The New Oxford Book of 17th Century Verse!

Our book today is Alastair Fowler's 1991 New Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, and it's as volatile and tremendous a tribute to National Poetry Month as could be imagined. Opinion among those I've quizzed is decidedly mixed as to the merit of even having a National Poetry Month (one poet of my acquaintance summed things up by saying "it can't possibly have any widespread effect other than to further marginalize the most marginalized literature in America"), but that's surely a debate about browbeating the public, not about the worth of poetry itself. And no other period of human history can rival the 'long' 17th century for verse, that glorious epoch from roughly the final years of Queen Elizabeth I to the advent of the Glorious Revolution. As Fowler here reckons that time, it stretches from George Chapman all the way to Alexander Pope, with stops along the way for Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, and Dryden.

There are lots and lots of other names in this updated version of the Oxford classic, including quite a few names that don't deserve to be here. Fowler is typically British in his diffidence:

A representative selection has meant more Drayton; more Cowley and Marvell; more Oldham and Strode; and many more female poets. It has meant including marginal figures such as the waterman Taylor, the alcoholic Brathwait, and the lunatic Carkesse. It has meant, in fact, including some 'subliterary' verse, and some very minor poets. If literature is the nation's memory, forgotten verse may contain things we need to know.

Or it may not. It's hard to imagine what even mercifully brief extracts from the life-outpourings of Emilia Lanier, John Chalkhill, or John Digby, the Earl of Bristol could teach us about much of anything, but if they and their ilk are the price of admission to the rest of this mighty host, you won't hear me complaining.

There's our old friend Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, writing about the cruelties of mankind and meaning, as she so often does, men, in this excerpt from 1653's "The Hunting of the Hare":

As if that God made creatures for man's meat,

And gave them life and sense, for man to eat;

Or else for sport, or recreation's sake,

Destroy those lives that God saw good to make;

Making their stomachs graves, which full they fill

With murthered bodies that in sport they kill.

Yet man doth think himself so gentle, mild,

When of all creatures he's most cruel wild;

And is so proud, thinks only he shall live,

That God a godlike nature did him give,

And that all creatures for his sake alone

Was made for him to tyrannize upon.

And there's Will Davenant, that weak-willed wit and wannabe wastrel who got his start in literary London while serving in the household of our old friend Fulke Greville and who, amidst stacks and stacks of intensely conventional writing, could occasionally produce something puckish and original, like this from 1673:

O Thou that sleepest like pig in straw,

Thou lady dear, arise:

Open, to keep the sun in awe,

Thy pretty pinking eyes;

And having stretched each leg and arm,

Put on your clean white smock,

And then, I pray, to keep you warm,

A petticoat on dock.

Arise, arise! Why should you sleep,

When you have slept enough?

Long since French boys cried 'Chimney-sweep',

And damsels 'Kitchen-stuff'.

The shops were opened long before,

And youngest prentice goes

To lay at his mistress' chamber door

His master's shining shoes.

Arise, arise; your breakfast stays:

Good water gruel warm,

Or sugar sops, which Galen says

With mace will do no harm.

Arise, arise; when you are up,

You'll find more to your cost,

For morning's draught in caudle cup,

Good nutbrown ale and toast.

And what of William Drummond of Hawthornden, the able poet and late-life friend of Ben Jonson? Drummond let a long and very active literary life, but in less inclusive anthologies than this one he might nevertheless get crowded right off the stage - either in favor of demographically advisable nonentities or to make room for more Shakespeare. Not so here, where we can read bittersweet little ditties like this bit fro Madrigal II.i, written in the first decade of the new century:

This life which seems so fair

Is like a bubble blown up in the air

By sporting children's breath,

Who chase it everywhere,

And strive who can most motion it bequeath:

And though it sometime seem of its own might,

Like to an eye of gold, to be fixed there,

And firm to hover in that empty height,

That only is because it is so light.

But in that pomp it doth not long appear;

For even when most admired, it in a thought,

A swelled from nothing, doth dissolve in nought.

I've praised these wonderful Oxford Books here before, but when it comes to anthologies this wide-ranging and thought-provoking, I don't mind repeating myself. And when I'm delighting in the acuity of Fowler's choices, I don't even mind all the makeweight names he was forced to mix in amongst them.

Nine Lives - from the North Plutarch!

Our nine lives this time around come from Plutarch, that revered first-century bestseller whose inexhaustible masterwork, the Parallel Lives, survives as one of the greatest literary wonders of the ancient world. As some of you will know, Plutarch’s Lives is one of my favorite books, one of that small shelf of volumes that, though not always of the first rank in terms of literary merit, have been indispensable companions to me in good times and bad; I suspect all readers have such a group of books, and Plutarch has been in mine since its beginning. I was recently given a pretty paperback of an abbreviated edition that set me re-reading with merry abandon.

