The Redemption of the Theological Ideal in the Baroque: An Analysis of Donne, Herbert, and Marvell’s Poetry

Abstract

The baroque is a term that its meaning, apart from its etymology, is not by any means clear. There are a lot of inconsistencies in the descriptions which have been given of the characteristics of baroque art. One of such disagreements is regarding the kind of mentality that it supposedly represents. Whereas a lot of critics—if not the majority of them—seem to believe that baroque art represents the kind of mind that was overwhelmed by existential fears, Gilles Deleuze represents the baroque subject as being capable of resolving such fears. He believes that baroque artists and philosophers were able to redeem the theological ideal, or the idea that the world is meaningful. They did so, he explains, by inventing new principles that were capable of proving that the world is perfectly harmonious despite the existence of evil. The aim of this study is to establish a correlation between, and provide new readings of, some major seventeenth-century poems, namely Donne’s “Anniversaries,” Herbert’s “Virtue” and Marvell’s “The Garden,” by showing that they indicate a struggle to save the theological ideal, or to prove that the world is perfectly harmonious–which is according to Deleuze characteristic of the baroque.