Ebook: Poetic Theory and Practice in Early Modern Verse: Unwritten Arts

Studies alternative concepts to received theories and practices of poetry in early modern England

• Explores new perspectives on early modern poetic theory and practice
• Unearths key lexicons and notions of Renaissance poetics in early modern English poems
• Freshly rereads canonical poems and poets alongside less frequented authors and texts
• Reads early modern poetic texts in the larger intellectual contexts of Britain and Europe
• Brings together a transnational team of scholars on early modern English literature

How did ideas about the poet’s art surface in early modern texts? By looking into the intersections between poetry, poetics and other discourses – logic, rhetoric, natural philosophy, medicine, mythography or religion – the essays in this volume unearth notions that remained largely unwritten in the official literary criticism of the period. Focusing on questions of poetry’s origins and style, and exploring individual responses to issues of authenticity, career design, difficulty, or inspiration, this collection revisits and renews the critical lexicons that connect poetic theory and practice in early modern English texts and their European contexts. Reading canonical poets and critics – Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Puttenham, Dryden – along less studied figures such as Henry Constable, Barnabe Barnes, Thomas Lodge, Aemilia Lanyer, Fulke Greville or George Chapman, this book extends the coordinates for a dialogue between literary practice and the Renaissance theories from which they stemmed and which they helped to outgrow.