St John’s College Library Newsletter L
LENT 2021
VOLUME 4, ISSUE 2
A man of many parts How many poets does it take to end a war? As unlikely as it sounds, in 1713 the answer was one: St John’s Fellow Matthew Prior. This year marks three centuries since Prior’s death, in September 1721. Today he is best remembered for his contribution to literature in the early years of the eighteenth century, when several now-familiar names – Swift, Pope, Johnson, Cowper and others – took direction from the ease and elegance of Prior’s verse and the pragmatic pessimism of his philosophy. During his lifetime, however, Prior was a high-profile public figure: a leading diplomat and ambassador who frequently travelled overseas and who played a crucial role in negotiating the Treaty of Utrecht, which brought an end to the complex European conflict known as the War of the Spanish Succession. Indeed, Prior’s role in the supposedly secret
negotiations with Louis XIV was so well known that his colleagues in parliament took to calling the treaty ‘Matt’s Peace’. This term’s Library exhibition takes a detailed look at Prior’s surprising life and achievements, and attempts to piece together the puzzle of how one person – who at the age of 11 was pulled out of school and sent to work behind the bar in his uncle’s tavern – managed to rise to prominence in the competitive and capricious worlds of politics and poetry simultaneously. A thread common to both contexts, in the eighteenth century at least, was satire, and the exhibition showcases several irreverent publications that poked fun at the poetic establishment and stoked the fires of long-held political rivalries (whig versus tory, England versus France, and so on). A spotlight on a very large and handsomely produced volume of Prior’s poetry published in 1718/19 also reveals how he managed to become one of the only poets ever to have generated a fortune through the publication of lyrics and odes. While we would of course rather be welcoming visitors to the Exhibition Area in person, there are advantages to curating an exhibition solely for viewing online. Limitations imposed by the size and configuration of glass cases disappear, so we can display items that would otherwise prove unwieldy or impractical to move, such as gilt-framed portraits and enormous folios. We can show Image: Matthew Prior, Ambassador to France. Painted by AlexisSimon Belle (1713/14). Oil on canvas.