Calling all English Majors...

[neotoma]

I'm looking for romantic poetry from the late Elizabethan and early Jacobin periods -- say 1580 to 1608. I'd like to avoid Shakespeare, since I know there *were* other poets out there then. Donne? Marlowe? Who else might have been popular enough for octavos of their poems to be available?

How familiar would an educated man have been with the Roman poets? I could get to the dirtier bits of Catallus, but is that period? Or would someone else be better for the 'classics' of the time?

Comments

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

I'm not an Elizabethan, but I'd think pretty much anything Latin would be fair game. Since, "Little Latin, less Greek" was the slam on Shakespeare, presumably gentlemen were expected to know it. As to what was the most popular, dunno.

Ben Jonson, along with Marlowe and Donne, are the other-English-poets who spring to mind. Are you looking for a verse that accomplishes something particular?

[gwendolen.livejournal.com]

Marlowe is more a playwright.

Try Edmund Spenser and Thomas Raleigh as the most well-known poets of the Elisbethean period. There were many others.

[writestufflee.livejournal.com]

Not an Elizabethan either, but I'm a former medievalist with an Elizabethan ex-boyfriend who's steeped in the stuff. Walter Raleigh, Thomas Campion, Thomas Nashe, Donne for sure, Philip Sidney barely fits in (he died in 1586), but he would have been well known then, Spenser absolutely. Not much difference between poets & playwrights at this time: all the plays were in verse, but Marlowe definitely wrote poetry too. Latin was required and in fact the lingua franca of scholars and gentlemen (which is why Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante & the Pearl Poet were such anomalies for writing in the vernacular), Greek nearly as mandatory, especially if you were studying for clerical orders, the naughty bits of Catullus were well-known, well-loved, and oft-repeated. Ovid was a favorite too. Pretty much all the Latin and Greek poets we have translations of now existed and were well known in the Late Middle Ages & Renaissance.

Hope that helps!

[ellid.livejournal.com]

Some of the Metaphysical poets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_poets), especially John Donne and George Herbert, as well as the Cavalier poets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavalier_poets). One might also check out Raleigh, Sidney, Surrey, Wyatt, Spenser, Sidney's sister the Countess of Pembroke, and the poetry anthologies like The Shepherds' Calendar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Clout).

Have fun! There's some wonderful stuff there!

[ellid.livejournal.com]

Oh, two more names:

Petrarch and Dante. Both were translated into English by the Jacobean period and were highly influential.

As for me, I think that "On His Mistress Going to Bed" is one of the most erotic poems in the English language.

[twistedchick]

I think you might want to look at the Courtier Poets -- Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, and a few others. I have a book somewhere... Anyone educated at that level would have been familiar with Latin (however, they may or may not have liked it enough to read it) but might not have had Greek. Marlowe, yes. Donne, yes. Campion, yes. And there are others.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

All educated people knew Ovid, which has lots of naughty but not quite filthy material.

BTW, for most of that period, one would be about as likely to hire a Jesuit tutor as a public school system would have been to hire a Communist teacher in 1955.