britain's Remembrancer was completed, Wither published The Nature of Man, his translation of a treatise by the eastern patriarch Nemesius. Wither's prefatory comments indicate the justification he seeks in the pages to follow. An existential self-analysis and self-expression are argued, for “How can God be well knowne, by him, that knoweth not himself? It is that knowledge which this Booke teacheth” (sig. A_2v).¹⁵ Sense perception of experience is the necessary inroad to knowledge, for “By the first sinne, wee lost, indeed, our light, but not our eyes” (A_4v). The first argument in the text proper defines man as “an understanding soul and a body,” and establishes that “the Soul doth naturally contain in itself this understanding, as the most excellent part thereof, and, as being the same to the Soul, which the Eye is to Body” (p. 2). Nemesius investigates several theories of perception, yet accepts Porphyry:¹⁶

That the soule her selfe, meeting with such objects as are visible, doth perceive and know, that all those things which are seene, be contained in her selfe, because it is she only which holds them together, to their preservation. For, (as he saith) whatsoever is in the world, is nothing else, but the soul holding together divers bodies. And it were not untruly said, that the soul commeth to the knowledge of its selfe, by the view of everything which is in the world. …

(Cap. 7, sec. 1)

The function defined for the soul in this passage defends the solipsistic role played out by George Wither in Britain's Remembrancer. The consequence of this position may be derived from a Christian reading of Porphyry's introspective soul. Following the achievement of self-knowledge, an awareness of the source of being, is a further withdrawal toward that ontological origin: the One for Plotinus and Porphyry; the Christian God for Nemesius. As the soul seeks its ecstatic and fulfilling union, the multiple and visible world ceases to cohere. The soul is no longer dutifully “holding together divers bodies.” Things, then, are annihilated as the mind seeks union with its archetype, as the soul flies toward the unintelligible. For the Christian poet this action, expressed in literature as a “rapture” or an “ecstasy,” forecasts the process of the Divine Mind which works toward universal annihilation and consequent purification: the Day of Judgment. Wither relates an example in Britain's Remembrancer:

          My thoughts (yet) climbed higher, and perceived
A glimpse of things that cannot be conceived.
The Love of God; the Joys that are to come …
                                                  … I did see
The World, but like an Atome, under me.

(BR, 309-10)

In later works, Wither tends to defend his individuality on grounds of divine inspiration. In Britain's Remembrancer he proceeds by way of original insights which gain authority because they are personal. As such, Britain's Remembrancer succeeds in conforming poetry to the process of perception, and in adapting heroic verse to matters of real life and experience. This is no mean achievement. Wither's poem anticipates similar endeavors from Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Céline, and others. But Wither's achievement has gone unrecognized because his poem is not as self-sustained and inherently interesting as it is principled and innovative. With his ordinary prescience, Wither acknowledged this failure by abandoning “inventions better part” and forcing his hopes to exceed his art. His proximity to old generic conventions and the heavy demands of the loose style combine to effect an erratic, and generally prosaic, epic poem. Yet Wither broke new ground.

John Milton pays an oblique and knowing tribute to a loose, innocent, and rapturous style such as Wither's in Paradise Lost, Book v.¹⁷ Before the fall, Adam and Eve bow their heads and begin a morning prayer.

Thir Orisons, each morning duly paid
In various style, for neither various style
Nor holy rapture wanted they to praise
Thir Maker, in fit strains pronounc't or sung
Unmeditated, such prompt eloquence
Flowd from thir lips, in Prose or numerous Verse …

(ll. 145-50)

The liberties conventionally allowed a pastoral singer are here confined to a pastoral context. The full freedom and spontaneity of a “various” style, spoken directly from the heart, straying from prose to measured poetry, is possible in a perfectly ordered, harmonious world which defines the man. Adam, or Wither's Philarete, can enjoy expressive liberty while the pastoral world provides a frame of coherence, but with Eden gone, the artist must impose that order. Wither, dedicated to a principle which attaches art directly to the conditions of life, does not.

Notes

1. The Anatomy of Melancholy, intro. H. Jackson (New York: Dutton, 1932), I, 31-32.

2. Although the Spenser Society reprinted most of Wither's works between 1871 and 1882, the most recent editor, Frank Sidgwick, presents only The Shepheards Hunting, Fidelia, and Faire Virtue, three early books. Commenting on the Spenser Society edition, Sidgwick says: “For a reprint of Juvenilia one might always be grateful. … But nearly all the rest of Wither's many publications have so little interest for any but the curious historian, that it is difficult to see why they were not allowed to remain stored in the library” (The Poetry of George Wither, 2 vols. [London: A. H. Bullen, 1902], I, xliv). Sidgwick's selectivity, possibly dictated by Charles Lamb's praise and preference, may have promoted the current habit of dividing Wither's works into early and late periods. Limited praise for the early poems and unlimited scorn for the later works have underscored Wither's reputation for this century. W. J. Courthope, with little regard for his own insight, proclaims that “Wither was one of that large class of poets who, mastered by their own temperaments, are impatient to submit to the laws of art. He had a real gift both for lyrical and satiric poetry, but in neither department could he ever get far away from himself” (A History of English Poetry [London: Macmillan, 1903], III, 320). Barrett Wendell treats Wither in a chapter titled “The Disintegration of Lyric Poetry,” in The Temper of the Seventeeth Century in English Literature (New York: Scribner's, 1904). Wendell values only one of Wither's poems, the song “Shall I wasting in despair. …” This preference has been repeated frequently.

