The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry, Donne to Marvell

English poetry in the first half of the seventeenth century, an outstandingly rich and varied body of verse, can be understood and appreciated more fully when set in its cultural and ideological context. This introductory Companion, consisting of fourteen new introductory essays by scholars of international standing, provides individual studies of Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Herbert, Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, Milton, Crashaw, Vaughan and Marvell, together with general essays on the political, social and religious context, and the relationship of poetry to the mutations and developments of genre and tradition.

In the English Renaissance, poetic texts were related to their social contexts both
in their original conditions of production and in their subsequent history of
reception through the media of manuscript and print. Since lyric poems, in
particular, ...