The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime. Jenny C. Mann. Ancient World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. xxii + 272 pp. $39.95.

Abstract

epigrams, and verse letters, Donne, Joseph Hall, John Marston, and others were reacting against stanzaic poetry as a pretentious European import, cladding their thoughts instead in the looser, lighter, naughty-but-native garb of Chaucer. Marking a turning point in the history of the couplet, chapter 3 positions Ben Jonson as the poet who, following the Bishops’ Ban of 1599, “contributed most to snatching the couplet from the fires and bringing it into polite society” (83). The reader is reminded here that rhyme alone does not a couplet make; Jonson’s reform of the couplet largely hinged on his “regularizing its meter and pauses” (90). Bolstering the pursuit of rhyme not empty of reason, Jonson made the English couplet a more measured form whose steady pace was well suited to the task of expressing inner character and patterning virtuous living. Chapter 4 considers the impact of the English Civil War on verse form. Using Robert Herrick, Katherine Philips, and Abraham Cowley as case studies, Rush posits that the poets of the period sought “to retain the Jonsonian couplet but make it responsive to the passions,” not least to accommodate the “extreme grief of a mourning nation” (126). Chapter 5 brings us full circle to Milton, who in 1668 took arms against a sea of couplets. While contextualizing Milton’s famous renunciation of rhyme in light of “his effort to craft a style distinct from the affective lyrics of the Royalists” (161), Rush looks back at the poet’s earlier use of rhyme in Comus, Lycidas, and especially the sonnets. Ironically, Milton appears to be a son of Ben: wresting Jonsonian formalism from the royalists, his metric regularity and reasonable rhymes connoted discipline, civility, and liberty within bounds. It seems only fitting to close this review with a rhyme. In Cooper’s Hill (1655), John Denhammirrors the measured flow of the river Thames with lines that, while epitomizing the ethos of the heroic couplet, just so happen to provide proper praise for this book: Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull, Strong without rage, without o’er-flowing full.