The focus of this study is the perception of nature in the language of poetry and the languages of natural philosophy, technology, theology, and global exploration, primarily in seventeenth-century England. Its premise is that language and the perception of nature vitally affect each other and that seventeenth-century poets, primarily John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughan, but also Margaret Cavendish, Thomas Traherne, Anne Finch, and others, responded to experimental proto-science and new technology in ways that we now call 'ecological' - concerned with watersheds and habitats and the lives of all creatures. It provides close readings of works by these poets in the contexts of natural history, philosophy, and theology as well as technology and land use, showing how they responded to what are currently considered ecological issues: deforestation, mining, air pollution, drainage of wetlands, destruction of habitats, the sentience and intelligence of animals, overbuilding, global commerce, the politics of land use, and relations between social justice and justice towards the other-than-human world. In this important book, Diane McColley demonstrates the language of poetry, the language of responsible science, and the language of moral and political philosophy all to be necessary parts of public discourse.
This study explores the relationship between the poetic language of Donne, Herbert, Milton and other British poets, and the choral music and part-songs of composers including Tallis, Byrd, Gibbons, Weelkes and Tomkins. The seventeenth century was the time in English literary history when music was most consciously linked to words, and when the mingling of Renaissance and 'new' philosophy opened new discovery routes for the interpretation of art. McColley offers close readings of poems and the musical settings of analogous texts, and discusses the philosophy, performance, and disputed political and ecclesiastical implications of polyphony. She also enters into the discourse about the nature of language, relating poets' use of language and composers' use of music to larger questions concerning the arts, politics and theology.
This beautifully illustrated multidisciplinary study addresses interpretations of the Genesis creation story in Paradise Lost and other seventeenth-century English poems and in the visual arts from the Middle Ages through the Reformation. It considers poems, visual images, and music concerned with divine and human creativity and interprets these works as salutary examples for the creation of the arts and the preservation of the earth. The central topic is the daily work of body or mind of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost as primal artists and caretakers of nature before the Fall, developing the arts of language, music, liturgy, and government, discovering the rudiments of a technology harmless to the biosphere, and dressing and keeping a garden that is an epitome of the whole earth. These unfallen arts promote awareness of the complex harmonies of creation and potentially of civilization: an awareness that is not only linear or binary but radiant and multiple; not only monodic but also choral. McColley argues that northern European visual artists and seventeenth-century English poets reimagined Eden in order to re-Edenize the imagination as a source of ethical and ecological healing. The best-known depictions of Adam and Eve in the visual arts, which focus on the drama of the all, depart from a widespread but undervalued tradition that more celebratory and regenerative and less susceptible to misogynous interpretation. This tradition includes the neglected topos of original righteousness and contributes to what we would now call ecological awareness. Poets allied to this view foster Edenic consciousness by creating a Paradisal language that weaves form, sound, image, metaphor, concept, and experience as closely as nature weaves life, and so exercises our sense of connections
The focus of this study is the perception of nature in the language of poetry and the languages of natural philosophy, technology, theology, and global exploration, primarily in seventeenth-century England. Its premise is that language and the perception of nature vitally affect each other and that seventeenth-century poets, primarily John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and Henry Vaughan, but also Margaret Cavendish, Thomas Traherne, Anne Finch, and others, responded to experimental proto-science and new technology in ways that we now call 'ecological' - concerned with watersheds and habitats and the lives of all creatures. It provides close readings of works by these poets in the contexts of natural history, philosophy, and theology as well as technology and land use, showing how they responded to what are currently considered ecological issues: deforestation, mining, air pollution, drainage of wetlands, destruction of habitats, the sentience and intelligence of animals, overbuilding, global commerce, the politics of land use, and relations between social justice and justice towards the other-than-human world. In this important book, Diane McColley demonstrates the language of poetry, the language of responsible science, and the language of moral and political philosophy all to be necessary parts of public discourse.
This beautifully illustrated multidisciplinary study addresses interpretations of the Genesis creation story in Paradise Lost and other seventeenth-century English poems and in the visual arts from the Middle Ages through the Reformation. It considers poems, visual images, and music concerned with divine and human creativity and interprets these works as salutary examples for the creation of the arts and the preservation of the earth. The central topic is the daily work of body or mind of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost as primal artists and caretakers of nature before the Fall, developing the arts of language, music, liturgy, and government, discovering the rudiments of a technology harmless to the biosphere, and dressing and keeping a garden that is an epitome of the whole earth. These unfallen arts promote awareness of the complex harmonies of creation and potentially of civilization: an awareness that is not only linear or binary but radiant and multiple; not only monodic but also choral. McColley argues that northern European visual artists and seventeenth-century English poets reimagined Eden in order to re-Edenize the imagination as a source of ethical and ecological healing. The best-known depictions of Adam and Eve in the visual arts, which focus on the drama of the all, depart from a widespread but undervalued tradition that more celebratory and regenerative and less susceptible to misogynous interpretation. This tradition includes the neglected topos of original righteousness and contributes to what we would now call ecological awareness. Poets allied to this view foster Edenic consciousness by creating a Paradisal language that weaves form, sound, image, metaphor, concept, and experience as closely as nature weaves life, and so exercises our sense of connections
This study explores the relationship between the poetic language of Donne, Herbert, Milton and other British poets, and the choral music and part-songs of composers including Tallis, Byrd, Gibbons, Weelkes and Tomkins. The seventeenth century was the time in English literary history when music was most consciously linked to words, and when the mingling of Renaissance and 'new' philosophy opened new discovery routes for the interpretation of art. McColley offers close readings of poems and the musical settings of analogous texts, and discusses the philosophy, performance, and disputed political and ecclesiastical implications of polyphony. She also enters into the discourse about the nature of language, relating poets' use of language and composers' use of music to larger questions concerning the arts, politics and theology.
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