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By Jeffrey Kahan |
Jan 1, 2008
A poet laureate is a poet officially appointed by a government and often expected to compose poems for royal births, weddings, and funerals. The title is partially derived from the Latin laureatus (“crowned with laurel”). The crown itself was based on the Greek myth of a nymph, Daphne, who, running from Apollo's embraces, was transformed by an interposing power into a bay tree or, to use its Latin genus, Laurus nobilis. The disappointed Apollo then made a crown or garland from the branches and declared the tree sacred to himself. The practice of crowning poets with laurel leaves was abolished by Theodosius (ruler of Rome from 379 -- 395), who considered the wreath a remnant of paganism. In the early days of the Renaissance, the honorific title came with a degree of political protection. On 23
August
1340 Petrarch, who had been called a necromancer and heretic because he read Virgil, was bestowed the degree by the Roman Senate.
The First Academic Laureates
According to Wiltshire Stanton Austin and John Rowe Kelley Ralph, after Geoffrey Chaucer met Petrarch, he “stylized himself” as England's poet laureate. But the supposed meeting of these two poets, while often repeated, remains unsubstantiated. We can more firmly state that the first granted English laureateships were purely scholastic distinctions, the equivalent of a master's degree in rhetoric and versification. Thus, many people might lay claim to being “a” rather than “the” laureate. It is generally agreed that John Skelton was the first English poet laureate. In 1490 William Caxton refers to Skelton as having been “late created poet-laureate in the University of Oxford.” The university registers at Oxford conferred laureation on Edward Watson, provided he compose a short poem of one hundred Latin verses of a nontragic cast. The next year Richard Smyth was similarly laureated on the condition that he write one hundred Latin hexameters. Another candidate, Maurice Brychensaw, had to write the same number of verses and promise not to read Ovid's “Art of Love” to his students. Cambridge seems to have had its own tradition. In 1493, for example, Skelton obtained permission to wear his laurel at Cambridge.The King's Verser
In terms of political appointments, we might also look at the English laureateship as evolving from the post of “King's Verser.” Just what kinds of verse these poets were to produce, however, is open to dispute. King Richard I took with him on his Crusades one William the Foreigner, referred to as the finest poet of the court; Edward II advanced on Scotland accompanied by a Carmelite friar, one Baston, described as “laureatus apud Oxonienes.” Another poet, Wale, wrote in praise of the conquests of Henry I. John Kay was poet laureate to Edward IV. His only surviving piece concerns the siege of Rhodes. The martial subject matter of many of the laureates comes to an abrupt close with Andrew Bernard, sometimes referred to as Bernard Andreas, poet to Henry VII and Henry VIII. His subjects were the now-traditional celebrations of birthdays and marriages. Still later court poets do not seem to have written anything specifically for the court at all. The aforementioned Skelton, who succeeded Bernard, was known for his satires. George Puttenham calls him “a rude railing rhymer, and all his doing ridiculous. He used both short distances and short measures, pleasing only the popular ear.”The Voluntary Poets Laureate: Spenser and Daniel
According to Robert Southey, Elizabeth had four poets laureate:That wreath which in Eliza's golden days My master dear, divinest Spenser, wore, That which rewarded Drayton's learned lays, Which thoughtful Ben and gentle Daniel bore.To correct Southey, Ben Jonson and Samuel Daniel wrote for James, not Elizabeth. Edmund Kemper Broadus suggests that Southey's confusion may have derived from Anthony Wood's Athenae Oxonienses (1691 -- 1692), which states: “Spencer, as I have been informed, was poet laureate to Queen Elizabeth. When he died, Samuel Daniel succeeded him.” The same list is in the Gentleman's Magazine of 1785. As for Michael Drayton, his tenuous claim to the title rests on his panegyric to Elizabeth I in Idea: The Shepherd's Garland (1593), written while Spenser was still very much alive. Certainly Spenser's contemporaries thought of him as the de facto poet laureate. In A Discourse of English Poetrie (1586), William Webbe suggested that Spenser “may well wear the garland and step before the best of all English poets.” Later writers, such as Thomas Fuller, while not mentioning the title of poet laureate, suggested that Spenser was Elizabeth's official court poet. The central evidence is Spenser's pension of £50, granted by Queen Elizabeth on 1 February 1591, the same year Spenser published the first three books of the Faerie Queene. However, that work was entered into the Stationer's Company on 1 December 1589. Hence, the pension's concurrence with the publication of this courtly poem may be mere coincidence. Samuel Daniel then laid claim to being the court's chief poet. In 1601 he gave a special presentational copy of his folio Works to Queen Elizabeth. In 1605 he gave another special presentational copy to the recently opened Bodleian Library. This was the first English poetic work donated to the library. In honor of James's accession in 1603, Daniel penned Panegyric Congradulatorie. The king seems to have rewarded him by making him first licenser of plays, then groom of the Privy Chamber, and finally his unofficial court poet from 1604 -- 1615. Through these dates Daniel received no salary or pension for his court masques or poems.
