ELIZABETHAN LOVE POETRY
A selection of poetry from the golden age of British poetry, the Elizabethan era. All of the major Elizabethan poets are featured in this book, as well as many lesser-known poets.
The poets in this book include: Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Nicholas Breton, William Percy, Giles George, Samuel Daniel, Henry Constable, Michael Drayton, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Campion, John Donne, Ben Jonson and Queen Elizabeth the First herself.
There are extracts from Elizabethan sonnet cycles by William Shakespeare (the Sonnets), Michael Drayton (Idea), Samuel Daniel (To Delia), Henry Constable (Diana), Edmund Spenser (Amoretti), and Sir Philip (Astrophil and Stella).
The full sonnet sequences are included in a companion volume, Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles.
The beloved (by convention, nearly always a woman) is at the centre of the Elizabethan love sonnet tradition. As Samuel Daniel puts it in his To Delia sonnet sequence: '[a]ll my live's sweet consists in her alone', a sentiment found in most Elizabethan sonnet sequences and love poems.