Early Modern Poetry Research Articles

"Cease, Be Dumb and Mute:" George Herbert's Ars Moriendi and the Poetics of Self-Discipline

Abstract: This essay explores how George Herbert's poetry frames apocalypticism in terms of personal mortality to strengthen individual practices of obedience and passivity in one's daily habits. By bringing together the science of daily devotion in the ars moriendi tradition and the imaginative resources of poetry and rhetoric, Herbert's verses locate the site of politics in the management and maintenance of practical, everyday affects. These intersections between early modern poetry and religion render habits of self-discipline in service of political passivity and quiescence, encouraging readers to practice obeying forces larger than oneself—even upon the destabilizing extremities of existential finitude.

REMINISCENCES OF PROFANUM AND SACRUM IN THE POETICS OF SERHII ZHADAN

The article examines the transformation of sacred and profane motifs in Serhii Zhadan’s creative work. In particular, a comparative analysis of early poems and modern poetry was carried out. The key sacred and profane images are revealed, which acquire a new meaning in the author’s authentic reading. Philosophical and intimate lyrics resonate with the Bible and profane space as a canvas of being. Serhii Zhadan’s early poems are full of hope and love and retain a fractal structure. The poet's modern poems illustrate the artist’s maturity and poise. On the other hand, modern Zhadan becomes more straightforward and uncompromising. Sacrum and profanum are not always opposite, but always complementary concepts in Serhii Zhadan’s work. Today, Serhii Zhadan addresses not only his contemporaries, but also the dead and the unborn, as Taras Shevchenko once did. The figure of Serhii Zhadan should be considered comprehensively through the prism of his activities. After all, volunteering and participation in a large number of public initiatives with the aim of enlightenment, the revival of the Ukrainian nation not only affects the artist's creativity, but also brings him to the forefront of the cultural and military front.

“Damn the Empire!”: Imperial Excess, National Nostalgia, and Metaphysical Modernism in the Poetics of Parade’s End

Ford Madox Ford famously intended his First World War tetralogy Parade’s End to have “for its purpose the obviating of all future wars”. But why do we engage in war to begin with? Modernist literature provides some provocative explanations. Ford’s Sylvia Tietjens, for example, proclaims that “You went to war when you desired to rape innumerable women. It was what war was for”. And in the very same year, Virginia Woolf’s shell-shocked Septimus Smith “went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare…” I argue that Ford’s understanding of the causality of war involves a strange combination of these two explanations in Parade’s End’s triangulation of seventeenth-century English literary tradition along with sexual and imperial conquest. While countless modernist novels exhibit a sensibility to the power of early modern poetry amidst battle, Parade’s End displays a particularly emphatic and extended focus on the relationship between poetic tradition and war. Soldiers of various ranks “talk…in intimate undertones about the resemblances between the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean sonnet form”, host timed sonnet competitions in the trenches, recurringly quote the seduction poetry of Marvell, and fantasize about George Herbert’s lifespan being “the only satisfactory age in England…yet what chance had it today? Or, still more, to-morrow?”. To answer this question, my own transtemporal study will use early modern scholarship to investigate seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry’s dual power to inspire and potentially obviate war. Much has been written on this tetralogy’s anti-linear plot but less on the broader temporality of its politico-literary vision. I contend that the metaphysical allusions of this text help Ford to show us the complexities of nationalism in the imperial conquest and imperial damnation that (early) modern aesthetics can catalyse.

“How we can make use of any verse in common life”: the place and function of early modern poetry in literary culture

ABSTRACT From the sixteenth century onwards, those education institutions that were humanistic by rhetoric turned to a basic education in poetry, teaching the use of verse in everyday life. Initially, this was related to ancient verse and its meaning, then was transferred to Neo-Latin poetry and to German (vernacular) verse, thereby transforming literary culture. On this basis, the role of poetry in literary culture in the Baltics is shown using three examples: the late humanistic literary culture of Riga in the 1580s, mainly in Latin; the literary culture in Reval (Tallinn) around fifty years later, much more influenced by German-language poetry; and finally, German poems in love letters of that time, showing the application and function of verse in the private space.

Rhythmic Counterpoints

Various approaches to rhythm or poetry have presented impediments to the theorisation and study of poetic rhythm. These include choices regarding the etymology of rhythm, the dismissal of relations between music and poetry, and the tendencies to see rhythm either as contrary to metre or conflated with it. This essay explores options and alternatives that enable understandings of rhythm in accord with our experience of music and poetry. A consideration of the affinities and comparability of both arts reveals viable entryways into poetic rhythm, including the practices of early modern poetry, particularly in Spanish.

