Green Thoughts, Green Shades: Essays by Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric

"What a delight it is to read these astute essays by poets one admires about poets one has treasured for years! The critical intelligence and lively writing on every page should appeal to a wide audience. Students of the Early Modern Lyric will find much to refresh their understanding; the general reader will be seduced -- and rewarded."—Chana Bloch, author of Mrs. Dumpty and co-translator of The Song of Songs

"This is a splendid collection, shrewdly conceived and brilliantly executed, which should be read by anyone who loves poetry. As some of our most accomplished contemporary poets ruminate on the poetry of the seventeenth century, they also illuminate the practices and possibilities of twenty-first century poetry."—Michael Schoenfeldt, author of Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England

"All poetry in English reaches back one way or another for its pith and sweetness to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There is always, in every true poem, some seed or element of that period, honey of lute song or devotional bite. I think that goes for Frank O'Hara and Allen Ginsberg, for Elizabeth Bishop and Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Lowell, for Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, for Mark Strand and Frank Bidart and Louise Glück, for C. D. Wright and Michael Palmer, and for the young poets in college and high school. You can hear it and feel it, through infinite variations--and that is why this book is a great idea."—Robert Pinsky, former Poet Laureate of the United States

"I am delighted by Jonathan Post's collection. There is no other collection or anthology of this sort, or even remotely similar, available to students of poetry of the past, or to readers of contemporary poets. Green Thoughts, Green Shades is the liveliest collection of criticism I have read in a long time."—Richard Howard, author of Trappings: New Poems

Green Thoughts, Green Shades is a strikingly original book, the first and only of its kind. Edited and introduced by noted seventeenth-century scholar Jonathan Post, it enlists the analytic and verbal power of some of today's most celebrated poets to illuminate from the inside out a number of the greatest lyric poets writing in English during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Written by people who spend much of their time thinking in verse and about verse, these original essays herald the return of the early modern lyric as crucial to understanding the present moment of poetry in the United States. This work provides fascinating insights into what today's poets find of special interest in their forebears. In addition, these discussions shed light on the contributors' own poetry and offer compelling clues to how the poetry of the past continues to inform that of the present.

Jonathan F. S. Post is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of English Lyric Poetry: The Early Seventeenth Century (1999), Sir Thomas Browne (1987), and Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision (1982).

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Green Thoughts, Green Shades

Jonathan F.S. Post

1. The Face of the Sonnet: Wyatt and Some Early Features of the Tradition

Peter Sacks

2. Sidney and the Sestina

Anthony Hecht

3. Naked Numbers: A Curve from Wyatt to Rochester

Heather McHugh

4. Ben Jonson and the Loathèd Word

Linda Gregerson

5. Donnes Sovereignty

Calvin Bedient

6. Anomaly, Conundrum, Thy-Will-Be-Done: On the Poetry of George Herbert

Carl Phillips

7. Milton in the Modern: The Invention of Personality

William Logan

8. Finding Anne Bradstreet

Eavan Boland

9. Unordinary Passions: Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle

Alice Fulton

10. "How coy a Figure": Marvelry

Stephen Yenser

11. Saint John the Rake: Rochesters Poetry

Thom Gunn

12. Edward Taylor: What Was He Up To?

Robert Hass

List of Contributors

Index