Renaissance Rogues

Whoever said poetry was boring must have never read the works of renaissance rogues like Shakespeare, John Donne, and the like!

Although much of their works were seemingly refined, these writers definitely had some dirty thoughts on their minds when they were writing...and that makes their work all the more exciting for us to read today!

The trick to picking up on these lewd and explicit features is understanding the literary and analytical conventions the poets used to incorporate them into their works.

This blog is a compilation of some of the most widely used literary and analytical devices in the poetry and plays of the Renaissance. My hope is that after you read it, you might appreciate poetry a little more!

To get you started,
-A literary term is a concept that specifically focuses on the formal operations of literary texts
-An analytical term is a concept that allows you to make sophisticated historical and/or critical analyses of texts

Personification

                  

  • Definition: Personification is a type of metaphor in which an object or abstraction is given human characteristics
  • Sentence: In Ben Jonson’s epigram “To Sickness,” to speaker personifies disease by asking “Why, disease dost thou molest ladies and of them the best?”
  • Read the entire epigram here:http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/jonson/forest8.htm
  1. renaissancerogues posted this