Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry by Wendy Beth Hyman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry by Wendy Beth Hyman Ryan Netzley Wendy Beth Hyman. Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. xiv + 201 pp. Wendy Beth Hyman’s Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry is one of those rare books that will immediately change how I teach. My students and I both tend to think that we have a pretty good bead on carpe diem poems. They maintain that they’ve heard enough pick-up lines that they can always see through such cringe-inducing clichés. I try to rebut their cynical reductions with a different brand of interpretive deflation: the invitation poem really commodifies time; the invitation really continues a classical tradition. Hyman’s book compellingly argues for the radical potential of the carpe diem tradition and the decidedly nuanced nature of its materialist philosophical commitments. In so doing, it serves as a useful antidote to my own and my students’ suspiciously pragmatic skepticism. Hyman’s introductory diagnosis of the invitation poem’s (the phrase she prefers to “carpe diem poem”) philosophical commitments and consequences is thoroughly convincing and sets the stage for much of what comes later: the Renaissance carpe diem tradition, which insists that death very much is the fast-approaching end, is predicated on a skeptical thought experiment that denies both Christian theology and social convention; in contrast to the classical invitation poem that offers non-actionable epideixis in the face of time’s inevitable passage, these Renaissance iterations insist on activity, even busyness; in part, that’s because these later poems must stage arguments against a Christian morality, as opposed to expression of consolation or contentment with the limited nature of time. Out of this compelling framing, Hyman draws two far-reaching consequences: 1) that religious unbelief is actually quite thinkable in the Renaissance and has been hiding in plain sight all these years; 2) that lyrics have speculative or optative aims on par with drama and narrative. Together, these two broad implications should prompt a welcome rethinking of materialist skepticism as something more interesting than mere cynical deflation or envious one-upmanship. [End Page 89] Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry discusses non-canonical and canonical examples of carpe diem verse in the English Renaissance, but also extends its analysis to non-lyric genres and drama. Chapter two, in addition to discussing Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd,” Ralegh’s response, and Carew’s “A Rapture,” examines the materialist world-view of the characters in Measure for Measure. Chapter five examines negative reactions to invitations to “seize the day” in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Milton’s A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle. Of these examinations of non-lyric works, chapter four’s account of the eroticization of doubt in Hero and Leander seems to me the most compelling and provocative. Hyman finds traces of paradoxical encomium in Marlowe’s heroic epistle, when Hero defends (or is forced to defend) the “nothing” that stands in for virginity. This chapter deftly shows how these moments parallel Crashaw’s, Rochester’s, and William Cornwallis’ poems on “nothing” and evoke the physiological indiscernibility of the hymen as a “nothing” that must nonetheless be defended. The point here is not simply that Leander (or Marlowe) traps Hero with his rhetorical duplicity (although they both do). Rather, Hyman describes skepticism’s desirability as residing in something more than caginess in the face of thwarted aspirations, the rough-and-ready pragmatic activity that the carpe diem speaker advocates. Instead, she hints at how impossible knowledge might not be a mark of failed action, but rather a challenge to the notion that doing and acting should be our busy response to nothingness. The volume’s second chapter, on Measure for Measure and carpe diem lyrics, draws on chapter one’s careful account of the pervasive influence of Lucretian materialism in Renaissance philosophy and culture. The argument here is that Isabella and the various men in the play who seem monomaniacally interested in her chastity talk past each other because of a fundamental philosophical misunderstanding: she does not...