SOURCE: “The Nature of the Poetry,” in The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, Louisiana State University Press, 1983, pp. 41-60.

In the following excerpt, Roberts surveys the major themes and stylistic elements of Wroth's poetry.

Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

Lady Mary Wroth's contemporaries recognized that her verse belonged to the Petrarchan tradition and strongly identified her as Sir Philip Sidney's successor, “In whom, her Uncle's noble Veine renewes.”¹ Despite the early seventeenth-century fashion of “hard lines” and metaphysical wit, Lady Mary chose to reach back to a much older poetic model. Although her sonnet collection uses the voice of a female persona, the sequence contains many Elizabethan elements, especially in its structure, diction, and imagery. Yet the distinctive tone of her poems is much closer to that of Donne's lyrics, with a harsh, occasionally cynical attitude toward earthly constancy.

Lady Mary's preference for the older Petrarchan forms may be best...