Hannibal remarks:

As for ottava rima, it would seem much the grander form, since it was
used for /Orlando Furioso/, /Gerusalemme liberata/, and the /Lusiadas/
(as well as Daniel's /Civil Wars/, Harington's Ariosto, etc. etc.).
Would such a meter really seem subversive?

Now that's an interesting question. Subversive--in itself? of Elizabeth
I, or her government? I don't see why it would be. But as an instrument
with which a poet generates and sustains tone, ottava rima? Might one
say Harrington's version of /Orlando Furioso /ottava rima becomes the
vehicle of an ironical attitude so pronounced and sustained as to have
sat in Byron's ear as he composed /Don Juan/? (I suspect that the way in
which Harrington and Byron deploy ottava rima is also Ariosto's, but I'm
not competent to have an opinion on Italian metrics). In bringing this
lineage up, I'm trying to suggest--at the cost of joining a conversation
I've been steadfastly refusing for several days now--that the idea of
presenting metrics per se as political or not political is a bit of a
straw dog. Metrics are like nails--they hold things together in
different ways according to how hard and what angle you apply the
hammer. It may be that certain metrical arrangements have political
implications on their own, or acquire them in certain contexts--as with
Milton's note on blank verse. But to limit oneself to metrics in the
abstract, as though poetry were just sound is to frame the argument more
for ridicule than for education. I suppose one might have a truly
descriptive (as opposed to theorizing) analysis of any given specimen,
but having done so, and venturing the question "so what?" might and I'm
inclined to say, ought to, put you back on Mr. Willett's bad side.

Which brings me to my second point:

Re this from Mr. Willett:

So far as I'm concerned, this is a tissue of selfserving, hollow and
evasive gestures, though I'm sure the author didn't think so. I am quite
familiar with renaissance books on prosody, and if Prof. Saenger thinks
they support him in any way, he should cite them.

I'm sorry if this presumes on Andrew's role, but he should not be
expected to be our entire police force. I for one, have had enough of
Willett's invective. What was first presented as a question about
Pastoral has repeatedly become an occasion for appropriating this
otherwise collegial list for relentless displays of one individual's
resentement. He demanding specifics, but I've yet to see any from
him--even after Harry Berger's explicit request for references to
Butler. Instead we get a picture of academic discourse that differs
entirely from my experience but suspiciously resembles any number of
politically motivated pages from 'the culture wars. I've cited
Harrington and Byron (casually I admit, but I have work to do). For
other specimens of metric analysis that open out onto larger--and even
political--issues, I recommend the essay on the Spenserian stanza that
Ken Gross published in PMLA a good many years ago, and Gordon Teskey on
Spenser and Milton, in his earlier essay, also in PMLA, and in his
recent book, Delirious Milton. So Willett, may I ask that you either
show us the offending passages in Marx, Foucault, Derrida et al or leave
us alone?

Marshall Grossman
Professor of English
University of Maryland
3101 SQH Susquehanna Hall
College Park, MD 20742

301-405-9651
[log in to unmask]



