Elizabethan Love Poets

Love poetry has never gone out of fashion, but the late 16th and early 17th centuries remain its golden age. Shakespeare’s sonnets cast such a dazzling light that we tend to forget that he was just one of many Elizabethan love poets. John Greening’s new study puts Shakespeare in the lively company of fifteen of his peers. The result is an accessible guide to the poetry scene of the period. Aimed as much at the interested general reader as at those studying literature, the book includes well-known figures such as Sir Walter Ralegh and Sir Philip Sidney, Kit Marlowe and Ben Jonson, along with others we should be remembering: Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, George Gascoigne, Fulke Greville, Lady Mary Wroth. There is Donne, of course, and Spenser. There are the song-writers Campion and Dowland. There is the irrepressible Anon – and even the Queen of England herself. Each chapter focuses on one key poem, and there is a detailed chronology of the period.

About the author:

John Greening is a poet, critic and teacher. He received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2008 and has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow for 2010. Greenwich Exchange publish his Hunts:Poems 1979-2009, his guides to Poets of the First World War and Yeats, together with three recent volumes in the Focus series on Hardy, Edward Thomas and Ted Hughes.

132  pages

ISBN: 978-1-906075-52-1