Seventeenth-century Poems Research Articles

Swarming Bees and Floating Signifiers in Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies

ABSTRACT Margaret Cavendish’s seventeenth-century poem, “The Head of Man Compared to a Hive of Bees,” calls attention to the position of honeybees as floating signifiers in literature. In her short poem, she creates simile after simile, comparing bees to physiological, political, social, and literary concerns. Bees appear to be mere similes, divorced from their “real,” natural state, but Cavendish’s poem in fact reveals the fraught nature of bee similes. The lived reality of honeybees is a secondary concern to poets, Cavendish’s poem implies, for bees are more important as recognizable and polysemous symbols than as creatures with their own experiences and needs.

The Redemption of the Theological Ideal in the Baroque: An Analysis of Donne, Herbert, and Marvell’s Poetry

The baroque is a term that its meaning, apart from its etymology, is not by any means clear. There are a lot of inconsistencies in the descriptions which have been given of the characteristics of baroque art. One of such disagreements is regarding the kind of mentality that it supposedly represents. Whereas a lot of critics—if not the majority of them—seem to believe that baroque art represents the kind of mind that was overwhelmed by existential fears, Gilles Deleuze represents the baroque subject as being capable of resolving such fears. He believes that baroque artists and philosophers were able to redeem the theological ideal, or the idea that the world is meaningful. They did so, he explains, by inventing new principles that were capable of proving that the world is perfectly harmonious despite the existence of evil. The aim of this study is to establish a correlation between, and provide new readings of, some major seventeenth-century poems, namely Donne’s “Anniversaries,” Herbert’s “Virtue” and Marvell’s “The Garden,” by showing that they indicate a struggle to save the theological ideal, or to prove that the world is perfectly harmonious–which is according to Deleuze characteristic of the baroque.

Learning to Stand: Paradise Regained Today

ABSTRACT Paradise Regained deals with the testing of personal and political resolve that follows forty days of self-isolation. It thus merits our immediate attention. The seventeenth-century poem that houses a nonconformist argument for liberty of conscience within its narration of Satan's temptation of Jesus in the wilderness is both pertinent and challenging for today's readers. We can apply God's exercise of his Son to current post-quarantine deliberations regarding how we wish to live now—specifically questions of privacy, good governance (for both self and state), shared values, and the future of political engagement.

TRANSLATING POETRY: CAN YOU LEARN IT?

This paper is an attempt to describe the process through which a translator needs to go when translating poetry. Poetry has been part of human civilization since the earliest times; it has derived from the oral tradition and has evolved through centuries into a distinct genre with particular characteristics in terms of structure, form, style, language and other specific features which differentiate it from prose. In the past, poetry has been translated mostly by poets; nevertheless, it seems possible that an individual who has been properly trained and with some practice and passion can produce good quality translation of poetic works. An exercise in translation of a seventeenth-century poem by Andrew Marvell in this paper is based on theory of equivalence to show several aspects of translating, namely the visual, semantic and aesthetic ones, which could pose challenges for translators but which could be addressed and overcome with adequate training. The translator needs to approach a poem and use equivalent means as much as possible to re-create the work by bridging the gaps pertaining to cultural, historical and linguistic codes. The purpose of this exercise is to draw attention to the need of incorporating translating of poetry into the formal translation studies at universities or other institutions dealing with training translators. It also strives to encourage other translators, as well as students and translating instructors to find more poetic works which have been overlooked in the past and which should be translated so that not only the English speakers can revel in their beauty and enchantment.

Augustan Allusion: Quotation and Self-Quotation in Pope’s Odyssey

Abstract The status of Pope’s Homer as a text which engages with numerous seventeenth-century poems and translations of classical epics is well established. Much of the criticism on this topic has so far focused on Pope’s use of Paradise Lost and Dryden’s Works of Virgil. This article contends that Pope’s use of other writers in the translation, including Denham and Waller, has been under-appreciated. I examine some previously unacknowledged borrowings from Denham and Waller in Pope’s Odyssey and relate them to Pope’s use of Milton and Dryden. I suggest that, within the context of direct quotation of whole verse-lines, Pope was himself responsible for privileging the presence of certain seventeenth-century authors in his Homer translations over others. The quotations of complete lines from Milton and Dryden are designed as ‘outward-looking’, but those from Denham and Waller are more ‘inward-looking’ and represent moments where he is reflecting privately on the main characteristics of their allusive strategies. Pope acknowledges that where Denham’s primary intertextual relationship was with Waller, the key source for Waller himself was his own early poetry. Waller’s early poems had, in turn, frequently drawn on works by other poets, and I outline how, in his Homer translations, Pope too repeats certain quotations frequently enough that they begin to function as self-quotations. I subsequently connect this technique to Pope’s readiness to repeat lines across his Iliad and Odyssey that are (largely) of his own invention to suggest that, in general, Pope’s allusive poetics follow Waller’s intertextual practice more closely than those of his other antecedents.

