Poetry and British Nationalisms in the Bardic Eighteenth Century by Jeff Strabone

Author:Jeff Strabone
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319952550
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Here the “School of Provence”, with which Pope’s plan began, comes third in chronological order. Historically speaking, Gray’s plan is a huge leap backward: to Welsh poetry “as far back as it can be traced”. For Gray, the poetic remains of the Welsh, the Norse, and the Anglo-Saxons were English poetry’s origin points, followed in time by Continental influence. In fairness to Warton, there is no way he could have known what Gray had in mind since he was allowed to see only a sketch. Gray’s concept of English literary history—that it was, in substantial part, Northern-derived—was advanced not by Warton but by two figures whose influence was also considerable: Percy and, decades later, Coleridge.

For Gray, the evidence to support this broader historical scope lay in the archaic poetry of the Northern nations. Metre and form become, in Gray’s method, a type of historical knowledge. We have seen how editors and imitators altered the metres of their distant poetic predecessors by regularizing line lengths, as in the cases of Dryden’s Chaucer and Ramsay’s The Ever Green. The same practices of syllable-adding and -subtracting appear in John Urry’s 1721 edition of the works of Chaucer,208 which Gray faulted in his commonplace book: “I would not with Mr. Urry , the Editor of Chaucer, insert words & syllables , unauthorized by the oldest Manuscripts, to help out what seems lame & defective in the measure of our ancient Writers”. The keyword in the passage is “seems”. Gray was aware that the problem lay not in older poets—widely presumed too primitive to write proper verse—but rather in his own contemporaries. For one thing, he understood that the mediation of scribes accounted for many of the inconsistencies recorded in manuscripts. But, whereas for the medievals “the manner of reading made up for the defects that appear in the writing”, we moderns lack the necessary historical knowledge of past metrical forms to know how to read their poetry properly.209

Unusually for a poet—or anyone—of his time, Gray had an advanced sense of the possibilities of medieval syllable-counting from his study of Anglo-Saxon grammar in Hickes’s Thesaurus and William Somner’s Saxon-Latin-English dictionary.210 With regard to the terminal -e, for instance, he understood that, by the time of Chaucer and Lydgate , “in verse they took the Liberty either to follow the old language in pronouncing the final syllable; or to sink the vowel and abridge it, as was usual; according to the necessity of their versification”.211 Gray’s appreciation of this seemingly technical point is important. The philologists had produced historical knowledge about grammar; now Gray was bringing that knowledge to bear on how to read and hear medieval poetry.212 Unlike his contemporaries, who deemed old poetry metrically deficient and tinkered with it to make it “correct”, Gray applied recent philological research about the Anglo-Saxon language to devise better methods of syllable-counting for the purpose of producing historical knowledge about metre. Such knowledge was becoming valuable because the cultural origins of the nation were increasingly thought to reside in its oldest poetry.

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