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Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry
Brian Vickers
Southern Illinois University Press, 1989

Back in print after 17 years, this is a concise history of rhetoric as it relates to structure, genre, and style, with special reference to English literature and literary criticism from Ancient Greece to the end of the 18th century.

The core of the book is a quite original argument that the figures of rhetoric were not mere mechanical devices, were not, as many believed, a "nuisance, a quite sterile appendage to rhetoric to which (unaccountably) teachers, pupils, and writers all over the world devoted much labor for over 2,000 years." Rather, Vickers demonstrates, rhetoric was a stylized representation of language and human feelings.

Vickers supplements his argument through analyses of the rhetorical and emotional structure of four Renaissance poems. He also defines 16 of the most common figures of rhetoric, citing examples from the classics, the Bible, and major English poets from Chaucer to Pope.

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Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry
Douglas Bush
Harvard University Press

This volume, originally published in 1937, is reissued with a new preface and a few small corrections. A brilliant study of the continuing and changing uses of classical mythology in English poetry, it treats most of the major and many of the minor English poets since 1680 and includes a chapter on the use of myth in American verse. It provides an illuminating overview of English poetry since the end of the Renaissance.

In his Preface to the new printing, Bush briefly surveys the various approaches to classical myth over the centuries. "During the last two generations," he observes, "most of the leading British and American poets (not to mention Rilke and others) have renewed the mythic or mythological tradition with fresh power. Thus, in spite of the accumulated pressures and threats of our time, the vitality and the necessity of myth remain." He also reminisces engagingly about the writing of the book and acknowledges that after three decades he does not find a great deal in it that he would wish to change.

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The Well-Tun’d Word
Musical Interpretations of English Poetry, 1597-1651
Elise Bickford Jorgens
University of Minnesota Press, 1982

The Well-Tun'd Word was first published in 1982. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

The years 1957–1651 marked a period of high achievement in the history of song. In The Well-Tun'd Word Elise Bickford Jorgens studies changing musical conventions of English song in relation to new patterns in poetic taste from the late Elizabethan era through the Jacobean and Caroline years, basing her work on the premise that any musical setting of a poem is an interpretation of the poem itself. Thus by 1625, she contends, solo song in England had undergone a pronounced change in musical style, from the lute song of earlier decades to the monophonic continuo song. The appearance of John Donne and especially Ben Johnson and the Cavalier poets marked the demise of the Elizabethan lyrical mode that had inspired composers like John Downland, Thomas Campion, John Danyel, and Robert Jones.

Jorgen's opening chapters describe and illustrate elements of the craft of poetry and the musical conventions that can represent them. Her presentation is both clear and thorough, and will be especially helpful for students and scholars of English literature who are not necessarily musicians. She then discusses four major categories of song: Measured Music, Dance Songs and Tuneful Airs, English Monody, and Pathetic Airs, and notes that influence upon them of Continental music styles. But her major effort is to distinguish between them by pointing out their several characteristic attitudes towards the musical representation of poetic texts. All four groups show patterns of change during the first half of the seventeenth century.

Jorgens concludes that the celebrated union of the "sister arts" for which Elizabethan song was renowned was increasingly difficult to maintain after about 1610. Poets no longer favored those elements of poetic style that could in turn produce pleasing musical styles. Solo songs became, with continuo composers like Henry and William Lawes, Nicholas Lanier, and John Wilson, either notated recitations of poetry or simple pleasant trifles.

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