Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry. By Wendy Beth Hyman

Abstract

When Thomas Carew’s speaker urges Celia to “reap our joys / Ere time such goodly fruit destroys,” it’s not hard to guess what this poem is up to. That’s because Carew was working with a script so formulaic it could be the subject of a quiz entitled “How to tell if you’re in a carpe diem lyric”: (1) You’re a virgin; (2) A male acquaintance is urging you to pick flowers; (3) Time’s wingèd chariot is purring in the background. The astonishing achievement of Wendy Beth Hyman’s Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry, then, is to undo everything we thought we knew about the carpe diem genre. Without denying its scriptedness, Hyman argues that lyrics like Carew’s “Persuasion to Enjoy” or Marvell’s notorious “To His Coy Mistress” are more than witty pickup lines with a classical pedigree. Instead, their injunctions to “make much of time”...