The Poetry of Immanence: Sacrament in Donne and Herbert (review)

Robert Whalen's The Poetry of Immanence is a promising first book of scholarship. The problem Whalen sets for himself - interpreting the religious orientation of the lyrics of John Donne and George Herbert - and the tool he uses to investigate it - sacramental topoi - take the pulse of a post-Reformation conflict with which historians and literary scholars have become increasingly fascinated. The book's subject, then, is both timely and complex, and serves as a welcome contribution to the discussion of sacramental poetics begun by Theresa DiPasquale, R.V. Young, and Achsah Guibbory.

Drawing on Louis Martz's term 'Catholic puritanism' to examine the role of sacrament in early modern religious subjectivity, Whalen rightly challenges the interpretation of these writers as exemplars of a 'Protestant poetics.' He does so by moving beyond a simple dichotomy between 'carnal' Catholicism and 'metaphorical' Reformed theology, and by seeing sacrament, particularly the Eucharist, as the institutional convergence of the ceremonial and psychological dimensions of religious experience. In doing so, he finds what might be a potentially divisive dichotomy between institutional ceremonies and private devotional spirituality integrated, paradoxically, in the incarnational poetics of Donne, and especially of Herbert. Whalen coins the term 'sacramental puritanism' to describe the liminal place occupied by sacrament for both writers and to express their complex ties to both the Roman Catholic and the Calvinist religious traditions.

Whalen argues that, for Donne, interest in sacramental ideas is most evident in his secular lyrics rather than in the sermons. In the lyrics, he argues, we see Donne testing the limits of an incarnational poetics by pushing the incarnational paradox beyond anything previously attempted in English verse. While focusing primarily on sacramental topoi in the verse, where they predominate, Whalen nonetheless devotes his final chapter on Donne to Donne's Christmas 1626 sermon and the complexity of the sacramental theology there expressed. But, like DiPasquale and Young when they discuss the interplay of material and spiritual sacramental theology in the sermons rather than the poems, Whalen is uncertain how to interpret Donne's equivocal language - and intentions - there, although he describes the rhetorical complexity of Donne's formulations admirably. What is play, even serious play, in the poems becomes difficult to read in the sermon, where the sermon's official purposes might rest uneasily beside Donne's personal and experiential evocation of 'real presence.'

Herbert, according to Whalen, integrates external (ceremonial) and internal (devotional) aspects of religious experience more effectively than Donne. In part, this is because Whalen finds Donne's wit playful rather than constructive, a viewpoint more suited to the poems than the sermons, but obscuring the very real religious and political work done by all of Donne's experiments with the word. Whalen is at his best in commenting on Herbert's doctrinal elusiveness and the controversies he navigates in his poems. For Whalen, Herbert's poems constitute a record of curious questions about the real presence of the Eucharist, documenting the range of sacramental theories available, and locating in the poems a 'materiality of presence' despite a 'spirituality of application.' 'For Herbert - whose searches [for the divine presence] are his daily bread - seeking and finding, presence and absence are but systole and diastole of the same beating heart.'

What one admires in Whalen's book are his moments of insight; his readings of Donne - and particularly of Herbert - are sensitive, nuanced, even brilliant at times. One wishes only that his discussion of sacramental topoi and the work they do for Donne and Herbert personally were embedded more thoroughly in the historical atmosphere of dispute and controversy in which they were written and circulated. That would mean engaging more fully not only with literary critics (and even here, Achsah Guibbory's important work on Ceremony and Community, and particularly its section on Herbert, is only briefly noted), but with historians such as Anthony Milton, Peter Lake, Michael Questier, Alexandra Walsham, and others who have considered the very questions he is probing. While Whalen...