Poetaster , like rhymester or versifier, is a derogatory term applied to bad or inferior poets. Specifically, poetaster has implications of unwarranted pretensions to artistic value. The word was coined in Latin by Erasmus in 1521.Erasmus, Letters 25 March 1521 (see Oxford English Dictionary s.v. "Poetaster").
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An "Aristius Fuscus" also appears in Ben Jonson's comedy Poetaster (1601).
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Talbot had been that schoolfellow of William Henry already spoken of, who was a poetaster like himself.
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Later published in The Knickerbocker by Hitchcock, under the pseudonym Poetaster, this is widely believed to have been the first ichnological poem.
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It was first used in English by Ben Jonson in his 1600 play Cynthia's Revels;Jonson, Cynthia's Revels act 2 scene 4. immediately afterwards Jonson chose it as the title of his 1601 play Poetaster. In that play the "poetaster" character is a satire on John Marston, one of Jonson's rivals in the Poetomachia or War of the Theatres.Ben Jonson ed.
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The quarto and folio texts both supply subtitles, with slight variants: in the quarto, the title is Poetaster or The Arraignment, and in the folio, Poetaster, Or His Arraignment. The principal character in the play is Ovid. It is widely accepted among scholars and critics that the character of Horace in Poetaster represents Jonson himself, while Crispinus, who vomits up a pretentious and bombastic vocabulary, is Marston, and Demetrius Fannius is Dekker. Individual commentators have attempted to identify other characters in the play with historical and literary figures of the era, including George Chapman and Shakespeare -- though these arguments have not been accepted by the scholarly consensus.
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The character of Bayes is ludicrous more for his hubris in damning actual plays in favour of imagined ones than he is for being a poetaster.
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Poetaster is a late Elizabethan satirical comedy written by Ben Jonson that was first performed in 1601. The play formed one element in the back-and-forth exchange between Jonson and his rivals John Marston and Thomas Dekker in the so-called Poetomachia or War of the Theatres of 1599-1601.James Loxley, The Complete Critical Guide to Ben Jonson. London, Routledge, 2002. Poetaster was entered into the Stationers' Register on 21 December 1601, and was first published in quarto in 1602 by the bookseller Matthew Lownes.
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Logan and Smith, pp. 74, 175-6, 221-2, 313. The term poetaster, meaning an inferior poet with pretensions to artistic value, had been coined by Erasmus in 1521. It was used by Jonson in 1600 and then popularised with this play a year later.
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Musician Joanna Newsom on the album The Milk-eyed Mender uses the term to refer to a struggling narrator wracked with ambition to create beautiful poetry in a verse from "Inflammatory Writ": :And as for my inflammatory writ? :Well, I wrote it and I was not inflamed one bit. :Advice from the master derailed that disaster; :he said "Hand that pen over to me, poetaster" Rapper Big Daddy Kane uses an adjectival form as an insult in his song "Uncut, Pure": :Your poetasterous style it plain bore me :Pardon the vainglory, but here's the Kane story The band Miracle Fortress has a song entitled "Poetaster".
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While poetaster has always been a negative appraisal of a poet's skills, rhymester (or rhymer) and versifier have held ambiguous meanings depending on the commentator's opinion of a writer's verse. Versifier is often used to refer to someone who produces work in verse with the implication that while technically able to make lines rhyme they have no real talent for poetry. Rhymer on the other hand is usually impolite despite attempts to salvage the reputation of rhymers such as the Rhymers' Club and Rhymer being a common last name. The faults of a poetaster frequently include errors or lapses in their work's meter, badly rhyming words which jar rather than flow, oversentimentality, too much use of the pathetic fallacy and unintentionally bathetic choice of subject matter.
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Henry James Pye (; 10 February 1744 - 11 August 1813) was an English poet, and Poet Laureate from 1790 until his death. His appointment owed nothing to poetic achievement, and was probably a reward for political favours. Pye was merely a competent prose writer, who fancied himself as a poet, earning the derisive label of poetaster.
