Lady Mary Wroth's Supplemental Failure

Since the first modern edition of her poetry in 1977, Lady Mary Wroth&s;s sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus has been the subject of increasing scholarly interest. But despite the excellent analysis devoted to a small number of her poems, there remains some sense that the obscure language, the confusing syntax, the imprecise narrative are all markers of Wroth&s;s poetic short-comings. In the spirit of this book, I want to consider how the deliberate failure of narrative detail and emotional clarity can, unexpectedly, create their own convincing representations of a newly complex poetic subjectivity. In this light, we can look at the poems that descend into obscurity or abstraction or impacted syntax—poems that seem to lose track of characters and events and the whole sense of poetic continuity—not as technical shortcomings but as deliberate failures of meaning. By situating Pamphilia to Amphilanthus within the broader context of her romance Urania —blending two very different works beneath a single narrative and thematic umbrella—Wroth creates a new means of embedding failure in a broader understanding. In this expanded context, Wroth is not simply faltering or failing to be clear; she is creating a layered self-awareness that conjures up new representations of a mind at work.