Poetic Priesthood in the Seventeenth Century: Reformed Ministry and Radical VerseTessiePraxas. Oxford: Oxford <scp>UP</scp>, 2022. 242 pp. <scp>ISBN</scp> 13: 9780192857125. $100.00 (cloth).

This book's central thesis claims the verse of Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Milton, and Traherne “as ministering to individual readers by privileging the formal resources of poetic language over the forms of liturgy” (3). Prakas signals in the Introduction that this study is loosely New Formalist in orientation, contending that verse “offers up the formal affordances of language … as spaces of intimate community with [God] that pious individuals can step into” (27). The chapters on Herbert and Crashaw, together with the Coda on Traherne, illustrate best how image, structure, and prosody create religious spaces for private devotion that surpass corporate, liturgical forms. The “desire for individual intimacy with God” (25) is what Prakas means by the term “radical” in her subtitle, not the religious enthusiasm and political subversiveness that one associates with the Ranters, Levellers, and Quakers of Nicholas McDowell's The English Radical Imagination (2003). The term “Reformed” in the subtitle may equally be misleading, as her five writers represent a range of theological and ecclesiastical positions that share general Protestant rather than specific Reformed traits—and not even Protestant in the case of Crashaw. Despite their different locations on the “Reformed” and “radical” spectrums, Prakas sets out to demonstrate that all five poets shift the locus of ministry from priest to poet, from pulpit to poem, from congregant to reader. Prakas begins with an exploration of metaphor in John Donne, focusing first on “The Relic,” then briefly on “A Valediction of My Name in the Window,” and finally on Donne's sermon on Psalm 38. In each instance, Donne invites the reader into the world of the metaphor in order to identify with its relation to the divine. “The Relic” may well illustrate the function of metaphor in Donne generally, but it seems an odd choice for a demonstration of the Reformed and radical aesthetic that Prakas describes in the Introduction. Perhaps “La Corona” or the Holy Sonnets are too obvious examples of the spaces created by the verse form as personal devotional exercise. Chapter 2 negotiates nicely the paradox of private reading and communal music in George Herbert's The Temple, resolving the apparent contradiction by showing that poems such as “Church-musick,” “Antiphon (I),” and “Easter” serve to imagine the potential for intimacy and harmony with God in the present moment (113). In Chapter 3, Prakas argues that Richard Crashaw, despite his confessional difference, emphasizes individual religious experience similar to that found in Donne and Herbert. Associating Crashaw's use of enjambment with the water imagery in the poems is somewhat simplistic, but it does draw the reader's attention to ways by which rhyme and rhythm contribute to the reader's affective experience of the text. Readers of Milton Quarterly will be especially interested in Chapter 4: “’Separate to God’: Self-Centered Syntax in John Milton's Samson Agonistes.” In this chapter, Prakas contends that the critique of ministerial leadership that is central to Samson Agonistes aligns it with the Reformed and radical aesthetic of the other writers under consideration. Prakas suggests that Samson's self-centered syntax reveals a solipsism that is “an almost inevitable consequence of ministerial behavior” (162). The self-recognition comes early on with Samson's admission of his guilt to Manoa (“Sole Author I, sole cause” SA 376), a reversal that prepares him for an act of self-annihilation that exonerates him as God's “faithful champion” (1751). Manoa and the Chorus do not learn from Samson's lesson in iconoclasm, as they ultimately turn to outward worship in monument and “sweet Lyric song” (1733-37). Prakas explains that Samson's solipsistic tendencies throughout the drama necessarily result in “a mode of self-focused self-indulgence” that overshadows the work (191). She concludes: “Despite its best attempts and whatever its form, poetry, like Samson himself, cannot fully escape the prelatical” (193). As such, Samson Agonistes seems a counter-argument to the examples of Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Traherne, who express greater confidence in poetry that is both “Reformed” and “radical” in the sense that the book has been arguing. The author generously integrates as many scholars as possible in her reading of Samson Agonistes, but such a variorum approach does not always serve the thesis of the book well. Referencing the critical literature about the date of composition, the relevance of 9/11, and the debate regarding Samson's prayer does not advance the argument that Samson Agonistes, like the lyric poems of Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Traherne, distances itself from liturgical and clerical intermediaries in order to create a positive space for individual intimacy with God. Prakas reads Samson's admission to Manoa (“Father, I do acknowledge and confess” 448) as a variation of the General Confession from the Order for Holy Communion. Even if this is an allusion to the Book of Common Prayer, it is too slight to carry the burden that she places on it for the remainder of the chapter as Samson's “attempt to distance himself from the corrupt ministerial behaviour he has previously acknowledged” (180). The book ends on a more positive note, however, in an analysis of Thomas Traherne's “Dumnesse.” Arguably, the Coda is the strongest writing in the book: not only does this section stand out for its attentiveness to form in the discussion of the poem, Prakas here makes her argument for the sacred space created by verse more confidently and clearly than elsewhere. One wonders why Traherne is relegated to the Coda if his verse prompts the individual reader's communion with the divine “most extensively of the poets in this study” (35). The same can be said about the insightful section on Mary Sidney's translations of the Psalms in the Introduction to the book, which could well have been developed as a separate chapter on “female sacerdotalism” (18), especially as Prakas sees Sidney as anticipating the poets that follow, particularly Donne and Herbert. Readers do well to take a hint from this book and consider seventeenth-century devotional verse, especially by women writers, more widely along the axis of Reformed and radical.