The "Metaphysicals": English Baroque Literature in Context
In the still predominantly British study of English literature, the term "Baroque" is hardly ever used to describe the era between the Renaissance and the age of Neoclassicism, and it seems that only scholars of comparative literature who have dared look across the Channel, such as René Wellek, as well as cultural scholars use it in their approach. 1 In British studies of English literature, the term "Metaphysical" is still given preference. Originally, "Metaphysical" was used as a derogatory term by the Neoclassicists in order to differentiate their aesthetics, which was based on reason and clearly defined rules, from the Baroque aesthetics of the "last age". From their point of view the Baroque poets had offended against the eternally valid norms of reason and nature and so, in this diphemistic sense, "Metaphysical" was meant to describe something "unnatural" or "adverse to nature" rather than the "supernatural". After John Dryden's and Samuel Johnson's derogatory use of the term "Metaphysical", it became a neutral technical term -- a frequent semantic change when the immediate historical context sinks into oblivion. In his influential Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693) Dryden described how, during his aberration from reason as a youth, he was dazzled by Abraham Cowley's "points of wit, and quirks of epigram" and other "puerilities", and looked upon him as a pupil of the Baroque poet John Donne:
Apart from being distorted by Neoclassical prejudices, Samuel Johnson's catalogue of the characteristics of English Baroque literature is also rather incomplete. Ever since Grierson's edition (1912) and Eliot's essay (1921), research into Baroque poetry has not only led to a revision of Neoclassical prejudices but has also looked at the Baroque period unhampered by the distortions of a different aesthetic approach. 5 It has, moreover, led to a substantial expansion and modification of Johnson's catalogue. On the basis of recent research studies, the characteristics of English Baroque literature can be summarized in nine points:
He [Donne] affects the metaphysics, where nature only should reign. [...] In this Mr Cowley has copied him to a fault. 2
In 1779, Samuel Johnson wrote a short biography of Abraham Cowley. This was the first of a series of biographical and critical prefaces to his anthology of Works of the English Poets (1779-1781), a book firmly based on Neoclassical principles. His judgement and terminology followed Dryden's:
About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a race of writers that may be termed the Metaphysical poets [...]. 3
In a rather haphazard enumeration Samuel Johnson accused these 'unnatural' poets of a great many offences against reason and nature: exhibiting artificiality instead of concealing art, the desire for originality at the expense of the mimesis of nature, unpolished stylistic carelessness, abstruse conceits arbitrarily yoked together in a kind of discordia concors, enormous hyperboles, gross absurdities, and horrible obscenities often conveyed in puns and quibbles. 4 The Rationalistic and Neoclassical purification of the language, as propagated by the Académie Française after 1634 and by the Royal Society after 1668, tolerated no multiple meanings of words that would confuse the understanding, and thus radically inverted the dynamic expansion of the Renaissance and (even more so) of the Baroque vocabulary prominent in Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Donne. Shakespearean and Metaphysical puns and quibbles offended against the most basic Neoclassical rules of reason, the rule of clarity and the rule of decorum.
In the literary comparison or image the distance between vehicle and tenor was widened in an artificial and affected way to such an extreme or even contrariness that any logical or natural relationship between the two was no longer immediately recognizable. 6 Comparing the body, in which the soul lives confined until its liberation by death, to a prison or to a coffin had been a natural conventional illustration of Plato's soma-sema-doctrine; but comparing the body to a rusty gun barrel which the bullet of the soul breaks in order to fly upward to heaven, as John Donne did in his Second Anniversary (1612), was an instance of Baroque wit, originality, and eccentricity:
Much has been written about the theatricality and dramatic quality of Metaphysical poetry, especially in its earlier phase. In their radical opposition to Calvinistic theology, Metaphysical poems are intensely picturesque, displaying all the pictorial splendour usually associated with the flashy illusory stage-designs of the Stuart court-masque. Calvin's rabbinistic, anti-Catholic, (and allegedly early Christian) interpretation of the first commandment of the decalogue (Exodus 20. 4), forbidding not only idols but all pictures, had entailed his ban on plays and playhouses in general. No theatres were allowed in Calvin's Genevan theocracy, and the early English Calvinists' ("Puritans'") antagonism to the theatre and its consequences has been well investigated. Small wonder that the Counter-Reformation reacted by stressing both the practice of the theatre (Jesuitendrama) and the literary and artistic commonplaces of the theatre. "Totus mundus agit histrionen", "el gran theatro del mundo", "das große Welttheater", became a favourite theme and motif of Baroque literature. 16 Moreover, against the background of the sister arts ut pictura poesis, attention should be paid to the theatricality both of Baroque church architecture and of Baroque painting. Baroque churches were splendidly designed as theatrum sacrum, and theatrical illusion (as in trompe l'oeil ceilings) was consciously made use of in order to involve the senses ad majorem Dei gloriam. The heavens opening and revealing God surrounded by his hierarchies of angels in all their glory was portrayed as a theatrical pageant comparable to (and exceeding) that of the most splendid court-masques, giving observers a sensual foretaste of the delights to come in the world beyond. Baroque paintings, too, are full of theatre motifs and heavy drapery, with curtains allowing glimpses of what seemingly was not meant to be seen. This, of course, had the contrary effect: disclosing rather than concealing, arousing curiosity and guiding the eye directly to what was only half-heartedly hidden. Christ in the manger or Christ on the cross no longer carries a napkin or loincloth hiding his shame, but rather a theatre curtain revealing it and conveying Christ's erotic potency and soteriological fertility to the astounded spectator.
Not only in literary comparisons but also in the context of the two conflicting world pictures and two conflicting religions -- even the most remote elements were connected in contentio or composition (now called antithesis) or synoeciosis or opposition (now called paradox). 17 We find heaven and hell, life and death, fire and water almost automatically linked, just as Baroque literature reflected the increasing awareness of a world out of joint on all levels. In their massive accumulation and complex clusters, antithesis and paradox became distinctive characteristics of Baroque rhetoric. 18 Thus, in his two earliest verse letters referring to his participation in the Islands Expedition (1597), 19 John Donne opposed the descriptions of two contrary experiences in extremis, a sea storm and a sea calm. Both not only threatened the sailors' lives, the second even more than the first, but confronted them with two versions of pristine, pre-Creationist, Godless chaos. In the storm
Situative as well as rhetorical paradoxes can be found in all epochs of literature, and have been aptly classified in three types: the serious and unresolvable paradox, the comical and satirical paradox, and the playful or semi-jocular paradox. 25 The distinctively Baroque paradox belonged to the first type. Like the conventional serious paradox, it opposed extreme opposites in seeming logicality; but it aimed at eccentric surprise. It exceeded the conventionality of Tertullian's maxim of "credo quia absurdum" in its witty originality and offence against conventional decorum. In John Donne's Holy Sonnets, each speaker tries to overcome the broken state of the world and the church in a privatissime illogical communion between two lovers, himself and his desired God. The speaker will never be free unless God chains him, and will never be chaste unless God rapes him. God has to overthrow him in order that he may firmly stand. 26 In Richard Crashaw's 'Hymn to Saint Teresa', penetration is the precondition of virginity as well as ignorance the precondition of knowledge, bankruptcy the precondition of trade, weakness the precondition of strength, martyrdom and death the precondition of life, and fall and sin the precondition of resurrection and salvation. In their theological and philosophical unresolvability, such serious paradoxes, homiletically conventional or sensationally shocking, were radically different from the traditional comical and satirical type of paradox on the one hand, and from the traditional playful or semi-jocular type of paradox on the other hand. 27 And they also differed from the paradoxy that modern literary theory postulates for all poetry (Cleanth Brooks and the New Criticism) or even prose (Paul de Man and Deconstructivism). The distinctive feature of Baroque paradoxes is their shocking choice of joined opposites as well as the sheer quantity of obsessive paradox cumulation, which sets them apart from the serious paradoxes that survived in the Augustan age, with its self-imposed obligation to a return to harmony and to the restrictive rule of decorum. 28 The typically Baroque use of paradoxes must be understood as the literary expression of an age that did not only have to face new contradictory theologies, philosophies, and views of history. 29 The age had, above all, been taken by surprise in having to face a totally new, non-geocentric world picture. Where the centre is lost, excess and eccentricity are the new norm itself. Thus, an aesthetics of excess, eccentricity, disproportion, non-balance, monstrosity, and stupendousness became the hallmark of the Baroque: "la estetica di stupare". And so the Baroque sought to bridge by an excessive and eccentric, original and innovative wit and art what faith found increasingly difficult to believe. 30 It was here that the replacement of religion by art began, and it is here that we find Matthew Arnold's and Friedrich Nietzsche's predecessors in doubt. Baroque man lived torn between two logically irreconcilable world pictures: on the one hand, the old Ptolemaic, geocentric one which had for centuries given man a sense of order and dignity, which was now increasingly called in doubt; and, on the other hand, the new Copernican, heliocentric one which, though it proved empirically convincing, resulted in a deep sense of physical and moral displacement and ontological disorientation. Tycho Brahe's typically Renaissance attempt at reconciling the two world pictures shows the whole extent of the dilemma. 31 From an early seventeenth-century rational and erudite man's point of view, Anthony Munday spoke of "opposed truth", 32 and Baltasar Gracián of "monstruos de la verdad". 33 This antithetical awareness explains Crashaw's desperate call to return to Saint Teresa's childish, pre-logical, and mystical acceptance of contraries beyond man's rational comprehension. But the lost firmness of faith was irretrievable, and Baroque mysticism differed from medieval mysticism in its strong element of doubt. In this, Baroque love of paradox and Baroque mysticism were closely connected.
