'Stone Walls' and ‘I’ron Bars': Richard Lovelace and the Conventions of Seventeenth-Century Prison Literature

Abstract

In transcending stone walls and iron bars, Lovelace's well-known song "To Althea, From Prison" celebrates a freedom distinctly at odds with prevailing, often religiously inspired transformations of seventeenth-century carceral realities. Lovelace's celebration of "Minds innocent and quiet" fashions from traditional conventions of prison literature a political statement that redefines freedom through stoic resolve. Refusing to be bound in either song or spirit, the poem binds loyalists together in rituals of love and faith that create in the untroubled mind and the untrammeled soul a secular religion. For a moment in the 1640s, Lovelace uniquely captured the mirthful spirit of stoicism buoyed by the love, friendship, and loyalties expressed in its trinity of wine, women, and royalism.