Canons of Renaissance Poetry - Yvor Winters's Alternative Canon of Elizabethan Poetry

Yvor Winters's Alternative Canon of Elizabethan Poetry

The American critic Yvor Winters suggested in 1939, an alternative canon of Elizabethan poetry. In this canon he excludes the famous representatives of the Petrarchan school of poetry, represented by Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, and instead turns his eye to a Native or Plain Style anti-Petrarchan movement, which he claims has been overlooked and undervalued. The most underrated member of this movement he deems to have been George Gascoigne (1525–1577), who "deserves to be ranked...among the six or seven greatest lyric poets of the century, and perhaps higher". Other members were Sir Walter Raleigh (1552–1618), Thomas Nashe (1567–1601), Barnabe Googe (1540–1594), and George Turberville (1540–1610).

Characteristic of this movement is that a poem has "a theme usually broad, simple, and obvious, even tending toward the proverbial, but usually a theme of some importance, humanly speaking; a feeling restrained to the minimum required by the subject; a rhetoric restrained to a similar minimum, the poet being interested in his rhetoric as a means of stating his matter as economically as possible, and not, as are the Petrarchans, in the pleasures of rhetoric for its own sake. There is also in the school a strong tendency towards aphoristic statement".

This attempt at rewriting a canon should not be seen as a challenge to the concept of the canon as such, but rather as an attempt to emulate T. S. Eliot's modernist revisions of the tradition. As with Eliot's canon, it may for today's reader say more about Winters and his time than about Elizabethan literature, but the list of poems he names among the best should still be of interest to the student who has already read the established, "Petrarchan," canon.

Winters compares the situation in Renaissance studies with that of the canon of eighteenth century poets, where he claims, "the two greatest poetic talents of the period, those of Samuel Johnson and of Charles Churchill" were obscured by the rising Romantic school and such poets as Thomas Gray and William Collins. The poems he mentions by Johnson and Churchill have been added to the list below.