Furey, Constance M. Poetic Relations: Intimacy and Faith in the English Renaissance. Chicago UP, 2017. xii +244 pp. ISBN 9780226434155. $45 cloth.

In Poetic Relations, Constance Furey turns to the Early Modern poetics of Anne Lock, Mary Sidney-Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, George Herbert, Anne Bradstreet, and Edward Taylor to examine how these authors reveal a faith created and sustained by intimate relationships, with others and with God. Her chapters take up four different kinds of intimacy— authorship, friendship, love and marriage—in order to illuminate a ‘relational self’ not ‘undone’ by others as Judith Butler theorises nor engaged in story telling as Hannah Arendt reveals, but a Self who emerges through the ‘fleeting moments’ of a resonant, dynamic and creative poetics, itself the ‘medium of relationality’ (13). Noting that those in Religious Studies have avoided Early Modern protestant poetry because it does not concern itself with ‘power dynamics, ritual action or embodiment’ (13), and that those in Early Modern poetics have failed to identify a ‘relational selfhood’ (15), Furey seeks to fill this gap. Asserting that the poets she considers are largely shaped by Calvinist theology rather than a more ambiguously inflected poetics, Furey makes her focus the very belief structure thought to culminate in Western Culture’s isolated and abandoned subject, terrifyingly conscious that ‘I am alone’. This assessment of Calvinist theology, Furey contends, has been ‘rightly emphasized but wrongly interpreted’ (6). To right this wrong and to ‘revitalize the study of belief’, Furey rejects the binaries that have informed devotional poetics, those between Self and Other, between Interior subjectivity and the external world, between sacrificial offering and commodified exchange, between Faith and Work formed by Love.

The first chapter, ‘Authorship’, locates in the poetics of Lock, Sidney and Lanyer a confessional act sanctioning the intimacy between readers and writers by authorising the writing subject. If Christopher Warley makes this encounter a ‘commodified exchange’ (34), Furey does not, declaring it relational rather than calculating, participatory rather than mercantile.[1] If Wendy Wall finds an ‘ideology of authorship’ that creates space for a woman’s voice, Fury says instead that ‘Herbert’s ideology was distinctive in presenting poetry as a relational offering that could pay ‘infinite debts’ by linking people to one another and to God in and through the interactions the poetry inscribes’ (36).[2] But does an ‘offering’ that pays ‘infinite debts’ truly abandon commodification when it exchanges sin and grace? And is the intimacy created between reading and writing women somehow larger and more participatory than an ideology opening up new space for female authorship? Furey says yes: on the one hand, the ‘current of grace’ that these women draw on elides individual forms of currency by turning a ‘tribute’ into a tributary (45) and, on the other, an authorial voice cannot possibly be the locus of ‘relational selfhood’  as “questions of possession merge with accounts of participation” (47). Consequently, Lock, Sidney Herbert and Lanyer make the intimacy between writer and reader central, establish a Eucharistic ‘Real Presence’ in and through the text and re-imagine solitary possession as ‘interactive engagement’ (40).

Furey’s second chapter on ‘Friendship’ takes up George Herbert’s attempt to befriend God, something especially troubling when his lyric Speakers confront a God who sacrifices Himself absolutely.  Like many scholars of Herbert, Furey wonders if reciprocity can occur between God and Man, between a deity who offers everything and the ‘give-and-take’ that deepens human intimacy. Turning away from the insights of Strier and Schoenfeldt in her reading of Herbert’s ‘Unkindness’, Furey makes the extraordinary claim that ‘kindness can be replaced by ‘‘use’’ as the basis of friendship’ (66).  ‘Use’, she says, initially meant not only to ‘observe, practice, or engage in’ but specifically ‘to partake or receive the Eucharist’ as the OED registers.

A careful glance at the examples in the OED reveals that ‘use’ was always linked to the ‘mass’ and the ‘sacrament’ between 1250 and 1565 and not in use again until after the Restoration. My sense is that the ‘use of the Mass’ and ‘reception of the Eucharist’ did not inhabit the same theological territory in the seventeenth century, despite Furey’s attempt to blur the two: if Herbert’s lines carry this meaning of ‘use’ at all, they carry it ironically. What God shed his human blood to ‘purchase’ and what Furey claims He ‘will receive’ turns on the ambiguity of the speaker’s modality – ‘my good-will’ (‘Unkindness’, l.24) [3] – rather than on any affirmation, an ambiguity Brian Cummings shows resonating throughout the lyrics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Speaker’s final assessment does not address the future but the present: ‘yet use I not my foes as I use thee’. Every bit as heartbreaking as Strier indicates, these words call into Presence the ‘virtue Friend’ that Schoenfeldt sees so clearly and that, at the end of this chapter, Furey dismisses again as not the point (86). I think it is. Herbert, an eloquent Christian classicist, allows his speaker to voice the pragmatics of ‘use-friendship’ to his own detriment and forsake the virtue friend who might liberate him to full consciousness and extraordinary intimacy. This consciousness glimmers in the lines the Speaker invites himself to ‘write’, but they are lines he does not live, at least not yet. Elsewhere, Furey is more careful with Herbert’s ambivalent assessment of friendship: she demonstrates how his speakers negotiate distance, how they commodify and calculate, how they feel their way toward intimacy, the same issues that ‘Unkindness’ lays all too bare.