It’s the current Wordsworth trade paperback, and although I don’t usually approve of abridgements, Plutarch is a bit of an exception. Read the whole thing, by all means, but the fact remains: in being fiercely nationalistic, Plutarch ends up spending too much time and effort on the lives of ancient Greeks to ballast out his lives of ancient Romans. For good or ill, Dion, Themistocles, and Agesilaus simply haven’t retained their general cultural interest in the way that Pompey, Caesar, and Cicero have - or at least, they haven’t for me. An edition of Plutarch that leans towards the Romans is therefore more congenial, although such a volume can’t omit the Greeks – lives like those of Theseus, Alcibiades, and of course Alexander the Great are too good not to include. But I usually end up concentrating on the Roman lives, and that’s what we’re doing today.

One life before the others, though, and neither a Roman nor a Greek: Thomas North, our Elizabethan translator! Because our source book today is, wonderfully enough, the North translation of Plutarch, which is far more often cited – chiefly because North’s was the Plutarch Shakespeare used and knew so well - than read. This is a great shame, because even among the Elizabethans (whose prose tends to tower rather embarrassingly over other eras), North was a master prose stylist. Even so mighty a wordsmith as Shakespeare can often find no better way of phrasing something than North’s way – time and again in the plays, Shakespeare pays North the ultimate compliment of word-for-word copying.

Our translator wasn’t originally intended for the literary life, and it’s possible he didn’t intend it himself. He was born around 1535, the second son of Lord North, and he was probably educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where his imperious father intended him to study the law (some form of employment being of course necessary for a second son, let alone the second son of a notoriously impecunious family, newly tacked-on ‘Lord’ or no). Young Thomas discovered in himself a facility for language, which is a not inconsiderable benefit in the study of law – but he also found some part of his pith that was alive to the beauty of language, and that part is anathema to legal studies. So Thomas gave up the law and turned to verse-making (none survive, thank the good lord) and translating: his version of The Morall Philosophie of Doni (a loose Spanish version of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius) was a modest surprise hit with its tiny publisher, although it made poor Thomas no less poor.

The Elizabethan smart set was acutely conscious of the fact (or at least the conceit) that they were living in a new golden age, and they were consequently hungry for manuals and guidebooks on how to do that. Knowing no other golden ages but one, they turned their eyes to the classics of ancient Greece and Rome, and suddenly a market for translations opened up. Thomas would become a major entrant in that market, and the avenue he took to get there brings him past the orbit of our old friend Marguerite of Navarre. She had a favorite at her court in France, a dissolute half-talent named Jacques Amyot, who in the late 1550s had the inspired idea of making a popular translation (into French, naturally) of Plutarch’s Lives. It was this translation Thomas came upon in the bookstalls when he accompanied his brother Roger (by then Lord North) to France on an embassy in 1574.

Thomas saw the commercial potentials as well as Amyot had, so he didn’t bother at first even to avail himself of a Greek text of the work (he was rusty anyway, although languages flowed for him like water) – he just set about translating Amyot’s translation. It proved a mighty task – Plutarch wrote a long book, and his prose is a labyrinth of unending sentences (his famed ‘periods’) that have to be seen to be believed. It’s not the sort of thing you can work on for long stretches of time if you value your sanity, and Thomas was often distracted (by romance, illicit and otherwise, by disastrous get-rich-quick schemes, once by poor health, etc.). But five years later, in 1579, he brought forth his Englished Plutarch and it was immediately successful not only with the literary set (by 1590, there was hardly a schoolroom or library in England that didn’t own either a copy or a knock-off) but with the great and influential of the land – including the lady at the top.

The book bore a dedicatory epistle to Queen Elizabeth, and in some ways it’s more remarkable than anything in the long book it precedes. Oh, it contains the usual fulsome fawning –there was a form for these things, after all, and it had taken a little work for Thomas’ friend-of-a-friend Lord Leicester to get him covert permission to make the dedication in the first place. Thomas assures the Queen that she’s more fit to be written up by Plutarch than read by him, and he hopes that the ‘common sort’ of her subjects will learn from the book how better to serve her, etc. But there are lines scattered throughout the dedication that read much more like one seasoned linguist speaking directly to another (Elizabeth had translated Plutarch, although not any of the Lives, and knew the tangle he could be). He reminds her of the simple truth, that she “can better understand it in Greek, than any man can make it English.”

Elizabeth could be a tricky dedicatee (her wit was barbed), but she must have liked receiving an almost professional compliment among the dross flattery of her day. She smiled upon the book, and sales soared.



