Canons of Renaissance Poetry - The Canonical Canon

The Canonical Canon

The central figures of the Elizabethan canon are Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Donne. There have been few attempts to change this long established list because the cultural importance of these six is so great that even re-evaluations on grounds of literary merit has not dared to dislodge them from the curriculum. For this reason the challenges to the canon that have been made during the last century have mainly been concerned with the so-called "minor" poets.

This distinction between "major" and "minor" poets, and between "major" and "minor" works by individual poets, is one of the mainstays of the canonical tradition. Its aim can be summed up in the words of F. T. Palgrave who in his The Golden Treasury aimed to pass over "extreme or temporary phases in style" in favour of "something neither modern, nor ancient, but true in all ages". This anachronistic ideal has curiously enough been prevalent throughout two hundred years of literary history whose ostensible goal has been to describe the period.