Poetry and Revolution

This is a re-examination of the canon of mid-17th-century verse. The book questions and discards the old description of the period as "Cavalier poetry" and advances instead a pluralistic canon rich in radical writing and poetry by those marginalized until recently in historical and literary accounts of the period. As well as a substantial quantity of women's verse, much of it previously unpublished, this book contains Irish, Scots, Scots Gaelic, and Welsh verse. This is in sympathy with the debate about the Civil Wars which challenges the old exclusive focus on England and sees the events of the mid century in a wider context. The book has full historical and bibliographical information, explication of all allusions, translations of all verse not in English, old spelling texts derived in every case from primary sources, and a wide ranging introduction covering such subjects as canon-formation, historical fiction, and the revision of the literary history of the period.