The Instauration Part 1

The Top Ten

Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer

Shake-speares Sonnets by William Shakespeare (Bray, ed.)

Paradise Lost by John Milton

The Satires by Juvenal (Dryden, ed. and trans.)

The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope

Idylls of the King by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

La Vita Nuova by Dante Alighieri (Rossetti, trans.)

*The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning

Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

Mexico City Blues by Jean-Louis Kerouac

I'll have more to say about this list, what it represents and what my reasons are for choosing these particular items, in the following sections. We're embarking on a new adventure, and I hope you'll stay with me as we go forward.


And So It Begins (Again)

What is The Top Ten? Is it about some Greatest Books That Must Be Read? Or some How to Read syllabus? Some Golden Treasury?

No to all. I picked the books on this list for a pretty specific purpose, which I've hinted at in the title to this series.

I suppose this list might be thought of as a set of cultural benchmarks, but, really, I want it to be something more. I'd rather think of it as a process of me suggesting things and you deciding to take me up on all, some, or none of them, and then us seeing what results.

I'm just an instigator, but I hope to be one in a good sense of the term.

Note: I used Jack Kerouac's French first name in the list for a particular reason (other than me sounding pompous -- isn't "The Instauration" pompous enough?), one that I hope to get into soon. Also, the name I've used for Shakespeare's sonnets is the actual title of the first edition.


The Where of Why

In the pages of The Art of Definition, I compared writing metrical lyric poems to sculpture. The books in The Top Ten list for The Instauration (a word that refers to revival) are more like carpentry or stonemasonry -- they are built, rather than composed.

They are built to do something, to take you somewhere, to provide you with some type of means.

And they take more books to make. We'll delve into that some here, as well.


Explaining the Explanation

I chose the entries for The Top Ten in the following way:

-- Each one had to be a book-length poem, and complete. So, The Canterbury Tales and Don Juan, for instance, were out. Each one could be a book of shorter poems in series, though. That meant Shake-speare's Sonnets and Idylls of the King were in.

-- Each one had to be a significant part of the development of the English long-poem, but they could also stand as individual works.

-- Each one had to have some kind of link, thematically. Idylls matches up with Paradise Lost pretty well in that area. Others seem like more of a stretch. I'll have more to say about this later.

-- And each is a book you could finish with a feeling of satisfaction, or at least accomplishment. More to say about that later, too.


The Tower Block

There's yet another reason I chose most of the entries in The Top Ten, one I mentioned earlier -- some use source material almost as important as the poems themselves, while others serve as source material for other books.

For instance, Idylls of the King uses Malory's Morte D'Arthur as a vital source, which is a book well worth a modern-day poet's time all by itself. La Vita Nuova, as another example, serves as the "backstory" for at least a third of the Divine Comedy -- another important book in a modern poet's library.

Some other members of The Top Ten may or may not qualify in this particular respect, but that's why the list is so interesting to explore.

Speaking of La Vita Nuova, there's another reason I included two translations in The Top Ten. I'll get into that another time.


Mixing Mortar

Here are some ideas about sources/references/whatnot for The Top Ten:

Troilus and Creseyde -- Of course, the Iliad and the Aeneid provide basic context, Boccaccio's Il Filostrato the basic story. But I'm going stick my neck out on this one: Chaucer is known to have used Persian sources for his Parliament of Fowles, so why not this one, too? Another note for the language-adventurous: a poet who followed Chaucer's generation translated The Aeneid into what I'd call a Scots-inflected late Middle English. His name was Gavin Douglas. (I attempted to read this in college, and I had to give up. And I got an "A" in Chaucer, and this was the full Middle English class, to boot.)

A check earlier turned up an Google eBook text of Troilus and Creseyde.

The Sonnets of Shakes-peare -- Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, a narrative poem in English by Emily (or Emilia) Bassano Lanier (or Lanyer). She's the woman some have said is The Dark Lady of the Sonnets. I used gutenberg.org. Also, a book about Aemilia (as the author spells it) by Suzanne Woods is available for a (brief) preview on Google Books. But the book of the original researcher, A.L. Rowse, while listed on Books, is not available for preview, at least by me.

Paradise Lost -- As I discussed at length (?) in Could it be?, one source to look at here is The Koran. I've used various translations, but the choice "interpretation" for the literary set likely is The Meaning of the Glorious Koran by Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall (really, that's his name). The Meaning is widely available in paperback.

The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenal -- Hmmm. What I'm thinking is, "Why Juvenal?" It seems the translation appeared in 1693, just a few years after Dryden, having converted to Catholicism, refused to swear loyalty to the new king and was dismissed as poet laureate. Also, it has been pointed out to me that Dryden translated only three of the Satires. Others translated the rest.

However, I can't help but think that, since Dryden authored the dedication and had its publication attached to his name, that he had some oversight (at least) for the other translations in that 1693 volume. Google Books has a scanned copy of the third printing. The dedication is essential background reading, as well.

