'At my grates no Althea': Prison Poetry and the Consolations of Sack in the Interregnum

Abstract

In the trans-shifting times of the mid-seventeenth century, imprisonment became as much a cavalier mode as the good life or love and affection. The prison poetry written in this period (not exclusively by those who had experienced confinement) moves away from the penitential meditations previously dominating this sub-genre into a celebration of common misfortune alleviated by drink. Classical drinking songs become politicised 'catches', individual authorship is subsumed, and Cavalier prison poets abandon complex rhetoric for simpler poems in ballad form which can be easily transmitted as propaganda and read as a defiant reaction to defeat.