The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry: Donne to Marvell.

Thomas N. Corns, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xx + 306 pp. $64.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.

In his preface, Thomas Corns claims that the essays represent "a cross-section of the most fruitful approaches to the study of the English literary renaissance of the last twenty-five years" (xii). His claim is not misleading; one of the signal virtues of this fine collection is its expert blend of traditional and novel approaches. The entire collection attests at once to the interpretive power of a currently unfashionable mode of criticism that pays attention to genre (discussed in a splendid essay by Alastair Fowler) and provides cogency to the current emphasis on the material transmission of books and manuscripts (explored in a distinguished essay by Arthur Marotti). One emerges from the collection not with a sense of the enormous distance separating new and old approaches but rather with a refreshing picture of the contiguity of new and old.

The collection is divided into two parts: part one, entitled "The Context," contains five thematically organized essays, while part two, "Some Poets," includes nine essays on individual poets (and, in one case, on a group of poets). Although practical, this arrangement somewhat misleadingly advertises a separation of text from context which the essays in both parts successfully challenge.

The five thematically-organized essays are on well-chosen topics, and provide partial guides to the approaches which are employed in the essays on individual writers. David Loewenstein successfully confronts the impossibly large subject of "Politics and Religion" in this turbulent period. Elaine Hobby's "The Politics of Gender" contains some pleasant surprises; particularly striking is her discussion of Katherine Philips's reworking of Donne's famous compass conceit. But Hobby neglects to mention Aemilia Lanyer, Lady Mary Wroth, and Ann Collins -- an oversight which is especially glaring in an essay weighted too heavily toward the end of the seventeenth century. Marotti's already mentioned essay on "Manuscript, Print, and the Social History of the Lyric" and Fowler's on "Genre and Tradition" together epitomize the best of new and old approaches. Brian Vickers closes out the section with a fine essay on "Rhetoric," a subject central to the period but frequently overlooked in recent criticism.

The nine essays on individual writers are solid, but a bit less energetic as a group than the topical essays. Particular highlights include Richard Helgerson's essay on Ben Jonson's efforts to resolve the opposed hierarchies of social and literary status, and Leah Marcus's essay on the materiality of Robert Herrick's "ethereal" Hesperides. Achsah Guibbory provides a wonderfully clear yet justly complex portrait of Donne. Helen Wilcox supplies a fine portrait of George Herbert as a liturgical, biblical, and musical poet, but at the expense of attending to the spiritual struggles that many past and present readers value. Thomas Corns presents an admirably balanced account of "Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, and Richard Lovelace," figures whose literary reputations have never recovered from their being on the losing side of the Civil War. Michael Wilding's "John Milton: The Early Works" offers some interesting insights into the widespread occasionality of Milton's early poetic performances, but sometimes imposes the political vision of the mature Milton on poems that have little traffic with this vision.

Anthony Low presents a suggestive account of Richard Crashaw, another underappreciated poet, arguing provocatively that current critical concerns with gender allow us, "for the first time since the Reformation came into England . . . to begin to understand and to sympathize with a `feminine' approach to love like Crashaw's" (252). The section, and the book as a whole, closes powerfully with two essays by critics returning to subjects on which they have published major books -- Jonathan Post on Henry Vaughan, and Donald M. Friedman on Andrew Marvell. In both cases, the authors blend fresh insights with a rare sympathy for the prospects of aesthetic accomplishment amid the limitations of history.

The collection, then, achieves remarkable balance in a period not noted for balance among its participants or its critics. It fails for the most part to represent the current rethinking of the canon, except in the essay by Hobby -- and even there the net could be cast much wider. The individual essays, moreover, vary rather widely in their use of up-to-date secondary references. Although it does not attempt to redraw the existing critical map of seventeenth century poetry, the collection nevertheless does consolidate and clarify available views of familiar material. A fine introduction to the field for ambitious undergraduates and beginning graduate students, it contains more than enough novelty to sustain the interest of specialists.