Thomas Traherne and Seventeenth-century Thought

Thomas Traherne and Seventeenth-century Thought PDF Author: Elizabeth S. Dodd
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843844249
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
New essays on Thomas Traherne challenge traditional critical readings of the poet.

Thomas Traherne and Seventeenth-century Thought

Thomas Traherne and Seventeenth-century Thought PDF Author: Elizabeth S. Dodd
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843844249
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
New essays on Thomas Traherne challenge traditional critical readings of the poet.

Centuries of Meditations

Centuries of Meditations PDF Author: Thomas Traherne
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Meditations
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description


Poetic Priesthood in the Seventeenth Century

Poetic Priesthood in the Seventeenth Century PDF Author: Tessie Prakas
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192857126
Category : Christian poetry, English
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Poetic Priesthood reads seventeenth-century devotional verse as staging a surprising competition between poetry and the established church. The work of John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, John Milton, and Thomas Traherne suggests that the demands of faith are better understood by poets than by priests--even while four of these authors were also ordained. While recent scholarship has tended to emphasize the shaping influence of the liturgy on the poetry of this period, this book argues that verse instead presents readers with a mode of articulating piety that relies on formal experimentation, and that varies from the forms of the church rather than straightforwardly reproducing them. In crafting this poetic aid to devotion, these authors practiced an alternative and even more ample form of ministry than in their ecclesiastical activities. In the wake of the Reformation, the liturgy of the English church centered on rituals of communal prayer and praise, but the poetry considered in this study suggests that such rituals in fact risk distracting worshippers from the pleasures and challenges of navigating an individual relationship with God. Yet these poets do not make this suggestion by rejecting communal rituals outright. Their verse invokes ecclesiastical practice as a basis for formal innovation that suggests how intimacy with the divine might look, feel, and sound, connecting humans with their God more precisely and more individually than the liturgy can. As they shift between explicit comment on the liturgy and more subtle departures from it in the interplay of verse form and denotation, these authors claim the work of priesthood for poetry.

The Poet and the Fly

The Poet and the Fly PDF Author: Robert Hudson
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
ISBN: 1506457290
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Flies are the most ubiquitous of insects: buzzing, minuscule, and seemingly insignificant, they've been both plagues and minor annoyances for millennia. Rather than ignore these incredibly mundane and seemingly insignificant creatures, poets spanning centuries--from the seventeenth to the twentieth--and continents--from North America to Asia--have found that these ordinary bugs in fact illuminate deep spiritual mysteries. In this revelatory book, Robert Hudson considers seven poets, each of whom wrote a provocative poem about a fly. These poets--all mystics in their own way--ponder the simple fly and come to astounding conclusions. Considering Emily Dickinson, William Blake, and several other poets, The Poet and the Fly brings together the poetry, the flies, and the poets' own lives to explore the imaginative, and often prophetic, insights that come from the startling combination of poetry and flies. Ultimately, the message each poet offers to us through the fly is as relevant today as it was in their own time: the miracle of existence, the gift of mortality, the power of the imagination, the need for compassion, the existence of the soul, the mystery of everything around us, and the sacramental, grace-giving power of story.

The Atom in Seventeenth-century Poetry

The Atom in Seventeenth-century Poetry PDF Author: Cassandra Gorman
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843845938
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
An investigation into the remarkable "poetics of the atom" in English literary texts from the mid to late seventeenth century. The early modern "atom" - understood as an indivisible particle of matter - captured the poetic imagination in ways that extended far beyond the reception of Lucretius and Epicurean atomism. Contrarily to fears of atomisation and materialist threat, many poets and philosophers of the period sought positive, spiritual motivation in the concept of material indivisibility. This book traces the metaphysical import of these poetic atoms, teasing out an affinity between poetic and atomic forms in seventeenth-century texts. In the writings of Henry More, Thomas Traherne, Margaret Cavendish, Hester Pulter and Lucy Hutchinson, both atoms and poems were instrumental in acts of creating, ordering and reconstructing knowledge. Their poems emerge as exquisitely self-conscious atomic forms, producing intimate reflections on the creative power and indivisibility of self, soul and God. The book begins with a survey of the imaginative possibilities surrounding the early modern "atom", before considering the indivisible centres of the Cambridge Platonist Henry More's cosmic, Spenserian poetics. The focus then turns to the lyrical bond formed between atom and soul in the writings of Thomas Traherne, and from there, to the experimental sequences of Margaret Cavendish and Hester Pulter, whose poetic spaces create new worlds and imagine alternative lives. The book concludes with a study of Lucy Hutchinson's creation poem Order and Disorder, which anticipates the regeneration of fallen being in atomic and alchemical terms.

George Herbert and the Seventeenth-century Religious Poets

George Herbert and the Seventeenth-century Religious Poets PDF Author: George Herbert
Publisher: W W Norton & Company Incorporated
ISBN: 9780393092547
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
This volume presents the major works of five poets--George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, and Thomas Traherne. While most of the selections are religious poetry, the important secular verse of Marvell and Crashaw is also included. Eighty poems by Herbert have been selected form The Temple, and two early poems from Issak Walton's Lives are also included.

The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (Routledge Revivals)

The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (Routledge Revivals) PDF Author: Charles Webster
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136505156
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
Intellectual history and early modern history have always occupied an important place in Past and Present. First published in 1974, this volume is a collection of original articles and debates, published in the journal between 1953 and May 1973, dealing with many aspects of the intellectual history of the seventeenth century. Several of the contributions have been extremely influential, and the debates represent major standpoints in controversies over genesis of modern ideas. Although England is the focus of attention for most of the contributors, their themes have wider significance. Among the topics covered in the collection are the political thought of the Levellers and of James Harrington; radical social movements of the Puritan Revolution; the ideological context of physiological theories associated with William Harvey; the relationship between science and religion and the social relations of science; and the function of millenariansim and eschatology in the seventeenth century. The editor’s Introduction indicates the context in which the articles were composed and provides valuable bibliographical information about the subjects discussed.

Selected Poems and Prose

Selected Poems and Prose PDF Author: Thomas Traherne
Publisher: Penguin Classics
ISBN: 9780140445435
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description


The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English Literature and Theology

The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English Literature and Theology PDF Author: Paul Cefalu
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198808712
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
The volume highlights how the Fourth Gospel and First Epistle of Saint John the Evangelist were leading apostolic texts during the early modern period in England, and the importance of Johannine theology to early modern religious poetry.

Boundless Innocence in Thomas Traherne's Poetic Theology

Boundless Innocence in Thomas Traherne's Poetic Theology PDF Author: Elizabeth S. Dodd
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317172922
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
The seventeenth-century poet and divine Thomas Traherne finds innocence in every stage of existence. He finds it in the chaos at the origins of creation as well as in the blessed order of Eden. He finds it in the activities of grace and the hope of glory, but also in the trials of misery and even in the abyss of the Fall. Boundless Innocence in Thomas Traherne’s Poetic Theology traces innocence through Traherne’s works as it transgresses the boundaries of the estates of the soul. Using grammatical and literary categories it explores various aspects of his poetic theology of innocence, uncovering the boundless desire which is embodied in the yearning cry: ’Were all Men Wise and Innocent...’ Recovering and reinterpreting a key but increasingly neglected theme in Traherne’s poetic theology, this book addresses fundamental misconceptions of the meaning of innocence in his work. Through a contextual and theological approach, it indicates the unexplored richness, complexity and diversity of this theme in the history of literature and theology.