HANNIBAL HAMLIN wrote:
> Umm. Well, I am as devoted to Mary Sidney as anyone -- I've written on
> her and I'm currently co-editing an edition of the Sidney Psalter
> (with Margaret Hannay, Michael Brennan, and Noel Kinnamon) for Oxford
> World's Classics. Some of my best friends are Mary Sidney scholars. :)
>
> By "Sidney Psalter" I meant (as I usually do) "The Psalter of the
> Sidneys [Philip and Mary]," though I realize this might not have been
> clear in the context of my comments on Philip. Like that of many
> Renaissance women, Mary's name is always a problem: "Sidney" seems to
> subordinate her to Philip, "Herbert" to her husband, "Pembroke"
> likewise. On completeness -- in so far as the project was begun by
> Philip, it was left incomplete. That was my point. Certainly as it
> exists now (and since the late 1590s), the Psalter is complete, and
> was indeed largely the work of Mary, who wrote Psalms 44-150 and
> revised some of Philip's translations of 1-43. I'm not aware of any
> evidence that it was Mary who began the project and then "bossed
> Philip into writing the other 43," though it is entirely possible that
> both siblings were involved in the project from its inception. Mary
> herself (in "To the Angell Spirit") makes clear that she was picking
> up where Philip left off. Of course, part of what's going on in this
> poem is Mary establishing her own literary reputation by tying it to
> Philip's, though Philip's literary reputation was already actually in
> significant ways a construction of Mary's (who controlled the
> publication of his works). But there is no reason to think that the
> idea of Philip beginning the work is a complete fabrication, or that
> her admiration for him (as brother and poet) is not genuine. For what
> it's worth, finally, I think Mary is much the better poet in the
> Psalms translations.
>
> On matters political, the idea of ottava rima (versus rime royal) as a
> jab at Elizabeth seems a little unlikely, since the dedication poem to
> Elizabeth was formally a presentation poem, not printed or widely
> circulated but prefixed to a copy of the Psalms that was likely
> intended to be given to the queen (see the extensive material in the
> OET edition of Mary's works). Why would Mary want to subvert Elizabeth
> in this way? A note on rhyme royal (cribbed from /The Princeton Encyc.
> of Poetry and Poetics/): it seems not to have been connected to actual
> royalty (though this was -- long post-Renaissance -- believed to have
> been the case, in connection to James I of Scotland). Gascoigne uses
> the term in his /Certayne Notes/ "with reference not to its original
> use as a form of address but to its gravity of subject, as in
> Chaucer's /Troilus/." It's used in Spenser's /Foure Hymnes/ and
> Shakespeare /Rape of Lucrece/, neither of which seems particular
> concerned with monarchs (though I suppose one could try to do
> something with the republican content and "royal" meter of the latter
> -- ignoring the fact that the meter wasn't "royal"). As for ottava
> rima, it would seem much the grander form, since it was used for
> /Orlando Furioso/, /Gerusalemme liberata/, and the /Lusiadas/ (as well
> as Daniel's /Civil Wars/, Harington's Ariosto, etc. etc.). Would such
> a meter really seem subversive?
>
> Hannibal
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Penny M <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 11:21 am
> Subject: Re: pastoral jottings
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
>
> > By ‘the Sidney Psalter’ you presumably mean /Mary/ Sidney’s Psalter?
> (Really, Hannibal! There is great deal to be said for feminist
> criticism.) It’s not incomplete; but I don’t think she ‘completed’ it.
> I think she deliberately wrote 107 Psalms as her ‘sonnet sequence’,
> adding ‘To the Angell Spirit’ as her 108^th , to match Astrophel and
> Stella. Then she bossed Philip into writing the other 43. Maureen
> Quilligan has noticed that the tribute to Philip employs the
> rhyme-royal stanza, while the dedication poem to Elizabeth is in
> ottava rima. Perhaps we have a political use of metre here?
> Subversive, anti-Elizabeth. It’s not intrinsically royal, but after
> it’s been so called, perhaps it becomes so?
>
> > Penny.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> *> From:* Sidney-Spenser Discussion List
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] *On Behalf Of *HANNIBAL HAMLIN
> *> Sent:* 11 June 2008 15:19
> *> To:* [log in to unmask]
> *> Subject:* Re: pastoral jottings
>
>
> > But Petrarch doesn't really follow the rota except in his aspiration
> toward epic, does he? Where's the pastoral? The //Rime// don't
> qualify, surely? It seems to me that the rota virgilium works much as
> the genres themselves do, in that it provides a template that poets
> can follow, reject, or adapt as suits theirs needs and inclinations.
