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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Ruth Connolly
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A number of poems in Lovelace’s Posthume Poems describe tiny creatures: snails, spiders, flies, ants and toads. These poetic subjectsare bound up literally in their own or others’ substances – ingested or digested by spider’s webs, toad’s spume or magpies’ bellies. This essay reads these tiny bodies as metaphors for particular affective states closely connected to the intestine conflicts of civil war.Interpreting these feelings through a combination of contemporary affect theory, and the symbolic histories of these tiny creatureswithin the emblem book tradition, this essay argues these poems draw attention to how the material losses experienced by Royalistsrender the emotional demands of exemplary self-fashioning increasing difficult to sustain. Lyric poetry becomes an unexpectedlyappropriate vehicle to articulate this ambivalence. Declared surplus to requirements (at least by Thomas Hobbes) in the new and heavily politicised aesthetic proposed by William Davenant and Hobbes in The Preface to Gondibert (1650), these “tiny creature” poems exploit the perceived inadequacies of the lyric form to diagnose the conditions of a non-monarchical world
Author(s): Connolly R
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: The Seventeenth Century
Year: 2017
Volume: 32
Issue: 4
Pages: 473-491
Print publication date: 29/12/2017
Online publication date: 07/02/2018
Acceptance date: 28/11/2017
Date deposited: 21/02/2018
ISSN (print): 0268-117X
ISSN (electronic): 2050-4616
Publisher: Routledge
URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2017.1394121
DOI: 10.1080/0268117X.2017.1394121
Notes: Part of a Special Issue entitled 'New-Modelled Cavaliers'
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