SOURCE: Ho, Elaine Y. L. “Fulke Greville's Caelica and the Calvinist Self.” Studies in English Literature 32, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 35-57.

In the following essay, Ho offers an in-depth analysis of Caelica, focusing on what this work reveals about Greville's personal development and his aesthetic as a writer.

Greville scholars and critics have always liked Caelica, for it offers a quasi-narrative from which teasing allusions to the writer's personal life and plentiful demonstrations of contextual influences seem available. First published as a sequence in 1633, with the poems arranged, according to Geoffrey Bullough, in the order they were composed, Caelica has become the focus of biographical speculation and of judgments about Greville's aesthetic and philosophical evolution.¹

There is a major critical tendency to trace in Caelica a development from youthful self-definitions as Petrarchan lover to a more mature and austere Calvinistic inwardness, and the progressive rejection of the rhetoric of courtly...