Criticism Review of Prof. Crawford's Lecture on 10/5

In last week's lecture, Prof. Crawford focused on imagery in poetry by looking specifically at the poetic tradition of the blazon--poems of praise and admiration. She began the lecture by providing the class with a bibliography of the materials and sources she would avail herself with throughout the course of the lecture. These primary and secondary sources included the Oxford English Dictionary, Nancy J. Vickers' "Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme," Eve Sedgwick's Between Men: English Literature and the Male Homosocial Desire, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, and the poems of Thomas Campion, Robert Herrick, and Jean Toomer. Prof. Crawford then introduced three theoretical concepts found in the criticism of Vickers and Sedgwick, the idea of Traffic in Women, homosociality, and triangulation, and then related these concepts to her reading of the primary texts at hand, the poems or blazons.

Traffic in women is the theory that the use of women, in poetry for example, was less about the women themselves and more about the cementing of relationships between men, therefore asserting the woman as merely a possession or commodity. Crawford connected this theory to Campion's poem "There is a Garden in Her Face," in which the poet equates his beloved's face with the notion of consumption and commodity through his comparison of her lips to cherries for sale (line 6). Through Campion's anatomical blazon (praise of a woman's body part), Crawford showed how such poems were a part of the literary Petrarchan tradition but also over-went those traditions through the display of women as not only being unattainable but also as a type of social capital and commerce in the competition that existed between men/poets. As Crawford points out, such audacities or deviations from the Petrarchan tradition are also seen in the poems of Herrick and Toomer and in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.


Through the criticism and theory of Vickers and Sedgwick, Crawford finds a new reading of these seemingly traditional blazons. With the modern theoretical concepts at her avail, she sheds new light on the audacities and sprezzatura of these poets in their attempt to acknowledge and overgo the tradition of the blazon. Crawford makes excellent use of the secondary sources and theoretical concepts to teach her students the conventions and unconventionalities of each poet and get them thinking outside the veil of Petrarchan literary tradition.

-Devon