Rosamond's complaint: Daniel, Ovid, and the purpose of poetry

Abstract

ABSTRACT Samuel Daniel's The Complaint of Rosamond was first published in 1592 as the second half of Daniel's first book. In this poem, the ghost of Henry II's mistress Rosamond appears to Daniel to commission a poem. Daniel's precedents for his poem are the complaint poems written in the late 1580s and early 1590s and, ultimately, Ovid's Heroides. The Heroides provide a female perspective on love stories usually told from the male point of view; they are also hopelessly belated texts that have no effect on the narratives to which they contribute. For Daniel, the Heroides are a useful precedent as they allow him to raise questions about the effect of poetry. Can poetry do or change anything? This is an especially pertinent question for Daniel, whose sonnet sequence Delia chronicles the speaker's repeated failure to make any impression on the hard heart of the woman he loves. Related to this is a second question: is poetry justified if its end is immoral? The Complaint of Rosamond functions as a comment both on the Heroides themselves and on Daniel's own sense of himself as a poet.

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