DESCRIPTIVE POETRY, the name given to a class of literature which may be defined as belonging to the i6th, i7th and i 8th centuries in Europe. From the earliest times, all poetry which was not subjectively lyrical was apt to indulge in ornament which might be named descriptive. But the critics of the i 7th century f ormed a distinction between the representations of the ancients and those of the moderns. We find Boileau emphasizing the state ment that, while Virgil paints, Tasso describes. This may be a use ful indication in defining not what should be, but what in prac tice has been, called "descriptive poetry." It is poetry in which the landscape, or architecture, or still life, or whatever may be the ob ject of the poet's attention, is not used as an accessory, but is itself the centre of interest. It is, in this sense, not correct to call poetry in which description is only the occasional ornament of a poem, and not its central subject, descriptive poetry. The landscape or still life must fill the canvas, or, if human interest is introduced, that must be treated as an accessory. Thomson's Seasons, in which landscape takes the central place, and Drayton's Polyolbion, where everything is sacrificed to a topographical progress through Britain, are strictly descriptive.
It will be obvious from this definition that the danger ahead of all purely descriptive poetry is that it will lack intensity, that it will be frigid, if not dead. Boileau was naturally the first to see this and in verses of brilliant humour he mocked the writer who, too full of his subject, and describing for description's sake, will never quit his theme until he has exhausted it : Fuyez de ces auteurs l'abondance sterile Et ne vous chargez point d'un detail inutile.
But Boileau's humorous sallies do not quite meet the question whether such purely descriptive poetry as he criticizes is legitimate at all.
In England had appeared the famous translation (1592-1611), by Joshua Sylvester, of the DivineWeeks and Works of Du Bartas, containing such lines as those which the juvenile Dryden admired so much : But when winter's keener breath began To crystallize the Baltic ocean, To glaze the lakes, and bridle up the floods, And perriwig with wool the bald-pate woods.
There was also the curious physiological epic of Phineas Fletcher, The Purple Island (1633). But on the whole it was not until French influences had made themselves felt on English poetry, that description, as Boileau conceived it, was cultivated as a dis tinct art. The Cooper's Hill (1642) of Sir John Denham may be contrasted with the less ambitious Penshurst of Ben Jonson, and the one represents the new no less completely than the other does the old generation. If, however, we examine Cooper's Hill carefully, we perceive that its aim is after all rather philosophical than topo graphical. The Thames is described indeed, but not very minutely, and the poet is mainly absorbed in moral reflections. Marvell's long poem on the beauties of Nunappleton comes nearer to the type. But it is hardly until we reach the i8th century that we arrive, in English literature, at what is properly known as descrip tive poetry. This was the age in which poets, often of no mean capacity, began to take such definite themes as a small country estate (Pomfret's Choice, 1700), the cultivation of the grape (Gay's Wine, 1708), a landscape (Pope's Windsor Forest, 1713), a military manoeuvre (Addison's Campaign, 1704), the industry of an apple orchard (Philip's Cyder, 1708) or a piece of topography (Tickell's Kensington Gardens, 1722), as the sole subject of a lengthy poem, generally written in heroic or blank verse.
This species of writing had been cultivated to a considerable degree through the preceding century, in Italy and (as the remarks of Boileau testify) in France, but it was in England that it reached its highest importance. The classic of descriptive poetry, in fact, the specimen which must be considered as the most important and the most successful, is The Seasons (1726-3o) of James Thomson (q.v.). In Thomson, for the first time, a poet of con siderable eminence appeared, to whom external nature was all sufficient, and who succeeded in conducting a long poem to its close by a single appeal to landscape, and to the emotions which it directly evokes. Coleridge, somewhat severely, described The Seasons as the work of a good rather than of a great poet, and it is an indisputable fact that, at its very best, descriptive poetry fails to awaken the highest powers of the imagination. A great part of Thomson's poem is nothing more or less than a skilfully varied of natural phenomena. Yet Thomson succeeds, as few other poets of his class have succeeded, in producing nobly massed effects and comprehensive beauties such as were utterly unknown to his predecessors. He was widely imitated in England, especially by Armstrong; by Akenside, by Shenstone (in The Schoolmistress, 1742), by the anonymous author of Albania, and by Goldsmith (in The Deserted Village, 177o). No better ex ample of the more pedestrian class of descriptive poetry could be found than the last-mentioned poem, with its minute and Dutch like painting: How often have I paused on every charm: The sheltered cot, the cultivated farm ; The never-failing brook, the busy mill, The decent church that topped the neighbouring hill: The hawthorn-bush, with seats beneath the shade.
For talking age and whispering lovers made.
On the Continent of Europe the example of Thomson was al most immediately fruitful. Four several translations of The Sea sons into French contended for the suffrages of the public, and J. F. de Saint-Lambert (1 7 1 6-1803) imitated Thomson in Les Saisons (1769), a poem which enjoyed popularity for half a cen tury, and of which Voltaire said that it was the only one of its generation which would reach posterity. Nevertheless, as Madame du Deffand told Walpole, Saint-Lambert is froid, fade et faux, and the same may be said of J. A. Roucher (1 , who wrote Les Mois in 1779, a descriptive poem, famous in its day. The Abbe Jacques Delille (1738-1813), perhaps the most ambitious descriptive poet who has ever lived, was treated as a Virgil by his contemporaries; he published Les Georgiques in 1769, Les Jardins in 1782, and L'Homme des champs in 1803, but he went furthest in his brilliant, though artificial, Trois regnes de la nature (1809), which French critics have called the masterpiece of this whole school of descriptive poetry. Delille, however, like Thomson be fore him, was unable to avoid monotony and want of coherency. Picture follows picture, and no progress is made. The satire of Marie Joseph Chenier, in his famous and witty Discours sur les poemes descriptifs, brought the vogue of this species of poetry to an end.
In England, again, Wordsworth, who treated the genius of Thomson with unmerited severity, revived descriptive poetry in a form which owed more than Wordsworth realized to the model of The Seasons. In The Excursion and The Prelude, as well as in many of his minor pieces, Wordsworth's philosophical and moral intentions cannot prevent us from perceiving the large part which pure description takes; and the same may be said of much of the early blank verse of S. T. Coleridge. Since their day, however, purely descriptive poetry has gone more and more completely out of fashion, and its place has been taken by the richer and directer effects of such prose as that of Ruskin in English, or of Fromentin and Pierre Loti in French.