Overview

Poetic Priesthood reads seventeenth-century devotional verse as staging a surprising competition between poetry and the established church. The work of John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, John Milton, and Thomas Traherne suggests that the demands of faith are better understood by poets than by priests--even while four of these authors were also ordained. While recent scholarship has tended to emphasize the shaping influence of the liturgy on the poetry of this period, this book argues that verse instead presents readers with a mode of articulating piety that relies on formal experimentation, and that varies from the forms of the church rather than straightforwardly reproducing them. In crafting this poetic aid to devotion, these authors practiced an alternative and even more ample form of ministry than in their ecclesiastical activities. In the wake of the Reformation, the liturgy of the English church centered on rituals of communal prayer and praise, but the poetry considered in this study suggests that such rituals in fact risk distracting worshippers from the pleasures and challenges of navigating an individual relationship with God. Yet these poets do not make this suggestion by rejecting communal rituals outright. Their verse invokes ecclesiastical practice as a basis for formal innovation that suggests how intimacy with the divine might look, feel, and sound, connecting humans with their God more precisely and more individually than the liturgy can. As they shift between explicit comment on the liturgy and more subtle departures from it in the interplay of verse form and denotation, these authors claim the work of priesthood for poetry.

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9780192857125

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Reviews

Parkas's book is a welcome and useful addition to studies of seventeenth-century religious writing. * Naya Tsentourou, The Spenser Review * No Good Quote * Ben Faber, Milton Quarterly *

Parkas's book is a welcome and useful addition to studies of seventeenth-century religious writing. * Naya Tsentourou, The Spenser Review *

Author Information

Tessie Prakas is Assistant Professor of English at Scripps College. Her scholarship and teaching focus primarily on early modern poetry and poetics, as well as on the relationship between music and literature. Her first book, Poetic Priesthood, reads seventeenth-century devotional poetry as practicing a counter-liturgical mode of piety. She has published articles in The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, the John Donne Journal, Christianity and Literature, and Gender and Song in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2014), and she is working on a project that reads early modern literary and musical practice in the light of our current critical preoccupation with interdisciplinarity.

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