The Columbia History of British Poetry (43 page)

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Page 178
Donaldson, Ian.
The Rapes of Lucretia
. Oxford: Clarendon, 1982.
Donno, Elizabeth Story, ed.
Elizabethan Minor Epics
. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. [Includes texts of Lodge, Marlowe, Heywood, Drayton, Chapman, Marston, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Shirley.]
Donno, Elizabeth Story. "The Epyllion." In
English Poetry and Prose, 1540674
, edited by Christopher B. Ricks. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1970.
Hulse, Clark.
Metamorphic Verse: The Elizahethan Minor Epic
. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.
Keach, William.
Elizabethan Erotic Narratives
. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1977.
Lerner, Laurence. "Ovid and the Elizabethans." In
Ovid Renewed
, edited by Charles Martindale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Miller, Paul William, ed.
Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance
. Gainsville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1967. [Includes texts of Barksted and Henry Austin.]
Seronsy, Cecil.
Samuel Daniel
. New York: Twayne, 1967.
 
Page 179
Sixteenth-Century Lyric Poetry
Richard C. McCoy
Lyric Poetry has traditionally been regarded, along with the drama, as the greatest literary accomplishment of sixteenth-century England. Originally, the lyric consisted of verses to be sung and accompanied by an instrumentin ancient Greece, the lyre. This musical notion of the lyric persisted in both theory and practice throughout the Renaissance, inspiring a number of critical treatises on meter and harmony in English verse as well as a multitude of songs by musicians and poets such as Sir Thomas Wyatt, William Byrd, Edmund Campion, and William Shakespeare among others. While John Stevens has shown how complex and uncertain the relationship between music and poetry can be in this period, it is still evident that lyrics such as Wyatt's "Blame Not My Lute" were set to music and sung before a select, often courtly audience. At the same time, the circulation of these verses in manuscript and their subsequent publication in printed collections made the lyric into one of the period's most popular and durable forms of literature, combining the immediacy and charm of song with the cryptic pleasures of the text.
The lyric has perennially been given pride of place in both contemporary and modern anthologies of sixteenth-century poetry.
Tottel's Miscellany
(1557), a collection of songs and sonnets, went through nine editions in thirty years and inspired a flood of comparable publications such as
The Paradise of Dainty Devices
(1576),
The Phoenix Nest
(1593), and
England's Helicon
(1600). These, in turn, have been a source for later collections such as Francis Palgrave's
Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language
(1861)described by
 
Page 180
its most recent editor, Christopher Ricks, as the "best-known and the best-selling anthology of English poetry ever."
For Palgrave and many others, the lyric is the virtual spirit and supreme essence of poetry. Marked by brevity and intensity of emotion that Wordsworth called the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," an acutely expressive subjectivity akin to the soliloquy, and an ineffably sensuous sweetness, the lyric speaks with a powerful immediacy. Moreover, it transcends the circumstances of its compositionproffering, in Palgrave's words, "treasures leading us in higher and healthier ways than those of the world." This exalted conception of the lyric, blending Romantic and Victorian sensibilities, has persisted into the twentieth century, influencing our conception of the canon in major works of scholarship such as E. K. Chambers's
Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse
(1932).
Nevertheless, the preeminence of the lyric and the belief in its transcendent purity and simplicity has been challenged by recent editors and critics. In
The New Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse
, Emrys Jones praises Chambers's scholarship while criticizing his predecessor's enthusiasm for "'dainty' pastorals and . . . pretty love songs." Recent scholarship and criticism have placed great emphasis on the historical circumstances of sixteenth-century poetic production, a tendency most evident in the approach called "New Historicism."
Nevertheless, modern readers of the Tudor lyric have been aware for some time of the complex historical and intellectual influences at work within this verse. One of the most powerful of these is the poetry of Francesco Petrarch, the fourteenth-century Italian humanist and poet whose
Rime Sparse
("Scattered Rhymes") inspired hundreds of sonnet sequences and love lyrics throughout Europe over three centuries. Even as they adhere to Petrarchan conventions and conceits, many of these writers insistas Sir Philip Sidney does in
Astrophil and Stella
that they speak what they feel, while others slavishly imitate "poore Petrarch's long deceased woes," thus raising difficult questions about the lyric persona and its authenticity.
Another important influence is the Neoplatonic idealization of the beloved so eloquently articulated in Castiglione's
Book of the Courtier
(translated into English and published in 1561) in which love becomes a means of redemption. Thus Spenser makes of his lady a "sweet Saynt" and "goddesse" in the
Amoretti
, enshrining her "glorious ymage" in a ''temple fayre . . . built within my mind." Such exalted sentiments

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