Customer Reviews

Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne and Marvell (Post-Contemporary Interventions)

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First, Donne is only Petrarchan in some ironic, oblique sense. Laura, or any woman resembling Laura, is not to be found in his Songs and Sonnets or his Elegies, not to mention his Divine Poems and Sermons. In fact, the women in Donne's poems are many and varied, and given varied treatments by the poet, some 'objectifying', some not so much. It's clear that Donne learned from Petrarch, of course, but he has done his own 'deconstruction' of it, and turned in the direction of the earth instead of Petrarch's Ovidian allusions and Neoplatonic ascent.

Second, where is Laura in Marvell? Is there some echo of her in his coy mistress? Would she find a place in the garden of the happily solitary poet? Perhaps there's a gender-bending allusion to her in his ode and other poems to Cromwell, but that's a bit of a stretch. In fact, I don't find in Marvell the delight in and antipathy toward all kinds of women that I find in Donne - make of that what you will.

So, that leaves, thirdly, Wyatt, the most immediate successor in English to the Petrarchan tradition. I'm not certain that the lover(s) in his poems are Lauralike, but his tropes are certainly similar to Petrarch's. Indeed, in Wyatt we find the lover in endless pursuit, frustrated by a beloved at once aloof and cruel. Yes, Wyatt is the poet in Estrin's trio hewing most to line she wishes to trace and tangle.

Believe it or not, there is a point to all this. I find Estrin's book flawed from the beginning because two of the three poets she studies refuse the Petrarchan mold she tries to impose upon 'em. She would have done better to examine Sidney, or Spenser (who himself undoes the Petrarchan tropes by having his sonnet sequence lead to marriage and erotic union with a real live flesh and blood woman, one who is particular and difficult as humans usually are).

This is all the more surprising because Estrin has obviously spent much time with the works of her three English poets. Puzzling, just puzzling - still, it's a bad book because for all her attention, Donne and Marvell especially elude her.