ABSTRACT
Important as rhetoric was to poetry in the sixteenth century, the nature of their relationship shifted through the early and middle decades of the next, as poets and Puritans alike increasingly extolled the virtues of the plain style and the meditative tradition continued to rework rhetorical norms for poetry.1 Their crossing was not entirely comfortable, however, as poets strived to maintain some important distinctions between the meditative and rhetorical traditions even as the two began increasingly to converge.2 Meditation and rhetoric were uneasy bedfellows not only because one is thought to be an inherently private art while the other has always been publicly oriented, but also because their meeting coincided with a converse tendency to separate public and private.3 Though such opposing tendencies are not
1 Though more recent scholars (such as Longfellow, Coles, and Quitslund) have taken up the topic, the fullest discussions of meditation and rhetoric in early modern poetry are offered by an earlier generation. See Erica Longfellow, “Poetry, the Self, and Prayer,” Religion and Literature 42.3 (2010): 184-91; Kimberly Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Beth Quitslund, “Despair and the Composition of the Self,” Spenser Studies 17 (2003): 91-106. Works whose relevance has not diminished include, in particular: Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (1954, New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press, 1962); Thomas O. Sloan, “Rhetoric and Meditation: Three Case Studies,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 1 (1971): 45-58; Sloan, “The Crossing of Rhetoric and Poetry in the English Renaissance,” The Rhetoric of Renaissance Poetry: From Wyatt to Milton, ed. Thomas O. Sloan and Raymond B. Waddington (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 212-42; Sloan, Donne, Milton, and the End of Humanist Rhetoric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); and Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979).
