PASTS AND FUTURES

Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, died in 1612, at the age of eighteen, after a brief illness. Among many other political, social, and cultural ramifications, his death served as a direct impetus for the publication of poetry: a number of poets previously active primarily in manuscript circulation—including John Donne, George Herbert, William Drummond, and others—published poems in response to his death. For these poets, as for much of England and Scotland, Henry had been an emblem of hope, and remained one in death.Footnote ¹ The hopes about him were not always held with equal sincerity or conviction, but they were rhetorically, politically, and personally significant to many people throughout his short life. The prince’s death displaced those hopes with far darker rumors and fears.Footnote ² This essay considers Prince Henry’s life and death as opportunities to reflect on the temporality of hope, remembrance, and despair in English printed poetry. It connects the promise of an admired young prince to that of the book industry and of individual books. This connection is fostered by, but extends beyond, the large number of elegies printed in the immediate aftermath of Prince Henry’s death. I am interested in these poems, and the books that collected them, not so much for what they tell us about Prince Henry or the politics of Jacobean monarchy but for the insights they offer into how notions of past and future interact with the structuring elements of poetry books.

The association of the prince with poetry’s ability to preserve lost hopes and consider alternate pasts and futures can be found in public poetry before he died and well after. A distinctly pessimistic poetics emerges out of the period of mourning that followed Henry’s death, but this aesthetic mode was not so much newly impelled by this abrupt turn of events as it was provided with a newly elevated platform and justification. The prince—living or dead—leads poets to think about the nature of hope, which, in turn, leads to complicated questions of temporality: to hope is, after all, to posit a future. To reflect on a lost hope is to contemplate a future that has been rendered impossible but not necessarily to replace it with a newly viable alternative, since there is no remaining hope to spur the imagination of such a future.Footnote ³ There is a difference in this sense between hopelessness and dread, and these poets (perhaps because of the political risks of the alternative) align themselves primarily with the former.

The poems and poetry books this essay discusses extend over several decades, from Samuel Daniel’s dedication to the still-living prince, originally written when Henry was eleven, to a poem by Henry King prominently anthologized during the interregnum. What all of these works have in common—besides their grounding in the life and death of a precocious leader who embodied the joy and treachery of hope—is a recognition of the problem of reception introduced by writing and publishing a poem on an issue of universal public concern. In Daniel’s case, that problem involves an association between the hopes represented by the young prince and those Daniel had seen in his own career and that of the once celebrated, later executed Earl of Essex. This connection leads Daniel to meditate on the relationship between history and reading: contemplating the immediacy of patronage in the face of the extended duration of literary history, he argues against an interpretation grounded in the historical moment of a work’s writing. I am adopting here a version of the interpretive model Daniel advocates: though these poems are grounded in a historical crisis, their awareness of the need to represent the moment that inspired them to an indeterminate audience places reception and point of origin in conflict as determinants of meaning. I am also interested in the relationship between the individual and collective poetic voices in anthology, and in that respect I draw heavily on Donne’s much-debated elegy for Prince Henry, which treats the individual and collective in conflict. As I observe, this tension is apparent in quite a few of the poems published in the immediate aftermath of Henry’s death. Finally, I consider the implications of these two problems inherent to occasional anthologies—the temporality of interpretation and the limits of poetic collectivity—for the more typical lyric collections that were popular throughout the seventeenth century. The temporal rupture represented by the prince’s death is an especially pointed demonstration of a problem thematized in many of these collections: the fact that their audience and the literary history that justifies them belong to entirely different historical moments.

Publication represents a temporal shift. It consists of taking something written in the past—something private and reasonably self-contained—and opening it up willingly to an uncertain future.Footnote ⁴ To publish, or consent to have something published, implies an anticipation of future benefits judged likely to outweigh the present cost and risk. This forward-looking orientation is also perceptible within the collective, and critics sometimes glean a sense of exuberance from the rapid growth of the book market at the turn of the seventeenth century, assuming that more readers for books must reflect and instill more confidence in their producers. But there is a countervailing tendency as well: as book production expands, its promises may fall short, undermined by the same forces that are driving the expansion. I am not referring to the social stigma that has sometimes been thought to adhere to print in the Renaissance but, rather, to a more general sense that whatever future is available for a given work, the industry as a whole serves more as a reminder of what has been lost or of what it cannot accomplish than as an emissary to a better world to come.Footnote ⁵

Critics frequently discuss the ways that thinking about print means thinking about the futures of texts. Whitney Trettien succinctly defines “the book as a synthetic publishing technology that materially gathers and processes the past for future readers.”Footnote ⁶ Trettien is resistant to traditional models of authorship and their organization around canonical figures, but a similar role for readers is active in Shakespeare studies, in which the daily immediacy of the theater is often contrasted with the anticipation of broader future reception that print allows. Lukas Erne observes that because Shakespeare “could not help knowing that his plays were being read and reread” as he was writing, he also knew that “future people” would read his subsequent work.Footnote ⁷ Anthologization, because its recombination of past texts promises possible subsequent recombinations, has an even more open-ended relationship to futurity, which Ted Treager compares to the “peculiar temporality” of commonplacing: “The commonplace book is a kind of time machine, whose practitioners must transform a present text into a plenipotentiary of resources for a future and as-yet hypothetical self.”Footnote ⁸ The anthology is a way of extending this machine for the purpose of other, even more hypothetical readers. Treager’s word “peculiar” speaks to a sense of uncertainty that sometimes creeps into critics’ sense of the time problem inherent in books. Trettien’s straightforward definition, quoted above, gives way later in her introduction to a more troubled one, in which the book “is always coming into being differently as the medium through which fragments of past knowledge come together and collide with the future.”Footnote ⁹ A hint of violence enters into what had been conveyed as mere utility.

