POETS Day! Dryden and Marvell were Mean Girls

Illustration by Rene Sears

I survived the Oscars thanks to Tom Hanks. My weekly Sunday night dinner crew is cavalcade of wonderful people with one tragic flaw that flies in bitter conflict with my own. Theirs is that, despite many degrees, they love watching awards shows. Mine is that I never check the award show calendar so I know which weeks to pretend to be sick and stay home.

I was warned this go round. I bemoaned my predicament mid Grammies on Twitter and a friend responded with the date and air time of the next trap, the dreaded Academy Awards. I forgot. Thankfully, three time Best Actor Award winner Tom Hanks, in what I see as a clear attempt to shut the door behind him and broach no competition, is narrating a great nature show about ‘Merica that aired opposite the movie self-love fest. If there’s one thing my Sunday dinner crew likes more than awards shows, it’s nature shows. Thank you, Tom. You’re showing God’s work.

The show was beautiful, and it’s all right here stuff. We’re in America. You should go out and see it. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Get out of work and spend an afternoon admiring the bounty we’re soaking in. If it’s raining, see if Tom’s show is streaming.

First, a little verse.

***

“Dan Brown?” This was after a few hundred feet of pondering.

“He was hugely popular.”

“Yeah, and his books are objectively not good.”

“He sold something like 80 million copies.”

“Something like that.” We went left towards the put-in. Our afternoon walks go left towards the put-in when weather allows and whim concedes a longer go along the creek. Right takes us home. “What about Stephanie Meyer?”

“She sold a billion.”

“Yeah, but if you played a drinking game and drank every time someone’s eyes were described as golden or bronze, your liver would fall out. Oh! Fenimore Cooper.” When my wife, when anybody, drops the James in James Fenimore Cooper, you know she’s thinking about Twain’s “The Literary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper.” That’d be fun to read again.

“What about Carrot Top?” And there, crossing the little rill that bisects the westernmost widening of the park as the first owl of the still lit evening sounded from somewhere back a ways on the far bank, I realized that I was seriously thinking about how to interpret Carrot Top’s career.

The thing is, I’ve laughed at his stand up. I’m not a fan, but from what I’ve seen he gets one in every so often. He has throngs of fans. Just not my thing. He is the butt of a lot of jokes, though.

What my wife and I were trying to come up with was someone who managed to attract attention for their awfulness, but kept enough of a following to put out new material over an appreciable period. I’ve written about Billy Ocean as someone who’s liked enough, though not by me, that he gets playing time. That makes him more of a menace than a genuinely bad musician. A bad musician doesn’t get records made. Billy Ocean sneaks up on you in elevators or on broadband commercials. And I’m only picking on him because he’s an earworm purveyor. Some of his songs are pretty good.

We want to know how a Richard Flecknoe rose to enough prominence to get famously skewered by two of the English language’s most highly regarded poets and then leave so little trace of himself for the rest of us. I suppose we are asking, how do you persist in being, so one-hit wonders aside, a well-known poetaster?

Flecknoe was a Catholic priest, possibly Irish, possibly Jesuit. We know he lived in the Netherlands for a while, and later in Rome. We know he wrote a naughty play of which no known copies survive. He wrote what was possibly the first English language opera, though no copies of the score can be found. He was responsible for many plays, none of which you’ve heard of even as a “is that the one?” tinkling at the periphery of a half-heard Jeopardy answer from years ago.

A Google search for his poetry yields lots of mentions of his prose and multiple links to the same copy paste biography, but only two poems in the result range before which a once-amused searcher gives up. The first is a misattributed Dryden work I’ll get to in a minute, credited to Flecknoe by some dolt or doltish aggregation engine serving poetrysoup.com, which I’ll derisively not link to, who pinned his name on it because he’s mentioned in the poem, though obviously as an object of… you’ll see. The second is pretty bad. Link here, but I can’t find it anywhere else to confirm it’s his. He makes no appearance as an author in the Quiller-Couch Oxford Book of English Verse nor the Helen Gardner reimagining. No Flecknoe in Norton. No Flecknoe at Poetry Foundation. Grok suggests library collections, mentioning Yale’s Beinecke Library specifically, and archive sites, but doesn’t find much digitalized. Project Gutenberg has two prose paragraphs by the man in a collection of essays. JSTOR has more than five hundred academic essays mentioning him, but no poetry in the, if I may repeat myself, “result range before which a once-amused searcher gives up.”

There was at one point however, enough of Flecknoe’s work – poetry, prose, as well as plays – in circulation to send Marvell into a 170 line mocu-tizzy and prompt Dryden to cast him in a strong supporting role in a forty-seven line longer diatribe.

Marvell found Flecknoe in Rome between 1645-1647. The most often encountered excerpt of the poem resulting from their meeting I see is this:

from Fleckno, an English Priest at Rome
(Andrew Marvell 1621-1678)

So while he with his gouty Fingers craules
Over the Lute, his murmuring Belly calls,
Whose hungry Guts to the same streightness twin’d
In Echo to the trembling Strings repin’d.

The “gouty” bit was not an uncommon Protestant dig at Catholic priests. This appears to be a grotesque personification of Flecknoe’s artistic talents, with “hungry Guts” to lute strings giving the sense of an undisciplined appetite acting on music. It’s tempting to let it be just that and not a petty or cruel attack on the man’s actual appearance or stature. But hold on.

