Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (review)

Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric by Barbara Kiefer Lswalski (Princeton: Princeton Univ Press. 1979 536 pp. $27.50) by Mary Ellen Rickey Barbara Lewa Is k is Protestant Poetics end the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, like her earlier books, escorts her readers through vast and, for many, largely unfamiliar territories Her thesis bemuses, both by itsemphasis of statement and by the enormity of the materials which she undertakes to use "This study, then, will argue two propositions. First, that an extensive and widely accessible body of literary theory, chiefly pertaining to the Bible and to fundamental Protestant assumptions about the spiritual life and about art, can be extrapolated from such sixteenth- and seventeenth-century materials as biblical commentaries, rhetorical handbooks, poetic paraphrases of scripture, emblem books, manuals on meditation and preaching. Second, that such theory, and the biblical models it identified, helped to shape contemporary attitudes about religious poetry, contributing directly to the remarkable flowering of the religious lyric in the seventeenth century, and especially to that major strain represented by Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, and Taylor"(p. 5). Professor Lewalski does not disappoint us by scanting the formative literatures which she has assumed. With her usual grace, she explores what she believes to be the primarily Calvinistic landscape of the seventeenth-century English church, beginning with Reformation theology of salvation and its grades of election, calling, justification, adoption, sanctification, and glorification. She then moves on to her view of Biblical poetics, restricting herself, however questionably, to English letterpress. Her argument runs something like this. Protestant poets were reluctant to employ appropriate clas82 REVIEW: PROTESTANT POETICS sical genre for their corresponding Christian efforts. At the same time, they found no models for the self-examining religious poems which constitute a part of the period's signal achievements In the Bible, however, lyrics of several types offered themselves as paradigms. The "poetical" books of the Old Testament — Job, the Psalter, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes.and the Song of Solomon — were often published separately and were separately commented upon. In addition, poetic extracts from the Bible were anthologized with other Christian verse: original compositions, liturgical hymns, and the like. The Psalter, particularly, came to be regarded as almost a standard text for translation combined with personal meditation. By 1640, Lewalski tells us. on the authority of Coburn Freer, over three hundred complete English renditions of the Psalms, in verse, existed. The Psalms, regarded as a distillate of the entirety of holy writ (Athanasius is cited as prooftext), were declared by Protestant divines to contain the spectrum of human emotions. Matthew Parker, enchantingly, likens their affective range to that of the Doric, Lydian, and Phrygian modes. The Canticles were similarly admired, and even more frequently analyzed, primarily as a fiction of the love between Christ and the Church, and secondarily as the love between Christ and the soul. A plot was assigned to the fiction, sequential episodes being peace, restlessness, reconciliation; or, more elaborately, desire for nearer communion, declining of affection, recovery, more declining and sense of the Bridegroom's aloofness, and ultimate faithfulness — allot this m contrast to Roman Catholic claims for allegory of mysticism and spiritual exaltation She gives due attention to Renaissance concern with scriptural sources for tropes and figures. Calvin, for example, believed Jesus' formula for consecrating the eucharist to be metonymy, Richard Bernard, somewhat later, pointed out that in the whole course of holy writ, but particularly in Job, the Psalter, the prophets, and the epistles, one meets with figurative speeches which, without a knowledge of rhetoric, cannot be understood. (One wonders what substantive difference this tradition offers from pre-Reformation speculation.) Protestant rhetoricee sacrae abounded, and Professor Lewalski tenders usa liberalsampling of them. Inad83 Mary Ellen Rickey dition. she gives fuller analysis of several of the Biblical tropes most frequently called into play by devotional poets of the time — sin as sickness or death, darkness or blindness, servitude or bondage, the Christian life as pilgrimage or warfare, as chastisement or trial. Godas husbandman orshepherd; the heart as synecdoche for the whole person Most of these are so familiar, both m the tradition thatsheaddressesand in larger ones, as to require less space than she affords More interesting...