Ñàéò ïîå糿, â³ðø³, ïîçäîðîâëåííÿ ó â³ðøàõ :: Walter Raleigh :: Êðèòèêà

Walter Raleigh :: Êðèòèêà

Few of Queen Elizabeth I's courtiers symbolized the Elizabethan era so completely as Sir Walter Raleigh. His flamboyant personal style, adventurous spirit, outspoken political views, and wide-ranging ambition epitomize the Renaissance ideals of exploration and learning. He also is recognized as a highly accomplished literary stylist and craftsman in both verse and prose. Some critics have compared his poetry with that of John Donne and Philip Sidney and have discovered that it anticipates the seventeenth-century metaphysical style. Raleigh's surviving poetic work, The Ocean to Cynthia, attests to his status as the embodiment of the quintessential Renaissance gentleman-scholar. Because he followed the Elizabethan courtly convention of privately circulating his poetry, much of his verse was lost until the discovery of four fragments of The Ocean to Cynthia in 1870 in Lord Salisbury's library at Hatfield. The Hatfield fragments are titled “The 21th: and last booke of the Ocean to Scinthia” and “The end of the 22 Boock, entreatinge of Sorrow.” The former is more than five-hundred lines, while the latter breaks off after twenty lines. The enigmatic titles of the fragments led scholars to believe that an immense and ambitious epic poem in twenty-two parts had once existed. However, recent scholarship has doubted the existence of such a work, crediting Raleigh with using the titles to suggest an epic scope to please the Queen. As is true of all Raleigh's court poetry, The Ocean to Cynthia is addressed to the Queen and reflects his standing in her favor at the time. It is not surprising, then, that poetry was the method Raleigh chose in his attempt to appease the Queen after her discovery of his secret marriage; The Ocean to Cynthia also is an expression of frustration and anger at his imprisonment. Prior to the discovery of the Hatfield fragments, scholars were preoccupied with establishing a definitive body of work that could be directly attributed to Raleigh. Poems in several different anthologies were wrongly identified as his. It is only in the twentieth century that controversies surrounding authorship have begun to settle. Raleigh's poetry has been viewed primarily as prime examples of Elizabethan patronage literature. Recent commentators have considered Raleigh's contribution to Elizabethan literary form apart from the traditional client-patron model, focusing on the language and structure of his works both as examples of the literature of his time and as precursors to later trends. Critics also have argued over the relative completeness of The Ocean to Cynthia and the effectiveness of the works as independent texts. The study of Raleigh's important writings, particularly his complex The Ocean to Cynthia, is ongoing as scholars continue to be challenged to identify and interpret Raleigh's works.