The Sonnet ‘Cure’: Renaissance Poetics to Romantic Prosaics

This chapter traces the therapeutic value of literature to Renaissance poetics. For Samuel Daniel (Defence of Rhyme, 1602), the poet made form out of human chaos through the creation of structured rhythmic patterns, a holdfast against disorder. George Puttenham (Art of English Poesy, 1589), drew a direct analogy between poet and physician: a poem offers, cathartically, ‘one short sorrowing’ as ‘the remedy of a long and grievous sorrow’. These concerns were reintroduced into the modern lyric tradition, the authors suggest, through the work of Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, for whom ‘the turnings intricate of verse’ effected ‘a sorrow that is not sorrow … to hear of’.