As shown above, Baroque literature's characteristic feature of replacing logical lines of argumentation by paradoxes, syllogisms, barocones 34 and other kinds of witty and spurious argumentation reflects the feeling of an original community and continuity increasingly torn apart. George Herbert's broken altar (fragmented in violation of biblical law) 35 symbolizes the broken church, and is wittily associated with the psalmist's broken heart as well as the speaker's broken poem. The speaker's poetic sacrifice, like all sacrifice, aims at an 'at-one-ment' with God, though (paradoxically) to the exclusion of both the church and the community. 36 Donne's First Anniversary, his above-mentioned poetic anatomy of the dead old world, provides another type of such unexpected disruptions of the train of thoughts. It teems with sudden changes of argument and truncated thoughts, marked by aposiopeses or interruptions of the type of "But no!" and underlined by numerous antitheses and unresolvable paradoxes. Another splendid instance is Donne's poem 'A Noctural upon St Lucy's Day', with its wittily paradoxical and surprising treatment of alchemy. 37 The speaker, tout seul by the death of his beloved lady and in his isolation from "all others", feels more than ordinarily depressed on St Lucy's day, being the shortest, darkest, and most sapless day of the year. All others stand in expectation of the next spring, which will renew their erotic vitality. The speaker, however, feels his own death multiplied into utter nothingness. Alchemy, the ultimate goal of which was the transformation of lower into higher matter, is replaced by a "new alchemy", transforming nothingness into a higher form of nothingness. Then this utter bodilessness will exalt him far above the mere fleshly and goatlike regeneration of "all others" and effect his regeneration into an infinitely higher love. Thus, nothingness distilled to its "quintessence" and "elixir" becomes a higher life, the nadir turns zenith. A dense erotic imagery (alchemy and alembics, the tropic of capricorn, sap and balm, lust, goat, bed) is inseparably interwoven with an equally dense religious number symbolism (3, 5, 7, 9, 12) and imagery (sun, vigil, eve). 38 Such a definitely unprudish sensuality as appears in these paradoxes refers to still another source of the logically broken dispositio of the classical literary rhetorical discourse: the trompe l'oeil argumentation of the Jesuits, i.e. the deliberate satisfaction of the senses, condemned by Calvin, by deceiving the senses (as well as in the above-mentioned trompe l'oeil perspective of Baroque church ceiling paintings) ad majorem Dei gloriam following Ignatius of Loyola and the Council of Trent (1545-63). 39
With the growing post-Copernican sense of macrocosmic chaos and the post-Machiavellian (and pre-Hobbesian) threat of political chaos, especially civil war, man tended to withdraw and in some cases even to create his own ordered microcosm: 40 alone with his paramour in his love chamber, alone with his God in his prayer-room, or, in the most extreme case, entirely alone (as the speaker of Andrew Marvell's 'The Garden'). This self-imposed separation of microcosmic privacy from macrocosm and state, in the hope of finding a last refuge of cosmic harmony in this privacy, dissolved the time-honoured doctrine of the three integrally corresponding planes of the Creation. 41 Calvinistic Protestantism had destroyed the old holistic Roman Catholic ceremony of the Eucharist (and with it the kath'holon unity of sensuality and spirituality, man and God, as well as high and low members of one church community). This had significantly contributed towards an irreversible development still in progress today, the individualization and isolation (Vereinzelung) of man, which modern sociologists have called "the tyranny of privacy". 42 Cast back upon himself in his private prayers for forgiveness and peace, the Protestant had begun to leave the traditional communio and to become tout seul. 43 Efforts during the Counter-Reformation to re-establish the old kath'holon feeling of a communio ecclesiastica et eucharistica were doomed to fail. In court culture, too, this by now irreversible development became apparent in the increasing isolation of the monarch and nobility. Whereas King Henry VIII and his daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, had still visited the country and personally responded to entertainments and pageants presented to them by the citizens, the succeeding Stuarts more and more withdrew into the privacy of their courts. King James I (1603-25) ostensibly reduced contact with the people, and King Charles I (1625-40) tried to abolish such public relations altogether, with disastrous political consequences which cost him both his throne (1642) and his life (30 January 1649). 44 The cult of the Stuart court-masque may be regarded as another symptom of that isolation, as the royals and their courtiers staged plays in which they themselves were both actors and spectators, to the exclusion of the public. 45 The admission of representatives of 'the world' to royal audiences became an intimidating ritual set in equally intimidating surroundings of architectural designs, which almost signalled unwelcome intrusion.
Driven into a similar isolation, quite contrary to his nostalgic Catholicism, the Baroque poet of the early Stuart period (1603-40) shunned the community of a world which he felt to be in the agonies of death and decay--vaguely comparable to the later Romantic poets' cult of loneliness, and then again to the self-withdrawal of the Decadent poets of the Fin de Siècle. 46 It has been convincingly shown that the individual speaker and lyric ego of the Baroque period assumed a solipsistic poetic dignity and dramatic complexity which was not regained until the lyrical revival in the Romantic movement of the later eighteenth century. 47 The speaker or ego of a Baroque lyric equally scolded the celestial bodies, the king, the nobility, the clergy as well as secular wealth and public morality as intruders, and banished them from the place of his poetic privacy. Thus John Donne about himself and his mistress:
The justification of and appeal to the senses ad majorem Dei gloriam, in conscious opposition to Calvin's reductionist spiritual theology, led the Baroque poets to adopt the Aristotelian enargeia or evidentia -- the ideal of "ante oculos ponere" as it is used in Ignatius of Loyola's Exercitia Spiritualia. 58 Calvin's destruction of the Eucharist had bedevilled the sensuous enjoyment of God, and Protestantism's recourse to the printed text had interrupted the lively and sensuous exchange between the speaker and hearer, the face-to-face interaction as between the giver and taker in the Eucharist. 59 The Counter-Reformation sought to re-establish that old sensuous interchange, and the need to bridge extreme poles which were drifting more and more apart accounts for the strained artificiality of the Baroque artist's creative effort. The truth conveyed by a work of art was not only to be understood, but to be received with ecstatic sensuality. It was meant to be heard with the ears, seen with the eyes, smelt with the nose, tasted with the tongue and felt by the sense of touch. This led to the tripartite structure of the Ignatian meditation as a weapon of the Counter-Reformation. In the first but indispensable step of meditation, compositio loci, the meditant had to conceive a vivid image of a particular scene of salvation, Christ's Crucifixion or Heaven or even Hell, if necessary with the aid of a Baroque painting. He had to feel Christ's pains, to see his blood flow, hear his words on the cross, taste and smell the sweetness of heaven and the sulphurous stench of hell, 60 before he was allowed to proceed to a theological comprehension in the second step of meditation. In the third stage he had to transfer his feelings and understanding into affective involvement and practical action. In 1954 Louis Martz, and in 1955 Arno Esch, showed this tripartite structure to be characteristic of a great part of English Baroque poetry. 61 In the title of his work Louis Martz even suggested calling all English Baroque poetry "The Poetry of Meditation". 62
In his Ars Poetica, Horace had recommended the golden mean between elliptical brevity and long-winded detail; and the early Neoclassicists of the School of Ben Jonson followed this conventional rule of "Breve esse laboro Obscurus fio". The Baroque poets of the School of Donne, however, revolted by making the very contrary, "masculine" elliptical brevity for the purpose of stylistic obscurity, their poetic ideal. In classical literary rhetorical discourse, obscurity had ever been a stylistic device of the ornatus. Thus, even in its own time, the term "strong lines" was used for English Baroque poetry, vehemently opposed by the early Neoclassical School of Ben Jonson. 63 In the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque age models changed: they shifted from Demosthenes' dense precision of thought to Isocrates' dazzling external form, from Cicero's balanced stylistic clarity to the epigrammatic and elliptical taciturnity of Tacitus and Seneca. 64 This also explains the popularity that Tacitus's contemporary Martial and his Epigrammata enjoyed with the Metaphysicals, who delighted in writing terse epigrams both in English and Latin: Donne's Epigrams, Herbert's Passio Discerpta, Crashaw's Epigrammata Sacra, Marvell's Inscribenda. Thus, the stylistic ideal of the Golden Latinity of Horace and Cicero was replaced by the later stylistic ideal of the Silver Latinity of Tacitus and Martial. Art historians, and, in their wake, literary historians consequently attempted to explain the Baroque as a returning phenomenon of decadence following classical peaks. 65 This was done, for example, by the art historian Jacob Burckhardt in 1855 and in 1860, until in Renaissance und Barock (1880) his pupil Heinrich Wölfflin suggested accepting Baroque decadence as an art form of its own. Decades later, this was still the case with Ernst Robert Curtius: in Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1948) he opposed classicism and mannerism as virtus and vitium.
The plain, partly colloquial, and often consciously deformed poetic style is a particularly striking feature of the English Protestant Baroque. John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, and Thomas Traherne demonstratively rejected the poetic diction and high stylization of Renaissance poetry from Petrarch to Shakespeare, as well as the ornatus malus of stylistic Mannerism (Euphuism, Gongorism, Marinism). 66 Thus, the plain style of English Baroque poems stood in antithetical tension to their highly complicated and conceptistic intellectual content. George Herbert expressed this most controversially - and even paradoxically - in his two 'Jordan' poems, with an artificial pun on the 'plains of Jordan':
In Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth Century Lyric, a study based on rich source material, Barbara Kiefer Lewalski 69 shows how the plain style of the Bible, so dear to Protestants, influenced English Baroque poetry no less strongly than did Ignatian meditation. It is a well known fact that European Protestantism could only encounter the, in a literal sense, 'sensational' flood of anti-Calvinist, Counter-Reformatory pictorial and emblematic art by its increasing acceptance or 'containment' of the picture itself and simply by using its contents for Protestant purposes. The by now plain churches, robbed of their ornamentation by iconoclasm, were filled again; what was originally a Counter-Reformatory emblem was now dedicated to the Protestant cause, 70 and the tripartite structure of the Ignatian meditation was adopted for numerous Protestant Baroque poems. English Protestant Baroque, however, differed considerably from Continental Jesuit Baroque in its frequent use of the biblical plain style as an important means of Protestant appropriation.
The classical maxim "ars est celare artem", often wrongly attributed to Horace, was the rhetorical poetic ideal in the Renaissance as well as in the later age of Neoclassicism. The Neoclassical critic Joseph Addison, for example, found fault with the Baroque poet's 'false wit', as apparent in "Anagrams, Chronograms, Lipograms, and Acrosticks" as well as "Poems cast into the Figures of Eggs, Axes, or Altars". 71 And the Neoclassical critic Samuel Johnson later generally pointed out that the Baroque poet perverted the doctrine of 'ars est celare artem' into its very opposite:
The enumeration and contextual description of these nine characteristic features of English Baroque literature in verse and prose indicates a complex variety of seemingly heterogeneous causes. But their overall coherence and interaction, the nature of and reason for their historical development, as well as their connections with the other Baroque arts both in England and on the Continent demand an even more extensive and differentiated contextual documentation. These characteristic features were often attributed to a returning esprit de révolution against the compulsion by rules and norms 77 characteristic of the Baroque, Romanticism, and then again the Neoromantic Fin de Siècle. Sigmund Freud showed that in human life superego-oriented, Apollonian phases controlled by rules and norms are always followed by id-oriented, revolutionary and Dionysiac phases despising rules and norms. Literary historians such as F.L. Lucas have applied this observation to literary history, as, for example, in their explanation of Romanticism as a revolution against rule- and norm-oriented Neoclassicism. 78 The same is true, at the turn of the 17th century, for the increasing rebellion against the fixed Petrarchan conventions which had dominated Renaissance poetry. 79 Under this aspect, Baroque Metaphysical and Neoclassical Cavalier poetry may be regarded as two very different, even contrary reactions to the same outworn Renaissance tradition. The Metaphysicals reacted by extension and excess according to the principle of originality. They tried to exceed Renaissance art by even more various forms and expressions; they sought its wit and splendour amongst other things by a superabundance of even bolder paradoxy; they extended traditional images to the most tortuous, unexpected, surprising, and original conceits by way of an excess of discordia concors and an innovative urge towards forward orientation, Entgrenzung. The Cavaliers, on the contrary, reacted by restriction according to the principle of imitation. They aimed at less variety, less wit and flashiness, preferring clarity and purification of the language, modification of extremes, reduction of images to natural associations, imitative backward orientation to the model of the Age of Emperor Augustus (1st century BC), obedience to the rules laid down by reason and Horace, Begrenzung and Überschaubarkeit. The fundamental difference appears from an invective that a Cavalier poet, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, wrote against the "male" and "strong line" Metaphysicals:
A similar development had already taken place in the history of painting. Since about 1520, the pre-Baroque Mannerists had begun to break the canonical forms of Renaissance painting (Raphael, Leonardo) by defocussation, decentralization, and winding lines (serpentinata) anticipating Bernini. Then, immediately in their wake, the high Baroque painters broke the content of Renaissance painting by sensualizing, eroticizing, and aggrandizing biblical history, as well as by dismissing the Renaissance ideals of proportion and beauty. Eccentricity, even deformity, became a hallmark of Baroque art, as in many of the court portraits of the Spanish painter Velazquez.
