Scope and Contents

The author analyzes English Renaissance pattern poetry from George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Richard Willis and its relationship to the classical shaped poetry, Christian models, and emblem forms. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents The author indicates that emblem books contained poems based upon religious texts that might be classified as Picture Poems today in terms of visual presentation, viz., an illustration with a poetic caption. The author demonstrates that Herbert's pattern poems were extensions of the Emblematic tradition. He also provides several other examples of Alter poems in the classic literature. According to others, the religious content is not a mandatory feature of emblem poems.The emblem poem depicted in this bibliographic citation was taken from Withers' "A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne" (1635). "The picture shows a rural landscape in which the sun, with kindly countenance, is shooting its rays with an eye at its center. The text is about sight and the eye of contemplation as the human faculty that was especially created by God for its capacity to achieve direct contact with Him." Westerweel adds, The vocabulary and ideas are Neoplatonic and are reminescent of the final...