Bad Poetry? New Perspectives on the Value of Sixteenth-Century Literature

An examination of the messy, often contradictory processes of poetic production and reception. The volume offers an invitation to read widely, question deeply and think critically.

In the wake of C. S. Lewis’s still-contested taxonomy of ‘drab’ and ‘golden’ poetic ages, this volume rethinks the critical and aesthetic stakes of bad poetry in early modern England—not to dismiss it, but to ask what it meant, how it functioned, and why it mattered. Revisiting poets like Arthur Gorges, Wal…