The circulation practices of verse have long been at the heart of early modern manuscript studies, with scholars studying not merely the movement of individual instances but cluster of poems, often copied out as a group that then successively travel together. Quantitative network analysis of existing datasets of early modern manuscript verse, collated and cleaned in the ERC-funded project 'STEMMA: Systems of Transmitting Early Modern Manuscript Verse, 1475-1700', offers a means to examine these theories at scale and a lens to identify manuscripts for closer textual study in ways analogue means have thus far been unable to achieve. Focusing on two poems - Henry Reynold's 'Black Maid to the Young Boy', and Henry King's response, 'The Young Boy's Reply' - this work uses network analysis to consider overlaps in manuscript miscellanies and maps the circulation of these poems in order to identify clusters of poems and potential shared materials, both building on and challenging traditional literature. This paper examines how network analysis models not only offer a means to identify traditional literary concepts, but re-evaluate their definitions as well, considering ontological questions around poetry in the act of translating literature into quantitative data and reflecting on how this process forces us to reckon with what traditionally stable literary concepts actually mean, or, at the least, demands a definitive answer to debates that often are whole fields in and of themselves. By using a small sample of early modern poetry as an example, it also seeks to offer a reusable model for other similar enquiries, and highlight the value of a small-scale model for future research.