Made Flesh. Kimberly Johnson

       Introduction

      Eucharistic Poetics: The Word Made Flesh

      This is a book about how poems work, and about how the interpretive demands of sacramental worship inform the production of poetic texts.

      If it seems impolite for a book to declare its intentions so brashly in its first gesture, such insolence has nevertheless been made necessary by the publication of several critical texts that set out to investigate what they term the poetics of the post-Reformation period, particularly in conjunction with a consideration of eucharistic theology. In what has become a minor fad in Renaissance literary criticism, a number of studies advertise themselves as engaged in an examination of the relationship between the sacramental theologies of the early modern period and the representational strategies of poetic texts; but too often these critical examinations seem to lose track of, or fundamentally to misunderstand, the terms in which they frame their projects. While a number of well-meaning critics have trafficked in phrases like “eucharistic poetics,” “sacramental poetics,” and “the poetics of immanence,” and have acknowledged, either explicitly or implicitly, the interpretive overlap between sacramental worship and the processes of signification, their attention remains focused not on poetics—that is, not on the way poems work as literary artifacts—but rather on whatever opinions concerning sacramental theology Renaissance literature seems to offer. The present study, by contrast, concerns itself primarily with poetics, with the ways in which poems communicate information beyond denotation and in addition to the referential content of words rather than with whatever thematic commentary poems may offer on the subject of the Eucharist. I am most urgently interested, in other words, in how poems say as opposed to what poems say. For it is in their concern with the success and failure of language to provide interpretive experiences that these poetic texts reveal and respond to the challenges of eucharistic worship. The Eucharist is after all a ritual fundamentally involved with the mechanisms of representation, and the question of how exactly Christ is presented in the bread and wine is one of the animating debates of the Reformation. This book demonstrates the ways in which the sacramental conjunction of text and materiality, word and flesh, in the ritual of Communion registers simultaneously as a theological concern and as a nexus for anxieties about how language—particularly poetic language, with its valences of embodiment—works.

      In advancing these claims, I do not seek to rehearse the arguments made by Malcolm Ross in his stealthily enduring 1954 study Poetry and Dogma. That book takes a dim, not to say curmudgeonly, view of post-Reformation poetry (as well as post-Reformation dogma), lamenting that what Ross identifies as Protestantism’s “outright abandonment of Eucharistic sacramentalism” constitutes nothing less than the “declension of symbol into metaphor,” with disastrous aesthetic effects.¹ Ross’s thesis suggests that such a shift—or, in his oft-repeated term, a “deterioration”—is at once the inevitable consequence of Reformed eucharistic theologies, which Ross argues make a “drastic separation of the sign from the thing signified” (51), and the ineluctable cause of poetic decline over the course of the seventeenth century. Leaving aside the tendentiousness of Ross’s approach to his subject, his argument is puzzling in its apparent indifference to the ways in which the work of John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Edward Taylor, and other devotional poets of the period explicitly engage—in the thematic content of their poems, to be sure, but also in their poetic strategies—issues of signification, sacrament, worship, and the ontological value of the material world and of the flesh, concerns whose purported decline in seventeenth-century poetry most vexes Ross. Indeed, the flowering of English poetry in the seventeenth century, which this study will argue stands in response to the challenges, tensions, and potentialities of sacramental worship, eventuates not, as Ross seems to think, in the thin broth of poetic godlessness but in the establishment of an aesthetic that underwrites the composition of poems even to the present day, an aesthetic that relies upon the capacities of poetry to express and to embody, in which the word is continually made flesh.

      Until fairly recently, Ross’s book was virtually the only critical study devoted to poetic treatments of the Eucharist in Renaissance poetry. But the last several years have seen the publication of a number of studies that acknowledge the proximity of sacramental worship and literary encounter in the early modern period.