328 BEN JONSON JOURNAL

Transcription

1 Book Reviews 327 Jonathan F. S. Post, ed., Green Thoughts, Green Shades: Essays by Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric. Berkeley: University of California Press, xiv pages. The subtitle of this book, "Essays by Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric," is quite problematic. In the first place, it is really the functional title of the work, since the main part of the title, "Green Thoughts, Green Shades," is an allusion to Andrew Marvell's The Garden, which is not the focus of this collection. Secondly, the trendy term "Early Modern" leaves the reader in limbo: exactly what historical period or intellectual movement does this term refer to? In fact, the term "Early Modern" does not so much define a historical period or intellectual movement as deny the existence of others. For example, there is no "Renaissance" (Wyatt, Shakespeare), no Restoration (Rochester, Dryden), no Cavaliers (Herrick), no Metaphysicals (Donne, Herbert). It is also a questionbegging rather than a neutral term: it in fact states that all literature or other intellectual activity that takes place between the medieval and the modern period (here defined as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) is a preparation for the modern period and should be interpreted in that light. Thus if one begins with the assumption that all lyric poetry from the "Early Modern" period is by definition a precursor to modern poetry, it makes perfectly good sense to have such poetry evaluated by practicing poets of the modern age. The fact that T. S. Eliot canonized much "Early Modern" or metaphysical poetry as an example to be followed by "Modern" poets encourages such a project (leaving aside for the moment that Eliot's "disassociation of sensibility" theory has been definitively refuted, and modern poets no longer look to seventeenth-century poetry as models). The first problem with this project is that modern poets are not, as poets, scholars of "Early Modern" literature. The fact that they are poets does not give them any blinding insight into the writings of fellow poets from three or four hundred years past. Therefore they must either lean on the labors of traditional scholarship, or ignore the historical context of the poetry they are commenting upon. Thus some of the contributors rhapsodize about pretty mundane biographical data, while others simply view the man or

2 328 BEN JONSON JOURNAL woman from the past as a fellow artist, struggling with the same stylistic and subject-oriented problems that are the bane of both the modern and the Early Modern poet. However, some of the contributors do wear two hats: Linda Gregerson and Thorn Gunn are both literary critics and poets, while the editor of the collection, Jonathan F. S. Post, is a specialist in the "Early Modern" period, but not a published poet. There are several other dangers implicit in this project. The modern poet will be under some pressure either to demonstrate that the Early Modern poet under review anticipates certain effects in modern poetry, or that the modern poet's own poetry harks back to some of the "special effects" of the earlier poetry. There will be a tendency on the part of the poet to stretch his Early Modern material and make it "fit" into modern concerns. The poet may also come to regard himself as a throwback to the earlier literature, particularly in the devotion to form. There will also be a conscious attempt to "modernize" the earlier poet, to misinterpret or to ignore the earlier context from which the poet emerges. All that being said, there are some very fine essays in this collection: entertaining, provocative, well written. The introduction by Jonathan F. S. Post speaks to some of the issues I have already addressed in this review, and offers a brief summary of the twelve essays that follow his remarks. The first two essays, Peter Sacks's "The Face of the Sonnet: Wyatt and Some Early Features of the Tradition" and Anthony Hecht's "Sidney and the Sestina," focus on technique and generic tradition. Sacks treats of "mental imaging," the "linkage between sonnet and imagined face" (20) in Wyatt's lyrics, while Hecht explores the rich complexities of Sidney's use of the sestina, with its six six-line stanzas and three-line envoy. Sidney, following the example of Sannazaro, added a further complication to the form by composing a double sestina in "Ye Goatherd Gods." The only essay on Marvell, Stephen Yenser's '"How Coy a Figure': Marvelry," demonstrates both Marvell's mastery of structure and Yenser's understanding of how the poet uses diction and metrical artistry to confound the material and the spiritual, to eroticize language and illuminate the physical density and solidity of objects in the world. Heather McHugh's quirky essay, "Naked Numbers: A Curve from Wyatt to Rochester," takes