The history of music sticks out insofar as this stylistic modification of the principle of harmony by distortion, dissonance, eccentricity, and enormity occurred somewhat later, around 1600, 82 with the breaking up of traditional polyphonic composition, and lasted somewhat longer, until around 1750. Pure polyphony began to be hybridized by monophony, further enriched with an increasing wealth of extremes and dissonances. The early period of Baroque music has been aptly characterized as aiming at typically Baroque originality, exploring "new resources such as chromaticism, dissonance, tonality, monody, recitative, and new vocal and instrumental combinations." 83 The introduction of the thoroughbase or basso continuo initiated a stile moderno (as distinct from the traditional polyphonic stile antico) which remained the fashion until the middle of the eighteenth century: the epoch of Baroque music. 84 This chiaroscuro-like thorough bass was often performed by ever new gigantic bass instruments which produced ever lower and darker sounds, throwing into relief tortuous lines of chromatically arranged tones high above: the contrabassoon, the great bass recorder, the bass flute, the bass dulcian, and the large bass viol. 85 By contrast, and analogous to the literary conceit, the instruments playing the upper lines grew more and more elevated in pitch: the Baroque flute or recorder, the (valveless) Baroque trumpet, the favourite oboe or hautboy expressing love (oboe d'amore), the frequently introduced "sharp violins" expressing "jealous pangs and desperation, fury, frantic indignation, depths of pains and heights of passion". 86 Thus, compositional artificiality (including quaintly handled counterpoints and compositiones figuratae such as notes arranged to form a cross or other subject of the piece) 87 coexisted with intense passions as analysed and described in philosophical, literary and musical Affektenlehren. 88 The widening of extremes was reflected in the concerto grosso as a favourite genre of Baroque music, with a small concertino (mostly of violins) playing against an overwhelming orchestral grosso. And it also manifested itself in the popularity of the castrato with his artificial voice ("falsetto"), whose growth-hampered larynx and unbroken voice produced a vocal range that no natural voice was capable of (up to three and a half octaves). His artificial voice, again, was matched by the castrato's monstrous size and androgynic appearance, which later exposed him to the ridicule of the 'nature'-oriented Neoclassical critics. Moreover, artificiality was the hallmark of many musical genres of the Baroque, such as the opera and the fugue, which later incurred similar satirical blame, as in Alexander Pope's second Dunciad (1742). There, the Harlot Opera with her false tinsel thus addresses the Empress Dulness "in quaint Recitativo":
Ten years later his successor Edmund Spenser broke the conventional inventio in his Amoretti, allowing the courtship to be crowned by success and marriage. Finally, in the 1590s, Shakespeare left all conventions behind, replacing the beautiful donna angelicata by a promiscuous bisexual youth and an ugly dark prostitute and complicating this confusion of emotions by introducing a fourth character, the Mannerist Rival Poet, who alternately sleeps with both the youth and the Dark Lady. But Shakespeare -- as well as Surrey and Watson and Sidney and Spenser -- largely remained loyal to the Renaissance conventions of poetic diction, even if he criticized empty elocutionary pathos in his Rival Poet.
It was left to the revolutionary and Baroque poet John Donne and his School to completely break apart the monolithic Petrarchan canon of form, content, and diction. 90 Donne's originally invented conceits, which may be explained as modelled on the tortuous pictorial illustrations of the contemporary emblem books, exploded traditional Petrarchan diction as effectively as his well-nigh ugly plain style and his originally invented metrical forms, which he freely chose to underline his very un-Petrarchan contents. Thus, the close relationship between the emblem and the conceit needs some further investigation in order to understand the Metaphysical revolt against Renaissance Petrarchism's ideals of proportion and beauty. 91
As a contemporary of Shakespeare, Donne also wrote his Songs and Sonnets for circulation in manuscript. Donne, born and brought up a Catholic, converted to Protestantism about 1596 and became an Anglican High Church divine. He was well acquainted with the Baroque conceits of the Jesuits modelled on Ignatian examples, as they were used in the underground activities of the Counter-Reformation in England in the 1590s, which took place despite the threat of most severe punishments. The prose meditations and poems of the English Jesuit and early Baroque author Robert Southwell circulated in manuscript and will probably have been known to John Donne, as was Southwell's spectacular and most cruel fate: Southwell was executed in London in 1595, after three years of imprisonment and torture in the Tower. 92 In any case, John Donne was familiar with the "emblems" or "hieroglyphics" of the Alciati tradition, which had its roots in a misunderstanding of the Egyptian hieroglyphs as pictorial moral ideograms. It was a fertile misunderstanding in the history of art, which explains the synonymity of "emblem" and "hieroglyph" in the Baroque period 93 , and which is still apparent in the original misnomer 'hieroglyph'. The Tridentine justification of the theological usefulness and acceptability of the 'sensational' picture, in contrast to Calvin's view, eventually led to the emblem gaining a similar Counter-Reformatory significance. The emblem acted as a mediator between the abstract contents of faith and the human senses, just as the Baroque painting or sculpture did for the concrete contents of faith. Modelled on the Exercitia of Ignatius, it was made to stimulate all the senses. Even the conscious deception of the senses, for example in the Baroque illusionist paintings on walls and ceilings ad majorem Dei gloriam, was accepted in line with the Jesuit principle of 'dulce et utile'.
Thus the 'sensational' visual art of the Baroque did not refrain from presenting abstract items of faith, such as divine grace, divine love and forgiveness, theological and secular sins and virtues through bold pictorial analogues, even if vehicle and tenor lay very far apart without any natural connection, thus acting against all laws of philosophical logic. As obvious clichés were only rarely available, the most important characteristic of an emblem book author in the Alciati tradition was the Baroque sense of 'wit', i.e. the capacity to produce original, artificial and remote pictorial analogies making use of the proverbial Jesuit sophistry and inventiveness. In the eikon of the emblem, he visualized divine grace via the image of a magnet for an iron heart or via the image of a besieger in front of a besieged fortress shaped like a heart. And in the poema of the emblem, he elaborated his lemma to explain the illustrations, thus creating literary conceits.
Baroque poems can often be read as the poemata of emblem books, as for example, John Donne's Holy Sonnet 'Thou hast made me':
Such heaped combinations of antitheses (contentiones) and paradoxes (synoecioses), as defined above, dominate even the shortest Metaphysical poems, everywhere shoring up a neo-mystical and holistic creed against threatening ruin and doubt, shouting "credo quia absurdum" so much the louder in their attempt at bridging the enormity of the gap. This neo-mysticism explains the frequency with which smallness and infinity as well as time and eternity are either juxtaposed or paradoxically joined under one aspect, cutting across the neat Thomistic categories of tempus, aevum, aeternitas. 101 The first stanza of the final chorus of Crashaw's Nativity Hymn, a typically Baroque poem written in the theatrical style of a Caroline court-masque, may serve to illustrate this:
The most famous literary manifestation of this widespread feeling that political, social, and moral coherence was crumbling together with the chaos in macrocosm and microcosm is John Donne's First Anniversary (1611) - a very theatrical poem full of conceits and breaches of logic, using as its central conceit the anatomy of the corpse of the old world after its slow and weary decease:
Through his clandestine marriage with Ann More in 1601, against all rules of civil and canonical law, John Donne forfeited his chance of a public career, thus thwarting all his previous efforts: "John Donne, Anne Donne, Vn-done". 120 Later, Donne was deeply disappointed when the King whom he had scolded and rebuked only made him Dean of St. Paul's instead of Archbishop of Canterbury. The bridge between heavenly spirituality and worldly sensuality was never broken down entirely, either in Donne's life or in Donne's poetry, where erotic and spiritual love were so dramatically juxtaposed that it is often difficult to distinguish between his love poems and his divine poems. 'The Canonization' may be regarded as the best example of that double tension.
Donne's pupil George Herbert, younger brother of the prominent Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, born in 1593 and 17 years Donne's junior, found it less difficult to give up his highly prestigious office as public orator at the University of Cambridge. In ostentatious modesty, he became rector of the humble country parish of Bemerton, located within walking distance between Salisbury, the proud cathedral town, and Wilton House, the gorgeous palace of his family, the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke. His Temple poems -- published in the year of his death by his literary executor Nicholas Ferrar, who also chose to live in rural isolation -- reduce the tension between erotic and spiritual love by submerging Donne's erotic imagery, and are much more easily classified as divine poetry. Yet they retain, albeit in reduced form, the dramatic tension between the desire for privacy and the temptations of the world, as for example in 'The Quip':
Andrew Marvell (born in 1621) and Thomas Traherne (born as late as 1637) were contrary characters in their public aspirations. Marvell was Latin Secretary to the Council of State (as successor to John Milton) before and anti-Cavalier controversialist after the Restoration; whereas Traherne, by contrast, was content to lead a single and devout life as rector of Credenhill in his native Herefordshire. What both had in common though was that, when they died (Marvell in 1678 and Traherne in 1674), they left their private mode Metaphysical lyrics unpublished. Marvell's lyrics were found by his housekeeper and published in 1681 (Miscellaneous Poems), and Traherne's were not found until 1896 and published in 1903 (Poetical Works). The private mode of their Metaphysical lyrics is quite unthreatened by worldly aspirations. In one of Marvell's much-anthologized meditational poems, a drop of dew, symbolizing the soul, has dropped into a bed of roses; yet it weeps with its own tear at the loss of heaven, despising the beauty and fragrance of the earthly roses,
In Traherne's highly visionary Poems of Felicity, 127 such as 'Eden' and 'Innocence', worldly seductions are no longer perceived, any more than worldly pains. Traherne was a Cambridge Platonist, a fact which helps explain his anti-Calvinism and flat denial of a fallen and corrupt earth:
Finally, Henry Vaughan, born in the same year as Andrew Marvell, showed no hesitation at all about giving up worldly careers with his conversion after 1648, and about remaining in the seclusion of his home county of Breconshire (Wales). His secular love poems belong to the period before his conversion: Poems (1646) and Olor Iscanus (MSS ca 1647). Quite unlike Donne, Vaughan felt ashamed of their erotic worldliness, and even more ashamed when his friends injudiciously published Olor Iscanus in 1651. His religious poems such as 'The World', 'The Retreat', or 'Corruption' -- all published in 1650 as part of the collection with the paradoxical title Silex Scintillans -- show him to be a nostalgic primitivist in the sense of Neo-Platonism, totally removed from this dark, chaotic world with its aspirations in love and war, and an esoteric admirer of the Hermetic philosophy:
Conversely, the late Metaphysical disintegration of Baroque complexity and dramaticality could also manifest itself in the very opposite way, fusing with Cavalier poetry (and thus breaking up the Baroque private mode). Abraham Cowley discards all spirituality and mysticism from the love poetry of his collection The Mistress (1646), isolating an extremely carnal amor eroticus from its theological combination with amor divinus. The late or post-Baroque "dissociation of sensibility" (as identified by T.S. Eliot) resulted from God becoming more and more removed from man, an intellectually constructed rather than emotionally experienced deus absconditus. Thus, the dissociation of sensibility increasingly split a more and more beast-like sexuality from a more and more barren and sterile holiness. This is the disintegrative line of the development of erotic literature from Abraham Cowley via the Earl of Rochester and John Cleland to Victorian pornography and the demonic or merely de-spiritualized animal eroticism in the anti-religious poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Gottfried Benn. 142 Cowley's poetry links love to gold, dowries, and treasures, even where his Machiavellian speakers ironically disavow all prostitution, as in 'The Given Love':
After 1640 the public mode of poetry flourishing in the Renaissance again gained ground, 148 and with it the classical public mode genres, i. e. the verse epic and the drama (the latter being strictly prohibited though secretly cultivated throughout the Commonwealth). John Milton's early lyric poetry written between 1629 and 1638 (such as the Nativity Ode, the sonnet 'On Shakespeare', and Lycidas) had already shown symptoms of overstepping the private mode and reassuming a public praeceptor populi stance, so that Milton could later claim them as poetical exercises for his epic magnum opus (first his projected King Arthur, then Paradise Lost). By having recourse to the epic models of Spenser and the Spenserians, notably Giles Fletcher, Milton demonstratively reached back across the hiatus which the late Jacobean and the Caroline period had left with regard to the writing of epics. Moreover, as the public mode or epic revival advanced from 1640 to 1660, the lyric poetry of the Metaphysicals and Cavaliers with their private and social modes respectively lost ground, so that the order of genre precedence was reversed again: the verse epic grew first and lyric poetry last in respect. Thomas Hobbes's 'Answer to Davenant', published separately in Paris in 1650 and then prefixed to the London edition of William Davenant's public mode verse epic Gondibert (1651), rates the "Heroique Poem Dramatique" highest, and "Sonets, Epigrams, Eclogues, and the like peeces" lowest, as being "but Essayes and parts of an entire Poem". 149 At the end stood the triumph of Neoclassicism, 150 with Abraham Cowley's recantation of his earlier Metaphysical mode of writing, the 'Ode of Wit' (1656):
In default of formal artes poeticae and artes rhetoricae, 153 we have to reconstruct Metaphysical ideals and their rationale from various sources. 154 Among the richest sources are no doubt the numerous English and Latin elegies on the death of the famous poet and preacher John Donne in 1631. Some of these were incorporated in the posthumous editions of Donne's poems in 1633 and 1635. They unanimously emphasized the uniqueness of the preacher and the poet. Donne's biographer, Izaak Walton, equated "miraculous Donne" with a prophet, sent by God to his dull people. 155 Sir Lucius Cary and Richard Corbet called Donne a king, at whose death comets ought to have fallen from the sky. 156 Arthur Wilson praised Donne as a spirit of high-flying fantasy "in the aire of Wit", whose flights, though admired by many, only few could follow. 157 Henry Valentine compared Donne to the unique solitary phoenix, 'unica semper avis'. 158 Donne himself had used the same image in his First Anniversary when describing his contemporaries after their loss of 'all relation'. The best known is the elegy by Thomas Carew, who described Donne as the last of his age, gleaning a harvested tradition. 159 After him, poetical quality would be replaced by mere light-weight quantity. Although such demonstrative rhetoric of praise or blame (genus demonstrativum) makes use of literary commonplaces rather than historical facts, Carew's pitching of Donne's Baroque originality against Neoclassical imitation and obedience to rules shows one of the prime characteristics in the self-understanding of the Metaphysicals, in the context of the time-honoured querelle des anciens et des modernes. Carew's epitaph has become a literary quotation:
In politics, one of these traditional rules had demanded social interaction with the subjects, visits and audiences such as Elizabeth I had still cultivated. But, 'absolving' himself from that time-honoured rule, the Baroque prince, like the Baroque poet, tended to withdraw into his privacy. There may seem to exist a basic contradiction between the Baroque poet and his enclosed garden on the one hand, and the Baroque prince and his gigantic palace and garden on the other hand. But, quite apart from the fact that contradiction was the life and soul of Baroque culture, the contradiction is resolved in the poet's and prince's common pursuit of saving privacy, 'absoluteness', though by opposite means. The poet as the prince's subject kept the world at a distance on a smaller scale, parallel to his forbidding rhetoric; the prince did the same on a larger scale, with his forbidding architectural and horticultural pomp.
As to Baroque palace architecture, the contradiction between the plain 'Protestant' façades and the Baroque 'Roman Catholic' interiors has already been noted above. It symbolized the progressive estrangement between the early Stuart court and the people, the 'absolutism' which cost King Charles I his life. Later, in Restoration England, during the reign of his son Charles II (1660-85), the same phenomenon manifested itself again in another form, e.g. in Sir Christopher Wren's 'Protestant Baroque' church architecture, which combined Bernini's Baroque with Jones's Neoclassicism. Wren's original designs were too close to Bernini and the Roman Catholic Baroque, and the king's judicious policy demanded a compromise. Wren had to cut Bernini's vertically towering upward lines and arches into segments, interrupting them by strong horizontal lines expressing the curbs set on Stuart absolutism. A similar reduction in force and ornament can be observed in Wren's, Vanbrugh's and Hawksmoor's palace architecture.
As for Baroque garden architecture, the contradiction appears in the heterogeneous combination of the garden's gigantic dimensions with the private bowers, nooks, and secretive mazes enclosed within its walls. A short characterization of the medieval garden will help us to understand the Baroque garden, not only by contrast, but because the typology of the medieval garden still shaped the numerous Metaphysical garden poems by Southwell, Donne, Herbert, Marvell, and Vaughan, as well as the numerous garden pictures of emblem books. The typical medieval garden is a "garden enclosed", entailing all the erotic and divine symbolism derived from the Old Testament Song of Solomon. 163 As such, the medieval garden had been understood as an image of paradise in the religious as well as erotic sense. The Greek word for the Hebrew Garden of Eden was 'enclosed', and associated Paradise with the Hebrew 'garden enclosed' of the Song of Solomon. As a consequence of this association, iconography presented both Paradise and its image in nuce, the medieval garden, as walled round-in, hedged enclosures. 164 The interior - fertile and cultivated - would represent an "idealized, controlled representation of nature" 165 and thus, of course, divine order. Outside the walls was the domain of barren chaos, out of which God had created this orderly world. The gardener of the medieval hortus conclusus was consequently an image of God, alter Deus, - and also of the medieval king, alter rex - , insofar as he cultivated and fertilized the garden (which would otherwise be as barren as the chaos without). He had to graft in order to bring about fertility (note the sexual imagery) and to cut and prune in order to prevent excrescences (note the judicial imagery). This 'garden of love' with its sexual and divine connotations designated both fruitfulness and harmony. The medieval garden was a peaceful fruit and vegetable garden for the cultivation of food and medical herbs, indicating that both God and his terrestrial representative, the king, were in charge of providing peace, nourishment, and healing for their people. Deus medicus and rex medicus were commonplace terms and icons. This iconology and symbolism survived in the emblems and poems of the Baroque period, although the gardens themselves had by then radically changed. The reader of Donne's 'Twickenham Garden', for instance, must have been acquainted with that tradition in order to understand the poem's speaker, a soul-sick man (like Shakespeare's Hamlet) possessed by the deadly sin of acedia. He visits God's garden of love and medicine only to persevere in his grief, because he refuses to see suffering as a precondition to regeneration or Good Friday as a precondition to Easter:
Among these retiros counted the mazes or labyrinths characteristic of the Baroque garden. They mirrored the epoch's sense of disorientation, though they were mostly constructed around a firm and fixed centre - as if insisting on the notion of a still centralized universe and the presence of a God and a Heavenly Jerusalem still acting as the final destination for man (though he may be temporarily lost) on the pilgrimage of his life. 171 But, in their dazzling combination with bowers, crooked lanes, and arboreta (artificial forests), they brought an element of artificial chaos into that otherwise cultivated garden, which had formerly been understood to exclude all chaos in favour of a small undisputed cosmos. Thus, the Baroque garden expressed the epoch's disorientation post Copernicum as well as Baroque poetry, its sense of contrariety or "antithetisches Lebensgefühl". In England, the Baroque garden's association with Stuart absolutism led to the fatal destruction of all Baroque gardens under Cromwell. The walls were pulled down, the bowers and mazes mangled, and the statues demonstratively beheaded, as was the king himself on 30 January 1649. 172 Andrew Marvell's 'The Mower against Gardens' paradoxically condenses all the Puritan arguments against the artificiality of such Baroque gardens into a Metaphysical poem. The poem's plain unreliable speaker, a rustic mower, and evidently more Calvinistic than Marvell himself, argues on the basis of the typically Protestant and anti-Catholic ideal of (Christian) original primitiveness, innocence, and simplicity. To him, the artificial grottos, waterworks, statues, exotic plants and "adulterate" fruits of Baroque gardens constitute a denaturation, a falsification of God's original primitive design:
The private mode of the Baroque poet, however, was easier to realize than the private mode of the Baroque prince. In the closed 'internal' circle of his court, the literal 'absolutism' of the Baroque prince's 'external' rule ended. Here, he was obliged to submit to a strict set of formal rules of courtly etiquette. The medieval king's divinely imposed 'heavy burden' had thus shrunk to 'idle ceremony' 186 , the merely formal remains of his ancestors' exacting code of princely virtues.
In contrast to their Neoclassical successors with their strict obedience to formal rules and restrictions, each of the English Baroque poets was a distinctive individual who emphasized his originality by breaking all conventional forms and conventions "as hee thought fit". 187 Eventually, English Baroque literature died together with Stuart absolutism and was superseded by Neoclassical poetry (analogous to Restoration concepts of kingship), 188 following ancient models and obeying rules and norms. In spite of its adulatory rhetoric, Thomas Carew's elegy on John Donne had proved prophetic.
Notes:
1 Wellek, 'The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship and Postscript', in Concepts of Criticism, New Haven and London, 1963, 69-114 and 115-127. For the similarities between English and Continental Baroque poetry see Frank Joseph Warnke's comparative approach in the introduction to his commendable anthology European Metaphysical Poetry, New Haven and London, 1961. Following Odette de Mourgues (Metaphysical, Baroque and Précieux Poetry, Oxford, 1953), Warnke tries to establish a finely detailed distinction between 'Metaphysical' and 'high Baroque'. Later studies again tend to return to terminological differentiations of the Baroque, cf. Gregory T. Dime in Studies in English Literature, 26 (1966), and David Evett in John Donne Journal, 5 (1986). For the position of wider cultural studies v. Stephan Kohl, who assigns Baroque to the open (functional) and Neoclassicism to the closed (textual) type; 'Kulturtypologie und englischer Barock', in Europäische Barockrezeption, ed. Klaus Garber, Wiesbaden, 1991, II. 981-994. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, London and New York, 2001, II. 749-751, contains an excellent discussion of the etymology and early usage of the term 'Baroque'.
