Generosity is an ambiguous quality, William Flesch observes; while receiving gifts is pleasant, gift-giving both displays the wealth and strength of the giver and places the receiver under an ...obligation. In provocative new readings of Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton, Flesch illuminates the personal authority that is bound inextricably with acts of generosity. Drawing on the work of such theorists as Mauss, Blanchot, Bourdieu, Wittgenstein, Bloom, Cavell, and Greenblatt, Flesch maintains that the literary power of Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton is at its most intense when they are exploring the limits of generosity. He considers how in Herbert's Temple divine assurance of the possibility of redemption is put into question and how the poet approaches such a gift with the ambivalence of a beneficiary. In his readings of Shakespeare's Richard II , Henry IV , King Lear , Antony and Cleopatra , and the sonnets, Flesch examines the perspective of the benefactor—including Shakespeare himself—who confronts the decline of his capacity to give. Turning to Milton's Paradise Lost , Flesch identifies two opposing ways of understanding generosity—Satan's, on the one hand, and Adam and Eve's, on the other - and elaborates the different conceptions of poetry to which these understandings give rise. Scholars of Shakespeare and of Renaissance culture, Miltonists, literary theorists, and others interested in the relationship between philosophy and literature will want to read this insightful and challenging book.
When a poet addresses a living person - whether friend or enemy, lover or sister - we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible ...listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy - George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the future, John Ashbery with the Renaissance painter Francesco Parmigianino? In Invisible Listeners, Helen Vendler argues that such poets must invent the language that will enact, on the page, an intimacy they lack in life. Through brilliantly insightful and gracefully written readings of these three great poets over three different centuries, Vendler maps out their relationships with their chosen listeners. For his part, Herbert revises the usual vertical address to God in favor of a horizontal one - addressing God as a friend.Whitman hovers in a sometimes erotic, sometimes quasi-religious language in conceiving the democratic camerado, who will, following Whitman's example, find his true self. And yet the camerado will be replaced, in Whitman's verse, by the ultimate invisible listener, Death.Ashbery, seeking a fellow artist who believes that art always distorts what it represents, finds he must travel to the remote past. In tones both tender and skeptical he addresses Parmigianino, whose extraordinary self-portrait in a convex mirror furnishes the poet with both a theory and a precedent for his own inventions. By creating the forms and speech of ideal intimacy, these poets set forth the possibility of a more complete and satisfactory human interchange - an ethics of relation that is uncoerced, understanding, and free.
George Herbert considers the limits and futilities of language in his devotional The Temple (1633), even as he constructs a place of worship through poems. Why poems and not sermons? The titles, ...shapes, and images of Herbert’s Temple poems frequently invoke either explicitly liturgical objects or more generally communal devotional objects, especially prayer. This article proposes that Herbert bolsters and stabilizes his ephemeral poem-prayers by using references to material instruments of worship. The poems flicker between object and prayer, and each form shadows the other. The interplay between poems as breathed and ephemeral, yet also materially constituted in print and through the object version of the poem’s reference (as in “The Altar,” for instance) shores up prayer as a thing persisting throughout time and that might be taken up by another person. The prayer, then, becomes an increasingly transferable, shareable object. Herbert’s prayers foster an ever-expanding community of those who choose to participate in reading The Temple and who can also use the crafted prayers as a means to rest from the divinely commanded “ceaseless” prayer.
Cestus Responds to Æthiopissa Whalen, Robert
Renaissance and Reformation,
01/2021, Letnik:
44, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Le manuscrit conservé sous la cote Yale Osborn MS. b 197 contient un témoin peu étudié, l'un de six, de l'« Æthiopissa ambit Cestum Diuersi Coloris Virum » de George Herbert, suivi de la seule copie ...connue d'une réponse de vingt-deux lignes, « Cesti ad Æthiopissam Responsio ». Si cette dernière ne peut être considérée avec certitude comme étant de Herbert, elle constitue néanmoins une réplique fascinante au poème, peut-être le moins herbertien de cet auteur. Cet article fournit une édition de ces textes et leur traduction, avec apparat critique. Il comprend également une description du manuscrit et une réflexion sur les arguments en faveur et à l'encontre de l'attribution du nouveau poème à Herbert.