Revisiting Places: Can We Still Be Early Modern? Keynote Address, Early Modern French Conference of the Society for Early Modern French Studies, 5–7 July 2022, St Andrews

This article articulates the places of early modern poetry with contemporary eco-theories. Mobilising the connectivities of οικος rather than the separations of environment, the author traces ecological senses of place in the poetry of Du Bellay, Jacques Peletier, and Ronsard, and reclaims Renaissance humanism from posthumanist detractors. Humanist pastoral poetry manifests the sense of connection claimed as the purview of contemporary concepts such as naturecultures or transcorporeality. Renaissance place, as an ecological habit of thought, contrasts favourably with modern veneration of wilderness which separates human from environs. The conclusion suggests continuities between Renaissance humanism and our academic humanities inasmuch as they privilege relational, rather than acquisitive or extractive, value systems. The text is a modified version of the keynote address to the 2022 SEMFS Conference and contains references to some of the papers presented in the spirit of archiving that stimulating intellectual space.

Harrison, Timothy M. Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England

Harrison, Timothy M. <i>Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England</i>

The Aesthetic of Transgression: Love and Limits in the Early Work of James Joyce

Abstract: This essay draws on Georges Bataille's notion of "transgression" to argue for a distinctive "aesthetic of transgression" in Joyce's writing. Bataille theorizes a dialectical transgression where the punishment it calls forth operates as a regulatory force, reinstituting the taboo and apparently cancelling the force of transgression. Joyce initially understands transgression non-dialectically, as the violation of a preexisting taboo punishable by the law, but his early writing gradually overcomes this by developing a dialectical transgression—an act of going beyond the limit that is simultaneously recontained within the limit. Joyce pursues this by thinking through the "allegory of love" he inherits from medieval and early modern poetry. He reconceives the allegory into scenes of incompletely disclosed erotic encounters: they represent acts of transgression and fail to represent them adequately, mystifying transgression even as it is being revealed. Joyce's transition to this more complex understanding of transgression is read into "A Portrait of the Artist," the relationship with Emma in Stephen Hero , and the incompletely disclosed erotic encounter in chapter XXV of Stephen Hero . Some examples are given of how scenes of transgressive sexuality are represented in Ulysses . The persistence of such scenes is used to argue for a distinctive aesthetics of transgression in Joyce's writing.

Fictions of Human Nature in Early Modern Poetry and Philosophy

Fictions of Human Nature in Early Modern Poetry and Philosophy

Revisiting the Question of Literary Patronage under the Early Safavids

Abstract This article reviews an old debate in Persian literary history surrounding the judgment of early modern poetry and, in particular, the legacy of the Safavid dynasty, and argues that a few of the questions over which scholars once disagreed have not been resolved to the extent that might be suspected. The general narrative that prevailed for most of the twentieth century, in which Persian lyric poetry of the early modern era was criticized as decadent and the Safavids were denounced for having abandoned their traditional duty to promote arts and letters, is now rightly considered obsolete. As the field has developed a more mature approach to these issues, however, the question of patronage at the Safavid court has been set aside more than it has been settled. We still have not reached a comprehensive understanding of the transformations that took place in Persian literary culture from the tenth/sixteenth century onward. The migration of scores of Iranian poets to Mughal India is recognized as a key development, but the impact of the contemporary situation in Safavid lands – including, perhaps, a relative lack of patronage – merits reconsideration.

The Communicative Function of Performative Ekphrasis, the Anagram Riddle and Proverbial Sayings in John Donne’s Poetic Diptych

This essay takes a communication-oriented approach to selected early modern English poetry. It presents a textual analysis of John Donne’s elegy The Anagram, related to the earlier observations concerning his elegy The Comparison, and reveals its multi-generic patterns as well as certain thematic and structural relations between these poems. It thus argues, on textually substantiated grounds, that these elegies may be regarded as a poetic diptych which utilizes features and functions of various forms of communication, associated with literature, visual arts, popular entertainment and folk wisdom. The argument continued in this essay is that Donne draws on the 15/16th-century experimental artistic trend recognized in the particular paintings attributed to B. Passarotti and Q. Massys and appears to superimpose text onto the earlier provided images. The comparative analysis of Donne’s elegies suggests he brings together different reference objects and his poetic message presupposes the addressee’s interaction: certain cognitive and creative processes. By presenting Donne’s ekphrasis as evolving from descriptive to performative, this essay indicates the need to further investigate early modern poetry, by means of interdisciplinary tools, for its references to other arts and, more generally, for its communicative potential.

Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England

Making the Miscellany: Poetry, Print, and the History of the Book in Early Modern England

A Mind of Her Own: Women's Interiority in the Middle English and Older Scots Pastourelles

The pastourelle achieved what might be called its classic form in Middle French poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: a mini-narrative in which the narrator, a knight or clerk, tells how he tried to have his will with a lower-class girl he happened upon while riding in the country. He greets her, sweet-talks her, and propositions her; she protests vigorously. Sometimes the debate ends here. Otherwise, her accoster overcomes her resistance by guile or force, and sexually assails her. The tone is light-hearted and cynical, the action crude. To modern readers, this narrative may be mildly amusing, rather tedious, or downright offensive. In Britain, however, where pastourelles are later and far fewer in number, the genre is handled more variously. This study examines thirteen poems that can be regarded as pastourelles, five in Middle English and eight in in Middle Scots. In contrast to the French model, where interiority, such as there is, involves the male perspective, the pastourelles composed in English or Scots give substance to the woman’s side of the debate. Whether or not she emerges as the victor in the encounter, her perspective is presented in thought-provoking and challenging ways, and becomes the most important contribution of the insular pastourelle corpus to medieval and early modern poetry.

The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture by Susan Stewart

Reviewed by: The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture by Susan Stewart Jeanne M. Britton Susan Stewart, The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2019). Pp. 368; 11 color illus., 80 halftones. $35.00 cloth. Susan Stewart’s The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture is an ambitious journey through the visual and literary culture of architectural ruins. Along the way, ancient and early modern poetry mingles with archaeological detail, “ruined” women confront architectural decay, and Romanticism seems to find its truest origins in Rome. The primary destination, though, is what Stewart refers to as the “ruins print,” a vital and vibrant combination of medium and genre in which archaeology, tourism, pilgrimage, and visual thinking coalesce. The master of this genre—and the star of this expansive book—is Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778). Stewart approaches Western artworks “as paradigmatic of conflicts between beliefs and practices involving materialism and value” (xiii). Her chapters offer an insightful, surprising retelling of the historical narrative in which architectural remains, especially Roman, are plundered or neglected for centuries, then objects of pilgrimage and sources of knowledge, later the foundation for artistic inspiration, and eventually representations not of the past or its aesthetics but a new value of interiority. Throughout, the material of artistic production plays a central role, whether it is the tufa of the ancient Roman builder or the copper of the eighteenth-century printmaker. The material aspects of printmaking—itself “an art of inscribing stone and other mineral surfaces” that “involves the erosion and [End Page 253] eventual destruction of the work’s own material” (38)—make it, more than painting, the appropriate medium for the representation of ruins. As each pressing of a copper plate wears down the malleable metal, “[p]rintmaking is indeed,” Stewart notes, itself “a process of ruination” (122). Matter and form take equal weight and perform equal conceptual work throughout her chapters, and while the ruin as a subject supports such an approach, it does not guarantee its success or clarity, which must be attributed to Stewart’s masterful readings that move seamlessly across languages, genres, and eras. The book is organized thematically and chronologically across eight chapters. The introduction establishes the connections between ruins and language that guide the volume’s approach to visual and literary works of art, noting that ruins “call for the supplement of further reading, further syntax” (2). The following chapter, “Matter: This Ruined Earth,” considers the material foundations of ruins alongside their abstract significance and touches on Goethe’s Faust, Vergil’s Aeneid, Hebrew scriptures, and the Tower of Babel. While ruins expose the construction methods of the ancient Romans, they also generate new perspectival views and disturb boundaries between interior and exterior, between transparency and opacity. “Marks: Inscription and Spolia” expands on the syntax that ruins summon by considering pagan and Christian uses of ancient remains in a wide range of classical and early modern texts before a section on the frequency of ruins in nativity scenes. In the following chapter, “Mater: Nymphs, Virgins, and Whores—On the Ruin of Women,” a striking effect of Stewart’s thematic structure is the connection between “Matter” and “Mater,” between building materials and maternity, and above all between the ruined building and the ruined woman. This connection initially seems somewhat strained but is strengthened in her discussions of a number of themes. Virginity and prostitution feature prominently in ruins narratives; the downfall of many a city is linked to promiscuity; architectural ruins are often the background for figures of human ruination. Most provocatively, she considers connections between the significance of the feminine and the reproducibility of the print, and in particular the etymological link between the Latin “matrix” [womb, source, origin] and “mater” [mother], in the following chapter (“Matrix: Humanism and the Rise of the Ruins Print”). In the context of copper-plate engraving, the “matrix”—the metal sheet from which a print is made—is a source of prolific aesthetic and imaginative reproduction. The second half of the book proceeds from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. “Model: The Architectural Imaginary” takes up the ruin as neoclassical model and (proto-) Romantic...

