What the critics said about Fulke Greville
Poet
‘Fulke Greville was one of the finest sonneteers of his day’
Elizabethan and Jacobean Poets, John F. Danby, pp. 27-30.
‘Greville is one of the most profound of our poets’
Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance, John Buxton (1954), pp. 98-100.
‘How great a poet Greville is. It is my opinion that he should be ranked with Jonson as one of the two great masters of the short poem in the Renaissance’
Forms of Discovery, Critial & Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English,
Yvor Winters (1967), pp. 44, 52.
‘Greville’s sonnet sequence, Caelica, is one of the most varied, accomplished, dynamic and deeply interesting pieces of writing which the whole of the period produced’
Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, Joan Rees, Routledge (1971), pp. xii, 118.
‘Greville is judged a fine poet by critics whom I admire’
The Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences, Lisle Cecil John (1965), p. 175.
‘Greville’s search for the promised clearer vision is uniquely urgent and complex and offers perhaps the most ingenious display of perspective wit among the metaphysical poets’
The Curious Perspective – Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century,
Ernest B. Gilman (1978), p. 195.
‘Petrarchan verse occasionally broaches the conflict of reasons and passion but seldom consistently or with the same force which Shakespeare and Fulke Greville, were able to exert’
The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney, Robert L. Montgomery, p. 103.
‘I know not that if you accept Shakespeare’s Sonnets, we have finer love-words in our language than are to be found in Caelica and scarcely a page without lines that have the very touch of Shakespeare himself. Greville’s works I take to be merest playthings compared with what he could have produced ... with his Shakespearean touches and ‘black lightning’ of power’
The Works of Fulke Greville, Alexander B Groshart, (1870), pp. vii-viii, xlvii.
Historian, Dramatist & Philosopher
‘Fulke Greville was a genius of very singular and rare quality’
The Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. A. W. Ward
& A. R. Waller, Volume V (1910), pp. 334-335.
‘that strange genius, Fulke Greville’
The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, George Sampson, 3rd ed. revised by R. C. Churchill, 1970, p. 127.
‘Greville is a weird obfuscated genius’
Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy, F. L. Lucas (1922), pp. 112-114.
‘Fulke Greville’s intellect was unquestionably supreme’
The Friend of Sir Philip Sidney, Alexander B Grosart, p. viii.
‘Fulke Greville was one of the most fiercely engaged and restless intelligences of his Age’
Richard Holmes quoted in The Golden Age of English Drama, S. Gorley Putt (1981). p. 110.
‘Greville’s mind was a vast species apart’
Cowley’s remark is quoted by William Hazlett, Works,
ed. P. P. Howe (1930-4), xvii., p. 130.
‘Fulke Greville, man of genius’
Foreign Influences in Elizabethan Plays, Felix E. Schelling (1923), p. 85.