Lyric Machines: Insects in Seventeenth-Century Poetry

This essay addresses the intriguing frequency of insect lyrics in seventeenth-century English poetry. While dramatic developments in the scientific and artistic regimes, including the invention of the microscope and the rise of still-life painting, undoubtedly played a role in this proliferation of entomological texts, this essay suggests that the figure of the insect was also deployed by early modern poets to probe the formal and imaginative potentialities of lyric, a genre that assumed a prominence over the course of the seventeenth century. The diminutive size, brief lifespan, and intricate anatomy of insects resonate with the formal qualities of lyric as short, compressed, and technically demanding objects of poetic matter, and the ambivalent attitudes to insects embody the contradictions surrounding the early modern idea of lyric. By using the life of fleas, glowworms, flies, bees, and grasshoppers to think through questions of lyric ontology, early modern poets from Donne to Killigrew redraw the familiar contours of the lyric genre as a contested territory of fascination and disgust with insect poiesis caught between human and animal, nature and machine, and life and death.