English Lyric Poetry: The Early Seventeenth Century (review)

Reviews Jonathan F.S. Post, English Lyric Poetry: The Early Seventeenth Century. New York: Routledge, 1999. 323 pp. $85. by Donald Friedman Jonathan Post has done one braver thing than most critical worthies of recent years have done. As if in prescient anticipation of Heather Dubrow's call (in her omnibus review of Renaissance scholarship in the Winter 2001 issue of SEL) for a new birth of "historicized formalism," he has written a work of unabashed literary history. He has also not shied away from performing the "aesthetic analysis" that Dubrow finds lacking in many of the "hybrid" forms of literary criticism that have burgeoned of late. But lest we conclude too hastily that this marks a sea-change in the course of Renaissance studies, it must be noted that English Lyric Poetry: The Early Seventeenth Century, published by Routledge, a house known for its fervent embrace of each latest theoretical innovation, was only the first in a projected series that was then canceled, and thus should probably be considered as a wave that never crested. Addressed to an interested general public as well as to informed specialists, the book means to reintroduce the major figures of the early Stuart era (Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Vaughan, the Milton of the 1645 Poems, and Marvell) together with a selection of the lesserknown , and without diverting too much energy to resolving questions of canonicity, to demonstrate their claim to importance in a full understanding of the literary culture of seventeenth-century England. Thus he describes his task as reading "not only between the lines but the lines themselves." English Lyric Poetry presents itself as a sequence of chapters about individual poets, allowing for digressions for oddities likeJohn Taylor "The Water Poet" and including compendia of women whose writings have entered the canon permanently in the wake of the fundamental revisions accomplished by feminist criticism, others of the "mob" of courtier-poets, some "Spenserians," and a few representatives of popular perspectives, such as George Wither, who figures so prominently 106Book Reviews in David Norbrook's recent rewriting of English republicanism. Crashaw and Traherne are omitted, the latter probably because of the absence of demonstrable literary influence on or from his contemporaries (a consistent concern of Post's throughout the volume, as is the lifehistory of genres and their mutations, such as the Petrarchan lyric and the heroic poem), the former possibly because of his eccentricity from the predominant currents of devotional verse. While giving us pungent characterizations of poets of wide-ranging differences, Post manages also to provide illuminating observations on differential uses of the couplet, the significance of versified literary criticism as a genre, the relation of Jonson's Cary-Morison ode to his complicated eulogy of Shakespeare in the Folio, and such specialized topics as the rhetorical significance of polysyllables in "An Horatian Ode." The discussion of Donne, which opens the book, like the restorative account of Drayton, is marked by Post's skill at rendering for his putative readership a refreshed vision of the poet's uniqueness while placing him firmly in appropriate historical relation to his time and to his literary coevals and predecessors. His direct dealing with Donne's "difficulty" becomes a form of judicious advocacy. Post's Herrick is neatly recuperated from Leah Marcus's perhaps excessively historicized celebrant of Stuart "sports," but without being detached in the least from the realities of his life and times. The darker and more troubled aspects of Lovelace's poems are revealed without disturbing the more conventional associations of his designation as "Cavalier." The chapter on Herbert is notably subtle and complex; wisely, it doesn't attempt to "cover" the multifarious Temple, but equally wisely touches on the most pertinent issues of that endlessly various work by concentrating on a pointedly select group of poems, from "Aaron" and "The Quidditie" to "A true Hymne" and, most perceptively, "The Forerunners." The Milton chapter is, perhaps understandably, marginally less adventurous in its individual readings, but succeeds admirably in fixing Milton both in his era and in his relation to other poets, while establishing clearly and specifically the ways in which he absorbs and transcends them. The same firm delicacy of statement and discrimination...