Milli mála - 2021, Blaðsíða 217
MILLI MÁLA
216 Milli mála 13/2021
Abstract
“Pen, paper, inke, you feeble instruments”:
The Precarity of Lyric Ontology in Elizabethan Sonnets
This essay investigates how Elizabethan sonnet sequences deploy
the signatures of Petrarchan desire to attend to the question of lyric
ontology—the material mode of existence of lyric poetry. The issue
acquired special urgency in late Elizabethan England, in the con-
text of rapid technological, economic, philosophical, and aesthetic
change that affected the material conditions of production and cir-
culation of poetry. The uneasy coexistence of manuscript and print
technologies, the practices of reading that included various forms of
material alteration (cutting, marginalia, collage etc.), paper short-
age, destruction of books, musical appropriations of lyric as well as
a host of other factors, created a volatile and multi-layered environ-
ment in which lyric poems were instantiated across forms and
media. Through a close reading of selected sonnets by Philip
Sidney, Samuel Daniel, Edmund Spenser, Giles Fletcher, and
Barnabe Barnes, this essay argues that in their poetry the affective
work of Petrarchism tropes the uncertainties and instabilities inher-
ent in the contemporary conditions of poetic ontology. Allegorizing
erotic longing for the beloved and the impossibility of its fulfilment
as a thwarted desire for a perennially elusive lyric text, these sonnets
exist at the point of vanishing, which puts under pressure—to a
point of unviability—their identity as speech acts and integrity as
material objects. Sensing the contemporary crises of textuality,
these Elizabethan sonnets make audible, legible, and visible the
precarious ontology of lyric poetry.
Keywords: lyric; Elizabethan sonnets; poetic ontology; book history;
Petrarchism; poetic imagination
“PEN, PAPER, INKE, YOU FEEBLE INSTRUMENTS”
10.33112/millimala.13.8