Ambition, Rank, and Poetry in 1590s England

Book excerpt: "Ambition, Rank, and Poetry in 1590s England focuses on the early work of George Chapman and on the writings of others who shared his social agenda and his nonprivileged status, including Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and Edmund Spenser as well as neglected writers such as Matthew Roydon and Aemilia Lanyer. Rather than placing poetry in the service of traditional social purposes - pleasing a patron, wooing a woman, displaying one's courtly skill, teaching morality - these writers held up poetry as important for its own sake: an idea taken for granted in much modern aesthetics."--Jacket.