Then place my purboil’d Head upon a Stake
Colin Burrow
- Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse 1625-1660 edited by Peter Davidson
Oxford, 716 pp, £75.00, July 1998, ISBN 0 19 818441 7
The traditional view of mid-17th-century verse is that it consists of ‘mere anthology pieces’. As a statement of fact this has a ghost of truth to it, since much of the verse from this period originally circulated in miscellaneous collections – manuscript gatherings of verse, or volumes of elegies by various hands. As a statement of value, though, that ‘mere’ is profoundly wrong. Mid-17th-century verse rarely asks to be read as part of the oeuvre of a single author. Instead, it thrives on miscellaneity. This long and damnably difficult to live through period produced an extraordinary quantity of poems which deserve to be appreciated as ephemera. Poems to named individuals, poems on generically delicious mistresses, poems of venomously individual hatred, poems which are unattributable, poems which only made sense in 1643, poems which seem to drift out of the air onto the page: verse of this kind is happiest in a miscellany, which allows readers to reflect on where it came from, when it was written, to whom and why.
You are not logged in
- If you have already registered then you can login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or university library please login here
- If you have an institutional print subscription without online access then you can find out about our institutional online subscriptions here
Vol. 21 No. 1 · 7 January 1999 » Colin Burrow » Then place my purboil’d Head upon a Stake (print version)
pages 26-27 | 2771 words