Pensioned Laureates: Jonson and Davenant
In 1616 King James made Jonson his unofficial court poet and pensioned him with one hundred marks a year. Thereafter Jonson wrote court masques and composed poems for James and then Charles I until 1630. Unlike the former volunteer laureates, Jonson's verse was not always sycophantic. Indeed, he seems to have considered himself an unofficial royal adviser. In his “An Epigram Consolatory” (1629), for example, he upbraids Charles and Mary, both despondent over the death of their firstborn son:Who dares deny, that all first-fruits are due To God, denies the Godhead to be true: Who doubts those fruits God can with gain restore, Doth by his doubt distrust his promise more. He can, he will, and with large interest, pay What, at his liking, he will take away. Then, royal Charles and Mary, do not grutch That the Almighty's will to you is such: But thank his greatness and his goodness too; And think all still the best that he will do.However, when discussing Jonson, most scholars of the poets laureate turn to the matter of finances. W. Forbes Gray, for example, suggests that James's pensioning of Jonson was a new and important phase in the laureateship: The payment… of an annual and determinate sum to Jonson effected a radical change in the position of the Court poet. From Jonson's day to ours there has been an almost unbroken succession of officially appointed and salaried Poets Laureate. The distinction of being the first Poet Laureate in the modern sense belongs undeniably to Jonson. He further notes that in 1630 Charles I raised Jonson's pension to £100 a year and added “a terse of Canary Spanish Wine.” (The wine was said to be Jonson's favorite, but its addition may also suggest that Charles was aware of the similar beneficence bestowed upon Chaucer in the reign of Edward III.) There is perhaps too much importance placed on Jonson's pension, which cannot with absolute certainty be linked to his being the court's unofficial poet laureate. As we have seen, Daniel filled the same role but received no pension. Furthermore, Jonson had difficulties in collecting his pension, as would many of his successors. In fact, as the post evolved, the payment for the laureateship actually decreased to no more than a token. Lastly, Jonson's raise in 1630 was actually concurrent with his rapid fall from favor as court poet. If the pension was connected to the laureateship, we should assume his raise should have signaled his continued favor, not his immediate dismissal. Did Jonson, like Spenser and Daniel before him, see himself as the court's poet laureate? If so, he did not do so in any publication, though a 1626 engraving, thereafter tipped into his 1616 Works, does show him bound with laurels. He clearly discussed the laureateship with others; in the forty-third chapter of his Titles of Honor, (1614) Jonson's friend John Selden treats of “the custom of giving crowns of laurel to poets.” Selden concludes: “Thus have I, by no unseasonable digression, performed a promise to you, my beloved Ben Jonson. Your curious learning and judgment may correct where I have erred, and adde where my notes and memory have left me short.” Other poets heaped scorn upon Jonson's ambitions. In Sir John Suckling's “A Sessions of the Poets” (1646) Jonson appears before a tribunal of poets and makes the case that “he deserved the bays.” The laurel is not accorded to him because his background as a writer of plays somehow makes him unfit. Thereupon William Davenant is considered. His poetry is thought deserving of the honor, but his claim is rejected because of a physical deformity.
Surely the company would have been content If they could have found any precedent; But in all their records either in verse or prose There was not one laureate without a nose.Davenant's nose had rotted off due to his venereal disease. But considering the attack on Jonson, the rejection of Davenant may have been based on yet another physical deformity: his repeated declaration that he was the bastard son of Shakespeare. Hence, Davenant's blood was tainted with the same popular playhouse strain that infected Jonson. As the poem continues, other poets are then considered and rejected. Finally, the laurel is given to a city alderman. In December 1638 William Davenant officially replaced Jonson and was granted a court pension of £100 a year. As had been the case with Jonson, Davenant was never invested with the official title of poet laureate and had difficulties collecting his pension. Official records from 1660 -- 1668 show that Charles II did not even continue the pension granted to Davenant by Charles I. Nor do the State Papers cite his court position, though the Calendar of State Papers for 1661 contains four references to Davenant in connection with theater licenses. The same volume contains references to 142 officers of the king's household, but there is no mention of Davenant even being the or even a “poet laureate.” Nonetheless, Davenant's collected Works in folio (1673) contains a portrait frontispiece in which he is seen wearing a laurel wreath; as well, the editor refers to Davenant as the Caroline “Poet Laureate to two Great Kings.”
