Selected Poems

by Fulke Greville Bar

Along with his childhood friend Sir Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville (1554–1628) was an important member of the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Although his poems, long out of print, are today less well known than those of Sidney, Spenser, or Shakespeare, Greville left an indelible mark on the world of Renaissance poetry, both in his love poems, which ably work within the English Petrarchan tradition, and in his religious meditations, which, along with the work of Donne and Herbert, stand as a highpoint of early Protestant poetics.Back in print for a new generation of scholars and readers, Thom Gunn’s selection of Greville’s short poems includes the whole of Greville’s lyric sequence, Caelica, along with choruses from some of Greville’s verse dramas. Gunn’s introduction places Greville’s thought in historical context and in relation to the existential anxieties that came to preoccupy writers in the twentieth century. It is as revealing about Gunn himself, and the reading of earlier English verse in the 1960s, as it is about Greville’s own poetic achievement. This reissue of Selected Poems of Fulke Greville is an event of the first order both for students of early British literature and for readers of Thom Gunn and English poetry generally.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Literature, Renaissance

128 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1968

Reviews

[Wastrel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absence my presence is; strangeness my grace


109 poems by the man a former US Poet Laureate calls "the greatest poet unknown to many readers".

The 'selection' in this (Powell's, for Carcanet) edition is simply the whole of Caelica, Greville's great sequence of love sonnets. Notably, most of them aren't sonnets, many aren't about love in any conventional sense, and it's debateable to what extent they form a sequence. Caelica was composed over at least 20 years, and probably closer to 40 or 50, and, whether by design or accident, there is a clear sense, not of a coherent argument, but of an evolution, that worms its way through an astonishing breadth of thought - from sex to God, from love to constitutional theory, from gynolatry to misogyny (to one brutal rejoinder from a woman), naivity to cynicism to self-awareness to faith, rapture to the darkest and most all-embracing depression, from conventional imitation to the most baroque individualism.

Just to give a sense of the development, the first stanza of "I" runs:

Love, the delight of all well-thinking minds;
Delight, the fruit of virtue dearly lov’d;
Virtue, the highest good, that reason finds;
Reason, the fire wherein men’s thoughts be prov’d;
Are from the world by Nature’s power bereft
And in one creature, for her glory, left.

While the first stanza of "CIX" runs:

Sion lies waste, and thy Jerusalem,
O Lord, is fall’n to utter desolation,
Against thy prophets, and thy holy men,
The sin hath wrought a fatal combination,
Profan’d thy name, thy worship overthrown,
And made thee living Lord, a God unknown.

From young love to apocalypse, a whole world - a whole life, literally - stands between.

Sometimes, Greville is charming; sometimes, off-putting. Sometimes he's powerful, other times pathetic. Sometimes he's conventional, other times shocking. Sometimes pithy, other terms verbose. Sometimes a poem just doesn't work; other times, it's a work of genius.

Greville takes on the conventions of his age, in theme and in style (an icy formalist rectitude), only to call them all into question, from the real nature of courtly love to the authority of rhyme and rhythm. His poems are often dense, cloyingly dense, with complex and problematic images and philosophies, all clotted and gnarled by extended semantics, contorted syntax and counterintuitive rhythms, with feminine rhymes and jolting caesuras; where other Elizabethan seem at times to try to rock the reader gently into quiet sleep, Greville wants to slap them, and shake them into alertness. His poems are, it's taken me a while to realise, what I think of as 'beautifully ugly'. Consider this rhythmic seizure of a stanza:

The flood that did, and dreadful fire that shall,
Drown, and burn up the malice of the earth,
The divers tongues, and Babylon’s downfall,
Are nothing to the man’s renewéd birth;
First, let the Law plough up thy wicked heart,
That Christ may come, and all these types depart.


Many of these poems do not fully yield at one reading - the syntax and punctuation ambiguous, the allusions obscure - but they haunt, and they reward the careful reader; even those that seem straightforward linger and unfold their contradictions and peculiarities in the mind's disrupted leisure. I've no doubt that, as problematic and yet as fascinating as Greville is, this is a collection I'll return to many times over.

Whether, as one renowned critic of the 20th century claimed, Greville is the equal only of Shakespeare and Jonson, may be debateable; but undoubtedly he is a poet of unique and magnetic qualities, who ought to be far more widely read than he is.

If the above has sparked some interest, I tried to write a review of this collection on my blog, but it turned into something more like an introduction to Greville, his context, and these poems - he's a poet to wrestle with, and I certainly spent a lot of words wrestling with him there, and yet the more I reread and the more I tried to describe, the more fascinating the poems became. So, if you've got some time to spare, do pop over and read that 'review', and share any thoughts you might have...


Love tears reason’s law in sunder,
Love, is god, let reason wonder.

[Kevin S · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

How very strange. You've got this contemporary and friend of Sidney writing about love and theology and politics but it's almost certainly nothing like you imagine. Think of, say, Shakespeare's sonnets, particularly the sort of brooding self loathing ones at the end, then make it clear in your own mind that you are in fact a predator and that your love object is doing a very good job in avoiding you. And then make that whole mess end up in a sort of ferocious attempt at reformation and the religious life? Oh yes, and praise Elizabeth occasionally while you're at it.
Very strange, but memorable and worth the puzzling through. An interesting precursor to Donne.

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrific book by a too unknown late 16th Century poet, great friend to Sir Philip Sidney. I'm writing new work based on each poem in this book. It's a terrific example of the Elizabeth care for the music of syllables.

[Ploughshares · Rating 5 out of 5]

From Recommended Books and Writers in the Winter 09/10 issue of Ploughshares. Recommended by Joshua Weiner.

You can read a full review here: http://www.pshares.org/issues/article...

[Genevieve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Calvinist Petrarchan love poetry from Elizabethan England, hardly ever read anymore. Weird, melancholy, and philosophical, but actually quite good!