Mythology & the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry

by Douglas Bush

The definitive study of a major creative force in the shaping of Romantic poetry, an erudite survey of classical mythology, and a brilliant overview of English poetry from the eighteenth century to our major contemporaries. Professor Bush's range and clarity of vision, combined with the authority and wit of his presentation, place this book among the few which may be called works of genuinely creative scholarship.

Genres: Criticism, Poetry, Mythology, Nonfiction

372 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1937

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A master compendium, parts of which I read in my graduate Milton seminar, e.g., his "Paradise Regained" references to myths are "almost all disparaging," say, "nymphs to the superstitious eye"(265). Bush says Renaissance poetry's essential tapestry wove in "more and more Ovid and Italian brocade": "A history of mythology in the Renaissance tradition must be largely an account of the metamorphoses of Ovid" which were all things to all people (p.6). Horace's Odes and Ovid's Amores, were little read in the Middle Ages, because the classics were read to form character. Learned John of Salisbury, in the 12thC, said ancients transmit information of virtue "quae facit bonum virum."
Clearly, Ovid made men good--at love, not life. And surely not good at war, for which Augustus had him exiled to Tomi, now Constanta, Romania.
Bush says that Italian mythological poems are wek, "long invertebrate poems"(72). He notes that the English Renaissance is un-Greek; it sports excess, not restraint: "Nothing could be less Greek than the Fairie Queene." But I would add that some high Renaissance poets--say, Jonson and Marvell--are in fact very restrained. See Marvell's tetrameter summation of Ovid in "The Garden":
"Apollo hunted Daphne so/ Only that she might Laurel grow;/ And Pan did after Syrinx speed / Not as a Nymph, but for a Reed." Or in "Coy Mistress," "I would love you ten years before the Flood/ And you should, if you please, refuse/ Till the conversion of the Jews." No excess here.
In Ch XIV, on Milton, Bush says that the great Puritan poet knew Ovid better that Marlowe and Shakespeare (though I think Ovid the Bard's favorite Latin, along with Plautus and Publilius Syrus), but Milton is hardly every "Ovidian"(248). Milton could almost repeat Homer, and Ovid's Metamorphoses. Milton "got by ear" out of necessity, Shakespeare, out of employment (251). Obviously, Ovid's licentiousness contrasts with Milton's "higher purpose," but as a young man Milton responded more to the amatory poems, rather everybody else's emphasis on the Metamorphoses.
Milton published his own Latin poems, metrically divided into Elegiacs and Silvae, in 1645, four years before he signed as a juror in the beheading of Charles I--which could have cost the blind poet his life, were it not for Hull Parliamentarian Andrew Marvell's defense. One of my favorite places to visit in London is the spot marked in Westminster Hall where Charles sat during his trial.

[Jeremy]

Read Ch. 1 ("Classical Themes in the Middle Ages") and Ch. 13 ("Allegory and Anti-Pagan Sentiment in the Seventeenth Century") on Nov. 2, 2017, on my flight to Atlanta for SAMLA.