Green Thoughts, Green Shades: Essays by Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric ed. by Jonathan F. S. Post (review)

Abstract

154 Reviews The Genesis ofNarrative is nevertheless a strong study,forboth its detailed attention to Malory and its application ofrecent literarytheory to this perennially evocative text. University of Winnipeg Murray J.Evans Green Thoughts, Green Shades: Essays by Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric. Ed. by Jonathan F. S. Post. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of CaliforniaPress. 2002. xv + 30opp. ?35 (pbk ?13.95). ISBN o520 -21455-2 (pbk 0-520-22752-2). Watch what happens when a scholar of Renaissance English literature asks, 'What might some of today's poets find of special interest in their forebears and worth retrieving for fellow readers of poetry? And of equal interest [though beyond the scope of this review to evaluate], what do their emphases tell us about their own poetry and, more broadly, about how the past continues to form the present?' (p. 3). The result is a collection of essays on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century verse that is unique in defining its contribution to English studies not through the contributors' shared critical perspective or focus on some significant genre, theme, issue, or crisis of the period, but on the shared vocation of its contributors as practising poets: Peter Sacks writes on Thomas Wyatt and the English sonnet; Anthony Hecht on Sir Philip Sidney and the sestina; Heather McHugh on 'the curve' from Wyatt to Rochester; Linda Gregerson on Ben Jonson; Calvin Bedient on John Donne; Carl Phillips on George Herbert; William Logan on John Milton; Eavan Bolan on Anne Bradstreet; Alice Fulton on Margaret Cavendish; Stephen Yenser on Andrew Marvel; Thom Gunn on Rochester; Robert Hass on Edward Taylor. Sceptical-minded readers might question whether the essays really differ from other academic treatments of early modern lyric poetry, given that the contributors all have prestigious academic credentials, nearly all have published works of literary criticism in addition to poetry, and two are even Renaissance specialists. But the answer is yes, the essays do differ,because this volume affords an opportunity to eschew the usually obligatory, thesis-driven argument forwhat the authors repeatedly call their 'meditations', 'ruminations', and 'reflections' on whatever it is they have found which gives the poetry some 'special interest' forthem (only one essay explicitly adopts the 'my-argument-is' mode). Without fail, their discoveries are fascinating. As Post rightly observes, the collection testifies to the authors' 'sense of exhilaration and joy (and power) enabled' by the poems that they encounter (p. 14), and at the same time their meditations, ruminations, and reflections are vastly illuminating, with precise, artful accounts of the subtle and varied ways that poems convey meaning and experience. Here is a guided tour of early modern lyric poetry that will startle readers, even those well grounded in the period, with reminders and revelations of its stunning beauty and coarseness, its dazzling complexity and audacity. Take as an example the quirky, labyrinthine devotional verse of Edward Taylor, who seems doggedly to have adhered to the notion, as Robert Hass marvels, that 'if you can keep inventingmetaphors, you do'. 'Watch what happens', Hass urges us, as he introduces a breathtaking stanza in which 'nostrils get mixed up with nipples, and the military metaphor wanders in, with the bore of a gun, called to mind presumably by the shape of nostrils' (p. 272). Admittedly, no necessary reason exists for attributing all that there is to praise about this collection to the authors' being poets, and cynical-minded readers might even express exasperation at the one essay that lays on the alliteration, chiasmus, and shocking expletives rather too thickly, as if fearful that we might forget that this is a poet writing the essay. But perhaps in the United States, especially, scholars and MLR, 99.1,2004 155 scholar-poets alike are short on venues for the kind of analytical meditations that Post's book puts on offer. The closest alternative is the classroom, where English professors may lecture and model close readings of poems, explaining what they find astounding or brilliant or hilarious. Green Thoughts, Green Shades captures all the expertise, passion, and much of the spectacle that characterizes such teaching at its most inspiring and instructional. Le Moyne College J.Christopher Warner Renaissance Configurations...