Puritan Age

 

The Puritan Age (1620–1660): A Comprehensive Literary and Historical Synthesis

1. The Puritan Movement: A Moral and Political Rebirth

To understand the Puritan movement is to look beyond the caricature of the "gloomy dogmatist" and recognize what we must frame as a "second and greater Renaissance." While the Italian Renaissance was essentially pagan and sensuous, offering little relief from the moral and political degradation of the Medici or the Borgias, the Puritan movement in England represented a profound national awakening. It was a strategic rebirth of man’s moral nature, centering on a dual pursuit of personal righteousness and civil liberty. We must view this era not as the rise of a narrow religious sect, but as a teleological shift in the English consciousness—a movement that aimed to make men fundamentally honest and fundamentally free.

The primary objectives of the movement—honesty and freedom—served as the catalysts for the overthrow of systemic despotism. While much historiography fixates on the "froth" of the era—the austere laws and the prohibition of Maypole dancing—this surface noise should not obscure the "mighty current" of justice that defines the period’s legacy. This was a movement of historic proportions: it was a Puritan, Thomas Hooker, who gave the world the first written constitution in Connecticut, a document where freemen explicitly limited the powers of their elected officers. This passion for liberty secured life and property from the tyranny of rulers, yet as the political victory over "divine right" was won, it inevitably led to a fragmentation of national unity and a subsequent collapse of unified literary ideals.

2. Transitional Shifts: From Elizabethan Vitality to Puritan Reflection

The seventeenth century marks a decisive departure from the romantic ardor that defined the Elizabethan age. As the sixteenth century’s youthful enthusiasm waned, it was replaced by a critical, intellectual spirit. This was an era of fermentation where the shared patriotism of the previous generation dissolved into a landscape of partisan struggle. We see a transition from the heart-led sentiments of the past toward more complex, often somber reflections on the human condition, necessitated by the intellectual trauma of losing a unified national identity.

To appreciate this shift, one must contrast the fundamental differences between Elizabethan and Puritan literature:

• Unity vs. Division: Elizabethan literature enjoyed a marked unity born of devotion to a sovereign who sought the nation’s welfare. Under the Stuarts, this was replaced by division; the kings became enemies of the people, and literature became as fragmented as the parties struggling for religious liberty.
• Vitality vs. Sadness: While Elizabethan works throbbed with youth, Puritan-age literature often spoke of age and pessimism. Writers frequently cried "Ichabod! the glory has departed"—a sentiment rooted not in mere religious gloom, but in the breaking up of old ideals in government and religion.
• Romanticism vs. Intellectualism: The intense, heart-driven romance of the Elizabethans was superseded by a critical spirit. In the Puritan age, romance became an intellectual exercise characterized by fantastic and artificial adornment of speech, replacing the natural utterance of true sentiment.

These changing standards and the loss of a fixed literary center provided the fertile, if chaotic, ground for the emergence of the "Transition Poets."

3. The Diverse Landscape of Seventeenth-Century Poetry

In the absence of fixed literary standards, the first half of the seventeenth century witnessed a "bewildering confusion of ideals." This period was characterized by a lack of accurate classification as various schools of poetry emerged in open rebellion against the styles of the past. The resulting landscape was one of startling variety, where the realism of the modern world began to intrude upon the fading allegories of the medieval.

The Transition Poets

Led by Samuel Daniel, these writers consciously deserted Spenser as a model. Daniel utilized the artificial sonnet but sought a "modern and realistic" style, setting himself against the "aged accents and untimely words" of past traditions to paint life as it truly is.

The Spenserian Poets

This group, including Giles Fletcher and George Wither, clung to older ideals. Fletcher’s Christ’s Victory and Triumph achieved a religious majesty that foreshadowed Milton. George Wither, who served as an epitome of the age’s political shifts from Royalist to Puritan, notably published the first English hymn book in 1623, signaling the move toward a more personal, liturgical expression.

