Books as Memorials: The Politics of Consolation

Abstract

My starting point is the curious fact that our knowledge of the poetry written during the I630s, in the reign of Charles I, comes largely from a series of books published in the I64os and I650s after that reign had ended, as conscious memorials and acts of homage to the dead. Defeat can have two contrasting effects, to expunge or to drench in falsifying retrospective sentiment: Auden, in lines which gain additional irony from the author's unsuccessful attempts to disown them, claims that 'History to the defeated I May say Alas but can never help or pardon'.' My own thoroughly nonrevisionist view is that history can say a great deal more than this, depending on what questions we ask it. The works discussed in this essay all actively seek to give a pattern to history, and in doing so both defy time and serve its sovereign power, in conscious acts of imaginative intervention. The curious belatedness of these twice-born poems enacts a process by which the 'flying minute', rapidly slipping out of sight, is transmuted into a made object, a testament.2