Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-5xszh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T12:34:08.579Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

12 - Seventeenth-century poetry 2: Herbert, Vaughan, Philips, Cowley, Crashaw, Marvell

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2011

Michael O'Neill
Affiliation:
University of Durham
Get access

Summary

Whether a lyric poem is addressed to a friend, to a lover or to God, its most intimate relationship of all is with the second person singular. It provides, or purports to provide, a privileged glimpse into the speaker’s private thoughts, which are sometimes the writer’s own; but its attention to personal address also has the effect of directing attention away from the poet. For this and other reasons, it defies easy distinctions between private and public. The following chapter will examine a number of issues arising from this continuum, each of which has a particular relevance to seventeenth-century conditions. What does it mean to write with God as your implied reader, in an age so conscious of the difference between religious denominations? How do coteries act to provide a halfway house between an audience of two and a wider, undifferentiated public, and how do the conditions of manuscript circulation reinforce this? How do writers of this era perform, celebrate and fictionalise relationships with their forebears, their contemporaries and their addressees? How did the Civil War inspire poets’ injunctions towards public action, or celebrations of the retired life?

The career of the first poet to be considered, George Herbert, has often been read as epitomising a retreat from public to private. Beginning with Herbert’s first biographer Izaak Walton, commentators on Herbert’s life have noted a seeming imbalance between the glittering prizes of his early years – Public Orator at Cambridge, Member of Parliament – and his modest latter-day role as a parish priest. Walton, and some subsequent biographers, have seen this move towards religious retirement as prompted in the first instance by a failure of worldly hopes. But looking at his English literary remains – the Latin ones tell a rather different story – Herbert’s commitment to religious devotion and devotional writing does coexist with a certain intolerance of secular activity.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Beal, Peter, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in 17th-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), ch. 5.Google Scholar
Corbett, Margery and Lightbown, Ronald, The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-Page in England, 1550–1660 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 10–14, 18–19.Google Scholar
Davidson, Peter (ed.), Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse, 1625–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
Duncan-Jones, Katherine ed. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, (London: Arden, 1997).
Hobby, Elaine, ‘Katherine Philips: Seventeenth-Century Lesbian Poet’, in Hobby, Elaine and White, Chris (eds.), What Lesbians Do in Books (London: The Women’s Press, 1991), pp. 183–204.Google Scholar
Hopkins, David and Mason, Tom ed. ‘On the Death of Mr Crashaw’, in Abraham Cowley: Selected Poems, (Manchester: Fyfield, 1994), lines 65–72.
Maltby, Judith, ‘From Temple to Synagogue: “Old” Conformity in the 1640s-1650s and the Case of Christopher Harvey’, in Lake, Peter and Questier, Michael (eds.), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), pp. 88–116.Google Scholar
Martz, Louis L., The Poetry of Meditation, first edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954).Google Scholar
Patrides, C. A. ed. The Complete English Poems of John Donne, (London: J.M. Dent, 1985).
Rambuss, Richard, For a reading of Crashaw which stresses the homoerotic implications of his verse, Closet Devotions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Randall, Dale, Winter Fruit: English Drama, 1642–1660 (Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
Ravelhofer, Barbara, ‘News Drama: The Tragic Subject of Charles I’, in Grant, Teresa and Ravelhofer, Barbara (eds.), English Historical Drama, 1500–1660: Forms Outside the Canon (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008).Google Scholar
Schaar, Claes, Marino and Crashaw, ‘Sospetto d’Herode’: A Commentary, (Lund: Gleerup, 1971).Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William, As You Like It, ed. Dusinberre, Juliet (London: Arden, 2006), Act 2 Scene 1, line 17.Google Scholar
Smith, Nigel ed. The Poems of Andrew Marvell, (Harlow: Longman, 2007).
Smith, Nigel ed. The Poems of Andrew Marvell, (Harlow: Longman, 2007).
Trotter, David, The Poetry of Abraham Cowley (London: Macmillan, 1979), ch. 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Veevers, Erica, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Walton, Izaak, ‘Life of Mr George Herbert’, in Saintsbury, George (ed.), The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert and Robert Sanderson (London: Oxford University Press, 1927).Google Scholar
West, Philip, Henry Vaughan’s ‘Silex Scintillans’: Scripture Uses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, George Walton ed. The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1974), pp. 494–5.
Williams, Walton; The Poems, English, Latin and Greek, of Richard Crashaw, ed. Martin, L. C. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×