This is a book about how poems work, and about how the interpretive demands of sacramental worship inform the production of poetic texts.

If it seems impolite for a book to declare its intentions so brashly in its first gesture, such insolence has nevertheless been made necessary by the publication of several critical texts that set out to investigate what they term thepoeticsof the post-Reformation period, particularly in conjunction with a consideration of eucharistic theology. In what has become a minor fad in Renaissance literary criticism, a number of studies advertise themselves as engaged in an examination of...

In order to understand the ways in which George Herbert’s elaborate experiments in poetic form are informed by the incarnational investments of sacramental worship, we must first consider the theological landscape in which Herbert producedThe Temple. Though Herbert’s era had not fully resolved the controversies of the preceding century, Herbert himself remains irenically reticent on the mechanics of eucharistic presence. Indeed, of the poets whose work is examined in the present study, Herbert is perhaps the least openly engaged in doctrinal and spiritual controversies. Owing to this doctrinal restraint, the good rector of Bemerton has come to be seen...

George Herbert’s influence on the poetry of Edward Taylor is readily apparent, sufficient to prompt Louis Martz to remark that “Edward Taylor appears to have had a mind saturated with Herbert’s poetry.” Martz’s observation refers primarily to Taylor’s devotional subject, numbering among the “thousand tantalizing echoes of Herbert” resonances ofThe Templein the latter poet’s lexicon along with a similar fear of inadequacy in attempting to praise God.¹ Taylor’s great twentieth-century editor Donald Stanford expands the catalogue of Herbert’s influence to include “An interest in typology, the frequent use of ‘mixed’ figures, a devout piety, and scores of verbal...

The practices that we have seen in the poems of George Herbert and Edward Taylor call attention to the way that poetic form and structure refuse to be sublimated into the transparency of semantic content. In the work of those poets, the material and substantial valences of the poetic text are themselves significant, objectively present and full of the substance of meaning in themselves. As the architectural elements of poetry constitute the site in which meaning inheres, they serve as organizing principles of perception, propounding, to return again to Allen Grossman’s phrase, “the presence of presence.”¹ In this capacity, poetic...

In his editorial headnote to Crashaw’s epigram on Luke 11, George Walton Williams notes mildly that “This little poem has provoked extravagant comment.”¹ Williams then goes on to catalogue examples of what he views as a troubling critical focus on the poem’s physicalized terminology, including Robert Adams’s infamous opinion that the epigram imparts “a nasty twist to the spiritual-carnal relation” and William Empson’s remark that it encompasses “a wide variety of sexual perversions.”² Williams springs to Crashaw’s supposed defense, insisting that the poem’s shocking imagery merely represents a spiritual principle and is therefore not really shocking at all. “The bloody...

The explicit stake of post-Reformation devotional poetry in the capacities of the word to produce a kind of immanent presence also registers in the contemporary literary culture more broadly. It is hardly surprising that Reformation-era theological anxieties about the sign, which undergird the interrogations of the materializing potentialities of language we see in Donne and Herbert and their devotional fellows, should ramify into the field of nondevotional literature; religious writing may have a thematic affinity for the particular representational concerns of sacramental worship, but the semiotic interrogations of sixteenth-century religious discourse had implications for sign-making in general. The eucharistic debates...