In 1591 Thomas was knighted. In 1595 he brought out a second edition of his Lives. In 1601 he was made Justice of the Peace and, more importantly by far, granted forty-pound annual pension by the Queen. In 1603 he published a third, much expanded, edition of his Lives. Until Dryden and the Dryden Industry came along, the North Plutarch stood as the English Plutarch, and it still resounds with that particular swash and swagger that the prose of Dryden (and my love for my three John-poets is well known) can’t match on its best day, and there’s always that tell-tale Elizabethan twinkle in the eye, as when he relates the drastic measures the Trojan women took to cure their sea-sickness in the life of Romulus:

Other say, that after the taking and destruction of Troya, there were certain Troyans which saving themselves from the sword, took such vessels as they found at adventure in the haven, and were by winds put with the Thuscane shore, where they anchored near unto the river of Tyber. There their wives being so sore sea sick, that possibly they could not any more endure the boisterous surges of the seas, it happened one of them among the rest (the noblest and wisest of the company) called Roma, to counsel the other women her companions to set their ships afire, which they did accordingly. Wherewith their husbands at first were marvellously offended.

Puckish humor can also be found glinting through the life of famed Roman financier Crassus – some of this humor is Plutarch’s, but North gives it an end-line bounce found neither in the master nor in Amyot:

Licinia had a goodly pleasant garden hard by the suburbs of the city, wherewith Crassus was marvellously in love, and would fain have had it good cheap: an upon this only occasion was often seen in speech with her, which made the people suspect him. But for as much as it seemed to the judges that his covetousness was the cause that made him follow her, he was cleared of the incest suspected, but he never left following of the nun, till he had got the garden of her.

And just as North sometimes accentuates Plutarch’s dry humor, he always expands a little on his author’s not-infrequent philosophical digressions on the nature of fortune and man. These digressions are the blood that pump through the factwork of the Parallel Lives – they’re what keeps the book immortal, as North must have known as well as anybody, and he’s always alive to the rhetorical possibilities involved, as in his life of Coriolanus:

… he was so carried away with the vehemence of anger, and desire of revenge, that he had no sense nor feeling of the hard state he was in, which the common people judge not to be sorrow, although indeed it be the very same. For when sorrow (as you would say) is set afire, then it is converted into spite and malice, and driveth away for that time all faintness of heart and natural fear. And this is the cause why the choleric man is so altered, and mad in his actions, as a man set afire with a burning ague: for when a man’s heart is troubled, his pulse will beat marvellous strongly.

Or the a sidelong glance at the too-temporary nature of any ‘good hap,’ as in the life of Marius:

But that which never suffereth men quietly to enjoy the good hap of any victory clearly, but in this mortal life doth ever mingle the ill with the good, be it either fortune or spite of fatal destiny, or else the necessity of the natural causes of earthly things, did shortly after this great joy bring news unto Marius, of his companion Catulus Luctatius the other consul, who was like a cloud in a fair bright day, and brought the city of Rome again into new fear and trouble.

As in the original, so in North: it’s often possible (indeed, thrilling) to follow the thread of great stories as that thread winds through different lives, as when a scene in the life of Cicero about the willful and soon-to-be-renegade senator Catiline shows us the beginnings of his public downfall:

In the end Cicero coming out of his house, called the senate to the temple of Jupiter Stator (as much to say, stayer), which standeth at the upper end of the holy street as they go to the Mount Palatine. There was Catiline with others, as though he meant to clear himself of the suspicion that went of him: howbeit there was not a senator that would sit down by him, but they did all rise from the bench where Catiline had taken his place. And further, when he began to speak, he could have no audience for the great noise they made against him.

And a scene in the life of Julius Caesar shows us the beginnings of that downfall’s aftermath, when two of Catiline’s cohorts in crime, Lentulus and Cethegus, are being tried after Catiline himself had “scaped out of the hands of justice.” Cicero wants them put to death (illegal and virtually unprecedented, but Cicero kept claiming the survival of the Republic depended on it), and Julius Caesar alone stand to defend them and the laws that are supposed to protect them (Plutarch hints and North echoes that Caesar was bribed; goading Cicero might have been sufficient reward):

…when they were convinced in open senate, Cicero being at that time consul, asking every man’s opinion in the senate, what punishment they should have, and every one of them till it came to Caesar, gave sentence they should die, Caesar then rising up to speak, made an oration (penned and premeditated before) and said, that it was neither lawful nor yet their custom did bear it, to put men of such nobility to death (but in an extremity) without lawful indictment and condemnation. And therefore, that if they were put in prison in some city of Italy, where Cicero thought best, until that Catiline were overthrown, the senate might then at their pleasure quietly take such order therein, as might best appear unto their wisdoms.

The greatest of these background-stories is of course the shattering of that Republic Cicero was so eager to commit murder to preserve, and in the shadow of that great drama, every Roman character is likewise brought to life by Plutarch’s fantastic combination of fact, rumor, and those aforementioned philosophical expansions. We see Brutus making his peace with Pompey in a cold-blooded calculation of who was likely to win in that great struggle:

Afterwards when the empire of Rome was divided into factions, and that Caesar and Pompey both were in arms one against the other, and that all the empire of Rome was in garboyle and uproar, it was thought then that Brutus would take part with Caesar, because Pompey not long before had put his father unto death. But Brutus preferring the respect of his country and commonwealth, before private affection, and persuading himself that Pompey had juster cause to enter into arms than Caesar, he then took part with Pompey, though oftentimes meeting him before, he thought scorn to the murderer of his father.

