I agree with the other reviewer: it is a wonder this has not received more attention on amazon, for it is indeed a marvelous resource. The fine annotations and apparatus are an education in rhetoric in themselves. The complete texts, abridged editions, and excerpts together provide a panoramic view of classical, renaissance, and later poetic debates, with the following questions or areas of interest being especially richly considered in both the texts themselves and the editor's work: a) the historical founding of English meter and early theories of prosody, b) the relation of meter to metaphysics, c) the evaluative problems posed, and anxieties stirred, by the comparison of classical "meter" with English vernacular "rhyme", the inchoate consciousness of England as a nation with an emergent literary tradition, and d) the relation of poetic to rhetorical theory, and e) of Renaissance understandings of their "rediscovery" of learning. Puttenham's Art of Poetry is a classic in itself, and though there is a complete critical edition, most readers will find this abridgment sufficient to reveal its insights and charms without becoming tiresome, as he takes us through a catalogue of figures of speech. Sidney's rhetoric in his defense is so suave, Daniel's so much like that of a barrister, and both together revealing the cultural, moral, and political stakes of poetry that anyone who cares about poetry will find their arguments profound -- even if contemporary literary criticism, with its skeptical materialism and fideism in the ultimacy of power, would discount them as "naïve."
In brief, the texts gathered here have much to teach us in themselves, and Alexander's annotations offer additional, historical and theoretical, insights that must have been a labor of love for him, so thoroughly and intelligently has he acquitted himself.
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shears1995
Penguins are classic.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 10, 2016
