The Wit of Seventeenth-Century Poetry.

This new volume is one of the series resulting from the seventeenth-century poetry conferences regularly held at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Each conference has a coherent theme, and though individual essays can be uneven, the cumulative effect of the series has been to preserve a space for the poetry of the seventeenth century which might have been ceded almost entirely - as currently appears the case with sixteenth-century poetry - to new historical analysis. An early essay in this volume has its starting point in Freud, and a late one is based in a re-reading of Eliot on the metaphysicals. Between them are contained a dozen papers which boldly go where not too many have ventured in recent years, at least until A. J. Smith's important revaluation of this central seventeenth-century problem in his 1991 Metaphysical Wit. There he wrote dryly that "a range of expectation which takes us from a wanton figurative ingenuity to the apprehension of the timeless in time leaves scope for enquiry" (6). Smith is referred to everywhere in these pages, neither canonized nor challenged, but a steady presence urging just such an enquiry, the rethinking of a perennial issue as important to the making of poetry in the 1620s as it was to criticism in the 1920s. (Before proceeding let me lament the absence of a contribution on the relationship of metaphysical wit to modernist wit.)

The essays are arranged in no detectable order - it might have been more helpful to encounter the careful definitions of P.G. Stanwood's and Lee M. Johnson's paper on "The Structure of Wit" at the very beginning - but the reader is early challenged by Helen Wilcox's direct handling of a subject where wit is thought to have been repudiated: the case of devotional poetry, a stratagem M. C. Allen returns to later in considering wit in relation to Herbert's pastoral concerns. The final essay, by Katherine M. Quinsey, considers the apparent rejection of wit in Dryden's Religio Laici. All the essays are "witty" in this sense, taking the unexpected and shaking out its various possibilities. Once or twice the results are all too familiar; according to Robert C. Evans, "wit" in Jonson's Epigrammes operates morally; women's wit can be submissive, but is often subversive, argues Erna Kelly. Once or twice inexpert handling, never a mark of wit, frustrates consent, as in Catherine Gimelli Martin's anxiously overargued "Pygmalion's Progress in the Garden of Love, or the Wit's Work is never Donne." There is more than we need on Donne and Herbert; only one tempting essay - Sharon Cadman Selig's - concerns Lovelace, and nothing substantial appears concerning King, Cowley, Cleveland or some of the lesser (though deserving) wits. Yet William Sessions' superb discussion of the "balancing wit" of Marvell's "Mower" poems shows how much these often worked-over poems still have to yield for us.

A recurrent theme throughout is Freud's insistence on the complicity of the hearer of a joke: that wit needs an audience. Jim Ellis's essay on the circumcision of Christ in seventeenth-century poetry attacks this problem directly, by pointing out how much the theme of the circumcision astonishes and repels the modern reader. He then proceeds to show deftly why a seventeenth-century reader would have thought differently, and finally ties the unfolding of his topic into a number of seventeenth-century themes that connect modernism and new historicism rather than secluding them from each other. None of these essays much mentions the sheer eclat required of the seventeenth-century wit, but Ellis's modest, knowing, and richly informative essay surely enacts it.

GERMAINE WARKENTIN Victoria College, University of Toronto