Introduction to The Poems of Owen Felltham, 1604?-1668
[In the following excerpt, Pebworth and Summers acknowledge that while Felltham's poetry was not the greatest of his age, the author of the Lusoria should be commended for the work's range, subtlety, and lyric beauty.]
Owen Felltham (or Feltham), recognized by Anthony à Wood as one of the poets who were in the 1630's “the chiefest of the nation,”1 is today known almost exclusively as the author of Resolves: Divine, Morall, Politicall, a collection of prose pieces issued originally in 1623 and extensively enlarged and revised during the following 38 years. Only one of Felltham's poems is frequently anthologized (L-32), and his verse has been virtually ignored by modern critics.2 The neglect into which Felltham's poetry has fallen is unfortunate, for although his canon is small—fewer than 50 lyrics and occasional pieces survive—it is nevertheless impressive in its variety and richness.
Relatively little is known of Felltham's life. Probably born at Mutford, a village near Lowestoft, Suffolk, in 1604, he was the son of Thomas Felltham, a well-to-do member of the gentry, and his wife Mary. Owen, who frequently affixed “Gentleman” to his name, was apparently proud of his family and its position; the Felltham arms appear on the engraved title pages of all the seventeenth-century editions of Resolves except the first. Although he was later to have a poem (L-20) published in Parnassus Biceps, a collection of verse by alumni of Oxford and Cambridge, no record exists of his having attended either university. Felltham's education was probably in the hands of tutors and, perhaps to a greater degree than is the case with most people, in his own hands. His self-education, as indicated in the expansions and revisions of Resolves by the increased breadth and depth of his reading in modern and ancient, sacred and secular authors, was a life-long and fruitful project.
Felltham first came upon the literary scene with the publication of the 1623 edition of Resolves. Throughout most of his life, he worked on this book, enlarging and revising its contents and seeing it through eight editions by 1661. As the result of a trip to Holland, probably made between 1623 and 1628, Felltham wrote a lively pamphlet, A Brief Character of the Low-Countries Under the States, which circulated in manuscript and in pirated editions until 1652, when he allowed his printer, Henry Seile, to issue a correct, though anonymous edition. Low-Countries continued to be published in both pirated and authorized versions in English and Dutch until the end of the century. Felltham's poems, most of which were collected in the Lusoria section of the 1661 Resolves, were written over a considerable span of time. Perhaps his earliest poem is “Authori” (S-1), which he contributed to Kingsmill Long's 1625 translation of Barclay's Argenis. Between 1625 and 1661, the poems appeared with some regularity in various printed miscellanies, and they apparently circulated widely in manuscript.
In the 1630's, Felltham became steward to Barnabas O'Brien, younger brother of the Irish fifth Earl of Thomond. Around 1628, O'Brien had purchased a manor at Great Billing, a village near Northampton. Felltham probably lived there, overseeing the estate. In 1639, Barnabas succeeded to his brother's title; and in 1646, the Earl and Countess Mary took up residence at Great Billing. When Barnabas died in 1657, Felltham continued as steward under his son Henry, seventh Earl, and the Dowager Countess, serving them until his own death in 1668. It is evident from his will that in the service of the O'Briens, Felltham became rather wealthy.
It was probably shortly after his appointment as the O'Brien steward that Felltham married Mary Clopton of Kentwell Hall, Melford, Suffolk. Of her, nothing further is known. She apparently died before her husband, for there is no mention of her in his will. If the couple had children, they evidently did not survive their father, since Felltham's will makes no reference to offspring. Felltham died on 23 February 1667/8 at the Dowager Countess's townhouse in the Strand and was buried the next day in St. Martin-in-the-Fields.
