“Our very prison this earth is”: the world as prison and other images common to More's Epigrams and later works

Abstract

More's Epigrams of 1518, usually associated with More's humanist phase, contain a number of poems designed as meditations on proper attitudes towards the goods of fortune. Special attention is given to how phrasing and argumentation used in the Epigrams reappears within a number of More's later works, including Last Things, Treatise on the Passion, and A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation. Both briefer and longer examples are discussed, the latter including More's more elaborate description of the world as prison (Epigram 119) and fame as an insubstantial wind (Epigram 132). Numerous parallels between the arguments of these epigrams and his later works, written for “spirituall profytt” ( The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, ed. Elizabeth Frances Rogers [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947], 531), are examined, giving us insights into the writings of the humanist More. As much of his earlier English poetry, some of the More's Latin poems were written with an eye towards “the happy continuannce and graciouse encreace of vertue” ( CW 1:51/20–21)