routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

Renaissance
poetry
65
the lover (the man of passion), and the scholar (the man of learning). His death
in 1586, after the Battle of Zutphen, sacrificing the last of his water supply to a
wounded soldier, made him a hero. His great sonnet sequence Astropbel and
Stella is one of the key texts of the time, distilling the author’s virtues and beliefs
into the first of the Renaissance love masterpieces. His other great work, Arcadia,
is a prose romance interspersed with many poems and songs. Its own history is
complicated: Sidney finished what is known as The Old Arcadia by about 1580.
He then started rewriting it. The New Arcadia, unfinished, was published in 1590,
and later versions added parts of The Old Arcadia, thereby creating textual
problems for generations of Sidney scholars. Arcadia is a complex and still
controversial mixture of pastoral romance, narrative intrigue, and evocative poetry
of love and nature. It is a work which has no equivalent in English literature.
The direct literary influence on the English Renaissance love sonnet
was the Italian Francesco Petrarca – known in English as Petrarch –
who wrote sonnets to his ideal woman, Laura. This idealisation is very
much a feature of early Renaissance verse. Classical allusions, Italian
Renaissance references, and contemporary concerns make the poetry
of the sixteenth century noticeably different in tone and content from
the poetry of the early seventeenth century, when Elizabeth was no
longer the monarch. There is a universalisation of personal feeling and
a concern with praise in the earlier verse. This becomes more directly
personal and more anguished as the sixteenth century comes to a close.
The earliest sonnets of the period are found in an anthology, Tottel’s
Miscellany, published in 1557. Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl
of Surrey (who both died in the 1540s), transposed Petrarch directly into
English, finding a formal expressiveness which native English poetry had
not enjoyed for two centuries. The native rhythms of the Skeltonics of the
turn of the century gave way almost completely to the upper-class, courtly,
highly formal, imported form. Poetry became the pastime of educated high
society. It is poetry of love and of loss, of solitude and change. The theme
of transience, which was to feature strongly in all Shakespeare’s work,
began to appear with greater frequency through the 1570s and 1580s.
A number of contrasts, or binaries, begin to emerge; these, from
the Renaissance onwards, will be found again and again to express
the contrasts, the extremes, and the ambiguities of the modern world.