The Emotive Image: Jesuit Poetics in the English Renaissance by Anthony Raspa (review)

HUMANITIES 421 outside such human fictions is pure alienation, and inaccessible to us'; that 'literature exerts its authority ... only through what Wallace Stevens calls a supreme fiction, a structure that has been made in the full knowledge that it is a fiction.' There is no explanation of where the full knowledgein suchcircumstances could possiblycome from. And I will conclude by observing only that such principles appear to deny the very idea of deliverance, since they exclude any possible vision of grace. (JOHN BAXTER) Anthony Raspa. The Emotive Image:Jesuit Poetics in the English Renaissance Texas Christian University Press. x, '73. $'9.50 Professor Raspa's aim in this book is to examine'the sacred version of Richard Crashaw and five other English poets in the light of Renaissance jesuit poetics.' The others are jasper Heywood, Robert Southwell, john Donne, William Alabaster, and Eldred Revet!, and the question addressed is 'how these English poets were influenced by jesuit aesthetic verse meditation that was the counterpart of the ascetic Spiritual Exercises of ... Ignatius Loyola: He hopes also to free himself from 'existing interpretations of the Metaphysical and the baroque which do not allow the exploration of jesuit aesthetics on their own grounds.' This book then serves to remind us that we are still in the wake of Martz's Poetry of Meditation; the author points out sensibly enough that, for all the debate around Martz's position, 'certain kinds of evidence cannot be wished away,' and in his foreword gives us fair warning: the appearance of Barbara Lewalski's Protestant Poetics and the SeventeenthCentury Religious Lyric after the completion of his manuscript changed none of his conclusions. Raspa argues that 'Ignatian aesthetics in England assumed disproportionate dimensions because the Church of Rome, its English hierarchy now swept away, survived principally in the hands of the jesuit mission priests'; that 'the Ignatian meditation appears as the one coherent explanation of a Catholic poetic sensibility in England among the numerous experiments in religious verse that accompanied the spread of the Counter Reformation'; and that'the growth of a vital Ignatian poetic in England is understandable only as the aesthetics of a disaffected religion, as the poetry of the priest's hiding hole in the country's usually surreptitious Catholic houses.' All this makes a brave beginning, and undoubtedly there is a good deal here to interest the student of the period; readers should be warned, however, that Raspa's method of exposition presupposes a very high level of prior interest and commitment (and knowledge of the people he is discussing) on the part of its readers. It seems to me also that Raspa 422 LETTERS IN CANADA 1983 sometimes too readily assumes his readers' assent as well as prior knowledge; a good many paragraphs call out for illustration andlor argument; see for example the interesting paragraph contrasting Catholic anagogy and Protestant typology (pp 25- 6). I found myself following this reasonably cheerfully until the sentence 'Imaginatively speaking, as examples of truth, the prototypes of the Bible were less profuse, and their mythological figures tended to be less personal than those in Catholic anagogy: at which point some discussion of the meaning in this context of 'profuse' and'personal' would have been welcome. Similarly with the statement (p 32) that 'the baroque world was not so much a counterstatement to the nascent physical sciences; itwas actually the accompanying philosophical statement of that scientific truth: Such statements are either self-evident to most of a book's intended readership, or they need more argument than they are given here. A similar problem arises when Raspa cites poetic texts; it is not always perfectly clear that they illustrate his theme in the ways he suggests, as for example on P 40: is it so very clear that all the cited passages represent pleas 'for the use of the senses to write poetry according to the requirements of the meditative psychology'? Is it an accurate reading of Donne's Holy Sonnet 'Why are wee by all creatures waited on?' to say that in it all earthly creatures are subject to man, not because he rules, but because he meditates (see P 46)? I cannot myself see what in...