This chapter seeks to remedy the decontextualization of Donnes Songs and Sonnets, to restore them alongside not only Donnes satires examined in Chapter 2, but also the other poets and writers that appear in this book and that were Donne’s closest peers. In doing so, the aim is both to resituate these lyrics amidst the urban culture in which Donne was so immersed through nearly all of his writing life and to connect these quintessentially metaphysical poems to the contemporary urban writing of the 1590s. Donnes lyrics reveal a similar concern with the social worlds of London in their persistent attempts to close out the particulars with which Nashes prose and the Inns satires engage. As a result, these poems are as much about the spatial realities of urban everyday life as they are about desire. Stylistically Donne’s Songs and Sonnets look less like a clean break with the past and more like an affirmation of an urban aesthetic that suffused the literary works of a certain subsection of 1590s London. Donnes lyrics take up the skeptical materialist style of this group of urban writers, at once obscure, various, and vibrantly immediate.

This chapter traces the precise urban realities that encouraged the Inns of Court satirists to turn to Thomas Nashe’s urban metaphysical style as they constructed the satires and epigrams that poured from the Inns. In doing so, I aim to clarify both Nashe’s and the city’s central place in the development of this poetic mode, a centrality that has been underrecognized in our literary genealogies. In this confluence of authors writing and reading amidst the city’s various spaces in the last decade of the century, we can see more clearly an urban metaphysical aesthetic, at once plenist, obscure, digressive, and visceral, being put into practice. The first part of this chapter explores the vogue for verse satire in the last years of the century, linking it both to the precise urban conditions out of which its authors wrote and to Nashe’s own skeptical impulses. The latter half examines the satires’ and epigrams’ formal features to show how these poems, just as Nashe’s prose before them, self-consciously reorganized and reprocessed the urban experience in ways that we now associate with the metaphysical style.

This chapter examines the imaginative choices, and the implications of these choices, that John Manningham made as he created a record of his daily life, what we now call his Diary, relating these choices to the urban metaphysical style that I have traced in the previous chapters. Manninghams collection of notes as a whole does imply that he rejected a more pragmatic or moralistic approach to his recordkeeping, a rejection in line with Nashes turn away from humanist utility and towards contention and wit. In addition, once we view Manningham’s diary as a reordering of experience, we can identify within the selection and sequence of entries a particular orientation to the world, a processing of urban reality that aligns with the recreation of reality in the writings of his Inns peers. Not only might we see a rejection of humanist models of reading and writing in the diary, we can also clearly see Manningham embracing a skeptical, witty, and contentious style of being in the world. It is a style that is highly performative, just as Nashe’s prose and the Inns satires are; it is also a style that signals an awareness of the heterogeneity and fragmentary nature of urban experience.

The turn of the century saw the emergence of a host of different entertainment media through which visual culture was industrialized, commodified, and otherwise modernized. New visual technologies, from photography, moving panoramas, stereoscopes, and cinema, to new image-delivery systems in advertisement and the illustrated press crystalized new forms of social organization and transformed visual perception. Following the modern crónicas of modernista writer Rubén Darío, the article explores the ways in which literary writing faced the challenge of the new mass culture and developed new languages and forms to reach a growing readership in the Latin American modernizing cities. Bridging both sides of the Atlantic and crossing over from the aesthete poet to the popular chronicler, Darío’s writing registers not just the intertwinement of high and mass culture, but above all the forms of spectatorship that delineated “the era of the mechanical reproducibility.”