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The Relation between Robert Southwell’s Neo-Latin and English Poetry

Despite the importance attributed to Southwell in Louis Martz’s The Poetry of Meditation, his Latin poetry—overlooked in Leicester Bradner’s Musae Anglicanae and the subject of a solitary unsatisfactory discussion in Pierre Janelle’s Robert Southwell the Writer—has received little attention. Such neglect is not unusual. Barbara Lewalski’s Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric—a spacious enough volume—disposes of Herbert’s important Latin collection Passio Discerpta in an endnote. This is despite a number of recent studies emphasising the position of Neo-Latin as a modern language alongside and correspondent with the vernacular, acting ‘as a sort of John the Baptist to the vernacular’, or ‘drinking from the same streams’. It is, I think, indisputable that Martz and Lewalski would have needed to modify their arguments had they taken the Neo-Latin poetry of Southwell and Herbert into account in their respective studies. Martz would have found some part of ‘meditative structure’ attributable to the conventions of Latin elegiac writing rather than to Ignatian meditation. Similarly, Lewalski would have had to qualify her description of so much poetry as ‘lyric’ had she considered its relation to Latin elegiac and epigrammatic writing.