Tessie Prakas's book is the latest to explore the relationship between early modern literature—and especially seventeenth-century devotional verse—and the post-Reformation church. Comprising a substantial introduction, chapters on John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and John Milton, and a coda on Thomas Traherne, it is an impressive debut, announcing the arrival of a poised and resourceful critical voice.
In the introduction, Prakas proposes that these five writers (with the tricky exception of Milton) saw poetry as a complement to or perhaps an improvement on the forms of church worship. Although Prakas acknowledges that her writers (again excepting Milton) were not themselves radicals, she terms their verse “radical” because it combines something like “the desire for individual intimacy with God that was so important to radical separatists” (25) with “similar commitments to those of writers who self-consciously embraced radical form: commitments to language use as a map of the human connection to...
