Robert Herrick, Victorian Poet: Christina Rossetti, George Meredith, and the Victorian Recovery of Hesperides. (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Language of Gaze in Robert Herrick\u27s Hesperides
2011
Robert Herrick's visual metaphors are the most powerful and yet the weakest. He attempts to capture the perspective of the subject but forever misses that position, as it is impossible to occupy the position of the subject and yet represent the subject through a gaze. In Hesperides, the lover's visual perception of the female form and his gaze of the beloved contradict each other creating not only an emotional tension but a psychological lure that escapes linguistic assimilation. The poet creates a persona who instead of expressing his satisfaction in his union with the beloved reveals his yearning for an unattainable ideal. In Hesperides the poet's gaze acts as an objet a, showing what the persona will always lack not what he can acquire in the foreseeabel future. The beloved is always moving along the emotional and visual meridian symbolizing a lack of all those attributes in the persona that she possesses. The persona's gaze functions as an unconscious invocation to the beloved to satisfy his desire with the full knowledge that between his gaze and what we actually sees is an illusion a lure that only dazzles the senses. This lure cannot be contained within the institution of marriage. And obviously both the perception and the gaze in Hesperides are intrinsically connected to Herrick's own understanding of the Anglican values, the representation of women, the reinterpretation of the mannerist tradition in poetry and his allegiance to the pollitical ideology of the times.
'Heaven and Hell in Robert Herrick's Body of Work,'
This essay examines the prominent treatment of the body in the published works of Robert Herrick. Leaving behind the mere cataloguing of body features in Petrarchan imitations (so characteristic of Elizabethan poetry) Herrick deals not just with limbs and members but with the functional aspects of the parts of the body. This essay offers a reading of the volume of Herrick's works (which included both Hesperides and Noble Numbers) as part of the overall pattern that is focused on the physical body as it is represented in his verses. Further, rejecting the critical tendency to treat the divine poems of Noble Numbers as an entirely separate collection (albeit bound together with Hesperides), it argues that to be fully understood and appreciated the volume as a whole requires reading as a composite like the body and the soul, or as Herrick refers to the two parts a ‘Hell’ and a ‘Heaven’.
2018
Hester Pulter’s (1605-1678) work was discovered in 1996 in the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds. Pulter composed her poetry in the 1640s-1650s, but her works were not compiled until the 1660s. Overall, her manuscript contains one hundred and twenty poems and emblems in addition to an unfinished prose romance. Pulter recalls her personal life in her poems, and the collection includes her elegiac and lyrical poems on different topics such as politics, religion, childbirth, and the death of her children. In her elegiac poetry, Pulter explores of the experience of childbirth and sickness through a set of conventional Christian ideas about death. However, Pulter’s elegiac poetry also breaks away from Christian conventions, often through the use of astronomical imagery. In this thesis, I argue that Pulter’s grief and consolation strategies sometimes differ from her contemporaries; however, she eventually finds consolation using imagery drawn from her knowledge of the new astr...
Modern Philology
This is the first book-length study by a single author to consider the full range of Hecht's production (not actually the first book, as stated in the blurb, since in 1989 Norman German published a work entitled Anthony Hecht). The author is undoubtedly the person best suited to the task. Jonathan F. S. Post is the editor of the crucial Selected Letters (2013), and is also a widely respected Shakespearean and seventeenth-century scholar, which is no slight asset when dealing with so learned and allusive a poet as Hecht. The title of Post's book comes, as he tells us in his preface, from the dramatic monologue "A Transparent Man," in which a dying woman talks about the view from her window, and wonders "how to deal / With such a thickness of particulars, / Deal with it faithfully, you understand, / Without blurring the issues" (xiii). Post declares that he takes this sentence "to be not a dissuasive but a call, a credo, applicable to poet and critic alike, and also, of course, a warning about the difficulty of getting things right" (xiii). Perhaps one of the first things a critic has to get right when dealing with a poet as complex and varied as Hecht (one small example of this variety is the simple fact that in his early books he rarely uses the same metrical or stanzaic form twice) is the structure of the book: Do you follow the poet's career chronologically or do you bundle together themes, forms, genres or images? On the one hand, there is the fact that there is a clear development in Hecht's works from the "highly polished, stylistically inventive" (20) poems of his first collection, A Summoning of Stones (1954; never re-Modern Philology, volume 115, number 2.