In stressing this tension between poetry books’ past and future, my intent is to counter the orientation toward the latter of much of the scholarship on early modern books in recent decades—namely, its focus on what becomes of books after they are printed, which tends to accentuate their history and status as material objects and commodities. Book historians often judge the formation of a book backward from its readership. Erin A. McCarthy generalizes that “poets’ and publishers’ speculations about the potentially vast unknown reading public for early modern poetry and their efforts to accommodate readers…must have been successful, as poetry was a steady and significant part of the London book trade and of English culture more generally.”Footnote ¹⁰ This emphasis often reveals itself not just in an insistence on the predominance of the material condition of books for their historical significance but also in a materiality that is bounded in specific temporal ways, as it is in a book by Zachary Lesser about Thomas Pavier’s Shakespeare quartos. Lesser employs an exhaustive archival approach, describing the “particular history” of each of several hundred copies of these books. Evidence of the provenance and uses of individual copies, Lesser says, “relates not simply to the reception of the book, to its history after it was printed and sold, but rather bears directly on the processes that created it. We cannot so easily divide the evidence into before and after, production and reception.”Footnote ¹¹ It is striking that Lesser assigns “before” to “production,” since he notes many of the ways that the Pavier quartos acknowledge their past: several reference theatrical productions from years or decades earlier on their title pages, and some of them (as W. W. Greg demonstrated and Lesser reinforces) are given false publication dates from well before their actual printing. There are also hints of their authorial posthumousness, since, whatever their dates, they were definitely printed after Shakespeare’s death, in 1616. Lesser, acknowledging this belatedness when he discusses the “ghost” left over time by an inked page on the one facing it, puns on the ghosts of Hamlet’s father and of Shakespeare.Footnote ¹² So there is a “before” before Lesser’s “before” that is essential to the way the books’ production negotiates with and informs their reception.

Explicit references to the past, and to past hopes especially, are an invitation to consider that prehistory of a book in its effect on readership. From a critic’s perspective, attention to such temporality requires looking beyond long-entrenched conflicts over methodological emphases on materiality or abstraction, context or form. Some of these divisions are currently in the midst of an overdue reconsideration: there is a broadly held desire in literary studies at present to reunite the skills of formal analysis with the historical contextualization of literature.Footnote ¹³ Books are a natural locus for this reunion, since they serve literary, economic, and social histories as some of the most important sources of evidence. Erin McCarthy “examines the physical features, organization, and textual editing of [poetry] books alongside careful readings of the texts they contain to show how these material instantiations create meaning” (as opposed to how these material features might convey or disseminate meaning).Footnote ¹⁴ Even critics who prioritize form more explicitly still assume a kind of transparency to the relationship between a book’s production and reception that I find overly optimistic. I share Megan Heffernan’s sense of books as forms that help orient the formal situations of individual poems. But her assertion that “professional compilers used the affordances of print to adjust the horizons of interpretation by making it possible to recognize continuities and read at a scale greater than the single poem” requires that future understanding somehow inhere within a book as produced.Footnote ¹⁵ This is the assumption I seek to question by thinking through the temporality of printed poetry in a moment of crisis.

Books’ pasts and parts each affect the way the other is understood, jointly emphasizing books’ capacity to assemble what would otherwise be scattered to the winds. This capacity is sometimes metaphorically and sometimes literally associated with the memorialization of the past, which informs one of the genres that poetry books often highlight: elegy. Memorialization and memorization are not consistently differentiated in Renaissance English, and these two functions, in the case of books, merge: preserving poems also laments the loss of their originary moment. The poems about Prince Henry represent a point of coalescence of a broader issue, highlighting a pessimistic attitude toward printed poetry that goes much further than the old idea of a stigma of print, explaining both the muted hopes of poets who participated in the book industry and the resistance of those, such as Donne, who continued to regard it warily.

UNFINISHT FRAME

Prince Henry was sought after as a patron of poetry.Footnote ¹⁶ For a teenager, he had a noticeable influence on the direction of literature: Arthur Gorges was an important member of his court, and the prince was a sponsor of George Chapman’s translations of Homer.Footnote ¹⁷ Samuel Daniel sought his support as well, which is telling, given Daniel’s role in the normalization of printed lyrics: as McCarthy observes, Daniel’s edition of his Delia in 1592 “was a landmark in the print history of English sonnet sequences,” and his role in the publication of Sidney’s sonnets helped usher in the publication of courtly love poetry.Footnote ¹⁸ Daniel eventually succeeded in getting the commission from Henry’s mother, Queen Anne, for a masque celebrating her son’s investiture as Prince of Wales in 1610.Footnote ¹⁹ This work, which was not a success and did not lead to further commissions from the royal family, is typical of the checkered history of Daniel’s pursuit of patronage, and he turned frequently to print as an alternative source of money and recognition for his work. The prince, well before his death, served Daniel as an emblem not only of hope but also of all the uncertainty that he associated with his literary ambitions and the ability of printed books to further them.

Despite his reliance on print to build his poetic reputation, Daniel frequently expressed not just the ambivalence many writers feel about the tradeoff between publicity and privacy in print but considerable doubts about his success and the literary future of England. Print assuaged these doubts only somewhat; it also gave him an opportunity to voice them to a broader audience. That duality became particularly apparent after his career as a public literary figure was disrupted by the 1601 execution of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who had once been the leader of the queen’s forces in Ireland. Daniel had a connection to Essex by way of his patron Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, but his literary work, more than any actual relationship, was the factor that caused him to be associated with this national scandal. A few years after Essex’s death, in 1604, Daniel arranged for a performance of his play Philotas, which featured a sympathetic depiction of the accomplished general executed by Alexander the Great for conspiracy. The Privy Council was unconvinced by Daniel’s fervent denial of any intended connection to Elizabeth’s rebellious former commander.Footnote ²⁰

Despite the Council’s censure, Daniel published an incomplete version of the play the following year, in circumstances that unwittingly invited consideration of the uncertainty of literary expectation.Footnote ²¹ Seeking a sympathetic eye and no doubt some protection, he dedicated it to Prince Henry, then a famously precocious eleven-year-old. Daniel’s dedicatory poem, appropriate for Henry’s youth and expectations, is devoted to hope and futurity. Daniel offers Philotas to the young prince but then retracts it in favor of a dedication to Henry’s future self: “To you most hopefull Prince, not as you are / But as you may be, do I give these lines.” ^{Footnote 22} Daniel immediately ties his dedication to a question of representation: the prince as addressee of the poem is separate from the prince as subject. This invocation of futurity takes on a different meaning after Prince Henry’s death, in 1612, though this poem’s first subsequent appearance is doubly posthumous: following its publication in three of Daniel’s poetry collections from 1605 to 1611, it did not appear again until after Daniel’s death, in the 1623 Whole Workes of Samuel Daniel Esquire in Poetrie. In that book, a dead author addresses a dead dedicatee about a shared future that never came about.

Daniel alludes to the Philotas trouble in other works around the same time, as Joan Rees documents; he clearly regarded it as a major setback for his literary ambitions.Footnote ²³ In the dedication to Philotas, he expresses the fear that the distortions of censorship will not end with the play but will extend themselves indefinitely. Daniel addresses the future prince in the interest of rescuing his tragedy, along with other remnants of England’s past literary renascence:

But he is imagining the success the prince will eventually bring his work to be, from his own perspective, posthumous: “Though I the remnant of another time, / Am never like to see that happinesse.” Daniel will serve the prince as a relic of a past set of possible futures, and he is so thoroughly embedded among those past hopes that he assumes no benefit from his current ones. The state of his “neglected harmonie” is treated as permanent, and the “hope” he ties to Prince Henry sounds more like a vain wish. As it turned out, of course, this anticipated highly literate and mature princedom was itself a hope that was merely a “remnant of another time.”