The First Official Poets Laureate: Dryden, Shadwell, Tate, Rowe
The first officially recognized and salaried poet laureate was John Dryden. His laureateship is usually dated to 1668, but Edmund Kemper Broadus notes that Dryden's appointment letters are dated 18 August 1670. In the confirmation Dryden is nominated to perform the functions previously ascribed to Jonson and Davenant—both are named. Dryden was paid annually £100 and a butt or “Pype of the best Canary Wyne.” However, if Dryden's job called on him to write court masques, duties previously performed by Jonson and Davenant, he was extraordinarily remiss in his duties. Only one masque was staged at court during Dryden's tenure, Calisto (1675), penned by John Crowne. Dryden did compose some court verse, including “Threnodia Augustalis,” described as “uninteresting… prosaic, frigid, and bombastic.” With the rise of William and Mary, Dryden's laureateship was “stripped from his brow” and granted sometime 14 February -- 27 May 1689 to Thomas Shadwell, a great admirer of Ben Jonson. His pay was the same as Dryden's, with the odd addendum that his wine is to be given to him only at Christmas. Though his verse has been described as “without exception, mechanical and dull,” Shadwell is arguably the first to fulfill what now seems like the mandatory functions of the poet laureate: to versify events of national importance. Shadwell soon died in 1692, his salary unpaid. Upon Shadwell's death, Nahum Tate, remembered for his Shakespeare adaptation of King Lear, was made poet laureate. Rather than a pension or a salary, Tate was owed a “fee”—wording that suggests he was now to be paid only if he fulfilled his poetic obligations, which he discharged with perfunctory regularity. George I selected Nicholas Rowe, a gifted playwright, the first editor of Shakespeare, and a translator of Lucan, to succeed Tate. As part of his official duties, Rowe was ordered to provide a New Year's ode and a birthday ode to be sung before the king. (Singing court poems remained a constant from this date until the reign of George III.)Poetic Failures: Eusden, Cibber, Whitehead, Wharton, Pye
After Rowe's death, the laureate passed to a group of poets generally ranked as either mediocre or utterly inept. This couplet from his laudation of George II is representative of the skills of the poet laureate Laurence Eusden:Thy virtues shine particularly nice, Ungloom'd with a confinity to vice.Colley Cibber, an actor whose writings have been described as “slovenly,” was appointed by George II in 1730. The title was then offered to Thomas Gray, but he declined on the pretext that the “office itself has always humbled the professor.” Thus, the laureateship passed to William Whitehead, whose work Samuel Johnson declared “grand nonsense.” Several poets laureate were appointed in the reign of George III, including Thomas Warton, a learned pedant but tedious poet, followed by Henry James Pye, described by Lord Byron as “eminently respectable in everything but his poetry.” How can we account for this drop off in quality? Spenser, Daniel, Jonson, and Davenant had eagerly sought the post, which afforded access to the court and the prestige of being the country's most accomplished poet. By the mid-eighteenth century being poet laureate was a low-level court appointment. Despite its low status, or perhaps because of it, the laureateship had become a minor reward for loyal service, not a supreme acknowledgment of poetic skill. Indeed, poets of real merit might maintain or even bolster their reputations by refusing the title. Thus, Richard Helgerson suggests that Alexander Pope was the first “anti-Laureate Laureate” because his Dunciad successfully attacked Colley Cibber. There are other factors we might consider: Jonson's masques had been performed for the court or at the homes of powerful members of the aristocracy; many of his royal poems had been presented in manuscript directly to the king or copied for a small coterie of readers. But by the mid- to late eighteenth century, it was common for the works of the poets laureate to be published for national consumption. Henceforth, the poet laureate had to please not only the court but the country as a whole. The result was poetry that was feeble and forgettable. Lastly, the laureateship and its workload were hardly worth the trouble. When Robert Southey became poet laureate, the pay was a mere £25.