I saw Eternity the other night
And thus, mystically uplifted into the light of the Empyrean, Vaughan's enraptured speaker looks pitifully down on this dark, chaotic world and its hurled-about votaries, who live in lightless caves: the lover and the statesman, the miser and the Epicurean. They are so far removed from the ecstatic speaker's scope that they cannot tempt him any more. Parallel to the decline of the Elizabethan drama and the Ptolemaic universe, Metaphysical poetry was increasingly deprived of its original dramatic tension. 134 The struggle between the temptations of privacy and those of the world upon the 'stage of life', the tension between erotic and divine love, and the conflicting rhetorical figures of disparity, which had been part of its Baroque theatricality, are irretrievably lost:
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright,
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years
Driv'n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov'd. In which the world
And all her train were hurl'd. 133
O fools (said I,) thus to prefer dark night
The difference between the earlier and the late Metaphysical poets is mirrored in Metaphysical pulpit oratory, if we compare the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne on the one hand with those of Jeremy Taylor on the other hand. Taylor, chaplain to King Charles I (as Andrewes had been chaplain to King James I), and Charles's spiritual aide on the scaffold, preached sermons that accumulated and intertwined Metaphysical conceits in disdain of all worldly aspirations:
Before true light,
To live in grots, and caves, and hate the day
Because it shews the way,
The way which from this dead and dark abode
Leads up to God,
A way where you might tread the Sun, and be
More bright than he. 135
LEARN to despise the world; [...] for it is a cousenage all the way; the head of it is a rainbow, and the face of it is flattery; [...] its body is as a shadow, and its hands do knit spider's webs; it is an image and a noise, with a Hyaena's lip and a Serpents tail [...] 136
In the history of Metaphysical poetry, this loss of dramatic tension and theatricality becomes manifest in a comparison of the late Mary Magdalene hymns or Christmas hymns of Henry Vaughan with the early ones written by Robert Southwell and Richard Crashaw. The "Dear, beauteous Saint" 137 of Vaughan's Silex Scintillans has cast away all of Mary Magdalene's traditional pictorial attributes: her mirror, her carefully combed hair, and her vessel of nard which simultaneously denoted the anointing of Christ's feet and the pernicious box of Pandora. Here, the saint's weeping eyes are no longer "sins loose and tempting spies", but fixed stars despising all earthly contact, except for their remote exhortation of "dark straglers" (moral and political sinners lost in the darkness of error). 138 Similarly, Vaughan's hymn on 'Christ's Nativity' presents an unworldly child in a clean manger, and one of the poem's few remaining conceits (the comparison of the manger with a human heart) opens up an estranging gap in time and space between man and God, a gap which God alone can bridge from far beyond human reach:
I would I had in my best part
Robert Southwell's and the young Milton's Christmas hymns, by contrast, describe very personal encounters with a "silly, tender Babe [...] In homely manger trembling" 140 , a tangible God "All meanly wrapt in a rude manger". 141 Pre-Baroque and Baroque paintings of the Nativity, as by Correggio, Barocci, and Caravaggio, mark the extreme poverty and everyday homeliness of the world's most exceptional moment of divine epiphany. The mightiest prince of the whole world appears in the homeliest hut, the greatest weakness is the greatest strength, and the child's sweet birth is envisaged so as to foreshadow the man's bitter passion. The swaddling-cloth is both at once: royal cloak and dead body's shroud. If such paradoxical and highly dramatic bridging of extremes may be regarded as a characteristic of Baroque art, then Vaughan's comfortable adoption of the spiritual and undramatic renunciation of the sensual extreme, both in his life and his poetry, indicates the end of the Baroque epoch.
Fit Roomes for thee! or that my heart
Were so clean as
Thy manger was!
But I am all filth, and obscene,
Yet, if thou wilt, thou canst make clean. 139
To give All will befit thee well;
This speaker's claim to uniqueness and privacy proves mere irony. A comparison of the poem with Donne's 'The Canonization' shows the almost parodistical destruction of the Baroque private mode. Whereas Donne's speaker excludes the genteel world and its accepted values in order to realize his unifying love with his one mistress, Cowley's speaker does so only in order to unmask both that world and himself as true dissimulating Machiavels, changing both amorous allegiances and political allegiances according to opportunity. The only thing that distinguishes him from the world is his honesty:
But not at Under-Rates to sell. 143
I'll some such crooked ways invent,
This should not, of course, mislead us to regard late Metaphysical poetry simply as a decadent form of Donne's poetry. 145 It stands in its own right, but it moved closer to Cavalier poetry and thus indicated its epoch's need for a less scholastic, less dramatically torn, but more rationalistic way of writing. It has been aptly shown that this development is also reflected in the development of the aesthetic philosophy of and in the style of Thomas Hobbes. 146 The apparent chaos in macrocosm, state, and microcosm had first led the intellectuals into a more or less extreme withdrawal, with the consequence of an upgrading of private and social mode poetry and a simultaneous devaluation of all public mode genres, notably the epic. The heyday of Metaphysical and Cavalier poetry saw an increasing decline both in the production of epic poetry and prose 147 and in the quality of drama. But, as the sense of chaos visibly increased with the Civil War in Britain (and the Thirty Years' War in Germany), there arose a new demand for a new public responsibility in literature.
As you, or your Fore-fathers went:
I'll flatter or oppose the King,
Turn Puritan, or Any Thing. 144
In a true piece of Wit all things must be,
But, eventually, the decline of Metaphysical poetry was also inseparably linked to the decline of Cavalier poetry. Lyric poetry and the lyric ego's private or social mode, repudiated in High Neoclassicism from Dryden to Johnson, did not reappear until the lyrical revival of the Preromantic and Romantic Movement of the later eighteenth century. 152
Yet all things there agree.
As in the Ark, joyn'd without force or strife,
All Creatures dwelt; all Creatures that had Life.
Or as the Primitive Forms of all
(If we compare great things with small)
Which without Discord or Confusion lie,
In that strange Mirror of the Deitie. 151
Here lies a King, that rul'd as hee thought fit
In terms of the history of ideas, the ideal of the Baroque poet was the counterpart of the ideal of the absolute prince. Thus, "the divine right of kings" 161 formed the counterpart to "the divine right of poets". In this respect, too, the Baroque poetry of the Metaphysicals reflected the intellectual climate of the age (of Stuart absolutism) much better than the Neoclassical poetry of the Cavaliers with its strict submission to Horatian rules. The Baroque refused to submit to poetic traditions and rules as laid down and reflected in Cicero or Horace, Scaliger or Puttenham. The Baroque prince refused to submit to ancient political traditions and rules as they could still be found in Erasmus or Elyot, for instance. While the medieval authoritative theorists of politics such as John of Salisbury, Bracton and others had placed the prince both above and under the law, rex supra et infra legem, rex legibus absolutus et legibus alligatus, the Baroque prince tended to neglect the latter parts of that dualistic approach. This new understanding of his absolute position had its roots not so much in Bodin or Hobbes, but in Machiavelli's 'absolving' the prince from hitherto firmly established and divinely ordained ethical norms. 162
The universall Monarchy of wit. 160
And that this place may thoroughly be thought
After the Middle Ages, 167 in the Renaissance, that paradisiacal 'garden of love' metamorphosed from intimacy to grandeur, and from a fruit and vegetable garden to an ornamental garden. Thus, it lost part of its religious symbolism in the wake of the general process of secularization. It adjoined a palace, mansion, or monastery, though not yet as part of a grand design comprising buildings and gardens. The development then progressed to the Baroque garden, facing a royal, ducal, or episcopal palace and proportioned to the whole length of that palace's façade. Moreover, it enriched the traditional Renaissance parterre by introducing costly, large-scale, artificial terraces. In its gigantic size and design, this ensemble embodied the Absolutist's prince's centralistic concentration of power. Spectacular and theatrical, with large and fragrant (mostly artificially grown) flowers and fruit, and with the magnificent mise-en-scène of its garden feasts to the sound of specially commissioned garden or river fireworks 168 and musical entertainments, the Baroque garden was - like Baroque poetry - designed to appeal to all the senses. Thus, it provides another proof of the close link between Baroque and absolutism. 169 This is also apparent in the Baroque garden's ingenious new water architecture, including machine-operated artificial fountains on meadows and in artificial musical grottos. 170 Nevertheless, as has been stated above, the interior of that gigantic Baroque garden was fantastically subdivided so as to provide the prince with "retiros" from the courtiers, just as the whole garden provided the court with a "retiro" from the 'vulgar' populace. The self-isolatory private mode was guaranteed both ways.
True Paradise, I have the serpent brought. 166
'Tis all enforc'd, the Fountain and the Grot;
Denaturation does not only imply devitalization and vilification, but sin. The poem's initial attack upon the "Vice" of "Luxurious Man" names one of the seven deadly sins, 'luxuria', the irregular lust of lovers, and the loss of both men's and plants' procreative vitality through unnatural excess in those oversecretive and overamorous gardens:
While the sweet Fields do lye forgot. 173
Luxurious Man, to bring his Vice in use,
What follows is a densely and subtly interwoven catalogue of other sins involved in Baroque horticulture: pride (in man's 'dealing between the bark and the [forbidden] tree' by assuming to improve God's natural paradise), robbery (in the Roman Catholic Spaniards' expeditions to exploit the exotic treasures of South America), adultery (in the unnatural breeding of new but unprocreative plants and trees), the Baroque princes' irregular craze for unnatural unprocreative eunuchs as gardeners, singers, or even lovers, and the Baroque princes' neglect of their public duty in the private mode of their walled-in self-seclusion. Here, "A dead and standing pool of Air" is perversely given preference to a more natural and accessible garden
Did after him the World seduce:
And from the fields the Flow'rs and Plants allure,
Where nature was most plain and pure. 174
Where willing Nature does to all dispence
This wild and fragrant innocence is implicitly pitched against the stale incense in Roman Catholic nunneries and churches. Far from Calvin's iconoclasm, Marvell was a Protestant who had appropriated the Baroque, though on a smaller scale and without the Roman Catholics' love of pompous artificial excess, just as the Baroque interior of Protestant churches adapted Baroque paintings and ornament on small panels and in reduced proportions. In that respect, Marvell's preference for natural and proportionate gardens resembled that of the High Churchman George Herbert in Bemerton, Salisbury. 176 Similarly, in Andrew Marvell's topographical poem 'Upon Appleton House. To my Lord Fairfax', the speaker argues not against gardens and garden pleasures themselves, but against unnatural artificiality, unnatural enclosures, and unnatural pompous grandeur and disproportion as typical of the Roman Catholic and Counter-Reformatory Baroque. His tale of the past, when the heiress Isabel Thwaites, wooed by William Fairfax, was confined in the former nunnery, establishes a significant parallel between Roman Catholic monasticism and Baroque horticulture. Both appear as dominated by sinful pride and unnatural luxury, both erect walled-in dungeons, and both lack the natural vigour of procreation. 177 Yet now the original nunnery's confining walls have been pulled down, and Cromwell's General Thomas Fairfax has built himself a solid, unpretentious, and functional brick mansion for temporal residence instead of a vast, artificial, and ornamental Baroque palace for permanent self-seclusion, and a 'military garden' instead of its complement, the 'amorous garden'. 178 Fairfax's garden "laid [...] out [...]
