The Baptized Muse: Early Christian Poetry as Cultural Authority by Karla Pollmann

Abstract

Religion & Literature 196 verse, clarified by comparison to an analogous element in another poetic tradition (from the style of Ugaritic epic to the rhythms of Old English verse to the syntactic patterns of the Yupik Eskimo). By formulating the language of this comparative, conversational inquiry in terms that will be familiar not only to biblical scholars but to scholars of literature and poetry as well, Dobbs-Allsopp makes a compelling bid for biblical poetry to follow biblical narrative and take its own place in the canon of comparative literatures. The book is divided into five chapters. Each of the first four advances a critical term for the study of biblical poetry (line, rhythm, lyric, and orality), while the fifth puts this new critical idiom to work, offering an interpretation of the brief poem found in Psalm 133. In Chapter 1, Dobbs-Allsopp makes a case that the poetic line (rather than the parallelistic line-pair) constitutes the “prosodic motor and defining feature of biblical verse” (20). Reframing this poetic line not as a matter of graphic representation but as a structure that was originally vocalized, Dobbs-Allsopp explores the ways in which stylistic features like parallelism served this oral tradition by magnifying the singularity of the poetic line in the absence of visual representation—individuating and emphasizing that line as “the fulcrum of its play” (93). Chapter 2 lends new conceptual clarity to the absence of meter in biblical poetry, construing this absence not as a deficiency, but as evidence of the Bible’s participation in a poetic tradition associated with the rhythms of modern writers like Walt Whitman—a tradition we would now call “free verse.” Chapter 3 considers the predominance of “lyric” poetry in the biblical canon—exploring how, in the absence of plot, lyric exploits language, syntax, and rhythm beyond their normal capacities as an “alternative means for organizing its discourse, for demarcating boundaries, for guiding auditors through to a satisfying denouement” (191). Chapter 4 addresses the interpretive missteps that arise as a consequence of the “hyper-literate orientation” of modern readers by taking a closer look at the “informing orality” of biblical poetics. Here, Dobbs-Allsopp clarifies that many of the stylistic features of this poetic tradition—the characteristic brevity of its lines, its rhythm, even its over studied parallel structure—can be understood better in relationship to the oral traditions that shaped the original composition and reception of these poems. The remarkable strength of these chapters is that they manage not only to provide fine-grained studies of the stylistic features of biblical verse illuminated by these new terms, but to do so in a way that contributes to wider scholarly conversations about poetic lineation, free rhythm, lyric, and orality. In this way, Dobbs-Allsopp does for biblical poetry what Erich Auerbach once did for biblical narrative: ushering it into the world of comparative literature by placing it alongside the Greek classics as a different primogenitor BOOK REVIEWS 197 of the Western literary tradition that can illuminate the works that follow it in new ways. On Biblical Poetry is a master class on the Hebrew Bible’s poetic tradition. Enriching, instructive, and demanding, it has that rare quality in a work of literary criticism (or biblical scholarship for that matter) that makes readers want to return to the objects of study—the poems themselves—to test out the promise of these hypotheses and see what more can be said. Together with other recently published studies in this area, including Jacqueline Vayntrub’s Beyond Orality, this text signals a new beginning in the study of biblical poetry—a discipline that will soon require a much larger bookshelf. Ashleigh Elser Hampden-Sydney College The Baptized Muse: Early Christian Poetry as Cultural Authority Karla Pollmann Oxford University Press, 2017. vii + 269 pp. $80 cloth. In “Plato; or, the Philosopher,” Ralph Waldo Emerson comments that “[e]very book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.” That quotation is an appropriate way to begin a review of Karla Pollmann’s The Baptized Muse—for at least three reasons. First...