Poetic Priesthood reads seventeenth-century devotional verse as staging a surprising competition between poetry and the established church. The work of John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, John Milton, and Thomas Traherne suggests that the demands of faith are better understood by poets than by priests—even while four of these authors were also ordained. While recent scholarship has tended to emphasize the shaping influence of the liturgy on the poetry of this period, this book argues that verse instead presents readers with a mode of articulating piety that relies on formal experimentation, and that varies from the forms of the church rather than straightforwardly reproducing them. In crafting this poetic aid to devotion, these authors practiced an alternative and even more ample form of ministry than in their ecclesiastical activities. In the wake of the Reformation, the liturgy of the English church centered on rituals of communal prayer and praise, but the poetry considered in this study suggests that such rituals in fact risk distracting worshippers from the pleasures and challenges of navigating an individual relationship with God. Yet these poets do not make this suggestion by rejecting communal rituals outright. Their verse invokes ecclesiastical practice as a basis for formal innovation that suggests how intimacy with the divine might look, feel, and sound, connecting humans with their God more precisely and more individually than the liturgy can. As they shift between explicit comment on the liturgy and more subtle departures from it in the interplay of verse form and denotation, these authors claim the work of priesthood for poetry.

Poetic Priesthood reads seventeenth-century devotional verse as staging a surprising competition between poetry and the established church. The work of John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, John Milton, and Thomas Traherne suggests that the demands of faith are better understood by poets than by priests--even while four of these authors were also ordained. While recent scholarship has tended to emphasize the shaping influence of the liturgy on the poetry of this period, this book argues that verse instead presents readers with a mode of articulating piety that relies on formal experimentation, and that varies from the forms of the church rather than straightforwardly reproducing them. In crafting this poetic aid to devotion, these authors practiced an alternative and even more ample form of ministry than in their ecclesiastical activities. In the wake of the Reformation, the liturgy of the English church centered on rituals of communal prayer and praise, but the poetry considered in this study suggests that such rituals in fact risk distracting worshippers from the pleasures and challenges of navigating an individual relationship with God. Yet these poets do not make this suggestion by rejecting communal rituals outright. Their verse invokes ecclesiastical practice as a basis for formal innovation that suggests how intimacy with the divine might look, feel, and sound, connecting humans with their God more precisely and more individually than the liturgy can. As they shift between explicit comment on the liturgy and more subtle departures from it in the interplay of verse form and denotation, these authors claim the work of priesthood for poetry.

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald, language: English, abstract: After the great poetry in the 13th century, which was highly influenced by the Franciscan religion, the English religious lyric found a new age in the 17th century. Two of the main poets of this time, also called “metaphysical poets”, are John Donne and George Herbert, whose poems will be analyzed in this term paper. Reading “Batter my Heart” and “The Collar” raises not only the question of religiosity but also of the speaker’s relation to God. Apart from the religious content, there are also stylistic devices, which are crucial for the time of metaphysical poetry. But, before it comes to an analysis, there will be given a short overview about the historical background, the importance of religion for the poets at that time and their impact on poetry to understand the meaning of their poems in a better way. Finally, there will be made a comparison of the two poems concerning the way they deal with religiosity and how they implement their idea of the speaker’s relation to God.

Examines the historical situation and developments in Japan and points out the parallels between English Romanticism and the poetics of the Kambun and Genroku periods, and especially shomon poets of the Japanese 17th century.