The Metaphysical Canon in Poetry: on Cristina Campo’s Translation Activity

The article focuses on Cristina Campo’s poetry translations in the context of her literary choices infl uenced by her predilection to metaphysical literature. The category of metaphysical literature can be understood, fi rst of all, as related to metaphysical English poets like John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and Henry Vaughan. Metaphysical were also those authors whose writings defi ed the categories of space and time, and transcended the temporal and geographical limits. One of the greatest Campo’s fascinations from that perspective was the poetry of William Carlos Williams, as well as other authors that entered in her category of imperdonabili. Campo’s translational activity followed a well-delineated path related strictly to her metaphysical inclinations and manifested certain traits of the tendency to establish the personalized canon of real and worthwhile literature that at the same time opposed the mainstream literary choices of that time

A quest for unification with the divine: Crashaw’s Teresa Poems “A Hymn to the Name and Honour of the Admirable Saint Teresa” and “The Flaming Heart”

As a metaphysical poet, Richard Crashaw (1613-1649) is recognized for his stylistic experimentation and deep religious faith. In the course of his short life, he became a fellow at Cambridge, was later introduced to Queen Henrietta Marie, Charles I’s wife, in France after his exile during the Interregnum, converted to Catholicism from Anglicanism and was highly influenced by Baroque poetry and the martyrdom of St. Teresa of Avila in his style and themes. He is a poet with a “most holy, humble and genuine soul” and in the last six years of his life, which coincided with a period of great crisis in both personal and professional spheres, he worked intensively on the religious phase of his literary career (Shepherd 1914, p. 1). He reflected his devotion to St. Teresa and to God in his religious poems. Within this context, this study analyses Crashaw’s two Teresian poems, “A Hymn to the Name and Honour of the Admirable Saint Teresa” and “The Flaming Heart” featuring the themes of the quest for divine love and unification with the divine along with Crashaw’s divergence from other metaphysical poets, his affection for the European style(s), and his religious views concerning both his country and other countries in Europe.

Seizing the “Point Imaginary”

“Seizing the ‘Point Imaginary’ ” follows erotic poets as they grapple with the elusive concept of nothingness. The pervasive quips about a woman’s “nothing” within Renaissance literature belie the fact that virginity is in several respects a genuine paradox. Although countless attempts upon the “point imaginary” were merely sexual in nature, others make of the hymen the ultimate sign of mystery and impossibility: a tympan between materiality and immateriality, the cusp between the known and unknown. The hymen, like the Lucretian atom or the draftsman’s mathematical horizon of sight, sometimes functions as the poet’s conceptual limit point. Worth pursuing for its own sake, this vanishing point of the female body further beckons the poet with the tantalizing threshold of knowledge that it emblematizes. A seemingly trivial seduction narrative such as Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander thereby re-emerges as a site for wrestling with the epistemological and ontological problems that this paradoxical bit of material represents. This chapter traces these operations in the works of several authors, including Shakespeare, Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley, Ben Jonson, John Davies, and Thomas Wyatt. “Nothing,” for these poets, may initially refer to the woman and her questionable virginity, but also becomes attached to more portentous unknowables and supersigns. Such “impossible” thoughts were not wholly containable within the airy realm of paradox. They had implications for how early moderns understood the limits of knowledge in relation to both bodily and poetic form.

Baroque Europe

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.

Johannine Dualism, Antinomianism, and Early Modern English Radical Dissent

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.

The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English 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.

Noli Me Tangere and the Reception of Mary Magdalene in Early Modern England

The second chapter assesses the early modern reception of the noli me tangere and hortulanus sequences of John 20. Early modern writers such as Robert Southwell, Gervase Markham, Thomas Walkington, and Nicholas Breton all reconstruct the pedagogical lessons vouchsafed to Mary throughout John 20. Mary is petitioned to recall to herself the words of Christ that she has already heard and to await patiently her post-resurrection reconciliation with Christ as Word of God. Several of these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts of Mary at the tomb show a keen appreciation of the method of discipleship misunderstanding used by John, even emulating that rhetorical approach in their treatments of Magdalene’s misplaced grief. Final sections of the chapter discuss the glorification of Mary in Hans Holbein’s Noli Me Tangere painting as well as in the poetry and prose of Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, and Anna Trapnel.

The Flesh Profiteth Nothing

The first chapter reviews the early modern interpretive fortunes of the most influential Johannine passages from the patristic through the early modern period: the bread of life discourses from John 6:26–59. Jesus’ designation of himself as the “bread of life” and “living bread” and his remarks on eating his flesh exert a profound influence on conceptions of the Eucharist from Augustine onward, prompting not only Ulrich Zwingli but also Thomas Cranmer and several English theologians to equate “eating” with believing. The burden of this chapter is to reconstruct the neglected influence of the bread of life discourse in the sacramental poems of George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, and Edward Taylor.