And we see poor befuddled Marc Antony! Plutarch usually has no hesitation in letting his readers know which historical figures he considers worthy and otherwise, but he – like all sensible historians before and after him – has categorical trouble with Antony. The man could be so charming, after all, and yet he birthed conflicting reports before he got out of bed in the morning, sometimes quite literally:

Then was Antonius straight marvellously commended and beloved of the soldiers, because he commonly exercised himself among them, and would oftentimes eat and drink with them, and also be liberal unto them, according to his nobility. But then in contrary manner, he purchased divers other men’s evil wills, because that through negligence he would not do them justice when they were injured, and dealt very churlishly with them that had suit unto him: and besides all this, he had an ill name to entice other men’s wives.

All these details and countless others Amyot squeezed out of the recondite, twisting, turning, breathless Greek of Plutarch and rendered in workaday French prose, and that result Thomas North then worked into one of the greatest extended virtuoso epics of Elizabethan prose ever written. Thank God for this Wordsworth paperback, but the truth remains: North’s Plutarch has been almost entirely forgotten, except perhaps as the inspiration for some of Shakespeare. It deserves a universal readership – not as a translation (although North often manages to massage Amyot closer to the ancient Greek) but as an almost unrivalled adventure story about the roles that courage and luck play in the lives of great men. In my perfect library, there’s a fat, gorgeous Penguin Classic titled The North Plutarch and lavished with footnotes, endnotes, an enthusiastic Introduction, and perhaps even a twenty-page profile of the dear brave translator, who led a sometimes happy but often beleaguered life but managed nevertheless to accomplish two miracles: to create a great book and to win the approval of history’s pickiest patron.

Make the acquaintance of this darling book and learn its ways. You won’t be sorry; it’s good for your garboyles.

Penguins on Parade: The Selected Poems of Dryden!

Some Penguin Classics abridge their subjects, for necessity’s sake. Take the 2001 edition of the selected poems of John Dryden, for instance. In confronting the text of England’s greatest poet, editors Steven N. Zwicker and David Bywaters were faced with an insuperable problem: Dryden wrote for a living, and he wrote a lot.

This wasn’t always the case. In his comparative youth, he had a mortal horror of work, of making art into work – the usual imbecility of the young and talented. As a result, he came to writing relatively late – but he made up for lost time! Once dawn finally broke, once he was convinced that he would only be alive this one time, that everything in the history of the world that would ever be written by John Dryden would have to be written by him in a paltry handful of years, he began filling his days and nights with writing, and although he often complained about it (deadlines, money, wretched printers, heedless audiences, etc – the writer’s complaints never change), that daily overwhelming brought him a joy so deep and complicated that it’s evident in virtually every line he wrote.

But, as noted, he wrote a  lot of lines. The collected edition assembled by Sir Walter Scott (no stranger to productivity) ran to 18 volumes, and the super-scholarly (not to say nit-picky) University of California Press rounds out at 20. Our editors put it succinctly:

He wrote about politics and religion, about trade and empire; he wrote for the theatre and for public occasions; he composed songs, fables, odes and panegyrics, brilliant satire and savage polemic; he translated from many languages and formulated an idiomatic, familiar and fluent prose style. Dryden virtually invented the commercial literary career …

Given all that, a Penguin Classic of Dryden’s complete verse would be something of a logistical impossibility, especially since he would have to include not only his translations of Horace and Persius, not only his ‘adaptations’ of Chaucer, but also all 12,000 lines of his 1697 edition of the works of Virgil (which our editors rightly call “a resounding and rehabilitating commercial and artistic success”), a monstrous magnum opus that plagued Dryden with doubts and elicited a premature apology for its defects:

What Virgil wrote in the vigor of his age, in plenty and at ease, I have undertaken to translate in my declining years: struggling with wants, oppressed with sickness, curbed in my genius, liable to be misconstrued in all I write…

(Anyone who’s actually read the Dryden Virgil will know that it has very little in the way of defects, but then, Dryden was a worrier)



Even leaving out the longer translations, the tracts, the glorious plays, and most of the prose (our editors cannot bring themselves to exclude all the prose – they include a few choice specimens, even though the inclusions take precious space that could otherwise have been devoted to more verse), there’s still an overwhelming amount of immortal verse, so further selection is necessary – and for form’s sake, Dryden’s first published poem, “Upon the Death of Lord Hastings” (1649) has to be here, even though it’s … well, shall we say not good? Hastings died at age 20 of the smallpox, which gets a clinically accurate but poetically disastrous treatment:

Each little pimple had a tear in it
To wait the fault its rising did commit

And of course space must be made for Dryden’s hilarious and vicious satire "MacFlecknoe," in which he mercilessly sends up every single one of his literary rivals and quite a few literary innocent bystanders. It’s one of the most superb extended outpourings of pure bile ever written, and our editors are duly appreciative:

MacFlecknoe allowed Dryden to ridicule and crush his rivals, and without departing from the suave tones and manners of literary greatness. In the abuse of rivals, only Pope equals Dryden as a master of irony and mock-epic scorn.

