Review by Choice Review
Like other volumes of similar titles, this one is superbly envisioned and carried out in fresh, important, useful essays. In the opening set of contextual studies, the topics--pressures on the verse of religion and politics, of gender politics, the social circumstances of manuscript and print dissemination, matters of genre theory and of rhetoric--are handled by scholars who have done substantial and groundbreaking work. D. Loewenstein, E. Hobby, A. Marotti, A. Fowler, and B. Vickers--write accessibly and clearly about issues that are being opened or reexamined in current scholarship. These essays explore questions that vibrantly matter in 17th-century verse; that all closely discuss specific poems as well as large-scale issues makes them especially useful and credible. Similar praise is due the essays on individual poets (Donne, Jonson, Herrick, Herbert, Carew-Suckling-Lovelace, early Milton, Crashaw, Vaughan, Marvell). There is no bad work here: All the individual studies have value as "companions" to new readers of the poetry, yet are sophisticated and critically shrewd inquiries. (There are problems: many lapses in proofreading, and some plain boners, as in Cromwell's "refusal not to be crowned," or attribution of Satan's first words in Paradise Lost to Beelzebub; a second printing ought to deal with these). The bibliographies are particularly good. No other current volume does the work of this one: essential; highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduate through faculty.
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
