[In the following excerpt, Korshin considers Denham's theory of poetry, which, he contends, foreshadows the neoclassical views of the Restoration period.]

Denham's place in the formation of neoclassical poetics has always been more or less well established, but whether he entirely deserves to be regarded principally as one of the fathers of eighteenth-century prosody is a matter open to serious discussion. It may seem curious that so many contemporary references to Denham tend to classify his achievement in terms of his versification, but we must remember that critical traditions and prevailing habits of the Restoration theorists often dictated an exaggeratedly great concern with matters of surface poetic technique. Certainly Dryden habitually regards Denham in this light, as when he reports that Sir George Mackenzie “asked me why I did not imitate in my verses the turns of Mr. Waller and Sir John Denham, of which he repeated many to me. I had often read with pleasure, and with some profit, those two fathers of our English poetry; but had not seriously enough considered those beauties which gave the last perfection to their works.”¹ Dryden was also familiar with Denham's theoretical advances in the art of translation, for he uses and refers to Denham's translation of Book II of the Aeneid, entitled The Destruction of Troy,² but this is the only place where he hints that there is more to Denham's poetry than numbers. The “turns” Dryden mentions here evidently is an allusion to the complexity of wit and imagery of Denham and Waller's poetry, an aspect of their intellectual milieu by which Dryden is evidently greatly affected.³ For while Denham says little about aesthetic problems except for conventional statements even in his few poems on poetic or intellectual affairs, the vast popularity of his principal poem, Coopers Hill, should tell us that there is something unique about his thematic, stylistic, and hence theoretic contributions which appealed, whether consciously or not, to the aesthetic philosophy of the neoclassical period. It is worthwhile to recall the conclusion of Johnson's Life of Denham: “He is one of the writers that improved our taste and advanced our language, and whom we ought therefore to read with gratitude, though having done much he left much to do.”⁴ Perhaps Johnson's words about language hint at one of Denham's chief gifts to the aesthetic theory of his age, since he is one of the very few poets of the mid-seventeenth century to take such an unusual interest in linguistic problems. This is exemplified in a portion of the “Preface” to the Destruction of Troy (1656), where Denham deals with translation in particular and with all poetry in a broader sense:

I conceive it a vulgar error in translating Poets, to affect being Fidus Interpres; let that care be with them who deal in matters of Fact, or matters of Faith; but whosoever aims at it in Poetry, as he attempts what is not required, so he shall never perform what he attempts; for it is not his business alone to translate Language into Language, but Poesie into Poesie; & Poesie is of so subtile a spirit, that in pouring out of one Language into another, it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not added in the transfusion, there will remain nothing but a Caput Mortuum, there being certain Graces and Happinesses peculiar to every Language, which gives life and energy to the words. …⁵

Denham's conception of poetry as more than language itself, and of the translator as a poet in his own right, may not qualify as a radical view for the seventeenth century, but for our purposes it furnishes an insight into his ideas about poetic composition. For the act of translation from one language into another is analogous to the act of transmitting thoughts into words; it parallels the creative act as Denham sees it. Hence poetry itself, without the addition of linguistic and stylistic grace, may become a “Caput Mortuum,” like the worthless residue in an alchemical experiment. Now Denham's advancement of our language, to recall Johnson's words, is accomplished principally through the refinement, clarity, and subdued elegance which he bestows upon his poetry. Indeed, his place in the growing tradition of poetic clarity is probably the most significant aspect in which his theoretic approach differs from that of our control in this study, Cleveland.