The gem of the book is Chapter 3, ‘Love’, in which Furey considers John Donne’s amatory and religious verse and returns to Aemilia Lanyer’s lyrics. Here, Furey’s background in Religious Studies become palpable for the first time as she elegantly assesses how Donne and Lanyer employ Chalcedonian Christology and Trinitarian unity by making the audience participants in an intimacy shared between two in order to be shared again. The analysis is wonderful, and the theological model that informs these readings offers Early Modernists a new pedagogy for the classroom since it makes perfect sense of the audiences Donne continually creates within his poems, even as it highlights the Incarnational and Eucharistic sharing that Lanyer holds out to all who read her. Both Christological and Trinitarian formulations are, of course, central to the 39 Articles of Religion. Throughout this chapter Furey draws on the work of Sarah Coakley, a theologian at Cambridge who offers sensitive readings not only of Chalcedon as Furey makes clear but also of Trinitarian unity, perceptively uncovering the fluidity of gender in a thoroughly nuanced assessment of Patristic thought.[4] Furey’s extended notes at the conclusion of the book (173-216), are illuminating in this chapter in particular (192-211).

Furey turns last of all to ‘Marriage’. Here, Anne Bradstreet’s sorrow at her husband’s absence, registered in poem after poem, creates a material register, Furey says, of a love that must remain as material as it is spiritual, wedding earthly bodies to souls in human life as with God. Bradstreet becomes a perfect articulator of this double engagement, erotically envisioned. The poem as a material record of intimacy with God sustains her when confronted with divine absence, both marking Presence and keeping it before her eyes, just as her poems to her husband did. Furey shows Edward Taylor doing this too, creating intimacy with God as an act of double creation in which the poem establishes the case: ‘Thy Maker is thy Husband’. The turn of Taylor’s sonnet—the space at the Volta—finds him attempting to make this his own, not by wholly affirming it but rather by questioning it: ‘My Maker, he my husband?’ (146). Furey says that the ‘wedding garment’ which the Speaker invites God to make for him (within the lines of the poem) becomes itself a product of their exchanges, uniting them materially on the page. Furey treats this relational selfhood as if it is fully realised, a ‘marriage’ already taking place, but Taylor’s use of tense locates the distance between this time and that transcendent moment of consummation, employing as he does the deontic ‘shall’: ‘I then shall be thy Bride Espoused by thee’. The poems Taylor writes cannot ‘commence the ceremony’ (147) that Furey identifies, cannot ‘perform the wedding of Bride and Bridegroom’ (147). Rather, they acknowledge the temporal distance, turning written prayers into love letters that negotiate absence by articulating a desire still unfulfilled.

I have to confess that my familiarity with Early Modern Reformation poetics made me wonder how a ‘relational selfhood’ as Furey describes it in Poetic Relations fills any gaps we have not more perfectly understood through the sociopolitical, gendered, and material criticism found in Grossman’s edition of Lanyer, Schoenfeldt’s work on Herbert or Targoff’s work on Common Prayer and Donne. Brian Cummings, in The Literary Culture of Reformation, writes the best book on this subject — a book not only capable of tracing the entire arc of Reformation poetics to its origins in the work of Erasmus and Luther but also clarifying its subtleties in the vernacular registers of modality and tense. What Furey does offer is a new emphasis rather than a more delineated exploration of Early Modern relationships as she calls into view the dynamic intimacy being textually constituted. And when Furey draws on theology as she does in Chapter 3, we have something that might not only explain ‘relational selfhood’ but also the logic of the form it takes. The gendered fluidity that Sarah Coakley develops in her analysis of the Trinity goes further still. In short, only the ‘turn to theology’ in Furey’s book breaks new ground for literary studies. Let’s go there.

Esther Gilman Richey 

University of South Carolina

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