Hostile Reader Response at Al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University to Selected Seventeenth Century Poems with a Carpe Diem Theme

Hostile Reader Response at Al-Imam Muhammad Ibn Saud Islamic University to Selected Seventeenth Century Poems with a Carpe Diem Theme

The Poetry of Friendship

Using the chapter ‘De l’amitie’ from Montaigne’s Essais as a guide to the qualities of friendship, this article compares, on one hand, the qualities of seventeenth-century poems of direct address in which the poet assumes a position of friendship with respect to the person addressed to the qualities, on the other hand, of poems claiming love as the basis of the relationship between speaker and explicit reader. Though a category ‘poetry of friendship’ is not so widely accepted as ‘love poems’, this brief note suggests that such a type of poem does exist and that it is dominated by themes of consolation and admonition.

Poetry and the Eucharist in the English Renaissance

Poetry and the Eucharist in the English Renaissance Gary Kuchar Kimberly Johnson, Made Flesh: Sacraments and Poetics in Post-Reformation England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 248 pp. $59.95 cloth. Sophie Read, Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 245 pp. $99.99 cloth. The two challenging and elegantly written books under review here are both examples of the New Formalism, a mode of criticism in which the distinctly literary properties of verse are analyzed within their historical contexts without being reduced to them. Moreover, both examine the same literary-historical intersection: eucharistic theology and the seventeenth-century devotional lyric. The major difference between these two studies is that Sophie Read’s formalist criticism is rooted in Renaissance theories of rhetoric whereas Kimberly Johnson’s close readings are inspired by some of the reflexive features of modernist and post-modernist poetics. While Read’s approach is more reliable overall, both works are provocative contributions to our understanding of the relations between poetry and eucharistic worship in early modern England. Johnson’s Made Flesh can be understood as a direct reversal of Stanley Fish’s well-known claim that the seventeenth-century literary artifact often “becomes the vehicle of its own abandonment.”1 According to Fish’s model of reading, seventeenth-century poems often instigate a form of spiritual understanding that transcends the medium of representation through a process of self-consumption. Turning this thesis on its head, Johnson argues that seventeenth-century poems invite attention to their materiality, or what she calls their “objecthood.” In particular, she examines how the poetic surfaces and linguistic materiality of poems concerned with Communion inevitably reproduce the tensions inherent in eucharistic thought and worship, the tensions, that is, between body and spirit, letter and meaning, [End Page 128] signifier and signified. One of her basic claims is that lyric poetry does not always behave well from a theological point of view. The medium has its own inclinations, especially when crossed with eucharistic theologies of presence. As a result, the formal dynamics of seventeenth-century eucharistic poems are said to often violate their immediate theological and spiritual contexts. In many instances, this is an excitingly provocative thesis; in others, however, it results in overly dehistoricized readings in which crucial contexts are overlooked for the sake of ingenious but unpersuasive interpretations.2 The result is a book in which the reader must sometimes play Tuve to her Empson. Made Flesh begins with an excellent overview of eucharistic theology, replete with Johnson’s elegant translations of Greek and Latin texts. In doing so, she sets up the context for her overarching claim that seventeenth-century eucharistic poetry “deploys a set of structural and representational tactics that emphasize the objecthood of language, both as material artifact on the page and as representational surface” (p. 27). Chapter 1 explores this thesis in relation to Herbert’s The Temple. The idea that Herbert attributed a certain kind of spiritual power to the materiality of poetic form and of church architecture is not itself new. Judy Kronenfeld has persuasively argued that Herbert’s “A Wreath” is not a self-consuming artifice, while Martin Elsky has situated Herbert’s pattern poems in the context of Neo-platonic theories of orthography in which signs bear spiritual power and meaning.3 Similarly, Paul Dyck has demonstrated how Herbert conceived of church buildings in terms of biblical textuality, resulting in an incarnational poetics that embraces the spiritual efficacy of the material realm.4 But Johnson offers a far more extreme reading of Herbert’s preoccupation with materiality. In her estimation, Herbert adopts poetic strategies that make his texts resist and obtrude upon the passage from material to spiritual ostensibly summarized in “The Elixir”: A man that looks on glasse, On it may stay his eye;Or if he pleaseth, through it passe, And then the heav’n espie. (ll. 9-12) Rather than reading this passage as exemplifying any sort of movement from material to spiritual (as it would seem to imply), Johnson sees it [End Page 129] as advertising “the interpretive dynamic of aesthetic media” (p. 47). In her interpretation, “The Elixir” focuses our...

