SOURCE: Roberts, David A. “Fulke Greville's Aesthetic Reconsidered.” Studies in Philology LXXIV, no. 4 (October 1977): 388-405.

In the following essay, Roberts explicates Greville's aesthetic as a poet.

I

The recent interest in Fulke Greville's poetry has been attended by a parallel interest in the nature of Greville's thought on the ideals and functions of poetry. Unfortunately, though for good reasons, most modern interpretations of Greville's aesthetic have emphasized his didacticism at the expense of his lyricism, creating a dichotomy that Greville and his contemporaries would have found incongruous.¹ Partly because Greville never composed a full-scale exposition of this aesthetic, and partly because we have tended to impose contemporary values, Greville's position has yet to receive adequate explication. Even those who act as apologists for Greville have sought to redeem him through a stylistic argument, defining his poetry as of the “plain style,” in contrast to the style of Spenser...