07/09/08

I explained my idea to both James and Maggie today--each thought that it sounded promising. Now I need to figure out how to put the idea into an example in 15 pages for Leonard's class and see if it can grow from there. I don't know that it will, but that's clearly the next step.

One locus I could look at is the Barnfield passage in which he talks about Sir Philip Sidney.

I guess, what I need in order to hit a 15 page paper is:

evidence of the two trends:
construction of a canon
changing model of homosexuality

(of the two, the former is perhaps harder than the latter. I don't, however, need primary sources initially--i can read criticism for that)

two texts, in which successorship is linked to male friendship in very different ways
i need a paternal friendship text and i need someone talking about other poets as older shepherds or something.

hmm. i can do this.

i'm just going to run out the clock now, though, because i want to work on german. D'you know what? today is going ot be my day off.

i came back to it. i may as well--it's almost two anyway, and so a few more minutes of typing won't hurt.

i was clearly exhausted, looking at my earlier text. Perhaps it's just my capitalization, but I seemed tired. Or, maybe I'm projecting. It seems like what I need to do is merely to explore the birth of a canon of Elizabethan poets, and to explore the ways the poets who make that canon think about canonicity. I'm not writing a dissertation here, just a 20 or s0 page paper that lays out an /argument/.

where to start? i could do an eebo search for Watson and look at the latest hits. But Watson is a bit of a common name.Hmm. I need to just keep reading and see if I turn up anything, I think. Let me just try to formulate my thesis here, so that I can see what comes out of it.

Over the course of the 17th century, a canon of English poets became to form first in the social networks of the Sons of Ben and the disciples of Donne and Drayton, and then in the development of criticism out of that. I'm interested in the rise of literary discipleship in terms of the relationship between men.

So one good place to start would be to read books on the Drayton circle, the Donne circle, the Jonson circle, and then outward from there. I suspect I'd find that these differ from Elizabethan poetic circles by being organized around a practitioner and marked by stylistic imitation rather than around a patron and marked by the dedicatory epistle and the elegy.

This is actually quite interesting. Fowler, in the intro to the New Oxford 17th Century verse, talks about how repeated imitation of forms helped create links among poets...