Verse and Poetics in George Herbert and John Donne

Verse and Poetics in George Herbert and John Donne PDF Author: Frances Cruickshank
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317002431
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
Innovative and highly readable, this study traces George Herbert's and John Donne's development of a distinct poetics through close readings of their poems, references to their letters, sermons, and prose treatises, and to other contemporary poets and theorists. In demonstrating a relationship between poetics and religious consciousness in Donne's and Herbert's verse, Frances Cruickshank explores their attitudes to the cultural, theological, and aesthetic enterprise of writing and reading verse. Cruickshank shows that Donne and Herbert regarded poetry as a mode not determined by its social and political contexts, but as operating in and on them with its own distinct set of aesthetic and intellectual values, and that ultimately, verse mattered as a privileged mode of religious discourse. This book is an important contribution to the ongoing scholarly dialogue about the nature of literary and cultural study of early modern England, and about the relationship between the writer and the world. Cruickshank confirms Donne's reputation as a fascinating and brilliant poetic figure while simultaneously rousing interest in Herbert by noting his unique merging of rusticity and urbanity and tranquility and uncertainty, allowing the reader to enter into these poets' imaginative worlds and to understand the literary genre they embraced and then transformed.

Verse and Poetics in George Herbert and John Donne

Verse and Poetics in George Herbert and John Donne PDF Author: Frances Cruickshank
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317002431
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 146

Get Book Here

Book Description
Innovative and highly readable, this study traces George Herbert's and John Donne's development of a distinct poetics through close readings of their poems, references to their letters, sermons, and prose treatises, and to other contemporary poets and theorists. In demonstrating a relationship between poetics and religious consciousness in Donne's and Herbert's verse, Frances Cruickshank explores their attitudes to the cultural, theological, and aesthetic enterprise of writing and reading verse. Cruickshank shows that Donne and Herbert regarded poetry as a mode not determined by its social and political contexts, but as operating in and on them with its own distinct set of aesthetic and intellectual values, and that ultimately, verse mattered as a privileged mode of religious discourse. This book is an important contribution to the ongoing scholarly dialogue about the nature of literary and cultural study of early modern England, and about the relationship between the writer and the world. Cruickshank confirms Donne's reputation as a fascinating and brilliant poetic figure while simultaneously rousing interest in Herbert by noting his unique merging of rusticity and urbanity and tranquility and uncertainty, allowing the reader to enter into these poets' imaginative worlds and to understand the literary genre they embraced and then transformed.

Verse and Poetics in George Herbert and John Donne

Verse and Poetics in George Herbert and John Donne PDF Author: Frances Cruickshank
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131700244X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
Innovative and highly readable, this study traces George Herbert's and John Donne's development of a distinct poetics through close readings of their poems, references to their letters, sermons, and prose treatises, and to other contemporary poets and theorists. In demonstrating a relationship between poetics and religious consciousness in Donne's and Herbert's verse, Frances Cruickshank explores their attitudes to the cultural, theological, and aesthetic enterprise of writing and reading verse. Cruickshank shows that Donne and Herbert regarded poetry as a mode not determined by its social and political contexts, but as operating in and on them with its own distinct set of aesthetic and intellectual values, and that ultimately, verse mattered as a privileged mode of religious discourse. This book is an important contribution to the ongoing scholarly dialogue about the nature of literary and cultural study of early modern England, and about the relationship between the writer and the world. Cruickshank confirms Donne's reputation as a fascinating and brilliant poetic figure while simultaneously rousing interest in Herbert by noting his unique merging of rusticity and urbanity and tranquility and uncertainty, allowing the reader to enter into these poets' imaginative worlds and to understand the literary genre they embraced and then transformed.

The Form of Love

The Form of Love PDF Author: James Kuzner
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823294536
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Can poetry articulate something about love that philosophy cannot? The Form of Love argues that it can. In close readings of seven “metaphysical” poems, the book shows how poets of the early modern period and beyond use poetic form to turn philosophy to other ends, in order not to represent the truth about love but to create a virtual experience of love, in all its guises. The Form of Love shows how verse creates love that can’t exist without poetry’s specific affordances, and how poems can, in their impossibility, prompt love’s radical re-imagining. Like the philosophies on which they draw, metaphysical poems imagine love as an intense form of non-sovereignty, of giving up control. They even imagine love as a liberating bondage—to a friend, a beloved, a saint, a God, or a garden. Yet these poems create strange, striking versions of such love, made in, rather than through, the devices, structures, and forces where love appears. Tracing how poems think, Kuzner argues, requires an intimate form of reading: close—even too close—attention to and thinking with the text. Showing how poetry thinks of love otherwise than other fields, the book reveals how poetry and philosophy can nevertheless enter into a relation that is itself like love.

The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Early Modern Literature

The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Early Modern Literature PDF Author: Victoria Bladen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000454819
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The Tree of Life and Arboreal Aesthetics in Early Modern Literature explores the vital motif of the tree of life and what it meant to early modern writers who drew from its long histories in biblical, classical and folkloric contexts, giving rise to a language of trees, an arboreal aesthetics. An ancient symbol of immortality, the tree of life was appropriated by Christian ideology and iconography to express ideas about Christ; however, the concept also migrated beyond religious doctrine. Ideas circulating around the tree of life enabled writers to imagine and articulate ideas of death and rebirth, loss and regeneration, the condition of the political state and personal states of the soul through arboreal metaphors and imagery. The motif could be used to sacralise landscapes, such as the garden, orchard or country estate, blurring the lines between contemporary green spaces and the spiritual and poetic imaginary. Located within the field of environmental humanities, and intersecting with ecocriticism and critical plant studies, this volume outlines a comprehensive history of the tree of life and offers interdisciplinary readings of focus texts by Shakespeare, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Aemilia Lanyer, Andrew Marvell and Ralph Austen. It includes consideration of related ideas and motifs, such as the tree of Jesse and the Green Man, illuminating the rich histories and meanings that emerge when an understanding of the tree of life and arboreal aesthetics are brought to the analysis of early modern literary texts and their representations of green spaces, both physical and metaphysical.

