The Poetry of Waller by Edmund Waller
"The Poetry of Waller" delves into the works of Edmund Waller, a notable figure in English lyric poetry, who flourished until the mid-18th century. His poetry is recognized for its homage to classical Greek and Roman traditions, showcasing a departure from the complex styles of the Metaphysical poets. Waller is credited with popularizing the heroic couplet, which allowed for a smoother rhythm and simpler vocabulary, making his work more accessible. Much of his early poetry centers on themes of love and admiration, often employing mythological references and idealized imagery rather than direct representations.
His poems, such as "To Phyllis" and "Of Love," explore familiar motifs of romantic pursuit and the emotional struggles associated with love. Waller's work also includes occasional pieces celebrating specific events, such as his reflections on love at first sight and his admiration for the beauty found in art and nature. Beyond lyricism, Waller's political poems, particularly "A Panegyric to My Lord Protector," engage with the tumultuous political landscape of his time, praising figures like Oliver Cromwell and later Charles II. His poetry reflects a balance between classical influence and the evolving English poetic tradition, marking a significant transition in the landscape of 17th-century literature.
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The Poetry of Waller by Edmund Waller
First published:Poems, 1645 and 1664; Divine Love, 1685
Critical Evaluation:
The poems of Edmund Waller were at one time famous, and from the time they were written until the middle of the eighteenth century he had the reputation of being England’s best lyric poet. The poems were admired for several reasons: they seemed to recall the poetry of those Greek and Roman writers who were so greatly admired during the Renaissance, and they marked the use of a new poetic diction or vocabulary by English authors. Also, Waller’s poetry represented a turning-away from the obscure (if brilliant) poetry of the Metaphysicals. Instead of difficult words and ideas he used the simplest expression; instead of the broken rhythms of this highly intellectual poetry he popularized the smoothness of the heroic couplet.
Waller’s early poetry was amatory and pastoral. It contains the customary numbers of allusions to Flavia, Chloris, and other fictional ladies of this type of poetry. The poems are written in praise of the woman admired and of the idea of love itself. These works do not attempt to give a direct and literal idea of their subject; instead, they refer to the goddesses of myth and the beauty of nature. Thus the subject of “On Her Coming to London” is never really given the form of an actual person, but is described as Juno, Athena, Aurora, and other famous names of myth. The method of this kind of poem is comparison and exaggeration: after the invocation of these goddesses the poet says of his beloved that she is “one that shall / Compare, perhaps exceed them all.”
The themes of Waller’s love poems are not original, nor is their intention to describe a new way of expressing emotion. They attempt to reinvigorate the lyrics of classical times, and their themes are old and familiar. “To Phyllis” is the kind of carpe diem verse we find in Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” and like that poem it can be traced at least as far back as Catullus. The whole burden may perhaps be summed up by the first line: “Why should we delay?” Other poems utilize the ancient convention of love as a mortal illness, or a war between man and woman. “Of Love” exemplifies the use of the latter theme; it goes through the whole familiar canon of love’s despair. Love makes the lover
lament, and sigh, and weep,
The woman is the conventional tyrant of Renaissance love poetry, the lover her equally conventional slave. The struggle is in vain; like the hunted stag, the lover is outmatched by the forces against him.
Much of Waller’s poetry is “occasional,” the kind of writing that commemorates some event. He writes of the sentimental qualities of a riband that a woman has bound around her hair; of a painting which has caused him to fall in love; of a lady he has seen in a garden. In each of these Waller follows the convention of love at first sight. The lover, who is always pictured as the man of great sensibility, immediately responds to the beauty of the person or object he sees before him. His “On the Discovery of A Lady’s Painting” invokes the Pygmalion myth and states that he has been seized by a passion unlike any “mortal flame” simply by seeing the representation of beauty. The most explicit statement of this kind of feeling is expressed in Waller’s “Of Loving at First Sight,” in which the poet conceives of himself as a seaman captured by a tempest and driven to his fate.
