Modern Poems Research Articles

‘where we put our suffering’: Tony Conran's Elegiac Modernism

Translator, essayist, and poet Tony Conran (1931–2013) is an underappreciated figure of twentieth-century poetry, whose productive late-career phase began in 1993, when his book-length, modernist poem Castles earned him the runner-up slot in both the BBC Wales Writer of the Year Award and the Wales Book of the Year Awards. In this discussion, Conran's Castles is considered as an example of elegiac modernism. Formally experimental and linguistically dense, the poem uses multiple mythic and historic frames of reference to situate both personal and public elegies. Analysis of this poem sheds light on Conran's engagement with both high modernism and the centuries-old Welsh poetic tradition. Moreover, the variety and quality of his output from 1993 marks him as a significant voice of contemporary poetry. Situated within critical debates surrounding modernism's newly expanded geographical and temporal scope, this article draws on Conran's unpublished correspondence and commentary in order to enrich our understanding of Castles and its specific Welsh modernist context.

Who Bought Paris? Hope Mirrlees, the Hogarth Press, and the Circulation of Modernist Poetry

This essay explores the early circulation history of Hope Mirrlees's Paris. Published by the Hogarth Press in 1920, Paris was neglected for nearly ninety years, though it has recently been republished and reevaluated. By examining the surviving Hogarth Press order book, the essay shows that Paris, unlike more famous works by T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, rarely reached readers who might have appreciated and advertised its poetic experiments. The essay uses this history to reflect on what sort of poem Paris was in 1920, and what circulation history means more broadly for criticism's recovery of forgotten modernist poems.

Modern Uzbek poems azimova

The article is about the modern Uzbek poem is a completely new phenomenon that has absorbed the features of the epic, classical written dastan and poems mastered from European literature, and as a novel is an “emerging genre”. In the poem, in addition to the plastic depiction of reality, non-plastic elements, such as the author’s emotional attitude to reality, his reflections, acquire special significance. The phenomenon of “romanization” taking place in modern poems proves that this genre continues to form. Evaluation of the poem from the point of view of the poetics of artistic modality, taking into account the state of decanonization of the genre shows how great its possibilities as a genre are. The process of romanization, taking place in the structure of the poems, shows that in them the hero has lost his status as an epic hero, and instead of him a person, a personality, has come to the center of the image.

The Paraclete and Fürsprache in Hölderlin's Homecoming

The Paraclete and Fürsprache in Hölderlin's Homecoming Rüdiger Campe (bio) Characterizing the poet's task through invoking comparative roles has been common practice throughout Renaissance and Humanist poetry. Early modern poetics revels in historical speculation on mythical heroes and singers, on kings and prophets as the precursors to the poet, and by doing so it reaches back to antiquity and, with intensified significance, to early Christianity. Hölderlin's poems mention the prophet and the rhapsode, the bard or the one who sings on behalf of the congregation and, more often than not, they revolve around the constitutive pair of the epic hero's fame and the poem which is its echo and vessel. Not for the first time, to be sure, but with new importance and urgency, in outlining such comparative roles, Hölderlin's poems define the situation of their own foundation. Rather than portraying the one who speaks, they determine their own procedures of addressing others with or without authority, legitimation and success. Invoking comparative roles in Hölderlin is less about portraying or staging the poet than invoking the place and the situation of the modern poem, which is—in the view of Max Kommerell's 1943 Thoughts on Poems (Gedanken über Gedichte)—the written poem. Arguably none of the comparative roles of the poet in Hölderlin is so precisely suited and crafted to delineating the poem's situation as the figure of the paraclete. It may help that in the biblical reference text, the Gospel of John (John 14–15 and 1 John 2), the paraclete hardly is a figure we can point at. In line with the Greek word's meaning—parakalein, in Latin advocare—the paraclete is, first, the one who is called at the side of defendants in order to speak on behalf of them [End Page 542] in front of a judge or a body of judges. This figure came onto the European stage with Apollo who, in the court scene of Aeschylus's Eumenides, lingers in the background and then emerges suddenly at Orest's side in the moment when the matricide no longer knows how to respond to the pressing questions of the Erinyes who act as prosecutors. Jesus Christ, the son, becomes humanity's advocate at the Father's house when he has disappeared from the disciples' sight and presence. Intimately linked to the absent Christ is, however, secondly, the other paraclete—a non-figure and a person who exists only in symbolic ways—who is identified as the Holy Spirit, and who maintains the lines of communication with the humans on earth throughout the time of Christ's absence. In this function, whether still Christ himself or the Holy Spirit, the paraclete is not an advocate who speaks to the Father on behalf of humankind but he is what Luther translates as Tröster and the King James Bible as the Comforter (John 14:16f.).1 The concept of the paraclete bridges the internal differences between advocate and comforter and takes on the persons of the Son as well as the Spirit. The paraclete, we might say, is too much at the same time to coalesce in a single picture or any picture at all. Zie* (which I use here as a substitute for he/she/it) is the process of personification rather than a distinct person (a person with or without a face). Zie* performs acts of disappearance and reappearance, rather than having any fixed form of appearance. Faceless or endowed with more than one face, the paraclete defines the situation of privileged access to the sphere of truth and judgment while maintaining the lines of communication with those who lack such access. The paracletic situation, it might be added, is the communicative pattern which is at the basis of all poetical figuration in the Western tradition. This is so at least as far as poetics, in its turn, has had a rhetorical substructure since Hellenistic and Roman times. The situation of the one speaking for others to the Other, the situation in court and, in derivative ways, at the forum, is the internal condition for all practice and theory of...

The Rhetoric of Whiteness and the Parallel Text in Nidhal Al-Qasim's Poetry: An Analytic Approach to Writing on Water and Mud

This paper deals with a number of techniques and parallel texts on which the modern poem relies, such as whiteness, title, opening and conclusion. The paper examines the poems of one of the young contemporary poets, Nidhal Al-Qasim. The researcher applied the reader-response approach in his analysis of the poems depending on the role of the recipient in deciphering the code of the texts because these texts are based on implication and suggestiveness.

К изучению источников по духовной культуре олетов Хулун-Буира

The article studies some sources that deal with certain aspects inherent to spiritual culture of Hulun Buir Olots (PRC). The work is topical enough since the ethnic group is small, and its size tends to further decrease. Insight into various aspects of history and culture of Hulun Buir Olots may be instrumental in clarifying individual issues of the historical and cultural unity of Western Mongols — Oirats (until the middle of the 18th century) — and reconstructing certain elements of their traditional culture. Goals. The paper aims to identify and investigate sources in Classical and modern Mongolian (Cyrillic) containing data on folklore, religion, and the formation of Olots in Hulun Buir. Results. The study reveals spiritual culture of the ethnic group is still characterized by many features typical for that of the Oirats. So, Olots of Hulun Buir have preserved the folk song Altai Khangai, songs and legends about the Oirat leader Galdan Boshogtu Khan. The lingering folk songs performed by Olots of Hulun Buir are similar to the those of Olots in Khovd (Mongolia). The article also examines pastoral songs, shamanic invocations, legends about the struggle between shamans and Buddhist priests. It is noteworthy that the first Buddhist monastery called Buyan Tsugluulagch was founded in 1785, and contributed a lot to the strengthening of Buddhism in the region. Olots paid great attention to the development of school education. For example, Zhalfun (a common clerk) founded a home school in an ordinary yurt around the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was teaching Mongolian and Manchu writing. Master Buyantogtokh founded an elementary school during the Manchukuo period and his student Ts. Hada grew to become a prominent scientist. The work also analyzes modern poems of some Olot intellectuals about Anu Khatun (Galdan Boshogtu Khan’s wife), school, etc. The study of Olot proverbs shows some of them belong to the general Mongolian cluster, and some have analogies in the Buryat and Barga (Barghut) languages. Moreover, the study discovers that until recently Olots of Hulun Buir have had storytellers that could recite the Jangar epic. Conclusions. Olots of Hulun Buir have a rich spiritual culture, and some elements of the latter go back to the common Oirat cultural heritage. At the same time, the spiritual culture of the ethnic group has its own local characteristics resulting from their long stay in Hulun Buir.

AN ANALISYS OF FEELING LOVE AND HATE IN SYLVIA PLATH’S POEM “DADDY”

Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy" remains one of the most controversial modern poems ever written. The aim of this research was to find the expresses of the aouthor feeling in the poem. The method used in this research was qualitative method with narrative approach. It showed the contradictory feelings between love as well as great hatred and disappoints feelings to her beloved daddy who does not gave any affection to her as a biological daughter. The author begins with her present understanding of her father and the kind of man that he was. As Daddy progresses, the readers begins to realize that the author has not always hated her father. She has not always seen him as a brute, although she makes it clear that he always has been oppressive. The author did not know anything apart from her father’s mentality, and so she prays for his recovery and then mourns his death. She even wishes to join him in death. The love came from Plath seeing her father as God when she was a child and from an obsessive need on the Plath’s part to love and to be loved. Meanwhile, the hate came from an intense, deep-rooted fear she felt towards her father, who completely dominated her life, viewing her unresolved feelings for her father as the root of all her pain and suffering. Plath uses various images to describe how she viewed her father. The images she uses change throughout the poem, causing the attitudes she communicates about her father to be inconsistent.

Organ Poem in the Music of European Composers: Modern Projections of the Genre

Relevance of study. The features of the modern poem for the organ are considered on the example of “Edith Stein” by Carlotta Ferrari (Italy) and “Voice of Memory” by Vladimir Guba (Ukraine). The relevance of the topic caused by the interest in the poem genre for the organ by both composers and performers. At the same time there is lack of musicology literature on this issue, which determines the need for genre-style attribution of organ works with a similar name.Main Objective. The purpose of the article is to determine the genre parameters of a poem for organ based on the example of works by composers of the second half of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. The objectives of the study are to determine the prerequisites for the formation of a poem for an organ as an independent genre unit and to compare the strategies of reading the genre by composers of Western European and Eastern European cultural formations.Methodology. The research methodology is based on the use of: the historical-typological method in determining the prerequisites for the formation of the poem genre for the organ and the historical stages of its development, the structural analysis method — in determining the form of works, the method of genre-style analysis — in determining additional genre-style parameters of poems, the semantic method analysis — in determining the features of the software component, as well as the method of comparative analysis when comparing the poems of K. Ferrari and V. Guba.Results/Finding and Conclusions. It is established that a poem for an organ is a species variety of a romantic instrumental poem, which affected the absence of clear boundaries, instability and potential variability of the poetic genre. It was revealed that the dynamics of the development of the organ poem demonstrates a gradual increase in the influence of the traditions of ancient organ music on it. It has been determined that poems for an organ of the turn of the twentieth — early 21 century demonstrate a free interpretation by composers of a genre invariant with a general tendency to mix genre traditions of romantic and baroque music. The poem “Edith Stein” by C. Ferrari and “The Voice of Memory” by V. Guba reveal similarities in a number of parameters (program, picturesqueness, contrast and dynamics of internal processes, monothemаtism, etc.). It was established that it was the difference in the mental prerequisites of the composers of the West European and East European cultural formations, expressed in the dissimilarity of the interpretation of the organ timbre, that influenced the principles of reading the genre. The religious programmatic nature of the poem by C. Ferrari became the reason for using a choral quote placed in the framework of Baroque genres (preludes, passacalia, small polyphonic cycle) and updated by means of repetitive techniques. Deprived of religious connotations, V. Guba’s poem is solved in a traditionally romantic way: while maintaining the main parameters of the genre, the degree of “emotional temperature” rises in it, which turns the opus into a lyrical and dramatic narrative.

O TRABALHO LITERÁRIO PRESENTE NO POEMA MODERNISTA COBRA NORATO: UMA LEITURA DA TRADIÇÃO NA RUPTURA.

Além de empenharem-se por uma autonomia cultural brasileira, é sabido que as obras nascidas sob a égide ideológica da Semana de 22 esforçaram-se em desprezar convictamente a tradição e os cânones formais. Cobra Norato, poema maior de Raul Bopp, publicado pela primeira vez em 1931, pretendeu confirmar tais premissas. Entretanto, no substrato do folclore amazônico que permeia esta poesia, podemos observar um trabalho literário que recupera metáforas e insumos clássicos. Solicitando a noção de pathosformel (Warburg, 2010), o presente artigo investiga como a linguagem poética de Cobra Norato (1931) repete magistralmente o imaginário mítico em sua macro e microestruturas, apontando para uma noção secular sobre arte – e por conseguinte sobre a Literatura - como artefato estético. Em paralelo a tal questão, este trabalho analisa como signos comuns à cultura clássica atravessam esta poesia de corrente modernista. Veremos assim, que o modo de refazer poeticamente o mito serpentário não se furtará ao diálogo com a antiguidade greco-latina, sugerindo a sobrevivência da tradição na ruptura.

Aspects and Significance of Korean Modern Poems with Photography as Subject Matters 2

Aspects and Significance of Korean Modern Poems with Photography as Subject Matters 2

Authorship and Unity of the Classical Arabic Poem through the Lens of Collaborative Composition

Abstract When a classical Arabic poem lacked a noticeable degree of thematic coherence and formal structure, it was at risk of foreign intervention aiming to improve it. Who was recognized in such a case as the author of the poem and on which grounds? This article looks at the interrelated questions of the poem’s unity and its authorship through the lens of collaborative poetry that was practiced by completing verse composed in the past. It presents an analysis of poetic collaboration cases from the second/eighth century to the Ayyubid era, and discusses different practical approaches of poets to authorship questions related to the earlier source poem and their own later completion. In the third/ninth century, as an expansive reservoir of ancient and modern poems became increasingly available, we occasionally notice the marks of plagiary, rather than forgery, on collaborative poems of this type. At the same time, and based on this very expansion, kinds of legitimate poetic influence can be detected in the completions of the later poets. Remarkably, poetic intervention did not cease and the poem conceptually did not achieve an inviolable status, when the scholars replaced the transmitters as the authorities on poetry around the third/ninth century and throughout the period under study. Nevertheless, the cultural domain for reshaping earlier verse changed, and the repertoire of poetry considered as “fair game” for this practice was narrowed down based on quality considerations.

Shuddering Century: Futurist Poetry, Colonial Korea, and Industrial Warfare

This article examines the reception of European futurism in colonial Korea in the early-to- mid-1930s through the writings of Kim Ki-rim and O Chang-hwan, both of whom composed over the course of 1934 long modernist poems engaging with modern warfare and global imperialism—Kim’s “Weather Map” (Kisangdo, p. 1935) and O’s “War” (Chŏnjaeng, 1934, unpublished). My central

近代詩의 剽竊과 模作 樣相 - 『東亞日報』 所載 ｢文壇探照燈｣을 中心으로

近代詩의 剽竊과 模作 樣相 - 『東亞日報』 所載 ｢文壇探照燈｣을 中心으로

AN EXPOSURE OF THE PROBLEMS OF SPINSTERS AS DEPICTED IN THE MALAYSIAN TAMIL MODERN POEMS BY USING EVENTS FROM THE RAMAYANA EPIC

Purpose of the study---The major objective of the research is to analyse how the events from the epic poem Ramayana are used in three Malaysian Tamil modern poems to portray the dilemma of the present-day spinsters. Methodology: The design of this study is qualitative method and the method of descriptive analysis has also been used. Main Findings: The findings show that the selected three Malaysian Tamil modern poems have been written to illustrate the problems faced by spinsters by using two events from the Ramayana. Of the three poems, one poem uses the event featuring Akalikai waiting for Rama's arrival to release her from her cursed life and two other poems showcase Sita waiting for the coming of Rama to break the bow and marry her. Applications of this study: This study is useful in finding out the effectiveness of using situations from epics to the poems of modern days in drawing examples, guidances and reflections so as to understand and find solutions to the problems of spinsters in the Malaysian Indian society of today. Novelty/Originality of this study: Problems of spinsters as depicted in Tamil modern poems reflect the reality faced by these people in the real-life of today. The poems do not claim to have a continuity of these problems from the past. The research claims to be the first such attempt to do a comparative study with an ancient literature, the Ramayana epic, in finding the similarities and differences of these problems in various distant time frames. © 2020, Hampstead Psychological Associates. All rights reserved.

A Portrait of the Poet as a Young Man: Noteworthy Omission in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son

A Portrait of the Poet as a Young Man:Noteworthy Omission in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son Peter Grybauskas (bio) But if we speak of a Cauldron, we must not wholly forget the Cooks. There are many things in the Cauldron, but the Cooks do not dip in the ladle quite blindly. Their selection is important. —J.R.R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-stories" (OFS 47) Possibly he was a member of Byrhtnoð's well-born heorðwerod, who missed the battle and happened to be a practised poet. —E. V. Gordon, on the identity of the anonymous author of The Battle of Maldon (1937) (22) For the purpose of this modern poem, it is suggested that Torhthelm (Totta) afterwards, when the duke's body has been brought to its long home at Ely, composes the poem, The Battle of Maldon. —J.R.R. Tolkien, Bodleian Library Tolkien MS 5 No authorial move would seem more plainly at odds with the elitist view of Tolkien as pedant—as writer of bloated, overwrought prose or laundry lists—than that of omission-by-excision: a strike-out here, a shelved word, passage, or chapter there. Yet omit he did, and often to great effect. In Tolkien's letters, he broaches the subject of omission on occasion, noting that such editorial decisions are often made according to the exigencies of narrative pacing and focus. On the links between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, he noted that these "were mostly written or sketched out, but cut out to lighten the boat." A measure of this cutting-room material finds its way into the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings, to be sure, but even there Tolkien implies that narrative [End Page 163] economy was a matter of some concern. Where, for instance, Tolkien chronicles the build-up to Bilbo's admission to the dwarf party to the Lonely Mountain, "the difficulties that Gandalf had with Thorin," he notes, "are omitted" (Letters 334). He was also famously keen to characterize his role in the creation of the text "as a 'recorder' only," and, in this role, to raise an important distinction between omission on the one hand, and error or untruth on the other: The faults that may appear in my record are, I believe, in no case due to errors, that is statements of what is not true, but omissions, and incompleteness of information, mostly due to the necessity of compression, and to the attempt to introduce information en passant in the course of narrative which naturally tended to cut out many things not immediately bearing on the tale. (Letters 289) While undoubtedly frustrating to certain readers, omissions are not, in Tolkien's view, to be seen as narrative flaws or authorial blunders. On the contrary, in this mode of recorder or chronicler, he goes so far as to prescribe omission, quite apart from its benefit to pacing and narrative buoyancy, for its virtue of lending an added air of realism to literary works: I feel it is better not to state everything (and indeed it is more realistic, since in chronicles and accounts of 'real' history, many facts that some enquirer would like to know are omitted, and the truth has to be discovered or guessed from such evidence as there is). (Letters 354) In placing such an emphasis on the role of omission in his texts, Tolkien seems almost to be taking a page from the manual of another 20th-century writer scarred by experiences in the Great War, Ernest Hemingway. While there is no evidence that Hemingway and Tolkien read one another's work, the American's now-legendary "Iceberg Theory" of omission endures as an effective model and a remarkably valuable analogue to the "impression of depth" so essential to Tolkien's whole literary project.1 As such, I give here a brief overview of the Iceberg's development over the course of Hemingway's career, followed by some preliminary considerations of its applicability to the study of Tolkien's works. The story goes that Hemingway experienced something of an epiphany during the writing of his 1923 short story "Out of Season." [End Page 164...

현대시 읽기를 통한 문학적 상상력이 ‘자기 효능감’에 미치는 영향

현대시 읽기를 통한 문학적 상상력이 ‘자기 효능감’에 미치는 영향

근대시 형성기의 율문일치(律文一致) 개념정립을 위한 시론(試論) - 김억의 시론(詩論)를 중심으로

근대시 형성기의 율문일치(律文一致) 개념정립을 위한 시론(試論) - 김억의 시론(詩論)를 중심으로

Beckett's Early Verse and the Modernist Long Poem: A Study of ‘Enueg I’

The premise of the article is the contention that Beckett studies have been focused too much on the philosophical, cultural and psychological dimensions of his established canon, at the expense of the artistry. That research on Beckett's work is issue-driven rather than otherwise, and the slender extant body of criticism specifically on his poetic achievements bears no comparison with the massive exploration of the other facets of Beckett's artistic activity. The critical neglect of Beckett's poetry may not be commensurate with the quality of his verse. And it is in the spirit of remedying this oversight that the present article is offered, focusing on ‘Enueg I’, a representative poem from Echo's Bones, which exhibits all the salient features of Beckett's early poetry. It is argued that Beckett's early verse display the twofold influence, that of the transatlantic Modernism of Eliot and Pound, and of French poetry, specifically the visionary and experimental works of Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and the surrealists. Furthermore, the article also demonstrates that ‘Enueg I’ testifies to Beckett's ambition to compose a complex long Modernist poem in the vein of The Waste Land or The Cantos. Beckett's ‘Enueg I’ has much in common with Eliot's exemplary disjunctive Modernist long poem. Both poems are premised on the acutely felt cultural crisis and display the similar tenor in their ending. Finally, they both close with the vision of the doomed and paralyzed world, and the prevalent sense of sterility and dissolution. In the subsequent analysis, which takes up the bulk of the article, careful attention is paid to the patterning of the verbal material, including also the most fundamental level, that of the arrangements of phonemes, with a view to uncovering the underlying network of sound patterns, which contributes decisively to the semantic dimension of the poem.