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In the sense that a poetaster is a pretended poet, John Marston coined the term parasitaster, for one who pretends to be a parasite or sycophant, in his play Parasitaster, or The Fawn (1604). Later in the 17th century (the earliest cited use is from 1684) appeared the term criticaster for an inferior and pretentious critic.
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A man, who, born in 1745, could write "Sir Charles Grandison is a much more unnatural character than Caliban," may have been a poetaster but was certainly not a fool.Lesser Poets, 1790–1837 He died in Pinner, Middlesex on 11 August 1813. He is buried in Pinner's parish church of St John the Baptist. Pye married twice.
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E. K. Chambers The Elizabethan Stage, 4 Volumes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923; Vol. 3, p. 365. It is generally argued that the play is more than a mere venting of personal spleen against two rivals; rather, Jonson attempted in Poetaster to express his views on "the poet's moral duties in society."Terence P. Logan and Denzell S. Smith, eds.
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Jonson's other work for the theatre in the last years of Elizabeth I's reign was marked by fighting and controversy. Cynthia's Revels was produced by the Children of the Chapel Royal at Blackfriars Theatre in 1600. It satirised both John Marston, who Jonson believed had accused him of lustfulness in Histriomastix, and Thomas Dekker. Jonson attacked the two poets again in Poetaster (1601).
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Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who characterizes Isyllus as a “poetaster without talent and a farcical politician,” has written an elaborate treatise on him (see Kiessling and Moellendorff, Philologische Untersuchungen, Heft 9, 1886), containing the text with notes, and essays on the political condition of Peloponnesus and the cult of Asclepius. The inscription was first edited by P. Kavvadias (1885), and by J. F. Baunack in Studien auf dem Gebiete der griechischen und der arischen Sprachen (1886).
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There are also epigrams "to his deare friend William Harrington" "to the heroicall Captaine Thomas James" (two), and "to the memory of his honoured friend, Master John Donne, an Eversary". The poetaster Henry Bold seems to have thought well of Beedome's poems, for the first fifty pages of his Wit a Sporting, 1657, are taken verbatim from Beedome's book. A copy of commendatory verses by Beedome is prefixed to Robert Farley's Light's Morall Emblems, 1638.
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Sir Gervase Simple falls in love with and marries a Lady Bird, who turns out to be a boy page in disguise, put up for the prank by Caperwit the poetaster. Three contented couples and a wedding masque provide the appropriate ending for the comedy. The main plot is supported by a roster of comic figures, notably the previously-mentioned Sir Gervase Simple and Caperwit, and Johnny Thump, the servant of Sir Gervase.
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He married and in his will left all his possessions to his wife, Alice. He died on 2 June 1636 and was buried in Hereford Cathedral. As a member of the Children of the Queen's Revels, Field acted in the innovative drama staged at Blackfriars in the first years of the 17th century. Cast lists associate him with Ben Jonson's Cynthia's Revels (1600) and The Poetaster (1601); a 1641 quarto associated him with George Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois.
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Ostler started out as a boy player in the Children of the Chapel troupe; he was cast in their 1601 production of Ben Jonson's The Poetaster, with Nathan Field and John Underwood, two other future King's Men. Ostler, like Underwood, joined the King's Men most likely in 1608 or soon after. Ostler was cast in their 1610 production of Jonson's The Alchemist, as well as subsequent productions of Bonduca, The Captain, and Valentinian. He played Antonio in Webster's The Duchess of Malfi.
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A correspondence followed, in which a meeting between Lockhart and John Scott was proposed, with Jonathan Henry Christie and Horace Smith as seconds. A series of delays and complicated negotiations resulted early in 1821 in a duel between Christie and John Scott, in which Scott was killed. Lockhart had called Keats a "vulgar cockney poetaster," due to what Lockhart considered to be Keats' relative lack of literary education. History, however, has tended to regard Keats as among the finest poets in English history.
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Original Italian: Teatri, arti e letteratura described the libretto as "in every aspect, one of the most monstrous productions that has ever come from the pen of a poetaster."Teatri, arti e letteratura (10 March 1836) p. 10. Original Italian: Shortly after the premiere, Casa Ricordi published several excerpts from the opera as sheet music, including the duet sung by Giovanna's husband and father in Act 2, ' (Look around you), and Giovanna's final cavatina of the opera, (Dear one! Dry your tears).
