Edward Taylor the Water Poet and Sir John Denham, by William Dobson (c. 1664)

Sir John Denham (1615-69)

Denham (on the right) was one of the most highly esteemed writers of the mid-seventeenth century and long after, along with Abraham Cowley and Edmund Waller.  The "long eighteenth century" especially prized these poets, though they are not read much now.  Denham's topographical Cooper's Hill (first edition, 1642) was widely read well into the nineteenth century for its focus on nature and national identity. Its intricate prosody, great use of the "heroic" couplet for special effects, and its framing of the outdoors in artistic space were immensely influential.  John Dryden championed this passage on the Thames:

O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without o'er-flowing full.  (189-92)

The sound echoes the sense, as Alexander Pope would have it in An Essay on Criticism (1711). Denham's vowels, consonants, and meter are mimetic of the ever-flowing Thames, "the harmony of things." He made the water and the poetry a double-sided entity to explain the greatness of the river and, not inconsequentially, the perfect Augustan poetic style, showing rather than telling exactly
what couplets are supposed to do.

Samuel Johnson, in The Life of Denham, qualifies his praise: "The lines are in themselves not perfect, for most of the words are to be understood simply on one side of the comparison, and metaphorically on the other; and if there be any language which does not express intellectual operations by material images, into that language they cannot be translated. But so much meaning is comprised in so few words; the particulars of resemblance are so perspicaciously collected, and every mode of excellence separated from its adjacent fault by so nice a line of limitations; the different parts of the sentence are so accurately adjusted; and the flow of the last couplet is so smooth and sweet--that the passage however celebrated has not been praised above its merit. It has beauty peculiar to itself, and must be numbered among those felicities which cannot be produced at will by wit and labour, but must arise unexpectedly in some hour propitious to poetry."

Both passages are from Seventeenth-Century British Poetry 1603-1660, ed. Rumrich and Chaplin (New York: Norton, 2006), 483, 739.