This chapter describes Clare’s attitude to form and surveys the various forms in which he writes. It emphasizes the variety of Clare’s formal achievement, showing how across his career he adopts different prosodic and generic conventions, including those of the sonnet, ballad, lyric, couplet, and ode. Running through all Clare’s poems, the chapter suggests, is a wariness of imposing excessive order upon the patterns of experience. The irregular beauty and emotional clarity of Clare’s poems emerge out of an effort to find a balance sympathetic to nature over artifice, spontaneity over control, and existing tradition over individual embellishment.

This chapter begins with a familiar antithesis: the opposition between the lyric poem and the novel. If the former seems to be characterized by the capture of a single instant, the expression of subjective thoughts and emotions, and a reaching after eternal truths, the latter seems instead to move through time, to fictionalize the objective world, and to be caught in the social and political webs of real life. This chapter challenges this received wisdom by considering the hybrid genre of the verse-novel and by taking as its chief case study George Meredith's 1862 verse-novel Modern Love. Meredith's work simultaneously dissolves and highlights the borders of the single poem, forcing readers to reconsider the relationship of the individual lyric to a larger whole, to the narrative threads running through that whole, to other individual poems, and to other generic alternatives. The chapter concludes by arguing that, because the act of reading verse-novels is often so self-conscious, the genre productively questions ideas of singularity and of self-sufficiency.

Lowell’s attraction to the sonnet was historical and architectural and yet the form itself, one he wrestled with above all others, had at its origin desire and unrequited love. For Lowell, the little song of the sonnet worked well as a house for the complaint, “an expression of grief, a lamentation, a plaint” (OED). As far back as the fourteenth century, Chaucer used it as a title for poems (“The Complaint unto Pity,” c. 1368) and complaints hold both an expression of torment or grief and a song. In the 1946 volume, Lord Weary’s Castle, Lowell uses the sonnet form to express such a plaint, in this case as a measure to aid in indirect self-reflection (“The North Sea Undertaker’s Complaint”). Life Studies (1959) finds Lowell still ruminating on the sonnet form and its expressive capacities, as we see in the triple sonnet “Beyond the Alps,” pivoting as it does between subjects and acting as an opportunity for historical rather than personal insight. Day by Day (1977) roots itself in the personal and introduces looser forms. The sonnet’s acoustic energies are not bottled here but the poems participate in sonnet-like thinking.

The literary oeuvre of the seventeenth-century literary genius Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is genre-diverse: it includes plays, texts defending women’s intellectual agency, correspondence, religious-themed works, and, last but not least, poetry. Sor Juana’s texts are touchpoints for nearly all facets of colonial literary studies; her lyric works are invoked in critical conversations treating transatlantic studies, Barroco de Indias, New Spanish creolism, and feminist studies. Sor Juana’s lyric works evince not only her intellectual prowess, but also her artistic mastery of a variety of poetic forms, unequalled in her day or after her lifetime. This chapter examines the range of Sor Juana’s lyric writing in its totality, from her masterpiece, Primero sueño, to her renowned romances, redondillas, sonetos, and villancicos, contextualizing these in the scholarly and historical contexts out of which they arise.

Chapter 3 explores how an exemplary amorous biography, a type of vita poetica or literary hagiography, was attributed to el divino Francesco Petrarch over the course of the sixteenth century. Imitatio applied not only to the figures and tropes of the Trionfi and Canzoniere, but also to the figura of the poet as a model or exemplar for the life of an author. After roughly two centuries (1374–1575), Petrarch’s lasting fame became literary immortality like that of ancient authors (Homer and Vergil). From the 1535 alleged rediscovery of Laura’s grave and Alessandro Piccolomini’s 1540 pilgrimage to Petrarch’s tomb, to the various sixteenth-century translations of Petrarch’s poetry, and commentaries made by lyric poets in the front matter to publications, in manuscript poems, and in pastoral fiction, the literary afterlife of the figura of the poet took shape. This chapter reconstructs the figura of the poet as it was imagined, articulated, imitated, and reinvented by sixteenth-century poets writing in Castilian. By the middle of the sixteenth century the Castilianized ingenio (ingenium) had come to define the figura of the poet. This chapter fills in a lacuna (Garcilaso to Góngora) of roughly sixty years which is crucial to Cervantes’ work and studies of early modern poetics.

Premodern literary circulation resembles premodern trade in material goods in that it covers the planet less completely than does the modern world-system. Instead, different kinds of literary texts circulated on different scales and in different networks. Short, simple, easily translated and adapted texts such as beast fables and frame-tales, travelled the most widely and crossed the most linguistic borders. Religious scripture, and other highly valued texts, also travelled great distances, thanks to the huge resources occasionally invested in their transmission and translation. By contrast, denser patterns of literary circulation took place in smaller, more clearly-defined, regions. A key index of such regions in pre-modern literature is the adaptation of specific poetic forms, tied to the distinctive prosodic qualities of a major literary language, and requiring sustained investment and effort to carry over successfully into new languages, typically vernaculars culturally dependent to some degree on the source language. This phenomenon is traced through the gradual circulation of two poetic forms, the Arabic qasida and the sonnet.

Poetry and Bondage begins in the late sixteenth century, with a new reading of Thomas Wyatt’s lyric poems in the context of his multiple experiences of imprisonment and surveillance. Wyatt is often regarded as a key figure in the initiation of an ‘inward turn’ or lyric interiority, and of modern English lyric. While such readings are problematic, they tell us something about what we think lyric is. Wyatt’s poetry demonstrates the importance of prisons for developing English-language lyric habits of address, intimacy and conceptualisations of power and selfhood. The chapter focuses on the various nets, chains, clogs and fetters in Wyatt’s poems, in relation to the conditions of amorous and political servitude they depict. It discusses how that servitude is enacted and challenged through formal constraints, such as the rondeau or the sonnet. It relates Wyatt’s tropes of bondage to the depiction of human and animal life in his poems and to the akratic subject’s obedience and resistance to sovereignty. It includes close readings of two of his most famous poems, ‘They flee…’ and ‘Whoso list to hunt’.

Since antiquity, poets have described their experience of versification as one of constraint. The introduction examines examples of this trope, and introduces the book’s central claim: that voluntary submission to formal constraints effaces the poetries and experiences of those who are actually in bondage. It discusses the way poets and critics have aligned the imposition or radical overthrow of formal constraints with conservative or revolutionary politics, and offers some working definitions of lyric. Close readings of a sonnet by Keats, and a discussion of J. S. Mill’s essay ‘What is Poetry’, establish the book’s historicist perspective on the ‘liberal lyric’ in relation to the histories of slavery. The introduction also explains the methodology, and situates my own critical practice in relation to whiteness as a kind of enclosure.

In the early seventeenth century, an English Catholic priest whose identity remains obscure penned a remarkable sequence of forty-four sonnets based on the Marian titles of the Litany of Loreto. The sequence relies heavily upon tradition for its content (the author goes so far as to annotate his sonnets with sources for his claims about Mary) and upon repetition for its themes and verbal texture. In these sonnets, the poet seeks to reanimate Marian devotion in order to combat what he sees as the disruptions and discontinuities of the Reformation. His poems studiously avoid offering new ideas, for novelty is, in his view, the project of the Protestant Reformation. Instead, his sequence proposes that litany prayer and devout repetition constitute a form of sacred memory, one modelled on a liturgical understanding of memory and re-presenting, that may ensure the continuity of tradition despite the Reformation's threats.