Daniel has no confidence even in the posthumous success he is hoping for, and despite the pride in his play he demonstrates in recommending it to the young prince, he still complains:

Confidence in publication overlaps with a broader pessimism. The pun on “line” highlights the untimeliness of the work: Daniel’s verse lines would best be associated with an earlier point in the line of his life’s fate. The pun also connects two different categories of temporality, though ones with the potential to further divide into three or four. The lines are “late-borne,” inserting a metaphor in which a poem has a life-span analogous to that of a person. They also carry their own temporality: to call them “lines” is to observe the way a poem is composed of individual elements measuring regular intervals, each giving way to the next. The comparison is to the line of “fate,” the literal line or thread that in Greek mythology determines the span of a human life. But the larger context of the poem places this idea within the line of history—the “grace” a courtier earns, after all, is determined largely by political shifts over time, a reality that coincided, in the case of both Philotas and Essex, with the Fates’ cutting of the thread of life. But Daniel can’t give up on his past hopes for the work he never completed:

The goal of his work is to “memorize”—that is, to memorialize—a “happinesse” that never came about. This happiness is both personal and historical: his own hopefulness corresponded with a national one. Conflating the two allows him to put forward the play, his “unfinisht frame,” as framing his life and history in a way that implies two losses: the work reflects the former hopes of author and nation, but its unfinishedness reframes those hopes in shadow, redoubling the poignancy of Daniel’s thwarted intentions for the finished work. The poem carries Daniel’s “zeale…to after times,” but also carries the failure of that zeal to lead to widespread understanding.

Daniel’s resignation that he has “out lived the date” of his positive reputation contrasts markedly with the appeal to the future in his initial address to Prince Henry: Philotas reaches its audience simultaneously too late and too early. Appropriately for this existential uncertainty, Daniel removed the whole second half of the poem—the more pessimistic part including the lines lamenting his “unfinisht frame”—from the 1607 version, replacing them with a reference to the prince’s “more mature survay” (a phrase that, for Daniel in 1607, could refer either to the present—the prince has a “more mature” perspective at thirteen than he had had in 1605—or to yet another imagined future).Footnote ²⁴ For the posthumous edition of 1623, a composite version was created including the additional lines inserted into the middle of the full-length original version. The 1623 edition also includes, for the first time, an “Apology” by Daniel, insisting that the play had been misread by its detractors. Though unpublished in his lifetime, the chronology within it implies that it was written in 1604. Daniel stresses that he had falsely imagined that his audience would have the same reaction to the story of Philotas that he had had when he first heard of it, “delight”: “The wrong application, and misconceiving of this Tragedy of Philotas, urges me worthy Readers, to answere for mine innocency, both in the choice of the subject, and the motives that long since induced me to write it, which were first the delight I tooke in the History it selfe as it lay, and then the aptnesse, I saw it had to fall easily into act, without interlacing other invention, then it properly yeelded in the owne circumstances, were sufficient for the worke, and a lawfull representing of a Tragedy.”Footnote ²⁵ Daniel then tells a long story to try to prove that he conceived Philotas “above eight yeares since,” and wrote it “about foure yeares since, and neere halfe a yeare before the late Tragedy of ours, (whereunto this is now most ignorantly resembled) unfortunately fell out heere in England ”—that is, he could not have intended an allusion to the death of Essex, because he wrote it before the fact.

In making that claim, however, he calls Essex’s story a national “Tragedy,” acknowledging that it lends itself to his chosen genre. Daniel also works that generic identification, and the analogy it suggests between events of state and dramatic structure, into the play. Philotas ends in classical tragic style, with a messenger announcing the outcome to the chorus. This nuntius proclaims that “Philotas ended hath the tragedy,” and his description of Philotas’s stoic tolerance of torture leads the chorus to pick up his reference to dramatic genre and expand it into a theatrical metaphor: “That part was acted well, God grant we heare / No worse a Scene than this.”Footnote ²⁶ Having lived through Essex’s demise, Daniel asserts through his play that it is possible to recognize a tragedy from within the midst of one. The “Apology,” in parallel to this generic self-reference, documents the play’s failure to achieve the cathartic possibilities of its genre while also trying to complete that achievement by casting the Essex affair, after all, as a true tragedy. But, as Daniel’s melancholic dedication to Prince Henry seems to anticipate, that generic fulfillment depends not just on Essex’s death but on Daniel’s, through a continued print history that will be beyond his control. To achieve its tragic ambitions, the play’s “line” of fate must exceed Daniel’s.

Had the “Apology” been present in the printed versions from the beginning, it would have helped determine the play’s relation to time and to history. The ultimate point of Daniel’s story in it seems to be his emotional response to the play’s reception in comparison to the better one he was expecting:

Daniel’s confidence that he could predict how “the better sort of men” would react to his work was nearly disastrous. Part of the context for his failure is the sheer duration of literary history at this late age. Adopting “the ancient forme of a Tragedy” ought to allow other kinds of distance to pertain to his work. The “subject” is “so remote a stranger,” but this means that the reader is similarly a remote stranger from it, all the more so if the work achieves its greatest success, as Daniel expects, after his death. This redoubled remoteness leaves its relation to context uncertain. The relationship between text and reader Daniel imagines is imbued with a sense of distance and abstraction that pertains as much to the play’s subject as to its reception on stage and in print. The value he places on that sense of distance suggests an argument for a noncontextual interpretation—not a presentist approach but one that is firmly fixed neither to the point of composition nor to the point of reading. What he wants is not to collapse the gap between subject and reader he identifies but to derive from it the freedom to fictionalize potentially dangerous ideas.

Even if Daniel, despite his denials, intended a relation to the Essex case, that intent does not affect his claim about his meaning here: he was counting on the unpredictability of interpretation, the sheer variability in relation to the remoteness of the original, to obscure his inspiration and thereby save his play for posterity. Daniel thus inserts a particular element into the relationship between publication and interpretation—“the passage of time”—that is not often considered, particularly in regard to the suppression of texts.Footnote ²⁷ Annabel Patterson has written influentially about how the experience of censorship seeps into the Renaissance understanding of interpretation. Though such influence is certainly perceptible for Daniel, his nostalgia for the low-stakes reading we might associate with the stories of irrelevantly ancient history implies at the least ambivalence about the “sophisticated system of oblique communication” Patterson describes—Daniel not only accepts but wants readings that are distinct from his political ends.Footnote ²⁸ His solution to the problem of the hostile reaction to Philotas is to prefer less control, not more. This apology is in keeping with Daniel’s direct references to the likelihood of unpredictable, long-term reading of his printed books: “I know I shalbe read, among the rest / So long as men speake english,” he says in the verse preface to his 1607 collection.Footnote ²⁹ In the “Apology” for Philotas, it seems his intention will be better understood when time has obscured the immediate circumstances of composition, even though much of his meaning will be lost. As he read the story of Philotas in relation to his own time, his readers will read it in relation to theirs.

