The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered by Margaret Anne Doody

Abstract

These objections notwithstanding, Arthur’s book deserves careful reading by scholars of all levels and without doubt a place in the ever-growing body of Gawain literature. douglas w u r te le / Carleton University Margaret Anne Doody, The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). xvi, 288. $44.50 (u.s.) Although aspects of Professor Doody’s book are irritating, it is an important polemical contribution to literary history. If its historical references are vague, conventional, and sometimes deliberately anachronistic, if its argument is unclear, circular, and not always logical, it will excite students and give teach­ ers of eighteenth-century letters new ideas for interpreting the period. Writing with enthusiasm for her subject, Doody debunks traditional pedagogical and scholarly habits. Interested in cultural and literary continuity rather than period and generic distinctions and indifferent to rhetorical and moral criti­ cism, she defines Augustan so as to make Milton one and insists the novel and poetry should be taught side by side on the grounds they have more in common than otherwise. As well as scorning modem editions which minimize the aural qualities of poetry, she validates original editions by reproducing a large num­ ber of illustrations which shed light on the visual character of eighteenthcentury poetry. Her analysis of twenty-eight plates is acute and often brilliant. The plates, besides serving as excellent teaching devices, oblige the scholar to confront the aesthetic basis of her literary polemic. Inspired by Johnson’s view of Pope’s genius as “active, ambitious, adven­ turous, always investigating, always aspiring,” Doody seeks to restore “ excite­ ment” to the reading of Augustan poetry (2). Proclaiming that liberty and audacity, adventure and experiment are central to Restoration and later poets, she shows how, in “ To Mr. Congreve,” Swift “surprises us with its range, its variety and its ability to mix likes with unlikes” (6). Yoking a riddle, an exhortation and a biblical prophecy in the last verse, Swift upholds a poetic law which prohibits no subject while involving playful and serious forms (7). The same free-ranging imagination is found in Dryden. Since major poets take the whole world for their subject, decorum is secondary to poetic appetite. In Doody’s eyes, hunger is a key Augustan metaphor for crea­ tivity: the notion that poetry should consume everything marks the selfconsciousness that Butler, Dryden, and Rochester developed and passed on to Swift and Pope. A sense of progress makes the Augustans, like poets of other periods, refuse the constraints of decomm (11). Dryden’s “Annus Mirabilis,” 225 recalling Spenser in its mixture of the homely and the grand, economy with sumptuousness, celebrates royalism, nationalism, and commercial expansion (12). Conceding that poets’ acceptance of imperial and commercial expan­ sion may be politically embarrassing, Doody claims that it influences Thom­ son’s The Seasons as well as Pope’s Windsor Forest (16). She stresses the parallel between expansionary ideology and Augustan poetic style, because lit­ erary expansiveness is a mark of the period as much as order or compromise. Doody equates economic and literary ideas: she sees The Rape of the Lock’s wide-ranging reference in terms of both commercial expansion and the period’s admiration for Longinus. Plates in Warburton’s edition of Pope sug­ gest that the poet figured himself to be a bardic genius trafficking with the poetic past as well as with the world (21). With such equivocation Doody challenges literary history. This figurative challenge is apparent when she examines Marvell’s “Last Instructions to a Painter” for affinities with Pope’s poetry. She asserts the continuity of Metaphysical and Augustan modes, view­ ing them as equally expansive and space-creating, equally ambitious and freetrading (24). For Doody, Johnson faulted the cramped wit of the Meta­ physicals because he was committed to mind-filling expansiveness. To cure literary history’s blindness to the way Augustan poets provoke complex sen­ suous reactions (27), she insists that the chief mark of their poems is that each possesses a range of styles and topics. Typically, each contains lyric beauty, satire, pathos, parody, and baroque emotiveness. Their defect is not excessive order or clarity but an experimental overabundance enjoyable only in certain moods...