Some Longer Elizabethan Poems

The Elizabethans wrote poetry to cheat death. These longer works, ambitious philosophical verses in ten-syllable quatrains, attempt nothing less than to prove the soul immortal and beauty eternal. Sir John Davies leads the collection with "Nosce Teipsum" - a sweeping meditation on self-knowledge that gripped readers across centuries with its argument that the soul contains "a divine particle" transcending flesh. Richard Barnfield contributes his own meditations on love and art's power to preserve what time destroys. A.H. Bullen's 1900 edition restores these demanding works with scholarly precision, tracing their debts to classical sources like Lucian while explaining how the era's poets spoke to each other across decades of innovation. This is not the Elizabethan age's playful wit or sonnet brevity, but its heavyweight verse - poems that require patience and repay it with meditations on consciousness, mortality, and why we insist on making beauty that outlasts us. For readers who want poetry that thinks big and writes large.