> Does any poet after Virgil really follow the wheel precisely? It seems
> the most one finds is some correspondence at either end: pastoral
> beginnings and epic aspirations. But what of georgic (the middle child
> always neglected)? Thomas Moffett writes georgic, but nothing else
> (same with Tusser). Spenser blends it into FQ, along with pastoral, in
> ingenious ways, with his Redcrosse St. Georgos and his idea of
> knightly labor (the sallying forth which Milton picks up in
> //Areopagitica//). I like Colin's (Burrow that is) idea of Spenser as
> permanent pastoralist. Is the same true of Sidney? The Arcadia is his
> epic if anything is, but it's even more pastoral than FQ.
>
> > Further questions:
>
> > Why is it that so many Renaissance epics are incomplete? Does this
> say something about the rota? Milton makes it through PL, but neither
> FQ nor the Arcadia make it to the end. One might perhaps add to this
> list Raleigh's Ocean to Cynthia. Any others?
>
> > The rota is further complicated by adding in genres Virgil never
> considered. Romance is obviously key for Spenser and Sidney (and
> Milton), but biblical genres are important too. For a long time it was
> a critical commonplace that Psalms functioned for poets like pastoral
> -- something to cut your poetic teeth on but then to move away from.
> This does seem true for some (Crashaw for instance), but for others
> Psalms were not juvenalia but the highest form of poetry. Milton says
> this, though he doesn't exactly practice it (note Mary Radzinowicz
> however on how psalmic PL is). Psalms might be in the epic position
> for Sidney, since the Sidney Psalter seems to have been his last major
> literary project (again, incomplete). Spenser is trickier -- according
> to Ponsonby he wrote a version of the Penitential Psalms, not extant.
> Ken Borris suggested at SCSC some time back that the common meter
> headnotes to the cantos in FQ were derived from Sternhold and Hopkins.
>
> > Anyway, as Anne P. has argued, David and Virgil were competing models
> for Renaissance poets, and it's interesting to see how individual
> writers negotiation between them. (I've written on the importance of
> Psalm 23 and biblical shepherds/sheep for Renaissance pastoral, for
> instance.)
>
> > Hannibal
>
>
>
>
>
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: Colin Burrow <[log in to unmask]>
> > Date: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 8:16 am
> > Subject: Re: pastoral jottings
> > To: [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
> > > I like /Africa/. Isn’t its learned over-achievement what aspiring
> sparks /sub tegmine fagi/ aspire to? So all those years of getting
> better and aspiring onwards and practising those hexameters and what
> do you get? The ability to write /Africa/. Isn’t that one of the best
> jokes there is?
>
> > Learn from it, oh ye youths.
>
> > Spenser is always pretty ironical about settled achievement (which is
> why he is so interested in going back to being young, starting again,
> not getting where you thought you’d got to), and this is partly why I
> like him (all right, I’ll confess it, even more than I like /Africa/).
> It’s an aspect of being a permanent pastoralist. Pastoral is a place
> where middle aged men can pretend to be young. And because Spenser is
> a permanent pastoralist we have Book VI and not another book; and this
> might also explain how /Colin Clouts Come Home Again/ (which I think
> is the best pastoral poem written in the sixteenth century, perhaps
> the best by an English writer apart from Milton’s /Epitaphium
> Damonis/) fits in near the end of his career, and why retrospection
> and regression (I think these are better words than ‘nostalgia’) are
> such permanent interests of his.
>
> > Penny has however suggested that there might be a ‘real world’ out
> there. I must contemplate this dreadful possibility for some moments
> before I continue to eradicate false quantities from the fifteenth
> draft of my hexameter epic on Stephen Hawking.
>
> > Ivorily,
>
> > Colin Burrow
>
> > Senior Research Fellow
>
> > All Souls College
>
> > High Street
>
> > Oxford OX1 4AL
>
> > 01865 279341 (direct) 01865 279379 (Lodge)
>
> > [log in to unmask]
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> > > *From:* Sidney-Spenser Discussion List
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] *On Behalf Of *Penny M
> > > *Sent:* 11 June 2008 11:18
> > > *To:* [log in to unmask]
> > > *Subject:* Re: pastoral jottings
>
> > > Dan, (and, if you could hang on to the bottom of the page, Colin)
>
> > > Thank you so much for immediately demonstrating what you would do
> with ‘O fons’ - very impressive; and you’ve drawn my attention to the
> possible dark side. I had remembered simply a kind of clear gem, amid
> his other mostly rather worldly odes. A bit like the simple song for
> Tatiana’s birthday in Tchaikovsky’s Onegin, which for all the
> affectation of the singing master, one can’t mock. Except that
> Horace’s ode is not composed of a simple melody, but is itself
> sophisticated.
>
> > > I admit I have not stuck strictly to pastoral, as in Julian’s
> flocks; I have been thinking in terms of meta-, escapism (rural), and
> ‘what is real’. I think with ‘remote from experience’, I wanted to put
> a wedge between your ‘place of escape’ and your ‘remote from
> experience’. Or perhaps I wanted to remove a wedge between poetry and
> real life. There can be false consciousness about ‘real urban’ and
> ‘false rural idyll’: Neil Powell, an editor of P.N. Review, wrote a
> good piece ages ago questioning the critic X (I genuinely can’t
> remember who) who had carped at some poems about the country by saying
> no-one should still be writing about roses round the door. Powell said
> a) he himself does have a house with roses round the door and b) the
> critic X had lived in the same village until a few months before.
>
> > > But I have to accept your point about Petrarch (Touchstone too, one
> could add) and his hankering for the world of ‘experience’ as you
> define it. However, isn’t it quite interesting that the Romans didn’t
> define it that way on? We have ‘work’ and ‘doing nothing’, while they
> had ‘otium’ and its ‘neg’.
>
> > > Re the career wheel raised by Colin Burrow: Isn’t Spenser teasing
> us or challenging us to see that he doesn’t believe in the Vergilian
> progression? In the Epistle, he says: (very first example, which
> notably destroys his argument) ‘So flew Theocritus, as you may
> perceive he was all ready full fledged’? Then he has Vergil – O.K.
> Then he has Mantuan . . . not full somd. Then Petrarch, Boccaccio,
> Marot, Sannazarus, all meant to be examples of not fully somd when
> writing eclogue. But surely in at least some of the cases, he must
> have considered their eclogues their crowning glory? Do you actually
> know any fans of ‘Africa’? (Oh, I suppose there must be a handful in
> All Souls – but in the ‘real world’?)
>
> > > Penny.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> > > *From:* Sidney-Spenser Discussion List
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] *On Behalf Of *Lochman, Daniel T
> > > *Sent:* 10 June 2008 16:45
> > > *To:* [log in to unmask]
> > > *Subject:* Re: pastoral jottings
>
> > > Penny,
>
> > > I’m by no means an expert on Horace or Rome, and I’m not sure I
> understand what you mean when you write that Horace’s farm was not
> remote from experience (perhaps you could explain?), but in reply to
> your question I’d note first that Horace’s poem (see below) is an ode
> rather than an eclogue; though it has pastoral elements in it, the
> words are directed at the fount rather than at a present or imagined
> person, and it is more in the vein of the epideictic rather than the
> deliberative. That said, it has pastoral elements, not just in its
> setting but in its assertion of the durability of the song. And I
> think it is pastoral also in that, though celebrating the pristine
> purity of the waters (and attempting to turn our gaze away from the
> world of experience), the poem has pressing upon it the ironic
> pollution caused by the sacrificial animal’s blood, the sacrifice
> itself recalling in its youth a projected loss of maturity seen in
> human terms: “venerem et proelia.” And even if we accept that the
> spring may be shielded from the “flagrantis Caniculae” the speaker’s
> awareness implies that an unpleasant alternative exists outside this
> place and that the spring is somehow in need of the memorial the poem
> provides.
>
> > > Beyond this, one might examine features of the poem’s verses and
> language that contribute to the sense of contrast between the pleasure
> of seclusion given meaning by implied contrasts with less pleasant or
> at least human realities: poetry and love as well as sacrifice and
> war. So, to the extent that the ode is pastoral, the world of
> experience (meant in a vaguely Blakean sense) seems to me to suffuse
> and give significance to the fons and Horace’s real farm. In pastoral,
> one may wish, like Petrarch in referring to the pleasant rustics in
> his letters about Vaucluse, to idealize that which one wishes to
> escape to, but, once among them, one cannot help but contrast one’s
> immediate experience with the world of “experience”: at Vaucluse
> Petrarch complains about the pastoral yokels and their lack of
> educated sophistication; they cannot offer him any serious conversation.
>
> > > I apologize for the length here, and I’d appreciate any corrections
> or instruction about Horace’s poem. Penny, thanks for drawing my
> attention to Horace’s poem, and I’m fascinated to see all the various
> threads sprouting from David’s first brave assertion as well as your
> interesting observations about Cuddy’s underdog position in Spenser’s
> August.
>
> > > Clearly, diachronic conversations persist!
>
> > > Dan
>
>
> > > O fons Bandusiae, splendidior vitro,
> > > dulci digne mero non sine floribus,
> > > cras donaberis haedo,
> > > cui frons turgida cornibus
>
> > > primis et venerem et proelia destinat.
> > > frustra: nam gelidos inficiet tibi
> > > rubro sanguine rivos
> > > lascivi suboles gregis.
>
> > > te flagrantis atrox hora Caniculae
> > > nescit tangere, tu frigus amabile
> > > fessis vomere tauris
> > > praebes et pecori vago.
>
> > > fies nobilium tu quoque fontium,
> > > me dicente cavis impositam ilicem
> > > saxis, unde loquaces
> > > lymphae desiliunt tuae.
>
>
> > > [O Fount Bandusia, brighter than crystal,
> > > worthy of sweet wine and flowers,
> > > tomorrow shalt thou be honoured with
> > > a firstling of the flock whose brow,
>
> > > with horns just budding, foretokens love
> > > and strife. Alas! in vain; for this
> > > offspring of the sportive flock shall
> > > dye thy cool waters with its own red blood.
>
> > > Thee the fierce season of the blazing
> > > dog-star cannot touch; to bullocks wearied
> > > of the ploughshare and to the roaming flock
> > > thou dost offer gracious coolness.
>
> > > Thou, too, shalt be numbered among the
> > > far-famed fountains, through the song I
> > > sing of the oak planted o'er the grotto
> > > whence thy babbling waters leap.]
>
> (> > http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/horaces-villa/poetry/Ode3.13.html)
>
>
> > > On 6/10/08 4:49 AM, "Penny M" <[log in to unmask]
> <[log in to unmask]" target="_blank">https:[log in to unmask]>>
> wrote:
>
> > > Dan, re ‘the form had received painterly strokes of civility and
> Roman political ambition that removed it from any thought of escape or
> remoteness from experience’ . . . . Horace had a /real/ farm to which
> he said he escaped from the city, but which was not ‘remote from
> experience’. What will you do with odes like ‘O fons Bandusiae’?
>
> > > Prompted by your thought about social tensions appearing (as they
> necessarily will) again in the utopian world: I love the ambiguity of
> Cuddie in S.C.’s August. He is only a goat-herd’s boy, not even a
> shepherd, but he is made to adjudicate between Willy (could be Philip
> Sidney? – anyway, higher in the social scale) and Perigot. Either
> because he genuinely can’t decide, or out of hierarchy-induced fear,
> he splits the prize between them; then sings a ‘proper’ song by Colin
> (slightly higher in the hierarchy (I think) as a shepherd’s boy) which
> is obviously better than those of the previous contestants, and E.K.
> says of him that he ‘seems to’ claim the prize, or if not claim it,
> know he is best. Doesn’t this show a paradox inherent in the coteries
> around Elizabethan pastoral-writing – that a commoner with talent can
> be acknowledged king of the contest, but the status is precarious
> within and without that charmed temporarily egalitarian world?
> > > And Cuddie’s status is highly problematic even as a commoner:
> ‘proper’ could mean ‘his own’, i.e. he covertly is none other than
> Colin. That song is, incidentally, the same song (transposed) as the
> sestina of 8 by A.W. in /Poetical Rhapsodie/, and sonnet 20 by the
> William Smith of /Chloris/. Are they all Colin? Yes. Pastoral (at that
> time) was used for disguise, among other things.
>
> > > Penny.
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> > > Spam <https://antispam.osu.edu/b.php?c=s&i=607691977&m=d656b305f764>
> > > Not spam
> <https://antispam.osu.edu/b.php?c=n&i=607691977&m=d656b305f764>
> > > Forget previous vote
> <https://antispam.osu.edu/b.php?c=f&i=607691977&m=d656b305f764>
>
>
>
>
> > Hannibal Hamlin
> > Associate Professor of English
> > The Ohio State University
> > Book Review Editor and Associate Editor, Reformation
>
> > Mailing Address (2007-2009):
>
> > The Folger Shakespeare Library
> > 201 East Capitol Street SE
> > Washington, DC 20003
>
> > Permanent Address:
>
> > Department of English
> > The Ohio State University
> > 421 Denney Hall, 164 W. 17th Avenue
> > Columbus, OH 43210-1340
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> > Spam <https://antispam.osu.edu/b.php?c=s&i=607737498&m=5957c9fdb6fe>
> > Not spam <https://antispam.osu.edu/b.php?c=n&i=607737498&m=5957c9fdb6fe>
> > Forget previous vote
> <https://antispam.osu.edu/b.php?c=f&i=607737498&m=5957c9fdb6fe>
>
>
>
> Hannibal Hamlin
> Associate Professor of English
> The Ohio State University
> Book Review Editor and Associate Editor, Reformation
>
> Mailing Address (2007-2009):
>
> The Folger Shakespeare Library
> 201 East Capitol Street SE
> Washington, DC 20003
>
> Permanent Address:
>
> Department of English
> The Ohio State University
> 421 Denney Hall, 164 W. 17th Avenue
> Columbus, OH 43210-1340
>