The Development of the English Love Lyric, 1580-1680

Abstract

This essay was runner-up in the 2005 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Renaissance Section. In the classical and Petrarchan love lyrics’ depiction of the relationship between the desiring lover and his normatively scornful beloved, early modern poets discovered a vehicle for exploring the English social and political order as well as the boundaries between tradition and innovation. As poets from Philip Sidney onward discovered, the social, political, and gender hierarchization of early modern society could be rehearsed as well as confronted in the symbolic staging of a relationship between dominant and submissive parties of opposite sexes. At the same time, the deep enmeshment of the love lyric in the humanist practice of imitatio engendered an abiding reverence for past models while simultaneously urging authors to achieve poetic independence. In the verse of writers like Philip Sidney, John Donne, Mary Wroth, Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace, and the Earl of Rochester, the interplay between the changing structures of English life and the individual's relation to those structures is registered in a dialectical engagement between modern verse and its models in a movement paralleling the interactions between the fictive lovers who form its subject matter.