Mary Wroth’s Ephemeral Epitaph

Abstract

This article argues that Mary Wroth, through her lyric sequence’s first song, defines poetic immortality as necessarily multimodal in the broadest sense, equally reliant on its literary intertexts and its material forms. The essay draws attention to the poem’s engagement with material writing practices, memorial customs, and literary connections, culminating with the self-penned epitaph Wroth’s speaker uses to close the poem. In so doing, this essay positions Wroth’s work, often read as self-consciously disengaged from her literary coterie, in a broad conversation about poetry’s capacity to endure as an object of imitation and affiliation.