Chapter 6 - Religious and Devotional Epigram and Lyric

Summary

Seventeenth-century English poetry is renowned for its religious lyric, especially that of Herbert, Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan and Traherne. In Chapters 2 and 3 we saw how the interest in metrical and formal variety, which is such a marked feature of Herbert’s 'Temple' (1633), can be traced back to the Latin poetic experiments and innovations of the latter sixteenth century, and specifically to the technical and tonal variety of the most influential of the psalm paraphrase collections. This chapter deals in large part with another of the influences upon Herbert’s distinctive style – namely the largely (though not exclusively) Jesuit poetics of Latin devotional verse, which combined with the tradition of formal variety, scriptural paraphrase and religious epigram to revolutionary effect in seventeenth-century England. It traces the development of religious verse in England from the mid-sixteenth through to the early eighteenth century, and describes how the new kind of devotional lyric was read and written alongside older types of religious verse, especially scriptural and devotional epigram and paraphrase.