Their need to have male identities as writers was unfortunate but essential in those benighted times for women poets. The sisters were eventually to find print, at their own cost, in the volume Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, which arrived at the parsonage on and caused a great thrill. The three sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, sat around the broad table in the Haworth parsonage while father Patrick amused himself with memories and guns across the hall. OF ALL THE Bronte sisters, Charlotte was the one who pushed to achieve publication. Scoff: No… damn you, Tease, I’m going to sit with Dryden’s lot…. Tease: Yes, two hundred smackers… did not I tell you? Scoff: What’’’ stab me vitals! You have a pension from the King? How do you think I got my pension from the King? The man’s straight as a carpenter’s rule. Scoff: Surely he has not slept with Dryden. Tease: My eyes deceive me my old chum… Dryden warms to him! Tease: He never will climb to fame… Lady Spreadham has slept with a hundred Coxcombs…Įnter John Dryden, who walks to the new poet and shakes his hand. Tease: Hah! Rises you say? Methinks the upstart has no juice in him. Scoff: ‘Tis said he has bedded Lady Spreadham and so he rises… Tease: ( loudly) S…s… surely not my old f…f…friend Scoff? Scoff: Heaven forfend! I heard he has a stutter. Tease: See how he pouts… beware, he may stand and read his latest ode! ‘tis that new bumpkin, thinks he’s the bee’s knees. Scoff and Tease sit in their usual seats by the fire, people-watching. We might imagine a new aspiring poet on the scene, creeping into his corner seat, with full wig on his pate, lace-trimmed coat, and slim book of verse in hand, being observed by two war-horses of the literary world: THIS WAS THE great age of the coffee house wits, when cliques and gangs gathered, keen to denigrate any perceived upstart. The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, Mature in dullness from his tender years: Dryden conceived of a Kingdom of Dullness, with MacFlecknoe as the King in need of an heir, so enter Thomas Shadwell: ‘ In prose and verse, was owned, without dispute/ Through all the realms of nonsense, absolute.’ Dryden builds up to a template description of the poet failed through fatal dullness: Shadwell, however, was hammered mercilessly for his failure to impress by the poet John Dryden in the seventeenth century. These noble lines are from his poem, ‘Air.’ He was deeply involved in the scraps and backbitings in the literary world of his time, and sadly, his verse has failed to inspire, and is not far behind the great McGonagall in flatness: Cibber, well published, and quite a force in the theatre of his time (he lived from 1671-1757), was nevertheless thought to be hopelessly mediocre. Outstanding among these alleged inadequates were Colley Cibber and Thomas Shadwell. The absolute masters of dullness found that they had a fame of sorts, as they were the target of much ridicule. I salute thee and thy noble verse, tho’ my own attempts are dire… Jack! Great bard of the west country, with a muse of fire, Or perhaps they published poems to their friends, or at least, celebrities with whom they wanted to be friends, so that they could pretend they were successful: Oh tender trembling tippling tiny trotter Most of them tried very hard to make their way in the world by writing in praise of anything they happened to come across, such as : In that great age of satire, there was undoubtedly a glut of mediocre talent amongst the scribblers. But these critics may be dull so…That’s why we have literary theory.īy the eighteenth century, as the great Alexander Pope reminded everyone, dullness in writers found a new low. Though they may also be dull, so other critics are needed to tell them. The snag is that a poet may be dull and not know it. Arguably, the main barrier to attaining that is a quality of dullness. THE BASIC MISSING faculty which may be absent in failed writers is talent.
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