Rethinking the Literary Baroque

Abstract

Rethinking the Literary Baroque James A. Knapp (bio) John Donne and Baroque Allegory by Hugh Grady. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Hardcover $105.00. Hugh Grady’s study of John Donne as a baroque poet takes Walter Benjamin’s early work The Origin of German Tragic Drama as its theoretical jumping-off point. The decision to read Donne and Benjamin together is strategic, as Benjamin the theorist developed at the same time that literary modernists rediscovered John Donne, hailing him as a poet relevant to the uncertainty of the moment in the wake of modernity’s advance in the early twentieth century. Donne’s aesthetic response to the seismic cultural upheavals that defined English culture at the turn of the seventeenth century spoke to the modernist curators of literature, including, most notably T.S. Eliot, Herbert Grierson, and Helen Gardner. The fact that Benjamin, among the most important thinkers of the modernist moment, was exploring seventeenth-century German drama at the same time that the English literary world was granting Donne new life as a poet suited to modernist aesthetics has not been explored in any detail by Donne scholars. Grady’s book seeks to fill that gap. The first chapter provides a long and detailed introduction to the study with two primary goals. First, Grady offers a careful review of the concept of the baroque as a critical, periodizing term. The history is complicated, as the term has never been fully accepted by [End Page 165] literary scholars, including even those comfortable with periodization. Grady recounts the efforts of René Wellek and later Frank Warnke to establish the baroque as a valuable literary critical term defining the shift in poetic sensibility that occurred around the turn of the seventeenth century in England. Borrowed from art history, the baroque referred to the stylistic mode that followed the Renaissance and preceded neoclassicism. Grady admits that the effort to adopt the baroque as the defining poetic mode in early seventeenth-century English literature was never fully successful. The fortunes of the term waned significantly after the advent of deconstruction and poststructuralist theory in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Despite its loss of currency, Grady lobbies for the term’s usefulness, arguing that it helps connect the shift from sixteenth-to seventeenth-century aesthetics to the advent of modernism and postmodernism in the twentieth century. The other primary accomplishment of the first chapter is to track Donne’s fortunes as a poet from the moment of his rediscovery with Eliot and the New Criticism through the era of high theory in the 1970s and 80s and up to the present. The account is lucid and concise, arguing that the New Critical championing of Donne as a poet characterized by “a troubled but usually successful search for aesthetic unity” (14) was the source of Donne’s fall from grace with critics in the aftermath of high theory, which stressed disruption and discontinuity rather than unity. Grady’s argument is that Benjamin’s account of modernist fragmentation not only describes Donne’s aesthetics better than the New Critics’ unity but that this is cause to see Donne’s poetry as speaking to the postmodern moment that is currently unfolding. Like the poets associated with both modernism and postmodernism, Donne was writing at a time when potent historical and cultural changes threatened previously coherent accounts of reality and human progress. Donne’s response was, in Grady’s view, a form of baroque allegory described by Benjamin in the book on German tragedy. Unlike traditional allegory, in Benjamin’s account, the baroque allegorical mode is defined by a difficult juxtaposition of seemingly incompatible fragments that are counterbalanced by a utopian alternative. In the second chapter, Grady turns to the Anniversaries as the paradigmatic examples of Donne’s deployment of baroque allegory in the Benjaminian sense. The argument stresses the fragmentation of the First Anniversary as its strength (a feature of the poem sometimes singled out for [End Page 166] criticism, especially in the era of the New Criticism). The world Donne anatomizes there is a fallen, incoherent world in which correspondence has failed. Only a glimpse of a hopeful alternative is available in the poem...