The Emotive Image: Jesuit Poetics in the English Renaissance

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS51 Anthony Raspa, The Emotive Image: Jesuit Poetics in the English Renaissance. Fort Worth, Texas: Texas Christian Univ. Press, 1983. 173 pp. $19.50. by Thomas P. Roche, Jr. Ever since the Reformation historians have tended to side with the reformers and to play down the positive aspects of Tridentine Catholicism. It is an implicit assumption of postRenaissance historiography. More recently literary critics have joined this game by trying to make us aware of a Protestant poetics, for the most part freeing itself from the trammels of a Medieval poetics — undefined, unexplored except for the mandatory quotation from Augustine, Aquinas, and Dante's Letter to Can Grande. I have found it difficult to accept this new attempt to put down ten contentious centuries of critical opinion in order to pump up the claims of an originality in the Renaissance that ignores the medieval heritage of English poetry in the Renaissance, particularly because its choice of terms reminds me of my colleague Hans Aarsleff's early experience of European history in his kindergarten days in Denmark. The lesson began with the concept of an "olive oil line" that ran across Spain and southern France. Above that line people were clean, Protestant, and used butter; below that line they were dirty, Catholic, used olive oil, and sang in the streets. The "olive oil line" presents a very neat paradigm for determining many things about European history — in particular, implicit prejudice. I am not sure that a Protestant poetics is a good thing for English literary studies simply because all the books that I have read for the past twenty years that have "poetics" in their titles have been making a sometimes interesting, sometimes silly, attempt to link Renaissance poetics with post-Romantic theories of creativity: the "power of the imagination" and "felt experience" abound. A "Protestant poetics" links both the "olive oil line" syndrome and a pre-Post Modernist theory, and that can surely not be a good thing for English literary studies since it fails to discriminate salient formal and intellectual issues that might characterize the poetics of the poetry written before a poetics was part of our critical jargon. To complete the "olive oil line" of poetics Professor Raspa offers us a Jesuit poetics, based 52BOOK REVIEWS tenuously on the meditational techniques of St. Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, which Raspa alleges is the ground of the poetry of Jasper Heywood, Robert Southwell, John Donne, William Alabaster, Richard Crashaw, and EIdred Revett. The simple act of naming these six poets as part of a coherent "tradition" makes the distaff side of "Protestant poetics" take on the vulnerability of the Maginot line. What purpose this book will serve is hard to say, for it is neither new readings of old poets nor an ordinary history of a segment of the English literary Renaissance. Its argument is contorted and often contradictory, and when one finally feels that one has grasped Raspa's new slant, he reverts to an older view of seventeenth-century religious poetry that most of us have been reading and teaching since the publication of Louis Martz's The Poetry of Meditation (1954). Raspa's main idea is that a "Jesuit poetics" evolved from St. Ignatius' Spiritual Exorcises. His further claim is that this new "poetics" is responsible for a monumental change in world-view to the Baroque in which man's sense of self and his relation to the world of sense changed radically. This seems to me a very dubious proposition, and Raspa does not do much to allay doubts in his own description of his project on page one of chapter one, entitled "Image, Affections and Love": The study argues that Jesuit poetics were constituted of three main elements — "image," "affections," and "love" — and that they influenced English poets for diverse historical and literary reasons. The issues brought up by this study are at once wide and particular. What is meant by "image," "affections," and "love"? How are they meditative? How were they poetic? To answer these questions adequately a new world view succeeding to the Elizabethan world picture in the Counter Reformation mind must be described in the second chapter. Such a step is...