Sigmund von Birken, der Literaturbetrieb, Netzwerke und Werkpolitik

Abstract Sigmund von Birken belongs to the »Trio of poets from Nürnberg«, together with Georg Philipp Harsdörffer and Johann Klaj whose posthumous fame is mainly due to their pastoral poetry with fullsounding verses in praise of peace and love. Birken started his career with an enormous upshot as organizer of multi-media spectacles during the peace ceremony in Nürnberg in 1650. Apart from his hymns and pastoral love poems, Birken’s poetry does not belong to the canon of early modern literature in Germany. If he had lived longer, he would probably have edited later all those poems which he had written on demand for special occasions and immediately published as separate brochures or leaflets in at least four huge volumes. He would have properly arranged love poems, odes in praise of friendship, poems dedicated to noblemen and civilians, hymns and secular songs, starting like his famous predecessors with his Latin verses. This ambitious publication project is outlined in his manuscript collections, but was not realized during Birken’s lifetime. To correct for this oversight, the commented edition of Birken’s complete poetic manuscripts, which was recently finished by Hartmut Laufhütte, gives a broad impression of his talents as a playful virtuoso in all kinds of genres, teacher of poetry, advisor, ›ghostwriter‹ and promotor of young poets, male and female alike. His diaries and correspondence account for his enormous productivity and versatility, thus enabling modern readers to watch him during the creative procedure more closely than any other German poet of his time. The edition of Birken’s manuscripts is on the same scale as a few other recently completed long term editions of early modern German ego-documents and poetry and sets high standards for further editions.

News, Programs, Publications, and Awards

News, Programs, Publications, and Awards

Early modern poetry in transcript: A bardic miscellany

Early modern poetry in transcript: <i>A bardic miscellany</i>

Translation and Transformission; or, Early Modernity in Motion

Translation and Transformission; or, Early Modernity in Motion A. E. B. Coldiron Just walk into virtually any Renaissance document, and it is liable to open in its own small ways into multiplicity, into non-identity with itself. By attending to such examples of text’s [sic] mis-self-representation, we can gauge something of what I call its “transformission”—how it was transformed as it was transmitted. (And since we don’t have texts that aren’t transmitted, transformission should cover most everything.) (Random Clod 246) The concept of “transformission,” created by Randall McLeod, does indeed “cover most everything.” It proves broadly generative for studying early modernity and is especially applicable to early modern translations, as the essays in this issue demonstrate. The most direct contribution of the idea of transformission to translation studies is procedural: when looking at translations, we should look also at changes made to their material texts. The idea of transformission, however, originated in textual studies and editorial theory, and those origins help us understand its special relevance to translation studies. This Foreword to a special issue on transformission and translation first considers briefly the textual origins of the idea of transformission, particularly examining how the perennial problem of variant versions can be reimagined through the lens of transformission and related textual-studies concepts. From there, the idea of transformission connects readily to translation studies: translations, after all, are variant versions of a work, and they, too, are transformed when transmitted. Transformission asks us in particular to consider material textuality [End Page 205] as a co-factor in translation, concomitant with verbal or linguistic factors. The idea of transformission helps us keep an eye on process, on exactly how material texts convey a translation’s meanings, and it helps us attend differently to difference as a factor in the construction of meaning. In a final stretch, we might also connect the Heraclitean idea of transformission to changes in cosmography and historiography that have long been identified with early modernity/Renaissance. McLeod’s foundational and often hilarious essay “Information on Information,” like his longer, vivid essay “Obliterature” and other works, uses the facts of textual variation to intervene in several arguments in textual studies, such as the surprisingly stubborn ones around a so-called “fixity of print.” In textual studies, the idea of transformission can in part be understood as a sensible, enlightened extension of the work of D. F. McKenzie: if the material text uniquely inflects, shapes, or even constructs the meaning of the work it conveys, as McKenzie established, then in transmission, any other text(s) of that work will inflect, shape, or construct different meaning(s) of it. This is most obviously true of re-mediations, works that are born in one medium and reappear in another, such as transcriptions of spoken texts, or manuscripts put into print, or digitizations. In such cases of re-mediation, it is easy to see McLeod’s point that when a text is transmitted, it is necessarily transformed. It is also easy, and useful, to bring other concepts in to play with the idea of transformission. For example, Wai-Chee Dimock’s idea of resonance would apply when considering, say, mise-en-page as an instrument of transformission in early modern poetry; Walter Ong’s theories of orality and residue would apply in discussing transcriptions of spoken words or written accounts of performances as transformissions; and Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura, advanced in a 1935 essay, would apply when examining transformissions from script to print. (This notion might also apply to transformissions from print to script, as in the case of early modern commonplace books or other manuscripts copied from printed books; my question would then be, “can aura be reinscribed in transformission?”) McLeod, however, at least when writing as a material-bibliographer, seems more interested in cases of non-re-mediated transformission (i.e., of texts reiterated within the same medium, such as re-editions, reprints, or copies). Most modern readers assume such texts are identical, just as they too often assume that there should be equivalence, fidelity, or even identity between a translation and its prior foreign text. Whether or not re-mediation is involved...

