THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

master a mangled sheet of verses. Like much of Rochester’s poetry it is a self mocking artifice, at once cynical and
provocative, flippant and serious.
Although poetic satire was a form cultivated by court wits, it was far from
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being an exclusively aristocratic property. Two highly esteemed satirists, John Oldham (1653-83) and Samuel Butler
(1613-80), emerged from relative obscurity to assert their significance as professional, as opposed to amateur, poets.
In the case of Oldham, who made a living as a schoolteacher and private tutor, literary fame came towards the end of
a relatively short life and was largely assured by a succession of posthumous editions of his poems. Butler, the son of a
Worcestershire farmer, achieved startling success only at the age of 49 with the publication of the first part of
Hudibras in 1662. Hudibras (Part II of which appeared in 1663 and Part III in 1678) proved to be the most popular
long poem of its day, quoted, cited, imitated, admired, and flattered by parody. The reputations of both poets have
since suffered from this initial blaze of contemporary adulation and the failure of later audiences to be enthralled by
their work. Although the names of the major characters in Butler’s Hudibras are derived from Spenser’s Faerie
Queene, his mock-heroic, digressive narrative from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and much of his ironic tone from
Rabelais’s Gargantua, the prime objects of its satire are very much the products of the confused, divisive, postrevolutionary
age. The poem’s comically cumbersome octosyllabic couplets also allow for a considerable range of
allusive comment on what Butler saw as the intellectual, political, and religious charlatanism of modern England. As
a Baconian sceptic he was far more inclined to attack the prevalence of popular error and personal delusion than to
hold up self evident truths or ideals. Hudibras aphoristically glances at churchmen and statesmen pursuing strategies
of power under the guise of Presbyterian or monarchical principle:
To domineer and to controul
Both o’re the body and the soul,
Is the most perfect discipline
Of Church-rule, and by right divine.
If the varieties, obsessions, and peculiar rhetoric of English Puritanism prove to be the poem’s main bugbear, and the
petty theological divisions between the Presbyterian Sir Hudibras and his Independent squire, Ralpho, the initial focus
of its satire, the introduction of the deluded astrologer Sidrophel in the second book and the reflection on the recent
political disruption of the Civil War in the third serve to emphasize the breadth of Butler’s satirical commentary.
Oldham, the son of a Puritan minister, is both a more disciplined and more directly classically rooted satirist. In
the Preface to his imitation of Horace’s Ars Poetica, for example, he aspires to put the Roman poet ‘into a more
modern dress, that is, by making him speak as if he were living and writing now’. Oldham’s poetry looks back in
order to attack the vices of the present; it reflects on precedent by insisting on a continuity in the expression of poetic
indignation. The poems by which he was best known in his lifetime, the four vituperative Satyrs upon the Jesuits
(1679-81), are unrelievedly
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angry denunciations of Jesuit machinations (a particularly hot issue in the wake of the exposure of the so-called
‘Popish Plot’ to assassinate Charles II in 1678). If scarcely ever a gentle poet, Oldham is certainly a subtler one in his
later work such as the ‘Satyr concerning Poetry’, the ‘Letter from the Country to a Friend in Town’, or ‘A Satyr
address’d to a Friend that is about to leave the University, and come abroad in the World’. This last poem underlines
the neglect and poverty which is the likely lot of a schoolmaster (‘A Dancing-Master shall be better paid, | Tho he
instructs the heels, and you the Head’) and it also reflects on the blessings of ’a close obscure retreat’, a small estate
sufficient to support a private man’s withdrawal from the irritations of work and public affairs. Here in an English
equivalent of Horace’s Sabine farm, ‘free from Noise, and all ambitious ends’, the poet aspires to ‘Enjoy a few choice
Books, and fewer Friends, | Lord of my self, accountable to none, | But to my Conscience, and my God alone’.
John Dryden’s ‘To the Memory of Mr Oldham’ (1684) claims an affinitive sympathy between the two poets (‘sure
our Souls were near ally’d’). It also, somewhat unfairly, suggests that Oldham died before he had learned to purge his
poetic style of ‘harsh cadence’, a ruggedness which Dryden held was not fully appropriate to satire. Dryden (1631-
1700) uses his elegy to display his own versatility; it is an exercise in modulation, a smooth play with couplets and
triplets, written in a pentameter which is subtly extended into an occasional hexameter and in couplets varied by a
single effective triplet. Oldham is mourned both as a reflection of Virgil’s Nisus, who slipped and failed to win a race,
and as a poetic equivalent to Marcellus, the prematurely dead heir of the Emperor Augustus of whom much had been
hoped. In both cases Dryden seems to be modestly projecting himself as the poet who has achieved the eminence