Gifts of Grace: Lewalski on English Protestant PoeticsProtestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski

Abstract

Barbara Lewalski's major new study advances a claim with extensive implications for our understanding of religious and literary history in the seventeenth-century English-speaking world. She herself is forthright about the revisionist character of her enterprise in proposing to replace standing emphases on Counter-Reformation, Continental, and medieval influences on the art and spirituality of such diverse poets as John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traherne, and Edward Taylor. Instead, she focuses on what she offers as a more germane but hitherto slighted native context: A broad consensus in regard to doctrine and the spiritual life, grounded upon belief in the absolute priority and centrality of scripture and upon paradigms afforded by the Pauline epistles, a consensus overarching the Anglican-Puritan divide and having great significance for religious poetry (p. ix). Lewalski's specific claim is, first, that seventeenth-century England witnessed the conscious evolution of a distinctively set of attitudes and approaches to the composition of religious lyric poetry, and, second, that the emergence of this Protestant poetics (her term) contributed directly to the remarkable flowering of the religious lyric in the seventeenth century, and especially to that major strain represented by Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, and Taylor (p. 5). Lewalski does not misconceive the force of the joint claim that informs her study. The wealth of materials with which she documents the coming into being of an English Protestant poetics in the seventeenth century mounts an effective challenge to critical commonplaces about the religious lyrics of the period and the supposed antiaesthetic orientation of thought more generally, whether these commonplaces arise from discussions of plain style, or alleged influences from Bonaventuran, Ignatian, and Salesian methods for meditation, or a thoroughgoing Augustinian ambivalence toward verbal art, or even imputed connections between denial of the dogma of Transubstantiation and a waning sensitivity to symbolic and metaphoric meaning. While explicitly corrective in its aims, however,