Materiality and Devotion in the Poetry of George Herbert

Materiality and Devotion in the Poetry of George Herbert PDF Author: Francesca Cioni
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198874405
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
This book uses textual and material evidence -- in poetry, prayers, physiologies, sermons, church buildings and monuments, manuscript diaries and notebooks -- to explore how material things held spiritual meaning in George Herbert's poetry, and to reflect on scholarly approaches to matter and form in devotional poetry.

Making Milton

Making Milton PDF Author: Emma Depledge
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192555022
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This volume consists of fourteen original essays that showcase the latest thinking about John Milton's emergence as a popular and canonical author. Contributors consider how Milton positioned himself in relation to the book trade, contemporaneous thinkers, and intellectual movements, as well as how his works have been positioned since their first publication. The individual chapters assess Milton's reception by exploring how his authorial persona was shaped by the modes of writing in which he chose to express himself, the material forms in which his works circulated, and the ways in which his texts were re-appropriated by later writers. The Milton that emerges is one who actively fashioned his reputation by carefully selecting his modes of writing, his language of composition, and the stationers with whom he collaborated. Throughout the volume, contributors also demonstrate the profound impact Milton and his works have had on the careers of a variety of agents, from publishers, booksellers, and fellow writers to colonizers in Mexico and South America.

Comparative Essays on the Poetry and Prose of John Donne and George Herbert

Comparative Essays on the Poetry and Prose of John Donne and George Herbert PDF Author: Russell M. Hillier
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 164453228X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
This book brings together ten essays on John Donne and George Herbert composed by an international group of scholars. The volume represents the first collection of its kind to draw close connections between these two distinguished early modern thinkers and poets who are justly coupled because of their personal and artistic association. The contributors' distinctive new approaches and insights illuminate a variety of topics and fields while suggesting new directions that future study of Donne and Herbert might take. Some chapters explore concrete instances of collaboration or communication between Donne and Herbert, and others find fresh ways to contextualize the Donnean and Herbertian lyric, carefully setting the poetry alongside discourses of apophatic theology or early modern political theory, while still others link Herbert's verse to Donne's devotional prose. Several chapters establish specific theological and aesthetic grounds for comparison, considering Donne and Herbert's respective positions on religious assurance, comic sensibility, and virtuosity with poetic endings.

The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English Literature and Theology

The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English Literature and Theology PDF Author: Paul Cefalu
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192536176
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English Literature and Theology argues that the Fourth Gospel and First Epistle of Saint John the Evangelist were so influential during the early modern period in England as to share with Pauline theology pride of place as leading apostolic texts on matters Christological, sacramental, pneumatological, and political. The book argues further that, in several instances, Johannine theology is more central than both Pauline theology and the Synoptic theology of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, particularly with regard to early modern polemicizing on the Trinity, distinctions between agape and eros, and the ideologies of radical dissent, especially the seventeenth-century antinomian challenge of free grace to traditional Puritan Pietism. In particular, early modern religious poetry, including works by Robert Southwell, George Herbert, John Donne, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Traherne, and Anna Trapnel, embraces a distinctive form of Johannine devotion that emphasizes the divine rather than human nature of Christ; the belief that salvation is achieved more through revelation than objective atonement and expiatory sin; a realized eschatology; a robust doctrine of assurance and comfort; and a stylistic and rhetorical approach to representing these theological features that often emulates John's mode of discipleship misunderstanding and dramatic irony. Early modern Johannine devotion assumes that religious lyrics often express a revelatory poetics that aims to clarify, typically through the use of dramatic irony, some of the deepest mysteries of the Fourth Gospel and First Epistle.

Scripture and the English Poetic Imagination

Scripture and the English Poetic Imagination PDF Author: David Lyle Jeffrey
Publisher: Baker Academic
ISBN: 1493416898
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
The God of the Bible often speaks in poetry. Beginning with an illuminating exploration of eloquence in the divine voice, a highly acclaimed professor of literature opens up the treasury of biblical tradition among English poets both past and present, showing them to be well attuned not only to Scripture's meaning but also to its music. In exploring the work of various poets, David Lyle Jeffrey demonstrates how the poetry of the Bible affords a register of understanding in which the beauty of Holy Scripture deepens meditation on its truth and is indeed a vital part of that truth.

Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England

Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England PDF Author: Sophie Read
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139620541
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The Reformation changed forever how the sacrament of the Eucharist was understood. This study of six canonical early modern lyric poets traces the literary afterlife of what was one of the greatest doctrinal shifts in English history. Sophie Read argues that the move from a literal to a figurative understanding of the phrase 'this is my body' exerted a powerful imaginative pull on successive generations. To illustrate this, she examines in detail the work of Southwell, Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan and Milton, who between them represent a broad range of doctrinal and confessional positions, from the Jesuit Southwell to Milton's heterodox Puritanism. Individually, each chapter examines how Eucharistic ideas are expressed through a particular rhetorical trope; together, they illuminate the continued importance of the Eucharist's transformation well into the seventeenth century - not simply as a matter of doctrine, but as a rhetorical and poetic mode.