A favourable review of Geoffrey Hiller and Peter Groves' book "Samuel Daniel: Selected Poetry and A Defense of Rhyme" (University of North Carolina, Asheville: Pegasus Press, 1998)

Daalder, Joost

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But for many readers, the book will chiefly be of interest in that it allows unmediated access to the words of a woman. The voice which emerges is engaging, both modest and confident, and Carol Neel draws special attention to this tension between her self-deprecation and the boldness of her educative purpose. She brings out, without adjudicating between,  di fferent  approaches to  the text  opened up by feminist  scholarship: for example, can it be taken as the voice of a distinctive female piety, or does it reveal a flattening of gender distinctions? Neel has done a fine job. Her book is a paperback reprint of a work published in hard covers some years ago, with the addition of new material at the end, where an exceptionally helpful Afterword engages with some of the surprisingly large volume of relevant recent work and suggests ways in which it facilitates the reading of the text. Dhuoda's work is rendered into clear English, to which an introduction, pitched roughly at undergraduate level, eases the path. The notes make available much material accumulated by Pierre Riché for his publication of a critical edition, and are generally helpful, although I am not sure whether to bel ieve the suggestion that  the let ters  in  the term ' tDtMt ' ,  which abbreviate the Latin 'dis manibus', stand for 'into the hands of God'; perhaps Dhuoda mistakenly thought they did, but the original meaning is 'to the spirits of the dead'. The book effectively presents a text which is interesting in many ways, and deserves a wide readership. John Moorhead Department of History University of Queensland Hiller, Geoffrey G., and Peter L. Groves, ed., Samuel Daniel. Selected Poetry and A Defense of Rhyme, University of North Carolina, Asheville, Pegasus Press, 1998; paper; pp. xii, 251; R.R.P. US$12.95. As I read this fine book I often thought of Shylock's exclamation: 'A Daniel come to judgement; yea a Daniel!' For not only have the editors and the publishers done an excellent job, but Daniel's work, as offered in this selection, embodies many of the qualities that at this stage our discipline is much in need of: such as discipline, common sense, sound workmanship, and above 214 ReviewsDaalder, Joost 2000. Review of "Samuel Daniel Selected Poetry and a Defense of Rhyme" by Hiller and Groves. 'Parergon', vol.17, no.2, 214-216.Archived at Flinders University: dspace.flinders.edu.auall a totally unprejudiced, shrewd, independent and unfashionable judgement of the world—perhaps particularly the literary world. As the editors point out, 'Daniel was highly regarded in his own time and much of his poetry was innovative and influential' (p. ix), but he has suffered from neglect by modern scholars, not least editors, and this selection, which presents him as a poet rather than dramatist ,  including a well-chosen sampling of his poetic output and the justly famous A Defense of Rhyme (which, fortunately, has not been neglected, though it still deserves more attention) should do something to redress the balance. Whether it will do so or not to the extent that Daniel deserves remains to be seen at a time like the present, which is still characterised by much sweeping, politicised comment on the 'Early Modern' period in general rather than careful reading of literary texts of any kind, leave alone texts as understated, unspectacular, and subtle as those of this poet. But that is all the more reason why we need this edition. A Defense of Rhyme, for example, is an outstanding example of English empirical common sense, accompanied by such theoretical insight as is needed for its job (but fortunately no more), warring against outrageous theorising based on undue admiration for foreign writers. Daniel seems to me even better in this treatise than the editors would allow. They feel that he would have benefited from 'the advent of modern linguistic theory' (p. 19), but it appears that he needed to learn little from that, and that he has a clear enough grasp of what he is discussing. Daniel exposes as purely dogmatic and silly Campion's thinking that the English should discard rhyme because the ancients did not use it, and, more importantly, successfully dismisses the foolish experiment with 'quantitative' verse that some of his contemporaries were obsessed by, recognising that 'quantity' is not a feature perceived by those who listen to English syllables, as distinct from 'accent' (or stress). That is, indeed, the key distinction, and it is not as though his judgement is merely intuitive—it is trenchantly intellectual, and he recognises that English iambic pentameter verse not only uses accent rather than length, but that it consists of ten syllables and five feet. He might, perhaps, have drawn a sharper distinction between 'metre' and 'speech rhythm', but his concept of English iambic metre per se is obviously accurate, and the more powerful because he realises—far more clearly than several of his theorising contemporaries—that English is a very different language from Latin. Reviews 215 Daalder, Joost 2000. Review of "Samuel Daniel Selected Poetry and a Defense of Rhyme" by Hiller and Groves. 'Parergon', vol.17, no.2, 214-216.Archived at Flinders University: dspace.flinders.edu.auHis steady refusal to be tempted by anything that is not true to his own experience also gives his verse an engagingly searching quality, especially after the fashionable, well-crafted but somewhat arid Delia sequence for which he remains best known in literary history. His other poems are, in fact, far more interesting. A Letter from Octavia, for example, is by the editors rightly described as 'a remarkable portrait of a sensitive woman, hurt by her husband's adultery but having the dignity and intelligence to appear neither sanctimonious not excessively self-pitying' (p. 10). In other words, if Octavia appears to us as an attractive character, in Daniel's portrayal of her, it is because he humanises her rather than that he either presents her as mere victim or makes her a strident ideologue; much current feminist  criticism will have difficulty accepting this characterisation, because it is not stereotypical, though clearly sympathetic. Daniel was capable of questioning things rather than readily accepting, as the editors put it, 'the more reductive attitudes current in his age' (p. 12). If he had lived today, he would no doubt have been an enemy to the more reductive attitudes of our own age. The editors and the publisher are to be congratulated for producing this admirable scholarly volume, which is most timely. J o o s t  D a a l d e r   S c h o o l  o f  H u m a n i t i e s   Flinders University Horowitz, Maryanne Clive, Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1998; cloth; pp. xviii , 373; 37 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$49.50. The concept of human mental seeds which 'grow' into sturdy plants blossoming with knowledge and virtue has been pervasive in European thought and provided many metaphors and visual motifs. Horowitz's book, showing us how this classical idea grew and flourished, is itself like a garden, abounding with vegetative imagery of rebirth, growth, cultivating, flowering, and, of course, familiar Renaissance images of a 'garden of the soul' and a garden in which to meditate and talk. The ideas of the Stoics and the Platonising Stoic educators, 216 Reviews Daalder, Joost 2000. Review of "Samuel Daniel Selected Poetry and a Defense of Rhyme" by Hiller and Groves. 'Parergon', vol.17, no.2, 214-216.Archived at Flinders University: dspace.flinders.edu.au

Review of "Samuel Daniel Selected Poetry and A Defense of Rhyme" by Hiller and Groves

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Review of "Samuel Daniel Selected Poetry and A Defense of Rhyme" by Hiller and Groves

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