The Atom in Seventeenth-Century Poetry

The Atom in Seventeenth-Century Literature (Studies in Renaissance Literature) (Volume 39) by Cassandra Gorman
2021 | ISBN: 1843845938, ASIN: B099NS17K6 | English | 208 pages | PDF | 2 MB
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, amongst others, both atoms and poems were instrumental in acts of creating, ordering and reconstructing knowledge. The poems of these authors emerge as exquisitely self-conscious atomic forms, producing intimate reflections on the creative power and indivisibility of self, soul and God.