The Catholic Religious Poets for Southwell to Crashaw: A Critical History | Date: 28 April 2011, 04:39
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The Catholic Religious Poets for Southwell to Crashaw: A Critical History
By A. D. Cousins
* Publisher: Sheed & Ward Ltd
* Number Of Pages: 221
* Publication Date: 1992-08
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0722015704
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780722015704
Contents
Chapter Page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
PREFACE xi
ONE English and Counter-Reformation
Traditions I
TWO St Robert Southwell 38
THREE Henry Constable and William Alabaster 72
FOUR Sir John Beaumont, William Habington,
and Some Others 102
FIVE Richard Crashaw 126
APPENDIX: Ralegh's Ocean to Scinthia 177
NOTES 181
INDEX OF NAMES 2OI
Preface
In studying the Catholic religious poets from Southwell to
Crashaw, this book focuses especially on the interplay in their
verse between natively English and Counter-Reformation
devotional literary traditions.1 As it does so, it puts forward
particularly two arguments: that (in contradiction to some
views) most of the more important Catholic poets write verse
which expresses a Christ-centred vision of reality; that the
divine agape receives almost as much attention in the Catholic
poets' verse as does devout eros. Finally, though, everything in
this book is directed towards the formation of one encompassing
argument: that the work of the Catholic religious poets
deserves closer examination and higher valuation than it has
usually been given.2
Before discussion of the poets begins, however, a few things
need to be remarked on, including the book's emphasis on the
interplay in their verse between native and foreign devotional
literary traditions. If Counter-Reformation, and necessarily
some more general, elements of what is customarily called the
baroque can be discerned as significantly present in the Catholic
religious poets' verse, its presence does not imply a writer
therefore to be both intellectually and stylistically sophisticated,
nor does its absence imply him therefore to be unsophisticated
in intellect and style. Southwell's best work, in my
view, is just about evenly divided between his more natively
English poems and his more continental; much the same could
be said of Alabaster. Further, none of Constable's, and virtually
none of Habington's religious poems have any direct
connection to the baroque - and neither is intellectually or
stylistically naive.3
Having mentioned the arguments that are especially put
forward in this study, I should like now to glance at some that
are not presented in it. To begin with, in what follows there is
no discussion of Donne or of Jonson as being, in any ways,
Catholic religious poets.4 Recent work on Donne's sacred
poetry, most notably that of Barbara K. Lewalski (which is
reinforced by John N. King's account of English Reformation
Literature) persuasively suggests that both its theology and its
literary strategies are Protestant, as of course Donne himself
was when he wrote it.5 The case for omitting consideration of
Jonson's religious verse from this study is much the same.
Although Jonson was for twelve years a Catholic, there is no
reason to believe that he was one when he wrote his devout
poems; furthermore, they bear no distinguishing signs of
either Catholic belief or Catholic literary practice.6 On the
basis of what is known about the two poets, it seems to me that
neither could reasonably be portrayed as a writer of Catholic
religious verse.
Another exclusion in the subsequent chapters is that of a
general argument about the Catholic poets as being political
dissidents insofar as they were members of an oppressed
religious minority.7 That they were religious and, to quite
different degrees, literary dissidents within English Renaissance
society is clear; the former means that in a broad sense
they were necessarily also political dissidents.8 But the practicability
of generalizing about their political dissidences seems,
to say the least, doubtful. If they were all religious dissidents,
their experiences of being so - and thus the extents to which
their Catholicism set them at odds with the governments under
which they lived - were diverse. Southwell, for example, publicly
declared his loyalty to the Crown (in his Humble Supplication)
at the same time as he was breaking a number of its laws
through the enactment of his religious principles.9 He was not,
yet was, in opposition to Elizabeth's government; his poetry,
whilst not treating of Elizabethan politics, was nonetheless
politically dissident, since it formed part of his illegal ministry
as a priest. On the other hand, Habington was a member of
Henrietta Maria's privileged Catholic circle: his religion
appears to have given him no personal cause for political
dissent, and no dissidence born of his Catholicism seems
discernible in any of his verse (a recent analysis of his play The
Queene of Arragonindicates, however, that he was a shrewd
critic of Charles's rule).10 The heterogeneous political and
social environments within which the Catholic religious poets
lived, the differences among their relations to and treatments
by those environments, the frequent lack of detailed biographical
information about them, and the very different revelations
in their verse - secular as well as sacred - of hostility to
or dissociation from their environments because of their Catholicism,
appear to make generalizations about them as political
dissidents less feasible than desirable.
All in all, then, it seems reasonable to suggest this: in
attempting a critical history of the Catholic religious poets
from Southwell to Crashaw, one necessarily emphazises them
to have been a various and disparate group of writers; one also
acknowledges their verse to be an often innovative, and an
often impressive, presence within the poetry of the English
Renaissance.
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