SOURCE: Peterson, Douglas L. “The Early Elizabethans.” In The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne: A History of the Plain and Eloquent Styles, pp. 120-63. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967.

In the following excerpt, Peterson analyzes several of Googe's poems, paying special attention to their thematic and literary indebtedness to poetry from Tottel's Miscellany.

Most of the good poems written in the two decades following the appearance of Tottel's Miscellany in 1557 are to be found among the works of Barnabe Googe, George Turbervile, and George Gascoigne.¹ Of these three poets only Gascoigne continued to write verse over a period of years. Googe and Turbervile, after publishing single collections of lyrical verse which they had probably written when fresh from the university, turned to what seemed to them more important political and literary labors.² Generally they follow the fashionable vogues that had been established by Tottel's Miscellany, although...