A New Historical Approach to John Donne’s A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning is one of John Donne’s most celebrated and most significant poems in which he declares, quite ingeniously, his ideal of spiritual love which transcends the ordinary and inferior love of others that is based on mere physicality. This essay applies New Historicism, a school of literary theory since the early 1980s, to Donne’s seventeenth-century poem. The study begins with elaborating on the major concepts and principles of New Historicism. Then, the historical, cultural and biographical circumstances that surrounded and motivated the composition of Donne’s poem are discussed. Finally, the discourses of religion, science, love, sexuality, space and time and the circulation of power implicit in the compass imagery, the metaphysical conceit used in this poem, are explored.

Bloodless Imitations: Lucan's Sea Fight in Holland's Naumachia and May's Continuation

This paper examines the debt owed to the description of the sea battle of Massilia in Lucan's Civil War by two seventeenth-century poems, Thomas May's Continuation of Lucan and Abraham Holland's Naumachia. It demonstrates how these poets systematically strip away Lucan's prurient interest in depicting anatomical violence by means of adapted translations of Lucan's original battle scene. The varying emphases of their appropriations of The Civil War are used to examine Lucan's position as a talisman for different poetic, historical, and political interests.

From Lack to Excess: “Minor” Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse (review)

Reviewed by: From Lack to Excess: “Minor” Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse Lisa Voigt Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda. From Lack to Excess: “Minor” Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2008. 241 pp. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel opens From Lack to Excess: “Minor” Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse with an intriguing juxtaposition of two epigraphs: an excerpt from Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s epistolary romance to the Portuguese Duchess of Aveiro and Homi Bhabha’s famous description of colonial mimicry as “almost the same but not white.” Sor Juana’s verses boast of her American distinctiveness to a European audience (“Que yo, Señora, nací / en la América abundante”), while Bhabha refers to the discrimination imposed on colonial subjects, but both quotations point to the colonial–metropolitan tension between proximity and distance, similarity and difference, which Martínez-San Miguel seeks to recover in what she calls “this collection of minor readings of colonial texts” (16). By “minor reading” she means a focus on the marginal and transcultural dimensions of texts that also participate in hegemonic discourse; following Deleuze and Guattari, she describes her study as “identifying the moments in which these texts become minor vis-à-vis the imperial literature to which they also belong” (38). The dual opening epigraph brings a seventeenth-century poem into conversation with a contemporary theoretical essay in a way that the book strives to do as a whole, as it “analyzes the narrative and rhetorical structures of Latin American colonial texts by establishing a dialogue with contemporary studies on minority discourse, and colonial and postcolonial theory” (16). Although the theoretical terminology that results from such a dialogue may appear excessive to some readers, there is no lack of insightful interpretations revealed by these “minor readings” of major works by Columbus, Cortés, Las Casas, Cabeza de Vaca, el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, and Sor Juana. Readers will recognize a familiar colonial literary canon in this selection, but From Lack to Excess succeeds in pulling these well-known and oft-studied texts together in a coherent and novel way. In Chapter One, “Colonial Texts as Minority Discourse,” Martínez-San Miguel situates her approach within recent discussions in colonial Latin American, postcolonial, and transatlantic studies. The synthesis of these debates is useful, although the careful attention paid to the promises and pitfalls of certain paradigms and terminology—colonial, transatlantic, early modern, hemispheric, etc.—does not extend to the use of “Latin America” as a geocultural unit in the colonial period (a “Latin America” that appears, in this book, to exclude Brazil). The first chapter also explains the utility of reading colonial texts as a form of “minority discourse,” in terms of their ambiguous relation to imperial power: like contemporary minority groups, the colonial producers of this discourse are both marginal and visible, [End Page 591] “capable of exercising pressure” or critique (29). In other words, “their texts are simultaneously mimetic and disruptive of an imperial order, . . . so different, yet so familiar,” as the epigraphs from Sor Juana and Homi Bhabha illustrate (40). Martínez-San Miguel is not so much interested in the construction of an ambivalent colonial subjectivity as in its textual and discursive forms: “how this ‘colonial’ condition is incorporated into the verbal strategies of the chronicles and written texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (16). Thus the conquistador Hernán Cortés’s Second Letter, for example, can also elicit a “minor reading,” one that emphasizes the text’s disruption without failing to acknowledge its complicity in the imperial system. Her approach thus has the advantage of grouping together written works that share similar rhetorical strategies, and which address similar (European) audiences, but whose authors’ backgrounds and identifications vary widely, from the Genoese Columbus and the Spaniard Cortés to the Peruvian mestizo Inca Garcilaso and the Novohispanic creoles Sor Juana and Sigüenza y Góngora. In Chapter Two, “Colonialism, Power, and Narration: Columbus, Cortés, and Las Casas,” Martínez-San Miguel moves from Columbus’s acknowledgment of the incommensurability of language to represent a New World to the narrative...

