Beckett could hardly perhaps have more perfectly exemplified Malone's dictum - 'The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness' - than by choosing both French and English as expressive mediums, and then translating from one to the other. In so strikingly hybridized a context even to speak of 'the English fiction' runs the risk of seeming simply a convenient construct ill-adapted to what is in reality, if not a confused, then at least a potentially confusing state of affairs. But even Beckett's extraordinary writing career began with due deference to the compromise of composing in his mother tongue, so that for all practical purposes there is a kind of logic in reserving 'the English fiction' for the body of work he produced before turning forty. The work in question comprises three novels - Murphy', Watt, and Dream of fair to middling women (the last to surface but the first to be written); three stories - Assumption, A case in a thousand and Echo's bones (none of them strictly part of the corpus as Beckett came to conceive it); a book of prose fiction that is not quite a novel and not quite a collection of short stories - More pricks than kicks; and a scatter of non-fictional items more or less ancillary to his narrative enterprises.

Belacqua, in Beckett's first collection of stories. The throwaway remark, directed towards a briefly appearing Scottish nurse, seems at first glance unimportant. Yet it stands as a prophetic exclamation about the creature's creator, Beckett himself. It also marks the only time in more than sixty years of publication that the word 'bilingual' appears in his writing. The creature was bilingual, like Belacqua, who dreamed in French, and Beckett made them so. Bilingualism does much to distinguish this most distinct of artists. To have two tongues, two modes of speech, two ways of responding to the world, is to be necessarily outside the security of a unified single viewpoint. The more bilingual he became, the less he spoke or wrote of it openly; the less he drew attention to it, the more it shaped his mature vision. Far from being a mere curiosity, bilingualism works at the heart of Beckett's aesthetic activity, releasing waves of innovative energy decade after decade.

Robert Herrick (1591-1674) and his Hesperides have long been admired for their lyricism. After a century of relative neglect between the poet's death and the late eighteenth century, interest in Herrick was revived by John Nichols through the Gentleman's Magazine. Poems like 'To the Virgins, to make much of Time', 'Corinna's going a Maying', 'Delight in Disorder', 'To Live Merrily, and to Trust to Good Verses', 'How Roses came Red', and 'How Violets came Blue' made Herrick the darling of nineteenth-century anthologists; Algernon Charles Swinburne called him 'the greatest songwriter - as surely as Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist - ever born of English race'. The copy of Hesperides now in the Newberry Library (Chicago, Illinois) was once owned by a Mr William Combes of Henley, an amiable gentleman book collector who was said to carry Hesperides in his right-hand coat pocket and Izaak Walton's Complete Angler in his left whenever 'with tapering rod and trembling float, he enjoys his favourite diversion of angling on the banks of the Thames'. But the genteel songster of this pastoral vignette was not the only image of the poet to surface during the nineteenth century: at least one Herrick poem, 'To Daffodils', was appropriated by Chartist writers, who identified him as a poet 'for the People'.

The poets of early modern England, from Donne to Marvell, were deeply engaged and stimulated by the period's political antagonisms and rich diversity of religious experience. Indeed, in their age politics and religion were thoroughly interconnected: as Sir Francis Bacon observed, 'Matters of religion and the church . . . in these times are become so intermixed with considerations of estate.' Since the time of Henry VIII's Protestant Reformation, which rejected papal authority, the king of England had assumed the supreme headship of the English Church and thus governed both state and church: this was true for the Stuart kings of our literary period - James I (1603-25) and Charles I (1625-49) - whose absolutist power was reinforced by the ecclesiastical hierarchy. As James I succinctly put it, 'No bishops, no king, no nobility'; and his son, Charles I, fully agreed, observing that in the kingdom 'religion is the only firm foundation of all power'. The purpose of this essay, however, is not only to explore the intimate connections between politics and religion as essential background for appreciating earlier seventeenth- century poetry: the aim is to highlight, using select examples from poems of the age, some of the ways its leading poets responded imaginatively to the political conflicts, ideologies, and religious currents of early-modern England up to the tumultuous years of the Civil War and Interregnum, when both the Stuart monarchy and Church of England were disrupted by revolution and Puritan opposition.

