Catullan Consciousness and the Early Modern Lyric in England: From Wyatt to Donne FROM THE PUBLISHER
By comparing Catullus to English lyricists of the 16th and early 17th centuries, Jacob Blevins here identifies a common function of the genre: lyric love poetry, he argues, provides the space in which speakers attempt to situate their self-identity among dominant cultural ideologies and individual desires.
SYNOPSIS
English love poets of the Renaissance were influenced extensively of course by many classical models, but Blevins (McNeese State U.) argues that they owed more to the disillusionment of Catullus' lover than to the playful subversiveness of Ovid's. He is not so concerned with direct borrowing from the Roman poet, as with the adoption, adaptation, and sometimes subversion of his lyric aesthetic by poets trying to use forms a thousand years old to express their own ideas and experiences in an entirely different language. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
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