With how sad steps, O mind, thou climb'st the lines

ogre_san has been eloquent in the past on the necessity of a magpie mind for writing purposes. It's all material for the muse. I do have to wonder what Fred is up to now, though. I've gotten sidetracked from Elizabethan Ovidian narratives (which I reread every so often for inspiration: witty erotic narrative poems? -- dude, I'm so there) into Elizabethan sonnet cycles.

Yes, really. I mean, my reaction to ye typical sonneteer is "Get over it already. Both her and yourself." As I get older, I lose more patience with the conventions of courtly love, and these stream squarely from that tradition, at least as refracted by Petrarch and distilled by Sidney. As a diet, it's kinda turning my brain to mush. Especially the middling poets.

I will admit, reading minor cycles does highlight the strengths of the better poets. Sidney, especially, was a master at dramatizing the story's arc (such as it is) and giving Stella a semblance of life. And Drayton may not have been a major talent, but he worked what talent he had well, and in particular gave many sonnets a unique dramatic immediacy, even otherwise mediocre ones. (As an editor comments, he never forgets his supposed purpose is to persuade the lady.)

And yet. Mush though it be, it's what my brain wants to read. I'm starting to worry, especially since I've been having disturbing dreams of repeated close readings of short poems. Maybe I should dose myself with more Venus and Adonis. Or Lord Peter and Harriet.

(Speaking of major talents, W.H. Auden writes in an introduction to Shakespeare's sonnets, "On going through the hundred and fifty-four of them, I find forty-nine which seem to me excellent throughout, and a good number of the rest have one or two memorable lines, but there are also several which I can only read out of a sense of duty." Oh, to have his list of forty-nine! For an anthology, he selected twenty-five, leaving at least twenty-four to be guessed at.)


Bibliography:
Elizabethan Minor Epics, edited by Elizabeth Story Donno
Amorous Rites: Elizabethan Erotic Verse, edited by Sandra Clarke
Elizabethan Sonnets, edited by Maurice Evans
Shakespeare's Sonnets, edited by William Burto
Portable Poets of the English Language, edited in five volumes by W.H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson

---L.