The English Renaissance

“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” These two lines, the closing couplet of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”), make one of the boldest boasts in poetry—about poetry. Centuries after the 1609 publication of the Sonnets, Shakespeare’s boast has never been proven wrong. As long as people have breathed (and spoken), seen (and read) poetry, they have returned to Shakespeare’s words and countless other poems from Shakespeare’s period in literary history. The English Renaissance, an era of cultural revival and poetic evolution starting in the late 15th century and spilling into the revolutionary years of the 17th century, stands as an early summit of poetry achievement, the era in which the modern sense of English poetry begins. The era’s influence—its enduring traditions, inspiring experiments, and seemingly unsurpassable highs—reverberates today.

The English Renaissance can be hard to date precisely, but for most scholars, it begins with the rise of the Tudor Dynasty (1485–1603) and reaches its cultural summit during the 45-year reign of the final Tudor monarch, the charismatic Elizabeth I (1558–1603). The period extends into the reigns of the Stuarts, King James I (1603–25) and perhaps that of Charles I (1625–49). The era seethed with incessant political tensions and—never separable from politics—religious rifts between Catholics and Protestants, especially the so-called Puritan sects that fought to reform the Church of England by removing any Catholic or “popish” practices. The Renaissance firmly ends once those tensions boil over into a distinctly different period of revolutionary change and a succession of nation-shaking events: the series of civil wars between Parliamentarians and Royalists, the execution of Charles I, the interregnum of republican-led governments, and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

A period lasting only a century or two but encompassing momentous change, the English Renaissance drastically shaped what being English meant, at home and abroad. As literacy increased and printing accelerated, the English language rose to a place of international prestige, and a distinctly English literature began to be braided from diverse cultural strands: Middle English poetry and medieval mystery plays; ballads, hymns, and popular songs; translations from classical literatures and contemporary literature from the Continent. As a nation and a fledgling empire, England emerged as an indomitable economic and military force, sending explorers, merchants, and colonists as far as Africa, Asia, and the so-called New World. At the epicenter of England’s explosive rise was the rapidly growing city of London, soon to become the largest city in Europe (and eventually the world). With its surging population, flourishing markets and ports, and thriving public theaters, London offered all the excitements of a modern metropolis—as well as all the dangers. The threat of bubonic plague loomed constantly over all of Europe, posing immense risks to a city as densely congested as London, where, every few years, a rampant outbreak forced theaters to close down for months at a time.

The term Renaissance, deriving from the French for “rebirth,” is a name retroactively bestowed by 19th-century thinkers, who distinguished the era by its revivals: a renewed interest in ancient languages, the recovery of antique manuscripts, and the return to the classical ideals underlying the era’s defining intellectual movement, Renaissance humanism. Greek and Roman models, renovated for modern purposes, were especially crucial for poets defining or defending their art. In the era’s pinnacle of literary criticism, The Defence of Poesy (1595), Philip Sidney borrowed his chief terms and questions from Greek philosophers born nearly two millennia earlier. “Poesy,” he proposes, “is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis—that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture—with this end, to teach and delight.” Against the charge, leveled in Plato’s Republic (c. 375 BCE), that all this poetic “counterfeiting” amounted to lying, Sidney mounted an entirely novel defense that flaunted a modern embrace of artifice and head-spinning fantasy. Poets couldn’t lie, because their allegorical and figurative inventions never pretended to be real or true—or so Sidney contended in an ingenious argumentative maneuver: “the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.”

Today we remember Sidney as an indisputably great poet and scholar of his time. To his contemporaries, however, he was far from a writer first: he was a nobleman, a courtier, a patron, a horseman, a paragon of knightly valor who died from battle injuries at age 31. All Renaissance poets were amateurs relative to the modern understanding of professional, career writers. Until late in the period, there was no system of royalties to reward publishing poetry, no author-owned copyright or freedom of the press to protect it, and only a small (if growing) literate audience to read it. (The first poet to collect his own work for publication was Ben Jonson, in 1616; the first to earn royalties was John Milton, who negotiated for earnings from the first edition of Paradise Lost in 1667.)

With little way to live solely on their publications, poets who needed work made their livings as playwrights, translators, essayists, scholars, secretaries, ambassadors, soldiers, politicians, physicians, composers, and clergymen—all occupations that took valuable time away from writing poetry. Poets of all classes found support and shelter—or simply an audience—in a handful of institutions. For Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Sidney, and Walter Raleigh, the center of poetry was the royal court. There, noblemen and noblewomen, public servants, and charming socialites alike practiced poetry as an exquisite pastime, an imaginative competition that transformed the social arts of persuasion, diplomacy, and self-making into displays of rhetorical dexterity and verbal play. Writers of lower status, gravitating to the court hoping to acquire the financial support of a patron, offered prestige, dedications, and commissioned works in exchange for favors, employment, or steady salaries. Another institution was the church: several of the era’s best poets—such as John Donne and George Herbert—were clergymen, and many others found their calling writing devotional poetry and adapting scripture, psalms, and prayers into vernacular English. Still other poets found a home in London's first permanent public theaters, built in the late 16th century. Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson conducted their audacious artistic experiments on stage in public entertainments of an unprecedentedly wide appeal. All these institutions posed immense barriers to women, even the most supremely educated and advantaged. Many of the period’s best-remembered women poets—Æemilia Lanyer, Mary Wroth, and Margaret Cavendish—came to prominence only in the 17th century.

