Occasional Poetics in the Early Modern Lyric

Abstract

Occasional poetics as a factor in the evolution of the modern English lyric has been relatively little studied. In this work I argue that the demands of poetic occasion played a major role in shaping the evolution of an important strain of English lyric poetry from Milton’s time through to the mid-eighteenth century. I consider first the reasons for and ramifications of the narrowing scope for poetic invention which was one of the socio-literary consequences of the English Reformation. I then examine several successive generation of poets’ ingenious responses to the problem of narrowing invention, which climax in the work of what I consider a greatly underrated generation of technically innovative poets of the early 1740s, who produced poems which created occasional pathos without a public occasion. These works showed later poets like Wordsworth how they could evade readers’ infinitely troublesome demand for a truthful event grounding the poem by shifting from public occasions to a private, unquestionable ‘mental occasion’.