Typology, Allegory, and Protestant Poetics

Abstract

Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, since its publication in 1979, has established the term "Protestant poetics" as an accepted term of literary inquiry and has invested that term with an unquestioned reality that should be examined within the larger context of late medieval and Renaissance poetry, not exclusively lyric. The critical acceptance of this term ignores many problems that should deeply concern us as an academic community. One such problem is that in English literary studies we tend to set up sub-groups; we are "definers," in the Lati nate sense of "setting limits." Thus, we in Departments of English separate the Renaissance in England from the Renaissance on the Continent; separated by that narrowchannel, we further divide that English Renaissance into Sixteenth Century vs. Seventeenth Century, Elizabethan vs. Jacobean, and within those temporal and monarchical schemes, we further divide into dramatic vs. non-dramatic, epic vs. lyric, etc. The problem is further compounded by a universal law that insists on a virtually total separation between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. These divisions are helpful for the clarity of our departmental curricula, but they are not helpful for a full picture of a culture at any period. Lewalski had every disciplinary right to choose the seventeenth-century religious lyric as the subject of her book, but in that choice her imposition of the term "Protestant poetics" equally forces her to disregard the work of Richard Crashaw, an English Roman Catholic poet of the period, whose similarities to the poets she chose makes his omission seriously call into question the validity of her claims for a "Protestant poetics," as Louis Martz noted in his review when