Scholars have identified a number of allusions to or echoes of George Herbert in the poetry of Edward Benlowes. Elsie Duncan-Jones first noted some of these in Benlowes' major work Theophila, Or ...Loves Sacrifice , many further ones from the same work were identified by Robert H. Ray and Richard F. Kennedy. Hitherto unnoticed, however, is a playful adaptation of the concluding line of Herbert's "The Size" in a much earlier Benlowes poem: his manuscript funeral elegy on Lady Anne Rich. "The Size" concludes with this word-play on "heaven/haven." In the opening section of Benlowes' elegy he recalls a dangerous sea-voyage he took with John Gauden. In Herbert's poem, the earthly sufferings are transcended, and the physical safety of a marine haven is supplanted by "heaven." Benlowes inverts Herbert's word-play and "heaven" becomes the vehicle of a metaphor in which physical safety is the tenor.
Kalyani presents a study of the Christian life and mystical experiences of poets Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Herbert which serve as the fundamental back ground to their poetry, so much so that ...they seem to play an important role, a connecting nexus of the design and format, the material and substance, the finale and achievement of their works. Kalyani defines mysticism and explains the attributes of mystics. Mysticism of different religions is analyzed. Specifically characteristics peculiar to Christian mysticism with reference to the great mystics of the world, and in particular, great Christian mystics of England and their views are dealt with. Kalyani deals with mysticism in Christian literature with special reference to George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins as mystics. It explains how as Christian mystics their experiences involve the perfect consummation of the love of God and highlights the art of establishing their conscious relation with the absolute. Above all union with Him is the ultimate object of their existence.
In this article, I explore the technical poetic strategies by which George Herbert represents the relation between divine and human agency. In Herbert’s poetry, God works upon the human will not by ...external influence but by indwelling human nature and enabling it from within. I show that Herbert follows the contours of an Augustinian theology according to which God is both immanent and transcendent, both “in and beyond” the human being. My reading of Herbert considers two groups of poems: first, poems of divine revelation that depict God and humanity engaged in a dialogue in which only one voice speaks (“JESU,” “Heaven,” and “Coloss. 3.3”), and second, poems about believers’ growing awareness of the interpenetration of divine and human agency in their lives (“Aaron,” “The Odour”). In both groups of poems, God’s action is represented as both internal to and beyond the resources of human agency.
With the aid of Jacqueline Cox, keeper of Cambridge’s University Archives, I have discovered a letter of George Herbert, dated April 24, 1620, to James Tabor, registrary of the University of ...Cambridge. The letter exists in a file of the vice chancellor’s court records of 1616–20, the bulk of which are dated 1619–20. In this period, the vice chancellor presided over the university court and heard cases affecting scholars and “privileged persons.” One common request to the vice chancellor’s court was to grant the title of “privileged person” to “scholar’s servants” of gentlemen, of heads of colleges, and of other dignitaries of the university (Herbert having become orator on January 21, 1620). The granting of the title of “privileged person” to a scholar’s servant gave the petitioner the right to retain the servant at Cambridge. George Herbert’s letter of April 24, 1620, is a request to University Registrary James Tabor to admit “Ed. Parrat” as a scholar’s servant. This letter provides new light on Herbert’s seriousness in undertaking the oratorship in 1620. The letter and entries in the Act Book’s “Register of Admissions to Privilege” show that Herbert maintained scholar’s servants throughout his time as orator, including late in 1626. The documents invite further consideration of his career at Cambridge, as well investigation of the lives of servants there.
This article considers three manuscript witnesses to the Musæ Responsoriæ, George Herbert's answer to Andrew Melville's polemical poem Anti-Tami-Cami-Categoria. None of these, two of them complete ...copies, was known to Herbert's first modern editor, F. E. Hutchinson, nor are they mentioned in any of the several subsequent editions of Herbert's Latin verse, all of which follow Hutchinson's sole source, the 1662 Ecclesiastes Solomonis of James Duport. In addition to providing descriptions of their contents and provenance, we survey the substantive variants and accidentals pertaining to the two complete copies and argue why one in particular will supplant Duport as copy-text for the new edition of Herbert's works currently in progress for Oxford University Press. Our essay also presents a hitherto unknown Latin epigram that appears in the other complete copy and considers evidence for attributing the poem to the author of The Temple.