The poetry springing from these competing centers was prismatically diverse. Just like our contemporary moment, it was volatilely susceptible to fashions and trends: first sonnet sequences and epyllions (or short epics) were all the rage, then odes and satires, then dramatic monologues and country-house poems. In his Defence, Sidney lists major poetic “kinds” that readers then and now can still recognize: pastoral, elegiac, satiric, comic, tragic, lyric, heroic. But there is no one Renaissance style. If some poets dazzle readers with fluent sonic patterns, delightful ornaments, or one startling metaphor after the next, others adopt a plain style, achieving their judicious effects by withholding any rhetorical pyrotechnics—or by deftly hiding their rhetoric under unassuming surfaces.

The shapes and sizes of a Renaissance poem ran the gamut from Ben Jonson’s prickly, no-word-wasted epigrams (“On Gut”: “Gut eats all day and lechers all the night; / So all his meat he tasteth over twice”) to Edmund Spenser’s gargantuan epic The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596); by his death, Spenser had completed six of a proposed 24 books and had still already produced one of the longest poems in the language. Far from a period of formal limitation or strictly codified rules, the Renaissance prized irreverent variation and brash gamesmanship. Even blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter, which is quite possibly the most frequently appearing form in all of English poetry, was the result of a one-off experiment, a translation of Virgil’s Aeneid (c. 1540) by the young Earl of Surrey. A mainstay of English poetry and verse drama ever since, blank verse was, at the time of its invention, a quietly revolutionary easing of restrictions. Removing the necessities of rhyme or strict stanza length, blank verse allowed poets and playwrights to narrate, meditate, and soliloquize at any length through capacious five-stress lines that (it was believed) approximated the duration of a single breath.

Perhaps the most recognizable form in Renaissance poetry was the sonnet, an intricately rhymed, 14-line poem derived from the Italian sonetto (“little song”) and perfected by the 14th-century poet Petrarch. The first English sonnets were Petrarchan translations and imitations by Wyatt and Surrey, who inaugurated an English tradition of love poems featuring idealized but frustratingly distant beloveds and speakers working through their dizzyingly mixed feelings in impassioned, hyperbolic, and often oxymoronic language: “I fear and hope. I burn and freeze like ice,” writes Wyatt in his translation of Petrarch’s Rima 134. “I love another, and thus I hate myself.” Love may be the central subject of sonnets and Renaissance poetry generally, but it comes in a color wheel of varieties: transient and transcendental, holy and forbidden, lustful and flirtatious and platonic, heterosexual and what we today call queer. Later poets stretched the sonnet’s traditionally taut bounds to encompass less traditional feelings: devotional piety in John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, female desire in Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, political furor in John Milton’s “On the Late Massacre at Piedmont.”

When does Renaissance poetry end? It’s difficult to say precisely, in part because the lives of poets and their stellar achievements don’t neatly conform to the era’s political and social milestones. By Elizabeth’s death, many of the greatest Elizabethan poets were writing at or near their peak, and the century’s best-known schools of poets were already coalescing. Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, and others became known as the Metaphysical poets, after the unfavorable nickname given by the 18th-century poet-critic Samuel Johnson. What Johnson disliked about the Metaphysical poets was precisely what modernists such as T.S. Eliot so admired: a blend of braininess and heart, willfully unmusical speech rhythms, and the outlandish, extravagantly developed metaphors that Johnson called conceits, in which “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” (Consider Donne’s comparison, in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” of two lovers’ souls to the “stiff twin” legs of a geometer’s compass, one moving, the other fixed, the two inextricably connected.) A later, contrasting school was the Cavalier poets, including Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew, and Richard Lovelace. All were Royalists, loyal to the king during the civil wars, and most were courtiers or otherwise linked to England’s ruling classes. Harmonizing classical moderation and cosmopolitan wit in measured verses, the Cavalier poets traced their gallant art to the urbane poet-playwright Ben Jonson; some even labeled themselves “Sons of Ben.” As the English Renaissance closes, its many threads—religious and secular, classical and topical—entwine in the virtuosic early poems of John Milton, whose synthesizing mind produced Paradise Lost (1667, 1674), the Christian epic towering over English-language poetry for centuries to follow.

The following poets, poem guides, articles, and recordings traverse almost two centuries of poetry, from Wyatt to Milton, and the Renaissance era that readers and poets have long prized as a golden age of poetic achievement in English. This introduction offers one sketch of that period’s ceaseless innovations and tremendous expansions.