Redeeming the Poet Laureateship: Southey, Wordsworth, Tennyson
The last poet laureate during the reign of George III was the aforementioned Robert Southey. Sir Walter Scott, hearing of the appointment, congratulated him with the hope that he would “redeem the crown of Spenser and of Dryden to its pristine dignity.” Southey had once been an advocate of the French Revolution but had renounced his early, radical views. This volte-face sickened the still radical William Hazlitt, who described Southey's laureate verse as “beneath criticism. … It is Namby-Pamby… a Methodist sermon turned into doggerel verse.” When Southey died in 1843, the title passed to another former radical, the seventy-three-year-old William Wordsworth. The Victorian prime minister Robert Peel to wrote him with the hope that he would accept the laureateship and, as a further enticement, added: “Do not be deterred by the fear of any obligations which the appointment may be supposed to imply. I will undertake that you shall have nothing required of you.” Wordsworth accepted and, taking the prime minister at his word, wrote nothing for the court. Wordsworth's silence was an important precedent in that it relieved future poets laureate from the obligation of penning servile panegyrics. As a result, it was now possible that the post of the poet laureate might become essentially apolitical. Thus upon Wordsworth's death in 1850, one candidate considered for the post was Leigh Hunt, poet of “The Story of Rimini” (1816) but more widely remembered for being imprisoned for his criticism of the prince regent, later crowned George IV. In the end Queen Victoria appointed Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who was terrifically skilled and known for his nationalistic epics. Walter Hamilton describes Tennyson as restoring the “grim, mysterious grandeur” of the laureateship; “he sits, like a modern Zeus, enveloped in clouds.” He served as poet laureate for forty-two years, and many thought him irreplaceable. Upon his death, there was even talk of abolishing the laureateship altogether.Poets of the Wood and War: Austin, Bridges
Queen Victoria proposed Algernon Charles Swinburne to fill the vacancy but was opposed by Prime Minister William Gladstone, who thought him too archly republican for the post. William Morris, George Meredith, and Rudyard Kipling were then considered. Victoria settled upon Alfred Austin, variously described as a Tennyson disciple and a “dummy” whose job it was to “Keep the seat ready… if a better is not to be had.” When Austin died in 1913, Kipling was again put forward and again passed over, this time in favor of Robert Bridges, a seventy-year-old who had all but “renounced poetry for other interests.” As it turned out, Bridges was an unpredictable poet. George V must have been pleased with his poet laureate's verse celebrating the U.S. entrance into World War I but must have been strongly displeased with Bridges's attack on Admiral Horatio Nelson, hero of the Battle of Trafalgar:The gentle unjealous Shakespeare, I trow, In his country tomb of peaceful fame, Must feel exiled from life and glow If he think of this man with his warrior claim, Who looketh o'er London as if 'twere his own, As he standeth in stone, aloft and alone, Sailing the sky with one arm and one eye.
Modern Laureates: Masefield, Lewis, Betjeman, Hughes, Motion
After Bridges the laureates tended to be cut from Southey's cloth of reformed radicalism. George V's subsequent poet laureate was John Masefield, a former vagrant who worked in a carpet factory for two years but thereafter gentrified himself by writing popular bucolic verse. Queen Elizabeth II's selections included Cecil Day-Lewis, a member of the Communist Party from 1935 -- 1938 who later worked at the Ministry of Information, translated Virgil's Aeneid (1952), and became a professor of poetry at Oxford. John Betjeman was sent down from Magdalen College because of poor grades. In his poem “Slough” (1937), Betjeman dreams of the day when bombs would fall on the town, killing all its rich industrialists:Come, bombs and blow to smithereens Those air-conditioned, bright canteens, Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans, Tinned minds, tinned breath.
Mess up the mess they call a town— A house for ninety-seven down And once a week a half a crown For twenty years.In later poems, such as “Inexpensive Progress” (1966), Betjeman continues to bemoan England's industrialization but no longer suggests any violent solutions. Ted Hughes was married to the American poet Sylvia Plath and wrote on shamanism, hermeticism, astrology, and the Ouija board before settling into a Wordsworthian love of wood and sky. Andrew Motion, who has been poet laureate since 1999, has received mixed reviews. On 16 January 2003 J. Bottum, books and arts editor of the Daily Standard, drubbed him as a “worthy a successor to Shadwell.” But Motion's appointment is perhaps more properly deemed a return to the earliest tradition of the scholar-poet. He has written critically acclaimed biographies of John Keats and Philip Larkin and has argued forcefully that poetry should have a more central role in the national curriculum. See also John Betjeman; Robert Bridges; Colley Cibber; Samuel Daniel; William Davenant; John Dryden; Ted Hughes; Ben Jonson; John Masefield; Robert Southey; Edmund Spenser; Nahum Tate; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; and William Wordsworth.
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