It is not clear why the “Apology,” evidently intended for the 1605 edition of Philotas, was not published until 1623.Footnote ³⁰ Regardless of the cause, however, its posthumous appearance redoubles its themes and those of the dedicatory poem, including its suggestive punning on the play’s lines and the “spent line” of Daniel’s reputation. The lines of grace or fated threads implied by the hopes of and for Prince Henry, Daniel’s life, his works’ reception, and Essex’s life—a line of public reputation coincident with Philotas’s within the play—all come together and are framed by the published work. Philotas needs to be presented within a context that acknowledges the inevitability of the author’s lack of control over its reception. In response, that frame shifts priority from reading to books’ capacity to collect the threads of a literary life together, even in the face of an indifferent posterity. Daniel anticipates to a remarkable degree the interpretive problems that arise out of the poems published after Prince Henry’s death. A book, like a prince and presumptive heir, provides a tenuous connection from a vaunted legacy—literary or historical—to an uncertain future, and this mediation between temporalities provides these poems their most urgent purpose and their greatest challenge.

PUBLIKE GREEFE

Even before his death, then, Prince Henry served through his connection to a posited future as a way to highlight poetry’s ability to bring memorialization and anticipation into the same aesthetic space. In poetry, this ability is to some extent conditioned by genre, as Daniel’s reference to tragedy acknowledges. J. K. Barret has argued convincingly that the “cross between past-consciousness and future-consciousness” she identifies in writers such as Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton “proves fertile ground for writers experimenting with their conception of the present moment.”Footnote ³¹ This dynamic in narrative and dramatic works leads her to challenge Jonathan Culler’s statement (derived from one by Alice Fulton) that “if narrative is about what happens next, lyric is about what happens now.” Barret, interested in alternative ways of imagining narrative time, notes that “next” can include multiple anticipated or actual futures at odds with each other. A complementary problem, I would suggest, also affects the lyric side of Culler’s division: lyric is seldom only “about what happens now.” In elegy and its related genres, the “now” of lyric address is overlaid by memories not fully accessible at the time of reading; in print, as Daniel’s references to distant future readerships acknowledge, such address may have a similar temporal multiplicity. That multiplicity complicates the stark temporal shift represented by the death of a public future.

The mourning of Prince Henry was extraordinarily well documented in print. The many books about him published between 1612 and 1614 include a quartet of sermons delivered by Daniel Price leading up to the funeral, a Latin oration by the prince’s chaplain, Leonel Sharp, and a detailed description of the funeral itself, with a narrative of the procession and lists of attendees.Footnote ³² But the occasion served especially as an impetus for books of verse.Footnote ³³ Some of these were in Latin: George Herbert was involved with a collection of Latin poems by Cambridge students titled Epicedium Cantabrigiense, which joined two from Oxford.Footnote ³⁴ Most were collaborative; even books centered on a single work, such as James Maxwell’s The Laudable Life, and Deplorable Death, of our Late Peerlesse Prince Henry, had shorter elegies by various other poets appended.Footnote ³⁵ The goal seemed to be to present poets united as the voice of national mourning. Scholarship that considers these poems collectively tends to tie that role to the public one the prince occupied in life. J. W. Williamson, in a book-length study, argues that “those poets and writers who shared, while Henry lived, the aims, motives, and assumptions of the dominant Protestant myth of the prince as conqueror, could only, once the prince was dead, defiantly restate their allegiance to that myth, though the body which it inhabited and on which it depended for symbolic sustenance was dead and decaying.”Footnote ³⁶ C. A. Patrides notes the prince’s ability to conjure admiration from the opposing factions of James’s reign, and that “the translation of the Prince into a symbol began at once” after his death. The preeminence of this symbolic function might help explain the distinctive role of literary memorializations in this period; as Patrides points out, despite the usual public religious ceremonies for a funeral of such national significance, “not preachers… but poets led the way” in the prince’s remembrance.Footnote ³⁷ Dennis Kay observes the extent to which those poets take over and exceed the function of preachers: they “articulate an apocalyptic view of history, and seem to aspire to a prophetic register.”Footnote ³⁸ The Prince Henry books were all printed during the two to three years following the prince’s death, but they had long afterlives not only through their interest to buyers and collectors (demonstrated by the large number of extant copies now) but also through the republication of their contents in other forms.Footnote ³⁹ Many of the poems, including those of Drummond, Sylvester, Herbert, and Donne, were later published in single-author collected editions.

But the content of these poems suggests that they are as concerned with each other as with the princely symbolism they are supposed to be perpetuating. Poets’ view of the collective work they are committed to is affected by the impossible narrative task of recording a temporal rupture as great as the one caused by Henry’s death, and their understanding of it is similarly conditioned by their awareness of each other’s simultaneous reckoning with the same problem. This circumstance also leads them to think about what poetry, especially in print, is and can do. The sheer elaborateness of some of these books—dozens of numbered stanzas; extravagant conceits; complex, difficult, and novel verse forms; prominent engravings—calls attention to media and genre. Some of the poets connect their collective role as the voice of public grief specifically with form. William Basse’s Great Brittaines Sunnes-set, published on its own, marks the collision between private and public loss by reflecting on prosody. His topic is public grief—“This generall Deluge of our eyes”Footnote ⁴⁰—but he tells his dedicatee, Sir Richard Wenman, that the purpose of the poem is to mediate between the intimacy they share and that “generall” mourning in which they both take part:

Basse makes a careful distinction between what he attributes to his patron “alone” and what is “publique,” claiming that the poem reflects without adding to the publicity of poetic mourning. He argues that the only way he can differentiate the intimate grief he shares with Wenman from the general one is to invent a new form and not “from examples borrow.” The novel structure he refers to is, evidently, that of the poem itself, whose stanzas comprise six iambic decasyllables of alternating rhymes followed by an alexandrine couplet. Basse’s nineteenth-century editor R. Warwick Bond notes that he “can find no other instance” of this stanza form (nor can I).Footnote ⁴²

This new form is necessary to distinguish the poem from others on the same topic. Basse acknowledges that he is an interloper among more distinguished voices: “Here weepe (young Muse) while elder pens compose / More solemne Rites unto his sacred Hearse.” His elegy belongs simultaneously to social and generic contexts, in which it competes, respectively, with “elder” poets and “more solemn” poems. For the collective purposes of public grief, his voice only has to add to their chorus, but when he tries to represent Wenman’s distinctive emotional response not only to him but to the broad audience he shares with these other poets, the crowdedness of the field becomes an obstacle. This self-awareness about literary communalism and competition can only be bolstered by the rapidity and effectiveness of proliferation offered by print.

