Poeta de Tristibus, Or, the Poet's Complaint
Anonymous
9781465585325
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Poeta de Tristibus: or, the Poet's Complaint (PdT) was published by two newly established booksellers, Henry Faithorne and John Kersey, early in November 1681 (title-page dated 1682). The poem is only one of a large number of Restoration satires on writers as a group, its nearest neighbors in time being the pseudo-Rochester "A Session of the Poets," the anonymous "Advice to Apollo," Mulgrave's "An Essay upon Satyr," Otway's The Poet's Complaint, Robert Gould's "To Julian, Secretary to the Muses," the anonymous "Satire on the Poets," Shadwell's The Tory Poets, and Thomas Wood'sJuvenalis Redivivus. It differs from these in its Hudibrastic meter, the richness of its biographical detail, and a relatively mild degree of animus against its victims, though there is quite a deal against poetry as art and trade. In the two introductory epistles, we are asked to believe first that the poem is the work of a young writer driven into exile by his poverty and secondly that the manuscript was sent from Dover to a relative on 10 January 1681 in acknowledgment of a piece of gold. It is possible, as will be seen, that this reflects an actual history; however, the matter is complicated by the existence of a second text, published by 12 November 1681 (Luttrell's date on his copy, now at Harvard, and apparently the only one still extant) as The Poet's Complaint (PC) in which the story is presented in a slightly different form and the text of the poem is little more than a third the length of PdT. An advertisement placed in Nathaniel Thompson's Loyal Protestant and True Domestick Intelligence on 19 November 1681 claims that the rival version, published by Dan Brown, was printed from a "spurious and very imperfect Copy which contains only the first Part of the said Poem, the three last Parts (which are the most considerable) being wholly left out, excepting some few lines of them foisted in here and there without any Sense or Coherence" and describes the Faithorne and Kersey manuscript as "from the s Original Copy in four parts (together with several Additions and Corrections by an Ingenious Person)." In a recent article (PQ, XLVII [1968], 547-562) the present editor has argued against this account of the poem's genesis, and has proposed the following hypothetical order of versions. (For the details of the argument the reader is referred to the article.)
