Appropriating and attributing the supernatural in the early modern country house poem

In this essay we wish to consider how speakers in various of the major, Stuart or Interregnum country house poems revisioning the Jonsonian paradigm established in To Penshurst appropriate and attribute the supernatural. We seek to explore the cunning and often complex syncretism with which they do so; at the same time, we hope to clarify the extent to which Jonson’s successors attempt to rewrite their Jonsonian pre-text. Our way of proceeding is to offer instances of new formalist analysis that complement the intensive and often illuminating historicist scrutinies of poems in the country house genre. One of our prime concerns is to suggest that close study of country house poems by Jonson, Carew, Herrick and Marvell reveals the speakers of those poems intricately appropriating and attributing the supernatural for what usually seem less than intricate ideological ends. Each of the poems, apart of course from Marvell’s, is in its own way monarchist; each indicates that its speaker seeks to promote monarchist political values and attitudes while variously creating an image of personal auctoritas. Further, each speaker (Herrick’s possibly excepted) at once promotes monarchist ideology while at the same time unknowingly attesting to difficulties in promoting it (at least, in terms of evoking classical myth and Christian orthodoxy--or combining them--for that purpose). Marvell’s speaker, however, celebrates Lord Fairfax and his family with apparent self-consciousness of the layered difficulties with which he has to deal.