What Butler Saw: Cross-Dressing and Spectatorship in Seventeenth-Century France

At the same time, Butler’s theories are open to a number of criticisms,whichIintendtointerrogateherebyreassessingherthought in the light of three seventeenth-century poems about cross-dressing. Above all, Butler’s theories are profoundly ahistorical; although not in itself a criticism, this does mean that she can tell us little about the particular ways in which sex and gender might be constructed in different historical or geographical contexts. My own research, for example, has demonstrated that the significance of cross-dressing can rarely be reduced to a matter of gender alone; indeed, cross-dressing can even become reified as a third term, quasi-independent of the two conventional genders. 2 Yet these problems of ahistoricity can be most helpfully explored through a second lacuna in Butler’s thought: the role of the spectator. Crucially, as Nicholas Hammond stresses, Butler’s exploration of cross-dressing ‘does not examine the importance of the body as

Tradition and the individual poem: an inquiry into anthologies

Introduction: questions and premises Part I. What Makes an Anthology: 1. Anthologies as a kind 2. The disposition of the space 3. The anthologist in the poem Part II. What Makes an Anthology-Piece: 4. 'Echoing song': Elizabethan and seventeenth-century poems 5. 'A darkling plain': public poems of 1770, 1867, 1955 6. 'The poet of 'the fish'': the anthologizing of Elizabeth Bishop Part III. What Poets Make of anthologies: 7. Poets as anthology readers 8. Poets as anthology makers Coda: T. S. Eliot's imaginary anthology Notes Indices.

Lucy Hutchinson and the Authorship of Two Seventeenth-Century Poems: A Computational Approach