Like Basse’s poem, George Wither’s equally elaborate Prince Henries Obsequies evokes both pride and anxiety about the peculiar position of joining a robust poetic enterprise that is the most visible part of a larger performance of public mourning. Wither’s generically composite work is a set of forty-five elegiac sonnets followed by an allegorical dialogue (in which Britain converses with “the Spirit of Prince Henrie”) and a bilingual poem, with parallel stanzas in Latin and English. Complaining that his “Soule in publike greefe no pleasure knowes,” Wither says that public mourning redoubles itself, as the source of grief is not only one’s own misfortune: “now for thousands, my poore heart doth ake.”Footnote ⁴³ Wither says he does not mean to “blaze his praise”—his goal is not to elevate his subject. The work of furthering the mythology of the prince that scholars have sometimes attributed to these poets is a task Wither considers beyond him: “It is a worke too mighty, and requires / Many a Pen, and many yeares of daies.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Wither sees himself as participating in a larger collective enterprise and simultaneously excluded from it, or overwhelmed by the sheer amount of labor it represents. Even poems like these that are published in single-author books must navigate the conflict between singularity and collectivity in the publishing of poetry, and Wither and Basse conceive of that conflict, somewhat anxiously, in terms of print’s capacity to bridge private and public affect.

George Chapman’s Epicede or Funerall Song was also the primary work in its volume, though the book includes various epitaphs as well as a prose description of Henry’s funeral.Footnote ⁴⁵ It has seemed to some commentators to stand out from the others; Williamson, for example, describes it as the only elegy for the prince that acknowledges that Henry might not have lived up to the myth.Footnote ⁴⁶ Chapman indulges in the grandest allegories, but not with the metaphysical themes of most of the others.Footnote ⁴⁷ Instead, he describes the prince’s life, death, and funeral, depicting the twelve days of his sickness as a battle between good and evil mythological figures even as he narrates it in specific, physical terms (Chapman even alludes to the claim of the prince’s physicians that their patient died of a fever originating in Hungary). But, like Basse and Wither, he is also aware of the specific role played by his fellow poets, and questions how an individual voice can represent the collective and vice versa. Their meditations on form help to highlight Chapman’s inventive use of sound in navigating this difficulty.

The stakes for poetry in Chapman’s elegy are high, and he emphasizes that most poets are not up to the task. What he seeks is an immediacy of representation, in which the muse would allow an experience of Henry’s death to be contained directly in poetry, not merely referenced:

Chapman’s hope is for a verse so direct in its ability to “show his ruines” that it would demonstrate the failure of “the wits” who are collectively mourning the prince. But this is a wish, not an assertion of what his poem accomplishes. The muse’s response leads Chapman to a flight of fancy—not the one he wants, in which he is inspired with “an Angels tongue,” but one in which various supernatural beings lament Henry themselves. So, at least here, Chapman does not provide the answer to the challenge he presents to poetry.

It is not just modesty that prevents Chapman from appointing himself the sole proper poetic mourner: there is a role for the collective after all, in the social rituals of lament. He turns back to the futility of poetry in describing the funeral, and also to form’s capacity for distinctive mimetic functions that both alleviate and highlight that futility:

Chapman’s repeated double words suggest the marching of the “grim waves” of mourners behind the hearse. They also hint at the “dead verse” struggling to revive itself in order to be equal to a task that cannot be accomplished sufficiently, as if the poem is stuttering as it tries to reinvigorate the forms it occupies. The spondees created by these repetitions, particularly those that begin lines (“On on” and “Mourne, mourne”), evoke a dirge for the prince but also a lament for a formally conscious poetry whose effectiveness Chapman imagines to have been lost with the prince’s death. Chapman brings to fruition what Basse intends with his call to innovate in form: an expansion of the mimetic possibilities in poetry, but one that serves to highlight, not overcome, the limitations of its public authority. Chapman expresses this idea concisely with one last repetition in the poem’s final lines:

The apotheosis of poetry does not transcend the prince’s death; it dies with him, and poetry’s “rise” is left for a rapturous future.

In these poems, print’s capacity to make private mourning public is parallel to the solidity it provides to the formal innovations that Basse and others pursue. But the opportunities print brings encounter the doubtful future of a medium whose audience is always uncertain. This collision between public function and formal effectiveness is represented in especially vivid and literal terms in Drummond’s Teares for Meliades. Teares is, like many of the elegies on Prince Henry, a reflection on the loss of a previously hoped for future and on the unity and inadequacy of national grief. In print, the poem also becomes a meditation on the relationships between language, thought, and the page. Following Teares, a pyramid-shaped poem extends one line at a time from a two-syllable line, “Of Jet,” to a dodecasyllable, “A Crystal Tomb to him, through which his worth appears.”Footnote ⁵¹ Any shape poem has a formal duality, employing visual and metrical structure to enact two simultaneous, not always perfectly complementary modes of representation. To use one as a preface to a longer poem adds a third formal function (aided by the illustrations)—helping to craft the book as a distinctive form that frames the main poem and its supporting texts.

After the pyramidal shape poem, a sonnet, printed within an engraving of an elaborate tomb, comments on the insufficiency of Henry’s coffin (later editions frame this poem more humbly, in woodcuts resembling rough-hewn planks). The connections between aural and graphic language suggested in the second edition are further heightened in Drummond’s 1614 Poems, which was bound with a new edition of Teares but includes Drummond’s earlier lyrics (the posthumous collection of Drummond’s poetry in 1656 reinforces the ties between these various works).Footnote ⁵² These lyrics are striking in relation to Teares and its accompanying poems of lament, since both parts of the volume share in Drummond’s preoccupations with language, history, and thought—and the fragility that each reinforces in the others. In one sonnet, Drummond concludes a tortured examination of hope and despair by turning against his own poem:

The arrangements of words are meaningful and representational because they foster confusion, not despite doing so.

