“Friendlesse verse”: The Poetics of Chapman’s “A Coronet for His Mistresse Philosophie” (1595)

Abstract:Published in his second poetry volume, Ouids Banquet of Sence (1595), George Chapman’s “A Coronet for His Mistresse Philosophie” is often read as a sequel to the volume’s title piece. By attending to Chapman’s controversial dialogue with the Petrarchan lyric tradition in the England of his time, to his commitment to a didactic aestheticism that defends poetry’s enlightening powers, and to his preoccupation with proportional form, the present essay claims for this miniature sequence an autonomous status as a practical poetics. Chapman’s crown of sonnets—the first English instance of this form—is a programmatic defense of the amatory lyric as an instrument that warrants poetry’s dedication to the search for knowledge.