| Shrnutí: | <p>This thesis explores the way that practices of imitation informed early modern ideas about manhood and friendship in the poetry of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1582?-1648). Through a series of case studies which situate Herbert’s verse in the homosocial networks in which it was composed, circulated, and read, it uses Herbert’s poetry as a lens to demonstrate the ways that imitation can be collaborative and dialogic, affirming social and familial relationships. Herbert’s poetry also demonstrates how ideas about multiplicity and an anxiety around malleability informed early modern thinking about gender and manhood.</p>
<p>Chapter 1 focuses on Herbert’s exchanges with John Donne, and argues that poetry, <em>imitatio</em>, and friendship were inextricably bound together, as being a good man and a good friend, contemporary theory suggested, meant imitating your friends in verse, sustaining these friendships through poetry, and asserting your own place as a poet in a social and literary lineage. Chapter 2 examines Herbert’s satire addressed to Ben Jonson, exploring ideas of self-satire and anxieties about travelling and imitating and absorbing new fashions and qualities without becoming irreparably changed. Travel and imitation are also themes which dominate Chapter 3, which discusses Herbert and Thomas Carew’s imitations of Giambattista Marino’s poetry and explores how political theories of diplomacy and literary theory intersect, specifically in the rhetorical trope of metonymy, prompting questions about truthful and accurate representation in embassy and poetry. Chapter 4 situates Herbert within the wider household of the Sidney-Herberts, and discusses the ramifications of ‘echo’ as a female-gendered equivalent to ‘male’ <em>imitatio</em>, using various aetiologies of the Echo myth to explore texts circulated within the Sidney-Herbert household. Chapter 5 addresses the publication history of Herbert’s poems and his autobiographical <em>Life of Himself</em> and demonstrates how Herbert’s <em>Life</em> imitated chivalric prose romances in an attempt to fashion himself as a model for imitation. As a whole this thesis shows the importance of understanding practices of imitation within homosocial networks and verse, and particularly argues that imitation was a crucial practice in becoming both a poet and a man.</p>
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