Context of inquiryDavid Norbrook has recently offered strong evidence for attributing two seventeenth-century poems to Lucy Hutchinson.1 He has also invited the present authors to employ the methods of computational stylistics as an independent test of these attributions. The objects of this article, therefore, are to test the authorship of the two poems and to consider the significance of the outcome. Much the larger of the two is Order and Disorder, a versification of the Book of Genesis in twenty cantos of rhymed pentameters. Its first five cantos were published anonymously in 1679 and, following Anthony Wood, have always been attributed to Sir Allen Apsley, Lucy Hutchinson's brother (DNB). The whole poem survives in manuscript in the Osborn Collection in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.2 The second poem, an anonymous piece running to 188 lines, is a polemical rejoinder to Waller's fulsome 'Panegyrick to My Lord Protector'. It survives among the Additional Manuscripts in the British Library.3To set our inquiry in context, we shall begin by identifying Norbrook's candidate and sketching some of the literary-historical interest of the case. Lucy Apsley was born in 1620 and married John Hutchinson in 1638. During the Civil War he served as governor of Nottingham on the parliamentary side; later he was one of the regicides. Until Norbrook's researches, and the work of Hugh de Quehen, who has edited her manuscript translation of the De rerum natura,4 Lucy Hutchinson was known almost entirely for a remarkable memoir of her husband, which is one of the chief eyewitness sources for the Civil War. Indeed, the facts of Hutchinson's canon as they were formerly understood seemed to tell a story in themselves. Her achievement was a significant, but narrow one. In the same manuscript as the life of her husband there is a fragmentary autobiography, which breaks off unfinished. Sandra Findley and Elaine Hobby suggested that after the 'failure' to write her own life Hutchinson found her voice in writing the biography of her husband, and then fell silent. They expressed frustration that her canon is such that (as so often in seventeenth-century women's autobiography) discussing Lucy Hutchinson's writing one inevitably ends up discussing the deeds of her husband.5Within the Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson Lucy Hutchinson writes of herself as an actor in the story in the third person ('Mistress Hutchinson', 'she', etc.) but has an 'I' for the author of the memoirs. This Mistress Hutchinson is a submissive wife. She declares her existence to be negated by the Colonel's death: 'Soe, as his shadow, she waited on him every where, till he was taken into that region of light which admitts of none, and then she vanisht into nothing'.6 There are some ironies in this situation. As N. H. Keeble points out, Hutchinson celebrates wifely silence and submissiveness, but wrote forcefully and at length. The Memoirs, Keeble says, argue fiercely both for rebellion and for patriarchy, championing at the same time the Revolution and submission to male authority; meanwhile every page she writes casts an ironic gloss by its own existence on the arguments for female silence which it puts forward.7Acceptance of Norbrook's attributions would give Hutchinson an altered place in literary history and in the historiography of the Early Modern woman writer. For she would need to be recognised, in the first place, as an independent voice in the resistance to Cromwell's growing power in the 1650s. Nor could she be seen any longer as falling silent after composing elegies on and a memoir to her husband. This Hutchinson, on the contrary, was capable of writing as herself rather than as her husband's wife. She was writing, and indeed publishing, into the late 1670s - the dedication to the Lucretius translation is dated 1675 and the first part of Order and Disorder was published in 1679. (She died in 1681 or early 1682.)The possibility that Lucy Hutchinson wrote these two poems is therefore of real literary and historical interest. …

George Herbert and Elizabeth Bishop

Joseph ?. Summers George Herbert and Elizabeth Bishop Elizabeth Bishop had a dream about George Herbert which she recorded in her Notebook: "They discuss the difference between his work and Donne's [Elizabeth Squires gave the impression it was the metrics] and touch upon Miss Moore's, which is said in the dream to beat Donne's but not his. 'This may have been subconscious politeness on my part,' Bishop notes, 'He had curls and was wearing a beautiful dark red satin coat. He said he could be "useful" to me. Praise God.' ,n He was. I got to know Elizabeth Bishop because she wanted to meet someone who was working on Herbert. I think she probably knew Herbert's poem better than anyone else I have known. She used to travel everywhere (Nova Scotia, Key West, Paris) with a copy of The Temple in her suitcase. She remarked that she once had to quit reading Herbert because she caught herself trying to write seventeenth-century poems rather than twentieth-century ones. I think "The Weed" is an example.2 When Elizabeth wrote me (October 4 and 5, 1954) about my book on Herbert, she remarked, "I'd been thinking that it was the hymn-singing Baptist backwards . . . village life that made me so susceptible to Herbert in the first place, and perhaps more or less the same thing was true in your case." (She was certainly right.) But by the time she was in college she knew that she admired a number of modern secular poets and wanted to write something like them, and she found congenial their usual rejection of familiar public rhetoric and the consciously poetic for a language close to that of a fairly ordinary conversation between literate friends. Herbert fulfilled, often better than Pound did, Pound's dictum that poetry should be at least as well-written as prose. Bishop found Herbert helpful as she consistently sustained her own high vision of that standard: no Herbert and Elizabeth Bishop49 inversions and no inflations, no rolling Ciceronian periods and no pontificating, no elevated "poetic diction." She had the keenest eye I've ever known — some times it seemed more like a nose — for the pretentious, the inaccurate, the derivative, and the dead. Occasionally Bishop quoted Herbert in a poem: "This morning's glitterings reveal / the sea is 'all a case of knives' " in "Wading at Wellfleet" is from one of Herbert's oddest metaphors in "Affliction" (TV): My thoughts are all a case of knives, Wounding my heart With scattered smart, As wat'ring pots give flowers their lives. Nothing their fury can control, While they do wound and pink my soul. (H. 7-13)3 Rarely, Bishop would unconsciously take an image or phrase from Herbert. "The Man-Moth" ends: Then from the lids One tear, his only possession, like the bee's sting, slips. Slyly he palms it, and if you're not paying attention he'll swallow it. However, if you watch, he'll hand it over, cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink. That "one tear" seems a direct descendant of the one "drop" which Christ "slipt" From thy right eye, (Which there did hang like streamers near the top Of some fair church to show the sore And bloody battle which thou once didst try) which filled the glass in which God had preserved the poet's tears (cf. Psalm 56:8) in the third poem which Herbert called "Praise." When I sent her the text of a lecture on her poetry I gave at Oxford that contained this observation, she wrote (October 19, 1967), "Of course I'm amazed at the obvious reflection of Herbert in the 'one tear' stanza — I'm sure you are quite right, but it had never occurred to 50Joseph H. Summers me at all . . . I'm always delighted when people discover these things." Bishop found Herbert's devotion to monosyllables completely congenial. I've never tried to count, but I have the impression that there are more monosyllabic lines in Herbert and Bishop than in any other significant poets in English. Sometimes Bishop's monosyllables seem Herbertian even when there is no obvious...

