A Little History of Literature

by John Sutherland

  Since I am coming to that Holy room,

  Where, with Thy choir of saints for evermore,

  I shall be made Thy music; as I come

  I tune the instrument here at the door,

  And what I must do then, think here before;

  Whilst my physicians by their love are grown

  Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie

  Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown

  That this is my south-west discovery,

  Per fretum febris, by these straits to die;

  I joy, that in these straits I see my west;

  For, though their currents yield return to none,

  What shall my west hurt me? As west and east

  In all flat maps (and I am one) are one,

  So death doth touch the resurrection.

  The hymn is as daring as anything Donne ever wrote. And it requires some work by the reader to follow the complex lines of thought. The conceits are packed in together, like sardines in a tin. His death will be a voyage of exploration; he will join the great seagoing voyagers on this last journey of his life. His physicians – soon to get to work on the autopsy – will find his dead body to be a map of where he is going, just as cosmographers discover the universe. Where is he going? West, into the cold dark night of the grave. But he has to pass through the east and the hot straits of his fatal fever (per fretum febris) to get there. Walton records that his friend ‘was so far from fearing Death, which to others is the King of Terrors, that he longed for the day of his dissolution’. One can only hope the Almighty admires fine poetry as much as we do.

  For those who find the complexity of Donne too rich a brew to swallow comfortably, there is simpler poetry to be found in the work of his fellow Metaphysical, George Herbert (1593–1633). Like Donne, Herbert was a clergyman – but not a high dignitary of the church. He was a country parson, and wrote a manual on how such lowly clergymen should carry out their duties. He also wrote exquisitely ‘plain’ verse. The following is the opening verse from his poem ‘Virtue’:

  Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,

  The bridall of the earth and skie:

  The dew shall weep thy fall to night;

  For thou must die.

  The ‘conceit’, or central idea, here is that nightfall is a forecast of our death. The secondary idea, that night is the ‘child’ or offspring of the earth and sky (in the dark, they meet, seamlessly, at the horizon to produce it), is beautifully original. But look at how simple the language is – every word is a monosyllable, apart from ‘bridall’ (a pun: it means bridle, as in what joins two horses in harness, and bridal, as in marriage).

  Has complex verse ever been made out of simpler – and in Donne's case, ‘low’ – materials? Eliot was right. This is poetry that breaks all the rules – and is the greater for it.

  CHAPTER 10

  Nations Rise

  MILTON AND SPENSER

  During the forty-five years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I – ‘good Queen Bess’ – there is a new ‘feel’ to literature: a growth of national pride and bursting confidence. England felt a certain ‘greatness’ in itself – a greatness, daring spirits might think, equal to that of ancient Rome. It expressed itself through literature in two ways: writing about England and writing in English, appropriating, where required, the literary forms of other supremely great nations and their literatures. Put another way, nationalism takes centre-stage.

  The first great English poem about England is Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene of 1590–96. It was composed during Elizabeth's mature years and is dedicated to her. Spenser was a courtier, a soldier, and a high-stakes political player, as well as a poet. He was not a professional writer. His pen was never Spenser's main source of income (although it could win him patrons who would bring him money) and it was not his main ambition in life to be a great figure in English literature. Ironically, that is precisely what he was destined to become.

  Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–99) was born the son of prosperous cloth maker, in the rising middle classes, and educated at Cambridge University. His early career was as a colonial administrator in Ireland where his principal duty was to enforce martial law, root out troublemakers, and put down rebellion. He did this efficiently and often brutally. As a reward the Queen gave him an Irish estate.

  Spenser was an ambitious man. He wanted more than Elizabeth had given him. And it was to further his ambitions, and to flatter her, that he conceived The Faerie Queene. The poem was prefaced by a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh who was pleasing their monarch in a different way, by making Britannia ruler of the waves.

  The Faerie Queene won Spenser a small pension but not, alas, the great favours he craved. Subsequently his life was marked by disappointment. His castle was burned down by Irish rebels in 1597 and it is thought that he lost members of his family in the attack. He moved back to London where he died in distressed circumstances, in his mid-forties. We don't know why he ended his life penniless.

  Spenser's career as a politician had been less than successful but his achievement as a poet was outstanding. Appropriately, his tomb lies alongside that of his ‘master’ Geoffrey Chaucer in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey. At his death the notable writers of the time (including Shakespeare, reportedly) threw commemorative verses into his grave. It was not just his passing but the dawning greatness of English literature that they were celebrating.

