Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate

"The Cromwellian Protectorate's instabilities helped to generate lively and innovative poetry. This new account of the period focuses on key cultural institutions - Parliament, an embassy to Sweden, Oxford University, Cromwell's state funeral - to examine poetry's relationship with a culture in transformation and crisis." "Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate asks how poetry confronted questions that were complicated by institutional practices, how poets tried to square their wider cultural sympathies with their interests in a particular parliamentary or university crisis, and how changes in institutions afforded poets critical insights into their society's problems and its place in the world. The readings of this book challenge previous representations of Protectorate culture as a phase of conservative back-sliding, or pragmatic compromise, under a quasi-monarchical order. Protectorate verse emerges as nuanced and vital writing, which looks beyond the personality of Oliver Cromwell to the tensions that shaped his power. Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate argues that it is precisely through being contingent and compromised that these poems achieve their vitality, and become so revealing."--Jacket.