Elizabethan Poetry: An Anthology

Elizabethan ladies and gentlemen just HAD to have their poetry. In order to be thought clever at court, to win the ear of even wealthier and more fashionable (and powerful) courtiers or to be thought well of by the opposite sex, knowing poetry was a big advantage and BEING a poet even better. With the Petrarcanism of Wyatt and Surrey's Songes and Sonnets of the 1550's, the Italian poet Petrarch hit the learned classes of England with something of the same faddishness the Beatles and Rolling Stones hit American mass culture in the '60s. You had to be a Petrarcan--and many of the earliest English sonnets are nothing but the Petrarcan themes translated, and without much change or rearranging, into English. But then it "took" on English soil. What a bargain Blaisdell's little book is! Here you have a great cross section of what charmed the Elizabethans. Some of it is downright ribald, like Thomas Campion's "I care not for those ladies that must be wooed and prayed/ . . . Give me kind Amaryllis the wanton country maid/ . . . when we come where comfort is, she never will say no." This is not to mention Donne's graphic "To His Mistress Going to Bed," which also appears here, with it's joyful celebration of sexuality: "O my America, my new found land!" Just because you were a courtier poet did not mean you were safe from meeting a violent end, as Robert Devereaux, Earl of Essex, learned, who charmed Queen Elizabeth, but later lost his head for treason. His "Essex's Last Voyage to the Haven of Happiness" is an extended plea for divine forgiveness for his errors before his execution. It's quite interesting to read women poets like Anne Askew and Anne Dacres, Countess of Arundel and even Queen Elizabeth herself, who, in her love for and patronage of poetry and drama set the standard for the age and brought literature in English to a new stage of greatness. Of course, it's not surprising that Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne and Sir Philip Sidney (whose 1583 Defense of Poesy and sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella had a big influence on the reception of poetry and the poetic way of looking at the world) are head and shoulders above the others--but it's great to see them side by side with their peers and in their proper milieu. That's the beauty of Blaisdell's anthology for those aready familiar with the "greats." Let's face it, some eras are more poetic than others, and the Elizabethan was a great and formative period in our poetry. What would it get you today to quote Petrarch at a Washington, D.C. cocktail party? Maybe ignored and possibly not invited back. Probably the last person you could imagine doing this with aplomb was Winston Churchill during one of his famous stays at the FDR White House. But then, he was disliked by Eleanor and thought to be a bad influence on Franklin, causing him to stay up too late at night and drink too much brandy.