Many English poets in the seventeenth century, from Ben Jonson and John Donne, to Andrew Marvell and John Milton, wrote poems that were responsive to or attentive of other people’s poems. Such poems took up the themes and means of their predecessors; sometimes exaggerating them to satirical effect, sometimes in praise, sometimes in disagreement. Many of Donne’s Verse Epistles, Elegies and Satires, and Marvell’s Last Instructions to a Painter, were written under these circumstances.

A specific form of responsive poetic engagement within a small, niche social group became known as ‘coterie poetry’. Coterie poets met at salons, or exchanged epistolary poems, in which they related news or exchanged advice. The poems were varied. But often, the authors would write narrative poems in which they took for themselves and for their friends alternative names from classical mythology. Sometimes these poems were published in print, more often they remained in manuscript circulation within polite society.

It was not a phenomenon limited to the English. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, a group of young Dutch men and women were said to regularly meet at Muiden Castle near Amsterdam, where they wrote poems in response to one another’s poems. The central figure of this ‘Muiderkring’ group was the poet and playwright Pieter Corneliszen Hooft, resident of Muiden, who invited the company of nobles, writers and scientists, both male and female, including the polymath Constantijn Huygens, the playwright Joost van den Vondel, and the artist and poet Anna Visscher.  A nineteenth-century portrait of the group shows them crowded round a small writing table, with a young woman standing, apparently reciting her poem from a sheaf of paper, while a young man seated to her right takes up his goose-feather pen.

In fact, recent scholarship has found it unlikely that the Muiderkring group met at all, that most of the members of the so-called group could never have set foot in Muiden castle. Many Dutch literary scholars now agree that the men and women knew and interacted with one another only through the poems and writings which they exchanged, and which remain. It has been suggested that such a group could be called a ‘virtual coterie’.