Divine Poems Research Articles

A Literature Review on Karabakh Women Poets of the 19th Century

The 19th century was the beginning of a period in the history of Azerbaijan in which new views, different approaches, and judgments emerged. The upheavals in social life as a matter, of course, led to the awakening of literary and artistic thoughts, and enlightenment, and elucidated the development of public, ethnic, and national identity. In the 19th century, the poetic assemblies functioning in Karabakh contributed to the development of literature, especially poetry, and the inclusion of poetry in social life and its impact on it. Thanks to the "Meclis-i Uns" and "Meclis-i Feramushan" literary assemblies, poets living in Karabakh came together and depicted the problems of the period, social life, and nature in their poems. Referring to these literary samples, it is feasible to see the view of 19th-century Karabakh. Aghabeyim Agha, Khurshidbanu Natavan, Fatma Khanim Kamina, and Ashuq Peri were female poets grown up in the Karabakh literary environment in the 19th century. Research related to the life, art, and literary personality of women poets who grew up in Karabakh was thoroughly scrutinized and investigated based on the qualitative method in the article. As a result of our research, we have come to the following conclusions; There is a need to prepare coherent comparative texts from the work of female poets. The works of these poets were published due to the permission of Soviet censorship. Poems with religious content were not included in these books, and Sufi works were presented as secular and divine poems. Keywords: Karabakh, Enlightenment, Poet, Literary Heritage, Azerbaijan.

Books and Manuscripts 2020

Books and Manuscripts 2020

John Donne : A Great Poet

John Donne is one of the greatest of English religious poets, and the poets of the 17th century on whom his influence was most deep and lasting than all religious poets. As Joan Bennett tells us this is so because his temperament was essentially religious. A man of religious temperament is constantly aware, constantly perceiving the underlying unity, the fundamental oneness of all phenomena, and the perception of such a relationship, such an inherent principle of unity, is revealed even by the imagery of the earliest poetry of Donne. No doubt Donne's religious poetry belongs to the later part of his career, to the period after his ordination, and the gloom, despair and frustration which resulted from the death of his wife, poverty, and ill-health. The earliest of his religious poems are the sonnet-sequence called La Corona and The Litanie; the best of his religious poetry is contained in the Holy Sonnets, the Divine Poems and The Three Hymns. The best of Donne's religious poetry was written only during the last phase of his career, but the nature of his imagery, even the early one, clearly indicated that his genius was religious and he was bound to take to religious poetry and to the pulpit.

Ascent: Philosophy and Paradise Lost by Tzachi Zamir

Religion & Literature 208 “Una candida cerva” from the Canzoniere; Augustine’s Confessions; Paradise Lost; and many others. This capacious range of interests makes this a particularly evocative and suggestive study; it does make Donne’s holy sonnets themselves a somewhat elusive presence in the volume, however. The first chapter only turns to “Death be not proud” on page 54 of a chapter that ends on page 56, for instance. The final chapter, again promised as a return to “Death be not proud,” discusses the sonnet itself only in the final three pages. Many of Donne’s sonnets are barely mentioned, and Donne’s other divine poems which might be of great interest for this trope are not discussed at all. These absences are both ironic (given the book’s focus on attentiveness vs. distraction) and a frustration, as many of Marno’s close readings of Donne’s poems are so very detailed, sophisticated, and suggestive. His reading of Petrarch takes seriously the notion of distraction that the “scattered rhymes” title suggests, and he parses the water images of “una candida cerva” beautifully (148). His attention to prosody in the sonnets is admirable and deftly managed. Marno’s reading of “This is my Playes last scene” rightly notes the “transient and disposable” series of images in the opening section of the poem (13). His reading of Donne’s death sonnet does (in the final chapter) fascinatingly address not only the series of unconvincing arguments in Donne’s sonnet but also the ironic revivification of Death in its final line. Framing these very intelligent readings, Marno’s scholarly contexts, though admirably comprehensive in some respects, do get oddly anchored to Martz’s and Lewalski’s (in)famous and now hoary disputes over the confessional allegiances of early modern religious verse. Marno appears to be torn about how to negotiate these battle lines. At times arguing for a synthesis of patristic and Protestant thinking, at times venturing to entertain Protestant debates, more often hearkening to Ignatian and medieval paradigms , Death Be Not Proud feels in some ways like postmodern poetic analysis within a mid-seventies frame of reference. Marno’s scholarly citations are very wide-ranging and usually current. But because the volume appears ambivalent about historical specificity, willing to avoid social intersections between religion and class, gender, or sexuality, and willing to use scriptural exegesis to build close readings, Marno’s study feels somewhat resistant to current discourses. I think by contrast of Gary Kuchar’s work, which has similar intellectual interests but which engages current questions with more ease. This oddly uncomfortable affect in Death Be Not Proud is amplified by its uneven attention to audience. In some ways Marno assumes a readership highly literate in both Christian theology and European literatures; he trusts us to follow his Greek and Latin terms and his frequent shifts from BOOK REVIEWS 209 Malebranche to Ashbery, from Kleist to Castiglione. These same shifts in the argument suggest a writer who is following his own lead rather than thinking of what his readers might be expecting. At other moments, Marno feels the need to explain to his readers what “we” need to know in order to follow his argument. “Let me open up here a brief excursus” is one example of both the organizational and prose style of Marno’s work, implying both a stream-of-consciousness argument and an ambivalent awareness of the reader’s capacities (60). Many of Marno’s claims also suffer from the dancing-about quality of the argument. The patristics are mostly present through Augustine; medieval cultures of piety are frequently referenced but rarely given primary evidence. Because Petrarch only appears briefly, Marno’s fascinating suggestion that sonnet sequences suggest a lack of attention does not really develop into an analysis of the sequence-ness of Donne’s holy sonnets. Even Ignatius, who would seem to be a central figure in this argument, does not get more than a brief mention until the fourth chapter of the book. Hence my sense that reading this monograph is more like waiting than it is like arriving. When we do arrive at a reading or an insight, Death Be Not Proud is rich...

Byron’s Early Divine Poems, Deprivation, and a Quest for Spiritual Reinforcement

Byron’s Early Divine Poems, Deprivation, and a Quest for Spiritual Reinforcement

Conflicts of Devotion: Liturgical Poetics in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century England by Daniel R. Gibbons

Reviewed by: Conflicts of Devotion: Liturgical Poetics in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century England by Daniel R. Gibbons Rhema Hokama Gibbons, Daniel R., Conflicts of Devotion: Liturgical Poetics in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century England, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2017; cloth; pp. x, 332; R.R.P. US $60.00; ISBN 9780268101343. In Daniel R. Gibbons's wide-ranging study on early modern liturgy and poetics, the question of what it means to participate in a unified spiritual community emerges as a central preoccupation for both English Protestants and Catholics. Gibbons's analysis of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer liturgies for the Communion and burial rites provides the historical and cultural foundation for his readings of the poems, which he discusses in individual chapters on Spenser's elegies, Southwell's lyric verse, Donne's divine poems, Herbert's The Temple, and Crashaw's English lyrics. Gibbon's central thesis is that the Prayerbook provided a rhetoric that enabled English worshippers to demarcate the boundaries of a unified religious community in post-Reformation England. Through its ambivalent language and prayers that could be interpreted variously to satisfy both traditionalist and Reformed worshippers alike, the Prayerbook's liturgies avoided alienating parishioners who ascribed to a range of religious allegiances — all of whom saw themselves as committed members of the nascent English church. While Gibbons largely moves away from the texts of the liturgies themselves in his readings of the poems, his claim is that the Prayerbook's language of accommodation and exclusion shapes the way poets defined religious identity and sought to include a diversity of religious beliefs in their imagined lyric communities. As a poetic device, this model of rhetorical accommodation allowed the many readers of a single poem — as Gibbons writes in his reading of Donne's Holy Sonnet 'Show me deare Christ' — to 'forge a timeless unified worshipping body' in spite of the 'multiple individual readings of a single prayer-poem' that this body of readers would likely construe (p. 162). Gibbons's study is a continuation of the kind of historicist work accomplished by recent monographs on the literary influence of the Book of Common Prayer, most prominently Ramie Targoff's Common Prayer: The Language [End Page 207] of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (University of Chicago Press, 2001) and Timothy Rosendale's Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England (Cambridge University Press, 2007). But Gibbons's emphasis on the continuity of Catholic thought in the writing and dissemination of the Prayerbook sets his study apart from the body of recent scholarship on English state worship. Indeed, one of the strengths of Gibbon's book is its inclusion of both Catholic and Protestant poets in its treatment of liturgical poetics. Although Gibbons positions the Book of Common Prayer as the central historical text in his interpretations of the poems, his study is equally inflected by a range of Catholic sources — including Augustine, Nicholas of Cusa, the Spanish mystics, and François de Sales. Gibbons's study is rewarding and worthwhile in that it serves as a reminder that the actual religious practices that we tend to label as 'Anglican' or 'Reformed', and even 'Protestant' and 'Catholic', rarely accommodate themselves to such neatly defined categories. In every chapter, Gibbons re-emphasizes the fluidity — and even self-contradictory quality — of post-Reformation English religious identity. This fluidity is what enables Gibbons to undertake parallel readings of poets who seem to write from vastly different theological commitments. For example, Gibbons makes the claim that both Spenser and Southwell respond to and challenge the cultural and psychological rifts left by the Prayerbook's Order for the Burial of the Dead — despite the fact that the former led state-directed anti-Catholic reforms in Ireland, and the latter was a Jesuit priest executed by the English state for his clandestine missionary work. Gibbons's decision to include in his study poets of diverse religious loyalties is testament to the wide-reaching cultural influence of the Book of Common Prayer, and the way that its liturgical rhetoric was appropriated and reimagined by those from opposing religious poles in Tudor and Stuart England. Rhema Hokama Singapore University of Technology and...

