Poetic Theory and Practice in Early Modern Verse: Unwritten Arts ed. by Zenón Luis-Martínez (review)

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• Poetic Theory and Practice in Early Modern Verse: Unwritten Arts ed. by Zenón Luis-Martínez
• Jane Vaughan

Luis-Martínez, Zenón, ed., Poetic Theory and Practice in Early Modern Verse: Unwritten Arts, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2023; hardback; pp. 352; R.R.P. £95.00; ISBN 9781399507820.

Zenón Luis-Martínez's useful volume brings together an international team of scholars—recognised and emerging experts in the field of Renaissance poetry—in a series of essays offering fresh readings of canonical, and lesser-known, poets of early modern England. Poets discussed in this book include Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, George Puttenham, and John Dryden, as well as those less often studied, such as Henry Constable, Barnabe Barnes, Thomas Lodge, Aemilia Lanyer, Fulke Greville, and George Chapman.

The volume follows other outputs of a 'Project of Excellence' funded by the Spanish government, broadly constituted to reassess works and examine a new aesthetic of English Renaissance poetry. Focusing on the interactions between historical practice and period theory, the various essays are well situated within a broader international movement concerned with re-examining issues in early [End Page 325] modern poetics, in an endeavour to unearth new insights into what may have been previously overlooked. For this volume, it is a concern with unwritten principles governing the poetic practice of the period, addressing the dialogue between literary practice and the Renaissance theories upon which they were based. The editor's introduction quotes Rosalie Colie, defining the process as a quest to discover the 'unwritten poetics by which writers worked and which they themselves created', which can be discovered from 'real' literature, as opposed to the conscious principles that can be gleaned from criticism and theory (p. 2). A worthy aim. Yet, as in many of the projects in this field, there is a slant towards modern preoccupations, such as the body, matter, and emotions: all of which we find usefully addressed in the volume as popular scholarly themes of late.

The book is loosely divided into three parts which organise its content in a non-prescriptive manner, endeavouring to relate papers thematically, and to one another, in various ways. The three essays in Part I, 'Origen: Poetic Aetiologies', variously investigate ideas of causation and origin in poetry, narratives that might be seen as alternative, or complementary, to those in the formal theory of period treatises. Those examined are, first, principles of divine grace; Joan Curbet Soler's 'Justified by Whose Grace? Poetic Worth and Transcendent Doubt in Late Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Poetry' looks at the principle of grace as the origin of poetics and its complexities in Sidney, Spenser, Greville, and Lanyer. Second, efficient cause: Emma Annette Wilson's 'The Logical Cause of an Early Modern Poetics of Action' traces the changing meanings and roles of cause, with particular attention to the efficient cause in Renaissance logic and its impact in English works by Sidney, Spenser, and Marlowe. Third, variants of materialism are reconsidered in Cassandra Gorman's fascinating 'Atomies of Love: Material (Mis)interpretations of Cupid's Origin in Elizabethan Poetry', analysing the poetic mythography of Cupid in Sidney and Drayton in light of the period's materialist philosophies' growing interest in atomic motion.

The second set of essays in Part II, 'Style: Outgrowing the Arts', gives attention to questions of poetic form arising at the intersections of theory and practice, where poetic style extends beyond the strictures of theory. Rocío G. Sumillera's 'Bloody Poetics: Towards a Physiology of the Epic Poem' addresses the semantic role of blood as 'a fundamental style indicator' in a poetics of epic style, particularly in the work of the early English translators of Homer: George Chapman and John Dryden. David J. Amelang's 'Figuring Ineloquence in Late Sixteenth Century Poetry' navigates between rhetorical theory and a selection of texts, including poems by Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, and Drayton, as well as dramatic pieces by Shakespeare, in search of a 'theory of the unpoetic' and a 'praxis of ineloquence' (p. 19). Sonia Hernández-Santano's 'Eloquent Bodies: Rhetoricising the Symptoms of Love in the English Epyllion', is concerned with performative poetics and...