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Seventeenth-Century Imagery: Essays on Uses of Figurative Language from Donne to Farquhar.Earl Miner

This collection, predominantly by members of the University of California, though with other contributions ranging from Norway to Japan and Australia, centers on the great poets of the early and midseventeenth century. Three essays devoted to Donne, three to Milton, constituting two-thirds of the volume, apply a professional, almost technological concern to rhetoric as it influenced the writers themselves. Rhetoric therefore is seen as part of the history of ideas. Walter Ong, and not Noam Chomsky, is the pole-star of this little ark, at the helm of which sits the editor of Volume m of Dryden's Poems for the California Edition. The atmosphere recalls delightful friendly seminars at the William Andrews Clark Library in Los Angeles, the book being dedicated to a colleague, H. T. Swedenborg, co-editor of the first volume of Dryden's Poems. It would provide a starting place for other discussions of the kind from which it sprang; the leader of any research seminar would find here both topics and method exemplified. One or two examples of well-conducted controversy include the veteran Pierre Legouis opposing the editor, Earl Miner, for considering Absalom andAchitopel one metaphor because of its translation of English into Jewish history (p. 191). Robert M. Adams' 'Contra Hartman' contests the idea that in Milton's Paradise Lost there is 'counterplay between narrative and imagery'; he sees this rather as a matter of dialectic, so that the descent of Raphael to Eden, looking like the Phoenix, 'is set off more brilliantly when his [Hartman's] analysis is placed in a narrative context, integrated with a narrative transition.' Something like Hartman's original approach seems to be implied in Stanley Fish's article on the structure of Reason of Church Government, which is seen not as a progressive rational argument but a structure of feeling built on two alternative views; mutual contrarieties of the pure, plain, reformed church with the bedizened Jezebel of prelacy are meant to appeal to the converted.