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English Renaissance Poetry: A Collection of Shorte Poems from Skelton to Jonson
English Renaissance Poetry A Collection of Shorte Poems from Skelton to Jonson Author:John Williams (Editor) "The period which extends from the beginning of the sixteenth century to about 1630 is a crucial one in the history of English poetry," writes John Williams in his Preface. "For a little more than a hundred years, that most sturdy and persistent of all literary forms, the short poem, engaged the attentions of the best literary minds of the centu... more »ry, and as a consequence underwent a series of transformations that changed its nature to a degree not usually recognized by the general reader. Embedded in the tangled history of that century, and sometimes obscured by it, are some of the great poems of our language; implicit in those poems, and in the criticism engendered bv them, are the essential questions of theory and practice that have occupied historians and critics, as well as poets, for the past three hundred and fifty years....
"Excepting only the drama written by Shakespeare, the short poem is the most important literary form of the age; I have, therefore, devoted this collection to it. Though a few of the poems in this book appear incidentally in plays, novels, and masques, they are complete in themselves, as are all the other poems. I have not included snippets or excerpts from longer works."
Included in this volume are poems by Skelton, More, Wyatt, Vaux, Surrey, Gascoigne, Googe, Turberville, Dyer, Ralegh, Spenser, Sidney, Greville, Peele, Greene, Lodge, Daniel, Drayton, the English Madrigalists, Shakespeare, Campion, Nashe, Donne, and Jonson.« less