Englands Helicon: Epideixis, Complaint, and Escapism
Ben Jonson Journal, 2002
Englands Helicon, an anthology of 159 pastoral poems published in London in 1600, with a second edition in 1614, contains some of the most interesting pastoral poetry of its age. It provides the modern reader with a fascinating glimpse into the complex desires, fears and fantasies of the Elizabethan pastoral poets, writers whose poetry addresses and revolves around the court and the Queen at its center. Surprisingly little scholarly attention has been paid to this anthology. When it is mentioned in recent work, it is usually as a typical example of the decorative, flattering "pastoral of power" by which gentlemen ¬poets promoted both official Elizabethan ideology and their own social status. A closer look at the poems and their intriguing introduction reveals, however, that intertwined with the voice of political epideixis are other, contrasting voices. Rather than being a straightforward example of the use of poetry for political mystification, Englands Helicon is multivocal and multivalent. The anthology contributes to the politically invaluable "Cult of Elizabeth" but concurrently undermines it with the revelation of the anxieties that it creates, and in addition expresses some striking strategies for resisting it. Here I will take a necessarily brief look at the unstable borderline between epideixis and complaint, praise and anxiety, in Englands Helicon, and describe one of the central strategies of resistance which emerges from the dialectic - the escapist fantasy.
Poetic Theory and Practice in Early Modern Verse: Unwritten Arts
2023
How did ideas about the poet’s art surface in early modern texts? By looking into the intersections between poetry, poetics and other discourses – logic, rhetoric, natural philosophy, medicine, mythography or religion – the essays in this volume unearth notions that remained largely unwritten in the official literary criticism of the period. Focusing on questions of poetry’s origins and style, and exploring individual responses to issues of authenticity, career design, difficulty, or inspiration, this collection revisits and renews the critical lexicons that connect poetic theory and practice in early modern English texts and their European contexts. Reading canonical poets and critics – Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Puttenham, Dryden – alongside less studied figures such as Henry Constable, Barnabe Barnes, Thomas Lodge, Aemilia Lanyer, Fulke Greville or George Chapman, this book extends the coordinates for a dialogue between literary practice and the Renaissance theories from which they stemmed and which they helped to outgrow.
Antiquarian poetry and royal performance
Early Modern Genres of History, 2024
In 1749, King Frederik V visited Norway, the northernmost part of his kingdom. It was a short journey, restricted to southeastern Norway and accomplished in a couple of weeks. From Christiania (present-day Oslo), the King travelled to Kongsberg to inspect the silver mines. He also visited the cities of Fredrikstad and Fredrikshald with their fortresses before returning to Denmark. En route, he was celebrated by his loyal subjects and shown all the tributes worthy of a monarch. The King himself is nonetheless reported to have been mostly interested in gambling and in the theatrical company that he had brought with him for his entertainment. 1 When the royal entourage stopped at Hokksund in Eiker on its way to Kongsberg, the vicar Christian Grawe welcomed the King with a poem of his own composition. It bore the title Salve & Vale-Prisca & nova Egerana (Hail and Farewell-Ancient and New Eiker). In 55 four-lined stanzas and with a large array of footnotes, Grawe delivered a description of the parish with numerous antiquarian details. When the poem appeared in print some months later, he could sign it not only as a vicar but also with his newly acquired title: professor antiqvitatis patriae. In the present world, poetry is not often used to communicate research results or to document scientific work. In the early modern period, on the other hand, as the present volume abundantly shows, historical writing employed a wide range of genres and forms. During the same period, literary forms were also used to discuss natural philosophy and the findings of natural history, even if such expressions long have been overlooked in the history of science. 2 The heyday for this type of literature was the seventeenth century. The genre to which Grawe's poem more particularly belongs, topographic descriptive poetry, was established during the same period, developing into romantic landscape poetry in the subsequent century. 3 The aim of this chapter is to look into the specific "genre of historical writing" that Grawe chose for conveying his topographical and antiquarian knowledge about the parish: The poem with footnotes. The first part of this chapter will examine the poem and the knowledge it presents. What does it tell us about Grawe's historical and antiquarian work? And how did he make the rhymed stanzas and their apparatus of notes serve as tools for historical
Manuscript Verse Collectors and the Politics of Anti-Courtly Love Poetry
Oxford University Press; Oxford Scholarship Online, 2009
When he copied poems into his notebook, a student of St. John's College, Cambridge preserved a wealth of texts that have come to characterize the English Renaissance. He also, however, collected verses that make this famous literary period appear strange. In only the Wrst few surviving leaves of his anthology, for instance, he oVered an unfamiliar account of Elizabethan love poetry, in which lyrics from the royal court sharply contrast, even as they resonate with, erotic verse. In the Wrst remaining text that he transcribed, Queen Elizabeth I regrets that she scorned her many suitors when she 'was fayre and younge and fauour graced' her.1 The series of Nicholas Breton's pastoral works that immediately follows the queen's poem features a song that was actually sung for her on progress, and which she liked so well that she ordered a repeat performance.2 In Breton's lyric, the shepherdess Phillida at Wrst