Although it is unarguably the case that governmental and other state structures have changed since the seventeenth century, sometimes it can be unthinkingly assumed that in another major site of power differences, that of gender roles, matters have remained largely the same. This has the result that whilst readings of Donne, or Vaughan, or Marvell might include an active consideration of the specifics of the status of Catholics in the early 1600s, or of the problematics of political alliances in the 1650s, it is still relatively common to find work on those same poets paying no heed to the particular contemporary limitations of femaleness and maleness. The result is a blurring of the specificity of the poetry and its concerns.

If the only evidence we had to go on when imagining the relationships between men and women in the seventeenth century was the most frequently anthologized male poetry of the period, we would gain a very distorted impression of the probable social realities. Whereas the legal and economic structures of seventeenth-century society ensured women's subordination to men, defending this through a panoply of ideological assertions, vast numbers of poems present the (would-be) mistress as all powerful, able to kill her admirer with an angry glance, her will irresistible.

One of the great achievements of modern literary studies has been the rediscovery of rhetoric. Thanks to the work of such scholars as E. R. Curtius, E. Faral, and B. Munteano we now know that rhetoric was a great formative influence on writers of all kinds from Virgil and Ovid to the generation of Goethe, Byron, and Stendhal. Although Romantic aesthetics programmatically rejected any external literary form in favour of spontaneous utterance, writers continued to use rhetoric, and its influence persisted well into this century. As a system teaching the art of composition and self-expression, rhetoric profoundly influenced poetry, drama, non-fictional prose works (history, philosophy, autobiography), religious poetry and prose (prayers, sermons). As the first fully developed aesthetic system it also affected ancient theories of art, and in the great period of its revival in early modern Europe, from 1400 to 1800, it was very influential in the visual arts (painting, sculpture, architecture), and in both the composing and performing of music. For English literature its high point of influence was in the 150 years between the Elizabethan writers and the Augustans. A knowledge of rhetoric is indispensable to understanding not only the forms taken by literature in this period but also the motives behind composition, the writer's attitude to both his material and his readers.

'Climacteric' (from the Greek for 'ladder') as a word and concept appears first in English at about the end of the sixteenth century. It identifies a critical moment in the life of an individual or a nation, so it is not surprising that it should come into currency around the death of Queen Elizabeth I, and become a familiar usage as the course of the Stuart dynasty moves toward armed rebellion and civic upheaval. In 'An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland' Marvell predicts that 'to all States not free' Cromwell will 'Clymacterick be' (lines 103-4),at thesame overwhelming military prowess Cromwell has displayed in subduing the Irish rebellion may be deployed against the remaining monarchic states of Europe. He implies that the triumphant Protestant general embodies the force of change that marks a crucial moment of history. The occasion for his writing the 'Ode' is also a climacteric moment in the poet's own development.

The American feminist poet, Adrienne Rich, remarks how, as a student in her early twenties, she was led to believe that poetry was 'the expression of a higher world view, what the critic Edward Said has termed “a quasireligious wonder,” instead of a human sign to be understood in secular and social terms'. My starting place is to remark that whatever conditions underlie Rich's sense of the opposition between poetry as transcendental expression and poetry as a sign system to be understood in secular and social terms, the conflict is misleading, although in interesting ways, when applied to a pre-Romantic (who is sometimes thought to be a proto- Romantic) like Vaughan, despite the fact that he is almost always remembered as the signal instance of a seventeenth-century poet who became memorable once he became a poet of transcendence: 'Lord, then said I, On me one breath, I And let me dye before my death'

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Donne's poems expressed a strong and independent spirit. For all their indebtedness to literary traditions and conventions, they took a sceptical stance toward many received ideas and seemed written in a 'new made Idiome'. The importance of his innovation was recognized by Thomas Carew, who praised Donne as the monarch of wit who 'purg'd' 'The Muses garden', threw away 'the lazie seeds / Of Servile imitation ... And fresh invention planted'.

