Robert Gould - Style and Literary Importance

Style and Literary Importance

In content, Gould was a sincere, harsh Royalist. In his satires, the families and ancestors of living noblemen are ridiculed viciously, if they took the Cromwellian side in the English Civil War. Additionally, Gould not only asserts Church of England positions, but he has nothing but vitriol for radical Protestants, from Richard Baxter to George Fox onward. His attacks on ladies and lords show all the marks of estrangement. They are attacked for being less than they would appear. Gould appeared to believe that the nobility should be, in fact, better than the general run of mankind. It is the lie that enrages him most, with betrayal being next in his catalog of sins to lash.

Stylistically, Robert Gould's poetry looks forward somewhat to the poetry of the 1710s. He was the friend of John Oldham, and there is some similarity in poetic forms. He was also a friend of Fleetwood Shepheard, addressing several poems to him. Shepheard was a confidante to Matthew Prior and Thomas Rymer, and Shepheard gave both financial aid to Gould and personal friendship (Sloan). He wrote almost exclusively in closed heroic couplets. Other than Dryden, whose poetic output was lowering, few poets of the 1680s are well preserved, and Gould occupies an interesting position. He is a generation younger than the primary Restoration wits (Dryden, Rochester, Buckingham) and younger even than Aphra Behn. His is the first Restoration generation, and he had only stories about the Interregnum. He is additionally unique in the literature of the Restoration in being a servant who composed poetry. While the Restoration had many figures who rose from common, or even poor, families, Gould used his writing to win his independence in the most literal way. His pen earned him a profession other than servitude and enabled him to escape a menial life, and, at the same time, allowed him to treat wealthy and established figures on an even footing.

Although Gould was apparently well known to his own and the next two generations of poets, his reputation was virtually erased in the nineteenth century. By the 1730s, when Alexander Pope began to reject the "licentious" Restoration poets and other "Tory" writers gradually distanced themselves from the Cavalier wits, Gould's works fell out of publication and public consciousness. Because his satires are sexually frank and exceptionally vicious, he was wholly unacceptable to the Victorian era critics who attempted literary histories and were responsible for the twentieth century's canon formation in literature. At the end of the twentiethth century, his name was revived as an example solely of "subliterary misogyny" by feminist literary critics such as Felicity Nussbaum, whose The Brink of All We Hate held out Gould's most scabrous satires (and almost exclusively Love Given O'er and the passage quoted above) as typical of an unpreserved tradition of misogyny. There remains one biography of Gould (by Eugene Sloan) and no contemporary edition of his works.