Jonathan F. S. Post, ed. Green Thoughts, Green Shades: Essays by Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric.

Burns, Michael Dean

Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. xiv + 300 pp. index. $50 (cl), $18.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-520-21455-2 (cl), 0-520-22752-2 (pbk).

As the collection's editor, Jonathan F. S. Post, asks, "What might some of today's poets find of special interest in their forebears and worth retrieving for fellow readers of poetry? And of equal interest, what do their emphases tell us about their own poetry and, more broadly, about how the past continues to form the present?" (3). Seeking answers to such questions, Post gathers together twelve essays by distinguished contemporary poets--Calvin Bedient, Eavan Boland, Mice Fulton, Linda Gregerson, Thorn Gunn, Robert Hass, Anthony Hecht, William Logan, Heather McHugh, Carl Phillips, Peter Sacks, and Stephen Yenser--whose literary subjects offer a by no means less venerable list of illustri: Wyatt, Sidney, Donne, Jonson, Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Bradstreet, Cavendish, Rochester, and Edward Taylor. Green Thoughts, Green Shades is unabashedly belletristic and formalist in its emphases, and all the better for being so. As Post declares in his excellent introduction, "If so diverse a group of essays can be said to have a common purpose, it is to stake a claim for reading poetically, in all that tricky word implies" (5). We are pleased to observe that the collection succeeds admirably in its self-proclaimed, tricky purpose.

Though historically sensitive and accurate in their analyses, the authors do not genuflect to the historicizing tendencies of current Renaissance scholarship. There are no "smoking guns," as it were, no new cultural facts or findings that contemporary historical scholarship has come rigorously to expect. Yet there are, instead, some excellent readings and critical judgments. Those of us who became students of literature before the hegemony of poststructuralism and the "new historicism" may remember being taught to read poetically by such "new critics" as Cleanth Brooks and Lawrence Perrine; and while we soon learned to sacrifice personal taste to the "business" of scholarship (and even, indeed, to give over all notions of "taste" and of esthetic categories generally), such a collection reminds us to renew our pleasure in reading. One finishes with a heightened appreciation of the esthetic achievements of Renaissance poets, as well as of the literary sophistication, technical mastery, and critical acumen of the contemporary poet-readers who are at the same time their heirs and legitimate rivals.

As with any collection, some essays rise above the rest in interest and insight. Readers of the Renaissance lyric who hope to find its impulses alive and well in contemporary verse will be especially pleased with Anthony Hecht's "Sidney and the Sestina," which explores the literary history of this complex lyric form and its mastery by one of the great poets of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Bishop. Peter Sack's "Face of the Sonnet" should resonate with those contemporary poets and scholars who carried Paul Fussell's Poetic Meter and Poetic Form in their back pockets, as if their bible of prosody. Linda Gregorson's "Ben Jonson and the Loathed Word" is razor-sharp in its criticisms of the Jonsonian plain style. Exemplifying "scholarship of the personal" (as such approaches have been called in recent issues of PMLA), Eavan Boland's "Finding Ann Bradstreet" situates its literary-biographical analysis within an engaging autobiographical frame. Mice Fulton's "Unordinary Passions: Margaret Cavendish" mounts a serious defense of the Duchess of Newcastle's still often-maligned poetic style. Thorn Gunn's "Saint John the Rake" argues shrewdly for the serious, "moral" commitments of Rochester's erotic verse. And those who know the critical forays that Stephen Yenser has made in previous essays will not be disappointed by his "'How Coy a Figure': Marvellry": here Yenser delights not only by his subject (a peek inside the life, times, and talent of Andrew Marvell) but by the [M]arvel[l]ously off-beat way it comes to us, ranging in its references from Robert Herrick to Wallace Stevens to Yeats and Roland Barthes. The essays devoted to Wyatt, Donne, Herbert, and Taylor make fairly conventional observations and are less successful, though even these sparkle due to their authors' finely polished and playful prose-poetic styles.

Arguably, the best strength of Green Thoughts, Green Shades is its attention to nuances of prosody and linguistic effect generally, as well as to the interconnections among genre, stylistics, and literary theme. This is a book for literary generalists, for devoted readers of poetry--both early modern and postmodern--and for serious students of prosody and genre theory.

JAMES S. BAUMLIN AND MICHAEL DEAN BURNS

Southwest Missouri State University