In the just Figure of a Fort" 179 was decorated with naturally grown flowers that often bore military names; 180 it had no artificially bred trees and flowers, no artificial waterworks, no artificial grottos, no artificial terraces, and no statues of fauns and fairies. Instead of providing an escapist private-mode retiro, this military garden was as functional and related to the unquiet times as the fortified house. Here General Fairfax would perform military exercises even in times of temporal peace: si vis pacem para bellum. 181 This, as well as the speaker's appeal to General Fairfax not to withdraw but to commit himself to public duties, or his allegorical argumentation both against too high (Cavaliers) and too low (Levellers), make it evident that Marvell's garden stanzas replace the Baroque private mode by a pre-Augustan public mode in keeping with the unquiet times. Accordingly, they are no longer poetry in praise of artificial Baroque retiros, the less so as the speaker repeatedly expresses the author's Protestant conviction that the earth's paradisiacal prelapsarian state cannot possibly be retrieved (natura totaliter corrupta). 182 The poem's expository grotesque satire on the sham perfection and strained inventiveness of Salomon de Caus 183 and his falsification of God's creation and creation's natural proportions establishes the contrast to the excesses and unrealistic escapism of Roman Catholic and Absolutist architecture and horticulture:
A wild and fragrant Innocence. 175
Within this sober Frame expect
One of King Charles I's favourite Baroque gardens was Wilton House, in front of the above-mentioned home of the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke, near Salisbury, begun around 1632 after designs by Salomon de Caus and with the help of Inigo Jones. It was chiefly modelled on the design of the magnificent Baroque garden in front of the palatial Villa D'Este in Tivoli near Rome, built by the powerful and ambitious Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este between 1560 and 1575, and on Caus's Hortus Palatinus in Heidelberg, built from 1615-1620 for Elizabeth Stuart and her husband Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate. Wilton House was restored by Inigo Jones and John Webb from 1649-52, decades after John Donne had visited Lady Pembroke, the mother of his pupil George Herbert. 185 Although the garden was not begun until the time of Donne's death, the king's and the poet's visits expressing their common predilection for the same palace and family once again show the cultural and ideological kinship of absolutism and the Baroque.
Work of no Forrain Architect;
That unto Caves and Quarries drew,
And Forrests did to Pastures hew;
Who of his great Design in pain
Did for a Model vault his Brain,
Whose Columnes should so high be raise'd
To arch the Brows that on them gaz'd. 184
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2 Dryden, A Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693), in Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson, Everyman's Library, London, 1962, II. 76 and 150.
3 Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, 'Life of Cowley' (1779-81), ed. L. Archer Hind, Everyman's Library, London, 1925, I. 11. Johnson found fault even with Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism (1711), because he surmised that Pope's notion of representative metre ("The sound must seem an echo to the sense", line 365) misled him into "many wild conceits and imaginary beauties"; 'Life of Pope', ed. cit. III. 230.
4 Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, 'Life of Cowley', ed. cit. I. 13-22.
5 Wolfgang G. Müller, 'T.S. Eliots Poetik und seine Barockrezeption', in Europäische Barockrezeption, II. 1027-1046.
6 See Mario Praz, Studi sul concettismo, Milan, 1934; and 'Baroque in England', Modern Philology 61 (1964), pp. 169-179. Leonard Unger, Donne's Poetry and Modern Criticism, New York, 1950, 1962, speaks of "extended metaphors" and "extended comparisons".
7 Donne, The Second Anniversary, or, Of the Progress of the Soul, 1612, lines 179-184, in Works, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson, Oxford, 1912, I. 256. The two Anniversaries (1611-12) were bold philosophic and didactic elegies formally addressed to the deceased Elizabeth Drury, daughter of his patron and friend Sir Robert Drury.
8 Hans Sedlmayr, Verlust der Mitte, Salzburg, 1948.
9 The whole Kleinseite or Malá Strana of Prague was Baroquified after 1627, when Roman Catholicism had been proclaimed the state religion in the Kingdom of Bohemia. The motor of this development was the Jesuit Collegium Clementinum (with its famous Baroque library).
10 E.g. Petrarch, Sonnetto In vita, 161, and Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, III/2, 1.
11 Crashaw, Steps to the Temple, 'The Weeper' and 'The Tear', London,1646, 1648, in Poems English, Latin, and Greek, ed. L. C. Martin, Oxford, 1957. The copy-text used here is that of 1648, ed. cit. pp. 308-314, as also reprinted in Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, Oxford, 1921, 1959, 1969, p. 130-136. It is more rewarding than the text of the first edition, though, unfortunately, it omits 'The Tear'.
12 Donne, Songs and Sonnets, 'The Flea', in Poems, ed. cit. I. 40-41. In contrast to conventional comparisons observing decorum on the one hand, and concetti on the other, see Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery, Chicago, 1947. For "theories which formalised the cult of the witty conceit" see A. J. Smith, Metaphysical Wit, Cambridge, 1991, 46-68.
13 Examples in Emblemata. Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, ed. Henkel/Schöne, Stuttgart, 1962, p. 1398 (Daniel Heinsius), and Georgette de Montenay, Emblemes ou Devises Chrestiennes, 1571, p. 45, repr. Continental Emblem Books, The Scolar Press, 1973.
14 Donne, Holy Sonnets, I, ll. 13-14., in Poems, ed. cit. I. 322.
15 Printed in Emblemata, ed. cit. p. 82.
16 Also v. Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, 3rd edition Berne and Munich, 1961, pp. 151-152, and Richard Alewyn / Karl Sälzle, Das große Welttheater, 1959, Munich, 1985.
17 Distinguished, for example, by Thomas Wilson (1553), George Puttenham (1589), and John Hoskins (1599).
18 'Rhetoric' in this context is used in its maximalist sense referring to the five partes artis: inventio (the finding of ideas)
dispositio (the arrangement of ideas)
Though in English the term is generally taken to refer only to 'the arts of language' (OED, 2nd ed. 'rhetoric', 1a), this minimalistic concept would here be insufficient.
elocutio (the formulation of ideas)
memoria
pronunciatio (delivery)
19 Donne, Letters to Several Personages, 'The Storm' and 'The Calm' (MSS 1597), in Poetical Works, ed. cit. I. 175-180.
20 Donne, 'The Storm', lines 67-72, ed. cit. I. 177.
21 Donne, 'The Calm', lines 49-50, ed. cit. I. 179.
22 Donne, The First Anniversary, or, An Anatomy of the World, 1611, ll. 19-88, in Poems, ed. cit. I. 232-234. Also v. Ulrich Broich, 'Form und Bedeutung der Paradoxie im Werk John Donnes', in Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 17 (1967), pp. 231-248.
23 Tourneur, The Revenger's Tragedy, III. v, ed. Foakes, The Revels Plays. London, 1966, pp. 70-73. Vindice's monologue in ll. 69-82 has been commented on by many poets and literary historians, ibid., 71.
24 Hübscher, 'Grundlegung einer Phraseologie der Geistesgeschichte', in Euphorion, 24 (1922), p. 15, supplement, pp. 517-562 and 759-805.
25 For this typology v. Burkhardt Niederhoff, "The Rule of Contrary": Das Paradox in der englischen Komödie der Restaurationszeit und des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts, Trier: WVT, 2001.
26 Examples from John Donne's Holy Sonnets, XIV and XVIII, (according to Grierson's numbering).
27 Ibid.
28 Note the occasional and chaste paradoxes in Dryden's and Pope's verse epistles.
29 For these contexts v. the ground-breaking study by Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica. The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox, Princeton, 1966.
30 This is also the central argument in A. J. Smith, Metaphysical Wit, passim.
31 Also v. John Robert Christianson, On Tycho's Island: Tycho Brahe and His Assistants, 1570-1601, Cambridge, 1999.
32 Quoted by Wolfgang Riehle, 'Zum Paradoxon bei Shakespeare', in Das Paradox, ed. Paul Geyer/Roland Hagenbüchle, Tübingen, 1992, 336.
33 Quoted by Wolfgang G. Müller, 'Das Paradoxon in der englischen Barocklyrik: John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw', ibid. I. 380.
34 This medieval Latin word for a form of syllogism as the possible etymon for 'Baroque' was originally suggested by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Dictionnaire de musique, Paris, 1768. The controversial etymology is defended by Renè Wellek.
35 Exodus 20. 25.
36 Herbert, 'The Altar', in Works, ed. F. E. Hutchinson, Oxford, 1941, p. 26. The pattern poem in the form of an altar underscores the poetological meaning of "this frame" (line 11).
37<7 Alchemy, which intended to convert lower into higher matter by bringing substances into "coition" under various conditions of heat, had strong erotic associations; v. contemporary paintings and engravings of alchemical laboratories ("stews"), and the brothel plot in Ben Jonson's comedy The Alchemist (1610).
38 Donne, 'A Nocturnal upon St Lucy's Day', in Poems, ed. cit. I. 44-45. 5 stanzas consisting of 9 lines each. Also cf. Günter Ahrends's interpretation, 'Discordia concors: John Donnes 'Nocturnall upon Saint Lucies Day'', Die neueren Sprachen, 70 (1971), pp. 68-85.
39 See Anthony Raspa, The Emotive Image: Jesuit Poetics in the English Renaissance. Fort Worth, Texas, 1983. The strong influence of plastic art upon Baroque poetry has been most intensively studied in the case of George Herbert; see for example Rosemond Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert. London, 1952. Helen Vendler came to the same conclusion in The Poetry of George Herbert. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1975.
40 At that time, 'microcosm' meant 'man' and 'microcosmography' was synonymous with 'anthropology'; v. OED.
41 For this v. E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, London, 1945, 1960, pp. 77-93.
42 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, New York, 1974. Thus, the loss of community began much earlier than Sennett assumes. Also v. Brigitte Glaser, The Creation of the Self in Autobiographical Forms of Writing in Seventeenth-Century England, Heidelberg, 2001, passim.
43 Also v. Philipp Wolf, Einheit, Abstraktion und literarisches Bewußtsein. Studien zur Ästhetisierung der Dichtung, zur Semantik des Geldes und anderen symbolischen Medien der frühen Neuzeit Englands, Tübingen, 1998, pp. 69-93 and 279-303.
44 Also v. Renate Schruff, Herrschergestalten bei Shakespeare. Untersucht vor dem Hintergrund zeitgenössischer Vorstellungen vom Herrscherideal, Tübingen, 1999, passim.
45 Also v. Jerzy Limon, The Masque of Stuart Culture, Newark, 1990. The replacement of the public audiences' "imaginary puissance" by magnificent illusory stage-designs was another symptom of dissociation, both from the public theatres and from the public dialogue between artist and playgoer.
46 Also v. Earl Miner, The Metaphysical Mode from Donne to Cowley, chapter 1 'The Private Mode', Princeton, 1969, 3-47. It is, however, misleading to call a poet such as Henry Vaughan "proto-Romantic"; the similarities between the nostalgic primitivism and cult of loneliness in Vaughan's 'The Retreat' (1650) and Wordsworth's 'Intimations Ode' (1807) are due to the Neo-Platonism shared by both poets.
47 Lowry Nelson, Baroque Lyric Poetry, New Haven and London, 1961, pp. 161-167.
48 Donne, 'The Sun Rising', lines 21-22, in Poems, ed. cit. I. 11.
49 Donne, 'A Hymn to Christ at the Author's Last Going into Germany', lines 29-30, ed. cit. I. 353.
50 Marvell, Miscellaneous Poems, 'The Garden', lines 15-16, in Poems and Letters, ed. Margoliouth/rev. Legouis, Oxford, 1971, I, 51. On the poem's 'unreliable speaker' providing a satire on the extremes of the Roman Catholic Baroque v. the interpretation below.
51 Hatzfeld, 'Der Barockstil der religiösen klassischen Lyrik in Frankreich', in Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch, 4 (1929), pp. 30-60.
52 Frank Joseph Warnke, 'Introduction', in European Metaphysical Poetry, p. 51, scolds this characteristic (with reference to Giambattista Marino) for being a "facile religiosity made more facile by sensuality".
