Descriptive Poetry - Works

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.