The Selected Poems of Fulke Greville

by Greville, Fulke

• ISBN13: 9780226308463
• ISBN10: 0226308464
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-05-29
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Along with his childhood friend Sir Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville (15541628) 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 Gunn's selection of Greville's short poems includes the whole of Greville's lyric sequence,Caelica, along with choruses from some of Greville's verse dramas. Gunn's introduction places Greville's 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 Greville's own poetic achievement.This reissue ofSelected Poems of Fulke Grevilleis an event of the first order both for students of early British literature and for readers of Thom Gunn and English poetry generally.

Author Biography

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

Life and Works

Introduction

Caelica Selected Choruses from the Plays

Index of First Lines

Afterword In the Labyrinth: Gunn’s Greville

Bradin Cormack (2009)

Note on the 2009 Edition

Selected Bibliography

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.