Works
In England the famous translation (1592–1611) by Joshua Sylvester of the Divine Weeks and Works of Du Bartas, containing such lines as those that the juvenile Dryden admired so much:
- But when winter's keener breath began
- To crystalize the Baltic ocean,
- To glaze the lakes and bridle up the floods,
- And perriwig with wool the bald-pate woods.
There was also the curious physiological epic of Phineas Fletcher, The Purple Island (1633). But on the whole, it was not until French influences had made themselves felt on English poetry that description, as Boileau conceived it, was cultivated as a distinct art. The Coopers Hill (1642) by Sir John Denham may be contrasted with the less ambitious To Penshurst of Ben Jonson and this one represents the new no less completely than the other does the old generation. If, however, Coopers Hill is examined carefully, it is perceived that its aim is after all rather philosophical than topographical. The Thames is described indeed, but not very minutely and the poet is mainly absorbed in moral reflections.
Marvell's long poem on the beauties of Nunappleton, Upon Appleton House, comes nearer to the type. But it is hardly until the 18th century that in English literature appears what is properly known as descriptive poetry. This was the age in which poets, often of no mean capacity, began to take such definite themes as a small country estate (Pomfrets Choice, 1700), the cultivation of the grape (Gays Wine, 1708), a landscape (Popes Windsor Forest, 1713), a military manoeuvre (Addisons Campaign, 1704), the industry of an apple orchard (Philips Cyder, 1708) or a piece of topography (Tickells Kensington Gardens, 1722) as the sole subject of a lengthy poem, generally written in heroic or blank verse. These tours de force were supported by minute efforts in miniature-painting, by touch applied to touch and were often monuments of industry, but they were apt to lack personal interest and suffered from a general and deplorable frigidity. They were infected with the faults that accompany an artificial style. They were monotonous, rhetorical, and symmetrical, while the uniformity of treatment inevitable to their plan rendered them hopelessly tedious if prolonged to any great extent.
Read more about this topic: Descriptive Poetry
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“We do not fear censorship for we have no wish to offend with improprieties or obscenities, but we do demand, as a right, the liberty to show the dark side of wrong, that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue—the same liberty that is conceded to the art of the written word, that art to which we owe the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.”
—D.W. (David Wark)
“Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood,
Even where horrible green parrots call and swing.
My works are all stamped down into the sultry mud.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“In doing good, we are generally cold, and languid, and sluggish; and of all things afraid of being too much in the right. But the works of malice and injustice are quite in another style. They are finished with a bold, masterly hand; touched as they are with the spirit of those vehement passions that call forth all our energies, whenever we oppress and persecute..”
—Edmund Burke (1729–97)