The English Lyric Tradition: Reading Poetic Masterpieces of the Middle Ages and Renaissance

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Although poetry can enrich our lives and help us make sense of the human condition, many readers are intimidated by the language and literary conventions of medieval and Renaissance poetry. Keeping the needs of new readers of old poetry in mind, Goldstein introduces some of the greatest masterpieces of lyric poetry over a span of five centuries. Selecting examples by such major writers as Chaucer, Wyatt, Shakespeare, and Milton, the author of this accessible book provides guidance in the art of reading earlier lyric poetry. He demonstrates how poetic meter works and explains how different historical kinds of lyric, including love complaints, sonnets, and elegies, helped poets communicate with readers. To help twenty-first-century readers appreciate lyric poetry from an era before it was assumed to be about personal expression, Goldstein introduces the rhetorical culture of earlier centuries, a time when verbal eloquence was especially prized by poets and their readers. In focusing on the historical development of poetic technique and literary genre, the book invites readers to respond to the artistry of poems that have stood up well to the test of time.