The Sempiternal Season: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Devotional Writing

The Sempiternal Season brings together fourteen essays primarily concerned with seventeenth-century English writers, especially John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, John Cosin, Joseph Beaumont, and Henry More. It also includes studies of their effect on Christina Rossetti, G.M. Hopkins, and T.S. Eliot. These essays share a desire for discovering the historical and the transcendent moment, the convergence of world and word. They reveal in their sometimes historical, sometimes formalist critical approach a desire to understand literary texts that are, broadly speaking, devotional or involved with religious sensibility.