Strictly an Elizabethan Lyrist by Alice Meynell

Name: Strictly an Elizabethan Lyrist
Author: Alice Meynell

“Strictly an Elizabethan Lyrist” is Alice Meynell’s critical appreciation of Robert Greene as a poet whose value lies less in depth of thought than in the fresh, unrepeatable lyric simplicity of Elizabethan English. Meynell sets Greene in a national literary history damaged by the Reformation’s destruction of older libraries and poems, making the sixteenth century England’s practical antiquity. Greene, born in the year Elizabeth I came to the throne and dead before her reign ended, becomes for Meynell an almost pure Elizabethan figure: brief-lived, morally disordered, repentant at death, yet untouched in the sweetness of his songs. Meynell separates Greene’s life from his lyrics. His biography may invite pity or judgment, but his poems need no apology. Their characteristic quality is singleness: each song holds one clear feeling or image at a time, without the mingled thought, contradiction, or psychological depth of later poetry. She likens sixteenth-century lyric to a single musical note, seventeenth-century poetry to harmonics, and nineteenth-century poetry to counterpoint. Greene’s songs are therefore slight, but they possess an early-morning freshness made possible by their age, language, and lightness. The essay’s highest praise goes to “Sephestia’s Song to Her Child,” which Meynell sees as Greene’s best lyric because it contains more than one emotional note. Its scene of father, mother, and laughing child brings a human complexity absent from his simpler songs. She finds in it a noisy tenderness, grief mingled with childish motion, and even a faint anticipation of Blake’s wilder song of birth. Meynell then considers “The Praise of Faunia,” admiring its sweetness and especially its final couplet, whose beauty feels more modern and intelligible. She praises “Radagon in Dianam” not as a whole but for certain stanzas whose shaded fountain, dark cypresses, green valley, white nymphs, and surrounding sunlight create a vivid contrast of coolness and heat. Such effects, she argues, can be missed because Greene’s verse moves so lightly that readers may pass over it too quickly. Her judgment remains measured. Greene can be dull because he has so little to say; he was not a major poet even among minor poets. His poems were often incidental songs embedded in prose works, not ambitious independent compositions. Yet their survival depends on the special luck of Elizabethan freshness. Later conventions of nymphs, fountains, shepherds, and pastoral lovers may have grown tiresome, but Greene’s versions retain innocence because they came early. His merit is not intellectual richness but authentic verbal simplicity, elastic movement, and the fortunate music of English at a moment when the language was young, mobile, and sweet.

By Alice Meynell · First published 1922 · Genre: Literary Criticism, Essay, Poetry Criticism · 1,730 words

First lines

England has little primitive poetry, because the Reformers not only broke graven images but destroyed libraries, and gave some centuries of minor literature to the flames. We have much ado in raking together a few stones of their hacking and scattering, but fire has saved their posterity the trouble of trying to restore an annihilated national poetry. Our writers, then (with the obvious exceptions), begin soon after the invention of movable type, and so modern are they that the sixteenth century must serve us for comparative antiquity. The language was mobile between Elizabeth and James, tuned by the hands of the masters whose lives lasted from one developing time into another, and who were themselves England, having history in common with their country.

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Strictly an Elizabethan Lyrist is listed on Textopian as an essay by Alice Meynell, dated 1922 CE.

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Work type: Essay
Author: Alice Meynell
Date: 1922 CE
Language: English
Genres: Literary Criticism, Essay, Poetry Criticism, Elizabethan Literary Studies, Biographical Criticism
Length: 1,730 words
Structure: 1 section, 17 paragraphs
Reading fit: Fairly Difficult (10th-12th Grade)

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Genres

Literary Criticism — The work is an analytical essay evaluating Robert Greene's lyric poetry, weighing its qualities, limitations, historical position, style, imagery, and lasting value.
Essay — The prose is reflective, argumentative, and interpretive rather than narrative, developing a sustained critical judgment in a compact essay form.
Poetry Criticism — The central subject is Greene's songs and lyrics, with close attention to poetic diction, metre, rhyme, imagery, musicality, and thematic simplicity.
Elizabethan Literary Studies — The essay situates Greene specifically within Elizabethan language, culture, lyric tradition, and the transition between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature.