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Epilogue: The Future of the Metaphysical
Christopher D'Addario, Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania
Book:

Urban Aesthetics in Early Modern London

Published online:

07 June 2023

Print publication:

15 June 2023, pp 205-209
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Summary

The epilogue reflects on some of the implications of the localized nature of the study and the historicism it practices. It questions the period boundary between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British literature as well as the too easy application of the term metaphysical to a disparate set of writers. In the process, it argues for an awareness of the distances that texts traveled as they influenced other writers and an openness to adopting a wider, more transnational, sense of literary connections and networks.

Simon Jackson
Published online:

11 November 2022

Print publication:

01 December 2022
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Described by one contemporary as the 'sweet singer of The Temple', George Herbert has long been recognised as a lover of music. Nevertheless, Herbert's own participation in seventeenth-century musical culture has yet to be examined in detail. This is the first extended critical study to situate Herbert's roles as priest, poet and musician in the context of the musico-poetic activities of members of his extended family, from the song culture surrounding William Herbert and Mary Sidney to the philosophy of his eldest brother Edward Herbert of Cherbury. It examines the secular visual music of the Stuart court masque as well as the sacred songs of the church. Arguing that Herbert's reading of Augustine helped to shape his musical thought, it explores the tension between the abstract ideal of music and its practical performance to articulate the distinctive theological insights Herbert derived from the musical culture of his time.

Chapter 10 - Plath and the Pastoral
from Part II - Literary Technique and Influence
- By Iain Twiddy
Edited by Tracy Brain, Bath Spa University
Book:

Sylvia Plath in Context

Published online:

03 August 2019

Print publication:

22 August 2019, pp 104-114
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Summary

Iain Twiddy elucidates several strands of the pastoral that operate in Plath’s poetry, ‘including metaphysical or internal pastoral, the intimacy of pastoral with loss, mourning and elegy, and the influence of pastoral figures’. There is also Plath’s engagement ‘with classical pastoral in early poems’.