READING DESIRE IN THE PASTORALS OF ELIZABETH SINGER ROWE

Elizabeth Singer Rowe (1674–1737) was a prolific writer in her day who was actively engaged in the writing world of London and who made credible literary contributions that are in need of redress. Following in the tradition of Isaac Watts (1674–1748), Rowe is perhaps best known for her divine poems, particularly her biblical paraphrases and hymns. Yet it does Rowe a disservice to read her exclusively through the lens of religiosity, for in doing so we overlook the depth and complexity of her poetry. Rowe is a complicated poet, and while positioning her within a literary camp is nearly impossible, undeniably she was a pastoral poet. Although to date no scholarship treats Rowe specifically as such, the sheer volume of pastoral poems within her poetic oeuvre suggests that her attraction to the form was clearly a preoccupation. As a pastoral poet, Rowe made contributions to the form that differ from her male contemporaries. Specific points of departure include her thematic range and variety, and her complication of the pastoral narrative and its figures. Rowe uses the pastoral to explore female desires that might otherwise be silenced, and she pushes the limitations of the form by infusing elegiac and confessional qualities, making the pastoral conducive for personal discovery and lament.

John Donne’s Of the Progress of the Soul: Unfolding Contemplations on Death and a Spiritual Voyage to the Immortal World

A number of John Donne`s prose and divine poems clearly enumerate his unswerving preoccupation with human mortality and the spiritual domain after death. Donne, installed Dean of St. Paul`s Cathedral in 1621, foregrounds such thematic concerns on the basis of his religious perspectives and attitudes. The Progress of the Soul-a commemorative verse for the death of Elizabeth Drury and written along with Holy Sonnets features his key subjects of man`s death and immortal soul after his bodily extinction. The main purpose of this paper is to examine how this poem embodies the transmigration of the soul after human mortality. The article investigates how the speaker unfolds his reflections on mortality, the human world, and the soul`s entering the imperishable realm beyond death. In dealing with this matter, the paper incorporates the author`s prose and other religious pieces of works which enrich his thematic ideas on the profound voyage of the soul into the spiritual haven after the physical demise of human beings.

Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry

Reviewed by: Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry Lara Dodds (bio) Ryan Netzley . Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011. 287 + viii pages. $70.00. "How does one desire a God that one does not lack?" (3). Ryan Netzley's study of the devotional verse of Herbert, Crashaw, Donne, and Milton answers this question by identifying in these poets' works a positive model of desire founded [End Page 150] not on absence, lack or failure, but on presence, immanence and love. Drawing upon the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Netzley offers an important corrective to the dominant approaches to early modern devotional poetry, which, whether from a psychoanalytic, theological, or literary historical perspective, define desire for God as work: "a quest for God that accords with our expectations of drama and accomplishment" (6). The alternative that Netzley proposes is a model of free action in which devotional practice, or the reading of poetry, offers a means to desire without ends, a curious purposelessness that does not demand a subject. The Eucharist—that central Christian sacrament of presence—conjoins Netzley's interests in desire, reading, and poetry, and Netzley finds a parallel logic in the poetry discussed in each of his chapters and the affective response required by the sacrament. It is difficult to overestimate the significance of the Eucharist in early modern culture and thought; debates about the sacrament engage not only the problem of redemption but also problems of signification, the relations of matter to spirit, and a host of debates about Scripture, ecclesiastical authority, and the Church. Engaging with these central early modern debates, Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist offers an important re-reading of early modern devotional poetry, but it will also be of interest to a broader audience for its theoretical formulation of problems of desire, signification, and reading. The book is structured as a series of four chapters, each of which delineates the central argument for a positive model of desire for and through presence in the devotional works of a different poet. In the first chapter, Netzley shows how the Communion poetry of Herbert's The Temple substitutes "tasting" for eating and "taking up" for possessing in order to define desire and reading as "intrinsically valuable" in themselves (23). Discussed in the introduction, the first chapter, and the conclusion, Herbert's "Love (III)" illustrates the stakes of the book's argument and the difficulty of avoiding a model of desire based on lack. The poem's speaker hits all the marks of the modern subject constituted by lack, "self-possessed and possessive" (198); Love corrects and dismisses this speaker, inviting readers to choose an affective presence instead. The second chapter begins by taking issue with the frequent scholarly complaints about the "excess" of Crashaw's verse. It is conventional to describe the feelings of disgust and repulsion inspired by Crashaw's imagery, yet this commonplace results from a refusal to take seriously Crashaw's claims about poetry's power. In this chapter, Netzley shows the limitations of transgression as a critical tool; in an insight that resonates throughout the book, excess is shown [End Page 151] to collapse back into a lack of God's presence. The most far-reaching arguments of this chapter invite a reconsideration of the figures of hyperbole and metonymy. Crashaw's verse is shown to produce a "radicalization of metonymy" (76) that neutralizes the problem of idolatry. The so-called "excess" of Crashaw's notoriously sensuous liquids enjoins a recognition of immanence, "that God is really and immediately in signs" (98). The third chapter, "Loving Fear: Affirmative Anxiety in John Donne's Divine Poems," provides an important test of Netzley's argument because, of course, Donne's divine poetry has so frequently and convincingly been explained through the concept of lack. Netzley argues, by contrast, that Donne's divine poems express an "affirmative anxiety" that is not future-oriented but productive of an "attentive response" to immanence (107). This chapter on Donne clearly illustrates one of the most useful of the book's insights: within an understanding of desire based upon lack, paralysis and...

Edmund Waller's Sacred Poems

At seventy-nine, Edmund Waller published slim volume Divine Poems (1685). Augmented with a summary statement Of in Book, these fruits of his late rebirth as a sacred poet crowned final collected edition of his works printed during his lifetime (1686). But bulk of this volume still reflected how worldly concerns had dominated his long career. Go, Lovely Rose (1645) and A Panegyric to My Lord Protector (1655) are merely most well known of his many poems praising beautiful women or powerful men.1 Judging Waller's poetical devotion a representative failure, Dr. Samuel Johnson explained The ideas of Christian Theology are too simple for eloquence, too sacred for fiction, and too majestick for ornament; to recommend them by tropes and figures is to magnify by a concave mirror sidereal hemisphere.2 These strictures pay Waller's sacred verses highest compliment they have ever received. In contrast, Waller's foremost recent explicators see Divine Poems as representing only their own mediocrity. Jack G. Gilbert considers them evidence that it was not possible for Waller in his late seventies to write such poetry well; Warren L. Chernaik similarly pronounces them indifferent as poetry.3 But these commentators both make an exception not made byJohnson when they admire Of Verses. Gerald Hammond also praises poem, as exemplifying the which make seventeenth-century lyric so distinctive.4 Though Chernaik and Gilbert both attempt to see Waller whole, neither addresses apparent paradox they admire Of Verses, but not Last Verses themselves. Hammond leaves unexplained another apparent paradox: Of Verses typifies glorious imprecisions, even though he twice calls attention to accuracy of its diction.5 He adds further imprecisions of his own when he thereby introduces his study of English Poets and Poems, 1616-1660

Editorial

“Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view, That stand upon the threshold of the new.” On the Foregoing Divine Poems, 1.18 Edmund Waller 1606–1687 Today the Journal opens yet another chapter in its relatively short but eventful life history. By now each of you has seen that we finally did it: changed the cover to a new design that we hope will meet with your approval and serve us well in the future. We have made every effort to capture in the cover design a connection to our successful past, while developing a new image, commensurate with the evolving international impact of the Journal. For help in creating the cover design, we are indebted to the creative efforts of graphic artist Michael Arnaud, and the critical appraisal afforded by the Publications and Executive Committees. In addition, we acknowledge the cooperation of Blackwell Publishing and Cadmus Press for bringing into reality the ideas and images that we developed. In many ways the appearance of a new cover is ironically quite timely because it stands as a signal of continuing innovations in the Journal that will appear in 1997. In this regard, be on the lookout for mini-reviews of ever increasing scope and subject matter that will hopefully herald the emergence in the Journal of a greater number of articles dealing with topics such as phosphate homeostasis, nephrolithiasis, vitamin D metabolism and parathyroid hormone related protein, among others. In addition, in the next several months a section will appear in the Journal dedicated to topical clinical material. Encompassing a monthly segment entitled “Clinical Vignettes,” dealing with important clinical observations, and corresponding reviews dedicated to clinical matters of diagnosis and treatment, this section will provide new and necessary balance to the continually exciting basic and clinical science that appears in the Journal. Other new developments are also in the designing stage and I will announce them as the plans are solidified. Of course, I invite you to join me in relishing the memories of the past, as we stand on the threshold of the new and recognize all that the new cover design signals about the Journal. I hope that you enjoy the ride!

