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c h a p t e r 1 The Rhetoric of Lyric Definitions, Descriptions, Disputations Annotated exhaustively, imitated widely, disseminated in editions that not coincidentally look very like Bibles, Francesco Petrarch’s Rime sparse is prototype and progenitor of the English early modern lyric, and, indeed, it might offer a credible model for those who attempt a transhistorical definition of that mode. But the confession of transgression that is its opening poem repeatedly transgresses characteristics commonly proposed as the norms of lyric. If this literary type represents the poet talking to himself, as numerous critics have assumed, the Canzoniere, like many English sonnet cycles, nevertheless begins on a poem to and about an audience. If the mode in question comprises an immediate outpouring of emotion, this text instead scrutinizes prior outpourings. And if a lyric is a discrete, short text, how does one explicate the threads that link the putatively individual lyrics in the Rime sparse to each other, tying them in patterns as elusive yet ineluctable as the bonds between Petrarch and Laura? I open my analysis of the problems of defining and describing lyric in the English Renaissance with a brief reference to an Italian text in part because it offers so apt a specimen of the dilemmas about audience, immediacy, and structure discussed seriatim in the chapters following this one. More to my purposes now, given its virtually iconic status in the early modern period, the Rime sparse provided the English poets who read and re-read it with a particularly potent and memorable instance of definitional and classificatory challenges. When Petrarch bequeaths to his English progeny a paradigm for the sonnet, he leaves to them as well a model not of clearly defined lyric characteristics but of problems in studying that mode. Petrarch’s heirs and assigns in the English Renaissance, this chapter argues, address such problems in many venues, but above all in two overlapping ones, the mythological narratives and the figurative language associated with poesy in general and lyric in particular. This is not to say that these or other sources reveal a widely accepted definition of lyric. Many English Renaissance writers and readers were cognizant of the category , and assays at description and definition do appear; but the period in question certainly did not have an uncontroversial formula for categorizing poems as lyric, and many commentaries are inconsistent with each other or even within themselves. Such contradictions are especially evident in the myth—or, more to the point, the conflicting myths—associated with Orpheus. The aim of this chapter is not to resolve inconsistencies by attributing to the early modern era more common ground on this subject than actually existed; on the contrary, I demonstrate below that the term “lyric” was used in a range of ways in the period. Hence I will explore what the very tensions and contradictions in question reveal about early modern lyrics and the processes of writing them and writing about them. The alternatives to focusing on myth and figure prove limited in more senses than one. Commentaries by Michael Drayton, George Puttenham, John Milton, and above all Philip Sidney are indubitably revealing, not least because they demonstrate some ways the term “lyric” was actually used in the early modern period, but these discussions are brief. Adducing the relative paucity of analyses like these as evidence, critics in our own period sometimes claim that the problem of discussing lyric was generally handled simply by being avoided. Not so, if one examines implicit commentaries as well as explicit ones. “In many ways the most acute poetics of the early modern lyric,” Roland Greene has argued about one version of such commentaries, “is written out in poems themselves.”1 Acute, yes, and an example of the significance of implicit observations, but not necessarily the most acute poetics. In fact, it is instead the allusions embedded in myth and trope that provide the most extensive and intriguing evidence of how the early modern period saw lyric. Admittedly, mining those two sources is complicated inasmuch as some such allusions involve types of verse besides lyric; and Orpheus himself, the subject of the most significant myths, wears many hats besides the beret of lyric poet. The data bases of myth and figure, however, remain invaluable for analyses of early modern lyric. At the very least, when the usages in question apply to other types of poetry as well as lyric, they remain...

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