Although readers might at times be hard pressed to detect suave manners in the poem itself, although they’ll have no trouble spotting the blood splatters, as when the aged bad poet Flecknoe is surveying the field of his literary descendants, intent on picking an heir. He’s drawn to Dryden’s chosen target Thomas Shadwell, who’s the main course of the poem:

Sh---- alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dullness, from his tender years.
Sh---- alone, of all my sons, is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Sh--- never deviates into sense.

Most of Dryden’s first-rate poems are here – there’s "Annus Mirabilis," "Astraea Redux," "Absalom and Achitophel," "The Medal," "To the Memory of Mr. Oldham," "The Hind and the Panther," and many others. And the end notes manage to be both brisk and compactly informative. In short, this Selected volume does exactly what it should: it gives the curious reader an inviting taste of this one supreme writer. It’s one of literature’s great crimes that Dryden’s work is today almost as little known as Shadwell’s – his verse never read except by unwilling undergraduates, his plays never performed despite how much fun they are, his essays never read even though they were the intellectual primer for every generation of subsequent critics. Maybe the right introductory volume – the one to catch the public imagination – hasn’t arrived yet. When it finally does, my money’s on it being a Penguin.

Penguins on Parade: Plutarch!

Our Penguin Classic this time around is actually four separate volumes, spread out over almost twenty years, which, when assembled, constitute only a portion of the work they translate – a work which is itself incomplete.

That doesn’t sound very auspicious, but in reality the four volumes that comprise the Penguin Classics version of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives are thoroughly delightful, in that intensely idiosyncratic way that typifies many of the best Penguins in our parade.

The trouble here starts with Plutarch himself. This first-century historian and essayist – a sought-after lecturer and the most famous man of letters of his day (prolific too – his section in any good bookshop would usually cover half a wall) – was born in Greece around A.D. 45 and spent most of his life there, writing and teaching and gaining enough renown so that when he eventually travelled to Rome, his fame preceded him. We’re not certain why he went there or how long he stayed, but he was apparently popular and well-respected by the mucky-mucks of Trajan’s Rome. When he died, around 120, he left behind many fans (including the emperor Hadrian) and a vast body of work.

That body of work is the problem – specifically, the fact that the success of the earliest volumes of his biographies of famous Greeks and Romans prompted him to keep writing such works, until the final tally was gigantic. Plutarch pairs one famous Greek with one famous Roman – often on the most specious grounds – writes a usually vivid, impressionistic account of their lives, and then (again, usually) writes a separate essay comparing the two. There are twenty-three pairs and four stand-alones, and no matter how you slice it, it’s a huge work – and a correspondingly huge undertaking for any translator who wants to do the whole thing.

In the English-speaking realm of scholarship, the translator’s name most often associated with Plutarch is of course Dryden. In 1683, Dryden took on the massive headache of overseeing an entirely new, complete translation of Plutarch from the Greek. Dryden had always been a man who talked much of how over-committed he was, how little time he had to do anything – and scholars throughout the intervening centuries have commented on the evident haste they say mars much of what he wrote (I respectfully disagree – although not always at his most accurate, he was almost always at his best when working at full-gallop, usually with the printer’s boy impatiently waiting in the doorway). In this case he was far more involved in the work than is generally credited, often going over rough pages late into the night (not so much to correct translating errors – nearly all of the poor drudges doing the translating knew their Greek better than he did – as to try to impose a uniformity of sweet English, a subject he knew better than any man alive and few who’ve ever lived).

The result was a great big thumper of a book, one that instantly displaced every previous English version (including the 1579 one – translated from a French translation – by Thomas North, which is something of a shame, since it’s really remarkably good English in its own right … Shakespeare was far from the only one to be mesmerized by it) and for centuries remained, for good or ill, the standard English Plutarch.

Standards can still become dated, however, and that happened to Dryden. In 1859, the fifth-rate English poet Arthur Clough published his epic revision of the work, which is the version of both Dryden and Plutarch that most readers are likely to encounter if they encounter any at all. Clough’s poetry might not be anything to cry from the rooftops, but he turned out to be a damn good reviser – especially considering it was nothing he’d ever intended to do (credit for the idea that a marketable book might be made by fixing the “creakings” of Dryden goes to a Boston bookseller who broke the concept through Clough’s thick skull during the poet’s stay in Cambridge). His revised Dryden comes closer than anything else in English had to being the impassioned one-man-show Plutarch’s original is.



