Gary M. Bouchard
"In astute ecclesiastical and theological contextualization and deft poetic explications, Theresa M. Kenney offers readers a perceptive understanding of and appreciation for how Southwell, Donne, Herbert, Milton, and Crashaw depict in their lyric poems the seminal event in Christianity of God taking on human flesh. In Kenney's thoroughly researched and jargon-free study, readers are ultimately provided not just a much keener understanding of the significance of the Christ Child in Elizabethan and Stuart poetry, but a perceptive presentation of the evolution of the religious lyric in England through these literary periods."
Sean H. McDowell
"One would think the subject of the Christ Child in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English religious lyrics is so well elucidated that not much new can be said about it. But Kenney's All Wonders in One Sight contains the wonders of new insights. Her analyses of the ways in which significant poems by Robert Southwell, John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, and Richard Crashaw collapse time and space in the service of conjuring a lively sense of Christ's presence offer promising pathways for future investigation into poems and poets long thought to be quite familiar. This book makes a valuable contribution."
Eric W. Nye
"This impressive volume considers a collection of significant early seventeenth-century poets who dramatize the Nativity in their lyric poetry. How does the vivid physicality of the Nativity and the Proleptic Passion come under pressure from the increasingly rarified notion of the Incarnation? In this work, Theresa M. Kenney engages with profound and enduring aesthetic and religious issues. She teaches us to puzzle over good poems, probe them, enter into them, learn from them, and in the end to appreciate more deeply the human imagination that we all share. Such criticism counteracts the levelling effect of various post-structuralisms, and it is the kind of criticism that will survive for future generations who have no need of further sneering cynicism."