3 Book Reviews 329 the term "cover" as a metaphor to describe the covering, uncovering, folding, and wrapping up of poems in words, of women in clothing, of naked lovers (Rochester) "discovering" themselves to their mistresses. Lovelace's Lucasta, for example, conceals herself in a muff that could only be made from animals stripped bare. (This is the first of two essays that attempt to convey respectability on the pseudo-pornographic poetry of Rochester.) Linda Gregerson's "Ben Jonson and the Loathed Word" focuses on the meaning and difficulty of Jonson's lyrics. She senses an "exclusionary dynamic" (87) that discourages all but the most committed readers. Jonson tries to tame the word, to reduce its mystery, to control the range of meaning it conveys. His task is made more difficult by the shifting of the word from Greek and Latin to the vernacular, by the declining authority of the religious word in a time of religious persecution. Calvin Bedient's "Donne's Sovereignty" emphasizes the spirit of play in Donne, a kind of "sovereign sport" (114). "For a blessed moment in the seventeenth century it was possible to think of love not as a melting threat but as the dearest form of sovereignty." Donne is attractive to modern poets because he possesses the ability "to dance among alternatives" (133). He is "[djazzingly competent. In charge. Distanced from us. Immediate. Superior" (134). Carl Phillips's "Anomaly, Conundrum, Thy-Will-Be-Done: On the Poetry of George Herbert" notes the struggle between the public and private person which plays itself out in Herbert's poetry, as well as the tension between Christian humility and verbal ostentation: How can the poet use his great verbal gifts without experiencing the sin of Pride? Paradoxically, his silences are as pregnant as his verse: he withholds judgments on matters he does not understand, and he leaves the reader to ponder the questions he has left open and unanswered. William Logan's "Milton in the Modern: The Invention of Personality" is altogether too dependent on Milton scholarship to make his poetic points, but he does defend Milton's difficult idiom in Paradise Lost, and has a rare appreciation for the emotional power of the sonnets: "In the sonnets, at best, we get the emotion unmediated, with frightening directness" (170). On the other hand, he makes a tenuous connection between Milton and modern poetry by presenting a "vision" of Robert Lowell in a mental hospital

4 330 BEN JONSON JOURNAL "reading aloud a revised version of Lycidas" (174). Since Logan has already dismissed Lycidas as "emotion choked in pastoral" (170), perhaps one has to be in a mental hospital to appreciate the poem! The second essay on Rochester, Thorn Gunn's "Saint John the Rake: Rochester's Poetry," attempts to justify Rochester's coarseness and indecency by placing his poetry within the respectable genres of sexual comedy and satire. His subject matter was degrading, but he was a master of diction, a poet who "took his language as seriously as his debauchery" (253). There are also several essays on relatively minor figures. Eavan Boland's "Finding Anne Bradstreet" admits that "her language rarely shines" (183), and her early poems were "structured, formal, and derivative," although there is more life and music in her later work. Unlike the other contributors, she declares no affinity to this lyric poet from the past: "Anne Bradstreet not only lived in another time; she continues to dwell in a past that I could never hope to find" (186). Alice Fulton's "Unordinary Passions: Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle" presents Cavendish in cultural rather than aesthetic terms: she was "the first English woman to write for publication" (195), an ardent feminist, and a woman who seemed to be anxious to break down the divisions between human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom. Robert Hass's "Edward Taylor: What Was He Up To?" makes the best case it can for Edward Taylor, but it is clear that Taylor lacks a sense of structure and is often a poor versifier. It is damning to say that "the middles are usually the best of Taylor's poems" (269). Still one must give credit to a poet who can discuss the creation and the creator in such homely but powerfully imagistic terms: "Who Spread its Canopy? Or Curtains Spun? / Who in this Bowling Alley bowld the Sun?" (270). Thus in some instances the poets have used their creative skills to give us a better sense of how "Early Modern" poems work. In others they have made some fairly conventional statements about major figures and illuminated some of the dark corners of genius in the minor figures. In sum, while these contemporary poets have made many insightful comments about the lyric poets of the past,

5 Book Reviews 331 it is not immediately obvious that their own poetic skills are central to their engagement with the poetry they discuss. John Mulryan St. Bonaventure University Andrew Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr. Studies in Modern British Religious History. Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, viii pages. Kathleen M. Comerford and Hilmar M. Pabel, eds., Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honour of John W. O'Malley, S.J. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, xxxiv pages. Andrew Lacey's The Cult of King Charles the Martyr is a thoroughly researched examination of how and (insofar as one can reconstruct the thinking of the time) why the government and the Church of England decided to declare Charles I a saint and martyr, added the Office for 30 January to The Book of Common Prayer shortly after the Restoration, and subsequently removed it in Lacey's tale begins with the final years of the king's life and continues through the Interregnum, the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution, and the period of factional strife between Whigs and Tories in the early eighteenth century. As he notes toward the end, some nostalgic High Anglicans continue to remember the no-longer-official Office of 30 January today somewhat as a few nostalgic British Catholics still mourn the Battle of Bosworth Field and the vilification of Richard III by Tudor usurpers. (Curious readers will find the webpages of the Society of King Charles the Martyr at and of the Richard III Society at net.) Although a fair number of novelists have portrayed the Cavaliers sympathetically Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, and John Buchan, for example recent work in the period by historical and literary scholars has usually given them short shrift. As Lacey wryly remarks at the start of his account, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a historian of the English Revolution in possession of a good mind has tended to study the Roundheads rather