The details of Owen Felltham's life are few and not particularly revealing. But what emerges from an examination of his work is the picture of an attractive and interesting person, very much a man of his own time. His world view is a conservative one, dominated by a preference for the old order, the Ptolemaic universe as Christianized by the Middle Ages. This concept of the universe teaches him that “order and degree” are of paramount importance in questions divine, moral, and political. It also leads to a reliance on the Monarch and the Established Church. And it made Felltham strive for order in his own life, manifesting itself in an emphasis on moderation. Philosophically, he wed a tolerant and attractive Christianity to Stoicism. As Douglas Bush notes perceptively, “Felltham's harmony of Christianity and Stoicism is tempered and sweetened by a love of life and literature, by philosophic charity and undogmatic good sense.”3 These attractive aspects of his personality are mirrored throughout Resolves and the poems.
When Felltham appended to the eighth edition of Resolves (1661) the section entitled Lusoria: Or Occasional Pieces. With a Taste of Some Letters, which included 42 of his poems, he cautioned that “The Poems, the Character, and some of the Letters, he looks upon as sports; that rather improve a man by preserving him from worse, then by bringing otherwise any considerable profit” (“To the Reader”). Despite this disclaimer, the poems need no apology. Not all of them, it is true, are successful either in conception or in execution. A few of them are simply ingenious exercises, and some are too obviously derivative. Felltham, admittedly, has no claim to status beyond that of minor poet, but in a period as rich in poetry as the seventeenth century, such status is hardly to be despised.
Considering the smallness of his canon, Felltham's range is particularly noteworthy. His poems include a distinguished collection of love lyrics and a body of occasional poetry in which are represented almost all the subgenres popular in the earlier seventeenth century, from the epitaph and elegy to the “instructions to the painter” poem. His range is evident even within the 16 love lyrics. These poems include exercises written to an imaginary scornful young lady in the conventional Petrarchan manner, witty variations on the cruel-fair theme, and very moving and personal statements which reflect the dual legacy of Donne and Jonson. They vary from the wit of “Song: Cupid and Venus” (L-31), where the poet proves that Cupid and Venus are but “A Boy and a common Tit” while “Vulcan onely is the god of love”; to the tender seriousness of “The Reconcilement” (L-12) and “When, Dearest, I but think on thee” (L-32). The subject matter of Felltham's occasional poems also indicates his breadth of interest. He mourns the passing of public figures from Henry, Earl of Oxford (L-6) to Archbishop Laud (L-36) and King Charles (L-40); his poems on literary subjects include both a witty rebuttal to one of Jonson's fits of pique (L-20) and a moving tribute to the great man (S-3), as well as a sound critical estimate occasioned by the death of Thomas Randolph (S-2). What most of these poems share are Felltham's highly developed sense of dramatic tension and his talent for the strikingly beautiful phrase.
Felltham's ability to produce arresting and beautiful imagery is quite noticeable in the poetry. Stating almost a commonplace in seventeenth-century love lyrics, Felltham is able to infuse freshness into the notion of the union of souls by the sheer beauty of his expression: “For when two souls shall towre so high, / Without their flesh their rayes shall flye, / Like Emanations from a Deity” (L-9). Similarly, the erotic conclusion to “The Reconcilement” (L-12), while hardly original, is movingly beautiful. Felltham's talent in this regard is expressed variously. It can be seen in the simple picture of Death approaching Lady Venetia Digby like a lover, “Gently he did imbrace her into clay” (L-14); and in the aphoristic statement prompted by the death of a young man: “Reading this know thou hast seen / Vertue tomb'd at but Fifteen” (L-19); as well as in the piercing description of our hopes and joys as “the feathers of the soul” (L-35).
