EDITORIAL

Abstract

Welcome to the 2011 Spring issue of English in which we offer fare for every reader's taste, ranging from the work of an early modern female poet, Aemilia Lanyer, to the influence on contemporary poetics of Woody Guthrie. The first article by Vassiliki Markidou focuses upon one of the poems gathered together in Lanyer's collection Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum published in the first decade of the reign of James Stuart on the English throne in 1611. This collection has enjoyed increasing critical attention since the 1980s. Earlier in the century, A. L. Rowse had speculated that Lanyer was in fact the ‘dark lady’ of Shakespeare's Sonnets. However, in recent decades, it is Lanyer's poetics, rather than speculative biographism, which has been uppermost in scholarly discussions. Markidou acknowledges that Lanyer is being awarded the crown of bays by many critics for having published the first country-house poem in English. Nonetheless, Markidou concentrates in her discussion upon the dynamic concept of home and non-home in Lanyer's poem ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’, drawing sustenance from the theorist Theano Terkenli's discussion of the same. Richly sensitive to the dynamics of location and dislocation, topographical and affective space, in Lanyer's poetic narrative, Markidou unveils a hitherto neglected line of vision upon myths of belonging being evoked with reference to one of the Great Houses (or rather Households) of the Jacobean period. Tim Morris maintains reader interest in the seventeenth century, but transports us to a Britain wracked by civil wars some thirty years later. Like Markidou, Morris also asks us to attend to the textuality of poetry, rather than biographical enquiry. Moreover, instead of rehearsing Abraham Cowley's familiar profile as a poet of erotic rapture, Morris concentrates upon the ways in which the tactics of amorous persuasion contained in the 1647 collection The Mistress may be seen to inform our understanding of the much wider cultural obsession in this period of bitter political divisions with subterfuge, security and textual encoding. In time of war, most particularly civil war, enormous energies are inevitably focused upon the laying bare of secrets, and indeed the creative (read, propagandist) production of secrets for wider consumption. If Morris identifies ‘the exhaustion of a discourse’ of erotics in The Mistress, he makes an equally persuasive case that we should return our attentions to a society with a consuming interest in ciphers and furtive exchange in order to appreciate fully Cowley's poetic undertaking.