Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis

Abstract

Les Amours would lead to more profitable long-term patronage. This approach to craftsmanship is reflected both thematically in his poetry and economically in his publishing practices. Kennedy reveals how Ronsard recycled poems between one collection of poetry dedicated to Cassandra Salviati and a later one dedicated to Marie de Bourgueil, making his complaints against the beloveds interchangeable. Ronsard also cleverly profited twice from the set of poems commissioned by French king Henri III for his recently deceased lover Marie de Clèves, when he repurposed and published them in a new collection, Sur la Mort de Marie, dedicated to his beloved Marie de Bourgueil. Part 3 analyzes Shakespeare’s sonnets within the framework of the Petrarchan homo economicus and a “dynamics of maturation” that characterized the poetry of Sidney and Spenser. Kennedy theorizes that, based on the opaque quality of the Young Man poems, Shakespeare continued to revise them after he composed the Dark Lady poems, and right up to the quarto’s publication in 1609. Indeed, it is in the Young Man cycle, where the figures of the homo economicus and homo literarum come together, where we see more explicit references to economics, enterprise, and work alongside the poetic expression of love, desire, and male friendship/homosociality. Kennedy closes the book by returning to the “shape-shifting” figure of Mercury as a model for the poets—and their respective contextual economies—examined throughout the book. He ultimately shows how Petrarch’s legacy was as economic as it was poetic, that the act of poetic revision and emendation should be understood within both theoretical frames of Platonic furor and Aristotelian craftsmanship. Kennedy’s command of the source materials and close readings of poetic variants are exceptional. With Petrarchism at Work he has written another authoritative and original study of Petrarch’s legacy that will greatly impact the field.