The Penguin Book of Restoration Verse [antikvár]

Introduction The men of the Restoration have stood up to the moralists much more resolutely than they ever did to the Dutch. Two and a half centuries of tinceasing reminders that their political behaviour was brutal and corrupt, their distrust of idealism shallow, their sexual mores gross, and their art trivial have managed only to obscure, not diminish, the degree of our reliance on them. Today we may even feel that we have more to learn about our own particular ^ predicament from the generation of Newton, Locke, Wren, ; I Hooke, Bunyan, Boyle, Shaftesbury, Purcell, Pepys, ^ Rochester and Dryden than from almost any other. If they [. were only seldom visited with the divine discontents of V their grandfathers, the Jacobeans, they were able to deal ! with the problems facing their society in a much more realistic and effective way. If they lacked something of the balance and urbanity of their successors, the Augustans, they were able to dare more greatly and to persist more energetically. Because we recognize this, it is no longer essential, as it was in the nineteenth century, to demonstrate i in detail that the poets and dramatists of the period really had something to say: the point at issue in recent discussions has been rather how successful, and how honest to themselves, they were in the saying. One of the aims of the present anthology is to offer material for an informed reconsideration of this question. A second and more fundamental aim has been to gather from the very large body of printed and manuscript verse surviving from the years between 1660 and 1700 a selection of the best poetry written about the things that meant most to the poets. What those things were does not take much finding out. Restoration poetry is concerned almost ex- 21 I' I-,.