ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the argument put forward in the poetry of Donne and Herbert that verse mattered as a laden and privileged mode of religious discourse. Their poems articulate a generous apprehension of verse's cognitive and devotional capacity, and as they interrogate its conditions, materials, processes and outcomes, they arrive repeatedly at the recognition of verse as irreducibly important. The book focuses on a marriage of historicism and formalism, and reject the binary opposition between poetics and materialism that, after all, bears little relation to early modern framings of world and writing. Poetry and materialism are seen as mutually exclusive and mutually antagonistic. If we take materialism seriously, poetry must renounce its pretensions and reveal its conspiracies; it must descend from its lofty perch to mingle with the rummage of cultural production.
