By Arthur L. Clements
This remark on poetry examines no matter if poetry has a redemptive caliber or energy to alter views.
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Extra info for Poetry of Contemplation: John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and the Modern Period
Example text
9). Although the word "meditation" was sometimes used inter-changeably in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the closely related words "prayer" and "contemplation," the terms did, however, also retain in those centuries the same distinct medieval meanings. As St. John of the Cross writes, "the state of beginners comprises meditation and discursive acts" (Flame, III, 30, in Complete Works, III, 68). Meditation, Louis Martz points out, ''cultivates the basic, the lower levels of the spiritual life; it is not, properly speaking, a mystical activity, but a part of the duties of every man in daily life" (The Poetry of Meditation, 16).
To determine whether a writer is or is not a mystic is in part to make a judgment about his progress in these familiar, well-described, and traditional terms. It must be emphasized that there is no absolute disjunction but rather a continuity, interrelationship, and movement back and forth between meditation and contemplation and the stages of the mystical life. ' He adds that meditation is an ordinary means of disposing oneself for mystical prayer. 'In order to reach this state, [the soul] will frequently need to make use of meditation, quietly and in moderation'" (Merton, 8990).
Other reasons for critical differences and difficulties arise from the notion that religious poets may have recourse to mystical terminology as a source of powerful metaphor and, more importantly, from the fact that meditation leads to and blends into contemplation and is therefore not always readily distinguishable from it. Given these circumstances, Louis Martz properly cautions against hasty and inaccurate labeling of meditative writers as mystical. " Although "meditative" may seem more accurate than the term "mystical" or "contemplative" when applied in general to English religious poetry of the seventeenth century, there still remain two important questions: (1) which term is more accurate when applied to particular Page xiv poems and to a particular poet of the seventeenth century; and (2) to what extent did ancient-medieval-Renaissance contemplative literature, in addition to sixteenth-century meditative literature, "influence" seventeenth-century English religious poetry.