Waller did not confine himself solely to lyric poetry. His single best-known poem is about Oliver Cromwell, “A Panegyric to My Lord Protector.” This poem was written in the decade when Cromwell ruled England, and its evident admiration for Cromwell was the cause of some embarrassment for Waller after Charles II became King in 1660. It reveals an admiration based on respect for power; the beginning is an apologia for the man who must use force in order to subdue “faction” and “civil hate.” There are many historical references in the poem, notably to the strife between the various splinter sects of Puritanism and to that between Parliament and King. With a good deal of pride and exultation Waller praises the new strength of England, which allows its navy to dominate the seas of Europe. The power of the country extends, Waller writes, “as far as winds can blow.” Like Milton, who also praised the power of the Puritan state, Waller writes of its new position in the European community, a position more powerful than it ever enjoyed under the Stuart kings. Yet the poem is about more than political and military power, for it praises especially the religious toleration of the new state, to which “the oppressed shall henceforth resort.” Waller writes that this is a new nation which has captured something far more honorable than mere wealth or power. It has shown that England can once more breed things of the “noblest kind,” for it has enjoyed a moral resurrection.
The culmination of the poem is the section on the personal achievement of Cromwell. Waller writes in praise not only of Cromwell’s courage and generalship, but also of the sense of “proportion” which enabled him to build a state after tearing one down. He uses language from the Bible to describe the patriarchal nature of his hero, who has acted like the great figures from the Book of Kings. Cromwell first taught the English “to subdue their foes,” but his greater accomplishment was to “order, teach, and their high spirits compose.”
With prudent, if not exactly admirable flexibility, Waller wrote soon after “To the King, Upon his Majesty’s Happy Return.” This poem sings the praises of Cromwell’s rival and is motivated by either a sincere change of heart or simple self-preservation. Like the rising sun, Charles II appears to dispel the clouds of rebellion and to bring forth “full majesty” to the land that has suffered from war and dictatorship. The qualities for which Charles is praised are not to be found in any biography of that king; they derive from the poetry of praise. He is compared to the sun and to Jove, to nature and to heaven. He is praised even more extensively as a Joshua and a Job. Finally, the poem culminates with a pious wish for the return of all those virtues that had departed with the king from England:
Faith, law, and piety, (that banished
After the Restoration, Waller continued in the vein of panegyric. His “Instructions to a Painter” is a long poem of praise for the nation; it celebrates one of the rare English victories over the Dutch in 1665. Waller conceives of this great event as the subject for an enormous canvas and he advises the hypothetical painter of this picture how best to give an idea of the heroic stature of the combatants. Pre-eminent among them is the “great monarch,” who is described as Augustus himself. “To the King” also celebrates the king and his accomplishments and returns to the mode of myth and exaggerated, full-throated praise. There is the favorite comparison to Jove, and other allusions to heroes of the Western World who are like Charles in his “high wisdom” and “power.”
Waller had a wide range of poetry. It should be noted that he tried his hand with success at religious poems. His “Divine Poems” begin with an argument for the authority of the Bible and discuss the nature and condition of man in the present. Their great theme is love; they move from the love of God for man to the love of man for his own kind. Their first statement is that only by this love can we “reform mankind” and their last is that we must retain the “image in our thought” of that love which made life possible. Waller writes in these poems that the classical and Christian traditions must eventually be opposed to each other, for the former have only philosophical falsehoods to offer to scriptural truths. After establishing this point of faith, the poet attempts to account for the Creation in terms of “love of creatures yet unmade”: man exists only because the love of God permits this existence. Thereafter these religious poems move to descriptions of fallen man in “this Iron Age.” These poems are typical of the Augustan attitude towards human history; they continually balance a sense of progress and aspiration by reminders of the human limitation.
Throughout these poems, no matter how varied their subjects Waller employed the rhyming couplet. He brought to technical excellence this form of verse and began what was to be a great change—his admirers called it a “reform”—in English poetry. The couplet became the favorite mode of verse in the century after Waller’s first experiments with it. Waller’s smoothness of expression and rhythm were widely imitated, and the diction he compiled became familiar in the poems of the eighteenth century. In essence, Waller brought back harmonics to English verse and began the great change from the poetry of Donne to that of Dryden.