IX * Milton and Poetry, 1603-1660

This chapter has five sections: 1. General; 2. Milton; 3. Donne; 4. Herbert; 5. Marvell. Section 1 is by Ken Simpson; section 2 is by Gina Hausknecht; section 3 is by Holly Faith Nelson; section 4 is by Paul Dyck; section 5 is by Alvin Snider. If anything can be inferred about works published in this area in 2006 it might be that biographical and author-centred approaches to early modern poetry and culture are making comebacks. Graham Parry's The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation: Glory, Laud and Honour is an especially noteworthy example of this trend. Throughout the book Parry moves from complex details to lucid generalizations in a narrative mode that only a scholar in complete control of his material can manage successfully. While acknowledging the short duration of the ‘beauty of holiness’ movement and the difficulty of naming the upsurge in creative activity devoted to the English church in the 1630s—‘Laudian’, ‘High Church’, ‘Baroque’, ‘sacramental’, and ‘Counter-Reformation’ are all used at different times—Parry does not hesitate to trace its intellectual and spiritual roots to Andrewes and Hooker and to outline the contributions of key figures: John Cosin, Richard Neile, Matthew Wren, Jeremy Taylor, William Austin, Richard Crashaw, and others, but especially Archbishop William Laud, whose partisanship led to the movement's growth and demise. The trumpets of the Counter-Reformation are muted in England compared to their blasts on the Continent, but placing the efforts of the English church within this context helps us to see the significance of this brief but influential period in church and art history. Chapters on ceremonies, furnishings (including brief sections on fonts, chancel screens, painted glass, and items associated with the Eucharist), and the architecture of parish churches, cathedrals, and chapels, are especially persuasive. Parry's studies of devotional prose, religious poetry, church music, and antiquarianism, while they cover familiar ground, do benefit from being seen as part of the Laudian imperative to use the arts to enhance the beauty of worship. The chapter on poetry is a case in point: Crashaw, as we might expect, is the poet who embodies Laudian ideals most fully, but Parry's sensitive readings of Herbert, Herrick, and Corbett also illustrate that a range of responses to Laud's strident sacramentalism were possible.

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