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William Jerdan, Poetry, and The Literary Gazette

While William Jerdan was editor of The Literary Gazette (1817-1850), he wrote most of the poetry reviews himself. As "a wet nurse to bards (111:232), as he called it, The Literary Gazette influenced the poets and the reading taste of his audience. He had published Bryan Waller Procter ("Barry Cornwall"), Barbara Hofland, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, encouraging young poets, vilifying bad ones, ridiculing Wordsworth and the Lake School, rebuking Byron's immorality even while admiring his genius, protecting the sensibilities of the young ladies among his readers, and holding out morality as the ultimate test of good poetry. Of poetry, he wrote, "Fashion was the guide of the last age. Nature is the guide of the present, and our progress must be from grandeur to grandeur; a keener sense of passion, a purer simplicity, a more comprehensive vision of nature, a more majestic, solemn and sacred love of all things lovely, will be wrought upon us in that upward flight, and, like the translated Prophet, the spirit be made sublime its ascent to receive the palm of immortality" (May 22, 1819). So long as it was moral and respectable enough to be read by young ladies, poetry would have a place in the Literary Gazette. However, some poets, such as Byron, presented a problem. Reviewed before Jerdan became editor, Byron had been compared to Dante, but, in Manfred, while there was a "symptom of incipient orthodoxy in the religious doctrines," he seemed to be "investigating the truths of religion," with, the reviewer hoped, "a sober and rational desire to benefit himself and not to astonish the world with some new creed of poetical theology" (June 21, 1817). The week after Jerdan became editor (July 26, 1817), both Coleridge's Sibylline Leaves and Byron's The Lament of Tasso were reviewed on the front page: if Byron had "ever written anything else there is immortality in these dozen pages." If only, it concluded, Byron "always chose subjects congenial to the most sublime poetic feeling, and left the mysteries of darkness and guilt to men whose genius was like their theme. How glorious would be his reward from an admiring world!" His comment on Coleridge and the Lake Poets: "[I]t will scarcely be anticipated that we intend to enter at all into the question which every production of the School to which it belongs invariably raises, i.e. whether it is poetry or drivelling, the true and genuine effusion of unsophisticated nature, or the wry babbling of imbecility, mistaking meanness for simplicity, and the most ludicrous grotesque for the best, because the nearest resembling, portrait of Reality." Even before Jerdan became editor, The Literary Gazette had ridiculed what it called the Lake School in a review of John Scott's House of Mourning: "he owes most of his peccadillos to the paddling and dabbling Lakeschool," and concluded with the hope that he would "discard the silliness of the Lake School" (March 5, 18171). The reviewer of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (August 19), probably Jerdan, seems mystified, questioning the sense of publishing it at all, doubting the writer's sanity: "We felt quite astonished that in prose as in poetry, the same individual could contrive to make us like and dislike him so extremely at the same moment." He objected to Coleridge's admiration of Wordsworth, "such a rhapsody of incomprehensible stuff, such a flux of the profound reasoning of folly ... such a medley of incoherent jargon." The Biographia Literaria received equally poor reviews in Blackwood's and from Hazlilt in the Edinburgh Review. A few weeks later, of Coleridge's Zapolya, Jerdan said that the author had improved under the lash of earlier criticisms; however, he objected to the rhyming, metre, and "trange coinage of new words." He concluded, critics "ho have been unqualified in their condemnation of his poetical attempts" should pause, as Zapolya proved "he existence of genius which may be misdirected, but cannot be denied" (November 15, 1817). …