Elizabethan Poetry [antikvár]

Preface The essays in this collection are intended to illuminate the assumptions, the variety, and the achievement of the non-dramatic poetry written in the reign of Elizabeth I. The first section is devoted to the problem of poetics that has most concerned students of this period and that most directly brings out questions about the relation between historical knowledge and critical analysis. The Faerie Queene is given a section of its own, not only because it presents special difficulties to the modern reader but also to emphasize its pre-eminence among Elizabethan poems. I have limited the essays (except for the first) to those whose interest is primarily critical, even at the expense of not representing such classics of scholarship as Douglas Bush's Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition. I have imposed this limitation both for the sake of general coherence and to focus attention on what has been a main point of interest for me in making this selection and will be, I hope, for those who use it. Modern criticism has been uncertain how to deal with Elizabethan poetry, even though, under Eliot's influence, it has been nourished by seventeenth-century poetry and Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. While for these bodies of literature there is a coherent tradition of critical praise, analysis, and controversy, most of the essays in this volume ask fundamental questions anew: "What kind of poem or what kind of language is this?" "What value or interest does poetry of this sort have?" We still need to ask these questions, but the variety and resourcefulness of the essays in this volume show how well they have been and are being answered. Certainly the time is past when Elizabethan poetry, and Spenser in particular, can be used as a whipping boy for Donne and Jonson. Berkeley, California July 1966 paul j. alpers