Heather Dubrow. The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. x + 293 pp. index. $49.95. ISBN: 978–0–8018–8704–8.

2008 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 1021-1023
Author(s):  
John Mulryan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Johns Hopkins University

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Erin A. McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Multiple Agents ◽  
Social Form ◽  
Print Publication ◽  
Book Publication

This chapter introduces Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England. Early modern lyric poetry was a social form, but print publication made poems available to anyone who either had the means to a buy a book or knew someone who did, radically expanding the early modern reading public. The study focuses on the period between the maturing of the market for printed English literature in the 1590s and the emergence of the professional poet following the Restoration to acknowledge changes in both the economics and aesthetics of poetry book publication. It argues that publication in its broadest sense is a form of mediation between multiple agents and material forms. Because print did not change poetry in a single way, this book presents a series of case studies. This chapter concludes with a brief overview of each.

Lyric Poetry

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Clarke ◽  
Simon Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
John Donne ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Song Of Songs ◽  
George Herbert ◽  
Aemilia Lanyer ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Religious Lyric

Legitimized by the poetry of the Bible, devotional lyric verse—crossing denominational lines, often combining Reformation spirituality with Renaissance rhetoric—flourished in early modern England. Poets like Mary and Philip Sidney and George Herbert modelled their work on the Book of Psalms, at times imitating the prosodic simplicity of the Sternhold and Hopkins metrical psalms, elsewhere adapting the sophisticated stanzaic variety of the Marot/Beze Psalter. Women like Aemilia Lanyer and Anne Southwell used the Song of Songs to express their devotion to Christ. The ‘mystical marriage’ was often used by women such as Barbara Mackay, who produced a version of the Song of Songs in manuscript, and Elizabeth Melville, who parodied Petrarchan poetry; and it was employed in shocking fashion by John Donne. The religious lyric exists on the borderline of public and private: in conclusion, we present such lyrics as social and occasional, and examine their relationship with music.

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