Robert Southwell Exponent of Religious Poetry in the Elizabethan Age
"In small proportions we just beauties see; And in short measures, life may perfect be. " |Ben Jonson could have had the Jesuit poet, Robert Southwell, in mind when he wrote the lines quoted above, for certainly they well apply to the lovable crusader for better norms in the art of poetry In the troubled times of the Elizabethan Age, Among literary historians Robert Southwell is invariably considered a minor Catholic poet whose spiritual beliefs led him eventually to forfeit his life as a traitor to the Crown. |In the following study the purpose of the writer has been to show at length how this poet through his life, his training, and his vocation was fitted in a remarkable manner to become the Exponent of Mysticism In Elizabethan England, More than any other poet of his age or in the century that followed, Robert Southwell directed all his efforts to the attainment of the "one thing necessary. " He slighted no means to help him to his end, so it is not strange that he, who borrowed the forms of profane love poetry to sing of Divine Love, should have been declared "Blessed" in the Christmas season of 1929, nearly three and a half centuries after he shed his blood at Tyburn, "looking most cheerfully. "
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