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"Can we plausibly think of verse forms as having ideologies? Are patterns of rhetoric, thought, and value so fully built into structure that one can speak usefully in an absolute sense of what a particular form represents culturally or what kinds of work it can do?" (1) So asks J. Paul Hunter in an important article on the heroic couplet, a verse form that has frequently been discussed in terms that imply affirmative answers to his questions. For example, a frequently cited essay on the late seventeenth-century couplet quotes a passage from John Dryden's Fables and then claims: "It is impossible not to conclude that the neo-classical cast of verse carried a pattern of wit which was too strong even for Dryden's compunctions. Nothing can be plainer than that this verse is neither Chaucer nor yet what Dryden set himself to write." (2) In other words, despite his intentions, the verse form made Dryden write as he did. These remarks are based on a careful definition of the couplet as it appeared at a particular time and place. In its attention to the specific features of the form as it was handed to Dryden, the essay, published in 1935, anticipates Hunter, who insists that if we are to think about the ideology of form, it must be "in particular historic moments and for particular groups of authors and readers." (3) But in its conclusions about Dryden particularly, the essay goes much farther than Hunter does in characterizing the determining strength of those forces, as does another landmark study of the couplet published in 1969, which begins with a chapter on "The Nature of the Closed Heroic Couplet." The word "nature" suggests a formalism more essential than does the introductory paragraph, where one reads only of "several points of general similarity." (4) But elsewhere, a determining force is clearly attributed to the couplet: although "the second line of a closed couplet is essentially climactic ... we can recognize its built-in qualities of flexibility and variety." (5) When analyzing particular poets' use of the couplet, the author does not escape this essentialism, but instead is trapped by it. For example, after arguing that Alexander Pope's couplet practice "presents us with one great style and one great vision ... that of unity in diversity," he must characterize unresolved tensions between the poet and his society as "beyond the implicit bounds of his form ... beyond the limits of its efficacy." (6) Thus, the critical language of even this comprehensive study reveals a reluctance or inability to alter one's understanding of the limits and bounds of Pope's couplet, even in the face of Pope's actual practice.
Hunter's concern is with a more recent group of critics who have similarly let their assumptions about the couplet blind them to what poets such as Pope actually do with this form. Significantly, these critics share Hunter's historicist perspective and argue that formalist criticism has regularly been used to advance elitist interests under the guise of "neutral" and "universal" aesthetic standards. (7) But in their efforts to correct disingenuous claims of neutrality for formalist criticism, they have veered to a kind of formal determinism that keeps them from recognizing the multiple meanings that literary forms can and do convey. More specifically, Hunter notes that "those who wish to distance themselves politically from what they take to be the rigid social propositions Pope uses couplets to make ... tend to talk about the couplet's central features in broad theoretical terms, emphasizing balance, symmetry, and closure as essential features, as if the terms themselves coded an authoritative and fixed universe." (8) These assumptions about the couplet in turn allow the same critics to reinforce their assumption that Pope was a rigid, self-righteous poet who lacked awareness of his self-contradictions. By examining carefully how Pope actually uses the couplet, Hunter identifies a much more complexly aware and hesitant poet, in his early career especially. Hunter argues that when thus historicized, formal criticism will provide such insight, but when based on a priori generalizations or essentialist assumptions, it will construct poets and poetry that do not exist. (9)
My purpose in this essay is to look carefully at the work of two of Pope's contemporaries in order to address further the central questions posed in Hunter's article as well as in the more general, current conversation about formalism. (10) Can a poet use the heroic couplet without being confined to an essential or inherent meaning in that form? And can readers of poetry talk usefully about the couplet without invoking essential meanings for it? I have chosen to focus on the careers and work of two laboring-class poets, Stephen Duck (1705-56) and Mary Collier (1690-1762), especially "The Thresher's Labour" (1730, 1736) by Duck and "The Woman's Labour" (1739) by Collier. These are not only the most well-known and highly praised poems by these authors; they are also the poems in which Duck and Collier are most intent on escaping the subjects and attitudes of their patrons, where they most explicitly voice complaint on behalf of their class and gender. If scholars of the couplet can find tension between Dryden's intentions and his poetic form, and between Pope's state of mind and his form, what kind of conflict will we discern between two laborers' most subversive poems and a verse form overwhelmingly favored by the educated elite and allegedly inseparable from "an authoritative and fixed universe"? What evidence can we find, in short, for or against an ideology of the heroic couplet? (11)
As James Sutherland pointed out over fifty years ago, of the forty-three eighteenth-century poets included in Samuel Johnson's Lives, thirty-three received university training at Oxford, Cambridge, Trinity, or Edinburgh. Of the remaining ten, four had a thorough grounding in the classics at Westminster, and two were educated as noblemen at home. In addition to the classical education of these poets (as well as of their readers), Sutherland cites the poets' wide general reading and extensive travel, their close relationships with aristocratic patrons, the relatively high cost of published poetry, and the dominance of classical models, neoclassical rules, and polite taste to support his characterization of eighteenth-century poets and poetry as "fundamentally aristocratic." Sutherland quotes a damning critical judgment by John Dennis--"What ploughman, what tinker, what trull is not capable of saying the like?"--to illustrate the widespread assumption that poetry is by definition beyond the grasp of the laboring class. (12) It is little wonder then that the literary work of laborers Duck and Collier, the former of whom allegedly "got English" as others acquired Latin or Greek, was greeted with various blends of astonishment, curiosity, skepticism, and condescension, for their lives, especially their educations, could hardly differ more from those summarized by...
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