The Prison Writer

I was reading some Richard Lovelace today. A Royalist during the English Civil War, he ended up getting imprisoned in 1642 and again in 1648. So he has some prison poems, most famously "To Althea, From Prison." In it he contrasts these little, sad consolations (like speaking to Althea through a grate and entangling in her hair) with the liberty that something else (in the first verse, gods) cannot know. It's a simple but moving formula.

I was then looking at the criticism through the MLA International Bibliography, such as it is. Many critics consider him a prison writer, and look at those poems authored from prison most closely. I find such groupings curious and compelling as well, though I'm at a loss to explain why. Is it because the desperation that prison represents makes the literature the imprisoned produce into crystals ripe with dramatic tension, as the authors seek redemption, ennobled resistance, spiritual clarity, or unparalleled grief?

There could be a topic here, one that could bridge the medieval and Renaissance world, as well as the classical one before it, and the (pretentiously) modern one. Let me muse on its bounds.

On one end, there's Boethius. Oh, is there ever Boethius, despairing in prison, visited by Lady Philosophy and made to turn away from self-indulgent grief and towards, first, earthly eudaimonism and then spiritual eudaimonism, inclining towards reason, love, and God. His exploration is a philosophical one, and in reading Chaucer's (and to a certain degree Walter Map's) translations of Boethius, I think that late medieval English authors were able to understand the link between philosophical rigor in translation (Chaucer and Walter Map so carefully choosing the words welefulness and blisfulnesse to distinguish between fallible and infallible eudaimonism) and the eloquence that can only be released in the depths of despair (Chaucer's metrical translations ... now I forget. Are they in poetry, or does he render them into prose too? If the latter, he still does an excellent job rendering both the poetic sense and the philosophical one).

Follow that through, and you have some form of prison literature coming through many of the centuries of medieval literature. Saints' lives often provide the transition, and I would argue that anchoritic life was also a form of imprisonment (though one in which the partaker was willing, it had larger symbolic significances of death, and the larger imprisonment involved the imprisonment of the soul in the body (OMG Marvell's "A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body")). Third, there are the  characters imprisoned through story, which can include Lancelot in The Knight of the Cart, the knights in The Knight's Tale, and knights or ladies in many of the romances. Fourth, you have the authors reporting themselves to be locked up. Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell ends with an entreaty by the author, as does Le Morte Darthur. From there, many poets afterwards have been at various times imprisoned, like Surrey.

It occurs to me that there's a division here between political imprisonments, religious ones, and other kinds (if there are). Sir Thomas Malory, Marvell, Surrey, and Boethius form a line of people imprisoned due to their political stances, which are sometimes indistinguishable from their personal indiscretions (the accusation of rape against Malory, for instance). The saints' lives and the anchorites have this happen for religious reasons, with an important factor being whether (or to what extent) they were able to determine (or reinterpret) their own imprisonment. The imprisonments that happen to characters are more bewildering. Sometimes it seems like the imprisonment is merely personal or individual, geared specifically against the knight in question. Sometimes, though, as with any romance involving Saracens or Welsh or the like, it seems like there's a geopolitical reason as well, even if it's only elaborated enough to say that religious difference is an excuse to persecute the hero. Finally, it can richly reinforce the present social circumstances of a society, as occurs in many plays where a character is thrown into slavery, desirably or not.

I've long been rambling, but despite their ostensible differences, I think that writing from a form of imprisonment can be compelling way to look at literatures through 1660. I'd have to read more to fill in the gaps.