Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England

Chapter 5. Immanent Textualities in a Postsacramental World

C h a p t e r 5 Immanent Textualities in a Postsacramental World The explicit stake of post-Reformation devotional poetry in the capacities of the word to produce a kind of immanent presence also registers in the contemporary literary culture more broadly. It is hardly surprising that Reformation-era theological anxieties about the sign, which undergird the interrogations of the materializing potentialities of language we see in Donne and Herbert and their devotional fellows, should ramify into the field of nondevotional literature; religious writing may have a thematic affinity for the particular representational concerns of sacramental worship, but the semiotic interrogations of sixteenth-century religious discourse had implications for sign-making in general. The eucharistic debates of the sixteenth century are finally about the ways in which a sign’s meaningfulness inheres not only in the way it redirects interpretation to an absent term but in its own status as an object—and not just a sacramental object, but an object as such. Accordingly, the early seventeenth century sees the widespread development of a poetics that announces its investment in the objective artifact of the poem, a poetics whose materializing elaborations suggest the creeping effects of the Reformation’s sustained engagement with the expressive status of signs. Contemporaries of Donne and Herbert, Crashaw and Taylor, who treat secular rather than sacred subjects nevertheless reveal, in the peculiarities of their poetic innovation, a marked sympathy to the triangulation of matter, meaning, and textuality that comes under scrutiny in devotional contexts. The wider literary culture of seventeenth-century England cultivates a poetics that resists hermeneutic transparency and places a premium on poetic objecthood and antiabsorption. Immanent Textualities 149 A recognition of the complex and enduring relationship between sacramental theology and hermeneutics following the Reformation illuminates the rather abrupt shift around the turn of the seventeenth century from a cultural aesthetic that privileged decorum and pellucidity in poetry to one that was increasingly characterized by hermeneutic interruption. The gentlemen who authored handbooks of poetry and literary criticism in the sixteenth century were careful to frame out the parameters of what was, in George Gascoigne’s terms, ‘‘lawfull’’ in verse; as George Puttenham puts it, ‘‘our intent is to make this Art vulgar for all English mens vse, & therefore are of necessitie to set downe the principal rules therein to be obserued.’’ In pursuit of such legitimate art, Gascoigne advises that the writer should pursue a smooth and inviting poetic method, and avoid techniques that might alienate or discompose the reader: ‘‘frame your stile to perspicuity and to be sensible: for the haughty obscure verse doth not much delight.’’1 Thomas Wilson, whose Arte of Rhetorique preceded and influenced the poetic theories of Gascoigne and Puttenham, stipulated that an author must construct his text such ‘‘that the hearers maie well knowe what he meaneth, and understande him wholly, the whiche he shall with ease do, if he utter his mind in plain wordes, suche as are usually received, and tell it orderly, without goyng about the busshe.’’2 Such characterizations of poetic decorum articulate the Horatian dual mandate that poetry ought to be ‘‘dulce’’ and ‘‘utile,’’ sweet and profitable, a formulation that makes the instructive utility of a work of art contingent upon its digestibility.3 But as we have seen, the model that emerges in the post-Reformation period displaces easy consumption for indigestibility and perspicuity for obstruction, indecorously asserting the unassimilable objecthood of texts in order to substantiate them, to make them present. This poetic pivot toward the nontransparency of the discursive surface provides some perspective on the work of Robert Herrick, whose virtuoso formal performances are matched by a disorienting investment in surfaces, in both thematics and style. Readers have long acknowledged Herrick’s fascination with palpable objects and sensual textures.4 Especially for many of the poet’s early-twentieth-century critics, Herrick’s seductive poetic surfaces bespoke a lack of depth, a shallowness of thought that excluded him from being categorized among the great ‘‘metaphysical’’ poets of his age.5 But Herrick’s commitment to a poetics that promotes and celebrates the exteriors of things indicates his susceptibility to the same aesthetic forces that shape his contemporaries. Herrick’s scintillations direct attention to 150 Chapter 5 the lustrous superstratum, not only of the objects he examines with such minute concentration—his considerations moving ‘‘piece by piece,’’ as he says by way of...