Hexameral Poetics

Giulio J. Pertile is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of St. Andrews. He is the author of Feeling Faint: Affect and Consciousness in the Renaissance (Northwestern, 2019) and coeditor of Re-imagining Andrew Marvell: the Poet at 400 (Oxford, 2022).

"Hexameral Poetics is breathtaking in its learning and scope. Pertile is a brilliant close reader of lyric metaphors, verse enjambment, and the allusive play of language in a literary form embedded in exegesis and hermeneutics while reaching beyond language to the natural world."---Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine "Pertile's brilliant and learned book reveals the intellectual depth and radical aesthetic possibilities of early modern European hexameral poetry. Hexameral Poetics shows how this neglected tradition provides the period's most profound meditations on the relation between God's acts of Creation and the ongoing human activity of creation. Pertile rewrites the prehistory of modernity's fixation on creativity by recovering and, in effect, redeeming the powers of an all but forgotten genre."---Timothy Harrison, University of Chicago