This chapter first considers the conceptual complexities involved in any reference to “the poem.” The poem can, for instance, be defined as a particular instantiation of a universal, called “poetry,” or it can be defined in opposition to other kinds of literary genre, linguistic artefact, or linguistic performance, from verse treatise to political slogan. The term “poem” may also be normative as well as descriptive, a marker not only of genre but also of success. Finally, the poem has sometimes been conceived in opposition to conceptual thinking itself, from which perspective the discourse of poems differs radically from the discourse of ideas. Treating examples by W. S. Graham, Ben Jonson, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Wallace Stevens, this chapter argues that, given this situation, poems continually strive to overspill their concept, whether by achieving the status of The Poem or of Poetry Itself, by breaking out of the confines of “mere” poetry and becoming part of the fabric of reality, or by changing what “poems” can be and what “poem” can mean.

This chapter explores the ways in which the practice of cookery and the act of eating were understood as analogous to the making and experiencing of literature in early modern writing – a set of similarities that was both exciting and disquieting. It begins with the word “conceit,” which could refer either to a wittily rhetorical piece of language or to something dainty and edible. This leads to a discussion of the ways in which eating causes distinctions between people and practices both to be made and to break down in this period (especially in the work of Shakespeare and Jonson). It ends with a discussion of the place of food in the writings of Margaret Cavendish – who distinguishes her own labours from the typical culinary work of women even as she sees Nature as a productive cook – and John Milton, who places a striking emphasis on prelapsarian eating as common to human and angel, while recognizing food as the most devilish of temptations.