Style in Ralegh's Short Poems

Abstract

cannot help but suggest, despite his disclaimer, an awed approval of gold and a condescending dislike of drabness; Winters's Native and Petrarchan suggest an opposition between the hardy indigenous Englishman and the fancy foreigner. Thus Lewis and Winters are probably equally tendentious in their opposing ways. Though few critics have been much interested in Lewis's terminology, several writers associated with Winters have slightly modified his terms in order to present his general view of sixteenth-century verse. Thus J. V. Cunningham calls the two styles the moral style and the sweet or pleasant style,3 and Douglas Peterson talks about the plain and eloquent styles.4 Winters himself said Lewis should have used the sixteenth century's own terms and called the two styles the plain and sugared or eloquent. Taking note of several other possibilities of naming the two styles, we can make two lists of characterizing terms: one can be called golden, Petrarchan, sugared, ornate, courtly, sweet, pleasant, eloquent; and the other drab, flat, native, moral, didactic, plain. Rather than offering an extended definition of the two styles in general terms, I would like to exemplify them in the concrete, and to argue that Sir Walter Ralegh understood (1) the differences between the two styles, (2) the proper occasions for the use of one rather than the other, and (3) the potentialities of each, even though his natural bent and his most impressive achievements are in only one style. And in order not to prejudice the argument from the outset, I will choose, as favorable characterizations of the two styles, the term golden for one and moral for the other.