In this study, L.E. Semler begins with a comprehensive, historical definition of Mannerism in visual arts from which he derives four key terms that constitute the nucleus of the aesthetic: technical precision, elegance, grazia, and the difficulta:facilita formula. These principles - interwoven with one another and with maniera - are derived from visual arts but are specifically designed to be transferable to any medium. The rest of the book situates the English poets in relation to the visual arts - including painting, limning, gold- and silversmithery, architecture, and garden design - and discusses their verse in relation to the key Mannerist principles.

This book brings together ten essays on John Donne and George Herbert composed by an international group of scholars. The volume represents the first collection of its kind to draw close connections between these two distinguished early modern thinkers and poets who are justly coupled because of their personal and artistic association. The contributors' distinctive new approaches and insights illuminate a variety of topics and fields while suggesting new directions that future study of Donne and Herbert might take. Some chapters explore concrete instances of collaboration or communication between Donne and Herbert, and others find fresh ways to contextualize the Donnean and Herbertian lyric, carefully setting the poetry alongside discourses of apophatic theology or early modern political theory, while still others link Herbert's verse to Donne's devotional prose. Several chapters establish specific theological and aesthetic grounds for comparison, considering Donne and Herbert's respective positions on religious assurance, comic sensibility, and virtuosity with poetic endings.

A study of how we should read one of America's most important poets

This book reveals the ways in which seventeenth-century poets used models of vision taken from philosophy, theology, scientific optics, political polemic and the visual arts to scrutinize the nature of individual perceptions and to examine poetry’s own relation to truth. Drawing on archival research, Poetry and Vision in Early Modern England brings together an innovative selection of texts and images to construct a new interdisciplinary context for interpreting the poetry of Cavendish, Traherne, Marvell and Milton. Each chapter presents a reappraisal of vision in the work of one of these authors, and these case studies also combine to offer a broader consideration of the ways that conceptions of seeing were used in poetry to explore the relations between the ‘inward’ life of the viewer and the ‘outward’ reality that lies beyond; terms that are shown to have been closely linked, through ideas about sight, with the emergence of the fundamental modern categories of the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’. This book will be of interest to literary scholars, art historians and historians of science.

Thus they suggest how his drawing on the resources of kind illuminates at once his own writings and their interactions with those of his literary predecessors and contemporaries. They suggest as well what his dealings with genre imply about his dealings with social and political authority in his world - for example, about his dealings with the courtly world and its ideologies, with specific patrons, with religious doctrine and controversy."--BOOK JACKET.

The sixteenth century in France was marked by religious warfare and shifting political and physical landscapes. Between 1549 and 1584, however, the Pléiade poets, including Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim Du Bellay, Rémy Belleau, and Antoine de Baïf, produced some of the most abiding and irenic depictions of rural French landscapes ever written. In The Poetry of Place, Louisa Mackenzie reveals and analyzes the cultural history of French paysage through her study of lyric poetry and its connections with landscape painting, cartography, and land use history. In the face of destructive environmental change, lyric poets in Renaissance France often wrote about idealized physical spaces, reclaiming the altered landscape to counteract the violence and loss of the period and creating in the process what Mackenzie, following David Harvey, terms 'spaces of hope.' This unique alliance of French Renaissance studies with cultural geography and eco-criticism demonstrates that sixteenth-century poetry created a powerful sense of place which continues to inform national and regional sentiment today.

Frank O'Hara's New York School & Mid-Century Mannerism offers a ground-breaking account of the poet Frank O'Hara and the extraordinary cultural blossoming O'Hara catalysed, namely the mid-century experimental and multi-disciplinary arts scene, the New York School. Fresh accounts of canonical figures (Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, George Balanchine, Fred Astaire) and original work on those too little discussed (Edwin Denby, Elaine de Kooning) resound with analysis of queer iconology from Michelangelo's David to James Dean. Sam Ladkin argues that O'Hara and the New York School revive Mannerism. Turning away from interpretations of O'Hara's Transcendentalism, Romanticism, or pastoralism, 'mid-century Mannerism' helps explain O'Hara's self-conscious style, its play with sweet and grand grace, contortion of conventional measure, risks with affectation, conceits, nonchalance, and scrambling of high/low culture. Mannerism clarifies the sociability implicit in the formal innovations of the New York School. The work also studies the kinship between art mediums by retooling rhetoric and recovering a perennial manneristic tendency beyond period style. Genealogies of grace, the figura serpentinata, sprezzatura, ornatus, and the marvellous exemplify qualities exhibited by O'Hara's New York School. Ladkin relates the essential role of dance in the New York School. O'Hara's reception has been tied to painting, predominantly Abstract Expressionism. He was also, however, a balletomane, a fan, for whom ballet was 'made up exclusively of qualities which other arts only aspire to in order to be truly modern.' Relaying ballet's Mannerist origins and aesthetics, and demonstrating its influence alongside Broadway and Hollywood musical-dance on art and poetry, completes the portrait of mid-century modernity.

