ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the imaginative means through which they conceived of their 'afterlife', and the range of responses it provoked in their work. It discusses the particular affective charge that the question of an afterlife carries by tracking closely the textual traces of disturbance — unease, hope, anxiety, exhilaration, fear — in the work of poets face to face with the uncertainty of their own posterity. Over the threshold of metamorphosis lay the prospect of entering a new life and of belonging to the privileged group of those whose immortal fame was assured. Icarus, that simulacrum of metamorphosis, was a favourite subject for the creators of emblems throughout the sixteenth century. The figure of metamorphosis, once the threshold of change has been passed and the process of transformation has begun, is employed by early modern poets in order to convey a complex set of concerns centred upon the consequences of 'doubling' and 'splitting' for poetic identity.