Reason's Muse: Andrew Marvell, R. Fletcher, and the Politics of Poetry in the Engagement Debate

Andrew Marvell's “An Horatian ode upon Cromwel's return from Ireland” may not be the most famous seventeenth-century poem but it is perhaps the most enigmatic. Its elusive, haunting quality defies any strict interpretation, and, as Blair Worden has recently indicated, the poem refuses to fall neatly into any simple “royalist” or “Cromwellian” category. Rather, the “Horatian Ode” has the aspect of a cultural artifact, having captured and held the historical moment that tore asunder two ages: the pre-1649 past of hereditary monarchy with its confidence in the traditions bequeathed by time, and the immediate post-1649 future, when the English state was to be governed by brute strength and naked power. As such, it has become a testament to the “fundamental shift in English civilization, that when every reservation has been made, the middle of the seventeenth century brought about.” For Worden “An Horatian Ode,” with its ambivalent stance of neither approval nor condemnation of the rise of Cromwell, epitomizes the state of Renaissance poetry before T. S. Eliot's much lamented “disassociation of sensibility” took place.

‘Delineated lives’: themes and variations in seventeenth-century poems about portraits

Abstract I A study of seventeenth-century English poems about portraits is elusive and at first rather tantalizing: while reference to a portrait occurs frequently, it is most often primarily a literary device - only rarely is it more than tenuously related to a particular and identifiable work of art. Yet despite this, such a study may provide some illuminating insights into the writers' attitudes towards the visual arts, and their changing expectations as regards portraiture.

Thomas Dekker, the Restoration of St. Paul's, and J. P. Collier, the Forger

This article concerns two seventeenth-century poems that have not been printed before except for brief extracts. They occupy pages 26–36 in a commonplace book in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D. C., known as MS.V.a.160 (formerly MS.452.1). The poems are there attributed to Thomas Dekker, one of the better-known Jacobean dramatists, author of The Shoemakers' Holiday and other middle-class comedies, and of a large number of pamphlets of ‘London life’ which are of great interest to the student of colloquial speech in the Jacobean period. Though the commonplace book includes other interesting material, my discussion will confine itself to the two Dekker items, their import and their claim to genuineness, with one slight exception only. The exception is a version of a little-known epitaph attributed, though not very persuasively, to Shakespeare, which I cite in a footnote since it has apparently not been printed for over a hundred years. Of the two Dekker poems, the second one is a bawdy song which probably refers to a special popular entertainment of the day.

John and Ann Cotton, of "Queen's Creek," Virginia

q OME American critics have given very high praise to the anonk;ymous seventeenth-century poem, Bacon's Epitaph, Made by His Man. Professor W. P. Trent, for example, has said of it: . . . in this epitaph we have what is in all probability the single poem in any true sense-the single product of sustained poetic art-that was written in America for a hundred and fifty years after the settlement of Jamestown. The twenty-two couplets would not have made Andrew Marvell blush could he have been taxed with writing them. It is the irony of fate that this devoted follower, who in a more favourable environment might have added another name to the galaxy of Restoration poets, should have left behind him not only no other traceable verses, but not even an ascertainable name.

Authorship of "Anonymous" seventeenth century poems

Authorship of "Anonymous" seventeenth century poems Get access Gorden Crosse Gorden Crosse Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume s13-I, Issue 14, 6 October 1923, Pages 267–268, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s13-I.14.267 Published: 06 October 1923