ORIGINS AND INNOVATIONS OF THE WESTERN LYRIC SEQUENCE (PETRARCH, TAYLOR, YEATS, SIDNEY, NERUDA, ADAN)

This study joins five essays in an interlocking argument concerning the formal and developmental unities of the Western lyric sequence, a poetic form invented by Petrarch in his Canzoniere. Through numerous examples from several languages and centuries, the sequence is considered as a temporal record, a vessel for character, and a figurative map. Petrarch's innovation of temporal process is regarded as the founding event of the form, while the openings to characterization and spatial unities are attainments of the form's advancing range. Besides these versions of unity, the study examines the dissolution of certain Petrarchan principles of topical organization in a Puritan devotional sequence by the American poet Edward Taylor; and it takes up two short series by Yeats as incipient examples of a modern tendency toward the devaluation of the single lyric self and the multiplication of voices, perspectives, and histories. The form is treated throughout the essays as a specimen of fiction that participates in the patterns of growth and change common to all fictions. With the poets already mentioned, the writers whose works are analyzed in detail are Sidney, Neruda, and Martin Adan.