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Book Reviews255 CLAUDE J. SUMMERS and TED-LARRY PEBWORTH, eds. "Bright Shootes of Everlastingnesse": The Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Columbia: University ofMissouri Press, 1987. 222 p. The religious element ofreligious poetry, as the editors ofthis volume note, has usually not been the central focus of twentieth-century criticism. New critics, structuralists, and deconstructionists have instead directed our attention to aspects of text and audience. This collection of twelve essays, drawn from the sixth biennial Renaissance conference at the University of Michigan, Dearborn (1984), approaches the poetry of the later Renaissance as statements of ideas. While modern and contemporary critics have focused on those aspects of literature which can presumably be found in all examples, these writers return us to the cultural and historical contexts of a particular literature, a literature defined by its subject matter rather than its technique. We have tended to assume that questions of text and audience are the general and universal aspects of literature and that questions about the author, intention, and context are special, unique, nongeneralizable features of individual works. Each of these essays assumes that the subject matter of seventeenth-century religious lyric is to be taken seriously, and concomitantly that there are questions and emotions which are basic and common within the human experience—that there are "timeless issues ofthe spirit" (ix) worthy ofour consideration. While these essays are loosely united in terms of subject matter, they vary widely in their critical methodology. Some are source studies; others range from explication de texte to formalist analysis. William Sessions traces his theme of "abandonment" as a dialectical pattern reflected in secular as well as religious texts of all genres, and by implication as an archetypal feature of the human experience. "Abandonment," as Sessions describes it, is a dialectical structure by which readers are involved in texts; examples are drawn from throughout history—Sappho, Petrarch, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Milton, and others. Clearly, Sessions' is an integrative and ambitious approach which sacrifices a distinctive definition of religious poetry for a more holistic perspective. Two other essays also show the influence of secular literature on religious poetry. Stella P. Revard argues that the nativity odes by Milton and Crashaw express private faith in the context of public celebration but that Cowley's "The Resurrection" is essentially a tour de force in the classical form. Joseph A. Wittreich, in the last essay of this collection, argues that in "the typological lyric," especially as we can see in the many references to the Samson story, scriptural narratives "become disfigured; cumulative patterns , doubling perspectives, chronological sequence, narrative shape . . . fall by the wayside" (210). At the same time, typology is "a bond between . . . very different kinds of poetry, between literatures both sacred and secular" (211). Other essays in this collection concentrate on fewer writers and provide more specific though varied notions of what constitutes religious literature. R.V. Young, Mary Ann Radzinowicz, and M. Thomas Hester focus almost exclusively on Donne and illustrate a range of approaches to religious literature. Young examines the doctrinal basis of Donne's poetry, drawing parallels with Spanish counter-Reformation poets to challenge the prevailing view that English religious poetry is understood best as a distinctively Protestant tradition. Radzinowicz's interest lies not in doctrine but in the subtle verbal echoes of sacred text in Donne's religious poetry. 256Rocky Mountain Review Hester pursues the central paradox of religious literature in a close reading of a single Donne poem, "As due by many titles," and shows that the use of language is itself problematical in addressing religious truth. There is not space here to discuss all twelve essays included in this volume, and it is not possible to place them in any convenient categories. The essays themselves were not selected because they approach their subject with a definitional problem in mind. It seems assumed that religion is whatever individuals say it is—a Cheshire Cat approach—yet much has been written, for example, on the philosophical nature of religious language. For a book devoted to "Religious Lyric" we might expect more of an attempt to articulate theory. Nonetheless, the essays provide excellent analyses of the poets considered and a useful collection of contrasting methodologies. GRANT...

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