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Bloomfield, the Poetry of Interpretation The Poetry of Interpretation: Exegetical Lyric after the English Reformation Gabriel Bloomfield Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2019 © 2019 Gabriel Bloomfield All rights reserved ABSTRACT The Poetry of Interpretation: Exegetical Lyric after the English Reformation Gabriel Bloomfield “The Poetry of Interpretation” writes a pre-history of the twentieth-century phenomenon of close reading by interpreting the devotional poetry of the English Renaissance in the context of the period’s exegetical literatures. The chapters explore a range of hermeneutic methods that allowed preachers and commentators, writing in the wake of the Reformation’s turn to the “literal sense” of scripture, to grapple with and clarify the bible’s “darke texts.” I argue that early modern religious poets—principally Anne Lock, John Donne, George Herbert, William Alabaster, and John Milton—absorbed these same methods into their compositional practices, merging the arts of poesis and exegesis. Consistently skeptical about the very project they undertake, however, these poets became not just practitioners but theorists of interpretive method. Situated at the intersection of religious history, hermeneutics, and poetics, this study develops a new understanding of lyric’s formal operations while intimating an alternative history of the discipline of literary criticism. CONTENTS List of Illustrations ii Acknowledgments iii Note on Texts vi Introduction 1 1. Expolition: Anne Lock and the Poetics of Marginal Increase 33 2. Chopology: How the Poem Crumbles 87 3. Similitude: “Multiplied Visions” and the Experience of Homiletic Verse 147 4. Prosopopoeia: The Poem’s Split Personality 208 Bibliography 273 i LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Anne Lock, A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner (London, 1560) 33 2. Henry Lok, Ecclesiastes (London, 1597) 74 3. George Herbert, “Coloss: 3.3.,” from The Temple (Bodleian MS, ca. 1633) 136 4. George Herbert, “Anagram,” from The Temple (Cambridge, 1633) 141 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My first and most profound thanks go to the faculty committee that has overseen this dissertation from its inception. Julie Crawford has consistently pushed me to be more ambitious in my claims and more forceful in my writing; her sharp eye has improved whatever craft is evident in this work at every level. Alan Stewart is an editorial witch-doctor who can miraculously diagnose exactly what ails a piece of writing and prescribe its remedy. He should be on everyone’s dissertation committee and undoubtedly is. Molly Murray is this study’s oldest friend and canniest critic; I am grateful beyond measure for her support, her expertise, and her innumerable readings of the drafts of these chapters. Just behind these three stand a cadre of other teachers and friends in Columbia’s Department of English and Comparative Literature. Jean Howard read most of the dissertation and offered her characteristically excellent advice. Jean, Molly, Jenny Davidson, and Erik Gray have been ideal pedagogical models and guides as I have found my footing in the classroom. All too briefly, Anahid Nersessian was an essential interlocutor and mentor, before she escaped to where the grass was greener. Eleanor Johnson and Joanna Stalnaker have given wonderful support of various kinds as I have attempted to stick the landing. Profound thanks to Jeff Dolven and Richard Strier for reading the dissertation for the defense and offering innumerable suggestions for its future development. I lay the blame for all of this on a trio of extraordinary professors at Yale who taught me how to read and made it seem like it would be fun to do it for a living: Roberta Frank (in whose seminar I first read Donne), David Kastan (read Donne again), and Catherine Nicholson (senior thesis on Donne). For various bits of help—readings of chapters or articles, conversations to help iii me through a knotty problem, permission to read their work before publication—my thanks to David and Cathy (again), as well as to Heather Dubrow, Timothy Harrison, Anne Lake Prescott, and Kirsten Stirling. For valuable critiques of articles that became a part of this work, my thanks to Reid Barbour and the readers for Studies in Philology, and to Doug Mao and several anonymous readers for English Literary History. I am grateful, too, to the staffs at the Bodleian, British, and Folger Libraries, where I undertook some of the research for this dissertation, as well as to Karla Nielsen and the staff at Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. I am grateful to the faculty and graduate students of the early modern colloquium at Columbia who have read and commented upon drafts of my work: Lauren Robertson, Tim Lundy, Chris McKeen, Noemie N’Diaye, Chelsea Spata, and Rachel Dunn Zhang. I would also like to thank the staff of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia: especially Nicole Meily, Aaron Robertson, and Pam Rodman, for all that they do to support graduate students. And on that score: profound thanks to the Graduate Workers of Columbia (GWC-UAW Local 2110). I am particularly lucky to have had as cohort-mates (and co-organizers) Alexander Lash and Michael West, who with infallible good cheer and scholarly vigor have made the intellectual journey of graduate study into a real pleasure. Others both within and outside the early modern academic sphere have made it a blast: Andrew Beaty, Marshall Bright, Caroline Fenkel, Lindsay Gibson, Allen Gillers, Jayne Hildebrand, Essie Lash, Liza McIntosh, Kate McIntyre, Bernadette Myers, Scott Sheu, Jessi O’Rourke-Suchoff, and Ben VanWagoner especially. Kevin Windhauser, recently, has become essential, both as a friend and as a critic. Adam Goldman and Rachel Selvin have kept me crazy. Robert Barton, Christine Kwon, Yinshi Lerman-Tan, Cooper Lewis, and Molly Silverstein were there from the start. iv Three people in particular are responsible for a good chunk of my happiness and for no inconsiderable portion of this dissertation’s achievements, such as they are. John Kuhn and Seth Williams have been extraordinary friends, brilliant interlocutors, and my most devoted mentees. Sarah Arkebauer, near-constant companion, has read nearly every word of this dissertation, has made her mark on every page, and has made life more than livable. My family, most of all, has made this work possible. My grandmother, Cindy Raabe, could always be relied upon for a stimulating conversation and a free lunch, as long as I lugged my way up to the East 80s. Joe McAndrew has made me feel welcome whether I was at his house or my own. And finally, PMB and JERB are my real happiness; this dissertation is dedicated to them, and to the memory of PR. v NOTE ON TEXTS In quoting from early printed editions of Renaissance texts in English, I have silently modernized i/j and u/v, but have otherwise retained original spelling and punctuation. Except where otherwise noted, my citations of early modern books are to the facsimiles collected at Early English Books Online (https://eebo.chadwyck.com/). vi INTRODUCTION There is a curious moment in C. A. Patrides’s introduction to his edition of John Donne’s Complete English Poems (1991) that seems at once to necessitate and to obliquely comprehend the argument of this dissertation. It appears during Patrides’s discussion of poetic conceit, the notoriously heterogeneous intellectual collision that arguably constitutes Donne’s most important innovation in the history of poetry.1 Donne, we are told, was daring to construct outrageous conceits, in part because to do so was to resist early modernity’s normative poetic regime. “Aspiring writers” in the Renaissance, writes Patrides, were “warned that conceits [...] ‘are not to be taken from things altogether different.’” Donne achieves poetic notoriety, then, by “leap[ing] over the decorous” norms that dictated what should and what should not be conjoined by the procedures of metaphor: his literary success in this account depends on his thrilling resistance to a kind of prissy, classicist writerly decorum.2 The authority that Patrides cites for this rule about “conceits,” however, is not, as one might expect, one of the sixteenth century’s many guides for writing poetry. This warning against constructing analogies out of “things altogether different” comes, in fact, from a work of homiletics: The Christian Synagogue (1623), a manual of preaching and scriptural interpretation by the Scottish minister John Weemes.3 Weemes, like so many of his contemporary preachers, 1 I am alluding, of course, to Samuel Johnson’s complaint, in his “Life of Cowley,” that in metaphysical poetry “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” and that the poet’s wit consists in the discovery of “occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” The Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 21, The Lives of the Poets, ed. John H. Middendorf (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 26. 2 John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. C. A. Patrides (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1991), 22. 3 John Weemes [Weemse], The Christian Synagogue (London, 1623). Weemes’s work was popular: the English Short Title Catalogue counts six editions of The Christian Synagogue 1 wrote from a position of intense concern about the misinterpretation of the Bible. Quoting an oft- cited passage from the Second Epistle of Peter, he writes in The Christian Synagogue: “Unstable soules wrest the Scripture: [wrest], It is a word borrowed from torturers, when they put an innocent man upon the rack, and makes [sic] him to speak the thing he never meant: so these wrest a sense out of the Scriptures, which the holy Ghost never meant.”4 This idea of “wresting” the meaning of scripture, of making it say something it did not intend, later becomes a part of Weemes’s critique of immoderate analogy: “Comparisons,” he writes, “must not be wrested further then the scope of the Comparison requires.”5 When interpreting scripture, Weemes insists, it is permissible to compare passages, or to liken divine ideas to secular ones, but only if the analogy does not appear forced.
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