The association of clarity and elegance, an ancient tradition in oratorical theory affirmed by Aristotle and the other Greek and Roman rhetoricians, received extensive attention from Renaissance commentators on the Poetics and the Ars Poetica as well as in the treatises of such prominent theoreticians as Vida and J. C. Scaliger.⁶ Denham's consciousness of this well-established critical convention, which Scaliger saw as the method for the achievement of linguistic propriety and the banishment of obscurity, is fundamentally the same as that of other critical thinkers of the Interregnum and the early Restoration.⁷ Thus when Denham prays that his verse may rival the Thames in such eminently poetic qualities as depth and clarity, he anticipates a common Restoration observation on the same subject, like that of Cowley on Sprat's style in his ode “To the Royal Society” (1667): “His candid Stile like a clean Stream does glide.”⁸ We also find that in Denham's mind the lack of clarity induced by excessive ornamentation is closely related to a level of vulgarity totally unacceptable to the demands of an exalted poetics and a polite audience. He writes, for example, in the brief poem “Natura Naturata” (c. 1650) of the threat to “our Judgment and our Wit” presented by “that Fantastick Fit” of nature which permits humanity to disguise the significance of certain objects or concepts in other than their “proper names.” The danger, as Denham sees it, may be a popularization of unnatural poetic diction: “Thus Reason's shadows us betray / By Tropes and Figures led astray, / From Nature, both her Guide and way.”⁹ An expression of this type in the mid-seventeenth century may quite naturally proceed from dissatisfaction generated by England's prevalent and long-lived political and social disorders; here Denham extends his reference to include verbal, doubtless chiefly poetical, statement as well. Such precise and explicit allusions should not surprise us, for a notable characteristic of the early neoclassical period is the tendency to spell out analogic allusions, as if through a self-conscious attempt to avoid the pitfalls of ambiguity. The poetical-political analogy, frequent in the 1640's with a Royalist like Cleveland, equally familiar in the 1650's with a Puritan like Marvell (most clearly in “Upon Appleton House”), continues on into the Restoration, but in the poetry of men more predominantly affected by the growth of neoclassical poetics like Denham and Waller we must expect to find the twin poles of the analogy more clearly defined. In fact, this poetic device is later to be marmorealized into a standard form of reference through the interrelating, in the poet's mind, of poetry and politics. In Denham's time, we may surmise that the implied comparison between poetic clarity or propriety and the greater harmony in the state springs from the widespread national desire for political stability; toward the end of the century, when this had actually been achieved, the rational poetry—orderly state analogy finally loses its immediacy.¹⁰ Ultimately, this complex interweaving of a nascent poetic tradition and the political realities of the age produces an aesthetic fabric responsible for the creative theories behind Denham's most important poem.

For Denham, unlike Cleveland, is more a Royalist apologist than a polemicist; hence Coopers Hill, despite its undeniable ironic passages, is primarily a moralistic epistle bearing some affinity to those of Dryden's last period like “To Her Grace the Dutchess of Ormond” and “To my Honour'd Kinsman, John Driden.”¹¹ Because of his devotion to the ideas of political accommodation and poetic moderation, Denham lacks the flamboyance of lyric poetry and the complexity of the baroque-metaphysical tradition of the conceit. This does not mean, however, that Denham is ineffective as a theorist. Quite the contrary: the great popularity and influence of Coopers Hill probably makes his theoretic position far better known and admired in neoclassical England than that of most other poets of the mid-century. His reputation, as we have seen, was chiefly as a master of language and prosody, if we are to accept the testimony of the neoclassical age as it comes to us.¹² But this is deceptive, for modern scholarship has shown conclusively that the linguistic reform often attributed to Denham and others had been in motion for decades before he started to write and that the heroic couplet which he was thought to have perfected came to maturity by 1640.¹³

Consequently, I shall propose that despite Denham's reputation as one of the “fathers” of neoclassical verse, i.e., prosody, this position is largely a critical figurehead, and that his greatest contribution to the ethos of the Restoration comes from his poetics of moderation, the most important theoretical conception in his poetry, above all in Coopers Hill. Denham achieves this quality of aesthetic moderation in several ways. One of the most important is through the attainment of balance—thematic, imagistic, and even syntactic. The prototype of this balance may be seen in his most famous lines, the much admired “Thames” couplets (“O could I flow like thee …”), which effect the interfusion of theme and symbol through the unifying medium of syntactic structure. But in a larger sphere we may perceive a didactic emphasis upon the concept of balance in Denham's description of the three prominent heights which dominate the poem. For Denham's moderate Royalist sentiments here cause him to prefer Windsor Hill (the monarchy) to both the heights of St. Paul's Cathedral (civil instability) and ruined Chertsey Abbey on St. Anne's Hill (religious strife). Around the less preferable heights Denham symbolizes repugnant signs of disharmony, like the crowded maze of fate of commercial London that clusters below the dome of St. Paul's:

