8
PARTISAN REVIEW
My joy, my griefe, my hope, my love,
Doe all within this
cir~le
move.
These neat oppositions of sense and phrase, looking backward to
the practice of Donne, presently evolved into what George William–
son has called a balanced pattern of neo-classical wit-into the nimble
/
juxtapositions of Pope.
In brief, a poetry of congruity, but very sprightly, evolveq from
a poetry of deeply clashing impulses. The tensions and psychological
paradoxes of the baroque resolved themselves in an expression more
external, attenuated, and gracefully "occult."
In its toughness and dramatic attack the poetry of Jonson was
as "metaphysical" as that of Donne, just as, in their way, portraits
by VanDyck were as baroque as those by Frans Hals. But there was
not the distortion that one finds in Donne. Already Jonson had the
sense of coherence and consonance so utterly alien to the Dean of
St. Paul's. There was a continuity, however, from this Jonsonian
metaphysical verse through Herrick, the Cavaliers, Waller, and . the
Restoration wits, to Mat Prior and Pope, who retained a great deal
of the dramatic metaphysical sting, though not with so irregular or
subtle a movement as in Jonson or Suckling. Thus, in a sense, there
was no opposition whatever between the distorted and "metaphysical"
baroque and the rococo, but rather a reasonably evident progression
from Donne to Pope.
IV
So much, of course, largely concerns one of the baroque "man–
ners"-the distorted baroque of complex tensions.
As
for the "shock–
ing" realism, the sort of thing to be observed in Ribera, Rembrandt's
anatomical studies, and certain statuary by Bernini, this revulsion
from the "grand-manner'' of the high Renaissance
is
best seen in the
appalling tragedies by Middleton, Ford, Webster, or Tourneur, or
in the satires of Donne and his more physiological exhibitions qf his
love. Indeed, the "manner" of Donne is not in doubt. He had little
of the operatic, the academic, or the pastoral rhetoric, although he
had "learned and fantastic elaborations" of conceit, as Grierson calls
them. He composed with the tense distortion of El Greco. Caravaggio,
notoriously, specialized in the "vulgar." However, like Caravaggio,
Donne was rebellious; like Caravaggio, Donne exploited effects, often
outrageously. Although more complex and clever, Donne· appears,