The argument of Teares is stated in temporal terms: in response to the realization that “one Hour can destroy” the “fading Hopes” of a nation, poets document their “untimely Teares,” but they will eventually give way to fame that will last as long as “about the Pole / the slow Boötes turns.”Footnote ⁵⁴ This temporal trajectory, in which history takes up and improves the “untimely Teares” of the moment, is bolstered by a spatial expansion as the book adopts the themes of the poem. As Wither implies by hoping that other poets will accomplish what he cannot, it is possible to extend this logic to the collective work of poets (and the many others involved in the production of poetry, who contribute to the definition of a poet’s role), but at the risk of revealing the inadequacy of the individual. The demands placed on poets expected to speak for a grieving nation were considerable, and, as Wither and Basse say frankly, formal innovations can be a way to acknowledge the peculiarity and extremity of poets’ collective task. In this context, Chapman’s sonic representations of the prince’s funeral can seem like much subtler versions of the elevation of form that leads to Drummond’s experiments with shape poems.

THIS FAITH IS HERESIE

Several of these poems are accompanied in print by groups of epitaphs or commendatory poems that amplify their references to collective, public lament. The most ambitious of such books form full-scale collections of elegies that literalize the references Basse and Wither make to poets’ collective mourning. One of the most successful books, Sundry Funeral Elegies on the Untimely Death of the most excellent Prince, Henry, appeared only as an appendix to an expanded edition of Josuah Sylvester’s Lachrymae Lachrymarum. The composite book featured elegies by several well-respected poets, including Edward Herbert and John Donne, and went through at least ten printings in quick succession.Footnote ⁵⁵ Sylvester’s poem was published with an elaborate title page and interior engravings in white on black, featuring skeletonic mementi mori down both margins of its opening pages. But despite its extravagance and its popularity, one of the book’s central themes is the insufficiency of poetry for the task at hand.

The futility of memorialization is a central theme in Edward Herbert’s contribution, which posits that life after the prince’s death can consist of nothing except memory, even while his death makes memory impossible:

Herbert turns the Platonic concept of anamnesis into a Merlinesque mirror time, in which all life after the prince’s death can only be oriented backward. A successful memorialization might thus seem to be one in which “We and posterity / Shall celebrate his name,” but in reality, that endeavor must acknowledge the inferiority of the present to the past. Herbert figures this awareness that the best is over as a will toward death. More directly than most, his conceit of a broken anamnesis offers an alternative to futurity—a future in which “we shall not remember that we live” (line 61), which he compares to the unconsciousness “when our Mothers womb did give / That life we felt not” (lines 62–63).

This is a much more pessimistic idea than is found in Herbert’s other elegies. In “Elegy for Doctor Dunn,” Herbert argues that “praise that wants truth, like words that want / Their proper meaning, doth it self recant”—praise poetry succeeds when it speaks truth. But in regard to Prince Henry, even truth is not sufficient. Ryan Netzley has recently argued that we should take seriously the tendency of seventeenth-century praise poetry to question its own purpose, which helps poetry establish itself as something that exists a little bit outside of the relentlessly economized world, something that “suspends, however provisionally, the net of valuation, its accounted payoffs, and its delivered contents.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In the case of elegy, Netzley tracks differing extremities of the trope in which poems of mourning reduce themselves to the mere expression of the obvious. He contrasts two poems that contain the phrase “She’s dead”: Donne’s Anniversaries, whose refrain “calls forth yet more expansive figures,” and Marvell’s “Epitaph upon Frances Jones,” in which the phrase “appears as a rebuke to meaning.”Footnote ⁵⁸ For Herbert—a particularly self-conscious poet who opens a satire with “I say, ’tis hard to write Satyrs”—the distinct acts of mourning a fellow poet and mourning a prince who is uniquely the subject of hope invoke different points along the continuum of expressive pessimism Netzley observes.Footnote ⁵⁹ In “Elegy for the Prince,” it is not that the praise poem undoes itself, but that celebrating what life depends on and is “already past” means that:

Poets cannot even lament, cannot even speak their pain, because the absence of the object of their grief is so thoroughly felt.

Despite his awareness of the act of writing, Herbert casts the whole poem in the first-person plural. His insistent “we” joins with many other references to collectivity in the book. Sundry Funeral Elegies highlights the likenesses between the poems it contains to the point of giving the same title to five of the six that were added, down to the typography: “On the untimely Death of the incomparable Prince, Henry.” They share a number of themes, particularly their own inadequacy. Henry Goodyere, for example, begins,

The “Circle,” within the metaphor, is a magician’s, but the word “such” implies an analogy to some kind of circle more in keeping with the first two lines. That could simply be the knot that ties “measur’d lines” together, but the image is also suggestive of the circle created by the collection of similar poems, which is justified by and continues to exist in reference to the “All-surmounting Woes” it can never contain within itself.

The last poem in the book, by Henry Burton, consists of a dialogue in which various individuals and groups respond to Henry’s death. The speech Burton attributes to “Poets” is apt:

Burton looks at the same poetic collective as the other poets do and sees a failed typology of heroic poetry: the modern counterparts to Homer and Virgil will not emerge, at least not when facing the tall task of describing Henry’s value. Coming at the end of Sundry Funeral Elegies, and following a series of protestations of poetry’s inability to express sufficient praise or sufficient grief, this anxiety does indeed seem to speak collectively—not only for the poets in the book but for all poets.

Donne’s poem, however, does not quite fit the humility that Goodyere and Burton claim for themselves and their fellow poets. Donne argues that Henry’s death induces a failure of reason, not of poetry, and then posits his own lines as representing a (heavily qualified) potential rehabilitation. A much debated poem, Donne’s elegy fits as oddly in his own oeuvre as it does in Sundry Funeral Elegies.Footnote ⁶³ It has often seemed strangely cold and cerebral to commentators: Jonson told Drummond that Donne had admitted to writing it “to match Sir Ed: Herbert in obscurenesse”; Edmund Gosse calls it “obscure, frigid, and affected.”Footnote ⁶⁴ C. A. Patrides, responding to Jonson, argues that “it is Donne’s poem that suffers by comparison” to Herbert’s “Elegy for the Prince.”Footnote ⁶⁵ But Patrides errs, I think, in understanding Jonson’s comment about the success of the poem. Jonson’s comparison is an acknowledgment that the authors involved in the Prince Henry collections were letting each other set the terms of what was possible and allowable in the recognition, demanded by the occasion, of a profound shift. Since they felt they were not up to the demand, poets reached beyond the ordinary means of their craft, whether through elaborate new forms or, in Herbert’s and Donne’s poems, hermetically elevated modes of representation.