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Portrait and signature of J. Gordon Coogler, from the frontispiece of his Purely Original Verse. J. Gordon Coogler (December 3, 1865 – September 9, 1901), or John Brown Gordon Coogler, was a self-taught American poet who achieved notoriety during his lifetime as a prolific producer of bad verse. Essayist H.L. Mencken is credited with assuring Coogler's lasting fame as a poetaster by mocking him as an example of the supposedly poor state of arts and letters in the American South.
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His best claim to fame may be the satirical poem "Ballad to the Tune of Salley in our Alley" by Lord Byron, in which Byron facetiously accuses him of being not only a poetaster, but a dandy as well. He owned Firbeck Hall in Rotherham. Sir Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe is set nearby, and Knight may have been Scott's source of local information when he was writing the book. He was admitted a Fellow of the Royal Society on 20 May 1841.
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The full name under which the Essay was first published is An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex, In Which are Inserted the Characters of a Pendant, a Squire, a Beau, a Vertuoso, a Poetaster, a City-Critick, &C.;, in a letter to a lady. Published in London by Roper and E[lizabeth] Wilkinson in 1696, the author was listed only as "a Lady." For many years, the work was attributed to Mary Astell, a contemporary of Drake and author of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies and other works.
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In 1728, Pope struck back against Welsted. In Peri Bathos, Welsted's obsequiousness is isolated and presented for derision, and in The Dunciad Pope accused him of writing poetry that flows like its inspiration: beer. In fact, Pope presented Welsted several places in The Dunciad as a laughable poetaster. Welsted attempted to fight back, and he teamed up with another of Pope's dunces, James Moore Smythe, for One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope in 1730, and in 1732 he wrote two attacks on Pope, Of Dulness and Scandal and Of False Fame.
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The house was pulled down in 1825. Streater's paintings in the ceiling of the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford were eulogised by poetaster, Robert Whitehall (1625–85) in his poem 'Urania': > :That future ages must confess they owe :To Streater more than Michael > Angelo! Streater also painted part of the chapel at All Souls', Oxford and ceilings at Whitehall, in London. Little of his decorative work now remains, except the ceiling of the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, which was restored in 1762 by Tilly KettleBiography of Tilly Kettle (Richard Green Fine Paintings).
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They are, also, notably ill-tempered. Thomas Davies called Poetaster "a contemptible mixture of the serio-comic, where the names of Augustus Caesar, Maecenas, Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Tibullus, are all sacrificed upon the altar of private resentment". Another early comedy in a different vein, The Case is Altered, is markedly similar to Shakespeare's romantic comedies in its foreign setting, emphasis on genial wit and love-plot. Henslowe's diary indicates that Jonson had a hand in numerous other plays, including many in genres such as English history with which he is not otherwise associated.
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Mrs. Moore This year Poetaster Julia A. Moore's first book of verse, The Sentimental Song Book, was published in Grand Rapids, and quickly went into a second printing. A copy fell into the hands of one James F. Ryder, a Cleveland, Ohio, publisher who recognized its awful majesty and soon republished it under the title The Sweet Singer of Michigan Salutes the Public. Ryder sent out numerous review copies to newspapers across the country, with a cover letter filled with low key mock praise. And so Moore received national attention.
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In the annals of poetasting, 1877 stands out as a historic year. So wrote William Topaz McGonagall (1825 -1902) a Scottish weaver, "actor", and "poet" who would become comically renowned as one of the worst poets in the English language. Also this year Poetaster Julia A. Moore, following up on the renown of her first book of verse, The Sweet Singer of Michigan Salutes the Public of 1876, decided to appear before her public. She gave a reading and singing performance, with orchestral accompaniment, at a Grand Rapids, Michigan, opera house.
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Scholars have found references to Sir Walter Raleigh and Gabriel Harvey. The characters Fastidious Brisk and Carlo Buffone in Every Man Out-- like Hedon and Anaides in Cynthia's Revels and Crispinus and Demeter in The Poetaster--are representations of Marston and Thomas Dekker.Chambers, Vol. 3, p. 363. The character Sogliardo, who Jonson includes in his general mockery of socially ambitious fools, is a country bumpkin, new to the city, who boasts of the coat of arms he has recently purchased, which, when he describes its colors, resembles a fool’s motley.
