In most cases the "love passionings" of Sid ney's imitators were of the head rather than of the heart. This undeniable note of artifice has led to serious doubts as to the sincerity of the greater sequences Sidney's, Spenser's and Shakespeare's. With due allowance for the un doubted imitations in all three poets, it remains true that their sonnets, as distinguished from others, have the very tone of sincerity. It would be an interesting question, though hard to an swer, whether through the impress of similar ideals of love and courtly behavior, the poets in England and their fellows in France had not acquired for the moment the same channels of thought whether the similarities in their work are not frequently coincidences rather than bor rowings.
Sidney's
and Stella) had been preceded by Thomas Watson's
(1582), a series of pedantic poems on love themes, which had the respect but not the imi tation of his contemporaries. In 15'92 appeared Samuel Daniel's (1659-1731) (Delia,' in honor of the Countess of Pembroke, Sidney's sister a finely written series remembered for some charming lines and for the oft-imitated "Care charmer Sleep," itself an imitation from Des portes.
Spenser's (Amoretti) (1595) record his own love story, and should be read with his beau tiful wedding song, the
Shakespeare's 'Sonnets,' printed in 1609 but written much earlier, mark the supreme reach of this kind of writing. Some of the attention they have received comes from the poet's greater fame as a dramatist ; some of it comes from the mystery that still on many sides en velopes the sonnets ; but the story itself, the con flict of the two angels of friendship and of dark love, is the most striking of the sonnet themes, and the powerful directness with which the sub ject for the most part is treated places the series above anything else of its kind in English. Natural as the sonnets seem, however, and spontaneous as the themes appear, yet compari son with other sequences shows that Shakespeare assimilated much of his predecessors; how much of his own life is in -the story remains the puzzle of his biographers.
In the years immediately following the son net-writing, the characteristic vehicle of Eliza bethan non-dramatic poetry was the song-book. The manuscript miscellanies of Henry VIII's time had contained the notes as well as the words of songs, and the Elizabethan period was rich in musicians as well as poets. In 15:: Nicholas Younge published his
Beginning with Wyatt, there had been a vein of satire in Elizabethan poetry. Gascoigne (1525-77) in his (Steel Glass) (1576), Lodge in his 'Fig for Momus> (1595), Joseph Hall in his (Virgidemiarum) (1597), and Marston in his (Satires) (1598), and many lesser writers, kept the tradition alive. One other minor strain, which was destined to flower later into larger expression, was religious verse often crude and moralizing, as in the miscellanies, often fantastic, as foreshadowing Donne (q.v.), but often devout. In Robert Southwell (1561 95), this writing becomes passionate and of the first quality. His (Saint Peter's Complaint) (1595) contains that one poem, "The Burning Babe," that Ben Jonson preferred to all his own work.
These are the main forms of Elizabethan non-dramatic poetry. If we except the (Faerie Queene,> the genius of the age is perhaps best seen in the drama. But in these other forms the Elizabethan mind preserved for us a broad and varied record of its amazing power to ab sorb the and to feel deeply its own experience. See ENGLISH LITERATURE; ENGLISH