A Great Poetic Age

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 778, 18 June 1954, Page 12

A Great Poetic Age

THE SHAKESPEAREAN MOMENT and its Place in the Poetry of the 17th Century, by Patric Cruttwell; Chatto and Windus, are lish price 18/-.

(Reviewed by

James

Bertram

. CRUTTWELL'S theory (for it is a genuine theory, worked out in some detail ) of what happened to English poetry in the 17th Century, is one of those academic studies that come pat after a good deal of pioneer work by others has cleared the ground. Grierson on Donne, Eliot on Marvell and the "dissociation of sensibility," Tillyard and Leavis on Milton, are some of the obvious critical stepping-stones to this reconstruction of a great age of English literature in terms of the supreme poetry it produced. Briefly, the thesis is that from the closing years of Elizabeth’s reign until the Civil War a moment of equipoise was reached in the transition from medieval to modern times: it was a moment, with all its tensions, peculiarly favourable to a various, inclusive and highly dramatic kind of poetry, typified in the maturity of Jacobean tragedy"both vulgar and intellectual, traditional and modernist, religious in essence but secular in form." Our own age has shown a special interest in the poetry

termed "metaphysical,’ but too often it has been studied in isolation, as though it were the outbreak of a rare and mysterious poetic disease. The great merit of Mr. Cruttwell’s bookwhich is freshly written in a style that is almost too nonilar--ice that it:

So ae a wa eS Pa ee shows went before and what came after this moment of unified sensibility. Beginning with a reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets that finds in them a number of clues to account for the change of manner in Hamlet and the later plays, Mr. Cruttwell examines the achievement of the "new-found methods" in Donne and Shakespeare: he discusses the growth of Puritanism and rationalism, the aftermath of the Civil War, and the new poetry of the Restorationwhich in "Heroic Drama" returned to the mode of Tamburlaine, one of the simpler and cruder Elizabethan forms. A neat if not entirely watertight formula at the end is invoked to distinguish the "two great types of mind" of the 17th Century represented by Shakespeare

and Milton. The whole treatment is much broader and richer than summary might suggest, and Mr. Cruttwell is at his best on figures marginal to his main thesis, such as Beaumont and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. This is a stimulating if sometimes irritating book, which no student of the period can afford to neglect.