Picture-pattern-poiesis: Visuality, the emblem, and seventeenth-century english religious lyric

This study examines visual representation in English religious lyric of the seventeenth century, clarifying the influence of emblem poetics on that genre. A comparison of poems by Richard Crashaw, Francis Quarles, Christopher Harvey, and George Herbert reveals two mechanisms of visuality at work: one, a diegetic mode using ekphrasis to pictorialize a contemplative image; the other, a mimetic figuration in which an architectonic poetics takes on the function of the emblem pictura. In a period so complexly engaged with the relation of the pictorial and the textual, this nuance is crucial to a full understanding of poiesis in devotional poetry.