SOURCE: Story, G. M. “William Alabaster and the Devotional Tradition.” In The Sonnets of William Alabaster, edited by G. M. Story and Helen Gardner, pp. xxiii-xxxvi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959.

In the following excerpt from the introduction to the definitive publication of Alabaster's sonnets, Story overviews the sequence within the tradition of devotional poetry and highlights its distinctive elements.

Not the least interesting paradox of Alabaster's eminently paradoxical verse is that its special quality comes from the fusion of an old and widespread devotional tradition with the new poetic temper of the last decade of the sixteenth century. His Divine Meditations are an early document for the study of the new school of poets (the ‘metaphysical’ Donne and his followers) which arose in the closing years of the Elizabethan era, and at the same time they lay bare that continuing tradition which is such a pronounced feature of...