Classical Influences and Innovations

The study of ancient Latin and Greek literature was central to the education of seventeenth-century poets, much as it was for their sixteenth-century predecessors. Fuelled by poetic, political, religious, and philosophical revolutions, seventeenth-century poets revised both the ancient past and the ways in which previous English poets had recreated that past. This chapter focuses on seventeenth-century English poets’ revisionary approaches to the classics, and their de- and re-mythologisations of classical myth. Two case studies show how these poets found models for their revisionary stances within the ancient poems themselves: Jonson’s scatological mock epic ‘On the Famous Voyage’, which turns back to Martial to satirise Spenserian poetry; and Hutchinson’s biblical epic Order and Disorder, which draws on Lucretius’s revisionary treatment of earlier myths for her own retelling of Genesis. The classics thus provide models for creative renewals of English poetic culture.