The poetry of immanence : sacrament in Donne and Herbert / Robert Whalen.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In this extensive study of two of the most celebrated seventeenth-century religious poets, Robert Whalen examines the role of sacrament in the formation of early modern religious subjectivity.

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CHOICE Review

Whalen (Northern Michigan Univ.) examines the ways Donne and Herbert handled the sacrament. Both approached sacramental topoi as "conceptual tools with which to explore both the intersection of spiritual and material aspects of human experience and their competing claims to Christianity." In part 1, the author demonstrates how Donne related sacrament to the profane aspects of his poetic experience: "Interest in sacramental ideas is most evident ... not in the religious poems and sermons but ... in the 'secular' love lyrics, elegies, satires, and verse epistles." By combining the Eucharist "with a variety of analogous but ostensibly nonreligious concerns[,] Donne ... tests the limits of an incarnational poetics." In part 2,Whalen argues that "Herbert's verse, though highly self-conscious and introspective, is ... immersed in the affective somatic imagery of sacrament and ceremony, perfecting the integration of external and internal aspects of religious experience only partially realized by Donne." Along with Theresa DiPasquale (Literature & Sacrament: The Sacred and the Secular in John Donne, CH, Apr'00), Whalen aims to rehabilitate and reinvigorate the study of sacrament. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate and research collections. M. W. Price Grove City College