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Article: Convention and consciousness in Prior's love lyrics. (poet Matthew Prior)
- Article from:
- Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
- Article date:
- June 22, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 Rice University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Critics have always had a difficult time "placing" Matthew Prior's achievement, but, in general, they have chosen to see him as the tail end of the seventeenth-century tradition of love poetry. In his famous essay, "The Metaphysical Poets," T. S. Eliot observes that "'courtly' poetry is derivative from Jonson, who borrowed liberally from the Latin; it expires in the next century with the sentiment and witticism of Prior." In the same essay, of course, Eliot makes his famous remark that "[i]n the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered," a divorce of thought and feeling for which he felt that Milton and Dryden in ...