Writing for the Inner Eye

Abraham Cowley reacted against the tradition of divine poetry that Du Bartas embodied, arguing that scriptural poets needed to have technical expertise and spiritual insight. As later seventeenth-century poets like Thomas Heywood, John Perrot, and Samuel Pordage became aware of the limits of simply describing literal truths from the Bible and natural world, they reverted to allegorical and other figurative narrative structures that could accommodate higher truths to the human imagination and describe psychological experience. John Milton had known Sylvester’s translation since he was a teenager, but Paradise Lost makes purposeful allusions that surpass Devine Weekes, showing how difficult it is to apprehend divine truth, and how interpretation depends on our point of view. Lucy Hutchinson’s meditations on Genesis revise Du Bartas’ poetics to strip away extraneous material that distracts from scriptural truth.

Little Histories

The second half of this book examines the diversity of divine poetry written after Du Bartas’ example, beginning in this chapter with historical and descriptive poems that were continuations of Du Bartas’ vision. Such poems were obeisant to a poetics that was effectively authorized by the Stuart monarch, and that treated the self not as an interpretive agent but an object of study. Poets like John Davies of Hereford and Phineas Fletcher invoked the hexameron as a token of continuity with the Semaines, and played with the motif of the microcosm, i.e. the self as a ‘little universe’, that cohered with the grand design of the Semaines. The overt smallness of Sylvester’s translation Little Bartas indicated his preoccupation with the pedagogical and spiritual benefit of divine verse, which is also found in Edward Cooke’s Bartas Junior.

Curating the Protestant Imagination

Even before a full translation existed, there were diverse English responses to Du Bartas’ insistence that divine verse should peg human creativity to the mind of the Creator. William Scott’s Model of Poesy sets this pessimistic view against more positive, socially engaged arguments closer to Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy. Scott and Sidney both translated Du Bartas, as did Robert Barret, whose verse chronicle The Sacred Warr is an early poem that faithfully follows Du Bartas’ ‘paterne’. Despite Edmund Spenser’s reported interest in Du Bartas, his poems (especially The Faerie Queene) suggest that human ignorance requires poets to write about non-fictional truths using allegorical structures. Those who did not read French might have encountered Du Bartas in Elizabethan drama, as a character in Christopher Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris, or in paraphrased extracts in George Peele’s David and Bethsabe and the anonymous Taming of a Shrew.

Solidarity and Compliance

This chapter discusses how sixteenth-century Scottish court poets and English translators showed deference towards Du Bartas’ example. Thomas Hudson, John Stewart of Baldynneis, William Fowler, and other poets at James’ court expressed their admiration for Du Bartas’ verse but did not seek to emulate him. The scholar, ambassador, and poet Adriaan Damman composed a Latin translation of Sepmaine that was circulated among continental friends in manuscript, and in a revised print edition to promote James’ reputation abroad. We also see how Du Bartas’ first translators in London, aware of his Scottish connections, also complied with James’ vision of Du Bartas’ significance.

History of a Friendship

James VI’s friendship with Du Bartas between 1584 and 1590 guided how the king wrote poetry and permanently changed how Du Bartas’ works were published and read. The Scottish monarch was in contact with Du Bartas at around the same time, or even before, Elizabethan courtiers like Anthony Bacon and Sir Philip Sidney were. The translation of L’Uranie in Essayes of a Prentise (1584) matched James’ enthusiasm for merging secular and sacred authority. James’ Lepanto and Du Bartas’ French translation of it supported cultural diplomacy between the courts in Edinburgh and Navarre. Du Bartas gave James a manuscript copy of Suites de la Seconde Semaine, perhaps during the poet’s visit to Scotland in 1587, that shows that James became Du Bartas’ first reader in the poet’s final years. His Maiesties Poetical Exercises (1591), printed a year after Du Bartas’ death, broadcast this friendship internationally.

Introduction

Du Bartas’ poems are about how the world was made, and how we make sense of the world. In praising the creative powers of God, his works advocate a Protestant poetics that denigrates human creativity and urges poets to replicate the established truths found in Scripture and nature. Despite contemporary and later comparisons between Du Bartas’ poems and the Book of Nature, his poems were self-consciously imperfect and are better understood as ‘poems of commonplaces’ that organize knowledge around a set of authoritative scriptural headings. This reading of the poems’ biblical aesthetics, in line with recent francophone criticism, provides a basis for understanding how English and Scottish readers from varied backgrounds read and imitated the poems. This chapter also outlines the book’s structure.

Retrospectives

Although Devine Weekes was read and admired throughout the seventeenth century, writers came to regard it as an outdated gathering of mythical information. Later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poets (such as Susanna Hopton, Thomas Ellwood, and Richard Blackmore) continued to test the relation between faith, empiricism, and poetry with Du Bartas as a distant precursor. The Lake Poets (William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey) remembered Du Bartas’ place in literary history, perhaps aware that he was an oblique precursor to literary Romanticism, even if he ignored the role of the creative consciousness. Du Bartas’ poetry should not just be read for its historical significance or as a source for other writers, but in dialogue with those who read and imitated his works.

Meditations

Several seventeenth-century poets explored ways to compose verse meditations that showed readers how to use scriptural poems like Devine Weekes as a devotional aid. Joseph Hall and Francis Quarles advocated new forms of non-lyric meditation, a literary mode especially practised by women writers. As such poems offered a greater role to the self as an interpretive agent, scriptural poets like Anne Southwell and Edward Browne stretched Du Bartas’ models in ways that responded to their personal, political, and social circumstances. Even though historical and meditative verse forms blended into each other, Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse distinguishes sharply between the two modes in order to cast her as a conservative historical poet writing under Du Bartas’ shadow.

Devine Weekes and Its Readers

Josuah Sylvester’s translation Devine Weekes and Workes (1605) marks the meridian point of Du Bartas’ English and Scottish reception, and is a decisive work for seventeenth-century devotional verse. Its publication made the most of the earlier associations with James VI and I and also of the Semaines’ value as poems of commonplaces. The addition of annotations and readers’ notes illustrate the edition’s many uses. The chapter also discusses Robert Nicolson, a friend of Sylvester, who shows how annotational practices could be the first step to composing new works on the same templates.