WRITERS OF PURITAN AGE AND RESTORATION AGE

             Any one or more than one writers of Puritan Age and Restoration Age... 

                WRITERS Of PURITAN AGE

               The Puritan movement was one for very ugly literal expression and teaching. But, over time, some room for creative expression arose and Puritan poets such as, 

* John Milton

* Edward Taylor

*John Donne

*George Herbert

*Thomas Crew

*John Bunyan 

*John Dryden 

 

                     produced some of the greatest verse of their old age.

                  Here, I'll give details about some of main writers of Puritan Age.... 

                      JOHN  MILTON

                      John Milton, (born December 9, 1608, London, England—died November 8, 1674, London), English poet, pamphleteer, and historian, considered the most significant English author after William Shakespeare.

                 

                  *NOTABLE WORKS

• "Comus"
• "Paradise Lost"
• "Areopagitica"
• "Samson Agonistes"
• ''Lycidas"
• "Il Penseroso"
• "L'Allegro"
• "A Treatise on Christian Doctrine"
• "Eikonoklastes"
• "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity"

   

                       Milton is best known for Paradise Lost, widely regarded as the greatest epic poem in English. Together with Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, it confirms Milton’s reputation as one of the greatest English poets. In his prose works Milton advocated the abolition of the Church of England and the execution of Charles I. 

                      From the beginning of the English Civil Wars in 1642 to long after the restoration of Charles II as king in 1660, he espoused in all his works a political philosophy that opposed tyranny and state-sanctioned religion.His influence extended not only through the civil wars and interregnum but also to the American and French revolutions. 

                         In his works on theology,  he valued liberty of conscience, the paramount importance of Scripture as a guide in matters of faith, and religious toleration toward dissidents. As a civil servant, Milton became the voice of the English Commonwealth after 1649 through his handling of its international correspondence and his defense of the government against polemical attacks from abroad.

                          Milton’s paternal grandfather, Richard, was a staunch Roman Catholic who expelled his son John, the poet’s father, from the family home in Oxfordshire for reading an English (i.e., Protestant) Bible. 

                       Banished and disinherited, Milton’s father established in London a business as a scrivener, preparing documents for legal transactions. He was also a moneylender, and he negotiated with creditors to arrange for loans on behalf of his clients.

                         He and his wife, Sara Jeffrey, whose father was a merchant tailor, had three children who survived their early years: Anne, the oldest, followed by John and Christopher. 

                        Though Christopher became a lawyer, a Royalist, and perhaps a Roman Catholic, he maintained throughout his life a cordial relationship with his older brother. After the Stuart monarchy was restored in 1660, Christopher, among others, may have interceded to prevent the execution of his brother.

                          John Milton was a seventeenth century English poet whose works have greatly influenced the literary world. Milton wrote poetry and prose between 1632 and 1674, and is most famous for his epic poetry. 

 

                      Special Collections and Archives holds a variety of Milton's major works, including Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, L'Allegro, and Il Penseroso. 

              Paradise Lost is one of the most recognized works in English literature. The first version, published in 1667, contained ten books. A later edition was published in 1674, which consisted of twelve books.Paradise Lost consists of more than 10,000 lines of verse.

                       

                       It tells the story of Adam and Eve, including their creation, inability to resist the temptations of Satan, and subsequent fall from grace. Special Collections and Archives holds several editions of Paradise Lost,  including one that was published in 1818. This edition was published by Benjamin Warner, a Quaker bookseller from Philadelphia. 

                   Another famous work by Milton is Paradise Regained, first published in 1671. Special Collections and Archives holds a 1790 edition titled, Paradise Regained: A Poem in Fourparts, by John Milton from the Text of Dr. Newton. 

                       This edition was published by William Young, a bookseller, printer, and publisher who had a printing business at his Philadelphia home. Milton's Paradise Regained is a philosophical dialogue between Satan and the Son of God. The Son of God strives for noble consciousness, an internal quality. Conversely, Satan believes that it is acceptable to pursue external values, such as power, wealth, and recognition.

                    Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso is another important work by Milton held in Special Collections and Archives. This edition was published 1855 in London by David Bogue. Myles Birket Foster, a famous illustrator, watercolor artist, and engraver in the nineteenth century, created the illustrations in this edition. 

                      His work depicts the interaction between day and night, one of Milton's primary themes in the work. Both L’Allegro and Il Penseroso consider the internal and external life of the poet through allegory.

