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.

1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Anselment, Raymond A. "'Stone Walls' and ‘I’ron Bars': Richard Lovelace and the Conventions of Seventeenth-Century Prison Literature." Renaissance and Reformation 29 (1): 2010. 15-34. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v29i1.11394. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.