The Poetic Nocturne: From Ancient Motif to Renaissance Genre
Fitter, Chris
Early Modern Literary Studies 3.2 (September 1997)
Abstract
The genre of poetic nocturne needs dating not to the eighteenth century and the verse of such as Parnell, Young and Gray as has literary history hitherto, but to the Renaissance: whose poetry, masques and painting, in revaluing night as a time of beauty and profundity, overturn, I will argue, the construction predominant in classical and medieval traditions. Those earlier approaches themselves, Greek, Roman, biblical, patristic and medieval, have never been systematically investigated for their representation of night. This paper, accordingly, will seek to sketch a basic poetic tradition, and its elevation to independent genre, hitherto uncharted: from whose Renaissance productions eighteenth-century and Romantic writing will often derive, and at whose heart lie Shakespeare, Jonson, and perhaps above all, the lyric but combative genius of Milton.
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