                        Milton was in his twenties when he wrote L”Allegro and Il Penseroso, a young poet questioning what it meant to be an epic poet. As he matured, this early work had a major influence on his later writings. As he grew older, his poems became more complex and insightful. 

                   By the time he wrote Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained Milton was blind.  Although he had lost his sight, he utilized what he called "divinest Melancholy" to compose his most powerful works.  

                         JOHN DONNE

                          John Donne ( 22 January 1572– 31 March 1631) was an English poet, scholar, soldier and secretary born into a recusant family, who later became a cleric in the Church of England.Under royal patronage, he was made Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London (1621–1631).He is considered the preeminent representative of the metaphysical poets. 

                  

                    His poetical works are noted for their metaphorical and sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, and satires. He is also known for his SERMONS. 

                         Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. 

                           His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English society and he met that knowledge with sharp criticism. Another important theme in Donne's poetry is the idea of true religion, something that he spent much time considering and about which he often theorised. 

                        He wrote secular poems as well as erotic and love poems. He is particularly famous for his mastery of metaphysical conceits. Donne wrote most of his love lyrics, erotic verse, and some sacred poems in the 1590s, creating two major volumes of work: Satires and Songs and Sonnets. In 1598, after returning from a two-year naval expedition against Spain, Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton.

Some Important Facts of His Life

1. He was the Chief exponent of the metaphysical school of poetry.
2. He served twice as a member of Parliament. First time in 1601 and the second time in 1614.
3. Although he wrote masterpieces in his life, his “Collected Poems” appeared posthumously. 

                      GEORGE HERBERT 

                    George Herbert (3 April 1593 – 1 March 1633) was a Welsh-born poet, orator, and priest of the Church of England. His poetry is associated with the writings of the metaphysical poets,  and he is recognised as "one of the foremost British devotional lyricists."

                  

                  He was born into an artistic and wealthy family and largely raised in England. He received a good education that led to his admission to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1609. 

                       He went there with the intention of becoming a priest, but he became the University's Public Orator and attracted the attention of King James I. He served in the Parliament of England in 1624 and briefly in 1625.

                        Several of Herbert's letters were eventually published, and also the orations he wrote during his time at Cambridge. He was classically educated, and in accordance with the custom these were in Latin and Greek, as were many of his other poems; of particular note is 'Memoriae Matris Sacrum', the sequence of memorial poems he wrote after the death of his mother Magdalen in 1627. All these writings are available in modern published collections, and can also be found on various websites.

                    Herbert is known as a poet of devotional verse. His poems focus on religious experience. Some of his most well-known poems are "The Altar" and "Easter Wings"—both pattern poems that are laid out on the page to resemble what they describe. 

                  

              

               He is best known for the short lyric poems from his single book of poetry The Temple. Because of the strange and unexpected images he used, he is sometimes known as a "metaphysical poet" alongside Donne and Andrew Marvell. In addition to writing in English, Herbert also wrote poems in Latin.

             WRITERS Of RESTORATION AGE

                     

                Much of the best poetry, notably that of John Dryden (the great literary figure of his time, in both poetry and prose), the earl of Rochester, Samuel Butler, and John Oldham, was satirical and led directly to the later achievements of Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and John Gay in the Augustan Age.

                      JOHN DRYDEN 

                      John Dryden (19 August [O.S.9 August] 1631 – 12 May  [O.S.1 May] 1700) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who was appointed England's first Poet Laureate in 1668.

                   

                     He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. Romanticist writer Sir Walter Scott called him "Glorious John".

                       His best known dramatic works are Marriage á la Mode (1672) and All for Love (1678), which was written in blank verse. When the bubonic plague swept through London in 1665, Dryden moved to Wiltshire where he wrote Of Dramatick Poesie (1668).

                   As a poet, Dryden is best known as a satirist and was England's first poet laureate in 1668. In addition to satires, Dryden wrote elegies, prologues, epilogues, odes, and panegyrics. His most famous poem is Absalom and Achitophel (1681).

                  NOTABLE WORKS

   *"Absalom and Achitophel"

    *"Marriage a-la-Mode"

     *"Mac Flecknoe"

      *"Aureng Zebe"

       *"Fables Ancient and Modern"

      *"Astraea Redux"

      *"The Indian Emperour"

      *"The Indian Queen"

       *"Secret Love, or the Maiden Queen"

       *"Of Dramatic Poesie, an Essay"

                 As poet laureate in those critical months Dryden could not stand aside, and in November 1681 he came to the support of the king with his Absalom and Achitophel, so drawing upon himself the wrath of the Whigs. 

