practice have often been collapsed. It might be altogether more accurate,
however, to imagine the period’s poetic energies as raging around a kind
of black hole. There has been an inevitable tendency to think of the work
of thegrex poetarum, largely encomiastic and spectacularly overt politically
and ideologically, as“public”poetry. Lately, however, in an essay whose
title provocatively refers to the“humanist anti-literature”of early Tudor
England, Carlson suggests that their writings were, quite programmatically,
written not to be read. A number of them exist in presentation manuscripts
only, and as such, they are expensive commodities, reified before–if ever–
they are read, and destined for inert, unopened life in a royal library to
which they add nothing but dead and ornate bulk. The poems do not
circulate beyond these manuscripts,“nor”–Carlson’s words–“were they
recopied by others or put directly into print. But no matter: the short-term
success André enjoyed highlights the importance of the singular audience
for whom he worked, who would rarely if ever have put much effort into
studying André’s copious output: the English king.”Pure surplus, useless
magnificence, conspicuous consumption at its most extreme: this is the
purpose of“the deluxe presentation copy that would not circulate, of poetry
that could not be read.”“This”Carlson writes,“is not literature. It is a
quasi-dramatic, ritualized public manifestation of anti-social waste, involv-
ing lavish expenditure of training, time, and materials, for no other end.”^27
Public poetry, then, destined for the crypt. Yet this is one crypt whose
contents we should not underestimate. When theAncien Régimecollapsed
in 1789 , Walter Benjamin notes, the signifiers of the Roman polity returned
with a vengeance, signaling a utopian break with the past by rewriting the
calendar of the new Republic.^28 The classicizing of Henry’s rhetoricians
carries a related charge, with the crucial and unsettling difference that what
it intuits is the absolutist moment whose undoing Benjamin describes. In
this chiastic history, what speaks to these Tudor poets is not the Roman
republic but theimperiumthat replaced it. And imperial destiny here
becomes a peculiar bondage: intimate commerce with a possibly unrespon-
sive monarch, within pages perhaps unread.
missing courtThe marriage of James IV of Scotland and Henry VII’s eldest daughter
Margaret Tudor at Holyrood Palace on 8 August 1503 solicited a rhetoric of
“new beginnings”with some urgency. James’s own accession to the Scottish
throne, as noted earlier, had been sufficiently turbulent; Lyndsay notori-
ously describes it as a full-blown oedipal drama:
Beginnings: André and Dunbar 31