The "kissing-poem" genre was wide-spread in Renaissance literature; this
book surveys its form and development.
There is a great deal of kissing in Renaissance poetry, but modern
critics do not generally recognise (as early readers did) that the
literary conventions of the kiss were closely related to a fully-formed,
lively and popular genre of Neo-Latin "kissing-poems". Beginning with
the imitation of Catullus in fifteenth-century Italy, this specialised
form was securely established in the next century by the Dutch poet
Janus Secundus, whose elegant Basia ("Kisses") were an extraordinary
international success. Secundus stimulated a long-lived tradition of
Latin and vernacular "kisses", willfully repetitious and yet
meticulously varied, which can tell us much about humanist poetics.
This book offers a critical account of the Renaissance kiss-poem, using
an abundance of vivid and often racy examples, many of them drawn from
authors who are all but forgotten today. It shows that the genre had a
sophisticated rationale and clear but flexible conventions. These
include habits of irony, mood and structure that proved widely
influential, and some slippery, self-conscious ways of dealing with
masculine sexuality. Presenting new readings of English writers
including Sidney, Shakespeare and Donne, the study also reminds us how
important Neo-Latin writing was to the literary culture of early modern
Britain. A number of well known texts are thus placed in a context
unfamiliar to most modern scholars, in order to show how deftly their
kisses engage with an international tradition of humanist poetry.
Alex Wong is currently a Research Fellow in English literature at St
John's College, University of Cambridge.
