SOURCE: Klawitter, George. “Craft and Purpose in Alabaster's Incarnation Sonnets.” University of Hartford Studies in Literature 15-16, no. 3-1 (1983-4): 60-66.

In the following essay, Klawitter provides a focused analysis of the fifteen of Alabaster's sonnets on the Incarnation of Christ.

In An Apology for Poetry, Sidney divides verse into three kinds, none of which precisely describes the kind of religious verse which began to appear in the decades after his death. His first category, “they that did imitate the inconceivable excellencies of God,” refers to poets praising the Divinity, like “David in his Psalms,” but the category cannot accommodate a religious poem like Herbert's “The Priesthood.”¹ Nor can Sidney's second group, the philosophical poems, account for a genre of verse that blends theology with lyricism. A poem purely theological might be cataloged with group two, a group which Sidney hints might not be poetry at all (“let...