The art of ease in English poetry: from Waller to Byron

Thesis

This thesis is a literary-critical study of the idea of ‘ease’ in English poetry from the middle of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth. At once a social, stylistic, and ethical ideal, a term of commendation and one of abuse, ‘ease’ is a central but habitually ill-understood word in the critical and poetical vocabulary of this period. Nominating a quality that a poem or a poet might wish to possess or seek to avoid, ‘ease’ could be a stylistic virtue of the first rank, a hard-won quality of poise, urbanity, and equanimity, or the mark of a morally suspect preoccupation with style at theexpense of substance and of a disreputable laxity in the exercise of poetic art. These contrastingly virtuous and vicious senses of the word tussle for pre-eminence, sometimes within a single work, throughout the period considered, in which the notionally simple category of ‘easy writing’ (that is, writing that comes easily to its author or appears to do so) acquires a rich but elusive character. The thesis traces the origins, development, and ultimate fate of the poetic idea of ease, from its early rolein the reception of Waller’s verse in the seventeenth century to Byron’s rearguard profession of an easy style in the Romantic period. Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Lloyd, and Cowper are all discussed in detail, but consideration is also given to Etherege, Wycherley, Rochester, Prior, Swift, Young, Thomson, Gray, and others. Special attention is paid throughout to the ambiguous and paradoxical aspects of ease, and to its strange double life as a term of both adulation and reproach.

Authors: Turner, JG

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-1rbxxoj1p
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Subjects: English