  The subject of The Faerie Queene is England itself – glory, and Gloriana (the name of the queen of the faerie court, and also as Elizabeth was known). An epic poem, it was originally intended to run to twelve books, but Spenser completed only six. It nonetheless remains one of the longest poems in the language and not one of the easiest. The half of The Faerie Queene which Spenser completed addresses itself to six moral virtues necessary to the establishment of a nation, one virtue in each book. These virtues are: Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice and Courtesy. Each is embodied as a different kind of knightly hero, five men and a woman, all in armour and embarked on quests to set the world to rights and bring to civilisation to a pagan and primitive world. Given the title and origins of the poem, we are particularly interested in the female knight, Britomart, in Book III. Like the Virgin Queen, whom the book overtly compliments, Britomart is the embodiment of militant chastity. No man can dominate or ‘own’ her. If Elizabeth had a favourite part of the poem, this, surely, was it.

  Spenser's poem is made up of rhymed verses, which we now call ‘Spenserian stanzas’ – complicated rhyming verses, extraordinarily hard to master. It is written in what is called ‘poetic diction’ – a ‘heightened’ language. With The Faerie Queene begins the convention that the language of English poetry is never the language of the day, nor of everyday discourse. The main poetic device in The Faerie Queene is allegory: saying one thing in terms of another, apparently quite different, thing. Let's look at the first lines of the poem's first stanza, which are a prime example of poetic diction and allegory:

  A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine,

  Y cladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde,

  Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine,

  The cruell markes of many' a bloudy fielde;

  Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield:

  No one, even in the sixteenth century, actually spoke in this pseudoantique way. (‘Pricking’, by the way, means the knight is driving his spurs into the horse to make it gallop.) But it creates exactly what Spenser wanted – an otherworldly (‘faerie’) effect. And the verse is rich with meaning as regards ‘holiness’ (this first book's particular virtue). Why, for example, is the knight encased in battered armour? The detail points to the fact that the great battles of Christianity have been won for us already by our ancestors. We shall not be required to become martyrs, or be burned at the stake, to prove our holiness. Virtually every stanza of the poem is packed in this way with allegorical meaning and is rich in its ‘Spenserian’ artificial language.

&nbs
p; English poetry took another important step forward a hundred years later, with the works of John Milton (1608–74). England, since the death of Elizabeth, had endured religious conflicts, in which Milton had played an active part on the side of the Commonwealth. The country was still in the process of defining itself. But the national confidence, so prominent in The Faerie Queene, is just as evident in Milton's Paradise Lost, which he began writing during the period of the Commonwealth and which was printed in 1667 during the reign of Charles II. Milton frankly acknowledged Spenser (as Spenser had acknowledged Chaucer) as his literary predecessor and a main influence. English literature now has a great ‘tradition’. These three poets are connected, like links in a chain.

  In Paradise Lost Milton set out to do something dauntingly ambitious. To write an epic – something to rival Virgil's Aeneid or Homer's Odyssey – and use that epic to ‘justify the ways of God to man’, as he put it. He would, in other words, re-tell the opening books of the Bible in a way that would make clearer some of the theological difficulties it poses. For instance, is it really wrong to eat ‘the apple of knowledge’? Is Eden a place where no work of any kind is done by Adam and Eve? Are they ‘married’? Milton grapples with these issues in the poem. It's the same kind of mission we saw in the mystery plays (now long gone from the great towns which gave them birth). But what Milton came up with was anything but literature of the streets. Paradise Lost is a poem that presupposes a highly educated reader – ideally one who knows some Latin.

  Milton's composition of Paradise Lost, which he conceived as his life's work and which, incredibly, he wrote after being stricken with blindness, began with two dilemmas. The first was, what language should he write in? Milton was a scholar. The languages of scholarship, over the centuries, were Ancient Greek and Latin. Milton was fluent in both. He had written much poetry in Latin. If his poem was going to be truly Virgilian, or Homeric, should he not use their language? He decided on English, but an English so flavoured with the ancient language that it sounds more like Latin.

  The other dilemma he faced was what ‘form’ he should write it in. He was steeped, as a scholar, in Aristotle's Poetics, and he recalled that the Greek critic had called tragedy the noblest literature. Milton toyed for some time with the idea of writing his great work as a tragedy, along the lines of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. He went so far as to write a plan for this tragedy called ‘Adam Unparadised’. In the event he went for the epic – a looser narrative form. A main reason for this was that, like Virgil, he resolved to create a work of literature that would celebrate the growth of a great nation. Milton believed that England was now a great nation, and that is a major assumption underlying Paradise Lost and the two choices Milton made.

  Whether Milton succeeded in his great mission is debatable. In his telling of the serpent's seduction of Adam and Eve – and more particularly, Satan's war with God narrated in the first books of the poem – he comes close, as the poet William Blake put it, to ‘being of the devil's party and not knowing it’. Milton doesn't quite know whose side he is on. Satan is a rebel and, in his own life, the poet was a rebel too; he had risked his life by opposing Charles I. Better to ‘reign in hell than serve in heaven’, says Satan. In context it sounds heroic. Also, Milton was clearly unsure whether he, personally, would not have eaten an ‘apple of knowledge’, whatever the consequences, or remained for all time in a state of innocent, guiltless, ‘blank’ ignorance. And Milton's view of the relationship of man and woman rubs many modern readers up the wrong way. This is how Adam and Eve are first pictured:

  Two of far nobler shape erect and tall,

  Godlike erect, with native honour clad

  In naked majesty seemed lords of all.