Under his proud survey the City lies,
And like a mist beneath a hill doth rise;
Whose state and wealth the business and the crowd,
Seems at this distance but a darker cloud:
And is to him who rightly things esteems,
No other in effect than what it seems:
Where, with like hast, through several ways, they run
Some to undo, and some to be undone;
While luxury and wealth, like war and peace,
Are each the others ruine and increase;
As Rivers lost in Seas some secret vein
Thence reconveighs, there to be lost again.(14)

Clearly, this is less a description of London than it is the general outline of an ethical problem; the analogic effect of the passage is to convey the impression of futility as seen in three neatly balanced examples of the insignificance of human behavior in the London anthill. Thus Denham provides rhetorical and syntactic balance for the contraries of gain and loss, war and peace, death and rebirth in the ominous symmetry of the recirculation of the river. In the 1655 text he replaces the suggestions of civil unrest in the 1642 text with a more subtle analogic reference to commercial rivalry, symbolic of the uneasy equipoise of the Interregnum. The purpose of the balanced style of this and most of the other descriptive passages in Coopers Hill is to introduce an ideal of poetic or artistic and, by analogy, political moderation. Dennis, in a brief but comprehensive view of the whole poem, not only realizes this but points out that Denham's achievement surpasses the merely verbal.¹⁵ The force of Denham's theoretical intentions becomes even more apparent when we compare the 1655 text with that of 1642: the numerous changes, including those in this passage, show how he strove to clear his garden of any rhetorical weeds which might unbalance the moderate sentiments of the whole. In his revision Denham omits approximately half of the turns of wit that appeared in the 1642 text. Clearly, then, Denham's poetic theory is responsive to the changes in his intellectual milieu, for he carries out a substantial clarification of his earlier style. Significantly, the alterations in Coopers Hill move the poem away from its original context which, however didactic and descriptive, still contains some of the acerbity of Cleveland, toward the genre in which it has been enshrined—the moderate panegyric of monarchy.¹⁶

The presentation of the second height, Windsor Hill, dominates the first half of the poem, since Denham is here writing in praise of the harmonious conditions which the well-regulated monarchy might impose upon England.¹⁷ Windsor rises into view,

                                                                                and doth it self present
With such an easie and unforc'd ascent,
That no stupendious precipice denies
Access, no horror turns away our eyes:
But such a Rise, as doth at once invite
A pleasure, and a reverence from the sight.
Thy mighty Masters Embleme, in whose face
Sate meekness, heightned with Majestick Grace
Such seems thy gentle height, made only proud
To be the basis of that pompous load,
Than which, a nobler weight no Mountain bears,
But Atlas only that supports the Sphears.(18)

The interpretation of Denham's aesthetic intentions in this passage depends upon an awareness both of the tradition of concordia discors and of the conception of poetic balance. The central intentional statement of the poem is probably the one in which he attempts to create a style which is accommodated to thematic concerns: “O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream / My great example, as it is my theme!” This “example” is strikingly similar to the imagistic equation established in his description of Windsor; just as the Thames is a flowing example or analogy to his poetry, so Windsor, “easie and unforc't” in ascent, is its “mighty Masters Embleme.” Nothing is wasted here: Denham explicitly rejects the concept of metaphor as ornamentation for its own sake; he replaces this older, Renaissance idea of copia with the neoclassical and utilitarian view of the purposiveness of imagery. Denham is moving toward what the Renaissance rhetoricians and theorists of style identify as the genus medium, but that he also takes such pains to identify one symbol and the symbolized should strike us as significant. Furthermore, although he says nothing explicit about the epithet “easie and unforc't” which might identify it with his poetic intentions as he does in his “Thames” simile, there can be little doubt that he means to imply the same relationship. For these attributes of Windsor-Charles I are the very qualities which Denham seeks to emulate in his poem. Moreover, they are the epitome of the poetics of moderation to which Denham aspires: what is easy and natural can offend neither by extremes of harshness nor by convoluted imagery and diction. Throughout the eighteenth century we find ease associated with naturalness, with the ideal fusion of nature and art, as when Johnson describes easy poetry as “that in which natural thoughts are expressed without violence to the language. The discriminating character of ease consists principally in the diction, for all true poetry requires that the sentiments be natural.”¹⁹ Thus Denham's intention here, as it is throughout Coopers Hill, is founded upon a poetic theory which insists upon clarity, naturalness, and the utilitarian view of metaphor as the bases of mimesis. The goal of his aesthetic philosophy is the establishment of a poetic mean which parallels, recalls, or prophesies a similar parity in the body politic.