The Rape of the Lock -- Essay on Criticism by Pope. Written just prior to Rape of the Lock, it served as Pope's explanation of his critical theory and practice, as well as that of the Augustan Age. Not the other poem's equal, by a long shot. But it is a source for what rules Pope had to bend or even break to make his tower poem work, as well as the source for some Pope quotes we use today.

While "rape" in Pope's case refers to the Middle English sense of "violent seizure of property," I think it also contains the modern sense of the word as a sexual assault in delicate (and deft) undertones. Because the author and the poem's dedicatee, Arabella Fermor, were both Roman Catholic, they did not enjoy full privileges of a citizen/subject in 18th Century England. The poem itself pokes fun at the fully privileged (in many senses of that word) of their era, however.

Another source: Le Comte de Gabalis by an anonymous(?) French author. Pope's dedicatory letter to his poem explains its relevance. That letter itself is also an essential source. Though very brief, just a half-dozen or so paragraphs, the letter does its job admirably. For comparison, check out the monster dedication Dryden felt he had to write for his Juvenal translation (see above).

I found a version of Rape of the Lock (with the letter) on gutenberg.org, with a nice introduction and notes by a turn-of-the-last-century Princeton scholar. This edition also adds the original "coffeehouse" text of the poem as an appendix. It is also available on Google Books. There are some funkily scanned versions of Le Comte on Google Books, and a very nice but undownloadable English version online as a .pdf.

BTW, a portrait of Arabella shows her with long, natural tresses -- no powdered wig or "beauty dot," which was likely part of a culture alien to her. My point is that it's a mistake to think Arabella Fermor is the "Belinda" of the final poem. She and her social circle served as a framework for the master poet to build his small, but sturdy tower of carefully connected narrative, dramatic and epigrammatic couplets.

You can get a "graphic novel" feel for The Rape of the Lock courtesy of Art Nouveau magister Aubrey Beardsley. I think Dover is the source there.

Idylls of the King -- As mentioned earlier in this blog, Morte D'Arthur by Malory. Also, The Mabinogion, translated by Lady Charlotte Guest (published by Dover in paperback not that many years ago). Upcoming sections will go into more detail on this poem.

La Vita Nuova -- The Divine Comedy. In college, I used the Ciardi translation, mostly, but looked at Binyon's, too. A short collection of works by Dante's dolce stil nuovo contemporaries (Cavalcanti, Guinizelli, et cetera) is also essential. Again in college, I bought a parallel-text translation of Italian poems published by Penguin in the late 1950s or early 1960s in a used bookstore. This was 35 years ago. The translator and editor was George Kay. I still cherish this book. My copies of the Ciardi and Binyon books are long gone -- something I still regret. Ciardi was Bantam (?), while the Binyon was in the original Portable Dante, along with, you guessed it, Rossetti's "La Vita."

But, a check of Google Books scored me a copy of the original book Rossetti published his translation in, Early Italian Poets (readable on Google Play). The Kay and Binyon texts are listed, but currently "not available as an eBook" by Google.

The Ring and the Book -- This is a 21,000-line set of 12 dramatic monologues. The first one, titled "The Ring and the Book". OK. In it, Browning (as himself) describes his gold ring and how he came by this book, which describes a murder trial of the 17th Century. The editor of my borrowed edition that has the complete Ring (a beat-up and foetid Complete Poems of) includes an essay on Browning's debt to Shelley, so, as I dove into "The Ring and the Book," I thought immediately of The Cenci, Shelley's dramatic poem about a similar crime of passion in Italy.

Four Quartets -- Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross. Also, the Bhagavad Gita by whoever wrote the Mahabharata, Revelations of Divine Love by Dame Julian of Norwich and The Booke Named The Governor by one of Eliot's ancestors. All these books are referenced, quoted or paraphrased in Four Quartets. I have not read any of them, so it looks like I'll be busy. (Revelations and The Governor are available free on Google Books. But you must pay for a copy of Dark Night of the Soul.)

I once read God in Search of Man by Abraham Joshua Heschel at the same time as Four Quartets, and I found that they have a lot in common. Time, existence and what you do with them, for instance. But that course may not be right for everyone.

Mexico City Blues -- Tristessa by Kerouac. This "novel" reads more like autobiography, but how much really was that, there's no telling now. More like a novella in two parts, Tristessa has layers that demand concentrated attention. Part one describes the period of the poet's life (?) at the time he wrote Mexico City Blues.

Also, Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible. The first edition, printed in the 1930s and found by Kerouac in the 1950s, became his vade mecum for Buddhism. The original edition now is available in Google Books.
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This is my list as a poet. I'm not an academic and never have been. That doesn't mean I don't believe students can’t have fun exploring these major poetic works. That’s my plan, frankly. I hope you, dear non-student readers, are having fun, too.

I think the key here is to keep an open mind about each poem, and to treat each of them individually. While I believe each one forms a benchmark in English literary history, each poem also deserves respect on its own merits.  

That's why I think of them as 'towers.'