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Poetry and Politics in the Cockney Schoolby Jeffrey N. Cox | |
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We find similar comments running throughout the commentary on the Hunt circle. The Monthly Review (2nd ser., 92 [July 1820], 306) again tackles Keats: ?? Mr. Keats is a very bold author,?? marked by ?? peculiarities both of thought and manner?? learned as ?? a disciple in a school in which these peculiarities are virtues: but the praises of this small coterie will hardly compensate for the disapprobation of the rest of the literary world.?? In defending Keats?s 1820 volume, the London Magazine (2 [September 1820], 315? 21) still complains of the ?? frequent obscurity and confusion of his language?? (and, we should note, this is said of the odes, ?? Lamia,?? ?? Isabella,?? and so on and not, say, Endymion) and asserts that ?? We cannot help applying the word insolent, in a literary sense, to some instances of his neglectfulness, to the random swagger of occasional expressions, to the bravado style of many of his sentiments.?? The other London Magazine, published by Gold and Northhouse, attacked Shelley?s The Cenci for being written in the ?? new-fangled style of poetry, facetiously yclept the Cockney School,?? marked by ?? an inordinate share of affectation and conceit?? along with ?? a prodigious quantity of assurance?? and ?? a contempt for all institutions, moral and divine?? (1 [April 1820], 401), as we see stylistic issues again sliding into ideological ones.
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These reviews correctly identify the Cockney style as both smart and abrasive (I am tempted to call it, using in good Huntian style one of our contemporary slang expressions, ?? smart-ass poetry??). There is something ?? bold?? and assured about this poetry, something challenging and thus potentially ?? insolent,?? even something arrogantly annoying in its contempt for commonly held notions. The Cockney style is part of the assault, analyzed by Olivia Smith, upon a class-based notion of what constitutes ?? proper?? or ?? pure?? language over against the ?? vulgarity?? of the working and even merchant classes;[20] the Hunt circle asserts that
Cockney ?? vulgarity?? can ascend to the same heights as traditional, ?? correct?? poetry. The Cockney style is witty, allusive, intelligent, and it also possesses an urban and at its best urbane arrogance. With its diction shifts, its ?? new-fangled?? feel, its odd juxtapositions, it was an attempt to capture the pulse of modern city life.
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It is important always to stress the urban nature of the Cockney School, for it was a necessary if not sufficient cause for this appellation that the poets around Hunt were identified, from the first Cockney School piece on, as being London ? as opposed to Lake District ? poets. The importance of the link between Hunt?s circle and London can be seen in the fact that it is repeated even in less contentious formulations, as when the writers around Hunt are referred to as the ?? metropolitan poets?? (see, for example, ?? Portraits of the Metropolitan Poets, No. I: Leigh Hunt,?? Honeycomb 5 [15 July 1820], 33? 37; also in Imperial Magazine 3 [November 1821], 969? 76, and 3 [December 1821], 1068? 73); or when Byron, who has complicated relations with the group, refers to the ?? Suburban School?? (letter to John Murray, 7 August 1821, L&J, VIII: 172);[21] or when the Imperial Magazine talks of Hunt, Keats, and Barry
Cornwall as ?? Cit poets?? (3 [August 1821], 696); or when the Monthly Magazine (50 [August 1820], 65) comments in a review of Hunt?s Amyntas on the ?? limited but sparkling genius of our modern metropolitan poets,?? a group that is seen to include Hunt, Keats, and Barry Cornwall.
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Hunt would try to turn the tables on his attackers when, in a review of Shelley?s Rosalind and Helen, he contrasts Shelley?s poem with Wordsworth?s Peter Bell, which Hunt had reviewed in the preceding issue of the Examiner, finding ?? The Poet of the Lakes?? entangled in ?? his egotism and ?saving knowledge?,?? which leads him to ?? plant himself by the side of the oldest tyrannies and slaveries??; Shelley, on the other hand, is ?? our Cosmopolite-Poet [who] would evidently die with pleasure to all personal identity, could he but see his fellow-creatures reasonable and happy?? (Examiner [9 May 1819], 302).[22] The contrast is not between the
poet of ?? nature?? and the city writer but between parochial prejudice and an urbane vision. The sense that an urban and cosmopolitan outlook is preferable to the egotistical provincialism of the Lake Poets is not unlike Byron?s argument in his then unpublished dedication to Don Juan where he criticizes the narrowness of the Lake Poets, who ?? by dint of long seclusion / From better company have kept your own / At Keswick, and through still continued fusion / Of one another?s minds at last have grown / To deem as a most logical conclusion, / That Poesy has wreaths for you alone; / There is a narrowness in such a notion, / Which makes me wish you?d change your lakes for ocean?? (ll. 33? 40). It is important that both Hunt and his ideological enemies define the poetry of the circle against that of the Lake School; for whatever poetic debts Hunt or Keats or Shelley owed to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, there is no doubt that they were engaged on opposite sides of a series of key cultural battles, with supporters of the Lake Poets seeing them as offering a Burkean embrace of nature as an anchor for conservative politics and with the Hunt circle seeing urban life as the ground for a cosmopolitan urbanity and liberalism.