When Penguin Classics (remember them?)(hee) decided to enter this torturous textual history, they made a tried and true editorial decision – to chop the block into more user-friendly pieces. Rex Warner’s 1958 volume The Fall of the Roman Republic contains just six lives – Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Cicero, and Caesar – with no parallel lives, no comparative essays, and none of the slight fustiness of Clough or the remaining “creakings” of Dryden; here was a blast of fresh translation, concentrating on some of the most famous, most pivotal Roman lives in history.  In his Introduction, Warner is indulgent of his great original:

He is a moralist and (as Shakespeare was to recognize) a dramatic artist. He accepts rather uncritically the Roman aristocratic tradition and applauds the intellectual and indeed disastrous moralizing of Cato or of Brutus. Yet in his presentation of the characters themselves he goes some way towards amending some of his more facile judgements. He is a fair man and cannot help showing, for instance, that Sulla was even more of a monster than Marius, that Cato was a bit of a prig, that Caesar, though disreputable in some ways, was, alone of the dynasts of his time, merciful to his enemies.

Warner’s volume was followed in 1960 by the first of Ian Scott-Kilvert’s efforts, The Rise and Fall of Athens, which features nine of the most important of Plutarch’s Greek lives: Theseus, Solon, Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon, Nicias, Lysander, Alcibiades, and Pericles. Scott-Kilvert’s next volume, The Makers of Rome, came out in 1965 and featured the remainder of the important Roman lives: Fabius Maximus, Gaius and Tiberius Gracchus, Sertorius, Marcellus, Cato the Elder, Coriolanus, Brutus, and Mark Antony. These two volumes run the same Introduction by Scott-Kilvert, and it contains one of the sweetest tributes to Plutarch I know:

… it is just this boundless interest in the individual character which has given the Lives their enduring popularity from age to age. Plutarch has an unerring sense of the drama of men in great situations. His eye ranges over a wider field of action than any of the classical historians. He surveys men’s conduct in war, in council, in love, in the use of money – always in Greek eyes a vital test of a man’s capacities – in religion, in the family, and he judges as a man of wide tolerance and ripe experience. Believing implicitly in the stature of his heroes, he has a genius for making greatness stand out in small actions. We think of Alexander handing his physician the paper denouncing him as an assassin, and in the same gesture drinking off the physic the man had prepared for him, or of Antony sending Enobarbus’s treasure after him; these and countless other scenes Plutarch has engraved upon the memory of posterity for all time. It was surely this power of his to epitomize the moral grandeur of the ancient world which appealed most strongly to Shakespeare and Montaigne, which inspired the gigantic outlines of such typically Renaissance heroes as Coriolanus and Mark Antony, and which later prompted Mme Roland’s remark that the Lives are the pasturage of great souls.

Scott-Kilvert’s final Plutarch volume for Penguin Classics, The Age of Alexander, also shares a version of this Introduction, although eight of the lives it features, Pelopidas, Agesilaus, Timoleon, Dion, Phocion, Demetrius, Pyrrhus, Demosthenes, are naturally overshadowed by the ninth, that of Alexander the Great.



All four of these volumes (Penguin also did versions of Plutarch’s Moralia and his writings on Sparta) sport sprightly notes, glossaries, maps, chronologies – all the appurtenances it never would have occurred to Dryden to provide in so helpful a manner. The four books – at least in their original mass market paperback format – are handy enough so you can carry the heart and pith of an English Plutarch with you anywhere, be it the train from Boston to New York or a slow packet plying the Indian Ocean. In freeing Plutarch from his own organizing schema, they perform an inestimable service to the many thousands of readers who might not otherwise have known him. And readers should know him. On the front page of my copy of The Rise and Fall of Athens, some previous owner had written, “Plutarch offers hope.” This is very simply true. That alone makes him indispensable.

Now what I wouldn’t give for Penguin Classics to publish a solid black-spined brick of the whole of the Parallel Lives! A new translation (with every last word included), new notes, new maps – new everything, a perfect shelf-companion to some of their very best other massive volumes: The Shorter Pepys, Black Lamb and Gray Falcon, the Pope Iliad, or last year’s epic Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Plutarch has deserved such a volume for two thousand years; I dream that someday Penguin will get around to it, while there's still anybody around to enjoy it.

The Signet Classic Poetry Series!

Writing about the Oxford World's Classics just now has turned my mind, somewhat predictably, to other book-series I've loved. It's not that implausible a leap: how books are published, the way they're packaged and presented to the reading public, forms a larger segment of how readers enjoy those books than I think gets credit. Certainly my own bookshelves are almost universally populated by not only the books I love most but the versions of those books I love most. If I didn't care about such things, if the only thing that concerned me was raw content, I'd have every Dover edition ever printed, and precious little else.

But invariably, the well-exercised love of books entails more than raw content. We come to like the way certain books feel in the hand, the way they look on the shelf, the way certain notes seem to answer all our questions in just the right way, or how certain abridgements seem to have all the good bits and none of the bad ones, or how the writer who pens the book's Introduction uses just the right tone, inviting but not fawning, collaborative but not condescending. Dozens of intangibles like these go into determining, for instance, which collection of Yeats we'll have, or what edition of The Pickwick Papers.