53 See also Louis L. Martz, The Wit of Love: Donne, Carew, Crashaw, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1969.
54 Donne, 'Hymn to Christ at the Author's Last Going into Germany', lines 1-8, in Poems, ed.cit. I. 352.
55 Donne, 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning', 7-8, ed. cit. I. 50. Note the symbolism of "gold to ayerie thinnesse beate" (line 24) in the ornament of Baroque architecture.
56 Ibid. line 26. Note the puns on erection in the saving act of love.
57 Donne, 'The Ecstasy', lines 20-23 and 73-74, ed. cit. I. 52-53. Note the typically Baroque paradoxes.
58 This observation was already made before Martz, 1954. See W. P. Friederich, Spiritualismus und Sensualismus in der englischen Barocklyrik, Vienna and Leipzig, 1932, and, after Martz, F. J. Warnke, Versions of Baroque, New Haven and London, 1972, pp. 130-157.
59 Also v. Philipp Wolf, Einheit, Abstraktion und literarisches Bewußtsein, pp. 97-148.
60 Ignatian "composition of place" is still of importance in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-15), where it serves the Jesuit educators to frighten the young, impressionable, artistic hero Stephen Dedalus with horrible visions of the Four Last Things (Death, Judgment, Hell, Heaven).
61 Arno Esch, Englische religiöse Lyrik des 17. Jahrhunderts: Studien zu Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan, Tübingen, 1955.
62 Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, New Haven, 1954, 1962.
63 So did Robert Burton in clear opposition to the Baroque rhetoric in his preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), likewise Francis Quarles in his preface to Argalus and Parthenia (1629). In her gender study Elaine Hobby shows why women could write Cavalier poetry, but not Metaphysical "strong lines"; The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry. Donne to Marvell, ed. T.N. Corns, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 31-51.
64 See also Helen Gardner in the introduction to her anthology The Metaphysical Poets, Oxford, 1957.
65 See F. Strich, 'Die Übertragung des Barockbegriffs von der bildenden Kunst auf die Dichtung', in Die Kunstformen des Barockzeitalters, ed. R. Stamm, Berne, 1956, pp. 243-265.
66 Cf. Shakespeare's sonnets, e. g. Sonnet 70, where the speaker finds fault with the Mannerist 'rival poet' for his false bodily as well as false stylistic paint. At the time wigs and make-up became a controversial - and later the standard - fashion.
67 Herbert, 'Jordan (I)', in Works, ed. cit. pp. 56-57. The complex title also refers to the replacement of a heathen poetic myth of inspiration (Helicon) by a Christian and biblical one, in the context of the biblical model of plain style in Metaphysical religious poetry.
68 For details v. Nicholas Cooper, Houses of the Gentry 1480-1680, New Haven and London, 1999, and Simon Thurley, Whitehall Palace, New York and London, 2000.
69 Princeton, 1979.
70 Even the Dutch Calvinists (such as Daniel Heinsius) published great numbers of emblem books, introduced pictorial arts into their churches, and wrote Protestant Baroque poetry (Heinsius, Joost van den Vondel, etc).
71 Addison, The Spectator, 62 (11 May 1711), ed. D. F. Bond, Oxford, 1965, I. 265. Addison does not mention the fact that such pattern poems as George Herbert's 'The Altar' and 'Easter Wings' or Robert Herrick's 'The Pillar of Fame' and 'This Cross-Tree' had their predecessors in late classical antiquity, as in the wings-poem of the Anthologia Graeca. Also v. Ulrich Ernst, 'The Figured Poem. Towards a Definition of Genre', Visible Language, 20 (1986), pp. 8-27.
72 Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, 'Life of Cowley', ed. cit. I. 11.
73 Thus, for example, Matteo Pellegrini, Delle acutezze (1639), and Baltasar Gracissn, Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1642, 1648). S. L. Bethell examines both works in 'The Nature of Metaphysical Wit', in Discussions of John Donne, ed. Frank Kermode, Boston, 1962, pp. 136-149.
74 Marino, La Murtoleide (1619), Fischiata 33, quoted in Austin Warren, Richard Crashaw. A Study in Baroque Sensibility, London, 1939, p. 75. See also F. J. Warnke, 'Marino and the English Metaphysicals', in Studies in the Renaissance, 2 (1955), pp. 160-175, and Ruth C. Wallerstein, Richard Crashaw: A Study in Style and Poetic Development, Madison, Wisconsin, 1959, passim.
75 T.S. Eliot, 'The Metaphysical Poets' (1921) (introduction to H.J.C. Grierson's anthology), in Selected Essays, London 1932, 3rd ed. 1951, 287.
76 Ibid., 288. Cf. S. L. Bethell, 'The Nature of Metaphysical Wit', and Ruth Wallerstein, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Poetic, Madison, 1960, pp. 166-169 (with reference to Marvell's Baroque wit and puns). Peter N. Skrine, who, in The Baroque, London, 1978, pp. 133-134, has a different notion of the Baroque age, sees Baroque wit above all in Marino's mythological poem L'Adone (1623).
77 See for example Earl Miner, The Metaphysical Mode, pp. 3-4. Also v. N. J. C. Andreasen, John Donne: Conservative Revolutionary, Princeton, 1967, passim.
78 F.L. Lucas, The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal, 'La princesse lointaine, or, The Nature of Romanticism', Cambridge, 1936.
79 Cf. J.W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet, London, 1956, and J. B. Leishman, Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Sonnets, London, 1961. For John Donne's "counterdiscourse" to Petrarchism see Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire. English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses, Ithaca and London, 1995, pp. 203-249.
80 Margaret Cavendish, The World's Olio, London, 1655; quoted from Elaine Hobby, 'The Politics of Gender', in Corns, p. 47.
81 For this cf. Shakespeare-Handbuch, ed. Ina Schabert, Stuttgart, 1972, pp. 614-616.
82 Early experimenters in that new technique were Heinrich Schütz (born 1585), Johann Hermann Schein (born 1586, one of Johann Sebastian Bach's predecessors as Cantor of St Thomas's School in Leipzig), and Samuel Scheidt (born 1587). J.-J. Rousseau's article in his Dictionnaire de musique, mentioned above, contains a highly perceptive description of Baroque music.
83 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. cit. II. 755.
84 Ibid.
85 The early Baroque period also witnessed the invention of the organ pedal.
86 For the affections moved by the various favourite instruments of the period v. John Dryden, 'A Song for St Cecilia's Day', 22 Nov 1687, here stanza 5.
87 As in Johann Sebastian Bach's Kreuzstabkantate, BWV 56 (1726).
88 For these v. Ulrich Thieme, Die Affektenlehre im philosophischen und musikalischen Denken des Barock, Celle, 1984, and John Hollander, The Untuning of the Sky, Princeton, 1961, chapter IV, pp. 162-244.
89 Pope, The Dunciad, 1742, IV. 53-58, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, London, 1939-1969, V. 346-347. Pope reproaches the opera for lack of nature, harmony, order, and regulating judgment or common sense.
90 Also v. R.L. Sharp, From Donne to Dryden, 1940, Hamden, Connecticut, 1965, pp. 34-61.
91 For this close relationship v. also Mario Praz, Studi sul concettismo, passim.
92 R. C. Bald, John Donne. A Life, Oxford, 1970, pp. 63-66; Bald even assumes a personal acquaintance.
93 As in Francis Quarles's emblem book Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man, London, 1638, 1639. This also explains the craze for obelisks with their engraved hieroglyphs, which Baroque city architects selected from the rubble of antiquity in order to adorn the centres of their newly-desiged places and squares: Piazza San Pietro, Piazza Navona, Piazza del Popolo in Rome, as well as genuine or imitated or stylized obelisks in the centres of places and squares in other European cities.
94 See annotations above.
95 See also Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books, 1948, New York, 1978.
96 Ibid. pp. 229-240.
97 Donne, Holy Sonnets, XVIII, ll. 11-14, in Poems, ed. cit. I. 330.
98 Crashaw, Steps to the Temple, 'The Weeper' (1648), ed. cit. pp. 308-14, passim.
99 Christ's markedly androgynic body, also apparent in nativity scenes, designs him as neither 'vir' nor 'mulier', but 'homo', who assumed the human form in order to save both men and women.
100 Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion, Chicago, 1996. For the combination of excess and eroticism cf. Robert Southwell's poem 'Christ's Bloody Sweat', in Poems, ed. cit. pp. 18-19.
101 Also v. Lowry Nelson, Baroque Lyric Poetry, p. 26.
102 Crashaw, Steps to the Temple, 'In the Holy Nativity of Our Lord God. A Hymn Sung as by the Shepherds' (1648), ed. cit. p. 250. Baroque Christmas poems (and paintings) with their pictorial descriptions of the world's greatest unique epiphany were especially suitable for such literary techniques of mystical reconciliation.
103 This impression has even misled critics to spot the roots of Postmodernism in the Jacobean era; e. g. Maurice Hunt, 'Elizabethan 'Modernism', Jacobean 'Postmodernism'', in Papers on Language and Literature, 31 (1995), 115-144.
104 Barabas in Marlowe, The Jew of Malta (1589-90), a prototype of the numerous later stage-Machiavels.
105 Donne, The First Anniversary, or, An Anatomy of the World, first printed 1611, lines 205-218, in Poems, ed. cit. I, 237-238. Cf. C.M. Coffin, John Donne and the New Philosophy, New York, 1937, 1958, and Odette de Mourgues, Metaphysical, Baroque and Précieux Poetry, pp. 88-99. For the debate over the world's alleged decadence v. Victor Harris, All Coherence Gone, Chicago, 1949, and Herschel Baker, The Wars of Truth, Cambridge, Mass., 1952.
106 Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, first printed 1609, I. iii. 86 (Ulysses on the Greeks) and II. ii. 167 and 176-77 (Hector on the Trojans). Cf. Rolf Lessenich, 'Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida: The Vision of Decadence', in Studia Neophilologica 49 (1977), pp. 221-32. For retreat into privacy as a possible result of the nauseating disorientation of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century intellectuals, in view of profound economical and social changes, v. L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson, London, 1937, and Robert Ellrodt, L'inspiration personelle et l'esprit du temps chez les poètes métaphysiques anglais, 'La Nausée', Paris, 1960, II. 46-93.
107 Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, I. iii. 101-110; for the aspect of world and art turning 'absurd' cf. Gustav René Hocke, Die Welt als Labyrinth, Hamburg, 1957, and Manierimus in der Literatur, Hamburg, 1959.
108 Donne, The First Anniversary, lines 396-97, ed. cit. I. 243.
109 Herbert, The Temple, 'The Church-Porch', lines 5-6, in Works, ed. cit. p. 6.
110 Ibid., 'The Altar', lines 15-16, ed. cit. p. 26.
111 As analysed below.
112 Woman was still regarded as an inferior and inverted man, who secreted semen like man, though to a lesser extent. For "tears", "milk", "balm", "wine" etc. as synonyms for semen v. Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, 3 vols., London, 1994.
