Verse and Poetics in George Herbert and John Donne (review)

Frances Cruickshank’s monograph is a significant literary achievement for several reasons. It is firstly an important contribution to literary criticism of early modern poetry; although its focus is the poetry of John Donne and George Herbert, the arguments are relevant and applicable to scholarly work on their contemporaries. Secondly, the book is a carefully argued interrogation of our modes of literary criticism. Specifically, it questions some of the assumptions and practices of new historicism and, while not denying the gains that have been made from these approaches, argues the need for a reinvigorated focus on the poetics of verse. The book is thus a thoughtful and persuasive voice entering into debates and discourses on literary theory and critical approaches. The third dimension of the book’s value is that it is beautifully and poetically written; it is the product of a unique scholarly mind giving words and ideas prolonged and deep thought. Every sentence has been carefully crafted, resulting in a monograph that is simply a joy to read.

The book’s introduction ‘Poetry versus Materialism’ signals its argument that the verse of Donne and Herbert was significant as a laden and privileged mode of religious discourse, one with an articulate self-consciousness about the processes and frustrations of religious verse. Cruickshank questions the way in which developments in new historicism and cultural materialism risk developing untenable binary oppositions between poetry and materialism. She argues that, given that the human experience of life is ‘a chaotic mix of the material and the immaterial’ (p. 2), we should approach early modern poetry in more nuanced and complex ways. Her work aims for a confluence of historicism and formalism, following the work of Richard Strier and others. Such an approach is essential for the early modern period given that ‘poetry in this period is both material and imaginary, equally culture is material and imagined’ (p. 2). Thus she situates her book and argument amidst the current challenges to the monopoly of historicism posed by the re-emergence of aestheticism.

Divided into four sections, the book firstly explores ‘The Soul in Paraphrase: Writing and Reading the Religious Lyric’, investigating the unique challenges that early modern religious verse poses. How do we approach verse that was imagined and crafted as an intense mode of communication with the divine, while simultaneously a rigorous self-examination and questioning of personal motives implicated in that process? In what ways did the poetics of form, the process of art-making, facilitate or undermine authentic religious feeling? ‘In poetry, conflict arose between the sincerity or “hart-depth” of religious feeling and the potential insincerity of the rhetorical vehicle’ (p. 19). Cruickshank draws from the work of Henry Peyre, Lionel Trilling, and Stanley Fish in tracing the critical history of this issue. As she observes, the poets write poetry about the inadequacy of poetry, while pointing to the resonant absence of the poetry they would like to have been able to offer their god. The poets move towards liminal spaces between the earthly and the divine, at least gesturing towards what they cannot accomplish.

The second section, ‘Taking Figures: Metaphor and Theology in Religious Poetics’, reiterates the centrality of metaphor to religious thought and thus to religious poetry: ‘In early modern thought, Christian allegory, analogy and image were not special but habitual’ (p. 41). The author argues that metaphor needs to be recognized as a process in which the material world is transformed by the immaterial ‘which in turn realizes or memorializes a moment otherwise lost’ (p. 43). Drawing from earlier work on metaphor, by Max Black and others, Cruickshank argues that metaphors in the hands of the devout imagination become potent vehicles of knowledge.

Section three, ‘Green Matter and the Figure of the Garden’, explores the importance of the figure of the garden and organic imagery in the work of Donne and Herbert. God is figured, in many of their poems, as a gardener...