Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (review)

Barbara Lewa Is k is Protestant Poetics end the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, like her earlier books, escorts her readers through vast and, for many, largely unfamiliar territories Her thesis bemuses, both by itsemphasis of statement and by the enormity of the materials which she undertakes to use "This study, then, will argue two propositions. First, that an extensive and widely accessible body of literary theory, chiefly pertaining to the Bible and to fundamental Protestant assumptions about the spiritual life and about art, can be extrapolated from such sixteenthand seventeenth-century materials as biblical commentaries, rhetorical handbooks, poetic paraphrases of scripture, emblem books, manuals on meditation and preaching. Second, that such theory, and the biblical models it identified, helped to shape contemporary attitudes about religious poetry, contributing directly to the remarkable flowering of the religious lyric in the seventeenth century, and especially to that major strain represented by Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Traherne, and Taylor"(p. 5).