SOURCE: White, Helen C. “Southwell: Metaphysical and Baroque.” Modern Philology 61, no. 2 (February 1964): 159-68.

In this essay, White argues that Southwell's poetry develops feeling through reiteration and that his techniques are more in line with Baroque than Metaphysical style.

One of the liveliest of the continuing discussions of seventeenth-century poetry concerns the nature of the Baroque. In a certain sense this discussion may even be said to have taken the place of the earlier discussion of the metaphysical. That there is a connection between the Baroque and the metaphysical, most critics would agree. But, in general, it may be said that we are more apt to think of the Baroque in terms of Continental literature and of the metaphysical in terms of English literature. And yet there unquestionably is a good deal of overlapping between the two styles, and students of the Baroque are rather likely to discover with...