Jane Hedley

English lyric poetry from Wyatt to Donne falls into three consecutive stylistic phases. Tottel's Miscellany presided over the first, making the lyrics of Wyatt and Surrey available for imitation by mid-century poets like Barnabe Googe, George Turberville, and George Gascoigne. The Shepheardes Calender and Sidney's Defense of Poesy ushered in the second, the Elizabethan or &"Golden&" phase of the 1580s and 1590s. In the third phase Donne and Jonson, reacting against the stylistic orientation of the Elizabethan poets, reconceived the status of &"poesy&" and resituated the lyric for a post-Elizabethan audience. Chapter 7 is shared between Donne and Jonson, post-Elizabethan writers who used metonymy to subvert the metaphoric stance of Elizabethan poetry. In a Postscript Hedley takes on the &"metaphysical conceit&" for a final demonstration of the explanatory power of Jakobson's theory of language. Professor Hedley uses the semiotic theory of Roman Jakobson to create stylistic profiles for each of these three phases of early Renaissance poetry. Along with the poetry itself she reexamines contemporary treatises, &"defenses,&" and &"notes of instruction&" to highlight key features of poetic practice. She proposes that early and mid-Tudor poetry is &"metonymic,&" that the collective orientation of the Elizabethan poets is &"metaphoric,&" and that Donne and Jonson bring metonymy to the fore once again. Chapter 1 sets out the essentials of Jakobson's theory. Hedley uses particular poems to show what is involved in claiming that a writer or a piece of writing has metaphoric or a metonymic basis. Chapter 2 explains how the metaphoric bias of Elizabethan poetry was produced, as &"poesy&" became part of England's national identity. This chapter broadens out beyond the lyric to include other modes of writing whose emergence belongs to an Elizabethan &"moment&" in the history of English literature. Beyond chapter 2, each chapter has a double purpose: to create stylistic profile for a single poetic generation and to highlight a particular aspect or feature of the poetry as an index of difference from one generation to the next. In the third chapter Hedley shows how Wyatt and Surrey used deixis metonymically to give their poems particular occasions. Chapter 4 explains how the metonymic bias of the mid-Tudor poets affected their use of metaphor, and highlights Gascoigne's appreciation of a metaphor as a social gambit or an instrument of moral suasion. Chapters 5 and 6 are centered in the Elizabethan period, but with perspectives into earlier and subsequent phases of metonymic writing. In chapter 5, a comprehensive discussion of the sonnet and the sonnet sequence shows how metaphoric writing cooperates with the &"poetic function&" of language. Chapter 6 deals with love poetry, as a social/political activity whose orientation differs radically from one generation of English Petrarchists to the next.

Metaphor and Metonymy in the Renaissance Lyric

Power in Verse

Modern Marriage and the Lyric Sequence investigates the ways in which some of our best poets writing in English have used poetic sequences to capture the lived experience of marriage. Beginning in 1862 with George Meredith’s Modern Love, Jane Hedley’s study utilizes the rubrics of temporality, dialogue, and triangulation to bring a deeply rooted and vitally interesting poetic genre into focus. Its twentieth- and twenty-first-century practitioners have included Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Lowell, Rita Dove, Eavan Boland, Louise Glück, Anne Carson, Ted Hughes, Claudia Emerson, Rachel Zucker, and Sharon Olds. In their poetic sequences the flourishing or failure of a particular marriage is always at stake, but as that relationship plays out over time, each sequence also speaks to larger questions: why we marry, what a marriage is, what our collective stake is in other people’s marriages. In the book’s final chapter gay marriage presents a fresh testing ground for these questions, in light of the US Supreme Court’s affirmation of same-sex marriage.

Modern Marriage and the Lyric Sequence

Willard Spiegelman

Nick Halpern

The subject of In the Frame is poetic ekphrasis: poems whose starting point or source of inspiration is a work of visual art. The authors of these sixteen essays, several of whom are poets as well as critics, have a twofold purpose: calling attention to the contribution women poets have made to this important genre of poetic writing and re-thinking ekphrastic poetry's motives and purposes. From Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop to Mary Jo Salter, C. D. Wright, and Susan Wheeler, many of our best women poets have done important work in this genre, and when they describe, confront, or speak for an image that is itself wordless, their motives are not only formal but aesthetic. Their poems also raise important questions, from a perspective that is often, but not always, gender-inflected about how art is made and displayed, experienced and valued, celebrated and commodified. Jane Hedley is K. Laurence Stapleton Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College. Willard Spiegelman is the Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University, and editor-in-chief of the Southwest Review. Nick Halpem is an associate professor in the English Department at North Carolina State University.

Jane Hedley

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