ABSTRACT
The Italians Milton highly praised in 1654 “not only for promoting humane studies but also for encouraging friendly intercourse” in their academies (CPW 4.1:615−19) were part of a larger “republic of letters” designed to explore personal and cultural contradictions without preconceived biases or more than playful exaggerations. Englishmen especially proted from this cross-cultural assimilation because it promoted a more active engagement with the “sensuous imagination” than censorious moralists such as Roger Ascham, who warned against “`the Siren songes of Italie.’” Yet these cultural exchanges actually encouraged the English to “understand the right relation between worldly and spiritual goods … from a Protestant perspective.”1 Sir Philip Sidney and George Puttenham further stressed how the skillful imitations of Italian style begun by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, transformed English poetry. According to Puttenham, by emulating the
sweete and stately measures … newly crept out of the schooles of Dante, Arioste, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude & homely maner of vulgar Poesies, from that it had bene before, and for that cause may iustly be sayd the rst reformers of our English meetre and stile.2
