SOURCE: "Ronsard and the English Renaissance," in Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. VII, No. 2, June, 1970, pp. 141-60.

Richmond is an English critic. In the following essay, he examines Ronsard's influence on the major English Renaissance poets, particularly John Donne, William Shakespeare, and Andrew Marvell.

There can be little doubt that a knowledge of the Petrarchan tradition provides a necessary background to any detailed study of almost any of those poets of the English Renaissance who are presently most fashionable in scholarly circles: authors such as Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and even Marvell. But it seems doubtful that the Italian tradition of itself is a sufficient clue to their aesthetic norms, even though one recent and very well documented scholarly study [by D. L. Guss entitled John Donne: Petrarchist, 1966] sums up the present view by saying that "Petrarchism is so central to the age that many critics have treated it...