The Metaphysical School

Led by John Milton’s contemporaries like John Donne and George Herbert, this "fantastic school" broke Elizabethan standards with "boldness and originality." Donne’s work was marked by an intellectual rigor and a sense of mystery, while Herbert’s poetry represented the first instance of a poet speaking "face to face with God." Within this school, we also find the "foregleams" of the next century: Abraham Cowley’s "Pindaric Odes" and Edmund Waller’s "closed couplet," which would eventually dominate English verse.

The Cavalier Poets

Figures like Herrick, Carew, Suckling, and Lovelace represented the "sensual and religious" paradox of the Royalists. Their work was often gay and trivial, yet even the most careless among them—such as Herrick in his "Litany"—could not escape the underlying religious terror of the Puritan spirit.

Amidst this poetic fragmentation, it was John Milton who ultimately unified the culture of the Renaissance with the moral earnestness of the Puritan movement.

4. The Master of the Epic: John Milton

John Milton stands as the "poet of steadfast will," a figure whose life and work were governed by a fixed purpose. This contrasts sharply with Shakespeare, the "poet of impulse," who mirrored the shifting passions of men. For Milton, art was an extension of the soul; he famously argued that he who would write well "ought himself to be a true poem." He was the heir of one great age and the prophet of another, adding to Renaissance beauty the tremendous moral earnestness of the Puritan.

Milton’s literary career followed three distinct phases:

1. The Horton Period (1632–1638): In six years of solitary study, Milton produced works of "exquisite finish," including L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, and Lycidas. These poems represent the high-water mark of lyric poetry, combining Elizabethan aesthetic grace with an emerging Puritan moral purpose.
2. The Militant Prose Period (1640–1660): Milton sacrificed his poetic ambitions and eventually his eyesight on the "altar of English liberty." Serving as Secretary for Foreign Tongues, he produced the Areopagitica, a seminal plea for the freedom of the press. Most notably, when warned that further strain would cost him his sight, he chose to write the Defensio pro Populo Anglicano to justify the people's right to defend themselves against tyranny.
3. The Final Epics: In his final years of blindness, Milton returned to his early dreams, producing the "colossal" Paradise Lost—an epic not of a man, but of the whole race. He followed this with Paradise Regained and finally Samson Agonistes, a tragedy reflecting his own personal status as a blind, scorned champion of a lost cause.

While Milton reached the scholarly heights of the Renaissance, the era’s spirit was captured with equal power in the humble, yet profound, prose of John Bunyan.

5. The Prose of the People: John Bunyan and the Great Allegory

If Milton represents the Renaissance-educated peak of the movement, John Bunyan represents the commanding extreme of religious individualism. A poor, uneducated tinker, Bunyan’s work sprang from the spiritual ferment of the common man, proving that the "accent of the Holy Ghost" was not confined to the elite. Together, the scholar and the tinker bookend the seventeenth century, demonstrating the vast breadth of the Puritan movement across English class lines.

The enduring impact of The Pilgrim's Progress lies in its status as a "real story" rather than a mere procession of shadows. Unlike other allegories, Bunyan’s characters are living men and women. His critique of contemporary social structures is most vividly seen in the jury of Vanity Fair, where characters like Mr. Blindman, Mr. Nogood, Mr. Heady, and Mr. Liveloose represent the systemic injustice of the era. Written in "terse, idiomatic prose," the work made the complex doctrine of salvation accessible to all, becoming the first extended story in the English language to achieve universal popularity.

While Bunyan and Milton dominate the landscape, several "Minor Prose Writers" provided a necessary counter-balance to the era’s storms:

• Robert Burton: Whose Anatomy of Melancholy is a vast hodgepodge of classic wealth.
• Sir Thomas Browne: Whose Religio Medici and Urn Burial treated science and revelation with a reverent, kindly tolerance.
• Thomas Fuller: The witty chronicler of the Worthies of England.
• Jeremy Taylor: The "Shakespeare of divines," who authored Holy Living and Dying.
• Richard Baxter: The tireless nonconformist who wrote The Saints' Everlasting Rest.
• Izaak Walton: Whose The Compleat Angler provided a sense of "inward calm" amidst "outward storm."

