"This book investigates the representative powers of language in early modern poetry--the powers, limits, and difficulties of description as well as poets' doubts about both the efficacy and virtue of mimesis. Mattison (Univ. of Toledo) offers intensely detailed readings of Spenser, Sidney, Donne, and Milton, looking at repeated images of veils and landscapes and at poetic attempts (especially by Milton) to create a poetic language that offers a glimpse of something beyond mimesis. Though grounded in particular texts, this dense, theoretical book will be heavy going for many. However, Mattison's conclusions are powerful and exceedingly well supported, repaying the attention required. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers." -- Choice Reviews "In a closely argued study of the limits of mimesis in Renaissance poetic theory and practice, Andrew Mattison challenges some of the dominant trends in early modern studies today.

The author explores the discrepancies not only between recent literary theory and the aims of Renaissance poetry, but also between Renaissance poetic theory and practice.The book that Mattison has written deserves a wide audience and as close and considerate attention as he bestows on the poets he so admirable and admiringly explores." -- Renaissance Quarterly "Andrew Mattison's The Unimagined in the English Renaissance: Poetry and the Limits of Mimesis argues that the purpose of mimesis overflows beyond mimesis into the unnamed and unseen. The purpose of representation is not to document something but to excite an image in someone else's mind. Mattison is interested in images of scarcity in connection with Spenser's pastoral poetry as linked via melancholy to a dearth of poetic materials, and in the differential perceptions of the Bower of Bliss among its various describes in The Faerie Queene.Mattison is also interested in lyric closure and the ways in which poems refuse to close." -- American Behavioral Scientist.