The Challenges of Orpheus

by Heather Dubrow

  19. Stephen Owen, Mi-Lou: Poetry and the Labyrinth of Desire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 134.

  20. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 272.

  21. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 271.

  22. Barbara Johnson, “Poetry and Syntax: What the Gypsy Knew,” in her collection, The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 69.

  23. A. R. Ammons, “A Poem Is a Walk,” in Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues, ed. Zofia Burr (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 17.

  24. Heather McHugh, “Naked Numbers: A Curve from Wyatt to Rochester,” in Green Thoughts, Green Shades: Essays by Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric, ed. Jonathan F. S. Post (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 67.

  25. Marvin Spevack, ed., The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), s.v. “poesy,” “poem,” “verse.”

  26. Throughout this chapter I cite The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956).

  27. I cite Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–1952).

  28. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 2nd ed., ed. and trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold, Vol. 2 (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, 1984).

  29. I cite Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977).

  30. Although she does not explore the relevance to lyric, Patricia Parker’s brief comments on the connection between turning and translation uncover a number of germanely pejorative associations (Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], esp. 121–122, 140–141). While her examination of “joining” (see esp. 76–115), which focuses on linguistic and marital unions, is also cognate to my discussion inasmuch as both are types of artisanal shaping, the distinctions between the turning I discuss and the joining on which she concentrates are as suggestive as the similarities.

  31. OED, s.v. “turn.” Throughout this book I cite the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (changes in subsequent editions are not significant for my purposes here).

  32. See Henry S. Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). I thank the author for sharing his work prior to publication.

  33. Mary Thomas Crane, “What Was Performance?” Criticism 43 (2001), 41–59.

  34. On the musical influences on “Lycidas,” see esp. Louise Schleiner, The Living Lyre in English Verse from Elizabeth through the Restoration (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), 102–112; the hypothesis about Herbert appears in Diane Kelsey Mc-Colley, Poetry and Music in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 161; the suggestion about these psalms appears in Anthony Low, Love’s Architecture: Devotional Modes in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 29.

  35. One of the most balanced discussions of this subject is the cautious analysis in David Lindley, Thomas Campion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986), Chapter 3.

  36. The influence of Petrarchism is traced in James Anderson Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations between Poetry and Music (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 138–149; that of metaphysical poetry in Elise Bickford Jorgens, The Well-Tun’d Word: Musical Interpretations of English Poetry, 1597–1651 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), esp. 220–221, 225, 240. The quotation is from Lindley, Thomas Campion, 143. Historical changes in the relationship of the arts are the principal focus of John Hollander’s important study, The Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500–1700 (1961; rpt., New York: W. W. Norton, 1970); Paula Johnson (Form and Transformation in Music and Poetry of the English Renaissance [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972]) argues, sometimes problematically, for historical shifts based on patterns of recurrence and progression in the two arts.

  37. John Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London: Methuen, 1961), 27–31.

  38. Hollander, Untuning of the Sky, 288; Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. 32–34.

  39. Thomas Ravenscroft, A Briefe Discourse…Measurable Music (London, 1614), sig. A3v.

  40. On the gendered seductiveness of music, see, e.g., two essays by Linda Phyllis Austern: “The Siren” and “‘No women are indeed’: The Boy Actor as Vocal Seductress in Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-century English Drama,” in Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, ed. Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). The gendering of music is also cogently discussed in Hollander, Untuning of the Sky, 107–108, 337; Carla Zecher, “The Gendering of the Lute in Sixteenth-Century French Love Poetry,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000), 769–791, and Zecher’s Sounding Objects: Musical Instruments, Poetry, and Art in Renais-sance France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), Chapter 1. I am grateful to Zecher for sharing her work with me before its publication.

  41. Austern, “The Siren,” 107.

  42. Hollander, Untuning of the Sky, 35.

  43. I thank my colleague Patricia Rosenmeyer for valuable information on this subject.

  44. Matthew Spring, The Lute in Britain: A History of the Instrument and Its Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 49, 255–256; Zecher, Sounding Objects, 139–146.

  45. William Fitzgerald, Catullan Provocations: Lyric Poetry and the Drama of Position (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 10–11.

  46. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967).

  47. Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), esp. Chapter 4.

  48. Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 211.

  49. John Makluire, The Buckler of Bodilie Health (Edinburgh, 1630), 64–66.

  50. John Donne, Letters to Severall Persons of Honour (London, 1651), 31.

  51. Wallace Stevens, “Adagia,” in Opus Posthumous, rev. ed., ed. Milton J. Bates (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 185. Future citations appear in parentheses within my text.