6. Pedagogical Directives: Critical Inquiry for Post-Graduate Students

For the post-graduate scholar, it is vital to develop a "historical sense" when assessing the Puritan Age. One must perceive the "inward calm" found in Walton’s angling not merely as an escape, but as a strategic survival of the mind during political upheaval. These texts are not artifacts; they are the intellectual records of a nation renegotiating its soul.

Deep-Thinking Prompts for Student Analysis

1. The Comparative Intellectual: Evaluate the fundamental differences between Shakespeare and Milton. Contrast Shakespeare’s "knowledge of men" with Milton’s pursuit of an "ideal man," and discuss how the shift from "impulse" to "purpose" redefined English poetics.
2. The "Second Renaissance" Theory: Critically assess the movement as a "second and greater Renaissance." Did the Puritan focus on moral nature fulfill the intellectual awakening of the 15th century, or was it a rejection of the pagan and sensuous values that defined the earlier period?
3. The Tension of Art: Using the works of Robert Herrick, analyze the internal struggle between the "Cavalier" and the "Puritan." How does his poetry manage to be simultaneously "pagan in spirit" and mastered by "religious terror"?
4. Literary Evolution: Discuss the "Metaphysical" revolt against Elizabethan style. To what extent did John Donne’s "boldness" and his destruction of traditional standards pave the way for the original and intellectual spirit of modern literature?

Blog Strategy Checklist

• Analytical Prose: Move beyond summary; synthesize political upheaval with aesthetic fragmentation.
• The "So What?" Layer: Address why the "Ichabod" sentiment matters to modern readers facing their own shifts in national identity.
• Logical Structure: Link the "historical sense" to specific texts—for example, connect Walton’s peaceful prose to the necessity of mental refuge during the Commonwealth.
• Source Fidelity: Ensure all claims regarding the Connecticut constitution, the first hymn book, and the jurors of Vanity Fair are cited with historical accuracy.

Metaphysical Poetry

1. Metaphysical Poets:

Metaphysical poet, any of the poets in 17th-century England who inclined to the personal and intellectual complexity and concentration that is displayed in the poetry of John Donne, the chief of the Metaphysicals. Others include Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, John Cleveland, and Abraham Cowley as well as, to a lesser extent, George Herbert and Richard Crashaw.

Their work is a blend of emotion and intellectual ingenuity, characterized by conceit or “wit”—that is, by the sometimes violent yoking together of apparently unconnected ideas and things so that the reader is startled out of his complacency and forced to think through the argument of the poem. Metaphysical poetry is less concerned with expressing feeling than with analyzing it, with the poet exploring the recesses of his consciousness. The boldness of the literary devices used—especially obliquity, irony, and paradox—are often reinforced by a dramatic directness of language and by rhythms derived from that of living speech.

Esteem for Metaphysical poetry never stood higher than in the 1930s and ’40s, largely because of T.S. Eliot’s influential essay “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921), a review of Herbert J.C. Grierson’s anthology Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the Seventeenth Century. In this essay Eliot argued that the works of these men embody a fusion of thought and feeling that later poets were unable to achieve because of a “dissociation of sensibility,” which resulted in works that were either intellectual or emotional but not both at once. In their own time, however, the epithet “metaphysical” was used pejoratively: in 1630 the Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden objected to those of his contemporaries who attempted to “abstract poetry to metaphysical ideas and scholastic quiddities.” At the end of the century, John Dryden censured Donne for affecting “the metaphysics” and for perplexing “the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy when he should engage their hearts . . . with the softnesses of love.” Samuel Johnson, in referring to the learning that their poetry displays, also dubbed them “the metaphysical poets,” and the term has continued in use ever since. Eliot’s adoption of the label as a term of praise is arguably a better guide to his personal aspirations about his own poetry than to the Metaphysical poets themselves; his use of metaphysical underestimates these poets’ debt to lyrical and socially engaged verse. Nonetheless, the term is useful for identifying the often-intellectual character of their writing. (J.E. Luebering)