But Felltham's most characteristic strength is his sense of drama. On the most obvious level, this can be seen in the abrupt openings of poems like “The Appeal” (L-5), “The Amazement” (L-17), “Gunemastix” (L-27), “Upon a breach of Promise” (L-29), and “Song: Cupid and Venus” (L-35). Somewhat more elaborately, this dramatic sense is expressed in the ingenious extension of metaphors and conventions, as, for example, the surprising expansion in “On Thomas, Lord Coventry …” (L-37) of the elegiac convention that has all nature weeping for the deceased. More significant, however, is Felltham's creation of dramatic situations within his poems and his juxtaposition of one attitude with another, sometimes contradictory attitude. This technique is used most successfully in what may be Felltham's most important poem, “On the Duke of Buckingham …” (L-4). Remarkably objective for an occasional poem, it holds in suspension contrasting attitudes, thereby creating a tension seldom found outside the lyric. Throughout the poem, Felltham opposes Buckingham's greatness with his enemies' hatred for him, the Duke's high estate with his assassin's resolve, finding in Buckingham a “great Example of Mortality” and sorrowing at his fall not because the Duke was a worthy man, but because his fall was unworthy of his position. In the poem's conclusion, Felltham examines in detail the extremism that can result in the fall of “so huge a pile / Of State” as Buckingham, and, finally, pleads for moderation. He resolves the tension in the poem not by ranting against the extremists, but by indicating the reconciliation implicit in the bonds of Christianity common to all Englishmen. The carefully structured tension between the great heights that Buckingham had attained and the great hatred in which he was held, along with the powerful language of the poem, makes the verses on Buckingham one of Felltham's most effective pieces.
Perhaps Felltham's greatest importance for the modern reader is that his poems, in addition to providing intrinsic pleasure, exemplify the most important characteristics of seventeenth-century secular poetry. It is, of course, a critical commonplace that a minor writer of a period often shows the tenor of his time better than does a major figure. Felltham, admittedly a minor poet, reveals in his small collection something of the richness and diversity that mark Caroline poetry. Colloquial and direct, subtle and sometimes argumentative, Felltham's poems in their psychological and philosophical reality clearly reflect the influence of Donne and his followers. But in their public quality, urbanely eschewing the eccentric, they also mirror the legacy of Jonson and the Cavaliers. This legacy is also manifest in the melodic diction of the love lyrics, several of which were set to music by the great seventeenth-century Oxford music professor and song writer, John Wilson.4 To point out the Donnean quality of “The Sympathy” (L-11) or the Jonsonian influence on “On a Hopeful Youth” (L-19), however, would be belaboring the obvious. Moreover, it would be misleading, for most of Felltham's poems, these included, are not merely derivative.
Felltham's measure as poet is not his originality, but his ability to make fresh and personal poems which derive from a fertile and various milieu. His may not be a distinctive voice, but it is a fine one nevertheless. “The Cause” (L-9), for instance, which expresses an idea and uses images reminiscent of those found in Donne's “The Canonization,” “The Anniversarie,” and “The Relique” and owes much to Jonson's lyrics in its simplicity, justifies itself in terms of its own beauty of statement. The central image of “The Sympathy” (L-11) is certainly clever in the metaphysical manner, yet the image of the sympathetic lutes is more than simply clever: it is arrestingly effective and wholly appropriate to the poem. Felltham, in the final analysis, merits the attention of modern readers not merely because he exemplifies the poetic characteristics of his age, but because he does it so well.
Notes
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“Clement Barksdale,” Athenae Oxonienses, 2 vols. (London: Thomas Bennet, 1691), II, 614.
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The fullest account of Felltham's life is the brief discussion in Chapter 1 of Ted-Larry Pebworth, Owen Felltham (New York: Twayne, in press). Chapter 4 of this book is devoted to a critical analysis of Felltham's poetry. Subsequently, this work is cited as Owen Felltham.
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English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600-1660, 2nd edition, rev. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 202.
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Six lyrics which are definitely by Felltham (L-3, L-5, L-7, L-13, L-16, and L-29) and one which is possibly his (M-3) are included in a Ms volume of songs (Mus. b. 1) presented to The Bodleian by Wilson about 1656, with the stipulation that it not be examined until after his death. Since the musical settings were written before Lusoria was issued, Wilson could have seen the poems only in manuscript.
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