                  In 1685, after the newly acceded king James II seemed to be moving to Catholic toleration, Dryden was received into the Roman Catholic church. In his longest poem, the beast fable The Hind and  the Panther (1687), he argued the case for his adopted church against the Church of England and the sects.

               

                       His earlier Religio Laici (1682) had argued in eloquent couplets for the consolations of Anglicanism and against unbelievers, Protestant dissenters, and Roman Catholics. Biographical debate about Dryden has often focused on his shifts of political and religious allegiance; critics, like his hostile contemporaries, have sometimes charged him with opportunity. 

                      SAMUEL BUTLER 

                   Samuel Butler (4 December 1835 – 18 June 1902) was the iconoclastic English author of the Utopian satirical novel Erewhon (1872) and the semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman The Way of All Flesh,  published posthumously in 1903. Both have remained in print ever since. In other studies he examined Christian orthodoxy, evolutionary thought, and Italian art, and made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey that are still consulted today. He was also an artist.

                  

                   

                 The name 'Hudibras' is derived from The Faerie Queene (II, 2, 17), and the setting of the poem is obviously imitated from Don Quixote, save that the imitation is a complete reversal of the attitude of the original. Cervantes treats the vanishing chivalry of Spain in a gentle and affectionate spirit, while showing the impossibility of its continuance in the changed conditions of life. 

                  

                 In Don Quixote, every element of grandeur and nobility is attributed to the most ordinary and meanest person, building, incident or surrounding; an inn is a castle, an inn-keeper a knight, flocks of sheep are armies; a barber's basin is a golden helmet in the vivid imagination of the knight; a mess of acorns set before him prompts a discourse full of regret at the passing away of the Golden Age, when Nature herself provided simple, wholesome fare for all, without necessity for resorting to force or fraud; and Justice prevails throughout. 

                       Notwithstanding the absurdity and impossibility of this revival, the reader's sympathy is ever on the side of the chivalric madman, even in his wildest extravagance. In Hudibras, on the contrary, the 'blasoning' or description of the knight and squire, while following the most accredited forms of chivalric romance, serves only to set forth the odious squalor of the modern surroundings. 

                        The knight's mental qualifications are given in great detail and, after that, his bodily accomplishments — all in a vein of satirical exaggeration. Butler's purpose is to show everything in its vilest aspect.

 

                       EVELYN AND PEPYS

                       The Restoration diarist John Evelyn was a man beset by curiosity. Late in life he lamented the “insatiable coveting to exhaust all that could or should be heard upon every head” that had sabotaged his “most glorious and useful undertakings”. 

             

                      Excess curiosity had proved the enemy of achievement. Yet Evelyn admired curiosity in others, not least his close friend and fellow diarist Samuel Pepys, “a very worthy, industrious and curious person”, as he once described him. “O Fortunate Mr Pepys!” he exclaimed in one of the scores of letters exchanged during their 40-year friendship. “Let me live among your inclinations” – 

                     Which in many ways he did, sharing Pepys’s unquenchable enthusiasm for new knowledge in nature, science, the arts. Both men were avid readers and book collectors, alerting each other to works “that may happly gratifie your Curiosity”; and both were active members of the Royal Society, attending meetings where they watched with fascination as roast mutton melted into blood, and white phosphorus exploded into “divers Corruscations & actual flames of fire”, demonstrating the emergence of “light out of the Chaos”.

            

                

                         Pepys begins his diary at a crucial point in Britain’s history. In September 1658, Oliver Cromwell died, passing the title of Protector (king in all but name) to his son Richard. Pepys’ employer, Edward Mountagu was closely associated with the Cromwells’ reign and the 1656-7 attempt to make Oliver king (Oliver refused because he feared the army’s republicanism). Following Richard’s overthrow in April 1659 Mountagu found himself increasingly at odds with the government’s growing republican elements.

                     The “Rump” parliament was in power from April, and favoured a parliamentary republic, but in October 1659 officers of the army took over, dismissing the Rump. It seemed like the only choice now was a military dictatorship or some kind of return to pre-Civil War monarchy, and the public feared another such war.

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