  For contemplation he and valour formed,

  For softness she and sweet attractive grace;

  He for God only, she for God in him.

  His fair large front and eye sublime declar'd

  Absolute rule …

  ‘He for God only, she for God in him’ is the line modern readers most often gag on. Illustrators have followed Milton's cue and traditionally show the couple (with the obligatory fig leaves) with Adam looking up, reverently, to heaven, and Eve gazing, adoringly, at his face as he does so. But later in the poem Eve rebels against this ‘absolute’ wifely submission. She insists on going off on her own to tend the Garden in Eden. Her domestic rebellion renders her vulnerable, of course, to the seductions of wily Satan (now in the form of a serpent) who persuades her, as a further act of independence, to eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

  Another bone of contention is the ‘English’ that Milton created for his poem. It is heavily, at times overpoweringly, ‘Latinised’ – it's almost as if he never could shake off the intention of writing the poem in the antique language. The following, from Book VII, describing Eden's vegetation, is a good example of Miltonic diction:

  … up stood the corny reed

  Embattled in her field: and the humble shrub,

  And bush with frizzled hair implicit: last

  Rose as in dance the stately trees, and spread

  Their branches hung with copious fruit; or gemmed

  Their blossoms …

  This is not the terminology of Gardener's Question Time.

  There are those, like the poet T.S. Eliot, who believe that Milton's Latinism in Paradise Lost throws up an off-putting ‘Chinese Wall’ around literature. Literary language should be closer to what the Romantic poet Wordsworth called ‘the language of men’, not the language of pedants and scholars who are thinking in Latin and translating their thought into English – as, one suspects, Milton sometimes did. But what really matters, for his poem and for English poetry generally, is that, by his choice, Milton established that the English language in the hands of a great poet like himself could create epic poetry to rival that of the ancients.

  There are many other problems raised by Paradise Lost. Can a poem, for example, really explain the Bible better than it can explain itself? No easy answers are possible. Great literature never makes things simpler – it gives no easy answers to difficult questions. What it does is to help us see how infinitely un-simple things are for us.

  Milton confidently declares in the first book of his twelve-book poem that his purpose is to make his readers better Christians, or, at least, better-informed Christians. Who knows? He may have succeeded with some readers in his uplifting religious mission. But the central achievement of Paradise Lost has been very different, and wholly literary. It pointed to ways in which literature in English, and poets writing in English, could develop. It laid a foundation. And that foundation was a literature which, henceforth, would be independently English. English in subject and English in expression.

  CHAPTER 11

  Who ‘Owns’ Literature?

  PRINTING, PUBLISHING AND COPYRIGHT

  The book you are holding in your hand at the moment is not a work of literature, but let's take it as a handy example. I wrote it. My name is there on the title page, and in the copyright line. So it's ‘my’ (John Sutherland's) book. Does that mean, though, that I ‘own’ the book in your hand? No, it doesn't – the physical copies are not mine. If you bought it, it's yours. But suppose someone broke into my house while I was writing this book, stole my computer, found the text of what I was writing and published it under their own name. What would happen? Provided I could prove that the original work was mine, I could sue the thief for infringement of copyright – for copying my original work without my permission and passing it off as his own (an offence known as ‘plagiarism’).

  From its beginning in the eighteenth century, modern copyright law has developed alongside the increasing availability of literary works in new formats. It has continually had to adapt to keep up with new technologies, including film adaptations in the twentieth century (Chapter 32) and, today, the challenge of e-books and the internet (Chapter 40). But in essence, copyright has always meant just that: ‘the right to copy’. As the copyrigh
t owner of what you are reading right now, I have granted Yale University Press the exclusive right to publish it in the form of this book.

  We talk about a ‘work of literature’ because it is the result – in very real terms – of the author's toil. Then, publishers talk about each of the works in their catalogue as a ‘title’: the word ‘title’ means ownership. Finally, when the books have been produced for sale, they are individual ‘copies’: you have in your hand a copy of my work. Each party ‘owns’ the work in a different way. Imagine a party of book-lovers. The host, pointing to his groaning shelves, proudly exclaims, ‘Look at my books!’ An author, scanning the shelves, says jubilantly, ‘I see you've got one of my books – did you enjoy it?’ A publisher, also inspecting the books, says ‘I'm very glad to see you've got so many of our books on the shelf’. They are all right, in a sense: the host owns the physical objects, the publisher the particular format, and the author the original words. And it points to the many different people and processes involved in getting a book written, published and sold nowadays.