Some Hard Map Making
- Some Hard Map Making*
Professor of English, State University of New York at Albany; co-editor with Hallett Smith and Roy Lamson of The Critical Reader (1962)
Footnotes
* Frank J. Warnke, European Metaphysical Poetry. New Haven and London: Yale University Press (Montreal: McGill University Press). 1961. Pp. xii, 317.
Lowry Nelson, Jr., Baroque Lyric Poetry. New Haven and London: Yale University Press (Montreal: McGill University Press). 1961. Pp. viii, 244.
Helen Gardner, ed., John Donne: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, Inc. 1962. Pp. 183.
Arnold Stein, John Donne’s Lyrics: The Eloquence of Action. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1962. Pp. viii, 244.
Jonas A. Barish, ed., Ben Jonson: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, Inc. 1963. Pp. 180.
Wesley Trimpi, Ben Jonson’s Poems: A Study of the Plain Style. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. 1962, Pp. x, 292.
notes
1. Warnke adds, “The important thing is that a persona docs emerge”; thus his argument adds weight to the view of Leonard Unger and to that of N. J. C. Andreasen, “Theme and Structure in Donne’s Satyres,” SEL, III (1963), 59–75.
2. In any event, “Elegie XII” ought to be approached with caution. Lines 39–72, speaking generally, suggest the vein of other Elegies, notably I and IV; but the feminine endings of 5–6, the rhetorical question-and-answer of 20–21, and the terminology of later lines (“dearest Friend,” “this to th’comfort of my Dear I vow”) certainly do not strike a note often encountered in the other Elegies.
3. Published in SEL, I (1961), as “On Elizabethan Wit.”
4. Stein’s argument in this regard parallels Nelson’s discussion of rhetorical devices contributing to “the dramaticality of a poem,” especially that “sort of negative definition that achieves precision by examining the alternatives or by taking the opposite into account” (94).
5. Related topics suggested by Trimpi are “Sidney’s relationship to the Senecan movement” (266) and Greville’s use of wit (269).
6. The original quotation has been slightly bowdlerised, in the interest of Jonsonian decorum.
7. Trimpi’s discussion of this matter bears significantly both on the “rationalistic distrust of words” observed in Donne’s poetry by Stein (52), and on Warnke’s conception of Northern Baroque (58).
8. It should be observed that Trimpi’s conclusion, “Jonson regarded the epistolary treatise [of Hoskyns, derived from Demetrius by way of Lipsius] as a general rhetorical statement,” rests on the fact that “in his transcription Jonson altered Hoskyns’s ‘In writing of letters there is’ to ‘In writing there is’” (62).
9. T. S. Eliot, George Herbert (London, 1962), 16.
