Sir Philip Sidney's Psalms, the Sixteenth-Century Psalter, and the Nature of Lyric

Abstract

To describe critically the sixteenth-century religious lyric, and to integrate it with the contemporary amatory poetry: these challenges are perhaps as perennial as any other major issue touching Renaissance English literature. Because of the generality or indifference with which the topic has been treated, many readers find that to step from sixteenth- to seventeenth-century devotional poetry in English is to enter a climate of poetic quality and critical rigor for which, it seems, there is little precedent: we often seem to lack a clearly articulated idea of what sixteenth-century devotional poets, many of whom are also the most influential profane poets of the age, were trying to accomplish through their divine lyrics, and of how their concerns might be seen as continuous with those of later writers. Building on the extant studies of historical and doctrinal elements in this body of work, how might we undertake to recuperate our understanding of its generic identity as lyric? In its many translations and adaptations over the sixteenth century, the Book of Psalms is central to the development of the age's religious lyric. It belongs with Petrarch's Rime sparse as a master text through which the writers of the age tested their capacities, in this case not only as worshippers and theologians but as poets and critics. I would like to suggest that if we thoroughly investigated the sixteenth-century uses of the Psalter, we would likely find that poets adapt it to a thoroughgoing critical and experimental impulse. Their Psalters stand for a range of positions as to the nature and potentialities of lyric discourse. It might be argued that