Taste and Bad Taste in Metaphysical Poetry: Richard Crashaw and Dylan Thomas

This chapter aims to offer an overview of those resurgences of the baroque that are most significant for my study – Germany’s rediscovery of the Trauerspiel and allegory, the colourful legacy of the Italian commedia dell ‘arte and the monist philosophy of Baruch Spinoza that informs Ernst Haeckel’s evolutionary science at the turn of the century. Anglo-American modernism’s debt to the baroque has already been discussed in some detail in the context of English metaphysical poetry, and this interest stemmed from T. S. Eliot’s essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921). The essay is a review of Herbert J. C. Grierson’s anthology Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler (1921), and between them the two works were responsible for a reappraisal of the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan and Abraham Cowley during the 1920’s and 1930s.

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The Halting Shadow

10.1093/oso/9780198729617.003.0011 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Deirdre David

Keyword(s):

Heart Failure ◽

Congestive Heart Failure ◽

Sexual Desire ◽

Respiratory Illness ◽

Perforated Ulcer ◽

Respiratory Illnesses ◽

Dylan Thomas ◽

One Year

The last years of Pamela’s life were marked by further illness but also by a remarkable dedication to work. She was hospitalized several times for respiratory illnesses, but in 1974 she published a book of autobiographical essays, Important to Me, which covered such topics as memories of her father, her relationship with Dylan Thomas, her visits to the USSR, and her friendship with other writers such as Edith Sitwell. After months of undiagnosed pain, Snow died in 1980 of a perforated ulcer and Pamela died almost one year later of congestive heart failure and respiratory illness exacerbated by having smoked since the age of fourteen. Yet characteristically she worked courageously until the very end on a novel published posthumously: A Bonfire, which similarly to her first novel deals explicitly with sexual desire. Her ashes were scattered at Stratford-upon-Avon, a place she visited every year on Shakespeare’s birthday.

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Johannine Dualism, Antinomianism, and Early Modern English Radical Dissent

10.1093/oso/9780198808718.003.0006 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Paul Cefalu

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

Early Modern ◽

Political Theology ◽

Fourth Gospel ◽

Richard Crashaw ◽

Broad Group ◽

Early Modern English ◽

Henry Vaughan

Johannine theology exerts a wide influence on a broad group of antinomian writers and mid-seventeenth-century English separatists, including the Familists, Diggers, Quakers, and a range of English mystics and spiritual enthusiasts. This chapter looks closely at the embrace of the most dualistic and eschatological passages of the Fourth Gospel and First Epistle by the English radical tradition. After an outline of the distinctive qualities of this Johannine political theology, the chapter turns to the antinomian influence on two radically different English poets, Richard Crashaw and Henry Vaughan. If Crashaw shows antinomian leanings despite his embrace of Laudian fundamentals, Vaughan emerges as something of an anti-enthusiast in his more politically topical poems of Silex Scintillans.

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The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English Literature and Theology

10.1093/oso/9780198808718.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Paul Cefalu

Keyword(s):

Early Modern ◽

English Literature ◽

Early Modern Period ◽

Fourth Gospel ◽

Religious Poetry ◽

Richard Crashaw ◽

Early Modern English ◽

Early Modern English Literature ◽

Pauline Theology ◽

Literature And Theology

The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English Literature and Theology argues that the Fourth Gospel and First Epistle of Saint John the Evangelist were so influential during the early modern period in England as to share with Pauline theology pride of place as leading apostolic texts on matters Christological, sacramental, pneumatological, and political. The book argues further that, in several instances, Johannine theology is more central than both Pauline theology and the Synoptic theology of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, particularly with regard to early modern polemicizing on the Trinity, distinctions between agape and eros, and the ideologies of radical dissent, especially the seventeenth-century antinomian challenge of free grace to traditional Puritan Pietism. In particular, early modern religious poetry, including works by Robert Southwell, George Herbert, John Donne, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Traherne, and Anna Trapnel, embraces a distinctive form of Johannine devotion that emphasizes the divine rather than human nature of Christ; the belief that salvation is achieved more through revelation than objective atonement and expiatory sin; a realized eschatology; a robust doctrine of assurance and comfort; and a stylistic and rhetorical approach to representing these theological features that often emulates John’s mode of discipleship misunderstanding and dramatic irony. Early modern Johannine devotion assumes that religious lyrics often express a revelatory poetics that aims to clarify, typically through dramatic irony, some of the deepest mysteries of the Fourth Gospel and First Epistle.

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In Memoriam Dylan Thomas: Strawinsky's Schoenbergian Technique

Tempo ◽

10.1017/s0040298200052360 ◽

1955 ◽

pp. 13-20 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Hans Keller

Keyword(s):

Present Article ◽

In Memoriam ◽

Dylan Thomas

Music examples usually illustrate articles, but the present article is no more than an illustration appended to my analytic music example of the complete central song from Strawinsky's most recent composition (Spring, 1954), In Memoriam Dylan Thomas. I think that writers on music should be encouraged to keep to the music, and seriously contend that all the adverse critics of Schoenberg's serial technique, and most of the writers who pass for serial experts, are incapable of a serial analysis and have only the very vaguest notion of what makes a serial piece “tick.” They quote a bar or two—usually from the opening of Schoenberg's 4th Quartet—where the note-row is fairly obvious or, anyway, has previously been uncovered by someone else, and then proceed to let obscure theory take the place of clear if complex practice. The reason is simple: they don't hear the row, and if you are unable to imagine a row aurally, it is very difficult, usually indeed impossible, to trace it throughout a piece. Let me hasten to add that I should not dream of reproaching any critic with his tone-row-deafness if he left it at that: for all we know, he may otherwise be a musical genius. If, however, he professes to talk serial “shop” at the same time, I raise the strongest moral objections.

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