  52. On the history of this movement, see John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).

  53. Gina Bloom, Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

  54. Joseph Trapp, Lectures on Poetry (London, 1742), 6; Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 16.

  55. Citations are to John Donne, The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965).

  56. Yeats, The Poems, 2nd ed., ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1997).

  57. See Zecher, “Gendering of the Lute,” 769–791.

  58. Hollander, Untuning of the Sky, esp. Chapter 2.

  59. Henry S. Turner, “Plotting Early Modernity,” in The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England, ed. Henry S. Turner (London: Routledge, 2002).

  60. Paula Blank, Shakespeare and the Mismeasure of Renaissance Man (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).

  61. Englands Helicon (London, 1600), sig. A3.

  62. See Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 177.

  63. I thank Wendy Hyman for this insight, as well as a number of other useful suggestions about this book.

  64. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “‘Corpses of Poesy’: Some Modern Poets and Some Gender Ideologi
es of Lyric,” in Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, ed. Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).

  65. All citations are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

  66. Thomas Palmer, The Emblems of Thomas Palmer: Two Hundred Poosees: Sloane Ms. 3794, ed. John Manning (New York: AMS Press, 1988).

  67. Throughout this discussion of Greek lyric I am indebted to Bruno Gentili, Poetry and Its Public in Ancient Greece: From Homer to the Fifth Century, trans. A. Thomas Cole (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) and to valuable conversations with Patricia Rosenmeyer.

  68. Gentili, Poetry and Its Public, 32–35, argues it was not.

  69. On these usages, see Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence, 3. I am also indebted to Patricia Rosenmeyer for information on this issue.

  70. Greene, “The Lyric,” 219–220.

  71. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Baxter Hathaway (1906; rpt., Kent, OH: Kent State University Press), 40, 77. Subsequent references will appear in parentheses within my text.

  72. The citation is to Roger Ascham, English Works: “Toxophilus,” “Report of the Affaires and State of Germany,” “The Scholemaster,” ed. William Aldis Wright (1904; rpt., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 283–284. Subsequent citations from this book will appear in my text.

  73. Michael Drayton, Poems (London, 1619), “To the Reader,” 279.

  74. Although he does not address the issue of gender in this passage, David Lindley comments trenchantly on the hierarchies implicit in Drayton’s passage and on his emphasis on social function (Lyric [London: Methuen, 1985], 6–7).

  75. I cite John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Odyssey Press, Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 669–670.

  76. Greene, “The Lyric,” 217.

  77. On this use of love poetry, see Ilona Bell, Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Marotti, Manuscript, esp.2–10.

  78. Stevens, Music and Poetry, esp. Chapter 9. Alhough this study anticipates Marotti’s, Bell’s, and others in situating the lyrics in social interactions, it differs in emphasizing that the poems in question might well evoke fictive situations rather than participating more directly and straightforwardly in “real” events (see esp. 154–155).

  79. Marotti, Manuscript, 76–82.

  80. All citations are to The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

  81. Among the many studies discussing the gendering of lyric in other periods is Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “‘Corpses of Poetry.’” This otherwise valuable study replicates an error common to students of poetry written after the early modern period: it assumes that a celebration of male power is not only normative but also virtually unchallenged in Petrarchism and other movements of its era.

  82. Herodotus, The Famous Hystory of Herodotus, trans. Barnabe Riche (London and New York: Constable and Alfred A. Knopf, 1924), 100.

  83. I am indebted to my colleague Patricia Rosenmeyer for this translation and for many other helpful suggestions about this section of the book.

  84. OED, s.v. “minikin.”

  85. See esp. three essays by Linda Phyllis Austern: “The Siren”; “‘No women are indeed’”; and “‘Alluring the Auditorie to Effeminacie’: Music and the Idea of the Feminine in Early Modern England,” Music and Letters, 74 (1993), 343–354. Also see Zecher’s “Gendering of the Lute” and Sounding Objects, esp. Chapter 1. Although Zecher chooses most of her examples from France, many of the texts in question were certainly familiar to English poets and arguably influenced their own genderings of song and of lyric.

  86. Roland Greene, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), esp. 5–6.

  87. The Poems of Robert Sidney, ed. P. J. Croft (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).

  88. Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583), sig. O4v, O5.

  89. George Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, ed. G. W. Pigman III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).

  90. For the argument that the poem alludes to the speaker’s penis and other useful commentary, see Douglas L. Peterson, The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne: A History of the Plain and Eloquent Styles, 2nd ed. (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1990), 160–162, 267.

  91. The connection between lyric and toys is discussed throughout Tiffany, Toy Medium. On the linguistic usage, see OED, s.v. “toy.”

