Milli mála - 2021, Qupperneq 189
188 Milli mála 13/2021
Petrarch’s sequence articulated a complex, in many ways unprece-
dented, form of lyric subjectivity emerging at a nexus of desire and
writing.8 His lyric cycle engages in a constant play of textual, cor-
poreal, emotional, and psychic fragmentation.9 The poet’s tortuous
relationship with the classical past, the impossibility of its recu-
peration and the belatedness of his own verse injected a form of
temporal dislocation into his lyric project.10 The close association of
the work and the material book that developed in the Renaissance,
although not unknown in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, can be
traced to Petrarch’s obsession with controlling his manuscripts.11
Inversely, the dissemination of Petrarch’s texts, accompanied by
commentary and multiple imitations of his verse, diluted the au-
thority and stability of Petrarchan textuality.12 Turning to the Rime
sparse, in other words, post-Petrarchan poets discovered a sophisti-
cated apparatus for probing the parameters of literary imagination,
the problems of authorship, the pressures of poetic influence, the
sources of inspiration, the instability of language, and the afterlives
of textual production.
This essay traces how Elizabethan sonneteers adapted the signa-
tures of Petrarchan desire to attend to the question of lyric ontolo-
gy. Considering sonnets from Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella,
Samuel Daniel’s Delia, Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti, and other col-
lections written in England in the 1590s, I suggest that they offer
microanalyses of the existential traits of lyric in its historical situa-
tion. Specifically, they imagine a precarious form of material exist-
ence. The affective work of Petrarchism in these sonnets tropes the
uncertainties inherent in the contemporary conditions of lyric pro-
duction; and intense erotic longing and the impossibility of its
fulfilment allegorize a thwarted desire for a lyric poem that remains
perennially elusive and unrealizable.
The preceding paragraph juggles some potentially contestable
terms. Lyric, for example, is not an easily definable category. If used
8 Freccero, “Fig Tree;” Regan, Love Words, 184–222.
9 Mazzotta, “Canzoniere;” Braden, Petrarchan Love, 1–60; Enterline, Rhetoric of the Body, 91–124.
10 T. Greene, Light in Troy, esp. 4–53.
11 Chartier, Order of Books, 55–57; Holmes, Assembling the Lyric Self, 170–79.
12 Kennedy, “Petrarchan Textuality.”
“PEN, PAPER, INKE, YOU FEEBLE INSTRUMENTS”
10.33112/millimala.13.8