Poetry and Vision in Early Modern England

This book reveals the ways in which seventeenth-century poets used models of vision taken from philosophy, theology, scientific optics, political polemic and the visual arts to scrutinize the nature of individual perceptions and to examine poetry's own relation to truth.

Drawing on archival research, Poetry and Vision in Early Modern England brings together an innovative selection of texts and images to construct a new interdisciplinary context for interpreting the poetry of Cavendish, Traherne, Marvell and Milton. Each chapter presents a reappraisal of vision in the work of one of these authors, and these case studies also combine to offer a broader consideration of the ways that conceptions of seeing were used in poetry to explore the relations between the 'inward' life of the viewer and the 'outward' reality that lies beyond; terms that are shown to have been closely linked, through ideas about sight, with the emergence of the fundamental modern categories of the 'subjective' and 'objective'. This book will be of interest to literary scholars, art historians and historians of science.

Constructs a uniquely wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary context that reveals poetry to be a discourse in which ideas about vision from other disciplines were tested and compared Each chapter puts forward a substantial new reading of a single author by raising important new questions These analyses of individual authors fit together to give a broader picture of the importance of vision in seventeenth-century poetry

Autorentext

Jane Partner studied English Literature at the University of Cambridge and Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, UK. She is now a Fellow at Trinity Hall in Cambridge, UK, where she teaches a range of literary and art-historical subjects.

Inhalt

1. Introduction.- 2. Margaret Cavendish, Vision and Fancy.- 3. The 'Infant-Ey' in the Devotional Writing of Thomas Traherne.- 4. Vision, Geometry and Truth in the Poetry of Andrew Marvell.- 5. The 'Advice to a Painter' Poems and the Politics of Visual Representation.- 6. Vision in Milton's Epic Poetry.- 7. Conclusion.