The term Metaphysical poets was coined by the critic Samuel Johnson to describe a loose group of 17th-century English poets whose work was characterised by the inventive use of conceits, and by a greater emphasis on the spoken rather than lyrical quality of their verse. These poets were not formally affiliated and few were highly regarded until 20th century attention established their importance. (Click here to read more)

2. Explore Metaphysical Poetry

Samuel Johnson - Metaphysical Poets

• 1 History of Metaphysical Poetry
• 2 Who Were the Metaphysical Poets?
• 3.1 Characteristics of Metaphysical Poetry
• 3.2 Characteristics of Metaphysical Poetry
• 4 Examples of Metaphysical Poems
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3. Video Resources

 

About John Donne

  

4. Analysis of Poems

Analysis of 'Death'

Analysis of 'Flea'

Analysis of 'The Sun Rising'

Analysis of 'Ecstasy' - Another analysis

Analysis of 'The Collar'

Analysis of 'To his Coy Mistress'

5. Online Test - Check your understanding

Cleanth Brooks: The Language of Paradox (The Well Wrought Urn)

This is compiled from various web and book resources

Cleanth Brooks’s concept of Paradox and Irony and their importance in poetry as discussed in his essay “The Language of Paradox” in The Well Wrought Urn (1947).

“The language of poetry is the language of paradox” Elucidate with reference to Cleanth Brooks’s essay The Language of Paradox.

Cleanth Brooks - The Language of Paradox from Dilip Barad

In literature, the paradox is a literary device consisting of the anomalous juxtaposition of incongruous ideas for the sake of striking exposition or unexpected insight. It functions as a method of literary composition - and analysis - which involves examining apparently contradictory statements and drawing conclusions either to reconcile them or to explain their presence.

Cleanth Brooks, an active member of the New Critical movement, outlines the use of reading poems through paradox as a method of critical interpretation. Paradox in poetry means that tension at the surface of a verse can lead to apparent contradictions and hypocrisies. His seminal essay, "The Language of Paradox," lays out Brooks' argument for the centrality of paradox by demonstrating that paradox is “the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry." The argument is based on the contention that referential language is too vague for the specific message a poet expresses; he must “make up his language as he goes." This, Brooks argues, is because words are mutable and meaning shifts when words are placed in relation to one another.

In this essay ("The Language of Paradox,"), Cleanth Brooks emphasizes how the language of poetry is different from that of the sciences, claiming that he is interested in our seeing that the paradoxes spring from the very nature of the poet's language: “it is a language in which the connotations play as great a part as the denotations. And I do not mean that the connotations are important as supplying some sort of frill or trimming, something external to the real matter in hand. I mean that the poet does not use a notation at all--as a scientist may properly be said to do so. The poet, within limits, has to make up his language as he goes.”

In this passage, Brooks stresses that poetic language is inherently different from scientific language because the poet constructs his language as he goes and defines his own rules. The poet, then, has control over language, and must take an active role in the shaping of what literature means. The poet, then, is not limited to the denotations of words, but, instead,  revel in the possible connotations of words. The individual poet is given a great deal of power, then, in the process of knowledge making and the reader is isolated from the production of meaning.

Paradox:

In the writing of poems, paradox is used as a method by which unlikely comparisons can be drawn and meaning can be extracted from poems both straightforward and enigmatic.

Brooks points to William Wordsworth's poem “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.” He begins by outlining the initial and surface conflict, which is that the speaker is filled with worship, while his female companion does not seem to be. The paradox, discovered by the poem’s end, is that the girl is more full of worship than the speaker precisely because she is always consumed with sympathy for nature and not - as is the speaker - in tune with nature while immersed in it.

In his reading of Wordsworth's poem, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge,” Brooks contends that the poem offers paradox not in its details, but in the situation which the speaker creates. Though London is a man-made marvel, and in many respects in opposition to nature, the speaker does not view London as a mechanical and artificial landscape but as a landscape comprised entirely of nature. Since London was created by man, and man is a part of nature, London is thus too a part of nature. It is this reason that gives the speaker the opportunity to remark upon the beauty of London as he would a natural phenomenon, and, as Brooks points out, can call the houses “sleeping” rather than “dead,” because they too are vivified with the natural spark of life, granted to them by the men that built them.

