“And you speaking pages,/ Who preserve our names for posterity”: The place of seventeenth-century poets in the literary history of bibliophiles

In the nineteenth century, the rise of bibliophilia was accompanied by the development of a publishing sector for amateurs. These two activities are asserted as modalities of re-evaluation, even rewriting, of institutional literary history. We wish to examine the role of seventeenth-century poetry within this bibliophilic literary history, and to question the critical topos that consists in seeing this century as a period when poetic activity began to wane.