Synopses & Reviews
Along with his childhood friend Sir Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville (1554-1628) was an important member of the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Although his poems, long out of print, are today less well known than those of Sidney, Spenser, or Shakespeare, Greville left an indelible mark on the world of Renaissance poetry, both in his love poems, which ably work within the English Petrarchan tradition, and in his religious meditations, which, along with the work of Donne and Herbert, stand as a highpoint of early Protestant poetics.
Back in print for a new generation of scholars and readers, Thom Gunns selection of Grevilles short poems includes the whole of Grevilles lyric sequence, Caelica, along with choruses from some of Grevilles verse dramas. Gunns introduction places Grevilles thought in historical context and in relation to the existential anxieties that came to preoccupy writers in the twentieth century. It is as revealing about Gunn himself, and the reading of earlier English verse in the 1960s, as it is about Grevilles own poetic achievement. This reissue of Selected Poems of Fulke Greville is an event of the first order both for students of early British literature and for readers of Thom Gunn and English poetry generally.
Review
“Thom Gunn's edition of Fulke Grevilles poems is doubly welcome. It makes available, in a handsome and reader-friendly volume, the austere, compelling lyrics of one of the masters of Elizabethan poetry. And through Gunns long Introduction and Bradin Cormacks Afterword, it sheds light on Gunn himself, one of the finest poets of the twentieth century."
Review
"Greville is probably the greatest poet unknown to many readers. The force of his imagination, his driven intelligence and his eruptive cadences, merits comparison with Donne, Herbert and Shakespeare. Thom Gunns visually inviting edition, with its preface a model of light and penetration, is one of my most treasured books. I recommend this new incarnation to anyone who has ever been thrilled by a poem."—Robert Pinsky
Review
"Back in 1968, Thom Gunns edition of Fulke Greville revealed an Elizabethan poet whom history had neglected but who spoke with an astonishing modernity. It was not so much that Gunn was influenced by Greville, as that they seemed to write in the same key. There was Grevilles will to defeat his own illusions, his existential loneliness, the charged precision of his abstract nouns, the terse muscularity of his style. For those to whom good poetry is always a living concern, Gunns introduction could not be bettered--and the poems are as magnificent as ever. A scholarly new afterword by Bradin Cormack suggests that neither Greville nor Gunn has lost his force."
About the Author
Thom Gunn (1929-2004) is the author of nine books of poems, including
The Man with Night Sweats and
Boss Cupid.
Bradin Cormack is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago. He is the author of A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509-1625, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Table of Contents
Note on the Text
Thom Gunn
Life and Works
Thom Gunn
Introduction
Thom Gunn
Caelica
Selected Choruses from the Plays
Index of First Lines
Afterword
In the Labyrinth: Gunns Greville
Bradin Cormack (2009)
Note on the 2009 Edition
Bradin Cormack
Selected Bibliography Bradin Cormack