Cultural Poetics is term Stephen Greenblatt uses in his book Renaissance Self-Fashioning, meaning the interpretation of literature as an essential element in the cultural creation of identity. Greenblatt's intention was to "explore the ways in which major English writers of the sixteenth century created their own performances, to analyze the choices they made in representing themselves and in fashioning characters, to understand the role of human autonomy in the construction of identity". He states that all of the English writers he discusses have been drawn to the human subject and to self-fashioning. That the "Renaissance figures we have considered understand that in our culture to abandon the craving for freedom, and to let go of one's stubborn hold upon selfhood, even selfhood conceived as a fiction, is to die". .
Chapter one describes, "the complex interplay in More's life and writings of self-fashioning and self-cancellation, the crafting of a public role and the profound desire to escape from the identity so crafted". In More's work, the amount of power is based upon the outrageousness of the plot, the more shocking the fiction, the more exciting appearance of power. Greenblatt claims that in order to understand More, you must take the "haunting perception" of "universal madness" very seriously and to understand the function a book, you must first understand the drama itself. .
The purpose of chapter two is to "examine the extent to which the intense inwardness Wyatt voices in the penitential psalms is brought into being" by comparing it to thing discusses in previous chapters. Greenblatt states that Wyatt differs because he does not "give himself over entirely to the Word: theological self-fashioning-the power of the book over identity-cannot be long separated from secular self-fashioning". He discusses Wyatt's attempt at introducing a new technique of poetry, terza rima in the English language.