The inclusion of Coopers Hill in the genre of descriptive poetry, a classification which we have seen to be only partially accurate, provoked the disapproval of one of Denham's eighteenth-century critics, John Scott, who found that instead of pictorial description Denham too often presents the reader “with a tedious enumeration of supposed qualities, illustrated by a string of far fetched and unnatural comparisons.”²⁰ That a later reader should object to Denham's failure to describe external nature with painterly accuracy is not unreasonable; what is notable is that Scott unknowingly touches upon one of the principal intentions of the poem, its analogic didacticism. For this conception is central to our understanding of Denham's poetic theory; it has been unnoticed that Denham makes a cogent statement of this intention in his 1667 preface “To the King,” one of the last things he wrote:

Most of the parts of this body have already had Your Majesties view, and having past the Test of so cleer and sharp-sighted a Judgment, which has as good a Title to give Law in Matters of this Nature as in any other, they who shall presume to dissent from Your Majesty, will do more wrong to their own Judgment, then their Judgment can do to me: And for those latter Parts which have not yet received Your Majesties favourable Aspect, if they who have seen them do not flatter me, … they will make it appear that it is not with me as with most of mankind, who never forsake their darling vices, till their vices forsake them; and that this Divorce was not Frigiditas causâ, but an Act of Choice, and not of Necessity. …²¹

Denham states that he had promised Charles I that he would cast aside his youthful follies, including poetry, when he entered his service; his preface to Charles II is really an elaborate and courtly apology for returning to poetry, even so briefly as he has. The recurrent metaphor in this letter is that of relinquishing a mistress or divorcing a wife but, as Denham says, this is a voluntary rather than a forced act. Hence the poet very elegantly exonerates himself from the charges of being vice-ridden, just the contrary to the situation “with most of mankind, who never forsake their darling vices, till their vices forsake them.” On the literal level of meaning this comment is not particularly important as a theoretic position. We must remember, however, that the latest revision of Coopers Hill is an intensely political poem possessing numerous allusions to the stability of the reigning monarchy. Hence when Denham justifies his arguments to the present monarch by hinting that he has forsaken his personal vices by choice while much of the world continues in its old vein, we may reasonably conclude that this is a mild but distinct statement of poetic intention. Denham does not, like the satirist, urge men to desist from vice; instead, like Horace in his Epistles, his purpose in Coopers Hill is to persuade his audience toward virtue, toward acceptance of the condition of balance and moderation which he describes in the last lines of his poem (ll. 343-358).²² That this attitude is an aspect of his poetic theory is demonstrated by the presentation of the last of the three heights in the poem, St. Anne's Hill, in which Denham discusses dissension in religion:

Is there no temperate Region can be known,
Betwixt their Frigid, and our Torrid Zone?
Could we not wake from that Lethargick dream,
But to be restless in a worse extream?
And for that Lethargy was there no cure,
But to be cast into a Calenture?(23)

The medical imagery which dominates this passage is commonplace in seventeenth-century poetry to represent, by analogy to physical disease, disorder in the body politic, but the chief point about these lines is that Denham takes the position of a rational persuader to a moderate, virtuous course. He does not show that the extremes of vice are disgusting, but exhorts his readers to a middle course simply by questioning the extremes.

