Passion: Baroque Devotion and the Poetics of Ecstasy

Chapter 4 contributes to a longstanding debate, first inaugurated by Louis Martz and Barbara Lewalski, over the purposes of early modern English devotional poetry. This chapter contends that the cultivation of excessive states of passion was the primary and explicit goal of baroque devotional poets like Richard Crashaw, Joseph Beaumont and John Donne. As I explain, the passions were a cross-confessional concern in early modern England, central to the devotional programmes of Puritans and Catholics alike, and the baroque gave religious practitioners a common means to instill passion across denominational lines. To demonstrate the uses of excess in English devotional poetics, I trace the development of a cross-confessional genre of baroque poetry about Mary Magdalene, who became a sacred exemplum of devotional excess. In the end, I reveal how the Catholic saint Teresa of Ávila inspired High Church Anglicans like Beaumont and Crashaw to push the excesses of baroque devotional poetics to new heights. For these authors, literature had the power not only to produce passion, but also to create real experiences of ecstasy.