I mean till he were drest: for else so thin
He stands, as if he only fed had been
With consecrated Wafers: and the Host
Hath sure more flesh and blood then he can boast.
This Basso Relievo of a Man,
Who as a Camel tall, yet easly can
The Needles Eye thread without any stich,
(His only impossible is to be rich)
Lest his too suttle Body, growing rare,
Should leave his Soul to wander in the Air,
He therefore circumscribes himself in rimes;
And swaddled in’s own papers seaven times,
Wears a close Jacket of poetick Buff,
With which he doth his third Dimension Stuff.

After that Marvell makes fun of his apartments. He’s a poor. And then to hear the man’s poetry:

Yet he first kist them, and after takes pains
To read; and then, because he understood
Not one Word, thought and swore that they were good.
But all his praises could not now appease
The provok’t Author, whom it did displease
To hear his Verses, by so just a curse,
That were ill made condemn’d to be read worse:
And how (impossible) he made yet more
Absurdityes in them than were before.
For he his untun’d voice did fall or raise
As a deaf Man upon a Viol playes,
Making the half points and the periods run
Confus’der than the atomes in the Sun.

I can’t find any evidence of an event or episode that made Marvell so energetically despise the man so much. These days we have warnings about writing in anger. “Think before you press send.” “Don’t text in anger.” This was written only two hundred years after the invention of the printing press. There were eons between writing and publishing. Marvell’s existence was a cooling down period. I’ve read that he may have been driven to rage by Flecknoe’s persistence, insistence, and obliviousness to his inadequacies. He must have been the most annoying person in the world; my sister-learning-trumpet-in-the-next-room-in-1988 annoying.

Dryden’s anger at the man is traceable. There’s some debate about it, but many suspect Dryden, England’s first Poet Laureate, didn’t like these (as suggested in Helmut Castrop’s “Dryden and Flecknoe: A Link,” The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 23, No. 92 (Nov., 1972)) lines from Flecknoe’s 1668 Sir William D’avenant’s Voyage to the Other World: With His Adventures in the Poets Elizium:

And finally, when he added, He was a Poet Laureate, they laugh’d, and said, Bayes was never more cheap than now; and that since Petrarch’s time, none had ever been legitimately crown’d.

Flecknoe felt bad about the slight to Dryden and his new post and wrote some glowing things about the man after. But apparently that didn’t do the trick. Dryden’s famous attack, “Mac Flecknoe,” isn’t directly aimed at Flecknoe. The main target was Thomas Shadwell, who would succeed Dryden as Laureate. Flecknoe is presented as the reigning monarch of nonsense passing the torch to Shadwell. It’s been suggested that Flecknoe was chosen because, again from Castrop, “that to Dryden Flecknoe simply represented the archetype of a bad poet, and that his sole function in Mac Flecknoe is to set off the portrait of Shadwell.” Seems a little vitriolic for that. I should note that Castrop doesn’t buy the archetype idea.

“Mac Flecktnoe” is fairly long. This is as excerpted by Helen Gardner in The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1950. She doesn’t use the title “Mac Flecknoe” at all, instead publishing under the title “The Crown Prince of Dullness.” Doubtless she found that somewhere, though I haven’t seen it used by anyone else. I included her title below because I thought it was funny.

from Mac Flecknoe
(John Dryden 1631-1700)

The Crown Prince of Dullness

All human things are subject to decay,
And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obey:
This Flecknoe found, who, like Augustus, young
Was call’d to empire, and had govern’d long:
In prose and verse, was own’d, without dispute
Through all the realms of Non-sense, absolute.
This aged prince now flourishing in peace,
And blest with issue of a large increase,
Worn out with business, did at length debate
To settle the succession of the State:
And pond’ring which of all his sons was fit
To reign, and wage immortal war with wit;
Cry’d, ’tis resolv’d; for nature pleads that he
Should only rule, who most resembles me:
Shadwell alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dullness from his tender years.
Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he
Who stands confirm’d in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.
Some beams of wit on other souls may fall,
Strike through and make a lucid interval;
But Shadwell’s genuine night admits no ray,
His rising fogs prevail upon the day:
Besides his goodly fabric fills the eye,
And seems design’d for thoughtless majesty:
Thoughtless as monarch oaks, that shade the plain,
And, spread in solemn state, supinely reign.

What gets me is how direct he is. Commentary stresses the wit of it. Maybe I’m off in my expectations, but I think of wit as more scalpel. This is a brutal hammering in retaliation. It’s not subtle.

Most of the rest of the poem is dedicated to making sure we all know Shadwell writes obscene plays. He brings up Flecknoe a few times more.

Here Flecknoe, as a place to fame well known,
Ambitiously design’d his Shadwell’s throne.

And here, again, to end the work.

The mantle fell to the young prophet’s part,
With double portion of his father’s art.

Not having a verified Flecknoe to share, I offer these bits of awful from his inheritor.

Your Awful Voice
Thomas Shadwell (1642-1692)

Your awful voice I hear and I obey,
Brother to Jove and monarch of the sea.
Come down, my blusterers, swell no more,
Your stormy rage give o’er.

To your prisons below,
Down you must go.
In hollow rocks your revels make,
Nor ’till I call your trembling dens forsake.

I’ll do the Christian thing and leave the possibility that the false rhymes in the first stanza look odd to us because we live in a post vowel shift world, but I don’t believe that’s gonna help. It certainly won’t help the lazy rhymes.

Speaking of false and lazy rhymes.

Nymphs and Shepherds

Nymphs and shepherds, come away.
In the groves let’s sport and play,
For this is Flora’s holiday,
Sacred to ease and happy love,
To dancing, to music and to poetry;
Your flocks may now securely rove
Whilst you express your jollity.
Nymphs and shepherds, come away.

A final note. Dryden didn’t exactly cover himself in glory picking on Flecknoe as he did, publishing four years after the latter’s death. Not strictly ballroom.