Mere Meter: A Revised History of English Poetry

This article tells the long history of poetry's relation to music and religion through the story of common meter in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Combining a new formalist sensibility of the text together with the more recent theories developed by the New Lyric studies, it aims to correct a critical coding of early modern poetry that distinguishes popular--as verse, meter, doggerel, rhyme--from elite, "literary" poetic production, despite its best-known poet, Thomas Sternhold, being a member of elite court circles. Enabled by a blinkered focus on a so-called "purely literary" poetic heritage routed through Tottel's Miscellany, the history of the sound of post-medieval English poetry has relied on divorcing it from its origins in musical church practices. Taking up the examples of Thomas Wyatt and George Herbert and then turning to Thomas Hardy and George Eliot's depictions of the nineteenth-century schism in church musical practices, this essay reveals how writers at once depended upon the common meter of Sternhold and John Hopkins while increasingly insisting upon an emerging literary elite at a distance from such metered rhyme.

Love’s Wounds: Violence and the Politics of Poetry in Early Modern Europe. By Cynthia N. Nazarian

This compelling and elegantly argued monograph contends that expression of unrequited love in Petrarch’s Rime sparse enabled poets of Renaissance France and England to craft a rhetoric of plight that questioned cultural, religious, and political authority. Posing as secular martyrs, poets deployed strategies of abjection to shape their lyric. Portraying themselves in distress, they sought what Cynthia N. Nazarian calls ‘countersovereignty’: subject positions that use parrhesia, unabashed and courageous address, to endow lyric with power and political mettle. Petrarch’s rhetoric of unrequited love addressed political and religious conflict. He and his followers sought less to overturn sovereign authority than to situate themselves in ‘an oppositional state of exception’ (p. 4). French and English poets in his wake shaped shorter verse, notably the sonnet, into arenas of struggle, contention, and contradiction. Chapter 1 shows how Petrarch feigned misery and lament to address political strife in Provence and Italy at the time of the Papal schism. The wretched persona of the Rime sparse (ten redactions, 1342–74) becomes a model for Maurice Scève’s Délie (1544), in which the speaker or implied subject martyrs himself in adulation of his beloved in order to reify (or commodify) her in the name of what Scève called an ‘object of the highest virtue’. Reading like ‘measured stutters’ (p. 57), the dizains occasionally use abjection to draw attention to the omnipotence of the monarch at the moment when Henri II and Catherine de’ Medici rise to power. Chapter 2 studies the ‘rhetoric of anxiety’ (p. 75) in Joachim Du Bellay’s synchronous Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse and the 115 sonnets of L’Olive (1549). Praise of imitation in the former implicitly makes a case for the art of borrowing and theft of Petrarchan forms which define the latter. Chapter 3 juxtaposes themes of martyrdom in Agrippa d’Aubigné’s early (unpublished) Hécatombe à Diane with the victims of Catholic depredations in his epic, Les Tragiques (1615). What had been the lover’s martyred body in the early verse later becomes the nation bloodied and dismembered by the Wars of Religion. Chapter 4 establishes ‘a deep intergenre consanguinity’ (p. 181) between Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti (1595) and the Faerie Queene (1590). Petrarchan codes are adapted to address the state of the monarchy under Elizabeth I. As in the sonnet sequences in L’Olive and L’Hécatombe, interwoven expression of abjection and subjection suggests that reasoned countersovereignty implies a need for proto-democratic checks and balances. Focusing on Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), the Conclusion shows how the comic poems, oscillating between tragedy and farce, mock the tactics that had defined Petrarchan rhetoric. Wounded subjects and bleeding bodies become signs of ever-renewed agency. To sum up: this volume is a vital, timely, and instructive engagement with early modern poetry and its will to power.