3. Britain's Remembrancer (Spenser Society, 1880), pp. 276, 277. The Spenser Society edition, which has been reprinted by Burt Franklin (New York, 1967), will be abbreviated hereafter as SS. Quotations from the SS edition will be documented in the text by title, volume number, and page number. Britain's Remembrancer, SS vols. 28-29, will be abbreviated BR.

4. See Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeeth Century (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 82-83; and cf. Oliver Elton, The English Muse (London: G. Bell, 1932), p. 205. Both of the lengthy studies of Wither maintain this distinction: J. M. French, “George Wither,” Diss. Harvard Univ. 1928; and C. S. Hensley, The Later Career of George Wither (The Hague: Mouton, 1969). Hensley's intention is to integrate Wither's early and late careers, however.

5. Scaliger degrades the pastoral, song, epigram, and ode. Bacon likewise dismisses these forms in his pursuit of the true veins of learning, and under the name of Poetry he will consider only feigned history, or the epic (De augmentia scientiarium, iv).

6. See Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), II, 306; Aubrey's Brief Lives, ed. O. L. Dick (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1962), pp. lxxxiv, 93. Aubrey is the first, and one of the few critics to recognize Wither's remarkable discernment and foresight regarding worldly affairs.

7. See Joan Grundy, The Spenserian Poets (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), p. 165. This book contains a good analysis of Wither's early poetry. Miss Grundy's observations on Abuses are particularly admirable.

8. These cantos have been edited separately, under this title, by J. M. French (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1932).

9. Literary apologists and historians from Sidney to Dryden seldom fail to mention that the first poets were prophets. Such were David, Solomon, Moses, the writer of Job, Orpheus, Amphion, and Homer. Plato's Ion is the source for the particular phrase “poetic fury” as well as the source for arguments against oracular verse. Sidney is a moderate on the value and propriety of furor poeticus; he claims that Plato denounces excesses only, not the principle. Ben Jonson, on the other hand, is adamant in considering poetic rapture as worse, even, than plagiarism. He writes: “the Wretcheder are the obstinate contemners of all helpes, and Arts: such as presuming on their owne Naturals … they utter all they can thinke, with a kind of violence, and indisposition; unexamin'd, without relation to … any fitnesse” (Timber, “Ingeniorum descrimina,” Nota 9, Herford and Simpson, VIII, p. 586). Since Wither was satirized as Chronomastix in Time Vindicated (1622-23), he may well be the subject of Jonson's criticism here.

   Between 1619 and 1623 Wither published Preparation to the Psalter, Songs of the Old Testament, and the latter expanded as Hymns and Songs of the Church. He is especially impressed by the prophetic voice of David. In Britain's Remembrancer we find some evidence of the prophetic stance:

   What should we do, but speak, when we are willed?
   With David … [we burn] within us, till we speake,
   And forth, at last, some thundring voice will breake.

   (BR, 282)

   The subject of Wither's prophetic voice and its effect on his later works has been examined by Allan Prichard in “George Wither: The Poet as Prophet,” SP, 59 (April, 1962), 211-30. Courthope (A History of English Poetry, p. 323) observes that Wither's decasyllabic rhyming couplet resembles that of Sylvester and John Davies of Hereford. Pritchard expands such a point by arguing that “Wither developed in a more extreme fashion than perhaps any other English poet the theory of inspiration which had been formulated by DuBartas and popularized in England through Sylvester's version of Urania and the Divine Weeks.” As it pertains to some of the later works, Pritchard's argument is convincing, but it goes nowhere. Wither can be better and more interesting than the prophet's role defines him, and he is in Britain's Remembrancer. One of his last publications (1660) is called Furor Poeticus (i.e.) Propheticus, A Poetic Phrensie. Though the title sounds, at best, inspired, Wither explains “to the reader” that this is not the work of an oracle, but that “by rationally pre-conjecturing the most probable events, I might not be surprized by them, but settle my heart … in a constant waiting upon God” (SS XXII, 3). Wither is a mystic, more like Vaughan than DuBartas' poet “extased (as in a holy transe).” But, as we will presently see, Wither uses a form of the poetic ecstasy. For the sake of morality and rhetorical appeal, and perhaps weakened by a low public regard and by the irrelevance of his efforts to understand the way things are, he can put on the mask of the man inspired.

10. Walter J. Ong, “Rhetoric in Renaissance England,” Studies in the Renaissance, 15 (1968), 63.

11. Ibid., p. 64.

12. Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1947), p. 386.

13. Ibid., p. 385.

14. Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 201-02.

15. The Nature of Man, trans. George Wither (London, 1636), Cap. 7, sec. 1. Read from a copy in the Houghton Library, Harvard.

16. It is worth noting that both Nemesius and Ramus work from Porphyry to establish a principle of genus. If Wither never encountered the theories of Ramus at first hand, he was aware of one of Ramus' important sources.

17. Milton's debt to Wither has been recognized and reasonably well documented. Sidgwick's introduction to The Poetry of George Wither is one reference. There is also E. M. Clark, “Milton and Wither,” SP, 56 (1959), 626-46. A better treatment may be found in Joan Grundy's The Spenserian Poets, chap. 10.