When we read poetry, we tend to believe that we are getting a glimpse of the interior of the poet's mind--pictures from the poet's imagination relayed through the representative power of language. But poets themselves sometimes express doubt (usually indirectly) that poetic language has the capability or the purpose of revealing these images. This book examines description in Renaissance poetry, aiming to reveal its complexity and variability, its distinctiveness from prose description, and what it can tell us about Renaissance ways of thinking about the visible world and the poetic mind. Recent criticism has tended to address representation as a product of culture; The Unimagined in the English Renaissance argues to the contrary that attention to description as a literary phenomenon can complicate its cultural context by recognizing the persistent problems of genre and literary history. The book focuses on Sidney, Spenser, Donne, and Milton, who had very different aims as poets but shared a degree of skepticism about imagistic representation. For these poets, description can obscure as much as it makes visible, and can create whole categories of existence that are outside of visibility altogether.

Andrew Marvell's Liminal Lyrics: The Space Between is an interdisciplinary study of the major lyric poems of seventeenth-century British metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell. The poet and his work have generally proven enigmatic to scholars because both refuse to fit into normal categories and expectations. This study invites Marvell readers to view the poet and some of his representative lyrics in the context of the anthropological concept of liminality as developed by Victor Turner and enriched by Arnold Van Gennep, Jacques Lacan, and other observers of the in-between aspects of experience. The approach differs from previous attempts to “explain” Marvell in that it allows multidisciplinary and multi-media contexts in a broad matrix of the areas of experience and representation that defy boundaries, that blur the line at which entrance becomes exit. This study acknowledges that the poems discussed, and, by implication, the entire corpus of Marvell’s work and the life that produced it, derive from a refusal to draw a definite divide. In analyzing a small selection of Marvell’s life and lyrics as explorations of various realms of liminality in word and image, readers can see a passageway to the poet’s works that never really reaches a destination; instead, the unlimited possibilities of the journey remain. Thus, the in-between aspects of the poet and his poetry actually define his technique as well as his brilliance.

The fruit of intensive collaboration among leading international specialists on the literature, religion and culture of early modern England, this volume examines the relationship between writing and religion in England from 1558, the year of the Elizabethan Settlement, up until the Act of Toleration of 1689. Throughout these studies, religious writing is broadly taken as being 'communicational' in the etymological sense: that is, as a medium which played a significant role in the creation or consolidation of communities. Some texts shaped or reinforced one particular kind of religious identity, whereas others fostered communities which cut across the religious borderlines which prevailed in other areas of social interaction. For a number of the scholars writing here, such communal differences correlate with different ways of drawing on the resources of cultural memory. The denominational spectrum covered ranges from several varieties of Dissent, through via media Anglicanism, to Laudianism and Roman Catholicism, and there are also glances towards heresy and the mid-seventeenth century's new atheism. With respect to the range of different genres examined, the volume spans the gamut from poetry, fictional prose, drama, court masque, sermons, devotional works, theological treatises, confessions of faith, church constitutions, tracts, and letters, to history-writing and translation. Arranged in roughly chronological order, Writing and Religion in England, 1558-1689 presents chapters which explore religious writing within the wider contexts of culture, ideas, attitudes, and law, as well as studies which concentrate more on the texts and readerships of particular writers. Several contributors embrace an inter-arts orientation, relating writing to liturgical ceremony, painting, music and architecture, while others opt for a stronger sociological slant, explicitly emphasizing the role of women writers and of writers from different sub-cultural backgrounds.