The 'soul's imaginary sight': Visuality and mimesis in early modern poetics (Richard Crashaw, Francis Quarles, Christopher Harvey, George Herbert, John Milton)

The Renaissance was a cultural moment especially rich visually, yet it also demonstrates a significant investment in the crafting of textual forms. When early modern poems incorporate visual modes of perception into their textual representations, they convert a diegetic description of an idea into a mimetic enactment of it, allowing the reader to experience a textual moment as they would a visual one. This discussion first explores the influence of emblem literature on the devotional poetry of Richard Crashaw, Francis Quarles, Christopher Harvey, and George Herbert, poets that seem to map out this space between word and picture. The religious lyric of these poets demarcates a transition point between visual representation in emblem picturae and a linguistic picturation or enactment of a poem's theme, linking pictorial visuality to the mimetic impulse and meditative experience. In Milton's use of the chiasmus, this rhetorical engagement reaches an apex. Like the religious poets of the earlier seventeenth century, Milton engages the reader in the act of cognitive “making,” by mimetically depicting or troping the pattern of the Redemptive Christian narrative through the figure of the chiasmus. In this way Milton achieves through poetry what would otherwise have been impossible in an exclusively narrative mode.; By thus investigating the ways in which these early modern poets implement various rhetorical strategies that draw on the cognitive valence of visuality through the rhetorical structure of their poetry, moments in which they engage their work to “show” as much as to “tell,” this discussion clarifies the relation of early modern poetry and the ut pictura tradition, characterizing this poetry not as “speaking pictures” but rather as “picturing speech,” language that, itself, pictures. The intersection between verbal and visual modes of representation in early modern poetry is crucial to understanding the heuristic function of the highly wrought artifacts these poets shape.