Poems on Affairs of State


Book Description

Deep conflicts in Restoration England produced a torrent of satirical verse on the policies, manners, and morals of Charles II and his age. Almost every poet—impelled by motives ranging from venality to patriotism—took his turn at satirizing the establishment. These Poems on Affairs of State, as they came to be known, provide an inexhaustible and minute record of the times from every point of view. The first volume of the Yale Edition includes the most important pieces, published and unpublished, dealing with events from the restoration of Charles to the outbreak of the Popist Plot in 1678. It is fully annotated and illustrated from contemporary materials. George deForest Lord, associate professor of English at Yale University and Master of Trumbull College, is general editor of the series as well as editor of this first volume.







The Making of Restoration Poetry


Book Description

A survey of Restoration poetry, from the forms in which it was disseminated to studies of important texts. This book explores the complex ways in which authors, publishers, and readers contributed to the making of Restoration poetry. The essays in Part I map some principal aspects of Restoration poetic culture: how poetic canons were established through both print and manuscript; how censorship operated within the manuscript transmission of erotic and politically sensitive poems; the poetic functions of authorial anonymity; the work of allusion and intertextualreference; the translation and adaptation of classical poetry; and the poetic representations of Charles II. Part II turns to individual poets, and charts the making of Dryden's canon; the ways in which Mac Flecknoe operates through intertextual allusions; the relationship of the variant texts of Marvell's "To his Coy Mistress"; and the treatment of Rochester's canon and text by his modern editors. The discussions are complemented by illustrationsdrawn from both printed books and manuscripts. PAUL HAMMOND is Professor of Seventeenth-Century Literature at the University of Leeds.




Plays, Poems, and Miscellaneous Writings associated with George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham


Book Description

George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham (1628-1687) was one of the most scandalous and controversial figures of the Restoration period. He was the principal author of The Rehearsal (1671), an enormously successful burlesque play that ridiculed John Dryden and the rhymed heroic drama. Historians remember Buckingham as an opponent who helped topple Clarendon from power in 1667, as a member of the 'Cabal' government in the early 1670s, and as an ally of the Earl of Shaftesbury in the political crisis of 1678-1683. The duke was prominent among the 'court wits' (Rochester, Etherege, Sedley, Dorset, Wycherley, and their circle); he was closely associated with such writers as Butler and Cowley; he was a conspicuous champion of religious toleration and a friend of William Penn. No edition of Buckingham has been published since 1775, partly because his work presents horrendous attribution problems. He was (probably) adapter or co-author of six plays (two of them vastly successful for more than a century) including one in French that appears here in English for the first time. He is also associated with nine topical pieces (variously political, religious, and satiric) and some twenty poems of wildly varying type. The 'Buckingham' commonplace book has previously been published only in fragmentary form. Almost all of these works present major difficulties in both attribution and annotation, here seriously addressed for the first time. This edition is a companion venture to Harold Love's important edition of Rochester (OUP, 1999).







The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester


Book Description

John Wilmot, the notorious Earl of Rochester, was the darling of the polished, profligate court of Charles II. One of the finest poets of the Restoration, patron to important playwrights, model for countless witty young rakes in Restoration comedies, he lived a full but short life, dying in 1680 (with a dramatic deathbed renunciation of his atheism) at the age of thirty-three. This edition of Rochester's poetry, brilliantly annotated and introduced by David M. Vieth, has been a classic work for decades. Rochester had many admirers: Graham Greene wrote Lord Rochester's Monkey; Daniel Defoe quoted him often; Tennyson recited his poems; Voltaire admired his satire for 'energy and fire'; Goethe could quote him in English; and Hazlitt said that 'his verses cut and sparkle like diamonds' and that 'his contempt for everything that others respect almost amounts to sublimity'. Book jacket.




The Poems of John Dryden: Volume Five


Book Description

This volume completes the five-volume Longman Annotated Poets Edition of the poems of John Dryden, the major poet of Restoration England. It provides a modernized text along with full explanatory annotation. The poems include Dryden's spirited translation from Ovid, Homer, Chaucer, and Boccaccio. This volume presents, in newly-edited texts and with a substantial editorial commentary, the complete non-dramatic poetry of John Dryden’s later years. It contains the full text of Dryden’s final collection, Fables Ancient and Modern, including its prose Dedication and Preface, together with a number of other poems of the late 1690s, and some posthumously published items.







Lines of Authority


Book Description

Focusing on the turbulent years between the execution of Charles I and the triumph of William III, Steven N. Zwicker reads English literature as a series of brilliant and deeply engaged polemical contests. Zwicker juxtaposes overtly polemical writings—pamphlets, broadsides, and ballads—with canonical works, including epic, historical verse, tragedy, and satire, in order to demonstrate how literature not only reflected on political action but also formed an important site of political exchange. Zwicker maintains that the sources of Restoration culture lay within the civil war years of the 1640s and that the memory of those years shaped writing and politics for the remainder of the century. In sensitive readings of such classic texts as Walton's Compleat Angler, Marvell's First Anniversary and Last Instructions, Milton's Paradise Lost, Dryden's Annus Mirabilis and Absalom and Achitophel, and Locke's Two Treatises of Government, he shows how these texts both engaged with pamphlet, squib, and broadside and challenged one another over the possession of cultural authority. Zwicker's analysis provides a new understanding of the connections between politics and aesthetics in the later seventeenth century and an appreciation for the texture of this culture. Successfully integrating literary history and political analysis, Lines of Authority will be valuable reading for a broad audience in the fields of Restoration and Protectorate literature, literary history, cultural and intellectual history, and the history of political thought.




The Poems of Alexander Pope: Volume One


Book Description

The Poems of Alexander Pope is a multi-volume edition of the poetry of Alexander Pope (1688–1744) resulting from a thorough reappraisal of his work, from composition through to reception. The annotations and headnotes are full and informative, and the layout is designed to enable the reader to navigate easily between the poems, the record of variants and the editorial commentary. The poems are presented in chronological order of publication, with original capitalisation, italicisation, punctuation and spelling preserved. A record of variants to each poem illustrates the changes Pope made in subsequent editions, and full editorial annotation sets the poems in appropriate literary, historical and cultural contexts. This volume contains the poetry that appeared between 1709 and 1714, including the Pastorals and the ‘Rape of the Locke’. Much of the publication history of these poems shows Pope collaborating with the major writers and publishers of his time, as might be expected of a writer whose preparation for a literary career was so meticulous. But Pope was also beginning to establish himself on his own account, publishing (at first anonymously) a substantial statement of ideas, An Essay on Criticism. Another separate pamphlet, Windsor-Forest, constituted his distinctive contribution to the heavy freight of ‘Peace’ poems prompted by the Treaty of Utrecht. In all, the poems presented in this volume reveal an engagement with the literary and publishing industry that is at once amenable and independent.