Six. The Lives of the Poets

Shakespeare, as we have seen, represented the stages of childhood and adolescence, of curiosity and exploration, in the growth of both the English language and English poetry. Variety and copiousness in experience and expression are the hallmarks of this stage in development. Johnson recognised in Shakespeare's portrayal of the active moving reality in all its original energy a ‘wide extension of meaning’, and paid homage to his enlargement of the English vocabulary. And yet, as we have also seen, Johnson did not absolve Shakespeare from the poet's responsibility to transcend reality to guide man towards moral and religious truth.

The paradigm of the mind's development from infancy to maturity, and the centrality of language to it, sustains the idea of the Lives of the Poets, amongst other things, as a ‘biography’ of poetical expression. After Shakespeare, the next stage in the growth of English poetry was characterised by the ‘strength’ of Denham. All through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the stylistic encomium of ‘strength’ had echoed and reechoed in connection with Denham. Pope had exhorted his readers to ‘praise the Easie Vigor of a Line,/Where Denham's Strength and Waller's Sweetness join’ (Essay on Criticism, II.360-61). In his Life of Denham Johnson defined the word, ‘strength’ with reference to Pope's use of it, as ‘lines and couplets, which convey much meaning in few words, and exhibit the sentiment with more weight than bulk’. Similarly he talked of the ‘much meaning [which] is comprised in so few words’ (Poets, I. 79-80) in Denham's famous ‘Thames Couplets’. It is evident by now that the conciseness and concentration that Johnson ascribed to the term ‘strength’ was not a function of representational meaning; neither were conceits or hyperbolical images the source of the intensity that Johnson saw in Denham. Rather, with Pope he paid tribute to the mental energy of the poet.

The question, then, as to what is the special quality of Denham's style w