7/14/08

So, I've been thinking again about evidence-- what I really need is poets thinking about each other under the guise of friendship, when the one writing is from a different generation. I think /The Unfortunate Traveler/ might actually be a place to start--its Surrey is quite different from Drayton's Surrey. Drayton's Surrey is thoroughly heterosexualized and the only poet in the picture. Jack, meanwhile, by becoming a second self, becomes something of a parody friend to Surrey. In that case, it'd also be worth talking about Greene, perhaps Greene's funeral, and then onto Amyntas?

The problem I'm having is that minor poets always die out, don't they? Each generation picks the ones they like, and we go from there--I can't think of any later references to Gascoyne, for instance, though I'll have ot pay more attention--it's always now that's more exciting than the previous generation, because all your contemporaries are actively trying to rewrite what the previous generation did.

But how you imagine your predecessors does change--Surrey is a good idea and one I'm glad ot have gotten free. Drayton historicizes him--the Drayton-Surrey relationship is what exactly? He was a great poet and so am I? (Think about the way that Drayton feminizes anxiety about writing.) Does Surrey in some way become D's Geraldine? I clearly have to reread this, and to think more about the Earl of Surrey in E/n times. And Wyatt, for that matter, and all the mid-century poets that would be the testcase for my theory. (Part of the problem is that I'm dealing with the very beginning of the nonymous production of verse, so there are relatively few precursors that can be identified.

All criticism by poets is choosing a father. (I really don't like the sexism of this discourse--one can have a strong mother that you need to get out of the shadow of, too. And I'm not quite sure the poets get to pick. But that's definitely what Dryden is doing when he starts to trace lineages. One way of doing this project would be a Spenser-Chaucer, Milton-Spenser, and then Dryden talking about those things investigation.