This book draws attention to the pervasive artistic rivalry between Elizabethan poetry and gardens in order to illustrate the benefits of a trans-media approach to the literary culture of the period.
In its blending of textual studies with discussions of specific historical patches of earth, The Poem and the Garden demonstrates how the fashions that drove poetic invention were as likely to be influenced by a popular print convention or a particular garden experience as they were by the formal genres of the classical poets. By moving beyond a strictly verbal approach in its analysis of creative imitation, this volume offers new ways of appreciating the kinds of comparative and competitive methods that shaped early modern poetics. Noting shared patterns―both conceptual and material―in these two areas not only helps explain the persistence of botanical metaphors in sixteenth-century books of poetry but also offers a new perspective on the types of contrastive illusions that distinguish the Elizabethan aesthetic.
With its interdisciplinary approach, The Poem and the Garden is of interest to all students and scholars who study early modern poetics, book history, and garden studies.
Author(s): Deborah Solomon
Series: New Interdisciplinary Approaches to Early Modern Culture: Confuences and Contexts
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 258
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Commonplace Concerns
Notes
1. "Glory to Garden, Glory to Muses, Glory to Vertue": The Englishing of Mount Parnassus
A Heterotopia of Pleasure
Pleasures upon Pleasures: Eyewitness Accounts of Tudor Gardens
Nonsuch
Kenilworth
The Garden in Early Literary Criticism
Notes
2. "A Pleasaunt Plotte of Fragrant Floures": Biblio-botanical Metaphors as Paratextual Framing Devices
Thomas Howell, Newe Sonets, and Pretie Pamphlets (c. 1568)
Thomas Howell, The Arbor of Amitie (1568)
Hugh Plat, The Floures of Philosophie (1572)
Isabella Whitney, A Sweet Nosgay (1573)
George Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573) and The Posies (1575)
Thomas Howell, H. His Devises (1581)
Notes
3. To Wander "As It Were in a Labyrinthe": Spenser's Garden Critiques on Reading Poetry
Spenser's Labyrinthine Faery Lond
The Wandring Islands of the Idle Lake
Cymochles in the Bower of Bliss
Cymochles and Guyon in Phaedria's Domain
Guyon in the Garden of Proserpine
Guyon in the Bower of Bliss
The Garden of Adonis
Notes
4. Of Patterns "More or Lesse Busie and Curious": The Early Modern Knot Garden as a Poetic Device
The Patterned Garden
The Patterned Poem
The Knot Garden and the Sonnet Sequence
Knotting the Page, the Poem, and the Garden
Hands, Pages, Leaves
Notes
Epilogue: Trans-media Matters
Notes
Appendix
Sequences with Printers' Flowers and One Poem Per Page:
Sequences without Printers' Flowers but with Centered Poems, Two Per Page:
Sequences Printed with No Centering or Borders:
Collections that Contain a Series of Sonnets but Are Not Officially Designated as Sequences:
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Index
