Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry (review)

"How does one desire a God that one does not lack?" (3). Ryan Netzley's study of the devotional verse of Herbert, Crashaw, Donne, and Milton answers this question by identifying in these poets' works a positive model of desire founded not on absence, lack or failure, but on presence, immanence and love. Drawing upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Netzley offers an important corrective to the dominant approaches to early modern devotional poetry, which, whether from a psychoanalytic, theological, or literary historical perspective, define desire for God as work: "a quest for God that accords with our expectations of drama and accomplishment" (6). The alternative that Netzley proposes is a model of free action in which devotional practice, or the reading of poetry, offers a means to desire without ends, a curious purposelessness that does not demand a subject. The Eucharist—that central Christian sacrament of presence—conjoins Netzley's interests in desire, reading, and poetry, and Netzley finds a parallel logic in the poetry discussed in each of his chapters and the affective response required by the sacrament. It is difficult to overestimate the significance of the Eucharist in early modern culture and thought; debates about the sacrament engage not only the problem of redemption but also problems of signification, the relations of matter to spirit, and a host of debates about Scripture, ecclesiastical authority, and the Church. Engaging with these central early modern debates, Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist offers an important re-reading of early modern devotional poetry, but it will also be of interest to a broader audience for its theoretical formulation of problems of desire, signification, and reading.

The book is structured as a series of four chapters, each of which delineates the central argument for a positive model of desire for and through presence in the devotional works of a different poet. In the first chapter, Netzley shows how the Communion poetry of Herbert's The Temple substitutes "tasting" for eating and "taking up" for possessing in order to define desire and reading as "intrinsically valuable" in themselves (23). Discussed in the introduction, the first chapter, and the conclusion, Herbert's "Love (III)" illustrates the stakes of the book's argument and the difficulty of avoiding a model of desire based on lack. The poem's speaker hits all the marks of the modern subject constituted by lack, "self-possessed and possessive" (198); Love corrects and dismisses this speaker, inviting readers to choose an affective presence instead.

The second chapter begins by taking issue with the frequent scholarly complaints about the "excess" of Crashaw's verse. It is conventional to describe the feelings of disgust and repulsion inspired by Crashaw's imagery, yet this commonplace results from a refusal to take seriously Crashaw's claims about poetry's power. In this chapter, Netzley shows the limitations of transgression as a critical tool; in an insight that resonates throughout the book, excess is shown to collapse back into a lack of God's presence. The most far-reaching arguments of this chapter invite a reconsideration of the figures of hyperbole and metonymy. Crashaw's verse is shown to produce a "radicalization of metonymy" (76) that neutralizes the problem of idolatry. The so-called "excess" of Crashaw's notoriously sensuous liquids enjoins a recognition of immanence, "that God is really and immediately in signs" (98).

The third chapter, "Loving Fear: Affirmative Anxiety in John Donne's Divine Poems," provides an important test of Netzley's argument because, of course, Donne's divine poetry has so frequently and convincingly been explained through the concept of lack. Netzley argues, by contrast, that Donne's divine poems express an "affirmative anxiety" that is not future-oriented but productive of an "attentive response" to immanence (107). This chapter on Donne clearly illustrates one of the most useful of the book's insights: within an understanding of desire based upon lack, paralysis and...