So it's entirely permissible that I'm thinking about book-series and recalling the ones I've particularly liked. And as Open Letters gears up for its January Poetry Issue, my thoughts naturally turn toward the innumerable volumes of poetry I've owned in my life. Not modern poetry, mind you, although well-meaning friends have been giving me volumes of it for decades - precious little of it seems to find purchase with me, but that doesn't mean I don't love poetry dearly ... and the series I find myself going back to again and again is the long-defunct Signet Classic Poetry Series.


These were solidly-manufactured white paperbacks printed in the 1960s on paper-stock slightly heavier than the norm (then or now) , featuring generous selections from the canonized poets of England and America (Marvell, Sidney, Spenser, Whitman, Milton, Keats, Shelley, etc). Each volume had a specially-commissioned introduction in which the master of ceremonies gave us an overview of the poet's life and times and, in the better attempts, a couple of good quips, as when John Hollander warns us of the "self-absorbed, sometimes drab lyrics" of the Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney - a good phrase and maybe not entirely wrong about Sidney, who could go on a bit much in this vein:

Over these brooks trusting to ease mine eyes,
(Mine eyes even great in labor with their tears)
I laid my face; my face wherein there lies
Clusters of clouds, which no sun ever clears.

In wat'ry glass my wat'ry eyes I see:
Sorrows ill eas'd, where sorrows painted be.
My thoughts imprison'd in my secret woes,
With flamy breath do issue oft in sound:
The sound of this strange air no sooner goes,
But that it doth with Echo's force rebound,
And make me hear the plaints I would refrain:
Thus outward helps my inward griefs maintain.

John Arthos gets the thankless task of introducing John Dryden to what he had to assume would be an audience consisting largely of college students (there was a time, four decades ago, when you couldn't glance in any direction on any campus in the country without spotting one of these books), and he takes a straightforward approach:

Of all England's poets Dryden is the one for whom the manner of grandeur counts the most. He masters it in a hundred ways - in passion, in thought, in mockery, even in joy. He brings grandeur into the light of common day, and it is still itself.



He comments that poetic tastes have drifted away from such grandeur, and he openly laments the fact that this drift has caused Dryden to be down-graded in the poetic pantheon. "We have too often," he tells us, "disposed of as superior journalism what is in fact literature." He hoped for a Dryden revival, and of course so do I, but that forty years ago, and the general run of hipsters attending poetry slams are still in no mood for stuff like this, from Absalom and Achitophel:

Did ever men forsake their present ease,
In midst of health imagine a disease;
Take pains contingent mischiefs to foresee,
Make heirs for monarchs, and for God decree?
What shall we think! Can people give away,
Both for themselves and sons, their native sway?
Then they are left defenseless to the sword
Of each unbounded, arbitrary lord:
The laws are vain, by which we right enjoy,
If Kings unquestioned can those laws destroy.

And if Arthos had the tough task of trying to get his readers to give Dryden a chance, that's nothing compared to the feat John Donne editor Marius Bewley had before him! Dryden wrote about unfashionable topics with bell-like clarity; Donne writes about unfashionable topics (personal religious faith, than which there can be no less fashionable topic among today's themselves-obsessed young people) too, but he does it with triple-jointed, jagged-brained, almost unfollowable mental twists and turns. Bewley does his best to draft a modern analog:

The influence of T.S. Eliot's poetry on the morale of the young literary intellectuals of the twenties and thirties must have resembled, in certain respects, the stimulus that Donne's poetry provided for an impatient generation long since surfeited with Petrarchism and the poetic conventionalities of the earlier Elizabethans.


But nothing Eliot ever wrote compares to this, and this is Donne trying to be accessible:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God; for You
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.
I, like a usurp'd town, to another due,
Labor to admit You, but Oh, to no end!
Reason, Your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love You, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto Your enemy:
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to You, imprison me, for I
Except You enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me.

The series got one famous person to write an Introduction. This was W. H. Auden, and for reasons passing understanding, he chose the Lord Byron volume. Thus, for a dozen pages or so, the reader watches, slightly appalled, while a hoof-mouthed and splay-footed irresolute yearner prissily gossips and back-bites about a man who would have eaten him for breakfast and been plenty hungry by lunch. The result is interesting in the way only ghastly mistakes can be, as here, when Auden insinuates for the hundredth time that he, why he himself, might just be a better poet than his subject:

If I had to introduce Byron to a student who knew nothing of his work, I would tell him: "Before you attempt to read any of the poetry, read all of the prose, his letters and journals. Once you have read these, you will be able, when you come to the poems, to recognize immediately which are authentic and which are bogus.

