Canons of Renaissance Poetry - Canons Before The 20th Century

Canons Before The 20th Century

Donne, Ben Jonson, and Spenser were major influences on 17th century poetry. Spenser was the primary English influence on John Milton; while Donne was imitated by the Metaphysical poets and Jonson by the Cavalier poets. Both Donne and Jonson influenced the leading poet of the late 17th century, John Dryden. However, Dryden condemned the Metaphysical tendency in his criticism. Metaphysical poetry fell further into disrepute in the 18th century, while the interest in Renaissance verse was rekindled through the scholarship of Thomas Warton and others. The Lake Poets and subsequent Romantics were well-read in Renaissance poetry; Coleridge admired Donne, which is slightly unusual for this period. However, the canon of Renaissance poetry was formed only in the Victorian period, with anthologies like Palgrave's Golden Treasury. A fairly representative idea of the "Victorian canon" is given by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of English Verse (1919). The poems from this period are largely songs; apart from the major names, one sees the two pioneers Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, and a scattering of poems by other writers of the period. The dominant figure is Anonymous. Some poems, such as Thomas Sackville's Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates, were highly regarded (and therefore "in the canon") but omitted as non-lyric.

The canon was also redistributed after Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy from 1860 formulated a view of the Renaissance as an aristocratic court culture. Consequently, later anthologies such as Arthur Symons's A Sixteenth-Century Anthology from 1905 focused on lyric poetry at the expense of other genres, a preference which remained throughout the first half of the 20th century.