Forms of Consolation in Early Modern English Poetry.

Abstract

"Forms of Consolation in Early Modern English Poetry" locates seventeenth-century English poetry in a culture that saw books as important resources for controlling passions like grief, anger, and desire. Rising literacy rates and increasingly cheap access to printed material made reading a newly popular means of navigating emotional life in early modern England. Authors and printers rushed to fill this market, producing vast quantities of prose consolation texts that offered readers religious, philosophical, and medical strategies for quelling emotions that early moderns believed could wreak havoc on their physical or spiritual health. While scholarship on intellectual history and humoral theory has deepened our understanding of early modern emotion, research on “consolation”—a common early modern term for emotional management—rarely encompasses poetic practice. "Forms of Consolation" claims that poetry played a distinct role in early moderns’ cultural obsession with reading as a mode of emotional regulation. Specifically, it argues that the formal qualities of verse, such as rhyme, meter, and lyric sequencing, produce unique methods of consolation not readily available to readers in their society’s prose discourses. In contrast to many prose consolation manuals, which instruct readers to contain, control, or move past troubling emotions, early modern poetry uses verse form to model the therapeutic potential of ruminating on emotion or to acknowledge the ways in which consolation is a provisional process. Thus, "Forms of Consolation" also counters a scholarly tradition that reads seventeenth-century English poetry as a genre primarily concerned with the authorial self. Instead, it argues that poems were not simply means by which writers unburdened themselves and examined their emotional lives; they were also crucial resources by which readers were encouraged to process their own emotions. The first three chapters explore lyric strategies of consolation in Shakespeare’s "Sonnets," Mary Wroth’s "Pamphilia to Amphilanthus," and George Herbert’s "The Temple." The last chapter examines epic and dialogic strategies of consolation John Milton’s "Paradise Lost." By addressing the ways in which poetic form offers readers unique processes for adjusting to loss or anxiety, "Forms of Consolation" considerably expands our understanding of emotional experience in early modern England.