“Roote out those odde rymes!”: The Unruly Matter of Early Modern Verse

Abstract

This article focuses on the literary-critical metaphors of late sixteenth-century England, taking as its starting point Thomas Lodge’s 1579 call to “roote out those odde rymes which runnes in euery rascales mouth.” In contrast to the humanist poetics that envisioned poetic form as geometric, even transcendent, artifice, Lodge’s language (“roote out,” “runnes”) suggests the earthbound and invasive. In this, it belongs to a cluster of early modern metaphors that figure poetic structures (rhyme, metric feet, alliteration) as material, biological forms. Moving between Lodge’s, William Webbe’s, Gabriel Harvey’s and Edmund Spenser’s “ecopoetic” metaphors, this article proposes an early modern “ecopoetics.” It argues that to recognize how such poetic structures “act as quasi agents … with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” is to reapproach early modern poiesis, centering less on the individual poet’s delimiting techne and more on how extra-human patterns and rhythms find their way onto the page.