The Wit Of Seventeenth Century Poetry

As the twelve original essays collected in this volume demonstrate, to study the wit of seventeenth-century poetry is necessarily to address concerns at the very heart of the period's shifting literary culture. It is a topic that raises persistent questions of thematics and authorial intent, even as it interrogates a wide spectrum of cultural practices. These essays by some of the most renowned scholars in seventeenth-century studies illuminate important authors and engage issues of politics and religion, of secular and sacred love, of literary theory and poetic technique, of gender relations and historical consciousness, of literary history and social change, as well as larger concerns of literary production and smaller ones of local effects. Collectively, they illustrate the vitality of the topic, both in its own right and as a means of understanding the complexity and range of seventeenth-century English poetry.

John Donne and the Line of Wit: From Metaphysical to Modernist is a study of influence, adaptation, historical imitation and invention. In his own time, Donne was celebrated for his distinctive style, especially for what his contemporaries recognized as "strong lines," that is, witty conceits or unusual, often unexpected and surprising comparisons. Donne's "metaphysical wit" fell out of fashion in the later seventeenth century, not to be significantly explored and revived until the early twentieth century, and then notably by the modernist movement in the years that followed Eliot's Waste Land (1922).Among the most important - and earliest - of poets and critics to respond to this movement are the self-styled Fugitives of the southern United States. As "fugitives" they stood against what seemed old and shop-worn language, and they gave their name and talent to the literary journal published at Vanderbilt University from 1922-25: The Fugitive provided an outlet for the work of John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and others, who discovered a "new" modernism that might be shaped out of the "old" metaphysical mode of Donne. Their poetry is characteristically concerned with verbal or "metaphysical" invention, usually composed with metrical formality, and from an objective, detached point of view.

English Lyric Poetry is a comprehensive reassessment of lyric poetry of the early seventeenth century. The study is directed at both beginning and more advanced students of literature, and responds to more specialised scholarly inquiries pursued of late in relation to specific poets. This extremely lucid and elegantly written book avoids the limitations of much recent criticism. Donne, Jonson, the Spenserians, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Vaughan, as well as many non-canonical and women poets, all receive sustained, fresh, and detailed analysis. Jonathan Post seeks to assimilate many of the post-New Critical theoretical concerns with readings of the major and minor, male and female, authors of the period.

This work shows how seventeenth-century English lyric poets were able to control the way that their poetry sounds when read aloud, and thus to influence emotional force and meaning. It begins by criticizing the contemporary treatments of meter. It then gives a theoretical and descriptive account, based on Dwight Bolinger's analysis of English intonation, of how and why iambic pentameter uniquely permits a poet to achieve both a regular rhythm and an expressive variety in intonation. The rest of the book consists of close readings of poems by Surrey, Sidney, Donne, Jonson, Herbert, and others to show each poet controlling intonation to achieve his own voice and thus his relationship with an implied listener. The work concludes by discussing the changing cultural context at the end of the century in which witty, intimate utterances yielded to the more public voice of Dryden, Pope, and the Augustan heroic couplet. Now retired, John Cooper taught at Portland State University.

A collection of seventeenth-century English prose and poetry.

Alistair Fowler's celebrated anthology includes generous selections from the work of all the century's major poets, notably Donne, Jonson, Milton, Drayton, Herbert, Marvell, and Dryden. It strikes a balance between Metaphysical wit and intellect and Jonsonian simplicity, while also accommodating hitherto neglected popular verse. The result is a truer, more Catholic representation of seventeenth-century verse than any previous anthology.