SOURCE: Donaldson-Evans, Lance K. “Two Baroque Devotional Poets: La Ceppéde and Alabaster.” Comparative Literature Studies 12, no. 1 (March 1975): 21-31.

In the following essay, Donaldson-Evans compares Alabaster's sonnets to those of the French poet La Ceppéde in order to suggest similarities in devotional poetry across Europe.

The rediscovery and ensuing re-evaluation of the devotional poetry of the baroque period has been one of the literary phenomena of the twentieth century. It is as though literary critics and readers alike have felt an intellectual and emotional kinship with the political, religious, and social upheavals which shook Europe after the Renaissance. In spite of L. P. Hartley's observation that “the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,”¹ one is tempted to speculate that the twentieth-century reader has seen in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries a prefiguration of the turmoil of his own era and that...