Introduction (review)

In the prefatory remarks to his 1970 monograph Marvell’s Pastoral Art, Donald M. Friedman acknowledges the example of scholars who modeled what he calls “the art of literary criticism” (p. vii). The phrasing of his tribute is telling. In his view, scholarship at its best does not merely present clinical dissections of literary art, but is itself a form of artistic expression: elegant, deliberate, humane, and offering the opportunity for prolonged discovery. We may enlist Philip Sidney in our description of such critical art, and echoing him assert that it is “an art of imitation” – in this case mimetic of the movements of the interpreting mind at work – and in its ideal form works “to teach and delight.”¹

This volume seeks to honor the achievement and example of Don Friedman, whose graceful prose, rigorous scholarship, and nimble arguments continue to persuade his colleagues and students that artful literary criticism can enchant even as it instructs, delight even as it challenges. For more than four decades, Don’s gemlike investigations into Renaissance poetry and drama have dazzled readers with their clarity and integrity, as well as their capacity to refract a bewildering variety of concerns. He has had the enviable distinction in his scholarly career of writing the single best essay on a variety of signal figures and poems. His series of wonderful essays from the early 1960s on Thomas Wyatt are still the finest sustained discussions of that important and elusive figure. He has edited an exemplary edition of Eldred Revett, a religious poet who has much to teach us about the possibilities and limitations of devotional verse in the period. And his book on Marvell, which remains the best book in a very crowded and elite field, has aged beautifully; its quiet knowledge of the ways that history presses on the act of poetic composition predate but also transcend the recent turn to politics in literary criticism. What sets Don’s works apart is not their shrewdness of mind – though they certainly have that – but the sense of care for the poem and its maker that suffuses his every sentence. In Don’s compassionate inquiries, the scholar shows himself willing to inhabit the text in order to learn what’s at stake, rather than approaching the language on the page ironically, as if it were a soluble puzzle to which the academic self is intellectually superior.

Consider the 1996 essay “Christ’s Image and Likeness in Donne.” Here, Don examines the peculiar logic of the “picture of Christ crucified” in the sonnet that begins “What if this present were the world’s last night?” The poem’s “structure of argument,” he observes, “is arranged so as to move us from the perception of Christ as fearsome judge to the recognition of Christ as merciful savior.”² In the course of exploring how “the persistent image of a wrathful God is replaced – either by superimposition of another image or by an act of interpretation – by the face of a savior, a ‘beauteous form’ which is understood to be the inscribed sign of a spirit of pity, mercy, and forgiveness” (pp. 81–82), Don focuses on the poem’s interpretive revision as an act of reformed seeing. This new-sightedness reveals the merciful face of Christ, yes, but it also demands a recognition that “the image of Christ is carried in and on the soul of man, defining his true and fundamental resemblance to God, as differentiated from his mere likeness.” Because Christ’s image lies in the heart, the self becomes a mirror for divine love, and is elevated in the association. “Like the eyes that are fixed upon him as he rides westward,” Don concludes, “this face is inescapable,” telling the speaker that “his own ‘piteous mind,’ in short, is the evidence of God’s innate mercy” (p. 91).

The implication of Don’s essay is that interpretation constitutes a transformative activity: just as Donne’s interpretation of Christ’s picture confirms both subject and object in a community of compassion, so may participation in the heuristic partnership of critical investigation simultaneously validate the reader...