The Early Modern Lyric: A Literary Wilderness of World Literature

Abstract

This article explores several aspects of the early modern poetic tradition as an antidote to presentism in comparative and world literature studies. A passage from Giovanni Battista Pigna’s Renaissance synthesis of Aristotelian and Horatian poetics is used to comment on comparative readings in general. This is followed by close readings of two dream poems by the early modern Italian Giovanni Aurelio Augurello and the modernist Spanish poet Antonio Machado, both of which relate to Renaissance literary traditions in different ways. Two different agonistic poems, one by Pierre-Daniel Huet and one attributed to a Frisian folk hero, are also subject to analysis in order to explore how the process of historical selection reshapes the literary corpus and subjugates certain types of writing to neglect.