Selected Poems of Bernard Barton, the 'Quaker Poet'. Christopher Stokes W.

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Название Selected Poems of Bernard Barton, the 'Quaker Poet'
Автор произведения Christopher Stokes W.
Жанр Языкознание
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Издательство Языкознание
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781785274428



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Edward FitzGerald (translator of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám) ensured his work remained culturally visible after his death in 1849, but by the time of E. V. Lucas’s biography in 1893, his star was waning – before being eclipsed entirely. This occlusion is a shame. His is a unique nineteenth-century poetic voice: one of sun-dappled Suffolk woodland and heath; gentle reflections on history, time and loss; and affectionately painted domestic scenes. It is influenced by Wordsworth, Cowper and Pope; the sentimental conventions of late Romantic writing; and fellow county poets such as George Crabbe and Robert Bloomfield. Nor is he limited to one strain: across his work one finds devotional verse, political writing, ekphrasis and even zesty satire.

      ‘A Maker of Literary Luxuries’: Barton’s Life

      It is about this time that Barton began to write. Initially, this appears to have been in the provincial press under the curious pen name ‘Marcus’: the earliest poem I have identified is ‘To Walter Scott, Esq., On Perusing His Lady of the Lake’, in the Suffolk Chronicle of 9 June 1810. By 1812 he had enough verses to compile his first volume Metrical Effusions; this was followed in 1818 by Poems, by an Amateur, printed for the author by subscription. Both these volumes were anonymous, as was all his work of this decade (or under the initials B.B.). The 1818 list of subscribers is a good indication of the poet’s social networks and the type of friendships he cultivated throughout his career, as well as his life in the 1810s specifically – the latter a period for which evidence like letters is scant. They include extended family, Quaker connections near and far, clergymen from Suffolk villages, individuals from Woodbridge and Ipswich (some of whom are also the subjects of poems in the volume), and influential gentry and other county worthies. Poets William Wordsworth, Thomas Moore and Robert Southey are also included. Yet the print run of Poems, by an Amateur was extremely limited at around 150 copies. It was only in the following decade that his poetic career truly prospered and he was catapulted into prominence, spurred by the first volume under his own name – Poems (1820), which gathered much of his best earlier verse with new material, and eventually ran to four editions with revisions and additions.

      It was the beginning of a prolonged and prolific phase in his literary life. Across the 1820s, he published no fewer than six major volumes. He became a frequent contributor to the newly relaunched London Magazine, which printed Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and many other major figures. Not only did his contributions to the London raise his literary profile, but some accounts also suggest that he met one of his closest correspondents, Charles Lamb, at one of its dinners. The decade also saw the first of the literary annuals, Frederic Shoberl’s Forget-Me-Not, quickly followed by a slew of imitators. These were popular commercial offerings, released for Christmas and New Year, dominated by sentimental poetry and interspersed with engravings. Barton would go on to publish much of his poetry in such gift books. He was reviewed well, reprinted regularly and even received a generous annuity to support his work organised by sympathetic Quakers led by Joseph John Gurney. Although he followed some famous advice from Charles Lamb not to abandon his clerkship at the bank, his poetic labour was intensive: letters from the time are abuzz with concern about reviews and royalties, and Robert Southey even counsels him to avoid the fate of Henry Kirke White, the consumptive, proto-Keatsian genius supposedly destroyed by overwork.

      ‘Light winds sweeping o’er a late-reap’d field’: Barton’s Style