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Southwell`s Sphere - The Influence of England`s Secret Poet (Paperback)
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Southwell`s Sphere - The Influence of England`s Secret Poet (Paperback)
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Once feared by Queen Elizabeth I and admired by William
Shakespeare, Robert Southwell, s.j. (1561-1595), clings today to a
thinning canonical presence in English literature among a sphere of
other writers incongruously called the metaphysical poets.
Southwell's Sphere lifts this sixteenth century Jesuit priest and
prolific writer from the obscurity in which he too often resides
and places him instead at the center of a sphere of English poets
upon whom his life and works exerted an observable influence. As he
weaved his religious content into the familiar loom of Elizabethan
form and style, this young missionary priest was seeking not just
to catechize those whom he regarded as the faithful and the fallen,
but to intentionally reform the verse of his native England.
Remarkably, during his brief six-year mission, he actually managed
in many respects to do so. Surviving for six years by successfully
navigating and fostering a complicated underground Catholic network
in and around London before being captured, tortured and
imprisoned, Southwell was brought to trial and executed at Tyburn
at age 33. He therefore never knew most of the "skillfuller wits"
that he called upon to direct their poetic skills to the service of
God. And like the marks upon his tortured body, the poetic marks of
influence that his work left upon individual writers of this era
were in many cases deliberately concealed. Southwell's Sphere seeks
to rediscover those marks and offer the reader a renewed
appreciation for this subverted and subverting literary force in
Early Modern England. In individual explicative chapters this book
examines works by six poets whose verse may be appreciated
differently in light of Robert Southwell's life and work. The
author makes the case that Southwell's works, posthumously and
prolifically published, instructed William Alabaster, provoked
Edmund Spenser, prompted George Herbert, haunted John Donne,
inspired Richard Crashaw and - two and a half centuries later -
consoled Gerard Manley Hopkins, s.j. With the exception of Spenser,
all of these poets were, like Southwell, ordained ministers. The
particular personal, political and religious complexities of each
of their lives notwithstanding, what they most shared in common
with Southwell was their priestly vocation, their talent as English
poets and the inevitable and inextricable joining of these two
activities in their lives. While it would have made little sense
for any of these poets to acknowledge Southwell as a poetic peer,
each of them authored important verse that can best be appreciated
within the sphere of this improbably successful and influential
English poet.
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