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He has an animated idea of good poetry, and a just contempt of poetasters in the different species of it. He says of himself, in the first satire. He frequently avows his admiration of Spenser, whose cotemporary he was. His first book, consisting of nine satires, appears in a manner entirely levelled at low and abject poetasters.
I have no time to indulge any longer in these laborious curiosities. God bless you, and cause to thrive and burgeon whatsoever you write, and fear no inks of miserable poetasters. Yours truly, Mary's love. My heart hath been right and powerful all its years. I never thought an evil or a weak thought in my life. The original letter is actually written in to inks, alternate black and red.
He was the dean of that group of "poets, poetaccios, poetasters, and poetillos," who beset the court.
Musicians, painters, artists, jugglers, sages, all whose fame, no matter of what motley kind, has reached the public ear, and whom praise or pay can bring together, are assembled. Poets are invited to read their productions; and as reading well is no mean art, and writing well still much more difficult, you may think what kind of an exhibition your every day poetasters make.
Saying it rather taught to say it. For if that "divine inspiration of poets," of which the poetasters make such rash and irreverent boastings, have, indeed, as all ages have held, any reality corresponding to it, it will rather be bestowed on such works as these, appeals from an unrighteous man to a righteous God, than on men whose only claim to celestial help seems to be that mere passionate sensibility, which our modern Draco once described when speaking of poor John Keats, as "an infinite hunger after all manner of pleasant things, crying to the universe, 'oh, that thou wert one great lump of sugar, that I might suck thee!"
I despise all that he can do, and am glad that I can so easily get rid of him and his ingratitude. I am hardened both to abuse and ingratitude. 'You, I am sure, will no more recommend your poetasters to my civility and good offices. It will be but half a guinea, and your name shall be put in the list I am making for him. You will be in very good company. 'Now for the Epitaphs!
Endowed for the most part with considerable facility of composition, the poetasters poured forth their feelings with torrential recklessness, demanding freedom for their inspiration, and cursing the age that fettered them with its prosaic cares, its cold reason, and its dry science.
If Frédet was too long away from Court, a rondel went to upbraid him; and it was in a rondel that Frédet would excuse himself. Sometimes two or three, or as many as a dozen, would set to work on the same refrain, the same idea, or in the same macaronic jargon. Some of the poetasters were heavy enough; others were not wanting in address; and the duchess herself was among those who most excelled.
The country teems with "poets, poetasters, poetitos, and poetaccios:" every man has his recognised position in literature as accurately defined as though he had been reviewed in a century of magazines, the fine ear of this people causing them to take the greatest pleasure in harmonious sounds and poetical expressions, whereas a false quantity or a prosaic phrase excite their violent indignation.
His travels in Italy, again, abound with classical quotations, happily introduced; but scarcely one of those quotations is in prose. He draws more illustrations from Ausonius and Manilius than from Cicero. Even his notions of the political and military affairs of the Romans seem to be derived from poets and poetasters.
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