| Abstrakt: |
This essay explores how the 'grotesque' as an early modern visual art term might be deployed in relation to Caroline poetry. I begin with an account of the grotesque as a distinctive art style with a characteristic terminology in early seventeenth-century England. Modes of grotesque theatrical performance are also relevant because they attract the same or related terminology and are inseparable from visual perception and representation. In the second half of the essay I analyse exemplary verse from three poetic genres by three Caroline poets: the faerie poems of Robert Herrick (1591-1674), the burlesque rhymes of Richard Flecknoe (c. 1605-c. 1677), and the nonsense verse of John Taylor the 'Water Poet' (1578-1653). These represent three distinct, yet related, traditions of grotesque verse that emerge in the context of Coryat's Crudities, literary clubs, and books of wit and drollery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
