Paradoxical Desire in the Poetry of Sidney, Spenser, Donne, and Herbert

<p>Inspired by conventional Petrarchism, early modern English poets adopted the concept and rhetoric of paradox in their articulations of desire while revealing significant progression and innovation. Desires expressed by the poet-lovers in the poems of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and George Herbert are the culmination of attempts to coordinate incongruent and contrasting extremes. This thesis examines how desire operates as paradox in Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Philip and Mary Sidney’s Psalms, Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion, Donne’s amorous and religious poems, and Herbert’s poems. Chapter One discusses Astrophil’s desire in Astrophil and Stella as demonstrating the Petrarchan lover enfolded in Neoplatonism. It also explores Donne’s amorous poems, which apply religious vocabularies to communicate sexual love, filling the gap between the distant extremes, establishing a paradoxical unity. In Chapter Two, the thesis compares Spenser’s speakers in Amoretti and Epithalamion and the Sidneys’ Psalmist as Neoplatonic lovers, both of whom search within the physical realms—nature and the body—to express the desire for their divine beloved. In Chapter Three, I compare Donne’s religious poems and selected lyrics from George Herbert’s The Temple. I argue that in Donne’s religious poems, spiritual love is mediated through fleshly desire in a sacramental poetics. The relationship between physical desire and spiritual love is comprehended through sacramental analogy. Comparably, in Herbert’s The Temple, the internal and external components of religious desire reflect the Sacramental theories in which Eucharistic elements communicate their divine referents. The effective way to express love for God, paradoxically, is to establish a spiritual justification for an affirmative embrace of sexuality, making fleshly desire serve as a vehicle of Divine grace. As Donne asserts in his Paradoxes and Problems, “by Discord things increase”. The poet-lovers in the works this thesis explores constantly yearn to imitate and represent their beloved by means of “Discord” and the performance of paradoxical unity. Accordingly, paradoxical desire becomes the inevitable consequence of the poet-lover as a desiring subject who approaches a supposedly insuperable obstacle when he correlates with the beloved obj</p>

Paradoxical Desire in the Poetry of Sidney, Spenser, Donne, and Herbert

<p>Inspired by conventional Petrarchism, early modern English poets adopted the concept and rhetoric of paradox in their articulations of desire while revealing significant progression and innovation. Desires expressed by the poet-lovers in the poems of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and George Herbert are the culmination of attempts to coordinate incongruent and contrasting extremes. This thesis examines how desire operates as paradox in Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Philip and Mary Sidney’s Psalms, Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion, Donne’s amorous and religious poems, and Herbert’s poems. Chapter One discusses Astrophil’s desire in Astrophil and Stella as demonstrating the Petrarchan lover enfolded in Neoplatonism. It also explores Donne’s amorous poems, which apply religious vocabularies to communicate sexual love, filling the gap between the distant extremes, establishing a paradoxical unity. In Chapter Two, the thesis compares Spenser’s speakers in Amoretti and Epithalamion and the Sidneys’ Psalmist as Neoplatonic lovers, both of whom search within the physical realms—nature and the body—to express the desire for their divine beloved. In Chapter Three, I compare Donne’s religious poems and selected lyrics from George Herbert’s The Temple. I argue that in Donne’s religious poems, spiritual love is mediated through fleshly desire in a sacramental poetics. The relationship between physical desire and spiritual love is comprehended through sacramental analogy. Comparably, in Herbert’s The Temple, the internal and external components of religious desire reflect the Sacramental theories in which Eucharistic elements communicate their divine referents. The effective way to express love for God, paradoxically, is to establish a spiritual justification for an affirmative embrace of sexuality, making fleshly desire serve as a vehicle of Divine grace. As Donne asserts in his Paradoxes and Problems, “by Discord things increase”. The poet-lovers in the works this thesis explores constantly yearn to imitate and represent their beloved by means of “Discord” and the performance of paradoxical unity. Accordingly, paradoxical desire becomes the inevitable consequence of the poet-lover as a desiring subject who approaches a supposedly insuperable obstacle when he correlates with the beloved obj</p>

The Acidale test: Spenser’s jettisoning of Sidney as poetic authoriser

This article questions the commonplace that Edmund Spenser always depicted Philip Sidney as his poetic authoriser by finding undercurrents in works through 1595 and by reading the Mount Acidale scene in the 1596 Faerie Queene as jettisoning Sidney. This study calls into question the accepted version of Spenser’s role in the historical development of Sidney’s image. It demonstrates that Spenser rethought his relationship to Sidney and reimagined himself as a poet. This study also resolves the disjunction between earlier depictions of Sidney as poet and the Sidney-like qualities of the unpoetical Calidore.

Edmund Spenser as Promethean poet: critical issues and the role of magic and Platonism in The Faerie Queene

One of the key points at which Platonism and magic or what could be called ‘Platonic magic’ is found in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene is in his use of the image of the classical Titan Prometheus. Examining Spenser’s text in light of Renaissance Platonist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s writings on magic, we can see that Prometheus serves as a model for Spenser’s tremendous creative ability as a ‘poet magus’. However, an examination of the Promethean qualities of ‘Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ also reveals that in the final sections of The Faerie Queene Spenser appears to lose hope in the Promethean power of the poet.

Passion’s Intentions

“Passion’s Intentions” provides a broad account of the concept of passion as the early modern period received it from various ancient and medieval sources. It starts with the rise of “treatises on the passions” in the seventeenth century, showing to what extent those books represent a new phenomenon but also anchoring their understanding of passion in a received “science of the soul”: a faculty psychology drawn largely from Aristotle, the Stoics, Augustine, and Aquinas. The chapter also connects that concept of passion to passages from the poetry of Edmund Spenser and John Donne and the plays of Shakespeare. But its primary aim is to emphasize the object-oriented, “intentional” nature of passion as the early modern period understood it: passion is directed at the world of things; it is intimately connected to the way those things appear to us, in what scholastic psychology called “intentions.” This also means that passion is not a purely internal state: while it is anchored in a structure of mental representations, it is also oriented to the world, shaped by situations, and must be understood with reference to those situations. As circumstanced encounters with qualitatively particular objects, the passions were seen to be infinite: knowledge of the passions comes from the outside in, through an immersive, open-ended, narrative understanding of particular lived situations. The chapter ends by briefly sketching how narrative, theorized by rhetoric as a mode of the knowledge of particulars, came to be seen as a crucial instrument of the knowledge of the passions.

Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser on Transnational Governance and the Future of Christendom

This article considers the writings of Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser within the context of European religious conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, amid the perceived Ottoman threat to Christendom. In their fictional works, these authors imagine an overarching authority that might replace the traditional papal power of oversight and deposing in order to regulate temporal sovereigns and foster a unity of Christian princes within Europe. Even as they can be read as reimagining Christendom, their fictional works reflect what Charles Taylor has called the “disenchantment” of sacred spaces within his philosophical history of the emergence of secularity within European cultures.