Book reviews

Book reviewed in this article:The Divine Poems of John Donne, edited with introduction and commentary by Helen Gardner, 2nd edition. Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press, ł9.00.C. H. SISSON, The Avoidance of Literature: Collected Essays edited by Michael Schmidt. Carcanet Press, ł7.90.The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas, edited and introduced by R. George Thomas. Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press, ł15.

The Originality of Donne's Satires

Donne's Satires customarily receive little attention. In accounts of Donne the poet they tend to be regarded as apprentice works (with only Satire III a ttracling more than passing comment). In general accounts of Elizabethan satire they are seen to rank somewhat below the achievements of Hall and Marston. Their unevenness and brevity, when compared with the more sustained work of Donne's fellow satirists in the fifteen-nineties, has no doubt contributed much to their neglect in the field of English satire, while within the corpus of Donne's poetry it would be difficult to argue that they should compete for critical attention with the Songs and Sonnets and the Divine Poems. Yet the placing of them in either the general or the particular context has resulted in a degree of injustice. Donne's failure to observe all the conventions of the Elizabethan satirical tradition is seen to be compounded by a failure to develop fully the unique tone and voice that are heard in his own later work; or, put another way, the Satires are on the one hand too 'original,' and on the other hand not quite 'original' enough. Before exploring further the nature of the critical problem raised by the Satires, however, it is worth pointing out that Donne at no stage seems to have regretted writing them. His remark to Wotton in 1600 that 'to my satyrs there belongs some feare' was presumably occasioned by the recent ban on satires and the burning of works by Marston, Davies, and Guilpin. It is fear which attaches to them, not the 'shame' which, in the same letter, he finds occasioned by the Elegies and Paradoxes. In fact he valued them to the extent of considering them worthy of careful revision as late as 1607, when they were sent to the Countess of Bedford.

SHORT NOTICES

SHORT NOTICES Francis Quarles: Hosanna or Divine Poems on the Passion of Christ and Threnodes. Edited By JOHN HORDEN. Pp xxx + 58. Liverpool: University Press, 1960. 10s. 6d. net. L. C. MARTIN L. C. MARTIN Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XIII, Issue 49, 1962, Pages 99-b–100, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XIII.49.99-b Published: 01 January 1962

Meditation and the Structure of Donne's "Holy Sonnets"

In recent years two important works dealing with Donne's Sonnets have appeared. I am referring of course to Miss Gardner's edition of The Divine Poems and to The Poetry of Meditation by Professor Louis L. Martz. Mr. Martz moves far beyond the scope of Miss Gardner's critical work, tracing the meditative tradition in poetry throughout the seventeenth century. The chief accomplishments of Miss Gardner's work are a regrouping of the poems and a thorough annotation. It is interesting to note that both Miss Gardner and Professor Martz reached independently several conclusions in regard to the structure of the Holy Sonnets :

Divine Poems of John Donne, for Mixed Chorus, a cappella

Divine Poems of John Donne, for Mixed Chorus, a cappella

REVIEWS

REVIEWS Get access John Donne. The Divine Poems. Edited with Introduction and Commentary by HELEN GARDNER. pp. xcviii + 147. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. 25s. net . J. B. LEISHMAN J. B. LEISHMAN Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume V, Issue 17, 1954, Pages 74–83, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/V.17.74 Published: 01 January 1954

Book Review: John Donne: The Divine Poems

Book Review: John Donne: The Divine Poems

REVIEWS

REVIEWS Get access John Donne: The Divine Poems. Edited with Introduction and Commentary by HELEN GARDNER. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1952. Pp. xcviii+148. 25s. F. M. POWICKE F. M. POWICKE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume IV, Issue 2, October 1953, Pages 280–281, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/IV.2.280 Published: 01 October 1953

“Divine poems, by Christiana,” of Ramsey, Hunts, 1792

“Divine poems, by Christiana,” of Ramsey, Hunts, 1792