Part of Donne's freshness comes from his intense analysis of important aspects of human experience - the desire for love, the desire to be purged of imperfection or sinfulness, and the longing to defeat mortality. He explores erotic love and human spirituality and the relation between them. Because his poetry speaks to needs and desires that seem to persist despite cultural and historical differences, Donne is accessible, compelling, and engaging. But his poetry is also difficult and complicated. Individual poems refuse to yield a single, unequivocal meaning, and his poetry exhibits considerable variety, defying readers' attempts to reduce it to a neat order.

Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, and Richard Lovelace, together with Robert Herrick, the subject of a separate essay, frequently have been seen by the critical tradition to constitute a group, often termed 'Cavalier' poets. The configuration is of considerable antiquity, and some points of association between some of them were sometimes recognized in the mid seventeenth century, shortly after the death of Carew (in 1640?) and Suckling (in 1641?). The perception that they are in some senses a group persists, reinforced by modern anthologists as well as critics. The agenda of this essay is to explain and thus dismantle the origins of that critical orthodoxy and to distinguish the characteristics not only of individual poets but also of the Caroline court culture before and after the inception of the Civil War, though paradoxically the mere title works to confirm that which I would set aside.

Carew (born c.1594) and Herrick (born 1591) reached creative maturity in the 1620s and early 1630s and Suckling (born 1609) flourished throughout the 1630s, yet very little of their poetry appeared in print before 1640. Their poems lived, rather, in the song settings of court musicians and in manuscript circulation, at first, no doubt, within the court coterie and among friends, and later in a widening circle of manuscript anthologies. When their pre-1640 works were delivered into print it was into a radically changed political and cultural world from that in which they were conceived. Lovelace and Herrick, publishing their major collections in 1648 and 1649, had the opportunity to revise and organize their works in the light of the dispersal of the Caroline court and the eclipse of the royalist cause, and they could and did write works in the 1640s which engaged both their personal catastrophes and those of the cause they espoused. For Carew and Suckling, their work was absorbed into that process of royalist lamentation as if through a process of retrospective revision.

In the English Renaissance, poetic texts were related to their social contexts both in their original conditions of production and in their subsequent history of reception through the media of manuscript and print. Since lyric poems, in particular, were primarily occasional, composed in specific circumstances for known audiences, factors of class, gender, patronage, kinship, friendship, political partisanship, and religious allegiance were inseparable from aesthetic issues in such works. Poets were acutely conscious of the social contexts of their work, and, especially when their poems were disseminated in manuscript, readers were able to appropriate poetic artefacts and adapt them to their individual needs. In the course of the seventeenth century lyrics were in the process of changing their status from that of ephemeral productions transmitted in manuscript within restricted social environments to that of durable artefacts widely distributed through the medium of print. While most lyric poetry first circulated in manuscript to family members, friends, colleagues, and patrons had specific social uses, print culture began to highlight the aesthetic features of poems, recontextualized their meanings, and preserved them for readerships beyond their original audiences.

Richard Crashaw (1612/13-49) was revived early in the twentieth century as a 'Metaphysical' poet and as a member of the 'School of Donne'. In some ways that classification was advantageous to his status, because he gained a degree of recognition by riding on Donne's coat-tails in the great wave of popularity inspired by H. J. C. Grierson, T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, I. A. Richards, William Empson, A. Alvarez, George Williamson, Frank Kermode, and scores of other famous advocates of metaphysical poetry as a kind of forerunner of our modern sensibility. The great disadvantage of being placed this way, however, was that Crashaw was vigorously assailed, by Leavis, Empson, Robert M. Adams and others, for not being just like Donne. Indeed, mid-twentieth-century criticism is full of violent (and often very funny) attacks on Crashaw's poetry as, among other things, neurotic, perverted, feminine, infantile, 'foreign', extravagant, tasteless, Catholic, and even cannibalistic. Some central quality in his poetry has consistently outraged critical tempers, inspiring otherwise moderate writers to reach for their purplest prose. One's first reaction to this phenomenon is that a poet who elicits such strong opposition - yet who continues to be reprinted, read, enjoyed, and argued about - cannot be all that bad. He must still have something important to tell us.

