'If words be made of breath': Inspiration, book-making, and the Renaissance lyric

This dissertation is a study of figures of inspiration in English and French lyric poetry from 1530 to 1660. The Western tradition, since Homer, has cast inspiration as a way for poets to access an immaterial realm of truth, whether through divine Muses or ecstatic transports. I argue, however, that in the Renaissance inspiration also points to a resolutely material phenomenon. My chapters follow theories of inspiration from their heyday in sixteenth-century Neoplatonism to their apparent decline with the emergence of seventeenth-century skepticism and an empirical "New Science." In the lyrics of Louise Labe, Clement Marot, Mary Sidney Herbert, John Donne, and John Milton, figures of inspiration establish a continuum between the materials of bodies and books, breath and page, black bile and ink. Each chapter also shows how textual materialist approaches can locate inspiration in a collaborative book-making process, whether coteries circulating manuscripts or "open market" book-sellers trading in printed works. Inspiration thus gains material contours through the "artifactuality" of specific manuscripts (by Sidney and Donne) or printed books (by Labe, Marot, Milton). My readings re-work the received literary history of inspired lyric, challenging an established narrative that associates the concept of inspiration with ancient or "pre-modern" poetics that are surpassed in an age of emergent modernity. By privileging an etymological connection to breath, I take figures of inspiration as a shorthand that describes the harnessing of the biological and textual matter needed to make a poem.