Of Paradise and Light: Essays on Henry Vaughan and John Milton in Honor of Alan Rudrum (review)

This festschrift of fifteen essays (not counting the introduction) celebrates the teaching, publication, and intellectual influence of Alan Rudrum, a scholar of Vaughan and Milton. The essays weigh heavily in favor of Vaughan (probably a good thing given the plenitude of work on Milton and relative shortage on Vaughan): ten essays on Vaughan (one only tangentially, Robert Wilcher's"The 'true, practice piety' of 'holy writing': Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Christopher Harvey and The Temple"), four on Milton, and one (DianeMcColley's "Water, Wood, and Stone: The Living Earth in Poems of Vaughan and Milton") on both. This weighting likely doth not protest the MLABibliography, but reflects the editors' interests: both Dixon and Nelson are Vaughan scholars. Indeed, Nelson would seem heavily involved in the intellectual genesis of the collection: she was Rudrum's student and, according to her flap jacket bio, wrote a dissertation on "the intertextuality of the poetry of Henry Vaughan"; and "intertextuality" in the works of Vaughan and Milton provides the intellectual framework of the collection. In this case, the collection title is its message: the title bears an intertextual relationship with E. C. Pettet's Of Paradise and Light: A Study of Vaughan's "Silex Scintillans" (1960). Since the insight that Vaughan and Milton utilized the works of other authors would be a pretty thin thread on which to hang and connect such heavyweights as Vaughan and Milton, the editors interweave some theoretical strands in their introductory essay. Of Vaughan they note, "He exposes the crevices between texts to signal the authority of his predecessors and to root his poetic identity and political allegiance in an established biblical, poetic, and philosophic tradition. He exalts the past through duplication, thereby rejecting the 'innovation' of his political enemies" (15). On the other hand, "Milton had a more complicated relationship with antecedent texts than does Vaughan. . . . Milton often desires his reader to interrogate authority as embodied by the pre-text; intertextuality, therefore, is less an aesthetic device than a political tool. While the Royalist Henry Vaughan quotes to maintain some measure of cultural continuity in radically discontinuous times and to celebrate duplication over innovation, the Puritan Milton challenges the 'authority of the texts from which he takes his allusions' and establishes 'the power of the individual reader over the authorship of the text, even his own'" (15–16). Clearly, we have here in the editors' own words (and those of Julia M. Walker) a foreshadowing of typical comments on essay collections: lack of a tight intellectual focus. Even so, the contributors, in spite of their widely diverse critical approaches, do largely stick to connecting Vaughan and Milton to other authors, though not to each other (alas!).

Thankfully, this collection does not suffer from the other affliction of collections: great disparity in essay quality, with a tendency to overweight the lower end. This is a big collection in every way: the fifteen essays fill 325 pages; thus, the authors have ample space to think big thoughts and do them justice. Not all of the essays compel equally, but all at least intrigue and embody a very high level of scholarship, as an eighteen-page, consolidated bibliography in very small type attests. Unfortunately, space restrictions forbid comment on all the essays, but I do want to say something about my favorites (not necessarily the best essays). Robert Wilcher's essay on the failure of Christopher Harvey and Richard Crashaw as imitators of Herbert is a marvel of scholarship and sensitive reading. JohnLeonard's essay on the difficulty of identifying and interpreting allusions in Milton should be required reading for all of us who chase allusions and would be even more convincing if he, too, could resist the chase. Peter Thomas's scholarly analysis of historical, classical, and autobiographical allusions in Olor Iscanus...