Donne takes quite a while even to acknowledge his topic, starting with a lengthy discussion of the relationship between faith and reason in the midst of a disorienting moment. The poem begins as follows:

The “period” here carries the sense of both ending and era. It is defined not as a particular span or point in time but only through its effect on Donne’s two “Centres,” faith and reason, both of which are disturbed.Footnote ⁶⁷ Unlike most of the poems in the collection, Donne’s does not contrast the states of the general mind before and after Henry’s death. His poem is set firmly in the time in which he is writing it, and its subject is “Contemplation of the Prince wee misse,” not the Prince’s life. Though he acknowledges the innocence of any previous faith in that life’s future, he stresses the falsehood of past belief through a grammar that circles ever deeper into self-negation:

This relationship between time and truth allows what was once a justifiable belief to become a “Heresie.” The counterfactual of Henry’s “Times” as king includes the anticipation that Henry would usher in “The last Dayes.” The true audacity here is that, because this imagined future will never come about, even apocalypse is now “Heresie.”

Reason does not fare any better than faith, and in this sense Donne seems consciously to evoke the skepticism his fellow poets displayed toward the effectiveness of poetry in order to outdo it (while adopting one of Herbert’s themes):

In moving toward the present, the poem also reaches in the direction of the collapse of time altogether. The failure of reason in response to the prince’s death turns it into a general death, the end of humanity. The biblical apocalypse is replaced with a secular one. The grammar places this problem of time within a social frame, though in a way that depends on the parsing of the first-person plural. Donne’s poem functions differently in an anthology context than it would in manuscript or in the posthumous collections of his poetry. In Sundry Funeral Elegies, Donne’s “we,” like Herbert’s, seems to speak for poets, declaring their griefs, rather than for mourners, the English people, or a yet more general collective of the bereft.

But Donne pulls back from this emotional and temporal extremity:

His “yet” (the second one in this sentence’s opening phrase) is the poem’s first reference to real, not just imagined, future. There is, finally and rarely for the book and for the Prince Henry poems generally, some kind of hope here, some expectation of future life.

But it is significant that accompanying this shift is a change from plural to singular pronouns: Donne lets his claim that “We are dead” stand, seeming to leave his fellow mourners and poets behind. In the culmination of the elusive strain of the poem that led Jonson to tell Drummond that Donne was being intentionally obscure, he also leaves readers behind. Donne says he can “reach” Henry “thus,” as if he is about to define an analogy between Henry’s embrace of “the Fires of Love” and something to which he and his readers and fellow poets can aspire. But, instead, he turns toward something his audience does not seem to have access to:

Like Goodyere, Donne invokes conjuration in order to claim a communicative connection to the prince. But Goodyere did so as an expression of rhetorical futility, whereas Donne seems oddly confident, assuming an intimate connection with a beloved of the prince (as I read these laments, Donne’s is the only one that declares a personal relationship to Prince Henry, even though there were other poets, such as Chapman, with a stronger claim to do so). That person, however, does not seem to be identifiable by either the readers of Lachrymae or subsequent critics, leading this poem into a deeply unsatisfying conclusion that undermines the sense of hope in the prayer to “see or hear.”Footnote ⁷² Donne’s wish to be “an Angel singing what” Henry was is an unfulfillable desire, but compared to the pessimism of Goodyere and Herbert, who declined even to think about what a sufficient lament might consist of, Donne puts one forward as almost a possibility. In turning away from anything like Burton’s depiction of poets as helpless in the face of Henry’s death, Donne hints at a tension between the collective voice of the anthology and the individual voice of a poet. Acknowledging that the analogies between individual poems that any collection depends on will not always be sufficient, he resists Burton’s collapse of likeness and loss by undoing both, offering idiosyncrasy as an antidote to the futility of lament.

The transition from “we” to “I” at the end of Donne’s elegy signals a limitation to the kind of communal lament that Sylvester’s collection and the other similar books foster. This reversion to an individual relationship to the deceased is Donne’s response to the same anxiety that leads Basse to declare the need to create new forms within what amounts to a collaborative elegy extending across many works and books. There is something paradoxical about the synecdochic role of individual poems within such a collaboration: the parts can only stand in for the whole successfully if they distinguish themselves somehow. Basse does so formally, in line with the recognition that the anthology is itself a form. Herbert, embracing the sense shared by all of the contributing poets that the prince’s death constitutes a temporal rupture, distinguishes himself with a novel philosophy of time. Donne simply announces his difference, acknowledging that poetic collectivity cannot make up for the loss of a collectively cherished hope.

UNABLE POETRY

Poems about Prince Henry’s death continued to influence the form of poetry books throughout the century. Abraham Wright’s Parnassus Biceps, a mid-century anthology of poems from Oxford and Cambridge intended to protest the Parliamentarian university reform of the 1650s, has its share of love poems and a few tributes to sack, but its overriding tone is alternately polemical and elegiac. Wright is interested in connecting his royalist lament with a previous moment in which the country was more united in its elegiac investment in the monarchy. The second of Wright’s elegies is a poem by Henry King, “An Elegy upon Prince Henryes Death.” King had contributed a Latin poem to one of the Oxford volumes published in the immediate aftermath of the prince’s death; this English one was unpublished until much later, and King evidently wrote and revised it over a period of time.Footnote ⁷³ Wright seems to have edited the poem for Parnassus; though it appears in various versions, Wright’s is the only one that takes the form of a quatorzain:

This is not quite the complaint about the inadequacy of general lament we have seen; King posits a direct statement that would serve sufficiently as “Epitaph and Verse / enough,” leaving the rest of poetry, including the rest of his poem, superfluous.

The decisive end, however, which concedes all meaning to the single phrase it repeats in lines 6 and 14, is not necessarily King’s conclusion. All other versions of the poem are longer than this, including the one that is otherwise closest, printed in a collection appended to Le Prince d’Amour (which is signed “B. R.” and generally attributed to Benjamin Rudyerd).Footnote ⁷⁵ The Le Prince version concludes with the following lines:

Adam Smyth, writing about the uses of Parnassus and similar mid-century anthologies, wonders whether Wright removed these lines because their claim that “unable poetry” cannot be adequate to the grief over Prince Henry’s death could have been “judged unsuitable for a collection intended to display poetry’s power.”Footnote ⁷⁷ It may be, though, that the more compact form, resembling a sonnet, helps Wright emphasize the relationship between lament for the dead, lament for lost hopes (in his case, those of academia in the Caroline period), and literary reminiscence that is central to the book.

