ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the formal features of The Secrets of Angling and argues for a strong connection, advanced by the text itself, between sportfishing and poetic expression. Printed posthumously in 1613, John Dennys’s Secrets of Angling is the first known fishing poem in English literary history. The poem’s major source is the medieval Treatyse of fysshynge wyth an Angle, which had been repeatedly edited and adapted by the time of Dennys’s writing. Dennys’s poem will capture the interest of its readers, and they may be surprised at being drawn in by “plaine Lines,” but all will be to their benefit. When John Dennys writes his angling treatise, he too contributes to an ecosystem in which human thoughts tend toward both the admiration and the capture of fish. In the double invocation that follows, Dennys draws on literary and cultural traditions that envision vibrant ecological diversity.