The resolving of contraries, real or poetic, is an essential ingredient of Denham's theoretic posture; poetry itself becomes a meliorating force, poetic wit assumes the role of creating equality between dissimilitudes, and imagery is utilitarian before it is decorative. In this respect we see the greatest disparity between Denham and other precursors of neoclassicism like Cowley, Cleveland, and Marvell, for his ultimate aesthetic motives almost always tend toward finding the mean between contradictions rather than in exploiting such polarities for their own sake. The opposites—thematic, imagistic, rhetorical—in Denham's poetry are more functional or utilitarian than the same device in the poetry of the Cavaliers and late Metaphysicals. One distinct feature of the aesthetic philosophy of poetry in the first half of the seventeenth century is the conscious attempt, through paradox and related poetic modes, to uncover the disparities beneath the placid surface of quotidian life and accepted morality. But Denham, who like most of his contemporaries was painfully aware of these inequalities, seeks through the use of contrarieties to prove the desirability, even the necessity of the mean. Whereas the metaphysical line of wit seeks to disunify, the neoclassical mode eventually seeks to balance and order and it is to this mode that Denham shows the most profound affinities. We have seen that the order which he creates in his poetry corresponds with the preferable state of the body politic: Denham's intention in this aspect of his theory is not to show us how art should imitate life but rather how art, in this case poetry, ought to function with didactic intent to recommend a certain course in life. For Windsor Hill, “easie and unforc't” in its majesty is, like the Thames, a symbol of the ordered existence in life and art which a sincere Royalist like Denham deemed most suitable. The final image of Coopers Hill, in which the flooding river is contained by prudence but devastates the countryside when men try to restrain its power, is almost archetypal in its significance yet is unmistakably contemporary in its analogic reference to artistic-political moderation. We might make similar observations about most of Denham's symbolic presentations in Coopers Hill and his other poetry, but to do so would only be to multiply evidence of his intellectual involvement with the theoretic aspirations of neoclassicism. The concordia discors conception which Denham employs to such advantage is only part of the picture of his stress on moderate ideals.²⁴ For it is evident that Denham's entire theory of poetry, underlaid by a strong concept of artistic balance, adumbrates the theoretical bases of Restoration neoclassicism with a suggestiveness that should banish the long accepted view of him as primarily a capable stylist and versifier.

Notes

1. “A Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire” (1693), Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson, 2 vols. (London, 1962), II, 150; cf. I, 7, 24; II, 281. Dryden's sentiments are fairly commonplace later in the century; cf. Johnson, Life of Denham, The Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1905), I, 80.

2. For Dryden's use of Denham's translation, see L. Proudfoot, Dryden's “Aeneid” and its Seventeenth Century Predecessors (Manchester, 1960), pp. 159-167.

3. See NED, s.v. “Turn,” sb., VI.32, “a modification of phraseology for a particular effect, or as a grace of embellishment; a special point or detail of style.” Cf. Essays, ed. Watson, II, 147, “The thought can turn itself with greater ease in a larger compass”; 150-151, where Dryden discusses the “turn” as an elaboration, through wordplay or intellection, of a single word or phrase in successive statements of the same poem.

4. Lives (1905), I, 82. The Biographia Britannica, 6 vols. in 7 (London, 1747-1766), III, 1646-1648, and Theophilus Cibber et al., Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, 5 vols. (London, 1752), III, 1-9, show no similar awareness of Denham's linguistic contributions.

5. The Political Works of Sir John Denham, ed. Theodore Howard Banks, Jr. (New Haven, 1928), p. 159. Denham's imagery here is alchemical; see NED, s.v. “Translate,” vb., I.4: “Transfusion,” sb. 1; “Caput Mortuum,” sb. 2, and quots. Denham's poetry badly needs annotation, which hopefully will be furnished by the forthcoming edition of Brendan O'Hehir.

