Hereafter Knowing in Sonnets and Their Similars

Hereafter Knowing in Sonnets and Other Similars explores the work of prominent poets through a philosophical and theological lens. The book focuses on the well-travelled yet precarious achievement that is Petrarch’s writing of the sonnet in Italian, his English successors Wyatt and Spenser with their own amatory strategies, and how Shakespeare’s sonnets turn the many difficult corners for imagining a writing against the untimely.

Its reach includes ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy; scripture; patristic theology; Renaissance and Contemporary poetry; and numerous language traditions including Greek, Latin, Italian, French, German, and English. Robert Mueller explores a set of writers who address themselves to significant Others-Dan Machlin to his body, Augustine to God, Petrarch to Laura, etc.-alongside Aristotelian and other forms of epistemology. Through exacting, insightful, and original readings of these writers, Mueller analyzes the circuits and relations that connect them to those they address, with particular attention to the ways they know and understand the objects of their poems and the temporal positions they adopt in respect to these objects. It offers new readings of canonical and noncanonical texts and assembles a singular archive of writers across many centuries and language traditions.