The names Edmund Spenser and John Donne are typically associated with different ages in English poetry, the former with the sixteenth century and the Elizabethan Golden Age, the latter with the 'metaphysical' poets of the seventeenth century. This collection of essays, part of The Manchester Spenser series, brings together leading Spenser and Donne scholars to challenge this dichotomous view and to engage critically with both poets, not only at the sites of direct allusion, imitation, or parody, but also in terms of common preoccupations and continuities of thought, informed by the literary and historical contexts of the politically and intellectually turbulent turn of the century. Juxtaposing these two poets, so apparently unlike one another, for comparison rather than contrast changes our understanding of each poet individually and moves towards a more holistic, relational view of their poetics.

Introduction: Spenser, Donne, and the trouble of periodization - Yulia Ryzhik
1 Caring to turn back: overhearing Spenser in Donne - Richard Danson Brown
2 Comparing figures: figures of comparison and repetition in Spenser and Donne - Christopher D. Johnson
3 Refiguring Donne and Spenser: aspects of Ramist rhetoric - Niranjan Goswami
4 Artes poeticae: Spenser, Donne, and the metaphysical sublime - Patrick Cheney
5 Spenser and Donne look to the Continent - Anne Lake Prescott
6 Ovidian Spenser, Ovidian Donne - Linda Gregerson
7 Cosmic matters: Spenser, Donne, and the philosophic poem - Ayesha Ramachandran
8 'Straunge characters': Spenser's Busirane and Donne's 'Valediction of my name in the window' - Elizabeth D. Harvey
9 Marriage and sacrifice: the poetics of the Epithalamia - Ramie Targoff
10 Spenser's and Donne's devotional poetics of scattering - David Marno
11 Eliot, Yeats, Joyce and the modernist reinvention of Spenser and Donne -Jane Grogan and Anne Fogarty
Index