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E. Rivers, Fray Luis de León: The Original Poems The sixteenth century in western Europe was also an age of translations (except in Germany, where Horace wasn't translated into the vernacular until well into the seventeenth century). The first English translator was Thomas Drant, who placed translations of Jeremiah and Horace side by side in Medicinable Morall, 1566. That was also the year that the Scot George Buchanan paraphrased the Psalms in a Horatian setting. Ben Jonson put Horace on the stage in 1601 in Poetaster, along with other classical Latin authors, giving them all their own verses to speak in translation.
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At the play's conclusion, Hercules holds a symbolic Court of Cupid, in which all the foolish courtiers are arrested for their crimes against love and good sense. It is often assumed that Duke Gonzago was intended as an unflattering portrait of King James I, although it is not known whether the king took offence at this portrayal. A parasitaster is one who pretends to be a parasite or sycophant. Marston coined the term, following the example of Ben Jonson's coinage of the term poetaster for an inept and pretentious versifier, in his play of the same name.
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Oxford was soon released, and in December 1581 Anne began a correspondence with him; and by January 1582, he was reconciled with her, acknowledging the paternity of her daughter Elizabeth. In his Pandora (1584), a work dedicated to her husband, the harpist and poetaster John Southern credited Anne with writing six elegiac poems memorialising her infant son, Lord Bulbecke, after his premature death as an infant in May 1583. However, this has been contested by Stephen May as the poems are written in Southern's style and draw heavily on his favourite poet, Philippe Desportes. However, Louise Schleiner supports Anne's authorship.
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Ben Jonson: rival, co-author, frenemy By 1601, he was well known in London literary circles, particularly in his role as enemy to the equally pugnacious Ben Jonson. Jonson, who reported to Drummond that Marston had accused him of sexual profligacy, satirized Marston as Clove in Every Man Out of His Humour, as Crispinus in Poetaster, and as Hedon in Cynthia's Revels. Jonson criticised Marston for being a false poet, a vain, careless writer who plagiarised the works of others and whose own works were marked by bizarre diction and ugly neologisms. For his part, Marston may have satirized Jonson as the complacent, arrogant critic Brabant Senior in Jack Drum's Entertainment and as the envious, misanthropic playwright and satirist Lampatho Doria in What You Will.
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Two troupes were intimately involved on the competing sides: the Children of Paul's acted John Marston's Jack Drum's Entertainment (1600) and What You Will (1601) and Thomas Dekker's Satiromastix (1601), while the Children of the Chapel had Jonson's Cynthia's Revels (1600) and The Poetaster (1601). The boys' troupes were strongly associated with the satirical comedy of Jonson, Marston, and Thomas Middleton, which has sometimes been described as a coterie drama for gentleman "wits", in contrast to the popular drama of writers like Shakespeare and Thomas Heywood that was performed at the Globe and the other large public theatres. Yet the boys also played serious tragedies and contemporary histories, notably the works of George Chapman -- Bussy D'Ambois, The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, and the double play The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron.
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1882 caricature from Punch Queen Victoria's funeral procession Edward VIIs coronation procession London 9 August 1902 On 1 April 1882, Wolseley was appointed Adjutant-General to the Forces, and, in August of that year, given command of the British forces in Egypt under Khedive Tewfik to suppress the Urabi Revolt. Having seized the Suez Canal, he then disembarked his troops at Ismailia and, after a very short campaign, completely defeated Urabi Pasha at the Battle of Tel el-Kebir, thereby suppressing yet another rebellion. For his services, he was promoted to the substantive rank of general on 18 November and raised to the peerage as Baron Wolseley, of Cairo and of Wolseley in the County of Stafford. He also received the thanks of Parliament and the Egypt Medal with clasp; the Order of Osmanieh, First Class, as bestowed by the Khedive; and the more dubious accolade of a composition in his honour by poetaster William Topaz McGonagall.
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