Interpreting poetry for teaching about style

This paper investigates a series of problems which may appear in the process of literary text interpretation, especially texts belonging to the lyric poetry genre, in view of teaching certain stylistic analysis techniques at the university level. Teaching in practice shows that one of the major difficulties that undergraduates can face in their stylistic approach to such a text consists in the correct decoding of its theme and message. The main objective of this paper is therefore to examine and interpret the external form of the analysed text meant to lead to its internal form. A configuration of the perimeter of this investigation involves certain methodological aspects belonging to the field of linguistic stylistics and, partially, to the domains of pragmatics and general semiotics. Implicitly, the analytical instruments to be used are selected from those specific to the aforementioned domains. The demonstrative analysis is applied to two modern Romanian poems, selected according to the following principle: the texts must contain enough aspects to create difficulties in reception and which require various stylistic approaches.

The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English Literature and Theology by Paul Cefalu

Religion & Literature 118 The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English Literature and Theology Paul Cefalu Cambridge University Press, 2018. 392 pp. $81.00 hardcover. Paul Cefalu has written a definitive account of Johannine theology’s influence on early modern English poetry and its theological milieus. This project is an intervention into recent decades’ prolonged interest in Pauline thought and early modern literature. Cefalu acknowledges this tradition of Pauline scholarship and avers not only that John was just as influential as Paul on early modern English writers but that, with respect to Christology, pneumatology, and soteriology, John may even have been the more significant of the two. Divergences from Pauline thought do not overly preoccupy the book, however. Instead, comparisons are made more frequently to the Synoptic gospels, as in Cefalu’s early reference to the distinct fusion of Christology and pneumatology in the Fourth Gospel’s account of Christ’s baptism. There, John the Baptist remarks, “he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me, Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending, & remaining on him, the same is he which baptizeth with the holy Ghost” (5; John 1:32-3). Whereas the Synoptics arguably construe a lower view of Christ’s divinity, “[f]or John,” Cefalu comments, “the Spirit affirms the power of God through the presence of the Son” (5). The book is organized topically through a sequence of Johannine themes, all of which in some way fall under the general banner of John’s “high Christolology” (285). These are the doctrine of Christ’s eternal preexistence and a correspondingly high view of his incarnation; a kerygmatic view of the Atonement as revelatory and oriented towards believers’ sanctification; a perspective on the realization of eschatological purification in the present rather than in an apocalyptic future; a theology of assurance in salvation through abiding with Christ; and a rhetorical strategy that presents these four theological themes by leading readers through a journey from misunderstanding to revelation. In addition to these five expressly foregrounded categories, other recurring topoi include the mutual indwelling of the Father and the Son, the doctrine of free grace, the symbolic and sacramental significance of blood and water, God as love, a political theology of kosmos, and intimacy or “Christ-mysticism” (317). Cefalu does not delve into questions about the authorship of John’s writings —the Gospel, epistles, and The Revelation. Indeed, there is little biblical criticism in the book. Instead, Johannine theology is introduced primarily through readings of such early modern writers as George Herbert, Henry BOOK REVIEWS 119 Vaughan, Edward Taylor, Richard Crashaw, John Donne, John Milton, and Thomas Traherne. What is Johannine theology after all, Cefalu asks, if not the commonality found in the reception of its pericopes and vocabularies in later literature? Johannine theology is dialectical, taking the form of a speech act of revelation, both circular and post-secular: “Johannine soteriology and theology likewise were sacralizing and enchanting to those early moderns who pledged a Johannine confession of Christ” (36). Early moderns discovered a theology of revelation in John, just as the Jesus depicted in the Fourth Gospel is the revealer of truth and salvation. At regular intervals, The Johannine Renaissance sharpens into detailed interpretations of early modern poems. In the fourth chapter, for example, Cefalu reorganizes observations about glorification, assurance, and revelation that feature in other chapters around the question of how early modern poets follow John’s divergence from the Synoptics’ largely ethical treatment of love—love of neighbor, one’s responsibility to love God—committing instead to the ontological dimensions of God as love. The chapter’s most significant examples come from Herbert, highlighted by a reading of “Assurance.” The poem concludes with the ontological statement: “What for it self love once began, / Now love and truth will end in man” (190). This is “one of Herbert’s most puzzling, hieroglyphic poems” because of the ambiguity of the singular “thought” that haunts the speaker’s belief in the assurance of salvation. Cefalu asks that we consider 1 John, chapter 3, which maintains that “God is greater than our heart” (191). The larger context of this passage, however, includes a discussion of Cain who wields...