contemptus mundi, like-minded, friends, epistemology, Donne, Sidney, Whitney, Googe, socially discursive

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not unrelated. She places herself at the centre of a sequence of verse exchanges in which each contributor is shown to be progressively more perceptive than the last, and thereby she situates herself as a foil for the arguments of her respondents.

These poets also represent verse answering as a discursive act that creates a spiritual and intellectual nexus between like-minded friends; perhaps such as that Sidney imagines when describes his intimate literary circle as a “blessed Trinitie”. ³²³ What such attitudes towards authorship evince is an affected spiritual and intellectual affinity between poets that is so closely knit that their respective thoughts, beliefs and ways of expressing themselves seem to strive towards becoming epistemologically attuned to one another. ³²⁴

These poems are characterised by their quest for engagement with good society and the rejection of contemptus mundi epistemology, and the poets’ objective is to transcend the solitude of living in their own minds and to achieve a socially discursive identity for their verse that prevents it becoming an isolated literary artifact. Simultaneously, this manufactured communion is meant to create the impression of one self-sufficient soul inhering in two or more bodies that are joined and mediated by the congress of the poets’ respective muses in the case of Donne, and mediated by the shared frames of reference provided by classical intertexts in the case of Googe and Whitney. ³²⁵ As well as being a

273-5).

³²³ ‘Upon his Meeting with his Two Worthy Friends and Fellow-Poets, Sir Edward Dier, and Maister Fulke Grevill’ (l.20), Ringler ed. (1962), pp.260-1.

³²⁴ As compared, for instance, to the warfare between the muses of literary rivals, such as when Fennor warns Taylor, “To halter vp your muse, my muse beginnes” (sig. Aiv^v).

³²⁵ An idea that Donne takes up explicitly in his epistle to Rowland Woodward, ‘To Mr. R. W.’ (“Zealously my muse”). According to Cecilia Infante, in his invitation to Woodward “to join his “Muse with myne,/ For myne is barren thus devorc’d from thyne,” the inference appears to be that a little lesbian frolicking will refresh the muses, who would then return to their poets with restored inspiration”, ‘Donne’s Incarnate Muse and his Claim to Poetic Control in “Sapho to Philaenis”’, in Representing Women in Renaissance England, ed. Ted-Larry Pebworth and Claude J. Summers (Columbia: Missouri UP, 1997), pp.93-106 (p.96). See also Elizabeth D.

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