ABSTRACT
Even in the heyday of its popularity, the Gardner-Martz approach to the Holy Sonnets must often have seemed unsatisfactory: the excuses Helen Gardner had to formulate to explain why individual poems did not fit the pattern she had uncovered in them 1. and the different results found by two scholars supposedly using the same strategy ought to have been enough to alert their readers to the wrongheadedness of the strategy. 2 But some of the theories that have been subsequently worked out to cover what happens in the poems are no happier. Indeed, the case made by Barbara K. Lewalski and others for seeing the Holy Sonnets as drawing on and developing a specifically Protestant poetic is potentially more misleading than the now discredited claim that they drew uncritically on the Ignatian meditative tradition.
