SOURCE: "Convention and Consciousness in Prior's Love Lyrics," in Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 35, No. 3, Summer, 1995, pp. 437-55.

In the following essay, Gildenhuys examines the function of consciousness in Prior's love poetry.

Critics have always had a difficult time "placing" Matthew Prior's achievement, but, in general, they have chosen to see him as the tail end of the seventeenth-century tradition of love poetry. In his famous essay, "The Metaphysical Poets," T. S. Eliot observes that "'courtly' poetry is derivative from Jonson, who borrowed liberally from the Latin; it expires in the next century with the sentiment and witticism of Prior." In the same essay, of course, Eliot makes his famous remark that "[i]n the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered," a divorce of thought and feeling for which he felt that Milton and Dryden in particular were responsible...