113 Also v. Roy Strong, The Renaissance Garden in England, London, 1979, 1998, pp. 12 seqq.
114 Donne, Songs and Sonnets, 'The Canonization', lines 10-18, ed. cit. I. 14.
115 Donne, Satires, III. lines 100-101, ed. cit. I. 158.
116 Cf. William R. Mueller, John Donne: Preacher, Princeton, 1962, pp. 89-114.
117 Cf. W. F. Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson, London, 1932, passim.
118 Cf. also Miner, The Metaphysical Mode, pp. 93-107.
119 For dramaticality as a characteristic of Baroque poetry v. Lowry Nelson, Baroque Lyric Poetry, pp. 87-98.
120 Reported in Izaak Walton's Lives (1640-1678), ed. George Saintsbury, The World's Classics, Oxford, 1927, p. 29.
121 Herbert, The Temple, 'The Quip' (1633), lines 1-4, in Works, ed. cit. p. 110.
122 Crashaw, Steps to the Temple, 'The Weeper' (1648), final stanza 31, ed. cit. p. 314. Note again the paradox of the lowliest being the highest, just as the weakest and poorest are the strongest and richest.
123 Marvell, Miscellaneous Poems, 'On a Drop of Dew', lines 29-30, in Poems and Letters, ed. cit. I. 12-13.
124 Here I differ considerably from Maren-Sofie Røstvig's naive reading of the poem in The Happy Man, 2 vols., Oslo, 1962.
125 Marvell, Miscellaneous Poems, 'The Garden', line 64, in Poems and Letters, ed. cit. I. 53.
126 Ibid. line 71, ed. cit. I. 53. For the pun v. Helge Kökeritz, Shakespeare's Pronunciation, New Haven, 1953, 1974.
127 Title provided by Thomas Traherne's brother Philip.
128 Traherne, Poems, 'Eden', lines 1-7, in Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, Oxford, 1958, 1965, II. 12. The quotation is from Thomas Traherne's own version, not that revised by his brother Philip.
129 Traherne, Poems, 'On Leaping over the Moon', lines 67-70, ed. cit. II. 132.
130 Ibid. lines 51-60, ed. cit. II. 131.
131 Pope, An Essay on Man, 1733-34, epistle II, lines 3-18. A similar span of 200 years was needed to find a new orientation after Niccolò Machiavelli's revolution in ethical philosophy (1513).
132 Cf. Elizabeth Holmes, Henry Vaughan and the Hermetic Philosophy, Oxford, 1932, and Rolf Lessenich, 'Henry Vaughan's Poem 'Regeneration'', in Studia Neophilologica, 44 (1972), pp. 76-89.
133 Vaughan, Silex Scintillans, 'The World' (1650), lines 1-15, in Works, ed. L.C . Martin, Oxford, 1957, p. 466.
134 Also v. Helen Gardner's 'Introduction' to her anthology The Metaphysical Poets, Oxford, 1957.
135 Ibid. lines 49-56; ed. cit. p. 467.
136 Taylor, XXV Sermons, London, 1653, p. 148.
137 Vaughan, Silex Scintillans, 'St Mary Magdalen', line 1, ed. cit. p. 507.
138 Ibid. lines 57-60, ed. cit. p. 509. The poem's two final stanzas with their contrast of the true tears of St Mary Magdalene with the false tears of the Pharisees may also be read as a Cavalier's criticism of the false saintliness of the Puritans: "Who Saint themselves, they are no Saints" (line 72).
139 Vaughan, Silex Scintillans, 'Christ's Nativity', lines 19-24, ed. cit. p. 442.
140 Southwell, 'New Prince, New Pomp', lines 1-2, in Poems, ed. cit. p. 16.
141 Milton, 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity', MS 1629, line 31, in Poetical Works, ed. Helen Darbishire, Oxford, 1955, II. 114.
142 For a detailed documentation of this development v. Norbert Lennartz, "The Unwashed Muse", research in progress (to be published).
143 Cowley, 'The Given Love', lines 55-56, in English Writings, ed. A. R. Waller, Cambridge, 1905-1906,. II. 70.
144 Ibid. lines 19-22, ed. cit. II. 69. Note the royalist's subtle satire on the Puritan hypocrisy of Cromwell's reign.
145 As in earlier histories of Metaphysical poetry: George Williamson, The Donne Tradition, Cambridge, Mass., 1930, and Alfred Alvarez, The School of Donne, London, 1961.
146 Raman Selden, 'Hobbes and Late Metaphysical Poetry', Journal of the History of Ideas, 35 (1974), 197-210.
147 In the history of the epic prose romance or novel, this may also account for the hiatus between the Elizabethan novel (John Lyly, Philip Sidney, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Deloney) and the Restoration and Augustan novel (John Bunyan, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe).
148 For details v. Earl Miner, The Restoration Mode from Milton to Dryden, chapter 1 'The Public Mode', Princeton, 1974, pp. 3-50.
149 Reprinted in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J.E. Spingarn, Oxford, 1908, II. 55-56.
150 Also v. R.L. Sharp, From Donne to Dryden. The Revolt against Metaphysical Poetry, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1940.
151 Cowley, 'Of Wit', 1656, lines 57-64 (stanza 8), in English Writings, ed. cit. II. 18. The aesthetic convert Cowley's siding with the mimetic principle of imitation against the Metaphysical principle of originality, his stigmatization of the forced conceit and surprising irrational quiddity, and his distinction between false (Metaphysical) and true (Neoclassical) wit anticipated later Neoclassical theorists such as Joseph Addison. Also cf. Cowley's poem 'To the Royal Society', prefixed to Thomas Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667).
152 Also v. Rolf P. Lessenich, Aspects of English Preromanticism, Cologne and Vienna, 1989, pp. 58-105.
153 Contemporary English poetics, such as Henry Peacham's chapter on the art of poetry in The Complete Gentleman (1622), or Henry Reynolds's Mythomystes (1632), or Ben Jonson's Timber (1641), were based on 16th-century Renaissance poetics and did not take the new Baroque rhetoric into account.
154 For this reason Wilbur Samuel Howell's Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700, Princeton, 1966, does not even mention Baroque rhetoric at all.
155 Printed in Donne, Poems, ed. cit. I. 376.
156 Ibid. I. 382 and 386.
157 Ibid. I. 385.
158 Ibid. I. 375.
159 Ibid. I. 379. Gleaning suggests precious quality beyond the mass.
160 Ibid. I. 380.
161 "The divine right of kings" was an expression for the aims of Stuart absolutism. James I und Charles I insisted that kings were Gods in their own right, "legibus absoluti".
162 According to the OED, 2nd edition, however, the term 'absolutism' for despotic government was not used until 1830, when it was transferred from theology (God's sovereign conduct in the affair of salvation in Calvin's doctrine of reprobation) to politics.
163 Chapter 12: The lover Solomon (Christ) regrets the erotic reservedness of his beloved Shulamite (the Church), "A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse, A spring shut up, a fountain sealed" (verse 12): and Shulamite opens her lap to her lover: "Let my beloved come into his garden, And eat his pleasant fruits".
164 See Stanley Stewart, The Enclosed Garden: The Tradition and the Image in Seventeenth-Century Poetry, Madison, Wisconsin, 1966, passim.
165 Strong, The English Renaissance Garden, p. 14.
166 Donne, Songs and Sonnets, 'Twickenham Garden', lines 8-9, in Poetical Works, ed. cit. I. 28.
167 Also v. Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, 1941, London, 1982. The Renaissance and Baroque garden retained the medieval iconology of the 'garden of love', the place both of the holy love of Solomon and Shulamilte and the sinful love of David and Bathsheba. See, for instance, Rubens's many garden paitings and engravings based on his own Renaissance parterre garden in Antwerp (of the type of Hans Vredeman de Vries's gardens); documented in the 2001 exhibition Gärten und Höfe der Rubenszeit at the Landesmuseum Mainz.
168 Eberhard Fähler, Feuerwerke des Barock, Stuttgart, 1974. Baroque fireworks involving scenic action could also be staged on rivers facing palaces, as on the occasion of the Palatine Marriage of Elizabeth, daughter of King James I, and Frederick, Elector Palatine at Heidelberg, in 1613 (Thames opposite Whitehall Palace).
169 See, for instance, the work of Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725), especially his serenata Il Giardino di Amore.
170 The most famous grotto architect and theorist was Salomon de Caus. The (musical) grotto combined worldly pleasure and spirituality in its association with St Mary Magdalene, who had visited Christ's grotto-tomb and (according to legend) spent the rest of her life as an penitent anchoress in a grotto.
171 For this interpretation of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century craze for labyrinths v. Daniela Tandecki, 'Der Garten als Symbol und Refugium göttlicher und menschlicher Liebe', Arcadia, 22 (1987), 122-25.
172 What Cromwell's soldiers had left was destroyed by the eighteenth-century craze for the English landscape garden (William Kent, 'Capability' Brown) with its programmatic dismissal of garden walls. Thus, not a single Baroque garden survived. Also v. John Dixon Hunt / Peter Willis (ed), The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden 1620-1820, London, 1975.
173 Marvell, Miscellaneous Poems, 'The Mower against Gardens', lines 31-32, in Poems and Letters, I. 44.
174 Ibid. lines 1-4. Note the biblical vocabulary associated with Original Sin and the Fall of Man.
175 Ibid. lines 33-34. My italics.
176 Herbert's advocacy of unpretentious gardens was related to his advocacy of the plain style; see, for instance, The Temple, 'Jordan' I, lines 6-7, and 'Paradise'.
177 Marvell, Miscellaneous Poems, 'Upon Appleton House. To my Lord Fairfax', Fairfax's speech (lines 203-224) arguing against the prioress's equivocatory seduction (97-200), in Poems and Letters, ed. cit. I. 65-69.
178 According to the heroic themes of love and war, the 'garden of love' and the 'garden of war' complemented each other. For the history and phaenomenology of the latter v. Jane Brown, The Pursuit of Paradise. A Social History of Gardens and Gardening, chapter 3 'The Military Garden', London, 1999, pp. 82-104.
179 Marvell, 'Upon Appleton House', stanza 36, ed. cit. I. 71.
180 Jane Brown, The Pursuit of Paradise, pp. 103-104.
181 Marvell, 'Upon Appleton House', ibid. Cf. the half-comical literary treatment of this motif and situation in Uncle Toby's military garden in Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy (1760-67).
182 The speaker's repeated expectations of finding a little paradise in the meadows and forests of Appleton House prove invariably fallacious.
183 Though a French Huguenot engineer and garden designer, Salomon de Caus or Caux (1576-1626) had studied Baroque horticulture in Italy and subsequently worked both for the Spanish court in Brussels and for the Stuart court.
184 Marvell, Miscellaneous Poems, 'Upon Appleton House. To my Lord Fairfax', lines 1-8 (stanza 1), in Poems and Letters, ed. cit. I. 62. 'Foreign' here means both 'non-English' and 'unnatural'.
185 The possible occasion of Donne's famous divine poem 'Good-Friday, 1613. Riding Westward'; for such speculations v. R. C. Bald, John Donne, A Life, pp. 269-71, and Helen Gardner's commentary in her second edition of Donne, The Divine Poems, Oxford, 1978, p. 98.
186 See the king's ceremony speech in Shakespeare, King Henry V, 1599, IV.1.247-301.
187 Rudolf Vierhaus also warns against a flat identification of Baroque and absolutism; 'Barock und Absolutismus', in Europäische Barockrezeption, I. 45-61.
188 See Rolf Lessenich, 'Tory versus Whig: John Dryden's Mythical Concept of Kingship', in Dryden and the World of Neoclassicism, ed. W. Görtschacher / H. Klein, Tübingen, 2001, pp. 245-258.