You read something like that and immediately want to corner Auden and ask him which of his own poems are bogus ... but you don't dare, because he would certainly respond by attacking you, and that might damage the gardenia you just this morning put in your lapel. Fortunately, an immutable law holds that when a poet excoriates his betters, he'll always accidentally point the finger at himself, as when Auden gamely tries to figure out just exactly why Byron is so, well, limited:

Byron's aesthetic theories, like those of any poet, were in part a set of working rules to help him write the kind of poetry it was in him to write, and in part an attempt to justify himself for not writing the kind of poetry for which he lacked the talent.



It's all the more maddening because of course Auden the poet is hugely talented, although there's nowhere in him anything as quietly beautiful as this little Stanzas for Music bauble, composed by Lord Byron in an idle afternoon but virtually swimming with translucent serenity:

There be none of Beauty's daughters
With a magic like thee;
And like music on the waters
Is thy sweet voice to me:
When, as if its sounds were causing
The charmed ocean's pausing,
The waves lie still and gleaming,
And the lulled winds seem dreaming
And the midnight moon is weaving
Her bright chain o'er the deep;
Whose breast is gently heaving,
As an infant's asleep:
So the spirit bows before thee,
To listen and adore thee;
With a full but soft emotion,
Like the swell of Summer's ocean.

There's a great deal more to savor in the collected Signet Classic Poetry Series, but alas, the whole run is out of print. Luckily, the books that flooded those campuses (each with a gorgeous, stately cover illustration) now show up regularly in used bookstores (somewhere out there are my Shelley volume and my Milton volume, both having unaccountably vanished from my shelves over the years), ready for you to give them a try.

The Oxford Book of English Verse

Our book today is the venerable Oxford Book of English Verse in the second edition helmed by the mighty Helen Gardner.

In John Mortimer's short story "Rumpole and the Golden Thread," the main character Horace Rumpole opines that when time and tide have washed away all remnants of the England he knows, three things will still survive: the British Breakfast, the presumption of innocence, and ... the Oxford Book of English Verse. In this as in so many things (like never pleading guilty, or the salubrious qualities of Chateau Thames Embankment), we here at Stevereads find ourselves in complete agreement with that lovable Old Bailey hack.

Or rather, almost complete. Rumpole's allegiance is, after all, to the first edition of the Oxford Book produced in 1900 through the herculean efforts of Arthur Quiller-Couch. Here we must admit a small apostasy: good as the Quiller-Couch volume is, it's nevertheless a quaintly Victorian conception, more a response to Palgrave's Treasury than to anything alive in the world of poetry at the turn of the 20th century. Even Quiller-Couch's revision of his own seminal work is more grudging than great-hearted.

No, it's enough to say he planted the seed and guarded its first sapling growth. Helen Gardner it is who brings it to perfection. Her volume, in turn, can never be bettered - when the time comes, it will need to be broken apart and entirely remade.

Botanical metaphors seem inevitable in describing a work of this much beauty and variety. An old Arab saying has it that a book is a garden you can carry i your satchel. If this is so, then the Oxford Book of English Verse represents the opulent parks and walkways of Versailles. Four pillars hold aloft the grand edifice of English letters - the novels of Jane Austen, the plays of Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and this indispensable volume.

Like those other pillars, it's really many volumes, as many volumes as there are readers who find it. The lovestruck mooncalf will find heartfelt outpouring aplenty. The melancholy brooder will find his surfeit of sighs. And the jeering satirist will find knives to make him smile. Gardner's range is far greater than Quiller-Couch's, and she is much more willing than he was to cut chunks of great verse from longer works. There is everything here, and all an appreciative reader can really do is flip pages and share their favorites. We here at Stevereads are no different in this, and we will leave you today with a few selections.

The first is from Henry King (1592-1669), written in one dash of self-pity the morning after he learned one of the best-kept secrets in the world:

Sic Vita

Like to the falling of a star,
Or as the flights of eagles are,
Or like the fresh spring's gaudy hue,
Or silver drops of morning dew,
Or like a wind that chafes the flood,
Or bubbles which on water stood:
Ever such is man whose borrowed light
Is straight called in, and paid to night.

The wind blows out the bubble dies;
The spring entombed in autumn dies;
The dew dries up, the star is shot;
The flight is past: and man forgot.

And here's the great John Dryden, waxing at his most pithy, as he always did when his heart was hurting:

Farewell, Ungrateful Traitor

Farewell, ungrateful traitor,
Farewell, my perjured swain,
Let never injured creature
Believe a man again.
The pleasure of possessing
Surpasses all expressing,
But 'tis too short a blessing,
And love too long a pain.

'Tis easy to deceive us
In pity of your pain,
But when we love you leave us
To rail at you in vain.
Before we have descried it
There is no bliss beside it,
But she that once has tried it
Will never love again.

The passion you pretended
Was only to obtain,
But when the charm is ended
The charmer you disdain.
Your love by ours we measure
Till we have lost our treasure
But dying is a pleasure,
When living is a pain.

And we'll end on a hopeful note, one of the most hopeful notes ever struck by a poet and one of our most loved pieces of verse (even though we don't believe a word of what it promises), by Christina Rossetti:

Uphill
Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow, dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.