PAUL HAMMOND, The Making of Restoration Poetry.

Abstract

WITHOUT question, this study of how Restoration poetry culturally was forged is erudite and valuable. However, the book is also uncommon. It puts forth no comprehensive reading of the Restoration publishing trade or of Restoration poetics as an overarching argument is not proposed. Instead, the volume is ‘designed as a collection of essays which explore linked themes … that … provide a varied, if necessarily partial, map of the complex material and intellectual factors which shaped the poetry of the period’ (p. xxiii). Additionally, the great majority of these linked essays are updated reprints, most older than a decade. Only two of the ten chapters are original to this publication. As a result, Hammond's volume has something of a cobbled-together feel to it, making its chapters perhaps best read in isolation as discrete studies. That is not to diminish the worth of Hammond's subject. As literary history, this book explores the remarkable combination of private and public elements that figure in poetic production. Two themes in particular are tracked. One is the way in which ‘not only … writers, but also … scribes, publishers, and readers’ (p. xxi) created the poetry of the period from 1660 to 1700. The canons of the major writers of the day were fashioned, of course, in large part by what those poets wrote about; however, how writers chose to publish their works bears almost equal importance to what survived and is remembered. Within the thriving practice of manuscript publication, for example, individual readers and scribes made innumerable influential choices about which poems were to find esteem and so be passed along. Similarly, in the emerging world of the print trade, innovative publishers (such as Jacob Tonson) put their crucial mark on the literary landscape. A second theme traced by Hammond is how much of Restoration poetry is fashioned by intertextual allusion, both to other English poets as well as to the classics. Such allusion creates an inner circle of readers who understand the references and an outer circle who do not; it also invites ‘a very active form of reading, making [the reader] in important respects a co-author, another maker of the text’ (p. xxii). All such points of reception theory are well made and contribute significantly to our understanding of the literature of the era.