Poetry and Matter in the English Renaissance

Abstract

Chapter 1, “Poetry and Matter in the English Renaissance” traces the crucial relationship between poetics and philosophical materialism in the early modern period, explaining why erotic verse so readily lent itself to confronting questions about the nature of being and of knowledge. This chapter shows that for Renaissance poets—informed by Lucretius’ great analogy between atoms and alphabetic letters—there is poetic form in elemental matter. The writing of poetry was therefore often understood as a physical practice, while poetry itself was understood as ontologically complex and efficacious. As terms such as “figuration” reveal, poetic making has both metaphorical and literal elements, which come especially to the fore in the ubiquitous blazons depicting the face of the beloved. Within the syntax of materialist poetics, foretelling the decay of the love object is therefore tantamount to a kind of deconstruction or unmaking—making poetry actually “do” the work of time. Multiple traditions, from Aristotelian hylomorphism to idealizing Petrarchism, had prepared the way for the female body to function as a proxy for embodied matter which poets could “figure,” “make,” or “undo.” This chapter presents the object of erotic poetry becoming just that: a fictional construct subjected to the recombinatory shaping of the godlike poet. As later chapters will develop, the paradoxical loneliness of the carpe diem invitation emerges from this troubling strategy, for it is an invitational form addressed to an entity it has forever exiled as metaphysically other. This chapter thus provides both a theoretical framework and historical background for the project’s larger claims.