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The contrast between the Hunt circle and the Lake Poets was most often used to complain that the Cockneys, as urban poets, had no sense of nature.[23] Blackwood?s began this line of attack: ?? Mr. Hunt is altogether
unacquainted with the face of nature in her magnificent scenes; he has never seen any mountain higher than Highgate-hill, nor reclined by any stream more pastoral than the Serpentine River. But he is determined to be a poet eminently rural?? (2 [October 1817], 39). We find the same complaints made elsewhere: ?? What a plague had the poets of Cockney to do with nature; the very air they breathe is artificial, and the circumstance of dwelling in a city presupposes a relinquishment of all rural notions and perceptions. Have they not Covent Garden market? What would they do with Arcadia??? (Gazette of Fashion, and Magazine of Literature, the Fine Arts, and Belles Lettres 5 [1 June 1822], 65); again, the Literary Journal (20 March 1819,p.192)offered a parodic ?? Pleasant Walks; A Cockney Pastoral, In the manner of Leigh Hunt, Esq.?? by ?? Beppo,?? where Hunt and Keats seek a ?? heath ? / A lovely one ? (and not / One like Hampstead?s up-and-down pathy spot)?? where they can find air able to dispel ?? From off our lungs the city?s filthy soot, / And smoke to boot.?? What is interesting about such criticisms is that they accept a kind of simple-minded, vaguely Wordsworthian attempt to redefine pastoral poetry as a form of natural speaking about immediate nature, ignoring the fact that ? from Theocritus in Alexandria to Virgil in Rome and Spenser in London ? the traditional pastoral had always been an urban poetry. The Cockneys actually did write a great deal of pastoral poetry ? that is, poetry written by urban poets about natural settings ? from Shelley?s Rosalind and Helen, a Modern Eclogue to Horace Smith?s Amarynthus, the Nympholept: A Pastoral Drama. As Stuart Curran suggests, there is in the Cockney attacks ?? an implicit assumption that the pastoral genre is no more than a fantasy spun by city dwellers ? Cockney poets.??[24]
Blackwood?s and its comrades ? not always admirers of Wordsworth ? use the Lake School to attack the Cockney pastorals for being artificial, for being a suburban fantasy of Hampstead rather than an accurate portrayal of the ?? real?? nature found in the Lake District. While their complaints connect to a traditional sense of the Cockney as a Londoner who knows only the environs of the city, what truly bothers them is that the Hunt circle uses the pastoral as a means for criticizing their society ? seen as dedicated to war and money-getting and prone to superstition and despondency ? and for imagining a utopian alternative of freedom and love. Blackwood?s must refute this reformist version of pastoral.
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Thus, behind all of the various features of the Cockney School assault is the basic fact that Blackwood?s and the other conservative reviews disliked Hunt?s politics and therefore suspected anyone who was associated with him. It is always important to remember ? against continuing claims that ?? Blackwood?s strictures were not politically motivated but derived from literary tastes and social class prejudices??[25] ? that the
Cockney School attacks were ideological and that one major bond between poets as different as Hunt, Shelley, Keats, and Byron was that of political (over class) allegiance. Or, rather, we should resist, with Hunt, the attempt to divide the political from the circle?s social, cultural, and literary concerns. No one then doubted the importance of politics to poetry. For example, Byron?s one-time doctor, Polidori, in his volume Ximenes finds poetry allying itself to power: ?? There was a time, when poetry, contented in the sylvan shade, sought but to please. ? Now, since even Lords have become desirous of wreathing the bay around their coronet, poetry has dared more ? it has crouched into a footstool for ambition to tread upon while aiming at power.??[26] Hazlitt?s famous
Examiner review (15 December 1816) of a production of Coriolanus may go the furthest in linking poetry and power, but there was the general assumption that there was a link between poetic vision and political debate. As the quotation from the London Magazine that opens this section suggests, poetry was judged on political grounds; put simply, one?s reception was dependent upon one?s views of the government of Castlereagh, Sidmouth, and Eldon. Hunt?s critique of the Quarterly Review?s attacks notes that the entire group?s work has been read as political pronouncements:
They dare not say a word till they know a man?s connexions and opinions. If his politics are not of the true cast, they cannot discover his poetry. If his faith is not orthodox, how can he have any wit in him? . . . I believe that the Quarterly Reviewers have never said a word, good or bad, about Mr. Barry Cornwall . . . It is enough for Mr. Gifford that he is praised by the Edinburgh Review and the Examiner. The same critic endeavoured to crush the young and exuberant genius of Mr. Keats, for no other reason than his expressing a different view of politics, and being first mentioned by that newspaper. Mr. Hazlitt, a man of greater powers of thinking than all the Quarterly Reviewers put together, they affect to consider next kin to a fool . . . [To them] Mr. Hazlitt was a mere dealer in slang, and Mr. Shelley a mere dealer in obscurity and nonsense. (Examiner, 9 June 1822,p.356) |