Brooks ends his essay with a reading of John Donne’s poem "The Canonization," which uses a paradox as its underlying metaphor. Using a charged religious term to describe the speaker’s physical love as saintly, Donne effectively argues that in rejecting the material world and withdrawing to a world of each other, the two lovers are appropriate candidates for canonization. This seems to parody both love and religion, but in fact it combines them, pairing unlikely circumstances and demonstrating their resulting complex meaning. Brooks points also to secondary paradoxes in the poem: the simultaneous duality and singleness of love, and the double and contradictory meanings of “die” in Metaphysical poetry (used here as both sexual union and literal death). He contends that these several meanings are impossible to convey at the right depth and emotion in any language but that of paradox. A similar paradox is used in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” when Juliet says “For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch and palm to palm is holy palmer’s kiss.”

Brooks' contemporaries in the sciences were, in the 40's and 50's, reorganizing university science curricula into codified disciplines. The study of English, however, remained less defined and it became a goal of the New Critical movement to justify literature in an age of science by separating the work from its author and reader, and by examining it as a self-sufficient artifact. In Brooks’s use of the paradox as a tool for analysis, however, he develops a logical case as a literary technique with strong emotional affect. His reading of “The Canonization” in “The Language of Paradox,” where paradox becomes central to expressing complicated ideas of sacred and secular love, provides an example of this development.

Irony

Although paradox and irony as New Critical tools for reading poetry are often conflated, they are independent poetical devices. Irony for Brooks is “the obvious warping of a statement by the context” whereas paradox is later glossed as “a special kind of qualification which involves the resolution of opposites.”

Irony functions as a presence in the text – the overriding context of the surrounding words that make up the poem. Only sentences such as 2 + 2 = 4 are free from irony; most other statements are prey to their immediate context and are altered by it (take, as an example, the following joke. "A woman walks into a bar and asks for a double entendre. The bartender gives it to her." This last statement, perfectly acceptable elsewhere, is transformed by its context in the joke to an innuendo) take their effect from it. Irony is the key to validating the poem because a test of any statement grows from the context – validating a statement demands examining the statement in the context of the poem and determining whether it is appropriate to that context.

Paradox, however, is essential to the structure and being of the poem. In The Language of Paradox (The Well Wrought Urn) Brooks shows that paradox was so essential to poetic meaning that paradox was almost identical to poetry. According to fellow New Critic Leroy Searle, Brooks’ use of paradox emphasized the indeterminate lines between form and content. “The form of the poem uniquely embodies its meaning” and the language of the poem “effects the reconciliation of opposites or contraries.” While irony functions within the poem, paradox often refers to the meaning and structure of the poem and is thus inclusive of irony. This existence of opposites or contraries and the reconciliation thereof is poetry and the meaning of the poem.

Criticism

R.S. Crane, in his essay "The Critical Monism of Cleanth Brooks," argues strongly against Brooks’ centrality of paradox. For one, Brooks believes that the very structure of poetry is paradox, and ignores the other subtleties of imagination and power that poets bring to their poems. Brooks simply believed that “’imagination’ reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities.” Brooks, in leaning on the crutch of paradox, only discusses the truth which poetry can reveal, and speaks nothing about the pleasure it can give. Also, by defining poetry as uniquely having a structure of paradox, Brooks ignores the power of paradox in everyday conversation and discourse, including scientific discourse, which Brooks claimed was opposed to poetry. Crane claims that, using Brooks’ definition of poetry, the most powerful paradoxical poem in modern history is Einstein’s formula E = mc², which is a profound paradox in that matter and energy are the same thing. The argument for the centrality of paradox (and irony) becomes a reductio ad absurdum and is therefore void (or at least ineffective) for literary analysis.