  92. See, e.g., Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Chapter 4.

  93. Austern, “‘Alluring,’” esp.347–348.

  94. Hollander, Untuning of the Sky, esp. 11–12.

  95. Zeiger, Beyond Consolation, esp. 2; she does not, however, pursue the relevance of her insight to the maenads.

  96. Peter J. Manning, “Wordsworth in the Keepsake, 1829,” in Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-century British Publishing and Reading Practices, ed. John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 68–69.

  97. For the information about “lispt” I am indebted to private correspondence with Stephen Orgel.

  98. The edition that Herrick probably used is valuably discussed by Gordon Braden in the Appendix of The Classics in English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). His comparison of Herrick’s “Vision” with its source focuses on the similarities rather than the differences (206–208).

  99. Comparing Herrick’s text with a version of the same Anacreontic poem by the Civil War writer Thomas Stanley underscores how much Herrick revises Anacreon and how profoundly he destabilizes his poem as a consequence:

  As on Purple carpets I

  Charm’d by wine in slumber ly,

  With a troop of Maids (resorted

  There to play) me thought I sported:

  Whose companions, lovely Boies,

  Interrupt me with rude noise:

  Yet I offer made to kisse them.

  But o’th’sudden wake and misse them:

  Vext to see them thus forsake me,

  I to sleep again betake me.

  (Thomas Stanley, Poems [1651])

  Notice that this text is on the whole far more simple and straightforward in its approach to gender. Admittedly, the unclear referent of the pronoun “them” in line 7 arguably at least gestures, however briefly and ambiguously, towards same-sex desire. But whereas the enchantress in Herrick’s poem is threatening, the cognate figures in Stanley’s version are responsible for nothing more aggressive than playing and making noise. Similarly, in contrast to Herrick’s: anticlosural ending, Stanley’s speaker, though “Vext” (9), seems to go back to sleep without much trouble, with the happy implication that the maids might return. (An interpretation of this poem from a different perspective may be found in Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1669 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994], 255–256; although it does not comment on the connection with Herrick, I am indebted to this book for drawing Stanley’s poem to my attention.)

  CHAPTER 2: THE DOMAIN OF ECHO

  1. These are not Piano’s first work in the United States; in particular, he designed the Menil Collection and the neighboring gallery of Cy Twombly’s work in Houston.

  2. Renzo Piano, Logbook, trans. Huw Evans (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997), 253.

  3. Piano, Logbook, 253.

  4. Dan Graham, Works, 1965–2000, ed. Marianne Brouwer (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2001), 77. Subsequent quotations from this book are identified parenthetically within my text.

  5. Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 33.

  6. Three studies that appeared after I completed this chapter all reconsider the model of a solit
ary speaker merely addressing himself or vainly attempting through apostrophe to evoke an absent listener; in one, Anne Keniston demonstrates how the losses associated with apostrophe produce fruitful commentaries on poetry (Overheard Voices: Address and Subjectivity in Postmodern American Poetry [Routledge: London, 2006]). Virginia Jackson posits “an intersubjective space” in which the writer may be “alone with” (Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005], esp. Chapter 3; the passage cited appears on 133). Helen Vendler argues that addresses to invisible listeners may build, not frustrate, intimacy (Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005]). My work participates in the project of rethinking direction of address but approaches that agenda differently from these and other studies; for example, I stress lability more than most other critics do and demonstrate how conditions distinctive to early modern England contribute to that instability. Also see William Fitzgerald, Catullan Provocations: Lyric Poetry and the Drama of Position (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). This acute study also stresses that the audience assumes a range of subject positions, relating the interplay between audience and speaker to conditions in Roman culture, and Fitzgerald comments with particular acuity on overhearing; but his work differs from mine in a number of ways, such as his recurrent emphasis on the empowerment of Catullus and his greater emphasis on the speaker.

  7. Throughout this chapter, references to Spenser’s minor poetry are to The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

  8. On Spenser’s involvement with the woodcuts, see Ruth Samson Luborsky, “The Allusive Presentation of The Shepheardes Calender,” Spenser Studies 1 (1980), esp. 29, 41–43.

  9. OED, s.v. “record.”

  10. On writing for a future audience, cf.the comparatist study of Lisa Lai-ming Wong, “A Promise (Over) Heard in Lyric,” New Literary History 37 (2006), 271–284.

  11. Roland Greene, “The Shepheardes Calender, Dialogue, and Periphrasis,” Spenser Studies 8 (1987), 10–12. Also cf. Ilona Bell’s arguments about the dialogic propensities of early modern love poetry, which are explored throughout Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).