Indeed, the whole poem fits rather well with Wright’s description of his collection in his preface: for Wright, poetry represents a past power but may not succeed in preserving it, and its meaning threatens to be lost to its own technical rigor. The preface to Parnassus Biceps opens by identifying it as a tribute to a lost golden age of university poetry that he feels has been destroyed by the academic reforms of the Interregnum. In Wright’s case the maternal image is deflected toward one of irrigation:

The conceit seems to require breasts to have sluices: the mixed metaphor suggests that Wright is unsure of the figurative context he wants, an uncertainty reflected in the way he is imagining the future uses of his book. Wright implores readers to find a reflection of themselves in the poems contained in the volume, but he also warns them of the book’s incapability of fully representing the past to which it is devoted:

Wright’s anxiety that all the learning of the universities is reduced in his book to “five feet and a conceit” implies that to represent a great library with a bunch of poems might lead a reader to continue the progression, so that those poems were further reduced to their individual metaphors and iambs. His dichotomy between the unrepresentable depth of academic life across its days and nights of study and the precision of verse form points to a general problem for books of verse. A book is a collecting form and a collection of smaller forms, which means its parts point toward progressively shrinking ones. The solution to this problem is to think of a book as pointing away from rather than toward its meaning: it comes down from the height of wit that originated it, and if it slopes toward the potential triviality of an individual verse line, it also invites a reader to look back toward more august beginnings.

Wright’s insistence that the academic reforms constitute a “Dissolution” of the universities associates those beginnings with a permanent loss. Prince Henry, emblem of dashed hopes, is a helpful exemplar for the poetics Wright is developing in two ways. Certainly Henry is a perfect figure for a royalist book of laments. But his death is also, as we have seen, emblematic of the tendency of ambitious public poetry to lose its purpose in its own formal innovations—to be reduced to “five feet, and a conceit.” Wright’s erasure of the end of King’s poem could be an attempt to limit it, or it could merely be the culmination of those lines’ command for poetry to “cease,” a bit of pessimism about poetry’s ability to change the world that is written into his anthology, despite its explicitly political rationale.

Wright’s use of King’s elegy is demonstrative of the way in which this collision of a distorted temporality and an emphatic use of form helps define the poetic anthology as it developed in the era. The general pessimism about poetic effectiveness in the poems responding to Prince Henry’s death shows one thing that these books can teach us about printed poetry in general: that its publication should not always indicate confidence in its positive effects. These books also demonstrate the significance of Megan Heffernan’s insight that “a modern focus on miscellaneity has occluded the formal history of printed poetry compilations”—that, in other words, fascination with the functions and uses of one particular genre of poetry books has prevented sufficient attention to what miscellanies share with other kinds of books that have poems in them.Footnote ⁸⁰ Traces of the backward- and inward-looking orientation I have found in the Prince Henry books are evident in other, less occasionally driven compilations. Miscellanies’ similarities to occasional collections like those I have discussed point to a different way of reading them than is currently common. Michelle O’Callaghan argues that these collections are best understood through their “recreational properties,” comparing them to a gallery forming “a tangible and sensory space that gives scope for recreating one’s mind and body.”Footnote ⁸¹ I would argue for a directly contrary approach. Attention to these books’ resistance to readership, their sense that they are defined more by their pasts and their parts than by their futures, reveals the connections they can foster between seemingly disparate poems.

Some collections of poems acknowledge the past explicitly by grounding their purposes in textual preservation. But this interest in preservation is coupled with one in loss, as is apparent in the front matter of The Paradyse of Daynty Devises, which went through nine editions.Footnote ⁸² The publisher Henry Disle’s dedicatory letter to Sir Henry Compton grounds the creation of the book in a death:

Disle’s justification for the book depends on a two-stage narrative. The original collection is presented as a singular event for a singular, “private” purpose; whatever purpose that may be is closed off (including from the reader) by the collector’s death. Then a second narrative focused on a larger collectivity begins, tying the shared opinions of Disle’s friends to the “learnyng and gravitie” they have in common with the poets represented in their collection. This latter justification, unlike the original “private use,” is available to be “accounted” by wise readers. Disle refers to several forms of likeness inaccessible to readers, including the “private use” that pulled these poems together in the first place. In light of recent emphasis on book use, it is striking that the use most prominently mentioned for this book is one that is over before it is printed, and, though Disle goes on to hope that the book will provide “delight” to readers, his narrative places the book’s true significance in the past, and in the work (“travell” is presumably meant in its laborious sense of “travail”) of putting it together. In an era when the printing of poetry still required an apology, a prior act of collection was an especially potent justification because it did not require an unprovable claim about future uses.

This superiority of the past over the future as rationale for poetic collection helps explain the long-running role of elegy in the development of the genre of multiauthor poetry books. Seth Lerer observes that critics have sometimes neglected the emphasis on death in Richard Tottel’s foundational Songes and Sonettes at the expense of its love poems. Lerer comments on the book’s “eulogies of poets and of lovers”: “If Songes and Sonettes taught a generation how to love, it also taught it how to elegize.”Footnote ⁸⁴ What’s more, that teaching—the capacity of these books to measure what is possible in poetry—arises in Songes out of elegy more than out of Petrarchan love poetry. In the poems that make up Tottel’s book the primary didactic role is given posthumously, by the Earl of Surrey, to Thomas Wyatt. Wyatt is lamented to have possessed:

Surrey’s idea of Wyatt’s legacy to poetry is a future that erases one past, robbing Chaucer of his status as the greatest English poet. But Surrey imagines that past replaced not with the bright future of the poetry Wyatt teaches but with a backward-looking one in which the best poets can do is recognize their inferiority to their master: Wyatt’s pupils will not “hit” his standard. With this poem at its heart, Songes and Sonettes questions the uses that might arise from its popularity. This pessimism arising from exemplarity haunted the rapid growth of the anthology over the century following the publication of Tottel’s miscellany.

Henry King’s reference to a poetry sufficient for “Earths last dissolution” (which in this case would consist merely of two words: “Henryes dead”) points to something shared between elegies like his and the poetry collections in which they may be found: the negotiation between a past explicitly identified as lost and a future understood to be uncertain. The prince’s death allows for a connection between an individual elegy and a broader lament for the end of an era. That function gives poetry a specific, public role that, in turn, helps justify poetic collections. The implicit claim of compilations, even topical ones such as the Prince Henry books, is not that they are defined by commonalities between collected poems, nor that the voices of individual poets merge into one. It is a claim of internal continuity, more effectively made by defining the components of a collection through their authors’ shared participation in something in the past: a common social or educational background, an act of mourning, or even the process of putting together the collection. Individual poems derive their status from the larger forms they contribute to, but the unity of such collecting forms is often located in the past rather than in the final version. Memorial volumes and miscellanies that lament the decline of a former poetic milieu are similarly exemplary for the collecting instinct. Defining a book’s purpose through its origin may mean grounding its future relation with readers not in utility or recreation but in loss.