humanist, grammar school, Hyder Edward Rollins, Sir Philip Sidney, Poesy, Renaissance poetics, Renaissance criticism, epideictic, rhetoric, praise

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she identifies the influence of humanist and grammar school educations upon the impulse to answer in verse and writes that, “mastery of poetic, like mastery of prose or oratory, was the purview of philosophy, learned through dedicated exercise and mastery of dialectic or logic”. ⁴

The profile of the genre has indeed fallen into neglect. Since the work of editors and cataloguers such as Hyder Edward Rollins, Herbert L. Collmann and a few others in the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, awareness of the pervasiveness of answer-poetry seems to have diminished among Renaissance scholars, and even its generic status has not been enshrined fully in the collective academic conscious. There is, it must be admitted, also a lack of formal accounts of the genre in the Renaissance. Answer-poetry falls outside Sir Philip Sidney’s definition of poesy, for instance. The typical answer-poet affirms emphatically, trading in certainties and using the epideictic rhetoric of praise or blame, unlike Sidney’s notion of a poet who “nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth”. ⁵

The affirmatory nature of the answer-poem is perhaps also partly responsible for its being excluded from the consideration of Renaissance poetics more recently. Mary Ann Radzinowicz suggests that paired poems (including verse answers) are in need of critical and theoretical exploration primarily because the certainties in which they often trade appear ostensibly to fall outside the purview of recent trends in Renaissance criticism:

The present critical climate is more interested in unresolved than resolved tensions, asymmetries than symmetries, gaps than unity, the social force of poetry than the unique voice, irrationality than transcendence, and complex than simple models of explanation.

Radzinowicz describes verse answering as “link[ing] an impulse to form paired poems with an impulse to best a companion poet and overgo a forerunner”, and she makes a case for an

⁴ Downs-Gamble (1996), 2.12.
⁵ An Apology for Poetry, in English Critical Essays (Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries), ed. Edmund D. Jones (OUP, 1961), pp.1-54 (p.33).

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