Ben Jonson wrote plays before he wrote poems and laid bricks before he did either. These activities - to which we should add his still later writing of court masques and entertainments - represent steps in a difficult but extraordinarily successful climb Jonson made up the steep face of fortune's hill, a climb that marked everything he wrote.

According to his own account, Jonson was born the posthumous son of an English clergyman, the grandson of 'a gentleman' who had served King Henry VIII. But this gentle lineage was obscured by his mother's marriage to a London bricklayer, whose craft Jonson was 'put to' at the age of sixteen: a humiliation he could, as he later said, 'not endure'. Military service in the Low Countries offered a first escape from bricklaying; acting and writing plays provided a second. The rapid success Jonson achieved as a playwright did not, however, satisfy his ambition — nor could it. The audience for plays was predominantly common and unlearned; actors were mere artisans; playwrights were a rag-tag mix of would-be gentlemen and players. Writing poems and circulating them through the private network of manuscript transmission opened the way to more elevated company. Among Jonson's earliest datable poems are an epitaph on Margaret Radcliffe (a maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth), an ode to James, Earl of Desmond, a 'proludium' and 'epode' to Sir John Salusbury, an ode to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and a verse epistle to Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland — all figures of considerable social distinction. But Jonson did not stop there. The production of masques and entertainments carried him still higher, to the royal summit of power and prestige. He wrote masques and entertainments directly for the king, who was their chief spectator; they were performed by the queen, the princes, and the leading aristocratic courtiers.

The relation of genre to tradition in the seventeenth century was not simple. For one thing, tradition itself was composite; being intricately divided into pagan-antique and Christian strands, the Christian into Protestant and Catholic, and the Protestant further split by sect. For another, whereas emphasis on genre seems to imply engagement with a stable body of literature, the period itself was one of radical social changes, rapidly changing valuation of literary textuality, and deliberate literary innovation. The complexity was such that several stories about genre probably need to be disengaged. One of them might narrate how epigram came to dominate the literary scene, determining its minutest operations. Another, how georgic, after being exiled from poetry, was at last welcomed back and thought its most refined, consummate representative. A third story could tell of promotions and demotions in the hierarchy of kinds. In a fourth, changes in the concept of genre itself would be the theme: changes responding to alterations in the practice of imitation.

It would be difficult and indeed absurd to approach Milton's poetry without an awareness of his revolutionary commitment. One of the foremost polemicists against the bishops, the monarchy, and the rest of the baggage of the old order, he became Latin secretary to the republican Council of State and official propagandist of the new regime with his great Defences of the English people. After the Restoration his life was in danger, he was imprisoned and some of the books that he wrote were burned. Yet when we turn to his first book of Poems, the political, the revolutionary are not the immediate impression we receive. Certainly the volume includes early work dating from before the revolutionary years. Yet the collection was published in 1645, after the conclusion of the first phase of the Civil War and at a point when Milton had already published polemical and increasingly radical prose tracts - Of Reformation in England (1641), Of Prelatical Episcopacy (1641), The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), Areopagitica (1644).

The posthumous publication in 1633 of a small volume entitled The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, By Mr George Herbert was one of the most notable events in the history of seventeenth-century English poetry and devotion. Within seven years the book was into its sixth edition, and five subsequent editions appeared before the century was out. It was read by members of a whole spectrum of religious and political groups in that most sectarian of periods in English history; Cromwell's personal chaplain recommended The Temple to his own son, and Charles I read it in captivity before his execution. Herbert became known as the 'sweet singer of the Temple', inviting comparisons with the Psalmist; he alone in his age was said to be one who 'rightly knew to touch Davids Harpe'. The poems were widely imitated by seventeenth-century writers, and cited by other admiring early readers in texts of piety and education. The foundations were laid for an appreciation of possibly the greatest devotional poet in the English language.