Sonnet sequences and social distinction

Abstract

Why must we worry over so simple a thing as preface-making? The individual or collective classification struggles aimed at transforming the categories of perception and appreciation of the social world and, through this, the social world itself, are indeed a forgotten dimension of the class struggle. Who so shall duly consider the whole Progresse of mans estate from life to death, shall finde it gentle Reader, to be nothing else but a verse pilgrimage through this earth to another world. One of the remarkable features of Drayton's 1619 folio Poems is the persistent voice of Drayton the pedantic literary historian. At the beginning of each section, a note lectures readers about the poem that follows. The preface to The Barrons Warres contains an elaborate discussion (complete with diagrams) of the rhyme-scheme of the stanzas, and Drayton goes on to cite as models “ Homers Iliads , and Ulysiads ,” “ Virgils Æneis, Statius Thebaies, Silius worke of the Carthaginian warre, Illyricus Argonauticks, Vida's Christeies ,” and Spenser. At the beginning of the Odes , Drayton launches into a two-page defense of his use of the term “ode” (“yet Criticism it selfe cannot say, that the Name is wrongfully vsurped”), citing as models Pindar, Anacreon, Horace, Petrarch, Chaucer, and “Colin Clout.” Drayton justifies his use of “heroicall” in Englands Heroicall Epistles (from Ovid), of “legend” in The Legend of Robert, Dvke of Normandy, Matilda the Faire, Pierce Gaveston … [and] Thomas Cromwell (“ so called of the Latine Gerund, Legendum, and signifying … things specially worthy to be read, was anciently used in an Ecclesiasticall sense, and restrained therein to things written in Prose, touching the Lives of Saints ”).

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