Is There a Poet Laureate of the Anthropocene?
“Annihilating all that’s made/To a green thought in a green shade.”
–Andrew Marvell, 1681
Sometime in 1612, the genius dramatist, unofficial Poet Laurette, and all-around Falstaffian personality that was the writer Ben Jonson imagined a sort of epic voyage down London’s now-long-lost Fleet River. Jonson’s epic concerned neither the harrowing of hell, nor the loss of Paradise, or at least it didn’t do either in quite the manner that Dante had or that Milton would. Rather, Jonson envisioned the travails of his characters on this industrial Styx as less sacred and more profane, lacking transcendence but making up for it in the sheer fecundity of sewage that floated upon the canal that today flows underneath the bohemian environs of Camden Town, and whose tinkling can be heard through sewer grates in Clerkenwell.
In Jonson’s mock-epic “On the Famous Voyage,” the bucolic and pastoral have been replaced with offal and shit, where “Arses were heard to croak, instead of frogs,” and a thick crust called “Ycleped Mud” composed of excrement and refuse was known to bob like moss on the surface of the water. So disgusting are the noxious fumes from both commerce and latrine that Jonson’s fellow colleague, the poet Sir John Harrington, would write in his 1586 A New Discourse of a Stale Subject Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax that such smells “are two of those pains of Hell…and therefore I have endeavored in my poor buildings to avoid those two inconveniences as much as I may.” And so, at his manor of Kelston, he constructed the forerunner of the modern flushing toilet.
Conventions of pastoral poetry often had characters with names like Strephon and Chloe in repose upon halcyon shores; Jonson’s is rather a sort of anti-pastoral, one in keeping with the grime and dirt that increasingly defined his era. On the Fleet River, “The sinks ran grease, and hair of measled hogs, /The heads, houghs, entrails, and the hides of dogs.” Flowing from the center green of the city out to the Thames, the Fleet was polluted with the garbage of nascent industry, a slick, oily stream; a fetid and beshitted, offal-filled cesspool, made glistening with the rendering of animal fat and the corpses of dogs and cats. Notorious prisons like Ludgate and Newgate were on the banks of that now-subterranean river; plague-ridden slums filled with rural transplants clung to the brown shores of the Fleet.
In his delightful , social historian describes the privies that would have been in homes lining rivers like the Fleet:
