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SIDNEY-SPENSER  June 2007

SIDNEY-SPENSER June 2007

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Subject:

Re: Amoretti and Sonnets

From:

"James C. Nohrnberg" <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Sidney-Spenser Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Thu, 7 Jun 2007 12:32:46 -0400

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (201 lines)

Re the following two comments made earlier:

Comment 1:
'The Scattered Rimes of the title of Petrarch’s collection seems to want to 
contradict the idea of sequence, even while numeration enforces it: for the 
deliberation (or deliberateness) as to where the poems go in the sequence 
and or the "story"or "history" is apparent and, as it were, in several cases 
numerologically preordained.'

A private correspondent asks if I know "John Hollander's remarkable 
meta-and-
more-than-sonnet sequence, The Powers of Thirteen, 169 thirteen-line (with
thirteen syllables per line) sonnet-like things?"  This seems to relate 
especially to this passage (Comment 1).

Comment 2:
'The case can certainly be made that the more strictly defined sequences 
gather into them the more "scattered rimes" of earlier sonnets not 
themselves "sequenced" or (to coin a definition) "plotted as belonging to a 
group by a single author of them." "The Progress of the Soule" is an 
implicit subject, as much as "the progress of an affair" is an explicit 
one.'

A second private correspondent says, "I can never think of sonnet 
sequences/collections without thinking about Psalms," and cannily inquires:

"Were Elizabethan poets modelling their sequences/collections on the
Psalms, a collection that was 'sequenced' by many? The Psalms have much in
common with the structuring devices of the sonnet sequences: coherent
groups, both sequential and scattered; "publication" together, etc... What
do you make of the influence of the Psalms on secular sonnet collections in
the early modern period?"

(This relates to Comment 2.)

Re Comment 1:
Someone somewhere mentioned Hollander's Perec-like tour de force to me--but 
I've not actually seen it.   Shakespeare's last sonnet is an ominous two 
lines short, and I think maybe I've seem poems as long as 18 lines accorded 
sonnet-status. A poet named Merrill Moore associated with the Fugitives 
wrote a huge book of 1000 sonnets--it had to do with his initials. I think 
there was an M embossed on the cover. (I haven't seen it for 40 years or 
more, but I do remember its being in either the Berkeley High School or 
Kenyon College library, ca. 1958!)   In other words, there are again two 
poles here, i.e., two formalist poles:  the "scattered" one, and the 
"collected" one:  the flock of poems that is shepherded into a single 
publication, and the rationed collection of poems that is a poem itself (and 
under strict numerical control).

Now back to the question re the Psalmist.
It's interesting that two great English sonneteers translated Psalms in 
groups, Milton and Sidney, and Wordsworth wrote the Ecclesiastical Sonnets. 
That's on the "content" side, if you will.   But on the "form" side--which 
might well include the "formulaic"-- I actually thought of this scriptural 
analogy when I was writing in the e-mailing about clusters, because long ago 
I wrote an endless (and unaccepted) review of James Kugel's book The Idea of 
Biblical Poetry, in which Kugel makes a good deal of the fact that a feature 
of biblical poetical texts of the psalmic variety is the migratory character 
of certain refrain-like chunks of them (not mere metrical putty, but 
nonetheless interchangeable, in a way that seemingly gives the lie to the 
unique unity of a given Psalm). (There are parallels in the prophets, but 
the psalms are the main instance for our purposes here.)  This would not be 
a case of a consciously adopted model for the Ren. poets, just a phenomenon 
that links the two metiers, uh, "phenomenologically" (or "structurally"). 
 That is, there are poems in the corpus that seem to get passed around, 
e.g., the number of English versions of Petrarch's "My galley charged with 
forgetfulness."  The doubled Narcissus sonnet in Spenser's Amoretti is 
another, very different example of the same phenomenon, consciously and 
thematically deployed, and indeed different, because adopted into the other 
pole, i.e., numerologically deployed.

On the content side (again), the first person "David" or "I" or "ego" or 
Psalmist of the Psalms is somewhat like the "Astrophil" (or whomever) or 
star-lover of collected sonnet practice -- on the one hand -- insofar as he 
is an individual with a personal
history, and -- on the other hand -- merely representative of the class 
"lover/s" like "Petrarchans," insofar as he (or she, in a few cases) is a 
corporate entity or personality whose experience with the cynosure-figure 
(i.e., the Lord, in the case of the Psalmist) is collective (the collective 
ego -- the people or Israel or the Suffering Servant, etc.).  Much of the 
power of the sonneteering tradition or convention must derive from a 
readership that overheard the speaker speaking his "tale of me" as speaking 
in its (the readership's) behalf, if only somewhat like a priest praying at 
an altar in behalf of his congretation.  Afterall, much of the sonnet 
tradition is quasi- psalmic in relation to that jealous god Dan Cupid and 
that religio Courtly Love.   -- Jim N.



On Thu, 7 Jun 2007 11:02:41 -0400
  anne prescott <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I'm swamped by SCSC business at the moment and don't have time to  check 
>this, but I recall something by Kent Hieatt on verbal overlaps  between the 
>Lover's Complaint and Sonnets? In any case, two quick  thoughts: first, 
>questions of authorship aside, for those of us  interested in the material 
>history of the book (and with at least a  touch of the postmodern 
>skepticism about capital A authorship) it's  interesting to see 1609 
>*Sonnets* follow the pattern you find in  Lodge, Spenser, Fletcher, Daniel 
>and others in which you get a sonnet  sequence, often something 
>fluffy--anacreontics, final sonnets about  Cupid, whatever--and then a long 
>poem. It's for that reason that I  prefer editions that include the 
>Complaint. If I were any more  postmodern I'd say something about 
>fetishizing authorship, but that  wouldn't be, um, me.
>      Second, and back to Spenser and sensuality, I do recommend  
> Roger Kuin's book *Chamber Music* in this regard--unusual in form,  even 
>to the point of including "Will" as a character in one chapter,  but/and 
>wise on the matter of desire and sonnets.  Anne P.
> 
> On Jun 6, 2007, at 6:56 PM, Colin Burrow wrote:
> 
>> Well yes and no. There’s also a growing body of work which suggests  
>> that Katherine Duncan-Jones may present rather too positive a view  
>> of Thorpe’s career, and that the 1609 volume gives off a variety of  
>> bibliographical cues, not all of which suggest that it was  
>> ‘authorized’. And if one gave credence to Brian Vickers’s  
>> Shakespeare, 'A Lover's Complaint', and John Davies of Hereford 
>> (Cambridge, 2007) then one might end up wondering how that strange  
>> and strangely Spenserian (off topic, me?) poem came to be printed  
>> along with the Sonnets. The RSC editors take his arguments  
>> seriously enough to leave A Lover’s Complaint out of their printed  
>> volume… Where does that leave our sense of the 1609 volume, or for  
>> that matter the relationship between Spenser and Shakespeare, I  
>> wonder?
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> 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:SIDNEY- 
>> [log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Peter C. Herman
>> Sent: 06 June 2007 17:35
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: Re: Amoretti and Sonnets
>>
>>
>>
>> since we have no knowledge of how far Shakespeare planned or  
>> approved the form in which his poems found their way into print.
>>
>>
>> This oint was mentioned earlier, but given Charlie's statement  
>> above, I thought it might bear repeating: there's now a substantial  
>> body of scholarship arguing that Shakespeare was much more involved  
>> with the publication of the Sonnets than previously assumed, and  
>> there is a corollary point: that Shakespeare wrote, or revised, the  
>> Sonnets close to their publication, and not earlier in his career.  
>> See, for example, these two articles:
>>
>> Duncan-Jones, Katherine. "Was the 1609 Shake-Speares Sonnets Really  
>> Unauthorized?"
>> Review of English Studies n.s. 34 (1983): 151-71.
>>
>> Hieatt, A. Kent, Charles W. Hieatt, and Anne Lake Prescott." "When  
>> did Shakespeare
>> Write Sonnets 1609?" Studies in Philology 88 (1991): 69-109.
>>
>> For the Sonnets generally, see also James Schiffer's 2000  
>> anthology, Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays.
>>
>> pch
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> At level of the sequence, the appearance of realism may therefore  
>> be partly accidental - with the messiness (for want of a better  
>> word) of real subjective experience being 'imitated' not through  
>> any authorial intention but rather as a consequence of the real- 
>> word messiness of the circumstances of publication.
>>
>> Charlie
>>
>> -- 
>> Website: www.charlesbutler.co.uk
>>
>>
> 

[log in to unmask]
James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121

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