6. See Vida, De Arte Poetica, III.15, in Poemata, 2 vols. (London, 1732), I, 123-124; Scaliger, Poetices Libri Septem (Lyons, 1561), pp. 176, 184. Denham was acquainted with Scaliger, whom he mentions in the 1667 Preface to Coopers Hill, “To the King,” Poetical Works, p. 60.

7. Scaliger, Poetices (1561), p. 184 (IV.v), does not exclude figurative language from propriety of diction: “Proprietatem appello, non quae excludit metaphoras”; but such language must avoid the several kinds of obscurity which he sets forth. The alliance of clarity and elegance may be found, as a general notion, in the critical writings of Boileau, Dryden, Mulgrave, Roscommon, Pope, and others.

8. The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley, 6 pts. (London, 1668), vi. 42 (stanza 9).

9. Poetical Works, pp. 106-107.

10. For discussion of the political background of this development, see J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675-1725 (London, 1967), pp. 1-30.

11. Denham was doubtless acquainted with the critical distinction between epistle and satire, according to which the epistle is seen as monitory, attempting to dissuade the reader from vice, and satire is regarded as curative, like Dryden's “Ense rescindendum,” attacking and eradicating vice. Scaliger makes such a distinction about the epistles and satires of Horace; see Poetices (1561), p. 337 (VI. vii), “Harum autem, ut ita dicam, sapientium Epistolarum ratio atque natura, neutiquam differt à Satyra, nam quemadmodum medicina aut praeservat à morbis, aut eos tollit: ita Epistolae proponunt ea quibus à vitio abstineamus: Satyra illis pugnat quibus vitia extirpentur.” Cf. Jay A. Levine, “The Status of the Verse Epistle before Pope,” SP, LIX (1962), 658-684.

12. Cf. Poetical Works, p. 29.

13. See Richard Foster Jones, The Triumph of the English Language (Stanford, 1952), pp. 168-213; Ruth C. Wallerstein, “The Development of the Rhetoric and Metre of the Heroic Couplet, especially in 1625-1645,” PMLA, L (1935), 166-209, esp. 199-207, demonstrates that Denham and Waller crowned rather than instigated the “reform” of English versification.

14. Poetical Works, p. 65 (ll. 25-36). This passage from the revised 1655 text is much less pointed and accusatory than the 1642 edition; Denham has moved perceptibly from the satirical sentiments of the first edition toward a much more moderate epistolary tone.

15. Remarks upon Mr. Pope's Translation of Homer. With Two Letters concerning Windsor Forest and the Temple of Fame (1717) in The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. E. N. Hooker, 2 vols. (Baltimore, 1939-43), II, 135-137.

16. James W. Johnson, The Formation of English Neo-Classical Thought (Princeton, 1967), pp. 17-18, points out that the establishment of the Augustan Age in Rome was attended by the general substitution of panegyric for criticism. Parallels between Augustan Rome and neoclassical England are tenuous and not wholly convincing, but something similar does happen temporarily in England in the early 1660's.

17. The excellent analysis of Earl R. Wasserman, The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems (Baltimore, 1959), pp. 53-61, stresses that Denham is writing within the long tradition of concordia discors, which conceives of opposites as ultimately productive of harmony.

18. Poetical Works, pp. 65-67 (ll. 41-52), 1655 text.

19. Idler, No. 77 in The Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, 1958- ), II, 239.

20. “On Denham's Cooper's-Hill,” Critical Essays on some of the Poems of Several English Poets (London, 1785), pp. 19, 22-25.

21. Poetical Works, p. 61.

22. Renaissance and seventeenth-century editors and annotators of Horace were aware of this distinction; see Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1961), I, 143; Isaac Casaubon, De Satyrica Graecorum Poesi, & Romanorum Satira Libri Duo (Paris, 1605), pp. 290-291. The most exhaustive modern treatment that I know is in Howard D. Weinbrot's The Formal Strain (forthcoming 1968), Chap. VI.

23. Poetical Works, p. 73 (ll. 139-144), 1655 text.

24. Cf. Wasserman, The Subtler Language, pp. 69-70.